The Lethal World of Nuclear Irresponsibility

When I first learned that former President Donald Trump’s palatial home in Florida had been “raided” by FBI agents who confiscated many boxes full of top secret “nuclear documents,” it seemed too ludicrous and laughable to be true. It’s a high crime to steal nuclear secrets. And I imagine it’s very hard to accomplish if you aren’t the KGB’s version of a nuclear cat burglar. It would be the height of asininity for a former president to do such a thing, an act of staggering irresponsibility and mortal danger — too crazy even for Trump.

But as the coverage evolved and the plausible reality of such tomfoolery sunk in, I flashed back to another act of asininity and preposterous irresponsibility involving plutonium waste that took place sometime around 2013 in Los Alamos. It was so incredible and off the wall it stunned the nuclear security world, much like Trump did. To make a long story short, someone was packing containers of plutonium sludge to be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in Carlsbad and buried a half a mile down in salt deposits. When a container exploded down there a year or so later, it was determined that despite all scientific and security protocols, a laboratory employee with an appropriate security clearance had poured cat litter, the kind you buy at the grocery store, into the container to absorb liquids in radioactive sludge instead of using the inorganic absorbent material that was regularly used after rigorous scientific experiments determined it worked. The cat litter was a crazy mistake, really beyond imagining. But eventually a very real, and equally unimagined chemical reaction blew the container open.

It would have been a laughable and ludicrous a situation. But 21 workers at WIPP were exposed to high levels of radiation when it reached the atmosphere through ventilator shafts. Traces of plutonium were found as far away as Carlsbad. And at the cost of millions of dollars, WIPP was shut down for more than five years.

The point is that the same highly technological and immensely expensive national security and surveillance apparatus in the United States broke down and allowed both President Trump to abscond with heavily guarded, top secret nuclear documents and workers at one of the nation’s most secure and surveilled scientific laboratories to put cat litter in with plutonium sludge.

There’s nothing ever laughable or casual about controlling the world’s most dangerous stuff, be it in bombs, or mines, or canisters. It requires the utmost discipline, restraint and care to contain it safely.

What if China or Russia, or Iran and North Korea, had gotten a hold of those Mar-a-Lago documents? The damage could have been catastrophic. Our adversaries might have learned about the science and design of our weapons systems. They could have found out what we know about their weapons and plans. It would have amounted to one of the greatest nuclear security breaches in American history. And it would have been carried out by a President of the United States.

The tale of Trump’s alleged theft of top secret nuclear documents was flashing through the national media a couple of days before another story of nuclear irresponsibility lit up the news, this time from ProPublica and the PBS NewsHour. In dramatic fashion, they told of “a uranium ghost town in the making” at a Superfund site in the Blue Water Valley near Milan, in the Grants Mineral Belt. Towns and subdivisions there have been slowly destroyed by radioactive waste since the 1950s. Uranium effects have been documented by residents in what they have come to call a “death map” that pin points those who have suffered radiation sickness or death. The so-called responsible company — Homestake Mining owned by a Toronto conglomerate — decided with the blessing of its acquiescing federal regulators to buy out local residents. Then instead of cleaning up the decades-old 22.2 million tons of highly-toxic uranium milling waste still contaminating area water supplies, they leveled the home sites.

Trump and Homestake are metaphors for the ridiculous and often hair-trigger dangers of anything nuclear in our country and in the world. If it’s true, Trump’s alleged theft of top secret nuclear documents would be the latest in a terrifying history of nuclear weapons espionage and the shadow world of nuclear near misses. And Homestake is but one of many hundreds of mining and milling companies that — with the permission of state and federal regulators — have turned great swaths of New Mexico and the Southwest into dusty nuclear poison zones.

It remains to be seen if Trump will join the rogue’s gallery of nuclear spies, the likes of Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, Harry Gold, and Theodore Hall, all of whom worked for the Soviets and had connections to New Mexico through the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. If it proves true in a court of law that Trump really was in possession of some of the most secret nuclear documents that the nation possesses, it would serve to further highlight the absurdly porous and easily jimmied system of top secret protocols. The Manhattan Project was, as far as anyone knew at the time, hermetically sealed, impregnable, hidden away in the Jemez Mountains, so hush-hush that no one even in Santa Fe really knew what was going on. But the Soviets did, from the first moment it seems, despite all the layers of precaution.

The world has been spared accidental explosive calamities of nuclear weapons so far because, unlike some security protocols, the failsafe devices on bombs and missiles have worked in emergency situations. And we’ve had unfathomable good luck avoiding accidental nuclear launches triggered by false information. But there have been 32 acknowledged nuclear weapons accidents worldwide, known as “Broken Arrows,” including two near Albuquerque.

In 1950, a B-29 bomber loaded with two atomic bombs took off from Kirtland AFB and crashed into Manzano Mountain killing all thirteen members of the crew. Manzano Base there, where much of the nation’s nuclear stockpile would be held securely for 40 years, was just operational. The high explosives in the bombs destroyed the plane, but the bombs themselves did not contain the detonators that would have resulted it an atomic explosion. It was the protocol in those days to disarm bombs for take-offs and landings.

Seven years later, another plane was approaching Kirtland with a payload of hydrogen bombs presumably for storage at Manzano Base. At about 1,700 feet, a bomb broke loose, took out the bomb bay door, and fell to the ground about four and a half miles south of Kirtland. The high explosive material detonated, leaving a huge crater and a star burst pattern of dispersed nuclear material. But the bomb itself was not armed, so major parts of Albuquerque were spared being accidentally leveled to the ground. If a hydrogen bomb were to go off today over any major city in the world, it would cause damage some 600 times more devastating than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs used to end WWII were the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT. Typical warheads today equal 9 million tons of TNT and some are equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT. The world has been lucky enough — or maybe even smart enough — not to have one of those monsters go off accidentally or with malice for some 77 years.

That’s one obvious reason why anything pertaining to nuclear weapons and their manufacture must remain top secret and under strict control. Accidents happen and crackpots take power.

What if spies had breached the security around those failsafe devices and protocols in the 1950s and somehow rendered them inoperable? Chances are Albuquerque wouldn’t exist.

What if the nuclear documents Trump is alleged to have stolen contain information about our failsafe systems? Nuclear espionage is not just another stupid Trumpian political game. Everything about nukes is ludicrously dangerous. Just ask the people who live around radioactive uranium mining and processing waste on Navajo and Laguna Pueblo land west of Albuquerque.

The ProPublica piece on “a uranium ghost town in the making,” did a good job “humanizing,” if you will, the disastrous exposure to radiation that miners and their families have suffered to produce the uranium to make nuclear weapons. The piece accentuates the casual and irresponsible attitudes that mining companies and even federal regulars have about the lives and health of indigenous Americans who live close to the more than 500 — some say thousands — of open pit uranium mines and milling sites with their toxic ponds and tons of radioactive debris.

It’s been estimated that close to 70% of lung cancers among non-smoking Navajo and Pueblo uranium miners comes from their exposure to radiation release in mining dust and debris. CDC studies show that uranium miners have five times more incidence of lung cancer than the national average.

It’s more than an out of sight, out of mind situation. There’s a shameless racism at work here too. Native people have been cruelly burdened with uranium waste for more than half a century. And despite the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) paying out more than $2.5 billion to miners, millers and downwinders who were stricken with cancer and other fatal diseases, new generations of children and elders and others continue to be exposed to dangerous radiation from mines and mill tailings. And RECA covers only a time frame of exposure from 1942 to 1971.

It is emblematic of how brutally we still disregard the health and safety of indigenous Americans that the least known but largest radioactive release in American history took place on Navajo land near Gallup in 1979. I’m sure very few Americans ever heard of it. The toxic spill at Church Rock released more than three times the amount of radiation as the reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania earlier that year, an event which brought nuclear reactor development to a stop in the United States for decades. Some 95 million gallons of radioactive effluent and 1100 tons of radioactive mill waste burst out of a tailings pond when its dam gave way, flooding into the Puerco River with such force it is said to have popped manhole covers as it roared by Gallup and on into Arizona. The spill caused devastating health problems all through the surrounding country side, ruining water supplies, causing birth defects and cancers and poisoning live stock.

Most of the toxic landscape west of us is still blowing in the winds around us. The Mixed Waste Landfill, with its highly toxic radioactive material on Sandia Base, still threatens Albuquerque and the stalled subdivision of Mesa del Sol. The mixed message the government told us was that the landfill wasn’t a harm to public health but it was too dangerous to be moved. Radiation from nuclear dumping and causal storage of waste, along with thousands of open air plutonium explosions at Los Alamos, are still, in all probability, causing cancer, reproductive disorders and other diseases in northern New Mexico.

What does it say about us that nuclear security is so lax in the United States that the FBI would have enough evidence to prove probable cause to search the home of a former President of the United States under a federal search warrant signed by a federal judge to look for top secret nuclear documents he is alleged to have taken out in boxes from secure environments in the White House?

What does it say about our sense of caution and responsibility, and about the sophistication of our nuclear security systems in general? It seems like it’s time to press for another congressional investigation, this time looking into the security of the nation’s 55 nuclear power plants, its thousands of nuclear warheads, its plutonium bomb manufacturing facilities at Los Alamos and elsewhere, its almost countless open pit uranium mines still uncovered, its hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive milling waste and the untold amounts of radioactive waste at dozens of other military industrial sites around the country vulnerable to accidents, sabotage and human error.

What an irony it would be if our national consciousness became sensitized at last to the dangers inherent in the nuclear industrial complex because of the glaringly preposterous situation of a former President of the United States stealing nuclear secrets from his own country, calling the allegation a hoax and then complaining bitterly when his government lawfully takes those documents back.