Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Blog

  • Nuclear Power Still a Deadly Proposition

    While Vice President Dick Cheney is actively promoting nuclear power as a significant plank in his energy plan, he claims that nuclear power is “a safe, clean and very plentiful energy source.”

    The Nuclear Energy Institute, the policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies industries, is currently running an energetic campaign for the revivification of nuclear power. Ubiquitous TV and radio ads carry the admonition that “Kids today are part of the most energy-intensive generation in history. They demand lots of clean electricity. And they deserve clean air.”

    Also, a consortium of 10 U.S. utilities has requested funding from the federal government for the construction of new reactors based on a European design, and they hope to receive government approval by 2010. This is a major policy change since no new nuclear reactors have been ordered in the United States since 1974.

    Nevertheless, the claims of the Mr. Cheney and the nuclear industry are false. According to data from the U.S. Energy Department (DOE), the production of nuclear power significantly contributes both to global warming and ozone depletion.

    The enrichment of uranium fuel for nuclear power uses 93 percent of the refrigerant chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gas made annually in the United States . The global production of CFC is banned under the Montreal Protocol because it is a potent destroyer of ozone in the stratosphere, which protects us from the carcinogenic effects of solar ultraviolet light. The ozone layer is now so thin that the population in Australia is currently experiencing one of the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world.

    CFC compounds are also potent global warming agents 10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient heat trappers than carbon dioxide, which itself is responsible for 50 percent of the global warming phenomenon.

    But nuclear power also contributes significantly to global carbon dioxide production. Huge quantities of fossil fuel are expended for the “front end” of the nuclear fuel cycle — to mine, mill and enrich the uranium fuel and to construct the massive nuclear reactor buildings and their cooling towers.

    Uranium enrichment is a particularly energy intensive process which uses electricity generated from huge coal-fired plants. Estimates of carbon dioxide production related to nuclear power are available from DOE for the “front end” of the nuclear fuel cycle, but prospective estimates for the “back end” of the cycle have yet to be calculated.

    Tens of thousands of tons of intensely hot radioactive fuel rods must continuously be cooled for decades in large pools of circulating water and these rods must then be carefully transported by road and rail and isolated from the environment in remote storage facilities in the United States . The radioactive reactor building must also be decommissioned after 40 years of operation, taken apart by remote control and similarly transported long distances and stored. Fully 95 percent of U.S. high level waste — waste that is intensely radioactive — has been generated by nuclear power thus far.

    This nuclear waste must then be guarded, protected and isolated from the environment for tens of thousands of years — a physical and scientific impossibility. Biologically dangerous radioactive elements such as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium will seep and leak into the water tables and become very concentrated in food chains for the rest of time, inevitably increasing the incidence of childhood cancer, genetic diseases and congenital malformations for this and future generations.

    Conclusion: Nuclear power is neither clean, green nor safe. It is the most biologically dangerous method to boil water to generate steam for the production of electricity.

    Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician, is president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute and author of The New Nuclear Danger, George Bush’s Military Industrial Complex (The New Press). She lives near Sydney, Australia.

    Originally published by the Baltimore Sun.

  • Depleted Uranium Blamed for Cancer Clusters Among Iraq War Vets

    A discovery by American Free Press that nearly half of the recently returned soldiers in one unit from Iraq have “malignant growths” is “critical evidence,” according to experts, that depleted uranium weapons are responsible for the huge number of disabled Gulf War vets – and damage to their DNA.

    A growing number of U.S. military personnel who are serving, or have served, in the Persian Gulf, Iraq , and Afghanistan have become sick and disabled from a variety of symptoms commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been blamed for causing many of the symptoms.

    “Gulf War vets are coming down with these symptoms at twice the rate of vets from previous conflicts,” said Barbara A. Goodno from the Dept. of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate.

    A recent discovery by American Free Press that nearly half the soldiers in one returned unit have malignant growths has provided the scientific community with “critical evidence,” experts say, to help understand exactly how depleted uranium affects humans – and their DNA.

    One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both told AFP that 27-28 percent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems, more than 5 times the rate of Viet Nam vets, and 4 times the rate of Korean War vets.

    Korényi-Both said his son had recently returned from Iraq , where he had been part of the initial assault from Kuwait to Baghdad . From his unit of 20 men, 8 now have “malignant growths,” Korényi-Both said.

    Dr. Korényi-Both is not an expert on DU, but has written extensively about how the fine desert sand blowing around Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula provides a ideal vehicle for toxins, increasing the range and effect of biological and chemical agents, such as DU, that attach themselves to the particles of sand.

    Korényi-Both described how, during the 1991 Gulf War, he and others had inhaled large quantities of sand dust that could have been laden with chemical or biological agents. The sand “destroyed our immune systems,” he said.

    FULK’S THEORY

    Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore lab, is investigating how DU affects the human body. Fulk said that 8 malignancies out of 20, in 16 months, “is spectacular – and of serious concern.”

    The high rate of malignancies found in this unit appears to have been caused by exposure to DU weapons on the battlefield. If DU were found to be the cause, this case would be “critical evidence” of Fulk’s theory on how the DU particulate affects DNA.

    Such quick malignancies are caused by the particulate effect of DU, according to Fulk:

    When DU (Uranium 238) decays, it transforms into two short-lived and “very hot” isotopes – Thorium 234 and Protactinium 234. As it transforms in the body, the DU particle is firing off faster and faster “bullets” into the DNA, Fulk said, or wherever it is lodged. Because uranium has a natural attraction to phosphorus, however, it is drawn to the phosphate in the DNA.

    As the Uranium 238 decays, it releases alpha and beta particles with millions of electron volts. When a DU particle makes this transformation in the human body it releases “huge amounts of energy in the same location doing lots of damage very quickly,” Fulk said.

    Thorium 234 has a half-life of 24 days and emits a beta particle of .270 million electron volts as it transforms into Protactinium 234, which has a half-life of less than 7 hours. Protactinium then emits a beta particle of 2.19 million electron volts as it transforms into the more stable Uranium 234.

    The chemical binding energy in the molecules of the human cell is less than 10 electron volts. One alpha particle from U-238 is over 4 million electron volts, which is like “nuking a cell.”

    Leuren Moret, a scientist who is opposed to the use of DU, compared it to sitting in front of a fire and putting a red-hot coal in your mouth. “The nuclear establishment wants us to believe that it is like sitting in front of the fire and warming the whole body evenly – and that no harm is done, but that is not the reality,” she said.

    “We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person,” Moret said. “These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer,” she said. “A new phenomenon.”

    The Pentagon’s Goodno questioned Dr. Korényi-Both’s report that 8 of 20 recently returned soldiers from one unit had experienced malignant growths. Goodno and Korényi-Both did agree, however, that Iraqi chemical and biological agents had not played a role in the 2003 invasion.

    This is significant because three factors have generally been blamed for causing Gulf War Syndrome: Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, the cocktail of vaccinations given to coalition soldiers, and depleted uranium. The absence of any detectable chemical or biological agents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq reduces the number of potential factors for the malignancies in the veterans to pre-war vaccinations and DU.

    Statistics published in Encyclopedia Britannica’s 2003 Almanac indicate that 325,000 Gulf War vets were receiving compensation for service-related disabilities in 2000. The almanac lists 580,400 combatants in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, yet only 467 U.S. personnel were actually wounded during the conflict. The 325,000 disabled Gulf War vets are equivalent to 56 percent of the number of military personnel “serving in the theater of operation.”

    Furthermore, in 2000, nine years after the three-week war in Iraq had ended, the number of disabled vets from the Gulf War was increasing yearly by more than 43,000. While the number of disabled vets from previous wars is decreasing by about 35,000 per year, since the “War on Terror” began in 2001, the total number of disabled vets has grown to some 2.5 million.

    MORE DISABLED VETS

    “More than ever before,” Brad Flohr of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said about the total number of disabled vets. Asked if there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II, Flohr said he believed so.

    Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs told AFP that current statistics indicate that more than half a million veterans of the 14-year-old “Gulf War era” are now receiving disability compensation. During this period, some 7,035 soldiers are reported having been wounded in Iraq .

    With 518,739 disabled “Gulf-era veterans” currently receiving disability compensation, according to Jemison, the number of veterans disabled after the war is more than 73 times the total number of wounded, in and out of combat, from the entire 14-year conflict with Iraq.

    DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS

    Last December, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police Company of New York and found that four of the men had absorbed or inhaled depleted uranium (U-238).

    Several of the men had traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, which is only produced in a nuclear reaction process. U-236 is a man-made isotope of uranium.

    “These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield,” Durakovic said.

    “Due to the current proliferation of DU weaponry, the battlefields of the future will be unlike any battlefields in history,” Durakovic, then Chief of Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Administration said after the first Gulf War, in which he served.

    Since 1991, the U.S. military has used DU in munitions as penetrating rods, which destroy enemy tanks and their occupants, and as armor on U.S. tanks. When DU penetrating rods strike a hard target some of the radioactive and chemically toxic DU is vaporized into ultra-fine particles that are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin.

    According to a survey of 10,051 Gulf War veterans, conducted between 1991 and 1995 by Vic Sylvester and the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association, 82 percent of veterans reported having entered captured Iraqi vehicles. “This would suggest that 123,000 soldiers have been directly exposed to DU,” Durakovic said.

    “Since the effects of contamination by uranium cannot be directed or contained, uranium’s chemical and radiological toxicity will create environments that are hostile not only to the health of enemy forces but of one’s own forces as well,” Durakovic said.

    “Because of the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU, the small number of particles trapped in the lungs, kidneys, and bone greatly increase the risk of cancer and all other illnesses over time,” Durakovic, an expert of internal contamination of radio-isotopes, said.

    According to Durakovic, other symptoms associated with DU poisoning are: emotional and mental deterioration, fatigue, loss of bowel and bladder control, and numerous forms of cancer. Such symptoms are increasing showing up in Iraq ‘s children and among Gulf War veterans and their offspring, he said.

    “Although I personally served in Operation Desert Shield as Unit Commander,” Durakovic said, “my expertise of internal contamination was never used because we were never informed of the intended use of DU prior to or during the war.”

    “The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in his March 25 article on DU weapons, “Silent Genocide.”

    “DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon’s response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”

    As AFP reported last week, the smallest particles of DU, when inhaled, are capable of moving throughout the human body, passing through cell walls and affecting the person’s Master Code, according to Fulk, and the “_expression of the DNA.”

    Four years after the Gulf War of 1991, Life magazine published a photo-essay entitled “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm,” which focused on the numerous cases of severe birth defects that had occurred in families of veterans from that war.

    Life reported, “Of the 400 sick vets who had already answered [Don Riegle’s Senate Banking] committee inquiries, a startling 65 percent reported birth defects or immune-system problems in children conceived after the war.”

    AFP asked the Dept. of Veterans Affairs if they kept records of the birth defects occurring among the families of veterans, and was told they do not.

  • The Museum of Attempted Suicide

    An enormous Mosler bank vault sits abandoned and forgotten on the dry lake bed of Frenchman Flat. It is ugly, and rusting, a big cookie jar from Hell — yet it is in some sense America’s greatest monument to hope and clear thinking.

    That giant safe at the Nevada Test Site is a relic of an Atomic Energy Commission experiment in 1957 (“Response of Protective Vaults to Blast Loading”). Filled with stocks and bonds, gold and silver, cash and insurance policies, it confirmed that our official valuables, contracts and financial instruments, could survive nuclear war. The test must have seemed like a good idea at the time, a masterpiece of steel-and-concrete realpolitik. After all, safes had tested well — quite by accident — at Hiroshima in 1945, when four Mosler vaults in the basement of the Teikoku Bank near Ground Zero were discovered in the ruins with their contents miraculously intact. In fact, American troops entering Hiroshima some weeks after the bombing, reported hundreds of small safes resting in the city’s ashes.

    Today at the Nevada Site all that remains of the vault’s reinforced concrete “bank building,” itself specially constructed for the test, are a few shards of blasted concrete and a tangle of rusting, arm-thick steel reinforcing rod, swept back like so many cat’s whiskers in the wind.

    Just before dawn on June 24 1957, a 37-kiloton fission bomb, code-named “Priscilla,” was suspended from a helium balloon about half a mile from where the big safe stands. In the path of Priscilla’s shock wave the Atomic Energy Commission had built its own tiny twentieth century city. Priscilla rocked that mini-civilization in southern Nevada with twice the explosive force of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Its flash — far brighter than the sun — was reflected back off the moon, and soldiers covering their eyes in trenches two miles away claim they were able to see the bones in their hands.

    Domed shelters of 2-inch thick aluminum alloy were flattened like so many soda pop cans stamped flat on a job site. The shock wave hammered reinforced concrete shelters, industrial buildings, cars in an underground parking garage, community shelters, a railroad trestle, a 55-ton diesel locomotive, parked airplanes, dummies in Russian and Chinese protective clothing, and a man-made pine forest rooted in concrete on the desert floor. Anesthetized Cheshire pigs in little protective suits were roasted alive in Priscilla’s thermal pulse. We’ll never know for sure but Priscilla’s heat, like that of the Hiroshima bomb, must have instantly incinerated unsuspecting ravens in mid-flight. Later that morning, the fallout cloud drifted eastward, where in the months to come it mingled with residual radioactive products from other atmospheric tests and eventually dispersed around the globe. Today, anyone in the world born after 1957 carries in his or her bones at least a few atoms of Strontium-90 fallout from Priscilla.

    In 1957, at about the moment that human self-extinction first became possible, many policy-makers already believed all-out nuclear war with the Soviets to be an inevitability. In fact, some of those planning the Priscilla shot, and assumedly curious to discover whether our stock and insurance certificates could survive it, must have known that full-scale nuclear war could theoretically end all life on earth. That year, hardly a decade after the atomic bomb had been but an exotic laboratory device, it was already a commodity; Priscilla was just one of 6,744 nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. (The Soviets had 660.)

    Here at Frenchman Flat we rehearsed our failed attempt at global suicide. It would have been a grand, charismatic gesture, spectacular pornography — the human species going out with a great bang, nothing dreary and plodding like AIDS or global climate change. It would have been visible throughout the solar system; and as Priscilla did indeed show, our valuables, safely locked away, would indeed have survived us.

    The Nevada Test Site, a particularly desolate thousand square miles of the Great Basin, was chosen in 1951 for our nuclear tests partly because it’s ringed by low mountains, naturally shielded from the prying eyes of the outside world. Today, if you stand amid the charmless wreckage at Frenchman Flat, another thing is clear: It is also impossible to see out of the basin; the place is disconnected from the rest of Nevada, from America, from civilization itself. It is a lifeless, humorless, Planet of the Apes location. These could have been the ruins of a future we stopped in its tracks — the ruins of Las Vegas, Vienna, or Tokyo, your town or my town, bombed back to the Stone Age.

    Today, as we sweat over whether North Korea has four bombs or six, or whether Iran has any at all, remember that in 1957, only 12 years after the Trinity test, the United States was manufacturing ten nuclear bombs per day, 3000 fission and fusion bombs every year. The largest in our ’57 arsenal was the 5-megaton Mark 21, powerful enough to flatten 400 Hiroshimas (or Fallujas or Oaklands) at a pop.

    Filling that vault with stocks and bonds in 1957 now seems a surreal gesture of hope, a vain defense against a future that never happened: Imagine the survivors — a hairless, sterilized post-nuclear Adam and Eve, dry heaving (like the radioactive feral dogs that roamed the deserted streets of Chernobyl) — crawling toward the bank vault in their bloody rags, trying to remember the combination, praying for their Chrysler stock, or grandpa’s gold watch, or their Prudential personal liability policies.

    Or imagine another future, one in which no humans remain to open the vault. This is the Twelve Monkeys future in which the global suicide only rehearsed at the Nevada Test Site in 1957 actually succeeds and no one mops up the radioactive slop or collects the insurance — with only ants and cockroaches left to puzzle over a warm, blasted vault on the radioactive sands of what was once Nevada.

    But cooler heads prevailed. Someone drifting off on a 47-year nap in 1957, when nuclear war seemed inevitable, might wake today startled to find that those crimes against the future have so far been held at bay. Our nuclear arsenal peaked at 30,000 weapons in 1966, and has stood at about 10,000 for the past five years. We have — so far — spared ourselves that future, mainly because of the hard work and clear thinking of two generations of leaders who understood what the wreckage at Frenchman Flat meant. Give them credit. Give credit to Dwight D. Eisenhower and Henry Cabot Lodge for introducing a plan for nuclear disarmament in 1957, only weeks after the Priscilla shot; and give credit to JFK for the Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty; to Richard Nixon for the SALT and ABM treaties; to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev for negotiating START I and START II. Give credit to Carter and Ford for signing strategic arms limitation agreements with Brezhnev. Give credit to thousands of dissident scientists, activists and ordinary citizens whose relentless pressure helped tip the balance away from madness. Above all, give credit to hundreds of clear thinking selfless men and women in the U.S. and Russia who recognized a slippery slope to Hell when they saw one, and were willing to do the hard work of negotiation and compromise.

    The insects and sagebrush have returned to the silent desert at the Nevada Test Site, and ravens once again circle above the vault. But the nuclear dog sleeps with one eye open. Weapons far larger than Priscilla are on alert today, no more anachronistic than rifles or anthrax. Twenty miles north of Frenchman Flat, the tower for “Ice Cap,” a shot put on hold in ’92 when George Herbert Walker Bush suspended American nuclear testing, still stands patiently ready to receive its bomb. As mandated in George W. Bush’s current “Nuclear Posture Review,” the Nevada Test Site is today in the process of ramping up its “ready status” from 2 years to 18 months.

    Meanwhile, the United States and 70 other nations maintain thousands of deeply buried, hardened underground bunkers for their top military and civilian officials, a defense against future nuclear war. This is the Frenchman Flat vault scenario writ large. And just in case — after withdrawing support for the ABM treaty — the Bush administration is aggressively pursuing the development of “usable bunker busters,” the first new generation of nuclear weapons since the Cold War. On the grounds of the Nevada Test Site, five miles west of the bank vault, stands the just finished $100,000,000 Device Assembly Facility, poised for either the disassembly of weapons from our stockpile, or for the assembly of new weapons.

    In these edgy times, when the possibility of nuclear war seems a thing of the past, a visit to Frenchman Flat should be a requirement for holding public office in America. To stand amid the rusty junk, amid the ruins of a ghastly future that was turned back — deliberately and methodically turned back by statesmen — is to reach a deep understanding of what is possible. This is the bone yard of a very bad idea, recognized for what it was.

    Jon Else is a documentary cinematographer and director whose films include ‘ Cadillac Desert ‘, ‘ Sing Faster ‘, and ‘ The Day After Trinity ‘. He teaches in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier this year, for a new film about nuclear weapons, he spent several days working at the Nevada Test Site and so visited, not for the first time, the vault at Frenchman Flat.

    Published on Friday, August 13, 2004 by TomDispatch.com

  • Hiroshima Cover-up: How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer

    Governments lie.
    —     I. F. Stone, Journalist

    At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.

    Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.

    Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and describe radiation sickness.

    Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly-people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”

    He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

    Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.

    “When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”

    Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation. Reporters whose dispatches convicted with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”

    U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.

    Four days after Burchett’s story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.

    Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began.3 Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”

    Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.”

    Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms . . . Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”

    But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.

    William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.

    It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.” Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

    Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, “his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence,” as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: “After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as ‘hoax or propaganda.’ The Times’ Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett’s reports, and parroted the government line.” Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing-which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers-were written by none other than Laurence.

    “Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”

    “Atomic Bill” Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials-he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.

    In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. . . . It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

    Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: “Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural.”

    Laurence was good at keeping his master’s secrets-from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence’s dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing-and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, “Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.”

    Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

    A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)

    W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.” He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”

    Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.” W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.

    The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times “regretted the lapses” of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty’s “credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”

    On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty’s award, concluding that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the articles that won the prize.

    As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of “uncritical parroting of propaganda”-as long as it is from the United States?

    It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped.

    Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show “Democracy Now!.” This is an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them , written with her brother journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence

    Democracy Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than 240 stations.

    Originally published by CommonDreams.org

  • Nagasaki Peace Declaration

    How many people in the world now remember that fateful day? At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, fifty-nine years ago, the city of Nagasaki was instantly transformed into ruins by a single atomic bomb dropped from an American warplane, killing some 74,000 people and wounding 75,000. Today, Nagasaki ‘s verdant cityscape attracts visitors from around the world, and its residents maintain a distinctive set of traditions and culture. Nevertheless, the city’s increasingly elderly atomic bomb survivors continue to suffer from the after-effects of the bombing as well as from health problems induced by the stress of their experience. We the citizens of Nagasaki call upon the world with a renewed sense of urgency, even as we reflect upon the intense suffering of those who have already perished.

    We call upon the citizens of the United States to look squarely at the reality of the tragedies that have unfolded in the wake of the atomic bombings 59 years ago. The International Court of Justice has clearly stated in an advisory opinion that the threat of nuclear weapons or their use is generally contrary to international law. Notwithstanding, the US government continues to possess and maintain approximately 10,000 nuclear weapons, and is conducting an ongoing program of subcritical nuclear testing. In addition, the so-called mini nuclear weapons that are the subject of new development efforts are intended to deliver truly horrific levels of force. In terms of the radioactivity that such weapons would release, there would be no difference compared to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki . So long as the world’s leading superpower fails to change its posture of dependence on nuclear weapons, it is clear that the tide of nuclear proliferation cannot be stemmed. People of America : The path leading to the eventual survival of the human race unequivocally requires the elimination of nuclear arms. The time has come to join hands and embark upon this path.

    We call upon the peoples of the world to recognize how scant is the value repeatedly being placed on human life, evidenced by events such as the war in Iraq and outbreaks of terrorism. Wisdom must prevail, and we must join together in enhancing and reinforcing the functions of the United Nations in order to resolve international conflicts, not by military force, but through concerted diplomatic efforts. Next year will be the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings, coinciding with the 2005 NPT Review Conference to be held at UN headquarters. With the approach of the coming year, let there be a convergence among the citizens of the world, NGOs, and all concerned parties who desire peace, so that the way may be opened for the elimination of those symbols of inhumanity known as nuclear weapons.

    We call upon the government of Japan to safeguard the peaceful underpinnings of its constitution, and, as the only nation ever to have experienced nuclear attack, to enact into law the threefold non-nuclear principle. The combination of the threefold non-nuclear principle with nuclear disarmament on the Korean Peninsula will pave the road towards the creation of a Northeast Asia nuclear-weapon-free zone. At the same time, the specifics of the Pyongyang Declaration must be agreed upon, while Japan itself must also pursue an independent security stance that does not rely on nuclear arms.

    We call upon the world’s youth to study the reality of the atomic bombings and to internalize a sense of respect for life, as our young people are doing in Nagasaki . The enthusiasm and hope manifested by youth who have considered the requirements of peace and are acting accordingly will serve to enlighten an increasingly confused world. Individuals who arise to take action close at hand can and will foster the realization of world peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

    We in Nagasaki will continue to share our experiences of the atomic bombing of our city, and will work to make Nagasaki a center for peace studies and peace promotion. It is our hope that we will thus be able to form bonds of friendship and solidarity with people throughout the world.

    Today, on the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing, as we pray for the repose of those who died and recall to mind their suffering, we the citizens of Nagasaki pledge our commitment to the realization of true peace in the world, free from nuclear weapons.

  • Summer Days, Presidential Campaigns and Hiroshima

    This past Friday, the world quietly observed the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the dawn of the first Nuclear Age.

    On this quiet late summer day in a presidential election season, not a word was noted in most of the communities across our land.

    In a local barbershop, a conversation was heard that there was hardly a difference in the candidates for this year’s presidential election. As I pondered this statement, I realized how remarkable it was in this season of remembrance and reflection. Currently, the world stands at the brink of entering a renewed second nuclear arms race dependent upon U.S. policy.

    Members of Congress, at home during their summer recess, will return to debate the president’s request for additional funding for new nuclear weapons systems, including the huge “Bunker Buster” and “Usable” mini-nukes. This reflects a mind-set that nuclear weapons are necessary and usable and that nuclear arms treaties constrict us and interfere with our ability to develop these new weapons systems.

    These ideas are reflected in the administration’s “Nuclear Posture Review,” released in March 2002. Remarkably, it also proposes that the United States alone could unleash a pre-emptive nuclear attack on a nation for the suspicion of threat. If no other issue were to be debated this season, this alone stands as the most critical for our future and that of future generations.

    Regarding the issues of nuclear security, we need to ask where the candidates stand. We must then decide and vote accordingly. Let’s look at three specific areas.

    1. Creation of new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
    2. Moratorium on nuclear testing and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
    3. The problem of former Soviet nuclear weapons.

    The CIA and intelligence communities advise that one of the most significant threats to U.S. security is attack by some terrorist organization using a weapon obtained from former Soviet stockpiles. These weapons are potentially more readily available following the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty, signed by President Bush and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, which aims to store rather than destroy nuclear stockpiles.

    On these questions, Bush is pressing Congress for funds to develop new nuclear weapons systems while Sen. John Kerry states he will “stop this administration’s program to develop new nuclear weapons. These are systems we don’t need.” He then questions what the message is that this sends to other countries.

    On nuclear testing, the president has asked for funding to prepare the Nevada test site for accelerated testing readiness and has spoken against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while Kerry is an outspoken proponent of arms control and nonproliferation. He supports ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    Third, on former Soviet nukes, the president has negotiated the SORT treaty, which, as stated, plans to store nuclear stockpiles. Kerry states that SORT “runs the risk of increasing the danger of nuclear theft by stockpiling thousands of warheads.” He states that when he is president, he will make securing weapons and materials from the former Soviet Union a priority in relations between the United States and Russia.

    Finally, we must ask how other nations of the world and our adversaries will respond to our lip service of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction, yet unilaterally pursuing the development and potential use of them.

    The answers to these questions will determine how we are viewed by the world community and the hope our future will hold.

    This 59th anniversary of Hiroshima, we are reminded of the famous Albert Einstein quote at the beginning of the first arms race: “With the unleashed power of the atom, we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe unless we change the way we think.”

    On these lazy days of summer, when politics seems so insignificant and remote, the choice is ours. There really are differences. We must decide. The world is watching.

    Robert Dodge, M.D., of Ventura, is co-chairman of Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions and president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ventura County.

    Originally published by the Ventura County Star.

  • 2004 Sadako Peace Day

    2004 Sadako Peace Day

    This has been a very soulful commemoration of this 59th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima . We have heard beautiful and haunting music, poetry and reflections as well as the sweet sounds of small birds in the oak trees that surround us and provide a canopy above us.

    This garden, Sadako Peace Garden , was created nine years ago and dedicated on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima , on August 6, 1995 , and each year since we have met in this garden on August 6 th to commemorate this important anniversary. This garden is dedicated to all who work for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons.

    As we reflect today, I believe that two critical questions of our time deserve our attention: What have we learned from Hiroshima that will help us prevent future Hiroshimas? And, what are we willing to do about what we have learned?

    If we have learned nothing from Hiroshima , as it sometimes seems, we are destined to have a tragic future. But even if we have learned that the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must never be repeated, we still face a tragic future if we are not willing to act upon this understanding. It seems to me certain that in the Nuclear Age, ignorance and apathy will be our undoing. We cannot allow them to become the accomplices of nuclear weapons.

    That is why education about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and advocacy for eliminating nuclear weapons are so critical to our common future, and why organizations like the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation are so important to building a more secure future.

    I want to share with you a poem that I received today by a poet in Tucson, Arizona, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk:

    Hiroshima Day –
    in my heart, I release
    a thousand cranes

    I hope that today we can all release a thousand cranes in our hearts and in our world. We are powerful beyond our imaginations, and the power of a thousand cranes released in many human hearts can change our world.

  • The Real Dirty Bombs: Depleted Uranium

    Lost in the media circus about the Iraq war, supposedly being fought to prevent a tyrant from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, is the salient fact that the United States and Britain are actively waging chemical and nuclear warfare in Iraq – using depleted uranium munitions.

    The corporate-controlled press has failed to inform the public that, in spite of years of UN inspections and numerous international treaties, tons of banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – used and unused – remain in Iraq. Indeed, both chemical and radioactive WMD have been – and continue to be used against U.S. and coalition soldiers.

    The media silence surrounding these banned WMD, and the horrendous consequences of their use, is due to the simple fact that they are being used by the U.S.-led coalition. They are the new “Silver Bullet” in the U.S. arsenal. They are depleted uranium weapons.

    Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were first used during the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. The Pentagon estimated that between 315 and 350 tons of DU were fired during the first Gulf War. During the 2003 invasion and current occupation of Iraq, U.S. and British troops have reportedly used more than five times as many DU bombs and shells as the total number used during the 1991 war.

    While the use of DU weapons and their effect on human health and the environment are subjects of extreme importance the Pentagon is noticeably reluctant to discuss these weapons. Despite numerous calls to specific individuals identified as being the appointed spokesmen on the subject, not one would answer their phone during normal business hours for the purpose of this article.

    Dr. Doug Rokke, on the other hand, former director of the U.S. Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, is very willing to talk about the effects of DU. Rokke was involved in the “clean up” of 34 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles hit by friendly fire during the 1991 Gulf War. Today he suffers from the ill effects of DU in his body.

    Rokke told American Free Press that the Pentagon uses DU weapons because they are the most effective at killing and destroying everything they hit. The highest level of the U.S. and British governments have “totally disregarded the consequences” of the use of DU weapons, Rokke said.

    The first Gulf War was the largest friendly fire incident in the history of American warfare, Rokke says. “The majority of the casualties were the result of friendly fire,” he told AFP.

    DU is used in many forms of ammunition as an armor penetrator because of its extreme weight and density. The uranium used in these missiles and bombs is a by-product of the nuclear enrichment process. Experts say the Department of Energy has 100 million tons of DU and using it in weapons saves the government money on the cost of its disposal.

    Rather than disposing of the radioactive waste, it is shaped into penetrator rods used in the billions of rounds being fired in Iraq and Afghanistan . The radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons industry has, in effect, been forcibly exported and spread in the environments of Iraq , Afghanistan , the former Yugoslavia , Puerto Rico , and elsewhere.

    THE REAL “DIRTY BOMBS”

    “A flying rod of solid uranium 18-inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter,” is what becomes of a DU tank round after it is fired, Rokke said. Because Uranium-238 is pyrophoric, meaning it burns on contact with air, DU rounds are burning as they fly.

    When the DU penetrator hits an object it breaks up and causes secondary explosions, Rokke said. “It’s way beyond a dirty bomb,” Rokke said, referring to the terror weapon that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material.

    Some of the uranium used with DU weapons vaporizes into extremely small particles, which are dispersed into the atmosphere where they remain until they fall to the ground with the rain. As a gas, the chemically toxic and radioactive uranium can easily enter the body through the skin or the lungs and be carried around the world until it falls to earth with the rain.

    AFP asked Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab, if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb. “That’s exactly what they are,” Falk said. “They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.”

    According to Falk, more than 30 percent of the DU fired from the cannons of U.S. tanks is reduced to particles one-tenth of a micron (one millionth of a meter) in size or smaller on impact.

    “The larger the bang” the greater the amount of DU that is dispersed into the atmosphere, Falk said. With the larger missiles and bombs, nearly 100 percent of the DU is reduced to radioactive dust particles of the “micron size” or smaller, he said.

    While the Pentagon officially denies the dangers of DU weapons, since at least 1943 the military has been aware of the extreme toxicity of uranium dispersed as a gas. A declassified memo written by James B. Conant and two other physicists working on the U.S. nuclear project during the Second World War, and sent to Brig. Gen. L.R. Groves on October 30, 1943, provides the evidence:

    “As a gas warfare instrument the [radioactive] material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs,” the 1943 memo reads. “In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulation in a person’s body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty.”

    The use of radioactive materials “as a terrain contaminant” to “deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations” is also discussed in the Groves memo of 1943.

    “Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it’s not going to decrease very much over time,” Leonard Dietz, a retired nuclear physicist with 33 years experience told the New York Daily News . “In the long run . veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem.”

    Inhaled particles of radioactive uranium oxide dust will either lodge in the lungs or travel through the body, depending on their size. The smallest particles can be carried through cell walls and “affect the master code – the __expression of the DNA,” Falk told AFP.

    Inhaled DU can “fool around with the keys” and do damage to “practically anything,” Falk said. “It affects the body in so many ways and there are so many different symptoms that they want to give it different names,” Falk said about the wide variety of ailments afflicting Gulf War veterans.

    Today, more than one out of every three veterans from the first Gulf War are permanently disabled. Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said that of the 592,561 discharged veterans from the 1991 war in Iraq , 179,310 are receiving disability compensation and another 24,763 cases are pending.

    The “epigenetic damage” done by DU has resulted in many grossly deformed children born in areas such as southern Iraq where tons of DU have contaminated the environment and local population. An untold number of Americans have also been born with severe birth defects as a result of DU contamination.

    The New York Daily News conducted a study on nine recently returned soldiers from the New York National Guard. Four of the nine were found to have “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded DU shells.

    Laboratory tests revealed two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the 9 soldiers. The four soldiers are the first confirmed cases of inhaled DU from the current Iraq war.

    “These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle,” said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the soldiers and performed the testing. “Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more DU exposure,” Duracovic said. Duracovic is a colonel in the Army reserves and served in the 1991 Gulf War.

    The test results showing that four of nine New York guardsmen test positive for DU “suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians,” the Daily News reported.

    “A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq ] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust,” Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium said, “And the health impact is worrisome for the future.”

    HOTTER THAN HELL

    “I’m hotter than hell,” Rokke told AFP. The Dept. of Energy tested Rokke in 1994 and found that he was excreting more than 5,000 times the permissible level of depleted uranium. Rokke, however, was not informed of the results until 1996.

    As director of the Depleted Uranium Project in 1994-95, Rokke said his task was three fold: determine how to provide medical care for DU victims, how to clean it up, and how to educate and train personnel using DU weapons.

    Today, Rokke says that DU cannot be cleaned up and there is no medical care. “Once you’re zapped – you’re zapped,” Rokke said. Among the health problems Rokke is suffering as a result of DU contamination is brittle teeth. He said that he just paid out $400 for an operation for teeth that have broken off. “The uranium replaces the calcium in your teeth and bones,” Rokke said.

    “You fight for medical care every day of your life,” he said.

    “There are over 30,000 casualties from this Iraq war,” Rokke said.

    The three tasks set out for the Depleted Uranium Project have all failed, Rokke said. He wants to know why medical care is not being provided for all the victims of DU and why the environment is not being cleaned up.

    “They have to be held accountable,” Rokke said, naming President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and British prime minister Tony Blair. They chose to use DU weapons and “totally disregarded the consequences.”

  • International Ju-Jitsu: Using United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 to Advance Nuclear Disarmament

    Introduction: Ju-Jitsu and Resolution 1540

    In the 16th Century Shirobei Akiyama, a Japanese man studying medicine in China, noticed that in a heavy blizzard branches of most strong trees broke while the elastic branches of the willow tree bent and efficiently freed themselves from the snow. He thus developed a martial art called Ju-Jitsu , which aims not to neutralize power with power but rationally absorb an attack and convert that energy to the opponent’s own detriment.

    On April 28, 2004, the United Nations Security Council adopted  Resolution 1540 requiring all States to take measures to prevent non-State actors from acquiring or developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in general.

    Critics of the resolution fear that it provides a mandate for the powerful countries that already possess nuclear weapons, particularly the permanent members of the Security Council (P5), to impose pressure or even use force to prevent other States and non-State actors to acquire such weapons themselves (see United Nations Security Council Unanimously Passes WMD Resolution, The Sunflower, May 2004 ).

    While there are definitely problems with the resolution, peace activists would be well advised to adopt the Ju-Jitsu approach and utilize the political momentum for action required by the UN resolution to move their governments to strengthen the norms and controls not only against the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, but also against those possessed and deployed by the P5.

    Thankfully, last minute changes in the resolution, made at the insistence of non-P5 Security Council members, provide political opportunities to do just this.

    Disarmament obligations in Resolution 1540

    The resolution notes that proliferation means ‘proliferation in all its aspects of all weapons of mass destruction,’ 1 and that action to prevent proliferation includes the implementation of ‘multi-lateral treaties whose aim is to eliminate or prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons,’ 2 and the need for ‘all member States to implement fully the disarmament treaties and agreements to which they are party.’ 3

    The resolution can thus be read to refer to efforts to prevent both horizontal proliferation (spread of weapons and related materials to those who do not yet have them) and vertical proliferation (continued possession, deployment and development of weapons by those already in possession of them). Such a reading is consistent with the disarmament obligations in the key multilateral treaties which aim to prevent proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons – referred to in the UN Security Council resolution – including Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons in the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention.

    Reporting

    Under the resolution, the Security Council established a Committee of the Security Council, consisting of all members of the Council, and called on all States to present a first report to the Committee within six months on steps they have taken or intend to take to implement the resolution.

    The reporting process provides an opportunity for all States to report on steps taken and steps planned to address both the vertical and horizontal proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

    In addition to the pre-ambular language calling for ‘all member States to implement fully the disarmament treaties and agreements to which they are party,’ 4 UNSC Resolution 1540 specifically ‘calls upon all States to promote the universal adoption and full implementation, and where necessary, strengthening of multilateral treaties to which they are parties, whose aim is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.’ 5

    Thus States should report not only on steps taken domestically to implement their own disarmament and non-proliferation obligations, but also on steps taken to promote the regional and international implementation of disarmament and non-proliferation obligations, including encouragement given to the Nuclear Weapon States to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

    Peaceful resolution of related conflicts

    UNSC Resolution also calls on ‘all Member States to resolve peacefully in accordance with the Charter any problems in that context (i.e. relating to proliferation of all weapons of mass destruction) threatening or disrupting the maintenance of regional and global stability.’ 6 This provides an opportunity for States to highlight peaceful methods for resolving such problems and to report on methods they have used or promoted. This could include:

    • Recourse to the International Court of Justice to solve the dispute of the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons (ICJ Advisory Opinion of 1996)
    • Support for United Nations Security Council action to respond to the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes of Iraq , and opposition to the use of force by countries acting outside the United Nations (US and UK use of fo rc e against Iraq )
    • Opposition to the doctrine of the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons to respond to the threat of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (US National Security Strategy)

    Criminal law

    UNSC Resolution 1540 requires all States to adopt and enfo rc e laws which prohibit any non-State actor to manufacture, acquire, possess, develop, transport, transfer or use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and their means of delivery.7 States in implementing this obligation should extend such laws to include any person, regardless of whether they are a non-State actor or official of a State. This would be consistent with the objectives of the resolution, as outlined in the pre-amble which does not distinguish between State and non-State actors in determining proliferation risks.

    Many countries have already adopted criminal laws relating to both State and non-State actors with respect to chemical weapons as part of their actions to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention. Some countries, e.g. New Zealand , have adopted such laws with respect to nuclear weapons (much to the displeasure of some of the Nuclear Weapon States). States should affirm that a discriminatory approach, i.e. prohibiting acts only if undertaken by non-State actors, would fail the legal principle of universality (the law must apply to all) and would encourage proliferation under the cover of agents of the State. The recent revelations of proliferation organized through the Khan network involving both non-State and State actors, indicates the necessity for responsibility to extend to State actors as well as non-State actors.

    Adopting criminal laws which apply to both State and non-State actors would strengthen the global norm of illegality of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

    Assistance to other States

    UNSC Resolution 1540 invites States to offer assistance to other ‘States lacking the legal and regulatory infrastructure, implementation experience and/or resources’8 to fulfill the provisions of the resolution. Some observers fear that this section was inserted at the wishes of the United States in order to provide legitimacy for them to dictate to other States how they should deal with the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. If such assistance is only left to the USA and other Nuclear Weapon States , countries will no doubt be encouraged to implement only the counter-proliferation and horizontal non-proliferation aspects of the resolution and ignore the disarmament provisions. However, the provision does provide the possibility for States with strong non-discriminatory laws against nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, to assist other States to develop similar laws.

    Disarmament Education

    UNSC Resolution 1540 calls upon all States to ‘develop appropriate ways to work with and inform industry and the public regarding their obligations under such laws [arising from multilateral treaties to which they are parties].’ 9

    This provides an opportunity for States to report on actions undertaken to inform and educate industry and public on non-proliferation issues including work done to implement the recommendations of the United Nations Study on Disarmament and Non-Proliferation Education.

    Transit through territorial waters

    The first paragraph of UNSC Resolution 1540 affirms ‘that proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, as well as their means of delivery, constitutes a threat to international peace and security.’ As such, activities on the high seas, involving the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons could be considered as inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea which reserves the seas for peaceful purposes consistent with ‘the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.’ 10

    Coastal States have authority in their territorial waters to prevent passage which is not innocent, 11 including passage which is ‘prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State,’ 12 or passage which is ‘in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations.’ 13

    States could therefore respond to the resolution by prohibiting the passage of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery through their territorial waters.

    Regional and international collaboration

    UNSC Resolution 1540 ‘Calls upon all States to promote dialogue and cooperation on non-proliferation.’ 14 Some States have joined the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which aims to develop cooperation between States to address proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery.

    However, there is a risk that unilateral and coalition actions like PSI could undermine the work of multilateral approaches and mechanisms to address non-proliferation if such actions do not adhere to non-discriminatory norms and principles of international law.

    States participating in PSI should report on such participation to the Committee of the Security Council, and ensure that such actions are consistent with the following principles 15:

    1. Strive for universality, transparency in decision making with proper regard for legitimate comme rc ial and security interests, verifiability, and equity in application.
    2. Ensure strict compliance with existing international law relating to transit, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
    3. Reinforce the verification regimes of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and assist in the creation of strengthened verification methods for the Biological Weapons Convention.
    4. Strengthen mechanisms within the existing regimes to more clearly determine prohibited and permitted activities relating to transport of identified materials, components, and technologies.
    5. Apply constraints and principles in a universal and equitable manner.
    6. Apply restrictions in such a manner as to reinfo rc e the existing arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament commitments and norms contained in treaty regimes.
    7. Assist in establishing objective positive standards by which countries are determined to be in good standing with the existing relevant treaty regimes.
    8. Ensure all measures reinforce the United Nations system and the rule of law.

    Nuclear Energy

    While the NPT affirms the right of States to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, nuclear reactors create a very real proliferation risk with all known cases of nuclear proliferation arising from the diversion of fissile materials from nuclear reactors or from the diversion of uranium supposedly enriched for nuclear reactors. Countries which have foresworn the development of nuclear reactors could report on their capabilities to produce sufficient energy in alternative ways in order to encourage other States to phase out or forgo nuclear energy.

    International steps

    In order to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons to States and non-State actors, a vital immediate step would be to achieve an international agreement to prohibit the production of fissile materials and place all existing stocks under international control. Such a measure would curtail the ability of States and non-State actors to acquire fissile material and use it to produce nuclear weapons. Concurrent steps which would curtail the ability of States and non-State actors to acquire nuclear weapons would be to disarm and disable all existing nuclear weapons pending the completion of negotiations on their elimination. The only guarantee against the proliferation of nuclear weapons to States and non-State actors is to eliminate the existing nuclear weapons and the means to produce them. This message should be made to the Committee of the Security Council by as many States as possible, along with other plans, proposals and actions leading to complete nuclear disarmament.

    Conclusion

    UN Security Council Resolution 1540 provides opportunities for significant disarmament steps by States, including opportunities to put pressure on nuclear weapon States to implement their disarmament obligations. The degree to which States act on these opportunities will depend mostly on how much encouragement and support they receive from disarmament advocates globally. So in short, it is up to us to make this happen and turn Resolution 1540 into a positive tool for disarmament.

    * Alyn Ware is a consultant for the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms.
    Contact: P.O.Box 23 – 257, Cable Car Lane , Wellington , Aotearoa-New Zealand
    Phone (64) 4 385-8192. Fax 385-8193 
    alynw@attglobal.net 
    www.ialana.org

    1.  Pre-ambular paragraph 2
    2. Pre-ambular paragraph 5
    3. Pre-ambular paragraph 13
    4. Pre-ambular paragraph 13
    5. Operative paragraph 8 (a)
    6. Pre-ambular paragraph 3
    7. Operative paragraph 2
    8. Operative paragraph 7
    9. Operative paragraph 8 (d)
    10. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 301
    11. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 25
    12. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 19 (1)
    13. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Article 19 (2) (a)
    14. Operative paragraph 9
    15. Presented by the Global Security Institute to the Seminar on Weapons of Mass Destruction and the United Nations , New York , Mar 5, 2004 . Convened by the government of New Zealand and the International Peace Academy.

  • Report on Trip to Europe by NAPF President

    Nuclear Age Peace Foundation president David Krieger was in Europe from July 2nd to July 9th. He was there to attend meetings of the International Council and Executive Committee of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES), where he serves as deputy chair of INES, and to give several talks. He gave the keynote address at the 40th anniversary meeting of the International Peace Research Association, spoke to some 150 participants from throughout Europe at the International Summer Academy of the Schlaining Peace Center, and gave a talk to the International Institute for Peace in Vienna.

    Two of the speeches by David in Europe (“Nuclear Disarmament in a Time of Globalization” and “US Policy and the Quest for Nuclear Disarmament”) can be found on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s web site at www.wagingpeace.org.On July 7th, David went to the Schlaining Peace Center, which is housed in an old castle in the Austrian countryside. His speech there the next morning was on “The US Peace Movement in a Time of ‘War against Terrorism.’”That afternoon he was taken to Vienna , where he did a radio interview and then spoke in the evening at the International Institute for Peace on “US Policy and the Quest for Nuclear Disarmament.” He was introduced by the president of the Institute, Erwin Lanc, a former Foreign Minister of Austria.The main topics of the INES workshop were: Responsibility and Education (The Duality of Science and the Social Responsibility of Scientists; Ambivalence of R & D in Modern Biotechnology; Peace Education; Whistleblowers); War and Weapons (New Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Strategy; Uranium Weapons); Peace and Sustainability (Energy and Peace; Water and Peace; Climate Change and Energy Conflicts); War Politics and Peace Promotion (Nuclear Targeting and the Non-Proliferation Treaty); Disarmament (International Control of Nuclear-Usable Materials; Chemical Disarmament); and a session focusing on problems specific to Europe (Space Militarization from a European Point of View; Environmental Problems in the Danube Area; Europe under Construction; and Problems of Chemical Safety in Europe).Following the two-day INES Council and Executive Committee meetings, INES put on a two-day workshop that ran parallel to the meeting of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), which allowed for networking with many members of this worldwide association. David gave the keynote address to IPRA on “Nuclear Disarmament in a Time of Globalization.”The INES meetings were held in Sopron, Hungary , a small town near the border of Austria. The participants in INES are a strongly engaged group of scientists and engineers, and their work supports and complements that of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. There were representatives at the meeting from throughout Europe as well as from Russia and Latin America. Future plans of INES include organizing for the International Einstein Year 2005, in which it is playing a leading role. Starting this November, INES will begin a series of meetings on Einstein’s views on peace, disarmament and social responsibility. In 2006, INES plans to focus on the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl , looking at the continuing dangers of nuclear power. In 2007/2008, INES will organize another major international congress. These activities are in addition to their ongoing work on ethics in science, the prevention of nuclear proliferation, their opposition to both missile and missile defense developments and a variety of other projects.