Symbolic Anti-Nuke Sculpture Falling Apart....Just Like the Anti-Nuke Movement

How appropriate:

Cartoonist Paul Conrad would probably draw pleasure from the newest fallout surrounding his anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica.

Two decades after its controversial placement in their downtown Civic Center, city officials worry that the stylistic mushroom-cloud artwork depicting the horror of atomic warfare is falling apart.

Exposure to salt air has caused the sculpture's fiberglass base to deteriorate, loosening some of the fasteners that hold the intertwined chains that form the 26-foot mushroom cloud.

Conrad was a die-hard leftist. His cartoons were a litany of anti-sanity, anti-Republican drivel. It's fitting that his sculpture, like his ideology, is falling apart.