Antinuclear

Suggestions that Julian Assange might be returned to Australia, with a “plea deal”.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could get a David Hicks-style plea deal with the US that would see him return to Australia, United States ambassador Caroline Kennedy has told the SMH . She said such a resolution to the Department of Justice’s case against him is possible despite US Secretary of State Antony Blinken coming across hard-lined about the matter.

Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton said Kennedy’s comments show the US wants to be done with the 13-year-long saga, but what would that look like exactly?’

Law expert at the ANU Don Rothwell told the paper the US could downgrade Assange’s 17 espionage charges for a guilty plea — he’s already done four years in a UK prison, and the rest of the sentence could be done in Australia. But Assange fans might say it’s hard to imagine him ever pleading guilty, or going to the US to do so.

August 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Racism and the choice to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Dehumanizing of “others” began but did not end with Japan

By Linda Pentz Gunter, Aug 13 2023, e https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/08/13/the-choice-to-bomb-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

The debate about whether the United States “needed” to drop atomic bombs on Japan will likely be waged indefinitely. Was it to end the war, save American lives, test the bomb or send a message to Stalin?

Amidst all the theories, some of which are disputed and a few disproven, one over-riding motivation remains: racism.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a highly effective propaganda campaign was waged in the US to paint Japanese people as sub-human or worse. The Japanese were depicted as predators and vermin. During reporting from Iwo Jima, Time magazine, pronounced the Japanese people “ignorant” and went on speculate: “Perhaps he is human. Nothing. . . indicates it.” 

Today, the posters and rhetoric in circulation then would be considered abhorrent hate speech. But in the 1940s, it instilled enough revulsion in the American public to justify the annihilation of at least 200,000 human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And it was only the beginning. After World War II, the newly emergent atomic powers began testing their weapons of annihilation on Indigenous communities far away. The Americans bombed the Marshall Islanders; the British targeted Aboriginal lands in Australia and the islands of Micronesia; the French went to Algeria and then Polynesia; the Soviet Union chose Kazakhstan.

The Marshallese, like the Japanese before them, were characterized as subhuman. They were deliberately experimented on, to see what would happen to human beings living in a highly radioactive environment. This included returning the people of Rongelap to their atoll just three years after they were removed to make way for the enormous and disastrous Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954. They were returned, because, said, Merril Eisenbud, director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Agency’s health and safety laboratory, “That island is by far the most contaminated place on Earth and it will be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”

Much of this was celebrated by the US military brass. The Marshallese victims of atomic tests were brutally denigrated as uncivilized, albeit they were, conceded Eisenbud in one his most appalling statements, “more like us than mice”.

The uranium needed for atomic weapons was mined in places such as the Congo in Africa, and on Native American and First Nations lands in North America. 

Today, France still gets at least half of the uranium needed to power its commercial nuclear reactors from Niger, although the recent coup there may have put that supply chain in jeopardy. But many of the people who mine it live without electricity and running water and suffer the health consequences of the radioactive tailings and waste left behind in their environment.

Of course, it’s not an entirely racist story. Atomic veterans the world over have struggled for recognition of their suffering and for compensation, largely unsuccessfully. Many experienced the tests directly. Others were sent in later to “clean up” the radioactive mess left behind.

In the US, citizens of Nevada and surrounding states were shocked to learn that their own government was willing to treat them like guinea pigs. The more than one thousand atomic tests carried out at the Nevada Test Site, situated on Western Shoshone land, contaminated communities across multiple US states.

Those communities were not warned or protected. Indeed, the Nevada tests were treated as something thrilling. Las Vegas even promoted them as some sort of bizarre tourist attraction. One postcard of the time depicts a massive mushroom cloud rising behind the “Desert Inn” in Las Vegas as an American family unpack their luggage. But the postcard was no mere fantasy. Photographs of the time show Las Vegas hotel guests around a swimming pool watching a mushroom could rise in the distance.

Still today, sickeningly, you can buy Fat Man and Little Boy earrings at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

The United States has never officially apologized — to the people of Japan, or the Marshall Islands, or New Mexico, where the first Trinity test took place, or Nevada and the neighbouring states. Nor has France for its part in bombing Algerians in the Sahara and French Polynesians in the South Pacific. The UK has neither apologized to, nor agreed to compensate, its atomic veterans for their exposures during atomic tests on Australian Aboriginal land and the Line Islands of the Pacific.

The dehumanizing of other human beings, mostly on the basis of what we erroneously call “race” (we are all the same “race”) is of course not restricted to the nuclear sector. Communities of color, at least in the United States, are routinely targeted by the fossil fuel and chemical industries and by industrial and inhumane factory farming.

In North Carolina, for example, where a large portion of the country’s horrendous hog factory farms are located — known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs — there are 10 million pigs, about one per person. However, these are concentrated in a handful of mainly African American counties. As the Rachel Carson Council describes it in its report, Pork and Pollution, in one predominantly North Carolina African American county alone there are 2.3 million hogs.

Addressing the fundamental crime of racism is an essential step if we are to eliminate the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate catastrophe now upon us.

This article is adapted from a blog entry originally published by Scottish CND and a subsequent webinar presentation for Scottish CND on August 8. For an essential deep look at racism and the nuclear sector, read Vincent Intondi’s excellent book, African Americans Against The Bomb.

August 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Concrete tomb filled with deadly nuclear waste is leaking as it’s starting to crack

Joe Harker, 12 August 2023 https://www.unilad.com/news/world-news/qin-xi-huang-tomb-china-emperor-terracotta-army-345786-20230809

43 years ago a concrete container of nuclear waste was constructed on a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, but there’s a big problem with that, it’s leaking.

During the Cold War, the US used islands in the Pacific to test nuclear weapons, and between 1946 and 1958 carried out a series of tests on Enewetak Atoll.

Of course, nuclear bombs poison the ground around them and the waste from these weapons is a dangerous commodity in and of itself. So between 1977 and 1980, a concrete dome was built to store the nuclear waste from the bomb tests.

That ended up being called the Runit Dome, because it was located on Runit Island, though it was also referred to as ‘the tomb’.

Housing radioactive debris, including poisonous plutonium, thousands of people scraped nuclear waste into a blast crater and covered it over with concrete to stop it from getting out.

Unfortunately that plan isn’t going quite so well as, according to IFL Science, a report from 2019 warns that changing conditions on the island are causing the concrete dome to crack.

Increasing temperatures are not helping the problem, while a rise in sea levels is also compounding the problem as the dome is not elevated off the ground, and the lapping waters of the sea are eroding it further.

This is all resulting in radioactive material bleeding out into the ground on the rest of the island and leaking out into the sea as well.

As long as the plutonium stays within the crater covered by the dome then it won’t be a major new source of contamination into the ocean.

That could all change if the cracking dome were to give way and seawater was able to flow in and out of the crater.

This concrete tomb could be a cracking nuclear coffin with a monster inside just waiting to be released, but for now things are still within acceptable levels.

According to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, marine radioactivity expert Dr Ken Buesseler said they’d ‘known for years that the dome is leaking’, but for now only a ‘small amount of radioactivity’ was getting out.

For context, this isn’t putting the surrounding area beyond safety standards just yet, and the plutonium sealed beneath the Runit Dome is only a fraction of what was released during nuclear testing.

While he said things were alright at the moment, he warned that they ‘hadn’t considered sea level rise in the 1970s when they built this’, and said the dome would be ‘at least partially submerged by the end of this century’.

August 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment