Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • Los Alamos on the 60th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

    As we gather here to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima, it is significant that we raise these memories here at Los Alamos in the heart of the dragon the very place where such an unprecedented level of violence against humanity was created in a single blast, resulting in the death of over 200,000 people by the end of 1945, most of them civilians. In the 60 years since, delayed effects including radiation-induced cancers, immunologic disorders, psychological trauma and birth defects have killed and afflicted many tens of thousands more in Japan.

    But it is not only the people of Japan who are suffering from the 60 year nuclear nightmare first created at Los Alamos. We are all downwinders. Nuclear weapons drove us to the unspeakable act of secretly testing radiation on our own population. 23,000 American civilians were subjected to radiation research in about 1400 projects over 30 years. The government tested on retarded children, mental patients, poor women and US soldiers. More than 200,000 troops were ordered to observe nuclear test detonations and were exposed to radiation.

    After 60 years, there are now at least seven acknowledged nuclear powers, and 44 nuclear capable states, thanks to the so called Atoms for Peace program which spread nuclear reactors and materials around the world and put the keys to the nuclear bomb factory in those nations hands­handing them the technology and materials for bombs, under the guise of “peaceful” nuclear energy. The world is awash in radioactive waste. We haven’t a clue where to put it. The best we have come up with in the US is a harebrained scheme to ship the toxic waste from weapons and power plants, by rail and by truck from the four corners of the continent and bury it in a hole in the ground in Nevada at Yucca Mountain. Citizens groups, like the proverbial boy with his finger in the dike, have been holding off the onslaught of this devastating disposal solution, preventing legislation from passing in the Congress for years, and now, when the current Republican Congress voted for it to proceed, with a lawsuit in the courts that hangs by a thread, having enlisted the Court’s aid in forestalling the process until some of the tainted, fraudulent evidence submitted by the government as to the suitability of the repository is re-examined. Deadly plutonium remains lethal for 250,000 years and there is no way to guarantee that the Yucca site could prevent radioactive seepage into the ground water over this unimaginable period of time. Remember that all of recorded history is only 5000 years old!

    The US has spent nearly six trillion dollars on nuclear weapons over the past sixty years, We’ve created more than 4500 contaminated sites, covering tens of thousands of acres that may take 75 years and cost as high as one trillion dollars “to clean up” Clean up of radioactive waste, much of which remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years is the wrong word. At best, we can only attempt to manage and contain the poisons from seeping into the air soil, and groundwater and visiting further destruction on our planet.

    And yet, 60 years later, our Doctor Strangeloves continue to create new sources of toxic waste with sub-critical underground tests of plutonium blown up with high explosives 1,000 feet below the desert floor at the Nevada test site; plans to fabricate new plutonium pits for nuclear bombs here at Los Alamos; plutonium powered rockets to fire into space which could spew down highly carcinogenic radioactive particles upon the earth below should there be an accident like the ill-fated Challenger and Columbia shuttles; as well as the bullets and tanks made with depleted uranium in a bizarre recycling program which enabled the government to make a dent in the 500,000 tons of depleted uranium waste amassed since the Manhattan Project. Don’t be misled by the term “depleted uranium”. Like “spent fuel” from civilian reactors, depleted uranium is highly toxic and carcinogenic and has a half-life of some 4.4 billion years. “Half life” is another euphemism that distances us through our language from grasping the deadly seriousness of what we are doing to our planet. For example, while the Half-life of plutonium is 26,000 years, it remains toxic for about 250,000 years until all the radioactivity decays. So you can imagine­or can you­the life span of depleted uranium with its half-life of over 4 billion years!

    There are heartbreaking reports that the hundreds of tons of DU ammunition used in Iraq during both wars, as well as in Bosnia left a growing legacy of respiratory problems, liver and kidney dysfunction among US vets and birth defects among their new born children with similar reports coming from Iraq and Kosovo, with an increase in leukemia and birth defects. Yet, as in so many cases, our government has covered up and denied that depleted uranium has been harmful even though a new National Academy of Sciences Report on the Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation has reaffirmed that there is no safe dose of radiation. Even the lowest levels of radiation can be carcinogenic. Discouragingly, an August report in the Denver Post informs us that 8500 uranium mining permits have been requested in Utah and Colorado, in the wake of the numerous new nuclear projects in the works, including a push by the Bush administration to build 50 new nuclear power plants by 2020.

    But perhaps the most damaging injury from the 60 years of the nuclear age is the toxic effect it has had on our very democracy. Because of nuclear weapons, the government created a whole culture of secrecy, lies and cover ups about the awful effects of the bomb. The very existence of nuclear weapons demonstrates a failure of democracy. We are not permitted to confront our own history. In 1995, 50 years after the bomb, Congress actually fired the Historian at the Smithsonian Museum, our must prestigious historical institution, because they didn’t want Americans to know about the controversy that preceded President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb at the end of World War II. Top US military officials, like Generals Omar Bradley and Eisenhower, wrote letters to Truman telling him it was unnecessary to use the bomb to end the war against Japan. Then there were reports of Winston Churchill, urging Truman to drop the bomb before Russian entered the Pacific front.

    Recent reports, in anticipation of this 60th Anniversary, have told us how the military censored photographs and films of the gruesome devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By not only developing the bomb and trying to maintain a monopoly on its use­despite urging by the “father of the bomb”, Robert Oppenheimer, to President Truman to stop the spread of atomic weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology, the United States lost its moral compass and entered a 60 year cycle of Empire. Pushing our weight around the world, we brandish our nuclear weapons. They are the brass knuckles on the fist of our empire. Even without ever dropping another nuclear weapon on a so-called “rogue or “axis of evil” state we are still using the 10,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal, just as a bank robber uses a gun in a hold up ­even without ever pulling the trigger. Breaking our promises for good faith efforts for nuclear disarmament in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, refusing to submit the Comprehensive Test Ban to the Senate for ratification, trashing the Anti-Ballistic Treaty to clear the way for dominating and controlling the military use of space–and spurring a new arms race to the heavens, developing new more useable nuclear weapons and planning to replace all the thousands we already have, we are seen as the nuclear bully, lawlessly menacingthe world with our might like some mad cowboy nation from the Wild West, while actually going to war without legal authority and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians under the false premise that Iraq was a nuclear threat to America.

    Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, of Hiroshima has written that “according to Japanese and Chinese tradition, a 60th anniversary begins a new cycle of rhythms in the interwoven fabric that binds humankind and nature.” Let us begin a new cycle in a life affirming connection of our humanity and nature. Let us awaken from our 60-year nuclear nightmare of imperial hegemony. Let us reject the drive for Empire and reclaim our democracy by working for the abolition of nuclear weapons. We know from public opinion polls that the majority of Americans, 65% in the latest poll taken even while we waged this misbegotten war against Iraq, said they think we’d be better off without nuclear weapons if all countries gave them up. Abolition Now, the campaign of the Abolition 2000 Network, of over 2000 organizations in 95 countries, is working with Mayor Akiba and nearly 1,000 Mayors around the world, to enroll our Mayors in a campaign to have a treaty negotiated by 2010 for the elimination of nuclear weapons, with full implementation by 2020. We have already produced a model nuclear weapons convention that is now an official UN document as a starting point for negotiations. We are working with the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament to enroll our members of Congress in these efforts. At least, until we get regime change here at home, we’ll have to work with our local, state and congressional members to use this cycle of renewal to put an end to the nuclear scourge. Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey of California has submitted a resolution proposing that negotiations begin on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. It needs the support of your member of Congress. We need a Senator to sponsor a similar resolution. There’s lots we can do to take back our Democracy and halt the spread of Empire. Let us use this 60th anniversary to begin a year of awakening, acknowledge our shameful nuclear history in which we sacrificed so much of our democracy to the national security state, and say no to the nuclear scourge and yes to our highest ideals of an open and transparent society that, with an informed public, can deliver on our cherished American ideals to uphold the rule of law and live in peace with other nations.

    Alice Slater is president of Global Resource Center for the Environment (GRACE).

  • Sixty Years After the Bombs

    It has been 60 years since the U.S. government used atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The weapons killed 200,000 people outright and left tens of thousands of others dying of radiation-induced cancers or afflicted by birth defects, immunological disorders and psychological traumas. It was a grim beginning to the nuclear age and led millions of people around the globe to conclude that the world stood on the brink of destruction.

    Fortunately, since 1945, we have managed to avert that fate. Thanks to widespread public pressure and the efforts of some far-sighted statesmen, governments around the world have exercised a surprising level of nuclear restraint. They have resisted the temptation to carry their quarrels to the level of nuclear war and have agreed to important nuclear arms control and disarmament measures.

    Perhaps the most important of these measures is the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed by virtually all nations. Under its provisions, non-nuclear nations pledged to forgo developing nuclear weapons and nuclear nations pledged to divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons. In this fashion, nations agreed to move toward a nuclear-free world.

    As a result, out of almost 200 nations, only eight – Britain, China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and the United States – are now nuclear states, although another, North Korea, might have them, too. Furthermore, the number of nuclear weapons in existence has declined, from about 70,000 at the height of the Cold War to some 30,000 today.

    Unfortunately, during the past decade, this modest progress has been reversed. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, India and Pakistan became nuclear states and additional nations have shown signs of joining the nuclear line.

    The policies of the Bush administration have been regressive. It has spurned the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and abandoned negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament. It also has championed the development of new U.S. nuclear weapons – despite the fact that the U.S. already possesses some 10,000 of them – and affirmed its willingness to initiate nuclear war. Not surprisingly, the Bush administration’s policies helped to wreck the recent NPT review conference at the U.N., where nations condemned its double standard.

    The Bush administration’s determination to preserve U.S. nuclear options seems particularly inappropriate to its “war on terror.” There is no morally acceptable way to employ nuclear weapons against terrorists, for terrorists do not control fixed territory. Instead, they intermingle with the general population and cannot be bombarded with nuclear weapons without causing a Hiroshima-style massacre of civilians.

    Conversely, the maintenance of nuclear stockpiles by the United States and other nations provides terrorists with the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons through theft, bribery or purchase. Thus, the only way to ensure against a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons or materials is to eliminate them from national arsenals.

    In these increasingly dangerous circumstances, many thousands of Americans – joined by concerned people around the globe – will be holding events this August to commemorate the atomic bombings and to demand that the nations of the world get back on track to nuclear disarmament. On Aug. 6, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, these actions will be especially large and prominent at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab in New Mexico, the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab in California, the U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada and the Y-12 Nuclear Facility in Tennessee. On Aug. 9, the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, there will be candlelight vigils held at city halls across the United States.

    There also is pressure for nuclear disarmament emerging in Congress, where Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., has introduced a resolution in the House (HR 373) calling for a comprehensive disarmament program. “There will be no security for America or our world,” she said, “unless we take all steps necessary for nuclear disarmament.”

    Today, 60 years after the inception of the nuclear era, these words are all too true. Thus far, through nuclear restraint, we have managed to stave off the specter of nuclear annihilation that has haunted the world since 1945. The future remains a race between wisdom and catastrophe.

    Lawrence S. Wittner, a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Associate, is professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany and author of “Toward Nuclear Abolition.”

    Originally published by the Washington Examiner.

  • The Treaty Wreckers

    In just a few months, Bush and Blair have destroyed global restraint on the development of nuclear weapons.

    Saturday is the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The nuclear powers are commemorating it in their own special way: by seeking to ensure that the experiment is repeated.

    As Robin Cook showed in his column last week, the British government appears to have decided to replace our Trident nuclear weapons, without consulting parliament or informing the public. It could be worse than he thinks. He pointed out that the atomic weapons establishment at Aldermaston has been re-equipped to build a new generation of bombs. But when this news was first leaked in 2002 a spokesman for the plant insisted the equipment was being installed not to replace Trident but to build either mini-nukes or warheads that could be used on cruise missiles.

    If this is true it means the government is replacing Trident and developing a new category of boil-in-the-bag weapons. As if to ensure we got the point, Geoff Hoon, then the defence secretary, announced before the leak that Britain would be prepared to use small nukes in a pre-emptive strike against a non-nuclear state. This put us in the hallowed company of North Korea.

    The Times, helpful as ever, explains why Trident should be replaced. “A decision to leave the club of nuclear powers,” it says, “would diminish Britain’s international standing and influence.” This is true, and it accounts for why almost everyone wants the bomb. Two weeks ago, on concluding their new nuclear treaty, George Bush and the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh announced that “international institutions must fully reflect changes in the global scenario that have taken place since 1945. The president reiterated his view that international institutions are going to have to adapt to reflect India’s central and growing role.” This translates as follows: “Now that India has the bomb it should join the UN security council.”

    It is because nuclear weapons confer power and status on the states that possess them that the non-proliferation treaty, of which the UK was a founding signatory, determines two things: that the non-nuclear powers should not acquire nuclear weapons, and that the nuclear powers should “pursue negotiations in good faith on … general and complete disarmament”. Blair has unilaterally decided to rip it up.

    But in helping to wreck the treaty we are only keeping up with our friends across the water. In May the US government launched a systematic assault on the agreement. The summit in New York was supposed to strengthen it, but the US, led by John Bolton – the undersecretary for arms control (someone had a good laugh over that one) – refused even to allow the other nations to draw up an agenda for discussion. The talks collapsed, and the treaty may now be all but dead. Needless to say, Bolton has been promoted: to the post of US ambassador to the UN. Yesterday Bush pushed his nomination through by means of a “recess appointment”: an undemocratic power that allows him to override Congress when its members are on holiday.

    Bush wanted to destroy the treaty because it couldn’t be reconciled with his new plans. Last month the Senate approved an initial $4m for research into a “robust nuclear earth penetrator” (RNEP). This is a bomb with a yield about 10 times that of the Hiroshima device, designed to blow up underground bunkers that might contain weapons of mass destruction. (You’ve spotted the contradiction.) Congress rejected funding for it in November, but Bush twisted enough arms this year to get it restarted. You see what a wonderful world he inhabits when you discover that the RNEP idea was conceived in 1991 as a means of dealing with Saddam Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons. Saddam is pacing his cell, but the Bushites, like the Japanese soldiers lost in Malaysia, march on. To pursue his war against the phantom of the phantom of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, Bush has destroyed the treaty that prevents the use of real ones.

    It gets worse. Last year Congress allocated funding for something called the “reliable replacement warhead”. The government’s story is that the existing warheads might be deteriorating. When they show signs of ageing they can be dismantled and rebuilt to a “safer and more reliable” design. It’s a pretty feeble excuse for building a new generation of nukes, but it worked. The development of the new bombs probably means the US will also breach the comprehensive test ban treaty – so we can kiss goodbye to another means of preventing proliferation.

    But the biggest disaster was Bush’s meeting with Manmohan Singh a fortnight ago. India is one of three states that possess nuclear weapons and refuse to sign the non-proliferation treaty (NPT). The treaty says India should be denied access to civil nuclear materials. But on July 18 Bush announced that “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, India should acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states”. He would “work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India” and “seek agreement from Congress to adjust US laws and policies”. Four months before the meeting the US lifted its south Asian arms embargo, selling Pakistan a fleet of F-16 aircraft, capable of a carrying a wide range of missiles, and India an anti-missile system. As a business plan, it’s hard to fault.

    Here then is how it works. If you acquire the bomb and threaten to use it you will qualify for American exceptionalism by proxy. Could there be a greater incentive for proliferation?

    The implications have not been lost on other states. ” India is looking after its own national interests,” a spokesman for the Iranian government complained on Wednesday. “We cannot criticise them for this. But what the Americans are doing is a double standard. On the one hand they are depriving an NPT member from having peaceful technology, but at the same time they are cooperating with India, which is not a member of the NPT.” North Korea (and this is the only good news around at the moment) is currently in its second week of talks with the US. While the Bush administration is doing the right thing by engaging with Pyongyang, the lesson is pretty clear. You could sketch it out as a Venn diagram. If you have oil and aren’t developing a bomb (Iraq) you get invaded. If you have oil and are developing a bomb (Iran) you get threatened with invasion, but it probably won’t happen. If you don’t have oil, but have the bomb, the US representative will fly to your country and open negotiations.

    The world of George Bush’s imagination comes into being by government decree. As a result of his tail-chasing paranoia, assisted by Tony Blair’s cowardice and Manmohan Singh’s opportunism, the global restraint on the development of nuclear weapons has, in effect, been destroyed in a few months. The world could now be more vulnerable to the consequences of proliferation than it has been for 35 years. Thanks to Bush and Blair, we might not go out with a whimper after all.

    Originally published by the Guardian.

  • Bin Laden’s Nuclear Connection

    In his interviews and writings over the past decade, Osama bin Laden has repeatedly talked about America’s atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He believes (incorrectly) that it was the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender–and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on America that will shock us into retreating from the Middle East.

    For an Administration that believes that the only thing it has to fear is the absence of fear, Osama’s threat is a helpful reminder that we live in a dangerous world. “It may only be a matter of time,” President Bush’s recently installed CIA director, Porter Goss, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, “before Al Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.”

    While such threats cannot be ignored, it is important to historicize and contextualize them if we are to understand how we have contributed to undermining our own security. There were alternative policies at the beginning of the nuclear age that our government could have followed–and could still promote–that would have mitigated the dangers we face today. There were people then, as now, who recognized that the knowledge of how to construct and deploy atomic bombs could not be kept secret for long. And there were people then, as now, who recognized that such bombs could be smuggled into major urban areas–meaning there is no defense against nuclear terrorism. Chief among those who clearly saw the nuclear future–as we have lived and are living it–was the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, who developed a plan for a nuclear-free world and did his best to promote this alternative path.

    The history of Oppenheimer’s failure to contain the nuclear genie makes clear that unilateralism and hubris are hardly unique to the Bush Administration; they have been a recurrent characteristic of US decision-making ever since the latter years of World War II. America’s nuclear monopoly was “the great equalizer,” Secretary of War Henry Stimson triumphantly declared in July 1945 at the Potsdam conference upon learning of the success of the atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bomb was our “trump card,” our “ace in the hole,” President Truman and his closest advisers believed. But others, more informed and more thoughtful, like Oppenheimer, realized that the bomb was a Trojan horse that would soon threaten our own security as much as it threatened the security of others. Oppenheimer’s efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the beginning of the atomic age are as applicable today as they were then.

    On October 25, 1945, Oppenheimer was ushered into the Oval Office to meet Truman to discuss his plans to eliminate nuclear weapons. By one account, Truman opened the conversation by stating, “The first thing is to define the national problem, then the international.” Oppenheimer disagreed. “Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem,” he cautiously replied. He meant, of course, that the first imperative was to stop the spread of atomic weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology. At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When he replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.” For Oppenheimer, such foolishness was proof of Truman’s limitations. The “incomprehension it showed just knocked the heart out of him,” recalled the Los Alamos scientist Willy Higinbotham.

    A week later, on November 2, Oppenheimer returned to the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. Some 500 people packed into the facility’s theater to hear “Oppie” talk about what he called “the fix we are in.” He spoke for an hour–much of it extemporaneously–and his audience was mesmerized; years later, people would say, “I remember Oppie’s speech.” “It is clear to me,” he said, “that wars have changed. It is clear to me that if these first bombs–the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki–that if these can destroy ten square miles, then that is really quite something. It is clear to me that they are going to be very cheap if anyone wants to make them.”

    A few days earlier, Truman had given a bellicose “Navy Day” speech in New York in which he had reveled in the atomic addition to America’s military power. The bomb, Truman said, would be held by the United States as a “sacred trust” for the rest of the world, and “we shall not give our approval to any compromises with evil.” Oppenheimer disliked Truman’s triumphalist tone: “If you approach the problem and say, ‘We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,’ then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.”

    In late January 1946 Oppenheimer was nevertheless heartened to learn that negotiations begun several months earlier had resulted in an agreement between the Soviet Union, the United States and other countries to establish a United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Pressured by veterans of the Manhattan Project and their media supporters, Truman appointed a special committee to draw up a concrete proposal for international control of nuclear weapons.

    As the only physicist on the board–indeed, as the only member of the board who knew anything about atomic energy– Oppenheimer naturally dominated their discussions, and he quickly persuaded his fellow panel members to endorse a dramatic and comprehensive plan. Turning to the internationalism of modern science as a model, Oppenheimer proposed an international agency that would monopolize all aspects of atomic energy and apportion its benefits as an incentive to individual countries. Oppenheimer believed that in the long run, “without world government there could be no permanent peace, [and] that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” Since world government was not a prospect, Oppenheimer argued that in the field of atomic energy all countries should agree to a “partial renunciation” of sovereignty.

    Under his plan, the proposed Atomic Development Authority would have sovereign ownership of all uranium mines, atomic power plants and laboratories. No nation would be permitted to build bombs–but scientists everywhere would still be allowed to exploit the atom for peaceful purposes. Complete and total transparency would make it impossible for any nation to marshal the enormous industrial, technical and material resources necessary to build an atomic weapon in secrecy. Oppenheimer understood that one couldn’t un-invent the weapon; the secret was out. But one could construct a system so transparent that it would at least provide ample warning if a rogue regime set about to make an atomic weapon.

    Soon afterward, Oppenheimer’s draft plan, which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, was optimistically submitted to the White House. But optimism was misplaced. While Secretary of State James Byrnes made a pretense of saying that he was “favorably impressed,” he was in fact shocked by the sweeping scope of the report’s recommendations. A day later he persuaded Truman to appoint his business partner, Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, “to translate” the Administration’s proposals to the United Nations. When Oppenheimer read the news, he told his Los Alamos friend Willy Higinbotham, by then president of the newly created Federation of Atomic Scientists, “We’re lost.”

    In private, Baruch was already expressing “great reservations” about the Acheson-Lilienthal Report’s recommendations. Like his advisers, Baruch was alarmed by the idea that privately owned mines might be taken over by an international Atomic Development Authority. (Both Baruch and Byrnes happened to be board members of and investors in Newmont Mining Corporation, a major company with a large stake in uranium mines.) And, as far as atomic weapons were concerned, Baruch thought of the US bomb as a “winning weapon.” In short order negotiations broke down completely over the question of “penalties.” Why, Baruch asked, was there no provision for the punishment of violators of the agreement? He thought a stockpile of nuclear weapons should be set aside and automatically used against any country found in violation.

    Disregarding the opinion of most scientists, Baruch decided that the Soviet Union would not be able to build its own atomic weapons for at least two decades, and thus that there was no need to relinquish the American monopoly anytime soon. Consequently, the plan he intended to submit to the UN would substantially amend–indeed, fundamentally alter–the Acheson-Lilienthal proposals: The Soviets would have to give up their right to a veto in the Security Council over any actions by the new atomic authority; any nation violating the agreement would immediately be subjected to an attack with atomic weapons; and, before being given access to any of the secrets surrounding the peaceful uses of atomic energy, the Soviets would have to submit to a survey of their uranium resources. What Baruch was proposing was not cooperative control over nuclear energy but an atomic pact designed to prolong the US monopoly.

    On June 14, 1946, Baruch presented his plan to the UN, dramatically stating that he offered the world “a choice between the quick and the dead.” As Oppenheimer and his colleagues had predicted, it was promptly rejected by the Soviet Union, which proposed as an alternative a simple treaty to ban the production or use of atomic weapons. The Truman Administration rejected the Soviet response out of hand. Negotiations continued in a desultory fashion for many months, but to no end.

    An early opportunity had been lost to make a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear-arms race between the two major powers. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before a US administration in the 1970s would propose a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then it was too late to prevent an arms race and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

    Oppenheimer’s anguish was real and deep. Every day the newspaper headlines gave him evidence that the world might once again be on the road to war. “Every American knows that if there is another major war,” he wrote in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on June 1, 1946, “atomic weapons will be used.” This meant, he argued, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. “We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world–Great Britain and the United States–used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

    He had made this observation earlier in a speech at Los Alamos, but to publish it in 1946 was an extraordinary admission. Less than a year after the events of August 1945, the man who had instructed the bombardiers exactly how to drop their atomic bombs on the center of two Japanese cities had come to the conclusion that he had supported the use of atomic weapons against “an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

    A major war was not Oppenheimer’s only worry. Sometime that year he was asked in a closed Senate hearing room “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city.” Oppenheimer responded, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” When a startled senator then followed by asking, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer quipped, “A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].” There was no defense against nuclear terrorism–and he felt there never would be. International control of the bomb, he later told an audience of Foreign Service and military officers, was “the only way in which this country can have security comparable to that which it had in the years before the war. It is the only way in which we will be able to live with bad governments, with new discoveries, with irresponsible governments such as are likely to arise in the next hundred years, without living in fairly constant fear of the surprise use of these weapons.” Today he would add Osama bin Laden’s terrorists to his list.

  • Nuclear Plants are Still Vulnerable, Panel Says

    Three and a half years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the government has failed to address the risk that a passenger plane flying at high speed could be deliberately crashed into a commercial nuclear plant, setting off fires and dispersing large amounts of radiation, a long-awaited report by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded.

    Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have maintained that such an attack is improbable and that detailed analyses of the consequences of such attacks are unnecessary. Experts at the nation’s premier scientific body said those judgments are flawed.

    “There are currently no requirements in place to defend against the kinds of larger-scale, pre-meditated, skillful attacks that were carried out on September 11, 2001,” a panel of scientists said, even as it agreed such an attack would be difficult to pull off.

    Academy officials battled the government for months to make their declassified conclusions public — and the version released yesterday charged that federal secrecy edicts designed to keep information from terrorists were paradoxically hurting efforts to defend against such attacks.

    Restrictions on sharing information imposed by the NRC had kept the industry from addressing vulnerabilities, the report said.

    As a result, government labs and independent researchers have sometimes worked at cross-purposes, searched for solutions that others had already found and duplicated complex analyses.

    NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the agency “respectfully disagrees” that there are no provisions to deal with major attacks.

    Security measures have been upgraded since 2001, and the agency continues to analyze risks, he said. But he emphasized that such attacks are improbable and that other agencies are guarding against them.

    “We do believe that the possibility of a successful attack using commercial aircraft is very small,” he said. It is impractical to ask commercial plants to defend against such attacks, Burnell concluded. But he said plants are aware of the risk and are implementing measures to deal with worst-case scenarios.

    As to the complaint of excessive secrecy, Burnell said the commission has to implement the law, which requires controls on information that could be misused. The debate is not over classified information but rather over sensitive data that ought not to be publicized.

    In an earlier interview, E. William Colglazier, executive officer of the academy, said the nuclear agency’s guidelines for this classification are vague. Even when officials agreed that certain details in the report are not secret, he said, they had argued that chunks of non-secret information, when presented together, constituted “Safeguards Information.”

    The report said government scientists and independent researchers had conducted analyses of threats without knowing that others were doing the same.

    Burnell acknowledged that “the system was not perfect” but said that as more people receive security clearances such bottlenecks could be reduced. The commission has indicated it is seeking to increase access to information.

    To the relief of the industry, the academy report disputed a characterization that the commission used in a letter to Congress on March 14. The letter implied that the academy was recommending moving spent nuclear fuel from large pools to dry storage casks. Industry believes that the pools are as safe as the casks and that moving the fuel is not worth the expense.

    Louis J. Lanzerotti, chairman of the academy’s report, said that his panel had called for analyses of large attacks and that those results might prompt the commission to move fuel to dry storage at some plants.

    Although dry storage has advantages, the risk of major attacks could be sufficiently addressed by changing how spent fuel is stored in pools and by installing water sprays to control fires, said the academy’s Kevin Crowley, the study coordinator.

    Originally published by The Washington Post

  • Erosion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

    I recently participated in a meeting on the Future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative at The Carter Center in Atlanta. The Middle Powers Initiative is a coalition of eight international civil society organizations, two of which have received the Nobel Peace Prize. I represented the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at the meeting, one of the founding organizations. In addition to civil society representatives such as myself, the meeting hosted diplomats from many countries. Among the participants were Marian Hobbs, New Zealand’s Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control; Senator Douglas Roche of Canada, chair of the Middle Powers Initiative; Nobuyasu Abe, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs; Ambassador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, Brazilian Ambassador and President-Designate of the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference; former US Ambassador Robert Grey Jr.; and Ambassador Rajab M. Sukayri of the Jordanian Foreign Ministry.

    The participants in the consultation were mindful of the recent United Nations Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Report, issued in December 2004, indicated that “the nuclear non-proliferation regime is now at risk because of lack of compliance with existing commitments, withdrawal or threats of withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to escape those commitments, a changing international security environment and the diffusion of technology.” The Report found, “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

    The Report further found that “if a simple nuclear device were detonated in a major city, the number of deaths would range from tens of thousands to more than one million. The shock to international commerce, employment and travel would amount to at least one trillion dollars. Such an attack could have further, far-reaching implications for international security, democratic governance and civil rights.” It was against this background of concern that the Atlanta meeting took place. Ambassador Duarte, who will preside over the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, said, “What we have to contend with at the 2005 Review Conference is a persistent and serious situation of erosion of confidence in the mechanisms of the NPT and on the ability of the instrument to survive the tests it has been put through.”

    Among the major issues that were discussed were the need for the Non-Proliferation Treaty to become universal by bringing in the three nuclear weapons states that are not parties to the treaty (Israel, India and Pakistan) and bringing back North Korea; for the nuclear weapons states parties to the treaty to fulfill their obligations for good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament; for more effective safeguarding of nuclear materials and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and for some effective method of sanctions for violating the Treaty’s provisions.

    Former President Jimmy Carter, who spoke at the meeting, pointed out, “Prospects for this year’s discussions are not encouraging. I have heard that the [Preparatory Committee] for the forthcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty talks have so far failed even to achieve an agenda because of the deep divisions between the nuclear powers who seek to stop proliferation without meeting their own disarmament commitments, and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose demands include firm disarmament commitments and considerations of the Israeli arsenal.”

    President Carter also pointed to the contradictions in US nuclear policy. “The United States claims to be upholding Article VI,” he said, referring to the disarmament provision of the Treaty, “but yet asserts a security strategy of testing and developing new weapons [such as] Star Wars and the earth penetrating ‘bunker buster,’ and has threatened first use, even against non-nuclear states, in case of ‘surprising military developments’ and ‘unexpected contingencies.’”

    President Carter referred to another of the contradictions in the approach to nuclear non-proliferation in addressing the issue of Iran and the Middle East: “While the international community is justified in exerting strong pressure on Iran to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, there is no public effort or comment in the United States or Europe calling for Israel to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty or submit to any other restraints. At the same time, we fail to acknowledge what a powerful incentive this is to Iran, Syria, Egypt, and other states to join the nuclear community.”

    There was a general sense at the meeting that the non-proliferation regime, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty that is its centerpiece, is eroding, and that some measure of success at the May 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is critical to the future of this regime. Right now the United States is choosing not to recognize the progress made at previous NPT Review Conferences on nuclear disarmament obligations. The Bush administration doesn’t want to be bound by promises made at the 1995 and 2000 NPT Review Conferences, promises that committed the nuclear weapons states to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to make nuclear disarmament transparent and irreversible, and to an “unequivocal undertaking” to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

    The US position is throwing the prospects for the 2005 Review Conference into disarray. There was a general sense at the meeting that unless the nuclear weapons states, including the United States, stand by their previous commitments, the prospects for assuring future efforts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation are dim. This is where we stand three months prior to the beginning of the 2005 Review Conference.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and a member of the International Steering Committee of the Middle Powers Initiative.

  • The Hibakusha Voice and the Future of the Anti-Nuclear Movement

    Mr. Tsuboi Sunao would appear to be an ordinary healthy elderly Japanese man except for the large patch of white skin that medical specialists call leucoderma on his forehead. He is a cheerful 79 year old, but over the past 60 years he has been critically ill four times, each time being told that he would not survive. He first fell ill immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima when he was unconscious for 40 days. He is presently suffering from prostate cancer. Despite his illness he has been and still is an active campaigner against nuclear arms and one of the best known hibakusha, or victims of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In December 2003 he went to Washington D.C., to protest against the permanent display of the “Enola Gay” in the new wing of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. He was not against the actual display of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people by the end of 1945. Rather he was against the exhibition of this plane without any explanation of the consequences caused as a result of the attack that took so many civilian lives and left tens of thousands of others to suffer throughout their lives.

    Mr. Tsuboi does not expect to be alive when Hiroshima City commemorates the 70th anniversary of the atomic attack in 2015. Indeed, it is almost certain that not only Mr. Tsuboi, but also most hibakusha will have passed away by then, as approximately 5000 hibakusha have died every year over the past ten years. Due to the rapidly diminishing number of hibakusha the “weathering of the Hiroshima experience” as it is called in Japan has become a serious concern for many citizens of this city in recent years. The number of children from various parts of Japan who visit the Atomic Bomb Museum in Peace Park on school excursions has also decreased sharply in recent years so that “oblivion to the Hiroshima memory” is becoming a nation wide phenomenon.

    In one corner of the Hiroshima Peace Park stands the statue of a young girl, Sadako, stretching her arms towards the sky. Sadako’s story is well known throughout the world, as books in many languages have been published about this girl who died of leukemia at the age of 12 in 1955, ten years after the bombing of Hiroshima. While ill in hospital Sadako attempted to make one thousand folded paper cranes, working on these until shortly before her death, in the belief that she would survive if she could achieve her goal. As a result of her efforts, the paper crane became a symbol of peace in Japan. Since her death visiting school groups from all over Japan have placed thousands of strings of paper cranes around her statute in memory of her lost youth and the Hiroshima tragedy. Sadly, over the past few years, these paper cranes have been set on fire a number of times, probably by young people, “just for fun.” To prevent such juvenile crime the city council built a small glass enclosure behind the statue in which to protect the paper cranes. Security cameras were also installed. Yet again, a few days before August 6, Hiroshima Day, in 2003, a university student from Kobe broke the glass and set fire to the cranes. When arrested he confessed that he did it out of frustration over the grim employment situation facing new university graduates. The incidents suggest that Sadako’s sorrowful tale, and the plight of the living as well as dead atomic victims, has become irrelevant to many young people in Japan.

    Today, Japan’s experience as the only nation to encounter a nuclear holocaust also appears irrelevant to Japan’s leading politicians including Prime Minister Koizumi. Until Mr. Koizumi became prime minister five years ago, it was an annual tradition for the prime minister to meet representatives of the hibakusha for about half an hour immediately after attending the commemoration ceremony in Peace Park on August 6. It was, of course, merely a token gesture for previous successive prime ministers to make a show of government concern for the health of hibakusha. Yet even this publicity gesture was cancelled, although Mr. Koizumi still reluctantly attends the ceremony. Some of his colleagues in the Liberal Democratic Party, including former Party Secretary General Abe Shinzo, think that Japan should develop nuclear arms for defense purposes against so-called “rogue nations” such as North Korea. Until a decade or so ago, there were still a few prominent conservative politicians who tenaciously objected to the nuclearization of Japan and to the dispatch of Japan’s Self Defense Forces to overseas war zones. Today, such statesmen no longer exist within the LDP. Article 9 of Japan’s post-war Constitution forbidding engagement in any form of armed conflict has so far been widely supported by the Japanese people, partly because of a strong desire not to repeat the nuclear holocaust. Recently, however, powerful voices both within the LDP as well as opposition parties have called for elimination of the pacifist clauses of the Constitution.

    For many months now major Japanese anti-nuclear organizations and other grass-roots peace movement groups have been planning their own events scheduled for August 2005 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet these planned events seem to offer few new ideas of how to tackle the problem of “oblivion to the Hiroshima memory” that pervades both the younger generation as well as the politicians. It is almost certain that events to commemorate the 60th anniversary will be the last chance for surviving hibakusha to appeal to the world to oppose the idea of genocide by weapons of mass destruction. I am sure that, in August 2005, they will receive much media attention from all over the world. However, the real question that the Japanese people should ask themselves is what they will do after the 60th anniversary in order to keep alive the Hiroshima memory and to utilize it to construct a peaceful world without the living voices of the hibakusha.

    A Hiroshima A-Bomb victim, Ms. Kurihara Sadako, once wrote the following passage in one of her poems:

    It was night in the basement of a broken building Victims of the atomic bomb Crowded into the candleless darkness

    Filling the room to overflowing The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death The stuffiness of human sweat, the writhing moans When, out of the darkness, came a wondrous voice “Oh! The baby’s coming!” it said ………. And so, a new life was born In the darkness of that living hell ………. We shall give forth new life! We shall bring forth new life! Even to our death

    What is urgently required for Japan’s peace movement now is a powerful cry for new life to its own ideas of peace with new perspectives in order to confront the present world of military violence and terrorism.

    Yuki Tanaka is a Research Professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and a coordinator of Japan Focus. He is the author of Japan’s Comfort Women. Sexual Slavery and Prostitution During World War II.

    This article originally appeared on ZNet

  • The Atom Bomb, Einstein, and Me

    Albert Einstein was Joseph Rotblat’s hero – and the great man’s last act was to endorse the young physicist’s anti-nuclear campaign .

    He is the greatest scientist that ever existed in the world. However, I became involved with Einstein not as a scientist, but as a pacifist. He inspired me very much, as a young physicist in Liverpool before the war. Einstein had transformed all our ideas about time and space. We knew many laws of nature but here comes a scientist who taught us these were only approximations and under certain conditions they are not valid. Many of the things we took for granted were overturned. It was such a tremendous revolution.

    I had started to work on the atom bomb in November 1939 at Liverpool University. I do not believe that making WMD is in the remit of scientists – however, I was afraid that if we in England had thought of the idea, German scientists would too. My rationale, which maybe turned out to be flawed, was that the only way we could prevent this happening was if we also had the bomb and threatened with retaliation. My intention was that it should not be used.

    Making the bomb was much more complicated than we had thought. It required the separation of isotopes which was something beyond our means in the UK during wartime. After Pearl Harbor, America began the Manhattan project. Between Churchill and Roosevelt, it was decided that British scientists would join the project. So I went to Los Alamos.

    It was a paradise for scientists. In Los Alamos, whatever you wanted, you got. If I needed something, from a bicycle to a cyclotron, I only had to write out a chit. I met many of the big names of science. Niels Bohr was already a hero for me. Dick Feynman was there and very young: 23, and I could see straight away he was a genius.

    In 1944, when I learned the Germans had given up the project, the whole rationale for my being there disappeared. I said I wanted to resign. I was accused of being a Soviet spy.

    I was eventually allowed to go on condition that I must not contact my colleagues. So, I became the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project and returned to Liverpool with no idea about its progress until I heard about Hiroshima on the BBC on August 6 1945.

    In Los Alamos, we were not quite sure if the whole thing would work – the atom bomb, after all, was based purely on calculations. I had some faint hope it would be a fizzle. And then, if it did work, that it would not be used against civilians but then it was used against them immediately. This was a terrible shock to me and I knew that a weapon 1,000 times more powerful was possible.

    I decided I should devote a great deal of my time to prevent another such catastrophe and began to go around and talk to scientists in Britain about the dreadful effects of the atom bomb.

    I came to think of Einstein more. I read about his involvement in the same ideas – he declared himself a pacifist. The emergency committee in the US, of which he was chairman, became very involved in the same activities as we did here, so I made an arrangement to go to America and meet him, but was refused a visa because of what happened in Los Alamos.

    I met Bertrand Russell and became an information source for him. There was the idea that high-level scientists should issue a manifesto to the world to draw attention to the dangers of a nuclear war. Russell wanted to get the best scientists in the field and the greatest scientist at the time was Einstein. So Russell wrote a letter.

    By the time Einstein’s reply reached London, he was dead. He had immediately replied, the last act of his life.

    We called it the Russell-Einstein manifesto. It was signed by 11 scientists. Russell insisted they were Nobel laureates, but asked me to sign even though I was not one. He said: “You will get it, I’m sure.” Einstein’s endorsement made an enormous difference his name was recognised by every person on the planet. Now I’m the only one of the signatories still alive. Because of this I feel it’s my duty to go on carrying the message from Einstein.

    Was our effort successful? When I received the Nobel peace prize, the committee said our efforts had contributed to preventing a nuclear war. Maybe to a tiny extent, we did.

    Einstein made us think about everything – nothing is absolute, everything is relative. He was a scientist but a realist and aware of what was going on in the world. He was quite the opposite of what people think about scientists – being absent-minded and immersed in their work and naive. He was fully aware and trying to do something about it. I admire him not only as a great man of science but also as a great human being. I think if he were still alive, he would still be working on his theories. But he would be working towards peace.

    Joseph Rotblat is emeritus professor of physics at St Bartholomew’s hospital medical college, London and cofounder of the Pugwash Conference (www.pugwash.org ). In 1995, he won the Nobel peace prize. This article was originally published by the Guardian.

    Guardian Unlimited C Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

  • Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove- A Book Review

    Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove by Peter Goodchild (Harvard, 2004)

    Although most people would prefer to forget it, ever since the atomic bombing of Japanese cities in August 1945 the world has lived on the brink of nuclear annihilation. And no individual played a more important role in fostering the nuclear arms race and its terrible dangers than Edward Teller, a Hungarian emigre physicist.

    In “Edward Teller: The Real Dr. Strangelove,” Peter Goodchild–an award-winning television producer for the BBC and the author of a biography of Robert Oppenheimer–provides a detailed, informative biography of Teller. Drawing upon interviews he conducted, manuscript materials, and secondary sources, Goodchild sketches a revealing portrait of this gifted and extraordinarily influential figure.

    Although Teller was born into a relatively privileged, comfortable, Jewish professional family in Budapest, he underwent an unhappy childhood. His mother was often worried and over-protective and, thus, he grew up a very serious child, frightened of everyday situations. Indeed, Teller himself recalled that “the consistency of numbers” was “the first memory I have of feeling secure.” And there was much to feel insecure about. Within short order, the Teller family life in Budapest was disrupted by World War I, a postwar Communist revolution, and a tide of post-Communist anti-Semitism. Though he was unusually bright, Teller recalled that, at school, he had no friends among his classmates, was ridiculed by some of his teachers, and “was practically a social outcast.” Not surprisingly, he “reached adolescence still a serious child with no sense of humor.”

    As Teller moved on to Germany to attend university classes and do physics research, his social acceptance and social skills improved markedly. Thrown together with other brilliant scientists, many of them as maladjusted as he was, Teller developed genuine warmth, humor, and charm. Nevertheless, his childhood difficulties deeply marked his subsequent career. Goodchild argues, convincingly, that Teller’s “thirst for acceptance–with the hurt and anger he felt when it was denied”–became “a defining feature” of his life.

    With the Nazi rise to power, Teller left Germany for Britain and, soon, for the United States, where he settled comfortably into an academic career. In 1939, along with two other Hungarian emigre physicists, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, he met with Albert Einstein and helped convince him to warn President Franklin Roosevelt that the German government might be developing an atomic bomb. This proved to be the beginning of the Manhattan Project, the secret wartime atomic bomb program. Teller worked on the project, which drew together many of the scientists who, in later years, would clash over nuclear weapons policy. Expecting to be appointed head of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, Teller was bitterly disappointed when he did not get the post.

    He was also chagrined when his plans for work on the “Super”H-bomb were disrupted. For these setbacks, he blamed the director of the Los Alamos lab, Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist whose influence, popularity, and cliquish behavior he began to resent. When Szilard asked Teller to circulate a petition at Los Alamos urging that the bomb not be used against Japan, Teller was ready to do it, but was dissuaded by Oppenheimer. Indeed, Teller reported back to Szilard that, in light of the need to convince the public that “the next war could be fatal,” the “actual combat use” of the weapon “might even be the best thing.” It was the first sign of his hawkishness and, also, of a complex relationship with Oppenheimer, that characterized his life in the following decades.

    With the end of the war, Teller –deeply pessimistic about postwar relations with the Soviet Union– pressed scientists to continue their nuclear weapons work. Initially, to be sure, he supported nuclear arms control and disarmament measures like the ill-fated Acheson-Lilienthal Plan. But, increasingly, he championed the development of the H-bomb– a project in which he hoped to play a leading role. As Goodchild shows, by developing the H-bomb, Teller was responding both to his fear that the Soviet Union might conquer the world and to his jealousy of Oppenheimer, then widely lauded as the “father of the atomic bomb.”

    The two issues, reflecting his anxiety and his ambition, soon became intertwined, for Oppenheimer and his circle proved to be major obstacles to getting the U.S. government to move forward with the H-bomb project. Gradually, however, Teller won the struggle. Particularly after the first Soviet nuclear test in the fall of 1949, powerful political figures, including President Harry Truman, lined up on the side of constructing an H-bomb. All Teller had to do was to figure out how to build it. Ironically, despite his vigorous weapons work at the Livermore laboratory, it was a problem that confounded him for years. Furthermore, the mathematician Stan Ulam may have been responsible for the necessary conceptual breakthrough. Nevertheless, Teller received the lion’s share of the credit and, ultimately, became known as “the father of the H-bomb”— a weapon a thousand times as powerful as the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima.

    Nor was the creation of the H-bomb Teller’s only victory over his putative enemies. In 1954, he teamed up with other foes of Oppenheimer (and of nuclear arms controls) to destroy his rival’s career and influence. Oppenheimer had applied to the Atomic Energy Commission to reinstate his security clearance, and this triggered a dramatic, highly-publicized loyalty-security hearing. Although Teller’s friends urged him not to testify, he rejected their advice. Thus, during the hearing, he asserted that, based on Oppenheimer’s actions since 1945, he thought it vital for national security to deny clearance to him. This also turned out to be the decision of the board, which cut off Oppenheimer from government programs he had once directed and terminated his lingering influence upon them.

    For Teller, it proved to be a pyrrhic victory. When the AEC surprised him by publishing the transcript of the loyalty-security hearing, many of Teller’s scientific colleagues –shocked by what they considered his betrayal of human decency–cut him off as well. Teller was devastated by their response. As he recalled: “If a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives, leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional colleagues. If more than ninety per cent of them come around to consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect. The truth is it had a profound effect.”

    Teller, however, proceeded to make new friends, particularly within the ranks of the military-industrial complex, who appreciated the positions he had taken and recognized his utility as a champion of new nuclear weapons programs. And he proved to be a good investment. Urging Congress and the President to spurn the idea of a nuclear test ban treaty, Teller argued that “it would be a crime against the people” to stop nuclear testing when he and other weapons scientists stood on the brink of developing a “clean” bomb. “Peaceful nuclear explosions,” he told President Dwight Eisenhower, could be used to uncover deposits of oil, alter the course of rivers, and “perhaps even modify the weather.” Eisenhower was greatly impressed, and suggested that it might be a good idea to share the “clean”; bombs with the Russians, an idea that Teller, naturally, resisted. Under Teller’ direction, his colleagues at Livermore devised ever wilder schemes to prove that nuclear testing could be hidden and, therefore, a test ban was not possible. These included exploding weapons in deep caves, building a gargantuan shield to hide x-rays from earthbound observers, and planning nuclear tests on the far side of the moon. Although much of the public was growing concerned about the nuclear fallout from testing, Teller assured Americans that fallout was “not worth worrying about.” Nuclear test radiation “need not necessarily be harmful,” he declared, and “may conceivably be helpful.”

    One of the zanier ventures promoted by Teller involved the use of H-bombs to blast out a deep-water harbor in northern Alaska. In the late 1950s, the influential physicist encouraged activities that included using nuclear explosives to create diamonds, to mine oil, and with the assistance of 26 nuclear devices to carve out a new canal adjacent to the Panama Canal. He even opined that it would be hard to “resist the temptation to shoot at the moon. . . to observe what kind of disturbance it might cause.” Eventually, these grandiose ideas took shape in Project Plowshare.

    To implement its first component, Project Chariot, Teller flew off to Alaska to propose exciting possibilities that included using nuclear explosions to construct dams, lakes, and canals. Ultimately, Teller narrowed down the Alaskan venture to using nuclear weapons to blast out a giant harbor near Cape Thompson. Although commercial interests in Alaska liked the idea, local scientists were critical and the local Inuit people –32 miles from the site of the planned nuclear explosions — were not at all eager to have their community turned into a nuclear wasteland. Responding to the surge of protest against Project Chariot, the Kennedy administration scrapped it. Goodchild reveals, however, that these apparently irrational schemes had a hidden logic, for “Chariot was intended as a cover for military activities.” Faced with the prospect of a nuclear test ban, Teller was promoting “peaceful” nuclear explosions as a means of continuing the testing of nuclear weapons.

    Teller’s fierce faith in nuclear weapons became ever more evident in the 1960s and 1970s. He testified before Congress against the Partial Test Ban Treaty and also spoke out against it on television. In addition, he championed the development of an ABM system that would employ nuclear explosions to destroy incoming missiles, held an underground nuclear test at Amchitka Island that set off the most powerful underground explosion in American history, and lobbied hard against the SALT treaties of Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. “He . . . was becoming so wildly hawkish,” recalled Marvin Goldberger, one of Teller’s early students, “that no one wanted him around except the extremists in the Pentagon.”

    Teller’s plunge into extremism carried over into the debate over the hazards of nuclear power. When the near meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant occurred, releasing dangerous amounts of radioactivity, Teller reassured a congressional committee that, “zero is the number of proven cases of damage to health due to a nuclear plant in the free world.” The day after his congressional appearance, Teller was hospitalized with a heart attack, and even this became grist for his propaganda mill. In July 1979, under a two-page headline in the Wall Street Journal reading “I WAS THE ONLY VICTIM OF THREE MILE ISLAND,” there appeared a large photo of Teller, along with his explanation that the cause of his health problem “was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.” Goodchild then goes on to say: “An editorial in the New York Times accused Teller of propaganda…It then pointed out something Teller had not mentioned: that the sponsor of the advertisement, Dresser Industries, had manufactured the valve that had stuck open and started the emergency.”

    Although Teller had substantial influence on U.S. public policy through the 1970s – fostering the H-bomb during the Truman years, purging Oppenheimer and sabotaging a test ban treaty during the Eisenhower years, excluding underground nuclear testing from the test ban treaty during the Kennedy years, securing the deployment of an ABM system during the Johnson years, and keeping the U.S. government busily engaged in the nuclear arms race during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years – he came into his own after the 1980 election victory of Ronald Reagan. Teller arranged for the appointment of a protégé of his as the president’s Science Advisor, became a member of the White House Science Council, met with the president at the White House on nuclear issues, and did as much as any other individual to convince him that the creation of a Star Wars anti-missile system was vital to the national defense. The Russians, Teller told Reagan, were about to deploy “powerful directed energy weapons” in space, thus enabling them to “militarily dominate both space and the earth, conclusively altering the world balance of power.” Thus, “urgent action” was needed to build an anti-missile system that would be powered by nuclear weapons explosions and could be deployed within a few years.

    As is well-known, Reagan swallowed this anti-missile proposal hook, line, and sinker though, in fact, Teller’s claims for it had little relation to reality. Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, was more dubious about the project, but he did approve a modified version, Brilliant Pebbles, also championed by Teller. Republicans in Congress also rallied behind the idea of missile defense, and during the Bill Clinton years–used their newfound strength in that legislative body to keep the project alive and the appropriations flowing to America’s weaponeers. Thereafter, George W. Bush, taking office, ordered the deployment of the new system and, a week before Teller’s death in 2003, awarded him the President’s Medal of Freedom, this nation’s highest civilian award. Along the way, Teller’s brainchild helped to sabotage an agreement at Reykjavik to eliminate strategic nuclear weapons, caused the scrapping of the ABM treaty, and resulted in expenditures of over $100 billion. And there is still no indication that it works.

    Overall, Goodchild’s book provides a fascinating, well-researched, and at times sympathetic study of an extraordinary individual. Unfortunately, though, the author has a much better grasp of Teller’s life than he does of his times. Thus, he makes some glaring historical mistakes. Among them are the claims that, before Japanese surrender, the U.S. government provided assurances to the Japanese government of the emperor’s safety and that “Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia” in February 1948. Even so, “Edward Teller” is a book well worth reading. Provocative and convincing, it highlights the importance of the personal dimension –including personal neuroses–in the history of the nuclear arms race.

    Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is “Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present” (Stanford University Press, 2003)

    Originally published by the History News Network

  • ElBaradei Says N.Korea Nuke Crisis Getting Worse

    The crisis caused by North Korea’s refusal to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions is deepening and needs to be resolved as soon as possible, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Wednesday.

    “This has been a pending issue for 12 years, and frankly it is getting worse,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei told Reuters in an interview.

    “We need to address the whole question and bring it to a resolution,” he said. “I would certainly hope that by the end of the year we should be there.”

    Communist North Korea has been locked in a stand-off with its neighbors and the United States over its nuclear program since 2002. Pyongyang has refused to return to six-country talks on dismantling its nuclear programs unless Washington drops what the North says is a “hostile policy.”

    ElBaradei said he hoped 2005 would see a return of IAEA inspectors to North Korea to conduct rigorous inspections that would provide guarantees to the world that all North Korean nuclear facilities and activities are under U.N. safeguards.

    The IAEA team was expelled on Dec. 31, 2002 and has not been allowed to return. Since that time, North Korea has produced enough plutonium for half a dozen nuclear weapons, the IAEA and a number of security think-tanks estimate.

    “I would like to see the six-party talks restarted as early as possible,” ElBaradei said.

    “I’d like to see by the end of the year a package agreement that takes care of the nuclear activities in North Korea and makes sure it is all under irreversible verification, that their security concerns are taken care and their humanitarian needs addressed.”

    The participants in the six-party talks are the United States, China, Russia, Japan and North and South Korea.

    The United States listed North Korea, Iran and pre-war Iraq as an “axis of evil” determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

    Washington has also accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program. But ElBaradei said it was North Korea, not Iran, that posed the greatest nuclear threat to the world.

    “I hope we can start to move on the Korean issue, which is the number one proliferation threat we are facing,” he said.

    Asked if the fact North Korea is widely believed to possess several nuclear weapons changed anything, ElBaradei said it did not.

    “It makes it more urgent, but it doesn’t change things. South Africa had nuclear weapons and they dismantled their program. So it’s an issue we are capable of dealing with once there’s an agreement,” he said.

    Originally publisehd by Reuters, Vienna