by Karl Grossman
Sunday afternoon,
November 17, 1996, President Bill Clinton, vacationing in Hawaii, is interrupted
by an urgent message from the US Space Command: The Russian Mars 96 space
probe - with a half-pound of deadly plutonium on board - is falling back
to Earth.
The US Space Command
(USSC) advises Clinton that it "estimates the spacecraft will reenter
the Earth's atmosphere" in a matter of hours "with a predicted
impact point in east-central Australia." Clinton calls Australian Prime
Minister John Howard - who, coincidentally, the president plans to visit
the very next day - and promises "assets we have in the Department
of Energy" to deal with any radioactive contamination.
The White House
issues a press release stating that: "[I]n the extremely unlikely event
that one or more of the [plutonium] batteries break open, the United States
is prepared to offer all necessary assistance to any nation to deal with
any resulting problems."
The 270 grams of
Plutonium-238 contained in four canisters could vaporize into fine dust
particles, spreading widely through the atmosphere and maximizing the number
of lethal doses that could reach human lungs. Plutonium has been described
as the most toxic substance known. The plutonium used in space devices -
Plutonium-238 - is 280 times more radioactive than Plutonium-239, the plutonium
used in atomic bombs.
On November 18,
the New York Times featured the front-page headline, "Russian Space
Probe Falls Back To Earth," and repeated the USSC's calculations that
"debris from the Russian Mars 96 spacecraft would reenter Earth's atmosphere
over the Pacific Ocean 500 miles southeast of New Zealand." On November
19, the Washington Post also carried a reassuring page one headline: "Errant
Russian Spacecraft Crashes Harmlessly After Scaring Australia."
But eleven days
later, on November 29, the USSC revised its account of what happened. The
probe fell, not in the ocean, but on Chile and Bolivia: It fell, not on
November 17, but on November 16 - the night before Clinton called Howard.
Nuclear Peril
vs. Double Standard
"The area where
any debris surviving this reentry could have fallen is located along an
approximately 50-mile-wide and 200-mile-long path, oriented southwest to
northeast," the USSC now reported. "This path is centered approximately
20 miles east of the Chilean city of Iquique and includes Chilean territory,
the border area of Bolivia and the Pacific Ocean."
The attention of
the Western media (which was intense when the falling probe appeared to
threaten Australia) lessened when the impact zone shifted to Latin America.
The New York Times relegated the story to a five-paragraph Reuters dispatch
under "World News Briefs" deep inside its December 14 edition.
"You can clearly
see the double standard," Houston aerospace engineer James Oberg told
the Boston Globe. "Australia got a phone call from the President, and
[Chile] got a two-week-old fax from somebody."
Asked why the US
is not providing South America with the kind of help Clinton had promised
Australia, Gordon Bendick, director of legislative affairs of the US National
Security Council, told reporters: "It's not the United States' responsibility
to protect the world from this."
According to Luis
Barrera, an astrophysicist at the Astronomy Institute at Chile's Universidad
Catolica del Norte, the Russian government also has been "uncooperative,"
refusing to give Chile a description of the canisters so that searchers
would know what to look for - if the plutonium batteries remained intact.
"The news is
bad," says Barrera. "I think it vaporized."
Forget the Mars
96 Crash - Please!
Dr. Barrera suspects
that the US does not want too much attention paid to the problem in South
America because it might effect NASA's plans for an October 1997 launch
of the $3.4 billion Cassini space probe with 72.3 pounds of plutonium fuel
- nearly 150 times the amount that was on the Mars 96 space probe.
Dr. Richard E. Webb,
author of The Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants, claims that launching
the Cassini mission is the equivalent of sending 17 large nuclear power
plants into the sky.
Space News notes
that "NASA's own statistics indicate the probability of another catastrophic
accident like [the Challenger shuttle explosion] is about one in 75."
Even if the accident-prone
Titan 4 rocket successfully launches the Cassini probe, an even more lethal
scenario could play itself out in August 1999 when the probe heads straight
back towards Earth for a risky "fly-by" maneuver.
NASA's own studies
admit that an "inadvertent reentry" into the Earth's 75-mile-high
atmosphere would shroud the planet in a pall of plutonium, exposing "approximately
5 billion of the estimated 7 to 8 billion world population."
Horst Poehler, a
22-year veteran of working for NASA contractors at the Kennedy Space Center,
describes the shielding on the Cassini's plutonium modules as "a joke.
It's fingernail thin."
The shielding consists
of an iridium alloy shell with a thickness of 0.022 inches (3/128-inch)
followed by two graphite shells each less than a quarter-inch thick, insulating
foil and, finally, a layer of 1/16th-inch-thick aluminum.
"Remember the
old Hollywood movies when a mad scientist would risk the world to carry
out his particular project," declared Dr. Poehler. "Well, those
mad scientists have moved to NASA."
In 1995, a subcommittee
of the House Appropriations Committee attempted to cancel the Cassini mission
as "too expensive," but the recommendation was quickly rejected.
As one committee aide explained, "lobbyists from Lockheed and NASA
were all over us."
Lockheed Martin,
the US government's largest military contractor, manufactures the Titan
IV rocket. Lockheed Martin also manufactures Cassini's plutonium-fueled
space reactor systems.
Despite the danger
and the dollars, the Cassini project continues to roll ahead - a plutonium
juggernaut that endangers an entire planet.
Further Info on Cassini:
There have been
at least 41 known Soviet and now Russian missions involving nuclear power.
At least six have failed.
To date, three of
26 US nuclear space missions have failed - a failure rate of 12 percent.
In August 1964,
a US satellite powered by a 2.1 pounds of plutonium in a SNAP 9A reactor
burned up over the West Indian Ocean, leaving a swath of plutonium-238 in
the stratosphere. By November 1970, only about 5 percent of the original
Plutonium-238 remained in the atmosphere and a US soil sampling showed SNAP-9A
debris was present "at all continents and at all latitudes."
As late as May 1995,
the radioactive dust could still be detected in the Northern Hemisphere
at aircraft altitudes. According to the report, Emergency Preparedness for
Nuclear-Powered Satellites, this single US reactor accident remains "the
main source of Plutonium-238 in the environment."
Eight damaged reactors
continue to circle the Earth. Cosmos 367, Cosmos 785, Cosmos 1266 and Cosmos
1299 were sent into higher "safe" orbits after malfunctioning.
They remain in orbit, 560 to 625 miles overhead.
Four abandoned US
SNAP reactors also circle the Earth, 500 to 1,000 miles overhead. All of
these reactors are destined to reenter Earth's atmosphere over the next
several hundred years.
Karl Grossman, a
journalism professor at the State University of New York/College at Old
Westbury, has won many reporting awards, including the prestigious George
Polk Award for investigative journalism. Excerpted from Grossman's new book,
The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program's Nuclear Threat to Our Planet (Common
Courage Press, Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951, (207) 525-0900, fax: -3068).
The Wrong Stuff: Plutonium in Space -
Racism and Corporate Interests