THE RIP IN THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM

compiled by Dee Finney

 

8-29-07 - DREAM - I was in a place where there was a lot of people, like an outdoor meeting place.

I heard a sound that sounded to me like a rip in the time/space continuum.

(To explain this sound take several pieces of crispy thick paper between two hands and tear it completely in half really fast.)

When I looked up, I saw 5 of what looked like myself pinned to a wall, each one a different color with huge colored wings like we think of angels having.  But they were flat - 1 dimensional figures - like photos pinned to the wall.

I didn't understand what that was all about and I continued to help the others get ready for a meeting.

There were round tables set up with chairs around them for 6 people at each table.

Before the meeting, I was given many - at least 12 purple tobacco plants which had fresh green shoots on them on the edges and I determined that they should be taken to Tennessee to be grown.

I these plants to my table and saw that my husband was already seated there.

As I set the tobacco plants down, he said to me, "What are you doing, trying to make a profit?"

I said in return, "If you aren't, then what are you doing here?"
 

During this same week, each day for 3 days, we found a plate (they were identical plates)  broken exactly in half for no reason. These were plates we had used for 10 years almost every day, and someone else used them for at least that long or longer before us.  To have each plate break in half all by itself with no one touching it was stunning.

Today - 9-7-07, I spoke with a friend who said that yesterday (9-6-07) she went to get an unbreakable bowl out of her cabinet to use, and 3 graduated size bowls all came out of the cabinet and shattered.  All three of them.

While the bowls were shattering, she heard the words, "The Matrix is shattering now!"

The coincidence of this happening is incredible.

When I was typing the words, "The Matrix is shattering now!"  the date December 2002 appeared half way down into the next space below it.  It is not on the other side of the page.  Where did that date come from.  Joe Mason said, "You have to read between the lines."  Perhaps we do.

I found this same date farther down the page as part of this statement.

"This pamphlet is intended for reprint. You are encouraged to copy and distribute it widely. December 2002
© 1978 Donnelly/Colt"

Dee

A Matrix is also a Grid

See also:  The Grid Shift   The Grid Shift - Kryon    The Grid Crop Circle   Humanity on the Pollen Path   Pole Shift

The Pyramid of Giza and the Magnetic Null Zone   Lazarus and Awakening the Giant   Weaving: The Dreams and Mythology

Gregg Braden says:  But now, we know that the poles are actually moving. We're living it right now. We don't know
exactly what that means, because even though it's happened fourteen times in the last four and
a half million years, it's never happened with six billion people on the earth.

Gregg: It's common knowledge to people that need to know these things. For example, FAA regulations say that when the poles move beyond five or eight degrees, the runways at the airports have to be renumbered to correlate with the magnetic headings that the pilots are seeing. The first airport in the United States to comply with this mandate was Minneapolis/St. Paul, where they spent something on the order of eighty-five thousand dollars to go through and renumber the runway headings.

But what happened in the May-June-July time frame of 2002 is that journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, and New Scientist released reports saying that we are definitely in the process
of a magnetic reversal, and the AP wires picked it up.

Scientists have no idea what the impact is going to be to electronic and electromagnetic power grids. But even more, they don't know what it means to human immune systems. Alternative healing modalities have shown a connection between magnetics and the immune system, which also would imply that our immune systems could very well be keyed into the magnetic fields of the earth.

We know that birds and animals migrate along the lines of these magnetic fields. So there is speculation that the changes taking place in the magnetic field are responsible for the changing migratory patterns in birds that have been recorded in Asia and North America.

The change in the fields also may explain why whales are beaching themselves. The lines of navigation that the whales have always followed have shifted and now lead them onto a beach.  When we take them back out into the water and set them free, they continue to align themselves with the same magnetic lines, and in following them, they end up on the beach again.


So, yes, it's common knowledge now. The most respected scientific journals say that we're in this shift. And even though we don't know precisely what that means, it's significant that it is being acknowledged in peer-review kinds of literature, and not just in speculative or pseudo-scientific magazines.

Editor's Note:  I have been tracking the solstice sunrises for 10 years, and personal evidence, which I have marked on my east window, shows that the sun is coming up 3 days later for the solstice than the calendar is telling us.
 

THERE IS A REASON FOR ALL THIS. THE ANSWER MAY LIE BELOW:

 

From MSN comes news of a spinning black hole in the constellation Scorpius that has created a stable dent in the fabric of space-time.

Scientists say the dent is the sort of thing predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It affects the movement of matter falling into the black hole.


 

An e-mail received 7-7-03 - at 8:53 p.m. PST

Recall if you will that AL BIELEK has said hundreds of times that something important will happen on AUGUST 12 2003. This is because of a rip in the SPACE TIME CONTINUUM that occurred during the PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT that occurred on AUGUST 12 1943.

Then there are harmonic rifts that will occur right up until 2013..

Perhaps something might happen on August 12 2003 that we may not be aware of . At least immediately. Then again we might be very aware of it.

According to BIELEK there was another TIMEWAVE EVENT that occurred on August 12 1983. I believe that was the date that he and his brother were catapulted to in time. Where Dr.Von Neuman was waiting for them. According to Bielek that Dr.Von Neuman didn't die in 1958 as the puppet press has said.

I have all of Bielek's video tapes. Recall that he said in 1996 that WORLD WAR III would start in 2003. And it would go NUCLEAR in 2004. Bielek was given this information by some FUTURIONS that he encountered in the year 2127. It's interesting that in 1996 he said that WORLD WAR THREE would start in the year 2003. And go ATOMIC in the year 2004.

No doubt it will be very interesting to see if BIELEK'S predictions come true.

I don't think there is any doubt that WORLD WAR THREE has started. It most definitely has. It's Just that the POOR SHEEPLE haven't found out as yet.

THE REAL STORY?       2012       TIME OF GLOBAL SHIFT

 

Published in Nexus Magazine

[Nexus Magazine Dec97-Jan98 edition N.B. published version slightly re-written and re-edited]

Earthquake Inducing Electromagnetic Weapons

Earthquake Inducing Electromagnetic Weapons Used at Kobe?

On 17 January 1995, the Japanese city of Kobe was struck by a massive earthquake that devastated much of the city, killing over 5,500 people and injuring many thousands more. Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Japanese Aum Supreme Truth (Aum Shinrikyo) sect, had surprisingly predicted, in a Tokyo radio broadcast on 8 January 1995, that a major quake would soon occur at Kobe. Asahara went even further and stated that this quake would be initiated by a "a foreign power" utilising an electromagnetic (EM) weapons system.

Aum's Science Minister Hideo Murai later stated at the Foreign Press Correspondents' Club in Tokyo on 7 April 1995 that, "There is a possibility that the great Hanshin [Kobe] earthquake was activated by electromagnetic power or some device that exerts energy into the ground." Although Asahara would undoubtedly have preferred his great predictive powers to be thought of as due to a highly developed and superior spiritual ability to examine the future time-track (thus attracting more gullible followers after this quake event), it is far more likely that he was fed warning intelligence re Kobe by Aum's Science Minister Murai, and/or Japanese Intelligence operatives who themselves were forewarned by Russian KGB officials.

In his pre-Aum days, Hideo Murai had worked on highly advanced microwave and gamma/cosmic-ray physics applications for cold moulding of steel at the Kobe Steel laboratories. This laboratory complex was located at the near-exact epicentre of the great Kobe earthquake. Japanese investigative journalists believe that this Kobe laboratory was one of several research facilities (located at Osaka, Tsukuba and Tokyo universities) engaged in top-secret research and development of EM weapons technology under the cover of Kobe Steel industrial research and/or environmental "desert-greening" studies.

The Aum's deputy leader, Kiyohide Hayakawa, in his pre-Aum days studied at Osaka University in the Landscape Engineering section of the Environmental Engineering department. His thesis is highly confidential and not available to the public, but allegedly contains only "landscape gardening" studies. There is some suggestion that his area of study included the use of advanced EM weapons technology in Weather Engineering. Japanese scientists from their EM weapon research university departments are today conducting extensive field observations of Eastern Goldfields weather patterns and the factors required to "green" our Australian deserts - on behalf of the Japanese Environmental Ministry and our Western Australian Government.

Certain public observations on exotic cloud formations, new weather patterns, and unusually wet weather suggest to this author that experiments in weather engineering involving EM weapons technology transmissions have been underway in Western Australia over the past 4-5 years, with the apparent aim to green our central semi-deserts and create a series of huge forests - for commercial gain and to act as a CO2 sink.

A large group of Japanese scientists including military personnel (some 50 people) were observed east of Perth last Easter 96 photographing with telescopic tripod mounted cameras and observing by telescope such exotic weather tests.

Weather patterns observed on several occasions, including Easter 96, consisted of several perfectly symetrical and exactly similar circular cloud multi-ring complexes - each complex touching the next along the outer cloud ring - each complex consisting of one cloud ring inside the next - like a "Russian Doll" - creating five concentric "smoke rings" - each cloud ring being tube like in x-sectional form - each complex having a diameter of some 30km - the group of cloud ring complexes formed as a line over some 100km offshore of our western coast. Such totally symetrical cloud formations and the associated events have never been observed in previous W.A. history.

The individual cloud ring complexes formed as one ring puff followed by another each expanding until the entire cloud system was established over a few hours in the late morning. Heavy weather formed up to seaward of these cloud complexes by late afternoon and then swept inland in the early evening. These events always involved evening power outages caused by overvoltage generation in our Darling Ranges power line system - just prior to the eastward movement of the previously static storm systems. Persons sensitive to EM fields were in physical agony all day as the cloud system and heavy weather formed up. Such weather events have been seen several times in the 1995/96 time period and correlated well with cyclonic storms turning south off of our northern shores and rushing inland to connect up with the eastwards moving heavy weather fronts - the combination of two enormous storm systems then proceeding to dump highly anomalous rainfall into central and south-eastern Western Australia.

Note the recent press (Washington Post/Asia Wall Street Journal/Malaysian Star 14/13-11-97 ) re Malaysia's intention to engage the services of a Russian State company and it's secret orbital satellite technology to create large cyclones (hurricanes to you Yanks) in order to blow away the smoke and haze from the recent massive environmental disaster created by the huge Indonesian and Borneo Jungle Fires. This Russian company now provides weather to order - anywhere on the planet - at a multi-million dollar price.

To say that they have not used this system in the bad old days of the "Cold War", or in the more recent past in weather warfare, or at someone's very specific bequest would be at best na_ve. For instance the huge storm cell generated in the Bay of Biscay that hit the UK in October 1987 in a historically unknown manner, whilst the world stock market was crashing. The cyclonic winds destroyed entire areas of forest and knocked out significant sections of southern England's telephone system, and therefore locked many persons into a collapsing market - unable to sell. Someone made a lot of money out of that - by getting out first in New York - and bashed the British financial system at the same time. Of course it was a natural event - an act of God - but what if someone was playing at being God ???

There have been many other examples of very odd high power storm cells hitting many areas of the USA, Australia, Asia, and Europe over the past decade or so - all creating m,assive damage and significant loss of life - some creating very special economic pressure - eg. Lloyds great collapse was due to huge unprecedented insurance claims originating in damage from storms of this type over several years - how many of these storms were created by a Russian EM system (or a US system ?)- and with what economic intention ??? There is ample evidence of steered storms hitting special targets - eg the case a few years ago of a hurricane that hit southern Florida and appeared to specifically alter course to attack an isolated nuclear power station right on the nose.

In future insurance claims will have to include next to "Acts of God", a clause about "Acts of Fabians/old KGB etc.". Real estate in the central Australian semi-deserts could suddenly become very valuable - gives the MABO Native Title Rights a whole new meaning !!!

Coming to grips with the "new" Tesla EM field world will involve some high powered reality adjustment by many human mushrooms.

The existence of such an EM technology capable of weather engineering has been denied by Western Government, "scientists", and news media for many years - inspite of ground breaking observation by US scientists such as Tom Bearden and others - who were usually sneared at as "nutters or loony tunes". Now either the Malaysian Environment ministry has stuffed up big time by running this press release - when it should have been kept under wraps - or perhaps the news release announces in a subtle way that the Russians have come to the aid of Malaysia in her recent currency hammering by George Souros and the US Treasury - the message is "back off" or face a blast from our EM weapons.

Either way the Weather Engineering Technology doubters and ivory tower experts have now got a lot of explaining to do.

The EM technology for creating weather engineering, earthquakes, city busting explosions, or zapping space craft and/or UFO's is basically the same system - they just differ by the amount of energy per micro second per square meter poured into your target.

We are told that greenhouse gases are our worst enemy and are creating El Nino effects and massive weather changes across the planet. We are told we MUST all rally together to combat this CO2 plague by creating yet more pressure on jobs, and we MUST stop the great flurocarbon release that is hitting the Ozone layer for six.

I am all in favour of sound ecological management of our planet - but the recent Kyoto Vaudeville show could do with a new scientific perspective - now that there is US Newspaper "proof" of the existence of weather engineering technology, and a complimentary suggestion of my own that Ozone destruction could be due to the use of massive Tesla EM field transmission power (of both Russian and US sources) - concentrating via geomagnetic electron flow lines down to the South Pole where it effects the destruction of ever so unstable Ozone - rather than the effects of fluorocarbon molecules.

I am afraid that we are being conned yet again with the new environmental bogie replacing the Hitler clone type hate/fear spin doctor ikon - all in the name of covert control of the human mushroom population of our planet..............

A far better game would be to spur us all onto the discovery of a clean "Free Energy Source" - to replace oil, coal, and uranium fuel systems. But meanwhile back at Kobe ................

For several days prior to the great Kobe earthquake there were reports of glowing orange-red and pink lights and spherical forms hovering over and along the Kobe fault line. Such Earth stress lights have been observed over major quakes in many parts of the globe since the 19th century, but the number and intensity of those that developed in the January 1995 pre-Kobe quake days appear to be highly anomalous.

The existence of geophysical weapons capable of creating or triggering earthquakes in highly stressed crustal regions has been discussed privately by geophysicists for a decade or more. Rumours have abounded over certain huge earthquakes of the 1970s and 1980s in the Central Asian republics of the former USSR. Some writers have suggested that these were caused by Israeli, French or American EM weapons systems used in retaliation for Soviet EM weapon strikes on the West.

US scientist Tom Bearden contends that the Soviets brought into service an intercontinental-range Tesla EM weapon in 1963 during the Khrushchev era.

The evidence that Kobe was not a natural earthquake is slender and is based primarily upon Asahara's prediction that was later proved so horrifyingly correct. There would appear to be some supporting evidence of an indirect nature involving political considerations and other more recent world events. Taking into consideration the entire Kobe and Aum Tokyo scenarios together with the earlier, possibly Aum-related, fireball-explosion-earthquake events of 28 May 1993 at Banjawarn, Western Australia, one is left with a very strong impression of a serious "EM fire" underlying the visible "dark plume of smoke" that rose over Kobe - (See Bright Skies Parts 1 to 4 for further evidence re the existence of EM Earthquake, City Buster, and Beam weapon systems).

But what motive could there possibly be for such a major city- busting weapon strike? Why choose an exotic EM weapon system?

It is quite possible that the EM strike was directed at the secret Kobe Steel EM weapons research laboratory and that the motive was in part to destroy this facility and cause such a resounding blow to the civilian population, similar in scale to the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the Japanese oligarchic powers behind the scenes would think long and hard before attempting to continue their EM weapons project. Only the big boys on the block were going to have the modern magical equivalent of Merlin's staff - all the second order gangs should think again ???

If the USA (or a covert international power group based therein) were the belligerent party that struck down Kobe, then the motive would most likely have included a 'big stick' warning to the Japanese powers to do what they were told with regard to the New World (economic) Order, or face the consequences.

It would appear from subsequent events that the Japanese oligarchy did not grovel under this attack but in fact, after some further provocation, went on the offensive with its own (or a friend's) EM weapon system.
 

  • Description: At the time this photo was made, smoke billowed 20,000 feet above Hiroshima while smoke from the burst of the first atomic bomb had spread over 10,000 feet on the target at the base of the rising column. Six planes of the 509th Composite Group, participated in this mission; one to carry the bomb Enola Gay, one to take scientific measurements of the blast The Great Artiste, the third to take photographs Necessary Evil the others flew approximately an hour ahead to act as weather scouts, 08/06/1945. Bad weather would disqualify a target as the scientists insisted on a visual delivery, the primary target was Hiroshima, secondary was Kokura, and tertiary was Nagasaki.
  • Source: US Archiv ARCWEB ARC Identifier: 542192
  • Post-Work: User:W.wolny
  • Licence: Public Domain

 

Taken from http://www.archives.gov/research_room/research_topics/world_war_2_
photos/images/ww2_1623.jpg, Page: http://www.archives.gov/research_room/research_topics/world_war_2_
photos/world_war_2_photos.html
August 9, 1945
The picture was taken from one of the B-29 Superfortresses used in the attack. Picture taken of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.
Transferred from en:Image:Nagasakibomb.jpg. Original history:
22:02, 1 Mar 2004 . . Raul654 (116768 bytes)
12:49, 20 Jul 2002 . . (Automated conversion) (93195 bytes)

Generally, materials produced by Federal agencies are in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission. However, not all materials appearing on this website are in the public domain. Some materials have been donated or obtained from individuals or organizations and may be subject to restrictions on use.[1]

 

 

Radiation burns on the back of Kiyoshi Kitsukawa,
a Hiroshima tram conductor who was standing with his back to the blast
about 1000 yards from the centre of the explosion.
 

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks during World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States of America under US President Harry S. Truman. On August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, followed on August 9, 1945 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki. They are the only instances of the use of nuclear weapons in warfare.

The United States Department of Energy estimates that, at Hiroshima, the death toll from the immediate blast was roughly 70,000, with additional deaths occuring in the time soon after the explosion and in the decades that followed.[1][2][3][4] The figures for Nagasaki are slightly less.[5] Other estimates vary widely,[6][7][8] and are as low as 74,000 for Nagasaki.[9] In both cities, the overwhelming majority of the deaths were civilians.

The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender, as well as the effects and justification of them, has been subject to much debate.

On August 15, 1945 Japan announced its surrender to the Allied Powers, signing the Instrument of Surrender on September 2 which officially ended World War II. Furthermore, the experience of bombing led post-war Japan to adopt Three Non-Nuclear Principles, which forbids Japan from nuclear armament.

Witness to the ghosts of Hiroshima

By Matt Condon
August 6, 2005
He was a small old man and he sat alone in the tram. It was late July and very warm and the tram was making its way through the southern suburbs of Hiroshima to the ferry terminal for the sacred island of Miyajima. The old man wore a large, floppy-brimmed canvas hat and a beige safari suit. He cradled in his lap a small bag. He had been watching me since I boarded near the A-Bomb Dome and sat on a bench opposite him.

As the tram emptied stop by stop along route two, he continued staring through his pair of enormous, thick-lensed spectacles. On occasion, I glanced at his kind, worn face and realised there was something not quite right with it - his features were curiously out of alignment. His left eye was smaller than his right, the difference exacerbated by the thick spectacle lenses. The cheekbone below the pinched eye was flat, in defiance of the other, which was round and full. It looked, to me, like a face that had suffered an accident a long time ago, and the imperfections were far away, on the horizon of a long life. At one point, it was just me and the old man in the tram, and this was when he rose slowly and sat beside me. "Where are you from?" he asked. His voice was thin and his English heavily accented but clear. "Australia," I said, turning to him.

He stared down at the carry bag in his hands. "Are you a soldier?" he asked.

I laughed at the unusual question. "No," I said.

"I remember the Australian soldiers in 1945," he said, "with the hats." He folded up one side of his canvas brim, making an impromptu slouch hat. "Very nice," he said, smiling.

Australian soldiers had taught him to speak English at a school in Hiroshima after the war. He had been born in 1928 and had been a "ship man" when he was younger. He gripped an imaginary ship's wheel with his old hands and motioned to steer from left to right. Then he said, unexpectedly: "I am of the atom bomb."

He rummaged in his carry bag and I noticed that the texture of the skin on his left hand was very smooth, an oddity consistent with his eye and his cheekbone. He was an old man divided into two sides. Eventually he produced a thick blue booklet the size of a passport. I had read of these books carried by A-bomb survivors. They were medical record books. "I am going to the hospital," he said, holding up the book. "Every week I go to the hospital." He tapped his knee with the book before returning it to his bag.

"I was visiting Hiroshima on that day," he said, recalling August 6, 1945. "The atom bomb. Wooosh." He raised a bunched fist and flicked his hand open to indicate the explosion. He looked at me with that crooked face and smiled again.

"I am of the atom bomb," he said.

I had come to Japan to retrace the steps of legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. As a young reporter, and in that early grappling for mentors and models, I had known of Burchett for a singular achievement - he was the first Western journalist into Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb. In the 60 years since Burchett filed his report, "The Atomic Plague", for London's Daily Express, it has probably remained the greatest individual newspaper "scoop" of the 20th century and into the millennium. It's impossible to know now to what degree Burchett was writing for history, but you get the feeling, from the opening line, that the young Victorian reporter had an eye to posterity: "I write this as a warning to the world."

Burchett was almost 34 years old when he made his solo journey from Tokyo to Hiroshima to bring the facts of the bomb's devastation to the world, as he put it. At tremendous risk to his safety, he took the long train journey south, travelling in that delicate period between the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan's official surrender. It struck me, as a journalist and a novelist, that one day I would write a novel about this chapter in Burchett's life. The story had everything - war, flight, danger, heroism and, at the centre of it all, one of the defining moments in human history. I made some cursory notes.

Years later, I was browsing through a book stall at a Gold Coast flea market when I came across an extremely battered copy of one of the prolific Burchett's polemic books, This Monstrous War. The book dealt with the Korean conflict. By now I knew more about his life, his evolution into a "radical" journalist and his ability to polarise readers, colleagues, even governments. He was accused of being a communist spy, a traitor, a fabricator. His own country, for a time, refused to grant him a passport and re-entry into Australia. Since Hiroshima, his reputation had wobbled and stumbled.

I developed a theory, too, that the impact of what Burchett saw in Hiroshima, and the scoop itself, changed something inside him: that the dropping of the A-bomb was a schismatic moment for mankind, and also for Burchett's psychology. The theory had no basis in fact. It was the fancy of the novelist, trying to find a way into the head of an undeveloped character. I was already knitting a person called Burchett with the grand, subterranean themes of an unwritten novel. The A-bomb divided the 20th century. So, too, would atoms split in the mind of my Mr Burchett, altering his view of the world, perhaps sending a hairline fracture through his soul.

When the Iraq conflict broke out in the wake of September 11, 2001, and the world witnessed the manipulation of the media by America, and truth, as they say, became a casualty itself, I kept thinking of Burchett and Hiroshima. In that instance, his purpose was the pursuit of truth. That purpose may have been tangled up with notions of future fame and accolades, of promotion and financial reward, of changing the world.

It is the dichotomy of reporting: at some points in your career you write for the public, but you also write for other journalists. "This is what I got," you're saying, "and you didn't." It was a dangerous, renegade act (often the prerequisite for defining moments) for which Burchett was later vilified by US government officials, who claimed he had fallen victim to Japanese propaganda. In some ways, it went to the very definition of reporting.

In the context of the contemporary world, with television and print journalists "embedded" with US troops invading Iraq (the word itself, embedded, so quickly redefined and attached to the media), I thought of Burchett and that warm September in 1945 when he walked through the ruins of Hiroshima with his notebook. I felt that something had been lost. That we had mislaid something very important about, or within, ourselves. That in modern times the media was like sediment, layer after layer of it, rolled out over feeling and empathy and rage and all those human responses to things that happen in the world. That everything would set like sandstone, and one day, beneath the many strata, a little fossilised truth would be found, embedded, fragile as a mosquito.

I'd bought Burchett's book This Monstrous War for $1, but didn't realise until I got home that it had been inscribed by the author. His best wishes and signature were scratched onto the title page in blue ink some time in the 1950s. When you begin a writing project you accept, beyond logic or reason, all manner of superstitions, totems, coincidences and signs. You believe they will help guide the arrow.

FROM: http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/witness-to-the-ghosts-of-hiroshima/2005/08/05/1123125901803.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

A Camera catches the ghosts on film


Clifford Ferns was serving in Iwakuni, 15 miles outside Hiroshima, around six months after the bombings. On a day trip to the city, he purchased a second-hand camera. Inside was undeveloped film with photos taken within hours of the blast.

The camera's original owner, according to the Japanese shopkeeper, had succumbed to radiation poisoning soon after taking the shots. There are 11 ghostly photographs.

Here is the fragility of human life. See the bodies, shrivelled, cooked; the slumped woman too tired or too sick to move herself from among the corpses; the blackened child suckling at his mother's breast (was the milk, by then, toxic?).

See, too, the moments of unexpected beauty. The arch of a temple seemingly untouched, like a rainbow shooting from the rubble. A woman and child, defiant, hungry, alive.

"I don't think I understood as a child about the photographs. I gathered there was something horrible in the albums, but my father was never one to talk about the war," said Mr Ferns . "When he died in 2000, I inherited the album."

Sixty years ago today, at 8:15am, an American B-29 Bomber called Enola Gay dropped a 10,000lb uranium bomb on Hiroshima. Dubbed "Little Boy" by its designers but called "the gimmick" by the Enola Gay's unsuspecting crew, the bomb exploded about 600 metres above the city, setting off a surge of heat reaching 4,000 degrees Celsius across a radius of nearly 3 miles. Around 140,000 people were killed instantly or died within a few months. The 60th anniversary of the bombing today is expected to draw 50,000 people to Hiroshima. In the last week, the city has been the focal point for the international peace movement. In the largest pre-anniversary event, about 8,000 people from over 30 countries attended the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, which concludes today.

In the decades following the Japanese surrender, the mushroom cloud that blew over the city remained the most enduring image of the bombing. This was partly due to the devastation; relatively few people survived on the ground to document the event.

But Clifford Ferns' photographs provide rare ground views of the devastation. The photographs are meticulously preserved, labelled and explained in handwritten captions. One caption reads: "More casualties: At left is a Japanese 'red cross' worker. Very little could be done for the injured. A large percentage of Drs perished - as did most medical supplies, bandages, etc."

Another states: "During my 3-week stay not a night passed but more victims of the A-bomb died and [were] cremated. Mostly 6 to 8 a night, although early [on] it was mass cremation, by the hundreds, daily."

Historians and scientists are already lining up to copy, study and ensure the preservation of the pictures. Yesterday, the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC contacted The Scotsman in an effort to obtain the photographs. And the Radiation Protection Division of the Health Protection Agency has expressed interest in seeing them as part of its continuing effort to document radiation exposure.

Oxford professor of Modern Japanese History, Ann Waswo, said: "My sense is that these photographs will add to a finite number of photos that exist. They will become part of a very poignant and important record."

Meanwhile, Mr Ferns has put the photographs in a safety-deposit box at a local bank. He does not know what he intends to do with them.

But he believes the ghosts have an important story to tell.

He said: "When you see the likes of children dead and bloated it makes you wonder why they are still producing bombs. The photographs show such horror and suffering. It's time for them to be seen."

This article: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1747472005

Last updated: 08-Aug-05 13:16 BST

FROM: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1747472005
 

THE GHOSTS OF HIROMSHIMA

     Smithsonian downplayed the casualties, saying only that the bombs "caused many tens of thousands of deaths" and that Hiroshima was "a definite military target."

    Americans were also told that use of the bombs "led to the immediate surrender of Japan and made unnecessary the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands." But it's not that straightforward. As Tsuyoshi Hasegawa has shown definitively in his new book, "Racing the Enemy" - and many other historians have long argued - it was the Soviet Union's entry into the Pacific war on Aug. 8, two days after the Hiroshima bombing, that provided the final "shock" that led to Japan's capitulation.

    The Enola Gay exhibit also repeated such outright lies as the assertion that "special leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities" warning civilians to evacuate. The fact is that atomic bomb warning leaflets were dropped on Japanese cities, but only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been destroyed.

    The hard truth is that the atomic bombings were unnecessary. A million lives were not saved. Indeed, McGeorge Bundy, the man who first popularized this figure, later confessed that he had pulled it out of thin air in order to justify the bombings in a 1947 Harper's magazine essay he had ghostwritten for Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.

    The bomb was dropped, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, said in November 1945, on "an essentially defeated enemy." President Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, quite plainly used it primarily to prevent the Soviets from sharing in the occupation of Japan. And they used it on Aug. 6 even though they had agreed among themselves as they returned home from the Potsdam Conference on Aug. 3 that the Japanese were looking for peace.

    These unpleasant historical facts were censored from the 1995 Smithsonian exhibit, an action that should trouble every American. When a government substitutes an officially sanctioned view for publicly debated history, democracy is diminished.

    Today, in the post-9/11 era, it is critically important that the US face the truth about the atomic bomb. For one thing, the myths surrounding Hiroshima have made it possible for our defense establishment to argue that atomic bombs are legitimate weapons that belong in a democracy's arsenal. But if, as Oppenheimer said, "they are weapons of aggression, of surprise and of terror," how can a democracy rely on such weapons?

    Oppenheimer understood very soon after Hiroshima that these weapons would ultimately threaten our very survival.

    Presciently, he even warned us against what is now our worst national nightmare - and Osama bin Laden's frequently voiced dream - an atomic suitcase bomb smuggled into an American city: "Of course it could be done," Oppenheimer told a Senate committee, "and people could destroy New York."

    Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender - and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the US that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.

    Finally, Hiroshima's myths have gradually given rise to an American unilateralism born of atomic arrogance.

    Oppenheimer warned against this "sleazy sense of omnipotence." He observed that "if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed.... You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."


    Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin are coauthors of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, published earlier this year by Knopf.

  http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/080505E.shtml

GROUND ZERO - 1945

THE HIROSHIMA PANELS
 

Hiroshima - It was said that the souls of the nuclear bomb victims at the end of World War 2 haunt the area. voices, pleading for help, crying and screaming can be heard around twilight. It was also said that some of those souls sometimes lurk in the shadows of the living.
 
THE NUCLEAR TESTS

From Hiroshima to Pokhran

A three-member Japanese delegation visited Pokhran as part of a 10-day tour of India and Pakistan aimed at raising public awareness about the devastating effects of nuclear war.

JEAN DREZE

"I WONDER for what purpose she came into this world," said Hiroshima survivor Yasuhiko Taketa, referring to his elder sister who died in agony at the age of 16. She was 1.4 km away from "ground zero" when a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. She was brought home, 7 km from ground zero, the next evening. "Her arrival is," said Taketa, "a very sad memory for me." "She was lying on a cart, severely burnt. Her clothes were glued to her skin. We wanted to spread oil on her skin, but we could not remove her clothes. So we had to cut the clothes away from the skin with scissors, causing her horrendous pain. She died on August 9, crying 'Mother, help me, mother help me'. There was nothing we could do to help her. There were no medicines, no doctors." Thus spoke Yasuhiko Taketa in Pokhran on June 17, 1998. Also present were two other Japanese citizens: Masa Takubo, international consultant of Japan's Gensuikin (Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs) and Ken Sakamoto, secretary-general of Gensuikin's Hiroshima branch.

The team's visit to Pokhran was part of a 10-day tour of India and Pakistan aimed at raising public awareness about the devastating effects of nuclear war.

The people of Pokhran gave a warm reception to the Japanese delegation. When the visitors arrived around 9.30 p.m., accompanied by a small group of concerned Indian citizens, hundreds of local people were waiting for them at Gandhi Chowk. They listened patiently until close to midnight, despite the frustration of double translation (from Japanese to English and then to Hindi). The audience was deeply moved by the delegation's testimonies, which included an exhibition of photographs from Hiroshima and a short film. Taketa's closing plea for a world-wide abolition of nuclear weapons and nuclear tests was greeted with loud applause.

Taketa spoke with calm and dignity, despite the obvious emotions stirred by memories of the dreadful events that followed the explosion:

"My name is Yasuhiko Taketa. I come from Hiroshima, where an atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, for the first time in history. I was 12 years old at that time, and a first grader in junior high school. We received a militaristic education and were told that we should give up our lives for the Emperor and for the country. Japan was losing its power day by day. By early 1945, it had lost control of the sea as well as of the sky.

"My home town was outside Hiroshima, but my school was in Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, we had been given a day off. In the morning, I was asked to deliver some food to my elder sister's house. A little after 8 a.m., I was waiting for the train at the railway station. Suddenly, there was an intense flash. Everything looked bluish white. Then there was a thunder-like sound. I felt as if my stomach had been cut open and my intestines were coming out. Then I felt extreme heat on my cheek. Looking in the direction from where the heat was coming, I saw a white spot, which became yellow and then red, and turned into a huge fireball, seemingly coming towards me. It was a horrendous sight. I felt like choking. I was looking at this 7 km away from ground zero.

"Later, I learnt that Enola Gay had released the bomb at a height of 9,000 metres, and that the bomb had exploded at a height of 600 metres. The surface temperature at ground zero rose to 6,000 oC. The diameter of the fireball was 200 metres. Under the fireball, those who had not been killed instantly were running around, trying to escape. After a while, we saw people fleeing Hiroshima towards our town. They looked like ghosts. Many were burnt, almost naked, with swollen faces, or had their skin peeled by the heat. Some were holding their intestines.

"Two days after the explosion, I walked into Hiroshima with some friends. The city was totally destroyed. There were dead bodies everywhere. Our school was devastated. The second graders who were at school that day were killed, all 183 of them. All around us, people were still dying. Some were crying, 'Give me water, give me water'. I saw a child groping for his mother's breast, but she was already dead. There were no facilities for cremation, so people dug holes and threw the bodies in them and then burnt them. There was a smell of charred bodies everywhere.

"At that time, Hiroshima's population was 400,000, of which 140,000 died by the end of 1945, 90 per cent of them within a week of the explosion. Of the city's 76,000 buildings, 70,000 were completely destroyed or burnt down.

"People continue to die even today, from the after-effects of radiation. The dreadfulness of nuclear war is that even if you survive the bombing, you can suffer much later. As of last year, there were 202,118 registered deaths due to the Hiroshima bombing. Survivors are faced with suffering and the fear of death every day. I would like you to remember this.

"Today's bombs are far more powerful than the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Imagine what would happen in the event of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Governments talk of nuclear deterrence, but nuclear weapons cannot bring security. In a nuclear war, there are no winners. Security comes from peaceful relations between nations.

"I don't know how long I will live, but however long I live, I want to continue working for peace. I also call on the people of India and Pakistan to work together for peace. That is my dream. As the Japanese philosopher Ichiro Moritaki said, 'We have to stop the chain reaction of atoms through the chain reaction of human beings'. Let us work together for peace, so that we may leave a peaceful world behind us for our children and grandchildren. That is my plea, and the message I have brought from Hiroshima."

EARLY the next morning, the delegation proceeded to Khetolai village near the test site. The reception they received there was overwhelming. The villagers had erected a large shamiana and had prepared a colourful welcome ceremony. In his opening remarks, the deputy sarpanch reminded the audience that at the time of the creation of the test site in 1965, the village had signed a petition against it. While greeting the Japanese visitors, he said that he wished they had come earlier, implying that the recent tests may have been averted.

The villagers watched the exhibition of photographs from Hiroshima with solemn interest. Already concerned about the possible side-effects of nuclear tests in the area, they were in total sympathy with the team's mission. Many of them were quick to point out that the Government should spend its money on schools and health centres, rather than on nuclear weapons. They felt even more strongly about it after Taketa's speech. As in Pokhran, his call for world peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons was received with roaring applause.

At the end of the programme, a local resident drafted a resolution, calling for universal nuclear disarmament and an immediate end to all nuclear tests. The resolution also demanded that the Government inform and consult citizens before any use of nuclear energy. The resolution was unanimously endorsed by a show of hands, and signatures from those who could sign in the rush that followed.

THE Khetolai declaration and the gatherings that preceded it raise interesting questions about the popular attitude towards the development of nuclear weapons. According to a much-cited "opinion survey" that was published in The Times of India on May 13, 90 per cent of the population approved of the recent tests. This survey was, however, conducted by telephone in eight major cities and is therefore confined to the privileged urban classes. The fact that the responses of telephone owners in the major cities were used to represent the views of the entire population speaks volumes about the political marginalisation of the underprivileged majority. It may be argued that ordinary people are not sufficiently aware of the facts to have an informed view on these issues. This is correct, but the solution to this is to inform them, rather than to rely on others to represent their views. The Pokhran and Khetolai gatherings show that when people are adequately informed, their views on nuclear weapons are far less enthusiastic than what the survey suggests.

That the people of Khetolai should turn out to be strong critics of nuclear weapons and nuclear testing is not surprising, given their concern about the possible effects of radiation in the area. More interesting is the public response in Pokhran, a BJP stronghold, where, according to earlier press reports, the nuclear tests were greeted with jubilation. The warm reception given to the Japanese delegation in Pokhran is not inconsistent with the possibility that many local residents consider the recent tests as being justified. However, the Pokhran gathering brings out another aspect of the public mood: when presented with the facts, most people strongly support universal nuclear disarmament and an immediate end to all nuclear tests. It remains to be seen whether the Government's nuclear strategy will do justice to this overwhelming popular concern.

FROM: http://www.nci.org/a/a7498.htm

 

Pacific Ocean: Bikini's Nuclear Ghosts; The Oceans; Scientific American Presents; by Zorpette;

I am at ground zero of the most powerful explosion ever created by the U.S. Forty-six meters (150 feet) underwater near the edge of Bikini Lagoon in the central Pacific, I am kneeling in the sand with a 27-year-old Majorcan divemaster at my side. At this moment, he's laughing into his scuba regulator at the sight of an array of big, five-pointed starfish on the seafloor, which evokes for him an American flag.

The divemaster, Antonio Ramon-Le-Blanc, and I have come to a place where very few have ever ventured: a submerged crater formed shortly before dawn on March 1, 1954, when the U.S. military detonated a thermonuclear bomb on a spit of sand jutting out from Nam Island, in the northwest corner of Bikini Atoll. The experts anticipated that this nuclear test, codenamed Bravo, would have an explosive yield equivalent to somewhere between three and six megatons of TNT. Instead they got 15 megatons, a crater 2,000 meters wide and a fireball that swelled far beyond expectations, terrifying the nine technicians left as observers in a concrete bunker 32 kilometers away.  

 

WHAT IF HIROSHIMA HAD NEVER HAPPENED?

August 6, 1970

If such temptations have been resisted, it may be because Hiroshima and Nagasaki have assumed the proportions of myth—needed and useful myth. This fact does not justify the toll of dead and wounded, nor lay their ghosts in the national conscience. Yet it gives them meaning. Horrifying as the ghosts of those victims are, there is no comparable meaning in the 135,000 ghosts of Dresden, that totally vengeful, ultimately useless crime of conventional warfare. But Dresden was a massive effort, involving 2,750 bombers. The essential terror of the nuclear bomb is that it is so small, so sudden and so simple to deliver—with the touch of a button.

Two Thousand Hiroshimas

Given this myth, we now measure nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in Hiroshimas. "Thirty megatons" means nothing. Two thousand Hiroshimas—its explosive equivalent—does. We multiply mentally: the dead, the maimed, the burned, the merely (and mercifully) vaporized. The ever-growing sophistication of weapons appalls: a Bomb with the explosive force of Little Boy can now be conveniently carried in a bowling bag and left on a park bench. It is now a fortunate commonplace that nuclear war simply cannot be a rational instrument of international policy.

Once, the U.S. tried to make it so. The alternative was an invitation missed—an invitation to moral heroism and political imagination—and an opportunity forever lost. Yet tragic errors can be the beginnings of new maturity. It may be no coincidence that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans seem to have discerned a dimension of tragedy in their lives, have been more willing to admit their faults, more able to examine the darker side of their actions.

Nations are still invited by the Bomb to heroic virtue and creative politics, but now the stakes are higher, not 100,000 lives but perhaps as many as 100 million. Imagination may demand boldness and risk: such adventurous human gambles, perhaps, as graduated gestures of disarmament, to encourage the larger success of strategic arms limitation agreements and other rational attempts toward mutual reduction of terror among nuclear powers. Such options, for a free nation as for a free man, still remain open. Even with Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned forever in the memory, there persists the hope for new opportunities and fresh choices.

Millions of dead and wounded on one hand. A single Bomb on the other, a Bomb that still had done nothing to justify three years of intensive work and a cost of more than $2 billion. Save one, spend the other. On the face of it, it was a simple choice. After all, even the Los Alamos laboratory chief himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had estimated that a reasonably sheltered population would suffer "only" 20,000 dead. Four times that number had died in a single night of fire raids in Tokyo. More B-29 incendiary raids might have caused havoc even greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At the end of May, six weeks before the critical test at Alamogordo, the Interim Committee, charged with advising the President on the Bomb and atomic energy, met in a two-day session. The committee —chaired by War Secretary Henry Stimson and including Scientists Vannevar Bush, Karl T. Compton and James B. Conant—recommended that the Bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. The objective, they also recommended, should be a "dual target," a military or industrial site surrounded by more lightly constructed buildings. The attack should come by surprise. The argument was that the U.S. must exhibit its new power spectacularly and decisively. "This deliberate, premeditated destruction," wrote Henry Stimson with sad conviction after the war, "was our least abhorrent choice. [It] put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies."

In reality, the choices were hardly so narrow. Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff, resolutely opposed invasion since Japan was "already thoroughly defeated." The Interim Committee itself was not fully convinced that the surprise bombing of a major target was the only way to use the Bomb: it asked its scientific panel to consider other alternatives. The panel ultimately endorsed the committee's decision, but others did not. From the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, the cover name for the atomic research center there, came the outspoken Franck Report, formulated by Physicists James Franck and Leo Szilard and Chemist Eugene Rabinowitch. Dropping the atom bomb on Japan, the report suggested, might unleash a nuclear arms race and a period of international distrust that would far outweigh any temporary advantage the U.S. might gain.

The report was the beginning of a wave of dissent that spread among many scientists in the atomic laboratories and executives in the Government after the Alamogordo test on July 16 demonstrated what the Bomb could do. Some dissenters demanded that the enemy be warned; critics of this course objected that Allied prisoners might be placed in the target area. Still others proposed demonstrations of various kinds—perhaps before an international inspection group, or as Physicist Edward Teller seems to have suggested offhandedly, a highly visible burst right on the Emperor's front porch, in Tokyo Bay.

Might such a demonstration have worked? Historians are divided. It is true that the one-two punch on Hiroshima and Nagasaki propelled the Japanese war party into an untenable position, gave the Emperor a convenient pretext for intervening in the crisis, and made it appear that the U.S. had Bombs to spare (in fact, there were no more immediately available). But the Nagasaki attack seems to have been lamentably premature. Hiroshima was 400 miles from Tokyo, far from the eyes of those who made national war policy. On the day Fat Man exploded, the Supreme Council was just getting the first fully detailed reports of damage at Hiroshima. Teller's pyrotechnical display over nighttime Tokyo, or a purely military raid on a nearby installation, might have made as much impression on the decision makers at little or no cost to civilian life.

It was not the twin bombings alone, moreover, that influenced the mode and speed of the Japanese surrender. Other factors were involved, some of them impossible to measure. The Russian entry into the war on Aug. 9 surely played a role, most importantly in convincing the Japanese that they could no longer expect mediation through Moscow. Failure of imagination on the U.S. side had prolonged the war. Old Japan hands like Joseph Grew had encouraged the U.S. to declare forthrightly that Japan could keep its Emperor, but his advice was heeded only in the final days of the war. Less reliance on the Bomb might well have produced more creative diplomacy, making a mere demonstration of the Bomb more than enough to tip the balance.

If it had, and Japan had forthwith surrendered, how different would have been the shape and mood of the postwar world? The framers of the Franck Report argued that international control of nuclear armaments—such as later suggested in the Baruch Plan before the U.N. in 1946—would have been much easier to achieve, and the argument seems tenable. A humane precedent would have been set, and the U.S. would have established a standard of trustworthiness even among those who had no will to give it trust, just as later, with the Marshall Plan, it would earn a reputation for generosity even among the most cynical. The nation would be free of the guilt that has nagged at its conscience ever since.

Traumatic Terror

Most important, the new atomic generation might have grown up confident that man was the master rather than the victim of nuclear discoveries, seeing the power of the atom more as opportunity than threat—and making that opportunity flower. Quite probably Japan, for instance, freed of its traumatic terror of atomic energy, would have been among the pioneers in peaceful nuclear research. Instead, an entire generation of children, all around the globe, has reached adulthood with a constant sense of lurking terror that has all too often surfaced in nightmares, or more maturely, in peace demonstrations.

Perhaps more than many other wartime decisions, dropping the Bomb was a consciously moral decision, wrought mostly by good men, mostly for good reasons—or at least for such good reasons as can be perceived under the pressures of war. But the evidence argues that it was a mistake, simply a choice of a lesser evil over a greater one, not so much moral wisdom as moral despair. Historian Gabriel Kolko suggests a political deficiency, calling the use of the Bomb and reliance on Russian intervention "a triumph of conservatism and mechanism" in U.S. policy. Whether the failing be moral or political, however, it remains the same—a lack of imagination, an unwillingness to risk a new tactic even in a new situation.

Edward Teller, one of the inventors of the hydrogen bomb and a champion of thermonuclear deterrent, complains that atomic experience has made Americans Bomb-shy, afraid to consider any rational use of nuclear weapons—worse yet, so fatalistic about nuclear warfare that they cannot bring themselves to build an adequate civilian defense system. It is a questionable complaint; U.S. deaths in a massive nuclear exchange, even in a well-sheltered nation, could approach 40 million—an unfathomable catastrophe for any society. But, in another sense—a sense Teller undoubtedly does not intend—the fatalistic terror about nuclear warfare may indeed be a vice. Because the Bomb is so much more inhuman than conventional arms, we are hypnotized by it and tend to overlook the inhumanity of many lesser weapons, such as the napalm and cluster bombs used in Southeast Asia.

Revisionist historians have found the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sinister in another—and less persuasive—way. They see them not so much as the closing acts of the Pacific war but the opening acts of the cold war—intended primarily to impress Stalin. There was a time, indeed, Louis Halle observes in The Cold War as History, when the U.S. had an atomic monopoly and might theoretically have challenged Soviet expansion by interposing a threat of nuclear bombing. Stalin, of course, might have chosen to respond by dispatching the giant Red Army to overrun a then poorly defended Europe. But Halle suggests a broader pragmatism in American restraint: the U.S. could not and did not attempt any such nuclear blackmail because it might have threatened "the whole fabric of world order."

With or without the heritage of threat and distrust from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a cold war of some kind seems to have been virtually unavoidable, s In fact—and this is one of the few advantages of the Bomb's fatal use—it seems to have helped prevent the cold war from turning hot. Without Hiroshima's brutal demonstration of the Bomb's power, might not one or another of the contestants have been tempted to test it during a military action such as Korea? Perhaps on the U.N. forces streaming toward the Yalu, or the Chinese forces massed at that border river?

FROM: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876740-5,00.html

 

WHAT IS THE TENNESSEE CONNECTION?

 Map locates Erwin, Tenn., site of nuclear pollution since 2005

August 22, 2007

Three years ago, a nuclear power plant near the Tennessee/North Carolina border apparently spilled uranium all over the place, and the event was hushed up in the name of national security. From the Houston Chronicle:
A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant — including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

The leak turned out to be one of nine violations or test failures since 2005 at privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., a longtime supplier of fuel to the U.S. Navy's nuclear fleet.

The public was never told about the problems when they happened. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission revealed them for the first time last month when it released an order demanding improvements at the company, but no fine.

Some 35 liters, or just over 9 gallons, of highly enriched uranium solution leaked from a transfer line into a protected glovebox and spilled onto the floor. The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid "running into a hallway" from under a door, according to one document.

The commission said there were two areas, the glovebox and an old elevator shaft, where the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

"It is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death," the agency wrote.

"We don't want any security information out there that's going to help a terrorist," agency Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in a newly released transcript from a closed commission meeting May 30. But "that's entirely separate" from dealing with an event that could have killed a worker at the plant.

"The pendulum maybe swung too far," agreed Luis Reyes, the commission's executive director for operations. "We want to make sure we don't go the other way, but we need to come back to some reasonable middle point."
FROM:  http://jlundberg.livejournal.com/511434.html
 

In 2004, the government became so concerned about releasing nuclear secrets that the commission removed more than 1,740 documents from its public archive - even some that apparently involved basic safety violations at the company, which operates a 65-acre gated complex in tiny Erwin, about 120 miles north of Knoxville.

Congressmen and environmental groups have criticized the policy, and now the commission staff is drafting recommendations that may ease its restrictions.

But environmental activists are still suspicious of the belated revelations and may challenge the commission's decision not to fine Nuclear Fuel Services for the safety violations.

"That party is not over - the full story of what is going on up there," said Ann Harris, a member of the Sierra Club's national nuclear task force.

Nuclear Fuel Services has been supplying fuel to the Navy since the 1960s. More recently, it has also been converting the government's stockpile of weapons-grade uranium into commercial reactor fuel.

While reviewing the commission's public Web page in 2004, the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors found what it considered protected information about Nuclear Fuel Service's work for the Navy.

The commission responded by sealing every document related to Nuclear Fuel Services and BWX Technologies in Lynchburg, Va., the only two companies licensed by the agency to manufacture, possess and store highly enriched uranium.

BWX Technologies has not experienced any problems as serious as the uranium spill at Nuclear Fuel Services, commission spokesman David McIntyre said. But its operations were included in the order to seal documents because it produces nuclear fuel for the Navy, too.

Under the policy, all the documents were stamped "Official Use Only," including papers about the policy itself and more than 1,740 documents from the commission's public archive.

The Associated Press first reported the policy in May after the commission briefly mentioned in its annual report to Congress a March 6, 2006, uranium leak at Nuclear Fuel Services. The leak was one of three "abnormal occurrences" of license holders cited during the year.

Agency commissioners, apparently struck by the significance of the event, took a special vote to skirt the "Official Use Only" rule so that Nuclear Fuel Services would be identified in the report as the site of the uranium leak.

Some 35 liters, or just over 9 gallons, of highly enriched uranium solution leaked from a transfer line into a protected glovebox and spilled onto the floor. The leak was discovered when a supervisor saw a yellow liquid "running into a hallway" from under a door, according to one document.

The commission said there were two areas, the glovebox and an old elevator shaft, where the solution potentially could have collected in such a way to cause an uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

"It is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death," the agency wrote.

"We don't want any security information out there that's going to help a terrorist," agency Commissioner Edward McGaffigan Jr. said in a newly released transcript from a closed commission meeting May 30. But "that's entirely separate" from dealing with an event that could have killed a worker at the plant.

"The pendulum maybe swung too far," agreed Luis Reyes, the commission's executive director for operations. "We want to make sure we don't go the other way, but we need to come back to some reasonable middle point."

Agency spokesman David McIntyre said it may be difficult to separate Nuclear Fuel Service's secret work for the Navy from its public work converting bomb-grade uranium to commercial reactor fuel. The leak happened on the commercial reactor side.

In a stinging letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman in July, two Democratic congressman from Michigan also blasted the policy.

"We agree that NRC should withhold from public view any sensitive security information of this nature. However, NRC went far beyond this narrow objective," read the letter from John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

McIntyre defended the commission's decision not to fine Nuclear Fuel Services, even though the agency rated the uranium leak last year as its second most-serious violation.

Instead, the agency ordered Nuclear Fuel Services to conduct a full review of its "safety culture" and make changes using outside experts.

"If we can get long-term permanent changes and improvements in their process it is better than slapping them with a fine every time something goes wrong," McIntyre said.

Nuclear Fuel Services Executive Vice President Timothy Lindstrom, a Navy veteran who joined the company in September, said the company had already made "significant progress."

"I think it is important that the public recognize that we do have a very robust safety program at NFS. We live in this community and take our stewardship very seriously," he said.

"I think if we were to have an event like this again, we would push to make it public," he added. "Clearly it would have been better to have this discussion 18 months ago than it is to have it now."

Meanwhile, NFS told its 700 employees this past week it will be "exploring the possibility of a sale" over the next 12 months - not because of the commission's disclosure, but because of the company's increasing value to a booming nuclear power industry.

"We are in a position of strength," company spokesman Tony Treadway said.

Nuclear Fuel Services: http://www.nuclearfuelservices.com

Erwin uranium spill cloaked in secrecy

Federal regulators looking into NRC policy that kept details from being public

RELATED LINKS

Read the letter detailing the NRC's secrecy policy with an East Tennessee nuclear facility

Federal regulators are reviewing a policy that has kept details on an East Tennessee nuclear facility — including a potentially deadly spill of highly enriched uranium last year — hidden from the public.

Since August 2004, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has designated most correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services Inc. as “official use only,” which has prevented inspection reports and other materials on the nuclear fuel producer from being publicly released.

That policy kept a March 2006 uranium spill at the company’s Erwin, Tenn., plant out of public view for more than a year, until the incident was disclosed in May in a required annual report to Congress. Local authorities weren’t even informed of the spill.

The disclosure drew attention from a Congressional committee, prompting the NRC to re-examine the “official use only” tag, an administrative designation that allows the commission to withhold sensitive documents without technically classifying them.

NRC spokesman Roger Hannah said commission staffers were reviewing the designation for documents on Nuclear Fuel Services, and possibly other licensees as well.

“I would assume that’s something they’re looking at across the board,” Hannah said.

The March 2006 incident prompted a change to the company’s Special Nuclear Materials License, but the February order detailing the change was kept from the public, which would have had a right to request a hearing on the changes. Hannah said the NRC has decided to reissue the order publicly, possibly within the week.

“The changes were an affirmation that NFS should establish a program to create a more robust safety culture within the plant among its employees and supervisors,” said Nuclear Fuel Services spokesman Tony Treadway.

The spill last year involved about 35 liters of highly enriched uranium solution that leaked into a protected glovebox, then onto the floor in a facility where highly enriched uranium is “downblended” to a lower enrichment for use in commercial reactors, including TVA’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama.

According to the NRC’s report, there were two chances for a “criticality” accident, where a nuclear chain reaction releases radiation. If such an incident occurred, “it is likely that at least one worker would have received an exposure high enough to cause acute health effects or death,” according to the report.

More information on the event came to light last week in a letter sent to the NRC by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The NRC had provided the committee with inspection reports on the Erwin facility, which have not been publicly released.

“NRC inspection reports suggest that it was merely a matter of luck that a criticality accident did not occur,” reads the letter, signed by U.S. Reps. John Dingell, the committee’s chair, and Bart Stupak, a subcommittee chair, both Michigan Democrats.

The letter revealed that the NRC implemented its “official use only” policy in August 2004 after a request from the Department of Energy’s Office of Naval Reactors, which was concerned that sensitive national security information could be found on the NRC’s public records system. The memo that established the policy was itself kept from the public.

“Thus, the public and Congress have been kept in the dark regarding NRC’s decision to withhold all documents regarding the NFS plant from public view,” the congressmen wrote.

The policy was supposed to cover only documents related to Nuclear Fuel Services’ and another contractor’s program to make nuclear fuel for Navy submarines. Treadway said last year’s spill was not related to the company’s production of naval fuel.

The NRC’s Hannah said he did not know why the spill was kept secret given the limited scope of the “official use only” policy.

“Unfortunately, we’re in a position in this case where it seems the public has been denied the right to know what’s going on there,” said Linda Modica, a Jonesborough resident who chairs the Sierra Club’s national radiation committee.

Modica said she lives downwind of the Erwin facility and drinks groundwater from the same watershed.

“We have no idea what, if anything, was released to the air or water at the time of that spill,” she said.

Yet the NRC has to walk a “delicate line” between giving citizens information about nuclear accidents and preventing terrorists from learning too much about bomb-grade materials, U.S. Rep David Davis said.

Davis, a Republican who hails from Unicoi County, said he has a personal stake in making sure his constituents are safe — his mother-in-law lives a half-mile from the Erwin facility.

“I want to make sure we use common sense on this issue,” Davis said. “We don’t want too much information out, but we don’t want to withhold information either.”

With about 715 employees, Nuclear Fuel Services, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is the largest employer in Unicoi County. The private company has a history of fines and enforcement actions by the NRC, which regulates commercial reactors and other uses of nuclear materials.

Erwin Mayor Don Lewis worked at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant for 43 years before retiring in 2002.

Lewis said he had “heard rumors” about the spill but ultimately learned about it through media reports, the same way as the general public. But he said he had no concerns about the incident or the fact that local authorities were not notified after it happened.

“I didn’t have any complaint whatsoever with the way it was handled,” Lewis said. “We can always ‘what if’ this, or ‘what if’ that, but really you got to look at the facts about the thing.”

Treadway said the spill did not injure anyone or cause harm to the environment. He said Nuclear Fuel Services reported the incident promptly to the NRC’s two resident inspectors at the Erwin facility. The NRC later notified the state of the spill, but not local authorities.

“We would have gone against (NRC) regulations should we have shared it with the public,” Treadway said.

For Modica, that’s precisely the problem.

“How can you trust that your government is duking it out for the public with respect to these polluters if they don’t tell you what they’re doing?” Modica asked.

Business writer Andrew Eder may be reached at 865-342-6318. © 2007 Knoxville News Sentinel
 

 

Children's disabilities blamed on Tennessee nuclear site

P. Casey Daley / The Nashville Tennessean

Photo: Susie and Scott Woods, above, wonder if the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation caused their son Alex, 3, to have the body and mind of a youth half his age.

By Susan Thomas, Laura Frank and Anne Paine /
The Nashville Tennessean

           OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -- The number of children's mental, physical and learning disabilities are mushrooming downstream
           from the federal government's giant Oak Ridge nuclear reservation.

While nobody has found a direct connection between the escalating number of disabilities and the huge Oak Ridge complex, nobody has seriously looked for one either.

But people who live nearby and see the disabilities have their suspicions about poisons leaked into the environment from Oak Ridge, where nuclear weapons parts were manufactured for the last quarter century.

In nearby Roane County, the school population has changed little since 1990, but an analysis of state records shows:
 
  • The number of kids with learning disabilities more than doubled from the 1990 to 1996 school years.
     
  • The number of kids with health-related disabilities jumped from eight to 123.
     
  • These disabilities range from leukemia to attention deficit disorder.
     
  • The number of kids with mental retardation rose at a rate four times that of the state.

"There just seems to be a tremendous increase in minimal brain dysfunction," says Robert J. McCracken, Roane County's director of special education until 1995.

He does not know why. The numbers alone do not suggest a cause. And experts say the numbers should be viewed with caution. But in the streets and stores of Roane County communities, there is a sense something is wrong with too many kids.

"As a parent, I am very concerned that the contamination coming from the government plants could be causing the disabilities and other problems the children are having," says Marcella Russell, 33, who volunteers as a teacher's aide at Oliver Springs Elementary School, which her two children attend. "I mean, you constantly hear about more and more children who live around here who are having unexplained problems, so you can't help but wonder if the plants may be hurting them."

The U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge reservation is a toxic tapestry of some of the worst, longest-lasting poisons known.

In 1991, an incinerator on the reservation began burning radioactive, toxic waste laced with cancer-causing PCBs, once widely used for electrical insulation. A group of sick reservation workers complained the emissions may be causing or contributing to their illnesses.

The Energy Department says the incinerator is safe. At the same time, some people here wonder if the growing number of kids' disabilities could reflect a more complex problem.

In addition, Roane County is downstream from two private companies that began burning nuclear waste about the same time as the Oak Ridge incinerator.

For decades, several companies in Roane and neighboring Anderson County have released toxic metals and chemicals. The Tennessee Valley Authority's coal-burning power plants in each county, like other coal-fired plants, also have emitted arsenic, mercury and radioactive particles for years.

Like the Energy Department, these facilities' operators say they emit nothing at harmful levels. But some wonder if the poisons from the reservation and these other sources are combining and accumulating in ways now proving harmful.

"What if we're dealing with multiple toxic substances here?" asks McCracken, recently named Anderson County High School principal. He recalls sitting in his old office at the Roane County schools administration building in Kingston, overlooking the Clinch River downstream from these sources: "I used to sit at my window and look at the stacks from the TVA plant, and wonder where all these things are going? Who knows what happens when you sprinkle in a little mercury and a little radiation? Nobody knows."

Bruce Hall Greenpeace Nuclear Disarmament Campaign <bruce.hall@wdc.greenpeace.org>
Compliments of Proposition One Committee
 

FROM; http://prop1.org/2000/safety/970925tn.htm
 
 

A guard mans a gate at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Sept. 11, 2001.
Guards cheated in a mock terrorist drill at the plant last summer, and apparently have been
doing so since the 1980s, the Energy Department's inspector general says in a report released
Monday, Jan. 26, 2004. Investigators found security personnel learned in advance which walls
would be breached and which buildings would be targeted, and planned accordingly. Then they
used improperly inserted batteries, mud or Vaseline to befuddled the body sensors
 that simulate fatal gunshots.
(Photo/Wade Payne)

Published on Tuesday, January 27, 2004
by the Knoxville News-Sentinel

Y-12 Test 'Unreliable'
Inspector General Report: Some Oak Ridge Plant Guards Were Tipped Off to Security Exercise
 
by Frank Munger

OAK RIDGE - A security test last summer at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant may have been "compromised" because some plant police had advance information on the exercise, according to a federal report released Monday.

The Oak Ridge test results were "tainted and unreliable," the U.S. Department of Energy's Inspector General concluded.

Furthermore, investigators said they interviewed "several current and former protective force personnel" who detailed improprieties in Y-12's security tests dating back to the mid-1980s. Guards were told, in some instances, what buildings were to be attacked during mock incursions and whether there would be diversionary tactics used in an exercise.

The IG report is the latest blow to the image of Oak Ridge security, coming on the heels of a scathing assessment by a government watchdog group. The Project On Government Oversight said that Y-12 security forces failed to protect the plant's nuclear assets during a December exercise - raising grave questions about their ability to counter a terrorist attack.

BWXT Y-12, which manages the plant for the federal government, last week named a new security director. The National Nuclear Security Administration, a DOE sub-unit that oversees the weapons operation, also changed security directors in Oak Ridge. Neither BWXT nor NNSA would say whether the leadership changes were results of the security problems.

Steven Wyatt, a spokesman in DOE's Oak Ridge office, declined comment Monday on the IG report. However, the document said that federal officials concurred with findings and were taking corrective actions.

Bill Brumley, the Oak Ridge chief of the NNSA, last year told the News Sentinel that the results of the summer exercise were considered too good to be true, and that he asked the Inspector General to look into the matter.

Eyebrows were raised when the Y-12 protective force won all four of the test exercises in the June security review. Computer simulations conducted before that review had predicted Y-12 police "would decisively lose two of the four scenarios."

While some guards interviewed by the IG said they did not have advance information on the security tests, investigators concluded there was enough evidence to taint the results.

"We found that shortly before the test, two participating protective force personnel were permitted to view the computer simulations of the four scenarios," the IG report said. "We concluded that this action was improper, since it had the potential to adversely impact the realism of the performance test and outcome. In short, the test results were tainted and should not, in our judgment, be relied upon."

During the Oak Ridge inspection, the team interviewed more than 30 current or former security police officers. Investigators said they received information on a "pattern of actions" over an extended period of time that may have skewed the realism of Y-12 security exercises and affected the performance results.

"We found their assertions to be credible and compelling," investigators said in the report.

The Inspector General report also heard allegations that Y-12 guards tampered with laser-based systems used to identify guards disabled during the simulated terrorist exercise. Investigators said some guards obstructed the sensors by applying tape, mud or petroleum jelly to the surface.

Among other allegations:

  • Managers identified the best-prepared guards and then substituted them for others scheduled to participate in an exercise.
     
  • A member of the Y-12 protective force would be assigned to "tail" the competing team during a preliminary tour of the plant while preparing for the exercise. This reportedly gave the defenders an advantage.
     
  • Based on advance information, responders would place trucks or other equipment at strategic sites to help conceal Y-12 guards or provide additional obstacles for the aggressors.

    Glenn Podonsky, who heads the DOE office that conducts security reviews at nuclear facilities, said test protocols do not allow for guards to receive advance information. He said recent experience showed that security personnel "do not attempt to deliberately compromise performance tests during inspections." If documented, however, such efforts would indicate there's a "significant weakness" in security management, Podonsky said.

    © Copyright 2004, Knoxville News-Sentinel Co

    FROM: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0127-06.htm

    http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/jul/11/erwin-uranium-spill-cloaked-in-secrecy/?printer=1/

  • Crime pays.
    (Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear weapons plant awarded)

    Publication Date: 01-MAY-02
    Publication Title: Sojourners
    Format: Online
    Company: Oak Ridge
    Author: Berger, Rose Marie ; Hochstedler, Jodi
     

    Nuclear weapons plant starts design for $3.5B production area Associated Press - August 23, 2007

    OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - The Department of Energy has approved designing a new uranium processing center at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee.

    It will cost as much as $3.5 billion.

    It potentially is the largest construction project at the weapons plant in decades and the most significant step yet in upgrading an installation dating back to World War II's Manhattan Project.

    The project will have to pass several more review hurdles before it can be built and may not be ready until 2018.

    The facility would replace the heart of the Y-12 manufacturing complex, consolidating operations from 60-year-old facilities with outdated equipment into a new structure.

    The 4,600-employee Y-12 installation is the nation's primary storehouse for weapons-grade uranium and the key producer of uranium parts used in every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.

    Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
     

    Inform your elected officials of your support for safe, renewable energy sources and of your concerns about:

    1. the need to stop generating more radioactive wastes until, if ever, the wastes accumulated over the past
         sixty years can be permanently isolated from the environment;

    2. the dangers of transporting radioactive wastes from place to place, such as the threat of accidents, and
         terrorist attack;

    3. the need to halt the proposed licensing and construction of the Yucca Mountain repository;

    4. the public health risks of manufacturing nuclear power and weapons wastes into consumer products;

    5. the dangers of commingling nuclear power and nuclear weapons production which could lead to weapons
        proliferation and acts of terrorism. You can continue to be informed about
    nuclear issues by becoming a
        member of the Nuclear Information & Resource Ser- vice. Please send your contribution to

    NIRS at 1424 16th St., NW,
    Suite 404,
    Washington, DC 20036.

    www.nirs.org

    Some references:

    1. To find your home along the nearest likely route to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository,
         type your address into www.mapscience.org and click on “Get Map.”

    2. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America. New York: W. W. Nor- ton, 1985.

    3. Kenneth D. Bergeron. Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power.
    Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2002.

    4. Rosalie Bertell. No Immediate Danger?– Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. Toronto: Wom- en’s Educational Press,1985.

    5. Catherine Caufield: Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

    6. Luis F. Fajardo, Morgan Berthrong and Robert E. Anderson. Radiation Pathology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

    7. John Gofman. Radiation and Human Health: A Comprehensive Investigation of the Evidence Relating Low-Level Radiation to Cancer
        and Other Diseases. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1981. 8. Ed Smeloff and Peter Asmus. Reinventing Electric Utilities:
        Competition, Citizen Action, and Clean Power. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997.

    9. Worldwatch Institute. Worldwatch Paper 106 —

    Nuclear Waste:The ProblemThat Won’t GoAway.” Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute © 1991.

    This pamphlet is intended for reprint. You are encouraged to copy and distribute it widely. December 2002 © 1978 Donnelly/Colt
    Union Bug = infinity = infinity = infinity the lethal legacy of the Atomic Age 1942 -2002 -

    Nuclear Information & Resource Service
    1424 16th St., NW, # 404,
    Washington, DC 20036
    Ph: 202-328-0002
    FAX: 202-462-2183

    nirsnet@nirs.org www.nirs.org

    World Information Service on Energy Amsterdam www.antenna.nl/wise “The fission reactor produces both energy and radioactive waste;
    we want to use the energy now and leave the radioactive waste for our children and grandchildren to take care of. This is against the
    ecological imperative: Thou shalt not leave a polluted and poisoned world to future generations.”

    Hannes Alfven, 1970 Nobel Laureate in Physics “Governments continue to promote the use of nuclear power without having any sure
    knowledge that a solution to this haunting problem of
    nuclear waste is near, or indeed that the problem can be solved at all. The deadly
    residue of the
    nuclear age that [Enrico] Fermi inaugurated may be our civilization’s longest-lasting legacy.” Worldwatch Paper 106.

    Radioactive waste has been accumulating for 60 years, and we don’t even know what to do with the first cupful. ©1976, 2002 Engelhardt
    in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Reprinted with permission. Mr. Engelhardt also contributed the title and logo of this pamphlet.

    Enough Is Enough Time Capsule

    The government is planning to build a deep geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, to store irradiated fuel rods.

    This site, however, is known to be geologically unsuitable and seismically unstable. Earthquakes have fractured the rock, creating
    pathways for radioactivity to percolate to the groundwater below — a source of water for drinking and irrigation. President Bush chose
    the Yucca Mountain site in 2002 to be the first national high-level waste repository, but it has not yet been approved by the US
    Nuclear
    Regulatory Commission. The Nevada location would mean transporting high-level wastes nationwide on highways, rail- ways and rivers—
    through population centers and farmland — through some communities as often as every day. We should stop generating more waste
    until, if ever , a safe disposal solution can be found.

    The federal government has had a long-standing policy of keeping nuclear weapons separate from civilian nuclear power. Currently,
    however, the US Department of Energy plans to generate tritium for bombs at
    Tennessee nuclear power plants and to use plutonium
    (from dismantled weapons) in commercial
    nuclear reactor fuel.

    Increasing the amount of weapons-grade materials at power plants makes these facilities even more attractive to terrorists, and more
    vulnerable.

    Then and Now “Low-level” nuclear power and weapons wastes have accumulated all over the country, creating an expensive and
    dangerous storage problem. It is a problem so out of control that the federal government is actually proposing to sell radioactively
    contaminated metals on the commercial market that could be used in the manufacture of pots and pans, prostheses, coins, toys, zippers,
    and other consumer goods.

     
    Nuclear
    power plants cannot operate without regular, deliberate releases of radioactive liquids, gases and particles into the environment
    during  their routine, everyday operation. It does not take an accident. Why does the government allow releases of radioactivity?

    Starting in the 1950s, commercial nuclear power plants began to produce electricity and tremendous amounts of radioactive waste. At
    every stage of the uranium fuel cycle — where uranium has been mined, milled, chemically converted, enriched, fabricated into fuel rods, fissioned
    in reactors and reprocessed —wastes are generated. At nuclear power plants the wastes include: irradiated fuel rods removed from the
     reactor vessel after fissioning for about six years; filters, resins, and evaporator sludges saturated with radioactive contaminants removed
    from  the liquid and gaseous effluents that are released to the environment; radioactive, corroded and embrittled pipes, pumps, and other
    components  that have been discarded; entire
    nuclear power plants — after decommissioning. A typical 1,000-megawatt reactor building
    may contain over 13,000 tons of contaminated concrete and over 1,400 tons of contaminated steel reinforcing bars in the floor alone.

    No permanent, safe technology or loca- tion has been found to isolate any of the sixty-year accumulation of radioactive waste from the
    human biosphere for the requi- site millennia. And yet we keep generating more and more. On December 2, 1942, scientists created the
    world’s first self-sustaining
    nuclear chain reaction at the Fermi reactor in Chicago. They proved they could harness the energy of the
    atom.

    The Atomic Age was born — and so was nuclear waste. Nuclear power plants generate high-level and so-called “low-level” wastes.

    High-level wastes are the irradiated fuel rods; “low-level” refers to everything else. Much “low-level” waste must be handled by remote-
    controlled equipment because contact with it could give a worker a lethal dose. ∞ ∞ Science and common sense dictate that radioactive
    wastes must be kept isolated from people and other living things; from water, soil and air; and from terrorists. ∞ Moving tens of thousands
    of shipments through 45 states and Washington, DC, for more than thirty years would not solve the problem. As long as
    nuclear plants
    keep operating, they will keep generating waste. During the time the fuel rods currently stored at
    nuclear power plants (in fuel pools
    and dry-storage casks) are being shipped to Yucca Mountain, roughly the same amount of new
    nuclear waste will have been generated.
     (There would be about as much waste stored on site at
    nuclear power plants after Yucca Mountain is full as there is at those plants
    today.) 

    Engelhardt in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Reprinted with permission. ʻJust Keep Driving Around – We May Come Up With A Solution Yet

    Already every nuclear power reactor generates plutonium; a 1000-megawatt reactor generates enough to make 40 nuclear bombs a year.

    As long as nuclear power plants operate, plutonium and other long-lived radioactive wastes will continue to be generated, endangering
    the environment and human health. No economically feasible technology exists to filter out some of the wastes — for example,
    radioactive hydrogen (tritium) and noble gases (like krypton and xenon that decay into biologically harmful radioactive strontium and
    cesium).

    The federal government, therefore, does not require that these materials be filtered. Any releases that do not exceed the government’s
    permissible contaminant levels are allowed to be discharged — into our air and into our water, unmonitored and unreported. “Permissible”
    does not mean safe. Many radioactive waste products are dangerous virtually forever. They continue giving off radioactive particles and
    rays for at least ten times each isotope’s “half-life.” Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. Xenon-135 decays into cesium-135,
    an isotope with a 2.3-million-year half-life. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Every radioisotope decays at its own rate,
    regardless of temperature, pressure or chemical environment. No process has been found to speed up the radioactive decay. It occurs
    only with the passage of time. Exposure to radiation increases the risk of damage to tissues, cells, DNA, and other vital
    and
    Forever
    “I don’t think the present controversy is over whether or not there is a safe level. I think all agree that we have no reason to
    assume
    that any level of radiation is utterly safe.” Arthur C. Upton, MD,1979, former director, National Cancer Institute. “

    [Scientists and researchers] know that radiation causes leukemia and almost every type of cancer, and that it will shorten a person’s life
     span by months, years, or decades. They know that it will cause cataracts and weaken bodily defenses. They know that, if ingested or
    inhaled, some radioactive substances will be more harmful to certain body organs than to others . . . .

    The tiniest amount of radiation to the reproductive cells will cause mutations. And as the National Academy of Sciences once put it, ‘the
     more radiation, the more mutations. The harm is cumulative.’ . . . More important, the cancer estimates deal with only one part of the
    problem. The other involves a greater unknown —
    the genetic damage to future generations.”
    (Barlett and Steele, 1985, pp. 298, 302)

    Inform your elected officials of your support for safe, renewable energy sources and of your concerns about:

    1. the need to stop generating more radioactive wastes until, if ever, the wastes accumulated over the
    past sixty years can be permanently isolated from the environment;

    2. the dangers of transporting radioactive wastes from place to place, such as the threat of accidents, and terrorist attack;

    3. the need to halt the proposed licensingand construction of the Yucca Mountain repository;

    4. the public health risks of manufacturing nuclear power and weapons wastes into consumer products;

    5. the dangers of commingling nuclear

    You can continue to be informed about nuclear issues by becoming a member of the Nuclear Information & Resource Service.
    Please send your contribution to NIRS at 1424 16th St., NW, Suite 404, Washington, DC 20036. www.nirs.org

    What You Can Do

    Some references:

    1. To find your home along the nearest likely route to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository,
    type your address into www.mapscience.org and click on “Get Map.”

    2. Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Forevermore: Nuclear Waste in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985.

    3. Kenneth D. Bergeron. Tritium on Ice: The Dangerous New Alliance of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power.
    Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2002.

    4. Rosalie Bertell. No Immediate Danger?– Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. Toronto: Women’s Educational Press,1985.

    5. Catherine Caufield: Multiple Exposures:
    Chronicles of the Radiation Age. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

    6. Luis F. Fajardo, Morgan Berthrong and Robert E. Anderson. Radiation Pathology.
    New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

    7. John Gofman.
    Radiation and Human Health:
    A Comprehensive Investigation of the Evidence Relating Low-Level Radiation to Cancer and
    Other Diseases. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1981.

    8. Ed Smeloff and Peter Asmus. Reinventing Electric Utilities: Competition, Citizen Action, and Clean Power.
    Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997.
    9. Worldwatch Institute. Worldwatch Paper 106 —
    Nuclear Waste:The ProblemThat Won’t GoAway.” Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute © 1991.

    This pamphlet is intended for reprint. You are encouraged to copy and distribute it widely.

    December 2002
    © 1978 Donnelly/Colt Union Bug = infinity = = infinity = = infinity the lethal legacy of the Atomic Age
    1942 -2002

    Nuclear Information & Resource Service
    1424 16th St., NW, # 404, Washington, DC 20036
    Ph: 202-328-0002 FAX: 202-462-2183

    nirsnet@nirs.org www.nirs.org

    World Information Service on Energy Amsterdam
    www.antenna.nl/wise

    “The fission reactor produces both energy and radioactive waste; we want to use the energy now and leave the
     radioactive waste for our children and grandchildren to take care of. This is against the ecological imperative:

    Thou shalt not leave a polluted and poisoned world to future generations.”

    Hannes Alfven, 1970 Nobel Laureate in Physics “Governments continue to promote the use of nuclear power
    without having any sure knowl- edge that a solution to this haunting problem of nuclear waste is near, or indeed
    that the prob- lem can be solved at all. The deadly residue the nuclear age that [Enrico] Fermi inaugurated may
    be our civilization’s longest-lasting legacy.” Worldwatch Paper 106. Radioactive waste has been accumulating
    for 60 years, and < we don’t even know what to do with the first cupful. ©1976, 2002 Engelhardt in the St. Louis
    Post-Dispatch. Reprinted with permission. Mr. Engelhardt also contributed the title and logo of this pamphlet.

    Enough Is Enough

    The government is planning to build a deep geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, to store irradiated fuel
    rods. This site, however, is known to be geologically unsuitable and seismically unstable. Earthquakes have fractured
    the rock, creating pathways for radioactivity to percolate to the groundwater below — a source of water for drinking
     and irrigation.

    President Bush chose the Yucca Mountain site in 2002 to be the first national high-level waste repository, but it has
    not yet been approved by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nevada location would mean transporting
    high-level wastes nationwide on highways, rail- ways and rivers—through population centers and farmland —
    through some communities as often as every day. We should stop generating more waste until, if ever , a safe
    disposal solution can be found. The federal government has had a long-standing policy of keeping
    nuclear weapons
    separate from civilian nuclear
    power.

    Currently, however, the US Department of Energy plans to generate tritium for bombs
    at Tennessee
    nuclear power plants and to use plutonium (from dismantled weapons) commercial nuclear reactor fuel.
    Increasing the amount of weapons-grade materials at power plants makes these facilities even more attractive to
    terrorists, and more vulnerable. Then and Now “Low-level” nuclear power and weapons wastes have accumulated
    all over the country, creating an expensive and dangerous storage problem. It is a problem so out of control that
     the federal government is actually  proposing to sell radioactively contaminated metals on the commercial market
     that could be used in the manufacture of pots and pans, prostheses, coins, toys, zippers, and other consumer goods.

    Nuclear power plants cannot operate without regular, deliberate releases of radioactive liquids, gases and particles
     into the environment during their routine, everyday operation. It does not take an accident.

    Why does the government allow releases of radioactivity? Starting in the 1950s, commercial nuclear power plants
     began to produce electricity and tremendous amounts of radioactive waste. At every stage of the uranium fuel cycle
    — where uranium has been mined, milled, chemically converted, enriched, fabricated into fuel rods, fissioned in
    reactors and reprocessed —wastes are generated. At nuclear power plants the wastes include: irradiated fuel rods
     removed from the reactor vessel after fissioning for about six years; filters, resins, and evaporator sludges saturated
    with radioactive contaminants removed from the liquid and gaseous effluents that are released to the environment;
    radioactive, corroded and embrittled pipes, pumps, and other components that have been discarded; entire nuclear
     power plants — after decommissioning. A typical 1,000-megawatt reactor building may contain over 13,000 tons
    of contaminated concrete and over 1,400 tons of contaminated steel reinforcing bars in the floor alone.

    No permanent, safe technology or location has been found to isolate any of the sixty-year accumulation of radioactive
     waste from the human biosphere for the requi- site millennia. And yet we keep generating more and more.

    On December 2, 1942, scientists created the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the Fermi reactor
     in Chicago. They proved they could harness the energy of the atom. The Atomic Age was born — and so was
    nuclear
    waste.
    Nuclear power plants generate high-level and so-called “low-level” wastes. High-level wastes are the
    irradiated fuel rods; “low-level” refers to everything else. Much “low-level” waste must be handled by remote-
    controlled equipment because contact with it could give a worker a lethal dose. ∞ ∞ Science and common sense
     dictate that radioactive wastes must be kept isolated from people and other living things; from water, soil and air;
    and from terrorists. Moving tens of thousands of shipments through generating waste. During the time the fuel rods
    currently stored at
    nuclear power plants (in fuel pools and dry-storage casks) are being shipped to Yucca Mountain,
     roughly the same amount of new
    nuclear waste will have been generated. (Th would be about as much waste stored
    on site
    nuclear power plants after Yucca Mountain is full as there is at those plants today.) ©1978, 2002 Engelhardt
    in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Reprinted with permission.

    Just Keep Driving Around – We May Come Up With A Solution Yet

     Already every nuclear power reactor generates plutonium; a 1000-megawatt reactor generates enough to make
    40
    nuclear bombs a year. As long as nuclear power plants operate, plutonium and other long-lived radioactive
    wastes will continue to be generated, endangering the environment and human health. No economically feasible
    technology exists to filter out some of the wastes — for example, radioactive hydrogen (tritium) and noble gases
    (like krypton and xenon that decay into biologically harmful radioactive strontium and cesium). The federal
    government, therefore, does not require that these materials be filtered. Any releases that do not exceed the
    government’s permissible contaminant lev are allowed to be discharged — into our air and into our water,
    unmonitored and unreported. “Permissible” does not mean safe. Many radioactive waste products are dangerous
    virtually forever. They continue giving off radioactive particles and rays for at least ten times each isotope’s “half-life.”
    Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. Xenon-135 decays into cesium-135, an isotope with a 2.3-million-
    year half-life. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Every radioisotope decays at its own rate, regardless
     of temperature, pressure or chemical environment. No process has been found to speed up the radioactive decay.
    It occurs only with the passage of time. Exposure to radiation increases the risk of damage to tissues, cells, DNA,
     and other vital molecules — potentially causing programmed cell death (apoptosis), genetic mutations, cancers,
     leukemias, birth defects, and reproductive, immune, cardiovascular, and endocrine system disorders. and Forever
     
    “I don’t think the present controversy is over whether or not there is a safe level.

    I think all agree that we have
    no reason to assume that any level of radiation is utterly safe.” Arthur C. Upton, MD,1979, former director,
    National Cancer Institute. “[Scientists and researchers] know that radiation causes leukemia and almost every
    type of cancer, and that it will shorten aore harmful to certain body organs than to others . . . .

    The tiniest amount of radiation to the reproductive cells will cause mutations. And as the National Academy of
    Sciences once put it, ‘the more radiation, the more mutations. The harm is cumulative.’ . . .

     More important, the cancer estimates deal with only one part of the problem. The other involves a greater unknown
    the genetic damage to future generations.” (Barlett and Steele, 1985, pp. 298, 302)  

    FUTURE NUCLEAR WAR
    Nuclear War against Iran
     

    January 3, 2006

    Video webcast: Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation on The Dangers of a US Sponsored Nuclear War at the Perdana Peace Forum, Kuala Lumpur, December 2005
     


    The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages. 

    Coalition partners, which include the US,  Israel and Turkey are in "an advanced stage of readiness". 

    Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack. 

    Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

    In recent developments, CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister  Recep Tayyip Erdogan "to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets."  Goss reportedly asked " for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation." (DDP, 30 December 2005).

    In turn, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks by the end of March: 

    All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran.... The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran's nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action.

    (James Petras,  Israel's War Deadline: Iran in the Crosshairs, Global Research, December 2005)

    The US sponsored military plan has been endorsed by NATO, although it is unclear, at this stage, as to the nature of NATO's involvement in the planned aerial attacks. 

    "Shock and Awe" 

    The various components of the military operation are firmly under US Command, coordinated by the Pentagon and US Strategic Command Headquarters (USSTRATCOM) at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska

    The actions announced by Israel would be carried out in close coordination with the Pentagon. The command structure of the operation is centralized and ultimately Washington will decide when to launch the military operation. 

    US military sources have confirmed that an aerial attack on Iran would involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US "shock and awe" bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003: 

    American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq. Using the full force of operational B-2 stealth bombers, staging from Diego Garcia or flying direct from the United States, possibly supplemented by F-117 stealth fighters staging from al Udeid in Qatar or some other location in theater, the two-dozen suspect nuclear sites would be targeted.

    Military planners could tailor their target list to reflect the preferences of the Administration by having limited air strikes that would target only the most crucial facilities ... or the United States could opt for a far more comprehensive set of strikes against a comprehensive range of WMD related targets, as well as conventional and unconventional forces that might be used to counterattack against US forces in Iraq 

    (See Globalsecurity.org at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iran-strikes.htm

    In November, US Strategic Command conducted a major exercise of a "global strike plan" entitled "Global Lightening". The latter involved a simulated attack using both conventional and nuclear weapons against a "fictitious enemy".

    Following the "Global Lightening" exercise, US Strategic Command declared an advanced state of readiness (See our analysis below) 

    While Asian press reports stated that the "fictitious enemy" in the Global Lightening exercise was North Korea, the timing of the exercises, suggests that they were conducted in anticipation of a planned attack on Iran.  

    Consensus for Nuclear War

    No dissenting political voices have emerged from within the European Union. 

    There are ongoing consultations between Washington, Paris and Berlin. Contrary to the invasion of Iraq, which was opposed at the diplomatic level by France and Germany, Washington has been building "a consensus" both within the Atlantic Alliance and  the UN Security Council. This consensus pertains to the conduct of a nuclear war, which could potentially affect a large part of the Middle East Central Asian region.  

    Moreover, a number of frontline Arab states are now tacit partners in the US/ Israeli military project.  A year ago in November 2004, Israel's top military brass met at NATO headquarters in Brussels with their counterparts from six members of the Mediterranean basin nations, including Egypt,  Jordan,  Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. A NATO-Israel protocol  was signed. Following these meetings, joint military exercises were held off the coast of Syria  involving the US, Israel and Turkey. and in February 2005, Israel participated in military exercises and "anti-terror maneuvers" together with several Arab countries. 

    The media in chorus has unequivocally pointed to Iran as a "threat to World Peace".  

    The antiwar movement has swallowed the media lies. The fact that the US and Israel are planning a Middle East nuclear holocaust is not part of the antiwar/ anti- globalization agenda.  

    The "surgical strikes" are presented to world public opinion as a means to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.  

    We are told that this is not a war but a military peace-keeping operation, in the form of aerial attacks directed against Iran's nuclear facilities. 

    Mini-nukes: "Safe for Civilians" 

    The press reports, while revealing certain features of the military agenda, largely serve to distort the broader nature of the military operation, which contemplates the preemptive use of tactical nuclear weapons.  

    The war agenda is based on the Bush administration's doctrine of "preemptive" nuclear war under the 2002  Nuclear Posture Review. 

    Media disinformation has been used extensively to conceal the devastating consequences of military action involving nuclear warheads against Iran. The fact that these surgical strikes would be carried out using both conventional and nuclear weapons is not an object of debate. 

    According to a 2003 Senate decision, the new generation of tactical nuclear weapons or "low yield" "mini-nukes", with an explosive capacity of up to 6 times a Hiroshima bomb, are now considered "safe for civilians" because the explosion is underground. 

    Through a propaganda campaign which has enlisted the support of "authoritative" nuclear scientists, the mini-nukes are being presented as an instrument of peace rather than war.  The low-yield nukes have now been cleared for "battlefield use", they are slated to be used in the next stage of America's "war on Terrorism" alongside conventional weapons:  

    Administration officials argue that low-yield nuclear weapons are needed as a credible deterrent against rogue states.[Iran, North Korea]  Their logic is that existing nuclear weapons are too destructive to be used except in a full-scale nuclear war. Potential enemies realize this, thus they do not consider the threat of nuclear retaliation to be credible. However, low-yield nuclear weapons are less destructive, thus might conceivably be used. That would make them more effective as a deterrent. ( Opponents Surprised By Elimination of Nuke Research Funds Defense News November 29, 2004)

    In an utterly twisted logic, nuclear weapons are presented as a means to building peace and preventing "collateral damage". The Pentagon has intimated, in this regard, that the ‘mini-nukes’ (with a yield of less than 5000 tons) are harmless to civilians because the explosions ‘take place under ground’. Each of these ‘mini-nukes’, nonetheless, constitutes – in terms of explosion and potential radioactive fallout – a significant fraction of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.  Estimates of yield for Nagasaki and Hiroshima indicate that they were respectively of  21000  and 15000 tons ( http://www.warbirdforum.com/hiroshim.htm

    In other words,  the low yielding mini-nukes have an explosive capacity of one third of a Hiroshima bomb. 

    TEXT BOX

    Mini-Nukes 

    The earth-penetrating capability of the [nuclear] B61-11 is fairly limited, however. Tests show it penetrates only 20 feet or so into dry earth when dropped from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Even so, by burying itself into the ground before detonation, a much higher proportion of the explosion energy is transferred to ground shock compared to a surface bursts. Any attempt to use it in an urban environment, however, would result in massive civilian casualties. Even at the low end of its 0.3-300 kiloton yield range, the nuclear blast will simply blow out a huge crater of radioactive material, creating a lethal gamma-radiation field over a large area.
    http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n1/weapons.htm 

    
    Gbu 28 Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28)

    The new definition of a nuclear warhead has blurred the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons:   

    'It's a package (of nuclear and conventional weapons). The implication of this obviously is that nuclear weapons are being brought down from a special category of being a last resort, or sort of the ultimate weapon, to being just another tool in the toolbox,' said Kristensen. (Japan Economic News Wire, op cit)

    We are a dangerous crossroads: military planners believe their own propaganda. 

    The military manuals state that this new generation of nuclear weapons are "safe" for use in the battlefield. They are no longer a weapon of last resort. There are no impediments or political obstacles to their use. In this context, Senator Edward Kennedy has accused the Bush Administration for having developed "a generation of more useable nuclear weapons."  

    The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of World Peace. 

    "Making the World safer" is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust. 

    But nuclear holocausts are not front page news!  In the words of Mordechai Vanunu, 

    The Israeli government is preparing to use nuclear weapons in its next war with the Islamic world. Here where I live, people often talk of the Holocaust. But each and every nuclear bomb is a Holocaust in itself. It can kill, devastate cities, destroy entire peoples. (See interview with Mordechai Vanunu, December 2005). 

    Space and Earth Attack Command Unit 

    A preemptive nuclear attack using tactical nuclear weapons would be coordinated out of US Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force base in Nebraska, in liaison with US and coalition command units in the Persian Gulf, the Diego Garcia military base, Israel and Turkey. 

    Under its new mandate, USSTRATCOM has a responsibility for "overseeing a global strike plan" consisting of both conventional and nuclear weapons. In military jargon, it is slated to play the role of  "a global integrator charged with the missions of Space Operations; Information Operations; Integrated Missile Defense; Global Command & Control; Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; Global Strike; and Strategic Deterrence.... "  

    In January 2005, at the outset of the military build-up directed against Iran, USSTRATCOM was identified as "the lead Combatant Command for integration and synchronization of DoD-wide efforts in combating weapons of mass destruction." 

    To implement this mandate, a brand new command unit entitled  Joint Functional Component Command Space and Global Strike, or JFCCSGS was created. 

    JFCCSGS has the mandate to oversee the launching of a nuclear attack in accordance with the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, approved by the US Congress in 2002. The NPR underscores the pre-emptive use of nuclear warheads not only against "rogue states" but also against China and Russia. 

    Since November,  JFCCSGS is said to be in "an advance state of readiness" following the conduct of relevant military exercises. The  announcement was made in early December by  U.S. Strategic Command to the effect that the command unit had achieved "an operational capability for rapidly striking targets around the globe using nuclear or conventional weapons." The exercises conducted in November used "a fictional country believed to represent North Korea" (see David Ruppe, 2 December 2005):  

    "The new unit [JFCCSGS] has 'met requirements necessary to declare an initial operational capability' as of Nov. 18. A week before this announcement, the unit finished a command-post exercise, dubbed Global Lightening, which was linked with another exercise, called Vigilant Shield, conducted by the North American Aerospace Defend Command, or NORAD, in charge of missile defense for North America.

    'After assuming several new missions in 2002, U.S. Strategic Command was reorganized to create better cooperation and cross-functional awareness,' said Navy Capt. James Graybeal, a chief spokesperson for STRATCOM. 'By May of this year, the JFCCSGS has published a concept of operations and began to develop its day-to-day operational requirements and integrated planning process.'

    'The command's performance during Global Lightning demonstrated its preparedness to execute its mission of proving integrated space and global strike capabilities to deter and dissuade aggressors and when directed, defeat adversaries through decisive joint global effects in support of STRATCOM,' he added without elaborating about 'new missions' of the new command unit that has around 250 personnel.

    Nuclear specialists and governmental sources pointed out that one of its main missions would be to implement the 2001 nuclear strategy that includes an option of preemptive nuclear attacks on 'rogue states' with WMDs. (Japanese Economic Newswire, 30 December 2005)

    CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022 

    JFCCSGS is in an advanced state of readiness to trigger nuclear attacks directed against Iran or North Korea. 

    The operational implementation of the Global Strike is called CONCEPT PLAN (CONPLAN) 8022. The latter is described as "an actual plan that the Navy and the Air Force translate into strike package for their submarines and bombers,' (Ibid). 

    CONPLAN 8022 is 'the overall umbrella plan for sort of the pre-planned strategic scenarios involving nuclear weapons.'

    'It's specifically focused on these new types of threats -- Iran, North Korea -- proliferators and potentially terrorists too,' he said. 'There's nothing that says that they can't use CONPLAN 8022 in limited scenarios against Russian and Chinese targets.'(According to Hans Kristensen, of the Nuclear Information Project, quoted in Japanese economic News Wire, op cit) 

    The mission of JFCCSGS is to implement CONPLAN 8022, in other words to trigger a nuclear war with Iran. 

    The Commander in Chief, namely George W. Bush would instruct the Secretary of Defense, who would then instruct the Joint Chiefs of staff to activate CONPLAN 8022. 

    CONPLAN is distinct from other  military operations. it does not contemplate the deployment of ground troops.  

    CONPLAN 8022 is different from other war plans in that it posits a small-scale operation and no "boots on the ground." The typical war plan encompasses an amalgam of forces -- air, ground, sea -- and takes into account the logistics and political dimensions needed to sustain those forces in protracted operations.... The global strike plan is offensive, triggered by the perception of an imminent threat and carried out by presidential order.) (William Arkin, Washington Post, May 2005

    The Role of Israel

    Since late 2004, Israel has been stockpiling US made conventional and nuclear weapons systems in anticipation of an attack on Iran. This stockpiling which is financed by US military aid was largely completed in June 2005. Israel has taken delivery from the US of several thousand "smart air launched weapons" including some 500 'bunker-buster bombs, which can also be used to deliver tactical nuclear bombs. 

    The B61-11 is the "nuclear version" of the "conventional" BLU 113, can be delivered in much same way as the conventional bunker buster bomb. (See Michel Chossudovsky, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO112C.html , see also
     http://www.thebulletin.org/article_nn.php?art_ofn=jf03norris ) .

    Moreover, reported in late 2003, Israeli Dolphin-class submarines equipped with US Harpoon missiles armed with nuclear warheads are now aimed at Iran. (See Gordon Thomas, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/THO311A.html

    TEXT BOX

    Late April 2005.  Sale of deadly military hardware to Israel. GBU-28 Buster Bunker Bombs:

    Coinciding with Putin's visit to Israel, the
    US Defence Security Cooperation Agency (Department of Defense) announced the sale of an additional 100 bunker-buster bombs produced by Lockheed Martin to Israel. This decision was viewed by the US media as  "a warning to Iran about its nuclear ambitions."

    The sale pertains to the larger and more sophisticated "Guided Bomb Unit-28 (GBU-28) BLU-113 Penetrator" (including the WGU-36A/B guidance control unit and support equipment). The GBU-28 is described as "a special weapon for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground. The fact of the matter is that the GBU-28 is among the World's most deadly "conventional" weapons used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, capable of causing thousands of civilian deaths through massive explosions.

    The Israeli Air Force are slated to use the  GBU-28s on their F-15 aircraft.

    (See text of DSCA news release at
    http://www.dsca.osd.mil/PressReleases/36-b/2005/Israel_05-10_corrected.pdf

    Extension of the War

    Tehran has confirmed that it will retaliate if attacked, in the form of ballistic missile strikes directed against Israel (CNN, 8 Feb 2005). These attacks, could also target US military facilities in Iraq and Persian Gulf, which would immediately lead us into a scenario of military escalation and all out war. 

    At present there are three distinct  war theaters: Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. The air strikes against Iran could contribute to unleashing a war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region. 

    Moreover, the planned attack on Iran should also be understood in relation to the timely withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, which has opened up a new space, for the deployment of Israeli forces. The participation of Turkey in the US-Israeli military operation is also a factor, following last year's agreement reached between Ankara and Tel Aviv.

    More recently,  Tehran has beefed up its air defenses through the acquisition of  Russian 29 Tor M-1 anti-missile systems. In October, with Moscow`s collaboration, "a Russian rocket lifted an Iranian spy satellite, the Sinah-1, into orbit." (see Chris Floyd)

    The Sinah-1 is just the first of several Iranian satellites set for Russian launches in the coming months.

    Thus the Iranians will soon have a satellite network in place to give them early warning of an Israeli attack, although it will still be a pale echo of the far more powerful Israeli and American space spies that can track the slightest movement of a Tehran mullah’s beard. What’s more, late last month Russia signed a $1 billion contract to sell Iran an advanced defense system that can destroy guided missiles and laser-guided bombs, the Sunday Times reports. This too will be ready in the next few months. (op.cit.)

    Ground War 

    While a ground war is not envisaged under CONPLAN, the aerial bombings could lead through the process of escalation into a ground war. 

    Iranian troops could cross the Iran-Iraq border  and confront coalition forces inside Iraq. Israeli troops and/or Special Forces could enter into Lebanon and Syria. 

    In recent developments, Israel plans to conduct military exercises as well as deploy Special Forces  in the mountainous areas of Turkey bordering Iran and Syria with the collaboration of the Ankara government:  

    Ankara and Tel Aviv have come to an agreement on allowing the Israeli army to carry out military exercises in the mountainous areas [in Turkey] that border Iran.

    [According to]  ... a UAE newspaper ..., according to the agreement reached by the Joint Chief of Staff of the Israeli army, Dan Halutz, and Turkish officials, Israel is to carry out various military manoeuvres in the areas that border Iran and Syria. [Punctuation as published here and throughout.] [Dan Halutz] had gone to Turkey a few days earlier.

    Citing certain sources without naming them, the UAE daily goes on to stress: The Israeli side made the request to carry out the manoeuvres because of the difficulty of passage in the mountain terrains close to Iran's borders in winter.

    The two Hakari [phonetic; not traced] and Bulo [phonetic; not traced] units are to take part in the manoeuvres that have not been scheduled yet. The units are the most important of Israel's special military units and are charged with fighting terrorism and carrying out guerrilla warfare.

    Earlier Turkey had agreed to Israeli pilots being trained in the area bordering Iran. The news [of the agreement] is released at a time when Turkish officials are trying to evade the accusation of cooperating with America in espionage operations against its neighbouring countries Syria and Iran. Since last week the Arab press has been publishing various reports about Ankara's readiness or, at least, agreement in principle to carry out negotiations about its soil and air space being used for action against Iran.

    (E'temad website, Tehran, in Persian 28 Dec 05, BBC Monitoring Services Translation) 

    Concluding remarks

    The implications are overwhelming. 

    The so-called international community has accepted the eventuality of a nuclear holocaust.  

    Those who decide have swallowed their own war propaganda. 

    A political consensus has developed in Western Europe and North America regarding the aerial attacks using tactical nuclear weapons, without considering their devastating implications. 

    This profit driven military adventure ultimately threatens the future of humanity. 

    What is needed in the months ahead is a major thrust, nationally and internationally which breaks the conspiracy of silence, which acknowledges the dangers, which brings this war project to the forefront of political debate and media attentiion, at all levels, which confronts and requires political and military leaders to take a firm stance against the US sponsored nuclear war. 

    Ultimately what is required are extensive international sanctions directed against the United States of America and Israel.  
     


    Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international best seller "The Globalization of Poverty " published in eleven languages. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, at   www.globalresearch.ca . He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His most recent book is entitled: America’s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005.


    Related article: Planned US-Israeli Attack on Iran, by Michel Chossudovsky

    Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation on The Dangers of a US Sponsored Nuclear War at the Perdana Peace Forum,
     


     Global Research Articles by Michel Chossudovsky

     
    The Unthinkable: The US- Israeli Nuclear War on Iran
    Selected Global Research Articles
       

    The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.

    At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout,  over a large part of the Middle East.

    There is mounting evidence that the Bush Administration in liaison with Israel and NATO is planning the  launching of a nuclear war against Iran, ironically, in retaliation for its nonexistent nuclear weapons program. The US-Israeli military operation is said to be in "an advanced state of readiness". 

    If such a plan were to be launched, the war would escalate and eventually engulf the entire Middle-East Central Asian region. 

    The war could extend beyond the region, as some analysts  have suggested, ultimately leading us into a World War III scenario. 

    In this regard, the structure of military alliances is crucial. China and Russia have entered into farreaching military cooperation agreements with Iran. The latter have a direct bearing on the conflict. Iran possesses an advanced air defense system as well as capabilities to target US and allied positions in Iraq and the Gulf States, as demonstrated in recent military exercises. 

    The US-led naval deployment (involving a massive deployment of military hardware) is taking place in two distinct theaters:the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

    The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean is broadly under the jurisdiction of NATO in liaison with Israel. Directed against Syria, it is conducted under the façade of a UN peace-keeping mission. In this context, the war on Lebanon last Summer must be viewed as a stage of the broader US sponsored military road-map.

    The naval armada in the Persian Gulf is largely under US command, with the participation of Canada.

    The naval buildup is coordinated with the air attacks. The planning of aerial bombings of Iran started in mid-2004, pursuant to the formulation of CONPLAN 8022 in early 2004. In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued. While its contents remain classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the stockpiling and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.

    Despite Pentagon statements which describe tactical nuclear weapons as "safe for the surrounding civilian population", the use of nukes in a conventional war theater would trigger a nuclear holocaust.The resulting radioactive contamination, which threatens future generations, would by no means be limited to the Middle East.

    In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a contingency plan "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States". The presumption was that if such a 9/11 type event were to take place, Iran would, according to Cheney, be behind it, thereby providing a pretext for punitive bombings, much in the same way as the US sponsored attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001, allegedly in retribution for the alleged support of the Taliban government to the 9/11 terrorists

    More recently, several analysts have focussed on the creation of a "Gulf of Tonkin incident", which would be used by the Bush administration as a pretext to wage war on Iran.

    We bring to the attention of our readers a selection of Global Research articles, which document various aspects of US-Israeli war preparations.

    It is essential that this information reaches the broader public. We invite our subscribers and readers to distribute and forward these articles far and wide.

    To reverse the tide of war requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war which contemplates the use of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel. 

    Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community, particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the political and military actors in high office must be challenged.

    There seems to be a reluctance by members of Congress to exercise their powers under the US Constitution, with a view to preventing the unthinkable: the onslaught of a US sponsored nuclear war. The consequences of  this inaction could be devastating. Once the decision is taken at the political level, it will be very difficult to turn the clock backwards.

    Moreover, the antiwar movement has not addressed the US sponsored nuclear threat on Iran in a consistent  way, in part due to divisions within its ranks, in part due to lack of information. Moreover, a significant sector of the antiwar movement considers that the "threat of Islamic terrorism" is real. "We are against the war, but we support the war on terrorism."  This ambivalent stance ultimately serves to reinforce the legitimacy of the US national security doctrine which is predicated on waging the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT).

    At this juncture, with the popularity of the Bush-Cheney regime at an all time low, a real opportunity exists to initiate an impeachment process, which could contribute to temporarily stalling the military agenda.

    The corporate media also bear a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. Until recently these war preparations involving the use of nuclear weapons have been scarcely covered by the corporate media. The latter must also be forcefully challenged for their biased coverage of the Middle East war.

    What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.

    It is essential to bring the US-Israeli war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America, Western Europe and Israel. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.

    Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 20 January 2007


    Selected Articles on the Proposed US-Israeli Nuclear War on Iran

     
    Is the Bush Administration Planning a Nuclear Holocaust?.
    - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2007-01-07
    The new nuclear doctrine turns concepts & realities upside down. It states that nuclear weapons are "safe" and their use will ensure "minimal collateral damage".

    US military strike on Iran seen by April '07; Sea-launched attack to hit oil, N-sites
     
    -by Ahmed Al-Jarallah - 2007-01-15

     
    - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2007-01-07

    «Babylon-2»: On US-Israeli Plans For a Nuclear War
    - by Dmitriy Baklin - 2007-01-20

     
    Bush administration provokes open war on Iran
    Irbil raid, and other operations, authorized "several months ago"
    - by Larry Chin - 2007-01-15

    Planned US-Israeli Nuclear Attack on Iran
    - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2007-01-07

     
    Immediate Impeachments: Preventing "The Guns of August" in Eurasia
    - by Prof. Francis Boyle - 2007-01-20
    If Bush and Cheney are not stopped immediately by means of impeachment, they could readily set off World War III in the volatile Middle East and Central Asia.

    Israel’s plans to Wage Nuclear War on Iran: History of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal
    Hundreds of nuclear warheads under the control of Israel's defense establishment
    - by Michael Carmichael - 2007-01-15
     
    Iran: Pieces in Place for Escalation
    - by Colonel Sam Gardiner - 2007-01-16
    The pieces are moving. They’ll be in place by the end of February. The media will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff.
     

     

    The "Demonization" of Muslims and the Battle for Oil
    - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2007-01-04
    Muslim countries possess three quarters of the World's oil reserves. In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves.
     
     

     

    "Cold War Shivers": War Preparations in the Middle East and Central Asia
    - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2006-10-06
    The Russian, Chinese and Iran war exercises conducted since August are part of a carefully coordinated endeavor, in response to the US-NATO military build-up
     
    Iran's President Did Not Say "Israel must be wiped off the map"
    - by Arash Norouzi - 2007-01-20
    Across the world, through media disinformation, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications
     
    The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.
    - by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya - 2006-10-01
    A powerful naval armada has been sent to the Persian Gulf.
    The March to War: Iran Preparing for US Air Attacks
    - by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya - 2006-09-21
    An attack on Iran would engulf the entire Middle East and Central Asian region into an extensive confrontation.
    The Dangers of a Middle East Nuclear War
    - by Michel Chossudovsky - 2006-02-17
    The Pentagon has blurred the distinction between conventional battlefield weapons & nuclear bombs. The nuclear bunker buster bomb is presented as an instrument of peace-making & regime change, which will enhance global security.
     
    Looking for a Gulf of Tonkin-like Incident
    - by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay - 2007-01-21
    How Congress Can Stop the Iran Attack or be Complicit in Nuclear War Crimes
    - by Prof. Jorge Hirsch - 2007-01-20

     
    Planned Attack on Iran: Bush Will Expand War Before Blair Resigns
    US timetable driven by retirement of Bush’s major ally, PM Tony Blair
    - by Michael Carmichael - 2007-01-16
     

    Secret "agreement of principles" between Israel and Syria
    What implications for US-Israeli war on Iran?
     
     
    Media Distortions: Preparing us for War with Iran
    The difference between "a" and "the" can be the difference between no war and nuclear war
    - by Floyd Rudmin - 2007-01-19

    Michel Chossudovsky is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by Michel Chossudovsky

    Depleted Uranium:
    The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War

    LEUREN MORET / World Affairs – The Journal of International Issues 1jul04

    [More by Leuren Moret]

    Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself.
    William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

    The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.

    LEUREN MORET

    Since 1991, the United States has staged four wars using depleted uranium weaponry, illegal under all international treaties, conventions and agreements, as well as under the US military law. The continued use of this illegal radioactive weaponry, which has already contaminated vast regions with low level radiation and will contaminate other parts of the world over time, is indeed a world affair and an international issue. The deeper purpose is revealed by comparing regions now contaminated with depleted uranium — from Egypt, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northern half of India — to the US geostrategic imperatives described in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard

    Fig. 1: Brzezinski’s map of the Eurasian Chessboard

    SOUTH REGION:  “This huge region, torn by volatile hatreds and surrounded by competing powerful neighbors, is likely to be a major battlefield, both for wars among nation-states and, more likely, for protracted ethnic and religious violence.  Whether India acts as a restraint or whether it takes advantage of some opportunity to impose its will on Pakistan will greatly affect the regional scope of the likely conflicts.  The internal strains within Turkey and Iran are likely not only to get worse but to greatly reduce the stabilizing role these states are capable of playing within this volcanic region.  Such developments will in turn make it more difficult to assimilate the new Central Asian states into the international community, while also adversely affecting the American-dominated security of the Persian Gulf region.  In any case, both America and the international community may be faced here with a challenge that will dwarf the recent crisis in the former Yugoslavia.”  Brzezinski 

     

    The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, "slipping nukes under the wire" by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.

    Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government’s own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

    After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.

    A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), reports that based on Chernobyl studies, low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 times greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:

    "The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."

     

    1943 MANHATTAN PROJECT BLUEPRINT FOR DEPLETED URANIUM

    In a declassified memo to General Leslie R. Groves, dated October 30, 1943, three of the top physicists in the Manhattan Project, Dr James B Conant, A H Compton, and H C Urey, made their recommendation, as members of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee, on the ‘Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon’:

    "As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small … There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty … it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging."

    As a Terrain Contaminant:

    "To be used in this manner, the radioactive materials would be spread on the ground either from the air or from the ground if in enemy controlled territory. In order to deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations … Areas so contaminated by radioactive material would be dangerous until the slow natural decay of the material took place … for average terrain no decontaminating methods are known. No effective protective clothing for personnel seems possible of development. … Reservoirs or wells would be contaminated or food poisoned with an effect similar to that resulting from inhalation of dust or smoke."

    Internal Exposure:

    "… Particles smaller than 1µ [micron] are more likely to be deposited in the alveoli where they will either remain indefinitely or be absorbed into the lymphatics or blood. … could get into the gastro-intestinal tract from polluted water, or food, or air. … may be absorbed from the lungs or G-I tract into the blood and so distributed throughout the body."

    Both the fission products and depleted uranium waste from the Atomic Bomb Project were to be utilised under this plan. The pyrophoric nature of depleted uranium, which causes it to begin to burn at very low temperatures from friction in the gun barrel, made it an ideal radioactive gas weapon then and now. Also it was more available because the amount of depleted uranium produced was much greater than the amount of fission products produced in 1943.

    Britain had thoughts of using poisoned gas on Iraq long before 1991:

    "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good... and it would spread a lively terror..." (Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after the First World War).

    GUIDED WEAPONS SYSTEMS

    Depleted uranium weapons were first given by the US to Israel for use under US supervision in the 1973 Sinai war against the Arabs. Since then the US has tested, manufactured, and sold depleted uranium weapons systems to 29 countries. An international taboo prevented their use until 1991, when the US broke the taboo and used them for the first time, on the battlefields of Iraq and Kuwait.

    The US military admitted using depleted uranium projectiles in tanks and planes, but warheads in missiles and bombs are classified or referred to as a ‘dense’ or ‘mystery metal’. Dai Williams, a researcher at the 2003 World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, reported finding 11 US patents for guided weapons systems with the term ‘depleted uranium’ or ‘dense metal’, which from the density can only be depleted uranium or tungsten, in order to fit the dimensions of the warhead.

     

    Figure 2 - Hard target guided weapons in 2002: smart bombs & cruise missiles with "dense metal" warheads (updated September 2002)

    Warhead weight

    Hard target guided weapons in 2001: smart bombs & cruise missiles with "dense metal" warheads

    Warhead weights include explosives (~20%) and casing. Dense metal ballast or liners (suspected to be DU) estimated to be 50-75% of warhead weight - necessary to double the density of previous versions. AUP = Advanced penetrators. S/CH = Shaped Charge. BR = BROACH Multiple Warhead System (S/CH+AUP). P = older 'heavy metal' penetrators. © Dai Williams 2002

    source: Depleted Uranium weapons in 2001-2002: Occupational, public and environmental health issues - Mystery Metal Nightmare in Afghanistan? Collected studies and public domain sources compiled by Dai Williams, first edition 31 January 2002

     

    Extensive carpet bombing, grid bombing, and the frequent use of missiles and depleted uranium bullets on buildings in densely populated areas has occurred in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. The discovery that bomb craters in Yugoslavia in 1999 were radioactive, and that an unexploded missile in 1999 contained a depleted uranium warhead, implies that the total amount of depleted uranium used since 1991 has been greatly underestimated. Of even greater concern, is that 100 per cent of the depleted uranium in bombs and missiles is aerosolized upon impact and immediately released into the atmosphere. This amount can be as much as 1.5 tons in the large bombs. In bullets and cannon shells, the amount aerosolized is 40-70 per cent, leaving pieces and unexploded shells in the environment, to provide new sources of radioactive dust and contamination of the groundwater from dissolved depleted uranium metal long after the battles are over, as reported in a 2003 report by the UN Environmental Program on Yugoslavia. Considering that the US has admitted using 34 tons of depleted uranium from bullets and cannon shells in Yugoslavia, and the fact that 35,000 NATO bombing missions occurred there in 1999, potentially the amount of depleted uranium contaminating Yugoslavia and transboundary drift into surrounding countries is staggering.

    Because of mysterious illnesses and post-war birth defects reported among Gulf War veterans and civilians in southern Iraq, and radiation related illnesses in UN Peacekeepers serving in Yugoslavia, growing concerns about radiation effects and environmental damage has stirred up international outrage about the use of radioactive weapons by the US after 1991. At the 2003 meeting of parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, discussing the U.S. desire to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile, the Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi AKIBA stated,

    "It is incumbent upon the rest of the world ... to stand up now and tell all of our military leaders that we refuse to be threatened or protected by nuclear weapons. We refuse to live in a world of continually recycled fear and hatred".

    ILLEGAL UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

    Four reasons why using depleted uranium weapons violates the UN Convention on Human Rights:

    LEGALITY TEST FOR WEAPONS UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

    TEMPORAL TEST – Weapons must not continue to act after the battle is over.

    ENVIRONMENTAL TEST – Weapons must not be unduly harmful to the environment.

    TERRITORIAL TEST – Weapons must not act off of the battlefield.

    HUMANENESS TEST – Weapons must not kill or wound inhumanly.

     

    International Human Rights and humanitarian lawyer, Karen Parker, determined that depleted uranium weaponry fails the four tests for legal weapons under international law, and that it is also illegal under the definition of a ‘poison’ weapon. Through Karen Parker’s continued efforts, a sub-commission of the UN Human Rights Commission determined in 1996 that depleted uranium is a weapon of mass destruction that should not be used:

    RESOLUTION 1996/16 ON STOPPING THE USE OF DEPLETED URANIUM - DU

    The military use of DU violates current international humanitarian law, including the principle that there is no unlimited right to choose the means and methods of warfare (Art. 22 Hague Convention VI (HCIV); Art. 35 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva (GP1); the ban on causing unnecessary suffering and superfluous injury (Art. 23 §le HCIV; Art. 35 §2 GP1), indiscriminate warfare (Art. 51 §4c and 5b GP1) as well as the use of poison or poisoned weapons.

    The deployment and use of DU violate the principles of international environmental and human rights protection. They contradict the right to life established by the Resolution 1996/16 of the UN Subcommittee on Human Rights.

     

    FOUR NUCLEAR WARS

    "Military Men Are Just Dumb, 
     Stupid, Animals To Be Used
     As Pawns In Foreign Policy"
            
    Henry Kissinger

    Although restricted to battlefields in Iraq and Kuwait, the 1991 Gulf War was one of the most toxic and environmentally devastating wars in world history. Oil well fires, the bombing of oil tankers and oil wells which released millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Arabia and desert, and the devastation from tanks and heavy equipment destroyed the desert ecosystem. The long term and far reaching effects, and dispersal of at least 340 tons of depleted uranium weapons, had a global environmental effect. Smoke from the oil fires was later found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii. Large annual dust storms originating in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia will quickly spread the radioactive contamination around the world, and weathering of old depleted uranium munitions on battlefields and other areas will provide new sources of radioactive contamination in future years. Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes.

     

    RADIATION RESPECTS NO BORDERS, NO SOCIOECONOMIC CLASS, AND NO RELIGION

    The expendability of the sanctity of life to achieve US political ends was described by US soldiers on the ground, and from the air, along the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991:

    "Iraqi soldiers [whether they] be young boys or old men. They were a sad sight, with absolutely no fight left in them. Their leaders had cut their Achilles’ tendons so they couldn’t run away and then left them. What weapons they had were in bad repair and little ammunition was on hand. They were hungry, cold, and scared. The hate I had for any Iraqi dissipated. These people had no business being on a battlefield."
    (S Hersh, New Yorker, May 22, 2000)

    American pilots bombing and strafing, with depleted uranium weapons, helpless retreating Iraqi soldiers who had already surrendered, exclaimed:

    "We toasted him…. we hit the jackpot….a turkey shoot….shooting fish in a barrel….basically just sitting ducks… There’s just nothing like it. It’s the biggest Fourth of July show you’ve ever seen, and to see those tanks just ‘boom’, and more stuff just keeps spewing out of them… they just become white hot. It’s wonderful."
    (L A Times and Washington Post, both February 27, 1991)

    Nearly 700,000 American Gulf War Veterans returned to the US from a war that lasted just a few weeks. Today more than 240,000 of those soldiers are on permanent medical disability, and over 11,000 are dead. In a US Government study on post-Gulf War babies born to 251 veterans, 67 per cent of the babies were reported to have serious illnesses or serious birth defects. They were born without eyes, ears, had missing organs, fused fingers, thyroid or other malfunctions. Depleted uranium in the semen of the soldiers internally contaminated their wives. Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time. Women in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq are afraid now to have babies, and when they do give birth, instead of asking if it is a girl or a boy, they ask ‘is it normal?’.

    KNOWN ILLNESSES INFLICTED BY INTERNALIZATION OF DEPLETED URANIUM PARTICLES

    Table 1: Compiled by Leuren Moret from Interviews with Gulf War Vets and their families

    GENERAL

    abnormal births and birth defects
    abnormal metabolism of semen: contains 
    amine & ammonium alkaline 
    acute autoimmune symptoms 
    (lung-, liver-, kidney failure) 
    acute myeloid leukemia 
    (deadly within days or weeks)
    acute immune depression 
    acute respiratory failure 
    asthma
    auto-immune deficiencies
    Balkan-syndrome 
    blood in stools and urine
    body function control loss
    bone cancer 
    brain damage
    brain tumors 
    burning semen 
    burning sensations 
    calcium loss in body
    cardiovascular signs or symptoms
    chemical sensitivities
    Chronic Fatigue Syndrome 
    chronic kidney and liver disorders 
    chronic myeloid leukemia 
    chronic respiratory infections 
    colon cancer 
    confusion
    diarrhea 
    digestive problems 
    dizziness
    Epstein Barr Syndrome
    fluid buildup
    fibromyalgia

    gastrointestinal signs/symptoms
    general fatigue 
    genetic alterations
    glandular carcinoma 
    Gulf war-syndrome 
    headaches (severe) 
    heart attack/disease 
    high blood pressure 
    high frequency of micturition 
    Hodgkin lymphoma 
    immune system deficiency 
    infections 
    insomnia 
    involuntary movements 
    joint/muscle/leg pain 
    kidney failure/damage
    leukemia 
    liver carcinoma
    loss of feeling in fingers 
    Lou Gehrigs Disease -ALS
    low blood oxygen saturation
    ( low HbO2) 
    low lung volume
    lung damage
    lung cancer 
    lymph cancer 
    lymphoma
    melanoma 
    memory loss 
    metallic taste
    Microplasma fermentans/ 
    incognitis infections
    mood swings – violence 
    homicide/suicide

    multiple cancers
    multiple myeloma 
    myeloma 
    muscle pain
    nerve damage 
    neuro-muscular degenerative 
    disease
    non-Hodgkin lymphoma 
    other malignancies 
    pancreas carcinoma 
    Parkinsons disease
    petit & grand mal fits
    rashes 
    reactive airway disease
    reduced IQ
    respiratory ailments 
    shortness of breath
    sinus diseases 
    skin cancer 
    skin damage: sweat glands 
    with trapped du-particles 
    skin infections 
    skin spotting 
    smell, loss of
    sleep disturbances
    stiffening of fingers 
    teeth crumbling
    thyroid cancer 
    thyroid disease
    unable to walk
    unusual fevers/night sweats
    unusual hair loss 
    vision problems
    weight loss

    CHILDREN

    alimentary disorders 
    asthma 
    bladder & sphincter paralysis 
    blindness 
    complete range of known and 
    unknown Congenital Defects 
    deafness 
    dyspraxia 
    headache 
    kidney disease 
    leukemia 
    lymphoma 
    malformations of legs, arms, 
    toes & fingers 
    respiratory disorders 
    stillbirth 
    neural tube defects

    FEMALE

    abdominal pain 
    breast cancer 
    breast cancer at very young 
    age (20) 
    cervix cancer 
    endometriosis
    headaches 
    incontinence 
    joint pain 
    lung cancer at age 20 and 
    non-smoker 
    menstrual problems 
    miscarriages 
    nausea 
    ovarian cancer 
    paralysis of digestive system 
    thyroid problems 
    uterine cancer

    MALE

    (acute) headache 
    acute myeloid leukemia 
    arthritis 
    avoiding people 
    breathing problems 
    (stridor) 
    chemical sensitivity 
    chronic myeloid leukemia 
    endometriosis in partners
    gastrointestinal disorder 
    hip and leg pain 
    joint pain 
    lung cancer at young age 
    lymphoma 
    skin cancer 
    skin eruptions 
    stomach pain 
    suicide 
    testicular cancer 
    unable to walk 

    VISIE: http://www.xs4all.nl/~stgvisie/VISIE/du-diagnosis.html 
    DESERT SHIELD/DESERT STORM website: http://www.ushostnet.com/gulfwar/articles.htm  04/1504

    Soldiers who served in Bradley fighting vehicles, where it was common to sit on ammunition boxes where depleted uranium ammunition was stored, are now reporting that many have rectal cancer.

    For the first time, medical doctors in Yugoslavia and Iraq have reported multiple in situ unrelated cancers developing in patients, and even in families who are living in highly contaminated areas. Even stranger, they report that cancer was unknown in previous generations. Very rare and unusual cancers and birth defects have also been reported to be increasing above normal levels prior to 1991, not only in war torn countries, but in neighbouring countries from transboundary contamination.

    Dr. Keith Baverstock, a senior radiation advisor who was on the staff of the World Health Organization, co-authored a report in November 2001, warning that the long-term health effects of depleted uranium would endanger Iraq’s civilian population, and that the dry climate would increase exposure from the tiny particles blowing around and be inhaled for years to come. The WHO refused to give him permission to publish the study, bowing to pressure from the IAEA. Dr. Baverstock released the damning report to the media in February 2004. Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of the UN Environment Program’s Post-Conflict Assessment Unit in Geneva, shares Baverstock’s anxiety about depleted uranium but UNEP experts have not been allowed into Iraq to assess the pollution. 

    "DEPLETED URANIUM SCARE" - Claimed by President George W. Bush on the official White House website:

    "During the Gulf War, coalition forces used armor-piercing ammunition made from depleted uranium, which is ideal for the purpose because of its great density. In recent years, the Iraqi regime has made substantial efforts to promote the false claim that the depleted uranium rounds fired by coalition forces have caused cancers and birth defects in Iraq. Iraq has distributed horrifying pictures of children with birth defects and linked them to depleted uranium. The campaign has two major propaganda assets:"

    "Uranium is a name that has frightening associations in the mind of the average person, which makes the lie relatively easy to sell; and Iraq could take advantage of an established international network of antinuclear activists who had already launched their own campaign against depleted uranium."

    "But scientists working for the World Health Organization, the UN Environmental Programme, and the European Union could find no health effects linked to exposure to depleted uranium."

    The US war in Afghanistan made it clear that this was not a war IN the third world, but a war AGAINST the third world. In Afghanistan where 800 to 1000 tons of depleted uranium was estimated to have been used in 2001, even uneducated Afghanis understand the impact these weapons have had on their children and on future generations:

    "After the Americans destroyed our village and killed many of us, we also lost our houses and have nothing to eat. However, we would have endured these miseries and even accepted them, if the Americans had not sentenced us all to death. When I saw my deformed grandson, I realized that my hopes of the future have vanished for good, different from the hopelessness of the Russian barbarism, even though at that time I lost my older son Shafiqullah. This time, however, I know we are part of the invisible genocide brought on us by America, a silent death from which I know we will not escape."
    (Jooma Khan of Laghman province, March 2003)

    In 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote a report warning about the potential health and environmental catastrophe from the use of depleted uranium weapons. The health effects had been known for a long time. The report sent to the UK government warned "in their estimation, if 50 tonnes of residual DU dust remained ‘in the region’ there could be half a million extra cancers by the end of the century [2000]." Estimates of depleted uranium weapons used in 1991, now range from the Pentagon’s admitted 325 tons, to other scientific bodies who put the figure as high as 900 tons. That would make the number of estimated cancers as high as 9,000,000, depending on the amount used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the 2003 Gulf War, estimates of 2200 tons have been given — causing about 22,000,000 new cancer cases. Altogether the total number of cancer patients estimated using the UKAEA data would be 25,250,000. In July of 1998, the CIA estimated the population of Iraq to be approximately 24,683,313.

    Ironically, the UN Resolution 661 calling for sanctions against Iraq, was signed on Hiroshima Day, August 6, 1990.

    THE PARALLELS

    War can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
    – Ludwig von Mises

    The parallels between Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are startlingly similar. The weapons used, the unfair treaties offered by the US, and the bombing and destruction of the environment and entire infrastructure. In every city of Iraq and Yugoslavia, the television and radio stations were bombed.

    Educational centres were targeted, and stores where educational materials were sold were destroyed on nearly the same day. Under UN sanctions, Iraq was not even allowed pencils for schoolchildren. Cultural antiquities and historical treasures were targeted and destroyed in all three countries, a kind of cultural and historical cleansing, a collective national psychic trauma.

    The permanent radioactive contamination and environmental devastation of all three countries is unprecedented, resulting in huge increases in cancer and birth defects following the attacks. These will increase over time from unknown effects due to chronic exposure, increasing internal levels of radiation from depleted uranium dust, and permanent genetic effects passed on to future generations. Clearly, this has been a genocidal plan from the start. 

    Fig. 3: Map of regions within a 1000 mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan which have been contaminated with depleted uranium since 1991. Depleted uranium dust will be repeatedly recycled throughout this dry region, and also carried around the world. More than ten times the amount of radiation, released during atmospheric testing, has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991. In 2002 the US government admitted that every person living in the US between 1957 and 1963 was internally contaminated with radiation. Note that the contaminated region corresponds with the "South" region on the Eurasian chessboard in Fig. 1.

    What has happened to Human Rights, to the Rights of the Child, to civil society, and to common humanity?

    It is up to the citizens of the world to stop the depleted uranium wars, and future nuclear wars, causing irreversible devastation. There are just a few generations left before the collapse of our environment, and then it will be too late. We can be no healthier than the health of the environment — we breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat food from the same soil.

    "Our collective gene pool of life, evolving for hundreds of millions of years has been seriously damaged in less than the past fifty. The time remaining to reverse this culture of ‘lemming death’ is on the wane. In the future, what will you tell our grandchildren about what you did in the prime of your life to turn around this death process?" (Rosalie Bertell, 1982)

    THE DEEPER PURPOSE: G*O*D* [Gold, Oil, and Drugs]

    "We must become the owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source, of at least a proportion of the oil which we require."
    (British Royal Commission, agreeing with Winston Churchill's policy towards Iraq 1913).

    "It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas."
    (US President George W. Bush, Beaverton, Oregon, Sep. 25, 2000).

    "If they turn on the radars we're going to blow up their goddamn SAMs (surface-to-air missiles). They know we own their country. We own their airspace... We dictate the way they live and talk. And that's what's great about America right now. It's a good thing, especially when there's a lot of oil out there we need."

    (US Brig. General William Looney in 1999, referring to Iraq).

    Millions of years ago, before India crashed into the Eurasian continent and uplifted the Himalayas, the ancient shallow Tethys sea stretched from the Atlantic across what is now the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian and Aral seas. Rich oil deposits are now located where ancient life accumulated and ‘cooked’ under just the right conditions to form large oil deposits in the ancient sediments. Long before 1991, Unocal in Afghanistan, Amoco in Yugoslavia, and various oil companies interested in Iraq oil deposits, had conducted extensive exploration and characterisation of oil deposits in the Middle East and Central Asian regions, including the northern half of India.

    Britain has maintained an interest in Middle Eastern oil deposits for a century, and has been the staunchest military partner of the US since the first depleted uranium war in 1991 in Iraq. Germany, another military partner in Yugoslavia with forces now in Afghanistan, was one of the major economic beneficiaries of the breakup of Yugoslavia and the colonisation of the Balkans. US interest in Yugoslavia had much to do with building pipelines from Central Asia to the Mediterranean warm water ports in Yugoslavia. A silent and hidden partnership between the US and Japan provided large amounts of cash from Japan to finance the 1991 Iraq and 1995/1999 Yugoslavian wars, with additional help in Afghanistan by providing not only cash, but fuel for the war, from Aegis warships of the Japanese Self Defense Forces in the Indian Ocean. Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi, and Halliburton are now partners in a Central Asian oil pipeline project. In 2004, despite much citizen opposition in Japan, the Japanese government has sent Self Defense Forces to Iraq for ‘reconstruction’. This action taken by the Japanese government, of placing troops on the ground in a war zone, will lead to rescinding Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, which forever prohibits military aggression by Japan.

    THE IRON TRIANGLE (all under one roof): MILITARY, BIG BUSINESS, POLITICS

    The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

    - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

    But what do oil, military partners, depleted uranium wars, and US foreign policy have to do with nuclear weapons? The answer came to me in 1991 when I became a whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San Francisco, California. Richard Berta, the Western Regional Inspector for the Department of Energy, told me "The Pentagon exists for the oil companies… and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon."

    Depleted uranium was used beginning in 1991 for three reasons:

    • To test the radiobiological effects of 4th generation nuclear weapons, which are still under development
    • To blur and break down the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons
    • To make it easier to reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal

    Today, the US is number one in 4th generation nuclear weapons research and development, followed by Japan and Germany tied for number two, and Russia and other countries follow.

    Figure 4: Depleted uranium and 4th generation nuclear weapons

    Map by Mika TSUTSUMI 12/12/03

     

    The Carlyle Group, a private massive equity firm, the 12th largest defense business with an obscenely high profit margin, is a business "arrangement" between the Bush and Bin Laden families, wealthy Saudis, former British Prime Minister John Major, James Baker III, Afsaneh Masheyekhi, Frank Carlucci, Colin Powell, other former US Government administrators, and Madeleine Albright’s daughter. The Carlyle Group is the ‘gatekeeper’ to the Saudi investment community. It owns 70 percent of Lockheed Martin Marietta, the largest military contractor in the US, and because Carlyle is privately owned, has no scrutiny or accountability whatsoever. A journalist who calls himself ‘a skunk at the garden party’ described investigating the Carlyle Group, he said ‘it’s like shadow boxing with a ghost’. The Group hires as lobbyists the best known politicians from around the world, in order to influence the politics of war, and privately profit from their previous public policies. The conflict of interest is obvious: President George W. Bush is creating wars as his father, former President George Bush, is globally peddling weapons and "protection". Lockheed Martin Marietta now owns Sandia Laboratories, a private contractor that makes the trigger for nuclear weapons, with a Sandia laboratory facility across the street from Los Alamos and Livermore National Laboratories, where the nuclear bombs are made.

    At the May 2003 University of California Regents meeting which I attended, Admiral Linton Brooks was present and newly in charge of the nuclear weapons programme under the Department of Energy. Admiral Brooks informed California Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante and the UC Regents that the management contract for the nuclear weapons laboratories, held unchallenged by the University of California for over 60 years, will be put up for competitive bid in 2005. The favoured institution, with a faculty member on the ‘blue ribbon committee’ making the contract award, is the University of Texas. This privatisation and management contract transfer of the US nuclear weapons programme will put control of the US nuclear weapons programme close to the Carlyle Group. The incestuous relationship between the US government, private companies, and the Bush and Bin Laden families in a way answers many of the lingering questions in everyone’s minds about many of the ill fated decisions and policies that have been implemented.

     

    But who is Osama bin Laden really?
    Let me rephrase that.  What is Osama bin Laden?

    He’s America’s family secret.  He is the American President’s dark doppelganger.  The savage twin of all that purports to be beautiful and civilised.  He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America’s foreign policy; its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of  "full spectrum dominance," its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts.  Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.

    Arundhati Roy
    The Algebra of Infinite Justice

     

    Leuren Moret has worked at two US nuclear weapons laboratories as a geoscientist. In 1991 she became a whistleblower at the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, and since then has worked as an independent citizen scientist and radiation specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to the UN subcommission investigating depleted uranium. Her research on the environmental and public health effects of low level radiation from atmospheric testing fallout, nuclear power plants, and depleted uranium weaponry, is available on the internet and at http://www.mindfully.org. In 2003, she testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan held in Japan, and presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and at the World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India in January 2004. She is a Contributing Editor to GLOBAL OUTLOOK, a City of Berkeley Environmental Commissioner, and the Past President of the Association for Women Geoscientists.

    More on Mindfully.org by Leuren Moret

    Websites:

    • International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan written opinion of Judge N. Bhagwat: also at http://www.traprockpeace.org/tokyo_trial_13march04.doc

    • Question 11: What does the US Government know about depleted uranium: http://traprockpeace.org/moret_25nov03.pdf 

    • World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference: http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de 

    • Radiation and Public Health Project: http://www.radiation.org 

    • "A comparison of delayed radiobiological effects of depleted-uranium munitions versus fourth-generation nuclear weapons" by A. Gsponer, J.-P. Hurni, and B. Vitale, 4th International Conference of the Yugoslav Nuclear Society, Belgrade, September 30-October 4, 2002. http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0210071

    • "Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons: The Physical Principles Of Thermonuclear Explosives, Inertial Confinement Fusion, And The Quest For Fourth Generation Nuclear Weapons" by Andre Gsponer and Jean-Pierre Hurni http://www.inesap.org/publ_tech01.htm

    • 54 minute VPRO Dutch TV "Carlyle Group" documentary on internet: http://www.vpro.nl/info/tegenlicht/index.shtml?7738514+7738518+7738520+11838857 

      • Real Player Video Documentary on the Carlyle Group, by VPRO Dutch television [500 kbps real video]

      • Real Player Video Documentary on the Carlyle Group, by VPRO Dutch television [100 kbps real video]

      • Overview of documentary - Interactive Flash Animation - with links to biographies and articles (Dutch) and specific sections of video.

      • English translation of Dutch introduction Translation of the first one minute forty seven seconds of this program.

        The war in Iraq is over.

        The rubble is still smoking While the first dozers are already entering the country.
        After the coalition forces destroyed Baghdad it is now primarily American companies who are to rebuild Iraq.

        An interesting point is that these companies usually have people on the payroll who have been politicians. Is this a conflict of interests or a new (global) way of doing business?

        One of the corporations that work this way is the Carlyle Group. On their payroll are people like : George Bush (Sr.), James Baker III and old premier John Major.

        The Carlyle Group is a private investment bank which doesn't come to the publics attention very often but it is one of the biggest American (ed: USA) investors of the defense industry, telecom, property and financial services.

        What is the Carlyle Group? Who are the people behind the name? And how much power does Carlyle have?

    • Global Outlook: http://www.globalresearch.de 

    • An interesting response. . .

      ----- Original Message -----
      From: "Leuren Moret" <leurenmoret@yahoo.com>
      To: < [US Army Col Special Ops Green Beret] >
      Sent: Wednesday, June 16, 2004 12:56 AM
      Subject: Re: Treachery And Treason

      Hi John - Here is an article coming out in July in World Affairs Journal. Can you please tell me what you think and whose decision it could have been to use DU on the Arab world? It looks to me like it was in the 1970s.

      Leuren

      -------- Response ---------

      From: < [US Army Col Special Ops Green Beret] >
      To: "Leuren Moret"  <leurenmoret@yahoo.com>  
      Subject: Re: Treachery And Treason
      Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 11:10:01 -0700

      Hi Leuren,

      Your report is very comprehensive and compelling.

      It begs the question WHO and WHY re the responsibility for the decision to create an area of deniability that covers the Arab world.

      It seems credible that the decision to isolate the Arab occupied areas of the world was and is intentional for the express purpose of controlling the flow of oil from Russia, through the mid-east countries of Afghanistan and Iraq (with eventual expansion to Syria and Iran and North Africa, and Saudi Arabia) while simultaneously destroying the current population to preclude resistance.

      Deaths in the contested area as a direct result of DU is, in my opinion, the covert means by which CONTROL over these lands will be accomplished.

      Systems must be in development to eventually provide automated CONTROL of the oil production mechanisms with minimum human exposure for maintenance. High altitude observation will CONTROL the threat of sabotage in ways perfected to secure Area 51 in Nevada.

      Whose Idea was this scenario? Henry Kissinger's fingerprints are all over this project. The Carlyle Group is in perfect position to carry out Henry's design.

      Take for example the exposure of Kissinger's genocidal action by configuring over 3000 secret B-52 strikes (using multiple aircraft) on Cambodia (1969-72) as written in the book "Side Show". B-52's would take off from Guam with assigned targets in North and South Vietnam only to receive in-flight changes of the coordinates to targets in Cambodia. Only the Command Pilot and the Navigator were aware of the changes, by design, to keep the bombing of Cambodia compartmentalized from other crew members to minimize compromising the illegal acts of war on a neutral country. This dovetails with the covert DU attack on the Arab World. It also provides the reason the US. Air Force ran out of 750 bombs during the Vietnam War. This also provides insight as to the diversion of the war on terrorism which began in Afghanistan only to be shifted, without justification, to Iraq, thereby cutting off the available resources to go after bin Laden and al Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan. It is now apparent that the United States only wanted the appearance of going after bin Laden since he is an integral part of the Carlyle Group. These are the "sources and methods" which must be kept compartmented from the clueless.

      Henry's other quote re military is; "they are mindless cattle". But, then again, the military leadership excepts it's existence as "expendable assets".

      He would have made a wonderful Nazi. Right up there with Goebbels, Eichmann, Erlichman, Haldeman, und Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

      We have definitely become the Aggressor Nation. I fear we will pay dearly for the criminal greed of those responsible.

      I will wait until your material is published before passing it on to interested parties.

      Strangely enough, the Trojan Horse inside a shield was the Green Beret emblem of the 10th Special Forces Group in Germany in the fifties and sixties....that was my first exposure to diabolical thinking and the "sources and methods" of the Agency.

      Best,
      John

      To send us your comments, questions, and suggestions click here
      The home page of this website is www.mindfully.org

     

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