Soviet and U.S. Nuclear Legacies

The environmental and human health legacy of the runaway Soviet nuclear weapons and energy program described in your series undoubtedly ranks “among the 20th Century’s greatest crimes.” But readers should not be misled by writer John-Thor Dahlburg’s only U.S. comparison: a factor of 3 million difference between the radioactive emissions of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.

The similarities between the U.S. nuclear weapons industry and the Soviet one are as striking as the differences. American weaponeers cranked out an insane 60,000-plus nuclear warheads. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and Department of Energy, as immune from public oversight as was the Kremlin, deceived and abused U.S. citizens for decades.

Russia has its Chelyabinsk; America has Hanford. This plutonium factory in Washington state emitted roughly 40,000 Three Mile Islands worth of radioactive iodine, plus other dangerous isotopes. It exposed downwind and downstream populations to many times the doses considered acceptable, even by the AEC’s 1940s standards.

Vast quantities of intensely radioactive waste are stored at Hanford and other sites, in tanks that have sometimes leaked or risked a catastrophic explosion.

Our version of Semipalatinsk is called Nevada, where half of the more than 200 U.S. atmospheric nuclear blasts took place. Several hundred thousand servicemen took part in experiments and war games that exposed them to heavy radiation doses. Similar numbers of citizens living downwind, sometimes including Southern Californians, were showered with fallout. None were informed of the hazards, given any protection, or adequately compensated for damage and illness.

The arms race may be over, but taxpayer-subsidized nuclear weapons enthusiasts scarcely seem to have noticed. Scientists at the weapons labs can’t imagine getting by on any less than the $2 billion annual research and testing budgets set before the Soviet collapse. They say that even though the United States has exploded about as many bombs as the rest of the world combined, there’s no end in sight--”national security” depends on eternal testing.

Creating a nuclear nightmare doesn’t require a brutal communist dictatorship. Boundless technological hubris, a cult of secrecy and paranoia, and gigantic government blank checks are enough.

PETER GRAY, Senior Science and Policy Writer Nuclear Weapons Program Friends of the Earth, Washington