Saturday, August 9, 2014

Musings: Nuclear Madness

Just this morning I was walking through the wild lands of New Mexico and thinking of this state's uranium deposits and troubled history with atomic research, nuclear storage facilities and workers disabled by their exposure to this deadly stuff. And then I checked my email and found this unexpected, and eerily timely, guest post by Kauai writer Jon Letman. Mahalo, Jon, for your research and thoughtful commentary:
From Nagasaki to Natanz: America's 70-year nuclear addiction

Today is August 9, the day the U.S. dropped the word's first plutonium bomb on Nagasaki in 1945. That bomb killed an estimated 60-80,000 people, gravely injuring untold thousands more. You might expect that August 9 and the anniversary of Hiroshima three days earlier, would move people—especially Americans—to think seriously about our atomic past and future.
But people have a lot on their mind these days—Ebola, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, government surveillance, police brutality, climate change, the economy, summer vacation, school supplies for the kids and so on. Who's got time to think about nuclear weapons? Besides, aren't those a thing of the past? Some people seem to think so.
As I learned recently, analysts who spend much of their careers closely following the manufacturer and movement of nuclear weapons, are concerned that most people—at least in the United States—really don't give much thought to nuclear weapons.
Earlier this summer, over a period of about seven weeks, I spent a fair amount of time listening to defense analysts and reading about America's multi-billion dollar efforts to modernize some of our own nuclear weapons as research for this article published at Truthout.
I heard a range of opinions from one defense policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who insisted nuclear weapons are "fundamentally a force for good" to an anti-nuclear advocate and director of the Peace and Economic Security Program with the American Friends Service Committee who said bluntly, "These are weapons that should not exist,” calling them “the most fundamental violation of basic human rights.”
One of the most insightful and measured voices in the world of nuclear weapons analysis today is Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. I spoke with him on the phone for about one hour in May, asking him very specific questions about the B61-12, America's most common and now most expensive nuclear gravity bomb.
I found Kristensen by chance when I happened upon an article he had co-authored which was posted on the Twitter feed of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The piece was about the B61-12 and how it was being redesigned for the twelfth time to make it more accurate so that with "just" 50 kilotons (kt) it could, at least in theory, be used to "hold at risk" the same targets which today require a 350 kt yield bomb (by comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was estimated to have been around 15 kt and Nagasaki was destroyed by an estimated 20 kt bomb).
As Kristensen and I discussed the B61-12 and its $10 billion (and rising) price tag, I wondered what exactly this bomb was designed to destroy. Did its producers (primarily Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin and Boeing) see B61-12 as something that could destroy a major world capital or sprawling metropolitan area? Might it some day be used to threaten a city in Bush's "axis of evil?"
"These are not [targeted] against cities," Kristensen told me. "Generally speaking the U.S. military is not very happy about targeting cities with weapons. It's just so controversial," he said.
Besides, Kristensen added, nuking a major population center is "kind of pointless." Why would you want to fry millions of civilians? The real targets of these bombs are key military and political leadership and critical infrastructure, command and control facilities or a weapons lab and such.
But Kristensen pointed out that there is always the chance that such targets could be in or close to a city or other heavily populated area. After all, aren't most leaders based in cities—Tehran, Pyongyang, Baghdad, Washington, London, Paris...? So even if the U.S. wanted to take out a Iran's Natanz Enrichment Complex for example, it would still be bombing a facility less than 20 miles from a city of 12,000 with Iran's first and third largest cities, Tehran and Isfahan (combined population 9.3 million) less than 200 miles away.
Even a low-yield nuclear bomb (Kristensen explained that "low-yield" refers to a bomb 10 kt or less) would almost certainly have grave environmental, social and psychological consequences for people downwind of any nuclear detonation.
Looking back at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can see that from the beginning of the nuclear age, the first targets were (at least by official accounts) primarily military in nature. Both Japanese cities (in fact, a third site called Kokura was intended to be bombed after Hiroshima and only spared when bad weather forced the U.S. to destroy its backup city Nagasaki) experienced unimaginable suffering as a result of the atomic bombings.
Despite this and all we've learned about the effects of radiation over the last seven decades, America and other nuclear nations continue to build newer, more accurate, more "useable" bombs. The U.S. alone is forecast to spend as much as $1 trillion on nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.
This pursuit is not only maddening, it's also sheer madness. And quibbling over a few billion dollars or a few extra kilotons is meaningless if you live in a society that is being robbed of real security (universal healthcare and education, a well-funded public infrastructure and robust environment and climate protection) when you and your children are perpetually in the shadow of a country with an insatiable appetite for the bomb.

To learn more about America's nuclear weapons past and present check out this FAQ page from the American Friends Service Committee

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

You said it best when you said we have more important things to think about. I've been to Hiroshima and the war memorial museum, I listened to an actual survivor of the Hiroshima bomb speak for 2 hours, she had no eyelids for ten years. It was terrible, and I felt terrible, and anyone I talked to about it back home said "well they deserved it for Pearl Harbor." I never really understood how someone could say that.

Anonymous said...

Thought provoking article, Joan. Thank you.
Conservative estimates of an Allied invasion of Japan would be at a cost of a million Allied lives. The A Bomb would have been dropped on Berlin if it was ready before the Third Reich fell.
I wonder how my grandfather would feel about big bombs on an enemy. He was a resident in Herr Hitler's camps, no bombs there until it was too late, but still millions died. Or Rwanda. Cambodia. USSR (Georgia and Ukraine. Massive life has been lost by tools of war from machetes, to controlling the food supply and regular old blanket bombings.
If the leaders, take their people down a bad path, the people will get the result.
If we don't have the big red nuclear button, who should?
even tho' more people are suffering and dieing today than all wars combined, because they gots no clean water. And all it takes is Chlorine to fix that. Oh wait a minute, Chlorine is a restricted use chemical, it must be bad.

Anonymous said...

i disagree. It wasn't as much for Pearl Harbor they deserved it for, but more for the massive torture and murder of thousands of innocent civilians in China, Korea and South East Asia. Not to mention the total disregard for the Geneva Convention and the killing and starving to death of thousands of unarmed prisoners of war. Japan visited upon it neighbors the worst kind of war crimes and atrocities. I have no sympathy for their populace that supported their Emperor in his quest for domination of every county in the Pacific and its unholy alliance with Nazi Germany. Those who would forget this or not mention it do an injustice themselves to the thousands and thousands of innocents the Japanese murdered all for oil and rubber. The U.S. chose to use "the bomb" to prevent the deaths of thousands more of our soldiers, our heroes, when Japan would not surrender and we were forced to invade their homeland to bring their war criminals to justice and halt their genocide. Next time, tell the whole story.

Anonymous said...

You can disagree, that's your right. The woman I talked to wasn't choosing to support her evil emperor. She was a child slave of 12 years old working to make bricks in a quarry in Hiroshima.

Anonymous said...

Civilians are wrongly punished for the misdeeds of their leaders and armies.

Anonymous said...

The situation with ALL aspects of using any form of nuclear or atomic power for any reason is shear madness! It's like going down a road that leads to a bottomless pit and the road is getting steeper and slipperier. We haven't even begun to figure out how to deal with all the waste. No closer than when man first embarked on this foolish endeavor. Pity the future generations when the consequences finally start to manifest.

Anonymous said...

Actually...I thought we were talking about "bombs", and not peaceful uses for atomic energy, and especially the technology that doe not use pressurized water for cooling. Just because the choice was made to build bombs does not mean it does not have some practical uses...one of which is using up the existing nuclear byproducts...sheeze...

Anonymous said...

Like Iraqi civilians whose country's boundaries are being redrawn and who went from living under a brutal dictator to being invaded for something that they had nothing to do with to civil war fueled in part by extremists who aren't even from there. This world.

Anonymous said...

Power, Might, Money, Control....game.

IF the Leaders who start wars were on the front lines fighting the Leaders who they despise with spears and swords......then the civilian population could watch them on TV, corporations can sell ads and still make money.

Putin vs. Obama .....one hand tied behind your back knife fight, etc.


Save the bombs and money for humanitarian relief around the world.

But then......no wars, population increases....and so do the diseases.

Zero Seven