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No wonder I'm wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts today! After all, it's exceedingly warm this July, with temperatures only recently hitting a startling 90 in New York City where I live.
Whoops! What was I thinking? I meant this April, as record spring heat moved from the Southwest, where it was 95 degrees in Burlington, Colorado, across the Midwest, to the Northeast. Here, for several days, it felt distinctly like mid-summer. And yes, it's increasingly obvious that we're truly beginning to roast this planet, thanks to the phenomenon known as climate change. In recent decades, it's become all too clear that the burning of fossil fuels represents a potentially world-ending way of life (at least as we humans have known it).
And worse yet, global warming isn't the first but the second apocalyptic way that humanity has pioneered to potentially destroy this planet, the other being, of course, nuclear war. For a long while now, it's seemed as if the nuclear issue that was such a part of my own "duck and cover" childhood, had ceded ground to climate change.
So, thank Vladimir Putin for reminding us that this "new Cold War" era of ours is still a potential nuclear nightmare, too. Only recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the hands on its Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight for the first time since its creation in 1947, thanks in significant part to the war in Ukraine. There, the possibility that Russia's president, pushed against a military wall, might indeed use such weaponry is something we're all now living with, as is the possibility that one of Ukraine's nuclear plants could go up in proverbial flames, creating another war-made Chernobyl.
And as frightening as that might be, those aren't the only nuclear dangers in Ukraine. Let TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, explain. All in all, let's just say that we humans are certainly a rash crew, aren't we? Tom
Will the West Turn Ukraine into a Nuclear Battlefield?
Why Depleted Uranium Should Have No Place There
By Joshua Frank
It's sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia's winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin's objectives, leaving little doubt that the West's conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine's defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland's new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of people have perished; whole villages, even cities, have been reduced to rubble; millions of Ukrainians have poured into Poland and elsewhere; while Russia's brutish invasion rages on with no end in sight.
The hope, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is that the Western allies will continue to furnish money, tanks, missiles, and everything else his battered country needs to fend off Putin's forces. The war will be won, according to Zelensky, not through backroom compromises but on the battlefield with guns and ammo.
"I appeal to you and the world with these most simple and yet important words," he said to a joint session of Great Britain's parliament in February. "Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom."
The United Kingdom, which has committed well over $2 billion in assistance to Ukraine, has so far refused to ship fighter jets there but has promised to supply more weaponry, including tank shells made with depleted uranium (DU), also known as "radioactive bullets." A by-product of uranium enrichment, DU is a very dense and radioactive metal that, when housed in small torpedo-like munitions, can pierce thickly armored tanks and other vehicles.
Reacting to the British announcement, Putin ominously said he would "respond accordingly" if the Ukrainians begin blasting off rounds of DU.
While the UK's decision to send depleted-uranium shells to Ukraine is unlikely to prove a turning point in the war's outcome, it will have a lasting, potentially devastating, impact on soldiers, civilians, and the environment. The controversial deployment of DU doesn't pose faintly the same risks as the actual nuclear weapons Putin and his associates have hinted they might use someday in Ukraine or as would a potential meltdown at the embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in that country. Still, its use will certainly help create an even more lethal, all too literally radioactive theater of war -- and Ukraine will end up paying a price for it.
The Radioactive Lions of Babylon
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