Nukewatch

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Former Pentagon Chief: Get Rid of Minuteman Missiles 

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Just in time to bolster the message of Nukewatch’s newly published Revised Edition of Nuclear Heartland, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry has called for the complete elimination of the remaining Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM).

Defense News reports that Mr. Perry, who was Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, said December 3, “Today … we now face the kind of dangers of a nuclear event like we had during the Cold War, an accidental war.”

 “Nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security, they endanger it.”
—William J. Perry

“The greatest source of that danger, to Perry’s mind, are the ICBMs,” Defense News noted, “which he said are simply too easy to launch on bad information and would be the most likely source of an accidental nuclear war. He referred to the ICBM as ‘destabilizing’ in that it invites an attack from another power.”

William J. Perry was Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton.

ICBMs, Sec. Perry concluded, “aren’t necessary … they’re not needed. Any reasonable definition of deterrence will not require that third leg.” The reference is to a nuclear weapons “triad” with submarines, bombers and missiles as “legs” of a three-part arsenal.

We note likewise in Nuclear Heartland, Revised that Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, who was Vice Commander of US Strategic Command—which controls the ICBMs—has said, “The greatest threat to my force is an accident. The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid.”

Perry’s analysis echoes that of other high-level military officials who have called for getting rid of the Minuteman IIIs.

A group of high-level military and political leaders chaired by General James Cartwright, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former Commander of US nuclear forces, published a report in 2012 which was signed by Senator Chuck Hagel who would later become Secretary of Defense. This study concluded that a total of 450 warheads deployed on submarines and heavy bombers with none left on ICBMs would constitute a massive enough nuclear arsenal.

The William J. Perry Project website notes that Secretary Perry has said, “A lifetime immersed in special access to and top-secret assessment of strategic nuclear options has given me a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons no longer provide for our security, they endanger it.”

—JL

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Don’t Bank on the Bomb

Financial Institutions Increasingly Drop the Bomb from Investment Portfolios
Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016
By PAX, The Hague, The Netherlands 

GENEVA—Fifty-three financial institutions prohibit or limit investments in nuclear weapon producers, shows “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” a report published November 12 by Dutch peace organization PAX. The number represents a 150 percent increase over last year’s report of the same name.

The increase in divestment illustrates the growing stigmatization of nuclear weapons because of the renewed focus on the indiscriminate and unlawful consequences of their manufacture and detonation. The PAX report also identifies 382 banks, insurance companies and pension funds which have made $493 billion available to nuclear weapons producers since January 2012. Based on evidence presented in the report, activists worldwide call on financial institutions to withdraw investments in companies making weapons of mass destruction, and demand that governments ban nuclear weapons.

The PAX report shows how these stigmatizing policies result in new exclusions by a number of institutions, including Fonds de Compensation (Luxembourg) and Nordea (Sweden). PAX researcher Wilbert van der Zeijden, co-author of the report, told reporters, “No bank, pension fund, or insurance company should have financial relations with companies involved in weapons of mass destruction. In the case of a nuclear detonation, the health and environmental consequences will last decades and effective aid will not be possible. The only way to prevent this from happening is to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons. Stigmatizing these inhumane and indiscriminate weapons, and excluding them from investments, will help.”

Nuclear weapons are the only weapons of mass destruction not yet explicitly prohibited under international law, a legal gap that 121 countries have pledged to fill. By stigmatizing investments in Bomb building, these 53 financial institutions help pave the way toward a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons.

Hall of Fame 

Investments in nuclear weapon producers are not a necessity but a choice, as is shown by 13 financial institutions listed in the report’s Hall of Fame. These institutions have outstanding policies preventing any and all investment in any company with association to nuclear weapons. These institutions are based in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Britain. Susi Snyder, co-author of the report said, “Divestment makes it clear to producers that as long as they are involved in nuclear weapon programs, they will be considered illegitimate and a bad investment.”

Top 10 Investors All Based in the US 

The top 10 investors alone provided more than $209 billion, out of the $493 billion total, to the identified nuclear weapon producers. All of the top 10 are based in the United States.

The top three—Capital Group, State Street, and Blackrock—have more than $95 billion combined invested in the producers named in this report.

In Europe, the most heavily invested are BNP Paribas (France), Royal Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom) and Crédit Agricole (France). In the Asia-Pacific region, the biggest investors are Mitsubishi UFJ Financial (Japan), Life Insurance Corporation of India, and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial (Japan).

—PAX is a non-governmental peace group based in Utrecht, The Netherlands, working for the protection and security of civilians, and to prevent and end armed violence. 

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Parliamentarians Pushing Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016

Having joined forces with the international campaign to abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN), Australian Member of Parliament Melissa Parke delivered this commanding appeal for a nuclear weapons ban treaty to Australia’s House of Representatives, November 12, 2015: 

The devastation, both human and environmental, seen in Japan in 1945 demonstrated conclusively that humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist. Yet, while the threat of nuclear weapons may seem like a thing of the past, right now there are nine nations that possess more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, 1,800 of which are on high alert, with the ability to be launched within minutes.

Nuclear-armed countries spend more than $143 billion per annum on maintaining and updating their arsenals, diverting public funds from critical services such as education and health care, yet nuclear weapons are ineffective and counterproductive in addressing global and national security challenges. Effective in annihilating everything? Yes. Making the world safer? Certainly not.

The late Honorable Tom Uren, a Member of Parliament for 32 years who served as a minister in the Whitlam and Hawke Labor governments, was a passionate anti-nuclear and peace activist. A prisoner of war at the Omuta camp located 80 kilometers from Nagasaki, Uren witnessed the second US atomic bombing. He said, “I will never forget, as long as I live, the color of the sky on the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on that city on August 9, 1945.”

Upon returning to Japan 15 years later, Uren’s opinion, that “no nation should use nuclear weapons against any other member of our human family,” was affirmed as he witnessed the ongoing devastation. The Tom Uren Memorial Fund, created after his passing in January this year, supports the work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN….

ICAN is an Australian civil society initiative that has been pivotal to the success of three major government and civil society conferences over the past three years—Oslo, Nayarit, and Vienna—that have put the [uncontrollable] impacts of nuclear weapons, and the need for a nuclear weapons ban, squarely on the global political agenda.… [The Dec. 2014 Vienna conference communique warned in part that the impact of nuclear weapon detonations “would not be constrained by national borders and could have regional and even global consequences,” including long-term damage to the environment, climate, and social order, and “could even threaten the survival of humankind.”]

The ICAN-commissioned Nielsen poll in 2014 indicated that 84 percent of Australians want the government to work toward a treaty banning nuclear weapons. With biological weapons, chemical weapons, land mines and cluster munitions banned, nuclear weapons remain the only weapons of mass destruction not yet explicitly prohibited under international law.

It is a matter of deep regret that at the recently concluded session of the UN General Assembly’s First Committee, which deals with disarmament and international security matters, Australia was the leader of a loose grouping of nations that worked to prevent progress toward the negotiation of a treaty prohibiting the use, production and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

Australia refused to join the overwhelming majority of the international community in declaring that nuclear weapons should never be used again under any circumstances. It objected to the words “under any circumstances.” This raises the question: under what circumstances does the government believe that nuclear weapons should be used?

I am pleased that, despite Australia’s best efforts to undermine moves towards a ban, the UN First Committee adopted a Mexico-led resolution to establish a subsidiary body of the General Assembly that will begin discussions in 2016 on the elements for a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The Australian delegation failed in its bid … for eternal deadlock. …

Australia must remove itself from its extended nuclear deterrence policy and shift its national security strategy towards an effective and sustainable security paradigm, like the vast majority of nation states that reject any role for nuclear weapons in their defense. …

I call on the Australian government to follow over 150 governments, the UN Secretary General and the Red Cross movement, and support the complete eradication of nuclear weapons. To quote the UN Secretary-General, “There are no right hands for wrong weapons.”

Tom Uren passed away on Australia Day* this year at the age of 93. Just three years earlier, on Australia Day in 2012, nearly 800 Order of Australia recipients, including former prime ministers, governors-general, foreign affairs and defense ministers, premiers, governors, High Court judges, and chiefs of the armed forces, called on the government to adopt a nuclear-weapons-free defense posture and work towards a nuclear weapons [ban] convention.

One of those 800 Order of Australia participants was Tom Uren. … In this week of remembrance … let us commit to taking those steps towards a nuclear-weapons-free world.

*January 26 is the official National Day of Australia and marks the arrival in 1788 of the First Fleet of British ships in New South Wales.

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Parting the Silk Curtain of Privilege

Through the Prism of Nonviolence
Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016
By John Heid 

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. 

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World And Me 

“Don’t all lives matter?” yelled an off-duty police officer to me over the din of idling traffic. He was stopped at a red light during rush hour in downtown Tucson where I and other members of Stand Up For Racial Justice were holding signs that read “Black Lives Matter.” I hollered back “Of course they do; no one here is saying they don’t…” Then the light turned green and he drove off leaving me in a fog of exhaust and frustration. He was not the only commuter that evening to shout out that hollow query. These drive-by moments are more theatrical than productive. The matters at hand can hardly be addressed by volleying sound bites and clichés. I understand. Just a few months earlier I was asking aloud the very same query: “Don’t all lives matter?”

For years I believed that I was pretty well attuned to racial injustice despite the efforts of some who sought to disabuse me of my self-assuredness. I considered myself to be a nonviolent activist as if that moniker somehow granted me automatic immunity from the social disease of racism. How could I be so flagrantly presumptuous? Privilege! It is as soft and seductive as silk, and nearly as impenetrable as teflon-coated chain mail armor.

In the mid-1960s my mother took my brothers and I to civil rights marches. She preached that all people are equal in the eyes of God. She spoke with admiration of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mom introduced me to John Howard Griffin’s best selling book Black Like Me. When I was 14, I went to a lecture Mr. Griffin gave and came out dizzy. How could the lives of black and white people be so different? How did I mange to ignore my childhood observations of people of color sitting in the back of the city bus while whites sat in the front? In my hometown, Erie, Penn., at 15, I went to hear Dick Gregory. How clearly I remember being puzzled. Why was this man so angry?

Any exposure I had to race relations during my adolescence was extracurricular. Nothing in my classroom textbooks ever invited me to explore, let alone challenge, the dominant cultural assumptions about race. The only book in my school desk that mentioned the word “privilege” was the dictionary.

In jails across the country from the mid-1980s on, I shared cells with many men of color. Some shared their stories. Their road to incarceration, their life’s journey, was categorically different than mine. I presumed we were in the same predicament—incarceration—but I was wrong. Their consequence was my choice. Our lives’ trajectories were not the same, even as we shared the same address. I now recall Malcolm X’s quote: “If you’re black, you were born in jail.” The guys were patient with me. I was a captive student, they my professors. In fits and starts I was learning on the job, or rather, I was un-learning.

Throughout the 1990s I attended lectures by Dr. Cornell West, Diane Nash, Angela Davis, and Jim Lawson. I read Audre Lourde, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Edward P. Jones, author of The Known World among others. Dr. West’s seminal work Race Matters stopped me in my tracks. Gradually, our understanding moves from the cerebral to the visceral. The entrenched edifice of privilege erodes much like a stone under drops of water. Now comes the latest drop, Ta-Neshi Coates and his short, powerful book, Between The World And Me. These writers and activists have been like bridges across the great divide of privilege; they invite me to cross over and examine my own journey, as much than theirs. What stereotypes do I carry deep within? How do I come to see the mirage of my cultural endowed privilege for what it is? And furthermore, how can I begin to transform the destructive consequences of this privilege into constructive ones?

The road comes without a map or dictionary. I stumble over terms, let alone ideas. What does Ta-Nehisi Coates mean when he writes: “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”

What I write is not so much a confession as my acknowledgment of a reality that has been palpably evident to my friends of color—for years. Now, step by step, I’m coming out. I don’t feel guilty so much as liberated, or at least walking on the rocky road to something more real, more human than what my Eurocentric culture has taught and that I had bought hook, line and sinker these many years.

Frederick Douglass wrote: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” I would add: Nor does the privilege that undergirds it. I now believe that for our nonviolence to be authentic and consistent we must work to dismantle systemic and personal privilege in its myriad and insidious forms—starting within ourselves. Black lives matter.

—John Heid lives and works at the Casa Mariposa Community in Tucson, Arizona.

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Radioactive Waste Ignites in Underground Nevada Dump

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2015-2016
By John LaForge 
A 40-second cellphone video captured five explosions and some of the plume of smoke and debris from the buried nuclear waste ignition near Beatty, Nevada, Oct. 18.

On Sunday, Oct. 18, an underground fire caused a string of at least five explosions in a long-closed-down low-level radioactive waste dump in the desert, 10 miles from Beatty, Nevada. The fire and explosions, which produced plumes of debris and white smoke, were caught on a 40-second cellphone video.* The Associated Press reported that debris from the dump was blown up to 190 feet by the explosions. Officials closed 140 miles of US Highway 95 for almost 24 hours because of the rad-waste explosions and fire, and because heavy flooding damaged roads in Nye County the same day.

Neighbors complained later that they were not told of the fire or why the highway, their only escape route, had been closed. Beatty resident Cindy Craig said to CBS News, “We didn’t even get told about it until the next day.” In an Oct. 20 conference call with reporters, Nevada State Fire Marshal Peter Mulvihill said, “We don’t know exactly what caught fire. We’re not exactly sure what was burning in that pit.”

Because the fire and explosions were caught on video, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Nevada National Guard, the US Departments of Energy and Homeland Security, and even the National Nuclear Security Administration all became involved in the emergency. After some fly-over radiation testing Oct. 19, Rusty Harris-Bishop, spokesman for the EPA’s Region 9 office in San Francisco, said, “No gamma radiation has been detected at this time.” However, monitoring above the area of the fire and explosions was initiated well after plumes of smoke from the explosions had dispersed.

Nye County Sheriff Sharon Wehrly said that US 95 was reopened at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 19, after air testing found no contamination.

The state National Guard later sent a four-member team to the scene to test ground-level contamination. They reported Oct. 21 not having detected alpha or beta radiation on the ground after walking within six feet of the burned trench.

Closed for 23 years, the 80-acre dumping ground was run from 1962 until 1993 by US Ecology, earlier known as Nuclear Engineering Co. US Ecology still operates a 40-acre hazardous waste dump adjacent to the radioactive waste site. A 1997 New York Times report about an earlier nuclear waste explosion said these accidents illustrate “how even a long-shut weapons plant can hide unknown dangers, and raise questions about what lies ahead.”

The low-level radioactive waste dump, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, consists of 22 trenches up to 800 feet long and 50 feet deep, and its older trenches have radioactive waste within three feet of the surface, the Las Vegas Sun reported. The accident took place in what is called Trench 14, which is part of a stadium-sized pit that was filled with rad-waste in the 1970s, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Certain radioactive materials are known to catch fire when in contact with water, so the flooding that struck prior to the fiery explosions may have caused them. Unfortunately authorities do not know what sorts of radioactive isotopes are buried in the trenches there. Nor does anyone know how much radioactive waste burned in the fire.

Management of the dump was transferred from US Ecology to the state of Nevada in 1993. Asked by the Review Journal if an independent investigation should be conducted to validate the integrity of the probe given that the state is conducting an investigation of an incident that happened on its own land, Department of Public Safety Director James Wright told the paper that “at this point we feel we have to get the initial findings.”

Judy Treichel, head of the nonprofit Nuclear Waste Task Force, also questioned whether Nevada state officials should be conducting the investigation. “I wonder if the state environmental department is smart, skilled and motivated to really dig through this thing,” she told the Review Journal. “The state is the property owner. The state is on the hook if there are big costs.”

Waste buried at the Beatty site does not include used fuel from nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons programs, but contaminated tools, clothing, medical and laboratory wastes and hardware such as steam generators from power reactors.

Buried Waste Theoretically and Literally Explosive

The history of self-igniting wastes is frightening, and warnings about the likelihood of further explosions are as recent as last year.

  • In February 2014, at a deep underground dump in New Mexico, a barrel of military rad-waste “burst after it arrived at the dump, releasing radioactive uranium, plutonium and americium throughout the underground facility,” according to National Public Radio. The so-called Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is an experimental project inside a deep salt deposit where the Pentagon is burying plutonium-contaminated wastes left from decades of nuclear weapons production. NPR’s March 26, 2015 story concerned the Department of Energy’s (DOE) 277-page report about the February explosion. The report says, “Experiments showed that various combinations of nitrate salt, Swheat Scoop® [cat litter], nitric acid, and oxalate self-heat at temperatures below 100°C.” The DOE report used the terms “thermal runaway” and “self-heat” rather than the word “explosion.” The underground accident contaminated 22 workers internally, spread plutonium contamination throughout the deep underground chambers, and shut down the operation. For almost two years, the DOE has been working to reopen the facility.
  • In expert hearings held in southern Ontario in Sepember 2014, Dr. Frank Greening made identical warnings about the potential explosiveness of Canadian radioactive waste if it were to be buried next to Lake Huron under plans made by Ontario Power Generation. (See p. 7)
  • In May 1997, an explosion ruptured a water line, and blew out windows and a door in the defunct Plutonium Reclamation Facility at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State, which for 40 years was the site of plutonium production for nuclear weapons. While no longer in operation, “plutonium-bearing material still remains” the DOE said at the time. Four months later the New York Times reported that the explosion “sent the lid of a big steel tank flying into the ceiling, cracking open the roof of the airtight building, and releasing a brown cloud of noxious, but not radioactive chemicals.” Eight workers, outside the building when the explosion took place, were sent for medical exams after reporting sore throats, headaches, and a metallic taste in their mouths.
    The 360-square mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation, on the bank of the Columbia River in southeast Washington State, was the site of nine plutonium production reactors during the Cold War nuclear weapons buildup and is now the one of most radioatively contaminated places in the world. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
  • In May 1996, a welding spark caused a waste cask explosion at Wisconsin’s Point Beach reactor on Lake Michigan. The blast of hydrogen gas was “powerful enough to up-end the three-ton lid while it was atop a storage cask filled with high-level waste.” The reactor’s owner called that accident merely a “gaseous ignition event,” but was later fined $325,000.
  • In 1995, government physicists Charles Bowman and Francesco Venneri at Los Alamos National Laboratory predicted that wastes buried at the (now-cancelled) Yucca Mountain high-level dump, 20 miles from Beatty, Neveda waste fire, might erupt in a nuclear explosion and scatter radioactivity to the winds or into groundwater, or both. Bowman and Venneri found that the explosion dangers will arise thousands of years from now—after steel waste containers dissolve and plutonium begins to disperse into surrounding rock. Former DOE geologist Jerry Szymanski said, “You’re talking about an unimaginable catastrophe. Chernobyl would be small potatoes.”
  • During the 1980s and 1990s the DOE reported that tanks holding high-level liquid radioactive waste at the Hanford Reservation and at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina could catch fire or explode from the build-up of hydrogen gas. According to the Seattle Times, twice in six months the DOE warned that 20 of 177 waste tanks could explode under certain conditions. The huge underground tanks store about 56 million gallons of the waste at Hanford. Likewise at the Savannah River Site, the Environmental Policy Institute reported in 1987 that tanks holding millions of gallons of liquid high-level wastes were at “substantial risk of exploding”—also from the combustion of either hydrogen gas or organic vapors. The chances of a tank explosion at Savannah River were reportedly as high as one in 50. Fifty-one large tanks there each hold between 750,000 and 1.3 million gallons of the unstable, thermally hot and highly radioactive liquids. At the two highly contaminated government sites, decades have been devoted to attempts at draining the tanks and solidifying the liquid wastes to prevent them from further contaminating groundwater. At Hanford alone, where 10 of 177 tanks had been emptied as of June 2013, the project has already cost $36 billion.
  • The worst known tank explosion took place at Chelyablinsk, in Russia’s Ural Mountains, the site of plutoniumproduction. On September 29, 1957 a high-level liquid-waste storage tank exploded—throwing a 160-ton lid off of the container, and spreading mainly strontium-90 across more than 64 square miles. The tank held 70 to 80 tons of highly radioactive waste, all of which was dispersed. The plume of radiation further contaminated the Techa River, fourteen lakes, and travelled at least 300 kilometers northeast from the explosion. At least 34,000 people were exposed to radiation—externally and internally—for one to three years before 10,700 were relocated from their homes. At least 200 people died from radiation sickness, and later the names of 30 small towns and a few larger ones were permanently removed from maps of the area.

The caustic, radioactive “self-heating thermal runaway” in Beatty, Nevada is only the latest warning not to bury radioactive waste. Putting the materials that act like explosive nuclear time bombs out-of-sight and out-of-mind will not keep us safe.

For such wastes, only above-ground, monitored, hardened, retrievable storage can ever come close to protecting the environment and human health. A halt to the on-going mass production of radioactive waste is the only economical path to finding improved and sustainable means of waste management.

Sources: Associated Press, Oct. 19, 20, 21 & 26; Boston Herald, Oct. 19; Las Vegas Review-Journal, Oct. 19, 20, 21 & 22; FoxReportDaily, Oct. 20; Las Vegas Sun, Oct. 21 & 22; and CBS Las Vegas, Oct. 22, 2015

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