A Global Truth Commission on Health and Environmental Damage from Nuclear Weapons Production

Extensive research in the past two decades has shown nuclear weapon states have, first of all, harmed their own people without informed consent, in the name of national security. Nuclear weapons production workers have been on the front lines of this underside of the Cold War that nuclear weapon states have waged on their own people. But the manner in which this slow attack on health and the environment was carried out is still largely unknown and little understood. In the last two decades, a substantial idea of the damage has begun to emerge from the fog of denial and propaganda in only one nuclear weapon state — the United States.

The US record that is public so far is not at all reassuring. It features deliberate emphasis on production compared to health protection, massive and routine violation of health and safety regulations, deliberately misleading workers so as not to arouse concerns or give hazardous duty pay when both were clearly warranted, and subversion of democratic process.

Sloppy, incompetent science was a routine part of the dismal picture. The Department of Energy has admitted that, until 1989, no effort was made to calculate internal radiation doses to workers arising from the inhalation or ingestion of radioactive materials. Work by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) on data from the Fernald plant near Cincinnati, Ohio, where uranium for plutonium production reactors was processed, showed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, most workers were in fact overexposed due to uranium inhalation. Many probably also suffered kidney damage due to the toxicity of uranium as a heavy metal. Yet they were reassured that they were not being harmed.

As such information has become public, calls for redress of injustice, and for public disclosure, health care, and compensation have risen. The United States recently passed legislation giving most radiation workers the right to apply for compensation and medical treatment in case they get certain diseases. No other government has yet made as broad an admission of potential harm from radiation as has the United States, though some modest programs are in effect for a limited number of people in some places. Raw data on worker doses and working conditions (with due respect for worker privacy) are, for the most part, still secret. While Russia has become more open since the mid-1980s, and some data on worker exposures are emerging, there are still practically no raw data available to independent Russian researchers. Secrecy also holds sway in the other relatively open countries — France, India, and Britain. The situation in China, Pakistan, and Israel is far worse.

The pattern of keeping health and environmental abuses of their own people secret in the name of national security is anti-democratic to the core. It presumes that the people would not make sacrifices for the security of their countries. It presumes that top nuclear bureaucrats can make life or death decisions in defiance of established laws, norms, and regulations without the informed consent of the people.

The harm has extended well beyond factory boundaries to workers’ families, neighbors of the plants, and the general public. For example, an official study by the US National Cancer Institute showed that during the 1950s, a large portion of the US milk supply was contaminated with iodine-131 due to fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. No other nuclear weapon state has conducted a similar effort at being accountable to its own public. Moreover, the atmospheric testing of the weapon states contaminated milk supply well beyond their borders. It is interesting to note that maps of milk contamination and dose estimates published by the National Cancer Institute magically stop at the borders of Canada and Mexico. Uranium miners in non-nuclear weapon states have been injured by nuclear weapon states. Test sites have polluted former colonial areas, such as Algeria and Polynesia. Yet, no proper accounting has been forthcoming. But then, why would nuclear weapon states be accountable to people beyond their borders when they have failed to be accountable to those within?

The deliberate harm inflicted upon workers and the public at large in the course of nuclear weapons production and testing raises troubling questions about how national security policy has been formulated. If the nuclear weapons establishment can engage in deliberately harming the very people it claims to protect without informing them, how can one be sure that the security policies themselves are not largely motivated by bureaucratic self-preservation rather than by the security and health interests of the community at large? This is by no means a rhetorical or theoretical question. There is strong evidence, for instance, that the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was motivated in part by the desire to justify the huge expenditure on nuclear bombs during the Manhattan project. The nuclear establishment feared that if the bombs were not seen as highly useful in the war effort, there would be relentless investigations for waste of money after the war. Such investigations would, no doubt, also have dimmed the prospects for continued large nuclear weapons budgets after the war.

A wide-ranging public discourse is needed within every nuclear weapon state about the health and environmental harm that they have inflicted upon their own people. A global debate is needed about harm outside the borders of those states. Much of that harm was knowingly inflicted. For instance, an editorial in the Engineering alumni magazine of the University of California in 1960 noted that "nuclear testing has so far produced about an additional 6,000 babies born with major birth defects [worldwide]." Yet, it added that "you must weigh this acknowledged risk with the demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal." The editorial did not explain why children in Nigeria or Costa Rica or Indonesia should have major birth defects so that the United States could have a nuclear arsenal.

It is time for the United Nations General Assembly to establish an independent and open Truth Commission on the ravages that have been inflicted upon the world by nuclear weapons production and testing. That commission should not only examine the nature and extent of that harm, and whether and how deliberately it was inflicted; it should recommend ways in which the world's people can hold nuclear weapons establishments accountable. It should also examine whether and to what extent the security arguments that have been claimed for nuclear weapons have been constructed with the aim of keeping people ignorant and fearful so that the weapons bureaucracies might perpetuate themselves. Such an examination would be of some considerable relevance today, given that nuclear weapons establishments are still refusing to meet their nuclear disarmament commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that people are still getting ill and dying from the harm that nuclear weapons establishments have inflicted upon them.

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