Nukewatch

Working for a nuclear-free future since 1979

by Leave a Comment

Grassroots Propelling the Nuclear Ban Treaty

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2019-2020
By Kelly Lundeen

“The US should work with the other nuclear armed countries to eliminate all nuclear weapons from all countries, in line with the new treaty.” (On July 7, 2017, 122 countries voted for the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations.)

If you agree, your opinion aligns with 49% of US adults polled by YouGov* on behalf of NuclearBan.US [a treaty compliance campaign]. Likewise, 30% of people identifying as Republican, 52% of women, 56% of Hispanics, and 53% of those over 55 years believe that the US should support the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

While it may be surprising to realize there are so many in the United States that agree, this 49% is part of the world majority. The recently released 2019 Nuclear Ban Monitor  finds 135 countries already following the word of the treaty even though turning that into official policy is a work in progress. Currently, there are 80 signatories, meaning the nations refuse to do anything contradictory to the treaty’s object and purpose. There are 34 countries (formally called “States Parties”) that have ratified the ban, meaning they are legally bound by its requirements. With these numbers steadily climbing, the TPNW is expected to enter into force soon, when 50 nations have ratified which will make nuclear weapons illegal under international law.

Financial institutions are keeping $1.7 trillion out of the hands of nuclear weapons producers.

In the United States, while the federal administrations of Obama and Trump have actively opposed the ban, the TPNW has advanced through several major campaigns including Don’t Bank on the Bomb, Back from the Brink and Warheads to Windmills: How to pay for a Green New Deal (by Timmon Wallis). Grassroots pressure is taking money away from the bomb by urging financial institutions to divest. Don’t Bank on the Bomb released its 2019 report Beyond the Bomb on October 17, documenting 77 financial institutions that have restricted investments in nuclear weapons producers. This number has more than doubled since 2014 when the annual report first appeared. Thirty-six of the 77 institutions have a comprehensive policy preventing any involvement in nuclear weapon producing companies, denying them access to over $1,700 billion in funds.

Back from the Brink is a campaign offering organizations and institutions a way to express support for the TPNW through their Call to Prevent Nuclear War resolution. To date endorsements have come from four state government bodies, including the California and Oregon state legislatures, and the Maine state senate and New Jersey state assembly, 39 municipalities, such as Tucson, Arizona, Honolulu, Hawaii, Washington, DC, and most recently Portland, Oregon, and over 260 environmental, faith, peace, health and academic organizations like Hip Hop Caucus, Soka Gakkai International, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center and 350.org.

The money saved by banning nuclear weapons can be redirected to solve economic inequalities and green technologies for facing the climate crisis.

Taking compliance with the Treaty Ban one step further is NuclearBan.US, the organization that coordinated the previously-mentioned poll. The group promotes both the Treaty Ban and the Green New Deal by linking them through its Warheads to Windmills campaign. By becoming compliant with the Nuclear Ban Treaty, “the money saved can be redirected to green technologies for [facing] the climate crisis.”

While the governments and weapons manufacturers try to ignore the Ban Treaty, a clamor from below continues to grow.

* All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov.com, a British internet-based research and data analytics firm. Total sample size was 1355 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between Sept. 20 and 23, 2019. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US adults (aged 18+).

by 2 Comments

Fukushima’s Hot Particles in Japan: Their Meaning for the Olympics and Beyond

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
By Cindy Folkers

Hundreds of thousands of people—athletes, officials, media, and spectators—will flood into Japan for the 2020 Olympics. But radiation exposure dangers from the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe have not ended since the meltdowns and explosions spread radioactive contamination over large areas reaching down to Tokyo and beyond. Soon after the start of the meltdowns in 2011, experts began warning of exposure to radioactive micro-particles or “hot particles”—a type of particle that poses a danger unaccounted for by regulatory agencies. In order to understand the special danger posed by these particles at the Olympics and beyond, we must first understand the current state of radiation exposure standards.

Hot Particles Don’t Fit Current Exposure Models

For decades, protection from radiation exposure has been based on understanding how doses are delivered to the human body. Are the doses high or low? Inside or outside the body? If a dose is internal, which organ is it impacting? Is the dose given all at one time, or over a longer time? Additional consideration should be given to who is receiving the exposure: men, women, children, fetuses—although protection based on age, gender and pregnancy falls short.

The difficulty with hot particles, which can travel great distances, is that they don’t deliver doses in the way experts expect. Current exposure assumptions hold that radionuclides settling in the body, i.e. through inhalation or ingestion, deliver a low dose to surrounding cells where they lodge. But these models are not truly reflecting the damage that is occurring. For instance, precise distribution of many radionuclides within the body eludes experts. And radiation doses delivered inside cells, which may seem low to an entire body, are large doses when just single cells or groupings of cells receive them. Hot particles deliver a much larger dose than what is considered “low.” And once they are inhaled or ingested, they deliver it specifically to the (often unpredictable) area of the body where they lodge.

Hot Particles Make Already Unpredictable Damage Worse

Not only can hot particle doses be unpredictable—so can the damage. Called “stochastic,” damage from radiation exposure may occur at all doses [no matter how small]. The higher the dose is, the greater the chance is that damage will happen. However, the severity of the damage is independent of the dose; that is even low doses of radiation can result in severe consequences. Sometimes these consequences take decades to manifest, but for times of life when fast growth is occurring—such as pregnancy or childhood—the damage may show up in a much shorter time frame.

Since all parts of the human body develop from single cells during pregnancy, the severity of a “radiation hit” during this development can be devastating for mother and child, yet governments and the nuclear industry never consider these exposures as having an official radiation impact. Therefore, NO safe dose CAN exist. Stochastic risk, coupled with the additional unpredictable and unaccounted-for risk from radioactive micro-particles, can lead to impacts that are more dangerous and difficult to quantify with currently used methods.

Olympics 2020 and Beyond

Clearly, as Japan prepares to host the 2020 Olympics, the danger posed by exposure to radioactive micro-particles should be considered, in addition to known and better understood radio-cesium contamination. While most of the radioactive particle dust has settled, it can be easily re-suspended by activities such as digging or running, and by rain, wind, snow, and flooding. Health officials in Japan continually fail to act and stop ongoing radioactive exposures. This lack of governmental action puts all residents of Japan at risk, and also any athletes, spectators and visitors that participate in the Olympics.

Currently, the torch relay is scheduled to begin with a special display of the “Flame of Recovery,” as the torch passes through still-contaminated areas of Fukushima Prefecture. Then, the “Grand Start,” the Japanese leg of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch Relay, will occur at “J. Village,” the former disaster response headquarters used during the initial nuclear meltdowns in 2011. It is 12.4 miles from Fukushima-1 wreckage site, and resides close to acres of radioactive topsoil and other material stored in bags. The bags and the cranes moving them are visible on satellite maps dated 2019. After starting in Fukushima, the torch will travel to all remaining prefectures of Japan. Further, there is indication that J. Village (now called National Training Center) is being retrofitted as a practice area for baseball, softball, and soccer. Games hosted in Fukushima Prefecture aren’t the only exposure concern, as radioisotopes have traveled far from the ruined cores of Fukushima’s reactors. Radionuclides from the meltdowns were found in Tokyo’s metropolitan area as late as 2016 and would increase and decrease, researchers observed, based on rainfall and run-off. One “high activity radioactively-hot dust particle” traveled from Fukushima’s ruined core, to a house in Nagoya, Japan—270 miles away.

In our normal lives, each one of us breathes in a modest amount of dust daily. People are also exposed through contaminated food, ingestion of dusts and soil, or through skin contact. Endurance athletes are at a higher risk, since they often eat much more—and take in more breaths per minute—than an average athlete or a person at rest. And, biologically, due to developing cells, children and pregnant women are at a much higher risk from radiation exposure than men. Many Olympic and Paralympic athletes are of childbearing age or adolescents.

Contamination in Japan has not gone away and neither should our awareness. While most of the athletes, coaches and spectators will leave Japan, the contamination remains, impacting generations of people who will have to contend with this danger for much longer than the eight-plus years they have already been through.

Japan’s government policy of dismissing radiation’s dangers, and normalizing exposure to radioactivity, is part of an attempt to resettle people in areas that would allow an external dose of 2 rem per year. Prior to the Fukushima meltdowns, this level was considered high-risk to the general population. This is not an acceptable level of exposure. The radioactive micro-particles found in areas with even lower background levels indicate a significant risk that Japan and governments around the world who support nuclear technologies are covering up. Merely understanding and quantifying these hot particles is not enough. Governments must protect people from exposure everywhere in the world, not just in Japan. The danger of radioactive micro-particles should be added to a long list of reasons why nuclear technology is not safe and should no longer be used.

Thanks to Arnie and Maggie Gundersen at Fairewinds Energy Education for technical and editorial input.

— Cindy Folkers is on the staff of Beyond Nuclear where she specializes in radiation impacts on health, Congress watch, energy legislation, climate change, and federal subsidies. She handles the group’s administrative operations, and wrote this report for the group’s website.

by Leave a Comment

Melting Ice & Sea Level Rise Could Spread Abandoned Military Rad Wastes

The main trench at Camp Century in Greenland led to an underground city carved out of the ice. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images
Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
By John LaForge

From opposite ends of the Earth, radioactive wastes left by the US military are colliding with climate disruption—icecap melt and sea level rise—threatening to further contaminate the oceans.

In the Greenland icecap, the US military dug 120 feet down into ice in 1959 and excavated enough to build a small “town.” Intended as an anti-Soviet nuclear missile launch site, the Pentagon carved over 1.5 miles of ice tunnels and chambers into the ice for laboratories, a dining hall, a recreation area, work space, a hospital, and living quarters for up to 200 soldiers, according to news accounts. Unfortunately, Camp Century, as it was called, was lit and heated by the world’s first “mobile” nuclear reactor.

When the site was abandoned in 1967, the military reportedly packed out the reactor vessel, but left behind 9,000 tons of biological, chemical and radioactive waste, “on the assumption it would be ‘preserved for eternity’” by the island’s historically perpetual accumulation of snow and ice, Jon Henley wrote for The Guardian.

In the years since, ice and snow cover above the dump has increased to about 110 feet, but today’s rapidly accelerating heating of the climate means the waste could eventually be uncovered, and melting ice water could potentially carry the toxins into the Atlantic. A study of this unplanned eventuality, led by William Colgan from Toronto’s York University, was published in Geophysical Research Letters. Colgan told The Guardian, “Our estimate is that by 2090, the exposure will be irreversible. It could happen sooner if the magnitude of climate change accelerates.” Indeed, global temperature rise over the last four years has greatly outpaced the most severe scientific models, and last July was the hottest recorded in human history.

*******
Meanwhile, Susanne Rust, reporting for Los Angeles Times, wrote recently that, “… on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.”

While Greenland’s melting ice helps propel sea level rise, 10,000 miles away on Runit Island, in the Anewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands—where the US conducted some 67 nuclear bomb detonation experiments—a giant cement-covered radioactive waste dump site is being threatened by the rapidly rising seas.
Under the cement cover known as Runit Dome, there are over 3 million cubic feet of deadly radioactive waste left by the US military’s nuclear bomb testing authorities. Like the US waste in Greenland’s warming ice, radioactive military debris is threatening to spread to the rising Pacific partly because of US industry-led carbon and methane pollution. As Susan Rust reported , “Now the concrete coffin, which locals call ‘The Tomb,’ is at risk of collapsing from rising seas and other effects of climate change. Tides are creeping up its sides, advancing higher every year as distant glaciers melt and ocean waters rise.”

“More than any other place, the Marshall Islands is a victim of the two greatest threats facing humanity—nuclear weapons and climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, a legal scholar at Columbia University’s law school, the LA Times article noted. “The United States is entirely responsible for the nuclear testing there, and its emissions have contributed more to climate change than those from any other country,” Gerrard said.

— Los Angeles Times, Nov. 10, 2019, The Guardian, Sept 27, 2016; Scientific American, Aug. 5, 2016

by Leave a Comment

Insulting Veterans & Historical Fact with Hiroshima Mythology

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
By John LaForge
The atomic bomb that incinerated Hiroshima, Japan Aug. 6, 1945 (pictured) was gob-smacking. It did with one device what had taken 464 heavy B-29 bombers to accomplish in the April 26, 1945 firebombing Tokyo. The 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb does not compare to today’s nuclear weapons. The smallest warheads in the US nuclear arsenal are 22 and 13 times more powerful: the 340-kiloton B-61 gravity bombs; and the 200-kiloton W80-1s on Advance Cruise Missiles. Photo by Associated Press.

With President Obama’s 2016 visit to Hiroshima, most news and opinion writers repeated the official cover-story that “the atomic bomb…ultimately spared more Japanese civilians from a final invasion,” as Kaimay Yuen Terry wrote for the Minneapolis StarTribune, or that, “Without it, more Japanese would have died in a US assault on the islands, as would have tens of thousands of Americans,” as Mike Hashimoto wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

Contrary to former governor Sarah Palin’s May 27, 2016 claim that Obama’s visit to Hiroshima “insult[ed] veterans,” the claim that US atomic bombings ended the war is the real insult to vets. This official story obscures and ignores the fact that US combat veterans and bomber crews defeated Japan before August 6, 1945, by sacrificing so mightily in massive bombing raids and in bloody battles for Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere. Dozens of high-level military officers, veterans of the Pacific war, have testified to the fact.

“The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives,” President Harry Truman gushed in his 1960 book Truman Speaks. Instructively, historians have found no record of any study, projection, memo, cable, or command where this estimate was suggested to Truman. It is a fictional pretext. In his book The Invasion of Japan, historian John Ray Skates says, “[P]rophecies of extremely high casualties only came to be widely accepted after the war to rationalize the use of the atomic bombs.” And historian Martin J. Sherwin “cited a ‘considerable body’ of new evidence that suggested the bomb may have cost, rather than saved, American lives. That is, if the US had not been so determined to complete, test, and finally use the bomb, it might have arranged the Japanese surrender weeks earlier, preventing much bloodshed on Okinawa.”

During his visit, President Obama perpetuated the mythology and the ahistorical nostalgia that guarantees the US public will never acknowledge, much less apologize for, the needless experimental massacre of 200,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Hashimoto wrote, “No apology [is] needed for sparing lives on both sides.…”

The New York Times chimed in as well, reporting: “Many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed.”

New Historical Consensus

While “many historians” may still believe this, the majority of them do not. As outlined by J. Samuel Walker, chief historian for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in the winter 1990 issue of the scholarly journal Diplomatic History, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”

Historian Gar Alperovitz wrote in his 1965 book Atomic Diplomacy, “[P]resently available evidence shows the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war or to save lives—and that this was understood by American leaders at the time.” Declassification of more documentation over the next 30 years made his comprehensive and matchless 1995 history, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth even stronger on this point.

Admirals and Generals Reject Official Pretext

Most of the ranking officers who directed the war in the Pacific never agreed that the bombs were conclusive in ending it. General Curtis LeMay, Commander of the 21st Bomber Command, said flatly at a Sept. 20, 1945 press conference: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” Pressed by a reporter who asked, “Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” General LeMay, who directed the destruction of 67 Japanese cities using mass incendiary attacks, answered, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Alperovitz recounts in The Decision that General George Kenny, who commanded US Army Air Force units in the Southwest Pacific, was asked in 1969 whether it was wise to have used atom bombs. Gen. Kenny said, “No! I think we had the Japs licked anyhow. I think they would have quit probably within a week or so of when they did quit.”

Fifteen years after Hiroshima, on Dec. 19, 1960 according to Alperovitz, Admiral Lewis Strauss, special assistant to WWII Navy Secretary James Forrestal, wrote to the naval historian Robert Albion that “from the Navy’s point of view, there are statements by Admiral King, Admiral Halsey, Admiral Radford, Admiral Nimitz, and others who expressed themselves to the effect that neither the atomic bomb nor the proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland were necessary to produce the surrender.”

And President Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his 1963 memoir Mandate for Change that when Secretary of War Henry Stimson told him atomic bombs were going to be used, he responded, “…I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…”

Admiral William Leahy, President Truman’s Chief of Staff, adamantly agreed. As reported in Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial by Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Leahy said, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons….” Lifton and Mitchell also note that Henry “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, said in his memoirs, “It always appeared to us that, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.”

Early questions about the necessity of the atomic bombings were answered with facts that were sometimes kept secret. “[A]n extensive official study by the US Strategic Bombing Survey published its conclusion that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion,” according to Alperovitz in The Decision. Alperovitz, who spent 30 years studying the issue, also revealed that another study issued in 1946 by the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division—first discovered in 1989—“concluded the atomic bomb had not been needed to end the war.”
—A version of this article first ran at PeaceVoice and CounterPunch.

by Leave a Comment

Nuclear Madness Still Raving

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-20
By John LaForge
The Nuclear Operations, Joint Publication 3-72 was published online by the US Joint Chief of Staff and then quickly deleted.

While Civil Society and a global movement marches steadily toward the abolition of nuclear weapons, planning and rehearsal for mass destruction using nuclear weapons are still routine in the US military and NATO. In June 2019, the US Joint Chief of Staff published online—then quickly deleted—its nuclear attack manual known as “Nuclear Operations, Joint Publication 3-72.”

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists noticed and managed to preserve a copy (https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_72.pdf), before the Joint Chiefs took it down. The manual refers to radioactive mass destruction using abstract, obtuse euphemism, like, “The employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations.” No reader of the gung-ho report would guess that the subject matter involves searing fireballs, vaporized flesh, blast and shock-wave devastation, demolished hospitals, mass firestorm, or permanent radioactive contaminating of water, soil, and the food chain.

The manual simply says nuclear attacks “create conditions,” but without ever describing them. “Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” and, as if Reagan never said, “Nuclear war cannot be won,” the report pretends it can. “[T]he use of a nuclear weapon will…create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.”

US nuclear war practice takes place annually in Europe. “Steadfast Noon” is NATO’s code name for the mass destruction rehearsal. Hans Kristensen reported for the Federation of American Scientists that, “This is the exercise that practices NATO’s nuclear strike mission with the B61…nuclear bombs the US deploys in Europe.” Jan Merička, in ESJ News Oct. 19, 2017, wrote that the practice is designed is “to simulate nuclear strikes…and was conducted from the Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium and Büchel Air Base in Germany, where US B61 thermonuclear bombs with the force of up to 340 kilotons of TNT are stored.”

To illustrate the Pentagon’s day-to-day readiness for nuclear war, it just opened its new $1.3 billion Strategic Command headquarters in Omaha, used for supervising and targeting the nuclear arsenal. The building is named after General Curtis LeMay, who, the Omaha World Herald reported, designed and managed the nighttime incendiary bombing raids on 60 Japanese towns that “incinerated entire cities” and killed between 241,000 and 900,000 civilians.

Contact Us

(715) 472-4185
nukewatch1@lakeland.ws

Address:
740A Round Lake Road
Luck, Wisconsin 54853
USA

Donate To Nukewatch

News & Information on Nuclear Weapons,
Power, Waste & Nonviolent Resistance

Stay Connected