Nuclearizing New York's Harbor

...Yet Mayor Edward I. Koch and most other city and state officials, carried away by predictions that the base would create thousands of new jobs and funnel hundreds of millions of dollars in financial benefits to the city's economy, gave the Navy's plan their enthusiastic support...

...In responding to the suit, the Navy trotted out the same game of hide-andseek it had earlier played in New Zealand, Japan and other friendly countries concerned about visits by U.S...

...The guidelinesare set forth in an operations document entitled, "Alert Planning Factors and Procedures...

...Of these, 66 took place in port...

...That is because the Navy maintains a policy of secrecy concerning its nuclear-armed battleships: Personnel are directed to conceal and withhold any information pertaining to accidents aboard these vessels as long as, in the Navy's opinion, there is no immediate danger to the public...

...The Navy, he observed, claimed that "military necessity" required the dispersal of its nuclear-armed fleet to various homeports...

...Although this prospect is being welcomed by most of the local political power structure, residents of the metropolitan area are suddenly going to realize that they are sitting ducks—potential victims of a catastrophe of monumental proportions...

...Because it could not be proved that the nuclear weapons would actually be present in the New York harbor, the court held, the Navy was under no obligation to address the public health and other problems that could result from a nuclear mishap, as required by the...

...Indeed, when one considers the immensity of the dangers posed by a nuclear weapons accident in the New York harbor, it is questionable whether any feasible emergency evacuation/medical treatment plan could be adequate...

...Nuclear weapons accidents can occur for a variety of reasons: human error by military personnel, or aberrant behavior due to stress, to psychotic/neurotic disorders, or to drug or alcohol abuse...

...and with other laws designed to protect the public from the risk of contamination posed by the movement of nuclear weapons into the harbor...

...Iowa and its six supporting vessels would be armed with a variety of nuclear weapons, each possessing fire power 15 times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima...

...Altogether, three years of efforts by respected environmental organizations, community groups and concerned citizens have failed to derail the Navy's plans for establishing the New York homeport...

...acts of terrorism or sabotage by civilians or foreign agents...

...Weiss petitioned Judge Sifton to be allowed to furnish him privately with a copy of the report, arguing that the Defense Department was "manipulating the classifying process to make it impossible for the Court to see it...

...Undeterred by this setback, a group of environmental organizations and concerned citizens, including Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club and seven members of New York's City Council, started lawsuits challenging the project in state and Federal courts...

...W. JacksonDavis, executive director of the Environmental Studies Institute at Santa Cruz, California, has observed that the incineration of a single nuclear warhead containing 5 kilograms of plutonium-239 in a three-hour chemical fire in New York harbor would, given the usual prevailing winds, spread radioactive plutonium dioxide in huge concentrations across Manhattan, the Bronx, parts of Queens, Westchester, Connecticut, and Massachusetts...

...Joseph A. Ruskay, a previous contributor to the NL, is on the steering committee of the New York Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control...

...Another Coast Guard study found that between 1968 and 1980 vessels carrying highly flammable, explosive, or otherwise hazardous cargo figured in 285 collisions, rammings and groundings...

...With hundreds of ship movements each day, there are frequent collisions in its busy channels, such as the Verrazano Narrows...

...At least 140 of the mishaps involved weapons similar to those scheduled to be deployed off Staten Island...

...The three judges on the Federal Court of Appeals who heard the case went even further, ruling that since the Navy had asserted it would move forward on the operational aspects of the homeport plan with or without additional housing for its personnel, environmental problems raised by those facilities were irrelevant to the construction of the base...

...Thus, barring a sudden about-face by a Congress less subservient to the demands of the military establishment— an unlikely development—the U.S.S...

...What is particularly upsetting to contemplate is that a nuclear foul-up could occur in New York harbor once the homeport is in operation without residents of the metropolitan area ever learning about it...

...nucleararmed vessels to their harbors: While admitting that the U.S.S...

...Over 30,000 latent cancer fatalities would result, as well as other illnesses and birth defects...

...Congressman Weiss asserted that the Navy had acted improperly in partially classifying the GAO document, which he had been permitted to see but whose contents he could not publicly reveal...

...Soon thereafter, Judge Sifton denied Congressman Weiss' motion...

...A few months later the coalition of plaintiffs tried a new tack...

...opponent of the homeport project, attempted to bring certain information to Judge Sifton's attention at the time he was hearing the suit over the Navy's housing plans for the Staten Island base...

...Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the homeport struggle, though, has been the performance of the Navy and the Defense Department...

...Nevertheless, he declined to stop the dredging or construction...

...The probability of anuclear accident in New York is especially high because the port is one of the most heavily trafficked in the United States...

...131 of them, involving 366 vessels, were shipto-ship collisions, and the balance represented single vessel accidents...

...The document goes on to order Navy commanders "to recover or remove, if at all practical, all evidence of the nuclear accident or significant incident as expeditiously as possible...

...The Board of Estimate then approved the plan, even though its provisions fell woefully short of what opponents of the homeport deemed minimally necessary...

...Yet that is not really surprising...

...Through secrecy and deviousness, they have been able to work their will irrespective of the welfare of a substantial part of the population...

...Clearly, there would be no hope of treating more than a comparative handful of plutonium-inhalation cases...

...Only two mobile vans equipped for radiation accident management exist in all of New York City...

...Ultimately the matter was placed before the Court of Appeals in Albany...

...In addition, the local newspapers and other media, with a few laudable exceptions, have from the beginning given scant coverage to the New York homeport controversy...

...He bolstered his application with an affidavit from Michael McCally, professor of clinical medicine at the University of Chicago, that detailed the extraordinary hazards to public health and safety inherent in the homeport project...

...The plaintiffs appealed Sifton's decision, but to no avail...

...In fact, since the homeport was first proposed, the Navy is consistently on record as refusing to either admit or deny that any such proposal exists...

...therefore it must be allowed to proceed with the project...

...While the Court was pondering this request, the Navy abruptly classified the entire GAO report, citing "national security" considerations...

...Throughout these legal skirmishes most of New York's public officials—including Mayor Koch, a majority of the city's Board of Estimate, Governor Mario Cuomo, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan—continued to support the project...

...In sum, he seemed to be saying that the military need only plead "national security" for its operations to be exempt from Federal environmental laws...

...The item in question was an April 1987 report of the General Accounting Office (GAO) that criticized the Navy's failure to address the public safety implications of its plan to put nuclear-armed warships in the New York harbor...

...Iowa and six other ships in the Navy's nuclear flotilla will in a year or two be anchored in New York's lower bay...

...Some three years ago, the Navy decided to disperse its nuclear fleet to 13 "homeports" on the East and West Coasts...

...The New York Times, for example, has seen fit to print very little about the issue, treating it almost as a nonevent...

...This past March an analysis-cumplan was completed, and it was the subject of a one-day hearing before the Mayor's Emergency Board...

...establishes an official admission by the Navy that it has a proposal to deploy nuclear weapons at the Staten Island homeport...

...What is more, despite all the rallies, public protests, lawsuits, and other activities of the project's opponents, the fact that New York is about to become a nuclear arsenal has virtually been forgotten by most of the 10 million or so residents who will be affected...

...New York's harbor was selected as one of these locations...

...Noting that the report contained "information of the utmost gravity," he maintained that withholding it from court scrutiny would "prevent fair and impartial review" of findings relevant to the safety of New York metropolitan area residents...

...People tend to have short memories, and every day, it seems, New Yorkers are assailed by new problems and fresh horror stories...

...When news of the plan to base seven heavily armed nuclear warships in one of the most densely populated areas in the world became public, it did not go unnoticed: Over 100,000 New Yorkers signed a petition asking for a referendum that would prohibit the City from providing funds or property for the Navy's proposed base...

...This was aptly demonstrated when Representative Ted Weiss (D.-N.Y...

...in its plans for the base facilities...

...If but one such accident had involved a nuclear-armed warship like the U.S.S...

...Citing a previous Supreme Court decision that had found the Navy's evasive doubletalk unobjectionable when its plan to store nuclear weapons in Hawaii was challenged, he declared that "none of the plaintiffs' proffered evidence considered alone or together...

...According to a Coast Guard study, 682 accidents took place in New York harbor between 1976 and 1980...

...Late last year, however, the stillvocal citizens' coalition noted the total lack of attention to emergency procedures in the event of a nuclear weapons accident aboard one of the Navy's vessels...

...Opinion polls showed that New Yorkers were overwhelmingly opposed to playing host to the nuclear battleships...

...The request was rejected by the Board, but its members were persuaded to order the City to draft, by the spring of 1988, an analysis of the risks of such an accident and an emergency plan for mass evacuation and medical treatment of the injured should one occur...

...Because the courts have been reluctant to challenge the Navy's policy, in many cases substantive judicial inquiry is foreclosed...

...The Mayor went so far as to direct the City's Corporation Counsel to ask the courts to force the referendum off the ballot...

...It urged the Board of Estimate to call a halt to all city funding for the project until an appropriate plan was drawn up, accompanied by an environmental impact statement detailing the consequences of a nuclear mishap...

...Judge Sifton agreed that the Navy had failed to comply with the...

...then commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, now head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), it states: "If possible, the nuclear accident or significant incident should be treated as an accident or incident involving conventional high explosives__A denial should characterize the accident or incident as a non-nuclear event...

...In the years 1965-85, the Navy reported an annual average of 32.6 nuclear "accidents" and "incidents" (there seems to be little difference between the two categories, judging from the definitions provided by the Chief of Naval Operations in a July 197 8 release...

...Iowa and its sister ships scheduled to be stationed in New York were capable of carrying nuclear weapons, the Navy insisted that for reasons of "national security" it could neither "confirm nor deny" that such weapons would in fact be aboard the vessels...

...Issued in May 1984 by Admiral William J. Crowe Jr...

...The judge was asked to enjoin all dredging and pier construction until the Navy modified its housing plans to satisfy the Federal environmental legislation...

...Moreover, even if all of the approximately 60 emergency hospital facilities in the city's five boroughs were available and the victims could be rapidly transported to them, none of these facilities have equipment for diagnostic measurement of contamination or of subsequent decontamination...

...Iowa and six other battleships riding at anchor in the lower bay off Staten Island—all fully outfitted with nuclear weapons...

...and simple, mechanical failure...

...This evidence left no doubt that the U.S.S...

...In April of last year, Judge Charles P. Sifton of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn delivered his ruling...

...Iowa, the result could have been catastrophic...

...The problems of evacuating hundreds of thousands of people attempting to escape exposure to airborne radiation defy description...

...The Federal level suit sought to enjoin the Navy from beginning construction of the base until it complied with the provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act...

...The plaintiffs offered testimony given at open Congressional hearings by a number of high-ranking Navy officers, as well as a detailed affidavit from Rear Admiral Eugene T. Carroll (retired), former Chief of American Armed Forces in Europe...

...In a highly unusual and controversial decision, the tribunal ruled that a referendum would be unconstitutional...

...They went back to Judge Sifton with evidence that the facilities planned by the Navy for housing some 5,000 seamen, officers, and members of their families at the homeport site threatened irremediable damage to the environment, including wildlife wetlands, and thus violated the...