The Action Site to Stop Cassini Earth Flyby
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NoFlyby Newsletter #7

Sent via email to NoFlyby subscribers, members of Congress, UN delegates and news media
October 1, 1998

Hi folks,

We have too much good material and ideas to delay in sending this newsletter alert.

1) Daniel Goldin, who is the director of NASA, will be on C-Span on Friday, October 2 in the morning as a live guest.

Please call in if you can and pose the question,

"Why risk the Earth at all with the scheduled August 1999 Cassini Earth flyby, when an independent Government Interagency group revealed that the plutonium containers couldn't withstand the force of an accidental Earth reentry and the 72.3 pounds of plutonium 238 could impact a significant proportion of Earth's population with a breatheable form of plutonium radiation pollution?"

Washington Journal: Democrats (202) 624-1111
Washington Journal: Republicans (202) 624-1115
Washington Journal: Others (202) 737-6734
Washington Journal: FAX (202) 393-3346
E-mail: journal@c-span.org

2) Earl Budin called and left the following transcribed voice message.

We will be following up on his idea in the form of a letter to Daniel Goldin, and will post it at "actions to stop the flyby."

"Jonathan, this is Earl Budin, I am at the airport on the way out of the country for a few weeks. I just wanted to tell you about an idea that I had that I gave to Karl Grossman on his message recorder, and hopefully between the two of you somebody will get it. Our idea in getting a Congressional investigation is a good one, but it occurred to me that an even more direct way of stopping the flyby is by prevailing on Daniel Goldin, the head of NASA. If he can be made aware of the fact that the people working under him at NASA distorted the truth and withheld the truth and lied, in their Environmental Impact Statement, as indicated by the independent safety panel analysis, I think he would be constrained to hold off on the flyby, if not cancel it completely. The idea being, of course, is that NASA kept proclaiming that the plutonium containers would not release a significant amount of plutonium and this was a complete falsehood as revealed by the independent safety analysis. It's hard to understand how they can do such a thing, but they did, and John Liver, the NASA representative in Washington, [D.C.], will probably be able to give us an explanation when we reach him. I gave his telephone number to Karl Grossman. He's a pretty good investigator and hopefully something can come of this and make it a lot easier for us to stop the flyby, rather than having to go through Congress with no certainty that something positive will happen. As you may recall, on multitude occasions in the Environmental Impact Statement, NASA made the statement that the plutonium containers.. [sentence interrupted by answering machine]"

3) Letter delivered to the Secretary General of the United Nations and Ambassadors of all nations in the UN Security Council by Mrs. Selma Brackman of the War & Peace Foundation.

4) Japanese TV interview on Cassini with written answers by Russell Hoffman

Russell Hoffman is the editor of the STOP CASSINI newsletter, and webmaster of the STOP CASSINI web site: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/cassini/index.htm These opinions, while his own, are the result of dozens of interviews with top radiation and space scientists who opposed Cassini, and also the result of research efforts which included thousands of pages of NASA documents and numerous other sources.

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