The Green Planet Monitor

Of all the staunchly pro-Israel Western powers who mouth support for a ‘two-state’ solution to Israel’s ‘conflict’ with the Palestinian people, no one puts its money where its mouth isn’t more than Canada.

Ottawa’s formal position appears straightforward, even just-minded.

Canada “recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Foreign Affairs Canada declares at its website, and is “committed to the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel.”

Canada doesn’t recognize “permanent Israeli control” over the Palestinian territories, territories Israel has occupied for the past 57 years, colonizing them with its own citizens, and effectively annexing them.

Israel is indeed an occupying power, Canada has consistently maintained since 1967, therefore subject to the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel insists the Palestinian territories are “disputed,” not occupied, and that Geneva IV doesn’t apply to its presence there, but its steadfast ally, Canada, begs to differ.

Geneva IV has been embedded in Canadian domestic legislation, as the Geneva Conventions Act, so Canada is strictly bound to abide by it, beginning with common Article 1 of all four of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

“The High Contracting Parties [e.g. Canada] undertake to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.”

As for those 300-plus Jewish-only settlements and outposts up and down the West Bank and encircling Jerusalem, now home to 750,000 Israeli Jews (“Les colonies,” Canada calls them at its French-language website), these are illegal under Geneva IV, Canada maintains, and “constitute a serious obstacle to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.”

To be precise, Israel’s colonies breach Article 49(6) of Geneva IV — a “grave breach” under Geneva’s 1977 Protocol Additional, and a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Palestinian youth detained at a Hebron checkpoint.

Lest there be any doubt about its commitment to the rules-based international order, Canada’s official position is that Israel “must fully respect international human rights and humanitarian law” — the sina qua non for creating a “climate conducive to achieving a just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement.”

Thus goes Trudeau government lip service to a just, durable peace in occupied Palestine/Israel.

In the first two months of Israel’s plausibly genocidal war on Gaza, however, Ottawa green-lit $28.5 million worth of military exports to Israel. Among these, bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices, and a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles and aviation hardware.

With the death toll rising, in mid-September, Canada suspended 30 active permits for weapon transfers to Israel, and declared its opposition to the transfer of 50,000 “highly explosive” mortars from Quebec to Israel, via the US.

Still, notwithstanding the July 19 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation and associated settlement enterprise are unlawful, and that UN member states must refrain from extending aid and assistance, the Canadian government continues to allow settlement products to be sold in Canada, tariff-free under the Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement — labeled ‘Product of Israel,’ no less.

And, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) grants charitable status to a host of Canadian organizations that funnel funds to Israeli settlement groups and ‘lone soldiers’ of the Israeli Occupation Forces, some of them Canadian.

Palestine advocates Ahed Tamimi & Miko Peled confront Israeli cop in Nabi Saleh (David Kattenburg)

In 2022, over 200 registered Canadian charities funneled $362 million to Israeli organizations linked to the Israeli army and air force, Israeli government agencies, Jewish supremacist groups, and West Bank colonies, in breach of CRA statutes.

Now, a group of Canadian organizations are calling on the CRA to cut these groups off.

They have reason to be optimistic about their prospects. On August 8, Canada’s most venerable Zionist charity and benefactor of the Jewish colonization project, the Jewish National Fund of Canada, had its status revoked.

JNF appealed the decision, seeking judicial review at the Federal Court of Canada, and requesting the court to expunge the publication of the revocation in the Canada Gazette.

The court hasn’t the jurisdiction to do so, Federal Court of Canada Justice Whyte Nowak ruled on November 8, dismissing the request. The Court will now proceed to consider the remainder of JNF’s judicial review application.

Meanwhile, in a report released this past Friday, Just Peace Advocates and Independent Jewish Voices Canada document millions of dollars in charitable donations funneled by ostensibly charitable Canadian groups to a handful of other Israeli organizations engaged in colonizing the West Bank, and soldier-settler violence against Palestinians. Just Peace Advocates and IJV are calling on the Canadian government to suspend the charitable status of these organizations, and to carry out audits and criminal investigations of their activities.

Among these groups — Mizrachi Organization of Canada, Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada, and the Heseg Foundation.

“Under the Guise of Charity: Canadian Funding for War Crimes in Occupied Palestine” was publicly released at a press conference in Toronto on November 8. Listen to the proceedings in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

In order of appearance: Alice Klein, member of Independent Jewish Voices Canada; Anver Emon, Professor of Law and History at University of Toronto; Khaled Mouammar, founder of the Canadian Arab Federation, and, the report’s co-author, Miles Howe, Assistant Professor of Critical Criminology at Brock University.

The press conference also featured a presentation by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Since the release of her most recent report to the UN Human Rights Council, “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” Albanese has been the target of attacks by Israel and its surrogates across Europe and North America.

Listen to Friday’s press conference in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Wanna destroy a people in whole or in part? In other words, commit genocide – as genocide is defined under international law?

You don’t need gas chambers, firing squads, and deep ditches.

Just destroy their schools and universities. Bomb their libraries, archives and cultural institutions; seize their historical records. Make it as hard as possible to go to their kids to go to school.

According to a late August report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than 10,600 children and 400 teachers had been killed in Israeli military operations by August 2024, and more than 15,300 students and 2,400 teachers injured.

“With more than 80% of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed,” a group of UN experts declared in April, “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts wrote.

The GPM spoke with the statement’s lead author.

First, listen to this: two attorneys for the government of South Africa, in January, arguing South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, in The Hague. Tembeka Ngcukaitobi is a South African lawyer and legal scholar, and a member of South Africa’s Judicial Services Commission. Blinne Ni Grahleigh is an Irish human rights and international law expert at Matrix Chambers, in London.

Listen to Ngcukaitobi and Ni Grahleigh in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Little kids go to school in Hebron, occupied Palestine (David Kattenburg)

Numbers speak louder than words.

Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, back on October 7, at least two thirds of the besieged enclave’s educational facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Israa University, the last remaining higher educational institution in Gaza, was demolished on January 17.

Today, over 600 thousand Gazan students have no access to education.

Or books. Thirteen Gaza public libraries are now in ruins. Some 200 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed. Among these, Gaza 7th century Omari Mosque, a center of Islamic faith and learning, demolished in an Israeli airstrike back in December. A Hamas stronghold, the Israeli military said.

Gaza’s Central Archives, repository of 150 years of Palestinian history, is reportedly in ruins.

Over the past year, Israeli military forces have killed at least 5500 students, 260 teachers and 95 university professors. The GPM reached out to Farida Shaheed, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Palestinian astrophysicist Imad Barghouthi – jailed by Israel on multiple occasions

Getting an elementary, secondary or university education in Palestine these days is one thing. Doing top-drawer scientific research is another. That’s what Yousef Najajreh has been doing for quite a number of years, under Israel military occupation and apartheid. Najajreh is a molecular pharmacologist in the faculties of Bethlehem and Al-Quds Universities, in occupied Palestine.

I’ve spoken and hung out with Yousef on a host of occasions, most recently this past May. Here’s a conversation of ours from back in 2022 – in the midst of Covid – in the wake of Israeli government legislation clamping down on visits by foreign academics to Palestinian campuses.

From Yousef, we’ll segue to Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, speaking to the International Court of Justice back in February, on the opening day of hearings on the legal consequences of Israel’s ‘prolonged’ occupation of Palestine.

Listen to all this in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Yousef Najajreh in his lab, Al-Quds University (David Kattenburg)

Over a year has passed since October 7, 2023 — the Palestinian/Israeli equivalent of 9-11.

In the course of its vengeful response to the invasion of southern Israel by Gaza-based Palestinian resistance fighters, itself precipitated by 17 years of brutal Israeli siege, Israel occupation forces have killed at least 42,000 Gazans, 16,000 of them children.

Palestinian casualties, direct and indirect, are surely higher. Some conflict epidemiologists peg the number at 180,000 — ripped to bits by US bombs, missiles, tank rounds and sniper bullets dropped and fired by Israel occupation forces, or snuffed out by forced starvation and thirst.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, since October 8, Israeli-delivered American bombs and missiles have killed 2300 Lebanese, three quarters of those in the last month alone. Over a million Lebanese people are now internal refugees (two million in Gaza).

Recently returned from his latest trip to Lebanon, Canadian lawyer, activist and journalist Dimitri Lascaris speaks with the GPM about all this. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch our conversation here:

Bacteria are Earth’s most ancient creatures.

And there are lots of them, with a total mass a thousand times more than all humans.

Microbes — both prokaryotic and eukaryotic — make planet Earth go round. Some of them are dangerous pathogens. Most of them aren’t. Indeed, some bacteria are great kitchen companions.

Anna Sigrithur has been harnessing microbial magic, fermenting food and drinks for years. She’s also a writer and artist, focusing on food cultures, food preservation, fermentation, microbiology, sensory perception and human/non-human relationships.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Ferments in process

Since the dawn of civilization, nothing has fascinated humans more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis Historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work. The collection, description and preservation of living things has come a long way since then. Today, biologists use fancy tools to collect creatures, and DNA barcoding technology to identify them.

Here’s a story about DNA barcoding. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dutch barcoder Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)

Earth’ surface is a little over one degree warmer today, on average, than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 200 years ago.

That doesn’t seem like much. Under the Paris Agreement, governments agreed to limit temperature rise to two degrees. At present emission rates, that target will likely be exceeded.

In a landmark report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists, back in 2018, researchers warned that a two degree rise in global surface temperature may actually exceed a critical planetary threshold, pushing Earth down a cascade of tipping points into “hothouse” mode, unlike anything this third rock from the sun has experienced since the mid-Miocene epoch, fifteen million years ago.

The GPM spoke about the report with its lead author, Will Steffen. A native of Norfolk, Nebraska, Steffen emigrated to Australia in the 1970s, where he took up a position at the Australian National University in Canberra. He served as the Executive Director of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme, a ground-breaking initiative aimed at studying the chemical, physical and biological processes governing Earth as system. His name came to be associated with a host of ideas about our planet, and humanity’s fate. Steffen’s Great Acceleration curves helped corroborate the idea, first proposed by Dutch chemist Paul Crützen, that Earth has entered a new Epoch, the Anthropocene.

Will Steffen passed away in January 2023.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

This past September 11 – an indelibly dreadful date — thirty-four Palestinians were killed in a pair of Israeli airstrikes on a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.

Twelve-thousand were sheltering there at the time, most of them women and children. Among the casualties, six aid workers with the UN Relief & Works Agency, UNRWA.

Founded in 1949, UNRWA provides humanitarian aid, protection and social services to millions of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and is mandated to do so until a “just and durable solution” to the plight of the Palestinian people is found.

In theory, that solution would involve fulfillment of the UN-mandated right of the Palestinian people to return to their homes inside present-day Israel, or be compensated for their losses.

Not surprisingly, Israel has had a hate-on for UNRWA since its inception.

Indeed, the Swedish diplomat responsible for the agency’s formation, Count Folke Bernadotte, was gunned down by Zionist militants shortly after his plan for Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in the course of Israel’s founding was tabled at the United Nations.

Bernadotte’s vision and plan lived on. So has Israel’s hatred for the agency he helped create.

Seventy-five years after Bernadotte’s brutal assassination, in the course of its seemingly genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has killed at least 220 UNRWA staff with US bombs and missiles.

For thoughts on Israel’s September 11 attack on the Nuseirat school, the GPM reached out to former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness, now the Executive Director of the Myanmar Accountability Project.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Count Folke Bernadotte

According to Wikipedia, Zionism is “an ethno-cultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century and aimed for the establishment of a Jewish state through the colonization of a land outside Europe … a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible. Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism became Israel’s national or state ideology.”

In 1975, the UN General Assembly declared Zionism to be “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” In 1991, that resolution was revoked.

Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism, Israel’s allies and advocates insist.

Tell that to US-based Jewish Voice for Peace, “the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world.”

North of the border, Independent Jewish Voices Canada has just declared itself to be anti-Zionist. For thoughts on that stance, the GPM reached out to IJV founding member Sid Shniad.

Listen to our conversation in today’s GPM podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

It’s a staggering statistic. Covid killed almost seven million worldwide. The number is likely higher.

Meanwhile, a potentially deadlier pandemic sweeps the planet — Bacterial infections antibiotics can’t cure.

According to one UK government study, by 2050, ten million may die annually, infected by multi or pan-resistant microbes no drug will kill.

Drug resistance is the ineluctable result of antibiotic overuse or misuse – to treat viral infections, for example. What doesn’t kill infectious bacteria makes them stronger. So, science searches for new ones.

The trouble is, Big Pharma isn’t interested. There’s no profit to be made developing drugs that will end up on the top shelf, reserved for emergencies, when no other drug will work. Big Pharma wants to produce drugs that billions will use, all the time – precisely how antibiotics can’t be used, or else they’d become useless!

So, academic researchers are picking up the slack.

At McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario a team of scientists are screening thousands of hopeful candidates, totally new kinds of antibiotics, that bugs have never seen, and are unlikely to become resistant to.

And, for hot tips on what will work and what won’t, they’re turning to artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning.

Jon Stokes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Since ancient times, nothing has fascinated human beings more than the diversity of life around them. Aristotle was among the first natural historians. Naturalis historia, by Pliny, is the Roman Empire’s largest surviving work.

The identification and description of living things has come a long way since ancient Greece and Rome. Today, biologists use DNA barcodes to identify living creatures.

a DNA barcode is a small fragment of DNA that’s characteristic for a species. A half-dozen standardized barcodes exist for different groups of organisms. COX1 is used to identify animals. Botanists use a chloroplast gene. The ‘Internal Transcribed Spacer’, or ITS barcode, is used to identify fungi. Bacteria have their own barcodes too.

Within any broad group, that standard barcode varies from species to species. A digital device reads it, just like a supermarket scanner reads the barcode on a can of soup or a roll of toilet paper. Predictably, DNA barcode readers are getting small.

Here’s a story about that. Listen to it in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Dutch biologist Kevin Beentjes and his barcode reader (David Kattenburg)

Men are from Mars, women from Venus, John Gray famously wrote, back in the nineties.

Science says it’s true – sort of: male and female brains are wired differently.

Sandra Witelson is a veteran brain researcher, with a collection of over a hundred brains she’s been gathering for years. Albert Einstein’s was the first. The differences between male and female grey matter – especially in the language and speech regions – interest Witelson greatly.

Witelson’s studies revolve around brain lateralization – anatomical and functional differences between people’s right and left cerebral hemispheres just above the ears. And, how male brains get sexualized. At the tender age of five weeks, male embryos get doused in testosterone, changing them and their brains forever.

Sandra Witelson is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Sandra Witelson (David Kattenburg)

Humanity has never faced a more monumental challenge. After two centuries of burning fossil carbon, trashing the atmosphere, pushing Earth systems to the edge of collapse, industrial societies need to develop other sources of energy that are renewable and clean.

The prospects are frightening, but climate angst has an antidote.

Wind and solar, for sure.

There’s another vast storehouse of energy on half the world’s doorstep — Earth’s oceans.

Covering three quarters of the planet’s surface, they store colossal volumes of heat, that can be tapped.

So can the kinetic energy from ocean waves and tides.

This past spring, in the Dutch capital of Den Haag, several hundred entrepreneurs and engineers came together to showcase innovative devices for doing just that, at the annual gathering of Ocean Energy Europe.

Listen to some voices the GPM gathered. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Alejandro Marques de Magallanes Crespo, founder of Magallanes Renovables

Talking about the energy of ocean tides — rising and falling like clockwork, under the influence of the moon — no better place to tap this colossal energy resource than the Shetland Islands, on the northern tip of Scotland, and in the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, home to the highest tides in the world.

That’s what a company called Nova Innovation is doing. Simon Forrest is founder and CEO. In a quiet spot on the margins of last spring’s Ocean Energy Europe conference, in The Hague, the GPM sat down for a chat with Simon.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Petit Passage, on the Bay of Fundy, where a Nova turbine will soon generate tidal energy

Conferences are fun. Lots of interesting people to meet and sessions to attend.

Better still, heading out into the field. Especially if it’s North Holland. That’s where the GPM went, last spring, on a bus trip organized by the Dutch Energy From Water Association, together with forty ocean energy innovators from around the world.

Our first stop: Den Helder, at the manufacturing facility of Symphony Wave Power, to see their wave energy demonstrator. Fred Gardner is Symphony’s founder.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Rik Siebers, Director of REDstack, showing small-scale model of reverse electrodialysis

Of all the forms of energy readily available to coastal communities around the world, none is more intriguing than salt.

To be more precise, salt gradients. Wherever fresh river water flows into salty ocean, that freshwater gets infused with sodium, calcium, chloride and sulfate ions, and salt gradients form. Make this happen across a plastic membrane, under controlled conditions, you generate electricity.

Reverse electrodialysis, it’s called. No better place to see this in action – indeed, the only place – than the Afsluitdijk. Check it out on a map. It’s that long highway, built on a dike between the Dutch provinces of North Holland and Friesland, separating the freshwater Ijsselmeer from the salty Waddenzee.

Afsluitdijk

Right in the middle of the Afsluitdijk, a company called REDstack is bringing fresh and saltwater together, and putting electricity into the Dutch grid. RED stands for Reverse Electrodialysis.

The first voice you’ll hear is Peter Scheijgrond, Chairman of the Dutch Energy From Water Association, our tour leader last spring. Then Rik Siebers, REDstack’s Managing Director and Michael van Oostrom, Head of Market Development.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Five weeks shy of the first anniversary of October 7, 2023 and the launch of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza, the GPM sat down with one of the conflict’s most astute observers, Mouin Rabbani.

Rabbani shared his thoughts about Israel’s genocidal war, the Palestinian people’s depleted, divided and leaderless ‘national liberation movement’ (a state of affairs much to Israel-USA’s liking), and about the much touted ‘Axis of Resistance’ — a coalition of independent parties that know how far to push Israel, ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian people, without damaging their own interests.

Shifting perceptions of the self-declared ‘Jewish State’ in Europe, the US, and within Israel itself, and recent groundbreaking developments at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, all point towards an uncertain future for Palestinians and Israelis alike, Rabbani tells the GPM in this interview.

Mouin Rabbani is a Dutch-Palestinian researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and contemporary Middle East issues. He’s served as the head of political affairs with the Office of the United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, and as Senior Middle East Analyst and Special Advisor on Israel-Palestine with the International Crisis Group.

These days, Rabbani is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and co-Editor of Jadaliyya.com.

The GPM spoke with Mouin Rabbani in The Hague. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Mouin Rabbani (David Kattenburg)

“It’s the economy, stupid.”

In search of US presidential campaign slogans summing up what concerned voters, this was the catchiest Bill Clinton strategist Jim Carville came up with, back in 1992.

“Change vs. more of the same” and “Don’t forget health care” were much less memorable.

Thirty-two years and eight presidential campaigns later, another pressing issue is on the minds of those who’d likely vote for Kamala Harris, if she gets on the right page — an arms embargo on Israel, and a US-enforced halt to the Gaza genocide.

The GPM spoke about the Harris campaign and Israel-USA’s ongoing Gaza genocide with Medea Benjamin, co-founder and tireless guerilla activist with the American feminist antiwar group, CODEPINK.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here.

Gaza (Tasnim News Agency)

Here’s another slogan – ‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall be Free’.

Sounds righteous, no? Calling for freedom … or an end to non-freedom?

According to allies and advocates of the ‘Jewish State’ of Israel, this popular slogan is horridly antisemitic – a vulgar rallying cry for racial hatred and genocide.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, shouting out this phrase can land you a stiff fine, or get your fired.

Earlier this month, a Berlin court slapped a 600 Euro fine (about 600 US dollars) on a young German-Iranian woman for shouting out this two-phrase declaration at a Berlin rally, four days after Hamas’ assault on southern Israel.

Bad timing. According to a court spokesperson, the slogan “could only be understood as a denial of Israel’s right to exist.” All the more reprehensible, Judge Birgit Balzer sniffed, given Germany’s responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust, and its sacred obligation to be perpetually penitent.

Staatsräson, it’s called. Reason of state. To learn more about Staatsräson — and the hazards of calling for Palestinian liberation in Germany, especially if you’re a person of colour — the GPM reached out to Wieland Hoban, Chairman of Germany’s Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East — Jüdische Stimme.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above or go here.

Listen to our complete conversation here:

Konrad Adenauer, architect of Staatsräson

And … Shout out about to another Harbinger Media Network podcast you might be interested in — Cyborg Goddess: a Feminist Tech Podcast. Host Jennifer Jill Fellows interviews researchers about the effects of technology. From bicycles to vibrators, birth control to fitbits, social media to chatGPT, Cyborg Goddess unpacks it all from a feminist intersectional lens. Check them out here.

Seventy-nine years ago, on August 6, 1945, the US dropped a uranium-enriched fission bomb, code named ‘Little Boy’, on the Japanese port city, Hiroshima.

Three days later, they dropped a second bomb, a plutonium-implosion device — Fat Man — on Nagasaki.

When the dust settled, between 130 and 225,000 people were dead or dying. To this day, casualty numbers vary widely. One thing is clear: they were almost all civilians.

Thousands more would sicken and die in the years to come.

America’s public rationale for its nuclear bombing of Japan: avoiding the huge casualties that supposedly would have resulted from putting boots on Japanese ground.

Other, more cynical reasons would emerge in time.

Here’s a story about America’s development of the bomb, adapted from a documentary produced by Clive Baugh, Ed Reece and David Kattenburg back in 1986. It takes its name from a prose-poem by the American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic and writer Thomas Merton.

The story features interviews with German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe, the head of the theoretical physics division of the Los Alamos Laboratory, where America’s first nuclear ‘device’, Trinity, was developed, and the winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics. We interviewed Bethe in his office at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. A memorable conversation.

You’ll also hear Martin Johns, late Professor Emeritus of physics at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, and researcher at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear facility. Johns joined the McMaster faculty in 1947, and helped manage its small experimental particle accelerator. He shares the history of Canada’s involvement in the development of America’s nuclear bombs (The Canadians were indeed involved. Listen to Hans Bethe).

And Rosalie Bertell, late anti-nuclear campaigner and authority on the effects of ionizing radiation. Bertell was a sister of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart, and author of the 1985 work No Immediate Danger – Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. She won the 1986 Right Livelihood Award — the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ — for “raising public awareness about the destruction of the biosphere and human gene pool, especially by low-level radiation.”

Thanks to Brenda Muller for her cello and Michael J. Birthelmer for his guitar. And to the Firesign Theatre, America’s counterculture comics.

Listen to all these voices in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Almost eighty years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the real reasons for America’s hideous assault have been unearthed by a small army of scholars. Among these – a guy named Glenn Alcalay. Alcalay is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, at City University of New York.

Back in the mid-1970s, Alcalay spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Marshall Islands, just north of the equator, in the Central Pacific. The US carried out 67 nuclear tests there, between 1946 and 1958.

The biggest was Bravo, its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, detonated at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls, on March 1, 1954. Alcalay spent those two years on a small atoll downwind from Bikini. Inspired by that experience, he began researching the impacts of US weapons testing on the Marshallese people — and the true history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stuff you won’t learn about from the blockbuster film, Oppenheimer.

Listen to our conversation with Glenn Alcalay. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Old observation tower pad on Bikini Island (David Kattenburg)

It’s a sobering truth – that few know. Having dropped those two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eighty years ago, America would probably not have become the most powerful nation in the world had it not been for a string of atolls in the central Pacific, and the hospitable islanders who let it test its arsenal there.

They didn’t have much choice. America tested its first bomb, Trinity, in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It dropped its second and third bombs on Japan. A year later — having been handed the Marshall Islands as a Strategic Trust by the UN — the US set out to use it as the testing ground for its now burgeoning nuclear arsenal. In July 1946, the US set off Able and Baker at Bikini Atoll, in the central Marshalls.

Twenty-one more would follow, including the leviathan, 15-megatonne Bravo blast, on March 1, 1954. Forty-four bombs were tested at Eniwetok atoll, in the northern Marshalls. Read a detailed account of the history of the Marshall Islands here, written back in 2007.

Nothing much has changed since then. Bikini is still contaminated, and has not been resettled. Radiation monitoring continues. Health impact claims adjudicated and awarded by the new defunct Nuclear Claims Tribunal have yet to be paid. Trust funds administered since 2016 by Bikini leaders have reportedly been squandered.

A third Compact of Free Association between the US and the Republic of the Marshall Islands is on track to be approved this Fall.

The Marshalls faithfully vote the way Washington tells them to at the UN — most famously, alongside neighboring Pacific island states, in opposition to UN resolutions condemning Israel or calling for the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.

The US continues to fire missiles at Kwajalein Atoll from California and Alaska, and nearby Ebeye is still packed like a sardine can.

Not surprisingly, the Marshallese people are as friendly as ever. Diabetes and heart disease kill more of them than nuclear-related cancers.

Listen to this story about the Marshall Islands in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.