Dilip Simeon's blog

Jacques Pauwels: Mythmaking and the Atomic Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki     Truman and his advisors thus fell under the spell of what the renowned American historian William Appleman Williams has called a “vision of omnipotence”. They convinced themselves that the new weapon would enable them to force their will on the Soviet Union. The atomic bomb was “a hammer”, as Truman himself put it, that he would wave over the heads of “those boys in the Kremlin”...  More Henry Giroux: Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Age of Normalized Violence What remains particularly ghastly about the rationale for dropping two atomic bombs was the attempt on the part of its defenders to construct a redemptive narrative through a perversion of humanistic commitment, of mass slaughter justified in the name of saving lives and winning the war...  More Abolish War - Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 Chomsky: Internationalism or Extinction Capitalism and war: The money behi...

A team of researchers from Columbia University has found that radiation levels from atomic testing in the Marshall Islands are still too high for human habitation. In their paper published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , the group describes radiation readings of soil samples from four of the islands, and what they found.  Over the years 1946 to 1958, scientists working for the U.S. government carried out 67 nuclear explosion tests in the Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the Marshall Islands. The tests were conducted to learn more about nuclear weapons and their destructiveness. Prior to conducting such tests, officials with the U.S. forcibly removed the atoll residents to other sites in the Marshall Islands. During testing, researchers discovered that fallout was reaching two other inhabited atolls (Rongelap and Utirik), so those people were moved, as well. After testing ended, officials with the U.S. government met with officials from the Marshall Islands t...

France has consistently underestimated the devastating impact of its nuclear tests in  French Polynesia  in the 1960s and 70s, according to groundbreaking new research that could allow more than 100,000 people to claim compensation. France conducted 193 nuclear tests from 1966 to 1996 at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia, including 41 atmospheric tests until 1974 that exposed the local population, site workers and French soldiers to high levels of radiation. Now that nuclear weapons are illegal, the Pacific demands truth on decades of testing By crunching the data from 2,000 pages of recently declassified French defence ministry documents, analysing maps, photos and other records, and carrying out dozens of interviews in France and French Polynesia, researchers have meticulously reconstructed three key nuclear tests and their fallout.  The Mururoa Files , a collaboration between investigative journalism newsroom  Disclose , Princeton university’...

Likely, the operation, whether by Israel or Saudi Arabia or both, was intended to spike tensions in US-Iranian relations so as to make it more difficult for Joe Biden to start back up the 2015 nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Israel does not acknowledge its covert operations, but it seems the most likely culprit…. The Iranian newspaper Ettela’at reports that on Friday, what it called “armed terrorist elements” mounted an assault on the automobile carrying Dr. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was badly wounded in the midst of the clash between his security team and the assailants and was transported to hospital, where he died of his injuries. Fakhrizadeh, an eminent nuclear scientist, was the head of the Research and Innovation Organization within the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.  Iran’s chief justice, Ayatollah Sayyed Ibrahim Ra’isi, characterized the attack as by “foreigners and international Zionism,” with, he said, “the sinister objec...

"If  we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said  Curtis LeMay  after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who had directed the assault over Japan in the final days of the Second World War, he believed in the use of nuclear weapons and thought any action acceptable in the pursuit of victory. Two decades later, he would say of Vietnam that America should “bomb them back into the stone ages”. But he was also honest enough to recognise that the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not regarded as a war crime only because America had won the war. Last week marked the  75th anniversary  of the world’s first nuclear attacks. And while Hiroshima has become a byword for existential horror, the moral implications of the bombings have increasingly faded into the background. Seventy-five years ago, LeMay was not alone...

As they mark 75 years since their cities were destroyed in an instant, the ageing men and women who bore witness to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are struggling to remind the world of the horror of  nuclear weapons . Keiko Ogura was eight years old when the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a 16-kilotonne nuclear bomb on  Hiroshima  at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945. An estimated 80,000 of the city’s 350,000 people were killed instantly; by the end of the year, the death toll would rise to 140,000 as survivors succumbed to injuries or illnesses connected to their exposure to radiation. Ogura, who was playing outside her home when the force of the blast swept her off her feet and knocked her unconscious, is one of a  dwindling number of survivors  who have made it their life’s work to tell their story. They hope, with  increasing desperation , for a world without nuclear weapons. “My father had said that something didn’t feel right that mo...

As this troubled summer rolls along, and the world begins to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the creation, and use, of the first atomic bombs, many special, or especially tragic, days will draw special attention.  They will include July 16 (first test of the weapon in New Mexico), August 6 (bomb dropped over Hiroshima) and August 9 (over Nagasaki).   Surely far fewer in the media and elsewhere will mark another key date:  July 3. On July 3, 1945, the great atomic scientist Leo Szilard finished a letter/petition that would become the strongest (virtually the only) real attempt at halting President Truman’s march to using the atomic bomb - still almost two weeks from its first test at Trinity–against Japanese cities. AbolishWar - Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 Dear xxxxxxxxxxxx, Enclosed is the text of a petition which will be submitted to the President of the United States. As you will see, this petition is based on purely moral considerations....

NB : The world should respect this man: he steered the USSR to a peaceful end, the implosion could have been catastrophic. This warning shows how foolish are those who think Trump is a harbinger of peace: his total disrespect for American law is paralleled by a equal disregard for treaties and obligations laid down for controlling the nuclear arm race. He is a scam artist and petty con-man who breeds and fosters others like him All of us should beware of ultra-nationalist theatrics. DS The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has warned that current tension between Russia and the West is putting the world in "colossal danger" due to the threat from nuclear weapons.  In an interview with the BBC's Steve Rosenberg, former President Gorbachev called for all countries to declare that nuclear weapons should be destroyed. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-50265870/mikhail-gorbachev-tells-the-bbc-world-in-colossal-danger Howdy Modi: The PM may be leading the In...

Even as the French nuclear regulator ASN has put the nuclear power company EDF on a safety watch after repeated warning in recent years about vulnerabilities in the EPR design, the Modi government in India continues to push for the purchase of 6 EPRs for setting up in Jaitapur. This open letter written by the former Union Power Secretary Dr. EAS Sarma to the Secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India deserves wider circulation.  E A S Sarma 14-40-4/1 Gokhale Road Maharanipeta Visakhapatnam 530002 To: Shri Kamlesh Nilkanth Vyas Secretary, Dept of Atomic Energy (DEA) & Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Govt of India Dear Shri Vyas, I have written numerous letters to your Department cautioning on the safety concerns arising in the case of EPR reactors to be supplied by EDF/ Areva for the proposed Jaitapur nuclear power project in Maharashtra. A copy of my last letter dated 8-7-2019 addressed to the Prime Minister, who heads DEA, an...

Donald Trump  pulled out of the  Iran nuclear deal  to spite his predecessor  Barack Obama , the UK’s former ambassador reportedly suggested in a new leaked diplomatic memo. Sir  Kim Darroch  claimed the US president’s actions amounted to “diplomatic vandalism” and were fuelled by “personality” reasons, according to a document seen by  The Mail on Sunday . The ambassador’s comments are said to have been made in May 2018 after  Boris Johnson , who was foreign secretary at the time, made a failed trip to the White House in a bid to change Mr Trump’s mind on leaving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The latest revelation came as police identified a suspect behind the leak, according to  The Sunday Times . Just hours earlier, Mr Johnson and Tory leadership rival Jeremy Hunt  criticised Metropolitan Police  assistant commissioner  Neil Basu  for warning journalists they could face prosecution for publishi...

Indeed, climate change can be seen like a slow motion version of Chernobyl on a far larger scale - a runaway failure of control over forces of enormous energy with the entire planet at risk. In responding to it the White House has come to resemble a kind of bastard combination of deregulated capitalism and Soviet-style perversion of language, an American version of the politburo. HBO’s  Chernobyl  is terrifying and engrossing drama but its creator, Craig Mazin, also intended it to be a modern parable. He says he was motivated partly to present it as a riposte to the global war on truth. Actually, it can be seen as more than that. It serves as a salutary warning of the global war on scientific truth. The villain of the story is not a single character but the  collective Soviet system of governance . George Orwell nailed the essence of this style of totalitarianism when he wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to...

From the pragmatic stratigraphic perspective, no marker is as distinct, or more globally synchronous, than the radioactive fallout from the use of nuclear weapons that began with the US army’s Trinity test in 1945. Since the early 1950s, this memento of humankind’s darkest self-destructive impulses has settled on the Earth’s surface like icing sugar on a sponge cake. Plotted on a graph, the radioactive fallout leaps up like an explosion. Zalasiewicz has taken to calling it the “bomb spike”. he slowly realized that the sciences were not a way to limit violence but to fuel it. He decided to hear and to feel this terrible earth shaking tremor travelling from Hiroshima, the only date in history that he takes as a real turning-point; the earth has been shaking ever since…. Thanatocraty - Serres’ word for the black triad made by scientists, politicians and industrialists. (Bruno Latour on Michel Serres -   Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures  (1987) It was February 200...

Japan’s emperor has marked his last birthday before his abdication next year by calling for his country’s younger generations to be taught accurately about the horrors of war and expressing relief that his reign has been a peaceful one for  Japan . A record 82,850 people cheered and waved Japanese  hinomaru  flags as Emperor Akihito, who turned 85 on Sunday, appeared on the balcony of the imperial palace in Tokyo with Empress Michiko, his eldest son and heir Crown Prince Naruhito and other members of his family. Naruhito, 58, will ascend to the Chrysanthemum throne on 1 May, the day after his father, who has had heart surgery and treatment for prostate cancer, becomes  the first Japanese emperor to abdicate in 200 years . The last was Emperor Kōkaku in 1817. Akihito returned to the legacy of the second world war in his pre-recorded speech, a subject that has helped define his 30-year reign, known as  heisei , or achieving peace. “It is important not to fo...

The first full interrogation of German scientist Felix Houtermans by the NKVD took place in January 1938 in Kharkov, to which he had been transported after his arrest in Moscow a month before. It lasted eleven straight days, a procedure known to the secret police as a “Conveyor.” During those eleven days Houtermans was given only two breaks, of five hours on the first day and two hours on the second. The rest of the time he was kept awake. After the fourth day, he was also kept on his feet. By the end, he was falling into unconsciousness every twenty to thirty minutes, and his feet were so swollen that his shoes had to be cut off afterward. The interrogators told him they were going to arrest his wife, that his children were going to be sent to an orphanage under new names, so he would never see them again. As he would later tell his cellmate, this last threat is what finally broke him. The interrogators only had two questions: “Who induced you to join the counterrevolutionary org...

Hardliners in  Iran  are rejoicing at Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally pull the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal and reimpose economic sanctions, and seizing on an opportunity to consolidate their power over reformists who championed the pact. The commander of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guards “congratulated” the nation on the US exit from the deal. According to the semi-official Fars news agency, the commander, Mohammad Ali Jafari said: “I congratulate and take into a good deed the vicious withdrawal of the US from JCPOA, which was not credible even before the withdrawal … It was proved once more that US isn’t trustworthy in regards its commitments.” At the opening session of the Iranian parliament on Wednesday, a group of hardline MPs held up a paper US flag and the text of the 2015 landmark nuclear deal, also known as the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA),  before setting fire to both  while chanting “death to America”. The MPs’ protest, w...

A 2003 study  paper  on uranium mining prepared by three former office-bearers of the UCIL—RC Gupta, AC Kundu and AK Sarangi—notes that “during the processing of uranium ore, some radio-nuclides are generated and remain in the tailings.” Surendra Gadekar, a nuclear physicist who conducted a health survey in Jadugoda in 2001, told me that radionuclides—atoms of the uranium ore that emit gamma radiation—can cause cancer, besides having other health hazards. He said that he found that the level of radiation in “some pockets” in the area was “five–six times higher than normal.” He also added that he came across several cases of tuberculosis, cancer and congenital defects among the villagers during his survey. “I had never seen something like that—there was red and black dust all around in the air,” Kartik Sardar, a 20-year-old resident of Tilaitand village in Jharkhand’s East Singhbhum district, told me. He was describing a dust storm had covered the neighbourhood and its hous...

The clock of the Cuban crisis began ticking on October 16, 1962, when President Kennedy was notified that U.S. spy planes had detected medium-range ballistic missiles in Cuba which could target much of the United States. On October 22, Kennedy announced this discovery on television and said that he would impose a naval “quarantine” of Cuba in two days. He warned that the launch of a single missile from the island would cause “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” This meant a massive United States nuclear attack on the USSR and its Eastern European satellite countries. Top military, intelligence, diplomatic and White House officials were now working around the clock to prepare options for the president. Kennedy secretly taperecorded the meetings in the Cabinet Room and the Oval Office. The tapes reveal military leaders pressing Kennedy to authorize an invasion, and Kennedy calmly asking questions and reminding everyone of the consequences of nuclear war. U.S. Air Fo...

Weeks after French nuclear watchdog IRSN reported a mysterious cloud of radioactive material over Europe, Russian authorities have confirmed that “extremely high” levels of the isotope ruthenium-106 were found in several parts of the country. Experts and analysts believe the ruthenium-106 detected in Europe was possibly released by accident from a Russian site engaged in chemical reprocessing of old nuclear fuel or a facility producing isotopes used in nuclear medicine. Russian radiation leak: everything you need to know The Russian Meteorological Service said in a statement on Tuesday that it recorded the release of ruthenium-106 in the southern Urals in late September and classified it as “extremely high contamination”. The highest concentration was registered in Argayash, a village in Chelyabinsk region in the southern Urals, which had levels of the isotope exceeding natural background pollution by 986 times, the service said. “Probes of radioactive aerosols from monitori...

A former Soviet military officer credited with averting a possible nuclear disaster at the peak of the Cold War has died at the age of 77.  He was the only officer in his team with a civilian education. Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a Russian nuclear early warning centre in 1983 when computers wrongly detected incoming missiles from the US. He took the decision that they were a false alarm and did not report them to his superiors. His actions, which came to light years later, possibly prevented nuclear war. Petrov died at his home in Moscow in May but his death has only now been made public. In an interview with the BBC in 2013, Petrov told how he had received computer readouts in the early hours of the morning of 26 September 1983 suggesting several US missiles had been launched. "I had all the data [to suggest there was an ongoing missile attack]. If I had sent my report up the chain of command, nobody would have said a word against it," he said. "All I had to d...

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — In a post-Cold War world, the fear of nuclear holocaust has receded from the global consciousness. Donald Trump’s threat of unleashing  “fire and fury like the world has never seen”  against North Korea was an untimely and unwelcome reminder of a past, perilous era. Even by Trump’s standards these statements were a new low. And they are dangerous. History teaches us that the journey from political logorrhea to global disaster can be terrifyingly short. As demagogues toss around nuclear threats like confetti at a wedding, it is easy to forget the devastation nuclear power can cause. But in one country, on Europe’s edge, they have not forgotten.  And where once life thrived, there now stands a vast mausoleum. The city of Chernobyl lies about 90 kilometers from Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. It’s an ancient site — originally part of the land of Kievan Rus, the federation of Slavic tribes from whom modern Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians ...