Unusual secrecy around 1950s nuclear testing , The Saturday Paper, Martin McKenzie-Murray 18 May 19 Between 1952 and 1957, Britain tested 12 nuclear weapons in Australia – on the Montebello Islands off the Pilbara coast, and at Maralinga and Emu Fields in the South Australian outback. The tests were hurried, incautious and showed extraordinary disregard for Australian assistance and the local Indigenous people who had been forcibly but imperfectly evacuated from their land.
It was a clusterfuck,” says Elizabeth Tynan, an Australian historian, and the award-winning author of Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga Story. “The disregard was partly driven by the fact they were in a rush. They cut corners. They did it on the cheap – and it showed. They had very little regard for safety. Cavalier. They knew about the risks. There were international protocols. Many were disregarded. I met one man, he was a technician with the British effort in Australia, and he said of Indigenous Australians that they were ‘nothing to do with us – it was the Australian government’s responsibility’.”
For Susanne Roff growing up in Melbourne in the 1950s was uneventful. But later, living in Scotland with her husband, William Roff, an eminent historian, she developed a dogged, almost obsessive interest in this chapter of British history that remains cloaked in secrecy.
Once a month, Roff takes the train south from her home in a Scottish fishing village – to archives in London, Birmingham and Cambridge. She’s still looking for answers. “Why was the purportedly Australia-controlled Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee so ineffective?” she asks. “Why was the UK able to continue testing at Maralinga until barely six weeks before opening of the 1956 Olympics despite the known hazards to east coast populations? Why didn’t [Sir Mark] Oliphant ever speak out against the tests and contamination, including when he was governor of South Australia?”
Late last year, Roff had another question: Why, more than 60 years after the last nuclear test in Australia, had the British government suddenly vanished previously declassified documents about the tests from its national archives? Roff wasn’t alone in her surprise. The Campaign for Freedom of Information, a British not-for-profit organisation, described it as worrying.
All that was certain was that the files had been removed on the order of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
“WE CAN BUT WONDER WHY THE WORLD’S THIRD ATOMIC AND THERMONUCLEAR POWER HAS SUDDENLY BECOME SO NERVOUS ABOUT EVENTS THAT HAPPENED DECADES AGO.”“The secrecy is arguably even worse today,” Tynan tells me. She is working on a second book about the British tests. “British service personnel have run into brick walls at every turn [in seeking compensation and acknowledgement]. One of the clues to the attitude of the British government is that it has not really ever properly acknowledged what they did. They were nuclear colonialists and they buggered up a part of our country. One former British personnel I met burst into tears when he thought about how Britain had never said sorry. The secrecy … seems incomprehensible. They continue to be secretive.”
But not all documents are closeted. Susanne Roff has some, which she shared with me – British intelligence files on Dr Eric Burhop, an Australian physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, which ran from 1939 to 1946. …….
Robert Menzies agreed to the testing immediately, without bothering to consult cabinet. For a time, only three people in the country knew of the agreement: the prime minister, treasurer and defence minister. He asked few questions of the British. “But it wasn’t pure patriotic sycophancy,” Tynan says of Menzies’ decision. “The pragmatic response was: vast reserves of uranium in Australia. It’s central to weaponry and power. It was completely valueless until the Manhattan Project. Then it became a valuable commodity. Australia had a lot of it. That was a very significant part of his reasoning. The other thing that would’ve informed Menzies’ thinking was that he was anxious to ensure Britain and America would protect Australia.”
They were also without the counsel of the Australians who had worked on the American tests – notably, Mark Oliphant and Eric Burhop. Both Susanne Roff and Elizabeth Tynan agree Oliphant would have been a strong head of the safety authority, which was otherwise feckless.
Both men were long suspected of being Communist spies, and may have been excluded to mollify US doubts about British security. The files on Burhop that I’ve seen are voluminous. The FBI, MI5 and ASIO all had records on him. In England and America, he was aggressively surveilled. His phone was tapped. Even Joseph Rotblat had his doubts about his former colleague. The British intelligence historian Andrew Brown has written: “Rotblat remained convinced that Burhop and other left-wing scientists … opposed the [proposed nuclear] moratorium not for their stated reasons but because it would perpetuate the USA’s monopoly and place the USSR at a dangerous disadvantage.”……
In 1984, Australia held a royal commission into the British tests. It found a litany of negligence and cover-ups. “Britain had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to it,” Elizabeth Tynan says. Today, their attitude is much the same. In 2015, Fiji – frustrated by Britain’s refusal to compensate its people who suffered radiation poisoning during the Pacific tests – declared it would compensate citizens itself. “We are bringing justice to a brave and proud group of Fijians to whom a great injustice was done,” Fiji’s prime minister said. “Fiji is not prepared to wait for Britain to do the right thing.”
Meanwhile, in Britain’s national archives, the nuclear files are still gone. “The UK government has always [downplayed] risks to the servicemen who took part in the tests, the Aboriginal community in the immediate vicinity of them, and the general population downwind … as well as possible genetic effects on subsequent generations,” Susanne Roff says. “We see similar responses in relation to Fukushima in Japan. All the operational and scientific documents relating to the Australian tests that have been on open access in the National Archives have suddenly gone walkabout. We can but wonder why the world’s third atomic and thermonuclear power has suddenly become so nervous about events that happened decades ago.” https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/law-crime/2019/05/18/unusual-secrecy-around-1950s-nuclear-testing/15581016008158
PRESIDENT KENNEDY GAVE ISRAEL A STRONG WARNING ABOUT ITS NUCLEAR REACTOR IN 1963
Kennedy, who was otherwise close to Israel, was furious with its ostensible nuclear weapons program., Jerusalem Post, BY RON KAMPEAS/JTA MAY 8, 2019 WASHINGTON (JTA) — Declassified documents show President John Kennedy warned Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1963 that U.S. support for the young country would be “seriously jeopardized” if Israel did not allow the United States periodic inspections of Israel’s nuclear reactor.
A telegram from Kennedy dated July 4, 1963, congratulates Eshkol on assuming the prime ministership after David Ben-Gurion’s resignation and recounts talks between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion about inspections at the reactor in Dimona.
“As I wrote Mr. Ben-Gurion, this government’s commitment to and support of Israel could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought that we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as Israel’s effort in the nuclear field,” the telegram said.
I Guarded Israel’s First Nuclear Device, Former Israeli Reveals in U.S. Testimony, Haaretz, 1 May 19
Elie Geisler says he was asked during the Six Day War to guard a secret base in central Israel that held the device. He described a clash with Col. Yitzhak Yaakov, who demanded control of the base and threatened to break into it by force
Ofer Aderet A former Israeli is claiming that during the Six Day War, he commanded a secret base in the center of the country where a nuclear core was stored that could have been used in a nuclear weapon.
In an interview appearing on the website of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Elie Geisler, who was a trained radiation inspector, tells Prof. Avner Cohen that he had been assigned to guard the device for the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. He also told Cohen that he feared there could be armed internal Israeli conflict over control of nuclear power. ………
During that period, said Geisler, the atmosphere at the base, like in the rest of the country, was “a mix of uncertainty and bellicosity.” He reflected on the fact that “I had under my control the first Jewish nuclear core. I had read some books and articles about the origins of the atomic bomb and recognized the enormous contributions of Jewish physicists to the making of the bomb—from Albert Einstein to Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard. I would stand in this small room and stare at the object with much awe, having seen photos and movies of the devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ……..
Geisler first addressed these events in a book he published in the United States under a pseudonym in 2017. In July of that year, Haaretz ran an article by historian Adam Raz about the book, under the title “The De Facto Coup D’etat: when Moshe Dayan Tried to Steal Israel’s First Nuclear Device.”
Yaakov, later a brigadier general, gave his own account to Cohen in interviews in 1999 and 2000, whose contents were published in 2017, four years after Yaakov’s death. Yaakov testified that official Israeli figures had planned to explode a nuclear device on a mountain in Sinai to deter Arab states from attacking. “……..
Cohen, author of “Israel and the Bomb” and “The Worst-Kept Secret,” is a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California, and a senior fellow at the Wilson Center. The interview with Geisler was initiated by Cohen and Joshua Pollack. His testimony appears in the newest edition of the journal Nonproliferation Review, which is published by the Middlebury Institute, and was simultaneously posted in the Wilson Center’s digital archives as part of its Avner Cohen Collection. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-former-israeli-in-u-s-interview-i-guarded-nuclear-device-during-six-day-war-1.7186402
Entrepreneurs turn their hand to armageddon the cover story of the Observer Magazine of 4 July 1982 (‘This man thinks you should buy a fall-out shelter’) says that Switzerland has large nuclear shelters under virtually every new building and claims that the Swiss are ‘leaders in domestic shelter technology’. Perhaps this is finally something to add to Harry Lime’s list of Swiss achievements, to go with brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and the cuckoo clock.
The piece is like something torn from a surrealist catalogue. You can almost hear Ted Rogers from 3-2-1 reading out the star prize credentials to the winners: ‘The Crabtree Subterrain shelters are prefabricated galvanised corrugated steel cylinders with unusually long access ways, enabling burial up to a depth of 20ft. All the shelters in the range hold five to seven people in varying degrees of comfort, and prices range from £1,000 for the 7ft model to £9,660 for the 20ft model, plus installation.’ That ‘varying degrees of comfort’ is given the lie by the pictures of the shelters, whose interior aesthetics are all ship’s cabin meets office stationery cupboard.
‘Renewed anxiety about the prospect of nuclear war at the start of 1980 sparked off a boom in the shelter-building industry,’ the article continues, ‘but public response has been considerably less enthusiastic.’ Presumably it was less enthusiastic still after the harrowing TV series Threads aired two years later, which left viewers wondering, who’d want to survive?
Just as in Dr Strangelove, there are always people willing to monetise nuclear armageddon. ‘A growing band of entrepreneurs have eagerly turned their hands to designing shelters. However, enterprise is no substitute for expertise, and many are structures of questionable effectiveness.’ Good luck trying to get your money back after the apocalypse.
The Crazy Story of How Israel Became a Military Giant (Thanks to Nuclear Weapons) And they will never admit it. National Interest, by Zachary Keck, 19 Apr 19, Although Israel doesn’t officially acknowledge it, it is well understood that the country possesses a nuclear weapon arsenal (although the exact number of warheads are in dispute). It is similarly well understood that the United States opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program during the John F. Kennedy and, to a lesser extent, Lyndon B. Johnson administrations. One part of the history that is less well known is that much of the funding for Israel’s nuclear weapons program came from private Americans in an effort that was spearheaded by, Abraham Feinberg, a prominent American who served as an unofficial advisor to both President Kennedy and President Johnson.
Israel’s interest in nuclear weapons basically dates back to the founding of the Jewish state in 1948. The country’s founding leader, David Ben-Gurion, was haunted both by the Holocaust and the unremitting hostility Israel faced from its much larger Arab neighbors. Ben-Gurion viewed nuclear weapons as a last resort option for ensuring the survival of the Jewish state in case its enemies ever used their much larger populations and economies to build conventionally superior militaries.
The problem Ben-Gurion and his closest advisors faced was that their young, poor, and relatively unsophisticated country didn’t possess the necessary technological and material resources to support an indigenous nuclear weapons program. Israel’s best hope of acquiring nuclear weapons came from finding a foreign patron. Fortunately for Israel, contemporary circumstances created conditions for it to obtain this support……..
France agreed to provide Israel with a small research reactor similar to the EL-3 reactor France had built at Saclay. Of course, the Suez invasion quickly went awry with both the United States and Soviet Union threatening Israel, France and Britain in different ways to get them to withdraw. France was unable to protect Israel from the superpowers’ threats. Before agreeing to withdraw, however, Israel demanded that Paris sweeten the nuclear cooperation. France agreed to provide Israel with a much larger plutonium-producing reactor at Dimona, natural uranium to fuel the reactor, and a reprocessing plant—basically everything Israel would need to use the plant to produce plutonium for a bomb except for heavy water.
This was a major coup—no country before or since has provided another state with such an extensive amount of the technology required to build a nuclear bomb. Still, it was only half the battle. Ben-Gurion still had to come up with the funds necessary to pay for the nuclear deal for France. ….
the Israeli prime minister decided to create a private fund to finance the deal with France. As documented by Michael Karpin in his excellent history of the Israel’s nuclear program,The Bomb in the Basement, Ben-Gurion directed his staff simply to “call Abe,” referring to Abe Feinberg. Feinberg was a prominent New York businessman, philanthropist and Jewish American leader with close ties to the Democratic Party. Feinberg was a prominent New York businessman, philanthropist and Jewish American leader with close ties to the Democratic Party. Before America’s entry into World War II, Feinberg had raised money to help European Jews emigrate to Palestine. After the war ended, he—like Ben-Gurion—went to Europe to view the Holocaust concentration camps. He also helped smuggle Holocaust survivors into Palestine at a time when the British had created blockades to prevent illegal Jewish immigration. During this time, he forged lasting bonds with many of the men who would later become senior leaders of the state of Israel. Upon returning back to the United States, he helped lobby President Harry Truman to recognize the Jewish state once it declared its independence. In return, Feinberg helped raise money for Truman’s reelection campaign.
Thus, it was natural that in October 1958 Ben-Gurion would turn to Feinberg to help raise the funds necessary for the Dimona deal. In fact, this wasn’t the first time Ben-Gurion would turn to American Jewish leaders to raise money for Israel’s causes. Foreseeing there would soon be a war of independence, Ben-Gurion went to New York in 1945 to raise funds to purchase armaments for the Jews in Palestine. …….
WW3 fears: How Britons were warned ‘NO ONE is safe’ during nuclear announcementBRITONS were told to “stay indoors” as “no place in the United Kingdom is safe” from the deadly threat of a nuclear bomb striking the nation during a broadcast intended to educate the population.
Express UK, By CALLUM HOARE Apr 12, 2019 Chilling video footage reveals how the UK was seriously preparing for a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union more than 40 years ago. It came as part of the “Protect and Survive” guide that was handed out during Margaret Thatcher’s Government during the Cold War in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Its purpose was to advise the public on how to act in the event of an imminent nuclear threat.
BRITONS were told to “stay indoors” as “no place in the United Kingdom is safe” from the deadly threat of a nuclear bomb striking the nation during a broadcast intended to educate the population.
Chilling video footage reveals how the UK was seriously preparing for a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union more than 40 years ago. It came as part of the “Protect and Survive” guide that was handed out during Margaret Thatcher’s Government during the Cold War in the late Seventies and early Eighties. Its purpose was to advise the public on how to act in the event of an imminent nuclear threat.
The information series, which was released to the public, was issued through pamphlets, radio broadcasts and films.
One part of a video, which was broadcasted on state TV, discussed nuclear fallout – the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast. It explained how this toxic dust and ash can be carried by the wind and therefore poses a threat to everyone in the UK. The narrator says: “Fallout is dust that is sucked up from the ground by the explosion
Fallout can kill and since it can be carried for great distances by the wind, it can settle anywhere – so no place in the United Kingdom is safe.
“The risk is as great in the countryside as in the towns, nobody can tell where the safest place will be.”
The documentary went on to reveal the Government’s safest advice of “stay at home” in the event of an attack.
It added: “You are just as safe in your own home as anywhere else.
“In fact, you are far better off in your home because it is the place you know and are known. So stay where you are – if you leave, your local authority may take it over for homeless families.
“And if you move, the authorities in the new place will not help you with food, accommodation or other essentials.”
The “Protect and Survive” campaign was released at a time when tensions between the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc were at an all-time high.
US President Ronald Reagan’s election victory in 1980 brought the world the closest it had been to nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, as his “evil empire” narrative proved to be particularly antagonising to the Soviet Politburo.
The Soviets racked up their defence and placed SS-30 missiles across eastern Europe as a show of force.
However, the US retaliated by convincing its allies in Europe to host its Pershing 2 ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles.
The fate of the world hung in the balance and Mrs Thatcher’s determination to make sure Britons were prepared for the worst is a testament to how seriously the situation was taken at the time.
The guide also taught families how to create a fallout room and, within that, an inner refuge.
It said families may have to stay inside there for at least two weeks, so stocking up on food and supplies was essential. Britons were urged to store three-and-a-half gallons of water each, keeping it in the bath or basins.
They were also given advice should they not be at home when a nuclear bomb struck.
The public was advised to “lie flat in a ditch and cover exposed skin”.
In the event of someone dying in a fallout room, their family should “place the body in another room and cover it as securely as possible”.
Since the early 1950s, the United States and Russia have had numerous accidents with their nuclear bombs, and a number have even gone missing. By Marcia Wendorf, April, 06th 2019 “Broken Arrow” is the name given to nuclear weapon accidents, whether they be by accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft or loss of the weapon. The U.S. admits to having 32 broken arrows worldwide, with six nuclear weapons having been lost and never recovered.
In the simplest terms, the way a nuclear weapon works is that a chemical high explosive compresses nuclear material until a critical mass is reached and fission is achieved. During fission, the nuclei of certain heavy atoms split into smaller, lighter nuclei, and release excess energy in the process. In some elements, such as certain isotopes of uranium and plutonium, the fission process releases excess neutrons which trigger a chain reaction if they’re absorbed by nearby atoms.
Thermonuclear weapons (hydrogen bombs) utilize a different process, that of fusion. When exposed to extremely high temperatures and pressures, some lightweight nuclei can fuse together to form heavier nuclei, releasing energy in the process. Those high temperatures and pressures are achieved by fission, so the trigger for a thermonuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon.
The 1950s
The first broken arrow occurred on February 14, 1950, when a U.S. Convair B-36 en route from Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska to Carswell AFB in Fort Worth, Texas, crashed in northern British Columbia after jettisoning a Mark 4 nuclear bomb into the Pacific Ocean. The bomb was never found, and it contained a substantial amount of natural uranium plus 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of high explosives. According to the U.S. Air Force, the bomb didn’t contain the plutonium core necessary for a nuclear detonation. This was the first loss of a nuclear weapon in history.
On April 11, 1950, a B-29 bomber carrying a nuclear weapon, four spare detonators, and a crew of 13 crashed into a mountain near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The bomb’s high explosives detonated and the nuclear capsule was damaged but it was recovered. All thirteen crew members onboard the aircraft died.
On August 5, 1950 at Fairfield-Suisun AFB, California, a B-29 bomber carrying a Mark 4 nuclear bomb experienced problems with two of its propellers and crashed while attempting an emergency landing. In the ensuing fire, the bomb’s high explosives detonated and killed 19 crew members and rescue personnel.
On November 10, 1950, near Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec, Canada, which is about 300 miles northeast of Montreal, a U.S. B-50 aircraft jettisoned a Mark 4 nuclear bombover the St. Lawrence River. The weapon’s high explosive detonated on impact, but the core was lacking a necessary component and did not detonate. The explosion did scatter almost 100 pounds (45 kg) of uranium. The airplane went on to land safely.
On March 10, 1956, a a B-47 aircraft, carrying three crewmen and two nuclear cores from MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, was en-route to Ben Guerir Air Base, Morocco, and had completed its first aerial refueling without incident. It failed to make contact with the tanker for a second refueling somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea, and it was reported missing. The kind of weapons the plane was carrying remains undisclosed, but the type of nuclear bombs commonly carried by B-47s was the Mark 15, which would have had a combined yield of 3.4 megatons. No trace of the plane or the two nuclear cores has ever been found.
On July 27, 1956, a U.S. B-47 bomber was on a training exercise when it crashed into a nuclear weapons storage facility at the Lakenheath Air Base in Suffolk, England. The entire crew of the aircraft was killed. Known as an “igloo”, the storage facility contained three Mark 6 nuclear bombs, one of whose detonators had been sheared off in the accident. Investigators concluded that it was a miracle that the bomb hadn’t exploded.
On May 22, 1957, a plane was transporting a nuclear bomb to Kirtland Air Force Base when suddenly, the bomb fell through the bomb bay doors and crashed into a field near Albuquerque, New Mexico. The bomb’s high explosives detonated, creating a crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet wide, however, the nuclear capsule was found intact. The only casualty was a cow who had been grazing close to the crash site.
On July 28, 1957, a U.S. Air Force C-124 aircraft from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware was carrying three nuclear bombs over the Atlantic Ocean. The plane experienced a loss of power, and the crew jettisoned two nuclear bombs into the ocean, and they have never been recovered.
On October 11, 1957, a plane carrying a nuclear bomb crashed on takeoff at Homestead Air Force Base, Florida. The plane burned for four hours, and the high explosives detonated, however, the nuclear capsule and its carrying case were found intact and only slightly damaged.
On February 5, 1958, near Savannah, Georgia, during a practice exercise, an F-86 fighter plane collided with a B-47 bomber that was carrying a 7,600-pound (3,400 kg) Mark 15 nuclear bomb. The F-86 crashed after the pilot ejected from the plane. The crew of the B-47 requested permission to jettison the bomb in order to reduce weight and prevent the bomb from exploding during an emergency landing. The bomb was jettisoned at 7,200 feet (2,200 m) over the Wassaw Sound off the shores of Tybee Island. Subsequent searches failed to locate the weapon.
It is not known if the bomb had its plutonium trigger, but if it did, the blast effects of a detonation would have been a fireball having a radius of 1.2 miles (2 km) and thermal radiation causing third-degree burns for 12 miles.
On March 11, 1958, a U.S. Air Force Boeing B-47E-LM Stratojet took off from Savannah, Georgia, and was scheduled to fly to the U.K. The aircraft was carrying nuclear weapons in case a war with the Soviet Union broke out. Captain Earl Koehler noticed a fault light in the cockpit, indicating that the bomb harness locking pin had not engaged. He sent Captain Bruce Kulka to the bomb bay area to fix the problem.
As Kulka reached around the bomb to pull himself up, he mistakenly grabbed the emergency release pin, and the Mark 6 bomb dropped onto the bomb bay doors. The bomb’s weight forced the doors open, and the bomb dropped 15,000 ft (4,600 m) to the ground. Two sisters, six-year-old Helen and nine-year-old Frances Gregg, along with their nine-year-old cousin Ella Davies, were playing 200 yards (180 m) from a playhouse their father had built for them.
The bomb struck the playhouse, its high explosives detonated and it created a crater 70 feet (21 m) wide and 35 feet (11 m) deep. Fortunately, the fissile nuclear core had been stored elsewhere on the plane. All three children were hurt, as were their father, mother and brother. The family sued the Air Force and received US $54,000. Today, the crater is still visible although overgrown by vegetation.
Sometime in 1958, a B-47 aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon inadvertently released the bomb over Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Luckily, the bomb lacked the fissile nuclear core, but the conventional explosives detonated, injuring six people and damaging buildings.
At a U.S. air base at Greenham Common, England on February 28, 1958, a B-47 carrying a nuclear weapon caught fire and completely burned. While the weapon didn’t explode, in 1960, a group of scientists found high levels of radioactive contamination at the base. The U.S. government has disclosed no further information about the incident.
On November 4, 1958, at Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, a plane carrying a nuclear weapon burst into flames during takeoff. The weapon’s high explosives detonated, killing a crewman, but the nuclear core remained intact. Only half a mile from the crash site was Butterfield Elementary School.
On November 26, 1958, at Chennault Air Force Base, Louisiana, a B-47 carrying one nuclear weapon caught fire while on the ground. This fire damaged the nuclear capsule and its protective case, and there was nuclear contamination of the area.
In Hardinsberg, Kentucky, on October 15, 1959, a B-52 carrying two nuclear weapons and a KC-135 refueling plane collided midair. Both planes and both bombs fell to the ground. The crash killed four crew members, and the two nuclear weapons were only slightly damaged. No radiation leakage was detected.
The 1960s
On January 24, 1961, a B-52 carrying two three- or four-megaton nuclear bombs was over Goldsboro, North Carolina when it suffered the structural failure of its right wing. The aircraft broke apart and the two nuclear weapons were released. On one bomb, three of its four arming mechanisms had activated.
In 2013, a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that only a single switch out of four had prevented the bomb’s detonation. One of the recovery team recalled, “Until my death, I will never forget hearing my sergeant say, ‘Lieutenant, we found the arm/safe switch.’ And I said, ‘Great.’ He said, ‘Not great. It’s on arm.'”
The second bomb plunged into a muddy field, and its tail was discovered 20 feet below ground. A decision was made to leave the uranium and plutonium in place, and The United States Army Corps of Engineers purchased a 400-foot (120 m) circular easement over the buried components. Had either of the bombs gone off, everyone within an 8.5 mile (13.7km) radius would have been killed.
On March 14, 1961 a B-52F-70-BW Stratofortress bomber carrying four nuclear weapons experienced a problem with its cabin temperature. After temperatures climbed to between 125 degrees F and 160 degrees, the crew descended to 12,000 feet and depressurized the plane. After all four engines flamed out, the pilot put the plane into a dive and all crew members bailed out.
The plane crashed into a barley field near Yuba City, California, and the nuclear weapons were released. The weapons’ multiple safety measures protected against a nuclear explosion or release of radioactive material. A fireman was killed and several others were injured while rushing to the accident scene.
On July 4, 1961, a K-19 “Hotel”-class Soviet nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine was off the coast of Norway. The cooling system of one of its two nuclear reactors failed, and the temperature of the nuclear core climbed to 800 degrees Celsius, threatening to melt down its fuel rods. The crew and the submarine itself were contaminated by radiation and several fatalities were reported.
On October 25, 1962, at the Duluth Sector Direction Center near Duluth, Minnesota, an intruder was shot while scaling a fence around the facility. This triggered a “sabotage alarm”, which triggered a warning at Volk Field in Wisconsin. This alarm triggered nuclear armed F-106A interceptor aircraft to be sent to the source of the original alarm – Duluth.
Because of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the U.S. was at DEFCON 3, and there were no practice drills, everything was the real deal. When Duluth communicated that nothing was seriously wrong, the planes were only stopped by a car that raced down the runway after them. The intruder turned out to have been a black bear.
On January 13, 1964, a U.S. B-52 carrying two nuclear bombs suffered severe turbulence, and its vertical stabilizer broke off. The crew bailed out and the plane crashed near Savage Mountain outside Barton, Maryland. The bombs were found “relatively intact in the middle of the wreckage”. Three crewmen were killed as a result of the accident.
On December 8, 1964, at Bunker Hill Air Force Base, Indiana, several Strategic Air Command (SAC) aircraft were taxiing down a runway. The jet blast from one aircraft caused the plane behind it to slide off the runway and catch fire. The five nuclear weapons onboard the plane burned, but radioactive contamination was limited to the immediate area of the crash and was subsequently removed.
On December 5, 1965, an A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft carrying a 1-megaton thermonuclear weapon, rolled off the deck of the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Pacific Ocean. The plane, its pilot, Douglas Webster, and the weapon sank in 16,000 feet of water and were never found. It wasn’t until 15 years later that the U.S. Navy finally admitted that the accident had taken place only 80 miles from Japan’s Ryuku island chain, and this caused an uproar in Japan, which prohibits nuclear weapons from being brought into its territory.
Sometime during the mid-1960s, in the Kara Sea, the Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin encountered problems with its nuclear reactors, possibly experiencing a meltdown. It was forced to dump the reactors into the sea and they have never been found.
The most well-known broken arrow occurred on January 17, 1966 near Palomares, Spain. A U.S. B-52 aircraft, carrying four nuclear weapons, collided with its refueling tanker, a KC-135, at 31,000 feet (9,450 m) and crashed over the Mediterranean Sea. Of the four Mk28-type hydrogen bombs, three were found on land near the fishing village of Palomares. The high explosives in two of the bombs had detonated and released plutonium contamination across a 0.77-square-mile (2 km2) area. The fourth bomb, was recovered intact after a 2 ½ month-long search. During the U.S. cleanup effort, over 1,400 tons of soil were sent to a nuclear storage site.
On January 21, 1968, a fire erupted onboard a B-52 bomber operating out of Thule Air Base in the Danish territory of Greenland. The plane was carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs, and it crashed onto the sea ice in North Star Bay. The conventional explosives detonated and the nuclear capsules ruptured and dispersed their contents, resulting in radioactive contamination.
The U.S. and Denmark launched a clean-up operation, but the secondary stage of one of the nuclear weapons was never found. Workers involved in the clean-up operation have been experiencing radiation-related illnesses, and they have sought compensation.
On April 11, 1968, a Soviet diesel-powered “Golf”-class ballistic missile submarine sank 750 miles northwest of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. U.S. intelligence determined that the submarine had been carrying three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles and several nuclear-tipped torpedoes. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), partnered with industrialist Howard Hughes to build a specially-designed deep-water salvage ship, the “Glomar Explorer” to recover the lost sub. They were only partly successful when the Glomar raised approximately half of the submarine.
Also during the Spring of 1968, the U.S.S. Scorpion, a nuclear attack submarine, mysteriously sank about 400 miles southwest of the Azores islands. Besides the tragic loss of all 99 crew members, the Scorpion was carrying two nuclear-tipped weapons with yields of up to 250 kilotons.
The 1970s
On April 12, 1970, in the Atlantic Ocean about 300 miles northwest of Spain, a Soviet “November”-class nuclear-powered attack submarine experienced a problem with its nuclear propulsion system. A merchant ship attached a tow line and attempted to pull the submarine to safety, but the submarine sank, killing all 52 crew members on board.
Off the coast of Sicily, Italy on November 22, 1975, twelve years to the day of his assassination, the U.S. aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy collided with the cruiser USS Belknap during an exercise. The collision occurred at night and during high seas. One, or possibly both ships, contained nuclear weapons, but no nuclear contamination was detected by rescue personnel.
The 1980s
On September 19, 1980, near Damascus, Arkansas, crewman were performing maintenance on a Titan II Inter-continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). A crewman accidentally dropped a wrench into the silo, and it punctured the missile’s fuel tank. The missile leaked fuel for over eight hours before finally exploding, killing one and injuring 21 others. The blast destroyed the entire compound, but the nuclear warhead was recovered intact.
On October 3, 1986, 480 miles east of Bermuda, a Soviet “Yankee I”-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine suffered an explosion and fire in one of its missile tubes. An attempt was made to tow the submarine, but it sank on October 6, 1986 in 18,000 feet of water, taking its two nuclear reactors and approximately 34 nuclear weapons down to the bottom of the sea.
About 300 miles north of the Norwegian coast on April 7, 1989, a Soviet nuclear-powered attack submarine, the “Komsomolets”, caught fire and sank. The vessel’s two nuclear reactors and two nuclear-armed torpedoes were lost, along with 42 of the 69 crew members.
On August 10, 1985, at the Chazhma Bay repair facility, about 35 miles from the city of Vladivostok, Russia, an “Echo”-class Soviet nuclear-powered submarine suffered a reactor explosion that released a cloud of radioactivity. Fortunately, the cloud never reached Vladivostok, but ten Soviet officers were killed by the explosion.
The 1990s
Also in the White Sea, on September 27, 1991, a “Typhoon”-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine suffered a missile launch malfunction during a test. No other information is available about this incident.
In the Barents Sea on February 11, 1992a collision occurred between a CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) “Sierra”-class nuclear-powered attack submarine and the U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarine “Baton Rouge”. The Commonwealth of Independent States is comprised of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. The vessels reportedly suffered only minor damage, but a dispute arose over whether the incident had happened inside or outside of Russian territorial waters.
On August 12, 2000, also in the Barents Sea, a CIS “Oscar II” class submarine, the “Kursk”, suffered a torpedo failure and explosion. The ship sank with all 118 men onboard. No evidence of radiation contamination was detected.
On August 29, 2007, at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles, each loaded with a W80-1 variable yield nuclear warhead, were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52H bomber, and transported to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The nuclear warheads were supposed to have been removed before transport, but they weren’t..
Once at Barksdale, the missiles with the nuclear warheads remained mounted to the aircraft for 36 hours and were not protected by the various mandatory security precautions for nuclear weapons. The missiles were never reported as missing, by Minot.
Living with the legacy of British Nuclear testing: Bobby Brown
Maralinga No More: The British Nuclear Bombing of First Nations Lands , Sydney Criminal Lawyers, By Paul Gregoire 31/03/2019“……..Around 800 kilometres northeast of Adelaide, Maralinga was chosen as the main nuclear testing site, as the government found that the Maralinga Tjarutja people – who’d been living there since time immemorial – weren’t actually using the land.
The local Indigenous peoples were never consulted about the testing. Many were forcibly removed from their lands and taken to Yalata mission in SA, which effectively served as a prison camp. Some remained in the vicinity of the test site. Signs written in English were erected warning them to leave.
Indeed, on 27 September 1956, when the first nuclear device, One Tree, was detonated at Maralinga, First Nations peoples had no rights under Commonwealth Law. The vote didn’t come until 1962, while citizenship rights weren’t granted until the 1967 Referendum.
A toxic legacy
The Menzies Liberal government passed the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952, which effectively allowed the British to access remotes parts of Australia to test atomic weapons. The general public for the most part had no awareness or understanding of what would take place.
British and Australian servicemen built a test site, airstrip and township at Maralinga known as Section 400. Australian troops signed documents under Australian secrecy laws that required them never to divulge any operational information, with the threat of harsh prison sentences.
Between September 1956 and October 1957, the British set off seven above ground nuclear bombs ranging from 1 to 27 kilotons. The first four were part of Operation Buffalo, while the last three made up Operation Antler.
Following these tests, the British continued to carry out around 600 minor nuclear warhead tests up until 1963. And it was these that caused the greatest contamination. The most dire being the Vixen B tests that led to massive contamination of plutonium, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years.
The impact upon First Nations
Around 1,200 Aboriginal people were exposed to the radioactive fallout of the tests. This could lead to blindness, skin rashes and fever. It caused the early deaths of entire families. And long-term illnesses such as cancer and lung disease became prevalent amongst these communities.
As for those who were moved away from their homelands, their way of life was destroyed. The Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act was passed by the SA parliament in 1984, which ensured the damaged land was handed back freehold to traditional owners, as soon as it became “safe” again.
The Maralinga Tjarutja people, as well as other First Nations peoples, gradually returned to their homelands. Australia and reluctant British governments carried out initially terribly shonky clean-ups, that got progressively better, of the Maralinga site in 1967, 2000 and 2009.
And the British government eventually paid affected Aboriginal peoples $13.5 million in compensation for the loss and contamination of their lands in 1995.
Prior to Maralinga
The late Yankunytjatjara elder Yami Lester was just a boy living at Walatinna in the South Australian outback, when at 7 am on 15 October 1953, the British detonated a nuclear bomb at a test site at Emu Fields, northeast of Maralinga.
Mr Lester watched as a long, black cloud of smoke stretched out from the bomb site towards his homelands. In the wake of two tests carried out at Emu Fields within 12 days of each other, Yemi permanently lost his site, sudden deaths occurred, and his people suffered long-term illnesses.
The Emu Fields blasts were not the first on Australian soils. The initial nuclear bomb blast was carried out on the Monte Bello Islands in October 1952, while two more blasts took place in this Indian Ocean region in 1956.
And just like the Maralinga and Emu Fields blasts, the radioactive waste from these islands travelled across the entire continent. Two hotspots of excessive radioactive fallout resulting from the Emu Fields blasts were the NSW towns of Lismore and Dubbo.
Adding insult to injury
In 1989, the federal government announced it was establishing a nuclear waste dump near Coober Pedy in SA on the lands the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta, a senior women’s council representing the local peoples, many of whom had directly suffered the impacts of British nuclear testing.
As opposition to the dump grew, the government used the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act 1989 to seize the land, where it proposed to store the waste that was being produced at Sydney’s Lucas Heights reactor.
n July 2004, after a six year long battle the Kungka Tjuta senior women brought a stop the nuclear waste repository being situated on their land. And the federal government then turned to the NT’s Muckaty Station to dump the NSW waste. However, after that fell through, it’s still looking for a site.
The global threat continues
Maralinga took place at the height of the Cold War, after the US government refused to continue its nuclear program with British participation. And following World War Two, the crumbling empire sought to develop its own nuclear capacities in its faraway colonial backyard.
But, while many believe the threat of nuclear war faded with the end of the Cold War, renowned political analyst Noam Chomsky still warns that the two major threats in the world today are climate change and nuclear war.
Chomsky has pointed to a March 2007 article published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences that revealed the “extremely dangerous” threat the Trump administration’s nuclear forces modernisation program is creating.
Recent comments on the proposed pit production at Savannah River Site warrant a cautionary comment. All is not wonderful news where pit production is concerned. It has a very dirty past. Awareness of that past is paramount to the protection of CSRA public health and safety.
The primary U.S. plant to smelt plutonium, purify it and shape it into “triggers” (pits) for nuclear bombs was Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Site. From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats manufactured more than 70,000 pits at a cost of nearly $4 million apiece. Each one contained enough breathable plutonium particles to kill every person on earth. Virtually all of the waste produced there remains on-site. As we have learned through the SRS waste storage struggles, there is no place for it to go and no government plan to develop a repository. What’s made at a nuclear processing plant, stays at the nuclear processing plant.
Much went wrong at Rocky Flats due to mismanagement, criminal government indifference and public complacency. It took more than 30 years for the public to become so concerned with the pollution hazards issuing from the plant before the Department of Energy (DOE) was forced to hold a public meeting in 1988 to address the problems. One example: The plant produced one boxcar a week packed with 140 drums of radioactive waste. They were parked on site. Moisture penetration of a drum could have triggered an explosion. Ground water, soil and air pollution were also major hazards. A subsequent DOE study indicated that Rocky Flats was the most dangerous site in the country.
On June 6, 1989 more than 70 FBI and EPA agents raided the plant to begin an official investigation of the contractor and DOE for environmental crimes. The plant manager acknowledged that problems were solved “when DOE wanted to pay for them.” The final FBI/EPA allegations included concealment of environmental contamination, false certification of federal environmental reports, improper storage and disposal of hazardous and radioactive waste, and illegal discharge of pollutants into creeks flowing to drinking water supplies. Another independent study found there was enough lost plutonium in the plant exhaust ducts to create the possibility of an accidental nuclear reaction. According to a later DOE report, about 62 pounds of plutonium was lost in the plant air ducts; enough for seven nuclear bombs.
A grand jury was convened to hear the case on Aug. 1, 1989. The contractor argued in court that it could not fulfill its DOE contract without also violating environmental laws. In order to remediate the damage, on Sept. 28, 1989, EPA added Rocky Flats to its Superfund cleanup list. The grand jury worked until May 1991, then voted to indict the plant contractor, five employees and three individuals working for DOE.
The Department of Justice refused to sign the indictments despite more than 400 environmental violations that occurred during the decades of pit production at the plant. All charges were dropped. A settlement guaranteed the contractor and all indicted individuals immunity. Although the contractor pleaded guilty to criminal violations of the federal hazardous waste law and the Clean Water Act, the fine was only $18.5 million, less than the corporation had collected in bonuses for meeting production quotas that year. The contractor’s annual fee to run the site was estimated at $10 million, with an additional $8.7 million paid from DOE for management and safety excellence.
The contractor was also allowed to sue for reimbursement of $7.9 million from taxpayers for fees and costs related to its case. In addition, the contractor’s plea agreement indemnified it from further claims and all future prosecution, criminal or civil. The trial records are permanently sealed. Further, the contractor argued that everything it did at Rocky Flats was at the behest of DOE and maintained the right to receive future government contracts.
Grand jury members asked to write their own report but the judge refused to read it or release it to the public. Not surprisingly, the report was leaked to the press and printed in a Denver newspaper and Harper’s magazine. In January 1993, a Congressional committee finally issued a report revealing evidence of high-level intervention by Justice Department officials for the purpose of reducing the contractor’s fines.
DOE has estimated that it will take until 2065 to clean up Rocky Flats, at a cost to American taxpayers of more than $40 billion. One DOE official testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that some weapons plants, like Rocky Flats, may never be cleaned up because we lack the technology to do so at a reasonable cost. Another investigator, testifying before the U.S. Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee, stated he did not believe it possible to reverse the harm done at Rocky Flats.
Could this history repeat itself at SRS? Without a comprehensive cradle to grave plan with built-in irrevocable government funding and independent oversight, including citizen stakeholder input, SRS could become the next Rocky Flats. How likely is the government to attach such planning and funding to an SRS pit processing campaign? Past experience at SRS includes years of having to do best guess planning under continuing resolution funding and government failures to pass a budget, decades of “temporarily” storing deadly radioactive waste due to the government’s failure to meet off-site disposition commitments, budget reductions, program cancellations (most recently, the MOX project), and more.
Plutonium pit production waste is not just radioactive. It is nuclear waste on steroids. If produced here, it will likely remain in our backyard, along with all the decades old waste at SRS. There is no place for it to go. Looming large as examples of the dangers and difficulties SRS will face in having pit production waste moved off-site are the explosion and prolonged closure at the New Mexico Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (the government’s only operating repository) and the abandonment of the Yucca Mountain project.
Is it the CSRA’s responsibility to take on this mission? Pit production, while bringing jobs to the Aiken/Augusts area, will add to the decades old SRS hazards waiting for DOE remediation. SRS is already part of the DOE nuclear complex cleanup program. That mission, 30 some years old, drags on under the burden of DOE mismanagement and variable federal funding. Estimates are it will take another 70 years to clean up the DOE nuclear complex and cost about $500 billion more. Celebration of plans to add U.S. pit production to SRS is a rush to judgement. Only the usual corporations, living large off gigantic federal awards, stand to benefit.
Dr. Rose O. Hayes is a medical anthropologist who spent her career in public health. She holds a B.S., M.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from SUNY and completed post-doctoral work in skeletal biology at The George Washington University. From 2009 to 2015, she served on the U.S. Department of Energy Site-Specific Advisory Board for the Savannah River plant, chairing its Nuclear Materials Committee.
“………… The Australian Museum estimates that pre-European invasion in 1788, about 750,000 Indigenous people (representing some 700 language groups) inhabited the continent that would become Australia. This figure may well be an underestimate.
Little over a century later, by federation in 1901, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island population had diminished to some 117,000. Black-white warfare and organised massacres, no matter how you define them, with police, British soldiers, native police, militia and raiding parties as the perpetrators, accounted for many tens of thousands of deaths. Individual acts of violence – including shootings, poisonings, torture and illegal incarceration – killed many more. Battle wounds, starvation (owing to the depletion of traditional hunting grounds) and disease – all of which can also be directly linked to invasion and frontier conflict – killed countless others.
Yet the historiographic confect of benign, peaceful settlement and the unexplained “passing” or “extinction” of the “natives” pervaded well into the 1960s, replete with the deception that very few Aboriginal people died violently during pastoral and urban expansion and dispossession. Things began to change with the emergence of a new, more inquisitive, less empire-centric cohort of historians and writers who, not content with the Anglophile colonial trope of terra nullius and benevolence to the Indigenes, began to commit truth to the page………..
In the 1970s and 1980s a number of historians – among them Henry Reynolds, Marilyn Lake and Richard Broome – began focusing on frontier violence, using the colonial records, newspaper archives and family histories (including generational oral accounts of killings).
Reynolds is acknowledged as the first Australian historian to make a calculated continental estimate of the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who died violently in Australian frontier conflict. In his 1981 book, The Other Side of the Frontier, and after at least a decade’s research Reynolds estimated the figure at about 20,000……….
Based on an extrapolation of native police documentation, they estimated (conservatively) that as many as 60,000 Aboriginal people died in frontier violence in Queensland alone.
THE Soviet Union used its own population as “guinea pigs” to tests the effects of its secret nuclear weapons as tensions rose with the United States, a former member of the European Parliament for Scotland revealed. By CALLUM HOARE, Feb 13, 2019 The Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as The Polygon, was home to at least 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989, during the height of the Cold War. These top-secret missions were carried out with little regard for human or environmental impact in the surrounding area, just 11 miles away. Locals were told their area had been selected to help counter the threat from the US but were not aware of the full extent of the radiation damage.
“They were not told these weapons were nuclear and there would be the question of radioactive fallout that would affect all of them.
“The KGB doctors would wait until the wind was blowing towards the villages, then detonate the bombs and spend days afterwards checking the effects on the locals.
“They were being used as human guinea pigs.”
Mr Stevenson claimed the KGB manipulated locals so they could test the full potential of their nuclear weapons.
He continued: “The KGB ordered them to pack books and bedding behind the windows of their houses and actually stand outside.
“The women were there holding their babies and the KGB told them ‘you will witness the might of Soviet technology’ and they were actually celebrating this massive bomb, not knowing it would make them severely ill.
“Igor Kurchatov and Andrei Sakharov were the fathers of the Soviet nuclear weapons.
“[Joseph] Stalin gave an order that if the bomb did not explode, the professors and all their team would be executed.”
In 1989, the anti-nuclear movement was started in Kazakhstan called “Nevada Semipalatinsk”, led by poet Olzhas Suleimenov.
The site was officially closed by the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev on 29 August 1991, denuclearising the country.
It has now become the best-researched atomic testing site in the world and is open to the public to visit.
Hampton Sides, author of a new book about a turning point in the Korea war, explores the state of the Koreas and Trump’s forthcoming visit. Interview, Bloomberg, By Tobin Harshaw, January 28, 2019,
“……It is a cliche that the so-called police action in Korea from 1950 to 1952 is America’s “forgotten war.” But, like most cliches, there is a lot of truth to it. American ignorance about the Korean War is a shame, and not only because it devalues the sacrifices of those who fought in it. With North Korea’s nuclear arsenal now threatening the U.S. mainland (not to mention Hawaii, Japan and the folks on the southern end of the peninsula), and President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un set to meet again next month, a little historical perspective might be helpful.
……….HS: Be mindful of the fact that North Korea’s fear and loathing of the U.S., however warped it seems, does have legitimate historical roots. During the Korean War, the U.S. bombed that country back to the Stone Age: Every building, every bridge, every village. The stated goal was to not leave a single brick standing upon another brick. That air campaign was gratuitous and cruel. We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. We’re a country that has a habit of bombing people and then wondering why those people hate us. As we parse the madness that is the Kim regime, we should always keep in mind that this underlying history of “terror from above” figures into that madness.
Kim strikes many as a lunatic, but his nuclear strategy has actually been quite rational and effective in achieving his goals. So coaxing him to give up his nukes will take some extremely creative and forceful negotiating. The Hermit Kingdom desperately needs many, many things from the outside world — food, medicines, capital, technology, expertise and so on, and Kim knows this. A big question is whether he would really allow his own people to benefit in any meaningful way from the flow of goods and amenities that a removal of sanctions would usher in. Another question is whether he’d actually allow outside experts to come in and closely monitor his regime’s nuclear compliance. Caveats aside, we can only hope the talks continue. I’m highly skeptical of Trump’s much-avowed skills as a deal-maker, but a deal is certainly in the interest of the whole wide world.
………..HS: It was repeatedly said during the 2016 campaign that Douglas MacArthur is Trump’s “favorite general.” I don’t get the sense that Trump reads history — or anything else, for that matter — but it’s a telling detail. Because with Douglas MacArthur you had a grandiose and vainglorious autocrat who had surrounded himself with sycophants and yes-men. He was a colorful and interesting character — in narrative terms, a gift that keeps on giving. But he was a thoroughgoing narcissist. It was said that he didn’t have a staff; he had a court. He didn’t want to hear inconvenient information. He didn’t like experts — he was the expert. He was in love with the vertical pronoun. It was all about him.This sounds extremely familiar to me.
………. Of course, Korea should never have been divided in the first place — drawing that line created one of the great geopolitical tragedies of modern times. Many thousands of families were torn apart and never allowed to see each other again. Historically speaking, there’s no difference between northern and southern Korea. It’s one country, one language, one culture, one people.
Or at least it was. After more than 70 years of living apart, a reunification, if by some miracle it ever happened, would be a wrenching and doubtless violent process. It’s not clear how a brainwashed and traumatized people from an impoverished police state integrates into the dynamic capitalist society that is modern South Korea. Still, I believe it’s destined to happen one day.https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-27/korean-war-in-current-events-from-the-1950s-to-a-nuclear-north
That day, a group of American and Norwegian researchers launched a Black Brant XII sounding rocket from the Arctic Circle island of Andøya in an effort to study aurora borealis (the northern lights).
The scientists had warned Russia, the US, and 28 other countries that they were planning a launch, as they knew there was a chance that the rocket would be mistaken for a nuclear first strike.
Within minutes, President Boris Yeltsin was brought his black nuclear-command suitcase. For several tense minutes, while Yeltsin spoke with his defense minister by telephone, confusion reigned,” the Washington Post’s David Hoffman reported a few years after the incident. “Little is known about what Yeltsin said, but these may have been some of the most dangerous moments of the nuclear age.”
It was, Hoffman reported, the first time a Russian or Soviet leader had used a nuclear briefcase in response to an actual alert. Yeltsin concluded that it was not actually a first strike and did not retaliate.
For that, I thank him; I don’t know if a Russian second strike would have sent enough warheads to kill 4-year-old Dylan all the way up in New Hampshire, but I’m also glad we didn’t have to find out.
But, of course, the 1995 incident was hardly the only time in the nuclear area we came close to an accidental nuclear exchange.
On October 27, 1962, Vasili Arkhipov, a Soviet navy officer, was in a nuclear submarine near Cuba when US naval forces started dropping depth charges (a mild explosive meant to signal for the submarine to identify itself). Two senior officers on the submarine thought that a nuclear war had already begun and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at a US vessel. But all three senior officers had to agree for the missile to fire, and Arkhipov dissented, preventing a nuclear exchange.
On September 26, 1983, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was watching the Soviet Union’s missile attack early warning system when it displayed, in large red letters, the word “LAUNCH”; Petrov’s computer terminal gradually indicated that one, then two, then three, and eventually a total of five American missiles were incoming. Petrov declined to report the strike, knowing that if he did, the likely response would be a full nuclear retaliation. And it was good he did, because the Minuteman missiles the detection system thought it saw were actually just the sun’s reflection off clouds.
Also, in 1980, an intercontinental ballistic missile exploded in Damascus, Arkansas, while it had a 9-megaton nuclear warhead — with three times more explosive power than all the bombs of World War II combined — on top of it. The warhead didn’t detonate; if it did, Arkansas wouldn’t exist and you never would have heard of Bill or Hillary Clinton.
We can live safely in the knowledge that much or all of humankind won’t suddenly vanish due to a miscalculation by a radar officer in Russia or the US, and that people near missile sites won’t find themselves incinerated accidentally due to technician error. Or we can continue to have nuclear weapons. But we have to choose.
My Turn: Martin Luther King’s quest to stop the nuclear arms race https://www.concordmonitor.com/KIngs-quest-to-stop-the-nuclear-arms-race-22786447By WILLIAM LAMBERS For the Monitor January 21, 2019, Civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. was also an activist for nuclear disarmament. Dr. King used his voice for peace during the Cold War nuclear arms race.
He can inspire us today to finish the journey of eliminating all nuclear weapons.
The year was 1958. The Soviet Union and the United States were developing and testing nukes at an alarming rate. In March, Dr. King received a letter from Norman Cousins and Clarence Pickett of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. King was asked to support a statement urging an end to nuclear testing.
He joined the SANE movement right away. In April, Dr. King also signed an appeal by Protestant clergyman on halting nuke tests.
The public outcry against nuclear tests helped encourage President Dwight Eisenhower to start negotiations with the Soviets on a test ban treaty in 1958. In October, King joined a statement to the U.S. and Soviet negotiators in Geneva.
It read “an important beginning has to be made on one vital part of the problem of world peace, the permanent internationally inspected ending of nuclear weapons tests.”
Eisenhower proposed a suspension of nuclear tests during the talks. There were no nuclear tests by the U.S. or the Soviets from late 1958 into 1961. His successor President John F. Kennedy was able to produce a limited treaty with the Soviets in 1963 banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and outer space. Underground tests did continue.
The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, banning all tests including underground, has yet to be ratified by the U.S. Senate. President Donald Trump could ask the Senate to ratify this treaty and fulfill one of Dr. King’s goals of ending nuke tests forever.
Ending nuclear testing was seen as a critical step toward stopping the arms race. Dr. King understood the threat of nukes.
In 1957, in Ebony Magazine, King wrote “I definitely feel that the development and use of nuclear weapons of war should be banned. It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic. Hundreds and millions of people would be killed outright by the blast and heat, and by the ionizing radiation produced at the instant of the explosion.”
Dr. King recognized that spending on nuclear armaments robbed from society. King said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”
The goal of eliminating nuclear weapons has been shared by successive leaders including presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. President Trump has yet to take action on eliminating nuclear weapons. Instead Trump has sought to scrap the Iran nuclear deal and the INF Treaty with Russia.
We have lost any momentum in reducing the nuclear danger. There are still close to 15,000 nukes worldwide, according to the Arms Control Association. Dr. King’s words can inspire us to jumpstart nuclear disarmament.
In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies” Dr. King said, “It is an eternal reminder to a generation depending on nuclear and atomic energy, a generation depending on physical violence, that love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe.”
King wanted all people, all nations, to come together to work out their differences. Through what Dr. King called “a great fellowship of love” the world can achieve peace and nuclear disarmament.
Instead of nation’s wasting dollars on nukes we could feed the hungry, end disease and save the environment. As we celebrate Martin Luther King Day listen to his words and be inspired to take action for world peace.
(William Lambers is the author of “The Road to Peace” and “Ending World Hunger.”)
Fifty years ago today, a nuclear meltdown occurred in Switzerland’s first experimental nuclear power station. Built in an underground chamber in Lucens in the western part of the country, it was the site of the worst nuclear accident in Swiss history.
The plant was opened in 1962, with the aim of not only producing energy, but also allowing Switzerland to develop a reactor bearing the “Made in Switzerland” label and enabling experiments with nuclear energy.
But these plans were pushed aside when disaster struck in the plant’s reactor cavity on January 21, 1969. A pressure tube burst which created a power surge leading to the reactor malfunctioning and an explosion. Luckily, a member of staff who was scheduled to be working on the reactor at the time was found safe and sound elsewhere. The plant’s underground design also prevented people and the environment from being harmed.
The accident’s severity registered at 5 out of a possible 7. The concentration of leaked cooling gas that was behind the door of the reactor cavity was lethal. It wasn’t even possible to measure the radioactivity because it was above the maximum level on the measuring instruments.
But the reactor cavern was not completely sealed: the radioactivity spread to the control room 100 metres away. In the machine cavern closest to the reactor, a team involved in shutting down the turbine had been exposed to radiation. A witness report said that since the decontamination showers had been out of order, the workers had to shower in a temporary facility without hot water.
The government ordered an inquiry into the incident and a report was eventually published ten years later. The Swiss Association for Atomic Energy found there had been no major negligence on the part of the plant’s managers. The cause of the incident was corrosion in a pressure tube, brought about by humidity.
Reluctantly, I have realised that the climate crisis is the most huge and urgent problem for humanity, now. This website is not able to do justice to this enormous topic. All that I can do is to pick out significant information as it arrives, and also note some, (not nearly enough) of the climate events happening.
Meanwhile, nuclear-news will focus on its original purpose, to reveal the disastrous effects of the nuclear industry, and to refute the propaganda lies from the nuclear lobby.
Existential Abrupt Climate Change Risks to Humanity: Part 1 of 3
Fortunately, Chernobyl health records are now available to the public. They show that people living in the radioactive traces fell ill from cancers, respiratory illness, anaemia, auto-immune disorders, birth defects, and fertility problems two to three times more frequently in the years after the accident than before. In a highly contaminated Belarusian town of Veprin, just six of 70 children in 1990 were characterised as “healthy”. The rest had one chronic disease or another. On average, the Veprin children had in their bodies 8,498 bq/kg of radioactive caesium (20 bq/kg is considered safe).
Currently, policymakers are advocating a massive expansion of nuclear power as a way to combat climate change. Before we enter a new nuclear age, the declassified Chernobyl health records raise questions that have been left unanswered about the impact of chronic low doses of radioactivity on human health.
Chernobyl’s disastrous cover-up is a warning for the next nuclear age
