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Archive for November, 2009

Dateline New Delhi:India’s Nuclear Cover-Up

Dateline New Delhi:
India’s Nuclear Cover-Up

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Indian Nuclear Disaster::Radiation leak at Kaiga nuclear plant, 50 workers hospitalised

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Sirsi (Karnataka): Over 50 workers at the Kaiga Nuclear Power Plant in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka have been hospitalised after suffering radiation poisioning. Reports said the employees were taken ill after drinking contaminated water in the plant.

The employees working in the first maintenance unit of the plant were treated for increasing level of tritium after they drank water from a water cooler in the operating area on November 24, official sources said on condition of anonymity.

Tritium, also known as Hydrogen-3, is used in research, fusion reactors and neutron generators.alt

Urine examination of the employees in the unit is done everyday as a matter of routine and during such a test four days ago it was found that the tritium level was more than the normal level. They were taken to the plant hospital in Mallapur and treated immediately, the sources said.

“The contents of the water in the cooler are being investigated,” the sources said.

Scientists carried out immediate checks for radioactivity at the plant site but no leakage was detected, they said. A probe was being carried out to find out how the water in the cooler was contaminated, the sources added.

Kaiga is one of India’s newer nuclear plants and has three atomic power units of 220 MW each. A fourth unit is ready for commissioning anytime.

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Mohammad Mansoor Ali Ansari Warned of Indian Nuclear Program Safety In August 2009:Indian Nuclear Program is Unsafe, Unsecure and Alarming Chernobyl Warning

Indian Nuclear Program is Unsafe, Unsecure and Alarming Chernobyl Warning

Posted: Aug 12th, 2009

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Switzerland; where Anti-Muslim bigotry is alive and flourishing

Donald Waters’ book on Switzerland — “Hitler’s Secret Ally.” From a late-twentieth century perspective,these nations (Switzerland, Spain. and Portugal)

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Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan

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In its war in Afghanistan, the United States has come to a crossroads. President Obama will be forced to choose one of four ways ahead. The choices are cruel, expensive and dangerous for our country; so we must be sure that he chooses the least painful, least expensive and safest of the possible choices.alt

The first possible choice is to keep on doing what we are now doing. That is, fighting the insurgency with about 60,000 American troops and 68,197 mercenaries at a cost of roughly $2,000 a day per person. That is, we now actually have a total complement of over 120,000 people on the public payroll at an overall cost, of roughly $100 billion a year. We can project a loss of a few hundred American soldiers a year and several thousand wounded. Our senior commander in the Central Command, General David Petraeus, tells us that we cannot win that war.

The second possible road ahead would involve adding substantial numbers of new troops. In General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, the accepted ratio of soldiers to natives is 20 to 25 per thousand natives.1 Afghanistan today is a country of about 33 million. Even if we discount the population to the target group of Pashtuns, we will must deal with 15 or so million people. So when he and General Stanley McChrystal ask for 40,000, it can only be a first installment. Soon — as the generals did in Vietnam – they will have to ask for another increment and then another, moving toward the supposedly winning number of 600,000 to 1.3 million. That is just the soldiers. Each soldier is now matched by a supporter, rather like medieval armies had flocks of camp followers, so those numbers will roughly double. Thus, over ten years, a figure often cited, or 40 years, which some of the leading neoconservatives have suggested, would pretty soon, as they say in Congress, involve “talking about real money.” In addition to the Congressionally-allocated outlay, the overall cost to our economy has not yet been summed up, but by analogy to the Iraq war, it will probably amount to upwards of $6 trillion.

Then there are the casualties: we have so far lost about a thousand — or a quarter as many as in Iraq. Casualties we can count, but the number of seriously wounded keeps growing because many of the effects of exposure to modern weapons do not show up until later. We have no reliable figures yet on Afghanistan. In Iraq at least 100,000 of the one and a half million soldiers who served there suffered severe psychological damage and about 300,000 have reported post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have suffered brain injuries. Crassly put, these “walking wounded” will not only be unable fully to contribute to American society but will be a burden on it for many years to come. It has been estimated that dealing with a brain-injured soldier over his remaining life will cost about $5 million. Cancer, from exposure to depleted uranium is, only now coming into full effect. All in all, it is sobering to calculate that 40 percent of the soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf war – which lasted only a hundred hours – are receiving disability payments. Inevitably, more “boots on the ground” will lead to more beds in hospitals.

General McChrystal has told us that we must have large numbers of additional troops to hold the territory we “clear.” He echoes what the Russian commanders told the Politburo: in a report on November 13, 1986, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev commented that the Russians attempted the same strategy but admitted that it failed. “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan,” he said, “that has not been occupied by one of or soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize . . . Without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.”

The Russian army fought a bloody, brutal campaign, using every trick or tool of counterinsurgency ever identified. The Russians killed a million Afghanis and turned about 5 million into refugees, but after a decade during which they lost 15,000 soldiers and virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union, they gave up and left. General McChrystal says it may take him a decade or more to “win.” But what “winning” means is unclear.

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