1970 Through 1979

• Richard Perle was expelled from Sen. Henry Jackson's office in the 1970s after the NSA caught him passing highly classified (National Security) documents to the Israeli Embassy. IZ All Google can confirm of this is repetitions and translations of this precise wording. It appears to have been late '70s: I spent the better part of eleven years working for Scoop Jackson starting in '69. GWU And yet An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli Embassy. [IT, IT citing Findley They Dare to Speak Out] What, he kept his job nearly ten years after that?!? By G-d, he did!

  Perle came to Washington for the first time in early 1969, at the age of 28, to work for a neo-con think tank called the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy. Within months, Senator Henry Scoop Jackson offered Perle a position on his staff, working with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And within months after that—less than a year—Perle was embroiled in an affair involving the leaking of a classified CIA report on alleged past Soviet treaty violations.

  The leaker (and author of the report) was CIA analyst David Sullivan, and the leakee was Richard Perle. CIA Director Stansfield Turner was incensed at the unauthorized disclosure, but before he could fire Sullivan, the latter quit. Turner urged Sen. Jackson to fire Perle, but he was let off with a reprimand. Jackson then added insult to injury by immediately hiring Sullivan to his staff. Sullivan and Perle became close friends and co-conspirators, and together established an informal right-wing network which they called the Madison Group, after their usual meeting place in—you might have guessed—the Madison Hotel Coffee Shop.

  Perle's second brush with the law occurred a year later in 1970. An FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle discussing with an Embassy official classified information which he said had been supplied to by a staff member on the National Security Council. An NSC/FBI investigation was launched to identify the staff member, and quickly focused upon Helmut Sonnenfeldt. The latter had been previously investigated in 1967 while a staff member of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, for suspected unauthorized transmission to an Israeli Government official of a classified document concerning the commencement of the 1967 war in the Middle East. CP

  No wonder I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing…I assumed one incident, maybe two…not this slew.
• Funding for the synthetic biological agent is obtained under HR 15090. The project, under the supervision of the CIA, is carried out by the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the army's top-secret biological weapons facility. Speculation is raised that molecular biology techniques are used to produce AIDS-like retroviruses. US intensifies its development of `ethnic weapons' (Military Review Nov 1970), designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA. HNN (Holy Crap. This lends credibility to the idea AIDS was created by the US to fulfill NSSM 200 (see '74).
• 1970: The main Kurdish group in Iraq, the Kurdish Democratic Party, negotiates a power-sharing agreement with VP Hussein, `believing he is a man they can do business with.' Afterwards, four Kurdish leaders become Cabinet Ministers in the Iraqi government. PBS

• In 1970, the IRS began stealing people's homes in satisfaction of personal income tax liens. I said steal and I meant steal. Congress never passed a law authorizing property seizures in personal income tax cases.

  It's not a small thing. The Constitution has multiple guarantees against seizure of property without due process of law; the 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendments, for starters. It's quite evident that the Founding Fathers went to great lengths to prevent some self-proclaimed dictator or monarch from grabbing property in America, as the King used to do in England…

  Here's how [it was done]. There were seizure regulations on the books for tax debtors whose debt lawfully arose from the federally-regulated occupations of sale of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. The IRS wanted to use those regulations on you. But the regulations were in the wrong book. They were in Title 27 of the US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). That book is called Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The IRS needed these regulations to be in Title 26, called Personal Income Tax. So they instructed the Printing Office to move them…

  [But] there was still a problem. In the back of each volume of the CFR there used to be a Table of Cross References, showing which punishments related to which crimes. The property-seizure laws still cross-referenced to Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and not Personal Income Tax…

  So they just removed the Tables of Cross References… AOS

• CIA ousts prince Sahounek (popular for having kept Cambodia out of the war) and installs Lon Nol (who promptly goes to war). Minor opposition parties like Khmer Rouge get a boost. PA
• 1970: Earliest known political contribution by John Hinckley Sr. to GHWB, for his senate bid. NB
• "Operation Tailwind". Caused a heap of trouble for Peter Arnett in 1998 over whether the US has used Sarin or tear gas on its own deserters. FAIR
• GWB is using the student deferment that keeps him out of Vietnam to cheer for the football team.
• 1970 Mar 5: Nuclear non-proliferation treaty ratified by 43 countries. F
• 1970 Apr: &rad;Apollo-13 reactor from with 3.78 kg Pu splashes down off Norfolk Is. Australia; covered up until 1980 July. [P citing The Australian 1980 Jul 31]
• 1970 May 4: National Guard stifles debate at Kent State University by killing 4 and paralysing another. PA
• May 11: George Winne, UC Berkeley student, last of 8 Americans known to have immolated themselves over the Vietnam war. DSS
• 1970 Jun 5: &rad;Indian Pt. springs a radioactive leak which takes 700 men 7 months of short stints to weld. P

  &rad;Dresden 2 out of control for 2 hours following `incredible series of mistakes' started by `spurious signal.' P

• 1970 Oct:

  [On the midterm election campaign, Nixon was met in San Jose] by a mob screaming oaths and obscenities and, when he left the hall, throwing eggs and rocks, one just grazing him. It was the first mob assault on a President in American history. We could see the hate in their faces…hear the hate in their voices, he said afterword in a statement denouncing the rioters as violent thugs representative of the worst in America. [Tuchman March of Folly 1983 p366]

  (cf the Christmas bombing a few years later)
• Aug: &rad;Another Livermore accident releasing 300 kCi. EN
• Aug: ANFO truck bombing of U of WI. `only major ANFO vehicle bombing in US…prior to OKC' Key suspect Leo Frederick Burt never caught. CTI
• Aug 10: `President Nixon signed PL91-213 and John D. Rockefeller, III became the "Population Czar." Nixon's August 10 National Security Memo leaves no doubt as to the genocidal nature of depopulation.' BG
• 1970 Sep: At symposium of the International Atomic Energy Agency it is revealed that reprocessing plants `lose' 1.5% of the materials they process, and a nuclear power plant diffuses 30 Ci/MW·a into the atmosphere. Jacques Cousteau [likely at the same symposium] describes photographing barrels of nuclear waste `lying open yawning like oysters.' [P citing Thieberger p 5]
• 1970 Sep 30: &rad;Coolant loss at Hanford trips primary SCRAM, which fails due to a short circuit. Backup SCRAM functions. GE calculated the probability of SCRAM failure was 10^-10; the actual rate so far has been a million times that. `Past accidents at Hanford occurred on 3rd October, 1954, 4th January 1955, and 6th January 1966.' [P citing Jean Geue AAEC; Webb, R. E. p 192–3]
• 1970 Oct 2: Robert McNamara as World Bank President tells international bankers that population growth is `the gravest issue that the world faces over the years ahead.' APFN
• 1970 Dec 18: &rad;Radiation leak from 10-kt Baneberry test in NV forces evacuation of hundreds. F The cloud drifted as far north as Canada, violating a treaty. (This page claims the release was deliberate. NF)
• 1971: US ceases compulsory smallpox vaccination, which causes more disease than it cures; 43 a after Holland, 46 a after Australia, and 64 a after England. DW

  It is claimed by medical historians that the vaccination process wiped out smallpox throughout the world. However, the truth is that compulsory vaccination was abandoned because more deaths were caused by the vaccinations than there were cases of smallpox. A slight of the hand trick was used to foster the claim that smallpox was eradicated by the vaccination practice. Everyone who had been vaccinated and who developed smallpox was diagnosed as having chicken pox! W · T

• 1971: Clarence Lasby Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War
• 1971: Germany bans water fluoridation F (while it remains mandatory in Michigan).
• 1971: &rad;Atomic Energy Commission announces `Project Salt Vault' to solve the nuclear waste problem. But when 180000 gallons of contaminated water pumped into a borehole promptly and unexpectedly disappear, the project is abandoned. L

  Greenpeace founded, to oppose nuclear testing. [Who Wants to be a Millionaire? 2002 Oct 23]

• 1971: &rad;Clinton-TN manufacturer of sealed radioactive sources abandons significantly contaminated plant site; cleanup costs fall on the federal and state gov'ts. [P citing Alexic Parks `A Landscape of Nuclear Tombs']
• 1971: &rad;Reactor KE, last of Hanford's original eight, is shut down. Only the relatively new N Reactor remains in production. TCH
• 1971: Iraqi agents try to assassinate Mustafa Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party. PBS
• CIA-backed Bolivian coup replaces leftist Juan Torres with dictator Hugo Banzer, who promptly disposes of 2000 opponents with torture and execution. PA
• US Coast Guard forcibly ends 18-mo occupation of Alcatraz by American Indian Movement, which had established an international Indian cultural center there to point up the US' continued refusal to honour its treaties. PA
• 1971 Jan: &rad;Defective equipment leaks Pu oxide into the atmosphere at Oklahoma City; 22 contaminated. [P citing Nucleus 1979 Jul 15]
• 1971: &rad;Malcolm Patterson dies of leukemia at 36 after working for 13 years at Windscale. British Nuclear Fuels admits liability and agrees to pay k$120 damages. [P citing The West Australian 1979 Nov 16]
• 1971 Jan: &rad;B-52 crashes 3 km from a small BWR [Charleuoix]. An eyewitness says the plane was heading directly in line with the reactor when it crashed. `If the plane had crashed into the reactor there would have been a major public disaster…' Grumman aerospace official speculates the plane may have flown into radioactive gasses (normally discharged) which could have interfered with the plane's electronics. `No report is made to the public.' [P citing R.E. Webb, 1 p 194–145 [sic]]
• Apr: Gen. Charles Cabell collapses and dies after physical at Ft Myers. JFKDE Some sort of wheel in the Bay of Pigs, and brother to mayor of Dallas at time of JFK assassination.
• 1971 Apr 14: Mordecai Bentov, re Six-Day War: `The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.' [ABBC citing Al-Hamishmar Apr 14]

  T$671-suit brought against GM for polluting the US. DB

• 1971 May: &rad;Millstone BWR has steam-valve problem which raises radioactivity and hence power level beyond ratings. Luckily the SCRAM functions, because there is no backup system supposedly because SCRAM contains several backup electrical relays. However, they had all been improperly made, causing the coating to become sticky; with time the switches become less likely to open in an emergency. In '73 the AEC will require backup SCRAM for licenses submitted after 1977, leaving 200 reactors without backups. [P citing Webb, p 193–4]
• 1971 Jun 17: Nixon `declares war' on drugs. FL (I use quotes because I'm not sure it's the literal war it would become.)
• 1971 August: &rad;Intruder gets past fences and guard towers onto grounds of VT Yankee. [P citing Nucleus 1979 Jul 25 citing Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1974]
• Aug 15: Nixon scuttles gold standard. WGT (But if the US went off Au now, what was Kennedy doing with Ag?)
• 1971 Nov: &rad;Arson causes M$5–10 damage to Indian Pt 2 [P citing Nucleus 1979 Jul 25 citing Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 1974]
• 1971 Nov 19: &rad;Monticello's radioactive wastewater storage overflows, loosing 50000 gallons into the Mississippi to end up in St. Paul's drinking water. EN · L

• The apex of the New York Times actions and editorial positions on the JFK assassination came in November and December 1971. They published three items supporting the Warren Commission eight years after the assassination, at a time when it seemed on the surface to be a dead issue…The third was a story by Fred Graham about the findings of Dr. Lattimer, who was allowed to see the autopsy photographs and x-rays of John Kennedy. Graham actually wrote most of his story, which solidly backed up the Warren Commission due to Lattimer's claims that the autopsy materials proved no conspiracy, before Lattimer ever entered the Archives [I wonder if he means proved there was no conspiracy or failed to prove there was a conspiracy?]…

  The concerted campaign on the part of the Times' management could have been timed to prevent a discovery of new evidence of conspiracy in the autopsy materials. The reason for this possibility developing in the November 1971 period is that the five-year restriction placed on the autopsy evidence by Burke Marshall, a Kennedy family lawyer, expired in November of 1971. Four well-known and highly reputable forensic pathologists, Dr. Cyril Wecht of Pittsburgh, Dr. John Nichols of the University of Kansas, Dr. Milton Helpern of New York City and Dr. John Chapman of Detroit had already asked permission to examine the x-rays and photos upon the expiration of the five-year period. All four were known to question the Warren Commission's findings. What better way to freeze them out of the Archives than to select a doctor who could be trusted to back up the Commission (Lattimer had published several articles doing just that), commission him to go into the Archives, and then persuade the New York Times to publish a front page story in its Sunday issue demonstrating that no one else need look at the materials because they supported the Warren Commission's findings. TA123

  (The reliable Dr. Lattimer, the urologist, [testifying] about the bullet wounds above the navel. TA123)
• 1971 Dec: &rad;Carton of radioactive Mb-99 salts leaks in Delta Airlines craft; the leak is not discovered until 9 flights later. Enough radiation escaped to cause AEC `some worries.' [P citing Thieberger p.5]
• 1971 Dec 12: &rad;500 gallons of primary coolant spill into the Thames near New London CT during transfer from the sub' Dace to tender Fulton. Although primary coolant water is radioactive only a few seconds, it contains corrosion particles that remain active for years. L [P citing Melbourne Sun 1976 Oct 8 p 23]
• 1971: GWB may have gotten GF Robin Lowman pregnant and obtained an illegal abortion. [D citing BC citing Crossfire 2000 Oct 20] spoof Bar: Yes, George made his underage lover kill their baby, but you have to understand, he was out of his mind on cocaine at the time. There is a really good chance that he would never make a 15-year-old do that now. BB
• 1972: Rep. Hale Boggs (D-LA) dies in plane crash. He'd been an outspoken member of the Warren commission; various sources reported that he had openly expressed doubts about the commission's findings. SNZ (Or perhaps he and his plane simply disappear in Alaska. TA123)
• 1972: 12 min to midnight. BAS
• 1972: Sweden bans public water fluoridation F (while it remains mandatory in Michigan).
• Lewis Powell, later of Supreme Court, advises US Chamber of Commerce to uy the top academic reputations in the country to add credibility to corporate studies and give business a stronger voice on the campuses. TWT

• Tapes of the Bush Family's long-time spiritual adviser, Billy Graham, have revealed that Graham used to have vehemently anti-Semitic conversations with Nixon. For example, Graham blamed `satanic Jews' for the nation's problems. After agreeing with Nixon that left-wing Jews dominate the news-media, Graham stated that `They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff,' and the Jewish `stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain.' He also admitted that `a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine…But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing about this country.'

  [X citing David Firestone `Billy Graham Responds to Lingering Anger Over 1972 Remarks on Jews' New York Times 2002 Mar 17]
• 1972: &rad;West Valley NY fuel reprocessor closes after 6 years in operation, leaving 600000 gallons of high-level waste buried in tanks that leak into Lakes Ontario and Erie. L
• 1972: &rad;Surry-1 (NY) valve failure kills two. Investigation detects more than 500 faulty welds. [P citing Work Circle Environmental Protection `Not Man Apart' 1972 Sep]
• 1972: Gen. Mattityahu Peled, re 6-Day War: `The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us…and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war…To pretend that the Egyptian forces massed on our frontiers were in a position to threaten the existence of Israel constitutes an insult not only to the intelligence of anyone capable of analyzing this sort of situation, but above all an insult to the Zahal,' tne Israeli army. [PSC citing Ha'aretz Mar 19] `By falsifying the causes of the war and confusing its true motivation, the Israeli government was seeking to render acceptable to the people the principle of partial or total annexation.' R [slightly different translation] `[N]o person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our defence against the Egyptian threat. To claim that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel's existence not only insults the intelligence of anyone capable of analyzing this kind of situation, but is an insult to Zahal,' the Israeli army. Ezer Weizman, father of the Israeli air force and later defense minister, confirms that there was `no threat of destruction' from the Arabs. [WRH drawing from Deliberate Deceptions&warn;] [ABBC citing Ha'aretz March 29, Le Monde June 3] (Y'know, with the number of Congressmen and House Rep's coming out with dissention literature, I'm getting the impression of a lot of hidden division and word-warfare in Washington.)
• 1972: Hussein visits Moscow, signs a Friendship and Cooperation treaty with the USSR next year. PBS
• 1972: French Connection broken up FL after the movie?? FC
• 1972 Mar: &rad;Sen. Mike Gravel of Alaska submits to the Congressional Record that a routine check in a nuclear power plant indicating abnormal radioactivity in the building's water system. Radioactivity was confirmed in the drinking fountain, traced to an inappropriate cross-connection between a 3000-gallon radioactive tank and the water system. L

• At the time, March of 1972, Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced Richard Allen as National Security Advisor, with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including Feith, who'd only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he'd been the object of an inquiry into whether he'd provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington…Feith did not remain unemployed for long, however. Richard Perle, who was in 1982 serving in the Pentagon as Assistant secretary for International Security Policy, hired him on the spot as his Special Counsel, and then as his Deputy. CP

  (Does this mean 1972 or 1982?)
• 1972 March: The Club of Rome publishes Limits to Growth&warn;, predicting that unless something serious is done soon to check the rampant overconsumption of the developed world, civilisation as we know it will disintegrate in the early 21st century. It seems to have been dismissed by those who count as yet another piece of impractical academic scaremongering Malthusian/Luddite anti-progress. Pity. (Some ignore Forrester's model because when they tried to run it backwards it showed a big population drop around 1880. X I bet the fools didn't properly account for the time delays in some of the feedbacks. As I recall the program—source code was in a Creative Computing—it was written with the assumption the time step was positive; that previously computed results represented earlier time values. Merely negating the time step would screw up all those time lags; you'd have to make serious mods to the code.)
• 1972 Mar: &rad;Dr. Abram Petkau publishes his finding that low, long-term radiation expose can be worse than high but short exposure totalling many more rays. Cell membranes that break down after 0.75 rad in a radioactive salt solution could take nearly 3500 rad in X-ray bursts. This totally defenestrated old thinking about low-dose exposure being safe, and that low-dose effects could be predicted from high-dose experiments. [SF citing Health Physics]
• GHWB, probably with Joe Kennedy's error in mind, has GWB do his military duty in `richboy' squadron of the National Guard.
• 1972: There are strong suspicions GWB was arrested for cocaine posession this year. The records appear to have been expunged for a community-service sentence, probably under pressure from la familia. [SS quoting recent publisher's foreword to Fortunate Son&warn;]
• 1972 Apr: Haim Barlev: `We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the 6-Day War, and we had never thought of such a possibility.' Chaim Herzog: `There was no danger of annihilation. Israeli headquarters never believed in this danger.' [ABBC citing Ma'ariv April 4] [R citing `April 19 interview' Ma'ariv] (Lord, I wish people would keep their sources straight.)
• 1972 May: J. Edgar Hoover dies. JFKDE
• 1972: Hale Boggs disappears over Alaska. House majority leader and Warren Commission member; had begun publically doubting the findings. JFKDE Also lost, aide Don Jonz and Rep. Nick Begich. BK

• With reëlection on his mind, Nixon was enraged by [Vietnamese] recalcitrance and swore among associates that The bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time. Against advice of a fearful domestic reaction…he announced the second half of the savage blow—naval blockade and mining of Haiphong harbour and round-the-clock raids by B52s…The Whitehouse staff, in its hopped-up state of nerves, believed the decision could make or break the President and spent over $8000 from election funds to elicit a flood of phony telegrams of approval and concocted advertisements in newspapers so that the Whitehouse could announce opinion running in support of the President. [Tuchman March of Folly 1983 p370]

  (Whitehouse is capable of Astroturfing.)
• 1972: Nixon pressures Kissinger to try nuclear weapons on Vietnam. SMH (CNN probably has it too, 'tis where I first saw it. This comes out `first thing' 2002 Mar 2. Could there be a deep reason? It sure doesn't win the US much sympathy. It `triggered an angry official reaction in [Vietnam] despite the recent reconciliation between the former foes.' What's the US goal in that? Is it just to remind us who has the biggest red nuclear button?)
• May 15: Attempted assassination of George Wallace, governor Alabama, on presidential campaign. Attributed to Arthur Bremmer. PS (This source claims seven wounds and thus seven bullets from a five-round S&W; but it doesn't go into proof no bullets caused multiple wounds.)
• June 17: Watergate breakin by CREEP, RNC, & CIA Security Chief James McCord, Jr., Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzales. MB
• E. Howard Hunt leads the breakin of Democrat Nat'l HQ in the Watergate Hotel partly to recover the photos connecting him to Dealy Plaza. ININ (Some more threads in this can be found here. It cites Haldeman The Ends of Power that Nixon used `Bay of Pigs' as code for the JFK assassination, and `the Texans' as Bush, Baker, & Mosbacher. Over and over on the Watergate tapes, these names [`Bay of Pigs', `Texans', `Hunt'] come up around the discussion of the photos from Dallas that Nixon was trying to obtain when he ordered the CIA to burglarize the Watergate. Citing Riordan `Three Men and a Barge' Common Cause Mar-Apr 1990, SF Chronicle 1977 May 7 interview with Frank Sturgis in which he stated that `the reason we burglarized the Watergate was because Nixon was interested in stopping news leaking related to the photos of our role in the assassination of President John Kennedy.')
• 1972 Aug 1: 1st Lt. GWB suspended from flying status for failure to accomplish annual medical examination. WRH
• 1972 (or '73) Sep: &rad;Millstone-1's 40000 Al-alloy condenser tubes corrode to the point of allowing sea water into the cooling system. [P citing Jean Geue AAEC Boston Globe 1974 Oct 14]
• 1972 Nov 23: &rad;DC-9 circles Oak Ridge for 2 hours. Most staff evacuate. Hijackers fly to Cuba with M$10. [P citing Thieberger p.6; Nucleus '79 Aug 25]

• Nixon was stunningly reëlected by the largest popular and electoral majorit[ies] ever recorded…The landslide was the result of many causes: the weakness and vacillation of his opponent, Sen. McGovern, whose ill-chosen declaration that he would go on his knees to Hanoi…repelled the voters; the success of [Nixon's] dirty tricks, which had destroyed a stronger candidate in the primaries… [Tuchman March of Folly 1983 p371]

  (I wonder what voting machines were in use then.)

• After Nixon's landslide victory…he knew he had to centralize all power into the Whitehouse to keep his faction in power, not only to hold power, but to prevent the media from digging into how he secretly shot his way into the Whitehouse, just like Hitler shot his way into control of Germany. The first thing Nixon did was to demand signed resignations of his entire government. Eliminate everyone, he told John Ehrlichman about reäppointment, except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause. [K citing Blumenthal Pledging Allegiance]

• 1972 Dec: &rad;Fire and two explosions at Pauling NY Pu plant. An undetermined amount of Pu scatters inside and outside the plant, resulting in its permanent shutdown. L
• 1972 Dec:

  Freed of concern about public protest [by landslide reëlection] Nixon responded with a ferocious blow, the notorious Christmas bombing, heaviest American action of the war. In 12 days of December the Air Force pounded North Vietnam with a greater tonnage of bombs than in the total of the past three years, reducing areas of Hanoi and Haiphong to rubble…The fierce attack so near the [war's] end darkened America's reputation at home and abroad, enhancing its image of brutality. [Tuchman March of Folly 1983 p372]

• CIA and British are funding mind-control experiments by WIlliam Sargent on unwitting British mental patients. It is admitted in Congressional hearings the experiments continue Nazi research. [GT citing one of the victims, Medical Council of Canada examiner Dr. Anne White] (Similar experiments were done in Canada; I believe CBC has a doco on that)
• 1972 Dec 8: UA crash in Chicago takes out 12 Watergate personalities, including E. H. Hunt's wife Dorothy. BK Skolnick contends the NTSB buries its own evidence of sabotage. SR · WA IL Rep. George Collins among dead. CNN
• 1973: Trilateral Commission founded by Brzezinski and Rockefeller. (Their plan seems to be, build a planet-scale version of the company town.) One charter member is GA Gov. Jimmy Carter, selected for having set up trade offices in Tokyo and Brussels. In With No Apologies Goldwater called it `David Rockefeller's newest international cabal…intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial, and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the US.' [BI citing Sklar Trilateralism: the Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management] [BI citing Robertson New World Order, Perloff Shadows of Power, London Sunday Times]
• In 1973 Richard Perle used his (and Senator Henry Scoop Jackson's) influence as a senior staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to help Wolfowitz obtain a job with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. CP
• Kissinger to Nixon re Chile: `I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.' TO
• Kissinger, re US bombing of Cambodia he designed: `Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?' TO
• 1973: Holland bans water fluoridation constitutionaally F (while it remains mandatory in Michigan).
• 1973:

  In the early 1960s [Allen] Frey found that when microwaves of 300 to 3000 MHz were pulsed at specific rates, humans (even deaf people) could hear them. The beam caused a booming, hissing, clicking, or buzzing, depending on the exact frequency and pulse rate, and the sound seemed to come from just behind the head.

  At first Frey was ridiculed for this announcement, just like many radar technicians who'd been told they were crazy for hearing certain radar beams. Later work has shown that the microwaves are sensed somewhere in the temporal region just above and slightly in front of the ears…hat the same effect can be used more subtly was demonstrated in 1973 by Dr. Joseph C. Sharp of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Sharp, serving as a test subject himself, heard and understood spoken words delivered to him in an echo-free isolation chamber via a pulsed-microwave audiogram (an analog of the word's sound vibrations) beamed into his brain. Such a device has obvious applications in covert operations designed to drive a target crazy with voices or deliver undetectable instructions to a programmed assassin. There are also indications that other pulsed frequenciescause similiar pressure waves in other tissues, which could disrupt various metabolic processes…

  Frey also reported that he could speed up, slow down, or stop isolated frog hearts by synchronizing the pulse rate of a microwave beam with the beat of the heart itself. Similiar results have been obtained using live frogs, indicating that it's technically feasible to produce heart attacks with a ray designed to penetrate the human chest. [S quoting Becker The Body Electric]

• 1973: Egypt attempts to reclaim the Sinai, taken by Israel in the '67 `preëmptive' attack. YT
• 1973: Nixon makes a secret agreement with Shah of Iran to begin covert action against Saddam's government. The US, Israel, and Iran then begin funding the Kurds in their battle against the Iraqi regime for an autonomous Kurdistan. PBS
• 1973: &rad;Edward Glosson, NJ dock worker, dies at 39. Ten years ago he got Pu on himself while handling a leaky box of liquid waste. Six years ago he lost a hand to a rare cancer. Then the arm. Then the shoulder. The company responsible paid no compensation. [P citing Nucleus '79 Aug 25; Thieberger p7]
• 1973: Israel's Yom-Kippur War is rather devastating to their hardware collection, and they demand the US resupply them. Especially with lots of tanks with 90-mm guns. The US gives them every new such tank they can find, and older refitted tanks. Then the Israelis discover they need the ammo too. The US scratches around and honestly can't find any (good thing it wasn't planning to use those tanks). Israel tells them there're 15000 rounds in the Marine-Corps supply depot in Hawai'i, and sure enough… [WRH quoting They Dare to Speak Out&warn; Ch. 5]
• 1973 Jan: Paris treaty meant to end Vietnam war. US promptly ignores it.

  One striking example of this technique was the treatment of the Paris peace treaty of January 1973, which the US was compelled to sign after the failure of its attempt to bludgeon North Vietnam into submission by the Christmas B-52 bombings of populated areas. The US government at once offered a version of the treaty that was diametrically opposed to its terms on every crucial point. This version was uniformly accepted and promulgated by the media, so that the actual terms of the peace treaty had been dismissed to the memory hole literally within a few days. The US and its South Vietnamese client then proceeded with massive violations of the actual treaty in an effort to attain their long-sought goals by violence, and when the Vietnamese adversaries finally responded in kind, they were universally denounced for the breakdown of the agreements and compelled to suffer for their crime. NI

• 1973 Jan 15: &rad;Cracked pipes at VT Yankee release 100× `safe' radiation limit. [P citing Times Record 1974 Apr 23]
• 1973 Jan 17: Smallish ANFO explosion at a fertilizer plant in Pryor Ck, OK. SFC
• US fails to win in Vietnam. The US had dropped ±1.5 Tg of bombs and sprayed 72 ML of toxic chemicals. (Not to mention the landmines.) SMH
• Uprising near Wounded Knee, declaring Oglala Nation independent of BIA-run Pine Ridge Resevation council, and calling for withdrawal of federal oversight of the reservation in accordance with the US' 1868 treaty with Lakotas. Promptly surrounded by Lakota tribal police, BIA police, federal marshals, tribal vigilantes, and FBI snipers, supported by National Guard with armored transports and helicopter gunships. Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations cancel mining leases in support of the Lakota. 71 days of negotiaitions and small-arms conflicts. Army recommends full-scale assault. PA
• Feb: Israel shoots down Libyan airliner.

  In sharp contrast [to the '83 downing of KAL007, this one] led to no outcry in the West, no denunciations for cold-blooded murder, and no boycott. This difference in treatment was explained by the New York Times precisely on the grounds of utility: No useful purpose is served by an acrimonious debate over the assignment of blame for the downing of a Libyan airliner in the Sinai peninsula last week. There was a very useful purpose served by focusing on the Soviet act, and a massive propaganda campaign ensued. TWT

• Apr 15: Sen. W'm Fulbright: Israel Controls the US Senate.

  Some readers might think it preposterous for me to assert that that a foreign nation controls America. But, consider the fact that the former head of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, said precisely that. He asserted on ABC's Face the Nation television program that Israel Controls the US Senate. And, Senator Fulbright was no dummy; it is in his name that the brightest students scramble after the so-named Fulbright scholarships. DD

  Fulbright appeared on the CBS Face the Nation program and in discussing American policy in the Mideast stated, Israel controls the US Senate. In a matter of just a few days, Fulbright's accusation of Zionist control disappeared from the press almost as if it had never happened. In his next election, he paid dearly for his truth telling. Huge amounts of Jewish money poured into Arkansas to defeat him, and Jews with any position of influence in business rallied to Help-Israel-Firster, Dale Bumpers. LCR

  (I recall a Lily Tomlin monologue from about this time, Ernestine talking to Martha Mitchell, which contained both Semitics and Senator Fulbright. Are the two related?)
• 1973 Apr 17: &rad;Numerous cracks in Millstone-1 cooling system are noticed when alarms go off on nuke subs docked nearby. [P citing Wall St Journal '73 May 3]

• When faced with a moral issue most American commentators simply ignore it—or as Elaine May said to Mike Nichols in one of their skits, I like a moral issue so much more than a real issue. Journalists who know quite as much or more than I about American politics seem never able to deal in print with the actual issues raised…In other words, don't give away the game because we're all in this together, making a pretty good living out of USA Inc. To describe things the way things really are is to be a @hit and we know what happens to @hits: they are flushed away. Unfortunately, to complete this out-of-control metaphor, the waters of the Republic are now befouled from too much flushing, and we are poisoned when we drink. [Vidal United States p852]

• Jul 2: Lou Russell, PI, dies of second heart attack. The first had been May 18, two days after a Woodward-Throat meeting. May have been the Watergate burglar that got away. BK
• John Leon, friend and associate of Lou Russell, dies of heart attack the day before a press conference on what he'd dug up re Watergate. BK
• 1973 Jul: &rad;Defective valve blows off Surry (VA) reactor, killing two. [P citing Nucleus 1979 Jul 25]
• Aug 22: Nixon, at press conference: I understand the heights of the wiretaps was when Robert Kennedy was Attorney General in 1963. I don't criticize him, however…But if he had had 10 more and as a result of wiretaps had been able to discover the Oswald plan it would have been worth it. Nixon is asked what the h@ll he meant by that, and babbles for awhile, saying I said if 10 more wiretaps could have found the conspiracy, if it was a conspiracy, or the individual, then it would have been worth it. BoL · X (Why should wiretaps have uncovered a lone nut? Recall that Nixon has already referred to the WCR as the greatest hoax ever, although we won't know that until 2003.)
• 1973 Sep 11: Pinochet's `violent' military coup, `the most notorious in Latin-American history,' against Chile's democratically-elected government. South America's first democratically-elected socialist government. PA Nixon and the CIA certainly revelled in it and probably arranged it. GWU · GWU · LAW The CIA may have authorised killing of Americans. G
• Oct 6–22: Yom Kippur war. US SR-71 detects Israel loading nuclear warheads in missiles; escapes Sharon's shoot-down attempt. `Sharon lied his ass off, a former senior State Department official said. Sharon and Meir said that Egypt had broken the truce and launched a massive attack, but the facts were the exact opposite. "`Sharon is a tough customer…He does what he wants and what he pleases, and he doesn't like being bossed around by the US."…"Go back to 1973. Sharon has always had the air of a man much put out by the obtuseness of Americans."' [JR citing UPI 2002 Oct 15] (This is the first war I remember; I was not quite 7.)
• Oct 12: Israel attempts to down SR71 Blackbird that had discovered their nuclear arsenal near Dimona. TT · T
• 1973 Oct 22: &rad;San Onofre (CA) has turbine malfunction. Abnormal vibration leads operators to quickly stop the reactor, causing overheating; the primary coolant system kicks in, causing a pressure drop; since this normally indicates a blockage, the emergency system kicks in and bursts the pipes. It takes six months to repair the wreck. [P citing Observer '73 Oct 2] (Gotta check something here, it's reported before it happens)
• For negotiating the Vietnam ceasefire, Kissinger awarded ½ a Nobel Peace Prize. The other ½ was to go to Le Duc Tho, but since the agreement didn't `take,' he declined. NoNo · N Tom Lehrer declares satire dead/obsolete (but he'd already quit showbiz; '67 last performance for money, '72 last for fun). TL There is eventually an international movement to have this annulled NoNo to return dignity to the word `peace.'
• Nov: Nixon: my cabbie missed a turn somewhere and we were off the highway…a woman came out of her house screaming and crying…She told me that John Kennedy had just been shot… [CM citing Esquire] (Compare with his first-anniversary story in Reader's Digest. And both accounts differ with a UPI story and photo showing him downcast in Idlewood Airport, before the cab ride.)
• 1973 Nov 7: Public Law 93-148, War Powers Resolution: `The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing US Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until US Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations.' SC
• Nov 10: School board of Drake ND (or is it NC? GS) burns Slaughterhouse Five, a tool of the devil, and fires the teacher who had assigned it. WDA · S101
• 1973 Nov 28: &rad;The wives of nearly 2000 Windscale workers refuse them sex, fearing radiation. [P citing Nucleus '79 Jul 25; Thieberger p.8]
• 1973 Dec 20: &rad;Truck with two casks radioactive cobalt piles up with a truck of inflammable lacquer, 5 other trucks, and 2 cars. [P citing Simpson, J.W. Op Cit. p.2]

1974

• 9 min to midnight. BAS
• Foot in the door: despite aspartame researching showing, for instance, it caused brain tumours and metabolised into formaldehyde, the FDA approves it for dry-food use. Dr. John Olney knew other metabolic products were problematic, eg aspartic acid caused holes in rat brains, phenylalinine caused `PKU in a small number of susceptible children,' and pushed the FDA ro reconsider. They merely urge Searle not to market the stuff. S
• 1974: Pallisades (MI) reactor taken out of service because half its 14000 condenser tubes leak. [P citing Thieberger p.11]
• 1974: &rad;Charlevoix Co MI, home of Big Rock, has an infant mortality rate 44[%] above US average; immature infant deaths 18% higher; leukemia 400% higher; cancer deaths 15% higher; congenital defects 230% higher. [P citing Thieberger p.8]
• 1974: &rad;Whistleblowers at the Isomedix company in NJ report that radioactive water was flushed down toilets and had contaminated pipes leading to sewers. The same year a worker receives a dose of radiation considered lethal, but is saved by prompt hospital treatment. L
• 1974: In Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo the Supreme Court somehow concludes the FCC's Fairness Doctrine requiring a modicum of balance in reporting inescapably dampens the vigor and limits the variety of public debate. [WoI p 46]
• 1974: Goofup at Savannah River vents 435 kCi of tritium. KOO
• Sen. Montoya, SSC on Watergate: Now because of Watergate, many young people are saying that public service is not as attractive as before. What advice do you have for these young people?
  Gordon Strachan: Stay away. CD
  IFA [Tuchman March of Folly 1983 p374] (I think a lot have taken the advice. Which is obviously unfortunate, but especially so because it's permitted the rise of the Dominionists.)
• GWB allegedly kicks his drug habit. [SS quoting recent publisher's foreword to Fortunate Son&warn; citing GWB press conference in 1999 Aug.]
• 1974: Nixon appoints GHWB ambassador to China, beginning a long Bush-family coziness with the country. USAT
• 1974 Apr 6: &rad;Northern States Power Company dumps 10000 gallons of radioactive water into the Mississippi causing Minneapolis to close its water intakes. P (Compare the St. Paul incident.)
• Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (But why would the epitome of capitalism support those inimical to capitalism? A possible answer is that both the big US capitalists, fascists at heart, and communists are both enemies of free markets working for a common goal under an Hegelian fake-problem-fake-solution cover story. CP)
• Apr 24: National Security Study Memorandum 200 advocates drastic regulation of global population by Y2K. A2k (Perhaps Limits to Growth was not ignored after all.) If authentic (which looks likely; there's a book&warn; about it; and several excerpts of that book here), this is a very interesting report, perhaps a classic in talking about the real issue without talking about it. The report, indeed, analyses only birth regulation. However, it thoroughly establishes that birth regulation is complex, costly, uncertain, slow…possibly even antiAmerican, in a very relevant sense: it clearly predicates successful birth regulation on improvement of living standards, and establishes that there is a much greater population in need of this increase than already have it.

  It is well-established that the US is highly dependant on foreign resources in order to maintain its standard of living, and is a small segment of the global population. The US cannot hope to maintain, let alone continue to elevate, its standard if the remaining majority of the planet seeks to improve its lot. (Certainly not without phenomenal and IMO literally fantastic improvements in efficiency.) In other words, a serious effort by the US to reduce birth rate globally would be a form of national suicide—or less abstractly, a form of domestic polital suicide for some admistration or another. It might be saleable to the electorate some number of times, but eventually they would figure it out; the global birth-regulation campaign would be political Russian roulette.

  Its detailed (and IMO realistic) analysis of population regulation from the birth end of the problem pretty much slaughters any sensible expectation Washington would pursue a birth-end-only solution.

  Admittedly, what I've been able to find out about the history of this report doesn't quite bear out my theory; eg supposedly it had resounding bipartisan support, it was the Vatican that scuttled it. PS However, it could also be that Congress did not immediately grasp the implications.

  This report is not a proof Washington initiated some death-end solution (eg famine and pestilence) but it is a strong indicator they would take advantage of anything that might happen to come along, such as AIDS.

  I want also to comment on a frequently-run idea that apparent pro-profligates seem to like: that the entire planet could be housed in suburb-like density in TX. While arithmetically true, it's exceedingly simplistic; room is hardly the total issue. There are three indispensible cycles: the air, the water, and the food. A modern suburb cycles none of those things within its own borders without displacing population. Profligates provide no calculations to show their TX-size suburb is supportable; they just think it's `obvious.' It isn't. I'm rude enough to say that it's exactly that kind of gross handwaving that's gotten humanity into its present mess.

• 1974 May 28: &rad;The Atomic Energy Commission reports that 861 `abnormal events' occurred in 1973 in the nation's 42 operative nuclear power plants. 12 involved the release of radioactivity `above permissible levels.' L
• Jun 3: Last Air America flight over Laos, ending the `secret' war. PA
• Aug 6: A law professor named W'm J. Clinton, in the AR Democrat: I think it's plain that the president should resign and spare the country the agony of this impeachment and removal proceeding.…I think the country could be spared a lot of agony and the government could worry about inflation and a lot of other problems if he'd go on and resign.…[There's] no question that an admission of making false statements to government officials and interfering with the FBI and the CIA is an impeachable offense. WRH
• Aug 9: Nixon hands off to Ford. FL Nixon …a war criminal, massively bombing countries with no legal authority…utterly corrupt and illegal campaign practices…his vice president, Spiro Agnew, had to resign and was convicted for taking bribes…his attorney general, John Mitchell, had to resign and was convicted of various crimes, as were many of his Whitehouse staff…finally he resigned too rather than face impeachment and sure conviction. AC
• 1974 Aug: Karen Silkwood is elected to the OCAW's three-person bargaining committee, first woman committee member in Kerr-McGee's history. Her assignment is health and safety. Although she had only been at the company for two years, she's upset about what she sees as abusive and dangerous conditions in the plant. IGC
• 1974 Sep 3: &rad;Los Alamos spills up to 3800 L radioactive liquid onto a street and parking lot. Some of the asphalt has to be replaced. `Past accidents at Los Alamos occurred on 21st Aug. 1945; 25th May, 1946; 30th Dec. 1958.' [P citing Thieberger, p.11; Nucleus 25/7/79]
• Sep 8: Ford pardons Nixon.

  Evans and Novak assumed that Julie Nixon Eisenhower talked Ford into the pardon on grounds that Nixon's health was poor. The Ford's fears for Nixon's health didn't seem to convince very many news media people who saw a rosy-cheeked, apparently robust ex-president in San Clemente. TA123

  (It took that ill health, what, 20 years to catch up to him? Got bad news for you, doc. You have less than a century to live.)
• 1974 Nov 7 (Thursday):
  
  Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld at the Whitehouse; former assistant to latter, latter assistant to Ford (DR next year to be youngest Defence Sec'y ever FT). Heisted from Salon, who dated the pic `Thursday, Nov. 7, 1975.…shortly after the Watergate scandal forced President Nixon from office.' I believe they meant today; '75 Nov 7 was a Friday. Documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information [on Olson's dabbling with anthrax for the CIA] were Whitehouse aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld…For 22 years there was a coverup. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new coverup. BA · GT · WJLA
• 1974 Nov 13: Karen Silkwood dies in car accident on the way to delivering documents exposing unsafe activities at Kerr-McGee's Pu plant in Crescent OK. [CP selling The Killing of Karen Silkwood] EN · F In the past week she'd been exposed to Pu in several unexplained incidents. (PBS' story is different; she was returning from a union meeting. Come to think of it she could have been doing both simultaneously.) 3.5 mg/L methaqualone (Quaalude) is found in her blood, almost twice the recommended dosage for inducing drowsiness. About 50 mg of undissolved methaqualone remained in her stomach. Her body is thoroughly studied; the distribution of radioactivity confirms her Pu exposure was acute. In 1979 a jury awards her estate M$10.5; the judge reduces it to k$5. In 1986 it's headed for retrial when Kerr-McGee settles for M$1.3. (PBS claims the Kerr-McGee plants close in 1975 yet I've found incidents into the '90s.) PBS
• &rad;Parts of a water supply beneath Idaho Falls nuclear lab have been contaminated by radioactive waste. Large amounts of hexavalant chromium—a stable carcinogen—have been released into the Snake River aquafer through injection wells. The aquafer extends 290 km and is used for human consumption and irrigation. Between 1951 and 1970 liquid waste containing 45 Tg of chemicals had been discharged into the ground above the aquafer. [P citing Lewiston Idaho Morning Tribunal '79 Nov AAP—AP West Australian '79 Nov 12 citing unpublished '74 federal report] KOO
• 1975: &rad;Officials `discover' 5000 houses and public areas in Grand Junction CO where radioactive tailings were mixed with concrete. EN
• 1975: First public display of Zapruder film (a bootleg copy) shows that what the Dan Rather had claimed, that it showed Kennedy's head rocketed forward, was false. DCD · WRH (Rocketed—sounds a lot like Luis Alvarez.)
• Kissinger, re US' sellout of Iraqi Kurds: `Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.' TO
• 1975: The virus section of Fort Detrick's Center for Biological Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated by the US Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus). HNN
• Fall of Saigon finally pushes the US out of Vietnam, two years after it had agreed to leave. PA
• US mixed up in trouble in Angola in ways too complex for me to summarise right now. PA
• 1975: Saddam makes surprise peace deal with the Shah of Iran at a meeting in Algiers. Within days, all US support for the Kurds is stopped and Saddam begins to counterattack their forces. US forbids its officials having any open contact with Iraqi Kurdish groups. PBS
• 1975: The Trilateral Commission of Zbigniew Brzezinski [FTW] and David Rockefeller—JDR's grandson? and the present holder of the family's power [MVT]—publishes Crisis of Democracy&warn;, which argues that there is an excess of democracy in the US. (And not in the sense that almost everyone from dogcatcher to electoral-college delegate—but of course not President—is up for election; but that too many of the poor, iggerant rabble have a vote. See, that poor, iggerant rabble had no clue what was good for 'em and thus had failed to promote David's brother(?) Nelson from NY Guber to Prez.)
• Excessive Sr-90 found in dairy near Shippingport. The problem is solved by cessation of sampling. KOO
• 1975: Release of Three Days of the Condor based on Six Days of the Condor&warn;. `It's all about oil.' Roughly: `In ten or fifteen years, when they're starving and freezing in the dark…they won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em.' Condor makes a mistake in giving the story to the NY Times; they're the cover-up paper. WSWS
• 1975: CIA helps topple the democratically elected left-leaning Whitlam gov't of Australia (in case you thought they confined their activities to the `third' world or something) by pushing Gov-Gen Kerr to exercise an archaic dissolution power. [S transcribing Watching Brief iv w/Ralph McGehee and others, Public Radio News Services, Melbourne, 1986 Oct-Nov] WUM · COAT `Australia's Defence Signals Directorate…runs some of the world's most famous spying bases, including Pine Gap, an isolated satellite control centre near Alice Springs…For more than 30 years, Pine Gap has controlled the CIA's electronic listening satellites, called Rhyolite, Aquacade, and Magnum…The use and control of Pine Gap by the CIA was a central issue in the overthrow of…Gough Whitlam…' H `There is evidence of CIA involvement in a virtual coup that overturned the Whitlam Labor government in Australia in 1975, when it was feared that Whitlam might interfere with Washington's military and intelligence bases in Australia.' DD (Thanks to PA for getting me 'round to this one.)
• 1975: Dr. Robert Gallo isolates HTLV-I. Virus section of Ft. Detrick renamed the Frederick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute, Gallo's employer. UPA
• 1975: &rad;There have been at least 271 fires and 410 `contamination incidents' at Rocky Flats. The cancer rate among Rocky Flats workers is seven times the national average. P
• 1975: &rad;Operator goofup dumps 50000 gallons of radioactive water into Oyster Creek's cellar. [P citing Clamshell Alliance p.4]
• 1975: &rad;NRC engineer Robert Pollard writes a report explaining the insider-sabotage threat to nuclear plants, using only stuff from the friendly neighbourhood hardware store (apparently even going as low-tech as popsicle sticks). The NRC quickly classifies the report and hides it; even Pollard has not seen it since. (Later he'll decide that sabotage is even easier than he thought.) TMIA
• 1975 Jan 30: &rad;NRC offlines 23 BWRs after fortuitous discovery of cracks in Dresden-2's high-pressure emergency-coolant pipes which could have made a little problem into a much bigger one. P
• Feb 14: CA Rep. Jerry Pettis dies in collision with mountain near Beaumont. CNN
• 1975 Mar: Jalal Talabani quits leadership of the Kurdish Democratic Party following the collapse of US support, to form the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Iraq's Kurdish opposition has been divided ever since. PBS (How neat; by dividing the opposition, the West has secured the position of their Baghdad Boy.)
• 1975 Mar 22: &rad;Fire at Brown's Ferry 1 destroys control cables; coolant system shuts itself off and only a makeshift pump arrangement keeps core from overheating. [P (1985) p. F-13] (IIRC the fire started when an electrician used a candle instead a flashlight and ignited the pitch that had been used to seal a passthrough to the containment vessel; the vessel was underpressured and the draft sucked the fire through the pitch, ruining the 2000 control cables.) Well, I was close. A technician was checking for air leaks with a candle. and thereby disconnected all important regulators, and emergency cooling systems. `Only chance' prevented meltdown of the 1.1 GW reactor. Damage M$100–150. The reactor design had been approved even though it did not meet regulatory requirements. [P citing (Work Circle Environmental Protection; Guyorgy, p.120; Webb, p.198; Clamshell Alliance p.4)] [GSP quoting IEER] L The reactor (one of three) is abandoned. DoE
• (undated) Winston Lord, Ass't Sec'y of State: `The Trilateral Commission doesn't run the world, the Council on Foreign Relations does that.' BI
• 1975 Mar 27: &rad;Millstone spills much radioactive water, some into Long Is. Sound. Nearly 1200 workers are evacuated, 20 wading through 4 kL of the stuff. [P citing Penelope Coleing; Work Circle Environmental Protection]
• Apr: Kissinger: `The US must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.' TO
• 1975: SAT scores drop precipitously. Eventually Sternglass and Bell decisively link this to fetal effects of the 1957 nuclear tests. SF
• May:

  Instead of using the wealth of the nation to improve the lot of our citizens, we have been wasting over a third of the federal budget on armaments and on the prosecution of open and secret wars. We have drafted men into the Army in peacetime, something the founders of this country would have been appalled at. We have been, in effect, for 33 years a garrison state whose main pupose has been the making of armaments and the prosecution of illegal wars—openly as in Vietnam and Cmmbodia, secretly as in Greece and Chile. Wherever there is a choice between a military dictatorship—like Pakistan—and a free government—like India—we support the dictator. And then wonder why we are everywhere denounced as hypocrites.

  This is not good for character. This is not good for business. We are running out of raw materials. Our currency is worth less and less. Our cities fall apart. Our armed forces have been, literally, demoralised by what we have done to them in using them for unjust ends. [Vidal United States p928]

• 1975 July: &rad;Faulty valves at VT Yankee dump 300 kL radioactive water into the river. [P citing Nucleus 25th July, 1979, p.15] P
• 1975 Jul: Routine FDA inspection of Searle's Skokie IL testing facilities finds many deviations from proper procedures. S (Aha! Rumsfeld was rep for IL IIRC.)
• 1975 Jul 10: Rumsfeld gives Ford a memo of administration officials' suggestions for CIA Director. Cheney's suggestions were Robert Bork, GHWB, and Lee Iacocca. The job is first offered to Edward Bennett Williams, but he doesn't want it. So it goes to GHWB, who didn't even make Rumsfeld's short list because of his Watergate entanglements, and despite such a partisan app't as RNC Chair to the post being entirely unprecedented and contrary to the agency's purpose. GBUB

• An example…is the umbrella poison-dart gun used in Dealey Plaza to shoot JFK in the throat. Such a weapon was postulated by Robert Cutler and the author [Robert Sprague] in mid-1975 as the one that fired the first shot from near the Stemmons Freeway sign. This seemed incred[ible] to most observers and so wild an idea that the author and Cutler did not discuss it with many researchers. Then Mr. Charles Senseney, a CIA weapon developer at Ft. Detrick MD, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 1975 and described an umbrella poison-dart gun he had made. He said it was always used in crowds with the umbrella open, firing through the webbing so it would not attract attention. Since it was silent, no one in the crowd could hear it and the assassin merely would fold up the umbrella and saunter away with the crowd. That is almost exactly what happened in Dealey Plaza. The first shot had always seemed to have had a paralytic effect on Kennedy. His fists were clenched and his head, shoulders and arms seemed to stiffen. There was a small entrance wound in his neck but no evidence of a bullet path through his neck and no bullet was ever recovered that matched that small size. TA123

• 1975 Nov 30: &rad;Meltdown at Leningrad-1 releases over 1.5 MCi, mainly radioactive iodine, detected 2 Mm away. The incident was discovered by activists in 1990 and acknowledged by the Russian gov't in 1996 Jan. EN [ P citing `Nucleonics Week' 31/5/90; WISE334 22/6/90; `Sudkurier (FRG)' 18/6/90; WISE-336 20/7/90]
• 1975 Dec: FDA task force finds serious problem with Searle research on many products incl. aspartame. S
• 1975 Dec 7: Indonesia invades East Timor. Kissinger warmly approves the annexation and promises to keep up the arms supply, in violation of US and international law. SMH

  Ford and Kissinger pay a visit to Suharto, to discuss matters of mutual interest. The next day, Indonesia—amply supplied by US weapons and supported by US intelligence—invades East Timor, beginning one of the greatest massacres and most brutal occupations in modern history, during which a third of the Timorese population will be killed, and another third forced into resettlement camps. Kissinger told reporters that the US understands Indonesia's position. TO

• 1976–7: GHWB heads the CIA FTW for 356 days, putting Manuel Noriega back on the payroll. NB
• 1976: Rep. Larry McDonald (later killed on KA007):

  The drive of the Rockefellers and their allies is to create a one-world government combining supercapitalism and Communism under the same tent, all under their control. Do I mean conspiracy? Yes I do. I am convinced there is such a plot, international in scope, generations old in planning, and incredibly evil in intent. GO

• 1976: Sprague Taking of America, 1-2-3 (title inspired by Godey Taking of Pelham 123)
• 1976:

  Television is not the truth! Television's a goddamned amusement park! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players! We're in the boredom-killing business! So if you want the truth, go to God! Go to your gurus! Go to yourselves—because that's the only place you're ever gonna find any real truth! But man—you're never gonna get any truth from us! [V quoting Network]

  (Isn't it amazing how even when some truth leaks out somewhere, its never really noticed?)
• 1976: Moshe Dyan, re Israel's provocation of Syria: `Eighty percent of the incidents worked like this: We would send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn't start shooting, we would tell the tractors to advance until the Syrians would get aggravated and start shooting. We used artillery and later the air force became involved.' PSC
• 1976: Pink Panther Strickes Again with Cartoon Cluseau doing a bit of Keaton Steamboat Bill in the title sequence (arguably his going into the screen is a bit of Sherlock Jr(?)) and Lom plays a bit of Bach on the obligatory evil organ. (Logging this to check in Wikipedia if it ever works again. I also happen to think it's the funniest PP movie.)
• Kahn, Brown, and Martel the next 200 years Attempted rebuttal of Forrester's model. Apparently qualitative, not quantitative. DO I'd be very interested to know whether they compared the minimum total power consumption of their utopia to solar and geothermal flux. I bet they use rather more energy than is actually available, making any fantasized technological advances moot. This oh, we'll solve that problem when we get there sounds to me an awful lot like running toward a cliff in the dark and saying oh, I'll put my parachute on when I get there. Or maybe more like Oh, someone will invent the parachute and give me one before I hit the ground. What, me worry? (Someone will doubtless cry that I like kaputey models when talking about one whose results I agree with—eg World3—and run down kaputey models when I don't like the results—eg ABC's animation of the JFK shooting. Let me acknowledge here that Forrester's kaputey model is just a kaputey model, and could be qualitatively wrong. I just don't think so. Remember too that Forrester's model takes a collection of feedback loops and simulates them to see what they do in agglomeration. ABC's kaputey animation is just a visualisation tool, a fancy database. It's telling you no more than what was put into it, whereas Forrester's generates—well, a forest given the trees. These two ways to use kaputeys should not be mentally confused.)
• 1976: The cities that have fluoridated the longest—Grand Rapids MI, Newburgh NY, and Evanston IL—now have the most dentists, 121 per 100000 population, twice the national average. [F citing CBS News almanac] (Is it any wonder the ADA promotes fluoridation?)
• 1976: Amnesty International declares Iran's CIA-trained security force SAVAK to have the worst human-rights record in the world, with a variety of torture techniques `beyond belief.' TI
• 1976: Netanyahu takes directorship of Jonathan Institute. L
• 1976: GWB arrested near Kennebunkport for drunk driving, pleads guilty, pays $150 and ME driving license temporarily suspended. CNN
• 1976: &rad;Pu dumped in the Maxy Flats KY unlined trenches travelled 240 m in less than ten years. [P citing Thieberger p12]
• Congress cuts off funding for the CIA's oppression of Angola. So the CIA use their Zaire puppet Mobutu as a proxy. PA
• 1976 Feb 18: Ford signs EO 11905 prohibiting political assassination. FTW
• Apr 6: Burke testifies to Congress re fluoridation:

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., M.D., of Civil War medical fame, and professor of anatomy at Harvard University, in 1843 and 1855 described then-prevailing treatment of puerperal fever in lying-in hospitals as criminal manslaughter. It was only manslaughter, however, not murder because the physicians of that day did not have, and could not have had, a sufficiently knowledgeable idea of the disease until the work of Pasteur and Lister decades later.

  The scientific and medical status of artificial fluoridation of public water supplies has now advanced to the stage of the possibility of socially imposed mass murder on an unexpectedly large scale involving tens of thousands of cancer deaths of Americans annually.

  (In other words, the fluoridationists of today do not have the option of saying they couldn't've known fluoridation was killing people.) The PHS immediately began making silly claims that the data hadn't been adjusted properly. FSU (In fact the tricks the NCI used look an awful lot like the tricks Sternglass found the AEC to be using to make radiation look harmless, such as slyly discarding data that went against them. What's that saying about figures lie and liars figure?)
• Apr 27:

  On April 27, 1976 the New York Times published a story on the Senate Intelligence Committee revelation that the CIA would be keeping 25 journalist agents within the news media. The Committee disclosed that George Bush planned to keep these people in the media positions that they had occupied for a long time.

  The significant point about the story was a statement by a Committee staff member that many of the individuals were in executive positions at American news organizations. Bush had directed that the CIA stop hiring correspondents accredited by American publications and other news organizations. The Times recognized that the pivotal word in Bush's directive was accredited. Executives who do not work as correspondents are apparently not covered by Mr. Bush's directive, nor are freelance writers who are not affiliated with a specific employer. The article also said that in most cases the media organization was not aware of the individual's CIA connection. TA123

• Jun: Antony Sutton Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
• 1976 Jul: &rad;Faulty valve at VT Yankee dumps another 300 kL tritium-contaminated water into the Connecticut, 2nd of 3 spills. [P citing Guyorgy, p.120; Clamshell Alliance p.4]
• 1976 Jul: &rad;Discovery that Port Hope (Canada), built on uranium waste landfill, has radiation in some buildings 100× safe. Bone-marrow abnormalities found in town residents. [P citing Nucleus 25th July, 1979, p.18; Craw Doo Dah Gazette August, 1976]
• Jul 4: Commencement of CIA-dubbed woodpecker signal; continues until shortly before the NYC blackout in '77. Triangulated to Soviet origin. Some suspect mind-control technology traceable to Tesla. [C'd'n Learning TV] the most powerful man made emr source ever. 10 pulses per second, 40 million watts per pulse [sic], it is psycho active. It is generated in the Soviet Union and permeates everything in the US. It was picked up by power grids and irradiated into homes. [ quoting Dr Robert Beck not to be confused with Dr Robert Becker:]

  The Soviets may already be using theirs, however, on a scale far beyond that of the Moscow Signal. During the US bicentennial celebration of July 4, 1976, a new radio signals was heard throughout the world. It has remained on the air more or lesscontinuously ever since. Varying up and down through the frequencies between 3.26 and 17.54 MHz, it is pulse-modulated at a rate of several times a second, so it sounds like a buzz saw or woodpecker. It was soon traced to an enormous transmitter near Kiev in the Soviet Ukraine.

  The signal is so strong it drowns out anything else on its wavelength. When it first appeared,the UN International Telecommunications Union protested because it interfered with several communications channels, including the emergency frequencies for aircraft on transoceanic flights. Now the woodpecker leaves holes; it skips the crucial frequencies as it moves up and down the spectrum. The signal is maintained at enormous expense from a current total of seven nations, the seven most powerful radio transmitters in the world. S quoting Becker The Body Electric]

• Faced with the new committee and Sprague's staff, the PCG had devise a strategy that included:

  1. Attacking Dick Sprague to discredit him with dirt and print it in the media.
  2. Using the media to spread PCG propaganda and control the sources of all stories concerning the Select Committee.
  3. Using PCG Congressmen to provide biased, distorted quotes to the media for its use.
  4. Trying to discredit the entire committee by making it appear to be disorganized and unmanageable.
  5. Controlling the voting and lobbying against the continuation of the committee in January and February.
  6. Influencing members of the House to vote against the Committee through a massive letter and telegram campaign.
  7. Exaggerating the emphasis placed on the size of the budget requested by Sprague without considering the need for such a budget.
  8. Demanding that the committee justify its existence by producing new evidence.
  9. Splitting the committee and attempting to create dissension; creating a battle between Henry Gonzalez and Richard Sprague and between Gonzalez and Downing.
  10. Hamstringing the staff so they could not receive salaries, could not travel, did not have subpoena power, could not make long distance telephone calls; blocking access to the key files at the FBI, Justice Department, CIA and Secret Service.
  11. Trying to insert their own man at the head of the staff.
  12. Brainwashing Henry Gonzalez into believing that Sprague and others were agents.
  13. Sacrificing Henry Gonzalez when it became obvious the PCG could not control him as their chairman.
  14. Leaking stories that seemed to make the committee's efforts unnecessary.

  TA123

• 1976 Jul 28: Earthquake at Tangshan, China kill over 650000. Just before the first tremor at 3:42 am, the sky lit up like daylight. The multi-hued lights, mainly white and red, were seen up to 200 miles away. Leaves on many trees were burned to a crisp and growing vegetables were scorched on one side, as if by a fireball. [JR and NDM citing NY Times 1977 Jun 5; Andrija Puharich 'Global Magnetic Warfare—A Layman's View of Certain Artificially Induced Unusual Effects on The Planet Earth During 1976 and 1977'] `Deadliest Earthquake of 20th Century' Magnitude 8.2 [Richter?], 150-km fault rupture AZU There had been a prediction of magnitude 5 or more, on Jul 16. Studies began; instruments showed nothing unusual but animal behaviour was quite changed. UN · SW There were no foreshocks; this is supposedly unusual. Q There are acknowledged cases of manmade earthquakes, but not by `remote control;' mining, damming, nuclear testing…fluid injection, eg waste disposal in Denver, 1962-65
• 1976: Olympics held in Montréal.
• 1976 Aug 3: Rep. Jerry Litton (D-MO) and family killed in plane crash. He'd just one the party's nomination for guber. CNN · SNZ
• Sep 10: BEA flight 831 spots UFO over Lithuania, an intense stationary ball of light. Test of Soviet EMG device, probing Western reaction? C
• Sep 15:

  A coalition of representatives from the Black Caucus, Henry Gonzalez and Thomas Downing managed to get Resolution H1540 through the House Rules Committee. Mark Lane, Coretta King and others were responsible for creating pressures that finally convinced Speaker Carl Albert, Chairman Tom Madden of the Rules Committee and others that this was necessary and desirable. The new resolution, made up of parts of the Downing and Gonzalez resolutions plus input from Rep. Walter Fauntroy from the Black Caucus called for a special 12-person committee to reopen the JFK and Dr. King cases and any other deaths that the committee might decide to investigate.

  The Rules Committee voted 9-4 in favor. Rep. Bolling, who perhaps unknowingly had lent his support to the opposition in the earlier vote, was an important swing vote and actually introduced the resolution in the meeting. The position of the nine who voted for the resolution was more than vindicated two days later, when the House passed the resolution by the extraordinary vote of 280-64…

  The real war was only beginning, however. The New York Times barely reported the event, did not mention the vote, and buried the story in the middle of another story with ½" in one column. The Washington Star and Post carried larger stories and the White Plains Reporter Dispatch made it a first page headline story. The PCG's media control slipped a bit…

  The PCG, during…these historic events…was very active in spreading its second line of defense information. Castro did it in revenge stories began popping up everywhere. Jack Anderson was revived to back up the strategy by publishing another of his Castro did it columns. TA123

• 1976 Sep 21: A car bomb kills Orlando Letelier and aide Ronni Moffit in Washington DC. Letelier was a fmr Chilean diplomant and prominent critic of the CIA-backed Pinochet, and was soon to testify gainst Pinochet. CIA Director GHWB tells the FBI there'd been no Chilean involvement. BK A CIA agent will be one convicted of the bombing. [TWT citing CIA's Greatest Hits&warn;] Judge Barrington Parker refused to allow defense evidence of CIA involvement. NB (Coming so soon after the seeding of the HSCA, I wonder if it was some sort of distraction attempt, or panic.)
• 1976 Oct?: Cuban airliner bombed by a group of CIA-linked Cuban exiles connected with the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination, killing 73. This attack and the Latelier carbombing (see Sep 21) were planned at the same meeting. [TWT citing CIA's Greatest Hits&warn;]
• 1976 Dec 13:

  The Whitehouse's reaction to the Watergate burglary was the first clue that something terrible has gone wrong with us. The elaborate and disastrous cover-up was out of all proportion to what was, in effect, a small crime the administration could have lived with. I suspect that our rulers' state of panic came from the fear the other horrors would have come to light—as indeed they have. But have the horrors ceased? Is there something that our rulers know that we don't? Is it possible that during the dark night of our empire's defeat in Cuba and Asia the American story shifted from cheerful familiar face to Jacobean tragedy—to murder, chaos? [Vidal New York Review of Books, in United States p883]

• 1977: Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirm that, between 1949 and 1969, 239 populated areas (including San Francisco, Washington DC, Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis) had been [deliberately?] contaminated with biological agents. HNN
• 1977: London Times on Bilderberg: …a clique of the richest, economically and politically most powerful and influential men in the Western world, who meet secretly to plan events that later appear just to happen. AMPP
• 1977: Carl Bernstein reveals that over 400 US journalists have been employed by the CIA. They range from freelancers who were paid for regular debriefings, to actual CIA officers who worked under deep cover. Nearly every major US news organization has had spooks on the payroll, usually with the cooperation of top management. [TWT citing CIA's Greatest Hits&warn;]
• 1977 Jan: The Commission moves in: Carter, president; Brzezinski, national security advisor; Walter Mondale, vice-president; Andrew Young, ambassador to UN; Michael Blumenthal, sec'y of treasury; Harold Brown, sec'y of defense. [Q² citing Zinn, People's History of the US] FTW [BI citing Laurence H. Shoup The Carter Presidency and Beyond] GHWB has to pried out of CIA with a crowbar. GBUB
• 1977 Mar 15: Carter directs (NSC-6) that relations with Cuba be normalised. GWU (It has yet to be obeyed.)
• Carter takes away many of the CIA's nifty toys like Air America, forcing them underground for their funding; drug-running. FTW

• Soon after the eyeless calf succumbed, a quarter of Bennett's peach orchard also died. Bennett called the operators of [Arkansas] Nuclear One, who soon visited his farm with a representative of the local agricultural extension service. They told him his problems were from winterkill. According to Bennett, a Louisiana State University horticulturist named &Dr;Earl Puls added poor management and an extremely high population of nematodes to the list of causes. Puls, who visited the farm for about one hour, said his findings were conclusive in ruling out any type of nuclear radiation.

  Puls' report was reminiscent of official studies done of animal problems at Lloyd Mixon's ranch near Rocky Flats and of official disclaimers at Vermont Yankee and Nine Mile Point. I've been raising peaches for more than thirty years now, Bennett told us in an interview, and there was just one year, back in the 1950s, when we had no crop. Now this fellow comes from some university, spends an hour here and tells me I'm mismanaging my orchards and don't know what I'm talking about. Well, I'll tell you this. We haven't lost anything in this heat and drought. And that plant's been shut down for a long time now [for repairs] and ever since it's been shut down, why, we've had as good a year as any. KOO

  &rad;Thousands of workers were unwittingly exposed to Pu and other highly radioactive metals over a 23-year period beginning in the mid-1950s at DoE's Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky. Workers, told they were handling U rather than the far nastier Pu, inhaled radioactive dust while processing the materials as part of a government experiment to recycle used nuclear reactor fuel. [L citing Washington Post 1999 Aug 8]

  Montréal Olympic forum completed (see 1976).

  Montréal Olympic forum begins to fall apart (see ??).

  Montréal finishes paying for '76 Olympics. (No! Just kidding. But I'd like to know what's so great about hosting the Olympics.)

  First packets transferred by IP; the Internet is born.

  Olympics held in Sarajevo; war breaks out shortly thereafter (see 1936).

  US manufacturing sector has decayed or plain lagged to the extent that AMPEX goes directly to Japan to license its new VCR. WRH

  Jean Chrétien tries to build a suburb on or near Banff or Jasper National Park. (Or is it, tries to expropriate Ship Harbour as a National Park? Something…)

  Someone realises it's not a great idea to let public-transit buses drive under the Pentagon; the tunnel is closed.

  May 18: US, SU, 29 other countries entreat not to attack each other via weather, earthquakes, tsunami. C

  1977: British army deliberately creates infamous Irish terrorist Brian Nelson. (And he was not the only one: Willie Carlin went into Sinn Fein and was given info by the British that got him promoted.) SH 2000 Nov 19 · SH 2001 Mar 4

  1977 Jul: &rad;Hinkley Pt. main coolant feedwater pipe fractures; hoses are rigged to spray cooling water on the concrete shielding of the reactor. [P citing Ian Breach `Windscale Fallout' p.39]

  1977 Jun 1: Donald Rumsfeld becomes Chair and CEO of Searle. CP He says he will `call in his markers' to get aspartame approved. JR

  A Chicago US Att'y asked to investigate Searle dawdles until the limitations run out, then jumps ship to Searle's law firm. A · S

  1977 Oct: Soviet-American statement calling for `termination of the state of war and establishment of normal peaceful relations' and internationally guaranteed borders and demilitarized zones between Israel and its neighbors. PLO endorses it, Israel and domestic US lobby `bitterly' denounce it. The US media, which usually line up behind the Whitehouse in the event of conflict with some foreign state, take the Zionist side against Carter, who backs down. [NI citing Kern Television and Middle East Diplomacy: President Carter's fall-1977 peace initiative]

  1977 Oct 7: &rad;19 Mg U-oxide powder fall off a truck after an accident near Springfield CO. Stuff was from WY heading to OK for processing. Spokesman: `Luckily no other traffic came along. If cars had churned through the powder we could have been faced with a major crisis.' [P citing West Australian '77 Oct 7]

  1977 Nov: Fmr Director of CIA Richard Helms pleads `no contest' to two charges of lying to the Senate Foreign Relations Cmtee, claiming the CIA had not covertly funded Allende's opponents for Chilean prez. Judge Barrington Parker imposes k$2 fine and suspended 2-a. The fine is faid through a little whip-'round at the CIA. `That night…a faction within the [CIA] openly declared war on the elected and legitimate government of the [US].' NB

  Nov 21: Cloud indications of a huge standing wave was observed off the Pacific coast of America, reaching from Alaska to Chile…These clouds grazed the land slightly at California. There a straight black line, as through drawn by a ruler, appeared in the cloud mass. It was an opening in the clouds, one mile wide and 200 miles long. C

  1977 Dec: &rad;5 Mg radioactive U concentrate spreads over 5,000 square miles, in some places up to a foot deep, after a truck crashes in CO. Wrong decontamination equipment sent to area. 12 hours before health specialist on scene. [P citing Nation Review 1979 May 3] (I bet this is actually the same as I've found listed for October.)

  Smallpox declared eradicated (from nature). Vaccination is credited, despite mountain of evidence vaccine doesn't work and although only about 10% of living humanity had received it.

  1977 Dec: Two hydrogen/oxygen explosions in Millstone's waste-gas stream blow door off chimney and completely shut down reactor. [P citing Parliamentary Legislative Research Service paper, Parliament Library, Canberra]

  1978: Seven leaders of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wash up on Argentinian beach. US finds out its own junta did the deed, buries the story. `The supposed Montonero note claiming responsibility for the abduction has been generally discounted.' [TBO citing Raul Castro, then US ambassador to Argentina and NSArchive documents released Dec 2002]

  1978: &rad; Worker replacing indicator light at Rancho Seco drops it, causing a short which trips a fuse and cuts much of the control power. Automatic safeties dump cold water in the hot vessel, which may have cracked it. V · O

  The event…was the execution of 23-year-old Princess Misha and her husband in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Misha was one of around 2,000 Saudi princesses who were obliged to preserve the House of Saud bloodlines by submitting to arranged marriages, but she decided to rebel and marry the man she loved.

  To cut a very long story short, Princess Misha eloped with a young man called Shaar, cousin of Saudi Arabia's influential ambassador in Beirut, the former General Ali Shaar. She adhered strictly to Islamic law, and persuaded a sheikh [priest or pastor equivalent] to marry them, before they both went to ground at the Hotel Al-Attras in a seaside resort called The Creek, north of Jedda. Unfortunately they were later identified when trying to flee the country by aircraft, and both were arrested on royal [not judicial] warrants.

  Princess Misha's grandfather was prince Muhammad Bin Adbul Aziz, the eldest surviving son of Ibn Saud and senior prince of the Saudi royal family, and he was furious. Though Misha had committed no offence whatever under Islamic law, her rebellious behavior threatened to undermine the obedience of the other 2,000 Saudi princesses. This unelected potentate then arbitrarily sentenced Princess Misha and her husband to death, despite the fact that the Islamic Courts refused to handle the case. King Khaled, the sole surviving full brother of Prince Muhammad, refused to sign an execution order, but he did not intervene either.

  On Prince Muhammad's personal orders, the couple were taken to the bazaar in Jedda on the following Friday midday, the customary time and place for the punishment of criminals. Other Saudi princesses were taken there to witness the spectacle and thus be suitably intimidated. Grandfather's retainers shot the princess dead in front of her husband, who was then very slowly and gruesomely beheaded by grandfather's personal bodyguards, because no one else was prepared to execute an innocent man on the whim of a potentate.

  It is perhaps ironic that the illegal execution of Princess Misha was one of the triggers which finally sent the young Osama Bin Laden off in the direction of Afghanistan to fight the Russians, because he could no longer tolerate living in a country where unelected potentates ignored the law and the judiciary, imposing instead the sorts of torture and arbitrary death sentences that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz favor today. JV

  (One has to be careful with Vialls, but there's stuff enough here to check into.)

  Shortly after Larry Flynt offers M$1 for new info on the JFK murder he is himself nearly killed. DD (Woody Harrelson would later play Flynt in a movie; Harrelson's father is one of many proposed JFK shooters.)

  US puts its SR-71 Blackbird into operation, spying on Poland and the Ethiopia–Somalia war. PA

  Evidence was beginning to pile up that the [uranium] mines were creating an epidemic of lung cancer. Colorado and other states began to fear a landslide of compensation claims that could cost taxpayers and industry millions. Their fears were substantiated by a PHS study that had begun in 1950, when the service began collecting data on uranium miners and how they were dying. In 1960 the PHS handed the figures to Joseph Wagoner, a recent doctoral graduate of the Harvard School of Public Health. Wagoner told us in an extensive Washington interview that by 1964 we showed 12 lung cancers in this group where just 2.8 were expected. We then updated the analysis one more year, and showed 22 lung cancers where there should have been only 5.7. When we went through 1965 we found 37 lung cancers where there should have been just seven. And through 1978, with that same group, we now show 205 lung cancers where there should have been only 40. In other words there has been a consistent fivefold increase in lung cancer among this group right down the line. KOO

  1978: Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men. HNN

  1978: Yeshayahu Gavish: `The danger of Israel's extermination was hardly present before the Six-day war.' [ABBC citing Lilienthal The Zionist Connection p 558]

  For many years the mainstream medical orthodoxy, put forth after it was no longer acceptable to torture children in the name of `moral hygiene,' was that babies don't feel pain. It wasn't until 1978 that researchers even suggested using anesthetic during circumcision, and even today, most medical circumcisions are performed without anesthesia… [MGM citing AMA

  1978: Israel moves on southern Lebanon. YT

  With the Yankees leading the Dodgers 7–2, the plant supervisor was engrossed in the game on a portable TV set he had sneaked, against regulations, into the facility. Had he not been so involved in watching New York win yet another World Championship, he might have noticed that an abnormal buildup of radioactivity was occurring in a small uranium-processing column nearby. No one was checking the plant's monitoring devices. One recording chart had run out of paper two weeks earlier. Meanwhile the solution in the processing column was dangerously unbalanced. As the game was getting under way, uranium concentrations in the column were sixty times what they should have been.

  Suddenly, at 8:45 P.M., high-radiation alarms began ringing around the plant. The panicked supervisor abandoned the Yankees. Operators in the control room fled to a sheltered area. Fortunately the column was brought under control. But official figures showed that at least eight thousand curies of radioactive iodine, krypton, and xenon had been released into the atmosphere, more than enough to threaten the health of anyone downwind. KOO

  1978: &rad;Pu buried at ID Falls dug up after 7 years because it was leaking from its barrels and threatening the water supply. [P citing Penelope Coleing for MAUM]

  1978: Introduction of drug-related asset forfeiture. FL

  1978: Aircraft goes down with 12 Egyptian generals aboard. Egypt will prohibit more than 3 generals to share any one flight. alB

  1978: Enron a big supporter of GWB's bid for Congress. [SPI citing Center for Public Integrity] Jr. would offer free beer to college students to garner their votes during his 1987 congressional race. (Which is typo?)

  1978 Jan: Specula explains how to create earthquakes by using the earth as a kind of magnetic laser. JR

  1978 Jan 23: &rad;Newly built reactor 56 km from Denver belches radioactive He. [P citing "The Herald" '78 Jan 24]

  1978 Jan 24: Carter signs EO 12306 renewing Ford's ban on political assassination. FTW

  &rad;Cosmos 954, Soviet satellite powered by 45 kg U-235 and launched Sep 18, crashes in northwestern Canada, spreading 500 kCi over thousands of km². Ft. Resolution warned not make tea of the top snow layer nor eat marrow of game animals. EN · F [P citing Nucleus 14/6/1978; Burleson, C.W. The Day the Bomb Fell 1980, p 227–245] The US will initiate bans on nuclear material in space, then discard the bans. AS `NASA has insisted on using nuclear when they don't really need it. They have been a pioneer in solar power. Rosetta is supposed to go beyond the orbit of Jupiter and rendezvous with a comet and is totally solar.' GNN

  1978 Mar: Founding of Shalom Achshav by 348 IDF convinced negotiation is the way to Israel-Palestine peace.

  1978 Apr: &rad;CIA device on Nanda Deve (Himalayan mt) for watching Chinese missile bases lost in avalanche along with its 1.3 kg Pu. Nanda Deve's snows run into the Ganges, sole water for millions. [P citing The Australian '78 Apr 12]

  1978 Apr: &rad;Monitors at Jan (Ranier OR) fail to warn two of high radiation. [P citing Nucleus '79 Jul 15 p.17]

  Apr 2: Bizarre lightning strike at Bell Is, Newfoundland, investigated by Los Alamos. C

  1978 May 22: &rad;Up to 500 gallons of radioactive water released near Puget Sound when USS Puffer mistakenly opens a valve. L

  1978: Pope Paul VI dies; Albino Luciani lasts 33 days as John Paul; Karol Wojtyla of Poland becomes John Paul II. [de Rosa Vicars of Christ 1989 p20]

  Nov 16: Judge Flaherty finds against fluoridation in Aitkendead v. Borough of West View PA.

  He defined the sole issue of fact as whether fluoride may be a carcinogen. He then found that [p]oint by point, every criticism made of the Burk-Yiamouyiannis study was met and explained by the plaintiffs. Often, the point was turned around against defendants. In short, this court was compellingly convinced of the evidence in favor of plaintiffs.

  …[A permanent injunction] was about to be filed when raw power showed itself with lightning speed and impressive clout to limit the political damage. The Chief Judge of the Commonwealth of the Court of Pennsylvania quickly stayed the preliminary injunction, ignoring the facts judicially found, as if public safety were not an issue. An administrative agency, which favored fluoridation as institutional policy, quickly and summarily entered findings which parroted USPHS propaganda. Another administrative agency, which had a similar institutional policy, then entered an order which purported to deny the Borough of West View permission to obey Judge Flaherty's injunction. Events thus took bizarre turns to save a sacred cow. FSU

  Flaherty: The proponents of fluoridation do nothing more than try to impugn the objectivity of those who oppose fluoridation. DW

  Dallas Morning News recovers Bronson film of Dealy Plaza, showing two men—neither of them Oswald—in the open 6th-floor TSBD window just minutes before the shooting. TA123

  1978 Nov 18: Massacre of `People's Templars' at Jonestown Guyana at moment of arrival of Rep. Leo J. Ryan (who also fell victim). CL `The Guyana coroner reported that most died of gunshot wounds, not cyanide poisoning.' TM (Just why does the US happen to produce so many `loony suicide cults'?)

  1978 Dec 31: &rad;Turbine building of Soviet Beloyarak-2 collapses, starting a fire that destroys the control cables. Reactor goes out of control; 8 fry trying to inject coolant. P citing `Nucleonics Week' 31/5/90; WISB-334 22/6/90]

  1979: First known AIDS cases, in NY. UPA

  1979: Nicaraguan dictator Samosa overthrown. CIA helps to retrain his National Guard into death squads known as the Contras. The Contras terrorize rural Nicaragua while the US military blockades Nicaragua's harbours with mines. TI

  On Capitol Hill, few members of Congress were willing to step forward. When Junior Hodge, for instance, sought help from his representative, Al Gore, Jr., the ex-Marine veteran of Nagasaki bulldozer assignments got no help as he lay ailing in eastern Tennessee. An aide to Congressman Gore noted that the Tennessee Valley Authority's nuclear power plants carry enormous political clout back home. I know nuclear weapons fallout isn't exactly the same thing, the aide told us, but it's close enough to nuclear power that we'd rather stay away from it publicly. KOO

  1979: Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani dies in Washington. On his deathbed, he laments once having trusted the US. PBS (The page points up the moment the Kurds realise they can't trust Saddam. Yet this is as close as it gets to mentioning that they can't trust the West either.)

  1979: American Atomics bankrupt. [P citing WISE Vol. 2 No. 1 '79 Nov/Dec; "International Herald Tribune" '79 Jan 10; Washington Post 10th October 1979; New York Times '79 Sep 30, Oct 7]

  In 1979 a Utah miner named George Val Snow told hearings on low-level radiation chaired by Senator Edward Kennedy…of a game the workers would play to see whose breath was most radioactive. The company, Snow said, had a Geiger counter out to measure the ore to see whether it was ore or waste. As we would come out at night we would blow on it to see who could put it furthest up on the scale. Sometimes we could put it clear off scale. KOO

  1979: Sask gov't gives French gov't- and Rothchild-owned multinational Amok full permission to develop one of the richest known U deposits, near Carawell Lake. The treaty rights of the Dene Indians are completely ignored. [P citing WISE No.4 p.9]

  1979 Jan: A `massive' popular uprising ousts the Shah of Iran, `a complete shock to US oil companies, the CIA, and the Pentagon, which used the hated Shah as a pro-US policeman of the Gulf region.' DEO (IIRC the US had even given Iran some of their minting presses, the only country ever so distinguished. It's thought that those presses became the source of the heaps of counterfeit Franklins that even the Fed couldn't tell from the real thing, which ultimately forced the US to make the first serious changes to the greenback in decades.)

  The disaster started in January 1979 when the Shah of Iran fled his country, leaving a 37-year monarchy in rubble. Fed up with what they considered the Shah's boot-licking subservience to US oil companies and US banks, fanatical followers of Ayatollah Khomeini seized the government. Where could the Shah take refuge? Most countries, either because they sympathized with the Ayatollah's religious beliefs or because they didn't want to offend Iran as an oil source, wanted nothing to do with the Shah.

  Why not let him into the US? President Carter had been warned by the CIA that if the Shah were allowed into this country, Iranian militants might storm the American embassy in Teheran. Nervous embassy officials passed word to the State Dep't that they feared that reaction too. So Carter made up his mind: no Shah.

  It was a smart decision, but it hadn't been cleared with the right people, among whom were David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan; Kissinger, a protégé of the Rockefeller family and a Chase consultant; and John J. McCloy, a former chairman of Chase who for years had been godfather and chief counselor to the world's largest oil companies. Rockefeller's desire to help the Shah was understandable. Chase Manhattan's London branch had always held the largest share of Iran's deposits and the Shah's personal fortune, estimated at around G$20, was managed by Chase.

  So the Chase trio put on the pressure—the loudest and most public complaints coming from Kissinger—and Carter caved. The results were as he feared: 12 days after the Shah arrived in the US, our Teheran embassy was seized and its employees taken hostage. They were not released until Reagan was sworn in as president more than a year later. Many believe the hostage embarrassment cost Carter a second term. TO

  1979: John Hinckley Sr. and son Scott contribute to John Connally's campaign against Reagan's prez nomination. NB

  1979: Chomsky & Herman The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism

  …an earlier version of the book would have appeared back in the fall of 1973 if its appearance in the US had not been all but aborted. The book had been contracted by Warner Modular Publications Inc., a relatively independent subsidiary of the Warner conglomerate, and 20,000 copies were produced. The editors and publisher were enthusiastic to get the book out and to promote it until officials of the parent company found out about the book and objected to its unpatriotic contents.

  William Sarnoff, a high officer of the parent company, was especially upset about the statement in the book that the leadership in the US, as a result of its dominant position and wide-ranging counterrevolutionary efforts, has been the most important single instigator, administrator, and moral and material sustainer of serious bloodbaths in the years that followed World War II. The parent company ordered the project stopped, including distribution of the 20,000 copies already printed and the advertising campaign that had begun. The publisher then worked out a compromise with the parent company that would allow them to publish the book but only if they published another opposing book for balance, i.e. one that supported US policies to suppress popular movements. But before the project could go forward, Warner closed down the publishing house and sold its inventory and contracts to a small noncommercial publisher that had no distribution capabilities. DC

  Fall of US-backed Nicaraguan dictator Anastasios Samoza II. The Sandinistas that take over are anti-poverty land reformers. The remnants of Samoza's murderous personal army struggle on (with much US help) as the Contras. PA

  Jan: Billy Lovelady dies of heart attack. He is officially the man photographed in the door of the TSBD, not LHO—even though the images are a better match for Oswald. WRH

  Feb 2: FBI recovers 68 kg U stolen by employee from GE Wilmington NC plant. [P citing Sydney Morning Herald '79 Sep 3]

  Mar 14: US closes 5 large nuclear plants over quake-resistance concerns. [P citing Sydney Morning Herald '79 Mar 15]

  Mar 16: China Syndrome released, in which `an area the size of Pennsylvania' could be rendered uninhabitable. A fictional California plant suffers a coolant problem masked by a faulty indicator. It was written in '74, based on a '70 incident at Dresden II involving a bad indicator and rewritten in '75 after the Brown's Ferry fire. SD

  By the spring of 1979 the peaceful atom was in serious financial straits. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 had sent fuel prices soaring, which by all expectations should have made atomic energy more competitive. Instead it sent the cost of the reactors themselves soaring, at a rate far higher than the cost increases in coal burners. Electricity prices also rose sharply, prompting American consumers to use far less. That, in turn, helped undercut the demand for new reactors, which fell further because of public pressure and a loss of faith in the technology. Orders fell drastically, from 41 in 1973 and 26 in 1974, to four in 1975, three in 1976, four in 1977, and two in 1978. Cancellations quickly outnumbered orders. In 1978 the number of domestic reactors on line, on order or under construction dropped to 197, lowest since 1972…

  By 1979 sloppy reactor construction, poor design, and inept operation had become a national scandal…one reactor cooling system had been hooked up to the plant's drinking supply. At another plant a basketball wrapped in tape had been used to plug a defective pipe. KOO

  And then there was…

  Mar 28: &rad;Reactor 2 at Three-Mile Island PA has pump failure, shutting down coolant system. Core overheats. Pressure-relief valve (made by Dresser X) opens, then fails to close; radioactive coolant water boils, floods containment; hydrogen bubble forms in vessel, interfering with cooling; hydrogen in containment explodes. Some fuel rods melt; core severely damaged. Radioactive steam vented. [P (1985) p. F-13] Secondary containment retained megacuries of I-131 [GSP quoting IEER] `only' ±15 Ci was released TCH but no-one knows for sure. The eight vent monitors had run at their kilorem limit for hours. [S citing Harrisburg mayor Steve Reed, 1998 PBS interview] `[S]o highly radioactive it may never re-open. [Activity in] building is 100× lethal level. [TMI] accident had 150 precedents [of] valve failures in similar reactors.' Metropolitan Edison is ultimately fined a brutal k$150 for 17 safety violations. [P citing [Australian] Daily News 79 May 1; WISE Vol.2 No.2 p.18] (This particular accident will stick in peoples' minds, probably thanks to the priming by and parallels with China Syndrome. Possibly also because of recent exposure of lies related to another PA reactor, Shippingport. SF (Maybe these are reason `Pennsylvania' was used in China Syndrome.) Its meme would not be surpassed until Chernobyl.) Despite claims by the nuclear industry that `no one died at TMI,' a study by Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass of U of Pittsburgh showed that the accident led to a minimum of 430 infant deaths. L

  At the TMI2 reactor, radiation monitors in vent stacks, where most of the radiation escaped, went off the scale the morning of the accident. NRC officials said that the monitors located in the vent stack and the passages leading to the stack were never contemplated for use in measuring releases of the TMI variety, so we don't really know what went up there… WISE Nov/Dec 1979; SECO newsletter). According to a newly-released report, as much as 20% of the core of the TMI nuclear power plant melted in the 1979 accident. (The Age 12/4/85) Human error evidently played a large part in the TMI accident. The NRC conducted a survey that revealed that 20 of the 107 senior operators at US nuclear plants were not licensed. Ten others were licensed at the wrong plants. Of all nuclear operators at 66 nuclear reactors, 53 had failed written examinations. 448 scored low enough to be required to attend special lectures to improve their abilities. The NRC has called for tougher training. It was suggested one method for improvement would be to raise the passing grade on the exam from the present requirement of 70% to 80%. (Critical Mass Journal WISE v2 #2 p8) P

  April: NRC closes temporarily all Babcock & Wilcox reactors to prevent power shortages in three states. CA Gov. Jerry Brown accuses nuclear industry of 20 years of lies. [P citing "West Australian" '79 Apr 30] (I think these B&W reactors are production reactors, not power reactors; nevertheless it shows the nuclear industry chews up a lot of energy as well as produce a lot of mess.)

  Apr: Mossad blows up a reactor being built in France for Iraq, decoying the investigation by making bogus calls from `French environmentalists trying to save the world from Harrisburgs.' TMIA

  May 9: &rad;(SURRY, RICHMOND VA) Sabotage attempt at Surry. NaOH dumped on 62 of 64 fuel elements through manhole-like openings in the floor of the fuel storage building. `Could have been extremely dangerous if rods were radioactive.' Later two men claim it was to underscore poor security. TMIA [P citing "The Age" 79 May 10; "Newport News"; "Sydney Morning Herald", '79 Jun 19; Nucleus '79 Jul 25 p.17]

  Jun: `R. C. Christian' commissions the `GA Guidestones.' RL (Radio Liberty spins the stones' message negatively, as un- or anti-American; yet, oddly, says `The fact that most Americans have never heard of the Georgia Guidestones or their message to humanity reflects the degree of control that exists today over what the American people think. We ignore that message at our peril.')

  Jul 3: Carter signs the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Brzezinski believes this aid would induce a Soviet military intervention. [GR citing 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview with ZB] (Robert Gates' From the Shadows also asserts US `aid' to Afghan militants began well before the Soviet invasion.)

  Jul 10: Québec's only nuclear power plant, condemned by some scientists as a `lemon' for functioning only 10 days since opening in '77 May, is shut down indefinitely. `It is possible that Gentilly 1 will have to be closed permanently.' [P, NF citing "West Australian" 11/7/1979] (I am checking the dates with the sources; Nukeworker disagrees with APIC and Nuclearfiles.)

  Jul 16: &rad;Nuclear flash flood: failure in earthen dam for settling pond of Church Rock NM U mill looses about 94 Mgal of acidic (pH<2) radioactive (alpha 128 nCi/L) solution and 1100 tons of solid wastes into the Puerco, passing Navajo reservation and settling out near Chambers AZ. [GSP citing `Shuey & Morgan 1988' and Chris Shuey Contaminant Loading on the Puerco River: A Historical Overview 1992 Southwest Research and Information Center, Albuquerque NM] L [P citing WISE; "AH" Program ABC '79 Aug 30; NY Times '79 Aug 28]

  Jul 20: Executive dictat 12148 creates FEMA FEMA undoing all the effort of the last couple of years wresting dictatorial emergency powers from the Whitehouse. HC

  Jul 25: Bruce ON closes after spilling 90 kL heavy water. [P citing WISE]

  Jul 27: Pilgrim 1 (MA) 670[?] BWR shuts down automatically when two valves fail to function after lightning strike. [P citing WISE]

  Aug 4: Three of five gov't-operated `Advanced Gas-Cooled' reactors in UK are out of use `after series of disastrous failures of design and equipment.' And `The American system of letting private companies build and run AGRs seems more risky than the British way.' [P citing Weekend News '79 Aug 4]

  Aug 7: &rad;Highly enriched U leaks from top-secret nuclear-fuel plant near Erwin TN. About 1000 people are exposed to up to 5× as much radiation as would normally be received in a year. Between 1968 and 1983 the plant `lost' 234 lbs of highly enriched U, forcing the plant to close 6 times. L · F

  Sep 29: &rad;AZ Gov. Bruce Babbit declares emergency and sends Nat'l Guard to clean up Tucson nuclear plant. At the kitchen for the public school system, across the street, k$300 of food is found contaminated by radioactive tritium; a chocolate cake had 56 nCi/L of it, almost 3× safe standard. Nuclear official blames Babbit's greed for publicity. [P citing Nucleus Vol.2 No.1 '79 Nov/Dec p.19] KOO

  Oct 15: &rad;Ft. St. Urain, 22 km from Denver, shut down after a malfunction releases radioactive gas into the atmosphere. The shutdown was the third in two years due to equipment malfunction. A spokesman for the Public Service Company of CO which operates the plant said the shutdown occurred after He, the primary coolant, seeped into a back-up water system. [P citing UP via Australian Oct 16] (He as a coolant??)

  Oct 29: Nuclear protestors attempt to close stock market on 50th anniversary of crash. F

  At footnote 23 in the case of Chrysler Corp. v. Brown, 441 US 281 (1979), the US Supreme Court admitted that no organic Act for the IRS could be found, after they searched for such an Act all the way back to the Civil War, which ended in 1865. The Guarantee Clause in the US Constitution guarantees the Rule of Law to all Americans (we are to be governed by Law and not by arbitrary bureaucrats). See Article IV, Section 4. Since there was no organic Act creating it, IRS is not a lawful organization. SL

  In retrospect there is chilling irony in the atomic bomb's—and the nuclear industry's—origins. Stopping Nazi barbarism provided the initial rationale for the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. At the Nuremberg trials some Nazi scientists and other functionaries were charged with grotesque experiments on humans; the Nuremberg judges rejected excuses and rationalizations.

  But since then, in the US, we have already accepted the policy of experimentation on involuntary human subjects, concluded &Dr;John W. Gofman, a pioneer in radiation research who codiscovered the fissionability of U-233 and helped isolate the world's first milligram of plutonium.

  In the mid-'50s—when the toxi[ci]ty of low-dose radiation was still uncertain—we were testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere and launching the Atoms for Peace Program, Gofman recalled in a 1979 statement. It should have been clear to me, even then, that both atmospheric bomb-testing and nuclear power constituted experimentation on involuntary human subjects, indeed on all forms of life.

  With extraordinarily blunt self-criticism Gofman—a physicist and medical doctor—went on: I am on record in 1957 as not being worried yet about fallout and still being optimistic about the benefits of nuclear power. There is no way I can justify my failure to help sound an alarm over these activities many years sooner than I did. I feel that at least several hundred scientists trained in the biomedical aspect of atomic energy—myself definitely included—are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity through our gross negligence and irresponsibility. And, Gofman added, Now that we know the hazard of low-dose radiation, the crime is not experimentation—it's murder.

  People viewing such an assessment as unfair or excessively strident might find it less so after visiting small towns like St. George, Utah, or Fredonia, Arizona, or Tonopah, Nevada. KOO

  Critical Mass Energy Project (of Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, Inc.) tabulated 122 accidents involving the transport of nuclear material in 1979, 17 involving radioactive contamination. L

  [move to 1973 May 15]: Jason Burton, Melbourne boy, dies after swallowing about a half-dozen fluoride tablets. The tablets were 0.5 mg fluoride each. Somehow the hospital staff had been so mislead about fluoride they they'd assumed it'd take well over 100 tablets to be lethal. Fluoride poisoning is the cause of death on the certificate, but Australian authorities deny fluoride has killed anyone. X · VV

  Rockwell sends Miriam Karkenan the records of her husband Dan's radiation history at Rocky Flats. They detail his on-the-job exposures for 1977, 1978, and 1979…which is odd, because he died in 1976. KOO (I think maybe they were making stuff up.)

  Nov 11: Malpractice at Annapolis MD water-treatment plant dumps fluoride(s) into the water supply at up to 50ppm. 10000 suffer acute poisoning. Heart-failure rate spikes to 5× normal. Several dialysis patients die immediately of fluorine poisoning. Fish went belly-up in pet shops. It was suppressed for two weeks so as not to jeopardise the fluoridation program. The day-tank's pump stuck on and overfilled it into a waste sump. The operator drained the overflow—1000 gal of 22% hydrofluorosilicic acid—directly into the fresh supply. Then lime was added to neutralise the acidity. (I don't know enough chemisty to see where the fluorine went.) VV [G citing Yiamouyiannis Fluoride the Aging Factor and JAMA 1980:244; 7] [FA quoting Evening Capital Nov 29]

  . Edward Teller claimed to have been the only victim of Three Mile Island. The nervous stress he suffered from attacks by nuclear opponents on his favored industry, he said, had led to a heart attack. As for fallout, Teller charged that the risk was no different from living in a high mountain area near Denver, where natural background radiation is higher than it is in central Pennsylvania.

  Teller did not specify whether this was calculated on living upwind or downwind from Rocky Flats. KOO

  Nov 30: Based on the Pennsylvania case (see 1978 Nov 16), Québec suspends their enforcement of their mandatory fluoridation. The moratorium holds for at least 20 years. So well-regarded is this report that a standard ecology textbook widely used in the secondary schools of Québec forthrightly acknowledges that [artificial fluoridation] is an environmental pollutant and [human carcinogen]. FSU

  In 1979 and 1980, during a brief interlude of relative openness (since closed down), the USAF revealed that its public-information outreach included the following:

  140 newspapers, 690 000 copies per week; Airman magazine, monthly circulation 125 000; 34 radio and 17 TV stations, primarily overseas; 45 000 headquarters and unit news releases; 615 000 hometown news releases; 6600 interviews with news media; 3200 news conferences; 500 news media orientation flights; 50 meetings with editorial boards; 11 000 speeches

  This excludes vast areas of the air force's public-information effort. Writing back in 1970, Senator J. W. Fulbright had found that the air force public-relations effort in 1968 involved 1305 full-time employees, exclusive of additional thousands that have public functions collateral to other duties. The air force at that time offered a weekly film-clip service for TV and a taped features program for use three times a week, sent to 1139 radio stations; it also produced 148 motion pictures, of which 24 were released for public consumption. There is no reason to believe that the air force public-relations effort has diminished since the 1960s.

  Note that this is just the air force. There are three other branches with massive programs, and there is a separate, overall public-information program under an assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in the Pentagon. In 1971, an Armed Forces Journal survey revealed that the Pentagon was publishing a total of 371 magazines at an annual cost of some $57 million, an operation sixteen times larger than the nation's biggest publisher…

  To put this into perspective, we may note the scope of public-information operations of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the National Council of the Churches of Christ (NCC), two of the largest of the nonprofit organizations that offer a consistently challenging voice to the views of the Pentagon. The AFSC's main office information-services budget in 1984–85 was under $500 000, with eleven staff people. Its institution-wide press releases run at about two hundred per year, its press conferences thirty a year, and it produces about one film and two or three slide shows a year. It does not offer film clips, photos, or taped radio programs to the media. The NCC Office of Information has an annual budget of some $350 000, issues about a hundred news releases per year, and holds four press conferences annually. The ratio of air force news releases and press conferences to those of the AFSC and NCC taken together are 150:1 (or 2200:1, if we count hometown news releases of the air force), and 94:1 respectively. Aggregating the other services would increase the differential by a large factor.

  Only the corporate sector has the resources to produce public information and propaganda on the scale of the Pentagon and other government bodies. TWT

  (Liberal media my assessor.)