TL: GREENPEACE MAGAZINE July/August 1989 SO: Greenpeace USA (GP) DT: July 1989 Keywords: greenpeace periodicals pre90 us digests gp / NAVAL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS: The Secret History Watering the Desert for Cows' Sake A Nation Drunk on Oil U.S. Congress Flips Over Dolphin Report A Nation Drunk on Oil By Andre Carothers "They have us hooked. We're oil money junkies. Got to keep mainlining those oil taxes, so drill anywhere you want boys. Just don't let the good times stop." --Dave Hammock, general manager, Valdez public radio station. For Alaska and the natural rhythms of majestic Prince William Sound, the good times stopped March 24. More than 11 million gallons of oil from the holed Exxon Valdez have clogged the Sound's countless bays and inlets, as well as the stomachs, fur and feathers of thousands of sea lions, otters, sea birds and fish. It is perhaps the world's worst oil spill. But what a party it was. Alaska's oil revenue hope chest, which has topped $10 billion, doled out an $800 check to every Alaskan citizen last year. More than 80 percent of the state's income comes from the pipeline. The state is so flush with oil money that Alaska residents pay no state income or sales taxes. This orgy is small potatoes compared to the galloping profits of the oil industry. More than $15 billion worth of oil was pumped out of the North Slope last year. The port of Valdez is one of the world's most profitable operations of any kind, taking in some $12 billion in the last 12 years. So obscene was the annual take of big oil at the beginning of this decade that Congress passed a windfall profits tax in an effort to skim some off for the national treasuries. Exxon made more than $5 billion on some $88 billion gross revenues last year. But nothing compares to the profligate oil binge that has dominated the United States in the 1980s. The mass motorization of America (the number of vehicles on the nation's roads is 70 percent higher than it was 20 years ago) now consumes some 65 percent of the nation's oil, or roughly 10 million barrels a day. Adjusted for inflation, gasoline prices are lower today than they were in 1973, at the onset of the "energy crisis," and less than half their peak eight years ago. At the behest of General Motors and Ford, the government in 1986 rolled back automobile efficiency standards. As a result, Detroit too is cashing in, pushing "full-size" luxury gas- guzzlers on consumers. On top of that, the Reagan administration cut funds for energy conservation by nearly three-quarters, reduced federal funding for research and development of renewable energy nearly 85 percent, and ended tax incentives for builders who wanted to use solar power technologies. Thanks in part to this extravagance, the United States and Canada lead every other industrialized nation in the amount of energy required to do business. Their auto fleets burn more oil on average than those of most other industrialized nations. If the U.S. government had not gutted the fuel efficiency standards set in the '70s, we would be burning 300,000 fewer barrels of oil a day. Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted each year because industry and government have collaborated to eliminate any incentive to save energy. All this would be merely stupid if it were not for the fact that extracting oil from the earth poisons the soil, air and water around the rigs and refineries. And when burned, it pollutes the earth's atmosphere. The oil aboard the Exxon Valdez, had it not spilled prematurely into Prince William Sound, would have concluded its useful life fouling the air of the lower 48, and eventually the entire planet, in the form of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and a host of other gases that contribute to acid rain and global warming. The United Nations and the National Academy of Sciences both have warned that global warming means human catastrophe in the form of raised sea levels, agricultural upheaval and habitat loss. The fossil fuel era must end, in part for fiscal reasons, but primarily for ecological ones. The United States, with six percent of the world population, uses a quarter of its energy, so the buck stops here. The best way to begin is a crash program to develop alternatives and promote efficiency, particularly in transport. The paltry progress we have made--for example, wringing 19 miles per gallon out of our car fleet--is a tiny fraction of what is possible. Engines that go five times as far on a gallon of gas are available, as are alternative fuels and mass transit systems. But unless the public outcry is massive and sustained, we can expect business as usual. It gives pause to consider that before Captain Hazlewood set a course for Bligh Reef, put the ship on automatic pilot and went to sleep, the world had begun to lose the battle to save the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge from the oil companies. The spill itself halted the flow of oil through Valdez for a mere five days. Within a few weeks, the Department of Interior issued permits to Shell Oil to begin drilling three- mile-deep exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea. Big oil also has its eyes on the coasts of California, Massachusetts, Florida and South Carolina. For those who choose to boycott, all the more power to them. May it bring Exxon's arrogant CEO, Lawrence G. Rawl, some discomfort (his retort, when asked to compare Prince William Sound to Bhopal, was that Exxon had "nobody dead"). But a tiny dent in Exxon's massive profits means nothing if it doesn't also help wean the nation from its addiction to fossil fuels. While we are cutting up our Exxon credit cards, the air above 60 U.S. cities remains well below air quality standards set nearly two decades ago. "We don't want to just boycott Exxon," says Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, New York. "We want to put them all out of business." Alaska's head is bloody and bowed. "Many of us now want our state's soul back," writes one Kodiak resident. "Wherever you are, don't do what we have done." Good advice, but hard to follow. For without sustained protest we can expect decision- makers to fall back in the thrall of the oil companies, a place where trading one of the most beautiful pieces of this country's natural heritage for a few months of oil we don't need seems "reasonable and prudent." THE EMERALD DESERT by Mark Reisner It's summertime. Do you know where your water is? Turning deserts into rice paddies, for one thing. Who benefits? Not the environment or the economy. FISH STORY by Bruce McKay When half the Atlantic coast's dolphins died two years ago, the U.S. Congress demanded answers. In April, government scientists turned in a report that only raises more questions. NAVAL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS: THE SECRET HISTORY by William M. Arkin and Joshua Handler The Belknap and the Guardfish are names that, but for a bit of luck, would have joined Chernobyl as warnings of the nuclear age. Greenpeace and the Institute for Policy Studies have uncovered a secret record of accidents that takes much of the lustre off Navy brass. ECONOTES: Louisiana, a haven for polluters--Whales as lyricists- -WMI comes clean?--Greenpeace goes platinum-- Hanford leaks radioactivity. ACTION ACCESS: Tree planting plans--Save the turtles-- Poison- free paper--Right to know--Greenpeace's "how-to" video--Whale meat again--Challenge plutonium. CAMPAIGNS: Penta protest--Sharks sink in nets--Plutonium production panned--A wasted waste trade meeting--Navajos nix incinerator--Livermore plans radioactive burn--New sludge scenario?--Pesticide lost at sea. ECONOTES LOUISIANA, THIRD WORLD DUMPING GROUND OH, FOR THE GOOD OLD days, when U.S. environmentalists and their gangs of regulators were ruining the economy by forcing well- meaning companies to take their business abroad. Now, according to a report in Taiwan's China Post, that country's super-rich plastics tycoon, Wang Yung Ching, is facing "difficulties raised by increasing labor and environmental movements." He plans to take his business, Formosa Plastics, abroad--to Louisiana. In March, Formosa Plastics announced plans for a $470 million plastic film production facility in Pointe Coupee Parish to manufacture such consumer staples as imitation leather, swimming pool liners and raincoats. This is the same Formosa Plastics that has had "serious ground water contamination and lots of releases" at a vinyl chloride plant in Baton Rouge, according to Willie Fontenot, special assistant on environmental affairs to the Louisiana state attorney general Formosa Plastics has a checkered history. In 1985, the Delaware Department of Natural Resources issued an emergency decree revoking all of the company's permits after tolerating four years of consistent violations, including 40 separate illegal releases of carcinogenic gas (10 after a cease-and-desist order was issued) and violations of waste water permits in 16 out of the preceding 24 months. Louisiana seems unconcerned. The company's renewed interest in Pointe Coupee, said one state development official, "symbolizes Formosa's commitment to Louisiana." TRY HARDER, NUMBER ONE TO SPRUCE UP ITS TARNISHED image, top executives at Waste Management Incorporated (WMI), the world's largest toxic and municipal waste "handler," have been sharing a tiny portion of the $750 million profit they took in last year with environmental groups. Roughly $350,000 went out last year to national and local groups to fund environmental television shows, publications, meetings and other worthwhile projects. WMI has also taken out a few ads, including one in the Winter 1988 issue of Wilderness magazine, headed "We profit from protecting the environment." It touts their "state-of-the-art" waste disposal landfill near San Jose that borders on one of four remaining colonies of the brown bay checkerspot butterfly. The company's public relations department faces an uphill battle. In the last 18 months, WMI has been barred from doing business in Chicago because of bribery convictions and fined $1 million in California, nearly $2 million in Florida and another $800,000 in Wisconsin as a result of anti-trust convictions and ground water contamination. In April of this year, Shelby County, Tennessee, also kicked the company out. In New Orleans last October, a city sanitation official testified he received death threats from WMI representatives in response to his investigation into alleged overcharging on waste-hauling contracts. The year-end report of Franklin Research and Development Corporation, a socially responsible investment advisory service, gives WMI its lowest rating, adding, "in the view of environmental organizations, it has one of the worst environmental reputations of any major corporation." As for the "state-of-the-art" landfill outside San Jose, it was discovered to be leaking in March. Still, WMI has chalked up a few successes, most notably with the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), the nation's largest environmental group. NWF President Jay Hair has given WMI chief Dean Buntrock a seat on their board. There is nothing incongruous about this relationship, says Hair, because WMI shares all of NWF's policies "related to toxics and waste disposal" and "is conducting its business in a responsible manner." HANFORD LEAKS ALTHOUGH ITS DAYS ARE numbered, Washington's 540-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation remains a hazard. The place where much of the radioactive material for the nation's nuclear arsenal was manufactured is scheduled to be closed. But how the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) goes about its business in Hanford's twilight years is of great significance, particularly after the release in March of a report commissioned by Greenpeace that shows far more ground water contamination than the government has admitted. According to Norm Buske and Linda Josephson of SEARCH Technical Services, 90 percent of the springs sampled along the edge of the Columbia River are contaminated with long-lived radioactive wastes. A previous SEARCH report, produced in 1986, proved that ground water migration from Hanford's PUREX plutonium processing plant was 10 times faster than DOE claimed. DOE has insisted for years that Hanford soils would prevent migration of wastes to the river. Not only are they still reprocessing plutonium and dumping the wastes on the ground (enough spent fuel rods remain to keep one plant in operation until 1995), but DOE's latest clean-up plan relies on the assumption that the wastes do not migrate. Says Tim Connor of the Hanford Education Action League, "The clean-up plan they are now considering would allow DOE to continue waste discharges into the soil for years to come." Adds Buske, "What are they going to do when the site is 'cleaned up?' Let farmers irrigate and children swim?" WATER, WATER, EVERYWHERE THIS FROM THE JUST-WHEN-you-thought-it-was-safe" department: according to a report by the Environmental Policy Institute, health conscious consumers who have been turning the U.S. bottled water business into a $1.9 billion-a-year concern may be ingesting water that is no safer than what pours from their kitchen tap. Bottled water is selling for up to 700 times what tap water costs, or three times the price of Kuwait's best crude. But government regulation is minimal; packagers need not test for more than a few contaminants, no one cares what type of material the bottles are made of, and the test results need not be reported to public officials. In 1987, Massachusetts looked into the contents of bottled water sold in that state and found, among other things, arsenic in A Sante Sparkling Mineral Water, lead in Holyoke Distilled Water and high levels of radiation in New England Spring Water. These companies have since cleaned up their products. While many bottled waters get a clean bill of health, say the authors of the report, the idea that bottled water is by definition cleaner than tap water "is clearly an unfounded assumption." THE MOSCOW HIT PARADE THE TALLIES ARE IN. ACCORDing to Tass news agency and the Moscow Kommsomol (Communist Party youth organization) newspaper, the Greenpeace album Rainbow Warriors is at the top of the charts in the Soviet Union. It is the first Western album to reach number one on the official Tass list. On March 6, the two record set, a collection of hits by groups such as REM, Eurythmics, U2 and Pretenders, was released in Moscow with the help of some of the artists. Police estimated some 6,000 fans waited that morning outside each of Moscow's Melodiya record stores, within hours, the first half million records sold out. Despite a paper shortage that delayed the second pressing, the record went platinum on May 15, with over one million copies sold. "Every time you plug in an electric appliance in the Soviet Union," said one Soviet journalist, "you hear the Greenpeace album." The record sales will help fund environmental work in the Soviet Union as well as international cooperation on scientific projects. It also introduces Greenpeace to the Soviet people, a pamphlet included inside the album sparked over 10,000 pieces of mail in the first week alone. Meanwhile, mail is pouring into Melodiya's stores asking when more records will be available, and the album is circulating on the black market. The album will be released in the West in June. DEEP WATER TROUBADOURS WHALES, PARTICULARLY 50-ton humpbacks, are long winded singers. A single song can last up to 30 minutes and a song session, for many hours. The mammals swap songs and pass them down from generation to generation. They improvise as well, changing the songs as they go. According to Katherine Payne, a biologist at the Long Term Research Institute (LTRI), the whales in a given area, such as the Pacific Ocean, "all know what the latest, hottest songs are." But scientists have long wondered how whales can remember these epic songs. "I have never been able to memorize the five-minute first Kyrie of the B-Minor Mass," Stephen Jay Gould has noted, "so how could a whale sing for 30 minutes and then repeat itself accurately?" The answer to this mystery, it seems, is rhyme. In February, Linda Guinee at Cornell University and Katherine Payne announced the discovery that whale songs contain repeating passages or rhymes. So, just as people use rhymes as mnemonic devices to remember Mother Goose and songs from Brahms to Run DMC, whales use rhymes to keep their verses straight. Guinee and Payne found that the longer and more complicated the song, the more prevalent the whales' use of rhymes. Scientists think that songs may be associated with mating. Male whales, who do most of the singing, may in fact be crooning love songs. "Not only are whales great singers," says Kate O'Connell, also at LTRI, "they're great poets as well." THE EMERALD DESERT By Marc Reisner A RATIONAL APPROACH? If you were to try to bring some sense and rationality into western water policy, where would you begin? A Ford Foundation-sponsored investigation, with which the author served as principal consultant (the report will be published later this year by Island Press), came up with the following recommendations: The Bureau of Reclamation, by far the largest marketer of water in the West, should not just permit but actively encourage transfers of water out of low value agricultural uses. (Usually, it does neither, particularly when some farmer objects to his neighbor's sale of federally supplied water, which is almost all of the time.) One simple way to accomplish this goal would be for the bureau to raise its absurdly low water rates. Doing so would not bankrupt its privileged customers, nor would it drive food prices through the roof. Farmers buying water from the state-built California Water Project pay four to five times more than those who get it from the bureau's gigantic Central Valley Project, but they still manage to farm profitably (on much less water), and their tomatoes and grapes cost the same as anyone else's. Western water laws should be amended in every state so that farmers who save water through conservation or by planting some less thirsty crop, retain their right to that water. They should then be permitted to sell it to make their effort and investment worthwhile. Incredibly, only California and Oregon, among all western states, explicitly state in their water codes that the water farmers manage to conserve remains theirs. "Use it or lose it" is, in this way, a doctrine that achieves exactly the opposite of what was originally intended: efficient water use. Subsidized water used to raise surplus crops should be subject to a hefty surcharge in order to discourage overproduction and frivolous water use. Incredibly, again, about 37 percent of all farmland irrigated with Bureau of Reclamation water raises surplus crops. Every western state should follow Oregon's recent example and amend its laws so that up to 25 percent of all salvaged or conserved water goes to fish, wildlife, and other environmental needs. Given the American public's overwhelming support for stronger environmental protection, taxpayers would almost certainly finance water purchases for environmental needs if the laws explicitly permitted such purchases in the first place. States worried that transfers of water rights from agriculture to cities could devastate rural communities should adopt the following scheme of priority: cities seeking new water must first pay the farmers to install state-of-the-art irrigation technology so that they can get by with less water on the same acreage. (Typical water savings with the best technology are in the range of 10 to 30 percent.) They must then negotiate emergency leases of water rights, where the farmers give up their water (for a good price) only during drought years. Only then can cities begin buying permanent water rights. Los ANGELES, ONE MIGHT REASONABLY guess, is the most prodigious user of water in the state of California, if not the entire world. At least 12 million people inhabit the metropolitan region, a sightless sprawl that has filled a basin twice the size of Luxembourg and is spilling into the ultramontane deserts beyond. The climate is semi-arid to emphatically dry, although many people, including Angelenos, seem surprised when you point this out, because enough water comes in by aqueduct each day (about two billion gallons) to have transformed this former stubbly grassland and alkali waste into an ersatz Miami, six times as large. Los Angeles now diverts the entire flow of the Owens River, one of the largest of the eastern Sierra Nevada streams; it appropriates a substantial share of the Colorado River, the largest by far in the American Southwest; it siphons off about a third of the flow of the Feather River, one of the biggest in the state, through an aqueduct 445 miles long. The few meager streams in and around the basin have long since been sucked dry. In Los Angeles, even after months of habitual drought (southern California is virtually rainless from April through November), the fastidiously manicured lawns remain green. The swimming pools remain filled, eight million cars well washed. There are verdant cemeteries for humans and their pets. The Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce boasts of more than 100 golf courses, shining like green lakes in that desiccated landscape where it rains about four inches in a typical year. Los Angeles is a palpable mirage, a vast outdoor Disneyland, the Babylon and Ur of the desert empire that is the American West. But surprisingly enough, Los Angeles is not the biggest consumer of water in California. It isn't even close. The most prolific user of water in California is grass--not lawn grass, which consumes half of the all the water imported by Los Angeles, but irrigated pasture, grass grown in the desert for cows and sheep. In 1986, just under a million acres of California crop land were planted in grass, requiring 4.2 million acre-feet of water--the domestic consumption, including swimming pools and lawns, of 22 million people. Such profligate use of water by agriculture is at the core of the so-called "water crisis" in the western states--and it is a major economic problem too. Since California is largely a desert state, now in the third year of what could turn out to be a historic drought, one would have to conclude that any crop using so much valuable water must be extraordinarily valuable itself, pumping billions and billions into what has become the sixth largest economy in the world. But that notion is even more wildly wrong than the common belief that Los Angeles drinks up half of all the water in the state. Measured against the gross state product of $575 billion, irrigated pasture's contribution of $94 million (in 1986) was as invisible as a flea on an elephant's leg. Put another way, irrigated pasture's gross value amounted to one five-thousandth of the California economy. But this almost worthless crop consumed one-seventh of the water on which that munificent economy depends. Steal Water from the Cows In all these figures is a startling irony and the casus belli of one of the most important, and potentially bitter, environmental campaigns of the next 10 years--a campaign that, if successful, could virtually halt the construction of new western dams for decades. If you would rather not ruin more rivers with dams, and you have water for 20 million people raising pasture, which grows to perfection on rainfall in 30 other states, then the obvious alternative to new dams is to buy, beg, borrow, or steal the water from the cows. You could dedicate half of it to rivers and wetlands, to salmon and waterfowl, and still have enough left over to satisfy California's projected urban demand for another 20 years. If that still isn't enough, you could begin buying water from California's alfalfa farmers, who use water for another 20 million people, raising another low-value crop. After that, you could retire some of the cotton acreage, since cotton, a now- and-then surplus crop that farmers elsewhere are often paid not to grow, consumes as much water as greater Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. Then you could move to the rice acreage, on the theory that it makes little sense to plant a crop in the desert that requires almost 100 inches of water per year, when that crop has been chronically in surplus for the past decade and contributes a miserable $210 million a year to the California economy, barely more than irrigated pasture. In fact, if you bought out just half the acreage given over to these four crops, you would reduce agricultural income (which is only 2.5 percent of the California economy anyway) by an almost insignificant 8 percent. You would still have a vast and undiminished acreage raising crops that make sense: grapes, tomatoes, oranges, lemons, artichokes, pears, beans, asparagus, avocados, almonds, peaches, lettuce, carrots, and the 150 others that California's Mediterranean climate blooms forth. But you would instantly free up enough water for another 10 cities the size of L.A. proper. . . God forbid. All the warmed-over plans for new dams and aqueducts--the $2 billion Auburn Dam, an enlarged Shasta Dam, dams on the wild rivers of the state's beautiful North Coast-- would be unnecessary if so much water did not go to what, by any reasonable standard, is frivolous use. (And things are no different in any other western state.) Even if agricultural water was purchased for $5,000 per acre-foot--two to four times the going rate--it would still be cheaper than water from new dams, which could cost $10,000 per acre foot. Used in an urban setting, the water would create more jobs and generate far more income than it does raising cows or surplus crops. The environment would also benefit in important ways. Obviously, there would be no "need" to submerge more wild rivers under grotesque mud-walled reservoirs. Some of the worst sources of toxic minerals and pesticides, which have poisoned wildlife refuges in California and throughout the American West, would be removed. (California farmers use 30 percent of all the pesticides applied in the United States, and no one knows how much of the residue is flushed into San Francisco Bay.) Cities buying water from farmers would be under pressure from their environmentally enlightened citizens to leave some of it in the rivers for the benefit of wildlife and fish. (Opinion polls show that urban dwellers in California and throughout the West are more interested in environmental protection than their rural counterparts. It is also a fact that agriculture's dams, diversion, poisoned runoff, and ubiquitous grazing livestock have damaged more of the West's watersheds and aquatic environment than probably anything else.) On the other hand, what are the odds that California will soon adopt anything like this water development-through-conservation plan? Almost nil. One reason is that the farmers' political power is vastly out of proportion to their economic might, although in the richest agricultural state in America, where huge corporations like Tenneco, Exxon, and Getty Oil are in the farming business, they have plenty of that too. Another reason is Americans' sentimental regard for agriculture, despite its gargantuan appetite for water, pesticides and taxpayer subsidies. But the most important reason has nothing to do with politics, economics, or sentimentality. It has to do with a scoundrel's second-to-last refuge: the law. Use it or Lose it In the American West, as in many other arid regions of the world, water is claimed and apportioned in ways utterly foreign to wetter climes. The western doctrine of water law is based on a system passed down from Sumerian times, usually referred to as the doctrine of appropriative rights. Poured into a kettle and boiled down for a week and a half (it is viscous and devilishly complex), appropriative rights doctrine becomes a fine residue of two overarching legal concepts. One is "first in time, first in right." The other is "use it or lose it." "First in time, first in right" means exactly what it says: the first person to lay a claim to water has "senior" rights to that water for as long as he and his descendants live. The doctrine was eagerly adopted in the 19th century by California and most other western states, when it became obvious that water, more than anything else, was the limiting factor in an arid region's economic growth. Under riparian rights doctrine, which still prevails in most of Europe and the eastern United States, the water in a river belongs to anyone who owns the land through which it flows. Applying that doctrine to an arid region, however, would leave a few riparian landowners with the region's entire water supply. It simply wouldn't do. Some of the largest western cities--San Francisco, Tucson, Denver, Los Angeles--grew up in places with far too little water to sustain their growth. The same applies to agriculture almost anywhere it rarely rains. The diversion of water, often over hundreds of miles, is absolutely essential for both urban and agricultural growth in the West. But to make the enormous effort and expense worthwhile, the cities and farmers need an assured water supply. The concept of first in time, first in right grants that inviolate water right to all successive claimants until the supply is, sometimes literally, used up. To ensure that those parties holding water rights do not simply hoard their supply, waiting for its value to increase, most western state water codes require them to put their water to some "beneficial use." If they do not, they lose their water rights. This seemingly pitiless doctrine was also viewed, in the 19th century, as essential to an arid region's economic future. If water was not constantly put to some beneficial use-- irrigating crop land, quenching an urban region's growing thirst-- economic development would be stunted and the desert would continue to exercise its majestic indifference to the material aspirations of mankind. When the doctrine of western water law was laid down, the American West was indeed, like a separate continent, isolated from the rest of the world by thousands of miles of ocean on the one side, by hundreds of miles of desert on the other. To be as self-sufficient as possible in food production was an entirely understandable, if not laudable, goal. As a result, many early water rights were granted for the "beneficial use" of raising grass or alfalfa for cattle or sheep. Today, with fast highways and refrigerated trucks and rail cars, the region can import its fresh meat from states with enough rainfall to grow grass--just as the eastern states import most of their fresh fruits and vegetables from California, Florida or Mexico. But farmers with huge water rights based on the "need" to irrigate pasture now find that, under appropriative rights doctrine, they cannot shift to oranges or grapes (which require far less water) without losing rights to all the water they would no longer need. Even if they are irrigating surplus crops like cotton and rice, the law almost insists that they keep doing so. That rice is raised in California's arid San Joaquin Valley, and that cotton, which once thrived in the wet Southeast, is now the principal crop grown in the scorching deserts of Arizona, tends to vindicate those who argue that less government is the highest form of government to which one can aspire. Nearly a century ago, when it became obvious that building immense dams and aqueducts was beyond the financial and technical ability of most western farmers, cities, and even states, the United States launched its first real experiment in socialism: an agency, as durable as it is antediluvian and obtuse, known as the Bureau of Reclamation. The bureau ranks second only to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the preeminent dam-builder in the western hemisphere (Brazil is catching up, but still has a long way to go). But to make a giant federal dam-building agency palatable to a society that still abhorred strong central government, Congress, in 1902, decreed that all farmers receiving irrigation water from the bureau must be charged only enough to repay the cost of the project-- without interest. In that simple, obscure provision is one of the principal causes of environmental destruction in the American West. Getting a home loan interest-free would reduce one's mortgage payments, depending on prevailing interest rates, by 60 to 90 percent; it is exactly the same in the case of Bureau of Reclamation water, and then some. When irrigation water costs as little as $3.50 an acre-foot (urban users typically pay 100 times as much for the same amount of water), it makes economic sense to raise water- consumptive and nearly worthless crops, especially if you get more taxpayer subsidies when your crop fails to reach the arbitrary "target" price. But it makes no sense to conserve water--not when a drip irrigation system can cost $800 per acre to install, and you can flood-irrigate the same acreage for fifteen dollars and change. Saving water is, quite literally, more expensive than wasting it. Put another way, federally subsidized water sold in western deserts is about two thousand times cheaper than its equivalent weight in sand. An Absurd Anachronism There, in a nutshell, is everything that is drastically wrong with our system of apportioning scarce water in the American West. The doctrine of appropriative rights forces farmers to continue irrigating grass rather than plant orange groves, for fear of losing their water rights. (And to a western farmer, there is no calamity like losing water rights.) Even if a farmer voluntarily forgoes some of his water for the sake of salmon or wild ducks, many western states refuse to recognize water returned to the natural environment as a "beneficial use." As a result, it can simply be appropriated by someone else. Farmers who cut their water consumption in half by installing drip systems, or by switching from pasture to lemons, usually find that they cannot sell what they no longer need, since it has ceased to be rightfully theirs! And with the Bureau of Reclamation selling tens of millions of acre-feet at astoundingly subsidized rates, many farmers have no incentive to conserve anyway. For at least a decade, a great number of enlightened westerners have complained that the doctrine of western water law has in large part, become an absurd anachronism, one that imprisons water in inefficient agricultural uses while cities go begging and environmental needs remain un-met. Even Republican politicians who normally oppose the environmental camp--Ronald Reagan and James Watt among them--have tried to gnaw away at the subsidies that make federally supplied water so cheap it could almost be free. So far, the results have been negligible. A few states, notably Colorado, permit a relatively free market in water rights to exist (most do not). But even there, most of the conservation disincentives referred to above still apply. If the government sold subsidized gasoline for 18 cents a gallon and penalized anyone who tried to get rid of his or her 20-year-old, 5,000-pound car, it could achieve a similar result. As an environmental issue, western water doctrine and policy is so complex and difficult to master that one despairs of early change. Even most westerners (and I include politicians) do not understand it, but it has created a thriving, blooming desert and a fantastic amount of private wealth, so they figure they might as well leave it alone. "We have a wonderful system of water conservation," a prominent western politician told me once. "It's called the doctrine of appropriative rights and the construction of dams." (In a westerner's hallucinatory water- short world, you "waste" water by letting it flow down rivers and out to sea, and you "conserve" it by building reservoirs.) On the other hand, things must change if the most enchanting and productive natural features of the western landscape--wild rivers, wetlands, fabulous estuaries such as the San Francisco Bay--are to survive at all. The Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge in Nevada, for example, is by far the most valuable waterfowl habitat in the state. Seventy-five percent of Nevada's ducks, 65 percent of its swans, and more than half of its geese depend on the refuge, an extremely important stopover and feeding ground for millions of wild waterfowl along the Pacific Flyway. Over the past 70 years, however, Still water's wetland acreage has declined by more than 90 percent--from 79,000 acres early in the century to barely 5,000 acres today. The main reason is agricultural water diversions upriver for a local alfalfa economy worth just a few million dollars a year. (One need hardly mention that much of the water the refuge still receives is full of selenium, boron and agrochemical crud.) In Nevada, as in most western states, irrigation agriculture consumes 85 to 90 percent of all the available water while contributing less than 5 percent to the state's economy. In California, a coastal state, the environmental damage caused by irrigation and subsidized water has been even worse. Six thousand miles of primordial salmon spawning habitat have become just a few hundred remnant miles, mainly because of huge irrigation-supply dams chinked low in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Friant Dam, a monolith built by the Bureau of Reclamation in 1949, completely destroyed the San Joaquin River's run of salmon, once the third-most prolific in the state. The bureau now wants to renew its Friant irrigation contracts for another 40 years, at the same inflation adjusted subsidized rates, without even considering the environmental calamity it has wrought. It has been hauled into court by a dozen environmental groups. Meanwhile, freshwater outflow to San Francisco Bay has been reduced by half, threatening the entire bay ecosystem with gradual ruin. (A combination of water diversions, pesticides, herbicides and urban pollution has reduced the striped bass population by 90 percent in just over 30 years.) And the Central Valley wetlands, still the most important winter habitat for waterfowl in North America, have been reduced in acreage by an appalling 95 percent. Before World War II, 40 to 50 million ducks still over wintered in California every year. Lately, the number has dropped to three million or fewer, while California-- thanks mainly to dams, diversions and subsidized irrigation water--still loses thousands of acres each year. Blaming agriculture for this disheartening mess strikes some people (including environmentalists in northern California) as heresy We have all been conditioned to believe that Los Angeles is the arch-villain, that the Tucsons and Denvers and Albuquerques are ruining the bucolic West. Where water is involved, however, relatively little responsibility for environmental destruction can be laid at the cities' feet. Urban southern California uses less than 10 percent of all the state's water and might be compared to a contained cancer: it has obliterated a lot of natural beauty under its ghastly, relentless sprawl, but has destroyed few distant wetlands or rivers, and has diverted only a small fraction of the fresh water that once nourished San Francisco Bay. But to blame the farmers themselves is not really fair, either, as they are merely pawns in an archaic system that has ceased to make much sense. We cannot expect farmers to refuse subsidized water that's too cheap to conserve. They cannot be asked to save water when their neighbor automatically gets what they no longer use. They cannot be asked to stop irrigating selenium-poisoned lands when the Bureau of Reclamation encouraged them to irrigate those lands in the first place and sells them the cheap water that makes it worthwhile. Some people fear, and not without reason that if a free market in water is created--if agricultural subsidies are ended and the cities get a license to buy up all the water rights they want-- the American West will metamorphose into an arid New Jersey. Some environmentalists have even advocated giving more water to agriculture, not less. These purblind arguments ignore the fact that, confronted with a stark choice, desert cities running out of water have always chosen to build dams rather than limit growth. A scarcity of water, in other words, has never crimped urban growth and probably never will. The largest dam currently proposed in the West with a serious chance of being built is Denver's Two Forks project. The East Bay Municipal Utility District in California wants to build two. In both instances, hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water are being used to irrigate low-value crops practically next door, but state and federal laws, water subsidies, or restrictive irrigation district covenants effectively keep that water out of the cities' hands. The answer to chaotic urban growth is to adopt tough-minded measures to control it such as limiting the number of new water and sewer hookups each year--as California's Marin County has decided to do. It is foolish to think that growth-obsessed cities such as San Jose and Denver will close their gates to new residents simply because they cannot buy water from farmers. Big cities are wealthy enough to build their own big dams (Denver's Two Forks Dam could easily cost $1 billion) and will most likely do so--if they cannot buy agricultural water, that is--until their own residents are thoroughly fed up with rampant growth. To reform western water law and policy and the stupefying, Soviet-style inefficiency it has wrought may be a job for Mikhail Gorbachev. But if we don't begin pretty soon, there will hardly be rivers or wetlands or estuaries left to save. Marc Reisner is the author of Cadillac Desert, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. ACTION ACCESS FREE TURTLES BY MAY 1 ALL SHRIMP trawlers were to be equipped with Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs). But as a last ditch stalling tactic, the state of Louisiana filed a temporary restraining order (TRO) on April 28th, requesting that the use of TEDs not be made mandatory at this time. Judge Patrick Carr denied the TRO, but Secretary of Commerce Robert A. Mosbacher, called for a 60-day warning period that will delay the enforcement of TED regulations yet again. Mosbacher's action amounts to tampering with the Endangered Species Act, selectively protecting endangered species, and ignoring due process (changing federal regulations requires a public comment period). Please write to the Hon. Robert A. Mosbacher, Secretary, U.S. Department of Commerce, Washington, DC 20230 and your congressional delegation. Say that the use of TEDs has already been postponed for five years and that further delays mean more sea turtles will drown in shrimp trawlers. KEEP GREENHOUSE AT BAY ONE WAY TO FIGHT THE GREEN house effect is to soak up carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere. If each of our one million readers planted a tree, we could neutralize the CO2 produced by burning one million tons of coal. Planting trees is especially beneficial in urban areas, where they shade "heat islands" that are normally three to five degrees warmer than outlying areas. Why not "green" your neighborhood? For further information, write: National Arbor Day Foundation, Conservation Trees,100 Arbor Ave. Nebraska City, NE 68410 and/ or American Forestry Association, Global ReLeaf, P.O. Box 2000, Washington, DC 20013. POISON OUT OF PAPER A TYPICAL BLEACHED-PULP mill generates roughly 50 tons of chlorinated poisons every day. Greenpeace has called for a regulatory solution to this problem: set one standard for all chlorinated poisons, along with strict time lines for complete elimination of these harmful compounds. This would compel the paper industry to shift to non-chlorine-based bleaching and to offer unbleached paper products. Write to your congressional delegation: U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515; U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510. GRASSROOTS RESEARCH NEW RIGHT-TO-KNOW LAWS require companies to file annual reports with EPA that list the toxic chemicals they release. Discharges for 1988 will be filed on July 1. These reports will be available on the new Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) database, which will be part of the National Library of Medicine's TOXNET on-line information system. To access the database via personal computer and modem, you can request applications and support services from the National Library of Medicine at 800638-8480 or 301-496-6193. Many public and university libraries subscribe to this TOXNET system. The TRI data will also be distributed on compact disks to 400 libraries in the Federal Government Depository Network. And every state right-to-know office has access to the TRI data. Greenpeace's new Citizen's Toxic Waste Audit Manual can teach you how to use the data to assemble a profile of a waste generator's emissions. For more information, send a self addressed stamped envelope to Waste Audit Manual, Green peace,1017 West Jackson Blvd., Chicago IL 60607. HOT VIDEO IF YOUR COMMUNITY IS fighting a hazardous waste incinerator, Greenpeace has produced a video that can help. This 30-minute presentation explains the hazards of toxic waste incineration and shows communities around the country that are fighting and defeating proposed facilities. Toxic Burn can be purchased on VHS for $19.95 from Greenpeace USA,1436 U St., NW, Washington, DC 20009; Attn: Video Department. PROTEST WHALERS IN SUPPORT OF OUR BOYCOTT, U.S. restaurant chains, such as Shoney's, Long John Silver's and Red Lobster, have suspended purchases of Icelandic fish. In addition,130 school systems have signed pledges not to do business with Iceland. This, combined with contract cancellations in Germany, has cost the Icelandic fishing industry $50 million. Despite this pressure, Iceland's whalers will kill up to a hundred whales this season. We need to take to the sidewalks and tell Burger King, Arthur Treacher's, Wendy's, Tastee Freez and Marriot Corporation that they should use their buying power to save the whales. On August 19, we will hold our seventh National Day to Protest Icelandic Whaling. Why not organize a protest? Write for an Icelandic Whaling Demonstration Kit from Greenpeace Iceland Boycott, 1436 U St., NW, Washington, DC 20009. MOP UP EXXON ON MARCH 24,THE EXXON Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. Animals are paying with their lives and fishermen with their livelihoods. Vent your anger at corporate irresponsibility and federal complacency. Don't just send a message to Exxon, send one to Congress. Tell them to support a moratorium on offshore oil development. Demand a responsible energy policy that will end our dependence on fossil fuels. Send rags or paper towels, like those used on the beaches in Valdez. Write "Energy Policy Now" on them and mail them to the House Appropriations Committee, H-218, U.S. Capitol, Washington, DC 20515. ENVIRONMENTAL BLUEPRINT A DIVERSE GROUP OF ENVIronmentalists, calling themselves "Project Blueprint," presented their environmental agenda in a meeting with President-Elect Bush in November. The report's editor, T. Allan Comp, has pared down the 1000-plus-page opus to paperback size. You can order Blueprint For The Environment: A Plan For Action for $13.95 (prepaid) from Howe Brothers Publishers, P.O. Box 6394, Salt Lake City, UT 84106; 800-426-5387. CHALLENGE PLUTONIUM THE PLUTONIUM CONTROL Act was introduced in Congress in May. It calls for the United States and Soviet Union to negotiate a mutually verifiable agreement to stop production of plutonium and enriched uranium for weapons (see Campaigns). Express your support for H.R. 2403 to The Honorable --------------, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, DC 20515 and for S.1047 to The Honorable ----------------, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510. Paid for by Greenpeace Action. Greenpeace Action is a sister organization of Greenpeace USA that promotes environmental protection and disarmament through grassroots organizing, education and legislation. FISH STORY: The government says 750 dolphins died of food poisoning. But no one's biting. By Bruce McKay BOB SCHOELKOPF RUNS THE MARINE MAMmal Stranding Center in Brigantine, New Jersey. He was once in the Navy but quit because he didn't like the way dolphins were treated. Along with the rehabilitation of sick and injured animals, his work had involved picking up the corpses of the handful of dolphins that washed up dead on New Jersey beaches each year and finding out what killed them. Generally it was old age or disease, even the odd shark attack. Then came the summer of 1987. By early July, seven dolphins, some alive, but obviously ailing, had beached themselves along the New Jersey shore. Over the next few weeks, the center was flooded with phone calls at all hours of the day and night; dolphins were washing up all over the beaches. Those still living were suffering; their skin was covered with lesions or sloughing off in sheets and they were breathing with great difficulty. On July 14, Schoelkopf called the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service, the branch of government charged with managing and studying marine mammals in the United States. Within two weeks, the government, under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), began to organize a major study. In August, the investigation went behind closed doors. Dr. Joseph R. Geraci, a world renowned expert on marine mammal husbandry and disease was asked to lead the investigation. His action plan left out Schoelkopf, who had been fastidiously removing organ samples from the New Jersey strandings for analysis at the government laboratory in Ames, Iowa. "All along I thought I had been participating as part of a team," says Schoelkopf. "I was thanked for my help and told they'd contact me if they needed anything." Others were similarly treated. Anne Dingwall, who coordinates wildlife issues for Greenpeace in the United States, asked for the results of the toxicological analyses, which according to Geraci, showed surprisingly high levels of some contaminants. No, she was informed, the contaminant levels were not going to be released until the investigation had reached its conclusion. It was an issue of great public concern, all right; more than 750 dolphins, perhaps over a thousand, died--more than half of the Atlantic coastal population. They were washing up on the same beaches enjoyed by ten million people a year. But it was to be studied privately. AND so THEY WAITED, 17 MONTHS IN ALL until February 1,1989, when NOAA and Dr. Geraci announced at a major press conference the investigation's conclusion. The dolphins "were poisoned by eating fish tainted by a naturally occurring toxin from 'red tide' algae." The evidence? Varying amounts of this neurotoxin were found in eight out of seventeen dolphins that had been tested. "Could we say that pollution had nothing to do with the die-off?" asked a journalist. "Yes," answered Geraci. "these dolphins died of breve toxin intoxication and poisoning." Many experts were incredulous, but there was no way to judge. NOAA did not supply the report upon which the statement was based. On February 12, Greenpeace was leaked the study, now known as the "preliminary final" report. In it, Geraci set the basis for arguing that a natural toxin killed the dolphins. Among the pages of statistics, however, lay clues that would lead others in the marine mammal community to an entirely different conclusion. The pages contained figures showing that the dolphins had absorbed astounding amounts of man-made chemicals, such as PCBs, DDT and chlordane. "They knew about this a year and a half ago," said Dingwall. "Why didn't they tell anyone?" The question is more than academic, because judging from a memo dated August 1987 and leaked to Congress and environmental groups, there are indications that government researchers may have decided early on to downplay the role of toxic pollution in the die-off. In it, one government scientist asks another for "data generated on PCBs/ pesticides" and then says that "no special attention will be drawn to these data . . . [and] a blanket statement will be made that the levels were not out of the ordinary." Congress is now looking into the origin of the memo. "One dolphin had the highest levels of PCBs ever found in a marine mammal--6,800 parts per million in the animal's blubber," said Lesley Scheele of Greenpeace's Ocean Ecology Campaign. "The government prohibits sale of fish for consumption with more than 2 parts per million. Under government regulations, that dolphin and most of the others would have to be disposed of as toxic waste. Many of them were swimming Superfund sites." The "preliminary final" report also showed that rigorous analyses were done for only a handful of chemicals, and some well-known hazards such as dioxins, dibenzofurans, and aromatic hydrocarbons hadn't been looked for at all. It failed to back up the case for chronic breve toxin poisoning with any precedents, largely because there aren't any. Breve toxin has never been shown to weaken an animal's immune system, nor is it associated with any of the lesions found in the dolphins. PCBs, on the other hand, are known to cause such lesions in other mammals. PCBs are also known as profound immuno-suppressers, as well as being toxic to the liver, skin and nervous system. "If even these high levels of PCBs were ignored," says Dingwall, "how can we take any aspect of this report seriously?" As the leaked report made the rounds of the scientific community, criticism mounted. Red tides of the kind that breed breve toxin producing algae are common in the Gulf of Mexico, yet no similar die-off has ever occurred there. "Considering what those poor animals looked like," said Scheele, "if a die- off like that had occurred in the last 150 years, we would have heard about it." Geraci would later argue that dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico have learned to avoid red tides, in part because three Gulf dolphins he analyzed had no breve toxin in them. Hardly a large sample or rigorous procedure, said critics. And Greenpeace supplied photographs proving that Gulf dolphins have no qualms about eating fish in red tides. Dr. Pierre Beland, a Canadian expert on Beluga whales who heads the St. Lawrence National Institute of Ecotoxicology, stated, "In its present form, the report is far from convincing In fact, the author has chosen to write it in such a way that he appears to be trying to convince himself." ON MAY 9, A SKEPTICAL U S. CONGRESS HELD a hearing to review the conclusions of what NOAA said was the "final" report. Few missed the fact that it differed from the "preliminary final" report, particularly as to its conclusions. The dolphins were now only "apparently" poisoned by breve toxin The influence of toxic chemicals would have to be "investigated further." "Sometime between the February 1 press conference and the drafting of the final report," said Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, "the tone grew far less definitive." Although he insists that breve toxin is the main culprit, even Geraci himself joined the flurry of backpedalling. When challenged by a reporter about his insistence in February that toxic contaminants had nothing to do with the die-off, he said, "Perhaps I should not have been so categorical." Nevertheless, Geraci stuck to his conclusion, and the hearing consisted largely of further criticism of the report. "The most notable shortcoming of the report," said Dr. Beland, "is that so little hard evidence implicating breve toxin exists, while remarkably little effort was put into investigating other possibilities for the die-off." Why would an internationally recognized marine mammal pathologist like Dr. Geraci produce a report so roundly condemned by his colleagues? While theories of conspiracy and incompetence have surfaced, perhaps the real reason is more subtle. The vagaries of funding and the influence of the scientific "establishment" are known to play significant roles, particularly in the area of marine mammals. Several of the people interviewed for this article declined to allow their names to be quoted, largely for fear that their careers would be compromised "The minute you get into marine mammals," said one, "it gets political." Fortunately, there is a new generation of ocean scientists, says Beland, who are more willing to look across scientific specialties, into toxicology, for example, for answers. These are the scientists who are suggesting a role for pollution in the dolphin die-off, but many are reluctant to be heard. "What seems incredible," says Beland, "is that when evidence appears that links the dolphin's plight with pollutants, we have to stand on a soap-box and wave our arms and scream. A lot of scientists don't want to hear it." Part of the congressional delegation from the Atlantic coast does want to hear it, and it appears that the investigation may be reopened "If we put it back into [NOAA's] hands, it'll be like the fox guarding the chicken coop," said one congressional aide, "but NOAA's all we've got. It has to be depoliticized." Aides have promised that the next investigation will be broad- based, not conducted behind closed doors. But in any case, after two years of "study" we are no closer to finding out what killed more than half of the Atlantic coastal population of tursiops, the bottle nose dolphin. And the question must be answered. "Something incredible, unusual, anomalous is happening along the eastern seaboard," Dr. Theodore Smayda of the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island testified in May. "It seems clear to me that we have the ongoing equivalent of 'silent spring' of the sea." Adds Melvin Goodwin of the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium (who publicly questioned the conclusions of NOAA's report despite the fact that all of Sea Grant's money comes from NOAA), "The mortalities may be symptomatic of more profound events taking place in other parts of the marine environment." Indeed, judging from other events--the seal die-offs in Europe, the humpback whale mortalities off Cape Cod, the continuing decline of the St. Lawrence belugas, closed beaches, fish kills, algal blooms and a panoply of other signals--the dolphin die-off is part of a pattern of environmental decline. Already this summer, reports Bob Schoelkopf, the Marine Mammal Stranding Center has taken in an unusual number of sick harbor seals. Bruce McKay is the marine mammal campaigner for Greenpeace in Canada. NAVAL NUCLEAR ACCIDENTS: The Secret History By William M. Arkin and Joshua Handler CLOSE CALLS In 1965, a pilot, a plane and a nuclear warhead pitched off the deck of the USS Ticonderoga only 80 miles from antinuclear Japan. Water pressure broke apart the plutonium warhead a few minutes later, but it took 24 years for the news to reach Tokyo. The 1975 collision between the USS Belknap and the USS John F. Kennedy threatened to scatter plutonium across southern Italy, Sicily and beyond. The USS Guardfish suffered a reactor accident in 1973. Four sailors were contaminated. NUCLEAR BOMBS AND REACTORS ON THE OCEAN FLOOR March 10,1956: A U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber carrying two capsules of nuclear materials for nuclear bombs, en route from Florida to Europe, fails to meet its aerial refuelling plane over the Mediterranean Sea. Presumed lost. April 18,1959: The U.S. Navy dumps reactor vessel and reactor plant components of the USS Seawolf into 9,000 feet of water, about 120 miles off the Maryland coast. June 4,1962: A nuclear test device atop a Thor rocket booster falls into the Pacific Ocean near Johnston Atoll after malfunctioning. Part of the United States' first high-altitude atmospheric nuclear test attempt. June 20,1962: A second attempt to detonate a nuclear device in the atmosphere fails when a Thor booster is destroyed over Johnston Atoll, and the nuclear device falls into the Pacific Ocean. April 10,1963: The nuclear-powered USS Thresher implodes and sinks 100 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in approximately 8,500 feet of water, killing all 129 aboard, including 17 civilian observers. May 27,1968: The USS Scorpion sinks 400 miles southwest of the Azores in more than 10,000 feet of water, killing 99 crewmen. Two ASTOR nuclear torpedoes aboard. April 11,1968: A Soviet Golf class ballistic missile submarine with three SS-N-5 missiles and probably two nuclear torpedoes sinks in the Pacific, about 750 miles northwest of the island of Oahu, Hawaii. April 12,1970: A Soviet November class nuclear-powered attack submarine experiences a nuclear propulsion casualty and sinks while operating in heavy seas, approximately 300 nautical miles northwest of Spain. At least two nuclear torpedoes aboard. October 6,1986: A Soviet Yankee I class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine with 16 SS-N-6 missiles and probably two nuclear torpedoes catches fire and explodes, sinking 600 miles northeast of Bermuda. April 7,1989: Nuclear-powered Mike class submarine with at least two warheads aboard sinks 300 miles off the coast of Norway,150 miles south southwest of Bear Island. JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE In 1981, when U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) officials first reported the loss of a nuclear bomb off the deck of the USS Ticonderoga, they said it was lost 500 miles from land. After Greenpeace and the Institute for Policy Studies revealed in May that the accident occurred only 80 miles from Japanese held islands in the Ryukyu chain, DOD insisted that the initial report was not in error: it was 500 miles from land--the Asian mainland--and in any case, the nearest Japanese landfall was only "a very small island in that chain," according to DOD spokesman Dan Howard. Does that mean, one reporter attending the May 9 press conference remarked, "if we lose [a bomb] in Manila Harbor, you are going to say it's 3,000 miles from San Francisco?" Inquisitive reporters also asked whether the Ticonderoga, the ship that lost the bomb, was bound for Japan: "Wasn't the carrier en route to Japan? And wouldn't that have violated Japanese law [against nuclear weapons in its territory]?" Howard replied that "the carrier was en route to Vietnam . . . at the time." But Howard evidently cannot tell bow from stern. According to the ship's logs, which were obtained by Greenpeace, the ship was sailing from Vietnam to Japan. And the ship, minus one of its nuclear weapons, subsequently docked in Tokyo Bay. Besides misrepresenting the ship's location and direction, the Pentagon also proved reluctant to part with information about the bomb. Howard told reporters that the loss of a one-megaton bomb containing five pounds of plutonium posed "no danger to anyone." But the Japanese were not reassured and asked U.S. officials to prepare a report, which was delivered four days later. This time, DOD admitted that the intense water pressure would have imploded the bomb before it reached bottom (some 16,000 feet at the site of the accident), "exposing nuclear material to the hydrosphere". The question arises, at what depth did the deadly plutonium begin dispersing? 500 feet? Without elaborating, DOD maintains there would be "no environmental impact." UNTIL RECENTLY, THE SAFETY RECORD OF the world's nuclear navies has been by all accounts exemplary. Dozens of nuclear-propelled ships and submarines, many carrying nuclear warheads, routinely travel the oceans and visit ports, apparently without incident. The tragic explosion aboard the USS Iowa, and the explosion, fire and eventual sinking of the Soviet Mike class submarine near Norway last April perhaps have raised concerns about the perilous nature of maritime military activities. But they have not shaken the general sense of nuclear safety at sea. In 1988, Greenpeace and the Institute for Policy Studies began to look into the Navy's record. Using public documents and Freedom of Information Act requests, we have discovered that in addition to the hundreds of minor collisions, fires and other mishaps that have become part of the public record, there is another log of incidents, a secret history, that has remained hidden. The recent spate of accidents, it appears, is not unusual. Rather, they are the latest in a long line of nuclear related mishaps that goes back to the 1950s, when naval nuclear propulsion and weaponry first became widely used. Overall, the study shows, the world's navies have experienced at least 1,200 major accidents, which have resulted in dozens of ship sinkings, hundreds of explosions and fires, costly repairs and loss of life. The accidents have occurred in shipyards and ports, in harbors and coastal waters and on the high seas throughout the world. And they have left an astounding by- product: 50 nuclear warheads and nine nuclear reactors lying on the ocean floor. It could be said that the world's sixth largest nuclear "power," after the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom and China, is the deep blue sea. Gathering this material has been difficult. The world's nuclear navies are not eager for their mishaps to become public knowledge. This reticence is part political calculation and part hubris. Contrary to popular belief, it is not designed to thwart geopolitical rivals. Indeed, anyone familiar with the intelligence apparatus of the superpowers knows that each is fully aware of the military successes and failures of the other. Rather, it is directed at allies, neutral nations and the public. The reason is simple and significant. Insofar as the world perceives the five nuclear navies as dangerous and unstable, their freedom of movement and the continued generosity of their respective governments is compromised. At stake for the rest of us is something far more important. With major naval accidents occurring at the rate of roughly one each week since the dawn of the nuclear age, it is remarkable that a major disaster involving large populations has not occurred. Nuclear-armed and propelled ships of all flags are in dozens of ports around the world simultaneously. It is a tribute to the care taken by the managers of these precarious technologies that no real catastrophe has yet occurred. In fact, they are publicly quite confident about their ability to maintain a safe record. On the other hand, they are equally fearful that a full airing of their record would reveal some of the other costs we pay for living in a nuclearized world, namely the profound lack of openness and public debate about naval nuclear issues. Rather than repudiate the critics, the four decade record of nuclear near-disasters at sea underscores the lengths that nuclear navies will go to deceive both allied and domestic polities and raises significant questions about the public trust. A case in point: The Belknap Disaster On November 22, 1975, during night exercises, the aircraft carrier USS John F: Kennedy collided with the cruiser USS Belknap in rough seas 70 miles east of Sicily. The collision caused major damage to both ships, with the Belknap's superstructure wedged underneath the overhanging flight deck of the carrier. The carrier's fuel lines were ruptured, raining gasoline over the deck of the Belknap. A raging fire punctuated with explosions lasted for more than two hours. The collision is one of the best-known naval accidents ever, but in all the documentation, no mention has ever been made of the nuclear weapons present aboard both ships, or the grave danger the Navy believed the nuclear warheads aboard the Belknap faced as a result of the fires. Minutes after the incident occurred, the commander of Carrier Striking Forces for the Sixth Fleet sent a secret nuclear weapons accident message, a "broken arrow," to the Pentagon, warning of the "high probability that nuclear weapons aboard the Belknap were involved in fire and explosions." He had good reason for concern. Much of the fire fighting equipment aboard the Belknap was destroyed by the collision, and the aluminum superstructure of the ship actually caught fire, melting and running "like hot butter" in the words of one U.S. Navy journalist. Fortunately for a large area of Italy and the Mediterranean, the fire was brought under control a scant 30 feet from the missile magazine. The reason for the secrecy was highly political. It relates to the U.S. Navy's policy of "neither confirming nor denying" the presence of nuclear weapons aboard its ships. If they had admitted that the Belknap and the Kennedy were carrying nuclear warheads, the Navy would be forced to deal with the controversy, if not the restrictions, that could accompany port calls at nations that are not eager to have nuclear weapons introduced into their territory. For these reasons, the U.S. Navy has never before confirmed the presence of nuclear weapons aboard the ships. According to the record, the nuclear weapons were aboard both ships as they patrolled the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Soon after the collision, the nuclear weapons aboard the Belknap were transferred to the USS Mount Baker, a munitions ship that promptly departed for courtesy calls to Italy and then Toulon, France, before returning to the United States. Was the Belknap a unique and isolated incident? Hardly. The record shows that it was perhaps the most dramatic of an otherwise commonplace event. In fact, one of the ships that steamed to the aid of the Belknap, the nuclear-capable frigate USS Bordelon, also collided with the USS John F: Kennedy a year later, 75 miles north of Scotland. The ASROC container, where nuclear weapons would normally be held, was nearly crushed. And that same morning, incidentally, a U.S. Navy Tomcat fighter rolled off the Kennedy's flight deck and sank in the North Sea. The USS Ticonderoga In 1981, the Department of Defense admitted there had been a nuclear weapons accident 15 years earlier. The entire confession read as follows: "At Sea, Pacific: An A-4 aircraft loaded with one nuclear weapon rolled off the elevator of a U.S. aircraft carrier and fell into the sea. The pilot, aircraft and equipment were lost. The incident occurred more than 500 miles from land." What actually happened is far more politically explosive. In December 1965, the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga left bombing operations off the coast of North Vietnam and headed for Yokosuka, Japan, where crew and officers would get a rest. On December 5, an A4-E Skyhawk attack jet rolled off an elevator and sank, with the pilot and one B43 thermonuclear bomb, into 16,000 feet of water. The ship was indeed 500 miles from land-- mainland China. In between the accident site and the Chinese mainland, however, lay miles of open ocean and one of the Pacific's most adamantly antinuclear nations, Japan. The nearest point of land, part of the Ryukyu island chain, was a scant 80 miles away. The Navy kept the true details of the accident a secret not only because it would demonstrate its disregard for the policies of foreign governments (Japan prohibits the "introduction" of nuclear weapons into its territory), but because of the questions the incident would raise about the presence of nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. Even as the revelations convulsed Japan and prompted it to demand an official explanation from the United States, the Pentagon was downplaying the story, declaring it "old news." They even argued initially that the ship was in fact steaming toward Vietnam, and therefore Japan's anti-nuclear stance had not been violated. The "neither confirm nor deny" (NCND) policy hangs like a cloud over naval history. The tragic sinking of the U.S. Navy attack submarine USS Scorpion, for example, in which 99 crewmen died, is described in full by the Department of Defense this way: "Spring 1968/At Sea, Atlantic: Details remain classified." However, it is well known that the Scorpion sank 400 miles southeast of the Azores in more than 10,000 feet of water. What the Navy is trying to hide is that the ship carried two nuclear torpedoes. Nuclear accidents of this kind are common enough, according to our research, to be of real concern. On August 18,1959, for example, the aircraft carrier USS Wasp had a major fire that required flooding the forward ammunition stores. Foam was pumped through the flight deck, and the crew prepared to flood the nuclear weapons storage spaces. But the commanding officer never gave the command, as the fire was finally brought under control. On January 19, 1966, a W45 nuclear warhead separated from a Terrier surface-to-air missile during loading aboard the cruiser USS Luce and fell eight feet, dented but unbreached. This incident made it onto the "Chronology of Nuclear Accident Statements" released by the Department of Defense in 1968, but it sank from view soon thereafter and was conspicuously absent from a register of nuclear weapons accidents released in April 1981. The list goes on. The Uncontrollable Fire By 1983, when the Fund for Constitutional Government published a report by David Kaplan entitled "The Nuclear Navy," the U.S. Navy prepared a response that stated, "there has never been an accident in the history of the U.S. Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program....The safety of the Navy's nuclear powered warships is on the record .... The Navy stands unequivocally behind that record." This statement is repeated annually in the Navy's testimony before the U.S. Congress. "As of spring of 1989," the service declared recently, "the Navy has had over 3,500 reactor years of operation without a reactor accident." Not so. On April 21, 1973, the nuclear powered attack submarine USS Guardfish leaked its primary coolant while running submerged about 370 miles south southwest of Puget Sound, Washington. The submarine, according to records recently uncovered, "surfaced, ventilated, decontaminated and repaired the casualty [accident] unassisted." Four crew members were taken to the Puget Sound Naval Hospital for radioactive monitoring. The event was never reported in the media, and other official documents about the Guardfish do not acknowledge that an accident occurred. Even the deck log reports nothing unusual, indicating that it was falsified at the time of the accident. How many other reactor leaks have occurred and remained unreported? The U.S. Navy admits to only one: a primary coolant leak aboard the USS Nimitz on May 11, 1979. According to our research, however, the attack submarine USS Swordfish suffered a propulsion "casualty" of unknown cause on November 24,1985. There are enough rumors of other mishaps to seriously question the Navy's claim of a nearly unblemished record. The United States has no qualms, however, about lambasting the accident record of the Soviet Union--and with good reason. Although the record of Soviet naval accidents is far more difficult to uncover than that of the United States, the information that is available indicates that they are far more accident-prone than we are. The spectacular Soviet sub sinkings of the '80s--a Yankee I class nuclear-powered submarine that exploded and sank 500 miles east of Bermuda in 1986 and a Mike class attack submarine that burned and sank this April--are only the most recent in a long series of Soviet nuclear disasters at sea. Five Soviet submarines in all are known to have sunk, carrying at least 40 nuclear missiles with them to the ocean floor. The most serious Soviet reactor accident involved the Lenin, a three-reactor icebreaker that was launched in September 1959. According to the U.S. Navy, "There is strong evidence that this ship experienced a nuclear related casualty in the 1960s, requiring the ship to be abandoned for over a year before work was begun to replace the three reactors with two." Reactor accidents or other serious mishaps also are known to have occurred aboard a Hotel class ballistic missile submarine in 1961 and again in late February 1972, an Echo II cruise missile submarine in August 1978, an Echo class attack submarine in August 1980 and the icebreaker Rossia in 1988. Despite this harrowing list of mishaps, the real tally is even higher. The former Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John L,. Butz, testified before the U.S. Congress in 1986 that "since the early 1950s, the Soviet submarine force has experienced numerous serious submarine casualties." Accidents Will Happen There is one common element in naval accidents: human fallibility. The influence of human error can not be overstated, particularly in the case of naval forces, where vessels, constantly on the move and in often difficult circumstances, are bombarded with information from a proliferation of sensors, all the while attempting to monitor a host of perceived "enemies." The only conclusion one can draw from the record is that accidents will happen, and no amount of engineering or mechanical fixes will eliminate the failures that accompany the operation of complex machinery. It is clear that being part of a nuclear navy does not exempt one from any of the laws, physical or behavioral, that govern other nautical pursuits. This situation would perhaps be tolerable in a non-nuclear world. Unfortunately, and despite the secrecy, it is generally conceded that the U.S. Navy and the Soviet Navy, and to a lesser extent the British, French and Chinese navies, routinely operate warships and submarines with nuclear weapons aboard. All five also have nuclear-powered vessels (India has one as well), and they all routinely carry their nuclear cargoes into ports around the world. The casual integration of nuclear weaponry and nuclear propulsion into the day-today operations of naval forces has become far more controversial since 1984, when New Zealand denied a port visit to a U.S. Navy vessel suspected of carrying nuclear weapons. In an effort to inoculate other nations against the anti-nuclear "Kiwi disease," the United States retaliated by severing the long-standing military relationship with New Zealand. Despite the bluster, the international aversion to nuclear weapons has not abated, as the ongoing controversy over the presence of U.S. bases in Spain and the Philippines clearly shows. The uproar in Japan this May over the news that a thermonuclear bomb lay on the sea floor 80 miles offshore and that the United States routinely violates its anti-nuclear principles is also testimony to the heated political climate. Nuclear secrecy has become so ingrained and knee jerk within the nuclear "club" and its military establishments that it seriously inhibits open debate. But the question of secrecy should not divert us from the real problem. The issue is the nuclear weapons themselves. The presence of 50 nuclear warheads and nine reactors on the ocean floor demands more than just an accounting of the hazards they might pose to the marine environment. Science cannot provide a definitive answer. What needs to be questioned are the military practices that put the bombs and reactors there in the first place. Ultimately, society must determine whether the costs are greater than the benefits nuclear weapons supposedly provide. Revealing the secret history of nuclear weapons accidents, of which this report is only a small beginning, is a significant threat to those who support the status quo. A full accounting of not just the accidents but of nuclear testing and research, nuclear diplomacy, nuclear strategies and of the nuclear materials and waste that have been strewn about the land and sea would, we suspect significantly shift the public's tolerance for business as usual in the nuclear age. William M. Arkin is the director of the National Security Programs at the Institute for Policy Studies. Joshua Handler is research coordinator of Greenpeace's Nuclear Free Seas Campaign. CAMPAIGNS PENTA: NO PICNIC THEY CAME FROM AS far away as Oroville, California, and Laramie, Wyoming: 30 people with little in common except that their lives have been forever damaged by contact with poisonous wood preservatives. Take Don Speegle, for instance, whose community is so contaminated with pentachlorophenol (known as "pent a") from the Koppers Company that citizens are warned not to eat local eggs, chicken or beef (the state says they are tainted with high levels of dioxins). Then there's Laurie Maddie, who used to live near Vulcan Chemicals, the sole producer of pent a in the United States. Laurie and her children have been plagued with medical problems they attribute to toxic chemical contamination. Greenpeace organized the conference, "Preserving Life: Winning Protection Against Wood Preservatives," so that people like Don and Laurie could share information, work together, and bring their concerns to Congress. The conference was timed to take place during the comment period for newly proposed EPA regulations on wood preservatives. The American Wood Preservers Institute had scheduled a massive industry lobby the same week to ask for weak regulations. So attendees hit Capitol Hill in advance, telling their stories to their congressional representatives, and urging strict regulation of the chemicals that have threatened their lives and homes. Over 38 wood-treatment sites around the country are on EPA's national Superfund list for priority cleanup. Yet EPA proposes to let the wood preserving industry continue its long history of self regulation. In fact, EPA uses a risk assessment presented by Vulcan Chemicals to justify lenient controls over the disposal of dioxin-contaminated pent a wastes--circumventing an unbiased peer review process. One EPA official who acted as project manager for the regulations (before being reassigned due to industry complaints) commented that EPA is granting the industry "a license to pollute by the proposed regulations" and that EPA has responded to industry's lobby "by proposing the most lenient regulations possible to the wood-preserving industry."--JC FROM CRADLE TO WATERY GRAVE LINDANE SPELLS TROUBLE wherever it goes. Because the pesticide lindane is a known carcinogen, which persists in the environment and accumulates in the food chain, the Pesticide Action Network has placed it on its "Dirty Dozen" list, and more than 70 countries have banned its use. In early March, Greenpeace activists from five countries entered a lindane waste site at the Inquinosa chemical factory in Sabinanigo, Spain, one of the world's two remaining lindane producers (the other one is Rhone-Poulenc in France). Wearing protective masks and suits, they chained themselves to dump trucks and blocked truck passage to prevent illegal waste dumping at the site, which has contaminated drinking water, soil, fruit and vegetables, and meat products in neighboring farmlands and towns. Samples taken from the nearby Gallego River showed lindane waste concentrations so high (21 times the legal limit) that Greenpeace called on the Minister of Public Works to ban the use of the river's water. A few weeks later, a routine shipment of lindane and other pesticides, en route from the Rhone-Poulenc plant in France to Indonesia, was lost at sea during a storm in the Channel. A tug boat, attempting to save the ship's cargo, failed to recover one container, which was packed with five tons of lindane. Dr. Paul Johnston, a scientific consultant for Greenpeace, said the persistent pesticide poses a great threat: "If the lindane gets into the sea, it could kill all marine life in a strip of sea 440 miles long and would last 20 years." The production, transport and use of the pesticide is dangerous. "The only way to prevent further contamination [all along this chain] is immediately to stop the manufacture of lindane and the production of its waste," said Xavier Pastor, director of Greenpeace Spain.--Blair Palese DISAPPOINTING BASEL CONVENTION ANTARCTIC PENGUINS WILL BE pleased. Parties to the newly drafted Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes agreed to forbid waste exports to "the area south of 60 degrees South latitude," otherwise known as the Antarctic Circle. Unfortunately, the rest of the world continues to be at risk from the escalating trade in hazardous waste. In the final hours of the gathering, waste-producing nations tossed aside rules of procedure and ignored objections from developing countries. The result? Measures meant to protect third world nations from dangerous waste imports were stripped from the convention, and just 34 of 105 nations signed on. Only one country in Asia, one in Central America and no country in Africa signed it. Said Dr. Kevin Stairs, Greenpeace's delegate to the convention, "Industrialized countries had the power to stop waste exports to the third world. Instead, they opted to legalize them." The convention does compel waste exporters to notify and receive consent from importing nations before any waste is shipped. But this requirement, already adhered to by industrialized nations, has not prevented toxic nightmares. Developing nations, often seduced by the money they receive from waste traders, are forced to make the Faustian choice between poverty and poison. But they don't have the expertise or resources to "dispose of" the toxics in a manner considered "safe" by western standards. Indeed, the United States successfully lobbied against a provision that would have banned waste shipments to countries where the wastes would be handled in a less environmentally sound manner than required in the country of export. U.S. delegates complained that if such a provision passed, it would create a de facto ban on U.S. waste exports, because the United States has the highest environmental standards in the world. As Dr. Stairs said, "Obviously, the U.S. feels that it is justified to subject its neighbors to less protection than it provides its own citizens."--JC NOT ON NAVAJO LAND! WHEN THE NAVAJO COMMUnity in Dilcon, Arizona, called on Greenpeace campaigner Bradley Angel, he was glad to help. For the second time this year, the Navajo reservation had been targeted by several toxics-handling companies as the perfect spot to dispose of their wastes. "Perfect" because the Navajo suffer from 72 percent unemployment, and the companies hoped to exploit their need for jobs. The scheme to build a hazardous waste incinerator was dropped in February, after local opposition became too hot to handle. Rut the facility's backers returned in the spring, bearing plans for a new "recycling, treatment, storage and disposal facility." Only they failed to mention that the so-called "recycling" plant would include an enormous Class I toxic waste dump. The companies -- Pegler Welch Engineering, Hi-Tech Recycling and Silicate Technology--were sent packing. After an emotional community meeting on April 11, Silicate Technology spokesman Steve Maupin was forced to drop the proposal. Maupin says he will try to convince other Navajo communities to accept the toxic waste dump. If he tries, it will be tough going. Dilcon residents, members of the local group, Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, and Greenpeace toxics campaigners are working together to prevent the toxic waste dump from being built anywhere on Navajo land. Greenpeace is releasing a video that documents the Navajo's fight against toxics. It is available in both Navajo and English from the Greenpeace office in San Francisco.--JC SHARK FISHERY SHUT DOWN CITING THE DECLINE OF THE thresher shark population and the drowning of marine mammals, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission and the Washington Department of Fisheries closed down the three-year-old gillnet fishery for thresher sharks off their coast in late April. Greenpeace first investigated the shark fishery in 1986 because it was concerned that the mile-long nets might accidentally catch marine mammals and deplete the docile thresher shark population. During a 4-day period in the summer of 1988, government observers found that the gillnets of seven boats ensnared a whale, dozens of other marine mammals, and 13 endangered leather back sea turtles. California, however, still permits thresher shark netting. Shark catches there have declined 90 percent since 1982, a clear sign of the over-fishing that threatens to damage the slow-growing shark population. --Ben Deeble BURNING RADIOACTIVE GARBAGE FOR 35 YEARS, THE LAWRENCE Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco has designed and built nuclear weapons for testing and dumped the toxic by-products into the ground and air. After being told to clean up the mess by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has put the lab on the Superfund cleanup list, lab officials announced a plan to burn their toxic and radioactive garbage in a three-story, football-field-sized incinerator. Operating 10 days a month, the plant would burn equipment contaminated with plutonium, strontium, cesium and 30 other radionuclides, producing 2 million pounds of radioactive ash each year. Not only would routine emissions be dangerous, but the draft environmental impact statement indicated that the plant could experience between four and seven accidental releases of radioactive byproducts each year. And the Department of Energy also warned of a possible explosion The scheme has infuriated nearby residents. "We've come to realize that the design and development of nuclear weapons is an inherently dangerous undertaking," says Marylia Kelley of Tri- Valley CARES, a local peace and ecology group. Her group joined with Greenpeace to oppose the plan at public hearings. Their work helped persuade Liver more's mayor, county supervisors, Representative Pete Stark, and California Senators Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson to oppose the incinerator. Noting the lab's "horrendous track record," Bradley Angel, toxic campaigner for Greenpeace, has argued that the incineration solution is fatally flawed: "Not only will incineration fail to destroy radioactive particles and heavy metal wastes, it will produce its own hazardous wastes in the form of combustion by- products like furans and dioxins." Critics have sued the lab to stop the plan, while the Department of Energy plans to hold further public hearings on the proposal. Comments and inquiries can be addressed to William Holman, Department of Energy Regional Office, 1333 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612, (415) 273-5370. --Gar Smith RISING TO THE CHALLENGE TWO YEARS AGO, GREENPEACE and other groups called on both superpowers to suspend their production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium and negotiate a mutual cutoff of the fissile materials used to make nuclear weapons. The "plutonium challenge," as it was then called, did not prompt an immediate response. But the subsequent breakdown of U.S. facilities that produce plutonium and General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's April 7 announcement that he was closing some of the Soviet Union's weapons material plants have persuaded some U.S. representatives to introduce legislation that could make the plutonium challenge a reality. Introduced in May, the Plutonium Control Act calls for a mutual halt to plutonium and highly enriched uranium production until a treaty banning both these materials can be negotiated. (The act would not ban the production of tritium or enriched uranium used as fuel for nuclear-powered ships and submarines. ) "We have the opportunity to turn the Soviet Union's political initiative into a meaningful, verifiable agreement to end plutonium production, particularly since we have unilaterally halted our own plutonium production," wrote the bill's House sponsors. Kenneth Adelman, a former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Reagan, denounced the initiative as "bumper-sticker arms control." But Damon Moglen, coordinator of Greenpeace's Military Nuclear Fuel Cycle Campaign, says this is not a bumper-sticker issue: "It would shut down U.S. and Soviet facilities that are polluting the environment and endangering public health, put a cap on the amount of material available to build nuclear weapons, and help strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)." He noted that continued superpower production of fissile materials undermines the credibility of the NPT. In combination with Green peace's other campaigns to end nuclear testing and rid the seas of nuclear weapons, Moglen argues that the act "is a significant attempt to stop the arms race at the fuel pump." (see Action Access) --RS NEW YORK, FLUSHING DESPITE NEW YORKERS CONcern that garbage and dolphins are washing up on their beaches, every flush of their toilets adds to pollution in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. New York City, Westchester and Nassau counties, and six New Jersey counties continue to dump their sewage sludge offshore. The Ocean Dumping Ban Act of 1988 says they must stop by 1991. Unfortunately, five of the six New Jersey counties are proposing to burn their sludge--moving their dump from the deep blue to the sky. And New York City doesn't even pretend to know what to do about their problem. They say they can't stop ocean dumping until 1998. Marcia D. Lowe of World watch Institute calls dumping and burning human wastes "a crime." "What is criminal," she says, "is that these basic plant nutrients--the same nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium that farmers purchase in chemical fertilizer--are treated like garbage." The solution is composting. But in order for sludge to be used safely, it must be free of heavy metals and industrial chemicals. And since industries flush their discharges into the sewers, it is not. This summer, the MV Greenpeace is docking at New York harbor. Toxic campaigners aboard the ship are calling for an immediate end to ocean dumping in the mid-Atlantic and an end to the dumping of toxic chemicals down the sewers. Greenpeace supports toxic-use-reduction legislation, which puts generators on a toxic-use-reduction schedule, with the goal of making sludge safe to reuse.--JC