Human Rights Now l 18 April, 2013

 

For Immediate Release

10 years after the war, Innocent New Lives are Still Dying and Suffering In Iraq.

Human Rights NGO publish the Report of a Fact Finding Mission on Congenital Birth Defects in Fallujah, Iraq in 2013

 

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War. After the war, particularly in the most recent few years, a deeply troubling rise in the numbers of birth defects has been reported by doctors in Iraq, leading to suspicions that environmental contamination from the war may be having a significant negative effect on the health of local people, and in particular infants and children. For instance in Fallujah, the city heavily attacked by the US twice in 2004, the data of Fallujah General Hospital shows that around 15% of babies of all births in Fallujah since 2003 have some congenital birth defect.

 

Human Rights Now (HRN), a Tokyo based international human rights NGO in consultative status with the UNEconomic and Social Council, conducted a fact-finding mission in Fallujah, Iraq in early 2013 to investigate thesituation of the reported increasing number of birth defects in Iraq.

 

Today, HRN published a report over 50 pages entitled "Innocent New Lives are Still Dying and Suffering in Iraq" on this investigation.

 

Full Report:

Iraq Report April 2013.pdf

 

Appendix:       

Appendix1 Iraq.pdf

Appendix2 Iraq.pdf

 

http://hrn.or.jp/eng/activity/area/iraq/press-release10-years-after-the-war-innocent-new-lives-are-still-dying-and-suffering-in-iraq-human-r/

Dave Krieger (Nuclear Age Peace Foundation) l DiaNuke.org  8 December, 2012 Is it time for a new international treaty that would outlaw nuclear weapons?  The short answer to this question is, Yes, it is time.  Actually, it is past time.  The criti...

Detonating the "twenty-seventh American "subcritical experiment" since full-scale nuclear weapons tests were halted in 1992," the U.S. is showing little real commitment to disarmament at a time when they are loudly demanding it of others. Posturing about Iran's potential nuclear weapons program is high, Israel's actual nuclear weapons program is virtually ignored. The U.S. agenda on nuclear is the picture of hypocracy. To continue atomic testing after all the harm it has done shows that, rhetoric aside, the nuclear boys club in the U.S. political establishment isn't planning on giving up their deadly game of playing chicken with fate anytime soon.

RT.com l 8 December, 2012

Iran has strongly condemned the US for carrying out a nuclear test in Nevada this week, saying the move threatens world peace and shows a hypocritical set of double standards set by Washington when it comes to nuclear research.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said the Wednesday detonation proves that US foreign policy relies heavily on the use of nuclear weapons, disregarding UN calls for global disarmament, PressTV reports.

The experiment also drew criticism from Japan, with Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui wondering why the Obama administration carried out the test, despite saying he would “seek a nuclear-free world.”

The test proves that the US “could use nuclear weapons anytime,” said Hirotami Yamada, who heads the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council.

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MIA STEINLE l Project on Government Oversight  9 November, 2012

Government investigators have uncovered conflicts of interest among the contractors working on a multi-billion dollar effort to decontaminate and decommission two of the nation’s nuclear weapons sites.

Contractors at plants in Piketon, Ohio, and in Oak Ridge, Tenn., were overseeing work by subcontracting companies in which they hold a financial interest, according to a report from the Department of Energy (DOE) Inspector General.

According to federal and DOE regulations, this arrangement means the contractors are “unable to render impartial assistance or advice to the government,” and their “objectivity in performing the contract work is or might be otherwise impaired,” the report said.

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Nuclear power generation, accidents, and atomic testing have all affected boy/girl birth ratios. While it has disproportionately affected the birth rate of girls, it has also lowered the overall birthrate.

The human sex odds at birth after the atmospheric atomic bomb tests, after Chernobyl, and in the vicinity of nuclear facilities.

Hagen Scherb & Kristina Voigt  l 19 February 2011     Springer-Verlag

As we think about the disproportionate harm to women and children from exposure to radiation, last year's National Geographic article adds another piece of the puzzle with information on a study showing lower birth rate for girls after nuclear testing and accidents.

Ker Than l National Geographic  2 June, 2011

Nuclear radiation from bomb tests and power plant accidents causes slightly more boys than girls to be born, a new study suggests. While effects were seen to be regional for incidents on the ground, like Chernobyl, atmospheric blasts were found to affect birth rates on a global scale.

 

The result: Millions fewer females have been born worldwide than would otherwise be expected, researchers estimate. And given Japan's current nuclear troubles, another boy boomlet could be on the way, experts say.

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Excerpt from 2008 interview with anthropologist Hugh Gusterson on nuclear weapons culture & disarmament from her forthcoming book: Loving This Planet.

The problem is that nuclear waste has a half-life of thousands and thousands of years … What would you put on the sign? [In 50,000 years] would a skull and crossbones intuitively warn any human being that there was something dangerous there, so you shouldn’t dig?

Helen Caldicott: You lived and drank with the scientists at Los Alamos for up to a year, got to know them, their culture, and then you described how they saw their bomb-making.

Hugh Gusterson: Being an anthropologist, we tend to move in with the people we’re studying, melt unobtrusively into the background, fit into the flow of daily life. I lived in three different houses at the weapons site for two years, with people who worked at the lab. I went to church every Sunday, different churches. I joined the lab’s singles’ group and its basketball and baseball teams. I tried to meet as many people who worked in the lab as I could. You get to know people in a really different way if you take the time to just become a part of the fabric of their lives. I want to put in a little plug for the anthropological method.

Helen Caldicott: As an Englishman, did you find it difficult joining the American cultural philosophy in the labs in Los Alamos and Livermore?

Hugh Gusterson: There are two nuclear weapons labs: one is Los Alamos, which developed the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the other is Lawrence Livermore in San Francisco, which was established in 1952. I have done extensive fieldwork at both labs. I was accepted, and I was a little startled by this. I’d thought that as a foreign citizen trying to understand the culture of a top secret military facility I would have a very hard time, but it turned out not to be true.

I vividly remember one weapons scientist telling me that he could never work on conventional weapons, because it would be immoral. He felt much more comfortable working on nuclear weapons, because he was convinced that nuclear weapons would never be used.

I moved to Lawrence Livermore first, at the end of the Reagan years. I expected to find the people who worked on nuclear weapons to be Reagan Republicans, conservatives who thought that there was a real threat of communist domination. I was surprised to find that many of the weapons scientists I got to know were Democrats as well as Republicans; some had protested the Vietnam War when they were younger. They’d been active in the civil rights movement. There was an interesting mixture of conservatives and liberals. And I vividly remember one weapons scientist telling me that he could never work on conventional weapons, because it would be immoral. He felt much more comfortable working on nuclear weapons, because he was convinced that nuclear weapons would never be used. I was very struck that he felt morally cleaner working on weapons that could destroy a city than he would have felt working on napalm.

The other thing I found was that about three-fourths of the people I interviewed were some form of active Christian. Most of them belonged to fairly moderate, midline Christian denominations: Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans. Relatively few belonged to the born-again Baptist sects. I did meet a few weapons designers who were evangelical. I found them the most troubling to get to know, because some of them believed that their work designing nuclear weapons was part of God’s plan, described in Revelations, to dissolve the Earth in fire and bring about the Day of Judgment. But most of the weapons scientists didn’t see much conflict between Christianity and designing weapons of mass destruction, and they were quite sure the weapons would never be used.

Critics of the arms race have focused on this strong belief held by weapons professionals, that nuclear weapons will never be used. Robert J. Lifton, the great antinuclear psychiatrist, has talked about it as a form of denial.

Helen Caldicott: Let’s go deeper into what you discovered about these actual bomb designers.

Hugh Gusterson: Since 1992 the United States hasn’t conducted any nuclear tests, something that causes some pain to the nuclear weapons scientists who were practicing a form of science that’s now a forbidden experiment. They can no longer test complete weapons, but they feel some bitterness about that. But back in the old days, up to 1992, life at the lab was structured around the design of new weapons and the testing of new weapons, so the lab produced nuclear tests. What they really lived for was to tweak the design of old weapons to figure out ways of making the weapons smaller and lighter, squeezing more explosive yield out of less plutonium, making them slightly different shapes. Weapons designers would compete with one another, proposing fiendish new design ideas that would be vetted by review committees within the Pentagon. If the designer was lucky enough to have one of the few ideas that made it onto the shot schedule, then they would work quite feverishly, often for months, as the tests neared completion. Particularly in the last weeks before a test, these designers could be working seventy-, even eighty-hour weeks. I would hear stories of people sleeping in cots in their offices in the lab. It culminated with a trip down to the nuclear test site in Nevada where nuclear weapons were tested.

The bomb would have vaporized enough of the earth that eventually a crater would collapse, and some of the designers to this day like to go down to the Nevada test site and look at their craters. These massive movements of earth.

They would dig an enormous, great hole, and the device—it’s never called a bomb—would be loaded onto a great canister with lots of very complicated, expensive diagnostic equipment. That diagnostic equipment would be completely destroyed in the nuclear tests. Its job was to measure the output of the nuclear device, in a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second, before it’s vaporized by what it’s measuring. These tests, by the late 1980s, were costing as much as $50 million apiece, and about eighteen a year were run. So you would watch the device being placed in this hole, with diagnostic equipment attached, and the hole gets backfilled, because it would have been a violation of international treaties for radiation to escape and cross international borders when the test happened. Then they would retreat to the control room, and from there they would watch a flickering of needles on the oscilloscopes, and that’s all they would see. It wasn’t like the old days, when nuclear weapons were tested aboveground and you would have to put on very thick glasses to protect your eyes from the flash, feel the heat and the shock wave and all that. It was more of a sterile experience by the 1980s, when nuclear testing had been forced underground.

Then came the final stage of the process: within a few hours of the explosion usually an enormous crater would appear in the desert. The bomb would have vaporized enough of the earth that eventually a crater would collapse, and some of the designers to this day like to go down to the Nevada test site and look at their craters. These massive movements of earth.

Helen Caldicott: Tell us about their psychological state as they built up to their very precious device.

Hugh Gusterson: It’s like any kind of creative process that’s very intense. It’s like someone working on a dissertation or a musician working on a recording. They become absorbed in the task. Unlike writing a book, this is a much more collective process, in which people have to interact with people in massive teams of chemists and engineers and machinists; people become quite tightly bonded. People would talk about feeling this psychological letdown when it’s over. They’d been working so feverishly, and suddenly it was over—what do you do? It’s a sort of vacuum that appears in their lives afterward. So the scientists are having this incredibly intense experience, bonding with their team.

For their families this experience was a real loss. The scientists are often traveling, so they’re not at home. Even if they’re not traveling, they’re working long hours in the lab and can’t be home very much. They can’t bring the work home, because it’s secret, so wives of weapons scientists would talk about being “science widows.” Their husbands weren’t dead, but they would be bereft of their husbands’ presence. They became psychologically focused on something going on elsewhere that they weren’t allowed to talk about, so their kids and wives would talk about this sense of having lost a family member in the process leading up to a test.

I’m talking about scientists’ wives as if all of these people are men. The majority are men, but by no means all of them. In the 1980s when I was doing my fieldwork, only about 5 percent of physics PhDs in the United States went to women. Physics was a male-dominated discipline. Actually, at the weapons labs there was a slight over-representation of women weapons designers, more like 6 percent or 7 percent. One woman weapons designer at Los Alamos told me that she thought that the female mind was particularly well suited to nuclear weapons design, because when you change one variable everything else changes with it. She argued that women think more holistically, so they had a better aptitude for nuclear weapons design.

Helen Caldicott: In the past you’ve described some of the terminology the scientists used. One talked about giving birth to the bomb and the need to push. And then, after the explosion, they talked about postnatal depression.

The language of death is banished from the world of nuclear weapons scientists; they don’t talk about killing people; they talk about collateral damage. People are not incinerated; they’re always carbonized.

Hugh Gusterson: They also talk about missiles being connected to the outside world by umbilical cords. The very first bomb tested was referred to as Oppenheimer’s baby. The one dropped on Hiroshima was Little Boy. So there is this language of metaphors of birth that surrounds this bomb enterprise. They talk about the results of radioactive decay processes as being daughter products. So there is this language of fertility and birth. There’s a man called Brian Easlea who’s a psychoanalytically-inclined academic, and he’s argued that this is all about men with birth envy. Because they can’t give birth the way women can, they’re trying to do something as awesome as birth. Testing a nuclear weapon is something as awesome as birth, so they’re betraying their deeper unconscious motives by using all this language of birth. I’ve asked many weapons scientists why they use these birth metaphors, and they say, You use birth metaphors to describe any creative process, don’t you? The language of death is banished from the world of nuclear weapons scientists; they don’t talk about killing people; they talk about collateral damage. People are not incinerated; they’re always carbonized—anesthetizing language from which death is banished. But there’s this very rich set of metaphors about birth. I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t an attempt on their part to say, We’re really about life, we’re not about killing people. Which you can see as a form of denial.

Helen Caldicott: Talk about the Replacement Reliable Warhead.

Hugh Gusterson: In 1992, the administration of Bush the Elder agreed to end nuclear testing. When Bill Clinton came to power he decided to turn the moratorium on nuclear testing into a test-ban treaty, which his administration negotiated. The weapons labs were not very happy about this.

Helen Caldicott: They can still keep some in storage.

Hugh Gusterson: They were worried that with this stockpile they could no longer work on improvements. Its design features were being frozen in place. They were worried about how to train a new generation of weapons designers without them being able to do any testing. Traditionally, the way you train designers is that you apprentice them until they get their own test. That old system of apprenticeship can’t work anymore. They were worried that these weapons they had designed were very temperamental, right on the edge of working properly. They were concerned that, as they aged, they might not work. They struck a bargain in which they agreed that if the Clinton administration gave them more money not to test nuclear weapons than they had given them to test nuclear weapons in the past, they would find a way of maintaining the stockpile and training new designers without nuclear testing.

They developed this enormous program of simulations called stockpile stewardship. It’s a way of simulating aspects of nuclear tests; for example, the Lawrence Livermore lab is in the process of building the most powerful laser on earth. It’s a $5 billion project. When it’s finished it will create temperatures and pressures greater than those inside the sun.* It will do this about 500 yards from a suburban housing development. When they push a button it will use the entire U.S. electricity supply for a fraction of an instant. So there’s an astonishing machine that enables the scientist to figure out more about the processes within a nuclear explosion and offers a different way of training young scientists. Since the 1990s the weapons labs have been building this very lavish program of simulations, and they’ve been recruiting new young designers. These temperamental, high-end new weapons they designed—as the parts wear out you can’t replace them with identical parts. They’d like to replace what is a stockpile of Porsches with a stockpile of Honda Civics. And the RRW, the Reliable Replacement Warhead, is a sort of bomb that will be superreliable. The point of designing it is also to give younger designers something to do so they can learn how to design a weapon. They had a design competition between Livermore and Los Alamos. Livermore won, and it looked as though they would be given $100 million to design a prototype RRW. Then Congress pulled the plug on the funding, and it’s been completely canceled. The weapons labs were begging for $10 million just to keep hope alive, to do little computer studies on it, and Congress didn’t even allow them to have that.

It is notoriously difficult for the United States to kill a weapons program. President Jimmy Carter thought he’d canceled the B-1 bomber, but military contractors waited for a more sympathetic president and brought it back. It was later used to drop bombs on Iraq.

Helen Caldicott: It’s totally hypocritical for the United States, even if they’re not replacing their warheads, to lecture other countries about not developing their own warheads, when America still has in stockpile, ready to go, thousands of hydrogen bombs, which could induce nuclear winter and the end of most life on Earth.

Hugh Gusterson: When the United States ratified the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970, one of the things they ratified was Article 6, which committed the established nuclear powers to negotiate, in good faith, ending the arms race and eliminating all nuclear weapons. In 1970 they agreed to a prompt cessation of the nuclear arms program. I don’t think many people would think that waiting until 1992 to end nuclear testing was a prompt cessation of the nuclear arms race...

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Excerpted from Loving This Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World, edited by Helen Caldicott, to be published by New Press, September 2012. © 2012 Helen Caldicott.

Greenpeace Blogs l Bunny McDiarmid  10 July, 2012 Today is the 27th anniversary of the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French secret service agents here in Auckland harbor. That is a long time ago now, but every year at this time I am remi...

"When new presidents were briefed about how it worked, they found it unthinkable. “And we call ourselves the human race,” John F. Kennedy is said to have commented."

It is time to de-alert the weapons, the Cold War is over. The U.S. and Russia are no longer enemies, if not always best friends. The Washington Post is right, we are 13 minutes to doomsday, and for what? Launch on warning pressures presidents to push the doomsday button, it insures there won't be time to think it through. It leaves the entire world vulnerable to hackers, computer failure, bad decisions, and human error.

It is time to put the missiles away and pull out the voice of reason. Differences can be worked out far more easily than reassembling the planet after a nuclear war. If there's anyone left to do it.

Washington Post Editorial l 8 July, 2012

THROUGHOUT THE Cold War, the United States kept land-based missiles with nuclear warheads on alert and ready to launch in three to four minutes after the president gave the order. Every president of the missile age was briefed about the procedure: In the event of an impending attack, the decision to launch would have to be made in 13 minutes or less. The theory of deterrence was that the United States had to threaten certain and large-scale retaliation against the Soviet Union, and that meant being prepared to shoot fast.

When new presidents were briefed about how it worked, they found it unthinkable. “And we call ourselves the human race,” John F. Kennedy is said to have commented. Not the least of their worries was the prospect of incomplete or faulty warning — a bad signal from a satellite, perhaps, or a missile launched by accident or by rogue actors. There was never a real missile attack during the superpower arms race, but there were serious false alarms.

Today, two decades after the end of the Cold War, one-third of U.S. strategic forces, including almost all land-based missiles and some sea-based, are still on launch-ready alert. ..

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Alice Slater l Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and Power in Space 19 June, 2012 In 2000, I traveled to India, invited to speak at the organizing meeting of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear and Disarmament and Peace.  About 600 organizations...