Author: Jeffrey W. Mason

October 5, 1991 – In response to President George H. W. Bush’s September 27^th proposal to remove all land-based tactical nuclear weapons from U.S. overseas bases and all of its sea-based tactical nuclear weapons from U.S. ships, submarines, and aircraft, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, escalated nuclear disarmament despite the opposition of some prominent military officers in calling for:  a stand down of all strategic bombers then on day-to-day alert status and the storage of their nuclear weapons, a stand down of 503 ICBMs including 134 MIRVed (multiple warhead) missiles, a halt to the buildup of launch facilities for rail-based ICBMs while also terminating their modernization programs and returning them to their basing facilities, and a commitment to discontinue development of a small mobile ICBM and of short-range attack missiles for heavy bombers.  Furthermore, he also proposed broader nuclear disarmament proposals that both sides might agree to by calling for deep cuts in strategic nuclear forces, the withdrawal of airborne tactical nuclear weapons, along with ground-based and sea-based weapons, a moratorium on nuclear testing with a promise by both sides to ratify a comprehensive test ban, a moratorium on the production of fissionable materials and a global commitment to a mutual no first-use policy.  Comments: Just 12 weeks later, the Soviet Union disbanded and peoples of the world rejoiced that the Cold War was over and that a new Peace Dividend might usher in a new era in international relations, but despite high hopes this substantially did not happen.  Subsequent U.S. presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama renewed bilateral arms control treaties with the Russians (until Trump irrationally set out to scuttle bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control) and President Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize for advocating the elimination of nuclear weapons, however the military-industrial complexes in America, Russia, and in other nuclear weapons states lobbied to convince their voting populations erroneously that nuclear deterrence had kept the peace, stabilized world relations, and would prevent any nuclear conflict.  Today the nine nuclear weapons states and their allies continue to waste trillions of dollars on conventional and nuclear weapons modernization amidst a new and more dangerous Cold War II arms race. (Sources: Burns H. Weston. “Towards Post-Cold War Global Security: A Legal Perspective” Booklet 32 Waging Peace Series: Annual Quentin-Baxter Memorial Lecture. Wellington, New Zealand, March 25, 1992. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation,  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 34-35, and National Security Archive. “Unilateral U.S. Nuclear Pullback in 1991 Matched by Soviet Cuts.” September 30, 2016, http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault-russia-programs/2016-09-30/unilateral-us-nuclear accessed August 1, 2020.) 

October 8, 2018 – On this date an insider Congressional newspaper The Hill published an opinion piece by the founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, David Krieger, titled, “Hacking Nuclear Weapons is a Global Threat.”  The article pointed out that in addition to the four “m’s” – words that describe how a nuclear attack could be initiated, malice, madness, mistake, and miscalculation, another frightening possibility could be nuclear conflict caused or precipitated due to cyberattacks on an enemy’s nuclear command and control or launch systems.  This penetration by hackers of cyber security walls was referred to as “manipulation.” Dr. Krieger provided a terrifying real world example of the hacking of nuclear weapons by mentioning a Royal Institute of International Affairs research study that noted, “As an example of what is possible, the U.S. is reported to have infiltrated parts of North Korea’s missile systems and caused test failures. Recent cases of cyber attacks indicate that nuclear weapons systems could also be subject to interference, hacking, and sabotage through the use of malware or viruses which could inflict digital components of a system at any time.  Minuteman silos, for example, are believed to be particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks.”  The author hit the proverbial nail on the head by concluding that, “The problem with nuclear deterrence is that it cannot be made effective and the potential for breaching the cybersecurity of nuclear arsenals only adds to the vulnerabilities and dangers…(therefore)…The only meaningful response to nuclear weapons is to stigmatize, delegitimize, and ban them.”

October 15-16, 2004 – The preeminent medical expert on the nuclear threat, Dr. Helen Caldicott, President of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, joined prominent voices like David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Oscar Shirani, a nuclear industry whistleblower, Dr. Arjun Makijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and others who spoke at a Nuclear Policy Research Institute Symposium “Nuclear Power and Children’s Health: What You Can Do” at the St. Scholastica Academy in Chicago, Illinois. Specific and detailed evidence of harmful environmental and health effects, especially those impacting children, was presented at the symposium.  Presenters addressed critical topics such as the dangers of nuclear power plants and the threat of terrorist targeting of these facilities, the hidden economic, environmental, and health costs of nuclear energy, advice on how to protect people from exposure to nuclear materials, how to address the conundrum of nuclear waste removal and sequestration including the risks of the transport and permanent disposal of nuclear waste, the incredibly unwise practice of recycling nuclear materials into household goods and an investigation into non-nuclear alternative energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and other safer technologies.  Comments: Unfortunately, too many Americans and other populations living in the dozens of nations  that unwisely utilize nuclear energy for electricity and/or are building a new generation of more dangerous and destabilizing nuclear weapons (thanks in part to President Trump’s commitment to help build nuclear plants throughout the Middle East) don’t seem to care or are completely ignorant about the tremendous dangers of the resulting radioactive contamination of the air, land, water supplies, other species and our own frail bodies, especially the impact on the most vulnerable – infants, children, and the elderly. Even more objectionable is the fact that the wealthiest and most politically powerful leaders of these nations, including the United States, purposely avoid building nuclear power and weapons production plants in or near the sequestered, gated communities that they call home, preferring instead to impose the toxic legacies of nuclear technologies on the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, and the politically disenfranchised or at least under enfranchised masses of their populations.  It’s way past time to end the nuclear threat and eliminate this unequal treatment of a large segment of the global population! 

November 3, 2020 – In the most critically important election in not only U.S. history but possibly in the future history of global civilization, Americans will decide for the first time ever whether to reelect a president who had been impeached.  But the reasons why Trump must be defeated rise infinitely above the fact he was impeached to matters that involve the survival of not only American democracy but of the human species – the threat he poses to the future.  In this calendar year alone, his tragic mishandling of the Corona virus COVID-19 pandemic, due in large part to his extremely dangerous anti-intellectual and anti-science mentality, was one of the worst series of mistakes a U.S. president has ever made.  He not only caused tens of thousands more Americans to die than would have died if he had acted swiftly two weeks or more before he actually did take significant but still error-filled action (accepting World Health Organization test kits instead of waiting longer for what turned out to be flawed American COVID19 test kits that previously Trump claimed were “the greatest”), but his misjudgments also triggered the worst economic downturn in the last 100 years and the first large-scale trade war since the 1930s!  His continued frivolous and reckless rhetoric during those months led hundreds if not thousands of Americans to try outlandishly unhealthy ways to combat the virus including recommending citizenry ingest disinfectants or take an antimalarial drug that hadn’t been cleared by the FDA. On May 24, 2020 the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that the efforts of Trump and his Republican Congressional leaders to blame China for the Coronavirus Pandemic is pushing U.S.-Chinese relations to “the brink of a new Cold War.” Later during the mostly peaceful protests (although rioting and looting did occur in a number of U.S. cities) over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, he pulled a page from the autocratic handbook in utilizing the 1807 Insurrection Act to justify his illegal and unconstitutional use of active-duty military troops and even prison guards to respond to the protests with an extreme show of force and oftentimes unreasonable use of violence.  Also around this same time period, Trump, in search of any and every way to blowup bilateral and multilateral nuclear arms control, decided in May that the U.S. should withdraw from the 2002 Open Skies Treaty, signed by nearly three dozen nations, that allowed the nuclear powers to prevent “nuclear breakout’ by allowing aircraft to overfly any participating power’s nuclear weapons test and research facilities.  Combine his unstable mental state – he has been diagnosed by dozens of mental health professionals as manifesting malignant narcissism and experiencing frontal lobe dementia – with his unprecedented and frightening belief system (“Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?”) and his history of lies, deception, and angry threatening rhetoric towards other leaders, nations, and ethnic groupings and the equation yields the greatest chance in American and world history of his triggering a nuclear conflict.  It could begin simply by this president utilizing a very low yield nuclear weapon to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure which could very well be the trip wire for other nations joining America’s precedence of utilizing nuclear weapons in combat for the first time since 1945 and thereby starting a slow chain of escalation that after weeks, months, or even years results in a larger scale nuclear war somewhere in the world, with the U.S. as a likely participant.  This would likely lead to a global nuclear winter caused by hundreds or thousands of warheads being detonated in a day or so precipitating the injection of horrendously large amounts of dust, debris, and firestorm remnants into the upper atmosphere blotting out the sun and triggering a global agricultural failure that will kill billions more than the hundreds of millions killed in the initial nuclear explosions of the war.  This could reasonably result in the end of civilization and even the eventual demise of the human species and countless other life forms on this planet.  In addition to this penultimate threat to the human race, if he somehow avoids nuclear war, he could nevertheless follow-through on his threats to wage a conventional war on either Iran or North Korea which could further destabilize the world economy and expand the ongoing perpetual war indefinitely.  And over the ensuing decades this would actually make nuclear or other WMD war more likely over the longer term.  In the short term, his unprecedented destruction of a number of nuclear and space arms control treaties, negotiated by past Republican and Democratic presidents and approved by bipartisan votes by Senators in both parties, especially his likely failure to renew the Moscow Treaty of 2011, also known as the New START Treaty by the deadline of February 5, 2021, make nuclear and even conventional war more likely (also, Trump’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty of 1987 reintroduces into the world a race to build thousands of nonnuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, some of which will carry nuclear warheads).  In 2016, Dr. Bruce G. Blair (1947-2020), a widely respected decades-long authority on nuclear command and control issues, argued that Donald Trump lacked the “responsibility, composure, competence, empathy, and diplomatic skill” to keep nuclear deterrence from failing “by intent, accident or miscalculation.” Yet another reason to defeat Trump is to circumvent a likely space war that again he helped set the stage for by his disregard for the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and his creation for the first time ever of a U.S. warfighting space force (as opposed to the existing U.S. Air Force focus on using space as a reconnaissance platform and early warning medium to help prevent nuclear war).  These actions have spurred Russia, China and other powerful nations to begin or greatly accelerate their own preparations for space warfare, which includes the building of “rods from God” or the reemergence of old Soviet FOBS – orbital weapons that could be used to strike with hyper speed at Earth targets.  Again this could also trigger a nuclear or WMD conflict that kills billions.  Even if humanity avoids nuclear conflict during future space wars, the penultimate result of such wars will be an exponential increase in the existing problem of creating many more millions of pieces of space debris.  This could likely result in a situation where launches of any space vehicles from satellites to manned craft might become impossible, causing humanity to lose its ability to live, work, and travel in outer space or even utilize space assets for the many benefits such technology has provided our species for many decades including weather forecasting.  This scenario might also make interception or deflection of an incoming asteroid or comet virtually impossible to achieve, dooming our species and countless others to a mass extinction event sometime in the next several decades.  Trump’s denial of global climate change and the growing impact of fossil fuel exploitation in accelerating global warming is another top reason why he must be defeated.  Climate change is obviously a longer term threat than nuclear war but just as important.  If it isn’t addressed and won’t be in Trump’s second term, violent weather, rising oceans, and growing geopolitical stability (that even Trump’s Pentagon admits will only get worse in the coming years) will result with many more millions suffering and thousands more dying over the next four years as a result of the president’s stubborn refusal to accept scientific consensus that something critical needs to be done to address this crisis.  A Green New Deal and a changed U.S. commitment to negotiate and follow through unilaterally on greenhouse gas reductions in this decade must be accomplished, something which the president unwisely considers as unnecessary and harmful to economic growth. There are many other paramount reasons why Donald Trump must be defeated in this 2020 election, but of course protection of our centuries old democratic values (specifically those in The Bill of Rights in particular and the U.S. Constitution in more general terms) and the rule of law including long-held U.S. recognition of the tenets of international law, are also worth mentioning.  Recently Trump began to lay the groundwork to create doubts about the upcoming November 3^rd election result with his unproven attacks on voting-by-mail and his purposeful appointment of a Postmaster General that he has tasked to slow down mail delivery and make it less efficient in order to undermine confidence in American voting during this COVID-19 pandemic, making it perhaps more likely he will dispute the result of the election.  But the entire list of reasons why Trump must go is too long to address in this article. (Sources:  Gayle Spinazze. “Press Release: It is Now 100 Seconds to Midnight.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. https://www.thebulletin.org/2020/01/press-release-it-is-now-100-seconds-to-midnight/ 

Dr. Bandy X. Lee. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess A President.” New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019, Anonymous (Senior Trump Administration Official) “A Warning.” New York: Twelve Books, 2019, Mary L. Trump. “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020, David Cay Johnston. “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018, “Bruce Blair, Crusader for Nuclear Arms Control, Dies at 72.” New York Times, July 24, 2020, http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/24/us/bruce-blair-dead.html and other resources too numerous to cite.) 

November 13, 1974 – Karen Silkwood, a 28-year old laboratory analyst-technician and head of the steering committee of the Crescent, Oklahoma chapter of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, who worked at one of Kerr-McGee Corporation’s ten civilian plutonium production plants in that state, died mysteriously when her automobile skidded 270 feet off Highway 74 and hit a concrete culvert.  Initially ruled an accident by a local law enforcement agency, subsequently investigators discovered a significant dent in the rear bumper of her Honda automobile and other prima facie evidence of foul play – another automobile forcing her car off the road.  That night Silkwood, portrayed by Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep in the 1983 film directed by Mike Nichols, was carrying a thick manila folder with evidence of negligent and possibly intentional worksite abuses resulting in the unsafe management and operation of the plant that included criminal negligence in the manufacturing of fuel rods at the Kerr-McGee plant in Crescent.  Examples of the abuses include unreported spills and leaks of radioactive products that contaminated workers, employees sent into dangerous plutonium production cycle work without adequate safety training, and radioactive storage containers left open and unattended for several days.  After visiting her union’s headquarters in Washington, DC, she was tasked with gathering evidence in order to prosecute management officials involved in the abuses.  It seems probable though that management wanted to avoid prosecution and the possible shutdown of its firm’s entire production enterprise by at first trying to scare off Silkwood, then later by arranging an accident to shut her up.  When Kerr-McGee’s own inspectors allegedly found no contamination at the plant, Silkwood became suspicious and had them bring Geiger counters to her apartment. Significant quantities of highly toxic plutonium (a mere millionth of a gram of this substance can induce cancer in a laboratory animal) were found in her refrigerator as well as at many other locations at her residence.  The night she died, her union colleagues suspected that she was carrying a folder of evidence against Kerr-McGee to New York Times reporter David Burnham.  After the fatal accident, a state trooper who was at the crash site mentioned seeing dozens of loose papers scattered in the mud near Silkwood’s Honda which he said he put back in the car.  But no folders or papers were ever recovered.  Years later, a number of journalists and pro bono investigators interviewed other employees at the plant, despite threats of losing their jobs, and pieced together evidence found in the archives of the Atomic Energy Commission (since renamed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) in Washington, DC.  In 1979, after the longest trial in Oklahoma history, Kerr-McGee was ordered to pay Silkwood’s family punitive damages.  While that judgment would later be reversed upon appeal, the case was finally settled out of court.  Comments:  This incident and countless others not only in the U.S. civilian nuclear power industry but in many other nations, along with the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979, helped convince the American public that nuclear power, then and now, is but another dangerous short- and long-term nuclear threat (along with the production of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons) to our species and certainly not a safe, viable, or even economical alternative to coal and fossil fuel-caused climate change. (Source:  “The Death of Karen Silkwood: An Investigation Into the Fate of A Whistle-Blower Uncovered the Dangers of the Nuclear Power Industry.”  Fifty Years of Rolling Stone. New York: Harry N. Abrams, May 16, 2017 along with mainstream and other alternative media sources.) 

November 16, 22, 2015 – On these two dates and on many occasions in the last several decades, U.S. military forces used depleted uranium-tipped munitions against military, and most probably unintended civilian, targets in numerous military engagements America has been involved in.  On the specific dates mentioned above, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesman Major Josh Jacques informed the publication Foreign Policy that U.S. Air Force A-10 Warthog fixed-wing aircraft shot 5,265 armor-piercing 30 millimeter rounds containing depleted uranium (DU) to destroy over 300 Islamic State vehicles in Syria’s eastern desert which were transporting illegal oil that the Islamic State (or ISIS) was attempting to profit from.  This admission contradicted a March 2015 statement by John Moore, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State, that DU would not be used in Iraq or Syria during Operation Inherent Resolve.  The use by U.S. military forces of depleted uranium munitions deployed on a number of ground and air platforms date back to the First Gulf War (1991), the U.S.-NATO bombing campaign in the Balkans and Kosovo in the 1990s and in the U.S. War in Iraq (2003 – ) and probably in other unconfirmed theatres of conflict as recently as this past year.  Since these weapons were first introduced in the 1970s, DU has been used at least hundreds of thousands of times by American military units.  Comments:  Despite long-time assurances by U.S. military and even some scientific authorities that DU has little or no radioactive toxic-related impact, many credible international medical and scientific establishments vigorously disagree.  One of many examples of this are statements made after scientific investigations were conducted by the Montreal-based Centre for Research on Globalization which concluded that, “It (DU) has been suspected as the culprit in lung and kidney illnesses because it is soluble in water and can be ingested as a fine dust through inhalation.”  A United Nations report authored in 2014 said that the Iraqi government considers U.S. use of DU in the 2003 war and beyond, “a danger to human beings and the environment.”  The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons said that the areas in Syria contaminated by DU in 2015 (and February 2017 and possibly later) “pose a risk to civilian health and must be isolated and addressed as soon as conditions allow.” The obvious concern about contamination of civilian populations in these war zones should also be extended to the health and well-being of U.S. and allied ground forces stationed in war theatres where DU has been used in the past and present.  DU use is considered one of the confirmed reasons for the existence of the medical condition classified as ‘Gulf War Syndrome.’ Therefore, it is not surprising that a growing number of global scientific, medical civilian and even military authorities have pushed for and are continuing to lobby for the abolition of the use of such unconscionable weaponry as depleted uranium munitions. (Sources: A variety of mainstream and alternative news sites.) 

December 1-8, 1986 – According to a May 29, 2012 National Security Archive (located at the campus of George Washington University in Washington, DC) Electronic Briefing Book No. 380 titled, “Mighty Derringer,” the U.S. government’s concern that nuclear terrorism was a realistic possibility caused the Department of Energy to stage a secret exercise on these dates by its Nuclear Emergency Support Search Teams (NEST) with assistance from the U.S. Delta Force military secret operations unit. The exercise involved conducting an expedited search of the city of Indianapolis for a hypothetical improvised nuclear device (IND) constructed and deployed by a terrorist cell from the fictional nation of Montrev.  But, the realistic exercise concluded with an explosion of the IND which hypothetically destroyed 20 square blocks of the downtown center of Indianapolis.  Comments: The growing possibility of nuclear terrorism in a world where a renewed nuclear arms race has been embraced by the U.S. president and other leaders of the nuclear weapons states is yet another reason for global citizenry to demand an end to the incredibly dangerous game of Nuclear Roulette.  It’s time to stop and reverse this anachronistic nuclear war game before humanity suffers a fatal blow.  The 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is a good starting point along with other global components including a Fissile Materials Production Moratorium, a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ratified by all nations particularly the United States, and the planned elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2030. 

December 9-12, 2019 – The Washington Post published a potential blockbuster series of articles titled, “The Afghanistan Papers – A Secret History of the War” starting with the December 9^th article by Craig Whitlock, “At War With The Truth.”  The authoritative series, which included quotes from key decision makers and U.S. military and political leaders, was described as a confidential trove of Pentagon and U.S. government documents revealing that senior officials failed to tell the truth about the eighteen year old endless war, and that these trusted strategists and politicians purposefully made overly optimistic assessments about U.S. progress in the war and the rebuilding of Afghanistan that they knew to be false while hiding overwhelming evidence that the conflict was unwinnable.  According to objective sources like the U.S. Congressional Research Service and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, the results of the Afghan War have been very deadly as about 150,000 civilians, soldiers, aid workers, and contractors have died including over 6,300 Americans.  Also. although the mainstream news media has always harped on how to afford Medicare for All and progressive health care plans, it rarely mentions that the wars the U.S. has fought since 2001 have cost over six trillion dollars (according to The Cost of War Project).  Comments:  This series reminds us all of the words inscribed on the façade of the U.S. National Archives, “The Past is Prologue,” because nearly 50 years ago, Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers, published in The New York Times, revealed similar findings about the Vietnam conflict.  Unfortunately while it appears the Pentagon Papers helped fuel further American popular opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, it seems unlikely that the Afghan Papers will have as powerful a role.  This relates to the fact that President Trump was at the same time as these revelations facing impeachment and before the mainstream and even alternative media could reiterate and follow-up on the article series, attention was diverted by Trump’s unprecedented, illegal, and unconstitutional breach of power in his assassination of a high Iranian military official Major General Qassem Soleimani in a January 3, 2020 drone strike near the Baghdad Airport. In retaliation, the Iranians launched two dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. military bases in Iraq, which fortunately did not result in loss of life. These events triggered an international war scare as both Trump and Iran’s leadership traded rhetoric threats including the U.S. president’s extremely horrific tweet indicating that he might attack 52 cultural and religious sites in Iran in retaliation for the taking of 52 U.S. hostages in November of 1979.  The tension was possibly the worse since Trump took office but thankfully within days the threat of U.S.-Iran full-scale war was apparently reduced.  However, the Trump administration’s ratcheting up of the use of military force, which began on Day One of this presidency, in a number of theaters including a significant, mostly unpublicized number of drone strikes, has flown under the radar as mainstream media has focused increasingly on other issues, legitimately on the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the resulting U.S. deaths (which was worsened by Trump’s delayed response to the Coronavirus), the Black Lives Matter protests, the 2020 election, and impeachment, but also a number of insignificant “entertainment” news items rather than returning to the paramount issue of America’s endless war in Afghanistan and the counterproductive, ever-growing Global War on Terrorism. (Sources including mainstream and alternative news media sites and Sonali Kolhatkar. “Afghan Papers Confirm That The Longest War Is A Lie.” Dec. 13, 2019, Truthdig. http://www.commondreams.org/Views/2019/12/13/afghanistan-papers-confirm-longest-war-lie and Neta C. Crawford.  “Costs of War: Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency.” Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. Nov. 2018 http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Human%20Costs%2C%20Nov%202018%20CoW.pdf accessed January 15, 2020.) 

April 4, 2018 – On the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven consisting of Catholic priest Steve Kelly, Dorothy Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy, Clare Grady, Elizabeth McAllister, Mark Colville, Patrick O’Neill, and Carmen Trotta, cut a hole in a security fence and entered one of two sites in the continental United States where the greatest number of nuclear weapons are stored – Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Marys, Georgia where six Trident Ohio-class strategic nuclear missile submarines (SSBNs) are based.  Each of the submarines carry 24 D5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles that usually have twelve MIRVed W76 nuclear warheads (100 kiloton explosive) or W88 nuclear warheads (300-475 kilotons explosive) on each rocket, a deadly total of 192 warheads which theoretically could each trigger nuclear winter.  Inside the base, the seven nonviolent individuals of the Catholic faith sang hymns, hung banners and crime-scene tape, and recorded the action with body cameras.  They also spray-painted slogans, pounded a display of a Tomahawk missile with a hammer and poured human blood on an official seal of the base, depicting a missile crossed with a submarine. One of them left an indictment against the United States.  They were all arrested, jailed, and charged with conspiracy, destruction of government property, depredation of a naval installation, and trespassing.  Four were released on bail after two months and the others remained in jail for over a year.  On October 24, 2019 in a widely publicized trial attended by hundreds of people including activist and actor Martin Sheen, and held in U.S. Southern District Federal Court in Brunswick, Georgia, they were found guilty on all counts by a jury and are expected to be sentenced sometime in 2020. These peace activists were an offshoot of the Catholic Worker movement founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin on May Day, 1933.  According to one of the members of Plowshares, Art Laffin, since the group’s first such action on September 9, 1980, “…others acting in community and some individually have entered military bases and weapons facilities and have symbolically and actually disarmed components of U.S. first-strike nuclear weapons systems:  the MX, Pershing II, and cruise missiles, Minuteman ICBMs, Trident II missiles, Trident submarines, B-52 bombers, P-3 Orion anti-submarine aircraft, the Navstar system, the ELF communication system, the Milstar Satellite system, a nuclear capable battleship, and the Aegis destroyer.  Combat aircraft used for military intervention such as F-111 fighter bomber, the F-15A fighter, the F-18 bomber, the A-10 Warthog (equipped with depleted uranium munitions), the Hawk aircraft as well as combat helicopters and other conventional weapons, military aircraft, missile launchers, bazookas, grenade launchers, and AK-5 military rifles have been disarmed.  Also model weapons have been disarmed at an ‘Arms Bazaar.’”  Comments: Peace advocates worldwide support this humanitarian nonviolent symbolic destruction of antiquated doomsday weaponry and the mindset that perpetuates the widespread acceptance and even affection for the institution of warfare as a legitimate means to settle disputes by elite world leaders and their supporters.  But often ignored in these highly successful efforts to penetrate these supposedly highly secure bases and disrupt and destroy these weapons and their platforms is the fact that these protests starkly illustrate that these extremely dangerous and deadly devices are, despite high-level assurances to the contrary, unexpectedly vulnerable to attacks or theft by domestic or foreign-based criminal elements and terrorists who could wreck extreme havoc and cause extremely large numbers of casualties if they successfully discharged these weapons of mass destruction, or helped precipitate an accidental nuclear exchange.  (Sources:  Paul Elie. “The Pope and Catholic Radicals Come Together Against Nuclear Weapons.” The New Yorker. Nov. 19, 2019 and “A History of the Plowshares Movement – A Talk by Art Laffin.” Oct. 22, 2019 http://www.kingsbayplowshares7.org/plowshares-history/ and other mainstream and alternative media sites.)

April 11, 2018 – Lorelei Goff’s article on The Appalachian Voices.org website, “Appalachia’s Toxic Dumping Ground: Ohio Residents Speak Out About The State’s Influx of Fracking Waste,” and other recent articles like “America’s Radioactive Secret” by Justin Nobel in the February 2020 issue of Rolling Stone illustrate the little known connection between the two existential threats to humanity today, the nuclear one (whether that means fears that nuclear weapons will be used on human populations or that contaminants from these doomsday weapons’ production cycle or from civilian nuclear power plants will further poison our waters, land, and bodies) and global climate change caused by the increasing utilization of fossil fuels and the accompanying impacts (which this writer was shocked to discover for the first time included harmful radioactive contamination) on the environment and our species.  The fact that conventional oil and gas wells as well as fracked natural gas exploitation in the United States results in the introduction into our previously protected surface environment of at least a trillion gallons a year of salty often dangerously radioactive toxic brine from deep underground, a naturally occurring waste product of oil and gas wells, is yet another reason why greener energy choices like solar, wind, hydropower, and possibly geothermal are a much safer and wiser alternative than oil, gas, and nuclear power.  Both articles, particularly Nobel’s Rolling Stone piece, which is a preview of his future book on this subject, point out that beyond the threat to Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia residents who are being exposed to thousands of brine waste-hauling trucks, there are about a million oil and gas wells in a total of 33 states and radioactive brine dumping sites in many other additional states.  Samples of radium, usually the most abundant radionuclide in brine waste water, and specifically the most common isotopes of which are radium-226 (radon) and radium-228 (with half-lives of 1,600 and 5.75 years, respectively), are judged safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission if they do not exceed 60 picocuries per liter.  Testing of the water routinely found inside waste trucks by credible academic institutions have found radiation levels as high as 3,500 to 8,500 picocuries per liter.  “Oil tanks, filters, pumps, hoses and trucks themselves that brine touches can all be contaminated with the radium building up into hardened ‘scale’ concentrating to as high as 400,000 picocuries per gram,” according to  John Stoltz director of the environmental center at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.  Stoltz also warned that, “Breathing in this stuff and ingesting it are the worst types of exposure. You are irradiating your tissues from the inside out.”  But while the radioactive particles fired off by radium can be blocked by the skin, it does readily attach to dust, making it very easy to accidentally inhale or ingest.  The problem would be bad enough if we just considered the health risks to oil and gas well workers, brine waste water truck drivers, workers who do the actual dumping at legitimate waste sites (as well as illegal ones such as abandoned deep coal mines for example), and local populations exposed accidentally to contamination by their interaction with exposed workers as well as their proximity to roads frequented by the brine hauling waste trucks.  But in point of fact, the problem is so hidden and misunderstood, by not only government environmental regulators but also oil and gas and related industrial interests that these contaminants are being purposely dumped into our environment under the guise of providing beneficial advantages.  One example is the spreading of brine on roads.  Nobel writes that, “The industry pawns off brine –offering it for free—on rural townships that use the salty solution as a winter de-icer and, in the summertime, as a dust tamper on unpaved roads.”  It is even sold in home improvement stores as a liquid de-icer called AquaSalina for use on patios, driveways and sidewalks, but an Ohio state laboratory tested a sample of the liquid and found it contained a dangerous radioactive level of 2,491 picocuries per liter.  The radium isotopes in this contaminated brine can obviously cause skin, lung, bone and other cancers including chronic lymphocytic leukemia.  Comments:  Over the past decades, the multibillion dollar fossil fuel industry has lobbied and successfully convinced the Environmental Protection Agency and many state environmental agencies to exempt this brine from being defined as hazardous waste.  However, after many years of workers’ lawsuits, legal settlements, and word spreading on the grapevine, it is getting harder and harder to hide this nuclear threat. Liz Moran of the New York Public Interest Research Group says, “It can be argued that if you close the loophole, you would put the industry out of business.”  Increasingly Americans and other global citizenry are demanding an end to this out-of-sight, out-of-mind deadly contamination of the ecosystem by pushing for a truly global Green New Deal which addresses both existential threats to humanity’s future – nuclear and climate catastrophes.  To quote a phrase from a famous film from the Seventies, “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”

April 12, 1970 – In the Bay of Biscay, almost 300 nautical miles northwest of Spain, K-8, a Soviet November class Type 627 attack submarine powered by two nuclear reactors and carrying four nuclear torpedoes experienced two fires in the dual reactors on April 8^th which had to be sealed off resulting in the initial deaths of eight crewman.  The submarine was able to surface and despite the arrival of a Soviet repair vessel that was able to attach and tow the submarine, bad weather and heavy seas not only doomed the salvage operation but led to the sinking of the vessel with the loss of all hands, an additional 52 Soviet sailors on this date. K-8 sank to a depth of 15,000 feet making recovery of the submarine’s reactor vessels and four nuclear torpedoes impossible.  Comments:  This deadly tragedy was just one example of dozens or even hundreds of accidents involving submarines, surface ships, and aircraft that led to the loss of nuclear propulsion units and/or nuclear weapons.  Some of the nuclear reactors and warheads lost at sea are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep, but the health and well-being of millions of people.  In the last decade with the unfortunate and irrational rejuvenation of the nuclear arms race, more of these types of accidents have probably already occurred and have been kept secret for national security reasons by the nine nuclear weapons states.  Even if humanity’s luck continues and nuclear conflicts are avoided, increasing contamination of the biosphere and the detrimental effects of increased radioactivity from nuclear weapons production and deployment on the health and well-being of our species and countless others are penultimate reasons why this madness must cease!  Global citizenry are working feverishly to achieve the goal of ending Cold War II and immediately terminating the renewed nuclear arms race, while pushing for large reductions and the eventual elimination of these doomsday weapons. (Sources: William Arkin and Joshua Handler. “Neptune Papers II: Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.” Greenpeace International. 1990; Spencer Dunmore. “Lost Subs.”  Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002; and Robert Farley. “Wild: The Soviet Submarine K-8 Sunk With 4 Nuclear Torpedoes Still Onboard.” The National Interest. Feb. 11, 2020 http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/wild-submarine-k-8-sunk-4-nuclear-torpedoes-still-onboard-122261 accessed March 11, 2020.)

April 27 – May 22, 2020 – (postponed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic) Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) at United Nations Headquarters in New York City which will occur several weeks after the 50^th anniversary of the entry into force of the NPT on March 5^th.  The international community continues to consider the NPT as one of the most seminal arms control treaties of the Nuclear Age.  The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was first signed on July 1, 1968 by the U.S., U.K., the Soviet Union, and 59 other nations and entered into force on March 5, 1970.  Currently, the treaty has 191 participating nation-states.  However nuclear weapons states India, Pakistan and Israel have refused to sign the treaty and North Korea revoked its signature.  More recently Iran has threatened to abandon the NPT if its European partners report its 2015 agreement breaches to the U.N. Security Council.  Comments:  While the Cold War-era world didn’t have to deal with a worst-case scenario of dozens of nuclear weapons states warned about by Democratic presidential candidate John Kennedy during the third Nixon-Kennedy Debate on Oct. 13, 1960, today things have reached a crisis point again.  Although there have been some historic meetings between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and U.S. President Donald Trump, despite some previous tit-for-tat nuclear saber-rattling tweets between the two men, it appears that a treaty ending the Korean War while also denuclearizing the Korean peninsula remains unlikely in the short-term.  More concerning may be President Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement and renewed stronger sanctions on that nation that recently led the Iranians to reverse their commitment to comply with the 2015 agreement in concert with their European partners while also criticizing the U.S.-led sanctions which they claim helped cripple the Iranian response to the deadly corona virus pandemic.  More frightening still is the fact that both the U.S. and Iran have heightened tensions by the use of military force including the assassination of a key Iranian leader by a U.S. drone and the launching by Iran of over 20 ballistic missiles at U.S. military bases in Iraq earlier this year.  At the very least there are fears that a conventional war may break out between the nations, most probably after the November 3, 2020 U.S. presidential election.  An increasingly likely war between the U.S. and either North Korea or Iran might inadvertently break the tripwire that triggers the first use of nuclear weapons in combat since 1945.  Several years ago, President Trump openly promoted the idea that Japan, South Korea, and other allies like possibly the Saudis should join the Nuclear Club which would obviously set U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy back decades.  In legal terms, the long-term prospects of a continued healthy NPT do not look good due to the fact that the vast majority of nations agreed to forestall their development of nuclear weapons fifty years ago only after the Nuclear Club members signed on to a critical pledge made in Article VI of the Treaty:  “All Parties undertake to pursue good faith negotiations on effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race and to nuclear disarmament and to general and complete disarmament.”   Although some significant progress did occur in these commitments during the last decades of the Cold War and in the 1990s and early 2000s when three former Soviet states Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, South Africa, and Libya denuclearized, events of the last fifteen years have almost totally negated these successes.  A renewed global nuclear arms race has been underway for several years, the nuclear weapons states have rejected the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons signed by dozens of nations on July 7, 2017 and while the trend of international state-to-state conventional wars have been reduced, the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) continues unabated for two decades and counting.  Thankfully many millions of global citizenry continue to protest and lobby their political representatives to end this counterproductive paradigm that has killed hundreds of millions of people over the last few centuries while demanding an end to international arms production and sales, the demilitarization of the planet, ending the nuclear threat represented by both nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and reorienting global priorities toward addressing climate change, cleaning up military and civilian toxic sites worldwide, preventing serious disease outbreaks, ending global poverty and providing a free education to the global masses regardless of their lack of economic means. (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p.1, “Iran to Quit NPT If Its Nuclear Programme Referred to UN: Tehran Says It Will Abandon Key Global Treaty If European Powers Bring Nuclear Deal Breaches to U.N. Security Council.” Aljazeera. January 20, 2020.  http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/iran-zrif-skip-davos-forum-programme-200120094500271.html and United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, “Background Information: 2020 NPT Review Conference.” United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs. New York, NY. http://www.meetings/unoda.org/section/conf-npt-2020-background/inf/ both accessed March 12, 2020 and other mainstream and alternative news sources.)

May 9, 1970 – One of the most notable labor leaders, human rights advocates (and participant in Civil Rights-era protests including the Selma March in 1965), peace activists (and opponent of the Vietnam War), and anti-nuclear spokesmen of the 20^th century was silenced on this date when Walter Philip Reuther, along with his wife and a number of friends and colleagues, perished in a plane crash near Pellston, Michigan.  Reuther was born in Wheeling, W.Va. on Sept. 1, 1907 and as a young man he moved to Detroit where he applied his skills as an expert tool and die maker in the auto industry.  Later, he was elected president of an influential auto workers’ union local group and led several sit-down strikes in 1937 and 1940, became president of the United Auto Workers in 1946 (and held that post the rest of his life), and helped found the anticommunist liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action.  In 1952, he was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and within three years he was a key player in the merger of both unions to form the AFL-CIO.  In the 1960s, he marched with Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Delano, California and also strongly showed his support for the Civil Rights movement by participating in the August 1963 March on Washington led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  The Republican candidate for president in 1964, a staunchly conservative Barry Goldwater, once declared Reuther “a more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do in America.”  In a Labor Day speech in 1966, Reuther presented a strong case for utilizing rapid technological advances not for war but for improving the human condition:  “The question that challenges the wisdom and the sense of human solidarity of the whole human family is the overriding question:  To what purpose do we commit the potential power of the 20^th century technological revolution?  Do we harness the potential power to the madness of nuclear war or can we build a rational and responsible world community and harness the rising star of science and technology to man’s peaceful purposes?  The 20^th century technological revolution has no ideology and it has no morality.  We must bend it to man’s peaceful purposes or we shall perish.” In another speech, Reuther proclaimed, “The people of the whole world are the prisoners of the Cold War and the insanity of the escalation of the nuclear arms race.  And that’s why I believe America has the responsibility for providing both the political and moral leadership to try to move the world out of this prison of the Cold War and the arms race towards reductions in the levels of armament because I believe that in the long run, peace is the only condition of human survival.” Comments: Fifty years ago a prominent voice of the poor, disenfranchised, and oppressed and a highly visible opponent of the nuclear arms race left us, and although he may be gone, Walter Reuther is not forgotten.  (Source:  The Reuther Library. “No Greater Calling: The Life of Walter P. Reuther.” Wayne State University. http://reuther100.wayne.edu accessed March 10, 2020.)

May 16, 2000 – New York Times journalist William Broad reported the release of declassified documents relating to a staff study by the U.S. Air Force Special Weapons Center conducted in January of 1959.  One of the participants in the study, the late astronomer-physicist Carl Sagan, was among several scientists tasked to assess the feasibility of conducting a nuclear weapons test on the lunar surface.  Sagan and the other participants concluded that the blast would “ruin the pristine environment of the moon.”  On January 27, 1967, the multilateral Outer Space Treaty was signed and the agreement was later entered into force on October 10 of that same year.  The treaty prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit, on the moon, or on any celestial body.    For decades the only possible amendment to this critical space treaty had been debate about utilizing nuclear weapons, as a last resort, to prevent a possible future asteroid or comet collision with our planet. Comments:  However in the last few years, the decades-long international legal and historical precedence prohibiting nuclear weapons from being deployed or exploded outside Earth’s atmosphere has significantly eroded and possibly is on its way to complete invalidation due to the actions of President Donald Trump.  Trump’s dangerous rhetoric (“Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?” 2016), anger-filled tweets aimed at North Korea and Iran, and his administration’s position that nuclear weapons may need to be tested routinely on a regular basis, despite a long-held scientific consensus by nuclear weapons laboratory experts that computer simulations have confirmed the long-term viability of the warheads (see JASON Group study conclusions  sourced below).  Additionally the President’s announcement of (in June of 2018) and follow-through with the establishment of the sixth branch of the U.S. Armed Forces as part of his Dec. 20, 2019 signing of the National Defense Authorization Act created The U.S. Space Force.  Although a Space Operations Service was part of the U.S. Air Force since 1982, it has now become an independent service charged with building the capability of fighting and winning wars in outer space which definitely constitutes a violation of the Outer Space Treaty and fuels the full-scale militarization of outer space possibly including unprecedented testing of nuclear weapons in orbital space or on heavenly bodies such as the Moon.  Trump’s actions aim to go way beyond established uses of the medium of outer space as mostly a reconnaissance platform for monitoring nuclear weapons tests and ballistic missile launches worldwide.  Obviously spy satellites and ground targeting systems have also been long deployed in the medium as well.  In the ensuing 18 months or less while preparations are underway to begin fulfilling its warfighting mission in outer space, it is fervently hoped by billions of global citizenry that President Trump is denied a second term and that more reasonable politicians and military leaders will reduce dramatically or even disestablish this means to trigger an irrational, further destabilizing species-threatening space arms race which might also trigger space- or ground-based nuclear war.  Even if large space conflict and the accompanying surface warfare is somehow avoided, smaller space conflicts will also contribute substantially to the growing problem of increasing exponentially the large number of pieces of orbital debris that encircle our planet, making manned and unmanned space travel riskier and eventually impossible.  Such an eventuality will make routine space weather forecasting and global communications problematic and even doom our species if we are someday unable to launch spacecraft or weaponry that can divert an incoming asteroid or comet determined to be on a collision course with Earth.  (Sources:  “Lifetime Extension Program (LEP): Executive Summary.”  JASON Program Office, The MITRE Corporation. JSA-09-334E, Sept 9, 2009. http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/lep.pdf

Katie Rogers. “Trump Orders Establishment of Space Force as Sixth Military Branch.” New York Times. June 18, 2018 http://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/us/politics/Trump-space-force-sixth-military-branch.html

And “What’s the Space Force?”  U.S. Space Force. http://www.spaceforce.mil/About-Us/FAQs/what’s-the-space-force all of which were accessed on March 3, 2020.)

May 27, 1923 – Birthdate of one of the most controversial figures in U.S. foreign and military policy and most importantly U.S. nuclear weapons policy – Henry A. Kissinger.  Born into a Jewish family in Furth a Bavarian city in Germany, Kissinger as a teen moved with his family to the United States where he joined the U.S. Army and served with distinction in an intelligence unit fighting the Nazis and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. After the war he earned masters and doctorate degrees at Harvard University, then he became a foreign policy advisor to the presidential campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller.  More than a decade before he became prominent as President Nixon’s National Security Advisor in January 1969 and later as Secretary of State in 1973-77, he was a study director of nuclear weapons and foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations during which time he wrote a book “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy” which was critical of President Eisenhower’s “massive retaliation” doctrine while also frighteningly advocating the use of tactical nuclear weapons for warfighting as part of his Realpolitik mindset. Later he played a dominant role in formulating U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon and Ford administrations calling for increased détente with the Soviets and the opening of relations with Communist China.  But many critics during that time and even today have rightfully criticized him for facilitating Nixon’s genocidal and sometimes secretive bombing of Indochina during the Vietnam War and for his support of a military coup in Chile launched on September 11, 1973 that resulted in not only the death of popularly elected democratic Socialist leader Salvador Allende but of the repression, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial murders of tens of thousands of leftists, religious leaders, journalists, indigenous and rural populations deemed enemies of the rightwing Latin American regimes involved in Operation Condor.  Comments:  Dr. Kissinger’s historical legacy is at best a mixed one but also predominantly negative from a progressive perspective.  While he did help create a ceasefire agreement to end major U.S. fighting in the Vietnam War in January 1973 and was nominated but declined accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, notable critics like New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd had their say on this matter, “Any peace prize that goes to Henry Kissinger but not Gandhi ain’t worth a can of Alpo.” In terms of the nuclear threat, again Kissinger’s commitment to the disturbingly flawed but mostly celebrated mainstream concept of nuclear deterrence and his views on the viability of tactical nuclear weapons are of serious concern.  Even more terrifying was Kissinger’s support and facilitation of President Nixon’s “madman strategy” during the Vietnam War and the fourth Mideast War which incorporated veiled nuclear threats from allegedly a sometimes irrational commander-in-chief meant to intimidate Hanoi, the Arab States opposing Israel and their patrons in Moscow. This extremely dangerous and unpredictable policy could have inadvertently triggered an accidental or unintentional full scale nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  In Kissinger’s favor are some thoughtful statements and policy pronouncements that he advanced during some junctures of his long career.  In 1965 he noted that, “No one knows how governments or people will react to a nuclear explosion under conditions where both sides possess nuclear arsenals,” which obviously characterized the period of the Cold War (1945-1991) as well as our current rejuvenated Cold War II and nuclear arms race that was initiated by Presidents Bush and Obama but accelerated exponentially by President Trump.  And he did join George Schultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn in advocating “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on January 4, 2007. (Sources:  “Henry Kissinger Biography.” Biography.com. http://www.biography.com/political-figure/henry-kissinger and William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball. “Nixon, Kissinger and the Madman Strategy During the Vietnam War.” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 517. http://www.nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb517-nixon-kissinger-and-the-madman-strategy-during-Vietnam-War/ both accessed March 4, 2020.)

June 3, 1980 – President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was awakened by his military assistant, General William Odom, around 2:30 a.m. and informed that NORAD’s computers had detected a launch of 2,200 Soviet ICBMs heading for U.S. targets.  The incident was one of many so-called “false warnings.”  When early warning radars and satellites could not verify the fictional Soviet first strike, Brzezinski determined that the attack was a false alarm.  Later it was discovered that this doomsday scare was caused by a faulty computer chip – which cost a mere 46 cents.  Comments:  Such false warnings are still possible today although technological verification is more sophisticated and supposedly more foolproof.  It is still true however that the very short response times in nuclear crises, make accidental, unintentional, or unauthorized nuclear warfare a frighteningly real possibility now and in the future.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 367-368.)

June 24, 1957 – Priscilla, a nuclear test blast was detonated at 700 feet altitude at Frenchman Flat in the Nevada Test Site with a magnitude estimated at 37 kilotons, two and a half times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  The purpose of the test was to assess the impact of nuclear weapons on targeted populations as well as equipment, weapons, and shelters.  French, Swiss, and German bomb shelters performed above expectations but dozens of pigs sealed inside the doors of machine gun emplacements died horribly.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear bombs over the last seven and a half decades by the nine nuclear weapons states has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations, especially native peoples and veterans who participated in observing tests at relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems and other detrimental environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing, which some irresponsible leaders like President Trump are arguing are needed again despite long-held scientific consensus that testing is not only unnecessary but destabilizing to the fragile nuclear deterrence construct.  Even more objectionable is the fact that world citizenry feel that such tests will only embolden elite leadership further into believing irrationally that nuclear conflicts are winnable as long as top leadership survive in deep underground shelters. (Sources: Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig. “Nuclear Weapons Databook: Volume II, Appendix B.” Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987 and Garrett M. Graff. “Raven Rock:  The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself – While the Rest of Us Die.”  New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2017, pp. 80-81.)

May 3, 1947 – Twenty one months after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a new postwar Japanese constitution, promulgated on Nov. 3, 1946, was established on this date.  The most notable section of this document, and one tied inexorably to the fact that Japanese militarism eventually resulted in their people being subjected to the horrors of nuclear attack, was and is Chapter 2: The Renunciation of War, which is framed by Article 9:  “…the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes…the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”  Nevertheless, the Japanese did recognize the need to establish Self-Defense Forces, as well as participate in United Nations’ peacekeeping operations in the ensuing decades after the Second World War ended.  However, in July of 2014, due in part to long-time pressure applied by the U.S. and other Western allies, the government of Japan approved a reinterpretation of this clause to allow Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to defend other nations, although some Japanese politicians and citizens argued that this change was illegitimate or unconstitutional.  Then, in September of 2015, the Japanese National Diet made the reinterpretation of Article 9 official by passing several laws to allow Japanese military units to provide material support to allies engaged in combat.  Comments:  Despite these changes to the War Renunciation section of the Japanese Constitution, that historic clause represents a precedent internationally for the eventual end of not only all nation-state war but even all resort to the use of military force – a development that is necessary, along with the phasing-out of national sovereignty, and the transition to peaceful global sovereignty that must include full and universal democratic representation in a global parliament of all peoples, ethnicities, racial and cultural groupings of humanity.  Global military forces will be transitioned to a planetary defense component essential to peacefully exploring the solar system and defending our planet from threats such as diverting incoming asteroids.  A parallel and equally powerful precedent, along with the War Renunciation Clause, was the July 7, 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Obviously, much more progress needs to be made before the era of armaments and war ends, but at least our species can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  (Sources:  “The Constitution of Japan (1947).”  Hanover Historical Texts Project.  https://history/hanover.edu/texts/1947con.html, Reuters. “Japan Takes Historic Step From Postwar Pacifism, Okays Fighting For Allies.” July 1, 2014 and Erik Slaven.  “Japan Enacts Major Changes to Its Self-Defense Laws.  Stars and Stripes.  Sept. 18, 2015. https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-enacts-major-changes-to-its-self-defense-laws-1.3688783 all of which were accessed on April 17, 2018.)

May 11, 1969 – On this date, one of the key components of the U.S. nuclear bomb making complex suffered a serious accident.  The sprawling Rocky Flats production facility, run by the Atomic Energy Commission’s contractor Dow Chemical Company, and its large buffer area which covered eleven square miles, located in Golden, Colorado about 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver, experienced a serious fire in Building 776-777 when five kilograms of plutonium ignited and spread from a containment area causing what was then the costliest industrial accident ever to occur in the United States.  It took two years to complete the clean-up of this toxic event which involved the dispersal of highly radioactive particles of plutonium 239-240, uranium, beryllium, a carcinogenic cleaning solvent called carbon tetrachloride, and other dangerous chemicals too numerous to list here.  This was possibly the first time that people living in and around Denver became aware of containment releases from the plant where it was later revealed that since 1952 workers had been fabricating nuclear weapons triggers called “pits,” which were, in turn, shipped to the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas to be incorporated into thermonuclear warheads.  Twenty years later, on June 6, 1989, FBI, Justice Department, and EPA representatives raided the Rocky Flats plant to investigate allegations of environmental crimes.  After large-scale public outcry, nuclear weapons production at the plant was stopped and clean-up of the site began in 1992.  Comments:  This is just one of dozens if not hundreds of serious accidents that have occurred in the bomb making factories of the nine nuclear weapons states and with a commitment by all or most of these nations to modernize and expand the production of their nuclear arsenals in the next 20-30 years, there is the need to strengthen growing opposition by global citizenry against the renewed Cold War II effort to build even more doomsday weapons.  Recently the Pentagon told the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that it must produce 80 new plutonium cores per year by 2030 just to sustain existing nuclear weapons and obviously even more “pits” consistent with a renewed nuclear modernization and expansion commitment made by both Presidents Obama and Trump.  But NNSA has responded that only Los Alamos National Laboratory is able now to produce the cores even though a Center for Public Integrity analysis found that there were not enough personnel able to safely handle plutonium at the laboratory.  This is just one of many related concerns that justify the logical conclusion that it is well past time to reduce and eliminate global nuclear arsenals rather than ratchet up the already high risks of nuclear war, deadly radioactive accidents, and further contamination of our fragile ecosystem.  (Sources:  David Brennan.  “U.S. Nukes Will Be Useless Without More Plutonium, Military Warns.”  Newsweek.  March 22, 2018, Government of the State of Colorado. “What is the History of Rocky Flats:  A Study of Rocky Flats Exposures.”  https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/HM_st-rocky-flats-exposures-study-history-of-site.pdf, and Laura Snider.  “Looking Back on Mother’s Day Fire at Rocky Flats.”  Boulder Daily Camera. May 10, 2009.)

May 12, 2018 – “Two Minutes to Midnight: How Do We Move from Geopolitical Conflict to Nuclear Abolition?” a conference organized by the International Peace Bureau, Peace and Planet, the Campaign for Peace Disarmament and Common Security, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, American Friends Service Committee, Peace Action New York State, and Brooklyn for Peace will be held at the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South & Thompson Street, in New York City. Speakers include Noam Chomsky, University of Arizona; Daniel Ellsberg; Christine Hong, UC-Santa Cruz and others.  Comments:  This conference’s subject matter is of utmost importance and its paramount topic should be routinely discussed in U.N. and other forums as well as in the U.S. and the other eight nuclear weapons states at regular conferences that include top military, political, and scientific participants as well as arms control and civil society activists.  The nuclear threat is growing due to large-scale nuclear modernization by the Nuclear Club members and thus the world is facing an increasing risk of the triggering of the nuclear doomsday machine through miscalculation, misperception, accident or unintentional causes, or the growing likelihood of a terrorist WMD event that might also trigger a larger nuclear catastrophe.  Even if humanity’s luck continues to hold out and we avoid such disasters (an increasingly unlikely scenario as each year passes, unfortunately), the growing radioactive threat caused by existing and new enrichment activities associated with a new generation of nuclear bomb making and the continued buildup of toxic nuclear wastes associated with military and civilian nuclear power plants, which contaminates the human gene pool as well as the larger ecosphere, makes the abolition of nuclear weapons and nuclear power the penultimate priority for the human species in the early 21^st century.  (Source:  Anthony Wier and Abigail Stowe-Thurston, Editors.  “Nuclear Calendar.”  Friends Committee on National Legislation, April 2018. http://www2.fcnl.org/Nuclear/Calendar/index/php accessed April 17, 2018.)

May 26, 1972 – On the same day that the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the SALT I Treaty that placed a ceiling on the number of offensive nuclear weapons, both Cold War antagonists also signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty which limited strategic defense launchers and interceptors.  A later July 3, 1974 ABM Treaty Protocol cut the number of ABM deployment areas permitted to each side from two to one and the number of launchers and interceptors from 200 to 100.  The SALT II Treaty signed in 1979 further reduced strategic offensive nuclear weapons.  Despite President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative proposal of March 23, 1983 and subsequent commitments to spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars on space- and land-based strategic defenses, the ABM Treaty survived and further strategic offensive reductions were mandated in the July 31, 1991 START Treaty and the January 3, 1993 START II agreement.  However, on Dec. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty and carried forward with this promise in 2002.  Although another offensive reduction treaty, New START, was signed by the U.S. and Russia in 2010, that treaty’s reductions have lapsed since February of this year.  Comments:  Due to missile defense developments by both Russia and the U.S. and its allies, especially the deployment of dozens of U.S. strategic defense interceptors in Alaska and California, as well as tactical missile defense systems deployed along the borders separating NATO countries and Russia, it appears that the lifting of restrictions on missile defenses, triggered by U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002, has accelerated not only strategic defenses but also the strategic offensive arms race.  Comments:  In a March 1, 2018 address to the Russian Federal Assembly, President Vladimir Putin outlined the development of new Russian nuclear weapons systems including the Sarmat ICBM equipped with multiple warheads, an intercontinental undersea drone, new long-range cruise missiles and two hypersonic weapons – the Kinzhal air-launched cruise missile and the Avangard glide vehicle.  Putin specifically described the rationale for the weapons largely in terms of U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty and concern about U.S. missile defense systems.  In turn, American military and political leaders are demanding from Congress even more funding for strategic offensive and defensive weapons.  The arms race cycle continues and now without restrictions on defenses, even more money will be spent to fuel riskier strategic instability.  The only alternative is to end this 21^st century race to nuclear Armageddon before it is too late. (Sources:  “Missile Defense Agency Fact Sheet:  Ground-based Midcourse Defense.”  Jan. 12, 2018. https://mda.mil/global/documents/pdf/bmds.pdf, Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp, 2-4, 84-85, Kingston Reif.  “New Russian Weapons Raise Arms Race Fears.”  Arms Control Today. Arms Control Association.  April 2018.  https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-04/news-russian-weapons-raise-arms-race-fears, both websites accessed April 17, 2018.)

May 28, 2000 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Dark Cloud:  Our Strange Love Affair With the Bomb,” produced by the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan and nonprofit organization and independent monitor of the Pentagon, founded in 1972, whose board of directors and staff included retired military officers (Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr.), former U.S. government officials (Philip Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of defense), and civilian experts (Dr. Bruce Blair, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer).  This episode, as described in a press release, focused on, “Nukes as portable infantry weapons, Nukes for digging tunnels, Nuclear decontamination with a whisk broom.  Secret government films of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s form the backdrop for this darkly entertaining exploration of America’s fascination with the Bomb.  At times, humorous, strange, and disturbing, these films reveal how the culture of nuclear weapons shaped American society during the Cold War, and how the advocates of nuclear culture sought to make atomic weapons a part of everyday life.  This show provides a valuable lesson in media literacy by exploring the nature of propaganda and deconstructing its messages.”  Comments:  Public acceptance and even affection for militarism and the myth that nuclear weapons have “kept the peace” and “made America great” is commonplace in 2018. Films and television programs increasingly focus on post-apocalyptic nuclear scenarios and even the language of officialdom is contaminated by militarism and love of the Bomb.  The term used for over a decade to describe changing U.S. Senate procedural rules to enable judicial and executive nominees to be confirmed with 51 votes, a simple majority, rather than 60 is termed, “the nuclear option.”  The good news is, as this television documentary proposed almost twenty years ago, through peace education and literacy, a growing number of denizens of our Pale Blue Dot are seeing war, doomsday weapons, and military speak as counterproductive to the long-term survival of our species.

Late May-Early June 2018 – A hopeful breakthrough for peace on the Korean Peninsula may occur sometime in this time period when U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.  Essential precursor steps toward a permanent treaty ending the nearly seventy year old Korean Conflict were taken in March when Mr. Kim secretly visited Beijing, China and met with President Xi Jinping and when South Korean President Moon Jae-in proposed and Mr. Kim accepted an offer to meet Mr. Moon at Peace House, a South Korean building inside the truce village at Panmunjom on April 27^th.  When the North Korean leader met with the Chinese President in March, Mr. Kim proposed “phased, synchronized moves toward denuclearization,” which is the same approach that saw negotiating successes as well as setbacks in past discussions with Washington.  Comments:  President Trump would be wise to accept the advice of 93-year old former President Jimmy Carter who helped prevent two wars during his tenure – a possible violent insurgency in Panama nipped in the bud by his push for the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977 and another Mideast war between Egypt and Israel circumvented by his personal diplomacy culminating in the Camp David Accords of 1978.  The 39^th President, who called President Trump’s selection of war hawk John Bolton to the post of National Security Adviser, “a disaster for our country,” nevertheless urged that Trump’s negotiators listen closely to the North Koreans for the core of their demands.  The best-selling author, Carter Center founder, and former peace envoy who travelled to Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for the 1994 Agreed Framework denuclearization deal signed by North Korea, delivered this specific advice to the 45^th President, “What the North Koreans have wanted for a long time is just assurance confirmed by the Six Powers Agreement – with China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and so forth – that the U.S. will not attack North Korea as long as North Korea stays at peace with its neighbors.”  President Carter noted that this may require concessions by the U.S. including a draw-down of U.S. troop levels in South Korea or an agreement to forego annual military exercises conducted off the coast of North Korea.  Considering Mr. Trump’s past belligerent rhetoric toward Mr. Kim and vice versa, as well as the history of failed Korean negotiations, it seems unlikely that the result of the Trump-Kim meeting will be a resolution of long-standing issues, but it is obviously better for the two men to meet peacefully rather than mutually escalate past nuclear threats.  (Sources:  Susan Page. “Jimmy Carter Calls Trump’s Decision to Hire Bolton ‘A Disaster’ for Our Country.” USA Today. March 26, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/26/jimmy-carter-decries-donald-trump-decision, Choe Sang-Hun. “North and South Korea Set a Date for Summit Meeting at Border.  The New York Times. March 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/world/asia/north-korea-south-summit-border.html, and Anthony Wier and Abigail Stowe-Thurston, Editors.  “Nuclear Calendar.”  Friends Committee on National Legislation, April 2018. http://www2.fcnl.org/Nuclear/Calendar/index/php, all of which were accessed April 17, 2018.)