Keeping Fear Alive

"The stark
truth is that one single failure of nuclear deterrence could end human
history."

These words,
from a recent essay by Dr. Helen Caldicott, are, you might
say, my devotional text for the day. I sit with them reluctantly, of
course. They trouble the soul more than anything else I can imagine. But
it occurs to me that, six and a half decades into the nuclear era, our
premature "peace" with these weapons -- our cultural forgetting, our
denial -- betokens a psychic helplessness that is enormously dark and
dangerous in its own right. At some level we know that our shadow is
growing. We watch it happen as spectators.

Does any
force seem more impervious to the collective will than that which drives
the nuclear weapons industry? Will it take, as Caldicott asks, a
horrific accident, an insane act of aggression, to shatter the
conspiracy? And by then, will it be too late?

The industry
continues to thrive and grow, having far outlived its original premise
of "mutually assured destruction"; the Cold War is over, but the money
we poured into it didn't become available for non-military spending.
Ultimate aggression continues to stalk the planet. We're in as much
danger as we've ever been.

And the cost
to us over these nuclear decades has not been merely financial -- lost
money for schools, infrastructure, health care. The nuclear weapons
industry has also been paid for in thousands of American lives, though
this fact still remains known primarily within the circle of survivors.
But legislation introduced into Congress this month to expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act has put the
suffering born by so many Americans -- who lived downwind of the nuclear
tests, worked in the industry or mined the uranium -- back into the news.

The original
RECA legislation, passed in 1990, compensated a handful of downwinders
in 22 rural counties in Arizona, Nevada and Utah. The new bill,
introduced by Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico on April 19 to address the
"gruesome legacy" of Cold War era weapons development, expands coverage
to the entire states of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana and
Colorado, as well as those harmed by the original Trinity blast in 1945,
in Alamogordo, N.M., and by the nuclear tests conducted upwind of Guam
in the Pacific. It also triples compensation for those who became ill
from the fallout to $150,000.

"Many
families in the downwind states have stories like mine," Tona Henderson wrote recently in the Idaho
Statesman. "Some of these stories are so sad because entire families
have died of cancer. . . .

"Both sides
of my family have been in the Treasure Valley since the 1870s. They
lived very long lives -- until they started dying of cancer after the
testing started.

"Since the
1950s, I have had 26 family members get cancer; 13 of those have died.
One was my cousin, who died of Ewing's sarcoma at the age of 15."

As I sit
with the terrible potential of the nuclear era, the possibility of
accident or aggressive use of the double-edged sword, I sit also with
its neglected, little known realities. Until the first RECA legislation
was passed, nuclear tests were still officially safe, just as they
remain, officially, necessary for our defense. As far as I'm concerned,
such military-industrial propaganda is as toxic as the fallout. Maybe
it's part of the fallout: the corrosion of truth and common sense, the
rape of compassion.

Humanity's
task is to evolve spiritually. Weapons technology, which we continue to
fund at staggering levels, requires us not to develop in such a
way, not to grow in loving connection to one another. This
stagnation is the spiritual equivalent, perhaps, of cancer.

One of the
provisions of Udall's bill would, according to the senator's press
release, "authorize $3 million for five years for epidemiological
research on the impacts of uranium development on communities and
families of uranium workers."

I can't help
but notice the insignificance of the dollar amount being sought for
this research -- or rather, I can't help but compare it to other sums of
money, diverted, without serious comment or thought, elsewhere. For
instance, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico has already
embarked on an expansion of its plutonium facilities for the
construction of warhead cores, or pits. The projected cost of this
project over a dozen years, according to Greg Mello of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group,
is at least $5.5 billion.

"The
facilities to be built are 'modern,' but their primary purpose is
outmoded," Mello writes.

Their
primary purpose is to keep America not so much "safe" as powerful, and
to perpetuate an agenda that is only about power and geopolitical
interests, which is retrospect always seem small and limited. Their
primary purpose, damn the cost, is to keep fear alive.