By Nancy Cambria
Years after a massive weapon of destruction is produced, its legacy lives on in a complex web that involves us all. If it is deployed and reaches its target, it remains forever embedded in the souls of those who withstood its terror. If it sits dormant, it haunts those who someday might become its helpless target. As a nation, we are strapped both by the deficits we amass to pay for these weapons and the resources we channel to repair what they already may have damaged. And for some individual communities, the toxic byproducts of a weapon's production may live on in the soil, with the community's citizens suffering from its poisons while profiting economically from its production. Large scale weapons threaten to destroy even as they promise to deter and protect, and everybody is in some way affected by this irony.
As we are once again reminded of these ironies by the daily headlines, HAVERFORD speaks with three alumni who, through the passion of their convictions and examples set during their Haverford education, have chosen to address the complex issues of the industrial weapons complex. As graduates of a college with deep Quaker roots and a tradition of peaceful solutions, their vocational choices are even more compelling. And while their approaches and opinions on the issues vary tremendously, their shared Haverford experience clearly guides them as they make their way through this tangled web...