By 1939, Otto Hahn had split uranium atoms by bombarding them with other bits of radiation, neutrons. And Fermi and Szilard had begun to build an atomic pile to utilize the chain reaction. And a year later, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Pierls described in a three-page paper how uranium-235 could be assembled into a critical mass producing an atomic explosion. And they noted:
"In addition to the destructive effects of the explosion itself, the whole material of the bomb would be transformed into a highly radioactive state. The energy radiated by these active substances will amount to about 20 percent of the energy liberated in the explosion, and the radiations would be fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion."
So, as early as that we had very much the picture of the atomic bomb. And it didn't stay just on paper: The most dramatic demonstration was on the 6th of August, 1945, when a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 400,000 people.20,000 died in the explosion and heat of the blast. Another bomb made from plutonium was dropped on Nagasaki. By the end of the year, 120,000 people were dead at Hiroshima, a further 70,000 at Nagasaki had died from the effects of the bomb. . . .
Since -- and of course, you know the story, we've been hearing the story of the tests in many other places, by the U.K., the U.S.S.R., the French, then the Chinese -- as of 1991, there had been 1,924 known nuclear tests, from which 400 had been carried out in the atmosphere, everybody on earth now has strontium-90 in their body tissues. According to one calculation, the increase in carbon-14 in the atmosphere will cause a million serious defects amongst children and two million embryonic and neo-natal deaths. Dr. Bertell has estimated, the waste generated to produce these tests was already by 1985 generating 20 to 40 deaths per day world-wide or 7,000 to 15,000 deaths per year and will cause 13 million deaths by the year 2000.
It's not just the bomb that has been, if you like, a test the whole way through, but so, in my view, has been the whole of the nuclear fuel cycle. After all, what we have done is to deploy a technology which is only partially understood with an enormously destructive capability -- which is known to be the case -- across the world -- in many cases on a commercial scale -- as if we understood it completely. And the results have been horrific. We've seen, for example, in the Soviet Union at Chelyabinsk nuclear wastes simply dumped into the Techa River until 1951 -- no processing at all; and of course, on the 29th of September in 1957, a waste explosion which released the equivalent of 20 million grams of radium -- about a quarter of the radiation released from Chernobyl -- in a one-kilometer high cloud contaminating 217 towns with a population of 270,000 people. We saw the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States which revealed just how high the risks have been. In its core, 16 tons of water per second were pumped at 200 kilometers an hour through 40,000 radioactive fuel rods, emitting the heat of 200,000 radiator bars. It is official wisdom -- or was official wisdom -- that a melt-down due to a failure in the cooling system would occur once in every billion reactor years. The melt-down happened -- that time, it was mostly contained within the reactor building. The next time, at Chernobyl, it wasn't, and half the world was contaminated.

In The Name Of World Peace
Atomic Tests In Both Hemispheres

Prof Jim Falk, Australia. Professor at Wollogong University,
member of the Faculty of Science and Technology Studies,
main technical expert witness in the first case of a
Maralinga veteran vs. Commonwealth of Australia.

And, I think it's important to remember what fires that scientific curiosity; we need to know what it is that is attractive, that has produced this result. And it's good to remember the pace of change, from Becquerel's discovery that uranium, this bit of rock, released a radiation, in the same year that they're able to generate a very similar thing from x-rays, in 1898. The urge to reveal the structure of the things in the rock that made that happen was irresistible. And the desire to see what it could do to meet human ends was, of course, also profoundly attractive. By the end of that year, the Curies had isolated radium and polonium, totally unknown to human beings in the entire history up to that time on the planet. By 1939, Otto Hahn had split uranium atoms by bombarding them with other bits of radiation, neutrons. And Fermi and Szilard had begun to build an atomic pile to utilize the chain reaction. And a year later, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Pierls described in a three-page paper how uranium-235 could be assembled into a critical mass producing an atomic explosion. And they noted:

"In addition to the destructive effects of the explosion itself, the whole material of the bomb would be transformed into a highly radioactive state. The energy radiated by these active substances will amount to about 20 percent of the energy liberated in the explosion, and the radiations would be fatal to living beings even a long time after the explosion."

So, as early as that we had very much the picture of the atomic bomb. And it didn't stay just on paper: The most dramatic demonstration was on the 6th of August, 1945, when a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 400,000 people.20,000 died in the explosion and heat of the blast. Another bomb made from plutonium was dropped on Nagasaki. By the end of the year, 120,000 people were dead at Hiroshima, a further 70,000 at Nagasaki had died from the effects of the bomb.

Now, the first thing to remember, because it helps us understand how other things are forgotten, is that there was a great scientific attractiveness to the understanding of the forces that had been unleashed. And what is attractive in science is not that these things are so complex, but they're so simple -- that we can understand such a powerful phenomenon with such simple ideas. Think of it! We know that uranium atoms release neutrons -- put one in space, nothing can happen; put another next to it, maybe once in a million years the neutron might hit the other one, and maybe it might split -- if it does, it releases another neutron. Start building up the number of atoms around that, more and more occasionally, an atom will be split, giving off more neutrons. At some point, as many neutrons will be produced as are destroyed, and then you have a chain reaction. And that is the critical mass that gives you an explosion where every bit of energy from every splitting is compounded into the heat and explosive force of a nuclear weapon. It's such a simple idea.

Think about the cloud! When the bomb goes off, it vaporizes into highly radioactive materials. It's very hot, so it's lighter than air and so it rises. It rises very fast because it's first of all very hot; the most unstable parts -- atoms -- decay away most quickly, so it cools rapidly to start with; and at some point, that rapidly rising column of hot gas reaches a point where it is cool enough to be of the same density as the air that it's in, and that's where it stops. A ball has expanded out, because it is hot, full of the radioactive materials, glowing, gas -- and then it starts to fall. And so we have the mushroom. And because it's been moving up fast, it drags a column of air with it, into which water vapour will first of all vaporize and then condense and fill with steam, and that's the column of the cloud. Such simple ideas against such dramatic phenomena. This is the sort of thing that turns scientists on.

And there were so many questions that you could ask; I mean, it wasn't just the question of a critical mass, but could we make this thing smaller? Well, we knew that beryllium reflected neutrons, so if we shoved some beryllium around the outside, we could decrease the amount of uranium because the neutrons would be denser, and so you'd need less atoms in there, so we could make the bomb smaller. What about increasing the fallout? Well, if we blow the thing up near the ground, we're going to suck up lots of dirt and that's going to be made radioactive, too, so it'll be a lot dirtier. It'll be more radioactive -- let's try it and see! We can alter the materials we make the bomb from -- what about plutonium? You only need six kilograms of plutonium to make a critical mass, you need ten of uranium, we can make a much more efficient little bomb, which can be used in all sorts of different ways. We can alter the type of the fallout -- what about dropping in some cobalt to make some very widely-spread highly radioactive fallout? Or what about -- could we make this thing arbitrarily large in its explosive power? -- That took a bit of thinking and, yes, it could be done; but here you had to do something rather clever, which Teller is supposed to have thought of, which is that you use a little fission bomb as a trigger and around that you pack some deuterium and tritium, which are isotopes of hydrogen -- we know if we exert a lot of pressure and energy on those, they will compress sufficiently to fuse and release a lot more energy. And then around that -- because what they do is, release lots of neutrons -- we can put as much uranium as we like, most of it will be turned into plutonium, and we can have a critical, a super-critical mass, as big as we like; and we can make a bomb arbitrarily powerful, as big as we might possibly want.

So the motivation, the scientific motivation for testing is that simple ideas can produce such powerful results. And, of course, the interest of the scientists combine with the interest of the military that some of these results just might fit into strategies that they could dream up. The first test then of the scientists' thinking was at Los Alamos. There was the question of whether it might set up a chain reaction in the atmosphere, which would have left us without one, but it didn't. There was certainly very little concern about fallout.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki have to be seen as the second tests -- they were with living targets! Different types of bombs were used on each occasion, special measuring devices were dropped, photographs were taken, the deaths were studied with great technical interest, a sample of the living -- 120,000 survivors -- were picked out and followed throughout their lifetimes to see what the effects of the radiation would be.[1] Leukemia started appearing after two years, peaking in 1954, in 1955 other cancers began to rise and are still appearing; and much of what was then used to follow through with the other tests of the nuclear technology came from that study: The safety levels for radiation, 300 millisievert-units -- doesn't matter what they are, really, they're a measure of the destruction to tissue caused by radiation -- 300 in 1950, dropping to one millisievert in 1985, dropping by a factor of 300, as progressively scientists realized that their really crude models had very little to do with the effect on human beings of radiation. Amongst the causes of that dropping was a change in the way it was modelled of very low doses, but also an understanding that they'd got it completely wrong as to how much radiation had actually been experienced at Hiroshima. And it was now conceded that in 1980 you should have seen at least seven times more cancers would be induced by a unit of radiation than had been understood to be the case in 1977. So the radiation levels, they too -- the permissible levels -- are experimental.

Inevitably, when you're deploying technology that you don't understand very well and you know that it's dangerous, and you know that you want to discover a lot more -- you don't put it in your own backyard; and the testing was primarily done in the lands of the defenseless. Bikini Atoll in 1946 -- a 15 megaton bomb designed to produce maximum fallout over the area, which "accidentally" -- inverted commas, I suspect -- contaminated Rongelap and caused many cancers, some 23 radio-eugenic diseases in its victims. Later tests -- some 14 islands were contaminated and, as the Atomic Energy Commission's director of Health and Safety said in 1956:

"While it's true the people don't live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it's nevertheless also true these people are more like us than mice."

And so that's -- it's very helpful!

Since -- and of course, you know the story, we've been hearing the story of the tests in many other places, by the U.K., the U.S.S.R., the French, then the Chinese -- as of 1991, there had been 1,924 known nuclear tests, from which 400 had been carried out in the atmosphere, everybody on earth now has strontium-90 in their body tissues. According to one calculation, the increase in carbon-14 in the atmosphere will cause a million serious defects amongst children and two million embryonic and neo-natal deaths. Dr. Bertell has estimated, the waste generated to produce these tests was already by 1985 generating 20 to 40 deaths per day world-wide or 7,000 to 15,000 deaths per year and will cause 13 million deaths by the year 2000.

It's not just the bomb that has been, if you like, a test the whole way through, but so, in my view, has been the whole of the nuclear fuel cycle. After all, what we have done is to deploy a technology which is only partially understood with an enormously destructive capability -- which is known to be the case -- across the world -- in many cases on a commercial scale -- as if we understood it completely. And the results have been horrific. We've seen, for example, in the Soviet Union at Chelyabinsk nuclear wastes simply dumped into the Techa River until 1951 -- no processing at all; and of course, on the 29th of September in 1957, a waste explosion which released the equivalent of 20 million grams of radium -- about a quarter of the radiation released from Chernobyl -- in a one-kilometer high cloud contaminating 217 towns with a population of 270,000 people. We saw the accident at Three Mile Island in the United States which revealed just how high the risks have been. In its core, 16 tons of water per second were pumped at 200 kilometers an hour through 40,000 radioactive fuel rods, emitting the heat of 200,000 radiator bars. It is official wisdom -- or was official wisdom -- that a melt-down due to a failure in the cooling system would occur once in every billion reactor years. The melt-down happened -- that time, it was mostly contained within the reactor building. The next time, at Chernobyl, it wasn't, and half the world was contaminated.

Now, if the nuclear explosions have been tests, their success has been much overrated. At least in terms of keeping the peace: Since testing began, there have been 127 conventional wars with 25 to 40 million casualties. But since the end of the Cold War, we have at least seen a combination of economic problems and a global anti-nuclear sentiment and a declining tension between the superpowers cause a very substantial reduction to begin in the superpower arsenals. In addition, the Russians have ceased testing, the French have temporarily ceased testing, and we stand at a historic moment. But the forces which created the testing of nuclear technology have not gone away. It remains a dangerous moment in human history. The nuclear industry would like to revive its dream, and the nuclear technology experiment could be pushed forward from many sources. The decision to cut back weapons in the arsenal acknowledges the failure of the military in either country to establish much military use for nuclear weapons, except for threatening each other. Their very extreme explosive power makes them unusable, except in most extreme circumstances, and that's always been a problem for the military. They would like to make them more useable after all that investment. And we've just had the Reed Report in the United States, produced from the Strategic Deterrence Study Group, which is the group, a sub-group, the group which produces the American Nuclear Strategic Plan, the "single integrated operational plan". It says: "We are not comfortable that we can count on deterrence to deal with many lethal Third World threats." It recommends the first use of U.S. nuclear weapons if any U.S. forces around the world should face the threat of impending annihilation of remote places around the globe. And so we have a pressure to keep testing, to keep developing, to develop new huge hydrogen bombs. Here, the defense establishment is developing a quite imaginative reason: that the earth might be struck by asteroids -- and we desperately need to develop a capability to shoot down asteroids. I mean, the last time that happened, the dinosaurs disappeared, and that wasn't very recent. But to develop also very small bombs, ten-ton micronuke warheads, 100-ton mininuke warheads, earth penetrators, enhanced magnetic pulse bombs which can be blended with conventional warfare of the sort that the United States' military establishment now expects to face in wars in the Third World. And truly, the testing in the lands of the less powerful will continue, if that is the case.

And it's also not true to say that nuclear weapons have completely failed the test of usability: If we recall the Gulf War, we should also recall that at that time there was a fear that Iraq would use chemical weapons, and we should recall that Iraq didn't. And the final piece of the puzzle we should recall is that senior officials in both the United States, United Kingdom and Israel all made very clear threats -- if not entirely explicit -- that in the event that chemical weapons would be used, there would be no restrictions on the weapons out of the Allied arsenals that would be used in return. And I think every Third World country will have recognized one thing from that encounter, and that is that nuclear weapons are useful in military engagements, even if they're not actually exploded. And that if you have one, you might make the nuclear weapons of the other side less useful. And I believe that the great crisis we now face is not so much the superpower arsenals increase in the number of warheads, but the development of a horizontal spread of nuclear weapons across many countries. We already know that Israel, India have developed nuclear weapons, we know that South Africa probably has developed a nuclear weapon, we know that North and South Korea are in a position to do so very quickly, we know that Brazil and Argentina moved some direction towards that capability, but moved a little back perhaps. Now we know that Japan will have generated the surplus of 77 tons of plutonium, enough for 10,000 bombs, by the year 2100 -- allegedly to be used in its commercial nuclear fuel cycle, but I'm talking about a surplus, a surplus above its plans for its commercial nuclear fuel cycle. It's greater than all the military plutonium ever produced in human history. And that surplus will increase thereafter. Iran and Iraq are obviously tense and have technological capability. The spread of countries towards the threshold of nuclear development, the accumulation of critical materials for the nuclear weapons continues, and the pressure for it to continue is increasing. It is not decreased by the tendency of the superpowers -- of the remaining superpowers, nuclear weapon powers, anyway -- to continue testing: At this point, the country that's doing that is the United States, and the doctrines that it is developing are very much the sorts of doctrines that will increase the pressure for proliferation rather than decrease it.

There is a profound and urgent need for the nuclear experiment to end. There is the possibility at this important moment for a Complete Test Ban Treaty. Many of the players have put the pieces in place for it. United States has not, and its allies must now insist that the Complete Test Ban Treaty be put in place. This conference has a role in that, too.

In 1977, there was in Salzburg the Conference for a Non-Nuclear Future, it was inspiring! Paul Leventhal revealed that 200 tons of uranium had disappeared on the high seas for Israel. It was a turning point, I think, in our understanding of the problem of proliferation. After that, Austria became nuclear-free. In the same time, nuclear power plants world-wide began to be scaled back so that now there is only going to be a tenth of the power plants operating that were envisioned in the year 1977 by the year 2000. Five years after the Salzburg conference, writing a history of the nuclear power battle, I wrote: "The Salzburg style of meeting was a creative experiment which could well be worth repeating." These Hearings, 15 years later, both reinforce the threat and promise spelled out at the Salzburg conference. The nuclear experiment with its live victims will be continued if we don't act. But if we do act -- and these Hearings are a crucial component of the next phase -- then we can grasp the opportunity, which now seems much more tangible than it did 15 years ago, to bring the deadly nuclear experiment to an end.

Thank you.


____________

1. As far as " followed throughout their lifetimes to see what the effects of the radiation would be," this study is by no means complete as many of the people were quite young in 1945, and are now only in their fifties or sixties. In Radiation-Induced Cancer from Low-Dose Exposure: An Independent Analysis, author Dr. John Gofman writes extensively about his belief that "the A-Bomb Study appears to grow increasingly deficient in adherence to the basic and meaningful standards of continuity in prospective research" (See particularly Chapter 5, Part 4 and following). See Section 2: The Atomic Bomb Survivors -- A Study and Its Alteration, Section 3: Preparing the Database for Analysis, and Section 4: Cancer-Risk and Dose-Response in Both Dosimetries. (Unfortunately, at present we only have the first two chapters of Section 2 worked up in an on-line form. We will have the rest of these sections put in place as soon as possible. In spite of this, Chapter 5 provides a sufficiently extensive overview of Retroactive Alteration of the Study to convey the depth and degree of the problem and what's at stake here.)
   See Also: Bio-Medical "Un-Knowledge" And Nuclear Pollution: A Common-Sense Proposal, particularly, "Section 4, Some Basic Rules of Believable Bio-Medical Research," and "Section 5, Some Examples of Rule-Breaking in Radiation Research," for a helpful enumeration of some Rules of Research to measure the integrity and believability of any study on the toxicity of a given pollutant by, and some concrete examples of their violation -- including the Atomic-Bomb Survivor Study.

Thank you, Jim, and before you leave the floor, could we add something on top of that, clapping as we did this morning. One, two, three, thank you, Jim. (...)

I welcome Ian Zabarte and Gracelyn Smallwood and [John] Hallam, please come on the stage. Ian Zabarte is the director of the Nuclear Oversight Project of the Western Shoshone Nation. Zabarte, welcome!