America's Atomic War
Against Its Citizens and Why It's Not Over Yet
Serious nuclear accident in Scotland revealed
Gory Tales of Terrorism By N.D. Jayaprakash
World awash in stolen nuclear material
Featured Views
Published in the June 27 - July 3, 2001 issue of the Boise (Idaho) Weekly
America's Atomic War Against Its Citizens and Why It's Not
Over Yet
By David Proctor
"After 15 years of investigating, I have concluded that the United States
government's atomic weapons industry knowingly and recklessly exposed millions
of people to dangerous levels of radiation.
"Nothing in our past compared to the official deceit and lying that took
place in order to protect the nuclear industry. In the name of national
security, politicians and bureaucrats ran roughshod over democracy and morality.
Ultimately, the Cold Warriors were willing to sacrifice their own people in
their zeal to beat the Russians."
-Former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall
from the foreword to Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's
Nuclear Arsenal by Michael D'Antonio
Since early June, newspapers in Australia and Great Britain have published
articles about experiments conducted in the 1950s and 1960s by U.S. scientists
on the bodies of deceased and stillborn babies.
Documents declassified by the U.S. Department of Energy show that scientists
from the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority worked with their American counterparts to
take the bodies of 6,000 infants from hospitals in Australia, Great Britain,
Canada, Hong Kong, South America and the U.S., then ship them to the United
States for the nuclear experiments-without permission from the parents.
It was called Project Sunshine.
Sunshine began in 1955 at the University of Chicago when Willard Libby, later a
Nobel Prize laureate for his research into carbon dating, instructed colleagues
to skirt the law in their search for bodies.
"Human samples are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a
good job of body-snatching, they will really be serving their country,"
Libby is quoted as saying.
The reasoning: Nuclear tests released great amounts of Strontium 90 into the
atmosphere. Libby and others connected with the American defense industry wanted
to know how much radiation was entering the food supply. The bodies and body
parts were cremated and the ashes tested with a sophisticated Geiger counter.
Grotesque as Project Sunshine was, it fits the pattern.
Since 1945, high officials of the United States government have maimed and
killed hundreds of thousands of their own people, first while they spent $5.5
trillion to test and maintain nuclear weapons, then as they spent billions to
support and under-regulate nuclear power plants. To cover their actions, the
officials-and those who succeeded them-have for decades lied to the public and
perjured themselves in court about the amount of radiation released and its
effect on the millions of people exposed to it.
Now, that same government wants to transport hundreds of tons of nuclear waste
through 43 states, including Idaho, on inadequate rail lines and highways past
138 million people to be stored in containers of unknown longevity for hundreds
of thousands of years in geologically unstable formations in New Mexico and
Nevada.
And once again, officials insist it will all be perfectly safe.
The government has known for at least 70 years that nuclear energy-regardless of
its form-is deadly to the human body.
The first publicized case of radiation injuries in America was the radium-dial
painters in the 1920s. These women used radium paint to put the luminous numbers
on watch dials. Many wet their brushes with their mouths to make the tiny points
needed for such fine work. When they began to die of cancer their successful
lawsuit against the watch company in 1928 made the dangers of radiation very
public.
The government also sponsored radiation experiments on animals in the 1940s, as
well as follow-up studies of the Trinity test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all in 1945.
Despite this knowledge, and America's acceptance of the Nuremberg human rights
protocols, the Atomic Energy Commission, a group appointed by the president and
obligated by law to protect the public, detonated more than 300 aboveground
nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific Ocean. The blasts
totaled 138,600 kilotons of explosive power, which Soviet scientist Andrei
Sakharov estimated would kill as many as 2.5 million people and American Nobel
laureate Linus Pauling calculated would cause 1 million seriously defective
children, another 1 million embryonic and neonatal deaths, and create millions
of hereditary defects.
In 1969, Dr. Ernest Sternglass traced the dramatic increases in infant deaths
and childhood leukemia in upstate New York to airborne radiation from the
nuclear tests. He estimated 375,000 American babies had been killed by fallout
radiation between 1951 and 1966. And that didn't count the deaths caused by the
Soviet Union's 715 tests.
Dr. John Gofman found that even low doses of radiation could cause cancer. In
the early 1970s, when Gofman and Dr. Art Tamplin refused to keep their findings
secret, they lost their research grants at DOE's Livermore National Laboratory.
The government, of course, did not have this information when it began
aboveground testing. It did know, however, that radiation was dangerous and was
being blown thousands of miles from the Pacific and Nevada sites. AEC's response
was to lie about fallout readings, falsify some reports and bury others so
Americans and Pacific islanders would accept the government's propaganda mantra
that there was no danger.
It wasn't only civilians who were handed this line of falsehoods. The Defense
Department marched soldiers within a few hundred yards of ground zero during
several atomic tests. When these "atomic veterans" started getting
cancer, their claims for benefits were denied. Soldiers who obtained their
service records found no mention of their trip to the Nevada Test Site. Only
recently has Congress recognized their sacrifice and authorized limited
treatment for the dying veterans.
In the early 1950s, southern Utah ranchers lost thousands of animals from
radiation poisoning following a particularly dirty test shot. They sued the
government, but during the discovery phase of the trial AEC officials lied about
having reports that documented the radiation the animals received and testified
there was no connection between fallout and the deaths. The truth came out at
another trial 30 years later.
Cancer deaths spiked in southern Utah in the mid-1950s. Diseases that had been
nearly nonexistent until then decimated whole families. The overwhelmed
undertaker in Cedar City, Utah, needed special training in order to prepare the
cancer-devastated bodies.
Simultaneously, Nevada Test Site workers began to develop the same types of
illnesses and die at an alarming rate. AEC again insisted the workers were safe,
that there was no connection between the cancers and the fallout.
But there was a connection, and AEC knew it. Government records, finally
released after decades of denial and secrecy, show that the entire country was
repeatedly dusted by fallout. Radioactive hot spots were found as far away as
Albany, New York. Public health statistics showed hundreds of thousands of
American babies were killed by fallout between 1951 and 1966. Another study
found SAT scores dropped in Utah during the testing.
The story of the uranium miners is as tragic as any. During the 1940s and 1950s,
thousands of poor, uneducated men, most of whom were American Indians, labored
in mines in the Four Corners region to produce uranium needed to manufacture
plutonium for bombs and atomic tests.
Forced to work without even the most basic ventilation system, the miners
breathed uranium-laced air, drank uranium-contaminated water and carried the
deadly dust home to their families. Thousands have since died of lung cancer and
other radiation-related diseases. Thus far, Congress has approved no
compensation for them.
The deadly rain of fallout stopped in 1963 but only momentarily. Even after the
United States and the Soviet Union's limited test-ban treaty, many of the next
700 underground tests "vented," the government's euphemism for
explosions that drifted radiation across the country.
In order to conduct those tests and build its nuclear stockpile, the government
needed bomb factories-huge installations that manufactured, assembled and tested
the deadly nuclear components. These factories were located at Savannah River,
South Carolina; Fernald, Ohio; Rocky Flats, Colorado; Pantex, Texas; Idaho
National Engineering Laboratory; Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford,
Washington.Again, the government played fast and loose with the safety and
health of both its employees and the thousands of civilians who lived nearby.
At Hanford, the infamous "Green Run" in December 1949, released 20,000
curies (a curie is a measure of radioactivity) of xenon-133 and 7,780 curies of
iodine-131. The radioactive plume measured 200 by 40 miles and dropped high
concentrations of fallout on the Tri-Cities. There was no public health warning
and no follow-up studies on the health of the residents. Over the years, Hanford
plastered the Columbia Valley repeatedly. About 1 million curies, the largest
accumulation of atomic industrial pollution on record, were dumped in the air,
water and ground.
Some lambs near Hanford were born without eyes, mouths or legs. Some had two
sets of sex organs, others had none. Juanita Andrewjeski had three miscarriages
and kept a map of her neighborhood, one of the closest farms to Hanford. On it
were 35 crosses for heart attacks and 32 circles for cancer. One girl was born
without eyes. Another couple had eight miscarriages and adopted all their
children. Two children were born without hipbones. One farm wife killed her baby
and herself after her husband died of cancer.
In 1974, Dr. Samuel Milham, a Washington State Department of Health
epidemiologist, noticed a 25 percent excess of cancers among Hanford nuclear
workers when compared with the rates among the state's non-nuclear workers. As
it had done so many times before, AEC buried Milham's findings. The agency
commissioned another study from a company with extensive Hanford contracts. When
that study affirmed Milham's work, it was buried, too.
Some 600,000 people worked in the nuclear weapons industry. Only last year did
Congress approve lump payments of $150,000 and lifetime care for those approved.
The Labor Department estimates 43,000 workers per year, and 28,000 survivors,
will apply annually.
From 1952 to 1970, INEL (now known as INEEL) workers dumped some 16 billion
gallons of liquid radioactive wastes into injection wells that fed directly into
the water table below. Radioactive contamination has been found 7.5 miles away,
threatening the long-term viability of the huge Snake River Plain Aquifer, the
major underground water source for 270,000 people and Idaho's famous potatoes.
There were also intentional iodine-131 releases in 1957 and 1963 that dosed the
residents of the farming communities west of INEL. Site officials waited for the
wind to blow away from Idaho Falls, where they lived, to make the release. The
people downwind were not told of these incidents until years later.
The taxpayers' bill to clean up this ungodly mess has already run into billions
of dollars, and the meter is still running.
In the 1950s, nuclear energy was billed as the answer to America's energy
questions. Today we know that billions of dollars have been wasted in this
attempt to produce electricity "too cheap to meter." The power plants,
according to a study done after Three Mile Island, were under-engineered, poorly
built, poorly staffed and badly run.
Now, as President Bush lobbies for more nuclear plants, ratepayers and taxpayers
are still on the hook for the billions of dollars it will cost to decommission
the plants, clean up the sites and safely store the contaminated building and
fuel rods for hundreds of thousands of years.
Finally, let us not forget the ugly history of medical experiments.
Declassified documents show that government and university doctors injected
scores of prisoners, mental patients, retarded adults and children and even
pregnant mothers with radioactive substances-nearly always without full
consent-sometimes just to see what would happen.
The Next 500,000 Years
Now, with this revolting 50-year record behind it, the government wants us to
believe it can safely move military, commercial and foreign waste to gigantic
burial grounds near Las Vegas (Yucca Mountain) and Carlsbad, N.M. (Waste
Isolation Pilot Project or WIPP). And protect it there for hundreds of thousands
of years.
Yucca, which is still not built despite 20 years of study and nearly $7 billion
invested, is intended to hold high-level nuclear reactor waste. WIPP, which is
open, was built to hold transuranic waste-clothing, tools, sludge and dirt
contaminated with small amounts of plutonium.The thousands of shipments that
will be made to these repositories through 43 states, this "mobile
Chernobyl," are a nightmare of potential accidents, economic catastrophe
and terrorism.
The radioactive garbage will then be stored in containers that haven't been
adequately tested and placed for longer than the human race has recorded its own
history in underground caverns whose long-term stability remains in doubt.
As one engineer put it, "How would you like to have to build something that
had to be 99.99999 percent perfect-forever?"
Perfect. That word doesn't quite describe either WIPP or Yucca.
The WIPP salt caverns near Carlsbad, NM, are located 2,150 feet below the
surface and consist of a 112-acre underground area on which taxpayers have spent
$2.1 billion so far. In 30 to 35 years, when the space is filled, the price tag
is expected to be $9 billion. It will include an elaborate marker system to warn
people not to drill into the salt for the next 500,000 years.
But some scientists expect problems long before that. DOE first discovered water
seeping into the WIPP excavations in 1983. The leaks finally became public in
1987 when New Mexico scientists concluded the salt formation contains much more
water than DOE anticipated. They warned that over time the brine could corrode
the waste drums and create a "radioactive waste slurry" that could
eventually reach the surface.
Inside WIPP, cracks have appeared in the ceilings and floors of several large
waste storage rooms, and the ceiling has collapsed in three areas-the result of
natural room closure (salt movement) that is two to three times faster than
anticipated. In 1983, DOE estimated it would take 25 years for the salt walls to
completely close in and lock the waste barrels into solid salt rock. At the rate
the rooms are closing, it may take only 13 years.
Another hazard is the known reserves of gas and oil. There is even an existing
oil and gas lease beneath the WIPP site. Despite the warning signs, these
resources could invite intrusion during the long future the repository must stay
isolated.
WIPP also has capacity problems. The repository is expected to hold about
160,000 cubic meters of transuranic waste. However, there are expected to be
443,000 to 592,000 cubic meters of waste that will need storage-roughly
two-and-one-half to three-and-one-half times WIPP's capacity.
Yucca Mountain, located about 80 miles from Las Vegas, the fastest growing city
the America, has been studied for 22 years to the tune of nearly $7 billion-paid
by electric utility customers. There is still no agreement on whether it is a
suitable site or not.
The plan is to bury the waste 660 to 1,400 feet below the surface in a
1,400-acre facility served by 100 miles of tunnels. By the time it's finished,
it will cost about $53 billion. Utility ratepayers will fork over $28 billion.
The rest of the bill will be handed to taxpayers.
One of the most volatile issues is the mountain's geology. There are 33 known
faults near Yucca Mountain. About 600 seismic events have occurred near the site
in the last 20 years alone, including a 5.6-magnitude earthquake in 1992.
Meanwhile, 70,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods are stored
at 77 sites around the country. The waste increases by 300 to 600 tons per year,
and those facilities are quickly running out of space.
If Yucca ever is opened, it will be full in less than 15 years.
First, though, the waste has to get there. The Yucca shipping campaign would be
the largest nuclear materials transport in history-some 80,000 shipments over 24
years.
Accidents happen. The federal government predicts 70 to 310 nuclear
transportation accidents over the next 75 years.
From 1964 to 1990, 2,561 spent fuel containers were shipped in the United
States. If a repository opens, there will about that many shipments per year.
An accident or terrorist act that opened a high-level waste cask would be
catastrophic. DOE predicts a severe accident in a rural area would contaminate
42 acres and cost $620 million. In an urban area it would cost $2 billion. Dr.
Marvin Resnikoff, the nuclear physicist who was an expert witness in the 1991
Andrus vs. U.S., testified that a similar accident would cost $40 billion.
Andrus vs. U.S. was a case filed by Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus. A judge ordered
that Andrus not interfere with nuclear waste shipments. The waste will be
transported by rail (88 percent) and truck (12 percent). Union Pacific is the
largest rail company in America and will handle most of the work. Their track
record is not encouraging. Derailments and other problems have become an
epidemic.
Even former Gov. Phil Batt, who allowed DOE to bring more than 1,000 shipments
of waste into Idaho and store it on the promise it would be removed to Yucca and
WIPP, declared Union Pacific's safety record "unacceptable."
Utah-based Huntsman Chemical says problems with Union Pacific have cost more
than $8 million in lost business and increased shipping costs since June 1997.
The U.S. military stopped using Union Pacific because of delays, and once the
railroad left a shipment of M-1 tanks unguarded.
The Association of American Railroads has said today's rail lines-in Idaho and
elsewhere-cannot handle the weight of nuclear casks, the casks themselves may
not withstand an accident and the railroads cannot afford to carry casks at the
slow speed the federal government requires.
In the meantime, the existing nuclear plants continue to produce this deadly
poison, much of which will last longer than human civilization has existed thus
far.
The public has been alerted to these dangers, but nuclear energy is a silent
killer, and the nuclear industry has run a very effective lobbying campaign.
Crucial to this is the fact that cancers take up to 20 years to develop, and in
that time people move, officials retire and change jobs, records are lost. It is
not a spectacular earthquake or even the AIDS epidemic, which burst suddenly
upon the world. Nuclear radiation kills quietly, with diseases that sometimes do
occur for other reasons. The tragic truth is it may take a large-scale accident
to get through to the daily media and much of the public.
Clearly, the history of nuclear energy-not just in the United States but
worldwide-demonstrates that the human race has not yet learned how to deal with
this incredible power and the waste it produces. We have left death and
destruction behind us every step of the way, from the mining of raw uranium, to
the manufacture of plutonium, to the assembly of weapons and reactors, to the
operation of the reactors, to the disposal of the waste they create. If we
humans had to pass a test, had to prove to some rational outside observer that
we deserve to be able to continue working with nuclear power, we would fail
utterly.
The only sensible solution is to stop producing nuclear waste altogether and
store existing waste as safely and as close to the point of production as
possible. Then, begin a reverse Manhattan Project to find ways to neutralize the
deadly mess we have created.
David Proctor has written for Boise Weekly, The Salt Lake Tribune, Idaho
Mountain Express, The Idaho Statesman, USA Today and Gannett News Service as a
reporter and editor. His work has also been published in Rolling Stone, Utah
Holiday, New Times, Zoo World, Edging West, InPrint, Focus, Boise and
Supermarket News magazines and Reuters news service.
THE HUMAN RADIATION EXPERIMENTS
How scientists secretly used US citizens as guinea pigs during the Cold War
By Alan R Cantwell Jr., M.D.
In preparing America for nuclear attack during the Cold War years following World War II, thousands of US citizens became the innocent victims of over 4,000 secret and classified radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and other government agencies, such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the Public Health Service (now the CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Veterans Administration (VA), the CIA, and NASA.
Millions of people were exposed to radioactive fallout from the continental testing of more than 200 atmospheric and underground nuclear weapons, and from the hundreds of secret releases of radiation into the environment. Over 200,000 “atomic vets” who worked closely with nuclear detonations at the Nevada test site during the 1950s and 1960s were especially vulnerable to radiation fallout.
Also affected were the thousands of so-called “downwinders”, who lived in nearby small towns in Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. These downwinders (along with the animal populations) suffered the worst cumulative radioactive effects of fallout, along with a contaminated environment teeming with radioactive food and farm products. The plight of these poor country people exposed to government-induced radiation sickness has been recorded in Carole Gallagher’s remarkable photo-essay American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War (The Free Press, 1993).
In reviewing declassified AEC records (now the Department of Energy) from the 1950s, Gallagher was shocked to discover one document that described the people downwind of the Nevada Test Site as “a low use segment of the population.” Her shock at such callous bigotry caused her to eventually move West to research, investigate and document those who lived closest to the Test Site, as well as workers at the site, and soldiers repeatedly exposed to nuclear bombs during the military tests.
Disinformation and
Nuclear FalloutIn the nuclear arms race, government doctors and scientists brainwashed the public into believing low dose radiation was not harmful. Some officials even tried to convince people that “a little radiation is good for you.” Totally ignored was the knowledge that the radiation from nuclear fallout could lead to an increased risk of cancer, heart disease, neurological disorders, immune system disease, reproductive abnormalities, sterility, birth defects, and genetic mutations which could be passed on from generation to generation. The full extent of this radiation damage to the American public during the Cold War years will never be known.
A secret AEC document, dated 17 April 1947, reveals that physicians were aware of these radiation hazards but simply ignored them. Under the title “Medical Experiments in Humans,” the memorandum read: “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such field work should be classified ‘Secret’.”
According to Gallagher, many downwinders testified that the Public Health Service officials told them that their ‘neurosis’ about the fallout was the only thing that would give them cancer, particularly if they were female. Women with severe radiation illness, hair loss, and badly burned skin, were clinically diagnosed in hospitals as “neurotic.” Other severely ill women were diagnosed with “housewife syndrome.” When Gallagher’s investigation led her to ask a Department of Energy spokesperson about the AEC/DOE’s practice of waiting until the wind blew towards Utah before testing nuclear bombs or venting radiation in order to avoid contaminating Las Vegas or Los Angeles, the unabashed and unconcerned official actually said on tape, “Those people in Utah don’t give a shit about radiation.”
Secret Radiation Experiments
Only recently, with the forced release of Top Secret documents, have details been revealed about the unethical and inhumane radiation studies conducted during the Cold War years from 1944 to 1974. The initial story broke in November 1993 in a series of articles in the Albuquerque Tribune which identified the names of 18 Americans secretly injected with plutonium, a key ingredient of the atomic bomb and one of the most toxic substances known to man. Some, but not all, of the patients were terminally ill. This horrifying story by journalist Eileen Welsome (who later won a Pulitzer Prize) unleashed a storm of nationwide protest prompting Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary to order the release of secret files and documents pertaining to these Cold War experiments.
The extremely dangerous plutonium experiment was performed under the auspices of the government’s Manhattan Project, which brought together a revered group of distinguished scientists to develop and test the atom bomb. The purpose of these secret experiments was to establish occupational standards for workers who would be producing plutonium and other radioactive ingredients for the nuclear energy industry.
Some of the classified government experiments included:
* Exposing more than 100 Alaskan villagers to radioactive iodine during the 1960s.
* Feeding 49 retarded and institutionalised teenagers radioactive iron and calcium in their cereal during the years 1946-1954.
* Exposing about 800 pregnant women in the late 1940s to radioactive iron to determine the effect on the fetus.
* Injecting 7 newborns (six were Black) with radioactive iodine.
* Exposing the testicles of more than 100 prisoners to cancer-causing doses of radiation. This experimentation continued into the early 1970s.
* Exposing almost 200 cancer patients to high levels of radiation from cesium and cobalt. The AEC finally stopped this experiment in 1974.
* Administering radioactive material to psychiatric patients in San Francisco and to prisoners in San Quentin.
* Administering massive doses of full body radiation to cancer patients hospitalised at the General Hospital in Cincinnati, Baylor College in Houston, Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City, and the US Naval Hospital in Bethesda, during the 1950s and 1960s. The experiment provided data to the military concerning how a nuclear attack might affect its troops.
* Exposing 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military. This was conducted at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco.
The Atomic Energy Commission
In 1995 the Energy Department admitted to over 430 radiation experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission between the years 1944 and 1974. Over 16,000 people were radiated, some of whom did not know the health risks or did not give consent.
These experiments were designed to help atomic scientists understand the human hazards of nuclear war and radiation fallout. Because the entire nuclear arms buildup was classified secret, these experiments were all stamped secret and allowed to take place under the banner of protecting “national security.”
Amazingly, these clandestine studies were conducted at the most prestigious medical institutions and colleges, including the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and the previously mentioned universities.
Uranium Mine Workers
In addition to these radiation experiments, workers who mined uranium for the AEC in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, were exposed to radioactive dust during the 1940s up to the 1960s. Although AEC scientists and epidemiologists knew the dust in these poorly ventilated mines was contaminated with deadly radon gas which could easily cause death from lung cancer, this lifesaving information was never passed on to the miners, many of whom were Native Americans. As a result, many miners died prematurely of cancer of the lung.
Stewart Udall, an Arizona Congressman and lawyer who also served as Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, represented the miners and their families in a class action lawsuit against the federal government for radiation injuries. In The Myths of August, Udall writes that some physicians who defended the decisions of the atomic establishment sought to justify these experiments by contending that little was known about the health risks associated with the various exposures. Others tried to put a positive face on tests conducted without obtaining informed consent by maintaining that these experiments nevertheless produced advances in medical knowledge. Some physicians argued that the conduct of the AEC doctors should be condoned because they were merely following the ‘prevailing ethics’ of the postwar period. When the miners’ case finally came to trial in 1983, the federal court in Arizona dismissed the case by declaring the US government was immune from lawsuit.
Medical Ethics of the Cold War
How could these physician-experimenters ignore the sworn Hippocratic Oath promising that doctors will not harm their patients? Did they violate the Nuremberg Code of justice developed in response to the Nazi war crimes trials after World War II?
The Nuremberg Code includes 10 principles to guide physicians in human experimentation. In actuality, prior to the Nazi war crime tribunals, there was no written code for doctors; and lawyers defending the Nazi doctors tried to argue that similar wartime experiments were conducted with prisoners at the Illinois State Penitentiary, who were deliberately infected with malaria.
During the Nuremberg trials the AMA came up with its own ethical standards, which included three requirements: 1) voluntary consent of the person on whom the experiment is to be performed must be obtained; 2) the danger of each experiment must be previously investigated by animal experimentation; and 3) the experiment must be performed under proper medical protection and management.
The records now show that many victims of the government’s radiation experiments did not voluntarily consent as required by the Code. As late as 1959, Harvard Medical School researcher Henry Beecher viewed the Code “as too extreme and not squaring with the realities of clinical research.” Another physician said the Code had little effect on mainstream medical morality and “doubted the ability of the sick to understand complex facts of their condition in a way to make consent meaningful.”
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1996, Jay Katz recalls an argument at Harvard Medical School in 1961 suggesting that the Code was not necessarily pertinent to or adequate for the conduct of research in the United States. Katz writes: “The medical research community found, and still finds, the stringency of the NC’s first principle all too onerous.” But patients in medical experiments expect the experiment to help them in some way – not to harm them! Patients also are often inclined to totally trust their physicians not to harm them. In The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, Katz concludes that many doctors view the Code as “a good code for barbarians but an unnecessary code for ordinary physicians.”
The President’s Advisory Committee
In January 1994 President Clinton convened an Advisory Committee to investigate the accusations surrounding the human radiation experiments. In their final report presented to the president on 3 October, 1995, the Committee found that up to the early 1960s it was common for physicians to conduct research on patients without their consent.
The Committee’s harshest criticism was reserved for those cases in which physicians used patients without their consent in experiments in which the patients could not possibly benefit medically. These cases included the 18 people injected with plutonium at Oak Ridge Hospital in Tennessee, the University of Rochester in New York, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at San Francisco, as well as two experiments in which seriously ill patients were injected with uranium, six at the University of Rochester and eleven at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The plutonium and uranium experiments undoubtedly put the subjects at increased risk for cancer in ten or twenty years’ time.
The Final Report of the President’s Advisory Committee is now available in The Human Radiation Experiments, published in 1996 by Oxford Press. Although the Committee studied the experiments in depth, there was no attempt to assess the damage done to individuals. In many cases, the names and records of the patients were no longer available, nor was there any easy way to identify how many experiments had been conducted, where they took place, and which government agencies sponsored them. The Department of Health and Human Services, the primary government sponsor of research, had long since discarded files on experiments performed decades ago.
The Committee discovered “the records of much of the nation’s recent history had been irretrievably lost or simply could not be located” and “only the barest description remained” for the majority of the experiments.
The Department of Energy also claimed all the pertinent records of its predecessor, the AEC, had been destroyed during the 1970s, but in some cases as late as 1989. All CIA records are classified. When records of the top secret MKULTRA program (in which unwitting subjects were experimented upon with a variety of mind-altering drugs) were requested, the CIA explained that all pertinent records had been destroyed during the 1970s when the program became a national scandal.
Keeping Government Secrets
The Committee made clear that its story could not have been told if the government did not keep some records that were eventually retrieved and made public. However, federal records management law also provides for the routine destruction of older records. Thus, in the great majority of cases the loss or destruction of requested documents was a function of normal record-keeping practices.
The Committee was dismayed to report: “At the same time, however, the records that recorded the destruction of documents, including secret documents, have themselves been lost or destroyed.” Thus, the circumstances of destruction (and indeed, whether documents were destroyed or simply lost) is often hard to ascertain.
In the Committee’s judgment the AEC had repeatedly deceived the public by denying it had engaged in human experimentation, and by issuing cover stories to cover-up secret investigations, and by deliberately supplying incomplete information to people who participated in government-sponsored biomedical research. It was clear that once government information was “born secret” it often remained that way.
The Committee concludes: “The government has the power to create and keep secrets of immense importance to us all.” Yet, without documents how can historians and other researchers uncover the truth about the government’s clandestine activities? Where is the ‘smoking gun’ when secret records are systematically shredded or reported as ‘lost’? We now know that many people were damaged during the government’s Cold War period of secrets and lies. But how can we uncover the medical and scientific secrets that remain hidden in the still classified documents from 1974 up to the present?
In the absence of medical records and follow-up, the ultimate fate of individuals who willingly or unwillingly “volunteered” for these experiments is not known. The Committee simply did not have the time or the resources to review individual files and histories. In many instances only fragmentary information survives about these experiments; whether people were harmed in these experiments could not be ascertained.
Current Secret Biomedical Experimentation
The US has the world’s largest arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. However, few people are aware of the covert biowarfare experiments conducted by various government agencies, particularly the military and the CIA.
For example, in August 1977 the CIA admitted to no less than 149 subprojects, including experiments to determine the effects of different drugs on human behaviour; work on lie-detectors, hypnosis, and electric shock; and the surreptitious delivery of drug-related materials. Forty-four colleges and universities were involved, along with fifteen research foundations, twelve hospitals or clinics, and three penal institutions. In the infamous MKULTRA mind-altering experiments, the victims were lured to hotel rooms for sexual encounters with prostitutes and were then drugged and monitored by CIA agents.
Military biowarfare attacks against unsuspecting Americans in the 1950s and 60s are a documented reality. The most notorious was a six-day US military bioattack on San Francisco in which clouds of potentially harmful bacteria were sprayed over the city. Twelve people developed pneumonia due to these infectious microbes, and one elderly man died from the bioattack.
In other secret attacks, bacteria were sprayed into New York City subway tunnels; into crowds at a Washington, D.C. airport; and onto highways in Pennsylvania. Biowarfare testing also took place in military bases in Virginia, in Key West, Florida, and off the coasts of California and Hawaii.
For 50 years the shameful details of the government’s radiation experiments were kept secret from the public. In The Plutonium Files, Eileen Welsome notes the ethical horror that resulted from the melding of military and medical agendas during the Cold War. She credits the atomic bomb project’s public relations machine for downplaying the fallout controversy, the illnesses of the atomic veterans, and the diseases of the downwinders. The government propagandists simply placed the blame on sudden wind shifts, misinformed scientists, the overactive imagination of aging soldiers, and even Communist propagandists.
Welsome concludes: “The web of deception and denial looks in retrospect like a vast conspiracy, but in actuality it was simply a reflection of the shared attitudes and beliefs of the scientists and the bureaucrats who were inducted into the weapons program at a time of national urgency and never abandoned their belief that nuclear war was imminent.” She worries if what we have learned from the thousands of radiation experiment documents made public over the last several years will be remembered. Like the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes against humanity, the radiation experiments should never be forgotten.
In reviewing Welsome’s book for the Los Angeles Times (2 January, 2000), Thomas Powers asks: “If the government lied about the danger of nuclear testing, can we trust them to tell us the truth about acid rain, global warming or the safety of deep storage for nuclear waste?”
Does Secret Medical
Experimentation Continue?To this day there are no adequate safeguards to protect people from secret government experimentation. Since the mid-1970s we have witnessed the spectacular rise of genetic engineering and molecular biology, as well as the concomitant outbreak of new and mysterious diseases like AIDS, chronic fatigue syndrome, the peculiar “Four Corners” lung disease discovered on Navajo land, and the appearance of unprecedented “emerging” viruses never before seen on the planet.
Investigators linking the possible origin of these diseases to the dangerous engineering of new microbes are often dismissed as paranoids and crackpots. The mysterious Persian Gulf War syndrome is yet another recent illness clouded in military and biologic secrecy, with the origin and cause still debated and the medical records of sick veterans often “lost” or otherwise unavailable. Not surprisingly, the same government institutions that funded the radiation experiments now largely control the research, the funding, and the cover stories pertaining to all these new diseases and viruses.
What is clear from studying the Committee’s Final Report is that the medical and scientific professions collaborated with the government and the military to abuse and harm US citizens. In the process, the nuclear establishment literally got away with murder. And there is simply no end to the secrets that still emerge from the Cold War years that began 58 years ago with the Manhattan Project.
In January 2000, the government presented the results of a statistical study showing that atomic workers employed in the nuclear weapons industry during the Cold War were more likely to suffer a higher rate of cancer, due to their exposure to cancer-causing radiation and chemicals.
From the 1940s up to the present time, government lawyers and scientists have repeatedly rejected the claims of workers who became sick as result of nuclear radiation and exposure to deadly uranium, plutonium, and fluorine. As many as 600,000 workers in 14 nuclear weapons plants are now affected by the government’s final admission of wrongdoing in exposing these people to cancer and other chronic illnesses.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, “workers told of spending years trying to get compensation payments from the state, of having to hire attorneys to get disability pay, of going to clinics that forced them to sign away rights to a portion of any future disability payment before they could be treated.”
Kay Sutherland, a worker at the Hanford plutonium plant in central Washington State, told a hearing that “the people in this area have been forced into poverty because they’ve had to retire in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, too young to get a retirement, and too young to get Social Security. They fall through the cracks and they die.” Sutherland has lost four of her five family members to disease, and has an enlarged liver and multiple tumours. She considers herself “a Holocaust survivor for the American Cold War.”
How can we stop these nuclear and biological horrors, which have condemned thousands of innocent people to disease and death? Why must decades of government-sanctioned medical abuse be kept secret and covered-up by scientists and physicians who claim to be concerned about the health of the public?
One way to prevent abuse might be to bring the physician-scientist perpetrators of these experiments to justice in a court of law. However, unless the public is aroused, this is unlikely to happen.
Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Geoffrey Sea notes: “A startling fact about the experiments is that, despite the documentation of hundreds of cases of unethical conduct resulting in lasting damage to thousands of people, not a single physician or nurse, scientist or technician, policy maker or administrator has yet come forward to admit wrongdoing.”
For over twenty years the law allowed the US Department of Defense (DoD) to use Americans as “guinea pigs.” This law (the US code annotated Title 50, Chapter 32, Section 1520, dated 30 July, 1977) remained on the books until it was repealed under public pressure in 1998. The new and revised bill prohibits the DoD from conducting tests and experiments on humans, but allows “exceptions.” One of the exceptions is that a test or experiment can be carried out for “any peaceful purpose that is related to a medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial, or research activity.” Thus, the 1998 law has obvious loopholes which allow secret testing to continue. For details on the restrictions (and exceptions) for human testing for chemical and biological agents, consult the Gulf War Vets website at http//www.gulfwarvets.com/1520a.htm .
Unethical and dangerous experimentation undoubtedly continues in secret up to the present time, ostensibly under the guise of “national security.” Thus, it would seem prudent for patients to think twice before signing-up for government-sponsored medical studies, particularly at leading medical institutions. Enlightened patients might also view doctors (and scientists) with a healthy dose of skepticism, and a touch of paranoia.
As weird as all this sounds, it could save your life!
References:
Cantwell AR Jr: Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot. Aries Rising Press. Los Angeles, 1993.
Declassified: Human Experimentation (Video, 1999). A&E Television. Distributed by New Video, 126 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011.
Faden RR, Lederer SE, Moreno JD: “U.S. medical researchers, the Nuremberg Doctors Trial, and the Nuremberg Code: A review of findings of the Advisory Committee on human radiation experiments.” JAMA 276:1667-1671, 1996.
Faden R; “The Advisory Committee on human radiation experiments: Reflections on a presidential committee.” Hastings Center Report 26 (no.5): 5-10, 1996
Gallagher C: American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War. The Free Press, New York, 1993.
Harris R and Paxman J: A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Hill and Wang, New York, 1982.
Katz J: The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code. Oxford University Press, New York, 1993.
Katz J: “The Nuremberg Code and the Nuremberg trial.” JAMA 276: 1663-1666, 1996.
Murphy K: “Government finally hears a nuclear town’s horrors.” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2000.
Sea G: “The radiation story no one would touch.” Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994.
The Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments. Oxford University Press, New York, 1996.
Udall SL: The Myths of August: A Personal Exploration of Our
Tragic Cold War Affair with the Atom. Pantheon Books, New York, 1994.
Watts ML: “U.S. acknowledges radiation caused cancers in workers.” New York Times, January 29, 2000.
Welsome E: The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War. The Dial Press, New York, 1999.
___________________________________________________________
Dr. Alan Cantwell is a physician and AIDS and cancer researcher. He is the author of Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot, and The Cancer Microbe, both published by Aries Rising Press, PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029, USA. Email: alanrcan@aol.com
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From The Sunday Herald (Scotland), July 8, 2001: http://www.sundayherald.com/16870 Revealed: nuclear plant accident after fuel rods collapse By Rob Edwards Environment Editor A SERIOUS accident at a nuclear power station in southern Scotland last week sent 24 fiercely radioactive fuel rods crashing to the floor -- narrowly avoiding the death of workers at the plant and the release of a radioactive cloud which would have contaminated the entire region. Managers of the Chapelcross nuclear reactors near Annan in Dumfries and Galloway are now anxiously trying to work out how to retrieve the fuel rods, which are still lying where they fell in the early hours of Thursday morning. All normal fuelling operations have been suspended at Chapelcross and at its sister station, Calder Hall, at Sellafield in Cumbria. The nuclear plant is run by state-owned, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), and is Scotland's oldest nuclear power station. Home to four 50-megawatt reactors and a secretive military plant which produces radioactive tritium for Trident warheads, it has been generating electricity -- and sometimes plutonium for atomic bombs -- since 1959. Nuclear engineers and regulators had initially feared that the fuel was damaged and would leak radioactivity into the air. However, it is now thought this has not happened. The worst scenario would have been that the fuel caught fire endangering the lives of the plant's workers. 'This was a cock-up that was potentially very serious indeed because of the risk of a fire,' said the leading independent nuclear engineer, John Large. 'It put the employees at risk and there could have been a local dispersion of radioactivity.' News of the accident, which has not been publicised and is likely to lead to legal action, alarmed politicians and environmentalists . They called for a crackdown by regulators, and argued that it highlighted the dangerous folly of the government's plan to build a new generation of nuclear reactors. 'I get worried,' said Fiona McLeod, the Scottish National Party's shadow deputy environment minister. 'Are they cutting corners? Is there now cause for concern about the safety of Chapelcross?' At about 1.15am on Thursday, engineers were routinely removing irradiated uranium fuel rods by remote control from reactor three, which has been shut down since April 24. They were trying to attach a cylinder containing 24 rods to a crane so that it could be lowered down a shaft into a flask and taken to a cooling pond for storage, when something went badly wrong. The cylinder suddenly came loose and fell two-and-a-half feet onto the shaft door, which was closed. The site's emergency incident plan was put into operation, its manager, Bob Clayton, woken from his bed, and a team of expert engineers assembled. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), the government's safety watchdog, was informed at 3.30am. Carbon dioxide was pumped over the fallen fuel to make sure that it didn't overheat or catch fire. The area around the fuel was monitored for radiation, as were outlets from the site, and the situation was kept under close review for the next few hours. 'It was very embarrassing for BNFL, pretty annoying to the NII, but not immediately life-threatening,' concluded one insider. Another pointed out that the accident could have been much worse if the shaft door had been open, because the fuel would have fallen a lot further. Large, who is currently advising the Russian government on the safety of retrieving the Kursk nuclear submarine from the Barents sea, pointed out that it was vital to remove the fallen fuel rods from the shaft door. They were blocking the only route by which fuel could be removed from the reactor, which could become urgent if problems developed, he explained. 'The story is certainly not over yet.' Two months ago Chapelcross suffered another problem during defuelling when a grab-release mechanism failed. In 1999 there were four pollution incidents at the plant, one of which resulted in the contamination of a local burn. In May 1967 radioactivity was released into the environment when fuel caught fire in a reactor and suffered a partial meltdown. Friends of the Earth Scotland claimed that last week's accident illustrated how dangerous the nuclear industry really is . 'This is the latest in a series of recent mishaps at Chapelcross and it is time the regulators cracked down, as they have done at Dounreay and Sellafield,' said the environmental group's chief executive, Kevin Dunion. 'This kind of potential disaster highlights the folly of even considering building a new generation of nuclear power stations. The people of south west Scotland must make it clear they want no further part in this risky business.' BNFL has said that it expects Chapelcross to be shut down before 2010, suggesting privately that a replacement nuclear station could be built there. Two weeks ago the UK government began a review of energy policy under the energy minister Brian Wilson, which is expected to result in a programme of new nuclear power stations. Yesterday BNFL stressed that the dropped fuel had not been damaged and that no radioactivity had leaked, an analysis that was supported by the NII and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. BNFL and the NII have now both launched investigations into the cause of the accident, but have not yet come to any conclusions. All refuelling operations at Chapelcross and Calder Hall had been suspended in the meantime as a precaution, a spokesman for BNFL told the Sunday Herald. 'It is quite a technical challenge to recover the situation,' he said, though he was confident that BNFL would manage it. The company, which is still hoping to be privatised despite a safety scandal at its Sellafield nuclear complex last year, will now have to figure out a way of remotely lifting up the cylinder full of 24 intensely radioactive fuel rods -- and then satisfy the NII that the plan is safe. According to John Large, this is likely to take at least two months. ___________________________ (c) 2001, The Sunday Herald http://www.sundayherald.com
"Cherry Blossoms hanging on the Cherry Tree... ... then FLASH blinding FLASH and there's nothing left to see."
The photographs of Yosuke Yamahata (referred to below) were published by Pomegranate Press in 1995 in a book titled "Nagasaki Journey" -- cg ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- From: "Mark Vallen" <mjvallen@earthlink.net > Date sent: Thu, 9 Aug 2001 10:58:51 -0700 Subject: [Actionla] Nagasaki August 9th, 1945 Fifty six years ago... August 9th, 1945... at 11:02 in the morning, the city of Nagasaki was obliterated by an Atomic Bomb. In memory of those who perished in the Nuclear Holocaust... 4 Photographs from ground zero Nagasaki have been posted on various Independent Media sites across the world by ART FOR A CHANGE (AFC). Those four Photos.... NAGASAKI - Carbonized Child NAGASAKI - No Doves Fly Here NAGASAKI - Human Shadow NAGASAKI - Dead City .... can be seen on the Los Angeles Independent Media site, at; http://la.indymedia.org/ Three of the Photos were taken by Yamahata Yosuke, the first Photographer to enter Nagasaki after the Atomic Bombing of August 9th. Entering the city the day after it had been devastated, the 28 year old Yamahata wandered amongst the ruins of the radioactive wasteland documenting the effects of the bomb. He took more than 100 photographs.... the most extensive documentation from either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Mr. Yamahata became violently ill in August of 1965 on the 20th Anniversary of the Bombing. He died a year later of Cancer at the age of 48. ART FOR A CHANGE now has a permanent online exhibition of 12 Paintings by Atomic Bomb Survivors (hibakusha) located at the following URL; http://www.art-for-a-change.com/Atomic/atomic.htm "Cherry Blossoms hanging on the Cherry Tree... ... then FLASH blinding FLASH and there's nothing left to see." Mark Vallen www.art-for-a-change.com
Forgotten History - Wednesday, October 24, 2001
"Little known facts and overlooked history" Want to become a Forgotten History subscriber for FREE? Visit: http://www.shagmail.com/sub/history.html
Against the backdrop of the Cold War, one of the strangest spectacles of the period were the Nevada tests of 1955. Here an almost surreal scenario developed when the national media went to Las Vegas to watch and prepare for a dress rehearsal for Armageddon. Over 500 newspaper, television and radio reporters were on hand to report on the soap opera that they were about to see. "The world's most expensive premiere will be unfolded out on the Nevada desert, and nothing that Hollywood ever produced will be able to equal it," said one reporter.
A mock town using mannequins was constructed to see what would happen to an American community if a nuclear bomb struck it. That was the official view. The unofficial view was that this was a great propaganda stunt for the nuclear industry. For some people it was a must see. Hotels did great business as people flocked to Vegas to see the spec- tacle. One hotel went so far as to change its name to the Atomic-View motel because the guests could get a good view of the explosion.
The buildup of the event dominated the news for over a week. All of the heavies of journalism were there to report on what was happening. The blast itself was anti-climatic and the FCDA estimated that in the case of a real attack over 8 mil- lion Americans would die. The Soviets, spurred on by the development of the H-bomb, poured enormous resources into their own bomb. The military used the soldiers as guinea pigs as they marched into ground zero without being told of the health risks.
The damage done to the survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have served as ample warning, but one of the amazing features of these tests was the lack of reporting on the health risks. Nobody in the media, amidst countless articles about the bomb, wrote of the health risks involved.
They were more interested in speaking to official experts about the tests than to consider what it might do to the men. Years later, when the atomic veterans came down with cancer and various other ailments, the VA denied the Vets benefits, the media was no where to be found and the experts said nothing.
The callous disregard for the men was unforgivable. Nobody ever tried to find out what were the results of this for the veterans. This was typical of the military that, after sending people to war as in Vietnam and the Gulf War, they often forgot about them when they get back. Or, worse yet, they deny any responsibility for their illness.
The politicians did their part to close the debate on what health risks were being asked of the servicemen. When two Colorado professors charged that the dust resulting from these blasts could become dangerous, the former governor of Colorado said, "They should be arrested." So all of our major institutions failed these men, the press, the politicians and the military and that remains the lesson of these tests. Question authority.
Sources: GI Guinea Pigs, Michael Uhl and Tod Ensign.
http://www.counterpunch.org/jayaprakash1.html
October 25, 2001
By N.D. Jayaprakash
The terrorist assault on various targets in the United States of America on 11th September 2001 is an extremely cowardly act that deserves to be condemned in no uncertain terms. The tragic loss of life resulting from the dastardly act is a reminder of the fact that it is invariably innocent people who get slaughtered in the vicious games which contending political interests in the world keep playing. The premeditated attack was apparently in retaliation for the repressive and wayward policies pursued by the U.S. Administration across the globe, which have had adverse impact on a sizeable section of humanity. In the recent past it is mostly people in West Asia who have had to bear the brunt of such policies. However, under no circumstances can there be any justification for the wreaking the wrath generated against the U.S. Administration on ordinary citizens of the United States, who do not play any direct role in the formulation of the policies in question.
The death toll in the gruesome tragedy is estimated to be over 6500. Thousands of people, not only in the United States but also from a number of other countries including India, have suddenly lost their near and dear ones. The pain and agony left by the tragedy was very palpable everywhere. The harrowing trauma that the passengers and crew of the hijacked airplanes underwent before they crashed can be well imagined. The sight of scores of people helplessly looking out from windows on the upper floors of the World Trade Center's burning 110-storey twin towers in New York was an extremely poignant sight to watch. What followed was even more chilling. While some jumped into the air in a desperate bid to escape from the advancing fire, others just got engulfed in it. The fate of those who jumped from that height to the ground several hundred feet below was predictable. The nightmarish experience could not have been any better for those who were trapped in the crumbling twin towers till they were crushed to death by the falling debris. The ghastly images and heart-rending scenes that were flashed on all television channels is a grim reminder of what terrorism has done and what terrorism can do.
Selective Amnesia
Most of the news-broadcasters compared the shocking event to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Some others called it the biggest terrorist attack of all time, an attack that was directed not only against the United States but also against all humanity. They continue to say so. It is, indeed, very unfortunate that not one of them from the major broadcasting media - BBC, CNN, Fox News, etc. - compared the 11th September attack to a very similar event but of far greater magnitude, a horrendous one that was a turning point in the history of the twentieth century. How is that even a passing reference to that unforgettable and earth-shaking event has not been made by any one in the media or by any of the spokespersons of the major governments?
Even in this hour of grief there can be no justification for resorting to selective amnesia. How could those manning responsible posts today not remember the dawning of the age of nuclear madness! Perhaps nobody wants to draw attention to the fact that it was the U.S. Administration, which was guilty of committing the biggest and most gruesome terrorist attack ever. By their decision to use atomic bombs, the U.S. leadership had wiped out more than two-thirds of the population of two Japanese cities. In that cold-blooded and unprovoked terrorist attack on the Japanese civilian population, the death toll was seventy times more than the lives lost in the U.S. on 11th September and the area of destruction was far greater. One terrorist attack certainly cannot justify another. However, the concerted attempt to conceal the U.S. Administration's unsavoury legacy is very glaring.
Cause for Celebration?
All reports show that, after the terrorist attack of 11th September, a pall of gloom has descended over the United States and across much of the world. But the major media networks also flashed the shocking news that in certain Palestinian camps in Lebanon and elsewhere the terrible event was a cause for much celebration. (The same news channels later clarified that the celebration was confined to a few isolated pockets only.) If these news reports are true, it is a matter of great shame that some people did celebrate the misfortune that had befallen others. How could people be so heartless and insensitive in this age?
As a matter of fact, there was much celebration too on the streets of New York - yes, in Manhattan - and elsewhere in the United States and especially on a ship sailing back from Europe to the United States bringing back the U.S. President from Potsdam, Germany. The date was 6th August 1945. The cause for celebration was the utterly senseless atomic bombing of Hiroshima by the United States. The then U.S. President, Harry S. Truman, who was leading the celebrations without an iota of guilt, had just announced to the world the successful strike on Hiroshima by the U.S. airforce. The U.S. President had been informed over the wireless that the atomic bomb had achieved the desired results. The Japanese' city of Hiroshima, which had been deliberately left untouched by "conventional" bombing, had been obliterated by a single atomic bomb. (When the truth began to sink in, those concerned U.S. citizens who were better informed quickly distanced themselves from the celebrations and started expressing their outrage at the senseless act. Later reports showed that over 200,000 of Hiroshima's population of 350,000 had been wiped out.)
Soon after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, information that trickled in from official briefings and from accounts sent by war correspondents about the death and destruction that was unleashed there were horrifying enough to prick the conscience of concerned people across the globe. Strong reactions of revulsion against the atomic bombings were evident even in the United States and Britain. One of the publications dealing with these developments and one that was brought out later shows that:
"All over the country [the United States], people wrote letters to the editors of their newspapers, protesting the killing of non-combatant civilians in Japan, calling it inhuman, and protesting our disregard for moral values. In Britain, too, where the news of the atom bomb topped all other news, the letter columns were full of such expressions such as 'In the name of humanity, let us stop and ask ourselves where we are marching'." [The Atomic Age Opens, ed. by Donald Potter Geddes, The World Publishing Company, New York, 1945, p.41]
Cold Blooded Act
The entire gruesome event in Hiroshima was carefully filmed and the physical effects of the attack accurately measured from airplanes accompanying the bomber that had dropped the atom bomb. The blinding flash, the reverberating blast, the mushroom cloud, the flattening of almost all standing structures (according to later estimates over 92 per cent of the 76,000 buildings that lay within four kilometers of ground zero had been destroyed), and the entire city being engulfed in a devastating fire in a short time must have all been a terrific sight to watch from the airplanes. However, it is not clear whether the audio system with the film crew on the accompanying aircraft was powerful enough to pick up the agonizing cries of those trapped in the falling debris and about to be devoured by the advancing fire. Also the rising smoke from the raging fire must have hid from view the thousands of screaming men, women and children - many with deep burns sustained from direct exposure to the scorching flash - jumping into the various rivers running through the city in order to escape from the searing heat. Few of them may have managed to get back on to the banks for most of them surely met a watery death. But for the smoke the happenings on the riverside would have been yet another spectacle to watch! Of course, effects of ionizing radiation were not yet apparent but the smell of burning human flesh was certainly in the air. Unfortunately, television and cable networks were not in vogue at that time; otherwise the entire world could have watched the "spectacular" event live! Terrorism had never tasted such success before or after! With the U.S. President in the lead, the destruction of Hiroshima and its people was a great occasion to celebrate with gay abandon! The "civilized" conduct of the U.S. President must have put even the worst barbarians to shame!
No, that was not the end. Three days later on 9th August 1945, an identical exercise - film crew et al included - was re-enacted over the city of Nagasaki. This time a more powerful atomic bomb was used. But, thanks to the hilly terrain, the fate of only 140,000 of the city's total population of 270,000 was sealed. Meanwhile the city of Kyoto with a population of over 1,000,000 had a providential escape. Kyoto had been replaced with the ill-fated Nagasaki at the last minute after the intervention of the then U.S. Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. (It is not clear why Stimson did not prevent the attack altogether.) Despite strong opposition from Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, Chief of the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project, Stimson was able to strike Kyoto off from the list of atomic targets and, thus, succeeded in miraculously saving no less than 800,000 Japanese lives. However, Gen. Groves, who was clearly disappointed, later wrote in his memoirs thus: "I particularly wanted Kyoto as a target because, as I have said, it was large enough an area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atom bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect." [Leslie Groves: Now It Can Be Told (Story of the Manhattan Project), Andre Deutsch, London, 1963, p.275]
Mark his words: "large enough an area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atom bomb". In other words, the United States had used atomic bombs on Japan to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atom bomb! Slaughtering 200,000 human beings at one go in Hiroshima was not satisfactory enough! Kyoto with its population of over 1,000,000 could have provided far better results! This is the assessment of none other than the very person who was heading the U.S. atomic bomb project then. Such crass views are definitely indicative of the "civilized" nature of the U.S. establishment.
Height of Inhumanity
What most people do not know is that the after effects of the atomic bombings are taking its toll to this day. In general, in the early stages most A-bomb casualties were due to the combined effects of burn, blast and radiation injuries. In later stages, deaths and diseases arose solely due to the delayed effects of nuclear radiation - a property which is unique to nuclear weapons. A large number of the 300,000 A-bomb survivors were exposed to ionizing radiation. So separate A-bomb hospitals were built in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to treat them. These hospitals, which have been providing treatment and monitoring the effects of radiation, have never been short of patients. The truth is, since the atomic bombings, debilitating diseases resulting from exposure to nuclear radiation have continued to kill hundreds of A-bomb victims each year. The perpetrators of the crime were well aware of the effects of radiation on living beings. Therefore, they wanted to target not only inanimate objects in the targeted areas but animate objects as well. But there was one problem.
The normal practice as far as 'conventional' bombing was concerned was to take certain precautions to minimize loss of life. This was done by dropping leaflets in advance announcing which cities and towns were to be bombed on certain nights urging the inhabitants to evacuate the target areas so as to give every chance to the civilian population to save themselves. Records show that the U.S. airforce followed this normal practice even during the period between 17th June to 5th August 1945 while carrying out its last major bombing raids over 58 Japanese cities with 'conventional' bombs. Strangely enough, the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not given any such warnings before they were attacked with atom bombs. In fact, Dr. Arthur Compton, the then Director of the Metallurgical Project (a unit of the Manhattan Project) later confessed that: "Hiroshima had not been given any specific warning. The people were caught unprepared. Men and women were accordingly in the streets, going about their normal business." [Arthur Compton: Atomic Quest, Oxford University Press, London, 1956, pp254-255]
While the population of towns subjected to 'conventional' bombing were given advance warning to evacuate, why was it that no such warning was given to the population of the two cities subjected to atomic bombings? Does it not prove that it was not only to maximize the loss of life but also to expose the maximum number of people to ionizing radiation that the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were denied a chance to evacuate the cities prior to the atomic bombings? Is it not the height of inhumanity to have had such utter contempt for human lives? Another morbid factor is that in order to measure the destructive power of the atomic bombs with accuracy, the five cities selected as potential A-bomb targets were left completely untouched by 'conventional' bombing for eight long months. During that period they were spared the disastrous fate that befell 66 other Japanese cities, which were blasted and burned with 'conventional' bombs including incendiary ones. However, the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ultimately turned out to be far worse! Therefore, would it not be fair enough to conclude that the magnitude of the latest horrendous crime, for which the "barbarian" Bin Laden is the prime suspect, seemingly pales into insignificance as compared to the campaign of calculated terror that the "civilized" U.S. leadership indulged in 56 years ago? Despite protests the "civilized" terror campaigns of the U.S. have continued unabated to this day on a different scale.
Bitter Taste
The objective of the above argument is only to drive home the point that one terrorist attack on the people of the United States should not erase the memory of the countless acts of state terrorism perpetrated by successive U.S. Administrations over the years. The victims of U.S. state terrorism have also undergone or are still undergoing the same pain, trauma and agony that the victims of the 11th September terrorist attack are now experiencing. In a very unfortunate way, the people of the United States for the first time have had a bitter taste of what their own Government has been doing to people across the world for years in different forms. The atomic bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massive and indiscriminate bombing of Vietnam (including use of thousands of tons of incendiary napalm bombs), the innumerable My Lai* type massacres, the use of chemical weapons such as the highly toxic defoliant Agent Orange** over Vietnam, the massive and indiscriminate bombing of Iraq and Yugoslavia, etc., are just a few examples of acts of U.S. state terrorism that people of other nations have had to endure.
[* On 16 March 1968, 80 soldiers of Charlie Company, First Battalion, 11th Light Infantry Brigade of the U.S. Army, under the command of Lt. William Calley, went on a 'search and destroy' mission to the village of My Lai in the South Vietnamese district of Son My. In the process over 300 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, were massacred. Ronald Heaberle who had accompanied the soldiers photographed the entire killings, which were published much later in the U.S. magazine Life on 5th December 1969. This was one instance where there was irrefutable proof and when several Vietnam War veterans in the U.S. came forward to testify about the perpetration of that mindless terrorist act.
** 11 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over South Vietnam between 1961 and 1970 covering 10 % of the country' land area and exposing millions of Vietnamese to its toxic effects. It has reportedly killed or seriously injured over 400,000 people and has already contributed to birth defects in over 500,000 children. The international reaction to the human tragedy resulting from this U.S. chemical warfare has been appalling. For details see the article by Robert Dreyfuss titled 'Apocalypse Still' in the U.S. magazine Mother Jones, January 2000.]
What rational explanation can the U.S. terrorists offer for targeting Iraqi civilian population with precision-guided and earth-penetrating cruise missiles while they were taking refuge in air-raid shelters to escape U.S. aerial bombings? Is not the U.S. Administration squarely responsible for the death of over 500,000 children in Iraq due to the untold suffering that the Iraqi people are forced to undergo as a result of the strict economic sanctions imposed on that country? Is not the U.S. Administration aiding and abetting the Zionists in systematically carrying out terrorist attacks on the people of Palestine in order to deprive them of their homeland? Is it not the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency of the United States) along with the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan) that encouraged, armed and funded "Islamic" terrorists in the 1980s to overthrow the then government in Afghanistan? Are they not the same terrorists who have been wreaking havoc in Kashmir with the same arms and funds? (Interestingly, while the Government of India repeatedly blames the ISI for aiding and abetting terrorism in Kashmir, it maintains total silence about the treacherous role of the CIA. Similarly, the Government of Pakistan blames RAW [Research and Analysis Wing of India] for the numerous acts of terrorism in Pakistan, while the CIA's devious role there is kept under wraps.) It should not be forgotten that the pain and suffering inflicted on the people of the other affected countries by acts of terrorism are also as real as that which is being experienced by people in the United States now. Therefore, retribution cannot be a one-way process. All acts of terrorism should be condemned and all those responsible for terrorist acts should be brought to book and punished irrespective of creed or nationality.
Untenable Justification
As to who planned the attack on 11th September it is still not very clearly evident, but the "barbarian" Osama Bin Laden continues to be the prime suspect. However, there is no doubt that it was the "civilized" U.S. President and his ilk that had ordered the wanton destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strange as it may seem, while there is world-wide hunt for the perpetrators of the heinous crime in New York, Washington-DC and Pittsburgh, neither President Truman nor anyone else in the U.S. Administration ever had to face any such threat for their dastardly act. They managed to get away scot-free on the spacious plea that the use of atomic bombs were necessary in order to end World War II and, as President Truman put it, "save American lives". The fact is there was not a grain of truth in the justification that the U.S. President had offered. (For details see N.D. Jayaprakash, The Meaning of Hiroshima Nagasaki, Delhi Science Forum and Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad, New Delhi, 1990.) But how many people across the world know the real facts even today? Do they know that several contemporary U.S. and British statesmen totally disagreed with President Truman's lame justification?
Fleet Admiral W.D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman successively and the top ranking officer in the entire military hierarchy then, was quite blunt in his criticism. According to him:
"The use of this barbaric 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 sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons."
He went on to add:
"My own feeling is that in being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
[W.D. Leahy: I Was There: The Personal History of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, Victor Gollencz Ltd., London, 1950, p.429 and p.514]
Interestingly, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain during the major part of World War II and a willing accomplice to the crime, has nevertheless made a frank admission. In his voluminous work on the history of the War, he has stated:
"It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bombs. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell and was brought about by overwhelming maritime power." [Winston S. Churchill: The Second World War, Vol. VI: Triumph and Tragedy, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1953, p.646]
What is intriguing is the fact that Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in South West Pacific Area during World War II, was not even consulted about the decision to use atom bombs although the selected targets fell within the area of his command! Gen. MacArthur was no pacifist. He was an arch right-winger. Yet he admitted during a press conference years later that: "We did not need the atomic Bombagainst Japan." [New York Times, 21 August 1963, p.30]
Gen. MacArthur subsequently went on to add that by June 1945: "My staff was unanimous in believing Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender. I even directed that plans be drawn 'for a peaceful occupation of Japan' without further military operations." [Douglas MacArthur: Reminiscences, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1964, p.260]
Another critical voice was that of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the U.S. forces in Europe during World War II and later President of the United States from 1953 to 1960. Recounting his reactions, Gen. Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs that at the Potsdam Conference of Heads of Governments of USA, UK and USSR in July 1945:
"I voiced to him [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the [atom] bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of such a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that movement, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'." [Dwight D. Eisenhower: Mandate for Change: 1953-1956, Doubleday & Company Inc., New York, 1963, pp. 312-313]
Disinformation Campaign
In order to quell the rising criticism against the atomic bombing and to hide the real facts from becoming public, the U.S. Administration carried out a massive disinformation campaign widely and repeatedly disseminating the untenable justification that President Truman had offered. (The brazen defense of the atomic bombing has continued without any let up.) At the same time the U.S. Administration kept doing everything in its power to suppress the real facts relating to the effects of the atomic bombing. The misinformation campaign is conducted in a very systematic way. After the surrender of Japan, U.S. armed forces occupied Japan on 2nd September 1945. Once the U.S. occupation got underway, they began to propagate that 'the atom bomb was dropped in order to end the Pacific War'. Accordingly, the idea that the atom bomb damages were 'a sacrifice that Japan simply had to accept' was spread and began to gain currency even among the Japanese. Simultaneously, the U.S. authorities stuck to the policy of strict secrecy on all aspects concerning the atom bomb. They went to the extent of issuing a press code in Japan on 19th September 1945 in order to suppress and play down the full story of the atom bomb damages.
The press code imposed prior censorship on all radio broadcast and on newspapers and other print media. Therefore, except for a brief period before the press code was imposed, all accounts of atom bomb damages disappeared from newspapers, magazines and academic journals. In the process the Japanese people themselves remained largely ignorant of the extent of the atom bomb damages and about the condition of the 300,000 atomic bomb survivors--the hibakusha. This lack of awareness also prevented adequate voluntary help being extended to the hibukusha even within Japan. It appears that it was only in 1952, after Japan regained its independence, that a few photographs of the atomic bombings were published for the first time in Japan! If people within Japan were so ill-informed about the happenings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of strict censorship imposed by the U.S. occupation forces, how could people elsewhere, especially in the vast areas then under U.S. and British influence, be better informed? (Moreover, the untold atrocities [such as the blood-curdling Nanking massacre of 1937] committed by the Japanese Imperial Army on people in China, Korea, and the Philippines and elsewhere in South East Asia would have initially made people indifferent to the happenings on the Japanese mainland.)
Earlier in November 1945, the U.S. occupation authorities went to the extent of confiscating a documentary entitled "The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" that was produced by the Japanese Film Corporation during September-October 1945. They also prohibited further documentary filming by the Japanese. It was only after strong public pressure that in 1968 the U.S. Administration returned a 16-mm print of this documentary to Japan. However, because of restrictions imposed by the Japanese Government, no one in Japan, save a few medical personnel, has ever viewed the film in its entirety. The Japanese Government's attitude in this regard, to say the least, is rather perplexing. Is it not absolutely intriguing that the government of a country, which has been a victim of atomic bombing, should try to hide the bitter truth about the deadly effects of the atomic bombing from its own citizens and from people elsewhere? In fact since 1952, successive Japanese governments have been colluding with successive U.S. administrations to do precisely that.
It has been the practice of the Japanese Government, which is intent on downplaying the effects of the atomic bombings, to send its representatives regularly to the Yasukuni Shrine, which venerates all of Japan's war dead including convicted war criminals. The shrine has attracted a lot of attention because it houses the remains of wartime Prime Minister General Hedeki Tojo and six others who were executed after being convicted as World War II criminals. The present Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, visited the Shrine on 13th August 2001 to pay obeisance to their memory. The irony is that the same war criminals were tried and executed by the War Crimes Tribunal set up by the United States for crimes committed before and during World War II, including crimes committed against the U.S. prisoners of war. But successive U.S. administrations have not raised a murmur of protest against the Japanese governments' gesture of paying obeisance to the very Japanese war criminals prosecuted by the U.S.! The truth of the matter is that the same right-wing forces, which led Japan into its imperialistic adventure, are still very much in control of the Japanese government. On their part, the U.S. authorities had actually prosecuted very few of the war criminals; most of them - especially the big industrialists who had backed the bloody Japanese Imperialist adventure to the hilt - were clandestinely rehabilitated. The most shocking incident is the case concerning Unit 731, a Japanese army unit, which was engaged in research on germ warfare during 1930-45 using human beings, including U.S. prisoners of war, as guinea pigs. According to a report in a prominent U.S. magazine, during the occupation:
"U.S. officials granted the Japanese unit members immunity from prosecution as war criminals in exchange for their laboratory records on germ warfare." [Newsweek, 19 April 1982, p.21]
So much for the concern and eagerness being shown by the U.S. Administration to render retributive justice for violation of human rights!
The Japanese Government while reacting to the macabre events of 11th September has completely desisted from making even a passing reference to the hideous way in which the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were subjected to a terrorist attack by the U.S. Administration. In fact the Japanese Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi, has maintained a studied silence on the matter. Reports show that even during his visit to the United States on 24th September 2001 no mention of the atomic bombings were ever made. Under the circumstances, Prime Minister Koizumi's silence on this vital issue itself speaks volumes.
Drawing the Correct Lessons
Had the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki received better global coverage--even if it was only on a fraction of the scale that the coverage of the horrors in New York, Washington-DC and Pittsburgh are receiving today--perhaps the resulting revulsion against nuclear weapons may have made the world a far safer place to live! Although there may have been some relaxation in the news censorship after the U.S. granted independence to Japan in 1952, the entire truth about the effects of the atomic bombings have never been made public to date. On the other hand, the misleading official justification for the atomic attack has been repeatedly spread far and wide.
The imposition of censorship by the U.S. Administration, particularly during the period of occupation, on all news relating to the effects of the atomic bombings was undoubtedly a calculated ploy on its part to give as little exposure as possible to the gruesome acts of terror in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was also a devious attempt on its part to conceal from the world's public the consequences of unleashing nuclear war in future. It is primarily due to the unrelenting struggle of the survivors of the atomic bombing and the groups and organisations supporting them that the facts about the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki started slowly getting disseminated. It is that sustained effort that is influencing concerned people across the world to join the global movement for elimination of nuclear weapons.
The wanton destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also the first salvo of the U.S. Administration in the unfolding Cold War with the Soviet Union. Aiding and abetting all kinds of rogue elements across the globe to serve its ends was an integral part of that anti-Communist agenda. The self-appointed defenders of 'democracy, freedom and liberty' had no compunctions in funding and arming self-seeking disparate groups--which defended anything but democracy, freedom and liberty--to act as its bulwarks to suppress anti-fascist and anti-colonial national liberation movements that became widespread at the end of the Second World War. The U.S. Administration gave no thought to the recoiling (or what is now termed as "blow-back") effect of that questionable strategy which served its short-term goal. At worst, in the long run, such carefully nurtured Frankenstein forces was expected to serve as permanent "enemies" or "whipping boys" for the burgeoning military-industrial complex. Although the probability of such forces striking at the U.S. mainland was not altogether discounted, the chances of such a strike ever taking place was thought to be beyond the realm of possibility. The people in the United States and elsewhere who have supported such a bizarre strategy are now forced to learn the hard way. It is hoped that they draw the correct lessons.
The several trillions of dollars misspent in the last fifty years on the vast global "defense" network to fight its "enemies" could not protect the U.S. from a simple strategy devised by a thoughtless suicide squad. If, instead of creating and fighting "enemies", the U.S. Administration had gone about making friends, the history of the world would have been very different. Successive U.S. Administrations have had ample opportunity to spend the vast human and material resources at its disposal in far more useful ways than on militarism. But it never chose to do so.
In this context it would be worthwhile to recall the fervent hope expressed by the former U.S. President General Eisenhower during a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 16th April 1953 soon after he had assumed the presidency. He said:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
He further added:
"This Government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction
"The monuments to this new kind of war would be these: roads and schools, hospitals and homes, food and health
"We are ready, in short, to dedicate our strength to serving the needs, rather than the fears of the world" [Dwight Eisenhower: Mandate for Change, Signet, New York, 1965, pp.189-192]
As to who prevented the hopes expressed by President Eisenhower from being fulfilled is something that the people of the United States will have to deeply ponder over.
Democracy, liberty and freedom have to be defended in deed not with words or swords. Integral to lasting democracy, liberty and freedom is banishment of poverty, ill-health, illiteracy, superstitious beliefs and backwardness on the one hand, and facilitating the creation of institutions that defend those laudable values on the other. Criminals and terrorists in today's world cannot prosper or become a major threat to democracy, liberty and freedom unless one or more States or influential sections within those States directly or indirectly sponsors them. Those who have sowed the poisonous seeds cannot disown responsibility for the bitter fruits. Why the U.S. Administration has always chosen to encourage and support the most retrograde forces in countries where it has chosen to intervene is something that needs to be examined more thoroughly. CP
N.D. Jayaprakash is a member of the Delhi Science Forum, an anti-nuclear weapons group. He lives in New Delhi, India. This is the first part of a two-part essay.
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Faking Nuclear Restraint: The Bush Administration's Secret Plan For Strengthening U.S. Nuclear Forces
WASHINGTON (February 13, 2002) -- After a year in office the Bush administration has completed the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) mandated by Congress in the fall of 2000. The NPR establishes the broad outline of Pentagon planning for U.S. nuclear strategy, force levels and infrastructure for the next 10 years and beyond. It also endorses significant revisions to the nuclear war planning process to enhance its flexibility and responsiveness, which would allow the Pentagon to generate new nuclear attack plans and have them approved quickly in a crisis.
The administration has provided the public with a cursory view of the NPR, but the entire report remains secret. The NPR has received little attention from the news media and even less from analysts. This is unfortunate. The logic and assumptions underlying the administration's hostility to arms control, and its infatuation with nuclear weapons, deserve vigorous public scrutiny and debate. Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan's first term has there been such an emphasis on nuclear weapons in U.S. defense strategy. Behind the administration's rhetorical mask of post Cold War restraint lie expansive plans to revitalize U.S. nuclear forces, and all the elements that support them, within a so-called "New Triad" of capabilities that combine nuclear and conventional offensive strikes with missile defenses and nuclear weapons infrastructure.
NRDC has learned from a variety of sources more about the likely implications of this review for the evolution of the U.S. nuclear posture. Words and phrases in quotation marks are said to be from the NPR or the Department of Defense (DOD) special briefing on the NPR:
Nuclear Weapons Forever?
* The Bush administration assumes that nuclear weapons will be part of U.S. military forces at least for the next 50 years. Starting from this premise it is planning an extensive and expensive series of programs to sustain and modernize the existing force and to begin studies for a new ICBM to be operational in 2020, a new SLBM and SSBN in 2030, and a new heavy bomber in 2040, as well as new warheads for all of them. Nuclear weapons will continue to play a "critical role" because they possess "unique properties" that provide "credible military options" for holding at risk "a wide range of target types" important to a potential adversary's threatened use of "weapons of mass destruction" or "large-scale conventional military force."
* The NPR uses terminology from the September 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, which states the purpose of possessing nuclear weapons is fourfold: to "assure allies and friends," "dissuade competitors," "deter aggressors" and "defeat enemies."
* The Bush administration will not eliminate the relatively inflexible nuclear "counterforce" Major Attack Options that characterized the Cold War nuclear planning process, despite the administration's pronouncements about being in a post-Cold War world. Instead, the administration will scale the attack options to the size required to preempt opposing threats, and supplement them by an "adaptive planning" process that anticipates a range of nuclear contingencies and is flexible enough to respond quickly where and when a crisis occurs.
The Numbers Game
* The United States is "adjusting its immediate nuclear force requirements" for "operationally deployed forces" downward, from 8,000 warheads today to 3,800 in 2007, in recognition of the changed relationship with Russia, but "Russia's nuclear forces and programs remain a concern." Barring unforeseen adverse developments, the NPR's eventual "goal" is to reach the level of 1,700 to 2,200 "operationally deployed weapons" in 2012.
* Over the next 10 years, the Bush administration's plans call for the United States to retain a total stockpile of intact nuclear weapons and weapon components that is roughly seven to nine times larger than the publicly stated goal of 1,700 to 2,200 "operationally deployed weapons." This is an accounting system worthy of Enron. The operationally deployed weapons are only the visible portion of a huge, hidden arsenal. To the "accountable" tally of 2,200 one must add the following:
* about 240 missile warheads on two Trident submarines in overhaul at any given time; * about 1,350 strategic missile and bomber warheads in the "responsive force;" * about 800 "nonstrategic" bombs assigned to US/NATO "dual-capable" aircraft; * about 320 "nonstrategic" sea-launched cruise missile warheads in the "responsive force;" * about 160 "spare" strategic and nonstrategic warheads; * about 4,900 intact warheads in the "inactive reserve" stockpile; equals * about 7,800 intact warheads; plus * about 5,000 stored plutonium "primary" and HEU "secondary" components that could be reassembled into weapons.
In other words, the Bush administration is actually planning to retain the potential to deploy not 1,700 to 2,200 nuclear weapons, but as many as 15,000.
Future Plans
* The administration plans to deactivate the MX/Peacekeeper ICBMs in phases over a three-year period beginning October 1, 2002. It will withdraw them in conjunction with introducing Trident II missiles into the Pacific. In the order of their conversion to Trident IIs, the Pacific fleet SSBNs are the Alaska (SSBN-732), Nevada (SSBN-733), Henry M. Jackson (SSBN-730), and Alabama (SSBN-731). Current plans call for the MX silos to be retained, rather than destroyed as specified in the SALT and START treaties. MX missile stages and nuclear warheads will also be retained.
* The administration plans to cut the number of Trident ballistic missile submarines from 18 to 14 by FY2007 (of which two in overhaul at any given time will not be considered part of the "operationally deployed force"). Four Trident SSBNs (Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Georgia ) will be converted to each carry up to 154 conventional cruise missiles. The submarines also may be used to support Special Operations Forces. There is $1 billion in the FY 2003 budget to begin the conversion. The submarines would remain accountable under the START I Treaty, though they will not carry SLBMs or the 768 warheads attributed to them.
* After these initial modest force reductions, the NPR provides that "no additional strategic delivery platforms are scheduled to be eliminated from strategic service."
* Each of the 500 Minuteman III ICBMs to be retained and modernized under the administration's plan will be equipped with a single reentry vehicle/warhead combination, either the Mk12A/W78 or a Mk21/W87. The Safety-Enhanced Reentry Vehicle (SERV) program permits the MM III to carry the Mk21. NRDC estimates that the 150 Minuteman IIIs at Minot AFB and 150 at Malmstrom AFB would carry the W78, while 150 Minuteman IIIs at F. E. Warren AFB and 50 more at Malmstrom would carry the W-87.
* The Pentagon is considering extending the life of the dual-capable F-16C/D and F-15E or to make some of the new Joint Strike Fighters nuclear capable.
* In the event of an international crisis, "the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture" by returning weapons from what henceforth will be labeled a "responsive" reserve back to the "operationally deployed" force. This "uploading" could be accomplished in a period ranging from days or weeks to months or years, depending on the particular weapon system.
Satellites, Intelligence and C3
* The administration believes that our military satellites are not "optimized" for the "current and developing mobile target challenge." Consequently, the DOD plans to develop extensive new real-time intelligence systems and long-range precision strike weapons to "dissuade a potential adversary from investing heavily in mobile ballistic missiles" or other "threatening capabilities." Planned improvements would provide the capability to rapidly locate and track mobile targets "from the time they deploy from garrison until they return."
* The administration will continue to invest in better intelligence capabilities for "Information Operations targeting, weaponeering, and strike execution," including better data on "adversary computer local area networks" and "other command and control systems."
* The current nuclear command and control system architecture will be expanded "to a true C2 conferencing system" through deployment later in the decade of new secure wideband and survivable Extremely High Frequency satellite communication systems.
Missile Defense
* The administration believes that deploying missile defenses will increase the United States' ability to "counteract WMD-backed coercive threats" by defeating small-scale missile attacks intended to coerce the United States into abandoning an embattled "ally or friend."
* The administration plans to integrate missile defense into the New Triad, which will enhance the United States' ability "to use its power projection forces" by "improving the ability to counterattack an enemy," and may also provide the president with "an option to manage a crisis" involving "one or more" opponents with weapons of mass destruction.
* The administration believes that missile defenses can have a "dissuasive effect" on potential adversaries by making it "more arduous and costly for an adversary to compete militarily with or wage war against the United States."
* The administration is considering an "emergency missile defense capability" for the 2003-2008 time period consisting of a single Airborne Laser for "limited operations" against "ballistic missiles of all ranges," a "rudimentary" Alaska-based midcourse interceptor system against "longer-range threats," and a sea-based Aegis system with "rudimentary midcourse capability" against "short-to-medium range threats."
* Based on the technical progress achieved with these early systems, the United States could deploy "operational capabilities" in the 2006-2008 time frame, including two to three Airborne Laser aircraft, "additional" ground-based midcourse sites, four sea-based midcourse ships, and "terminal" defense systems, such as the PAC-3 (an upgraded version of the Patriot "Scudbuster" missile that missed most of its targets in the 1991 Persian Gulf War) and the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, slated for deployment by 2008.
The Nuclear Complex and Infrastructure
* The administration plans to revitalize U.S. nuclear infrastructure with the capacity to: upgrade existing systems, "surge" production of weapons, and develop and field "entirely new systems." All of this is designed to "discourage" other countries from "competing militarily with the United States."
* The administration believes that the current arsenal -- a subset of what was in place at the end of the Cold War -- is not what is needed for the future. That arsenal was developed and deployed mainly to deter the former Soviet Union and to carry out the "Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP)." In the administration's view, significantly modified and quite possibly new nuclear warheads will be required to accomplish new military missions, and thus the NPR calls for a revitalized nuclear weapon complex that could, if directed, design, develop, manufacture and certify new warheads. The administration believes that the development of this arsenal must begin now because it will take much longer than a decade to complete. This arsenal would have the capability to target and destroy mobile and re-locatable targets and hard and deeply buried targets.
* Plans are underway to expand the capacity and capability of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Pantex nuclear weapons assembly-disassembly plant near Amarillo, Texas, to meet a planned workload of some 600 warheads (assembled or dismantled) per year, up from the current capacity of 350 warheads per year.
* For the "long term," the NPR projects the need for "a new modern production facility" to deal with the "large-scale replacement" of plutonium components and "new production." The NNSA is "accelerating preliminary design work" on a "modern pit manufacturing facility" so that new production capacity can be "brought on line when it is needed."
* The NNSA is embarked on a seven- to eight-year project to expand the capacity and capability of the Y-12 Plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to meet the planned workload for replacing nuclear warhead secondary stages and other uranium components.
* The NNSA is reestablishing advanced warhead concept design teams at each of the three design laboratories -- Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories -- "to energize design work on advanced concepts." This initiative will focus on "evolving DOD requirements," including nuclear weapons to defeat "Hardened and Deeply Buried Targets" and "Agent Defeat Weapons" for attacking chemical and biological warfare sites, and to reduce collateral damage via improved accuracy and variable and reduced yields.
* The NNSA is launching a program to enhance nuclear explosive test readiness at the Nevada Test Site by "replacing key underground-test-unique components," modernizing test diagnostic capabilities, augmenting key personnel, increasing their proficiency in underground test operations, conducting "test-related exercises of appropriate fidelity," and shortening the time required to show "regulatory and safety compliance."
Spinning the Nuclear Posture Review While Violating U.S. Treaty Commitments
Administration officials have sought to cast the NPR as a watershed step in breaking with the Cold War past. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated in the publicly released foreword:
"First and foremost, the Nuclear Posture Review puts the Cold War practices related to planning for strategic forces behind us.... As a result of this review, the U.S. will no longer plan, size or sustain its forces as Russia presented merely a smaller version of the threat posed by the former Soviet Union."
In fact, a fully informed analysis of the NPR suggests that far more has been retained than discarded from the Cold War's doctrine and practice regarding nuclear weapons, and the break is not nearly as clean as suggested.
Moreover, a strong case can be made that the nuclear weapons policies and programs laid out in the NPR effectively preclude further U.S. "good faith" participation in international negotiations on nuclear disarmament. Good faith participation in such negotiations, leading to the achievement of "effective measures" (such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) "relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament," is a legal and political obligation of all parties under Article VI of the nearly universal nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that entered into force in 1970. The Bush administration posture of avoiding further binding legal constraints on the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while pursuing the reinvigoration of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and the development of new nuclear weapons, will be viewed by many nations as a blatant breach of the "good faith" negotiating standard under the treaty, and tantamount to a U.S. "breakout" from the NPT.
U.S. Nuclear Forces (2002-2012)
Today there are an estimated 10,650 intact nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile (See Table 1). In addition, there are in storage at Pantex and Oak Ridge, respectively, approximately 5,000 plutonium pits and approximately the same number of canned subassemblies, i.e., thermonuclear secondaries, which are retained as a "strategic reserve. "there are another 7,000 pits at Pantex that have been declared excess from warheads dismantled during the first Bush and Clinton administrations. The 10,650 intact warheads and the 5,000 "strategic reserve" pits so far have not been included in the Bush administration plans for nuclear reductions. What will change is how they are counted.
The Departments of Defense and Energy characterize the intact nuclear warheads in the stockpile as either active or inactive.
* Active warheads are maintained in a ready-for-use status with tritium and other limited life components installed.
* Inactive warheads do not have limited life components installed, and may not have the latest warhead modifications.
Currently there are approximately 8,000 active warheads and approximately 2,700 inactive warheads in the U.S. stockpile, according to NRDC estimates.
The Pentagon also characterizes its nuclear forces as either strategic or non-strategic. The strategic forces comprise intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and heavy bombers -- the B-52s and B-2s. NRDC estimates that there are approximately 6,800 active strategic nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal today and that there are about 1,160 active non-strategic warheads (See Table 1).
With the issuance of the NPR some new terms have been introduced into this special lexicon that legislators and reporters should be sensitive to as they analyze this administration's policies and plans. The active warhead inventory is now broken down into deployed warheads, responsive force warheads, and spares. Deployed warheads consist of " operationally deployed warheads" and those associated with weapon systems in overhaul. "Responsive force warheads" consist of active warheads not on deployed systems. These are kept in secure storage, but are available to be returned to the operationally deployed force to meet some contingency. Depending on the particular weapon system this may take days, weeks, months, or as long as a year or more.
For example, if Russia were to deploy forces that the United States determined to be hostile and aggressive, the option is there to reintroduce ICBM or SLBM warheads and/or bomber weapons back into service. Finally, there are a number of spare warheads that are part of the "active," but not "operational" inventory. While each weapon system and warhead type is different, we estimate that the number of spares is about 5 percent to 10 percent of the number of "operational" warheads.
Unlike the counting rules agreed to in past SALT and START treaties, warheads removed from weapon systems in overhaul are not included in the projected level of ~3,800 in 2007 and the goal of 1,700 to 2,000 warheads by 2012. Only operationally deployed warheads are counted.
The Bush administration's proposed stockpile "reductions" are to be implemented in two phases, the first by FY 2007 with "operationally deployed" warheads reduced to ~3,800, and a second step by 2012 to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads. The main actions are retirement of the MX/Peacekeeper, removal of four Trident submarines from strategic service, and the downloading of warheads on deployed ICBMs and SLBMs. Table 2 is our estimate of what an operationally deployed force of 3,800 warheads might look like with 1,400 warheads transferred to the responsive force and 1,000 to the inactive category.
As can be seen by comparing Tables 1 and 2, the total number of warheads remains essentially the same. While there are no treaty requirements or bilateral agreements calling for the elimination of warheads, the U.S. Senate attached the following "condition" in July 1992 to its Resolution of Ratification for the START I Treaty:
"Inasmuch as the prospect of a loss of control of nuclear weapons or fissile material in the former Soviet Union could pose a serious threat to the United States and to international peace and security, in connection with any further agreement reducing strategic offensive arms, the President shall seek an appropriate arrangement, including the use of reciprocal inspections, data exchanges, and other cooperative measures, to monitor -- (A) the numbers of nuclear stockpile weapons on the territory of the parties to this Treaty; and (B) the location and [fissile material] inventory of facilities on the territory of the parties to this treaty capable of producing or processing significant quantities of fissile materials.
The Bush administration's plans as laid out in the NPR for further reductions in strategic arms, which the administration has said will be codified in some kind of formal "agreement" with Russia, make no provision for the measures mandated by the Senate in 1992, and would appear to contravene the so-called "Biden Condition," named after its primary sponsor, Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden.
Table 3 is our estimate of what an operationally deployed force of 2,200 warheads might look like in 2012. This was accomplished by further downloading SLBMs and shifting warheads to the responsive force and inactive warhead category. We conclude that under current plans there will be few, if any, real reductions in the size of the total stockpile of active and inactive warheads in the U.S. arsenal between 2002 and 2012 (compare Table 1 and 3). In a decade with only one warhead type scheduled for retirement (approximately 600 W62s), and with a modest new production capability planned, the number will not decrease significantly.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national, non-profit organization of scientists, lawyers and environmental specialists dedicated to protecting public health and the environment. Founded in 1970, NRDC has more than 500,000 members nationwide, served from offices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Additional Downloadable Materials for the Press Table 1. Nuclear Forces (January 2002) in PDF format, 6k. Table 2. Nuclear Forces (end-FY 2006; conceptual) in PDF format, 6k. Table 3. Nuclear Forces (2012; Conceptual) in PDF format, 6k.
Greg Mello Los Alamos Study Group 212 East Marcy Street, #10 Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-982-7747 voice 505-982-8502 fax gmello@lasg.org
From
World awash in stolen nuclear material
Thursday, March 7, 2002 at 17:30 JST
SAN FRANCISCO - International researchers have compiled what they say is the world's most complete database of lost, stolen and misplaced nuclear material - depicting a world awash in weapons-grade uranium and plutonium that nobody can account for.
"It truly is frightening," Lyudmila Zaitseva, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies, said on Wednesday. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg."
Stanford announced its database as U.S. senators held a hearing in Washington to assess the threat of "dirty bombs," or radioactive material dispersed by conventional explosives.
The Stanford program, dubbed the Database on Nuclear Smuggling, Theft and Orphan Radiation Sources, is intended to help governments and international agencies track wayward nuclear material worldwide, supplementing existing national programs that often fail to share information.
The project took on added urgency following the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington, which spurred fears that extremists might seek to use nuclear weapons in the future.
"It blows the mind, the lack of information," said George Bunn, a veteran arms control negotiator and a member of the database group. "What we're trying to say is: 'What are the facts?"'
The facts, even on cursory examination, are chilling.
Zaitseva said that, over the past 10 years, at least 40 kg of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium had been stolen from poorly protected nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union. While most of this material subsequently was retrieved, at least 2 kg of highly enriched uranium stolen from a reactor in Georgia remains missing.
Other thefts have included several fuel rods that disappeared from a research reactor in the Congo in the mid-1990s. While one of these fuel rods later resurfaced in Italy - reportedly in the hands of the Mafia - the other has not been found.
The Stanford group, led by nuclear physicist and arms control researcher Friedrich Steinhausler, decided to form its database after becoming alarmed over the patchy nature of most of the available information.
Combining data from two existing unclassified databases and adding new information from sources ranging from government agencies to local media reports, the team has evaluated each entry for accuracy and probability.
An expert at the Federation of American Scientists, the oldest U.S. arms control group, welcomed the establishment of the database, saying it could play a crucial role in helping governments ascertain the real level of nuclear threat.
"This is a smart step," said Michael Levi, director of the group's Strategic Security Project. "Knowing what's out there is the first step to bringing it back in."
The database includes illicitly obtained weapons-grade nuclear material as well as "orphaned" radiation sources - scientific or medical material that may have been lost, misplaced or simply thrown away but which still poses a health and security threat.
Steinhausler said the database would be open only to approved researchers, and that the Stanford group was beginning to contact government agencies in the United States and Europe about sharing information to build more effective international supervision of nuclear material.
"We cannot supply the means to improve the situation," Steinhausler said in a statement. "We're pinpointing weaknesses and loopholes and saying, 'Do something about it.'"
Zaitseva, visiting Stanford from the Kazakhstan National Nuclear Center, said the database was helping to build a dim picture of the market for stolen uranium, plutonium, and other dangerous materials.
But she added that while in many cases those behind nuclear thefts can be identified, the ultimate destination of the nuclear material has remained a mystery.
"We haven't found a single occasion in which the actual end users have been caught," Zaitseva said.
"We can only guess by the routes where the material is going. We can't say for sure if it is Iraq, Iran, North Korea, al Qaeda or Hezbollah. We can only make assumptions."
She added that the dangers of an unsupervised, underground market in nuclear material were likely to grow, noting that a U.S.-sponsored program to secure nuclear components in the former Soviet Union thus far had only locked up about a third of an estimated 600 tons of weapons-usable material.
"It's just not protected," she said. "This is hot stuff. If you steal 20 kilograms of that material, you can build a nuclear weapon."
(Compiled from wire reports)
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