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

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

November 3, 2020 Posted by | 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 | 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 | Germany, history, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A history of nuclear weapons accidents

THE NUCLEAR  TREATY dividing the World, Byline Times, Stephen Colegrave, 21 October 2020  “……… A History Of Near Accidents  It is easy to be sympathetic with their position when the number of near nuclear weapons accidents are considered.
In early 2009, two nuclear submarines, the French Le Triomphant and British Vanguard, both carrying nuclear weapons, crashed into each other deep in the Atlantic. Fortunately, they were not going fast enough to cause much damage.

Two years earlier, the American Air Force lost six nuclear armed cruise missiles for 36 hours when, unknown to anyone, they were fitted to a B-52 bomber and flown completely unauthorised to a base in Louisiana, left unguarded on the runway until anyone worked out what had happened.

In 2000, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten reported that classified documents obtained by a group of former workers at the Thule airbase suggest that one of four hydrogen bombs on a B-52 bomber that crashed there in 1968 was never found.

There are many instances of false alarms and nuclear bombs nearly being launched. One of the most dangerous of these was stopped by little-known hero Lieutenant Colonel Petrov who, in 1983, probably really did save the world. When he was alerted by an early warning system that five nuclear missiles by America were coming towards the Soviet Union, instead of immediately raising the alarm to his superiors who would have ordered retaliation, he instinctively decided that, if there was an attack, more than five missiles would have been launched and rightly decided that the system was faulty.

These incidents seem to have done nothing to dent the UK and America’s insistence that nuclear weapons safeguard and guarantee peace. The old Cold War politics of nuclear deterrents can seemingly do nothing to deter democratic interference on social media or the global impact of COVID-19. Like scary but lumbering dinosaurs, our trident submarines roam the ocean’s depths with enormous fire power – just one missile can kill more than 10 million people – while Russian President Vladimir Putin interferes with democratic elections in the West for less than the price of a non-nuclear fighter jet.https://bylinetimes.com/2020/10/21/the-nuclear-treaty-dividing-the-world/

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

60 years since nuclear war very nearly happened

Nearly 60 years ago this week, we were one argument away from nuclear war, Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis remain important, yet Americans largely ignore foreign policy. Deseret News, By Arthur Cyr, Columnist  Oct 20, 2020  The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred more than a half century ago, but the lessons remain important. Nuclear arms control talks between Moscow and Washington have derailed, and UN arms embargo of Iran has ended.

Current dangers of fatal military miscalculation may equal the height of the Cold War. In the United States, our military presence in the Mideast fuels fitful debate but not sustained discussion of serious strategic risks involved.

During Oct. 22-28, 1962, the Cuba crisis dominated world attention, as Washington and Moscow sparred on the edge of thermonuclear war. Lessons include difficulty of securing accurate intelligence and the unpredictability of events.

On Oct. 14, 1962, U.S. reconnaissance photos revealed the Soviet Union was placing offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, despite contrary assurances. On Oct. 16, after thorough review and analysis, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy informed President John F. Kennedy……….

The initial pressure for military attack dissipated. Kennedy deftly delayed intense pressures for war, while avoiding angry confrontation.

Lessons of the crisis include the importance of disciplined objective intelligence analysis, and communicating with opponents. Then and now, U.S. presidential leadership is essential.

Today, U.S. troops are in the Mideast close to forces from Russia, Iran, Israel, Syria, Turkey and various armed insurgent groups. Yet Americans remain preoccupied with domestic concerns and largely ignore foreign policy.

Cuban Missile Crisis lessons remain important, ignored at great peril.

Arthur I. Cyr is Clausen Distinguished Professor at Carthage College and author of “After the Cold War.” Contact acyr@carthage.edu      https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2020/10/20/21525956/cold-war-cuban-missile-crisis-jfk-nuclear-weapons

October 22, 2020 Posted by | history, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ionising radiation – the tragedy of the ”radium girls”.

They weren’t just making paints, they were doing the painting, too. According to NPR, US Radium hired scores of girls and young women — as young as just 11-years-old — to paint watch dials with the glow-in-the-dark, radium-based paint. As if just working with the paint wasn’t bad enough, they were also encouraged to put the brush between their lips and twirl it into a point. It was the best way to get truly precise numbers and brush strokes, but with each lick of the brush, they were swallowing radium.

the human body isn’t great at telling the difference between radium and calcium. Radium gets absorbed into the bones just like calcium does, and when that happens, the rot starts.

Writer and historian Kate Moore documented the cases of the Radium Girls (via The Spectator) and found that there were a whole host of symptoms. Some started suffering from chronic exhaustion. For many, it started with their teeth — one by one, those teeth would start to decay and rot. When they were removed, their gums wouldn’t heal. In some cases, the jaw would just simply disintegrate at the dentist’s touch. Bad breath was common. Skin became so delicate that the slightest touch would tear open wounds. Ulcers formed for some, and those that were pregnant bore stillborn babies.

THE RADIUM GIRLS HAD TO BE BURIED IN LEAD-LINED COFFINS
The Radium Girls weren’t just sick, they were very literally radioactive. Mollie Maggia was exhumed in 1927, in the hopes that her bones would give still-living Radium Girls the evidence they needed to win in court. According to Popular Science, her coffin was lifted out of the ground, and her body? It glowed. That wasn’t entirely surprising, considering her bones were found to be highly radioactive — and considering radium’s half-life is 1,600 years, they’re not going to stop glowing any time soon.

Eventually, 16 separate sites around Ottawa would be classified as Superfund sites. 

NPR Illinois says that many have been cleaned up, but as of 2018, there was at least one site — a 17-acre plot of land on the Fox River — that still remained a highly radioactive and terrifying legacy of the Radium Girls.

THE MESSED UP TRUTH ABOUT THE RADIUM GIRLS  https://www.grunge.com/181092/the-messed-up-truth-about-the-radium-girls/   BY DEBRA KELLY/DEC. JULY 14, 2020 
History is filled with episodes that prove mankind is just sort of making everything up as it goes. There’s no shortage of things that can kill us or do horrible, terrible things to our soft and squishy bodies, and every time we think we know about them all, it turns out there’s something else lurking around the corner.

And sometimes, it’s disguised as something awesome. Need proof? Look no further than the Radium Girls.

Yes, that radium. Today, the Royal Society of Chemistry says there’s really only one use for radium — targeted cancer treatments, because it’s so good at killing cells. It was first discovered in 1898 by Marie and Pierre Curie, after they extracted a single milligram from ten tons of a uranium ore called pitchblende. And it was pretty darn cool. It glowed, and seriously, how exciting is that? Unfortunately, it was also deadly — as the so-called Radium Girls would find out.

Continue reading →

October 3, 2020 Posted by | history, radiation, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

In 1951, Winston Churchill suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Russia

BOMBS AWAY Winston Churchill suggested dropping nuclear bombs on Russia in 1951.The Sun, Abe Hawken
9 Sep 2020, WINSTON Churchill disccused dropping nuclear bombs on Russia during the Cold War in 1951, a new memorandum reveals.

The then leader of the opposition is said to have wanted his war strategy to involve using nuclear strikes to bomb Russia and China into submission.

He thought the best way to end the conflict was to give Russia an “ultimatum” and if they refused, he would threaten 20 to 30 cities with atom bombs.

Churchill then wanted to warn Russia it was “imperative” the civilian population of each named city was “immediately evacuated”.

He was convinced Russia would refuse their terms so he discussed plans to bomb “one of the targets, and if necessary, additional ones”.

Churchill hoped that by the third attack the Kremlin would eventually meet their terms.

The bombshell plans have come to light in a memorandum written by the New York Times general manager Julius Ochs Adler, according to The Times.

In it, he describes a conversation the pair had during lunch at Churchill’s home in Kent on Sunday, April 29, 1951……….

Richard Toye, head of history of the University of Exeter, found the note in papers belonging to the New York Times Company.

He said Churchill recommended a threat like this in 1949 when the Soviet Union did not have nuclear weapons.

However, he added that it was a revelation he was still contemplating a similar threat two years later.

He told The Times: “One can question his judgment at this point.”…………https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/uknews/12621015/winston-churchill-nuclear-bombs-russia/

September 10, 2020 Posted by | history, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Central Asia’s toxic nuclear legacy

 

According to Kyrgyz official data, the gamma radiation on tailings pit surfaces are within 17-60 mR/hr; however, in the damaged areas, radiation levels reach 400-500 mR/hr. An exposure to 100 mSv a year (a millisievert, mSv, is equal to 100 milliroentgens, mR) or 10,000 mR is the point where an increase in cancer is clearly evident. At 400-500 mR/hr this would be achieved in 20-25 hours, or just one day. Radionuclides and heavy metals from these tailing pits and dumps are seeping into the surface and groundwater, polluting water and farmland and increasing the risk of cancer for local people.

Birth anomalies are an additional indicator of environmental radioactive contamination. A study by the Institute of Medical Problems showed that the incidence of birth defects in Mailuu-Suu was three times higher than in the country’s second largest city of Osh. Studies have correlated birth defects to the distance of the parents’ residences from radioactive waste sites. Polluted water is the major factor causing the development of congenital malformations, according to research by the Institute of Medical Problems.

Mailuu-Suu: Cleaning up Central Asia’s toxic uranium legacy https://www.thethirdpole.net/2020/09/02/mailuu-suu-cleaning-up-central-asias-toxic-uranium-legacy/

Countries must set aside territorial disputes and work together to clean up radioactive waste seeping into rivers and farmland in the Ferghana Valley – causing an environmental and health catastrophe for people living in the region   Janyl Madykova, September 2, 2020   Political tensions between countries in Central Asia have intensified since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Along with border conflicts and water disputes, problems have arisen from residual radioactive waste located in the Kyrgyz town of Mailuu-Suu in the Ferghana Valley, which has caused widespread pollution of river and farmland, and led to major impacts on the health and economy of people in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Industrial-scale uranium mining began in Mailuu-Suu during the Soviet era in 1946 and lasted until 1968. Uranium ore from Europe and China was also processed in Mailuu-Suu during this time.

As a result, the small town of 24,000 people is now surrounded by about 3 million cubic metres of uranium waste left in 23 tailings pits and 13 dumps. These sites have contaminated the Mailuu-Suu river, a major tributary of the Syr Darya which flows through Kyrgyzstan and into Uzbekistan, carrying radioactive waste into the densely populated Ferghana Valley.

The biggest problem is that earthquakes, landslides and heavy rainfall events have intensified in recent years, destroying uranium tailing storage sites along the river and mountain slopes, contaminating surrounding areas. A number of international organisations have worked to prevent further disasters in Mailuu-Suu. The World Bank has allocated more than USD 11 million to clean up uranium tailings. The European Commission launched an initiative in 2015 to remediate the most dangerous sites in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

However, the pollution remains, and Central Asian countries must cooperate to prevent further environmental disasters in the Ferghana Valley, as well as mitigate economic damage and resolve political issues.

A town built on radioactive waste

According to the state surveys there are 92 radioactive and toxic storage facilities across Kyrgyzstan today. The most dangerous of these are the Mailuu-Suu uranium sites, because of numerous hazards threatening the tailing pits. Were these tailing pits destabilised, they would have potentially catastrophic environmental consequences for Kyrgyzstan and the neighbouring countries of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, with the radioactive waste contaminating the river as well as the soil and irrigated farmland surrounding it.

Uranium was first discovered in the region in 1933, and within 20 years 10,000 tonnes of uranium oxide was extracted in Mailuu-Suu. Residual radioactive waste in southern Kyrgyzstan currently poses a major environmental threat to the densely populated parts of the Ferghana Valley, home to about 14 million people.

Landslides are the major risk. There are more than 200 landslide-prone locations around Mailuu-Suu. There was little such threat in the 1940s, but landslide activity has intensified since 1954 due to increased rainfall. Landslides in Mailuu-Suu occurred several times in 1988, 1992 and 2002, damaging infrastructure and altering water flow. The most dangerous landslide is Koi-Tash, which happened in 2017 and could block the riverbed and spread radioactive contamination down the river.

The 1950s saw one of the most salient examples of the danger posed by vulnerable waste dumps. In April 1958, as a result of rainfall and high seismic activity, an alluvial dam collapsed into tailings pit #7 in Mailuu-Suu, pushing more than 400,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste into the Mailuu-Suu river, which then spread 30-40 km downstream in irrigated farmland in Uzbekistan. The effects of this disaster have lasted to this day, with the radioactive contamination of the river and surrounding soil and vegetation causing major health problems and fatalities. Such disasters also heighten tensions between the regional states. Continue reading →

September 7, 2020 Posted by | ASIA, children, environment, history, Reference, women | Leave a comment

Racism in nuclear bomb testing, bombing of Japanese people, and nuclear waste dumping

Langston Hughes voiced the opinion that until racial injustice on home ground in the United States ceases, “it is going to be very hard for some Americans not to think the easiest way to settle the problems of Asia is simply dropping an atom bomb on colored heads there.”[25] While his statement was made in 1953, near the eighth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, it remains equally relevant today, as we approach the 75th anniversary

Memorial Days: the racial underpinnings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings  , Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Elaine Scarry, Elaine Scarry is the author of Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom and The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. She is Cabot Profess…   By Elaine Scarry, August 3, 2020

This past Memorial Day, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the throat of an African-American, George Floyd, for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Seventy-five years ago, an American pilot dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima. Worlds apart in time, space, and scale, the two events share three key features. Each was an act of state violence. Each was an act carried out against a defenseless opponent. Each was an act of naked racism. ……….

Self-defense was not an option for any one of the 300,000 civilian inhabitants of the city of Hiroshima, nor for any one of the 250,000 civilians in Nagasaki three days later. We know from John Hersey’s classic Hiroshima that as day dawned on that August morning, the city was full of courageous undertakings meant to increase the town’s collective capacity for self-defense against conventional warfare, such as the clearing of fire lanes by hundreds of young school girls, many of whom would instantly vanish in the 6,000° C temperature of the initial flash, and others of whom, more distant from the center, would retain their lives but lose their faces.[2] The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki initiated an era in which—for the first time on Earth and now continuing for seven and a half decades—humankind collectively and summarily lost the right self-defense. No one on Earth—or almost no one on Earth[3]—has the means to outlive a blast that is four times the heat of the sun or withstand the hurricane winds and raging fires that follow………

Centuries of political philosophers have asked, “What kind of political arrangements will create a noble and generous people?” Surely such arrangements cannot be ones where a handful of men control the means for destroying at will everyone on Earth from whom the means of self-defense have been eliminated……..

When Americans first learned that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been collectively vaporized in less time than it takes for the heart to beat, many cheered. But not all. Black poet Langston Hughes at once recognized the moral depravity of executing 100,000 people and discerned racism as the phenomenon that had licensed the depravity: “How come we did not try them [atomic bombs] on Germany…  . They just did not want to use them on white folks.”[4] Although the building of the weapon was completed only after Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, Japan had been designated the target on September 18, 1944, and training for the mission had already been initiated in that same month.[5] Black journalist George Schuyler wrote: “The atom bomb puts the Anglo-Saxons definitely on top where they will remain for decades”; the country, in its “racial arrogance,” has “achieved the supreme triumph of being able to slaughter whole cities at a time.”[6]

Still within the first year (and still before John Hersey had begun to awaken Americans to the horrible aversiveness of the injuries), novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston denounced the US president as a “butcher” and scorned the public’s silent compliance, asking, “Is it that we are so devoted to a ‘good Massa’ that we feel we ought not to even protest such crimes?”[7] Silence—whether practiced by whites or people of color—was, she saw, a cowardly act of moral enslavement to a white supremacist. Continue reading →

August 4, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, culture and arts, history, indigenous issues, Reference, social effects, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Virtual tours planned at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum

Virtual tours planned at atomic bomb museums,  https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20200721_43/?fbclid=IwAR2KZ-D8gWm-K1Yl8WVBDpUyobELxvI6Hm-DiWxtZYPBmyS8mo9BOneLd2E  21 Jul 20, Two Japanese museums dedicated to documenting the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki plan to offer virtual tours online in cooperation with an international NGO devoted to the elimination of nuclear weapons.They are planning the events as the number of international visitors to these museums has dropped sharply due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Kawasaki Akira, a member from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, unveiled the plan online on Monday.

The exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum will be shown live on Instagram. Volunteers and researchers from universities will explain the displays in English.

The Hiroshima museum will hold the virtual tour on Wednesday for about 30 minutes after closing time, between 6:30 p.m. and 7p.m. Japan time.

The Nagasaki museum will hold it on Friday for about 30 minutes before opening time, between 8:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. Japan time.

Kawasaki said his group and the museums want to do everything possible online as various activities have been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

He said he wants to offer young people abroad an opportunity to find out about the damage and aftereffects of the atomic bombings of the two cities.

July 25, 2020 Posted by | history, Japan, media, weapons and war | Leave a comment

British soldiers the guinea pigs for testing effects of nuclear radiation

https://www.youtube.com/embed/LqhhPtgOETo
  “My task was to go in and pick up all the radioactive debris, load them into my truck and take them to the decontamination centre. “I had no protection whatsoever. The only people who had protection on Christmas Island were civilian AWREs – Atomic Weapons Research Establishment people.”  A study undertaken by Sue Rabbitt Roff, a social scientist at Dundee University in 1999, found that of 2,261 children born to veterans, 39% were born with serious medical conditions. By contrast, the national incidence figure in Britain is around 2.5%. “I want them to apologise to all the nuclear veterans for using us as experiments,” he said.    I still maintain that they wanted to find out the level of radiation that a person could survive the nuclear bombs with. I want them to apologise to all the nuclear veterans for using us as experiments’, says Fife Christmas Island veteran,   https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/fife/1377815/i-want-them-to-apologise-to-all-the-nuclear-veterans-for-using-us-as-experiments-says-fife-christmas-island-veteran/ July 4 2020  Michael Alexander. Here’s why nuclear test veteran Dave Whyte from Fife intends to campaign for justice “until the end” In the 18 years that Christmas Island veteran Dave Whyte from Fife has been campaigning for “justice” for Britain’s nuclear test veterans, he has never held back with the language he has used to describe the Ministry of Defence’s treatment of British soldiers during the nuclear tests of the 1950s. He has compared the nuclear tests with the “experiments of Nazi Doctor Joseph Mengele”, accused the MoD of treating soldiers as “guinea pigs” and made comparisons with the aftermath of “Chernobyl”. He blames his exposure to the fallout from five atomic and hydrogen bomb blasts in 1958 for a catalogue of health problems he’s experienced over the years including the loss of all his teeth at 25 and the discovery in his mid-30s that he was sterile. The Ministry of Defence, meanwhile, has said there is no valid evidence linking the nuclear tests to ill health. But despite numerous attempts at legal action against the MoD over the years, which, he admits have “hit every brick wall available”, the now 83-year-old, of Kirkcaldy, is refusing to give up as he continues searching for an admission that he, and thousands of other servicemen – now dwindling in numbers – were exposed to more radiation than the authorities have ever admitted. Born and raised in Montrose before a spell living in Edinburgh and Germany where his sergeant major father served with the Royal Artillery, Mr Whyte was 22-years-old and serving with the Royal Engineers when he was sent to Christmas Island in the South Pacific in 1958. The Cold War was at its height and Mr Whyte was stationed there, off the north-eastern coast of Australia, to assist with British nuclear tests. His job was to collect samples afterwards. At the time the stakes were high. Amid real fears that the Cold War could escalate into open warfare with the USSR, Britain was determined that it should have its own nuclear deterrent. In all, Britain and the USA caused some 40 nuclear test explosions in the Pacific region between 1952 and 1962. Something like 21,000 British servicemen were exposed to these explosions. But little did Mr Whyte and his colleagues realise that in years to come, some would suffer ill health and in some cases premature death. Some would suffer from rare forms of leukaemia. Others reported congenital deformities in their children with a disproportionate number of stillbirths. “I was at Grapple Y – the largest hydrogen bomb exploded by Britain,” said Mr Whyte. Continue reading →

July 6, 2020 Posted by | health, history, PERSONAL STORIES, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Anthropocene, begun in 16th Century colonialism, slavery -? for repair in 21st Century post-Covid-19 recovery

Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the ‘great dying’ of the 16th century, The Conversation, Mark Maslin, Professor of Earth System Science, UCL, Simon Lewis, Professor of Global Change Science at University of Leeds and, UCL June 25, 2020 The toppling of statues at Black Lives Matter protests has powerfully articulated that the roots of modern racism lie in European colonisation and slavery. Racism will be more forcefully opposed once we acknowledge this history and learn from it. Geographers and geologists can help contribute to this new understanding of our past, by defining the new human-dominated period of Earth’s history as beginning with European colonialism.Today our impacts on the environment are immense: humans move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined. We may have kicked off the sixth “mass extinction” in Earth’s history, and the global climate is warming so fast we have delayed the next ice age.

We’ve made enough concrete to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer two millimetres thick. Enough plastic has been manufactured to clingfilm it as well. We annually produce 4.8 billion tonnes of our top five crops and 4.8 billion livestock animals. There are 1.4 billion motor vehicles, 2 billion personal computers, and more mobile phones than the 7.8 billion people on Earth.

All this suggests humans have become a geological superpower and evidence of our impact will be visible in rocks millions of years from now. This is a new geological epoch that scientists are calling the Anthropocene, combining the words for “human” and “recent-time”. But debate still continues as to when we should define the beginning of this period. When exactly did we leave behind the Holocene – the 10,000 years of stability that allowed farming and complex civilisations to develop – and move into the new epoch?

Five years ago we published evidence that the start of capitalism and European colonisation meet the formal scientific criteria for the start of the Anthropocene.

Our planetary impacts have increased since our earliest ancestors stepped down from the trees, at first by hunting some animal species to extinction. Much later, following the development of farming and agricultural societies, we started to change the climate. Yet Earth only truly became a “human planet” with the emergence of something quite different. This was capitalism, which itself grew out of European expansion in the 15th and 16th century and the era of colonisation and subjugation of indigenous peoples all around the world.

In the Americas, just 100 years after Christopher Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas in 1492, 56 million indigenous Americans were dead, mainly in South and Central America. This was 90% of the population. Most were killed by diseases brought across the Atlantic by Europeans, which had never been seen before in the Americas: measles, smallpox, influenza, the bubonic plague. War, slavery and wave after wave of disease combined to cause this “great dying”, something the world had never seen before, or since.

In North America the population decline was slower but no less dramatic due to slower colonisation by Europeans. US census data suggest the Native American population may have been as low as 250,000 people by 1900 from a pre-Columbus level of 5 million, a 95% decline.

This depopulation left the continents dominated by Europeans, who set up plantations and filled a labour shortage with enslaved workers. In total, more than 12 million people were forced to leave Africa and work for Europeans as slaves. ……….

In addition to the critical task of highlighting and tackling the racism within science, perhaps geologists and geographers can also make a small contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement by unflinchingly compiling the evidence showing that when humans started to exert a huge influence on the Earth’s environment was also the start of the brutal European colonisation of the world.

In her insightful book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, the geography professor Kathryn Yusoff makes it very clear that predominantly white geologists and geographers need to acknowledge that Europeans decimated indigenous and minority populations whenever so-called progress occurred.

Defining the start of the human planet as the period of colonisation, the spread of deadly diseases and transatlantic slavery, means we can face the past and ensure we deal with its toxic legacy. If 1610 marks both a turning point in human relations with the Earth and our treatment of each other, then maybe, just maybe, 2020 could mark the start of a new chapter of equality, environmental justice and stewardship of the only planet in the universe known to harbour any life. It’s a struggle nobody can afford to lose. https://theconversation.com/why-the-anthropocene-began-with-european-colonisation-mass-slavery-and-the-great-dying-of-the-16th-century-140661

June 27, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, civil liberties, climate change, environment, history | Leave a comment

USA’s secret plan for “dominance”by exploding a nuclear bomb on the moon

REVEALED: The US wanted to detonate a nuclear bomb on the MOON in 1959 to counter the Soviet lead in the space race and show dominance  

  • New details of an astonishing scheme, first detailed in 1999, have been revealed
  • John Greenewald, Jr writes in Secrets from the Vault about numerous plans
  • He says a nuclear bomb on the moon was ‘one of the stupider things’ considered
  • The US government also wanted to build a military base on the moon by 1966 

By HARRIET ALEXANDER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 10:28 AEST, 21 June 2020 | UPDATED: 15:01 AEST, 21 June 2020

New details about a U.S. plan to blow up a nuclear bomb on the moon as a Cold War ‘show of dominance’ have been revealed in a recently-published book.

The secret mission, code-named Project A119, was conceived at the dawn of the space race by an Air Force division located at New Mexico‘s Kirtland Air Force Base.

A report authored in June 1959 entitled ‘A Study of Lunar Research Flights’ explained plans to explode the bomb on the moon’s ‘terminator’ – the area between the part of the surface that is illuminated by the sun, and the part that’s dark.

The explosion would have likely been visible with the naked eye from Earth because the military had planned to add sodium to the bomb, which would glow when it exploded  

A nuclear bomb on the surface of the moon was definitely one of the stupider things the government could do,’ said John Greenewald, Jr., author of Secrets from the Vault. 

The book, published in April, details some of the more surreal suggestions made in history.

Greenewald, 39, has been interested in U.S. government secrets since he was 15 and has filed more than 3,000 Freedom of Information Requests……… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8443569/US-wanted-detonate-nuclear-bomb-moon-1959-dominance.html 

June 21, 2020 Posted by | history, politics international, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty- its promise and its failure

Now, nuclear disarmament is at a standstill, existing treaties have either been dismantled or at risk, development in underway of new types of nuclear weapons with new missions and lowered threshold of use, and threats of use of nuclear weapons have been sounded.

May 12, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, history, politics international, Reference, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Looking back to May 1986 – the exodus from Kiev, after the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe

May 7, 2020 Posted by | history, safety | Leave a comment

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