C. Hall Special to the Times Seafair's thunderous party is over, the Navy sailors had their celebrated Seattle shore leave, and the USS Alabama has presumably gone back to patrolling the deep oceans. Now Seattle has a quieter chance to decide about the issue of nuclear weapons as the Seattle City Council considers Councilman Richard Conlin's resolution calling for a nuclear-free Seafair from now on. The central issue is not about the Navy or the sailors. The issue is that nuclear weapons are illegal under international and humanitarian law and we are obligated as citizens under the Nuremberg Principles to call our country to account. Trident submarines also represent our moral willingness to threaten everything sacred, including life, liberty, civilization and future.
Trident is the closest that human ingenuity has ever come to building a doomsday machine.
Each of America's eighteen Trident submarines is built from the keel up to be a weapon of mass destruction. Each sub can carry two dozen C-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each missile is designed to carry eight W-76 nuclear warheads. Fully loaded, each Trident submarine carries the explosive equivalent of 900 Nagasaki atomic bombs. But that's not enough for us.