“Wolfowitz’s study of nuclear policy was more than a higher mathematics; it was a kind of mystical Kabbalah …”
- Sidney Blumenthal

He was a good boy, not a rebel. Unlike some neoconservatives who had begun on the left and swerved right, his path was straight. His mathematician father’s only complaint about him was that he had not become a mathematician. Instead, young Wolfowitz fell under the spell of one of his father’s friends, Albert Wohlstetter, an old Trotskyist turned Cold War nuclear theologian. Wolfowitz was a pupil in the most exclusive school. (Richard Perle was another acolyte of Wohlstetter’s.) Wolfowitz’s study of nuclear policy was more than a higher mathematics; it was a kind of mystical Kabbalah …. Wolfowitz’s doctoral thesis was on why Israeli development of a nuclear weapon threatened Middle Eastern and world stability.

Wolfowitz’s recruitment onto the “B Team” in the late 1970s, created under the Ford administration through conservative pressure in order to discredit the CIA’s assessments of the Soviet Union’s nuclear capabilities, signaled his entrance into the sanctum sanctorum of nuclear theologians and Republican policymaking. The factual rebuttal of the B Team’s assertions was not a black mark. Conservatives were on the ascendancy and Wolfowitz was a rare young man among them with a first-class mind and education.

[Sidney Blumenthal: salon.com]

Thanks, EB

Following up on my previous post about sludge dumping in Sierra Blanca Texas: Bush Romances Atom in Texas –

[A]ggressive efforts by lobbyists representing Governor Bush worked with the utility industry to successfully push through federal legislation that could make Texas the largest low-level radioactive waste dumpsite in the country.

When George W. Bush was inaugurated as Texas Governor in 1995, one of the first federal initiatives he undertook on behalf of Texas industry was attempting to pass federal legislation creating the Texas-Maine-Vermont radioactive waste compact to fund construction of a radioactive waste dump in the small Texas border town Sierra Blanca.
[Link]

Environmental Justice Case Study: The Struggle for Sierra Blanca, Texas Against A Low-Level Nuclear Waste Site –

In 1994, the states of Texas, Maine, and Vermont entered a compact allowing the disposal of low-level nuclear waste at a proposed Texas site. This creates the tenth such compact in the United States since 1980, when a Federal law was passed requiring states take responsibility for their low-level nuclear waste, urging cooperation. This compact demands both Maine and Vermont to pay Texas $25 million to build a disposal facility. Prior to becoming law, the compact first needed to gain Congressional approval. Following its approval on September 20, 1998, the compact then required the state of Texas to license the project before moving forward. October 22, 1998, Texas officials voted to deny the compact’s proposed site located just outside of Sierra Blanca.

Sierra Blanca, a small West Texas town over two-thirds Hispanic, already hosts Merco Joint Venture. This company is the town’s largest employer shipping over 400,000 tons of New York City sludge daily to a nearby ranch. Furthermore, Sierra Blanca is located only sixteen miles from the Mexico border, on top of an aquifer, and in an active Earthquake area. Residents, environmentalists, and community groups have made numerous cries of “environmental racism”, even filing a suit under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The groups have faced an uphill battle defending the town from becoming a nuclear disposal site. However, while the fight was won in Sierra Blanca, the compact is law and these states will seek an alternative site.

[Link]

Nuclear Information and Resource Center –

President Clinton Pulls the Trigger on Minority Community
Okays Sending Radioactive Waste to Texas Border Town

Wash., D.C. — On September 20, President Clinton violated the very spirit and letter of his own 1994 Executive order on Environmental Justice by signing the Texas/Maine/Vermont Radioactive Waste dump Compact (HR 629) into law. His signature traded the civil rights of the low-income, Mexican American people of Sierra Blanca, Texas for the nuclear power industry.

[Link]

According to Thomas @ the Library of Congress –

H.R.629
Title: To grant the consent of the Congress to the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact.
Sponsor: Rep Barton, Joe [TX-6] (introduced 2/6/1997) Cosponsors (23)
Related Bills: H.RES.258, H.RES.511, S.270
Latest Major Action: Became Public Law No: 105-236 [GPO: Text, PDF]
House Reports: 105-181; Latest Conference Report: 105-630 (in Congressional Record H5724-5727)

[Link]

Norma Chavez campaign–

Chairwoman Chávez marches 4 days from El Paso to Sierra Blanca against the proposed Sierra Blanca Low-Level Radioactive Waste Facility.

[Link]

Lone Star Chapter Sierra Club: Position Statement on Radioactive Waste

See also: Yucca Mountain

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore changes his mind, calls for nuclear power

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands [see Amchitka]. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
[link]

via Dave’s Picks

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (and many other admirable initiatives), is another old-school environmentalist who has come around to nuclear power

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbani­zation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. [link]

Jared Diamond, author and lecturer, also endorses nuclear power. Diamond spoke at a conference sponsored by the Long Now Foundation (another Stewart Brand project). Mark Hertsgaard chronicles the event, and calls both Diamond and Brand to task –

During a public lecture in San Francisco last month [July 2005], Jared Diamond, the mega-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, became the latest and most prominent environmental intellectual to endorse nuclear power as a necessary response to global warming.

Addressing an overflow crowd at the Cowell Theater about why some societies fail and others don’t (the theme of his most recent book, Collapse), Diamond three times cited global warming as a threat that could ruin modern civilization. During the question period, he was asked if he agreed with Stewart Brand, whose Long Now Foundation was sponsoring the lecture, that global warming posed such a grave threat that humanity had to embrace nuclear power. It was a delicate moment, for Brand, the former editor of The Whole Earth Catalogue , was on stage with Diamond.

“I did not know that Stewart Brand said that,” Diamond replied. “But yes, to deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power.” Nuclear, he added, should simply be “done carefully, like they do in France, where there have been no accidents.”

“I did not expect that answer,” Brand said.

Neither, it seemed, did much of the audience. Overwhelmingly white and affluent, they had nodded reverentially at everything Diamond had said thus far—about the self-destructiveness of ancient civilizations that leveled forests (Easter Island) or eroded soils (the Mayans) in pursuit of short-term gain, about the need for America to rethink its “core value” of consumerism if it hopes to survive. They had clapped when Diamond mocked President Bush’s see-no-evil approach to environmental protection.

Yet now here was Diamond urging an expansion of nuclear power, a technology most environmentalists regard as irredeemably evil.

“Deal with it,” crowed Brand as the crowd sat in stunned silence.
[link]

“Crowed” …? Maybe: crows are tricksters, and Brand has long been that.

BERLIN, MARCH 29 2006 : Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear programme, with help from Pakistani experts, the German magazine Cicero reports in its latest edition, citing western security sources.

It says that during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia in aircraft laid on by the oil-rich kingdom.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them took the opportunity to “disappear” from their hotel rooms, sometimes for up to three weeks, it quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.

According to western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998 thanks to the work of the now-disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Cicero, which will appear on newsstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons “because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear programme”.

The magazine also said satellite images prove that Saudi Arabia has set up in al-Sulaiyil, South of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

According to some western security services, long-range Ghauri-type missiles of Pakistani-origin are housed inside the silos. [Link]

Via Rolling Stone

Also at Forbes