Beyond Nuclear International
Slow violence and toxic waste
Art exhibition “Hot Spots: Radioactivity and Landscape” makes the invisible visible
By Jodi Heckel
Illinois leads the nation in the amount of energy it produces from nuclear sources. But the aftermath of its production often is unseen.
An exhibition that opened at Krannert Art Museum (KAM) in October seeks to make visible the long-term impact of the nuclear industry, particularly issues surrounding radioactive waste. “Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape” features the work of a variety of artists and collectives. It opened at KAM on Oct. 17 and runs through March 21.
The exhibition was organized by the University of Buffalo Art Galleries and inspired by the role the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area played in the Manhattan Project; the radioactive waste being stored at sites such as the Niagara Falls Storage Site; and the “hot spots” from radioactive slag once used as backfill in roads and parking lots there.
“This exhibition is about slow violence and how toxic waste has a duration we cannot compute. It outlives humans,” said Amy Powell, KAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art.
Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape, installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, 2019. Photo by Julia Nucci Kelly.
Americans say the Green New Deal is “too expensive”
Are skewed polling and media bias to blame?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
What are opinion polls and what exactly do their outcomes signify?
Their results are predicated on two things:
- The level of information the respondents have been exposed to.
- The framing of the questions on the poll.
What is missing, when the media report the results of these polls, is their own failure to adequately inform the public on the issue at hand in the first place.
Thus, the responses in a recent Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation Poll on the Green New Deal (GND), as reported in an article in the November 27 edition of the Post, reflected the fact that most people know almost nothing about the GND at all. This is hardly surprising. Most mainstream media outlets, whether print, radio and television or on line, saturate us day after day with everything Trump.
The climate crisis is at last starting to get some traction in the media. But it’s way past due. And it’s only happening now that there is a crisis. The opportunities to heed the scientific warnings even decades ago and start enlightening the public then, were missed, deliberately or otherwise.
Nuclear winter in a warming world?
India-Pakistan nuclear war would have “no precedent in human experience”
By Daniel Stain
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could, over the span of less than a week, kill 50-125 million people—more than the death toll during all six years of World War II, according to new research.
A new study conducted by researchers from CU Boulder and Rutgers University examines how such a hypothetical future conflict would have consequences that could ripple across the globe. Today, India and Pakistan each have about 150 nuclear warheads at their disposal, and that number is expected to climb to more than 200 by 2025.
The picture is grim. That level of warfare wouldn’t just kill millions of people locally, said CU Boulder’s Brian Toon, who led the research published on October 2, 2019 in the journal Science Advances. It might also plunge the entire planet into a severe cold spell, possibly with temperatures not seen since the last Ice Age.
His team’s findings come as tensions are again simmering between India and Pakistan. In August, India made a change to its constitution that stripped rights from people living in the long-contested region of Kashmir. Soon after, the nation sent troops to Kashmir, moves that Pakistan criticized sharply.
“An India-Pakistan war could double the normal death rate in the world,” said Toon, a professor in the Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). “This is a war that would have no precedent in human experience.”
First the U.S. invaded Iraq — then left it poisoned
Scientist: Bombs, bullets and military hardware abandoned by U.S. forces have left Iraq “toxic for millennia”
By David Masciotra
The political and moral culture of the United States allows for bipartisan cooperation to destroy an entire country, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process, without even the flimsiest of justification. Then, only a few years later, everyone can act as if it never happened.
In 2011, the U.S. withdrew most of its military personnel from Iraq, leaving the country in ruins. Estimates of the number of civilians who died during the war in Iraq range from 151,000 to 655,000. An additional 4,491 American military personnel perished in the war. Because the bombs have stopped falling from the sky and the invasion and occupation of Iraq no longer makes headlines, Americans likely devote no thought to the devastation that occurred in their name.
With the exception of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, who is currently polling at or below 2 percent, no candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination has consistently addressed the criminality, cruelty and cavalier wastefulness of American foreign policy. Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the race, not only supported the war in Iraq — despite his recent incoherent claims to the contrary — but as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee acted as its most effective and influential salesman in the Democratic Party.
The “Eyes Wide Open” project in Philadelphia memorialized slain Iraqi civilians. (Photo: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com)
The blasé attitude of America toward the death and destruction it creates, all while boasting of its benevolence, cannot withstand the scrutiny of science. Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan and recipient of the Rachel Carson Prize, has led several investigative expeditions in Iraq to determine how the pollutants and toxic chemicals from the U.S.-led war are poisoning Iraq’s people and environment. The health effects are catastrophic, and will remain so long after the war reached its official end.
Where are the national anti-war monuments?
It’s time to memorialize peace in our public spaces
By Dr. Michael Knox
I travel frequently and have seen the many monuments to soldiers and to wars that occupy our city squares and parks. In the summer of 2005 my son James and I visited Washington, DC after he finished his first year of college. We made the standard tour of the city, visiting museums, the White House, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and the newly dedicated National World War II Memorial.
These memorials exist to reinforce the notion that war efforts or activities are highly valued and rewarded by our society. In this and other visits to the National Mall, I have encountered dozens of war veterans discussing their combat experiences with their children, grandchildren, other relatives and friends. I imagine that most of the listeners were proud of the speaker’s military service and some viewed the war veteran as a potential role model.
“There is no public validation of antiwar activities and no memorial.” (Photo: Women in Black, by Camilla Hoel, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Suddenly, with my son present, I realized that all of my own personal memories and stories in this realm were of antiwar activities. I was immediately struck by the fact that there are no National Monuments here to convey a message that our society also values peace and recognizes those who take action to oppose one or more U.S. wars. There is no public validation of antiwar activities and no memorial to serve as a catalyst for discussion regarding courageous peace efforts by Americans over the past centuries.
This realization led to the organization of the US Peace Memorial Foundation in 2005 and my retirement in 2011 so that I could devote the remainder of my life to creating this monument, initially online and later as a physical structure in our nation’s capital.
The insanity of punishing the good
Why aren’t we exalting peace heroes and abolishing nuclear weapons?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
You’re liable to run into trouble if you try to suggest there is a greater threat to planetary survival than climate change. But there is. It’s called nuclear war.
Granted — and thank goodness — climate change is finally all the rage now. Rage has taken over, and rightly so, especially among the young whose future has been effectively ruined by the inaction of their elders.
There is no arguing that the climate crisis is an emergency. We have left it so late that the steps we must take have likely become unachievable — such as never extracting another drop of oil, another lump of coal, or another whiff of gas from the earth ever; starting now.
We are in a desperate scramble to save ourselves.
Photo by Friends of the Earth Scotland.
Meanwhile, the fact that we could set omnicide in motion with one deliberate or accidental push of the nuclear button is all but ignored.
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