THE WORLD WIDE WEB OF NUCLEAR CRIME

THE WORLD WIDE WEB OF NUCLEAR CRIME

Andrew McKillop

June 2011

Early on in the “atomic century” – in the early 20th century – public knowledge of the dangers and risks of nuclear materials was so low that criminal charlatans could purposefully vend nuclear poison as so-called elixirs and health remedies. At the time, a series of “medical” products containing radioactive elements were marketed to the general public. These included “Radithor” made from distilled water with added radium 226 and 228 isotopes. Produced from 1918 – 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories of East Orange, New Jersey, USA this was a big seller.

This lethal product was marketed as a “Cure for the Living Dead” and “Perpetual Sunshine”.

Today, nuclear crime spans the globe and extends from so-called “civil” nuclear activities to related and dependent nuclear crime. For the period 1993 – 2006 the UN atomic energy promotion agency the IAEA reports 1080 nuclear trafficking incidents of which 275 involved unauthorized possession and sale, and 332 incidents involved theft or loss of radioactive materials. The same IAEA, we can note, reported deaths due to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 as “a few dozen” until as late as 2002, so it is no surprise to learn that various open sources report hundreds more incidents than the IAEA admits.

The recent director of the IAEA, Mohamed El Baradei, soon after quitting the job at the end of 2009 has himself said the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT is unworkable and unrealistic, for one reason because new nuclear power-using countries will go on raising their demand to control the full fuel cycle, recycling and reprocessing wastes simply to economize and stretch uranium fuel supplies. Also simply because ever increasing quantities of fuel and wastes are shipped worldwide, and due to the temptation for organized and petty crime to get hold of nuclear materials, the global nuclear system will increasingly “lose” radioactive materials. These will inevitably be used for nuclear blackmail, as weapons for terrorism, or lost creating long-term carcinogenic pollution of the environment.

Only a complete end to the nuclear power industry can stop these permanent and presently growing threats, which have one massive upstream source: so-called civil nuclear power.

CRIMINALIZING NUCLEAR PROFITEERS

Corporate and state nuclear crime in the “civil” nuclear power industry is however not yet recognized as criminal. It is called “peaceful use of the atom” but in fact produces vastly long-lived cancer-causing radioactive materials, which can also be used to make Depleted Uranium weapons, dirty bombs, and the supposed “clean” bombs officially owned by only 5 nations – the permanent members of the UN Security Council. At least 4 other nations also possess so-called “clean” bombs. As many as 35 other nations could produce some or all of these types of nuclear weapons, in many cases overnight or “in two screwdriver turns”.

Civil nuclear disaster, the most recent at Fukushima, exhibits and proves the huge risks and dangers of the so-called “peaceful” production and use of nuclear materials. Exactly like the asbestos industry and its conspiracy to profit from disease, misery and economic loss – and for many years described as having “unknown and unproven” toxicity and therefore commercially licit and legal – corporate and political nuclear criminals conspire to destroy and damage public health and the environment. Their so-called “scientific” advisers, also like the asbestos conspiracy and for their own personal profit, conspire to perpetrate long-term crime against society, human welfare and the environment by corruptly producing and publishing inaccurate and distorted information.

The scale of damage from nuclear crime is however vastly greater and longer-lived than from asbestos or any other industrial pollution, such as pesticides or heavy metals. Loss of livelihood, economic damage, long-term cancer deaths and injury, and complete sterilization of thousands of square kilometres of land for decades, perhaps centuries into the future are some of the major daily threats utilized by corporate and state elites to force the general public into supine quiescence and fearful acceptance of their permanent and criminal threat to organized society, human civilization and the biosphere.

Concerning nuclear weapons, the basic linkage between so-called “peaceful use” nuclear materials and cheaply produced but deadly nuclear weapons – Depleted Uranium (DU) munitions produced directly from nuclear wastes – is entirely proven. Only war crime could be considered as in any way comparable with state and corporate nuclear crime.

Today, public anger and concern over the open-ended scale of the nuclear menace perpetrated by corporate and state elites in full knowledge of the dangers they expose us to, has sharply risen with rapidly increasing knowledge of the real intentions of these criminal elites. Their intention is to force the acceptance of provenly dangerous methods for producing, at most, 6 percent of world energy supply using a large number of pretexts and falsified information. They do this for their own profit and to the loss of society. Their proven deceit and their continuous falsification of scientific, technical, medical and evironmental information underlines the criminal nature of their endeavor.

ZERO TOLERANCE

Already today, certain corporate nuclear elites and their “godfathers” in the political domain are rapidly preparing to exit the nuclear domain. The political elites, often describing themselves as “democratic” but refusing all demands for full-and-fair national referndums on nuclear power – because they know the public decision would be outright rejection of nuclear power – understand the wind has changed and citizens now have much better information on the insane risks of nuclear power. Their exit decision is also motivated because they fear legal pursuit and prosecution. They are therefore engaging action to quickly distance themselves from rising public reaction, and future criminal charges, which again clearly reveals their full knowledge of the massive criminal endeavor they are perpetrating.

In Japan, following the Fukushima disaster, both the political elite including prime minister Naoto Kan, who will soon resign, and the directors of the nuclear plant operating company Tepco, including CEO Masataka Shimizu have expressed “deep regrets” for the disaster – opening the way for possible criminal charges at a later date for active conspiracy to misinform the public on the open-ended risks of unsafe nuclear power, and in the case of Tepco to systematically falsify key safety, maintenance, operating accident records, and other “sensitive” data for decades. Tepco, now bankrupt, is unable to pay for more than a tiny fraction of the massive economic damage it has caused, meaning that the political elites who have protected the unsafe nuclear power industry in Japan for decades will utilize public funds to cover the damage done by a criminal private enterprise they have protected.

Peddling cancer risk for generations ahead – long after the corrupt nuclear corporations have declared themselves bankrupt to prevent legal pursuit – and producing nuclear materials able to be used in a large variety of weapons, icluding cheap but deadly weapons of mass destruction makes the advertising and promotion of nuclear idustrial activity a linked criminal endeavor. At present however, we can still find false advertising claims presenting nuclear power as “clean, green and safe”.

The wilful and therefore criminal and conspiratorial misinformation on nuclear power includes academic, science research and technological entities, such as so-called learned and academic journals prepared to publish false information, often for direct remuneration and profit, which downplays or denies the open-ended real risks and future costs of nuclear power. Exactly as for the asbestos industry at its height, nuclear criminials have easily-identified, supposedly “scientific” outlets for their guileful misinformation, including state-influenced or state-owned TV and print media in a certain number of countries.

Today, tobacco advertising, just like the sale or promotion of asbestos, is illegal in most countries. Any person or entity attempting to advertise or promote these products is engaging in criminal activity. The vastly greater and proven risks and dangers of unsafe nuclear power must be treated in exactly the same way: that is Zero Tolerance.

THE WORLD WIDE WEB OF CRIME

Due to the much larger scale of the nuclear industry, and its now critical and permanent need to secure reactor sales on on hand, and secure uranium fuel supplies on the other, the industry has vastly expanded into low income and developing countries since the 1990s. This “offshoring” strategy – similar to action by asbestos, pesticide and tobacco producers – seeks to profit from less informed public opinion and more easily corrupted political elites, to perpetrate a provenly dangerous industry. In the case of the nuclear industry it also seeks access to undepleted reserves of uranium, cheap labour and the absence of serious environment protection or mineworker safety legislation.

The criminal “offshoring” strategy on occasions reaches such heights of open corruption and sheer contempt for global and regional security as the December 2007 attempt by president Nicolas Sarkozy of France to sell his then-friend and fellow head of state Muammar Gaddafi a nuclear reactor. Sale of nuclear reactors and all related products and services, such as uranium fuel and waste disposal is in almost all cases undertaken in secret – favouring corruption.

More routinely, the nuclear industry’s uranium sourcing in Africa and Asia has proceeded for over two decades, almost systematically utilising and operating corruption, mineworker exploitation and massive environmental pollution. In many cases, these crimes are well-documented.

In Africa, specific cases of uranium-related corruption sometimes at head of state level have concerned, or continue to concern many countries. These include Niger, Central Africa Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Mali, Malawi and several others. Criminal activity in some cases includes bribery, theft, extortion and murder by state militia or other armed forces under the direct control of the internationally recognized authorities of affected countries.

The individual persons and entities engaged in this criminal endeavor can be identified and pursued. Only a restricted number of nuclear industrial corporations operate this systematic corruption of deciders and the elite in low income countries for the sale of reactors and for the pillage of natural resources – with disastrous long-term global and regional security risks and environmental damage. These corporations specially include Areva of France, GE-Hitachi and Westinghouse-Toshiba of the US and Japan, Rusatom of Russia, Kepco of South Korea, and China Guangdong Nuclear Power Corp. Certain major uranium mining entities, such as Cameco of Canada are also well-known for their systematic use of corruption to further heir pprofits.

PURSUING THE GUILTY

Citizen action is not necessarily limited to the legal domain or to providing full and fair information on the risks, dangers and costs of nuclear power and the action of nuclear criminals. The identification and boycottage of all persons and entities profiting from nuclear crime is an urgent necessity and has begun, in several countries. In Germany and Switzerland political deciders avoided the humiliation of defeat by referendum through quickly moving to a full and formal nuclear exit strategy following the upsurge of information on nuclear danger, and rising public concern, generated by the Fukushima disaster.

Government action to avoid a referendum defeat in these two countries was accelerated by the existence of well organized, sufficiently funded and longstanding anti-nuclear associations and organizations, utilising all methods of citizen protest action.

This action can include sit-in protest to block transport convoys of unsafe nuclear materials, the identification and harassment of nuclear research enterprises remunerated by corporate nuclear profiteers, and action to thwart, slow or hinder the criminal nuclear elites of so-called “democratic” states. In particular these include political deciders whose daily actions provide continuing legal protection and personal profit for criminal corporate elites.

These elites surely benefit from large numbers of security guards and the full panoply of state repression against citizen action, but are unable to thwart or suppress mass-scale protest: shortly before the May 30th decision of the German government to announce a rapid nuclear exit strategy, anti-nuclear protest rallies in Germany – described by state media pundits in France as “semi fascist” – had attained as many as 250 000 persons. Utilzing state repression against such large numbers of citizens, even in dictatorial regimes controlled by war criminals such as Bashr al Assad or Muammar Gaddafi, is a losing strategy. The state engaged in criminal repressive activity against its own citizens will be beaten.

Due to the urgency of quickly halting all nuclear acitvity and rapidly reducing world production of nuclear materials to zero, further citizen action against nuclear crime will be needed. The entire “nuclear value chain” is as fragile as the claimed safety or innocuity of nuclear power, offering many weak points at which citizen action can apply successful pressure. This action, as with action by citizen groups and individual citizens against the asbestos industry while it continued to receive full state protection from political elites closely linked with the industry, may of course fall in the domain of “illegal” but action against nuclear criminals is justified, is needed, and will take place.

Copyright AMK 2011