You know I occasionally use my bully pulpit here at WorldNetDaily to
introduce you to some of our remarkable contributors who, for whatever
reason, are not getting the recognition and readership they deserve.
Gordon Prather is one of those.
Prather decided to become a nuclear physicist and naval officer when he was 15.
It was the novel “The Caine Mutiny” that made him want to go to sea. And it was movies like “The Thing,” wherein incredibly naïve scientists always seemed to take the side of the alien and were promptly scarfed up that made him think there might be a place for a scientist with a little common sense.
He also noticed that those weirdo scientists never seemed to get the “the good-looking broad” — his words, ladies, not mine. It occurred to him that there might be a place for a nuke scientist with a little common sense there, too!
Prather was born and raised in a very small town in southwest Oklahoma, didn’t know squat about physics or the sea, but got his B.S. in physics and was commissioned through Oklahoma University’s Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps. But the BuPers (that’s the Bureau of Naval Personnel, for you landlubbers) didn’t assign him to the mythical Caine, the USS Purdy or the USS Hyman. Instead, they sent him to the highly secret Department of Defense nuclear weapons project.
“The Navy put me in the nuke business, and I have essentially never gotten out — or wanted to,” he says.
Prather, then, has served in the U.S. military, worked at two of the three nuke weapons labs, served as an aide to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla., and was a presidential appointee in Caspar Weinberger’s Pentagon.
“I have hands-on experience at every level and in every theater of U.S. nuke programs, from R&D through PPBS (that’s planning, programming, budgeting system, for you civilians), congressional authorization and appropriation, through development in the fleet and in the field,” he says modestly. “There are not many such people, and the columns I write could literally not be written by many others, either.”
He’s not bragging, really. Prather earned his Ph.D in physics from Utah State University in 1967. He is now the proprietor of PsiStar and specializes in nuclear proliferation prevention, weapons of mass destruction systems, planning-programming-budgeting by Defense and Energy and environmental remediation associated with those departments. He has, of course, held top-level security clearances.
The neatest trick of all, though, is that Prather doesn’t write like a scientist, a policy wonk or a technocrat. He writes like a writer.
How did we discover this talent? Why isn’t he working for the New York Times? How the heck did a start-up Internet content provider secure the time and energy of a man with this ability and resume?
Hey, folks, get used to it. We’re good.
I don’t always agree with Prather, as he knows. He lets me know whenever I get off the reservation — particularly in areas of his expertise, the hard sciences.
But that’s one of the many beautiful and unappreciated aspects of WorldNetDaily. This newssite is no one-trick pony. Anybody looking for one is going to be sadly disappointed. Every day I hear from people questioning me for the inclusion of this columnist or that story in our lineup. They don’t get it. You can’t measure or evaluate WND on the basis of one columnist or one story — or even one day’s complete editorial lineup.
We do this for a living — each and every day, 365 days a year.
And, at least twice a week, on Tuesdays
(like today) and Saturdays, Prather waxes scientific for WND. Love him or hate him, you gotta read him.
You say you’re not really interested in science? Well, see if you’d like to read more of this: “Al Gore believes in his heart of hearts that the world is going to hell in a wheelbarrow and that it’s all our fault. Most of us believe the planet earth is ours, to serve as our home. The globalists and modern-day druids, on the other hand, believe it is the planet earth — not the human spirit — that is sacred and the sacred planet would be much better off if none of us parasites were crawling around on it.”
Well, now, maybe you know why he’s not writing for the New York Times. He may be scientifically correct, but he’s anything but “politically correct.”
And, in conclusion, let me tell you one more thing about Prather. As he tells it, he did get the good-looking broad, too.
Syria and America’s bloody diplomacy
Mike Pottage