Nuclear weapons do not make Americans safer. Rather, they threaten us all with their uncontrollable and unforgiving power. They are weapons of mass annihilation, indiscriminate in nature, threatening combatants and civilians alike. They kill and maim. They cause unnecessary suffering. They are immoral and their use would violate the humanitarian laws of warfare. No country should be allowed to possess weaponry that is capable of destroying civilization and ending most life on the planet, including the human species.
Nuclear weapons and human fallibility are a most dangerous mix. As long as nuclear weapons exist in the world, civilization and the human species are threatened. Nuclear deterrence is not foolproof, and time is not our friend. We must approach this task with the urgency it demands. We must confront nuclear weapons and those countries that possess and rely upon them with what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.”
There are still more than 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world, most in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. However, seven other countries also possess these annihilators. These countries are: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Even one of these weapons can destroy a city, a few can destroy a country, and an exchange of 100 of them between India and Pakistan on the other side’s cities could trigger a nuclear famine resulting in the deaths of some two billion people globally. A larger nuclear exchange between the US and Russia could return the planet to an ice age, resulting in nearly universal death.
What is needed today is for the countries of the world to engage in negotiations in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and to achieve total nuclear disarmament. That is what is required of us and the other countries of the world under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law. Unfortunately, rather than negotiating in good faith for these ends, the nuclear-armed countries are engaged in expensive programs to modernize their nuclear arsenals.
The goal of negotiations should be a universal agreement for all the nuclear-armed countries to give up their nuclear arsenals in a phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent manner. It will require the participation of all countries, but some country will need to lead in convening these negotiations. That country should be the United States of America, given its background in developing, using and testing nuclear weapons. But, if history is a guide, that won’t happen until the people of the United States demand it of their government.
The country that has stepped up to take a leadership role in calling on the nuclear-armed nations to fulfill their obligations for nuclear disarmament is a small, courageous Pacific Island state, the Republic of the Marshall Islands. It is suing the nine nuclear-armed nations to require them to do what they are obligated to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law; that is, to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament.
The Nuclear Zero initiative of the Marshall Islands falls in this 70th anniversary year of the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States. Enough people have already suffered from nuclear weapons – those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those in the Marshall Islands, the Nevada Test Site, Semipalatinsk, Lop Nor and other nuclear weapon test sites around the world. It is time for humanity to take charge of its own destiny. In the Nuclear Age, ridding the world of nuclear weapons is an imperative. Our common future depends upon our shared success.
Of course, the perspective expressed above is my own. It is tragic, though, that such a perspective did not make it into the President’s 2015 State of the Union Message to the Congress and People of the United States. It was an opportunity to teach and lead that was missed by the President. Why, we might ask, is he engaged in modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, a trillion dollar project, instead of negotiating for the elimination of nuclear weapons? After all, in Prague in 2009, the president expressed boldly, “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” What has happened to that commitment?
Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the author of ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition.
This article was originally published by The Hill.
Click here to download a PDF of Bill Wickersham’s “Reflections of a University of Missouri Peace Activist: 1962-1970”
Bill Wickersham is an educational psychologist and peace educator whose post-doctoral work in peace psychology was under the directon of Dr. Theodore F. Lentz, at the Peace Research Lab, St. Louis, Missouri. His military service was in the U.S. Army, where he served as an enlisted man, and was a graduate of the Army’s Infantry School, Fort Benning, Georgia.
He was a University of Missouri – Columbia staff and faculty member from 1959 to 1970, serving as Program Director of the Memorial Student Union, as Assistant Director of the Community Action Training Center, and as Professor of Extension Education. He also taught for the School of Social and Community Services, and for the College of Education.
After being fired from the University in 1970 for non-violent anti-war activities concerning the U.S. war in Vietnam, he served as an assistant to former U.S. Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania who was President of the World Federalists, U.S.A., and founder of the bipartisan Congressional caucus known as Members of Congress for Peace Through Law. He was also a founding supporter of the Center for Defense Information. Other teaching assignments were at the Universities of Iowa and Southern Illinois (Carbondale), and at Prescott College in Arizona. At Iowa, he was College Program Coordinator for the College of Law’s Center for World Order Studies.
From 1981 to 1985, he was Executive Director of the World Federalist Association, Washington, DC, under the direction of the organization’s president, noted editor and peace advocate, Norman Cousins. From 1985 to 1994 he served as a national training manager for the U.S. Customs Service and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. In the later 1990’s, Wickersham returned to the University of Missouri as an Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies, a position which he still holds today.
In 2001, he was awarded the Gandhi, King, Ikeda Peace Award from the Martin Luther King, Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Currently, he serves as an associate of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, California, as a member of Global Action to Prevent War, and as a member of Veterans for Peace.
Lijon Eknilang was just a little girl at the time of the Bravo nuclear test on March 1, 1954. She remembered the snowstorm-like covering of radioactive fallout that plagued Rongelap following the blast. Like so many of her neighbors, Lijon faced long-term health problems following the blast. For Lijon, those terrible health problems came in the form of seven miscarriages, and the inability to have children.
Lijon’s suffering motivated her to pursue anti-nuclear activism, which brought her to the United States and Europe to draw attention to the health problems experienced by the people of Rongelap. Often referred to as the ‘icon of the Marshall Islands,’ Lijon’s international advocacy for the nuclear test victims at Rongelap has been instrumental in exposing the tragedies that occurred there. Lijon spoke on behalf of the Rongelapese nuclear test victims before the United States Congress and the Advisory Proceedings on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons at the International Court of Justice. She exposed the health problems and gruesome birth defects faced by the Rongelapese women, and in doing so become known for her accounts of ‘jellyfish babies’, which she described as children born with no muscles or bones.
Lijon Eknilang continued her advocacy throughout her life, participating in many discussions and panels, and submitting her personal accounts to publications such as the Seattle Journal for Social Justice. In August, 2012, Lijon passed away on the island of Majuro. She was 82.
February 1, 1955 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after a White House meeting in which top Army leaders lobbied for large U.S. troop increases in Europe, replied, “The Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos [if a war started with the Soviet Union]. You can’t have this kind of war, there just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” (Source: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013, p. 144.)
February 1, 2011 – David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt’s New York Times article, “Pakistan Nuclear Arms Pose Challenges to U.S. Policy” revealed that recent leaks by Pakistani or other South Asian sources put the number of nuclear warheads in that nation’s nuclear arsenal as 110 with enough fissile material to make 40-100 more warheads. If true, this would allow Pakistan to eclipse France as the world’s fifth largest nuclear power. Comments: While it is possible that disinformation may be inflating the arsenals of long-time antagonists India and Pakistan (who fought three wars in 1947, 1965, and 1971 and nearly came to nuclear blows at the turn of the millennium), it is nevertheless also true that tensions between not only India-Pakistan but also the United States and Pakistan could one day trigger a nuclear conflict in the region unless all nations push for global zero reductions and, in the shorter-term, a South Asian NWFZ (nuclear-weapon-free-zone).
February 2, 1993 – Semipalatinsk, the main Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan where 456 (340 underground and 116 above ground) of the Soviet/Russian total of 715 nuclear tests were conducted between 1949 and 1989, was officially closed. On October 3, 1995, the U.S., under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, agreed to help permanently shut down the site and in the period 1997-2000, 181 test tunnels and 13 test shafts at the site were sealed in a cooperative U.S.-Kazakhstan effort. The site was declared “safe” by U.S. authorities according to a 2012 Department of Defense Fact Sheet, although the resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests have negatively impacted generations of peoples living in the surrounding region.
(Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 15-16, 24 and Nuclear Threat Initiative website http://www.nti.org/facilities/ accessed January 7, 2015.)
February 8, 1982 – In the second edition of a three-part series published in The New Yorker, which later appeared as the award-winning, best-selling book “The Fate of the Earth,” New York city native and staff writer of that publication Jonathan Schell (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014) disagreed with Christian fundamentalists who argued that the nuclear holocaust that the U.S. threatened to unleash is the Armageddon threatened by God in the Bible. “It is not God who threatens us but we ourselves.” Shell argued. “Extinction would be utterly meaningless. There can be no justification for it and therefore no justification for any nation to push the world into nuclear hostilities.” And he also warned that, “…gigantic insane crimes are not prevented merely because they are ‘unthinkable.’ We must recognize the peril, dismantle the weapons and arrange the political affairs of the earth so that the weapons will not be built again.” (Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/02/08/the-fate-of-the-earth-ii-the-second-death.)
February 13-14, 1950 – A U.S. Convair B-36 bomber, equipped with a Mark IV nuclear bomb, took off from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska enroute to Carswell Air Force Base, New Mexico on a mission simulating a nuclear attack on the city of San Francisco. The plane was forced down when a design flaw caused three of its engines to catch fire near Vancouver Island off the Canadian coast. The Mark IV, which was made of uranium but thankfully had a nonworking lead nuclear pit, was jettisoned and the bomb’s 5,000 pound high explosive charge detonated at around 3,000 feet altitude. 12 of the crew of 16 personnel survived the crash. This incident was allegedly the first known loss of a nuclear weapon in history and it constitutes just one example of hundreds of nuclear accidents, near-misses, and “Broken Arrows” – any one of which could have accidentally triggered an unintentional nuclear war. That risk still exists today. (Sources: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013 and website http://introtoglobalstudies.com/2012/10/broken-arrow-lost-nuclear-weapon-in-Canada accessed January 8, 2015.)
February 17, 1953 – Years after serving as the civilian director of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave one of many speeches opposing the growing nuclear arms race, this one at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which [the U.S. and U.S.S.R.] will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and the life of the other, though not without risking its own…We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” (Sources: Craig Nelson. “The Age of Radiance.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 259 and note that Oppenheimer’s speech excerpts were published in the July 1953 edition of Foreign Affairs: “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” p. 529.)
February 20, 1971 – At 9:33 a.m. EST, the National Emergency Warning Center at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado Springs allegedly transmitted an emergency teletype message directing all U.S. radio and television stations to cease normal broadcasting by order of President Richard Nixon. The message was not cancelled for more than 40 minutes. This incident may have been caused by a teletype operator loading the wrong tape instead of the routine Emergency Broadcast Network test broadcast. Nevertheless, newsrooms across America were in turmoil and the public was unnecessarily panicked. (Source: Jesus Diaz. This Message From NORAD Announced Global Nuclear War – In 1971. July 5, 2012. http://gizmodo.com/5923528/this-message-from-norad-announced-world-nuclear-war-in-1971 accessed January 7, 2015.)
February 23, 2013 – The Washington Post reported that Governor Jay Inslee had publicly announced that six of the 177 million gallon nuclear waste tanks at Hanford Reservation in south-central Washington state were experiencing significant leaks. The tanks are long-past their 20-year life span and the federal government is spending just a few billion dollars annually cleaning up dozens of legacy nuclear bomb-making sites nationally. Comments: In addition to the large military nuclear waste problem at sites like Hanford, Paducah, Kentucky, Fernald, Ohio, Oak Ridge, Tennessee and other locations, civilian nuclear power plant wastes, including thousands of spent fuel rods kept in water storage pools at nuclear reactor sites, and wastes shipped to the flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Project facility in New Mexico, represent a decades-long growing problem for not only the United States but for dozens of other nations that oversee the world’s 400 civilian nuclear power plants. This is yet another reason to call for not only the elimination of thousands of nuclear weapons but also the dangerous, economically unsustainable, and unhealthy global civilian nuclear power infrastructure. The huge clean up conundrum is growing exponentially worse year after year but policymakers continue to ignore or downgrade this crisis.
Ursula Gelis, Executive director of the ‘Global Women’s Association against Nuclear Testing’ works for the rights and needs of victims of nuclear weapons explosions and nuclear testing. Her partners are in Kazakhstan and other states, affected by the long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing. At the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in December 2014[1], she interviewed an anti-nuclear activist and nuclear test victim from Australia.
Sue Haseldine in front of the Black Death column in Vienna in December 2014. Photo: Ursula Gelis
The Plague column in Vienna convincingly depicts human suffering; in this case – the tragedy of the Black Death epidemic from 1679 in Austria which killed about 30 000 to 75 000 souls. A Black Death does not distinguish between a noble and a beggar, and a nuclear weapon explosion does not either.
In today’s Australia, Aboriginal communities are still suffering from European racism that came in the aftermath of Captain Cook (1770) who looked at the Aborigines as lucky people, even if they did not own many material goods!
The first inhabitants of Australia, the people who were there ab origine, from the beginning, were food-gathering and hunting people. They arrived about 50,000 years ago.[2]
From region to region, Aboriginal tribes have clear cultural distinctions and their ability to co-exist with nature in a sustainable way could serve as a paradigm for human survival.
Western cultures, still proud of their technological achievements, and apparently committed to poison and to destroy the whole Earth, should listen to indigenous civilizations in order to prevent human extinction.
Aborigines survived best by avoiding contact with ‘White people’. The invaders brought diseases indigenous people had no immunity to resist. Children were taken away by missionaries, claiming that the parents were infidels.[3] Interestingly enough, the church and social Darwinism partnered in suppressing Aborigines. Evolution theory served to justify any brutality: massacres, plundering of goods, rape, etc. The ‘savage’ had to be domesticated and was defined as a race doomed to be extinct.[4]
In 1947 the British government decided to develop their own nuclear weapons program. “In August 1954, the Australian Cabinet agreed to the establishment of a permanent testing ground at a site that became named Maralinga, […] in southwestern South Australia.”[5]
The United Kingdom conducted 12 atmospheric tests between 1952 and 1957 on Australian territories at Maralinga, Emu Fields and Monte Bello Islands. […] During the testing period, roughly 16,000 Australian civilians and servicemen involved in the tests and 22,000 British servicemen were exposed to nuclear fallout.[6]
“Aboriginal people living downwind of the tests and other Australians more distant […] came into contact with airborne radioactivity.”[7]
“Plutonium and uranium fallout […] contaminated Aboriginal lands. Although the British government declared the Maralinga site safe following a 1967 cleanup, surveys in the 1980s proved otherwise, prompting a new cleanup project. Conflicts of interest, cost-cutting measures, shallow burials of radioactive waste, and other management “compromises” have left hundreds of square kilometers of Aboriginal lands contaminated and unfit for rehabilitation.”[8]
Civil disobedience
Sue Coleman-Haseldine (64) from the Kokatha-Mula nation is a survivor of British nuclear weapon testing and spoke at the Vienna conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in December 2014[9].
Sue was born in Ceduna, a city about 1000 kilometers straight west from Adelaide, South Australia. Her community, including the local farmers, consists of approximately 4000 people. She grew up nearby, lived in the region all her life and can trace back the family’s history up to her great grand-mother.
“Our knowledge about colonialism started with Captain Cook. My grand grand-father was an Irish man who eventually went back to the white people. Our old people told us not to hate him. They were singing Irish songs to us around the camp fire. My first language was Kokatha, which is also my tribe’s name. Later at school, we had to learn English.”
Sue’s mother’s generation had to follow the colonizer’s order of only speaking English, so Sue was educated to speak her native tongue by her grand-parents as the cultural tradition-keeper. She went to an English school and grew up at a German mission.[10]
Sue always tried to combine traditional life-style with the governmental request of following the ‘British way’. She went out in the bush, kept Aboriginal traditions and educated herself and others. “This was maybe already an act of resistance, I guess”, she said smiling. Sue won the South Australian premier’s award for excellence in indigenous leadership in 2007 for her work as an activist, cultural teacher and environmental defender.[11]
“The elderly people had talked about the Nullarbor[12] dust storm, not knowing that they had seen the fall-out from Maralinga. I knew about Maralinga and started questioning the amount of cancer deaths. This was at the time when I started my own family.
More and more people were dying of leukemia and thyroid cancer. I had doctors remove my thyroids. My grand-daughter got it as well. The official city doctors offered us a radioactive drink to kill the cancer cells but we refused. My husband has heart problems and his family members died from leukemia too. Sometimes people die from ‘unknown causes’.
We learned that the effects of radiation can pass from one generation to the other and can also ‘jump further’ to the third one. When I taught about bush food I felt terribly guilty because I knew about the contamination of the soil. When I spoke to our doctor he simply said that I should carry on teaching about traditional food because we could not do anything about the contamination.”
Entertaining workers of the nuclear program
British servicemen could feel at home among friendly people from the Kokatha-Mula nation. Soldiers were accompanied to the beach during their holidays and Sue vividly remembers those encounters. “They were just ordinary soldiers, away from home and lonely. We became simply friendly with them. Also they had been misused as guinea-pigs. We had no clue that dying might have been already begun.
We were just innocent. We were not allowed to go to Maralinga. I know that the area was poisoned yet we did not know a lot. The old people could feel it, I guess.” –
Recently, “a […] case-control study examined miscarriage in wives and congenital conditions in offspring of the 2007 membership of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, a group of ex-servicemen who were stationed at atmospheric nuclear weapon test sites between 1952-67 [was conducted]…”[13]
Sue talks about the ‘Seven Sisters’, the Pleiades star constellation which plays also a role in Aboriginal traditions. The stars are girls who were travelling through Australia being chased by a man. One was caught and killed. Eventually she went up to the skies, followed by her free sisters.
“When we see them from September to March in the Australian skies, we think of them as strong. We are saying that what the sisters bury, man should never dig up because everything buried was poisoned.
My people are still living on contaminated land, because clean-up operations were not sufficient. Before testing, we had to leave our territories. Officials told us that our displacement is for governmental purposes. We had no idea what really was going on in terms of nuclear explosions.
After testing people were sent back, for instance to a place called ‘Old Valley’ on Maralinga lands but Maralinga village was closed off. The government is now thinking to open it as a tourist site.
In terms of measuring radioactivity we are totally cut off from acquiring information because it is illegal to have a Geiger counter! We are particular concerned of the uranium mining industry, exploiting sands found near the former testing site. Plutonium testing took place at the Woomera rocket range site. The place is military territory and we do not know what actually is going on there.”
Overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one)
“There was a fellow called Eddie Koiki Mabo fighting for that the native Australians had a prior title to land” ‘taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770’.[14]
“Normally rules are not very nice for Aboriginal people. Property rights are splitting communities and devastate families. The government wanted us to prove that we had lived on our land for the last two hundred years. I said no, because this land was given to me by birth and not by the British government. So finally we could seek recognition but the minerals belong to the Crown.”
“Our alliance is well connected and once a month the community leaders link up by phone and we talk about what to do next. During meetings, governmental people are absent. We have international visitors from France, Japan and so on. People from all over the world should know that we do exist, that we are humans (laughter).
We want to stop uranium mining, let us start with banning it for a year first. Then we could probably breathe better…and of course, I do not want any nuclear weapon testing. Nuclear weapons should not exist.
In order to understand our complex societies, it is best to be with us for a while. Our strong connection to the land might be valuable for you to experience. We do not own the land, the land owns us. Come over, a week is plenty of time to convert you into one of us.”
[6] From 1957 to 1958, nine atmospheric tests followed over Christmas Island (Kiritimati) and Malden Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some of which were considerably more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The remaining 24 UK nuclear tests were conducted jointly with the United States at the Nevada Test Site.
[10]Occasional Paper 3: The struggle for souls and science, constructing the fifth continent: German missionaries and scientists in Australia. The 16 papers in this volume, edited by Professor Walter Veit, explore the contribution of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German scientists and missionaries in the emerging fields of Australian ethnography and linguistics.
Themes within the papers include the study of Aboriginal religion, language, and art, and the conflict between missionaries and the emerging discipline of academic anthropology in Australia and Britain.
Occasional Papers Number 3 also addresses the academic influences, research agendas and methodologies of the German scholars who worked in Australia, as well as the extent to which those scholars dominated the creation of an image of Australia in Europe in both theory and practice. http://artsandmuseums.nt.gov.au/museums/strehlow/manuscripts/publications.
[14] The Mabo decision altered the foundation of land law in Australia by overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one) on which British claims to possession of Australia were based. This recognition inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law. The judgments of the High Court in the Mabo case recognized the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their islands in the eastern Torres Strait. The Court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people in Australia prior to the establishment of the British Colony of New South Wales in 1788. In recognizing that Indigenous people in Australia had a prior title to land taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770, the Court held that this title exists today in any portion of land where it has not legally been extinguished. The decision of the High Court was swiftly followed by the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) which attempted to codify the implications of the decision and set out a legislative regime under which Australia’s Indigenous people could seek recognition of their native title rights.
A quarter century after the end of the Cold War and decades after the signing of landmark nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, are the U.S. and Russian governments once more engaged in a potentially disastrous nuclear arms race with one another? It certainly looks like it.
With approximately 15,000 nuclear weapons between them, the United States and Russia already possess about 93 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, thus making them the world’s nuclear hegemons. But, apparently, like great powers throughout history, they do not consider their vast military might sufficient, especially in the context of their growing international rivalry.
Although, in early 2009, President Barack Obama announced his “commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” the U.S. government today has moved well along toward implementing an administration plan for U.S. nuclear “modernization.” This entails spending $355 billion over a ten-year period for a massive renovation of U.S. nuclear weapons plants and laboratories. Moreover, the cost is scheduled to soar after this renovation, when an array of new nuclear weapons will be produced. “That’s where all the big money is,” noted Ashton Carter, recently nominated as U.S. Secretary of Defense. “By comparison, everything that we’re doing now is cheap.” The Obama administration has asked the Pentagon to plan for 12 new nuclear missile-firing submarines, up to 100 new nuclear bombers, and 400 land-based nuclear missiles. According to outside experts and a bipartisan, independent panel commissioned by Congress and the Defense Department, that will bring the total price tag for the U.S. nuclear weapons buildup to approximately $1 trillion.
For its part, the Russian government seems determined to match―or surpass―that record. With President Vladimir Putin eager to use nuclear weapons as a symbol of Russian influence, Moscow is building, at great expense, new generations of giant ballistic missile submarines, as well as nuclear attack submarines that are reportedly equal or superior to their U.S. counterparts in performance and stealth. Armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, they periodically make forays across the Atlantic, heading for the U.S. coast. Deeply concerned about the potential of these missiles to level a surprise attack, the U.S. military has already launched the first of two experimental “blimps” over Washington, DC, designed to help detect them. The Obama administration also charges that Russian testing of a new medium-range cruise missile is a violation of the 1987 INF treaty. Although the Russian government denies the existence of the offending missile, its rhetoric has been less than diplomatic. As the Ukraine crisis developed, Putin told a public audience that “Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers,” and foreign nations “should understand it’s best not to mess with us.” Pravda was even more inflammatory. In an article published in November titled “Russia prepares a nuclear surprise for NATO,” it bragged about Russia’s alleged superiority over the United States in nuclear weaponry.
Not surprisingly, the one nuclear disarmament agreement signed between the U.S. and Russian governments since 2003―the New START treaty of 2011―is being implemented remarkably slowly. New START, designed to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons (the most powerful ones) in each country by 30 percent by 2018, has not led to substantial reductions in either nation’s deployed nuclear arsenal. Indeed, between March and October 2014, the two nations each increased their deployed nuclear forces. Also, they maintain large arsenals of nuclear weapons targeting one another, with about 1,800 of them on high alert―ready to be launched within minutes against the populations of both nations.
The souring of relations between the U.S. and Russian governments has been going on for years, but it has reached a very dangerous level during the current confrontation over Ukraine. In their dealings with this conflict-torn nation, there’s plenty of fault on both sides. U.S. officials should have recognized that any Russian government would have been angered by NATO’s steady recruitment of East European countries―especially Ukraine, which had been united with Russia in the same nation until recently, was sharing a common border with Russia, and was housing one of Russia’s most important naval bases (in Crimea). For their part, Russian officials had no legal basis for seizing and annexing Crimea or aiding heavily-armed separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine.
But however reckless the two nuclear behemoths have been, this does not mean that they have to continue this behavior. Plenty of compromise formulas exist―for example, leaving Ukraine out of NATO, altering that country’s structure to allow for a high degree of self-government in the war-torn east, and organizing a UN-sponsored referendum in Crimea. And possibilities for compromise also exist in other areas of U.S.-Russian relations.
Failing to agree to a diplomatic settlement of these and other issues will do more than continue violent turmoil in Ukraine. Indeed, the disastrous, downhill slide of both the United States and Russia into a vastly expensive nuclear arms race will bankrupt them and, also, by providing an example of dependence on nuclear might, encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional nations. After all, how can they succeed in getting other countries to forswear developing nuclear weapons when―47 years after the U.S. and Soviet governments signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which they pledged their own nuclear disarmament―their successors are engaged in yet another nuclear arms race? Finally, of course, this new arms race, unless checked, seems likely to lead, sooner or later, to a nuclear catastrophe of immense proportions.
Can the U.S. and Russian governments calm down, settle their quarrels peacefully, and return to a policy of nuclear disarmament? Let’s hope so.
This short animated video from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation outlines many of the reasons why nuclear deterrence cannot be proven to work and represents an existential threat to humanity.
From 1946 to 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests in my home, the Marshall Islands. The most powerful of those tests was the “Bravo” shot, a 15 megaton device detonated on March 1, 1954, at Bikini atoll – which was 1,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Since then, the US has continued to deny responsibility while many Marshallese continue to die due to cancer and other radiation related illnesses. In my own family, both my grandparents passed away before I was born due to cancer and just two years ago I lost my ten year old niece Bianca to leukemia. Radiation related illnesses endure into today, and many more of our family members continue to battle with the effects of those tests which took place over 50 years ago.
We Marshallese grow up with this history and these stories. We know them all too well. Not just stories of cancer, but also stories of babies born with no limbs, of stillbirths and thyroid problems, of families starving on outer atolls after being displaced from their own homes, stories of ash that fell from the sky that looked like snow. And then there are the stories of the land we lost – the beautiful bountiful Bikini atoll, how the elders cried as they were ripped from the shores of their ancestors.
The hardships which the “nuclear nomads” of the four atolls – Bikini, Rongelap, Enewetak and Utrik – have had to face is all the more horrific when you take into account how strongly our culture is tied to our islands, how peaceful we have been as a people, and how vulnerable we were to the US. As our land and our food became contaminated, we were forced into an increased dependence on imported, canned foods, a major change in our diet and lifestyle – which has contributed to a modern day epidemic of diabetes. It also meant that our people were no longer able to maintain certain cultural traditions, skills and knowledge that depended on close ties to our land. Despite all of these trials, however, our people have survived. And we continue to resist.
I am proud to say I come from a line of activists who have for many years fought against these atrocities. It is this history which gives us the strength that is needed to continue to remember, recommit, and resist, as we continue the struggle to bring about change for our people.
This article was originally published by Common Dreams.
Image: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (www.thebulletin.org)
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just announced its latest nuclear Doomsday Clock moving ahead the minute hand to three minutes till midnight. The clock represents the count down to zero in minutes to nuclear apocalypse – midnight. This significant move of TWO minutes is the 22nd time since its inception in 1947 that the time has been changed.
In moving the hand to 3 minutes to midnight, Kennette Benedict the Executive Director of the Bulletin, identified in her comments: “the probability of global catastrophe is very high”… “the choice is ours and the clock is ticking”…”we feel the need to warn the world” …”the decision was based on a very strong feeling of urgency”. She spoke to the dangers of both nuclear weapons and climate change saying, “they are both very difficult and we are ignoring them” and emphasized “this is about doomsday, this is about the end of civilization as we know it”. The Clock has ranged from 2 minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War to 17 minutes till midnight with the hopes that followed the end of the Cold War. The decision to move the minute hand is made by the Bulletin’s Board of Directors in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates.
What is clear is that the time to ban nuclear weapons is now. Today’s announcement by the Bulletin further corroborates the dangers confirmed by recent climate science. These studies identify the much greater dangers posed by even a small regional nuclear war using just 100 Hiroshima size bombs out of the 16,300 weapons in today’s global stockpiles. The ensuing dramatic climate changes and famine that would follow threaten the lives of up to 2 billion on the planet with effects that would last beyond 10 years. There is no escaping the global impact of such a small regional nuclear war.
Medical science has weighed in on the impacts and devastation of even the smallest nuclear explosion in one of our cities and the reality is there is no adequate medical or public health response to such an attack. We kid ourselves into a false sense that we can prepare and plan for the outcome of a bomb detonation. Every aspect and facet of our society would be overwhelmed by a nuclear attack. Ultimately the resultant dead at ground zero would be the lucky ones.
Probability theorists have long calculated the dismal odds that the chance for nuclear event either by plan or accident are not in our favor. Recent documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act detail over 1000 mishaps that have happened in our nuclear arsenals. Time is not on our side and the fact that we have not experienced a nuclear catastrophe is more a result of luck than mastery and control over these immoral weapons of terror.
The time to act is now. There is so much that can and must be done. Congress will soon begin budget debates that include proposals to increase nuclear weapons spending for stockpile modernization by $355 Billion over the next decade and up to a Trillion in the next 30 years. Expenditures for weapons that can never be used and at a time when the economic needs for our country and world are so great.
Around the world, there is a growing awareness of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, and a corresponding desire to rid the world of these weapons.The Vienna Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons conference last month saw 4/5 of the nations of the world participating. In Oct., 2014, at the UN, 155 nations called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. At Vienna, 44 nations plus the pope advocated for a treaty banning nuclear weapons.
The people are making their voices heard and demanding a change of course from the status quo.
In this week’s State of the Union address, President Obama emphasized that we are one people with a common destiny. He said this both in reference to our nation and our world. The threat of nuclear weapons unites us even as it threatens our very existence. This reality can also be remembered in the words of Martin Luther King when he said,
“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
The time for action is now, before it is too late. It’s 3 minutes till midnight.
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When President Obama first took office he was deeply concerned about nuclear disarmament. In 2009, in a speech in Prague he had this to say about nuclear weapons:
Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.
He also said at Prague:
So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.) I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, “Yes, we can.” (Applause.)
We might well ask not only what happened to “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but what happened to President Obama’s commitment?
In President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address, the only mention of nuclear weapons was in relation to the agreement the Obama administration is seeking to negotiate with Iran. The President promised to veto any additional sanctions placed on Iran, which he said would undermine the negotiations between the US and Iran to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. President Obama also expressed considerable concern for the dangers of climate change, a clear danger to the environment and the future. But there was no mention in the State of the Union of “America’s commitment” to nuclear disarmament.
President Obama’s early concerns for nuclear disarmament led to his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but he seems to have given up his pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons. He does so to the detriment of all Americans and all people of the world. Nuclear weapons are equal opportunity destroyers – women, men and children. Under Obama’s leadership, America is setting a course to modernize its nuclear infrastructure, weapons and delivery systems. Not only is the expected price tag for the US nuclear modernization program expected to exceed $1 trillion over the next three decades, but such a program endangers all Americans rather than providing them with security.
In a recent article in The Nation, Theodore Postol, a MIT professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy, argued, “No rational actor would take steps to start a nuclear war. But the modernization effort significantly increases the chances of an accident during an unpredicted, and unpredictable, crisis – one that could escalate beyond anyone’s capacity to imagine.” Postol concluded, “In a world that is fundamentally unpredictable, the pursuit of an unchallenged capacity to fight and win a nuclear war is a dangerous folly.”
Mr. President, we live in an unpredictable world, but it is predictable based on history that nuclear weapons and human fallibility are a dangerous and highly flammable mix. Nuclear weapons, including our own, threaten all Americans and all humanity. Don’t give up on the essential quest for a Nuclear Zero world, which you seemed so eager to achieve upon assuming office.
Nuclear weapons and human fallibility are a most dangerous mix. As long as nuclear weapons exist in the world, civilization and the human species are threatened. Nuclear deterrence is not foolproof, and time is not our friend. We must approach this task with the urgency it demands. We must confront nuclear weapons and those countries that possess and rely upon them with what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.”
A quarter century after the end of the Cold War and decades after the signing of landmark nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, are the U.S. and Russian governments once more engaged in a potentially disastrous nuclear arms race with one another? It certainly looks like it.
We might well ask not only what happened to “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but what happened to President Obama’s commitment?