[sacw] [ACT] Does Nuke Capability Make Pakistanis Secure? (part 1)

Harsh Kapoor aiindex@mnet.fr
Mon, 13 Mar 2000 00:41:20 -0800


FYI
(South Asians Against Nukes)
------------------------------

The News International / News on Sunday
12 March 2000
Political Economy

REDEFINING NATIONAL SECURITY: DOES NUCLEAR CAPABILITY REALLY MAKE
PAKISTANIS SECURE? OR IS IT JUST A GRAND DELUSION OF IMAGINATION?

Impregnable nuclear deterrence or incalculable human
tragedy?

Why, despite the world-wide catalogue of disasters and tragic
experiences with nuclear
programs, does a country like Pakistan persist in its "nuclear
capability"? In this there
seems to be little difference between a relatively democratic state
like the US and a
state like Pakistan, with a tradition of arbitrary authority and
secrecy. In both the
United States and Pakistan all "they" have to do is say the magic
words---"the National
interest"---and everyone goes quiet. Science has become entangled in
the politics of
nuclear power, this is the corruption at the heart of the nuclear
state.... In a series of
articles, Political Economy, both as a matter of philosophy and
policy, presents an
alternative perspective over an issue that ostensibly enjoys an
unprecedented national
consensus; it is certainly opportune to redefine the 'substance and
essence' of the
Republic's 'national security paradigm' =96 as a prelude to the
emergence of 'social
security paradigm'

Dr Zia Mian

Powerful individuals and institutions in India and Pakistan
increasingly share common
positions over the issues surrounding nuclear weapons and nuclear
power. These include
support for the imperatives of "nuclear security" in general, and the
diversion of social
resources to create such "security" in particular. They also share the
belief that the
possession of nuclear weapons is morally justified. Taken together,
this is an agreement
to the effect that both sides should be prepared in principle, and in
reality, for the next
India-Pakistan war to be a total war, involving the unprecedented
deliberate destruction
of major cities in South Asia. 

A newer area of agreement is the public justification to be offered in
support of this
whole set-up. Responding to the increasingly tight squeeze on
resources, South Asia's
nuclear armourers and their ideologue are now seeking cover behind the
notion that
nuclear weapons can provide "cheap security."

At the state level, however, there is no let up in the claim that the
nuclear programs of
India and Pakistan are for peaceful purposes. The Indian government
even claims that
their nuclear weapons test-explosion in 1974 was a peaceful nuclear
explosion!

The "peaceful nuclear programme" in both countries is supposed to be
directed towards
using nuclear power to generate electricity. The possibility of using
nuclear power to
produce electricity emerged in the West in the late 1940s and 1950s and
was touted as
a universal panacea. The early promise of cheap (perhaps even free),
safe, unlimited
electricity produced in nuclear power stations is now like a fairy
tale. It stands revealed
as a bargain with the devil, selling the future for the gratification
of the here and now.
To put it simply, using nuclear power to make electricity is like
burning down your own
house to have light to eat your dinner by. The same image can be used
to view nuclear
weapons; they amount to soaking yourself and your family in petrol,
lighting a match and
saying, "Come on then, attack me if you dare." 

THE HUMAN COSTS OF NUCLEAR PROGRAMS

What is not discussed in the debate about nuclear weapons or nuclear
power, especially
in Pakistan, are the human costs of exposing large numbers of workers
and the
environment to processes involving nuclear materials. In all the talk
of the costs of
security and the need to end load security and the need to end load
shedding, there is
no mention of what this really mean. There are delayed costs that do
not show up in
national figures for defence spending or installed electric power
generation capacity.
These costs cannot be accounted for perhaps for decades following the
exposure of
people and their environment to radioactivity.

The debate on the nuclear issue in Pakistan is so restricted, it is as
if everyone taking
part in it had accepted a set of limits as to what can and cannot be
said, and since the
limits of debate are set in advance it is no surprise that the same old
arguments go
around. Taking the official arguments at face value for the purposes of
argument, there
are usually three reasons given for pursuing the nuclear power
programme. The first is
that the raw material, uranium, is in relative abundance compared to
oil and gas.
Secondly, the power generation process is reliable compared to
hydroelectric (no load
shedding). Thirdly, it has a positive effect on the scientific and
technological capability
of the state. The acute problems associated with the radioactive
contamination of
people, of land, air and water for time scales much longer than any
other human effect
on the environment, which have effectively killed off the nuclear
programs in most
Western countries, merit little attention in Pakistan.

The scientific understanding of these problems has undergone profound
changes in the
last two decades or so, and the most recent work shows the dangers may
be far worse
than even the early opponents of nuclear power ever imagined. The full
human and
environmental costs of the nuclear age are there to be seen the world
over, and the
equivalent costs for Pakistan must be accounted for-- unless, of
course, if it is to be
electricity, or defence, at any price! 

In any such assessment, the fact that people are affected by working
with nuclear
material is the crucial starting point. Substances such as uranium
undergo a
spontaneous decay process where the nucleus at the centre of each atom
breaks into
usually two relatively large, but unequal, pieces and accompanying this
decay is the
emission of radiation and energetic particles. The larger pieces, or
fission fragments, are
in turn radioactive, and decay, accompanied by more radiation and
particle emission. 

It is this radiation and the energetic particles that are a direct
danger to health through
the damage they inflict on any material they encounter. The exact
details of particular
kinds of radiation and particles are not relevant here, all that
matters is that they are an
inevitable, often deadly, accompaniment to presence of radioactive
materials. 

The first link in the chain between radioactive materials and sickness
may be traced
back to mining areas in Eastern Europe 500 years ago, where severe
illnesses in the
miners were attributed to the special properties of the ore they were
working with.

It was not until the end of the 19th century that the special component
of the ore was
identified and named---it was to be called uranium. At the same time
the illness of the
miners was identified, it was lung cancer.

One study in 1913 noted that about 40% of the miners from a particular
village who had
died in the previous 40 or so years had died from this disease. By the
early 1940s lung
cancer among uranium ore miners was a textbook case of exposure to
radioactive
materials. The insidious part of this exposure was that it took two or
three decades from
working in the mines to developing the lung cancer, and other diseases.

That this should have been sufficient to induce caution in ambitious
nuclear plans but
was not, give a revealing insight into the heart of the "nuclear
state". Rather than, for
example, informing miners about the risk and encouraging them to take
all possible
precaution, an attitude of "what they don't know can't hurt them" seems
to have
prevailed. Uranium miners in the United States report that as late as
the 1960s, they
went to work without being informed about radiation or safety measures. 

In a remarkable 1967 testimony to Congress, the US Federal Radiation
Council and the
US Atomic Energy Commission argued for a balance between biological
risk and the
impact on the mining industry; records should be kept to assess the
scale of the problem
but no remedial measures should be taken. It is worth mentioning here
that a 1984
survey of Native American men in one mining region of the US found that
72% of all lung
cancer sufferers among them had worked in the uranium mines.

The scientific debate centres on the long-term effects of human
exposure to radiation.
Until recently, it has been standard practice to work out the long-term
effects on people
of exposure to radiation and energetic particles by suing the data
collected from the
health records of the Japanese survivors of the American nuclear attack
on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in 1945. In each city many tens of thousands of people
died instantly,
others more slowly, leading to about 240,000 immediate casualties. Each
year over a
thousand cancer death among the survivors are added to the total
casualty list. 

It is these survivors that constitute an appalling human database on
radiation effects.
The official studies based on the health records of these survivors
show unambiguously
that a brief exposure to high doses of radiation causes cancer. 

The results are then modified to assess the effects of lower doses of
radiation over
longer periods of time. The conventional picture that emerges from such
work is that
there is little long-term danger from the low levels of radiation
normally encountered by
workers in nuclear facilities. This has been used by the US Atomic
Energy Commission
and the US Department of Energy to argue that the standards limiting
the exposure of
workers in facilities dealing with nuclear materials are already too
stringent, do not need
tightening, and even to argue that the standards set just after Wold
War II were too
high and could be lowered.

There are other indicators that suggest that confidence in these
official studies may be
misplaced. It has been known for over thirty years that the data from
the Japanese
survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki underestimated the effects of
radiation, such as
X-rays, on babies still in the womb.

Japanese children exposed to such radiation from the American bombing
while still in the
womb, showed no increased incidence of leukaemia, but data from medical
records from
Western hospitals suggest that children exposed to such radiation
during routine
X-raying of pregnant women have a 60% greater chance of developing this
disease. 

More recently, the medical records of nearly ten thousand workers at a
major US nuclear
facility were made public, because of a court case, and have formed the
basis for a
study which suggests that even the levels of exposure to radiation that
were considered
safe do, in fact, increase the occurrence of cancer. The time between
exposure and the
first signs of illness may be a decade. In comparison the Japanese data
would imply that
there was no chance of such an increase. Exposing workers in nuclear
facilities to even
low levels of radiation makes them more likely to get cancer of the
respiratory system,
since they breathe the radioactive material into their lungs. It makes
them more likely to
get cancer of the digestive system, because they swallow radioactive
material in the air.

It also makes them more likely to get cancer of the bone marrow because
some
absorbed radioactive material is concentrated there by the body. From
beginning to end,
the nuclear cycle is beset with problems and dangers to workers in the
industry, people
in the neighborhood, and the environment alike. It all begins with
getting uranium out of
the ground.

After mining uranium ore, and exposing the miners to radioactive dust
and gases which
they breathe and swallow and take home on their clothes and on their
skin, the ore is
processed. The ore is then crushed, mixed with water and chemically
treated. In the
next stage, the product is dried and washed again and roasted to
produce a
concentrated form of uranium called "yellow cake." 

In the drying process considerable amounts of uranium are lost to the
air as dust,
polluting everything it reaches as it is carried by the wind. Most of
the original material
dug up from the ground is left behind as waste, in the form of a
mixture of poisonous
solids and water, and still retains most of the radioactivity of the
original ore.

This mixture or "mill tailings" is stored in large open ponds to
settle, even though it will
be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Small specks of
radioactive material
can be lifted from the tailing and carried by the wind, further
exposing communities in
the area. To prevent this, the tailings are often stored underwater,
but then the
underground reservoir which is often the source of clean drinking water
is polluted by
material from the tailings pond. 

Once polluted such a reservoir cannot be cleaned up. There are further
dangers of the
radioactive material getting into the local food chain, if food is
grown near the ponds.
There are accidents at tailings ponds, too. In 1979, a US dam holding
uranium mine
tailings burst, and the tailings flowed into a river. The river water
became unfit for
drinking, animals who drank the water became contaminated, and the
ground water
contained radioactivity to a depth of ten metres.

The US experience suggests this is by no means an unusual occurrence.
In the space of
20 years there were 15 accidental tailings pond leaks, seven dams
failed, five pipelines
carrying the waste burst and there were two floods. It is particularly
important to note
that even "safe" tailings ponds are dangerous. Heavy rain can carry the
toxic and
radioactive material from the ponds to streams and rivers and into the
ground water. All
this before the uranium has been used to produce a single watt of
electricity or to
produce fear in a neighbour.

The history of the nuclear age is a history of atomic energy
commissions covering up
accidents at their facilities. Even in the US where, thanks to the
Freedom of Information
Act, there is relatively greater access to information, it was not till
1986 that the public
was informed of severe radioactive contamination of areas surrounding a
major nuclear
weapons facility going back to the 1940s and 1950s. A medical
assessment suggested
that five % of the people in the surrounding areas were exposed to
"significcent"
amounts of radioactive material. It is not only nuclear weapons
facilities that are danger.
In England, at the site of the world's first nuclear power station
(opened in 1966) there
was a fire in a nuclear reactor in 1967, which burned for nearly three
days, producing
radioactive smoke that spread over the countryside. There is evidence
that radiation
from the 1957 accident spread as far as Denmark and Germany. In a 700
square-km area
around the power station, the grass was poisoned by the radiation, and
milk from cows
grazing on it was banned for public consumption. Official estimates say
that there were
nearly 300 cases of cancer in the wake of the accident, and the figure
is low because
the area was sparsely populated.

An accident at a reactor sited close to a city, or in an intensive
agricultural area, or
close to a major river would have immeasurably worse results. The worst
such reactor
accident was that at the Russian Chernobyl power station in 1986. About
135,000
people, in fact everyone within about 30 km of the reactor, were forced
to leave their
homes. The soil in this important agricultural area will not be
cultivable perhaps for a
decade. The estimated human fatalities from the cancers induced by the
accident range
from thousands to over 100,000 in the next few decades, all over the
world.

It is not only nuclear weapons plants and reactors that are hazardous,
even lethal,
facilities to those who work there and the local population. An
explosion at a Russian site
storing just the waste from the manufacture of nuclear weapons in the
late 1950s is
believed to have killed hundreds of people and poisoned thousands of
square miles of
countryside. A Russian scientist who drove to the area reported that
"on both sides of
the road as far as one could see the land was dead; no villages, no
towns, only the
chimneys of destroyed houses, no cultivated fields or pastures, no
pastures, no herds,
no people.... nothing".

Why then, despite the world-wide catalogue of disasters and tragic
experiences with
nuclear programs, does a country like Pakistan persist in its "nuclear
capability"? The
Pakistani nuclear programme is sheltered close to the heart of the
state, it is controlled
by the Prime Minister's Secretariat.

The light of accountability is never allowed to shine in on it,
presumably because nuclear
physicists are such delicate flowers. (And, of course, everyone knows
that nuclear
physics is too hard for the rest of us to under-stand.) In this
darkness, fierce monsters
breed, and claim, like dragons, to guard a great magical treasure. 

In this there seems to be little difference between a relatively
democratic state like the
US and a state like Pakistan, with a tradition of arbitrary authority
and secrecy. In both
the United States and Pakistan all "they" have to do is say the magic
words---"the
National interest"---and everyone goes quiet. Science has become
entangled in the
politics of nuclear power, this is the corruption at the heart of the
nuclear state.

TO BE
CONTINUED

The writer is a nuclear physicist, currently on a research fellowship
at the Center for
Energy and Environment Studies, Princeton University, USA.