"Vietnam and the United States agreed Friday to set up radiation monitoring equipment in the Asian nation's major container port, federal officials said.
The National Nuclear Security Agency said the goal is to bar the smuggling of nuclear material through the port of Cai Mep in the province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau.
"Our partnership with Vietnam will greatly strengthen our capability to prevent nuclear and radiological smuggling through the maritime system in a key, strategic region of the world," said Kenneth Baker, a top official with the agency. "We appreciate Vietnam's efforts and commitment to keeping these dangerous materials out of the hands of terrorists, smugglers and proliferators.""
I finished up my class at Weber State University last week, studying Vietnam and Watergate through popular culture. High praise for Justina Bernstein for teaching it. The class was an eye-opener for a lot of reasons, not the least of which the miserable reminder that nothing really changes, including the seemingly inevitable forces that draw our politicians into foreign policy traps.
The last assignment was to ponder the Afghanistan "surge" President Obama just announced in light of our studies. What I did was compare Obama's West Point speech with Richard Nixon's 1970 speech announcing the incursion into Cambodia. It was distressing to see Obama and Nixon giving parallel speeches, structured the same way and attempting to achieve the same goals.
Both presidents were faced with wars they want to get out of. Both felt the need to up the ante to give the local forces a chance to build up and take on the fight. Both felt they had right on their sides, both claimed allies, both claimed that ultimate victory would be the result.
And we all know how Vietnam worked out.
I finished up my class at Weber State University last week, studying Vietnam and Watergate through popular culture. High praise for Justina Bernstein for teaching it. The class was an eye-opener for a lot of reasons, not the least of which the miserable reminder that nothing really changes, including the seemingly inevitable forces that draw our politicians into foreign policy traps.
The last assignment was to ponder the Afghanistan "surge" President Obama just announced in light of our studies. What I did was compare Obama's West Point speech with Richard Nixon's 1970 speech announcing the incursion into Cambodia. It was distressing to see Obama and Nixon giving parallel speeches, structured the same way and attempting to achieve the same goals.
Both presidents were faced with wars they want to get out of. Both felt the need to up the ante to give the local forces a chance to build up and take on the fight. Both felt they had right on their sides, both claimed allies, both claimed that ultimate victory would be the result.
And we all know how Vietnam worked out.
During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares.
Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion.
And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow.
Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.
During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares.
Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion.
And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow.
Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.
During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares.
Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion.
And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow.
Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.
During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares.
Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion.
And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow.
Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.
During the Vietnam War, the hell that was soldiers' daily lives sometimes was complicated by their exposure to plastic explosives and their neurotoxic effects. Back home, munitions workers faced similar nightmares.
Though not wandering the jungle in search of Viet Cong, workers on the front lines at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant knew that at any moment they could be injured or die in an explosion.
And those who were lucky or smart enough to survive could have ended up like Mary Ludlow.
Ludlow, a Wisconsin resident, worked two stints at the plant in the late-1960s, totaling about six months. Ludlow left the plant a second time, and for good, when her then-husband decided to pursue a graduate degree at Iowa State University in Ames.
"Toshiba Corp., Hitachi Ltd. and Tokyo Electric Power Co. are among six Japanese companies that will form a joint venture to sell nuclear reactors and technology to Vietnam and other countries.
The group, which includes Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Chubu Electric Power Co. and Kansai Electric Power Co., will seek financial assistance from the trade ministry, they said in a joint statement yesterday. The companies have set up an office ahead of forming the venture this autumn.
Japan is holding talks for nuclear cooperation treaties with India, Jordan, and Russia and has had preliminary discussions with Vietnam. The trade ministry will work to speed negotiations for the treaties, which are necessary for Japanese companies to export nuclear technology, the ministry said in a statement yesterday. "
"How do wars begin? With a "master illusion", according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA's pioneers in "black propaganda", known today as "news management". In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an "incident" that became the "conclusive proof of North Vietnam's aggression". This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
"The CIA," he said, "loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons-the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world. They floated this junk off the coast of central Vietnam. Then they shot it up and made it look like a fire fight had taken place, and they brought in the American press. Based on this evidence, two Marine landing teams went into Danang and a week after that the American air force began regular bombing of North Vietnam." An invasion that took three million lives was under way."
One hundred survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki returned to Tokyo on Tuesday from a four-month voyage around the world to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons and share their experiences with global audiences. During the voyage, organized by the nongovernmental organization Peace Boat, the survivors visited 20 countries to meet with the local people to seek nuclear abolition.
In Danang, Vietnam, in September they visited victims of Agent Orange, a chemical dropped by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War, at the Rehabilitation Center for Victims of Agent Orange, while in Papeete, Tahiti, in December, they met with those who were affected by French nuclear tests at the Mururoa Atoll, according to Peace Boat. From Japan, 94 survivors participated in the voyage, with four from South Korea, two from Brazil, and one each from Australia, Canada and Mexico, according to Peace Boat.
A U.S. agency has overturned its 2003 research that said no health hazards were caused by decades of military exercises on Vieques, a bombing range-turned-tourist destination off Puerto Rico's east coast.
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said Friday it intends to "modify" some of its earlier research on Vieques, where the U.S. and its allies trained for conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq.
The agency, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used its own studies to conclude in 2003 that there was essentially no health risk from the bombing range - a conclusion widely criticized by academics and residents on the 18-mile-long island of less than 10,000 people.
A U.S. agency has overturned its 2003 research that said no health hazards were caused by decades of military exercises on Vieques, a bombing range-turned-tourist destination off Puerto Rico's east coast.
The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said Friday it intends to "modify" some of its earlier research on Vieques, where the U.S. and its allies trained for conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq.
The agency, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, used its own studies to conclude in 2003 that there was essentially no health risk from the bombing range - a conclusion widely criticized by academics and residents on the 18-mile-long island of less than 10,000 people.
Despite long-standing public concern about the safety of nuclear energy, more and more people are realizing that it may be the most environmentally friendly way to generate large amounts of electricity. Several nations, including Brazil, China, Egypt, Finland, India, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam, are building or planning nuclear plants. But this global trend has not as yet extended to the U.S., where work on the last such facility began some 30 years ago.
If developed sensibly, nuclear power could be truly sustainable and essentially inexhaustible and could operate without contributing to climate change. In particular, a relatively new form of nuclear technology could overcome the principal drawbacks of current methods-namely, worries about reactor accidents, the potential for diversion of nuclear fuel into highly destructive weapons, the management of dangerous, long-lived radioactive waste, and the depletion of global reserves of economically available uranium. This nuclear fuel cycle would combine two innovations: pyrometallurgical processing (a high-temperature method of recycling reactor waste into fuel) and advanced fast-neutron reactors capable of burning that fuel. With this approach, the radioactivity from the generated waste could drop to safe levels in a few hundred years, thereby eliminating the need to segregate waste for tens of thousands of years.
Tokyo Electric Power Co (9501.T), Asia's largest utility, is considering building nuclear power plants overseas, Kyodo News Agency reported on Wednesday.
Kyodo said TEPCO was considering focusing such moves in emerging countries in Asia, such as Vietnam and India, where demand for electricity is expected to strengthen as their economies grow.
Many people seem to be holding up nuclear power as the answer to our current energy crisis. I don't believe nuclear power is the answer for several reasons, with its high cost being the main reason.
Nuclear power construction costs are huge. The costs and economic failure of nuclear power construction in the 1970s and 1980s were described by Forbes magazine as "the largest managerial disaster in U.S. business history, involving $100 billion in wasted investments and cost overruns, exceeded in magnitude only by the Vietnam War and the savings and loan crisis." These high costs are not just a thing of the past. Currently, Finland is constructing the Olkiluoto-3 reactor, which is at least 24 months behind schedule after 28 months, and at least 50 percent over budget. Maybe that is why, in 2007, new nuclear received no investment from private capital, whereas decentralized renewables worldwide received $71 billion.
Teddy Nez, a Navajo rancher and Vietnam War veteran, lives practically in the shadow of a 40-foot-high pile of radioactive waste abutting his small home outside of Gallup, N.M. Nez has colon cancer, which he treats with herbs - but not with ones growing near his house, because those could be contaminated with uranium.
The Philippines may choose to dispose of nuclear waste at the Spratlys Islands should the government proceed with a plan to use nuclear energy.
Using the islands as a disposal facility for spent nuclear fuel may even end the dispute over its ownership, said Pangasinan Representative Mark Cojuangco, who authored a House Bill that intends to rehabilitate the country's only nuclear plant in Bataan.
Besides the Philippines, a host of other countries including China, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Vietnam are claiming dominion over the islands.
The disputed territory "can actually be a mechanism for regional peace because [other countries claiming the Spratlys] are looking for repositories of nuclear waste," Cojuangco said in a briefing.
Editor's note: This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg's personal memoir of the nuclear era, "The American Doomsday Machine." The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War. Subsequent installments also will appear on Truthdig. The author is a senior fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not-so far as I knew then-all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.
Doug Rokke earned his B.S. in Physics at Western Illinois University followed by his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics and technology education at the University of Illinois. His military career has spanned 4 decades to include combat duty during the Vietnam War and Gulf War 1.
Dr. Doug Rokke is a Depleted Uranium expert.
Doug served as a member of the 3rd U.S. Army Medical Command's Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) teaching, medical response, and special operations team, the 3rd U.S. Army captured equipment project team, and with the 3rd U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Assessment team during Gulf War 1(Operation Desert Storm).
"ONE of Australia's most respected military figures has joined veterans' groups in calling for war benefits to be paid to Australian servicemen who were exposed to British atom bomb tests in the 1950s.
The retired major-general, Alan Stretton, who led the reconstruction of Darwin after Cyclone Tracy and commanded Australia's troops in Vietnam, said a declaration stating the tests constituted "non-warlike, hazardous" operations would give former servicemen and their widows access to the same entitlements as other war veterans."
"A report linking water contamination at Camp Lejeune to cancer in former base residents went to the desk of President Barack Obama this week.
The President's Cancer Panel released a 240-page analysis Thursday urging the president to tighten regulations on environmental carcinogens and chemicals known to increase cancer risk.
"In 2009 alone, approximately 1.5 million American men, women, and children were diagnosed with cancer, and 562,000 died from the disease," an introductory letter addressed to Obama reads. "With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action."
The report, the focus of the panel's work for the 2008-2009 year, contains a section dedicated to exposure to contaminants and other hazards from military sources. Included are brief descriptions of the Vietnam-era carcinogen Agent Orange, chromium, radioactive contamination, and historical water contamination with the solvents TCE and PCE at Camp Lejeune. "
HA NOI - Viet Nam wanted Japan to help the country develop a safe nuclear programme, Deputy Prime Minister Hoang Trung Hai told visiting Japanese Deputy Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Nakano Masashi in Ha Noi yesterday.
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