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US Defense Secretary Robert Gates believes the United States needs to resume its nuclear tests. The US needs to take steps to transform an ageing and very expensive complex of nuclear weapons from the Cold War era to a smaller and less costly enterprise that could meet the nation's security needs for the future. He said the current nuclear stockpile has been re-engineered to extend its life span, but such extensions cannot continue indefinitely. Without a modernization program, Gates said, the long-term outlook for the arsenal is "bleak."

Treating radioactive wastes lingering from the Cold War era when the United States experimented with nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site is in its final chapter, the National Nuclear Security Administration said today. Since completing 48 shipments involving 1,860 55-gallon drums of what's known as "transuranic," or TRU, wastes from the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. In November 2005, Nevada is preparing another 58 oversized boxes for disposal.

Hanford workers are about to learn what was disposed of in one of the nuclear reservation's earliest burial grounds. Work has started on digging up the 618-1 Burial Ground, which was used from 1945 -- the end of World War II -- through 1951 for debris from research and uranium fuel production. It was the first burial ground in the 300 Area, which is just upriver from Richland. And it's also the only one there that ended up under a building as work at Hanford increased during the Cold War and more facilities were needed in the 300 Area.

WE may have all missed the most interesting point in the kerfuffle over the Indo-US nuclear deal. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi have emerged as the greatest advertising team since World War II. The strategy is not dissimilar to that employed by Germany and Italy in the war: Repeat a lie often enough and it will be perceived as the truth. Take the promise of electricity to every village. The claim is arrant nonsense. The eight reactors the government wants to purchase in the next four years - commissioning will be much later - will not increase the share of nuclear power in the energy mix beyond 2.5 percent.

Sixty-three years ago this week war became obsolete in man's quest to resolve conflict. On August 6, 1945 and three days later August 9, 1945 the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan were destroyed by the first atomic weapons used in war. The weapons, small and crude weapons by todays standards killed 90,000 and 40,000 people instantly and caused the deaths of 200,000 by the end of 1945 and an additional tens of thousands more over the next years.

The West's re-demonization of Russia is in full swing, with aging advocates barely able to conceal their glee in resurrecting the "good old days." It's a sad commentary on our grand strategic thinking that we so blithely add back the Cold War to our already full plate of global security interests.

Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., Tuesday urged Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to designate Hanford's B Reactor as a National Historic Landmark. "Not only is it an engineering landmark, but it helps tell the story of Hanford's role in ending World War II and providing nuclear deterrence during the Cold War," Hastings wrote in a letter to Kempthorne.

The just-published Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town is a book about a community, tragedy and governmental malfeasance. Written by Kelly McMasters, who teaches writing at Columbia University and grew up in Shirley, it has broad significance. It's the story of how Walter Shirley, a Brooklynite who trained at the Camp Upton in Suffolk County during World War I later built a community named for him south of the Army camp and how, after World War II, the federal government turned Camp Upton into Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).

Over the past two weeks, for the first time, news was shared in Kuwait that sand that has been contaminated since the 1991 U.S. Coalition War in Kuwait has now been shipped to U.S. soil and is currently heading to Idaho. The sand's contamination resulted from U.S. military vehicles and munitions combining in a combustive accident at the end of that war.

They built the nuclear weapons that helped win World War II and the Cold War. When the nation's future depended on them, they stood firm. Now where is their government when they need its help?

As the U.S. economy sank ever lower, a huge brouhaha erupted this week over claims that Iran might have nuclear weapons. The new CIA director, Leon Panetta, said "there is no question, they (Iran) are seeking that capability." The Pentagon chief, Admiral Mike Mullen, claimed Iran had "enough fissile material to build a bomb." Prime Minister Stephen Harper had claimed Iran posed an "absolutely unacceptable threat." However, to Harper's credit, he just admitted that Afghanistan is a no-win war. While Rome burns, here we go again with renewed hysteria over MWMD's -- Muslim weapons of mass destruction. War drums are again beating over Iran. The czar of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, Admiral Dennis Blair, stated Iran could have enough enriched uranium for one atomic weapon by 2010-15. But he reaffirmed the 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not have nuclear weapons and is not pursuing them. Defence Secretary William Gates backed up Blair. Public confusion over Iran comes from misunderstanding nuclear enrichment and lurid scare stories.

After I wrote my piece this past week about Dr. Herbert Clark from RPI passing away I realized that I had written a piece about this subject a bit more deeply 20 years ago. I had interviewed a man who was an "Atomic Vet," one of the thousands of our brave soldiers who became guinea pigs during the flurry of atomic tests that began in the 1940's. I am reproducing here again for those not associated with the subject and I will follow it up with an update on the issue in the near future. I published this piece in Hardcopy for the Common Good, a monthly social issues magazine I published in the 1980s. This article appeared in the December, 1989 issue - 20 years ago. What About the Atomic Vets? When Saratoga's John Delay was drafted into the army in 1956, at age 19, he thought his time would be spent like most post war GI's - perform his assigned duties and go back home. What he didn't know was that he would become a human guinea pig in a series of radiation experiments conducted by the U.S. Government. Many people have compared these experiments to the human atrocities of Germany and Japan during the second war.

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.

On the eighth anniversary of a program to compensate ill Hanford workers or their survivors, the federal government has paid out $472 million for Hanford and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory claims. Nationwide the program has paid out $5 billion in compensation and medical claims for illnesses in World War II and Cold War workers in the nuclear weapons industry. At Hanford $389 million has been paid in compensation plus $12 million for medical bills. At PNNL $68 million has been paid in compensation and $2 million for medical bills. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act pays compensation of $150,000 for employees with cancer or beryllium disease believed to be caused by radiation exposure on the job. A second part of the program pays compensation up to $250,000 for a wider range of illnesses believed caused by exposure to radiation or hazardous chemicals. For more information, call the Hanford Resource Center at 946-3333 or 888-654-0014.

Santa Susana Field Laboratory history * Data fuzzy on severity of two U.S. accidents Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power became one of the nation's main builders of rocket engines during the Cold War, and later became a major producer of "Star Wars" defense technology. Atomics International, a separate division of Rocketdyne's parent corporation, also set up shop at the 2,850-acre Santa Susana Field Laboratory south of Simi Valley, where it operated 10 small nuclear test reactors. The legacy of technological innovations at the Field Lab co-exists with a reality of chemical and nuclear contamination over a period of more than 50 years:

In yesterday's post, I provided a little background and explained that how the question of why we have so many nuclear weapons, and why we had even more back in the day, is not a very simple question. But I've learned a few things about this issue that I never knew before, and hopefully you didn't know them either. In the Cold War, especially the earlier years, the world was a much different place. There was no internet, no cell phones, very few satellites (the first satellite went up in 1957 and didn't do anything), no GPS systems, and a much more limited ability to fly over enemy air space to take pictures. We certainly didn't have stealth planes or UAV's. Today, we have all these things, and the US uses them to spy on its enemies. In the Cold War, the USSR resided behind the so-called "Iron Curtain" of secrecy and suspicion. In short, we couldn't see them, and they couldn't see us.

Work should begin this month to dig up another Cold War burial ground at Hanford used to dispose of boron balls once employed to soak up radioactive neutrons. The boron balls were part of a backup emergency system at Hanford reactors starting in the 1950s to slow down or stop nuclear reactions. The burial ground, which holds assorted wastes from Hanford's K reactors, includes 16 unlined trenches and 11 silos. The silos contain the boron balls, radiation-contaminated reactor equipment and pieces, and ash from burning radiation-contaminated waste. Washington Closure announced Thursday that it has awarded a $9 million subcontract to Dance Designs of Pocatello, Idaho, for the work. Watts Construction Inc. of Kennewick and Babcock Services Inc. of Richland are major subcontractors to Dance Designs, which also has offices in Richland. During the Cold War, K East and K West were among nine reactors along the Columbia River at Hanford that produced plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program. The K Reactors operated from 1954-71 and waste from them was buried nearby in the 118-K-1 Burial Ground until 1973.

If you haven't thought of the possibility that epidemic influenzas such as 'swine flu,' or 'H1N1 virus,' may come about as a result of low-level radiation in the form of fallout that covers the Earth, neither did I. That was until last week when someone proposed the idea to me. It all sounds like something out of a science fiction novel: 'a catastrophic nuclear war in 2030 covers the Earth with toxic radioactive fallout that gives rise to mutant viruses which infect and destroy surviving clusters of humans...' But, back in the 1950s, the so-called 'father of the [Soviet] hydrogen bomb' predicted that the radioactive fallout from the 'Cold War' could accelerate the rise of mutant pathogens, including influenzas.

A hair salon is an unlikely place to stage a war. It's the morning after the grassroots group opposed to building a nuclear reactor in the province, Renewable Power - the Intelligent Choice (RPIC), waged its latest campaign, an April 27 rally outside Prince Albert City Hall, and already members are planning their next move. Janis McKnight and Richard Swanby, owners of the Blunt hair salon, haven't seen their first client for the day, except for local environmentalist and professional photographer, Thomas Porter. But he's not here for a trim. This is strategy. This is a war for public opinion.

Advocates for sick nuclear workers are calling on Congress to create a National Day of Remembrance to recognize those workers who died or became ill while producing weapons for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. A nationwide petition drive will be launched in Oak Ridge Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Atomic Trades and Labor Council office, 109 Viking Road. The Oak Ridge event is sponsored by the non-profit group, Cold War Patriots, and will feature a 40-foot petition scroll and display of the proposed act. The petition will be available at Professional Case Management in Jackson Plaza through May 1, when it will be transported to other Cold War nuclear sites to gather more signatures.