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March 1, 1995 – In an article titled, “Nation of Nitwits,” Bob Herbert reported in the New York Times that a recent Gallup Poll of the American people discovered just a few years after the Cold War (1945-1991) ended, that over 20 percent of respondents “knew virtually nothing about an atomic bomb attack.  They didn’t know whether – or in some cases, even if – such an attack occurred.”  Presumably that means that fifty years later, a surprising total of at least one-fifth of Americans were unaware of the U.S. atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.  Comments:  It is likely that fewer respondents would have expressed ignorance about the history and current dangers associated with global nuclear arsenals if this poll had been conducted after the fiftieth anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially when the debate concerning the display of the nosecone of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in downtown Washington, DC made the national headlines that summer.  At issue was whether that aerospace artifact should include specific historical details on the horrendous human impact, short- and long-term, of the unleashing by the U.S. military of weapons of mass destruction, of a scale previously unforeseen in human history, on populated civilian targets.  Today, although much ignorance still exists on the matter of the nuclear threat, even among some of America’s top political leaders, a growing number of global citizenry continue to push for drastic reductions in and the eventual elimination of this manmade Doomsday machine.

March 11, 1958 – A U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber of the 308^th Bombardment Wing, flying from Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah, Georgia to a base in England as part of a four-plane mock bombing exercise called Operation Snow Flurry, accidentally released a 30-kiloton Mark VI nuclear weapon over Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Thankfully the nuclear weapon did not discharge but the conventional high explosives jacketing the nuclear core did explode creating a crater 75 feet in diameter and 35 feet deep which destroyed a farm house and injured several people.  Comments:  This incident represents yet another example of thousands of nuclear accidents, near-misses, and “Broken Arrows,” only some of which the Pentagon and other members of the Nuclear Club have formally acknowledged.  (Sources:  The Center for Defense Information.  “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents:  Dangers In Our Midst.”  The Defense Monitor, Vol. 10, No. 5, 1981 and Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

March 17, 1953 – The first of eleven nuclear test explosions, conducted March through June of 1953 as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, occurred on this date at the Nevada Test Site.  The 16 kiloton blast was one of seven tower shots in a test series “to find devices for possible inclusion in the nuclear stockpile, to improve military tactics, equipment and training for the atomic battlefield, and to enhance civil defense requirements by measuring and assessing blast effects upon dwellings, shelters, automobiles, and other structures.”  Some of this test series involved the participation of approximately 21,000 military service members.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by the nine nuclear weapons states has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations especially native peoples and hundreds of thousands of military “participants.”  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people today due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook, Volume II, Appendix B.”  National Resources Defense Council, Inc.  Cambridge, MA:  Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, page 153.)

March 23, 1983 – President Ronald Reagan, speaking before a national television audience, announced his dream of making Soviet nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” by proposing the research, development, and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), later nicknamed “Star Wars” by news media representatives.  Over $100 billion was spent in the next two decades researching exotic space-based X-ray lasers and other orbital SDI sensors and weapons.  Cost estimates for the program spiraled as high as several trillion dollars as it became clear that a strategic defensive buildup would fuel even more of an offensive nuclear arms race.  This led to the program being downsized in the 1990s to tackle shorter-range missile threats from nations such as Iran and North Korea.  Under President Clinton, the program was renamed National Missile Defense (NMD) in 1996 and focused on using Ground-Based Interceptors to intercept threat missiles in mid-trajectory.  Then, President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty despite widespread criticism that this move would increase nuclear instability and ratchet up the risk of nuclear war by lifting restrictions on defensive weapons.  In late 2002, the Bush Administration announced the newly named Missile Defense Agency (MDA) would, despite inadequate R&D and a large number of test failures, begin building a Ground-Based Missile Defense (GMD) system.  In 2017, after a decade and a half, the program’s price tag is $40 billion and increasing.  Its test record is poor, oversight of the program has been wholly inadequate, and according to a plethora of defense experts, inside and outside the government, it has no demonstrated ability to stop an incoming missile under real-world conditions.  Comments:  There is little doubt that the Republican-controlled 115^th Congress and President Trump will probably increase funding for GMD and possibly expand the focus of missile defense back to outer space as President Reagan proposed almost 35 years ago despite risking the violation of the Outer Space Treaty and other prohibitions on the militarization of outer space, not to mention the tremendous waste of U.S. taxpayer dollars.  (Source:  Laura Grego, George N. Lewis, and David Wright.  “Shielded From Oversight:  The Disastrous U.S. Approach to Strategic Missile Defense.”  Union of Concerned Scientists, July 2016, pp. 1, 6.)

March 28, 1979 – A partial meltdown of two reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg was one of the most serious nuclear accidents in history.  It caused a massive release of radioactive products endangering residents in the region in the immediate aftermath and for decades after this incident.  The “cleanup” of the accident between August 1979 and December 1993 cost taxpayers approximately $1 billion.   The incident came four years after the Norman C. Rasmussen-chaired Nuclear Regulatory Commission-sponsored report (designated “WASH-1400”), which downgraded the nuclear accident consequences noted in previous government and nongovernmental reports.   German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) wrote an article in the January 1976 edition of Scientific American, which provided a more realistic threat assessment of a catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown than the Rasmussen Report.  Bethe’s analysis concluded that a serious nuclear accident would claim 3,300 prompt fatalities, create 45,000 instances of early radiation illness, impact 240,000 individuals with cancerous thyroid nodules over a 30-year period, produce 45,000 latent cancer fatalities over the same time period, and trigger approximately 30,000 genetic defects spanning a 150-year period.  His estimated cost (in 1976 dollars) of such an accident was $14 billion.  Comments:  Under President Trump’s Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, there will be a renewed effort to build more nuclear power plants, promote dangerous nuclear energy in other nations, and accelerate the frightening privatization of the handling and disposition of a huge volume of nuclear waste.  In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage conundrum, as well as the terrorist targeting potential, the economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an accelerated phase-out of global civilian nuclear power plants over the next decade.  (Sources:  “14 Year Cleanup at Three Mile Island Concludes.”  New York Times.  Aug. 15, 1993 accessed on February 6, 2017 at www.nytimes.com and various news media reports.)

March 30, 2016 – At a town hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin hosted by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump followed up on frightening comments he made days earlier regarding nuclear weapons.  Candidate Trump said that he would “not take nuclear weapons off the table” comparing the use of genocidal Doomsday weapons as mere playing cards in a game.  “Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” he queried host Chris Matthews.  Awhile later, Donald Trump said, “Look nuclear should be off the table, but would there be a time when it could be used, possibly, possibly.”  This led Matthews to ask him point-blank, “Can you tell (the people of) the Middle East we’re not using a nuclear weapon on anybody?”  The future President responded, “I would never say that, I would never take any of my cards off the table.”  Comments:  Although President Barack Obama, other Democrats and even conservative Republicans criticized Trump’s brazenly reckless statements on how he might consider actually targeting people and nations with nuclear weapons and thereby loosen strong international prohibitions, spanning more than seven decades, against using such immoral, illegal, and genocidal weapons, few in the corporate news media countered by proposing that nuclear weapons be significantly reduced or even entirely eliminated!  While the future 45^th President was rightly criticized, perhaps not strongly enough though, no one criticized the existing flawed nuclear deterrence system and the alleged right of most Nuclear Club members to validate their long-standing first-use policies.  Surprisingly, no change in the status quo ante, whereby the risk of nuclear war is continually increasing day-by-day, week-by-week, and year-by-year has been forcefully advocated by the mainstream corporate news media or any of the nuclear powers.  (Source:  Full Transcript:  MSNBC Town Hall with Donald Trump Moderated by Chris Matthews, March 30, 2016 http://info.msnbc.com/_news/2016/03/30/35330907-full-transcript-msnbc-town-hall-with-donald-trump-moderated-by-chris-matthews accessed Feb. 18, 2017.)

February 2, 1962 – Although the Soviet Union’s first underground nuclear test actually occurred on October 11, 1961, on this date the first Soviet underground nuclear explosion was detected by U.S. military authorities.  Initially considered a clandestine way to hide the exact specifications of test warheads, underground nuclear testing by both the U.S. and Soviet Union became accepted and even promoted as an alternative to space-based and particularly atmospheric nuclear testing which spread radioactive strontium-90 over the entire surface of the planet and was found as a contaminant in the teeth of children worldwide.  The Limited Test Ban Treaty negotiated by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, which entered into force on Oct. 10, 1963, relegated nuclear tests solely to underground sites.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by the nine nuclear weapons states has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations especially native peoples.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people today due to nuclear testing.  Since an ever growing global network of hundreds of extremely sensitive seismic monitoring stations has made nuclear test cheating impossible, President Trump should recommend that the Senate ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) at the earliest possible opportunity.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 10 and Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook, Volume IV.”  National Resources Defense Council, Inc.  Cambridge, MA:  Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, p.5.)

February 10, 2015 – An article published on this date in the Rutland Herald newspaper authored by Susan Smallheer, was titled, “Strontium-90 Detected in Vermont Yankee Well Water.”  The article noted that test results by the Vermont Department of Health in conjunction with The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Oak Ridge Laboratory confirmed that the volatile cancer-causing isotope strontium-90 was detected in water wells at the Entergy Corporation’s Vermont Yankee nuclear plant in the underground plume between the reactor building and the Connecticut River, a water source that had been previously contaminated with radioactive tritium in 2010.  Although the water test samples were taken in August before the plant was shut down permanently in December of 2014 and the commissioner of the state health department, Dr. Harry Chen, claimed the presence of 3.5 pico curies per liter of strontium-90 was less than half the drinking water standard of eight pico curies per liter per day and NRC Spokesman Neil Sheehan claimed that new tests showed only one pico curie per liter, there is little doubt that a number of dangerous radioactive toxic contaminants have been and are now definitely leaking from not only Vermont Yankee but also from most if not all of the operating or recently decommissioned global civilian nuclear reactors of which there are over 400.  The bad news for Vermont Yankee reactor neighbors is that the entire facility will not be completely dismantled and decontaminated for as long as five decades from now according to Dr. Chen.  Comments:  In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear reactor accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage conundrum as well as the terrorist targeting potential, the economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an accelerated phase-out of global civilian nuclear power plants over the next decade.  President Donald Trump should embrace this proposal and announce it publicly in his first 100 days in office along with a strong commitment to reduce and eliminate coal and other fossil fuel energy sources that increase global warming while subsidizing accelerated government and corporate green energy solutions in order to combat climate change.  (Source:  http://www.recorder.com/home/15625872-95/strontium-90-detected-in-vt-yankee-well-water accessed Jan. 15, 2017.)

February 14, 1967 – A treaty prohibiting the research, development, and production of nuclear weapons in Latin America, the Treaty of Tlatelolco, was signed on this date.  Eventually all 33 nation-states in the region, including Cuba, acceded to the treaty which entered into force on April 22, 1968.  The treaty included two protocols that allowed both nuclear weapons states and those countries with territories in the region to participate in the regime.  In effect, this treaty created a nuclear-weapons-free-zone (NWFZ) in the region as did later agreements in other areas of the world such as the August 6, 1985 Raratonga Treaty, which established a South Pacific NWFZ, the December 15, 1995 Bangkok Treaty, which mandated a Southeast Asia NWFZ, and the April 11, 1996 Pelindaba Treaty, which created an African NWFZ, and hundreds of municipal NWFZs in a number of global cities including several in the United States.  Comments:  The growing global campaign to significantly reduce and eliminate nuclear arsenals, which has helped expand an ever-growing zone of nuclear-weapons-free regions, suffered a symbolic setback recently when President Donald Trump not only argued for expanding and growing the U.S. nuclear weapons inventory but also expressed the desire to see non-nuclear states such as South Korea and Japan develop their own doomsday weapons.  In addition, hoped for NWFZs in the Mideast and Southwest/Southern Asia became less likely due to Donald Trump’s rhetoric, agreed to by Republican leaders in the newly sworn in 115^th Congress, about terminating the Iran nuclear deal.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 1-4.)

February 20, 2016 – A team of U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command airmen from the 91^st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota and the 625^th Strategic Operations Squadron at Offutt, AFB, Nebraska aboard the Airborne Launch Control System, in coordination with the 576^th Flight Test Squadron (FLTS), launched an unarmed LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM equipped with a test reentry vehicle, that would in wartime carry one or more nuclear weapons, from Vandenberg AFB, California 4,200 miles to impact the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands despite the long standing opposition of the government of that territory led by Foreign Minister Tony de Brum to continued violations of their sovereignty by such tests and consistent with a series of Nuclear Zero lawsuits filed in the International Court of Justice in The Hague starting in October 2014 by that government against the nuclear weapons states to convince those nations to end the nuclear arms race.by committing to nuclear disarmament as they agreed to in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).  One week later, the U.S. conducted yet another such nuclear test launch.  Comments:  The official U.S. rationale for decades of continuing tests of its ICBM-based nuclear arsenal as representing, “a visible message of national security which serves to assure our partners and dissuade potential aggressors,” as stated by the 576^th FLTS commander Colonel Craig Ramsey, rings quite hollow when we consider that the U.S. itself has never enacted a policy of No First Use of nuclear weapons.  Therefore, regular ICBM testing ensures that a U.S. nuclear first strike remains a viable offensive capability – making nuclear warfare a more likely eventuality.  The same is true for Russia, China and the other nuclear weapons states.  (Source:  “Minot Tests Minuteman III.” U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command – Office of Public Affairs, Feb. 22, 2016 http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/670572/minot-tests-minuteman-iii accessed Jan. 13, 2017.)

February 23, 1981 – Despite rhetoric by right-wing Cold Warriors including representatives of the Committee on the Present Danger like President Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and ultra-conservative scholars in the late 1970s and early 1980s such as Leon Sloss, Richard Pipes, and others that believed that the Soviet Union planned to fight and win a nuclear war with the United States, the comments that Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev made at the 26^th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party argued against such irrationality, then and now, “To try and outstrip each other in the arms race or to expect to win a nuclear war is dangerous madness.”  Comments:  Nonetheless, Russia, China, other nuclear powers, the U.S., and its nuclear-armed allies, especially the administration of President Donald Trump, building on a decision made by former President Barack Obama, have announced plans to spend trillions of dollars, pounds, rubles, etc., to modernize their nuclear arsenals and prevail in a nuclear arms race.  Madness, indeed.  (Sources:  Marilyn Bechtel, David Laibman, and Daniel Rosenberg, editors.  Full Text of “Peace, Plan and Progress:  The 26^th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”  A New World Review Collection.  New York:  NWR Publications, Inc., 1981.  https://archive.org/Stream/PeacePlanAndProgress/Peace%20and%20Progress_djvu.txt accessed Jan. 19, 2017 and Jerry Wayne Sanders.  “Peddlers of Crisis:  The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment.”  Cambridge, MA:  South End Press, 1983.)

February 26, 1950 – Manhattan Project physicist, Hungarian-born Leo Szilard informed listeners at a University of Chicago Roundtable broadcast on NBC Radio for the first time about a potential doomsday scenario that scientists might one day construct – a global arsenal of very large naval ship-sized cobalt-60 nuclear weapons that could irradiate the world and wipe out the human race.  Comments:  While there is no evidence that such a doomsday weapon (dramatized in the Stanley Kubrick black comedy film Dr. Strangelove) was ever constructed, the Soviet Union did create a system known as Perimeter or Dead Hand which became operational in the early to mid-1980s to ensure that if Soviet leadership was suddenly, like a bolt out of the blue, decapitated, killed in a surprise nuclear attack on the Kremlin, that the entirety of the Soviet nuclear arsenal could still be launched automatically either by subordinate commanders or by an automated electronic command and control system.  Comments:  This set of facts only strengthens the argument that during the Cold War, and unfortunately also today during Cold War II, humanity has been extremely fortunate that a nuclear war has not been triggered due to inadvertent, accidental, unintentional, or irrational circumstances.  Before our species’ luck runs out, it is imperative that all nine nuclear weapons states drastically reduce and eliminate global nuclear arsenals at the earliest date possible.  (Sources:  Samuel Upton Newtan.  “Nuclear War I and Other Major Nuclear Disasters of the 20^th Century.  Bloomington, Indiana:  Author House, 2007, pp. 37-38 and Nicholas Thompson. “Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine.”  Wired.  Sept. 21, 2009.  https://www.wired.com/2009/09mg-deadhand/ accessed Jan. 19, 2017.)