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The Marshall Islands, Nuclear Testing, and the NPT
Lasrick writes: Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment, details the horrific consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands and explains the lawsuits the Marshallese have filed against the nuclear weapons states. The lawsuits hope to close the huge loophole those states carved for themselves with the vague wording of Article VI of the NPT (Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty), wording that allows those states to delay, seemingly indefinitely, implementing the disarmament they agreed to when they signed the treaty.
The damage done to them was only by the United States
The NPT is not violated by any member state's actions, read it.
As horrible as nuclear weapons are, and as ideal as a world without them would be, this is wishful thinking at its best. The level of trust and cooperation required for everyone to give up nuclear weapons is in large part simply impossible given the current state of human and world affairs. We've certainly not managed to eliminate war or armed conflict. All we've done is limit its scope and size.
And speaking of that, it's in large part due to nuclear weapons that there have been no major wars in the past 70 years. The most we've seen were proxy wars that were limited in scope, and while many of those were horrible, they pale in comparison to the two World Wars, or really any of the major power conflicts that preceded them. The world with nuclear-armed major powers is paradoxically MORE peaceful than the world before it was. Prior to the nuclear age, it's difficult to go more than 20-30 years without two or more major powers going to war. The presence of nuclear weapons was the final thing that made "Total War" too costly a concept for rational actors to even consider it.
Reduce their number and scope? Sure, by all means. Get rid of them entirely? That's quite a different thing.
The ethics of nations maintaining nuclear arsenals is a debate not likely to be resolved soon. However, the nasty things our defense research scientists did to the people living on the Marshall Islands is hopefully something everyone could agree is not OK.
There hasn't been another world war since major states nuked up, so I'd prefer everyone stayed armed, thank you very much.
So we've entered the endless small war phase. BFD.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
This lawsuit is a legal mess, destined to fail. In fact, it already did fail and they're just trying futilely to revive it. All applicable statutes of limitations passed years ago. You can't wait decades to file a lawsuit. Equally as importantly, "The Marshall Islands" as a political subdivision does not have standing to sue for injuries that occurred to specific people and property there. Those people and property owners would have to sue, not their regional government. Finally, the decisions which were made and the actions taken were political decisions made by the United States in exercise of its sovereign authority - and you can't sue for that. It seems that the plaintiffs know this, which is why they are now trying to frame the lawsuit as a claim to enforce the NPT. The problem with that is, yet again, a lack of standing on several levels, and an inaccurate interpretation of the treaty itself. First, there is no cause of action through which any individual or entity can force the government to comply with or enforce a treaty. International relations are solely the sovereign domain of the federal government, and they can decide to abide by (or disregard) treaties as our elected officials see fit. Second, the treaty is not being violated. It does not require disarmament, nor is there a mandatory timeline for any particular disarmament-related activity. It says the signatories will negotiate towards an agreement regarding disarmament. That's not an enforceable mandate in any meaningful sense. Why? Because the signatories never actually had any intention of disarming, so they made an agreement that didn't require them to disarm. A third party can't come in and force them to abide by a deal they didn't make in the first place. Look, the Marshallese got screwed. There was a discriminatory component to that. It wouldn't happen the same way today. But the bottom line is that we needed a place to test weapons of mass destruction, and the Marshall Islands were the best choice available. So the US did what they had to do to make the program work. They should have provided market-based compensation for the taking of land, and they should have relocated everyone out of the zone of danger, turning the entire area into a restricted military installation before blowing it up repeatedly. There should have been no injuries and no uncompensated loss of property. But the reasonable conclusion to take away from those events is not that nuclear weapons should be eliminated, or that the tests shouldn't have been conducted at that location. They served a critical purpose for national security, and anyone who says otherwise is a revisionist with an agenda.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
since he knows the U.S. government won't do anything to him.
It's mutual. He's irrelevant.
You are starting with a relatively small number of people, probably better to think of it as a percentage
In the short term:
"A number of the 64 inhabitants of Rongelap experienced immediate radiation sickness including vomiting, skin damage and hair loss. By the time they were evacuated from the area two days after the detonation of Castle Bravo, some of the islanders had received 175 rads (See Chart 2) from gamma radiation and 160 rads from I-131"
http://www.ctbto.org/nuclear-t...
In the long term:
"We estimate that the nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands will cause about 500 additional cancer cases among Marshallese exposed during the years 1946-1958, about a 9% increase over the number of cancers expected in the absence of exposure to regional fallout."
http://marshall.csu.edu.au/Mar...
So, you are probably saying, wow, just over 500 people affected, pretty small number if you consider Bhopal and Chernobyl
But if you consider that the population of the islands was 10,000 at the time, then that is 5% of their population, which is significant
There is also the persistent presence of isotopes that raise the expectation of cancer for all people to 9% over people not from the Marshall islands
They certainly have a legitimate beef with the government, whether they can leverage that to change global policy is another thing.
We would probably not be having this conversation if 5% of the general population had been exposed to isotopes that had caused cancer
I suppose that it is a matter of perspective
Wherever You Go, There You Are
So we've entered the endless small war phase.
Try to find a time in history when the world wasn't in the endless small war phase (other than when the world was in a big war phase of course)
So we've entered the endless small war phase.
Try to find a time in history when the world wasn't in the endless small war phase (other than when the world was in a big war phase of course)
I think you might take a look at Afghanistan and what it helped do to the soviets. Those endless small wars do a great and inexorable job of Bankrupting countries. I'll take a few nukes every hundred years to a bnakrupt country fighting for gawd knows what in gawd knows where for people who want us dead anyhow, and are just using whoever sides with them at the moment.
Are you willing to bankrupt America to support these folks?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Every other country did it in their back yard. The Russians did it in Siberia. The Indians did it in the Thar desert. The Pakis did it in Balochistan. Why can't the US do it somewhere below the Death Valley, or under Alaska? Why can't the French do it somewhere under the French Alps? I don't know where the Brits or Chinese tested theirs, so can't comment.
The British nuclear program tested weapons at the Montebello Islands off the north-west coast of Western Australia , and at Maralinga in South Australia. They also worked on ICBM development at the Woomera Test Range near the test zone.
Speaking of the horrific consequences of nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific, a big one that's still with us today is the knee-jerk phobia of nuclear power, often by people who can't distinguish between the two. Along with wind and solar, nuclear power is one of our chief tools to mitigate global warming, which will in the long term prove to be far worse than weapons testing. It sure doesn't help that the US government lied through its teeth about atmospheric testing. I've been trying to find a copy of Joseph Rotblat's paper deducing that most of the yield of the Ivy Mike and Castle Bravo tests came from the fast fission of the U-238 tamper, revealing as a lie the government's claim that fusion bombs were inherently clean. Anybody know where I can find a copy?
You realise we came close to a full scale nuclear war at least three times during the cold war?
Yes - and if we could un-invent the things I'd be absolutely for that. However complete disarmament would not help with a cold war scenario like this since the tensions were so high that paranoia would set in an one side would worry that the other side was rebuilding its nuclear weapons in secret and so start their own re-armament program in secret.
This leads to a potentially even more dangerous situation than having two sides each with a known nuclear arsenal. If one side believes that they are the first to re-arm how much more likely are they to use the devices in a pre-emptive strike than they would if they new the other side could retaliate in kind? Probably the best situation we can hope for is a world where only a handful of nations possess the devices and where each of their arsenals is limited. This preserves the deterrent while minimizing the risk of accident, or even worse, theft. Fortunately this seems to be the situation we are in although it would be great if the nuclear nations to reduced their stockpiles of warheads further.
The USA did it in Nevada as well, but has used a lot more varied testing locations.
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I think you might take a look at Afghanistan and what it helped do to the soviets
The Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was more along the lines of:
Boris: "We need something to distract the people at home! They are getting restless!"
Piotr: "How about a war? That's always worked in the past!"
Boris: "Yes, but against who? We have to pick something close enough to be threatening, but far enough away that they won't come here!"
Piotr: "How about Afghanistan?"
Boris: "Perfect! Whoever heard of a Moslem holding a grudge?"
The total number of nuclear weapons is in decline.
Many of the doomsday horrors that tipped ICBMS for Cold War Game Over scenarios have been rendered into electricity.
cite "The Megatons to Megawatts program was initiated in 1993 and successfully completed in December 2013. A total of 500 tonnes of Russian warhead grade HEU (high enriched uranium, equivalent to 20,008 nuclear warheads) were converted in Russia to nearly 15,000 tonnes tons of LEU (low enriched uranium) and sold to the US for use as fuel in American nuclear power plants. During the 20-year Megatons to Megawatts program, as much as 10 percent of the electricity produced in the United States was generated by fuel fabricated using LEU from Russian HEU. During this period, on a comparatively modest basis, the U.S. government has also been converting some of its excess nuclear warhead HEU into power plant fuel. Efforts have also been undertaken to demonstrate the commercial feasibility of converting warhead plutonium into fuel to augment nuclear fuel for U.S. power plants."
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck.... Shoot it!
From 1950-present the effective yield of nuclear weapons in general has also increased by ~35% as people-targets voluntarily clump together.
I find it ironic that an approach with a proven track record, Mutual Assured Destruction, has been lambasted as some sort of cold-war artifact, of intrinsic evil. The threat of Armageddon is the evil, MAD was the preventative. The United States of America was even founded on it. The 'armed militia model' where the empire and an armed populace, each with the power to hold the other in check -- the whole quotable 'We the People' litany -- is just a flowery and (to our ears) archaically quaint way of introducing the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction as a deterrent to tyranny. In a practical and historical sense MAD is the only device capable of holding peoples in restraint, long enough that the meme of self-restraint might creep into the culture.
Decreasing weapons count is just a stage past what Carl Sagan referred to as 'nuclear adolescence', and from the height of tensions to now we're coming along fine. Too many young folk just dismiss the Cold War weapons buildout as some kind of mass psychosis without trying to place themselves there mentally. Sure it was insane, but when you believe your enemy is batty insane what would you do? You have to do something a bit dodgy yourself, in calculated fashion. When revisionist historians try to inject the idea that some hypothetical and magical Kissinger-robot could have descended from the heavens (The Day The Earth Stood Still) and defused the situation, gotten the nuclear powers to sit down and talk like kindergarteners in a circle waiting for a pat on the head, they cheat us all. There was rational thinking, difficult and courageous decisions and some pretty good know-how behind those Cold War excesses. The idea of a hostile invasion may seem quaint and laughable today, but then it was a very real concern. We had just fought a world war to prevent one.
Everybody talks about a new world in the morning.
New world in the morning, that's today!
It's time to weaponize space for quick response in defense of the Earth,
or we're ALL sitting ducks.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Nope. FYI Afganistan had a land border with USSR, Russian empire tried to control it since 19 century - USSR considered Afganistan something like protectorate. Distraction of people at home was sertanly not among the reasons - Brezhnev would get 'reelected' anyhow.
Another time, another country - Monica's War.
Boris: "Perfect! Whoever heard of a Moslem holding a grudge?"
Even though I don't agree with you, your scenario with that last line made me laugh so hard I cried! I needed that today.
Well played sir, well played indeed!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
A few conflicts where 20,000 people die is far better than a World War II sized event where 60 TO 85 MILLION die. And that total only includes ~130,000 from the use of primitive nuclear weapons.
Are small wars bad? Of course they are. But big honking all-in fuck-up-entire-continents wars are FAR worse.
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A few conflicts where 20,000 people die is far better than a World War II sized event where 60 TO 85 MILLION die. And that total only includes ~130,000 from the use of primitive nuclear weapons.
Are small wars bad? Of course they are. But big honking all-in fuck-up-entire-continents wars are FAR worse.
And of course that is assuming that the nuclear weapons somehow majically keep the big wars from happening.
There are at least two groups who want the world to end. One is kooky, and the other is bat shit crazy. What do you think they are going to do if they get the chance of issuing a 10 negation weapon of God?
Never underestimate large numbers of people to lose their sanity. It happened twice last century.
As Albert Einstein said:
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There's always been conflict for the entirety of human history, but the endless proxy wars are a lot more modern of a concept. Granted, proxy wars aren't new either, but with nuclear weapons they tend to stay that way, instead of eventually dragging the main powers directly into them.
Nobody uses multi-megaton weapons anymore (except for keeping around some old stock for bunker-buster type applications) because of the inverse-cube law of expanding spheres. It takes a shload more power to do the same damage as several smaller lighter warheads. Thus, MIRV was born. Less fallout (less fissile material being used in the bomb that blows itself to bits before the material can be fissioned), spread over less distance (cloud doesn't rise as high, injecting radioactive crap into the upper atmosphere), less weight to throw on the top of a rocket, etc.
In fact, the US [reportedly] uses "dial-a-yield" where they can actually electronically tune the warhead from somewhere in the Hiroshima range to 300kt depending on need. The big-dick 15 Mt thermonuclear weapons of the 1950s that required a booster capable of putting a Gemini capsule in orbit are no more.
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