The KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN DEPARTMENT
CARLSBAD — A French corporation is looking at U.S. locations for a uranium enrichment facility, including an area between Carlsbad and Hobbs.
State Rep. John Heaton said Monday the Areva plant would be similar to one being built near Eunice to make fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.
Areva says it hopes to make a decision by early next year.
A Slovak police spokesman told journalists that the authorities in Slovakia and Hungary had been monitoring the activities of the alleged nuclear traders for several months before arresting them. They were detained in eastern Slovakia and eastern Hungary, near the common borders with Ukraine.
Western officials have been concerned for years about the risk of nuclear smuggling from the former Soviet Union, although US-funded safeguarding programmes have been effective in reducing the danger of nuclear trading.
Officials at the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said they knew little about the reported incident across Austria's border in Slovakia, but that the agency's nuclear security department would be looking into the matter urgently.
Police said they would supply more details about the case today. The main Slovak news agency reported that the material involved was enriched uranium but there were no indications of the degree of enrichment.
Low enriched uranium is used for nuclear power plant fuel, while weapons-grade uranium is highly enriched. In 2002 it emerged that Iran had been conducting an illicit nuclear programme for 18 years, greatly helped by the disgraced metallurgist Abdul Qadeer Khan's Pakistan-based smuggling racket.
Khan was found to have been privately channelling nuclear materials and equipment to Iran, North Korea, and Libya.
Slovak police said that the detained men had been attempting to sell the radioactive material for $1m (£480,000).
The growing uncertainty over the status of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is another reminder that these weapons continue to threaten the world, and suggests why Canada should be pushing for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, worldwide.
There has never been a more important time for Canada's voice to be heard in support of nuclear disarmament, but if recent votes at the United Nations last month are any indication, Canada is slowly shifting toward embracing nuclear weapons.
Traditionally, Canada has been a champion of nuclear disarmament. But last month, our position was put to the test on a key UN vote to diminish the risk of nuclear war, and Canada sat silent.
Our ambassador, on instructions from Ottawa, abstained on an important UN resolution "calling on Nuclear Weapons States to lower the operating status of nuclear weapons." This was the first time such a motion had made it to a vote.
The intent of the motion, championed by retired Canadian senator Douglas Roche and his organization, the Middle Powers Initiative, was to lengthen the time required for a nuclear launch, reducing the risk of an accidental or premature launch.
But the Harper government doesn't see it that way. In explaining Canada's silent abstention, our ambassador said that while
"reducing operational readiness remained important ... at the same time, deterrence remained an important element of international security and a fundamental part of the deterrence policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)."
In other words, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has decided that NATO's nuclear deterrence policy reigns supreme.
At the urging of anti-nuclear organizations such as the Canadian Pugwash Group, last spring then-foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay reported to Parliament that he had raised concerns about NATO's reliance upon nuclear weapons at a meeting of the alliance.
Then the government shifted tactics, and a few weeks later then-defence minister Gordon O'Connor told Parliament:
"We are a member of NATO and we stand by NATO's policies. NATO, at this stage, has no policy of disarming from nuclear weapons."
Not surprisingly, the old policy supporting "the complete elimination of nuclear weapons" was changed on the foreign affairs department website to say that Canada's policy is
"consistent with our membership in NATO."
But the reason for this shift may have less to do with NATO itself than with acquiescence to the United States' interests in keeping the door open to a renewal of nuclear weapons testing.
Equally worrisome this year was Canada's reticence to put its name behind a motion to prevent nuclear weapons testing. Last year, Canada co-sponsored a resolution calling for a Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).
In October, Canada failed to co-sponsor the resolution that stressed
"the vital importance and urgency of signature and ratification, without delay and without conditions, to achieve the earliest entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty."
Thankfully, the resolution passed, 166 in favour to only one opposed (United States) with four abstentions (Colombia, India, Mauritius, Syria).
Ultimately, Canada voted in favour, but could Canada's decision not to co-sponsor the resolution, as it had done in the past, be related to the U.S. plan to develop new nuclear weapons?
This is a troublesome shift in Canada's policy on nuclear disarmament. One can trace its beginnings to 2005 when the Liberals, trying to curry favour in Washington, started getting cold feet on nuclear disarmament.
In her book Holding the Bully's Coat, Linda McQuaig notes positively that, by 2005, Canadian leadership over several years had led to 13 other countries breaking ranks with their NATO allies and voting with Canada in support of a resolution aimed at ending the deadlock that is paralyzing the UN's Conference on Disarmament.
Consistent with its leadership, Canada announced its intention to support another important nuclear disarmament resolution at the UN First Committee, the body responsible for disarmament. Canada's support of the creative and inspired initiative was intended to try to break the impasse on disarmament talks by proposing new, ad hoc committees that would bypass the deadlock.
But with hours to go, Canada pulled the plug on supporting the UN resolution, and as a result other countries followed suit. The reason: Paul Martin's government succumbed to intense pressure from the White House.
McQuaig notes, "tragically, the moment had been lost."
While Martin's failing may have been an aberration, Stephen Harper's Conservatives may be making a more permanent policy shift.
Parliamentarians and Canadians need to raise the alarm about this shift. It is inconceivable that, at a time of renewed threats from nuclear weapons, Canada would be shifting away from an active role in advancing nuclear disarmament.
It is up to those who feel strongly that such a move is disastrous for global security to hold all parliamentarians accountable for allowing this to take place. It's not too late to stop this shift in its tracks.
I wrote one of the first articles about Depleted Uranium poisoning (which applied to civilians and enemy soldiers as much as our own people--or more) a few years back. The issue continues--according to a recent AP story: '... six soldiers who have fallen ill since their return from Iraq said Friday that the Army ignored their complaints about uranium poisoning from U.S. weapons fired during combat. They also said they were denied testing for the radioactive substance. "We were all healthy when we left home. Now, I suffer from headaches, fatigue, dizziness, blood in the urine, unexplained rashes," said Sgt. Jerry Ojeda, 28, who was stationed south of Baghdad with other National Guard members of the 442nd Military Police Company." Sgt. Herbert Reed, 50, said that when a dozen soldiers asked for treatment last fall, they initially were turned away....' Here's my original piece, which applies now to our soldiers in Iraq--and to civilians.
by John Shirley
Sources:
"Collateral Damage: How U.S. Troops Were Exposed to Depleted Uranium
During the Persian Gulf War," Dan Fahey, Swords to Plowshares Depleted
Uranium Network of the Military Toxins Project.
U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute: Health and Environmental
Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army, Technical Report,
June 1995.
U.S. General Accounting Office, Operation Desert Storm: "Early
Performance Assessment of Bradley and Abrams," January 2, 1992.
The Nation Magazine, October 21, 1996, "The Pentagon's Radioactive
Bullet" by Bill Mesler.
(c) Copyright 1996 ParaScope, Inc.
John Shirley is the author of numerous books and many, many short stories. His novels include Crawlers, Demons, In Darkness Waiting, and seminal cyberpunk works City Come A-Walkin', and the A Song Called Youth trilogy of Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, and Eclipse Corona. His collections include the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild award-winning Black Butterflies and Really Really Really Really Weird Stories. He also writes for screen (The Crow) and television. As a musician Shirley has fronted his own bands and written lyrics for Blue Õyster Cult and others.
DU May be Causing Global Contamination
There are those who believe that the widespread use of Depleted Uranium in weaponry is creating a cloud of low-level (but hazardous) radioactive particles around the world, causing a global epidemic of diabetes and cancer. (DU is used by the US and British military in coating tanks and shells.) One article on the global contamination theory is here: The Queen’s Death Star. And here’s the LATEST development:
They were told depleted uranium was not hazardous. Now, 23 years after a US arms plant closed, workers and residents have cancer - and experts say their suffering shows the use of such weapons may be a war crime. It is 50 years since Tony Ciarfello and his friends used the yard of a depleted uranium weapons factory as their playground in Colonie, a suburb of Albany in upstate New York state. . .Today there are lumps on Ciarfello’s chest - strange, round tumours that protrude about an inch.
‘No one seems to know what they are,’he says.
‘I’ve also had a brain aneurysm caused by a suspected tumour. I’m constantly fatigued and for years I’ve had terrible pains, deep inside my leg bones. I fall over without warning and I’ve got a heart condition.’Ciarfello’s illnesses have rendered him unable to work for years. Aged 57 and a father of five, he looks much older.
In a paper to be published in the next issue of the scientific journal Science of the Total Environment, a team led by Professor Randall Parrish of Leicester University reports the results of a three-year study of Colonie, funded by Britain’s Ministry of Defence.
Parrish’s team has found that DU contamination, which remains radioactive for millions of years, is in effect impossible to eradicate, not only from the environment but also from the bodies of humans. Twenty-three years after production ceased they tested the urine of five former workers. All are still contaminated with DU. . .
TV footage shot in Baghdad in 2003 shows children playing in the remains of tanks coated with thick, black DU oxide, while there have long been claims that the DU shells that destroyed Saddam Hussein’s tanks in the 1991 Gulf war were responsible for high rates of cancer in places such as Basra.
For a general article on DU see Nukes of the Gulf War by John Shirley.
| Depleted uranium -- a way out? [Please write the French Government -- TODAY] | |
| TEHRAN, Nov. 19 (MNA) -- The term Persian Gulf War Syndrome is now known worldwide -- but -- after the 1991 Iraq war, as formerly A1 fit soldiers fell ill with debilitating symptoms in their thousands, the cause was, for two years, a “mystery”. | |
It was in 1993, when a group of twenty-four affected soldiers approached Professor Asaf Durakovic, one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of radiation, that a cause came to light. They had many times the “safe” level of chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium (DU) in their bodies. Durakovic, although a senior officer in the U.S. Army during the first Persian Gulf War, had been unaware that the weapons used had contained depleted uranium. “I was horrified,” he said. “I was a soldier, but above all I am a doctor.” By 1997, it was estimated that ninety thousand Durakovic, who is also medical consultant for the Children of Chernobyl project at Two other physicians, Dr. Burroughs and Dr. Slingerland of the Oddly, all the records pertaining to the sick soldiers at the Two years before Durakovic’s discovery, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) “self initiated” a report warning the government that if fifty tons of the residual dust from the explosions of the weapons on impact was left “in the region”, they estimated it would generate “half a million” extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (2000.) Further, “depleted” is a misnomer. These weapons are made from waste from the nuclear fuel cycle and thus contain the whole lethal nuclear cocktail. DU weapons (sold to seventeen countries that are known and possibly others -- why let poisoning the planet and its population get in the way of numerous millions of quick bucks) are equivalent to spreading the contents of a nuclear reactor around the globe. And far from fifty tons and that chilling warning, in Strangely, this time, there have been few reports of soldiers with the terrible effects of 1991, where they were only in the region for a few weeks. Although troops now remain for months or a year, Persian Gulf War Syndrome mark 2 seems not an issue. Perhaps it is because, reportedly, doctors treating returning troops have been threatened with jail and or hefty fines if they say anything regarding DU-related symptoms. The implication regarding compensation to countries affected by this poisoned legacy (DU’s lethality lasts for four and a half billion years) and troops is financially stratospheric. Since the 2003 invasion, In Bosnia and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia where DU weapons were used (with missiles also dropped accidentally in neighboring countries, by the U.S., to whom all the world’s lives are seemingly cheap) the “Iraq Syndrome” quickly became apparent. Even European peacekeepers on relatively short tours of duty became ill and developed leukemia and other cancers, and a number died. A five man film crew from BBC Scotland all tested DU positive after filming for less than a week there. Afghanistan too was “liberated” in 2001, by uranium weapons, which continue to be routinely used, condemning generations yet to be born to deformities and the living -- the newborn and under fives the most susceptible -- to cancers and other horrific DU-related conditions. Durakovic also found high levels of uranium in hospital patients there, as there will undoubtedly be in the occupying forces. He also found identical conditions to “Children born with no limbs, no eyes, or with tumors protruding from their mouths and eyes.” The latest country to fall victim to uranium weapons is He then noted a report in Lebanon’s Daily Star saying that Dr. Khobeisi, a scientist, had measured gamma radiation in a bomb crater at Khiam in the south of the country, at ten to twenty times higher (samples taken from different locations in the crater) than naturally occurring background radiation. The following month, independent researcher Dai Williams** went to “The results were astonishing.” Both soil and filter contained enriched uranium with the soil sample containing uranium about nine times higher than the natural background. (Remember how threatening the West has become towards The soil sample was also sent to the Busby asks, There are two other chilling possibilities says Busby: a fusion bomb or a thermobaric bomb, both of which would need enriched uranium. Certainly, doctors were reporting bodies in conditions they could find in no medical manuals, as in the attack on Lebanese authorities denied the presence of enriched uranium; The samples tested had already cost £2,000. Donations from an Arab friend and Swiss supporters totaled £850 -- and Dai Williams had paid the rest out of his own money. More work is needed, but it is now known that the IDF used enriched uranium in “Since it is in the ambulance air filter, it is also in the lungs of the inhabitants… the Lebanese people have been sacrificed to cancers, leukemia, birth defects, like the people of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Busby, adding, “and it may be worse: since we still do not know what the weapon was.” And have these weapons been used on the people of In context, Green Audit studied airborne uranium at sites in the As with the radionuclides from Can anything be done to halt the use of these genocidal weapons? Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the Boyle points out that the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices.” Clearly, he says, DU is “analogous” to poison gas. The government of “All that needs to be done is for anti-DU citizens, activists and NGOs in every country to pressure their foreign minister to write to their French counterpart, drawing attention to the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of The letter should add that this Protocol is believed to “already prohibit the use in war of depleted uranium ammunition, uranium armor plate and all other uranium weapons.” A request should be made that the letter be circulated to all other High Contracting Parties to the 1925 Protocol and addressed to: His Excellency, The Foreign Minister, 37, 75351 Or Fax: 33-1-43-17-4275. Professor Boyle points out, Such a sympathetic state exists. * Author of Wings of Death and of Wolves of Water (2007) essential reading on radiation’s horrors, published by Green Audit (admin@greenaudit.org). Busby is also involved in Radioactive Times, the journal of the Low Level Radiation Campaign, a detailed quarterly update on nuclear industry shenanigans (http://www.llrc.org). ** See http://www.eoslifework.co.uk for a wealth of DU related material. (Nov. 20 |
by Sherwood Ross By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan. So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed." "More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991,"Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine. Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California. Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, " The long- term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control." Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed." She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive." Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground." "Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults,"Caldicott wrote. "My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities," she wrote in her book, "Nuclear Power is not the Answer"(The New Press). Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars " have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people---particularly children--- are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity." Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, " the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,"Caldicott explained. Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the sperm, leading to birth deformities. Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan. These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan. " Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes,"Moret asserts. Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it. As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, "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." Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to them suffered from "severe illnesses and deformities." Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders. While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly deformities. Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead, published reports indicate. This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield. Of course, "depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS),"writes Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism," from Clarity Press Inc. "The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS---even beyond the point where everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation,"Boyle writes. Boyle contends, "The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.'s Gulf War II as well as their afterborn children." Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention prohibiting poison gas. Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his "The Sorrows of Empire"(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points "toward a significant role for DU." By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, "the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction." Moret calls DU "the Trojan Horse of nuclear war." She describes it as "the weapon that keeps killing." Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products. Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled. But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the radioactive waste has been dumped. In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East, suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll. Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor, informed the media, Iraq's arid climate would increase exposure from its tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian population for years to come. The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000 and 80,000, respectively. Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have claimed the lives of another 100,000 Japanese civilians. Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com. Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and several wire services and is a contributor to national magazines. |
Sherwood Ross is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sherwood Ross |
By David Swanson
Jonathan Schell's latest book "The Seventh Decade" places our current situation in the context of the past 62 years of the nuclear age, or the past 68 years as Schell might prefer to date it. It was 68 years ago that scientists concluded a nuclear bomb was possible. Scientists and politicians immediately began trying to develop nukes out of fear that someone else would do so first. And as soon as nukes had been developed in one country, spies began passing the information to other countries out of fear that they would fail to develop their own nukes, thus leaving one nuclear nation unchecked.
We arrived 18 years ago in a situation in which the first nuclear nation is largely unchallenged. This has led to aggressive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but not the use of nukes. In fact, nuclear powers have time and again lost brutal wars to smaller states without making use of nuclear bombs. It is highly unlikely that a small state developing a nuclear bomb in a nuke-free world would be able to bend other states to its will. And nukes are no weapons at all against non-state terrorists with box cutters. So why don't the nuclear powers disarm?
New nations are rapidly pursuing membership in the ranks of nuclear states largely because there are nuclear states, and the proliferation of nuclear technology facilitates additional proliferation, fueling a vicious cycle that makes nuclear war ever more likely. Schell's book lays out an overwhelming case that we have two and only two choices before us:
"If a person gets lung cancer, a doctor may prescribe a harsh regimen of chemotherapy to prevent the disease's spread and save the patient's life. The patient may reject the recommendation, but then must expect metastasis and all its consequences. The diagnostician's advice regarding nuclear danger today must be of the same kind. Do you want to stop the spread of nuclear weapons? Then prepare yourself to get rid of your own. But perhaps you want to hold onto your bombs? All right, but then get ready for proliferation. Get ready for new cold wars - or hot. And get ready for nuclear explosions in your cities."
Schell recounts how tragically close Reagan and Gorbachev came to complete nuclear disarmament. The point at which the negotiations fell apart was Reagan's unwillingness to disarm without creating a missile defense system, and Gorbachev's refusal to believe that Reagan would share such a system with the Soviet Union. Had Gorbachev realized that such a system would fail, he might have conceded the meaningless bargaining chip and disarmed the two largest nuclear states.
Now the clear purpose of so-called "missile defense" systems is aggressive war from space. And the goal of non-proliferation rhetoric is to provide excuses for launching aggressive wars with conventional (or perhaps even nuclear) weapons. But the whole idea of using military force to block proliferation is very new. It may also be short-lived, having shown itself to be both fraudulent and a failure on its own terms.
Short-lived also was the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s. Schell points out that we now live in a time when excuses for nuclear arsenals must be even more strained and fantastical, but pressure to disarm has evaporated. Ridding the world of nukes now seems so 80s. Schell notes that none of what he calls "major" presidential candidates are talking about disarmament. But Schell must still be living in the media universe of the 1980s if he does not realize that talk of disarmament would be enough to immediately disqualify one as a "major" candidate.
Schell imagines a nuclear-free world, but cannot imagine influencing the national conversation by supporting a candidate, like Dennis Kucinich, who agrees with him.
Schell does place some hope, as do I, in the possibility that a movement to end global warming will grow to include a movement to eliminate nuclear weapons.
The two movements would seem to be perfect allies, as it would be quite a shame to save the world from one of the two dangers we face and lose it to the other.
The Mystery of Minot: Loose nukes and a cluster of dead airmen raise troubling questions by Dave Lindorff Page 1 of 1 page(s) | |    |
This article appeared initially in the Oct. 22, 2007 issue of American Conservative magazine.
By Dave Lindorff
The unauthorized Aug. 29 cross-country flight of a B-52H Stratofortress armed with six nuclear-tipped AGM-29 Advanced Cruise missiles, which saw these 150-kiloton warheads go missing for 36 hours, has all the elements of two Hollywood movies. One would be a thriller about the theft from an armed weapons bunker of six nukes for some dark and murky purpose. The lead might be played by Matt Damon. The other movie would be a slapstick comedy about a bunch of bozos who couldn’t tell the difference between a nuclear weapon and a pile of dummy warheads. The lead might be played by Adam Sandler, backed by the cast of “Police Academy III.”
So far, the Pentagon, which has launched two separate investigations into the incident, seems to be assuming that it is dealing with the comedy version, saying that some incredible “mistake” led to nuclear weapons being taken inadvertently from a weapons-storage bunker, loaded into launch position on a bomber, and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana.
For the rest of this story, please go to ThisCantBeHappening.net
