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October 23, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Haul No! Tour Report: Building Momentum in Resistance to Grand Canyon Uranium Mining & Transport

Leona Morgan (standing) of Diné No Nukes in Albuquerque, New Mexico, spoke to an international gathering July 14 in Büchel Germany about the deadly colonial effects of the uranium fuel chain.

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Haul No!

This article was edited for length, with permission, from the original post at: www.haulno.org

In December 2016, Indigenous anti-nuke and sacred sites organizers formed volunteer-based Haul No! to raise awareness, organize, and take action to protect sacred lands, water, and health from the toxic threat of radioactive uranium ore transport from the Grand Canyon to the White Mesa Mill. In March 2017, Energy Fuels Inc. (EFI), the owner of Canyon Mine and White Mesa Mill (the only commercially operating uranium processing plant in the US), announced that it could start mining uranium in June 2017. Haul No! kicked into gear and started organizing an awareness and action tour along the 300-mile planned haul route.

Bluff, Utah — Shut Down White Mesa Mill

Haul No! initiated the tour on June 13, 2017 in Bluff, Utah, just 20 miles south of the White Mesa Mill. Since 1979, the mill has processed and disposed of some of the most toxic radioactive waste produced in the US. Energy Fuels stores the mill tailings in “impoundments” that occupy about 275 acres next to the mill, which was built on sacred Ute Mountain Ute land. The site includes more than 200 rare and significant cultural sites, several of which have already been destroyed by Energy Fuels.

The White Mesa Mill is currently undergoing renewal of its Byproduct Radioactive Material License and Groundwater Quality Discharge Permits.

Ute Mountain Ute residents of White Mesa joined Haul No! and shared their experiences with the Bluff community. Ephraim Dutchie spoke about the spiritual quality of the land and the environmental racism they experience from mill workers, pro-mill residents, and law enforcement. “They don’t care about our community they only care about money. White Mesa is not the only community that will be affected by this. Keep water pure and land sacred,” Ephraim said.

Bluff and White Mesa residents expressed great concern that their drinking water will be contaminated by further milling. In the past two years alone, two spills have occurred en route to the mill. Both involved trucks from the Cameco Resources uranium mine in Wyoming, and one spill spread radioactive barium sulfate sludge along US Highway 191.

The next day, Haul No! met up with Ute Mountain Ute organizers at the White Mesa Mill. Haul No! volunteer Leona Morgan, who also organizes the Radiation Monitoring Project, donned her hazmat suit and mask to monitor radioactive pollution at the entrance of the mill. Part of the crew went directly to the mill site to bring the message that we want them to shut down. Yolanda Badback, White Mesa Concerned Community Organizer, confronted EFI workers as law enforcement agents arrived in response to a call regarding trespassing and vandalism. Yolanda stated, “This was our land and now it’s poisoned, Energy Fuels has no right to be here.” There were no issues aside from a warning.

Oljato, Utah/Monument Valley/Kayenta, Ariz. — A Legacy of Abandoned Uranium Mines

Haul No! volunteer Leona Morgan, who also works with Diné No Nukes and Radiation Monitoring Project, donned her hazmat suit & mask to monitor radioactive pollution at the entrance of the mill. When mistaken for being simply a photo-op, Leona said, “I’m not just messing around guys…I’m really working here.”

Our next stop was Oljato, Utah, which is located within the iconic Monument Valley. Oljato Chapter was the first to pass a resolution opposing transport in December 2016 and has long been plagued by abandoned uranium mines.

More than 523 abandoned uranium mines remain throughout the Navajo Nation, where Diné families have been subject to decades of radioactive contamination. The Navajo Nation banned uranium mining and milling in 2005 and transport of radioactive materials in 2012, though this matter is one of conflict due to lack of jurisdiction over state and federally-controlled highways such as EFI’s planned Canyon Mine haul route. This point is a policy focus of Haul No!

While two of our group headed to Blanding, Utah to testify at a White Mesa Mill hearing, the rest of the crew headed to Kayenta. Folks there stated that they’ve already seen trucks that look like uranium hauling barreling through their town. We clarified that at this point we know that uranium and arsenic-laced water from Canyon Mine was being transported in unmarked vehicles, and that this may be un-permitted—but no ore has been mined or transported. It was very clear that those in attendance do not want any more radioactive transport through their community.

Tuba City, Ariz. — Rare Metals’ Deadly Legacy

At the Tuba City Flea Market, our table volunteers heard constant accounts of cancer and passing of relatives due to work at the Tuba City Rare Metals mill. From June 1956 to November 1966, the mill processed 796,489 tons of uranium ore. In 1988, Department of Energy started cleaning up this Superfund site, where a layer of soil and rock remains the only covering over 2.3 million tons of hazardous waste. A rock dam surrounds the radioactive waste to control runoff water that flows into nearby Moenkopi Wash.

During our presentation that evening, Leona asked how many of the 40 or so people in attendance had a relative or were themselves directly impacted by uranium mining or milling, and everyone raised their hands. All expressed strong opposition to further transport of radioactive materials through their lands.

Flagstaff, Ariz. — A Critical Point Of Intervention

Our tour continued on Monday, June 19 in Flagstaff, where 65 people attended our presentation. The next day our crew and local residents delivered a petition to Flagstaff City Council calling for a resolution and ordinance to oppose uranium transport. The City of Flagstaff has jurisdiction over a small part of the transport route and organizers see this as a possible stopping-point to safeguard all communities.

Cameron, Ariz. — A Legacy Of Abandoned Uranium Mines

On Tuesday, June 20 we made it to Cameron, where everyone at our tour stop had been directly impacted by uranium mining and expressed great concern of high-level radioactive ore coming through their lands. The small community has faced uranium contamination for decades. Cameron officials have already expressed that they are willing to block uranium transport if necessary.

Gathering at Red Butte

The Haul No! Tour culminated at the Red Butte Gathering hosted by the Havasupai Tribal Council, June 23-25. We set up camp near Sacred Red Butte on traditional Havasupai homelands about 4 miles from Canyon Mine. Haul No! offered training in Non-Violent Direct Action and gave updates on the mine and transport issues. We listened to talks, participated in prayer walks, and round danced in blistering Arizona temperatures. We will focus more on the Red Butte Gathering in Part 2 of the Haul No! Tour Report Back.

Flagstaff City Council

On July 5, 2017, our request for “Consideration of Council Action to Oppose Uranium Transport” was approved despite a surprise appearance by Energy Fuels President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Chalmers, who claimed that the transport is not more dangerous than other transport that happens on a daily basis. He also informed the Council that EFI’s preferred route would go north of the San Francisco Peaks and not through Flagstaff. The agenda item will be discussed at the City of Flagstaff regular council meeting on October 10, 2017.

Further updates will be posted at www.haulno.org, where you can sign our pledge of resistance. For inquiries or to make a donation; email: stopcanyonmine@gmail.com.

—Arianne Peterson and Leona Morgan helped edit this article.

October 18, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The United States Once Carpet-Bombed North Korea

A living nightmare that haunts the country to this day

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Bruce Cumings

As they always do on the anniversary of the armistice, North Koreans celebrated their “victory” in the Korean War on 27 July. A few days later, President Donald Trump remarked that if the North Koreans made any more threats, they “will be met with fire and fury, and frankly, power the likes of which the world has never seen.”

No US president has uttered words like this since Harry Truman warned the Japanese, between Hiroshima and Nagasaki, either to surrender or face “a rain of ruin from the air, the likes of which has never been seen on this earth.” Trump’s nuclear bluster, made off-the-cuff between golf rounds, was widely condemned, but a few days later he doubled down on it.

As a White House staffer told the New York Times, the president “believes he has a better feel for Mr. Kim [Jong Un] than his advisers do. He thinks of Mr. Kim as someone pushing people around, and Mr. Trump thinks he needs to show that he cannot be pushed.”

Trump is surrounded by people who echo his fantasies of ultimate power. Sebastian Gorka, a strange figure advising Trump—said to be a Trump “favorite” and a dead ringer for a Bela Lugosi flunky in a Dracula movie—told Fox News that Trump’s “fire and fury” line meant “don’t test America and don’t test Donald J. Trump.”

We are not just a superpower, Gorka said, “we are now a hyper-power. Nobody in the world, especially not North Korea, comes close to challenging our military capabilities.” This has been a truism since the Soviet Union collapsed, but it doesn’t explain how the US has failed to win four of the five major wars it has fought since 1945. One of those wars was in Korea, where rough peasant armies, North Korean and Chinese, fought the US to a standstill.

It was 64 years ago that North Koreans emerged from this war into a living nightmare, after three years of “rain and ruin” by the US Air Force. Pyongyang had been razed, with the Air Force stating in official documents that the North’s cities suffered greater damage than German and Japanese cities firebombed during World War II.

Just as the Japan scholar Richard Minear termed Truman’s atomic attacks “exterminationist,” the great French writer and film-maker Chris Marker wrote after a visit to the North in 1957: “Extermination crossed this land.” It was an indelible experience still drilled into the heads of every North Korean.

On my first visit to Pyongyang in 1981, a guide quickly brought up the bombing and said it had killed several of his family members. Wall posters depicted a wizened old woman in the midst of the bombing, declaring “American imperialists—wolves.”

The day after Trump’s bluster, the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] stated: “The US once waged a tragic war that plunged this land into a sea of blood and fire, and has been leaving no stone unturned to obliterate the DPRK’s ideology and system century after century.”

There are 25 million human beings living in North Korea. They bleed like we do, they live and die like we do, they love their kin like we do. Trump’s callous and cavalier threat was perhaps the most irresponsible thing he has said since becoming president—which is really saying something—but most Americans will not know this because they know nothing about the carpet-bombing of North Korea.

What about the 50 million South Koreans, whose elders also suffered through this war? “Trump doesn’t seem to understand what an alliance is, and doesn’t seem to consider his ally when he says those things,” Lee Byong-chul, a senior fellow at an institute in Seoul, told the New York Times.

“No American president has mentioned a military option so easily, so offhandedly as he has.” But here Trump has a precedent: Bill Clinton also didn’t bother to consult the former South Korean president Kim Young Sam when drawing up plans for a pre-emptive strike in June 1994.

The next few weeks are critical to this deepening crisis, with annual “Ulchi-Freedom Guardian” war games set to start up on August 21, involving tens of thousands of US and South Korean troops.

North Korean generals have been preparing for moments like this for decades, gaming out war scenarios during several crises going back to January 1968 when they seized the US spy ship Pueblo and held the crew for 11 months.

Thus the North’s statements in the current crisis (unlike Trump’s) have a concrete, predictable nature: lots of bluster and bombast combined with quite specific plans, namely four medium-range missiles to be launched into waters near Guam on 15 August, if Kim Jong Un gives the go ahead.

Pyongyang always pursues tit-for-tat strategies: the US lifts B1-B nuclear-capable bombers from Guam for flyovers of South Korea—a constant not just under Trump but also during Obama’s tenure—and the North chooses a scenario that will call attention to the nuclear blackmail that the US has pursued going back to the Korean war, and particularly during the decades from 1958 to 1990, when the US stationed hundreds of nukes in South Korea with standard plans to use them in the early stages of a North Korean invasion. Pyongyang also likes to choose dates that have historical resonance: 15 August is the anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonialism in 1945.

Upon the news of his wife’s death, Shakespeare’s Macbeth said, “Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” He famously added: “signifying nothing”. Trump signified this: yet another American venture in extermination.

— Professor Bruce Cumings is chair of the History Department at the University of Chicago and the author, most recently, of The Korean War: a History, Random House Modern Library, 2010. He wrote this commentary for The Guardian, August 13, 2017

October 18, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“We Burned Down Every Town in North Korea”

A US soldier walks across Hamhung, North Korea, rubblized by carpet bombing in an undated photo.

Fall Quarterly 2017

By John LaForge

“We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population?” — General Curtis LeMay, in “Strategic Air Warfare,” by Richard H. Kohn

The US public wants to know why North Korea is so paranoid, militarily hostile and boastful—and why its leaders in Pyongyang point their fingers at the United States every time they test another rocket or bomb. Sixty five years ago, according to US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, “We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too.” Today, the Pentagon is simultaneously bombing or rocketing seven different non-nuclear countries. On August 21, just as it does twice a year, some 17,500 US military personnel, with thousands of South Korean troops launched massive joint war games off the North’s coast, exercises that rehearse an invasion of the North where the two historical bookmarks cannot be considered separately.

The US regularly tests long-range ballistic nuclear missiles from Vandenberg Air Base, weapons that can obliterate the capital Pyongyang. On Aug. 31, the US flew two nuclear-capable B1 bombers near the demilitarized zone, accompanied by South Korea fighter jet bombers. Presidential administrations have routinely called North Korea “evil,” and a “state sponsor of terrorism.” US military officials call the tiny country a principle threat to US security. In 2002, according to Korean Policy Institute fellow Hyun Lee writing in the Summer 2017 Korean Quarterly, President G.W. Bush listed North Korea with seven countries that are potential targets of a pre-emptive US nuclear attack.

Yet it’s North Korea’s mostly failing rocket tests that are called “provocative” and “destabilizing” by the State Dept., the Council on Foreign Relations and the White House, regardless of which party is in power. In 1994, Bill Clinton said, “If North Korea ever used a nuclear weapon, it would no longer continue to exist.” In April 2016, Barack Obama, speaking to CBS News, called the North’s President Kim Jong-un “erratic” and “irresponsible”—and went on to warn, “We could, obviously, destroy North Korea with our arsenals.” Likewise, the current Defense Secretary Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis made an openly genocidal threat on August 8, saying the North must stop any action that would “lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people,” Reuters reported. Pyongyang must wonder how to call off the dogs: It has said it will stop testing its nuclear weapons and missiles if the US halts its military exercises. In May 2016, it declared a “no first use” policy, pledging not to use nuclear weapons without first being attacked with them. In 1993, Lee reports, after the collapse of the USSR, the Pentagon under Bill Clinton, “announced that it was targeting some of its strategic nuclear weapons away from the former Soviet Union to North Korea.”

The literal mass destruction of North Korea and today’s threats of more should be considered in the context of the living memory of the older generation. Robert Neer’s 2013 book Napalm (Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press), reports that Gen. LeMay, head of 21st Bomber Command, wrote, “We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes…” Eighth Army chemical officer Donald Bode reportedly said, on an “average good day” pilots in the Korean War “dropped 70,000 gallons of napalm: 45,000 from the US Air Force, 10,000-20,000 by its Navy, and 4,000-5,000 by Marines”—who nicknamed the burning jellied gasoline “cooking oil.”

Neer reports that more bombs were dropped on Korea than in the whole of the Pacific theater during World War II—635,000 tons, versus 503,000 tons. “Pyongyang, a city of half a million people before 1950, was said to have had only two buildings left intact,” according to Neer.

Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States says, “Perhaps 2 million Koreans, North and South, were killed in the Korean war, all in the name of opposing ‘the rule of force.’” Bruce Coming’s history The Korean War, says, “of more than 4 million casualties … at least 2 million were civilians. … Estimated North Korean casualties numbered 2 million including about 1 million civilians… An estimated 900,000 Chinese soldiers lost their lives in combat.”

An insider’s overview, according to Neer in Napalm, comes from Gen. Douglas MacArthur. In May 1951, the former supreme commander testified to Congress, “The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20 million people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children … I vomited.”

October 18, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Democracy Breaks Out at the UN as 122 Nations Vote to Ban the Bomb

We are witnessing a striking global shift in how the world views nuclear weapons.

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Alice Slater

On July 7, 2017, at a UN Conference mandated by the UN General Assembly to negotiate a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons—the only weapons of mass destruction yet to be banned—122 nations completed the job after three weeks, accompanied by a celebratory outburst of cheers, tears, and applause among hundreds of activists, government delegates, and experts, as well as survivors of the lethal nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and witnesses to the devastating, toxic nuclear-test explosions in the Pacific. The new treaty outlaws any prohibited activities related to nuclear weapons, including use, threat to use, development, testing, production, manufacturing, acquiring, possession, stockpiling, transferring, receiving, stationing, installation, and deployment of nuclear weapons. It also bans states from lending assistance, which includes such prohibited acts as financing for their development and manufacture, engaging in military preparations and planning, and permitting the transit of nuclear weapons through territorial water or airspace.

We are witnessing a striking shift in how the world views nuclear weapons. The change has transformed public conversation about nuclear weapons, from the same old talk about national “security” and its reliance on “nuclear deterrence,” to the widely publicized evidence of the catastrophic health and environmental consequences of their use. A series of compelling presentations of the devastating effects of nuclear weapons detonations, organized by enlightened governments and civil society’s International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was inspired by a stunning statement from the International Committee of the Red Cross addressing the human consequences of nuclear war.

At meetings hosted by Norway, Mexico, and Austria, overwhelming evidence demonstrated the disastrous devastation threatening humanity from the nuclear weapons chain—from uranium mining and milling, to weapons production, testing, and use—whether deliberately or by accident or negligence. This newly appreciated understanding—exposing the terrifying havoc that would be inflicted on our planet—gave impetus for this moment when governments and civil society fulfilled a negotiating mandate for a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.

Perhaps the most significant addition to the treaty, after a draft treaty from an earlier week of talks in March was submitted to the states by the expert and determined president of the conference, Ambassador Elayne Whyte Gómez of Costa Rica, was amending the prohibition not to use nuclear weapons by adding the words “or threaten to use,” driving a stake through the heart of the beloved “deterrence” doctrine of the nuclear-weapons states, which are holding the whole world hostage to their perceived “security” needs, threatening the earth with radioactive annihilation in their MAD scheme for “Mutually Assured Destruction.” The ban also creates a path for nuclear-armed states to join the treaty, requiring verifiable, time-bound, transparent elimination of all nuclear-weapons programs or irreversible conversion of all nuclear-weapons related facilities.

The negotiations were boycotted by all nine nuclear-weapons states and US allies under the so-called nuclear “umbrella” in NATO, Japan, South Korea, and Australia. The Netherlands was the only NATO member present, its parliament having required its attendance in response to public pressure, and was the only “no” vote. Last summer, after a UN Working Group recommended that the General Assembly resolve to establish the ban-treaty negotiations, the United States pressured its NATO allies, arguing that “the effects of a ban could be wide-ranging and degrade enduring security relationships.” Upon the adoption of the ban treaty, the United States, United Kingdom, and France issued a statement that “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it” as it “does not address the security concerns that continue to make nuclear deterrence necessary” and will create “even more divisions at a time…of growing threats, including those from the DPRK’s ongoing proliferation efforts.” Ironically, North Korea was the only nuclear power to vote for the ban treaty, last October, when the UN’s First Committee for Disarmament forwarded a resolution for ban-treaty negotiations to the General Assembly.

Yet the absence of the nuclear weapons states contributed to a more democratic process, with fruitful interchanges between experts and witnesses from civil society who were present and engaged through much of the proceedings instead of being outside locked doors, as is usual when the nuclear powers are negotiating their endless, step-by-step process that has only resulted in leaner, meaner, constantly modernized, re-designed, and refurbished nuclear weapons. Obama, before he left office was planning to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years for two new bomb factories, new warheads, and new delivery systems.

The Ban Treaty affirms the states’ determination to realize the purpose of the UN Charter and reminds us that the very first resolution of the UN in 1946 called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. With no state holding veto power, and no hidebound rules of consensus—that have stalled all progress on nuclear abolition and additional initiatives for world peace in other UN and treaty bodies—this negotiation was a gift from the UN General Assembly, which democratically requires states to be represented in negotiations with an equal vote and doesn’t require consensus to come to a decision.

Despite the recalcitrance of the nuclear terror-mongers, we know that previous treaties banning weapons have changed international norms and stigmatized the weapons leading to policy revisions even in states that never signed those treaties.

The Ban Treaty requires 50 states to sign and ratify it before it enters into force, and will be open for signature September 20 when heads of state meet in New York for the UN General Assembly’s opening session. Campaigners will be working to gather the necessary ratifications and, now that nuclear weapons are unlawful and banned, to shame those NATO states which keep US nuclear weapons on their territory (Belgium, Germany , Turkey, Netherlands, Italy), and to pressure other alliance states which hypocritically condemn nuclear weapons but participate in nuclear-war planning. In the nuclear-weapons states, there can be divestment campaigns from institutions that support the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons now that they have been prohibited and declared unlawful. See www.dontbankonthebomb.com

To keep the momentum going in this burgeoning movement to ban the bomb, check out www.icanw.org. For a more detailed roadmap of what lies ahead, see Zia Mian’s take on future possibilities in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

— Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and serves on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War. She wrote this piece for The Nation.

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Fall Quarterly 2017

By Haul No!

Bluff, Utah — Shut Down White Mesa Mill

Oljato, Utah/Monument Valley/Kayenta, Ariz. — A Legacy of Abandoned Uranium Mines

Tuba City, Ariz. — Rare Metals’ Deadly Legacy

Flagstaff, Ariz. — A Critical Point Of Intervention

Cameron, Ariz. — A Legacy Of Abandoned Uranium Mines

Gathering at Red Butte

Flagstaff City Council

A living nightmare that haunts the country to this day

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Bruce Cumings

Fall Quarterly 2017

By John LaForge

Fall Quarterly 2017

By Alice Slater

Fall Quarterly 2017

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