eleven thirty am in moscow these are your r.t. headlines gadhafi is remaining supporters but fierce resistance in three libyan cities while his remaining supporters in tripoli see their gripped by fear and oppression loyalist forces forces are deeply entrenched in sirte bani walid and saddam but these whereabouts remain unknown. as nato seems ahead with pressure agreements on putting u.s. missiles in eastern europe there are security concerns of the kremlin and a call for urgent talks rumania poland and turkey poised to host elements of the defense shield that moscow feels could neutralize its nuclear deterrence. moscow

and london put deals before differences with david cameron securing multi-million dollar contracts during the first trip by british prime minister to russia in six years both sides shelf their disagreements even though the two thousand and six london murder of former f.s.b. officer alexander litvinenko came up at the news conference. and peacekeepers in kosovo on high alert as an ethnic tension in serbia as great a way republican reaches a boiling point violence broke out recently when kosovo forcibly seems to serbian checkpoints. up next r.t. takes a look at how conflicts can leave iraq scars on the planet part two of our special report coming up. this placement is another of the 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 of the tens of million government decided to close

the camps for rwandan refugees the column of refugees in this photo spread for twenty seven miles or the rwandan. these women are i.d.p.'s internally displaced persons although they have fled the genocide and are for problems 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 gender when government backed arab militia men target the sudan's black population. with their heavy demand for wood and six million internally displaced persons and further stress to a landscape already degraded by climate change and desert. enter nl 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 on the outskirts of 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 i to cook with to heat their homes where they 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 american war. there is a clash and was a clash between a very highly technological society and a largely agrarian society. i think we had

a lot of arrogance we thought we're going to go in and take control blow up or we needed to blow rock and do basically what we wanted. one of the main reasons that i refused to carry weapons was that i could not see any justification for the destruction of the way and at the level that i saw an 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 cancerian is specially there were times and places where i would look out and see nothing but

a ravenous landscape bomb craters one after the other so close together and use a little islands agreement that had not been bombed. i grew up in a small town and illinois. a town surrounded by corn fields and fields very beautiful towns along that were in the river. and when i saw from i am describing the destruction to the land i couldn't help wondering where this happened to our cornfields are being sealed i would we feel if that happened. and i was the only. the there.

i went there that were 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 line in the sand that was going to be. put the cause of freedom i wast whatever little faith i had in the war being no work and he's. got bored. bored bored. bored. bored. bored.

but away in the pacific i was a tiny at all of bikini in the martial art doesn't start with the ambition of mankind but edible thought it was gone over the graveyard of many ships goes the navy man don't know if i go to take some of my friends waiting at sonic but. i mean maybe a personnel come a shot a callee out that first task to deal with the islanders who lived on a japanese mandate for twenty years now to jamie the. united states now wants to turn this great it power in something part of benefit. and that is experiment here. are the first step.

i think it's generally the case that the greater and more durable impacts come from preparation for war rather than combat itself. doesn't have the best minds parm to support a man who march and say a one plot but the mobilization reaches filter the rate of the life of the nation actors must bring in the parson must fall other sawmills wait for law and builders wait 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 intensive 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 there have been environmental problems with radioactive waste. which no one anywhere has satisfactorily saw. i grew up near the handshake and a reservation which is located in washington state when the nuclear bombs were developed their little thought was given to what to do about the waste that would result afterwards and now the u.s. department of energy calls hanford the world's largest environmental cleanup project hanford washington is the site where the united states has essentially accumulated its nuclear waste mostly from weapons work also from nuclear power and other radioactive related industries hanford was constructed in one nine hundred forty two and 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 a sucky production of plutonium intensified during the cold war. sixty three the dual purpose n. reactor was constructed to generate nuclear power for civilian use with a really good building completed nineteen sixty three. to break instruction. and i think it's very appropriate that we come in. with a wretched beyond the parapet military strength. of the find a chance to strike a blow for peace and the final chance to strike a blow for a piano like rock and this is a great while i can assure you. and proud of the work we be doing today i want the life work out not necessary for the pilot chris. to

realize the united states will move into. providing security for our people. it operate for a little like this but you know that it was. since the production of tony i'm ceased in one nine hundred eighty seven cleanup has been the only mission at the head for 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 a 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 stood 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 justin absolute in the pacific and one of the world's largest incinerators was built in the middle of a wildlife refuge and that process and burning those chemical weapons from okinawa in germany took place in one thousand nine hundred two to the year two thousand

john snapple has penned it 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 atmosphere nuclear testing. our vehicle for bluegill a one of a kind of casual thing. as a stick file which caused the fire that could finish a. missile any more on the watch. when at least one of the atmospheric tests with a 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 joints are stored as they say on johnson outs 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 the phone it was piped out in austin those efficient little petting going out in it had maids before you got to do in something shelters the people calmly waited all unaware that already descending upon them was the atom bomb. but it was all over on and off square miles of had lost a moment but on the last into extinction and all shattering devastation in which

was wrong that time again. radiation effects look fantastic limpid on walls and fun it tonight present shadow a lot outlined on a building the design of her dress left on the body of a woman who would die in a few days. off from the office of. members of the so-called nuclear club states known that detonated nuclear weapons either best to or foreign soil among them at least two thousand that's have been conducted atmosphere under water 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 lean i think islamists any nation retained seek new weapons other nations who want them few years. 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 rape as if it was some i don't political play thing about society gone mad on war and i knew that america would never invest the necessary energy is in

rehabilitation of its. star long as the ventures and i continued to draw men and skills for money like funding money just struck him to. the world's currently spending somewhere around two trillion us tiles on the floor and preparations for war and this enormous to fish for a fraction of that amount we could have clean water sanitation education good health care for everybody on the planet such a terrible division of resources. any war takes place on the matter how large or how small has enormous costs to it we're talking in lebanon today billions of dollars of heating 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 think less so the costs of war really. if they're well understood and in most cases they're not but if they 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. just as surely as a particular problem in this trauma concerned about climate change just one example i think illustrates that well if we imagine one if sixteen thought. flying for just under one ad if you suppress many twice as much oil as he every chimeric can see does and he says in he's ok if you hear. the f. sixteen it's just one machine in one branch of the military to take another example the army's abrams tank weighs sixty eight tons 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 on it uses them for ships and tanks and planes and heating buildings and a whole host of other things. for probably the largest impact that all the defense effort has is a diversion of intellectual hundred g. and our monetary resources away from trying to solve and 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.

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 bunch and address at the new york times on the new book. economy building an economy for the year. well but 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 many more serious threats climate change being an obvious one population growth being another the economy does not exist in a 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 monday collapse the challenge is not to rush not a high tech know what terri 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 united nations graph of global budget restoring we are 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 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 that'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 about 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 way than if we just stay with the half trillion dollars of u.s. taxpayer money going to military purposes. the environment is an integral part of our national security and i don't mean that in a trite and cliched way our resource constraints even if we were to defend

ourselves physically we need those resources and if we are not going to be able to preserve them it is strategically tactically and just commonsense wise a big mistake as security concerns are discussed the environment is immediately trapped 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 where so protecting the environment should be considered that a level of. environmental harms should be considered what we call in political terry common overtness if you're at a crossroads you have two cars that have divergent interests one is going in one direction the other in the other direction they're 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 aversions. rising temperatures rising seas and intensifying storms eroding coastlines falling water tables planting 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 on 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're going to change the system now and that means become politically active it means supporting political candidates who understand the issues of to do something about it it means letting elected representatives whether members of the city council are members of congress or part of that's around the world let them know about our concerns and what we expect them to do about it and this is going to decide whether we make or not we have to become politically active .

like millions of americans i've lost thousands of dollars in retirement funds and i haven't had as bad as many so it's not just about them it's about me to not. only man brahmana ya got to sit. back. and geez. need it. now. since this is my film i get the last word this financial crisis will not be turned off like a light story. wealthy british style

sun. sometimes it's. good for the. markets why not scandals. find out what's really happening to the global economy in these kinds of reports on r.g.p. .