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New Ground 113July - August, 2007ContentsNew Ground 113.1 - 08.01.2007
New Ground 113.2 - 08.14.2007
New Ground 113.3 - 08.30.2007
New Ground 113.4 - 09.07.2007
United for Peace and Justiceby Bob Roman United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) held its 3rd National Assembly in the O'Hare airport town of Rosemont on the weekend of June 22nd through the 24th. The sessions were long, and while there was disagreement, UFPJ came to something of a consensus on having a nation-wide "fall offensive" against the war. There will be a variety of actions culminating in regional demonstrations on October 27. It is hoped that the demonstrations will be international in scope. Chicago will be the focus for the Midwest. More information can be found at the UFPJ web site, http://www.unitedforpeace.org . As plans develop locally, check the Chicagoans Against War and Injustice (CAWI), http://www.noiraqwar-chicago.org/ for information. Chicago DSA will be promoting some of these events, also. DSA was represented at the UFPJ Assembly mostly by activists from Young Democratic Socialists (YDS) chapters in Michigan, Kansas, and Ohio. Our literature table was well received, and a number of activists from around the country expressed interest in forming YDS chapters. UFPJ, in common with other peace groups, faces a number of environmental problems. The first is that there are several peace movements (not to be confused with organizations, of which there are legion) here in the States. They more or less get along, attend each other's events, but represent different (if sometimes overlapping) constituencies and ideologies. This is only a problem because dreams of unity (or, for some organizations, hegemony) distract leadership from discussions of just what role their organization can play in the larger scheme of things. This may be a disability, but it's not fatal. Another, rather more important, problem is that while a majority of people in the U.S. have turned against the war, they have not therefore begun supporting the anti-war movements. The idea that opposition to the war will be the catalyst to a broad, majority movement for justice is attractive, but sadly there's little indication of it happening. Cobbling together networks of "special" interests may increase turn out at particular actions. But if you think of the cacophony of messages at the anti-corporate globalization rallies of some years ago, you can also see why this prospect drives some anti-war activists straight up the wall. Nonetheless, this is the natural strategy for UFPJ to follow. After all, they are united for peace and justice. In Chicago and in some other parts of the country, the regional demonstrations will be a challenge. Bringing off an action of consequence is not just labor intensive. It requires money as well. Never mind publicity, start adding up the rental for stage and adequate sound system; you might need insurance. Etc.! You get into five to the left of the decimal pretty quick. All of this the peace movements have done before in Chicago. We can do it again. The Dangers of Reprocessing Spent Nuclear Fuelby Sydney Baiman In 1975, a General Electric facility for the recovery of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel was constructed 40 miles southwest of Chicago in Morris, Illinois. During final testing, the plant was declared inoperable without extensive modifications. Since then, it has laid dormant, serving to store about 750 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel from the neighboring Dresden Nuclear Power Plants. Currently, the U.S. Department of Energy, with the encouragement of the Bush administration, has tentative plans to return the plant to its original purpose, the recovery of plutonium from spent fuel. What Is Reprocessing?Reprocessing is the chemical procedure for separating plutonium and fissionable uranium from spent fuel rods. These fuel rods were first used as the fuel in nuclear power plants. After 18 months of use they are now 1000 times more radioactive, and need to be stored in circulating water. The irradiated fuel is chopped up via remote control, behind heavy lead shielding. These pieces are then dissolved in boiling nitric acid, releasing a litany of toxic fumes. The plutonium is separated from the acid solution by chemical means, leaving large quantities of high-level radioactive liquid waste and sludge behind. This entire procedure multiplies the original level of waste 160 times and is energy intensive. There are several facilities similar to the proposed Morris, Illinois plant that operate globally. None have a good safety record. A few of these plants include: Windscale/Sellafield in Cumbria, northwest England, Cogema at Cap De La Hague in Normandy, France, and several plants near Chelyabinsk in the Ural mountains of Russia. In the United States, two military reprocessing plants in Hanford, Washington, and Getty Oil in West Valley, New York no longer operate. The Reprocessing Safety RecordAt the Hanford facility, there are 250, 000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive liquid waste now stored in 151 tanks. Since the beginning of operations at the plant, there have been dozens of significant leaks into the groundwater table. The reprocessing plant in West Valley had an accident and was closed since 1972, leaving behind 600,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste and 300,000 gallons of toxic sludge. This amount of waste, however, pales in comparison to that of the Windscale/Sellafield plants in England. On October 10, 1957, the number one pile at the Sellafield plants suffered a serious accident, spewing fission products over so much land that authorities were forced to seize all milk and growing food products over a 400 square mile area. By 1977, the Sellafield plants were discharging 1000 times more radiation into the air, water, and land than their sister plant Cogema in France. Since 1952, diluted liquid cesium 137 and plutonium have been pumped through a two-kilometer pipe to the Irish Sea. Due to this constant flow of more than 500,000 curies of radiation into the water, fully a half ton of plutonium now forms a 350-square-mile elliptical "lake of plutonium" at the pipe's end. The Irish Sea has become the most toxic body of water in the world. Plutonium, the most toxic substance known to man, has been found on the beaches of the northwest coast of Ireland, the northern coast of Wales, and the coasts of Sweden, Denmark, and Belgium. Plutonium silt has washed up on beaches and contaminated coastal marshes in Cumbria. Plutonium dust has been found in the vacuum cleaners of the residents of Seascale, four miles from the Sellafield facility. In 1993, a cancer cluster was discovered at Seascale. Health EffectsJohn Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., physicist and biomedical researcher at the University of California worries about health effects resulting from the contamination of food, mainly milk and red meat products. Gofman writes, "Strontium 90 in the milk masquerades as calcium, invades the human system, and heads straight for the bones. Iodine 131 acts like normal Iodine, going straight for the thyroid and salivary glands. The entire ghoulish family also produces alpha, beta, and gamma rays that have little respect for the cells of the body." Another by-product, Cesium 137, invades the muscles, gonads, and ovaries, causing sterility.
ConclusionAll the reprocessing plants worldwide have had serious accidents. In the U.S., three of them have tried and failed. Reprocessing offers little more than a vast safety and health hazard. Rather than diminishing the amount of nuclear waste, the current Department of Energy plan calls for its expansion. The poor safety record, environmental contamination, and disastrous health effects from reprocessing facilities make it dangerous to support the construction of a new uranium/plutonium installation in Morris, Illinois. Editor's Note: Sydney Baiman is a member of Greater Oak Park DSA and a Board member of the Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) in Chicago, IL. She can be contacted at 708.358.0967 or 708.445.9052. For More Information
The Wounds That Never HealBy Bob Roman Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War by Penny Coleman. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. 223 pages, $23.95. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has become recognized as an inevitable consequence of war, and this book is a wonderful discussion of PTSD, it's history, and the efforts (or lack thereof) to treat it in just that context: war. My only problem with the book is that I agree far too much with the author. Why is this a problem? A great part of the book deals with the Vietnam War, a history that is very much in dispute and often written from a particular point of view. I would feel more comfortable, actually, with someone I had political disagreements with. For example, Coleman discusses the Nixon Administration's campaign to blame Vietnam veterans' problems on abuse the veterans suffered from protesters and radicals. The iconic image, of course, is the spat-upon veteran. Coleman uses Jerry Lembcke's work, The Spitting Image, to refute this; after extensive research, he was unable to find any evidence such a thing happened. But Lembcke's research could be absolutely solid and still be wrong. Even if it never happened, why does it feel, to many, as though it did? Why would that be of any concern aside from politics? It turns out that one of several things that leaves combat veterans vulnerable to PTSD is a related violation of a sense of "what's right." Related: thus this mostly applies to the soldier's relations with the military (including peers), but it could apply to the soldier's relation to society and country in general, especially given that soldiers were rotated out of Vietnam as individuals and not as units. For a good account of just how general a violation of "what's right" could be during Vietnam, I'd recommend a slim book of poetry first published in 1976: The Long War Dead by Bryan Alec Floyd. As poetry, the quality is uneven but in affect each is etched with blood. Aside from brief excursions into the Trojan and American Revolutionary wars, Penny Coleman begins her history with the American Civil War. The state of medicine in the States did not allow for any consistency in diagnosis, never mind treatment, but some military doctors made astute observations, even if military practice remained barbaric. For the U.S. military, at least, the big breakthrough was World War I. Apparently someone prior to our entry was paying attention to the European experience; the military devised a scheme to provide effective battlefield maintenance, essentially patching up soldiers well enough that they could be sent back to the front though their post-war fates are another matter. Coleman weaves together a number of interesting strands in her discussion of PTSD up to the Vietnam War: advances in psychology that provided insight into what was happening to these soldiers, lessons learned then discarded for bureaucratic convenience in time for the next war with a pretty consistent lack of interest in providing help to soldiers after their wars, and the epidemic of suicide that seems to plague combat veterans. A majority of the book deals with Vietnam. This is not simply because of Coleman's interests; the Vietnam war was different. Coleman uses the history recounted earlier in the book to compare and contrast with military practice during the Vietnam war. One of the more presently relevant observations concerns the implementation operant conditioning in military training after World War II. A study found that during that war, 75 to 80 percent of soldiers were not firing their weapons, even when their lives were immediately threatened. By the time of Vietnam, the firing rate had gone from 25 percent to 95 percent. Intertwined with each chapter are personal testimonies by families of Vietnam veterans, accounts that give immediacy to the issues Coleman is discussing. All of the testimonies involve suicide. Coleman is making a point here, one that needs to be made. And it can be quite affecting, including one widow who exclaims, "This isn't over, this isn't over. It's 1999, and my husband just died from the Vietnam War." After reading the book twice, I'm still not certain what all the political implications are. But an important one is the degree to which the Vietnam war was ended not by protest and politics here in the States but by the disintegration of the combat forces in Vietnam. This has become a fashionable observation in the anti-war movement today, recalling especially those soldiers who were active in organized resistance. This is perhaps a bit of wishful thinking on the part of wannabe revolutionaries; Coleman's book documents that while there was considerable organized resistance, a better part it was very individual and sometimes violent (e.g., "fragging"). But this does suggest that anti-war organizing within the military and among veterans is not to be neglected. Perhaps Coleman's conclusion is correct:
Perhaps. Though Nelson Algren's short story, "pero venceremos" comes to mind. The protagonist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, spends much of his time in a bar where he reiterates, endlessly, a particularly gruesome encounter in battle to the complete and uncomprehending distraction of his friends and acquaintances. Finally one of his friends tells him to forget it; the battle was a hundred years ago. No, he says, it's just like yesterday. But after a long pause, he asks, "Did I say yesterday? It wasn't even yesterday, the way it feels." "How does it feel, Denny?" "It feels more--like tomorrow." |
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