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  • Nuclear Weapons and the Deep State: Can Bureaucracy Constrain Nuclear Weapons?

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    I’m naturally inclined toward apocalyptic thinking, so I find it all too easy to imagine scenarios involving catastrophic nuclear conflict. Mistake, misunderstanding, unintended escalatory spirals, culminating in mass death and environmental disaster: it’s still a fearful and quite real possibility. In January 2018, escalating tensions between the US and North Korea led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of the symbolic nuclear “Doomsday Clock” forward by 30 seconds, to 11:58 p.m.: two minutes to midnight.

    That same month, in Hawaii and Japan, false alarms about incoming ballistic missiles led to brief public panics, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored a workshop on “public health responses to a nuclear detonation.” If you’re a normal human being, you should be feeling thoroughly rattled—and perhaps inclined to browse through listings of hardened underground bunkers for sale in your region.

    But I live in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. For those of you who don’t know the DC region’s geography, this means I live in that strange land—part geographical reality, part state of mind—known as “Inside the Beltway.” Outside the Beltway, jittery school children are ducking and covering. Inside the Beltway, bureaucratic familiarity, the exigencies of politics, and the incentive structures of the defense industry combine to create a looking-glass world in which the potential horrors of nuclear conflict are rationalized away.

    Inside the Beltway, it’s routine to hear “experts,” who should surely know better, speak with cavalier dismissiveness about existential threats to human civilization. Inside the Beltway, at think tanks, in government buildings, and in the offices of defense contractors, talk of nuclear catastrophe is brushed aside as so much wacky paranoia—the sort of ridiculous fearmongering indulged in by people who are neither responsible nor knowledgeable.

    “The world has had nuclear weapons for more than 70 years, and we haven’t had a nuclear apocalypse yet,” say the Inside the Beltway Experts. “Ipso facto, this shows that we have successfully learned how to manage nuclear threats.” In fact, this shows only that we haven’t blown ourselves up yet. In the grand sweep of human history, 70 years is the blink of an eye. And as President Donald Trump—the man with the biggest button—is in the process of demonstrating, nuclear peace can’t be taken for granted.

    Trump’s bellicose (and sometimes baffling) pronouncements about nuclear weapons and possible conflict with North Korea have raised anew a question that has rarely been posed since the end of the Cold War: Are there any legal constraints governing presidential decisions on the use of nuclear weapons? Should there be legal constraints? And, whether or not there are meaningful legal constraints, are there any practical constraints—bureaucratic, political, or cultural—on the presidential nuclear power?

    In my view, there are no clear or firm US legal constraints against a presidential “first use” of nuclear weapons. True, the Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war; true, the 1973 War Powers Resolution sought to reaffirm Congress’s war-making prerogatives. It’s not hard to make a strong argument, based on text and on history, that the president needs to receive congressional authorization before launching an offensive nuclear strike.

    But inside the Beltway, there are thousands of clever lawyers, many sitting inside the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and the State Department, whose job it is to find legal arguments that justify executive power. Those arguments are not hard to find, for a clever lawyer. The president is the executive and the commander in chief! The president may need to make a decision in a time frame that precludes congressional consultation! Launching a few nuclear weapons is not the same thing as starting a “war”! The War Powers Resolution applies only to sending US military personnel into overseas combat, not to launching unmanned missiles overseas!

    At the end of the day, the clever lawyers generally prevail. As a practical matter, then, there is no US legal bar to a presidential first use of nuclear weapons.

    If you doubt this, consider the cautionary tale of executive power under President Barack Obama and his 2011 decision to intervene militarily in Libya. The War Powers Resolution seemed designed to prevent a president from doing precisely this sort of thing without notifying Congress or seeking congressional authorization.1 But the Obama administration took the position that military action in Libya didn’t count as “hostilities,” since the US was relying mainly on air strikes from unmanned drones and had no ground combat troops in Libya.

    The administration therefore opted not to provide formal War Powers Resolution notification to Congress—much less seek congressional authorization. On both sides of the aisle, members of Congress complained: President Obama was ignoring what appeared to be the plain meaning of the War Powers Resolution. But nothing changed. The US military intervention in Libya continued. Obama wasn’t impeached.

    International law is even more ambiguous on nuclear weapons, and even less likely to serve as a meaningful constraint than US domestic law. True, international legal rules prohibit aggressive uses of force and require that military force be necessary and proportionate and make appropriate distinctions between civilian and military targets, but in practice these terms become troublingly slippery. In 1996, for instance, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, coming to the unsatisfying conclusion that the use of nuclear weapons would “generally be contrary to the rules of international law. … However, … the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance …” In other words: don’t ask us!

    Law is thus a slender reed to lean on in the search for constraints on presidential nuclear powers. This is, of course, a shame and a terrible failure; the purpose of law—of the rule of law—is, most fundamentally, to regulate violence and place constraints on power. What’s more, placing decisions about the use of nuclear weapons in the hands of a single individual is, as Elaine Scarry argues in her book Thermonuclear Monarchy, profoundly undemocratic: how can we claim to have a democracy when we give one individual the power, in effect, to obliterate the whole earth? Prior to the nuclear age, who could have even imagined such awesome destructive power in the hands of one man?

    Granted, nuclear weapons are not the only weapons with profoundly antidemocratic effects. In their recent book, Forged Through Fire, political scientists John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth trace the historical connections between the evolution of democracy, the expansion of the suffrage, and the granting of political rights to large numbers of people, on the one hand, and the existence of manpower-intensive forms of warfare, on the other. When elites need to field mass armies in order to protect themselves from external threat, they are forced to grant rights and some degree of political power to the masses as a means of motivating them to fight.

    By contrast, the ascendance of forms of warfare that are not manpower-intensive—unmanned drones and cyber weapons as much as nuclear weapons—tends to correlate with contractions of democracy. When political leaders believe they can deter or respond to external threats without the need to raise and sustain mass armies, they have little motivation to make decisions in a democratic manner.

    There are, then, few meaningful legal constraints on presidential nuclear powers, much as we may wish it were otherwise. Are there, however, some practical constraints on a presidential first use of nuclear weapons, constraints that arise out of bureaucratic practice or political necessity?

    In the pragmatic realm, there are some constraints, though they are far from sufficient. Remember: the presidential nuclear power is not a magic wand; it works only insofar as we have created an elaborate institutional and physical infrastructure designed to make it work. That is to say: if the President wants to launch one or more nuclear strikes, he needs to have the right missiles in the right launch locations with the right targets programmed into them. Missiles are built and maintained and programmed by human beings.

    The presidential nuclear power is, in this sense, more like the power to order from a menu than the power to instantly produce any cuisine. Historically, the US nuclear arsenal has been designed and maintained to focus on particular threats: Russia, North Korea, Iran, and so forth. Specific target sets associated with these potential adversaries are preprogrammed.

    If a US president wants to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against North Korea, it is a safe bet to assume that the military knows exactly which missiles to fire at which targets, and it is unlikely that anyone in the (short) chain of command would question a presidential order to strike.

    If a US president suddenly decided to launch nuclear weapons against Canada, it would be quite a different story: strike packages and targets would need to hastily be put together, creating the time and space for advisors close to the president to say, “Mr. President, this is not a good idea, let’s talk about this.” Would we suddenly find officers and advisors willing to say, “Wait a minute, Mr. President, I can’t seem to work the lock on the nuclear football, we’d better call the secretary of defense and get him over here to discuss this”? I think we would.

    This is perhaps not terribly consoling. But we should not imagine that building in a more extensive and consultative decision-making process would guarantee wiser decisions. Legislatively or through embedded bureaucratic practice, we could create a system in which the president needs the concurrence of, say, the secretary of defense and the attorney general before launching a preemptive nuclear strike.

    But homogenous groups, particularly in a hierarchical setting where people are habituated to abiding by the decision of the commander in chief, will not necessarily put meaningful brakes on a presidential decision. “Groupthink” led us to the 2003 Iraq War, a catastrophically foolish venture to which hundreds of intelligent “experts” gave their wholehearted support. Even those with serious reservations tend to go along to get along. We are social animals; that’s what we do. Especially inside the Beltway.

    My final point brings me back to where I began: particularly when dealing with the Inside the Beltway crowd, those of us who care deeply about reining in presidential nuclear powers need to draw careful distinctions, and be mindful of the language we use. Those opposed to nuclear weapons have a natural tendency to speak in terms of extremes: we talk about nuclear winters and climate catastrophe, about cataclysmic global conflicts with high-yield nuclear devices capable of destroying the planet earth.

    The language of catastrophe is easily brushed aside by Beltway insiders. In the halls of the Pentagon and the White House, such scenarios just generate dismissive chuckles: “That’s not what we’re talking about,” the “experts” will say. “Nobody would be crazy enough to start an unlimited global nuclear war. Remember, not all nuclear weapons are the same. When we talk about nuclear strikes, we’re talking about designing small, tactical, tailored nuclear weapons. We could control their use; we could ensure that only military targets would be affected; we would only use these low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons in very special circumstances, such as to destroy hardened underground bunkers that we couldn’t get at through conventional weapons.”

    There is, in other words, nothing to worry about, say the Beltway insiders: we can manage and control this fearsome nuclear power. This is foolish. Even a small-scale, “precise” use of tactical nuclear weapons runs a very high risk of deliberate or inadvertent escalation, as well as a high risk of normalizing the use of nuclear weapons, thus opening the door to wider use.

    Those concerned about nuclear weapons use need to confront this false logic head on: to spell out the ways in which “control” over nuclear conflict is inherently illusory.

    Those inside the Beltway have lived with the threat of nuclear weapons for so long that it has stopped seeming like a real threat. The insiders are like those crocodile or grizzly bear tamers who become so habituated to the proximity of a dangerous predator that they convince themselves the danger isn’t real—the bear won’t attack them! Until the bear, being a bear, does attack them.

    Inside the Beltway, we are so used to living in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse that it has stopped frightening us. But we should never forget that we are living with a dangerous predator—only in this case, the predator is us.

  • Protocol for a U.S. Nuclear Strike

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    The current US protocol for deciding whether to launch a nuclear strike—developed in the early 1960s, with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles—has two main functions and virtues: first, it concentrates the power and authority over the use of nuclear weapons in the presidency, at the highest level of the executive branch of the US government, thus keeping it out of the hands of the military and others. Second, it enables the president to respond rapidly and decisively to a nuclear attack by an enemy whose missiles may fly from one side of the planet to the other in 30 minutes; or whose missiles launched from submarines in the oceans may fly to targets in the United States in 15 minutes. It’s critical to have a protocol that allows the president to consider the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, to order their use, and to have the process of implementation begin in a very, very short period of time.

    The protocol’s virtues also produce its disadvantages. By virtue of the speed and concentration of authority in this protocol, the president has an opportunity to effectively railroad the nuclear commanders and forces into executing even a very large nuclear strike first—preemptively or preventively. That could lead to a misguided decision based on an impulsive psychology or on other factors that lead to a very bad call.

    The other downside to this protocol, which we used to talk about a lot more than we do today, is that the protocol itself, rooted as it is in speed and concentrated authority, can railroad the president into authorizing, in a hasty way, the use of nuclear weapons based on indications, possibly false, of an attack underway (a strategy known as “launch on warning”). In other words, we might believe we are retaliating when in fact we’re launching first.

    During the Cold War, to my knowledge, a false alarm never led to notification of the president at the beginning of the protocol that I’m about to describe. The false alarms were caught before that happened. Ironically, today, with the proliferation of ballistic missiles over the last decade (there’s been a huge surge in ballistic missile proliferation, and in their testing) you find that recent missile launches—from China, from Iran, from North Korea—have led on multiple occasions to sufficient ambiguity that the presidents have actually been notified about the ongoing event.

    Here are the key features of the current protocol. It begins with an early-warning function: the effort to detect a possible attack against North America and to notify the president and others to begin a process of deliberation. Every single day, the early-warning staffs out in Colorado and Omaha pick up events that require a second look to determine whether we’re under attack. Events they might review include a Japanese satellite launch into space, a North Korean missile test, a US missile test out of California, a wildfire in the southwest US. Most of these are usually dismissed quickly. Once or twice a month, something happens that requires a really close second look. And once in a blue moon, something happens and all hell breaks loose, as in the case of a false alarm concerning a missile launch.

    If these staffs receive any indication that we may be under attack, they have three minutes from the time the first sensor data arrives until they have to provide a preliminary assessment as to whether North America is under attack. If the assessment is of medium or high confidence that there is a threat, they initiate a process that will bring the president and his top advisors into an emergency conference no matter what time of day or night.

    Imagine that the president has decided to initiate a conference with his top advisors to consider the first use of nuclear weapons. The United States does not have a no-first-use policy. Furthermore, under the current review of our nuclear policy, undertaken primarily by the Pentagon, there is an emerging thesis that we should move further away from no first use and consider use of nuclear weapons in a wider variety of contingencies. We are on the verge of modifying our assurance to non-nuclear-weapons countries that we would not use nuclear weapons against them, in contradiction to the position adopted by the Obama administration.

    The emergency meeting of the president and his top advisors will typically include statutory members of the National Security Council: the secretary of defense; the secretary of state; the national security advisor; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who participates at the discretion and the invitation of the secretary of defense; and a number of key military command centers and personnel, the most important of whom is the commander of strategic forces based in Omaha, Nebraska, who commands all our strategic nuclear weapons.

    Time and circumstances permitting, the commander will brief the president on his nuclear options and their consequences. It will not be a long briefing. He’s going to have to boil this down into very, very brief sound-bites for the president: here are your options and here are the consequences. The commander will then ask the president a couple questions, such as whether he wants to withhold attacks on a particular location, such as a populous city. That briefing, if we are under attack, will be as short as 30 seconds. Of course, if the president is considering the first use of nuclear weapons, the timeline is not nearly as short and that conversation can last for quite a long period.

    If we are under attack, the president is going to have to consider his options in about six minutes, given how this protocol tends to work. If we’re not under attack, he can deliberate longer. Then he makes a decision: What option am I going to pursue? Am I going to decide to attack North Korea, for example? (With the current preprogrammed attack plan, I estimate we would have 80 nuclear aim points in North Korea.)

    Let’s say the president chooses an option. It will be conveyed instantly to the war room at the Pentagon, which probably initiated the presidential conference in the first place. The people in the Pentagon war room are listening in on the conversation and are beginning, as they hear the president moving toward a decision to use nuclear weapons, to prepare a launch order.

    Note that the secretary of defense does not confirm the president’s decision, nor does he or she have a right to veto it, nor does anyone else have the authority to override the decision. This is what Elaine Scarry has identified as, in effect, a “thermonuclear monarchy,” which gives the US president almost carte blanche command over the nuclear forces.

    When the president conveys his decision to the war room, they ask him to authenticate his identity using a special code. It’s referred to colloquially as “the biscuit,” otherwise known more officially as the “gold code.” If that code matches, the war room at the Pentagon, or an alternate, will format a launch order that will be transmitted down the chain of command to the executing commanders of the submarines, land-based rockets, and bombers.

    That launch order is roughly half the length of a tweet. It contains all the information necessary for the crews down the chain of command to launch their forces: the time to fire, the chosen war plan, an unlock code that the crews need to physically unlock their weapons prior to the launch, and special authentication codes that the crews check with the codes in their safes to satisfy themselves that these orders came from the president (those codes are not in the possession of the president, but of the military).

    That takes two minutes: 10 seconds to authenticate, then a minute or two to format and transmit the order. And in two more minutes, from the receipt of that order down the chain of command, missiles could be leaving their silos; it takes only about one minute for a Minuteman crew in the plains states of the Midwest to carry out their launch checklist. This was my job in the 1970s and at the time, it took me one minute. We delayed a little bit, for classified reasons, but that’s how long it took then and that’s how long it takes today.

    After the crews enter the war plan it goes out to all the missiles, which are preprogrammed with what wartime targets to strike. In peacetime, they are aimed at the ocean, but changing their targets to Moscow or any other targets is as easy as changing the channel on your TV set.

    Today, within a minute or two there can be up to 400 high-yield strategic weapons launched out of their silos to their targets, wherever those targets may be. Submarines take about 10 minutes longer because it takes them longer to target their missiles, position the submarine, and get to the proper depth. But even submarines on alert in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans would within 15 minutes be launching missiles out of their tubes, then firing them one at a time every 15 seconds.

    Lastly, the bombers would take 8 to 10 hours to reach their launch points if they were already on alert. They are not normally, today, in peacetime, on alert. They don’t even have bombs on board, so in a crisis they would have to be placed on full alert, with bombs and cruise missiles loaded, before they were usable.

    To sum up: the president wakes up, gives an order through a system so streamlined that there’s almost no gatekeeping, and, within five minutes, 400 bombs leave on missiles launched out of the Midwest. About 10 minutes later, another 400 leave on missiles launched out of submarines. That’s 800 nuclear weapons—roughly the equivalent of, in round numbers, 15,000 Hiroshima bombs.

    Reform of current US launch protocol is long overdue. Layering on new safeguards that strengthen checks and balances on presidential launch authority is necessary to reduce the risk of nuclear first use. Safeguards include the Markey-Lieu Bill, which would prohibit the president from employing nuclear weapons first unless Congress has declared war and provided specific authorization for their use; the Betts/Waxman solution, which would add the secretary of defense and attorney general to the chain of command to certify that a presidential launch order is authentic and legal; and adoption of a no-first-use policy, which would draw a red line that, if crossed, makes the president accountable and even impeachable.

    Regarding a second strike, the United States should eliminate launch on warning and move toward a true retaliatory posture, requiring protection of the president and his successors and providing a large increase in warning and decision time.

  • Nuclear North Korea: 1999 and 2017

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    William Perry
    Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Perry.

    In 1998, North Korea launched a long-range missile. The test happened to be unsuccessful, but the fact that they were testing caused great concern that they were cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework, by which they agreed to shut down their nuclear program at Yongbyon. We believed that they must still have some nuclear developments underway, because an ICBM doesn’t make much sense unless it’s carrying a nuclear weapon. The test led people in Congress to believe that we had to pull out of the Agreed Framework. In that turmoil, President Clinton asked me if I would temporarily come back into government and serve as his special representative on dealing with North Korea.

    I foolishly accepted the assignment. The first thing I did was brief Congress about my new assignment and my goal to stop any nuclear developments that might be still underway in North Korea, as well as their development of long-range missiles. Not all the members were thrilled, but they seemed to accept it. I then asked the Japanese prime minister and the South Korean president to appoint an equivalent person to work with me so that this would be a tripartite process rather than an American process. The three of us spent the next several months working and then released a report that laid out a diplomatic path for approaching North Korea.

    The single most important statement in that report was that we must “deal with North Korea as it is, not as we might wish it to be.” I believe that statement is as true today as it was when the report came out, in 1999. I then requested a meeting with the North Korean leaders and they granted it. They allowed me to fly an Air Force plane directly into Pyongyang, which is so unusual that, as we flew into North Korea, I was looking down wondering whether the air defense people on the ground had gotten the word that it was all right for this US Air Force plane to fly in there. After a very interesting four days in Pyongyang, we ended with a comprehensive verbal agreement about what North Koreans would not do; what the US would do to provide additional security assurances to North Korea; and what Japan and South Korea would offer in the way of economic incentives.

    This was followed by a series of actions in North Korea, some of which were quite encouraging, including allowing North Korean athletes to march with South Korean athletes in the Olympics—a symbolic gesture, but a very nice one. Kim Jong-il sent his top military aide, vice marshal Jo Myong-rok, back to the United States to see if we could come to a formal agreement. He asked me if he could stop at Stanford on the way so that I could show him around Silicon Valley, which I did. I arranged to take him to companies where the CEOs happened to be Korean Americans so that they could speak to him in his own language.

    Jo’s meeting in Washington was successful. He met with both the secretary of state and the president and we reached a final agreement. The signing was nominally set for a month or two in the future, whenever Clinton and Kim Jong-il could get their schedules worked out. The meeting happened in October of 2000. The next month, a new US administration was elected. Initially, the Bush administration said they would continue the effort, but in fact two months later President Bush cut off all discussions with North Korea. For two years there were no discussions at all, and the whole process collapsed.

    The Bush Administration believed that they could get a better agreement. By 2017 that had resulted in North Korea having 20 to 30 nuclear weapons, a few of them thermonuclear, and a couple of hundred ballistic missiles, most of them capable of reaching South Korea and some of them capable of reaching Japan. And North Korea was developing missiles capable of reaching the United States.

    The purpose of these nuclear weapons in my considered judgment is to deter the United States from making a military attack on North Korea. They want to sustain their regime and, more broadly, the Kim dynasty. Each of the three leaders of North Korea has essentially been an emperor with absolute power, including the power to summarily execute someone if they decide to do so. North Korean leaders have absolute power over international decisions.

    The current North Korean regime in my judgment is ruthless, including to their own people, and reckless. But I do not believe they are suicidal. I do not believe they are crazy. They’re seeking to stay in power, and therefore, in my judgment, they will use the nuclear weapons only in response to an attack. Nuclear weapons are useful to them, but only if they do not use them. Once they use them, the leaders understand that they will die and their country will be devastated.

    I therefore think that the US fear of an unprovoked attack by North Korea is groundless. But still, it’s a very dangerous situation. North Korea will use nuclear weapons if attacked, and there certainly has been ample talk in the United States of making a preemptive attack on them. North Korea may even use nuclear weapons if they believe they’re about to be attacked.

    Consider the consequences. North Korea has Seoul and Tokyo and other cities within range of their nuclear weapons. If they attack those cities, they will destroy them. Millions of people will die. This is not hyperbole. Putting on my technical hat as former secretary of defense and former under secretary of defense for research and engineering, I can confidently say that we could avenge such an action, but we cannot defend against it. We do not have a defense capable of protecting against a missile attack on Tokyo and Seoul.

    Our policy should be to ensure that this does not happen. How do we do that? We have to get serious about diplomacy. I’m convinced that there is a diplomatic path available to us. The path to Pyongyang is through Beijing. We should start our diplomacy with China so that the US and China can agree on the dangers and how to deal with them. We also need to address China’s concern about having American troops along the Yellow River, which is one of the big factors holding them back from taking meaningful action.

  • Presidential First Use vs. Congress

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    What are the constitutional limits on the president, if any, when it comes to using nuclear weapons? What kind of decision making comes into play when we think of the unthinkable: nuclear war? I say “unthinkable” because for over 70 years the idea around nuclear deterrence has been that we have these terribly destructive nuclear weapons in order to make sure that we do not use them. They used to call this MAD—“mutually assured destruction”—and it is mad. It is totally insane. But this idea remains the international framework for restraint.

    The nuclear disarmament treaties of the last decades have been bilateral and multilateral. Such treaties have significantly decreased the number of weapons in the US and Russian arsenals; eliminated nuclear aboveground testing and nearly all belowground testing; prevented nearly all countries from acquiring or developing nuclear weapons; and restrained those nations that have nuclear weapons from acquiring new ones. These were no small accomplishments. Congress has enshrined most of these into US law, either by ratifying treaties or by authorizing and funding nonproliferation programs. I firmly believe that Congress would not have acted in these ways without a very engaged citizenry.

    And now here we are today. Speaking for myself, I don’t believe that I’ve ever been so worried about a possible nuclear confrontation in my life. Nuclear weapon use can be triggered very quickly and then can escalate so rapidly that before we know it we’re in a nuclear war. The national command authority is very simple. The president makes the decision to use nuclear weapons and the secretary of defense executes the order. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you right now, I don’t know what will. Once the decision is made and in the process of being carried out, our systems of checks and balances don’t apply. Congress couldn’t stop it. The Supreme Court couldn’t stop it. The way it’s set up, not even the secretary of defense in theory has the authority to stop it.

    This is far from what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they drafted and adopted the document as the foundation of all our laws and democratic institutions. The framers gave the power to declare war to Congress. That is why H.R. 669 and S. 200, the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, was introduced by Congressman Ted Lieu of California and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, in January 2017. This bill prohibits any and every president from using US armed forces to carry out a first-use nuclear strike unless Congress has declared war and authorized such a first strike. I’m proud to be the very first cosponsor of the House bill, H.R. 669, which currently has 77 cosponsors: not a bad beginning.

    Requiring that Congress authorize a nuclear first strike shouldn’t be a Democrat or Republican issue. This is a commonsense issue. The bill clearly defines a first strike as meaning that the enemy has not launched a nuclear weapon against the United States or an ally of the United States. If another country launches a nuclear weapon at us, the President does have the right to proportionate self-defense under international law.

    Some might argue that prohibiting the United States from striking first with a nuclear weapon ties the president’s hands and makes the country vulnerable to attack. However, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, a true champion of rational nuclear disarmament, has noted that in any imaginable scenario, the US military could rely on our conventional arsenal alone to deliver a first strike of devastating force. That conventional arsenal includes our B-2 bombers, our cruise missiles, our Tomahawks, our nonnuclear ICBMs, and a huge range of weaponry. We’ve seen the destructive capacity of those conventional first-strike weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Limiting a first strike involving nuclear force does not leave us weak or vulnerable.

    Democrats were strongly pushing President Obama to adopt a no-first-strike policy when he was in office. This is not just about President Trump. We have been contemplating this policy for quite some time. But it will take many more cosponsors for this bill to have any chance of moving in the House or the Senate. It will take the Republican leadership of Congress being a lot more nervous about the possibility of the president actually launching a nuclear strike. Meanwhile we have the President backing away from hard-won international agreements to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians. We have him exchanging ever more heated taunts with nuclear-armed North Korea. This is why the Markey-Lieu bill is so absolutely necessary.

    Congress needs to assert its Constitutional authority when it comes to war, and especially when it comes to the catastrophic possibility of nuclear war. I’m proud to have also joined with Senator Markey and Representative Conyers to introduce bipartisan, bicameral legislation to reaffirm Congress’s constitutional power over first strike on North Korea. H.R. 4140, the No Unconstitutional Strike against North Korea Act, was introduced last October with 60 co-sponsors. Two of them are Republicans. The bill restricts any funds from being used to launch a military strike against North Korea without prior approval from Congress. That’s any strike, not just a nuclear strike. Because war is war is war is war, and only Congress has the right to declare and authorize it.

    I worry that President Trump actually believes that we have some kind of missile defense system able to knock all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons out of the sky if they were to launch a nuclear weapon. No such thing exists. We cannot guarantee the protection of ourselves and our allies.

    These current crises, threatening and as frightening as they are, speak to the underlying and long-unresolved crisis of nuclear weapons themselves. President Obama began a program of so-called nuclear modernization, which would update, not just maintain, the current US nuclear arsenal, and replace older nuclear weapons with modern versions. President Trump has doubled down on that proposal to modernize and update our current nuclear weapons, and is proposing to create new nuclear weapons.

    The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with a report that estimated the cost of President Trump’s plans to maintain and replace the US nuclear arsenal over 30 years at $1.24 trillion. That is $200 billion more than the last estimate. When you factor in inflation the price tag soars to $1.7 trillion. These costs are simply unsustainable. They threaten the entire federal budget, including the rest of the military budget.

    The CBO report also laid out several different options for improving our military force structure that are much more cost-effective. This is important, because the Pentagon sometimes likes to paint its proposals in very stark terms: either give us everything we ask for or we’re all gonna die. That’s a false choice, as the CBO report makes abundantly clear.

    However, I fervently believe that the best choice the United States can make, and that the world can make, is to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. I realize that this can’t be done in a day. I’m not a fool. But my fear right now is that there has been a shift in thinking among the nuclear powers—not just the United States and Russia but also France, the UK, and China, not to mention India, Pakistan, and North Korea—that nuclear arsenals must be protected, updated, and increased, all with an eye to the inevitable use of a nuclear strike against an enemy in the foreseeable future.

    While the nuclear powers are hunkering down, the rest of the world is moving toward a demand for total nuclear disarmament. Not too long ago that was at least a future goal of nuclear powers: careful, verifiable, incremental disarmament, while assuring that no other nation acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. I fear for the current moment. We have members of Congress who think using a nuke against North Korea or Iran is not just something we should think about; they believe it is something we should do.

    I think it’s time to get moving again. It’s time once again to remind our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers that these are issues that affect every single American family, every single one of us. In a very busy world, where families are focused on picking up their kids from school, wondering how the economy is going to affect their jobs and their grocery bills, there is one more sure thing that we all need to remember: a nuclear war will kill us all. Quickly or slowly, it will kill all of us. Nuclear war not only devastates the people where it falls. Over time, it would devastate the world as we know it. That was once a commonly understood fact, but it’s been forgotten because so many other crises and hardships have moved to the forefront.

    It is time to remind everyone, including every single member of Congress, what the reality is. It is time to rebuild this movement across ages, across regions, cities, towns, suburbs, and rural communities, across genders and races, because a nuclear war will devastate us all. It’s important to remember, though, how different the times are now than when the freeze movement was organized. We no longer have a Democratic Congress. We don’t even have a moderate Republican Congress. We have a very conservative Republican-controlled House and Senate that have never moved forward any legislation outside their own narrow agenda. And we have a very unstable, volatile, erratic White House.

    In 1978 I was a college intern in the office of Senator George McGovern (no relation but one of my heroes). I had the privilege of attending a debate that he had with William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale University. The debate was entitled “Resolved: That the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Are in the Interest of US National Security.” Senator McGovern concluded by referring to a 1963 debate on a limited nuclear test ban treaty. And here’s what he said that night at Yale:

    Senator Everett Dirksen took the floor to close the debate. He said that he had just reread John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the description of what happened to that great city, the morning after. The scene of one family sitting charred around the breakfast table; out in the yard, bits and pieces of children’s clothing; the broken arm of a doll; toys and debris scattered over the landscape. And he said, “I thought about that scene, and I said that someday Everett Dirksen will be buried in Illinois, and when that happens, I don’t want them to put on my gravestone, ‘He knew about this, and he didn’t care.’”

    We need to show that we care. We need to build this movement. Time is of the essence.

  • Presidential First Use: Introduction

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    This article was originally published by The Nation.

    Among the things we know about nuclear weapons, two features are our focus today.

    The first is the spectacular level of injury that nuclear weapons can inflict on the earth and all its inhabitants, human, animal, and plants. On our ground and on our sky.

    Recent work on nuclear winter shows that if even a tiny fraction of the worldwide current arsenal is used—not 1 percent but 3/100th of 1 percent of the total blast power—20 million people will die on the first afternoon and 1 billion in the first months. That research, by scientist Alan Robock, has appeared in leading science journals.

    It is for this reason that the International Committee of the Red Cross has said that, if even a single city is hit, its worldwide resources will not be sufficient to help.

    Every study reaches the same conclusion. Even if the weapon should be still smaller—reduced so that it is 3/10,000 of 1 percent of the total nuclear blast power available today, the injuries will be beyond our reach. A study in the Netherlands showed that a single small nuclear weapon arriving in Rotterdam will kill 70,000 people. Ten thousand survivors will be severely burned. Yet in all of Netherlands there are only 100 burn beds. If the discrepancy between the number burned and the number of treatment beds seems uncivilized, recognize that Mass General, a leading hospital in Boston, has seven burn beds.

    As the size of the weapon increases, so too do the injuries. According to a report by Steven Starr, Lynn Eden and Ted Postol in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, if an 800-kiloton weapon should be detonated above Manhattan, the center of the blast will be four times the temperature of the sun and within “tens of minutes,” a firestorm will cover 90 to 150 square miles.

    So the first feature is the unconscionable level of injury, injuries that cannot be repaired. Only injuries that have not yet happened can be undone. Once they have happened it is too late to be indignant.

    Even more central to our discussion: The second feature of the nuclear arsenal is that this capacity for unthinkable levels of injury resides in the hands of a solitary person, or a small handful of persons, in the United States as well as in the other nuclear states. Nuclear weapons strategy in the United States is designed around “presidential first use,” an arrangement that enables one man, the president, to kill and maim many millions of people in a single afternoon.

    The key features of nuclear architecture are, then, this unthinkably magnified level of injury at one end of the weapon and at the other end of the weapon, an unthinkably small number of men who determine our collective fate and the fate of the planet.

    What remains to be seen is whether the people of our own country—and more generally the people of the earth—will permit these weapons and these arrangements for presidential first use to remain in place.

    And then there is a second key question: If the people of this country do not wish these arrangements to remain in place, are there legal and constitutional tools that can help dismantle those arrangements?

    It will be helpful to keep in mind that the nuclear architecture is a physical architecture, but the physical architecture is accompanied by a mental architecture and it is this mental architecture that keeps the physical architecture in place.

    Let me say a few words about each.

    As for the physical architecture, we can see from this chart that 93 percent of the world’s total arsenal is possessed by the United States and Russia. The small wedge at one o’clock is the portion of the arsenal owned by the other seven nuclear states. North Korea has, by the most accurate estimates, fissile material for fewer than 20 warheads. (Here and there estimates have come in as high as 60 warheads, but Hans Kristensen at the Federation of American Scientists—over time the single most reliable voice on weapons count—judges 20 or fewer to be still the best estimate.)

    The legend on the chart tells us that each icon represents five warheads. To get an accurate picture of the world arsenal, we need to multiply the field of icons fivefold.

    In attempting to comprehend the vast scale of the United States arsenal, we are assisted by The New York Times, which recently provided a compelling set of graphics. It calculated what portion of the US stockpile would be needed to “decimate” Libya, what portion to “decimate” North Korea, what portion to “decimate” Syria, Iraq, Iran, China, Russia, and then showed how many weapons would be left over after we had killed one-fourth of the population in those seven countries. Their answer: Seventy percent of the US arsenal would remain.

    It takes thousands of painstaking small steps to put a physical arsenal into place, and 99 percent of those steps have already been completed. We’re not waiting for something to start; we’re very late, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’s 2 ½-minutes-to-midnight tells us. Only the last of the thousand steps—the launch itself—remains.

    For example, specific cities all over the world have specific targets assigned to them. Weapons are assigned not just to our opponents but to our potential opponents, and even to our non-opponents. During the most-recent Bush administration, Vice President Cheney became curious about how many are assigned to each city: “Tell me, I said to the planners, how many warheads are going to hit Kiev under the current plan. It was a difficult question to get an answer to because I don’t think anybody had ever asked it before, but I finally got a report back that under the current targeting plan, we had literally dozens of warheads targeted on this single city.”

    Until the Clinton administration, the longitude and latitude of those cities were programed into the missiles before they were loaded into the Ohio-class submarines. Out of fear that a hacker would initiate a launch, this practice was changed so that instead of the geographical coordinates of cities, the longitude and latitude of uninhabited regions of ocean were programed into the missiles. It is noteworthy that this ethical change was brought about not by the application of moral reasoning—not by the demands of the citizenry or councils of government—but by the very real possibility of a hacker. Throughout this enlightened shift to open-ocean targeting, what never changed was the assignment of specified weapons to specified cities.

    What about the mental architecture that has kept this physical architecture in place?

    The mental architecture requires first and foremost that little information be given to the citizenry. In turn, attempts of the citizenry to protest can be silenced by pointing out that they are speaking without knowledge or information. This blackout of information imperils citizenship in the same way that in earlier centuries depriving people of the art of reading and writing imperiled citizenship. It has acted as a firm piece of social control.

    Many Americans believe that our nuclear weapons will be used only in response to a nuclear attack by another country. Nothing could be further from the truth. We have had first-use arrangements and a first-use policy throughout the 70 years of the nuclear age.

    Most Americans believe that the only time following Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the United States came close to launching a nuclear weapon was during the Cuban missile crisis.

    We now know that Eisenhower twice considered using an atomic weapon in the Taiwan Straits in 1954 and again in Berlin in 1959; that the Kennedy administration, according to Robert McNamara, three times came within “a hair’s breadth” of war with Russia; that Lyndon Johnson considered using a nuclear weapon against China to prevent that country from getting a bomb; and that Nixon, by his own account, four times contemplated using a nuclear weapon. The record stops there because only after a 30-year-time-lag when presidential papers are released do we learn what our leaders planned.

    Our current president, President Trump, is for many of us in the country and for many people throughout the world a particularly reckless figure. Yet the presidential first-use structure is catastrophic even in the hands of the best of men. Yes, it is wildly dangerous if someone is openly reckless and irrational; but it continues to be fatal even in the hands of those who are nominally rational because it is itself a deeply irrational and reckless architecture.

    One great silencer against questions or complaints has been deterrence, an incoherent doctrine whereby nuclear war is best prevented not by ceasing to have, but by having nuclear weapons.

    Gen. Lee Butler, commander in chief of the US Strategic Command from 1992 to 1994, punctures the concept of deterrence most succinctly, deploring the way over decades “the nuclear priesthood extolled its virtues and bowed to its demands”:

    Appropriated from the lexicon of conventional warfare, this simple prescription for adequate military preparation thus became in the nuclear age a formula for unmitigated catastrophe … it was premised on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions, and logical contradictions.

    A third feature of this disabling mental architecture is the erroneous belief that nuclear weapons cannot be unmade. Assurance that they can be unmade comes from many quarters. The entire Southern Hemisphere is blanketed with nuclear-weapons-free treaties: the Treaty of Pelindaba, Treaty of Tlatelolco, Treaty of Bangkok, Treaty of Rarotonga. The nuclear architecture takes place across a north-south divide; nuclear states reside only in the Northern Hemisphere. A study made in Scotland of the timetable for eliminating the United Kingdom’s nuclear arsenal by John Ainslie—a timetable judged reasonable by leading military experts in our own country such as former missile-launch officer Bruce Blair—shows the simple and straightforward steps that can be followed (some completed in hours, others requiring several years). Compared to the problem of global warming, the steps for dismantling nuclear weapons are straightforward and eminently doable.

    Is the question that we are asking today—about the legality, constitutionality, or justness of presidential first use—a narrow question (as some people have said to me)?

    Or is it instead, as I believe, a question whose answer is profound and deep and has the potential to strike a fatal blow to the nuclear architecture?

  • Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? It is just?

    Nuclear weapons strategy in the United States is designed around “presidential first use,” an arrangement that enables one person, the president, to kill and maim many millions of people in a single afternoon. Is presidential first use legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just? At a November 4, 2017, conference held at Harvard University and co-chaired by Elaine Scarry of Harvard and Jonathan King of MIT, gathers international and constitutional scholars and politicians to examine the nature of presidential first use in the United States alongside parallel arrangements in the other eight nuclear states. The conference exposed the grave illegality of first use, the likelihood of its occurring, and the way citizens can step forward to dismantle it.

    Transcript of Presentations

    Elaine Scarry: Introduction

    Congressman Jim McGovern: Presidential First Use vs. Congress

    William J. Perry: Nuclear North Korea: 1999 and 2017

    Bruce G. Blair: Protocol for a US Nuclear Strike

    Rosa Brooks: Nuclear Weapons and the Deep State

    Kennette Benedict: Congress and the Citizenry

    John Burroughs: International Law and First Use of Nuclear Weapons

    Bruce Ackerman: Presidential Lawlessness

    Zia Mian: Nuclear Weapons Use in South Asia

    Hugh Gusterson: Democracy, Hypocrisy, First Use

    Sissela Bok: The Use and Misuse of the Language of Self-Defense

  • March: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    March 1, 1954 – After more than three years of research and development by physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and despite strong opposition from many former Manhattan Project scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “super” or hydrogen bomb was first detonated on this date in a test designated Bravo as part of the Operation Castle series of nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.  Quoting a 2013 Alex Wellerstein article from the blog NuclearSecrecy.org, Daniel Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday Machine” described the impact and significance of the first U.S. thermonuclear weapon, “The yield for the first droppable H-bomb…was fifteen megatons. That is a million times more explosive power than the largest blockbusters in World War II…The yield was 250 percent greater than the largest yield that had been predicted for it, six megatons resulting – along with an unexpected shift of wind – in heavy radioactive fallout contaminating inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, one of (the crew of 23 hospitalized sailors) whom died.  The reason for the great underestimate of yield, with its serious human consequences, was precisely the kind of scientific error or unforeseen reactivity that (Manhattan Project scientist Enrico) Fermi had feared in the connection with the possibility of atmospheric ignition (impacting the entire surface of the Earth) from the Trinity test (the first atomic bomb blast on July 16, 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico).  Los Alamos bomb designers had neglected or greatly underestimated the contribution of the production of neutrons and to the yield from one of the isotopes including in the hydrogen fuel, lithium-7, which had been thought to be relatively inert but proved not to be under the unprecedented condition of the dry-fuel thermonuclear detonation.”  Bravo produced a crater in the atoll with a diameter of 6,000 feet and a depth of 240 feet as the blast created a fireball four miles wide and a mushroom cloud 60 miles across.  Comments:  The frightening 1949 characterization of such doomsday machines by nuclear bomb designers Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi justify renewed efforts by global citizenry today to eliminate these weapons before it is too late, “By its very nature, it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.  It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he (or she) happens to be a resident of an enemy country.”

    (Sources:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig. “Nuclear Weapons Databook:  Volume II, Appendix B.” Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., Cambridge, MA:  Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, p. 154 and Daniel Ellsberg.  “The Doomsday Machine:  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”  New York:  Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 285; 289-290.)

    March 11, 1999 – Retired General George Lee Butler, who was selected as head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command on Jan. 25, 1991 and served in that capacity until stepping down in 1994 and became one of the first high-ranking U.S. military officers to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons in a December 1996 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, gave a speech on this date to the staff and supporters of the Canadian Network Against Nuclear Weapons in Montreal.  In his remarks, Butler described the Pentagon’s nuclear war plan or SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in this manner, “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life.”  Comments:  In his later years, General Butler said this about nuclear weapons, “Rather than being concerned about the moral implications of these devices, we continue to pursue them as if they were our salvation – as opposed to the prospective engine of our utter destruction…As long as these weapons exist, and people hold them in such high regard for reasons of national esteem, they act as a brake on our capacity for advancing our humanity…The cold hard fact of the matter is that a nuclear weapon is, at its very core, anti-ethical…Nuclear conflict is essentially an irrational activity, because essentially what you’re doing is signing your own death notice.”

    (Sources:  George Lee Butler.  “General Lee Butler Addresses The Canadian Network Against Nuclear Weapons.”  WagingPeace.org. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  March 11, 1999 https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/general-lee-butler-addresses-the-canadian-network-against-nuclear-weapons/ accessed Feb. 15, 2018 and Norman Kempster. “Ex-Chief of U.S. Nuclear Forces Seeks Total Ban.”  Los Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 1996.)

    March 15, 1980 – One of four SS-N-6 Serb (R-27 Zyb) submarine-launched-ballistic-missiles, launched as part of a training exercise from a Soviet submarine sailing in the Sea of Okhotsk bordering the Pacific Ocean between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island in the far northeastern zone of the Soviet Union, pursued a trajectory that potentially threatened Japan or Alaska.  This quickly resulted in the U.S. Strategic Air Command convening a threat assessment conference which determined that no Soviet missile attack was in progress.  Comments:  Many of the numerous false warnings of nuclear attack (another prominent example being the Jan. 25, 1995 Black Brant Incident involving a Norwegian sounding rocket which almost caused Russian President Boris Yeltsin to launch a nuclear counterstrike) that have occurred in all nine nuclear weapons states over the decades since the dawn of the nuclear age, have taken the world to the edge of global catastrophe.  This state of affairs represents one of the most powerful rationales for eliminating world nuclear arsenals.

    (Source:  John Pike, et al., “Chicken Little and Darth Vader:  Is the Sky Really Falling?” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 1, 1991, p. 61.)

    March 20, 2003 – The United States began a large-scale air assault and land invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on this date.  After the collapse of Hussein’s government, efforts to find substantial evidence of weapons of mass destruction however proved unsuccessful (proving what representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed after more than a decade of in-country inspections).  Eventually the dissolution of the Iraqi military helped fuel a long-term, robust and deadly insurgency that went on bloody year after bloody year.  By the time of large-scale U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in December of 2011, there were almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers and anywhere between 150,000 and one million Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed.  Many millions of other Iraqis were wounded or forced to flee the country as refugees.  Over 32,000 U.S. soldiers were wounded in the fighting with at least 10,000 suffering the effects of PTSD.  The cost estimates for the war, which include ongoing long-term medical treatment for tens of thousands of U.S. troops, range from one to three trillion dollars.  Comments:  Despite former President Barack Obama’s statement that, “The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made America stronger,” it is likely that the “cure” for the problem of suspected, surviving WMD (which were not destroyed by U.S./allied forces in the first Persian Gulf War of 1991 or thereafter by intermittent air strikes in the years preceding the second Gulf War) in Iraq was worse than the “disease.”  Hopefully the lesson of the U.S. experience in Iraq that military invasion and occupation is not a wise course of action to prevent nuclear proliferation will convince the Trump Administration not to go the same route in North Korea and/or Iran.  But even smaller-scale conventional or tactical nuclear strikes on those nations’ nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure will likely only fuel long-term conflict and heighten the risk of acts of terrorism, particularly WMD terrorism.  A better solution is to embrace the new United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and work toward universal ratification of this treaty and other verifiable nuclear weapons elimination agreements to reduce the chance of perpetual conventional war or a nuclear doomsday.

    (Sources:  Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. “The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond.” Washington Post, Sept. 5, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html accessed Feb. 19, 2018 and numerous mainstream and alternative news media sources.)

    March 28, 1960 – On this date, the French oceanographer, explorer, and co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung, Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997) appeared on the cover of Time magazine.  Cousteau devoted his life to studying and preserving diverse ocean environments on our planet and promoting responsible treatment of the flora and fauna of the seas by recording his trips on the ABC-TV series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.  He was one of the first environmentalists to witness the negative impact of global warming on fragile ocean ecosystems and Cousteau also opposed the building of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants because of their deleterious impacts on humanity and the environment.  In 1959, he helped organize the First World Oceanic Congress and a year later he lobbied his native France and other countries to stop dumping radioactive waste into the Mediterranean Sea which led to an eventual ban on such activities.  In 1977 he was awarded the United Nations International Environmental Prize.

    (Sources:  “Jacques Cousteau.”  Biography.com http://www.biography.com/people/jacques-cousteau-9259496 and The Gale Group.  “Opposing Viewpoints In Context:  Environmental Science In Context:  Radioactive Waste.” 2009.)

    March 31, 1998 – The United Kingdom withdrew from service the last of its estimated 100 WE-177 tactical nuclear free-fall bombs, making the U.S. the only nation with tactical nuclear weapons deployed outside its own territory.  Comments:  While the U.S. drastically reduced the numbers of tactical nuclear weapons deployed outside U.S. borders from several thousand during the height of the Cold War to its current total of approximately 150 warheads stationed in five European countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey), there nevertheless remain serious concerns of the increased risk of unauthorized, accidental, or unintentional nuclear war with Russia.  Many scholars and arms control experts today feel that NATO’s expansion (and the deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons ever closer to Russia’s western borders) since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and increased tensions relating to recent crises in Crimea and Ukraine, have helped trigger a renewed Cold War.  Also, there is speculation that with the recent release of the Trump Administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review this past February, which supports building smaller yield, more usable tactical weapons (and possibly deploying them in places like South Korea and Japan where they might be used against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile sites), that the overall risk of nuclear war has actually increased.

    (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 57 and Kingston Reif. “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Turkey Raise Alarms.”  Arms Control Association, November 2017.)

  • Miyoko Matsubara

    I heard from friends in Hiroshima that Miyoko Matsubara left this world on February 9th. She was a very gentle and dedicated hibakusha, who came several times for extended periods to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara to practice her English and polish the presentation of her experience as an atomic bomb survivor. She was 13 years old when the atomic bomb destroyed her city. Like so many other survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, she was traumatized by the experience and wanted to assure that no other people or cities suffered the trauma and tragedy that she and her city had.

    Miyoko had a deep commitment to peace and to spreading the central message of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Never Again! She was particularly enthusiastic about sharing her message with young people, and spoke often in school classrooms. I can readily recall her smiling face, and I remember clearly the humility she expressed in her deep bows.

    I think that everyone who knew her was enriched by her enthusiasm, sincerity and friendship. May she rest in peace.

    Here is a poem I wrote about her many years ago:

    She bowed deeply.  She bowed deeper than the oceans.  She bowed
    from the top of Mt. Fuji to the bottom of the ocean.  She bowed so deeply and
    so often that the winds blew hard.

    The winds blew her whispered apologies and prayers across all the
    continents.  But the winds whistled too loudly, and made it impossible to hear
    her apologies and prayers.  The winds made the oceans crazy.  The water in
    the oceans rose up in a wild molecular dance.  The oceans threw themselves
    against the continents.  The people were frightened.  They ran screaming from
    the shores.  They feared the white water and the whistling wind.  They
    huddled together in dark places.  They strained to hear the words in the wind.

    In some places there were some people who thought they heard an
    apology.  In other places there were people who thought they heard a prayer.

    She bowed deeply.  She bowed more deeply than anyone should bow.

  • We Call BS

    This speech was delivered at a rally on February 17, 2018, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

    We haven’t already had a moment of silence in the House of Representatives, so I would like to have another one. Thank you.

    Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it’s time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.

    We certainly do not understand why it should be harder to make plans with friends on weekends than to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon. In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

    I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student’s right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

    Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are watertight. The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past four years alone.

    I found out today there’s a website shootingtracker.com. Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA’s shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn’t had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.

    I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go through other school shooter drills. When we’ve had our say with the government — and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying ‘it is what it is,’ but if us students have learned anything, it’s that if you don’t study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it’s time to start doing something.

    We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we’re going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That’s going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it’s going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

    There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities again and again.” We did, time and time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn’t know this kid. OK, we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.

    And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the student’s fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn’t take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking about the FBI. I’m talking about the people he lived with. I’m talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.

    If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I’m going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.

    You want to know something? It doesn’t matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don’t do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.

    To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.

    If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not act like it. In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

    From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don’t really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don’t need a psychologist and I don’t need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

    Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he’s stating for the record, “Well, it’s a shame the FBI isn’t doing background checks on these mentally ill people.” Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

    The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice to call BS. Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn’t reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.

    If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.

  • Duck and Cover

    Once those articulate Florida high school students, God love them, are finished exposing the craven emptiness of politicians like Marco Rubio and others subverted by the NRA, they might want to turn to nuclear weapons as another sacred cow ripe for the “we call B.S.” treatment.

    The acute dangers of gun violence and nuclear weapons offer ominous parallels. Both are deadly serious issues that provoke absurd levels of avoidance and paralysis.

    For 22 years, pressure from the NRA upon the Center for Disease Control caused Congress to defund research into gun fatalities. Opportunists like Rubio duck and take cover from the obvious root cause of our endless mass shootings, the glut of unregulated guns, to any other explanation no matter how implausible, in order to avoid shutting off the spigot of blood-soaked NRA cash.

    The solutions to keeping children in schools safe from mass shootings have never been hidden. There is a slam-dunk correlation between the numbers of guns in any country and the number of mass shootings, and the United States wins the booby prize for having by far the most guns and the most shootings.

    Avoidance continues rampant on the nuclear issue as well. Last fall Senator Corker, acknowledging bipartisan concerns about the unstable temperament of the president, opened a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examining some of the legal issues of nuclear command and control, by remarking that this was the first hearing on the subject since 1976! Senator Rubio was there, tut-tutting that even talking about whether military personnel had the option to refuse to carry out illegal orders (they do) might undermine our credibility with North Korea.

    While the president’s unhinged bellicosity may indeed keep us up at night, the overall structure of executive authority over nuclear weapons is an even greater cause for sweaty insomnia than any particular person in office. No human being, however well-trained in sober decision-making, should ever be put in the position of having five minutes to decide whether to launch a fleet of nuclear-winter-causing missiles because someone else’s nuclear-winter-causing missiles were already on their way—or not, as in the case of the Hawaiian false alarm.

    Those who call for arming teachers, who buy into deterrence theory on either the gun level or the nuclear level, must justify the improbable notion that the more we are armed, the more we can move into the future without errors, misinterpretations, and accidents. Nuclear deterrence, designed to ensure stability, is undercut by the inherently unstable momentum of “we build-they build.” In order to be certain that the weapons, whether a loaded pistol in the drawer or a ballistic missile in a silo, are never used, they must be kept ready for instant use—accidents waiting to happen.

    Fortunately, the insane levels of destructiveness built up during the Cold War were reduced by the hard work of skilled diplomats—reminding us that sensible further reductions in nuclear arms remain within the realm of possibility even if political will is presently lacking.

    Reductions in the equally grotesque numbers of guns in the possession of American citizens are equally possible with well-structured buyback programs and common-sense regulations based upon the model of licensing citizens to drive cars.

    Duck and cover stopgaps only fuel vain illusions of survivability—crouching in closets or hiding under desks as a viable protection from either a shooter with an AR-15 or the detonation of a nuclear weapon. Prevention is not nine-tenths but ten-tenths of the cure.

    The rhythmic repetition of shootings tempts us to assume that the probability of nuclear war is much less likely than further gun slaughter. The reality is that without a fundamental change of direction, both more mass shootings and more nuclear weapons used against people are tragically inevitable. Too many assault rifles in the hands of too many angry, alienated young men will yield more incidents. The authority to launch nuclear weapons from North Korea is itself in the hands of an alienated young man, leaving aside that our president is himself a far cry from being a grown-up.

    Powerful lobbying efforts thwart reasonable plans for reducing either guns or nuclear weapons. In the case of the latter, a vast program of renewal costing trillions is getting under way, in clear violation of the spirit of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to which the U.S. is a signatory.

    The argument that the more we are armed to the teeth the safer we will be simply does not hold up under statistical examination. Where gun regulations are stricter, violent incidents drop, and where they are looser, incidents rise. Period. There is no logical reason to assume matters are any different with nuclear weapons. The more there are, and the more people who are handling them, the greater the chance of their being used. Period.

    That is why 122 nations signed an agreement at the U.N. last year banning nuclear weapons. In a similar spirit the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School quickly sublimated their grief and rage into a growing political movement to change gun laws. When they become adults and begin to run for office, it’s hopeful to imagine they will also call B.S. on the notion that more nuclear weapons make us safer.

    Winslow Myers, the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide,” serves on the Advisory Board of the War Prevention Initiative and writes for Peacevoice.