Who Will Stop the Pentagon’s Conspiracy of Silence Killing Our Planet and Us?

Climatologists are cautious when talking about wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Libya. This goes for other hot spots around the world-past and present. Unlike the states they answer to, they want you to know climate change helped produce the droughts and scarcity which have contributed to these wars more than politics or economics. It’s a silence which isn’t so golden. Indeed, the main pathological factor behind these wars is a sometimes delayed indirect or direct “human footprint,” the largest and most dangerous being the Pentagon and its feedback loop.

Known as the “world’s biggest polluter,” the Pentagon has by far “toxified” much of the planet and its atmosphere. With more than 1000 military and naval bases in the U.S. and hundreds more overseas, fuel and chemical and pipeline spills have left a toxic legacy. Nor does this account for the thousands of wildernesses the Pentagon’s destroyed to convert into bombing and live-firing ranges. The same is true for millions who’ve either been sickened or have died early due wars and silent killers like depleted uranium, pesticides, and defoliants like Agent Orange.

In the meantime, the Pentagon’s feedback loop produces more hazardous waste than five of the largest chemical companies combined. In fact, the Pentagon’s environmental program just warned it had to contend with 39,000 contaminated areas spread across 19 million acres in the U.S. alone. Thousands of more “superfund sites” and overseas military bases rank among some of the most polluted and silent killers in the world. This includes toxic chemicals that contaminate drinking water, soils, and aquifers, and atmospheric toxins which cause respiratory diseases.

The Pentagon’s Silent Feedback Loop Conspiracy
Although climatologists disagree as to what extent wars are caused by climate change, they do agree the Pentagon’s toxic feedback loop is a major cause to rising temperatures. It’s a feedback loop that not only consumes enormous amounts of resources but then destroys remaining ones. This has, in return, led to water and soil scarcity. In “The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace warns: “If climate change makes conflict only 3 percent more likely in a given country, that’s no trivial effect.” With two hundred countries and the Pentagon’s military-ideological complex, any rise in temperature will yield many more wars, more bloodshed, and more silent suffering.

The Pentagon’s feedback loop has quietly added to the rise in global temperatures for decades. Along with conducting more nuclear weapons tests than all other nations combined, massive amounts of radiation still contaminate many islands in the Pacific. Not only have people living on Marshall, Guam, and Midway Islands-where dozens of nuclear weapons were dropped-have had to been moved but they’ve suffered from exceedingly high rates of cancer. Even the marine life was destroyed, its coral reefs killed by atomic disease and bleaching.

Parts of the U.S. haven’t escaped nuclear weapons testing and dumping either. Home to many Native Americans, the American Southwest was polluted by long-abandoned uranium mines where nuclear material was obtained by military contractors. This goes for the Pentagon’s foreign wars. According to EcoWatch, one of its most horrendous environmental records is in Iraq. Not only did the Pentagon’s war lead to the desertification of 90 percent of Iraqi territory, but it crippled the country’s agricultural industry forcing it to import more than 80 percent of its food.

A Silent Conspiracy to Bleed the Earth to Death
The Pentagon remains an indirect and direct game-changer in these and other climate change wars. To be sure, climatologists have managed to prove a relationship between temperature and violence: for every half degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, even one degree warmer would increase twice as many wars as we have today-and likely more. Figure in the Pentagon’s toxic feedback loop and wars and just imagine what two or three degrees more would produce!

In the meantime, climatologists warn the Arctic’s permafrost is thawing 70 years ahead of what they previously believed making the risk of conflict even greater. As reported by Commondreams, this melting permafrost is releasing more catastrophic levels of methane and other gases into the atmosphere, which in return creates a feedback loop that accelerates the climate crisis leading to more warming. But instead of reversing course the Pentagon is already planning new weapons systems for an Arctic War. An Arctic War to be fought from a list of potential Arctic bases.

Real bases in the U.S. have already silently killed more than enough people and natural habitats. Billion-dollar dredging projects along the East and West coasts, where U.S. naval ships operate, have destroyed coral reef colonies. Like dozens of other reports, a new report by Truthout has moreover exposed how people living on and near Maryland’s Patuxent River Naval Air Station are being contaminated by drinking water. In addition to a variety of cancers known to jeopardize human reproductive health, people are contracting other cancers as well which lead to death.

A New Way of Thinking Exposes Conspiracies of Silence
Although warning signs of how the Pentagon’s conspiracy of silence is destroying the Planet and us are everywhere, the Pentagon plans to build an airstrip on one of the most biodiverse regions in the entire world, Galapagos. Surely this will have the same destructive impact on a number of species found nowhere else on the planet as Florida and Maryland. The same goes for its global military operations. To counter Iran, it just moved into the Persian Gulf more toxic firepower reminiscent of the same kind of toxic response in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

Even the Pentagon’s new billion-dollar Space Force and impact on the environment was met with silence. Indeed, the dangers of sending rockets in the atmosphere and outer space to build and arm a manned space stations with missiles poses an environmental catastrophe which pales in comparison to a thousand nuclear bombs exploding. The same goes for the Pentagon’s inability to win America’s recent wars in any convincing way. The Pentagon is now considering forgoing conventional warfare for the “Nuclear Option.” Will Iran be ground zero? Or the Planet?

For now, the Pentagon may seem obsessed with climate change by issuing regular climate threat assessments but, yet, it’s already planning for a new era of conflict governed by global warming. Albert Einstein warned of this kind of mentality when he wrote: “We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.” Consequently, only a new mode of thinking and living can expose the Pentagon’s conspiracy that is silently killing our Planet and us. Otherwise, the Planet we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John’s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.WN.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and www.WN.com/dallasdarling.