U.S. Defies U.N. Decision–Plans Massive Military Detonation on Western Shoshone Land Western Shoshone
call for halt to planned June 2 “Bunker Buster” detonation at the Nevada Test Site
"Divine Strake"
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U.S. Defies U.N. Decision– Plans Massive Military Detonation on Western Shoshone Land Western Shoshone call for halt to planned June 2 “Bunker Buster” detonation at the Nevada Test Site "Divine Strake" |
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background : Divine Strake from Federation of American Scientists (website)
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Apr. 27, 2006 Officials show off pit, offer assurances blast will be safeBy KEITH ROGERS
NEVADA TEST SITE -- Miners took a break Wednesday from drilling and blasting a large pit in which 700 tons of explosives is scheduled to be detonated June 2. With the 36-foot-deep pit only two-thirds finished, work halted as Defense and Energy officials offered a tour of a tunnel 100 feet beneath the pit and assured reporters they can safely conduct the Divine Strake bunker-buster test if all goes as planned. The massive detonation of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil set off by C-4 explosives will give weapons scientists data on how shock waves travel through a 100-foot-thick block of bedded limestone. The tunnel will offer evidence of the blast's power to destroy a buried cache of weapons of mass destruction. The above-ground blast near the top of Syncline Ridge will send a mushroom-shaped dust cloud 10,000 feet into the atmosphere and release an explosive yield equivalent to detonating 593 tons of TNT, 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas, said officials with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. That would be larger than the 430-ton yield produced by the Danny Boy nuclear bomb that was set off in a basalt crater at the test site in 1962. The $23 million Divine Strake test will be the culmination of a decade of planning and experimentation aimed at fine-tuning confidence in the ability of existing weapons to defeat deeply buried, hardened targets. One official, Doug Bruder, a civil engineer who leads the agency's Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, denied that the Divine Strake test is geared to developing a new nuclear bunker-buster bomb as some independent scientists have speculated. Instead, he said, the effort is to assess the capabilities of current weapons to penetrate a target through explosive shock waves in a specific geologic setting -- in this case, a limestone tunnel. The test supports how officials can "best plan for those weapons to be used if we ever have to," Bruder said. "What it also gives us in the future is how high the bar needs to be in terms of our future advanced explosives." Aside from the Divine Strake test, he said the agency has a large program to explore more powerful conventional explosives. "We want those explosives to be as powerful as possible but non-nuclear. So we need to know what does it take to actually defeat a facility like that. Now we know what we actually have to achieve in terms of power of the new explosive," he said. Since construction of the 1,100-foot-long tunnel was completed in 1999, the agency has conducted 45 tests, including live munitions dropped by Air Force warplanes, he said. That is in addition to small-scale laboratory experiments for the project and a pair of medium-scale explosions at the Mitchell limestone quarry, about 35 miles south of Bloomington, Ind. Those tests in 2004 and 2005 were powered by 3,000 pounds of nitromethane. Officials for the National Nuclear Security Administration, a branch of the Department of Energy that is hosting the test, would not comment on a lawsuit seeking to block the test that was filed last week by Western Shoshones and downwinders from Utah. Nevada environmental officials meanwhile, have asked the NNSA for more information that demonstrates harmful pollutants won't be released beyond the boundary of the 1,375-square-mile test site. Most above-ground contamination sites are more than four miles away from the tunnel. A muck pile from six nuclear tests that were conducted below ground is more than a mile away. Those below-ground, weapons effects tests were conducted between 1962 and 1971, NNSA officials said. The atmospheric, atomic bomb tests -- four each in two locations -- were conducted during the 1950s. During Wednesday's preview tour, Linda Cohn, an NNSA environmental protection specialist, offered assurances that no radioactive materials from past nuclear tests at the test site would be injected into the atmosphere and carried beyond the test site's boundary. She said survey's conducted Tuesday confirmed that "there is no radioactive contamination adjacent to this experiment site." "The crater from this test is only about 98 feet in radius. It will be a large cloud but it's not going to go off site," Cohn said. http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Apr-27-Thu-2006/news/7073128.html |
Explosion test has Hatch upset
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For more info send us an email or call the number below. Native Americans step up campaign against bomb test19/04/2006With the clock ticking towards the Pentagons testing of a massive new bomb, Native Americans of Nevadas Western Shoshone nation are stepping up their efforts to stop the scheduled blast from occurring. The Pentagon plans to detonate the new megabomb weighing 700 short tons (635 metric tons) on June 2, as part of its efforts to develop non-nuclear ordnance capable of destroying deeply buried, subterranean targets. Dubbed Divine Strake, the test is scheduled to take place on the Nevada Test Site a high desert valley that is surrounded by mountains and sits 140 kilometres from Las Vegas. If the blast occurs, it will be the largest open-air chemical explosion in the sites history. According to Utah's Salt Lake Tribune, Divine Strake will be five times bigger than the largest non-nuclear bomb currently in the United States arsenal the Massive Ordinance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), which has been nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs. Western Shoshone woman Carrie Dann, who has been a Native American activist for four decades, told Daily Ireland that the proposed blast was wrong not only for the indigenous peoples but for all peoples and all life. The earth is your mother, and you cannot separate yourself from your mother," Ms Dann said during a telephone interview from the Nevada-based Western Shoshone Defence Project. You cannot take away the earth that feeds you and clothes you and everything. No way. Kevin Rohrer a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that operates the test site has claimed that the United States is within its rights to conduct the testing. He insists that a 1985 US Supreme Court ruling recognised that the Shoshone were paid in full for the land under the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946 and therefore the land no longer belongs to the tribe. Julie Fishel, a lawyer for the Western Shoshone Defence Project, said all such court rulings were illegitimate because they were rooted in proclamations and laws passed during the original European conquest of indigenous lands. Ms Fishel said such US claims were based on the Christian Document of Discovery, a doctrine formed via a series papal bulls that were issued between 1452 and 1493, as the Europeans began exploring lands in the western hemisphere. The Document of Discovery gave moral sanction to the seizing of native lands. In 1823, the US Supreme Court officially incorporated the concept into US law by ruling that European settlers had achieved ultimate dominion over the lands that they had explored over the previous 330 years and that Native Americans had forever lost their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations. Ms Fishel told Daily Ireland: US federal Indian law is based on the Document of Discovery antiquated, racist doctrines. And during those proceedings, the Western Shoshone were never allowed to present evidence. They were not given a hearing on the record. Ms Fishel, whose great-grandparents were Irish, said she frequently used a link to Ireland when explaining events on Shoshone lands. The pattern of behaviour between the United States and Native Americans is the same as whats happened in Ireland. In fact, we make that analogy quite often because many of the trees that were clear-cut in Ireland by the colonisers in Ireland were used to build ships to get to the US, and those people then colonised Indian lands here, she said. According to Western Shoshone leaders, the proposed June 2 blast site was recognised by the United States as belonging to the Western Shoshone nation under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley. The US authorities dispute this claim. The Nevada Test Site, previously known as the Nevada Proving Ground, was the United States main nuclear weapons testing site between 1951 and 1959. Some arms-race experts believe that, even after the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, the United States conducted underground tests for many more years. Scientists have linked increased cases of cancer and leukaemia in areas surrounding the test site to exposure to radiation from the nuclear testing. Julie Fishel said the proposed blast was all the more striking because of recent US government actions regarding nuclear science both in signing a treaty to bolster Indias nuclear capabilities, and US efforts to thwart the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea. I think the United States is doing whatever it wants to do. It doesn't seem to be paying heed to whether or not there is any consistency in that behaviour. They are behaving as if they dont have to follow anyones rules, that they can say one thing and then do exactly the opposite, she said. In March, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva called on Washington to abort the June 2 test and to desist from activities that violated Western Shoshone sovereignty. Activist Carrie Dann said: Even looking at it from the point of health, when you detonate a bomb like that down at the test site, its going to raise up the deaths from people already exposed to radiation. America has never really looked at the indigenous problem. America is supposed to be ruled by laws. But when it comes to indigenous issues,its just ruled by arrogance, as far as Im concerned. |
Native Americans Want 'Bunker Buster' Test StoppedTue., Apr. 11, 2006
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The National Nuclear Security Administration "is prohibited from allowing this test to proceed until authorization from NDEP (the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection) has been received," the state division Administrator Leo Drozdoff wrote in a letter sent Friday to test site manager Kathleen Carlson. The letter refers to an "To date, the NNSA has not responded to this information request. NNSA is reminded that no approval was received. ... In order to conduct this test, NNSA needs to provide all information and demonstrations required," Drozdoff wrote. Kevin Rohrer, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration's Nevada Site Office, said his agency will provide the requested information to the state "within two weeks." "What the state wants to see is further analysis and computer modeling of any plume that might be generated from this to ensure that any emissions are still within the threshold established in our air permit," Rohrer said. He said initial calculations based on detonating 900 tons of ammonium nitrate fuel oil solution in a 30-foot pit show the blast will be in compliance with the test site's air permit that was issued in June 2004. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which wants to conduct the test above a limestone tunnel, intends to use a smaller amount of ammonium nitrate fuel oil solution, 700 tons. "We believe we're going to be well below the threshold," Rohrer said. The state's April 2005 request seeks documentation that identifies hazardous pollutants that will be carried by the explosion's mushroom cloud. It also calls for documentation that demonstrates that state and federal air quality standards will be met. The information is required under an existing air quality permit for operating the government's test site, 65 miles northwest of In a statement issued Tuesday, Steve Robinson, Gov. Kenny Guinn's deputy chief of staff, said: "The governor's office expects the NNSA to fully comply with all applicable state environmental rules and regulations before any testing is done." Drozdoff's letter was written the same day that Citizen Alert, a statewide environmental group, called for the Defense Department and Energy Department to halt the Divine Strake blast, claiming it is unnecessary and could send surface contamination from previous atomic bomb tests into the air. When told Tuesday about the state blocking the explosion until air quality compliance is demonstrated, Citizen Alert Executive Director "Instead of NNSA hiring their contractors to do what the state wants, they need to bring in an independent study group to do that, somebody who isn't on their payroll and doesn't owe them," she said. The Divine Strake blast is aimed at developing technology for weapons to penetrate "hardened and deeply buried targets," according to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. |
Western Shoshone oppose planned 700-ton detonation Click ELKO, Nev. - Western Shoshone opposed the Pentagon's planned 700-ton detonation on aboriginal Western Shoshone land, as a delegation of Western Shoshone returned from Geneva, Switzerland, with support from the United Nations for protection of their human rights and territory. James Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, confirmed that the United States plans to detonate 700 tons of explosives at the Nevada Test Site on June 2. While the Pentagon calls it ''Divine Strake,'' Western Shoshone said there is nothing divine about a massive explosion on their traditional lands. ''I believe when you are working testing weaponry for destruction of life, you should not associate it with 'divine.' We want this insanity to stop - no more bombs and no more testing,'' Western Shoshone grandmother Carrie Dann, executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, said. As Nevada and Utah congressmen pressed the Pentagon for answers, critics of the Bush administration say the blast is related to an effort to build a nuclear bunker-buster. ''It is abundantly clear, at least to me, that the military has not given up the idea of a nuclear penetrator,'' Christopher Hellman, policy analyst with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, told the Las Vegas Sun newspaper. Hellman said that Congress killed funding for the nuclear bunker-busting program last year. However, he said, ''they want it'' and would continue those efforts. Western Shoshone said the test would be in direct violation of the recent decision of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. CERD, in the decision made public March 10, urged the United States to ''freeze,'' ''desist'' and ''stop'' actions and threats against the Western Shoshone. The committee stressed the ''nature and urgency'' of the situation and informed the United States that it warrants immediate attention under the committee's Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure. The CERD decision explicitly cited ongoing weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site as well as efforts to build an unprecedented high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. Chief Raymond Yowell, of the Western Shoshone National Council, said Western Shoshone are opposed to any further military testing on Shoshone lands. ''This is a direct violation of the CERD finding and an affront to our religious belief [that] mother earth is sacred and should not be harmed. All people who are opposed to these actions by the U.S. should step forward and make their opposition known.'' Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, also questioned the detonation in a letter to Tegnelia. ''Although I understand that this test is not a nuclear test, I am greatly concerned that you have not provided the public with adequate assurances that the test is not being conducted in order to further misguided attempts to build new low-yield nuclear devices,'' Matheson wrote. The Defense Department's Defense Threat Reduction Agency does not deny that the test was described last year as a planning tool for development of a tactical nuclear weapon. Earlier, Tegnelia told Agence France Presse that the result of the 700-ton detonation would be a ''mushroom cloud.'' However, he later retracted the statement. ''I don't want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons.'' Tegnelia also said it would be the ''largest single explosive that we could imagine.'' While the military denies that it is a nuclear test, it will still be many times more powerful than the smallest weapon in the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The Divine Strake blast will be five times larger than the military's largest conventional weapon, the Massive Ordinance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB, nicknamed the Mother of All Bombs, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. Pete Litster, executive director of Shundahai Network, said ongoing weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site violate international law. ''They violate the standing treaty between the U.S. government and the Western Shoshone people. They also violate the spirit of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The test site is located on Western Shoshone territory, and must not continue to be misused in bold violation of standing agreements between the U.S. government and the Western Shoshone Nation.'' Although approval for the test was sought and obtained from the state of Nevada in January, the test detonation could be cancelled. The Western Shoshone National Council, the Western Shoshone Defense Project and Shundahai Network urged a united effort to halt the detonation. C Indian Country Today April 17, 2006. All Rights Reserved |
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A worker pushes a cart Wednesday in the tunnel beneath a pit at the Nevada Test Site where an explosives tests will take place in June. The tunnel will simulate a location where weapons of mass destructions could be buried.