ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

by CHRIS BUSBY Secret documents released to me as a result of an order by the Judge in the nuclear test veteran pension appeals (the late HH Hugh Stubbs) reveal valuable evidence about uranium in fallout. The documents show that fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing contains enormous amounts of uranium. This should be no surprise as nuclear bombs contain a lot of uranium, and most of it remains unfissioned after a nuclear explosion. But what will come as news to a great many people is the importance in the fallout of an isotope of uranium that few of us have even heard of: uranium-234, a highly radioactive alpha emitter which concentrates in the ‘enriched uranium’ (EU) used in nuclear bombs. All uranium binds to DNA and causes cancer and genetic effects in the children of those exposed – but U-234 is especially hazardous. A  restricted document  shows that the matter was raised as early as 1953 at a meeting at Harwell by the late Karl Z Morgan, who was in charge o...

by WILLIAM D. HARTUNG On Nov. 10 the White House forwarded a request to Congress for an additional $5.6 billion to fight the war against the Islamic State. This is pocket change by Pentagon standards. The president’s new war funding request equals only about 1 percent of the Pentagon’s $500 billion base budget, and just 10 percent of the $59.6 billion that is already in the administration’s proposal for war funding for 2015. With all this money at its disposal, why does the Pentagon need more funds now for the war against Islamic State? The short answer is, it doesn’t. It’s an open secret that the war budget – known in Washington-ese as the Overseas Contingency Operations account – has been used for years as the Pentagon’s personal piggy bank to pay for a whole array of projects that have nothing to do with any existing conflict. In fiscal year 2014, which ended Oct. 1, independent estimates suggest that as much as $30 billion of the $80 billion-plus OCO request was used for items unre...

by MEL CARRIERE Last September 26 forty-three student protestors on their way to a protest rally were abducted in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico by the police, then handed over to a drug trafficking gang that most likely murdered them. Since that time widespread protests have erupted in Mexico over this outrage. Although the United States shares a border with this troubled nation and a significant percentage of our population is either Mexican or of Mexican ancestry, very few reports surrounding this atrocity have appeared in the American media. This begs the question of whether or not this information is being deliberately concealed from the American public and if so, why? Although my wife is Mexican and stays more attuned to what is going on in Mexico than I do via the Spanish language media, the first I heard about the abduction and massacre came from the cover of the Wall Street Journal, which I happened to glance at last Saturday. On the way home from work I expected to hear more about ...