An All-American Horror Story: Three-Quarters of a Century of Nuclear Follies - and That's Just Where to Begin

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

01 July 21

 

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-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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es, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to take out humanity. Sixty-odd years after secretly reading that book and wondering about the future that would someday be mine, I’m living, it seems, in that very future, however Martian-less it might be. Still, just in case you hadn’t noticed, our present moment could easily be imagined as straight out of a science-fiction novel that, even at my age, I’d prefer not to read by flashlight in the dark of night.

I mean, I was barely one when Hiroshima was obliterated by a single atomic bomb. In the splintering of a moment and the mushroom cloud that followed, a genuinely apocalyptic power that had once rested only in the hands of the gods (and perhaps science-fiction authors) became an everyday part of our all-too-human world. From that day on, it was possible to imagine that we — not the Martians or the gods — could end it all. It became possible to imagine that we ourselves were the apocalypse. And give us credit. If we haven’t actually done so yet, neither have we done a bad job when it comes to preparing the way for just such a conclusion to human history.

Let’s put this in perspective. In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years after two American atomic bombs left the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ashes, the world’s nuclear powers actually increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion more than they had put out the previous year. And that increase was only a small percentage of the ongoing investment of those nine — yes, nine — countries in their growing nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, if you happen to be an American, more than half of the total 2020 “investment” in weaponry appropriate for world-ending scenarios, $37.4 billion to be exact, was plunked down by our own country. (A staggering $13.3 billion was given to weapons maker Northrop Grumman alone to begin the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the one thing our thoroughly troubled world obviously needs.) In all, those nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000 a minute in 2020 to “improve” their arsenals — the ones that, if ever used, could end history as we know it.

In the Dust of the History of Death

Imagine for a second if all that money had instead been devoted to creating and disseminating vaccines for most of the world’s population, which has yet to receive such shots and so be rescued from the ravages of Covid-19, itself a death-dealing, sci-fi-style nightmare of the first order. But how could I even think such a thing when, in the decades since this country dropped that first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it’s learned its atomic lessons all too well? Otherwise, why would its leaders now be planning to devote at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades to “modernizing” what’s already the most modern nuclear arsenal on the planet?

Let me just add that I visited Hiroshima once upon a time with a Japanese colleague who had been born on an island off the coast of atomically destroyed Nagasaki. In 1982, he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which, despite exhibiting a carbonized child’s lunchbox and permanently imprinted human shadows, can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home to New York City, I could barely talk about it.

Admittedly, though nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, most of them significantly more powerful than the single bomb that turned Hiroshima into a landscape of rubble, not one has ever been used in war. And that should be considered a miracle on a planet where, when it comes to weapons and war, miracles of any sort tend to be few and far between. After all, it’s estimated that, in 2020, this country alone had more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, at least 1,300 of them deployed and ready to use — enough, that is, to destroy several worlds.

Consider it an irony of the first order, then, that U.S. leaders have spent years focused on trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon, but not for a day, not for an hour, not for a second on keeping this country from producing ever more of them and the delivery systems that would distribute them anywhere on this planet. In that light, just consider, for instance, that, in 2021, the U.S. is preparing to invest more than $100 billion in producing a totally new ICBM, whose total cost over its “lifespan” (though perhaps the correct word would be “deathspan”) is already projected at $264 billion — and that’s before the cost overruns even begin. All of this for a future that… well, your guess is as good as mine.

Or consider that, only recently, the American and Russian heads of state, the two countries with by far the biggest nuclear arsenals, met in Geneva, Switzerland, and talked for hours, especially about cyberwar, while spending little appreciable time considering how to rein in their most devastating weaponry and head the planet toward a denuclearized future.

And keep in mind that all of this is happening on a planet where it’s now commonplace scientific knowledge that even a nuclear war between two regional powers, India and Pakistan, could throw so many particulates into the atmosphere as to create a nuclear winter on this planet, one likely to starve to death billions of us. In other words, just one regional nuclear conflict could leave the chaos and horror of the Covid-19 pandemic in the unimpressive dust of the history of death.

A Slow-Motion Hiroshima?

And yet, here’s perhaps the strangest thing of all: we’re still convinced that, since the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how much world-ending weaponry has been stockpiled by China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, none has been used. Unfortunately, that should increasingly be seen as a Martian-less fantasy of the first order.

While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust. Hiroshima took place in literally seconds, a single blinding flash of heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even centuries of heat.

That all-too-apocalyptic phenomenon was set off in the nineteenth century via the coal-burning that accompanied the industrial revolution, first in Great Britain and then elsewhere across the planet. It’s only continued over all these years thanks to the burning, above all, of fossil fuels — oil and natural gas — and the release of carbon (and methane) into the atmosphere. In the case of climate change, there are no ICBMs, no nuclear-missile-armed submarines, no nuclear bombers. Instead, there are oil and natural gas companies, whose CEOs, regularly abetted by governments, have proven all too ready to destroy this planet for record profits. They’ve been perfectly willing to burn fossil fuels in a criminal fashion until, quite literally, the end of time. Worse yet, they generally knew just what kind of harm they were causing long before most of the rest of us and, in response, actively supported climate denialism.

No, there was no mushroom cloud, but rather a “cloud” of greenhouse gases forming over endless years beyond human vision. Still, let’s face it, on this planet of ours, not in 2031 or 2051 or 2101 but right at this very moment, we’re beginning to experience the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear war.

In a sense, we’re already living through a modern slo-mo version of Hiroshima, no matter where we are or where we’ve traveled. At this moment, with an increasingly fierce megadrought gripping the West and Southwest, the likes of which hasn’t been experienced in at least 1,200 years, among the top candidates for an American Hiroshima would be Phoenix (118 degrees), Las Vegas (114 degrees), the aptly named Death Valley (128 degrees), Palm Springs (123 degrees), and Salt Lake City (107), all record temperatures for this season. A recent report suggests that temperatures in famed Yellowstone National Park are now as high or higher than at any time in the past 20,000 years (and possibly in the last 800,000 years). And temperatures in Oregon and Washington are already soaring in record fashion with more to come, even as the fire season across the West arrives earlier and more fiercely each year. As I write this, for instance, California’s Big Sur region is ablaze in a striking fashion, among growing numbers of western fires. Under the circumstances, ironically enough, one of the only reasons some temperature records might not be set is that sun-blocking smoke from those fires might suppress the heat somewhat.

You should know that you’re on a different planet when even the most mainstream of news sources begins to put climate change in the lead in environmental pieces, as in this recent first sentence of a CNN report: “The incredible pictures of a depleted Lake Mead, on the Nevada-Arizona border, illustrate the effects of drought brought on by climate change.”

You could also imagine our modern Hiroshimas in the Florida Keys, where inexorably rising sea levels, due in part to the massive melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, are already threatening that especially low-lying part of that southern state. Or perhaps the Gulf Coast would qualify, since the heating waters of the Atlantic are now creating record tropical-storm and hurricane seasons that, like the heat and fires in the West, seem to arrive earlier each year. (One Florida city, Miami, is already contemplating building a massive seawall to protect itself against devastating future storm surges.)

In this desperately elongated version of nuclear war, everything being experienced in this country (and in a similar fashion around the world, from Australia’s brutally historic wildfires to a recent heat wave in the Persian Gulf, where temperatures topped 125 degrees) will only grow ever more extreme, even if, by some miracle, those nuclear weapons are kept under wraps. After all, according to a new NASA study, the planet has been trapping far more heat than imagined in this century so far. In addition, a recently revealed draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests that our over-heating future will only grow worse in ways that hadn’t previously been imagined. Tipping points may be reached — from the melting of polar ice sheets and Arctic permafrost (releasing vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere) to the possible transformation of much of the Amazon rain forest into savannah — that could affect the lives of our children and grandchildren disastrously for decades to come. And that would be the case even if greenhouse-gas releases are brought under control relatively quickly.

Once upon a time, who could have imagined that humanity would inherit the kinds of apocalyptic powers previously left to the gods or that, when we finally noticed them, we would prove eerily unable to respond? Even if another nuclear weapon is never used, we stand capable, in slow-motion fashion, of making significant parts of our world uninhabitable — or, for that matter, if we were to act soon, keeping it at least reasonably habitable into the distant future.

Imagine, just as a modest start, a planet on which every dollar earmarked for nuclear weapons would be invested in a green set of solutions to a world growing by the year ever warmer, ever redder, ever less inhabitable.

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Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.

Biden EPA Appears to Side With Chemical Industry in Microplastics Health Conflict

By Emma Howard, Greenpeace

01 July 21

A proposal at the UN’s Stockholm convention could set a precedent for the regulation of chemicals in microplastics, but trade groups have opposed it

rade groups representing the world’s biggest oil and chemical companies – including BASF, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Ineos, BP and Shell – are opposing the global regulation of toxic and persistent chemicals in microplastics, according to documents obtained by Unearthed.

The industry argued that there is still insufficient evidence to justify the incorporation of the plastic additive UV-328 into the Stockholm Convention, the UN’s global treaty on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) – chemicals which, once released, do not easily break down in nature.

Its inclusion would lead to bans on its production and use – and could be a landmark for the regulation of chemicals that spread around the world via microplastics and plastic waste.

The Biden administration appears to be supporting the industry position on UV-328.

Microplastics now seem to be ubiquitous, with particles detected in food, water, air and animals, and even human stools. Much less is known about their impact and relatively little research has been done on UV-328, but scientists are concerned that it does not break down easily in the environment, accumulates in organisms and may cause harm to wildlife or human health.

It has also raised concerns among some Indigenous people in the Arctic because it is a major sink for plastic pollution and such communities are often more exposed to POPs through the traditional foods they eat.

Viola Waghiyi, who is a Native Village of Savoonga tribal citizen, part of a Yupik indigenous community on Sivuqaq in the Arctic, and recently appointed to Biden’s new White House environmental justice advisory council, criticised the US’ position.

“We’re concerned that this chemical has reached the Arctic and could be toxic, but this is not just about one chemical,” she told Unearthed. “Our community has already been so exposed to so many chemicals. The Stockholm Convention recognizes the special vulnerabilities of Arctic Indigenous Peoples, but the EPA is not looking out for the health and wellbeing of our people. The US produces so many toxic chemicals but it is not even a party to the convention.”

The US is able to participate and make interventions at the Convention as an observer, despite not being a party.

It’s not known if Indigenous communities have been exposed to UV-328, but it has been found in birds’ eggs and minks’ livers in the Arctic.

Very high concern

UV-328 is widely used in plastic products, rubber, paints, coatings and cosmetics to protect them from UV damage. The EU classifies it as a substance of very high concern (SVHC) on the basis that it persists in the environment, accumulates in organisms and has toxic properties.

It is one of numerous chemicals added in the plastic manufacturing process which some scientists are now concerned could spread far and wide via microplastics, posing potential risks to wildlife, human health or the environment.

A recent report by the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) warns that regulators have “yet to grasp” the impact of chemical and plastic pollution on fish declines.

Dr. Omowunmi H. Fred-Ahmadu, an environmental chemist at Covenant University, Nigeria, and lead author of a paper from last year on microplastic chemicals, told Unearthed: “Plastics are a cocktail of all kinds of chemicals, such as UV-328, which are embedded to modify its structure and function. But they are not chemically bound to the plastic, so these chemicals are slowly released in the environment, or when they enter organisms, even if the plastic itself ends up being excreted. This is where most of the toxicity – the harm – comes from.

“The extent of the harm they cause to humans is still being investigated, but quite a number of toxic effects have been established in marine organisms, such as reproductive issues and the growth inhibition of organs,” she continued.

“Welcome to our future”

When a party puts forward a proposal to list a new chemical under the Stockholm convention, they must provide evidence that it meets five initial criteria that identifies the chemical and shows it is persistent, accumulates in organisms, has adverse effects – and that there is potential for it to travel around the world, far from its original source.

The proposal to list UV-328, put forward by the Swiss government last year, is the first one that makes a case that a chemical meets this final criteria, called “long-range transport”, in part on the basis that it travels via microplastics and plastic debris.

This is what appears to concern the European and American chemical trade groups, which expressed fears in the documents – obtained from the US Environmental Protection Agency using freedom of information rules – that the proposal could set a significant precedent.

It also seems of concern to the US environmental regulator. In April 2019 – during the Trump administration – the American Chemistry Council (ACC) forwarded an email to the EPA in which the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) raised concerns about the proposal. A senior EPA official wrote back to the ACC: “Wow – that’s quite a precedent. Holy moly.”

The ACC replied: “we’ve seen numerous presentations about getting microplastics into Stockholm and it looks like this is the first concrete proposal.”

The EPA official responded: “Welcome to our future.”

The same official, a senior policy advisor called Karissa Kovner, appears to still be leading the EPA’s work on the issue under the Biden administration, which is pushing back against the proposal.

The Stockholm Convention’s scientific committee agreed at a meeting in January that there is sufficient evidence to meet its initial criteria for listing the chemical as a Persistent Organic Pollutant, although the US, the ACC and CEFIC all argued against some of these criteria at the time. BASF, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Shell, BP are members of both groups, while Ineos is a member of CEFIC alone.

Speaking two months later at a conference organised by the ACC, Kovner explained that the US did not agree with three of the five criteria, including on long-range transport.

“Looking at the science [on long-range transport] we felt differently, quite frankly, than a number of our colleagues at the global level and scientists that are represented at the POPRC,” she said.

Read the documents here

Given the issue divided parties at the meeting, it has formed a working group to consider it and draft new guidance – meaning a clear precedent has not yet been set.

The EPA told Unearthed that its views were based on a technical review by scientists.

“No ‘policy position’ was taken regarding the listing of UV-328 by the U.S. under the last Administration, and nor has there been one under this Administration,” a spokesperson said.

Democratic Congressman Alan Lowenthal, who re-introduced a key bill on plastic pollution to Congress in March, told Unearthed that he is concerned about the health impacts of many chemicals commonly used in plastics, such as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and phthalates. “We are no longer just poisoning the environment with our waste—we are poisoning ourselves. It is for these reasons Senator Merkley and I sought to ban the use of such chemicals in plastics in the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act,” he said.

“The Biden Administration must seek to lead on this issue domestically and internationally to address the issue associated with the production, disposal, and waste of plastics. This is more than a solid waste or ocean pollution crisis. It is now an environmental justice, international human rights, climate, and public health issue.”

Not enough evidence

The process to decide if the chemical additive will be banned under the convention is still ongoing.

In September the proposal will go forward to the next stage of the process, where the convention’s committee will produce a risk profile to decide whether UV-328 poses enough risk to warrant global action. A later stage considers socio-economic concerns. The whole process which could lead to regulation will take at least another two years and is likely to be subject to significant further lobbying.

In a document regarding the Swiss proposal that CEFIC submitted to an expert group at the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in April 2019, the trade group makes lengthy arguments criticising the science used in the proposal to support the idea that UV-328 is transported via microplastics, air, water or migratory species.

They cast doubt on the quality of the data available and contended that there is not enough to justify its regulation under the Stockholm Convention.

Scientists told Unearthed that there is relatively little data available on this chemical, but that they have concerns nonetheless.

Dr Zhanyun Wang, a senior scientist at public university ETH Zürich and an observer to the Stockholm convention’s scientific committee, told Unearthed: “We don’t have to stop everything [with regards to regulation] until we have very solid scientific evidence. I think we have to work with whatever data we have and move forward while generating data. There is concern about the continued releases and accumulation of this chemical in the environment and organisms, which could cause long-term, poorly mitigable, adverse effects on biodiversity, ecosystem services or human health.”

Although the available research suggests the short-term toxicity of UV-328 is minor, the ECHA concluded in 2014 that it meets its toxicity criteria, based on studies on rats, that found prolonged or repeated exposure could have impacts on the liver or kidneys. Other research suggests it could have effects on the endocrine system, which manages hormones in the body.

CEFIC argued that pollution could have come from a local source and that there has not been “sufficient rate of transfer to remote areas”.

As well as in the Arctic, UV-328 has been detected in plastic debris on Hawaii and in sewage in the Canary Islands. It has also been detected in human breast milk.

Polluted milk

Prof Laura Vandenberg of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and co-author of a recent report on endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics told Unearthed: “The industry is basically saying that until they have polluted enough – until they have created a big enough problem – we can’t do anything about it.

“When it comes to proving the harm of this chemical, there isn’t a lot of evidence available yet, but the assumption is that if a chemical doesn’t degrade, we are altering our environment in a permanent way and we shouldn’t be doing that. When we start finding chemicals in human breast milk, it is not good. It means it is going into babies during vulnerable developmental periods. Most people would assume that breast milk would not be polluted, that it would be the best food you could give your babies.”

Scientists commented that some of CEFIC’s comments are valid and should be considered but “there is also untrue information in there,” according to Wang. “Other conclusions are taken out of context,” he said.

In pushing back against the evidence for regulating UV-328 CEFIC expanded their arguments to comment more broadly on the chemicals associated with plastics.

They argued that the Convention’s assessment should not focus on plastic because it is of “minimal importance in comparison to other routes of exposure”. They also argued that the impact of wildlife consuming microplastics on the accumulation of chemicals inside animals is “generally minor in nature”.

Prof Hideshige Takada, a microplastics expert at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology who presented his work on UV-328 at the Stockholm meeting, told Unearthed that CEFIC was wrong to argue this.

“Microplastics are a major source of the [chemical] additives” for marine organisms that ingest and retain them, he said.

Further research

Scientists agree on the need for urgent further research. Dr Zhe Lu, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Quebec at Rimouski and lead author of a study on UV stabilisers in the Arctic told Unearthed: “I believe there is both evidence that suggests that microplastics are a possible route for organisms to expose to some of these plastic-associated chemicals and evidence that suggests that they are not…In general with this chemical, my feeling is that we need to do more research.”

In a statement, CEFIC said they would support a ban if it did occur, but went on to criticise the scientific evidence used so far to consider such a decision suggesting it should wait until more studies have been conducted.

CEFIC told Unearthed: “If scientific evidence confirms that the substance UV-328 meets the criteria of a persistent organic pollutant set by this Convention, we fully support its ban for production and use globally.

“Cefic also agrees that the potential effect of intentionally added microplastics on the environment poses a legitimate concern. Their impact on water or soil needs to be carefully examined and then regulated.”

The body accepted it had questioned if the evidence was robust enough: “our technical experts raised some very specific scientific concerns with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) about the quality of evidence linked to microplastics and plastic additives travelling through air or water over long distances.”

Jon Corley, a communications director for the American Chemistry Council told Unearthed: “The nomination of UV-328 as a [Persistent Organic Compound] [is] well-recognized as setting a potential precedent to expand the interpretation of the Stockholm Convention POPs criteria. It is important that any chemical management system uses a risk-based framework that combines hazard, exposure, and use information along with the best available science.

The EPA told Unearthed: “the U.S. found that the Convention’s requirements for bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and adverse effects had not been met. Therefore, the U.S. suggested that the proposal be put aside… The scientific analysis used to arrive at this conclusion was developed entirely by career scientists at EPA and concurred with through the typical interagency review process (which also included career officials at participating agencies).”

BP declined to comment but pointed out that they no longer produce any plastics, having sold their petrochemicals business to Ineos.

Shell also declined to comment but pointed Unearthed to their 2021 review of industry associations, which states they are aligned with the climate-related policy of both CEFIC and the ACC.