Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
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