WEBSITES - see also links

New anti-nuclear organisation - based in South Africa - CANE - Coalition Against Nuclear Energy. CANE is a growing group of Organisations, NGOs, Environmental Groups, Communities and Citizens from all over South Africa who are opposed to Nuclear Energy as a Power Source www.cane.org.za/

FILMS

Doco Man's Passion The Cairns Post May 3, 2008 - "David Bradbury is hoping to spark debate when he brings his controversial documentary about nuclear power to Cairns.for Tropical Innovation Week, he hopes to shock his audience.

The documentary explores the nuclear power for Australia debate, with David travelling to the US, France, England and Japan to research nuclear power, the problems it causes, and how it works

"Each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle is dependent on fossil fuel," David says, which is a little known fact in the public arena.

His film explores the push for a nuclear future in Australia and includes uranium mining, focusing on the danger of open-cut mines that leave radioactive material on the surface to blow in the wind.
David says it's too small to see and odourless but that it is carcinogenic........................................".

Review by Fidel Castro of the book, 'Nemesis'Granma International (Cuba) In this review, Castro is quoting s directly from 'Nemesis' by Chalmers Johnson - ".......'"It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined.

The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is in itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth…'

'The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other…'
'There are many reasons for this budgetary sleight-of-hand-including a desire for secrecy on the part of the president, the secretary of defense, and the military-industrial complex-but the chief one is that members of Congress, who profit enormously from defense jobs and pork-barrel projects in their districts, have a political interest in supporting the Department of Defense…'...........................……

……………………………..U.S. spending for its military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008), conservatively calculated, to at least $1.1 trillion........

...-- the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption...

...……………..under Pentagon leadership, entire new industries were created to manufacture large aircraft, nuclear-powered submarines, nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and surveillance and communications satellites. This led to what President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address of February 6, 1961: "The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience" -- that is, the military-industrial complex. . ……………

................................……………….'Nuclear weapons were not just America's secret weapon, but also its secret economic weapon. As of 2006, we still had 9,960 of them (of the most modern ones). There is today no sane use for them, while the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of social security and health care, quality education and access to education for all, not to speak of the retention of highly skilled jobs within the American economy. . '

Building Bombs (1989) DVD Review Digitally Obsessed 7 March 08 "...when you have four or five people within a block of each other, in one place, dying of cancer, it's just too much of a coincidence.'- Evelyn Couch

This Academy Award-nominated film by Mark Mori and Susan J. Robinson takes us to the company town of Aiken, Georgia. The company was Du Pont (and later, Westinghouse), and the business was bombs: the Savannah River Plant, built in the 1950s, was not only a huge employer but also the nation's largest manufacturer of nuclear bombs.

The power of Building Bombs is in its straightforward manner. The message isn't shouted to the heavens. It's willfully understated by the filmmakers, and by narrator Jane Alexander. The story told is about the very real fallout from nuclear bombs: contaminated water sources, rare blood diseases, nuclear waste stored in cardboard boxes, even radioactive turtles left to wander through neighboring farms. It's clear that there was (and still is) a general lack of understanding about the specific dangers from low-level radioactive contamination, and a lack of clarity about safe ways to store and process waste.

The filmmakers interview politicians, but also everyday plant workers, retired scientists, and a former plant waste management engineer whose report on dangers to the local water supply, and one of the country's largest aquifers, located nearby. What goes on looks at the plant doesn't look that different from what goes on in almost every workplace in the country: standard corporate cost-cutting, and employees compensating by ignoring problems..................The story may seem to lack relevance for having taken place twenty years ago (and covering history that goes back to the 50s). The reactors at the Savannah River Site have been shut down for some time, and now it serves as a waste storage facility. I think what's clear, though, is that this is a story that repeats itself every generation,..............

...................Somewhere, there's a corporation looking to save money, and people that will pay the price for carelessness and greed. The clean-up costs at the site ran to the tens of millions of dollars, while the true costs of the health impacts to employees and local residents may never be known. Taxpayer money is now going to a private consortium that will, beginning in 2016, process and dispose of some of the nation's surplus weapons-grade plutonium at Savannah River, the bulk of which was generated at the site..........................................".

The intensifying WMD problem - Olaf Egeberg from the book: "COMING HOME: A Crossover Bible For Christians, Muslims, Jews And Members Of Other Religious Faiths As Well As For Thoroughly Non-Religious Persons."We live with the increasing threat that someone is going to use a nuclear weapon. These weapons are proliferating.....

.....Information on how to build them is out now (on the Internet, of course) and stolen materials are available. ..............We now have terrorist organizations (not just nations) that can bring on a WMD event. And these groups are rather secret and dispersed. If one unleashes its WMD among us, there's no nation or place to bomb in retaliation.

WMD retaliation is simply out of the question.................. The old belief doesn't hold up any more. So the basic rationale for continuing to have these things is now gone. Only vague, obsolete fears keep WMDs going...........Without some nation being first we won't ever get ourselves out of a WMD world. - from the book free online at www.changesahead.net.