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27 Oct ' 08:48
A Word About Nuclear Crimes and Censorship
by Idealist.ws (Oct. 25, 2010)
Idealist agrees in principle with the points made in the Resalat letter of objection. We feel that Obama's subcritical nuclear test was a nuclear-criminal act.
But, you may ask, what is a nuclear crime?
The greatest crimes in human history have been nuclear ones. Nuclear crimes are not limited to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the slew of early Cold War-era human radiation experiments. The gamut runs from abuses in nuclear medicine to lies surrounding nuclear energy to grave crimes against humanity from nuclear weapons development, and the list goes on and on and on. While historians are normally expected to research and tabulate knowable or estimable numbers of victims from past wars and armed conflicts, the collateral damage in human lives attributed to historical toxic, radioactive pollution from peacetime and military applications of nuclear fission is unknowable and barely estimable.
Part of the problem therein lies in the historical failure - at the time of the 'crime' - by government officials overseeing nuclear laboratories to properly monitor stack emissions, comprehensively monitor deposition of fallout in populated areas, track radioactive cloud trajectories across international boundaries, and, furthermore, fully disclose yields and types and quantities of materials used in nuclear weapons tests and laboratory experiments.
Later attempts by government agencies to reconstruct off-site doses from weapons labs and nuclear testing emissions were preemptively sabotaged - boxes containing relevant documents were irretrievably buried in radioactive waste pits or destroyed; warehouses containing nuclear workers' files had mysteriously been set ablaze; film badges - needed to substantiate workers' or veterans' claims for medical benefits and damages - were misplaced, 'lost,' etc...with no further explanation.
As final products, dose reconstruction studies, in general, were barely suitable as public health tools as they were formulated with sparse or unusable data and subjected - rarely to the benefit of the injured - to the lens of 'health physics,' a hybrid field of medicine and hard science that lacks any credibility.
As is the case with any coverup, the sabotage was intentional to downplay the harm, avert a panicked public, and evade prosecution and damages. Even those testimonies and death-bed confessions by nuclear workers, downwinders and whistleblowers, as with collectable raw data still contaminating everything on the face of the Earth including nuclear buildings and victims' bodies, was rarely fully collected or incorporated into the final conclusion.
Rarely has any Cold-War era nuclear official been prosecuted for their role in nuclear coverups. Some have argued that the first and largest government-sponsored nuclear testing fallout study, titled 'Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American People from Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests,' was withheld from the public for eights years - sitting on an officials' desk over that time- so as to allow former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission officials to live out the rest of their lives in impunity.
Although several Manhattan Project scientists expressed their deep reluctance and even resistance to the development, ultimate use and military adoption of 'the bomb,' we may one day look back on them not as pioneers, but as villains. John Gofman, a well-known atomic scientist and radiation expert, went further than any of them - he wrote in his 1970s book An Irreverent, Illustrated View of Nuclear Power:
"I am on record in 1957 as not being worried yet about fallout and still being optimistic about the benefits of nuclear power. There is no way I can justify my failure to help sound an alarm over these activities many years sooner than I did. I feel that at least several hundred scientists trained in the biomedical aspect of atomic energy--myself definitely included--are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity through our gross negligence and irresponsibility...Now that we know the hazard of low-dose radiation, the crime is not experimentation--it's murder."
Norman Cousins, journalist and anti-nuclear crusader, was one of the few writers who transcended the way Americans fragment their view of nuclear or radiation problems - each problem not being related to other nuclear problems or part of an epidemic of nuclear criminality. Cousins saw that the problem was widespread, epidemic and its solution lied in removing the 'penalty-free zone' for governmental nuclear liars. In his column that appeared in the Daily Herald (Chicago) on May 7, 1979, Cousins wrote:
"...the American people have difficulty today in trusting the statements of nuclear officials on radiation hazards. In the aftermath of the Three Mile Island episode, for example, people are reluctant to accept at face value the reassuring statements about the disappearance of the danger. One wonders whether those statements are more a reflection of public relations strategy than of the need to provide a scientifically accurate assessment of the present situation. One fact emerges from the revelations of deceit by government officials about nuclear fallout: No law now protects the American people against lying by their government....no penalties now apply to lying on matters that can cause death or serious harm to human beings. The time has come to draw the line against coverups - especially where the health and safety of the American people are concerned."
In addition to the above, Idealist feels that the U.S. media, including alternative media and even so-called first amendment/independent reporting entities, are censoring the U.S.'s latest subcritical nuclear test.
Every day that passes that this story doesn't get the attention it deserves, and thereby fails to mobilize concerned citizens to work to undue or reverse the harm the U.S. has wreaked upon global stability and trust with regards to nuclearism from its recent subcritical test, we come closer and closer to the onset of a new arms race and resumption of nuclear testing by one or more nations, and we are removed, deeper and deeper, from the prospect of an in-force CTBT and nuclear-free world.
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