[NukeNet] Nukes & The Press

[Bill Smirnow]

     Nuclear Weapons, War and the Media

Beyond the Bomb Conference

Pace University

New York City

November 4,  2006

Karl Grossman

Professor, State University of New York, College
at Old Westbury

            In examining the interplay between
nuclear weapons, war and the media, it is
instructive to examine how The New York Times, the
paper of record in the United States, gave
direction to press coverage in this country as the
so-called "nuclear age" opened.
            It's a shocking story. As Beverly
Deepe Keever, a reporter for Newsweek, The New
York Herald Tribune and The Christian Science
Monitor before becoming a professor of journalism
at the University of Hawaii, details in her
important book, News Zero: The New York Times and
The Bomb, "from the dawn of the atomic-bomb age,
[William L.] Laurence and The Times almost
single-handedly shaped the news of this epoch and
helped birth the acceptance of the most
destructive force ever created."
            Who was William L. Laurence? He was
the granddaddy of embedded reporters­plus. A
science reporter for The Times, he was hired by
the Manhattan Project, the World War II crash
program to build an atomic bomb and, while working
for the government remained on The Times payroll,
his Times weekly salary going to his wife while he
also was paid by the government.
        The arrangement was made by the Manhattan
Project's head, General Leslie Groves, with the
publisher and editor of The Times. Keever writes:
"To sell the bomb, the U.S. government needed The
Times...and The Times willingly obliged."
            At the Manhattan Project, Laurence
participated in "the government's cover-up of the
super-secret Trinity shot." Held a month before
the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, in the Trinity test a nuclear device was
exploded for the first time. Laurence prepared a
press release to "disguise the detonation and
resulting radiation." The "fake news" claimed
there had been a "jumbo detonation of an
ammunition magazine filled with high explosives at
the 2000-square mile Alamogordo Air Base."
        The Timesman didn't stop with this
deception.
        He prepared a 10-part series at the
Manhattan Project glorifying its making of atomic
weapons­and all but ignoring the dangers of
radioactivity. And after the bombs fell on Japan,
The Times itself ran the series and "on behalf of
the government" distributed it free "to the press
nationwide."
Laurence's avid pro-nuclear writings continued
when he returned to The Times this becoming an
institutional stance of the publication. The
Times, writes Keever, "became little more than a
propaganda outlet for the U.S. government in its
drive to cover up the dangers of immediate
radiation and future radioactivity emanating from
the use and testing of nuclear weapons."
        The Times, she writes, "tolerated or aided
the U.S. government's Cold War cover-up that
resulted in minimizing or denying the health and
environmental effects arising from the use in
Japan and later testing of the most destructive
weaponry in U.S. history in Pacific Islands once
called paradise..The Times aided the U.S.
government in keeping in the dark thousands of
U.S. servicemen, production workers and miners,
even civil defense officials, Pacific Islanders
and others worldwide about the dangers of
radiation."
        Other Times writers who participated in
the pro-nuclear spin included its military editor,
Hanson Baldwin. Writes Keever: "In editorials and
articles, The Times clearly favored Operation
Crossroads," a major nuclear test in the Pacific,
and when President Truman "postponed the first
scheduled dates for the test, Baldwin complained
that 'well-meaning but muddled persons, in and out
of Congress, are proposing the permanent
cancellation of the tests.'"
        The atomic dysfunction at The Times went
on and on. The nuclear testing-caused tragedy
"from 1947 to 1991 unfolding in the faraway
Marshall Islands," for instance, was "largely
untold by The Times."
        And the dysfunction continues today as The
New York Times leads U.S. media in pushing for a
"revival" of nuclear power.
        Notes Keever, "A huge outcry followed the
revelation of a breach of reporting ethics by a
single individual when the Times in mid-2003
exposed the plagiarism and fraud committed.yet the
issues raised" by her research "are far more
pervasive and more importantly condoned and
institutionalized as part of media management
policies and practices. This investigation serves
as a wake-up call for journalists of today and
tomorrow."
        It's more than a wake-up call for
journalists today.
        It could be a critical to the lives and
survival of millions.
        I helped Keever with her book sharing with
her the work of Deborah Lipstadt, professor of
Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory
University, the author of Beyond Belief: The
American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust,
and Kenneth Libo, author and curator.
        Beyond Belief is about how much was known
about the Holocaust­as hundreds of thousands and
then millions of Jews were being killed in the
1930s and 1940s­and this was intensely covered by
the Jewish press. Yet The Times, Lipstadt writes
in Beyond Belief, downplayed the horrible news
coming out of Europe. Lipstadt writes that if The
Times had done solid journalism about the
situation, "it is possible that other American
papers would have followed suit"­and what was
happening could have been widely exposed­and
efforts made to stop it.
        Libo was responsible for exhibits on this
issue including one at the National Museum of
American Jewish History which featured enlarged
photocopies of small, back-page Times articles on
the shipping off of Jews to concentration camps
placed alongside the major stories on this which
ran in Jewish papers. A sign at the exhibit,
Keever notes, quoting an article by me, read:
"Setting the tone for coverage in the general
press" of the Holocaust was The New York Times
which "downplayed" the news.
        Keever ends her book stating that "history
might have unfolded quite differently if The Times
had reported the Holocaust more prominently and
vigorously," and, likewise, "History might also
have unfolded quite differently if The Times had
given more than News-Zero coverage of the effects"
of the "nuclear holocaust" of our time.
        What should The Times and other media be
reporting?  First and foremost, that nuclear
weapons and nuclear power are two sides of the
same coin­that there is no "peaceful atom."
            Then it should examine the proposition
that the only real way to end the threat of
nuclear weapons spreading throughout this world
today is to also put a stop to nuclear technology.
            Radical? Yes, but consider the even
more radical alternative: a world in which scores
of nations will be able to construct nuclear
weaponry because they possess nuclear power
technology. There are major parts of the
Earth­Africa, South America, the South Pacific,
and others­that have now been designated
nuclear-free zones. If we are really to have a
world free of the horrific threat of nuclear
weapons, the goal needs to be the designation of
this entire planet as a nuclear-free zone­no
nuclear weapons, no nuclear power.
        Radical? Yes, but consider the
alternative­trying to keep using carrots and
sticks, juggling on the road to inevitable nuclear
disaster.
A nuclear-free world is the only way, I believe,
through which humanity will be free of the specter
of nuclear warfare. Some will say putting the
atomic genie back into the bottle is impossible. I
say: anything people have done, other people can
undo. Especially if the reason is good. And the
prospect of massive loss of life from nuclear
destruction is the best of reasons.
            As Amory and Hunter Lovins wrote in
their book, Energy/War: Breaking the Nuclear Link:
"All nuclear fission technologies both use and
produce fissionable materials that are or can be
concentrated. Unavoidably latent in those
technologies, therefore, is a potential for
nuclear violence and coercion which may be
exploited by governments, factions."
            "Little strategic material is needed
to make a weapon of mass destruction.
Nagasaki-yield bomb can be made from a few
kilograms of plutonium, a piece the size of a
tennis ball."
"A large power reactor," they noted, "annually
produces.hundreds of kilograms of plutonium; a
large fast breeder reactor would contain thousands
of kilograms; a large reprocessing plant may
separate tens of thousands."
Civilian nuclear power technology, they say,
provides the way to make nuclear
weapons­furnishing the materiel and trained
personnel.
        That's how India got The Bomb in 1974.
Canada supplied a reactor for "peaceful purposes"
and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission trained
Indian engineers. And lo and behold, India had
nuclear weapons.
        Where have media been in examining the
operations of the International Atomic Energy
Agency­the global nuclear-pusher?
        The IAEA was formed as a result of
President Eisenhower's 1953 "Atoms for Peace"
speech before the UN General Assembly. Eisenhower
proposed the creation of an international agency
to promote civilian applications of atomic energy
and, somehow at the same time, control the use of
fissionable material­a dual role paralleling that
of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In 1974, the
AEC was abolished after the U.S. Congress
concluded that, in theory and practice, it was in
conflict of interest. But the IAEA­in the AEC's
image­remains with us.
        The IAEA's mandate: "To accelerate and
enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to
peace, health and prosperity throughout the
 world."
>From its outset, the IAEA has been run by atomic
zealots.
        Its first director general was Sterling
Cole, who, as a U.S. congressman was an original
member and then chairman of the Joint Committee on
Atomic Energy, as extreme in its promotion of
nuclear technology as the AEC.
        Later, Hans Blix became IAEA director
general­after, his official IAEA biography
stresses, leading a move in his native Sweden
against the effort to close nuclear power plants
there.
        Blix was outspoken in insisting nuclear
technology be spread throughout the world­calling
for "resolute response by government, acting
individually or together as in the [IAE] Agency."
        Blix's long-time IAEA second-in command:
Morris Rosen­formerly of the AEC and before that
the nuclear division of General Electric. After
the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, he rendered
this advice: "There is very little doubt that
nuclear power is a rather benign industrial
enterprise and we may have to expect catastrophic
accidents from time to time."
        As for the current IAEA director general,
Mohamed ElBaradei, he too, is a great nuclear
booster. "There is clearly a sense of rising
expectations for nuclear power," he told a
gathering in Paris last year organized by the IAEA
entitled "International Conference on Nuclear
Power for the 2lst Century."
        The IAEA has been doing everything it can
to fuel those expectations­scandalously
downplaying the public health consequences of
nuclear accidents including the Chernobyl
disaster, promoting all sorts of atomic technology
and, with its nearly $300 million annual budget,
encouraging the spread of nuclear power around the
globe.
        The War & Peace Foundation has wisely
proposed that the IAEA be replaced with a World
Sustainable Energy Agency which would promote  the
use of safe, clean, non-lethal energy
technologies.
        Meanwhile, true nuclear non-proliferation,
as Amory and Hunter Lovins state, requires "civil
denuclearization."
        Even Admiral Hyman Rickover, the "father"
of the U.S. nuclear navy and manager of
construction of the first commercial nuclear plant
in the U.S., in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in the
end came to the conclusion that the world must­in
his words­"outlaw nuclear reactors."
        Rickover, in a farewell address, told a
committee of Congress in 1982: "I'll be
philosophical. Until about two billion years ago,
it was impossible to have any life on earth: that
is, there was so much radiation on earth you
couldn't have any life­fish or anything.
Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount
of radiation on this planet and probably in the
entire system reduced and made it possible for
some for some form of life to begin."
        "Now," Rickover went on, "when we go back
to using nuclear power, we are creating something
which nature tried to destroy to make life
possible.Every time you produce radiation, you
produce something that has life, in some cases for
billions of years, and I think there the human
race is going to wreck itself, and it's far more
important that we get control of this horrible
force and try to eliminate it."
        As for nuclear weaponry, the "lesson of
history," said the retiring admiral, is that in
war nations "will use" whatever weaponry they
have.
        Where have media been on focusing on these
realities? In the case of The New York Times and
most of mainstream media: in league with a power
structure archly pro-nuclear.at News Zero.
        Now, positively, the media revolution of
our time and what it can mean to get the truth
out­in Q&A.

***

Karl Grossman is professor of journalism at the
State University of New York/College at Old
Westbury and coordinator of its Media &
Communications Major. A major concentration for
decades has been nuclear technology. Among the six
books he has authored are: Cover Up: What You Are
Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power; The
Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat To
Our Planet; Power Crazy; and Weapons in Space.
Grossman has given presentations on nuclear issues
around the world. He has long also been active on
television. He narrated and wrote the
award-winning documentaries: The Push To Revive
Nuclear Power; Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization
and Weaponization of the Heavens; and Three Mile
Island Revisited, all produced by EnviroVideo
(www.envirovideo.com). For the past 15 years,
Grossman has hosted Enviro Close-Up, aired
nationally on Free Speech TV, the DISH satellite
network (Channel 9415), and on more than 100 cable
TV systems and on commercial TV. His magazine and
newspaper articles have appeared in numerous
publications. He is a charter member of the
Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict
Resolution and Peace of the International
Association of University Presidents and the
United Nations. He is a member of the boards of
directors of the Nuclear Information and Resource
Service-World Information Service on Energy and
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and board of
advisors of the Global Network Against Weapons &
Nuclear Power in Space. He can be reached at
kgrossman at hamptons.com or Box 1680, Sag Harbor, NY
11963