#nukefree

Despite an official state policy of shrouding the topic in secrecy, everyone has known for some time that Israel is a nuclear nation. Estimates indicate that it possesses anywhere from 80 to 200 nuclear warheads. This arsenal is a radioactive ghost haunting political relations in the Middle East and it’s time to exorcise it by talking openly about what Israel’s nuclear monopoly means for the region and the geopolitical stability of the world. While we watched Israel hit Gaza with relentless airstrikes, world superpowers were playing a game of nuclear chess with Iran. Move and countermove is currently ongoing. Though not officially at the chessboard, Israel is the unnamed player in this game — it has made it very clear that it would view a nuclear armed Iran as an existential threat and conduct a pre-emptive strike on its nuclear facilities if the Islamic republic acquired a nuclear warhead or reached breakout capacity. Israel has conducted such strikes in the past. In 1981 they bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak. 2007 saw them take out a partially constructed nuclear reactor in Syria. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is run for civilian purposes, but Israel is not convinced. They are watching Iran carefully. All the parties involved in the nuclear negotiations with Iran — the United States included — are nervous that Israel will act unilaterally again and attack Iran before diplomatic measures can ensure it won't weaponize its nuclear program. Concern is the right response here. There is a high probability that such an attack would cause the type of geopolitical fallout and shearing off into sides that starts World War. Imagine a scenario where nuclear negotiations between Iran and the United States fail. Israel does what it has threatened to do and destroys Iran’s nuclear facilities with a series of tactical air strikes. Iran retaliates by leveling Israel’s nuclear facility at Dimona with a barrage of long-range ballistic missiles. It then fires rockets at Sderot, Ashkelon and Tel Aviv. Israel sends its air force back into Iran to bomb launch sites. Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards call for war. Israel asks the United States to commit to a joint operation against Iran, but Obama opts for a diplomatic approach. Israel refuses to wait, believing it faces an active existential threat. Prime minister Netanyahu has his generals ready a nuclear strike as a way of getting Iran to back down. Iran responds to the threat by increasing rocket fire into Israel. In the pressure of this moment, can the Israeli leadership be trusted to pause before pushing the button? Air raid sirens should be sounding. History sounds the first warning, as it always does. When Israel was invaded by Egyptian and Syrian forces in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Moshe Dayan, the defense minister at the time, tabled the nuclear option in cabinet discussions with Golda Meir. His proposition: ready a nuclear strike that could be used as a measure of last resort if Israel was overrun by the enemy. The event established Dayan's nuclear protocol as a feature of the Israeli deterrent strategy. It has since become known as Israel's 'Samson Option', or way of ensuring it will never suffer absolute defeat at the hands of the Arab nations that surround it, even if this means collapsing the temple of the Middle East onto the heads of its own people. Israel’s repetitive air and ground assaults on Gaza throughout 2008 to 2014 sound sirens as well. The most recent attack on Gaza has shown that Netanyahu and the current Israeli leadership have very little restraint when they feel their nation is under threat. The grievously high civilian and child death toll in Gaza over the course of Operation Protective Edge alone casts doubt on their ability to exercise self-control and shows that Israel has scant concern for collateral damage when it has decided to eliminate an enemy. Before the former head of Gaza's police bomb squad Hazem Abu Murad died trying to defuse unexploded Israeli ordnance, he estimated that Israel had dropped between 18 to 20,000 tons of explosive on Gaza since 7 July 2014. This is equivalent to the kilotonnage of one of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States in 1945. This parallel directs us towards the deeply distressing voices within Israel that have alluded to a nuclear strike on Gaza in past conflicts. In 2009, during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s current foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Israel “must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II. Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary.” Critics and commentators interpreted this remark as a reference to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, which saved the Americans from staging a military invasion and occupation of Japan. Later in 2009, the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said outright that Lieberman had “threatened to use nuclear weapons against Gaza.” Lieberman’s comment set a precedent for similar pronouncements. In 2012, during Operation Pillar of Defense, Gilad Sharon (the son of the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon) had an article published in the Jerusalem Post which argued for a “decisive conclusion” to Israel’s assault on Gaza. In the article he stated: “We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima — the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.” At the time of publication, when this information was still displayed on the article's permanent link, Gilad Sharon’s article was liked 1,674 times by Jerusalem Post readers and tweeted 389 times. These numbers surged during Israel's 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip, roughly tripling before leveling off at the last available tally. Returning to the question of a nuclear-armed Iran, Israel’s current economic minister Naftali Bennett is one of the most vocal proponents of a pre-emptive strike if Iran reaches anywhere close to nuclear breakout capacity. Bennett is a man irresponsible enough to suggest repeatedly that any deal with Iran that fails to dismantle its nuclear program entirely could lead to a nuclear terrorist attack on New York. Dangerously inflammatory, and showing little political restraint or caution, he pushed relentlessly within the Israeli government for a total military takeover of the Gaza strip during Operation Protective Edge. Only Lieberman, former deputy defense minister Danny Danon and the deputy speaker of the Knesset Moshe Feiglin shouted as loud as Bennett to escalate the scale of the invasion and hit Gaza with maximum military force. With such men in his cabinet and in the Knesset, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu will not be allowed to think clearly and act freely if any viable Iranian threat to his nation emerges. Of course, Netanyahu himself may already be primed for attack, with or without Lieberman and Bennett. He displays immense anxiety over a nuclear Iran. To what extent this anxiety will be a mental mushroom cloud that Netanyahu can not see past when the critical moment arrives will only be revealed during a moment of extreme geopolitical instability and reactivity—a time when there will no longer be any opportunity for us to influence events. This is why we can not rely on the chance that our generation’s most dangerous game of nuclear chess will have precisely the right outcome. It will be too late to do anything if the game finishes badly. But the outrage of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza has suddenly made its status as a nuclear power in the Middle East unnerving. The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's call for a 2014 conference on a nuclear free Middle East is a signal of the alarm being felt within the international community. Opinions are undergoing a tectonic shift, and global events have opened up the space needed for a mass change in perception. A clearing for action has appeared. There has never been a better moment to apply international pressure to Israel to get them to sign up to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran signed the treaty in 1968. Global safety means we secure Israel’s signature in 2015.

VIDEO: U.S. EPA Says Agana Springs is Clean Again After 320 Tons of PCB Laced Soil is Removed

Last Updated on Monday, 23 April 2012 20:55 Written by Josh TyquiengcoMonday, 23 April 2012 18:28

Guam News - Guam News

Guam- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has completed the removal of contaminated soil from the Agana Springs area.

According to On-Site Coordinator Michelle Rogow, 320 tons of Polychlorinated Biphenyls or PCBs have been removed from a former military water pump station. The cleanup began in December 2011 and is the result of site assessments that found PCBs had leaked from the pump station into the ground. U.S. EPA worked with Guam EPA on the project and spent over $650 thousand dollars to restore the area. Rogow says this morning, they finished back filling the site and covered it with top soil. She notes the contaminated soil was already shipped off to a hazardous waste site in the U.S. mainland.

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“It was shipped out in boxes in 12 shipping containers” said Rogow. “So those are the large 40 foot containers and 12 of them were needed to take the material off of this site. The excavation exceeded 5 feet in depth in some locations, but we're happy to announce that we got it all and we think the area is now going to be safe after today.”

Rogow adds it is now up to the Government of Guam to decide what the land can be used for. She mentions the area is no longer a threat to Agana Springs residents and hopes it can be converted into a park at some point.

READ the U.S. EPA's release in FULL below:

Honolulu - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency working with the Guam Environmental Protection Agency completed the cleanup of contaminated soil from a former military water pump station at Agana Springs, Guam.

Electrical transformers and other equipment at the former military water pump station at Agana Springs contained oil with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a cancer-causing chemical. In 2007, site assessments found PCBs had leaked from the pump station equipment into the ground. “The excavation of hundreds of tons of toxic soil restores the land for use by the residents of Guam,” said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA’s Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest. “EPA thanks the community of Agana Springs for its cooperation during our cleanup operations.” Since cleanup began in December 2011, approximately 320 tons of PCB contaminated soil was removed from the area of the former water pump station and shipped off to a hazardous waste site on the U.S. mainland for proper disposal. EPA spent over $650,000 for the restoration of the area. In addition to Guam EPA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Guam Historic Preservation Office assisted with the cleanup effort.  While the area has been restored and graded, a silt fence may remain on site to protect the Agana pond from sediment while vegetation is re-established on the property.  PCBs were manufactured in the United States from 1929 until 1979 when their manufacture was banned.  During that time, PCBs were used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications including electrical, heat transfer, and hydraulic equipment. Once in the environment, PCBs do not readily break down and may also be taken up into the bodies of small organisms and fish. As a result, people who ingest fish from contaminated waters may be exposed to PCBs that have bioaccumulated in the fish they are eating. PCBs have been determined to be a probable human carcinogen, and may cause a variety of other adverse health effects on the immune system, reproductive system, nervous system, and endocrine system. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contaminated soil collected in Agana Springs

Posted: Dec 16, 2011 3:54 PMUpdated: Dec 16, 2011 3:54 PM

by Ken Quintanilla

Guam - What used to be a military water pump station now lays a piece of Government of Guam property known to have soil contaminated with PCBs, the Guam Environmental Protection Agency and their federal counterparts for the past two weeks have worked to excavate the contaminated soil at Agana Springs caused by a spill from the former pump station and old transformers. 

USEPA on-scene coordinator Michelle Rogow tells KUAM News that the military has since declined to participate in the cleanup, so her team will ship the soil for proper disposal at a hazardous waste disposal facility in the States. "We did not find harmful levels of PCBs within Hagatna Pond, but we did find some pretty notable levels on land. Our goal is to remove the stuff that is on land so it doesn't transport into the pond that it stays out of the waterway and this property is safe for kids to play and people to come and use the pond."

You can help by signing the online petition!

  http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/the-world-community-must

  Message below from Harvey Wasserman

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