Dear friends, I hope I can be forgiven for posting something that has no direct relation to Kumamoto. I’d like to write a little about this article from the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/10/cold-war-era-weapon-100bn-us-plan-to-build-new-nuclear-missile-sparks-concern Today I was listening to a “Democracy Now” podcast from about a week ago. They were talking about US plans to develop a new, very expensive nuclear weapon (the one mentioned in the Guardian article). They were also talking about the UK’s movements in a similar direction. I’m pretty much of a news junkie, both in regard to the US and Japan, but this was the first I’d heard of it. I searched in Japanese and finally, after some effort, found a Japanese article about the UKs strengthening of its nuclear arsenal and one more on US plans: https://otakei.otakuma.net/archives/2020090908.html But, it’s the kind of news that you have to know about already in order to be able to find an article about it. For the Japanee article on U.S. plans, I needed to use GBSD, the abbreviation for “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent,” the name of the program, in order to find anything. If you do a Google search in English with Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent you can find articles about the program from fairly reputable sources. Major news services, however, seem to be mostly silent. Granted, there’s a lot to report these day and this seems to have been developing over some time but I still can’t help but scratch my head as to how this can be more-or-less public yet not be considered to be newsworthy. :) –Kirk P.S. If “fake news” is fiction that gets lots of attention, what is real news that gets ignored for the most part? “Silent news”?