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March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

US & UK Cover-Up of Trident Missile Failure

By John LaForge

Last June, off the coast of Florida, the test of a $21 million Trident D5 missile fired from the British submarine HMS Vengeance, failed and the unarmed rocket self-destructed, but the news was kept secret from the British and US public—at the request of President Obama—for seven months.

Fired toward what the Navy calls its “Eastern firing range” near the west coast of Africa, the London Sunday Times—a right-wing journal owned by the Rupert Murdoch machine—revealed in January that the test of the D5 missile, which reportedly has a range of 7,500 miles, saw the rocket fail and careen toward the US coast before spinning out into the Atlantic. The self-destruction trick is programmed to be automatic after a failure is detected, CNN reported.

The Times also revealed that when the colossally expensive failure occurred in June, the Obama White House asked then Prime Minister David Cameron’s government not to comment on it publicly. The Times report was based on a British military official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The submarine Vengeance is one of four Trident subs including Vanguard, Victorious, and Vigilant. Each submarine carries 16 Trident missiles with eight nuclear warheads on each missile; 512 nuclear weapons in all.

The rocket failure came just one month prior to the House of Commons vote on whether to approve a controversial $50-to-$100 billion program to replace the four missile-firing Trident subs. Under the slogan “Scrap Trident,” strong majorities of the general public, the British Labour Party, and the Scottish Parliament (Britain’s Tridents are based in Scotland) are opposed to replacement. “Unaware of the failure, members of the House of Commons voted 472 to 117 in favor of renewal,” CNN reported.

Both the UK and the US have invested hundreds of billions of tax dollars in upgrading nuclear arsenals, and both are beholden to multinational conglomerates that design and build nuclear weapons and contribute generously to political campaigns and party coffers. The world’s largest arms dealer, Lockheed Martin based in Bethesda, Maryland, builds the flawed $21 million-dollar missiles. The UK’s 512 Trident missiles garner about $10.75 billion for Lockheed Martin.

Catastrophic failures of such expensive weapons can prompt increased calls for their elimination. Scores of UN member states will begin negotiations March 26 in New York seeking a treaty ban on nuclear weapons, an “international convention” that both the US and UK governments have worked to derail.

Weapons “Lease” may violate treaty

Britain’s long-range Trident D5 missiles are all produced and owned by the United States, which then “leases” about 512 of them to the Royal Navy—which is turn is invited to “test” them off Florida’s coast near Port Canaveral. Articles I and II of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty forbid the transfer to another state, and the acceptance from another state, any nuclear weapon system.

The cost of building four new ballistic-missile-firing submarines is said by the UK government to babout $49.8 billion. Britain’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other independent experts warn that the actual cost will be closer to $124.7 billion.

Asked four times in January if she knew of the failure prior to the July House of Commons vote on Trident replacement July 18, 2016, Prime Minister Theresa May refused to answer, the London Telegraph reported.

“I can assure the House that the capability and effectiveness of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent is not in doubt,” British Defense Minister Michael Fallon said Jan. 23. The phrase “nuclear deterrent” is the destabilizing rationale that allows nine self-selected countries to plan and threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. Minister Fallon asserted his “absolute confidence” in the missile system, if not in his ability to keep a secret.

The Times disclosed the failure January 22 after being informed by an anonymous source in the Ministry of Defense. The Times reported, “[A] senior naval source has told this newspaper that the missile—which was unarmed for the test—may have veered off in the wrong direction towards America after being launched from HMS Vengeance.…”

According to the Times, “The source said: ‘There was a major panic at the highest level of government and the military after the first test of our nuclear deterrent in four years ended in disastrous failure. Ultimately Downing Street decided to cover up the failed test. The upcoming Trident vote made it all the more sensitive.’”

—Sunday Times, Jan. 22 & 24; Nadia Prupis, Commondreams, Jan. 23; CNN, Jan. 23; The London Telegraph, Jan. 22; Russia Today, Jan. 22, 2017.

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear-Armed Submarine Collision Off Scotland Kept Secret For 43 Years

With missile hatch doors open, testing equipment aboard an *Ohio* class ballistic missile-firing Trident submarine. Over 500 *Trident* D5 long-range US missiles like these are “leased” to Britain’s Royal Navy for use on its four Trident submarines.

Documents reveal 1974 crash between US and Soviet subs off Scottish coast

Matthew Weaver, The Guardian

Two nuclear submarines from rival sides in the cold war collided a few miles off the coast of Scotland in an incident that was covered up for 43 years.

The potentially catastrophic crash occurred in November 1974 when the SSBN James Madison, armed with 16 Poseidon nuclear missiles, was heading out of the US naval base at Holy Loch, 30 miles north-west of Glasgow.

Soon after leaving the port it hit an unidentified Soviet submarine that had been sent to tail it, according to a cable to then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, marked “secret eyes only.”

The cable, sent by national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, said: “Have just received word from the Pentagon that one of our Poseidon submarines has just collided with a Soviet submarine.

“The SSBN James Madison was departing Holy Loch to take up station when it collided with a Soviet submarine waiting outside the port to take up trail. Both submarines surfaced and the Soviet boat subsequently submerged again. There is no report yet of the extent of damage. Will keep you posted.”

The cable was published by the CIA on January 17 as part of a mass release of more than 12 million pages of previously classified reports in 930,000 documents. The cable corroborates an until-now unconfirmed report on the incident in the Washington Post on January 1, 1975 by the investigative journalist Jack Anderson.

He reported that the collision left a 9-foot scratch on the side of the James Madison and that the two submarines came within inches of sinking one another.

Another document marked “top secret” released in the same batch expressed alarm that the news of the collision had leaked. It said: “On January 3, the NID [National Intelligence Daily] ran an item on the collision just off Holy Loch of US Polaris submarine and a Soviet attack submarine. Unfortunately, Jack Anderson had run the same news in the Washington Post a day or two earlier.

“This pre-emption on Anderson’s part forced the surfacing of a piece of information in a current intelligence two months after the event occurred….”

Kate Hudson, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said the secret cable exposed the “enormous risks” of nuclear weapons. “The history of nuclear weapons is a history of near misses, accidents, potential catastrophes and cover-ups. This latest example joins 25 other near misses that could have led to nuclear war.”

CND is calling for an inquiry into Trident, the successor to the Poseidon program, after it emerged that a malfunctioning missile with the potential to carry a nuclear warhead was forced to self-destruct in mid-air off the US coast last June. (See this article.)

Hudson added: “These enormous risks have to be acknowledged particularly when we also now face the increasing likelihood of cyber-attack on nuclear weapons systems. With advancing technological developments added to the already dangerous mix there can be no confidence that nuclear weapons are a credible part of British security in the 21st century.

“This is also the week of the Trident missile crisis, a misfire and a government cover-up. We shouldn’t have to wait 40 years for the CIA to release documents to know the truth, which is why we’re calling for a Trident inquiry.”

Member of Parliament Brendan O’Hara, the Scottish National Party defence spokesman, said the disclosure was “deeply worrying.” He added, “What happened in 1974 looks like a very, very lucky escape—it could have been completely devastating.

“The truth is—as we saw with the Trident malfunction revelations—nothing has changed, it could happen again,” he said.

“The people of Scotland live in the shadow of this appalling nuclear arsenal because Westminster puts it there—against the [wishes of the] vast majority of its elected representatives—and without taking the necessary measures to defend it or to protect the people who live here,” O’Hara said.

James Jinks, who with Peter Hennessy wrote a history of Royal Navy submarines, said the cable was further confirmation of a “highly secret underwater game of cat and mouse.”

He said: “The Soviets routinely sent submarines to waters around Scotland, where they would attempt to detect, track and trail Royal Navy and US Navy ballistic missile-carrying submarines as they deployed from the Royal Navy base at Faslane and the US Navy base at Holy Loch.”

He added: “A little under two years before the collision between an unidentified Soviet submarine and USS James Madison, another Soviet submarine, a nuclear-powered Victor class submarine, was detected in the Clyde-approach areas.

“For six days, the Soviet submarine remained 60 miles north-west of Donegal and 50 miles off Colonsay, where it was kept under 24-hour surveillance by Royal Air Force Nimrod maritime patrol aircraft operating out of RAF Kinloss. It was eventually ‘chased out’ of the area by HMS Conqueror, a Royal Navy nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine.”

Read the original Guardian article here.

March 15, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Disappeared on the Border: Chased and Scattered to Death

By John Heid

“We recognize the weight that the language of disappearance holds; we use it to call attention to the fact that disappearance is not a natural or inevitable phenomenon but rather a direct consequence of US border-enforcement policies and practices.”

—From “Disappeared: How The US Border Enforcement Agencies are Fueling a Missing Persons Crisis,” by La Coalitión De Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths

The sunbaked skull seemed to complement the volcanic rocks that lie strewn around it. Haunting in its symmetry. Ivory amidst ebony, splayed across the desert floor. The year-round searing heat of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge can do that, bake things into anonymity. Were it not for the vacant eye sockets, we likely would have walked right by these human remains unaware that someone’s life ended there, or nearby. Eerily the eyeless skull faced south.

Joel Smith, Director of Operations for Humane Borders, and I were hiking in the Growler Valley region of the Refuge on our annual maintenance check of loosely-scattered water stations. The region’s austerity is at once beautiful and perilous. The aptly named El Camino del Diablo (Devil’s Highway) cuts a parallel swath across part of the valley. There is little shade anywhere, save the occasional Palo Verde or mesquite tree. Teddy bear cholla, salt and brittlebush, ocotillo and prickly pear cactus provide modest ground cover. The horizon is elusive. One can walk all day and not feel any closer to the mountain just ahead. Time and distance seem like illusions. I have never encountered anyone on my hikes there. Not one.

Joel tried unsuccessfully to summon Border Patrol agents to report the remains. As dusk approached we planted a blue flag on a high pole marking the site for later recovery. Then we returned to our camp miles away.

Prior to the mid 1990s, deaths in the desert were rare and usually attributable to vehicular accidents. Today the Sonoran Desert, 100,000 square miles of Arizona, California and Northern Mexico, particularly its remotest areas, is a veritable death trap. “Exposure” or more frequently “undetermined” is listed as cause of death. In late December 2016, humanitarian aid workers initiated an exploratory effort in the vast reaches of the Refuge. Four sets of skeletal human remains were recovered in the first week, in the Growler Valley. Several more were discovered in the ensuing weeks. The border-hugging refuge is a cemetery of the unknown, and unburied.

Since 1999, the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office has handled more than 2,800 human remains, those who died attempting to migrate through the southern Arizona deserts. Border Patrol reports 6,029 human remains recovered in the same region since the 1990s. Fifty-one bodies have been recorded already this year, with deaths trending between 100 and 250 annually over 10 years. Skeletal remains like those Joel and I encountered are not counted; nor are the deaths of migrants in Border Patrol custody. Estimates of the total number of migrant fatalities vary between three and 10-times the official number of bodies recovered.

This is a dark untold chapter behind this staggering body count, the story of the dead never recovered, the disappeared.

“I’m looking for a disappeared person” was the gist of over 800 phone calls to the Missing Migrant Crisis Line in 2015 alone. A family member is desperately seeking information on the whereabouts of a loved one who has come north from Mexico or Central America—and has not turned up.

The term “disappeared” has generally been associated with people kidnapped by authoritarian regimes and killed without explanation. The United Nation’s definition of “enforced disappearance” now includes state policies which result in persons being disappeared. People don’t just vanish into thin air in the Sonoran Desert. A sophisticated technological network which includes surveillance towers, drones, ground sensors, and cameras work together with an ever-increasing number of Border Patrol agents to create a vast zone of enforcement which pushes people further into formidable, lethal terrain. In effect, the desert becomes a weapon. People do not just disappear. They are disappeared. Their numbers are unknowable, uncountable, and reprehensible—at least in the view of civil society. Even one lost is one too many, let alone thousands. The 1999 “Prevention Through Deterrence” enforcement directive which fueled this catastrophe is not only fatally flawed, it is criminal.

Members of La Coalitión De Derechos Humanos and No More Deaths held a press conference near the border fence in Nogales, Arizona last December to announce the publication of their latest abuse report: “Deadly Apprehension Methods, The Consequences of Chase and Scatter in the Wilderness.” The study spotlights one of the US Border Patrol’s more egregious tactics, “Chase and Scatter.”

“Chase” is defined as “the active period of pursuit of border crossers by US Border Patrol agents during an attempted apprehension.” Four-wheelers, horses, and low-flying helicopters—euphemistically called “dusting”—are used to pursue people. The copter hovers directly over people creating a maelstrom of rocks, branches and dust, which scatters people in the chaos. Then the chase ensues.

In 42 percent of the over 500 interviews conducted by La Coalitión de Derechos Humans, people reported members of their group lost to the wilderness by this tactic; 41 percent reported injuries including broken limbs and lacerations. A few individuals are usually apprehended. The rest are scattered, often unable to regroup, fleeing alone into the wilderness. This tactic has contributed to untold numbers of the disappeared. The policy’s title is “Prevention Through deterrence.” Human remains are what deterrence looks like.

As I’m writing Feb. 14, I’ve been told that four more sets of human remains were recovered in the Growler Valley last week. There is no end in sight.

—John Heid lives and works with the Mariposa Community in Tucson.

February 23, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Yucca Mountain Scientifically Unsuitable for Rad Waste Repository

Yucca Mountain poses risks beyond Nevada communities. Because of its distance from the majority of radioactive waste in the country, the transport routes would impact a wide swath of the United States. Rail accidents are not rare, so the risks posed from the transport of this material involve millions of people along shipping routes.

By John LaForge

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) sets strict standards that must be met before a high-level radioactive waste repository can be licensed. The licensing process for the Yucca Mountain dump site, which has cost $9 billion to date, was halted in 2010 because the site can no longer be defended on scientific grounds. In its current location, 90 miles from Las Vegas, the dump would also be unlawful because according to the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley, the Western Shoshone Nation holds title to Yucca Mountain and the Western Shoshone overwhelmingly oppose the dump.

While Congressional leaders talk today about reconsidering Yucca, crucial scientific findings (some listed below) should permanently disqualify it. Principle among them is that the geology of Yucca Mt. doesn’t meet the original statutory requirements established by the NWPA. Even after hydrological, geological, volcanic and seismological show-stoppers have been revealed, the licensing process was not halted (until 2010). Instead, NWPA specifications have been repeatedly weakened, leading one Nevada Governor, Kenny Guinn, to accuse the Energy Dept. of lowering standards to win approval for the site.

In 2014, Allison Macfarlane, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), warned that when the licensing process was halted, there were still hundreds of “contentions” challenging the application. The General Accounting Office reported that the project’s former managing contractor, Bechtel SAIC, had in 2001 identified 293 unresolved technical issues to further analyze before licensing could proceed. Each contention must be argued before a panel of administrative law judges. Macfarlane wrote in Science magazine that the “[Dept. of Energy] will not be able to submit an acceptable application to NRC within the express statutory time frames for several years because it will take that long to resolve many technical issues.” Macfarlane concluded that “disposal of high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain is based on an unsound engineering strategy and poor use of present understanding of the properties of spent nuclear fuel.”

In 2007, the Bow Ridge earthquake fault was discovered by the US Geological Survey’s Yucca Mt. Project Branch to be hundreds of feet east of where it had estimated. It passes directly under a planned pad where waste canisters would be kept for years before they are entombed in tunnels inside the mountain, according to the USGS’s May 21, 2007 letter. The error means designers must revamp or scrap their plans. Yucca Mt. project officials said they are still developing repository design, construction and operating ideas. The DOE has never produced blueprints that Nevada state officials can review and critique.

In 2004, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the National Academy of Sciences found “no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years…” The Academy reported instead that “repository performance” must be judged on “a time scale that is on the order of [one million] years at Yucca Mountain.” It’s been known for decades that some of the waste, as a New York Times science writer said, “remains radioactive for millions of years,” that it “would be hazardous for millions of years,” and, as the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported, that “nearly 100 million pounds” of high-level waste “will remain lethal for millions of years.” The National Academy of Sciences found in 1983 that the “chemical characteristics of the water at Yucca Mt. are such that the wastes would dissolve more easily than at most other places.” The NAS also “make[s] the assumption that a nuclear waste repository will eventually leak,” and “The wastes would … most likely reach humans through water flowing underground through the wastes and eventually reaching the surface through springs or wells.”

In 2002, a mild earthquake on June 14, about 12 miles southeast of Yucca Mt. fueled opposition to plans for the dump. The magnitude-4.4 quake was called a “wake-up call” by critics who pointed to the potential for damage to above-ground storage facilities, where thousands of tons of waste brought to the site would be kept for decades while it cools. “If anyone ever wondered about the wisdom of locating an underground radioactive dump site on an active fault line, this shows why,” Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said after the quake.

In 1999, a DOE report declared that leaving the waste in storage at reactor sites is just as safe as moving it to Yucca Mt. — as long as the waste is repackaged every 100 years. Given the uncertainties about Yucca Mt. and the risks of moving waste fuel, it makes sense to leave the material were it is generated at the reactor sites while developing alternatives. Independent scientists suggest on-site, above-ground, monitored storage, hardened against terrorism, along with additional measures for safety and security.

In 1998, evidence that the inside of the mountain is periodically flooded with water came in the form of zircon crystals found deep inside. “Crystals do not form without complete immersion in water,” said Jerry Szymanski, formerly the DOE’s top geologist at Yucca. Szymanski’s finding that deep water rises and falls inside Yucca Mt. means “hot underground water has invaded the mountain and might again in the time when radioactive waste would still be extremely dangerous. The results would be catastrophic.” In 1998, the Yucca Mt. site was found to be subject to earthquakes or lava flows every 1,000 years — 10 times more frequently than earlier estimated — according to a California Institute of Technology study. The finding meant that radiation dispersal from the site is much more likely during the dump’s radioactive hazard period.

In 1997, DOE researchers announced that rain water had seeped down 800 feet from the top of Yucca Mt. into the repository in a mere 40 years (as dated by chlorine-36). Government scientists had earlier claimed that rainwater would take hundreds or thousands of years to reach the waste caverns. Federal officials have long required that the existence of fast-flowing water would disqualify the site.

In 1995, government physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory warned in an internal report that the wastes might erupt in a nuclear explosion and scatter radioactivity to the winds or into groundwater, or both. Dr. Charles D. Bowman and Dr. Francesco Venneri found that staggering dangers will arise thousands of years from now — after steel waste containers dissolve and plutonium begins to disperse into surrounding rock. Dr. John Browne, head of energy research at Los Alamos National Lab, said about the research paper, “Our feeling is that the subject is so important that it deserves additional peer review outside the laboratory.” The DOE’s former top geologist Jerry Szymanski said to the Washington Post, “You’re talking about an unimaginable catastrophe. Chernobyl would be small potatoes.”

In 1990, the National Research Council said in a study that the DOE’s Yucca Mt. plan is “bound to fail” because: a) requiring predictions of safety for even 10,000 years is a scientific impossibility; and b) the Nuclear Waste Policy Act demands a level of safety that science cannot guarantee. The US Circuit Court of Appeals later ordered the government to judge dumpsite performance based not on a 10,000-year, but a one-million-year time scale.

In 1989, sixteen scientists from the US Geologic Survey charged that the DOE was using stop-work orders “to prevent the discovery of problems that would doom the repository.” The geologists reported that, “There is no facility for trial and error, for genuine research, for innovation, or for creativity.” Even the NRC complained that, “work at Yucca Mt. seemed designed mostly to get the repository built rather than to determine if the site is suitable.”

If Yucca Mt.’s containment puzzles can be solved or ignored and it is rehabilitated and licensed after sitting unattended for seven years, gamblers in Las Vegas and scores of other cities around the country will have a problem of health science to face. Fred Dilger, a Clark County, Nevada planner and former state transportation analyst, has warned that when waste trains go through town, “All of the casinos on the west side of Las Vegas Boulevard would be bathed in gamma radiation.”

Yucca Mountain Scientifically Unsuitable for Rad Waste Repository

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Documents reveal 1974 crash between US and Soviet subs off Scottish coast

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