Deadly Deceptions: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons and our Environment
A half-hour video produced and directed by Debra Chasnoff
Academy Award for the best short documentary in 1991
Reviewed by Garry Walters
The Campaign for International Co-operation and Disarmament obtained a copy this video film from the United States and on November 22 held its Australian premier showing at their Melbourne office.
General Electric Aircraft Engineers recently participated in the Avalon Airshow here. General Electric is a major contractor in the $400 million avionics update of the Royal Australian Airforce's F-111 fighter-bombers.
Hence the relevance now in Australia of the video introducing the grassroots movement developing world-wide to get GE out of the nuclear weapons business.
The video focuses on the terrifying human and environmental costs of GE's nuclear weapons development, particularly the highly secret Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory near New York and the Hanford, Washington nuclear bomb plant.
Under GE management, Hanford deliberately, "experimentally" released radioactivity at twice worst intensity recorded in the Chernobyl disaster, yet there has never been any evacuations for this or any other "accidental" releases. US government documents on such outrages have remained classified since as far back as 1949.
The nearby Columbia River is the most polluted with radioactivity in the world. The US government estimated that a clean-up would cost $60 billion, over 30 years!
GE helped to produce the first nuclear weapons used in warfare at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From 1946-1965 GE produced plutonium at Hanford and nearby farmers have recorded up to 50% of stock with gross or fatal deformities.
GE is the industry leader in the production of critical components in nuclear weapons, making it a leading actor in the military-industrial complex responsible for 98.8% of all high level nuclear waste. Most ozone destruction and oil consumption is also military-related, so the military-industrial club is the largest pollution source in the world.
There is a "revolving door" between the US military hierarchy and the top GE management and the company employs 150 people just in its Washington lobby office.
When workers health and safety issues begun to be expressed at the Knolls site, GE imposed a total speak out ban on the work force, threatening life imprisonment, fines up to $100,000 and the sack.
GE Chief Executive Officer Jack Walsh had a close enough working relationship with President George Bush to result in a Presidential Order exempting Knolls from normal occupational health and safety monitoring and controls.
The CICD Australian premiere showing of the video featured a talk by Community Aid Abroad's Consumer Boycotts co-convenor Grey Perry, who explained how broad united fronts can use boycott strategies to help achieve progressive outcomes.
As guest speaker, Perry outlined the CAA Baby Food Action Group's contribution to the 1977-84 Nestle boycott, which a US presidential consumers affairs adviser once described as the most successful consumer-led campaign in history.
The US-based INFACT activist campaign group, which was instrumental in the Nestle boycott, are successfully promoting a GE boycott, using the Deadly Deception video since 1986 to pressure GE through a loss of millions of dollars in sales into withdrawing from its nuclear weapons industry involvement.
As INFACT director Nancy Cole is quoted in the video, such pressure on GE also affects other nuclear industry companies.
The campaign has already prompted GE to quadruple its image advertising and forced withdrawal form building triggers for atom bombs.
CICD is projecting for 1993 that the video be used as widely as possible in schools, universities and the broad progressive and labor movement, according to secretary Jim Blackwell. n