Imperialism and the Logic Of Mass Destruction

Carl Boggs

As throughout much of its war-obsessed history, the United States is currently engaged in military conflict – or threatening such action – across a broad contested terrain.   In the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, Washington has resorted to its familiar global modus operandi: sending off barrages of missiles and bombs, much of it hitting civilian populations and resources needed for their survival.   Death tolls mount, the largest numbers lately in the protracted battle for Mosul.   Heavier casualties are being visited upon non-combatants in Yemen, thanks to U.S.-backed Saudi aerial savagery.

We have been told by the media that President Trump has apparently relaxed the rules of warfare, thus allowing civilians to be more easily victimized the midst of armed conflict.   Innocent noncombatants are being made increasingly vulnerable to ravages of the largest and most aggressive war machine in history.  That, however, would be a serious misreading of the situation: Trump, like Obama, the Bushes, and Clinton before him, is simply operating within an historical pattern of imperial war making for which rules of engagement matter little, if at all.    There is no deviation from the norm.

In fact Pentagon elites insist nothing has changed in their methods of warfare – and they are right.   While the U.S. accuses, threatens, and attacks others for their (real or imputed) transgressions, its own apparatus of mass destruction continues with few legal or moral constraints.  In particular, Washington long ago turned aerial terrorism into a normalized mode of technowar that reduces civilians to dispensable objects.

In recent weeks U.S. aerial bombardments in Syria alone have reportedly killed several hundred people, mainly civilians.   Daily raids in Iraq, mostly targeting ISIS in Mosul, have accounted for more than 3000 civilian deaths, according to AirWars sources.    To believe this is a departure from the past – or that civilian casualties are simply an inevitable by-product of combat – is to ignore the American history of savage warfare, which since World War II has meant bringing horrendous death and destruction from the skies.

There is actually nothing “indiscriminate” about this savagery: all too often it has been planned, deliberate, systematic – and discriminate.    Moreover, the U.S. has far surpassed any other nation in the production, deployment, and use of WMD, its military doctrines now as in the past embracing the virtues of weaponry designed to bring mass destruction.  Consider that WMD comes in four distinct types: nuclear, biological, chemical, conventional (mainly saturation bombing).    We could add to this list economic sanctions of the sort the U.S. (through the United Nations) imposed on Iraq during the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.  As the U.S. resorted to sanctions continuously in the postwar era – targeting Iran, Cuba, Yugoslavia, North Korea, and Russia as well as Iraq – the civilian death toll (well past a million) has far exceeded that from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons combined.

Yet it is conventional warfare that has brought the greatest destruction, for both combatants and civilians – and it remains the most imposing threat today.    The WMD threat arrives in the form of strategic (alternatively saturation, area, carpet, or scorched-earth) bombing, introduced by the British and Americans during World War II and refined across the decades.   Worth noting is that the U.S. is the only nation to have manufactured, stored, deployed, and used all five types of WMD.

In densely-populated centers like Mosul and Raqqa – and where hundreds of drone strikes are carried out – efforts to distinguish between combatants and civilians are virtually impossible; large numbers of civilian dead and wounded tolls are inevitable.   That has never deterred U.S. military decision-makers at the Pentagon or in the field, whatever “rules” are set forth in the Universal Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) or international statutes.    From World War II to Korea, Indochina, Iraq, Yugoslavia, and beyond, this carnage is alternately blamed on mistakes, inescapable “collateral damage”, intelligence failures, enemy use of “human shields” – all while boasting of the latest “precision weaponry”.   Unfortunately, the U.S. military rarely conducts genuine investigations into the devastation it produces, and for good reason: it does want to come face-to-face with its flagrant war crimes.

Since late 2014 U.S. (or Coalition) planes have carried out more than 20,000 strikes in Iraq and Syria, resulting in an estimated 70,000 “militant” deaths – a number that surely includes civilian losses that will never be known and based on a calculus that is routinely understated.  According to AirWars, at least 3325 civilians were killed from a total of 566 air strikes in the region, but that is only where evidence is clearly available.  Meanwhile, recent non-combatant deaths in Mosul alone have reached more than 2500, as reported by AirWars.  Important civilian objects – residences, public buildings, markets, etc. – have been repeatedly hit with high-explosive weaponry.  The bombing raids have only intensified.

What is taking place in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria replicates a familiar disregard for long-established international law, as even the corporate media unwittingly acknowledges by attributing a “loosening of rules” to the out-of-control Trump.   California Representative Ted Lieu recently sent a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis seeking clarification of American global behavior: “The substantial increases in civilian deaths caused by U.S. military force in Syria and Iraq brings into question whether the Trump administration is violating the Laws of War.”  Trump is indeed violating such laws – specifically the 1949 Geneva Protocol prohibiting wanton attacks on civilians – but, as noted, he is simply following deeply-entrenched American practices.

For more than a century American imperialism has been fueled by a combustible mixture of national exceptionalism, militarism, racism, and pursuit of global supremacy.  Civilian inhabitants and their necessary supports have never stood in the way of these powerful forces, even where it has meant resort to WMD.    Demonized Asian populations have been mercilessly targeted, with impunity – and unbelievably savage consequences.   Looking at the apparent willingness of the Trump administration to consider nuclear warfare on the Korean peninsula, with its unthinkable horrors, we can readily see that little has changed over the decades.

As Washington looks to reassert economic, political, and military leverage in the Asia-Pacific region – the so-called “Asian Pivot” to contain China – escalating U.S. threats should be taken seriously.   Whether conventional or nuclear, the Pentagon is poised to strike first against North Korea.  For several months, indeed years, the U.S. has done everything short of all-out war to intimidate and subvert the Kim Jung Un regime: large-scale military exercises, economic sanctions, cyberattacks, new troop deployments, constant threats of attack.   There is much talk in Washington and the media of “preemptive war”, including efforts to “decapitate” the regime.   A supposedly impenetrable missile-defense system (THAAD) is being installed across South Korea.

Koreans already know far more than they would prefer about the horrors of mass destruction emanating from the U.S.   What can only be called a war of annihilation, carried out by the U.S. to secure battlefield victory over endless stalemate, in the face of strong Chinese and North Korean forces, left a death toll on the peninsula with estimates reaching as high as five million, nearly 80 percent civilian.   Political, legal, and moral constraints were routinely tossed aside, as American military culture eagerly took up the World War II code that mass killing of civilians was legitimate – actually vital – to the kind of war of attrition the U.S. had waged against the Japanese.

When the U.S. Army was forced into a perilous retreat in fall 1950, General Douglas MacArthur ordered his air force to destroy “every means of communication, every installation, factory, city, town, and village” in Korea.   Food sources and water facilities were systematically targeted and obliterated.   Nonstop raids, employing napalm and other incendiary devices, left the main centers of human life (including the capital Pyongyang) in smoking ruins.   Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, in their eye-opening book The United States and Biological Warfare, write: “As it had been in World War II, strategic bombing was extended to the mass destruction of civilian populations, and as in World War II the reservations that the U.S. had about saturation bombing of Europeans in that earlier war were not extended to Asians.”

In December of 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed President Truman’s readiness to use atomic bombs in Korea to avoid further stalemate or defeat.   This “option” was retained throughout the war, finally to be jettisoned by President Eisenhower in 1953.  White House and Pentagon officials also favored employing both chemical and biological weapons in a theater where mass destruction was already far advanced.

In fact the U.S. did launch a phase of biological warfare in Korea, a criminal project the warfare state has tried to keep secret.  Evidence uncovered by the Koreans and Chinese revealed a U.S. military campaign to disseminate a wide variety of deadly biological agents, hoping to create epidemics, panic, and social breakdown in the north.  In late 1950 large outbreaks of plague, cholera, smallpox, and encephalitis were reported in Pyongyang and several provinces, according to Endicott and Hagerman.   This was part of a scorched-earth policy U.S. troops employed as they retreated southward throughout 1950 and 1951.

Endicott and Hagerman add: “The U.S. had substantial stocks of biological weapons on hand.  Moral qualms about using biological or atomic weapons had been brushed aside by top leaders and biological warfare might dodge the political bullet of adverse public and world opinion if it were kept secret enough to make plausible denial of its use.”  Moreover, Washington had not signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning such weaponry.  Later investigations and reports found the U.S. guilty as charged, a finding naturally dismissed by Americans as “Communist propaganda”.

The Pentagon’s biological program was kept intact until early 1953.   Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force was busy destroying every Korean target in sight, including agricultural fields and hydroelectric dams, dropping an endless supply of fragmentation bombs, napalm, and high-explosive devices.  In August 1952 Pyongyang was leveled by a series of saturation-bombing raids.  Still unable to break the military stalemate, the USAF transferred a large stock of atomic weapons to Okinawa as it prepared for a new phase of warfare that, fortunately, was never set in motion.

Embracing the great benefits of WMD, the U.S. military was able to revitalize its strategy of total war, understood by many at the summits of power as God’s work.   General Matthew Ridgway, Eighth Army commander, could say in 1951: “The real issues are whether the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism . . . [and] whether we are able to survive with God’s hand to guide and lead us, or to perish in the dead existence of a Godless world.”  Before Korea, the God of a privileged imperial nation had similarly blessed the American takeover of the Philippines at a cost of several hundred thousand lives – and before that the massacre of Indian tribes (by Andrew Jackson’s troops) at Horseshoe Bend and (by Colonel John Chivington’s marauders) at Sand Creek, among many other atrocities.

An imperialist ideology that embellished, even celebrated, warfare against civilians reached its first methodical expression during World War II.   In the Pacific, this meant a war of annihilation against the Japanese, who at that time stood for the “Asian masses” or “hordes”.    In such a war everything was permissible, starting with the deliberate and ruthless obliteration of entire cities, including those with little or no military significance. Saturation bombing launched by waves of the most technologically-developed warplanes raised barbarism to new levels.  Admiral William Halsey, U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, vowing revenge for Pearl Harbor, promised that Japanese would henceforth be spoken only in hell while ordering his personnel to “kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.”  (Worth noting: only military targets were hit at Pearl Harbor.)  The remarkable American hatred of Japanese was destined to produce, in John Dower’s words (War without Mercy “a spellbinding spectacle of brutality and death.”

On March 9-10, 1945, U.S. planes dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, with the aim of destroying the city; at least 100,000 civilians were instantly killed.   Aerial terrorism then turned to Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, and more than 60 other cities, targeting mostly defenseless civilian areas with vengeful frenzy.   A few cities remained – Hiroshima and Nagasaki among them – until they were obliterated by the new superweapon developed at the Manhattan Project, leaving another 150,000 dead amid unimaginable mass destruction.

There could be no justification for such criminality.   A.J. Grayling, in his book All the Dead Cities, surveyed the history of strategic bombing and concluded that World War II pilots should have refused orders to carry out such raids.   (None in fact did.)  General Curtis LeMay, architect of the firebombing attacks on Japanese cities, later conceded: “If we had lost the war we would all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”   Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals moved to exclude that very possibility, so aerial mass murder was exempted from wartime culpability.

World War II set in motion an elevated trajectory of imperial atrocities that would continue throughout the postwar years.   While nations were generally expected to follow international law and wartime rules of engagement, and the vast majority have chosen to do so, the U.S. simply took another path: contempt for the norms of universality.   To this day Washington steadfastly refuses participation in the International Criminal Court (ICC), understandably fearing prosecution of its own government and military personnel for war crimes.  The plain fact is that American elites can routinely launch wars against peace and target civilian populations without even the pretense of any legal rationale.

Less than a decade after the Korean War the U.S. commenced a new phase of barbarism in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, dropping eight million tons of bombs compared to the two million tons dropped on all countries in World War II.   This was equivalent to 640 Hiroshimas.   Saturation bombing was perfected beyond its usage against Japan and Korea:  B-52s systematically carpet-bombed large zones, followed by a torrent of anti-personnel weapons including cluster bombs, white-phosphorous, and a specially-upgraded napalm.   By 1974, the U.S. military had dropped seven bombs for every person in Indochina.   As for napalm, a staggering 373,000 tons was unleashed in Vietnam, compared to 32,000 tons in Korea.

In Vietnam, the Pentagon relied heavily on chemical warfare:  roughly 6500 flights to spray Agent Orange and other toxic agents were carried out between 1962 and 1971, the intent being to destroy crops and foliage.   Operation Ranch Hand contaminated more than 31,000 square kilometers, poisoning at least four million people and leaving hundreds of thousands afflicted with cancer, lung diseases, and birth defects.  Such warfare could never distinguish combatants from civilians, nor did the U.S. military command make any real efforts to do so.

In more recent decades, civilian death tolls resulting from U.S. military operations in the Middle East and beyond have easily surpassed one million.   Harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and others could have reached that same figure.   Aerial bombardments have devastated large, densely-populated areas of Iraq, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libra, and Syria.    Weapons “upgraded” with depleted uranium (DU) have left a toxic legacy in Iraq and Serbia, overwhelmingly harming civilians.

Back to Korea:  the Trump administration says it has “lost all patience” with North Korean leaders and their “reckless behavior”, and has (again) “opened the door” to military attack while seemingly holding out prospects of diplomacy that, however, depend on rigid stipulations.   Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that for any talks to occur North Korea would first have to “exhibit good faith commitment” by jettisoning its nuclear program – a complete non-starter.  Given such imperial arrogance, can mounting confrontation be avoided?

With all that is at stake – perhaps one million people killed within the first day or so of a new Korean War, vast urban centers decimated, a potential nuclear exchange – rational leadership might be expected to retreat from such a nightmarish scenario and consider a more peaceful modus vivendi.   (For the U.S., a peaceful option is exactly what is “off the table”.)     From the standpoint of Washington, “rational” pursuits are also imperial pursuits and imperial pursuits generally lead to military pursuits, as history demonstrates.   Technowar managers are not especially sensitive to the prospects of massive civilian losses.  Normal behavioral assumptions therefore do not apply to U.S. war calculations, whoever occupies the White House.

Politicizing Anti-Semitism

Lawrence Davidson

“Back in the day,” which in this case was 8 February 2007, the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism adopted a “working definition” of anti-Semitism which included the following point: It is anti-Semitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor).” The whole definition, including the quoted sentence, was not original with the State Department. It was originally “written collaboratively by a small group of non-governmental organizations” which remained unnamed.

This “working definition” has proved to have staying power. Thus the U.S. Congress has used the State Department document in devising its Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016, and in December of 2016, the British government adopted an almost identical “working definition,” which listed the same alleged act of denial – the one that links the Jewish people’s “right of self-determination” with the “claim that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavor” as an example of “contemporary anti-Semitism.”

There is something not quite right about this aspect of the “working definition.” The two parts of the quoted sentence don’t really go together logically. Thus, labeling Israel as it presently exists as a “racist endeavor” does not “deny the Jewish people their right of self-determination.” It only asserts that self-determination carried forth in a racist manner, by Jews or anyone else, is illegitimate.

Although neither the State Department’s nor the U.K. government’s taking up of this “working definition” are not legally binding on non-governmental individuals or organizations (a fact not widely publicized), it has allowed both U.S. and British Zionists to label critics of Israel as anti-Semites in what appears to be a semi-official way, and this has opened the floodgates for a growing number of actions by colleges, universities, civic groups and the like to ban conferences, student organizations and speakers who would condemn Israeli behavior and support Palestinian rights.

Subsequently, the respected British jurist Hugh Tomlinson has come out with an opinion on this “working definition” which finds it flawed, and the U.K. government’s assertion of it legally unenforceable.

A Flawed Assumption

The assertion that criticism of Israel is an act of anti-Semitism relies on the assumption that, because Israel describes itself as “a Jewish state,” it represents all Jews. This exaggeration, in turn, seems reasonable due to a broader tendency, most prevalent in the democratic West, to confuse governments and the people they claim authority over. Americans and most Europeans live in democracies and vote for their governments in relatively honest elections. So, aren’t they in some way to be identified with the policies of their governments? The claim can be no more than partially true. Maybe an argument can be made for those who actually voted for the policymakers in a politically aware fashion. But what of the those who did not vote for them? Or how about those who did not vote at all? How about those who do not reside within the country that claims them?

It is interesting to note that this identification of specific groups with specific governments is rarely made by those living in dictatorships and states with rigged elections. In those places the population knows that their wishes have no relation to policy. Often their assumption is that the same sort of disconnect is a really a worldwide phenomenon. So, for instance, if you go to Iran, Iranians will usually tell you that they heartily dislike the U.S. government and, at the same time, really like the American people. No one believes that the two things, government and people, are really the same thing.

When it comes to populations that are spread out beyond one particular state, the exaggeration becomes even more obvious. Thus, can the Buddhist government of Sri Lanka claim the loyalty of Nepalese Buddhists for their horrible war against the Tamils? Should the ethnic Chinese living in San Francisco be expected to support the expansionist policies of the Chinese government in Tibet?

Common sense tells us that it is a gross exaggeration to identify specific ethnic or religious groups with the policies of specific governments, even democratic ones. Yet as we have seen above, in one ongoing case, that of the Jews and Israel, the argument is being pushed very strongly – to the point where laws are being considered to mandate just such an identification.

Israel De-Civilizes

Since the inception of the the State of Israel, one Israeli government after the other has insisted that the Israeli state officially represents every last Jew on the planet – thus conflating nationality and religious identity. The fabricated nature of this claim has become more obvious as Israeli behavior and culture has grown ever more racist and the policies of its governments more blatantly in violation of international law and the norms of human and civil rights.

While much of the rest of the world has strived to increase diversity and tolerance, Israel and a small number of other states (such places as Myanmar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, etc.) go about practicing official discrimination, segregation, and expulsion. As they do so, they inevitably produce cultures that those who support human and civil rights can only describe as ugly and deformed. As a consequence, more and more Jews have responded by disassociating themselves with Zionist Israel.

What then has been the response of the Israeli government? It is, essentially, to spit in the face of Jews supportive of human rights. The Israelis seek to force the issue by using their influence and that of Zionist lobby surrogates to push for new laws in key foreign lands, such as the U.S. and the U.K., to make criticism of the Israeli state legally synonymous with anti-Semitism. The U.S. and British adoption of the suspect portion of the “working definition” of anti-Semitism cited here is a step in this direction, and a consequence of Zionist pressure.

***

It should be noted that Israel and its supporters, being the “deep thinkers” they aren’t, have created an reductio ad absurdum situation. To wit, anyone who publicly condemns Israeli human rights violations (that is Israeli racist acts) must be anti-Semitic (racist) – even if they happen to be Jewish. That is what you get when you pursue particularistic expediency over the general logic of tolerance and humanitarianism.

One can ask how it is that American and British, as well as other politicians and law makers, who are themselves part of cultures that are even now seeking to overcome racism, can buy into such an illogical argument?

Their doing so seems to be an expression of the electoral marketplace. Politicians need money to survive in their chosen career. As long as it does not cost them an overwhelming number of votes, they will sell their support to high bidders. And, no one bids higher than the Zionists.

This means that democratic politics is most often not a principled activity. It can be idealized, of course, but as long as it is dependent on incessant fund-raising, it will be corrupt in practice. That is why the Zionists can easily arrange for most Western politicians to selectively suppress free speech in their own countries and support racism in Israel.

Nuclear Waste: Planning for the Next Million Years

Ruby Russell

Berlin.

It’s been over 60 years since the first nuclear power plant was switched on in Russia and now 31 years (last week) since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Yet despite the decades-long history of nuclear power, most countries still haven’t agreed on a way to safely store nuclear waste.

Leading the way is Finland with the world’s first permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel. High-level radioactive waste is to be buried 400 metres deep in the granite bedrock of Olkiluoto Island off the Finnish coast, where its operators claim it will be secure for the next 100,000 years.

Governments, on the whole, aren’t good at long term planning though. And this is a major problem for the nuclear industry where eventualities must be planned for in terms of hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of years.

Teams of artists and philosophers are even debating how to mark repository sites to warn off future generations who may be as removed from us as we are from the first homo sapiens to arrive in Europe.

Even the more easily grasped timescales involved in nuclear waste disposal pose huge technical, economic and social challenges. Finland is to start loading the Olkiluoto repository in 2020 and the process is expected to take 100 years. That may seem like a long time, and it is considering that the first observed nuclear reaction was made less than 100 years ago in 1919.

Sweden, which is pushing forward with the same technology as Finland, is the only other European country close to such an advanced stage of planning. Favourable geological conditions and relatively small quantities of just one type of waste – spent fuel, without the additional problems of reprocessed waste – mean both countries have advantages over other nuclear nations.

For the most part,says Stephen Thomas, Emeritus Professor of Energy Policy at Greenwich University, high-level radioactive waste is lying around waiting for a solution.

“Around the world, everybody is extending the spent fuel storage and reactors. Find me a reactor that’s been in operation for 20 years and I’ll find you a plant which has had its spent fuel facility increased. Every one. There’s nowhere to put it”, says Thomas.

Public resistance

In 2011, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a full phase out nuclear power by 2022, making Europe’s largest economy a trailblazer in renewable energy.

Back in 1977, Germany was seen as a pioneer of disposal solutions when it began exploring a former salt mine at Gorleben as a possible repository. From the start, locals protested vehemently. A decades-long battle ensued with intense debate over whether the site was geologically suitable.

Some experts claimed that with its location in a sparsely populated area close to the then border with East Germany, the site was selected more for political than scientific reasons. In 2000 the government put a moratorium on the investigation.

A bill passed this year will see Gorleben back on the agenda as a possible waste site, in a search that views the country as a ‘blank map’, with salt, granite and clay sites all to be considered.

Officially, a site is to be identified by 2031 and built by 2050. But the state of Saxony is already pushing to be excluded from the process and some experts say this bid looks highly optimistic.

In the UK, exploration of a potential site conveniently close to the Sellafield decommissioning and reprocessing site – home to by far the country’s worst nuclear waste problem – stalled and was cancelled following a public and scientific consultation process.

In France, the plan for a clay repository near the village of Bure is more advanced than most. French nuclear agency ANDRA plans to have it ready by 2035. But observers say there has been a lack of public consultation and public protests are heating up ahead of an upcoming parliamentary vote over the site’s future.

Unknown costs

Besides the technical and political issues surrounding final disposal there are also massive economic challenges.

In the UK, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority forecast that the current cost of clean-up is somewhere between £95 billion (840 billion yuan) and £219 billion (2 trillion yuan), based on the data available. The total planned expenditure for 2017/2018 is £3.24 billion (20 billion yuan), of which £2.36 billion (20 billion yuan) will be funded by the government and the taxpayer; £0.88 billion by income from commercial operations.

In Germany, nuclear power plant operators are largely responsible for decommissioning reactors once they are switched off – this is where spent fuel is removed and sites dismantled – a process that takes decades in itself.

Under an agreement reached last year, waste disposal is now the responsibility of the state. Utilities are to pay 23.6 billion euros (177 billion yuan) into a state-administered fund to cover this. But experts worry that ultimately, taxpayers will be left footing the bill.

“For all the waste management and disposal of waste there is no technical concept and so you cannot estimate costs“, says Wolfgang Irrek, professor for energy management at Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences in Germany. Instead, the calculation is based on 20-year-old estimates for the Gorleben site.

Long-term intermediate storage

Some experts say final disposal is a bit of a red herring in any case. As appealing as the idea of settling the matter once and for all might be, questions have been raised about the long-term security of even the Finnish project.

“It’s very arrogant, scientifically, to say today we have safe disposal for tens of thousands of years”, says Mycle Schneider, an independent nuclear policy analyst and lead author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report. “I am not convinced geological storage is good forever – I have not seen the argument made conclusively. It’s too early to say.”

Instead, Schneider advocates a focus on ensuring that interim storage is up to the job, which, for the most part, it isn’t.

“We have got into problems with waste because it has been packaged on the assumption that it would go in the ground at a certain time, and it hasn’t, and the packaging has degraded”, Thomas says.

The UK and France have used wet storage for spent nuclear fuel, meaning the waste is kept in pools for long periods of time. Schneider says if there is anything to be learned from the European experience with nuclear waste it’s to take the German route of getting the cooled waste out of the water and into dry storage as quickly as possible.

“There is absolutely no doubt that dry storage is much safer and much more secure than pool storage”, says Schneider. “If you lose the water you are in trouble because the fuel will heat up. Depending on the age of the fuel, you might get fuel fires that will dwarf the nuclear accidents we have seen so far.”

He points to the Fukushima disaster, where it was initially unclear if a spent fuel fire was on the cards; a scenario which would have called for the evacuation of at least 10 million people.

In the UK, Andrew Blowers of independent expert group Nuclear Waste Advisory Associates says the locations of planned reactors pose their own set of problems.

“A lot of dangerous spent fuel is going to be stored on new-build sites which are in vulnerable coastal locations, which stacks up to a huge problem for the next century with climate change”, says Blowers.

Tip of the iceberg

And all this concerns only a tiny fraction of the overall radioactive waste problem. “High-level waste represents the smallest volume”, says Schneider. “The biggest volumes are [found] the lower you go in the contamination levels. A single uranium mine, like the German Wismut, can generate hundreds of millions of tonnes of waste.”

Decommissioning generates huge volumes of contaminated material. Intermediate-level waste storage repositories in Germany have also been fraught with technical and public acceptance problems, while decommissioning in the UK has seen costs spiral out of control.

“Britain is an example of how to make provisions for decommissioning wrong – we have made every mistake it is possible to make and have ended up with a nuclear authority that has no money”, Thomas says.

Germany has decided to phase out nuclear power altogether. Having defined volumes of material to deal with should give it some advantage, but Thomas says there is still too little experience of decommissioning to really know what the country is in for.

“The amount of decommissioning that has gone on in the world is negligible. I think there are six plants that have been fully decommissioned that operated for a decent amount of time.”

Still, Blowers says Germany’s got one thing right. “What we don’t want is more nuclear waste created when we are not at all sure what we are going to do with what we’ve already got.”

Apartheid in the Shadows: the USA, IBM and South Africa’s Digital Police State

Michael Kwet 

“Beggars and vagrants” are not welcome in Parkhurst, a mostly white suburb of about 5,000 in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Criminals of “increasing sophistication and aggression” are on the prowl, residents claim.  To combat local crime, community members proposed a solution: put surveillance everywhere.  Their proposal, however, was not for “traditional” surveillance.  Thanks to the digital revolution, Parkhurst could now integrate facial recognition, thermal sensors, infrared tracking, and data analytics.  Armed with powerful new tech, poor black “vagrants” can be watched, flagged, policed, and intimidated into submission.

“Smart” surveillance systems are being assembled quietly inside the country.  The public has been kept uninformed.  This is the first in-depth exposé of smart policing in South Africa.

A New “Revolution”

Two years ago, Parkhurst became one of the first SA neighborhoods to embark on the installation of their own smart surveillance system.  This little community made national headlines as the first suburb in South Africa to get residential fiber Internet.  Media outlets whitewashed the surveillance component.

The Parkhurst Village Residents and Business Owners Association fought for “Fibre to the Home” Internet.  Their primary motivation was “modern” digital surveillance only high-speed Internet could power, said the organization’s chair, Cheryl Labuschagne.  That residents now have fast Internet seems to be a secondary bonus.

A Vumatel employee, Giorgio Lovino, elaborates: the fiber “connects to the CCTV [surveillance] cameras…throughout the suburb and it transmits the video feed from those cameras…to a control point where their cameras can then be monitored off-site.  And it allows them to do number plate recognition, facial recognition, and all these types of surveillance activities.”  The CCTV system is being worked out so that it may be affordable to the community.

Parkhurst plans to install infrared and heat-source cameras to track body movements.  Labuschagne says they will use “GPS technology and so on to map where incidents occur” and determine “what movement is considered abnormal rather than typical movements in a neighborhood of people walking their dogs and so on.”

Labuschagne leaves unstated what constitutes “abnormal” movements.  However, iSentry, the CCTV software Parkhurst seeks, makes it explicit.  Their promotional video, titled “Unusual Behavior Detection”, depicts a young, black “beggar”, flagged by iSentry’s artificial intelligence-based video analytics.  Within moments, he and an accomplice are brought to the ground by a gang of cops, semi-automatic gun pointed.

The scene appears to be staged for promotional filming as a “typical scenario” for how the system should work.  That is to say, Parkhurst’s 21^st century policing system is advertised to target poor black people.

The iSentry system, deployed by CSS Tactical, has been installed in nearby suburbs, and is spreading to others.

Parkview Police Station Commander, Colonel Moodley, supports the “refreshing” initiative “wholeheartedly”.  Labuschagne proclaims she is “really really hopeful that what we’ve started is a revolution” in South Africa.

Smart Cities: Surveillance in the Shadows

A revolution is a number of years in the making.  In 2011, the City of Johannesburg announced a draft Growth and Development Strategy (GDS 2040) to convert Johannesburg into a “smart city” in cooperation with the private sector.  Digital technology would overhaul everything from public service delivery to crime management using “smart infrastructure” and “intelligent Video and Internet surveillance systems”.

Shortly thereafter, Johannesburg began implementing “smart policing” based on new surveillance cameras and centralized police data analytics.  Last year, then Mayor Parks Tau (ANC) attributed smart policing to a 22% crime reduction for 2014/15 in the wealthy central business district of Johannesburg – a whites-only area under apartheid.  Tau boasted his crime-fighting tools have “face recognition technologies, number plate recognition technologies and are able to detect or anticipate when a group of people are planning a smash and grab.”  The City of Cape Town is similarly following suit.

High-speed Internet is critical to smart video surveillance because it enables the transmission of high definition feeds.  Computers need richly detailed images to identify words, faces, and other attributes.  Blurry images will not do.  Thus where there is high-speed Internet, there can also be smart surveillance.

At the helm of South Africa’s high-speed Internet roll-out is Siyabonga Cwele, the former Minister of Intelligence (2008-09) and State Security (2009-14).  As SA’s former spy boss, Cwele supported the controversial Protection of State Information Bill which bolsters the protection of state secrets.

Cwele lists no formal credentials, industry experience or training in technology.  Nevertheless, President Jacob Zuma, himself a former intelligence chief, appointed Cwele as Minister of the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services (DTPS).  This puts a former spy minister in charge of South Africa’s Internet.

Speaking in the Western Cape, Cwele told South Africans they “must adapt” to a “change [in] our notions of privacy”.  The “fourth industrial revolution” – a term coined by World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab – is coming to South Africa.

Smart Policing: United States, South Africa

Across the Atlantic, smart policing is well under way.  In 2016, a study published by ProPublica found that software commonly used in the United States to predict “future criminals” is “biased against blacks”.  Even though there were no racial categories programmed into the software, blacks were incorrectly ranked as “future criminals” at almost twice the rate of white defendants.  The racist ranking could not be explained by prior crimes or the type of crimes committed, the study found.

In US public spaces, aerial surveillance drones and smart sensors are being used for urban population control.  In 2015, the FBI disclosed it flew surveillance drones over Ferguson and Baltimore during BlackLivesMatter protests prompted by police murders of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray.  Published documents reveal the FBI was utilizing infrared and night-vision cameras and keeping recordings of aerial drone surveillance footage.

Cell phones are also targeted by cops.  In 2015, Baltimore residents discovered their city police department is systematically abusing “stingray” devices that trick cell phone owners into revealing their location.  Evidence shows the stingray devices are overwhelmingly concentrated in poor black neighborhoods, with disproportionate impact on people of color.  Half of all US adults are now in a law enforcement facial-recognition database.  One-fourth of the nation’s police departments have access to face-recognition databases.

Smart policing is a controversial new component of the digital era.  Using smart surveillance, computers and sensors automatically detect and interpret video feeds and other data in real-time to facilitate ubiquitous policing.  As the cost of technology drops, corporate and state actors are littering cities with an array of sensors – microphones to detect gun-shots, hi-res video for face recognition, infrared and heat to evaluate bodily movements – and networking them with high-speed Internet to radically expand police power.

Utilizing advanced data analytics, those with access to the surveillance – corporations, police departments, private security firms, government spy agencies – sift through massive troves of data to hone in on groups and persons of interest.  Computer software is determining where to concentrate cops on patrol to prevent “future crime”, with potentially disastrous effects on civil rights.

The South African state is mirroring the US.  The government has “grabber” devices that pretend to be cell phone towers in order to “track [a] phone’s movements, pinpoint its location, intercept its calls, or eavesdrop on conversations” – without the cell phone owner ever knowing it.  Protesters, when gathered in large groups, are highly vulnerable to grabbers.

Drone surveillance has also begun.  The City of Cape Town is experimenting with aerial drones to watch over citizens.  Their website even calls the program “Big Brother”.  A Pretoria-based company, Desert Wolf, developed a drone that can spray tear gas and fire rubber bullets at protesters.  An unnamed mining company ordered 25 units.

As I reported at Counterpunch in January, South Africa-based R&D organization, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has quietly developed Cmore.  A new “Jason Bourne” type surveillance system, Cmore aggregates and analyzes data from drone footage, CCTVs, cell phone data, and other inputs for maritime, park, and border policing.  The CSIR considered Cmore “for police” and subsequently partnered with the South African Police Service (SAPS).  Experiments include “crowd-control concept demonstrations”.

Meanwhile, Johannesburg’s Intelligence Operations Centre (IOC) is now outfitted with “100 existing high impact cameras” enabled for software-based “Intelligent Video Analytics as an input into Intelligent Law Enforcement”.  The new anti-immigrant mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba (DA),  endorsed predictive policing in April 2016, months before his election victory.

Five years prior, IBM, the major computer and surveillance partner to the apartheid state, partnered with the City of Johannesburg to define a roadmap which includes crime prevention and investigative analytics.

IBM Corporation: Apartheid Past and Present

In 2002, South Africans brought a law suit against US corporations alleging direct support for human rights violations committed by the apartheid regime.  IBM, SA plaintiffs claimed, provided technology used to implement the apartheid-era racial classification system.

The USA continuously provides technology to oppressive foreign regimes.  In years past, multiple US corporations played a treacherous role assisting South African apartheid.  IBM has been among the worst offenders.

Beginning in the 1930s, IBM New York, under the direction of its president, Thomas Watson, Sr., supplied Hollerith punch card systems to their IBM Germany subsidiary for use by the Third Reich.  IBM machines were customized for the Nazis to efficiently track and sort groups targeted for persecution and genocide.  Numbers tattooed on Auschwitz inmates began as IBM punch card system identification numbers.

During apartheid, with Thomas Watson, Jr. now president, IBM New York leased its IBM South Africa subsidiary with specialized technology tailored for the apartheid state.  In 1952, the apartheid regime ordered its first electronic tabulator to IBM South Africa.  There is ample evidence their technology was used to categorize, segregate and denationalize blacks.

In 1965, IBM lost a bid to produce passbooks targeting the black population.  However, they won the contract to build the eerie “Book of Life” issued after 1970 – a surveillance project covering additional races (e.g., coloureds, Indians, and whites).

Computer automation of the population register helped streamline the infamous “reference book” system.  The reference books (scorned as “dompas” or “dumb pass”) were designed to monitor and control blacks from a centralized location, the Central Reference Bureau in Pretoria.

As Keith Breckenridge’s Biometric State (2014) details, police desired the ability to swiftly identify and locate “Natives” by their national ID or fingerprints contained in the passbooks.  It was “a single, cost-effective tool that would allow the police to track elusive African suspects.”

But this form of centralized surveillance had weaknesses – people would lose or burn their dompas or rip out or forge pages.  An unwieldy registration backlog quickly ballooned out of control.  The dystopian dream of panoptic population control by an all-seeing state failed, but the consequences were brutal.  Apartheid cops used the passbook system to perpetrate mass violence and incarceration against blacks.

IBM New York, the central headquarters which provided technology and expertise to its SA subsidiary, has denied liability.  Last June, they successfully fought off the law suit brought to US courts by black South African plaintiffs representing victims of apartheid.  Plaintiffs included relatives of those tortured, raped, and murdered, in many instances in connection with passbook violations.

In 2011, the City of Johannesburg announced a partnership with IBM to conduct a “five-year public safety strategy in line with the city’s 2040 vision of a smart city”.  Unlike the “dumb” passbook system, IBM’s latest system is “smart”: it uses “integrated intelligence” for “crime prevention and investigation – including increased police presence and visibility, better coordination amongst agencies, and a data center with predictive analytics” as well as “intelligence sharing”.

IBM bases its innovations on its new “Watson” supercomputer system famous for surpassing humans in the quiz show Jeopardy.  Their Smart Vision Suite includes “moving object detection, tracking, object classification, color classification, and face tracking” as well as “large scale learning of vehicles and pedestrians”.  They have a ten-year partnership with South Africa’s Department of Science and Technology.

SA in the 21^st Century: A Digital Police State

South Africa’s smart policing movement has escaped public conversation.  Media coverage has been mostly taken up by tech outlets that focus on individual technologies, and apparently see nothing wrong or even endorse this turn of events.

In March, hard-hitting investigative journalists at amaBhungane reported that the Free State issued and awarded a “One Stop ICT Fusion Centre” tender in violation of proper procurement procedures.  The fusion centre will apparently provide “an integrated ICT system for the entire provincial government”, including “security camera surveillance and traffic management” in a centralized control room.  Indian corporation Tech Mahindra is “the solutions partner”.

There is another story here, aside from the tender: what is Tech Mahindra up to?  According to a Tech Mahindra brochure, as a part of their “Smart City Solutions”, they provide “Smart Security Surveillance”, which includes license plate and facial recognition, behavior analysis, video analytics, and real-time monitoring.

Mahindra Defence Systems and US-based Cisco Systems have teamed up in Lucknow, India, to deploy 10,000 cameras.  In April 2015, the Uttar Pradesh government’s “state police demonstrated drones that can be used to shower pepper powder on an unruly mob”.  Five of these “crowd control” drones were to be launched that month; they have a range of up to 600 meters.  The surveillance “will be very useful in managing traffic violations” as well.

Mahindra is based in India.  However 21^st century models and technologies of repression are distinctly Western.

This is the current path for South Africa, already begun.

Perhaps it is worth recalling a bit of history.  In 2016, a former (now-deceased) CIA operative, Donald Rickard, happily admitted he provided intelligence which led to Nelson Mandela’s 1962 arrest.  Years later, Steve Biko was placed under a banning order by the state, which silenced his speech and restricted his movement.  Police detained and tortured him, leading to his tragic death.  Apartheid cops murdered untold numbers through riot control, the “prevention of unrest”, and the policing of “public disorder”.

SA universities are spending millions on surveillance to quell #FeesMustFall protests.  In 2016, CCTVs at Rhodes University mushroomed to provide what seems like blanket coverage, even extending inside buildings.  Management refuses to disclose details.  Earlier this year, Wits University added new CCTVs and announced considerations for drone surveillance and biometrics on campus.  And in March, eNCA’s Checkpoint reported that the University of Johannesburg appointed a private security company, Bold Heart Group, that spies on students.

Outside of student spaces, service delivery protests abound.  From Vuwani to Cape Town, people are active in the streets.  In response to Zuma’s latest cabinet re-shuffle, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people amassed in public to exercise their constitutionally protected right to protest.

On April 20, amaBhungane launched a challenge to the constitutionality of the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-Related Information Act (Rica).  The challenge focuses on bulk communications interceptions.  There could be no better time to also challenge the legality and ethics of smart policing.

It is essential to note that both major political parties – the ANC and the DA – are assembling the smart surveillance state.  It remains to be seen what smaller parties like the EFF and UDM have to say – and what the public will say itself.

Two decades after apartheid, half the population lives on $2 (R26) or less per day, while the majority are getting poorer.  Serious plans for large scale wealth redistribution remain off the table.  In the shadows, the state – and some wealthy citizens – are teaming up with corporations to unleash Western policing for population control.