Nuclear Kitty Litter

In February there was quite a serious radiation leak at the Waste Isolation Pilot Program (WIPP), in the New Mexico desert. WIPP was supposed to be the long term repository for America’s nuclear waste, most of which is left over from the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (you can find one of my posts about it here). WIPP has been up and running for fifteen years. Its mission was to safely store nuclear waste for 10,000 years, which seems a strange statement, since much of this stuff remains lethal for hundreds of thousands and even millions of years. Welcome to the world of Dr Strangeloves, where every year more than 400 reactors worldwide churn out tons and tons of this lethal nuclear waste that no one knows what to do with. The Strangeloves appear to believe that sometime in the near future, pixies will magically appear and spirit away all this lethal crap. Oh well, the best laid plans of psychotics, which includes 55-gallon barrels of highly dangerous nuclear waste that explode. I’ll let Arnie Gundersen explain, in an interview he gave yesterday to CNN…

The above CNN piece is somewhat surprising, because thesedays it’s unusual for the mainstream media to give any proper coverage to issues that matter (the corporate toe rags who run CNN are obviously perturbed by those exploding barrels). To highlight this I’m going to go back more than 30 years, to a landmark American tv movie called The Day After, which was made by the ABC Motion Picture Division. The Day After aired in November 1983 and was watched by a then-record-breaking 100 million Americans. The movie was about full scale nuclear war and its effects on the United States (if you like being manically depressed you can find the complete movie here). Incidentally, a year later there was a BBC co-production called Threads, which was set in the UK and was a much more gutsy take on nuclear war (you can find the complete Threads here). But getting back to The Day After, immediately after it was aired, ABC News broadcast a live debate about nuclear weapons, hosted by Ted Koppel. Taking part were the scientist Carl Sagan, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the philosopher Elie Wiesel, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, General Brent Scowcroft and conservative commentator William F. Buckley. The only remotely sane people in this debate are Carl Sagan and the host, Ted Koppel (the full debate follows at the end of this post); but my point is, could you imagine such a debate taking place today, about, say, the ongoing horror story that is Fukushima?

Which brings me on to younger generations, who might think that all this is ancient history. It’s not, because although World War Three hasn’t happen like those old movies portray, the Dr Strangeloves and the madness continues right to this present day, with exploding barrels of nuclear waste in New Mexico, and with Fukushima, et al. The cancer pandemic brought about by the release of these lethal man-made radionuclides into the environment, probably has, and will, kill more people over the decades than if there had been an all-out nuclear war. At the start of this year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released a report which stated that over the coming twenty years cancer rates worldwide will increase by a staggering 70%. This means that in the coming decades about 8 out of every 10 people will get cancer. The ‘experts’ get wheeled out and tell us that the cancer pandemic is due to this and due to that, it’s due to everything except man-made radionuclides, which are now awash in our environment and are one of the few scientifically proven carcinogens.

That’s how demented some members of the human race are.

Which brings us onto that ABC News debate about nuclear weapons. Listen to the voices, and watch the body language, of participants like Kissinger, McNamara and Buckley, who basically try to intellectualise mass murder (exactly the same as the Nazis did). It should be noted that at the time of this debate, in 1983, the USA and USSR each had about 20,000 nuclear warheads, which was enough to wipe out all life on Earth many, many times over. It should also be noted that even today both the USA and Russia still each have about 5,000 nuclear warheads, the majority of which are on hair-trigger alert. In otherwords, armageddon has never gone away. It’s just as mad now as it was back then; but keep taking the drugs, folks, so that you don’t have to think about the psychopaths with their fingers on the button. Many of us in the western world are guilty, because we vote into power lunatics who should really be in an asylum. And so it goes…

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One Response to Nuclear Kitty Litter

  1. gragor says:

    Thank you for this post and linking it to the video of the Talking Heads.

    Lovely times that the dialogue setting the scene for the movie ‘The Day After’ seems to sound like the news reports of American aggression against North Korea and their response. Unfortunately it all brings back my memories of our Duck and Cover drills in the basement of my grade school in 1962.

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