TL: THE TRUE PLANETARIANS DREAM OF THE PEACEFUL BOMB
SO: GREENPEACE MAGAZINE, No. I/92 GP GERMANY (GP)
DT: February 1992
Keywords: nuclear weapons civil explosions cis russia
construction radiation testing us ussr history waste disposal
toxics /

by Jochen Vorfelder

In the nineteen sixties physicists in the East and West tried to
realise megalomaniac construction projects with atomic bombs.
Entire stretches of land were as a result contaminated for a long
time.  Russian entrepreneurs are now offering the radiating tech
nology again to the highest bidder.

Varvarka Street is in the centre of Moscow, hardly a stone's
throw from the Russian Foreign Ministry.  Behind the doors of
number 15, in a modest villa, is one of the joint ventures which
have been shooting up like mushrooms since the advent of the
free-market economy.  The atmosphere of a clearance sale prevails
in the former centre of world communism.  Robber barons are
seizing the rubble the collapsed empire still has to offer and
selling it off to the highest bidder.  The International Chetek
Corporation, as the company at no. 15 Varvarka Street is called,
appears to be one of the biggest in the confused grey industry.
It offers an especially hot contraband for sale worldwide -
private nuclear explosions for disposing of wastes.

  "Chetek is the sole proprietor of the technology which guaran
tees the ecologically pure liquidation of highly toxic chemical
and industrial wastes by means of thermonuclear explosions," the
company advertises in its brochure. - And announces that an "ato
mic explosion for demonstration purposes is planned" this summer
on the island of Novaya Zemlya in the Russian polar sea.

  "Chetek, you must realise, is a serious enterprise," Vladimir
Dimitriev, the company boss, points out, and lists other parties
involved.  Prominent among the shareholders in the "man-
technology-capital" (Chetek) company's original capital of 250
million rubles - besides cadres from the former USSR Ministry of
Atomic Energy and Industry, MAPI - are scientists from Arzamas-
16, the secret centre of Soviet nuclear research south of Gorky.

"We have the technology and the organisation enabling us to
destroy any kind of waste, including nuclear residues, for 450 to
1,900 dollars," calculated Dimitriev, who is still looking for
foreign investors, to visitors from Greenpeace.  One of his
physicists outlined how the waste disposal was supposed to work.
After the highly explosive poisons, delivered from all over the
world, have been sunk to a depth of six hundred metres, an atomic
warhead is detonated in the sealed shaft.  The heat of up to a
million degrees atomizes the waste and at the same time encases
it in a cavity the walls of which, having melted like glass,
should isolate the decay products.  Valery Siderov, vice
president of Chetek, wants to "treat" some 3,000 tonnes of
"chemical waste from foreign suppliers" with a single warhead in
this way at the planned test on Novaya Zemlya.

  The technology that Chetek wants to profitably market is not
new.  "Peaceful nuclear explosions", or PNE, have been a spooky
play area for megalomaniac competitors in the armaments race and
bomb physicists since as far back as the end of the fifties.
About 180 atomic warheads have been detonated in the past thirty-
five years in order to make the bombs industrially usable.
With the wind of the Cold War at their backs, and flanked by
apparently inexhaustible budgets of millions, atomic physicists
in east and west are here beginning to take flight at unheard-of
intellectual altitudes.  "We shall level mountains to the ground,
take water into the desert and drive firebreaks through the
jungle.  We shall bring life, happiness and prosperity to places
in which no person has yet set foot," dreamed Vladimir Vishinsky,
one of the mentors of the Soviet programme, back in 1951.  Edward
Teller, the father of the American hydrogen bomb and champion of
the SDI programme, had something similar in mind.  While in
charge of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the LLL [LLNL], in
California, the centre of American PNE research, Teller in 1952
already spoke of controlling the weather with atomic fire,
irrigating Central Africa and producing artificial diamonds.
Herbert York, the LLL's first director, said "Teller was keen on
any programme  and any idea that made nuclear weapons look good
and useful."

Some ideas - always in line with the general political situation
- were come up with in this regard.  In November 1956, at the
height of the Suez crisis, physicists at Livermore suggested
leaving the Egyptian blockade alone and instead laying  a 300
mile long canal from the Mediterranean right through the Negev
desert to the Gulf of Aqaba with a chain detonation of atomic
warheads.  Five years later, when negotiations on the future of
the Panama Canal had reached a political impasse, Teller and his
people had the proposal for an atomic canal right through Central
America already on hand.

In doing this Teller and the Livermore crew brought into play for
the first time the terminology that was to provide a suitable
framework for the mixture of scientific ingenuity and
technological megalomania.  What was concerned here was not the
simple movement of earth or vile weapon systems, Teller said to
the US Congress in nigh religious fervour, but "planetary
projects"  devised by "planetary engineers".  The belief that the
power of the bomb can satisfactorily rearrange God's creation was
held firmly by the first planetarians.

  The first atomic warhead aimed at giving practical information
on the dreams' feasibility was detonated in the Nevada desert on
6th July 1962.  The 140-kilotonne bomb with the code name Sedan,
which had an explosive power roughly ten times that of the Hiro
shima detonation, plowed a 300 foot deep, 300 yard wide crater in
the earth - the scientists had thoughtfully given the American
test programme the name "Plowshare".

  A total of 27 civil test explosions above or under the ground
were carried out in Nevada and bordering US states between 1961
and 1973 - all with the aim of making audacious planetary
achievements.  Included in the matters under discussion at the
Livermore Laboratory were oil shale in Canada, an artificial ore
and oil harbour on the coast of Alaska (codename Chariot), a
similar project on the north coast of Australia (Cape Keraudren),
and the artificial deepening of the Torres Strait between New
Guinea and Australia.

  None of the ambitious map exercises was ever realised.  The
reason being that unexpected technical difficulties caused the
cost estimates to shoot up to astronomic heights, while on earth
criticism and resistance to civil bombs was becoming increasingly
manifest.  After over sixty countries throughout the world signed
the first partial test ban treaty in 1963, the Plowshare
Programme also stood at disposition.  At the Pentagon and in
Congress, which was politically responsible for further "civil"
uses, formed opponents and supporters of a technology whose grey
zones could never be precisely defined as the technology of
atomic destruction.  Were PNEs - ran the central point at issue -
not armament tests in disguise?

  The Livermore planetarians started to retreat under public
pressure to solely underground tests.  But before the end of the
sixties, after the signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty,
Plowshare and the civil use of the bombs suddenly became a
political non-runner.  This was so in spite of the new and, in
Teller's opinion, promising avenues of use which had by then been
turned to - the new motto being the exploitation of natural gas
and oil.

Like the Americans, the Soviets had begun with civil tests at the
end of the fifties, but in having these insulated far away in
Siberia, they did not have to be the least bit concerned about
public opinion, let alone mass protests.  They thus bombed until
1988, in accordance with a resolution of the twentieth Party
Congress, for all it was worth.

  Prior to 1960 they first of all detonated test warheads in
order to make the technology ready for use, doing this at the
nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan and on Novaya
Zemlya in the northern polar sea.  From 1963 the Soviet
planetarians then spread their empire with some 120 blast holes
and atomic-bomb craters, so as to dam waters, connect rivers,
open up underground fields of natural gas, turn oil wells into
springs, or put out fires.  In "Project 1004", for example, a 125
kilo tonne explosive was detonated on 15th January 1965 at the
mouth of two rivers in Kazakhstan.  The crater's wall, four
hundred yards wide and three hundred feet deep, dammed an
artificial  lake.  The crater itself was flooded to be an
additional reservoir and in order to irrigate a state collective
melon and sun flower farm.  Five years after the detonation the
colossal bomb crater was given over to being a local recreation
area and bathing lake.

  Most of the Soviet Union's explosives were used to bomb storage
cavities and open up reserves in rich natural oil and gas fields
around the Urals, on the Caspian Sea and on the Arctic
peninsulars.  Six PNEs were used to stimulate gas in the Orenburg
area in the Urals.  Between 1980 and 1982 alone, seven of a total
of thirty-six underground explosions were used to open up gas
fields at Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea.  Here warheads between
two to forty kilotonnes were detonated at depths of up to eight
thousand feet in order to loosen the earth or create stable
hollow spaces.   Gas was held in the deep man-made stores before
being sent to Western Europe on its way down the branches of the
pipleline network.

  PNE experts' working sessions to exchange scientific know-how
were held at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, in
Vienna, between 1970 and 1976.  The meetings in effect brought
together a curious collection of frustrated bomb producers and
abstruse mega-projects, as all the PNE countries were represen
ted. - The Americans, the Soviets, and also France, which between
1961 and 1966 had carried out thirteen underground tests in the
Algerian Sahara and exploded a bomb in the desert atmosphere; and
India, which exploded a 15 kilotonne warhead in the Rajasthan
desert in 1974, an act alleged as having been for a peaceful
purpose but generally adjudged to have been a threat to its
neighbour in the west, Pakistan.

  Egypt toyed with the idea of blowing a canal forty-five miles
long from the Mediterranean into the Qattara Depression, an
enormous desert valley lying below the Mediterranean's sea level.
 A hydroelectric plant which Siemens had already shown interest
in building was supposed to use the falling water to supply the
country with cheap electricity.  Thailand had 600-page-long plans
drawn up on how, by means of 139 PNEs, a 60-mile long canal might
be bombed through the Kra isthmus in order to force a direct
route for supertankers from the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Thai
land.  The costs were noted very carefully in the minutes - 3.6
million US dollars and the evacuation of some 200,000 Thais for
several years.

Crucial data were nonetheless kept vague.  Neither the Americans
nor the "Plowshareski", as the Soviet PNE technicians were
jovially referred to among their colleagues, considered more
closely the radioactive emissions that were released by the
"peaceful" bombs.  The civil bombs and the use of radioactive
plutonium were in the planetarians' fanatical view the "salvation
of mankind"  for which there was a price to pay - unfortunately,
of course, but one that was acceptable.  It was intentionally
rated as low.   A study from Livermore that was presented in
Vienna in 1974 compared the fallout with the dose that a person
was in any case exposed to, through natural radiation, "during an
intercontinental return flight or a seven-day holiday in the
Sierra Nevada mountains".

  At first the truth forced its way out gradually and a bit at a
time.  When, in July 1962, the Sedan's pressure wave flung twelve
million tonnes of mud and rock up to over a mile high, the radio
active precipitation could be measured in the north of Canada. In
the atomic downwind path in the border state of Utah the health
department, without attracting much attention, withdrew fresh
milk from sale.  Analyses detected iodine-131 and a maximum pol
lution of 30,000 becquerel per litre.  This can be compared with
maximum values, in Bavaria, of 1,500 becquerel after Chernobyl.
An incidence of leukaemia and thyroid cancer of up to five hun
dred per cent above the normal north American average has been
recorded among the "Downwinders" in Utah, residents in the radio
active downwind path.  This is a consequence not only of the PNEs
but also of the American armament tests.

  When Sedan - only one of a total of eight hundred tests in
Nevada's military zone - detonated in 1962, radiating plutonium
in the form of dust was spread over almost a hundred thousand
square miles, the area of what used to be West Germany.  Just a
single milligramme in the lungs can cause cancer.  Some 700,000
people live in the region.  The atomic energy authority, the AEC,
distributed to them in the nineteen fifties a brochure which
contained a remarkable sentence: "If you live near the Nevada
Test Site you are in a very real sense an active participant in
the nation's test programme."

  The fate of an American national hero illustrates how high the
radiation in diverse "hot spots" around the Nevada test site
actually is.  In 1954 John Wayne made the film "The Conqueror",
in which he acted Genghis Khan, in Utah.  It was a year in which,
a hundred and forty miles away, eleven tests had taken place
above ground.  After the outside scenes had been finished the
technicians took with them sixty tons of sand for further scenes
in the studio.  Twelve years later, ninety-one of the two hundred
and twenty members of the original film team became ill with
carcinomas, and over fifty died of cancer, including John Wayne.
The situation is much the same in the former USSR.  When the
125-tonne warhead was detonated in Project 1004 in 1965, the
needle deflected six days later at the measuring station at Nii
gata in Japan, over 1250 miles away.  The decay substances
tellurium, barium and strontium were measured in abnormally high
concentrations in rainwater, persisting for over a week;
according to a report in the British scientific magazine Nature
these could only have come from the 1004 explosion.

  Preston Truman, an American, has in the meantime been to the
crater, and made video films available to Greenpeace. Mr. Truman,
who is president of the "Downwinders" in Salt Lake City, was born
105 miles north of the Nevada Test Site.  At the age of fifteen
he became ill with cancer of the lymph glands; thirteen years of
chemotherapy have so far prevented his death.


  In the interviews with Mr. Truman the inhabitants of the
village of Shargal near the flooded 1004 bomb crater told of
thirty deaths from cancer per year per thousand inhabitants.  A
doctor at the nearby hospital at Kaneer stated that ninety per
cent of those newly born were born already ill and suffered from
chronic anaemia and skin mutations.  A resident told Mr. Truman,
"We feel the radiation is to blame, but we don't have a
diagnosis."

At another nuclear lake, bombed out with three PNEs in the Perm
district in the Urals in 1976, and used as a test for a projected
canal to the Caspian Sea, the pollution has now been assessed
more precisely by the district Soviet's environment committee.
Today, almost sixteen years after the explosion, the radiation at
the deep blue hole, which is six hundred yards long and four
hundred yards wide, deviates between 15 and 50 millisieverts per
hour.  On the day of the Chernobyl disaster, by comparison, 100
millisieverts per hour were measured directly at the burst
reactor.

  At the port of Murmansk, in the Novaya Zemlya fallout zone,
where besides military warheads PNEs are also detonated, ominous
cases of illness are increasing.  According to figures in the
state hospital the cases of haemophilioid diseases and cancer
among young people in the polar sea nuclear fleet's home port are
rising dramatically.  Some local environmentalists are therefore
calling for the planned explosion of waste by Chetek on Novaya
Zemlya to be postponed until its consequences can be assessed.
Understandably, they want to know what happens when, for in
stance, highly toxic dioxins are transformed into new decay sub
stances by nuclear power.  How can radioactivity and chemical
poisons be prevented from penetrating the surface?  Tatyana Dubo
vaya, the head of the radiological institute in Murmansk, says
"life expectation in Murmansk is at all events already below the
national average".

  As far as Chetek's boss, Vladimir Dimitriev, is concerned, such
reservations are not relevant.  In the Spiegel he referred to
those warning of environmental consequences as "awful
dilettantes".  The radiation from his underground nuclear fire
was  "precisely nil".  He wants to put the atomic explosion
technology, which he regards as "tried and tested, mature and
harmless", on the market as swiftly as possible.  As one of his
staff told Greenpeace in a confidential talk, Mr. Dimitriev late
last year contacted the former UN Secretary General, Mr. Perez de
Cuellar, for this reason.

  Dimitriev's current polar site, Novaya Zemlya, is barely
passable in the icy winter, and therefore not suitable for
atomizing waste all the year round.  He therefore asked the
international organisation in a letter to make an ownerless palm
island in the Pacific available to him for year-round nuclear
atomizing.  In  view of this bold visionary power Mr. Vladimir
Dimitriev must surely be counted among the great true
planetarians.
     Jochen Vorfelder.

 [Another good  source is Trevor Findlay's book "Nuclear
Dynamite: The Peaceful  Nuclear Explosions Fiasco".]
[Greenbase Inventory May 28, 1992 ]