Nukewatch – Page 199

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

What Does It Mean to Have Trump’s Finger on the Nuclear Button?

“The nuclear football,” pictured being carried by an aide Feb. 12, never leaves the president’s side. President Obama was one among millions who were mortified at the thought of Trump gaining control of nuclear war codes. At a rally last October, Obama said it was a terrible prospect. “How can you trust him with the nuclear codes? You can’t do it,” Obama said, Inquisitr.com reported Jan. 26, 2017.

A nuclear launch expert plays
out various scenarios.

By Bruce Blair

Donald Trump, Dec. 15, 2015: “The biggest problem we have is nuclear; nuclear proliferation, and having some maniac, some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon. That’s in my opinion that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now.”…

To a degree we haven’t seen, perhaps since the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, the question of Donald Trump’s temperament and judgment on matters of war and peace is stirring attention—and trepidation—particularly when the subject of nuclear weapons comes up. Some people believe that Trump himself is the maniac, the madman with nukes that appears in Trump’s own worst nightmare.…

In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time. You might imagine this awesome executive power would be hamstrung with checks and balances, but by law, custom and congressional deference there may be no responsibility where the president has more absolute control. There is no advice and consent by the Senate. There is no second-guessing by the Supreme Court….

The “nuclear button” is a metaphor for a complex apparatus that has the president’s brain at its apex. The image of a commander-in-chief simply pressing a button captures none of the machinery, people, and procedures designed to inform the president and translate his or her decisions into coherent action. Although it remains shrouded in secrecy, we actually know a great deal about it, beginning with the president’s first task of opening the “nuclear suitcase” in an emergency to review his nuclear attack options.…

Let us say the president is awakened in the middle of the night (the proverbial 3 a.m. phone call) by his… top nuclear adviser and told of an incoming nuclear strike. Since the flight time of missiles fired from launch stations in Russia or China to the White House is 30 minutes, and 12 minutes or less for missiles fired from submarines lurking in the Western Atlantic Ocean… the steadiness and brainpower of the president in such circumstances are serious questions indeed….

This call has never happened.… The closest we came … occurred in 1979, when the consoles at our early-warning hub in Colorado lit up with indications of a large-scale Soviet missile attack. President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, received back-to-back calls in the middle of the night informing him of the imminent nuclear destruction of the United States. The second call reported an all-out attack. Brzezinski was seconds away from waking Carter to pass on the dreadful news and convince him of the need to order retaliation without delay (within a six-minute deadline). Brzezinski was sure the end was near.

Just before he picked up the phone to call Carter, Brzezinski received a third call, this time canceling the alarm. It was a mistake caused by human and technical error. A training tape simulating an all-out Soviet attack had inadvertently slipped into the actual real-time attack early warning network. The impending nuclear holocaust was a mirage that confused the duty crew. (They were fired for taking eight minutes instead of the required three minutes to declare their degree of confidence that an attack against North America was underway.)

How would … President Trump behave under such duress, informed of the attack and the imminent destruction of the nation’s capital and himself? He would have only a few minutes to consider the reliability of the attack report and decide whether and how to retaliate. If the attack is real, and he hesitates, a president will likely be killed and the chain of command decapitated, perhaps permanently. …

The only real protection against nuclear disaster is total elimination of nuclear weapons….

—Bruce Blair is a nuclear security expert and a research scholar at the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton. This excerpt is from a much longer article in Politico, June 11, 2016. See the full piece, and an analysis of statements made by Trump, here.

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Bomb Tweeting While the World “Comes to its Senses”

Commentary by John LaForge

When Donald Trump “Tweeted” something about nuclear weapons last December 23, he was deliberately trivializing the Bomb to make it appear small, the way he makes light of targeting civilians, torturing suspects, deporting millions, shooting someone in the street, beating up critics, and sexual assault. About the nuclear arsenal, the chief Tweeter said, “The US must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

Trump appears unaware of either the “strength” of the US arsenal, or that much of the world actually is coming to its senses regarding nuclear weapons. Mr. Trump either knows almost nothing about nuclear weapons—and broadcasts nonsense about them—or he wants to distract attention from current progress being made toward their abolition, or both.

The same day as his H-bomb screed, Dec. 23, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) overwhelmingly approved a groundbreaking resolution to begin negotiations in 2017 on a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The vote follows the October 2016 decision by the UNGA First Committee to begin work on the new treaty—a resolution that was opposed by the Obama Administration and several other nuclear-armed governments.

The UN nuclear weapons “treaty ban” talks will proceed in two sessions: March 27 to 31; and June 15 to July 7. During a UN budget committee meeting last December, the US delegation under Obama fought against a funding request for the planned four weeks of negotiations. But under pressure from ban proponents Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa, the US withdrew its opposition and the funding was approved.

The Dec. 23 UNGA resolution passed 113 to 35. Putting the lie to Mr. Obama’s 2009 promise that, “the United States will take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons,” US delegate Samantha Power voted against the resolution. So did nuclear-armed England, France, Russia, and Israel. But not every nuclear state parroted Obama’s obstructionism. US partners India and Pakistan abstained, as did China. North Korea and Iran voted in favor. Saudi Arabia bucked pressure from the US, its principle arms supplier, and voted Yes. Even Italy voted Yes, despite its being a NATO partner and home to about 80 US B61 H-bombs, still deployed at two of its air force bases.

The US government knows a treaty ban will demolish the manufactured perception that nuclear weapons are legitimate, while already banned landmines, gas, poison, biological and cluster munitions are not. An international ban would also make it politically embarrassing, and legally suspect, for the US and NATO to continue their nuclear war planning.

In a leaked document sent to NATO members in October—before the UNGA First Committee decision—the US urged both opposition to the resolution and a boycott of the negotiations. US marching orders were disobeyed by certain allies and partners including The Netherlands, India, and Pakistan—which all abstained, and by Italy which voted Yes.

The “capability” of the US nuclear arsenal is already redundant, according to Sec. of Defense Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis. In January 2015, Mattis denigrated the Air Force’s 450 land-based missiles, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee, “You should ask: ‘Is it time to reduce the triad … removing the land-based missiles?’” Mattis is friends with former Defense Secretary William Perry who has repeatedly called for eliminating the same missiles. They should be scrapped, Perry says, because “They’re not needed.” The same position is advocated by Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of US nuclear forces, and by Republican Senator and later Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

To “greatly strengthen and expand” the indiscriminate power of H-bombs is strategically irrational, economically bankrupting, and environmentally self-destructive. The Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, which has studied the subject for four decades, reported in 2014 that just 100 nuclear warheads—if detonated—could plunge the Earth into smoke-shrouded darkness long enough to destroy agriculture and starve billions of people to death. The United States has 7,000 warheads, or 70 times the “strength” to do ourselves in. Trump would do better to greatly strengthen and expand his understanding of nuclear madness.

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

First Nations Condemn High-Level Liquid Waste Shipments

By Arianne Peterson and John LaForge

Spring 2017 Quarterly

On February 22, both the Iroquois Caucus and Anishinabek Nation in Canada declared their opposition to plans to transport more than 5,812 gallons of extaordinarily radioactive waste in liquid form through their territories. The US Department of Energy (DOE) plan, backed by Atomic Energy Canada Limited and Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, intend to send 100 to 150 truckloads of waste, over the course of four years, roughly 1,300 miles from Chalk River, Ontario to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina using public roads and bridges.

The never-before-attempted long range transports of high-level liquid waste are set to start this spring, following US District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s Feb. 2 ruling in favor of the DOE and against a challenge brought by a coalition of environmental groups led by Beyond Nuclear. The exact shipment routes for the waste are being kept secret due to terrorism concerns, but the convoys must pass over at least one waterway directly tied to the Great Lakes—the drinking supply for 40 million people. The waste liquid is so extremely toxic that just one quart of it, evenly dispersed, is enough to contaminate the entire drinking water supply of Washington, DC (a reservoir of just over 140 million gallons) above the safe drinking water standards of the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We assert inherent ownership of the water and jurisdiction within our regions and traditional territories,” said Patrick Madahbee, the Grand Council Chief of 40 Anishinabek First Nations. “We will stand with our Iroquois allies to protect the drinking water. Water is the lifeblood of Mother Earth. Why would we put our precious resource in jeopardy? A spill into any of the waterways would have a tremendous impact on the Great Lakes. Millions of people would be affected—on both sides of the border.”

The weapons-grade waste material, which originated in the US and has been made almost 17,000 times more toxic and more radioactive through processing in Canada, will be “down-blended” at the Savannah River Site into a form that cannot be used for weapons. But critics point out that the process can be done onsite in Canada without putting dozens of communities and the Great Lakes environment at unnecessary and repeated risk of contamination.

The 6,000 gallons are so radioactively volatile that they cannot be shipped all at once, but sent in small, radioactive containers. The total has so much uranium-235 that combing it in a large shipment would risk a “criticality” accident—the uncontrolled chain reaction of nuclear fission—that would look like a bomb blast.

So much gamma radiation is expected to be emminating from the casks that extra long tractor-trailers are intended to separate drivers from the deadly hazard.

“The Iroquois Caucus is well aware that liquid of a very similar nature has been routinely solidified and stored at Chalk River since 2003,” Kahnawà:ke Grand Chief Joseph Tokwiro Norton explained.

The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples mandates that states ensure no storage or disposal of hazardous materials shall take place in the lands or territories of indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent. The Anishinabek Chiefs in Assembly in 2010 passed resolutions opposing the exporting and storage of nuclear waste by either land or water across the Anishinabek Nation, and Canada is a signatory to the UN Declaration.

The indigenous governments are joined by more than 22 municipal councils in the Niagara Peninsula that have passed resolutions opposing the transports.

Seven plaintiffs had urged the court to either suspend the shipments or require a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) in compliance with US environmental law, because such highly radioactive material has never before been transported over public roads in liquid form. But the February ruling deferred to the DOE’s earlier claims that transport of this deadly waste in liquid form poses no more dangers than hauling it in solid form—even without an EIS.

Mary Olson, Director of Nuclear Information and Resource Service’s Southeast Office, one of the plaintiffs, said,“Even without any leakage of the contents, people will be exposed to penetrating gamma radiation and damaging neutron radiation just by sitting in traffic beside one of the transport trucks.”

—Dr. Gordon Edwards, “Radioactive Roads: Transportation of Highly Radioactive Liquid Waste,” Feb. 21; Anishinabek News, Feb. 22; Iroquois Caucus, Feb. 22; WBFO News (Toronto) Feb. 21; and Aiken Standard, and BeyondNuclear.org, Feb. 3, 2017

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Reflection and Commitment on Being a Better Ally

**Water Protectors stand together in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in October 2016. Photo: Rob Wilson.**

Editorial

Spring 2017 Quarterly

In our winter fund appeal, we highlighted Nukewatch’s engagement with the struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) led by Indigenous Water Protectors at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Since then, we have reflected on our position—as a mostly white organization—in relation to a Native-led struggle, and we realize we made some mistakes that perpetuated, rather than resisted, the forces of colonialism that continue to oppress and work to erase the presence of Native people in our society.

The letter included a photo of one of our members at a Standing Rock camp holding our Nuclear Heartland banner, which shows the location of US nuclear missiles deployed throughout the Great Plains. We referenced the intersection of our anti-nuclear mission with the No DAPL movement in an appeal for funds, excerpted here:

“The combination in North Dakota of nuclear-armed missiles, dangerous oil pipelines, and 3,000 active hydraulic fracturing wells, has created a literally explosive conflation of the worst environmental threats faced by rural communities anywhere. Help us relieve the region of at least the military leg of this terrible triad by donating to Nukewatch today.”

Simply put, we used the success of a Native-led struggle for justice to draw attention—and money—to our own issues and organization. This was wrong, and we deeply regret it. Because in doing so we failed to prioritize the concern of the Indigenous people who are leading this difficult battle: the fact that they have a fundamental right to exist on the land that white colonizers have been trying to take from them for generations. Native rights are the main issue here and should not be obscured by the concerns of more racially privileged activists.

We are grateful to writer and organizer Kelly Hayes for her piece, “How to Talk About #NoDAPL: A Native Perspective,” published October 27 on her blog transformativespaces.org, which helped us realize our mistakes. Here is an excerpt:

“In discussing #NoDAPL, too few people have started from a place of naming that we have a right to defend our water and our lives, simply because we have a natural right to defend ourselves and our communities. When ‘climate justice,’ in a very broad sense, becomes the center of conversation, our fronts of struggle are often reduced to a staging ground for the messaging of NGOs.

“This is happening far too frequently in public discussion of #NoDAPL.

“Yes, everyone should be talking about climate change, but you should also be talking about the fact that Native communities deserve to survive, because our lives are worth defending in their own right—not simply because ‘this affects us all.’

“So when you talk about Standing Rock, please begin by acknowledging that this pipeline was redirected from an area where it was most likely to impact white people. And please remind people that our people are struggling to survive the violence of colonization on many fronts, and that people shouldn’t simply engage with or retweet such stories when they see a concrete connection to their own issues—or a jumping off point to discuss their own issues. Our friends, allies and accomplices should be fighting alongside us because they value our humanity and right to live, in addition to whatever else they believe in.”

Rather than referencing Standing Rock’s relationship to our anti-nuclear work in our fundraising letter, we should have amplified the voices of Native Water Protectors and called for our fellow white activists to support their efforts. We acknowledge these mistakes here as part of an effort to improve the way we work in solidarity with those fighting for racial justice. We hope our white readers in particular might be reminded by our reflections to avoid similar pitfalls through truly listening to the voices of people of color and more critically analyzing our ally roles, as we intend to do.

Nukewatch is committed to amplifying and supporting calls for justice from marginalized groups not just because they are related to our anti-nuclear work, but because they need to be heard. We will continue to take action in ways that reflect the priorities of disenfranchised activists, such as answering calls from Standing Rock to organize local protests that target banks funding the DAPL. We will also send a portion of the donations received as a result of our fund appeal to the legal defense collective at Standing Rock. If you are not already involved, please join us in defending Native rights at Standing Rock and beyond.

For more about the continuing struggle at Standing Rock go to LastRealIndians.com.

To learn more about being an ally, see the Standing Rock Solidarity Toolkit from Showing Up for Racial Justice.

—Arianne Peterson wrote this piece, representing the views of the Nukewatch staff.

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Federal Regulator Halts Move to Toughen Radiation Exposure Limits

By John LaForge

Spring 2017 Quarterly

Work has been halted on two rulemaking projects that would have reduced the amount of radiation the government permits workers and the public to be exposed to without their consent. The improved limits would have been in line with internationally accepted standards, Bloomberg BNA reports.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announcement says stopping the process of setting stricter radiation exposure limits was “due to the high costs of implementing such changes.” The purpose of the NRC is to protect public and nuclear worker health and safety, but this time it’s just saving money for the nuclear industry.

The cancellation of two unfinished and long-overdue precautionary improvements, noted in the Dec. 27 Federal Register, came as a shock to nuclear industry watchdogs who have campaigned for increased radiation protection since 1990. That year, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) recommended that radiation industry worker exposures be reduced by three-fifths, from 50 milliSieverts per year to 20 milliSieverts per year. (A milliSievert is a measure of the body’s absorption of radiation.)

The recommendation has never been adopted by the United States. Based in Ottawa, Ontario, ICRP sets standards used worldwide as the basis for radiological protection.

Ed Lyman, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Bloomberg that termination of these projects “makes the US look out of step with the rest of the world. It makes it look like we’re basing our regulations on obsolete information.” Jerry Hiatt with the industry group Nuclear Energy Institute was relieved by the NRC move telling Bloomberg that existing rules were adequate, and that it’s unnecessary to reduce today’s permitted exposures.

The rulemaking project was begun by the NRC staff in 2008 and was intended to update the country’s radiation protection standards in accordance with ICRP’s international standards, primarily with respect to radiation dose. The NRC staff had previously recommended that the commission reduce the total radiation worker exposure from 50 milliSieverts-per-year to 20 milliSieverts-per-year—in line with the ICRP’s 1990 global recommendation. However, the NRC rejected the recommendation.

The NRC’s decision not to align permitted radiation exposures with those of the ICRP is the equivalent of “throwing out one of the most significant changes to get the US in step with the rest of the world,” Lyman said. The commission formally approved the stop-work orders in April 2016, but it only notified the public on December 27.

The NRC also decided to stop work on a second rule-making which would have brought the US in line with international rules regarding daily releases of radioactive waste water from nuclear reactors. By way of explanation, the NRC said, its current standard “continues to provide adequate protection of the health and safety of workers, the public and the environment.”

Over the last 70 years, permitted radiation exposure limits for workers and the public have dramatically decreased as science has come to better understand the toxic and cancer-causing properties of low doses.

In its 2012 pamphlet “Radiation Exposure and Cancer” the NRC reports that, “[A]ny increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.” Likewise the National Academy of Sciences, in its latest book-length report on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, BEIR-7, says: “[L]ow-dose radiation acts predominantly as a tumor-initiating agent,” and “[T]he smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.” The US Environmental Protection Agency agrees that “[A]ny 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.”

But today, when the standard international radiation exposure limit for workers and the public is less than half what our own government allows, the NRC is protecting radiation industry shareholders, not public health and safety.

—Bloomberg BNA, “Costs Stop Updates to New Radiation Protection Rules”; Federal Register, Dec. 27, 2016.

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

A nuclear launch expert plays out various scenarios.

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Stay Connected

A nuclear launch expert plays
out various scenarios.