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April 7, 2025 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Three Declarations of Genocide and the U.S. Responses

Protester at the 2025 Superbowl halftime show displaying stitched together Sudanese and Palestinian flags, linking the genocides ongoing in both countries — the U.S. has recognized the genocide in Sudan as such, but refuses to name the U.S.-armed genocide in Gaza. Photo: newsbreak.com

Three recent reports by respected international humanitarian organizations have generated global approbation and negative reactions by both the Israeli and U.S. governments.
– Amnesty International

Amnesty International (AI) issued its 296-page report (“You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza”) on December 4. Israel immediately called it “a fabricated report that is entirely false and based on lies.” The U.S. State Department echoed the Israeli government in disagreeing with the report. Spokesperson Vedant Patel declared: “We have said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.” He gave no reasons for that opinion.

Reviewing the nine-month period from October 7, 2023, AI concluded that Israel committed prohibited acts under Articles II (a), (b), and (c) of the Genocide Convention of 1948, specifically the killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.

After describing the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide, AI examined both the specified prohibited actions and the requirement of intent. The report concluded that both benchmarks were met. In his December 7 Counterpunch article (“The Worst of International Crimes”), Jeffrey St. Clair quoted portions of the report that detailed the destruction of life and infrastructure, successive evacuations of residents, and the denial of food and humanitarian assistance. The International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant expressed international condemnation of the same war crimes cited in the AI report.

Human Rights Watch

Not to be outdone, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued its 179-page report (“Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Deprives Palestinians in Gaza of Water”) on December 19. It focused not on bombs and bullets, but rather on the deprivation of water for the inhabitants of Gaza.

The HRW report cited Israel’s: “Extensive damage and destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure, including the apparently deliberate, systematic razing of the solar panels powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants by Israeli ground forces, as well as Israeli soldiers filming themselves demolishing a key water reservoir.” Based on such findings, Human Rights Watch blamed Israel for causing the deaths of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by systematically restricting and targeting Gaza’s water supply. According to HRW, such actions amounted to “acts of genocide.”

Israel’s Foreign Ministry denounced the report, accusing HRW of “once more spreading its blood libels in order to promote its anti-Israel propaganda.” It claimed that Israel has worked to facilitate the flow of water and humanitarian aid into Gaza throughout the war. The State Department spokesman said that the U.S. “disagreed with” HRW’s accusation that Israel was carrying out “acts of genocide” by damaging water infrastructure.

Doctors Without Borders

A third report (33 pages) published by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) on December 19 is entitled “Gaza: Life in a Death Trap.” It centers on the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the repeated forced evacuations of residents. In the words of the report, “MSF has witnessed 14 months of repeated attacks on civilians, the dismantling of essential civilian infrastructure including healthcare facilities, and a systematic denial of humanitarian assistance, seemingly underpinning Israel’s campaign to unravel the very fabric of society in Gaza….The consequences of these impediments are made even more harmful due to the uniqueness of a war being waged on a besieged area from which nobody can escape.”

According to MSF Secretary General Christopher Lockyear, “What our medical teams have witnessed on the ground throughout this conflict is consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organizations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza.”

In response, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman accused MSF of “lying and misleading the public.” The U.S. response likewise denounced the report. State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said with respect to MSF: “Even within their report, they make pretty clear that they don’t have the legal authority to determine intentionality.”

Why has the U.S. government repeatedly denied allegations of Israeli genocide in Gaza? In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attack, when he pledged to “stand with” its U.S. ally, Biden may have been driven by his decades-long admiration of Israel. The Israeli Defense Force’s scorched Earth bomb and missile attacks on Gaza have continued unabated throughout the Gaza Strip, and Israel has severely limited the provision of water, food, medicines, and other humanitarian aid. Now the death toll (not counting those buried under the rubble) has risen to more than 45,000. Yet Biden repeatedly refused to stop arming the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). His massive transfers of U.S.-made lethal weapons enabled Netanyahu, now an indicted war criminal facing ICC arrest warrants, to intensify his relentless bombardments of Gazan civilians.

If and when the war in Gaza is deemed a genocide by the International Court of Justice, Biden and his Secretaries of State and Defense could be (and, in my view should be) liable for complicity under the Genocide Convention of 1948. Americans should understand that Biden’s legacy is not all domestic triumph. It is even more a shameful foreign policy legacy of destruction and death.

— L. Michael Hager is cofounder and former Director General of the International Development Law Organization in Rome.

April 7, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Raytheon Pushes Doomsday Clock Closer to Midnight

Elizabeth Murray and John Heid of the Pacific Life Community were arrested on March 5, 2025 when they crossed onto the property of Tucson, Arizona’s Raytheon weapons factory to share their Ash Wednesday message for a nuclear-free future with workers. John Heid stated, “While there are many pressing issues in these times, the doomsday clock keeps ticking. The nuclear weapons industry quietly metastasizes before our very eyes. If we don’t pay attention and resist, nukes will have the last word. The very last.” Photo: Nuclear Resister

Opinion by Jack Cohen-Joppa

TUCSON, Ariz — In Tom Lehrer’s classic Cold War ditty, “So Long Mom,” a nuclear bomber pilot sings, “I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”

It’s darkly funny, because even though we don’t talk much about it, we all know it’s true. Planned or imagined, nuclear war scenarios rarely last longer.

But how much time have we got before then? How near is that threat of omnicide today?

The Doomsday Clock is a visual metaphor created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists back in 1947 to illustrate how close we are to global calamity from nuclear weapons and other looming threats to civilization as we know it. Originally set at seven minutes to midnight, in 2023 it advanced to 90 seconds to midnight, largely due to nuclear threats from the war in Ukraine.

Now, with wars still raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, escalating climate chaos, and increasing biological and artificial intelligence threats, the clock has been pushed to just 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been in history.

And Raytheon Corp. keeps pushing us closer.

In April 2020 — Raytheon, with more than 12,000 local employees and the bulk of its research, development, and production based in Tucson — was awarded a sole-source contract to produce about 1,000 new nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles. Known by the bland acronym LRSO (Long Range Stand-Off), the missile is arguably both redundant and destabilizing in a time of disappearing nuclear diplomacy.

Not only that, but because of its work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.

Why aren’t we talking about it? Despite near-universal condemnation of nuclear weapons by leaders of the world’s religions, we could use more local political and religious leaders speaking out against this blasphemous enterprise in our backyard. It’s not as if it’s a military secret. The industry press has recently carried reports of LRSO flight tests, budget allocations, production schedules, and more. Yet local media have not kept up.

Raytheon also has nothing to say. Usually, southern Arizona’s largest employer and exporter is mighty boastful of the panoply of products in their military portfolio. Their website is filled with fulsome bragging and lurid photos of deadly hardware. But the baddest boy of the bunch is missing in action. The nuclear-armed LRSO only pops up in a handful of financial reports. Raytheon’s original press release heralding the multibillion-dollar contract was posted on its website and quoted by the Tucson media in April 2020. But now it’s gone, simply deleted from its media archive.

Perhaps management has realized that there is nothing to be gained by crowing about their only product that, if used as intended, would be the instrument of multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity (incomprehensible death and devastation, disproportionate civilian casualties, lasting contamination of land and water, etc.). Raytheon’s “products” are certainly nothing I’m proud of as a Tucsonan.

This is the same Raytheon/RTX that last November was fined nearly $1 billion for defrauding the government (i.e., the taxpayer) and paying multiple bribes to promote business with the government of Qatar.

Experts debate whether the LRSO is intended for a nuclear surprise attack, or just another layer of“deterrence.” But if it isn’t meant to be used first, that just makes it fit into plans for a full-scale nuclear war. All ninety minutes of it. Shouldn’t we all pay more attention, and demand that our elected leaders resist this insanity?

— Jack Cohen-Joppa is a husband and father and a Tucson resident since 1986. He is co-coordinator since 1980 of the Nuclear Resister, www.nuclearresister.org. This piece was written for the Arizona Daily Star January 31.

Raytheon was awarded a $2 billion contract to build 1,000 redundant and destabilizing new nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles. Cost estimates have since risen to $13 million per missile according to Military News. Photo: airandspaceforces.com

April 7, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Federal Law Violations, Anti-democratic Process in Preparing for New Plutonium Weapon Cores

By Los Alamos Study Group

At a February public hearing, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was harshly criticized by citizen watchdogs for its tardy environmental analysis of plans to produce new plutonium nuclear warhead cores (known as “pits”) at the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in New Mexico. The critics condemn the report’s inadequacy and the agency’s violations of the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA.

LANL has decided to build extremely complex and dangerous plutonium fabrication systems on its highly-contaminated New Mexico site in order to fabricate new pits for future warheads. The production would violate long-standing policy, as well as presidential promises that the United States would not manufacture new nuclear weapons.

The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review said, “It is U.S. nuclear policy that nuclear weapons Life Extension Programs…will not support new military missions or provide for new military capabilities.” The Los Alamos Study Group lambasted the NNSA and its “after decision” report and the group has collected 1,125 individual and 245 business, organizational, and religious community endorsements to the following statement:

“We call upon our elected officials to: Oppose plutonium warhead core (‘pit’) production at LANL first and foremost, but also elsewhere; Oppose the design, testing, and production of new and ‘upgraded’ nuclear weapons; Prioritize removal and disposal of legacy plutonium waste from LANL over production of additional nuclear waste from nuclear weapons; Choose human security, community resilience, and environmental protection over nuclear weapons production and our bloated military. We can no longer delay. We must use every opportunity, at every level of government, to prioritize human needs, invest in our communities, and build a more just and sustainable society.”

Study Group Director Greg Mello said at a hearing:

Angelina Crowley is escorted from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s public hearing February 11 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. Crowley, who identified herself as a member of the Albuquerque Party for Socialism and Liberation, yelled, “No nuclear aggression. We need housing and health care.” Members of the audience cheered and chanted, “No more nukes,” after she left. Photo by Michael G. Seamans, The New Mexican.“We come to bury [the report], not to praise it. The most important thing about this report is that it comes long after, rather than before, the (Sept. 2, 2020) decision to add a pit factory to LANL.

“These hearings and ‘comment opportunities’ are being staged to create a veneer of legitimacy for decisions taken prior to environmental analysis, in direct violation of NEPA, and to avoid proper NEPA analysis in the future. A completed Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) is — NNSA hopes — a NEPA ‘get out of jail free’ ticket.

“There has never been any valid environmental analysis of the choice to produce plutonium pits at LANL. The present process is NNSA’s attempt to cover its tracks.

“There has never even been a business-case analysis by NNSA endorsing production in LANL’s old plutonium building, an omission contrary to Dept. of Energy regulations. In 2017, NNSA said ‘don’t do it there’. It’s still a terrible idea and NNSA knows it.

“The SWEIS ‘alternatives’ aren’t alternatives at all. By merely including all these projects in the SWEIS, NNSA will have done, by its lights, sufficient NEPA analysis to go ahead with any or all of them. They do not have to agree with any comments or engage with commenters in good faith.

“These hearings are designed to take the democratic voice from civil society, not to provide it. NNSA is not here to listen and does not care what the public says.”

Study Group organizer Bex Hampton added, “New Mexicans were never given a choice regarding whether to host a plutonium pit factory in our state because if we had an option we would oppose it. We would not consent to becoming ‘ground zero’ for the new nuclear arms race with Russia and China, and we will continue to organize to halt the Los Alamos Plutonium Bomb factory in its tracks.”

— The Los Alamos Study group is a watchdog organization in Albuquerque.

April 7, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Fukushima Pollution Solution: Spread Radioactivity Far and Wide

By John Laforge

The dispersal of radioactive wastewater from Japan’s 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi reactor disaster site to the Pacific Ocean is “in line with international safety standards” according to a task force set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear power advocacy program, in a December 24, 2024 report.

Ever since the Tokyo Electric Power Co., or Tepco, first proposed pumping wastewater left from cooling
Fukushima’s three hot piles of melted reactor fuel into the Pacific, the IAEA has supported, encouraged, and endorsed the plan, in spite of its own formal published guidelines which advise against it.

In June 2023, Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, published a scathing critique of the IAEA’s approval, finding the oceanic pollution violates essential provisions of the agency’s own General Safety Guide.

The IAEA’s first 2023 report on the dumping scheme said the plan was “consistent” with its standards, and it claimed even before the first major release of the radioactive water that it would have a “negligible radiological impact to people and the environment.” Now the IAEA’s onsite laboratory in Japan has analyzed the first ten discharges that have been conducted between August 2023 and October 2024, Nuclear Engineering International reported.

The bulk of the radioactivity in the wastewater being pumped into the ocean is from tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen, and carbon-14, neither of which can be filtered from water they contaminate. However, analyses of 1.3 million tons of waste coolant now stored in tanks shows a complex mix of other highly radioactive isotopes, including strontium-90, cesium-134 and -137, cobalt-60, americium, technetium, and even tellurium-127. In 2018, Tepco apologized for the failure of its giant filter system to separate all the materials it promised to, and has said it would repeatedly re-filter the contaminated water to try and remove 62 different reactor-borne isotopes before dumping it into the world’s largest ocean.

IAEA Approval is License to Copy Bad Actors

Watch the new documentary “Unfogging Fukushima” at: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-12-31/CGTN-documentary-Unfogging-Fukushima-1zMeVq1VirC/p.html

Japan’s oceanic radioactive pollution was supposed to have been banned with the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter. This monumental international law against disposing of hazardous and radioactive wastes at sea prohibits dumping “from vessels, aircraft, platforms or other man-made structures.”

Yet the use of major undersea pipelines at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan, at La Hague in France, and at Sellafield in the UK have been granted exemptions — as if the massive pumping systems were not “man-made.” On a yearly basis, the La Hague plutonium processing system discharges some 1.4 million barrels worth of liquid radioactive waste into the North Sea, Greenpeace reports. And the U.K.’s Sellafield site pumps 24 million barrels of radioactive liquids into the Irish Sea every year.

When the IAEA says that Japan’s ocean dumping is “in line with international safety standards,” this is the oceanic radioactive polluting that is being referenced and endorsed.

Radioactive Soil to be Spread Nationwide

In spite of obvious risks to workers who handle it, and the threat of surface water contamination caused by rain runoff and winds, the Japanese government has approved plans to allow 14 million metric tons of radioactive soil — and 300,000 metric tons of
radioactive ash from incinerators — to be used in public works projects like road and railway construction, and even agriculture “nationwide,” according to international news reports.

The government calls the plan “recycling,” and it’s been consistently opposed by critics who point to federal regulations that forbid any use of radioactive materials that are contaminated with more than 100 becquerels of cesium-137 per kilogram (Bq/kg). Waste that’s “hotter” must be disposed of as radioactive waste.

Yet the government intends to allow the use of soil
(scraped from thousands of square kilometers that were hit with fallout from the three meltdowns) containing up to 8,000 Bq/kg of cesium, 80 times the federal limit. Radioactive cesium was spewed in large quantities from the triple meltdowns of March 2011 and it persists in the environment for up to 300 years. (Mountain forests in the fallout zones north and west of Fukushima cannot have topsoil removed and so remain contaminated with cesium which is spread downhill by heavy rains.)

Watchdogs with the Citizens Nuclear Information Center (CNIC) in Tokyo point out that government rules would be violated if the 8,000 Bq/Kg limit is allowed. Yumiko Fuseya wrote in CNIC’s newsletter, “Despite the Nuclear Reactor Regulation Act stating that only waste of 100 Bq/kg (becquerels/kilogram) or less can be recycled, [the plan says] ‘removed soil’ of up to 8,000 Bq/kg can be recycled, and this is a double standard.”

Fuseya contested that Japan’s Ministry of Environment, “claims that ‘disposal’ includes ‘recycling,’ even though Article 41 of the Act on Special Measures Concerning the Handling of Materials Contaminated by Radiation does not include ‘recycling.’” The daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported December 5 that about 75% of the 14 million tons of bagged soil has a radioactive cesium count of 8,000 becquerels or less per kilogram.

CNIC also reports that the government has conducted hair-raising agricultural experiments in Fukushima Prefecture, such as growing and harvesting cucumbers and radishes “in fields where the [contaminated] soil has been covered with normal soil.”

Just as the International Atomic Energy Agency has
approved of dispersing contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean, the IAEA last September gave final approval to Japan’s plan for using the radioactive soil and fly ash for public works projects, saying that the scheme is “consistent with IAEA safety standards.”

Ongoing Earthquakes & Aftershocks

As if accidents with wastewater pumping, Pacific Ocean poisoning with radioactive wastewater, and spreading millions of tons of cesium-tainted soil around the public commons weren’t hazardous enough, routine earthquakes and their aftershocks off northeast Japan relentlessly rock the Fukushima disaster site and threaten to crack open giant tanks now holding 1.3 million tons of highly radioactive wastewater. Relentlessly frequent quakes also endanger the means of water-cooling the 880 tons of molten reactor fuel (“corium”) still thermally
hot and radioactively unreachable somewhere beneath the three smashed reactors.

On January 23, after a 5.2 magnitude quake hit the
Fukushima Prefecture’s Aizu area, the government
warned of possible aftershocks and urged people to “stay vigilant” against landslides and avalanches. On April 4, 2024 a 6.1 magnitude quake rattled Fukushima’s coastline just 47 miles off the site of the three meltdowns — far closer than the super quake of March 2011, the biggest in Japan’s recorded history, which was 80 miles offshore.

Clean-up Workers Fear Contamination

Following a string of clean-up related radiation accidents at the devastated station, Tepco workers have grown more concerned about their safety. The daily Asahi Shimbun reports that a Tepco survey of its workers found that over 40 percent of the workforce was worried about jobsite “radiation issues.” Of this group, 52% said “physical contamination” was their main concern, seven percentage points higher than the company’s 2023 survey. Tepco said that the repetition of exposure accidents on site have likely increased workers’ worries.

In October 2024, two workers were hospitalized after being splashed with highly radioactive liquid wastes bursting from a hose that disconnected inside a wastewater treatment building. And in February 2024, 5.5 metric tonnes of highly radioactive liquid waste gushed from a “cesium absorption apparatus” in an incinerator building before a worker noted it and closed a valve.

New documentary: “Unfogging Fukushima”

The China Global Television Network (CGTN) has
produced a documentary, “Unfogging Fukushima,” on the triple reactor meltdown and its massive radioactive releases which premiered December 31, 2024. The network announced the debut noting, “Despite extensive efforts over the past 13 years, problems such as discharging nuclear-contaminated water into the sea still exist. CGTN visited the worst-hit area, measured nuclear radiation, and investigated the truth behind the enduring consequences of the accident.”

Correction: In the Winter ‘24-’25 Quarterly, we mistakenly reported the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (FFAN) is in Tokyo, but it’s in the United States and is a project of the National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy. See their educational material at: https://nislappdc.org/fukushima-fallout/; or contact FFAN: 160 Alamo Plaza #286, Alamo, CA 94507; email: betsy@nislappdc.org

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