nuclear-news

A pair of conferences here this week have tried to raise public and government awareness of nuclear weapons.

The first, a Civil Society Forum put on by the Int’l Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, ICAN, brought together non-governmental groups, parliamentarians, and activists of all stripes to try and boost morale and renew enthusiasm in efforts to ban the bomb.

About 700 participants spent two days delving into the ghastly health and environmental effects of nuclear war, the hair-raising frequency of H-bomb accidents and near detonations, and the horrifying impacts of bomb test fallout — and other human radiation experiments conducted without informed consent upon our own unwitting civilians and soldiers……..

A second conference of about 1,000 government representatives, NGOs and others followed the ICAN meeting. The “Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons” (HINW) was the 3rd in a series and your felonious Nukewatch reporter was somehow granted permission to attend the deeply stuffy affair.

After decades of negotiations over the numerical size of nuclear arsenals, the HINW meetings have finally faced the harsh ugliness and catastrophic health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons.

Expert witnesses spoke directly to 180 state governments about the ethical, legal, medical and ecological consequences of H-bomb detonations which are — in the language of diplomatic nicety — “foreseeable.” Then, scores of state delegates called on nuclear-armed countries (US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) to dissolve their reliance on the worst of our WsMD and see them abolished.

But the naked emperor can’t see his own bare ass……….

Immediately following harrowing personal testimonies from downwind bomb test victims, and a review by Ms. Olson of the science showing women and children to be far more vulnerable to radiation than men, the U.S. interrupted.

Although conveners explicitly directed participants to only ask questions, US delegate Adam Scheinman was the first at the mic and he declared flatly, “I will not ask a question but make a statement.” The bully then completely ignored the panel’s discussion of the brutal, gruesome, and long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing and use. Instead, in ringing non sequitur, the U.S.’s prepared remarks declared opposition to a nuclear weapons ban treaty..…..

The U.S.’s refusal to support (and its dismissal of) the movement for a nuclear weapons ban/treaty should be the story today, but corporate media can be counted on to regurgitate Obama’s encouragement of interminable negotiations to nowhere.

The desired result of its bombast is that the U.S. will momentarily divert attention from the indiscriminate, uncontrollable, widespread, persistent, radiological and genetically destabilizing impact of its nuclear weapons — and gotten television to pat it on the back merely for showing up and “listening.”

Indeed, after its usurpation of center-stage here — and after having ignored and then temporarily recast the subject of the conference — the U.S. may now leave the building and get back to its one-thousand-billion-dollar upgrade of infrastructure for producing 80 new H-bombs a year by 2020. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/10/us-attends-then-defies-conference-on-nuclear-weapons-effects/