nuclear-news

In a joint declaration, those of us taking part in the nationwide protests said, “Nuclear weapons allow us to gauge the full extent of brutality that the 1 percent — which rules through exploitation, coercion and violence — is capable of committing.” August 6 was a day of remembrance, but also one in which the 99 percent took action “to ensure such destruction [as took place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki] is never wrought on anyone ever again.”

Bearing a banner that read “¡Ya Basta! (un)Occupy The Bomb!” at least six people in New Mexico were arrested as a crowd of roughly 50 demonstrators, periodically throughout the day, blocked an entrance to Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Occupying what was once Pueblo land and the home to 2,000 archeological sites, LANL is the birthplace of the atomic bomb. To this day, secretive weapons experiments are carried out at the lab.

New Mexico local Michelle Victoria, who helped organize the nonviolent direct action at Los Alamos, said the roadblock illustrated community and indigenous opposition to the weapons lab. Last summer, a wildfire swept through Los Alamos, narrowly missing 30,000 55 gallon drums of radioactive waste stored above ground at the site. “There’s a lot radioactivity around here,” said Victoria. “What they used to do at the lab back in the ’50s was just wheel barrels of radioactive material and dump them off the canyon.”

Victoria raised concerns that radioactive ash from last summer’s fire could have spread into the Rio Grande River, which provides drinking water to 90 percent of New Mexico’s municipalities. “We know and believe this is wrong and we are willing to put our bodies on the line for it to stop.”

Meanwhile, 20 miles West of Seattle, members of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Direct Actionsymbolically shut down U.S. Naval base Kitsap-Bangor in the Puget Sound. A fleet of eight nuclear powered submarines carrying Trident D-5 ballistic missiles are docked at Bangor. Each sub can carry up to eight warheads loaded with between 100 kilotons or 475 kilotons of nuclear explosives each. By comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 12 kt. “Those submarines could wipe out an entire continent,” said Leonard Eiger with the Ground Zero Center. “They don’t discriminate between civilian and military targets, a violation of international law.”……

On Sunday afternoon, heavily armed police kept a stern eye on peace activists and Buddhist monks making sure those gathered in front of the facility to pray away the demons inside wouldn’t try to hop the fence. In an email message, Rice told Occupy Nukes organizers to “continue the transformation each of you represents.”

The day of action comes amid President Barack Obama’s efforts to expand the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal. According to a White House fact sheet, Obama is pushing for investments of $80 billion “to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex,” and $100 billion to revamp “existing capabilities and modernize some strategic [delivery] systems” by 2020. This nuclear spending spree includes $4 to 12 billion for anew plutonium processing complex at Los Alamos.

“Money spent on nukes is irradiating social programs for the 99 percent,” warns Occupy Nukes. We cite a Brookings Institution study which notes that between 1940 and 1998 the U.S. spent more money on nuclear weapons — $5.5 billion — than the “combined total federal spending for education; training, employment, and social services; agriculture; natural resources and the environment; general science, space, and technology; community and regional development, including disaster relief; law enforcement; and energy production and regulation.” That figure reached 7.2 trillion by the end of President George W. Bush’s term in the White House, and we accuse Obama of charting the same costly nuclear course……

The grassroots struggle against the nuclear-industrial complex in the U.S. is beginning to grow again, as evidenced by Occupy Nukes. This fall, the new anti-nuke movement should find its greatest expression since the height of the disarmament movement in the early 1980s, as thousands from across the country are expected to converge on Washington, D.C., to call for a future free of uranium mining, nuclear weapons, nuke plants and nuke waste.

If inspiration is coming from anywhere, though, it’s from Japan, where hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in recent weeks against the re-ignition of reactors. The Japanese no nukes movement may even be approaching the critical mass needed to move the country off nukes for good. Close to 80 percent of the population favors a phase-out and the former prime minister, who stepped down after his government’s mishandling of the meltdown, is pushing for legislation that would accomplish just that.

Such a move would go a long way toward showing the ability of people power to disarm nuclear power and help point the way not only to a world free from the fear of another Fukushima or Hiroshima, but also a world where human health and safety is the priority above all. http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/christianity/occupy-nukes-challenges-nuclear-power-bomb-anniversary