The Environmental Effects of Warfare.

The environmental effects of warfare, and the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.

A Talk to Nature and Society Forum, Canberra June 15, 2005 by
Dr Sue Wareham, President, Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia)

War and the Environment
It’s actually quite hard to find an up-to-date study of the total global impacts of military activity (war and preparations for war) on the environment, although there is some information on specific wars and their effects. This subject is generally not studied systematically and it is an issue that the environmental movement has not focussed on in a sustained fashion. I will describe some of the major effects and give some examples, though not in any order of importance

1. The enormous consumption of fossil fuels in both training for and conducting modern warfare.
Michael Renner in the 1991 Worldwatch Institute State of the World report, said that the Pentagon was the single largest consumer in the US of oil. Given that the US accounts for about half of global military spending, the Pentagon is certainly one of the world’s largest consumers of oil. The fuel consumption of fighter jets, tanks etc is enormous. For example, in less than one hour, an F-16 consumes almost twice as much oil as the average US motorist uses in one year.

2. In addition to oil consumption, military forces use of iron, steel and many other minerals is extremely large.

3. Military activity causes land degradation, soil compaction, and crater-filled landscapes left by bombing either in training ranges or in warfare. Vietnam is scarred by 2.5 million bomb craters.

4. Disruption of habitats and wildlife behaviour and migration by land activities and by low level flights

5. The extensive use of chemicals for example, about 50 million litres of the defoliant Agent Orange by US forces in Vietnam, with the resultant destruction of vast areas of forest. Its effects are still being felt by both veterans and by the people of Vietnam where it is blamed for a high rate of birth deformities.

6. Large assortment of other chemicals left behind after military activity, including lead and other metals, pesticides, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), cyanides, acids, alkalis, propellants and explosives. These contaminate soil and groundwater.

The toxic legacy is not only a problem in former war zones. Tons of waste was dumped in Subic Bay in the Phillipines during the time the US Navy had a base there . And in an August 1991 report to US Congress, the Department of Defence listed over 17,000 potential hazardous waste sites at over 1,800 military installations throughout the country. Less than 2% of the sites had been “cleaned up”. More than 2/3 of the sites classified by the US Environment Protection Agency as highly toxic and dangerous are or were military bases.

7. Landmines and other UXO which remain in place after hostilities have finished, are a particular problem which have received attention, although the problem is still enormous, with tens of millions of theses weapons still in situ.

8. Pollution can also be caused by deliberate acts of sabotage, such as the spilling and burning of Kuwaiti oil wells by Iraqi troops in the 1991 Gulf War, which was one of the greatest environmental disasters of modern times. Six hundred oil wells were set alight, and 4 – 8 million barrels of oil were spilled. There was massive damage to hundreds of kms of coastline, including mudflats, marine life, migratory and local birds, coral reefs, mangroves, sea-grass beds. Oil lakes formed in the desert. A vast array of chemicals including approximately 50,000 tons of sulphur dioxide were released into the atmosphere by the burning wells, sunlight was reduced, and soot, gases and chemicals spread as far as the Himalayas.

9. During the 1991 Gulf War there was also the deliberate bombing of electricity and sewerage plants, resulting in sewerage flowing into the rivers and streets. During the current war in Iraq, many residents of Baghdad have no choice but to drink from the highly polluted Tigris River

10. Deliberate induction of atmospheric changes were alleged in the war in Serbia during the 1990s, where two professors have claimed that NATO forces dropped chemicals into the atmosphere to clear cloud cover so that ground targets could be bombed. They claim this action caused drought which could persist for many years.

11. The deliberate targeting of chemical and other industrial facilities - instances of this were documented in a report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in the US on the effects of NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999, eg bombing in Pancevo caused major release of mercury and other environmental damage.

12. Uranium munitions are a newer threat, created by the ready availability of uranium from nuclear waste. Despite the title “depleted” uranium, uranium munitions have both low-level radioactivity and chemical toxicity properties, and they are suspected of contributing to the very high rates of cancer, especially childhood leukaemia (7 times previous rates), in southern Iraq where these weapons were used extensively in 1991. They were also used in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq again in the current war. The half-life of depleted uranium is 4.5 billion years, that is it is permanent. Appropriate studies of its effects have not been carried out.

13. Refugees forced to flee war zones place additional pressure on environments because they must use whatever they can simply to survive. This has been a major problem in parts of Africa such as Tanzania, with refugees from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

To bring some of theses effects closer to home, you might be aware that there has just commenced in Northern Australia a joint US-Aust military exercise called Operation Talisman Sabre, involving approx 17,000 US and Aust troops. So 17,000 troops must be transported to the area and will leave their heavy ecological footprints there. The centres to be used include Shoalwater Bay, a wilderness area on the central Qld coast, near the Great Barrier Reef , Cowley Beach, Townsville, the Timor and Coral Seas and parts of the Northern Territory. These are sites of major environmental significance for land and marine bird life, and it is feared that the effects on flora and fauna will be severe. In addition, the message the exercises send to our neighbours is not a friendly, but rather a provocative, one.

Nuclear weapons testing
Despite the staggering extent of environmental damage from this so-called “conventional” warfare and its preparation, the picture gets worse when we look at the effects of the development of nuclear weapons. The effects of the use of nuclear weapons I will not even consider. We have done enough damage even before these weapons are actually used again.

The most obvious of the environmental impacts of the development of nuclear weapons is in their testing, and there have been more than 1,900 such tests. Air, sea and land have been contaminated with fallout. In 1991 the report “Radioactive Heaven and Earth: the health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on and above the earth” was released by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. The report estimated that the fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests that would be delivered to the world’s population until the year 2000 would cause approximately 430,000 cancer deaths. If doses were integrated out to infinity, the total number of cancer deaths was estimated at 2.4 million.

At Hanford plutonium facility in Washington State in the USA, vast quantities of contaminated water polluted the Columbia River and ground water, and radioactive iodine was released into the atmosphere. Severe health effects on the local population have been documented.

In the former Soviet Union the problem is equally bad if not worse. As one observer put it, “For the Soviet authorities, managing waste meant dumping it into the nearest body of water”. The facility at Chelyabinsk in the Urals discharged millions of curies of radioactive waste into the Techa River in the late 1940s and the 1950s, and by 1951 traces of radioactivity was detected in the Arctic Ocean 1,600 kms downstream. Searching for a better solution, the authorities then diverted the waste into nearby Lake Karachay, which became so radioactive that it was eventually covered in concrete.

The report also concluded that “many aspects of nuclear weapons testing have been characterized by a disregard, sometimes wilful, of public health and environment…. Propaganda and public relations reassurances about safety have dominated the pronouncements of every nuclear weapons state regarding the dangers of fallout and the health and environmental consequences of testing.”; and “Health consequences of nuclear weapons testing have fallen most heavily on minority, rural or disenfranchised populations.”

Therefore this is the price we are already paying for nuclear weapons policies of the last 60 years, and the price we have already inflicted on future generations. Cancers from radioactive contamination of the atmosphere, the seas and groundwater will continue for as long as humanity continues, and nothing we do can change this shameful legacy that we leave our descendants. The very best we can hope for is to stop this problem from getting any worse, and that means at least two things: the cessation of nuclear weapons production, and getting rid of every such weapon that exists to ensure they are never used. There is in fact a third element which I will come to shortly, and that relates to nuclear power.

But first, why get rid of all nuclear weapons ? There are several overwhelming reasons –outlined in the MAPW booklet “Australia and the Non Proliferation Treaty 2005: getting serious about ridding the world of WMD’s” – but the main one is that unless these weapons are eliminated, they will be used again. The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons reported in 1996, “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility”.

Although nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare since 1945, the world has come frighteningly close on many occasions, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Robert McNamara, US Defense Secretary at the time, reports that there were huge miscalculations on both sides and that the world came “a hair’s-breadth from destruction”.
Miscalculation and human error can never be eliminated and should not be underestimated Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and others stand as grim reminders of this.
The accidental launch of a nuclear missile remains a terrifying possibility, and is in fact even more likely now, with the severe deterioration of command and control structures in Russia, than during the Cold War. Russia and the US retain thousands of nuclear weapons on high alert, whereby a decision to launch could be made within minutes of an incoming missile threat being perceived. In 1995, President Yeltsin was brought his nuclear command suitcase when Russia’s faulty radar systems mistakenly identified a Norwegian weather rocket as a US missile.

If nuclear weapons are used again – that is, if they are not eliminated – the results will be catastrophic. Nuclear weapons are unique in their capacity to cause human suffering and environmental devastation. Biological and chemical weapons, while they are morally repugnant weapons of terror and are capable of causing enormous suffering, they do not come close to the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons. Only nuclear weapons can cause the destruction of a city instantaneously and leave a radioactive wasteland.

So the big question now, given the renewed interest in nuclear power globally, including in Australia, is: Can we get rid of nuclear weapons in a nuclear powered world? And I should say at the outset that there are very many facets to the decision about nuclear power –

• the economics, nuclear power being one of the most expensive ways of producing electricity
• the consumption of fossil fuels used in the mining and enrichment of uranium, fuel fabrication, transport, reactor construction and operation and decommissioning at the other end of its life span,
• the health and environmental hazards of uranium mining
• the hazards of transport
• the still unresolved waste issue,
• the consequences of accident, even if the risk of accident is small,
• the possibility of terrorist attack on a nuclear facility to create panic by the dispersal of radiation
• the security required to guard nuclear materials from diversion by terrorists or others.
• the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons

If it were not for all these problems, nuclear power would probably be a good idea.

I’m going to discuss mostly the last one, the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and especially from an Australian perspective as our government positions itself to sell more uranium.

We are told by the uranium industry, and the government, that our uranium cannot end up in nuclear weapons because we have safeguards agreements, and therefore our uranium is not a proliferation concern. But there is a major problem. The technology needed to develop nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not very different. The major technical obstacle to developing a nuclear weapon is acquiring the fissile fuel, either enriched uranium or plutonium. However the same facilities used to produce low-enriched uranium for nuclear power can be used to make high-enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Civilian uranium enrichment facilities can provide a cover for the enrichment required for nuclear weapons, and it can be very hard to know what the full purpose of an enrichment program is.
The most stark example of this currently is Iran, and here I should just explain briefly a problem inherent in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This Treaty is one of the few instruments we have with which the nuclear weapons states can be held accountable to their obligation to disarm, and it is therefore one of the most important treaties in existence, but one of its failures is that it promises the “inalienable right” to access to nuclear technology, while also promising an end to nuclear weapons. The incompatibility of these dual goals is becoming increasingly apparent. There are few obstacles to a country going a considerable distance towards nuclear weapons development while a signatory to the NPT, with access to enrichment and reactor technology and technical support for ‘peaceful’ nuclear activities, and then withdrawing from the Treaty when they are ready to proceed with weaponisation.
As an NPT member, Iran can claim full justification in pursuing uranium enrichment for the production of nuclear energy; and in asking Iran to cease uranium enrichment, the IAEA is asking Iran to forgo a “benefit” to which it is entitled as an NPT member. Although the IAEA has not found any proof of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, the country’s uranium enrichment program has raised suspicions. Is it purely peaceful or are there military applications? The sort of dilemma surely will only become more common if nuclear power programs spread.
Consider the following,

• Accounting procedures for nuclear materials involve uncertainties and margins of error which, on the industrial scale involved, means that it cannot be excluded that material sufficient to produce one or more nuclear weapons could be diverted
• At any stage of enrichment, processing or fabrication, it is impossible to distinguish by any means uranium from one source from uranium from any other source. Accounting is ‘virtual’ – so-called ‘flag-swapping’ has been shown to be routine
• Even if atoms of Australian uranium were not used for weapons, Australian uranium contributes to the total pool of uranium used for the purposes of electricity generation and weapons. Australia’s proposed uranium sales to China, which has nuclear weapons, is a case in point.
• It is widely acknowledged that IAEA safeguards, even with the Additional Protocol, are inadequate. This is demonstrated by the presumed development of nuclear weapons by North Korea; for most of the period that this was occurring, the country was a signatory to the NPT; Iraq’s previous (prior to 1991) substantial progress in nuclear weapons development occurred while it was a member of the NPT and subject to IAEA safeguards.
• A number of countries have developed nuclear weapons via essentially clandestine programs largely utilising ‘research’ and civilian reactors – examples include Israel, India, Pakistan and South Africa, the first three of which do not belong to the NPT.

Current horizontal nuclear proliferation risks and the critical state of the global non-proliferation regime were recently highlighted by the UN High-level Panel, which ‘calls urgent attention to the precarious state of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and warns of the risk of a possible cascade of proliferation in the future.’ It elaborates:

‘The first and most immediate concern is that some countries, under cover of their current Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons membership, will covertly and illegally develop full-scale weapons programs, or that … they will acquire all the materials and expertise needed for weapons programmes with the option of withdrawing from the Treaty at the point when they are ready to proceed with weaponisation. The second longer-term, concern is about the erosion and possible collapse of the whole Treaty regime. Almost 60 states currently operate or are constructing nuclear power or research reactors, and at least 40 possess the industrial and scientific infrastructure which would enable them, if they chose, to build nuclear weapons at relatively short notice. Both concerns are now very real. We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.’

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research has highlighted the alarming proliferation dangers associated with substantial expansion of enrichment capacity to serve greatly expanded nuclear power generation in the US in the following assessment:
‘…in order to fuel one thousand 1000 megawatt nuclear plants (a common reference case in many nuclear growth scenarios), a global uranium enrichment capacity roughly nine to ten times greater than that currently operating in the United States would be required. If just 1% of that capacity was used instead to manufacture highly enriched uranium (HEU), then enough HEU could be produced every year to make between 175 and 310 nuclear weapons. With an expanded trade in the specialized materials required to build and operate gas centrifuge and other enrichment plants that would accompany an increase in nuclear power, illicit sales and diversion of supposedly ‘peaceful’ technologies will become harder to identify.’

I will mention briefly a research program which has been conducted in Australia which is totally contrary to the Australian government’s statements regarding weapons proliferation; documented recently by Greenpeace in their report ’Secrets, lies and uranium enrichment' It is research into laser enrichment, principally of uranium, at the Lucas Heights facility in Sydney. The report convincingly documents a largely secret but close relationship between Silex Systems Ltd and the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). Silex leases over 2000 square meters of space in the publicly-owned facility at Lucas Heights, has been provided by ANSTO with contract staff, equipment and radioactive materials, and unspecified access to ANSTO resources. While the Silex laser enrichment technology has a number of potential non-radioactive applications for other elements such as carbon and silicon, the focus of Silex appears to be uranium.

If further successfully developed and demonstrated, laser enrichment of uranium would significantly add to nuclear weapons proliferation risks, for the very reasons that the company promotes as the benefits of laser enrichment: reduced energy requirements, and reduced capital costs. Thus in contrast to the massive energy, size and industrial capacity required by current gas centrifuge facilities, making them difficult to conceal; laser enrichment could enable a facility the size of a small warehouse or large garage to produce sufficient HEU for the construction of 1-2 nuclear weapons per year, and would be much easier to conceal.

For these reasons, as documented in the Greenpeace report, laser enrichment has been of proliferation concern to the US CIA and US Office of Technology Assessment. This concern was formally demonstrated when the US Dept of Energy classified the Silex process as ‘Restricted Data’, a classification usually relating to the design of nuclear weapons, or the acquisition of nuclear material suitable for their construction.

To return briefly to some of the other risks associated with nuclear power:

Accident.
We are told that accidents like the one at Chernobyl couldn’t happen again, but the nuclear power industry is very keen on giving assurances. At the 1995 Congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Budapest, the Head of the Soviet Nuclear Energy Dept stated that the risk for a meltdown or similar catastrophe in a nuclear reactor was less than one in a million reactor years. The following year the catastrophe at Chernobyl occurred.
Numerous other incidents and near misses underscore the fact that risks of serious reactor accidents are not confined to specific types of reactors or particular countries – notable examples include the 30 September 1999 accident at the Tokai-mura nuclear power plant in Japan; the 28 March 1979 partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania; and others. Many nuclear power plants around the world, constructed in the 1960s and 70s, are now entering the last phase of life, increasing the probability of reactor failure and catastrophic accidents.

Attacks on nuclear power facilities
Nuclear reactors and associated facilities, particularly spent fuel storage facilities, which contain large quantities of long-lived radioactive substances, potentially pose a highly attractive target for terrorist attack. Indeed considering feasibility, visibility, potential for severe consequences, with persistent environmental contamination over large areas and need for costly clean-up, major evacuation and other social disruption, economic damage and political effect, it is hard to envisage many more attractive potential targets for terrorists. US reports indicate that diagrams of nuclear power plans were found in Al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan in 2002.
Statements by the IAEA and US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and research studies conducted by the US Dept of Energy, confirm that all current containment structures surrounding nuclear reactors could be breached by attacks such as those which occurred at the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001.
In both the US and Russia, simulated attacks on nuclear power plants have shown that many reactors are poorly secured, even against an attack by a handful of relatively lightly armed persons: 27 of the 57 simulated attacks in the US in the 1990s revealed significant vulnerabilities that could have caused reactor core damage and release of radioactivity.
Of even greater concern than reactors are fuel storage facilities, particularly storage ponds for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel. These often contain much larger radioactive inventories than reactors themselves, and generally are housed in simple buildings without robust containment structures, and therefore are more vulnerable to attack, and attacks would be more likely to result in catastrophic release of radioactivity.
Radioactive waste.

It must be emphasized that the radioactive waste generated by nuclear reactors is long-lived and dangerous: a typical 1000 megawatt (MW) reactor produces around 300 kg of plutonium per year. There is as yet no proven solution to the need to isolate with extreme reliability large volumes of extremely dangerous waste for the hundreds of thousands to millions of year periods required for their decay – essentially permanently. This is unprecedented: no such demand of human society has ever been made. No human institution has persisted for anywhere near this length of time.

No comprehensive and viable plan for long-term radioactive waste management is in place in any country. This and the previous two generations are forcibly committing virtually all future human generations to deal with this radioactive and toxic burden and be exposed to its dangers.

For these and other reasons, nuclear power does not represent a solution to the serious problem of global warming.

The priorities for Australia’s energy future should be urgent, substantial and coordinated action to increase energy efficiency, reduce energy demand, and replace conventional fossil fuel energy sources with renewable energy technologies.

We thank Sue Wareham for permission to publish this article

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