By Tillman Ruff
A physician specialising in infectious diseases and public health,
and is also an active member of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War.The primary purpose of nuclear tests is the development of reliable and effective nuclear weapons.
The more than 2,000 nuclear tests carried out have been integral to the growth of the nuclear arsenals and have had direct, serious and long-term adverse health and environment effects. Every human alive now and over the next tens of thousands of years will carry radioactive elements created by nuclear tests, causing a small increase in their lifetime cancer risk.
Increases in the rates of radiation-related cancers have been documented in military personnel involved in nuclear tests, and also within communities downwind of test sites in Australia, Kazakhstan, the United States and the Micronesian Pacific Islands. It is estimated that due to atmospheric testing alone, 430,000 fatal human cancers will be produced by the year 2000, with an eventual total of 2.4 million.
Governments of nuclear-weapons states have shown an alarming and sometimes wilful disregard of public and environmental health. There has been :
deliberate secrecy and misinformation about the safety of nuclear tests; non-existent or inadequate identification and monitoring of highly exposed populations; little study of the effects of dangerous, long-lived radioactive wastes in an underground or submarine environment; and no significant attempt, in most cases, to clean-up test sites and to deal with the longer-term health and environmental effects of nuclear testing. Nuclear test sites are in effect unstudied, unlicensed and high-level radioactive waste dumps, without legislative or public scrutiny such as environmental impact assessment. Test sites seldom meet the most basic criteria for a nuclear waste repository such as exclusion of ground water, lack of fractures or fissures, and high absorption of radionuclides. At Moruroa there is already disturbing evidence of the leakage of radionuclides (tritium, iodine-131 and caesium-134) from beneath the coral atoll.
The burden of nuclear testing has fallen most heavily on colonised, indigenous or minority groups – Aboriginal people in Australia (especially at the former British test site at Maralinga), Micronesian and Polynesian Pacific islanders, Uygur people in China, Western Shoshone people in Nevada and the Kazakh people. The effects have been far broader than those related to radiation and often involve:
displacement from traditional lands and disruption of traditional communities; economic, social and military domination; and non-radiation related health problems such as, in the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, outbreaks of ciguatera fish poisoning.
Known Nuclear Tests 1945-1996 Atmospheric Underground Total United States 215 817 1032 Former Soviet Union 207 508 715 France 45 165 210 United Kingdom 21 24 45 China 23 20 43 India 0 1 1
Article from "Unclean, Unsafe & Unwanted - The Nuclear Industry Nightmare",
a special insert prepared for the June 1996 issue of Habitat,
produced by the Australian Conservation Foundation.
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