From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: Nuclear Cover-Up: 49+ years old, going strong, and killing us all
Summary: our nuclearized-militarized state is killing us and our planet
Keywords: deception, official sources gibberish, contradictions, illogic, death
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 22:16:51 GMT


  Excerpts from an exceptionally lucid speech follow (speech begins 178 lines 
  below this one) given by author and journalist Norman Solomon at UCSC on 
  February 24, 1992 articulating the critical issue of the almost 50-year-old 
  nuclear age and industry and its continuous promotion by official 
  mythologies about the "peaceful atom," about how we are "safe" from the 
  deadly toxicity of high-level and low-level radioactive material, fallout, 
  waste, and contamination of the biosphere, and about how the production and 
  operation of nuclear power plants and the nuclear weapons assembly line--not 
  to mention "temporary" radioactive waste sites--make us "secure."  --ratitor


        In the case of nuclear weapons it's certainly the case that the
     entire technology was born in secrecy.  It's been called the nuclear
     priesthood.  We live, in that sense, in a theological society--a
     theo-political culture that exalts the nuclear priests.  We are
     supposed to defer to them.  They have an aura of holiness about them
     and we are urged in ways, direct or indirect, to defer to their
     greater wisdom.  Presumably when people die in southern Utah because
     of fall-out, when the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific die
     because of the legacies of nuclear testing, when Native American
     uranium miners die as a result of being sent into the radon ovens of
     uranium mines in the Southwest, presumably they don't know the ``Big
     Picture.''  The ``Big Picture'' is supposed to be the important one,
     and it comes to us from ``on high.''  That's the kind of theocracy
     that we're encouraged to make fun of when it happens in a place like
     Iran, but to defer to when it happens in the United States of America.
        We know that one of the charges against the doctors and government
     officials of the Third Reich brought to trial at Nuremberg was of
     experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed
     consent.  What happened in the concentration camps in effect happened
     in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has happened ever since in the United
     States and elsewhere as a result of the production, testing and
     deployment of nuclear weapons.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected
     as targets for the atomic bombs for reasons including the facts that
     those cities were large enough to show the gradations of effect half
     a mile, a mile, two miles, five miles and that they hadn't been
     subjected to major previous so-called conventional bombardment. . . 
        One of the most logical or illogical inconsistencies of the entire
     nuclear PR game has to do with the question of nuclear waste.
     There's all this agonizing and abstract discussion about nuclear
     waste.  If your bathtub were overflowing and you came in the front
     door and there was water in your living room having run down the
     steps from the bathroom, you probably would decide that one of the
     first things you should do is turn off the water.  But that's too
     logical for the nuclear priesthood.  Here we have nuclear waste being
     produced at dozens of nuclear weapons facilities;  high-level
     radioactive plutonium, cesium, strontium, nuclear power plants each
     producing hundreds of pounds of plutonium every year;  many, many
     pounds of high-level nuclear waste every month, and somehow they
     can't figure out what to do.  They can't figure out that if you don't
     know what to do with the deadly garbage, that you stop producing it.
     You know, that would be a logical step.  Somehow the waste is out
     there and the production is here and never the twain shall meet and
     it's that separation which has been one of the serious flaws in the
     entire media coverage of nuclear reactors.
        In late 1988 and 1989, when anti-nuclear publicity was rampant,
     you can barely find any stories about the Nevada Test Site.  Other
     facilities are talked about a lot, but the most sacred spot was the
     test site.  It's kind of an axiom of mass media coverage that the
     more important something is--the more important something is in human
     terms--the less coverage it should get.  So the Nevada Test Site got
     almost no coverage at all.  It's a DOE facility.  It's an
     environmental catastrophe.  There's plenty of documentation to that
     effect, but the Nevada Test Site wasn't talked about because if you
     shut down the test site you have to shut down the nuclear weapons
     escalation game.  And it's a game that is of course very lucrative.
     It's a game that the nuclear weapons labs and the contractors and the
     people in the Pentagon love to play.  So the Nevada Test Site is
     virtually unknown to most people in the United States. . . .
        Orwell could never come up with a better phrase than ``national
     security,'' and that's where we are in 1992.  We are told that a
     nuclear weapons assembly line that is causing cancer and leukemia,
     causing genetic injury, is there for our national security.  The
     nuclear weapons assembly line dumps scores of deadly, long-lived
     isotopes into waterways, the air, the soil, and our food, and we're
     told that those isotopes are part of our national security. . . .
        The book "Killing Our Own" and other books such as "Deadly Deceit"
     document the ways that the cover-ups have been implemented through
     the national security pseudo-science establishment.  When the
     evidence became too incontrovertible--when the health of the atomic
     veterans, from the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site and
     in the Marshall Islands, from the people living near many of the
     atomic reactors and waste dumps and nuclear facilities became too
     obviously damaged to ignore--then the fallback positions were taken.
     This new awareness had to be given some novocaine.  It's kind of like
     anaesthesia without surgery.  That's the response that we get from
     the media managers and the military planners when there is public
     awareness.  We're told that there's a crisis in our country because
     the people don't trust the government anymore and that we need to be
     concerned because people are too skeptical--they don't trust what
     they hear from Congress, they don't trust what they hear from the
     executive branch of the US government.  But rather than there being
     not enough trust, there is still too much trust.  As people have
     found who grew up downwind of mushroom clouds believing what they
     were told, their trust was not only misplaced but very deadly. . . .
        People with other perspectives were excluded from mass media
     coverage even when it was one of the top stories of the year in 1988.
     There was a front-page article in "The New York Times" by Fox
     Butterfield, who mentioned a 1970 study that found alarming plutonium
     levels in the Denver area due to emissions from the Rocky Flats
     plant.  The article jumped over a decade and a half of history--
     history that was inconvenient.  This news article said, ``Although
     the study attracted some attention at the time, only in the last two
     or three years has public concern about Rocky Flats become widespread
     in this area as a result of a number of problems.''  There were tens
     of thousands of people who went out and protested at the Rocky Flats
     plant in the late 1970s and early '80s.  But that didn't count.  
     People sat on the railroad tracks to block the shipping of material 
     into the Rocky Flats plant.  Again, that didn't count as far as "The 
     New York Times" was concerned.  The "Times" headlined that front-page
     article, ``Dispute on Waste Poses Threat to Weapons Plant.''  Two
     days later Butterfield reported more on this nuclear threat.  He
     wrote in "The New York Times" that Idaho's refusal to accept more of
     Rocky Flats' nuclear waste ``has posed a serious threat to the
     continued operations of Rocky Flats.''
        So we're supposed to get the idea, either consciously or
     otherwise, that first and foremost the plant was threatened.  That's
     where the threat is, it's to the nuclear weapons industry.  It's to
     the profit takers from making more nuclear weapons.  That's where the
     threat is aimed.  As for the people who live downstream and downwind
     from the nuclear facilities--their health and well-being, the threat
     to their existence--that's secondary. . . .
        "The New York Times" has habitually tried, on this issue of
     nuclear weapons production, to be dramatic yet reassuring.  A front-
     page headline in December 1988 declared ``Wide Threat Seen in
     Contamination at Nuclear Units.''  Yet a subheadline incredulously
     stated that ``No effect on humans has yet been found.''  So of course
     what the "Times" was doing was regurgitating the very same gibberish
     that had been fed to them by their official sources.  The account was
     very illogical and contradicted by health studies. . . .
      . . .  I often think of a statement attributed to the Italian anti-
     fascist Antonio Gramsci who spoke about what he called the need for 
     ``pessimism of the mind and optimism of the will.''  Sometimes when 
     we talk about these very pressing and real issues we may hear from 
     family, or friends, or acquaintances, or co-workers that we're being 
     cynical.  I beg to differ.  The real cynicism is to say ``I don't 
     want to know.''  The real cynicism is to say ``This doesn't concern 
     me.''  The real cynicism is to say ``Well, gee, the people in power 
     wouldn't do that to us.''  Which is what people said when they got 
     up at dawn and watched the mushroom cloud and the fallout blow 
     through their communities.
        The cynicism that we're fighting is the cynicism of obedience and
     of trust in institutions and of individuals with authority, and if
     we're going to challenge cynicism we need to challenge the
     nuclearized state.  We need to challenge the militarized state.  We
     need to challenge the mechanisms of propaganda and social control
     that in ways large and small are raining down on us just as surely as
     the fallout fell on the people of the Marshall Islands, southern
     Utah, and northern Arizona.




     ____________________________________________________________________
     This article is excerpted from "The Monthly Planet," a publication
     of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze of Santa Cruz County.  (Subscriptions
     are available for $15;  add $1.24 tax in Santa Cruz County;  add
     $1.09 tax for subs mailed to other CA addresses.)

     Contact:  John Govsky c/o "The Monthly Planet"
     Address:  P.O. Box 8463, Santa Cruz, CA 95061-8463
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     Internet: freezecruz@igc.apc.org scfreeze@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us
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     Reprint permission is granted for non-profit use, provided that a
     copy of the publication in which the article appears is sent to us
     and that the following credit appears with the article:

     (C) 1992 "The Monthly Planet," P.O. Box 8463, Santa Cruz, CA  95061.
     ____________________________________________________________________
     ____________________________________________________________________
     March 1992 issue--"The Monthly Planet" / Article length: 5510 words
     ____________________________________________________________________



                              Nuclear Cover-Up:
       Norman Solomon Blasts Mainstream Media Coverage of Nuclear Issues

     Excerpts from a speech by Norman Solomon on February 24, 1992 at UCSC




        Norman Solomon is an author, investigative journalist, and a board
     member of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), one of the
     country's most successful and articulate media watch groups.  His
     articles about nuclear weapons, news media, and US-Soviet relations
     have appeared in dozens of major newspapers and magazines, including
     "The Nation," "The Progressive," the "Los Angeles Times," the "Boston
     Globe," and the "San Jose Mercury News."  He has appeared on national
     programs such as ABC's "Good Morning America," CNN's "rossfire,"and
     NPR's "ll Things Considered." During eight visits to Moscow in the
     Gorbachev era, Solomon has reported for Pacifica Radio National News,
     Pacific News Service and other American media.
        Solomon is co-author of "Unreliable Sources:  A Guide to Detecting
     Bias in News Media" (Lyle Stuart, 1990) and "Killing Our Own:  The
     Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation" (Delacorte
     Press and Delta Books, 1982).  He has also co-authored "The Power of
     Babble:  The Politicians' Dictionary of Buzzwords and Doubletalk for
     Every Occasion" (soon to be published).
        On February 24th, Norman Solomon spoke in Santa Cruz on the news
     media's coverage of nuclear issues.  The following condensed text of
     his speech was transcribed by Vianne Neblett, and edited by Catherine
     Banghart, Sara Nisenson, and John Govsky.




        Ten years ago I came to the University of California at Santa Cruz
     campus and spoke about the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear
     power plants, the local hazard and the global threat.  At the time I
     was writing in publications like "Nuclear Times," expressing my
     concern about what seemed to me to be a hazardously narrow focus of
     what was then the national Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign.  Ten
     years later many locally based grassroots organizations that grew out
     of the Nuclear Freeze movement showed that my fears were unjustified.
     I can't think of a better example than the Santa Cruz Nuclear Weapons
     Freeze campaign which is making exactly the kind of connections month
     in and month out in "The Monthly Planet" newspaper that the news
     media were urging the anti-nuclear movement not to make a decade ago.
        When we deal with the implications of nuclear weapons, nuclear
     power plants and assorted other corporately backed technologies,
     we're urged to segment the planet, not to look in holistic terms at
     what is going on.
        One of the big dangers of any movement is when we start to take
     seriously what "Time" and "Newsweek" and the networks say about our
     movement.  I'm afraid this happened in the early and mid-1980s, when
     the movement against nuclear weapons and nuclear power reached at
     least a temporary height, and we got a lot of prompting from the mass
     media to not get too radical;  to be careful;  to be respectable.  We
     had a burst of publicity in 1988 and 1989 about nuclear weapons
     production in the United States.  Unfortunately we were often
     successfully encouraged to believe that the mass media of this
     country had finally come to terms with our legacy of radioactive
     pollution.  What I'd like to do is briefly try to put what happened
     in late 1988 with the Department of Energy and nuclear weapons
     scandal in a historical context, then talk a little bit about what
     happened in the late '80s in the propaganda wars, and what's been
     happening since then.
        In the case of nuclear weapons it's certainly the case that the
     entire technology was born in secrecy.  It's been called the nuclear
     priesthood.  We live, in that sense, in a theological society--a
     theo-political culture that exalts the nuclear priests.  We are
     supposed to defer to them.  They have an aura of holiness about them
     and we are urged in ways, direct or indirect, to defer to their
     greater wisdom.  Presumably when people die in southern Utah because
     of fall-out, when the Marshall Islanders in the South Pacific die
     because of the legacies of nuclear testing, when Native American
     uranium miners die as a result of being sent into the radon ovens of
     uranium mines in the Southwest, presumably they don't know the ``Big
     Picture.''  The ``Big Picture'' is supposed to be the important one,
     and it comes to us from ``on high.''  That's the kind of theocracy
     that we're encouraged to make fun of when it happens in a place like
     Iran, but to defer to when it happens in the United States of
     America.
        The last time I wrote to the US Department of Energy for a
     complete official roster of the so-called ``Announced United States
     Nuclear Tests,'' I found on the list the Trinity test in Alamogordo,
     New Mexico in the early summer of 1945 which was kept secret at the
     time.  Then the second and third listings of ``Announced United
     States Nuclear Tests'' were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I think that
     tells us a lot about the psychology of the US government's attitude
     towards the development and ``testing'' of nuclear weapons.  Because
     in a real sense what happened in Japan on August 6th and 9th in
     1945--the dropping of those two bombs--were in fact tests.  That's
     clear if you look at the historical documentation.  It's clear that
     in fact those cities were chosen for test reasons.  And it's chilling
     because, for one thing, World War II began with a public ethic that
     one did not drop bombs on civilian populations.  In 1939 it would
     have been pretty much unthinkable that the US government would do
     such a thing.  But after the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo the US
     government had acclimated its own citizens to the atomic bombings of
     Hiroshima and Nagasaki;  to accept the very atrocities, the anti-
     ethical activities that were to be condemned at Nuremberg.
        We know that one of the charges against the doctors and government
     officials of the Third Reich brought to trial at Nuremberg was of
     experimentation on human beings without their voluntary and informed
     consent.  What happened in the concentration camps in effect happened
     in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and has happened ever since in the United
     States and elsewhere as a result of the production, testing and
     deployment of nuclear weapons.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were selected
     as targets for the atomic bombs for reasons including the facts that
     those cities were large enough to show the gradations of effect half
     a mile, a mile, two miles, five miles and that they hadn't been
     subjected to major previous so-called conventional bombardment.
     These cities were laboratories that were selected by the planners for
     the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan.  And we often hear in
     public discussion from government officials that somehow these were
     not real uses of nuclear weapons.  You'll hear that nuclear weapons
     have never been used in war.  It's kind of gone again down the memory
     hole:  forget about it, it's not convenient.
        In the late 1940s there were some major decisions to be made about
     nuclear weapons and it's no coincidence that this happened
     concurrently with the establishment putting the fix in, so to speak,
     for the national security nuclear state.  In the summer of 1946 there
     were the first peacetime explosions in history, and one of the main
     purposes of the tests was to put the American people to sleep about
     nuclear weapons;  to say ``Don't worry, you can relax, nuclear
     weapons will make you secure, they can be aimed in a certain
     direction.''  It was an important illusion.  And to make matters more
     convincing, about 42,000 US troops were deployed within a few miles
     of those atomic explosions.  Later many US Navy personnel were
     deployed to scrape the radiation off of the ships.  Some of the
     ships, however, were so radioactive that they had to be sunk.  And of
     course this has been a pattern ever since.  In the last few years
     we've heard a lot about the ``cleanup'' of Department of Energy (DOE)
     nuclear weapons facilities and these words are presented to us to
     substitute for reality.  We're encouraged to confuse the myth and the
     real world.
        In 1951 the United States expanded the nuclear test program by
     setting up the Nevada Test Site.  It's clear from declassified
     documents that the government knew that the radiation would be
     dangerous.  There were warnings provided privately by some scientists
     that people would be at risk, but the US government had some
     solutions.  One was to lie to the American people, and another was to
     wait until the wind was blowing in the ``right direction.''  In this
     case it meant the wind would be blowing away from Las Vegas, away
     from Los Angeles and towards communities in southern Utah, central
     Nevada, and northern Arizona;  communities that housed people in
     small- and medium-sized towns, rural people who had sheep herds and
     other livestock.
        Diseases began to appear that had never been seen before in those
     small communities.  It's worth recalling that these were primarily
     Mormon communities.  These people didn't smoke cigarettes and they
     didn't drink alcohol.  They didn't have leukemia among their children
     or among the adult population to speak of, yet in places like
     Fredonia, Arizona, St. George, Utah, and Railroad Valley, Nevada,
     children began to be diagnosed with leukemia in the mid-1950s.  In
     the book that I co-authored with Harvey Wasserman titled "Killing Our
     Own," we quoted a letter written by a senator from the state of
     Nevada to the parents of a child who had died of leukemia.  The
     senator said, ``You must not believe the Communist scare stories
     about radioactivity.''  It was decades later in the late 1970s when
     Congress finally held some kind of hearings.  And as one parent from
     Nevada who had lost a child testified, ``I feel like we--we were
     treated as guinea pigs, only worse.''
        So the US government continued to set off atomic bombs in the
     South Pacific and around the Nevada Test Site.  In 1958, when there
     was a temporary moratorium in the works, the US nuclear testers were
     eager to set off a bunch of atomic bombs quickly in a row.  They were
     up against their deadline and the weather conditions weren't right,
     that is, they weren't pointing the radiation with the wind patterns
     towards those who had been bureaucratically deemed expendable--again
     echoes from the dock at Nuremberg.  But the tests continued and the
     mushroom clouds rose over Nevada and the fallout blew for hundreds of
     miles around.  It blew, among other places, to Los Angeles.  You
     could say that after 15, 20, 25 years, there's not much that can be
     done about the initial exposure, which is true.  Then you could say
     so there's no point in going into it, which is not true because early
     screening even today would be helpful for those people who were born
     in 1959 in Los Angeles.  But then, as now, the US government is not
     interested in candor, it's not interested in public health.  It's
     interested in furthering its own agenda.
        After many hundreds of nuclear tests by the United States and the
     Soviet Union, which began testing in the late 1940s, there was the
     Limited Test Ban Treaty.  Often John Kennedy is cited for what is
     really a moving speech at the American University where he discusses
     the threats to the health of the world from nuclear testing.  The
     speech was very significant because it did reflect a desire of the
     Kennedy administration to end at least above ground or, as it is
     sometimes called, atmospheric nuclear testing.  But the speech also
     provides some windows into the limits of that historical period and
     for every presidency in the nuclear age.  Because unfortunately when
     a president says that ``We don't want to go to war'' the real
     translation is ``We are planning to go to war.''  It's like Bertolt
     Brecht said, ``When the government speaks loudest about the need for
     peace, get ready for the war.''  In many ways what Kennedy was saying
     was that it was necessary for the United States to sustain--to
     continue a situation of dominance.  One of the reasons that I think
     the Limited Test Ban Treaty could be continued to be sold to the
     military people was that the US would continue to test underground.
     In fact that's what happened and the arms race continued right on.
        While it was a public health victory to ban above-ground nuclear
     tests with the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, at the same time it
     was not in any way a disarmament measure.  Today, in 1992, the ground
     still shakes in southern Nevada every time the bombs explode and the
     arms race lurches forward.  The Limited Test Ban Treaty put our
     consciousness about nuclear weapons underground as well.  Meanwhile
     the nuclear weapons assembly line that had been established in the
     years after World War II was functioning in high gear and two of the
     most important institutions for continuing the nuclear arms race were
     administered by the University of California.  That great
     humanitarian institution of higher learning was committed in the
     1950s, as it is in the 1990s, to give its seal of approval and its
     supposed respectability to an industry that is continually finding
     better ways to incinerate the planet.  It was also a very important
     move to get companies like General Electric, Westinghouse, Monsanto,
     and DuPont involved in post-war weapons production and then sanitize
     it with the Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories being administered
     by the University of California.  In this way it can seem very
     erudite to figure out what J. Robert Oppenheimer called the ``sweet
     problem'' of designing nuclear weapons.  Of course that problem never
     ends because there's always a way to tinker with the design to make a
     warhead smaller and more compact, giving it more bang for the weight.
        In the 1950s they called Hanford, Washington a boomtown.  People
     moved in, housing was built, jobs were plentiful.  People went to
     work and didn't talk to the kids at home in the evenings and weekends
     about what they did.  They were making bombs which were supposed to
     be normalized and the mass media, as is their usual role, put
     cosmetics on the corpse, happy-faced stickers on weapons of mass
     destruction.  And so, as industries will do, the nuclear industry
     kept functioning and needed more PR.
        One of the PR tricks had been what Eisenhower had called the
     ``peaceful atom'':  nuclear power plants.  The electrical utilities
     were not invited in, they were kicked into the nuclear parade through
     all kinds of bribes and inducements.  There was the insurance cap
     that limited their liability with the government picking up the tab.
     There were all kinds of subsidies great and small.  And there was a
     tremendous PR machine--the old Atomic Energy Commission, chaired by
     Dixie Lee Ray in the '60s.  She would go in front of the cameras and
     say, ``I would eat plutonium.  I'm not worried, you know, these
     isotopes don't worry me.''  And of course that's proof positive that
     patriarchy is culturally caused rather than biologically.  So nuclear
     plants began to be built.
        Nuclear issues add an interesting little wrinkle now, in the
     Democratic presidential campaign.  In the primaries for instance, in
     one of the debates, the national media seemed astonished that the
     issue of nuclear power was even being brought up.  Jerry Brown made
     some very good points.  He challenged this kind of acceptance--this
     tacit support for nuclear power--from many Democrats and kind of
     throw-back retrograde support for nuclear power coming from Paul
     Tsongas.  The news media were very surprised.  Why do people care
     about nuclear power?  Isn't that passe? If you grew up in the '60s 
     you heard a lot about it and in the '50s, from the outset, it was a
     rationale.  The US government and its PR flacks could always say,
     ``Well, if we're going to have nuclear power it's going to be a
     peaceful atom.''  It was a way to tell ourselves that nuclear
     technology, that fission, wasn't such a bad deal after all.  Those
     myths are still with us.  Sometimes I think it's simply a matter of
     industry officials playing dumb.
        One of the most logical or illogical inconsistencies of the entire
     nuclear PR game has to do with the question of nuclear waste.
     There's all this agonizing and abstract discussion about nuclear
     waste.  If your bathtub were overflowing and you came in the front
     door and there was water in your living room having run down the
     steps from the bathroom, you probably would decide that one of the
     first things you should do is turn off the water.  But that's too
     logical for the nuclear priesthood.  Here we have nuclear waste being
     produced at dozens of nuclear weapons facilities;  high-level
     radioactive plutonium, cesium, strontium, nuclear power plants each
     producing hundreds of pounds of plutonium every year;  many, many
     pounds of high-level nuclear waste every month, and somehow they
     can't figure out what to do.  They can't figure out that if you don't
     know what to do with the deadly garbage, that you stop producing it.
     You know, that would be a logical step.  Somehow the waste is out
     there and the production is here and never the twain shall meet and
     it's that separation which has been one of the serious flaws in the
     entire media coverage of nuclear reactors.
        In late 1988 and 1989, when anti-nuclear publicity was rampant,
     you can barely find any stories about the Nevada Test Site.  Other
     facilities are talked about a lot, but the most sacred spot was the
     test site.  It's kind of an axiom of mass media coverage that the
     more important something is--the more important something is in human
     terms--the less coverage it should get.  So the Nevada Test Site got
     almost no coverage at all.  It's a DOE facility.  It's an
     environmental catastrophe.  There's plenty of documentation to that
     effect, but the Nevada Test Site wasn't talked about because if you
     shut down the test site you have to shut down the nuclear weapons
     escalation game.  And it's a game that is of course very lucrative.
     It's a game that the nuclear weapons labs and the contractors and the
     people in the Pentagon love to play.  So the Nevada Test Site is
     virtually unknown to most people in the United States.
        A related phenomenon would be the fact that the United States
     refuses to pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, even
     today in 1992.  These have been called public secrets and this says a
     lot about how the pseudo-democracy in the United States works.  No,
     it's not secret, just hardly anybody knows about it.  So it's a
     public secret.  It's part of the functioning of the propaganda
     system.  Most years a dozen or more nuclear bombs explode under the
     desert floor in Nevada and most of them are larger than the bombs
     dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It goes on and on and the
     designers have a field day.  They can continue to tinker and find
     nuclear bomb designs that will be part of still more accurate nuclear
     weapons.  Why is accuracy so important and speed so important? 
     Because the faster the delivery of nuclear weapons, the faster and
     more accurate the attack, the more tempted officials may be to use
     them in a first strike.
        People in the Pentagon have always treasured the option of first
     strike, that is, the initiation of nuclear war.  What a great example
     of the entire militarists' psychology.  We don't make weapons because
     there are targets that are appropriate;  we make weapons and then
     figure out how to concoct some targets that are then reported to have
     something to do with this notion of ``national security.''
        Orwell could never come up with a better phrase than ``national
     security,'' and that's where we are in 1992.  We are told that a
     nuclear weapons assembly line that is causing cancer and leukemia,
     causing genetic injury, is there for our national security.  The
     nuclear weapons assembly line dumps scores of deadly, long-lived
     isotopes into waterways, the air, the soil, and our food, and we're
     told that those isotopes are part of our national security.
        It's a major challenge for us to regain the use of language, to
     talk about security, to discuss the true costs of nuclear weapons,
     and not only the budgetary costs.  We must also insist that the human
     costs of nuclear technology be discussed.  That's where the entire
     presidential campaign has nothing to say.  From Buchanan to Harkin,
     they don't have much to say about the real issues of nuclear weapons.
     I know that Tom Harkin has more of an interest in nuclear disarmament
     than the Bushes and the Buchanans, but I've been listening to all the
     debates thus far and I don't hear any of the ``major'' mass media-
     anointed candidates addressing this issue at all.  So it falls back
     again and again on us to raise these issues and not necessarily in a
     polite way, in order to build and rebuild a movement;  to build on
     what's been done in the past years so that these issues are real in
     human terms when they're publicly discussed and when policy decisions
     get made.
        I want to say a little bit about some of the verbal mechanisms and
     publicity strategies that have been used to diffuse what has been a
     crisis for the nuclear weapons makers in this country.  I'd like to
     give just a few examples of how the very deep and angry concern of
     people in this country has been blocked by the news media.  I want to
     be sure to mention that there were at least 300,000 US soldiers
     exposed to nuclear bomb tests, atmospheric tests at short range
     between 1945 and 1962.  These soldiers have suffered increased
     incidences of leukemia and cancer.  Our book titled "Killing Our Own"
     documents the situation, and our book was published in 1982 when
     there was a great deal less evidence than there is today, a decade
     later.  In a sense what we're getting in the fifth decade after the
     Manhattan Project is a whole first echo of the atomic age coming
     back.
        The book "Killing Our Own" and other books such as "Deadly Deceit"
     document the ways that the cover-ups have been implemented through
     the national security pseudo-science establishment.  When the
     evidence became too incontrovertible--when the health of the atomic
     veterans, from the people living downwind of the Nevada Test Site and
     in the Marshall Islands, from the people living near many of the
     atomic reactors and waste dumps and nuclear facilities became too
     obviously damaged to ignore--then the fallback positions were taken.
     This new awareness had to be given some novocaine.  It's kind of like
     anaesthesia without surgery.  That's the response that we get from
     the media managers and the military planners when there is public
     awareness.  We're told that there's a crisis in our country because
     the people don't trust the government anymore and that we need to be
     concerned because people are too skeptical--they don't trust what
     they hear from Congress, they don't trust what they hear from the
     executive branch of the US government.  But rather than there being
     not enough trust, there is still too much trust.  As people have
     found who grew up downwind of mushroom clouds believing what they
     were told, their trust was not only misplaced but very deadly.
        The Soviet Union stopped all nuclear testing for a year and a half
     in the mid-1980s and beseeched the United States to join in for a
     permanent ban on nuclear test explosions.  The US, to this day, has
     refused to engage in anything like a moratorium on nuclear tests.
        People with other perspectives were excluded from mass media
     coverage even when it was one of the top stories of the year in 1988.
     There was a front-page article in "The New York Times" by Fox
     Butterfield, who mentioned a 1970 study that found alarming plutonium
     levels in the Denver area due to emissions from the Rocky Flats
     plant.  The article jumped over a decade and a half of history--
     history that was inconvenient.  This news article said, ``Although
     the study attracted some attention at the time, only in the last two
     or three years has public concern about Rocky Flats become widespread
     in this area as a result of a number of problems.''  There were tens
     of thousands of people who went out and protested at the Rocky Flats
     plant in the late 1970s and '80s.  But that didn't count.  People sat 
     on the railroad tracks to early block the shipping of material into
     the Rocky Flats plant.  Again, that didn't count as far as "The New
     York Times" was concerned.  The "Times" headlined that front-page
     article, ``Dispute on Waste Poses Threat to Weapons Plant.''  Two
     days later Butterfield reported more on this nuclear threat.  He
     wrote in "The New York Times" that Idaho's refusal to accept more of
     Rocky Flats' nuclear waste ``has posed a serious threat to the
     continued operations of Rocky Flats.''
        So we're supposed to get the idea, either consciously or
     otherwise, that first and foremost the plant was threatened.  That's
     where the threat is, it's to the nuclear weapons industry.  It's to
     the profit takers from making more nuclear weapons.  That's where the
     threat is aimed.  As for the people who live downstream and downwind
     from the nuclear facilities--their health and well-being, the threat
     to their existence--that's secondary.
        Now of course any officially orchestrated scandal is incomplete
     without very high-profile redemption.  So the mass media, while
     beginning to report on the sins of the nuclear bomb makers, seemed
     very eager to bring tidings of repentance.  So in late 1988, "Time"
     magazine revealed that the DOE ``finally seemed bent on reform'' and
     ``has taken commendable steps to infuse a safety-conscious attitude
     in the weapons facilities.''  It's really easy to turn over a new
     nuclear leaf.  The US government has done it hundreds of times.  The
     idea though that safe nuclear weapons production could be an oxymoron
     was just too much off the beaten path for the mass media to even
     entertain.  Instead the kind of official self-flagellations were
     taken at face value.  "The Washington Post" front page printed a
     contrite quote from an undersecretary of the DOE saying, ``We have a
     moral obligation to rectify past sins.''  "The New York Times"
     asserted that, ``The Energy Department has provided a candid account
     of its failings.''  I think it's pretty evident that the strategy for
     the DOE was to say ``yeah we made a mess of things and you're gonna
     need to give us a bunch more money so we can make things right.''
        The entire new generation of nuclear weapons production facilities
     is going to be financed largely with the rationale that the weapons
     plants have to be cleaned up.  What better Orwellian way to do it
     than to say that for environmental reasons we have to budget a whole
     lot more money to make nuclear weapons.  It makes about as much sense
     as the rest of the news media that we get.
        "The New York Times" has habitually tried, on this issue of
     nuclear weapons production, to be dramatic yet reassuring.  A front-
     page headline in December 1988 declared ``Wide Threat Seen in
     Contamination at Nuclear Units.''  Yet a subheadline incredulously
     stated that ``No effect on humans has yet been found.''  So of course
     what the "Times" was doing was regurgitating the very same gibberish
     that had been fed to them by their official sources.  The account was
     very illogical and contradicted by health studies.
        One of my favorite editorials to appear in daily newspapers in
     this country on the subject of nuclear weapons was printed by "The
     New York Times" in the period when George Bush was about to move into
     the White House.  The editorial was titled ``The Bomb on Mr. Bush's
     Desk.'' "The New York Times," in its wisdom, in its official
     editorial, urged the incoming President George Bush to ``escape
     catastrophe by moving fast and setting priorities.''  The
     ``catastrophe'' that the "Times" was intent on avoiding was the
     prospect that the US government's ability to manufacture more nuclear
     weapons might be impeded by a shortage of tritium.  As a matter of
     fact the "Times" referred to ``the operation of the bomb complex'' as
     being a matter of tremendous importance and concluded, ``Mr. Bush has
     only a limited time to avert its collapse.''  But, as we might have
     predicted at the time, George Bush in fact knew to quickly avert the
     collapse and therefore avert what the "Times" referred to as the
     catastrophe of disarmament.
        I was very interested in the term ``bomb complex'' by the "Times"
     editorial.  They were hell-bent on safeguarding what they called the
     operation of the ``bomb complex'' but I don't think they were talking
     about the psychological mechanisms.  They were talking about the
     literal assembly line.  There was a follow-up on the top of page one
     by a "Times" reporter, Michael R. Gordon, under the headline, ``How a
     Vital Nuclear Material Came to Be in Short Supply.''  They were
     banging on the drums, they were getting it together to produce more
     tritium as soon as possible.  And it was interesting to look at all
     43 paragraphs of that article.  You had exactly one half of one
     paragraph devoted to any kind of contrary view.  I want to read to
     you how they handled it in the "Times:"  ``Not everyone is convinced
     that the shortage of tritium is a national emergency.  Some critics
     of the administration say that the United States could afford
     dismantling some nuclear weapons to salvage the tritium it needs, but
     the administration rejects this idea.''  End of quote.  That's all we
     get to hear about that idea.  When Bush got into office, the new DOE
     Secretary James Watkins was really like the new cleric for the
     nuclear priesthood.  He arrived admitting to sins and promising
     absolution through pouring more money into the nuclear weapons
     assembly line.  He got tremendous amounts of great press stating that
     finally he was going to set things straight.  Then years later in
     1991 the news quietly came out, on the back page with two or three
     paragraphs, that come hell or high water Watkins was committed to
     restarting weapons material production facilities at the Savannah
     River plant, whether or not the environmental regulations were met.
     So it's the same old hustle over and over again.
        We are, in 1992 more than ever, in a situation where the news
     media function to put a cloak of murky mystification over events
     large and small.  The corporate control of the media itself is
     consolidating.  There are corporations larger in size and fewer in
     number that are making a killing off of the media industry.
     Sometimes they are owned by corporations that are directly involved
     in contracting to the Pentagon and the nuclear departments of the
     federal government.  One prime example of course is NBC, which is
     owned by General Electric (GE).  When the Gulf War happened in early
     1991 Tom Brokaw never told the people watching "NBC Nightly News"
     that the people signing his paycheck were making a killing, literally
     and figuratively, off of the Gulf War.  GE had sold huge quantities
     of weapons systems and components to the Pentagon that were then used
     during the Gulf War.
        This process of mystification is one that we have to challenge.
     We have to strip away the falsehoods, the deceit, and the dangerous
     ways in which words and images are manipulated to shield us from the
     realities of control.  It's one of the great paradoxes that the more
     these corporate forces manipulate and control the mass media, the
     less those mass media tell us who really controls them and, to a
     large degree, controls public perception.  We, to put it mildly, have
     a big task ahead of us.  I often think of a statement attributed to
     the Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci who spoke about what he
     called the need for ``pessimism of the mind and optimism of the
     will.''  Sometimes when we talk about these very pressing and real
     issues we may hear from family, or friends, or acquaintances, or co-
     workers that we're being cynical.  I beg to differ.  The real
     cynicism is to say ``I don't want to know.''  The real cynicism is to
     say ``This doesn't concern me.''  The real cynicism is to say ``Well,
     gee, the people in power wouldn't do that to us.''  Which is what
     people said when they got up at dawn and watched the mushroom cloud
     and the fallout blow through their communities.
        The cynicism that we're fighting is the cynicism of obedience and
     of trust in institutions and of individuals with authority, and if
     we're going to challenge cynicism we need to challenge the
     nuclearized state.  We need to challenge the militarized state.  We
     need to challenge the mechanisms of propaganda and social control
     that in ways large and small are raining down on us just as surely as
     the fallout fell on the people of the Marshall Islands, southern
     Utah, and northern Arizona.  Thanks very much.



--
                                              daveus rattus   

                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.