Baird enters the Iran got nukes! office pool

Baird says Iran could build nuclear bomb within months screams the CBC headline over Evan Solomon interviewing John Baird under a giant picture of visiting Israel PM Shimon Peres.

Fans of the Iran got nukes! cry wolf sweepstakes will recall both Peres and Netanyahu predicted in 1992 that Iran would have nuclear warheads by 1999, 1992 also being the year a former Mossad official advised "Iran has to be identified as Enemy No.1"

"Remember," said former IDF Chief of Strategic Planning Shlomo Brom in 2004 (page 167):

"the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes but they’re always five to seven years from the bomb."

Juan Cole lists his top four Iran got nukes! predictions in the 90's from a longer list at Christian Science Monitor, which notes that the alarums predate the 1979 Islamic revolution to a time when the US, Germany and France were selling 20 nuclear reactors to Iran.
Wide Asleep in America has a more extensive list beginning in 1984.
.
Boris : "Baird also won't talk about why Iran might want to develop a threshold capacity for nuclear weapons for regional strategic reasons."
Let's go to the map, shall we?

Death by pudding or parking lot

George Monbiot : The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out

"It's a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system."

The missile defence system doesn't actually work of course, but to be fair, that isn't its job. Its real job, in Monbiot's happy phrase, is to keep the pudding production going. There's big bucks in pudding - $150B so far.

Meanwhile the Czech Republic is also gearing up to host a US pudding factory, pending approval from its parliament.


Linda McQuaig notes that "goal of eliminating nuclear weapons — arguably the most pressing issue humankind faces — has otherwise slipped so far off the political agenda it rarely merits a mention."

We're happy to pretend that installing a missile defence system in Poland has something or other to do with Iran, which doesn't have any nukes, but when it comes to the nuclear weapons of the U. S., Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India and Pakistan, we're oblivious.

McQuaig :

"Peace advocates Anatol Rapoport and Leonard Johnson (a retired Canadian general) compare our society to the cells of a body in the process of committing suicide. All the cells keep operating normally, each doing its own job, even as the person writes a suicide note, puts a gun in his mouth and prepares to pull the trigger."

Here's Canada's note:

In 2002, Canada became the first NATO country to vote for a pro-disarmament resolution, despite strong opposition from the United States, and called for "the complete elimination of nuclear weapons...through steadily advocating national, bilateral and multilateral steps."

Michael Byers noted that last year that the Foreign Affairs website had been amended to say that Canada's nuclear weapons policy is now "consistent with our membership in NATO and NORAD, and in a manner sensitive to the broader international security context."


Death by pudding or parking lot - take your pick. And don't forget to leave a note.

A First Nation apology to Japan

In 1942, Minister of Munitions and Supply C.D. Howe re-opened a uranium mine at Great Bear Lake to supply uranium for the World War II atomic bomb program. Although the dangers of working with uranium were known at the time, no one in the government saw fit to inform the Dene First Nation of Sahtu, the Sahtugot'ine, who were hired to work the mine in Port Radium. After 20 years of unknowingly polluting their freshwater resource and irradiating themselves, the Sahtugot'ine workers started to die from lung, colon, and kidney cancers. They lost a generation :

"Deline is practically a village of widows, most of the men who worked as laborers have died of some form of cancer. The widows, who are traditional women, were left to raise their families with no breadwinners, supporters. They were left to depend on welfare and other young men for their traditional food source.
This village of young men are the first generation of men in the history of Dene on this lake to grow up without guidance from their grandfathers, fathers and uncles. This cultural, economic, spiritual, emotional deprivation impact on the community is a threat to the survival of the one and only tribe on Great Bear Lake."

As this Dominion article states : "The Sahtugot'ine were sacrificed for an effort that ultimately slaughtered hundreds of thousands.

On 6 August 1945, B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped Fat Man on Hiroshima, a city of 343,000, killing 100,000 people immediately and leveling the city.
In 1998, six members of the Sahtugot'ine went to Japan to commemorate the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an atrocity that some Sahtugot'ine unwittingly had a hand in, a role they now regret."

Six Sahtogot'ine survivors, victims of the same atomic program that levelled Hiroshima, went to Japan to commemorate their complicity in an atrocity they hadn't known they had contributed to at the time. That's what grown-ups do when confronted with an unintended consequence of their actions. Perhaps those currently weaselling against the PM's apology to the First Nations on our behalf - I didn't do it! It was along time ago! - would like to consider how their argument stacks up compared to the First Nation apology to Japanese victims.

With thanks to Waterbaby for the Dominion article.

SPP and nukes in the tarsands : "a marriage made in heaven"

In 1957 the US Atomic Energy Commission was looking for peaceful uses for nuclear bombs. They began to explore the possibilities of using them in engineering projects and in '58 Project Ploughshares was announced to the world by Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. According to historian Dr. Michael Payne, "the cabinet of Alberta Premier Ernest Manning seriously considered allowing the underground detonation of a 9 kilotonne atomic bomb at Cheechum Crossing in northern Alberta in an experiment to determine if nuclear power might help remove oil from the oilsands."

They don't give up easy, do they?

On Friday the Alberta and US governments signed an agreement to jointly research the use of atomic power for oilsands development. The Alberta Research Council and the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, announced they will collaborate on "the potential application of current and future nuclear energy technology".

But what I found illuminating was how differently the "partners" chose to announce it :

Mel Knight, Alberta’s Minister of Energy :
"Meeting our province’s electricity demands both now and in the future begins with reliable and clear information on all of the available energy options,” said Mel Knight, Alberta’s minister of energy. “We welcome collaborations such as the one announced between the Alberta Research Council and Idaho National Laboratories to provide the solid analysis and research on the options available to address Alberta’s unique needs."

So this is for Alberta's electricity demands, Alberta's "unique needs" then?
According to INL - not so much...

INL : "This is a marriage made in heaven," said Idaho laboratory associate director Bill Rogers.
Although no budget for the collaboration was announced, he said potentially all his operation’s 3,800 scientists can be drafted into the Alberta project. “The U.S. is dependent on Alberta for energy security,” Rogers said, pointing to the province’s "essential" role as the biggest source of increasing American oil and natural gas imports."

Not that we haven't had, you know, inklings :
Bruce Power buys assets of Energy Alberta Corp. in bid to build nuclear plant

Alberta doesn't yet have a written nuclear policy, according to Premier Stelmach .
I'm betting the US Energy Department can help them with that.

Kady O'Malley rocks the House

with her totally brilliant live-blogging of the Chalk River nukes fiasco hearings over at Macleans.ca,
in which she catches Health-is-BigBiz-and-I-got-me-lots-of-shares-in-it-Minister Tony Clement bemoaning the fate of "the best laid plans of mice, women and men."
*snerk*

Our story so far :
~Back in July, Natural Resources (and by "Natural" we are of course including nuking the tar sands and reinstating oil supertanker runs up and down the BC coast Inside Passage) Minister Gary Lunn holds a press conference to announce he is moments away from successfully inking a deal to sell half the publicly-owned crown corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.to General Electric. Oddly this bit of news fails to even break wind in the mainscream media.
~Nov./Dec. : Linda Keen and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission extend the AEC shutdown of the 50 year old Chalk River nuclear reactor for safety violations.
~All parties, repeat, all parties pass legislation to reopen it after some bullshit story about it being the world's only supplier of medical isotopes for diagnosing cancer patients is briefly circulated before being refuted by, you know, actual doctors.
~Gary Lunn, the Natural Resources minister, fires Linda Keen, head of Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, for doing her job, at 15 minutes to midnight the night before she is to testify before an emergency session of the Natural Resources committee which has been specially convened to look into the Chalk River nukes fiasco.
~Jan 29, 2008 : Linda Keen testifies! Tough, forthright, eminently credible, she makes considerable use of sneaky tricks like statistics and logic and her own expertise to confound her Con critics, who, sadly, are apparently reduced to mangling John Steinbeck.

Take it away, Kady!

P.S. : OK, the top of Kady's blog is now featuring a story about Harper's deputy press secretary Dimitri Soudas' part in a backroom federal contract real estate deal intended to suck up votes from Montreal's Hassidic community!!!, but if you scroll down past this latest bit of Con Accountability Act violation, you'll get to her Tales of the Isotopes etc.

Still catching up on what's happened while I was...whoa! - WTF!

Wait.
In July the Toronto Star reported that the federal government was negotiating to sell part of the Crown-owned Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. to General Electric, with Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn leading the privatization discussions.
"Lunn is driving this himself," one source told the Star. "GE is very confident that this is a done deal."


Next we hear that Canada's nuclear watchdog, Linda Keen, president of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, has been fired for doing her job - in this case shutting down the Chalk River nuclear facility for safety infractions - and that the feds have reopened it again anyway over her objections.
Gary Lunn : "The federal government has lost confidence in Ms Keen's leadership abilities."

Marc Zwelling of Vector Research : "In polls Canadians express wariness over selling the government-owned nuclear facilities, probably because voters are afraid private companies would cut corners in the name of profit and risk meltdowns and Chernobyl-type disasters."

Yeah. So you can just imagine how we feel about friggin government cutting corners in the name of profit and the chance to sell off yet another Crown corporation that we've already paid for once.

Fucking unbelievable.

Creeping Canadian colonialism

Politics and Poetry often writes to issues of Canadian nuclear policy and indigenous rights, and sometimes they overlap as in the polite protest at Sharbot Lake, but today her research makes some disturbing new connections between the two.
Remember back in September when Canada's Getting-Old-Really-Fast Government not only declined to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, but according to Maclean's, aggressively opposed it?
A bit of a puzzler at the time, garnering a ton of bad PR and apparently for little gain, as the declaration wasn't binding on Canadian law anyway.
In The Uranium-Backed War on Indigenous Peoples, Politics and Poetry provides new research that suggests the reason Canada didn’t sign that declaration is because Canadian companies intend to mine uranium on indigenous lands in Niger, Quebec, and New Mexico.

Go.

Is Canada still "No Nukes!"? - Part III

Is Canada still "No Nukes"?

Is Canada still "No Nukes"? - Part II

Yesterday in The Star :

Canada edges toward deadly nuclear embrace

Push back.

Dear Minister Bernier,
I write to express my concern that Canada recently abstained from voting on an important resolution at the United Nations calling on Nuclear Weapons States to lower the operating status of nuclear weapons. Fortunately, that resolution passed even without Canadian support.
I urge you to redouble Canada’s efforts towards nuclear disarmament, by supporting global initiatives that aim to lessen the risk of nuclear use, such as working to develop a treaty prohibiting these dangerous weapons.
With 27,000 nuclear weapons still remaining on the planet, Canada must not relent in working towards a safer, nuclear-free world.
I await your reply,

Your name here.

Is Canada still "No Nukes"? - Part II

Politics 'n Poetry noticed that Canada abstained on a UN vote on depleted uranium two days ago.

UN : "The Assembly, taking into consideration the potential harmful effects of the use of armaments and ammunitions containing depleted uranium on human health and the environment, would request the Secretary-General to seek the views of Member States and relevant international organizations on the subject and to submit a report to the Assembly at its next session."

Not a ban on the use of DU, mind you - just a resolution asking for further study.
It passed 122 in favour, with 6 against and 35 abstentions. Canada was one of those abstentions.

WTF? What could we possibly have against studying the 'potential' dangers of DU.......

UN : "The representative of the United States said that she would vote “no” on draft resolution “L.18/Rev.1”. That draft called for action by the Secretary-General, based on the harmful environmental and health effects of depleted uranium. The draft ignored scientific information on that subject. That subject had been investigated by the Defence Department, NATO and UNEP, among others, and none of those studies had documented environmental or health effects of those munitions."

So. The US Defense Dept investigated DU, didn't find any health or environmental problems, and so the rest of us should just shut up about it. DU is apparently the new AGW.

In all, there were 13 resolutions on nukes and the US voted against all of them.

Canada also abstained on a resolution to "recognize that the maintenance of nuclear weapons systems at a high level of readiness increased the risk of the use of such weapons, including the unintentional or accidental use" ~ 124 in favour to 3 against with 34 abstentions; and a "Vote on Indian Ocean as a Zone of Peace" ~ 120 in favour to 3 against with 45 abstentions

Is Canada still "No nukes!" Six weeks ago, UBC Prof. Michael Byers noted that the message on Canada's Foreign Affairs and Int Trade website calling for "the complete elimination of nuclear weapons...through steadily advocating national, bilateral and multilateral steps" had been amended to say that Canada's nuclear weapons policy is now "consistent with our membership in NATO and NORAD, and in a manner sensitive to the broader international security context."

Uh - oh.

SPP : Nukes and kitty litter

G&M : "Terrorists could easily carry nuclear materials for a dirty bomb from Canada into the United States, the U.S. Congress was told yesterday, sparking demands for much greater border security.
"With the exception of the U.S., there are more international terrorist organizations active in Canada than anywhere else in the world," Senator Ken Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, said."

Leaving aside for a moment his admission that there are more international terrorist orgs in the US than there are in Canada, what we want to know is what is being done about terrorists smuggling kitty litter from Canada into the US.

The Department of Homeland Security is on the case.
Since, you know, that date, the DHS has deployed a $200 million national network of detectors known as radiation portal monitors to protect US ports and borders against nuclear weapons and dirty bombs.
The trouble with these devices is that they often cannot distinguish between a nuclear device and cat litter.

[Ed. note : If only somone had asked me, I would have personally been willing to fail to determine the difference between kitty litter and a nuclear bomb for merely half that much.]

Evidently stung by US Government Accountability Office criticism of their kitty litter detecting device boondoggle, DHS officials commissioned a whole new batch of detectors, called Advanced Spectroscopic Portals, at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion. The DHS then helped the contractor pass the dry run tests by "allowing contractors to "collect test data" about the kinds of radioactive materials they would be screening and then to "adjust their systems accordingly" for the actual tests in February and March."
The GAO is unimpressed and there will be further tests.

But back to the G&M and the official Canadian government reaction to the news that there are more international terrorist orgs in the US than there are here in Canada and that this is somehow our fault and we should do something about it, goddamnit :

"Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Canada has an aggressive anti-terrorism program... adding that Canada is safer than it was 1½ years ago.[Ed.: *snigger*]
Mr. Day said Canada has put $431-million toward improving infrastructure at border points and $19.5-million to expanding integrated border teams."

Actually we've done better than that - the Canadian company Bubble Technology Industries (BTI) has partnered with Raytheon to make the new and improved but interestingly tested kitty litter detectors.

And why should we care whether the DHS is acting as a mere extension of the defence industry while operating as a US government department at the same time?
Because the DHS is coordinating the security working groups of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, that's why.

Nuclear greenwashing and spinning

Dear Canadian media :
Please stop printing crap like this about Patrick Moore and nuclear power:

"A popular Canadian environmentalist said Tuesday it's silly for Saskatchewan to benefit from uranium exports but not from nuclear energy.
Speaking in Saskatoon at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Patrick Moore, former president of Greenpeace Canada and founder of Greenspirit, an environmental consultancy firm, said ..."How ridiculous is it for a province that supplies uranium to 441 nuclear plants around the world to have an anti-nuclear policy at home?"
Moore admits he was opposed to nuclear energy during his Greenpeace years, but changed his mind after researching the power source. The environmentalist hopes more people take a closer look at nuclear energy, saying general uncertainties about the fuel comes from concerns over nuclear waste, meltdowns and proliferation, all of which are not likely to happen or cause damage."

unless you are going to also follow the money and mention that Moore's speaking engagement at that Chamber of Commerce luncheon was hosted by two Canadian uranium mining companies, that Moore's current cross-Canada tour is sponsored by TEAM CANDU, and that Moore is being paid to support nuclear power by the US Nuclear Energy Institute.

Thank you.

Is Canada still "No Nukes"?

UBC Professor Michael Byers noticed a change in Canada's stated position on nuclear weapons at the government website, dfait.

Embassy Mag : Canada's Disturbing Change of Position :
"In January 2002, Canada's policy called for "the complete elimination of nuclear weapons...through steadily advocating national, bilateral and multilateral steps "

But recently, the same foreign affairs website has been amended to say that Canada's nuclear weapons policy is now "consistent with our membership in NATO and NORAD, and in a manner sensitive to the broader international security context." As Mr. Byers rightly points out, this clause strips Canada's policy of any real meaning."

Given NATO and the USA, yeah, it does.
In a search of dfait just now, I found the phrase "the complete elimination of " still in use up to Oct 2005.
After that, it only appears in archives. I guess the sixties really are over.

Rather touchingly, I see the moon is still off-limits though :
"The 1979 Moon Agreement – formally the Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies – reiterates the Outer Space Treaty's obligation that the Moon be used only for peaceful purposes."

Lucky moon. Maybe one day we can get something like that for Earth too.

"The Outer Space Treaty only explicitly forbids orbiting nuclear weapons or other WMD about the Earth, installing them on celestial bodies, or stationing in outer space in any other manner."

We're still good on that last one though, dfait, right? Right?