The great problem, as we have noted, is that global peoples who have been made ignorant and oblivious by propaganda of the harm caused to them will not usually be aware that their governments are being destructive.  They usually won't know that their right to safer and healthier living is being denied.   

So, who is to blame?  The reader might take pity on the citizen, yet, Jefferson argues, the citizen is not to be pardoned as the victim. The reason is the citizen has a duty to 'throw off' their government if it ever becomes destructive.

Jefferson writes: 

"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

When these governments are belonging to people - they exist for the people, their powers are simply borrowed from the people - how did the people allow such grand deceit?  These citizens' ancestors - across the New and Old Worlds - created these governments to forever protect the natural moral rights of man. Yet the inheritors of these republics, which are the people of today, are uncommitted to those original promises of natural rights.  This is not the first time that lack of commitment to even the very basic of human rights has caused suffering and mass crimes. In the U.S., both the government and the people were complicit in denying, and even abusing, rights, as in slavery and lynchings.  (Any honest person will have to chastise Mr. Jefferson himself, who was a slaveholder, etc...)

As we have chronicled in this book, the nuclear age has been a type of holocaust; one that has escaped the attention of the masses because science was hijacked by powerful forces uncommitted to human rights.  Yet, the people allowed this to happen.  The American people allowed its government to hoard power during the second World War and that power was abused by government by imposing secrets on military endeavors such as the Manhattan Project and suppressing knowledge of health effects of atomic experiments of 1945 and beyond.  In 2011 and 2012, we are experiencing the worse nuclear flashpoint since the 1960s, which was when a ramp-up of open-air nuclear testing threatened global public health.  Although modes of testing most damaging to health were phased out stemming from 1960s protests, decades of coverups kept the masses from learning the true health toll that followed from global radiological exposures to testing fallout.  Since the 1960s - even before then - governments have conspired with one another to not monitor and not divulge radiation levels during nuclear accidents.  They have conspired to silence or muzzle scientists who aim to speak out about 'nonthreshold' biological effects of radiation.  This is a dangerous alliance in any time. But it is especially dangerous in our time because the various nuclear 'time bombs' - aging reactors, as one example - around the world that will inevitably go off will greatly harm us because our governments won't protect us.  They have become destructive.  

Jefferson provides us with two options when our government has become destructive: abolishment or alteration.  

But who will do this?  If we look at America, we have a peculiar situation wherein both the people and the government are the problem. Both country and citizen have forfeited their duties.  Legislative acts of the 1950s gave the U.S. Government a 'duty of care' when it came to atomic energy that it completely neglected in its conduct of nuclear testing in Nevada later that decade - this is per a federal judge's ruling in 1984.  As for the American people, they too have neglected their duty, which was a duty 'assigned' to them per Jefferson's document.  

Whereas in America's 18th century it was the British government imposed on them as well as the British people who were the problem, today it is both the American government and its people.  Jefferson foresaw that the American people might one day have to 'throw off' their own government, and assigned them the duty to know when destructive government is happening and to do something about it.   A cursory reading of the Declaration of Independence might lead someone to believe that the document was 100% about criticizing the tryanny of the British government. But Jefferson was not uncritical of the British people in his Declaration.  He writes in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence (which was later sanitized and whittled down by Congress):

"Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. we have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend a jurisdiction over these our states. we have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration & settlement here, no one of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these were effected at the expence of our own blood & treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain: that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted one common king, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual league & amity with them: but that submission to their parliament was no part of our constitution, nor ever in idea, if history may be credited: and we appealed to their native justice & magnanimity, as well as to the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations which were likely to interrupt our correspondence & connection. they too have been deaf to the voice of justice & of consanguinity, & when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power."

The American people are like the British people of the mid-18th century.  They have, bemusingly so, via their free elections re-established into power their own disturbers of harmony and destructors of their rights!   Both the people and the U.S. government are condemnable.  And, it would appear, neither can save the other.  The same is true for most of the failed democracies on this planet.  The people are complicit of their destructive governments.   

What is the solution to a diseased nation?   If the first draft of the Declaration is any guide, Jefferson would have us turn on ourselves; he wrote of the British people: "we must endeavor to forget our former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends."  Will those individuals who with clear vision and deep and abiding faith in the reason for self-government lead their countrymen to honor their 'duty' as citizens and fight their own people as well as government to 'throw off' this 'nuclear first, people second' tyranny?  We must look elsewhere - at democracies-turned-dictactorships such as in Egypt and Iraq - to see what could happen to the lost democracies of the free world.  It might take bloodshed as in Iraq or a peaceful coup as in Egypt.  It might be a Facebook revolution or it might take streets soaked in the blood of its citizens.  Undoubtedly, a revolution will happen to this 'nuclear first, people second' world governance and I pray it will be bloodless and soon.

Prefixes, conversions and equivalents

Tables about atomic elements, decay charts, fission yields

NuclearCrimes.org's sitemap and various public and government documents of interest we uploaded online: 1. 2.