JULY 1, 2005
Women Activists Fighting Nuclear-Weapons Proliferation
by Heather Wokusch
(Featured in the April 2005 edition of Activist Magazine)
Nuclear weapons are at the forefront of today's international conflicts, yet women are often left out of the loop regarding crucial proliferation decisions. Determined activists across the globe aim to change that.
Only 33 women (vs. 660 men) led delegations to the six major global conferences on non-proliferation between 1992 and 2002. During that time, only 2 women (vs. 88 men) were Ambassadors in the UN Security Council, and only 7% of the country delegations to the General Assembly First Committee on Security and Disarmament were headed by women.
This relative under-representation on the international political stage is especially glaring since women run a higher risk than men of dying from the cancers associated with radiation exposure. Also alarming is the elevated birth-defect rate for women in war zones where nuclear weapons have been deployed.
In the US, the women's movement to abolish nuclear weapons unofficially began in early November 1961, when thousands of homemakers and business women across the country left their jobs for a one-day protest against the US-Russian nuclear weapons buildup. The so-called Women's Strike for Peace eventually became a powerful social movement which ultimately helped thwart NATO's proposal for a nuclear fleet.
Today, female anti-nuclear-weapons activists represent a broad spectrum and are equally diverse in getting their message across. In one high-profile October 2002 incident, three Dominican nuns illegally entered an Air Force silo in Colorado which housed 49 rockets fitted with nuclear warheads (each warhead's destructive potential dwarfing that of the Hiroshima bomb). Vowing to "transform swords into plowshares," the nuns used their own blood to paint a cross on the silo and then hammered at its structure, conducting a liturgy before being arrested. The women were later sentenced to monetary fines and roughly 3 years in prison each.
Just a month after the silo incident in Colorado, a small team of Citizen Weapons Inspectors tried to gain access to California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - a major design facility for stockpiled nuclear weapons.
While the Citizen Inspectors were denied access to the lab's facilities, their protest was nonetheless a success. Inga Olson, Program Director of Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment) was one of the participants: "It was uncanny that at the same time weapons inspectors were returning to Iraq, we were at the gates of Livermore's nuclear weapons lab waiting to be allowed to inspect the facilities for WMD. The hypocrisy of that moment on Veterans Day, 2002 hit a nerve causing news media across the country and around the world to write about our demonstration."
Stateside activists such as Ms. Olson and the Dominican nuns face an uphill battle due to the nation's recent proliferation spending spree. The US budget for nuclear-weapon activities in fiscal 2004 topped $6 billion (over half a billion more than in 2003) while expenditures for nuclear-test readiness alone surged by 39% in the same period. The Department of Energy's proposed budget for FY 2006 requests over $6.6 billion for nuclear "Weapons activities," including development of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, which Congress rejected in 2005 for being "provocative and overly aggressive."
Meanwhile, funding for non-proliferation efforts, environmental clean-up of nuclear-weapons sites and securing existing stockpiles has plummeted. The Department of Energy's FY 2006 budget slashes funds for "Nuclear waste disposal" by over 12%.
Of course, the US isn't alone in possessing a stockpile of nuclear weapons: Russia also boasts a lavish arsenal, and the two countries share a whopping 96% of the globe's 30,000 nuclear weapons between them. China and France trail with roughly 300-400 warheads each, and the UK, Israel, India and Pakistan have fewer than 200 each.
How well all of these potentially catastrophic nuclear devices are maintained and monitored is of critical concern, and women have been at the forefront in pushing for accountability. Dr. Helen Caldicott, the Australian pediatrician and founder of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, has dedicated much of her career to nuclear disarmament, but as she told Democracy Now! in July 2004, "&ldots; since the Cold War ended, nothing has changed. America and Russia still target each other with 3,500 hydrogen bombs. Nothing has changed except the animosity has disappeared, and the two countries are friends, but they still hold the world as nuclear hostage ready to blow us up at any second of any day."
Another leading voice for non-proliferation and disarmament was Japan's Satomi Oba, former president of Plutonium Action Hiroshima and chair member of the international non-proliferation movement Abolition 2000. For decades before her untimely death in February 2005, Oba organized grassroots events, spoke to international groups and broke ground for other activists, such as Atsuko Nogawa, the young Japanese woman who organized a 4-month anti-nuclear protest trek which 70 people took from Australia all the way to Japan, as part of the 2004 events commemorating the anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Caldicott , Oba and other women have fought not only against the build-up and stockpiling of nuclear warheads, but also against the use of radioactive weaponry, such as depleted uranium (DU) in today's military conflicts. A nuclear-waste product valued for its ability to penetrate tank armor, DU ignites upon impact, releasing millions of radioactive uranium particles which spread in the wind to be inhaled by humans and absorbed by plants and animals. DU remains radioactive for billions of years.
US forces used an estimated 300 tons of DU ammunition in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, and NATO forces deployed roughly 11 tons of it in the 1999 Balkan conflict. DU ammunition was also used during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
While the Pentagon insists that DU-exposure poses no long-term health risks, many physicians disagree. One prominent voice in the struggle against DU has been that of the epidemiologist Dr. Rosalie Bertell, founder of the Canadian-based International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH).
Here's how Bertell describes the effects of DU poisoning: "It can be stored in liver, kidney, bone or other tissues, again for years, irradiating all of the delicate tissues located near its storage place. It can effect the blood, which is the basis of our immune system, and do damage to the renal system as it is eventually excreted in the urine. It can also initiate cancer or promote cancers, which have been initiated by other carcinogens." Bertell notes that DU has been found in the urine of thousands of seriously ill veterans even 7-8 years after service.
Bertell and Caldicott link the elevated rates of cancer and birth defects in Iraq following the Gulf War to DU exposure, and have called on the Pentagon to clean up the areas it has contaminated.
Also leading the fight against DU is the geoscientist Leuren Moret, Environmental Commissioner for the City of Berkeley, California. Moret is concerned about the impact of radiation on public health, and has spoken out on behalf of both indigenous people and service members exposed to DU weaponry. She recently told the San Francisco Bay View about the unexpected fate of many Gulf War veterans and their families: "Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems."
According to Moret, "In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases." Moret added that the Department of Veterans Affairs says it doesn't keep records of birth defects occurring in veterans' families.
Groups across the Atlantic are also working against the military and civilian deployment of DU. The UK's Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (CADU), for example, conducts workshops, pickets army information centers, leaflets industry workers and organized an international conference in late 2004. Patricia Sanchez, a CADU volunteer, describes how the group came about: "We first became aware of the dangers of DU after hearing Felicity Arbuthnot speak about the health effects attributed to DU use in the first Gulf War. She is a journalist who has visited Iraq many times, is a mine of information and a passionate speaker. We were profoundly moved at her stories of the damage done to civilians, especially to the children. We felt we had to do something about it and decided to launch CADU."
Elsewhere in the UK, nuclear activists are joining CADU in making themselves heard about nuclear weapons. In February 2005, for example, the Aldermaston Women's Peace Campaign (AWPC) staged a "die-in" at their local government office in protest of new projects scheduled at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) headquarters in Aldermaston, the only UK location at which nuclear bombs are produced.
Within weeks of the Aldermaston event, 13 activists temporarily took over part of Lockheed Martin's European headquarters in Brussels, protesting the company's nuclear-weapons activities. Elena Rodriguez Portela from the Belgian group For Mother Earth was there and described the scene, "We had one group of people playing samba staying in the hall of the building to block the security in case of need, and a second group going to the office to disturb the work of the employees by asking annoying questions about the dirty businesses of Lockheed Martin, and to talk to the European director of the company." Rodriguez Portela added, "I did it because I feel people forget that war is an industry, an industry from the governments that is killing people. If we make people aware of what is going on we will still have hope."
These creative grassroots actions complement the work of similarly-focused global groups, such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The moral of the story? Across the world, women are proving that non-proliferation is a non-gender issue. How soon that reality will be reflected in the halls of power remains to be seen.
Heather Wokusch is a journalist who has continued to document the use of depleted uranium. Her articles may be found at her web site, www.heatherWokusch.com