Article: 776 of sgi.talk.ratical
From: (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Nuclear Cover-Up: 49+ years old, going strong, and killing us all
Summary: our nuclearized-militarized state is killing us and our planet
Keywords: deception, official sources gibberish, contradictions, illogic, death
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 16:20:50 GMT
Lines: 709
Excerpts from an exceptionally lucid speech follow (speech begins 178 lines
below this one) given by author and journalist Norman Solomon at UCSC on
February 24, 1992 articulating the critical issue of the almost 50-year-old
nuclear age and industry and its continuous promotion by official
mythologies about the "peaceful atom," about how we are "safe" from the
deadly toxicity of high-level and low-level radioactive material, fallout,
waste, and contamination of the biosphere, and about how the production and
operation of nuclear power plants and the nuclear weapons assembly line--not
to mention "temporary" radioactive waste sites--make us "secure." --ratitor
In the case of nuclear weapons it's certainly the case that the
entire technology was born in secrecy. It's been called the nuclear
priesthood. We live, in that sense, in a theological society--a
theo-political culture that exalts the nuclear priests. We are
supposed to defer to them. They have an aura of holiness about them
and we are urged in ways, direct or indirect, to defer to their
greater wisdom. Presumably when people die in southern Utah because
of fall-out, when the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific die
because of the legacies of nuclear testing, when Native American
uranium miners die as a result of being sent into the radon ovens of
uranium mines in the Southwest, presumably they don't know the ``Big
Picture.'' The ``Big Picture'' is supposed to be the important one,
and it comes to us from ``on high.'' That's the kind of theocracy
that we're encouraged to make fun of when it happens in a place like
Iran, but to defer to when it happens in the United States of America.
We know that one of the charges against the doctors and government
officials of the Third Reich brought to trial at Nuremberg was of
experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed
consent. What happened in the concentration camps in effect happened
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has happened ever since in the United
States and elsewhere as a result of the production, testing and
deployment of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected
as targets for the atomic bombs for reasons including the facts that
those cities were large enough to show the gradations of effect half
a mile, a mile, two miles, five miles and that they hadn't been
subjected to major previous so-called conventional bombardment. . .
One of the most logical or illogical inconsistencies of the entire
nuclear PR game has to do with the question of nuclear waste.
There's all this agonizing and abstract discussion about nuclear
waste. If your bathtub were overflowing and you came in the front
door and there was water in your living room having run down the
steps from the bathroom, you probably would decide that one of the
first things you should do is turn off the water. But that's too
logical for the nuclear priesthood. Here we have nuclear waste being
produced at dozens of nuclear weapons facilities; high-level
radioactive plutonium, cesium, strontium, nuclear power plants each
producing hundreds of pounds of plutonium every year; many, many
pounds of high-level nuclear waste every month, and somehow they
can't figure out what to do. They can't figure out that if you don't
know what to do with the deadly garbage, that you stop producing it.
You know, that would be a logical step. Somehow the waste is out
there and the production is here and never the twain shall meet and
it's that separation which has been one of the serious flaws in the
entire media coverage of nuclear reactors.
In late 1988 and 1989, when anti-nuclear publicity was rampant,
you can barely find any stories about the Nevada Test Site. Other
facilities are talked about a lot, but the most sacred spot was the
test site. It's kind of an axiom of mass media coverage that the
more important something is--the more important something is in human
terms--the less coverage it should get. So the Nevada Test Site got
almost no coverage at all. It's a DOE facility. It's an
environmental catastrophe. There's plenty of documentation to that
effect, but the Nevada Test Site wasn't talked about because if you
shut down the test site you have to shut down the nuclear weapons
escalation game. And it's a game that is of course very lucrative.
It's a game that the nuclear weapons labs and the contractors and the
people in the Pentagon love to play. So the Nevada Test Site is
virtually unknown to most people in the United States. . . .
Orwell could never come up with a better phrase than ``national
security,'' and that's where we are in 1992. We are told that a
nuclear weapons assembly line that is causing cancer and leukemia,
causing genetic injury, is there for our national security. The
nuclear weapons assembly line dumps scores of deadly, long-lived
isotopes into waterways, the air, the soil, and our food, and we're
told that those isotopes are part of our national security. . . .
The book "Killing Our Own" and other books such as "Deadly Deceit"
document the ways that the cover-ups have been implemented through
the national security pseudo-science establishment. When the
evidence became too incontrovertible--when the health of the atomic
veterans, from the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site and
in the Marshall Islands, from the people living near many of the
atomic reactors and waste dumps and nuclear facilities became too
obviously damaged to ignore--then the fallback positions were taken.
This new awareness had to be given some novocaine. It's kind of like
anaesthesia without surgery. That's the response that we get from
the media managers and the military planners when there is public
awareness. We're told that there's a crisis in our country because
the people don't trust the government anymore and that we need to be
concerned because people are too skeptical--they don't trust what
they hear from Congress, they don't trust what they hear from the
executive branch of the US government. But rather than there being
not enough trust, there is still too much trust. As people have
found who grew up downwind of mushroom clouds believing what they
were told, their trust was not only misplaced but very deadly. . . .
People with other perspectives were excluded from mass media
coverage even when it was one of the top stories of the year in 1988.
There was a front-page article in "The New York Times" by Fox
Butterfield, who mentioned a 1970 study that found alarming plutonium
levels in the Denver area due to emissions from the Rocky Flats
plant. The article jumped over a decade and a half of history--
history that was inconvenient. This news article said, ``Although
the study attracted some attention at the time, only in the last two
or three years has public concern about Rocky Flats become widespread
in this area as a result of a number of problems.'' There were tens
of thousands of people who went out and protested at the Rocky Flats
plant in the late 1970s and early '80s. But that didn't count.
People sat on the railroad tracks to block the shipping of material
into the Rocky Flats plant. Again, that didn't count as far as "The
New York Times" was concerned. The "Times" headlined that front-page
article, ``Dispute on Waste Poses Threat to Weapons Plant.'' Two
days later Butterfield reported more on this nuclear threat. He
wrote in "The New York Times" that Idaho's refusal to accept more of
Rocky Flats' nuclear waste ``has posed a serious threat to the
continued operations of Rocky Flats.''
So we're supposed to get the idea, either consciously or
otherwise, that first and foremost the plant was threatened. That's
where the threat is, it's to the nuclear weapons industry. It's to
the profit takers from making more nuclear weapons. That's where the
threat is aimed. As for the people who live downstream and downwind
from the nuclear facilities--their health and well-being, the threat
to their existence--that's secondary. . . .
"The New York Times" has habitually tried, on this issue of
nuclear weapons production, to be dramatic yet reassuring. A front-
page headline in December 1988 declared ``Wide Threat Seen in
Contamination at Nuclear Units.'' Yet a subheadline incredulously
stated that ``No effect on humans has yet been found.'' So of course
what the "Times" was doing was regurgitating the very same gibberish
that had been fed to them by their official sources. The account was
very illogical and contradicted by health studies. . . .
. . . I often think of a statement attributed to the Italian anti-
fascist Antonio Gramsci who spoke about what he called the need for
``pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will.'' Sometimes when
we talk about these very pressing and real issues we may hear from
family, or friends, or acquaintances, or co-workers that we're being
cynical. I beg to differ. The real cynicism is to say ``I don't
want to know.'' The real cynicism is to say ``This doesn't concern
me.'' The real cynicism is to say ``Well, gee, the people in power
wouldn't do that to us.'' Which is what people said when they got
up at dawn and watched the mushroom cloud and the fallout blow
through their communities.
The cynicism that we're fighting is the cynicism of obedience and
of trust in institutions and of individuals with authority, and if
we're going to challenge cynicism we need to challenge the
nuclearized state. We need to challenge the militarized state. We
need to challenge the mechanisms of propaganda and social control
that in ways large and small are raining down on us just as surely as
the fallout fell on the people of the Marshall Islands, southern
Utah, and northern Arizona.
____________________________________________________________________
This article is excerpted from "The Monthly Planet," a publication
of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Santa Cruz County. (Subscriptions
are available for $15; add $1.24 tax in Santa Cruz County; add
$1.09 tax for subs mailed to other CA addresses.)
Contact: John Govsky c/o "The Monthly Planet"
Address: P.O. Box 8463, Santa Cruz, CA 95061-8463
Voice: 408-429-8755
Fax: : 408-429-8889
Internet: freezecruz@igc.apc.org scfreeze@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us
PeaceNet: freezecruz
Cruzio: scfreeze
Reprint permission is granted for non-profit use, provided that a
copy of the publication in which the article appears is sent to us
and that the following credit appears with the article:
(C) 1992 "The Monthly Planet," P.O. Box 8463, Santa Cruz, CA 95061.
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
March 1992 issue--"The Monthly Planet" / Article length: 5510 words
____________________________________________________________________
Nuclear Cover-Up:
Norman Solomon Blasts Mainstream Media Coverage of Nuclear Issues
Excerpts from a speech by Norman Solomon on February 24, 1992 at UCSC
Norman Solomon is an author, investigative journalist, and a board
member of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), one of the
country's most successful and articulate media watch groups. His
articles about nuclear weapons, news media, and US-Soviet relations
have appeared in dozens of major newspapers and magazines, including
"The Nation," "The Progressive," the "Los Angeles Times," the "Boston
Globe," and the "San Jose Mercury News." He has appeared on national
programs such as ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "rossfire,"and
NPR's "ll Things Considered." During eight visits to Moscow in the
Gorbachev era, Solomon has reported for Pacifica Radio National News,
Pacific News Service and other American media.
Solomon is co-author of "Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting
Bias in News Media" (Lyle Stuart, 1990) and "Killing Our Own: The
Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation" (Delacorte
Press and Delta Books, 1982). He has also co-authored "The Power of
Babble: The Politicians' Dictionary of Buzzwords and Doubletalk for
Every Occasion" (soon to be published).
On February 24th, Norman Solomon spoke in Santa Cruz on the news
media's coverage of nuclear issues. The following condensed text of
his speech was transcribed by Vianne Neblett, and edited by Catherine
Banghart, Sara Nisenson, and John Govsky.
Ten years ago I came to the University of California at Santa Cruz
campus and spoke about the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear
power plants, the local hazard and the global threat. At the time I
was writing in publications like "Nuclear Times," expressing my
concern about what seemed to me to be a hazardously narrow focus of
what was then the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. Ten
years later many locally based grassroots organizations that grew out
of the Nuclear Freeze movement showed that my fears were unjustified.
I can't think of a better example than the Santa Cruz Nuclear Weapons
Freeze campaign which is making exactly the kind of connections month
in and month out in "The Monthly Planet" newspaper that the news
media were urging the anti-nuclear movement not to make a decade ago.
When we deal with the implications of nuclear weapons, nuclear
power plants and assorted other corporately backed technologies,
we're urged to segment the planet, not to look in holistic terms at
what is going on.
One of the big dangers of any movement is when we start to take
seriously what "Time" and "Newsweek" and the networks say about our
movement. I'm afraid this happened in the early and mid-1980s, when
the movement against nuclear weapons and nuclear power reached at
least a temporary height, and we got a lot of prompting from the mass
media to not get too radical; to be careful; to be respectable. We
had a burst of publicity in 1988 and 1989 about nuclear weapons
production in the United States. Unfortunately we were often
successfully encouraged to believe that the mass media of this
country had finally come to terms with our legacy of radioactive
pollution. What I'd like to do is briefly try to put what happened
in late 1988 with the Department of Energy and nuclear weapons
scandal in a historical context, then talk a little bit about what
happened in the late '80s in the propaganda wars, and what's been
happening since then.
In the case of nuclear weapons it's certainly the case that the
entire technology was born in secrecy. It's been called the nuclear
priesthood. We live, in that sense, in a theological society--a
theo-political culture that exalts the nuclear priests. We are
supposed to defer to them. They have an aura of holiness about them
and we are urged in ways, direct or indirect, to defer to their
greater wisdom. Presumably when people die in southern Utah because
of fall-out, when the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific die
because of the legacies of nuclear testing, when Native American
uranium miners die as a result of being sent into the radon ovens of
uranium mines in the Southwest, presumably they don't know the ``Big
Picture.'' The ``Big Picture'' is supposed to be the important one,
and it comes to us from ``on high.'' That's the kind of theocracy
that we're encouraged to make fun of when it happens in a place like
Iran, but to defer to when it happens in the United States of
America.
The last time I wrote to the US Department of Energy for a
complete official roster of the so-called ``Announced United States
Nuclear Tests,'' I found on the list the Trinity test in Alamogordo,
New Mexico in the early summer of 1945 which was kept secret at the
time. Then the second and third listings of ``Announced United
States Nuclear Tests'' were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think that
tells us a lot about the psychology of the US government's attitude
towards the development and ``testing'' of nuclear weapons. Because
in a real sense what happened in Japan on August 6th and 9th in
1945--the dropping of those two bombs--were in fact tests. That's
clear if you look at the historical documentation. It's clear that
in fact those cities were chosen for test reasons. And it's chilling
because, for one thing, World War II began with a public ethic that
one did not drop bombs on civilian populations. In 1939 it would
have been pretty much unthinkable that the US government would do
such a thing. But after the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo the US
government had acclimated its own citizens to the atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki; to accept the very atrocities, the anti-
ethical activities that were to be condemned at Nuremberg.
We know that one of the charges against the doctors and government
officials of the Third Reich brought to trial at Nuremberg was of
experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed
consent. What happened in the concentration camps in effect happened
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has happened ever since in the United
States and elsewhere as a result of the production, testing and
deployment of nuclear weapons. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected
as targets for the atomic bombs for reasons including the facts that
those cities were large enough to show the gradations of effect half
a mile, a mile, two miles, five miles and that they hadn't been
subjected to major previous so-called conventional bombardment.
These cities were laboratories that were selected by the planners for
the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. And we often hear in
public discussion from government officials that somehow these were
not real uses of nuclear weapons. You'll hear that nuclear weapons
have never been used in war. It's kind of gone again down the memory
hole: forget about it, it's not convenient.
In the late 1940s there were some major decisions to be made about
nuclear weapons and it's no coincidence that this happened
concurrently with the establishment putting the fix in, so to speak,
for the national security nuclear state. In the summer of 1946 there
were the first peacetime explosions in history, and one of the main
purposes of the tests was to put the American people to sleep about
nuclear weapons; to say ``Don't worry, you can relax, nuclear
weapons will make you secure, they can be aimed in a certain
direction.'' It was an important illusion. And to make matters more
convincing, about 42,000 US troops were deployed within a few miles
of those atomic explosions. Later many US Navy personnel were
deployed to scrape the radiation off of the ships. Some of the
ships, however, were so radioactive that they had to be sunk. And of
course this has been a pattern ever since. In the last few years
we've heard a lot about the ``cleanup'' of Department of Energy (DOE)
nuclear weapons facilities and these words are presented to us to
substitute for reality. We're encouraged to confuse the myth and the
real world.
In 1951 the United States expanded the nuclear test program by
setting up the Nevada Test Site. It's clear from declassified
documents that the government knew that the radiation would be
dangerous. There were warnings provided privately by some scientists
that people would be at risk, but the US government had some
solutions. One was to lie to the American people, and another was to
wait until the wind was blowing in the ``right direction.'' In this
case it meant the wind would be blowing away from Las Vegas, away
from Los Angeles and towards communities in southern Utah, central
Nevada, and northern Arizona; communities that housed people in
small- and medium-sized towns, rural people who had sheep herds and
other livestock.
Diseases began to appear that had never been seen before in those
small communities. It's worth recalling that these were primarily
Mormon communities. These people didn't smoke cigarettes and they
didn't drink alcohol. They didn't have leukemia among their children
or among the adult population to speak of, yet in places like
Fredonia, Arizona, St. George, Utah, and Railroad Valley, Nevada,
children began to be diagnosed with leukemia in the mid-1950s. In
the book that I co-authored with Harvey Wasserman titled "Killing Our
Own," we quoted a letter written by a senator from the state of
Nevada to the parents of a child who had died of leukemia. The
senator said, ``You must not believe the Communist scare stories
about radioactivity.'' It was decades later in the late 1970s when
Congress finally held some kind of hearings. And as one parent from
Nevada who had lost a child testified, ``I feel like we--we were
treated as guinea pigs, only worse.''
So the US government continued to set off atomic bombs in the
South Pacific and around the Nevada Test Site. In 1958, when there
was a temporary moratorium in the works, the US nuclear testers were
eager to set off a bunch of atomic bombs quickly in a row. They were
up against their deadline and the weather conditions weren't right,
that is, they weren't pointing the radiation with the wind patterns
towards those who had been bureaucratically deemed expendable--again
echoes from the dock at Nuremberg. But the tests continued and the
mushroom clouds rose over Nevada and the fallout blew for hundreds of
miles around. It blew, among other places, to Los Angeles. You
could say that after 15, 20, 25 years, there's not much that can be
done about the initial exposure, which is true. Then you could say
so there's no point in going into it, which is not true because early
screening even today would be helpful for those people who were born
in 1959 in Los Angeles. But then, as now, the US government is not
interested in candor, it's not interested in public health. It's
interested in furthering its own agenda.
After many hundreds of nuclear tests by the United States and the
Soviet Union, which began testing in the late 1940s, there was the
Limited Test Ban Treaty. Often John Kennedy is cited for what is
really a moving speech at the American University where he discusses
the threats to the health of the world from nuclear testing. The
speech was very significant because it did reflect a desire of the
Kennedy administration to end at least above ground or, as it is
sometimes called, atmospheric nuclear testing. But the speech also
provides some windows into the limits of that historical period and
for every presidency in the nuclear age. Because unfortunately when
a president says that ``We don't want to go to war'' the real
translation is ``We are planning to go to war.'' It's like Bertolt
Brecht said, ``When the government speaks loudest about the need for
peace, get ready for the war.'' In many ways what Kennedy was saying
was that it was necessary for the United States to sustain--to
continue a situation of dominance. One of the reasons that I think
the Limited Test Ban Treaty could be continued to be sold to the
military people was that the US would continue to test underground.
In fact that's what happened and the arms race continued right on.
While it was a public health victory to ban above-ground nuclear
tests with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, at the same time it
was not in any way a disarmament measure. Today, in 1992, the ground
still shakes in southern Nevada every time the bombs explode and the
arms race lurches forward. The Limited Test Ban Treaty put our
consciousness about nuclear weapons underground as well. Meanwhile
the nuclear weapons assembly line that had been established in the
years after World War II was functioning in high gear and two of the
most important institutions for continuing the nuclear arms race were
administered by the University of California. That great
humanitarian institution of higher learning was committed in the
1950s, as it is in the 1990s, to give its seal of approval and its
supposed respectability to an industry that is continually finding
better ways to incinerate the planet. It was also a very important
move to get companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, Monsanto,
and DuPont involved in post-war weapons production and then sanitize
it with the Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories being administered
by the University of California. In this way it can seem very
erudite to figure out what J. Robert Oppenheimer called the ``sweet
problem'' of designing nuclear weapons. Of course that problem never
ends because there's always a way to tinker with the design to make a
warhead smaller and more compact, giving it more bang for the weight.
In the 1950s they called Hanford, Washington a boomtown. People
moved in, housing was built, jobs were plentiful. People went to
work and didn't talk to the kids at home in the evenings and weekends
about what they did. They were making bombs which were supposed to
be normalized and the mass media, as is their usual role, put
cosmetics on the corpse, happy-faced stickers on weapons of mass
destruction. And so, as industries will do, the nuclear industry
kept functioning and needed more PR.
One of the PR tricks had been what Eisenhower had called the
``peaceful atom'': nuclear power plants. The electrical utilities
were not invited in, they were kicked into the nuclear parade through
all kinds of bribes and inducements. There was the insurance cap
that limited their liability with the government picking up the tab.
There were all kinds of subsidies great and small. And there was a
tremendous PR machine--the old Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by
Dixie Lee Ray in the '60s. She would go in front of the cameras and
say, ``I would eat plutonium. I'm not worried, you know, these
isotopes don't worry me.'' And of course that's proof positive that
patriarchy is culturally caused rather than biologically. So nuclear
plants began to be built.
Nuclear issues add an interesting little wrinkle now, in the
Democratic presidential campaign. In the primaries for instance, in
one of the debates, the national media seemed astonished that the
issue of nuclear power was even being brought up. Jerry Brown made
some very good points. He challenged this kind of acceptance--this
tacit support for nuclear power--from many Democrats and kind of
throw-back retrograde support for nuclear power coming from Paul
Tsongas. The news media were very surprised. Why do people care
about nuclear power? Isn't that passe? If you grew up in the '60s
you heard a lot about it and in the '50s, from the outset, it was a
rationale. The US government and its PR flacks could always say,
``Well, if we're going to have nuclear power it's going to be a
peaceful atom.'' It was a way to tell ourselves that nuclear
technology, that fission, wasn't such a bad deal after all. Those
myths are still with us. Sometimes I think it's simply a matter of
industry officials playing dumb.
One of the most logical or illogical inconsistencies of the entire
nuclear PR game has to do with the question of nuclear waste.
There's all this agonizing and abstract discussion about nuclear
waste. If your bathtub were overflowing and you came in the front
door and there was water in your living room having run down the
steps from the bathroom, you probably would decide that one of the
first things you should do is turn off the water. But that's too
logical for the nuclear priesthood. Here we have nuclear waste being
produced at dozens of nuclear weapons facilities; high-level
radioactive plutonium, cesium, strontium, nuclear power plants each
producing hundreds of pounds of plutonium every year; many, many
pounds of high-level nuclear waste every month, and somehow they
can't figure out what to do. They can't figure out that if you don't
know what to do with the deadly garbage, that you stop producing it.
You know, that would be a logical step. Somehow the waste is out
there and the production is here and never the twain shall meet and
it's that separation which has been one of the serious flaws in the
entire media coverage of nuclear reactors.
In late 1988 and 1989, when anti-nuclear publicity was rampant,
you can barely find any stories about the Nevada Test Site. Other
facilities are talked about a lot, but the most sacred spot was the
test site. It's kind of an axiom of mass media coverage that the
more important something is--the more important something is in human
terms--the less coverage it should get. So the Nevada Test Site got
almost no coverage at all. It's a DOE facility. It's an
environmental catastrophe. There's plenty of documentation to that
effect, but the Nevada Test Site wasn't talked about because if you
shut down the test site you have to shut down the nuclear weapons
escalation game. And it's a game that is of course very lucrative.
It's a game that the nuclear weapons labs and the contractors and the
people in the Pentagon love to play. So the Nevada Test Site is
virtually unknown to most people in the United States.
A related phenomenon would be the fact that the United States
refuses to pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, even
today in 1992. These have been called public secrets and this says a
lot about how the pseudo-democracy in the United States works. No,
it's not secret, just hardly anybody knows about it. So it's a
public secret. It's part of the functioning of the propaganda
system. Most years a dozen or more nuclear bombs explode under the
desert floor in Nevada and most of them are larger than the bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It goes on and on and the
designers have a field day. They can continue to tinker and find
nuclear bomb designs that will be part of still more accurate nuclear
weapons. Why is accuracy so important and speed so important?
Because the faster the delivery of nuclear weapons, the faster and
more accurate the attack, the more tempted officials may be to use
them in a first strike.
People in the Pentagon have always treasured the option of first
strike, that is, the initiation of nuclear war. What a great example
of the entire militarists' psychology. We don't make weapons because
there are targets that are appropriate; we make weapons and then
figure out how to concoct some targets that are then reported to have
something to do with this notion of ``national security.''
Orwell could never come up with a better phrase than ``national
security,'' and that's where we are in 1992. We are told that a
nuclear weapons assembly line that is causing cancer and leukemia,
causing genetic injury, is there for our national security. The
nuclear weapons assembly line dumps scores of deadly, long-lived
isotopes into waterways, the air, the soil, and our food, and we're
told that those isotopes are part of our national security.
It's a major challenge for us to regain the use of language, to
talk about security, to discuss the true costs of nuclear weapons,
and not only the budgetary costs. We must also insist that the human
costs of nuclear technology be discussed. That's where the entire
presidential campaign has nothing to say. From Buchanan to Harkin,
they don't have much to say about the real issues of nuclear weapons.
I know that Tom Harkin has more of an interest in nuclear disarmament
than the Bushes and the Buchanans, but I've been listening to all the
debates thus far and I don't hear any of the ``major'' mass media-
anointed candidates addressing this issue at all. So it falls back
again and again on us to raise these issues and not necessarily in a
polite way, in order to build and rebuild a movement; to build on
what's been done in the past years so that these issues are real in
human terms when they're publicly discussed and when policy decisions
get made.
I want to say a little bit about some of the verbal mechanisms and
publicity strategies that have been used to diffuse what has been a
crisis for the nuclear weapons makers in this country. I'd like to
give just a few examples of how the very deep and angry concern of
people in this country has been blocked by the news media. I want to
be sure to mention that there were at least 300,000 US soldiers
exposed to nuclear bomb tests, atmospheric tests at short range
between 1945 and 1962. These soldiers have suffered increased
incidences of leukemia and cancer. Our book titled "Killing Our Own"
documents the situation, and our book was published in 1982 when
there was a great deal less evidence than there is today, a decade
later. In a sense what we're getting in the fifth decade after the
Manhattan Project is a whole first echo of the atomic age coming
back.
The book "Killing Our Own" and other books such as "Deadly Deceit"
document the ways that the cover-ups have been implemented through
the national security pseudo-science establishment. When the
evidence became too incontrovertible--when the health of the atomic
veterans, from the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site and
in the Marshall Islands, from the people living near many of the
atomic reactors and waste dumps and nuclear facilities became too
obviously damaged to ignore--then the fallback positions were taken.
This new awareness had to be given some novocaine. It's kind of like
anaesthesia without surgery. That's the response that we get from
the media managers and the military planners when there is public
awareness. We're told that there's a crisis in our country because
the people don't trust the government anymore and that we need to be
concerned because people are too skeptical--they don't trust what
they hear from Congress, they don't trust what they hear from the
executive branch of the US government. But rather than there being
not enough trust, there is still too much trust. As people have
found who grew up downwind of mushroom clouds believing what they
were told, their trust was not only misplaced but very deadly.
The Soviet Union stopped all nuclear testing for a year and a half
in the mid-1980s and beseeched the United States to join in for a
permanent ban on nuclear test explosions. The US, to this day, has
refused to engage in anything like a moratorium on nuclear tests.
People with other perspectives were excluded from mass media
coverage even when it was one of the top stories of the year in 1988.
There was a front-page article in "The New York Times" by Fox
Butterfield, who mentioned a 1970 study that found alarming plutonium
levels in the Denver area due to emissions from the Rocky Flats
plant. The article jumped over a decade and a half of history--
history that was inconvenient. This news article said, ``Although
the study attracted some attention at the time, only in the last two
or three years has public concern about Rocky Flats become widespread
in this area as a result of a number of problems.'' There were tens
of thousands of people who went out and protested at the Rocky Flats
plant in the late 1970s and '80s. But that didn't count. People sat
on the railroad tracks to early block the shipping of material into
the Rocky Flats plant. Again, that didn't count as far as "The New
York Times" was concerned. The "Times" headlined that front-page
article, ``Dispute on Waste Poses Threat to Weapons Plant.'' Two
days later Butterfield reported more on this nuclear threat. He
wrote in "The New York Times" that Idaho's refusal to accept more of
Rocky Flats' nuclear waste ``has posed a serious threat to the
continued operations of Rocky Flats.''
So we're supposed to get the idea, either consciously or
otherwise, that first and foremost the plant was threatened. That's
where the threat is, it's to the nuclear weapons industry. It's to
the profit takers from making more nuclear weapons. That's where the
threat is aimed. As for the people who live downstream and downwind
from the nuclear facilities--their health and well-being, the threat
to their existence--that's secondary.
Now of course any officially orchestrated scandal is incomplete
without very high-profile redemption. So the mass media, while
beginning to report on the sins of the nuclear bomb makers, seemed
very eager to bring tidings of repentance. So in late 1988, "Time"
magazine revealed that the DOE ``finally seemed bent on reform'' and
``has taken commendable steps to infuse a safety-conscious attitude
in the weapons facilities.'' It's really easy to turn over a new
nuclear leaf. The US government has done it hundreds of times. The
idea though that safe nuclear weapons production could be an oxymoron
was just too much off the beaten path for the mass media to even
entertain. Instead the kind of official self-flagellations were
taken at face value. "The Washington Post" front page printed a
contrite quote from an undersecretary of the DOE saying, ``We have a
moral obligation to rectify past sins.'' "The New York Times"
asserted that, ``The Energy Department has provided a candid account
of its failings.'' I think it's pretty evident that the strategy for
the DOE was to say ``yeah we made a mess of things and you're gonna
need to give us a bunch more money so we can make things right.''
The entire new generation of nuclear weapons production facilities
is going to be financed largely with the rationale that the weapons
plants have to be cleaned up. What better Orwellian way to do it
than to say that for environmental reasons we have to budget a whole
lot more money to make nuclear weapons. It makes about as much sense
as the rest of the news media that we get.
"The New York Times" has habitually tried, on this issue of
nuclear weapons production, to be dramatic yet reassuring. A front-
page headline in December 1988 declared ``Wide Threat Seen in
Contamination at Nuclear Units.'' Yet a subheadline incredulously
stated that ``No effect on humans has yet been found.'' So of course
what the "Times" was doing was regurgitating the very same gibberish
that had been fed to them by their official sources. The account was
very illogical and contradicted by health studies.
One of my favorite editorials to appear in daily newspapers in
this country on the subject of nuclear weapons was printed by "The
New York Times" in the period when George Bush was about to move into
the White House. The editorial was titled ``The Bomb on Mr. Bush's
Desk.'' "The New York Times," in its wisdom, in its official
editorial, urged the incoming President George Bush to ``escape
catastrophe by moving fast and setting priorities.'' The
``catastrophe'' that the "Times" was intent on avoiding was the
prospect that the US government's ability to manufacture more nuclear
weapons might be impeded by a shortage of tritium. As a matter of
fact the "Times" referred to ``the operation of the bomb complex'' as
being a matter of tremendous importance and concluded, ``Mr. Bush has
only a limited time to avert its collapse.'' But, as we might have
predicted at the time, George Bush in fact knew to quickly avert the
collapse and therefore avert what the "Times" referred to as the
catastrophe of disarmament.
I was very interested in the term ``bomb complex'' by the "Times"
editorial. They were hell-bent on safeguarding what they called the
operation of the ``bomb complex'' but I don't think they were talking
about the psychological mechanisms. They were talking about the
literal assembly line. There was a follow-up on the top of page one
by a "Times" reporter, Michael R. Gordon, under the headline, ``How a
Vital Nuclear Material Came to Be in Short Supply.'' They were
banging on the drums, they were getting it together to produce more
tritium as soon as possible. And it was interesting to look at all
43 paragraphs of that article. You had exactly one half of one
paragraph devoted to any kind of contrary view. I want to read to
you how they handled it in the "Times:" ``Not everyone is convinced
that the shortage of tritium is a national emergency. Some critics
of the administration say that the United States could afford
dismantling some nuclear weapons to salvage the tritium it needs, but
the administration rejects this idea.'' End of quote. That's all we
get to hear about that idea. When Bush got into office, the new DOE
Secretary James Watkins was really like the new cleric for the
nuclear priesthood. He arrived admitting to sins and promising
absolution through pouring more money into the nuclear weapons
assembly line. He got tremendous amounts of great press stating that
finally he was going to set things straight. Then years later in
1991 the news quietly came out, on the back page with two or three
paragraphs, that come hell or high water Watkins was committed to
restarting weapons material production facilities at the Savannah
River plant, whether or not the environmental regulations were met.
So it's the same old hustle over and over again.
We are, in 1992 more than ever, in a situation where the news
media function to put a cloak of murky mystification over events
large and small. The corporate control of the media itself is
consolidating. There are corporations larger in size and fewer in
number that are making a killing off of the media industry.
Sometimes they are owned by corporations that are directly involved
in contracting to the Pentagon and the nuclear departments of the
federal government. One prime example of course is NBC, which is
owned by General Electric (GE). When the Gulf War happened in early
1991 Tom Brokaw never told the people watching "NBC Nightly News"
that the people signing his paycheck were making a killing, literally
and figuratively, off of the Gulf War. GE had sold huge quantities
of weapons systems and components to the Pentagon that were then used
during the Gulf War.
This process of mystification is one that we have to challenge.
We have to strip away the falsehoods, the deceit, and the dangerous
ways in which words and images are manipulated to shield us from the
realities of control. It's one of the great paradoxes that the more
these corporate forces manipulate and control the mass media, the
less those mass media tell us who really controls them and, to a
large degree, controls public perception. We, to put it mildly, have
a big task ahead of us. I often think of a statement attributed to
the Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci who spoke about what he
called the need for ``pessimism of the mind and optimism of the
will.'' Sometimes when we talk about these very pressing and real
issues we may hear from family, or friends, or acquaintances, or co-
workers that we're being cynical. I beg to differ. The real
cynicism is to say ``I don't want to know.'' The real cynicism is to
say ``This doesn't concern me.'' The real cynicism is to say ``Well,
gee, the people in power wouldn't do that to us.'' Which is what
people said when they got up at dawn and watched the mushroom cloud
and the fallout blow through their communities.
The cynicism that we're fighting is the cynicism of obedience and
of trust in institutions and of individuals with authority, and if
we're going to challenge cynicism we need to challenge the
nuclearized state. We need to challenge the militarized state. We
need to challenge the mechanisms of propaganda and social control
that in ways large and small are raining down on us just as surely as
the fallout fell on the people of the Marshall Islands, southern
Utah, and northern Arizona. Thanks very much.
--
daveus rattus
yer friendly neighborhood ratman
KOYAANISQATSI
ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language) n. 1. crazy life. 2. life
in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.