he's available in some of the tilting of the reus till jerusalem. it's five thirty am in moscow good to have you with us here on r.t.c. are headlines russia's security services brief the country's lawmakers on the investigation into last month's bombing of moscow's double that of the airport seven accomplices of the suicide bomber have been identified this after russia's most wanted terrorist doku umarov says he ordered the attack. with the leaks founder julian assange battles attempts to extradite him to sweden in a london court for the second day with the hearing said to resume friday songes lawyers say he'll be denied justice by stockholm and handed over to the u.s. he fears persecution for revealing secret american diplomatic documents to the world. and president hosni mubarak attempts to appease egypt's opposition with

even more concessions by demonstrators in cairo remain defiant the man being tipped to replace mubarak has links with the cia fueling fears that washington may be pulling the strings vice president omar suleiman is former head of egyptian intelligence which has been widely criticized for its systematic use of torture. me up in our special report we find out about war a silent casualty the environment scarred lands and wounded lives coming up next. displacement is another of war's consequences the forced migration of civilians has profound impacts on the natural environment. this image was taken in one thousand nine hundred six after the tens of million government decided to close camps for rwandan refugees the column of refugees in this photo stretched for twenty seven miles toward the rwandan border. these women are i.d.p.'s

internally displaced persons although they have fled the genocide in darfur province they have not crossed the sudanese border and are not considered refugees under international law collect wood for cooking they must risk being attacked by the jan jaweed government backed arab militiamen who target the sudan's black population. with their heavy demand for wood this is dan six million internally displaced persons add further stress to a landscape already degraded by climate change into certification. internal displacement is a growing problem in iraq an estimated two million civilians have been displaced since the start of operation iraqi freedom i.d.p. camps have sprung up in the outskirts of nash f. baghdad and nineveh many lack potable water medicine and proper waste disposal. the

real risk of not addressing the environmental problems is that people simply have to leave their homes if they don't have wood to burn to cook with to heat their homes with don't have water to drink they leave and you see massive displacement happening we call it environmental refugees if you will but people are leaving their homes this creates a demand on resources it creates a demand on infrastructure and ultimately displacement undermines the peace process in the vietnam war which the vietnamese call the american war. there is a class that was a clash between very highly technological society in a largely agrarian society. i think we have a lot of arrogance we thought we were going to go in and take control blow up or needed to blow up and do basically what we wanted.

one of the main reasons that i refused to carry a weapon was that i could not see any justification for the destruction of the lands at the level that i saw in infantry platoon. was mainly moved from place to place by helicopter the helicopters would fly high so as not to draw ground fire and when you're at a high altitude you can look out on the land and see it for miles and miles and miles in the kuchi area especially there were times in places where i would look out and see nothing but a rabbit's landscape bomb craters one after the other so close together and you see little islands of green that had not been bombed. i grew up in

a small town in illinois. town surrounded by corn fields and fields very beautiful town along the illinois river. and when i saw from high in the sky the destruction to the land i couldn't help wondering what if that had happened to our cornfields are being sealed i would really feel if that happened. now do you think. i was i. i went to that war knowing nothing at all but when i saw that level of destruction

i could not believe that this was going to lead to democracy that this was a wind in the sand was going to be. for the cause of freedom i wast whatever little faith i had in the war and being noble in any sense. far away in the pacific lies the tiny atoll of bikini in the. chosen spot of the on

beefing up mankind was terrible false it will go in will be the graveyard of many ships a ghost a navy man down there by goats pigs and white rats awaiting the atomic blast. i mean native personnel come a shot a county out the first time to deal with the island those who live down the japanese mandate. not examine. the united states now wants to turn this great. power or something. and the experiments. are the first step not correct. i think it's generally the case that the greater and more durable impacts come from preparation for war rather than combat self. defense lines to

support the men who mark. but the mobilization reaches still farther into the life of the nation axes must bring in the forests and trees must fall or the sawmills weight loss and builders right for lumber states feel the need to be militarily prepared and in the modern world that has meant building a military industrial complex building a pollution intense is industry to generate military goods one of the best examples of how the business of preparing for war can have long lasting environmental impacts is the nuclear weapons programs around the world that have been in place since the early one nine hundred forty s. wherever this is happened had been environmental problems with radioactive waste.

which no one anywhere has satisfactorily saw. i grew up near the hanford nuclear reservation which is located in washington state when the nuclear bomb for developed their little thought was given to what to do about the waste that would result afterwards indeed now the u.s. department of energy calls him third the world's largest environmental cleanup project pampered washington is the site where the united states says essentially accumulated its nuclear waste mostly from weapons work also from nuclear power and other radioactive related industries hanford was constructed in one thousand nine hundred eighty two under the top secret manhattan project its location along the columbia river provided a ready source of water for cooling nuclear reactors the hanford engineering works produced the plutonium used in the trinity test device and in the fat man released

on the. production of plutonium intensified during the cold war in one thousand and sixty three the dual purpose n. reactor was constructed to generate nuclear power for civilian use when the reactor building completed nineteen sixty three. to break for the construction of. a proper get the. but they're not just been done to battle but not. find a chance to strike a blow. to find a chance to strike a blow for a better life. this is a great laugh i can assure you. from the work we began today. but life worked out. for the electricity. in the united states. providing security for our people.

but. since the production of tony i'm ceased in one thousand nine hundred eighty seven cleanup has been the only mission at the nuclear reservation there are fifty three million gallons of high level radioactive and chemical waste and fraud stored in one hundred seventy seven underground tanks seventy of these tanks have leaked spilling proximately one million gallons of waste into the soil. after washington is a wasteland of leaking radioactive waste that will be with us for decades and decades probably centuries to come and it's currently costing us billions of dollars to just try to contain let alone clean up in truth it's never going to be cleaned up and some of the radioactive waste will remain potentially lethal for twenty four thousand years which is any way you slice it

a long time. the united states used to stockpile chemical weapons unbeknown to most of the world in germany and in okinawa with u.s. troops in japan and those two stockpiles which were never used of course were shipped back secretly to johnston at all in the pacific and one of the world's largest incinerators was built in the middle of a wildlife refuge and that process in burning those chemical weapons from okinawa in germany took place in one thousand nine hundred two to the year two thousand john snapple has been that still is being studied but that's actually a very interesting case of a unique coral reef really in the middle of the pacific ocean it's about seven

hundred fifty miles west of hawaii that was used as a launch site for atmospheric nuclear testing. the five july the fourth vehicle for bluegill a one of a column casualty i know that was a sticking fuel file which caused a fire left more from ignition. missile and more of the more she. went at least one of the atmospheric tests with the hydrogen bomb blew up on the launch pad a good part of just now told was left with highly radioactive plutonium debris twenty years later all the agent orange that was all dumped on johnson stored as

they say on johnson at all that really over time became a dump site of agent orange and now thirdly we put chemical weapons on johnson at all this national wildlife refuge under the fish and wildlife department has really been used and abused by the military over the ages. for. only a few hours before it was wiped out in austin it was efficient little telling point out that it had made before you what to do in such as shelters the people calmly waited all unaware that already descending upon them was the atom bomb. when it was all over on and off scrambles of head off for a moment but on one blasted to extinction the all shattering devastation in which was born that time again. radiation effects not fantastically imprinted on walls and fun it just like doesn't shadow a lot outlined on a building the design of

a dress left on the body of a woman who would die in a few days anyhow. visible. from. the. members of the so-called nuclear club states known to have detonated nuclear weapons either best pic or foreign soil among them at least two thousand have been conducted to spear underwater underground and in space. we're retaining tens of thousands of nuclear weapons when probably a few hundred would be enough for deterrence we have nuclear weapons far in excess of any conceivable need for them as the strongest conventional power by orders of magnitude in the world for this country to say that

we need nuclear weapons what does that signal to the rest of the world. that they must be very valuable and that they probably would want to get them selves i mean i think as long as any nation retained sneak weapons other nations who want them a few years. is or go about was a real promise of hope for the poor both black and white through the poverty program then came the build up in vietnam. and i watched this program broken and it was a rated as if it was some i don't political play thing about suicide to gone mad on war and i knew that america would never invest the necessary energies in rehabilitation of its. star long as the adventures like vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like found in money destructive section

to. the world's currently spending somewhere around a trillion you a stylus on war and preparations for war and this is enormous to fish for a fraction of that a man we could have clean water sanitation education good health care for everybody on the planet such a terrible today she herself since. any war that takes place on the matter how large or how small it has enormous costs to it we're talking in lebanon to the billions of dollars of cleaning up just a fifteen day war let alone you know the years and years of warfare in iraq or afghanistan or vietnam or wherever else they may take place so the costs of war really. if they're well understood and in most cases they're not but if they're well understood should preclude the war to begin with the war is not worth the cost in terms of lives but also long term environmental and public health damage for

decades to come. fossil fuel is a particular problem in this time a concern at that climate change just fine example i think illustrates it well if we imagine one f. sixteen fighter. flying for just under one at a decent proximately twice as much oil as he average american citizen he's in he's ok if you're here. the f. sixteen is just one machine in one branch of the military to take another example the army's abrams tank weighs sixty eight tons and requires two gallons of fuel per mile. all told the united states department of defense burned some three hundred fifty thousand barrels of oil per day making it the world's largest single consumer the defense department uses i think somewhat over two thirds of the energy. that

the u.s. government. uses and it uses them for ships and tanks and planes and heating buildings and a whole host of other things. were probably the largest impact that all the defense effort has is a diversion of intellectual and or g. and our monetary resources away from trying to solve an address some of the long term problems. in sea level is also rising and in louisiana we've been losing thirty square miles a year roughly. of land. i mean if the united states were losing that to some foreign power we'd have the military out there defending you. we often ask the question where were you on september eleventh well i remember that

very curtly because i was in new york and i was there specifically to give a luncheon address at the new york times on the new book eco economy building an economy for the year. well by mid-morning that lunch was already history terrorism is a threat no question about it but on my list of threats to our future. there are there are many more serious threats climate change being an obvious one population growth being another the economy does not exist in the vacuum it is entirely dependent on the earth's natural systems and resources and if we damage and destroy those systems and resources then the economy will eventually decline and one day collapse the challenge is not to fashion a high tech military response to terrorism that will work the challenge is to build an environmentally sustainable equitable society that will do more to undermine

terrorism than any possible high tech military weapon systems we can divide us. the other exciting thing is that almost everything we need to do has already been done by at least one country. in his book plan b. lester brown uses scientific and economic studies together with data from the world bank united states government and the united nations to draft a global budget for restoring the earth we look at the two sort of major components of what we think it's going to take to create a sustainable future one is poverty eradication and population stabilization and then we treat those as one because we think they're closely related when we put the budgets together for eradicating poverty stabilizing population plus what we call the earth restoration budget it comes to a total of one hundred sixty one billion dollars now that's a lot of money it's

a third of the u.s. military budget. it's a third of the u.s. military budget and the u.s. military budget is half of the global military budget which is now without a trillion dollars and if you asked the question could we reduce the u.s. military budget by a third. and shift those expenditures into poverty eradication population stabilization earth restoration i think it's clear that we would do far more to insure our future than if we just stay with a half trillion dollars of u.s. taxpayer money going to military purposes. the environment is in intend to fund national security and i don't mean that in a trite and cliched way our resource constraints even if we were to defend us that is physically we need those resources and if we're not going to be able to prove

the them it is strategically tactically and just common sense why a big mistake as soon. giorgi concerns are discussed the environment is immediately trumped and people say well we have to move forward because this is a matter of our survival and what we have been suggesting is that the environment itself has a very survivalist take element to it so protecting the environment should be considered at that level. environmental harms should be considered what we call in political terry common of versions if you are at a crossroads you have two cars that have divergent interests one is going in one direction the other in the other direction they are not going in the same direction but they have a common aversion which is getting into an accident. and they're likely to cooperate over that common aversion whether it's through a stop sign or through some kind of traffic regimen even sides that do not like to

cooperate on other things and have divergent interests they may still have common of versions. rising temperatures rising seas and intensifying storms eroding coastlines falling water tables vanishing habitats and species the broad threats facing us in the twenty first century are environmental yet the environment is consistently overshadowed by the immediacy of war and preparations for war it is extremely difficult to get the nation mobilized against something that is a long term as opposed to a short term problem as long as there is no emphasis or insufficient emphasis from the national leadership to protect the environment you probably cannot expect the military to give it high priority what we're looking at now is

a threat to our global civilization and saving. our civilization is not a spectator sport we've got to change the system now and that means become politically active it means supporting political candidates who understand the issues of what to do something about it it means letting elected representatives whether members of the city council or members of congress or parliaments around the world let them know about our concerns and what we expect them to do about them this is going to decide whether we make or not we have to become politically active .

this is nature and discover is. communicate with the wild and learn. test yourself and become free. see what nature can give you an aunty. wealthy british style. markets why not scandals find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into kinds a report on our.

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