Tag: Nuclear

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090817/NEWS01/908170340/0/NEWS01/Aid-sought-for–Atomic-Vets-

Posted on: Monday, August 17, 2009

Aid sought for ‘Atomic Vets’

Bill would facilitate care for U.S. veterans exposed to radiation

By John Yaukey
Advertiser Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – Charles Clark knew something was wrong when he started losing his teeth at age 37.

“They just fell out – no blood,” the Hawai’i resident said.

He is virtually certain it had something to do with his Navy service in the Pacific during World War II, when he was exposed to atomic bomb radiation.

On Sept. 23, 1945, the 17-year-old sailor entered Nagasaki, Japan, where six weeks earlier the world’s second nuclear weapons attack had killed 80,000 people. Some died due to massive doses of radiation.

Clark remained in Nagasaki for five days, setting up ship-to-shore communications. It would forever change his life.

Since then, “I’ve had more than 180 skin cancers removed from my face,” he said in a recent interview. “Even today, the cancer keeps recurring. It never stops.”

Clark is among a group called the “Atomic Vets” – American military veterans exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons.

Between 1945 and 1962, half a million U.S. troops participated in more than 250 atmospheric and underwater atomic bomb tests, most in the Pacific and Nevada. Many of these veterans have since suffered a panoply of illnesses commonly associated with radiation exposure, but many have had trouble getting the care they need.

Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai’i, has introduced legislation that would streamline the process and add transparency.

“These veterans are dying every day from diseases caused, at least in part, by their service in atomic tests and other nuclear weapon-related activities,” the 11-term congressman said.

The treatment process is run through the Department of Veterans Affairs using data from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Typically, the process entails a veteran approaching the VA with a claim. At that point, the agency sends the information to the DTRA, which decides whether the veteran’s service record indicates past exposure to high doses of radiation.

This process, known as “dose reconstruction,” can take months and occurs behind closed doors, critics say.

It can be cumbersome and mysterious, especially for someone already dealing with a life-threatening illness.

The DTRA and the VA recognize 22 types of cancer that qualify as caused by radiation exposure. Some cancers must occur within a particular time frame, such as 20 years from exposure, to qualify.

More than 90 percent of the veterans who apply for benefits outside the set parameters are denied, according to research Abercrombie’s staff has done.

Abercrombie’s legislation, the Atomic Veterans Relief Act, would add transparency by opening up DTRA’s analysis methods.

There is no companion bill yet in the Senate. Abercrombie introduced his legislation around Memorial Day. He hopes it will pick up momentum as stories like Clark’s circulate, and as lawmakers gain appreciation for the sacrifices of war through the prism of two ongoing conflicts.

“We’re trying to get some certainty in the process,” said Abercrombie, who is running for governor in a state with a large retired military population.

DTRA spokeswoman Kate Hooten said the agency has well-established protocols for determining radiation exposure, and she noted that over the decades, many veterans have scattered across the globe and are out of touch with government health care networks.

“This is an important issue,” she said. “We’re always interested in finding out how we can reach out to the public.”

Vets remember

To make the case for his reform legislation, Abercrombie has collected the narratives of some veterans who worked around nuclear tests and are suffering multiple cancers and other ailments.

Edward Blas, who lives on Guam, was stationed in the Marshall Islands during the cleanup on Eniwetok Atoll after 43 nuclear tests there.

“The evidence was overwhelming that we were exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation while we lived on ground zero,” he wrote.

Despite the fact that he has never smoked, Blas is anemic and diabetic and weighs half the 220 pounds he did in the service. But his medical claim was denied on the grounds that veterans who served there after the nuclear tests were not considered “atomic vets.”

But those were different times. Not much was known about radiation exposure.

In the early days of the nation’s nuclear program, Cold War imperatives overrode most other concerns.

“I’ve talked to people who were pretty casual about radiation in the early going,” said Richard Rhodes, author of the 900-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.”

“We were at war and we had to take some risks,” Rhodes said in an interview this week.

For Clark, the risks went further than his own body.

His daughter lost both breasts, while his granddaughter suffers from skin ailments, all of which he is convinced can be traced back to Nagasaki.

“We just never understood what we were getting into back then,” Clark said. “We were young kids.”

(The following manifestation was made by Rep. Walden Bello of the Party-list Akbayan! on the floor of the House of Representatives of the Philippines on August 13, 2009. It was prepared by Herbert Docena of Focus on the Global South.)

US’ nuclear-powered carrier entry to Manila violates ASEAN treaty, Philippine constitution

Yesterday, the USS George Washington aircraft carrier-a gargantuan ship measuring as long as seven Olympic-sized swimming pools in length and as high as a 24-storey building-docked at the Manila Bay. It carried with it over 6,000 US troops-or over a third of the number of US troops that used to be based in the former US bases in Subic and Clark. With a flight deck twice as large as UP’s Sunken Garden, accommodating over 80 aircraft, carriers like the USS George Washington have been described by US military officials as a kind of “floating base”-no less a part of the US overseas military presence as its ground bases.

It is no secret that the USS George Washington is nuclear-powered: two Westinghouse nuclear reactors provide the propulsion it needs for speed. Though the United States government would “neither confirm or deny” whether the ships actually carry nuclear weapons, what is known is that that these carriers were designed and built to have the capacity to actually launch nuclear weapons. In Japan, where the question has rankled the public for decades, a high-ranking US official has said that “responsible and thinking Japanese… accept the probability that at least some of our ships may carry nuclear weapons.”

Responsible and thinking Filipinos could and should also therefore assume that some US ships carry nuclear weapons. But that we do not accept it, however, has been made clear when we overwhelmingly ratified-at the urging of the late President Cory Aquino-the 1987 Philippine constitution. Section 8 clearly states that our country “adopts and pursues a policy of freedom from nuclear weapons in its territory.” By forging the Treaty on the Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in 1995, we have been joined by our neighbors in rejecting what the Americans want us to accept.

USS George Washington is just one of an increasing number of US warships visiting the country. Since 2001, port visits have surged nearly 20-fold: from 7 in 2001 to 130 last year. And the government does not even seem to be keeping track. Just last June, a Chinese submarine hit a sonar array being towed by the USS John McCain off Subic Bay-and Filipino officials did not even know that the USS John McCain was here.

These recurring ship visits are part of the new kind of US military basing in the Philippines-one that is different from the kind the US had in Subic and Clark-but no less dangerous and illegal. Other dimensions of this include the permanent basing of the 600-strong US Joint Special Operations Task Force in Zamboanga City, the designation of “cooperative security locations,” a category of US bases, in unspecified locations all over the country. This is again a creeping and underhanded subversion of the Constitution and the Filipinos’ sovereign will.

This deepening US military presence reveals what it is that the US wants the Philippines to continue to do as the “coordinator” for US interests in the ASEAN: that is, as an open staging ground for US intervention in the region.

We in Akbayan! demand the immediate withdrawal of the USS George Washington from Philippine territory and call for a moratorium on all further US warship entries into the country. If the US insists on “neither confirming nor denying” the presence of nuclear weapons in its ships, we demand that a Congressional Committee be allowed to fully inspect all US warships in our territory. We also call for an immediate investigation on the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Mindanao and a freeze in further deployments by its troops. Finally we call for the abrogation of the Visiting Forces Agreement. These should move us forward in redefining our relations with the US and bring us closer to an independent self-respecting foreign policy.

In Hiroshima

By Ann Wright

I am in the ancient Japanese city of Hiroshima for the annual ceremonies on Aug. 6 to honor the souls of over 140,000 Japanese, South Koreans and Chinese who died instantly and over 300,000 who suffered serious wounds 64 years ago when the United States used weapons of mass destruction — atomic bombs — on the people of Hiroshima, and three days later, on the people of Nagasaki.

The rationale for dropping the atomic bombs was to force the Japanese government to surrender to end World War II, not by killing more of the Japanese military, but by killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and putting fear of a similar fate in the remaining civilian population of Japan.

The U.S. government still tells us that tens of thousands of American military would have been killed if the United States had had to invade the mainland of Japan and that American lives were saved by using these bombs on civilian populations.

Yet historical documents reveal that the United States government knew that because of Japanese losses in the Pacific, the Japanese government would have surrendered — probably within a month. There was no need to have incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, except to test for the first time the effects of atomic bombs on a civilian target, thereby sending a warning of U.S. military dominance to not only the Japanese government, military and citizens, but to the rest of the world! Even today, the Department of Energy’s website details the need for scientific data on the effects of the bombs and steadfastly ignores the fact that specific targeting of a civilian population is a war crime. But, history shows us that the victors of war prosecute the losers of wars for their war crimes, while the losers cannot hold accountable the victors for their crimes.

The Japanese targeting of the U.S. military facility Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which killed 2,402 and wounded 1,282, brought the United States into World War II. The 2,974 civilians killed in the four September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States brought America into the eight year invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and paved the way for the Bush administration to attack Iraq in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent civilians have been killed.

Atomic bombs were not the only weapons of mass destruction used by both allied and axis military forces during World War II. Nazi Germany firebombed hundred of British cities and towns and British and U.S. air forces retaliated by firebombing hundreds of cities in Germany.

In 1945, virtually every major city in Japan was fire bombed by the United States. In a three-month period from February to July, 1945, the U.S. Air Force conducted 14 days of air raids sending over 2,500 B-29 bombers to drop firebombs on Tokyo. In one day alone, March 10, 1945, B-29s dropped incendiary bombs that killed over 100,000 people and burned more the 25 percent of the city.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared being firebombed so they would be in tact to ensure that the destructive power of the atomic bombs dropped on those two cities could be better measured by the U.S. government. Neither city was a large military town or had huge war industries. Japanese friends have pointed out that Nagasaki was home to one of the largest Christian populations in Japan and have remarked on the irony of a “Christian nation” targeting the Christian population of Japan.

For the past few days I have attended and been a speaker at the 2009 World Conference against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (http://www.antiatom.org/GSKY/en/discription_gensuikyo.htm). This conference is held annually to re-focus the world’s attention to the horrible destructive power of the atomic and hydrogen bombs and the necessity to abolish them for the sake of the future of the planet.

We heard the emotional and moving testimony of the Habakusha of Japan who survived the 1945 bombings, but have had life-long medical problems. Most Habukusha have now died — victims of cancer from the radioactivity of the bombs. Those still surviving are in their late 70s and 80s and live with the memories of August 6 — stories of having their clothes seared into their bodies, seeing friends and teachers with skin handing from their bodies, faces gone, injured, jumping into the river to try to cool their bodies, people calling for help from under collapsed buildings, thousands of dead lying in the streets — having to help keep cremation fires going for weeks to burn the bodies. Many school children on weekly work details in the city vanished — incinerated with no trace left on this earth. Painful stories retold to educate others to the horrors of nuclear weapons.

We also heard the stories of men and women who were contaminated in the 2000 tests of atomic and nuclear weapons by the British on Christmas Island and in Australia, the French in French Polynesia and Algeria, the Soviet Union in Semi-Palatinsk, and Novaya Zemlya Island, the Chinese in Lop Nor, the Indians in the Rajastan desert, the Pakistanis in Baluchistan, the North Koreans in P’Unggye-yok, the South Africans and Israelis in a suspected test above Prince Edward Island in the Indian Ocean and the United States in the Marshall Islands, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Alaska and Mississippi.

Most of those injured during the testing are still having difficulty getting acknowledgment of their injuries so they may receive treatment.

And we have heard from international delegates from other nations that have been invaded by the United States and suffered the effects of U.S. weapons of mass destruction. Bui Van Nghi, a delegate from Vietnam, told us of America’s use of Agent Orange 45 years ago to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam in order to expose the supply routes of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army, but which also exposed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (and American soldiers) to the cancer causing carcinogens — killing many and causing cancers and deformities in first, second and third generations.

Dr. Sami from Iraq told of targeting and destruction of civil infrastructure facilities in Baghdad in America’s “Shock and Awe” campaign in March, 2003 and purposeful destruction of the city of Fallujah in 2004. As a medical doctor, he is concerned about the effects of depleted uranium used in America weaponry. High levels of cancer in Iraqis exposed to exploded depleted uranium shells and to materials contaminated with low level radioactivity from the depleted uranium during 1990-91 are being tracked, as are still-births and deformities in second generations, reflecting data complied on American military personnel who served in Gulf War I and their families. The six years of U.S. combat in Iraq from 2003 to 2009 has created another wave of exposure of Iraqis and Americans to depleted uranium.

The Japanese people are looking forward to a new approach on nuclear weapons from the United States. Each speaker in the Hiroshima ceremonies referred to President Obama’s April 5, 2009, speech in Prague, Czech Republic, in which he affirmed his commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and his belief that countries with nuclear weapons would move toward disarmament, those without them would not acquire them and that all countries should have access to peaceful nuclear energy. In contrast to the Bush administration, Obama said he is committed to the success of the 2010 NPT review conference to be held in May, 2010 in New York.

The speakers focused on President Obama’s historic comments on nuclear weapons and chose not to mention his military strategy for conventional wars — the largest military budget in the history of the world, the dramatic increase in military operations in Afghanistan and America’s continuing military presence in Iraq.

Our job as citizens is ensure that President Obama follows his words with concrete actions to reduce, and then eliminate nuclear weapons from the planet. It won’t be easy, that’s for sure, but the safety and security of the people on our earth is at stake. The May, 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty conference in New York City, will bring tens of thousands of citizens from around the world committed to abolishing nuclear weapons — come join us!!

Today, Hiroshima looks like any other modern Japanese city, except for the Peace Memorial Park built in the center of the city. In the past 64 years, until the Bush administration arm-twisted the Japanese government to ignore its own Article 9 constitutional prohibition against war to send naval refueling vessels and air transport planes as a part of the coalition of the willing in the war on Iraq, Japan has not participated in military operations against any country.

In these 64 years, the people of Japan have enjoyed the benefits of peace while the United States has begun wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and has invaded and occupied numerous other countries-Grenada, Haiti, Panama, and has funded and provided weapons for Israel’s wars in the Middle East.

No more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis! No more war!

Ann Wright served 29 years in the US Army and Army Reserves and retired as a Colonel. She was a U.S. diplomat for 16 years and served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She has co-led 3 trips to Gaza since January, 2009. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience” (www.voicesofconscience.com).

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-wright/in-hiroshima_b_255521.html

The German peace movement won an major victory. After 17 years of struggle to close down a former Russian Air Force bombing and shooting range, the German minister of defense announced that the government was abandoning its plans to conduct military training in the area.  A victory celebration is planned for August 23rd.   They welcome messages of solidarity from allies around the world to be shared at this event.  Here’s a  message from a leader of the movement Hans-Peter Laubenthal <A-HPR@t-online.de>:

Big success for the German peace movement against the “bombodrom”

The “bombodrom” is a 120 square kilometers big area in Germany, 80 km north of Berlin. This area was used by the Russian Air Force as bombing and shooting training area (therefore named with the Russian word “bombodrom”). The people in this area suffered for the noise and the poisoning of the environment for more than 30 years. After the unification of Germany. they had hoped that this will stop. But since 1992 the German government wanted to use this area for the German Air Force. Since that time the people resisted to this plan, we have been resisting now for 17 years, and now we have won!! The German minister of defense declared, that the government gives up their plans to use the area as bombing and shooting training area.

Our success concerns not only Germany, but also the NATO and the military force of the European Union.

We resisted by three means:
1) Legal processes
2) Demonstrations and other legal protest
3) actions of civil disobedience (e.g. occupying the territory)

The concerned villages and enterprises went to the court. Altogether there were 27 verdicts. The German government lost them all, because they had not fulfilled the basic needs of a zoning procedure. Because of old laws from Nazi times our army thought they are especially privileged to choose any ground for military purposes. But in the end all courts decided that this old Nazi-law is no longer valid and they must investigate what influence the “bombodrom” would have to the citizens and their enterprises. The area is beautiful and can become a tourist attraction. During these 17 years several movements were able to build up wide spread resistance. In the last 8 years there was always the biggest Easter March of the peace movement in this area. Many actions took place to get photos into our media. See the homepage www.freieheide.de. Even if you cannot read German see the photos under “Fotogalerie”, so you can get an impression of some actions. I think the story of this resistance must be told to learn for similar situations.

The “bombodrom” is not only a German case, because not only the German Air Force and the Army were foreseen to train there but also all our allies. This was to be the central training ground also for the NATO Reaction Force and the European Battle Groups, which are formed now and are to be ready between 2011 and 2013. This was mentioned in the operation plan of the German ministry for defense for the air-ground-bombing-area Wittstock from 2008, August 28th.

In this operation plan also the “nuclear sharing” is mentioned. Germany is by no means a nuclear free zone. In the German airbase in Büchel, near the city of Cochem on the river Mosel the USA still have deployed 20 nuclear bombs of the types B-61-3 and B-61-4 in subterranean bunkers. And this 20 years after the Cold War has ended. The bombs have a variable power between 45 and 170 kilotons and therefore up to 13 times higher power for destruction than the bomb of Hiroshima. The nuclear bombs which have also been in Ramstein and Nörvenich have been removed.

The nuclear bombs are ready for use, when the US president gives the order and after the special code for the security systems has arrived on a separated way of commands. The USA claim to have the right to use their nuclear bombs, deployed in Europe, outside the NATO area for the support of their regional headquarter GENICOM which is “responsible” for the Middle East. Experts estimate, that there are still 240 nuclear bombs in Europe. On the German airbase Büchel US special forces with 50 soldiers guard the nuclear bombs. In case the order comes from Washington they would release the safety catch and fix them under the German Tornado-plane, which the German pilot then has to fly to the designated target. Even by military standards this makes no sense at all, for the Tornado jet s have a range of 1853 km. In this range there are only NATO allies.

The German government sticks to the nuclear bombs in Germany. On 2008, June 25th the speaker of the government Kossendystated that the people, who demand the withdrawal they “challenge the status of the Atlantic Alliance”, and “hinder the right of determination” and have in mind “to weaken the relationship between North America and Europe durably”.

It was planned, that the German Tornados coming with the nuclear bombs from Büchel should exercise at the “bombodrom”, how to drop the nuclear bombs. They were supposed to train the “loft-procedure”. According to the operation plan from 2003 the Tornados would come from south and at the training area go down to a low flight level and accelerate up to 1000 km/h. at a short distance to the goal they would go up steeply and release their training bombs. By this loft-procedure the bomb has a longer way, so that the pilot has enough time to escape with his plane from the explosion, that otherwise could destroy his own plane. They did these exercises mainly in the USA. Many experts thought that this training is no longer possible, because in the next years the Tornados will be replaced by Eurofighters, which cannot drop nuclear bombs. But in the latest operation plan you can read, that for the “nuclear sharing” 85 Tornados will be kept for this task, even after the year 2017.

All this plans cannot work, because of 17 years of resistance.

There will be a big “victory party” of the peace movement at August 23rd.

I ask you to send messages to us, so we can read them to the activists.

I hope you all also feel encouraged. It is possible to get rid of military bases, if you have enough energy to fight for years. Of course I know that it is not a final victory, because our Air Force will now try to get other training facilities in our neighbour country Poland. So the fight goes on.