The UK government is now targeting critics of the fake chemical attack in Salisbury it has attributed to the Russians with zero evidence.
Most recent example, Dr. Chris Busby, a British retired nuclear scientist. His home in Bideford, Devon was raided after cops responding to a domestic argument reported feeling sick after visiting the residence.
Later, it was reported, these supposedly stricken officers felt fine.
Busby was arrested and detained under the explosives act.
I believe the “concern for a woman’s safety” and the reportedly sickened cops are phony as the Skripal poisoning itself. Dr. Busby was targeted for his criticism of the government response to the Skripal affair. He has also criticized the United States for using depleted uranium.
Busby was raided, arrested, and his home sealed off not because he posed a threat to a woman—or because the authorities claim there is a dangerous lab in the home—but because he has appeared on RT and elsewhere expressing a belief the Skripal affair is a false flag.
Dr Busby is used as an “expert” by the Kremlin-backed RT channel – formerly Russia Today – which today broadcast a staggering interview with suspected Salisbury hitmen Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.
The website headline reads: “COP POISON PROBE Police taken ill with ‘chemical poisoning’ after raid on home of British nuclear expert who appears on Russia Today.” The Independent ran a similar headline.
Obviously, this raid was planned well beforehand, and the alleged argument was nothing more than an excuse to get inside the home and frame Busby—not for posing a risk to the public, or building explosives, but because he criticized the government, not on Facebook or his own website, but on RT, which is licensed by the Russian government and is falsely and absurdly accused of working with Vladimir Putin to flip an election in the United States.
The raid and arrest send a strong message: criticism of the state, especially in regard to the Skripals, will not be tolerated.
The UK Ministry of Defense has been accused of downplaying the real dangers stemming from the UK nuclear deterrent after the report by a safety watchdog put the number of accidents, involving British nukes, at 110, four times higher the official count.
Unveiled on Wednesday by the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an independent nuclear watchdog, the report sheds light onto dozens of mishaps involving British nuclear weapons, featuring previously unreported accidents with potentially disastrous consequences. The in-depth study, which traces back all 65 years of the British nuclear program, arranges accidents into seven sections in accordance with their place of origin.
The report is based on the official findings, including the report on nuclear weapons safety written by Professor Sir Ronald Oxburgh, information revealed during parliamentary questions, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act as well as from whistleblowers, witnesses and other researchers.
The biggest group of all lists accidents that took place on nuclear-capable submarines, ships and aircraft. The causes for a total of 45 mishaps, including 24 that occurred with nuclear-armed submarines, range from collision and fires to the effects of lightning.
In one of the most notable accidents of that kind, Royal Navy submarine HMS Vanguard, which is capable of carrying up to 48 Trident nuclear warheads, collided with a French Le Triomphant submarine, which could be armed with about the same amount of TN75 nuclear warheads. The circumstances of the accident, which happened early February 2009 in the Atlantic Ocean, were hushed up at the time and still not known to the full.
Although the official investigation report into the collision came to the reassuring conclusion that “at no time was nuclear safety compromised and the Strategic Weapon System remained inside tolerable limits at all times”, whistleblowers’ accounts are far more daunting. An officer who was on board the UK submarine reportedly said “We thought, this it we’re all going to die,” while recalling the incident in the conversation with Royal Navy whistleblower William McNeilly.
Other case studies include a nuclear warhead carrier sliding off the rode into the ditch on January 10, 1987 in Wiltshire. The misfortune is described by the authors as “most visible” and “embarrassing” incident to date. Overall, 22 road transportation incidents, among them overturning of vehicles carrying nukes, have been cited in the report.
While only 14 accidents, linked to the faults in manufacturing and production process, are listed in the report, the most severe nuclear accident in UK history also falls into this category. The fire at the Windscale plant in 1957 led to massive release of radiation from graphite-moderated reactor that triggered “around 100 fatal cancers and around 90 non-fatal cancers.”
The report also lists 21 “security-related” incidents and eight incidents blamed onto the improper storage and handling of the nukes.
The comprehensive study, spanning over 100 pages under an awe-inspiring title “Playing with Fire,” blames the defense ministry for attempting to sweep the issue of nuclear safety under the carpet by concealing essential details of the incidents and downplaying their impact.
The report argues that the official data released by the British Defense Ministry in 2003 which put the number of incidents at 27, is “far from a full list of all the accidents.”
It is not the first time the British military has been accused of covering up major issues with its nuclear deterrent. News on a failed Trident missile test, carried out off Florida coast in June 2016, sparked a new round of heated debates on the British nuclear program. The routine test performed by the HMS Vengeance in June 2016 from Port Canaveral went horribly wrong with the missile heading back to the US mainland. However, the UK authorities did not issue any statement on the failed test, reportedly, advised to refrain from sharing unfavorable data by US colleagues.
The Trident missile malfunction came just weeks before the UK parliament voted in favor of renewing controversial Britain’s Trident deterrent, estimated to cost some £40 billion.
In January, McNeilly, who was first to leak the details about the serious fire issues aboard Trident submarine, told RT that he has witnessed Trident “fail 3 out of 3 WP 186 Missile Compensating Tests.”
Secret UK Cabinet files released by the National Archives in Kew, west London on Thursday reveal that at the height of protests against the deployment of US nuclear cruise missiles in 1983-1985 the government of Margaret Thatcher was horrified by a prospect of US military shooting British peace activists.
Throughout the 1980-s Britain was in a grip of mass peace protests against the deployment of American cruise missiles tipped with nuclear warheads.
While publicly dismissing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other peace groups as “unrepresentative” of the British people, privately Thatcher and her Ministers were agonizing over the ways of “combatting” them, as the declassified files show. The Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine established a pro-government “peace” group to challenge CND’s “unilateralism”, while the Secret Service was charged with “exposing” the CND’s foreign backers. They failed to find any. Apparently, they hadn’t yet mastered the art of creating “dodgy dossiers” at the time.
Top secret documents
A handwritten note informed the Prime Minister of the failure: “you will remember asking me to find out whether Sir Robert Armstrong knew who was financing CND’s activities at Molesworth. The attached is his answer, though it does not answer the question where CND get their money from.”
A MAJOR ELECTION PROBLEM
The CND was considered by the government to be a fairly responsible organization, but the famous peace women of Greenham Common (the US cruise missile site to the west of London) were branded “extremist”.
Handwritten note to Thatcher regarding CND
The repeated attempts by peace activists to breach security at bases housing nuclear weapons, like RAF Upper Heyford, ran the risk of a confrontation with armed US guards, and the Ministers were horrified by a prospect of the US military shooting British civilians on their home turf.
“The Home Secretary believes that an incident involving US firearms could be a major election problem”, a handwritten note of 17 May 1983 advised Thatcher who was in the middle of her reelection bid.
Even warning the demonstrators of this mortal danger was deemed to be politically too sensitive.
“…it would be a mistake to make any public reference to the presence of armed guards in the next few weeks”, wrote Home Secretary William Whitelaw on 17 May 1983. “The arming of security personnel in any circumstances is a potentially controversial issue. In this case there is the added complication that they are US personnel outside our control.”
A flurry of minutes between the Home, Defense, Foreign Secretaries and the PM explored how to “tactfully” impress on the Americans that shooting a British civilian during the UK election campaign would be a very bad idea.
The Home Secretary cautioned: “I see the difficulty of signaling tactfully to the US authorities our expectation that firearms will not be used without good cause during the proposed blockade [of RAF Upper Heyford – NG] from 31 May to 3 June [1983]. But the timing, which could hardly be more sensitive [UK general election – NG], and the traditionally different approach to the use of firearms in law enforcement in the United States make me think that the possibility should, at least, be explored.”
It appears from these discussions that the British Government did not feel to be in a position to take up the issue directly with the US military commanders stationed in the UK!
The Home Secretary suggested “a high level approach to the US Embassy who might [NG] be persuaded to emphasize the risks to the military commanders responsible for the base… The Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary would, no doubt, advise on whether [NG] some message might be sent and how it could best be delivered.”
Reply from Secret Service
Not entirely sure that the Americans would heed the plea, the Ministers planned to insert a thousand or more UK personnel between the demonstrators and the US armed guards. On quite a few occasions there were two guards for every protester! The Ministers were also crunching numbers as to how many millions of pounds they would need to install electronic security systems around the bases. Security at UK military installations, even at those housing nuclear weapons, Ministers agreed, was inadequate.
TRAVELLERS, GYPSIES AND PEACE CAMPS
The best solution to the government’s worries would of course be the eviction of protesters from peace camps around the USAF/RAF bases. But there was a legal conundrum, as explained by the then Secretary of State for Transport Nicholas Ridley:
“First, there is our policy towards travellers [e.g. gypsies — NG]. The situation of these people and the Greenham Common protestors is, I believe, in law much the same. They both trespass on the highway. Yet in the case of travellers, we condone it.”
This advice was not something Margaret Thatcher and other Ministers apparently wanted to hear, just like Tony Blair after them didn’t like the legal warnings about the Iraq invasion. In both cases the voices of reason were eventually silenced. As the declassified files show, Nicholas Ridley was put under serious pressure, not least by the Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine, to reconsider his position.
“ONLY MAJOR TRAGEDY CAN COMPETE WITH CND PICTURES”
Heseltine also took the lead in the “presentational” aspect of “combatting” the peace activists.
Request to Secret Service
To counter the publicity of a series of mass protests across the UK planned by the CND for Easter 1983 he volunteered to make a speech at the Berlin Wall accusing the CND of working for the “forces of oppression” on the other side.
Heseltine’s visit to West Berlin was welcomed by his West German counterpart Dr. Woerner but he warned that it could provoke demonstrations in Berlin itself!
Foreign Office ministers and Thatcher’s own chief press secretary Bernard Ingham were equally in two minds about the validity of Heseltine’s counter-offensive:
“What we have to avoid is the charge that the CND’s Easter activities have the government rattled.”
The CND’s Easter “peace offensive” will only “secure less airtime and have less impact if something more newsworthy in television terms occurs – e.g. (to be brutal) a North Sea blowout; an assassination attempt on the Pope, etc.”, Bernard Ingham wrote in confidence on 17 March 1983.
“… If we accept that only a major tragedy can compete with CND pictures, Mr. Heseltine’s visit to the Berlin Wall should be seen more as a preemptive strike than a competitive event. In any case, I have serious doubts about Ministers being seen to be competing with CND on Good Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion.”
“…It is also a day when there is not much sport,” Thatcher’s chief press secretary lamented.
LET THE ROYALS DO THE BIDDING
To win the “battle of ideas” against the CND Ingham suggested to “feed into the BBC and ITN at an appropriate level the idea of getting cameras to film the various pursuits” like “pigeon, or whippet or tortoise racing (or whatever respectable minority sport we can confidently prove attracts more participants than CND demonstrating).”
Upper Heyford US Armed Guards
But what would really “do the trick would be press and TV pictures, for TV release on the evening of Good Friday and/or Saturday newspapers of Prince William in Australia.”
Eventually, the UK government succeeded in reclaiming parts of the land occupied by the peace camps under the pretext of road improvements, and the Soviet-American arms reductions deals made US cruise missiles in Europe redundant.
In his notes of March 1983 Bernard Ingham wrote that “CND, if successful, contains not the seeds but the certainty of its annihilation”. CND, in its own way, did contribute to the success of arms talks in late 1980-s, but this did not lead to its annihilation. To the contrary, with the relapses of Cold War mentality in the British Establishment the peace movement appears to go through a revival.
Britain’s nuclear bomb test veterans suffered severe genetic damage from radiation, writes Chris Busby, and their case for compensation is being heard in the High Court today. Key to their case is evidence of similar damage inflicted on in utero babies exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, and how the dreadful health impacts of radiation cascade down to future generations.
The world has had 30 years to assess the consequences for life on Earth of the disaster at Chernobyl. This is about the same period during which I have studied the effects of radioactive pollution on the planet.
It was the radioactive rain in the mountains of North Wales, where I lived in 1986, that brought me into this strange Alice in Wonderland area of science, where people and children die, and the global authorities, advised by physicists, deny what would be obvious to a child at school.
Chernobyl was mentioned as the star that fell to earth in the Book of Revelations. You may laugh, and it may be a coincidence, but the impact of the event has certainly been of biblical proportions.
It is a story about the imposition by reductionist science on humanity of a version of the truth constructed from mathematics, not the only one, but perhaps the most important, since it involves the systematic destruction of the genetic basis of life. It is a story of lies, secrecy, power, assassination and money: the vast amounts of money that would be lost if the truth came out.
Shortly after the murder in 1992 of the German Green Party leader and anti-nuclear activist Petra Kelly, the late Prof Ernest Sternglass (the first of the radiation scientist/ activists) told me that Kelly had just struck a deal with a German TV company to run a series demonstrating the true awfulness of the immediate effects of radiation.
A dreadful global cover up begins
He said: if the truth came out, all the Uranium and the billions of dollars in Uranium shares would turn into sand. So something like a cover-up had to happen, and it did, continuing the process of chicanery and control of information that began with the nuclear weapons tests of the 50s and 60s.
In 1959, as the genetic effects of the atmospheric tests became apparent, the control of the understanding of radiation and health was wrested from the World Health Organization (WHO) and passed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Photo caption: Explosion cloud from the UK’s Operation Hurricane atomic bomb test on Australia’s Montebello Islands, 3rd October 1952. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Since then, no research on the health effects of radiation has been carried out by WHO, which has led to a permanent vigil outside their headquarters in Geneva by the group Independent WHO.
The arguments about the health effects of Chernobyl have mostly centered on cancer. I won’t write much about cancer here. The study of radiation and cancer has many complications, including that the data is often suspect, the time lag between the cancer diagnosis and the original radiation exposure can be 20 years, in which time a lot can happen, introducing ammunition (and opportunity) for those denying causation.
The predictions of the global cancer yield of the Chernobyl contamination has ranged from around a million (as predicted independently by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), Rosalie Bertell, John Gofman and me, to about 600,000 (Alexey Yablokov), to less than a few thousand (the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), whose risk model is the current basis for all legal constraints on radioactive releases in Europe.
Cancer: just one manifestation of the genetic damage caused by radiation
Cancer is caused by genetic damage but takes a while to show. More easily studied is the immediate and direct genetic damage, demonstrated in birth rates of congenital diseases, birth defects, fetal abnormalities, data which is easier to locate. The effects of a sudden increase in radioactive contamination are most easily seen in sudden increases in these indicators.
You don’t have to wait 20 years. Out they come after nine months or in aborted fetuses with their heart and central nervous system defects, their lack of hands and feet, their huge hydrocephalic heads, their inside-out organs, their cleft palates, cyclops eyes and the whole range of dreadful and usually fatal conditions. There is no argument, and the affair is in the hands of doctors, not physicists. The physicists of the ICRP base their risk of genetic effects on experiments with mice.
I was in Kiev in 2000 at the WHO conference on Chernobyl. On the podium, conducting the theatricals, were the top men in the IAEA (Abel Gonzalez) and the United National Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), represented by Canadian Norman Gentner. “No effects can be seen” – Abel Gonzalez. “Internal radiation is the same as external” – Norman Gentner. Happily you can watch this farce as it was videotaped by a Swiss team (embed below).
So: cut to the chase, to the fatal assault on the edifice of the current ICRP radiation risk model. In January 2016 Prof Inge Schmitz Feuerhake, Dr Sebastian Pflugbeil and I published a major review paper on the genetic effects of radiation in the prestigious Korean peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Health and Toxicology.
What the research shows is that in every corner of the ex-Soviet Union and Europe and even further afield where epidemiologists and pediatricians looked, there were large and statistically significant increases in congenital diseases at birth and in babies that were aborted.
The genetic risk that cascades through the generations
The new article recalculates the genetic risk from radiation based upon reports from Germany, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Egypt, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Italy, the UK, Scotland, Wales, indeed everywhere where anyone looked.
There was a sudden jump in birth defects immediately following the contamination from Chernobyl and in proportion; but only up to the point where the exposure was so great the babies died in the womb or miscarried early in pregnancy. Thus, the relation between exposure level and effect was not a simple one where the birth defects increased with exposure: after a critical level of exposure they leveled off, or indeed fell.
Also since contamination is still there, women are still giving birth to genetically damaged children some 30 years later. These results, published by many doctors, epidemiologists and researchers in many different journals, show that the effects occurred at levels of contamination that provided ‘doses’, that yardstick of radiation exposure invented by the ICRP, that were very low, often below the natural background dose.
It is worse: from research on the nuclear test site veterans’ grandchildren (also reviewed in the study) it is clear that these effects continue down the generations and will only disappear when an offspring dies without issue, and leaves the genome of the human race. And many will or already have done: since what causes genetic malformation in the infant, at a larger dose causes fetal death and infertility.
These facts now form the basis of the case of Britain’s nuclear test veterans, whose case I am representing in the High Court today. The UK government recklessly exposed them to a double blast of intense radiation from the gamma ray burst of nuclear bombs, and to the subsequent fallout, and has since washed their hands of the matter.
The vetermans’ demand is that the sacrifice they and their families made should be recognised, and fair compensation paid. The MOD has resisted their claim by fair means and foul, but finally the evidence is assembled and their case is being heard. Today’s hearing is largely procedural, and the substantive hearings are scheduled to take place for some two weeks of June.
The scientific fraud explained
No one can have failed to have noticed the increase in human infertility that has occurred since the radioactive contamination of the planet began in the 1950s. As ex-US Atomic Energy Commission scientists John Gofman wrote in 1981 “the nuclear industry is waging a war on humanity.”
So how can it be possible that the legislative system has got it so wrong? The answer is also given in the paper. It is that the concept of ‘dose’ which may be convenient for the physicists as it is simple to compute, really does not address the situation where the substances that provide the dose are inside the body, often bound chemically to the DNA, which is the acknowledged target for all these genetic effects.
It shows that the human genome (and of course that of all life) is exquisitely sensitive to radiation damage from such internal exposures, to Strontium-90, Plutonium-239, Uranium and particularly to the nano-particles containing these radioactive elements which were produced when the reactor No 4 blew apart.
The paper shows the studies of the Hiroshima bomb survivors, upon which the current unsafe radiation laws are based were faulty because the true comparison group, those not in the city at the time of the bombing, was abandoned when it began to look like there was a real effect. Was this stupidity? Was it a trick? Does someone have to go to jail?
Last month, Prof. Alexey Yablokov, Dr. Alex Rosen and I wrote to the editor of The Lancet, in a recorded delivery letter posted by the Independent WHO in Geneva, requesting space in that influential journal to draw attention to these truths and overturn the false and dangerous structures created by the physicists.
Let us all hope that some good will finally come of the disaster – that the real legacy of Chernobyl will be the understanding of the true danger to health of radioactive pollution.
And that Britain’s nuclear bomb test veterans, and their families, will finally receive the justice they so richly deserve.
Chris Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia. See also: chrisbusbyexposed.org, greenaudit.org and llrc.org.
Latest book: Christopher Busby (2015) ‘What is Life? On the origin and mechanism of living systems’. QTP Publications. Illustrated by Saoirse Morgan. ISBN 978-0-9565132-1-2, 130pp. Order from Amazon UK (£10.00) or QTP publications 10 Bratwell Rd, Coleraine, BT51 4LB.
Up until the late 1980s radioactive wastes including plutonium wastes were tumble tipped into trenches. Now the site has gone all hi tech and compacts radioactive waste into rusting shipping containers…
From Radiation Free Lakeland April 30. 2016
Drigg the quaint coastal village is also home to the UKs ‘Low Level Waste Repository’ (the word ‘Nuclear’ has been dropped from the official title) Although locals know this as the Nuclear Dump. Drigg is located near the Sellafield nuclear site on the shifting sands of the Cumbrian coast. Up until the late 1980s radioactive wastes including plutonium wastes were tumble tipped into trenches. Now the site has gone all hi tech and compacts radioactive waste into rusting shipping containers, any void in the container is filled with concrete.
The site sits above West Cumbria Aquifer from which is drawn the borehole water supply for much of West Cumbria while Sellafield gets most of its water from Wastwater.
The plan is to keep on dumping the high end of “low level” radioactive waste here despite the threat of inundation not just from the Irish Sea but also from the rivers and becks running through and alongside the site.
The planning application to extend the wastes, stacking ever more shipping containers higher, has already been approved by our toothless regulators, the Environment Agency.
Please write to the Development Control and Regulation Committee of Cumbria County Council who will be looking at this application on the 11th May ( if it isn’t postponed again) and ask them to refuse permission for the continued use of Drigg as a nuclear waste dump. Ask them to lobby government to hold a moratorium on “decommissioning” and dumping (breaking up and ‘disposing’ of old nuclear plants) which we now know means dispersal of radioactive wastes to Drigg rather than containment on original sites. Many more Driggs and radioactive landfills will be needed if new nuclear build goes ahead.
The site owners the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority pass day to day running of the site to multinational corporations involved in “decommissioning’ and those corporations largely monitor themselves. SO the same people responsible for producing the waste are also responsible for dumping it. The Environment Agency has told us it sees no conflict of interest in this…but we do! Studsvik, a Swedishcompany who operate the only radioactive scrap metal plant in Europe here in Cumbria is one of the partners of the Drigg site. On 20th April Studsvik’s waste operations were taken over by EDF. Presumably this means that EDF now have a large hand in running the Drigg site? Will EDF be tempted to ship tonnes of radioactive metals from their 9 nuclear plants being decommissioned now in France, to the Studsvik plant in Workington now that they own it? And will the ever increasing tonnage of radioactive shot metal from that radioactive metal “recycling” end up in Drigg which they will also be operating?
Heal Fukushima 