Press Room

To Miriam Pemberton, a national-security analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, the new study should prompt a major re-assessment of the regular military budget (not including the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars), which grew by nearly 50 percent in real terms to more than half a trillion dollars – over the decade that followed 9/11.

“We need to bring that budget back to where it was when these wars began,” she told IPS. “Those savings need to be re-invested in the needs that have been neglected over the past decade, foremost among them, in my view, being the urgent need to address the climate crisis by investing in a transition to a clean energy and transportation economy.”

In the first five years after the reactor closed, Sacramento County child-cancer rates for ages zero to 19 fell 13.6 percent, while the rest of the state remained virtually unchanged, according to the report.

After five years, the child-cancer county rate remained below the state's incidents.

“The federal government, unfortunately, has been caught up in a conflict of interest about the effects of ionizing radiation mainly because of its role in establishing nuclear weapons and usage of atomic energy to generate electricity,” said Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, who focuses on nuclear disarmament, environmental, and energy policies.

“I think we need to keep a careful eye on how the government proceeds in doing these studies, and that I think there needs to be much more support for independent studies of this kind.”

"[I]t proves once again that [Obama's] got a Cracker Jack speech writing team. His speech in Jerusalem and even some of the stuff he said to the Palestinians was pretty great. You know, the man can talk. And the speech talked about justice . . . But the problem was he said all that wonderful stuff but made very clear, quite explicit, that if Israel simply said no, there would be no consequences. 

. . . But it was also important . . . that when the U.S. wants to pressure Israel for something they want, which in this case was a reconciliation between its two crucial allies in the region, Israel and Turkey, the U.S. gets what it wants . . . And that's one of the important lessons. The U.S. has the capacity to pressure Israel.

It doesn't use that capacity on behalf of the Palestinians. It will use it when necessary to gain something vis-a-vis Turkey. But so far we have not seen a commitment to the lovely words that President Obama spoke to justice, to an end of occupation, to equality. We're not seeing that."