Atomic Bomb Effects Cover-up Reported in New York Times
https://www.wanttoknow.info/atomicbombcoverup— 25 Dec 22
The below article is an excellent example of how even the New York Times has twisted the facts and manipulated public opinion in order to support a deeper agenda. This revealing story covers the bombing of Hiroshima back in 1945, yet the same deceptive techniques of distortion and manipulation continue to be used today to support the profit-making war machine.
The New York Times itself acknowledged government and media complicity in hiding the effects of the Atomic bomb in an Aug. 3, 2005 Reuters article they published titled “U.S. Suppressed Footage of Hiroshima for Decades.” Read this revealing article on the Times website on this webpage.
[Note: Since this message was originally posted in 2004, the New York Times removed the article at the above link. A web search shows that no other major media have this revealing story posted. Thankfully, you can still read a copy of this Reuters article on a foreign news website.]
Here’s a quote from this Reuters article, “In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. authorities seized and suppressed film shot in the bombed cities by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of devastation wrought by the new weapons.” The below article goes into greater detail on the depth of deception. Please help to inform others by sharing this revealing news with your friends and colleagues and exploring the “What you can do” section below.
Hiroshima Cover-up:
How the War Department’s Timesman Won a Pulitzer
by Amy Goodman and David Goodman, Aug. 10, 2004
At the dawn of the nuclear age, an independent Australian journalist named Wilfred Burchett traveled to Japan to cover the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The only problem was that General Douglas MacArthur had declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the press. Over 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. The world’s media obediently crowded onto the USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the surrender of the Japanese.
Wilfred Burchett decided to strike out on his own. He was determined to see for himself what this nuclear bomb had done, to understand what this vaunted new weapon was all about. So he boarded a train and traveled for thirty hours to the city of Hiroshima in defiance of General MacArthur’s orders.
Burchett emerged from the train into a nightmare world. The devastation that confronted him was unlike any he had ever seen during the war. The city of Hiroshima, with a population of 350,000, had been razed. Multistory buildings were reduced to charred posts. He saw people’s shadows seared into walls and sidewalks. He met people with their skin melting off. In the hospital, he saw patients with purple skin hemorrhages, gangrene, fever, and rapid hair loss. Burchett was among the first to witness and and describe radiation sickness.
Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, thirty days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”
He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”
Burchett’s article, headlined THE ATOMIC PLAGUE, was published on September 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation. Burchett’s candid reaction to the horror shocked readers. “In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show. “When you arrive in Hiroshima you can look around for twenty-five and perhaps thirty square miles. You can see hardly a building. It gives you an empty feeling in the stomach to see such man-made destruction.”
Burchett’s searing independent reportage was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. General MacArthur had gone to pains to restrict journalists’ access to the bombed cities, and his military censors were sanitizing and even killing dispatches that described the horror. The official narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.
Reporters whose dispatches [conflicted] with this version of events found themselves silenced: George Weller of the Chicago Daily News slipped into Nagasaki and wrote a 25,000-word story on the nightmare that he found there. Then he made a crucial error: He submitted the piece to military censors. His newspaper never even received his story. As Weller later summarized his experience with MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”
U.S. authorities responded in time-honored fashion to Burchett’s revelations: They attacked the messenger. General MacArthur ordered him expelled from Japan (the order was later rescinded), and his camera with photos of Hiroshima mysteriously vanished while he was in the hospital. U.S. officials accused Burchett of being influenced by Japanese propaganda. They scoffed at the notion of an atomic sickness. The U.S. military issued a press release right after the Hiroshima bombing that downplayed human casualties, instead emphasizing that the bombed area was the site of valuable industrial and military targets.
Four days after Burchett’s story splashed across front pages around the world, Major General Leslie R. Groves, director of the atomic bomb project, invited a select group of thirty reporters to New Mexico. Foremost among this group was William L. Laurence, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for The New York Times. Groves took the reporters to the site of the first atomic test. His intent was to demonstrate that no atomic radiation lingered at the site. Groves trusted Laurence to convey the military’s line; the general was not disappointed.
Laurence’s front-page story, U.S. ATOM BOMB SITE BELIES TOKYO TALES: TESTS ON NEW MEXICO RANGE CONFIRM THAT BLAST, AND NOT RADIATION, TOOK TOLL, ran on September 12, 1945, following a three-day delay to clear military censors. “This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations [sic] were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity,” the article began. Laurence said unapologetically that the Army tour was intended “to give the lie to these claims.”
Laurence quoted General Groves: “The Japanese claim that people died from radiation. If this is true, the number was very small.” Laurence then went on to offer his own remarkable editorial on what happened: “The Japanese are still continuing their propaganda aimed at creating the impression that we won the war unfairly, and thus attempting to create sympathy for themselves and milder terms. Thus, at the beginning, the Japanese described ‘symptoms’ that did not ring true.”
But Laurence knew better. He had observed the first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945, and he withheld what he knew about radioactive fallout across the southwestern desert that poisoned local residents and livestock. He kept mum about the spiking Geiger counters all around the test site.
William L. Laurence went on to write a series of ten articles for the Times that served as a glowing tribute to the ingenuity and technical achievements of the nuclear program. Throughout these and other reports, he downplayed and denied the human impact of the bombing. Laurence won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.
It turns out that William L. Laurence was not only receiving a salary from The New York Times. He was also on the payroll of the War Department. In March 1945, General Leslie Groves had held a secret meeting at The New York Times with Laurence to offer him a job writing press releases for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. program to develop atomic weapons. The intent, according to the Times, was “to explain the intricacies of the atomic bomb’s operating principles in laymen’s language.” Laurence also helped write statements on the bomb for President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
Laurence eagerly accepted the offer, “his scientific curiosity and patriotic zeal perhaps blinding him to the notion that he was at the same time compromising his journalistic independence,” as essayist Harold Evans wrote in a history of war reporting. Evans recounted: “After the bombing, the brilliant but bullying Groves continually suppressed or distorted the effects of radiation. He dismissed reports of Japanese deaths as ‘hoax or propaganda.’ The Times’ Laurence weighed in, too, after Burchett’s reports, and parroted the government line.” Indeed, numerous press releases issued by the military after the Hiroshima bombing – which in the absence of eyewitness accounts were often reproduced verbatim by U.S. newspapers – were written by none other than Laurence.
“Mine has been the honor, unique in the history of journalism, of preparing the War Department’s official press release for worldwide distribution,” boasted Laurence in his memoirs, Dawn Over Zero. “No greater honor could have come to any newspaperman, or anyone else for that matter.”
“Atomic Bill” Laurence revered atomic weapons. He had been crusading for an American nuclear program in articles as far back as 1929. His dual status as government agent and reporter earned him an unprecedented level of access to American military officials – he even flew in the squadron of planes that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. His reports on the atomic bomb and its use had a hagiographic tone, laced with descriptions that conveyed almost religious awe.
In Laurence’s article about the bombing of Nagasaki (it was withheld by military censors until a month after the bombing), he described the detonation over Nagasaki that incinerated 100,000 people. Laurence waxed: “Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”
Laurence later recounted his impressions of the atomic bomb: “Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing, so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one . . . felt oneself in the presence of the supranatural.”
Laurence was good at keeping his master’s secrets – from suppressing the reports of deadly radioactivity in New Mexico to denying them in Japan. The Times was also good at keeping secrets, only revealing Laurence’s dual status as government spokesman and reporter on August 7, the day after the Hiroshima bombing – and four months after Laurence began working for the Pentagon. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell wrote in their excellent book Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, “Here was the nation’s leading science reporter, severely compromised, not only unable but disinclined to reveal all he knew about the potential hazards of the most important scientific discovery of his time.”
Radiation: Now You See It, Now You Don’t
A curious twist to this story concerns another New York Times journalist who reported on Hiroshima; his name, believe it or not, was William Lawrence (his byline was W.H. Lawrence). He has long been confused with William L. Laurence. (Even Wilfred Burchett confuses the two men in his memoirs and his 1983 book, Shadows of Hiroshima.) Unlike the War Department’s Pulitzer Prize winner, W.H. Lawrence visited and reported on Hiroshima on the same day as Burchett. (William L. Laurence, after flying in the squadron of planes that bombed Nagasaki, was subsequently called back to the United States by the Times and did not visit the bombed cities.)
W.H. Lawrence’s original dispatch from Hiroshima was published on September 5, 1945. He reported matter-of-factly about the deadly effects of radiation, and wrote that Japanese doctors worried that “all who had been in Hiroshima that day would die as a result of the bomb’s lingering effects.” He described how “persons who had been only slightly injured on the day of the blast lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles, developed temperatures of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, their hair began to drop out, they lost their appetites, vomited blood and finally died.”
Oddly enough, W.H. Lawrence contradicted himself one week later in an article headlined NO RADIOACTIVITY IN HIROSHIMA RUIN. For this article, the Pentagon’s spin machine had swung into high gear in response to Burchett’s horrifying account of “atomic plague.” W.H. Lawrence reported that Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, chief of the War Department’s atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima, “denied categorically that [the bomb] produced a dangerous, lingering radioactivity.” Lawrence’s dispatch quotes only Farrell; the reporter never mentions his eyewitness account of people dying from radiation sickness that he wrote the previous week.
The conflicting accounts of Wilfred Burchett and William L. Laurence might be ancient history were it not for a modern twist. On October 23, 2003, The New York Times published an article about a controversy over a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to Times reporter Walter Duranty. A former correspondent in the Soviet Union, Duranty had denied the existence of a famine that had killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.
The Pulitzer Board had launched two inquiries to consider stripping Duranty of his prize. The Times “regretted the lapses” of its reporter and had published a signed editorial saying that Duranty’s work was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.” Current Times executive editor Bill Keller decried Duranty’s “credulous, uncritical parroting of propaganda.”
On November 21, 2003, the Pulitzer Board decided against rescinding Duranty’s award, concluding that there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in the articles that won the prize.
As an apologist for Joseph Stalin, Duranty is easy pickings. What about the “deliberate deception” of William L. Laurence in denying the lethal effects of radioactivity? And what of the fact that the Pulitzer Board knowingly awarded the top journalism prize to the Pentagon’s paid publicist, who denied the suffering of millions of Japanese? Do the Pulitzer Board and the Times approve of “uncritical parroting ” – as long as it is from the United States?
It is long overdue that the prize for Hiroshima’s apologist be stripped.
The original of the above article published on Aug. 10, 2004 is available here.
Amy Goodman is host of the national radio and TV show “Democracy Now!.” This is an excerpt from her new national bestselling book The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them, written with her brother journalist David, exposes the reporting of Times correspondent William L. Laurence. Democracy Now! is a national radio and TV program, broadcast on more than 240 stations.
Important Note: A profound 22-minute video features interviews of a number of “atomic soldiers” who were ordered to watch the nuclear bomb blasts from as close as a mile away. They were sworn to secrecy under a penalty of a $10,000 fine (roughly $100,000 in today’s dollars) or 10 years in jail and instructed never to talk to their wives or their fellow soldiers about anything they saw or experienced. Don’t miss this incredible film, available on this webpage, that the U.S. government doesn’t want you to see.
No place for nuclear in New York’s clean energy future
syracuse.com, by Joseph J. Heath & Betty Lyons 2 Dec 22
As New York energy demand and prices spike heading into winter, the state’s Climate Action Council (CAC) works on its final Scoping Plan for implementing New York’s landmark climate legislation, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). The Scoping Plan will lay out the details of how the state will accomplish the transition to clean energy, and how the transition will serve environmental justice.
Justice is a cornerstone of New York’s climate law, which stipulates that actions must not disproportionately burden disadvantaged communities. In a recent meeting, CAC members proposed strengthening Scoping Plan language to explain exactly why such burdens are unacceptable, and why climate and environmental justice must include every community in the state, including serious consultation with Indigenous Nations.
Continued reliance on nuclear plants — both existing and untested “advanced” nuclear or “small modular reactors” — violates these priorities. The Onondaga Nation, Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force and the American Indian Law Alliance concluded that nuclear power is not viable in combating climate change. The CAC should reach the same conclusion.
The CAC’s Climate Justice Working Group has called on the CAC to draft a serious plan to phase out Oswego County’s three aging nuclear plants (on the traditional territory of the Onondaga Nation): Nine Mile Point (NMP) Unit 1, NMP 2 and FitzPatrick. So far, CAC has not responded to that call.
All three plants are old and obsolete. NMP Unit 1 is the oldest operating U.S. reactor, commissioned in 1969; FitzPatrick in 1975. These two are already past the 40-year lifespan they were designed for. However, their operating licenses are dangerously extended — through 2029 for NMP Unit 1, 2034 for FitzPatrick and 2046 for NMP Unit 2 (commissioned in 1988). These plants require increasing repair and replacement as components age, and, since they cannot compete in an unrigged market, rely on massive state and federal subsidies taken from ratepayers.
The three Oswego plants have GE Boiling Water Reactors, the same flawed design as Fukushima: weak containment vessels and highly radioactive spent fuel stored on an upper floor. The vulnerable pools are packed with more fuel rods than they were designed to hold. If the pools leak or water circulation fails, risk of fire and major radiation rises significantly. Water levels at Lake Ontario in recent years came within one foot of flooding these cement pools, a major problem at Fukushima. With rain events increasing due to climate change, flooding-related catastrophes increase in likelihood…………
The longer the Oswego plants run, the worse their impacts will be. The plants’ day-to-day operation kills millions of fish, causes thermal pollution, withdraws 13 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario a year, and releases tritium (a non-filterable radioactive hydrogen isotope) into air and water, to be absorbed by plants and our skin, lungs and GI tracts.
A leading point in CAC’s consideration of how to serve justice through the Scoping Plan should be that the whole nuclear lifecycle disproportionately harms Indigenous Nations and Peoples.
Seneca Nation citizens living on the Cattaraugus “Reservation” have already been impacted by the West Valley nuclear fuel reprocessing facility south of Buffalo. Tritium and lethal isotopes Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 contaminate the soil, groundwater and surface waters including Cattaraugus Creek, which flows into Lake Erie…………………..
Impacts from existing and proposed nuclear plants are not trivial or dismissible. New York should not waste resources in so-called advanced nuclear plants or even riskier small modular reactors. This is no better than existing technology: They have the same life-cycle impacts, accident risks, high costs and toxic waste. The growing dangers of continuing spent fuel rod accumulation, with no safe storage mechanism and no plan, is enough of a reason for reasonable CAC members to refuse money for new nuclear plants.
Not only is new nuclear not a just option, the state should cease subsidizing Nine Mile Point Units 1 and 2 and FitzPatrick. Nuclear energy harms the environment and public health and violates Indigenous rights and sovereignty. Investing in any nuclear energy goes against New York’s commitment to environmental justice and climate justice.
Joe Heath has served as General Legal Counsel for the Onondaga Nation since 1982. He was a leader in the effort to ban fracking in New York state. Prior to law school, Heath served as an officer on nuclear submarines.
Betty Lyons is the president and executive director of The American Indian Law Alliance (AILA) and an Onondaga Nation citizen. AILA was founded in 1989; it is an Indigenous, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works with Indigenous nations, communities and organizations for sovereignty, human rights and social justice for Indigenous Peoples.
Videos showing execution of Russian POWs in Ukraine are authentic – New York Times
Rt.com 21 Nov 22
The clips suggest captive troops were “killed at close range,” the American newspaper insists.
The New York Times says it has verified the authenticity of videos that surfaced online last week, showing the execution of captive Russian soldiers by Ukrainian troops. The men “appear to have been shot dead at close range,” according to the newspaper.
The events shown in the clips occurred in the village of Makeyevka in the People’s Republic of Lugansk, earlier this month, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
“The videos… whose authenticity has been verified by The New York Times, offer a rare look into one gruesome moment among many in the war, but do not show how or why the Russian soldiers were killed,” the NYT wrote, adding that what actually happened to the soldiers remains “a mystery.”
However, the outlet noted out that judging by the footage, “at least 11 Russians… appear to have been shot dead at close range after one of their fellow fighters suddenly opened fire on Ukrainian soldiers standing nearby.”
The NYT also cited Dr. Rohini Haar, medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights, who said that “killing or wounding a combatant, who, having laid down his arms or having no longer means of defense, has surrendered at discretion” is a violation of the laws of international armed conflict……………….. https://www.rt.com/news/566901-ukraine-pow-execution-nyt/
The New York Times on Ukraine: Vietnam Déjà Vu
Zelensky did not explain how Ukraine was going to accomplish this, short of a U.S./NATO war with Russia. That’s the rub.
the Times wants to pre-empt Biden from doing the only sensible thing: tell Zelensky to stop the extreme rhetoric and talk to the Russians.
AntiWar.com, by Ray McGovern
The New York Times is going full-bore for war in Ukraine. It is difficult to explain the yellow journalism, but the so-called “paper of record” did the same thing on Vietnam (see below). In other words, the Gray Lady is whoring again.
It may be, as some allege, that the NYT has never met a war it did not want to get the U.S. involved in – or, once in, to escalate. However true that may be, I still cannot figure out why – why again.
With four Ukrainian oblasts about to join Russia and a mercurial President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, making outlandish threats to take them – and Crimea – back, perhaps the Times believes it must move decisively to make it as difficult as possible for President Biden to behave more sensibly.
The Guardian reported yesterday that “Zelensky has vowed to liberate the entire country as Russia pressed on with its supposed referendum in occupied areas of Ukraine …” Zelensky said Ukraine’s armed forces would throw the Russian forces out and retaliate against “every strike of the aggressor.” He pledged that Ukraine’s armed forces would regain control of the southern Kherson region and the eastern Donbas, which includes Luhansk province and Crimea.
Shades of Zelensky’s Feb. 24, 2021 Presidential Decree No. 117 “Approving the Strategy for de-occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol” – which gave the major push to growing tension in and around Ukraine.
Zelensky did not explain how Ukraine was going to accomplish this, short of a U.S./NATO war with Russia. That’s the rub.
Must Biden Appear Tough Before Midterms?
The Times seems out to use the prelude to the midterms to advantage. If past is prologue, the Times wants to pre-empt Biden from doing the only sensible thing: tell Zelensky to stop the extreme rhetoric and talk to the Russians.
The Times may fear the off-chance that an adult will come into the room and persuade President Biden that:
- He does not have to keep being diddled by Zelensky and his neocon supporters;
- Ukraine is not winning the war, despite recent successes on the battlefield;
- The US cannot seriously “weaken” Russia without risking wider war;
- On the sanctions front, German politicians may not be able to resist turning on the spigot to North Stream 2, lest the European economy and the European people freeze this winter.
Shameful
Never having been held accountable for reporting as flat fact that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and cheerleading for the US/UK war of aggression starting in March 2003, the New York Times seems to feel it has carte blanche to demonize Russian President Vladimir Putin, in exactly the same way it did Saddam Hussein – and Ho Chi Minh, for god’s sake, four decades earlier.
Over the weekend the Times’s reporting has been slanted to lead readers to conclude that Putin is some kind of monster with whom no one could possibly negotiate. NYT reporters and also opinion writers rely now on Ukrainian officials; then on US intelligence officials. The collective performance is truly a travesty.
On Saturday, for example, opinion writer David Brooks tells us Putin is “a deeply wounded tiger.” And ( get this!)……………………………………………..
that our major newspapers propagated a view that “the only way out of the crisis … was a military victory over the forces of Ho Chi Minh.” In other words, no negotiations.
Actually, the American public had been coming to the conclusion that the war was a mistake, but having been indoctrinated for so many years about our “vital interests” in Vietnam, opposition did not really gather steam until it was too late.
And today, for the Establishment media, it is déjà vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra – again.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/09/25/nyt-on-ukraine-vietnam-dj-vu/
The Insanity That Grips Washington – militarism applauded in New York Times
You know you’re living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War III while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned, writes Caitlin Johnston.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/28/the-insanity-that-grips-washington/ By Caitlin Johnstone, CaitlinJohnstone.com, 28 Sept 22,
The New York Times, which consistently supports every American war, has published an op-ed by a neoconservative think tanker titled “Biden’s Cautious Foreign Policy Imperils Us“.
This would be Joseph Biden, the president of the United States who has been consistently vowing to go to war with the People’s Republic of China if it attacks Taiwan, and whose administration has been pouring billions of dollars into a world-threatening proxy war in Ukraine which it knowingly provoked and from which it has no exit strategy.
With this administration’s acceleration toward global conflict on two different fronts, one could easily argue that Biden actually has the least cautious foreign policy of any president in history.
“In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threat and call-up of reservists, it was reassuring for the leader of the free world to be unflinching,” writes the article’s author Kori Schake, who then adds, “Rhetoric aside, the administration has signaled in numerous other ways that Putin’s threats have constrained support for Ukraine.”
As though the possibility of nuclear war should not constrain U.S. proxy warfare in that country. As though the crazy thing is not the U.S. government’s insane nuclear brinkmanship with Russia, but its reluctance to go further.
More Money for War
Schake criticizes the fact that while Biden has been saying a PRC attack on Taiwan would mean a direct U.S. hot war with China, the U.S. military would need far more funding and far greater expansion to be able to win such a war, so it should definitely do those things instead of simply not rushing into World War Three.
“But worse are the real gaps in capability that call into question whether the United States could indeed defend Taiwan,” Schake writes, adding:
“The ships, troop numbers, planes and missile defenses in the Pacific are a poor match for China’s capability. The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has assessed that the threat to Taiwan between now and 2030 is ‘acute,’ yet the defense budget is not geared to providing improved capabilities until the mid-2030s. More broadly, the Biden administration isn’t funding an American military that can adequately carry out our defense commitments, a dangerous posture for a great power. The Democratic-led Congress added $29 billion last year and $45 billion this year to the Department of Defense budget request, a measure of just how inadequate the Biden budget is.”
As Shchake discusses the urgent need to explode the U.S. military budget [already at $777.7 billion] in order to defend Taiwan, The New York Times neglects to inform us that Schake’s employer, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has been caught accepting a small fortune from Taiwan’s de facto embassy while churning out materials urging the U.S. government to go to greater lengths to arm Taiwan.
In a 2013 article titled “The Secret Foreign Donor Behind the American Enterprise Institute,” The Nation’s Eli Clifton reports that, thanks to a filing error by AEI, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office was found to have been one of the think tank’s top donors in 2009. Had that filing error not been made, we never would have learned this important information about AEI’s glaring conflict of interest in its Taiwan commentary.
AEI is one of the most prominent neoconservative think tanks in the United States, with extensive ties to Bush-era neocons like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Kristol and Kagan families, and has played a very active role in pushing for more war and militarism in U.S. foreign policy. Dick Cheney sits on its board of trustees, and Mike Pompeo celebrated his one year anniversary as C.I.A. director there.
Epitome of the Revolving Door
Schake herself is as intimately interwoven with the military-industrial complex as anyone can possibly be without actually being a literal Raytheon munition.
Her resume is a perfect illustration of the life of a revolving door swamp monster, from a stint at the Pentagon, to the university circuit, to the National Security Council, to the U.S. Military Academy, to the State Department, to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign, to the Hoover Institution, to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, to her current gig as director of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI.
Her entire career is the story of a woman doing everything she can to promote war while being rewarded with wealth and prestige for doing so.
And now here she is being granted space in The New York Times, a news media outlet of unrivaled influence where enemies of U.S. militarism and imperialism are consistently denied a platform, to tell us all that the Biden administration is endangering us not with its insanely reckless hawkishness, but by being too “cautious”.
One of the craziest things happening in the world today is the way westerners are being trained to freak out all the time about Russian propaganda, which barely exists in the west, even as we are hammered every day with extreme aggression by the immensely influential propaganda of the U.S.-centralized empire.
You know you are living in a profoundly sick society when the world’s most influential newspaper runs propaganda for World War Three while voices pushing for truth, transparency and peace are marginalized, silenced, shunned, and imprisoned.
Atomic Lies: New York’s bizarre Nuclear Preparedness PSA
http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/2022/07/16/atomic-lies-new-yorks-bizarre-nuclear-preparedness-psa/
July 16th, 2022 – by Gar Smith / Environmentalists Against War, ) — On July 11, New York City’s Emergency Management office released a Public Service Announcement that pretended to share important advice on steps New Yorkers could take to survive a nuclear attack. Here’s the PSA:
Re that “Don’t ask me how or why” PSA:
This updated version of the government’s misleading “duck-and-cover” nuclear war survival campaign from the 1950s begins by instructing New Yorkers to get away from the windows and huddle together “in the middle” of their building.
But, unlike a single-family suburban home, a typical New York high-rise apartment building can house thousands of individuals—so the “middle of the building” would get crowded pretty quickly.
While the PSA’s advice might help to survive a guided missile strike, it would be useless for a nuclear detonation. (All the more reason why there should be a nation-wide rebroadcast of ABC’s 1983 nuclear-strike enactment, “The Day After.”)
What Nuclear Scientists Say Would Happen
The New York PSA was so misleading that it prompted Steven Starr (a senior scientists with Physicians for Social Responsibility) to repost a 2015 research paper he co-authored with two other scientists. The article, which appeared in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, addressed “the consequences of the detonation of a single [800 kiloton] warhead over midtown Manhattan.” Here are some sobering details:
“Within a few tenths of millionths of a second after detonation, the center of the warhead would reach a temperature of roughly 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius), or about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.”“
[T]he enormous heat and light from the fireball would almost instantly ignite fires over a total area of about 100 square miles.”
“The mass fire, or firestorm, would quickly increase in intensity, heating enormous volumes of air that would rise at speeds approaching 300 miles per hour.”
“The fireball would vaporize the structures directly below it and produce an immense blast wave and high-speed winds, crushing even heavily built concrete structures within a couple miles of ground zero. The blast would tear apart high-rise buildings and expose their contents to the solar temperatures; it would spread fires by exposing ignitable surfaces, releasing flammable materials, and dispersing burning materials.”
- “Two miles from ground zero, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with all its magnificent historical treasures, would be obliterated. Two and half miles from ground zero, in Lower Manhattan, the East Village, and Stuyvesant Town, the fireball would appear 2,700 times brighter than a desert sun at noon.”
- ““Within tens of minutes, everything within approximately five to seven miles of Midtown Manhattan would be engulfed by a gigantic firestorm. The fire zone would cover a total area of 90 to 152 square miles. The firestorm would rage for three to six hours. Air temperatures in the fire zone would likely average 400 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Why Are They Telling Us To Prep For A Nuclear Attack??
Ellsberg on Nuclear Abolition or Annihilation
The following two short videos were released on July 11 by Defuse Nuclear War with the following introduction: Directed by Oscar-nominee Judith Ehrlich, this series explores the dangers of nuclear weapons and the politics that drive their existence. Hear firsthand accounts from Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg about his time as a nuclear war planner for the US military and learn hidden truth about realities of nuclear weapons.
ICBMs: Hair-Trigger Annihilation
War in Ukraine is getting complicated, and America isn’t ready — The New York Times
https://en.thepage.ua/politics/war-in-ukraine-is-getting-complicated-and-america-isnt-ready Author Valery Moiseev, 22 May 22,
The Senate passed a $40 billion emergency aid package for Ukraine, but with a small group of isolationist Republicans loudly criticizing the spending and the war entering a new and complicated phase, continued bipartisan support is not guaranteed. This is stated in an editorial published in The New York Times (NYT).
Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, warned the Senate Armed Services Committee recently that the war in Ukraine could take “a more unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory”, with the increased likelihood that Russia could threaten to use nuclear weapons.
The newspaper also notes that there are many questions that President Biden has yet to answer for the American public.
Is the United States, for example, trying to help bring an end to “this conflict” (as the newspaper calls the war in Ukraine) through a settlement that would allow for a sovereign Ukraine and some kind of relationship between the United States and Russia? Or is the United States now trying to weaken Russia permanently? Has the administration’s goal shifted to destabilizing Putin or having him removed? Does the United States intend to hold Putin accountable as a war criminal? Or is the goal to try to avoid a wider war — and if so, how to achieve this?
Without clarity on these questions, the White House not only risks losing Americans’ interest in supporting Ukrainians — who continue to suffer the loss of lives and livelihoods — but also jeopardizes long-term peace and security on the European continent, the NYT says.
The authors of the article believe that Americans “have been galvanized by Ukraine’s suffering”, but popular support for a war far from U.S. shores will not continue indefinitely. Inflation is a much bigger issue for American voters, and problems in global food and energy markets are likely to intensify.
“It is tempting to see Ukraine’s stunning successes against Russia’s aggression as a sign that with sufficient American and European help, Ukraine is close to pushing Russia back to its positions before the invasion. But that is a dangerous assumption.”
The article says that Russia remains too strong, and Putin has invested too much personal prestige in the invasion to back down.
“Unrealistic expectations could draw the United States and NATO ever deeper into a costly, drawn-out war. Russia, however battered and inept, is still capable of inflicting untold destruction on Ukraine and is still a nuclear superpower with an aggrieved, volatile despot who has shown little inclination toward a negotiated settlement.”
The NYT says that it is the Ukrainians who must make the hard decisions: they are the ones fighting, dying and losing their homes to Russian aggression, and it is they who must decide what an end to the war might look like. “If the conflict does lead to real negotiations, it will be Ukrainian leaders who will have to make the painful territorial decisions that any compromise will demand.”
But as the war continues, “Biden should also make clear to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his people that there is a limit to how far the United States and NATO will confront Russia, and limits to the arms, money and political support they can muster. It is imperative that the Ukrainian government’s decisions be based on a realistic assessment of its means and how much more destruction Ukraine can sustain.”
Confronting this reality may be painful, but it is not appeasement, the NYT stresses. This is what governments are duty bound to do, not chase after an illusory “win.” Russia will be feeling the pain of isolation and debilitating economic sanctions for years to come, and Putin will go down in history as a butcher. The challenge now is to shake off the euphoria, stop the taunting and focus on defining and completing the mission.
Strong call for New York City to legislate against investment of pension funds into nuclear weapons production
“We call on Speaker Corey Johnson and the City Council to vote and urgently pass Res. 976 and Intro.1621 to divest pension funds from nuclear weapon producers and reaffirm New York City as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. The legislation introduced by Council member Danny Dromm already inspired a historic hearing in City Hall and has the support of a majority of the City Council. As New Yorkers this is our moment to make hope and peace possible for a new generation.”
Nuclear disarmament campaigners press for legislation in New York City on 76th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings. Pressenza, 13.08.21 – US, United States – Pressenza New York In a commemoration of the August 6 and August 9, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was both somber and spirited, New York City-based nuclear disarmament advocates assembled outside the Municipal Building in downtown New York City. Advocates joined members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), 2017 Nobel Peace Laureate in honoring New York nuclear disarmament heroes and urging Council Speaker Corey Johnson to reaffirm NYC as a nuclear weapons free zone.
Speakers included Michie Takeuchi, second generation Hiroshima Hibakusha survivor, Robert Croonquist, Hibakusha Stories Project founder, Bud Courtney of the Catholic Worker, Dr. Emily Welty, Director of Peace and Justice Studies at Pace University, Seth Shelden, ICAN representative at the United Nations and Brendan Fay ogranizer with NYCAN (New York Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons).
Dr. Emily Welty reminded the gathering that the site for the Vigil is profound with history, because the development of the atomic bombs began across the street from City Hall at the Manhattan Project headquarters, at 270 Broadway.
In remarks Brendan Fay, Irish gay activist and nuclear disarmament advocate highlighted the legacy of LGBTQ New Yorkers in the global movement for nuclear disarmament.
- Bayard Rustin (1912-1987) highlighted the connection between colonialism, racism and nuclear weapons and traveled to Algeria in 1959 to protest French nuclear testing.
- James Baldwin (1924 –1987) as a member of National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was among the leading speakers at the 1961 Peace Rally in Washington, DC. He said, “What am I doing here? Only those who would fail to see the relationship between the fight for civil rights and the struggle for world peace would be surprised to see me. Both fights are the same.”
- David McReynolds (1929-2018) was the first openly gay presidential candidate, a socialist and lifelong pacifist. During his 40-year career with the War Resisters League he became an international hero of the nuclear disarmament movement.
- Leslie Cagan (b. 1947) was a lead organizer of the largest disarmament rally in US history, the June 12, 1982 Rally Against the Arms Race.
- Peter Ciccchino (1960-2000) was arrested over two dozen times for peace, for nuclear disarmament, and for housing and human rights.
Fay thanked Council Member Danny Dromm (District 25) for introducing the nuclear divestment legislation in 2019. “Council Member Dromm follows the steps of previous council members including Council President and civil rights leader Paul O’Dwyer (1907 – 1998) who was a strong advocate for nuclear disarmament in City Hall.
Holding a poster of African American Civil rights leader and nuclear disarmament advocate Bayard Rustin,
Fay said, “As LGBTQ+ New Yorkers we join the rest of the human family this August 6th and August 9th in raising our voices to demand a world without nuclear weapons, for the sake of the children, for a future of hope. On this 76th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we say there is no Pride in bomb production. There is no Pride in raising the rainbow flag while investing in weapons of death.”
What of the nuclear weapons New York worker pensions are invested in? They are built to divide, harm, maim, kill. $475 million (0.25%) of New York worker pension funds are currently invested in the production of nuclear weapons. Our worker pensions must no longer be used as weapons of war. We are nurses, doctors, teachers, sanitation workers, firefighters, social workers, artists – our common cause is justice and peace……..
Fay said, “We call on Speaker Corey Johnson and the City Council to vote and urgently pass Res. 976 and Intro.1621 to divest pension funds from nuclear weapon producers and reaffirm New York City as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. The legislation introduced by Council member Danny Dromm already inspired a historic hearing in City Hall and has the support of a majority of the City Council. As New Yorkers this is our moment to make hope and peace possible for a new generation.”…….
Resolution 976 calls on the Comptroller to instruct pension funds to divest from companies involved in the production of nuclear weapons (approximately $475 million dollars) and re-affirms New York City as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.
Introduction 1621 establishes a Nuclear Disarmament Advisory Committee to advise the City Council.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, adopted by 122 countries in 2017, makes nuclear weapons comprehensively illegal and became international law on January 22, 2021. https://www.pressenza.com/2021/08/nuclear-disarmament-campaigners-press-for-legislation-in-new-york-city-on-76th-anniversary-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki-bombings/
The ”New Yorker” sinks to sloppy sentimenta praise of pro nuclear advocates
The Once-Proud New Yorker Soils Itself in Radioactive Offal https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/67935-rsn-the-once-proud-new-yorker-soils-itself-in-radioactive-offal, By Harvey Wasserman, 21 February 21
or decades, The New Yorker has set a high bar for journalistic excellence.
Graced by its signature brand of droll, sophisticated cartooning, the magazine’s exquisitely edited screeds have reliably delivered profound analyses of the world’s most pressing issues.
But in a breathless, amateurish pursuit of atomic energy, the editorial staff has leapt into a sad sinkhole of radioactive mediocracy.
The latest is Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s shallow, shoddy “Activists Who Embrace Nuclear Power,” yet another tedious plea that we learn to love the Peaceful Atom.
For at least a century, countless scientific pioneers have exposed the murderous realities of nuclear radiation. Legendary researchers like Marie Curie, Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell, Helen Caldicott, John Gofman, Ernest Sternglass, Thomas Mancuso, Karl Z. Morgan, Samuel Epstein, Robert Alvarez, Arnie Gundersen, Amory Lovins, and others have issued vital warnings.
In Pavlovian opposition, the industry has rolled out an endless array of amateur “environmentalists” whose activist credentials are distinguished only by an endless love for atomic power.
Most infamous are Greenpeace veteran Patrick Moore and Berkeley-based Michael Shellenberger, both climate skeptics who share a theatrical passion for uninspected, uninsured nukes. With no credible scientific credentials, this unholy pair has conjured imaginative advocacies for companion corporate embarrassments like genetically modified food, clear-cut deforestation, and more.
With far more prestige, climate pioneer Dr. James Hanson and Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand have brought significant gravitas to the nuclear debate.
But The New Yorker dotes on two workers at California’s Diablo Canyon. Neither is a scientist. Both claim to be “environmentalists.” One wears a lavender pendant made of uranium glass which “emits a near-negligible amount” of radiation, despite a huge body of scientific evidence warning this is a literally insane thing to do – especially for someone who might be around small children.
The writer lauds her heroines for calling themselves “Mothers for
Nuclear” while snubbing legendary “Mothers for Peace” activists who’ve organized locally for a half-century. While touring Diablo with her new best friends, the author coos that “we smiled as if we were at Disneyland.”
Such “Nuclear Renaissance” absurdities are very old news.
Given The New Yorker’s stellar history, we might expect a meaningful, in-depth exploration of today’s core atomic realities: no more big reactors will be built in the US, and our 90+ old plants are in deep, dangerous disarray.
Forbes long ago branded atomic power “the largest managerial failure in US history.” America’s very last two reactors (at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle) sucked up $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees from Barack Obama plus $3.7 billion more from Donald Trump. Years behind schedule, Vogtle’s final price tag (if it ever opens) will exceed $30 billion.
South Carolina’s engineering and legal morass at V.C. Summer wasted more than $10 billion on two failed reactors. In Ohio, $61 million in utility bribes for a massive nuke bailout have shattered the state.
As for alternatives, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow says, “nuclear scientists, for their part, are working on smaller, more nimble nuclear reactors. There are complex economic considerations, which are inseparable from policy.”
In other words, the proposed Small Modular Reactors are already so clearly uncompetitive that only obsessive pro-nukers (like Bill Gates) think they’ll hold market value against wind and solar (which The New Yorker attacks).
Precisely as ice storms froze feedwater pipes and shut one of two reactors at the South Texas Nuclear Plant, the magazine falsely claims that atomic reactors do “not depend on particular weather conditions to operate.” Globally-warmed rivers can no longer reliably cool many French reactors. Earthquakes have dangerously damaged US-designed nukes in Ohio and Virginia. Intake pipes at Diablo and other coastal plants are vulnerable to tsunami surges. Staggering design and construction flaws (a major Diablo component was once installed backwards; boric acid ate through key parts of Ohio’s Davis-Besse) give the entire industry a Keystone Kops/Rube Goldberg aura.
Tuhus-Dubrow skims the waste issue. Dry casks at Diablo and elsewhere are generally less than an inch thick. They can’t be re-opened for inspection or maintenance, and are already cracking (more-versatile German casks are 19 inches thick).
With an average age of well over 30, US reactors face dangerous decay. After four years of Trump, and even longer as a corrupt rubber stamp, the infamously dysfunctional Nuclear Regulatory Commission has left these collapsing, uninsured jalopies virtually unregulated and uninspected.
Tuhus-Dubrow ignores the fact that (unlike Disneyland) Diablo Unit One was long ago reported to be severely embrittled. That means critical components could shatter like glass if flooded to contain a meltdown. Ensuing Chernobyl-scale steam and hydrogen explosions would spread apocalyptic radiation throughout the ecosphere.
Despite a petition signed by more than 2,000 Californians and key Hollywood A-listers, Gov. Gavin Newsom refuses to inspect Diablo’s decayed reactors.
The New Yorker says smoke coming from huge northern California fires dimmed solar panels. But those fires were caused by the gross incompetence, neglect, and mismanagement of the twice-bankrupt Pacific Gas & Electric, which runs Diablo.
PG&E is a federal felon, convicted for killing scores of Californians in avoidable explosions and fires. Tuhus-Dubrow simply ignores such slipshod mismanagement, which could prove catastrophic at a nuke as old as Diablo.
Overall, the nuke power debate has long since transcended random, folksy industry devotees who like to label themselves “green.” No serious analyst argues that, after the fiscal fiascos at V.C. Summer and Plant Vogtle, any big new reactors will ever be built in the US. Small ones are cost-prohibitive pipe dreams, especially as wind, solar, battery and LED/efficiency technologies continue to advance.
The question of how long America’s 90+ jalopy nukes can run until the next one explodes remains unanswered … and utterly terrifying.
Somehow, the revered New Yorker has polluted its pages with a pro-nuke fantasy while missing this most critical atomic issue.
Let’s hope it corrects the deficiency before the next Chernobyl lays waste to our own nation.
Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solatopia.org, along with The People’s Spiral of US History.
Fukushima launches first sake promotion event in New York
New York’s Climate Strike and the Things That Make Teen-Agers March — limitless life
Cultural Comment New York’s Climate Strike and the Things That Make Teen-Agers March By Alexandra Schwartz September 20, 2019 What had brought so many teens to Foley Square, in Manhattan, for the New York climate strike? Everyone’s answer was the same, the only one possible: a sense of existential threat. Photograph by Jonno Rattman for The […]
via New York’s Climate Strike and the Things That Make Teen-Agers March — limitless life
New York City supports students’ climate protest
More than one million New York students allowed to skip school for climate protest, Public school students in New York are allowed to skip class to join the youth climate strikes.
SBS NEWS, BY ANNE BARNARD 18 Sep 19 When New York City announced that public school students could skip classes without penalties to join the youth climate strikes planned around the world on Friday, you could almost hear a sigh of relief.Before the announcement, the protests, to be held three days ahead of the United Nations Climate Action Summit, had thrown a new complication into the usual back-to-school chaos: With the protests framed as a cry to protect their futures from climate disaster, should students heed the call?
Parents had wondered how to word emails to principals requesting excused absences. Teachers had been wondering how to react. Some students had been vowing to protest no matter what, but others had worried about possible repercussions.
Most of all, the decision last week by the nation’s largest school district buoyed national protest organisers, who are hoping that the demonstrations will be the largest on climate in US history, with at least 800 planned across the 50 states. They expressed hope that other districts around the country would follow suit.
“Holy smokes, this thing could get HUGE,” Jamie Henn, a founder of the climate action organisation 350.org, said on Twitter after the decision was announced by New York City’s Department of Education………
Demonstrators as young as nine had already turned up to greet the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg when she arrived last month by an emissions-free yacht in New York Harbour. Greta has inspired Friday student protests in at least 100 countries.
Larger crowds, mostly of high school students, have demonstrated with her on two recent Fridays at the United Nations………
Some 600 medical professionals across the country have also signed a virtual “doctor’s note” encouraging teachers to excuse students on the grounds that climate change is dangerous to their and others’ health. HTTPS://WWW.SBS.COM.AU/NEWS/MORE-THAN-ONE-MILLION-NEW-YORK-STUDENTS-ALLOWED-TO-SKIP-SCHOOL-FOR-CLIMATE-PROTEST
Australian investigative journalist exposes Guardian/New York Times betrayal of Assange — Rise Up Times
The papers leaked by Manning documented at least 200 civilian deaths at the hands of US and allied forces that had previously been hidden from the public, along with clear evidence of war crimes, including the existence of a secret “black unit” within the US military, tasked with carrying out illegal assassinations.
City councillors call for New York City to divest from companies involved in the production of nuclear weapons
Nuclear Weapons Money 27th June 2019 Move the Nuclear Weapons Money welcomes the initiative of New York CityCouncil members Daniel Dromm, Helen Rosenthal and Ben Kallos to call on New York City to divest from companies involved in the production of nuclear
weapons, and to reaffirm New York City as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.
On June 26, the city councillors introduced Resolution 976 calling on the City
Council to make such a policy decision, and Initiative 1621 under which the
City would establish an advisory committee to examine nuclear disarmament
and issues related to recognizing and reaffirming New York city as a
nuclear weapons-free zone.
The council declared New York to be a
Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in 1983 with the adoption of Resolution 364 which
prohibits the production, transport, placement or deployment of nuclear
weapons within the territorial limits of New York City, and the adoption of
Resolution 568 which declared that no ship be permitted to bring nuclear
missiles into the harbour of New York.
As Reactors Shut in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Nuke War Rages in Ohio and New York
Reader Supported News, 11 May 19
As the nuke power industry slumps toward oblivion, two huge reactors are shutting in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
The shutdowns are a body blow to atomic energy. The soaring costs of the decayed US reactor fleet have forced them to beg gerrymandered state legislatures for huge bailouts.
Just two US reactors are still being built. Stuffed with $12 billion in interest-free federal loans, Georgia’s Vogtle is nearing a staggering $30 billion in cost. Years behind schedule, the lowest possible costs of whatever electricity the two reactors there might produce already far exceed wind and solar.
Virtually none of the 98 US reactors now operating can compete with wind, solar, or methane. All but one are more than twenty years old, with serious issues of obsolescence and decay; some are more than forty, operating far behind their original design life.
Four decrepit, money-losing, upstate New York State reactors still run because Governor Andrew Cuomo is handing them $7.6 billion in bailouts. This year’s price tag jumped more than $50 million, despite Cuomo’s promise it would drop. Safe energy/consumer groups are fighting him in court.
Cuomo has otherwise agreed to shut two old reactors at Indian Point, which sit on an earthquake fault north of New York City.
But Illinois has voted billions to sustain three old reactors that can’t compete with wind/solar and gas. New Jersey has also jumped in with hundreds of millions for money-losing nukes.
In Massachusetts, the Pilgrim reactor will shut this month. The New York Times says Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Unit One will die in September, dropping the US fleet to 96. The industry wants to scam billions in bailouts for the Keystone State’s other nukes, which are being vastly outstripped by renewables.
But the Ohio war over two geezer nukes rages full bore. Their owner, Akron’s FirstEnergy, is bankrupt, trying to shed its cleanup responsibilities. Despite slipping millions in “lobbying” to key state officials, FirstEnergy has still been unable to shaft the state with its $300m/year nuke-bailout scam.
Designed in the 1960s, FirstEnergy’s Davis-Besse opened near Toledo in 1977. A serious accident presaged the 1979 meltdown at its doomed clone, Three Mile Island Unit Two.
In 2002, boric acid ate Davis-Besse’s infamous “hole in the head” to within an inch of irradiating the entire Great Lakes and north coast.
The leaks are still an issue. But Davis-Besse’s owners sawed off the top of an abandoned Michigan nuke, cut through the containment building, and pasted it into the damaged reactor. The radioactive shield building is crumbling along with the rest of the nuke, from top to bottom.
East of Cleveland, Perry opened in 1986, just after the first earthquake that damaged a US nuke. To this day, no operators have been forced to run a reactor caught amidst a seismic shaking.
The utility and its backers are betting on Ohio’s gerrymandered legislature to gouge some $300 million from the tax/rate-paying public. A bevy of “free market” Republicans wants at least $150 million per year for the nukes, and another $150 million or more for various unclear activities, including about $8.5 million yearly for company president Chuck Jones.
FirstEnergy burns huge quantities of gas, oil, and coal but hypes its “emissions free” nukes that spew Carbon 14, heat, and radiation. The industry does not want to mention or pay for its thousands of tons of radioactive waste.
Such details are loudly overlooked by a mutant choir trumpeting nukes as “zero emission.” All reactors spew deadly isotopes along with climate-killing heat and some Carbon 14. They stand in the way of the wind, solar, batteries, and LED efficiency that comprise our only route to saving the climate.
Ohio’s north coast region is great for wind. More than $4 billion in private capital is waiting to create more than 10,000 jobs while slashing electric rates. The surrounding states of Indiana, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania have far more wind turbines than Ohio, operating at big profits with substantial workforces.
But an absurd anti-green setback requirement from a bought legislature has frozen Ohio’s turbine industry. Without that single Ohio Code sentence, cheap wind energy would be flooding the state. The “need” for nukes would evaporate. The reactor jobs “lost” would be dwarfed by those in renewables.
Against all odds, a very broad coalition of environmentalists, wind promoters, consumers, and industrialists has kept FirstEnergy at bay. Bailout opponents vastly outnumber nuke pushers at ongoing hearings.
But worldwide, the clock ticks on the next old money-sucking reactor to collapse from incompetence and greed, or to crumble in an earthquake, tsunami, or terror attack.
The shutdowns of Pilgrim and Three Mile Island mark huge victories for jobs, the economy, and the climate. If green advocates can now win in Ohio and Pennsylvania and roll back the insanity in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, the march of the shutdowns just might outrun the next meltdown. Stay tuned!
Harvey Wasserman’s Green Power & Wellness Show is podcast at prn.fm; California Solartopia is broadcast at KPFK-Pacifica, 90.7 fm, Los Angeles. His Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to Solartopia will soon be at www.solartopia.org.
1.This Month
EVENTS.
Movie Premiere -“The Road to War”- Australia is being set up to be the US proxy in its coming war with China.
Premiere in Melbourne March 22 at the Carlton Nova cinema
Hobart screening State Cinema March 23 with special guest Bob Brown
Adelaide screening Capri cinema March 29
Further information or interviews with David Bradbury:
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