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But there is yet a third way for a
country to get the ingredients to
make a nuclear weapon. lt can
secretly acquire waste plutonium.
Waste plutonium is the by-product of
many commercial reactors through–
out the wor!d. A typical reactor
creates about 440
pounds
a year.
Waste plutonium contains other
kinds of plutonium than plutonium-
239. Waste plutonium's explosive
power and controllability is therefore
reduced. But it is still sorne of the
most deadly stuff in the world. (A
thousandth of a gram will cause
massive fibrosis of the lungs; a mil–
lionth will cause cancer.) Neverthe–
less, you can still make an atom
bomb out of it, though an unreliable
one.
Now, read this shocking fact
reported by David Burnham in the
April 1, 1979,
Atlantic Monthly
magazine:
"As of the end of 1976, taking into
a'ccount all of the nuclear facilities in
the United States,
8,000 pounds
of
highly enriched uranium and pluto–
nium
could not be accounted for."
(Officials contend that "most" of
that 8 ,000 pounds has been "stuck in
pipes" or lost in faulty bookkeeping
procedures. Let's hope so.)
The Energy Angle
The extreme vulnerability of the
world's oil supply has made nuclear
power very attractive to many coun–
tries. A typical example is South
Korea . There the cos t of electricity
from nuclear power is only half the
cost of electricity from the Organiza–
tion of Petroleum Exporting Coun–
tries' (OPEC) oil. Unfortunately, the
world supply of natural uranium is
finite. The major exporter is the
United States. Many nations do not
want to be dependent on the United
States-or anyone else- for their
supplies.
However, if you own a reprocess–
ing plant you can extend your supply
of commercial grade uranium by 50
per cent!
The energy crisis combined with
the finite supply of uranium in the
world threatens horrible conse–
quences. Many, many countries now
have an incredible incentive to have
reprocessing plants. Remember: a
reprocessing plant gives the ability to
go nuclear, almost at will.
April 1980
The terrible potential for nuclear
proliferation has been acknowledged
by professional military men. Maj.
Windried M. Dunkel , a West Ger–
man officer writing in
Military
Review,
a publication of the U.S.
Army Command and General Staff
College, has warned:
"I believe that if a country wants
possession of nuclear weapons it can
get them; technology and compo–
nents are well known and available
on the world market."
Foretold Thousands of Years Ago
This sorry state of affairs is rooted in
hard fact. No wi shful thinking will
make it go away.
It
does not depend
on what you believe about Bible
prophecy for its truth. And no skeptic
or atheist can deny it by attacking
the Bible. Nevertheless, it is exactly
what you would expect if Bible
prophecy were true, because it was
foretold in Bible prophecy.
The Bible prophets did not have
words like
thermonuc/ear
and
radia–
tion
to describe what God revealed to
them in vision. Nevertheless certain
descriptions of end-time events bear
uncanny similarity to the effects of
nuclear bomb warfare.
The following was translated into
English 320 years before anyone had
ever heard of an atomic bomb.
lt
is a
description of what life on earth will
be like just before the prophetic "day
of the Lord" (a period of time imme–
diately preceding the intervention of
Jesus Christ in world affairs):
" . . . they are burned up, so that
none can pass through [an allusion to
an area being quarantined because of
contamination by radioactivity?];
neither can men hear the voice of the
cattle; both the fowl of the heavens
and the beast are fled; they are gone"
(Jeremiah 9:10).
Another prophecy, describing an
attack on a 20th century power exer–
cising the same political power over
other nations as did the ancient
Assyrian capital of Nineveh, paints a
picture reminiscent of Hiroshima
after the blast:
·
"She [Nineveh] is empty, and
void, and waste: and the heart mel–
teth, and the knees smite together,
and much pain is in all loins, and the
faces of them all gather blackness"
(Nahum 2:1 0) .
The clincher is found in Revelation
9:17-18 , where
mass
destruction
warfare is explicitly foretold:
"And ... out of their mouths issued
fire and smoke and brimstone. By
these three was the third part of men
killed, by the fire, and by the smoke,
and by the brimstone, which issued
out of their mouths."
A "third part of men" could not be
readily killed by conventional war–
fare. Such mass slaughter could only
be achieved by the widespread use of
nuclear weapons!
Pressures to Go Nuclear
Is the day coming when every local
border skirmish or regional conflict
involves a potential nuclear ex–
change?
The fact is that as the United
States has become progressively
more unreliable asan ally, more and
more nations feel
forced
to use their
"peaceful" nuclear power capacity to
build atomic and hydrogen bomb
weapons.
When, for example, the Carter
administration made plans to with–
draw troops from South Korea, that
country immediately
threat~ned
to
go nuclear. According to a C IA
report, then South Korean President
Park Chung Hee warned that "if the
United States withdraws its nuclear
umbrella; South Korea would have to
begin developing its own nuclear
weapons."
The same kind of concern applies
to Taiwan, any of the oil states
around the Persian Gulf, Israel ,
South Afri<;a or Japan.
Nuclear weapons radically change
the way a nation is treated in the
world. For many small nations ,
nuclear weapons seem to be the only
way to make the superpowers take
them seriously.
This change in world power poli–
tics- small nations acquiring oew–
found clout- was also foretcild in the
Bible:
"Beat your plowshares into
swords, and your pruning hooks into
spears: Jet the weak say, I am strong"
(Joel 3:10).
New Members of the Club
The Soviet Union, the United States,
France, Britain and the People's
Republic of China all have nuclear
weapons, and varying sophisticated
means of delivery, including ínter-
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