[News] Deadly Legacy of Nuclear Terror

Sat Jul 22 10:54:36 EDT 2023

 Deadly Legacy of Nuclear Terror

July 20, 2023 -
https://www.indigenousaction.org/architect-of-annihilation-oppenheimers-deadly-legacy-of-nuclear-terror/
*Read our quick and dirty review of the movie here
<https://www.indigenousaction.org/a-quick-dirty-review-of-the-movie-oppenheimer/>.*

*Klee Benally, Indigenous Action/Haul No! *
*Contributions by Leona Morgan, Diné No Nukes/Haul No!*

Printable posters (PDFs): 11″x17″ color
<https://www.indigenousaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Oppenheimers-legacy-poster-color-1.pdf>,
11″x17″ black & white
<https://www.indigenousaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Oppenheimers-legacy-poster-BW-2.pdf>
<https://i0.wp.com/www.indigenousaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Oppenheimers-legacy-poster-color-scaled.webp?ssl=1>

The genocidal colonial terror of nuclear energy and weapons is not
entertainment.

To glorify such deadly science and technology as a dramatic character
study, is to spit in the face of hundreds of thousands of corpses and
survivors scattered throughout the history of the so-called Atomic age.

Think of it this way, for every minute that passes during the film’s 3-hour
run time, more than 1,100 citizens in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
died due to Oppenheimer’s weapon of mass destruction. This doesn’t account
for those downwind of nuclear tests
<https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/downwinder-advocacy-group-to-air-advertisement-ahead-of-some-area-oppenheimer-showings/article_9227b554-25a4-11ee-a893-2f2ce866941f.html>
who were exposed to radioactive fallout (some are protesting screenings
<https://www.ucsusa.org/take-action/preventing-nuclear-war>), it doesn’t
account for those poisoned by uranium mines, it doesn’t account for those
killed during nuclear power plant melt-downs, it doesn’t account for those
in the Marshall Islands who are forever poisoned.

For every second you sit in the air conditioned theater with a warm buttery
popcorn bucket in your lap, 18 people dead in the blink of an eye. Thanks
to Oppenheimer.

Though you’ll certainly learn enough about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the
“father of the atomic bomb,” thanks to director Christopher Nolan’s 70mm
IMAX odyssey, let’s be clear about his deadly legacy and the overall
military and scientific industrial complex behind it.

After the successful detonation of the very first atomic bomb, Oppenheimer
infamously quoted the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become
death, the destroyer of worlds.” Barely a month later, the “U.S” dropped
two atomic bombs devastating the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and more
than 200,000 people were killed. Some of the shadows of those perished were
burned into the streets. One survivor, Sachiko Matsuo, relayed their
thoughts as they tried to make sense of what was happening when Nagasaki
was struck, “I could see nothing below. My grandmother started to cry,
‘Everybody is dead. This is the end of the world.” A devastation that Nolan
intentionally leaves out because, according to the director, the film is
not told from the perspectives of those who were bombed, but by those who
were responsible for it. Nolan casually explains
<https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/christopher-nolan-explains-why-don-160000284.html>,
“[Oppenheimer] learned about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the
radio, the same as the rest of the world.”

Months after the atomic detonation at the “Trinity” site in occupied Tewa
lands of New Mexico, Oppenheimer resigned. He walked away expressing the
conflict of having, “blood on his hands,” (though reportedly he later said
the bombings were not “on his conscience”) while leaving a legacy of
nuclear devastation and radioactive pollution permanently poisoning lands,
waters, and bodies to this day.

U.S. military and political machinery cannibalized the scientist and turned
him into a villain of their imperialist cold-war anxiety. They reminded him
and the other scientists behind the Manhattan Project, that they and their
interests were always in control.

Oppenheimer never was a hero, he was an architect of annihilation.

The race to develop the first atomic bomb (after Nazis had split the atom)
never could be a strategy of peaceful deterrence, it was a strategy of
domination and annihilation.

Nazi Germany was committing genocide against Jewish people while the U.S.
sat on the political sidelines. It wasn’t until they were directly
threatened that the U.S. intervened. Though Nazi Germany was defeated on
May 8th, 1945, the U.S. dropped two separate atomic bombs on the
non-military targets of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on
August 6th and 9th, 1945.

To underscore Oppenheimer’s complicity, he suppressed a petition by 70
Manhattan Project scientists
<https://www.businessinsider.com/oppenheimer-los-alamos-manhattan-project-scientists-atomic-bomb-petition-2023-7?op=1>
urging President Truman not to drop the bombs on moral grounds. The
scientists also argued that since the war was nearing its end, Japan should
be given the opportunity to surrender.

Today there are approximately 12,500 nuclear warheads in nine countries
with almost 90 percent of them held by the U.S. and Russia. It is estimated
that 100 nuclear weapons <https://www.mdpi.com/2313-576X/4/2/25> is an
“adequate… deterrence” threshold for the “mutually assured destruction” of
the world.

Oppenheimer built the gun that is still held to the head of everyone who
lives on this Earth today. Throughout the decades after the development of
“The Bomb,” millions throughout the world have rallied for nuclear
disarmament <https://www.icanw.org>, yet politicians have never taken their
fingers off the trigger.

*The Deadly Legacy of Nuclear Colonialism*

Nuclear weapons production and energy would not be possible without uranium.

Global uranium mining boomed during and after World War II and
continues to threaten
communities throughout the world.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_by_country>

Today, more than 15,000 abandoned uranium mines
<https://cleanupthemines.org/> are located within the so-called U.S.,
mostly in and around Indigenous communities, permanently poisoning sacred
lands and waters with little to no political action being taken to clean up
their deadly toxic legacy.

Indigenous communities have long been at the front lines of the struggle to
stop the deadly legacy of the nuclear industry. Nuclear colonialism has
resulted in radioactive pollution that has poisoned drinking water systems
of entire communities like Red Shirt Village in South Dakota and Sanders in
Arizona. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has closed more than 22
wells on the Navajo Nation where there are more than 523 abandoned uranium
mines. In Ludlow, South Dakota an abandoned uranium mine sits within feet
of an elementary school, poisoning the ground where children continue to
play to this day.

Nuclear colonialism has ravaged our communities and left a deadly legacy of
cancers, birth defects, and other serious health consequences, it is the
slow genocide of Indigenous Peoples.

>From 1944 to 1986 some 30 million tons of uranium ore were extracted from
mines on Diné lands. Diné workers were told little of the potential health
risks with many not given any protective gear. As demand for uranium
decreased the mines closed, leaving over a thousand contaminated sites. To
this day none have been completely cleaned up.

On July 16, 1979, just 34 years after Oppenheimer oversaw the July 16, 1945
Trinity test, the single largest accidental release of radioactivity
occurred
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/ne8w4x/church-rock-americas-forgotten-nuclear-disaster-is-still-poisoning-navajo-lands-40-years-later>
on Diné Bikéyah (The Navajo Nation) at the Church Rock uranium mill. More
than 1,100 tons of solid radioactive mill waste and 94 million gallons of
radioactive tailings poured into the Puerco River when an earthen dam
broke. Today, water in the downstream community of Sanders, Arizona is
poisoned with radioactive contamination from the spill.

Although uranium mining is now banned on the reservation due to advocacy
from Diné anti-nuclear organizers, Navajo politicians have sought to allow
new mining in areas already contaminated by the industry’s toxic legacy.
It is estimated that 25% of all the recoverable uranium remaining in the
country is located on Diné Bikéyah.
Though there has never been a comprehensive human health study on the
impacts of uranium mining in the area, a focused study
<https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/sites/navajo_birth_cohort_study/index.html>has
detected uranium in the urine of babies born to Diné women exposed to
uranium.

Western Shoshone lands in so-called Nevada, which have never been ceded to
the “U.S.” government, have long been under attack by the military and
nuclear industries.

Between 1951 and 1992 more than 1,000 nuclear bombs have been detonated
above and below the surface at an area called the Nevada Test Site on
Western Shoshone lands which make it one of the most bombed nations on
earth. Communities in areas around the test site faced severe exposure to
radioactive fallout, which caused cancers, leukemia & other illnesses.
Those who have suffered this radioactive pollution are collectively known
as “Downwinders.”

Western Shoshone spiritual practitioner Corbin Harney, who passed on in
2007, helped initiate a grassroots effort
<https://www.shundahaiarchives.org/>to shutdown the test site and abolish
nuclear weapons. He once said, “We’re not helping Mother Earth at all. The
roots, the berries, the animals, are not here anymore, nothing’s here. It’s
sad. We’re selling the air, the water, we’re already selling each other.
Somewhere it’s going to come to an end.”

Between 1945 and 1958, sixty-seven atomic bombs were detonated in tests
conducted in Ṃajeḷ (the Marshall Islands). Some Indigenous people of the
islands have all together stopped reproducing due to the severity of cancer
and birth defects they have faced due to radioactive pollution.

In 1987 the “U.S.” congress initiated a controversial project to transport
and store almost all of the U.S.’s toxic waste at Yucca Mountain located
about 100 miles northwest of so-called Las Vegas, Nevada. Yucca Mountain
has been held holy to the Paiute and Western Shoshone Nations since time
immemorial. In January 2010 the Obama administration approved a $54 billion
dollar taxpayer loan in a guarantee program for new nuclear reactor
construction, three times what Bush previously promised in 2005.

There are currently 93 operating nuclear reactors in the so-called U.S.
that supply 20% of the country’s electricity. There are nearly 90,000 tons
<https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-603>of highly radioactive spent
nuclear waste stored in concrete dams at nuclear power plants throughout
the country with the waste increasing at a rate of 2,000 tons per year.

>From the 1979 disasters of Three Mile Island and Churchrock to the 1986
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant melted down, the nuclear industry has been
wrought with mass catastrophes with permanent global consequences.

In 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant catastrophically failed and
began melting down after it was hit by an earthquake and tsunami. It’s been
reported that the Fukushima plant has been leaking approximately 300 tons
of radioactive water into the ocean every day. Today, the Japanese
government is open about its plans to release remaining radioactive waters
into the Pacific.

“Depleted Uranium” weapons deployed by the U.S. in imperialist wars
(particularly
Iraq and Afghanistan
<https://hir.harvard.edu/depleted-uranium-devastated-health-military-operations-and-environmental-injustice-in-the-middle-east/>)
have also poisoned eco-systems, including at proving grounds and firing
ranges in Arizona, Maryland, Indiana and Vieques, Puerto Rico. Depleted
uranium is a by-product of uranium enrichment process when it’s used for
nuclear reactor fuel and in the making of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear energy production is now claimed as a “green solution” to the
climate crisis, but nothing could be further from the truth of this deadly
lie.

In April 2022, the Biden administration announced a $6 billion government
bailout to “rescue” nuclear power plants at risk of closing. A colonial
government representative stated, “U.S. nuclear power plants contribute
more than half of our carbon-free electricity, and President Biden is
committed to keeping these plants active to reach our clean energy goals.”
They, along with Climate Justice activists cite nuclear energy as necessary
to combat global warming, all while ignoring the devastating permanent
impacts Indigenous Peoples have faced.

Due to this “greenwashing” of nuclear energy, we face a push for nuclear
hydrogen, small modular nuclear reactors, and High-Assay Low-Enriched
Uranium (HALEU) driving a renewed threat of new uranium mining,
transportation, & processing.

Though the Obama administration placed a moratorium on thousands of uranium
mine leases around the Grand Canyon in 2012, pre-existing uranium claims
were allowed. Environmental groups and Indigenous Nations are
currently attempting
to make the moratorium permanent
<https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/media/media-advisories/media-advisory-grijalva-sen-sinema-to-join-tribes-in-call-for-potus-to-designate-baaj-nwaavjo-itah-kukveni-grand-canyon-national-monument>
and push for a new national monument <https://keepitgrandaz.org/>, yet
these will do little to nothing for the handful of pre-existing uranium
mines that have been allowed to move forward.

Despite  these actions, underground blasting & above ground work has begun
at Pinyon Plain/Canyon Mine <https://haulno.com/>, just miles from the
Grand Canyon. Once Energy Fuels, the company operating the mine, starts
hauling out radioactive ore, they plan to transport 30 tons per day through
Northern Arizona to the company’s processing mill in White Mesa, 300 miles
away.

The White Mesa Mill
<https://sjrnews.com/san-juan-county/more-70-protesters-gather-white-mesa-protest-mill-operations>is
the only conventional uranium mill licensed to operate in the U.S. The mill
was built on sacred ancestral lands of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe near
Blanding, Utah. Energy Fuels disposes radioactive and toxic waste tailings
in “impoundments” that take up about 275 acres next to the mill. Since
there are limited radioactive waste facilities, White Mesa Mill has become
an ad hoc dump for the world’s nuclear wastes that have no final repository.

In so-called New Mexico, a state addicted to nuclear monies for both
nuclear weapons and energy facilities, there are two national nuclear labs
and two national waste facilities. Along with legacy uranium mines and
mills, there was Project Gasbuggy
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy> (an underground
detonation), a “Broken Arrow” accident near Albuquerque
<https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/broken-arrow-accidents/>, and
countless tons of radioactive waste buried in unlined pits, Pueblo kivas,
and watersheds. Currently, there are planned expansions and modifications
at Los Alamos National Labs, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and Urenco
uranium enrichment facility. Most recently, the state has been threatened
by two newly licensed consolidated interim storage facilities for “spent
fuel” from nuclear power plants in New Mexico and Texas. The federal
government continues to push nuclear projects with financial incentives.

Nuclear proliferation continues as the U.S. allows uranium miners and
others who are eligible for the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to die.
Many continue to suffer and wait for compensation funds to be allocated or
are not eligible due to the limitations of the act.

The devastation of nuclear colonialism, which permanently destroys
Indigenous communities throughout the world, is not entertainment. This is
the terrifying legacy of nuclear energy and weapons that movies like
Oppenheimer and duplicitous climate justice activists advocate.

Indigenous Peoples live, suffer, and continue to resist its consequences
every day.

END NUCLEAR COLONIALISM!

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