80 Years of Lies: The US Finally Admits It Knew It Didn’t Need to Bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…[it was] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and future president
By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News, https://www.mintpressnews.com/hiroshima-nagasaki-us-nuclear-lies/290336/ August 7, 2025
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the world is drifting as close to another nuclear confrontation as it has been in decades.
With Israeli and American attacks on Iranian nuclear energy sites, India and Pakistan going to war in May, and escalating violence between Russia and NATO-backed forces in Ukraine, the shadow of another nuclear war looms large over daily life.
Eighty Years Of Lies
The United States remains the only nation to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. While the dates of August 6 and August 9, 1945, are seared into the popular conscience of all Japanese people, those days hold far less salience in American society.
When discussed at all in the U.S., this dark chapter in human history is usually presented as a necessary evil, or even a day of liberation—an event that saved hundreds of thousands of lives, prevented the need for an invasion of Japan, and ended the Second World War early. This, however, could not be further from the truth.
American generals and war planners agreed that Japan was on the point of collapse, and had, for weeks, been attempting to negotiate a surrender. The decision, then, to incinerate hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians was one taken to project American power across the world, and to stymie the rise of the Soviet Union.
“It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse,” General Henry Arnold, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1945, wrote in his 1949 memoirs.
Arnold was far from alone in this assessment. Indeed, Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the Navy’s highest-ranking officer during World War II, bitterly condemned the United States for its decision and compared his own country to the most savage regimes in world history.
As he wrote in 1950:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”
By 1945, Japan had been militarily and economically exhausted. Losing key allies Italy in 1943 and Germany by May 1945, and facing the immediate prospect of an all-out Soviet invasion of Japan, the country’s leaders were frantically pursuing peace negotiations. Their only real condition appeared to be that they wished to keep as a figurehead the emperor—a position that, by some accounts, dates back more than 2,600 years.
“I am convinced,” former President Herbert Hoover wrote to his successor, Harry S. Truman, “if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan—tell them they can have their emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists—you’ll get a peace in Japan—you’ll have both wars over.”
Many of Truman’s closest advisors told him the same thing. “I am absolutely convinced that had we said they could keep the emperor, together with the threat of an atomic bomb, they would have accepted, and we would never have had to drop the bomb,” said John McCloy, Truman’s Assistant Secretary of War.
Nevertheless, Truman initially took an absolutist position, refusing to hear any Japanese negotiating caveats. This stance, according to General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of Allied Forces in the Pacific, actually lengthened the war. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” he said, “If the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” Truman, however, dropped two bombs, then reversed his position on the emperor, in order to stop Japanese society from falling apart.
At that point in the war, however, the United States was emerging as the sole global superpower and enjoyed an unprecedented position of influence. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan underscored this; it was a power play, intended to strike fear into the hearts of world leaders, especially in the Soviet Union and China.
First Japan, Then The World
Hiroshima and Nagasaki drastically curbed the U.S.S.R.’s ambitions in Japan. Joseph Stalin’s forces had invaded and permanently annexed Sakhalin Island in 1945 and planned to occupy Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island. The move likely prevented the island nation from coming under the Soviet sphere of influence.
To this day, Japan remains deeply tied to the U.S., economically, politically, and militarily. There are around 60,000 U.S. troops in Japan, spread across 120 military bases.
Many in Truman’s administration wished to use the atom bomb against the Soviet Union as well. President Truman, however, worried that the destruction of Moscow would lead the Red Army to invade and destroy Western Europe as a response. As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the U.S.S.R. and its military in one fell swoop.
War planners estimated this figure to be around 400. To that end, Truman ordered the immediate ramping up of production. Such a strike, we now know, would have caused a nuclear winter that would have permanently ended all organized life on Earth.
The decision to destroy Russia was met with stiff opposition among the American scientific community. It is now widely believed that Manhattan Project scientists, including Robert J. Oppenheimer himself, passed nuclear secrets to Moscow in an effort to speed up their nuclear project and develop a deterrent to halt this doomsday scenario. This part of history, however, was left out of the 2023 biopic movie.
By 1949, the U.S.S.R. was able to produce a credible nuclear deterrent before the U.S. had produced sufficient quantities for an all-out attack, thus ending the threat and bringing the world into the era of mutually assured destruction.
“Certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” concluded a 1946 report from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and future president, was of the same opinion, stating that:
Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…[it was] no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”
Nevertheless, both Truman and Eisenhower publicly toyed with the idea of using nuclear weapons against China to stop the rise of Communism and to defend their client regime in Taiwan. It was only the development of a Chinese warhead in 1964 that led to the end of the danger, and, ultimately, the détente era of good relations between the two powers that lasted until President Obama’s Pivot to Asia.
Ultimately, then, the people of Japan were the collateral damage in a giant U.S. attempt to project its power worldwide. As Brigadier General Carer Clarke, head of U.S. intelligence on Japan wrote, “When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn’t need to do it, we used them [Japanese citizens] as an experiment for two atomic bombs.”
Tiptoeing Closer To Armageddon
The danger of nuclear weapons is far from over. Today, Israel and the United States – two nations with atomic weaponry – attack Iranian nuclear facilities. Yet their continued, hyper-aggressive actions against their foes only suggest to other countries that, unless they too possess weapons of mass destruction, they will not be safe from attack. North Korea, a country with a conventional and nuclear deterrent, faces no such air strikes from the U.S. or its allies. These actions, therefore, will likely result in more nations pursuing nuclear ambitions.
Earlier this year, India and Pakistan (two more nuclear-armed states) came into open conflict thanks to disputes over terrorism and Jammu and Kashmir. Many influential individuals on both sides of the border were demanding their respective sides launch their nukes – a decision that could also spell the end of organized human life. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine continues, with NATO forces urging President Zelensky to up the ante. Earlier this month, President Trump himself reportedly encouraged the Ukrainian leader to use his Western-made weapons to strike Moscow.
It is precisely actions such as these that led the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists to move their famous Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to catastrophe.
“The war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation,” they wrote in their explanation, adding that conflicts in Asia could spiral out of control into a wider war at any point, and that nuclear powers are updating and expanding their arsenals.
The Pentagon, too, is recruiting Elon Musk to help it build what it calls an American Iron Dome. While this move is couched in defensive language, such a system – if successful – would grant the U.S. the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response.
Thus, as we look back at the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, we must understand that not only were they entirely avoidable, but that we are now closer to a catastrophic nuclear confrontation than many people realize.
Hiroshima’s fading legacy: the race to secure survivors’ memories amid a new era of nuclear brinkmanship.
Eighty years on from the destruction of the city, registered survivors of the blast – known as hibakusha – have fallen below 100,000
Justin McCurry in Hiroshima, Tue 5 Aug 2025 , https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/05/hiroshima-atomic-bomb-80-year-anniversary-survivors
The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.
“I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere … and it was so hot,” Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. “The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.”
Niiyama and her eldest sister had rushed to the city to search for their father, Mitsugi, who worked in a bank located just 1km from the hypocentre. They had been evacuated to a neighbourhood just outside the city, but knew something dreadful had happened in Hiroshima when they saw trucks passing their temporary home carrying badly burned victims.
As Hiroshima prepares to mark 80 years since the city was destroyed in the world’s first nuclear attack, the 90-year-old is one of a small number of hibakusha – survivors of the atomic bombings – still able to recall the horrors they witnessed after their home was reduced to rubble in an instant.
At 8:15am on 6 August, the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a nuclear bomb on the city. “Little Boy” detonated about 600 metres from the ground, with a force equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year as victims succumbed to burns and illnesses caused by acute exposure to radiation.
Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 74,000. And on 15 August, a demoralised Japan surrendered, bringing an end to the second world war.
Niiyama, one of four sisters, never found her father or his remains, which were likely incinerated along with those of his colleagues. “My father was tall, so for a long time whenever I saw a tall man from behind, I would run up to him thinking it might be him,” she says. “But it never was.”
With the number of people who survived the bombing and witnessed its immediate aftermath dwindling by the year, it is being left to younger people to continue to communicate the horrors inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For decades Niiyama, who is a registered hibakusha, said nothing of the trauma she had suffered as a schoolgirl, not even to members of her own family. “I didn’t want to remember what had happened,” she says. “And many hibakusha stayed quiet as they knew they might face discrimination, like not being able to marry or find a job. There were rumours that children born to hibakusha would be deformed.”
It was only when her granddaughter, Kyoko Niiyama, then a high school student, asked her about her wartime experiences that Niiyama broke her silence.
“When my children are older, they’ll naturally ask about what happened to their grandmother,” says the younger Niiyama, 35, a reporter for a local newspaper and the mother of two young children. “It would be such a shame if I wasn’t able to tell them … that’s why I decided to ask my grandmother about the bomb.”
She is one of a growing number of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki studying to become “family successors” – a local government initiative that certifies the descendants of first-generation hibakusha to record and pass on the experiences of the only people on earth to have lived through nuclear warfare.
“Now that the anniversary is approaching, I can talk to her again,” Kyoko says. “This is a really precious time for our family.”
‘I don’t want to think about that day’
Last year, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks won recognition for their campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons when Nihon Hidankyo – a nationwide network of hibakusha – was awarded the Nobel peace prize.
But survivors face a race against time to ensure that their message lives on in a world that is edging closer to a new age of nuclear brinkmanship.
The world’s nine nuclear states are spending billions of dollars on modernising, and in some cases expanding, their arsenals. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has refused to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine, and last week a veiled nuclear threat by the country’s former leader, Dmitry Medvedev, prompted Donald Trump – who had earlier compared US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks – to claim that he had moved two nuclear submarines closer to the region. North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons continues unchecked.
“The hibakusha have spent their lifetimes courageously telling their stories again and again, essentially reliving their childhood traumas – to make sure the world learns the reality of what nuclear weapons actually do to people and why they must be abolished, so that no one else goes through what they have suffered,” says Melissa Parke, executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
“These brave hibakusha deserve to have their decades of campaigning vindicated and to witness the elimination of nuclear weapons in their lifetimes. This would provide some nuclear justice.”
The number of registered survivors of both attacks fell to just below 100,000 this year, according to the health ministry, compared with more than 372,000 in 1981. Their average age is 86. Just one of the 78 people confirmed to have been within 500 metres of the hypocentre of the blast in Hiroshima is still alive – an 89-year-old man.
On the eve of the anniversary, the ministry said it would no longer conduct a survey every 10 years to assess the living conditions and health of hibakusha, saying it wanted to “lessen the burden” on ageing survivors.
Niiyama, who struggles to walk, will watch Wednesday’s ceremony at home and pause to remember her father, whose memory is represented by a teacup he used that was retrieved from the devastation.
“I don’t like the month of August,” she says. “I have nightmares around the anniversary. I don’t want to think about that day, but I can’t forget it. But I’m glad I still remember that I’m a hibakusha.”
Niiyama, who struggles to walk, will watch Wednesday’s ceremony at home and pause to remember her father, whose memory is represented by a teacup he used that was retrieved from the devastation.
“I don’t like the month of August,” she says. “I have nightmares around the anniversary. I don’t want to think about that day, but I can’t forget it. But I’m glad I still remember that I’m a hibakusha.”
Hiroshima’s history lesson
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/08/03/hiroshimas-history-lesson/
By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation.
Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority.
What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?
By Eric Ross, Common Dreams
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.
The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.
Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.
The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?
The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
A Tale of Two Laboratories
In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.
The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimerwould describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”
For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.
One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.
Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”
Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”
In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.
The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer
Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.
Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?
One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.
Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”
Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”
Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”
The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.
Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”
When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierlsacknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”
Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.
“Remember Your Humanity”
The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.
Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, researcher, and PhD Candidate in the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amhers
The Kyshtym disaster: Russia’s hidden nuclear crisis
The Kyshtym disaster in 1957 was the Soviet Union’s biggest nuclear crisis until Chernobyl. So, why did the Soviets keep quiet about the former for decades?
28 July 25, https://www.history.co.uk/articles/kyshtym-disaster-russia-hidden-nuclear-crisis
What would be considered the worst nuclear disaster in history? Many scholars would say Chernobyl, when an explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine released dangerous levels of radiation.
This was on 26th April 1986, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. Was Chernobyl inevitable? Many historians do believe that Soviet authorities failed to learn lessons from an earlier nuclear crisis on their own soil. Below, we at Sky HISTORY look back at the 1957 Kyshtym disaster — and how the Soviets kept it under wraps for decades.
Was there really a nuclear plant in Kyshtym?
The nuclear plant at the heart of the Kyshtym disaster was not actually in the Russian town of that name. Instead, it was in a secretive ‘closed city’ nearby, called Chelyabinsk-40. Today, it is called Ozyorsk. (Both Kyshtym and Ozyorsk are in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast.)
In the 1940s, the Soviets realised that they were trailing the United States in the development of nuclear weapons. To help themselves catch up, they hastily built what is now commonly known as the Mayak nuclear plant.
This facility, which still stands today, was tasked with processing plutonium needed to make nuclear weapons. However, because the plant was assembled in a rush, many safety risks of the project were not considered sufficiently.
The Kyshtym explosion and its immediate aftermath
Before the Kyshtym disaster, it was routine for Mayak workers to deposit radioactive waste into the Techa River. This bode ill (literally) for villagers along the river who used it as a source of drinking water.
So, Mayak staff later decided to store such waste in an underground storage compartment of the plant itself. This space comprised 14 stainless steel containers attached to a concrete base.
However, in the 1950s, the cooling system in one of these tanks started to malfunction. This led the waste in the container to heat up and eventually, on 29th September 1957, explode. The force sent 20 curies of radioactive material flying a kilometre into the air.
The wind blew the radioactive particles over an area of about 20,000 square kilometres inhabited by approximately 270,000 people. This was generally to the northeast, away from Chelyabinsk-40, which lay upwind from the Mayak plant.
How did authorities initially react?
Residents of nearby areas were not initially notified of what had happened. This was largely due to the Soviet Union’s strong culture of secrecy during the Cold War. The national government didn’t want to let slip that Mayak even existed, let alone that a nuclear explosion had happened there.
It was also around the same time that the Soviet Union launched its Sputnik satellite, a big PR coup. Admitting responsibility for what was the world’s biggest nuclear disaster to date would have been more than an inconvenient fly in the ointment.
Still, the Soviets also knew that doing what they could to limit the radioactive contamination would go some way towards keeping everyone in the dark. So, while about 10,000 local residents were evacuated over the next two years, they weren’t told exactly why.
A cover-up lasting for decades
Almost 17,000 hectares of the contaminated area was turned into East Ural Nature Reserve in 1968. Members of the public were barred from entry, which remains the case to this day. Scientists have studied the reserve to monitor the long-term effects of nuclear radiation on its ecology.
The Kyshtym disaster was kept secret from the public until 1976, when Soviet dissident Zhores Medvedev reported about it in New Scientist magazine. However, the Soviet government still did not openly acknowledge the Kyshtym disaster before accidentally revealing it to the United Nations in the late 1980s.
It is estimated that thousands of cancer cases may have resulted from exposure to radiation caused by the nuclear explosion way back in 1957.
How does Kyshtym compare to Chernobyl?
On the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES), Kyshtym is classified as Level 6. Chernobyl, an even bigger catastrophe, is ranked just one level higher (Level 7) on the INES. Kyshtym released about 40% as much radioactivity as Chernobyl.
Chernobyl is thought to have affected a larger population, too, as 335,000 people were evacuated in the wake of the 1986 disaster. Also, while Chernobyl quickly claimed 31 lives, none were lost in the immediate aftermath of Kyshtym.
Origins of Israel’s nuclear ambiguity lie in a secret deal forged between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir – podcast
Israel has never officially confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons and has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Instead, even as evidence has emerged about its nuclear capabilities, Israel has maintained a policy of nuclear ambiguity.
The origins of this opacity lie in a secret deal forged in a one-on-one meeting between Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, and the US president, Richard Nixon, at the White House in September 1969.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Avner Cohen, professor of non-proliferation studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterrey in the US, about that 1969 deal and why it has endured for more than 50 years. Cohen is the author of Israel and the Bomb, considered the definitive work on Israel’s nuclear programme, and has been interrogated by the Israeli state for his research.
Cohen tells us that the understanding between Meir and Nixon meant the US accepted Israel as a special kind of nuclear weapon state. In turn, Israel committed to restraint, not to test nuclear weapons, and not to be the first to introduce them to the region. Neither side has confirmed the existence of a deal, and there are only hints at it in the historical record. Cohen explains:
Once you realise that there is actually a deal, it explains a great deal of the situation. Why the US [is] looking the other way, why the issue is determined to be removed from the diplomatic agenda, and why many other countries, especially in the west, prefer not to see the Israeli nuclear issue.
Listen to the conversation with Avner Cohen on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
80 Years Ago: The First Atomic Explosion, 16 July 1945.
James B. Conant’s Eyewitness Account:
“The Whole Sky Suddenly Full of White Light Like the End of the World”
1,100 Square Miles in New Mexico Exposed to Radioactive Contamination
UCLA Report Suspected “Many Potential Long-Term Insidious Hazards” From Trinity Test Radiation
Washington, D.C., July 16, 2025 – Early in the morning of 16 July 1945, 80 years ago today, the U.S. Manhattan Project staged the first test of a nuclear weapon in the New Mexican desert. It was the first trial of a plutonium implosion weapon—the same weapon type that devastated Nagasaki a few weeks later. The explosion on the ground produced radioactive fallout contaminating over 1,100 square miles of the state, with some debris spreading as far north as Canada. Six weeks after the test, a “swath of fairly high radioactivity on the ground cover[ed] an area of about 100 miles long by 30 miles wide,” according to a Los Alamos Laboratory report published today for first time by the National Security Archive, while “gamma radiation was found in measurable but very low intensities in Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Raton and even in Trinidad, Colorado,” 260 miles from the point of detonation.
To mark the anniversary of this world-historic event, the National Security Archive today published a collection of essential declassified documents on the first atomic bomb test and the radioactive contamination that preoccupied government officials and medical experts during the years that followed. The new posting builds upon an Electronic Briefing Book of documents, photos, and period films published last year by the Archive, fortifying it with a number of significant new records, including:
- memoranda sent to Manhattan Project director Gen. Leslie R. Groves by his Scientific Advisor Richard C. Tolman on the so-called “100-ton test”—the Trinity “dress rehearsal”—and the reasons for holding a test of the implosion device at the Trinity site,
- Manhattan Project Director General Leslie Groves’ phoned-in message on the test minutes after it occurred, reporting that results were “probably … above expectations,”
- reports by Chief of British Mission Sir James Chadwick on the Test, who wrote, “Even now, a week later, I am filled with awe when I look back at this moment. It was a vision from the Book of Revelation,”
- and Harvard University President James B. Conant’s dramatic firsthand account of the test, observing that “the enormity of the light and its length quite stunned me.”
The Trinity Test planners prepared for possible adverse public health effects but did not know how far radioactive debris would spread, and the biological and public health impact of low-level radiation is still a contested issue. But during the years after Trinity, researchers with the Atomic Energy Project at the Medical School of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) collected evidence to help determine whether the fallout produced a health hazard. While the studies drew no firm conclusions, a 1951 report by the Project found that there were “many potential long-term insidious hazards from the present low-level contamination which is the focal point of these studies.” The possibility that such hazards could eventually inspire legal action was concerning to medical experts who also wanted to learn more about the military implications of low levels of radiation contaminating “large land areas,” leading the Atomic Energy Commission to fund a research program at UCLA to determine the scope and impact of the contamination.
The Trinity test took place 80 years ago, but it is not entirely in the past. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute have determined that the test’s fallout contributed to excess numbers of thyroid cancers. To this his day, “down winders” in New Mexico seek federal compensation under the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act (RECA), which so far has excluded that state, even though 33 of its counties, including tribal areas, experienced levels of radiation exposure that were higher than other U.S. counties covered by the Act.
Israel – Iran: The Confrontation
while the Iranian documents seized by the Mossad did not reveal a military nuclear program, [ 18 ] despite the statements of Benyamin Netanyahu, the neutrality of the Argentine Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has been questioned based on the first Israeli documents seized by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. They show that he passed on observations of his organization to Israel, even though Israel is not a member. Among the IAEA governors, Russia, China and Burkina Faso opposed this resolution.
Coincidentally, Rafael Grossi has already been grilled about his strange silence during the Russian special operation in Ukraine: during a speech at the Davos Forum in 2022, he revealed that the Ukrainian regime had stored 30,000 kilos of plutonium and 40,000 kilos of enriched uranium at the Zaporijia plant. After that, nothing more, despite Russian objections.
The day after the publication of the documents seized by Iran, Tel Aviv attacked Iran. This is exactly the same behavior as during the 2006 war against Lebanon…………In reality, it attacked to block investigations by the Lebanese police and judiciary into a vast network of Israeli espionage and terrorism in Lebanon
Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet.org
Tue, 17 Jun 2025 https://www.sott.net/article/500180-Israel-Iran-The-Confrontation
The confrontation between Israel and Iran does not correspond at all to the image presented by the media. Its roots go back to the time before the Islamic Republic and have nothing to do with the production of a nuclear bomb.The current start of the war is intended to cover up the misdeeds of the Argentine Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The time has come: the confrontation between Israel and Persia has begun. Its origins lie not in the Islamic Republic, but in everything that preceded it. This war will continue until one of the opponents is exhausted.
To understand what is happening and avoid falling into one of the two official narratives that obscure the reality of the problem, we need to take a few steps back.
Iran’s Enemies in the 20th Century
All demonstrations in Iran against external enemies end with the inevitable “Death to the United Kingdom, Death to the United States, Death to Israel!” It is a cry that comes from the depths of Persian suffering since World War I.
Although we in the West are not aware of it, Iran was the victim of the largest genocide of the First World War in 1917-1919 [ 1 ] . 6 to 8 million people died of hunger out of a population of 18 to 20 million, i.e. between a quarter and a third of Iranians. Iran, although neutral, was crushed by the British armies, against a background of rivalry with the Bolsheviks and the Ottomans. This horror left a traumatic memory that is still very much present in Iran [ 2 ] For an Iranian there is no doubt that the United Kingdom is the first enemy of his country.
The British, who had colonized Iran with the help of one of his officers, Reza Shah (1925-1941), overthrew him to install his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979), in power. Behind these guises, they plundered the country’s oil. In 1951, the Shah appointed Mohammad Mossadegh as prime minister. Mossadegh nationalized oil at the expense of London. What followed was a conflict in which the British attacked viciously and organized a color revolution with the help of the Americans. This was “Operation Ajax” [ 3 ] . The new [Persian] regime was no longer led by London, but by Washington. The American embassy, which installed the telephone system, tapped all the ministers’ lines so that they could listen in live, without their knowledge. This system was discovered during the 1978 revolution. So Iranians have no doubt that the United States is their second enemy.
When Mossadegh was ousted, the British appointed General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Zahedi was a Nazi they had imprisoned in Cairo, but London was counting on him to restore “order.” So he set up a secret police force modeled on the Gestapo. He recruited former Nazis to train them, and several hundred “revisionist Zionists” were sent by Yitzhak Shamir (then working for the Mossad) to supervise them [ 4 ] . The horrors of the Savak, the most horrific secret police in the world at the time, can still be seen in the museum dedicated to it in Tehran [ 5 ] . So there is no doubt in the Iranian mindset that Israel is their third enemy.
Israel’s Only Enemy in the 20th Century
Contrary to what the Israeli public believes after 25 years of “revisionist Zionist” propaganda, Iran – neither that of the Shah nor that of the Islamic Republic – has never had the goal of destroying the Jewish population of occupied Palestine. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made clear, the goal was to destroy the State of Israel in the same way that Russia had destroyed the USSR [ 6 ] .
No, the only enemy of the State of Israel is the one that has sabotaged every attempt at peace between Jews and Arabs for 80 years: the United Kingdom. As I have often explained, when the Foreign Office drew up its plan, The Future of Palestine, in 1915, it specified that a Jewish state should be established in Mandatory Palestine, but that it should in no way be able to guarantee its own security.
It was not until two years later that the government of David Lloyd George drew up the Balfour Declaration, which announced the establishment of a Jewish National Home, and the government of Woodrow Wilson committed itself to the establishment of an independent state for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.
The author of this text, Lord Herbert Samuel, became the British High Commissioner in Palestine. True to himself, he preferred the “revisionist Zionists” of Jabotinsky on the one hand and the anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on the other. He was subsequently appointed Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department in the government of Archibald Sinclair.
This policy continues unabated to this day, with the UK still supporting the “revisionist Zionist” Benjamin Netanyahu on one side and the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, on the other.
The continuation of the conflict between the “revisionist Zionists” and Iran
Continue readingSecuring the nuclear nation, (Russia)
Cambridge University Press: Kate Brown 20 November 2018, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nationalities-papers/article/abs/securing-the-nuclear-nation/9D92C7AA447CC337F56999FC8C03C4D4
Abstract
In 1946, in the Southern Urals, construction of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics first plutonium plant fell to the GULAG-Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD). The chief officers in charge of the program – Lavrentii Beria, Sergei Kruglov, and Ivan Tkachenko – had been pivotal figures in the deportation and political and ethnic cleansing of territories retaken from Axis forces during WWII.
These men were charged with building a nuclear weapons complex to defend the Soviet Union from the American nuclear monopoly. In part thanks to the criminalization and deportation of ethnic minorities, Gulag territories grew crowded with foreign nationals and ethnic minorities in the postwar years. The NKVD generals were appalled to find that masses of forced laborers employed at the plutonium construction site were members of enemy nations. Beria issued orders to cleanse the ranks of foreign enemies, but construction managers could not spare a single healthy body as they raced to complete their deadlines.
To solve this problem, they created two zones: an interior, affluent zone for plutonium workers made up almost exclusively of Russians; and anterior zones of prisoners, soldiers, ex-cons, and local farmers, many of whom were non-Russian. The selective quality of Soviet “nuclearity” meant that many people who were exposed to the plant’s secret plutonium disasters were ethnic minorities, people whose exposures went unrecorded or under-recorded because of their invisibility and low social value.
The United States and Greenland, Part I: Episodes in Nuclear History 1947-1968
National Security Archive, 4 June 25
Greenland “Green Light”: Danish PM’s Secret Acquiescence Encouraged U.S. Nuclear Deployments
Pentagon Approved Nuclear-Armed B-52 Flights Over Greenland
State Department: U.S. Can Do “Almost Anything, Literally, That We Want to in Greenland”
Danish Officials Worried About Danger of U.S. Nuclear Accidents
Washington, D.C., June 3, 2025 – The Trump administration’s intention to acquire Greenland, including possibly by force, has put a focus on the history of its strategic interest to U.S. policymakers. Today, the National Security Archive publishes the first of a two-part declassified document collection on the U.S. role in Greenland during the middle years of the Cold War, covering the decisions that led to the secret deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in the Danish territory in 1958 to the 1968 crash of a nuclear-armed B-52 bomber near Thule Air Base that left plutonium-laced debris scattered across miles of Arctic sea ice.[1]
The radioactive mess caused by the accident required a major clean-up and caused a serious controversy in U.S.-Denmark relations. The U.S. had never officially told Denmark that it was flying nuclear weapons over Greenland, although Danish officials suspected it; nor had the U.S. informed the Danes that it had once stored nuclear weapons in Greenland, although in 1957 they had received a tacit “green light” to do so from the Danish prime minister, according to documents included in today’s posting. But both the nuclear-armed overflights of Greenland and the storage of nuclear weapons there were in strong contradiction to Denmark’s declared non-nuclear policy. When the bomber crash exposed the overflights, Denmark tried to resolve the conflict by seeking a U.S. pledge that Greenland would be nuclear free.
This new publication revisits the nuclear and strategic history of the United States and Greenland as it emerged during the late 1940s through the crash in 1968, highlighting key declassified documents from the archival record, FOIA releases, the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), and other sources. The analysis draws on the work of U.S. and Danish scholars who have written about the B-52 crash and the history of the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland during the Cold War, including revelations in the 1990s that prompted Danish experts to revisit the historical record.[2]
Part I, below, looks at U.S. strategic interests in Greenland in the early Cold War period, including Danish government acquiescence to the storage of nuclear weapons there, U.S. nuclear-armed airborne alert flights over Greenland, and the 1968 B-52 crash. Part II will document the aftermath of the accident, including the clean-up of contaminated ice, the U.S.-Denmark government nuclear policy settlement, and the failed search for lost nuclear weapons parts deep in the waters of North Star Bay.
Background
Greenland has been seen as an important strategic interest to United States defense officials and policymakers since World War II. After the fall of France in June 1940, the Nazis seized Denmark, and the Roosevelt administration feared that Germany would occupy Greenland, threatening Canada and the United States. In response, the U.S. insisted that Greenland was part of the Western Hemisphere and thus a territory that had to be “assimilated to the general hemispheric system of continental defense.” The U.S. began talks with Danish Ambassador Henrik Kauffmann, who was acting on his own authority as “leader of the Free Danes” and in defiance of the German occupiers. On 9 April 1941, Kauffmann signed an extraordinary agreement with Washington giving the United States almost unlimited access to build military facilities in Greenland and would remain valid as long as there were “dangers to the American continent,” after which the two parties could modify or terminate it. By the end of World War II, the U.S. had 17 military facilities in Greenland. After the liberation of Denmark from German rule, the Danish Parliament ratified the Kauffmann-U.S. agreement on 23 May 1945, but it assumed its early termination, with Denmark taking over Greenland’s defense.[3]
In 1946, the Truman administration gave brief consideration to buying Greenland because it continued to see it as important for U.S. security.[4] During 1947, with the U.S. beginning to define the Soviet Union as an adversary, defense officials saw Greenland as an important “primary base,” especially because they were unsure about long-term access to Iceland and the Azores.[5] Thus, maintaining U.S. access was an important concern, as exemplified in an early National Security Council report that U.S. bases in Greenland, along with Iceland and the Azores, were of “extreme importance” for any war “in the next 15 or 20 years.” For their part, Danish authorities had no interest in selling Greenland but sought to restore their nation’s sovereignty there; having joined NATO, they dropped their traditional neutrality approach and were more willing to accept a limited U.S. presence. In late 1949, the U.S. and Denmark opened what became drawn out negotiations over Greenland; during 1950, the U.S. even returned some facilities to Denmark, including Sandrestrom air base. But in late 1950, with Cold War tensions deepening, the Pentagon gave the negotiations greater priority, seeking an agreement that would let the U.S. develop a base at Thule as part of an air strategy designed to reach Soviet targets across the Arctic.[6]
In April 1951, the two countries reached an agreement on the “defense of Greenland” that superseded the 1941 treaty, confirmed Danish sovereignty, and delineated three “defense areas” for use by the United States, with additional areas subject to future negotiations. Under the agreement, each signatory would “take such measures as are necessary or appropriate to carry out expeditiously their respective and joint responsibilities in Greenland, in accordance with NATO plans.” Consistent with that broad guidance, the U.S. would be free to operate its bases as it saw fit, including the movement of “supplies,” and with no restrictions on its access to airspace over Greenland. With this agreement, Washington had achieved its overriding security goals in Greenland. To move the agreement through Parliament, the Danish government emphasized its defensive character, although the negotiators and top officials understood that U.S. objectives went beyond that.[7]
In 1955, a few years after the 1951 agreement, the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to revive interest in purchasing Greenland to ensure U.S. control over the strategically important territory and without having to rely on an agreement with another government. But the JCS proposal never found traction in high levels of the Eisenhower administration. The State Department saw no point to it, since the United States was already “permitted to do almost anything, literally, that we want to in Greenland.” The 1951 agreement stayed in place for decades. Denmark and the United States finally modified it in 2004, limiting the “defense area” to Thule Air Base and taking “Greenland Home Rule” more fully into account.
Nuclear Issues
When the U.S. negotiated the 1951 agreement, nuclear deployments were not an active consideration in official thinking about a role for U.S. bases for Greenland. Yet by 1957, when U.S. government agencies, including the State Department, became interested in deploying nuclear bombs at Thule, they used the agreement’s open-ended language to justify such actions. According to an August 1957 letter signed by Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy, the Agreement was “sufficiently broad to permit the use of facilities in Greenland for the introduction and storage of [nuclear] weapons.” The problem was to determine whether Danish leaders would see it that way.
without consulting the Danish Government, Murphy thought it best to seek the advice of the U.S. ambassador, former Nebraska Governor Val Peterson. Peterson recommended bringing the question to Danish authorities and, having received the Department’s approval, in mid-November 1957 he asked Prime Minister Hans Christian Hansen if he wished to be informed about nuclear deployments. By way of reply, Hansen handed Peterson a “vague and indefinite” paper that U.S. and Danish officials interpreted as a virtual “green light” for the deployments. Hansen raised no objections, asked for no information, and tacitly accepted the U.S. government’s loose interpretation of the 1951 agreement. He insisted, however, that the U.S. treat his response as secret because he recognized how dangerous it was for domestic politics, where anti-nuclear sentiment was strong, and for Denmark’s relations with the Soviet Union, which would have strongly objected.[8]
When Prime Minister Hansen tacitly approved the deployment of U.S. nuclear weapons in Greenland, he was initiating what Danish scholar Thorsten Borring Olesen has characterized as a “double standard” nuclear policy. On the one hand, in a May 1957 address, Hansen had stated that the government would not receive nuclear weapons “under the present conditions.” Thus, Denmark abstained from NATO nuclear storage and sharing plans as they developed in the following years. On the other hand, the Danish leadership treated Greenland differently with respect to nuclear weapons even though, as of 1953, it was no longer a colony but a county represented in Parliament. This double standard was not necessarily a preference for Denmark’s leaders but they felt constrained by the need to accommodate U.S. policy goals in Greenland. Thus, by keeping their Greenland policy secret, Hansen and his successors kept relations with Washington on an even keel while avoiding domestic political crises and pressure from the Soviet Union.[9]
In 1958, the Strategic Air Command deployed nuclear weapons in Greenland, the details of which were disclosed in a declassified SAC history requested by Hans Kristensen, then with the Nautilus Institute. According to Kristensen’s research and the Danish study of “Greenland During the Cold War,” during 1958 the U.S. deployed four nuclear weapons in Greenland—two Mark 6 atomic bombs and two MK 36 thermonuclear bombs as well as 15 non-nuclear components. That SAC kept bombs there for less than a year suggests that it did not have a clear reason to continue storing them in Greenland. Nevertheless, the U.S. kept nuclear air defense weapons at Thule: 48 nuclear weapons were available for Nike-Hercules air missiles through mid-1965. There may also have been a deployment of nuclear weapons for Falcon air-to-air missiles through 1965, but their numbers are unknown.[10]
Airborne Alert and the January 1968 Crash
If it had only been an issue of the U.S. storing nuclear weapons on the ground in Greenland for a few years, the matter might have been kept under wraps for years. But the crash of a U.S. Air Force B-52 on 21 January 1968 near Thule Air Base exposed another nuclear secret and caused serious difficulties in U.S.-Denmark relations…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The Documents………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2025-06-03/united-states-and-greenland-part-i-episodes-nuclear-history?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=1b16b82b-2b4e-4a93-9ceb-91f5cda9b942
The health impact of nuclear tests in French Polynesia – archive, 1981
there is mounting, though not yet definitive evidence of cancer and brain tumours in the area, especially among the young.
France spent €90,000 countering research into the effects of its Pacific nuclear tests in the 1960s and 70s. Learn how the Guardian reported early accounts of sickness and contamination
Guardian, Compiled by Richard Nelsson, 28 May 25
The health impact of nuclear tests in French Polynesia – archive, 1981
France spent €90,000 countering research into the effects of its Pacific nuclear tests in the 1960s and 70s. Learn how the Guardian reported early accounts of sickness and contamination
Compiled by Richard NelssonWed 28 May 2025
Pacific islanders agitate in the shadow of the bomb
By Christopher Price
17 September 1981
A recent Canard cartoon shows Adam and Eve looking at an H-bomb. “Look, H for Hernu,” (the new Socialist defence minister), says Adam. “Yes and for Horror, Holocaust, Hecatomb and Hiroshima,” adds Eve.
French Socialists have never hitherto allowed the nuclear issue to dominate their politics. If it is beginning to do so now it is partly because keeping their independent nuclear deterrent, which they continue to test underground in Muroroa atoll in French Polynesia, implies continuing colonial domination of the islands of the South Pacific – an issue which is very much alive, both among the Indigenous people of the Pacific and in the rank and file of the Socialist party in France.
The official position – “auto-determination” – as stated by Mr Henri Emmanuelli, the French Colonial minister when he visited France’s Pacific colonies was that he would discuss anything if a democratic majority wanted to. But he also said that recent election results made a referendum on the subject unnecessary.
That none of these three groups of islands (Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis and Futuna) can immediately prove a majority for independence is partly due to strenuous French efforts over the years to stamp on emerging independence movements. More powerful than anything else [influencing the calls for independence] are the pollutant effects of nuclear tests on the human and natural environment. They are now beginning to make themselves felt. Hitherto everything that happens on Mururoa has been officially secret. But Mr Hernu has now a new “frankness” about the tests in an effort to allay anxiety; and immediately after he left the Centre d’Expérimentation du Pacifique issued its first-ever admission of an accident; it was not safe to swim off Mururoa.
In fact, authoritative reports state that there is now a crack 15 to 19 inches wide and over half a mile long in the atoll below sea level; that radioactive leaks into the Pacific have been taking place for many years; that a neighbouring atoll, Fangataufa, has been literally blasted out of the sea.
It is not yet possible to gauge the effect of such leaks, but coupled with the profound disquiet about Japanese plans to use the Pacific as a nuclear waste dumping ground, fears about pollution of fish and other marine life and consequently poisoning of the whole ocean, island populations will undoubtedly put further pressure on the Mitterrand government to reconsider its nuclear testing policy.
“Why don’t they do it in Nice?” was the one constant question put to me by the Polynesians. It echoed “Mururoa and Auvergne”, the most telling of the posters in the campaign which forced the French, eight years ago, to put the tests underground. Now there is a new twist to the story. It’s not just H-bombs the French are exploding inside Mururoa.
It was confirmed by Mr Giscard in June 1980 that France had been undertaking feasibility studies of neutron bombs since 1976, and this week Mr Mauroy, the Socialist prime minister, committed his government to strengthening France’s strategic nuclear arsenal and to the development of the neutron bomb. The knowledge that France is as keen as the US on upping the nuclear option can only add to the disquiet.
On top of this there is mounting, though not yet definitive evidence of cancer and brain tumours in the area, especially among the young. The French authorities counter that there is still less radioactivity in Polynesia than in the Massif Central. Maybe, but the fact that they go to quite extraordinary lengths of security in the treatment of such cases in French hospitals, suggesting a pathological desire to suppress such evidence as exists. One Actuel reporter, Mr Luis González-Mata, who tried to investigate the issue in Polynesia and in France, met continuous hostility.
So far the French government’s response to the political pressure has been to offer that decentralisation of local government to its overseas territories which the towns and cities of France are soon to enjoy. But it will be pressed to go further. The Pacific Forum comprising all independent Pacific countries, decided in Vanuatu in August to send a delegation to Mr Mitterrand demanding to know his intentions.
This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.
Testimonies from the atoll
Mururoa has been the centre of French nuclear tests for decades, largely in secret and often with scant regard for the people who live nearby. For the first time the native workers and their families tell their side of the story.
7 September 1990
Manutahi started work as a welder on Mururoa in 1965 at the age of 32. That was before the tests had started. He worked on the construction of the blockhouses Dindon and Denise.
In 1965 and at the beginning of 1966, we were allowed to eat all the fish in the lagoon but when we returned in 1967, we were forbidden to eat any. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2025/may/28/the-health-impact-of-nuclear-tests-in-french-polynesia-1981
John Hersey
Did you know John Hersey had to circumvent military restrictions just to step foot in post-atomic Hiroshima? The young journalist’s 1946 pilgrimage to the still-smoldering city would become one of the most consequential acts of subterfuge in journalism history – and forever change how the world understood nuclear war.
As American occupation forces tightly controlled access to the decimated city, Hersey navigated checkpoints and bureaucracy with quiet determination. The rubble was still warm when he arrived, the air thick with the scent of charred wood and something more sinister – what survivors called “the atomic smell.” While military reports focused on blast radii and structural damage, Hersey carried no measuring tools. His instruments were a notebook, boundless empathy, and an unshakable belief that history should be recorded in human heartbeats rather than casualty counts.
What he found defied comprehension. A watchmaker’s shop where dozens of timepieces all stopped at 8:15. Shadows of vaporized office workers permanently etched onto concrete walls. A group of schoolgirls whose patterned kimonos had burned into their skin, the fabric’s flower designs now grotesque scars. Hersey moved through this nightmare landscape like a ghost, collecting stories with revolutionary patience. He would sit for hours with survivors in their makeshift lean-tos, letting long silences coax out memories too terrible to voice.
The genius of his approach lay in the ordinary details: a clerk who survived because he’d bent down to tie his shoe; a doctor who mistook the mushroom cloud for “a magnesium flare”; a mother who recognized her drowned child only by the yarn of a handmade sweater. These weren’t the sweeping narratives of generals or politicians – they were fragile human moments that made the unimaginable real.
Hersey’s reporting methods were as radical as his mission. He physically retraced survivors’ steps through the ruins, noting where each had been standing when the world ended. He recorded not just their words but their trembling hands, the way their voices broke decades later describing the taste of radioactive rain. Most astonishingly, he did it all while American soldiers played baseball nearby, their casual normalcy a surreal counterpoint to the surrounding devastation.
The result, of course, was Hiroshima – a work that stripped war reporting of its abstractions and forced readers to confront nuclear destruction one agonizing personal story at a time. But behind its publication lies this extraordinary truth: that one stubborn reporter’s unauthorized pilgrimage gave voice to history’s first atomic survivors when their own government preferred silence. Hersey proved that sometimes the most powerful journalism requires not just bearing witness, but first having the courage to slip past the guards.
80 years on, US still embattled in senseless Cold War with Russia
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL , 7 May 25, https://theaimn.net/80-years-on-us-still-embattled-in-a-cold-war-with-russia/#google_vignette
May 8 marks 80 years since Victory in Europe Day. That victory kicked off the 46 year long Cold War against our great WWII ally Soviet Union (now Russia).
Sadly, the 1991 end of the Soviet Union simply transferred the Cold War into a cool war against Russia which has since gone cold again.
We’ve spent the last 34 years ever expanding the Cold War NATO alliance to Russia’s borders to keep them out of the European political economy and guarantee a yearly trillion dollar defense budget to prop up American capitalism. What good is the world’s largest military if you do not have a monstrous enemy to justify it?
That could have been avoided except for arguably the worst vice presidential pick in American history.
Every American today knows who Harry Truman was but few have a clue about his predecessor. Henry Wallace was a 20th century American visionary shoved out of the vice presidency in 1944, denying him the presidency upon the death of FDR, and changing America and the world for the worse.
Henry Wallace has been largely written out of the American Story told to succeeding generations of Americans by the protectors of the American Super Power Myth.
Born in 1888 to an affluent Iowa Republican farm family, Wallace increased family wealth with his Hi-Bred Corn Company. But the Depression turned Wallace into a zealous champion of the common man, landing him the Secretary of Agriculture post in FDR’s first term. Possibly the most effective New Dealer, Wallace championed the broken American farmer using curtailed production and price supports to ameliorate rampant rural poverty. His unbridled Bernie Sanders like democratic socialism of the 30’s garnered him FDR’s reverence and the 1940 third term vice presidency.
Wallace transformed the vice presidency for the good, long before Dick Cheney transformed it for evil. FDR made him what journalists tabbed the ‘Assistant President’ in his role mobilizing war production during WWII and championing FDR’s vision for a truly peaceful post WWII world working in partnership with critical war ally Russia for a peaceful Europe and ending European colonialism in Asia and Africa.
In 1942 he gave his famous “Common Man” speech, declaring the 20th century must celebrate the common man, not just, as Time publisher Henry Luce postured, the American Century. In 1943, he joined with the black community following the Detroit race riot, arguing “We cannot crush Nazi brutality abroad and condone race riots at home.”
His near FDR like popularity made him a lock for VP again on the ’44 Democratic ticket. But with FDR fading mentally and physically, party leaders saw opportunity to dump him. His peace proclivities threatened their continuation of a war economy to combat their imaginary new Hitler in the form of Joseph Stalin.
They closed the late night convention session on the brink of re nominating Wallace for a second term. That garnered time to make deals with the other candidates to move the pliant Harry Truman from last to first in the final VP tally.
Three months into term four FDR died thrusting Truman into the White House. This set the stage for the Cold War due to Truman’s capitulation to the neo-conservatives of his day such as Jimmy Byrnes and Jimmy Forestall who demanded a fresh enemy to keep the emerging Military-Industrial Complex in business. A Wallace presidency would have sidelined these anti Russian hardliners. The chance for a truly peaceful post WWII world was irrevocably lost.
The post WWII neocons won out over Wallace, but undaunted he launched a 3rd party progressive campaign in 1948 to unseat Truman. McCarthyite red smears and personal attacks on his progressive philosophy doomed him to just 3% of the ’48 vote, ending his career. Also ended was any opportunity for America to retreat from senseless Cold War.
That leaves us to ponder if today’s new Cold War will rage on for another 80 years.
The Anglo-Nazi Global Empire That Almost Was
Polls of European citizens conducted in the immediate aftermath of World War II showed there was little public doubt that the Red Army was primarily responsible for Nazi Germany’s destruction, while Britain and the US were perceived as playing mere walk-on roles.
For example, in 1945, 57% of French citizens believed Moscow “contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945” – just 20% named the US, and 12% Britain. By 2015, less than a quarter of respondents recognised the Soviet role, with 54% believing the US to be Nazism’s ultimate vanquisher. Meanwhile, a survey on the 80th anniversary of D-Day in June 2024 found 42% of Britons believed their own country had done more to crush Hitler than all other allies combined.
Kit Klarenberg, May 04, 2025, https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/the-anglo-nazi-global-empire-that
As VE Day approaches, Western officials, pundits and journalists are widely seeking to exploit the 80th anniversary of Nazism’s defeat for political purposes. European leaders have threatened state attendees of Russia’s grand May 9th victory parade with adverse consequences. Meanwhile, countless sources draw historical comparisons between appeasement of Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s, and the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to strike a deal with Moscow to end the Ukraine proxy conflict.
As The Atlantic put it in March, “Trump Is Offering Putin Another Munich” – a reference to the September 1938 Munich Agreement, under which Western powers, led by Britain, granted a vast portion of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. Mainstream narratives of appeasement state that this represented the policy’s apotheosis – its final act, which it was believed would permanently sate Adolf Hitler’s expansionist ambitions, but actually made World War II inevitable.
Appeasement is universally accepted today in the West as a well-intentioned but ultimately catastrophically failed and misguided attempt to avoid another global conflict with Germany, for peace’s sake. According to this reading, European governments made certain concessions to Hitler, while turning a blind eye to egregious breaches of the post-World War I Versailles Treaty, such as the Luftwaffe’s creation in February 1935, and Nazi Germany’s military occupation of the Rhineland in May the next year.
In reality though, from Britain’s perspective, the Munich Agreement was intended to be just the start of a wider process that would culminate in “world political partnership” between London and Berlin. Two months prior, the Federation of British Industries (FBI), known today as the Confederation of British Industry, made contact with its Nazi counterpart, Reichsgruppe Industrie (RI). The pair eagerly agreed their respective governments should enter into formal negotiations on Anglo-German economic integration.
Representatives of these organisations met face-to-face in London on November 9th that year. The summit went swimmingly, and a formal conference in Düsseldorf was scheduled for next March. Coincidentally, later that evening in Berlin, Kristallnacht erupted, with Nazi paramilitaries burning and destroying synagogues and Jewish businesses across Germany. The most infamous pogrom in history was no deterrent to continued discussions and meetings between FBI and RI representatives. A month later, they inked a formal agreement on the creation of an international Anglo-Nazi coal cartel.
British officials fully endorsed this burgeoning relationship, believing it would provide a crucial foundation for future alliance with Nazi Germany in other fields. Moreover, it was hoped Berlin’s industrial and technological prowess would reinvigorate Britain’s economy at home and throughout the Empire, which was ever-increasingly lagging behind the ascendant US. In February 1939, representatives of British government and industry made a pilgrimage to Berlin to feast with high-ranking Nazi officials, in advance of the next month’s joint conference.
As FBI representatives prepared to depart for Düsseldorf in March, British cabinet chief Walter Runciman – a fervent advocate of appeasement, and chief architect of Czechoslovakia’s carve up – informed them, “gentlemen, the peace of Europe is in your hands.” In a sick twist, they arrived on March 14th, while Czechoslovakian president Emil Hácha was in Berlin meeting with Hitler. Offered the choice of freely allowing Nazi troops entry into his country, or the Luftwaffe reducing Prague to rubble before all-out invasion, he suffered a heart attack.
After revival, Hácha chose the former option. The Düsseldorf conference commenced the next morning, as Nazi tanks stormed unhindered into rump Czechoslovakia. Against this monstrous backdrop, a 12-point declaration was ironed out by the FBI and RI. It envisaged “a world economic partnership between the business communities” of Berlin and London. That August, FBI representatives secretly met with Herman Göring to anoint the agreement. In the meantime, the British government had via back channels made a formal offer of wide-ranging “cooperation” with Nazi Germany.
‘Political Partnership’
In April 1938, journeyman diplomat Herbert von Dirksen was appointed Nazi Germany’s ambassador to London. A committed National Socialist and rabid antisemite, he also harboured a particularly visceral loathing of Poles, believing them to be subhuman, eagerly supporting Poland’s total erasure. Despite this, due to his English language fluency and aristocratic manners, he charmed British officials and citizens alike, and was widely perceived locally as Nazi Germany’s respectable face.
Even more vitally though, Dirksen – in common with many powerful elements of the British establishment – was convinced that not only could war be avoided, but London and Berlin would instead forge a global economic, military, and political alliance. His 18 months in Britain before the outbreak of World War II were spent working tirelessly to achieve these goals, by establishing and maintaining communication lines between officials and decisionmakers in the two countries, while attempting to broker deals.
Dirksen published an official memoir in 1950, detailing his lengthy diplomatic career. However, far more revealing insights into the period immediately preceding World War II, and behind-the-scenes efforts to achieve enduring detente between Britain and Nazi Germany, are contained in the virtually unknown Dirksen Papers, a two-volume record released by the Soviet Union’s Foreign Languages Publishing House without his consent. They contain private communications sent to and from Dirksen, diary entries, and memos he wrote for himself, never intended for public consumption.
The contents were sourced from a vast trove of documents found by the Red Army after it seized Gröditzberg, a castle owned by Dirksen where he spent most of World War II. Mainstream historians have markedly made no use of the Dirksen Papers. Whether this is due to their bombshell disclosures posing a variety of dire threats to established Western narratives of World War II, and revealing much the British government wishes to remain forever secret, is a matter of speculation.
Read more: The Anglo-Nazi Global Empire That Almost WasImmediately after World War II began, Dirksen “keenly” felt an “obligation” to author a detailed post-mortem on the failure of Britain’s peace overtures to Nazi Germany, and his own. He was particularly compelled to write it as “all important documents” in Berlin’s London embassy had been burned following Britain’s formal declaration of war on September 3rd 1939. Reflecting on his experiences, Dirksen spoke of “the tragic and paramount thing about the rise of the new Anglo-German war”:
“Germany demanded an equal place with Britain as a world power…Britain was in principle prepared to concede. But, whereas Germany demanded immediate, complete and unequivocal satisfaction of her demands, Britain – although she was ready to renounce her Eastern commitments, and…allow Germany a predominant position in East and Southeast Europe, and to discuss genuine world political partnership with Germany – wanted this to be done only by way of negotiation and a gradual revision of British policy.”
‘German Reply’
From London’s perspective, Dirksen lamented, this radical change in the global order “could be effected in a period of months, but not of days or weeks.” Another stumbling block was the British and French making a “guarantee” to defend Poland in the event she was attacked by Nazi Germany, in March 1939. This bellicose stance – along with belligerent speeches from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain – was at total odds with simultaneous conciliatory approaches such as Düsseldorf, and the private stances and utterances of British officials to their Nazi counterparts.
In any event, it appears London instantly regretted its pledge to defend Poland. Dirksen records in his post-mortem how subsequently, senior British officials told him they sought “an Anglo-German entente” that would “render Britain’s guarantee policy nugatory” and “enable Britain to extricate her from her predicament in regard to Poland,” so Warsaw would “be left to face Germany alone”.
In mid-July 1939, Horace Wilson – an extremely powerful civil servant and Chamberlain’s right hand man – approached Göring’s chief aide Helmuth Wohlthat during a visit to London. Wilson “outlined a program for a comprehensive adjustment of Anglo-German relations” to him, which amounted to a radical overhaul of the two countries’ “political, military and economic arrangements.” This included “a non-aggression pact”, explicitly concerned with shredding Britain’s “guarantee” to Warsaw. Dirksen noted:
“The underlying purpose of this treaty was to make it possible for the British gradually to disembarrass themselves of their commitments toward Poland, on the ground that they had…secured Germany’s renunciation of methods of aggression.”
Elsewhere, “comprehensive” proposals for economic cooperation were outlined, with the promise of “negotiations…to be undertaken on colonial questions, supplies of raw material for Germany, delimitation of industrial markets, international debt problems, and the application of the most favoured nation clause.” In addition, a realignment of “the spheres of interest of the Great Powers” would be up for discussion, opening the door for further Nazi territorial expansion. Dirksen makes clear these grand plans were fully endorsed at the British government’s highest levels:
“The importance of Wilson’s proposals was demonstrated by the fact that Wilson invited Wohlthat to have them confirmed by Chamberlain personally.”
During his stay in London, Wohlthat also had extensive discussions with Overseas Trade Secretary Robert Hudson, who told him “three big regions offered the two nations an immense field for economic activity.” This included the existing British Empire, China and Russia. “Here agreement was possible; as also in other regions,” including the Balkans, where “England had no economic ambitions.” In other words, resource-rich Yugoslavia would be Nazi Germany’s for the taking, under the terms of “world political partnership” with Britain.
Dirksen outlined the contents of Wohlthat’s talks with Hudson and Wilson in a “strictly secret” internal memo, excitedly noting “England alone could not adequately take care of her vast Empire, and it would be quite possible for Germany to be given a rather comprehensive share.” A telegram dispatched to Dirksen from the German Foreign Office on July 31st 1939 recorded Wohlthat had informed Göring of Britain’s secret proposals, who in turn notified Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
Dirksen noted elsewhere Wohlthat specifically asked the British how such negotiations “might be put on a tangible footing.” Wilson informed him “the decisive thing” was for Hitler to “[make] his willingness known” by officially authorising a senior Nazi official to discuss the “program”. Wilson “furthermore strongly stressed the great value the British government laid upon a German reply” to these offers, and how London “considered that slipping into war was the only alternative.”
‘Authoritarian Regimes’
No “reply” apparently ever came. On September 1st 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Britain declared war on Germany two days later, and the rest is history – albeit history that is subject to determined obfuscation, constant rewriting, and deliberate distortion. Polls of European citizens conducted in the immediate aftermath of World War II showed there was little public doubt that the Red Army was primarily responsible for Nazi Germany’s destruction, while Britain and the US were perceived as playing mere walk-on roles.
For example, in 1945, 57% of French citizens believed Moscow “contributed most to the defeat of Germany in 1945” – just 20% named the US, and 12% Britain. By 2015, less than a quarter of respondents recognised the Soviet role, with 54% believing the US to be Nazism’s ultimate vanquisher. Meanwhile, a survey on the 80th anniversary of D-Day in June 2024 found 42% of Britons believed their own country had done more to crush Hitler than all other allies combined.
The same poll identified a staggering level of ignorance among British citizens of all ages about World War II more generally, with only two thirds of respondents even able to place D-Day as having occurred during that conflict. The pollsters didn’t gauge public knowledge of Britain’s long-running, concerted attempts to forge a global Empire with Nazi Germany in the War’s leadup, although betting is high that the figure would be approximately zero.
Meanwhile, in 2009 the European Parliament instituted a day of remembrance on August 23rd each year, to “mark the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of All Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes”. This is just one of several modern-day initiatives to perversely conflate Communism and Nazism, while transforming Wehrmacht and SS collaborators, Holocaust perpetrators, and fascists in countries liberated by the Red Army into victims, and laying blame for World War II at Russia’s feet, by dent of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
What officials in London proposed to Hitler in 1939 far eclipsed the terms of that controversial agreement, but there will of course be no consideration of this when VE Day is celebrated in Western capitals in 2025. In Britain, the government has “encouraged” the public to host street parties, and attend a march by over 1,300 uniformed soldiers from Parliament Square to Buckingham Palace. It is a bitter irony the procession will start and end at the very places where, eight decades ago, support for Nazi Germany was strongest in the country.
Niagara County New York Radiation Disaster -discovered in 2024
, https://thewaynefocus.blogspot.com/2024/09/niagara-county-new-york-radiation.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawKBMSNleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFDTTNHRFd0N0pwdkx2OTA0AR6FccTj8LP8Wpr9m0agp5nEln7TFC3Ld6AcVDU4Y4iWAAUTRe5z2YA7yZTtHQ_aem_xv_Ij8_zSCXoSMWjxV-mbw
Regarding the Niagara County, New York Radioactivity Contamination Disaster Discovered in 2024 as a result of surreptitious shipments of high, medium and low grade radioactive materials from Niagara County, New York to Van Buren Charter Township, Wayne County, Michigan Notes from September 19, 2024
Simplified Timeline of the Van Buren Charter Township Nuclear Waste Disaster Gleaned from newspaper reports, personal interviews, discussion and official remarks
1. Decision is made to create Fusion Atomic Bomb
2 For this timeline a bomb will be manufactured at the Hanford, Washington Nuclear Reservation a. This bomb will ultimately be delivered to Nagasaki for atmospheric explosion .
3. The work commences at the Hanford Reservation creating enormous amounts of radioactive waste. The waste was likely composed of but not limited to : a. Radioactive Soil b. Radioactive Water c. Radioactive Powdered Chemicals d. Radioactive Liquid Chemicals e. Radioactive wood, metal, ceramic, cloth and other radioactive materials
4. The liquid waste was deposited regularly in gigantic storage tanks a. The liquid waste burned through the containing steel and contaminated large areas b. That issue is still being addressed c. The materials are making their way towards the Columbia River
5. The solid waste was collected in many instances into giant piles a. Eventually it was decided to bury most of the solid waste b. The groundwater flow picked up radiation and other toxic chemicals from the buried materials and began their own migration towards the Columbia River c. This contamination is still being dealt with.
6. It was decided either immediately following the end of World War 2 or in the 1950’s that getting rid of the radioactive materials left over from the frenetic activity surrounding the creation of the Nagasaki Atomic Weapon would be a good course of action a A series of steps to neutralize or prepare the material to be buried without it contaminating ground waters, the Earth or the air was put together b. A contract was let out and a contractor selected to deal with the materials c. Either by rapid truck transport, as is happening in the present situation between Lewiston, New York and the Charter Township of Van Buren, Michigan, or train shipments by a presently unknown carrier over a presently unknown route, the materials were taken from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State and transported 2,514 miles to a new site in Lewiston, New York d. The material was deposited on the ground in an unknown manner. Indications are that it was an open dump.
7. The contractor began preparations to treat the materials. Indications were that the intent was to reduce overall radioactivity in some manner, but primarily, the work would center on making the materials easier to handle and somewhat inert by suspending them in glass and other materials for burial. a. At some point, apparently a year after the deposition of the materials in Lewiston, NY, the Federal Government abruptly changed the manner in which the work was to be done. Because of the high levels of radioactivity in the materials special buildings had to be erected, special clothing had to be provided to workers, workers could only be exposed to the materials for specific amounts of time and specialized ventilation and atmospheric equipment and filters would need to be installed b. Upon receipt of these new requirements and having completed a brief study of the impact on profits to the enterprise the contractor left. The work was abandoned. c. The radioactive materials that had been transported to Lewiston, NY from the nuclear reservation at Hanford, WA were left to the elements for at least one year, maybe two and possibly longer d. A decision was made at some unspecified time to bury the materials at the place where they were deposited. e. Due to the arrangements of the materials they were either laid out in a large area and then bulldozed into piles or had been deposited in piles initially. They were apparently buried without any sort of underground barrier. f. From a crude visual observation of the present state of the materials it appears they were buried on the surface in gigantic piles. Some have settled into the earth while others appear to have retained their mounding shape.
8. In 2016 after considerable wrangling and the realization that cancers and other dread diseases were spiking in the area and due to action by the Tuscarora nation and approximately 300 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency in New York or whatever organization had been caring for the materials for nearly a century, it was decided, after local public hearings, that the United States Army Corps of Engineers would remove all of the materials to another location.
9. One of the primary driving forces behind moving the materials, along with higher rates of cancer, other diseases, probable birth defects and possible birth mortality, was that the materials were burning their way to the Niagara River.
10. At this point, due to ionization and the natural dispersal of these unnatural elements, an area many times larger than the original point of delivery now existed. The materials had exited the property lines and have contaminated an enormous area around where they had been dropped off. Parallel and Interesting Points of Interest in a Somewhat Linear Timeline of Events in Some Order These may or may not figure in the final Niagara County, New York Contamination Disaster of 2016 :
(1.)A landfill was built abutting the nuclear waste dump in Lewiston, NY. a. The landfill was used for depositing materials from across Niagara County and perhaps elsewhere
(2) A driver for a paving company in Canada rolled his truck over a. The driver was subsequently fired by his brothers b. The driver started his own paving company c. At one point someone said to him, ‘You know, we sure could use someone to carry away all this waste when were done with the work.’ d. The driver began a waste hauling service e. The driver’s waste hauling service was successful and the driver opened or took control of a dump f. The driver became a successful businessman and the dump expanded g. The driver’s company became well known in the area h. The company purchased or controlled several area dumps (landfills) and they expanded
(3) During the course of all this there was a separate issue with the Love Canal and another location where chemicals were deposited in an irresponsible and unprofessional manner leading to health impacts across that area. The Love Canal is also in Niagara County
(4)At this point the timeline is murky and breaks up but these facts occurred : a. Along with the materials being collected and removed from the Lewiston Nuclear Storage Site that are being moved now against common sense there were even more hazardous and radioactive materials moved to Van Buren Charter Township, MI without telling any of the residents. b. It is not clear if the Michigan Governor know this, but certainly, it would have been the business of the State of Michigan Department of the Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to be alerted or informed that the material was on the way. The words ‘alerted’ and ‘informed’ are used loosely here because according the processes of the State of Michigan Department of the Environment, Great Lakes and Energy moving or depositing or releasing into the atmosphere, into the Earth or into the waters of the Great Lakes water system it is a simple manner not only to gain approval but to continue dumping and polluting in amounts of many tens of thousands of tons for a small fee, which may be deferred or excused according to the sentiments of the Michigan Department of the Environment, Great Lakes and Energy employee assigned to the work. c. Niagara County and other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States of Army Corps of Engineers, the New York State department of the environment, local elected officials, state elected officials and possibly federal elected officials became aware of a widespread problem involving radioactivity across Niagara County. d. Many, many miles of State, County and local roads apparently have been paved with radioactive materials. e. The radioactive materials used in the paving were used in various ways, sometimes as a substrate, sometimes as a binder and sometimes included in the surface paving materials. It is likely that in some cases it was used in all three preparations and/or other situations f. Radioactive materials have been encountered in commercial parking lots, residential driveways, aggregate placement under foundations for private homes and at least one large cemetery had been covered in it from a depth of two to more feet. g. In one case a large deposit of radioactive material that was discovered near a large commercial construction project was noted by authorities. They could not determine where it came from. In a wicked denouement, that actually has not been resolved, upon return to the site the material had been removed by unknown persons for unknown reasons. So – they found a large amount of highly radioactive material near to a construction site, recorded the fact, went back at some undetermined time and found that the material was gone. h. Finely grained black sand with very high radioactivity levels was removed from several private residential sites.
(5) The waste disposal company (the dump and landfill operator) took over the collection business of Republic Waste in at least most of the areas in Niagara County, NY, if not all of them.
(6) Republic Waste has a dump located nearby the Niagara Nuclear Site in Lewiston, New York.
(7). The landfill owner died
(8). The company still exists and remains the largest and richest waste handling company in northwestern New York and eastern Ontario.
(9.) A decision was made unbeknownst to the local inhabitants in Michigan, to move the materials that have now placed the Columbia River and the Niagara River in jeopardy of further contamination by radioactive nuclear materials and other toxic waste to bury this material in the watershed of the Huron River and very close to Ford Lake and so, repeat the pattern of mismanagement of the materials and place even more Americans in peril while enriching private corporations. We also seen and are experiencing deflecting the responsibility from poorly run Federal and State organizations and departments ostensibly in place to protect the health and well being of Americans, but, which, instead, have seen to their own diverse interests and need.
(10.) Federal Michigan Elected Representatives point to the State Michigan Elected Representatives as the core to the solution of these co-occurring disasters while State Michigan Elected Representatives point to the Federal Michigan Elected Representatives to solve the problem.
(11. ) New York elected at all levels remain mute and do not remark nor comment on these disasters, the original one being clearly in there area of influence and duty in New York State.
(12.) Both Governor Whitmer of Michigan and Governor Hochul of New have been silent on the issue. We see no comments either supporting the resolution of these two disasters or mitigating the destruction clearly raging in Niagara County, New York nor the current assault on the heavily populated area in southeastern Michigan where this poisonous, dangerous and poorly managed material is being dumped to the peril of individuals, seniors, families, children and businesses in the local area, county and region. Possible Conclusions or Inference, including Possible Actions to take regarding the Niagara County, New York Contamination Disaster so as not to exacerbate the Van Buren Charter Township Waste Disaster now occurring – 1. There seems to be a very dangerous situation that has occurred with the infrastructure in Niagara County, New York. The roads will need to be checked. 2. Wherever the substrate came from that supply line needs to be discontinued. 3. The company that supplied the radioactive material needs to be discovered and their area of activity made known. 4. Was nuclear material to be used for paving also transported to Ontario across national borders without notification or was it imported from Canada into New York where it was used to pave roads, parking lots, cover at least one cemetery and be used for foundation preparations for homes, business and driveways? 5. I feel that an inspection of the garbage trucks and paving trucks in the area would be in order to ensure that they are not contaminated with radioactivity 6. I feel that MICares in Michigan should be alerted to the fact that this material has been passing into our environment for at least the past two to three years if not longer. 7. I feel that medical monitoring for the affected people in Niagara County, New York is in order 8. I feel that a radioactive survey of all the roadways, building sites, homes, commercial sites that have been built in the area since at least the 1960’s should be performed in Niagara County. This should include a review of all cemeteries and any locations that the paving/dump company owner provided services to, whether for profit or charitable purposes – with special attention to churches, elementary schools, high schools, private and public parks, hospitals and other locations. Thank you for your time and attention.
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 an
industrialized 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
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