Beyond Nuclear International
Jane Fonda lights up Fire Drill Fridays
“We’re going to have to be very brave and very united and very determined”
By Linda Pentz Gunter
When at last she raised her fist in a trademark salute, then held out her hands to be zip-tied by police, it was the end of another long day for Jane Fonda, 81.
The two-time Academy Award and BAFTA winning actress has spent four of the last five Fridays getting herself arrested in Washington, DC, protesting for action — or against what she sees as inaction — on climate change.
It’s a script for which this long-time activist needs no rehearsal. For Fonda, this is now the most important role of her life.
Fonda is participating in a weekly protest she has dubbed Fire Drill Fridays — in a nod to teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg’s warning that our house is on fire. She has moved temporarily to Washington, DC and, sporting a fiery red coat, has vowed to demonstrate and face arrest every Friday until mid-January when she must resume filming her hit television show, Grace and Frankie. The first Fire Drill Friday was October 11.
Jane Fonda is arrested for the fourth straight week protesting climate inaction. (Photo courtesy Fire Drill Fridays.)
They came to stop a crime
Instead, seven Catholic peacemakers were convicted and now await sentencing
By Jack Cohen-Joppa, The Nuclear Resister
“…You are the hope you have arrived to find.”
So ended a brief message that Fr. Steve Kelly wrote from jail last month to be read to more than 100 friends and supporters. We had travelled from across the United States for a Festival of Hope on the eve of the trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares in coastal Brunswick, Georgia.
While many of us hoped for their acquittal, Steve reminded us that hope in the nuclear age comes first from building community, and hope is sustained every time we act together for a nuclear-free future.
The 70-year-old Jesuit knows something about sustaining hope in hard places. This time, he’s already been in jail for over a year and a half. He was arrested with six other Catholic nuclear abolitionists – Mark Colville, Clare Grady, Martha Hennessy, Elizabeth McAlister, Patrick O’Neill and Carmen Trotta – in the wee hours of April 5, 2018, inside the United States’ Submarine Base Kings Bay. There they cut fences and used hand tools, paint and human blood to condemn nuclear weapons and carry out symbolic acts of disarmament.
The Kings Bay Plowshares joined a nearly 40-year tradition of more than 100 nonviolent direct actions where participants give form to the Biblical prophecy of Isaiah and “beat swords into plowshares.” Five of the seven took part in earlier Plowshares actions and have spent time in federal prison – in Steve’s case, more than ten years.
The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 pre-action. Left to right: Clare Grady, Patrick O’Neill, Liz McAlister, Fr. Steve Kelly, Martha Hennessy, Mark Colville and Carmen Trotta.(Photo: KBP7)
The delusion of thorium
After 50 years and four failures, the US abandoned thorium reactors
By Helen Caldicott
As Australia is grappling with the notion of introducing nuclear power into the country, it seems imperative the general public understand the intricacies of these technologies so they can make informed decisions. Thorium reactors are amongst those being suggested at this time.
The U.S. tried for 50 years to create thorium reactors, without success. Four commercial thorium reactors were constructed, all of which failed. And because of the complexity of problems listed below, thorium reactors are far more expensive than uranium fueled reactors.
The longstanding effort to produce these reactors cost the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars, while billions more dollars are still required to dispose of the highly toxic waste emanating from these failed trials.
The truth is, thorium is not a naturally fissionable material. It is, therefore, necessary to mix thorium with either enriched uranium-235 (up to 20 per cent enrichment) or with plutonium – both of which are innately fissionable – to get the process going.
While uranium enrichment is already very expensive, the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from uranium powered reactors is enormously expensive and very dangerous to the workers who are exposed to toxic radioactive isotopes during the process. Reprocessing spent fuel requires chopping up radioactive fuel rods by remote control, then dissolving them in concentrated nitric acid from which plutonium is precipitated out by complex chemical means.
Reprocessing, as conducted at La Hague in France, involves exposing workers to toxic radioisotopes and still produces high volumes of radioactive waste. (Photo: Jean-Marie Taillat for WikiMedia Commons)
Vast quantities of highly acidic, highly radioactive liquid waste then remain to be disposed of. (Only 6 kilograms of plutonium-239 can fuel a nuclear weapon, while each reactor makes 250 kilos of plutonium per year. One-millionth of a gram of plutonium, if inhaled, is carcinogenic.)
Uranium mining and my family’s story
The 1,000 uranium mines of “John Wayne country” and their terrible legacy
By Tommy Rock, Ph.D.
My name is Tommy Rock, PhD., and I am from the Navajo tribe in the southwest U.S. I live in Monument Valley, Utah, which is in southeastern Utah near the Four Corners area (where the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet). Monument Valley is also on the Navajo Nation. Monument Valley was made famous by John Wayne and John Ford when it appeared in their western movies such as She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache, just to name a few. This place has a beautiful red stone hovering above the arid desert landscape.
Growing Up With My Grandparents
My story begins with my being raised by my grandparents. During the winter months, we lived in Copper Canyon, which is in the northwestern part of Monument Valley. Copper Canyon has a spring that flows year-round. We have our livestock there, our cattle and horses. The area is surrounded by redstone walls like a corral with two ways out. The area is also arid with desert shrubs. During the summer we went to our summer camp out of Copper Canyon.
The wooden shack that I grew up in with my grandparents. Located in Copper Canyon. The cabin had no running water and no electricity. (Photo: Tommy Rock)
We lived in a wooden shack. I think my grandfather built it long ago. Seems like the structure was there an eternity because that is all I remember. My grandmother was the only one that had a bed. My grandfather and I had a sheepskin that we slept on. Every morning my grandfather would tell me to go run, and, if I did not get up, he poured water on me. He said that it would make me strong.
Humans of the Polygon
The dark legacy of Soviet atomic testing
By Dr. Togzhan Kassenova
It has been thirty years since the last Soviet test rocked the Semipalatinsk Polygon in Kazakhstan, but its dark legacy still haunts people who live nearby. The victims, now in their fourth generation, continue to pay the price for the Soviet nuclear might. Together, with two colleagues, we embark to meet them in the villages of Karaul, Znamenka (Kokentau), and Sarzhal.
The first and youngest victim we meet is a sweet six-month-old baby boy named after Kazakhstan’s first president. Nursultan has a benign tumor of bright red color on his head and six fingers on his left hand. His mom, a young woman in her 20s, tells us she heard that the extra limb could be removed with a laser. When I do my research later, I cannot find any references to that being possible with a laser. Instead, traditional surgery is recommended within the first month of birth.
We do not know if Nursultan’s parents will go for a surgery, but his mom worries that, if left like that, her boy will be teased later in life. Nursultan smiles at us with his happy toothless smile, unaware of his predicament. The disease, known by its scientific name of polydactyly, is caused by a genetic mutation.
Visiting families in Karaul
The same day we meet a small girl who is missing four fingers on her hand, a genetic mutation similar to Nursultan’s. Her family is kind enough to receive us and share their story. Their other daughter faced cancer and survived after persevering through two years of chemotherapy. Now she is free of cancer but needs regular checks for the benign tumor that remains on her face bone. These checks can only be done in larger cities, and travel requires financial resources that the family does not have. “We reached out to a charity organization, but they told us because she was cancer-free, they couldn’t help,” they tell us. A few years ago, these parents already lost another daughter to sudden pneumonia. She was six.
Forget deterrence
Russia and the US must see each other as partners in survival
By E. Martin Schotz
Let us begin by examining two moments from the media in the past year. The first occurred on an NPR program during a segment exploring under what conditions the United States might launch nuclear weapons. At one point the host exclaimed, “Well we wouldn’t want to blow up the world, if we didn’t have a good reason to do so.” Put a check by that comment. We will come back to it.
The second moment was a question a reporter put to Senator Bernie Sanders as to whether he would be willing to push the nuclear button. The sense of the question was that to be qualified to be President of the United States you had to be willing to “push the button.”
How did we ever get into this situation, where we are planning to blow up the world and need to make sure we have a “good reason” to do so, and in which, in order to be considered competent to be President of the United States, you have to be willing to blow up the world?
The persistent belief that nuclear weapons possession equates with strength. (Cover art of Atomic War! #1, November 1952, Published 1952-1953. Copyright expired. Wikimedia Commons.)
This is literally the absurd criminal insanity in which we are living with nuclear weapons. How has this come about? By what means have we, as otherwise sane human beings, allowed ourselves to be put in such a situation? How can political representatives and military officials who ordinarily appear sane participate in such a situation?
I want to suggest in this essay that one key to understanding this insanity rests on our failure to grasp the irrationality of the concept “nuclear deterrence.” Albert Einstein, at the dawn of the nuclear age, famously warned that “the splitting of the atom has changed everything in the world except our mode of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”
Deterrence is a word we have carried over from an earlier age. It is based on the idea that you are less likely to be attacked in war if the enemy that might attack you would be subjected to unacceptable destruction. It is with this simple logic that nuclear weapons have been developed, tested and deployed by the United States, by Russia, and by other nuclear powers. It is with this concept that our policy makers developed the policy of “Mutually Assured Destruction” as a way of preventing nuclear war.
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