Tag: Nuclear

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“Secret Japan-US nuclear deal” revealed

US nuke-weapons have a Free Pass to enter Japan

“Secret Japan-US nuclear deal” revealed

June 1, 2009, a Japanese former Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ryohei Murata, and other 3 former Vice-Ministers admitted the existence of a “Secret Nuclear Deal” between the U.S. and Japan in Japanese news papers.

The long standing agreement has allowed U.S. war vessels and aircraft to bring nuclear weapons into Japan, totally in violation of the 3 Non-Nuclear Principles –to neither possess, manufacture, nor allow nuclear weapons to enter the country.

The Japanese government has denied the existence of such an agreement since 1960, but many citizens and peace activists have maintained outright skepticism. The ex Vice Minister’s revelation is another jolt to government credibility, both for the many years of secrecy, and for the serious violation of nuclear prohibitions.

Source: http://www.jpkenpo.us/News.en.html

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Another round of anti-North Korea fear mongering

I am for nuclear abolition, but the hypocrisy of the nuclear powers is outrageous: why is it okay for the U.S. to have missiles and nuclear warheads, but the countries that are consistently threatened by the U.S. are not allowed to have these same weapons?

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Hawaii warned of missile threat

Pyongyang could improve accuracy of weapon within 3 years, Pentagon says

By Julian E. Barnes
Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON – North Korea may be capable of hitting Hawai’i and the West Coast of the United States with its missiles within three years, but it is unlikely to be able to deliver a nuclear warhead in that time frame, a top U.S. defense official said yesterday.

The assessment came as North Korea’s rulers show signs of preparing for additional weapons tests in the face of international condemnation and new United Nations sanctions.

The estimate of three to five years, given in congressional testimony by Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is longer than horizons estimated previously by the U.S. military. It follows North Korea’s most recent weapons tests, including a nuclear detonation last month and a multistage missile launch in April that indicated progress but highlighted flaws in the country’s missile technology.

Cartwright outlined the potential threat posed by North Korean missiles in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Pyongyang’s Taepodong-2 missile is designed to reach the U.S. West Coast, but analysts say they believe the missile is inaccurate and so far has failed to reach a third stage, a critical leap to be able to hit the United States.

Cartwright said Pyongyang might be able to overcome its technical problems in three to five years.

But Cartwright said that horizon did not include the time needed to develop an actual warhead. He did not estimate how long it might take Pyongyang to develop a warhead small enough to put on a long-range missile.

Cartwright stressed that his assessment represented an estimate. “My crystal ball’s not going to be any better than anyone else’s,” he said.

Under questioning from Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., Cartwright said he was “90 percent plus” confident that the United States could shoot down a missile launched from North Korea.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has proposed trimming the overall U.S. missile-defense budget but has requested $900 million to maintain and improve interceptor missiles based in California and Alaska.

Source: http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090617/NEWS08/906170374/Hawai+i+warned+of+missile+threat

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When we almost nuked Savannah

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair05152009.html

May 15-17, 2009

When We Almost Nuked Savannah

The Case of the Missing H-Bomb

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.

Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it.

On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber’s pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered.

The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: “A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed.”

Soon search and rescue teams were sent to the site. Wassaw Slough was mysteriously cordoned off by Air Force troops. For six weeks, the Air Force looked for the bomb without success. Underwater divers scoured the depths, troops tromped through nearby salt marshes, and a blimp hovered over the area attempting to spot a hole or crater in the beach or swamp. Then just a month later, the search was abruptly halted. The Air Force sent its forces to Florence, South Carolina, where another H-bomb had been accidentally dropped by a B-47. The bomb’s 200 pounds of TNT exploded on impact, sending radioactive debris across the landscape. The explosion caused extensive property damage and several injuries on the ground. Fortunately, the nuke itself didn’t detonate.

The search teams never returned to Tybee Island, and the affair of the missing H-bomb was discreetly covered up. The end of the search was noted in a partially declassified memo from the Pentagon to the AEC, in which the Air Force politely requested a new H-bomb to replace the one it had lost. “The search for this weapon was discontinued on 4-16-58 and the weapon is considered irretrievably lost. It is requested that one [phrase redacted] weapon be made available for release to the DOD as a replacement.”

There was a big problem, of course, and the Pentagon knew it. In the first three months of 1958 alone, the Air Force had four major accidents involving H-bombs. (Since 1945, the United States has lost 11 nuclear weapons.) The Tybee Island bomb remained a threat, as the AEC acknowledged in a June 10, 1958 classified memo to Congress: “There exists the possibility of accidental discovery of the unrecovered weapon through dredging or construction in the probable impact area. … The Department of Defense has been requested to monitor all dredging and construction activities.”

But the wizards of Armageddon saw it less as a security, safety or ecological problem, than a potential public relations disaster that could turn an already paranoid population against their ambitious nuclear project. The Pentagon and the AEC tried to squelch media interest in the issue by a doling out a morsel of candor and a lot of misdirection. In a joint statement to the press, the Defense Department and the AEC admitted that radioactivity could be “scattered” by the detonation of the high explosives in the H-bombs. But the letter downplayed possibility of that ever happening: “The likelihood that a particular accident would involve a nuclear weapon is extremely limited.”

In fact, that scenario had already occurred and would occur again.

That’s where the matter stood for more than 42 years until a deep sea salvage company, run by former Air Force personnel and a CIA agent, disclosed the existence of the bomb and offered to locate it for a million dollars. Along with recently declassified documents, the disclosure prompted fear and outrage among coastal residents and calls for a congressional investigation into the incident itself and why the Pentagon had stopped looking for the missing bomb. “We’re horrified because some of that information has been covered up for years,” said Rep. Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican.

The cover-up continues. The Air Force, however, has told local residents and the congressional delegation that there was nothing to worry about.

“We’ve looked into this particular issue from all angles and we’re very comfortable,” said Major Gen. Franklin J. “Judd” Blaisdell, deputy chief of staff for air and space operations at Air Force headquarters in Washington. “Our biggest concern is that of localized heavy metal contamination.”

The Air Force even has suggested that the bomb itself was not armed with a plutonium trigger. But this contention is disputed by a number of factors. Howard Dixon, a former Air Force sergeant who specialized in loading nuclear weapons onto planes, said that in his 31 years of experience he never once remembered a bomb being put on a plane that wasn’t fully armed. Moreover, a newly declassified 1966 congressional testimony of W.J. Howard, then assistant secretary of defense, describes the Tybee Island bomb as a “complete weapon, a bomb with a nuclear capsule.” Howard said that the Tybee Island bomb was one of two weapons lost up to that time that contained a plutonium trigger.

Recently declassified documents show that the jettisoned bomb was an “Mk-15, Mod O” hydrogen bomb, weighing four tons and packing more than 100 times the explosive punch of the one that incinerated Hiroshima. This was the first thermonuclear weapon deployed by the Air Force and featured the relatively primitive design created by that evil genius Edward Teller. The only fail-safe for this weapon was the physical separation of the plutonium capsule (or pit) from the weapon.

In addition to the primary nuclear capsule, the bomb also harbored a secondary nuclear explosive, or sparkplug, designed to make it go thermo. This is a hollow plug about an inch in diameter made of either plutonium or highly enriched uranium (the Pentagon has never said which) that is filled with fusion fuel, most likely lithium-6 deuteride. Lithium is highly reactive in water. The plutonium in the bomb was manufactured at the Hanford Nuclear Site in Washington State and would be the oldest in the United States. That’s bad news: Plutonium gets more dangerous as it ages. In addition, the bomb would contain other radioactive materials, such as uranium and beryllium.

The bomb is also charged with 400 pounds of TNT, designed to cause the plutonium trigger to implode and thus start the nuclear explosion. As the years go by, those high explosives are becoming flaky, brittle and sensitive. The bomb is most likely now buried in 5 to 15 feet of sand and slowly leaking radioactivity into the rich crabbing grounds of the Wassaw Slough. If the Pentagon can’t find the Tybee Island bomb, others might. That’s the conclusion of Bert Soleau, a former CIA officer who now works with ASSURE, the salvage company. Soleau, a chemical engineer, said that it wouldn’t be hard for terrorists to locate the weapon and recover the lithium, beryllium and enriched uranium, “the essential building blocks of nuclear weapons.” What to do? Coastal residents want the weapon located and removed. “Plutonium is a nightmare and their own people know it,” said Pam O’Brien, an anti-nuke organizer from Douglassville, Georgia. “It can get in everything–your eyes, your bones, your gonads. You never get over it. They need to get that thing out of there.”

The situation is reminiscent of the Palomares incident. On January 16, 1966, a B-52 bomber, carrying four hydrogen bombs, crashed while attempting to refuel in mid-air above the Spanish coast. Three of the H-bombs landed near the coastal farming village of Palomares. One of the bombs landed in a dry creek bed and was recovered, battered but relatively intact. But the TNT in two of the bombs exploded, gouging 10-foot holes in the ground and showering uranium and plutonium over a vast area. Over the next three months, more than 1,400 tons of radioactive soil and vegetation was scooped up, placed in barrels and, ironically enough, shipped back to the Savannah River Nuclear Weapons Lab, where it remains. The tomato fields near the craters were burned and buried. But there’s no question that due to strong winds and other factors much of the contaminated soil was simply left in the area. “The total extent of the spread will never be known,” concluded a 1975 report by the Defense Nuclear Agency.

The cleanup was a joint operation between Air Force personnel and members of the Spanish civil guard. The U.S. workers wore protective clothing and were monitored for radiation exposure, but similar precautions weren’t taken for their Spanish counterparts. “The Air Force was unprepared to provide adequate detection and monitoring for personnel when an aircraft accident occurred involving plutonium weapons in a remote area of a foreign country,” the Air Force commander in charge of the cleanup later testified to Congress.

The fourth bomb landed eight miles offshore and was missing for several months. It was eventually located by a mini-submarine in 2,850 feet of water, where it rests to this day.

Two years later, on January 21, 1968, a similar accident occurred when a B-52 caught fire in flight above Greenland and crashed in ice-covered North Star Bay near the Thule Air Base. The impact detonated the explosives in all four of the plane’s H-bombs, which scattered uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 2,000-foot radius. The intense fire melted a hole in the ice, which then refroze, encapsulating much of the debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs. The recovery operation, conducted in near total darkness at temperatures that plunged to minus-70 degrees, was known as Project Crested Ice. But the work crews called it “Dr. Freezelove.”

More than 10,000 tons of snow and ice were cut away, put into barrels and transported to Savannah River and Oak Ridge for disposal. Other radioactive debris was simply left on site, to melt into the bay after the spring thaws. More than 3,000 workers helped in the Thule recovery effort, many of them Danish soldiers. As at Palomares, most of the American workers were offered some protective gear, but not the Danes, who did much of the most dangerous work, including filling the barrels with the debris, often by hand. The decontamination procedures were primitive to say the least. An Air Force report noted that they were cleansed “by simply brushing the snow from garments and vehicles.”

Even though more than 38 Navy ships were called to assist in the recovery operation, and it was an open secret that the bombs had been lost, the Pentagon continued to lie about the situation. In one contentious exchange with the press, a Pentagon spokesman uttered this classic bit of military doublespeak: “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for.”

When Danish workers at Thule began to get sick from a slate of illnesses, ranging from rare cancers to blood disorders, the Pentagon refused to help. Even after a 1987 epidemiological study by a Danish medical institute showed that Thule workers were 50 percent more likely to develop cancers than other members of the Danish military, the Pentagon still refused to cooperate. Later that year, 200 of the workers sued the United States under the Foreign Military Claims Act. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the discovery process revealed thousands of pages of secret documents about the incident, including the fact that Air Force workers at the site, unlike the Danes, have not been subject to long-term health monitoring. Even so, the Pentagon continues to keep most of the material on the Thule incident secret, including any information on the extent of the radioactive (and other toxic) contamination.

These recovery efforts don’t inspire much confidence. But the Tybee Island bomb presents an even touchier situation. The presence of the unstable lithium deuteride and the deteriorating high explosives make retrieval of the bomb a very dangerous proposition–so dangerous, in fact, that even some environmentalists and anti-nuke activists argue that it might present less of a risk to leave the bomb wherever it is.

In short, there aren’t any easy answers. The problem is exacerbated by the Pentagon’s failure to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the situation and reluctance to fully disclose what it knows. “I believe the plutonium capsule is in the bomb, but that a nuclear detonation is improbable because the neutron generators used back then were polonium-beryllium, which has a very short half-life,” said Don Moniak, a nuclear weapons expert with the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League in Aiken, South Carolina. “Without neutrons, weapons grade plutonium won’t blow. However, there could be a fission or criticality event if the plutonium was somehow put in an incorrect configuration. There could be a major inferno if the high explosives went off and the lithium deuteride reacted as expected. Or there could just be an explosion that scattered uranium and plutonium all over hell.”

This essay is featured in the forthcoming book, Loose Nukes published by Count Zero Press.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

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More on Somali ‘pirates’: Who is the robber?

Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates

Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling

Monday, 5 January 2009

Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labelling as “one of the great menaces of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell – and some justice on their side.

Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage Bluebeard that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often saved from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains Of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence.

If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked often, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.

Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively, without torture. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century”.

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal Navy.” This is why they were romantic heroes, despite being unproductive thieves.

The words of one pirate from that lost age, a young British man called William Scott, should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirateing to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: “Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury – you name it.” Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to “dispose” of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: “Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.”

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia’s seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation – and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: “If nothing is done, there soon won’t be much fish left in our coastal waters.”

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We won’t act on those crimes – the only sane solution to this problem – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.

The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail – but who is the robber?

j.hari@independent.co.uk

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html

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More than meets the eye on the Somali ‘pirates’ story

‘Pirates’ Strike a U.S. Ship Owned by a Pentagon Contractor, But Is the Media Telling the Whole Story?

By Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports

Posted on April 8, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/135716/

UPDATE: At least one nuclear-powered U.S. warship is reportedly on its way to the scene of the hijacking off the coast of Somalia of a vessel owned by a major Pentagon contractor. A U.S. official told the Associated Press the destroyer USS Bainbridge is en route while another official said six or seven ships are responding to the takeover of the “Maersk Alabama,” which is part of a fleet of ships owned by Maersk Ltd., a U.S. subsidiary of a Denmark firm, which does about a half-billion dollars in business with the U.S. government a year.

The Somali pirates who took control of the 17,000-ton “Maersk Alabama” cargo-ship in the early hours of Wednesday morning probably were unaware that the ship they were boarding belonged to a U.S. Department of Defense contractor with “top security clearance,” which does a half-billion dollars in annual business with the Pentagon, primarily the Navy. The ship was being operated by an “all-American” crew — there were 20 U.S. nationals on the ship. “Every indication is that this is the first time a U.S.-flagged ship has been successfully seized by pirates,” said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a spokesperson for for the U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet. The last documented pirate attack of a U.S. vessel by African pirates was reported in 1804, off Libya, according to The Los Angeles Times.

The company, A.P. Moller-Maersk, is a Denmark-based company with a large U.S. subsidiary, Maersk Line, Ltd, that serves U.S. government agencies and contractors. The company, which is based in Norfolk, Virginia, runs the world’s largest fleet of U.S.-flag vessels. The “Alabama” was about 300 miles off the coast of the Puntland region of northern Somalia when it was taken. The U.S. military says the Alabama was not operating on a DoD contract at the time and was said to be delivering food aid.

The closest U.S. warship to the “Alabama” at the time of the seizure was 300 miles away. The U.S. Navy did not say how or if it would respond, but seemed not to rule out intervention. “It’s fair to say we are closely monitoring the situation, but we will not discuss nor speculate on current and future military operations,” said Navy Cmdr. Jane Campbell.

The seizure of the ship seemed to have been short-lived. At the time of this writing, the Pentagon was reporting that the U.S. crew retook the ship and was holding one of the pirates in custody. At this point, it is unclear if the crew acted alone or had assistance from the military or another security force.

Over the past year, there has been a dramatic uptick in media coverage of the “pirates,” particularly in the Gulf of Aden. Pirates reportedly took in upwards of $150 million in ransoms last year alone. In fact, at the moment the Alabama’s seizure, pirates were already holding 14 other vessels with about 200 crew members, according to the International Maritime Bureau. There have been seven hijackings in the past month alone.

Often, the reporting on pirates centers around the gangsterism of the pirates and the seemingly huge ransoms they demand. Indeed, piracy can be a very profitable business, as the following report from Reuters suggests:

A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that the operation to hijack the Saudi tanker, the Sirius Star, cost no more than $25,000, assuming that the pirates bought new equipment and weapons ($450 apiece for an AK-47 Kalashnikov, $5,000 for an RPG-7 grenade launcher, $15,000 for a speedboat). That contrasts with an initial ransom demand to the tanker’s owner, Saudi Aramco, of $25 million.

“Piracy is an excellent business model if you operate from an impoverished, lawless place like Somalia,” says Patrick Cullen, a security expert at the London School of Economics who has been researching piracy. “The risk-reward ratio is just huge.”

But this type of coverage of the pirates is similar to the false narrative about “tribalism” being the cause of all of Africa’s problems. Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole “pirate” story. Consider what one pirate told The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter “loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition” last year. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali:. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.” Now, that “coast guard” analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story. Indeed the Times article was titled, “Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money.” Yet, The New York Times acknowledged, “the piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago… as a response to illegal fishing.”

Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are “being stolen every year by illegal trawlers” off Somalia’s coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence.

But it isn’t just the theft of seafood. Nuclear dumping has polluted the environment. “In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed,” wrote Johann Hari in The Independent. “Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since — and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.”

According to Hari:

As soon as the [Somali] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.
…
This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia — and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence.”

As the media coverage of the pirates has increased, private security companies like Xe/Blackwater have stepped in, seeing profits. A few months ago, Blackwater executives flew to London to meet with shipping company executives about protecting their ships from pirate attacks. In October, the company deployed the MacArthur, its “private sector warship equipped with helicopters” to the Gulf of Aden. “We have been contacted by shipowners who say they need our help in making sure goods get to their destination,” said the company’s executive vice-president, Bill Matthews. “The McArthur can help us accomplish that.”

According to an engineer aboard the MacArthur, the ship, whose crew includes former Navy SEALS, was at one point stationed in an area several hundred miles off the coast of Yemen. “Security teams will escort ships around both horns of Africa, Somalia and Yemen as they head to the Suez Canal… The McArthur will serve as a staging point for the SEALs and their smaller boats.”

All of this is important to keep in context any time you see a short blurb pop up about pirates attacking ships. “Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our toxic waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome?” Hari asked. “We won’t act on those crimes — the only sane solution to this problem — but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we swiftly send in the gunboats.”

***

Just as it seemed that this drama was coming to an end, the story has taken a very bizarre turn. It seems as though the pirates essentially tricked the ship’s “all-American” crew into handing over the Alabama’s captain, Capt. Richard Phillips.

After reports, based on Pentagon sources, emerged that the ship had been retaken by the US crew, word came from the ship that the captain of the “Alabama” had been taken by the pirates onto a lifeboat. The details of how exactly the four pirates managed to get the captain onto a lifeboat are still sketchy, but it seems a little bit like a scene out of a Marx brothers movie. The ship’s second mate Kenn Quinn was interviewed on CNN and described how the crew was essentially tricked into handing the captain over to the pirates. Quinn spoke to CNN’s Kyra Phillips:

Quinn: When they board, they sank their boats so the captain talked them into getting off the ship with the lifeboat. But we took one of their pirates hostage and did an exchange. What? Huh? Okay. I’ve got to go.

Phillips: Ken, can you stay with me for just two more seconds?

Quinn: What?

Phillips: Can you tell me about the negotiations, what you’ve offered these pirates in exchange for your captain?

Quinn: We had one of their hostages. We had a pirate we took and kept him for 12 hours. We tied him up and he was our prisoner.

Phillips: Did you return him?

Quinn: Yeah, we did. But we returned him but they didn’t return the captain. So now we’re just trying to offer them whatever we can. Food. But it’s not working too good.”

As TV Newser pointed out, “Later Phillips gave what may be the understatement of the day: ‘It sounds like the pirates did not keep their end of the deal.'”

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His writing and reporting is available at RebelReports.com.

© 2009 Rebel Reports All rights reserved.

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Communities Seek Accountability for Military Pollution

CSWAB UPDATE

Communities Seek Accountability for Military Pollution

A national coalition of 90 affected communities and organizations have joined together to support federal legislation that will require the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to comply with laws designed to protect human health and the environment.

A joint letter to the White House, organized by Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger, expresses support for H.R. 672 – a bill that was introduced earlier this year by Congressman Bob Filner (D-CA). Also known as the “Military Environmental Responsibility Act,” the bill seeks to eliminate military waivers to key environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

The Department of Defense is responsible for more than 31,000 cleanup sites on more than 4,600 active and former defense properties. About one in 10 Americans – nearly 29 million – live within 10 miles of a military site that is listed as a national priority for hazardous waste cleanup under the federal Superfund program.

The proposed law would also apply to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) which today has responsibility for nuclear cleanup activities at 21 sites covering more than two million acres in 13 states and which will require billions of dollars a year for several more decades.

In the March 23 letter the groups write: “Unregulated military projects have placed countless communities, workers, soldiers, and families at increased risk for cancer and other deadly disease from exposure to military toxins – the hidden casualties here at home. Even as we write this letter, contamination caused by munitions production, testing, and disposal is poisoning our drinking water wells, contaminating the air we breathe, destroying our lakes, rivers, and fisheries, and polluting our soils and
farmlands.”

“It is important to insist that the Military Environmental Responsibility Act be pushed to make a clear statement that no one should be above the law,” said Evelyn Yates, who lives near Arkansas’ Pine Bluff Arsenal – one of six Army installations in the United States that currently stores chemical weapons. “In my community, that is destroying chemical weapons with open incineration no one seems to be paying attention but, like my sweet departed mother use to say, it will all come out in the wash. Will the wash day be five years down the road when we are all guessing the cause of all the new local diseases?”

“Everyone has to be accountable when they do wrong. The military should be accountable when thousands of people have been exposed to toxins,” said Doris Bradshaw, director of Defense Depot Memphis Tennessee Concerned Citizens Committee and neighbor of a 642-acre Army site where contamination from mustard and other chemical agents has been found. “The new law will make the government accountable for health issues that have been going on for years.”

Among those exposed to toxins at former military sites are civilian workers. In the windowless basement of Philadelphia’s now-closed Defense Personnel Supply, workers making clothing for the Army say that they were exposed to fumes, insecticides and other environmental hazards.

“The basement area had no ventilation or windows,” said Mable Mallard, a seamstress who worked at the factory for 10 years, until it closed in 1994. “People were working for $5 an hour in unhealthy and unsafe conditions – it was a sweatshop.”

“The fox has been watching the hen house,” said Gilbert Sanchez, the director of Tribal Environmental Watch Alliance and a community leader at the Pueblo of San Ildefonso in New Mexico. “It is time to address the impacts of DOE facilities like the Los Alamos National Laboratory that are and have been done for the military use of nuclear weapons, depleted uranium, waste storage on site, and poor oversight by the Agency.”

Among the cosponsors of the bill is Representative Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) whose district includes the former Badger Army Ammunition Plant. Rural neighbors of the Badger plant organized Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger (CSWAB) in 1990 when groundwater contamination from the military base was detected in nearby drinking water wells. Families there were unknowingly exposed to carcinogenic solvents in their well water for more than 15 years.

(If you would like CSWAB to email you a copy of our joint letter as a .pdf attachment, please send your email request to info@cswab.org)

—

Laura Olah, Executive Director
Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger
E12629 Weigand’s Bay South
Merrimac, WI 53561
(608)643-3124
Email: info@cswab.org
Website: www.cswab.org

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Obama wants to put federal nuclear weapons labs under the Pentagon

According to an AP story carried here in the Marine Corps Times, Obama is considering placing the federal laboratories that developed nuclear weapons under the military.  This would be a dangerous development.

The AP writes:

The Obama administration is considering moving the nation’s federal weapons complex, including New Mexico’s Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, under military control, ending decades of civilian oversight.

The article continues:

Civilian management stems from a World War II decision by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the top scientist on the secret Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic bomb and led to the founding of Los Alamos lab. Oppenheimer had the weapons designed by civilian scientists rather than military officers.

Read the full article here: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2009/02/ap_obama_labs_020409/

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David Krieger to speak on Nuclear Weapons and the Human Future

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE HUMAN FUTURE

David Krieger, PhD
President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
Santa Barbara, California

Thursday, February 12, 2009
6pm to 8pm
Honolulu Friends Meeting House
2426 O`ahu Avenue
Honolulu, Hawai`i
Free and open to the public

David Krieger is a founder and President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which has initiated many innovative and important projects for building peace, strengthening international law and abolishing nuclear weapons. Dr. Krieger will speak about the challenges and prospects of abolishing nuclear weapons under the Obama administration.

He has lectured widely on issues of peace, security, international law, and the abolition of nuclear weapons and is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age, including The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (based on a recent conference organized by Hawai’i’s Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research). He serves on the Boards of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, the International Institute for Peace, the Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence and Mayors for Peace. He also served as panel chair of the Citizens’ Hearing on the Legality of U.S. Actions in Iraq and as a member of the Jury of Conscience of the World Tribunal on Iraq.

Co-sponsors: American Friends Service Committee – Hawai’i, DMZ-Hawai’i / Aloha ‘Aina, Pacific Justice and Reconcilliation Center, Matsunaga Institute for Peace-UH Manoa, ‘Ohana Koa/ Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific.

For more information, please contact: Richard at (808) 956-3712 or Terri at (808) 988-6266

Download the leaflet to the event and Krieger’s biography here.

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Nuclear future for Hawai’i? ‘A’ole!

The Honolulu Advertiser editorialized that perhaps Hawai’i should reconsider its ban on nuclear power since the Navy continues to violate Hawai’i’s constitution by bringing nuclear powered ships and nuclear weapons into our waters and ports.   Crazy.

We almost had a nuclear catastrophe in port when a fire aboard the USS Sargo nearly caused a meltdown of the reactor. The captain had to sink the ship to flood it in order to extinguish the fire.

Leaking nuclear cooling water has led to radioactive Cobalt 60 contamination in the sediment of Ke Awalau o Pu’uloa (aka Pearl Harbor).

Spent fuel is cut out of the nuclear ships and stored on the docks in the shipyard behind concrete barricades until they can ship it out to a “permanent” disposal site.  Problem is, there are no safe and permanent methods of disposing of nuclear waste.

No, Hawai’i should strengthen it’s nuclear ban, and make the Navy adhere to it.

Hawaii’s nuclear future

January 9th, 2009 by Jerry Burris

The latest word is that the Navy intends to homeport a number of the latest class of nuclear submarines at Pearl Harbor. Military reporter William Cole has the story HERE.

That’s good news for the economy, workers at Pearl Harbor Shipyard and and for folks who sell things to the submariners and their families. Part of the work of the Shipyard will be involved with nuclear reactor “refueling and defuelings,” according to Cole.

This raises an interesting question as the state moves toward an energy future that is less dependent on oil. Today, the state constitution forbids the use of nuclear power without extraordinary approval by the Legislature (section 8). Might this change the argument?

After all, we are already putting nuclear fuel in and taking nuclear fuel out within the borders of our state. Should this option be reserved for the military alone?

A thought, at any rate.

Source: http://akamaipolitics.honadvblogs.com/2009/01/09/hawaiis-nuclear-future/

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Nuclear survivors of Rongelap

http://counterpunch.org/johnston11212008.html

Weekend Edition
November 21 / 23, 2008

The Voices of Rongelap
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

By BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON
and HOLLY M. BARKER

John Anjain, Alab of Rongelap, Marshall Islands:

Early in the morning of March 1, 1954, sometime around five or six o’clock, American planes dropped a hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll. Shortly before this happened, I had awakened and stepped out of my house. Once outside, I looked around and saw Billiet Edmond making coffee near his house. I walked up and stood next to him. The two of us talked about going fishing later in the morning. After only a few minutes had passed we saw a light to the west of Rongelap Atoll. When this light reached Rongelap we saw many beautiful colors. I expect the reason people didn’t go inside their houses right away was because the yellow, green, pink, red, and blue colors which they saw were such a beautiful sight before their eyes.

The second thing that happened involved the gust of wind that came from the explosion. The wind was so hot and strong that some people who were outside staggered, including Billiet and I. Even some windows fell as a result of the wind.

The third thing that happened concerned the smoke-cloud which we saw from the bomb blast. The smoke rose quickly to the clouds and as it reached them we heard a sound louder than thunder. When people heard this deafening clap some of the women and children fled to the woods. Once the sound of the explosion had died out everyone began cooking, some made donuts and others cooked rice.

Later some men went fishing, including myself. Around nine or ten-o’clock I took my throw net and left to go fishing near Jabwon. As I walked along the beach I looked at the sky and saw it was white like smoke; nevertheless I kept on going. When I reached Jabwon, or even a little before, I began to feel a fine powder falling all over my body and into my eyes. I felt it but I didn’t know what it was.

I went ahead with my fishing and caught enough fish with my throw-net to fill a bag. Then I went to the woods to pick some coconuts. I came back to the beach and sat on a rock to drink the coconuts and eat some raw fish. As I was sitting and eating, the powder began to fall harder. I looked out and saw that the coconuts had changed color. By now all the trees were white as well as my entire body. I gazed up at the sky but couldn’t see the clouds because it was so misty. I didn’t believe this was dangerous. I only knew that powder was falling. I was somewhat afraid nevertheless.

When I returned to Rongelap village I saw people cooking food outside their cook-houses. They didn’t know the powder was very dangerous. The powder fell all day and night long over the entire atoll of Rongelap. During the night people were sick. They were nauseous, they had stomach, head, ear, leg and shoulder aches. People did not sleep that night because they were sick.

The next day, March 2, 1954, people got up in the morning and went down to get water. It had turned a yellowish color. “Oh, Oh” they cried out and said “the powder that fell down yesterday and last night is a harmful thing.” They were sick and so Jabwe, the health-aide, walked around in the morning and warned the people not to drink the water. He told them that if they were thirsty to drink coconuts only.

. . . At three o’clock in the afternoon of March 2, 1954 a seaplane from Enewetak Atoll landed in the lagoon of Rongelap and two men came ashore. Billiet and I asked them why they had come to Rongelap and they responded by saying they had come to inspect the damage caused by the bomb. They said they would spend twenty minutes looking at all the wells, cement water catchments, houses and other things. The two men returned quickly to their plane and left without telling anyone that the food, water, and other things were harmful to human beings.

Everyone was quite surprised at the speed with which the men surveyed everything in the island and then returned to their plane. People said maybe we’ve been really harmed because the men were in such a hurry to leave. Although they said they would look around for about twenty minutes, they probably didn’t stay here for more than ten minutes. So in less than ten minutes after their arrival on Rongelap, the two men had already taken off.

. . . On that day we looked at the water catchments, tubs and other places where there was a great deal of water stored. The water had turned a strong yellow and those who drank it said it tasted bitter.

On March 3, early in the morning, a ship and a seaplane with four propellers appeared on Rongelap. Out of the plane came Mr. Oscar de[Brum] – and Mr. Wiles, the governor of Kwajelein Atoll. As their boat reached the shore, Mr. Oscar cried out to the people to get on board and forget about their personal belongings for whoever thought of staying behind would die. Such were the words by which he spoke to them. Therefore, none of the people went back to their houses, but immediately got on the boats and sailed to board the ship that would take them away. Those who were sick and old were evacuated by plane.

. . . At ten o’clock in the morning we left Rongelap for Ailinginae Atoll and arrived there at three in the afternoon. We picked up nineteen people on this atoll and by five o’clock we were on our way to Kwajalein.

On March 4, we arrived on Kwajalein and met the Admiral who then sent us to where we were to stay. A day later, Dr. Conard and his medical team arrived. The doctors were very thorough in checking and caring for our injuries and showed much concern in examining us. The Admiral was also very concerned about our situation and took us in as if we were his own children. His name was Admiral Clark.

Ever since 1954 Dr. Conard has continued to examine the fallout victims on a yearly basis. These visits are very important for all the people on Rongelap and others in the Marshall Islands. These medical examinations are also of great importance for men throughout the world.

. . . From 1959 to 1963 and 1964, after the Rongelapese had returned to Rongelap from Majuro, many women gave birth prematurely to babies which looked somewhat like animals. Women also had miscarriages. During these years many other strange things happened with regard to food, especially to fish in which the fertilized eggs and liver turned a blackish color. In all my forty years I had never seen this happen in fish either on Rongelap or in any of the other places I’ve been in the Marshall Islands. Also, when people ate fish or [arrowroot] starch produced on Rongelap, they developed a rash in their mouths. This too I had never seen before.

. . . I, John, Anjain, was magistrate of Rongelap when all this occurred and I now write this to explain what happened to the Rongelap people at that time.

[In 1954] the people of Rongelap stayed on Kwajalein for three months and the DOE [Atomic Energy Commission] people removed the Rongelap people to Majuro. The people lived in Majuro for three years and in 1956 the DOE, Trust Territory government and the UN came to Majuro and I went with them to attend a meeting with them at the school in Rita. And they told me that it is time that we go back home. And I asked “are we really going home while Rongelap is contaminated?” And the answer that they give me is that “it is true that Rongelap is contaminated but it is not dangerous. And if you don’t believe us, well then stay here and take care of yourself.”

. . . In 1957 the people returned to Rongelap and the DOE promised that there wouldn’t be any problems to the Rongelap people. However in 1958 and 1959 most of the women gave birth to something that was not resembling human beings. There was a woman giving birth to a grape. Another woman gave birth to something that resembles a monkey. And so on. There was a child born at that time and there was no shell covering the top of that child’s head.

The American doctors came every year to examine us. Every year they came, and they told us that we were not sick, and then they would return the next year. But they did find something wrong. They found one boy did not grow as fast as boys his age. They gave him medicine. Then they began finding the thyroid sickness.

My son Lekoj was thirteen when they found his thyroid was sick. They took him away to a hospital in America. They cut out his thyroid. They gave him some medicine and told him to take it every day for the rest of his life. The same thing happened to other people. The doctors kept returning and examining us. Several years ago, they took me to a hospital in America, and they cut out my thyroid. They gave me medicine and told me to take it every day for the rest of my life.

A few years after the bomb, Senator Amata Kabua tried to get some compensation for the people of Rongelap. He got a lawyer, and the lawyer made a case in court. The court turned our case down. The court said it could not consider our case because we were not part of the United States. Dwight Heine went to the United Nations to tell them about us. People from the United Nations came to see us, and we told them how we felt. Finally, in 1964, the U.S. Congress passed a bill. The bill gave us money as a payment for our experience. Some of the people spent all their money; some of them still have money in the bank. After we got the money, they began finding the thyroid sickness.

In 1972, they took Lekoj away again. They said they wanted to examine him. They took him to America to a big hospital near Washington. Later, they took me to this hospital near Washington because they said he was very sick. My son Lekoj died after [I] arrived. He never saw his island again. He returned home in a box. He is buried on our island. The doctors say he had a sickness called leukemia. They are quite sure it was from the bomb.

But I am positive.

I saw the ash fall on him. I know it was the bomb. I watched him die.

***

Statement of Almira Matayoshi to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, Marshall Islands (2001):

I was pregnant when they dropped the bomb [Bravo]. I was flown off of Rongelap with the other pregnant women and elderly people. The rest of the people left on the boat. I gave birth to Robert on Ejit, and he was normal. The child I had after Robert, when we had returned to Rongelap, I gave birth to something that was like grapes. I felt like I was going to die from the loss of blood. My vision was gone, and I was fading in and out of consciousness. They emergency evacuated me to Kwajalein, and I was sure I was going to die. After the grapes, I had a third child. It wasn’t like a child at all. It had no bones and was all skin. When I gave birth they said, “Ak ta men en?” [What is that thing?]. Mama said uror [a term denoting exacerbation]. It was the first strange child that people had seen. I was the first. That time was the worst in my life. I feel both angry and embarrassed.

***

What words can possibly communicate what it is like to see and survive such sights? To become increasingly fearful that the intense beauty of your world-the water, the sand, the plants, the soil, the sea, and all the creatures within-has been fundamentally transformed by invisible, untouchable, all-encompassing poison? After years and years of living in a radioactive laboratory as the subject of scrutiny and study, what does it mean to find your fears confirmed-that your favorite foods are taboo, that your loved ones grow old before their time and your children fail to thrive? What does it mean to “survive” downwind from the the United States proving grounds – where nuclear war was practiced and perfected by Cold War warriors?

In 1946, after evacuating the people of Bikini and nearby atoll communities in the Marshall Islands, the United States detonated two atomic weapons: the same type of bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. In 1947 the United Nations designated the Marshall Islands a United States Trust Territory. Over the next eleven years, this U.S. territory played host to another sixty-five atmospheric atomic and thermonuclear tests. The largest of these tests, code named Bravo, was detonated on March 1, 1954. This 15-megaton hydrogen bomb was purposefully exploded close to the ground. It melted huge quantities of coral atoll, sucking it up and mixing it with radiation released by the weapon before depositing it on the islands and inhabitants in the form of ash, or radioactive fallout. The wind was blowing that morning in the direction of inhabited atolls, including Rongelap and Utrik, some 100 and 300 miles from the test site at Bikini. The Marshallese communities on Rongelap, Ailinginae, and Utrik atolls, U.S. servicemen on Rongerik Atoll (weathermen who were monitoring winds and fallout), and the twenty-three-man crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) received near-lethal doses of radiation from the Bravo event.

International protests and calls for a ban on nuclear weapons testing prompted the U.S. government to publicly acknowledge the incident and accept liability. The Marshallese filed an April 20, 1954, complaint to the United Nations Trusteeship Council:

We, the Marshallese people feel that we must follow the dictates of our consciences to bring forth this urgent plea to the United Nations, which has pledged itself to safeguard the life, liberty and the general well being of the people of the Trust Territory, of which the Marshallese people are a part.

. . . The Marshallese people are not only fearful of the danger to their persons from these deadly weapons in case of another miscalculation, but they are also very concerned for the increasing number of people who are being removed from their land.

. . . Land means a great deal to the Marshallese. It means more than just a place where you can plant your food crops and build your houses; or a place where you can bury your dead. It is the very life of the people. Take away their land and their spirits go also.

In response to this petition the United States assured the General Assembly of the United Nations:

The fact that anyone was injured by recent nuclear tests in the Pacific has caused the American people genuine and deep regret. . . . The United States Government considers the resulting petition of the Marshall Islanders to be both reasonable and helpful. . . . The Trusteeship Agreement of 1947 which covers the Marshall Islands was predicated upon the fact that the United Nations clearly approved these islands as a strategic area in which atomic tests had already been held. Hence, from the onset, it was clear that the right to close areas for security reasons anticipated closing them for atomic tests, and the United Nations was so notified; such tests were conducted in 1948, 1951, 1952 as well as in 1954. . . . The question is whether the United States authorities in charge have exercised due precaution in looking after the safety and welfare of the Islanders involved. That is the essence of their petition and it is entirely justified. In reply, it can be categorically stated that no stone will be left unturned to safeguard the present and future well-being of the Islanders.

The United States promised the Marshallese and the United Nations General Assembly that “Guarantees are given the Marshallese for fair and just compensation for losses of all sorts.”

These guarantees worked: the United States was able to continue its atmospheric weapons testing program in the Marshall Islands through 1958 and at its Nevada test site through 1963, when the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union finally signed on to a limited test ban treaty.

The United States has not, however, fully lived up to its promises to the United Nations or the Marshallese people to safeguard their well-being. Atmospheric weapons testing in the Pacific resulted in considerable human and environmental harm.

Atmospheric nuclear weapons tests released numerous radioisotopes and dangerous heavy metals. An estimated 2 percent of the radioactive fallout was iodine-131, a highly radioactive isotope with an 8-day half-life. The nuclear war games conducted by the United States in the Marshall Islands released some 8 billion curies of iodine-131. To place this figure in broader context, over the entire history of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Proving Grounds, some 150 million curies of iodine-131 were released, and varying analyses of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster estimate an iodine-131 release of 40 to 54 million curies. Much of the iodine-131 released in the Marshall Islands was the by-product of the March 1, 1954, Bravo test detonation of the hydrogen bomb. Designed to produce and contain as much radioactive fallout in the immediate area as possible, in order to create laboratory-like conditions, Bravo unleashed as much explosive yield as one thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs. Communities living downwind from the blast, especially the Rongelap community, were acutely exposed to its fallout.

Evacuated three days after the blast, the people of Rongelap spent three months under intense medical scrutiny as human subjects in Project 4.1. They spent three years as refugees and were returned to their still-contaminated atoll in 1957 with assurances that their islands were now safe. They lived on Rongelap for another twenty-eight years and as the closest populated atoll to the Pacific Proving Grounds, they were exposed to additional fallout from another series of nuclear tests in 1958. While living on Rongelap, the community was visited annually, and later biannually, by U.S. government scientists and medical doctors conducting follow-up studies begun under Project 4.1. Researchers collected fish, plants, soil, and human body samples to document the presence of radioisotopes deposited from sixty-seven tests, the movement of these isotopes through the food chain and the human body, and the adverse health impact of this radiation on the human body.

The community left Rongelap in 1985 after receiving information from some U.S. scientists that confirmed their long-held fears that their ancestral homeland was contaminated with radiation at levels that posed a serious risk to their health. Today, the Rongelap community lives in exile, largely on borrowed or rented lands in Kwajalein and Majuro atolls. Recent efforts to remediate fallout hazards on areas of some islands and to rebuild homes and community structure on the island of Rongelap suggest that the community may, someday soon, have the choice of returning home. Whether or not remediation is successful and people decide to return remains to be seen.

The people of Rongelap are not the only nuclear nomads created by the actions of military and nuclear powers over the past six decades. They are, however, one of the most studied communities.

Following their acute exposure in 1954 the people of Rongelap enrolled in a medical research program sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission. The program was designed to document the movement of radiation through the atmosphere, food chain, and human body, with the goal of understanding the long-term effects of human exposure to ionizing radiation.

Over the years, U.S. scientists added to the research program “control” subjects, including people on Rongelap who were not present during the Bravo test, people on the nearby atoll of Utrik, people on Likiep (another populated atoll in the northern Marshall Islands), and people on Majuro. Control subjects were typically selected to match the acutely exposed by age and sex, and scientists studied these people in many instances for four decades. Comparative studies documented increases in thyroid disorders, stunted growth in children, and increases in many forms of cancer and leukemia, cataracts, and other radiation-related illnesses.

For four decades, U.S. government scientists returned to the Marshall Islands to conduct exams and collect blood, tissue, bone marrow, teeth, and other samples. These studies generated a broad array of scientific findings, including the recognition that not only can acute exposures to radiation stimulate short-term effects but that late effects can emerge years and decades following the initial exposure. For example, by studying the Marshallese population, scientists found that radio-iodine-131 adheres to and accumulates in the thyroid, stimulating the production of benign and cancerous nodules and interfering with the production of hormones, leaving pregnant women and children especially vulnerable. They also discovered that people who were not exposed to an acute level of ionizing radiation but were exposed to low-levels on a daily basis because they lived in an area contaminated by fallout also developed thyroid and other radiogenic problems. The lessons learned by scientists included an awareness of the many complicated ways that radiation adversely affects the human body.

The Rongelap study was structured in ways that required the involvement of children from other atolls, especially children in the southern part of the nation. Such involvement extended over decades. Control subjects were selected at the direction of authorities. Being singled out resulted in social stigmatization (people were shunned because of the social perception that all people studied by the medical survey team were damaged by radiation). Control subject experiences included thorough examinations with photographs and x-rays; measurement of internal radiation with whole-body counters; the sampling of blood, bone marrow, skin, and other tissue; and, on a number of occasions, the injection of radioisotopes, vaccines, and other nonexplained substances. The experience of serving as a research control was intrusive, painful, and potentially harmful to the health of the participant.

The research agenda was shaped to meet U.S. military and scientific research objectives rather than the personal health needs of the affected population. The pressing question for the U.S. government was how to document and interpret the Marshallese experience in ways that might predict the consequences for U.S. troops or U.S. citizens exposed to radiation in the event of nuclear war. Marshallese health concerns, especially worries that radiation from fallout remained in their environment, poisoning their food and their bodies, were often ignored.

The classified nature of this research had profound effects within the Marshall Islands and within the broader scientific research community. Research protocols, data, and findings were restricted to those with security clearance. Patients, and later the Marshall Islands government, were denied access to medical records generated by this research.

This biomedical research was conducted by Brookhaven National Laboratory with monies appropriated by the U.S. Congress for the health of the Rongelap people. However, rather than investments in local health infrastructure, funds were used to periodically transport medical staff and supplies from the United States to the Marshall Islands for brief examinations of the “exposed” and “control” populations; to analyze the samples that were collected; to occasionally treat conditions that were defined as radiogenic in nature; and, in later years, to acquire and supply a ship with the necessary technology to conduct whole-body counting, x-ray, and other laboratory procedures. Some of the residents who developed thyroid tumors and other radiogenic conditions were brought to the United States for study and surgical removal of the thyroid gland.

When the U.S. government states that it has provided millions of dollars to the Marshall Islands for issues related to the weapons testing, it does not mention that enormous portions of this money went into advancing U.S. scientific interests, not into services for the people.

The culture of secrecy that characterized biomedical research in the Marshall Islands facilitated efforts to shape public opinion on the safety of the nuclear weapons testing program. Scientific findings were cherry-picked: those studies released to the public were carefully selected; conclusions were carefully worded to support the contention that exposed communities suffered no lasting effects from their exposure and that their exposure presented no threat to the health of subsequent generations. Manipulated “findings” were used to counter calls within the United Nations to establish a ban on nuclear weapons testing; to calm local and regional complaints that exposure to radiation was producing a wide array of untreated health effects, especially reproductive effects; and to reduce the economic liability of the U.S. government in meeting its obligations to its former territory.

As the decades passed, people experienced a growing incidence of adverse health effects, most notably the late onset of thyroid cancer and stunted growth and retardation in children in “exposed” as well as “control” populations. These health problems fed concerns that Rongelap Atoll was still dangerously contaminated and posed a significant hazard to occupants, a fact that became evident in the restudy of radiological conditions in the northern Marshall Islands in 1978. The results of this survey and the input of a few independent foreign experts led the Rongelapese to evacuate their homes in 1985, with the assistance of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior on what proved to be its final voyage in the Pacific. The evacuation of Rongelap occurred without the assistance or approval of the U.S. government. The restudy confirmed that much of the northern Marshall Islands was indeed still contaminated and that some areas would not be habitable without extensive remediation for at least twenty-five thousand years.

In 1986, after years of negotiations and the threat of some $7.1 billion in damage claims making their way through the U.S. court system, the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands signed a Compact of Free Association, releasing the U.S. government from pending legal claims through the establishment of a compensation trust fund. The Compact of Free Association requires the United States to continue efforts to adequately address the full range of damages and injuries resulting from the testing program. Section 177 of the compact outlines responsibilities for monitoring the environment and human health effects of radiation from the nuclear weapons tests in the northern Marshall Islands (Bikini and Enewetak, the two ground-zero locations and Rongelap and Utrik atolls, the two communities enrolled in the Project 4.1 biomedical study). An additional provision of section 177 enables the Republic of the Marshall Islands to petition the U.S. Congress for additional compensatory funds should conditions change or new information come to light. Congress set aside $150 million to fund the provisions of the initial compact, which established a compensation trust fund with funds administered through a Nuclear Claims Tribunal that receives claims and issues awards for personal injury and property damage.

When the Compact of Free Association was negotiated and the Nuclear Claims Tribunal established much of the scientific record was classified: The Marshallese were never fully briefed on the nature of the nuclear weapons testing program and the full extent of its damages. This inequitable access to fundamental information has severely hampered Marshallese efforts to achieve a meaningful and comprehensive remedy. For example, to this day, the United States acknowledges in its compensatory programs the obligation to address nuclear-weapons-related damage to property and people in only four atolls: Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap and Utrik. The U.S. documentary record tells another story: a 1955 survey, declassified in 1994 and released to the RMI in 1995, reports fallout from the 1954 Bravo test occurring at hazardous levels on twenty-eight atolls throughout the Marshall Islands. The entire nation, not simply the four atolls, is downwind, and the whole country has been adversely affected by nuclear weapons.

Today, the Rongelap community lives in exile, largely on borrowed or rented lands in Kwajalein and Majuro atolls. Recent efforts to remediate fallout hazards on areas of some islands and to rebuild homes and community structure on the island of Rongelap suggest that the community may, someday soon, have the choice of returning home. Whether or not remediation is successful and people decide to return remains to be seen.

The Marshallese have suffered more illness, death, and grief than any population should endure, and historical wrongs resulting from the nuclear weapons testing program have been compounded by inadequate and underfunded medical assistance. Despite the seriously elevated cancer rates in the Marshall Islands, as of this writing there is no oncologist in the country. There is no ability to provide chemotherapy or radiation treatment. Perhaps worst of all, there is no ability to undertake a nationwide screening for cancer to catch the illness in its early stages and provide patients with the greatest chance for survival and an improved quality of life.

A minimalist approach to health care has been provided through the Compact of Free Association (177 Agreement): Some seventeen thousand people receive health care through the 177 Health Care Program established to address the radiogenic health issues of the people of Enewetak, Bikini, Rongelap, and Utrik islands. This system is woefully underfunded and lacks comprehensive cancer treatment capability. Many people have filed personal-injury claims with the Nuclear Claims Tribunal and, with their compensation, moved to Hawaii and the continental United States seeking, among other things, better health care. The NCT has ordered millions of dollars in compensation for personal-injury claims, but many more people have been found eligible than originally anticipated. Thus the majority of awards have yet to be paid in full to victims or their surviving families. And while a compensatory payment provides assistance at one level or another, in no way does it provide the means to restore overall health.

What is clearly lacking in the Marshall Islands, and sorely needed, is a high-quality medical care program that would address direct and indirect health problems caused by U.S. activities during the nuclear test period, and build the capacity of the Marshall Islands to address these needs.

The story of Rongelap is one of systemic injury, and inadequate and at times abusive response on the part of the U.S. government. U.S. government activities in the Marshall Islands resulted in profound consequences for the entire nation, unmet U.S. obligations, and an intergenerational responsibility. Under the Bush Administration, the U.S. government views its responsibility to its former territorial possession, and those people adversely affected by the nuclear weapons testing program, as a set of limited obligations that have in large part been addressed.

Political administrations come and go, but radiogenic contamination and disease present protracted, ulcerating, intergenerational problems. The toxic and radioactive contamination of soil, water, terrestrial and marine biota, and human life that is the legacy of nuclear war games in the Marshall Islands is difficult and expensive to monitor, let alone remediate. The health complications of radiation exposure for individuals and their offspring are similarly expensive to monitor and treat. Nevertheless, just as the U.S. government continues to appropriate billions of dollars for the cleanup of the plutonium processing plant in Hanford, Washington, and as it continues to make appropriations to provide full compensation to people living downwind from the Nevada Test Site, so too must it honor commitments to the inhabitants of the former trust territory, who deserve the same level of health care and cleanup as U.S. citizens.

In today’s world-where uranium mining occurs at historic levels, where depleted uranium is widely used in military training and war, and where nuclear power and weapons production are again on the agendas of the world’s nations-these lessons have currency. The experiences of the people of Rongelap, whose lives were transformed not only by acute exposure but also by chronic exposure to low-level radiation, should be read as a timely, cautionary tale.

This essay is excerpted from The Consequential Dangers of Nuclear War: the Rongelap Report

Barbara Rose Johnston is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the Center for Political Ecology, and a member of the expert advisory group for UNESCO’s Water and Cultural Diversity Project. She is the co-author of The Consequential Dangers of Nuclear War: the Rongelap Report. Her documentation of dam legacy issues in Guatemala is available in Spanish and English at http://www.centerforpoliticalecology.org/chixoy.html. She can be reached at: bjohnston@igc.org

Holly M. Barker served as the advisor to the Republic of the Marshall Islands Embassy for 18 years and now teaches anthropology as a full-time lecturer a the University of Washington. Her latest book is Consequential Damages of Nuclear War – The Rongelap Report, by Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly M. Barker (Left Coast Press 2008). She can be contacted at hmbarker@u.washington.edu.

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