Vast areas of the Earth are devastated from governments displaying their nuclear weapons to each other. All nuclear states also exhibited racism in choosing their test sites in a way that would not contaminate their own dominant populations. France and England bombed North Africa, the South Pacific, and Australia. Russia mainly bombed the tribal area of Kazakhstan; China bombed the Uigyur people near Tibet. The United States bombed Japan, as well as Apache country in New Mexico, several South Pacific islands, and Amchitka, Alaska. The U.S. (and England) blew up over 1,000 bombs on Western Shoshone treaty lands in Nevada.(Read more about the Nevada Test Site.) At one point the U.S. considered bombing the Moon, to impress their might upon earthbound viewers.
Knowledge of possible disastrous consequences on the part of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission is documented. But in a 1951 document on the viability of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), the AEC referred to the downwind population, predominately Shoshone, Paiute and Mormon ranchers, as “a low-use segment of society”. The AEC routinely warned the Eastman Kodak Co. of test dates so that they could protect film stocks held for sale, after an incident in which their film stocks were fogged as far away as upstate New York, but they did not warn local “downwind” residents, even those in nearby Las Vegas.
In addition to deliberately exposing unsuspecting civilians, enlisted men were lined up on ship decks in the South Pacific or marched through sand and dust in Nevada to determine the effects of fallout on U.S. military capabilities.
Public outcry brought an end to above-ground nuclear testing in 1963, but by then, everyone on earth had plutonium and strontium in their bodies and genes. One great catalyst was the Baby Teeth Project, a collaboration between mothers nation-wide and Dr. Joseph Mangano, in which the presence of Strontium 90 was demonstrated in young children’s baby teeth, most likely due to milk consumption. 20 years later, increasing cancer rates became obvious, and they continue to rise about 1% per year.
Underground testing continued to vent to the atmosphere, while contaminating soil and water. Israel, India and Pakistan have joined the Big Five Bomb-Owners, with more competing nations on the horizon. Today, despite years of international attempts to conclude the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the U.S. still has not ratified it, and leads the world in ongoing nuclear weapons testing.
At the five-year review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the United Nations in May, 2000, documents were revealed that detailed U.S. plans to ensure that nuclear weapons would “remain viable forever”. DOE wants a whole new weapons complex built, and technology developed for ‘maintaining’ weapons also serves for testing new designs. The addiction to nukes continues.
“The period of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the U.S.S.R is a sad page in the history of civilized man. Without question, it was the cause of hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths. Yet there was complete silence on the part of the ICRP.”*
Karl Morgan, member of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (1950-71), which set radiation exposure standards.