Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • Consequences of Nuclear Weapons

    2010_10_25_starr_1stcomm.pdf

  • New Book Concludes: Chernobyl death toll 985,000, mostly from cancer

    This article was originally published by Op-Ed News.

    This past April 26th marked the 24th  anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant accident. It came as the nuclear industry and pro-nuclear government officials in the United States and other nations were trying to “revive” nuclear power. And it followed the publication of a book, the most comprehensive study ever made, on the impacts of the Chernobyl disaster.

    Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment was published by the New York Academy of Sciences. It is authored by three noted scientists:

    Russian biologist Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the Russian president; Dr. Alexey Nesterenko, a biologist and ecologist in Belarus; and Dr.Vassili Nesterenko, a physicist and at the time of the accident director of the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus. Its editor is Dr. Janette Sherman, a physician and toxicologist long-involved in studying the health impacts of radioactivity.

    The book is solidly based–on health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports–some 5,000 in all.

    It concludes that based on records now available, some 985,000 people died, mainly of cancer, as a result of theChernobyl accident. That is between when the accident occurred in 1986 and 2004. More deaths, it projects, will follow.

    The book explodes the claim of the International Atomic Energy Agency–still on its website that the expected death toll from the Chernobyl accident will be 4,000. The IAEA, the new book shows, is underestimating, to the extreme, the casualties of Chernobyl.

    Alice Slater, representative in New York of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, comments: “The tragic news uncovered by the comprehensive new research that almost one million people died in the toxic aftermath of Chernobyl should be a wake-up call to people all over the world to petition their governments to put a halt to the current industry-driven “nuclear renaissance.’ Aided by a corrupt IAEA, the world has been subjected to a massive cover-up and deception about the true damages caused by Chernobyl.”

    Further worsening the situation, she said, has been “the collusive agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization in which the WHO is precluded from publishing any research on radiation effects without consultation with the IAEA.” WHO, the public health arm of the UN, has supported the IAEA’s claim that 4,000 will die as a result of the accident.

    “How fortunate,” said Ms. Slater, “that independent scientists have now revealed the horrific costs of the Chernobyl accident.”

    The book also scores the position of the IAEA, set up through the UN in 1957 “to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy,” and its 1959 agreement with WHO. There is a “need to change,” it says, the IAEA-WHO pact. It has muzzled the WHO, providing for the “hiding” from the “public of any information”unwanted” by the nuclear industry.

    “An important lesson from the Chernobyl experience is that experts and organizations tied to the nuclear industry have dismissed and ignored the consequences of the catastrophe,” it states.

    The book details the spread of radioactive poisons following the explosion of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26, 1986. These major releases only ended when the fire at the reactor was brought under control in mid-May. Emitted were “hundreds of millions of curies, a quantity hundreds of times larger than the fallout from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” The most extensive fall-out occurred in regions closest to the plant–in the Ukraine (the reactor was 60 miles from Kiev in Ukraine), Belarus and Russia.

    However, there was fallout all over the world as the winds kept changing direction “so the radioactive emissions”covered an enormous territory.”

    The radioactive poisons sent billowing from the plant into the air included Cesium-137, Plutonium, Iodine-131 and Strontium-90.

    There is a breakdown by country, highlighted by maps, of where the radionuclides fell out. Beyond Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, the countries included Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The radiological measurements show that some 10% of Chernobyl poisons “fell on Asia”Huge areas” of eastern Turkey and central China “were highly contaminated,” reports the book. Northwestern Japan was impacted, too.

    Northern Africa was hit with “more than 5% of all Chernobyl releases.” The finding of Cesium-137 and both Plutonium-239 and Plutonium-240 “in accumulated Nile River sediment is evidence of significant Chernobyl contamination,” it states.

    “Areas of North America were contaminated from the first, most powerful explosion, which lifted a cloud of radionuclides to a height of more than 10 km. Some 1% of all Chernobyl nuclides,” says the book, “fell on North America.”

    The consequences on public health are extensively analyzed. Medical records involving children–the young, their cells more rapidly multiplying, are especially affected by radioactivity–are considered. Before the accident, more than 80% of the children in the territories of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia extensively contaminated by Chernobyl “were healthy,” the book reports, based on health data. But “today fewer than 20% are well.”

    There is an examination of genetic impacts with records reflecting an increase in “chromosomal aberrations” wherever there was fallout. This will continue through the “children of irradiated parents for as many as seven generations.” So “the genetic consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe will impact hundreds of millions of people.”

    As to deaths, the list of countries and consequences begins with Belarus. “For the period 1990-2000 cancer mortality in Belarus increased 40%,” it states, again based on medical data and illuminated by tables in the book. “The increase was a maximum in the most highly contaminated Gomel Province and lower in the less contaminated Brest and Mogilev provinces.” They include childhood cancers, thyroid cancer, leukemia and other cancers.

    Considering health data of people in all nations impacted by the fallout, the “overall mortality for the period from April 1986 to the end of 2004 from the Chernobyl catastrophe was estimated as 985,000 additional deaths.”

    Further, “the concentrations” of some of the poisons, because they have radioactive half-lives ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 years, “will remain practically the same virtually forever.”

    The book also examines the impact on plants and animals. “Immediately after the catastrophe, the frequency of plant mutations in the contaminated territories increased sharply.”

    There are photographs of some of these plant mutations. “Chernobyl irradiation has caused many structural anomalies and tumorlike changes in many plant species and has led to genetic disorders, sometimes continuing for many years,” it says. “Twenty-three years after the catastrophe it is still too early to know if the whole spectrum of plant radiogenic changes has been discerned. We are far from knowing all of the consequences for flora resulting from the catastrophe.”

    As to animals, the book notes “serious increases in morbidity and mortality that bear striking resemblance to changes in the public health of humans–increasing tumor rates, immunodeficiencies, and decreasing life expectancy.”

    In one study it is found that “survival rates of barn swallows in the most contaminated sites near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are close to zero. In areas of moderate contamination, annual survival is less than 25%.” Research is cited into ghastly abnormalities in barn swallows that do hatch: “two heads, two tails.”

    “In 1986,” the book states, “the level of irradiation in plants and animals in Western Europe, North America, the Arctic, and eastern Asia were sometimes hundreds and even thousands of times above acceptable norms.”

    In its final chapter, the book declares that the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant “was the worst technogenic accident in history.” And it examines “obstacles” to the reporting of the true consequences of Chernobyl with a special focus on “organizations associated with the nuclear industry” that “protect the industry first–not the public.” Here, the IAEA and WHO are charged.

    The book ends by quoting U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s call in 1963 for an end of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.”The Chernobyl catastrophe,” it declares, “demonstrates that the nuclear industry’s willingness to risk the health of humanity and our environment with nuclear power plants will result, not only theoretically, but practically, in the same level of hazard as nuclear weapons.”

    Dr. Sherman, speaking of the IAEA’s and WHO’s dealing with the impacts of Chernobyl, commented: “It’s like Dracula guarding the blood bank.” The 1959 agreement under which WHO “is not to be independent of the IAEA” but must clear any information it obtains on issues involving radioactivity with the IAEA has put “the two in bed together.”

    Of her reflections on 14 months editing the book, she said: “Every single system that was studied–whether human or wolves or livestock or fish or trees or mushrooms or bacteria–all were changed, some of them irreversibly. The scope of the damage is stunning.”

    In his foreword, Dr. Dimitro Grodzinsky, chairman of the Ukranian National Commission on Radiation Protection, writes about how “apologists of nuclear power” sought to hide the real impacts of the Chernobyl disaster from the time when the accident occurred. The book “provides the largest and most complete collection of data concerning the negative consequences of Chernobyl on the health of people and the environment…The main conclusion of the book is that it is impossible and wrong “to forget Chernobyl.’”

    In the record of Big Lies, the claim of the IAEA-WHO that “only” 4,000 people will die as a result of the Chernobyl catastrophe is among the biggest. The Chernobyl accident is, as the new book documents, an ongoing global catastrophe.

    And it is a clear call for no new nuclear power plants to be built and for the closing of the dangerous atomic machines now running–and a switch to safe energy technologies, now available, led by solar and wind energy, that will not leave nearly a million people dead from one disaster.

  • Depleted Uranium: What we know, what we don’t know, and what we must find out

    2010_09_15_passera_du.pdf

  • Nuclear Detonation: Fifteen Scenarios

    Many people are complacent about nuclear weapons.  They would prefer to deny the nuclear threat and put nuclear dangers out of their minds.  Unfortunately, this is a dangerous approach to a serious threat to humanity. There are many ways in which a nuclear detonation could take place, including accident, miscalculation and intentional use.  Any use of nuclear weapons, including by accident or miscalculation, could lead to the destruction of a city as occurred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Further, a nuclear weapon detonation could trigger a retaliatory response leading to nuclear war and even broader devastation, including the annihilation of complex life on the planet.  Listed below are 15 possible scenarios for a nuclear detonation.  These are 15 arguments against complacency and for engagement in seeking a world without nuclear weapons.

    1. False Alarm:  A false alarm triggers a decision to launch a nuclear attack.
    2. Unauthorized Launch: Launch codes are obtained by hackers, espionage agents or coercion and used to launch high alert forces.  This could involve the physical takeover of a mobile missile, or the use of codes obtained via pre-delegation.
    3. Accidental Nuclear War:  An accidental launch leads to an escalation into a nuclear war.
    4. Control and Communications failure:  A rogue field commander or submarine commander falls out or deliberately puts himself out of communications with his central command and launches a nuclear attack on his own authority.
    5. “Dr. Strangelove” Nuclear War:  The launch of a nuclear attack by a rogue field or submarine commander leads to a retaliatory strike that escalates into a nuclear war.
    6. A Terrorist Bomb:  A terrorist group obtains nuclear materials and creates an unsophisticated nuclear device or obtains a bomb and succeeds in detonating it in a large city.
    7. Terrorist Bomb Triggers Nuclear War:  A terrorist nuclear attack is disguised in such a way as to appear to come from another nuclear weapons state, leading to a “retaliatory strike” that escalates into nuclear war.
    8. Preemptive Attack:  Believing one’s country to be under nuclear attack or about to be under such attack, a leader of a nuclear weapon state launches a preemptive nuclear attack.
    9. Preventive Nuclear War:  A nuclear weapons state launches an unprovoked nuclear attack against another country perceived to pose a future threat.  An example would be the use by Israel of a small tactical nuclear weapon against deeply buried nuclear facilities in Iran.
    10. Escalation of Conventional War:  India and Pakistan, for example, engage in further conventional war over Kashmir.  The conflict escalates into a nuclear exchange of approximately 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons, resulting in potentially a billion deaths.
    11. Military Parity:  In a conventional war, Russia defaults to nuclear weapons due to its deteriorating conventional military capability.
    12. Irrational Leader:  An unstable and paranoid leader, fearing attack and/or regime change, launches a nuclear attack against perceived adversaries.  There are no democratic controls.
    13. Rational Leader:  A leader, making what he deems to be rational calculations, launches a nuclear attack against perceived adversaries to assure the survival of his country.  There are no democratic controls.
    14. Prompt Global Strike:  The US proceeds with plans to place conventional weapons on some of its inter-continental ballistic missiles.  When launching one of these missiles, it is mistaken for a nuclear-armed warhead, resulting in a retaliatory nuclear attack.
    15. Intentional Nuclear War:  Tensions and conflict between major nuclear powers mount, leading to an intentional nuclear war.  Civilization is destroyed and complex life on Earth is ended.

  • Countdown to Zero Neglects the Greatest Nuclear Danger of All

    The greatest nuclear danger today is not Countdown to Zero‘s nuclear “accident” or “miscalculation” or “madness.” The greatest nuclear danger today, still, like 65 years ago, is nuclear war.

    Two weeks before the 65th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed just six days later by the end of the Second World War, Magnolia Pictures released a new film, Countdown to Zero. It was made by some of the same people who made An Inconvenient Truth, and the filmmakers unapologetically expressed the hope that it would change the game on nuclear disarmament much as their previous film did on climate change.

    The film quite shrewdly bases its argument on a single sentence, uttered by President John F. Kennedy nearly half a century ago. In his first speech before the United Nations, on September 25, 1961, the president said, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.”

    (Damocles was a court sycophant to the 4th Century BC tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse. When Dionysius invited him one day to come and sit on his powerful throne, Damocles noticed, to his horror, a deadly sword suspended directly above, point down, held only by a single strand of the hair of a horse. In this way, Damocles learned the truth about the life of a ruler in the ancient world — or, as JFK wisely discerned, the life of everyone in the nuclear age.)

    Countdown then, quite persuasively, details how, nearly half a century later, those three nuclear dangers remain quite imminent.

    It reveals just how close both the United States and the Soviet Union came, more than once, to launching not just one, but perhaps 101 nuclear-tipped missiles — utterly by accident. (The filmgoer is left to guess the likelihood that we can dodge that particular nuclear bullet indefinitely in a world of nine nuclear-armed nations, with perhaps soon more.)

    It examines episodes like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (and others almost wholly unknown to the public), when miscalculation, misinformation, or misunderstanding brought us to the brink of a civilization-ending nuclear war. (The filmgoer can perform the same exercise here.)

    And it illuminates just how many efforts have already been made, by non-state terrorists, to obtain or build a nuclear weapon, transport it to a major world city, and set it off — and just how likely it is that, eventually, somebody is going to pull that off.

    However, Countdown neglects to mention a fourth scenario by which the actual detonation of nuclear weapons might come about sometime in the next century, or the next decade, or the next year.

    Don’t get me wrong. The film is excellent, especially as a vehicle for growing the nuclear disarmament movement, and preaching beyond the choir. This is a sin of omission, not commission.

    But during this week when we commemorate the 65th anniversaries of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the end of the Second World War, one is compelled to point out that the scenario the film omits is, ironically, another Hiroshima. Another Nagasaki. Another conscious, intentional launching of a nuclear weapon. Another calm, sober initiation of nuclear war.

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were instantaneously obliterated by the American atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” on August 6th and 9th, 1945 (devices perhaps a hundred times less powerful than many of the nuclear weapons deployed in arsenals today), were not, of course, atomic attacks carried out by the “madness” of non-state terrorists. Nor were they “accidents.” Nor were they “miscalculations.”

    The White House was not in a panic in August 1945. The orders to dispatch the B-29’s carrying the atomic bombs were not issued in error. President Harry S. Truman and his advisors were not rushed into hurriedly deciding that if we didn’t immediately launch a nuclear attack upon the Japanese, Tokyo would launch a nuclear attack (or, indeed, any kind of an attack) on us.

    No, the United States government made a cool, composed, calculated decision that it could bring about a precisely-defined political aim by employing nuclear weapons as an act of war.

    And that kind of nuclear eventuality, today, may be at least as likely as the three others described in Countdown to Zero.

    After the end of the Cold War, and before its corpse had even grown cold in the grave, the Clinton Administration astonishingly chose not to diminish, but instead to expand the role of nuclear weapons in American national security doctrines. Now these weapons were designated for the first time as “counterproliferants.”

    They were to be used not only in retaliation, but as a tool of pre-emption against “rogue states” and non-state actors. And they were to used to prevent them from acquiring not only nuclear weapons, but chemical weapons and biological weapons as well.

    The Bush Administration, in its Nuclear Posture Review of December 2001, specifically articulated several scenarios where the United States might employ America’s vast nuclear arsenal. Like the Clinton doctrines, many of these would be carried out not only not in response to a nuclear attack, but indeed not in response to any attack upon us at all. The Bush document even named seven particular states as the possible targets of a preemptive American nuclear attack upon them.

    The Obama Administration, in its Nuclear Posture Review of April 2010, stated plainly that it anticipated far fewer contingencies where the United States might actually use its nuclear weapons in combat.

    However, many nuclear policy experts had urged the new Administration to adopt an explicit policy of “No First Use” — a statement that our country would never employ nuclear weapons except to retaliate for the use of nuclear weapons against our allies or ourselves.

    China, despite laughably less powerful military forces than the United States, both conventional and nuclear, has long maintained such a policy of “No First Use.”

    But President Obama refused. His Administration insists that still, in certain circumstances, the president of the United States might need to authorize an American nuclear first strike. His Administration explicitly maintains the policy option for America to start a nuclear war.

    In addition, for at least the past half decade, speculation has run rampant that either the United States or Israel, or both, might launch a preemptive attack on all elements of the Iranian nuclear complex, to forestall the (hypothetical) future possibility that Iran might someday obtain a nuclear arsenal of its own. Just this month, on Sunday August 1, the lead article in the Washington Post Sunday Outlook section, by Steven Simon and Ray Takeyh, was called, “A Nuclear Iran. Would America Strike to Prevent It?”

    Such a preemptive strike, of course, might be undertaken exclusively with conventional military forces. Or, it might not.

    In the April 17, 2006 issue of the New Yorker magazine, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons perhaps 5-10 years down the road, Pentagon planners were preparing not just military strikes on that country, but nuclear strikes.

    In the July 10, 2006 issue, Hersh reported that after lengthy and heated internal military debates, the Pentagon brass had concluded that, for the time being, a nuclear attack on Iran would be “politically unacceptable.”

    But then on January 7, 2007, the Times of London reported that Israel had begun laying the groundwork for a series of nuclear strikes on the Iranian nuclear infrastructure — perhaps utilizing tactical nuclear weapons supplied by the United States, and perhaps too in conjunction with American forces.

    If all that were not worrisome enough, in a CNN presidential debate on June 5, 2007, no less than four of the Republican presidential candidates indicated that to forestall a nuclear Iran, they would consider launching an American nuclear first strike against Iran.

    But that all took place during the last Administration, right? Right. But in the press conference announcing the Obama Nuclear Posture Review on April 6, 2010, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, asked directly about “No First Use,” said that the Administration was unwilling to “limit ourselves so explicitly.”

    And when asked directly about Iran and North Korea, he said that despite the limitations on American nuclear employment doctrines in the new document, with regard to those two states in particular, “all options are on the table.” Live on C-Span. Three separate times.

    Accident. Miscalculation. Madness. The creators of Countdown to Zero are quite correct in asserting that these contemporary nuclear perils are quite real, and, indeed, that they could come to pass today “at any moment.”

    But all the nine nuclear-armed nations must also embrace the principle that nuclear weapons can serve no purpose other than to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others (a purpose that will disappear if, someday, we can achieve at last universal nuclear disarmament).

    The nuclear-armed nations cannot continue to conjure contingencies for employing nuclear weapons on any hypothetical field of battle, or to fantasize that starting a nuclear war could ever serve either their own national interests or the interests of the human community.

    If they do continue to do so, then we may just be on a countdown not to nuclear zero, but to something else nuclear entirely.

    After all, said President Kennedy, in the very next sentence he uttered after his “nuclear Damocles” at the United Nations on September 25, 1961, “The weapons of war must be abolished, before they abolish us.”

  • New Terms for a Common Understanding of De-Alerting

    2010_08_13_new_terms_dealerting.pdf

  • Nuke U: How the University of California Is Helping to Blow Up the World

    This article was originally published by The Bohemian.

    On my way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory a few years ago, I found it listed in a New Mexico phone book—under “University of California.”

    Since the early 1940s, UC has managed the nation’s top laboratories for designing nuclear bombs. Today, California’s public university system is still immersed in the nuclear weapons business.

    Sixty-five years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, the University of California imprimatur is an air freshener for the stench of preparations for global annihilation. Nuclear war planners have been pleased to exploit UC’s vast technical expertise and its image of high-minded academic purpose.

    During most of WWII, scientists labored in strict secrecy at the isolated Los Alamos lab in the New Mexico desert, making possible the first nuclear weaponry. After the atomic bombings of Japan, UC continued to manage Los Alamos. And in 1952, when the government opened a second nuclear bomb generator, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco, UC won the prize to manage operations there, too.

    A few years into the 21st century, security scandals caused a shakeup. UC lost its exclusive management slots at Los Alamos and Livermore, but retained major roles at both laboratories.

    In mid-2006, the Los Alamos lab went under a new management structure, widened to also include Bechtel and a couple of other private firms. A year later, a similar team, likewise including UC and Bechtel, won a deal to jointly manage Livermore.

    At Los Alamos, I learned that the new management team was, legally speaking, an LLC, a limited liability corporation. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the concept of “limited liability” for managers of a laboratory that designs nuclear weapons.

    Weird, huh? But not any stranger than having the state of California’s top system of higher education devoted to R&D for designing better ways to blow up the planet.

    Yes, those laboratories do some nifty ecological research and other laudable things. But nuclear weapons remain central to the labs’ mission. And, lofty rhetoric aside, the federal government is pouring billions more dollars into the continuous high-tech pursuit of nuclear weapons “modernization.”

    Last spring, the White House announced plans for this decade that include investing $80 billion “to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex”—in addition to “well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems.”

    In fact, the U.S. government is now on a jag to boost spending for its nuclear arsenal. As the Livermore-based organization Tri-Valley CAREs noted weeks ago, “the 2011 budget request for nuclear weapons is the largest in our nation’s history; bigger than under George W. Bush and a whopping 40 percent higher than the amount spent for nuclear weapons activities on average during the Cold War.”

    Credit where due: the UC-managed laboratories for nuclear bombs have been on the cutting edge of digital advancement. Their record recalls a comment from Martin Luther King Jr., who noted the proliferation of “guided missiles and misguided men.”

    When I interviewed Los Alamos press officer Kevin Roark, he explained that “this laboratory has been at the forefront of computing research and development” from the Manhattan Project days of slide rules and punch cards to the lab’s present-day computers, with one able to do upwards of 100 trillion calculations per second.

    An official website of the University of California boasts that “UC has been involved in the management of these laboratories since their inception—a relationship spanning seven decades—as a public service to the nation.” With a lab on the UC Berkeley campus included in the mix, “the three laboratories have a combined workforce of more than 21,000 and operate on federally financed budgets totaling more than $4 billion.”

    For sure, there’s plenty of money sloshing around to reward the masters—and academic servants—of the nuclear weapons industry. But should the University of California be managing laboratories that design the latest technologies for nuclear holocaust? 

  • Nuke Accident Would Dwarf Oil Spill

    This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

    Bob Herbert’s July 19 New York Times column rightly states that the harm from a meltdown at a nuclear power plant “would make the Deepwater Horizon disaster look like a walk in the park.” Herbert also warns that systems needed to prevent a meltdown are not well developed. “Right now, we’re not ready,” he says.

    The damage from the April oil well rupture which spewed into the Gulf of Mexico is still being calculated. It killed 11 workers and thousands of aquatic creatures. Recovery workers have become ill attempting to cap the damaged well. The ecosystem of a large body of water and coastline has been damaged. The economic losses are staggering.

    But the Deepwater disaster still can’t hold a candle to a nuclear accident.

    Understanding why a meltdown would be so devastating is possible only after recognizing that nuclear reactors produce the same radioactive chemicals in atomic bomb explosions. Splitting uranium atoms produces a cocktail of 100-plus chemicals that are radioactive waste products, including Cesium-137, Iodine-131, and Strontium-90.

    If water cooling a reactor’s core or waste pools was removed, from mechanical failure or act of sabotage, huge amounts of toxic gases and particles would be released and breathed by humans. Many thousands would be stricken immediately with radiation poisoning, and subsequently with cancer. Infants and children would suffer most.

    From 1945 to 1963, atom bombs were tested in the atmosphere in remote areas of the south Pacific and Nevada. But still, the fallout drifted long distances and contaminated the diet of all Americans. In 1999, the National Institute of Medicine concluded that up to 212,000 Americans developed thyroid cancer from the Nevada tests.

    But reactors are not in remote locations. Most are near highly populated areas. One example is Indian Point, which is just 23 miles from the New York City border. The plant has three reactors; one has shut down, but the other two have been operating since the mid-1970s. Its aging parts are corroding, and several “near miss” meltdown situations have occurred in the past decade, according to a 2006 Greenpeace report.

    If Indian Point experienced a meltdown, and an evacuation was attempted, New York area traffic would be far worse than its usual crawl. Radioactivity, carried by winds, would reach 21 million people living within 50 miles of the plant. Even among those evacuated, many would not be able to return to their homes, since their environment would remain contaminated.

    Indian Point may be the worst case scenario for a meltdown, as New York is the most populated city in the U.S. But nuclear plants are situated on the outskirts of virtually every major metropolitan area in the nation.

    Bob Herbert’s warning that systems to prevent meltdowns at nuclear plants are insufficient was also a conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. One of the hijacked planes headed for Manhattan flew directly over Indian Point. Had the plane crashed into Indian Point’s core or waste pools, the consequences would have been far worse than the loss of nearly 3,000 lives at the World Trade Center.

    Safety systems exist at nuclear plants, but anything less than 100 percent effectiveness is dangerous. One flaw came to light in 2002 at the Davis Besse plant near Toledo Ohio. Boric acid had eaten through nearly all of an 8-inch a steel beam in the plant’s ceiling, reducing it to less than half an inch at its thinnest part. Disturbingly, the problem was discovered accidentally, not from any routine safety procedure.

    The meltdown scenario is disturbing, but there is more to the nuclear threat. Most radioactive waste is stored, but some is routinely or accidentally released into air and water from all 104 U.S. nuclear reactors. These enter our bodies through breathing, and also the food chain.

    No government program has ever measured how much radioactivity from reactors enters our bodies, as officials call these amounts “negligible.” But a landmark study, whose results have been published in five leading medical journals, has provided evidence to the contrary. Levels of Strontium-90 in nearly 5,000 baby teeth are 30 to 50% greater in children living closest to nuclear plants, and are rising over time. In the 1950s and 1960s, Strontium-90 was often cited as one of the most toxic chemicals in bomb fallout.

    Tooth study results raise the question of whether reactor emissions have raised cancer rates near nuclear plants. Again, government officials dismiss this possibility. But near nuclear plants in New York and New Jersey, increases in Sr-90 in teeth were matched by similar increases in local childhood cancer rates a few years later.

    Children suffer the greatest damage from radiation exposure, but adults are not exempt. Thyroid cancer is one of the most radiation-sensitive cancers, because radioactive iodine in bomb fallout and reactor emissions seek out the thyroid gland and destroy its cells. A 2009 scientific article reported the highest U.S. thyroid cancer rate in a small 90-mile radius. This encompassed eastern Pennsylvania, central New Jersey, and southern New York, where 16 reactors are located.

    Other scientific reports have documented evidence that nuclear plant shut downs are followed immediately by dramatic reductions in local infant deaths and child cancers. This is similar to what happened nationally following the 1963 ban on above-ground atomic tests.

    Proposals to build new reactors to replace carbon-producing coal plants are accompanied by claims that nuclear power is “clean.” This could not be further from the truth. We should never forget that nuclear reactors are essentially controlled atom bombs.

    As lessons of the Deepwater fiasco are learned, we must understand the hard truth that certain energy sources pose very high risks to our security and health. We must do all we can to prevent another massive oil spill, or a nuclear meltdown. But we should go further, by developing energy sources that are safe. Solar panels need no security precautions. Wind mills don’t cause environmental catastrophes. We must be proactive and safe.

  • Howard Zinn’s the Bomb

    The late Howard Zinn’s new book “The Bomb” is a brilliant little dissection of some of the central myths of our militarized society. Those who’ve read “A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments,” by H.P. Albarelli Jr. know that this is a year for publishing the stories of horrible things that the United States has done to French towns. In that case, Albarelli, describes the CIA administering LSD to an entire town, with deadly results. In “The Bomb,” Zinn describes the U.S. military making its first use of napalm by dropping it all over another French town, burning anyone and anything it touched. Zinn was in one of the planes, taking part in this horrendous crime.

    In mid-April 1945, the war in Europe was essentially over. Everyone knew it was ending. There was no military reason (if that’s not an oxymoron) to attack the Germans stationed near Royan, France, much less to burn the French men, women, and children in the town to death. The British had already destroyed the town in January, similarly bombing it because of its vicinity to German troops, in what was widely called a tragic mistake. This tragic mistake was rationalized as an inevitable part of war, just as were the horrific firebombings that successfully reached German targets, just as was the later bombing of Royan with napalm. Zinn blames the Supreme Allied Command for seeking to add a “victory” in the final weeks of a war already won. He blames the local military commanders’ ambitions. He blames the American Air Force’s desire to test a new weapon. And he blames everyone involved — which must include himself — for “the most powerful motive of all: the habit of obedience, the universal teaching of all cultures, not to get out of line, not even to think about that which one has not been assigned to think about, the negative motive of not having either a reason or a will to intercede.”

    When Zinn returned from the war in Europe, he expected to be sent to the war in the Pacific, until he saw and rejoiced at seeing the news of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 65 years ago this August. Only years later did Zinn come to understand the inexcusable crime of the greatest proportions that was the dropping of nuclear bombs in Japan, actions similar in some ways to the final bombing of Royan. The war with Japan was already over, the Japanese seeking peace and willing to surrender. Japan asked only that it be permitted to keep its emperor, a request that was later granted. But, like napalm, the nuclear bombs were weapons that needed testing. The second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, was a different sort of bomb that also needed testing. President Harry Truman wanted to demonstrate nuclear bombs to the world and especially to Russia. And he wanted to end the war with Japan before Russia became part of it. The horrific form of mass murder he employed was in no way justifiable.

    Zinn also goes back to dismantle the mythical reasons the United States was in the war to begin with. The United States, England, and France were imperial powers supporting each other’s international aggressions in places like the Philippines. They opposed the same from Germany and Japan, but not aggression itself. Most of America’s tin and rubber came from the Southwest Pacific. The United States made clear for years its lack of concern for the Jews being attacked in Germany. It also demonstrated its lack of opposition to racism through its treatment of African Americans and Japanese Americans. Franklin D. Roosevelt described fascist bombing campaigns over civilian areas as “inhuman barbarity” but then did the same on a much larger scale to German cities, which was followed up by the destruction on an unprecedented scale of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — actions that came after years of dehumanizing the Japanese. Zinn points out that “LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: ‘This is the only way.’” Aware that the war would end without any more bombing, and aware that U.S. prisoners of war would be killed by the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, the U.S. military went ahead and dropped the bombs.

    Americans allowed these things to be done in their name, just as the Germans and Japanese allowed horrible crimes to be committed in their names. Zinn points out, with his trademark clarity, how the use of the word “we” blends governments together with peoples and serves to equate our own people with our military, while we demonize the people of other lands because of actions by their governments. “The Bomb” suggest a better way to think about such matters and firmly establishes that:

    • what the U.S. military is doing now, today, parallels the crimes of the past and shares their dishonorable motivations;
    • the bad wars have a lot in common with the so-called “good war,” about which there was little if anything good;
    • Howard Zinn did far more in his life for peace than for war, and more for peace than just about anybody else, certainly more than several Nobel Peace Prize winners.

  • Scenarios for Nuclear Catastrophe

    In a recent article that I wrote, “British Petroleum, Imagination and Nuclear Catastrophe,” I argued we should use the occasion of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to imagine scenarios in which a nuclear catastrophe could take place.  The reason for imagining such scenarios should be obvious: to keep them from occurring.  

    Here is a proposition: Continued offshore oil drilling runs the risk of future offshore oil leak catastrophes that will destroy large aquatic and shoreline habitats.  Applied to nuclear weapons, the proposition could be restated in this way: Continued reliance on nuclear weapons runs the risk of future nuclear catastrophes that will destroy cities, countries and civilization.

    In my article, I proposed four of many possible scenarios that could be envisioned.  These scenarios involved a terrorist bomb on a major city somewhere in the world; an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war; an accidental nuclear launch by Russia, leading to a nuclear exchange with the US; and a nuclear attack by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on Japan and South Korea.  

    These scenarios elicited responses that I would like to share.  The first response, from South Korea, expressed the opinion that Kim Jong-Il would not make a preemptive nuclear attack.  The writer said, “I agree with your imagined scenarios except for the following: …Kim Jong-Il is not so irrational that he would attack Japan and South Korea for not receiving development assistance.  He and North Korean officials usually say that they would attack only in the case of being attacked….”  This may be true, but it remains difficult to predict which leaders will act rationally and which will not.  It seems certain, though, that all leaders will not act rationally at all times with regard to nuclear weapons, and that deterrence theory, at a minimum, requires rational decision makers.

    The second and third responses imagine other scenarios.  The second response focuses on Israel: “You forget one other horrible scenario: Israel decides to preemptively bomb Tehran and Isfahan, because they ‘fear for their own safety.’ Armed with nukes, and in the name of ‘Civil Defense,’ rogue Israel thumbs its nose at the world again and takes out parts of Iran….”  Would Israel initiate a nuclear attack under certain circumstances, such as a major threat from Arab countries?  The truth is that we do not know under what conditions Israel, or any other nuclear weapon state, would initiate such an attack.

    The third response, from South Africa, focuses on the possibility of a US initiated nuclear attack: “In your scenarios you do not imagine the US pressing the nuclear button.   The United States is beyond question the most aggressive nation in the world and remains among the most recalcitrant in signing peace and environmental protocols.  As a person who lives outside the United States, I feel most threatened by the US.  The US does not negotiate, at the heart of which is compromise for the greater good.   Narrow interests are pursued relentlessly – even to the detriment of US citizens.”

    The response continued, “I was appalled to receive by email photos of a US warship recently launched.   It was built from the scrap metal of the Twin Towers and named ‘Never Forget’ or some such title.   I don’t believe that honors the lives lost.  What would have honored them would be a ship custom built to deliver aid, medical services, etc. to disaster areas and developing countries.   I do believe citizens in the US, so many of whom are brought up on the myth that the US is always in the right, should recognize their own potential to be the ultimate aggressors in the use of nuclear weapons.  They use every other weapon of destruction – Agent Orange, cluster bombs, etc.  Why should they hold back on nuclear weapons?”

    Would the US initiate a nuclear attack?  The answer is the same for the US or any other nuclear weapon state: We don’t know.  What we do know is that the leaders of countries that possess nuclear weapons are essentially holding the world, including their own citizens, hostage to the potential catastrophic consequences of using these weapons.

    Deterrence can fail in many ways, some of which we cannot foresee, and it may be the unforeseeable scenarios that are most dangerous.  We don’t know what the trigger may be, only that we are playing with nuclear fire.  The Gulf of Mexico recovery from the British Petroleum oil spill may take decades.  For civilization to recover from nuclear war could take centuries and might not be possible.  The oil spill in the Gulf has provided us an opportunity to awaken to the nuclear dangers that confront us and to act.  The question remains: Will we seize this opportunity?