The biggest experiment in history – atomic bombing of Bikini Atoll
Bikini Atoll became the centerpiece of a colossal military operation.
The hydrogen bomb that was detonated on this spot on March 1, 1954, created a fireball four miles wide and raised the temperature of the lagoon water to 99,000 degrees. The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and nearly three times stronger than its creators expected. It shook islands 250 miles away. It vaporized three islands in the atoll. And it killed every living thing in the air, on land, and in the sea for miles around.
PARADISE WITH AN ASTERISK, OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, OCTOBER 17, 2012“……..Operation Crossroads, the most spectacular and expensive science experiment in history, was first proposed in August 1945, a few weeks after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Harry Truman had ordered the Army and Navy to conduct further tests of nuclear weapons. The reason, which sounds implausible if not ridiculous today, was to see if atomic bombs, when dropped on warships at sea, would sink them. Continue reading
Luck saved world from nuclear holocaust, in Cuban crisis
While Kennedy and Khrushchev’s restraint helped avert disaster, luck played an equally significant role. In one of the most dangerous moments of the crisis, a Soviet captain almost fired his submarine’s nuclear-tipped torpedo at a U.S. warship. However, authorization to fire was denied by one of the officers on board.
A nuclear nightmare The Hill, By Kingston Reif, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation – 10/31/12 “.….. the 50th anniversary of one of the most terrifying real-life horror stories of all time: The Cuban Missile Crisis. Continue reading
Nuclear war prevented by one thoughtful Soviet officer
The launch of the B-59′s nuclear torpedo required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Arkhipov was alone in refusing permission.
Thank you Vasili Arkhipov, the man who stopped nuclear war Fifty years ago, Arkhipov, a senior officer on the Soviet B-59 submarine, refused permission to launch its nuclear torpedo Edward Wilson guardian.co.uk, 27 October 2012 If you were born before 27 October 1962, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov saved your life. It was the most dangerous day in history. An American spy plane had been shot down over Cuba while another U2 had got lost and strayed into Soviet airspace. As these dramas ratcheted tensions beyond breaking point, an American destroyer, the USS Beale, began to drop depth charges on the B-59, a Soviet submarine armed with a nuclear weapon. Continue reading
East Kazakhstan’s horror nuclear legacy from Soviet times till now
Josef Stalin’s nuclear legacy remains in East Kazakhstan Scotsman.com, 9 October 2012 Stalin used the area as a nuclear test site and the local population have been paying a terrible price ever since. The plight of these people in East Kazakhstan has touched the heart of Scottish MEP Struan Stevenson, who has campaigned to bring their situation to wider
recognition for 13 years. Now, in an exclusive article for
The Scotsman, he argues Stalin’s actions could have devastating consequences in the future, too Continue reading
Today’s Republicans lie about Ronald Reagan: he condemned nuclear weapons
Perhaps the most audacious whopper is that of many Republican candidates who claim the legacy of President Ronald Reagan and do not espouse his policies.
I have gathered some quotes of his on the abolition of nuclear weapons. It should be clear that he was not just concerned that bad people or countries should have the weapon, but that the weapon itself is bad.
Ronald Reagan, Republicans, and Nuclear Weapons HUFFINGTON POST : 09/30/2012 Listening to today’s candidates –at any level — one would not know that, historically, Republicans have been instrumental in advancing arms control, nonproliferation, and nuclear disarmament. That is, until the recent Bush administration. In fact, active Republican leadership was essential in obtaining the Biological Weapons Convention, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, and the Chemical Weapons Convention, to name but a few.
However, the current Republicans running for offices, both high and low, have forgotten this legacy of success in making America and the world safer based on the US value of the rule of law.
Of serious concern is that the men who brought us the eight-year anomaly of consistent failure now comprise Romney’s foreign policy team. Out of 24 advisers, 17 played significant roles in the Bush administration and contributed to an unmatched history of unprecedented catastrophes. These guys include Max Boot, John Bolton, Elliot Cohen, and Cofer Black. They constructed an era defined by lies to justify a war in Iraq, a distortion of American values that rationalized torture, the execution of an aggressive war of choice rather than necessity, degradation of the international legal order which the United States had spent decades to establish, and the execution of costly military ventures based on money borrowed from China. Continue reading
Intrigue as authorities tried to cover up danger of Three Mile Island nuclear accident
Gordon MacLeod had, in his words, “recommended and, on the next day, urged the governor in the strongest possible terms to call for the departure of pregnant women and young children from an area within five miles of the Three Mile Island plant.”
`Gordon,’ the governor said, `I’m going to have to ask for your resignation.'”
People Died at Three Mile Island http://www.ratical.org radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO14.html Gordon MacLeod sat across from the governor of Pennsylvania. It was October 9, 1979. MacLeod had been state secretary of health since twelve days prior to the accident at Three Mile Island.
A tall, trim Bostonian, MacLeod was a lifelong Republican who had served in Richard Nixon’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As both a medical doctor and an engineer he had moved from a research fellowship at Harvard Medical School to a chairmanship at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public Health.
In 1979 Governor Richard Thornburgh, a neighbor of MacLeod’s, had urged him to take charge of the state’s Department of Health, which was in disarray. MacLeod had resisted, but finally agreed, with the understanding he would serve just two years, then return to academia.
Now, eight months later, as controversy still raged over how much radiation had been released at Three Mile Island, the governor’s office called the secretary of health for a conference. The meeting began with some small talk, MacLeod told us a year later. And then Thornburgh got to the point. “`Gordon,’ the governor said, `I’m going to have to ask for your resignation.'”
“I just sat there,” MacLeod told us, “stunned. After going to all that trouble to get me to come on board, he was now telling me to leave after just eight months because things were `just not working out.'”[1]
Thornburgh’s public explanation for MacLeod’s firing was a “difference in institutional style.” But the state media had other ideas. As the UPI reported it, MacLeod had been “state government’s harshest critic of the way the Thornburgh administration responded to the Three Mile Island accident. And that may have been why he was fired.” Indeed, MacLeod’s problems with Thornburgh had begun on March 29, the day after news of radioactive releases from TMI began to spread. MacLeod had, in his words, “recommended and, on the next day, urged the governor in the strongest possible terms to call for the departure of pregnant women and young children from an area within five miles of the Three Mile Island plant.” MacLeod told us later that if he had a chance to do it over, he would also have urged the departure of children in puberty, who are also extraordinarily radiation-sensitive.
But the state’s nuclear engineers and radiation health physicists disagreed with MacLeod, and they told the governor there was no need for an evacuation. Initially Thornburgh advised area residents to stay indoors, but said nothing about evacuating.[3]
Meanwhile Dr. Ernest Sternglass had gone to Harrisburg the day after the accident. After testing on his own and finding high radiation levels, he urged that the state evacuate pregnant women and small children. He was worried in particular that I-131 doses could prove devastating to the small children and infants in utero who were particularly vulnerable to miscarriages, stillbirths, malformations, childhood leukemias, and other radiation-linked problems. Thornburgh publicly charged Sternglass with being an alarmist and stood firm in his refusal to call for an evacuation.
That night the state’s Department of Environmental Resources announced that because the holding tanks at TMI were overloaded with radioactive liquids, Met Ed had been flushing them for hours into the Susquehanna River. No one had bothered to notify communities downstream that were continuing to draw their drinking water from the river.[4]
Finally Thornburgh asked NRC chairman Joseph Hendrie, a nuclear engineer, what he would do if he had a pregnant wife in the area. Hendrie replied that he would get her out “because we don’t know what is going to happen.”
Thornburgh then decided to do what MacLeod had quietly urged and what he had attacked Ernest Sternglass for publicly suggesting. At noon on March 30–two days after the start of the accident–he announced that he was “advising those who may be particularly susceptible to the effects of radiation, that is, pregnant Women and pre-school-age children, to leave the area within a 5-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice.”
Government secrecy on the litany of nuclear accidents
Windscale nuclear reactor, U.K. (1957); Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, U.S. (1961); Three Mile Island power plant, U.S. (1979); Chernobyl power plant, Russia (1986); Seversk, Russia (1993); the Tokai-Mura nuclear fuel processing facility, Japan (1989); Mihama power plant, Japan (2004); Fukushima Daiichi power plant, Japan (2011) and the Marcoule nuclear site, France (2011).
All these incidents and many more unreported ones including from India have obviously raised questions about the desirability of nuclear energy and any real possibility of it being “safe.”
Desirability of nuclear power is the real question, THE HINDU, 28 Sept 12 MADHUMITA DUTTA “….. The claim [is that]modern technology, maintenance and safety standards will make it “safe.” Notwithstanding of course the ideal scientifically “controlled” conditions vs ground realities.
If one looks at the dubious track record of nuclear power plants across the world and its horrendous reputation of regularly exposing its workers and residents to dangerous levels of ionising radiations, the disconnect is pretty obvious.
In 1957, a fault in the cooling system in Kyshtym nuclear complex in Russia led to a chemical explosion and the release of 70-80 tonnes of radioactive material into the air, exposing thousands of people and leading to the evacuation of thousands more. Major accidents, which have killed, maimed and exposed large populations of worker and local
residents, have been reported from various other nuclear facilities — Continue reading
History of the West’s encouragement of Iran’s nuclear programme
Hypocritical Threats Against Iran On a Pedestal of Nuclear Immorality by SAUL LANDAU, CounterPunch 21 Sept 12, The U.S. government gave U.S. nuclear-energy companies a green light to sell their knowledge and technical support to Iran. With their blessings, the Shah also established close ties to European companies, who hustled to Teheran to do business. Continue reading
Ex-French nuclear chief charged over Chernobyl cover-up, Terra Daily, Some 12.500 people, according to the police, protest in Cherbourg, northwestern France, 15 April 2006, against a new kind of reactor, the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) and to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Chernobyl
Paris (AFP) May 31, 2006The former head of the state-run French body monitoring radiation was charged Wednesday with “aggravated deceit” over the alleged cover-up
of the effects of the May 1986 Chernobyl disaster on France. Continue reading
For decades, a stream of lies from the nuclear industry
Nuclear sector seeks to regain trust after Fukushima, Paul Langley’s Nuclear History Blog, Sep 13, 2012
* Nuclear industry needs to be transparent – Areva chief
* Fukushima was an error – Westinghouse executive
Throughout my life, I recall, a constant stream of nuclear lies. As the old nukers die, new ones fill their shoes and believe, without much question, everything they are told. When it blows up in our faces, they first deny and then cry “Error”. Pray for Japan. Its useless looking for nuclear help, or nuclear truth, from nuclear industry. imo.
March 11 was an error,” said Ric Perez, president and chief operating officer of Westinghouse, also a leading nuclear company and majority-owned by Japan’s Toshiba.
Perez said it was the sector’s obligation to continue to improve safety and address points of contention as a collective industry rather than companies from different countries……
They will say and do anything to hide the fact that the Fukushima reactors are still venting radionuclides onto land, sea and air. They will say and do anything to keep their share values up. They will do anything to block such news from being accurately and routinely reported in the mass media. They cannot at this point though, control the internet.
These are the very same companies and governments who warned favored people to move out of Utah and Nevada, the same ones who, throughout the 1950s to 1980s labelled dissenting scientists and individuals as “unpatriotic”, the same ones who called who complained to government about the death of their children from nuclear fallout as being ‘Communistically inspired’, the same ones who forced the Marshall Islanders to return to contaminated land. They are the sames who directed funds which became a permanent Dole to nuclear industry, the same ones who permit nuclear industry to cause global havoc within the protection of limited liability, the same ones who fund phony research known as hormesis, which these liars falsely claim “proves” that nuclear emissions such as strontium, cesium, Xenon and Krypton is beneficial to health. These routine emissions, particularly at refuelling cause disease.
These are the same ones who told Japan and the world that there were no meltdowns at the Fukushima Reactors, the same ones who told Japan and the world that it was fine to eat plutonium, that only unhappy people get radiation sickness, that noone was at risk, that it was safe to move back into the Fukushima immediate fallout zone, that it was good to decontaminate even when fallout is still arriving and even civilians have returned to the areas being decontaminated. The rad readings in air in Fukushima City, where people walk passed workers removing cesium and other nuclear shit with steam cleaners, where kids have to walk to school even though they are warned to avoid the rain and stay indoors, is higher than the rad rad readings in air in the permanent exclusion zone.
Yea, you are a mistake Westinghouse. So are the rest of them. If Fukushima was a mistake unforeseen by world nuclear industry and government, why were scientists in the 1960s and 1970s so abused and ignored by pro nuclear companies and government? Why, when the AEC Ergen Report of the 1960s demanded a technical fix to the high risk of emergency core cooling system failure was it ignored? Why were no full scale tests conducted? When Lapp highlighted the “Problem of Nuclear Plumbing” (New York Times) in 1971, why was he ignored? When Nader and Abbott highlighted the high inherent risks of ranks of reactors clumped together in “reactor parks” in 1975 and when those two also repeated the high risks presented by “nuclear plumbing”, inadequate containment and poor resistance to disasters inherent in nuclear reactors, why did World Nuclear respond by merely calling Nader and Abbott nasty names? The sale and construction of the reactors for TEPCOs Fukushima Diiachi site went ahead in this very same period. Was that a mistake? How is it a mistake if dozens, literally dozens of people from around the world, many independent scientists and some scientists who lost their jobs because they spoke honestly, all said the same things.That the ECCS was inadquate, that disaster resistance was inadequate, that containment was inadequate, that lives would be at risk.
The world nuclear lobby built reactors anyway. That is a deliberate act. Lapp could see that reactors had to be built away from major cities. As a result the Japanese food basket of Fukushima now lies as radiologically, nuclide venting ruin. Well done? I don’t think so…
http://nuclearhistory.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/fukushima-was-mistake-wetinghouse-chief-boy-he-thinks-its-still-1954/
Truth about health effects of low dose radiation is now coming out
From Nuclear Information and Resource Service, 13 Sept 12, The debate on the effects of low-dose radiation, confined until the first decade of the 21st century to narrow circles in which a few independent scientists stood opposed to national and international specialized nuclear energy agencies (among others the International Commission on Radiation Protection or ICRP and the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA), entered the public arena by way of three recent events, events which made it clear that the reference model for effects of ionizing radiation on health was beginning to be called into question.
The first of these, in 1999, was the sudden interruption of the research work of Yuri Bendazhevsky, and his arrest and imprisonment for “activities threatening state security”.
The event provoked an international movement of support and call for his release, which paradoxically gave world visibility to his research results—results that contradict the optimistic appraisals of the health consequences of the Chernobyl accident published by international organizations.
The nuclear industry understands the impact of nuclear disasters to be the effect of a single event like an explosion of a reactor. Only those who die or are effected during that time frame are categorized as attributable to the disaster.
However, other scientists, citing fundamental scientific knowledge about the genesis of cancer, understand the disease as a multi-stage process. If not merely external irradiation but also internal contamination at the level of a given organ is taken into account as relevant to the cancer process, it becomes necessary to attend to the effects of two types of exposure: extremely brief exposure of the entire body – termed acute exposure – and extremely low doses from point sources that hit very near target organs over a long period of time – chronic exposure -but vary in terms of internal movements and whether the organism responds by retaining or purging itself of inhaled or ingested radioactive particles.
This video does a great job of explaining the different sides to the argument. Which side do you believe?
http://vimeo.com/33724891
Text citation: http://www.lit.kobe-u.ac.jp/philosophy/images/pdf/Paul_JOBIN/ThebaudMony-PrefaceEnglishEd.pdf
Since 1927 genetic damage from radiation has been known!
Fukushima’s Butterflies – known since 1927 technorg, blogs by Jan Hemmer
August 17, 2012 by Mikkai ignored by IAEA, WHO, USCEAR, BEIR, ICRP Quote: “The collapse of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant caused a massive release of radioactive materials to the environment. A prompt and reliable system for evaluating the biological impacts of this accident on animals has not been available. Here we show that the accident caused physiological and genetic damage to the pale grass blue Zizeeria maha, a common lycaenid butterfly in Japan. We collected the first-voltine adults in the Fukushima area in May 2011, some of which showed relatively mild abnormalities. The F1 offspring from the first-voltine females showed more severe abnormalities, which were inherited by the F2 generation. Adult butterflies collected in September 2011 showed more severe abnormalities than those collected in May. ***Similar abnormalities were experimentally reproduced in individuals from a non-contaminated area by external and internal low-dose exposures.**
“We conclude that artificial radionuclides from the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant caused physiological and genetic damage to this species.“
TO ALL: The Butterflies of Fukushima are known since 1927! One of the best hidden secrets of the Atomic Military Industrial Complex.
EVIDENCE: Herman J Mueller discovered in 1927 (!) the following: Continue reading
Irresponsibility of military “experts” and a childish plan for hand held nuclear weapons
Handheld nuclear weapons? The Army was once working on them http://perspectivesonthenews.blogs.deseretnews.com/2012/08/29/handheld-nuclear-weapons-the-army-was-once-working-on-them/ By Jay Evensen, August 29, 2012 If you check the Internet, you will find some discussion on the possibility of developing a handheld or shoulder-holstered nuclear weapon launcher. More recently, the discussion has centered on a so-called briefcase bomb that terrorists might be able to deliver undetected to a major U.S. city.
But I was amused recently to come across a very matter-of-fact discussion about the imminent development of a handheld nuclear launcher on a “Meet the Press” program broadcast Jan. 4, 1959. The guest that day was Gen. James M. Gavin , who had just resigned as chief of the Army Division of Research and Development. The questioner is John W. Finney of the New York Times. (Thanks to otrcat.com , where I purchased an archive of these shows.)
Gen. Gavin was no crackpot. He was a highly respected military man who had served with distinction during World War II and was a leading advocate for racially integrating the armed forces.
More than anything, what this clip illustrates to me is the incredible naivety the military had about nuclear bombs in the 1950s. Remember, this was the period during which above-ground tests were contaminating wide swaths of the American West and sickening its people — something the government has belatedly, and reluctantly, admitted .
Click the link below to listen to the clip, then feel thankful the general’s predictions didn’t come true. Otherwise, U.S. troops may be training Afghan soldiers today in the use of such weapons, while hoping they don’t end up in the hands of terrorists or, in any case, that soldiers could run away faster than the fallout from such a bomb could come back to get them. Meet the Press, Jan. 4, 1959
Space exploration’s radioactive mess
In Russia, the situation is even grimmer. In true Soviet fashion, the bomb makers secretly dumped unknown quantities of liquid waste into giant reservoirs around the plant. Nobody knows how much radioactive contamination is out there, but a single accident – the explosion of a waste tank in 1957 – is thought to have been Chernobyl-like in scale.
remember this, too: That little rover on Mars has left a big mess back here on Earth.
Curiosity’s dirty little secret http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/curiositys-dirty-little-secret-20120828-24xvn.html#ixzz255PEGe79 August 29, 2012 I’m as happy as anyone that the Curiosity rover got to Mars; it’s hard not to barrack for all those NASA geeks in their blue polo shirts. But before you get all apple pie about the achievement, there’s something you should know: Curiosity runs on plutonium from a Soviet-era nuclear weapons plant.
Take a look at the back of Curiosity. Other rovers have solar panels, but Curiosity doesn’t. Instead, there’s a little white thing that looks cute, almost like a tail. Inside are eight boxes filled with pellets of nuclear fuel. This stuff is hot, so hot that the boxes glow bright red, and will glow for years to come. Think of it as nuclear charcoal. The fuel will keep the rover toasty on cold Martian nights and supply it with electricity.
It’s a neat trick, and one that NASA has used before. Since the 1960s, the US has been launching nuclear-powered spacecraft. The first were military satellites. That worked swell, except that when the mission ended, you had a radioactive pile of junk orbiting the planet. And every now and then, one would fail to launch or fall back to Earth. That was bad for PR.
USA’s Treasure Island hid nasty radiation secret
residents were not fully informed about contamination. “They should have been more open and upfront, because there would have been people who would have chosen not to live here,”
Treasure Island radiation discovery casts shadow over expansion plans
Contamination left by US navy found to have 400 times the EPA’s human exposure limits, but military branch denies report Rory Carroll in Los Angeles guardian.co.uk, 17 August 2012 It was called Treasure Island in honour of Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirate classic, but the artificial island off San Francisco bay has nothing but trouble buried in its soil: radioactive contamination left by the US navy.
Internal documents and emails from the navy and public health officials reveal that the contamination, a legacy of ships exposed to atomic blasts and radiation training during the cold war, is more widespread than previously thought. Continue reading
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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