Why
would The Public
Ever Believe Me?
By Andrew Kishner
10 October,
2008
idealist.ws
It's
a sad thing to see an anti-nuclear community disintegrate before your
eyes. With Intermountain West groups having closed shop, having lost
its executive directors, having lost funding, having lost direction,
can we afford this defense-less posture?
'Defense-less?' you ask. 'Where is the danger?'
The danger, friends, is the region's public health enemy number 1,
the Nevada Test Site. Allow me to remind you: the Nevada Test Site
is still prepped for resumption of nuclear testing and there are those
in the Defense Department who want (yes, want) to do more - to resume
- testing. Then there are the horribly contaminated soils at the Test
Site, the subcritical tests that have been the culprit for nations
going-nuclear, the people downwind who have been horribly poisoned
but never fully compensated, the public health effects that were never
properly studied, and the winds.
Oh, those fearful winds.
I wish I will never have to breathe in the air from a harsh wind in
Utah and Nevada ever again.
Why? I wish to tell you that there is no danger from all of 'that'.
I wish I wouldn't have to tell you what is in that air. All I can
tell you is that danger is largely why I fight so hard.
But, first, let's rewind. The opposition is dying. In the Intermountain
West, the groups - Citizen Alert, Shundahai, Nevada Desert Experience,
just to name a few - have experienced over the past one to two years
severe cuts in staff, funding, programs, and overall effectiveness.
I'm not sure Citizen Alert even exists anymore, and the other two
I mentioned have had no leadership for many, many months. There are
other groups, like HEAL and Western Shoshone Defense Project and so
on, but those groups are usually much too focused on nuclear waste
issues to look over at the Nevada Test Site and downwinder issues.
All of those above-mentioned groups were even part of a coalition
to stop Divine Strake that – to put it kindly - was weaker than
the sum of its parts and never fully came together.
Then you have the 'key players' in this game who have been severely
'hurt' over the past year: Reno-lawyer Robert Hager whose character
was assassinated earlier this year by his local television station
on top of his losing over $500,000 in lawyers fees when a Federal
District Court Judge wouldn't admit that Hager won the Divine Strake
lawsuit (Hager even ended up in the hospital one day due to stress
over the 'Strake' fight); then you have Robert Loux, whose malfeasance
led to his demise as head of the State of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear
Projects that is the only effective government-wide check on the Nevada
Test Site; then you have some fine activists in ‘downwinder-country’
Idaho, who are now fighting a proposed nuke plant and two of the lead
activists got spun into the web of separate spurious (in my opinion)
lawsuits filed by the nuke plant developer designed to 'tie up' the
activists for a while; then you have others, many others, behind the
scenes who gave up, sold out, are 'too busy,' and so on, and stopped
their complaining about Nevada Test Site (NTS) dangers.
After nuclear testing at the NTS stopped in 1992, the public's attention
and appetite for fighting 'lesser dangerous' projects at the test
site was dulled. Subcritical testing, proposed in the mid-1990s, drew
ire for a few years. But people gave up. Low-level nuke waste transport
and storage on the actual Nevada Test Site - not Yucca - drew some
opposition when proposed in 2002. Then came Divine Strake. We all
know about that. And since then, you hear about a subcritical test
or two at the test site, that draws opposition from yours truly and
Nevada Desert Experience (NDE), which formidably continues its annual
spiritual and educational walks in and around Las Vegas and protests
at the Test Site.
Still, I bet - no, rather, I know - that people think there's no danger
from the NTS, or its legacy of testing. There is one thing worse than
seeing an anti-nuclear community disintegrate. It is when nothing
sprouts up in its place and ignorance becomes the public's only medicine.
NTS-related issues ranging from proliferation to waste storage to
indigenous rights are no longer being sufficiently addressed due to
the demise of these groups and key players. As new projects are proposed,
there persists an imbalance in the information the public receives.
The vacuum created by the departure of activist groups becomes filled
by media and government disinformation. And it is disinformation that
got us here in the first place. In the early 1950’s no one thought
to question the Atomic Energy Commission’s insistence that ‘There
is no danger’ when the agency would conduct atmospheric nuclear
bomb tests that rained fallout on sheep and humans. Had the public
questioned the AEC, then we might not have had such a prolonged and
prolific era of nuclear weapons building and testing that has wreaked
so much harm on Western lands and peoples. Yet, even today, strangely
enough, those same assurances are being given. ‘There is no
danger.’ Like I said, I wish that were true, yet I believe that,
above all other issues, there is one that is the most important: downwind
from the test site, the soil is toxic, the water is toxic, the air
is toxic. That is why I am afraid of the winds. That is why I moved
away from Utah. Will people believe me? Why should they believe me
when only one person says ‘There is danger’?
Meanwhile the winds are blowing. And I will keep writing.
