Glaring omission
Although a reader of many years, I am considerably put out (or is it: put off?) with the Militant for your unforgivable glaring omission in your editorial of March 27: "Nuclear waste, capitalist legacy." Oh really?

How about "Nuclear waste, etc., Stalinist legacy?" Try, won't you, a follow-up addendum : say a "teensy weensy" statement on East European pollution, nuclear or otherwise - that unfolding events after '89 - astounded "the West": progressive and conservative alike.

Please address this issue soon, in any case (as I know you have done, quite a long while ago) of the shameful, criminal misdeeds of all kinds in the former so-called peoples democracies.

Mary Shull
Acton, Ontario

Editor replies: The Militant has a long record of detailing the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China - including their contempt for the lives of working people and the environment. Two weeks after our editorial appeared, we ran an article - one of many in recent years - on the continuing devastation posed by the Chernobyl disaster in the Ukraine (see `Militant,' April 17, page 11). The subject of the editorial to which reader Shull refers was the U.S. nuclear industry. She is correct in pointing out that nuclear waste is a danger no matter where it is.

At the same time the greatest threat to working people around the globe is headquartered in Washington. The nuclear legacy to humanity will persist until political power is taken out of the hands of the capitalist warmakers.

Russian revolution
Keep up the good work! The women's liberation insert (March 20) was excellent. Some early writings on the Russian revolution and Lenin and Trotsky would be great.

A reader
Baltimore, Maryland

More on Decatur, Illinois
I am interested in hearing more about the fights taking place in Decatur, perhaps a comprehensive article about all three strikes and the corporate and local government responses, as well as general support from the community. The Militant is awesome - keep it up.

Pieter Clayton
Boise, Idaho

Keep the truth coming
Thank you for three years of the truth. Renew me for two more years.

Guy Blue
Tacoma, Washington

Picking nuclear targets
An article in the April 24 Militant mentions that Kyoto, the traditional capital of Japan, was not attacked by the U.S. Air Force during World War II. But it had a close escape. General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, wrote, "If we had not recommended Kyoto as an atomic target, it...would most likely have been seriously damaged, if not destroyed."

Cities under consideration as targets for atomic weapons were spared conventional air raids so that study of the damage would reveal the power of the new weapons. "I particularly wanted Kyoto as a target because...it was large enough in area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atomic bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect," Groves wrote.

Secretary of War Stimson overruled him, sensitive to the importance of world public opinion on Washington's standing in the post-war world. With hindsight, Groves came to agree, but added that Stimson "did not forsee that much of the criticism he so scrupulously sought to avoid would come from American citizens." General Groves's revealing book is entitled Now it Can Be Told. It also recounts U.S. military operations in Germany designed to capture or destroy suspected sites of German nuclear research before the arrival of their French and Soviet "allies."

Chris Morris
Manchester, England

Mumia Abu-Jamal
About 70 people rallied in the rotunda in Harrisburg's State Capitol March 28 to speak against the death penalty. Pennsylvania's new administration is pushing for a greater use of the death penalty. Six weeks into office, Gov. Thomas Ridge signed three death warrants and promises more.

The annual rally and lobby day was called by Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE). Activists came from across the state of Pennsylvania as well as from New York, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many came to demand a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a well-known political prisoner on death row. Abu-Jamal was convicted in 1981 for the shooting death of a Philadelphia police officer.

Pamela Africa of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia spoke. "We don't know who killed police officer Daniel Faulkner, but we do know that Mumia didn't do it. He did not have a fair trial. We demand a trial like they're having for O.J. Simpson." Africa, to much applause, promised more protests if and when Governor Ridge sings a death warrant for Abu-Jamal, and denounced Black state politicians for doing little on his behalf. Abu-Jamal has been denied full access to his legal defense committee.

A statement was read from Mark Curtis, a member of the Socialist Workers Party framed-up on rape and burglary charges.

Glova Scott
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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