By Tracy Turner
The US Government and Nuclear Disinformation:
Watch the 90-minutes of the 1982 movie “The Atomic Café”. Keep in mind they put Ethel Rosenberg in an electric chair and electrocuted her four times because her husband passed on some very low-level nuclear documents to the Russians. An American corporation sold centrifuges, guidebooks, etc. to the French with the full understanding the French would sell them to Iran. Nobody was charged with a crime. This industry sells nuclear power plants to shady regimes (with US Federal wink and nod) all the time, as long as those regimes allow us to fly bombers over en route to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted four times, to keep people from wanting to know anything about this multi-billion dollar welfare industry. She was murdered to make an example out of her. Her heart did not stop until they pulled the switch four times, her hair smoking. It is very similar, though not the same as, wiki leaks. Poison 300 million plus persons for 350 million years, get rich. Leak some papers, embarrass the illuminati, and be electrocuted four times. It is not a solvent, lucrative business, based on electricity for a few based on poisoning 6.6 billion human beings. More about that, below. I feel the government is afraid wiki leaks will leak nuclear toxin papers. Leak more corporate welfare state papers.
The United States government, between 1945 and the present, has poisoned American citizens with nuclear bomb fallout, Plutonium dispersion tests, intentional venting of radioactive gases from underground mishaps, etc.
The following places are polluted from nuclear bomb testing:
Alaska -” Amchitka
Colorado – Grand Valley and Rifle
Mississippi – Hattiesburg
New Mexico -” Alamagordo, Carlsbad, Farmington and White Sands (Trinity)
Nevada -” Central Nevada Test Area, Fallon, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada Test Site.
How these places and many others became nuclear poison that affects all of our shortened lives mostly masquerades as DOE, Department of Energy and “Energy Legislation” which almost nobody reads. For the purposes of this article, we will ignore how big oil and natural gas “fracking” is cutting your life even shorter with their visibly dirty energy. Try to get your mind around a source of life-shortening pollution that is not acceptable dinner conversation. “Aunt Sue’s slow death from metastasized cancer is too raw and painful by itself; having to think about being passive accomplice, complicit through inaction is unthinkable. Everyone has an Aunt, Uncle or Neighbor who had a horrible tumor or slow, cancerous death. The idea the government will put you on a list for poking your little nose into their big nuclear ambitions is frightening, Aunt Sue’s memory painful.
The Downwinders (We are all downwinders):
Before you forget about these places, consider some parameters you may not know about: Although the local “downwind area” is heavily polluted (radioactive from fallout), it is a mere 1/20 of the poison produced, but very concentrated because it is in a tiny area. Patterns are prevailing winds at lower altitudes, mostly. The inverse is the other 19/20’s that flow in four or more directions or paths: prevailing winds speeds and directions at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50K, etc. feet above ground level. At 10k feet, perhaps due east at 50 mph. 20K feet, perhaps due north at 60 mph. at 30k feet, perhaps due south at 35 mph. At 80K feet, maybe due east at 75 mph. Multiply this fractal pattern times the 330 above ground tests (330 tests, times 200 tons of fallout dust per test equals 66,000 tons of fallout) 132,000,000 pounds of dirt, dust, ash, nuclear glass, isotopes like Strontium 90. The dispersal pattern is not uniform or regular. Some of the richest farmland in America is also where huge quantities of certain isotopes landed.
A few facts about the nuclear bomb testing done by the US government from 1945 to the present:
There have been 828 underground nuclear bomb tests in Nevada from 1952 to 1992. 260 Above ground tests in Nevada from 1945 to 1992. From 1945 to 1980, the United States, former Soviet Union, Britain, China and France detonated 504 nuclear bombs in above ground tests. 330 above ground tests were conducted by the United States.
All the United States government agencies use the words “safe” or “safe levels” frequently and for each and all situations covered in newspapers, in tests done by ecologists, environmentalists and / or universities. Conversely, the Bikini Atoll Rehabilitation Committee [BARC], overlooked by renowned international scientists, considers that the fruits, vegetables, meat, fish and milk from Bikini Atoll are a health hazard. There were 109 tests in the area of Bikini Atoll and Enewetak (offshore). There were 1054 tests done by the United States, approximately 900 of them in the states of Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico and Nevada. The USA EPA and USDA claim all the fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts, fish, grain and milk produced downwind of these test sites are “safe”. That the drinking water downstream from these sites is “safe”.
Poor Southwest neolib downwinders, rich neocon downwinders, green apolitical downwinders:
Most of the Southwestern United States has been irradiated by above ground nuclear bomb tests, but only about 5% of the nuclear fallout lands in the small area near the blast. The other 95% of the fallout disperses over a larger area “downwind”. The rotation of the Earth creates the “gulf stream”, both air and ocean currents carrying the fallout East. The above ground plumes move predominately East but also widen out as they travel east. In plainest terms, Florida, Cuba, Main, the Great Lakes, the Southern bible-belt states, the Midwest corn and cattle areas, the farming bread belts are all downwind. In the words of an Air Force Colonel who monitored radioactive fallout from above ground tests, “we are all downwinders”. Even though the area is “larger”, having 95% of the fallout land where people live, grow their food, farm their fish, store their corn, barley and rye, etc. means we are all having our DNA bombarded with constant levels of Cesium 137, Plutonium 239, Tritium, Iodine 131, Uranium 238, Strontium 90 and etc.
These radioisotopes, in small amounts (too small to cause nausea, but not too small to cause birth defects, cancer, reproductive harm) make their way into Maine Cranberries. Virginia Tobacco. Cuban Rum and Cigars. Canadian Whiskey. Alberta Beef. African Tapioca. New Zealand Kiwi fruit. Polar ice, squid, salmon, whales. These poisons accumulate in greater concentrations as one species like a dolphin feeds on polluted salmon and flounder. Or us as we drink milk and eat everything we eat, drink everything we drink. They are not neocon or neolib isotopes, they are equal opportunity cancers, equal opportunity ADHD children with cleft palates, babies with heart disease, babies with smaller brains than 6 generations ago (this was one of the first birth defects ever witnessed to Hiroshima newborns). Tiny heads, tiny brains, no brain at all. Maybe your babies got a lower dose, the smaller brain and head is not as obvious. This generation” If irradiated pregnant women tend to have babies with under-developed brains, why are the industry spokespeople touting that “a little exposure is actually good for you”? Maybe it is good for population control of the masses by a few rich bullies”
My pet theory is that most of the new, “designer illnesses” have their roots in nuclear poison. 3-4 generations of irradiated people. Lower IQ’s, more mental illness, more crime, violence. More cancer, tumors. More health care costs. More people needing Prozac. Part psychological damage, part physical damage at our cellular and our sub-atomic level. More damage at our DNA level than science can currently measure. Just a theory, based on 60+ years of exposure. More top predators dying off. More species going extinct. Maybe even a “global warming” factor, climate change factor. Can you prove it is not any or all of these, to * your * satisfaction?
The nuclear industry has been trying to repaint its image as suppliers of safe, clean, quiet nuclear power. Many political activists and environmentalists believe electrical generation is merely a from an industry that earns billions of dollars selling weapons grade plutonium and selling “clean, safe” energy to third world nations (moving the pollution to poor countries). The 27,000 acres of the Native American Navajo Nation is about to have the last of its clean drinking water permanently polluted with Uranium leaching from Uranium mining. The teenagers of the Navajo Nation in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico suffer 17 times the national average in cancers and tumors. They suffer the groundwater pollution of Uranium mining and are in close proximity to the open air and underground bomb test sites. The US EPA says their water is “safe”, even if it is 25 times higher in Uranium than “Federal Standards”. Many atomic scientists believe there is no level of “safe” exposure, no amount of “safe” rads, Pico curies, etc., except zero.
The nuclear industry has billions of dollars at their disposal to have spokespersons, image consultants, talking heads, political lobbyists make their poison look attractive and safe. Two of these industry behemoth tax-dollar welfare corporations own 2/3 of the television stations and newspapers in America. Their competition, what little of it there is in TV and News, will not tackle any of their dirty laundry activities.
Keep in mind, once they get their 3% of the Uranium they want out of a mine, that company division declares bankruptcy, so they leave behind their latest environmental disaster. The state they create these poison hellholes in have 15-20 times the national average in tumors and cancer; that state is loathe to cross Washington on allowing the mining, loathe to enforce the cleanup terms in the permit. The permits always say one thing about cleanup, but the mine shuts down, the profits go offshore, the cleanup is levied to taxpayers as a new superfund site. The “new product”, after even more concentrated, deadlier pollution is left behind at a “refinery”, is a new Hydrogen bomb, fusion (rather than fission) of Plutonium. More Tritium in your food, water and air. More Plutonium for the residents of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Plutonium and other contaminants leaching into the food and water of the refinery community. This is referred to as “the same background levels as granite”. This is where politicians get much of their election money, re-election money. Where former “federal energy czars” from government can leave office and sit on a “new board of directors” seat.
As the city of Las Vegas, Nevada grows in both area, population (urban sprawl), the need for clean water grows. The water table below Nevada’s four test areas (Central Nevada Test Area, Fallon, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada Test Site) has had radioactive wastes percolating downward and outward since the mid-1940’s. It is inevitable that unmonitored water wells will be drilled and the water used for drinking, bathing, swimming pools, food and farming. Urban sprawl puts the residents themselves ever closer to these test sites. Radiation does not recognize man-made borders. Drought and winds carry the dust into St. George and Hurricane, Utah; Kingman, Arizona; Death Valley, California. Groundwater aquifers do not have immunity from radiation poisoning. The test area radiation will move into populated areas, will not necessarily be detected in the scant 7 test wells.
The Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency all speak in terms of radiation not moving into this aquifer or that “for at least 100 years”. Such a round, arbitrary number, not in my back yard, not in my lifetime. None of the agencies mentioned gives any written guarantees with those optimistic predictions. These same agencies ignore and / or minimize Uranium mining leaching, mine tailings and cancer 17 times the national average anywhere in America those conditions occur (Uranium is mined almost anywhere there is granite or sandstone, if the ore is high enough in natural content. Once disturbed by miners, it is a vile, extremely deadly water polluter; one of those industry secrets the “power plant” boosters never mention.
One of the least understood aspects of the most government-censored forms of pollution in the United States is that the “irradiated ash” or fallout is now part of the US “ecosystem”. It is not “government mandated” to “stay put”. Your car or pickup truck tires, driving on a downwind dirt road, are putting radioactive debris into your lungs and the pickup in front of you as you drive is no doubt quadrupling your exposure. What if “El Nino” wet, rainy years are washing the fallout downstream into community drinking water and farm irrigation reservoirs? A few years of Southwest drought, and the wind is blowing that irradiated debris in whichever direction that wind is going?
Think for a moment what Nevada, New Mexico above ground bomb test fallout is: sand, silt, clay and organic matter (plants, animals, insects) scooped up (pulverized and incinerated beyond recognition) by the initial blast, which forms a large crater. As the material is lifted skyward, the nuclei from Plutonium atoms is irradiating (contaminating) 200 tons of soil and lifting it to altitudes of 10,000 to 80,000 feet above ground level. 5% lands nearby, relatively close to or even at ground zero. But some of it lands in Florida and Nova Scotia, or even circles the globe to land on the west coast of the United States. It is both a local and a global poisoning of all of us. As part of our ecosystem” we have radioactive pond sediment for fish to lay their eggs in. We have radioactive forests to burn and waft pine tree smoke in to our nostrils 20 years after the test. Although the official, secretive, censored version uses the words “safe” and “safe levels”, we are re-exposed by soil erosion, dust in the wind, eating foods from contaminated soils and waters.
This is a form of entirely human-made, human-contrived cancer that needs 3.5 million years to cool of back to truly safe levels. From 1945 onwards, there is no such thing as “background levels”. If you read this and are the leader of a country, do you really want to emulate the “super-powers”? Poison your own citizens, push your allies to poison their people, and try to prevent your “enemies” from poisoning themselves in imitation of us, in the name of “national security”?
Anderson, Loudon and Oak Ridge Counties in Tennessee are three of the largest “superfund sites” in America. It is impossible to “clean these counties up”. This is a genie that cannot be put back into a bottle, or “thrown away”. The government pretends there is such a thing as “nuclear material disposal”. How do you throw away a 3,500,000-year poison? Calling a generation as 25 years, in 140,000 generations the Plutonium isotopes in these three counties, from Uranium refining, will be cooled off and safe to the touch. All of the above are most often referred to as “in the interests of National Security”. Like the 3-Mile Island venting. Like the Hanford Reactor meltdown. Like the Russian’s Chernobyl. Both George W. Bush and Obama thwart the START treaty with “non-critical mass tests”. Look at the price we all are paying so Obama can throw his weight around internationally.
Please use the electronic buttons on this website to send this to your elected representatives. This is the costliest and most polluting, most devious of all the US welfare corporations. Most of this, all of this, was done without your blessing. For most Americans, it was also done with absolutely no resistance from you. Collectively, it is our 3,500,000 year legacy to those who come after us, our great grand children. We must stop this particular insanity before we have nothing but mutated and sterile people. At the very least, we have a plethora of irradiated people who spent half or more of their lives fearing thermonuclear warfare. The damage to their souls is evident all around us, except on the TV and in the newspaper.
• If *
If the Nukes Industry gave up their disinformation campaign that exposure is good for you, that they are all about “clean electricity”, they’d have a bigger “our tax dollar bankroll”. * If * they sold off all of their “news and infotainment industry” holdings, their would be billions in their “war chest”. This would not even cover the environmental cleanup of Depleted Uranium projectiles fired in 1991 Desert Storm under George H.W. Bush. It would fall short of the Depleted Uranium “armor piercers” (AP rounds) fired in the two George W. Bush/Barrack Obama debacles. Invading foreigners, robbing their natural resources, spraying their land with 3.5 million year poison “makes us safer from terrorists”. Our victims are poster men and women for Al Quada recruitment.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”. H. L. Mencken
“The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real”. General Douglas MacArthur
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
General Omar N. Bradley
War is just a racket…I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else.
General Smedley Butler
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.
General Smedley Butler
Whether or not patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, national security can be the last refuge of the tyrant.
Lord Walker of Gestingthorpe
Do we really want to defend “our way of life”, considering that it entails unleashing a 3.5 million year, deadly poisonous genie who cannot be rebottled? Hand this “genie” to today’s “friends” and threaten our enemies by taunting them into developing their own version? This is not a “way of life” that is morally or spiritually or economically defensible. This is something done in the shadows with and by our passive consent.
Instead of taking a drink and turning on infotainment, instead of taking some Prozac to block out how these thoughts make you feel inside” Click the buttons and links that send this to your nuclear-sponsored elected officials. Please exercise the little democracy and freedom you have left. Keep in mind that the next country we politically force into “accepting” a “clean power generation plant” may be the next Chernobyl meltdown or the parent of that country’s infant Plutonium weapons breeder reactor. In plain English, this poison is being shot at our enemies, and candy-coated to our “friends”. Colorless, odorless, tasteless, invisible with 40 half-lives before it is truly “background” safe level. All of us paid for this insanity, but none of us asked our government to spend 50 years moving to this direction, in secret.
The government “tracked” how much nuclear fallout fell “where”. It was done from satelites and aircraft (Air Force). These documents are still not “declassified” in the interests of “national security”.
In closing, the US Supreme Court made a decision about “The Rights of US Free Press” to “publish” secret government documents that “expose government dishonesty”. Now we are going to “prosecute foreigners” and “censor foreign press”. Our highest court rules on this in the Pentagon Papers. Now both the neocon and neolib demagogues are going to reverse our highest court with foreign nationals and foreign, online press? Does this mean the Washington Post staff, those alive and connected with the Pentagon Papers, are now jail bait? When did our President, CIA, NSA, Congress, Senate and big business welfare corporations take over the Higher Court?
Author’s Bio: Most of my life has been devoted to various career fields/avocations Horticulture, Botany, Activism and Environmentalism. More recently, I’ve grown increasingly worried about the disconnect between government and ordinary people. Rich people and rich corporations communicate fine. I feel neolibs and neocons both screw over the voters, streamline the businesses of the Fortune 500.