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Armistice Day First

“After the War a Medal and Maybe a Job.” Cartoon by John French Sloan, 1914

It gets harder to commemorate World War I, because of time and the public’s embrace of or indifference to a permanent war economy.

About the Great War British novelist H.G. Wells wrote on August 14, 1914, “This is already the vastest war in history. … For this is now a war for peace. It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest of all wars, is not just another war — it is the last war!”

Optimists said it would be short. Instead, it was the worst bloodbath to date with an estimated 16 to 37 million dead. Combat and other acts of war killed at least 7 million civilians and over 10 million military personnel, while diseases, hunger, pogroms and targeted genocide killed millions more. Rather than “for ever” stopping war, the unprecedented wartime profiteering and victor’s imposition of vengeful reparations the set the stage for World War II’s 70 million fatalities, and the nearly continuous string of money-making legalized murder that has continued since. One low estimate is that since “war to end all war,” about 100 million people have died in war zones.

Armistice Day was established in 1919 to revere the peace, and to remember and commemorate WW I’s the suffering, horror, fear, pain, and loss. In 1918, the headlines roared: “Armistice Signed, End of the War!” and Armistice Day was grounded in the near universal revulsion against war’s dreadful costs, futility, graft, pointlessness and particularly against the corruptions of the politicians who prolonged the conflict. Today’s US governments all spend hundreds of billions on weapons production jobs that our xenophobic fearmongering and its consequent wars sustain. As long as US allies keep trading their oil and cash for US guns, even barbaric, medieval dictatorships like Saudi Arabia (which has beheaded 600 prison convicts since 2014) are coddled, pampered, guided and supplied militarily in its ghastly war of deliberately induced pandemics and malnutrition against Yemen.

In September 2014, on a visit to Italy’s largest military cemetery the Pope warned of a “piecemeal” World War III that may have already begun — with dozens of ongoing, undeclared wars, official crimes, state-sponsored fighter jet and drone attacks, and specialized commando raids the world over. A short list of current warring includes US combat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia; civil wars in Nigeria, Maghreb, Libya, and South Sudan; and the Mexican drug war. Pope Francis said about all this, “Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, and destruction.”

“Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.” — Harry Patch, pictured, the last surviving soldier of World War I, 2007. Photo: Shaun Curry/AFP/Getty Images.

In 1954, Armistice Day was replaced with Veterans Day, and so our public celebration of peace and an end to war became a rally to “support the troops,” a state and federal day off, and a platform for military recruitment. Not everyone was pleased. The novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a World War II veteran and POW, later wrote, “Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”

Two critics of World War I come to mind. Montana Congresswoman Jannette Rankin said, “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake,” and in his statement during his Court Martial in 1918, Max Plowman said: “I am resigning my commission because I no longer believe that war can end war. War is a disorder, and disorder cannot breed order. Doing evil that good may come is apparent folly.”   — John LaForge.

This was written for the Duluth Reader Weekly,

http://duluthreader.com/articles/2018/11/08/15056_armistice_day_first

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Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty Could Become Law Next Year

Beatrice Fihn, Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, spoke at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Sept. 15. Photo by John LaForge

“GENEVA (Reuters) — A treaty banning nuclear weapons could come into force by the end of 2019, backers of a campaign that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize said in an annual progress report on Monday.”

This October 29 report also announced a newly established watchdog for the 2017 nuclear weapons ban known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The new “Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor” published by Norwegian People’s Aid will measure progress related to signature, ratification, and entry into force of the TPNW.

So far, 19 governments have ratified the TPNW and it will come into force after 50 states ratify. Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told Reuters, “We have about 25 or 30 countries that say they will be ready [to ratify] by the end of 2019, so it’s definitely possible” to pass the 50 country mark next year.

The TPNW places nuclear weapons in the same outlaw category as biological weapons, poison gas, land minds and cluster munitions, all of which are banned by treaties. The Monitor says the TPNW will further stigmatize both nuclear weapons and the countries that ignore the treaty. The Monitor can be downloaded on <www.banmonitor.org>

The Monitor’s lead article says about the new ban treaty: “Adopted by 122 states on 7 July 2017 at a United Nations diplomatic conference, the TPNW provides a reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.” Once it takes effect, the TPNW will forbid the development, testing, possessing, hosting, using of, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. The treaty also outlaws assisting, encouraging, or inducing these prohibited acts. The treaty “codifies norms and actions that are needed to create and maintain a world without nuclear weapons,” the Monitor notes.

The United States under president Obama led the nuclear-armed states’ opposition to the treaty, and when final negotiations were launched March 27, 2017, Trump’s UN ambassador Nikki Haley explained the US-led boycott this way: “[W]e have to be realistic. Is there anyone that believes that North Korea would agree to a ban on nuclear weapons?”

Realists for Unilateral Nuclear Abolition

But being realistic means at least listening to realists, and no one can be considered more so than the late Paul Nitze, the Cold War military strategist and Reagan presidential adviser. As Secretary of the Navy and later Deputy Secretary of Defense, Nitze drafted and implemented US nuclear war plans himself. His advocacy produced of the world’s first hydrogen bombs and the vast increase of the arsenal’s size.

Yet five years before his death, this hard-nosed realist wrote, “I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them is costly and adds nothing to our security.”

Sec. Nitze’s public and absolute renunciation of the Bomb, “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1999,  read, “I can think of no circumstances under which it would be wise for the United States to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.”

This total rejection of “nuclear deterrence” had become the view of a life-long defender of pro-nuclear orthodoxy. Sec. Nitze’s argument demolishes Ambassador Haley’s ahistorical March 27, 2017 UN speech, in which she said, “[W]e can’t honestly say that we can protect our people by allowing the bad actors to have [nuclear weapons], and those of us that are good, trying to keep peace and safety not to have them.”

Putting aside the United States’ “trying to keep peace and safety” by simultaneously bombing seven different countries, Amb. Haley’s excuses for the Bomb are archaic and laughable in view of the devastating non-nuclear weapons in the Pentagon’s hands. Sec. Nitze made this point crisply: “In view of the fact that we can achieve our objectives with conventional weapons, there is no purpose to be gained through the use of our nuclear arsenal.”

Haley and the nuclear-armed states could embrace the new ban treaty using Sec. Nitze’s words: “Destruction of the arms did not prove feasible then [in 1982], but there is no good reason why it should not be carried out now.” — John LaForge

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Presidential Nuclear Nonsense

In the 1980s, hundreds of thousands marched in German towns against US intermediate range Pershing nuclear missiles. Upper right banner says: “Missiles out of Heilbronn [pop. 122,000] and off to the Pentagon”
The Reagan Administration’s 1980s crazy talk of “winning” nuclear war with “only” 20 million US dead produced a lot of anti-nuclear activism — all over the world. In Europe, hundreds of thousands marched against the placement of US Cruise and Pershing II missiles in NATO countries.

Fear of nuclear war and anger over presidential ignorance of it also produced the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF. The treaty banned nuclear-armed missiles in Europe with a range of 270-to-2970 miles. About 2,700 missiles were destroyed by 1991, a deal that weapons salesmen like President !#&$! don’t like.

What the British, German, Dutch and Belgian marching masses were so alarmed about was NATO’s plan to destroy Europe in order to save it. Former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt explained it this way: “So-called ‘flexible response’ …. means that the West … says to the Soviet Union: ‘We threaten you with a military defense strategy which foresees the early use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons.’ That means for the Germans that the West in its self-defense would destroy Germany.”

Schmidt’s description was no exaggeration. In an October 5, 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service, “flexible response” was explained similarly. “NATO’s strategy of ‘flexible response’… is designed,” the C.R.S. wrote, “to allow NATO to … be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict, with the intent of slowing or stopping [opponents] if they … advanced into Western Europe.”

Now, President !#&$! says he will withdraw from the INF treaty because he claims Russia is in violation of it. Russia denies this, noting that research and development is not banned, that its new land-based cruise missile “fully complies” with the treaty’s requirements.

These questions could all be settled with negotiations, but President !#&$! wants to get contracts for new missiles signed and the gusher of military spending pumping, so that electoral votes are bought and paid for this year, and in 2020. Last Feb. 12, the Prez boasted, “We’re increasing arsenals of virtually every weapon. If they’re not going to stop, we’re going to be so far ahead of anybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before.” Never mind that the president cannot speak English; he and Congress are handing hundreds of billions of your tax dollars to their friends.

• Boeing took down $14.6 billion for the year 2015, and last February, won a $6.5 billion contract from the Missile Defense Agency to complete an “a new missile field with 20 additional” ground-based interceptor rockets at Fort Greely, Alaska, according to the Washington Post. While missile defense systems have never worked, the Pentagon said the total Boeing contract would reach $12.6 billion through 2023. • Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest arms merchant, is buried in money with $29.4 billion coming to it in 2015 under 66,000 contracts. • Raytheon was obligated to get $12.3 billion that year, including $31.8 million 464 Excalibur cannon-fired munitions that will also be sold to Sweden, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands. • General Dynamics drank up $11.8 billion building warships. • Northrop Grumman took down $9.5 billion, including the year’s portion of the (projected) $55 billion Long-Range Strike Bomber. • United Technologies nailed a cool $1 billion for a few more F-35 fighter jet engines, but was obligated to get $6.6 billion for its 24,000 contracts in 2015.

With the public demanding affordable health care, better public schools, energy efficient cars, mass transit, and safe energy production, weapons builders could instead be putting their engineering expertise to good use. Enough of our wartime frenzy of bomb-building waste and fraud may again move millions to demand a reversal.

Martin Schulz, leader of the German Social Democrats who campaigned against Angela Merkel last year, was being reasonable in September 2017 when he said, “As chancellor, I will commit Germany to having the nuclear weapons stationed here withdrawn from our country. The cap on nuclear weapons in our country must be zero.” — John LaForge

 

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The White House Vs. Radiation Science & Health: Expanding Exposures Would Save Industry Billions

Radiation Can Smash Apart DNA

Experts at the US National Academies of Science settled a big question in 2005, and the president’s business friends don’t like the answer. Is there a dose of radiation so low that it is harmless? (Ionizing radiation is the alpha and beta particles, and the neutron, gamma and X-rays given off by radioactive materials in medicine, the military, industry, and reactor operations.) The NAS published its answer in its seventh edition of “Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation” (BEIR-VII), where it emphatically said: “No.” As they had done many times before, the NAS concluded that any radiation exposure, no matter how slight, carries a risk of causing cancer or other illnesses.

The NAS panel that produced BEIR-VII “could not ignore the current body of scientific studies that are now recognizing harmful and hitherto unpredicted effects at very low doses of radiation,” said Cindy Folkers at Nuclear Information & Resource Service in Takoma Park, MD.

But like the handful of scientists who stand against the 98% and say climate change is not caused by industrialism, there are a couple of nuclear-happy quacks who say radiation exposure is good for us. The President wants us to believe them. (Time: “Trump Administration Moving to Weaken EPA Radiation Regulations”)

Like scientists in the tobacco industry who conned millions and even got company CEOs to lie to Congress about their knowledge of cigarette hazards, some nuclear industry-sponsored researchers claim that low doses of radiation are harmless and could even act like inoculations. This “hormesis” theory was explicitly rejected in BEIR-VII. Dr. Peter Crane, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission attorney told the New York Times in Sept. 2015, “[T]he National Academies of Science, along with the rest of mainstream scientific authority, regard hormesis as wholly without merit.” A separate study published in Radiation Research in 2005 and reported in the journal Science was said to be “the latest blow to the [hormesis] notion that there is a threshold of exposure to radiation below which there is no health threat (and there might even be a benefit).”

Trying to Save the Industry Billions

In 2002, Roger Clark, President of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), warned in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that “Some people think that too much money is being spent to achieve low levels of residual contamination.” They want, “a threshold in the dose-response relationship in order to reduce expenditure,” Clark said.

As Science reported in 1999, “Billions of dollars are at stake. Stricter standards could increase the amount that agencies and industries must spend to clean up radioactive waste and protect workers.” In June 2015, a landmark international study reported in The Lancet Haematology presented “strong evidence of positive associations between protracted low-dose radiation exposure and leukemia.” The journal Nature said of the study: “The finding … scuppers the popular idea that there might be a threshold dose below which radiation is harmless — and provides scientists with some hard numbers to quantify the risks of everyday exposures.”

Now, as with climate change deniers and tobacco hucksters, fringe scientists are singing the de-regulation song that Trump’s industrialists wants to hear. If weakened radiation exposure limits are approved by Congress, the nuclear industry will save billions and its profit margins could grow as fast as lung tumors.

The public and the scientific community must fight back. There is no safe level of exposure to ionizing radiation. Even the smallest radiation exposures have cellular-level effects. The EPA website has said for years: “Based on current scientific evidence, any exposure to radiation can be harmful (or can increase the risk of cancer)… In other words, it is assumed that no radiation exposure is completely risk free.” Every US government agency that regulates radiation releases or its medical use makes the same warning — based on BEIR-VII (BEIR-VI, BEIR-V, etc.) In 1989, the National Academy’s BEIR-V quadrupled the risk of cancer from low-dose radiation exposures, and warned explicitly about “a much greater danger” of mental retardation among babies exposed in the womb to radiation.

An under-reported concern about radiation is the fact that internal contamination is far more dangerous than the same exposure outside the body.

In Oct. 2004, the British government’s Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters reported that low-level radiation from nuclear reactors may be up to 10 times more hazardous when ingested or inhaled than previously estimated. Dr. Chris Busby, the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, compares the two harms this way: “Externally, think of exposure like being warmed before a glowing fireplace. Internally, think of taking a hot coal from that fire and popping it into your mouth.”

When radioactive materials are vented, dumped or leaked, they contaminate soil, water, rainfall and food, and they can then be inhaled or ingested. Some persist in the environment for centuries. Tritium (radioactive hydrogen) is released to the air and to bodies of water by reactors and nuclear wastes. It persists for 120 years. Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility wrote Sept. 30 that, “Tritium gets built right into the body’s organic molecules, including DNA molecules. Precisely because tritium is so difficult to control, and so easily dispersed into the air and the water around nuclear facilities, industry experts advocate for lax standards and permissive practices regarding release.”

Dozens of studies indicate that low doses of radiation given over long periods of time are far more dangerous than the industry and the government claim. Infant mortality rates and childhood leukemia rates both increase in areas downwind from operating reactors. By 1999, the government finally admitted that radiation exposures endured for years by nuclear weapons workers had made them sick, contrary to decades of repeated assurances that the doses were harmless.

We all have a responsibility to reject Trump’s nuclear bailout which would expose everyone to more radiation, and instead to demand a robust strengthening of radiation protection regulations particularly with respect to infants and children.     — John LaForge

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The Climate’s Already Too Hot for Nuclear Power

Fall Quarterly 2018
The single nuclear reactor Ft. Calhoun station near Omaha, Nebraska was inundated by Missouri River flooding in June 2011. Missouri floodwaters also threatened the Cooper reactor in Brownville, Nebraska, which narrowly escaped a shutdown. Ft. Calhoun was permanently closed in 2016, but still “stores” 600,000 to 800,000 pounds (300 to 400 tons) of high level radioactive waste fuel in the floodplain.
By John LaForge, Nukewatch

With the summer’s record high temp’s all over the world, Andy Rowell asked this pointed question in Oil Change International: “For the last decade the nuclear industry has been telling us it is the solution to climate change. But if their reactors can’t work in our rapidly warming world, are we just building a whole new generation of expensive white elephants?”

Indeed, Reuters reported Aug. 4 that Electricity de France (EDF) in Paris shut down four nuclear reactors at three sites due to the heat summer wave. EDF, the mostly government-owned utility, ordered the shut downs because the scorching summer heat that slammed Europe drastically raised temperatures in the Rhone and Rhine Rivers. Temperatures reached 98.6°F in the Rhone valley, home to 14 reactors. Highs in Spain and Portugal in early August hovered around 104°F and reached 116.6°F.

The warming of seawater caused by Europe’s heat wave forced Finland’s two Loviisa reactors, about 65 miles outside Helsinki, to reduce power in July, just as it did before, in 2010 and 2011, Reuters reported.

The July 2006 heat wave also forced European reactor operators to reduce or halt production due to dramatic increases in the temperature of river waters. The Guardian reported back then that Spain shut down its reactor on the River Ebro. Reactor operators in Germany also cut output then, and several German and French units were allowed to temporarily violate temperature limits on the hot water the reactors return to rivers.

Nuclear reactors exacerbate global warming

In 2003, temperatures in French rivers reached record highs that also forced the temporary powering down of four reactors. France’s nuclear oversight authority then gave some reactor operators permission to return the river water at temperatures not normally allowed, a move that critics said would endanger fish and add to global warming.

Meanwhile, rising sea levels threaten to shutter one-out-of-four of the world’s 460 power reactors currently built on coastlines. John Vidal reports in the Aug. 21 edition of Hakai magazine that experts have warned that even newly built seawalls may not provide sufficient protection. Vidal interviewed Pete Roche, a former adviser to the UK government and Greenpeace, who pointed out that the seawall at the $25-billion “Hinkley Point C” nuclear station being built in southwest England “does not adequately take into account sea-level rise due to climate change.”

“In fact,” Vidal reports, research by Ensia — a nonprofit environmental magazine published at the University of Minnesota — suggests that “at least 100 US, European, and Asian nuclear power stations built just a few meters above sea level could be threatened by serious flooding caused by accelerating sea-level rise and more frequent storm surges.”

The two St. Lucie reactors in Florida are among the US coastal nuclear sites considered most vulnerable to storm surges. While no US reactors have been “in imminent danger of a meltdown because of a storm surge,” Vidal notes, there have been many close calls. “Three US reactors were temporarily shut down because of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and a fourth, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, was put on alert when water levels rose dramatically, according to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

But the NRC is not concerned about storm surges. In August 2017, as Hurricane Harvey pummeled east Texas, environmental groups called for the immediate shutdown of the two South Texas Project reactors near Bay City. Instead, the twin, 42-year-old behemoths were kept running at full capacity throughout the disaster, the wettest tropical cyclone on record in the United States.

 

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