OMNI
NUCLEAR WEAPONS NUCLEAR
ABOLITION NEWSLETTER # 19, May 25, 2014.
OMNI
Building a Culture of PEACE, Justice, and Ecology. Compiled by Dick Bennett.
(See
#1, June 14, 2007; #2, January 8, 2008; #3 May 16, 2008; #4 June 10; 2009, #5 July 23, 2009, ; #6 Sept. 21, 2009; #7
August 29, 2010; #8 April 11, 2011; #9 August 4, 2011; #10 Feb. 27, 2012; #11
April 4, 2012; #12 June 27, 2012; #13 July 27, 2012; #14 August 11, 2012; #15,
Dec. 4, 2012; #16 July 20, 2013; #17 Dec. 17, 2014; #18 Feb. 8, 2014)
Imagine a world free
of nuclear weapons, be committed to that goal, join OMNI to strive with others
for that goal. OMNI, a northwest
Arkansas advocacy organization, is part of the international peace, justice,
and ecology movement against the US
NATIONAL SECURITY STATE
For seven years, these 19
newsletters, related newsletters, and the OMNI
Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology
have been Arkansas
See OMNI’s Related NEWSLETTERS:
Nuclear Abolition Day June
2.
International Day against
Nuclear Tests August 29.
OMNI NUCLEAR FREE AND INDEPENDENT PACIFIC DAY AND MARSHALL ISLANDS
OMNI’s NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL DAYS PROJECT: Castle Bravo Explosion 60 Anniversary Feb. 28.
Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:
http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ These hundreds of newsletters provide OMNI and the peace, justice,
and ecology movement with information and criticism independent of money or
party. Here is the link to
the Index to the newsletters: http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/
Nos. 14-18 at end of this newsletter.
Contents Nuclear
Weapons #19
Anti-Nuclear
Organizations
WAND in Action
Council
for a Livable World
Latest
No. of Nukewatch Quarterly
Catholic
Opposition to Nuclear Weapons
Transform Now Ploughshares
The Catholic Worker, (May 2014)
Pax Christi
Wellen
on Masco, Nuclear Weapons Scientists
The New Yorker, a Recent Assessment of
Dr. Strangelove
Glenn
Alcalay, Radiation Experiments in Pacific ,
Marshall Islands
Robert
Alvarez, US Military Radioactive Wastes
Call
Your Congressmen and tell them you want them to work to abolish nuclear
weapons, our only possible safety.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Latest
No. of Nukewatch Quarterly (Spring
2014)
The
magazine covers all aspects of weapons and power.
Dick’s
Selection:
Cover
Page has 2 articles: 1): German pilots are trained to fly “Tornado”
Jet Bombers that carry US H-bombs. 60 of these bombers have crashed, 33 pilots
or navigators have been killed. 2) The
Los Alamos/Sandia labs in NM have successfully tested a new B61 bomb. The Obama admin. is upgrading all of the
nuclear weapons.
Page
1 has 2 articles: 1) Annotated list of
all the nuclear arsenals around the world, plus map of nuclear bases in
US; 2) Report on 3 nuclear weapons protestors
sentenced to long prison terms: Sr. Megan Rice (age 84), Greg Boertje-Obed,
Michael Walli
Contact
me for address if you would like to subsribe.
OMNI/NWA needs more people speaking out for Nuclear Weapons Abolition.
CATHOLIC OPPOSITION TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS
TRANSFORM NOW PLOUGHSHARES Google Search, April 26, 2014
[See
Nonviolence and Just War newsletters
--Dick]
1.
Transform Now Plowshares | They will hammer their swords ...
Several people requested we post this
song, performed at the most recent Festival of Hope. Lyrics are by Ralph
Hutchison; the performed version lifted the tune ...
Megan Rice
Francis Lloyd, counsel for
Megan Rice, has filed her sentencing ...
|
Judge Sends
Transform Now ...
Judge Sends Transform Now Plowshares
Resisters to Prison ...
|
2.
Disarmnowplowshares's Blog | Love of enemies means ...
Apr 13, 2014 - Transform Now
Plowshares: A Trumpet Call to All of Us. Posted on February 22, 2014 by
Subversive Peacemaker. by William “Bix” Bichsel.
3.
Plowshares Movement - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wikipedia
The Plowshares Movement is an
anti-nuclear weapons and (mostly) .... who compose the Transform Now
Plowshares movement, breached security at the U.S.
History - Actions - Recent actions - See also
4.
Megan Rice - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Wikipedia
The three are members of the
organization "Transform Now Plowshares", a part of the
Plowshares Movement, which references the Book of Isaiah's call to ...
5.
Transform Now Plowshares Archives - Oak Ridge Today
Feb 18, 2014 - The U.S. Marshals have
placed a “cone of silence” over Sister Megan Rice, the 83-year-old defendant in
the Transform Now Plowshares action ...
7.
Sentence
postponed for Transform Now Plowshares ...
National Catholic Reporter
Jan 28, 2014 - The three, who call
themselves the Transform Now
Plowshares, are facing long prison sentences for sabotage following their
July 28, 2012, ...
8.
Transform Now Plowshares | PAX CHRISTI USA
Posts about Transform Now
Plowshares written by paxchristiusa.
CATHOLIC WORKER (MAY 2014)
[--Dick]
Patrick O’Neill, “Sr. Megan, Mike &
Greg—Thanks!” Recounts and deplores US District Court
Judge Amul R. Thapar’s harsh sentencing of three Catholic antiwar activists,
“three of the finest, most loving people on God’s Good Earth.” Then O’Neill explores the behavior of the
judge in contrast to the TNP three.
Excellent essay. Let us all speak
up until the scourge of war is ended, just as public disapproval ended dueling
and lynching. Let’s not merely wring our
hands over the slaughters, but with Mother Jones we must protest as individuals
and with groups.
“On Questions of War & Peace.”
A different sort of judge presided over the trial of nine nuclear
weapons resisters in Kansas City
PAX CHRISTI http://paxchristiusa.org/
NUCLEAR
DISARMAMENT: Pax Christi USA signs onto Catholic communities letter to
Secretary Kerry regarding non-proliferation
Pax
Christi USA has signed onto a letter from Catholic communities in the
The letter reads, in
part:
As the leadership of Catholic communities and organizations in the
United States
We would like to begin by expressing
our disappointment that the United States
did not take part in the 2nd International Conference on the Humanitarian
Impact of Nuclear Weapons in Nayarit ,
Mexico
Leave a comment
REFLECTIO
Nuclear Weapons Are an Aging Society, Too
|
|
 Russ Wellen, Op-Ed, NationofChange, May 25, 1014: In 2004 anthropologist Joseph Masco wrote a seminal article for
the August issue of American Ethnologist titled Nuclear technoaesthetics. He
followed that up with a book titled The
Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico
(Princeton University Press, 2006). In his article, which addresses, among
other things, the effects on the mentality of nuclear scientists after
nuclear testing was banned, he reproduces the thoughts of a former deputy
director of nuclear weapons technologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. |
JanUARY 23, 2014
This month
marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear
weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of
controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could
order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union ,
without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous
… an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda.
Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers
playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the
Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a
dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that
someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s
approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When
“Fail-Safe”—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney
Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The
incidents in ‘Fail-Safe’ are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air
Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first
casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that
dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a
nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily
fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did
indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite
the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an
accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely
eliminated.
The command
and control of nuclear weapons has long been plagued by an “always/never” dilemma. The
administrative and technological systems that are necessary to insure that
nuclear weapons are always available for use in wartime may be quite different
from those necessary to guarantee that such weapons can never be used, without
proper authorization, in peacetime. During the nineteen-fifties and sixties,
the “always” in American war planning was given far greater precedence than the
“never.” Through two terms in office, beginning in 1953, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower struggled with this dilemma. He wanted to retain Presidential
control of nuclear weapons while defending America and its allies from attack.
But, in a crisis, those two goals might prove contradictory, raising all sorts
of difficult questions. What if Soviet bombers were en route to the United States
but the President somehow couldn’t be reached? What if Soviet tanks were
rolling into West Germany
but a communications breakdown prevented NATOofficers
from contacting the White House? What if the President were killed during a
surprise attack on Washington ,
D.C.
With great
reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear
weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the
President. Air Force pilots were allowed to fire their nuclear anti-aircraft
rockets to shoot down Soviet bombers heading toward the United States . And about half a
dozen high-level American commanders were allowed to use far more powerful
nuclear weapons, without contacting the White House first, when their forces
were under attack and “the urgency of time and circumstances clearly does not
permit a specific decision by the President, or other person empowered to act
in his stead.” Eisenhower worried that providing that sort of authorization in
advance could make it possible for someone to do “something foolish down the
chain of command” and start an all-out nuclear war. But the
alternative—allowing an attack on the United States to go unanswered or NATO forces to be
overrun—seemed a lot worse. Aware that his decision might create public unease
about who really controlled America ’s
nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower insisted that his delegation of Presidential
authority be kept secret. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he
confessed to being “very fearful of having written papers on this matter.”
President
John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office,
about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a
substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could
start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach
you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the
wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the
roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe .
Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could
detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from
Turkey , Holland ,
Italy , Great Britain , and Germany
from using them without the approval of the United States .
In
December, 1960, fifteen members of Congress serving on the Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy had toured NATO bases to investigate how American nuclear weapons were
being deployed. They found that the weapons—some of them about a hundred times
more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—were routinely guarded,
transported, and handled by foreign military personnel. American control of the
weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who
accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in
German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American
atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized
that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from
taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
* * *
The Kennedy
Administration soon decided to put locking devices inside NATO’s nuclear weapons. The coded
electromechanical switches, known as “permissive action links” (PALs),
would be placed on the arming lines. The weapons would be inoperable without
the proper code—and that code would be shared with NATO allies only
when the White House was prepared to fight the Soviets. The American military
didn’t like the idea of these coded switches, fearing that mechanical devices
installed to improve weapon safety would diminish weapon reliability. A
top-secret State Department memo summarized the view of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff in 1961: “all is well with the atomic stockpile program and there is no
need for any changes.”
After a
crash program to develop the new control technology, during the
mid-nineteen-sixties, permissive action links were finally placed inside most
of the nuclear weapons deployed byNATO forces. But
Kennedy’s directive applied only to the NATO arsenal. For years, the Air Force and the Navy blocked
attempts to add coded switches to the weapons solely in their custody. During a
national emergency, they argued, the consequences of not receiving the proper
code from the White House might be disastrous. And locked weapons might play
into the hands of Communist saboteurs. “The very existence of the lock
capability,” a top Air Force general claimed, “would create a fail-disable
potential for knowledgeable agents to ‘dud’ the entire Minuteman [missile]
force.” The Joint Chiefs thought that strict military discipline was the best
safeguard against an unauthorized nuclear strike. A two-man rule was instituted
to make it more difficult for someone to use a nuclear weapon without
permission. And a new screening program, the Human Reliability Program, was
created to stop people with emotional, psychological, and substance-abuse
problems from gaining access to nuclear weapons.
Despite
public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of
1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as
Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or
missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets. Kubrick had
researched the subject for years, consulted experts, and worked closely with a
former R.A.F. pilot, Peter George, on the screenplay of the film. George’s
novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for
most of “Strangelove” ’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top
official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to
every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic
Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale
about what might go wrong. Even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
privately worried that an accident, a mistake, or a rogue American officer
could start a nuclear war.
Coded
switches to prevent the unauthorized use of nuclear weapons were finally added
to the control systems of American missiles and bombers in the early
nineteen-seventies. The Air Force was not pleased, and considered the new
security measures to be an insult, a lack of confidence in its personnel.
Although the Air Force now denies this
claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to
launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
* * *
The early
permissive action links were rudimentary. Placed in NATO weapons
during the nineteen-sixties and known as Category A PALs, the switches relied on a
split four-digit code, with ten thousand possible combinations. If the United States
went to war, two people would be necessary to unlock a nuclear weapon, each of
them provided with half the code. Category APALs were useful mainly to delay
unauthorized use, to buy time after a weapon had been taken or to thwart an
individual psychotic hoping to cause a large explosion. A skilled technician
could open a stolen weapon and unlock it within a few hours. Today’s Category D PALs, installed in the Air
Force’s hydrogen bombs, are more sophisticated. They require a six-digit code,
with a million possible combinations, and have a limited-try feature that
disables a weapon when the wrong code is repeatedly entered.
The Air
Force’s land-based Minuteman III missiles and the Navy’s submarine-based
Trident II missiles now require an eight-digit code—which is no longer
00000000—in order to be launched. The Minuteman crews receive the code via
underground cables or an aboveground radio antenna. Sending the launch code to
submarines deep underwater presents a greater challenge. Trident submarines
contain two safes. One holds the keys necessary to launch a missile; the other
holds the combination to the safe with the keys; and the combination to the
safe holding the combination must be transmitted to the sub by
very-low-frequency or extremely-low-frequency radio. In a pinch, if Washington , D.C.
The
security measures now used to control America ’s nuclear weapons are a
vast improvement over those of 1964. But, like all human endeavors, they are
inherently flawed. The Department of Defense’s Personnel Reliability Program is
supposed to keep people with serious emotional or psychological issues away
from nuclear weapons—and yet two of the nation’s top nuclear commanders were
recently removed from their posts. Neither appears to be the sort of calm,
stable person you want with a finger on the button. In fact, their misbehavior
seems straight out of “Strangelove.”
Vice
Admiral Tim Giardina, the second-highest-ranking officer at the U.S. Strategic
Command—the organization responsible for all of America’s nuclear forces—-was
investigated last summer for allegedly using counterfeit gambling chips at the
Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa. According to the Iowa Division of
Criminal Investigation, “a significant monetary amount” of counterfeit chips
was involved. Giardina was relieved of his command on October 3, 2013. A few days later,
Major General Michael Carey, the Air Force commander in charge of America’s
intercontinental ballistic missiles, was fired for conduct “unbecoming an
officer and a gentleman.”According to a report by the Inspector General of the Air
Force, Carey had consumed too much alcohol during an official trip to Russia,
behaved rudely toward Russian officers, spent time with “suspect” young foreign
women in Moscow, loudly discussed sensitive information in a public hotel
lounge there, and drunkenly pleaded to get onstage and sing with a Beatles
cover band at La Cantina, a Mexican restaurant near Red Square. Despite his
requests, the band wouldn’t let Carey onstage to sing or to play the guitar.
While
drinking beer in the executive lounge at Moscow ’s
Marriott Aurora during that visit, General Carey made an admission with serious
public-policy implications. He off-handedly told a delegation of U.S.
national-security officials that his missile-launch officers have the “worst
morale in the Air Force.” Recent events suggest that may be true. In the spring
of 2013, nineteen launch officers at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota were decertified for violating
safety rules and poor discipline. In August, 2013, the entire missile wing at
Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana
failed its safety inspection. Last week, the Air Force revealed that
thirty-four launch officers at Malmstrom had been decertified for cheating on
proficiency exams—and that at least three launch officers are being
investigated for illegal drug use. The findings of a report by the RAND
Corporation, leaked to the A.P., were equally disturbing. The study found that
the rates of spousal abuse and court martials among Air Force personnel with
nuclear responsibilities are much higher than those among people with other jobs
in the Air Force. “We don’t care if things go properly,” a launch officer told RAND . “We just don’t want to get in trouble.”
The most
unlikely and absurd plot element in “Strangelove” is the existence of a Soviet
“Doomsday Machine.” The device would trigger itself, automatically, if the Soviet Union were attacked with nuclear weapons. It was
meant to be the ultimate deterrent, a threat to destroy the world in order to
prevent an American nuclear strike. But the failure of the Soviets to tell the United States
about the contraption defeats its purpose and, at the end of the film,
inadvertently causes a nuclear Armageddon. “The whole point of the Doomsday
Machine is lost,” Dr. Strangelove, the President’s science adviser, explains to
the Soviet Ambassador, “if
you keep it a secret!”
A decade
after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union
began work on the Perimeter system—-a network of sensors and computers that
could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from
the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film.
Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand. Once it was activated, Perimeter
would order the launch of long-range missiles at the United States if it detected
nuclear detonations on Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be reached. Like
the Doomsday Machine in “Strangelove,” Perimeter was kept secret from the United States ;
its existence was not revealed until years after the Cold War ended.
In
retrospect, Kubrick’s black comedy provided a far more accurate description of
the dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems than the ones that
the American people got from the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream
media.
“This is
absolute madness, Ambassador,” President Merkin Muffley says in the film, after
being told about the Soviets’ automated retaliatory system. “Why should you
build such a thing?” Fifty years later, that question remains unanswered, and
“Strangelove” seems all the more brilliant, bleak, and terrifyingly on the
mark.
You can
read Eric Schlosser’s guide to the long-secret documents that help explain the risks America took with its nuclear
arsenal, and watch and read his deconstruction of clips from “Dr. Strangelove” and from a little-seen film about permissive action links.
Eric
Schlosser is the author of “Command and Control.”
History of US nuclear weapons
testing - a revolting legacy of power’s lack of empathy
Human Radiation Experiments in the Pacific
” . . .
protect the inhabitants against the loss of their lands and
resources; protect the health of the inhabitants . . .” (1)
According to Marshallese folklore a half-bad and half-good god named Etao was
associated with slyness and trickery. When bad things happened people
knew that Etao was behind it. “He’s dangerous, that Etao,” some people
said. “He does bad things to people and then laughs at them.”(2)
Many in the Castle-Bravo
Sixty years ago this month the American Etao unleashed its unprecedented fury at Bikini Atoll in the
Castle-Bravo, the first in a series of megaton-range hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll on March first of 1954, was nicknamed “the shrimp” by its designer – Edward Teller – because it was the first deliverable thermonuclear weapon in the megaton range in the
At fifteen megatons – 1,000 times the Hiroshima A-bomb – the Bravo behemoth was a fission-fusion-fission [3-F] thermonuclear bomb that spread deadly radioactive fallout over an enormous swath of the central Pacific Ocean, including the inhabited atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utrik in the
As an international fallout controversy reached a crescendo, a hastily called press conference was held in
Adm. Lewis Strauss: “I’ve just returned from the Pacific Proving Grounds of the AEC where I witnessed the second part of a test series of thermonuclear weapons . . . For shot one [Bravo] the wind failed to follow the predictions, but shifted south of that line and the little islands of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utrik were in the edge of the path of the fallout . . . The 236 Marshallese natives appeared to me to be well and happy . . .The results, which the scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore had hoped to obtain from these two tests [Bravo and Union] were fully realized. An enormous potential has been added to our military posture.” Strauss added the caveat that “the medical staff on
Even former Sec. of State Henry Kissinger took note of the significance of Bravo and the new perils associated with widespread radioactive fallout contamination from megaton sized H-bombs, as might happen if the Soviets dropped The Big One on our nation’s capital and the fallout headed up the Eastern Seaboard. Writing about nuclear weapons and foreign policy in 1957, Kissinger wrote: “The damage caused by radiation is twofold: direct damage leading to illness, death or reduced life expectancy, and genetic effects.”(4)
Almira Matayoshi was one of the Rongelap “natives” referred to by Adm. Strauss. When I interviewed her in 1981 in Majuro she recounted her experience with Bravo:
The flash of light was very strong, then came the big sound of the explosion; it was quite a while before the fallout came. The powder was yellowish and when you walked it was
all over your body. Then people began to get very weak and bean to vomit. Most of us were weak and my son was out of breath.
I have pains and much fear of the bomb. At that time I wanted to die, and we were really suffering; our bodies ached and our feet were covered with burns and our hair fell out. Now I see babies growing up abnormally and some are mentally disturbed, but none of these things happened before the bomb. It is sad to see the babies now.(5)
A persistent puzzle surrounds the question of intentionality. In a 1982 New York Times interview, Gene Curbow (the former weather technician during Bravo) confessed that the winds did not “shift” according to the official
The late Dr. Robert Conard, head of the Brookhaven/AEC medical surveillance team for the islanders, wrote in his 1958 annual report on the exposed Marshallese: “The habitation of these people on Rongelap Island affords the opportunity for a most valuable ecological radiation study on human beings . . . The various radionuclides present on the island can be traced from the soil through the food chain and into the human being.”(7)
In reference to the exposed Marshallese after Bravo, AEC official Merrill Eisenbud bluntly stated during a NYC AEC meeting in 1956, “Now, data of this type has never been available. While it is true that these people do not live the way westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”(8)
At present, the atoll communities of
Following 67 A- and H-bombs at Bikini and Enewetak between 1946-58, the U.S. was not about to let go of its island capture, terminate the AEC-Brookhaven long-term human radiation studies at Rongelap and Utirk, nor forfeit the valuable “catcher’s mitt” at Kwajalein for monthly incoming ICBMs from Vandenberg air base in California and Kauai. In 1961 – following a polio outbreak on Ebeye, Kwajalein – Pres. Kennedy ordered a comprehensive review of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands by his Harvard economist friend Anthony M. Solomon, head of the New York Reserve Bank.
Correspondingly, JFK’s National Security Action Memorandum 145 of April 18, 1962 called for the movement of
Through legerdemain and the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, the
To this end the Solomon Report recommended a massive spending program just prior to a future status plebiscite being planned for
As the Pentagon and AEC used the isolated isles of the
Characterized as “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” ballistic missile defense has always had a reputation for fantasy and wish fulfillment, sold to Pres. Reagan with an exciting and glitzy video designed to parallel the then-sensation called “Star Wars.” Kwajalein and the fiction of Ballistic Missile Defense has tragically dumped good money after bad, notwithstanding the huge profits by Boeing, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, MIT’s Lincoln Lab, Aerojet, Booz Allen et al. Between 1962 and 1996 the
And what do we have to show for our nearly $300 billion missile defense boondoggle? Last July 4thwas also the planned launch date for a test of the BMD program. The Ground Based Missile Defense system at Kwajalein Atoll failed again, despite the fact that the test was manipulated: “The intercept team knew ahead of time when to expect the incoming missile and all its relevant flight parameters. Such luxury is obviously not available in real-life combat. But even if the $214 million ‘test’ had worked it would not prove much.”(12)
The collateral damage known as
Likening it to South African apartheid, I recall my first encounter with
Having spent the afternoon on
And just to insure the longevity of the asymmetry, the American Etao embedded a little-noticed caveat into the 1963 Limited [Atmospheric] Test Ban Treaty that allows the U.S. to unilaterally resume nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, despite assurances to the contrary during the 1986 Compact status negotiations. Safeguard “C,” as the provision is known, also calls for the readiness of Johnston Atoll and Kauai in the Hawaiian archipelago, and Enewetak Atoll in the
Several formerly inhabited atolls remain off limits due to lingering radioactivity decades after the last H-bomb shattered the peace on
The recently discovered Mexican refugee fisherman on Ebon Atoll in the
Undoubtedly the legendary Etao is somewhere lurking in these once-pacific isles savoring the work of its American protégé . . .
[Addendum: PBS is sitting on an important 90-minute film about the radiation experiments in the
Endnotes
1. United
Nations. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands .
Trusteeship Agreement. URL: http://www.fsmlaw.org/miscdocs/trustshipagree.htm.
New York .
1947. Article VI.
2. Grey,
Eve. Legends of Micronesia . Book
Two. The sly Etao andthe sea demon. 1951. Honolulu : Office of
the High Commissioner. TTPI, Dept. of Educations. Micronesian
Reader Series. Pages 35-36.
3. Adm.
Lewis Strauss, chair-AEC. Press conference about Bravo with Pres.
Eisenhower, March 12, 1954, Washington ,
D.C.
4. Henry
Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. Council on Foreign
Relations. Harper Bros.: New
York . 1957. Page.75.
5.
Interview with Almira Matayoshi conducted by Glenn Alcalay in Feburary 1981 in Majuro , Marshall
Islands
6. Judith
Miller. “Four veterans suing U.S. over exposure in ’54 atom
test.” New York Times. Sept. 20, 1982.
7. Robert
Conard, M.D., et al. March 1957 medical survey of Rongelap and Utrik
people three years after exposure to radioactive fallout. Brookhaven
National Laboratory, Upton ,
N.Y.
8. Merrill
Eisenbud. Minutes of A.E.C. meeting. U.S.A.E.C. Health and Safety
Laboratory. Advisory Committee on Biology & Medicine. January
13-14, 1956. Page 232.
9. Report
by the U.S. Government
Survey Mission
to the TTPI by Anthony M. Solomon, October 9, 1963. Page 41.
The Solomon Report is online: https://archive.org/stream/TheSolomonReportAmericasRuthlessBlueprintForTheAssimilationOf/micronesia3_djvu.txt
10.
Report by the U.S.
Government Survey Mission
to the TTPI by Anthony M. Solomon, October 9, 1963. Pages
41-42. The Solomon Report is online: https://archive.org/stream/TheSolomonReportAmericasRuthlessBlueprintForTheAssimilationOf/micronesia3_djvu.txt
11.
Stephen Schwartz. “The real price of
ballistic missile defenses.” The Nonproliferation Review. April 13,
2012.
12.
Yousaf Butt. “Let’s end bogus missile
defense testing.” Reuters. July 16, 2013.
13.
Glenn Alcalay. Journal entry of January
21, 1976. Aboard the MV Militobi. Peace Corps Journal, Marshall
Islands 1975-77.
14.
David Evans. “Safeguard ‘C’: U.S.
spending millions on plan to re-start Pacific nuclear tests.” Chicago Tribune. August
26, 1990.
15.
Giff Johnson. “At 60, legacy of Bravo
still reverberates in Marshall
Islands .” Editorial. Marshall Islands
Glenn Alcalay is an adjunct professor of anthropology at
Related Stories
By Rob Hotakainen, McClatchy | Report
By Judy Molland, Care2 | Report
02/24/2014 -
16:06
A primer: Military
nuclear wastes in the United
States
Robert
Alvarez
alvarezJM.jpg
ROBERT
ALVAREZ
A senior scholar at the
Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to
the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national
security and...
Research,
development, testing, and production of US nuclear weapons occurred at
thousands of sites in nearly every state, as well as Puerto Rico, the Marshall Islands , Johnston Atoll, and Christmas Island in the Pacific. Between 1940 and 1996,
the United States Soviet
Union 's.
US nuclear
weapons sites—many of them under the aegis of the Energy Department—constitute
some of the most contaminated zones in the Western hemisphere, and attempts to
remediate those sites are now approaching their fifth decade. It is the most
costly, complex, and risky environmental cleanup effort ever undertaken,
dwarfing the cleanup of Defense Department sites and the Environmental
Protection Agency’s Superfund program. Long-term liability estimates range from
approximately $300 billion to $1 trillion. Site
remediation and disposition of radioactive detritus are expected to continue
well into this century. After that, long-term stewardship of profoundly
contaminated areas will pose a challenge spanning hundreds of centuries.
Research,
development, testing and production of nuclear weapons by the United States
·
More than 1 million cubic meters of transuranic radioactive wastes.
·
Approximately 6 million cubic meters of low-level radioactive wastes.
·
Approximately 4.7 billion cubic
meters of contaminated soil and groundwater (according to an Energy Department
document unavailable online).
·
About 100 million gallons of high-level radioactive wastes,
considered among the most dangerous, left in aging tanks larger that most state
capitol domes. More than a third of some 200 tanks have leaked and threaten
groundwater and waterways such as the Columbia River.
·
Areas contaminated by more than 1,054 nuclear weapons tests, 219 of
which involved aboveground detonations. As of 1992, underground
shots released about 300 million curies of radioactive materials at the Nevada
Test Site—making it the most radioactively contaminated
area in the United States. Areas in the Republic of the
Marshall Islands remain uninhabitable from US aboveground tests in the 1940s and 1950s.
·
More than 700,000 metric tons of excess nuclear weapons production materials,
in addition to hundreds of tons of weapons-usable plutonium and highly
enriched uranium.
The human health
legacy of the US
Even today, the
radioactive waste from the dawn of the nuclear age remains a significant
challenge to public health in highly populated areas. For instance, in 1973 a
large amount of uranium processing wastes, generated to make the first nuclear
weapons at the Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis Missouri
River .
The dump contains
the largest single amount of thorium 230 in the country and possibly the world.
With a half-life of more than 75,000 years, it is comparable in toxicity to
plutonium. Even though these concerns were repeatedly raised with the US
Environmental Protection Agency, the agency issued a Record of Decision in 2008
that allows for “in place disposal” of these wastes, subject to institutional
controls and with a cap over radiologically contaminated areas. Lost in this
process is an important warning by a panel of the National Academy
of Sciences in 2000 that "engineered barriers and institutional
controls—are inherently failure prone.”
The radiological
legacy of nuclear weapons will be with us for a very long time.
[I read this article in Nukewatch
Quarterly (Spring 2014). It appeared
originally in The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists (Feb. 24, 2014). –Dick]
Contents of Nuclear
Weapons Newsletter #14 August 14, 2012
Video
Underground: Hydrogen Bomb Testing in Marshall Islands
From
the Nuclear Abolitionist
Resisters
Receive New Felony Charges
Contents of #15
Protesters
Arrested, Sign Petition
Plutonium
Cores Project Stopped
Mayors
vs. Nukes
Uranium
Mines
The Nuclear Resister (Sept. 3, 2012)
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation (NAPF)
Contents #16
Disarmament
Video Contest
The Nuclear Resister (March 17, 2013)
WAND,
End the MOX Program
Sign
Declaration Against Nuclear Deterrence
Eiger,
Actions Arguments Against Nuclear Weapons
Chomsky,
Nuclear War Threats
Chomsky’s
New Book, Nuclear War and Environmental
Catastrophe
Green,
Consequences of Nuclear Attack
Contents #17
Nuclear
War: What It Might Be Like
Schillinger,
Novel Envisions Manhattan
Opposition
to Nuclear Weapons, Abolition Movement
Pope
Francis for Abolition
Joseph
Rotblat, Opponent of Nuclear Weapons
History
Past
Nuclear Close Calls
Thirteen Days, Year 2000 Film About
Cuban Missile Crisis
Contact
President Obama
Contents of Nuclear
Weapons Newsletter #18
Remembering Nuclear
Testing at the Marshall
Islands
Resistance
to Nuclear Weapons
WAND
Protest March 25, 2014
25th
Anniversary, 2nd edition of Nuclear
Heartland to Be Published
Schlosser,
Dr. Strangelove and Nuclear War
Resistance,
Nevada Desert
Helen
Caldicott’s Books Still Speak to Us
News
from Anti-Nuclear UK
FCNL
Nuclear Calendar
Contact
your Arkansas
Steve Womack 202-225-4301
Tim
Griffin
202-225-2506
Tom
Cotton
202-225-3772
Rick Crawford
202-225-4076
END NUCLEAR WEAPONS NEWSLETTER #19
