Cold War

The hidden agenda of the Cold War

First and foremost is the legacy of the cold war was a trillion dollar nuclear arms race that led to death and destruction unlike any previous war. With the advent of nuclear weapons and radioactive fallout, the dna of people and all living beings worldwide have been contaminated. The deadly radioactive element Plutonium which did not exist on the planet is now in the bones of everyone as a result of nuclear weapons.

The cold war was packaged to Americans as an ideological war. For anyone alive today that experienced the recent invasion of Iraq, the same kind of us vs. them mentality was in play against the evil empire. The Cold War was nearly a century in the making and evolved directly out of the conflict between working people around the world and the super elite ruling classes of Europe and America. During the first decades of the industrial revolution workers were treated like beasts of burden. The advent of mass production factories and Taylorism, to repressive treatment of children created a huge chasm that pushed workers around the world to embrace radical changes like socialism.

As ever growing numbers of Europeans came to America to escape the repressive monarchies they brought with them the ideas and European labor organizing strategies. Yes, the roots of the cold war are all about the ruling elites fear of workers and their call for democratic control over the means of production. Since workers were rapidly making alliances across national boundries, it became the number one strategy of the corporate elite to label workers traitors. America and Europe's wealthiest were absolutely terrified of the idea that workering people wanted democratic principles in the workplace, even worker ownership.

The collapse of economies around the world during the late 1920's was the real start of the cold war as working people gained a rare ally with the election of President Franklin Roosevelt. His open support for working people (the New Deal) was hated by the ruling class (FDR's own mother called him a traitor). After FDR's death the country's military propaganda machine and conservatively held national media led the drumbeat against the Soviet menace calling for the all out development of a nuclear weapons. Few Americans today can imagine the fact that FDR won four presidential terms in office, the last three without any support from the country's media. This country's media did everything in its power to undermine the New Deal, yet working people were given far more than just Social Security, but the first American presidency to actively enforce and professional regulate the corporate giants of Wall Street.

In reality the Cold War was about several simulteanous global tensions, the foremost being America's unstated takeover of Britain's global emperial agenda. The country's elite went from being highly isolationist to taking on the global role of playing a dominant military role around the world. America whether the public was aware of it or not had inheritted the brutal mantle of emperial Europe's past. Rather than seeking to engage the Soviet machine in democracizing the world, we would bring the very Nazi scientists who we had just defeated to America to help launch a new chapter in the war between working people and elite.

The fallout from the Cold War went far beyond ideological values. The people of the world represent a far more complex cultural mix than the "You're with us or against us" ring wing mentality that drove the world over half of the 20th century. This era was more about the brutal takedown of organized labor using the corporate media as a propaganda machine to frighten and misguide American people into taking the worst possible path of antagonism towards democratic values worldwide.

The most classic example of this nightmare was with Vietnam. At the end of World War II, The French were demanding that they be given emperial control of Vietnam. Ho Chi Ming came to the U.S. and showed President Truman a copy of their proposed constitution which was a copy of the America's. They sought to copy our values and requested that the country be given its freedom from colonial French rule. Truman would make a devastating mistake of handing Vietnam back to the oppressive French, which resulted in the war that continued until 1975. Our refusal to support Ming led to the radicalization of the freedom movement that could have been averted.

At the end of World War II, the colonial powers of Europe controlled most of the world. At the end of the cold world, most of that control was lost or replaced by independent freedom movements across Africa, South America and Asia. We were on the wrong side of those battles everywhere on the planet and we lost. Rather than properly framing these struggles around the world for what they were, they were cast in the false guise of spheres of influence, communist vs. freedom. Countries that had once been undemocratically ruled by European military force were unable to stop the forces of independence and were thus forced to support military dictatorships to keep almost the entire world from turning socialist. Soon Even most of Europe threw off its royalist yoke and moved towards a social vs. elite split that dominates the continent's political values to this day.

In most of the world today, its not hard to see the benefits of social democracy, that is unless you are a resident of America where the propaganda machine that institigated the war has never allowed such heretical thoughts to emerge. Today liberals or progressives are labeled as traitors or worse for suggesting that working people should be able to have access to democratic values vs. the top down dominator agenda of the wealthiest elite.

With the collapse of the Soviet empire this very same military industrial complex had to seek out and find another enemy to rationalize the spending of more money militarily than the rest of the world combined. It is this very top down corporate military industrial complex and its Machevellian Pax Americana dream that now threatens to set off the largest extinction in millions of years that will set the planet's biosphere back millions of years. There is no greater threat to all life on this planet today than those that are terrified of democratically run societies.

It is the DOE's primary job to carry out cold war agenda as laid out in the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. Here are some of the major aspects of this agenda:

Please note that the Soviet side of the cold war is neither condoned or rationalized as atrocities were carried out by both sides.

Japan

The Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan

The U.S. is the only country to have ever used nuclear bombs on civilian targets. Note that president Truman who okayed the dropping of the bombs lied to the public that the Japanese bombs were dropped on military targets. The bombs, which were originally meant as a counter to the German nuclear weapons program have been rationalized as a quick solution to ending World War II. The bombs supposedly saved thousands of American military personel from having to physically subdue the Japanese people.

Yes, it was war. Millions of people had already lost their lives. America in what has to be the most unethical positions of the 20th century followed the Nazi's own acts of attacking civilian populations after Germany broke with traditional rules of engagement. So we fire bombed Dresden and Tokyo and then dropped two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed over 300,000 civilians, setting the stage for a global nuclear arms race with the Soviet empire.

The Manhattan Project was first called Uranium Committee in 1939 after Albert Einstein's letter warning FDR of Germany's nuclear plans. The project of building the two bombs was originally hatched by businessmen and politicians in a secretive enclave called the Bohemian Club that annually brought together some of the country's most powerful corporate and political figures at a retreat north of San Francisco California. The University of California would take a lead role in managing the hundreds of scientists that would be the genesis of the project with its first two major labs at Los Alamos where the bombs were constructed and at facilities set up by UC scientist Lawrence Livermore at what is today known as the Livermore Labs.

This secret group of scientists worked throughout the war to extract, enrich and produce the first nuclear devices ever used. Robert Oppenheimer, who coordinated the scientists during the war would be forever tainted as being a security risk afterwords by the man who by many has come to be known as Dr. Stranglove (Edward Teller) and his crazed alliance of proteges.

It would be dismayed scientests from the Manahattan Project who would organize the first opposition to the continued development and push for ever larger nuclear weapons. Albert Einstein would be among those opposed.

Energy Net: Main DOE News Library  ORNL  Hanford  Los Alamos  Savannah River  Livermore

Islanders

DOE official History link

The Atomic Bombs that were dropped on Pacific Islands

The U.S. is still living with what it did to numerous Pacific Islands after World War II. After defeating Japan we took control of many small nations from Guam to the Marshall Islands where atmospheric tests completely anhilated islands and in some cases making what was left permanently uninhabittable. Guam for example is attempting to get itself listed as an downwinder culture while continued fighting over health effects payments and a push by the U.S. government to forced islanders to return to areas that they still consider radioactively contaminated is taking place today. France and the UK also did testing in the Pacific effecting the health and lands of aboriginal people as well that are still in deep dispute right up to the present.

Vets

The Atomic Bombs tested in Nevada with Veterans watching

In what is clearly one of the most devastating maneuvers of the cold war, a half million military service men during the 1950's were intentionally exposed to substantial doses of radioactive fallout without informing them of the dangers. Much later, they or their families were given cash payments, yet what price was paid for the damages to their health and their genetic heritage?

The dangers of radiation to health impacts were not fully understood, yet there had already been decades of previous health effects that were known. We were supposed giving soldiers combat experience during nuclear exchanges. Yet, after Hiroshima the deadly impacts from radiation exposure and severe burns were hidden from the public. There could be no other implication other than the fact that this country was preparing to actively use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Not until years after the Cuban Missile Crisis did American strategists realize just how clinically insane such an act would have resulted in with much of America's eastern seaboard being destroyed by nuclear bombs.

Yet, it took little real work to discover that the Soviet's were making ever larger bombs at the same pace we were on a scale that should have if made public would have brought down the whole nuclear race by the mid 1950's.

Downwinders

Atomic Fallout affects US population nationwide

This is probably the most controversial aspect of this country's nuclear weapons testing program. Between 1948 and 1963 the USA tested hundreds of above ground nuclear weapons tests. Each test released radiation that spread across the country. The DOE(AEC) kept detailed records on each test and where the radiation went, keeping the details secret from the public. Even though oposition to the above ground testing started almost from the beginning the opponents nor the public were never told about where the fallout landed.

In 1998 a massive 13 year investigative compilation of the tests was forced to go public after political pressure disclosed the report's existance.

Oak Ridge nuclear complex

Miners

Uranium Mining impacts on native people

Thousands of uranium miners were offered jobs that destroyed their health, their families and their communities. Most of these miners were native american tribal people located in the southwest. Nearly 60 years after mining started, there are still impacts. The impacts are just plain horrific and represent one of the very worst examples of environmental racism.

If you wish to learn more about the historic scandals surrounding uranium mining, you can go here where there are extensive details. In brief, this country has been fed a false image of just how substantial the impacts and damages have been. The country has produced over 100 million cubic yards of uranium tailings at thousands of abandoned mines, many of which have yet to be cleaned up. One report suggested that it would cost at least $30 billion in taxpayer funding to cleanup the contamination left behind by private companies from here and around the world that closed their operations when the uranium industry collapsed in 1990.

There are many major episodes like the country's largest nuclear accident at Rio Peurco that released far more radiation TMI did when a massive uranium tailings dam collapsed on Navajo lands. From native people using the contaminated tailings to make homes, to one instance where an entire city had its streets, sidewalks, public buildings and all nearly all of the foundations of private homes were made out of tailings. Or the massive tailings pile that to this day is endangering the entire Colorado River, there is scandal after scandal that has mostly been never been told in any kind of detail that might help most Americans understand the deadly nature of uranium that is just never mentioned when speaking of either nuclear weapons or power development, especially what will happen around the world if there is a dramatic increase in uranium mining to meet the needs of the proposed global push to build hundreds of new nuclear reactors that the nuclear industry is pushing.

DOE Fallout Library
DOE "national security" page
DOE: Office of Health, Safety & Environment
DU Gulf Exposure Report
DOE: Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program
DOL: Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program

Workers

The contamination of nuclear fuel cycle workers

There have been over 600,000 workers who spent time involved in the production of nuclear fuel for commerical nuclear energy and our weapons programs over the last 60 years. Activists estimate that at least 400,000 of them have had health impacts. The scope of these impacts represents another one of the most explosive scandals in this country. It wasn't until the very end of the Clinton administration was there an attempt to compensate those who have had their health and genetic futures damaged or destroyed.

The true scope of this scandal has yet to fully been told. During the Bush administration, the Dept. of Labor which was put in charge of managing the worker compensation program has paid out over a billion dollars for workers claims yet, during that time ever more numbers of workers died trying to get help as a result of an adversarial process that pitted individual workers against the legal resources of the government. Of over 100,000 workers that had applied for compensation less than one in four received help.

In one of the most scandalous examples the health records of one of the major facilities in Ohio were purposely radioactively contaminated and then buried in a nuclear waste dump across the country. At the Rocky Flat's plutonium facility neighbors living near the facility were given hundreds of millions of dollars in legal compensation due to contamination including one of the nation's worst nuclear incidents in the 1950's.

National Cancer Institute Study: Estimated exposure to Americans from nuclear testing

DOE: Human Radiation Experiments
DOE Worker's being killed by Bureaucrats
DOE Corruption at Knolls Lab
The Hormesis Claim that low levels of radiation is safe
Human Experimentation, Plutonium, and Colonel Stafford Warren
Human medical experimentation in the United States 1833-1965
UK: Fallout, Denials, and Trials: Recognizing the Health Legacy of Nuclear Test Veterans
Radiation Scandals
Energy Net: Atomic Veteran News Library
Energy Net: EEOICPA News Library

Civilians

The intentional contamination of civilians without their knowledge

There can be no more outrageous scandal that the intentional radioactive contamination of civilians without their consent or knowledge. Yet, this maccabre nightmare took place for decades and to this day very likely is still taking place.

At the end of the 1980's with national concern peaking about the nuclear issue, former astronaut and Senator John Glenn held national hearings after being tipped about this scandal. Attempts to hide this dark moment from the public at large is still unlike almost any revelation this country has ever had to acknowledge.

In one of the most agregious examples, Officials at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state in the 1950's purposely released hundreds of thousands of curies of Iodine 131 that spread across the state resulting in the region having one of the higher rates of cancer in the country.

Prisoners and the mentally handicapped were injected with radiation without consent or knowledge, some dying.

When would it finally become public that America harbored some of the very same Nazi scientists who tortured Jews and other minorities during World War two, which then turned their experimental research on citizens here! Does this sound to nuts or what!

Sadly, as a result of this criminal activity the US government is required by statute to maintain a public website that documents these actions. The location of the site is routinely changing so that it is very difficult to find unless one knows exactly what to search for online.

DOE Database on Waste Management and Cleanup
DOE Tribal Nuclear Cleanup Program
DOE National Environmental Policy Act
DOE: Yucca Mountain Project: Web site closed
Mathew Wald: A New Vision for Nuclear Waste
WIPP: Waste Issolation Pilot Project
Info: Tank Waste Treatment list
DU Hex Management Program
DOE: Long-Term Stewardship Project
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management
DOE: Blue Ribbon Nuclear Waste Commission

Energy Net: Yucca Mountain Repository News Library
Energy Net: Waste Isolation Pilot Project News Library
Energy Net: West Valley cleanup Project
Energy Net: Energy Solutions low level waste facility News Library
Energy Net: Nuclear Waste News Library
Las Vegas Review: Yucca Mt. News Archives

Politics

Machevellian Bullying and the Nuclear Club

The politics of the nuclear era are nothing short of catastrophic. It must be reinforced here just how cataclismic the nuclear agenda has been on this country's values and how they have played out over the last half of the 20th century, right up to the present. Nuclear brinksmanship continues to be played today. Humanity has yet to shift from a purely Freudian-Machevellian militant dominator mindset that is base assumptions that humans are incapable of doing good. This country inherited the global agenda of the British after World War II and is now quickly seeing itself in a twighlight of power as the rest of the world, no longer comfortable with this country's bullying seeks to find a way to survive the growing problems of over population and global resource depletion issues. The U.S. use of force to maintain the control of middle eastern oil supplies has set off a new generation of tensions that can only be reversed if this country ends it bullying tactics.

At present, there is absolutely no indication anywhere within the power elite of either party on how it could reverse the course it is on. Both parties are now fully in the grasp of Wall Street and are incapable of ending this countries reliance on wealthy money to reverse decades of growing political corruption. The current president is incapable of obtaining enough votes to reverse the rightwing based nuclear mindset that is built into every single Pork barrell DOE political tap dance in the country.

The first president in history not to be overtly pro-nuclear weapons was Bill Clinton and he nearly fried for taking dramatic actions like not promoting an ardent weapons promoter to the head of the agency. The current president doesn't even come close to Clinton's attempt to counter the pro-nuclear culture that dominates the DOE. His Nobel Peace Prize is nothing short of nuclear dressing. Compared to his dramatic stand to shut down NASA's massive budget in a time of economic crisis we are witnessing dramatic increases in DOE's nuclear funding! His Nobel Peace Prize should be revoked until he uses his bully pulpit to tell the people of this country why DOE needs to be completely overhauled.

His call for a 30% reduction in nuclear weapons is not enough. There will still be thousands of bombs left that could wipe humanity off the face of the earth. Why are we still on hair trigger alert against Russia's nuclear arsenal? The world has called on the U.S. to stop its bigotted middle eastern nuclear weapons policy it. Nuclear tensions are now greater than ever between the muslim and Indian world. Global tensions that are based on who can deliver a nuclear weapon continues to drive the world into ever greater regional dangers.

After over 50 years of lying to the Japanese public a new political era came into power dislosing the past lies to a society that has long called for a nuclear free world. Tensions between North Korea, China, Iran and Russia continue to as the single most destablizing political problem in the world today. Action speaks louder than words, and in no country of the world has the nuclear agenda been acted on more than in the U.S. Former President George W. Bush threatened to used nuclear weapons against Iraq in 2003 and today the fear of weapons falling into the hands of terrorists is a product of 50 years of failed anti-proliferation regimes that have been mostly ignored.

Andrew Lichterman: The U.S. Plan to Modernize its Nuclear Weapons Complex
Controversial History of Radiation Epidemiology and Risk Estimation
Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement

Legacy

The legacy of radioactive waste at nuclear facilities

There is no greater peril to humanity and all biological life than the stockpile of nuclear materials scattered around the globe. The list of nuclear materials that will remain deadly for eons is beyond the capacity of any known technical solution today, and very likely for all time. From the materials that the nuclear establishment wants like functioning nuclear weapons, Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU), isotopes used in medicine, food sterilization, industrial processes, or the waste streams from either nuclear weapons, or commercial nuclear uses, there are now well over 600 known radioactive isotopes that scientists are aware of, or are being used.

These isotopes have half-lives from a few seconds into millions of years or even longer. Russia and the USA have over 90% of these materials, with America having spent the last 20 years formulating a plan to deal with its wastes while there is absolutely nothing on Russia's horizon to deal with their waste nightmare. A major division of the Department of Energy called the office of Environmental Management has estimated that it will cost between $270-330 billion between 1997 and 2047 to deal with this country's nuclear weapons wastes. The very largest location of where these contaminants are is at the DOE's Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington followed by the Nevada's nuclear weapons testing grounds.

At present time the DOE has one major nuclear waste facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Project located in a salt dome in New Mexico that is rapidly becoming the home for much of this country's military wastes. Yet, it was not designed to deal with very worst of the worst which is currently housed in large semi-buried tank farm at Hanford of liquid wastes. When this tank farm was first built in the late 1950's. Americans were told that the tanks would be the state of the art solution that would last for hundred's of years. Yet, with 20 years the tanks had started leaking but also represented dangers of major radiation releases. "The scientific" claims made by the country's leading experts represents the hard cold reality that we have no real solution nor will have that this country can afford other than dumping the wastes in places that won't endanger the world some time in the near future.

In 1982 the US congress started a process to deal with the most deadly commercial and weapons wastes when they passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. With the Act's passage the DOE and congress ganged up on the politically weak state of Nevada and chose it as the home of where the country would dump the spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors. The place chosen was on the disputed homelands of the Shoshone Indian tribe at a place called Yucca Mountain. The Shoshone refuses to relinguish its ownership of Yucca Mountain and has demanded that all work stop from the start of the project onward.

In 1993 just after the DOE built offices to oversee $100 billion construction of the repository, an earthquake destroyed one of them. 20 years later, President Obama withdrew Yucca Mountain as the country's dumping site after the State of Nevada's heroic twenty year battle to stop the dump. The state had shown that every major scientific claim being made by the DOE were wrong or seriously flawed. The battle played a central role in the wrongful election of George Bush in 2000. Today this country is having to start again with what to do with radioactive wastes that will remain deadly for millions of years.

Yet these highly deadly wastes which nuclear proponents routinely claims as being very small in quantity, truly are small in quantity when compared to the rest of the country's nuclear wastes.

Over 90% of all radioactive wastes this country all come from the first step of uranium mining. Today, most uranium mining is done on poor people's lands in other countries. Just as this country has shipped all of its industrial jobs overseas, it has also shipped all of the uranium mining to Canada, Australia, Africa or Asia (Kazahkstan). Yet there are literally thousands of football fields full of abandoned uranium mining tailings spread across the western USA, most it on tribal lands that have damaged the people's health, their environment and their future. In Congressional hearings in 2008 it was shown that programs set up over 30 years ago to cleanup abandoned uranium mines by companies have yet to be done. And now we are being told that a whole new group of giant corporations want to use our 1872 mining laws to come onto federal and reservation lands, dig up uranium at the taxpayer's expense! Fool me once, shame on you... There is close to 100 million cubic meters of uranium tailings that will remaind deadly for millions of years that still contain 85% of the radiation it held prior to being mined. These tailings are contaminated the west's water and air to this day with no real long term solution other than throw it into a nuclear waste dump. These dump's have some of the very worst regulatory oversight imaginable. So the wastes dumped in them today will still be dangerous generations from now, when the dumps start to leak leaving our children to clean up our messes. Please note, that every single radioactive waste dump this country has ever created eventually failed and has had to be cleanup up and paid for by taxdollars, while the companies that dumped and profitted from them are either bankrupt, moved elsewhere, or in the case of U.S. Ecology are now dumping wastes at a dump in Washington on federal lands.

As part of the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act back in the early 1980's the nuclear industry went shopping for a plan to build 13 nuclear waste dumps across the country. The federal legislation dictated that the states would have build nuclear waste dumps and take deed to nuclear wastes created by America's nuclear businesses. Over the next 15 years, every single dump planned was blocked by public oppostion. It left the country with a small number of dumps that had been set up in the late 1960's or 1970's that were rapidly filling up with no place to store the ever growing rad-waste, even though the nuclear power industry as well as the country's uranium mining industries had all but collapsed. Attempts to burn radioactive wastes was all but halted except in the heart of the nuclear industry in Tennessee where to this day the government still incinerates radioactive wastes. The industry's watchdog, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been deregulating wastes for decades only to run up against public opposition. Yet in a recent nationally syndicated investigative piece by the Knight Ridder chain of which the rest of the national media refused to cover, there are regulat stories of rad-waste getting recycled into consumer products. A recent global news story out of India where deadly medical equipment got recycled, killing one and putting 8 others into hospital is again a non-story within the pro-nuclear media here.

A generation ago, the accidents, scandals and economic fallout of the deranged nuclear maniacs of this country was shut down. Today, we are being told that we should trust these same mad scientists when they are now covering up ever growing crisis at an increasingly aging nuclear reactor fleet. The Chernobyl accident in 1986 wiped out the entire economic benefits of the Russian nuclear era. Today, we watch as the global media hide the ever growing fallout from that accident, implying that it could never happen, just as the exact same claims were made about the massive Gulf Oil spill. It only takes one catastrophe, and with over 100 aging reactors across the country, the chances are that we will see a disaster that could pull the country into a devestating economic crisis similar to what happend around Chernobyl, or Katrina and New Orleans is inevitable. In 1990 the Wall Street Journal estimated the costs to cleanup Chernobyl with be hundred's of billions of dollars. That accident required over 600,000 drafted workers to deal with the event. Are we ready to claim with 100% certainty that this will not happen here, when the country is facing an evergrowing economic belt tightening era?

We are economically trapped into continuing to use old reactors, as the nuclear industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince a gullible public that we should build another new generation of reactors at prices that will surely steal what few dollars we have left that were going into wind, solar or conservation. Power sources that could also reduce our greenhouse footprint, make far more jobs and reverse the devastating idiocy of letting too big too fail energy giants continue to rule this country's energy policies.

DU

Radioactive Bullets: Depleted Uranium

There is no modern weapon that has created more censorship, health impacts and controversy, than depleted uranium. From a dangerous byproduct of the enrichment process to an advanced weapon that may have affected the lives of millions of people in Yugoslavia, the middle east to military testing sites from Hawaii to Puerto Rico (Vieques) this radioactive weapon is the modern equivalent to Agent Orange.

Just as this issue raises its head at the international level, US government and military strategists use their claims of authority to douse all coverage of this issue other than some kind of minor irritation. Activists have been driven off the internet by military tactics, yet the recent controversy in the middle east where thousands of children are turning up horribly deformed or coming down in ever growing numbers with leukemia won't just dissappear no matter the tactics used within the USA.