Health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing and production
"In the dim light of a hospital room, seven year old Jimmy was remembering the day on which he was told that he had leukaemia. He remembered his mother's tears, his father's bewildered anger, the alien feeling of the hospital's environment. Then his mind replayed the nausea and diarrhoea caused by radiation therapy and chemotherapy, his hair falling out and kids laughing at him? Jimmy died gently, exhausted at having lost so much blood. His tissue had broken down completely, and he was bleeding from every body opening. His bed looked like a battelefield."
No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, Rosalie Bertell, p.1
 Jimmy's story is one of hundreds of thousands of similar stories related to the nuclear age. Radiation released from every step in the nuclear weapons production cycle, plus that released in the testing of nuclear weapons, has spread invisibly and insidiously around the planet. This radiation causes cancers, congenital defects, mental retardation, immune destruction, cancer, stillbirths and other health problems. In human terms, the cost has been astronomical. Bio-statistician Rosalie Bertell has estimated that ? The global victims of the radiation pollution related to nuclear weapon production, testing, use and waste conservatively number 13 million."
In 1984 the United Nations Human Rights Committee noted that ?It is evident that the designing, testing, manufacture, possession, deployment and use of nuclear weapons are among the greatest threats to the right to life which confront mankind today,? and concluded that ?The production, testing, possession, deployment and use of nuclear weapons should be prohibited and recognised as crimes against humanity".
Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands
Since the testing there has been a tremendous increase in health problems?
Many of my friends keep quiet about the strange births they had. They gave birth, not to children as we like to think of them, but to things we could only describe as ?octopuses', ?apples', ?turtles' and other things in our experience. The most common have been ?jellyfish' babies. These babies are born with no bones in their bodies and with transparent skin. We can see their brains and hearts beating. There are no legs, no arms, no head, no nothing.?
Lijon Eknilang in Pacific Women Speak out, The Raven Press, Christchurch, 1998. |
The actual human cost of the nuclear arms race will never be known. Many of the individual cases of health problems and deaths likely to be caused by the nuclear weapons cycle are difficult to link to it. Radioactive elements enter the body furtively and do their damage secretly leaving no business cards. They will continue their rampage until they are exhausted, which for some radioactive elements, will be over 100,000 years from now.
Nuclear Testing
Of all the activities concerning nuclear weapons, testing has been the most destructive of human health and the environment. China, France, India, Pakistan, Russia, the US and UK have collectively conducted over 2000 nuclear explosions for testing purposes ? approximately 500 above ground and the rest underground. The story of Lijon Eknilang (box at right) is just one of the many from the test sites and adjacent areas in the Marshall Islands, Te Ao Maohi (French Polynesia), Maralinga, Nevada, Kazakhstan, Lop Nor, Novaya Zemlya, Kiribati and Pokhran. It has been estimated that global fallout from nuclear testing will lead to over 2 million cancer fatalities alone, not counting other health effects.
Nuclear Weapons Production
 Production of nuclear weapons involves the generation of large quantities of waste material and contamination of surrounding areas. There are over 4500 contaminated Department of Energy sites in the United States . Production facilities for nuclear weapons, such as those at Feed Materials Production Center (OH), Hanford Reservation (WA), Los Alamos (NM), Rocky Flats (CO), Oak Ridge (TN) and Savannah River (SC), are heavily polluted and some have been demonstrated by epidemiological surveys to have elevated levels of cancer in surrounding communities.
Production sites in the former Soviet Union are even more heavily contaminated. These include Chelyabinsk 65 in the Urals, with radioactive wastes dumped into the Techa River , Lake Karachay , Dimistrovgrad, Tomsk , and Krasnoyarsk . Estimates of the US dispersion of radioactivity into the environment from nuclear weapons production is 3 million curies, while in the former Soviet Union it is 1.7 billion curries.
Clean up, disposition and safe disarmament
Two sets of figures
Israel Torres was half buried in a trench by the explosion of a bomb in 1957, and he began to vomit immediately? He began to suffer from severe headaches, dizziness and muscle spasms. The doctors denied that the radiation to which he had been exposed could have caused his illness? Just after the blast a machine that was passed over Israel Torres' body began to tick wildly. The man who held the machine said to him, ?Marine you have had it.? When he wrote to the military asking for the reading on the green badge he wore to record his exposure to radiation, he was told they had lost his particular badge. In 1982, a man who had been a medic in the army at the same test site in 1957 said he had been ordered to lie about the amount of radiation registered on each badge. He kept two sets of books, one with the true figures and another with lower, false figures .
Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones, Doubleday . New York . 1992 |
Clean-up of contaminated sites, disposition of excess fissile material and dismantling of nuclear weapons also contaminates the environment and threatens human health. Clean-up and containment of radioactive products that are dangerous for thousands of years presents the biggest challenge. But there are also risks in dismantlement of nuclear weapons including hazards to workers and environmental risks associated with non-nuclear aspects such as missile destruction. For example, pursuant to the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, hundreds of Pershing missiles were burned in the open air or exploded on a test stand at the Pueblo Army Depot in Colorado , United States . These procedures release clouds of toxic hydrochloric acid when the missiles' solid fuel combines with moisture.
Government Statistics
Government reporting on health effects of nuclear weapons testing and on radiation releases from nuclear weapons production sites has often been inaccurate, incomplete or non-existent. Non-governmental organisations have often had to fill the gap. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, Women Strike for Peace and Physicians for Social Responsibility collected deciduous teeth of children to test the absorption of radioactive strontium from US nuclear testing. The release of the results was an important factor in achieving a Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
Sources: Health and Environment, in Security ad survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, IPPNW, 1999, pp3-13-3-19
Radioactive Heaven and Earth. IPPNW. Apex Press. New York. 1991
Nuclear Wastelands, Howard Hu, Arjun Makhijani, Katherine Yih. Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1995.
Human Rights Committee General Comment 14(23) on Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Novemeber 2, 1984.
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