Nukewatch – Page 160

November 2, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty Could Become Law Next Year

Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, spoke at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Sept. 15. Photo by John LaForge

“GENEVA (Reuters) — A treaty banning nuclear weapons could come into force by the end of 2019, backers of a campaign that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize said in an annual progress report on Monday.”

This October 29 report also announced a newly established watchdog for the 2017 nuclear weapons ban known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The new “Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor” published by Norwegian People’s Aid will measure progress related to signature, ratification, and entry into force of the TPNW.

So far, 19 governments have ratified the TPNW and it will come into force after 50 states ratify. Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told Reuters, “We have about 25 or 30 countries that say they will be ready [to ratify] by the end of 2019, so it’s definitely possible” to pass the 50 country mark next year.

The TPNW places nuclear weapons in the same outlaw category as biological weapons, poison gas, land minds and cluster munitions, all of which are banned by treaties. The Monitor says the TPNW will further stigmatize both nuclear weapons and the countries that ignore the treaty. The Monitor can be downloaded on <www.banmonitor.org>

The Monitor’s lead article says about the new ban treaty: “Adopted by 122 states on 7 July 2017 at a United Nations diplomatic conference, the TPNW provides a reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.” Once it takes effect, the TPNW will forbid the development, testing, possessing, hosting, using of, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. The treaty also outlaws assisting, encouraging, or inducing these prohibited acts. The treaty “codifies norms and actions that are needed to create and maintain a world without nuclear weapons,” the Monitor notes.

The United States under president Obama led the nuclear-armed states’ opposition to the treaty, and when final negotiations were launched March 27, 2017, Trump’s UN ambassador Nikki Haley explained the US-led boycott this way: “[W]e have to be realistic. Is there anyone that believes that North Korea would agree to a ban on nuclear weapons?”

Realists for Unilateral Nuclear Abolition

But being realistic means at least listening to realists, and no one can be considered more so than the late Paul Nitze, the Cold War military strategist and Reagan presidential adviser. As Secretary of the Navy and later Deputy Secretary of Defense, Nitze drafted and implemented US nuclear war plans himself. His advocacy produced of the world’s first hydrogen bombs and the vast increase of the arsenal’s size.

Yet five years before his death, this hard-nosed realist wrote, “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security.”

Sec. Nitze’s public and absolute renunciation of the Bomb, “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1999, read, “I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.”

This total rejection of “nuclear deterrence” had become the view of a life-long defender of pro-nuclear orthodoxy. Sec. Nitze’s argument demolishes Ambassador Haley’s ahistorical March 27, 2017 UN speech, in which she said, “[W]e can’t honestly say that we can protect our people by allowing the bad actors to have [nuclear weapons], and those of us that are good, trying to keep peace and safety not to have them.”

Putting aside the United States’ “trying to keep peace and safety” by simultaneously bombing seven different countries, Amb. Haley’s excuses for the Bomb are archaic and laughable in view of the devastating non-nuclear weapons in the Pentagon’s hands. Sec. Nitze made this point crisply: “In view of the fact that we can achieve our objectives with conventional weapons, there is no purpose to be gained through the use of our nuclear arsenal.”

Haley and the nuclear-armed states could embrace the new ban treaty using Sec. Nitze’s words: “Destruction of the arms did not prove feasible then [in 1982], but there is no good reason why it should not be carried out now.” — John LaForge

October 24, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Presidential Nuclear Nonsense

In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands marched in German towns against US intermediate range Pershing nuclear missiles. Upper right banner says: “Missiles out of Heilbronn [pop. 122,000] and off to the Pentagon”

The Reagan Administration’s 1980s crazy talk of “winning” nuclear war with “only” 20 million US dead produced a lot of anti-nuclear activism — all over the world. In Europe, hundreds of thousands marched against the placement of US Cruise and Pershing II missiles in NATO countries.

Fear of nuclear war and anger over presidential ignorance of it also produced the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF. The treaty banned nuclear-armed missiles in Europe with a range of 270-to-2970 miles. About 2,700 missiles were destroyed by 1991, a deal that weapons salesmen like President !#&$! don’t like.

What the British, German, Dutch and Belgian marching masses were so alarmed about was NATO’s plan to destroy Europe in order to save it. Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt explained it this way: “So-called ‘flexible response’ …. means that the West … says to the Soviet Union: ‘We threaten you with a military defense strategy which foresees the early use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons.’ That means for the Germans that the West in its self-defense would destroy Germany.”

Schmidt’s description was no exaggeration. In an October 5, 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service, “flexible response” was explained similarly. “NATO’s strategy of ‘flexible response’… is designed,” the C.R.S. wrote, “to allow NATO to … be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict, with the intent of slowing or stopping [opponents] if they … advanced into Western Europe.”

Now, President !#&$! says he will withdraw from the INF treaty because he claims Russia is in violation of it. Russia denies this, noting that research and development is not banned, that its new land-based cruise missile “fully complies” with the treaty’s requirements.

These questions could all be settled with negotiations, but President !#&$! wants to get contracts for new missiles signed and the gusher of military spending pumping, so that electoral votes are bought and paid for this year, and in 2020. Last Feb. 12, the Prez boasted, “We’re increasing arsenals of virtually every weapon. If they’re not going to stop, we’re going to be so far ahead of anybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before.” Never mind that the president cannot speak English; he and Congress are handing hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to their friends.

• Boeing took down $14.6 billion for the year 2015, and last February, won a $6.5 billion contract from the Missile Defense Agency to complete an “a new missile field with 20 additional” ground-based interceptor rockets at Fort Greely, Alaska, according to the Washington Post. While missile defense systems have never worked, the Pentagon said the total Boeing contract would reach $12.6 billion through 2023. • Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms merchant, is buried in money with $29.4 billion coming to it in 2015 under 66,000 contracts. • Raytheon was obligated to get $12.3 billion that year, including $31.8 million 464 Excalibur cannon-fired munitions that will also be sold to Sweden, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. • General Dynamics drank up $11.8 billion building warships. • Northrop Grumman took down $9.5 billion, including the year’s portion of the (projected) $55 billion Long-Range Strike Bomber. • United Technologies nailed a cool $1 billion for a few more F-35 fighter jet engines, but was obligated to get $6.6 billion for its 24,000 contracts in 2015.

With the public demanding affordable health care, better public schools, energy efficient cars, mass transit, and safe energy production, weapons builders could instead be putting their engineering expertise to good use. Enough of our wartime frenzy of bomb-building waste and fraud may again move millions to demand a reversal.

Martin Schulz, leader of the German Social Democrats who campaigned against Angela Merkel last year, was being reasonable in September 2017 when he said, “As chancellor, I will commit Germany to having the nuclear weapons stationed here withdrawn from our country. The cap on nuclear weapons in our country must be zero.” — John LaForge

October 17, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The White House Vs. Radiation Science & Health: Expanding Exposures Would Save Industry Billions

Experts at the US National Academies of Science settled a big question in 2005, and the president’s business friends don’t like the answer. Is there a dose of radiation so low that it is harmless? (Ionizing radiation is the alpha and beta particles, and the neutron, gamma and X-rays given off by radioactive materials in medicine, the military, industry, and reactor operations.) The NAS published its answer in its seventh edition of “Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation” (BEIR-VII), where it emphatically said: “No.” As they had done many times before, the NAS concluded that any radiation exposure, no matter how slight, carries a risk of causing cancer or other illnesses.

The NAS panel that produced BEIR-VII “could not ignore the current body of scientific studies that are now recognizing harmful and hitherto unpredicted effects at very low doses of radiation,” said Cindy Folkers at Nuclear Information & Resource Service in Takoma Park, MD.

But like the handful of scientists who stand against the 98% and say climate change is not caused by industrialism, there are a couple of nuclear-happy quacks who say radiation exposure is good for us. The President wants us to believe them. (Time: “Trump Administration Moving to Weaken EPA Radiation Regulations”)

Like scientists in the tobacco industry who conned millions and even got company CEOs to lie to Congress about their knowledge of cigarette hazards, some nuclear industry-sponsored researchers claim that low doses of radiation are harmless and could even act like inoculations. This “hormesis” theory was explicitly rejected in BEIR-VII. Dr. Peter Crane, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission attorney told the New York Times in Sept. 2015, “[T]he National Academies of Science, along with the rest of mainstream scientific authority, regard hormesis as wholly without merit.” A separate study published in Radiation Research in 2005 and reported in the journal Science was said to be “the latest blow to the [hormesis] notion that there is a threshold of exposure to radiation below which there is no health threat (and there might even be a benefit).”

Trying to Save the Industry Billions

In 2002, Roger Clark, President of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), warned in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that “Some people think that too much money is being spent to achieve low levels of residual contamination.” They want, “a threshold in the dose-response relationship in order to reduce expenditure,” Clark said.

As Science reported in 1999, “Billions of dollars are at stake. Stricter standards could increase the amount that agencies and industries must spend to clean up radioactive waste and protect workers.” In June 2015, a landmark international study reported in The Lancet Haematology presented “strong evidence of positive associations between protracted low-dose radiation exposure and leukemia.” The journal Nature said of the study: “The finding … scuppers the popular idea that there might be a threshold dose below which radiation is harmless — and provides scientists with some hard numbers to quantify the risks of everyday exposures.”

Now, as with climate change deniers and tobacco hucksters, fringe scientists are singing the de-regulation song that Trump’s industrialists wants to hear. If weakened radiation exposure limits are approved by Congress, the nuclear industry will save billions and its profit margins could grow as fast as lung tumors.

The public and the scientific community must fight back. There is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation. Even the smallest radiation exposures have cellular-level effects. The EPA website has said for years: “Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (or can increase the risk of cancer)… In other words, it is assumed that no radiation exposure is completely risk free.” Every US government agency that regulates radiation releases or its medical use makes the same warning — based on BEIR-VII (BEIR-VI, BEIR-V, etc.) In 1989, the National Academy’s BEIR-V quadrupled the risk of cancer from low-dose radiation exposures, and warned explicitly about “a much greater danger” of mental retardation among babies exposed in the womb to radiation.

An under-reported concern about radiation is the fact that internal contamination is far more dangerous than the same exposure outside the body.

In Oct. 2004, the British government’s Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters reported that low-level radiation from nuclear reactors may be up to 10 times more hazardous when ingested or inhaled than previously estimated. Dr. Chris Busby, the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, compares the two harms this way: “Externally, think of exposure like being warmed before a glowing fireplace. Internally, think of taking a hot coal from that fire and popping it into your mouth.”

When radioactive materials are vented, dumped or leaked, they contaminate soil, water, rainfall and food, and they can then be inhaled or ingested. Some persist in the environment for centuries. Tritium (radioactive hydrogen) is released to the air and to bodies of water by reactors and nuclear wastes. It persists for 120 years. Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility wrote Sept. 30 that, “Tritium gets built right into the body’s organic molecules, including DNA molecules. Precisely because tritium is so difficult to control, and so easily dispersed into the air and the water around nuclear facilities, industry experts advocate for lax standards and permissive practices regarding release.”

Dozens of studies indicate that low doses of radiation given over long periods of time are far more dangerous than the industry and the government claim. Infant mortality rates and childhood leukemia rates both increase in areas downwind from operating reactors. By 1999, the government finally admitted that radiation exposures endured for years by nuclear weapons workers had made them sick, contrary to decades of repeated assurances that the doses were harmless.

We all have a responsibility to reject Trump’s nuclear bailout which would expose everyone to more radiation, and instead to demand a robust strengthening of radiation protection regulations particularly with respect to infants and children. — John LaForge

October 15, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nukewatch Delegation Joins Resistance to US H-bombs in Germany

Fall Quarterly 2018

Sixteen of 18 nuclear abolitionists who conducted a mass “go-in” protest at the Büchel Air Force Base in Germany July 15 pose at the base’s south entrance upon being released by the military. The 18, including activists from the US, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK—one in a wheel chair and another on crutches—gained entry by clipping through perimeter fences and razor wire in five separate places, in broad daylight, on a Sunday morning to bring attention to US hydrogen bombs deployed there, and to highlight the lax security surrounding nuclear weapons systems. One regional daily paper asked: “How could this happen?” Photo: Rolf Schlesener.

By Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa

The demand of many Germans to rid their country of US nuclear weapons was again manifest by a 20-week-long series of protests at the Büchel Air Force Base in the Moselle River valley. The sponsoring group, Büchel is Everywhere: Nuclear Weapons-Free Now!, is a nation-wide coalition of 50 peace and justice groups dedicated to nonviolent civil resistance for nuclear abolition. Groups are invited to take responsibility for blockades and other creative protests during particular weeks, while camping on a plot of land next to the base, purchased five years ago by the coalition.

“Civil disobedience is forced on us because the government pays no attention to polite requests for dialogue or to petitions for a nuclear-free Germany. Major social changes, like the ousting of U.S. nuclear missiles from Europe in the 1980s, all require civil resistance to finally be accomplished,” said Marion Küpker, international coordinator for Büchel Is Everywhere!

After cutting through chain link and NATO wire fencing with 15 others on July 15, Marion, John and Ann unfurled a banner from DVG-VK (German Peace Society of War Resisters), the country’s oldest and largest peace organization.

As they did last year, Wisconsin-based Nukewatch brought a delegation of American nuclear abolitionists to join International Week at the camp, to demand that the small arsenal of US nuclear weapons stockpiled for NATO use at Büchel be sent back home.

After extensive planning in public meetings, and in broad daylight on Sunday, July 15, eighteen people—seven from the US, six from Germany, four from the Netherlands and one from England—cut through the perimeter fence in five places. They entered without interruption and walked around carrying banners, some for over an hour. One group got as far as the base runway before being apprehended. Three people, including Susan Crane, a Catholic Worker from California, walked through two unlocked interior gates and into a high security zone containing four suspected nuclear bunkers. The three climbed atop one bunker where they remained unnoticed for an hour. Guards finally took notice when they unfurled a banner: “Disarm B-61 Nukes”—a reference to the model number of the 20 nuclear weapons estimated to be there.

All 18 activists were eventually discovered, arrested, searched, ID’d and then released over four hours later with no charges, just an order to stay 100 meters away from the base for 24 hours. Their blockade of the gate 12 hours later brought no repercussions.

At the air base’s main gate, CeeCee Anderson from Atlanta, far left, joined members of the Youth Work Camp in displaying the 3-D illustration of a missile prevented from blasting off by chains of resistance.

A Quakers’ group action on July 23 involved timing and coordination. While some blocked the main gate in a routine way, others were poised for entry. On cue, a third group of three fence cutters went to work severing the wires, allowing a group of seven to walk through and get on the runway just as the Tornado jets that would carry the B-61s were to be taking off for practice. Once they’d cut the fence, that group slipped away to alert the base that protesters “are on your runway” and to stop the war games.

Those on the runway were detained, had their IDs checked and were released but were told they may face charges.

Later, a high-ranking air force pilot escorted by a local police officer came to the camp to complain. It was the first time in 20 years of the campaign that a pilot had ever approached the protest camp. With no sense of the irony, the officer scolded organizers, warning that the runway occupation action had endangered protesters and pilots.

“The base’s 20 thermonuclear bombs that pilots are training to use are a threat to the entire biosphere,” replied the campers, “so get your priorities in order.”

Nukewatch coordinator John LaForge remarked, “Yes, it’s hard to break into jail here in Germany. The civil police are so sophisticated that they go to extreme levels to pretend that nothing happened and that nuclear weapons bases are secure. Even German citizens who get prosecuted for ‘trespass’ and ‘damage to property’ (fences) have to refuse to pay fines at several levels to get a couple of days in the jug.”

During an action August 6, “Weapons Inspectors” reached this weapons bunker that was surrounded by an additional level of security razor wire causing suspicion that the nuclear weapons were being stored there.

Two days later, Crane, LaForge, German organizers Marion Küpker and Gerd Büntzly went to the chief prosecutor’s office in Koblenz, asking that the charge of trespass against Büntzly be dropped, unless the same charges are brought against the four Americans, including Crane and LaForge, who joined Büntzly for a go-in action to the nuclear bunkers in July, 2017. Last January, Büntzly was fined for the offense.

Crane and LaForge, equipped with a radiation monitor, made one last inspection for nuclear weapons on Hiroshima Day, August 6. They clipped through the perimeter chain-link fence and through a more secure razor wire fence inside to reach a set of previously uninspected airplane shelters. They spent an hour atop one of the shelters, recording measurements. After climbing down to inspect a second bunker, they were observed and detained by a large number of soldiers who forced them to lie face-down at gunpoint for about an hour until civilian police arrived.

“We hoped to confirm that the US has removed its nuclear bombs in compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, but our investigation was halted by the military,” Crane said. “The extra razor wire around the bunker, the near access to the jet runway, and the massive heavily armed military reaction to us indicates the U.S. nuclear weapons are here,” she concluded.

“Weapons Inspectors” Susan Crane and John LaForge first cut through chain link fence before entering German Air Force Base housing US nuclear weapons.

Then the “Weapons Inspectors” cut through and step over thick razor wire using a rug.

After having their identities confirmed by both military and civilian police, they were driven separately to the main gate. They waited in custody until their passports were returned, and then civilian police released Crane and LaForge at the gate.

For more information, visit nukewatchinfo.org and buechel-atombombenfrei.jimdo.com (German language).

—Reprinted with permission from the Nuclear Resister #189, Sept. 1, 2018, p.5. John LaForge contributed some reporting.

Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty Could Become Law Next Year

Presidential Nuclear Nonsense

The White House Vs. Radiation Science & Health: Expanding Exposures Would Save Industry Billions

Trying to Save the Industry Billions

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Trying to Save the Industry Billions

Page 1 – Fukushima Update

Fall Quarterly 2018

By Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Stay Connected