Editor's Note: Mickey Z (Michael Zezima) is the author of Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of "The Good War" (Soft Skull Press, 2000). He also contributed a chapter called "Saving Private Power" to You Are Being Lied To (New York: Disinfo Books, 2001), edited by Russ Kick.

Let's suppose global warming is reversed, the Greenhouse Effect vanishes, and all pesticides, herbicides, and noxious chemicals are vanquished from the globe. Slaughterhouses are shuttered, animal laboratories padlocked, and the fur industry goes kaput.

While we're at it, how about the U.S. institutes universal health care, Israel gets out of the occupied territories, the Brits apologize to Ireland, and free elections reign supreme throughout Central and South America.

Now let's go for broke: The New York Times prints the truth, the CIA disbands, and just for fun all forms of authority are eliminated if they cannot be justified.

Wouldn't life be just grand?

'Fraid not, fellow travelers, because radiation is forever. You see, at the risk of appearing glib, there is one dilemma that just may take precedence over all of our myriad social, economic, political, and cultural problems, and that is nuclear proliferation. Quite simply, no one can be completely free on a planet defiled by lethal substances that remain radioactive for hundreds, thousands, and even millions of years.

"As a physician," Dr. Helen Caldicott declares, "I contend that nuclear technology threatens life on our planet with extinction. If present trends continue, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink will soon be contaminated with enough radioactive pollutants to pose a potential health hazard far greater than any plague humanity has ever experienced."

It matters little whether you support the National Education Association or National Rifle Association: radiation knows no boundaries, and with an ever-increasing number of nations acquiring the technology needed to produce a major disaster, the plutonium problem is growing exponentially.

Now, for those of you just tuning in, plutonium is a tad noxious. Called "the most toxic chemical known to science" by Dr. Michio Kaku, a professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, less than one-millionth of a gram of plutonium, a virtually invisible particle, is a carcinogenic dose. Yet, on a planet already debased by X-ray abuse, uranium mining, underground testing, food irradiation, depleted uranium weapons, dueling ICBMs, and nukes in space, we can now add the new threat: radioactive everything.

A Spectrum article (January/February 1999) detailed a novel method already in use of disposing of the waste created by half a century of nuclear operations: recycle the radioactive metals into consumer products like eating utensils, furniture, jewelry, pots, pans, eyeglasses and more.

"We're looking at an exponential increase,'" Diane D'Arrigo, a staff member at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) told Anne-Marie Cusac of The Progressive: "Think about the metal you come into contact with every day. Your IUD, and your bracelets, your silverware, the zipper on your crotch, the coins in your pocket, frying pans, belt buckles, that chair you're sitting on, the batteries that are in your car and motorbike, the batteries in your computer.'"

This blueprint has been given the green light by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the metal industry is already lobbying to set standards that will license them to use as much of the cheap atomic by-product as possible. Products containing recycled radioactive materials will be allowed to emit up to 10 millirems of radiation per year, if the metal lobbyists get their way, with the obligatory claim, of course, that such a "small" dose is not dangerous.

"According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Spectrum reports, "a radiation dose of 10 millirems per year received continuously over a lifetime increases the risk of cancer by 4 in 10,000. This would translate to 92,755 additional cancer deaths in the U.S. alone."

"Some states can make a profit by selling contaminated metals to unsuspecting steel and scrap metal to recyclers and manufacturers," explains Rhio, an investigative journalist who has recently executed the mass e-mailing of a report from the NIRS on nuclear recycling.

"Atomic utilities and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy are working hand-in-hand to increase radioactive 'recycling,' weaken radiation protection standards, and allow utilities to conduct incomplete clean-up of contaminated nuclear reactor sites." The NIRS contends, "It's all part of utility deregulation and restructuring."

In archetypal corporate/government style, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is legalizing the release of radioactive metals and the Department of Energy is currently sending hot materials from nuclear weapons sites to scrap yards where it will be mixed with so-called "clean metal" and made available for unrestricted public use.

According to the NIRS, "radioactive waste and materials are being used to make everyday household items, from toys, tableware and toasters to belt buckles and batteries."

As vile as this sounds, it could be worse. A decade ago, the US government wanted to declare one-third of the nation's "low-level" radioactive waste "below regulatory concern" (BRC) and thus removed from the "radioactive waste" category entirely. "These BRC radwastes [would] be allowed to go wherever municipal trash is going today," environmentalist Peter Montague wrote nearly eleven years ago.

"Congress revoked that BRC policy because people spoke up," Rhio reminds us. Still, despite public outcry, approximately 7,500 tons of radioactive metals were recycled in 1996 alone with another 1,577,000 metric tons stockpiled and waiting for the chance to become a zipper or spoon.

"There is no safe dose or dose rate below which dangers disappear. No threshold-dose,'" John Gofman, a former associate director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, and co-discoverer of Uranium-233, told Cusac in The Progressive: "Serious, lethal effects from minimal radiation doses are not 'hypothetical,' 'just theoretical,' or 'imaginary.' They are real."

As for the radioactive items already in the marketplace, a 1980s study found that fourteen Americans who wore contaminated jewelry had already developed finger cancer, some of who required amputation.