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Comment by tekkk | Hacker News Reader

Well when you look down the history you'll find every nation did something horrible (if they have existed long enough). US itself is quite special case in its imperialism which happened much later than the others's (Spain, Netherlands etc).

But coming back to present day, it's the actions that we do now that in my opinion matter the most. And US keeps failing on those still, time after time. European countries are in some regards better, but well we are still far away from that utopian society where all things are in perfect balance.

It's sad though that US can't take responsibility for their own nuclear waste. They spend billions on their armed forces yet fixing the aftermath of their nuclear bomb tests can't be fit into that budget? Makes no sense.

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I think the people in former Yugoslavia and also the Middle East would love to see the army pick up after itself. Especially the depleted uranium ammunition turns the areas it was used in into a wasteland. I remember a British researcher pulling one used round from a water-tank and brining it home. The airport in the UK went NUTS. One round... The army used 1000 tons of depleted uranium munitions in 3 weeks during the 2003 Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium#Ammunition

Then again, airports are remarkably touchy about many things that aren’t all that bad.

> US itself is quite special case in its imperialism which happened much later than the others's (Spain, Netherlands etc).

This happened because the US emerged and differentiated itself from a colonial power. Also, the imperialism of the US was there from almost the very beginning. A call-to-action of sorts for the colonies was when their British metropolitan counterparts attempted to limit their western expansion. There's a weird belief where people think the US only turned to imperialism around the time of the Spanish-American war, but this was only due to running out of western expansion within their own lands.

The US military is an enormous polluter, even on native soil. Places like Hanford site — which is still undergoing cleanup after being decommissioned in the 1970s — are well known, but there are thousands of places the military has ravaged.

One good example is the naval training range the island of Vieques outside Puerto Rico [1], abandoned in the early 2000s and today a superfund site; they're still cleaning that up. Heavy metals such as mercury pollute the soil, cancer rates are way up, and the Eastern side of the island is littered with ammunition, unexploded ordnance and possibly depleted uranium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_in_Vieques,...

The EPA likes to get in on the action, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...

Search for fernald nuclear plant the US government did same thing there in my home town. Took the worst nuclear waste known to man put it in a concrete silo that cracked and leaked into our water source. The whole town was drinking from a aquifer that had k-65 waste in direct contact with the water pool and you could see the cracked leaking silo from the road.

The US paid to develop and maintain those weapons to protect you from Russia for 50 years. Maybe you Europeans could pick up the tab for the clean-up?

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