Welcome to Lopez Island. Thanks for representing us. You sit on the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees rebuilding the Trident submarine fleet home-ported on Hood Canal, sea-based leg of the trillion dollar rebuild of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.

Congress seems eager to create jobs building weapons of mass destruction which if ever used will incinerate innocent civilians. The hostile use of any modern nuclear weapon for deterrence or whatever justification would constitute a crime against humanity under international law. Each Trident D-5 warhead outsizes the Hiroshima atomic bomb by a factor of 7 (W-76 warhead) to 30 times (W-88 warhead). Each Trident

submarine warship under New START can carry 96 warheads.

America’s best climate scientists were asked to calculate the climate effects from a small nuclear war, for example, between India and Pakistan with their historic animosities and 250 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs between them. Professor Alan Robock calculated what would happen if 100 of these bombs were detonated against cities in both countries. He shares his results in a TED talk on YouTube – 200 million deaths from immediate blast, burn, and radiation effects, and widespread famines in South Asia and China putting perhaps two billion people at risk of dying from starvation due to millions of tons of smoke billowing into the stratosphere cooling both hemispheres for a decade.

One Trident warship can carry 7 to 30 times the explosive force of this 100-atomic-bomb war. A $350 billion plan is now underway to build and deploy twelve new Trident submarines to continuously threaten potential enemies from the world’s oceans through 2099.

Topf & Sons contracted with the Nazis to build mass incinerators used initially at Buchenwald and later at five other Nazi death camps. Who are the US individuals and corporations planning and building these doomsday systems today, and what will they say if ever confronted with the crimes against humanity these systems are designed to inflict?

Mr. Larsen, please vote to stop or at least seriously reduce the rebuild of the Trident first-strike system that sits in the heart of our beautiful Hood Canal.

David Hall

Lopez Island