This is an incredible article. It's long but well written and highly compelling. It's about the Marshall Islands and the long-lasting impacts of atom bomb testing (and conventional weapons testing, and biological weapons testing) on the islands. It begins with "the dome", a concrete nuclear waste repository built to house "more than 3.1 million cubic feet... of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium."
There is so much I want to quote but I'd rather encourage people to go and read it for yourselves. It's a horror show of carelessness and outright disregard for human life. For example,
U.S. government documents from the time show that officials weighed the potential hazards of radiation exposure against “the current low morale of the natives” and a “risk of an onset of indolence.” Ultimately they decided to go forward with the resettlement so researchers could study the effects of lingering radiation on human beings.
“Data of this type has never been available,” Merrill Eisenbud, a U.S official with the Atomic Energy Commission, said at a January 1956 meeting of the agency’s Biology and Medicine Committee. “While it is true that these people do not live the way that Westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless also true that they are more like us than the mice.”
José Mujica
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
José Alberto "Pepe" Mujica Cordano (Spanish pronunciation: [xoˈse muˈxika]; born 20 May 1935) is a Uruguayan farmer and retired politician who served as the 40th President of Uruguay from 2010 to 2015. A former guerrilla with the Tupamaros, he was imprisoned for 12 years during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. A member of the Broad Front coalition of left-wing parties, Mujica was Minister of Livestock, Agriculture, and Fisheries from 2005 to 2008 and a Senator afterwards. As the candidate of the Broad Front, he won the 2009 presidential election and took office as President on 1 March 2010.
He has been described as "the world's humblest head of state" due to his austere lifestyle and his donation of around 90 percent of his $12,000 monthly salary to charities that benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs...
Uruguay? While the US was callously polluting the Marshall Islands, Uruguay was a military regime that disappeared political opponents.
CIA World Factbook:
"Civilian rule was ... restored ... 1985.
Uruguay's political and labor conditions are among the freest on the continent."
We are talking about 1956. We know that the UK was busy exposing its own servicemen to atomic tests - and killing/maiming some volunteers in nerve agent tests at Porton Down at this time.
If we're talking about now. Several countries spring to mind. New Zealand is probably unlikely to, for example. Costa Rica doesn't have a military.
Right. Even with only a fraction of the emnities of the Cold War, all countries still face strategic enemies and need solutions that will protect themselves.
Which brings up the question of what should "good" countries do when threatened or damaged by "bad" countries? Ties nicely to John le Carré and what immoral acts should agents of democracies do against agents of totalitarian states.
The answer for every country is to do some pretty bad sh.t to protect their lives, prosperity and liberty.
Even nice little New Zealand teamed up with the US in the ANZUS military alliance, went to war against North Korea/China and killed Commie guerrillas in Malaysia. At home Commies were watched, arrested and driven out of government jobs.
Even nice little Costa Rica flirted with the Soviets and flirted with the Americans, getting entangled in the Cold War and for example turning a blind eye to anti-Castro training camps for Cuban exiles.
Due to its sheer scale, a superpower like the US was going to do more sh.t than a little country and it's going to involve nukes rather than AK-47s, but I simply don't believe you'll find a single country during the Cold War that didn't do its bit of carelessness and outright disregard for human life.
Obviously it's appalling and indefensible to have done that.
The combination of racism and nuclear-testing-on-foreign-civilians does seem part of a typical pattern for the US specifically - which isn't to say that other countries don't do bad things, as lpm is trying to suggest with her boring straw man there.
The list of countries I'd be a bit surprised if they'd done something like this is quite long, actually. The list where I'd be like "hmm sounds about right" is a lot shorter: USA, UK (though probably not on its own), China, France, Russia/USSR. Who am I missing? You need places that develop weapons of mass destruction, have overseas territories etc. at all (which is actually pretty unusual, globally speaking) and whose interactions with the world are mediated via a belief in racial/cultural superiority.
I'm sure the Spanish and Portuguese would have done it when they were expanding their empires, for example, but that was a long time ago so their opportunities for biological warfare were much smaller.
Morally, I don't think testing weapons on your 'enemies' - internal or external - is any better, but it is a lot more usual geopolitically AFAICT.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.
I'm sure the Spanish and Portuguese would have done it when they were expanding their empires, for example, but that was a long time ago so their opportunities for biological warfare were much smaller.
Right. Even with only a fraction of the emnities of the Cold War, all countries still face strategic enemies and need solutions that will protect themselves.
Which brings up the question of what should "good" countries do when threatened or damaged by "bad" countries? Ties nicely to John le Carré and what immoral acts should agents of democracies do against agents of totalitarian states.
The answer for every country is to do some pretty bad sh.t to protect their lives, prosperity and liberty.
Even nice little New Zealand teamed up with the US in the ANZUS military alliance, went to war against North Korea/China and killed Commie guerrillas in Malaysia. At home Commies were watched, arrested and driven out of government jobs.
Even nice little Costa Rica flirted with the Soviets and flirted with the Americans, getting entangled in the Cold War and for example turning a blind eye to anti-Castro training camps for Cuban exiles.
Due to its sheer scale, a superpower like the US was going to do more sh.t than a little country and it's going to involve nukes rather than AK-47s, but I simply don't believe you'll find a single country during the Cold War that didn't do its bit of carelessness and outright disregard for human life.
There was a reason why I said, "If we're talking about now"
I'm sure the Spanish and Portuguese would have done it when they were expanding their empires, for example, but that was a long time ago so their opportunities for biological warfare were much smaller.
See Jared Diamond "Guns, Germs and Steel".
Indeed - or Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, written by an Uruguayan journalist who was sentenced to death (in absentia) by the dictatorship. It's a postcolonial history of the continent showing quite clearly how the US stepped into the gap left by the retreating European colonial powers to continue a similar story of oppression and exploitation by other means.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.
I wonder how much of the current tendency to divide the world into teams ultimately derives from the Cold War's for-us-or-against-us rhetoric. As lpm exemplifies, there's a tendency to think "Oooo, so-and-so is criticising the testing of radioactive weapons on the Marshall Islanders, they must think Stalin is a great guy," or to try to imply they don't understand why wars happen in general, and similar stupidity. In fact, criticising both the USSR's and USA's foreign policy during the Cold War would be an entirely consistent position to hold, but a lot of people would seem to prefer that we ignore the faults of one team if we decide that in the round they're 'better' in one way or another.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.
There was a reason why I said, "If we're talking about now"
I don't think you're allowed to do that.
If you look at the current world with very low threat levels you can say "Isn't New Zealand nice" and "Costa Rica doesn't have a military". But what does that tell us about the nature of the two countries, except under the low threat environment?
New Zealanders went off to foreign countries before to kill Commie insurgents. Can't point to their lack of Commie killing now, because is that because New Zealand has gone nice or because there aren't any Commies?
