Ukiah Daily Journal from Ukiah, California • Page 4

WEDNESDAY OCT. 2,1991 THE UKIAH DAILY JOURNAL lw Perspectives To wrnt an opinion artlcla for the Journal, telephone Jim SrhWi, 468-3519 EDITORIAL Log export tax is worth considering We find little to argue against on this proposed log export tax. It has some decided advantages which could benefit Mendocino County and the economy of the North Coast Under the plan by Oregon lawmakers, states would have the authority to levy a tax of up to 10 percent of the value of private logs sold for export. It also would provide a 2 percent tax credit to tree growers who process their logs within the U.S. Three-fourths of the export tax revenue would go into a federal trust fund to be returned proportionately to the contributing states for use in economic development, displaced worker programs and forestry assistance for private timberland owners.

The other 25 percent would be used to reduce the federal deficit. The sponsors predict a 10 percent tax would provide about $79.5 million a year for Washington and $52.5 million for Oregon. No figures were available for California. A coalition of timber, farm, labor and shipping groups has already denounced the proposal, saying it would lead to retaliation from foreign trading partners who provide the Northwest with billions of dollars of sales annually. But we doubt such would be the case.

If Japan and other Pacific Rim countries are hungry for our wood, let's charge them for it Surely, they have no compunction about gouging us for their TVs, radios, VCRs and CDs. And are Pacific Rim nations going to stop shipping us electronic equipment if we institute a tax on raw wood. Surely not. The Japanese will not risk hurting a market of 250 million people. Ironically, the legislation was introduced in the House at the same time the Wilderness Society was reporting that one in every four trees cut in the Northwest is shipped to an overseas market.

If that's the case, we should explot this advantage since, as the report stated, about 3 billion board feet of raw logs exported during 1990 has cost U.S. workers 19,200 timber jobs. Last year, President Bush signed into law a permanent ban on log exports from federal lands in the West, as well as new restrictions on exports from state-owned lands. This gives small timberland owners some clout they should use it. Where to Write EXECUTIVE OFFICES President George Bush The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, D.C. 20500 FAX Governor Pete Wilson State Capitol Sacramento, 95814 FAX U.S. SENATE Alan Cranston, Democrat U.S. Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 San Francisco John Seymour, Republican U.S.

Senate Washington, D.C. 20510 San Francisco REPRESENTATIVE Frank Riggs, R-Windsor U.S. House of Representatives Washington, D.C. 20515 Santa Rosa First District toll-free 800-834-1383 FAX TO SHOOT THE SEQUEL: LETTERS Bush's 'just do it' arms control plan By WALTER R. MEARS The Associated Prsss With his "just do it" arms control plan, President Bush is eliminating U.S.

tactical nuclear weapons that have stirred political and diplomatic disputes for years and hoping for matching cuts that would help keep the Soviet arsenal under central control. Unilateral, if partial, nuclear disarmament is a preemptive move against the prospect of a Soviet Union disbanded into nation states, at least four of which could have battlefield nuclear weapons. Arms negotiations with Moscow have been a laborious, years-long process. It took nine years to negotiate the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which hasn't yet been ratified, and would be phased into full effect over an additional seven years. Time frames like those are pointless now, given the headlong pace of change in the Soviet Union.

That new reality prompted the drastic nuclear overhaul Bush announced Friday night, including the sort of steps Republicans used to dismiss as unilateral disarmament when Democrats proposed them. Two years ago, with the Iron Curtain cracking but not yet down, the administration wanted to modernize NATO's short-range nuclear missiles, a move resisted by West Germany, where most of them were based. Bush yielded and agreed to put the whole question off until 1992. Now there is one Germany. The old Soviet military alliance has vanished, yielding to fledgling democracies.

And that leaves tactical missiles aimed at repelling an eastern invasion that is no longer a practical possibility. NATO was planning to seek negotiations for the elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons in Europe. But Bush said that would take too long. The U.S. weapons outlasted their targets.

So the president is eliminating them and ordering a standdown from alert status while maintaining a force of airborne tactical nuclear weapons. The Soviet arsenal is estimated at about 12,000 battlefield nuclear weapons, including artillery shells, short-range missiles, air defense warheads and nuclear land mines. That's well over double the number estimated to be affected by Bush's decision on U.S. tactical weapons. "My first question to President Bush was: 'Is this a unilateral Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev said in a Moscow television interview.

"His answer was yes. But in his letter and in our conversation, the president emphasized that the United States urges us to reciprocate." The emphasis is on the latter. "The real urgency is not our weapons," Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense, said in a CNN interview Sunday. "The real urgency is their weapons because you have a country that is starting to break apart, a country that faces potential enormous political problems in the future." The size, mobility and sheer numbers of tactical nuclear weapons have sometimes made the question of controlling their possible use a matter of U.S. political debate.

In Moscow, the newspaper Pravda said the U.S. administration seems "deeply concerned about the reliability of Soviet control over its nuclear arsenal." That fits the instant arms control plan in which Bush is writing off land-and sea-based tactical weapons the administration deems no longer necessary, and urging that the Soviets match the United States by destroying their ground- launched battlefield nuclear weapons. The Soviet government isn't precluding matching cutbacks, but it hasn't ordered them. A top Kremlin diplomat is due in Washington soon to discuss the situation. Brent Scowcroft, Bush's national security adviser, said negotiations on short-range weapons could have taken years.

Instead, he said, the president decided to tell Moscow: "We want to get rid of ours. You get rid of yours. Let's just do it." Bush also urged that remaining Soviet nuclear weapons be consolidated at central locations. That also could help to keep them under cen- tral control. "I have always been quite satisfied that the Soviet Union, through the center, exercised very good control over their nuclear weapons with respect to strategic systems," Gen.

Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday. "Obviously, tactical nuclear systems are a little more difficult to categorize that way, am reasonably satisfied that the Soviets are as concerned as we are over these kinds of weapons and how they have to be controlled." Scrapping them certainly would do it. vice president and columnist for The Associated Press, has reported on Washington and national politics for more than 25 years. Cold warriors pleased with new realities By JOHN K. WILEY The Associated Prsss FAIRCHILD AIR FORCE BASE, Wash.

U.S. pilots who had been on round-the-clock alert for a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union are leaving the spartan quarters where they killed time waiting for the doomsday order that never came. "I never thought we'd live to see the full reduction," Air Force Maj. Joe Nelson said Monday. "I thought it was a misprint when I read it in the paper," he said of President Bush's "stand-down" order on Friday to reduce the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Since 1957, the Air Force has kept B-S2 long-range bombers and the KC-135 tankers that refueled them in flight on 24-hour alert. They often waited with engines running, ready to launch strikes against the Soviet Union the instant the command was given. Since Friday, crews at 11 Strategic Air Command bases have removed nuclear cruise missiles from the bombers and locked them away in storage. The planes were sent to maintenance shops to be readied for regular flight duties. Now, it would take 24 hours to re-load the bombers with nuclear missiles.

Crews assigned to the warplanes had lived for seven days at a stretch in barracks a city block's distance from the "alert pad." Crew members were free to roam the base but had to be ready to take the planes up on short notice. "Our families will like it. The divorce rate should go way down," Master Sgt. Jack Sprague said as airmen packed up belongings in the barracks Monday. Over the years, as many as eight of the 325th Bombardment Squadron's 20 or more bombers the exact number is classified would be on the pad at all times, armed, fueled and ready to go.

Wailing on alert could involve sitting in a plane for as many as 12 hours at a stretch. That could be boring, but it had its exhilarating moments, said Master Sgt. Keith Krebs, a B-52 gunner. When the horn marking an alert sounded, the adrenalin flowed until it was determined to be a false alarm or a drill, he said. "It's the feeling you get when you're real close to having a car wreck," he said.

Most used the time to take ground-school classes, Nelson said. Some dedicated themselves to memorizing dictionaries or encyclopedias. The announcement has brought a new worry job security. LOCALLY OPERATED MEMBER DONREY MEDIA GROUP Donald W. Reynolds, Founder Ukiah Daily Uwrtodno County Edwardt, Publisher 3P? 8 Bell Office Manager Dennis Wilson- Advertising Director vie Martinez Production Manager Eddie Sequeira- Retail Manager Don Helms Clrcutefen Manager Member Audit Bureau Of Circulations 1991 Member California Newspaper Publishers Association Question of life and death To The Editor: "When does human life begin?" To the Rev.

Kraps the answer "rings out loud and clear, 'human life begins at Unfortunately, he either purposefully or ignorantly omits relevant Biblical passages and embryology from his arguments to reach such a conclusion. Embryologically, newbom's first breath is not that significant. Life is distinguished from non-life by several factors, including growth, movement, heartbeat, brain function, taking in nutrients, giving off waste, etc. An unborn child exhibits all of these just as a bom child does and is therefore most certainly alive. An unborn child even "breathes" in the most accurate sense of the term: the unborn child must take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide just as you or I must to stay alive.

The only difference is that the unborn child does so through its mother and the born child does so directly. This is a very minor difference and one that certainly does not justify saying "life begins with breath." In addition, the unborn child is not just a "tissue growth" or offshoot of its mother; the unborn child is genetically unique from both its mother and its father (and indeed from everyone there is no direct blood flow from mother to child; and the only way the child receives nourishment is through the exchange allowed by the placenta. Biblically, several passages give strong significance to the unborn child. In Luke 1:41, John the Baptist, while in the womb, recognizes the pregnant Mary and leaps for joy, activities which are hardly characteristic of a non-living being. In Psalm 139, David declares that Cod was actively and intimately involved in his creation inside his mother's womb.

This alone should tell us that the unborn child has special significance worthy of protection. Genesis 1:27 says man was created in the image of God; something created in the image of God, special in God's sight from the moment of conception, should not be willfully destroyed. In Exodus we are commanded by God not to murder not to take innocent life. Also, Proverbs says one of the things He abhors are hands that shed innocent blood. Who is more innocent than the unborn child? Jesus himself said in Matthew 25:40, "To the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even the least of them, you did it to me." Who is the least of his brothers, if not the unborn child? And if Christ equates our actions toward the unborn child as actions toward him, what does this Say for abortion? Why do we put so much effort into helping a hurting after it is bom yet ignore it or even kill it before it is born? To make matters worse, the Rev.

Kraps then abandons his own "loud and clear" position by saying that the answer to the question of when life begins is a matter of personal belief, t'-at "each of us must answer the question for ourselves." Thus apparently saying that the moment when a human life begins has no objective reality that it's all in our heads. If a woman believes that her child's life begins at birth, then for her it does. If another woman believes that her child's life begins at conception, then for her it does. Not only does this fly in the face of medicine and Christianity, as noted above, but if followed to its logical conclusion would allow a mother, by her personal religious belief, to decide that her child's life hasn't begun until age 2 or 12 or 22 and with a clear conscience "abort" her child before that time, since "it" wasn't really a living human. Our freedom and rights as human beings will not long survive if we accept such subjective nonsense.

No one has a right to decide for another when their life begins or when their life ends of whether they are human or not. The unborn child is alive. is human. The unborn child deserves protection, deserves the inalienable right to life. Randy Moehnke ii- i-i Ukiah Telling it like it is To The Editor: Regarding letters written by Ronald Libby J.W.

Daniels, Gary Gamble: You told it like it is! Equally as important as the economic factors may be, it is frightening that the Air Pollution Control Board and others are naive enough to believe or listen to the negative and so-called "environmentalists." They really don't care about the real effort Masonite has been putting forth to comply with the laws. You do not take a new process and fine-tune it overnight. It is as if these zealots do not really care. Nothing Masonite does pleases them. They would indeed close the plant down! Why? It's almost subversive.

Jo-An Butts Ukiah GARRY TRUDEAU NORTH AT MACH 2.5! A FPWMOMTHSA60, PEOPiZHAP GIVEN UP ON THIS PART OF EVERYONE TOU? MET WAS OWZ.Y 70 INVENT POST-WAR. ECONOMY! BUT I KNEW! I AGAIN ANPAQAINTOTHI5 BU6HTEPREGION! AHEflP OF THE OIKVE iUAYS, HE'S A SUIT, SIR. VISIONARY. OF COURSE, MY ACCOUNTANT MUGHEP!.