The Negative Impact of the Nuclear Weapons Industry on the Environment

In the past week more that 2,000 heat records have been matched or beaten in the United States.¹ Rising heat averages have been regularly linked to environmental degradation. Could our continued proliferation and modernization of nuclear arsenals be feeding the destruction of our natural environment? I believe the answer is clearly yes. Here are a few reasons why:

After the Winter: Nuclear Famine

Ninety-nine percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Extinction is the norm. What falls outside normalcy is a self-inflicted extinction, that is, the species being solely responsible for their wipe-out. How certain species met their demise might have several contending theories, but every paleontologist can agree that the dinosaurs, as an example, weren’t annihilated because a tyrannosaurs rex detonated a Jurassic bomb on the triceratops. Our species, humans, has scientific and technological achievements rivaled by no other life-form in the history of Earth. However, these great feats are also what make us so vulnerable; some of our inventions, though ingenious, also hold the grave capability of destroying our population.

Remembering the March 11th Disaster

This guest blog comes from former NAPF intern Olivia Wong, who is now living, working and studying in Japan.

On the bottom of the ocean floor, offshore from the Oshika Peninsula, Miyagi Prefecture, a massive uninhibited force rippled through the depths of the ocean. Thousands of kilometers away, at that exact same moment, I was sitting in a classroom taking a final exam in Japanese at my university in Santa Barbara. The range of the seismic epicenter was colossal, measuring about 500 kilometers from north to south and spanning roughly 200 km from east to west. Immediately after the tectonic plates began to shift, waves began to form, and the tsunami was born.

The voices of different news stations overlapping each other echoed throughout the wing of the Japanese Language and Studies department. I stood in the doorway of my professor’s office and watched the numbers “9.0” flash violently across the screen. Nano-seconds later, images of a thrashing wave engulfing the coast of Northeast Japan replaced the reports of the earthquake. The creature took on a life of its own, indiscriminately consuming everything in its path into a deep malevolent abyss. Beset by the pandemonium erupting on the television, my teachers and I observed in silence, as we were too horrified to even make a gesture of disbelief.

Why Can't We Say Sorry?

In Senate Resolution 330, the U.S. Senate has designated January 27, 2012 as "a national day of remembrance for Americans who, during the Cold War, worked and lived downwind from nuclear testing sites and were adversely affected by the radiation exposure generated by the above ground nuclear weapons testing."

The first nuclear test explosion at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles from Las Vegas, was conducted on January 27, 1951. The United States proceeded to conduct over 1,000 nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site over the next 40 years.

Nuclear Accident Strikes Close to Home

Three Mile Island

Until recently I did not realize that San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are designed to withstand even less seismic stress than the designs of the Japanese nuclear plants.  I see the situation at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon as especially dangerous because we know that a major seismic event is due along these fault lines and could strike either of these facilities at any time.  San Onofre, situated adjacent the beach at Camp Pendleton, would appear vulnerable to tsunamis as well as earthquake.  (I am not aware of the tsunami vulnerability of Diablo Canyon).  In any case I agree that the tragedy in Japan should be a wake-up call at least for us in California and that ordinary prudence requires an immediate and thorough review of these two facilities for earthquake and tsunami vulnerability.  Either site would appear to be a disaster waiting to happen.

The events in Japan and the implications for nuclear power in the U.S. strike especially close to home for me, inasmuch as my father (now deceased) was intimately involved with the nuclear power industry from its inception. 

Can We Still Blow Up the World?

I was recently asked the following questions: How many times could we blow up the world with the number of nuclear missiles New START will take off the table? And with the number still on the table afterwards, how many times can we blow up the planet?  Here is my response:

I’ve actually never thought there was a good answer to the questions you pose.  First of all, you can’t really “blow up the world.”  What you can do, though, is destroy civilization and potentially annihilate the human species and most complex life.  We could do the worst we can to the planet and it will survive us, although not in a way we would necessarily recognize over the next few hundred thousand years.  And it is unlikely that members of our species would be here to observe the planet at all after an all-out nuclear war.

Another Reason to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Links between nuclear security and climate change demonstrated by wildfires in Russia

by Rob van Riet*

From massive landslides caused by torrential rain in China, to unprecedented floods affecting over 14 million people (and counting) in Pakistan, to rampant wildfires spreading through parts of Russia; the Northern hemisphere has been experiencing some extreme weather conditions this summer. Although one should be careful in proving (or disproving) climate change by pointing to such incidents, these episodes give a taste of some of the expected effects of global warming.

A concern that has been growing in my mind for some time is how nuclear security fits into this increasingly unstable picture (all three abovementioned countries have nuclear arsenals).

The wildfires that have been besieging Russia for over two weeks now have deepened this worry. With western and central parts of Russia suffering the worst heat wave since records began 130 years ago, wildfires have been ravaging the countryside. They have destroyed more than a third of cultivable land, claimed over 50 lives, clouded Moscow in smoke and damaged several military sites. Another threat surfaced last week when blazes were on their way to engulfing key nuclear sites.

David Krieger's Article for Common Dreams

Be sure to read David Krieger's latest article over at Common Dreams.  An excerpt is below:

British Petroluem, Imagination, and Nuclear Catastrophe

by David Krieger

Before the catastrophic British Petroleum oil gush in the Gulf of Mexico, there were environmentalists who warned that offshore drilling was fraught with risk - risk of exactly the type of environmental damage that is occurring. They were mocked by people who chanted slogans such as "Drill, baby, drill." Now it is clear that the "Drill, baby, drill" crowd was foolish and greedy. The economic wellbeing of people in and around the Gulf coast has been badly damaged and, for some, destroyed altogether. Aquatic and estuary life, in the Gulf and beyond, has fallen victim to an environmental disaster that was foreseeable with a modicum of vision and imagination.

Albert Einstein reached the conclusion that "Imagination is more important than knowledge." He said that "knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." Let us try applying our imaginations to nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Here are some scenarios: