Plutonium was named after Pluto, \u201cgod of the underworld,\u201d Hades, or hell. It was created inside faulty reactors, concentrated, and machined by US scientists into the most devastating and horrifying of all weapons. Photos of what the Manhattan Project\u2019s plutonium bomb did to human beings at Nagasaki prove the point. There is radioactive blowback in the fact that the thousands of tons of plutonium created since 1945 is so dangerously hot and long-lived that, like the underworld itself, nobody knows how to handle it at all — except maybe to trivialize it.<\/p>\n
Hoping perhaps to show that the bomb from hell can be transformed from a vengeful,\u00a0 self-destructive,\u00a0 nightmare demon, into a benign, peace-loving,\u00a0fairy-tale prince, nuclear propagandists and their friends in Congress\u00a0are establishing nuclear war theme parks — without the taint\u00a0of mass destruction — at former bomb factories and\u00a0nuclear weapons launch pads all across the country.<\/p>\n
Tours are being offered at the \u201cB Reactor,\u201d on the Hanford Reservation\u00a0in Washington State which in 2008 was declared a National Historic\u00a0Landmark. Plutonium production reactors for the nuclear arsenal were sloppily operated there for decades, releasing large amounts of radioactive fallout and causing permanent tainting of groundwater which now threatens the Columbia River\u2014cover it up, make it a destination.<\/p>\n
These nuclear war theme parks are part of a deliberate attempt to trivialize nuclear weapons and to dumb down popular understanding of their environmental and human health legacy. After employing hellish mythology to manufacture real massacres so vast that governments might quake, it wasn\u2019t too big a leap for the same scientists to follow Hiroshima and Nagasaki with 16,000 human radiation experiments on US citizens, 100 atmospheric bomb tests, deliberate mass venting of radiation, intentional \u201ctest-to-failure\u201d reactor meltdowns, and ocean sinkings of tons of rad\u2019 waste and entire navy propulsion reactors. All this coldblooded recklessness severely and permanently endangers human, animal and environmental health, because radiation in the body in cumulative doses attacks the gene pool in multi-generational perpetuity. Enormous radiation releases by commercial reactors and nuclear waste sites — at Windscale, Chelyabinsk, Tomsk, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, etc. — have resulted directly from the nuclear weapons program first unveiled in a show of butchery, and later peddled like laundry soap to an uninformed public as a \u201cpeaceful atom\u201d that would bring \u201celectricity too cheap to meter.\u201d We now know the nuclear age will bring a never-ending due bill too gargantuan to quantify.<\/p>\n
Last month, thanks largely to Senators from nuclear weapons states Tennessee and New Mexico, a Manhattan Project National Historical Park was officially authorized. Oddly, three proposed sites for this \u201cpark\u201d are secret sections of the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tenn., off limits to the public.<\/p>\n
In view of the fact that the Manhattan Project\u2019s atomic bombings of Japanese cities were not merely unnecessary but known in advance not to be necessary, the United States should be making formal apologies to the victims and their survivors in Japan, and offering reparations to them, not glorifying the planning, preparation and commission of mass destruction.<\/p>\n
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