Hiroshima marks 79 years since atomic bombing, as nuclear war fears rise
Japan Times, By Kathleen Benoza, STAFF WRITER, 6 Aug 24
Raging conflicts across the globe are “reinforcing the public assumption” that military force — and nuclear deterrence — are needed to solve global issues, a view Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui rejected Tuesday in a speech at a ceremony marking 79 years since Hiroshima was devastated by an atomic bomb.
Citing former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s push to end the Cold War, Matsui stressed the need to “not be resigned to pessimism” amid conflicts such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war, adding that the world must take collective action and show that dialogue can overcome conflict.
“Our unity will move leaders now relying on nuclear deterrence to shift their policies,” he said. “We can make that happen.”
Speaking after Matsui, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida emphasized in his own speech that the suffering that transpired in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “must never be repeated.”
“It is our country’s mission as the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings in war to steadily continue our efforts toward realizing a world without nuclear weapons,” he said…………………………………….
Noting that the number of nuclear weapons could soon increase for the first time since the peak of the Cold War, Kishida stressed the urgency of this effort.
To prevent this, he pledged to continue to promote the passage of the long-stalled Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, which prohibits the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, noting that Japan had established a framework for the FMCT that included both nuclear-armed and non-nuclear-armed states.
“I myself will take the lead and actively participate,” he said.
During the final days of World War II, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945 and again three days later on Nagasaki. The blasts killed hundreds of thousands and left many survivors — known as hibakusha — with lasting injuries and illnesses from radiation exposure.
This year’s ceremony saw the second-largest number of countries participating, with 109 nations involved, according to organizers. Roughly 50,000 people attended the event.
Nine countries currently maintain nuclear arsenals — the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Japan, despite being the sole country to be attacked with nuclear bombs, has faced criticism from some corners over its effort to rid the world of the weapons.
Critics note that Tokyo has not participated in more ambitious initiatives, including the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Since 2018, Japan has consistently voted against an annual United Nations General Assembly resolution that supports adoption of the treaty — which would prohibit the development, testing, production, stockpiling, stationing, transfer, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons — due to its reliance on the U.S. nuclear deterrent. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/08/06/japan/hiroshima-bombing-79-anniversary/
79 years since the unthinkable
But are we closer than ever to nuclear war?
By Kate Hudson, August 4 2024 https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/08/04/79-years-since-the-unthinkable/
As we mourn the loss of all those killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by US atomic bombs, in August 1945, we cannot avoid the fact that we are closer than ever to nuclear war. The war on Ukraine is greatly increasing the risk. So too is NATO’s location of upgraded nuclear weapons across Europe — including Britain — and Russia’s siting of similar weapons in Belarus. Irresponsible talk suggesting that “tactical” nuclear weapons could be deployed on the battlefield — as if radiation can be constrained in a small area — makes nuclear use more likely.
And our own government is leading the charge on greater militarisation and is in denial about the dangers it is unleashing. This is a bad time for humanity — and for all forms of life on Earth. It’s time for us to stand up and say No: we refuse to be taken into nuclear Armageddon.
Help in raising awareness of the existential peril of nuclear weapons is coming from an unusual quarter — Hollywood. Many of us have seen the blockbuster, Oppenheimer. Many in the movement have their criticisms but my own feeling is that you cannot leave the film without being aware of the terror of nuclear weapons, and their world-destroying capacity.
I attended a screening hosted by London Region CND; it was sold out within hours, and followed by a dynamic audience discussion that lasted till 11pm. I recognised only two people in the audience. That’s the crowd we need to engage with — none of us just want to preach to the converted. But there is a particular flaw in the film I must raise, as we remember Hiroshima Day.
It was repeatedly suggested that dropping the bomb was necessary to end the second world war. Although there was eventually a quick aside that countered this, it could easily have been missed. So for the record, this is the reality of what happened.
Conventional wisdom, especially in the US, is that it was necessary to drop the bomb to bring about a speedy conclusion to the war and save lives. Even today many people believe that the bomb was necessary to bring about a Japanese surrender and to avoid the need for an invasion of Japan by the US, which might have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
But extensive scholarly research in the US, using primary sources from the time, shows that this just wasn’t true. By the time the bomb was ready for use, Japan was ready to surrender. As General Dwight Eisenhower said, Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face, and “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Here’s what was said at the time by some of the key players:
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 because of the effective blockade and successful bombing with conventional weapons … In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. – Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s chief of staff
Nor were the atomic bombs decisive. It has long been held in justification that they made unnecessary an invasion of the Japanese mainland and thus saved the resultant fighting and thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides. On few matters is the adverse evidence so strong. The bombs fell after the decision had been taken by the Japanese government to surrender. That the war had to be ended was agreed at a meeting of key members of the supreme war direction council with the emperor on 20 June 1945, a full six weeks before the devastation of Hiroshima. – Professor JK Galbraith, official US investigator, Japan 1945
It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power. – Winston S Churchill, British wartime leader
So if Japan was ready to surrender, why were atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A significant factor in the decision to bomb was the US’s desire to establish its dominance in the region after the war. Those planning for the post-war situation believed that this required US occupation of Japan, enabling it to establish a permanent military presence, shape its political and economic system and dominate the Pacific region. But the US’s key strategic concern, above all, was the position of the Soviet Union in the post-war world.
Evidence suggests that the US wanted to demonstrate its unique military power — its possession of the atomic bomb — in order to gain political and diplomatic advantage over the Soviet Union in the post-war settlement in both Asia and Europe. So nothing to do with ending the war with Japan.
I leave the final word to Joseph Rotblat — the true hero of the Manhattan Project. Whatever qualms Oppenheimer may have felt after the event, as shown in the film, the fact is he pursued the bomb to the bitter end. Rotblat was a nuclear physicist from a Polish-Jewish family. He had seen the development of the atomic bomb as a necessary evil in the arms race to defeat Hitler, and went to work on the Manhattan Project. At the end of 1944, it was clear that Germany was not going to succeed in making an atom bomb. In these circumstances, Rotblat left the Manhattan Project. Others tried to alert politicians to the dangers ahead. But top politicians pressed for the rapid completion of the bomb.
As Rotblat himself later pointed out: “There is good reason to believe that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not so much the end of the second world war as the beginning of the cold war, the first step in a fateful chain of events, the start of an insane arms race that brought us very close to a nuclear holocaust and the destruction of civilisation.”
In memory of all those who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have suffered the consequences since, let us do our utmost to prevent the same catastrophe happening again; let us take action to prevent our politicians catapulting us into nuclear war — and the destruction of all life on this planet.
Kate Hudson has been General Secretary of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) since September 2010. Prior to this she served as the organisation’s Chair from 2003. She is a leading anti-nuclear and anti-war campaigner nationally and internationally. This article was originally published by CND in August 2023.
Canada and the Atom Bomb: Remembering As an Act of Resistance
Anton Wagner, July 23, 2024, http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/hiroshima/remembering/
I met Setsuko Thurlow in 1995 when I produced Our Hiroshima for Vision TV for the 50th commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1954, she had received death threats while studying at an American college in Virginia after criticizing the United States’ hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands, one thousand times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But when she settled in Canada with her husband, Jim Thurlow, the following year, she found “a very passive, almost indifferent world here. Maybe Canadians felt they had nothing to do with the nuclear age.”
In Our Hiroshima, Setsuko singled out the Eldorado uranium refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, that enriched all the uranium used by the American Manhattan Project to produce the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. She found Canadians were not informed about their country’s involvement in the development of the atom bomb and failed to recognize that nuclear weapons were a universal, global phenomenon. “We all have to be concerned.”
The documentary showed her speaking to a huge peace rally at the University of Toronto Varsity Stadium in 1982. “Peoples around the world, with their deafening silence, have permitted their government to continue producing and accumulating ever more destructive weapons of genocide,” she told the rally. The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on armaments annually “diverted the resources that could feed the starving, heal the sick, and teach the illiterate.”
Setsuko began sharing the horrors she had witnessed as a survivor of Hiroshima with Canadians in “A Silent Flash of Light,” published in Saturday Night in August 1985. She would make these same very detailed, moving personal descriptions for international media for the next four decades. Nine members of her family and over three hundred of her schoolmates and teachers perished. Her family’s house was but ashes and broken tiles. Only an ornate clock in a cast-iron frame (seen in Jim Allen’s photograph above) could be salvaged as a reminder of life before the atomic bombing. “In the Peace Park in Hiroshima, there is a cenotaph with the inscription: ‘Rest in peace; the evil will not be repeated,’” she concluded her Saturday Night memoir. “This has become the vow of the survivors. Only then will our loved ones’ grotesque deaths not have been in vain. Only then will our own survival have meaning.
Thirty-two years later, in December 2017, Setsuko Thurlow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Beatrice Fihn, awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for bringing about the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In her acceptance speech, she asked her audience in Oslo, “Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in vain.”
With the approaching 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings in 2020, Thurlow wrote to all the world’s heads of state, including Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who had not yet ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In her personal appeal to the Prime Minister, she included my research document “Canada and the Atom Bomb” that provides the factual basis for this “Canada and the Atom Bomb” exhibition.
Setsuko referred to the delegation from Deline in the Northwest Territories representing Dene hunters and trappers employed by Eldorado to carry the sacks of radioactive uranium ore on their backs for transport to the Eldorado refinery in Port Hope. The delegation travelled to Hiroshima in August of 1998 and expressed their regret that uranium from their lands had been used in the development of the atom bomb. As seen in Robert Del Tredici’s photographs, Dene had themselves died of cancer because of their exposure to uranium ore, leaving Deline a village of widows. “Surely,” Thurlow wrote Trudeau, “the Canadian Government should make its own acknowledgement of Canada’s contribution to the creation of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
She stated that an awareness by Canadians of our country’s direct participation in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had all but disappeared from our collective consciousness. Thurlow proposed to the Prime Minister that the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings would be the appropriate moment to acknowledge Canada’s critical role in the creation of nuclear weapons, express a statement of regret for the deaths and suffering they caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as announce that Canada would ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The Globe and Mail headlined her August 2020 op ed about her appeal to Trudeau, “Canada must acknowledge our key role in developing the deadly atomic bomb.”
Justin Trudeau never acknowledged receipt of Setsuko’s appeal, although Liberal MP Ali Ehsassi personally delivered a copy to the Prime Minister’s Office. With Trudeau’s refusal to meet or communicate with Thurlow, she turned her lobbying efforts to Toronto City Council. She had facilitated the creation of a large Peace Garden directly in front of City Hall as a memorial to the atomic bombings and the need for peace in 1984. As shown in the exhibition, City Council hosted Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau who turned the sod, beginning construction of the Peace Garden; Pope John Paul II kindled its eternal flame, and Queen Elizabeth II dedicated it as a lasting expression of Toronto’s commitment to peace.
Setsuko was a fierce defender of the Peace Garden when the $40 million revitalization of the City Hall Square resulted in its demolition. She was a leading figure among peace activists and community peace groups who convinced City Council to rebuild the Peace Garden on the civic square. Michael Chambers’ images capture this rededication of the Peace Garden in 2016.
The following year, Toronto City Council honoured Setsuko for her peace activism and reaffirmed Toronto as a nuclear weapons-free zone. The Toronto Board of Health held public hearings that resulted in its recommendation that City Council request that the Government of Canada sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. City Council passed such a motion and sent the text to Justin Trudeau, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Minister of Health.
But nothing Canadian peace activists did changed the policies of the federal Canadian government. Setsuko Thurlow’s life-long commitment towards the abolition of nuclear weapons is a challenge to all concerned about the survival of human civilization. How can we transform our yearning for peace and justice into political action that will compel governments to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons? Setsuko donated her family’s precious ornate clock to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa for a small peace exhibition in 2013. Will some survivors of a nuclear holocaust digging in the rubble of what once was Ottawa find a small, charred clock that once belonged to a survivor of the first atomic bombing but whose words of remembrance of that horror were buried by the silence of political leaders?
‘Low level’ ionizing radiation, and the history of debate about its effects
From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You, Dale Dewar, 4 July 2024
“……………………………………………………………………………………………………. Humans have lived with natural radiation for thousands of years – has it caused damage?
There are two distinct examples of natural radiation causing cancer: radon, largely in basements, and skin cancers from cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays were discovered in 1912 by an Austrian physicist, Victor Hess. He went up in a balloon and measured the ionizing radiation as he ascended and found that it was three times higher at 5300 meters elevation than at ground. Others discovered that cosmic rays were largely made up of protons (89%) and alpha particles (10%).
Alpha particles are stopped by skin, beta particles pass just through the skin and x-rays and gamma rays pass completely through a human body. This would make x-ray and gamma rays seem to be the most dangerous as they leave a trail of ions in their passage but if the particles become internal (by eating or breathing) they are up to 20 times more dangerous.
When any of these particles or rays interact with anything including biological matter, they cause ions. Sometimes the damage can be repaired, sometimes it cannot, and the cell dies or replicates the damage. Sometimes the damage affects the very process of replication itself.
This is what happens when a tumour is formed. A cell “goes wild” and doesn’t know when to turn off its growth.
If radioactive dust is inspired or eaten, the release of radioactivity occurs in the body. If it is radium dust, for example, the release of radioactivity continues for as long as the tiny bit of radium is present or 16,400 years (the half-life of radium x 10). The skeletal remains of the “radium girls” will still be radioactive for 16 millennia!
In 1927, an American, Hermann Muller was able to show the effect of radiation (he used x-rays) on genetic material. He had no doubt that it produced mutations in succeeding generations and remained a staunch defender of radiation protection measures and was opposed to atmospheric nuclear tests[iv].
To answer the question, how dangerous is the radiation that we call “background” radiation, the radiation that we cannot avoid? Some European researchers compared the incidence of cancers in children who lived in areas with low background radiation (0.70 mSv) to those who lived in areas with higher background radiation (2.3 mSv). Every tumour marker studied was higher in the children with the higher background radiation.[v]
Why do we know so little about radiation’s danger to health?
The nuclear industry has a singular interest in keeping populations ignorant. It continues to market nuclear energy as “safe” when no nuclear power plant can be operated without release of radiation in the form of tritiated hydrogen gas. By the time that Japan has released all its tritiated water (from Fukushima) into the Pacific Ocean, there will be no “unexposed” population with which to compare cancer rates.
In 1962 Dr. John Gofman was recruited by the US Atomic Energy Commission to head a biomedical unit. He was told that “the AEC was on the hot seat because a series [of atmospheric atomic bomb tests] had clobbered the Utah milkshed[vi]with radioiodine. And they have been getting a lot of flak. They think that maybe if we had a biology group working with the weaponeers at Livermore[vii], such things could be averted.”
The recruitment came with a very generous budget – 3 million dollars (almost three trillion dollars in 2020 dollars). John surrounded himself with scientists and technicians along with an outstanding colleague and Nobel laureate, Arthur Tamplin.
His first task as the chair of the biomedical unit was to squash a research paper[viii] by Dr. Harold Knapp that concluded a one hundred fold increase in the amount of radiation received from fallout by the people who lived in the downwind areas. Gofman and five other experts reviewed the data, asked technical questions and concluded that the research was scientifically sound and ought to be published.
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) balked,” We’ve told these people [in the fallout zone] all along that it’s safe and we can’t change our story now.”
Gofman’s committee remained firm.
It was clear that Gofman was not a lapdog hireling. When his department could not support the “Plowshares Project”[ix], the use of atomic bombs for “good”, they became known as the “enemy within”. Gofman thought that they were being teased and it was all in fun but this was the beginning of his demise as a go-to person for the AEC.
In 1969, Dr. Ernest Sternglass published research papers claiming that up to three hundred thousand children might have died from radioactive fallout from atmospheric bomb testing. It received popular coverage in Esquire under the title “The Death of all Children”. John’s colleague Arthur Tamplin re-calculated the data, and his result was an estimation of four thousand. Unfortunately, the AEC was still deeply displeased. The only answer they wanted was zero, that is, no children affected.
The Atomic Energy Commission had been promoting a “safe threshold” of radiation below which no health effects could be detected. A safe threshold made it possible to expose servicemen to atomic bomb tests, for workers in nuclear power plants to receive yearly doses of radiation and for people living near nuclear power plants to receive regular discharges of radiation. Drs Gofman and Tamplin estimated that the cancer risk from radiation was twenty times as bad as the most pessimistic estimate previously made.[x] Not only did they conclude that the risk was high, they also concluded that there was no safe amount of radiation and that it could be assumed that there was some risk all the way down to zero.” They presented their research at the Institute for Electrical Electronic Engineers (IEEE) meeting in October, 1969. A month later, John was invited to give the same paper to hearings convened by Senator Muskie.
Their research was picked up by the Washington Press. Their bosses in the AEC made a decision and started rumors. John heard that he “didn’t care about cancer at all and that he was trying to undermine national defense”[xi]. (He had already resigned his directorship of the laboratory but remained as a research associate.) Dr. Tamplin’s research staff was fired.
When John was called before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, a Congressional committee, he and Arthur reviewed all the data they could find. They concluded that “as a matter of fact, we’d underestimated the hazard of radiation when we’d given the Muskie testimony”. They wrote fourteen more research papers. John’s main research was now into chromosomes and their response to radiation. He applied elsewhere for funding to continue, including the Cancer Society but research funding had dried up. The AEC restructured its biomedical unit; it had discovered that doctors and health researchers were hard to control.
At the same time, two scientists with the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that AEC didn’t know if the cooling system for a type of reactor worked. The credibility held by the AEC became questioable.
The government abolished it and created two new agencies: ERDA (Energy Research and Development Agency) and NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission), the former to oversee research and the latter to regulate the industry.
Drs John Gofman, Arthur Tamblin, and Harold Knapp were harassed, ridiculed, and sidelined because their research showed that radiation affected health. The industry didn’t stop there. Drs. Linus Pauling, Alice Stewart, Ernest Sternglass and Hermann Muller suffered similar fates. The US desire for nuclear arms required nuclear power plants. Nuclear radiation had to be safe………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://ionizingradiationandyou.blogspot.com/
History of the medical profession’s role in illnesses and death caused by nuclear radiation.
From Hiroshima to Fukushima to You, Dale Dewar, 4 July 2024 “…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Are we still questioning the safety of ionizing radiation? Nuclear industry leaders are delighted to remind me that physicians are the leading causes of the radioactive “burden” that most people carry.
Inadvertent research in medicine
What is less well known is that the medical profession has inadvertently conducted research on radioactivity and, after the fact of the exposures, discovered correlations of injury with radioactivity. Only a few are listed here:
1. Radiation-Induced Meningiomas:
In the early 1900’s until after the discovery of topical anti-fungals[2] in the late 1950’s, the treatment of choice for fungal or yeast infections of the scalp was irradiation, especially for Jewish children planning to immigrate to Isreal. The technique exposed the scalp to 5 – 8 Gy to the scalp, and 1.4 – 1.5 Gy to the surface of the brain. Initially it seemed like a safe thing to do.
But then reports of somnolence (sleepiness) lasting from 4 – 14 days in 30 of 1100 children occurred. By the 1930’s side effects included atrophic changes to the scalp, epilepsy, hemiparesis, emotional changes and dilatation of the brain’s ventricles.
The absolute death knell to the practice occurred in 1966 when University Medical Center (New York) published a study showing a dramatic increase in cancers among those irradiated. An increase rate of psychiatric hospitalizations was also noted.
Studies continue to roll in – the latent phase for meningioma is approximately 30 years but metastatic tumours may take over 40 years to develop. No one irradiates scalps for ringworm now.[xvii]
2. Treatment of tuberculosis using chest fluoroscopy:
Between 1925 and 1954, one of the therapies for tuberculosis was collapse of the lung followed by x-Ray fluoroscopy. More than 2500 of these patients were followed for 30 years. Increases in the rate of cancer of the breast was not seen until about 10 to 15 years after first exposure[3]. There were 147 breast cancers in the treated cohort compared to 113.6 in tuberculosis patients that were not treated with fluoroscopy. The researchers concluded that younger women were more likely to develop cancer and that the risk of developing cancer remained high for their entire lives.
The fluoroscopic and x-ray doses were known. Another finding from this study was that fractionated doses had the same risk of developing cancer as the single total dose.[xviii]
3. Irradiation of the thymus gland and subsequent breast cancer
Young children normally have large thymus glands. With the advent of chest x-rays in the 1920’s, this large thymus was viewed with suspicion. Pediatricians feared that a large thymus could lead to respiratory problems. Until 1953[xix]irradiation of the thymus was done to decrease its size.
The rate of breast cancer among woman who were so treated as children was three times that of those that were not treated. The cancers occurred when women were in their early 30’s, more than 25 years after irradiation.
Since the amount of radiation given to the thymus was quite low, researchers have become concerned about the rising tendency for CT scans of the chest either for diagnosis or treatment. Their results “underscored the importance of limiting radiation exposure in the youngest children as much as possible.”
4. CT scans of children’s heads following injuries.
Like many physicians wishing to comfort parents whose child had a concussion, I was pleased to be able to refer the child to a CT scanner when one became available in 1996. We all slept better at night thinking that a normal CT meant that the kid’s brain was ok.
Maybe we should not have.
A Canadian study of children receiving CTs to the head indicated that as few as four CT scans before the age of six could result in doubling the risk of leukemias, lymphomas and intracranial tumours starting about ten years later.[xx]
5, Secondary cancers resulting from radiation treatment for cancer
Until recently second primary cancers were neither given serious thought nor studied. Most patients receiving radiation did not live long enough, the 15 to 20 years after their treatment, to display the side effects of ionizing radiation.
One of the first studies on this population indicated that the number of second cancers caused by radiation was as high as one person in five.
There are many criticisms of this study not the least of which is that the size of their sample was small and, at ten years, the length of time for the development of solid cancers was short, but the researchers still concluded that “an effort toward a reduction in their incidence is mandatory. In parallel, radiation therapy philosophy must evolve, and the aim of treatment should be to deliver the minimal effective radiation therapy rather than the maximal tolerable dose.[xxi]
Arising from their work were estimations of dose associated with harm. They concluded that the incidence increased with the dose even though thyroid and breast cancers were observed following doses as low as 100 mGy and adults developed cancers following treatment doses as little 500 mGy. The risk of developing sarcoma (bone cancer) was 30.6 times higher for doses of more than 44 Gray than for doses of less than 15 Gray.
6. Side effects of ionizing radiation tracers and heart disease.
Research has shown that the lifetime risk of developing fatal cancer from the use of a radioactive tracer as in a PET or MIBI scan is 1 in 2000, in other words, it is lower than the lifetime risk of dying in a motor vehicle accident (1 in 108).[xxii]
However, when Canadian researchers focused on their 82,861 patients who had heart attacks, they found that 77% underwent at least one cardiac imaging or therapeutic procedure involving low-dose ionizing radiation. By comparing populations, they found that for every 10 mSv of radiation there was a 3% increase in the risk of age- and sex-adjusted cancer over a follow-up period of five years.
Because five year follow-up is very short for the development of cancers, this is an underestimate, probably by a large factor…………………………………………………………………….. https://ionizingradiationandyou.blogspot.com/
For 75 Years, NATO Has Been Terrorizing the Globe
Ukraine Breathes New Life into NATO
Most recently, NATO has performed its familiar war-mongering role in Ukraine, where it has trained Ukrainian troops, including members of the neo-Nazi-led Azov Battalion.
The latter began attacking the people of eastern Ukraine after the 2014 U.S.-backed coup that triggered the devastating ongoing conflict.
This conflict was provoked in part by U.S. efforts to extend NATO membership to Ukraine, which CIA Director William Burns had warned was a red line that should not be crossed.[14]
In late March 2022, thanks to peace talks mediated by Turkey, Russia was ready to withdraw from all the territory it had captured if Ukraine agreed to give up any commitment to join NATO or allow NATO military bases or missiles to be stationed on its territory.
The deal was scuttled when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky that the “collective West” would not support it.
By Jeremy Kuzmarov, July 13, 2024, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/07/13/for-75-years-nato-has-been-terrorizing-the-globe/
Will a formidable peace movement ever emerge that can succeed in stopping it?
This past week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrated its 75th anniversary by hosting a summit in Washington, D.C., where its founding treaty was signed.
A declaration issued at the summit made clear NATO’s intent to continuously confront Russia in Ukraine, and to further expand its operations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.[1]
The Biden administration announced that: a) they are going to start stationing long-range nuclear and other missiles (including hypersonic missiles, that the U.S. doesn’t even have yet) in Germany, within easy striking-distance of Moscow; b) nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets will be arriving in Ukraine any day now, and will go into service “during the summer”; and that c) Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to join NATO.
A commemorative documentary featured now on NATO’s website celebrates NATO’s role in facilitating the Western victory in the Cold War and in allegedly ending ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans in the 1990s, curtailing terrorism from Afghanistan after 9/11, and helping to protect the world from Russian aggression.
NATO’s formation in April 1949 is depicted as being vital in preventing the U.S. from having fallen into dreaded isolationism as it had after World War I, and in protecting European security in the face of the Soviet threat.
Colonel Richard Williams, Deputy Director of NATO’s Defense Investment Division, 1997-2011, states that “NATO is the only organization that offers hope that peace can become a real possibility.”
George Orwell would surely be proud of these latter comments in light of NATO’s long record of war-making. The true, venal history is exposed in a short book by peace activists Medea Benjamin and David Swanson, NATO: What You Need to Know, whose publication was timed to encourage protests at the 75th NATO anniversary summit.
Danger to World Peace
In the preface, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs wrote that “NATO is a clear and present danger to world peace, a war machine run amok that operates beyond the democratic control of the citizenry of the NATO countries.” Sachs continued: “The war machine lines the pockets of the arms contractors at the core of NATO, U.S. companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Europe’s arms manufacturers…NATO also sucks one nation after another into the vortex of war, instability, displacement, and poverty. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan and with many victims in between.”[2]
Benjamin and Swanson emphasize in their introduction that NATO has repeatedly violated the UN Charter outlawing military aggression and the UN’s 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons because of the placement of U.S. nuclear weapons in five European NATO nations.
NATO’s formation in 1949 as a military defense alliance against the Soviet Union was predicated on rampant propaganda that grossly exaggerated the Soviet threat, and on the ouster of peace-oriented politicians such as Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President.
Wallace had proposed a continuation of Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation with the Soviets and was consequently removed in a coup d’état at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1944 and then fired by Harry S. Truman as Commerce Secretary.
Under the direction of Truman’s advisers, including Joe Biden’s political mentor W. Averell Harriman, NATO established private clandestine armies among fascist elements throughout Western Europe who carried out black-flag terrorist activities as part of a strategy to inculcate fear in local populations and to discredit the political left.
In Italy, NATO operatives bombed a Bologna rail station and then planted evidence in the home of a left-wing journalist to make it look like he was the culprit.[3]
Rather than supporting democracy in Western Europe, NATO has a record of empowering reactionary forces. After World War II, it helped destroy popular movements of the left that had led the fight against fascism and were intent on redistributing wealth.
Greece was accepted as a NATO member only after its “ruthless Western-backed government killed or jailed the last of the partisans who had liberated it from the Nazis.”[4]
Turkey’s membership in NATO gave NATO military control of the Bosporus Strait—the only navigational waterway between the Mediterranean and Black Seas and a choke point for the Soviet ports of Odessa and Sevastapol.[5]
Within a decade of joining the Alliance, both Turkey and Greece were toppled in right-wing coups, which did not affect NATO membership. NATO further accepted Portugal as a member when it was ruled by a fascist dictator, Antonio Salazar, who provided the U.S. with a military base in the Azores.
NATO backed Portugal’s brutal suppression of anti-colonial movements in its African colonies (i.e., Angola and Mozambique), supported France’s colonial war in Algeria and the U.S. aggression in Korea, which resulted in the killing of 20% of North Korea’s population.
At an Asian-African conference in Bandung in 1955, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called NATO “the most powerful protector of colonialism” and said that Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia “would probably have been independent if it had not been for NATO.”[6]
Upholding Unipolar U.S. Power
The U.S. has long been a driving force behind NATO because NATO “provides a vehicle for imposing U.S. leadership over Western nations,” according to Benjamin and Swanson. It has “tied Europe to U.S. military, geopolitical, and economic interests, made Europeans dependent on U.S. military power, and helped fortify U.S. global economic interests.”[7]
After the end of the Cold War, U.S. weapons companies helped lobby for NATO’s expansion. A lobby group called U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was run by the Vice President of Lockheed Martin.[8]
The father of the Cold War containment strategy, George F. Kennan, warned that NATO expansion in the 1990s would be a disastrous folly that would antagonize the Russians and trigger a new Cold War, but to no avail.
Beholden in part to the Polish-American and other Eastern European lobbies alongside the weapons lobbyists, the Clinton administration expanded NATO to three Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic)—in violation of a pledge made by the George H.W. Bush administration to the Russians that NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the East.”
George W. Bush followed Clinton by expanding NATO to seven additional countries—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Later, NATO was expanded to Montenegro and to Sweden and Finland.
Sowing Methodical Devastation
In 1994, NATO launched its first-ever combat operations in Bosnia, conducting hundreds of air strikes, which contributed to the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia and transformed Bosnia into what Swanson and Benjamin call a “dysfunctional ward of NATO and the West.”[9]
In 1999, NATO carried out an illegal bombing campaign that dropped 23,000 bombs on Serbia, which killed thousands of civilians. This was followed by the U.S.-NATO invasion and occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo, resulting in the empowerment of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which established Kosovo as a mafia state.
As a spoil of victory, the U.S. acquired the 955-acre Camp Bondsteel in southeastern Kosovo, which became a secret CIA black site for illegal detention and torture. (Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Álvaro Gil-Robles called Camp Bondsteel a “smaller version of Guantanamo.”[10])
NATO caused more mayhem and bloodshed in the catastrophic 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. During that time, U.S. and NATO forces dropped 85,000 bombs and missiles and conducted tens of thousands of “kill or capture” night raids, largely targeting innocent civilians, in a futile attempt to destroy the Taliban.
In Iraq, NATO soldiers from Canada, Hungary, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands trained senior military officers who carried out massive human rights crimes in sustaining the illegal U.S. military occupation.[11]
NATO played a further instrumental role in the 2011 regime-change operation targeting Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi who had given Libya the fifth-highest GDP per capita in Africa and the highest human development rating there.
Before the start of bombing operations, NATO secretly deployed CIA officers and British, French, Canadian and Qatari Special Forces to organize and lead Libyan jihadist forces intent on toppling the secular nationalist Qaddafi.[12]
NATO took full command of all aspects of the Libyan air war, with warships from 12 NATO countries sent to enforce a critical naval blockade.
Benjamin and Swanson wrote that, “after taking the capital, Tripoli, NATO and its allies cut off food, water, and electricity to the people of Sirte and Bani Walid as they bombarded them for weeks. The combination of aerial, naval, and artillery bombardment, starvation and rebel atrocities on these civilian populations made a final, savage mockery of the UN Security Council’s mandate to protect civilians.”[13]
Ukraine Breathes New Life into NATO
Most recently, NATO has performed its familiar war-mongering role in Ukraine, where it has trained Ukrainian troops, including members of the neo-Nazi-led Azov Battalion.
The latter began attacking the people of eastern Ukraine after the 2014 U.S.-backed coup that triggered the devastating ongoing conflict.
This conflict was provoked in part by U.S. efforts to extend NATO membership to Ukraine, which CIA Director William Burns had warned was a red line that should not be crossed.[14]
In late March 2022, thanks to peace talks mediated by Turkey, Russia was ready to withdraw from all the territory it had captured if Ukraine agreed to give up any commitment to join NATO or allow NATO military bases or missiles to be stationed on its territory. The deal was scuttled when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky that the “collective West” would not support it.
This ensured that the war would go on—at the cost of the flower of Ukraine’s youth who have been sacrificed in another unwinnable war.
Hope for the Future?
NATO’s dubious role in triggering the ongoing bloodbath in Ukraine is sadly characteristic of a 75-year history of provoking warfare and terrorizing civilians—in the service of U.S. and Western global hegemony.
At the end of their book, Swanson and Benjamin note that people around the world increasingly see the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace.
Americans themselves remain divided about NATO: 47% want to see the U.S. keep its current commitment, and 28% want to either decrease it or withdraw entirely.
In a reflection of the rising hawkishness of the Democratic Party base and its susceptibility to government propaganda, only 14% of Democrats want no or less participation in NATO compared to 42% of Republicans.[15]
These data, while potentially discouraging, do reflect the fact that a significant percentage of Americans—including many living in the conservative heartland—are weary of foreign military intervention and NATO and represent a significant potential organizing base.
Given the high percentage of support for NATO among liberal Democrats, an urgent task should be for peace activists to embark on a vigorous campaign of public education targeting liberals that focuses on NATO’s horrifying history.
Benjamin and Swanson’s book is a perfect resource for that campaign and should be widely distributed to better inform the U.S. public about the evil ways their tax dollars are being spent.
References…………………………
July 16 – New Mexico anniversaries – of first nuclear weapons test, and of Church Rock radioactive waste disaster
Alicia Inez Guzmán, Investigative Reporter https://mailchi.mp/searchlightnm.org/high-beam-98-6254036?e=a70296a261 10 Jul 24
As far as anniversaries go, July 16 marks not one but two grave events. At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer led a secret cadre of scientists to detonate the world’s first atomic bomb in the Chihuahuan Desert of south-central New Mexico. The light was so bright that a local blind woman could detect, briefly, the burst of illumination, local newspapers read. That same light was potent enough to bleach brown cows. The unearthly heat, meanwhile, turned sand into glass. But despite what was known about radiation at the time, nobody from the public was evacuated.
Exactly 34 years later, and at almost exactly the same time, an earthen dam holding uranium mill waste collapsed, unleashing 1,100 tons of solid radioactive waste and 94,000 gallons of tailings into northwestern New Mexico’s Rio Puerco. The Church Rock spill would release three times more radiation into the environment than the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, most of it into the lands of the Navajo Nation. It was, as the Environmental Protection Agency deemed it, the largest radioactive spill in U.S. history. To my own shock and horror — and I’m certain the shock and horror of countless others — New Mexico’s governor at the time refused to declare the breach a federal emergency. Again, nobody was evacuated.
The two events are indelibly linked, not only by the day and time they share, but also by a kind of hubris unique to the nuclear age. By that, I mean a kind of hubris in which the lives and lands of New Mexicans were, and in many ways continue to be, deliberately disregarded. Thousands of people lived within a 50-mile radius of the Trinity Site. The waste at Church Rock? It flowed past some 1,700 homes.
For me, the date also marks just over one year since I began writing about nuclear affairs in New Mexico, the only “cradle-to-grave-state” in the nation. In that time, I’ve covered safety lapses in the plutonium pit factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the school-to-lab pipeline, allegations of fraud, waste and abuse at LANL, a secret autopsy program, legacy plutonium contamination and many other thorny issues.
The dirty history of ‘Nukey Poo’, the reactor that soiled the Antarctic
By Nick O’Malley, July 10, 2024 , https://www.theage.com.au/environment/conservation/the-dirty-history-of-nukey-poo-the-reactor-that-soiled-the-antarctic-20240708-p5jrzd.html
The rekindled nuclear debate in Australia has stirred old memories in some of a little-known chapter of our region’s history, when the US Navy quietly installed what today we might call a small modular reactor at the US Antarctic base on Ross Island.
The machine, nicknamed “Nukey Poo” by the technicians who looked after it, was installed at McMurdo base in 1961, when Antarctic exploration was expanding and nuclear energy had developed a bright futuristic sheen.
Things did not end well.
Back then, as now, Antarctic missions relied upon lifelines with distant homes. Supplies had to be carried long and sometimes dangerous distances. The US kept its Antarctic sites supplied via an ongoing supply mission called Operation Deep Freeze, which was based at the McMurdo Naval Air Facility.
According to an article on the Nukey Poo incident published in 1978 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists – a journal concerned with the potential danger of nuclear technology, founded by Albert Einstein and veterans of the Manhattan Project – while a gallon of diesel cost the US Navy US12¢ back then, by the time the Americans shipped supplies to McMurdo, diesel cost 40¢ a gallon. At South Pole station, diesel was worth $12 a gallon.
But the then US Atomic Energy Commission had a solution to save costs on transporting supplies. What if McMurdo, and other distant US bases, were supplied by small transportable nuclear reactors? Congress agreed and soon the Martin Marietta Corporation won a contract to build them.
In an advertisement in Scientific American, the company boasted in language reminiscent of today’s debate over modular reactors that “because nuclear energy packs great power in little space, it’s extremely useful when you need electricity in remotes spots. It’s portable and gives you power that last for years …” Soon, the company said, nuclear power might be carrying us to outer space and frying our eggs.
A reactor named PM-3A (PM stood for “portable, medium powered”) was shipped out in sea crates and installed at McMurdo – which is within New Zealand-claimed Antarctic territory – over the summer of 1961 and became known on the base as Nukey Poo. Because cement would not cure in the frigid climate, the reactor was not encased in concrete, rather its four major components sat in steel tanks embedded in gravel and wrapped in a lead shield.
Admiral George Dufek described the moment as “a dramatic new era in man’s conquest of the remotest continent”. The US administration was certain the reactor did not violate the Antarctic Treaty’s declaration that “any nuclear explosions in Antarctica and the disposal there of radioactive waste material shall be prohibited”.
Within a year, Nukey Poo caused its first fuss, a hydrogen fire in a containment tank that led to a shutdown and energy shortages. Icebreakers fought to break through and fuel for generators was delivered by helicopter, which burned as much as they delivered over the course of a flight. Over the following years, Nukey Poo proved so unreliable and expensive to maintain that the military gave up hopes of using the technology to displace diesel at other remote locations.
In 1972, the navy began the three-year task of decommissioning the reactor and decontaminating the site. During that process, they discovered corrosion that technicians feared may have caused leaks of irradiated material. No detailed investigation was done. The secretary of the US National Academy of Sciences said the program was ended due to a series of malfunctions and the possibility of leaks, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported. The New Zealand government declared the decision was economic.
Either way, it was decided not only to remove the reactor, but half the hillside it was built into. Eventually 12,000 tonnes of irradiated gravel and soil was removed on supply ships to be buried in concrete lined pits in the United States.
The young Australian scientist, Dr Howard Dengate, who had run one of the NZ bases, hitched a lift on one those ships, the Schuyler Otis Bland, in 1977. Dengate recalls a grumpy captain who once swore at him for inviting bad luck on the ship by whistling on deck. The captain, Dengate recalled this week, blamed him for “whistling up” the storm that struck the vessel before the Australian disembarked in New Zealand and the ship sailed on to the US.
Though the reactor was little discussed in the wider world, no secret was made on the base of the reactor or its impact. Indeed, Dengate recalled finding an operating manual for the reactor in the American rubbish pits that New Zealanders had developed the habit of fossicking in.
But the story did not end there.
In 2011, an investigation by journalists of News 5 Cleveland found evidence that McMurdo personnel were exposed to long-term radiation, and in 2017 compensation was paid to some American veterans of the base. A year later, New Zealand officials announced that it was possible that New Zealand staff were also affected.
It has since been reported that four New Zealanders had raised claims about their ill health since their time in the Antarctic.
In 2020, the Waitangi Tribunal, a permanent commission in New Zealand to investigate cases against the Crown, launched inquiries. They are not yet complete.
Asked if he was concerned about travelling with the irradiated material, Dengate said he was not. “We were young and dumb and adventurous,” he told this masthead of his time in the Antarctic.
How Israel Became a Nuclear Power
The United States actively works to shield the Israeli nuclear weapons program from criticism as well as public knowledge.
In effect, unwillingness to commit to nuclear nonproliferation has led to nuclear proliferation.
https://antinuclear.net/2024/06/24/keep-up-to-date-on-australias-media-quagmire-on-nuclear-power/
Israel’s nuclear weapons program has been an open secret for over fifty years. Declassified documents and the wider availability of satellite imagery have largely been responsible for revealing the extent of the nation’s nuclear program. So too has the courage of whistleblowers such as Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician who exposed his country’s covert program and was subsequently drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents in Italy before being secretly tried and sentenced to eighteen years in prison in 1986.
Yet the United States and other nuclear-armed states, as well as a broad range of bodies responsible for monitoring arms proliferation, continue to maintain a policy of not publicly acknowledging the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons.
These norms of institutional secrecy are surprisingly powerful and far-reaching. US government employees have been fired for referring to Israeli nuclear weapons. Even Wikipedia’s page on the subject uses circuitous language to refer to their existence. (The page is locked to edits from almost all contributors.) This approach is effective: a 2021 poll suggested that more Americans believed that Iran has nuclear weapons than that Israel does, when the reality is the opposite.
This wall of silence has proven remarkably porous. During the early days of Israel’s war on Gaza, government officials openly entertained the possibility of using nuclear weapons on the battlefield, and figures within the US military think tank circuit have wondered whether Israel’s secrecy is doing it more harm than good.
Conventional wisdom about the strategic importance of possessing nuclear weapons is that there’s no reason to have one if you don’t tell anyone. Intimidation is as much a part of deterrence as use. If no one suspects you can respond to an attack with the overwhelming force of a nuclear counterattack, what’s to make them think twice?
But Hezbollah’s continued assault on northern Israel, which has thus far led to the evacuation of over ninety thousand people, gives lie to the notion that possession of nuclear weapons offers complete protection. In a recent speech, Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, made it clear that if Israel were to cross what it considers to be red lines, there would be no target within the country safe from a retaliatory response. It is therefore not clear that Israel’s nuclear weapons are on their own preventing it from being attacked in a way that threatens its existence. Israel’s relationship with the United States has, however, afforded it a range of impressive offensive and defensive nonnuclear capabilities, backed up by the even larger looming threat of US military involvement, which it is actively using.
Were the US to enforce its own policies consistently, Israel’s status as a state in possession of nuclear weapons would directly threaten its access to aid. The Glenn Amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act explicitly prohibits arms assistance to and mandates sanctions on countries that have, as Israel did in 1979, tested a nuclear weapon after 1977. But the fact that its nuclear weapons program continues to command this kind of bizarre deference illuminates the forces driving nuclear proliferation around the world.
The Forces Behind Proliferation
Scrupulous nonacknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons in the present day is part of the United States’ general position of aiding Israeli military endeavors, regardless of the financial or strategic cost. But the reason Israel has nuclear weapons in the first place has less to do with its relationship with the United States and more to do with the geopolitical forces that have driven proliferation since America first dropped the bomb on Japan.
The program that produced Israel’s nuclear weapons is as old as the state itself. As Avner Cohen details in Israel and the Bomb, a nuclear program was discussed by Israel’s leaders practically from the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, took an intense personal interest in nuclear technologies in particular and science and technology as foundations of modern state power in general.Hezbollah’s continued assault on northern Israel gives lie to the notion that possession of nuclear weapons offers complete protection.
Already in 1949, Israel was conducting exploratory research for potential uranium deposits in the Negev, a desert region in the country’s south. When these proved inadequate, it developed techniques for producing usable nuclear material from the relatively poor resources at its disposal, before turning to the United States as the potential source of the raw materials necessary to jump-start a nuclear program.
But in the immediate postwar years, the United States was unwilling to provide the necessary material without guarantees from Israel that the country’s leaders saw as undesirably inhibiting. Israel instead turned to other small countries with nuclear programs at different stages of development: France and Norway, two of only three European countries in the early 1950s operating nuclear reactors.
Israel and France shared a set of geopolitical interests. Both opposed the government of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The French, motivated by neocolonial idealism, took issue with Nasser for nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Israel of course felt threatened by Nasser’s Arab nationalism.
Skepticism about the possibility that the US nuclear umbrella could actually offer security guarantees also motivated nations like France to advance a Gaullist policy of strategic autonomy. This meant encouraging nuclear proliferation where doing so would secure the broader geopolitical interests of declining powers.
Nonproliferation Amid Great-Power Rivalry
In the present, the United States actively works to shield the Israeli nuclear weapons program from criticism as well as public knowledge. As with France’s hostility to a Nasser-led anti-Western order, the Israeli-US alliance is strongly motivated by fear of Iran, or any other anti-American state, developing its own nuclear program. Yet Israel’s nuclear weapons, along with the substantial, long-term support among a certain segment of the US political class for war with Iran, are two very powerful factors driving Iran to develop its own nuclear weapon.
At present, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, though experts believe that it currently maintains the capability to quickly develop them. President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal limited Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon and imposed a regime of inspections and oversight which provided assurance to other countries that it was not developing nuclear weapons. But Israel opposed the deal on the grounds that it did not go far enough to preclude the possibility that Iran might one day develop a nuclear weapon — a similar kind of all-or-nothing approach to the one that informed the Donald Trump administration’s decision to exit the agreement in 2018.
As Israel’s war on Gaza continues and expands outward into the broader region, it seems it may only be a matter of time before Iran finally does develop a nuclear weapon. After its recent large-scale rocket attacks against Israel, Iran announced that it might reverse its current voluntary commitment to not developing nuclear weapons should Israel retaliate by hitting its nuclear facilities. It goes without saying that this would make the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran much more dangerous, giving even low-level incidents the potential to escalate to dramatic and destructive new heights.
The United States actively works to shield the Israeli nuclear weapons program from criticism as well as public knowledge.
In effect, unwillingness to commit to nuclear nonproliferation has led to nuclear proliferation. This explains why Saudi Arabia has in recent years betrayed nuclear ambitions. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has stated in US press outlets that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran did so. Yet rather than treating this open disregard for stated US policy as a serious limit on US-Saudi relations, the United States has been pushing for a so-called “normalization” deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel — including a stipulation of a “credible path to a Palestinian state.” Saudi Arabia, in turn, wants the United States to provide it with nuclear technology — ostensibly, of course, for a power program.
The dilemma for America is that whatever interest it does have in nuclear nonproliferation must be balanced against its broader commitment to global hegemony. The latter would be undermined if China, which it now sees as its key competitor, stepped in to provide technical support to fledgling nuclear programs, as it has done with Saudi Arabia. Last year, China sent one of its engineering companies to conduct surveys of the Gulf monarchy’s uranium deposits, although it seems unlikely that these deposits could support a nuclear program of any size.
Nuclear weapons experts have called for safeguards that could prevent the development of a Saudi nuclear weapons program. Yet unlike in the case of Israel’s search for nuclear material, the threat of safeguards doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to the kingdom’s openly stated nuclear ambitions. It sometimes seems that U.S. nuclear weapons policy in 2024 is based on a tacit acceptance of its powerlessness over global nuclear weapons politics. Rather than trying to prevent proliferation, America has been forced to settle for the role of being the primary nuclear patron where it can.
Existential Threats
Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons has been largely irrelevant to the ongoing war in Gaza. The country’s overwhelming conventional capabilities have granted it superiority on the battlefield, at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. But possession of nuclear weapons reinforces the worldview that underlies Israel’s political calculations (and to some extent, those of every nuclear-armed country): that its existence is constantly threatened, and it is only rational for it to possess the means of responding to such threats with unlimited force.
It is the states with the most nuclear weapons, Russia and the United States, that most assiduously cling to the logic that weapons of mass destruction are the only safeguard against existential threats. Both have consistently bypassed opportunities to deescalate the very real, immediate risks to human safety and civilization that the continued existence of nuclear weapons poses. In doing so, they’ve set a powerful precedent for every other country in the world to uphold nuclear weapons as the only real guarantor of security.
Without a real commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in global politics by the states that can certainly afford it, this de facto policy encourages nuclear proliferation. Israel’s well-defended status as a nuclear power that need not even announce itself is not an exception, but an example to other states thinking of going nuclear.
Emma Claire Foley is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. Her writing and commentary has appeared in Newsweek, NBC, the Guardian, and elsewhere.
The US, Russia, and Ukraine: 75 Years of Hate Propaganda
Zelensky: The “Winston Churchill of Our Time” (George W. Bush)
In the Western symphony of propaganda, the hated Putin, the “autocrat,” is contrasted with the heroic Zelensky the “democrat” (Time magazine’s 2022 “person of the year”). But how democratic is Zelensky?
His man-of-the-hour image had help from international friends. Zelensky’s global perception management team is run by a well-connected London-based British firm, The PR Network, that helps him prepare messages for global consumption.
BY GERALD SUSSMAN APRIL 18, 2023, https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/04/18/the-us-russia-and-ukraine-75-years-of-hate-propaganda/
“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”
– Henry Kissinger
“But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
– Adolf Hitler
“We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on deceiving the public].”
– Mike Pompeo on his time as CIA director
What is state propaganda? It is a disciplined and coordinated discourse using mass persuasion on behalf of state interests. It’s one instrument of what’s called realpolitik – foreign policy designed to advance “national interests,” which in a neoliberal economy like the US means corporate interests. The oligarchs, the billionaire class in the age of neoliberalism, in their unfettered greed have employed both US political parties and their accessories in the media, the intelligence community, and Congress and turned them into a collective ministry of (dis)information and subalterns of empire. Propaganda as a tool in foreign policy commonly relies on hate-laden ideology to mobilize public consensus.
Enemies
A key to successful mass mobilization of the public mind is the enemy construct. One of the key studies on the subject found that the US has had a permanent need for enemies, and when not “readily available, we have created them” (Finlay, Holsti, and Fagen, cited in Murray & Myers, 1989, p. 555). Russia as enemy (Russophobia) works just as well if not better when it’s conceived in demeaning ethnic rather than political economic terms. That’s because hierarchical race and ethnicity ideas are closer to the surface of public prejudice than those focused on, for example, effigies of socialism or communism. In other words, it is easier to orchestrate hatred toward Russia and Putin when there preexists a deep distrust of Russians, their history, and (orthodox religious) culture and its people based on “difference” and a perceived civilizational threat to the West. Under such collective psychological conditioning, this has led to a rejection of Russia membership in the congregation controlled by white European Christian nations.
The US has manufactured innumerable enemies during the course of its existence, and it has had to in order to become a world superpower. Since 1776, there have been only 16 years when the country was not at war. In the pantheon of America’s villains during its 247-year history, one of the most prominent portraits is that of the demonic Vladimir Putin, whose “enemy” status among Americans was pumped up to 70% by March 2022, soon after the start of Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine.
The “liberal” Democrats are found to be far more inclined to carry out a proxy war against Russia than Republicans and much more supportive of supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons and US troops: tanks (67% to 48%), long-range missiles (60% to 41%), fighter jets (56% to 39%), direct invasion (33% to 22%) (Frankovic and Orth, 2023). Former CIA director and defense secretary under Obama, Leon Panetta bluntly declared, ‘It’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not” (Bloomberg, 2022).
The massive US “proxy” assault on Russia, more like a full-scale invasion but without its own troops physically on the ground and in the air, is only the latest episode of a hundred-year-old effort to impose Western hegemony over that country. It started with the joint “expedition” that the sanctimonious Woodrow Wilson (“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men”) sent to Siberia and northern Russia in a failed attempt, along with mainly European allies, to back the White Russians in the civil war and overthrow the Bolshevik government. Anti-communism was toned down during the Second World War, as it was the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, tactically allied with the US and the British Empire, that bore by far the heaviest burden, suffering 27 million deaths, in defeating the Nazi regime. It’s a sobering reality of historical proportions that is rarely acknowledged in the US. Immediately following the war, the US quickly converted the USSR/Russia from ally to enemy (and their enemies to allies) and worked closely with anti-communist groups in Ukraine and the larger Soviet region in efforts to break apart the Soviet state.
The then newly formed CIA, established in 1947, covertly supervised underground far right organizations in Ukraine, in particular the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the anti-Soviet Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA), as part of its “psychological warfare activities
Continue readingWhy Won’t the US Help Negotiate a Peaceful End to the War in Ukraine?
In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it. Years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side treated the agreement not as a solemn treaty but as a delaying tactic to “give Ukraine time” to build its military strength. In the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbas between 2014 and 2021.
Jeffrey Sachs, 19 June 24, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/role-of-us-in-russia-ukraine-
For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations. The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world. After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.
Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.
To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states: Ukraine, Romania (NATO member 2004), Bulgaria (NATO member 2004), Turkey (NATO member 1952), and Georgia, an idea straight from the playbook of the British Empire in the Crimean War (1853-6).
Brzezinski spelled out a chronology of NATO enlargement in 1997, including NATO membership of Ukraine during 2005-2010. The U.S. in fact proposed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. By 2020, NATO had in fact enlarged by 14 countries in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia, 2009; Montenegro, 2017; and Northern Macedonia, 2020), while promising future membership to Ukraine and Georgia.
The White House is dead wrong to evade negotiations just because of disagreements with Russia’s proposals. It should put up its own proposals and get down to the business of negotiating an end to the war.
In short, the 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons, and carried forward consistently since then, has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power.
It is against this grim backdrop that Russian leaders have repeatedly proposed to negotiate security arrangements with Europe and the U.S. that would provide security for all countries concerned, not just the NATO bloc. Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.
In June 2008, as the U.S. prepared to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a European Security Treaty, calling for collective security and an end to NATO’s unilateralism. Suffice it to say, the U.S. showed no interest whatsoever in Russia’s proposals, and instead proceeded with its long-held plans for NATO enlargement.
The second Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. I happened to see the U.S. complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest.
The evidence of U.S. complicity in the coup is overwhelming. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on a phone line in January 2014 plotting the change of government in Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. Senators went personally to Kiev to stir up the protests (akin to Chinese or Russian political leaders coming to DC on January 6, 2021 to rile up the crowds). On February 21, 2014, the Europeans, U.S., and Russia brokered a deal with Yanukovych in which Yanukovich agreed to early elections. Yet the coup leaders reneged on the deal the same day, took over government buildings, threatened more violence, and deposed Yanukovych the next day. The U.S. supported the coup and immediately extended recognition to the new government.
In my view, this was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation, of which there have been several dozen around the world, including sixty-four episodes between 1947 and 1989 meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O’Rourke. Covert regime-change operations are of course not really hidden from view, but the U.S. government vociferously denies its role, keeps all documents highly confidential, and systematically gaslights the world:
“Do not believe what you see plainly with your own eyes! The U.S. had nothing to do with this.” Details of the operations eventually emerge, however, through eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, the forced release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, declassification of papers after years or decades, and memoirs, but all far too late for real accountability.
In any event, the violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. In the following months and years, the government in Kiev launched a military campaign to retake the breakaway regions, deploying neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms.
In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it. Years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side treated the agreement not as a solemn treaty but as a delaying tactic to “give Ukraine time” to build its military strength. In the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbas between 2014 and 2021.
Following the definitive collapse of the Minsk II agreement, Putin again proposed negotiations with the U.S. in December 2021. By that point, the issues went even beyond NATO enlargement to include fundamental issues of nuclear armaments. Step by step, the U.S. neocons had abandoned nuclear arms control with Russia, with the U.S. unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, placing Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania in 2010 onwards, and walking out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty in 2019.
In view of these dire concerns, Putin put on the table on December 15, 2021 a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees.” The most immediate issue on the table (Article 4 of the draft treaty) was the end of the U.S. attempt to expand NATO to Ukraine. I called U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the end of 2021 to try to convince the Biden White House to enter the negotiations. My main advice was to avoid a war in Ukraine by accepting Ukraine’s neutrality, rather than NATO membership, which was a bright red line for Russia.
The White House flatly rejected the advice, claiming remarkably (and obtusely) that NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine was none of Russia’s business! Yet what would the U.S. say if some country in the Western hemisphere decided to host Chinese or Russian bases? Would the White House, State Department, or Congress say, “That’s just fine, that’s a matter of concern only to Russia or China and the host country?” No. The world nearly came to nuclear Armageddon in 1962 when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. imposed a naval quarantine and threatened war unless the Russians removed the missiles. The U.S. military alliance does not belong in Ukraine any more than the Russian or Chinese military belongs close to the U.S. border.
The fourth offer of Putin to negotiate came in March 2022, when Russia and Ukraine nearly closed a peace deal just weeks after the start of Russia’s special military operation that began on February 24, 2022. Russia, once again, was after one big thing: Ukraine’s neutrality, i.e., no NATO membership and no hosting of U.S. missiles on Russia’s border.
Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky quickly accepted Ukraine’s neutrality, and Ukraine and Russia exchanged papers, with the skillful mediation of the Foreign Ministry of Turkey. Then suddenly, at the end of March, Ukraine abandoned the negotiations.
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, following in the tradition of British anti-Russian war-mongering dating back to the Crimean War (1853-6), actually flew to Kiev to warn Zelensky against neutrality and the importance of Ukraine defeating Russia on the battlefield. Since that date, Ukraine has lost around 500,000 dead and is on the ropes on the battlefield.
Now we have Russia’s fifth offer of negotiations, explained clearly and cogently by Putin himself in his speech to diplomats at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14. Putin laid out Russia’s proposed terms to end the war in Ukraine.
“Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear- free, and undergo demilitarization and de-nazification,” Putin said. “These parameters were broadly agreed upon during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022, including specific details on demilitarization such as the agreed numbers of tanks and other military equipment. We reached consensus on all points.
“Certainly, the rights, freedoms, and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully protected,” he continued. “The new territorial realities, including the status of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions as parts of the Russian Federation, should be acknowledged. These foundational principles need to be formalized through fundamental international agreements in the future. Naturally, this entails the removal of all Western sanctions against Russia as well.”
Let me say a few words about negotiating.
Russia’s proposals should now be met at the negotiating table by proposals from the U.S. and Ukraine. The White House is dead wrong to evade negotiations just because of disagreements with Russia’s proposals. It should put up its own proposals and get down to the business of negotiating an end to the war.
There are three core issues for Russia: Ukraine’s neutrality (non-NATO enlargement), Crimea remaining in Russian hands, and boundary changes in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The first two are almost surely non-negotiable. The end of NATO enlargement is the fundamental casus belli. Crimea is also core for Russia, as Crimea has been home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet since 1783 and is fundamental to Russia’s national security.
The third core issue, the borders of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, will be a key point of negotiations. The U.S. cannot pretend that borders are sacrosanct after NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to relinquish Kosovo, and after the U.S. pressured Sudan to relinquish South Sudan. Yes, Ukraine’s borders will be redrawn as the result of the 10 years of war, the situation on the battlefield, the choices of the local populations, and tradeoffs made at the negotiating table.
Biden needs to accept that negotiations are not a sign of weakness. As Kennedy put it, “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” Ronald Reagan famously described his own negotiating strategy using a Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.”
The neocon approach to Russia, delusional and hubristic from the start, lies in ruins. NATO will never enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia will not be toppled by a CIA covert operation. Ukraine is being horribly bloodied on the battlefield, often losing 1,000 or more dead and wounded in a single day. The failed neocon game plan brings us closer to nuclear Armageddon.
Yet Biden still refuses to negotiate. Following Putin’s speech, the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine firmly rejected negotiations once again. Biden and his team have still not relinquished the neocon fantasy of defeating Russia and expanding NATO to Ukraine.
The Ukrainian people have been lied to time and again by Zelensky and Biden and other leaders of NATO countries, who told them falsely and repeatedly that Ukraine would prevail on the battlefield and that there were no options to negotiate. Ukraine is now under martial law. The public is given no say about its own slaughter.
For the sake of Ukraine’s very survival, and to avoid nuclear war, the President of the United States has one overriding responsibility today: Negotiate.
From the Hiroshima bomb to Israel’s nuclear weapons, the path leads back to Congo’s uranium
Conspiracies in the Congo Linda Pentz Gunter 16 June 24 https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/06/16/conspiracies-in-the-congo/
It involved the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); a Belgian mining company; a fictitious Liberian trading company; a German-named ship — the Scheersberg A; a Spanish crew; a German petrochemical official; an Italian paint company; an Israeli freighter; the Greek island of Crete; a Turkish port; and a confession made in Norway.
If this sounds like the plot for an elaborate work of fiction, it was — it formed the basis of Ken Follett’s 1979 thriller, Triple. But it was also all true. The clandestine operation, which took place in November 1968, smuggled an estimated 200 tonnes of uranium yellowcake out of the DRC, transporting it to Israel. It was orchestrated by Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence service and came to be known as Operation Plumbat, since the illicit cargo was marked as lead.
The scheme was set in motion when, after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, France curtailed its weapons supplies to Israel and likely the uranium fuel as well needed for Israel’s Dimona reactor, believed then and still to be at the heart of the country’s nuclear weapons program. The operation concluded with an exchange of ships and cargos on the high seas, the Scheersberg A eventually docking empty in Turkey while the uranium, now aboard an Israeli freighter, made its way to Haifa and eventually to Dimona.
The Plumbat operation was first exposed in April 1977 at a non-proliferation conference in Salzburg, Austria by Paul Leventhal, who went on to found the Nuclear Control Institute in 1981.
Israel officially denies that any of this took place, despite ample documentation and the later confession of one of its Mossad officers after his arrest in Norway. This was yet another bizarre twist in the tale when a Mossad operation in Lillehammer to assassinate one of the 1973 Munich Olympic attackers instead mistakenly took out an innocent Moroccan waiter on his way home from work. One of the agents, in order to prove to Norwegian authorities that he was indeed with Mossad, related the story of Operation Plumbat.
Of course, Israel also officially denies the existence of its nuclear weapons arsenal.
The uranium bound for Israel came from the Shinkolobwe mine in DRC’s Katanga province. The veins of uranium that run through Shinkolobwe bleed everywhere. And so do its victims.
The DRC is the site of the present day genocide that no one talks about. As many as six million people have now died in the ongoing fighting there, mostly over mineral rights. That long and bloody history began in the 1880s when the despotic Belgian king, Leopold II, enslaved and brutalized the country’s population, violence that continued under the subsequent Belgian government that took control in 1908.
The Belgians first began mining uranium at Shinkolobwe in 1921. In 1939, Albert Einstein, by then aware that a nuclear bomb could potentially be built and that Nazi Germany might be pursuing one, alerted President Roosevelt to the need for access to a rich uranium supply. The best such, Einstein said, could be found in what was then known as the Belgian Congo.
Once Nazi Germany had occupied Belgium in 1940, concerns grew that the uranium stockpiled at Shinkolobwe could fall into Hitler’s hands. A plan was quickly developed to ship 1,200 tons of uranium ore to the US where it was first stored on Staten Island and eventually transported to the Manhattan Project’s nuclear bomb factory at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
As recounted in Susan Williams’s non-fiction book, Spies in the Congo, US agents in various guises slipped in and out of the Congo, secretly shepherding the uranium back to the Manhattan Project. A second shipment of 1,000 tons of stockpiled ore soon followed. Wrote Williams, citing Gabrielle Hecht’s book, Being Nuclear, Africans and the Global Uranium Trade: “The miners sorted and packed up the uranium ore by hand and, according to estimates, they could have been exposed to a year’s worth of radiation in about two weeks.”
Seventy percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima atomic bomb came from Shinkolobwe and another ten percent was used in the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
However, the colonialist skulduggery didn’t end there. When the DRC gained its independence in June 1960 and Patrice Lumumba became the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Katanga province abruptly seceded from the country. In an effort to quell the rebellion, Lumumba appealed to the United Nations but was rebuffed. He then turned to the Soviet Union for help, sealing his fate.
The assassination of Lumumba on January 17, 1961 after barely six months in office, appears to have come on direct orders from President Eisenhower, officially out of concerns that Lumumba’s association with the Soviets would create a communist stronghold in the region.
But uranium was also at the heart of the plot and the US may not have acted alone. UK Labour Party peer, David Lea, reported in 2013 that a former MI6 operative, Daphne Park, told him she and MI6 orchestrated the assassination to protect the uranium supply. “Lumumba would have handed over the whole lot to the Russians,” said Park according to Lea.
All of these schemes and intrigues have come about at the price of peace and stability for the Congolese people. Contamination from the radioactive and heavy metals left behind at the mine site continues to poison people and the environment. Other minerals, especially cobalt and copper, have invited further plunder and conflict.
And there could soon be renewed interest in Shinkolobwe’s uranium. “At a time when many nations are engaged in an arms race, stockpiling weapons of mass destruction to prove their ‘strength’, Shinkolobwe mine still risks being seen as an attractive prospect,” wrote young Congolese climate activist, Remy Zahiga in a paper for the Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
Renewed interest may be coming from countries such as France (which inked a deal, thus far unexploited, in 2008) and China, eager to continue and expand their nuclear power programs under the false premise of climate mitigation. China already owns other mines in the DRC. “The existence of hidden entrances and ownership of all surrounding infrastructure would make the Shinkolobwe mine an attractive location should China decide to supplement its current uranium imports,” writes Daniel Allen in his 2024 paper, Uranium Security in the DRC.
And yet, the world looks away.
During an online event hosted by the Peace & Justice Project, an initiative of former UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and his wife Laura Alvarez, Congo-born London councillor, Michelline Safi-Ngongo, asked with rightful indignation and somewhat rhetorically why the media never talked about the on-going genocide in her country?
The answer was sadly all too obvious, including to her. Black faces. Far away places. Africa, where these things “happen all the time”. Worthy of a shrug, then forgotten. When the West needs uranium or cobalt or copper, workers in the Congo and their families become suddenly expendable.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. You can learn more about the Congo’s uranium history in her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/06/16/conspiracies-in-the-congo/
“In Ukraine, a war for memory.”
In defense of what is remembered. At Savur–Mohila hill, Horlivka province. (Guy Mettan.) Report from Donbas, Part 2.
The Floutist, JUN 03, 2024
To destroy the shared past of a people is to go some way toward destroying a people—the coherence and solidity of their identity, their ability to think and act collectively, their collective confidence in themselves, altogether their place in the world.…………………….
Guy Mettan
It is now two years and several months since the Russian military began its intervention in Ukraine. And between Russia and the West, between the Ukrainians in Kiev and the former Ukrainians who have become Russians again, the battle is not just a military struggle. It is also a struggle in defence of memory against those who would obliterate it.
In the West, the 80th anniversary of the D–Day landings on 6 June will be commemorated without the Russians. This is an official if symbolic denial that the victory over Nazi Germany was first and foremost a Soviet victory and that Operation Overlord could not have succeeded without the Red Army’s Operation Bagration in the east, to hold off German tank divisions.
Attempts to erase the past in this manner are not at all new. One finds cases of it throughout history. But in the lands to Europe’s east and the Russian Federation’s west it has greatly intensified since 2014, a decade back, when, some months after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Kiev, the Western powers marked the 70th anniversary of the D–Day landings and refused to invite Russians to the ceremonies held on the Normandy beaches—this while inviting representatives of the former enemy, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Across Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, and in Ukraine in particular, history is being turned upside down. Historical statues and war memorials honouring those who defeated the Reich in the Second World War are being demolished to erect steles, inscribed stone pillars, that commemorate not the Soviet’s hard-won victory but the victims of the Soviets. These monuments are also intended to mark the glory of the nationalists who fought alongside the Nazis and massacred Jews, such as Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Roman Shukhevich.
Every day, monuments are taken down and others erected in their place—on the sly, in the silence of the Western media. We seem to forget, to take but one example of many, that the Treblinka death camp was run by a group of some 20 German SS troops and that the exterminations were carried out by a hundred Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards.
This rewriting of history amounts to a war on the past of a people. And if it is waged not on battlefields but at sites of memory, the outcome of this struggle is comparably important. To destroy the collective memories of a people is to destroy their common identity. In this way it also destroys their understanding of their place in the world and their ability to act effectively—and so their ability to go forward. If you have no past you have no future, it has been said: This is the ultimate objective of those who attack the shared memories of others.
None of this has gone unnoticed by the people of Donbas. And, true to their motto, “Never forget, never forgive,” they are in response redoubling their commemorative faith and monuments to fallen heroes……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
It is estimated that 75,000 to 102,000 people were massacred at 4/4–bis from the end of 1941 to September 1943, two or three times as many as at the better documented massacre in 1941 at the ravine in Kiev known as Babi Yar. The entire Jewish community of Donetsk (called Stalino at the time) was thrown into the pit, along with tens of thousands of others. …………………………………………………….
A visit to No. 4/4–bis is all it takes to understand why the people of Donbas rose up against Kiev in April 2014, when the regime that emerged from the U.S.–backed Maidan coup wanted officially to ban their language while sending the heirs of their forebears’ executioners to suppress them. This region has a strong tradition of resistance to any kind of invaders, from German Nazis to west–Ukrainian ultranationalists in Nazi–style uniforms. If No. 4/4–bis is about remembering, it is also about determination.
You can destroy monuments, but not memories.
Seventy kilometres northeast of Donetsk, in the direction of Bakhmut, in the province of Horlivka, the monumental Savur–Mohila cenotaph is another testimony to the battles of the last century. It is erected at the top of the highest hill in the Donbas, on the site of one of the great clashes of the Second World War. That took place in July–August 1943, at the same time as the famous tank battle of Kursk, which was to break the Wehrmacht……………………………………………………………………………….
This battle to preserve memory against its destruction is probably most intense in Lugansk. I’m welcomed there by Anna Soroka, a historian who has been fighting in the republic’s regiments since 2014.
The first monument she shows me commemorates the 67 children killed by Ukrainian militias from the Kraken and Aïdar battalions, both of them neo–Nazi, who tried to take the city in 2014, failed, and then proceeded to shell it until the Russian intervention in 2022. It was built in the middle of a park that serves today as a kindergarten. Several kids were killed there by targeted Ukrainian shelling—targeted, surely, as the surrounding buildings were not hit.
Children are the objects of an unrelenting information war on both sides. The Ukrainians have filed war crimes charges against the Russians, and the International Criminal Court has indicted Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s children’s affairs agency, Maria Lvova–Belova, for allegedly kidnapping Ukrainian children. Western propaganda repeats these accusations over and over, in media and in the cinema: A full-length documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol, directed by Mstyslav Chernov, Michelle Mizner, and Raney Aronson–Rath, featured these allegations and has just won this year’s Oscar for best documentary.
Western media reports naturally fail to pass on the point of view of the inhabitants of the Donbas—who say it is the Ukrainians who are taking children hostage. There is, in fact, a volunteer organization in Ukraine called the White Angels, modelled on the infamous Syrian White Helmets, who, as you will recall, were far from the neutral rescue workers they posed as and, in fact, were covertly funded by Western intelligence and acted in behalf of jihadist groups.
These White Angel detachments were formed in February 2022 by a certain Rustam Lukomsky. The Western (or Western-backed) press has mentioned them on several occasions. The Kyiv Independent (24 March 2024), Le Monde (7 February 2023), the BBC (30 January 2024) are among the media that have reported on this group. “Amid the thud of explosions and rattle of gunfire,” a typical report reads, “a special police unit called the White Angels goes door-to-door helping evacuate the town’s remaining civilians.” Lukomsky, whose background remains unclear, is portrayed invariably as a hero of these operations.
For those in Donbas, the White Angels are something very different. The group’s aim, residents here say, is to force parents in front-line areas to separate from their children under the pretext of protecting them. The children are thus isolated and “taken to safety” in the rear, where they are used as a means of blackmail against their families.
These families are in this way torn between two equally unbearable choices: Either they abandon their homes to join their children, or they remain near the front and are forced to collaborate with the Ukrainian army, which invites them to denounce or sabotage the movements of the Russian army………………………………
The second Lugansk monument is located in a wood just outside the city. Like Donetsk’s Mine No. 4/4–bis, it does not appear on our search-engine result pages. And like Donetsk’s Mine No. 4/4–bis, it commemorates the site of the massacre of Lugansk’s Jewish community. About 3,000 mainly Jewish women and children and 8,000 adults of various faiths were executed here by the Nazis during the Wehrmacht’s occupation of the city.
“We can’t understand why, today, Kiev is honouring the descendants of those who killed so many of our people during the Second World War,” Anna Soroka, the historian and soldier, tells me as we tour the site. It has been abandoned to brambles since 1991, when Luhansk Oblast, which was previously part of the USSR, became part of Ukraine following the referendum on independence. The new authorities of the republic decided recently to cut the bushes and to restore it.
A little further along, on the other side of the road, the republic’s authorities have erected a vast memorial honouring the combatants and civilians killed in the 2014–2022 war. Nearly 400 graves are lined up on either side of a walkway that leads from a Rodin-inspired statue near the entrance to a column and a small chapel at the centre of the site.
Anna personally knew most of the people buried here………………………………………………………………..
On our way back into Lugansk we pass a large monument to the Soviet soldiers who liberated the city in 1943. And then, after a few more miles, we come upon a Ukrainian tank decorated with flowers and set on a concrete base beside the freeway: Local inhabitants put it there as a reminder that this tank bombed their homes 10 years ago. Below, there is a field still littered with mines where people are strongly advised against walking.
The last monuments on this mournful tour of the city are perhaps the most emblematic of the tragic fate of Donbas over the last hundred years. These comprise the Hostra Mohyla memorial, which is set on a small hill southeast of the city…………………………………………………………………………….
The largest of these memorials, which crowns the top of the complex, holds the key to the psychology of the region’s inhabitants. I studied it carefully.
It features four giant statues of soldiers, heroes-in-arms of the four wars that mark the collective consciousness of Donbas: There is a bronze fighter from the Civil War of 1917–1921, a Soviet soldier from the Great Patriotic War, a militant from the anti–Kiev resistance of 2014–2018, and, finally, a fighter from the war of liberation of the oblast that began in 2022 and continues to the present day. Again, the past lives on and informs the present.
More erasure: For the Hostra Mohyla site, as for others, there is absolutely no information to be found on Western search engines despite its popularity with the locals. Google and Wikipedia ignore or have banned these sites from their directories. Only the German Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, provides any information on the Jewish victims……………………. https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/in-ukraine-a-war-for-memory?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=112164&post_id=144941821&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
In 1939 the Soviet Union ‘planned to send a million troops to stop Hitler if Britain and France agreed pact’
Nick Holdsworth in Moscow, The Telegraph, Sat, 18 Oct 2008 https://www.sott.net/article/491642-Stalin-planned-to-send-a-million-troops-to-stop-Hitler-if-Britain-and-France-agreed-pact
Stalin was ‘prepared to move more than a million Soviet troops to the German border to deter Hitler’s aggression just before the Second World War’
Papers which were kept secret for almost 70 years show that the Soviet Union proposed sending a powerful military force in an effort to entice Britain and France into an anti-Nazi alliance.
Such an agreement could have changed the course of 20th century history, preventing Hitler’s pact with Stalin which gave him free rein to go to war with Germany’s other neighbours.
The offer of a military force to help contain Hitler was made by a senior Soviet military delegation at a Kremlin meeting with senior British and French officers, two weeks before war broke out in 1939.
The new documents, copies of which have been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, show the vast numbers of infantry, artillery and airborne forces which Stalin’s generals said could be dispatched, if Polish objections to the Red Army crossing its territory could first be overcome.
But the British and French side – briefed by their governments to talk, but not authorised to commit to binding deals – did not respond to the Soviet offer, made on August 15, 1939. Instead, Stalin turned to Germany, signing the notorious non-aggression treaty with Hitler barely a week later.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named after the foreign secretaries of the two countries, came on August 23 – just a week before Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby sparking the outbreak of the war. But it would never have happened if Stalin’s offer of a western alliance had been accepted, according to retired Russian foreign intelligence service Major General Lev Sotskov, who sorted the 700 pages of declassified documents.
“This was the final chance to slay the wolf, even after [British Conservative prime minister Neville] Chamberlain and the French had given up Czechoslovakia to German aggression the previous year in the Munich Agreement,” said Gen Sotskov, 75.
The Soviet offer – made by war minister Marshall Klementi Voroshilov and Red Army chief of general staff Boris Shaposhnikov – would have put up to 120 infantry divisions (each with some 19,000 troops), 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy artillery pieces, 9,500 tanks and up to 5,500 fighter aircraft and bombers on Germany’s borders in the event of war in the west, declassified minutes of the meeting show.
But Admiral Sir Reginald Drax, who lead the British delegation, told his Soviet counterparts that he authorised only to talk, not to make deals.
“Had the British, French and their European ally Poland, taken this offer seriously then together we could have put some 300 or more divisions into the field on two fronts against Germany – double the number Hitler had at the time,” said Gen Sotskov, who joined the Soviet intelligence service in 1956. “This was a chance to save the world or at least stop the wolf in its tracks.”
When asked what forces Britain itself could deploy in the west against possible Nazi aggression, Admiral Drax said there were just 16 combat ready divisions, leaving the Soviets bewildered by Britain’s lack of preparation for the looming conflict.
The Soviet attempt to secure an anti-Nazi alliance involving the British and the French is well known. But the extent to which Moscow was prepared to go has never before been revealed.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, best selling author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of The Red Tsar, said it was apparent there were details in the declassified documents that were not known to western historians.
“The detail of Stalin’s offer underlines what is known; that the British and French may have lost a colossal opportunity in 1939 to prevent the German aggression which unleashed the Second World War. It shows that Stalin may have been more serious than we realised in offering this alliance.”
Professor Donald Cameron Watt, author of How War Came – widely seen as the definitive account of the last 12 months before war began – said the details were new, but said he was sceptical about the claim that they were spelled out during the meetings.
“There was no mention of this in any of the three contemporaneous diaries, two British and one French – including that of Drax,” he said. “I don’t myself believe the Russians were serious.”
The declassified archives – which cover the period from early 1938 until the outbreak of war in September 1939 – reveal that the Kremlin had known of the unprecedented pressure Britain and France put on Czechoslovakia to appease Hitler by surrendering the ethnic German Sudetenland region in 1938.
“At every stage of the appeasement process, from the earliest top secret meetings between the British and French, we understood exactly and in detail what was going on,” Gen Sotskov said.
“It was clear that appeasement would not stop with Czechoslovakia’s surrender of the Sudetenland and that neither the British nor the French would lift a finger when Hitler dismembered the rest of the country.”
Stalin’s sources, Gen Sotskov says, were Soviet foreign intelligence agents in Europe, but not London. “The documents do not reveal precisely who the agents were, but they were probably in Paris or Rome.”
Shortly before the notorious Munich Agreement of 1938 – in which Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, effectively gave Hitler the go-ahead to annexe the Sudetenland – Czechoslovakia’s President Eduard Benes was told in no uncertain terms not to invoke his country’s military treaty with the Soviet Union in the face of further German aggression.
“Chamberlain knew that Czechoslovakia had been given up for lost the day he returned from Munich in September 1938 waving a piece of paper with Hitler’s signature on it,” Gen Sotksov said.
The top secret discussions between the Anglo-French military delegation and the Soviets in August 1939 – five months after the Nazis marched into Czechoslovakia – suggest both desperation and impotence of the western powers in the face of Nazi aggression.
Poland, whose territory the vast Russian army would have had to cross to confront Germany, was firmly against such an alliance. Britain was doubtful about the efficacy of any Soviet forces because only the previous year, Stalin had purged thousands of top Red Army commanders.
The documents will be used by Russian historians to help explain and justify Stalin’s controversial pact with Hitler, which remains infamous as an example of diplomatic expediency.
“It was clear that the Soviet Union stood alone and had to turn to Germany and sign a non-aggression pact to gain some time to prepare ourselves for the conflict that was clearly coming,” said Gen Sotskov.
A desperate attempt by the French on August 21 to revive the talks was rebuffed, as secret Soviet-Nazi talks were already well advanced.
It was only two years later, following Hitler’s Blitzkreig attack on Russia in June 1941, that the alliance with the West which Stalin had sought finally came about – by which time France, Poland and much of the rest of Europe were already under German occupation.
Labour and nuclear weapons: a turbulent ideological history
BY CHAS NEWKEY-BURDEN, THE WEEK UK, 15 Apr 24
From the 1940s to Keir Starmer, the party leadership has zigzagged in and out of love with the bomb
“We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs,” Labour’s then foreign secretary Ernest Bevin reportedly said in the 1940s, and “we’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it”.
That “thing” was the atomic bomb, but since being acquired by the UK, nuclear weapons have been a “divisive issue” within Labour, said the BBC.
Anti-nuke ‘fixture’
Michael Foot, who became Labour leader in 1980, was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and “a fixture at anti-nuclear demonstrations”, said socialist magazine Tribune.
When Neil Kinnock took over as leader in 1983, the party’s policy, which he supported, was unilateral nuclear disarmament and the removal of all US nuclear weapons and bases from British soil. But this policy was only supported by a minority of the British public, and Labour lost the 1987 general election.
By 1989, Kinnock had convinced the party to drop these policies, but “many” on the Labour left remain “vehemently opposed” to that decision, said the BBC.
Previously ‘unthinkable’
As a young MP, Tony Blair was a member of CND, but he was never strongly in favour of unilateral disarmament, and as party leader, he was on board with the party’s pro-nuclear policy……………………………………………
A ‘nuclear-free world’
Like Foot and Blair, Jeremy Corbyn was also a CND member, rising up to be vice-president of the campaign group before he became party leader in 2015. Corbyn told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme that if he became prime minister, he would instruct the UK’s defence chiefs never to use the Trident nuclear weapons system.
“I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons,” he said. “I am opposed to the holding of nuclear weapons. I want to see a nuclear-free world. I believe it is possible.”……………………
‘Unshakeable’
Corbyn’s successor, Keir Starmer, has moved the party back to a staunchly pro-nuclear policy. In an article in the Daily Mail last week, he said that his commitment to the UK’s nuclear weapons was “unshakeable” and “absolute”……………………
Asked by ITV News if he would be willing to push the nuclear button as PM if Britain were under attack, Starmer said that “deterrence only works if there is a preparedness to use it”. https://theweek.com/defence/labour-nuclear-weapons-history
1 This Month
5 January -Webinar-What is Trump’s Golden Dome?
REGISTER AT Massachusetts Peace Action Education
New book – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1923372157?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Now until to February 10, 2026 Radioactive waste storage in France: the debate is finally open! How to participate?
-
Archives
- December 2025 (346)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (377)
- September 2025 (258)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
- April 2025 (305)
- March 2025 (319)
- February 2025 (234)
- January 2025 (250)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 