Enormous Cuts in Military Spending? Read the Fine Print
By Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis | Dissident Voice | August 3rd, 2011
In this age of austerity, all the politicians are talking about the need for spending cuts. But when it comes to shared burdens and slashed budgets, don’t expect the Pentagon to start holding bake sales, despite what you may have heard about reductions to its obscenely bloated funding.
Citing the U.S. government’s $14.3 trillion debt, lawmakers from both parties have seized the moment to try and attain long hoped-for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But the recent deal does seem to include some good news for lovers of peace: the push for reductions would encompass the war-making part of the state. Indeed, according to a “fact sheet” released by the White House on the bipartisan compromise, the recent deal to raise the national debt ceiling “puts us on track to cut $350 billion from the defense budget over 10 years.”
Popular liberal pundits, such as The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson and Ezra Klein, reacted by calling the supposed defense cuts “gigantic” and “unprecedented.” The White House says they’re the first spending reductions since the 1990s.
But don’t start cheering yet. As with any other major bipartisan initiative in Washington – the Iraq war and the Wall Street bailouts come to mind – there’s ample reason to be skeptical.
First, the cuts for 2012 are virtually nil. Security spending—which includes the Pentagon, State Department, Homeland Security, part of Veterans Affairs and intelligence spending—will be capped at $684 billion in 2012, a decline of merely $5 billion (less than 1 percent) from this year.
Yes, there are potentially far more drastic cuts down the road. In addition to the first $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade, a bipartisan Congressional committee must come up with an additional $1.5 trillion cuts by November — or trigger an automatic across-the-board reduction of $1.2 trillion starting in 2013, half of which would be expected to come from military spending.
However, expect this threat of deep military cuts – if cutting defense by 3 percent a year can be called “deep” when it has grown at a rate of 9 percent over the last decade – to be used as a bargaining chip by Democrats to extract concessions on tax increases from Republicans; don’t hold your breath expecting them to actually materialize. And with House Republicans already pledging to “fight on behalf of our Armed Forces,” by which they mean the military-industrial complex, don’t expect Democrats to put up much of a fight. Even were Obama so inclined, the idea that he will expend political capital on cutting military spending even as he expands the war on terror in Libya, Yemen and Somalia is doubtful, especially with an election looming.
But let’s put aside cynicism and accept the Obama administration at its word. Let’s assume the White House and Congress agree to cut military spending by $350 billion a year over 10 years. While the numbers may sound impressive out of context, that’s like draining an Olympic-sized pool with a glass from your kitchen: you’re going to be at it for awhile. The military budget has ballooned so much over the last decade that even if it were cut in half tomorrow, the U.S. would still spend more than it did in 2001.
Indeed, the Obama administration’s proposed military budget for 2012 – the baseline from which future cuts are projected – is at its “highest level since World War II,” according to the non-partisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “surpassing the Cold War peak” set by Ronald Reagan and a Democratic House of Representatives in 1985. Even if, instead of over a decade, the whole, entirely-subject-to-change $350 billion were cut from the defense budget in one fiscal year alone, the U.S. would still lead the globe in military spending, devoting twice as much to guns and bombs as its closest and much more populous rival, China. And that’s without factoring in the cost of any new wars.
Of course, official budget numbers don’t tell the whole story. Factoring in interest payments for past military expenditures, spending on veterans’ care and other defense-related items not included in the Pentagon budget, economist Robert Higgs estimates the yearly grand total spent on the military is $1 trillion or more, with over half of the federal income tax going to the military. And that massive national debt that’s being used to justify cuts in social spending? Nothing has contributed to it more than the dramatic rise in military spending over the last decade, a factoid you might have missed if you get your news from a television.
The tragic irony is that debt caused in large part by foreign military adventures is being used to further a class war here at home, even as the bloodshed continues in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and beyond. Too bad that, rather than denounce this morally and fiscally damaging addiction to militarism, politicians prefer to orchestrate the decline of the American empire from within.
Medea Benjamin can be reached at (medea@globalexchange.org)
The War on You
By Michael Collins | The Money Party | July 31, 2011
Let the word go forth from Washington! The corporate rulers occupying our nation’s capital have declared war on just about every citizen.
Have no doubt: those in the upper ranges of the top 1% of wealth in this country (aka The Money Party) want to kick you to the curb.
They want to reduce your social security and make you go broke paying for medical care.
They want to lower your wages and trash your retirement.
They ignore the clear facts that we’ve had negative job growth since 2000 and the situation is just getting worse.
They want to ship jobs, factories, and entire businesses overseas and give companies that do that a big fat tax credit for doing so.
They’ve been given so much for nothing for so long. Now, they’re ready to take it all. It’s their time!
The most recent assault is the ridiculous debate about raising the debt ceiling. There should be no debate. Failing to raise the ceiling right now means deliberate default on debts, refusing to pay bills the government can pay. It’s called fraud.
The pressing need to fix the budget is a separate issue. Reduced spending and increased revenues should come through broad public involvement and open debate. It mandates that the rulers behave like adults.
But this crisis isn’t about putting together a real budget. It’s about creating a budget that punishes you, your family, and friends. It’s about taking your attention away from your vital interests to maximize income and control by The Money Party.
Were the leaders on either side of the debate serious, the Bush era tax cuts would be rescinded. These cuts on the top 1% were temporary. Guess what? Congress lied. When the temporary tax breaks ran out a few months ago, they were revived and renewed just when we had the greatest need for revenues.
The Money Party won’t give up its wars either. Iraq and Afghanistan have added $4 trillion to the national debt of $14 trillion. Why not stop the wars? How hard is that to figure that out?
Getting rid of Bush tax cuts for the super-rich, ending the wars, and moving out of the recession/depression would be huge steps toward balancing the budget. But that won’t happen with this Congress and this president. Why? That would cost the financial elite money for taxes and lost income for all those weapons they sell to support the wars.
The Attack on You Began in Earnest Just Years Ago
Congress repealed Depression era banking regulation that kept your banks from risky investments in 1999.
Congress enacted legislation in 2000 that allowed extremely risky investments in real estate and other derivatives, illegal for nearly a century.
In 2001, the big banks and Wall Street celebrated its newly purchased freedoms with a decade-long binge of fraud and risky investments. Like a greedy con artist, they took everything they could from people here and around the world until there was no more to take. We have now hit the wall thanks to them.
The outrageous expenses of wars based on lies caught up with us and shoved the deficit to new heights. The tax cuts for the top 1% took away revenues needed to balance the budget.
The money they steal from the Social Security surplus is no longer enough. They want to keep the tax in place for us and take an even bigger rake-off.
This crisis is manufactured by the ongoing greed of The Money Party. It is funded by the US Treasury. You pay for it, all of it.
Ron Paul’s Challenge to the Left
A Question of Morality
By John V. Walsh | Dissident Voice | July 29th, 2011
On the question of war and empire, the Republican presidential candidates from Romney to Bachmann are clones of Obama, just as surely as Obama is a clone of Bush.
There is, however, one exception, Rep. Ron Paul (R, TX) the only contender who is a consistent, principled anti-interventionist, opposed to overseas Empire, and a staunch defender of our civil liberties so imperiled since 9/11. These are not new-found positions for Paul, come upon along the campaign trail or via a focus group, but long standing convictions, rooted in libertarian principles and verified by countless votes in the House and speeches on the Floor. You can take them to the proverbial bank. Nothing approaching this phenomenon has been seen in a major party since George McGovern. And even McGovern did not identify, let alone oppose, the U.S. as an Empire.
Paul must be taken seriously; he is not a candidate without real prospects. In New Hampshire, he is running third in the Republican race behind the chameleonic Romney and the looney Bachmann. And in the latest national Rasmussen poll, Dr. Paul runs 37% to 41% against Obama, clearly within striking distance of victory. Interestingly when Paul is put up against Obama, as opposed to others, the percentage choosing Obama drops. Paul has money from his grass roots “money bomb” fundraising and he has an enthusiastic base, especially among the under 30 set.
The question must be asked, what is to be done by the antiwar Left? This question may be put in a variety of ways. The Left often acknowledges its obligation to those in developing countries, people of color over the planet whose standard of living and life itself is held back by the depredations of the U.S. Empire. If the Left acknowledges such a primary obligation, does it not need to support an antiwar candidate like Paul when there is no other around? Look at Libya with thousands killed by NATO bombing and the infrastructure of the African country with the highest Human Development Index being systematically destroyed. It is a war that is undeclared by Congress, therefore in violation of the Constitution and thus an impeachable action. Or Iraq where a million have been killed and four million displaced. Paul takes an unequivocal stance to stop this killing. How can the Left justify withholding its support?
Is not the very first obligation of the Left above and beyond all else to stop the killing, done in our name and with our tax dollars? Is any other stance moral? And does not the Paul candidacy need to be seen in this light?
The Left has complained for decades that it is unable to reach much of the American public with a message of peace. In large part that is due to a cultural gap – the “progressive” Left does not speak in the same language as much of the country. Nor does the Left share the same worldview as many Americans. Ron Paul does, and he can reach, in fact, has reached these people with a solid anti-intervention message. Paul does not ask that his base change its worldview but simply to understand that anti-interventionism is a consistent part of that view. Paul speaks in straightforward terms. Let us stop poking our nose into other nations’ business and stop wasting our money doing so. He reaches people never before touched by an anti-war message. How can the Left pass up the chance to help such a candidate?
But what of other issues – like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security which the libertarian Paul wants to phase out, albeit gradually. Paul, the country doc, knows full well how people of little means rely on these programs and he proposes no sudden termination of them. But this author and others on the Left want to extend those programs. How do we square that circle? I contend it is no problem, because Paul is committed to preservation of civil liberties and the prerogatives of Congress. I am confident that under those conditions, where the discussion is open and free, my views on these social democratic programs will prevail. I am sure that my Libertarian friends feel the same way. And what more can we ask for in a democracy? Under Paul I do not have to worry about being locked up for my views. I am confident of that under Paul; I am not with any other candidate. Certainly not with Barack Obama.
On the other hand the only way that popular entitlement programs can be scrapped is by taking the decisions out of the hands of our elected officials and putting them in the hands of unelected bureaucrats. That is precisely what Obama is trying to do in the case of Medicare with his so-called “Independent Payment Advisory Board.” Congress will effectively be out of the loop, and so we will be unable to affect the decision with our votes. And Obama has already signaled that he is willing to cut these fixed benefit (aka “entitlement”) programs, incurring the wrath even of the usually placid AARP. As Alexander Cockburn has remarked, the only way to end Medicare is by pretending to save it – that is, by stealth. That is the way of Obama – but not of Paul.
The slogan “No Justice, No Peace,” has often been used by the Left; and for the developing world it is quite appropriate. But in the heart of the Empire it is the other way around: “No Peace, No Justice” – in that order. Until we get the monkey of Empire off our back, neither the desire for lower taxes nor the desire for better social benefits are likely to be realized. The Left cannot afford to ignore this fact or the Ron Paul candidacy. At the least it must be discussed. To simply avoid the question and look the other way as the wars and slaughter continue simply does not qualify as a moral stance.
Seismic hazard underestimated at Los Alamos Nuclear Lab
Press TV – July 23, 2011
New Mexico nuclear watchdogs are sounding the alarm over a proposed $6 billion, four-floor, super-WalMart sized building on the grounds of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Six metric tons — that’s 13,228 pounds — of plutonium would be stored at the new facility, which would also serve as a manufacturing plant to produce plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons. The project is a key part of a $180 billion federal plan to modernize aging U.S. nuclear [weapons] infrastructure.
The Department of Energy recently released a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed facility, giving a green light to the project, slated for completion in 2023.
However a vigilant Geologist and former Los Alamos Laboratory scientist calls the draft report “incomplete”, “inadequate” and says it “underestimates the seismic hazard” at the site.
California is famous for its earthquakes, but many Western states sit on unpredictable fault lines, New Mexico included. Through independent analysis of the site, Geologist Robert Gilkenson finds multiple errors with the Department of Energy draft report that could prove disastrous should a major earthquake shake Los Alamos.
Among other problems, Gilkenson says the design plans for the new building anticipate a lower level magnitude quake than could hit, and necessary field investigations to determine fault location, and fault geometry, have not been completed. If such a facility were built and then rocked by an earthquake, the resulting accident could rival the Fukushima disaster in Japan.
See also: uprisingradio.org
The Pentagon & slave labor in U.S. prisons
June 14, 2011 | Kinetic Truth
Prisoners earning 23 cents an hour in U.S. federal prisons are manufacturing high-tech electronic components for Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles, launchers for TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, and other guided missile systems. A March article by journalist and financial researcher Justin Rohrlich of World in Review is worth a closer look at the full implications of this ominous development. (minyanville.com)
The expanding use of prison industries, which pay slave wages, as a way to increase profits for giant military corporations is a frontal attack on the rights of all workers.
Prison labor — with no union protection, overtime pay, vacation days, pensions, benefits, health and safety protection, or Social Security withholding — also makes complex components for McDonnell Douglas/Boeing’s F-15 fighter aircraft, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, and Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter. Prison labor produces night-vision goggles, body armor, camouflage uniforms, radio and communication devices, and lighting systems and components for 30-mm to 300-mm battleship anti-aircraft guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder. Prisoners recycle toxic electronic equipment and overhaul military vehicles.
Labor in federal prisons is contracted out by UNICOR, previously known as Federal Prison Industries, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons. In 14 prison factories, more than 3,000 prisoners manufacture electronic equipment for land, sea and airborne communication. UNICOR is now the U.S. government’s 39th largest contractor, with 110 factories at 79 federal penitentiaries.
The majority of UNICOR’s products and services are on contract to orders from the Department of Defense. Giant multinational corporations purchase parts assembled at some of the lowest labor rates in the world, then resell the finished weapons components at the highest rates of profit. For example, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation subcontract components, then assemble and sell advanced weapons systems to the Pentagon.
Increased profits, unhealthy workplaces
However, the Pentagon is not the only buyer. U.S. corporations are the world’s largest arms dealers, while weapons and aircraft are the largest U.S. export. The U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and diplomats pressure NATO members and dependent countries around the world into multibillion-dollar weapons purchases that generate further corporate profits, often leaving many countries mired in enormous debt.
But the fact that the capitalist state has found yet another way to drastically undercut union workers’ wages and ensure still higher profits to military corporations — whose weapons wreak such havoc around the world — is an ominous development.
According to CNN Money, the U.S. highly skilled and well-paid “aerospace workforce has shrunk by 40 percent in the past 20 years. Like many other industries, the defense sector has been quietly outsourcing production (and jobs) to cheaper labor markets overseas.” (Feb. 24) It seems that with prison labor, these jobs are also being outsourced domestically.
Meanwhile, dividends and options to a handful of top stockholders and CEO compensation packages at top military corporations exceed the total payment of wages to the more than 23,000 imprisoned workers who produce UNICOR parts.
The prison work is often dangerous, toxic and unprotected. At FCC Victorville, a federal prison located at an old U.S. airbase, prisoners clean, overhaul and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat and coated in toxic spent ammunition, depleted uranium dust and chemicals.
A federal lawsuit by prisoners, food service workers and family members at FCI Marianna, a minimum security women’s prison in Florida, cited that toxic dust containing lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic poisoned those who worked at UNICOR’s computer and electronic recycling factory.
Prisoners there worked covered in dust, without safety equipment, protective gear, air filtration or masks. The suit explained that the toxic dust caused severe damage to nervous and reproductive systems, lung damage, bone disease, kidney failure, blood clots, cancers, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, memory lapses, skin lesions, and circulatory and respiratory problems. This is one of eight federal prison recycling facilities — employing 1,200 prisoners — run by UNICOR.
After years of complaints the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Federal Occupational Health Service concurred in October 2008 that UNICOR has jeopardized the lives and safety of untold numbers of prisoners and staff. (Prison Legal News, Feb. 17, 2009)
Racism & U.S. prisons
The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. imprisons more than 25 percent of all people imprisoned in the world.
There are more than 2.3 million prisoners in federal, state and local prisons in the U.S. Twice as many people are under probation and parole. Many tens of thousands of other prisoners include undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing and youthful offenders in categories considered reform or detention.
The racism that pervades every aspect of life in capitalist society — from jobs, income and housing to education and opportunity — is most brutally reflected by who is caught up in the U.S. prison system.
More than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are people of color. Seventy percent of those being sentenced under the three strikes law in California — which requires mandatory sentences of 25 years to life after three felony convictions — are people of color. Nationally, 39 percent of African-American men in their 20s are in prison, on probation or on parole. The U.S. imprisons more people than South Africa did under apartheid. (Linn Washington, “Incarceration Nation”)
The U.S. prison population is not only the largest in the world — it is relentlessly growing. The U.S. prison population is more than five times what it was 30 years ago.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, there were 400,000 prisoners in the U.S. Today the number exceeds 2.3 million. In California the prison population soared from 23,264 in 1980 to 170,000 in 2010. The Pennsylvania prison population climbed from 8,243 to 51,487 in those same years. There are now more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began, according to Law Professor Michelle Alexander in the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
Today a staggering 1-in-100 adults in the U.S. are living behind bars. But this crime, which breaks families and destroys lives, is not evenly distributed. In major urban areas one-half of Black men have criminal records. This means life-long, legalized discrimination in student loans, financial assistance, access to public housing, mortgages, the right to vote and, of course, the possibility of being hired for a job.
What Could Truly End the Space Program: a Nuclear Disaster Overhead
By KARL GROSSMAN | CounterPunch | July 22, 2011
What is NASA’s future now that Atlantis has landed and the shuttle program is over? If NASA persists in using nuclear power in space, the agency’s future is threatened.
Between November 25 and December 15 NASA plans to launch for use on Mars a rover fueled with 10.6 pounds of plutonium, more plutonium than ever used on a rover.
The mission has a huge cost: $2.5 billion.
But if there is an accident before the rover is well on its way to Mars, and plutonium is released on Earth, its cost stands to be yet more gargantuan.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for what it calls its Mars Science Laboratory Mission says that if plutonium is released on Earth, the cost could be as high as $1.5 billion to decontaminate each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas” impacted.
What‘s the probability of an accident releasing plutonium? The NASA document says “the probability of an accident with a release of plutonium” is 1-in-220 “overall.”
If you knew your chance of not surviving an airplane flight—or just a drive in a car—was 1 in 220, would you take that trip?
And is this enormous risk necessary?
In two weeks, there will be a NASA mission demonstrating a clear alternative to atomic energy in space: solar power.
On August 5, NASA plans to launch a solar-powered space probe it’s named Juno to Jupiter. There’s no atomic energy involved, although NASA for decades has insisted that nuclear power is necessary for space devices beyond the orbit of Mars. With Juno, NASA will be showing it had that wrong.
“Juno will provide answers to critical science questions about Jupiter, as well as key information that will dramatically enhance present theories about the early formation of our own solar system,” says NASA on its website. “In 2016, the spinning, solar-powered Juno spacecraft will reach Jupiter.” It will be equipped with “instruments that can sense the hidden world beneath Jupiter’s colorful clouds” and make 33 passes of Jupiter.
As notes Aviation Week and Space Technology: “The unique spacecraft will set a record by running on solar power rather than nuclear radioisotope thermoelectric generators previously used to operate spacecraft that far from the Sun.”
The Mars rover to be launched, named Curiosity by NASA, will be equipped with these radioisotope thermoelectric generators using plutonium, the deadliest radioactive substance.
Juno, a large craft—66-feet wide—will be powered by solar panels built by a Boeing subsidiary, Spectrolab. The panels can convert 28 percent of the sunlight that them to electricity. They’ll also produce heat to keep Juno’s instruments warm. This mission’s cost is $1.1 billion.
In fact, Juno is not a wholly unique spacecraft. In 2004, the European Space Agency launched a space probe called Rosetta that is also solar-powered. Its mission is to orbit and land on a comet—beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
Moreover, there have been major developments in “solar sails” to propel spacecraft. Last year, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its Ikaros spacecraft with solar sails taking it to Venus. In January, NASA itself launched its NanoSail-D spacecraft. The Planetary Society has been developing several spacecraft that will take advantage of photons emitted by the Sun to travel through the vacuum of space.
At no point will Juno (or the other solar spacecrafts) be a threat to life on Earth. This includes Juno posing no danger when in 2013 it makes a flyby of Earth. Such flybys making use of Earth’s gravity to increase a spacecraft’s velocity have constituted dangerous maneuvers when in recent years they’ve involved plutonium-powered space probes such as NASA’s Galileo and Cassini probes.
Curiosity is a return to nuclear danger.
NASA’s Final Environmental Impact statement admits that a large swath of Earth could be impacted by plutonium in an accident involving it. The document’s section on “Impacts of Radiological Releases” says “the affected environment” could include “the regional area near the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and the global area.”
“Launch area accidents would initially release material into the regional area, defined…to be within …62 miles of the launch pad,” says the document. This is an area from Cape Canaveral west to Orlando.
But “since some of the accidents result in the release of very fine particles less than a micron in diameter, a portion of such releases could be transported beyond…62 miles,” it goes on. These particles could become “well-mixed in the troposphere”—the atmosphere five to nine miles high—“and have been assumed to potentially affect persons living within a latitude band from approximately 23-degrees north to 30-degrees north.” That’s a swath through the Caribbean, across North Africa and the Mideast, then India and China Hawaii and other Pacific islands, and Mexico and southern Texas.
Then, as the rocket carrying Curiosity up gains altitude, the impacts of an accident in which plutonium is released would be even broader. The plutonium could affect people “anywhere between 28-degrees north and 28-degrees south latitude,” says the NASA document. That’s a band around the mid-section of the Earth including much of South America, Africa and Australia.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has long emphasized that a pound of plutonium if uniformly distributed could hypothetically give a fatal dose of lung cancer to every person on Earth. A pound, even 10.6 pounds, could never be that uniformly distributed, of course. But an accident in which plutonium is released by a space device as tiny particles falling to Earth maximizes its lethality. A millionth of a gram of plutonium can be a fatal dose. The pathway of greatest concern is the breathing in plutonium particle..
As the NASA Environmental Impact Statement puts it: “Particles smaller than about 5 microns would be transported to and remain in the trachea, bronchi, or deep lung regions.” The plutonium particles “would continuously irradiate lung tissue.”
“A small fraction would be transported over time directly to the blood or to lymph nodes and then to the blood,” it continues. Once plutonium “has entered the blood via ingestion or inhalation, it would circulate and be deposited primarily in the liver and skeletal system.” Also, says the document, some of the plutonium would migrate to the testes or ovaries.
The cost of decontamination of areas affected by the plutonium could be, according to the NASA statement, $267 million for each square mile of farmland, $478 million for each square mile of forests and $1.5 billion for each square mile of “mixed-use urban areas.”
The NASA document lists “secondary social costs associated with the decontamination and mitigation activities” as: “Temporary or longer term relocation of residents; temporary or longer term loss of employment; destruction or quarantine of agricultural products including citrus crops; land use restrictions which could affect real estate values, tourism and recreational activities; restriction or bands on commercial fishing; and public health effects and medical care.”
As to why the use of a plutonium-powered rover on Mars—considering that NASA has successfully used solar-powered rovers on Mars—the NASA Environmental Impact Statement says that a “solar-powered rover…would not be capable of operating over the full range of scientifically desirable landing site latitudes” on this mission.
There’s more to it. For many decades there has been a marriage of nuclear power and space at NASA. The use of nuclear power on space missions has been heavily promoted by the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and the many DOE (previously AEC) national laboratories including Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. This provides work for these government entities. Also, the manufacturers of nuclear-powered space devices—General Electric was a pioneers in this—have pushed their products. Further, NAS has sought to coordinate its activities with the U.S. military. The military for decades has planned for the deployment of nuclear-powered weapons in space.
Personifying the NASA-military connection now is NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former NASA astronaut and Marine Corps major general. Appointed by President Barack Obama, he is a booster of radioisotope thermoelectric generators as well as rockets using nuclear power for propulsion. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars through the years on such rockets but none have ever taken off and the programs have all ended up cancelled largely out of concern about a nuclear-powered rocket blowing up on launch or falling back to Earth.
Accidents have happened in the U.S. space nuclear program. Of the 26 space missions that have used plutonium which are listed in the NASA Environmental Impact Statement for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission, three underwent accident causing, admits the document.
The worst occurred in 1964 and involved, it notes, the SNAP-9A plutonium system aboard a satellite that failed to achieve orbit and dropped to Earth, disintegrating as it fell. The 2.1 pounds of plutonium fuel dispersed widely over the Earth and Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, long linked this accident to an increase in global lung cancer. With the SNAP-9A accident, NASA switched to solar energy on satellites. Now all satellites—and the International Space Station—are solar-powered.
There was a near-miss involving a nuclear disaster and a space shuttle. The ill-fated Challenger’s next mission in 1986 was to loft a plutonium-powered space probe.
The NASA Environmental Impact Statement includes comments from people and organizations some highly critical of a plutonium-powered Mars Science Laboratory Mission.
Leah Karpen of Asheville, North Carolina says: “Every expansion of plutonium research, development and transportation of this deadly material increases the risk of nuclear accident or theft. In addition, plutonium production is expensive and diverts resources from the more important social needs of our society today, and in the future.” She urges NASA “to reconsider the use of nuclear” and go with solar instead.
Jeremy Maxand, executive director of the Idaho-based Snake River Alliance, calls on NASA and the Department of Energy to “take this opportunity to move space exploration in a sustainable direction with regard to power. Using solar rather than nuclear to power the Mars Science Laboratory Mission would keep the U.S. safe, advance energy technologies that are cleaner and more secure, be more fiscally responsible, and set a responsible example to other countries as they make decisions about their energy future.”
Ace Hoffman of Carlsbad, California speaks of “today’s nuclear NASA” and a “closed society of dangerous, closed-minded ‘scientists’ who are hoodwinking the American public and who are guilty of premeditated random murder.” He adds: “The media has a duty to learn the truth rather than parrot NASA’s blanketly-false assertions.”
NASA, in response to the criticisms, repeatedly states in the document: “NASA and the DOE take very seriously the possibility that an action they take could potentially result in harm to humans or the environment. Therefore, both agencies maintain vigorous processes to reduce the potential for such events.”
Involved in challenging the mission is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (www.space4peace.org). Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Maine-based organization, says that “NASA sadly appears committed to maintaining their dangerous alliance with the nuclear industry. Both entities view space as a new market for the deadly plutonium fuel.” Says Gagnon: “The taxpayers are being asked once again to pay for nuclear missions that could endanger the life of all the people on the planet…Have we not learned anything from Chernobyl and Fukushima? We don’t need to be launching nukes into space. It’s not a gamble we can afford to take.”
With the return of Atlantis and end of the shuttle program, there are concerns about this being the “end” of the U.S. space program.
An accident if NASA continues to insist on mixing nuclear power and atomic energy—a nuclear disaster overhead—that, indeed, could end the space program.
~
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet(Common Courage Press) and wrote and presented the TV program Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens (www.envirovideo.com).
A National Park for Nukes?
By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM | CounterPunch | July 20, 2011
When the Truman administration dropped the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, they not only initiated a Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, they also began a struggle over the meaning of the atom bomb inside the United States.
It began slowly. Criticism of the bomb was at first strongly repressed by McCarthyism and other militaristic histrionics, but by the late 1950s hard questions about nuclear weapons were publicly being raised. By the late 1960s doubts and criticisms went mainstream. Disillusioned Americans wondered, had it been necessary to reduce two Japanese cities to dust, killing hundreds of thousands in mere seconds? Was it necessary to sacrifice vast zones of the American West to uranium mining, nuclear dumps, testing grounds, and weapons silos? Had the government acted in hasty ignorance, or in knowing neglect when it allowed miners and downwinders and soldiers to be poisoned with radioactive dust? Was there really a “missile gap”? Did atomic scientists actually purposefully expose their own children to radiation? Would it be possible to survive nuclear war, as the experts told us? What did the creators of the atom bomb really think about their “achievement”? What opportunity costs was our multi-trillion dollar investment in nukes imposing upon us as a country?
These and other questions about the nation’s commitment to nuclear weapons were intensely debated as the Vietnam war rose to a fever pitch. New evidence continually surfaced revealing that the federal government had often acted with malice and intentional deception throughout the Manhattan Project, through the 1950s, and beyond. Historians began to document the realities of the nuclear age, including willful poisonings, and experimental defilement of the people and ecosystems of North America, especially Nevada’s Great Basin, and also the South Pacific’s Marshall Islands, and other testing and nuclear dumping grounds where generations would suffer on lands poisoned for thousands of years.
Quickly much of the logic that had justified the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came apart, and newer, more informed histories were drafted, showing cynical US leaders bent on punishing Japan and thwarting Soviet occupation of that island, not quickly ending the war and saving US and Japanese life. Gar Alperovitz’s “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb” presented the bones of this argument. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s “Racing the Enemy” concluded the argument in extensively researched detail.
In other exposés of journalism and archival research the nuclear labs and testing grounds of America were exposed not as monuments to great achievements of science and national will, but rather as institutions of hubris and death, occupying stolen Indian lands, and dreaming up ever more deadly doomsday machines in the forms of thermonuclear weapons, MIRVed missiles, neutron bombs, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. The willingness of US leaders to threaten the use of nuclear weapons again and again against non-nuclear states was revealed, particularly after Vietnam.
The nation’s nuclear weapons program lost its early luster then as many Americans came to fully grasp the toxic legacy, and understand the antidemocratic tendencies inexorably tied to the bomb and the institutions that created it. The 1980s brought this awareness to a peak as public perceptions of the bomb and its creators congealed around condemnation and a desire to abolish nuclear weapons.
When the Cold War ended the toxic legacy of the Manhattan Project and the continuing US nuclear weapons program was subjected to its greatest scrutiny of all. Losing their mythical rival in the Soviet “evil empire,” the weapons labs entered a long decade of scandalous revelation; declining morale, accidents, corruption, theft, espionage, greed, incompetence. The 1990s and early 2000s brought repeated crises for the US nuclear establishment. ‘If only it were possible to bring back the good old days,’ thought the bewildered senior weaponeers. However, these good old days too were tarnished by the truth.
All the while, all through these eras of revelation and crisis, the weaponeers who dedicated their lives to the nuclear enterprise waged a battle of ideas to hide the ugly truths of the Manhattan Project’s historical legacy. These acolytes of nuclearism —old Cold Warriors retired from the weapons labs, the Department of Energy, the military, and the private sector corporations that have made billions from building the bomb and spoiling the land and water and DNA of large swaths of the earth— they organized their own effort to re-write history all over again, to recast nuclearism in the benevolent form it had lost. They sought to recapture former glories that had withered through decades of sobering reality. As public perceptions of the bomb and the nuclear labs further soured they stepped up their game, especially in the 1990s.
Their revisions began modestly enough, but quickly turned into a national institutionalized effort. Historical foundations were incorporated by DOE retirees and nuclear boosters around various Cold War nuclear weapons sites. Soon large sums of money were raised, and with the eager cooperation of the nuclear labs and military-industrial corporations still designing and building nuclear arms, museums were opened to the public. These museums grew into absurdly large and well financed propaganda pieces.
The Bradbury Museum in downtown Los Alamos, named after Norris Bradbury, the second Los Alamos Laboratory director, became a museum of “science,” not just of the lab, or simply the weapons it built, or merely the Cold War. No, it is “science.” This aspiration to educate the public about “general science” was reflected LANL’s intense effort in the 1990s and early 2000s to obscure its own core mission of nuclear weapons, constantly draping itself in the prestige of being a “national laboratory,” or as the lab still describes itself, “a premier national security research institution, delivering scientific and engineering solutions for the nation’s most crucial and complex problems.” The lab also launched its own history web site in the 2000s showing its preferred arc of development, from the Manhattan Project to “computing,” and “basic science,” even though the lab remained thoroughly a nuclear weapons facility, and today is in fact becoming more and more dedicated to weapons manufacturing.
Inside the Bradbury Museum is an entire history of LANL, the Manhattan Project, nuclear science, and a few exhibits extolling the lab’s supposedly non-nuclear contributions. Full scale nuclear missiles and bombs float on wires above and sit in displays within arms reach. You’re encouraged to touch the bomb. You’re told not to fear radiation. The Bradbury Museum, funded with federal dollars, became a key site of struggle over history in the 1990s as community groups battled the lab and DOE to include a different interpretation of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, a narrative that didn’t claim it was a “necessity” to end the war and save lives, one that showed in images, and described through first hand accounts what the victims experienced. Parties without an agenda to promote nuclear weapons were, in other words, simply asking the Bradbury to present the history that most historians now acknowledge as most complete. In the end the lab and museum’s staff, composed of pro-nuclear managers, allowed an alternative display in a dark corner of the museum, completely marginalized from the rest of the lavish exhibits.
For about a decade the Bradbury Museum stood as the premier pro-nuclear weapons propaganda tool. Other sites within the weapons complex were busy building their own museums though. The Nevada Test Site opened the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas in 2005 after a pro-nuclear weapons lobby, the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, raised enough money and convinced the Smithsonian Institute to join up.
It should be noted that the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, like the foundations that run or help support the Bradbury and other nuclear museums, is run by a roster of retired Test Site employees and contractors, all strong believers in nuclear weapons as forces of unquestionable good in the nation’s past and present. The NTSHF’s president Nick Aquilina, for example, was described in a tribute published in the Congressional Record in 1994 as a man who “characterizes the spirit and dedication of a generation of Americans who dedicated their lives to maintaining our nuclear deterrent”. Aquilina was a thirty-two year career DOE manager. The foundation’s chairman, Troy Wade, is head of the Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, a lobby for the state’s military-industrial complex, and also a retired DOE manager. With or without the Smithsonian’s involvement it’s obvious what sort of historical narrative about nuclear weapons testing attendees will be exposed to.
In the Atomic Testing Museum one is subjected to an entire historical narrative emphasizing the race for the bomb between the USA and Germany, culminating in the “necessary” dropping of the bomb on Japan, and then describing decades of testing in the desert northwest of Vegas, emphasizing the greatness of nuclear weapons and the men who built and blew them up. It’s all packaged in a feel good, almost kitschy nostalgia. There’s even a theater where you can sit through a simulated nuclear blast in which air is blown into your face and the bench beneath you rumbles and shakes. The kids must love that.
The biggest museum contribution to the pro-nuclear weapons historical narrative to date, however, is the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. Located in a hanger-sized building along a major boulevard in Albuquerque, New Mexico, just blocks from Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base (where thousands of nuclear weapons are currently stockpiled) the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History is nothing less than a flattering shrine to nuclear weapons, replete with a seventy foot tall Redstone missile in the front parking lot. Like the Atomic Testing Museum, the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is also a Smithsonian affiliate, but it casts its own role in much grander terms: according to the Museum’s web site, its “mission is to serve as America’s resource for nuclear history and science.” That’s “America’s resource” singular – a one stop oracle of truth.
Like Bradbury or the Atomic Testing Museum, the National Museum’s exhibits extoll the history of nuclear science, recounting a narrative filled with bravery and wonder regarding the Manhattan Project’s personalities. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan is predictably explained as a benevolent, if unfortunate necessity to save the lives of not only American GIs, but also Japanese women and children. The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History also has a backyard in which it displays decommissioned nuclear-capable aircraft, disassembled nuclear missiles, nuclear rocket launchers, and even a submarine. Like the other pro-nuclear museums everything is kid friendly. You can walk right up and rub your hand on the nose of a nuclear missile.
Apparently not satisfied with this now national network of pro-nuclear weapons museums, each with multi-million dollar budgets and tens of thousands of visitors (there’s another in TOak Ridge, Tennessee called the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the B Reactor Museum Association in Richland, Washington) the nuclear weaponeers have for years sought a more powerful medium through which to communicate their hagiography of nuclear weapons.
In 2004 they found it in a bill sponsored by New Mexicos’ Democratic Senator Jeff Bingaman (it was probably dreamed up and written by the same pro-nuclear weapons boosters who organized and built the atomic propaganda museums in Los Alamos and Albuquerque). Senator Bingaman, in partnership with his then senior colleague Senator Pete Dominici, and also the two Senators from Washington State, and Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, introduced the “Manhattan Project National Historical Park Study Act,” the first step in establishing a national park dedicated to nuclear weapons. Money for the study was initially hard to find, but eventually allocated. Completed recently, the Obama administration announced on the 13th of July its intention to embrace this project and create a national historic park in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
It would be a very strange national park. Los Alamos Laboratory was built on sacred lands filled with Native American ruins, existing and extensively used ceremonial sites, burial grounds, and other places of profound cultural significance to the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande Valley. Were it not a nuclear weapons lab, it is likely it would have long ago been deemed reservation land because of its true ownership, or a National Park because of its sublime beauty, or given some other dedication of preservation and reverence.
Pressing against LANL’s boundaries on three sides already is the Bandelier National Monument, created in 1916 by Congress, and containing tens of thousands of archaeological sites and 23,000 acres of wilderness. As a National Park Service property should be, Bandelier is dedicated to the high desert, to the western pine, juniper, and fir forests of the Southwest, and to a history of human habitation that is thousands of years old. When Los Alamos was built, it was on top of this one-of-a-kind landscape that Congress had previously recognized as nationally unique and worthy of preservation. The lab colonized this landscape and occupied it with gigantic industrial-nuclear manufacturing and testing facilities. The spotted owls, coyotes, and spirits of the land, one imagines, fled the fumes and noise.
The entire notion of creating a national park dedicated to the history of nuclear weapons seems completely out of sync with the purpose of parks. The National Parks Service, for example, explains in its own criteria for establishing national parks that, “hunting, mining, and other consumptive uses such as grazing are generally prohibited in National Parks”. Well what about nuclear weapons designing, nuclear waste dumping, high explosives testing, and biological warfare experimentation? What about planning for and manufacturing the weapons for the annihilation of entire ecosystems? Is that allowed in National Parks? It will be if this plan moves forward.
The National Parks Service has already had to defend this proposal from criticism leveled by myself and my colleague Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group. According to a spokesperson for the NPS, the Manhattan Project’s sites “are significant parts of our national cultural history. And before they get bulldozed over, we are in favor of preserving these places so future generations can study these events, for good or bad.” This description all sounds very neutral and useful, but it’s not at all what’s happening.
The problem with this sort of thinking is that it completely ignores how the proposal to create a Manhattan Project National Historic Park came about, that it was the idea of pro-nuclear lobbyists who have already succeeded in creating a national network of taxpayer-funded, Smithsonian-affiliated museums dedicated to glorifying nuclear weapons. These parties are not interested in preserving places for unbiased reflection on the bomb’s creation. They are set on valorizing nuclear weapons, and they understand that a National Historic Park for the Manhattan Project would be the pinnacle.
And more than anything, they understand that reclaiming the past and re-polishing the bomb’s image by dedicating a National Park to it will serve their aims today, aims that include pushing ahead with highly controversial and historically unprecedented investments in new nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos is, after all, currently undertaking a construction program that is larger in dollar terms than the entire Manhattan Project in New Mexico, all to build a new plutonium bomb pit factory.
Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA. He can be reached at: darwin@riseup.net
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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