I spent the entire day yesterday sending e-mails out to peace groups all over the U.S. about Rep. Cynthia McKinney's plan to lead the fight against funding the nuclear rocket. (See yesterday's entry below for details.)
I found two sources that listed the address for virtually every peace group in the country and copied and pasted, one by one, an e-mail to them. The nuclear rocket issue is not known to many people, even in the peace movement, so I figured it was worth my time to bring some awareness to folks.
This is the way I was able to make the Cancel Cassini Campaign, back in 1997, such a big issue. For three years before the launch of the space mission, that carried 72 pounds of plutonium-238 on-board, I day in and day out tried to do something to make people aware of Cassini. So now I am doing the same thing on Project Prometheus - the nuclear rocket.
Some months ago I was contacted by the Keystone Center in Colorado. They are a PR firm hired by NASA to determine what critics of the nuclear rocket intend to do to stop it. The Keystone Center intends to help NASA draft public relations strategies to blunt our efforts. They wrote, and then called, wanting a meeting so they could find out about our plans. Imagine that, they wanted me to sit down and tell them what we plan to do to stop Project Prometheus so they could then turn around and help NASA! Of course, I declined the meeting. Let them read the blog like everyone else who is spying on us from NASA and the military-industrial complex. Let them earn their $$$$ the hard way! Work for it!
I will say this. We do intend to run a global campaign to Park Project Prometheus. We want to park it in the annals of history alongside past nuclear rocket schemes like Orion, Rover, NERVA, and Timberwind. All previous generations of the nuclear rocket were cancelled because of enormous cost and fear of the environmental consequences of an accident. What makes anyone think that the reaction to Prometheus will be any different?
There is one difference. Today the media are under control of a handful of multi-national corporations that are owned by or connected to the military-industrial complex. It will be harder to get decent stories written about the dangers of the nuclear rocket. At the same time we have a Congress under the thumb of the aerospace industry's big money. The fight will be hard this time around but no less important.
It will be our strategy to bring attention to Project Prometheus in any way possible. It will take extraordinary effort to reach beyond the barriers erected by corporate money and power. That is why I spent the entire day yesterday e-mailing groups, one by one, around the nation. A spider spins its web one strand at a time.