Not our kind of blast

After a Nevada newspaper recently reported that the Department of Defense was planning to conduct the largest nonatomic blast in U.S. history in our backyard, the residents of Bloomington and surrounding areas were understandably alarmed. Fortunately, the DoD has announced it won't run the operation here -- but that doesn't mean it's time for complacency. Mitchell, Ind., the rumored sight of the planned blast, is a small town 45 minutes away from Bloomington, where the government has held tests in the past. The area is strikingly similar in topography to Bloomington, with rolling hills, limestone deposits and an extensive cave system. \nThe test under debate goes by the name "Divine Strake," an interesting moniker for the most powerful non-nuclear blast ever devised. \nThere is nothing divine about 700 tons of explosives unleashed in the Hoosier countryside. The effects of merely testing that amount of explosives would be more than just the collapse of all cave systems within an immediate radius, but also the injury of all birds in flight within 1,084 feet, human eardrum rupture within 2,250 feet and various structural damage within a few miles. \nDo we have to sacrifice our natural wonders in the name of Homeland Security? To quote the proverb attributed to Chief Seattle of the Squamash, "The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth." The cave system, which has taken eons of infinitesimal increments of erosion to exist, is not ours to destroy in the name of a more effective means of violence. Yes, measuring the destruction inflicted on the delicate cave system might be a perfect way to test the efficacy of Divine Strake, but the long-term ecological and topological costs are hard to determine and most likely would be disastrous.\nThat said, the next question that arises is, if not here, then where? The open farmland of Kansas? The frozen tundra of the Alaskan wilderness? The rock formations in Utah? The deserts of Nevada or New Mexico? The traditional line of thinking is that if the military has developed a new weapon in order to theoretically keep us safer, it must be tested somewhere. It could be argued that it is our patriotic duty in this time of war to support the military in any way, including allowing it to blow up bits of our country. However, this weapon is so monumental in its scale of destruction that no place in our homeland is a good place for detonation. It's hard to fathom the true extent of destruction following a blast of 700 tons of military-grade explosives, but it is easy to see that no one wants or deserves this test in their back yards. The military is welcome to build structures in which to do a contained blast, but if the only way to test Divine Strake is by destroying our environment, then the American people should present the military with an emphatic "No"