The Battle of the Little Bighorn came as a complete shock to white America. Today we must worry about an even greater shock with an essentially infinite radioactive death toll.
The stunning defeat of General George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. 7th Cavalry came on the Great Plains at the hands of the Lakota warrior-chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse on June 25, 1876, 150 years ago this week.
The U.S. was in the throes of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Its centerpiece was a huge global exposition in Philadelphia, which bragged to the world about America’s technological innovations.
The military defeat came as an astonishing, very public gut punch to American arrogance and pride. It was epitomized by Custer, the celebrated son of Monroe, Michigan, where his statue still stands in the town square, a short distance from the Fermi Atomic Power Plant.
Fermi Unit One nearly blew up on October 5, 1966. Unit Two has recently been threatened by fire, an “incident” potentially capable of irradiating much of the Great Lakes and continental U.S.
Today the nuclear power industry is pushing, Custer-like, for still more reactors that could do inconceivable harm to all of us.
To say Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were endowed with unique genius is to vastly understate their legacy. They were both truly great political leaders and military strategists. (A superb two-part documentary just out on Netflix today helps tell their story.)
In its pride and power, white America never believed a nation of “mere Indigenous” could defeat the white industrial army that had just conquered the South….and most of the continent.
But America’s atomic arrogance was pre-cursed in the mind-set of Custer, whose infamous failure on the battlefield led to his immediate death, along with some 250 soldiers under his command.
Today, the U.S. nuclear power industry is on the brink of repeating such history, born of arrogance, on an apocalyptic scale.
Now run by Donald Trump, America’s atomic power industry considers itself to be invincible. Its operators are exempted by federal law from accident liability. All homeowner policies in this country contain language explaining that the insurance company is not liable for damage done by radioactive fallout from a commercial reactor. Neither is the owner of the reactor.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has for decades rubber stamped nearly everything the reactor industry has demanded. It did provide a modicum of expertise with a qualified staff that would sometimes raise critical safety issues.
In one case, for example, NRC site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned that California’s Diablo Canyon reactors might not withstand the earthquake we all expect to shatter the plant someday soon.
The NRC’s official response was to caustically ignore Peck’s findings. Predictably, Dr. Peck is no longer with the commission.
Last year Elon Musk’s DOGE purged the NRC of a hundred or more experts like Peck. Trump became the first U.S. president to fire an NRC Chair. Meanwhile, he made direct financial investments in the industry. He explicitly ordered the commission to “rubber stamp” all industry demands. The NRC has complied by gutting radiation health standards, deeply endangering the millions of innocent downwinders who live near the reactors.
The Trump regime is now pouring billions of public dollars into building still more untested, unproven, unsafe, profoundly uneconomic and uncompetitive reactors, from which the Trump Family will personally profit. Thus its legendary grift has gone officially radioactive.
Among other things, the industry is pushing to re-open a deeply defective shut reactor at Palisades, Michigan, a plant whose own engineers warn of impending disaster. At Fermi Two, around the corner from the statue of Custer, fire has threatened an accident that could forever contaminate the Great Lakes.
The Trump regime—in partnership with “green” Governor Gavin Newsom—continues to operate the hideously costly, decayed and devastatingly dangerous reactors at Diablo Canyon.
There is much, much more, all of it both infuriating and terrifying.
After Little Bighorn, both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse were heartlessly murdered by white captors. Their death was accompanied by the genocidal slaughter of some 60 million buffalo, ordered by General William Tecumseh Sherman as part of his “scorched earth” strategy aimed at ridding the continent of its Indigenous population.
This week, on the 150th anniversary of Little Bighorn, we all face a form of radioactive payback at the hands of ever more arrogant incompetence.
But this time, all these years later, we are all in the downwinder role of the Indigenous….and the fallout promises to be truly apocalyptic in scope.
The post From Custer to Radioactive Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Karl Grossman – Harvey Wasserman.