by David Robinson
...Nuclear weapons could not be possible without racism. Indeed, the nuclear industry as a whole would be impossible without racism. Nuclear weapons are the product of highly enriched uranium and the plutonium that can be processed from it. Most mining and milling of uranium ore is done on the lands of indigenous peoples: Hopi and Navajo lands in the Southwest United States, Cree land in Northern Canada, Aboriginal lands in Australia, and Tribal Homelands in South Africa. Communities of color bear a disproportionate share of the risks and health effects caused by radiation released during mining and milling. The uranium fuel made from this ore for commercial reactors is processed in plants often located intentionally in communities of color, mostly African-American.
When the U.S. government went looking for a place to test its nuclear weapons, they chose an isolated area north of Las Vegas, Nevada. That land belonged to the Western Shoshone Nation, who called it Newe Segobia. It became the most bombed land on earth. Since 1951, more than 1,000 full-scale nuclear weapons explosions have taken place on this, the now infamous Nevada Test Site.
The radiation released by nearly 40 years of exploding nuclear weapons in the Southwest have dramatically increased cancer-related deaths among the predominantly Hispanic populations east of the Test site. The ripple-effect of such a high rate of cancer deaths on families living in that part of the country is incalculable. The wanton disrespect shown to these communities was exacerbated by decades of denial by federal authorities of any connection between the weapons testing and the high rate of cancer deaths.
The end of the nuclear cycle is similarly wrought with racist practice as energy corporations, as well as federal and state entities continue to site radioactive dumps in or near communities of color. Seventeen of the 20 potential sites for federal interim storage of high-level radioactive waste were on Native American lands. In Nevada, Yucca Mountain, a sacred site of the Western Shoshone Nation, is being developed as a central depository for the U.S.’s high-level nuclear waste.
What do we see when we open our eyes to the racism of nuclear policy? We see whole communities of color affected by displacement and terrible health effects that destroy families. We see thousands of persons of color who have been killed by radiation exposure as they mined and processed nuclear materials that would eventually be incorporated into weapons of mass destruction. We see those weapons now pointed at people of color in other parts of the world.
As we view the disintegration in Iraq we must remember that the pretext for the invasion and occupation was the alleged intent to develop the very same weapons upon which U.S. Military power has been built. Racism and hypocrisy are not always flip sides of the same coin. If we look carefully and clearly through an anti-racist lens, we see that there is in fact nothing hypocritical about going to war to prevent a non-white nation from developing nuclear weapons. It is simply one more ominously congruent aspect of the racism that underscores every aspect of U.S. Nuclear weapons policy...
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0515-22.htm
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