Last month while in Mexico, I wrote a piece about the US Navy and how their use of sonar was killing whales and dolphins around the world. I have other bones to pick with the Navy concerning the environment which I’ll write about in coming weeks.
I did most of my research in an Internet cafe in Xilitla; a wonderful town atop a jungle covered mountain in the Huastecan country, about a ten-hour drive south of the Valley.
The owners of the cafe have a 4-year-old daughter who salutes me and calls me Captain Walter. It was her parent’s idea. She’s usually on line when she’s at the cafe. Her parents help her visit sites that have furry cartoon animals or Barbie dolls some of which are helping her to learn to read. She sometimes changes computers to work next to me. She works a mean mouse.
The Navy currently has 18 trident missile nuclear submarines. Each submarine carries 24 missiles; each missile has 8 warheads. Each submarine can therefore deliver 192 nuclear weapons to targets within 4000 nautical miles.
The missiles are actually capable of carrying 12 warheads each but years ago we signed an agreement limiting the number of warheads to 8. We can all take comfort in the fact however, that we didn’t agree on how big the warheads could be so the 8 bombs on board each missile are bigger bombs than if there were 12.
We could multiply the number of warheads per submarine (192) times the number of submarines (18) but I don’t see much point in it.
It is more warheads than we had in submarines during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union existed and the Berlin Wall was still up. None of this is even remotely classified; it’s all on official Navy web sites. They are in fact quite proud of it all.
It was after 10 PM and my 4 year old friend wasn’t there that when I was studying up on the warhead situation. There was however a young Huastecan woman nursing an infant beside me. She wasn’t on line but was earnestly asking questions to a young woman beside her, who was looking things up for her on the Internet. I’m pretty sure the woman on line was an employee of the Mexican government working late. There are a lot of Mexican social programs helping indigenos (Indians). There are over fifty different indigenous languages still spoken in rural Mexico. They were speaking a dialect of Huasteco but the sites they were visiting were in Spanish. Their conversation were so intense I knew it was something really important they were trying to find; like who owned the land she lived on, where the baby’s grandfather was, or a medical question. That’s about all I could tell because it’s really not polite to look at what kind of surfing the net your neighbors are doing two computers away. It is really not polite when there is an infant and a bare breast in between.
Things got a little awkward for a couple of seconds. The Huastecan woman didn’t know exactly how embarrassed she was supposed to be about nursing and adjusted her top accordingly. I didn’t know how embarrassed I should be in being interested in my surroundings and adjusted my eyes accordingly.
Good vibes prevailed. I got back to my naval nonsense, the Huastecan got back to her questions, the woman helping the Huastecan, got back to her net searches, and the baby got back to supper on the other breast.
All was well in the world for a few moments but I thought about it and realized that the Huastecan woman next to me would have no comprehension of what I was looking at; a diagrammatic table of weapons systems, and I was so very glad.
I would have been so embarrassed. I can’t imagine anything I could be looking at on the net that would be more obscene.
Questions and comments can be sent to
Waltssalt@yahoo.com
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