Keep The Trains A-Rollin'

This train's got the disappearing railroad blues.

- "City of New Orleans", by Steve Goodman

Power outages along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor this morning caused delays and cancellations, not only for Amtrak trains but also for trains operated by regional agencies NJT (New Jersey Transit), SEPTA (Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority), and MARC (Maryland Area Regional Commuter) which use Amtrak's tracks and power lines.

The reaction of most people in the New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington metropolitan areas to this news was probably, "what, again?". Entering "Amtrak power outage" or "Amtrak signal problems" into your search engine will give you an idea of how often this seems to happen.

Unfortunately, each time an incident like this occurs, it reinforces the idea that train travel is unreliable, and makes people more likely to use their cars. "Better pull your car out of the garage if you need to get to work on time", chirped one local TV newscaster this morning.

With the growing recognition that we, as a country, need to break our oil addiction, we need to find ways to encourage more, not less, train travel. Our overconsumption of oil, fueled in part by daily reliance on the personal automobile for commuting to work, has given us the Deepwater Horizon disaster (killing 11 workers and ruining the Gulf coast ecosystems), global warming, and military operations aimed at ensuring the steady flow of petroleum from the Arabian peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Encouraging more people to ride the train to work is an essential part of changing our energy use, but this can only work if the trains actually run on time. For this reason, funding for mass transit must be part of the equation whenever bills dealing with energy or climate change are debated; the issues are inextricably linked.

Government funding was used to build the interstate highways (beginning under the Republican Eisenhower administration in the 1950s), and continues to subsidize travel by car and plane. Government funding is now needed for capital improvements to our existing rail lines, as well as to build new lines, to give people more reasons to leave their cars in the garage each day and take the train to work.

Hiroshima - The Original Ground Zero

Sixty-five years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Three days later, on August 9, our military dropped another atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki. These were the first, and so far the only, uses of nuclear weapons in attacks against people.

The official story promulgated in the U.S. is that these two A-bomb attacks were necessary to force a recalcitrant Japanese government to finally surrender and bring an end to World War II; without them, a high-casualty land invasion would have been necessary. My father, an Army Corporal serving in the Pacific at the time, was one of the soldiers being prepared for this invasion force, and was relieved that this use of atomic weapons had cancelled that invasion and probably saved his life.

Others, however, were horrified by these new weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and called on governments to limit their use and stockpiling. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who had led the Manhattan Project scientists in developing these A-bombs, spoke out publicly against starting a nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which led to the loss of his security clearance and thus his ability to continue any government employment. U.S. physicist Albert Einstein and British philosopher Bertrand Russell coauthored a manifesto in 1955 which stated, in part: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them." In 1957, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Benjamin Spock (author of "Baby and Child Care"), Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Norman Cousins and others formed The Committee For A SANE Nuclear Policy.

Governments eventually began to listen. On August 5, 1963 - the day before the 18-year anniversary of the first atomic bomb attack - the governments of the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which limited testing of nuclear weapons to underground tests, out of rising public concerns over radioactive fallout from testing on the ground, in the atmosphere, or in the Pacific Ocean. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968, was intended to prevent non-nuclear countries from developing or acquiring these weapons, although the refusal of India, Pakistan, and Israel to sign the treaty and their development of their own nuclear arsenals has weakened the treaty, as has the glacial pace of the promised disarmament by the established nuclear "club". The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), completed in 1996, was signed by President Clinton but failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

The time may be right, though, for a new round of efforts to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all. For the first time, the U.S. government sent an official representative (John Roos, our Ambassador to Japan) to the annual August 6 memorial service at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park near Ground Zero of the 1945 detonation. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also there, along with representatives of nuclear powers Britain and France. Peace groups, including the Quakers' Friends Committee on National Legislation, are recommending we contact our Senators to push for ratification of the CTBT as well as the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) signed in April by U.S. President Obama and Russian President Medvedev.

The fact that this would put peace advocates on the same side of this issue as Henry Kissinger, who has been preaching nuclear abolition since 2007, should not deter us. Military hawks and their armchair cheerleaders initially welcomed atomic/nuclear bombs as the epitome of efficiency; they meant that a city could now be destroyed by a single bomber dropping a single bomb, rather than the multiple bombers dropping hundreds of incendiary bombs it took to destroy Dresden and Tokyo during World War II. However, they soon grew frustrated as political leaders refused to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and Vietnam; what's the use of having such a great weapon, they grumbled, if we're not allowed to use it? Kissinger is probably just continuing his practice of realpolitik, deciding that if the U.S. and its allies can never actually use the darned things, we might as well just ban them forever.

This may be the first time in my life that I've ever agreed with Henry Kissinger on anything.