i would be very reluctant to cut defense spending until we see really how these two conflicts we're in are going to come out and not to worry senator because the u.s. is leading the world in military spending we'll talk about why some americans may not want this to be a sauna. and radiation levels in japan catch up to those a term noble but could another hazardous waste crisis be on the horizon we'll investigate whether nato is using depleted uranium weapons in libya. it was such

a gigantic achievement for all humanity and the russians of course regret of their role in this and houston we have a golden celebration fifty years ago today russia launched the first managers face we're going to have more on the inspirational legacy of cosman i hear it the garron . welcome back it's tuesday april twelfth i can here in washington d.c. and lucy catherine of and you're watching our team. now as debt reduction dominates the political debate here in washington lawmakers are pushing for massive cuts in the us budget but one area that is likely to escape the cutting frenzy is a sacred cow of military spending which according to a new report by a stunning eighty one percent since two thousand and one so how are american taxpayers regarding to reacting to a trend that shows no sign of letting up well arty's karen ford reports.

but. plenty is on the u.s. chopping block this week health care education infrastructure was here he was all over. everything that is except for the pentagon my greatest fear is that in economic tough times the people will see the principle of it as the place to solve the nation's deficit problems i would be very reluctant to cut defense spending until we see really how these two conflicts were and are going to come out worldwide military spending increased by twenty point six billion dollars in two thousand and ten and one thousand point six billion of that was the u.s. alone according to the stockholm international peace research institute the u.s. very much sees itself as

a global military power it's the only global military superpower. so it perceives it security interests as encompassing the whole world. the u.s. has spent one hundred eighty nine two hundred thirty five years at war in two thousand and ten the us spent more on its military in the next ten highest countries combined. both president bush and obama have ripped of the wars defense spending in the us has increased eighty one percent since two thousand what this seems to reflect a bipartisan prioritization of military and military conceptions of security even in the face of such difficult economic times and american earning federal minimum wage and working forty hours a week fifty two weeks a year can expect to earn a little over fifteen thousand dollars this year well below the poverty line you can also expect to pay more than five hundred dollars directly to the pentagon and american earning fifty thousand dollars

a year will see their income. over two thousand and go directly to america's wars they thought out of control in the oil fields and sold them. little bit just. drags those tax dollars also go to maintaining over one thousand us bases insights world by as well as the pentagon's two hundred thirty four golf courses that's. the one percent of americans polled would rather cut military spending than sacrifice social programs children poor women homeless you know take care of the needs of our population to spend enormous amounts of money on the pentagon budget while our every program is being cut is just fraudulent and obscene try to put it on the ground. they say they feel betrayed by a president was elected i'm promises to and work where doing all these wars and i

don't even want to say and i think that right there is i'm upset with obama you need a reset button you know we need to change right we need the obama administration to do the right thing to stop this attention to continuous military buildup at the four cents of every dollar americans pay in taxes goes to funding past and future war and for all the tough talk by president obama about making hard choices cutting the budget and closing the deficit yeah many americans are wondering when it will be the pentagon's turn to tighten its belt you know in florida our t. washington d.c. . you have a century ago president right i was in howard issued a dire warning to this nation there are immense military establishment joined up with a large arms industry is one of the biggest threats to american democracy. our. resources and why very good are. certainly very structure of our society. in the councils of government we must car guard against was issued that includes

whether sought alone sought by the military industrial complex the potentials or the disastrous rise faced power exists and will persist now that the eisenhower's warning has become today's reality and as we watch this country fall behind other nations in space travel education health care and economic might we are still number one when it comes to the military industrial complex after all this is the force that accounts for arguably as title as being the world's biggest military spender well joining me to discuss all this from panama city florida is columnist and former reagan administration official dr paul craig roberts thank you so much for being here dr roberts now if president eisenhower were alive today what do you think he would make of our enormous military budgets the close ties between washington the pentagon wall street and the like. well he would recognize it is

a huge waste of resources and now his production his warning was correct. democracy now takes second stage to the allegorically private interest and the military security complex is the most powerful these interests and these laws have no national purpose system only in order to create profits for the armaments industry and has no other purpose the idea that the united states threatened by afghanistan or iraq is uncertainty and no sane person can possibly believe them well and even china which would be the strongest rival i guess the united states we spend six months as times in our military on our military as that country so do you think if these massive budgets are coming out of fear or right i mean there really is no rival that that's worth this massive massive budget and that they're coming out of corruption and total corruption to pay off the homeless

in the streets and internally politicians get very generous campaign contributions so it's a recycling of taxpayers' money politicians give it to the armaments industries and armaments industries maybe hundreds of billions of dollars and get back millions to the politicians in campaign contributions and that's what's going on in the wars or appointments that have no real reason i'll grant problems for the governments of the sort of same time i mean the united states at this moment is going a serious financial crisis debts and deficits are at the top of the political agenda that's all that we're hearing from our lawmakers on the hill and so we're hearing things like you know it's time to stop relying on the social safety net that we're used to social security medicare etc etc so why not let's play devil's advocate argument aren't even title is the problem not robert. of course not.

so security payroll tax is more than funded self. since one nine hundred eighty four is generated two trillion dollars that's two thousand billion dollars more in revenues that have been paid out and benefits and what happened to that money and the politicians took and spinach spend it on wars and on the military security complex which bankrupting america is the is the military budget this thing is about twice the reported size of the generally reported size is seven hundred billion is actually about one point two trillion. that's an annual basis it makes no sense the only enemies the united states has is the ones it's created by bombing countries but you just don't think that many missile situation and the economic situation we're in that ability lead to sort of a push from what band from the establishment within to start looking at the fence cuts as a serious viable option i mean are we at this crisis point where we can't turn away

from these types of caught at least as an option. they're too greedy they're driving the country into the ground they're destroying the dollar the dollar is falling every week other foreign currencies make new car it's against the dollar the canadian dollar will be australian dollar the swiss trade recently even the euro making new highs it's no and all the politicians talk about is taking away social security and health care if they do that there will be no basis for consumer demand you can't go and take away pensions from the elderly and expect to have an economy well if they inflate our lawmakers in washington for perfectly fine with doing that but now president obama is set to announce his big speech tomorrow on the possible ways to cut the debt in the deficit and one of the things that's to talk about it but he will be offering some sort of steps on cutting the defense budget what do you expect to see from the president in that vein. just to talk

i think we always said from him he can't do anything he doesn't go in the country the country's government military security complex wall street apac be all industry agribusiness these are the powerful groups that write the laws and congress passes and the president sounds he's a popular he can't do anything. the american people have no control over the united states government is controlled by these very powerful ali gorky interests they have well to go they own it they found. dr roberts before i jump off a bridge because the this indeed a depressing assessment what's the endgame here for the united states i mean we have to wait to be called in our debt and complete and utter catastrophic economic collapse before the system changes. i think so yes.

and. then insurance if. you. are right and unfortunately a doctor or a doctor of us we are out of time we will have to have you back thank you so much for your time that's former assistant secretary of the treasury in the reagan ministration now japan today raise the sabera the level of its nuclear crisis from five to seven making it now on par with the term noble disaster now as the specter of lethal fallout from the fukushima nuclear reactor has rightly captured world attention there could also be an unreported nuclear disaster unfolding in north africa afresh right fighting rocked libya today where hostilities continue but amid the myth that there are mounting questions as to whether the west is again using the preview rainy unripened and its aerial assault r.t.

if you can have that story here. these leave young men cheer on top of a tank hit by coalition forces unaware of the silent killer they could be breathing in as they celebrate though the western coalition denies using depleted uranium in bombings in the country others say there's a good chance weapons with the highly poisonous radioactive element have been used that kind of damage but there's a really good chance it was a de niro. which i'm sure it was. that's reduced anybody who's part of it is going to initial exposure who will go of the wind blowing all. the particles are in the air. so all these people in these cars you. know lisa styria served in the u.s. military during the first gulf war in the early ninety nine clearing up battle

fields in kuwait back then the u.s. dropped more than three hundred fifty tons of depleted uranium over kuwait and iraq pictures of bombings from libya seen all too familiar you see how those touches are red that's the burning see how it shoots out instead of a cone straight up a flare at the bottom that's a new explosion depleted uranium in military terms is highly efficient relatively cheap and powerful enough to penetrate the heaviest armor nato flatly denies its use in libya even though the u.n. human rights commission has called for advanced countries who refused to sign up include the u.s. the u.k. friends and this will the smallest particles a few rainy i'm nanoparticles are the most dangerous ones inhaled they get into the blood until spreading to any organ including the heart brain liver once the

particles penetrate your cell tissue this is when you get all kinds of kinetic new patients and people in iraq for example grieving that contaminated air every day and experts say there is no way to fight it in fallujah or in iraq where the u.s. blocked thousands of depleted uranium rounds after the two thousand and three invasion a quarter of all babies are born with a range of horrendous ever normalities higher rates of cancer leukemia and infant mortality of being found here then after the economy bombs were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki the u.s. and the british military admitted widespread use of depleted uranium in bombing ostia in one thousand nine hundred ninety five for a legacy felt today with cancer and leukemia rates several times higher than normal because medical confirmation all around pollute. iraq that the health effects of the radium are there and we see it throughout iraq or shorted arabia kuwait afghanistan somalia the balkans and again our c unit moving into

libya dr dog rocky was a leading specialist in the cleanup after the gulf war says there is no way of actually decontaminating affected areas that i was going to remember around a lot about the health and environment approach you're a mission he unself was exposed to depleted uranium almost all of the members of his team are now there some theory that the suffering of those bombs in areas where there will be no western troops will go unnoticed. thank you it's just. kind of that and. just saying hey look everybody is dying here they've got fences and they sit up with nations and so forth i don't think anyone listens depleted uranium has a half life of four and a house billion years hence it's the scription by some as the silent killer that will never stop killing. r t launching to n.b.c.

so could a silent killer be rearing its ugly head in the libyan war and what would be the toxic toll on the people there for more we turn to former u.s. marine kenneth o'keefe he is the managing director for the sunni project and joins us live from gaza kind of thank you so much for being here it's great to have you back now you served as a u.s. marine in the one thousand nine hundred one gulf war which unfortunately is one of the first times where depleted uranium was used on the battlefield talk a little bit about your personal experiences with with the human missions. well you know i didn't know anything about it when i when i was in the marines back in the early ninety's and i only found out about it later and realized that you know i was in the areas where the stuff was used and my ex-wife actually had a couple of miscarriages by me and at that point i started to realize that i might very well have been had some of these do you just write ments and my wife actually our two and a half year old son was born to two months early

a couple years back and i can tell you that there was some fear of what i have seen happening to the iraqi people i've been to southern iraq i visited the children's hospital down there and i have seen the effects they have photo album after photo album of these babies that don't even look human and i think that the use of depleted uranium is pretty much the definition definition of crime against humanity a definition of pregnancy many of those are powerful words therefore you would think that given given the blowback effect from soldiers that there would be some sort of change in the system that we wouldn't continue to use these weapons when there's you know i can understand ok maybe we're not asking for other countries lives not that that's ok but obviously that seems to be the line of thought here why not protect our own men and women who are coming into contact with these weapons. well the sad reality is that using the so-called heroes i was called a hero as were all of us and the first gulf war we are nothing more than cannon

fodder and that's the reality they use experimental drugs on a string the gulf war of which i was a participant they gave us experimental drugs so it's not just even do you we're talking about the same thing that adolf hitler did to the jews and gypsies was done to us by our own government radiation experiments have also been done on us troops and so to even think that the high ranking officials in charge of the us military care at all about the troops his pure fantasy don't care about the lower ranking troops at all and they use us in the most obscene of ways and when we come home and have health problems or mental problems or are losing our homes does the government help us no they do not so why would we live under the illusion that the high ranking officials care about us they do not they don't care about us and they certainly don't care about the enemy and nowhere was that more of it and i think in the budget shutdown to paint only on the saw men and women on the front lines not getting paid as a result of the posturing here in washington but back to libya given the use of

these likely to remain in munitions in iraq and kosovo do you think even though the nato officials and u.s. officials insist they are not being used in libya do you think that depleted uranium could now be seeing action on the games around. first thought why would we believe the commanders in the theater there why would we believe anyone in the high ranking positions of the us government the israeli government the british government i mean they're all patent lawyers and for us to think they wouldn't use these munitions would be beyond i you could say of course they will and of course the do everything to cover it up as they always do and the bottom line is until people become more dialed in and actually start caring about this issue i it's going to continue and the thing that really is important to realize is as i think your report really made clear these are do you does fragments they pick up and actually can be lifted up into the upper atmosphere and blown into the jet stream

and actually reach destinations thousands and thousands of miles away so this stuff is spreading all around the planet this is seriously a crime against humanity and he is high time that international law is finally once and for all applied and those that are giving the orders to use this stuff are held to account now unfortunately it doesn't really look like there's going to be that kind of holding to account because it seems that no one is really covering this issue and actually we're out of time to thank you so much for your time and hoping to have you back on i was former u.s. marine and activist kenneth o'keefe now today marks the world wide celebration of a monumental feat that he years ago so because not yuri gagarin boarded his boss took one spacecraft and became the first human being in space and one lasting legacy of the car in spite of the nation's launch pad of baikonur cosmodrome the pad is still in use today but the latest crew of the international space station blasting off on the site just last week the tests are still

a visit the place where history doesn't. i'm here in baikonur where many significant events in space history had taken place not least of which was the first successful manned space flight well it all began here because on this day fifty years ago cosmonaut yuri got aboard his bus stop one capsule and blasted off into space all that launch pad where he had taken off from is now called the good god and start it's the very same launch pad used by the a so used to him a twenty one crew when they left for space on april five going to be a international space station they were of course in a spacecraft that had the initial value to go got it to mark this anniversary well since then a lot of there's a long list of achievements in terms of a space exploration what different countries have done in that field well we have been speaking to the astronauts and for them one of the biggest progress they've seen really is the it cooperation among countries the international space station

is an example a clear example if you will of the global efforts in that regard now of course there are a lot of celebrations planned a two hour mark the anniversary here in baikonur famous personalities are expected to be here and also a special guest who will be joining in the celebrations for a variety of reasons is a band called utica got it for. them i have the honor of taken reconstruct a great strange craft to strace first i was very happy to not only it was only the beginning of april twelve one thousand nine hundred sixty one the day you got it blasted off into space orbited the earth and made history. a feat celebrated across the globe. it was incredible it was hard to believe that this actually happened but let's show you. but for this man it was

also the day his name shot to fame you know i didn't he was not paris didn't know where i was serving they only knew i graduated from pine it's kind of me and the facility was working it was top secret only heard that you re going to be censored to space they see that it was me janice came to our house to interview my parents but they knew nothing i think they could help us attach. he had not the utica god in one thousand nine hundred sixty three while working at the launchpad he ended up face to face with a man and introduced himself. you asked me what month i was born i said and it seemed to me like he was going to collapse or even stretched out my hands to hold him up it turns out he's been in much as well what it was like this will serve as a reminder for future generations of man's first journey into space but for now there are still those who can tell the story of you got it and that momentous day from memory adding another layer of color to history adequate off scale was

a doctor who prepared the garden for his first flight she recalls that very day fifty years ago. when we examined the guard looked more pale than usual he was unsociable and quiet which was not like him and i know he would answer by nodding or a short yes to all questions sometimes he would start humming some tunes this was a different category and would your two month and hugged and i sound yury everything will be fine and he nodded back when you're with the think as soon as you got in return to earth he was a superstar a hero for his compatriots those who knew him admit they weren't quite sure how to act around him. not looking volleyball in the garden and little guy approached the wheel dearest he was very surprised he said what song was. played against him were giving way to govern noticed this and that was offended he said let's play fair ok

for. you the hard pressed to find someone he knew who got it and has a bad word to say after all he was chosen not just reasonability as he cosmonauts but also for his demeanor and signature smile certainly not a bad reputation to be associated with for this you got it this are celia arty so what remains are storper humanity when it comes to space exploration where the answer i turn to space entrepreneur jack remember he told me that your ego current space mission was not only a great accomplishment for russia but for the entire world take a look. i mean the amazing things. but as time passes becoming human. and two hundred years from now three hundred years from now. the only holiday we can be sure that schoolchildren throughout the universe will celebrate

a cultural the first day and it will not be the first the russian or the first human. and it's an extraordinary just in the howard. years how it's gone from being political to celebrate. its goes to new york city and it's only gone now as humanity moves forward with what's space exploration unfortunately the u.s. the space program is retiring the shuttle fleet leotards hard nasa announced today that one of the shuttles is going to be hosted in a meeting exam but what does that say to you about the local trend toward space exploration could be seen as a climate that now that some countries like the u.s. are not doing what they used to know and we talked about this before i think we're going to see a blooming opportunity to go to space because you know while the shuttles are doing it to museums we have all sorts of entrepreneur projects around we have a little and. are merging with nasa contracts with indians and chinese

and russians and europeans japanese so we're entering the one area where weightier from the not important just when you fly you don't really think about whether you look. or you know how you get to europe so i think the beginning of a great deal. very briefly do you think that this wonderful era could be marred by the global economic crisis that maybe folks are saying you know what it's time to spend money on real world things down here on earth and not what captures the imagination space. you know we have to go to space we are going to space itself future and so there are certainly there are a selfish reasons for us to go into the species in this typical of the economic times we have they would look carefully and more economically responsibly and we will and so this is a day of celebration into my russian colleagues let me say you know congratulations and i look forward you know let's wait milestones we do together it's kind rational

to a message from space entrepreneur jack or unfortunately that does it for now for more on us and me on twitter at lucy i know a lot of shows up in thirty minutes by adam our system. we're here we are here right here. i told her i. want to.