National Radio Project

MAKING CONTACT

Transcript: #09-98 Nuclear Fronts: Atomic Business and the U.S. Government
March 4, 1998

Program description at http://www.radioproject.org/archive/1998/9809.html

Phillip Babich: Welcome to Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. This week on Making Contact:

Jackie Cabasso: What many governments of the non-nuclear weapon states are calling for, and what the Abolition 2000 global network to eliminate nuclear weapons is calling for, is commencement of immediate negotiations on the treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Dennis Bernstein: The idea that we’re training 400 people in 20 countries, over 20 countries, on how to detonate a nuclear weapon does not say much for the Nonproliferation Treaty that was signed last year.

Phillip Babich: Despite assurances from the Clinton Administration that the United States is moving toward nuclear non-proliferation, the development of atomic weapons and power plants continues. Multinational corporations are cashing in as countries line up to purchase nuclear arms and technology. I’m Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact.

In 1953, the United States launched the Atoms for Peace Program. Its stated purpose was to share with other countries the "clean, safe, cheap and limitless potential of nuclear energy." The critics, say Atoms for Peace, established by President Dwight Eisenhower, served as a conduit for nuclear sales.

Claire Greensfelder: Eisenhower basically sold nuclear power to the world, and when the market dropped off dramatically here in the U.S. in 1973 as a result of anti-nuclear citizen movements here, the pressure to sell nuclear power abroad really increased.

Phillip Babich: Claire Greensfelder is with Plutonium-Free Future and former director of the Greenpeace USA Nuclear Campaign.

Claire Greensfelder: The initial hard sell was done in 1953 at the Atoms for Peace conference, hosted by President Eisenhower, where again, in order to hang on to our nuclear weapons, we said we will now turn this into the "peaceful atom," and invited nations from all over the world, developing and industrialized nations, to the U.S. for this conference where we talked about how we would develop nuclear power all over the world. It was the entry key to being a global power. It was a sign of having arrived in the 20th century to be having your own nuclear power industry. And it also gave you the possibility of weapons proliferation’s, in spite of the fact that everyone signed the treaty and said, "No, we won’t develop nuclear weapons if you help us develop nuclear power." The truth is, many countries did. South Africa, Israel, Pakistan, India, Argentina is believed to have a bomb. Even many people believe that Japan is only a few weeks away from assembling a bomb if they wanted to, that they have all the technology available.

Phillip Babich: In fact, according to Greensfelder, U.S. trade representatives have signed over 40 deals with foreign countries to pave the way for nuclear power plant sales since the signing of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Claire Greensfelder: These are part of the devil’s bargain that the U.S. and other nations made in the Nonproliferation Treaty when it was first signed. Article Four of the Treaty guarantees the inalienable right to develop nuclear power. Now, this is what the five nuclear nations said: "If we get to keep our nuclear weapons, we will move toward disarmament." (That’s Article Six, which they have not done, except when they have been totally pressured by their citizens.) "We will move toward disarmament and in exchange we will provide you with nuclear power, with the technology for peaceful use of the atom." Which of course also provided the industries in those nations, Siemens -- actually Siemens is in Germany -- but France, Cogema in the U.S. we’re talking Bechtel, Westinghouse, General Electric. Many of the companies that have built nuclear power in the nuclear nations’ nuclear weapons states, also are involved with trade in the non-nuclear weapons states to develop their nuclear power industries. So, it’s been -- by signing Article Four and accepting that part of the Nonproliferation Treaty, we created a market around the world for nuclear power.

Jackie Cabasso: There’s now a growing role being articulated in U.S. policy for nuclear weapons, which is something they call counter-proliferation, which means explicitly threatening to use nuclear weapons to deter "the use of other weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons or biological weapons." And in fact the U.S. has, in the last couple of years, covertly threatened to use nuclear weapons against both Libya and Iraq.

Phillip Babich: Jackie Cabasso is with the Western States Legal Foundation, a pro-disarmament group.

Jackie Cabasso: At any given time, there are between eight and eleven U.S. nuclear-powered, ballistic missile submarines carrying thousands of the most powerful long-range nuclear weapons ever built, patrolling the world’s oceans. And they’re ready to target any city on earth within a matter of seconds. And this is a rate equal to that at the height of the Cold War. U.S. and Russian nuclear forces remain on hair trigger alert. They stand ready to fire a total of more than 5000 nuclear weapons at each other within a half hour. The U.S. explicitly maintains a policy, if threatened, [of] first use of nuclear weapons, which was recently reaffirmed by President Clinton, as well as a policy of massive retaliation, if struck. And in the face of the expansion of NATO, right up to its borders, Russia has actually reversed its previous pledge of first use, and so Russia now threatens first use as well. The U.S. currently maintains about 7,250 operational long-range nuclear weapons, and many more tactical, that means short range and reserve and inactive warheads. And the total is well over 10,000 warheads now that the U.S. maintains. And that number is not expected to go down.

Phillip Babich: Also behind this push to sell nuclear technology are banks that supply loans to foreign countries to finance nuclear purchases. In some cases, the nuclear industry pressures banks to make these loans. Claire Greensfelder of Plutonium Free Future.

Claire Greensfelder: Westinghouse had organized a deal where the Export-Import Bank, also known as the ExIm Bank, would guarantee a loan to the Philippines for a nuclear reactor they were building there. This is a very controversial reactor. It was actually finally stopped a number of years back. It was going to be turned into a natural gas plant. Then it was possibly going to be put back into a nuclear reactor. It’s in limbo now with the Asian financial crisis. But in any case, right now, the government of the Philippines is still paying $100,000 a day in interest alone, for a reactor that was never built. And yet the ExIm Bank was pressured to give that loan, and who benefited? Westinghouse. Westinghouse, who was involved in the design and the construction of the reactor that has never been completed and never been operated.

Phillip Babich: In other cases, the U.S. government makes a policy decision that could open the door for nuclear sales. U.S.-based corporations, such as Bechtel, according to Greensfelder, had been anticipating President Clinton’s re-approval of China’s most-favored nation trade status, to sell that country nuclear power plants.

Claire Greensfelder: Now with Clinton having granted most favored nation status last October, these corporations had the way paved for them for $50 billion, potentially, in nuclear construction deals in China. And we have recently discovered, by some documents that were leaked to a number of environmental organizations, that American financial institutions, including Lehman Brothers, J.P.Morgan and Company, Bank America’s Securities and Smith Barney, are actually underwriting loans to the State Development Bank of China for one of their nuclear power plants currently under construction, the Guanzhou reactor.

Dennis Bernstein: The U.S. government had made a national security decision to arm Iraq. Weapons are a big business. So all our weapons defense contractors, and related contractors who build U.S. weapons arsenals participated in helping the Iraqis.

Phillip Babich: Dennis Bernstein is an investigative journalist with Pacific News Service and KPFA radio. He recently published an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian exposing a bank deal that enabled Iraq to arm itself with weapons of mass destruction prior to the 1991 Gulf War.

Dennis Bernstein: You could say that George Bush was a key advisor to Saddam Hussein from 1985 to 1990. We’re talking about him carrying over military intelligence. We’re talking about technical advise coming from U.S. corporations on how to deal with Iran, how to target better Iran. We’re talking about George Bush arriving with various kinds of intelligence like this. U.S. corporations provided billions of dollars in technology to the Iraqis for the creation of chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons of mass destruction. Just about every defense company who was anything, participated on the part of the U.S., Honeywell; Hewlett Packard; International Imaging Systems, they gave imaging technology for computers for missile programs; Tektronix, computer graphics terminals for Iraqi missile centers. We’re talking about vacuum pumps and bellows for nuclear weapons plants, and on and on. This policy went on, as I said, until right before the Gulf War. By the way, the policy continued even after intelligence came in that the Iraqis were using weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, biological weapons against the Kurds and against the Iranians.

Phillip Babich: A bank in Atlanta, according to Bernstein, funneled $5 billion to Iraq over a five year period leading up to the Gulf War. Two billion dollars of that money was earmarked for the Iraqi military.

Dennis Bernstein: The bank manager there was indicted on something over 300 counts. Supposedly it was a one-man operation, where this one guy, this bank manager, managed to funnel over $2 billion into Iraqi supply dumps. You believe that? Well, don’t. Twenty Congressmen, in 1992, didn’t either, and they asked for a special prosecutor. It never came, but their charges were, they were accusing the administration of among other things, a conspiracy to defraud the U.S., and to commit offenses against the U.S., making false statement, obstruction of justice, concealment of falsification of records, perjury, mail and wire fraud, financial conflict of interest by high executive branch officials. There was an ongoing full court press to shut this story down. The judge in the trial finally lost it, and started giving these declarations from the bench, about the fact that this was a major cover-up, that U.S. agencies were in fact misleading the court, lying, calling the prosecutors, refusing to allow investigators to go in and investigate the connection between B&L in Atlanta and the mother bank in Italy. In other words, five agencies at least, of the United States government, were involved in a full-fledged cover-up. When the Clinton people came in, in 1992, Gore said, in a campaign speech, "This is worse than Watergate." As soon as they got elected they said, "We’ve got to lay off the Iraq thing now. We’ve got what we needed. We got the election. We’ve gotta move on."

Sue Supriano: You’re listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. This program can now be heard on over 120 stations in the United States, Canada, Haiti, and South Africa, and around the world on Radio for Peace International short wave. If you want to get in touch with any of the organizations you hear about on this program, please give us a call. It’s toll-free, 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcript, or if you have a comment or suggestions for future programs.

Phillip Babich: In 1996, President Clinton signed the Second Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, setting limits on the types of nuclear weapons testing that countries are allowed to conduct. But according to Jackie Cabasso of the Western States Legal Foundation, U.S. nuclear laboratories are going forward with nuclear experiments using sophisticated computer and laser technology intended to develop new weapons.

Jackie Cabasso: The Clinton Administration has made a -- tried to make a great deal out of the fact that it "completed the work of John F. Kennedy and signed the Comprehensive Ban Treaty." However, Clinton made an explicit deal with the laboratories. And in his letter to the Senate, submitting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty for ratification, he set forth a series of safeguards.

Phillip Babich: Those safeguards include promoting laboratory testing, and reserving the option to resume underground nuclear detonations, if it’s in the interest of the United States to do so.

Jackie Cabasso: So essentially you have a very close analogy to what happened in 1963. And we’ve got a complex now underway, that according to secret documents, without a doubt there is in fact new nuclear weapons research going on. And that there are a number of modifications to existing weapons and new weapons in the pipeline, and that they are going as far as prototyping and flight testing.

Claire Greensfelder: The U.N. set up an intergovernmental agency called the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has a dual role internationally that many of us in the movement for abolition of nuclear power and weapons think is absolutely inconsistent. On the one hand they are supposed to monitor the research in other civilian nuclear reactors around the world that are being developed in concordance with the Nonproliferation Treaty, to make sure that they are not proliferating into weapons work. At the same time, their job is to promote nuclear power. So they are both selling it to countries and monitoring its safety. And we think that that is a totally unrealistic rule. They end up sometime in their zeal to sell nuclear power maybe a little less cautious than they should be in what’s really happening with it.

And we think that what the U.N. ought to be doing is developing a sustainable energy agency, one that will take us to the 20th century. With the energy sources that are now looking to be the very best for the earth and for the health and safety of people and all living things: solar power, wind power, biomass, solar hydrogen energy, wave energy, that all the natural energies, many of which derive from the sun. So we would like to see a solar energy or a sustainable energy agency happening at the intergovernmental level. And get the I.A.E.A. out of the business of promoting nuclear power.

Every step of the nuclear fuel train gives the possibility for health risks and radioactive contamination. It contaminates the site where it’s on for 250,000 years. The uranium mine tailings that are created as the result of uranium mining are also huge in volume and carry a large amount of radioactivity. 80% of radioactivity is left in the mine tailings after it’s mined, another 250,000 years. There’s the waste storage problem. There’s transportation of fuel rods.

Manuel Pino: That nuclear fuel chain, or nuker fuel cycle, as we call it, has impacted Indian people in all phases of development, from mining, to storage, to waste facilities.

Phillip Babich: Manuel Pino is an American Indian from the Acoma Nation in New Mexico.

Manuel Pino: I have seen the impacts right before my very eyes in some of the elders who worked in the early phases of uranium mining, when there was a pick and shovel operation, without ventilation, without respiratory equipment. You know, these people were virtually miners’ canaries that went in to the crude mines in the late [thirties], early [1940s], in the testing phase of nuclear weaponry, which eventually was used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uranium produced to trigger those nuclear warheads came from the Navaho reservation.

Phillip Babich: Pino adds that Native Americans had little choice in citing the uranium mines.

Manuel Pino: The decision to mine uranium was done by the legal institutions of this country, namely the federal government, the multinational corporations, and the tribal government, with very little input from the people itself. So, during this 30-year development process, the people had a little, very little voice in whether they opposed development or not. And in the 1950s we found out that very few people knew what was going to happen 30 years down the road, not only to human beings but to the environment, to the animals, and to all our relations that exist on Mother Earth.

Claire Greensfelder: If you read the Nuclear Regulatory Commission dockets that track the stuff, you see there are accidents every day. They’re not all reported in the press. There’s little accidents. There’s big accidents. There’s the most famous ones of Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl, of course, that were extremely dangerous. Large amounts of contamination. In Japan a number of years ago, I attended a meeting where all the nuclear accidents in nuclear reactors that had just been reported in the press, were read. Just one year’s worth. It took 45 minutes to read through them. And these were the ones that had been reported in the press. What’s interesting to note too, is that here’s Japan, a country built on volcanoes and earthquakes, that has as a result of both the American and European nuclear industries supporting them, 47 operating reactors in an area smaller than California.

Phillip Babich: U.S. corporations and government agencies are also involved in training foreign countries on how to use nuclear weapons. According the Dennis Bernstein, the United States sponsored a so-called detonation conference in Portland, Oregon, in 1989.

Dennis Bernstein: Every major weapons government facility in this country sponsored this detonation conference. Over 400 people came from 20 countries to learn how to explode, among other things, nuclear weapons. At this conference were both Iraqis and Israelis. The Iraqis who came to this conference were from the Alcoya Defense Weapons Complex, the largest weapons complex in Iraq. This is a complex that was for creating major explosives for, for instance, major explosives in rocket fuel. They were working on the condor ballistic missile. Nuclear weapons, everything that the Iraqis were working on in terms of weapons of mass destruction were created at this weapons plant in Iraq. Three technicians were there at this Detonation Conference. Out of these hundreds of people that were there, many were from defense corporations. This is what Eisenhower talked about: the military industrial complex, that there is no line between the industry and the builders and they go back and forth. So this is really about the perpetuation of weapons. This is about solving problems with nuclear weapons, as opposed to dialoging. It also has to do with the real premise that we’re in the Gulf, that we’re ready to bomb there. Which is that? It’s about control. And U.S. officials have always believed that control comes out of the barrel of the gun. And so this is a perpetuation of that kind of policy which is why you can have Iraqis and Israelis having lunch together, and then learning about weapons that will help them explode each other off the face of the earth.

Phillip Babich: As the United States and other countries disseminate nuclear weapons and technology, the nuclear industry is looking for more uranium.

Manuel Pino: When we went in 1992 as a delegation of indigenous peoples from North American to what was called the World Uranium Hearing in Salzburg, Austria, where indigenous people impacted by nuclear development came together to present testimony to international governing bodies. In Salzburg, we found out, in our interaction with people from the Soviet Union, from Africa, in Namibia, from Australia and the Aborigines, to our brothers and sisters in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada, where intensive uranium development is taking place as we speak. We had the opportunity to interact with all these indigenous peoples throughout the world, people from Latin America. Well, we found out that a lot of the mining companies that folded because of the economic depletion of the demand for domestic uranium in the mid-1980s, just relocated to another part of the world where they could exploit people. And lo and behold, we found that a lot of the mining companies that were part of the 38-year development process near Acoman Laguna Pueblos, where I’m from, are now located among Aboriginal people of Australia or up north in Saskatchewan among the Cree and Penea people, on the Blood reserve in Eastern Ontario. So the global interdependence of this nuclear fuel cycle by the corporate entity is a chain in itself. And the development process and the exploitation of cheap labor force to garner profits for the corporate entity is still very much upon us today.

Phillip Babich: Some activists have been calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons and atomic energy.

Jackie Cabasso: To me when I hear the term "arms control" I mean I guess I have a cynical interpretation, that means, yeah, we control all the arms. What we’ve managed to do is we’ve reduced the numbers some. But in and of itself that doesn’t mean a whole lot, because of the posture and the operational status of the weapons and the fact that the quality of the weapons keeps being improved. And so I think what’s becoming more and more recognized is that we need a kind of paradigm shift. The Australian government established a commission of international experts to come up with a plan for the elimination of nuclear weapons in 1996, the Canberra Commission. And they found in terms of proliferation, their bottom-line finding was that the possession of nuclear weapons by any one state is a constant stimulus to other states to acquire them. And that the single biggest problem preventing elimination of nuclear weapons was the lack of political will by the nuclear weapons states, and in particular by the United States. And they recommended a series of immediate measures, to be undertaken in 1997, starting with separating, de-alerting the weapons and separating the warheads from their delivery systems. What many governments of the non-nuclear weapons states are calling for and what the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons is calling for, is commencement of immediate negotiations on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Phillip Babich: Because most nuclear programs operate under a program of intense security, it’s often difficult for activists to get current information on weapons production. This was the case in Israel until a former nuclear plant worker blew the whistle on his government in 1986. Mordecai Vanunu had clandestinely taken photographs from inside one of Israel’s nuclear factories, left the country, and showed this evidence to activists in Australia. Sam Day, former editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, told Vanunu’s story recently during a tour of the United States. Day said that Vanunu shared his information with the London Sunday Times when he went public with the photographs.

Sam Day: The Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, had gotten wind of the fact that one of their former nuclear workers was spilling his guts to a newspaper. And when that became known by the Mossad, the head of the Mossad went straight to the Prime Minister, the main named Shimon Peres, the man who as a young diplomat in the late 1950s negotiated the key agreements with France which gave Israel the technology it needed to get started producing nuclear weapons. And so he was outraged, doubly outraged, and he gave the Mossad an order. He said, "Look, I want you to bring that son of a bitch back to Israel. Bring him back alive, so that we can deal with him as he should be dealt with."

Phillip Babich: Despite Vanunu’s arrest, the London Sunday Times’ story ran.

Sam Day: His pictures and his stories showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Israel had indeed become a nuclear weapons power. Had nuclear weapons. Little Israel, one of the smallest countries in the world, had become a major player in the nuclear arms race. With somewhere between 100 and 200 warheads of advanced design, and that Israel was on the threshold of creating thermonuclear warheads, which are much much bigger and more dangerous and more versatile than the old atomic bombs of Hiroshima era. It has been conducted with the full knowledge and awareness of the United States since the very beginning. CIA’s activities and the satellite surveillance has kept, first of all the Eisenhower administration, and every single other administration basically fully informed of what’s happening. We desperately need a real policy against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Phillip Babich: Mordecai Vanunu is still in prison.

That’s it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at nuclear proliferation, corporate interest, and foreign policy. Thanks for listening. If you want free background information, please give us a call. We have a limited amount of a Safe Energy Handbook, published by Plutonium Free Future. You’ll hear our toll-free number in a moment. A special thanks to Rebecca Armstrong and Maria Gillardin for recorded portions.

Samantha Haimovitch: If you want more information about the subject of this week’s program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes and transcripts, or if you’d like to make a comment about what you’ve just heard. Making Contact is an independent production funded by individual contributors. We’re committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. Our producers are David Barsamian, Phillip Babich, and Denise Graab. Our senior advisor is Norman Solomon and our executive director is Peggy Law. Our theme music is by the Charley Hunter Trio. For everyone at Making Contact, thanks for listening.