Trinity

— PFAS and The Bomb

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From Military Poisons

By Pat Elder
August 6, 2023

Trinity – July 16, 1945 – Made possible through the discovery and development of PFAS chemicals.

17th-century depiction of Daedalus & Icarus – Musee Antoine Vivenel, Compiègne, France

In Greek mythology, the tale of Daedalus and his son, Icarus provides a lesson that humanity has never learned. Daedalus created wings from feathers and wax. He warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun for fear that the wax would melt. Icarus took off, exhilarated with the invention, and soared exuberantly toward the sun. His wings fell apart, and Icarus fell to his death.

Remarkable technologies may escape our control and imperil mankind. Two astonishing inventions in 1938 are like Daedalus’ fastening of wings to wax: the splitting of the uranium atom by German scientists and the discovery of per – and poly fluoroalkyl substances, (PFAS) by Dupont chemists in New Jersey.

It’s not a stretch. Both nuclear weaponry and PFAS chemicals are existential threats to humanity. Their development and use are inextricably linked. 

Trinity – July 16, 1945

PFAS was developed through the Manhattan Project.

J. Robert Oppenheimer and his crew needed a way to separate uranium to make the bomb. They used fluorine gas for this purpose. The scientists soon discovered that fluorine gas bonds with carbon molecules to make fluorochemicals, the most highly resistant coolants known – and a critical development leading to Trinity.

The Manhattan Project perfected a white powder that could extinguish fires better than any substance ever created. It repels grease, dirt, and water better than anything, ever. Imagine the military applications! PFAS never breaks down. It never goes away. It is bioaccumulative, and it is highly carcinogenic. Most alarmingly, it plays havoc on a woman’s reproductive system. It contributes to a host of childhood diseases. It threatens our immune system, and it has been linked to the spread of COVID 19 and other diseases. It’s in our bodies and our children are born with it.

It was used to manufacture Teflon products and Scotchguard, and waterproofing for a thousand products. It is still used widely. People haven’t gotten the message. PFAS is bad news for all of us.

March 4, 2016 – Firefighters strike a pose reminiscent of the Iwo Jima statue in Washington. A team of firefighters battle a huge fire during a live-fire training exercise at Hurlburt Field, Fla. (Photo: US Air Force)

The military has used PFAS in firefighting foam to extinguish super-hot petroleum-based fires since 1968.

If 500 bases participated in monthly firefighting foam drills from the early 1970’s until the early 2020’s, that might be 500 bases x 12 months x 50 years which comes to 300,000 separate environmental catastrophes. Some bases held fire training exercises weekly. The damage is incalculable, and it is with us forever.

Often, they’d create a 100-foot diameter crater about one to two feet deep; they’d fill it with jet fuel and a cocktail of oils, lubricants, and paints and ignite it. Then, the firefighters would snuff the flames with foam. The firefighters got sick, many with bladder and testicular cancer. The carcinogens from the foam were allowed to seep into groundwater and surface water. Drinking water sources are contaminated, as well as the food, especially the sea food we consume.

Wurtsmuth Air Force Base in Michigan closed 30 years ago but the people in the region cannot eat the local fish or wildlife today because it is poisonous. Food is poisoned by the chemicals worldwide.

Try to comprehend the concept of a highly toxic chemical, comprised of an indestructible fluorine-carbon bond that never breaks down in our bodies or the environment and continuously accumulates in us. 

Although billions of people are ingesting the substances in their drinking water, most of the PFAS in our bodies comes from eating contaminated fish and seafood that are loaded with the chemicals. The air, our lungs and our homes are filled with cancerous dust.

The EPA in the U.S. and regulatory agencies around the world are criminally negligent for doing little to protect public health.

Wherever there are nuclear weapons, PFAS is present. Nuclear-powered ships and those carrying nuclear weapons also carry huge quantities of the materials. After training exercises and frequent accidents, the chemicals are sprayed into the sea. 

We can’t get rid of it. We can’t bury it. We can’t incinerate it. We don’t know what to do with it and this is the truth. Notions of “cleaning up” PFAS are misguided.  

PFAS are the demons let loose from Pandora’s box. All 14,000 PFAS substances are believed to be toxic. The military and manufacturers should be forced to sthe making the compounds while taking measures to begin remediating the catastrophe at a cost that will likely exceed hundreds of billions of dollars.  

Rachel Carson is a latter-day prophet!

From Rachel Carson in her prophetic book, Silent Spring, 1962:

“If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals, eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones – we had better know something about their nature and their power.”

The fish are poisoned with PFAS in Japan with some species containing more than 100,000 parts per trillion of PFOS in their filet. The U.S. military is responsible for much of this contamination. I will be travelling to Japan in September and October with three others with Veterans for Peace to address audiences and to test surface waters for PFAS in 20 cities. The U.S. military is not being regulated by states, the federal government or foreign “host” nations. The military’s toxic legacy is shrouded in secrecy. Please help us and make a note that your contribution is for the Japan delegation.

Financial support from the  Downs Law Group makes this work possible. The firm is working to provide legal representation to individuals with a high likelihood of exposure to PFAS and other contaminants.

The Downs Law Group employs attorneys accredited by the Department of Veterans Affairs to assist those who have served in obtaining VA Compensation and Pension Benefits they are rightly owed.

If you spent time in the military and you think you may be sick as a result of your service, think about joining this group to learn from others with similar issues. Are you interested in joining a multi-base class action lawsuit pertaining to illnesses stemming from various kinds of environmental contamination? Join the Veterans & Civilians Clean Water Alliance Facebook group. (2.4 K members and growing rapidly.)

https://www.militarypoisons.org/latest-news/pfas-and-the-bombnbsp

— Trinity downwinders: Dancing in the dust of death

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Deliberate government atrocities —

“From the very beginning, the federal government has refused to take responsibility,”  — Sen. Tom Udall

‘A few people were probably overexposed, but they couldn’t prove it and we couldn’t prove it so we just assumed we got away with it.’” — Manhattan Project Medical Director, Dr. Louis Hempelmann

From Beyond Nuclear International

July 16 2018

Time to recognize New Mexico’s Trinity downwinders

By Linda Pentz Gunter

When Barbara Kent was twelve years old she went away to dance camp. It was July 1945. A dozen young girls were enjoying a summer retreat, sleeping together in a cabin, and sharing their love of dance. On July 16 they danced with something deadly.

After being jolted unexpectedly out of bed, they went outside pre-dawn when it should have been dark, to find it bright as day with a strange white ash falling like snowflakes. “Winter in July,” Kent, now 86 years old, has called it.

The girls rubbed the “snowflakes” on their bodies and caught them with their tongues. Before they all turned 40, 10 of the 12 girls had died.

No one had warned the girls, or their teacher, or anyone in the community, that the US government had just exploded the first atomic bomb a little more than 50 miles away at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico, now known as the Trinity Test Site. The “snowflakes” were deadly radioactive fallout and just the beginning of an endless — and likely permanent — cycle of disease, death and deprivation.

“While it was not the end of the world, it was the beginning of the end for so many people,” said Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, an organization that “seeks justice for the unknowing, unwilling and uncompensated participants of the July 16, 1945 Trinity test in southern New Mexico.”

Uncompensated because, even though the Trinity atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico, and for no reason that anyone has yet ascertained, the people of New Mexico dosed by the fallout have never been acknowledged or officially recognized by the federal government as downwinders.

They have never been compensated and, certainly, they have never received an apology from the US government.

That is why, for the past eight years, first as a US congressman and now as a member of the US Senate, Tom Udall (D-NM) has been fighting for the Trinity downwinders in his state to be included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act that, since the law’s inception in 1990, and even after it was amended in 2000, has failed, among others, to include New Mexico victims of the Trinity test.

On June 26, 2018, a hearing finally took place before the US Senate Judiciary Committee, at which Udall and many victims of exposure to radioactive fallout and uranium mining — on the Navajo Nation, in Idaho, New Mexico and even Guam — testified. All of them asked that RECA be amended once again to include those forgotten, ignored and affected, even though in many ways it is coming seventy three years too late.

“People sometimes ask me, ‘why don’t you just move?’” said Cordova when we talked after the Hill hearing. “Well the only safe day to move was July 15, 1945.”

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