RE: BWC HPS Meeting on February 21

[Rodney Bauman <RBauman@wssrap.com>]

Regarding Dr. Makhijani, the following clip was posted this weekend on the
DOE-Watch website.  This should be a interesting meeting.
	
Source:
http://www.tompaine.com/opinion/2001/02/06/1.html</A>
========================================================
URANIUM AND YOU
How Many Birth Defects and Cancers Should Be Allowed in the Name of National

Security? 
                 
Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental 
Research in Takoma Park, Maryland.

It's no secret that nuclear weapon states have harmed many people, and 
particularly weapons production workers, in the name of national security. 
But how this slow attack on health and the environment was carried out is 
still largely unknown and little understood. Through extensive research 
during the last two decades, a picture of the damage has begun to emerge
from 
the fog of denial and propaganda in only one nuclear weapon state -- the 
United States. 

That picture is far from reassuring: The government and its contractors 
deliberately emphasized production at the expense of health, routinely 
violating health and safety regulations, deliberately misleading workers so 
as not to arouse concerns or give hazardous duty pay when both were clearly 
warranted. 

Sloppy, incompetent science was a routine part of this dismal picture. The 
Department of Energy has admitted that, until 1989, no effort was made to 
calculate workers' internal radiation doses -- even though many were
inhaling 
and ingesting radioactive materials. IEER's work on data from the Fernald 
plant near Cincinnati, Ohio, where uranium for plutonium production reactors

was processed, showed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, most workers were
in 
fact overexposed due to uranium inhalation. Many probably also suffered 
kidney damage due to the toxicity of uranium as a heavy metal. Yet officials

reassured them that they were not being harmed. 

As such information has become public, workers and their advocates have 
demanded justice. The United States recently passed legislation giving most 
injured radiation workers the right to apply for compensation and medical 
treatment. 

The harm has extended well beyond factory boundaries to workers' families, 
neighbors and the general public. For example, an official study by the U.S.

National Cancer Institute showed that during the 1950s, a large portion of 
the U.S. milk supply was contaminated with iodine-131, a carcinogen, due to 
fallout from the Nevada test site. 

No other government has yet made as broad an admission of potential harm
from 
radiation as the United States, though some modest programs are in effect
for 
a limited number of people in some places. 

In Russia there are still practically no raw data available to independent 
researchers. Secrecy also holds sway in the other relatively open countries 
-- France, India, and Britain. The situation in China, Pakistan, and Israel 
is far worse. 

The pattern of keeping health and environmental abuses of their own people 
secret in the name of national security is anti-democratic to the core. It 
presumes that the people would not make sacrifices for the security of their

countries, and it presumes that top nuclear bureaucrats can make life or 
death decisions in defiance of established laws without the informed consent

of the people. 

Moreover, the damage caused by the nuclear states has extended well beyond 
their borders. Though the maps of contamination published by the National 
Cancer Institute magically stop at the borders of Canada and Mexico, 
atmospheric testing nonetheless permeated their milk too. Uranium miners in 
non-nuclear weapon states have also been injured. And test sites have 
polluted former colonies, such as Algeria and Polynesia. Yet, no proper 
accounting has been done. But then, why would nuclear weapon states be 
accountable to people beyond their borders when they have failed to be 
accountable to those within? 

Much of the harm from nuclear weapons production and testing was knowingly 
inflicted. For instance, a 1960 editorial in the engineering alumni magazine

of the University of California noted that "nuclear testing has so far 
produced about an additional 6,000 babies born with major birth defects 
[worldwide]." Yet, it added "you must weigh this acknowledged risk with the 
demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal." The editorial

did not explain why children in Nigeria or Costa Rica or Indonesia should 
have major birth defects so that the United States could have a nuclear 
arsenal. 

All of this raises troubling questions about how national security policy
has 
been formulated. If the nuclear weapons establishment can knowingly and 
secretly harm the very people it claims to protect, how can one be sure that

the security policies themselves are not largely motivated by bureaucratic 
self-preservation rather than by the interests of the community at large? 

This is by no means a rhetorical or theoretical question. There is strong 
evidence, for instance, that the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was

motivated in part by the desire to justify the huge expenditure on nuclear 
bombs during the Manhattan project. The nuclear establishment feared that if

the bombs were not seen as highly useful in the war effort, there would be 
relentless investigations for waste of money after the war. Such 
investigations would, no doubt, also have dimmed the prospects for continued

large nuclear weapons budgets after the war. 

The public needs to engage in a wide-ranging discourse about the health and 
environmental harm that nuclear weapon states have inflicted upon their own 
people as well as those beyond their borders. 

An International Truth Commission to lead this discourse should not only 
examine the nature of that harm, and whether it was deliberately inflicted; 
it should recommend ways in which people can hold nuclear weapons 
establishments accountable. It should also determine whether the security 
arguments that have been claimed for nuclear weapons have been constructed
to 
perpetuate the nuclear weapons industry and bureaucracy. Such an examination

would be of some considerable relevance today, given that nuclear weapons 
establishments are still refusing to meet their nuclear disarmament 
commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that people are 
still getting ill and dying from the harm that nuclear weapons
establishments 
have inflicted upon them.


-----Original Message-----
From: BobCherry@aol.com [mailto:BobCherry@aol.com]
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 4:51 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: BWC HPS Meeting on February 21

Baltimore-Washington Chapter of the Health Physics Society
February 21, 2001

Estimating Worker Doses in Nuclear Weapons Plants
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.

Arjun Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental 
Research in Takoma Park, Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering at the

University of California, Berkeley, specializing in nuclear fusion. A 
recognized authority on energy issues and nuclear issues in particular, Dr. 
Makhijani is the author and co-author of numerous reports and books on
topics 
such as radioactive waste storage and disposal, nuclear testing, disposition

of fissile materials, energy efficiency and ozone depletion. He is the 
principal editor of Nuclear Wastelands: a Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons 
Production and Its Health and Environmental/ Effects, published by MIT Press

in July 1995, and subsequently nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Dr. Makhijani has served as a consultant to numerous organizations including

the Tennessee Valley Authority, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and several 
agencies of the United Nations.
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