Tag: cold war

World’s deadliest spot: the horror of Lake Karachay

Standing for just one hour at the shore of Russia’s Lake Karachay (“black water”) in 1990 would have killed you. Before it was buried beneath concrete and stone, the lake held an apocalyptic secret: over 50 times more radioactive material than was released in the Chernobyl disaster.

For decades, the Soviet Union’s Mayak nuclear facility — built in secrecy between 1946-1948 as part of Stalin’s nuclear weapons program — used this small lake in the Ural Mountains as a convenient dumping ground for its most dangerous nuclear waste, creating what the Worldwatch Institute would later describe as “the most polluted spot on Earth.” To spread the good cheer, the 1957 Kyshtym Disaster (an explosion in underground storage vats) forced officials to start dumping the radioactive schmutz in other areas, including the nearby Techa River.

The lake became even more deadly when it started drying up in 1968, exposing radioactive sediment on the shoreline. Winds swept up the contaminated dust and carried it across the countryside, irradiating half a million people. In nearby villages like Metlino, doctors worked overtime treating what they could only call the “special disease”— the compassionate servants in the Politburo forbade them from mentioning radiation in their diagnoses.

The lake bed itself was a monument to nuclear horror — its sediment, nearly 11 feet deep, was composed almost entirely of high-level radioactive waste. Between 1978 and 1986, as the deadly reality of the situation became clear, workers risked their lives to dump almost 10,000 hollow concrete blocks into the lake to keep the radioactive sediment from shifting. The project to finally bury the lake completely would take until 2015, when the last layer of rock and soil transformed Lake Karachay from a liquid nightmare into what officials euphemistically termed “a near-surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility.”

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Program to pay nuclear fallout victims expires due to U.S. House’s inaction

Faced with the choice of expanding or at minimum extending a program to offer compensation to victims of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War, members of Congress did neither.

Despite repeated pleas from victims and their advocates, House Speaker Mike Johnson refused to allow House members to vote on a bipartisan bill that would expand and extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). As a result, the program expired Friday, leaving victims of nuclear weapons detonations at the Nevada Test Site and their families to fend for themselves.

Several Downwinders — the name applied to tens of tens of thousands of people exposed to harmful radiation from nuclear testing at the Nevada site during the 1950s and early 1960s — expressed anger and a sense of betrayal that congressional leaders allowed the program to lapse.

St. George downwinder and longtime RECA advocate Claudia Peterson called the Congress’s failure to pass the legislation “a travesty.”

“This is something our government did to their own people,” said Peterson, who has lost her father, daughter, sister, neighbors and friends to various forms of cancer. “Our government is sending money all over the world and not even taking care of our own people that they damaged [due to nuclear testing] and are responsible for.”

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America’s Cold War Doomsday Satellite

When most people think about drama surrounding the launch of a nuclear weapon, they usually think about some sort of tense face-off between two officers who don’t agree on whether or not to launch, often spurred by some sort of garbled message or unforeseen circumstance that leaves those orders in doubt. But in reality, this is actually the least dramatic portion of the entire exercise. American nuclear missile crews, regardless of which leg of the nuclear triad they fall under, train ceaselessly to execute the orders to launch under any circumstances. If the codes match…missiles fly. What *does* keep nuclear planners up at night is how to make sure the shooters end up getting the orders to fire in the first place.  

Early in the Cold War, new and maturing technologies in warfare and communications led to some interesting ideas about how to get launch orders to alert crews no matter what. Simply put, communications underpinned the entire credibility of the nuclear deterrent. The Pentagon needed a way to make absolutely sure that no matter what happened to its command and control infrastructure during the opening of a nuclear exchange, the president’s orders would be delivered. In the end, they decided that the best way to launch a bunch of missiles and set bombers flying was to launch a missile capable of delivering those commands. That missile was the AN/DRC 8 Emergency Rocket Communications System or ERCS.

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When the C.I.A. Turned Writers Into Operatives

Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” is a pod-maker of the mad-scientist variety: he cooks up projects using his own zeal, research, and audacious notions, then unleashes the results on the world. “Theory of Everything,” which originated in 2004, a decade before the podcast boom, has always been intellectually rigorous, funny, and whimsical, with a format that David Carr, the late Times media reporter, once described as “What are we talking about this week? Who knows! Off we go! 1984! The year, not the book.” Recently, Walker released his magnum opus, a nine-episode miniseries called “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” which he started reporting while hunkered down on a French island in the early days of the pandemic. It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that time, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy. Fittingly, it begins with “1984”—the book, not the year.

The series takes its name from the Orwell quote “All art is propaganda . . . on the other hand, not all propaganda is art”—an idea, Walker tells us, perhaps best expressed by the 1956 film version of Orwell’s novel, which was “secretly made by the C.I.A.” (This is a truthful simplification.) We hear old newsreel audio describing the film’s glamorous London première, where there were evening gowns, tuxedos, and people dressed as Thought Police. The novel, we recall, is about a totalitarian future, in which the dictator Big Brother controls and mass-surveils the populace; it ends with its once rebellious hero, Winston Smith, accepting his love for Big Brother. The 1956 film had two versions: one faithful to the novel, the other with a “happy” ending, for European audiences, screened at the première. (In it, Smith defiantly yells “Down with Big Brother!” in front of a Lenin-style propaganda poster, then dies in a hail of secret-police gunfire.) Walker chats with the British historian Tony Shaw, who argues that the U.S. government thought the movie’s “twist” made it more “anti-Soviet.” Nikita Khrushchev had just announced his policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, and Walker believes that the film was the West’s unofficial response. “Peaceful coexistence: not an option,” he says. “Only freedom or death.”

It’s a zesty beginning, meant to draw us into the heart of Walker’s project: a group biography, as he calls it, of the writers Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright, whose trajectories help to illuminate the shadowy maneuverings of the cultural Cold War between 1956 and 1960. (Macdonald and Tynan contributed to The New Yorker.) All three men’s lives intersect with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lavishly funded anti-Communist organization secretly set up by the C.I.A. and headquartered in Europe, which sponsored conferences, literary magazines, art exhibitions, and other projects. Macdonald, an ornery American essayist, was a critic of Stalin and totalitarianism, and then a critic of paranoid McCarthyism. Tynan, the influential British theatre critic for The Observer, lustily called for political engagement in art, for dissent, and for “anti-anti-Americanism”; during the series’ time frame, he lives in London and New York. Wright, the American novelist and essayist (“Native Son,” “Uncle Tom’s Children”), was living in Paris, where he had moved in the forties, partly for the freedom from American racism. An anti-Communist former Communist, he was involved in many C.C.F. projects, and contended with his literary antagonist and fellow-expatriate James Baldwin, who was on the C.C.F.’s radar, too.

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‘HOME DESK’: THE FOREIGN OFFICE’S COVERT PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN INSIDE BRITAIN

The UK Foreign Office conducted covert propaganda operations inside the UK during the Cold War, recently declassified files show. 

It sought to challenge and discredit leading journalists at television’s World In Action programme, intellectuals such as Eric Hobsbawm and the leaders of some of Britain’s largest trade unions. 

The government body responsible was a highly secretive unit called the Home Desk, a part of Britain’s Cold War propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD), which was housed within the Foreign Office.

The Home Desk’s modus operandi was to collect information on “subversive” individuals and organisations from open and secret sources, ranging from newspaper clippings and books to MI5 moles and classified material.

It would then pass this information to trusted contacts in the British press, parliament, think tanks, universities, and other private networks in an effort to discredit the activities of “subversive” leftists in Britain.

The Home Desk was kept entirely hidden from the public, and its funding was not subject to parliamentary oversight. Outside of a small clique of high-ranking British ministers, diplomats, and intelligence agents, the Home Desk simply did not exist.

Its ultimate target was the British public. The recently declassified record allows us to peel back a layer of these secret operations.

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Nuclear Weapons Turned Wild Boars Into an Irradiated Menace, Study Finds

Nuclear weapons tests that took place in the mid-20th century are still a major source of radioactivity in Germany’s wild boars, accounting for anywhere from 10 to 68 percent of contamination in meat samples from these animals, reports a new study. 

The discovery could help to explain why wild boars have remained so much more radioactive than other species in their ecosystems, which is a longstanding problem known as the “wild boar paradox.” Previously, scientists assumed this radiation was almost entirely produced by the catastrophic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, but the new research shows that weapons tests are also a substantial and long-lived source of environmental contamination, a finding that is particularly ominous in light of Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling during its invasion of Ukraine.

Nuclear fallout produces radioactive particles, including isotopes of the element cesium, which can still be found in ecosystems today. Radiocesium has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that half of it decays in that time period, so it makes sense that concentrations of the contaminant have been gradually receding in Europe over time. 

Wild boars are the bizarre exception to this rule. Radiocesium levels in these animals have remained constant, a puzzling fact that has rendered them unsafe to eat and has thus contributed to a rampant overpopulation of boars across Europe as demand for their meat has plummeted.

Now, scientists co-led by Georg Steinhauser and Bin Feng, who are radiochemists at the Vienna University of Technology, have discovered that much of this persistent contamination can be traced back to nuclear weapons testing. 

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The Institutionalization of the New Cold War

The 31 countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are taking their victory laps over the latest expansion of the political-military alliance.  The boastful communique for last week’s NATO summit in Lithuania had more than 60 references to nuclear weapons, and promised modernization for NATO’s nuclear powers: the United States, Britain, and France.  There is increased likelihood for the pre-positioning of advanced military weaponry, particularly artillery and air defense systems.  The Baltic Sea will become Lake NATO.

When the NATO countries halt their celebration, it will be time to plan for the next Cold War, which will be far worse than the Cold War that dominated the 1950s and 1960s.  Cold War 2.0 will be more expensive than its predecessor, and far more difficult to bring to a close. The excessive military spending will complicate far more urgent tasks dealing with the climate crisis and the next pandemic, which will eventually occur.  Finally, arms control and disarmament, which was the primary process for pursuing an end to the earlier Cold War, will be more difficult to orchestrate.

The first Cold War was relatively easy for the United States to manage.  The twelve founding members of NATO were compatible in terms of policies and processes; and the perception of the threat was shared.  In Cold War 2.0, the United States will not be as dominant; the alliance will be divided between the western and eastern members of the alliance; and the perception of the threat will vary due to domestic politics and geographic proximity to Russia.  The current difficulties and debates over Ukraine membership; future relations with Russia; and appropriate levels of defense spending are already creating tensions within the alliance.

U.S. supporters of NATO expansion have provided a series of fatuous arguments to defend their position.  The New York Times has trumpeted that “Ukraine has become a testing ground for state-of-the art weapons and information systems, and new ways to use them, that…could shape warfare for generations to come.”  The military-industrial complex couldn’t have written this justification more succinctly.  Right-wing ideologues, such as the Washington Post’s Marc Thiessen, boast that “lessons learned on the Ukrainian battlefield could be used to help Taiwan,” which ignores the differences between an amphibious assault in Taiwan vs. the war of attrition in Ukraine.

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Revealed: How Israel Turned Nazi War Criminals Into Mossad Agents

One day, two and a half years ago, the Jerusalem-based historian Danny Orbach received a surprising phone call from his wife. She told him that a “huge, fat envelope” was sticking precariously out of their mailbox, and that it bore the logo of the Prime Minister’s Office.

When Orbach got home, he was astounded to discover that the Mossad had sent him internal documents that – until then – had been classified, and so were inaccessible to both scholars and the general public. The items were related to a historical phenomenon he was investigating: Nazi war criminals who were employed as mercenaries all over the world during the Cold War. Some of them worked for West Germany, others for the Soviet Union and the United States; some assisted Arab countries and some even collaborated with the Jewish state.

Orbach, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had waited a long time for the documents. “At first, I tried to work through all kinds of people I knew in the organization, but it didn’t help,” he says. “Afterward, I decided to try the most official way. I got in touch with the spokesperson’s unit at the Prime Minister’s Office [to which the Mossad is accountable], and I waited for a reply. I was already quite desperate, though I had been warned that things in that organization move slowly.”

The documents in the envelope helped Orbach write his latest book, “Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries during the Cold War” (Pegasus Books, 2022, with the Hebrew translation published this month by Kinneret-Zmora Bitan). But Orbach was not the only one who ever received a fat envelope from the Mossad. Another was Alois Brunner, though the contents of his envelope were very different. Brunner, who was Adolf Eichmann’s deputy, fled after the war to Egypt and subsequently settled in Syria.

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From Russia to the U.K. and With a UFO Society in the Middle of All the Chaos

“The Aetherius Society is an international spiritual organization dedicated to spreading, and acting upon, the teachings of advanced extraterrestrial intelligences,” its members state.  They continue: “In great compassion, these beings recognize the extent of suffering on Earth and have made countless sacrifices in their mission to help us to create a better world. The Society was founded in the mid-1950s by an Englishman named George King shortly after he was contacted in London by an extraterrestrial intelligence known as ‘Aetherius.’ The main body of the Society’s teachings consists of the wisdom given through the mediumship of Dr. King by the Master Aetherius and other advanced intelligences from this world and beyond. The single greatest aspect of the Society’s teachings is the importance of selfless service to others.”

UFO researchers David Clarke and Andy Roberts say: “The Aetherius Society were never a huge organization, indeed their numbers rarely totaled more than one thousand members worldwide…The Aetherius Society was not for everyone but, for those seekers who wanted or needed a spiritual dimension to their saucer beliefs, they provided a philosophy, structure and network of sincere like-minded souls.” George King suffered a heart-attack in 1986, underwent a multiple heart bypass in 1992, and died in Santa Barbara on July 12, 1997. The Aetherius Society, though, continues to thrive. Now, it’s time to address matters relative to the Aetherius Society, nuclear weapons, Russia, the U.K.’s Communist Party, and the secret surveillance of ufologists. 

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EPA finds radioactive contamination in more areas of West Lake Landfill

Radioactive waste in the West Lake Landfill is more widespread than previously thought, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

The finding is based on two years of testing at the St. Louis County site, which has held thousands of tons of radioactive waste for decades. An underground “fire” in another area of the landfill threatens to exacerbate the issue, which residents believe is responsible for a host of mysterious illnesses.

Chris Jump, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, said the findings don’t change the agency’s planned cleanup strategy or the level of risk the site poses to the surrounding residents. The radioactive waste is still within the footprint of the landfill, she said.

“The site boundaries themselves aren’t expanding, but the area that will need the radioactive protective cover is larger than previously known,” Jump said to a crowd of about 50 Tuesday night at the District 9 Machinists hall in Bridgeton.

The Missouri Independent and MuckRock are partnering to investigate the history of dumping and cleanup efforts of radioactive waste in the St. Louis area.

St. Louis was pivotal to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, and community members say they’re still suffering. Waste from uranium processing in downtown St. Louis — part of the Manhattan Project — contaminated Coldwater Creek, exposing generations of children who played in the creek and most recently forcing the shutdown of an area elementary school.

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