Nukewatch – Page 180

March 7, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima: A Human-Made Disaster Brought on by Bad Faith

“Nearly seven years after the triple reactor meltdowns, this unique nuclear crisis is still underway,” Greenpeace International’s Shaun Burnie wrote in a blogpost last December. The word “unique” is an understatement but true. The March 11, 2011 meltdowns are the world’s first combined earthquake-tsunami-reactor catastrophe. Moreover, while other power reactors have run out-of-control, melted down and contaminated large areas, never before have three simultaneously suffered mass earthquake damage, station black-outs, loss-of-coolant and complete meltdowns.

The consequences of its meltdowns-cubed are uniquely over three times deeper, broader and more expensive than anyone was prepared to handle. In the days following the initial quake, tsunami(s), and explosions, the head of the emergency response said, “There is no manual for this disaster.” Managers have had to invent, design, develop and implement the recovery whole cloth. Evacuation was so haphazard that on August 9, 2011, one local mayor accused the government of murder.

The crisis is ongoing in many ways: radioactively contaminated water is still pouring into the Pacific Ocean (permanently contaminating and altering sea life which bio-accumulates and bio-concentrates the radioactivity); radioactive gases and perhaps even “hot particles” are still wafting out of destroyed reactor structures and waste fuel pools; the constant threat of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan puts millions of gallons of radioactive waste (rad waste) water now stored near the shore in tanks at risk of spilling; and the dangerous work of collecting radioactive soils, leaves and tree trimmings from farmlands, school yards, parks and gardens continuously adds to vast collections of 1-ton radioactive waste bags.

The government estimates that 30 million cubic meters of this collected rad waste — a nearly unimaginable 29 million tons — will eventually require burial, incineration or reuse in road-building. The disaster is ongoing because the dangerous radiation exposures endured by the workers in these disaster response jobs is cumulative and irreversible — and the work will continue for 3 centuries or so. This is because: 1) cesium-137, one of the principle pollutants spewed by the meltdowns, takes 300 years to decay to other isotopes; and 2) in spite of the gigantic amount of contaminated material that’s been scrapped together and bagged — at over 1000 Temporary Storage Sites and elsewhere at 141,000 locations across Fukushima — the effort covers “only a small fraction of the total landmass of radioactively contaminated areas,” as Greenpeace’s Burnie reports. The “largest areas of significant contamination [are] the forested mountains of Fukushima,” Burnie notes, and will continue for three centuries to re-contaminate the soil down-wind and down-river, “through weathering processes and the natural water and lifecycle of trees and rivers.”

Fukushima’s endless radiation effects — from thyroid cancers, to contaminated sea food, from poisoned pregnancies to irradiated clean-up workers — should be the final insult from nuclear power and weapons. And they will be if the general public wises up to the unacceptable risks of continuing to operate nuclear reactors.

In “Fukushima Meltdown” author Takashi Hirose says, “The people responsible for the horror of this nuclear accident are the people who promoted nuclear power.”

In “Fukushima Meltdown” the first scholarly book to appear on the incident, author Takashi Hirose dashed off a grim warning after having published books and articles warning of the terrible danger of nuclear power since the 1980s. His cautions are more important now than ever, because commercial media will this week repeat the tragic-comic assurances that “no one died,” that Fukushima’s “released radiation was less than Chernobyl,” and that “nuclear power is clean.”

Natural disasters will never disappear, Takashi wrote, and there is no way of putting an end to earthquakes and tsunamis. “However, the Fukushima Disaster is neither a natural disaster nor ordained by fate. It is a human-made disaster brought about by bad faith.” In his terrifying 150 pages, Takashi methodically proves the case that the Fukushima catastrophe “was easily predictable and preventable.” In a nutshell, two principle government and corporate lies demonstrate how bad faith brought about the worst reactor accident in history. Exposing and rejecting these lies can prevent another meltdown.

Initially the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) asserted over and over that “there is no crisis” and even that “there will be no radiation release.” A month after the start of the disaster, the government admitted that radiation gushing to the sea and spewing to the atmosphere was at the same level as Chernobyl (the 1986 reactor disaster in Ukraine). Author Takashi calls this use of disinformation “as terrifying as what is happening at the actual site.” “From day one I had been saying that huge amounts of radiation were sure to be escaping.… From day one the situation had reached the highest level for nuclear accidents, Level 7, and from day one the government knew this, but it concealed that information from the people, thus causing far more people to be irradiated than otherwise would have been the case.”

The other glaring example of bad faith has been Tepco’s repeatedly saying, “We could not imagine that a once-in-a-thousand-years earthquake might come,” and further that “the tsunami was beyond our expectation.” These are lies. The destroyed Fukushima reactors were hit by an easily imaginable 14-meter tsunami. In 1896, the Meji-Sanriku quake’s tsunami reached 38.2 meters on the Iwate coast not far from Fukushima; the 1933 Hokkaido quake caused a 28.7 meter tsunami. Indeed, since the late 1970s experts have warned that a disaster like Fukushima was possible. In the late 1990s, seismology professor Ishibashi Katsuhiko at Kobe Univ. coined an explicit new term meaning “nuclear-power-plant-earthquake-disaster.” Because Prof. Ishibashi’s many books on the subject are well-known, “it is impossible that his warnings were unknown to the officials of Tepco,” who just want to dodge criminal charges.

The lessons for the 99 faulty reactors in this country and the other 300 around the world are clear enough. It’s absurd to put reactors near earthquakes or volcanoes or anywhere near the water. And, as Takashi says, “The people responsible for the horror of this nuclear accident are the people who promoted nuclear power.”

March 1, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

False Alarms and Exaggerated Threats

Three days after the January 13 false alarm of a North Korean nuclear attack on Hawaii, Japan’s public TV broadcaster NHK issued its own false alarm around 7 p.m., warning in error that North Korea had launched a missile at Japan.

As reported by CNN, Jan. 17, and by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and Reuters Jan. 16, the shocking message was received by Japanese smart phone users and by NHK TV website viewers. Like in Hawaii, the Japanese public was amazed to read, according to a translation from Reuters:

“NORTH KOREA APPEARS TO HAVE LAUNCHED A MISSILE . THE GOVERNMENT URGES PEOPLE TO TAKE SHELTER INSIDE BUILDINGS OR UNDERGROUND.”

Unlike Hawaii’s error, which threw the state’s population of 1.4 million into a panic, NHK’s fake news was broadcast nation-wide across Japan, a country of 127 million people. The network blamed the wrongful alert on a “switching error,” and corrected it in less than 10 minutes. “This happened because equipment to send a news flash onto the Internet had been incorrectly operated. We are deeply sorry,” NHK announced on its 9:00 p.m. news Jan. 16, Reuters reported. The Japanese alarm evidently did not cause the same amount of panic and chaos that was seen across Hawaii.

In “Arsenals of Folly,” author Richard Rhodes documents how US government “officials frequently and deliberately inflated their estimates of military threats facing the United States, beginning with … exaggerated Soviet military capabilities.” A review in the Feb. 7, 2008 New York Review of Books said, “The exaggeration of foreign threats, however pernicious, is a tactic,” and quotes Rhodes’ study: “Threat inflation was crucial to maintaining the defense budgets… Fear was part of the program …”

The New York Review also noted that in 1998, the US Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States “warned that Iran and North Korea could hit the US with missiles within five years.” Twenty years later, neither country can do so.

Still the success of the steady drum beat of anti-North Korea messaging from the White House, State Dept. and the Pentagon is showcased by National Public Radio online which announced: “Both Hawaii and Japan have been increasingly concerned about North Korea’s continued weapons testing. As NPR’s Scott Neuman reported, North Korea ‘routinely conducts test launches of its ballistic missiles over Japanese territory.’ Last month, Hawaii began monthly tests of its nuclear attack warning system, the first since the Cold War.”

As with most major news organizations, NPR fails to provide analysis regarding what North Korea could hope to gain by attacking Japan or the United States. The Reuters report of Japan’s false claim of a January 16 North Korean attack continued in this vein, noting: “The mistake took place at a tense time in the region following North Korea’s largest nuclear test to date in September and its claim in November that it had successfully tested a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the entire US mainland.”

During shooting wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, and throughout the Cold War, the US public has often learned after-the-fact that well-publicized threats or provocations were unreal, notably the famously false “missile gap” of 1960, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin “incident” which led to the US invasion of Vietnam, and Iraq’s fake weapons of mass destruction that led to the 2003 invasion.

After decades living with the fearsome “Soviet threat,” wire services reported in 1988 that, “The Soviet Union is highly unlikely to launch a sudden military attack on NATO forces in Europe, despite Western military leaders’ fear about a Pearl Harbor-type strike, a congressional study said.” Dozens of news accounts in 2001 reported that an internal CIA review from 1989 found “every major assessment from 1974 to 1986 ‘substantially’ overestimated” the Soviet threat. On Oct. 1, 1991 the Associated Press reported that, “American taxpayers may have wasted tens of billions of dollars arming to confront a Soviet empire that was in a state of decline…”

In 2004, a StarTribune headline reported: “No Iraq links to Al-Qaida: 9/11 panel’s report contradicts a US justification for going to war.” Iraq’s missing arsenal voided the other justification, leading to several thousand more “tens of billions” tax dollars wasted.

Today’s extravagantly endless war on terror likewise requires fear to be endlessly hyped. Dick Meyer reporting for in Newsday in 2015 chronicled how the threat of terror “is massively exaggerated in both the public and official mind.” This is crucial, as Rhodes pointed out in “Arsenals,” especially with the new military budget jumping to $786 billion (including $182 billion in military spending outside the Pentagon), $80 billion over last year’s. — John LaForge

February 23, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Threats of Mass Destruction Are All ‘Mentally Deranged’

The US maintains a fleet of heavy long-range B-52 bombers like this one that carry nuclear-armed Cruise missiles and B61 nuclear gravity bombs, among many others, and which regularly fly “exercises” near North Korea.

After Trump’s Sept. 23 bombast at the United Nations where he claimed the US might “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” the propagandists in Pyongyang responded quickly, calling him a “mentally deranged dotard.” During Trump’s 2017 visit to South Korea, an editorial in the Minju Joson, a state-run newspaper published in Pyongyang, said the president’s speech to the South’s parliament was a “load of rubbish spouted by the old lunatic Trump” and “was all nonsense.”

“Far from making remarks of any persuasive power that can be viewed to be helpful to defusing tension, he made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors,” the North’s President Kim Jong-un said after Trump’s UN bomb threat.

Of course the imbecility of Trump’s speech is almost always rude nonsense, but his White House predecessors have been nearly as bloodthirsty in their overt threats against North Korea. While Trump certainly speaks like a mentally deranged dotard, his threat to totally destroy a country of 25 million people is only as deranged as those made by earlier presidents.

On July 12, 1993, Bill Clinton was in South Korea and warned that if the North developed and used an atomic weapon, the United States would “overwhelmingly retaliate,” and he adding chillingly, “It would mean the end of their country as they know it.”

George Bush continued the routine, hatefully naming North Korea part of an “axis of evil” during his 2002 State of the Union speech. Bush’s choice of the word “axis” usefully conjured images of Hitler Fascism, against which any atrocity can of course be excused.

Likewise, Barack Obama calmly threatened the North during his April 2014 visit to Seoul, saying, “We will not hesitate to use our military might to defend our allies and our way of life.” Calling the North “a pariah state that would rather starve its people than feed their hopes and dreams,” Obama hearkened back to the country’s terrible 1996-1998 famine — “one of the great famines of the 20th Century” according to UN aid agencies. Obama conveniently neglected to recall much less apologise for any US responsibility in failing to provide adequate emergency food aid to the starving.

Nowadays, Trump gets rightfully condemned for making threats of mass destruction against the tiny, underdeveloped North, especially as he sits at the head of the grandest military empire in the history of the world, with 12 ballistic missile submarines, 19 aircraft carrier battle groups, 450 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, almost 800 military bases in 70 countries and territories abroad, and shooting wars underway in seven different countries.

Yet jittery trepidation regarding phantom threats by North Korea is routinely, almost universally voiced — even if it’s just as routinely debunked. In 1996, the editors at the New York Times warned, “North Korea could threaten parts of Hawaii and Alaska” in less 10 years. (“Star Wars, the Sequel” May 14) Now 22 years on, the North still can’t do it. In 2000, the same editors said US intelligence agencies “predict that North Korea could have the capacity to launch a handful of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles within five years.” (“Prelude to a Missile Defense,” Dec. 19) Eighteen years later, it still can’t.

Fearmongering about North Korea always lacks any evidence that its ruling regime is suicidal, because there is no such evidence. Never explained by our military-industrial-Congressional weapons merchants, newspaper and TV pundits, or think tank analysts is why the North would precipitate its inevitable self-destruction by attacking the United States or its allies, because it never would.

A few reporters have managed to fit this acknowledgment into their stories, and for this they need to be recognized. Jessica Durando, writing in USA Today Nov. 21, 2017, said North Korea’s leader appears “determined to keep his nuclear arsenal to deter a U.S. attempt to overthrow him.”

And journalist Loretta Napoleoni, author of the brand new “North Korea: The Country We Love to Hate” (2018, University of Western Australia Press), spoke to the London Express Feb. 20, saying about the North’s arsenal of 10 to 12 unusable nuclear bombs: “I don’t think they have any intention to use it. It is a deterrent,” Napoleoni said, “and very much what they wanted to achieve in order to make sure that nobody would attack them ever again.”

In view of the just-announced joint US/South Korean military invasion rehearsals known as “exercises” now set for April, North Korea is the place for legitimate trepidation.

— John LaForge

February 16, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Unwinnable War Budget Goes Nuclear

In keeping with the Trump Administration’s Feb. 2^nd Nuclear Posture Review, Trump’s just-released Fiscal Year 2019 federal budget proposal dramatically ramps-up nuclear weapons research and production.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, is receiving a $2.2 billion overall boost to $15.1 billion, a 17 percent increase above FY 2018. Of that, a full $12.8 billion is for nuclear weapons — 8 percent above FY 2018.

The NNSA’s “Directed [nuclear weapons] Stockpile Work” is increased 41 percent, from $3.3 billion to $4.7 billion. The “stockpile” programs are the hands-on, nut-and-bolts operations that include extending the operational service time of today’s nuclear weapons for up to 60 years, while also endowing them with new military capabilities.

In addition, the NNSA budget shows the addition of another $1.76 billion to “Nuclear Weapons Activities,” for a grand total FY 2019 budget of $12.78 billion. The document doesn’t make clear where the additional money comes from. In the past it’s been drawn from Pentagon, but elsewhere in Trump’s budget there is a cut of over $17 billion from the anti-poverty Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which ought to cover the NNSA.

Of course, these figures cover just one fiscal year. Enormous as they are, they’re merely down-payments that only open the door on a proposed 30-year nuclear weapons “rebuild.” The $1.74 trillion “upgrade” includes $313 billion for a new fleet of missile-launching submarines; $13 billion for a “smart” hydrogen bomb the United States has never built before; $50 billion for a so-called “interoperable” nuclear warheads intended for use on either submarines, rockets, or missiles; $127 billion for a new heavy, long-range bomber dubbed the “China bomber” (to improve relations with our No. 1 trading partner); $30 billion for a new nuclear-armed Cruise missile; $149 billion for 600 new land-based missiles; and another $261 billion to rebuilt the Y-12 bomb plant in Tennessee, the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, and the (already finished) Kansas City bomb plant in Missouri.

Trump’s plan also calls for a 13 percent increase in over all military spending (about $80 billion), raising Pentagon allotment to $686 billion. Can you say “national bankruptcy”?

In a show of fiscal responsibility, some of the increases in weapons and war planning programs are being offset by deep cuts to the social safety net, education and healthcare programs. Although Mr. Trump’s political base of undereducated white supremacists are the biggest user of food stamps in the country, his budget slashes the Department of Education by over 10 percent, and bars Food Stamp recipients from buying fresh food and vegetables, “providing only a box food delivery program,” Democracy Now! reported. Trump’s budget also phases out federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting which supports public and community radio and TV stations, also known as Educational TV. With cuts to health, education and nutrition programs, you’d think the Self-proclaimed “genius” was trying to dumb down the electorate.

Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico summed up the fiscal year plan this way: “Trump’s budget prepares for nuclear war, which even Ronald Reagan said ‘can’t be won and must never be fought.’ It finances a new arms race with Russia and increases the chances of a nuclear war with North Korea. It further raids the treasury by diverting huge sums of money to the usual fat cat nuclear weapons contractors.”

There must be a way to cut military spending, but we would have to be able to grasp its magnitude. In just the fiscal year 2015, the warplane, missile and satellite maker Lockheed Martin Corporation alone won $46 billion in military contracts. –John LaForge

February 6, 2018 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

US NUCLEAR WAR PLAN or “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW” 2018

The “Nuclear Posture Review” is the sterile, abstract, ambiguous, euphemistic government explanation of its plans to commit indiscriminate mass slaughter of civlians using nuclear weapons. The Feb. 2, 2018 is the newest since 2010. Photo: Peter Sellers as “Dr. Strangelove.”

HERE IS THE US GOVERNMENT’S 2018 NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY and LANGUAGE ON USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS KNOWN AS THE “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW”