Letter: Nuclear options are proliferating in the hands of the madmen of our age

Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Enola Gay. Little Boy. Fat Man. Remembering the horrific event 80 years ago that trumpeted the advent of the now-inescapable Nuclear Age is impossible to forget; nor should we. Two Japanese cities disappeared in their respective instants. Few stop really to think about their meaning, much less the desperate savagery of fanatical Japanese armies ripping through Southeast Asia, China, eastern Russia and the Pacific, essentially necessitating that first exercise of the world-shattering atomic phenomena we and others have converted to the “nuclear option.”

Radioactivity’s terrible effects were felt in Utah in the months and years before 1945. A particularly “hot” uranium mine in Utah’s southeasternmost corner cursed with many cancers the mine’s Native tribal workers and f