Something good came from aboveground nuclear testing?

While puttering about today, I turned on NPR as I so often do, and heard the last words of a story that ended the reporter saying “That would be an unexpected bit of good news inspired by the Cold War atomic tests.”

What?!

How could anything good have come from the aboveground nuclear tests, much less something having to do with recovery from damage to your heart muscle?

The story “Nuclear Fallout Solves Heart Mystery” tells how the above-ground nuclear tests of the first decades of the aotmic era have led to a small breakthrough, something about how researchers were able to determine that heart cells do in fact regenerate, albeit very slowly, by measuring the decay rate of carbon 14 in heart muscle cells. Crazy… but good science, carefully and actually down in a fairly conservative manner to ensure the best course of study, can produce some truly ground-breaking results.

NPR: “New Book Dissects Reagan’s Role In The Cold War”

The Cold War used to be my academic passion. It’s taken a back seat to gardening and urban farming for some time now, probably because I’m just tired of being in college. (“Senioritis” strikes even us old timers, it seems. I’m not even 35, but compared to many of my fellow students, I’m an old timer.) And try as I may, I have not been able to grow either books nor beer in my gardens…

James Mann’s book peers into the mind and the administration of President Ronald Reagan, and shows that the now-deified (by the right, anyway) president was often at odds with the pundits and talking heads of the day.

Moreover, I suspect it shows that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev played a much bigger and more central role in ending the Cold War than may have been thought by many. Yes, Reagan figuratively waltzed with Gorbachev in the end, but it was Gorbachev who began the process of deep thaw within the once-myopic state.

I look forward to reading this book.

And please, if you can, buy it through a local book seller. (Harry Schwartz, we miss you!)

Weapons grade plutonium-239 found in Hanford nuke dump

In the later years of World War II, the U.S. government set out on an ambitious project to develop nuclear weapons, ultimately succeeding in July 1945. The greater project involved work by hundreds of scientists across the country, including Los Alamos, New Mexico; Washington; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

As a result of this, there are large swaths of New Mexico and Washington state that are now deeply contaminated with intensely radioactive nuclear waste. The Hanford site will take decades or longer to get slightly cleaned up. And it was there at Hanford that a jar containing a sizable quantity of very refined plutonium-239 was found in an old safe that had been dumped and abandoned back in 1951, where it stayed until it was discovered in 2004.

Is that plutonium in that jar, or are you just happy to see me?

That dirty glass jar on the right is the one holding the refined plutonium. Apparently someone put the jar in that safe upon receipt from the uranium-plutonium refinery at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which apparently then proceeded to cause the whole safe to be come contaminated, presumably by radiation and radioactive sources that resulted from having that very hot sample of plutonium in the jar.

New Scientist has a lengthy article on this chilling discovery.

It almost makes me want to say, “Never mind the credit crisis and the economic meltdown; what are we going to do with our thousands of nuclear weapons and thousands millions of tons of nuclear waste?” We could always try to bury it and forget about it, but these things do have an often deadly way of turning up.

(h/t Slashdot.)

Also: Time has an article about Obama’s stated intention to halt development of nuclear weapons. Good riddance, I say. My interest in Obama the candidate was crystallized when I heard he wanted to stop the development of nukes. That’s a very good start. But can he start to help us get rid of them en masse?

Gorbachev Decries America’s “Cold War”-Style Military Spending Plans

Washington Post’s The Trail blog discusses an op-ed written by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev,¹ in which he points out the Bush administration’s use of military power or the threat of military action as its primarily means of addressing world problems. Gorbachev argues that neither major presidential candidate has proposed anything different from continued military aggression and arms buildups. This is despite the rhetoric of change that has propelled Barack Obama to his status as likely Democratic nominee, though it is no surprise at all coming from John more-of-the-same hot-head McCain.

(Has Obama proposed doing anything to directly reduce defense spending? I’m curious. Despite being an Obama supporter, I don’t know what he’s said on this. Something else to look into. Was that what McCain and Hillary Clinton called him “naive” over?)

Mr. Gorbachev’s comparison of U.S. strategy to the Cold War is quite valid. He writes, “[the U.S.] runs over 700 military bases across the world and plans to build more as if the Cold War were not a thing of the past, and the country were surrounded by enemies.” With the upstart of the missile defense program several years ago, there was a question in some circles as to whether the Cold War had actually ended, or if it was being started anew, given the stark differences between Bush and former Russian President Vladimir Putin on the matter of missile defense. While Condoleeza Rice’s statement that there was no new cold war served only to underline the validity of belief in there being one, that came well after I had started the blog, once entitled “The New Cold War,” but later renamed it “The New Bear: 21st Century Russia — Post-Soviet Russia and its growingly complicated with the United States, Europe, and itself.”

While he presided over the end of the Soviet Union, America’s former hated enemy, we would be wise to listen to his insight on this topic. The Soviet Union collapsed partially due to its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, partially because it tried to keep up with America’s breakneck military spending and nuclear missile building in the 1980s, but especially because Mr. Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestrokia reforms gave the Soviet people the freedoms they had never had before, many of the same ones that we take for granted in America. Because of this freedom, the long-subsumed political and social pressures of the hugely diverse Soviet republics was able to bubble up to the surface, leading to the USSR’s disintegration in 1991, and the terrorist self-sovereignty uprisings in Chechnya and Georgia. The Soviet Union’s collapse occurred not just under the weight of its sprawling military, but of its stagnant economy and fragmenting society.

¹That Gorbachev wrote this in the Russian government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta seems a bit odd to me, as Gorbachev is not well-liked among his countrymen despite being the key player in ending the Cold War.)

Fifty-four years ago today, Joe McCarthy fell from power

It was on June 9, 1954, that U.S. Army attorney Joseph Welch chastised Wisconsin’s most infamous senator, Joseph R. McCarthy. It was during the so-called Army-McCarthy Hearings that were held by the United States Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations that McCarthy, evidently intoxicated and looking quite disheveled, chose to violate an agreement he had made with Mr. Welch prior to the public hearing, provoking Mr. Welch’s now-legendary derision of McCarthy. The Museum Broadcast Communications summarizes it well:

The afternoon of 9 June 1954 brought the emotional climax of the hearings, an exchange replayed in myriad Cold War documentaries. Ignoring a pre-hearing agreement between Welch and Cohn, McCarthy insinuated that one Fred Fischer, a young lawyer at Hale & Dorr, harbored communist sympathies. Welch responded with a righteous outburst that hit all the hot buttons: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness….Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” When McCarthy tried to strike back, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman “call the next witness.” Pausing just a beat, the hushed gallery erupted in applause. The uncomprehending McCarthy, shot dead on live TV, turned to Cohn and stammered, “What happened?”

What happened was that television, whose coverage of McCarthy’s news conferences and addresses to the nation had earlier lent him legitimacy and power, had now precipitated his downfall. Prolonged exposure to McCarthy’s odious character and ill-mannered interruptions was a textbook demonstration of how a hot personality wilted under the glare of a cool medium. Toward the close of the hearings, Senator Stuart Symington (Democrat, Missouri) underscored the lesson in media politics during a sharp exchange with McCarthy: “The American people have had a look at you for six weeks. You are not fooling anyone.”

McCarthy was later censured by the United States Senate, his political career effectively over. He would die just two years later, on May 2, 1957 (aged 48).