Re: Trintiy Site as Positive PR?? -Reply

["Sue M. Dupre" <dupre@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>]

Good morning!  The Cold War (especially the Cuban missile crisis) was at 
its peak when I was in lower elementary school.  I was at an impressionable 
and vulnerable age, and the fears of the adults around me and the fears 
expressed on TV and in the newspapers about nuclear war made a lasting 
impression on me.  I had regular nightmares throughout my teens and 
20s about nuclear war. (My fears didn't keep me from educating myself - 
my last science project in high school was on nuclear war and ended up 
going to the State Science Fair.)

I'm not wildly eccentric and may be 
representative of some portion of baby boomers my age.  Although my 
training and professional experience have provided a reasonable 
perspective toward radiation as a hazardous agent (i.e., I'm 
prudently cautious about the potential of large doses of radiation to 
cause harm), I most certainly have deep-seated emotional baggage about 
nuclear war and nuclear weapons.  I disagree quite strongly with Jim 
Muckerheide's view that "Most people who think about it ... easily 
put weapons in the spectrum of things nuclear and radiation ...."  I 
might go to Trinity as a sort of pilgrimage to something that shaped my 
youth and the age I grew up in and out of respect for an 
extraordinary and awesome power, but I'm won't be there thinking about	 
nuclear weapons in the same way as any other source of radiation. 

Sue Dupre/Health Physicist/Princeton University
dupre@princeton.edu