Modern American history includes catastrophic crimes of the government like the Vietnam war, the continued oppression of Native Americans and the present war in Iraq. To these criminal transgressions of our “leaders” should be added the calamitous development of nuclear bombs after World War II. The US conducted 216 atmospheric tests between 1946 and 1962. Pristine islands in the Pacific were totally destroyed, at times leaving a mile-wide crater on the ocean floor. Thousands of Polynesians were exiled and left traumatized through generations. What is left of Bikini Atoll is uninhabitable to this day. 106 of these atmospheric tests were carried out a mere 63 miles from Las Vegas! All the while the government was shamefully lying to the local people through a systematic campaign of propaganda and intimidation.

The radioactive fallout from these Nevada tests drifted eastward extending over the breadth of the nation, even out into the Atlantic ocean. (The fallout also drifted westward, and one study from 1998 revealed breast cancer clusters in California's Marin county directly in the path of the fallout.) The countless cancer victims that these tests caused had to wait until the 1990s for a formal apology and monetary compensation from the government. By that time very many had already died. A report conducted in 1998 by the National Cancer Institute and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concludes that nuclear testing has exposed to radiation nearly everyone who has resided in the United States since 1951. Indeed, some of the radioactive materials from these atmospheric tests still circulate in the atmosphere at this moment. The new report says at least 15,000 Americans died from cancers directly related to these atomic tests.

What is more, from 1951 to 1957 at the Nevada test site, the mindless lunacy of the government and the military led to the carrying out of “atomic war exercises” by US soldiers at or near ground zero. Sometimes the soldiers were as close as 1.8 miles from the blast. In this way military commanders wished to “harden” their troops to “tactical atomic warfare.” The army equipped some American infantrymen in Europe and the Far East with the "Davy Crocket" - a bazooka fitted with a small nuclear warhead. It was decommissioned in 1972 because it exploded too close to the soldiers who fired it. Very many of these military guinea pigs contracted cancers and died.

The sculpture above reveals the mushroom cloud as a cult object, a golden calf for the demented idolators at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Californa, the biggest think-tank in the world. Author Alex Abella has written about the demented ideas for global domination that he researched there:

“The United States had demobilized its armed forces after World War II; new weapons, such as the atomic bomb, were seen as cheaper and more efficient than keeping large numbers of soldiers stationed abroad. Rather than nationalize key military industries, as Great Britain and France had done, the U.S. government opted to contract out its scientific research development to private concerns. The private sector, not bound by the procurement and personnel requirements of the Pentagon, could create new weapons faster and cheaper. RAND would be a bridge between the two worlds of military planning and civilian development.”

Soldiers of Reason
by Alex Abella (2008)

update August 29, 2012 In 1962 forthcoming bans on atmospheric nuclear testing resulted in an orgy of nuclear tests in outer space at 50, 100, 250 and 400 kilometers altitude. The series of five nuclear explosions above the earth’s atmosphere – an extremely dangerous example of scientific tyranny endangering all life on earth – was given the name Operation Fishbowl. These atomic explosions were 1,000 times more powerful than the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As with the initial Trinity test at Los Alamos, the atomic scientists did not know what the result would be. Even with the possibility of igniting the atmosphere or damaging the magnetic shield protecting us against solar winds, the fools rushed in where angels fear to tread, took colossal risks motivated by mere curiosity, and, mentally deranged psychopaths, they created irrevoccable damage in the earth’s radiation belt, risking all life on earth. In fact, these tests, along with 6 previous atomic tests carried out in 1958 far above the earth’s atmosphere, added a third artificial radiation belt beyond the inner and outer Van Allen belts, crippling satellites and endangering the coming manned space flights. The holes in the ozone layer are also attributed to these tests. On July 9, 1962, another Operation Fishbowl test was carried out. Called Starfish Prime, this 1.4 megaton nuclear explosion was detonated at 400 kilometers altitude! Hotel suites had been rented out in Hawaii as if it were to view a mere fireworks display. All life on earth was being jeopardized, but in Honolulu the headlines merely read. “N-Blast Produces Colorful Display”. In 1958 six previous tests had already been carried out varying from 200, 1,000, 2,000 and 4,000 miles altitude over the south Atlantic! The bomb called Yucca was 1.7 megatons. Teak was 3.5 megatons. Orange was 3.8 megatons. To you reading these lines which I have cast out like a message in a bottle in the ocean of cyber-space: This insane scientific tyranny is not only still in power today, but it is even taking far greater risks, causing far greater damage to the biosphere with geo- and bio-engineering, taking far greater leaps into the pestilent mental illness which eats away at their deranged minds to the woe of humankind. To trust them (the scientific-political-banking-military-industrial complex which has usurped the power of our nation) is to trust your executioners. To vote for one puppet or the other whom they present as presidential candidates is to be asleep. It is time to wake up! Their success depends on your continued slumber. Update from Press TV June 13, 2014: The United States narrowly averted a nuclear disaster in 1961 after two atomic bombs fell from a B-52 bomber and came frighteningly close to detonating in North Carolina, newly-released documents reveal. On January 24, 1961, two hydrogen bombs fell from a B-52 as it broke apart in the sky and hit the ground near the city of Goldsboro. The Air Force bomber suffered a “failure of the right wing” and broke in half while flying over North Carolina, said documents revealed by the National Security Archive this week. As the bombs were plunging toward the ground the parachute for one failed to deploy. The weapon whose parachute opened landed intact but the second bomb landed in a “free fall” with the impact of the crash putting it in the “armed” setting. Fortunately, a part of the bomb needed to initiate an explosion was damaged as it hit the ground. If the 4-megaton bomb had been detonated, a disaster worse than the devastation wrought in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 could have befallen the United States. Each bomb was capable of generating explosions 260 times more powerful than the one that devastated Hiroshima. The bombs the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were 0.01 and 0.02 megatons respectively. Eight crew members were aboard the B-52 and five survived the crash.

Soldiers were not the only “nuclear guinea pigs” of the United States government. Civilians were deliberately injected with uranium and plutonium in government-sponsored experiments. They were fed food contaminated with fall-out from atomic tests, and made to breathe radioactive air. As if taking the experiments of Mengele and other nazi “doctors” as a model, American scientists subjected hundreds of citizens to high levels of radiation. Mentally retarded children were fed it in their cornflakes. Black university students, prisoners, mental hospital patients, pregnant women and others were injected, or fed or exposed to materials like plutonium 238.

Radioactive particles were intentionally pumped into the air of New Mexico, Tennessee and Utah to use the entire population as guinea pigs. Dead children were used in atomic bomb experiments to measure the amount of strontium 90 in the skeleton. Australian child cadavers (aborigines?) were also imported to the US for similar experiments. The anguish, pain, sorrow and suffering that the government inflicted willingly on its own citizens continues to this day, for all the victims have not died. And yet, nuclear testing has resumed at the Nevada Test Site! On September 19, 2003, the underground test named Piano was conducted. On May 25, 2004, the underground test named Armando was conducted.

"From 1960-71, in experiments which may have caused the most deaths and spanned the most years, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, exposed 88 cancer patients to whole body radiation. Many of these human guinea pigs were poor African-Americans at Cincinnati General Hospital with inoperable tumors. All but one of the 88 patients have since died. There is evidence that scientists forged signatures on the consent forms for the Cincinnati experiments. Gloria Nelson testified before the House that her grandmother, Amelia Jackson, had been strong and still working before she was treated by Dr. Saenger. Following exposure to 100 rads of whole body radiation (about 7,500 chest X-rays), Amelia Jackson bled and vomited for days and became permanently disabled. Nelson testified that the signature on her grandmother's consent form was forged... Even at this late date, it seems that some scientists involved are unable to see any problems with their behavior." ( Tod Ensign and Glenn Alcalay )

"Climax" (Nevada, 1953)

xx
Nevada test site 1951, 1955

A vast body of information about nuclear bomb testing and its effects on humans has yet to see the light of day, but some individual accounts are horrific. The United States government has released documents giving details of atomic bomb tests conducted during the Cold War. One of the films shows a group of unprotected "military observers" who were placed directly beneath an airborne detonation. The film commentary says: "The observers stood directly right under the burst, indicating the safety of intercepted nuclear rocketry." Some participants in the experiments were told that radioactive fallout could simply be brushed away.

Demonstrating a common decontamination procedure, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cassidy uses a broom to remove radioactive dust from Lieutenant Colonel Glover Johns following the 1952 Charlie test at the Nevada Proving Ground. Johns had toured the blast area shortly after the test along with other troops at "Camp Desert Rock." This meaningless procedure of course returns some of the contamination to the air, where it is inhaled or ingested. Radioactive particles also adhere to the broom, possibly spreading contamination to those who may not have been initially affected.

Mohave medicine men stood on a sacred mountain in Nevada northwest of Las Vegas and saw the blasts. The Aha Macav (Mohave) people have lived in this area of North America for many thousands of years. Unlike the American military conducting the atomic tests in Nevada, they regard the desert as sacred. Numerous landmarks in the Mohave homeland, as well as other tribal homelands across the continent, are seeped in millenia-old traditions of ongoing spiritual teachings and mythologies. Many are veritable shrines as sacred to the Indigenous Nations as the church in Bethlehem, built on the supposed site of Jesus’ birth, is sacred to christians.

But for the Americans at the time of these atmospheric nuclear tests (and the hundreds of underground tests), the Nevada desert was just a barren wasteland best suited for large-scale destruction, leaving scars in the landscape for hundreds of years to come, as are the monumental craters blown from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The Mohave medicine men looked in awe as the evil power of the devastators unleashed its energy and light, unfolding its mushroom cloud of self-annihilation. They stood on the sacred mountain Savetpilye (Charleston Peak) as they beheld the atomic flash with bare eyes, as silent as ghosts. Maybe some of them went blind, or died of radioactive poisoning, thinking it was another of the white man’s diseases like syphilis or smallpox, not knowing that it was an even deadlier disease: progress.

Adding insult to injury in this destruction of Native American homelands, the atomic technicians gave their nuclear bombs Native American tribal names: Mohawk, Zuni, Aztec, Apache, Dakota, Cherokee, Huron, Seminole, Shasta. These outrages, as well as the killing of numerous innocent people, occurred in times of “peace.” The U.S. Congress, reacting like a man who has just shot himself in the foot, declared in 1980: “The greatest irony of our atmospheric nuclear testing program is that the only victims of U.S. nuclear arms since World War II have been our own people.” (This statement overlooks one Japanese fisherman who was killed as a result of the Bravo blast in 1954. The widow of the Japanese fisherman received a meagre $2,778 from the State Department.)

There are many more such apalling “ironies” derived from this wanton devastation by the federal government in time of “peace”. In 1963 the Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed by the U.S, the U.S.S.R. and the UK banning all nuclear testing in the atmosphere, oceans and outer space. Global radioactive fallout was the most intense in history in that year. Tens of thousands of people have died slow deaths from cancer as a result of this global fallout in time of “peace,” deaths that have never been documented. The thousands of American victims at present have no more deadly an enemy than their own government.

Craters left after nearly 600 underground nuclear tests conducted over a
Rhode-Island-sized testing grounds in traditional Mojave territory near Las Vegas
National Geographic April 1989

"How does it become man to behave toward this American government today?
I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."

– Henry David Thoreau
On Civil Disobedience

Bikinians being "evacuated" from their homeland

Michael Light, author of 100 Suns, the photographic record of the US atmospheric tests, writes: “The human cost of the tests was, and continues to be, steep.”

Indigenous islanders were uprooted without recourse from the test site areas initially, and several tests greatly exceeded expected yields, creating intense and unexpected radiological disasters. Of these, the 15-megaton 1954 Bravo test at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands was the worst, badly sickening test personnel, relocated islanders nearby, and the crew of a Japaneses fishing vessel 85 miles away from the blast. Repeated large-scale testing has also resulted in enduring radiological contamination of all the test islands, including Enewetak Atoll and Johnston and Christmas Islands. Bikini remains uninhabitable to this day. [...] In 1988 the United States established a Marshallese Nuclear Tribunal to compensate the radiation victims, and more than 1,000 islanders have received damages.

The following short documentary (7:30 minutes) reveals that these people, called "savages" by the American scientists, were consciously used as human guinea pigs to see the effects of radiation on humans:

San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 7, 1999:
DATELINE - Majuro Atoll, Marshall Islands

Early one morning 45 years ago, an 11-year-old boy named Norio Kebenli was preparing to fish in the lagoon of Rongelap Atoll, a necklace of tiny coconut palm-covered islands in the center of the Pacific Ocean.

The sun was dawning in the east, as it always does. Kebenli prepared a small boat for the day ahead, as he always did. Then a second sun rose from the west. Kebenli's life, like those of all Rongelapese, would never be the same.

"The light appeared in the western sky and became bigger and bigger," Kebenli, now 56, recalls. "`The light was so strong it hurt my eyes. It filled the whole western sky."

A few hours later, thick flakes of radioactive fallout began falling on Rongelap. By the time a U.S. Navy destroyer arrived the next day to evacuate the atoll, people were vomiting blood and losing their hair. A hydrogen bomb test on neighboring Bikini Atoll ["Bravo"] had gone awry, they were told everyone must leave immediately.

The survivors and their descendants are still waiting to return home.

The Americans moved the Rongelap people from their atoll after (!) the “Bravo” test. They later returned, being told it was safe. Birth defects and other health problems began to escalate among the people, but the United States ignored their cries for relocation to a safer home. It took a private organization to evacuate them. They now live in over-populated and desperate conditions with an extremely high suicide rate among their young people.

In interviews with Jack Niedenthal in 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991 (all in Marshallese), Bikini elder Lore Kessibuki spoke of the banishment of the Bikinians imposed on them by the United States. When the Japanese invaded their homeland, Kili island was used as a prison camp for Marshall islanders who misbehaved. He continued:

You could say that in those days Kili was considered, literally, a prison. Then came the Americans after World War II, and after moving us from Bikini so that they could test their bombs, they eventually moved the Bikinian people to Kili. We feel that Kili is like a prison because we can't sail to another island, or even take a long refreshing walk when life closes in on us. Many times even the ships refuse to stop and unload supplies for the island. There are many other things that simply cannot be done on Kili, because it is such a small island. The food we brought with us did not last very long. We again began to starve. This time, when we began to worry, we all blamed everything on the Americans. What could we do? The Americans moved us here, then they forgot about their responsibilities to us, and again we found ourselves starving. We were full of worry and near death. Their promises were once again not ringing true. And yet, through all of this, most of us remained hopeful that the Americans would come to our aid. Most of us clung desperately to the belief that the Americans would again be our saviors.

In those early days on Kili we spent a lot of time contemplating and dreaming about our homeland. But negative feelings would always surge up in our beings telling us that we would never see our islands again. These thoughts made us realize that we may never again be able to pass on the valuable traditional skills necessary to sustain our lives on the outer islands. And, therefore, there was the possibility that our origins and our stories of Bikini might also be forgotten. These thoughts made living on Kili very depressing. [...] America, America, America--where are you?

Realities today
One among several grandchildren of test survivors born
on the island of Utrik who were born badly deformed.
Most died within weeks.

Bikini Atoll homepage

"Mike"
Enewetak Atoll 1952
This single blast exceeded the explosive power of
all the weapons used in WW I and WW II

In his systematic list of all the Pacific tests, Michael Light begins by naming the specific islands in the respective atolls starting in 1946. As the tests proceed into the 1960s, he refers to these test islands as ”the former island Nam” (Bikini Atoll) or ”the former island Eugelab" (Enewetak Atoll). Even after the American patriots had obliterated these serene Pacific islands forever from the face of the earth, they continued bombing in the craters formed after these ”former islands” had disappeared! The 15-megaton Bravo was detonated on March 1, 1954, the largest US nuclear explosion ever carried out. It was about 2.5 times more powerful than predicted. It obliterated Nam Island in the Bikini Atoll. The flash was seen in Okinawa, 2,600 miles away, and left a crater on the ocean floor 1.25 miles wide and 250 feet deep. The debris of the vaporized tropical island was carried upward in a mushroom cloud to 130,000 feet with a diameter of 66 miles. Three weeks later the 11-megaton Romeo was detonated in the crater created by Bravo on "the former island of Nam, Bikini Atoll."

"Bravo"

"They'll pay for fire: I'll give another gift
To men, an evil thing for their delight,
And all will love this ruin in their hearts."
So spoke the father of men and gods,
                                          and laughed.

– Hesiod, Theogony
tr. Dorothea Schmidt Wender

In 1966 the US dropped 4 nuclear bombs on Spain by accident. At this time, when the psychosis of the Cold War was at its most intense, the US had B52 bombers armed with nuclear weapons in the sky twenty four hours a day. Both the USA and the Soviet Union maintained huge fleets of nuclear-weapon-laden bombers in the air 24 hours a day, in addition to thousands of nuclear ICBM’s in bunkers and submarines in a time of global panic. The logistics of this operation were formidable, involving refueling at high altitudes by another plane equally as big, a routine occuring several times a day, seven days a week.

In 1966, the two planes collided over southern Spain and crashed. Several pilots died. Four nuclear bombs fell to earth, just southwest of Cartagena. The explosive device used to initiate the nuclear explosion went off on one bomb, but by miracle it didn't detonate. It took over two months to find the four bombs. Three were found on land and one at over 700 meters depth in the Mediterranean. There was considerable radioactive leakage from the three on land. Spain forbid these fly-overs after that. It was an international scandal at the time and again proof that our lives are in the worst of hands.

In 1968 an American bomber carrying four atomic bombs crashed in Greenland. The explosive devices on some of the bombs exploded, but miraculously did not detonate the atomic bombs. Only three of the bombs were located. The fourth is lost, lying under the ice of northern Greenland, according to the BBC. Such devastating incompetence can only repeatedly occur without our annihilation because of some miraculous divine intervention that spares us.

"Romeo"

How is slow mass-murder by radiation poisoning, immeasurable human suffering and agony, the total destruction of many Pacific islands during 16 years of testing, and the cataclysmic trauma left in living human souls, to be evaluated in monetary terms? How much money is required for a pedophile to give his victims so that justice is achieved? The harm is irreversible. We Americans have the government we deserve. It is tragic, however, that this irreverent, incompetent body still tyrannizes over Native Americans, in the Pacific and on the continent of Turtle Island. I am personally frightened by this lunatic incompetence, and by the final destination to which this dubious ”leadership” is taking us, especially considering Michael Light’s final comments on the Bomb:

One cannot help but wonder what as citizens we still do not know about the subject of nuclear weapons, not only in the sense of the surreal excesses of the Cold War past, but in terms of the hidden, weaponized nuclear present that will be with us for as long as we know time.

"Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society
seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals
into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government
is changed, and [although] the march of civilization is a train of felonies -
yet, general ends are somehow answered."

– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The American Scholar

"What ends Ralph... oblivion's???"

– A tergiversator

Update October 12, 2004

Native American domains of course include South America. Indirectly, atomic research derived from the Manhattan Project not only devastated native Pacific cultures, but at least one native culture in South America, the Yanomami of Venezuela. Just before Patrick Tierney’s shocking book Darkness in El Dorado was published on October 1, 2000, revealing terrible crimes committed by scientists against the Yanomami, Tierney’s colleague Terry Turner, Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, wrote to Leslie Sponsel, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii, of ”an impending scandal.” Turner wrote:

”The focus of the scandal is the long-term project for study of the Yanomami of Venezuela organized by James Neel, the human geneticist, in which Napoleon Chagnon, Timothy Asch, and numerous other anthropologists took part. The French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also works with the Yanomami but is not part of Neel-Chagnon project, also figures in a different scandalous capacity.

One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic Energy Commission's secret program of experiments on human subjects. James Neel, the originator and director of the project, was part of the medical and genetic research team attached to the Atomic Energy Commission since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was a member of the small group of researchers responsible for studying the effects of radiation on human subjects. He personally headed the team that investigated the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs on survivors. He was put in charge of the study of the effects of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later was involved in the studies of the effects of the radioactivity from the experimental A and H bomb blasts in the Marshall Islands on the natives. [...] The same group also secretly carried out experiments on human subjects in the USA. These included injecting people with radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or permission, in some cases leading to their death or disfigurement. [...]

Another member of the same AEC group of human geneticists and medical experimenters, a Venezuelan, Marcel Roche, was a close colleague of Neel's and spent some time at his AEC-funded center for Human Genetics at Ann Arbor. He returned to Venezuela after the war and did a study of the Yanomami that involved administering doses of a radioactive isotope of iodine and analyzing samples of blood for genetic data. Roche and his project were apparently the connection that led Neel to choose the Yanomami for his big study of the genetics of "leadership" and differential rates of reproduction among dominant and sub-dominant males in a genetically "isolated" human population. There is thus a genealogical connection between the human experiments carried out by the AEC, and Neel's and Chagnon's Yanomami project, which was from the outset funded by the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission).”

It seems that there is not enough collective courage nor integrity inside or outside the scientific community to intelligently confront these crimes and all their ramifications regarding the true nature of the “American Dream.” While the ghastly crimes of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union deservedly receive the full force of civilization's contempt, similar ghastly crimes committed at the behest of the US government strangely do not. Even now, as I write this, crimes against humanity committed by the US government are being carried out, cities are being devastated, women, children, old people and non-combattant men are being killed ("collateral damage"), and prisoners routinely tortured in the name of American goodness, as the world looks on passively.

Some scholars have compared ”Manifest Destiny” with Hitler’s Lebensraumpolitik, and have revealed the horrifying similarities between these two ”master races”. They tell us that Hitler is known to have expressed admiration for the efficiency of the American genocide campaigns against the First Nations, viewing them as a forerunner for his own plans for mass-extermination of the Jews.* The United States also expressed profound admiration for Adolf Hitler in 1938 when Time magazine honored him on its cover, in full nazi regalia, as “man of the year.” Hitler’s plan was to conquer the world. Manifest Destiny was a plan to conquer the West. However, as one conquers one’s way westward, circumnavigation of the globe is the natural result of Manifest Destiny. Today, ”globalization,” ”global economy” and ”global culture” are all the end result of the destructive vision: Manifest Destiny. That is, Manifest Destiny is a dream about conquering the world, the same dream as that of Adolf Hitler – "the wholesale moral bankruptcy of the entire western world."(Lilian Friedberg) Meanwhile, the three million First Nation survivors of the American holocaust remain astonished that so few have noticed what Ward Churchill calls "this little matter of genocide." (excerpt from Hitch-Hiker in Hades)
__________________________________
*”Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,” Lilian Friedberg, paraphrasing Hitler’s biographer John Toland, American Indian Quarterly, Summer 2000. vol. 2 no. 3. Note: Ms Friedberg is both of Jewish and Native American origin.

see also Yanomami genocide”

Memory says, "I did that." Pride replies,
"I could not have done that." Eventually, memory yields.

– Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil

Major General Smedley Butler, 1935, comments:

"I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force – the Marine Corps... And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect money in. I helped in the raping of a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street... I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped get Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents."

Bush has said: "We will not allow the world's worst weapons
to remain in the hands of the world's worst leaders".
Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That's you.

– Harold Pinter (House of Commons speech, October 2002)

Update May 29, 2005

The first detonation of an atomic bomb at Trinity Site was done at the risk of conceivably blowing up the state of New Mexico, and possible blowing an irreparable hole in our atmosphere. No one knew beforehand exactly what would result. They took the risk, acted irresponsibly, and here we are today with shit up to our eyebrows thanks to their monkey business. What janitor can clean up this mess? The other day I heard a spokesman for America's physicists refer to Robert Oppenheimer as a "wise man", thus placing him among such illustrious company as Buddha, Socrates and Lao Tzu. How deplorable is their vanity! Almost as if addressing Oppenheimer and his colleagues, the true wise man, the dying Tibetan sage Milarepa, put it this way to his apprentices come to say goodbye:

However learned you may be, it will hardly help you if you lack deep inner experience, but instead consciously devote yourself to harmful actions, thus casting yourself still deeper into the lower world through self-deceit.*

According to Richard Feynman, even as the mushroom cloud was still churning with scientific murkiness in the sky over Hiroshima, partying, jubilation, revelling and getting drunk was the pastime at Los Alamos by the atom-bomb-making team – at the very instant, mind you, that tens of thousands of innocent civilians had been slaughtered by their mischief. The fact that their long years of research on the Manhattan Project (originally to create a super-weapon against Germany) resulted in the instantaneous extinction of the population of Hiroshima, and decades of pain, sorrow, agony and despair for the survivors, was a cause for jubilation and carousing for the scientists. I call to the reader's attention yet one more time: This, the most efficient and all-encompassing mass-murder in the history of the homo sapiens (which the military refer to as "collateral damage"), was cause for rejoicing and partying (!) by the most advanced nuclear physicists of the age, among whom was Feynman the Nobel prize-winner. (Not to wonder that the American inventor of the barbaric surgery called "frontal lobotomy" also won the Prize!) (Excerpt from Crazy Devil Sweeping)
__________________________________
* The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, tr. Garma C.C. Chang,
University Books, New York, 1962. (2 vols.)

Update August 19, 2005
Project Chariot

Project Chariot was the code-name for the US government’s proposed excavation project to build a harbor on the west coast of Alaska, for the eventual shipment of coal, oil, and other non-renewable resources thought to exist along this part of the coast. Using nuclear bombs for “engineering” was the essence of the Plowshare Program, of which Project Chariot was a part. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission [AEC] established the Plowshare Program in 1957 to "investigate and develop peaceful uses for nuclear explosives." One Plowshare project was to explode a channel across the isthmus of Panama with hundreds of nuclear explosions to create a new, bigger Panama canal. Actively supporting these proposals was Dr. Edward Teller, “father of the hydrogen bomb” and director of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California.

In early 1958, the AEC selected a site at the mouth of the Ogotoruk Creek near Cape Thompson, Alaska, approximately 30 miles southeast of the Inupiat Eskimo village of Point Hope. The project for an experimental harbor excavated by many atmospheric nuclear explosions was to be called Project Chariot. The project was never executed, but preliminary studies were made, including the importation of irradiated soil from the Nevada Test Site, to measure its effects on the local environment. (The soil remained at the Chariot site for over 30 years, until it was crated and shipped back to Nevada, and disposed of at the Test Site). The Native American inhabitants were greatly distressed over the radioactive fallout that would result, and the enduring contamination of wildlife resources and human communities. As usual, the official response was the deplorable falsehood that such risks were "minimal". The planned series of atomic explosions would have created a channel 400 meters wide, 100 meters deep and 1,500 meters long that led to the main basin of the harbor. The blast planned for the harbor basin would have been 100 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.

Late in 1962, after extensive scientific studies, the AEC announced that it "would defer further consideration of the proposed Chariot experiment," due in part to public criticism, especially from the Eskimo community. That the scientists and politicians, independent of public criticism, could come to the conclusion themselves that such, ahem… “peaceful” use of atomic bombs was not only calamitous, but idiotic, was and is too much to ask. Although these lunatic and destructive endeavors were halted, there is discussion today to continue with the scientific brainchild of “atomic engineering”. They will continue trying to force their square scientific peg into the round hole of nature until an outcry from more enlightened people puts a stop to it. Is this not in fact imbecility disguised as intelligence, no matter how many Nobel Prize winners are involved? To what degree must they arouse contempt in us for themselves to understand that they are contemptible?

"Yeso"
Christmas Island, June 10, 1962

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center;
Corruption never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught — they say — God, when he walked on earth.

—Robinson Jeffers

Robinson and Una Jeffers
Pacific sunset
(Jeffers studies)

Epilogue

I began surfing when I was thirteen or fourteen, about the time when the photograph of the "Yeso" test above was taken. The Pacific Ocean is a mother to surfers, and love for this Great Mother is evident also in the life and work of Robinson Jeffers. He stands on the cliff with his wife before his shrine, the Pacific Ocean. No eloquence can pronounce the great sorrow I feel when evoking the brutal rape of this oceanic Great Mother by the United States, and the terrible suffering inflicted on the Polynesians, whose culture gave surfing to the world. This sorrow has a life span infinitely longer than the radioactivity that still poisons the Pacific Ocean, the territory of the Mohave and Eskimo peoples, and the hearts and minds of all reasoning people on earth.

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