nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

  • Home
  • 1.This Month
  • ACTION !
  • Disclaimer
  • Links
  • PAGES on NUCLEAR ISSUES

The world came much closer to nuclear war than we realized in 1983.

Apocalypse Averted, The world came much closer to nuclear war than we realized in 1983.   https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/able-archer-nuclear-war-reagan.html-19 Feb  21, BY FRED KAPLAN

Newly declassified documents reveal that in November 1983, at the height of Cold War tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union came closer to nuclear war than historians—and even many officials at the time—have known until now.

The revelations aren’t mere details of history; they also hold relevant lessons for how leaders should think and act in ongoing crises in hot spots around the world today.

The documents, released this week by the State Department historian’s office, focus on a massive military training exercise known as Able Archer, in which NATO simulated the transition from conventional to nuclear conflict in the event of a war in Europe.

It turned out, top Soviet leaders thought that the war game was real—that the U.S. and NATO really were about to launch a nuclear first strike against the USSR—and top Soviet military commanders took steps to retaliate.

In one of those steps, the new documents reveal, the commander of the Soviet 4th Army Air Forces in Eastern Europe ordered all of his units to make “preparations for the immediate use of nuclear weapons.” As part of that order, crewmen loaded actual nuclear bombs onto several combat planes.

Much about the Able Archer war game was first made public just six years ago, when, after more than a decade of legal battles, the National Security Archive, a private research organization, obtained a lengthy, extremely classified U.S. intelligence report detailing exactly what NATO forces did, and how Soviet commanders responded, during the exercise.

But the fact that the Soviets armed their aircraft with nuclear bombs—a discovery based on U.S. and British intelligence intercepts of Soviet communications at the time—has not been declassified until now. The new fact elevates to a higher level the danger that the world briefly faced, even though—unlike with other nuclear near misses, such as the Cuban missile crisis—almost nobody knew it at the time.

The Able Archer crisis might not have been a near miss—it might easily have escalated to a shooting war—had it not been for a single American officer, Lt. Gen. Leonard Perroots, the intelligence chief for U.S. Air Forces in Europe, who saw the Soviet moves, interpreted them correctly, and stopped what might otherwise have been a deadly escalation.

Most U.S. officers viewed Able Archer as a typical war game, nothing that would throw Soviet officers into a panic. But Perroots saw that, in fact, it was something different. It was a lot bigger than most of these games, involving a fleet of cargo transport planes flying 19,000 soldiers in 170 sorties from the United States to bases in Europe. And it was more realistic as well. The cargo planes maintained radio silence. B-52 bomber crews taxied their planes to their runways and loaded them with dummy bombs that looked remarkably real. The Strategic Air Command raised its nuclear alert levels to the highest level. The Soviets were monitoring all of this, of course, as they generally did and as the U.S. commanders knew they would. But they reacted in ways that they never had before—in ways similar to how they might have acted if the U.S. were gearing up for a real attack—including, as we now know, loading nuclear bombs on aircraft in Eastern Europe.

Ordinarily, when the Soviets took such actions, U.S. intelligence agencies would notify senior military officers, either on the scene or back in Washington, who would respond with similar actions, if just to let the Soviets know that we were watching what they were doing and were ready to repel an attack.

When Perroots informed his boss, the commander in chief of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, Gen. Billy Minter, of the Soviets’ “unusual activity” at the start of Able Archer, Minter was about to respond in the usual way, but Perroots advised him to hold off. He recognized that the Soviets were probably reacting to what we were doing—and any further escalation on our part would worsen the situation, might even trigger war. Let’s wait and see what happens next, he suggested.

Ordinarily, when the Soviets took such actions, U.S. intelligence agencies would notify senior military officers, either on the scene or back in Washington, who would respond with similar actions, if just to let the Soviets know that we were watching what they were doing and were ready to repel an attack.

When Perroots informed his boss, the commander in chief of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, Gen. Billy Minter, of the Soviets’ “unusual activity” at the start of Able Archer, Minter was about to respond in the usual way, but Perroots advised him to hold off. He recognized that the Soviets were probably reacting to what we were doing—and any further escalation on our part would worsen the situation, might even trigger war. Let’s wait and see what happens next, he suggested.

And indeed, after Able Archer ended a few days later and the thousands of American troops flew home and SAC lowered its nuclear alert, the Soviets unloaded their bombs and canceled their nuclear alert as well.

One of the newly declassified documents is a memo that Perroots wrote in 1989, as he was retiring from his final career post as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, detailing what he’d seen and done during Able Archer six years earlier. The National Security Archive has long been trying to obtain the Perroots memo; DIA officials have told the archive’s lawyers that the memo was lost. On their own initiative, State Department historians found it in a file at the CIA.

The Able Archer near miss did come to have consequences—in a good way. While the war game was unfolding, Oleg Gordievsky, a London-based KGB officer who had turned double agent, was providing his British handlers in MI6 with documents revealing that Soviet officials were viewing the exercise as a prelude to an attack by the United States and NATO. The British, as was customary, shared the intelligence with their American cousins. At first, and for more than a year after, the CIA’s top officials were skeptical, dismissing the Soviets’ “war scare” as “propaganda,” designed to inflame anti-American sentiment in Western Europe.

But President Ronald Reagan took the war scare seriously. Just days after the wrap-up of Able Archer, his national security adviser, Robert “Bud” McFarlane, showed him Gordievsky’s reports, which Reagan read with—as McFarlane recalled years later—“genuine anxiety.”

Reagan had been pushing hard against the Kremlin, hoping the pressure might bring down the Soviet system. In 1981, his first year in office, an armada of 83 U.S., British, Canadian, and Norwegian ships sailed near Soviet waters, undetected. In April 1983, seven months before Able Archer, 40 U.S. warships, including three aircraft carriers, approached Kamchatka Peninsula, off the USSR’s eastern coast, maintaining radio silence and jamming Soviet radar. As part of the operation, Navy combat planes simulated a bombing run over a military site 20 miles inside Soviet territory. An internal NSA history noted, “These actions were calculated to induce paranoia, and they did.”

Still, as Reagan read the Gordievsky report, “it did bother him,” McFarlane later recalled, that the Soviets would seriously entertain “the very idea” that he would launch a nuclear first strike. On Nov. 18, 1983, one week after Able Archer was over, he wrote in his diary, “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them no one here has any intention of doing anything like that.”

The same day, Reagan met with his secretary of state, George Shultz (who died this month at the age of 100), to discuss setting up a back channel of communication with Moscow. The next morning, 12 senior officials met for breakfast in Shultz’s dining room at the State Department to discuss reopening long-moribund talks with Moscow—a topic so sensitive at the time that Shultz told them not to tell anybody that the meeting had even taken place. Two months later, on Jan. 16, 1984, Reagan gave a televised speech. The key line—a dramatic departure from previous pronouncements on the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”—was this: “If the Soviet government wants peace, then there will be peace. … Let us begin now.”

He had to wait a little while. Two Soviet leaders, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, died while Reagan’s diplomats tried to arrange meetings. But then came Mikhail Gorbachev, a genuine reformer, looking for peace with the West so he could finance his politico-economic perestroika, and, soon enough, the Iron Curtain shattered and the Cold War ended.

This might not have happened if Reagan hadn’t realized, in the wake of Able Archer, that his belligerent rhetoric and aggressive actions had gone too far—that he had to dial things back and see if the two countries might get along, before their myriad causes for mutual distrust unleashed catastrophe.

In some ways, the world today is less fraught with ultimate danger than it was 38 years ago. There is no cause for fear of a massive nuclear attack by or against the United States, Russia, or, really, any other country. But at the same time, the world is more densely laced with hot spots that could erupt into war, and war zones that could spread like lethal firestorms, and there are fewer power blocs—no real “superpowers,” in the sense that the term once meant—that might contain the conflagration. Intelligence is scanty or ambiguous about many of these potential crisis areas. Assumptions about an adversary’s ambitions or odd actions can more easily harden into dogma.

February 20, 2021 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Amidst the trauma of the Chamoli flash floods, people recall an old lost nuclear device

Did a lost nuclear device cause Chamoli flash floods? Decades-old suspicion comes back to haunt villagers, https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2021/feb/10/the-floods-were-caused-by-lost-nuclear-deviceuttarakhand-villagers-story-goes-back-to-1965-2262071.html

In the year 2018, state cabinet minister of Uttarakhand Satpal Maharaj had said that he had urged the Prime Minister to take action in this regard.

 Vineet Upadhyay
Express News Service

CHAMOLI: While experts are yet to pinpoint the cause of Chamoli flash floods and many are warning about climate change, the floods brought back fears of old tales related to a lost radioactive material in the Nanda Devi glaciers.

As per local residents in and around village Raini, a ‘machine’ was installed on Nanda Devi mountains in 1965 which had a nuclear device within.

Kartik Singh (92), a resident of Raini village claims that he was part of the 1965 expedition to install the ‘machine’, says, “I used to work as a porter then. Some people asked me to carry a packed, concealed load. I agreed. We went to a place called ‘Camp IV’. Later, a blizzard hit us and we decided to leave the device and return to safety.”

A mix of myths and rumours have filled Raini and adjacent villages after the flash floods. Many believe that the nuclear device caused the flash floods which wreaked havoc washing away two hydropower projects and killing many. Total 32 bodies have been found to date while 174 are missing.

“The device is dangerous and may be the cause of these floods meting the snow,” added Singh.

In the year 2010, responding to an RTI query of an activist Gurvinder Singh Chadha which had total 7 questions related to the radioactive device in question, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center had replied, “This center has no information on the above. Hence, we are unable to provide any information under the RTI Act 2005.”

Interestingly, one of the questions by Chadha included if American senator Richard Autier warned India about the nuclear device in 1965 and famous Russian scientist Arthur Compeleene also warned India saying that lakhs of people may be affected due to the radiation.

Chadha died last year. Dushyant Mainali, a practicing advocate in Uttarakhand Hugh Court and friend of the activist recalls, “He had filed RTI queries related to the device two times. He used to talk about this story often and had logical reasons to make us believe.”

Many books have been written on the issue including one by Stephen Alter. The Mussoorie-based author has written about a secret operation in which a device was to be installed to monitor China which had conducted a nuclear test in 1962 in Xinjiang province.

Weighing around 56kg, including an 8-10ft-high antenna, two transceiver sets system, the remote sensing device which was supposed to keep track of any further nuclear tests by China after 1964 is believed to be installed by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America and Intelligence Bureau of India to spy on China.

In the year 2018, state cabinet minister of Uttarakhand Satpal Maharaj had said that he had urged the Prime Minister to take action in this regard.

The radioactive material is said to be an alloy of Pu-238 with 18 percent Pu-239 which is considered the most effective combination to prolong the life span of the material and generate maximum energy.

After the team which went on the expedition returned to the spot in the year 1966, they could not find the device. The device is said to have a life of around 100 years out of which 45 are still left. However, many believe the story is too far from reality and even a myth.

Mohan Singh, another resident of Raini village who has In the year 2018, state cabinet minister of Uttarakhand Satpal Maharaj had said that he had urged the Prime Minister to take action in this regard.

The radioactive material is said to be an alloy of Pu-238 with 18 percent Pu-239 which is considered the most effective combination to prolong the life span of the material and generate maximum energy.

After the team which went on the expedition returned to the spot in the year 1966, they could not find the device. The device is said to have a life of around 100 years out of which 45 are still left. However, many believe the story is too far from reality and even a myth.

Mohan Singh, another resident of Raini village  who has taken part in many expeditions in Nanda Devi glaciers said, “I don’t think this flash flood is a result of any device. I don’t believe in this story. To me these are just rumours which started at some point in time and became a myth eventually.”

February 10, 2021 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, India | Leave a comment

Mary Olson pays tribute to Rosalie Bertell, the great explainer of radiation impacts on health

My Six Mentors,   by Mary Olson, Gender and Radiation Impact Project, 1 January 20121 

“……………. Rosalie Bertell, PhD

It was Rosalie who most let me know that I am able to contribute original work towards the day that People, to decide not to split atoms any more. Human beings began splitting atoms in Chicago, in 1942. Rosalie, a PhD in mathematics and member of the Order of Gray Nuns, knew more than anyone else I have worked with, that all of it—every last nuclear license, and radioactive emission, all the waste and all the bombs and all the money congress gives to nuclear activities are choices. People made, and continue to make these decisions…and we can change our mind.

Rosalie studied radiation impacts and was committed to service on behalf of future generations. She won the Right Livelihood award for her work with communities impacted by nuclear industry. Often called the “alternative Peace Prize” – she was one of the first women to be honored. As a laureate, she was encouraged to find and mentor students. Rosalie hoped that I, and my coworker Diane D’Arrigo would go to graduate school and she could be our mentor. We decided since we were already in our 50’s to simply study with her, informally. We traveled, 5 or 6 times to the Mother House where she resided and she generously met with us in the last two years of her life. She was always small in stature, but at that point her back was bent and she barely came up to my chest, but still had the intensity of a wolverine!

It was Rosalie Bertell who helped me tackle one of the biggest challenges I have faced. After a public talk on radioactive waste policy that I gave during this time, a woman asked me if radiation was more harmful to women, to her, compared to a man. Even though I had studied and known many of the top independent radiation researchers, including Bertell, I had never heard that biological sex could be a factor for harm—other than in reproduction (pregnancy)—but that is more about the embryo and fetus than the woman. I told her that I was sorry, I did not know and would get back to her. In fact, I forgot.

Two years later, when nuclear reactors exploded in Japan at a site called Fukushima Daiichi, I remembered that question and knew it urgently needed an answer. I was unaware that Dr Arjun Makhijani and a team had written on sex differences in radiation harm in 2006 (see www.ieer.org ) and also did not turn that up as I searched for any information on differences between males and females. My findings, five years later are an independent confirmation of the IEER work.

Since I found nothing on a basic google dive, I called Rosalie, who was at that point nearing the end of her life, to ask if she had studied biological sex. She had not, and the one report she pointed me to was out of print. It was my second call, a week later, that prompted her to tell me that I would have to look at the data myself.

I had no idea that the National Academy of Science (NAS) had published tables with 60 years of data on cancers and cancer deaths among the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rosalie told me to find out for myself. I was shocked. I had stopped any formal study of math in the 6th grade…she was a mathematician—I asked her to do it, and she reminded me that she was dying. I protested again. It was her next words that pushed me. Rosalie said, “The data is divided by males and females so you can look at this question—and if there is a difference, it will be a simple pattern. It is good you do not have more math because if there is a difference, you will find it and not make it more complicated than it is.” She said to get a few pencils, a sharpener, an eraser and lots of paper, and go to it. I did.

The result was my first paper on the topic, “Atomic Radiation is More Harmful to Women,” (October 2011) published to the web in time for Rosalie to congratulate me. Three years later the paper was the basis for my invitation to speak at the global Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Weapons. Three years later as the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was in the work, I founded the Gender and Radiation Impact Project. Rosalie is the one who put rocket fuel in my determination to help. If the world decides to base radiation protection on Refence Little Girl—make every regulation in terms of protecting females who are infants—five years old, future generations have a chance. Rosalie is the one who modeled for me that it is possible to reach for the best possible outcome, and, indeed, we have an obligation to do so………..……  https://www.genderandradiation.org/blog/2020/12/31/my-six-mentors

 

January 2, 2021 Posted by Christina MacPherson | 2 WORLD, history, PERSONAL STORIES, radiation, Reference, women, Women | Leave a comment

How the USA and Soviet Union planned to use nuclear radiation as a weapon.

 This was initially seen as a great idea –  you could kill all the people while leaving the omfrastructure intact for your own use.
Death Dust: The Little-Known Story of U.S. and Soviet Pursuit of Radiological Weapons,  Three international security experts chart the rise and fall of radiological weapons programs in the United States and the Soviet Union. The MIT Press Reader

By: Morgan L. Kaplan, 31 Jan 20, 

For decades, the thought of radiological weapons has conjured terrifying images of cities covered in “death dust.” Classified as a weapon of mass destruction — alongside chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons — it has remained a point of mystery as to why these devastatingly indiscriminate weapons were not pursued in earnest by more state and non-state actors alike.

What did early radiological weapons (RW) programs look like? How and why did they arise, and what accounts for their ultimate demise? Aside from a handful of known cases, why have RW programs not proliferated with the same alacrity as other weapons programs?

Thanks to the rigorous and rich historical work of Samuel Meyer, Sarah Bidgood, and William Potter of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, we now have more answers. Focusing on the United States and Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s, the authors, in a recent study published in the journal International Security, trace the unique origins of these RW programs, as well as explain why they were subsequently abandoned. Their study, “Death Dust: The Little-Known Story of U.S. and Soviet Pursuit of Radiological Weapons,” reveals a fascinating web of causes, including organizational and bureaucratic politics, international competition, economic and technological constraints, and even the powerful initiatives of well-placed individuals.

While the authors’ work examines the past, it speaks directly to the present and future trajectory of RW programs. If you are interested in military innovation, the history of weapons of mass destruction, the sociology of technology, and science fiction (yes, science fiction!), the exchange featured below is for you.

Morgan Kaplan: First things first, what are radiological weapons? Do any countries or non-state actors have them today?

Samuel Meyer, Sarah Bidgood, and William C. Potter: We define a radiological weapon as one intended to disperse radioactive material in the absence of a nuclear detonation. ……..

……….. May 1941 — the first reference to RW appeared in a U.S. government document: the Report of the Uranium Committee. The report identified three possible military aspects of atomic fission, the first of which was “production of violently radioactive materials … carried by airplanes to be scattered as bombs over enemy territory.” (The other two possible applications noted in the report were “a power source on submarines and other ships” and “violently explosive bombs.”) ………

Technological advances were among the major drivers of RW programs in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and RW were initially pursued in tandem with nuclear weapons and chemical weapons (CW) programs. The anticipated promise of RW as a weapons innovation, however, never materialized in either country due to a combination of factors, including technical difficulties in the production and maintenance of the weapons, diminution in the perceived military utility of RW relative to both CW and nuclear weapons, and low threat perceptions about adversary RW capabilities. ……..

the parallelism in many respects between the rise and demise of the U.S. and Soviet RW programs; and (5) the serious but ultimately unsuccessful effort by the United States and the Soviet Union to secure a draft convention at the Conference on Disarmament prohibiting radiological weapons.

MK: Are radiological weapons a thing of the past or do they remain an attractive option for some countries and non-state actors today?

The authors: We are encouraged that no country has either used RW in war or has incorporated them into a national military arsenal. We are concerned, however, that the Russian Federation, despite its own unsuccessful history with RW, has shown renewed interest in advanced nuclear weapons that seek to maximize radioactive contamination. We also worry that some countries may conclude that RW serve their perceived national interests, especially in the absence of international legal restraints. It therefore is important, we believe, to revive U.S.-Russian cooperation to ban radiological weapons and strengthen the norm against their use.

Morgan L. Kaplan is the Executive Editor of International Security and Series Editor of the Belfer Center Studies in International Security book series at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/death-dust-the-little-known-story-of-radiological-weapons/

January 2, 2021 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, radiation, Russia, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Non violent anti-nuclear action – the Clamshell Alliance model for success

Know Your Nonviolent History: In 1976 Clamshell Alliance Launches Mass Demonstrations https://www.riverasun.com/know-your-nonviolent-history-in-1976-clamshell-alliance-launches-mass-demonstrations/August 18, 2016, by Rivera Sun  On August 1st, 1976, the first nonviolent mass demonstration of the Clamshell Alliance took place at the proposed site of the Seabrook Nuclear Energy Facility in New Hampshire. The Clamshell Alliance was a group of anti-nuclear activists who worked to stop nuclear power plant construction at a time when President Nixon’s “Project Independence” had proposed the construction of over 1,000 nuclear power plants throughout the nation. Although the Clamshell Alliance was only partially successful in halting the Seabrook facility, their mass mobilizations deterred the plans for other plants and changed the landscape of nuclear energy forever. If not for the Clamshell Alliance, it is possible that we would be living in the nuclear nightmare of President Nixon’s vision of a thousand plants by the year 2000.

The Clamshell Alliance used a model of affinity groups of 6-20 people, and a spokes council system that functioned on consensus decision-making by all members. In July 1976, the Clamshell Alliance adopted a Declaration of Nuclear Resistance and by August 1st had mobilized their first protest of 200-600 people. Later in August, a second protest and civil disobedience action occupied the Seabrook construction site for 75 minutes, singing songs and planting trees. Nearly all of the 200 participants were arrested.

In April of 1977, the Clamshell Alliance mobilized 2,000 people for a demonstration. 1,400 participants were arrested, most refusing to post bail. They were held in jails and National Guard armories for up to two weeks. The activists used this time for training and networking, and subsequently, the detention of the activists was seen as a blunder on the part of Governor Meldrim Thomson.

In 1978, the Clamshell Alliance successfully organized another series of mass demonstrations and arrests. From June 23-26th, the alliance accepted an agreement to legally protest on the site for three days. Some sources claim this protest was one of the largest on-site protests in the history of the anti-nuclear movement, citing over 20,000 participants and very few arrests.

On March 29th, 1979, the meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, propelled the dangers of nuclear power to the forefront of national concern. In collaboration with other groups, a huge anti-nuclear energy rally was organized in Washington, D.C. on May 6, 1979. Between 50,000 and 120,000 people gathered to protest nuclear power and demand safe alternatives.

These demonstrations played a major role in slowing and stopping the rush toward nuclear energy. Although Unit 1 of Seabrook Power Plant went online in 1990, Unit 2 was cancelled altogether. The project cost seven times the original billion-dollar estimate and was completed 14 years later than anticipated. In that time, hundreds of other proposals were dropped, due to the high social and fiscal costs encountered by the Seabrook Power Plant. For decades after the inception of the Clamshell Alliance and other similar groups, no new nuclear power facilities were proposed or constructed. The Clamshell Alliance left a lasting legacy in its organizing structure, movement practices, consensus model, and strategies for change. These are all tools and resources that can be used by current movements for change.

This article is from Rivera Sun’s book of nonviolent histories that have made our world. Click here for more information.

January 1, 2021 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, opposition to nuclear, Reference, USA | 1 Comment

Kingston Fossil Plant and Oakridge Nuclear Facility – an unholy alliance of radioactive pollution

While no one was killed by the 2008 coal ash spill itself, dozens of workers have died from illnesses that emerged during or after the cleanup. Hundreds of other workers are sick from respiratory, cardiac, neurological, and blood disorders, as well as cancers.

The apparent mixing of fossil fuel and nuclear waste streams underscores the long relationship between the Kingston and Oak Ridge facilities.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, so much cesium-137 and mercury was released into the Clinch from Oak Ridge that the Department of Energy, or DOE, said that the river and its feeder stream “served as pipelines for contaminants.” Yet TVA and its contractors, with the blessing of both state and federal regulators, classified all 4 million tons of material they recovered from the Emory as “non-hazardous.”

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis confirms that the ash that was left in the river was “found to be commingled with contamination from the Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Reservation site.

For nearly a century, both Oak Ridge and TVA treated their waste with less care than most families treat household garbage. It was often dumped into unlined, and sometimes unmarked, pits that continue to leak into waterways. For decades, Oak Ridge served as the Southeast’s burial ground for nuclear waste. It was stored within watersheds and floodplains that fed the Clinch River. But exactly where and how this waste was buried has been notoriously hard to track.

A Legacy of Contamination, How the Kingston coal ash spill unearthed a nuclear nightmare, Grist By Austyn Gaffney on Dec 15, 2020  This story was published in partnership with the Daily Yonder.

In 2009, App Thacker was hired to run a dredge along the Emory River in eastern Tennessee. Picture anindustrialized fleet modeled after Huck Finn’s raft: Nicknamed Adelyn, Kylee, and Shirley, the blue, flat-bottomed boats used mechanical arms called cutterheads to dig up riverbeds and siphon the excavated sediment into shoreline canals. The largest dredge, a two-story behemoth called the Sandpiper, had pipes wide enough to swallow a push lawnmower. Smaller dredges like Thacker’s scuttled behind it, scooping up excess muck like fish skimming a whale’s corpse. They all had the same directive: Remove the thick grey sludge that clogged the Emory.

The sludge was coal ash, the waste leftover when coal is burned to generate electricity. Twelve years ago this month, more than a billion gallons of wet ash burst from a holding pond monitored by the region’s major utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA. Thacker, a heavy machinery operator with Knoxville’s 917 union, became one of hundreds of people that TVA contractors hired to clean up the spill. For about four years, Thacker spent every afternoon driving 35 miles from his home to arrive in time for his 5 p.m. shift, just as the makeshift overhead lights illuminating the canals of ash flicked on.

Dredging at night was hard work. The pump inside the dredge clogged repeatedly, so Thacker took off his shirt and entered water up to his armpits to remove rocks, tree limbs, tires, and other debris, sometimes in below-freezing temperatures. Soon, ringworm-like sores crested along his arms, interwoven with his fading red and blue tattoos. Thacker’s supervisors gave him a cream for the skin lesions, and he began wearing long black cow-birthing gloves while he unclogged pumps. While Thacker knew that the water was contaminated — that was the point of the dredging — he felt relatively safe. After all, TVA was one of the oldest and most respected employers in the state, with a sterling reputation for worker safety.

Then, one night, the dredging stopped.

Sometime between December 2009 and January 2010, roughly halfway through the final, 500-foot-wide section of the Emory designated for cleanup, operators turned off the pumps that sucked the ash from the river. For a multi-billion dollar remediation project, this order was unprecedented. The dredges had been operating 24/7 in an effort to clean up the disaster area as quickly as possible, removing roughly 3,000 cubic yards of material — almost enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool — each day. But official reports from TVA show that the dredging of the Emory encountered unusually high levels of contamination: Sediment samples showed that mercury levels were three times higher in the river than they were in coal ash from the holding pond that caused the disaster.

Then there was the nuclear waste. Continue reading →

December 29, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | employment, environment, history, legal, PERSONAL STORIES, politics, Reference, safety, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Untrue: claims that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War 2

Did the Atomic Bomb End the Pacific War?
The use of the atomic weapon must be seen as a continuation and a start: the nuclear continuation of the conventional terror bombing of Japanese civilians, and the start of a new “cold war.” Portside, August 2, 2020 Paul Ham

Many historians and most lay people still

believe the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the Pacific War.

They claim with varying intensity that the Japanese regime surrendered unconditionally in response to the nuclear attack; that the bomb saved a million or more Amercian servicemen; that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen chiefly for their value as military targets; and that the use of the weapon was, according to a post-war propaganda campaign aimed at soothing American consciences, ‘our least abhorrent   choice’.

The trouble is, not one of these claims is true.

That such denial of the facts has been allowed to persist for 75 years, that so many people believe this ‘revisionist’ line – revisionist because it was concocted after the war as a post-facto justification for the bomb – demonstrates the power of a government-sponsored rewrite of history over the minds of academics, journalists, citizens and presidents.

The uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, code-named ‘Little Boy’, landed on the city center, exploding above the main hospital and wiping out dozens of schools, killing 75,000 people, including tens of thousands of school children.

‘Fat Man’, the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki, incinerated the largest Catholic community in Japan, obliterating the country’s biggest cathedral along with a residential district packed with schools and hospitals. Its missed its original target, the city center.

Zealous apologists for the bomb will have started picking holes: Hiroshima held troops? Yes, a few enfeebled battalions. Hiroshima had military factories? Most were on the outskirts of town, well clear of the bomb. Continue reading →

December 29, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, spinbuster, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Uranprojekt -The Nazi Nuclear Program

Uranprojekt -The Nazi Nuclear Program , Heritage Daily, 17 Nov 20,   

Uranprojekt, also known informally as the Uranverein (meaning Uranium Club) was a secret German project, to research and develop atomic weapons and energy during the Second World War.

Prior to the outbreak of hostilities, Germany was at the forefront of nuclear fission, with the discovery of the first nuclear fission of heavy elements by Otto Hahn (referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry), and his assistant Fritz Strassmann from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1938.

This was shortly followed by Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish physicist who theorised, and then proved in 1939 that the uranium nucleus had been split, giving the name “fission”.

In light of the recent discoveries, Germany was encouraged by a paper submitted by experimental physicist Wilhelm Hanle, which proposed the use of uranium fission in a reactor. This led to a small team being tasked to study the potential military applications of nuclear energy.

The Germans then established a new research project on the 1st September 1939 (the same day generally considered to be the start of WW2 with the invasion of Poland by Germany), under the auspices of the Wehrmacht’s Heereswaffenamt (HWA), the German Army Weapons Agency responsible for researching weaponry, ammunition, and equipment.

The USA also became aware of the German program that same year, when Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt, warning of the German threat in creating a “nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated.”

It was quickly realised by the HWA that the project would be unable to make a decisive contribution to ending the war in the near term, so authority was placed under the Reichsforschungsrat (RFR, Reich Research Council), maintaining its kriegswichtig (war importance) designation.

The project was then expanded into three main areas of research, the Uranmaschine to investigate creating a nuclear reactor, the production of uranium and heavy water, and the separation of uranium isotopes.

Research struggled with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), as the majority of Germany‘s scientific minds were turned to focus on developing other new technologies that could have a more immediate impact on the war effort (namely rocket technology and jet aircraft).

The project also suffered from a drained talent pool. Many top German scientists and nuclear physicists (some of which were Jewish or with Jewish heritage) had fled the country, and there was a lack of understanding and investment from the regime in the pure scientific application of the research (in comparison, the Manhattan Project consumed some $2 billion (1945) in government funds, compared to a mere 8 million reichsmarks $2 million (1945) on the Uranprojekt).

This resulted in the Germans never achieving a successful chain reaction, nor did they manage to develop a method of enriching uranium (having never seriously considered plutonium as a viable substitute).

In 1942, a conference was initiated by Albert Speer as head of the “Reich Ministry for Armament and Ammunition” (RMBM: Reichsministerium für Bewaffnung und Munition) to discuss the continuation of research, and the prospects for developing nuclear weapons……. https://www.heritagedaily.com/2020/11/uranprojekt-the-nazi-nuclear-program/136152

November 19, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | Germany, history, Reference | Leave a comment

The USA devised an apocalyptic nuclear weapon – the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile or SLAM

PROJECT PLUTO: THE CRAZIEST NUCLEAR WEAPON IN HISTORY  SOFREP, by Sandboxx  15 Nov 20,  “…………. Although the destructive force of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been so monstrous that they changed the geopolitical landscape of the world forever, both the U.S. and Soviet Union immediately set about developing newer, even more powerful thermonuclear weapons. Other programs sought new and dynamic delivery methods for these powerful nukes, ranging from ballistic missiles to unguided bombs.Project Pluto and the SLAM Missile

One such effort under the supervision of the U.S. Air Force was a weapon dubbed the Supersonic Low Altitude Missile or SLAM (not to be mistaken for the later AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile). The SLAM missile program was to utilize a ramjet nuclear propulsion system being developed under the name Project Pluto. Today, Russia is developing the 9M730 Burevestnik, or Skyfall missile, to leverage the same nuclear propulsion concept.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin recently pointed out, nuclear propulsion offers practically endless range, and estimates at the time suggested the American SLAM Missile would likely fly for 113,000 miles or more before its fuel was expended. Based on those figures, the missile could fly around the entire globe at the equator at least four and a half times without breaking a sweat.

The unshielded nuclear reactor powering the missile would practically rain radiation onto the ground as it flew, offering the first of at least three separate means of destruction the SLAM missile provided. In order to more effectively leverage the unending range of the nuclear ramjet, the SLAM missile was designed to literally drop hydrogen bombs on targets as it flew. Finally, with its bevy of bombs expended, the SLAM missile would fly itself into one final target, detonating its own thermonuclear warhead as it did. That final strike could feasibly be days or even weeks after the missile was first launched.

Over time, the SLAM missile came to be known as Pluto to many who worked on it, due to the missile’s development through the project with the same name.

The onboard nuclear reactor produced more than 500-megawatts of power and operated at a scorching 2,500 degrees — hot enough to compromise the structural integrity of metal alloys designed specifically to withstand high amounts of heat. Ultimately, the decision was made to forgo metal internal parts in favor of specially developed ceramics sourced from the Coors Porcelain Company, based in Colorado.

The downside to ramjet propulsion is that it can only function when traveling at high speeds. In order to reach those speeds, the SLAM would be carried aloft and accelerated by rocket boosters until the missile was moving fast enough for the nuclear ramjet to engage. Once the nuclear ramjet system was operating, the missile could remain aloft practically indefinitely, which would allow it to engage multiple targets and even avoid intercept.

The nuclear-powered ramjet was so loud that the missile’s designers theorized that the shock wave of the missile flying overhead on its own would likely kill anyone in its path, and if not, the gamma and neutron radiation from the unshielded reactor sputtering fission fragments out the back probably would. While this effectively made the missile’s engine a weapon in its own right, it also made flying the SLAM over friendly territory impossible.

While the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction has since made the launch of just one nuclear weapon the start of a cascade that could feasibly end life on Earth as we know it, Project Pluto’s SLAM Missile was practically apocalyptic in its own right. The nuclear powerplant that would grant the missile effectively unlimited range would also potentially kill anyone it passed over, but the real destructive power of the SLAM missile came from its payload.

Unlike most cruise missiles, which are designed with a propulsion system meant to carry a warhead to its target, Project Pluto’s SLAM carried not only a nuclear warhead, but 16 additional hydrogen bombs that it could drop along its path to the final target. Some even suggested flying the missile in a zig-zagging course across the Soviet Union, irradiating massive swaths of territory and delivering it’s 16 hydrogen bombs to different targets around the country.

Doing so would not only offer the ability to engage multiple targets, but would almost certainly also leave the Soviet populace in a state of terror. A low-flying missile spewing radiation as it passed over towns, shattering windows and deafening bystanders as it delivered nuclear hellfire to targets spanning the massive Soviet Union, would likely have far-reaching effects on morale.

How Do You Test an Apocalyptic Weapon?

Project Pluto’s nuclear propulsion system made testing the platform a difficult enterprise. Once the nuclear reactor onboard was engaged, it would continue to function until it hit its target or expended all of its fuel. Any territory the weapon passed over during flight would be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, limiting the ways and the places in which the weapon’s engine could even be tested.

On May 14, 1961, engineers powered up the Project Pluto propulsion system on a train car for just a few seconds, and a week later a second test saw the system run for a full five minutes. The engine produced 513 megawatts of power, which equated to around 35,000 pounds of thrust — 6,000 pounds more than an F-16’s Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 afterburning turbofan engine with its afterburner engaged.

However, those engine tests were the only large scale tests Project Pluto would ultimately see, in part, because a fully assembled SLAM missile would irradiate so much territory that it was difficult to imagine any safe way of actually testing it.

A weapon That’s Too Destructive to Use

Ultimately, Project Pluto and its SLAM missile were canceled before ever leaving the ground. The cancellation came for a litany of reasons, including the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and the introduction of global strike heavy payload bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress. There were, however, some other considerations that led to the program’s downfall.

Because the SLAM would irradiate, destroy, or deafen anyone and anything it flew over, the missile could not be launched from U.S. soil or be allowed to fly over any territory other than its target nation. That meant the missile could really only be used from just over the Soviet border, whereas ICBMs could be launched from the American midwest and reach their targets in the Soviet Union without trouble.

There was also a pressing concern that developing such a terrible weapon would likely motivate the Soviet Union to respond in kind. Each time the United States unveiled a new weapon or strategic capability, the Soviet Union saw to it that they could match and deter that development. As a result, it stood to reason that America’s nuclear-spewing apocalypse missile would prompt the Soviets to build their own if one entered into service.

Project Pluto and its SLAM missile program were canceled on July 1, 1964 https://sofrep.com/news/project-pluto-the-craziest-nuclear-weapon-in-history/

November 16, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The tragic nuclear history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Six Million dead, The Congo Holocaust has its origins in minerals plunder and colonialism  https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/3011373848, By Linda Pentz Gunter, 8 Nov 20, 

When you’ve lost family members to the Nazi death camps, it’s a pain that never goes away. Six of my relatives were killed there, four more shot in Polish ghettos and at Forlì. They died long before I was born and were people I never knew. But we have their photographs. Their pain stares out from those images, a perpetual ache.

But what use is endless mourning if no lessons are learned? The most important one surely is that no such Holocaust must ever be allowed to happen again? And yet it has. To almost universal silence. No one speaks of today’s six million dead. They lie beneath the mineral-rich soil of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), invisible and unmourned by the world beyond their country’s borders.

“The Holocaust continues in DRC with the complicity of the international community,” Rodrigue Muganwa Lubulu wrote to me in an email exchange. “Women and girls are raped every day and the dead are counted by tens each day.” He is the program director for CRISPAL Afrique and gave a zoom talk recently hosted by ICAN Germany.

The tragedy of the DRC, the second largest country in Africa, began with the discovery in 1915 of the Shinkolobwe uranium deposit, the richest ever discovered at the time. Its plunder, from 1921 until its closure in 2004, “has been a curse for the powerless community” around the mine, said Lubulu, “because not only have they been forced to abandon their lands, houses and fields in favor of uranium mining, but also all the men were forced to dig out those extremely radioactive materials without protective equipment.”

The cancers and other illnesses that killed those uranium workers are still harming the community today, Lubulu says, even though the mine is now shut down.

The DRC was first colonized by Belgium in 1908 and known as the Belgian Congo until it gained independence in 1960. (It was known as Zaire between 1971 and 1997.) It rapidly became a country of great interest, especially to the United State and the then Soviet Union, engaged in a growing Cold War arms race. Then, as now, the country promised riches to its White pillagers. In the Eastern part of the country, wrote Armin Rosen, in a June 26, 2013 article in The Atlantic, “just feet beneath the surface of the earth are enough minerals to keep the global technology and defense industries humming.”

But during World War II, the uranium mined from Shinkolobwe went to the American Manhattan Project. “More than 70 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb came from Shinkolobwe,” says Lubulu, whose organization is holding workshops and other events in an effort to persuade the government of the DNC to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

He is haunted by what might have been if the “ore of death” as he calls uranium, had instead been left where it belongs; in the ground. “Without the uranium of Shinkolobwe, the 5th of August 1945 would have been a perfect and productive day in Hiroshima,” he said during his ICAN presentation.

This is supported by a recollection from the Manhattan Project’s Colonel Ken Nichols, who wrote: “Without Sengier’s foresight in stockpiling ore in the United States and aboveground in Africa, we simply would not have had the amounts of uranium needed to justify building the large separation plants and the plutonium reactors.” Edgar Sengier was the then director of Union Minière du Haut Katanga, and had stockpiled 1,200 tonnes of uranium ore in a warehouse in New York. This ore and an additional 3,000 tonnes of ore stored above-ground at the mine was purchased by Nichols for use in the Manhattan Project.

That connection between his homeland and Hiroshima, and the haunting reminders of its outcome so movingly expressed by Japan’s Hibakusha, as the atomic bomb survivors are known, is what spurs Lubulu and CRISPAL to urge on the ratification and implementation of the TPNW.

“You cannot separate nuclear weapons from uranium,” Lubulu said. “Once you have one, you get the other. Once you dig it out, it becomes a monster and you can’t control it anymore.”

Tragically, that monster could be unleashed again at Shinkolobwe. Both France and China are interested in mineral rights there. CRISPAL needs to move fast to educate people about these renewed dangers. But they face dangers of their own in doing so.

Since 1997, when internal and cross-border strife took hold in the DRC, at least six million people have died. Trying to leaflet or hold meetings in such communities, especially if it is in opposition to uranium mining, is fraught with danger. No one involved has forgotten the brutal treatment of Congolese anti-uranium mining activist, Golden Misabiko, who was arrested, imprisoned twice, poisoned by his own government in an apparent, and mercifully unsuccessful, assassination attempt, separated from his family and forced into exile.

Despite this, Lubulu believes that, above all, love will find a way. “There is no door that enough love cannot open,” he said in concluding his presentation. Hopefully, the rest of the world will start sending some love in Congo’s direction.

November 9, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | AFRICA, history, indigenous issues, Uranium | Leave a comment

315 nuclear bombs and ongoing suffering: the shameful history of nuclear testing in Australia and the Pacific

315 nuclear bombs and ongoing suffering: the shameful history of nuclear testing in Australia and the Pacific, https://theconversation.com/315-nuclear-bombs-and-ongoing-suffering-the-shameful-history-of-nuclear-testing-in-australia-and-the-pacific-148909, Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor, Education and Learning Unit, Nossal Institute for Global Health, School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Dimity Hawkins, PhD Candidate, Swinburne University of Technology
November 3, 2020     The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received its 50th ratification on October 24, and will therefore come into force in January 2021. A historic development, this new international law will ban the possession, development, testing, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons.Unfortunately the nuclear powers — the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Russia, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — haven’t signed on to the treaty. As such, they are not immediately obliged to help victims and remediate contaminated environments, but others party to the treaty do have these obligations. The shifting norms around this will hopefully put ongoing pressure on nuclear testing countries to open records and to cooperate with accountability measures.

For the people of the Pacific region, particularly those who bore the brunt of nuclear weapons testing during the 20th century, it will bring a new opportunity for their voices to be heard on the long-term costs of nuclear violence. The treaty is the first to enshrine enduring commitments to addressing their needs.

From 1946, around 315 nuclear tests were carried out in the Pacific by the US, Britain and France. These nations’ largest ever nuclear tests took place on colonised lands and oceans, from Australia to the Marshall Islands, Kiribati to French Polynesia.

The impacts of these tests are still being felt today.

All nuclear tests cause harm

Studies of nuclear test workers and exposed nearby communities around the world consistently show adverse health effects, especially increased risks of cancer.

The total number of global cancer deaths as a result of atmospheric nuclear test explosions has been estimated at between 2 million and 2.4 million, even though these studies used radiation risk estimates that are now dated and likely underestimated the risk.

The number of additional non-fatal cancer cases caused by test explosions is similar. As confirmed in a large recent study of nuclear industry workers in France, the UK and US, the numbers of radiation-related deaths due to other diseases, such as heart attacks and strokes, is also likely to be similar.

Britain conducted 12 nuclear test explosions in Australia between 1952 and 1957, and hundreds of minor trials of radioactive and toxic materials for bomb development up to 1963. These caused untold health problems for local Aboriginal people who were at the highest risk of radiation. Many of them were not properly evacuated, and some were not informed at all.

We may never know the full impact of these explosions because in many cases, as the Royal Commission report on British Nuclear Tests in Australia found in 1985: “the resources allocated for Aboriginal welfare and safety were ludicrous, amounting to nothing more than a token gesture”. But we can listen to the survivors.

The late Yami Lester directly experienced the impacts of nuclear weapons. A Yankunytjatjara elder from South Australia, Yami was a child when the British tested at Emu Field in October 1953. He recalled the “Black Mist” after the bomb blast:

It wasn’t long after that a black smoke came through. A strange black smoke, it was shiny and oily. A few hours later we all got crook, every one of us. We were all vomiting; we had diarrhoea, skin rashes and sore eyes. I had really sore eyes. They were so sore I couldn’t open them for two or three weeks. Some of the older people, they died. They were too weak to survive all the sickness. The closest clinic was 400 miles away.

His daughter, Karina Lester, is an ambassador for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Australia, and continues to be driven by her family’s experience. She writes:

For decades now my family have campaigned and spoken up against the harms of nuclear weapons because of their firsthand experience of the British nuclear tests […] Many Aboriginal people suffered from the British nuclear tests that took place in the 1950s and 1960s and many are still suffering from the impacts today.

More than 16,000 Australian workers were also exposed. A key government-funded study belatedly followed these veterans over an 18-year period from 1982. Despite the difficulties of conducting a study decades later with incomplete data, it found they had 23% higher rates of cancer and 18% more deaths from cancers than the general population.

An additional health impact in Pacific island countries is the toxic disease “ciguatera”, caused by certain microscopic plankton at the base of the marine food chain, which thrive on damaged coral. Their toxins concentrate up the food chain, especially in fish, and cause illness and occasional deaths in people who eat them. In the Marshall Islands, Kiritimati and French Polynesia, outbreaks of the disease among locals have been associated with coral damage caused by nuclear test explosions and the extensive military and shipping infrastructure supporting them.

Pacific survivors of nuclear testing haven’t been focused solely on addressing their own considerable needs for justice and care; they’ve been powerful advocates that no one should suffer as they have ever again, and have worked tirelessly for the eradication of nuclear weapons. It’s no surprise independent Pacific island nations are strong supporters of the new treaty, accounting for ten of the first 50 ratifications.

Negligence and little accountability

Some nations that have undertaken nuclear tests have provided some care and compensation for their nuclear test workers; only the US has made some provisions for people exposed, though only for mainland US residents downwind of the Nevada Test Site. No testing nation has extended any such arrangement beyond its own shores to the colonised and minority peoples it put in harm’s way. Nor has any testing nation made fully publicly available its records of the history, conduct and effects of its nuclear tests on exposed populations and the environment.

These nations have also been negligent by quickly abandoning former test sites. There has been inadequate clean-up and little or none of the long-term environmental monitoring needed to detect radioactive leakage from underground test sites into groundwater, soil and air. One example among many is the Runit concrete dome in the Marshall Islands, which holds nuclear waste from US testing in the 1940s and 50s. It’s increasingly inundated by rising sea levels, and is leaking radioactive material.

The treaty provides a light in a dark time. It contains the only internationally agreed framework for all nations to verifiably eliminate nuclear weapons.

It’s our fervent hope the treaty will mark the increasingly urgent beginning of the end of nuclear weapons. It is our determined expectation that our country will step up. Australia has not yet ratified the treaty, but the bitter legacy of nuclear testing across our country and region should spur us to join this new global effort.

November 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | environment, health, history, indigenous issues, Reference, wastes | Leave a comment

Cuban missile crisis -a reminder that nuclear war could so easily still happen

Yes, nuclear war could still happen   https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/523951-yes-nuclear-war-could-still-happen, BY JOHN DALE GROVER, — 11/02/20  The recent anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis should be a reminder to American citizens and policymakers that nuclear war is not impossible. For 13 days from Oct. 16, 1962, to Oct. 28, 1962, America and the Soviet Union nearly killed each other in a nuclear war. Today, the passing of that anniversary should warn us that through a crisis that spirals out of control, sheer accident, or miscommunication, Washington could still find itself in a nuclear exchange with Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang.

Today, relations with China are strained and tensions with North Korea — though on an uneasy pause — will likely resume sooner rather than later. America’s relationship with Russia is also contentious and only one arms control treaty remains in place between Washington and Moscow. The 2011 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) is set to expire in February 2021, but last-minute negotiations are underway to extend that treaty for another year.

History shows that dealing with a hostile nuclear power requires dual firmness: a strong military to deter any attack and a strong diplomatic corps to diffuse any crisis or misunderstanding. The problem is that without diplomacy, miscommunication, changing redlines, and accidents could start a nuclear war. In fact, the Cuban Missile Crisis is a perfect example of that.
In April 1961, President John F. Kennedy tried to overthrow Cuban dictator Fidel Castro in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, just one of several events that prompted Castro to ask Moscow for help. Complicating the situation, the U.S. stationed Jupiter nuclear missiles in its ally Turkey, which were very close to the Soviet Union. As a result, Moscow feared an attack and wanted to do the same thing to Washington by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba.

Kennedy considered many options, including bombing the missile sites or invading Cuba, but thankfully decided against military action. Instead, he ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba. While America enforced its de-facto blockade, negotiations commenced, and a secret agreement was made: Moscow would remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba if Washington removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. However, Washington kept its end of the deal quiet to make it look as if Moscow had backed down — a decision which has incorrectly given the impression to later generations of policymakers that hard power is all that matters when facing a crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis nearly spiraled into a nuclear war as accidents, errors, and miscommunication was commonplace. For example, the CIA incorrectly estimated that only around 12,000 Soviet troops were in Cuba. In reality, there were over 40,000 and if any of them had died, Moscow would surely have retaliated.

Kennedy considered many options, including bombing the missile sites or invading Cuba, but thankfully decided against military action. Instead, he ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba. While America enforced its de-facto blockade, negotiations commenced, and a secret agreement was made: Moscow would remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba if Washington removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. However, Washington kept its end of the deal quiet to make it look as if Moscow had backed down — a decision which has incorrectly given the impression to later generations of policymakers that hard power is all that matters when facing a crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis nearly spiraled into a nuclear war as accidents, errors, and miscommunication was commonplace. For example, the CIA incorrectly estimated that only around 12,000 Soviet troops were in Cuba. In reality, there were over 40,000 and if any of them had died, Moscow would surely have retaliated.
In addition, according to the U.S. National Archives, the CIA “was also unaware that the Soviets had on hand 35 LUNA battlefield nuclear weapons that would have devastated any American landing force.” The Archives also noted that during the crisis, “Several anti-Castro groups, operating under a CIA program… went about their sabotage activities because no one had thought to cancel their mission, which could have been mistaken for assault preparations.”

The list goes on. Shortly after being ordered to Defcon 2, General Thomas Powers, commander of America’s nuclear bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) dangerously broadcast some of his orders without code and out in the open. America also conducted a routine ICBM test even though such a move may have looked like an attack.

A guard at Duluth Air Base mistook a bear for a saboteur and pulled an alarm, which accidentally rang the nuclear attack warning at Volks Field in Wisconsin. The nuclear-armed fighter jets nearly took off but were halted by an officer who drove onto the runway with his lights flashing.
There were also not one — but two — simultaneous U-2 spy plane incidents. One American spy plane accidentally got lost over the Soviet Union for at least an hour and a half, while another U-2 over Cuba was actually shot down by Russian troops that acted unilaterally without authorization from Moscow.

November 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A USA Senator reflects on the anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis

Sam Nunn on Cold War & nuclear weapons, Technique, Hope Williams on November 2, 2020  2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World Word II and the start of the Cold War, a conflict that shaped former United States Senator Sam Nunn’s time while serving in Congress, as well as his work afterwards with the Nuclear Threat Initiative.On Oct. 14, Nunn discussed how nuclear weapons still pose a threat to the world today in a talk with the Georgia Historical Society.

Nunn, who was born in Macon, Georgia, attended Tech, Emory University and Emory Law School. He then served in the U.S. Coast Guard and Georgia House of Representatives before being elected in 1972 to the U.S. Senate.

One of his earliest experiences with the intersection of foreign policy and nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, during which he was attending a NATO Conference with the Armed Services Committee in Europe.

“We were actually briefed by the Air Force with photographs and all the classified information, sort of every step of the way once the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out,” said Nunn. “… We were at Wiesbaden Air Force Base, which was sort of the head of the U.S. Air Force Europe, on the night where it really looked like we were going to war.”

That night, Nunn sat next to the top Air Force General in Europe during dinner.

“He had a whole big computer back [with] him with all sorts of communication equipment,” said Nunn. “During the course of the dinner, he told me that he had about 20 to 30 seconds, once he got the signal, to basically turn loose his aircraft to go after the Soviet Union, because we thought we were going to war.”

This experience shaped his view of nuclear war.

“That brought home a sense of reality to me about the dangers of nuclear war that had an effect on the rest of my life,” said Nunn. “… It brought home to me two things: how close we came to war and how much subjective judgment was involved in the [John F.] Kennedy decisions and the [Nikita] Khrushchev decisions to avoid war and second, how little warning time we had.”

Nunn points out that during the 1960s, leaders had more decision time because planes flew much slower.

“Having very little decision time in a moment of great crisis is extremely dangerous for the world and that’s, to me, one of the prime goals we should have today, which is to give both U.S. and Russian leaders more time so that we do not move into a nuclear war by blunder,” said Nunn.

New technology adds additional danger.

“When you introduce cyber and possible interference in command and control and warning systems, I still very much worry about compressed decision time,” said Nunn.

“And if I had my way today, and I’ve told President Obama this, I’ve told President Trump this and I’ve told President Putin this, that if I had my way, the leaders would call in their military and say ‘Look, we have a mutual existential interest to give each other more warning time.’”……….

Relating decisions about the usage of nuclear weapons to presidential politics, Nunn served under six presidents during his terms as a Senator:

Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. As commander-in-chief, presidents have the sole authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons.

“It is a moral question, but every military commander is charged with the responsibility of carrying out orders from the commander-in-chief,” said Nunn.

“But those orders have to be moral orders, and how do you determine that?”…….

In conclusion, Nunn reiterates there is currently less of a chance of premeditated nuclear attacks than there was during the Cold War, but with a more compressed decision time for leaders, there is a higher risk of a mistake.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do so that our children and grandchildren can live in a world that does not have the perils of nuclear, biological and climate change, all of those things hanging over us,” said Nunn.

“So it’s very hard under these circumstances to get out to the voters, to get seen.”……..

In conclusion, Nunn reiterates there is currently less of a chance of premeditated nuclear attacks than there was during the Cold War, but with a more compressed decision time for leaders, there is a higher risk of a mistake.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do so that our children and grandchildren can live in a world that does not have the perils of nuclear, biological and climate change, all of those things hanging over us,” said Nunn.

“So it’s very hard under these circumstances to get out to the voters, to get seen.”…… https://nique.net/life/2020/11/02/sam-nunn-on-cold-war-nuclear-weapons/

November 3, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | history, politics international, Reference, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Now climate change, rising seas, swamping Kiribati and the Marshall Islands, victims of nuclear racism

Losing paradise,  Atomic racism decimated Kiribati and the Marshall Islands; now climate change is sinking them, Beyond Nuclear   https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/2998141589–1 Nov 20, This is an extract from the Don’t Bank on the Bomb Scotland report “Nuclear Weapons, the Climate and Our Environment”.

Kiribati.  In 1954, the government of Winston Churchill decided that the UK needed to develop a hydrogen bomb (a more sophisticated and destructive type of nuclear weapon). The US and Russia had already developed an H-bomb and Churchill argued that the UK “could not expect to maintain our influence as a world power unless we possessed the most up-to-date nuclear weapons”.

The governments of Australia and New Zealand refused to allow a hydrogen bomb test to be conducted on their territories so the British government searched for an alternative site. Kiritimati Island and Malden Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony in the central Pacific Ocean (now the Republic of Kiribati) were chosen. Nine nuclear weapons tests – including the first hydrogen bomb tests – were carried out there as part of “Operation Grapple” between 1957 and 1958.

Military personnel from the UK, New Zealand and Fiji (then a British colony) and Gilbertese labourers were brought in to work on the operation. Many of the service personnel were ordered to witness the tests in the open, on beaches or on the decks of ships, and were simply told to turn their backs and shut their eyes when the bombs were detonated. There is evidence that Fijian forces were given more dangerous tasks than their British counterparts, putting them at greater risk from radiation exposure. The local Gilbertese were relocated and evacuated to British naval vessels during some of the tests but many were exposed to fallout, along with naval personnel and soldiers.

After Grapple X, the UK’s first megaton hydrogen bomb test in November 1957, dead fish washed ashore and “birds were observed to have their feathers burnt off, to the extent that they could not fly”. The larger Grapple Y test in 1958 spread fallout over Kiritimati Island and destroyed large areas of vegetation.

Despite evidence that military personnel and local people suffered serious health problems as a result of the tests, including blindness, cancers, leukaemia and reproductive difficulties, the British government has consistently denied that they were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and has resisted claims for compensation.

Like the Marshall Islands, the low-lying Republic of Kiribati is now bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change. Salt water washed in on king tides has contaminated the islands’ scarce freshwater resources. Pits that are used to grow taro plants have been ruined and the healthy subsistence lifestyle of local people is under threat.

It is predicted that rising sea levels will further impact freshwater resources and reduce the amount of agricultural land, while storm damage and erosion will increase. Much of the land will ultimately be submerged. In anticipation of the need to relocate its entire population, the government of Kiribati bought 20km2 of land on Fiji in 2014.

The UK is set to spend £3.4 billion a year on Trident nuclear weapons system between 2019 and 2070. If Trident were scrapped, a portion of the savings could be provide to the Republic of Kiribati in the form of climate finance (see section 1.2.1). Scrapping Trident would also allow money and skills to be redirected towards measures aimed at drastically cutting the UK’s carbon emissions (see section 1.2.2) – action that Pacific island nations are urgently demanding.

The Marshall Islands.  The most devasting incident of radioactive contamination took place 8,000 km from the US mainland during the Castle Bravo test in 1954. The US detonated the largest nuclear weapon in its history at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, causing fallout to spread over an area of more than 11,000km. Residents of nearby atolls, Rongelap and Utirik, were exposed to high levels of radiation, suffering burns, radiation sickness, skin lesions and hair loss as a result.

Castle Bravo was just one of 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the US in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. Forty years after the tests, the cervical cancer mortality rate for women of the Marshall Islands was found to be 60 times greater than the rate for women in the US mainland, while breast and lung cancer rates were five and three times greater respectively. High rates of infant mortality have also been found in the Marshall Islands and a legacy of birth defects and infertility has been documented. Many Marshallese were relocated by the US to make way for the testing.

Some were moved to Rongelap Atoll and relocated yet again after the fallout from Castle Bravo left the area uninhabitable.

Rongelap Atoll was resettled in 1957 after the US government declared that the area was safe. However, many of those who returned developed serious health conditions and the entire population was evacuated by Greenpeace in 1984. An attempt to resettle Bikini Atoll was similarly abandoned in 1978 after it became clear that the area was still unsafe for human habitation.

A 2019 peer-reviewed study found levels of the radioactive isotope caesium-137 in fruits taken from some parts of Bikini and Rongelap to be significantly higher than levels recorded at the sites of the world’s worst nuclear accidents, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

Compounding the injustice of nuclear weapons testing, the Republic of the Marshall Islands is now on the frontline of the climate emergency. The government declared a national climate crisis in 2019, citing the nation’s extreme vulnerability to rising sea levels and the “implications for the security, human rights and wellbeing of the Marshallese people”.

At Runit Island, one of 40 islands in the Enewetak Atoll, rising sea levels are threatening to release radioactive materials into an already contaminated lagoon. In the late 1970s, the US army dumped 90,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste, including plutonium, into a nuclear blast crater and covered it with a concrete cap. Radioactive materials are leaking out of the crater and cracks have appeared on the concrete cap. Encroaching salt water caused by rising sea levels could collapse the structure altogether. The Marshallese government has asked the US for help to prevent an environmental catastrophe but the US maintains that the dome is the Marshall Islands’ responsibility. Hilda Heine, then President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, said of the dome in 2019: “We don’t want it. We didn’t build it. The garbage inside is not ours. It’s theirs.”

The Runit Island dome offers a stark illustration of the ways in which the injustices of nuclear weapons testing and climate change overlap. Marshall Islanders were left with the toxic legacy of nuclear weapons testing conducted on their territory by another state. The country is now being forced to deal with the effects of a climate crisis that they did not create, including the erosion of the Runit dome.

The nations that contributed most to the crisis are failing to cut their emissions quickly enough to limit further global heating, leaving the Marshallese at the mercy of droughts, cyclones and rising seas. A recent study found that if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions are maintained, the Marshall Islands will be flooded with sea water annually from 2050. The resulting damage to infrastructure and contamination of freshwater supplies will render the islands uninhabitable.

If the US scrapped its nuclear weapons programme, it could give a portion of the billions of dollars that would be saved to the Republic of the Marshall Islands to help the country mitigate and adapt to climate disruption (see section 1.2.1 on international climate finance). The US could also use the freed-up funds to invest in its own Just Transition away from a fossil-fuel powered economy.   Read the full report.

November 2, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | climate change, environment, history, OCEANIA, Reference, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Hitler’s quest for nuclear weapons

WW2: Hitler’s true nuclear capacity exposed in secret sabotage mission that ‘saved world’

WORLD WAR 2 saw the Allies cooperate to fight Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany but jaw-dropping documents reveal just how close he came to using nuclear weapons. Express UK By CALLUM HOARE Oct 21, 2020   The German nuclear weapons programme was an unsuccessful scientific effort to research and develop atomic weapons during World War 2. It went through several phases but was ultimately “frozen at the laboratory level” with historians and scholars alike generally agreeing it failed on all fronts. With that, Hitler is thought to have focused more on his revolutionary V1 and V2 rockets, but he came terrifyingly close to arming them with nuclear warheads, according to declassified papers unearthed by writer and filmmaker Damien Lewis.

The author of ‘Hunting Hitler’s Nukes’ wrote: “That Hitler’s Germany might win the race to build the world’s first atom bomb was arguably one of Winston Churchill’s greatest wartime concerns and one that was shared with his good friend US president Franklin D Roosevelt.  …….

“The greatest fear was that the Nazis had mastered the technology to fit a nuclear or radiological charge to the V2s, in which case there would be no defence possible.

“Churchill ordered aerial surveys to forewarn of such attacks – dry-run rehearsals to prepare for such an ordeal, and for frontline doctors to be briefed on the symptoms of radiation poisoning.

Such fears were very real. Following German physicist Otto Hahn splitting the atom in December 1938, the Allies believed the Germans to be two years ahead in the race to build the atom bomb.”

In May 1940, German forces struck a further blow in the race for nuclear supremacy after seizing Olen, Belgium, where the largest remaining stock of European uranium was located.

British intelligence reports on Operation Peppermint found by Mr Lewis revealed fears from London.

One read: “Since the fall of Belgium, much of the largest stock of uranium has been available [to Germany] from the refinery.”

The report went on to chronicle how “several hundred tonnes of crude concentrates had been removed from Belgium”.

According to Mr Lewis, its destination was the AuerGesellschaft refinery, at Oranienburg, Germany.

Allied research suggested it would require 20,000 workers, half a million watts of electricity and $150million (£114million) in expenditure to build the world’s first atom bomb.

Hitler, who now controlled most of western Europe, could demand such resources.

And, in concentration camps, he had access to millions of workers.

Mr Lewis noted: “In short, the Fuhrer could harness Germany’s foremost engineering capabilities to its scientific expertise and western Europe’s almost unlimited resources – all of which made an atom bomb a real possibility.”……..

According to Mr Lewis, its destination was the AuerGesellschaft refinery, at Oranienburg, Germany.

Allied research suggested it would require 20,000 workers, half a million watts of electricity and $150million (£114million) in expenditure to build the world’s first atom bomb.

Hitler, who now controlled most of western Europe, could demand such resources.

And, in concentration camps, he had access to millions of workers.

Mr Lewis noted: “In short, the Fuhrer could harness Germany’s foremost engineering capabilities to its scientific expertise and western Europe’s almost unlimited resources – all of which made an atom bomb a real possibility.”

“Details of Operation Peppermint and the measures taken to prepare for a Nazi nuclear strike were revealed in papers that I unearthed from the National Archives.

“This came as a great surprise to me, for I was unaware that the Allied wartime leaders viewed Nazi Germany’s nuclear programme as such a real and present threat.”

However, a top secret heroic mission would lead to a breakthrough……..

Hunting Hitler’s Nukes: The Secret Race to Stop the Nazi Bomb’ is published by Quercus and available to buy here. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1350513/world-war-2-hitler-nuclear-capacity-secret-winston-churchill-operation-peppermint-spt

October 22, 2020 Posted by Christina MacPherson | Germany, history, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries    

1.This Month

You can find names and items of interest by using our SEARCH button. Scroll down the right hand sidebar to find it
*******
of the week

Demystifying Nuclear Power Blog

*******************************************
***
***********************

EVENTS

11 March ONLINE  Ten Years Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Rio de Janeiro International Uranium Film Festival Free Online Screening and Debate.

********

13 – March – Protest  – France ROUEN (76) – HAUTE-NORMANDIE – RASSEMBLEMENT] Fukushima plus jamais ça : arrêt du nucléaire civil et militaire

 

*******

SAFECAST 10TH ANNIVERSARY ONLINE EVENT, SAT. , MARCH 13, 2021

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Categories

    • 1
      • Arclight's Vision
    • 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
      • business and costs
        • employment
        • marketing
      • climate change
      • culture and arts
      • ENERGY
        • renewable
          • decentralised
          • energy storage
      • environment
        • oceans
        • water
      • health
        • children
        • psychology – mental health
        • radiation
        • social effects
        • women
      • history
      • indigenous issues
      • Legal
        • deaths by radiation
        • legal
      • marketing of nuclear
      • media
        • investigative journalism
        • Wikileaks
      • opposition to nuclear
      • PERSONAL STORIES
      • politics
        • psychology and culture
          • Trump – personality
        • public opinion
        • USA elections 2016
      • politics international
      • Religion and ethics
      • safety
        • incidents
      • secrets,lies and civil liberties
        • civil liberties
      • spinbuster
        • Education
      • technology
        • reprocessing
        • Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
        • space travel
      • Uranium
      • wastes
        • – plutonium
        • decommission reactor
      • weapons and war
        • depleted uranium
      • Women
    • 2 WORLD
      • ANTARCTICA
      • ARCTIC
      • ASIA
        • Burma
        • China
        • India
        • Indonesia
        • Japan
          • – Fukushima 2011
          • Fukushima 2012
          • Fukushima 2013
          • Fukushima 2014
          • Fukushima 2015
          • Fukushima 2016
          • Fukushima continuing
        • Malaysia
        • Mongolia
        • North Korea
        • Pakistan
        • South Korea
        • Taiwan
        • Turkey
        • Vietnam
      • EUROPE
        • Belarus
        • Bulgaria
        • Denmark
        • Finland
        • France
        • Germany
        • Greece
        • Ireland
        • Italy
        • Kazakhstan
        • Kyrgyzstan
        • Russia
        • Spain
        • Sweden
        • Switzerland
        • UK
        • Ukraine
      • MIDDLE EAST
        • Afghanistan
        • Egypt
        • Gaza
        • Iran
        • Iraq
        • Israel
        • Jordan
        • Libya
        • Saudi Arabia
        • Syria
        • Turkey
        • United Arab Emirates
      • NORTH AMERICA
        • Canada
        • USA
          • election USA 2020
      • OCEANIA
        • New Zealand
        • Philippines
      • SOUTH AMERICA
        • Brazil
    • ACTION
    • AFRICA
      • Kenya
      • Malawi
      • Mali
      • Namibia
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • Somalia
      • South Africa
    • AUSTRALIA
    • Christina's notes
    • Christina's themes
    • culture and arts
    • Fukushima 2017
    • Fukushima 2018
    • fukushima 2019
    • Fukushima 2020
    • Fukushima 2021
    • general
    • global warming
    • Humour (God we need it)
    • Nuclear
    • RARE EARTHS
      • thorium
    • Reference
    • resources – print
    • Resources -audiovicual
    • World
    • World Nuclear
    • YouTube

  • Pages

    • 1.This Month
    • ACTION !
    • Disclaimer
    • Links
    • PAGES on NUCLEAR ISSUES
      • audio-visual news
      • Anti Nuclear, Clean Energy Movement
        • Anti Nuclear movement – a success story
          • – 2013 – the struggle for a nuclear-free, liveable world
          • – 2013: the battle to expose nuclear lies about ionising radiation
            • Speakers at Fukushima Symposium March 2013
            • Symposium 2013 Ian Fairlie
      • Civil Liberties
        • – Civil liberties – China and USA
      • Climate change
      • Climate Change
      • Economics
        • – Employment
        • – Marketing nuclear power
        • – Marketing Nuclear Power Internationally
        • nuclear ‘renaissance’?
        • Nuclear energy – the sick man of the corporate world
      • Energy
        • – Solar energy
      • Environment
        • – Nuclear Power and the Tragedy of the Commons
        • – Water
      • Health
        • Birth Defects in the Chernobyl Radiation Affected Region
      • History
        • Nuclear History – the forgotten disasters
      • Indigenous issues
      • Ionising radiation
        • – Ionising radiation – medical
        • Fukushima FACT SHEET
      • Media
        • Nuclear Power and Media 2012
      • Nuclear Power and the Consumer Society – theme for December 2012
      • Peace and nuclear disarmament
        • Peace on a Nuclear Free Earth
      • Politics
        • – Politics USA
      • Public opinion
      • Religion and ethics
        • -Ethics of nuclear power
      • Resources – print
      • Safety
      • Secrets and lies
        • – NUCLEAR LIES – theme for January 2012
        • – Nuclear Secrets and Lies
      • Spinbuster
        • 2013 nuclear spin – all about FEAR -theme for June
        • Spinbuster 1
      • Technology
        • TECHNOLOGY Challenges
      • Wastes
        • NUCLEAR WASTES – theme for October 2012
        • – Plutonium
      • Weapons and war
      • Women

  • Recommended websites

    • Antinuclear
    • Beyond nuclear
    • Exposing the truth about thorium nuclear propaganda
    • Mining Awareness Plus
    • Nuclear Information and Resource Service
    • NUCLEAR NFORMATION

  • Archives

    • March 2021 (25)
    • February 2021 (271)
    • January 2021 (278)
    • December 2020 (230)
    • November 2020 (297)
    • October 2020 (392)
    • September 2020 (349)
    • August 2020 (351)
    • July 2020 (280)
    • June 2020 (293)
    • May 2020 (251)
    • April 2020 (273)

  • Categories

    • 1
      • Arclight's Vision
    • 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
      • business and costs
        • employment
        • marketing
      • climate change
      • culture and arts
      • ENERGY
        • renewable
          • decentralised
          • energy storage
      • environment
        • oceans
        • water
      • health
        • children
        • psychology – mental health
        • radiation
        • social effects
        • women
      • history
      • indigenous issues
      • Legal
        • deaths by radiation
        • legal
      • marketing of nuclear
      • media
        • investigative journalism
        • Wikileaks
      • opposition to nuclear
      • PERSONAL STORIES
      • politics
        • psychology and culture
          • Trump – personality
        • public opinion
        • USA elections 2016
      • politics international
      • Religion and ethics
      • safety
        • incidents
      • secrets,lies and civil liberties
        • civil liberties
      • spinbuster
        • Education
      • technology
        • reprocessing
        • Small Modular Nuclear Reactors
        • space travel
      • Uranium
      • wastes
        • – plutonium
        • decommission reactor
      • weapons and war
        • depleted uranium
      • Women
    • 2 WORLD
      • ANTARCTICA
      • ARCTIC
      • ASIA
        • Burma
        • China
        • India
        • Indonesia
        • Japan
          • – Fukushima 2011
          • Fukushima 2012
          • Fukushima 2013
          • Fukushima 2014
          • Fukushima 2015
          • Fukushima 2016
          • Fukushima continuing
        • Malaysia
        • Mongolia
        • North Korea
        • Pakistan
        • South Korea
        • Taiwan
        • Turkey
        • Vietnam
      • EUROPE
        • Belarus
        • Bulgaria
        • Denmark
        • Finland
        • France
        • Germany
        • Greece
        • Ireland
        • Italy
        • Kazakhstan
        • Kyrgyzstan
        • Russia
        • Spain
        • Sweden
        • Switzerland
        • UK
        • Ukraine
      • MIDDLE EAST
        • Afghanistan
        • Egypt
        • Gaza
        • Iran
        • Iraq
        • Israel
        • Jordan
        • Libya
        • Saudi Arabia
        • Syria
        • Turkey
        • United Arab Emirates
      • NORTH AMERICA
        • Canada
        • USA
          • election USA 2020
      • OCEANIA
        • New Zealand
        • Philippines
      • SOUTH AMERICA
        • Brazil
    • ACTION
    • AFRICA
      • Kenya
      • Malawi
      • Mali
      • Namibia
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • Somalia
      • South Africa
    • AUSTRALIA
    • Christina's notes
    • Christina's themes
    • culture and arts
    • Fukushima 2017
    • Fukushima 2018
    • fukushima 2019
    • Fukushima 2020
    • Fukushima 2021
    • general
    • global warming
    • Humour (God we need it)
    • Nuclear
    • RARE EARTHS
      • thorium
    • Reference
    • resources – print
    • Resources -audiovicual
    • World
    • World Nuclear
    • YouTube

  • RSS

    Entries RSS
    Comments RSS

Site info

nuclear-news
Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.
Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy