Imperial Beach, California, Part 6

The City of Imperial Beach says of their swamp: “The Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve, Check out Imperial Beach’s environmental jewel!”

Living in Imperial Beach -- or San Diego -- means living near nuclear weapons. We must understand that while California is the seventh largest economy in the entire world (bigger than Red China’s), San Diego by itself is the seventh largest military force in the entire world. Not only does the place have tens of thousands of real assault troops (the United States Marines), but it has a marvelous air force of one thousand six hundred nuclear capable fighters and bombers and lots of really huge black missile launching submarines. Then we have the hundreds of surface ships including cruise missile launching ships.

Finally, San Diego has six nuclear powered aircraft carriers. Each carrier needs more than 5,000 men to run it and even though these things are more than a thousand feet long they can do a zippy 50 miles per hour. plus. Stopping is a problem, but forward is fun.

To hold all those things that can really go BOOM in the night our security forces have placed the special uranium and plutonium powered stuff in heavily secured bunkers right up the sandy beach from the Tijuana River Estuary and Border Field State Park. Yes, right up the beach.

Who on earth might be so interested in these bunkers and some form of general retribution? The ships that landed Marines at Mogadishu, Somalia came from San Diego. The surface ships that sent hundreds of cruise missiles into Baghdad came from San Diego. The fighter bombers that blew up the Iraqi’s homes came from San Diego. The submarines that sent cruise missiles to Afghanistan came from San Diego. The ship that sent the surface to air missiles into the Iranian passenger laden Airbus flight 655 and killed hundreds of civilians was the USS Vincennes, from San Diego.

So it is good that we live in this land of Hope and that we can block out the Darkness. For it is all quite true that many of our simple border travelers come from cities 10,000 miles distant — Baghdad, Kabul, Damascus, Jiddah, and Peshawar — and they are constantly peering over the U.S. Navy’s fencing and at those odd steel reinforced earthen lumps with the heavy steel doors and the too few guards and they are certainly wondering how to peek inside and light a fuse.

Inside these bunkers are enormous amounts of stored energy in the form of uranium and plutonium and other rare metals and which are often tickled by puffs of tritium gas. A pound of uranium is about the size of your eyeball. The retail price of uranium is approximately $10.75 per pound although there seem to be few retail stores open for business outside of Chechnya. Uranium is 40 times more naturally abundant than silver and so it is not nearly as special as we all have been told ever since our “Duck and Cover” days at grade school.