Nuclear Technology, Radiation Exposure, and Plutonium
PLANET EARTH — 70 years ago today, the first atomic bomb
used to kill people was detonated approximately 580 meters above
the center of Hiroshima, Japan. From the
Hiroshima
Peace Museum website:
One second after detonation, the fireball was 280 meters in
diameter. The temperature at the center was over one million
degrees centigrade. The heat emitted by that fireball raised
surface temperatures near the hypocenter to 3,000 to 4,000
degrees centigrade. Five hundred meters from the hypocenter, the
blast pressure was 19 tons per square meter. The maximum wind
speed was 440 meters per second. This blast simply crushed all
wooden buildings within a radius of two
kilometers.[1]
The terrorizing capability to obliterate life on Earth with nuclear
war was conceived 70 years ago. Its potential began to manifest in
the late 1950s, and was wholly produceable by the 1960s when arsenals
of multi-megaton hydrogen bombs numbered in the thousands and ICBMs
were deployed. The means to create nuclear weapons came from the
existence of uranium. The Manhattan project was all about enriching
uranium. Since the 1960s the specter of nuclear annihilation has
been steadily amplified by technology that continues the manipulation
of uranium to generate radioactive elements especially suited to
making nuclear warheads. As Dr. Gordon Edwards has noted,
“Plutonium is the primary explosive in
most nuclear weapons. It is an artificial element, created
inside any reactor that uses uranium fuel. The first reactors
were built in the U.S. in order to produce plutonium for
bombs.”[2]
From 1995 to 2007 I had the great privilege and high honor to work
with Dr. John Gofman[3] and his editor, Egan
O’Connor, building the web presence of the
Committee for
Nuclear Responsibility (CNR). CNR was “a non-profit educational
group, organized in 1971 to provide
independent analyses of sources and health effects of xrays and other
ionizing radiations.” In a 1979 Pacifica Radio interview
Dr. Gofman recounted producing a small amount of plutonium in the fall
of 1943 for the people working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project.
I remember when J. Robert Oppenheimer came back from Los Alamos
and came to see me and said he absolutely needed a miligram of
plutonium in a hurry. At that time the total world stock was
about a tenth of a miligram—yet a year later we were going to
have grams of it—and asked if we would prepare it.
And we agreed to do it. So we bombarded a ton uranium nitrate
on the Berkeley Cyclotron night and day for two months and then
we set up a little chemical factory in Gilman Hall in the
chemistry department on the campus and we worked night and
day around the clock to separate that plutonium out of that
ton of uranium and deliver it to Dr. Oppenheimer and Dr.
Kennedy: one point two miligrams of plutonium. So it was
the world’s largest factor of increase in plutonium
production at that moment. The world’s first miligram.
I don’t know whether I'm proud of that or sad about it
now.[4]
As Maria Gilardin described in
Part
One of her May 2012 TUC Radio
Program, “Shut Down Nuclear Power Plants,
The Life and Work of Dr. John Gofman,”
In spite or because of this lab work Gofman has done more in his
lifetime to warn people of the dangers of plutonium and radiation
than most other scientists. One reason why Gofman is considered
one of the greatest scientists of the 20th Century by independent
colleagues and by the Right Livelihood Committee that gave him
the 1992 Award, is that
his work bridged two of the most consequential disciplines for the
understanding of the risks of radiation: nuclear physics and
medicine.[5]
Before the fall of 1943, the total world supply of
plutonium was less than a quarter of a milligram.
A 2011 report by the International Panel on Fissile Material
estimates “the global stockpile of separated plutonium
at 485 ± 10 metric tons, of which, roughly half was
produced for use in weapons. The other half was produced for
civilian uses. About 98% of plutonium is held by states with
nuclear weapons, and the remaining 2% is mostly held by
Japan, which has over 10 tons of
plutonium.”[6]
Among his many gifts, John Gofman had the ability to distill
the essence of a process or property of the physical, biological
world and make it understandable to people not possessing a
background in science. One of his significant contributions to
the study of the health effects of exposure to radiation was
conducting highly detailed studies and publishing his results
with all the raw data used to demonstrate how the conclusions
made were reached. In a 1994 interview he succinctly described
the fact that there is no safe threshold or dose of radiation
exposure.
[I]onizing radiation is not like a poison out of a bottle where
you can dilute it and dilute it. The lowest dose of ionizing
radiation is one nuclear track through one cell. You can’t have a
fraction of a dose of that sort. Either a track goes through the
nucleus and affects it, or it doesn’t. So I said ‘What evidence
do we have concerning one, or two or three or four or six or 10
tracks?’ And I came up with
nine studies of cancer being produced
where we’re dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell.
Four involved breast cancer. With those studies, as far as I’m
concerned, it’s not a question of ‘We don’t
know.’ The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just
ignore it, because it’s inconvenient. We can now [in 1994] say,
there
cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If
this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit
murder.
In 1971, Gofman and colleague, Arthur Tamplin published the
seminal book, Poisoned Power, The Case Against Nuclear Power
Plants. It was republished in 1979 with an extension to the
subtitle, “Before and After Three Mile Island.”
I produced a complete
hypertext representation of the 1979 edition in 1998.
Chapter 8,
“The Nuclear Legacy — Radioactive Wastes and
Plutonium,” contains a section titled,
Plutonium, The Ultimate Hazard:
The worldwide inventory of plutonium is man-made. It was
virtually non-existent in the earth's crust before the
U.S. atomic bomb program was initiated. By far the major
use of plutonium today is in the manufacture of nuclear
bombs.
Plutonium has several nuclides, the most important
being plutonium-239 (Pu-239) which is used in the
manufacture of nuclear bombs.... Its extremely
long half-life, 24,000 years, will keep Pu-239's
radioactivity undiminished much longer than the recorded
history of modern man.
The cancer producing potential of plutonium is well
known. An amount as small as one ten-millionth of an
ounce injected under the skin of mice has caused
cancer. A similar amount injected into the blood streams
of dogs has produced bone cancers. However, it is the
lung that is the most vulnerable to plutonium.
The vulnerability of the lung to plutonium exists
because plutonium exposed to air ignites spontaneously.
As it burns, it forms numerous tiny particles of plutonium
dioxide. These particles are intensely radioactive.
If inhaled, they are deposited in the deepest portions
of the lung. There they remain, immobilized for
hundreds of days, and during this time their radiation
is able to affect the cancer-sensitive cells of the lung.
The tissue around the particle is exposed to a very
intense localized dose of radiation.
Thus in just 7 decades—an infinitesimal blip in geologic
time—we humans have created astronomically vast amounts of
plutonium, an artificial element, and one of the most deadly
dangerous substances imaginable. Further, it is supremely
important to understand that a significant portion of the
generated plutonium comes from nuclear power plants. Two books
highly relevant to this situation are The Nuclear Power
Deception and Nuclear Wastelands.[7]
I first began to learn of all this in the 1970s and was overwhelmed
by it. I didn’t know what to do to respond to the knowledge
of the absolute power of nuclear weapons to destroy humanity and all
life on earth.
In addition, and inextricably related to the weapons themselves, was
and is the ever increasing burden to the biosphere of man-made
radioactive matter being generated in nuclear reactors. Regarding
all this man-made radioactivity, Dr. Edwards has observed, “It
is a big, big problem. In fact it’s an unprecedented problem.
One of the greatest—I believe—one of the greatest
unsolved problems that the human race is
facing.”[8]
It is the time span of these long-lived radioactive elements that
is so difficult to comprehend, especially plutonium which will
remain absolutely lethal to all biological life forms for what
will be, in effect, eternity.[9]
Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction Symposium
Beginning on February 28 of this year Helen Caldicott convened an
extraordinarily vital Symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine
in New York City on The
Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction
(DPNE).
It reawakened an urge to once more look deeply at the threat posed
by the consequences of playing with the poisoned fire.
In May work began on crafting a collection of files to highlight
and emphasize the significance of this Conference. The shortcut link
to it is: <ratical.org/ne>.
Here you will find
background
on the Symposium,
complete
transcripts with inlined slides of 8 speakers (soon to be 9),
mp3s
of all speakers plus the Q&As,
additional
educational materials, and
means to
engage with people working to
abolish nuclear weapons.
Dr. Caldicott set up the Symposium after reading an article
in the Atlantic Monthly that itself was based on a short
article in the 19 April 2014 Huffington Post, written by
Stephen Hawking (Director of Research at the
Centre
for Theoretical Physics at Cambridge), Stuart Russell
(Berkeley computer science professor), Max Tegmark, and
Frank Wilczek (both physics professors at M.I.T.) titled,
“Transcending
Complacency on Superintelligent Machines.” I learned
of this background from Maria Gilardin’s
first
installment of an eight-part mini-series on the Symposium
produced in her exemplary Time
of Useful Consciousness Radio program. The following is an
excerpt of what the four authors wrote:
Artificial intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly.
Recent landmarks ... as self-driving cars, a computer winning at
Jeopardy!, and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now
and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fueled by
unprecedented investments ...
The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilization has
to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict
what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the
tools AI may provide ... Success in creating AI would be the
biggest event in human history.
Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to
avoid the risks. In the near term, for example, world militaries
are considering autonomous weapon systems that can choose and
eliminate their own targets; the
UN and
Human
Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons....
Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what
can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles
from being organized in ways that perform even more advanced
computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains....
One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets,
out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders,
and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the
short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term
impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.
So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks,
the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the
best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilization sent
us a text message saying, “We’ll arrive in a few
decades,” would we just reply, “OK, call us when you
get here—we’ll leave the lights on”? Probably
not—but this is more or less what is happening with AI.
Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing ever
to happen to humanity, little serious research is devoted to
these issues outside small non-profit institutes ... All of
us—not only scientists, industrialists and
generals—should ask ourselves what can we do now to improve
the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks
[of artificial intelligence].
Steven Starr[10] was one of the speakers at
the Symposium. In 2013 with his help I made a hypertext transcript
of the presentation he gave that March at the Helen Caldicott Foundation
Fukushima
Symposium
[webcast archive is
here]
on “The
Implications of The Massive Contamination of Japan With
Radioactive Cesium.” In that talk he presents an
examination in very clear terms of the what we are
dealing with. While he focused on cesium-137, plutonium
is also something new to us as a species.
Long-lived radionuclides, such as cesium-137, are something new to
us as a species. They did not exist on Earth, in any appreciable
quantities, during the entire evolution of complex life. Although
they are invisible to our senses, they are millions of times more
poisonous than most of the common poisons we are familiar with. They
cause cancer, leukemia, genetic mutations, birth defects,
malformations and abortions at concentrations almost below human
recognition and comprehension. They are lethal at the
atomic or molecular level.
They emit radiation, invisible forms of matter and energy that we
might compare to fire, because radiation burns and destroys human
tissue. But unlike the fire of fossil fuels, the nuclear fire that
issues forth from radioactive elements cannot be extinguished. It
is not a fire that can be scattered or suffocated, because it burns
at the atomic level – it comes from the disintegration of
single atoms.
At the DPNE
Symposium he spoke on
“Nuclear
War: An Unrecognized Mass Extinction Event Waiting To Happen.”
In it Mr. Starr presents a lucid, compelling assessment of the
overriding necessity to educate recent generations growing up
since the 1980s who essentially have no knowledge or understanding
of the effects or consequences of nuclear war. Excerpting the
beginning of his talk:
In 1945, Albert Einstein said, “The release of atomic power
has changed everything except our way of thinking.” In
2015, seventy years later, we are still stockpiling nuclear
weapons in preparation for nuclear war. Our continued
willingness to allow huge nuclear arsenals to exist clearly shows
that we have not fundamentally grasped the most important truth
of the nuclear age: that a nuclear war is not likely to be
survived by the human species.
Remarkably, the leaders of the Nuclear Weapon States have chosen
to ignore the authoritative, long-standing scientific research
done by the climatologists, research that predicts virtually
any nuclear war, fought with even a fraction of the operational
and deployed nuclear arsenals, will leave the Earth essentially
uninhabitable.
It is not clear that these leaders are even aware of the
findings of this research, since they have consistently refused
to meet with the scientists who did the studies.
A universal ignorance of basic nuclear facts ultimately creates a
very dangerous situation, because leaders who are unaware that
nuclear war can end human history are likely to lack the gut fear
of nuclear war that’s needed to prevent them from leading
us into a nuclear holocaust.
Without this basic knowledge, it is almost impossible for anyone
to understand the immense dangers posed by nuclear war. Thus I am
now going to take some time to explain these facts, to try to
insure my message today is clear.
|
Two days ago my wife Nina and I were blessed with a visit from my niece
on her way from Vermont back to California. In her twenties,
and filled with an abundant searching curiosity and energy, she was
returning from working at a summer camp for teenagers and related
how in conversations they expressed their underlying fear of the
world ending as a result of myriad human activities. Of the
plethora of issues demanding resolution through the exercise of our
intelligence with clarity and coherence, it has always seemed
the most fundamental challenge—far exceeding every other
item on the list—is the threat of nuclear
annihilation.[11]
A New Movement to Ban Nuclear Weapons
As terrifying and paralyzing as the prospect of this reality is,
energy wells up from within to seek paths to address this seemingly
impossible-to-solve puzzle. My interest to look at this is
fundamentally inspired by Helen Caldicott’s example and
commitment.[12]
One of the 8 (soon to be 9) transcripts is of Tim Wright who spoke about
“A
New Movement to Ban Nuclear Weapons.”
Tim is the Director (Asia Pacific)
of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(ICAN).[13]
The ICAN was launched in Vienna on 30 April 2007. This
timeline
conveys a sense of its momentum. Tim spoke in a grounded,
engaged, clear, voice. The awareness he expressed was
palpable. At the start he acknowledged how reading Helen
Caldicott’s autobiography informed his own work:
Like most of you here today I come from a country that has
experienced and continues to endure the devastating consequences
of nuclear weapons. The cancer deaths, birth defects, cultures
destroyed, food sources poisoned, Indigenous communities forever
displaced from their sacred lands.
I learned of all this in the late 1990s when I read Helen
Caldicott’s autobiography,
A
Desperate Passion. I learned
of the misery that the British and Australian governments had
knowingly and with little care or concern unleashed on our
people, particularly our Indigenous People whom they saw as
expendable, powerless, less than human.
The
atmospheric
nuclear tests in Australia, and the hundreds of
plutonium experiments that accompanied them,
dispersed
radiation across much of our vast continent. No one has
ever apologized for this and the suffering continues. This
is my motivation for speaking out against nuclear weapons.
|
Dr. Caldicott is the living embodiment of a supremely vital,
conscious member of our human family, calling us on to face
squarely what we have brought into existence and what we must, if
we are successful, abolish if we are to not fulfill what she
shared in an e-mail last January. I asked about an exchange she
had years ago with Carl
Sagan to which she wrote, “I asked Carl if he thought
that there was any other life in the universe and he said after
a pause: No because if any other species had reached our stage
of evolution they would have destroyed themselves.”
As naive or foolish as it may sound, we cannot accept that this is
the only possible outcome of the human project here on Earth. I
understand that as a white man I have been given extraordinary
privileges and opportunities that the majority of my fellow human
beings alive today do not enjoy. With this understanding, I
endeavor to live out the maxim, those to whom much is given, much
is expected in return.
Tim described a promising recent shift in the way nuclear weapons
are being thought about and related to by the overwhelming
majority of the family of nations that do not
possess, nor house, these annihilation machines.
Over the past few years, we have seen the start of a fundamental
shift in the way that governments talk about nuclear
weapons—not the governments of nuclear-armed nations or
their nuclear-weapon-loving allies, who remain firmly stuck in
cold war thinking, but the rest: the other hundred or more
members of the family of nations, constituting the overwhelming
majority.
Possessing the bomb, it is worth remembering, is not normal.
Almost every nation in the world has made a legal undertaking
never to acquire nuclear weapons. But for many years, these
nations have taken a back seat in disarmament debates, waiting
patiently, idly, hoping that the promise of Prague, and every
other promise, would be realized. But no longer. The so-called
humanitarian initiative on nuclear weapons has emerged because of
mounting frustration at the failure of nuclear-armed nations to
fulfill their decades-old disarmament commitments under
the NPT.
It has emerged out of recognition that simply bemoaning their
inaction, no matter how loudly, is not an effective strategy for
achieving abolition. Indeed, why would we expect the
nuclear-armed states to lead us to a nuclear-weapon-free world?
Why would they willingly, happily give up weapons that they hold
so dear, that they perceive as the ultimate guarantor of their
security, that they believe give them prestige and status in
international affairs?
Meeting as we are at the
Academy of Medicine, it is perhaps
appropriate to draw an analogy with the banning of smoking in
public places, and I do apologize to the smokers here because
it’s not a very nice comparison. We would never expect the
smoking community to initiate and lead efforts to impose such a
ban. In fact, we would expect them stridently to resist it. The
non-smoking community (the majority)—who wish to live and
work in a healthy environment—must be the driving force.
That should be obvious. Similarly, it is the non-nuclear-weapon
states on whom we must depend to drive a process to ban nuclear
weapons, to stigmatize them, to make them socially and
politically unacceptable, to make it harder for nations to get
away with possessing and upgrading them, and to help the
nuclear-weapon states overcome this awful, debilitating
addiction.
This flips the traditional arms-control approach on its head. The
humanitarian initiative is about empowering and mobilizing the
rest of the world to say “enough.” It is about
shifting the debate from “acceptable,”
“safe” numbers of nuclear warheads to their
fundamental inhumanity and incompatibility with basic standards
of civilized behaviour. It is about taking away from the
nuclear-armed states the power to dictate the terms of the debate
and to set the agenda—and refusing to perpetuate their
exceptionalism.
|
In researching sources to link to for Tim’s talk, I looked up
what I could find about what he referred to as “weasel
states.”
The Non-Proliferation Treaty falsely divides the world into
nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states. In reality,
there is a significant group in the middle: 30 or so nations that
claim the protection of U.S. nuclear weapons. They reinforce the
idea of nuclear weapons as legitimate, useful, and necessary
instruments. The humanitarian initiative has shone a spotlight on these
enabler
states, known less affectionately as
“ weasel
states,” and they are scampering. They are not used to this
level of scrutiny. They have always claimed to be committed to
disarmament. But are clearly part of the problem—and that
we can change.
|
In doing so, I found my way to
Wildfire and Richard Lennane. I
wrote a summary paragraph about this project in the
What
To Do section of the
DPNE
collection:
This group is exercising refreshing human intelligence with clarity.
The analysis presented is cogent and well-informed as well as highly
effective at exposing government hypocrisy.
Richard Lennane, listed as Wildfire’s “Chief Inflammatory
Officer,” is based in Geneva, Switzerland and also serves as
“Head,
Implementation Support Unit, Biological Weapons
Convention,” United Nations Institute for Disarmament
Affairs (UNODA). Two highly incisive youtube films are
Wildfire
statement at HINW14 Vienna (4:56, Dec 2014) and
The Wildfire
approach to nuclear disarmament (3:19, 22 Jun 2015). Read a
penetrating 2-page summary concerning the What, Why, How, Where, Who, &
When of “A
treaty banning nuclear weapons”.
Help Close the Book Now On Man-Made Nuclear Extinction
I wrote Richard asking for his ideas about a Petition my friend
and colleague rebecca lord and I have been working on. The
Petition is inspired by Steven Starr’s talk,
“Nuclear
War: An Unrecognized Mass Extinction Event Waiting To Happen,”
and after asking him for help, Steven sent the text and
references we are using for it. Richard wrote back with
very helpful ideas, thoughts, and suggestions. We have
incorporated some of what he shared in the current form of the
present petition. A copy of it is listed in the
What To Do
section and the active Petition itself is
on
change.org.
The current Petition’s title is:
Demand the President of the United States publicly acknowledges
and addresses
the threat the US nuclear arsenal poses to the continued
existence of Life on Earth.
Its essential thrust is to serve as an educational tool for all people
to apprehend what has not been acknowledged, talked about, nor acted
upon since the 1980s when both Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
publicly stated that nuclear weapons could never be used.
Two
slides from the talk give by Alan
Robock[14] on
“Nuclear
Famine and Nuclear Winter: Climatic Effects of
Nuclear War, Catastrophic Threats to the Global Food
Supply,” summarize what they said. First was from a
1985
Reagan interview while he was President:
and second was
a
2000 interview with State of the World Forum Co-Chair Mikhail Gorbachev:
Please do sign
the
Petition; talk it up with your family and friends,
as well as (of course) give it play on whatever social networking conduits
you’re hooked up to. Previously I was not inclined to make a
facebook or twitter page for ratical.org. This will be amended in the
near term to give additional visibility and play to
the
DPNE
collection and its educational purpose: to assist in putting the threat
of nuclear annihilation back on the front burner so we can finally,
collectively, as the single, precious, fragile, extraordinarily gifted
human family that we are, come together and abolish these weapons that
another speaker, physicist and cosmologist, Max
Tegmark,[15] so pointedly
described in his talk,
“Artificial
Intelligence and the Risk of Accidental Nuclear War: A Cosmic
Perspective”:
Here we are on this planet, and we humans have decided to build
this device. It’s called the Spectacular Thermonuclear
Unpredictable Population Incineration Device. I’m a little
bit inspired by Dr. Seuss here, I have to confess. This is a long
mouthful so let’s just abbreviate it: S-T-U-P-I-D.
It’s a very complicated device—it’s a bit like
a Rube Goldberg machine inside. A very elaborate system.
Nobody—there’s not a single person on the planet who
actually understands how 100 percent of it works.
It was so complicated to build that it really took the talent and
resources from more than one country, they worked really hard on
it, for many, many years. And not just on the technical
side—to invent the technology to be able to create what
this device does. Namely, massive explosions around the planet.
But also to overcome a lot of human inhibitions towards doing
just this. So this system actually involves also a lot of very
clever social engineering where you put people in special
uniforms and have a lot of peer pressure and you use all the
latest social coercion technology to make people do things they
otherwise normally wouldn’t do.
And so a lot of clever thought has gone into building STUPID.
It’s kind of remarkable that we went ahead and put so much
effort into building it since actually, really, there’s
almost nobody on this spinning ball in space who really wants it
to ever get used.
|
Educating ourselves and others serves Life’s needs here on
Earth and gives significance and purpose to our days. It enables
us to use our intelligence to act with clarity and coherence. A treaty
banning nuclear weapons is a global humanitarian imperative of the
highest order. It is achievable and increasingly urgent. The
DPNE’s
What To Do
section contains significant means to further the work of implementing
a treaty banning nuclear weapons as well as to increase
consciousness of the overriding necessity to do so.
Once nuclear
weapons are banned, there will still be the challenge of solving
the problem of nuclear waste that continues to grow as long
as nuclear reactors operate and that will be the most lasting and
significant legacy our epoch leaves to the future. However
dealing with the threat of extinction from nuclear weapons will buy
more time to actually address the nuclear waste
problem.[16]
Going through old bookmarks, I just re-visited the site
of Chris Jordan photographic
arts. Quoting from the Contact page,
“Chris
Jordan’s work explores the collective shadow of
contemporary mass culture from a variety of photographic and
conceptual perspectives. Edge-walking the lines between beauty
and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far,
the visible and the invisible, Jordan’s images confront the
enormous power of humanity’s collective will. His works are
exhibited and published worldwide.” Re-exploring the site,
where there are many extremely provocative and profound
visual representations of our mass culture reality, I was especially
struck by E
Pluribus Unum as an indicator—as of 5 years ago—of
how many people on Earth are engaged in engendering a world of
inclusion where everyone and everything belongs. You must visit
the page itself to apprehend the magnitude of what is being
represented by zooming out from within this visualization.
|
E
Pluribus Unum, 2010 24x24 feet, laser etched onto aluminum panels
Depicts the names of one million organizations around the world
that are devoted to peace, environmental stewardship, social
justice, and the preservation of diverse and indigenous culture.
The actual number of such organizations is unknown, but estimates
range between one and two million, and growing.
|
To be sure, there are a wealth of disturbing facts visualized
by Jordan. Still, as with all eternal opposites, forever
joined like two sides of a coin, there is also the life-affirming
expression of the “enormous
power of humanity’s collective will” to understand and
be informed by. This power is what we must
ALL engage,
direct, and focus, to close the book on the possibility of extinction
by nuclear weapons, for the sake of the children, all we share Earth with,
and all that is yet to be born and live out lives here long, long,
long after we are gone.
|
References
§
-
From
August
6, 1945; Hiroshima in ruins, Main Building, Image 01,
The Hiroshima Peace Museum.
§
-
Quote from, Plutonium,
The Bomb, “Nuclear
Technology ~ A Primer,” by Dr. Gordon Edwards, president of
the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear
Responsibility (CCNR). The CCNR website provides an invaluable
resource “dedicated to education and research on all issues related
to nuclear energy, whether civilian or military—including
non-nuclear alternatives—especially those pertaining to
Canada.”
§
-
Summary of the life work of
Dr. John Gofman:
-
Ph.D. in
nuclear/physical chemistry (UC Berkeley, 1943) and M.D. (UCSF, 1946);
-
Group Co-Leader of the Plutonium Project (for the Manhattan Project)
at the University of California, Berkeley, 1941-1943:
- co-discovered protactinium-232, uranium-232, protactinium-233,
and uranium-233;
-
with Robert E. Connick and Arthur C. Wahl shares patent #2,671,251 on
he sodium uranyl acetate process for the separation of plutonium in
irradiated fuel from uranium and fission products;
-
with Robert E.
Connick and George C. Pimentel shares patent #2,912,302 on the
columbium oxide process for the separation of plutonium in irradiated
fuel from uranium and fission products;
-
and with Glenn Seaborg and
Raymond Stoughton shares patent #3,123,535 on the slow and fast
neutron fissionability of uranium-233, with its application to
production of nuclear power or nuclear weapons;
-
received several medical awards for pioneering
work on the chemistry of lipoproteins and their relationship with
heart disease;
-
Modern Medicine Award, 1954;
-
American Heart
Association’s Lyman Duff Lectureship Award, 1965;
-
Stouffer Prize
(shared) for outstanding contributions to research in arteriosclerosis,
1972;
-
American College of Cardiology, 1974, selected as one of
twenty-five leading researchers in cardiology of the past
quarter-century;
-
Founder and first Director, Biomedical
Research Division of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory;
-
Chairman, Committee for Nuclear
Responsibility;
-
Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology,
UC Berkeley;
-
Right Livelihood
Award, 1992, ‘for his pioneering work in exposing the health
effects of low-level radiation’;
-
author of more than one
hundred scientific papers in peer-review journals in the fields of
nuclear / physical chemistry, coronary heart disease, ultracentrifugal
analysis of the serum lipoproteins, the relationship of human
chromosomes to cancer, and the biological effects of radiation, with
especial reference to causation of cancer and hereditary injury;
as well as fourteen books:
-
Dietary
Prevention and Treatment of Heart Disease with Alex V Nichols &
E Virginia Dobbin (1958)
-
What We Do Know About Heart Attacks (1958)
-
Coronary
Heart Disease (1959)
-
A
Specific Common Chromosomal Pathway for the Origin
of Human Malignancy with Jason L Minkler; Robert K Tandy;
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. Bio-medical Division (1967)
-
Population
Control Through Nuclear Pollution,
by Arthur R Tamplin & John Gofman, (1970)
-
Poisoned Power, The Case
Against Nuclear Power Plants Before and After Three Mile Island,
with Arthur R. Tamplin, Ph.D (1971, updated in 1979)
-
Irrevy:
An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear Power: A Collection of Talks,
from Blunderland to Seabrook IV (1979)
-
Some Medical Causes And Consequences Of Nuclear War: How
Physicians Might Help To Prevent Nuclear War (1980 or 1981)
-
Radiation
And Human Health (1981)
-
X-Rays:
Health Effects of Common Exams with Egan O’Connor (1985)
-
Radiation-Induced
Cancer From Low-Dose Exposure: A Independent Analysis (1990)
-
Chernobyl
Accident: Radiation Consequences for This and Future
Generations (in Russian, 1994)
-
Preventing Breast Cancer:
The Story Of A Major, Proven, Preventable Cause Of This Disease (1996),
-
Radiation from Medical Procedures
in the Pathogenesis of Cancer and Ischemic Heart Disease: Dose-Response
Studies with Physicians per 100,000 Population (1999)
-
Helpful overviews include:
-
What Is Humanity’s Most
Harmful Law? The Law of Concentrated Benefit over Diffuse Injury,
with Egan O’Connor, CNR, November 1993
-
Gofman on the health effects of
radiation: ‘There is no safe threshold’,” synapse,
January 1994
-
What Is Factually Wrong with
This Belief: “Harm from Low-Dose Radiation Is Just Hypothetical
— Not Proven”, CNR, Fall 1995
-
Answers to
Frequently-Asked-Questions about “Radiation”,
with Egan O’Connor, CNR, Fall 1996
-
A Wake-Up Call for Everyone
Who Dislikes Cancer and Inherited Afflictions, with Egan O’Connor,
CNR, Spring 1997
§
-
See Also: From
Research to Laboratory Production of Plutonium, from
Human Radiation Studies: Remembering The Early Years,
Oral
History of Dr. John W. Gofman, M.D., Ph.D.,
Conducted December 20, 1994, United States Department of Energy,
Office of Human Radiation Experiments, June 1995.
§
-
For the past 20 years Maria Gilardin has produced a weekly
program, freely available as 29-minute broadcast quality
podcasts on the web, called
Time of Useful Consciousness Radio.
Time of Useful Consciousness is an aeronautical term. The time
between the onset of oxygen deficiency and the loss of consciousness,
the brief moments in which a pilot may save the plane. Her
productions are exemplary in the realm of broadcast journalism. I
have learned so much from and am forever indebted to Maria for her
unparalleled skills in summarizing and distilling the essence of the
most significant challenges we are confronted by in our epoch
that must be constructively addressed and resolved.
§
-
“Global Fissile Stockpile Estimates,” section of
Fissile
Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) at a Glance,
Arms Control Association, August 2013. The source of
the figures themselves are drawn from the
International Panel
on Fissile Material’s (IPFM) 2011
Global
Fissile Material Report.
In addition, while writing this paper, I received further assistance
from Steven Starr (a speaker at the Symposium)
concerning plutonium:
Uranium was the key to generate plutonium although it is possible
to make fissionable U233 from thorium in a nuclear reactor. However,
they chose plutonium because it is so much cheaper to mass produce,
and that is why 99% or more of modern nuclear weapons have plutonium
“pits” as their primaries, and why the US and Russia
have many tens of thousands of plutonium pits in storage (they kept
them after the nuclear weapons were dismantled).
Note that when they talk about plutonium, quite a bit of it (I
think at least half) is still in the spent fuel, still
unseparated from the spent fuel rods, most of which are sitting
in spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants. Japan has separated
10 tons of it, which will allow it to quickly become a nuclear
weapon state. I think it is a “virtual nuclear weapon
state” now, having produced all the components so that they
can be easily and quickly assembled into nuclear weapons. I also
think the purpose of the recent
Japanese State
Secrets Act was to
prevent disclosure of this information, as much as it was to
limit discussion and disclosure of what is going on at Fukushima.
See Also:
“United
States Circumvented Laws To Help Japan Accumulate Tons
of Plutonium,” by Joseph Trento, DC Bureau,
9 April 2012.
§
-
The two books are:
-
The
Nuclear Power Deception, U.S. Mythology from
Electricity “Too Cheap To Meter” to
“Inherently Safe” Reactors, by Arjun
Makhijani and Scott Saleska, (Apex Press: (1999), 266 pages,
paperback.
~ Borrow a copy from a Library near you ~
This book provides critical analysis and historical evidence to
refute claims that nuclear power can alleviate the build-up of
greenhouse gases and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil. It
also reveals the hazards of further proliferation of nuclear
weapons from the growing quantities of plutonium generated by
existing nuclear power plants throughout the world. Essential
background reading for students, teachers, peace and
environmental activists, and others concerned about nuclear power.
The authors base their analysis on a sound grasp of the technology
and a sophisticated understanding of the subterranean military,
economical, political, and technical issues that lead to the failure
of the first nuclear power era. Makhijani and Saleska successfully
demystify the technology with lucid and accurate explanations.
A wealth of Selections from the Book are available in PDF form:
-
Nuclear
Wastelands, A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons
Production and Its Health and Environmental Effects,
editors Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu, and Katherine Yih,
MIT Press, (2000) 669 pages, paperback edition
includes afterword, briefly updating 1995 hardcover edition.
(A joint project of the
International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War and the
Institute for Energy
and Environmental Research.)
~ Borrow a copy from a Library near you ~
A handbook for scholars, students, policy makers, journalists,
and peace and environmental activists, providing concise
histories of the development of nuclear weapons programs
of every declared and de-facto nuclear weapons power. The
thorough documentation and analysis of Nuclear Wastelands
brings to light governmental secrecy and outright deception
that have camouflaged the damage done to the very people and
lands the weapons were meant to safeguard.
An astonishing ... collection of research on nuclear
weapons.... This voluminous book is a kind of Baedeker of the
Bomb. It meticulously gathers together every piece of public
information about the nuclear cycle, some of it leaked, some of
it dragged out thanks to court cases, some published in
specialist commissions but little noticed at the time. No future
research into nuclear weapons will be credible unless it refers
to this study.
—Jonathan Steel, The Guardian (UK), 9 August 1995
§
-
Quote is at 13:42-13:53 from the film,
Gordon Edwards on
High-Level Nuclear Waste in Schreiber, Ontario February 11, 2015. This
presentation provides an historical overview of how the problem
of nuclear waste came to be acknowledged and slowly grappled
with. Near its beginning are some very helpful educational
explanations about radioactivity. On an Apple computer, press
Control-LEFTMOUSE on the local file link here –
<GordonEdwards021115.mp3>
– to download the mp3 to your machine.
§
-
Regarding the time span of long-lived radioactive elements,
Dr. Gordon Edwards (Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility)
published, “Nuclear
Waste: Abandonment versus Rolling Stewardship,” 12 June 2015,
in which the comparison is made,
The pyramids of Egypt are 5,000 years old. The Great Lakes did
not exist 15,000 years ago. But the half-life of plutonium-239
is 24,000 years, and plutonium-239 gradually changes into
uranium-235—which has a half-life of 700 million years.
Michael Madsen directed and narrated the 2009 documentary film,
Into Eternity, A
Film for the Future. In a
2011
interview with Helen Caldicott, Madsen
describes
the paradox of how to act responsibly with regard to taking care
of lethal nuclear garbage generated in nuclear reactors:
As I always say about this
film, nuclear energy stands on the
shoulders of almost all the scientific
knowledge that we have about the
universe. It is really the powers of
the universe that we are harvesting.
So
much knowledge is fused together in
this technology. In that sense it's the
hallmark of human civilization. But
the flip side is the waste which has
this time span built in to it which
I believe is beyond what we can really
understand.
So
on the one hand it's based on deep
understanding in a scientific respect.
But it also has this very, very
difficult time span for us even to
relate to.
Then
if we cannot relate to it – if we cannot
understand it or grasp it – it's suddenly
impossible to act responsibly.
§
-
Steven Starr, MT (ASCP), graduated from the School of Health
Professions at the University of Missouri, Columbia in 1985. He
subsequently worked as a Medical Technologist over a period of 27
years at a number of hospitals in Columbia, Missouri, including
Columbia Regional Hospital, Boone Hospital Center, and Ellis
Fischel Cancer Center, as well as at Saint Mary’s Health
Center, in Jefferson City, Missouri. Mr. Starr is currently the
Director
of the Clinical
Laboratory Science Program at the
University of Missouri.
Steven is an
Associate
member of the
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
and
has
been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
His writings appear on the websites of
PSR,
the
Nuclear
Age Peace Foundation, the
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies,
Scientists
for Global Responsibility, and the
International
Network of Scientists Against Proliferation.
From 2007 through 2011, he worked with the governments
of Switzerland, Chile, and New Zealand, in support of
their efforts at the United Nations to eliminate
thousands of high-alert, launch-ready nuclear weapons.
Mr. Starr is also an expert on the environmental consequences of
nuclear war, and in 2011, he made an address to the U.N. First
Committee describing the dangers that nuclear weapons and nuclear
war poses to all nations and peoples. He has made presentations
to Ministry Officials, Parliamentarians, Universities, citizens
and students from around the world, and specializes in making
technical scientific information understandable to all audiences.
Note of
Appreciation:
I am especially grateful to Steven Starr for the time and assistance
he has generously provided helping me accurately describe key
elements in the first section of this essay as
well as the wording
for the
Petition. Beyond this, his
DPNE
presentation on
An
Unrecognized Mass Extinction Event Waiting To Happen was for me, the
most significant talk in its critical elucidation of the necessity of
educating younger people to address the “universal ignorance of
basic nuclear facts” that has been perpetuated since the end of
the 1980s.
|
§
-
An inspiring collection to explore of people on the earlier side of
life is 30 under 30 —
Highlighting the next generation of leaders in humanitarian
disarmament.
§
-
Helen Caldicott’s devotion to serving Life’s needs is
life-long and constant. Inspiring to the extreme, she is an
exemplar of uncommon tenacity and perseverance, devoting herself
over the last forty-four years to an international campaign to
educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age
and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop
environmental destruction. A detailed summary of Dr.
Caldicott’s journey is provided in the
About section
of helencaldicott.com.
In addition, her complete
curriculum vitae is an invaluable reference for informing
oneself about what one single person can do to make a positive,
life-affirming difference in the world.
§
-
Tim Wright helped set up ICAN beginning in 2006 and ever since
then, he has been instrumental in expanding the movement’s
influence. More about Tim:
-
Tim Wright on twitter
and facebook
-
Introducing
Tim Wright, ICAN’s Own Radical Dreamer!, by Emily Watson,
Politics Personified, 14 May 2015
-
Interview
with Tim Wright from the International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear weapons, by Tony Robertson, Pressenza, International
Press Agency, 3 March 2015
-
youtube: ICAN
statement on UN International Day for the Total
Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, Tim Wright, Asia Pacific
Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(ICAN), delivers a statement at the UN in New York on 26 September
2014 to mark the first-ever International Day for the Total
Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. Footage courtesy of UN Webcast.
“Given the dire state of play, one might be inclined to
despair. But to despair is a recipe for further inaction, and
inaction a recipe for catastrophe of unprecedented proportions.
Instead we must chart a new course. Rather than waiting in
vain for leadership by the nuclear armed states, the rest of
the world must embark now on negotiations to prohibit nuclear
weapons categorically.” (1:49-2:16)
§
-
Dr. Alan Robock
is a Distinguished Professor of Climate Science in the Department
of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University.
Professor
Robock has published more
350 articles on his research in the area of climate change,
including more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. His areas of
expertise include geo-engineering, climatic effects of
nuclear war, effects of volcanic eruptions on climate,
regional atmosphere-hydrology modeling, and soil moisture
variations. He serves as editor of
Reviews of Geophysics,
the most highly cited journal in the U.S. sciences. His
honors include being a Fellow of the
American Geophysical
Union, the American
Meteorological Society, and the
American Association of
the Advancement of Science, and
recipient of the AMS Jule Charney Award. Professor Robock
is a lead author of the 2013 Working Group 1 for the
Fifth
Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change which was awarded the Nobel Peace in
2007.
In a 2010 interview in the
Newsletter of the Atmospheric
Sciences Section of the AGU, Professor Robock was asked,
“What would you consider the most two significant achievements
in your career?” He described the first achievement as the
following:
The most significant achievement is my work on nuclear winter. In
the 1980s, by running climate model simulations, doing studies of
the impacts of forest fire smoke on surface temperature, and by
writing about policy implications, I am proud to have been part
of the team that warned the world of the danger of the use of
nuclear weapons. Nuclear winter theory led to a vigorous
discussion of the direct effects of the use of nuclear weapons
and a realization that the nuclear arms race was crazy and
dangerous, and that the use of nuclear weapons would be suicide.
This led directly to the end of the nuclear arms race, several
years before the end of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev, then
leader of the Soviet Union, described in
an
interview in 1994 how
he felt when he got control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal,
"Perhaps there was an emotional side to it.... But it was
rectified by my knowledge of the might that had been accumulated.
One-thousandth of this might was enough to destroy all living
things on earth. And I knew the report on ‘nuclear
winter.’" And in 2000 he said, "Models made by Russian and
American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a
nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on
Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to
people of honor and morality, to act in that situation."
[Robock, A., and O. B. Toon (2010),
Local
Nuclear War, Global Suffering. Scientific American, 302, 74-81.]
I am now working with Brian Toon and other colleagues to warn the
world that the current reduced American and Russian arsenals can
still produce nuclear winter, and that even a nuclear war between
India and Pakistan could produce climate change unprecedented in
recorded human history. We are frustrated that people are not
paying as much attention to our results as people did previously,
but I was honored in September, 2010, by an invitation from Fidel
Castro to come to Cuba and give a talk about nuclear winter. He
listened for an hour to my talk and then wrote extensively about
the need to rid the world of nuclear weapons. For the story of my
trip, please visit:
climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/Cuba/
For more about this work, go to
climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/
§
-
Max Tegmark has been
concerned about nuclear war risk since his teens and started
publishing articles about it at the age of 20.
He is President of the Future
Of Life Institute which aims to
prevent human extinction as discussed in his popular book,
Our
Mathematical Universe. His scientific interests also include
precision
cosmology and the ultimate nature of reality. He is an
MIT
physics professor with
more
than 200 technical papers and is featured in
dozens
of science documentaries. His
work with the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey on galaxy clustering,
shared the first prize in Science Magazine’s
breakthrough
of the year 2003.
§
-
Dr. Edwards’ February 2015 presentation in
Ontario covers a great deal of ground with regard to the
problem of dealing responsibly with the radioactivity that will
far outlast human history. In his 12 June 2015 essay on
“Nuclear
Waste: Abandonment versus Rolling Stewardship,” the
reality is addressed concerning the fact that we do not have a
permanent solution to nuclear waste given we are pursuing
Abandonment not Rolling Stewardship. From page 3:
Realizing that there is as yet no genuine solution to the nuclear
waste problem – we do not know how to destroy this waste or
render it harmless – the only responsible alternative to
abandonment is Rolling Stewardship. There is a growing awareness
on the part of those who have struggled with this problem that
this is the way to go.
“The word “disposal” has come to mean
permanence and irretrievability in the minds of the public, and
that raises questions about our stewardship of the waste. For
that reason we do not use the word disposal.”
Nuclear waste remains harmful for unimaginably long periods of
time. Until the waste can be eliminated, it must be managed on a
multigenerational basis. This implies continual monitoring and
periodic retrieval and repackaging (e.g. 50-100 years).
Rolling Stewardship implies persistence of memory: the accurate
transmission of information and the transfer of responsibility
from one generation to the next. For example, there could be a
ceremonial “changing of the guard” every 20 years,
accompanied by a thorough refamiliarization with &
recharacterization of the waste.
Rolling Stewardship will ensure that leakages can be rapidly
detected and corrected. It will also provide a constant incentive
to improve containment and find a solution to the waste problem.
But it requires meticulous planning and commitment to succeed.
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