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  • Overcoming Geopolitical Obstacles to Nuclear Zero by Daniel Ellsberg

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Daniel Ellsberg at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    ellsberg

    I think each speaker has, understandably, started by saying what a privilege it is to be here. Let me define that privilege as I feel it, very much very specifically. I don’t believe, in my lifetime, I have been in a discussion group for one day or two days with as many knowledgeable people about nuclear war, nuclear policy, nuclear. If others have been more fortunate, fine. But I see this as a group that is unprecedented for me, and I’m 85. Just saying… A question of age here. We were just a little interested. Noam is the senior person here at 87, I have a senior here, six months more than I am, I’m 85. How many people here are over 64? Okay. You were 10 years old at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I’d say is close to being old enough, and if you’re 70, you’d be 16. That was the last time the American people were conscious of being close, possibly close, to nuclear war. If you’re under that… Let’s say if you’re under 25, you were born after the Cold War, the first Cold War. They’re going to see another one. The people who are in college now are going to understand what ‘Cold War’ means. I’m sorry, ’cause we’re on the way, if we’re not in it already.

    But they have no consciousness of what the first one meant, they couldn’t have. My understanding of… I think that the American public’s understanding and elite’s understanding of nuclear war is almost non-existent. When somebody mentioned earlier whether they knew the difference between an A-bomb and an H-bomb, I’ve asked many audiences that over the year. And I expect to get one, two or three people out of 500 or 1,000 who know that difference. In other words, they know almost nothing. So, let me ask, why aren’t the young involved in this? No American government and no other government has ever taken an effort to educate its people, and that includes non-nuclear states, as well. Eisenhower actually went through a brief period, in the very first months of his administration, on an op… What he called Operation Candor. Capital C-A-N-D-O-R, Candor. It was 1953, we had just tested a thermonuclear weapon in the last days of the Truman administration, having decided not to postpone that ’til Nixon. And he was actually tempted to tell people that the group worked on it in the White House, actually. On telling them of what fallout meant and what difference it made to have H-bombs over A-bombs.

    I think Steven pointed out on your picture the difference is a thousand. In 1954, the first droppable H-bomb was tested. It was one thousand times the Hiroshima weapon. Very few people have a sense of what that means, or what it means right now, that India and Pakistan don’t have H-bombs, and will shortly if testing resumes, which many Republicans and others have been favoring for a long time, and what difference that would make. And I’ll go into that in just a moment. So, that’s sort of not knowing the first thing about the situation we’re in today. I was actually, I have to say, physically dizzy and fainting from the last two talks today by Steven and Hans. Not because I was unfamiliar, I am one of those who actually did know probably most, though far from all, of what each of them had to say. But seeing it all together in one place, and as of today, I was fainting. And the reason was this. Here’s something where I differ from the other people here, who are comparably knowledgers to me, but I’m the one who was part of the problem. No one else here, I suspect, has to think about or deal with the fact that they were on the side of the nuclear arms race at any point in their lives.

    But I wasn’t just, say, designing nuclear weapons, which I know nothing about, or looking at weapons effects specifically. I’m not a scientist, I was an economist. I’m not a scientist. My work was on war plans. And what I was hearing was, “It’s back.” The insanities that I was dealing with, insanities that I was dealing with at that time, and was part of, are coming back. And let me make a little distinction there, my job was to try to somehow edge away, or more than edge away, from the insanities of the Eisenhower war plans. And I was to devise new… I was given the job under the Secretary of Defense McNamara to do new guidance for the operational war plans, that would be a major, major revision of the Eisenhower plans. Which I won’t even take time… I’ve sent my manuscript, by the way, to everybody here. I didn’t expect any of you to have time in the couple of weeks to really look at it. I’m going to talk about a couple of things today that actually aren’t yet dealt with that much in the book. But you will get in the chapters the nature of the Eisenhower proposals. And you know, it was mind-boggling.

    And yet I’ve come to realize that the plans that I, and later, the Kennedy administration worked on, were infeasible modifications of the Eisenhower plan. The actual experience of a nuclear war would’ve been virtually unchanged then and now from the Eisenhower plans, mad as they were. And the subtitle to my book might be the title in the end, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, started out in my mind as somewhat ironic, an attention-catcher. But as I worked along, realized no, they’re real confessions. I have more to confess of being on the wrong track and taking too long to learn it and so forth. They really are confessions. Now, I do think that that background, when I say that I see it coming around again, is based on a understanding of what nuclear weapons were and have been for that is shared by most anti-nuclear activists or specialists, few of whom I think have had real exposure to the actual plans. They’ve heard about them, but they haven’t actually held a plan in their mind or been part of it and so forth. For instance, the word “deterrent” was and is deliberately ambiguous and little understood by most people.

    The purpose of US nuclear war plans and preparations has always been primarily, and at first exclusively, to deter conventional attack by communist forces, by US first-use of nuclear weapons. Let’s remember that between ’45 and ’49, late ’49, when there were plans, nuclear war plans. We had a monopoly which we expected to continue. It was not to deter a Soviet nuclear attack, they didn’t have any and they weren’t expected to for quite a while. And actually, they were slower than we expected to build up their stockpile, especially when it came to ICBMs, but even early on. So that as long as a decade into the nuclear era, we had close to a monopoly. Not literally a monopoly after ’49, but something close to a monopoly. That’s where our policies and our planning were based on that period, essentially where we did not have to fear, especially in the US, putting aside Europe later, but for the US we didn’t have to fear a nuclear weapon landing on us, any more than when we firebombed Tokyo we had to worry that we would be firebombed in return. It was not an issue. And by the way, the plans were started in a period when the initial A-bombs did not, of which we had a very limited stock, again we had three by the end of the month, maybe 10 by the end of the year, did not affect the level of destruction we were already inflicting on Japan.

    Oppenheimer and the others did not expect the first A-bomb to kill as many people as Tokyo in March 9th and 10th, and it didn’t come close. So it wasn’t changing the level of destruction, it was simply a more efficient, cheaper way of doing it with one bomb instead of 300 bombers, but we had 300 bombers and we were using them every day, so it wasn’t changing. And really, the level of expected casualties in Europe or Russia or anywhere, did not reach World War II levels in our estimation. And none of you… That really hasn’t come out very much, what the expectations were. But I can tell you that as late as the early 50s, even mid 50s, you were talking about 15 or 20 million, big figure. But compared to 60 million dead in World War II, so you haven’t gone beyond World War II. From one year to the next in the planning, the casualties went from 15-20 million to 150 million and 200 million, up by 10 times. The mega-tonnage went up much more than that, but for a variety of reasons the damage is in proportional. But you’re going up to hundreds of millions instead of tens. Now that’s something different.

    Okay, the purpose, though, what was the purpose of those weapons? The purpose was almost exclusively to deter. We weren’t anxious to fight, except for a very few individuals. Curtis LeMay was probably correctly perceived as having wanted to get rid of the… Final solution to the Soviet problem, to the communist problem. And there were a few others like that, but they could be named mostly in the Air Force on a hand or two hands, something like that. No, it was to deter. To deter by exterminating the Soviet Union, by the ability to do it. Now, Dick mentioned that… Dick Faulkner, just now, that the Soviets perceive us, and most people, maybe we perceive us, as the one country that’s actually used these weapons. I wish that were true. Actually, we’ve used them dozens of times and to some degree continuously ever since 1945, and some other countries have, too. Why do you think Israel or Pakistan have gotten nuclear weapons, so as not to use them? They are using them the same way we’ve used them every year we’ve had them, which is the way you use a gun when you point it at someone’s head in a confrontation, whether or not you pull the trigger.

    You are using the gun and you could not make that threat whether it’s successful or not if you didn’t have it. And we’re not pointing it. It’s been very conspicuously on our holster on our side. Which, as USAF, as Air Force will point out, is a continuous use. And so it is, indeed. So, that use has been not only by the United States. I’ve been recently reading stuff from the Soviet archives now that’s come out in the last 20 years, and realized, for example, that Khrushchev believed that his threats in Suez, which I must say I thought at the time, everybody thought were ridiculous and may have been ridiculous, he believed it got the Suez War ended. So, he used it over Kuwait, a crisis which I’m sure almost none of you are aware of. The so-called Lebanon-Iraq crisis in Kuwait. Khrushchev made nuclear threats then, as he did later after the Bay of Pigs, which looked pretty ridiculous. And it was certainly bluffs, except that the Soviet specialists say now, “But he believed they worked.” And that encouraged him, then, as soon as he got ICBMs, to make threats over Berlin in 1958, which didn’t get him what he wanted.

    Now in short, this is using the weapons, and using them to what? To deter nuclear attack? No. Not in any single case. And I could give you a list. Berlin, South Vietnam in the 50s, Dien Bien Phu, when we offered, and so forth. Let’s come up, because I don’t have much time here, let’s come right up to the present.

    How many of you had ever heard the name Kaliningrad more than a year ago? How many of you heard it before today? Not so many, right? Look it up on Google. I just found, by the way, that it was originally called Königsberg, which rings in my memory a little bit, under Prussia. But it changed that name in 1946. So we’ve heard of Kaliningrad. Hans mentioned that it’s on the Polish border, right? And when I heard you say that, I thought, “There’s a little better way of saying that.” It’s between Poland and Lithuania. Those are both in NATO. It is part of Russia. It has no land access to Russia, to the rest of Russia. It’s an enclave. It has sea, it’s on a seaport, so they take that seriously.

    It’s now surrounded by NATO, like West Berlin, which had 22 Soviet divisions around it, between it and the rest of NATO. First of all, there’s only one way for the Russians then militarily to defend. It can’t defend, protect. Can it protect? Deter an attack on Kaliningrad, in the area of Kaliningrad. It can say, “Well, we’ll attack you elsewhere if you go into Kaliningrad.” There’s only one way, and that’s to threaten nuclear war, first use. That’s what they are doing. And not implicitly, but explicitly. Putin has said publicly, more than once, “Go into Kaliningrad… ” Which has a population of 400,000, it’s 86 square miles, and so forth. “Go into Kaliningrad, it’s nuclear war. It’s the same as invading Russia, okay?”

    Iskander missiles, dual-capable, in Kaliningrad. Now, do they have nuclear weapons? Warheads? We don’t know. They’re dual-capable. But I say again, you know, he has no other way of doing it, and he is doing it. And the NATO exercise we heard about earlier, had us, NATO, us, going into Kaliningrad. Now, maybe he wouldn’t start a nuclear war. He’d be insane to do it, of course, wouldn’t he? And so, should we assume that’s silly, it’s a bluff? It probably is mainly a bluff. Should we assume, then, that no problem, going into Kaliningrad, now why would go into Kaliningrad? Well, because NATO has just accepted the Baltics into the… If you look at the map on the Baltics. We have no more way of defending the Baltics locally with our divisions that we’re putting… Not divisions, brigades, we’ve been putting there in exercises, than they have of defending Kaliningrad. So what is the NATO answer to that? First use, which it’s always been. When I say, are we… It’s all coming back, let me go back to one little bit of history. Possibly the first use of our nuclear weapons, which was a bluff after the World War, Second World War, was sending publicly described nuclear capable bombers, B-29s, over to England for possible use with the Berlin Blockade, when I was 17. The Berlin Blockade.

    And needed why? Well, if they had interfered with our air access, which they could easily have done, very easily, stopped our air access, we had no other plan than going to war or NATO plan, at that point. How, against the overwhelming Soviet armed forces? No, impossible. So, anyway, Truman believed, by the way, rightly or wrongly, as Gregg Herken has brought out in his book, definitely believed we were successful on that. We kept them from interfering with our air, by fighter pilots in the Axis, it made it possible to stay in West Berlin and get committed there. So, it was a success, which encouraged us to base NATO and other, make all the other uses, I’ve talked of here, that as our first, useful success. Even though it was, in the short run a bluff, the bombers weren’t even configured for nuclear weapons, those B-29s. But they could have been, within weeks. We only had, at that point, a relative handful, a dozen, or a couple dozen, of nuclear weapons.

    Russia is today… There was only one way ever to defend West Berlin ’til the end of the Cold War. Granted, it got less acute after Ostpolitik with Willy Brandt, for which he got the Nobel Prize in ’72. Cold War lasted another 14 years, 15 years. But, in principle, from beginning to end, Berlin was defended by the threat of first use of nuclear weapons. And then by the way, the Kennedy administration came in and, contrary to Eisenhower, Eisenhower’s attitude always was, “Don’t talk about limited nuclear war, especially with Russia. Out of the question. It’ll get big, so go big from the beginning. Go first.” That was Eisenhower’s policy.

    The US didn’t think that looked so good. What’s the alternative? Well, Kennedy, I believe, and the others, the civilians I knew inside said, “You don’t want to initiate nuclear war. But how do you deter it? How do you deal with and how do you reassure Adenauer and reassure the rest of Europe and so forth?” Well, by making the commitment and making the threat. And so what do we try to fill NATO on, with some success? Demonstration strikes. Have you heard that? You heard it earlier this morning. Escalate to de-escalate. A demonstration to show that, I’m sure, Noam, you’ve read stuff on this, if I’m not mistaken, those who were in charge of Berlin planning, you don’t want to go all out. So throw one or two nuclear weapons at them to let them know the risks. So they’ll pull back. Right? Crazy, it was crazy. Crazy then, and crazy now.

    Is it possible for anybody to believe in that? Well, a lot of people seemed to believe in it. The Russians are talking as if they believe in it. Do they really? Who knows? Let me extend that just a moment more.

    The Russians are now defending Kaliningrad by the same threat that NATO used for 50 and more years to defend West Berlin. We are now openly and explicitly defending the Baltics the same way we defended West Berlin or the Russians defended Kaliningrad. And I put to you, there is no other military way to do these things. Let me come back to the last time we came really close, in our knowledge, to nuclear war. It wasn’t the last time, but the public doesn’t know that. Noam made some examples, and others, as late as 1995, actually, with Yeltsin, well after the Cold War. 1983, Andropov, false alarms in his countries, serious ones in 1979, 1981. Serious ones.

    Okay. But the public doesn’t know of any of those. The last time was the Cuban Missile Crisis. How did that come about? Very quickly in one word. Khrushchev knew something that I didn’t know, and I worked for the EXCOM, the Executive Committee, NSC, I was on two of the working groups for the EXCOM, or the NSC during that. And then, a year later, no that was ’62. And two years later, with high clearances, higher than top secret, I studied the Cuban Missile Crisis for most of the year inside the government.

    I still didn’t know that Kennedy had, for a year prior to that, been making every preparation for an invasion of Cuba, which the Russians knew. Exercising it, including an exercise against the Caribbean dictator Ortsac, O-R-T-S-A-C, Ortsac, which as Khrushchev recognized was Castro spelled backwards. And that was the public description of this. And we had been making covert operations into Cuba on an enormous scale. The man who burglarized my doctor’s office, Eugenio Martinez, had as a boat captain made 300 visits, covertly, into Cuba, before the Cuban Missile Crisis, as part of Mongoose. 300, okay.

    So Castro was saying, as he said in his memoirs and later, and we now know very well, “How am I going to keep from losing Cuba? The only country that is going communist without Soviet forces there?” They felt very romantically, almost sentimentally, and also, their foothold in the Western hemisphere and so forth. “I’m going to lose Cuba.” And then he had a brainstorm. And almost nobody in the whole literature describes that brainstorm in the following terms, “I’m going to defend Cuba the way the US defends Berlin.” The only way it could be defended from the Soviet Union, by threatening nuclear weapons. But, he only had, in ’62, still going on, 10 or some say 40 ICBMs. He had threatened to use those over the Bay of Pigs, but that was silly. No. Put nuclear weapons in Cuba.

    That was the only way he could do it, and it would have worked. It wasn’t that crazy, if you could get them there without being stopped. So he had to do it secretly, and he succeeded. He did get them there without being stopped, and once they were there, had he revealed them, I would say, nobody says this, had he revealed them, simply said, “They’re there, just the way your weapons are in Turkey. They’re there. Live with it,” there would have been no question of invading Cuba. It would be out of the question. He would have defended Cuba as long as he wanted to, or if he wanted to trade the weapons, he could trade them not just for Turkish weapons, he could make a big trade if we had to get those out of there.

    So what we see now is then we are currently preparing… I’ll sum it up. No one, no civilian that I know of, put aside LeMay and a couple of others, have wanted to see us in a nuclear war. No president has found himself able or willing to back off from threats of initiating nuclear war and preparing to do it. And the only way that threat can be made they thought plausible, even remotely, in the early years, decades, against the Soviet Union was to have some ability to limit the damage to the United States by hitting all of their hard targets, hitting all of their ICBMs, hitting their command and control, everything else. That was your only way supposedly of surviving. That’s why we had 10,000 weapons, 20,000 weapons, and so forth. It was not to deter a Soviet nuclear attack. It was to make credible a US first strike, and it still is. And that is what it’s for today.

    But now, and I have to take… I’m sorry, but here’s the last 60 seconds. Steve Star today, to my surprise… I mean I hadn’t planned on it, gave you the talk that I had planned to give about nuclear winter, because I think it’s of extreme importance. I know most of what he said, though I was still startled by some things. Of how many of you is that true? How many of you felt you knew most of what Steve Star said today? Really, can I see the hands? Well, it’s more than I would have thought, and we’re talking now about not nuclear winter as it was in 1983, but the studies of the last 10 years since 2007. Let me just ask again. How many of you have read studies by Alan Robock or Toon? Okay. Now you’ve published several. Okay. Meaning that no one has drawn from them that I’ve seen in writing. It’s not just that we’re talking that a nuclear war with Russia of the kind we’re threatening and preparing as in the past would lead to the death of not just most humans, but 99% of humans at most, 98%, 99%. Okay. People understand that if they’ve read the studies.

    I see no one draw the following point, which is very simple. Counterforce, striking first, makes no difference compared to striking second. Most of our warheads, our counterforce, are for striking first. They are for preemption, they are for damage limiting, which is if you believe the studies, which I do, is totally infeasible. Everybody dies, whether you go first or second. So all of these weapons we’re now modernizing and building, actually we are preparing nothing other. They still make credible threats. Credible why? Because humans are crazy, and nations are crazy. It’s credible to make a threat of omnicide, I’m sorry to say, but people don’t realize that’s the threat they’re making. It is the threat we are making. We are in the position of threatening to be a suicide bomber? No. A mutual homicide bomber? No. An omnicide bomber is what we’re threatening to do, not because we want to do it. And I think if that were known, it would at least change the discourse, shall I say. And it certainly is not known.

    As I was saying to my wife, finally, last night… Patricia was saying… I said, “Immoral,” and she said, “Immoral. Immoral is what? Masturbation, adultery, gayness, and so forth. It’s not the right word, somehow, for this.” And I said, “Alright. What is the right word?” We were up late discussing this kind of thing. “What is the… ” There’s no language. Humans never faced precisely this until let’s say 2007, except that who’s heard of it? Nobody knows it, and so forth. We’ve never in our lives faced what we are threatening on either side. It’s not a concept in humans. Can humans relate to this? Well, that remains to be seen, but we haven’t tried.

  • Overcoming Psychological Obstacles to Nuclear Zero by Judith Lipton

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Judith Lipton at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    judith pages

    My name is Judy Lipton, I’m a psychiatrist. I’ve been involved with Physicians for Social Responsibility since 1979, but actually I was involved with SANE and SDS and SNCC and the Institute for Policy Studies back in 1965 during the Selma years and so forth. So I have a fairly long background in politics. You need to imagine that I’m not the only one sitting here. Please imagine for a second that there’s me, here, but that next to me, right over here is my husband, David Barash. And he’s the ghost in the room who’ll be speaking partly through my voice and sometimes through his own voice, but he’s definitely here, and you’ll hear him at times and I’ll try to tell you when he’s talking and when I’m talking.

    I need to tell you that I’m stunned to be here; I’m extremely grateful to Richard Falk and David Krueger, I’m so incredibly happy to meet my hero Dan Ellsberg and Paul Chappell. But I do feel like Dorothy the small and meek, and I’m aware that each of you are what are called woggle-bugs, which is from volume II in the Wizard of Oz series, HM Woggle-bug, TE. And each of you should have an envelope with pictures, a bibliography, a list and some song lyrics here, a bunch of things. Much more than I could say in 15 minutes, because I had no clue how to wake people up in 15 minutes before dinner, except to put things down in a way that you could get back to them, and also these things are available online.

    So I’m aware that all of you are highly educated, thoroughly magnified woggle-bugs in each of your own specialties. And I am Dorothy the small and meek, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be here. My expertise as a psychiatrist is, we’ll come in a little bit, and I’m also somewhat an expert in evolutionary biology and psychopharmacology, I’m not going to talk about that stuff very much. What I really want to talk about to begin with is that I am totally sick of the cat fights, the undermining, the catty undermining, the fratricide, the cannibalism, and the general conflict in the left that has plagued me and the movements in the left ever since I’ve been involved since the 1960s. I’ve had more trouble organizing demonstrations and things from the young Trotskyites than I have from the military.

    The left tends to eat itself. And academics tend to eat themselves as well, and I’m totally sick of and refuse to talk about, unless it’s way after dinner and some drinks, I’m really not going to talk about the nature of human nature; I’m not going to talk about sociobiology versus post-modernism; I’m not going to talk about psychopharmacology versus psychotherapy. I’m absolutely sick of the way that paradigms make woggle-bugs fight with one another, and I don’t think we need to do that. So my purpose tonight is to try to bring us together, understanding that we each come from very different perspectives, and we could argue about sociobiology and evolutionary psychiatry and memes and genes and human nature and all that, but I’m deathly sick of it and I don’t want to do it. I want to talk about ways to move this movement forward, and here’s what I want to teach you.

    Back when my husband and I were young, we were married 40 years, so that was a long time ago. First we were mountain climbers, ice climbers, we did Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker and stuff like that. And then we had children and we became hikers, and as we would hike, we would play a game called the cream of mushroom soup game. The cream of mushroom soup game is to imagine a can of cream of mushroom soup, say a Campbell’s, and then deconstruct it, say from a Marxist point of view. Please tell me how cream of mushroom soup represents the food of the proletariat, or not? Does it represent the capitalist takeover of the food system? What is the biological content of cream of mushroom soup? Does it have food value or is it empty calories? What is the post-modern view? Does cream of mushroom soup even exist or is it a fantasy of our culture? Is it simply an Andy Warhol picture?

    So we would walk hundreds of miles with our children, talking about paradigms, and we would go… Think about cream of mushroom soup and paradigms, Freudian paradigms, Jungian paradigms, biblical paradigms, Christian paradigms, Jewish paradigms, Buddhist paradigms, you name it. If you could find a way to talk about a Buddhist approach to cream of mushroom soup, we would find it. And that’s how we spend our time hiking. So, what I decided to do for this conference… Well, there are two things I’m going to do. Alright, first of all, I want everyone to sing a song with me. I’m not a good singer like the people who are singing here, but this is a song about unity.

    I want you to realize that we’ve been talking about people in this meeting. And to be honest, I’m a little sick of people too. There are 10 to the 20 species of animals on this Earth, of which we represent one. There are 975 species of beetles in Costa Rica. When we begin to talk about omnicide, we are talking about killing 10 to the 20th creatures, some of whom are sentient beings. Not just cats and dogs and whatever, Cecil the lion’s offspring will be vaporized. The ivory trade, all of the elephants. We’re talking about every living thing.

    And so, it seems to me that we have to broaden the dialogue here that omnicide doesn’t just mean our esteemed race. We made the bombs, we get to blow things up. But really, we’re talking about responsibility for an entire ecosystem that’s much bigger and much more complicated than we can imagine. And at the very end, I’ll introduce you to my favorite microbe, which may be the solution to our entire question for this meeting.

    Alright. So the song I want people to sing together with me, you may know it from school or you may know it from summer camp. It’s called “All God’s Critters.” And it goes: All God’s Critters got a place in the choir, some sing low and some sing higher. Some sing out loud on the telephone wire and some just clap their hands, their paws or anything they got now. Woo!” Any of you know this song?

    Listen to the bass, it’s the one at the bottom where the bullfrog runs and the hippopotamus moans and groans with the big to-do and that old cow just goes moo. The dogs and the cats they take up the middle where the hummingbirds hum and the crickets fiddle, the donkey brays and the pony neighs and the old coyote howls. Listen to the top where the little birds sing and The melodies with the high notes ringing. The hoot owl hollers about everything and the neighbor disagrees. Singing in the nighttime, singing in the day. The little duck quacks and he’s on his way. The possum ain’t got much to say and the porcupine talks to himself. It’s a simple song of livings on everywhere by the ox and the fox and the grizzly bear, the grumpy alligator and the hawk above, the sly raccoon and the turtle dove.

    So, I feel that that’s our responsibility, really. Beyond the 7 billion people on the planet and we have to be very serious about it. So, I began to play the cream of mushroom soup game and one of your handouts is called “Psychological Obstacles to Nuclear Zero or Even to Nuclear Reductions for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Retreat”, by Judith Lipton and David Barash.

    On this list are 50, count them, 50 potential paradigms for obstacles to nuclear zero. They were what I could throw up on the bulletin board. They were what occurred to me as I was playing the cream of mushroom soup game. And everyone here in the room could play the cream of mushroom soup game and add to this and add different paradigms and play with the paradigms, because my conviction is that each person, whether it’s a plumber, a gardener, an equestrian, somebody who grows orchids, everyone has something to contribute. All God’s critters got a place in the choir. All these people have a place in the choir. And our job is not to confine ourselves to the elite intellectuals who read the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the FAS and the ACA. I mean, I’ve been doing that. I can talk the language.

    But that’s not what’s going to make change. We have to get out to like plumbers for social responsibility, because nuclear war is really bad for the construction industry. Boeing has a union that builds equipment, not for the bombers, but literally like their desks, and their furniture and other stuff. Those Boeing workers can be brought together, because nuclear war is bad for their income. It’s a general call. So, I wanted to mention to you… Yes. I told you that there were 950,000 species of insects, 390,900 plant species known to man, and at the end of your handout is what I think is the cutest animal in the whole world and maybe the solution to the problem of nuclear war. It’s under… It’s either XX… Oh, XX and XY.

    I don’t know if any of you have ever seen a tardigrade. A tardigrade is a micro-animal, it’s about 0.5mm and they look like this. This is electron. They have little snouts. They live everywhere. They live on the external parts of spaceships. They go down to -2 degrees Kelvin and up to 350 degrees Celsius. When they’re not happy, if they don’t get what they need, they turn into what are called TONS, T-O-N-S. TONS from tardigrades have been found in Shakespeare portfolios and things. All you do to get them to turn back to tardigrades is you add water and then they fluff up and become happy tardigrades again. You can find them in moss all over the world and in the bottom of volcanoes.

    One of the theories of the world is that the tardigrades have come and are taking over the planet and that eventually we will in fact be extinguished, because the tardigrades are more adaptive. So I wanted to introduce you to the tardigrades, because I think they’re so cute and think that as long as we’re talking about putting crazy ideas up on the wall, why not tardigrades?

    In the other parts of the handout, again because I’m a doctor, I think in terms of triage and I think of long-term solutions. There is a part in here about triage, about immediate steps to reduce the threat of nuclear war. I think one of the biggest immediate threats to reducing the threat of nuclear war is nuclear fundamentalism that says, “If we can’t get to zero, it’s not worth anything.” I apologize to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and if you want to send me home, that’s okay. I think we should not let the best be the enemy of the good and that there are immediate steps that can be taken now, stat! , to reduce the risk of nuclear war this year. This moment. Tonight. I made a list of those. But again, I’m not a woggle-bug, so my list may be woefully inefficient. And then finally I made a list of where to go from here. There’s a first aid emergency measure list. There’s another list in here about suggestions for where to go for the future. Some of the suggestions have already been mentioned, like media and youth and things like that.

    But I think that there have to be much more aggressive academic approaches that transcend the normal bureaucracies within our departments and cause us to fight with each other because we don’t agree about our paradigms. We have to gang up on our department chairmans and say, “Nuclear war is bad, whether you’re a psychoanalyst or a psychopharmacologist or a sociobiologist or a postmodernist.” It doesn’t matter. We need to get this on the agenda. So academic approaches, labor and union approaches, and finally and many media… Oh, yes, and direct action.

    I have one controversial suggestion, which is that I was thinking that perhaps Russia, NATO, Israel, India, Pakistan and China could blow up one bomb that was well-televised somewhere. Just do it. People have forgotten what nuclear explosions look like. The pictures are old, they’re black and white. And I think if it were possible for the nuclear countries to come together and just do one 10 kiloton bomb somewhere, but in really good Technicolor, with good, good, video. I think that that might be quite an eye-opener for people. So that’s my, I suppose, most controversial suggestion.

  • Overcoming Geopolitical Obstacles to Nuclear Zero by Richard Falk

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Richard Falk at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    falk

    Let me say what others have said, that it’s a great privilege to be part of this symposium and this group. And I want to start by reinforcing a couple of things that Rich put before us. I think it’s not only a geopolitical moment generated by a resurgent nationalism, but it’s also a kind of perverse political moment, in which autocrats are being elected to lead most of the critical governments in the world. And we’re living in an age of what I’ve sometimes called the ‘popular autocrat’. Not only are they elected to actually diminish democracy, but they remain popular after they do that. The most extreme example is in the Philippines, where a really quite openly fascist leader, who takes pride in executing people without any foundation is wildly popular in the country. But it’s true in India, in Japan, in China, as in Russia, Turkey, Eastern Europe, and more and more countries, and we have the Trump phenomenon and Brexit, they’re all out in that domain, which is also characterized by elites being out of touch with the feelings of the people of their own societies.

    The Trump phenomenon is an illustration, but it happens in many other places in the world in a similar way, where the people that think, well, who are the political class, to use that terminology, really don’t understand what is animating their own citizenry. And that contributes, I think, to this toxic interaction between an anti-democratic mood that is re-embracing the Westphalian idea of territorial sovereign states. And of course, that mood of nationalism for a geopolitical actor like the United States is closely tied to militarism. And militarism, of course, is closely tied to nuclearism. And so, we’re in a context, which seems to be extremely averse to the goals of this foundation and of this symposium. And I think, the dialectical challenge to that interpretation was, I think, highlighted by the presentations we had just before lunch, which suggest that if we don’t effectively challenge the nuclear complacency, we’re on a course of species suicide.

    In other words that… And what makes this so daunting is, as I think, Steven made very vividly clear, is that we do have the scientific basis for a rational adjustment to these threats. We have an elite and a politically dominant climate that resists that kind of message, because it challenges the prevailing paradigm for how security is to be achieved, and why we need to rethink what we mean by strategic stability. I was stimulated in that direction by Hans’ presentation this morning to feel that, if we really take these threats seriously, strategic stability means something very, very different than what it means in the Beltway, and in other governing circles around the world.

    So, on the one level, you have the challenge of the unacknowledged apocalyptic consequences of an outbreak of nuclear war. And that is coupled with the realization that there are several geopolitical contexts of encounter that could easily escalate into a hot war, and in a hot war, easily cross the nuclear threshold. And it’s significant in this, in a sort of symbolic sense, that President Obama was pressed, you probably recall, recently to endorse a no-first-use pledge. And he rejected that, which I think was an opportunity on his part to re-establish the nuclear taboo, which I think is being undermined by these geopolitical developments. And the fact that he was under the kind of governmental and military industrial complex pressures that didn’t allow him to do that, or led him to believe that he shouldn’t do that, is indicative, it seems to me, of the adverse climate that exists within the US government and is shared to a significant degree by what we know about the other nuclear governmental elites.

    An additional problem that I have, and it may be provocative for some of us here, is I have for quite a long time felt that there’s a tension between the sort of world view and stability that the arms control community seeks to achieve, and the transformative vision that those that endorse nuclear abolition or nuclear zero seek to achieve. They’re not compatible, and yet they’re treated as if they’re compatible. And the reason they’re not compatible is that the more success one has within the arms control paradigm, the less necessity there seems to be to take the risks of altering that paradigm. So if you can stabilize… And I think the existing leaderships in the most countries have adopted this managerial consensus, it’s given an academic gloss by scholars like Joseph Nye and Graham Allison, that this is the best you can do. And the best you can do is a combination of pursuing stabilizing measures, plus a geopolitical enforcement of the non-proliferation regime.

    That’s a very important element in this managerial worldview. And it’s not enforcing the Treaty, because the Treaty, of course, as we all know, has a disarmament provision. But in the geopolitical understanding of non-proliferation, that Article X is excluded, it’s basically seen as irrelevant. And so, what this geopolitical regime involves is first of all the prevention of any political actors who are seen as hostile to the broad international status quo from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    Israel is the most famous exemption, and someone referred earlier to India and Pakistan also. They were for various reasons not seen as hostile. Iran, on the other hand, the West is ready to go to war to prevent acquisition of nuclear weapons, even though, as Noam mentioned, I think last night, they don’t pose any kind of threat beyond trying to establish deterrents for themselves. That’s really if they were to acquire nuclear weapons, that would be their role in that. So that the managerials’ status quo involves the geopolitical enforcement of the NPT, possession and continuous development, modernization of the arsenals at a level where they are not too expensive and they don’t have too great risks of accidents or unwanted access, and also a realization that having nuclear weapons gives you a certain status, psycho-political status within the world system.

    And it’s not coincidental, I suppose, that the five permanent members of the UN Security Council were the first five countries to acquire nuclear weapons. So there’s a kind of correlation in the political consciousness between international status and having this kind of weaponry of mass destruction. So it comes back to this question of; what can one do given this understanding of the existing situation, which on its face seems discouraging, to awaken enough of the public to create political traction to challenge nuclear complacency. How do you gain that political traction? And I think two critical audiences are youth, and somehow trying to penetrate the media. And the media, broadly conceived, is including film, and tv and radio. But somehow, which is difficult to do, because the media in particular has become corporatized and in its own way deferential to the managerial consensus. So it would be, it’s not an easy thing to do.

    The final point that I would try to make is that the US has a double or triple distinctive relationship to these, to this challenge. First of all, as Obama pointed out at Prague, it’s the only country ever to have used these weapons, and it has sustained a position of technological dominance in relation to the weaponry ever since 1945.

    Secondly, it is the main architect of a global militarized global security system that includes foreign military bases, navies in every ocean, the militarization of space and the oceans. So the US, we’re not living in a unipolar world, but there is a kind of control over the global security structure that no other country is in a position to challenge except… And even then in a very precarious way the regional dominance, in other words, China wants to have a kind of parity within its region. And that’s seen as provocative from the perspective of this global security system.

    And the same thing Russia’s… Part of the reason Russia is perceived now as being provocative is, it wants to play a role similar to what it did during the Cold War in the Middle East. And that’s, again, a threat to this globalization of the American domination project and the American-led security system. So then in that sense it seems to me one needs to revitalize the language of the preamble of the UN Charter as if we meant it. This time as if we meant to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, and that relates to this idea that you can isolate nuclear weaponry from this larger context of a militarized security structure.

    And therefore, what Jackie was saying this morning about the need to take into our understanding the linkages to conventional weaponry, and the vulnerability that many countries will feel toward American conventional superiority is something that is, I think, part of what any kind of awakening process involves. But underneath all of this is what do we do to awaken first of all the American public sufficiently to gain political traction to challenge nuclear complacency.

  • The State of the Nuclear Danger by Steven Starr

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Steven Starr at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. A PowerPoint presentation to go along with this talk is here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    starr

    David mentioned earlier that, he asked about why do we have this adherence to deterrence, and I believe one of the requirements for that is essentially the avoidance or even the outright rejection of the existential threat posed by nuclear arsenals. In other words, how can you threaten to use nuclear weapons if you would acknowledge that the use of these weapons could lead to the destruction of the human race or at least civilization? So my talk today focuses on what as I see as a confirmation of that rejection here in the United States, which is the rejection by US leadership of the nuclear winter studies.

    I want to talk about the studies first, because I think I want to underline how important they are. Ten years ago, the world’s leading climatologists chose to re-investigate the long-term environmental impacts of nuclear war. The peer reviewed studies that I have listed in the slide are considered to be the most authoritative type of scientific research. It’s subjected to criticism by the international scientific community before its final publication in scholarly journals. During this criticism period, there were no serious errors found in the studies. Working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers, and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA, these scientists use state-of-the-art computer modeling to evaluate the consequences of a range of possible nuclear conflicts. It began with a hypothetical war in Southeast Asia, in which a total of 100 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs were exploded in the cities of India and Pakistan. In order to give you an idea of what a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb can do, please consider these images of Hiroshima before and after the use of an atomic bomb. These bombs had an explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.

    The detonation of such an atomic bomb will instantly ignite fires over a surface area of three to five square miles. The scientists calculated that the blast, fire, and radiation from a war fought with 100 atomic bombs could produce as many fatalities as World War II. However, the long-term environmental effects of the war could significantly disrupt the global weather for at least a decade, which could lead to, or would lead, likely lead to a vast global famine. This slide was… Each click is one day the smoke spread in the burning cities of India and Pakistan, the scientists predicted this would cause 3 to 4 million tons of black carbon soot from the nuclear firestorms to rise quickly above cloud level into the stratosphere, where it could not be rained out. The smoke would circle the earth in less than two weeks, would form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would remain for more than a decade. The smoke would absorb warming sunlight, which would heat the smoke to temperatures near the boiling point of water, which would lead to ozone losses of 20%-50% over populated areas. This would almost double the amount of UVV reached in some regions, and would create UVV indices unprecedented in human history.

    In North America and Central Europe, the time required to get a painful sunburn at midday in June could decrease to as little as six minutes for fair-skinned individuals. As the smoke layer blocked warming sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface, it would produce the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1,000 years. This is a slide taken from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in an article published by doctors Toon and Robock. Medical experts have predicted that the shortening of growing seasons and corresponding decreases in agricultural production could cause up to 2 billion people to perish from famine. The climatologists also investigated the effects of a nuclear war fought with vastly more powerful thermonuclear weapons possessed by the US, Russia, China, France and England.

    Some of the first thermonuclear weapons constructed during the 1950s and 60s were a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb. And when you look at photos of nuclear weapons, it’s important to consider how far away they were taken. This was our first test of a nuclear weapon. During the last 30 years, the average size of thermonuclear or strategic nuclear weapons has decreased, yet today each of the approximately 3,200-3,500 strategic weapons deployed by the US and Russia is 70-80 times more powerful than the atomic bombs that were modeled in the India-Pakistan study. The smallest strategic weapon has an explosive power of 100,000 tons of TNT, a ton is 2,000 pounds, compared to an atomic bomb, that averaged an explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.

    If you look at the scale, the largest nuclear bomb versus the atomic bomb, you’re going up by a factor of about 1,000. So you have 24,000 pounds of TNT, 3 million pounds of TNT for an atomic bomb, and really about 2.4 billion pounds of TNT for our large strategic nuclear weapon. And I made this photo just to compare an image I showed of the Hiroshima bomb at the base of what it would look like in comparison to Castle Bravo. I had a veteran from the South Pacific say, “You need to do a slide, because the atomic bombs were like fire crackers compared to hydrogen bombs.”

    Strategic nuclear weapons produce much larger fire storms than do atomic bombs. A standard Russian 800 kiloton warhead, which John was kind enough to publish in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, on an average day will ignite fires covering a surface area of 90-152 square miles. So a war fought with hundreds or thousands of US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons would ignite immense nuclear firestorms covering land surface areas of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. This would probably occur within a period of a couple of hours, or less possibly. This is the US-Russian nuclear war. The scientists calculated that these fires could produce up to 180 million tons of black carbon, soot and smoke, which would form a dense global stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke would remain in the stratosphere for 10 to 20 years and would block as much as 70% of sunlight from reaching the surface of the northern hemisphere and 35% from the southern hemisphere.

    It takes maybe a month or two for it to equilibrate. So much sunlight would be blocked by the smoke that the noonday sun would resemble a full moon at midnight, if you were in the northern hemisphere. Under such conditions, it would require only a matter of days or weeks for the daily minimum temperatures to fall below freezing in the largest agricultural areas of the northern hemisphere. Freezing temperatures would occur every day for a period of between one to three years. Average surface temperatures would become colder than those experienced 18,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age, and the prolonged cold would cause average rainfall to decrease by up to 90%. Growing seasons would be completely eliminated for more than a decade, and it would be too cold and dark to grow food crops, which would doom the majority of the human population. So the profound cold and dark following nuclear war became first known as ‘nuclear winter’, and it was first predicted in 1983 by a group of NASA scientists. And I took the liberty of copying a cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that announced this discovery, I think it was in 1984.

    During the 1980s, a large body of research was done by such groups as the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment and Scope, the World Meteorological Organization, and the US National Research Council of the US National Academy of Sciences. Their work essentially supported the initial findings of the 1983 studies. The idea of nuclear winter, published and supported by prominent scientists, generated extensive public alarm, put political pressure on the US and the Soviet Union to reverse a runaway nuclear arms race. Unfortunately, this created a backlash among many powerful military and industrial interests, who undertook the extensive media campaign to brand nuclear winter as ‘bad science’ and the scientists who discovered it as ‘irresponsible’. Critics used various uncertainties in the studies and the first climate models, which are primitive by today’s standards, as a basis to criticize and reject the concept of nuclear winter. In 1986, the Council on Foreign Relations published an article by the scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who predicted drops in global cooling about half as large as those first predicted by the 1983 studies, and they described this as ‘nuclear autumn’.

    Nuclear autumn studies were later found to be deeply flawed, but it didn’t matter, because nuclear winter was subject to criticism and damning articles in the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine. In 1987, the National Review called nuclear winter ‘a fraud’. In 2000, Discover Magazine published an article which described nuclear winter as ‘one of the 20 greatest scientific blunders in history’. The endless smear campaign was successful, and the general public, and even most anti-nuclear activists, were left with the idea that nuclear winter had been discredited. I found this with Physicians for Social Responsibility, when we were trying to get funding in 2001 to renew nuclear winter research. 9/11 took it off the agenda, but I was kind of shocked that no one really believed this anymore. Yet the scientists didn’t give up, and in 2006 they returned to their labs to perform the research that I just described at the beginning of my talk. The new research not only upheld the previous findings, but it actually found the earlier studies underestimated the environmental effects of nuclear war, because it found that the smoke is heated by sunlight, and it creates a self-lofting effect. That’s why it stays in the stratosphere for so long.

    So after the initial series of studies were published in 2007 and 2008, two of the lead scientists, Dr. Alan Robock from Rutgers and Dr. Toon of the University of Colorado, made a series of requests to meet with the members of the Obama administration. They offered to brief the White House about their findings, which they assumed would have great impact upon nuclear weapons policy. But their offers were met with indifference. Finally, after a number of years of trying, I’ve been told that Dr. Robock and Toon were allowed an audience with John Holdren, the senior advisor to President Barack Obama on Science and Technology. Also, Dr. Robock has met with Rose Gottemoeller, as you all know, the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control. Dr. Robock has the impression that neither Holdren nor Gottemoeller think that nuclear winter research is correct. But it’s not only Holdren and Gottemoeller who reject the nuclear winter research. According to sources cited by Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, and I really respect Greg, he’s a brilliant guy. He goes to the White House quite frequently, and talks to people in the National Security Council. He says that the US Nuclear Weapons Council, which is a group that determines the size and composition of US nuclear weapons, as well as the policies for their use, has stated that ‘the predictions of nuclear winter were disproved years ago’.

    It may be that General John Hyten, the Head of the Strategic Command, who is in charge of the US nuclear triad, and General Paul Selva, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the second highest-ranking officer in the US, have never seen or heard of the 21st century nuclear winter studies that I describe. Perhaps when they hear a question about nuclear winter, they only remember the smear campaigns done against the early studies, or maybe they just choose not to accept the new research, despite the fact that it has withstood the criticism of the global scientific community.

    Regardless, the question of nuclear winter research by the top military and political leaders of the US raises some profoundly important questions. Do they fully understand the consequences of nuclear war? And do they realize that launch-ready nuclear weapons they control constitute a self-destruct mechanism for the human race? Meanwhile, US political leaders generally support the ongoing US confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia and China. Mainstream corporate media, including the editorial boards of The New York Times and Washington Post engage in anti-Russian and anti-Putin rhetoric that rivals the hate speech of the McCarthy era. The US has renewed the Cold War with Russia with no debate or protest and subsequently engaged in proxy wars with Russia in Ukraine and Syria, as well as threatening military action against China in the South China Sea. And I brought this up just to show that the Bulletin has supported more recently these studies. This was an article that Toon and Robock.

    I’m going to just quickly summarize, since this is supposed to be the state of nuclear danger, how I see it. Hillary Clinton, who appears to be likely to become the next President of the US, has repeatedly called for a US-imposed no-fly zone over Syria, where Russian planes are now flying in support of the Syrian armed forces. Marine General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Congress in September that, should the US attempt to set up such a no-fly zone, it would surely result in war with Russia.

    Apparently, there’s now some debate about this. However, Russia has responded by moving its latest air defense system to Syria, and has stated it would shoot down any US or NATO planes that attempted to attack Syrian armed forces. Russia has also sent its only aircraft carrier, along with all of its Northern fleet and much of its Baltic fleet to the Mediterranean in its largest surface deployment of naval vessels since the end of the Cold War. In response to what NATO leaders describe as Russia’s dangerous and aggressive behavior, NATO has built up a rapid defense force of 40,000 troops on the Russian border in the Baltic states and Poland. This force includes hundreds of tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery. NATO troops stationed in Estonia are within artillery range of St. Petersburg, which is the second largest city in Russia. Imagine if that was in Tijuana and they could hit Los Angeles. The US has deployed its Aegis Ashore Ballistic Missile Defense System in Romania and is constructing another such system in Poland. The Mark 41 launch systems that’s used in the Aegis Ashore systems can also be used to launch nuclear long-range cruise missiles, so it’s a dual-use system. And Putin has pointed this out.

    In other words, the US has built and is building launch sites for nuclear missiles on the Russian border. This fact has been widely reported on Russian TV and has infuriated the Russian public. It was in St. Petersburg at an economic forum when Putin… You can look on the internet under ‘Putin’s warning’, and he lectured a group of international media people that Russia would be forced to retaliate against this threat. So, while Russian officials maintain that its actions are no more than routine, Russia now appears to be preparing for war. And Hans pointed out that these things can be viewed in different ways, but I still find some of this alarming, myself. On October 5th, Russia conducted a nationwide civil defense drill that included 40 million of its people being directed to fallout shelters. Reuters reported on October 7th that Russia had moved its Iskander-capable nuclear missiles, as Hans referred to, to Kaliningrad, which borders Poland.

    So, while the US ignores the danger of nuclear war, Russian scholar Stephen Cohen reports that the danger of nuclear war with the US is the leading news story in Russia. I listen to Cohen interviews on the John Batchelor Show every week, and it’s really one of the few sources in our media where you can get informed updates. Cohen speaks Russian and he listens to the Russian media, and he states, “Just as there are no discussion of the most existential question of our time in the American political class, the possibility of war with Russia, it is the only thing being discussed in the Russian political class. These are two different political universes. In Russia, all the discussion in the newspapers, and there is plenty of free discussion on talk show TV which echoes what the Kremlin is thinking, online, in the elite newspapers, and in the popular broadcasts, the number one, two, three and four topics of the day are the possibility of war with the United States.”

    And Cohen goes on to say that, “I conclude from this that the leadership of Russia actually believes now, in reaction to what the US and NATO have said and done over the last two years, and particularly in reaction to the breakdown of the proposed cooperation in Syria, and the rhetoric coming out of Washington, that war is a real possibility. I can’t remember when, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, that Moscow leadership came to this conclusion in its collective head.”

    My own personal assessment of the state of the nuclear danger today is that it’s profound. The US is sleepwalking towards nuclear war. Our leaders have turned a blind eye to the scientifically predicted consequences of nuclear war and appear to be intent on making Russia back down. This is a recipe for unlimited human disaster. But it’s still not too late to seek a dialogue, diplomacy and detente with Russia and China, and to create a global discussion about the existential dangers of nuclear war, which, when was the last time you heard about this? You certainly didn’t hear about it in the presidential debates. It’s like people have forgotten about it. But I think that they don’t want to think about it, because it’s just too painful.

    We must return to the understanding that nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought. And this can be achieved if we listen to the warnings from the scientific community about the omnicidal consequences of nuclear war. I think we need to hold the feet to the fire of the US Nuclear Weapons Council, because any debate on this is useful, because then people will go, “What?” Just like my students in my class, they’re all uniformly horrified when they find out about what nuclear weapons will do. They don’t know, they really don’t know. And I think this recognition can provide what David suggested to be as a pressure point.

  • The State of the Nuclear Danger by Hans Kristensen

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Hans Kristensen at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. A link to Kristensen’s PowerPoint presentation that accompanied this talk is here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    kristensen

    Thanks very much for the invitation to come all the way out here. I managed to see two oceans in one day, so that’s pretty good. And I’ve been asked to talk about the state of affairs, so to speak, in the nine nuclear weapons countries, which is impossible in 15 minutes. [chuckle] So a lot of this is information overkill, of course, but the point of it is so that the slides and the information is available for you later on if you want to go online and look at it. So some of them I’ll just jump very quickly across them. But basically what I want to capture in this one is to give you an impression of three major themes, three major issues, the state of affair with the effort to reduce nuclear weapons, what has been accomplished and what does the trend look like for the next decade or so. And then look at the modernization programs that are around the world and the nuclear operations that we’re seeing changing very significantly right now, as a matter of fact.

    Somebody said that today was the anniversary of the UN Charter, I think it was. And today, as we speak, is also the beginning of US Strategic Command’s Global Thunder Nuclear Strike exercise that is beginning today. The B52s are taking off, the ICBMs are exercising and the ballistic missiles submarines. So we’ll see what comes out. But this is sort of a good reminder that there are two pieces here that are competing, and right now this one will be in focus for sure for the next week or 10 days.

    So I want to begin with a reminder. John very kindly reminded us of the hope, which I think is relevant and it’s also important when you look at the development of nuclear forces over the last several decades, we’ve had enormous progress compared to the arsenals that were during the Cold War. That’s of course if you’re interested in numbers. If you’re looking for this sort of final outcome, it’s a little more murky, but both in terms of overall numbers, in terms of categories of those weapon systems and what they were intended to do has changed significantly. In the United States, for example, the US has done away with all of its non-strategic nuclear weapons, except a few hundred that are for the tactical fighter aircraft. That means all army weapons, artillery, short-range missiles, all navy weapons, anti-submarine, anti-air, land attack, cruise missile, gone and destroyed. A huge development, these weapon systems used to sail around the world, rubbing up against other nuclear navies on the world oceans, sailing into countries’ ports whether they had non-nuclear policies or not, what have you.

    So, that is an amazing development in my view. Where we are now, what should capture your imagination, of course, is the bottom chart there, the enormous difference in the perception between the United States and Russia. How many nuclear weapons they think they need for security, versus everyone else. There’s no country on the planet who thinks they need more than a few hundred nuclear weapons for sort of basic nuclear deterrence missions. So the rest is very much a leftover of what we saw during the Cold War, the mindsets, the strategies, the inertia from the different agencies, it’s very hard to get them out of this nuclear business, and the politicians from the states where they produce some of these systems, of course.

    But if you look at just the United States and Russia, I’m going to focus on just the United States and Russia in this one, not just because they’re the biggest, but also because of the way things are developing right now, they are some of the most important, I think, trends in terms of what can influence the future of nuclear weapons globally. The most important part is that the pace of reductions has slowed down significantly, compared to two decades, one decade ago. We saw some very dramatic changes. And now it is as if the nuclear powers are not heading toward zero, they’re sort of hedging toward the indefinite future and thinking about what should their position be in the world of powers, decades from now. So that means that this development toward zero has really slowed down, and it is likely to stay very modest in the future years. The new START Treaty is the only existing treaty that has any effect on nuclear forces right now, and that treaty is so modest in terms of reductions and perhaps, more important, of the treaty is the verification regime that’s associated where the countries go on and inspect each other’s bases and what have you.

    But we are in a very problematic trend here, I think, because you can see the United States is reducing its number of deployed strategic warheads, and the Russians have started to increase their strategic nuclear warheads. And so, there are no limits under the treaty until 2018, so no one is in violation of the treaty now. [chuckle] At that day, February 2018, that’s when they have to meet the limit. And we’re talking only a few hundred warheads, so this is just about adjusting what is on the forces, this will not require any significant adjustment of the nuclear posture. So this is a very modest treaty. It looks bad, but I think you should also look at this statement from the US Department of Defense from 2012, which said that, even if Russia breaks out of the new START Treaty with significantly more nuclear warheads deployed, they would not be able to have an effect on the strategic stability, the thinking that goes into strategic stability seen from the US perspective.

    So the US is not very interested anymore in exact parity. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about what you can do with the forces you have. And Obama, of course, came in with a lot of promise or expectations, hope about reductions and fundamental change. He had a phrase that was, “To put an end to Cold War thinking.” That was the key in the Prague speech. And that is probably the one thing they certainly have not done, because if you look at how… The blue line is the fluctuation in the US stockpile. How many weapons have entered the stockpile? How many have left the stockpile over the years? So you can see the activity in and out of the stockpile here.

    And so what you should note, of course, is the enormous build up in this area. Eisenhower added over 11,000, I think it’s even higher, I think it’s 17,000 weapons to the stockpile. It’s mad. And then it slowed down and there were even some that were removed, but it was zig-zagging here until the end of the Cold War, when we saw these enormous reductions here, and later, the Bush administration. But Obama has been very modest, very little effect. He has taken about 700 nuclear weapons out of the stockpile. And that’s, of course, a lot, it’s more than most nuclear weapons states in the world, but out of this arsenal of 5,000, it’s much more modest. And so he has actually come out being the president that has reduced the US nuclear stockpile the least of any post-Cold War president.

    Now, we hear again and again that the United States has not been doing anything on its nuclear weapons, that we’ve had a “procurement holiday,” as they call it. And people used to argue that so that they can make the case, that now we need some money to modernize. But this of course ignores completely the modernizations that have happened for the last two decades. These may not have been entirely new weapons systems that came in. We have changed the way we go about things in the United States, so we instead spend more energy on extending the life of the existing systems, extending the life of existing nuclear warheads, etcetera. But we’ve had some significant ones in that period. The ballistic missile submarine fleet came in, the Trident II missile was introduced also out in the Pacific Fleet. We’ve had an entire upgrade of the Minuteman III force, the B-2 bombers came in in that period as well. Numerous different warheads were introduced, life extension programs, command and control, and now, we have B61-12, the next guy, the nuclear bomb that is being worked on. So this has been quite a busy holiday. [chuckle]

    But that’s just to say, the United States doesn’t go about its nuclear modernization in the same way that Russia or China go about their nuclear modernizations, nor do the cycles happen at the same time. So it’s completely off the mark to look out the window and say, “They’re modernizing, we’re not. So therefore, we must be behind.” Our modernization came in the 1980s and early 90s. The Russians’ came in in the late 1990s and in the 2000s, so they’re in the middle of their modernization cycle. And then it’ll go like that. It doesn’t happen at the same time. But it’s very important to not begin to spin modernization programs any which way you want it. But the Russian modernization program is across the board. They’re in the middle of it, mainly phasing out Soviet-era systems and replacing them with new ones. So we see ICBMs coming in, mobiles, as well as silos, we see new submarines, we see them working on first an extension of the production line for the black jet bomber, but they’re also working on a new bomber. We see a broad range of modernizations effort in the non-strategic as well, non-strategic forces like the Iskander, for example, that gets a lot of headlines right now, but also attack submarines like the Yasen-class with land attack cruise missile capability.

    For the United States, the same story. Across-the-board modernization that includes both ICBM subs, bombers as well as tactical weapon systems and the infrastructure, the factories to produce these things. And over the next decade, they are thinking in the order of $340 billion to be spent on this enterprise and we’ve heard, of course, $3 trillion, no, $1 trillion for the next 30 years, I think that’s the word. And there’s also some of that modernization that has effects for NATO, and this has to do with the B61 bomb that is deployed in Europe, part of the arsenal, integrated onto US bombers over there but also allied bombers. Yes, the United States provides nuclear weapons to allies’ bombers so that in a case of war, they would deliver our nuclear weapons, very controversial arrangement. There’s a whole story to that. We can go back to that later, whatever.

    But right now, it’s the B61-12 that is the focus of this effort. This will come, take all the gravity bombs that are currently in the US arsenal and build those capabilities into one weapons system. Right now, they have numerous versions of the B61, as well as a very high yield B83 bomb. The effects, the military effects of those capabilities will be concentrated into one weapons system, that’s the B61-12. The new about this is that it has a tail kit that guides it to its target so it can hit it more accurately. Thereby, they can use a warhead with a much lower maximum yield to get the same effects that today require hundreds of kilotons in yield. So that’s a way of making a nuclear weapon much more efficient. But of course, that also means that you suddenly have all the weapons systems, so to speak, everywhere, instead of in certain bases or only for certain types of aircraft, now it’s gonna be available across the force.

    China, very quickly, they’re in the middle of a modernization, shifting to more mobile systems, more capable ICBMs, including now beginning to put multiple warheads on their ICBMs. They’re building new bombers that may have nuclear cruise missile capability. It’s not quite clear. A ballistic submarine fleet and some ground launch cruise missiles that are being identified as possibly nuclear. France, a similar situation. They’re in the middle of a modernization of their force. They’ve just finished introducing this cruise missile on their bombers. They have a new version of their ballistic missile submarines that’s been introduced into the navy. And they’re putting new kinds of warheads on them.

    Britain has just decided to go ahead with replacement of its ballistic missile submarine fleet. So we will see that. They’re using a modified version of the American W86 warhead on their system. Of course, if you ask the Brits it’s not true, they say it’s their own system, but it is a version of it that is similar to it but with some modifications. They are using the US re-entry body, the new re-entry body that the US has just flushed into its fleet that has a special fuse on it that enables this warhead to significantly increase the kill capability of hard targets. So this is happening both in the British fleet, but also in the US fleet.

    Pakistan: Full speed ahead. Short range, medium range, cruise missiles, infrastructure, plutonium production facilities, reactors coming in, air launch, ground launch, cruise missiles, a very dynamic program, including very short range system. This one has a range of only 60 kilometers. Specifically designed to be used before strategic nuclear weapons are used. So this is an opening front in the Pakistani-India relationship that is very worrisome, and designed specifically to be used against Indian conventional forces invading Pakistan.

    India: Looking more toward China, but certainly keeping its eye on Pakistan, but developing a longer range system that will be able to cover all of China. It’ll begin to deploy them in canisters on the road, instead of these sort of open transport modes, so they’ll be much more resilient and flexible and can be used actually also quicker in a quicker respond. Their first ballistic missile submarine has just been handed over to the navy and we will see that beginning to go at some point over the next couple of years, out on actual patrols with nuclear weapons. They also have various other systems, but that’s sort of the focus of their nuclear posture development.

    Israel: The same situation, with land-based ballistic missiles and bombers with gravity bombs. There might be a nuclear cruise missile capability on their submarines. There have been lot of rumors about it. It’s a little foggy still, but that’s the sort of the overall trend here. The most important part then is this combination, as well as a longer range version of the Jericho ballistic missile. We hear numbers of Israeli arsenals, 200, 300, some people even say 400 nuclear weapons. I think they’re vastly exaggerated. I think the Israeli arsenal is probably closer to sort of 80 to 100 warheads, or something like that. They don’t have a war fighting type of nuclear arsenals. I don’t really think what they would do with all those weapons.

    And of course, North Korea: Full speed ahead. You name it, they’ll come up with some system some way or another. They’re working on a submarine, land-based mobile ICBMs, fixed ICBMs, they’re trying to get that in. There have been rumors of some cruise missile capability, but there are many rumors about North Korea. And right now, despite five underground nuclear tests, it’s still not entirely clear that they have managed to weaponize these weapons so that they can be delivered with a ballistic missile. We still need to see more of those kind of tests where they’re testing vehicles that are actually intended to deliver the warhead. So there is a process there, but they’re certainly on their way, no doubt about it.

    And finally, operations. We’ve seen some significant changes over the last four, five years, in the way that Russia and the United States are operating their nuclear forces. Part of the picture is that these nuclear forces are dual capable. So, sometimes, they may be intended as conventional operations, but they also send a nuclear message. And we’ve seen that again and again, when information, for example, about the Iskander system going to Kaliningrad, is being really highlighted in the news media and the public reactions, as a nuclear system going in. But the primary mission, of course, is conventional. But it has nuclear capability, we believe. We’ve seen some significant operations in the Baltic and North Sea area, including apparently, a simulated nuclear strike in 2013 against Sweden, with Backfire bombers.

    We also have other naval nuclear weapons. Russia has a much broader nuclear weapons arsenal, in terms of types, both for the navy, the air defense system, the air force and the ground forces. And they seem to be holding on to that capability. On the US side, we have seen new deployments of nuclear-capable fighter squadrons to both the Baltic states, to Poland, and even to Sweden, a place where we did not see those type of deployments 10 years ago. We see now, a periodic forward deployments of long-range nuclear bombers to Europe, to operate for several weeks from a base, and flying around and do exercises deep, deep into the Baltic Sea, and over-flying the Baltic states, just a few tens of miles from the Russian border. We are beginning to see now, again, ballistic missile submarines conducting port visits in Europe, to signal that Europe is backed by the American ballistic missile submarine strike force.

    So a very significant development. And very recently, just the last couple of years, we’ve seen some completely new developments in the bomber force operations. It started in 2015, with this one that was called Polar Growl, an exercise that sent four nuclear-capable bombers on missions up over the North Pole. They went all the way to their launch point for the cruise missiles, as well as into the North Sea, and these are just hypothetical strike patterns for each bomber, carrying 20 air launch, long-range cruise missiles. 80 cruise missiles is a significant force just for eight bombers. This year we saw a repetition of this, looking a little different, but the same central theme. A couple of bombers flying up over the North Pole, going just along the Russian coast, outside that territory, of course, and this one, going over the North Sea, and all the way into the Baltic Sea, and doing exercises up, along and down the coast of the Baltic states.

    And in the Pacific, we saw the B2 bombers going up, going down toward the Kamchatka Peninsula, which is where the Russian Pacific submarine fleet is based. STRATCOM said they have not done this type of an exercise since 1987. So, we’re now back… European Command has forged what they call a new link with STRATCOM, for assurance and deterrence missions. And that is a description from a chapter in their posture statement that deals with the nuclear forces, so this is nuclear messaging. And so this raises the question. What’s the plan? Does anybody know about the next step? I can’t imagine next year’s exercise, will probably have to be a little bigger and do something a little extra, because otherwise, we’re slacking. We’re messaging here, right? So, this is a worrisome step, where we’re beginning to take, and the Russians are beginning to take the step further up the escalation ladder. Yes.

    [Were those planes carrying nuclear weapons at the time?]

    No. The planes are not carrying nuclear weapons. In fact, US bombers do not carry nuclear weapons anywhere. They are loading nuclear capable systems, but without the warheads for exercises. But we’ve seen in 2007, obviously, that mistakes can happen. That was when six cruise missiles were flown across the United States, because the security system broke down. But on these exercises, no. But what we’re beginning to see is that these are nuclear-capable bombers that are going to missions. We’re also beginning to see conventional long-range strike bombers going on these missions. And when they’re doing these exercises, they’re loading onto the bomber force both nuclear and conventional long-strike cruise missiles. So this is an integration of conventional nuclear, in the strategic mission in support of both Europe and Asia. Yes?

    [In Russian exercises, do we know whether they refrain from using nuclear weapons? From flying their nuclear weapons with their bombers?]

    Know, is a strong word. I would say, we suspect that they don’t. Even in the Russian military, it’s just a lot of trouble if you have an accident. And why do it if you don’t have to. But they do simulate it. Absolutely. They simulate both the loading process and all the procedures when they fly, and the launch procedures, etcetera, etcetera.

    [But we can’t tell?]

    Exactly. We can’t tell if that plane really has something on board, unless we have some really good intelligence. So, that’s sort of, everybody’s doing it and everybody’s doing more of it and this is the concern right now.

    [Since we don’t know if the Russian planes, for example, are carrying nuclear weapons, doesn’t it make it more dangerous in a period of crisis?]

    Exactly, and there was a debate a few years ago about whether the United States should add conventional warheads to its submarines’ ballistic fleet. And there was a heavy opposition in the US Congress against it, specifically to try to keep a red line between nuclear and conventional. You would have had conventional and nuclear on the same submarine, and so they said, “Nah, let’s not do that.” [chuckle] But on the bombers, that’s part of the standard posture. You can have conventional. You can have JASSM cruise missiles. You can have air launch cruise missiles. Now they’re building, working on building a new long-range nuclear cruise missile, it’s called the LRSO, so far. That’s going to come into the force in the mid, late 20s. That’s going to replace the ALCM. This is part of this overall repetition of the current nuclear posture through the modernization.

  • Assessing the Alarming Lack of Progress by Jackie Cabasso

    This is the transcript of a talk given by Jackie Cabasso at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse” on October 24, 2016. The audio of this talk is available here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

    cabasso

    It’s really a great honor and a little bit daunting to be on the podium here with Professor Chomsky, but he seems a pretty down-to-earth guy. [laughter] I’m going to try to limit my remarks to the allotted time, there’s a great deal to say on this topic. When I looked at my email this morning, I saw two subject lines one after the other. “Top British General warns of nuclear war with Russia, ‘the end of life as we know it’” immediately followed by, “The week the world agreed to make nuclear weapons illegal.” I think that this kind of sums at where we’re at, but it also underlines the point that with the internet and social media that we have available to us today, we’re operating in a blizzard of propaganda, probably unprecedented, that makes our work even harder, because we don’t know who to believe or what to believe. And this makes the imperative for critical thinking even more important. I believe that we need to think much more deeply and systematically about the causes of our existential predicament, which are the same as the causes of climate change, wars, unprecedented economic disparities resulting in a plethora of social ills, and we need to make strategic organizing and advocacy choices based on this analysis.

    This will also help build a movement of movements that we will need to prevail on nuclear disarmament and many other pressing issues, the popular movement to that Noam was just talking about. I believe that nuclear weapons are not a single issue and cannot be understood as such. Nuclear weapons are ultimate instruments of power, power projection, militarism and war; they are the currency of global domination. There’s an inextricable link between nuclear and conventional weapons also, especially in light of today’s high-tech arms racing. Nuclear weapons cannot simply be plucked out of this equation. I believe that nuclear disarmament will not be possible unless accompanied by significant demilitarization and general disarmament, which is sometimes called strategic stability, and I’ll talk more about that.

    At the height of the Cold War and the height of the anti-nuclear movement in 1982, as I was being arrested non-violently blocking the gates to the Livermore nuclear weapons lab, along with Dan Ellsberg and several thousand other people, I could not have dreamed that less than 10 years later the Soviet Union would disappear overnight and the Cold War would end. Like many others I think in such unlikely event I would have predicted that nuclear disarmament would quickly follow, but we were wrong. We didn’t understand the forces that were driving the nuclear arms race, and I’m not sure that we do now. When assessing the alarming lack of progress on nuclear disarmament, we sometimes forget the fundamentals haven’t really changed since the beginning of the nuclear age, and certainly not since the end of World War II.

    In appealing to the 1982 United Nations Second Special on Disarmament the Hiroshima Mayor, Takashi Araki, said, “Hiroshima is not merely a witness of history, Hiroshima is an endless warning for the future of humankind. If Hiroshima is ever forgotten it is evident that the mistake will be repeated and bring human history to an end.” When the Cold War ended, it was almost as if the planet itself breathed a huge sigh of relief. People around the world hoped and believed that they had escaped the nuclear holocaust and largely put nuclear weapons out of their minds. During the 1980s, fear of nuclear war was by far the most visible issue of concern to the American public. Yet following the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and especially US nuclear weapons, fell off the public’s radar screen. Nuclear arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament became increasingly isolated issues, experts in Washington DC redefined post-Cold War nuclear priorities almost solely in terms of securing Russian loose nukes and keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of rogue states and terrorists.

    Meanwhile, deeply embedded in the military industrial complex, Pentagon planners and scientists at the nuclear weapons labs conjured up new justifications to sustain the nuclear weapons enterprise. Following the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Colin Powell, then Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared, “You’ve got to step aside from the context we’re been using for the past 40 years, that you base military planning against a specific threat. We no longer have the luxury of having a threat to plan for, what we planned for is that we’re a super power. We are the major player on the world’s stage with responsibilities and interests around the world.” And this sounds a lot like some of Ashton Carter’s recent rhetoric.

    When looking back over things that I’ve written in the past, I found many similar themes recurring that I’d actually forgotten about, because things keep moving so fast. How many people remember Presidential Decision Directive 60 that was issued by President Clinton in 1997, nearly 10 years after the Cold War ended? This Presidential Directive reaffirmed the threatened first use of nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of US national security, and contemplated an expanding role for nuclear weapons to deter not only nuclear, but also chemical and biological weapons. The Bush doctrine of preventive war was a continuation and an expansion of programs and policies carried out by every US administration, Democrat and Republican, since President Harry Truman, a Democrat, authorized the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

    You may remember the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, which I also had sort of put out of my mind. It stated that “nuclear attack options that vary in scale, scope and purpose will contemplate other military capabilities”. And it did something very important that described the transition to a new strategic triad, which provides an understanding of how the US planned to, and in fact is planning to carry out its global war-fighting strategy. In one corner of the new triad, the old strategic triad, the nuclear triad, consisting of submarine-based ballistic missiles, land-based based intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers was moved up to one corner and combined with conventional high tech weaponry. This category was named Offensive Strike Systems.

    The other legs of the new triad were defenses and a revitalized defense infrastructure that will provide new capabilities in a timely fashion to meet emerging threats. This was a super-sized infrastructure to serve as both the nuclear and the conventional weapon systems, the warheads and the delivery systems. And these were all bound together by enhanced command and control and intelligent systems. And these three legs of the new strategic triad were designed and are designed to work together to enable the United States project overwhelming military force. And in this context you can understand that, so-called defenses actually work like shields with the swords of offensive weapons, and protect the US forward deployments and freedom of action around the world. In particular, the missile defense systems, which we’re hearing a little bit about now as provocations to Russia and China, or as perceived provocations to Russia and China, were describe by Admiral Ramdas, the former head of India’s Navy, who’s describe US theater missile defenses as “a net thrown over the globe”.

    Now, in 2010, the Obama Nuclear Posture Review was released, exactly one year and one day after the Prague speech. And despite hopes for dramatic change, of course, this Nuclear Posture Review revealed no substantial changes in US nuclear force structure, maintained all three legs of the strategic triad, only marginally reduced the role of nuclear weapons in US national security policy, stating, “These nuclear forces will continue to play an essential role in deterring potential adversaries and reassuring allies and partners around the world”. The NPR explicitly rejected reducing the high alert status of intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic submarines, concluding that, “The current alert posture of US strategic forces with heavy bombers off full-time alert, nearly all ICBMs on alert and a significant number of sea-launched ballistic missiles at sea at any given time should be maintained for the present”.

    It also reaffirmed the policy of extended deterrence and retains the capability to forward deploy US nuclear weapons on tactical fighter bombers and heavy bombers, including at NATO bases in Europe, while proceeding with the modification of the B61 bomb carried on those planes. That was before the 2011 turnaround that Professor Chomsky talked about. I don’t have time to really go into it, but I want to talk about in greater specificity about the linkage between nuclear and high tech conventional offensive and defensive weapons, again, this concept called strategic stability.

    Okay, I’ll move quickly. The US government as, I think everyone here knows, is officially committed to modernizing its nuclear bombs and warheads, delivery systems, the laboratories and plants that design and maintain them, and US policy and budget documents for many years now manifest an intent to keep thousands of US nuclear weapons in active service for the foreseeable future, and the capacity to bring stored weapons into service, and to design and manufacture new weapons should they be desired. Russia’s nuclear weapons programs and policies closely mirror those of the US, and are also reflected in the other nuclear weapons possessing states. But perhaps and even more dangerous than nuclear warhead modifications are upgrades for delivery systems for conventional weapons.

    In 2008, General Kevin Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command, declared, “We have a Prompt Global Strike delivery capability on alert today, but is configured only with nuclear weapons, which limits the options available to the President and may in some cases reduce the credibility of our deterrents.” And along these lines the Pentagon began development of a new generation of long-range delivery systems, capable of carrying conventional warheads. The US is hoping to take advantage of continuing advances in space technologies and improvements in guidance technologies to place non-nuclear as well nuclear payloads on long-range missiles. The goal is to achieve “Prompt Global Strike, the ability to hit targets anywhere on earth in an hour or else and to hit them accurately enough so that non-nuclear payloads can destroy the target”. This is one of many ways in which the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons has been blurred.

    In addition, the US is researching new kinds of weapons, including gliding, maneuvering reentry vehicles that could carry a variety of weapons and hypersonic weapons, intended to attack targets many times faster than the speed of sound, before a defender could react. Russia actually is believed to be testing these as a possible way to attack missile defense systems. Tests of hypersonic vehicles that are part of this research and development effort have been conducted in recent years at Vandenberg Air Force Base, not so far from here, where the US Air Force routinely conducts tests of unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. The possibility that Prompt Global Strike Program might succeed, although there are many technical obstacles, impedes nuclear disarmament efforts and is helping to accelerate a new round of arms racing.

    Russian security analysts have been raising concerns for years that these conventional US alternatives to nuclear weapons might pose an obstacle to US/Russian nuclear arms control negotiations. In 2009, Alexei Arbatov at the Carnegie Moscow Center observed, “There are very few countries that are afraid of American nuclear weapons. But there are many countries which are afraid of American conventional weapons. In particular, nuclear weapon states like China and Russia are primarily concerned about growing American conventional, precision-guided long-range capability.” Paradoxically, Robert Einhorn, a special advisor for non-proliferation and arms control to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, remarked in 2007, “We should be putting far more effort into developing more effective conventional weapons. It’s hard to imagine a president using nuclear weapons in almost any circumstance, but no one doubts our willingness to use conventional weapons.” And this statement, unfortunately, is all too true. In 2015, the US spent almost $600 billion on its military, more than twice as much as China and Russia combined, and more than one third of the world’s countries combined.

    An even more overpowering conventional US military threat surely is not the desired outcome of the nuclear disarmament process. How will potential adversaries with fewer economic resources respond? Won’t they have an incentive to maintain or acquire nuclear weapons to counter US conventional superiority? And won’t that in turn entrench US determination to retain and modernize its own nuclear arsenal, thus rendering the goal of nuclear disarmament nearly impossible? This conundrum poses one of the biggest challenges to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

    I wanted to actually just talk about the political machinations around the START II Treaty and the ratification process, because it’s an example of how nuclear disarmament treaties have been turned on their heads and actually have become anti-disarmament treaties. This was true with the comprehensive test ban process. But the political conditions attached to Senate ratification in the US, and mirrored by Russia, effectively did turn START into an anti-disarmament measure. And this was stated in so many words by Senator Bob Corker, a Republican Senator from Tennessee whose state is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, site of the proposed multi-billion dollar uranium processing facility.

    He said, “I am proud that as result of ratification we have been successful in securing commitments from the administration on modernization of our nuclear arsenal and support of our missile defense programs, two things that would not have happened otherwise. In fact, thanks in part to the contributions of my staff and I have been able to make, the new START Treaty could easily be called, ‘The Nuclear Modernization and Missile Defense Act of 2010′”. And one of the problems that we face as anti-nuclear advocates is that this critique was kept out of the debate in Washington by the arms control groups who were trying to be realistic. So we’ve seen what the outcome of that has been. Those conditions, by the way, were essentially mirrored by the Russian Duma. And in my personal opinion, we’re worse off with that treaty, because of the process then we would be if it hadn’t happened in the first place.

    So in conclusion, the concept of security, I think, needs to be re-framed and redefined at every level of society and government, with a premium on universal, human and ecological security, a return to multilateralism, and a commitment to cooperative, non-violent means of conflict resolution. Nuclear disarmament should serve as the leading edge of a global trend towards general and complete disarmament, and redirection of military expenditures to meet human needs and protect the environment. Progress towards a global society that is more fair, peaceful and ecologically sustainable is inter-dependent. We are unlikely to get far on any of these objectives without progress on all. And I want to emphasize that these are not preconditions for disarmament, but together with disarmament, are preconditions for human survival. In our relationships with both each other and the planet, we are now up against the hard choice that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., warned us about, non-violence or non-existence.

  • Message to the Symposium from Daisaku Ikeda

    Message to the symposium

    “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse”
    Santa Barbara, USA

    It is a great honor to be able to hold this international symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse,” here in Santa Barbara, this beautiful city set between the mountains and the sea. On behalf of Soka Gakkai International (SGI) members in 192 countries and territories worldwide, I would like to express our most heartfelt gratitude to all participants and all those whose support has made this event possible.

    For years, Dr. David Krieger has led the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) with unyielding energy and vision as it has developed a broad range of activities for peace. In addition to this symposium, it has been our pleasure to support and collaborate with NAPF on a number of projects, including the collection of some 5 million signatures for the Nuclear Zero campaign and cosponsoring an event calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons held in The Hague. Allow me to take this opportunity to express again my deepest respect for Dr. Krieger and all our esteemed friends at NAPF.

    In light of the continued spread of nuclear weapons and the proliferation of related threats, there is shared and growing concern about the inhumane nature of these weapons. We see this in the increasing number of countries supporting the “Humanitarian Pledge” as a path to resolving this issue. Within global civil society, there is a rising chorus of voices calling for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, with new forms of action being increasingly taken up by members of the younger generation.

    Against this backdrop, this past August, the United Nations Open-ended Working Group adopted a set of recommendations calling for the holding of a conference in 2017 to negotiate a legally binding instrument prohibiting nuclear weapons. It is imperative that this conference be held next year, decisively strengthening momentum to bring the age of nuclear weapons to a close.

    The enduring inspiration for the SGI’s efforts for nuclear abolition is the declaration made by the second president of the Soka Gakkai, Josei Toda, in 1957, at the height of Cold War tensions, in which he denounced these weapons as an absolute evil and called for their elimination. To quote that declaration: “Although a movement calling for a ban on the testing of atomic or nuclear weapons has arisen around the world, it is my wish to go further, to attack the problem at its root. I want to expose and rip out the claws that lie hidden in the very depths of such weapons.”

    As Buddhists who regard the sanctity of life as a paramount value, we have worked with people and organizations who share our commitment, engaging in a wide range of activities in venues throughout the world. These have included mounting exhibitions and creating a variety of forums for dialogue and learning.These activities have been rooted in the conviction that the key to breaking through the current deadlock lies in fostering global solidarity among ordinary citizens, unleashing the power of change and ushering in the dawn of a new and hope-filled era.

    The challenge of nuclear weapons abolition must be a shared global enterprise, engaging all states and civil society actors. It is a struggle to counter the core pathology of contemporary civilization—the all-too-casual disregard for life, its value and sanctity. The struggle for nuclear abolition is an effort to redirect the world toward an authentically human orientation. Today is United Nations Day, and I am confident that the elimination of nuclear weapons must be a vital milepost toward the enduring realization of the ideals of the UN Charter: “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person.”

    We must bring this nuclear age to an end. To achieve this, we are committed to continuing our efforts, with unflagging energy and alongside our respected friends, to expand the global popular solidarity for nuclear weapons abolition.

    In closing, I offer my best wishes for the health, well-being and success of all the participants in this symposium.

    Daisaku Ikeda
    President, Soka Gakkai International (SGI)
    October 24, 2016

  • The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse

    David Krieger delivered these remarks at the opening session of the symposium “The Fierce Urgency of Nuclear Zero: Changing the Discourse,” held on October 24-25, 2016 in Santa Barbara, California.

     

    Thank you all for taking time to join us to participate in the symposium.

    Each of you was invited to participate because we believe in your work and value your insights.

    I think that everyone participating feels the urgency of getting to zero, or at least on the path to zero.  Perhaps you are also feeling, as I do, the frustration and pain of putting in so much effort over so many decades, and having witnessed so relatively little progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons.  The world seems stuck, or regressing, on this issue of such great importance to humanity’s future.

    We’ve organized this symposium in an effort to achieve a breakthrough in thinking and discourse on the path to zero nuclear weapons.  Our great hope for the symposium is that we may, by brainstorming and common concern, find some creative ways to move the world closer to the goal of Nuclear Zero.  Given the track record of the nuclear-armed states of nuclear entrenchment, reliance on nuclear arsenals for deterrence, and their plans to modernize their nuclear arsenals, I recognize that we are setting the bar high.  The state of the world with its existential nuclear threats, however, is calling out for setting high goals and aiming to achieve them with a sense of urgency.

    Let me provide a brief overview of where we stand, by contrasting some positive perspectives with some negative counterpoints:

    1. Positive: Since the mid-1980s, the number of nuclear weapons in the world has been reduced by 55,000.

    Negative: There remain more than 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  The use of only a small percentage of these could destroy civilization and much of complex life.

    1. Positive: Nuclear weapons have not been used in warfare since 1945, when two were used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Negative: Since 1945, there have been many close calls related to nuclear detonations due to accidents, false alarms, miscalculations and intentional confrontations.

    1. Positive: We have not yet destroyed civilization or complex life with nuclear weapons.

    Negative: The odds of a child born today dying in a nuclear war during his or her expected 80-year lifespan are estimated at one in six.  These are not acceptable odds.  It is like playing Nuclear Roulette with nuclear weapons pointed at humanity’s head.

    1. Positive: The nuclear-armed states are committed under international law to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race at an early date.

    Negative: It is already long past “an early date,” and rather than negotiating in good faith, the nuclear-armed states are all engaged in modernizing their nuclear arsenals.

    1. Positive: The nuclear-armed states are committed under international law to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament.

    Negative: No such negotiations are taking place and there doesn’t seem to be either the political will to initiate them, or the judicial will to enforce such good faith negotiations..

    1. Positive: At this point, there are only nine countries in possession of nuclear weapons.

    Negative: Nine countries is nine too many.  Also, the U.S. keeps its nuclear weapons on the territory of five countries in Europe and provides a “nuclear umbrella” to more than 30 allied countries, including 28 NATO members.

    1. Positive: The Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union ended without a major world war and without any war going nuclear.

    Negative: Relations between the U.S. and Russia are growing chilly and many analysts believe we are entering a new Cold War between the two nuclear-armed powers.

    1. Positive: Young people could take the lead in changing the discourse on nuclear weapons.

    Negative: Young people, by and large, are not well educated on the issue and give priority to other issues.

    1. Positive: It is not too late to change our thinking, our discourse and our actions with regard to nuclear dangers.

    Negative: There are few signs that political leaders of nuclear-armed states are ready to engage in this issue with the commitment and political will necessary to achieve Nuclear Zero.

    It is a formidable task to overcome the many obstacles on the path to Nuclear Zero.  These include:

    • the lack of political will by the leaders of nuclear-armed countries and their allies;
    • a managerial policy orientation (arms control rather than disarmament);
    • an inadequately agreed-upon global ethic;
    • the extreme arrogance of nuclear possessors, including belief in their infallibility;
    • the strong belief in the efficacy of nuclear deterrence (a Maginot Line in the Mind);
    • the widespread ignorance and complacency on the part of the public and elites;
    • the mistaken belief that nuclear weapons provide protection to their possessors;
    • the tyranny of experts (that is, “national security” elites);
    • the conformity of political leaders;
    • an insufficient global structure to support and enforce Nuclear Zero;
    • the inability to make progress in changing our modes of thinking, as Einstein warned we must; and
    • a failure of imagination.

    I hope that these and other obstacles to the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons will be touched upon in the course of our discussions.  I am also hopeful that we will each grow in understanding by our sharing of insights in dialogue with one another.  Finally, I hope that we may develop and agree upon a Final Statement that will be a message to people everywhere that will help move the world closer to the goal of Nuclear Zero.

  • World Beyond War: An Idea Whose Time Is Coming

    Over 300 people gathered last week at a conference at American University in Washington DC which brought together a remarkable assembly of philosophers, scientists, activists, diplomats, lawyers, doctors, economists, media experts, and activists working against patriarchy, gender discrimination, poverty, and racism, to develop creative answers and intelligent directions on how people can take action to put an end to war.   The event was organized by World Beyond War– a new and vibrant network and campaign, which in less than two years has gained the endorsement of thousands of people and organizations in 135 countries who signed a pledge “to commit to engage in and support nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations for war and to create a sustainable and just peace”.  The gathering initiated a sorely needed examination of the public perception of the inevitability of war on the planet while promoting the possibilities and solutions for abolishing it.

    One of the more astonishing reports was the heart wrenching presentations on the ongoing state of chaos and destruction in the Congo where more than 6 million people have died.  We learned how the US and its allies have been supporting brutal dictators who are responsible for these deaths, ever since the CIA was involved in the overthrow and murder of its first democratically elected President, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961.

    (To help those trying to spread the word and bring peace to the region, check out www.congojustice.org or www.friendsofthecongo.org ) Dennis Kucinich spoke about his success in establishing a Department of Peace as well as missed opportunities when Congress rejected the impeachment legislation he introduced to hold the Bush administration to account for war crimes in Iraq.  Gar Alperovitz gave a challenging analysis of a new initiative to create the post-capitalist economy, The Next System Project, at http://www.thenextsystem.org/ with inspiring examples of programs instituted at the community level, such as worker cooperatives and public ownership of banks and utilities.  Barbara Wien delivered a rousing presentation on patriarchy, calling it “the mother’s milk of militarism”.  We heard, via video, UK Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time peace activist who has been campaigning to scrap Britain’s nuclear arsenal, on the very same day he was re-elected to lead his party and be its next candidate for Prime Minister.  Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin gave a chilling report on how Saudi Arabia corrupts and buys the US Congress and its army of lobbyists with huge multi-million payments. Bruce Gagnon, with the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, reported on the rising tide of activism in South Korea and Japan to protest the destabilizing new U.S. missile bases in Asia and how more than 10,000 people demonstrated in Seoul.  Journalist Gareth Porter proposed a ten year plan for ending what he described as “the permanent war state”, crediting General Smedley Butler, known for having characterized war as a “racket”.  Porter’s talk is posted here.

    What Butler said in 1935, underscored by Porter was:

    War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

    Videos of all the panels and speakers are posted here: http://worldbeyondwar.org/NoWar2016/

    Workshops addressed issues such as closing the more than 800 US military bases encircling the globe, ending military recruitment in schools, abolishing nuclear weapons, organizing young people to work for Palestinian freedom, bringing the US into the International Criminal Court, mitigating the effects of the new cold war through citizen exchanges with Russia to promote better relations,  updating World Beyond War’s strategy manual,  A Global Security System: An Alternative to War,  providing activists  and scholars key information on the myths, obstacles, and solutions that have already worked to end wars.

    (See http://worldbeyondwar.org/alternative/)

    The conference came at a time when significant global events demonstrated that it is possible to end war.  During the weekend of the meeting, Columbia negotiated to settle the longest running armed conflict in the Western hemisphere after 52 years of slaughter and destruction at a peace conference between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Unfortunately a subsequent public referendum rejected the historic settlement by a margin of less than one percent although the ceasefire is still holding.    And the phenomenon of so many previously hostile indigenous tribes of America coming together in North Dakota to help the Standing Rock Sioux defeat the pipeline that is threatening their water and earth—“burying the hatchet” so to speak and using peaceful non-violent means to protect our planet can be seen as a metaphor for what all the nations of the world must now do as well—give up our tribal differences as members of nation states and “bury the hatchet” as global citizens.

    It is increasingly dawning on people that the current post-Cold War series of wars and military devastation waged on the world by the US and its alliances only make conditions more violent and perilous at home.  We are beginning to understand that these wars may be void of any conceivable purpose except to feed the war machine.   A growing number of people are supporting third party candidates that pledge to drastically cut the military budget although their voices are generally ignored.    Despite the difficulty most of us have in imagining an end to war in these distressing times, when our foreign policy is so militarized, and the media is beating the drums for war and shutting out the voices of the peacemakers, the World Beyond War gathering offered new possibilities for shifting our priorities and our mind set. Regardless of who is elected on November 8, this conference demonstrated that there are growing numbers of us who are engaged and understand what is at stake.   Their work and ideas will be needed if we are to end the violence and destruction of war.

    Alice Slater is an Advisor to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and serves on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War.  This article first appeared at TheNation.com on October 6, 2016.

  • Science and Society

    I would like to announce that an updated and very much enlarged edition of my book “Science and Society” will very soon be published by World Scientific (in November, 2016). The book can be purchased at a 20% discount at the following address by quoting the code number WSSPPS20.

    http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10227

    science_societyThis book has a very interesting history. In 1986, a friend from the World Health Organization called my attention to an essay contest sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. A prize was offered for the best essay on how to give science and engineering students a sense of social responsibility for the consequences of their work. I wrote an essay arguing that the best way to do this would be to introduce a course on the history and social impact of science. It would make students aware of the vast social consequences of scientific and  technological progress, and the sections dealing with modern times would discuss topics such as genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, sustainability and climate change.

    My essay did not win the competition, but my WHO friend liked it so much that he translated it into Danish, and we submitted it for publication to “Politiken”, one of Denmark’s largest newspapers. Many students from the University of Copenhagen read my essay in “Politiken”. They came to me and said: “If you really believe what you wrote, then you have to make such a course for us”.

    As a result, I started to teach a course which initially had the title “Science, Ethics and Politics”. It was very difficult to get it accepted by the Studies Committee, which thought that science, ethics and politics were three entirely different things, and that they ought not to be connected in any way. Finally I was allowed to give the course under the condition that neither I nor any of the students would get any credit for it.

    In spite of these difficulties, the course was a huge success. The audiences were very large and enthusiastic, and we had many distinguished guest speakers. I wrote the book, “Science and Society”, and we used it as a text. The students presented reports on the chapters of the book, and on supplementary books that they had read. We also saw many films, borrowed from the United Nations Information Service, which happened to have an office in Copenhagen.

    Finally, when the name of the course was changed to “Science and Society”, the Studies Committee allowed students to get credits for attending it. Meanwhile, the President (Rektor) of the University of Copenhagen, Professor Ove Nathan, was aware of my course and the troubles with the Studies Committee. He kept sending me encouraging notes, telling me to keep on with the project, regardless of how bitterly it was opposed.

    Later, Prof. Nathan telephoned to me and asked me to become the Contact Person for Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. They had asked him to do this, but he was too busy with his duties as Rektor. In this way, I became Contact Person for Pugwash, and Chairman of the Danish National Pugwash Group. The Pugwash organization shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons and to peacefully solve global problems related to science. (See www.pugwash.org).

    Locally printed editions of “Science and Society”  were used in courses taught not only in Denmark, but also in Sweden, Switzerland, England and Myanmar. In Denmark, there were several other similar courses, for example at the Niels Bohr Institute. In 2001 those of us who taught courses relating to social responsibility wrote to the Danish Minister of Education saying that attendance at such a course ought to be compulsory for all students of science and engineering. The Minister called together the heads of all Danish institutions of higher education, and they accepted the proposal. In 2004, these courses were ready, and they have been given ever since then at all universities and technical institutes in Denmark.

    In expanding and updating “Science and Society”, I hope to inform a large public about the very serious  challenges that we are facing today, including threats of catastrophic climate change, thermonuclear war and large-scale global famine. Although many of these problems are the result of the astonishingly rapid growth of science and technology, and the misuse of our increased power over nature, it is not only scientists who need to act to find solutions. Everyone needs to be informed, and everyone must accept responsibility.

    I am a little worried by the fact that some of the later chapters in the book require a technical background for full comprehension, but I hope that non-technical readers will just skip over the difficult parts. It would be very good if the book could be used at the high-school or gymnasium level, as well as in colleges and universities.

    Finally, here is a link to an article where I have tried to make my Internet publications more easily available:

    https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2016/03/15/peace/