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May 4
GUEST: Joshua Frank, Managing
Editor of CounterPunch and the author of Atomic
Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America,
talks about the catastrophic dangers of the largest plutonium
site in the US.
The
Cold War’s Lingering Nuclear Threat
Joshua has this story covered in about every angle. And the pieces fit together very nicely. We learn about the beginning of the nuclear age, when making a bomb crowded out just about any other goal. Certainly, the health of workers almost consistently came out last.
There were always a lot of secrets to be kept from foreign nations. But we suspect there were other reasons as well, like environmental damage and the failure to even think about how to clean up the monstrous pile of nuclear waste.
Cleaning up had its own problems. There were secret government contracts that had no penalty for cost overruns. In fact, every goal that was not met resulted in more money to the private defense contractors. Bechtel is part of this story with its million dollar kickback schemes and revolving doors for governmental inspectors.
Maybe Atomic Days can be looked at another way, as a symbol of what the military industrial complex has done to this country. Its costs have been staggering and its pollution unmatched by any other industry. As our country is being forced to choose between defaulting on its debts or cutting urgently needed social programs, we see little media attention to the $842 billion "defense" budget that is bankrupting us all. Joshua Frank's new book helps explain how our supposed democracy lost its way.
