Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear testing

  • Moving Back to Rongelap?

    This speech was delivered at the 2012 World Conference against A- and H- Bombs.


    Good morning. My name is Jelton Anjain. I bring warm lakwe (greetings) on behalf of the people of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Rongelap Atoll local government and especially the displaced people of Rongelap. I have the great honor and privilege to be here joining you throughout this week to commemorate all the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-Bombs. This conference is significant in that they bring us together from different parts of the world where we become one in friendship to fight for peace and justice and try to convince the world to eradicate the use of nuclear weapons.


    I would like to take this opportunity to give special thanks to the Organizing Committee for inviting me to join you this week. Last time I joined these rallies was when I escorted my uncle John Anjain back in 2004. Now my father Jeton Anjain and all my uncles who fought this nuclear injustice have passed away and we, the younger generations, still carry on their legacy. We are a small group of people, but we will never stop in our fight against this nuclear injustice that was brought upon us.


    I’d like to tell you a hypothetical story. We all know the importance of making a living from our natural resources.


    “If the islands were not used for testing of nuclear bombs and our islands remained clean today, and if I was a farmer, I would easily go into my field of crops and harvest, and afterwards, I’d take my spear gun and go spear fishing. For a day’s work, a normal farmer/fisherman would easily make over $500 if he takes his crops and fish to sell at any market. Now, since the islands are contaminated and we were forced to get sicknesses and to leave our homeland, those normal farmers/fishermen who are not fortunate enough to get educated and cannot find a decent job, they are forced to live on $75 for their quarterly compensations from the US government.”


    That has always been the situation of the Rongelapese over the years and that is the situation of the Rongelapese today.


    Just in 2010, the US Congress sent a letter to the US Department of Interiors’ office of Insular Affairs urging them to have the people of Rongelap move from Mejatto Island in the Kwajalein Atoll back to Rongelap. Despite the fact that the islands are not ready and still contaminated, US Congress is urging our people to move back. US government is telling our people that those who choose not to move to Rongelap will no longer receive compensation. We were given until October of 2011 to move back but are people are still uneasy about going back as we know the islands are still not clean. The US calls this relocation a necessity due to budgetary difficulties. Since the scientists have certified these islands as ready for resettlement, it is a legal and economic necessity. Now if the scientists are saying that these islands are safe to go back to, why are they urging our people to “consume 30% local diet from the land and 70% imported food.” This statement alone clearly indicates that the islands are still contaminated.


    Now they say it’s a “legal and economic necessity.” Our lives are worth more than their money, our lives are worth more than their legal system. We have a right to live a full and healthy life as human beings. Mejatto Island is only 60 miles away from the urban city of Ebeye. And Ebeye is the closest place our people on Mejatto get their imported food from, but transportation to and from Ebeye is hard to come by, especially when the weather and seas are not good. If we move back to our islands and are not allowed to eat from the land, how can our people get imported food from Ebeye when it is close to 200 miles away from Rongelap? And transportation is always a problem. People would have to rely on tri-annual ships that would come and bring them food, and if the ships don’t make their scheduled runs, they would be forced to eat off the land which is poisonous.


    The RMI national government does not support this relocation by the US government for the Rongelap people to move back even though the Rongelap local government and the US government are pushing for it. The Alap association of Rongelap, which I represent, does not support this resettlement at the moment, for we all know the islands are still not livable. We do not want to risk going back and have our people get sick again just like we did when the US told our people back in 1957 that the islands were safe to return to after three years of exile. We surely don’t want to take that risk again. The community is uncertain as to whether to go back home or not because our local leadership does not conduct public hearings to report on current status of the radiation, funds and reports on guaranteed better and safe life. People do not trust the Department of Energy (DoE), they are not truthful about the cleanup and safety of the islands and guaranteed health insurance for the people, especially the descendants of our hibakusha. Like you, we go through the same social, economic and health injustices caused by what the US did to our islands, for the so-called “good of mankind.” I tell you, slavery still exists today: we are slaves to the social and cultural instability. We are slaves to the limited educational skills we bear. We are slaves to the health problems our children and elders encounter every day. We are slaves for we lack the economic stability to prevent these causes of slavery in our lives.


    So I am here today, my friends, as their voice. I come to ask you to be our extended voice to the world. Let the world know of what we go through every day we wake up to greet the sun. I ask that we stand together to fight this injustice. Only then will we be able to overcome all of this.


    Komol.

  • Movement Challenging U.S. Missile Testing Grows

    Early in the morning on February 25, the United States Air Force test-launched a first-strike, nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) despite the largest anti-test demonstrations in almost 30 years. The launch took place in the dark fog of night at 2:46 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) on the central California coast, firing the missile to the other end of the Ronald Reagan Missile Range in the Marshall Islands over 4,000 miles away. Despite the military’s ability to follow through with the test, the offensive nature of delivery systems and the threatening message of their test flights is growing in significance in anti-nuclear circles around the globe.
     
    The next test-launch was scheduled for March 1, extremely soon after last Saturday’s test, but was canceled abruptly on Tuesday, just as a media campaign began to cancel the test. March 1 is the anniversary of the tragic “Castle Bravo” test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll for which the swimwear received its name. That test dropped radioactive fallout on the people of Rongelap, leading to catastrophic health and genetic problems that continue to this day, necessitating the on-going evacuation of their island. It also sparked the Japanese anti-nuclear movement which had been prevented to exist under the U.S. occupation that followed World War II. The Lucky Dragon #5 fishing vessel, a Japanese ship, was also caught in the fallout of the March 1 test.
     
    The test-launch of a Minuteman III on July 28, 2011, was a rare failure necessitating the destruction of the missile mid-flight. A subsequent test scheduled for September 21, 2011, the U.N.-designated International Day of Peace, was postponed as a growing chorus of international opposition was decrying the contradiction of a peace-loving nation testing such a thing on that special day.
     
    Following on the energy of the demonstration last Saturday, a group of activists spoke on the phone on Monday to develop a quick, proactive plan for the next 48 hours to try to stop this week’s second test. The group decided to address people’s comments to both President Obama and also U.N. Secretary General Moon. The groundwork for the outreach had been well laid already, and key communities to reach were identified: Japanese activists, people from Micronesia, downwinder groups, Native land rights organizers, faith-based networks, etc.
     
    Testing warhead, bomb and delivery systems all violate the spirit of working towards nuclear disarmament to which the United States has obligated itself. The February 24 protest began at 5 minutes to midnight—the current setting of the Federation of American Scientist’s “Doomsday Clock”—in the hopes that public pressure would force President Obama to turn away from his pro-nuclear budget (with increases for both nuclear weapons and power). The test-launch of ICBMs makes hypocrites of U.S. foreign policy planners who demand a stand down of nuclear ambitions from countries they’re hostile to, while further upgrading our own weapons of mass destruction. The quantity and quality of U.S. nuclear weapons dwarf all others; we must not wait for other nations to pull back, but must increase the rate of dismantlement of our own nuclear weapons.
     
    Daniel Ellsberg, who as a military analyst for the RAND Corporation in the 1960s developed strategic plans for the Secretary of Defense MacNamara and later leaked the lies of Vietnam war planners in what became known as the Pentagon Papers, crossed the line at the base and was taken into custody along with 14 other men and women in an act of civil resistance. “They cannot be allowed to test these lightning rods of doomsday without arresting American citizens. We need to push this. It takes public pressure through education and public protest,” Ellsberg said at the rally before entering the base. Twenty-nine years ago, Ellsberg was also arrested at VAFB with hundreds of others who went into the back-country of the huge base to disrupt launch plans for another ICBM, the MX missile, which ultimately was not deployed, largely due to public pressure. Ellsberg continued by stating, “No one in this country should have their hands on the destruction of the world. We can’t trust these folks with the future of humanity.”
     
    Ellsberg also pointed out that Cold War deterrence was based on various lies and mistakes, like when U.S. plans were based on the thought that the U.S.S.R. had 1,000 missiles but actually only had 4 at that time. Current war plans continue to be based on misrepresentations, including those regarding Iraq, Iran, North Korea and the ongoing nuclear programs of Israel, Pakistan and India.
     
    Our peace actions and civil resistance at VAFB, and at the Nevada Test Site, Y-12 Plant in Tennessee and elsewhere in the expanding nuclear “bombplex” all are part of an international effort to wake up the public and our leaders to the immorality, illegality and stupidity of maintaining nuclear capabilities. The U.S. program encourages horizontal proliferation. All nuclear weapons must be eliminated. “Theirs” are bad; ours are at least as horrific. The move to make ICBMs dual use—meaning they carry nuclear or non-nuclear warheads—further increases nuclear danger by potentially confusing adversaries into thinking they’re under nuclear attack.
     
    With about a hundred demonstrators braving the damp cold of the designated protest area outside of Vandenberg, other important attendees crossed the line in an “anti-test”: David Krieger, founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and his wife Carolee committed their first-ever acts of civil resistance and were exhilarated by the experience. Cindy Sheehan, who’s son was killed as a soldier in Iraq and who has become an outspoken peace activist, also was cited and released. Judy Talaugon, a grandmother and descendant of the local Chumash people blessed and welcomed the protesters. Importantly, Paul O’Toko, an elder from Micronesia and founder of Indigenous Stewards International, brought a sizable group including several of his children—although they did not engage in the trespass itself. Fr. Louis Vitale, a frequent presence at VAFB and other demonstration sites said, “I would gladly give my life even to delay a missile launch.”

  • Nuclear Guinea Pigs

    This article was originally published by Honolulu Weekly.


    In the old-timey section of Kalihi, tucked between auto repair shops and boarded-up storefronts, Maza Attari, a Marshall Islander, lived with four family members in a one-bedroom apartment barely bigger than a ping-pong table. When visited by this reporter last summer, Attari had been unable to find steady work since being flown to Honolulu 12 years ago for back surgery that had left him with a severe limp and weakened muscles.


    Attari’s circumstances exemplify the far-reaching impacts of nuclear testing upon irradiated, exiled or dislocated Marshall Islanders. From 1946 to 1962, their home atolls served as experimental grounds where the US detonated nuclear weapons and tested delivery systems in the transition from conventional to intercontinental bombers. In all, the US exploded 86 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, which are situated 3,000 miles west of Honolulu. Those 86 bombs equated to 8,580 Hiroshima-size bombs–or 1.4 weapons per day for 16 years.


    A one-time magistrate and mayor on Utrik, Attari said last summer that he doubted he would be able to return there, prophesying instead, “I’m going to stay here until I die.” He died in September of this year, without ever receiving the reparations that he and other nuclear victims have claimed.


    The Debt


    It is a debt that is not only owed them, but that has compounded over time. Because these nuclear weapons experiments were too dangerous and unpredictable to be conducted on the US mainland, Attari and other Marshallese are part of the reason for America’s superpower status today. A half-century later, the Marshall Islands continue to serve as a crucial part of an outer defense periphery for the US heartland–6,000 miles away. That periphery includes the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, where for more than three decades missiles fired from 4,000 miles away (at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California) have crashed near Kwajalein Atoll, horribly frightening the indigenous inhabitants and leaving them unsure of where the debris will fall.


    A Child Out of Time


    Attari was 7 years old and living on Utrik Island on March 1, 1954, when the US unleashed the most destructive weapon in its history–the 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, code-named Bravo. It was early in the morning, and his family members leaped up when they heard a deafening noise. “Everyone was surprised,” he explains. Radioactive fallout contaminated the uncovered cement containers used for drinking water and local food. “Too bad,” US officials said when they arrived days later to begin evacuating 239 sickened inhabitants of Utrik and Rongelap atolls to the Kwajalein naval base.


    Snow-like radioactive particles fell 100 to 125 miles away on property and persons on these atolls, who had not been evacuated beforehand or alerted about precautions to take.


    The British government, between 1957 and 1958 conducted nine atmospheric tests, yielding the equivalent of about 12,000,000 tons of TNT, and the French carried out 193 Pacific nuclear tests yielding the equivalent of about 13,500,000 tons beginning in 1962 and ending on Jan. 27, 1996. The British and French data were recently gleaned from hard-to-find sources and compiled by University of Hawaii botany professor Mark Merlin and graduate student Ricardo Gonzalez, enabling them to reveal for the first time a pathbreaking, half-century panorama of the environmental consequences of Pacific nuclear testing conducted by all three nations.


    The Things They Carried


    As a result, many exposed Islanders have since suffered from or been operated on for abnormalities of the thyroid, which can lead to stunted growth, mental retardation and cancer. Like many on Utrik, Attari said, his sister died of cancer and three brothers with thyroid abnormalities have also died. Attari had not been subjected to surgery but he medicated his thyroid by daily taking US-supplied white, pea-size tablets called levothyroxin. He continued to be monitored at least twice a year by US Department of Energy medical teams who study Bravo-exposed islanders in a program kept secret for 40 years.


    After three months on Kwajalein, Attari and other Utrik residents were returned home. But it was three years before the more severely contaminated Rongelapese, who suffered skin burns, vomiting, hair loss and diarrhea, were returned to their ancestral island. US photographers extensively documented the move–labeled “Rongelap Repatriation”–that included mug shots of the returnees.


    The Pain of Exile


    It caused some Marshallese to endure the pain and suffering of a long list of verified diseases and exiled them from their ancestral homelands where they had maintained their way of life and a self-sufficient livelihood. It contaminated their islands and marine life, in some cases for decades, if not centuries. It vaporized some of their precious lands and moonscaped others, as shown by the bombing craters on Enewetak.


    The Bikini islanders, for example, were uprooted in 1946 so that their atoll could serve as a Pacific proving ground for the first US nuclear test and are still exiled today. That first test at Bikini inspired creation of the two-piece swimsuit that has ever since populated Waikiki and beaches worldwide. But Bikinians are ignored in their petition for more funding from the US government for land damages and numerous other claims that exceed earlier payments. The testing prompted one irradiated Rongelap woman to exclaim, Americans “are smart at doing stupid things.”


    An Almost-Forever Poison


    The Bravo H-bomb was l,000 times more powerful than the bomb detonated above Hiroshima and it was laced with plutonium, one of the planet’s most deadly substances with a radioactive existence of half a million years that may be hazardous to humans for at least half that time. In addition, Bravo and other US Pacific tests were launched in the atmosphere or underwater, which spewed radioactive mist, pulverized coral and snow-flake-like particles high into the air and, most disastrously, across the Pacific, landing on peoples and soils where it could be absorbed or inhaled for decades and will continue as hazards for a near-eternity.


    Unwittingly and unknowingly, Attari and other Pacific islanders had been thrust from an oral culture into the atomic age; without a vocabulary word for radioactivity, they began calling it a poison and to describe themselves as poisoned people. Attari and the other Bravo–contaminated Marshallese entered history as the first-ever examples of the effects of radioactive fallout on humans who had escaped a nuclear explosion. Unlike the wartime victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic-weapons explosions, a historian notes, Pacific Islanders who experienced the peacetime tests are important because “they have already lived in what might be our common future.”


    APEC and Forgotten Islanders


    Attari and other Marshallese have battled for more than a decade in the US courts, before Congress and with the Bush administration for more funds to pay greater-than-anticipated costs of their health care, property damages, resettlement, cleanup, and compensation for their vaporized islands. A 1995 study by the Congressional Research Service advised Congress that the Marshallese health-related claims and loss-of-land methodologies were reasonable and appropriate but their multi-billion-dollar estimates needed more analysis. The islanders are still awaiting a favorable nod from President Obama, in town this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference.


    Leaders joining President Obama this week hail from 21 countries including the Russian Federation, People’s Republic of China, Japan, Indonesia, Brunei, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong. But missing will be the voices and concerns of many peoples of the so-called Small Island States, scattered amidst about 25,000 atolls, islets and islands, that experienced the economic havoc and uniquely violent history that have transformed the Pacific region during half a century. Nor is the Marshallese multi-billion-dollar petition now confronting Obama and Congress on the agenda of APEC leaders, despite its relevance to the continuing controversy cast by Fukushima’s nuclear disaster.


    Long before the fears of drifting contamination seeded by Chernobyl and Fukushima, Bravo and the other shots in the H-Bomb era produced radioactive components that encircled the globe, settling silently from the heavens. One exhaustive study titled “Atomic Audit” concluded that fallout and other residual radioactivity from atmospheric nuclear testing by all nations have caused or will cause through infinity an estimated 3 million premature cancer deaths. As a result, University of Hawaii scientist John Harrison explained, all organisms, including humans, carry the watermark of the nuclear era woven into their bodies, thus changing “the chemical signature of our bones.”


    Guinea Pigs


    Not until 1994, 40 years after Bravo’s fallout, did Attari and other exposed islanders learn they were used as human subjects to research the effects of radioactive fallout and of livin. Within days after Bravo, while still at the naval base to which they had been evacuated, Rongelap and Utrik Islanders were incorporated into Project 4.1. They were neither asked for nor gave their informed consent, nor were told the risks of the studies for which they gained no benefit.


    Titled the “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation Due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons, the document was classified “Secret Restricted Data.”


    Seven weeks after Bravo, on April 21, the lead US doctor examining them, Dr. E.P. Cronkite, recommended to military officials in Honolulu that these Marshallese should probably be exposed to no more radiation for the rest of their “natural lives.” Despite this recommendation, after three years, US officials in 1957 assured the Rongelapese that their radioactive homeland was safe and returned them there. Rongelapese remained in their radioactive homeland for 28 years. They were shocked to learn that a 1982 US Department of Energy report indicated that parts of Rongelap, where some were living, “were as contaminated as those forbidden to humans.” As a result, in 1985, the islanders beseeched US officials to move them. The US refused. So 70 islanders were removed by the Greenpeace environmental organization. During those years on Rongelap, they lived in an environment that had been contaminated not only by Bravo and five other shots in 1954 but also by the residue from 17 shots in 1956 and 32 shots in 1958. Data on radiation levels from tests in 1956 and 1958, when combined yield greater than Bravo, have been requested by the Marshallese government but almost 50 years later US officials had yet to disclose them.


    During these years, many Marshallese lost their lives or loved ones as exemplified by John Anjain, the mayor of Rongelap in 1954. Because of the fallout, he and four members of his family were operated on for thyroid tumors. His wife’s tumor killed her. His son, who was one year old at the time of Bravo, had a thyroid tumor removed when he was 12 and died seven years later from leukemia. The elder Anjain died in Honolulu’s Straub Hospital in 2004 at age 83.


    Denying the Experiment


    Anjain had accused US officials of using the islanders as “guinea pigs” for regularly monitoring their health for decades without providing them medical treatment. But in October 1995 an advisory committee appointed by President William Clinton “found no evidence that the initial exposure of the Rongelapese or their later relocation constituted a deliberate human experiment.”


    Since being rescued by Greenpeace, Rongelapese have been living 100 miles away on Majetto Island, sustained by US aid. The US has provided $45 million to establish a Rongelap Resettlement Trust Fund that has led to cleaning up soil on parts of the main island but not on all of the 60 or so islets in the atoll that are used for food gathering. Some houses, a church, power plant, water-making equipment and paved roads now dot parts of Rongelap Island.


    US officials are vowing this autumn to cut US aid to those electing to remain at Majetto rather than to repatriate home.


    Rongelapese are reluctant to return. “Resettling the people of Rongelap under rules severely restricting their ability to move about their homeland, or to gather food from their traditional sources, does not constitute sensible repatriation,” Marshallese Sen. Michael Kabua, a member of the Rongelap Atoll Local Government Council, told a US House subcommittee on May 20, 2010. The people do not want to return, he said, “to a land where the future well-being of their children will be in jeopardy, and where they themselves cannot be assured of safety and security,” and where “they will remain as strangers in their own home.” And they remember the sad history of the Americans repatriating islanders to their heavily radioactive homelands on the assurance they were safe only to learn otherwise decades and heartbreaks later.

  • CTBT Article XIV Conference

    This speech was delivered by Ellen Tauscher to the CTBT Article XIV Conference in New York City on September 23, 2011.


    As Delivered


    Ellen TauscherDistinguished Co-Presidents, High Commissioner, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,


    I am so pleased to be here representing the United States. When Secretary Clinton came to this conference two years ago, she ended a ten-year absence on the part of our nation. Today, I stand before you proud of the accomplishments that the Obama Administration has made thus far in arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament.


    Since entering office, the Administration has achieved entry into force of the New START Treaty, released an updated Nuclear Posture Review, and helped to achieve a consensus Action Plan at the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference.


    The Administration also convened the successful 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, helped secure and relocate vulnerable nuclear materials, led efforts to establish an international nuclear fuel bank, and increased effective multilateral cooperation to prevent illicit nuclear activities.


    For the United States, this is just the beginning. One of our highest priorities is the ratification and entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. The Treaty is an essential step toward the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons, the vision President Obama articulated in Prague in April 2009.


    The CTBT is central to leading nuclear weapons states toward a world of diminished reliance on nuclear weapons and reduced nuclear competition. With a global ban on nuclear explosive tests in place, states interested in pursuing or advancing their nuclear weapons programs would have to either risk deploying weapons uncertain of their effectiveness or face international condemnation, and possible sanctions, for conducting nuclear explosive tests.


    A CTBT that has entered into force would benefit national and international security and facilitate greater international cooperation on other arms control and nonproliferation priorities. The United States has observed a moratorium on nuclear explosive testing since 1992 and our policies are already consistent with the central prohibition of the treaty.


    It has been 12 years since our Senate failed to give its advice and consent to the ratification of the CTBT. Lack of support stemmed from two concerns: the verifiability of the Treaty and the continuing safety and reliability of America’s nuclear deterrent without nuclear explosive testing.


    Today, there have been dramatic developments on both fronts and we have a much stronger case to make in support of ratification.


    The Treaty’s verification regime has grown exponentially over the last decade. Today, the International Monitoring System (IMS) is roughly 85 percent complete and when fully completed, there will be IMS facilities in 89 countries spanning the globe. At entry into force, the full body of technical data gathered via the International Monitoring System will be available to all States Parties. In addition, with the recent Fukushima nuclear crisis, we have already seen dramatic proof of the utility of the IMS for non-verification related purposes, such as tsunami warnings and tracking radioactivity from reactor accidents.


    We have continued to provide the full costs of operating, maintaining and sustaining 34 certified IMS stations among those assigned by the Treaty to the United States. We announced last month a voluntary in-kind contribution of $8.9 million to support projects that will accelerate development of the CTBT verification regime. This month, we concluded a Memorandum of Understanding with the Provisional Technical Secretariat to contribute up to $25.5 million to underwrite the rebuilding of the hydroacoustic monitoring station on Crozet Island in the southern Indian Ocean.


    Together, U.S. extra-budgetary contributions to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization this year total $34.4 million, more than our annual assessed contribution. Given the tough budget climate in Washington and other capitals, those contributions clearly demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the treaty and the vital importance the United States attaches to completing the verification regime.


    With regard to our nuclear deterrent, our extensive surveillance methods and computational modeling developed under the Stockpile Stewardship Program over the last 15 years have allowed our nuclear experts to understand how these weapons work and the effects of aging even better than when nuclear explosive testing was conducted. The United States can maintain a safe and effective nuclear deterrent without conducting nuclear explosive tests.


    With these advancements in verification and stockpile stewardship in mind, we have begun the process of engaging the Senate. We like to think of our efforts as an “information exchange” and are working to get these facts out to members and staff, many of whom have never dealt with this Treaty. We know that this is a very technical agreement and we want people to absorb and understand the science behind it. There are no set timeframes and we are going to be patient, but we will also have to be persistent.


    Of course, we do not expect people to be in receive-only mode, so we are eager to start a discussion. It is only through discussion and debate that we will work through questions and concerns about the Treaty and eventually get it ratified.


    Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentleman, the United States is committed to the CTBT and we intend to see it enter into force, but we cannot do it alone. As we move forward with our process, we call on all governments to declare or reaffirm their commitment not to test. Congratulations to Guinea for becoming the 155th nation to ratify the CTBT just days ago. Also, congratulations to Ghana, Central African Republic, Liberia, Trinidad and Tobago, the Marshall Islands and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, all of whom have ratified the Treaty since our last conference. Your example adds important momentum to achieving the goal of ending nuclear explosive testing forever. We call on the remaining Annex 2 States to join us in moving forward toward ratification.


    We do not expect that the path remaining to entry into force will be traveled quickly or easily. For our part, we will need the support of the Senate and the American people in order to move ahead, but move ahead we will, because we know that the CTBT will benefit the security of the United States and that of the world.


    Thank you.

  • US Cancels Nuclear-Capable Missile Test on International Day of Peace

    David KriegerThe US Air Force is standing down its plan to launch a nuclear-capable missile on the United Nations International Day of Peace.  It’s a very small step, but it is a step in the right direction.  It’s possible that the Air Force planners didn’t know about the International Day of Peace or even that there is such a day.  There is such a day, though, and it is observed annually by the countries of the world on September 21st.


    When the Air Force announced that it had scheduled a test of a nuclear-capable Minuteman III inter-continental ballistic missile for September 21st, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation notified its Action Alert Network.  Members of this Network sent over 7,000 messages to President Obama calling for cancellation of the offending missile test, and for the president to act in taking US nuclear weapons off high-alert status. 


    Perhaps those thousands of messages awakened someone to the inappropriateness of demonstrating a nuclear show of force on the International Day of Peace.  But perhaps not.  In announcing the cancellation of the missile test, a spokesperson said it was being postponed in order to complete “post test analysis” of another Minuteman III test that failed on July 27th.  It makes sense to study previous failures, but one wonders why the Air Force would announce a test shortly after a failure, and then use the failure as the reason to cancel the new test.


    At any rate, the US has precluded one serious mistake, that is, to have thumbed its nose at the world community by performing a nuclear-capable missile test on the International Day of Peace.  Regardless of its public justification for standing down its missile test, it was the right decision to cancel it. 


    The International Day of Peace will now be a slightly more peaceful day.  But the fact remains that the United States and Russia each maintain some 1,000 nuclear weapons on high-alert status, a Cold War posture that has no place in the 21st century.  President Obama could take a meaningful step toward his stated goal of a world free of nuclear weapons by taking all US nuclear weapons off high-alert status.  This would be showing real leadership, the kind of leadership hoped for from the United States.


    The United Nations General Assembly called in its Resolution 55/282 in 2001 for the International Day of Peace to “be observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence….”  It would be a major step for the United States to actually observe the International Day of Peace by observing a ceasefire in its current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and its hostilities in various other countries.  That would send a message to the world that the US is ready to begin leading an international effort for peace, rather than being so quick, determined and persistent in seeking to settle disputes with its powerful military forces. 

  • International Day Against Nuclear Tests: Translating Words Into Actions

    Tom CollinaOn behalf of ACA, I would like to thank the organizers of this meeting—the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Mission of Kazakhstan to the International Organizations in Geneva—for inviting me here today to speak.


    It is particularly fitting for Kazakhstan to be represented here, as it was twenty years ago—in 1991– that the people of Kazakhstan succeeded in closing the former Soviet test site at Semipalatinsk. This was followed by Soviet President Gorbachev’s declaration of a moratorium on nuclear testing, and then the United States announced its moratorium in 1992. The CTBT was then negotiated and signed in 1996.


    So in many ways it all began with Kazakhstan, and we owe them many thanks.


    But of course, 15 years later our work is not done, and I am glad we have such things as “international days against nuclear tests” to remind us that we must still bring the CTBT into force.


    Some might ask, why is the CTBT still important? Because the test ban is a crucial barrier to the spread of nuclear weapons to additional nations AND to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorist groups.


    Indeed, the treaty is more important today than ever.


    By banning all nuclear tests, the CTBT prevents the established nuclear-weapon states from proof-testing new, more sophisticated warhead designs. And newer members of the nuclear club would not be able to perfect smaller, more easily deliverable warheads without testing.


    The treaty also serves to reinforce the nonproliferation system by serving as a confidence-building measure about a state’s nuclear intentions, and it can help head-off and de-escalate regional tensions.


    For these and other reasons, CTBT entry into force has long been considered a key part of fulfilling Article VI of the NPT.


    With the CTBT in force, capabilities to detect and deter possible clandestine nuclear testing by other states will be significantly greater. Entry-into-force is essential to making short-notice, on-site inspections possible and for maintaining long-term political and financial support for the monitoring system.


    How can we Accelerate Entry Into Force?


    Now, 182 states have signed the CTBT, an impressive number, but the treaty must still be ratified by nine states before it can formally enter into force —the United States, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, Indonesia, Egypt, and North Korea.


    In three weeks, states parties will gather in New York to speak about the value of the treaty and the need for prompt entry into force. We appreciate this effort, but actions speak louder than words. That conference must help produce a serious diplomatic action plan for getting the remaining hold out states on board.


    Ratification by the United States and China is particularly important. Given their existing nuclear test moratoria and treaty signatures, Washington and Beijing already bear most CTBT-related responsibilities, yet their failure to ratify has denied them—and others—the full security benefits of the treaty.


    In April 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to “immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of” the CTBT. He said, “After more than five decades of talks, it is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned.” We agree.


    But now, President Obama must translate those words into action and mount a serious public campaign to win the support of two-thirds of the U.S. Senate for ratification of the treaty.


    With the support of a wide array of NGOs in the United States and around the globe, the Obama administration can and must make the case that the Treaty enhances international security, is effectively verifiable, and is essential to curb the spread of nuclear weapons in the decades to come.


    The technical and political case for the CTBT is much stronger today than it was in 1999 when the Senate briefly considered the treaty. The Senate must honestly review the new evidence for the treaty rather than arrive at judgments based on old information.


    It is also time for China’s leaders to act. For years, Beijing has reported that the CTBT is before the National People’s Congress but has apparently taken no action on ratification. We note the January 19, 2011 Joint Statement by Presidents Hu Jintao and Obama stating that “… both sides support early entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.”


    Washington’s renewed pursuit of CTBT ratification opens up opportunities for China and other Annex 2 states—such as Indonesia—to lead the way toward entry into force by ratifying before the United States. Action by Beijing would increase its credibility as a nonproliferation leader and improve the chances that other states would follow suit.


    India and Pakistan could advance the cause of nuclear disarmament and substantially ease regional tensions by converting their unilateral test moratoria into a legally binding commitment to end nuclear testing through the CTBT.


    With no shortage of conflict in the Middle East, ratification by Israel, Egypt and Iran would reduce nuclear-weapons-related security concerns in the region. It would also help create the conditions necessary for a regional zone free of weapons of mass destruction.


    Likewise, if Israel were to ratify, it would get closer to the nuclear nonproliferation mainstream and help encourage other states in the region to follow suit.


    Iranian ratification could help reduce concerns that its nuclear program would be used to develop smaller, deliverable nuclear warheads. Iran’s failure to ratify the CTBT raises further questions about the nature of its nuclear activities.


    North Korea’s nuclear tests undermine Asian security. The DPRK should declare a halt to further testing pending the resumption of the Six-Party talks. The participants in those talks should make North Korea’s approval of the CTBT one of the key steps in the process.


    In closing, we sincerely urge all states that have not done so to ratify the CTBT. To those that have ratified, we thank you and ask you to contribute to the Article XIV Conference on Entry Into Force in September.


    ACA and supporters of the CTBT the world over stand ready to help bring the treaty into force.


    Thank you.

  • Radiation, Japan and the Marshall Islands

    This article was originally published by CounterPunch.


    When the dangerous dust and gases settle and we discover just how much radiation escaped the damaged Fukushima reactors and spent fuel rods, we may never know how many people are being exposed to radiation from the burning fuel rods and reactor cores, and how much exposure they will receive over time. Minute and above-background traces of Iodine-131 are already showing up in Tokyo’s water supply – 150 miles southwest of the leaking reactors – and in milk and spinach [with a dash of Cesium-137] from 75 miles away. The Japanese government has recently warned pregnant women and children to avoid drinking Tokyo tap water, and I-131 levels 1,200 times above background levels were recorded in seawater near the reactors.


    Aside from sharing the dubious distinction of both nations having been at the receiving end of America’s nuclear weapons, Japan and the Marshall Islands now share another dubious distinction. The unleashed isotopes of concern from the damaged Japanese reactors – Iodine-131, Cesium-137, Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239 – are well known to the Marshall Islanders living downwind of the testing sites at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the central Pacific, following sixty-seven A- and H-bombs exploded between 1946-58. In fact, it is precisely these isotopes that continue to haunt the 80,000 Marshallese fifty-three years after the last thermonuclear test in the megaton range shook their pristine coral atolls and contaminated their fragile marine ecosystems.


    In fact, it was the irradiated downwind Marshallese on Rongelap and Utrik in 1954 caught in the Bravo fallout – and I-131 – that taught the world about the thyroid effect from the uptake of radioactive iodine.


    The U.S.’ largest [fusion] hydrogen bomb – Bravo – was 1,000 times the Hiroshima atomic [fission] bomb, and deposited a liberal sprinkling of these and a potent potpourri of 300 other radionuclides over a wide swath of the Central Pacific and the inhabited atolls in the Marshalls archipelago in March 1954 during “Operation Castle.”


    The Rongelap islanders 120 miles downwind from Bikini received 190 rems [1.9 Sv] of whole-body gamma dose before being evacuated. The Utrik people 320 miles downwind received 15 rems [150 mSv] before their evacuation. Many of the on-site nuclear workers at Fukushima have already exceeded the Utrik dose in multiples.


    Also entrapped within the thermonuclear maelstrom from Bravo was the not-so-Lucky Dragon [Fukuryu Maru] Japanese fishing trawler with its crew of twenty-three fishing for tuna near Bikini [see The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon by Ralph Lapp]. As the heavily exposed fishermen’s health quickly deteriorated after Bravo, the radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died of a liver illness six months after his exposure; his is now a household name in Japan and is associated with the “Bikini bomb.”


    Meanwhile, the Japanese fishing industry was rocked when Geiger counters registered “talking fish” [what the Japanese called the clicking sound of the contaminated fish being monitored] from the 800 pounds of tuna catch of the Lucky Dragon in Yaizu and in local fish markets. Much of the Japanese tuna at the time was caught by a fleet of 1,000 fishing boats operating in the fertile tuna waters near the U.S.’ Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshalls.


    In response to the plight and symbolism of the Lucky Dragon, Japanese women collected 34 million signatures on petitions advocating the immediate abolition of both atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1955. Pugwash, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-nuclear organization was founded in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in response to Bravo. The dangers of radioactive fallout from Bravo inspired Nevil Shute’s classic nuclear dystopia On the Beach, as well as Godzilla.


    To quell the diplomatic furor – whereby the Japanese representative to the U.N. accused the U.S. in March 1954 of “once again using nuclear weapons against the Japanese people” – the U.S. paid two million dollars to the fishing company which owned the Lucky Dragon; each of the 23 fishermen ended up with the princely sum of $5,000 in 1956 and the tuna company kept the rest.


    AEC chair Lewis Strauss (who originally proposed nuclear energy “too cheap to meter” in the post-War Atoms for Peace program) told President Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty in April 1954 that the Lucky Dragon was not a fishing boat at all – it was a “Red spy outfit” snooping on the American nuclear tests.


    The legacy of latent radiogenic diseases from hydrogen bomb testing in the Marshall Islands provides some clues about what ill-health mysteries await the affected Japanese in the decades ahead. Also, the Marshall Islands provide insight about ecosystem contamination of these dangerous radioactive isotopes, and what this means for the affected Japanese.


    Profiles of the four isotopes


    o Iodine-131 [radioactive iodine] has a half life of eight days, and concentrates in the thyroid gland about 5,000 times more efficiently than other parts of the body. Traces of I-131 have been discovered in Tokyo drinking water and in seawater offshore from the reactors. It took nine years for the first thyroid tumor to appear among the exposed Marshallese and hypothyroidism and cancer continued to appear decades later.


    o Cesium-137 has a half life of thirty years and is a chemical analog of potassium; Cs-137 concentrates in muscle and other parts of the body. Rongelap Island has a new layer of topsoil containing potassium to help neutralize the Cs-137 left over from the H-bomb tests, but the Marshallese residents remain unconvinced and suspicious about the habitability of their long abandoned home atoll. Meanwhile, the U.S. is pressuring hard for their repatriation despite the fact that most islands at Rongelap will remain off limits for many decades with strict dietary restrictions of local foods.


    o Strontium-90 has a half life of twenty-eight years, is a chemical analog of calcium and is known as a “bone seeker.” Rongelap and the other downwind atolls have residual Sr-90 in their soils, groundwater and marine ecosystems.


    o Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,000 years, is considered one of the most toxic substances on Earth, and if absorbed is a potent alpha emitter that can induce cancer. This isotope too is found in the soils and groundwater of the downwind atolls from the Bikini and Enewetak H-bomb tests.


    Lessons from the Marshall Islands


    * It took nine years after exposure to the 1954 Bravo fallout for the first thyroid tumor and hypothyroidism to occur in an exposed Utrik woman from the I-131. Several more tumors [and other radiogenic disorders] among the exposed people appeared the following year and every year thereafter. The latency period for thyroid abnormalities and other radiogenic disorders [see below] endures for several decades.


    * Because a child’s thyroid gland is much smaller than an adult’s thyroid, it receives a higher concentration of I-131 than an adult dose. Also, because a child’s thyroid gland is growing more quickly than an adult’s, it requires and absorbs more iodine [and I-131] than an adult thyroid gland. That is, the thyroid effect is age-related.


    * Radioactive Iodine-129 with a half-life of 15 million years and a well-documented capacity to bioaccumulate in the foodchain, will also remain as a persistent problem for the affected Japanese.


    * The Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established in 1988 to settle all past and future claims against the U.S. for health injury and property loss damages from the nuclear tests. As of 2006, the NCT had paid out $73 million [of the $91 million awarded] for 1,999 Marshallese claimants. There are thirty-six medical conditions that are presumed to be caused by the nuclear tests [http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com]. Eligibility for Marshallese citizens consists of having been in the Marshall Islands during the testing period [1946-58] and having at least one of the presumptive medical disorders.


    * The sociocultural and psychological effects [e.g., PTSD] of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be long-lasting, given the uncertainty surrounding the contamination of their prefecture and beyond. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton eloquently detailed this uncertain future and fears about “invisible contamination” concerning the Hiroshima and Nagasaki “hibakusha” [“A-bomb survivors”] in his award-winning 1968 magnum opus Death in Life.


    * Noted radiation experts John Gofman [co-discoverer of U-232 and U-233 and author of Radiation and Human Health], Karl Z. Morgan [a founder of health physics] and Edward Radford [Chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR III committee and advisor to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal] stated that there is no threshold dose for low level ionizing radiation:


        Any amount of ionizing radiation – which is cumulative – can pose a health threat for certain individuals, and especially those with compromised immune systems.

  • New Momentum for Nuclear Abolition: Opportunities and Obstacles

    On this tenth anniversary of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, launched in the wake of India’s nuclear tests and Pakistan’s entry into the nuclear club as well, the world is facing ever new dangers in the nuclear age, even as these growing perils spark burgeoning new demands for nuclear disarmament across the globe. Perhaps the most unexpected call, which kicked off much of the current avalanche of new campaigns, initiatives, and projects for nuclear abolition, was an article in the Wall Street Journal, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” in January 2007, when four rusty cold warriors, led by Henry Kissinger together with Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Schultz warned of the dangers of terrorism and nuclear proliferation and called for nuclear disarmament.


    Their article inspired a whole series of statements around the world by former military and government officials, echoing their call for a nuclear weapons free world, essentially providing  the political cover for President Obama’s Prague speech in April, 2009, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. Obama pledged “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”– although adding that it might not be reached “in my lifetime.” His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton subsequently misquoted him, noting that “the President has acknowledged we might not achieve the ambition of a world without nuclear weapons in our lifetime or successive lifetimes.” And then Clinton pushed the ball even further down the road, speaking about the new START Treaty with Russia, foreseeing “a goal of a world someday, in some century, free of nuclear weapons.”


    After the initial statement of Kissinger and company, the group was tagged by various journalists and pundits as “the four horsemen”, perhaps ironically unaware that the biblical reference in the New Testament to the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is to a quartet of mythical marauders representing evil, war, famine and death.  The following year, in 2009, the world welcomed a Five Point Action Plan for Nuclear Disarmament urged by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon   which included the goal of a Nuclear Weapons Convention or framework of agreements to eliminate nuclear weapons.


    Ban Ki-moon’s proposal validated at last the largely unheralded efforts of civil society, which immediately after forming the Abolition 2000 Network at the 1995 Non-proliferation Treaty Review and Extension conference (NPT), extending the 25 year old  NPT’s expiration date indefinitely,  called for negotiations on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The Network’s Working Group of lawyers, scientists, and policymakers drafted a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, submitted by Costa Rica to the UN as an official document. As the millennium approached, Abolition 2000 then enrolled over 2000 members in 95 countries and kept its name, despite the failure of negotiations to materialize. Fifteen years later, the nuclear weapons convention is an idea whose time has come, with calls for negotiations arising from every part of the globe.


    The Kissinger crew noted the growing power of campaigns and initiatives including grassroots pressure on America’s NATO allies, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway for NATO to remove U.S nuclear weapons now stationed in Europe under NATO’s “nuclear sharing” policy, calls to revive the Rajiv Gandhi Plan for Nuclear Disarmament, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Global Zero, the expanding Parliamentary Network for Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Disarmament, the Mayors for Peace approaching  5,000 member cities, together with leaders around the world clamoring for negotiations to begin on a treaty to ban the bomb.  They issued a second statement one year later in 2008, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World” .  Clearly walking back from their earlier call, they warned of a “nuclear tipping point” demanding better measures to prevent nuclear terrorism and more secure controls on nuclear material and the nuclear fuel cycle, while bemoaning the fact that:
    In some respects, the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain. From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can’t get there from here. But the risks from continuing to go down the mountain or standing pat are too real to ignore. We must chart a course to higher ground where the mountaintop becomes more visible.


    Of course, Civil Society had no difficulty seeing the top of the mountain and was proposing to reach it by urging that negotiations begin on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, just as the world had done for chemical and biological weapons, and landmines and cluster bombs as well.  It wasn’t as if the world had never banned a class of weapons before. With a third article this year by Kissinger and his colleagues, their lack of good faith is apparent. Titled “How to Protect Our Nuclear Deterrent”, they emphasize the importance of maintaining the credibility of the US nuclear deterrent by supporting  the Congressional drive to undercut, with a multi-billion dollar modernization program for the nuclear weaponeers, the modest START treaty  negotiated by Obama and Medvedev. 


    The treaty would cut deployed weapons in their massive arsenals of about 23,000 nuclear bombs, from 2,200 each to between 1,500 and 1,675. There are 1,000 nuclear bombs, in total, in the remaining nuclear countries—UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. START would also cut strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles from 1,600 each to 800. US mid-term elections with Republican control of the Congress and a diminished Democratic Senate majority,  may scuttle START’s ratification, leaving both countries without the ability to resume mutual inspections and verification of their nuclear activity which ended when the old START treaty expired in December 2009. Disturbingly, the international committee of the Russian Duma has rescinded its recommendation that Russia ratify START, pending US action, in light of the disappointing US elections results and the steep price tag the Republicans have attached to buy their votes for ratification.


    Since Russia and the US still have more than 10,000 weapons, START is only a modest step forward but one that is essential to demonstrate US and Russia willingness to tackle the unconscionable numbers of bombs in their arsenals. It was a difficult negotiation, hedged with caveats on missile defenses. The Russians are alarmed at US efforts to surround Russia with a ring of missile ”defenses”, seeking to site missile and radar bases in Poland, the Czech Republic, Rumania, Bulgaria and Ukraine, right up to the Russian border. Indeed, these START negotiations echoed the tragic lost opportunity at the Reagan-Gorbachev 1986 Reykjavik summit when negotiations for the total abolition of nuclear weapons collapsed because Reagan wouldn’t give up plans for a Strategic Defense Initiative to dominate space.


    Obama submitted START to the Senate for ratification attached to a Faustian bargain with the military-industrial-scientific-congressional complex for an additional $80 billion in new nuclear weapons testing and modernization and funding for a plutonium- pit bomb factory at Los Alamos, a uranium processing plant at Oak Ridge, and a new manufacturing facility for non-nuclear bomb parts in Kansas City—spreading the evil largesse across the whole continent– as well as an additional $100 billion for delivery systems—planes, submarines and missiles for launching nuclear bombs by air, sea and land.


    Obama also assured Congress that nothing in the START treaty would preclude the US from developing offensive missile “defenses” and its planned “prompt global strike” weapons systems,  an integral part of US plans to dominate and control the military use of space.  In October, the US and Israel were the only countries to abstain on a UN Resolution against the weaponization of space. This was actually an improvement in the US position since up to now it was the only country to vote NO on the resolution. The US has consistently blocked consensus on voting for negotiations on a draft treaty, submitted to the UN by Russia and China, to ban weapons in space.


    While the U.S. and its allies have been excoriating Pakistan for blocking consensus on proposed negotiations to cut off the production of fissile materials for “weapons purposes”, no countries are holding the U.S. to account for blocking consensus on keeping weapons out of space.  Pakistan is still playing catch up to produce nuclear materials while the other nuclear powers all have excess tons of highly enriched uranium(HEU) and plutonium(PU) from both military and civilian production. There are about 1600 tons of HEU and 500 tons of PU on our planet, enough to produce more than 120,000 nuclear weapons!


    Enacting the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty now, without moving rapidly on nuclear disarmament as well, would give an advantage to older more technologically advanced nuclear weapons states which already have excessive surpluses of bomb making materials.  And it is also an exercise in futility. By calling for the cut- off of fissile materials production only for “weapons purposes” without cutting off the production of materials such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium for so called “peaceful purposes”, the treaty would be no more than a leaking sieve as hundreds of tons of bomb-making material would continually be churned out in civilian reactors in more than 40 countries around the world.


    India was well aware of discriminatory nuclear legislation when it refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 because the treaty provided that five existing nuclear weapons states, the US, UK, Russia, France and China, need only negotiate in “good faith” for nuclear disarmament while all the other countries of the world had to promise not to acquire nuclear weapons.  India proposed unsuccessfully that a nuclear abolition treaty for all nations be negotiated and then went on to develop its own nuclear capabilities, acquiring the bomb in 1974. In 1988 Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi proposed “An Action Plan for Ushering In a Nuclear-Weapon Free and Non-Violent World Order” which was totally ignored by the U.S although Russia expressed some interest in the plan.


    Every year since 1996, the UN General Assembly votes on a resolution to commence negotiations leading to the conclusion of a Nuclear Weapons Convention based on the 1996 decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control”. At the 2010 NPT Review Conference, a host of countries spoke in support of negotiating a Nuclear Weapons Convention and proposed a meeting in 2014 to discuss the path forward. Although the meeting proposal was blocked in the final document, the nuclear weapons states for the first time agreed to include a reference to negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention although the language was watered down considerably from the first draft.  Significantly, a unique provision in the outcome document affirmed, for the first time, the need for all States to comply with International Humanitarian Law under which the ICJ held that nuclear weapons are generally illegal. This provides new possibilities for action by non-nuclear weapons states to shift from the usual “step by step” approach of arms control to legislating an outright prohibition of nuclear weapons as illegal under international law, as was done with landmines and cluster bombs.


    There were 140 nations who made statements supporting negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention at the NPT Review, including one nuclear weapons state —China.   And when the annual resolution came to a vote in the UN First Committee of the General Assembly this fall, three nuclear weapons states, China, India, and Pakistan supported the call for negotiations.   Once again, the U.S. attempted to put the brakes on when Rose Gotmoeller, US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control Verification and Compliance, in remarks at the UN, belittled the prospects for a nuclear weapons treaty urging “a pragmatic step-by-step approach rather than the impractical leap of seeking to negotiate a nuclear weapons convention or the pointless calls for convening a fourth special session of the General Assembly devoted to disarmament, for which there is no international consensus.”


    In October, 2010, Obama test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile 5,000 miles away from California to Guam and conducted the first “sub-critical” nuclear test since 2006, 1,000 feet below the desert floor, exploding plutonium with chemicals, without creating a chain-reaction. This was the 24th test in a program started by Clinton who tried to buy the support of the military-industrial-scientific–congressional complex for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which they later reneged on anyway. There were seven billion dollars a year for computer-simulated nuclear tests coupled with sub-critical tests and new laboratory infrastructure, which the Doctor Strangeloves contended were essential to maintain the “safety and reliability” of the arsenal.  Which brings us back full circle to the justification Obama claims for his pay-off to Congress to get START ratified.  Furthermore, the UK and France, emulating the worst in US policy, have just announced a “cost saving” plan to combine efforts and build a brand new joint  nuclear weapons laboratory in France, to test– surprise, surprise– the “safety and reliability” of their arsenals.


    Small wonder that a new statement in October 2010 by a Russian quartet of military and government officials, led by Yevgeny Primakov, asserted that many countries, including “a widespread belief in Russia” believe that their “nuclear potential is a key element of great power status.” Asserting that nuclear disarmament requires “greater confidence among nations, along with greater international security and stability” and referring to inequalities in “armaments, anti-ballistic missile defense, conventional weapons, strategic non-nuclear weapons as well as space militarization plans”, they conclude that to achieve nuclear disarmament “we must reorganize international life on more civilized principles and according to the demands of a new century.”
    President Obama, in his Prague speech, characterized nuclear terrorism as “the greatest danger we face”. Yet Nobel economist Thomas Schelling, who applies game theory to the study of conflict and cooperation  recently described the exceedingly low probability of terrorists ever getting their hands on enough illicit nuclear material to build a bomb. Far more dangerous and terrifying is the more than 3500 nuclear bombs, mounted on missiles and ready to fire within minutes which the US and Russia still aim at each other. Just this year we had reports of computer failures in the US that put 50 nuclear weapons out of commission, a UK Trident nuclear submarine running aground in the mud off the coast of Scotland, and six nuclear bombs mistakenly flown without knowledge of the commanders across the country from North Dakota to Louisiana. A US Defense Department report noted that between 1950 and 1980 there were 32 airplane crashes with nuclear bombs aboard, Luckily none of them ever exploded, although two of them, in Palomares, Spain and Thule, Greenland, spewed plutonium on the ground which had to be cordoned off and contained. Not to mention the incredibly close call when a Norwegian weather satellite went off course in 1983  and was interpreted by the Russians as a possible nuclear attack which a wise commander, Stanislav Petrov, on duty in the nuclear bunker, decided heroically, against orders, and to the great good fortune of the world, to disregard.
    Furthermore, we are creating much greater danger in our efforts to secure and lock down radioactive bomb material.  Rather than containing the toxic poisons in sturdy, above-ground concrete casks, which last for hundreds of years, under guns, gates and guards, we are actually transporting our lethal legacy through populated areas over roads, rail and seas, from the four corners of the earth back to reprocessing facilities. The US and Russia are using the highly enriched uranium they transport, for example, which was spread around to 28 countries during the atoms for peace program for research reactors, in reprocessing facilities where they are blended down for fuel for so called “peaceful nuclear power plants” now in the planning stages for exponential growth in a “nuclear renaissance” around the planet, about to spread their radioactive poisons into the air, water, and soil, while giving ever more nations the reactor- generated capacity to make nuclear bomb material.  
    Even if these materials are never used in a nuclear bomb, they are already causing death, destruction and illness in the communities where the uranium is mined, milled, processed and in the environs surrounding nuclear power plants. A German study found an increased incidence of childhood cancer and leukemias in communities with nuclear reactors. A recent study by Russian scientists published by the New York Academy of Medicine found nearly one million people died from the 1986 Chernobyl accident,  contrary to corrupted reports from the World Health Organization which has a collusive agreement with the nuclear-industry dominated International Atomic Energy Agency to submit its health findings on radiation issues to the IAEA before they can be made public. The two agencies habitually underreport the true extent of the carnage caused by this lethal technology.


    Moreover, while the Non-Proliferation Treaty guarantees every member the right to the “peaceful” use of nuclear technology, the US and its allies are picking which countries can exercise that right—it’s OK for Japan, but not for Iran. In the past few years, there has been an explosion of planned  nuclear power plants in many new countries, including Egypt, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Turkey, Indonesia, Vienam Algeria, Burma, and others who want to get in under the wire before the nuclear “haves” preclude them from freely accessing the whole panoply of technology for the nuclear fuel cycle.  Indeed the US just made a deal with the United Arab Emirates that they would not enrich uranium in return for US technical assistance on civilian nuclear power, but Jordan is balking at making the same agreement. This is a recipe for chaos. The top of the mountain beckons.  It’s time for a moratorium on any further development of nuclear weapons or nuclear power. The sun, wind, tides, and geothermal heat can readily supply humanity with all its energy needs. In the words of the visionary thinker and architect, Buckminster Fuller:


    We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire’s level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet’s daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.


    Building on the burgeoning support for a nuclear weapons convention, civil society, together with parliamentarians and Mayors are exploring possibilities for various governments to put together a like-minded group of governments to  begin an “Ottawa” or “Oslo” process, the way the world was able to ban landmines and cluster bombs. Blocked by consensus rules at the UN, the governments of Canada in the case of landmines, and Norway in the case of cluster bombs, joined in partnership with civil society and like-minded governments to negotiate those landmark treaties. Eventually many of the hold-out countries signed on.


    Who will take the lead for organizing the talks for a nuclear weapons convention? Over one hundred nations spoke in favor of the nuclear weapons convention at the NPT. And there are three nuclear weapons powers, China, India, and Pakistan on the record in support of those negotiations in a UN Resolution. Perhaps in the 21st century, it is time for Asia to take the lead. If a country like Norway, or Switzerland or Austria, which have spoken in favor of negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention, were to host such a conference, having the three Asian powers in attendance would send a powerful signal to the world that the time has come to ban the bomb. Certainly India, with the Rajiv Gandhi plan has already given much thought to this critical dilemma.  


    Even if the other nuclear weapons states were to sit out the negotiations, eventually world opinion would catch up with them and they would have to join in. In the meantime, the steps for moving forward, for dismantlement, verification, monitoring, inspection, handling of nuclear materials, insurance against breakout, additional research, and administration of the treaty could be discussed and debated. Much of this has already been proposed in the Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, which can be reviewed, together with commentary on its various provisions, at http://www.icanw.org/securing-our-survival  NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION!


    After 65 years it’s time to retire the bomb.

  • The Legacy of Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands

    This article was originally published on Common Dreams.

    The radiological legacy of U.S. nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands remains to this day and will persist for many years to come. The most severe impacts were visited upon the people of the Rongelap Atoll in 1954 following a very large thermonuclear explosion which deposited life-threatening quantities of radioactive fallout on their homeland. They received more than three times the estimated external dose than to the most heavily exposed people living near the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986. It took more than two days before the Rongelap people were evacuated after the explosion. Many suffered from tissue destructive effects, such as burns, and subsequently from latent radiation-induced diseases.

    In 1957, they were returned to their homeland even though officials and scientists working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) determined that radiation doses would significantly exceed those allowed for citizens of the United States. The desire to study humans living in a radiation-contaminated environment appeared to be a major element of this decision. A scientist in a previously secret transcript of a meeting where they decided to return the Rongelap people to their atoll stated an island contaminated by the 1954 H-Bomb tests was “by far the most contaminated place in the world.” He further concluded that,

        “It would be very interesting to go back and get good environmental data… so as to get a measure of the human uptake, when people live in a contaminated environment…Now, data of this type has never been available. …While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”

    By 1985, the people of Rongelap fled their atoll, after determining that the levels of contamination were comparable to the Bikini atoll where numerous nuclear devices were detonated. The Bikini people were re-settled in 1969 but had to evacuate their homes in1978 after radiation exposures were found to be excessive. The Rongelap people fled for good reason. In 1982, a policy was secretly established by the energy department during the closing phase of negotiations between the United States and the nascent Republic of the Marshall Islands over the Compact of Free Association to eliminate radiation protection standards, so as to not interfere with the potential resumption of weapons testing. This resulted in a sudden and alarming increase in radiation doses to the Rongelap people eating local food.

    These circumstances were subsequently uncovered in 1991 by the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. As a result, the U.S. Congress terminated DOE’s nuclear test readiness program in the Pacific and in 1992 the U.S. Departments of Energy and Interior entered into an agreement with the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Local Rongelap Government that re-established radiation protection standards as a major element for the re-settlement of Rongelap.

    Apparently, this was not done for the southern islands of the atoll where local food is obtained. Despite the long and unfortunate aftermath of nuclear testing in the Marshalls, it appears that this critical element of safety was lost in the shuffle.

    As it now stands, if forced to return to their homeland the Rongelap people could receive radiation doses about 10 times greater than allowed for the public in the United States.

    Until the U. S. Government can assure that steps to mitigate doses to the same levels that are protective of American people are demonstrated, efforts to force the Rongelap people back to the home by Members of the U.S. Congress and the Obama Administration is unjustified and unfairly places the burden of protection on the Rongelap people. It appears that DOE and Interior have quietly crept away from the 1992 agreement, without verifying that its terms and conditions to allow for safe habitability will be met.

    Over the past 20 years, the U.S. Congress has enacted legislation to compensate to residents living near DOE’s Nevada Test Site uranium miners, nuclear weapons workers, and military personnel for radiation-related illnesses. These laws provide for a greater benefit of the doubt than for the people of the Marshall Islands where 66 nuclear weapons were exploded in the open air. In 2005, the National Cancer Institute reported that the risk of contracting cancer for those exposed to fallout was greater than one in three.

    The people of the Marshall Islands had their homeland and health sacrificed for the national security interests of the United States. The Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress should promptly correct this injustice.

  • The Hawkish Case for Nuclear Disarmament

    This article was originally published by the Los Angeles Times

    Last week, peace activists around the world commemorated the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, arguing that nuclear weapons should be abolished so that such destruction will never be repeated. Their call for peace through disarmament has traditionally been a rallying cry of the left. In fact, the peace sign, that ultimate icon of 1960s war protests, is actually a rendering of the semaphoric symbols for the letters “N” and “D”: “Nuclear Disarmament.”
    Conservatives, by contrast, have put their faith in “peace through strength,” an ancient notion made fresh during the Cold War by Ronald Reagan. Which is why, in April, when President Obama outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons, the right reacted with incredulity, as if he had suggested pacifying the Taliban with a group hug. Newt Gingrich, for one, called the president’s disarmament speech a “fantasy.”
    As the president moves to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal in concert with Russia’s and implement new arms control measures, the allegedly foolish goal of disarmament has become an obvious target for hawks hoping to undermine the president’s agenda. But if the abolition of nuclear weapons is a fantasy, it’s one that ought to excite the country’s hawks as much as its doves.
    Traditionally, military power was measured in relative, not absolute, terms, meaning that your security was a function not of how many weapons you had, but of how many more you had than your enemy. The advent of nuclear weapons skewed that calculation. Because it would take only a few nuclear weapons to destroy a civilization, the atomic bomb became an equalizer for Davids confronting Goliath-sized enemies.
    During the Cold War, one could argue that that dynamic helped the U.S. because Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered NATO’s. But today, with the specter of rogue-state nuclear programs, it’s more likely that we are the ones who would be deterred. For example, would we have waged Operation Desert Storm (let alone Operation Iraqi Freedom) if Saddam Hussein had been able to strike New York or Washington with a nuclear weapon? Probably not. Our half-trillion-dollar-a-year military can, in essence, be defanged by any dictator with a handful of A-bombs.
    That is a remarkable waste of America’s incredible conventional superiority. Our fleet of stealth fighters and bombers can establish air dominance in virtually any scenario, allowing us to obliterate an adversary’s military infrastructure at will. At sea, our fleet is larger than the next 17 navies combined and includes 11 carrier battle groups that can project power around the globe. (By contrast, few of our potential adversaries field even a single carrier.) All in all, the U.S. accounts for just shy of half the world’s defense spending, more than the next 45 nations combined. That’s six times more than China, 10 times more than Russia and nearly 100 times more than Iran.

    Yet despite potential flash points with nations such as Russia (over Georgia) or China (over Taiwan), it would be lunacy to engage in combat with either because of the risk of escalation to a nuclear conflict. Abolishing nuclear weapons would obviously not make conflict with those states a good idea, but it would dramatically increase American freedom of action in a crisis. That should make hawks, with their strong faith in the efficacy of American military power, very happy. Indeed, if anyone opposes disarmament, it should be our rivals.
    American conservatives cling to our arsenal as though it gives us great sway over foreign countries. Yet when our conventional power has proved insufficient, nukes have done little to augment our influence abroad.
    In the early years of the Cold War, when we had a nuclear monopoly, the Soviet Union reneged on promises made at Yalta and solidified its control over Eastern Europe. In 1949, despite our assistance to the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communists took over the mainland and formed the People’s Republic, and the following year they stormed across the Yalu River and into the Korean War even though our atomic arsenal could have wiped out their cities as easily as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Years later, the bomb did nothing to prevent, shorten or decide the Vietnam War. And, of course, nukes have provided no assistance in stabilizing Iraq or Afghanistan. Today, they threaten us far more than they protect us: Nuclear terrorism is the greatest threat we face, but our own nuclear arsenal cannot protect us from an attack.
    Nuclear weapons do deter states from attacking us with nuclear weapons — and few would suggest that we unilaterally give up our arsenal while others retain theirs. But, oddly, it is here that conservatives seem to doubt the utility of nuclear weapons more than their counterparts on the left. Whereas many liberals and realists believe that Iran could be deterred if it built the bomb, conservatives are far less sanguine, insisting that a nuclear Tehran is an unacceptable threat. They too understand that the U.S. arsenal is no guarantor of security, and that even a handful of nuclear weapons in enemy hands threatens to neuter our conventional advantage.
    Of course, we’re a long way from disarmament. But, today, beyond the small number of weapons each nuclear state can justify as a credible deterrent, every additional weapon represents only a greater risk — of theft, accident or unauthorized use. Which is why the president’s efforts to reduce the U.S. and Russian arsenals, ban nuclear testing and prevent the further production of fissile material are so valuable. Each of these measures will help protect the U.S., and if they bring us closer to disarmament, then that is a cause for celebration by hawks and doves alike.

    Peter Scoblic is executive editor of the New Republic and author of “U.S. vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror.”