For several years, grass roots activists in Central Florida have been trying, without much success, to get national environmental and peace groups interested in a bizarre and insane-sounding scheme scheduled to unfold in October 1997. Largely, they've fai led. While a bit of activist noise is being made now, far too late, mainstream media has continued to mostly ignore a NASA project that carries a palpable risk of ending all human life.

The project is the Cassini probe, a nuclear-powered mission to Saturn set to launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral October 6. Cassini's toxic payload: 72.3 pounds of plutonium, to be used for fuel as Cassini circles the sun, flies by Earth again in August 1999, and uses Earth's gravity to propel the probe on a decade-long flight to Saturn.

"Toxic" hardly does the matter justice. Plutonium-238, ingested, can induce cancer in humans in a dose of one millionth of a gram. One pound, if uniformly distributed, could hypothetically induce cancer in every human on earth. Several NASA missions over the past 30 years have exploded on launch and vaporized their fuel. If, instead, the launch goes well, most of Cassini's poisonous payload will be intact when it zips by Earth in 1999 at an altitude of only 312 miles. At 75 miles, friction with the planet 's upper atmosphere would slow down Cassini, gravity would pull it in, and the resulting fireball could conceivably burn up the probe and disperse plutonium globally.

A NASA explosion occurred as recently as January 17 (when a Delta rocket blew up shortly after launch at Cape Canaveral), and a Russian Mars probe with a much smaller nuclear payload fell back to Earth last November (triggering a bizarre U.S. government c over-up which first claimed the probe fell in the South Pacific before it was proven to have fallen along the Chilean/Bolivian border; satellite searches were unable to locate the plutonium battery pack). That adds to the worries of folks who grew up watc hing Challenger in 1986 and a series of 1960s rocket disasters--and who rightly distrust the U.S. government's record in informing citizens here or anywhere else of the risks of technology.

NASA, predictably, insists that Cassini is safe; proponents of nuclear technology always do, and in retrospect it seems they're invariably proven wrong. (Been to Hanford lately?) Yet NASA's own initial Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Missio n states that if an "inadvertant reentry occurred" during the 1999 fly-by, five billion of the seven to eight billion people on Earth "could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure."

As risk assessment goes, that's one helluva down side. The scariest part is that the risk is being taken on for no apparent reason. Cassini is a scientific probe; alternative fueling via solar panels is perfectly feasible. Life on earth is being jeopardiz ed essentially to feed the macho, pro-technology sensibilities of a militarized government bureaucracy (NASA) incapable of admitting error.

If Cassini launches successfully, these astro-cowboys can say they told us so; but how will we know? An earlier version of nuclear payloads, General Electric's RTGs, were used in satellites from 1961 until a 1964 accident in which a SNAP-9A (Systems for N uclear Auxiliary Power) fell to earth, burning up in the atmosphere. Some scientists believe the SNAP-9A accident is responsible for the increase in global rates of lung cancer at that time. The U.S. wouldn't even admit--and when it did admit, mainstream media ignored--details of last fall's Russian probe crash. And last July, Los Alamos National Laboratory reported increased contamination of workers and equipment, citing work on Cassini's plutonium-fueled systems as the primary cause. It's hardly a recip e for trust. And then there's the fly-by in 1999. And an additional series of nuclear-payload space missions being pushed hard by the Clinton Administration "for military and civilian purposes."

With so many government and corporate misdeeds at the end of our century, it's easy to trace greed, lust for power, and other wicked motives. But sometimes we look too deeply; sometimes institutions, and the individuals in them, are simply breathtakingly stupid. Let's hope the breathtaking, with Cassini, isn't literal.