 Welcome viewers to our ongoing program, Nuclear Free Future Conversation, coming to you from Channel 17 Town Meeting TV, Center for Media and Democracy here in Burlington, Vermont. I'm your host, Margaret Harrington, and viewers, let's welcome remotely from their different locations, Kevin Camps from Beyond Nuclear, and Alfred C. Meyer from Physicians for Social Responsibility. Welcome, Kevin Camps. Welcome, Alfred Meyer to Nuclear Free Future Conversation. Thanks so much, Margaret. Thank you, Margaret. Good, it's good to see you and hear you again. And here we are coming up to the 75th year since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the title of our program we have agreed upon is 75 Years of Nuclear Full Out from Hiroshima to Now. So, Kevin and Alfred, could you please start us out, as agreed, with the, an overview of the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear power and the significant 75th anniversary is being observed this year. Thank you so much. I'll jump in. It's been a really powerful time, a very sobering time. Just yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the Trinity Blast in New Mexico. So groups like the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium held their annual commemoration, had to do it remotely this year, but it is just so sobering. I mean, they did an hour long online commemoration and they ended it by reading hundreds of names of mostly Hispanic, but also Native American and also white American folks who died because of the fallout from the Trinity Blast on July 16th, 1945. Some of them died within years, others died decades later, but these were cancers and other diseases caused by the massive radioactive fallout from that particularly dirty nuclear weapons detonation, which happened to be the first in history. So that is beginning a few weeks now, as you mentioned, coming up the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, followed just three days later by the Nagasaki commemoration. So a very, very significant commemoration this time because the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and New Mexico, many of them will not be living to see the 100th commemoration. So this is a very important one to hear their stories. A lot of us are not familiar with the Trinity at all because that was like a test, wasn't it? Yes, it was. The Manhattan Project was confident that a uranium bomb would explode. So they never even tested the uranium bomb before they dropped that on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. But three weeks before they dropped the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, August 9th, 1945, they did have to test it because it was a much more complicated device and much different technology. And so the Trinity test was the first test of this plutonium-based bomb. And it dispersed huge amounts of plutonium, 10 pounds, 10 of the 13 pounds of the plutonium that were in the test did not fission, which meant they were sent as particulates throughout the environment. And with air and water carrying it, it can go far and far. And these particles remained dangerous. The half-life's 24,000 years, so it's dangerous for 240,000 years. We've spread this stuff in the very first act of using one of these things. We've spread gross contamination throughout the world that'll be dangerous for generations to come. Alfred, at the time, what happened physically to the people around Trinity that was in New Mexico, right? Yes, there was a lot of fallout, kind of almost like snow and ash coming down for many days afterwards. And these are people who have just open cisterns for their water supplies. It's a very living on the land agrarian area, which the government described as being empty, but which really contained something like 30,000 people, living on small little farms and whatnot. But so this got into there, it stained their sheets. Somebody had their sheets on the clothesline drying and this radioactive ash stained it. Of course, radioactivity, you can't see it, you can't smell it, you can't taste it. So the dirty ash and the radioactive dust, you could see. But this got spread throughout the area and there was no effort to monitor the dose amount, nor to follow up to any kind of epidemiological study to see what are the effects. It actually was a unplanned, poorly run human study on radiation. That's horrible, horrible to hear on every point. Plus, I have a question though, Alfred, about was there was no testing of the bomb on before Hiroshima? There was no testing of that bomb beforehand? Not of the, they were confident about the design of the uranium weapon. It's a fairly simple, I mean, it's an incredible feat to split the atom, but they were confident they could do it with the uranium. Kevin might have more details on that. No, it's an important point because it shows, here we are, 75 years later, past the Manhattan Project. These weapons designs have been out there for a long time. I mean, the Soviets had spies at Los Alamos at the Montreal, Quebec, Canadian atomic lab during the Manhattan Project. They had a lot of information and where Leslie grows the Pentagon thought that the U.S. would have a monopoly for 15 years. They only had one for four, the United States, because the Soviets detonated their first weapon in 1949, a test. But the uranium weapons design used at Hiroshima is so straightforward that 75 years later it just indicates how dangerous nuclear weapons proliferation is because a lot of folks in the world have had this design in hand for a long time. So that's something we need to worry about is the proliferation of these very straightforward nuclear weapons designs. I wanted to jump back real quick because you asked Margaret about the health impact on the people of New Mexico downwind of Trinity. And our colleagues, Kitty Tucker and Bob Alvarez published a study that appeared in the bulletin of the atomic scientists a year ago and was just republished because here it is, the 75th annual commemoration. And this was Kitty's last work. Actually, it was published posthumously shortly after she passed on. It was incredible. What she did, she did the primary research was to look at the pediatric health records of New Mexico for the years 1945, 1946, the months in question. There was a dramatic increase in miscarriages and stillbirths that happened in the immediate aftermath of Trinity, undeniably related in the county's downwind. And on the commemoration held by the Trinity Downwinders yesterday, one of the stories that was told was that, of course, people noticed that there was this dramatic increase in infant mortality. And they actually contacted the Manhattan Project. They contacted the US military. They contacted the authorities and were trying to bring attention and get help. And they were met with silence and denial. And there's a op-ed that appeared in the New York Times yesterday that essentially is entitled The Day We Bombed America. And it made the very important point. It cited this Kitty Tucker and Bob Alvarez piece and it said the first victims of the atomic age were American babies. And yes, they happened to be Hispanic and Native American and some were white, but just ghoulish, just awful. And one of the quotes in this op-ed that just floored me was a doctor associated with the Manhattan Project, who essentially said, and this was a quote, that we got away with it, we got away with it. I was just saying that Kitty Tucker was demanding justice in her article for the people of New Mexico, The Trinity Downwinders. And that is what the Trinity Downwinders are still calling for. Their slogan is 75 years later and still waiting. And they said that that response by the Manhattan Project, the fledgling Atomic Energy Commission, the federal officials, the military officials in New Mexico who they reached out to in their desperation in their crisis of losing baby in large numbers, that that was unforgivable and they have not forgotten that. We have to remember that the Manhattan Project was a super secret endeavor. When Truman took over from FDR, even though Truman was vice president, he didn't even know the whole program was underway. And it had built in 1942 an industry the same size as the then automobile industry. So this is a massive enterprise that involves many different moving parts. But that was all done in secret. And that secrecy applies both to the health impacts that they haven't really been looked into well or carefully or given much credit. And also the operation of the whole endeavor and that area that problem of secrecy is maintained to this day. And I feel that the health data has been hijacked by the industry and the military, they don't want to admit the atomic workers, the people who worked in the factories that built up, at one point the world had 72,000 nuclear warheads. So there's a lot of workers working with a lot of dangerous stuff and they were injured and damaged and made sick. And although there's a government program, the radiation, what is it, Kevin, Rika? Rika Exposure Compensation Act. Which is supposed to honor these atomic veterans. In fact, even though a fair amount of money is spent every year, it's for the administration of the program and very few awards are made because the government doesn't want to admit the liability, it doesn't want to admit the harm it's caused and is still causing. So what you're saying is there was an awareness right at the detonations of the bomb testing that there was great danger to the personnel who were involved, as well as the people who were not considered at all in the surrounding district in New Mexico. Yes, and in fact, there was serious discussion by the people doing the test as to whether or not the Trinity test would burn up the Earth's atmosphere. This was a serious scientific concern so they went ahead and did the test. I mean, this is, the kind of power we're up against in this endeavor and it still is the centerpiece of US defense policy. Even though we have the largest by far conventional forces and huge military, it's our nuclear weapons that are the trump card. Right, but we need to move on to the actual bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6th, August 9th, 1945 and the great number of people who were killed and affected by the radiation pullout at that time. So Kevin, would you continue on with that about what happened on those two days? Well, hundreds of thousands of people were instantly killed by the blast and the fires in each city and then many more people would die over months and years and decades to come because of their exposure to the harmful radioactivity that was released. So these were genocidal weapons. There's a book called The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperowitz, which came out in 1995 on the 40th anniversary of the bombings. That made very compelling arguments that those bombs were not needed, they did not have to happen. And he quoted people like Eisenhower and Leahy, who was commander of the Navy, who said the war was over. We did not need to hit those people with these things. We were not taught to wage war that way. And incredibly enough, Arjun Makajani, who we were talking about the harm to the nuclear weapons workforce and the neighboring communities to these facilities that make the bombs, he wrote a book called Nuclear Wastelands about that. He was a co-author. He also, in his research, found out that the US Department of Energy listed Trinity as the first atomic weapons test followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the second and third nuclear weapons tests. And when he brought attention to this, it was such a shameful admission by the Department of Energy that these were tests that they actually removed them from that list, but the truth was out. And there's a lot of truth to that. These were tests. And actually, Asgar Alperowitz wrote in that book the decision to use the atomic bomb. This was a message to the Soviets that the United States was delivering. We are the superpower. We are in charge. You need to stop your armies in Manchuria. Don't come any closer to Japan. And it was used in Eastern Europe as well to draw the line between East and West, so to speak. And it's been used that way ever since. I mean, there's this notion that nuclear weapons have only been used twice by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, they've been used ever since. It's like a bank robber with a gun. The bank robber may not pull the trigger, but the bank robber is using that gun to rob the bank. And so that's how the United States and other nuclear weapons powers use nuclear weapons. They are the trump card in their back pocket. And it puts the entire planet at risk. And Alfred, could you go into the union, like the two sides of the same coin, between nuclear weapons and nuclear power? And when you put forward an idea for this program, you said that nuclear weapons are necessary for nuclear power and vice versa. This is how it's so conjoined. Well, I believe what I said is that nuclear weapons are, excuse me, nuclear power, civilian nuclear power, is an integral part of our nuclear weapons complex. And just today, I came across an additional report from the Atlantic Council, which is a high eyebrow think tank in Washington. And they were very specific that we have to have civilian nuclear power, that they even come up with a number of $42.8 billion that civilian nuclear power contributes towards our nuclear weapons defense, our national, they always call it national security. And they talk about, I won't read the quotes right now, but that if this was not the case, that it would be a terrible shock to the economy and to our national security. And so this is 2019 in October. In 2017, Ernie Moniz, who was the one Obama second secretary of energy, who actually, both of them were highly respected, highly trained physicists and scientists. But Ernie Moniz wrote a report in 2017 talking about, again, how civilian nuclear power is fundamental to our national security. If you go on the Nuclear Energy Institute's website, that's the pro-industry promotion group, under advantages, they have a headline called advantages. And if you look under the advantages, if you look at security, it shows a picture of a woman of color in army fatigues holding what appears to be her daughter also in fatigues. And this statement is civilian nuclear power is fundamental for our national security. So I give them credit for being much more honest about what this is, because in the past, I've talked to many people who are pro-nuclear power who say, oh, we hate weapons. We don't want anything to do with weapons. Get rid of them all. But nuclear power, that's what's going to save us from climate change, even though it can't for many reasons. So the real reason it's pushed for is to the capacity for the military. We might have heard of small, modular reactors. Take a little reactor on a train car out to Kansas someplace and bingo, they'd have clean energy, like magic. Well, what that really is for, it's not for Topeka, Kansas. It's really for new reactors for atomic submarines. It's really for the military. And there are stories like this in Britain. I'm just finding more and more official acknowledgement of this, because they've tried to support nuclear power on its environmental basis. But it's so unbelievably expensive and difficult that that argument doesn't fly. So now they're being honest. We need it for bombs. And Kevin, could you go forward with the nuclear fuel chain from mining to waste and how it's harmful at every step and how the conjoined forces of nuclear power and nuclear weapons are? Margaret? Yes. If I could interrupt, and I think we'd like to just round out this discussion of nuclear weapons. Of course, Alfred. A couple more comments. One is that I will mention that in 1953, President Eisenhower started what was called a program called Adams for Peace. And I see this as an attempt to put a smiley face on this ghastly experience the world had of seeing two cities incinerated in an instant. The world was horrified. So this was an effort to, number one, make it a happy face. We're going to bring you energy too cheap to meter, even though the studies at the time said the biggest problem with nuclear was cost. But anyway, this also became a huge program of nuclear proliferation. We built nuclear reactors all over the world in all different societies with all different safety standards and governmental structures and whatnot. We spread nuclear all over. We're just almost at the end of getting all that uranium back from all these places we've sent it. But that's from the 50s. And so anyway, but then I wanted to ask Kevin just to mention that there are important commemorations of the 75th bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's a website you can go to. HiroshimaNagasaki75.org. And you can find an event near you. You can set up an event. You can find resources. You can take action in your community and join together with your community, I think, for support, because this is a terrible story we're telling. And it's going on. It's getting worse. We're just in the throes of the restart of an arms race, a nuclear arms race with Russia. But Kevin, add to that, please. Yes. Because I'm doing so much work in New Mexico these days on the Holtec high-level radioactive waste dump, I'm tuned in to the commemoration that's happening in New Mexico. We spoke about Trinity, but there's going to be a major commemoration that's focused on Los Alamos. It's organized by a coalition of New Mexicans. And this happens every year at Los Alamos on August 6 for Hiroshima on August 9 for Nagasaki. Because of the pandemic, it's going to be remote by computer this time. They're going to have a lineup of speakers that's going to be combined with non-violence training to walk our talk. And this will be a major one, as I said. Many of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now in their 70s at least, and will not be around for the 100th, most likely. So this is it to hear from them. And that is a very significant for a major anniversary. Of course, they'll be back next year. But I wanted to answer Margaret's question about this nuclear fuel chain by pointing to another commemoration that was held in New Mexico yesterday by the Nuclear Issues Study Group, a group that's several years old now. We are allies in the fight against Holtak, for example. They had an incredible panel of speakers, including Congolese and South African speakers yesterday. And who were the first victims of the Manhattan Project? It wasn't the Trinity Downwinders. They were the first Downwinders, yes. But what about the uranium miners in Congo, the local residents downstream and downwind of the Shinkolobwe mine? And it's a remarkable story. The uranium ore there was very rich, where most uranium ore in the world is less than 1% uranium. This ore was 65% uranium, very rich in uranium. And it's radioactive progeny, which happened to be very hazardous. And so that mining at the so-called Belgian Congo uranium mine that fueled the Manhattan Project was incredibly harmful to the miners and their families and the other local residents. And so those stories were told last night. There is a recording of that event at Nuclear Issues Study Group. So if folks don't know this story, please check it out. And it indicated what was to come here in this country and around the world. And many times the uranium mining takes place on indigenous peoples' lands in the Four Corners, Navajo, Dine, and Pueblo Indian. In fact, Los Alamos, very near a uranium mining district, was built on top of Pueblo Indian communities, essentially. There are sacred lands, there are burial grounds, there are residential communities nearby downstream downwind of Los Alamos. So this is from the very beginning that indigenous peoples have been harmed at every stage. Another commemoration we didn't mention yet, but it was a very ironic date, July 16th, again, only 1979. The biggest radiological release in US history happened on July 16th, 1979, the Church Rock, New Mexico, uranium mill tailings dam breach, where tens of millions of radioactive and toxic wastewater flowed through a breach in an earthen dam into the Puerco River, which is the sole source of drinking water and irrigation water for Navajo Dine shepherds downstream into Arizona. So that was also commemorated yesterday by groups like the Red Water Pond Road Community Association, Dine Navajo Group, and another one, the Eastern Navajo Dine against uranium mining endom. So just July 16th is a very somber day of mourning in New Mexico. And just to give you a sense of the ghoulish tone deafness of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they chose July 16th in 2018 to begin the whole tech licensing proceeding for this high-level radioactive waste dump. We're, you know, the people promoting this, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, for instance, was at Los Alamos yesterday, lauding all the benefits that this nuclear age has brought to us, and in my mind, ignoring all the problems that we've been talking about today, and that it really ties in with current events in our country now in terms of George Floyd, racism, economic colonialism, and the effects of capitalism, that we're seeing that so much of this story, the nuclear story really is about the environmental injustices to so many people, the downwinders, the native peoples, the, you know, also many of the parts of the nuclear weapons complex that work, which again is polluting at every step, is done in neighborhoods where poor and Black and brown communities live. And I think that just as the Black Lives Matter movement is trying to restructure where guns are, take them out of the hands of the police and have, you know, really addressed the issues at hand, I think too now is the time to defund nuclear weapons and to get rid of them, that the entire world, you know, is threatened by Donald Trump's finger on the button. He has sole authority to push that. He doesn't have to ask anybody. He doesn't have to get anybody's permission. And this is a grave risk of actually blowing ourselves up. But even if we don't blow ourselves up, just to have these things at all means that a vast number of populations and places are horribly damaged and polluted. Kevin and Alfred, let's talk about the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons and opportunities for action and engagement, OK? So let's just segue into that at this point, OK? Without my question and maybe which one of you wants to start that, Alfred or Kevin? Sure. I would just, you know, hold up the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 2017, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese word is hibakusha, they were on stage with the international campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons, ICANN, in receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. And the speaker, a survivor of Hiroshima who is Japanese-Canadian, Satsuko Thurlow spoke very powerfully at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. And really, it was a rallying cry to support this treaty that is really making progress. It began in 2017. ICANN was honored for its role in getting this going, this grassroots international campaign. And just in the past week, two more countries have ratified the treaty, Fiji and Botswana. And now that brings the number of ratifications up to 40. There are 10 more to go. And I'm hopeful that with this 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings, that more countries will do the right thing right now and get this done. Because at 50 ratifications, this becomes binding international law and not only the nuclear weapons powers, but the other countries that live under the nuclear umbrella, so to speak, countries like Canada and the NATO European countries, they will then be outside of international law because of their support for these prohibited weapons, these prohibited weapons of mass destruction called nuclear weapons. So it's very hopeful. It's tremendous good work coming at a critical time when the Trump administration is ripping up arms control and non-proliferation treaties that have been on the books for a half century in some cases. It's a very dangerous time, as Alfred said. And it's an important time to leverage these anniversaries towards positive action to protect our planet and all its inhabitants. And I think that the treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons is, in my mind, a real bright spot. We've been having this discussion today. And in a sober analysis of it, it's pretty depressing stuff. But I really see this as an effort that's very hopeful and very possible. It's an effort that at the UN went through the General Assembly, so that the permanent members of the Security Council, who are all nuclear weapons powers, could not veto this effort. This was democracy breaking out at the UN. And the countries who really would suffer from the use of these horrible weapons are saying we shouldn't have them. And again, this is where I see similarity with the Black Lives Matter movement is that we need to change the whole normative way of thinking of our society and change what we value, change what we pursue. The pursuing nuclear weapons will not give us security. It puts us at much greater risk. And it's unjust to so many other people. And the huge amounts of money used for that could do so much else for the whole world. So I think that people should also know that there's an effort called Back from the Brink. And their website is www.preventnuclearwar.org. And there again, you can find out what's going on in your community or find out a way to get, start something in your community, but to put pressure on our elected officials to say we don't want this huge amounts of money going into nuclear efforts. The Department of Energy has just issued a report saying how we have to reassert our position as the lead competitor of nuclear exports and nuclear technology. And we have to subsidize more uranium mining and create great stock, on and on and on. You can do a whole story on that one report, but this is what's driving things, is this big push to bolster and refurbish the whole nuclear weapons complex. And we don't need the nuclear power, we don't need the nuclear weapons. We'll be much better without them. On that note, Alfred Meyer, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Kevin Camps of Beyond Nuclear, we will end part one of our program. And viewers, we will return for part two and please stay tuned to us. Thank you, Channel 17, Center for Media and Democracy. That's all for now. Thank you for viewing.