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The Missing Link Event: A battle for justice and reparations for Shinkolobwe’s negative uranium legacy

By Isaiah Mombilo
Edited by Leona Morgan with permission

Editor’s note: The Congolese Civil Society of South Africa (CCSSA) is a non-governmental organization based in Cape Town, South Africa with a mission of “Uniting all Congolese and all African[s] living in South Africa under one umbrella regardless of their ethnic, religious or political origin, country and views.” This summer, CCSSA held its annual event called “The Missing Link” which is aimed at telling the world the story of Shinkolobwe uranium mine, a deliberately erased but essential part of the Manhattan Project. This year’s hybrid event featured local speakers, music and dance as well as presenters from around the world, including Haruko Moritaki from Hiroshima.

Photo Credit: justseeds.org.

The CCSSA commemorated the 78th anniversary of the tragic end of the Second World War on Sunday, July 30, 2023.

This end was happy in that it marked the culmination of five years of combat and hostility; however, the victory of one camp shocked the collective human conscience following the disastrous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

Everything seems to have been said about this atrocious war and the start of the nuclear arms race, and yet, nearly eight decades later, an important part of the story still remains unknown, if not hidden. This is what the CCSSA has been fighting to reveal and enshrine in the official narrative for eight years now through an annual event titled, “The Missing Link.”
This year’s event consisted of several parts starting with paying tribute to the memory of all the Japanese victims of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A candle was lit and a minute of silence was held in their memory.

There were talks about the bomb and its impacts, testimonies from victims and descendants of victims who survived and became anti-nuclear activists. There were presentations about the Shinkolobwe uranium mine with its uniquely rich uranium ore deposit of 65 percent [today, mines are often 2 percent or less], and about the route this uranium took throughout the Manhattan Project.

Photo Credit: Mail and Guardian

Lastly, there were testimonies from Indigenous Peoples fighting nuclear impacts in the United States and India, followed by a message from CCSSA Vice-chairperson Joe-Yves Salankang Sa Ngol entitled “Shinkolobwe: A City That Doesn’t Exist.”
Salankang Sa Ngol explained why the name “Shinkolobwe” does not appear anywhere in the official World War II narrative.

First, the U.S. Americans and Belgians had this small village removed not only from the narrative, but also from the map of the Congo to prevent their German adversaries from knowing where the precious uranium was located. Secondly, these two countries did not want to be held responsible for the mass crimes committed during the extraction of the uranium. Congolese were sent into the depths of the mine to extract this dangerous ore without any appropriate protective equipment. They extracted, sorted, transported and loaded it without protection, and its highly radioactive waste was abandoned in the open air for years. No concrete action has been taken to dismantle the mine’s remaining infrastructure, to clean up the site, or even to complete an assessment of the radiation risks to surrounding populations.

This year, the gathering of voices from several continents, from both the point of origin of the Shinkolobwe uranium and its final resting place, is proof that gradually the world is learning of this missing link.

Together, let’s work for a denuclearized and healthy world.

For full reflection by Isaiah Mombilo, visit: congolesecivilsocietysa.org/resources.
To see the 2023 Missing Link event: facebook.com/congolesecivilsocietyofsouthafrica.

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NATO’s Steadfast Noon, is Ready-Made Doom

 

A U.S. B61 free-fall gravity bomb inside a bunker alongside a German Tornado fighter jet on Büchel Air Force Base, Germany.

By John La Forge, October 20, 2023

On October 16, during the NATO-supplied, nuclear-armed hot war in Ukraine, the alliance began its annual nuclear attack rehearsal dubbed “Steadfast Noon.” This practice involves air forces from 13 countries, the “exercising” of fighter jets and U.S. B-52s, lasts until October 26, and will be roaring over Italy, Croatia and the eastern Mediterranean — not far from two aircraft carrier battle groups charging toward the war over the Gaza Strip prison break.

A hundred people joined an October 14 protest outside Germany’s Nörvenich Air Base calling for cancellation of the rehearsal, to no avail.

NATO Sec. Gen. Jens Stoltenberg naturally said, “Our exercise will help to ensure the credibility, effectiveness and security of our nuclear deterrent.” This is shrewd, silk tie talk about threatening nuclear attacks, threats barely distinguishable from Russia’s verbal warnings. Mr. Stoltenberg dared to add, “[T]he fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

Aware that this fundamental purpose was disproved and vaporized by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, NATO practices nuclear attacks. Steadfast Noon is a role-play for pilots, a dry run to test classroom preparations made at the German branch of the U.S. Air Force Nuclear College on Ramstein Air Base. According to the AFNC website, the school “is responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters … every day.” Some such air-delivered nuclear weapons are the U.S. “B61” free-fall gravity bombs stationed in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Turkey.

One Nuclear College course named “Theater Nuclear Operation” was described this way (before the page was taken down): “[A] 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting.” Another class is said to provide: “proficiency in importing and creating target models, developing attack plans using conventional or nuclear weapons, performing consequence assessment to WMD scenarios.”

If you imagined that nuclear war is unthinkable, this school says its fighter jet pilot students, “will be able to import, edit, and modify target sites”; “calculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets; [and] “develop attack plans using either conventional or nuclear weapons.”

These B61s are just the U.S. nukes closest to Moscow. Add to these the French, British and U.S. thermonuclear weapons on submarines, long-range missiles, and bombers (totals are approximately 5244 U.S., 225 British, and 290 French).

At the protest in Nörvenich, Ludo De Brabander, from the Belgian peace group Peace Now, spoke of the 10 to 20 B61s stationed at Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium. “These bombs will soon be replaced by new B61-12 nuclear bombs,” he said. “Because of their ‘precision’ and ‘low yield,’ these nuclear weapons are considered ‘operational,’ lowering the threshold for nuclear war. All of this is happening without any official explanation or public debate.”

The concept of suicidal ideation applies to steadfast planning or the actual launch of nuclear weapons attacks. Daniel Ellsberg, in Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (Haymarket Books 2016), said, “[O]our private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single U.S. or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million.”

So Steadfast Noon is not just code language, or public relations. The event is a large-scale, psychological operation intended to teach us to pretend that nuclear attacks can do good. Of course if nuclear firestorms could save lives and end war — as U.S. mythology says of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki — then the Pentagon would have used them on Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. People love to be fooled.

— This was first published at CounterPunch: https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/10/20/natos-steadfast-noon-is-ready-made-doom/

 

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Above and Below the Mushroom Cloud

Letter by Yukiyo Kawano, edited by Lindsay Potter
“We are all agents of history, regardless of our consciousness or intentions.”
— Joseph Gerson, With Hiroshima Eyes
Yukiyo Kawano, a U.S.-based visual artist, born and raised in Hiroshima, circulated a letter earlier this year to engender critical analysis in the anti-nuclear movement. Seventy-eight years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kawano’s letter questions the perspective and portrayal of the dominant U.S. historical narrative, which isolates U.S. atomic policy from those it victimizes. Kawano’s letter concerns an inflatable mushroom cloud artistically rendered by Pedro Reyes and exhibited in several U.S. cities in 2022. Excerpts from her letter appear in italics below.
[Reyes’s] image…coincides with the image taken by a U.S. military aircraft from the sky of the mushroom cloud rising from the Nagasaki atomic bomb. Is it an image that instantly offers viewers a space to safely assume that the photographer/military personnel has all the possible means to escape to minimize their exposure to radiation? Such a view was never offered for people who were at the ground level in Nagasaki (or Hiroshima) … I worry about the normalization of such an image.
Without asking critical questions we remain subjected to a state-sponsored historical record. Why does the official U.S. narrative surrounding the 9/11 attacks focus on “ground zero” and on images of victims’ families, but the U.S. government portrayal of the atomic bombings presents the military victors’ perspective? Similarly, we have a vast library of books, films, and museum archives to preserve the perspective of victims of Nazi Germany. This is an important history, but it stands in contrast to the lack of such memorialization for those who suffered under U.S. militarism. It is clear: when the U.S. can be portrayed as the victor and savior, or if U.S. lives are lost, the suffering of victims is essential to the story. When the U.S. perpetrates genocide and human rights atrocities, the faces of victims go unseen.
The U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantaneously took the lives of every living being in their proximity. The mushroom shaped cloud that arose from the detonation was an accumulation of ash from the city itself. That Cloud contains our grandparents’ flesh and bones … How do we address the issue … so as to avoid reinstating the violence… engage in a discussion of ways we can ensure equity around artwork that deals with historical trauma … we all react with different degrees of intensity to potent images depending on our frames of reference…whether we know anyone who has been impacted.”
The disarmament movement must resist criminal policy while also advocating a more accurate public understanding, one that debunks the propaganda of nationalism and lifts up the voices it seeks to silence. Howard Zinn famously said that controlling people’s sense of history can make them believe anything. Kawano and others elevating hibakusha voices are reminders that stories and images make up the foundation of our history and cultural identity.
Yukiyo Kawano received a response from the Union of Concerned Scientists including concrete steps organizations can take to shift this paradigm. Here are full versions of Yukio Kawano’s original letter and the response from the Union of Concerned Scientists:
Yukio Kawano’s Letter:

My name is Yukiyo Kawano, I am a U.S. based visual artist, born and raised in Hiroshima. I am sending you an email to talk about the inflatable sculpture that Mr. Pedro Reyes has been installing in many cities including NYC, in Times Square in June, 2022 (https://www.alonzocoburn.com/pedro-reyes). I understand that this project was commissioned by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as well as other anti-nuclear organizations based in the U.S.

I trust that the artist spent time studying the Hiroshima/Nagasaki discourse and that his  intentions are good; however, I do worry about the normalization of such an image. Also I am hoping to make a specific argument for the need of a critical analysis that hasn’t yet been incorporated into the anti-nuclear movement as it has within other movements.

Art pieces often work as a public’s unraveling of various social and environmental issues. Today’s artists are constantly being asked to see and question what is at stake: Who is telling the story? Who is silenced in the process? What is the nature of history? Who is assumed to be the viewer in a given context? In this case the installation of an inflatable sculpture that depicts the colossal, visual effect of an atomic bomb explosion, commissioned by anti-nuclear organizations based in the U.S., and sector of the Mexican government.

The question that we must ask ourselves is whether the artist is exempt from the need to scrutinize the project on its own terms, and in its larger context of, for example, the ICAN/ the TPNW? Can the artistic intention to redeem or transmogrify succeed with any symbol associated with historically contentious events, not to say atrocities? I think that the symbolic image archived on the artist’s website shows that we all react with different degrees of intensity to potent images depending on our frames of reference, for example, what we know about their references, whether we know anyone who has been impacted.

The first image (the symbol) on the website taken from overhead, gives a birdseye view that coincides with the image taken by a U.S. military aircraft from the sky of the mushroom cloud rising from the Nagasaki atomic bomb.  Is it an image that instantly offers viewers a space to safely assume that the photographer/military personnel has all the possible means to escape to minimize their exposure to radiation?  Such a view was never offered for people who were at the ground level in Nagasaki (or Hiroshima) on that critical day. People who’ve been working from this ground-level perspective, such as a scholar and writer Yuki Miyamoto (Beyond the Mushroom Cloud 2011), have been projecting this specific viewpoint of ground zero (https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823240500/beyond-the-mushroom-cloud/).

The U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantaneously took the lives of every living being in their proximity. The mushroom shaped cloud that arose from the detonation was an accumulation of ash of the city itself. That Cloud contains our grandparents’ flesh and bones. Again, the question here is what is the framework around the artwork that constitutes historical trauma? How do we address the issue to be respectful of the difficult and often painful feelings that arise from this artwork so as to avoid reinstating the violence?

I am currently working on a protocole that looks at how we can democratize knowledge for artists and activists.

I would like to invite Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists as well as other ICAN supporters to engage in a discussion of ways we can ensure equity around artwork that deals with historical trauma germane to a specific place, specific common-history, and generations that have been affected.  What is the artist’s responsibility when addressing a hypothetical /probable global-based future using the evidence of what has already happened in these communities? A good start to this discussion would be a piece by Lilly Adams of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which looks at how we can work with impacted people in ways that are inclusive, diverse and equitable (https://www.nuclearvoices.org/post/working-equitably-with-nuclear-frontline-communities).

Also to be considered among contemporary art practitioners is how the material condition gives rise to specific art objects, namely, the polyethylene film that was used for the inflatable sculpture along with the 12,075 rocket-shaped balloons which were handed out at the venue to onlookers. This opens another set of considerations about how art, seeking to address an issue, can be unaware of the politics of its very production, ignoring how its production and dissemination contributes to the climate crisis.

From a singular “woman of color” perspective, I would recommend an examination of the “authorized righteousness” of a large portion of the movement who believe it to be their voice, their moral duty to decide how these images are purveyed regardless of reinstating trauma.

It takes tremendous will for women of color to voice our concerns in a world where we suffer from many forms of violence.  Asian-Americans are “encouraged” not to speak out, which causes self-censorship.  We are pressured by a large percentage of people in our community who want to keep the status quo. The American response to these issues is difficult for Japanese nationals to understand. People who have not had an opportunity to question their circumstances, never given an escape route from aspiring whiteness, are hostage to this normalization in which they constantly suffer systemic violence.

Response from Union of Concerned Scientists:

Dear Yukiyo,

On behalf of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, we want to sincerely thank you for taking the time to write this letter (“A letter to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”) and share it with us and others in our community. We know that writing about trauma and personal experiences of nuclear harm can be painful and draining. We see this letter as a gift, which has allowed our team to consider new perspectives, engage in deep self-reflection, and start an important discussion. Your letter is a thoughtful contribution to the ongoing conversation in the larger nuclear NGO community about equity and representation. We are also glad to see the dialogue already underway between you and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Through our long association with the Bulletin, we’ve come to appreciate that they consulted with and included some impacted communities in the event. We recognize that Hibakusha and other impacted communities are not a monolith, and there are likely a diversity of reactions to this kind of art or event. Regardless, speaking only for ourselves and as participants in this event, we apologize for our own lack of consideration about the implications for frontline communities. We wish we had thought more carefully about what the imagery and event itself would mean for impacted communities. We apologize for any trauma or inequities that our participation perpetuated for you or any others. More generally, we have realized oversights and gaps in our efforts to address equity, justice, and support of frontline communities in the nuclear space, and are still learning about these issues and shifting our programming to be more responsive.

We are actively engaged in discussions about how to do better, and we hope we can continue to have those conversations with you, other artists and frontline community members, and others who work in the nuclear weapons community. Our conversations are just beginning, but in direct relation to this letter, we are undertaking the following actions:

• Reviewing our imagery and language across our website and other digital media and
working to replace images that portray nuclear harm from the “victors” perspective
with perspectives and voices of sufferers. We would welcome your, and other
frontline community, partnership and guidance on this effort.

• While we have long-standing work with frontline communities, it’s clear that we still
have a lot to learn. We commit to deepening our work with these communities,
seeking their guidance, working to elevate their voices and perspective, and
supporting them in having a role in decision making on nuclear policy.

• Specifically, we have worked with hibakusha and around the anniversaries of the
bombings in Japan in many ways over the years, for example through blog posts,
various social media and multimedia projects, and community wide initiatives. We
are interested in reviewing this work and also receiving input from you and others on
if it has felt harmful or offensive to impacted communities.

• More broadly, we aim to ask questions of all our work, not just that directly related to
or with frontline communities, including the questions you posed in your letter:

o Who is telling the story; who is silenced? What is the nature of the history?
How do we avoid reinstating violence?

• Supporting continued conversation on these issues in the larger community that
works in the nuclear weapons space. This could involve creating additional
opportunities for frontline community artists to share their perspectives.

We are doing this in conjunction with broader program and organization-wide anti-racism, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives, which our team is committed to continuing, recognizing that this work must be life-long and ongoing.

Finally, we welcome feedback on these action steps and everything we have written here.

Sincerely,
The Global Security Team at the Union of Concerned Scientists

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IN EUROPE: Calling Out the Courts for Ignoring and Protecting Nuclear Threats  

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Photo by JL

By John LaForge

HAMBURG, Germany — Between Sept. 22 and 25, the German campaign “Büchel is Everywhere! Nuclear Weapons-Free Now” conducted a pair of rallies and a bicycle protest ride between Karlsruhe, Germany and Strasbourg, France to draw attention to unresolved court cases about anti-nuclear weapons protests and to the threat of nuclear attacks alarmingly highlighted by the NATO-supplied war in Ukraine.

In Germany, 20 nuclear weapons abolitionists have appealed trespass convictions resulting from their protest actions at Büchel Air Force Base, which holds 15-to-20 U.S. nuclear weapons. The country’s highest tribunal, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, has dismissed all 20 of them without comment, simply affirming lower court decisions. From these 20 cases, six activists have appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The ECHR considers cases in which defendants have exhausted legal recourse in their EU country but believe trial courts erred or violated rights and freedoms established in the European Convention on Human Rights.

In his 1985 study Humanizing Hell! The Law V. Nuclear Weapons (Hamish Hamilton, London), George Delf presents the legal case against the threatened use of nuclear weapons. In chapter five “The Judge’s Tale,” Delf explains the role of judges and court systems in protecting nuclear weapons establishments by ignoring international legal prohibitions that forbid mass destruction and even the planning of it.

Speaking at rallies outside the high court in Karlsruhe September 22, and again at the gates of the ECHR in Strasbourg September 25, I presented Delf’s critique in abridged form:

Judges here and in the U.S. are afraid of international law. In Germany, the U.S., and elsewhere, when judges have been given the opportunity to enforce laws intended to restrict military violence, they have mostly turned a blind eye to the law, and a deaf ear to those of us who sought its support. Germany’s Constitutional Court has now done so 20 times. So far, the ECHR has ignored six applications alleging that Germany’s judges unlawfully ignored treaties that forbid the nuclear attack planning going on at Büchel.

Our nonviolent actions at Büchel Air Force Base all attempted to interfere with its planning and preparing for indiscriminate mass destruction using U.S. nuclear weapons. Nuremberg law holds that individuals who participate in planning a war “in violation of international treaties” are committing a war crime. The top prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trial, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, said, “A basic provision of the [Nuremberg] Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.”

Because the nuclear bombs at Büchel can only produce poisoned attacks outlawed by the Hague Conventions of 1907, and because they are known in advance to cause indiscriminate destruction of civilians, massacres, the base is a crime scene and our interventions there are acts of crime prevention.

At trial, it would be reasonable to expect that our reliance on international law would attract the keen interest of judges who are paid handsome salaries to enforce the law.

This has hardly ever happened. Instead, we’ve been met with a mixture of silence and evasion. Over and over again the judges have refused to confront the most important issue ever to face any civilization — its survival or annihilation.

With rare exceptions, judges in Germany, the U.S., France, and Russia — the same four states that enforced the Nuremberg Judgment — all work silently to evade and avoid Nuremberg’s plain logic.

In trial after trial, when the judges have heard us explain the Nuremberg crimes underway at Büchel [and at nuclear weapons installations elsewhere], they have often silently and passively ignored our defense. Or they have actively played their part in the Kabuki dance theater that says international law is not relevant in lower courts, and that testimony on the question from experts in treaty law is unnecessary. Instead of facing the most serious existential threat endangering the world, judges have made much of obeying trespass statutes. These judges have a lot to answer for, since the very essence of the Nuremberg Charter and Judgment is that individuals have international duties that go before any national obligations of obedience imposed by the State.

We have engaged in civil resistance, and we’ve endured trial and imprisonment in avoid collaboration with our governments’ nuclear weapons attack preparations, and to interfere with ongoing criminal acts. People of good will understand that this resistance is a public expression of withdrawing our consent from the government’s most self-destructive wrongdoing.

Our resistance can also raise the consciousness of the larger community and dramatize the seriousness and urgency of the issue. With a globalized war being waged in Ukraine and increasing the threat of nuclear weapons attacks, the issue could not be more urgent.

Our resistance, and the lawful defense of our actions at trial and on appeal give the courts, the public prosecutors, educators, and the media an opportunity to address the gravest of all issues. Sometimes our defiance creates a crisis of conscience among observers who then face a choice of whether or not to collaborate, to stay silent, or to do something for nuclear disarmament.

Nuclear weapons threaten to destroy civilization and much of biological life on earth. Yet a former U.S. administration had the gall to urge countries to withdraw their ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Ray Acheson, director of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom disarmament program, and a key advocate in the establishment of the TPNW, said of the absurd demand which had never before made by any head of state: “It’s incredible that a nuclear-armed state is demanding other countries withdraw from a treaty banning nuclear weapons.” Acheson added, “When a ‘military power’ is this afraid of international law, you know you’ve done it right.” ###

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Tepco’s License to Kill: Japan’s Dispersal of Radioactive Waste — No Accident Anymore

South Korean protesters lampooned Japanese authorities who said you could drink the 1.37 million tonnes of radioactive wastewater they began pumping into the Pacific Ocean Aug. 24.

 

By John LaForge

Japan is set to start pumping millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean on Thurs., August 24, from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (Tepco’s) devastated triple reactor meltdown site at Fukushima.

This deliberate contamination of the public commons — no accident this time — is a license to kill, a criminally reckless endangerment of sea life and the food web. Yet the 1992 ban on ocean dumping of radioactive waste applies only to barrels thrown from ships, not liquids sent into the sea through pipes. Further, the Law of the Sea allows victims to bring legal action only after an alleged harm has occurred, and then puts the burden of proof on victims to show that their illness(es) were caused by a particular radioactive poison.

The nuclear industry and its government protectors run this game of radioactive waste dispersal using bailouts, bribes, and the lengthy “latency period” — the time between one’s radioactive contamination and the appearance of cancer, heart disease, etc. — which produces radiation victims years or decades after the “Fuku sushi” they ate. The nuclear industry has always depended on the fact that its chance of losing a radiation damage lawsuit is somewhere between a slim one and a fat one.

The catastrophic Fukushima earthquake-tsunami-meltdown-cubed has forced Tepco’s overseers of the three ferociously radioactive masses of melted uranium/plutonium fuel, or “corium,” to continuously pour cold water on to the unapproachable wreckage. Combined with rivers of groundwater that gushes through quake-smashed cracks in reactor foundation, the water becomes poisoned with radioactive uranium, cobalt, strontium, cesium, plutonium, and more. The failed Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) has not removed these or other deadly isotopes from the wastewater now stored onshore in giant tanks. The New York Times reported Aug. 21 that, “According to Tepco’s website, just 30 percent of the approximately 473,000 tons of water in the tanks have been fully treated to the point that only tritium remains.”

Spewing radioactivity is standard industry practice

It’s no surprise that reactor-friendly governments and the International Atomic Energy Agency (whose mission is to promote nuclear reactor proliferation and to lie about radiation risks), have given Japan’s oceanic pollution scheme their seal of approval. All of them have repeatedly declared that dumping radioactive wastes into public water bodies is ordinary industrial practice and legal around the world. With straight faces, the authorities chant in unison that reactor operations contaminate the environment with radioactive liquids all day, every day, and this is somehow intended to demonstrate that such contamination is natural and danger “negligible.”

At La Hague, France and at Sellafield, England, giant reactor waste complexes process waste fuel rods, producing billions of gallons of highly radioactive liquids, and for decades the carcinogenic offal has been pumped directly into the North Sea (by France) and the Irish Sea (by England). Dr. Chris Busby, scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk which studied internal radiation contamination, has found cancer clusters among children along the Irish seacoast — likely caused by internal exposure to Sellafield’s radioactive emissions.

Scientists, ecologists, medical authorities, environmentalists, historians, and oceanographers have repeatedly pointed out that there are practical alternatives to the dumping, and that nothing positive can result from adding radioactive pollution to the environment and the food web. The British Medical Journal only last week published the latest in a long series of studies [1] that have found again and again that exposure to low levels of radiation is more harmful than scientists previously thought. [2]

The Japanese government and Tepco hope that their global dispersal of reactor disaster waste will save the industry enough money that it can stay afloat against the astronomical costs of post-Fukushima liability and disaster response. But like the plague of mass shootings in the United States, Thursday’s start of Japan’s globalized pollution solution raises the chaos and deadliness of reactor operations to new heights, while the authorities claim from their bribery zones that nothing can be done about either hand guns or nuclear reactors.

Notes

[1] British Medical Journal, Aug. 16, 2023, study finds the risk of cancer death after exposure to low-dose ionizing radiation underestimated.

[2] “Ionising radiation and risk of death from leukaemia and lymphoma in radiation-monitored workers,” The Lancet, July 7, 2015; “Even low-level radioactivity is damaging, scientists conclude,” Science Daily, Nov. 13, 2012; “With New Data, a Debate on Low-Level Radiation,” New York Times, July 19, 2005; “Epidemiology: Russian Cancer Study Adds to the Indictment of Low-Dose Radiation,” Science, Nov. 11, 2005; “Study: No Radiation Level Safe,” Associated Press, June 29, 2005; “No dose too low,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec. 1997;  “Study: Even Low-Dose Radiation is Dangerous,” Reuters, Oct. 9, 1997; “Radiation health effects understated, study shows,” AP, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 25, 1995; “Researcher discovers greater radiation risk,” AP, Milwaukee Journal, Dec. 9, 1992; “Radiation risks may be more than believed,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1991; “International Panel Urges Cut In Allowable Radiation Dose,” New York Times, June 23, 1990; “Higher Cancer Risk Found in Low-Level Radiation,” New York Times, Dec. 20, 1989; “No Safe Radiation,” Scientific American, August 1958.

–John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch and a regular contributor to CounterPunch and PeaceVoice.

 

 

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