By Sandra Michaud

The issues surrounding nuclear weapons and their effects on New Mexico were the subject of a public forum held Thursday evening in the J. Cloyd Miller Library on the WNMU campus.

The panel of four, moderated by Nick Seibel, publisher of the Silver City Daily Press, presented their views on the subject and then answered questions from the audience of over 50 people.

The forum started off by a statement from Elizabeth Driggers, from Senator Tom Udall €™s district office.

She spoke of the work the Senator had done to address the plight of those affected by not only nuclear testing, but also those who worked in the industry, especially mining. He continued in the footsteps of his father, Stewart Udall. Eventually the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act was enacted in 1990. “Since his election in 1998, Senator Udall has continued the legacy of his father to advocate and seek for justice for Americans sickened from our nation’s nuclear weapons work,” she said.

Driggers said that Senator Udall has been working to amend the act, to cover more of those affected. “Senator Udall has introduced this legislation every year since joining Congress, and is committed to fighting for legislation to expand coverage to those who have been left out of the process.”

She added that the Senator shares the President’s goal of a world in which nuclear weapons are no longer necessary, and supports his efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Driggers also said that the senator supports the national labs in New Mexico and their important national security mission including their work on non-proliferation.

Senator Martin Heinrich’s representative was not able to attend, due to illness, but the Senator sent a statement that was read by Moderator Seibel. In it, he talked about his support for START, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, as being vital for national security. “By making modest reductions to the two largest nuclear stockpiles in the world, and applying appropriate verification measures, everyone wins. Not only do we diminish the threat of nuclear war, but we reduce the probability of terrorists or rogue states acquiring loose nuclear material.”

He also spoke of his pride in the role Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories have in developing counter proliferation and verification strategies and the technology to support them.

Heinrich’s statement included his commitment to cleaning up abandoned uranium mines and securing compensation for those adversely affected by the nuclear industry in New Mexico and the Southwest.
The next panelist to speak was Tina Cordova, co-founder and co-chair of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. The group was founded in 2005 to address the issues that began with the Trinity testing in 1945.

“I have seen far too many people who mean a lot to me live with and die from cancer. I’m a cancer survivor and the first question that they asked me when I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer was, ‘When were you exposed to radiation?’”

She said the group’s goal is to bring attention to the health problems that people have been suffering from for the past 70 years with little or no attention from the Federal Government.

“Our stories are difficult to hear, because the stories that we tell are stories of entire families being wiped out by cancer,” she said. “And we have started the process of documenting this ourselves because the government has never come back to do it,” Cordova continued.

“We would like to see the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expanded to include the people of New Mexico because we were the first Downwinders.”

Cordova questioned why New Mexico has been left out from receiving compensation, when the fund has already paid $2 billion to people who lived downwind of the Nevada test sites.

David Culp from the Friends Committee on National Legislation from Washington D.C. spoke about the successes during the past 25 years by groups fighting nuclear proliferation. These include canceling the development of four new nuclear weapon warhead systems; stopping the building of four new nuclear bomb plants, saving billions of dollars; the implementation of the Nuclear test Ban Treaty and the new START Treaty; and finally reducing the nuclear arsenals of both the United States and Russia by 85% each.

Culp said that he sees two options for the future, good and bad. “I really think we’ve about a 50-50 chance of going in either direction given the current political situation.”

The good option would be to negotiate another arms control agreement with the Russians, getting the arsenals down to 1,000 weapons each, and then making another one, reducing them to 500 each. “Next is that the Iran nuclear deal goes through, and that we negotiate a similar agreement with North Korea,” he said.

The bad scenario would be that when the START treaty expires in 2017, nothing takes its place, and the Iranian agreement doesn’t go through.

Culp said that the pressure for new designs for weapons at the labs would be pushing us back into a new arms race, and proposes that instead the labs’ missions be changed; Sandia to do research and development into cyber security and Los Alamos to do the same for energy research and development.

“The people of New Mexico really have a responsibility," Culp said. "You have all of the facilities.... You have a very knowledgeable public, you’ve got a lot of people who have thought about nuclear weapons for a long time, and a lot of the accomplishments I talked about were the result of the hard work of people here."

Paul Magno of Witness for Peace in Washington, D.C. spoke of the three people, members of the group Transform Now Plowshares, who peacefully infiltrated the Oakridge Nuclear Weapons Complex in Tennessee one night three years ago.

“They traversed the distance from the outer fence through three fences and arrived at the highly enriched maintenance facility at Oakridge where they symbolically used hammers to knock some chips out of the building. They painted peace messages on the building and marked it with human blood, and they began to pray, light candles and offer bread to the security guard who confronted them,” he said.

They were convicted of sabotage and sentenced to jail. The three included an 85-year-old nun. However this past May, the court overturned the sentence. “The court was unequivocal that accusing them of sabotage for unfurling banners, for writing peace messages and lighting candles and sharing bread was a little preposterous,” Magno said.

Magno said that their actions were based on the premise that the arms race is illegal by international law that’s binding on our country. “That is to say the non-proliferation treaty which we have insisted on at length when we talk to Iran, we have ignored our responsibility for ourselves.”

He said that former Attorney General Ramsey Clark testified at the trial, explaining that our country’s actions in trying to evade the non-proliferation treaty were unlawful, even as we sought to impose it on other countries. “He (Clark) further explained that even though we’ve reduced our nuclear weapons substantially over the decades through a number of treaties, we have not reduced our nuclear firepower,” Magno said.

Magno said that, unless something changes, a child born today will be living under the nuclear threat his entire life. “We owe it to that child and to the future of all our children and grandchildren and of our planet to... forcefully walk away from it. Our country has led the world into the nuclear era, and it has enough energy and resources to lead the world out of the nuclear era if we are committed to it.”

The first question from the audience was about what to do with the plutonium, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years, if it were removed from the bombs.

“The reason it didn’t get addressed is that there’s no answer.” Culp said, “The solution that was in place was to turn it into a fuel that would be used in commercial reactors. That program has fallen apart, because of cost overruns.”

Cordova said that the Center for Disease Control did a 10-year study to find out exactly what has happened to the area around Los Alamos, and that when they accessed the documents they found out something frightening.

“The thing that’s scary for me is that they have determined that there were 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium that went unfusioned during the Trinity tests, and that are not accounted for. And so it’s out there in the desert someplace,” she said.

Cordova added that they are continuing to test non-nuclear bombs there, but when they do that they stir up radioactive dust in the area.

Another audience question was directed at Cordova, asking about statistics about the occurrences of cancer in the area around the Trinity test site compared to the rest of New Mexico.

She said that although the government described the area as deserted and remote there were more than 40,000 people living in the four counties surrounding the area.

“The CDC report said that the day of the bomb, the exposure could have been 10,000 times what is considered acceptable today. That’s something I wanted to say: 'When is it okay for a government to poison their people and walk away for 70 years? Is that how democracies work?' That’s been our problem because they didn’t tell us before, they didn’t tell us afterwards, and they never came back,” she said.

Cordova added that the CDC’s statistics show that the cancer rate in those four counties is six times the national average.

Another audience member elicited laughter when he commented on the Transform Now Plowshares action at Oakridge, “The 85-year-old lady out there cutting through fences and demonstrating, among other things, the lack of security at Oakridge, those people deserve incredible support.”

He questioned that while the budget for nuclear weapons sits unused, compensation funds are being cut, and asked about the chances for Senator Udall’s bill to expand RECA being passed.

Cordova said that she thought the bill has momentum now that it has never had before, due to the fact that it is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the first bombs. She said that New Mexico has been getting a lot of national recognition on this subject.

“The legislation now has a number of co-sponsors in both the House and Senate sides and some of them are Republican,” she said. She added that Representative Steve Pearce is one of the sponsors and is working to get the bill before the Judicial Committee.

“So it’s an uphill battle; we have lots of new co-signers; I hope that everyone will contact Representative Pearce and let him know that this is a critical issue for the people of New Mexico,” she said.

Culp said that he, too, thought it was an uphill battle, but that everything that has been accomplished so far was also uphill.

When asked if there were any other people in the world that are working along with the small groups in America or if they would have to stand alone, the panelists offered hope.

Culp said that there were definitely groups in Russia, which, even though they are being silenced by the Putin administration, are working for non-proliferation.

Magno said, “I don’t think we’re as alone in the United States as we think we are. There are a lot of people who see the problem and are frustrated. There’s a lot of work going on and a lot of movement.”

He added that internationally there are over 110 countries that signed the Humanitarian Initiative that was started in Austria. He said there was a lot of frustration with the stonewalling by the nuclear powers in the past 40 years, “And they really want to tell them it’s time to behave better.”

“People can make big changes happen, if they put together the force to do it from below. That’s why I’m optimistic that we can do that, and we have to if we’re going to have a future,” Magno said.