Author: Jeffrey W. Mason

April 7, 1954 – An article in the New York Times by William Lawrence titled, “Cobalt Bomb Can Be Built,” was published on this date.  The article quoted Albert Einstein and Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard who both expressed concern that 400 one-ton deuterium-cobalt bombs could release enough radiation to end all life on Earth.  About ten months after this article appeared, German nuclear scientist Otto Hahn publicly noted that only ten very large cobalt bombs could also trigger global catastrophe.  Comments:  Over the past seven-plus decades of the Nuclear Age, there have been many real and imagined ways for humanity to commit omnicide.  However, as Daniel Ellsberg’s 2017 book, “The Doomsday Machine:  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” points out that due to the discovery in the early 1980s of the nuclear winter scenario by Carl Sagan and his colleagues and subsequent reinforcing studies by Rutgers Professor Alan Robock and other scholars, we can realize today that such exotic doomsday devices like those envisioned in the Fifties aren’t required to extinguish the human race, or at least destroy global civilization.  Because we now know that only a small fraction, perhaps 200 or so warheads, of the existing stocks of global nuclear arsenals (which now number over 10,000 devices) can do the trick.  So, even in a so-called “limited” nuclear exchange between say India and Pakistan, dozens of warheads exploding in a period of a few hours or a day could inject millions of tons or more of smoke and debris into the upper atmosphere, cooling the Earth significantly and triggering the subsequent collapse of global agriculture and the ensuing starvation of billions of people.  Unfortunately, this critical information largely has not been conveyed to the general public, especially the American people, by the mainstream news media.   Instead, American cable news networks and an array of mainstream newspapers has conveyed to the public a warped fascination with the spy vs. spy and tit-for-tat cyber warfare “games” played by both America and Russia, Trump and Putin.  As for doomsday scares, the American media loves to stoke fear and anger toward Russia every chance it gets.  For instance, recently a plethora of media sources pointed out that the Pentagon revealed that Russia is developing a “ultra-deep, stealthy nuclear-armed undersea, autonomous torpedo,” which it plans to deploy off the eastern coast of the United States.  Mainstream media viewers are told that the torpedo carries a highly radioactive cobalt warhead that could contaminate large areas of the East Coast making the region unsuitable for military, economic, or other activity for a long period of time.  While, of course, this is a frightening threat, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, that both America and Russia as well as most of the other nuclear weapons states can trigger global nuclear winter and thereby extinguish 99 percent of our species without resort to exploding one alleged doomsday weapons system, is at the same time ignored or downplayed.  However, a growing movement of global citizenry and an increasing number of scientists, politicians, and military leaders are performing a public service by describing the unvarnished truth about the nuclear threat while also arguing for drastic reductions and the eventual elimination of extremely dangerous global nuclear arsenals.

(Sources:  Jeffrey Lewis. “Putin’s Doomsday Machine.”  Foreign Policy.  Nov. 12, 2015 http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/12/putins-doomsday-machine-nuclear-weapon-us-russia/ and Lucy Pasha-Robinson. “U.S. Says Russia Developing ‘Doomsday’ Autonomous Nuclear Torpedo as Trump Administration Announces More Aggressive Stance to Moscow.”  The Independent.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russia-doomsday-nuclear -armed-undersea-torpedo-pentagon-defense-department-nuclear-posture-review-a8192541.html both accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 10, 1945 – Three months before the first-ever test of an atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16^th, the medical staff of the U.S. Manhattan (Project) Engineering District in Oak Ridge, Tennessee secretly injected highly radioactive plutonium into the bodies of victims of an automobile accident without their consent.  It was the first of over a dozen other injections of unknowing human subjects over the next two years in order to gather vital information for U.S. military and civilian scientists on how much exposure to the deadly substance would cause harm.  Over a period of 40 years and perhaps longer, the U.S. Department of Energy catalogued over 48 different radiation experiments conducted not only on adults but also on children including racial and ethnic minorities, the indigent, as well as the mentally ill, pregnant women and their fetuses, all in the name of national security.  Comments:  Such experiments represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of countless purposeful experiments, tests, and radioactive exposures inflicted on civilians and soldiers by representatives of the nine nuclear weapons states and possibly other nations that considered or are today considering acquiring nuclear weapons and/or fissile materials.  It is also extremely possible that these secret experiments may still be occurring through perhaps more subtle or hidden methodologies.  This is yet another paramount reason why nuclear weapons and nuclear power should be dramatically reduced and eliminated entirely (except for legitimate medicinal uses or every limited internationally-sanctioned civilian nuclear fusion reactor research) by 2030.

(Sources:  U.S. Department of Energy.  “Human Radiation Experiments:  The Department of Energy Roadmap to the Story and Records.” Document Number DOE/EH-0445, February 1995 and Eileen Welsome. “The Plutonium Files:  America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War.”  New York:  Dial Press, 1999.)

April 12, 2018 – The Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) 2018 Capstone Conference, the final conference of the 2017-2018 PONI Conference Series, now in its 14^th year, sponsored by the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies of Washington, DC, will be held at the Offutt Inn at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.  “The conference will feature presentations from emerging nuclear experts covering topics such as nuclear strategies, rising threats in the East, arms control and proliferation challenges, and threats to alliances and institutions.  The PONI Conference series, which is unique in its emphasis on featuring rising experts and young professionals in the nuclear field, draws emerging thought leaders from across the nuclear enterprise and provides them a visible platform for sharing their new thinking on a range of nuclear issues.”  Comments:  One of the key cogs of the Congressional-military-industrial-corporate-think tank complex are academic-sounding conferences like this meeting held annually at one of the most secure U.S. military bases in the world, where anti-nuclear activists would not have direct access (although of course, protest actions are still possible outside the main gates of the base).  The list of speakers and the agenda are not provided and STRATCOM’s website notes that, “Conference presentations and keynote speakers are off-the-record.”  However, the site does mention that the keynote address will be given by General John E. Hyten, current commander of U.S. STRATCOM.  But the media and the public does have access to the 2016 PONI Capstone Conference comments of a former commander of STRATCOM, Admiral Cecil D. Haney who remarked that, “…we must be thoughtful going forward, because deterring in today’s multi-polar world requires us to view threats across the “spectrum of conflict,” where escalation may occur with more than one adversary, and will be transregional, multi-domain and multifunctional…Strategic deterrence is a complex subject that is foundational to our nation’s security.  Deterrence depends on the situation and one size never fits all, yet it is bounded in the understanding that adversaries will not gain the benefit they seek…Adversaries cannot escalate their way out of a failed conflict…the U.S. will respond in a time, place, and domain of our choosing.”  Admiral Haney also noted that, “Our strategic capabilities are routinely demonstrated or exercised,” and referred to B-2 bomber threats against North Korea (which he specifically mentioned as “B-2 deployment to U.S. Pacific Command”) and remarked that, “we flight-tested two ICBMs from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota” (which most of the world’s population sees no differently than such tests staged irregularly by China, Russia, or North Korea, as rehearsals for a nuclear Armageddon).  Of course, no speech by STRATCOM’s commander would be complete without a pitch to Congress for more doomsday weaponry as the Admiral added that, “We must not jeopardize strategic stability by failing to sustain, to modernize, and, in some cases, expand our deterrent forces.  In the 2020s to 2030s recapitalization (a euphemism for a new generation of nuclear bomb-making with more sophisticated and thus actually more globally destabilizing weapons and nuclear platforms) will grow to between six and seven percent (of the annual bloated U.S. military budget), a modest price to pay to deter Russia and North Korea.”  The only other speaker mentioned on the website for this year’s conference is of course a representative of the “corporate” or “think-tank” sponsor of the 2018 PONI Capstone Conference – The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), whose trustees include top Cold Warriors from past presidential administrations such as Dr. Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage, and Brent Scowcroft.  The conference speaker for CSIS is Rebecca Hersman, a former assistant secretary of defense and Congressional staffer for the House Armed Services Committee, whose body of work includes papers that support “Building a Compelling Rationale for the Role and Value of U.S. Nuclear Weapons” (2016), and an article on the February 2018 Trump Administration’s nuclear posture review (NPR), which she characterizes as, “the retention and modernization of the current nuclear triad largely proposed and supported by the Obama Administration.”  Professor Edward Herman’s 1989 work “The Terrorism Industry” and many more recent academic and journalistic accounts have proven that think-tanks like CSIS have extensive direct ties to U.S. weapons contractors as well as the U.S. intelligence community.  It is clear that such conferences reinforce and justify, in terms of public perceptions, that “American exceptionalism” and U.S. global nuclear hegemony go hand-in-hand and will continue indefinitely (as its adherents fervently hope) as did other “enlightened” hegemons in history like the Roman and British empires.  However, as disastrous as it was for the world when those past empires fell, the growing likelihood of nuclear Armageddon today threatens the very existence of our species and countless others on the planet.  Thankfully, a growing consensus of world leaders and global citizenry are committed to preventing that from happening.  When the majority of U.S. leaders join the movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons and if, in fact, that goal is someday reached thanks largely to American leadership, then perhaps on that day one can really embrace the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism.”

(Sources:  “Nuclear Calendar” Natural Resources Defense Council. http://www2.fcnl.org/NuclearCalendarindex.php, “PONI 2018 Capstone Conference.” https://www.CSIS.org/events/poni-2018-capstone-conference, “Project on Nuclear Issues Capstone Conference, April 13, 2016. http://www.stratcom.mil/Media/Speeches/Article/986478/project-on-nuclear-issues-capstone-conference/(2016)back all of which were accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 19, 2015 – On this date, two former Cold War adversaries published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “How to Avert a Nuclear War.”  U.S. Marine Corps General James E. Cartwright, the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, and Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, a former director of the research institute of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, both of whom then worked on the Global Zero Commission on Nuclear Risk Reduction, argued that, “Russia and the United States are still living with the nuclear strike doctrine of the Cold War which dictated three strategic options:  first strike, launch-on-warning, and post-attack retaliation.”  The two Cold Warriors noted particularly that, “For either side, the decision to launch-on-warning…after an alert of an apparent attack must be made in minutes.  This is therefore the riskiest scenario, since provocations or malfunctions can trigger a global catastrophe.  Since computer-based information systems have been in place, the likelihood of such errors has been minimized.  But, the emergence of cyber warfare threats has increased the potential for false alerts in early warning systems.  The possibility of an error cannot be ruled out.”  These military experts also point to another related concern that due to the loss of all of Russia’s early warning satellites, that nation’s haphazard system of prefabricated border radars allow even less time to react to false warning of a potential U.S. nuclear first strike.  Generals Cartwright and Dvorkin concluded that, “Launch-on-warning puts enormous strain on the nuclear chains of command in both countries…the risk, however small, of cataclysmic error remains…This risk should motivate the presidents of Russia and the United States to decide in tandem to eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies, (for it) is a relic of Cold War strategy whose risk today far exceeds its value…Our leaders…need…(to) agree to scrap this obsolete protocol before a devastating error occurs.”  Comments:  Over the last few years, other military and civilian leaders in the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states have shocked the Congressional-military-industrial complex by pushing for the elimination of all land-based ICBMs, the establishment of a no-first use policy, and other restrictions limiting any use of nuclear weapons including post-attack retaliation, low threshold bunker-busting bombs, or other smaller yield nuclear devices that some have proposed using to attack Iranian or North Korean underground nuclear facilities.  But the Nuclear Genie’s minions continue their solitary focus on continuing past risky behavior as “defense” contractors, their CEOs, and other institutions continue to profit despite their flawed perception that the chance of accidental or unintentional nuclear war is so infinitesimally small that they are justified in supporting “the maintenance of robust deterrence.”  And unfortunately today, three years after Cartwright and Dvorkin’s op-ed, the presidents of Russia and the United States both take every opportunity to rattle their nuclear sabers and err on the side of pushing for more nukes, more options for their use, and more strategic instability to counterintuitively ‘make Russia and America great again.’

(Source:  Numerous mainstream and alternative news media sources and http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/opinion/how-to-avert-a-nuclear-war-html?_r=0 accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 26, 1986 – At the Chernobyl Nuclear Complex located about 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Kiev, capital of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the U.S.S.R., a fire developed in the core of the number four reactor unit which triggered an explosion that blew the roof off the building resulting in the largest ever release of radioactive material from a civilian reactor, with the possible exception of the Fukushima Dai-chi accident on March 11, 2011 in northeast Japan.  Two were killed and 200 others hospitalized, but the Soviet government did not release specific details of the nuclear meltdown until two days later when Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and other European neighbors detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity.  8,000 died and 435,000 people were evacuated from the region in the ensuing days, weeks, months, and years.  Although West Germany, Sweden, and other nations provided assistance to the Soviet Union to deal with the deadly, widespread radioactive fallout from the accident, some argue today that the U.S., China, Russia, France, Japan, and other nations should establish a permanent, multilateral civilian-military-humanitarian response force to quickly address such serious nuclear and natural disasters in a time-urgent, nonpartisan manner.  In November of 2016, a massive shelter, costing 1.5 billion euros and measuring 843 feet wide and 354 feet tall, which was constructed by 10,000 workers, was sealed shut over the number four reactor unit at Chernobyl.  Inside the deadliest radioactive structure on the planet is approximately 200 tons of radioactive corium, 30 tons of contaminated dust, and a very large indeterminate amount of uranium and plutonium.  Radiation levels inside the shelter still run as high as 5,000 to 10,000 roentgens per hour.  A 2016 report by Greenpeace on the local and regional impacts of the disaster found that in many cases, in grain stocks for instance, radiation levels in the contaminated zone surrounding the shelter where about five million people live today, are still surprisingly high.  According to scientific testing conducted by Greenpeace consultants and experts, overall contamination from key isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 may have fallen somewhat, but continue to linger at prohibitive levels especially in forested areas of the contaminated zone.  Comments:  In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and others too numerous to list here, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage conundrum as well as terrorist targeting potential, the economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an accelerated phase-out of global civilian nuclear power plants over the next decade as well as an absolute halt to massive plans by most of the nuclear weapons states to accelerate production of fissile materials in order to build a new, unneeded generation of destabilizing nuclear weaponry, while polluting our fragile ecosphere with more radioactivity.

(Sources:  “Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacy of Chernobyl and Fukushima.” Greenpeace.  March-April 2016. http://greenpeace.org/france/PageFiles/266171/Nuclear_Scars_report_WEB_final_version_20160403.pdf and Gleb Garanich. “30 Years After Chernobyl, Locals Still Eating Radioactive Food.” Reuters (also published on Newsweek website). March 9, 2016. http://www.newsweek.com/30-years-after-chernobyl-locals-still-eating-radioactive-food-435253 and “Chernobyl Arch Moved into Place in Historic Engineering Feat.”  World Nuclear News. Nov. 14, 2016. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Chernobyl-arch-moved-into-place-in-historic-engineering-feat-14111602.html all of which were accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 30, 1998 – The U.S. Senate, by a vote of 80-19, approved NATO’s eastern expansion to the former Soviet Warsaw Pact military alliance countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th members of the Alliance, a move that was later formalized at a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Brussels on March 16, 1999.  Nevertheless, there were and still are dissenting opinions about how unchecked NATO expansion is interpreted as a threat to Moscow.  Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR), who after retiring from Congress became the director of the Center for Defense Information, noted that, “We are forcing them to rely more and more heavily on nuclear weapons (to make up for the advantage over Russia in conventional arms deployed on or near Russia’s western borders by larger and larger numbers of NATO countries).  And the more you rely on nuclear weapons, the lower the hair trigger for nuclear war.”  As the years passed several other European nations, most of them also former Warsaw Pact countries, joined NATO which has now increased its membership to 29 nations.  NATO expansion, which has correlated with increasing tensions between the Alliance and Russia as illustrated in the recent Crimea-Ukraine Crisis and renewed episodes, over the last several years, of close aerial and naval encounters between NATO and Russian craft, has proven Bumpers and many other observers correct as nuclear war risks have escalated leading scholars to refer to contemporary times as “a second Cold War.”  Comments:  Tensions are still on the rise as seen by the comments in 2016-17 of many observers including former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev who warned, “The world has never been closer to nuclear war than it is at present.”  At the same time, German politicians including Social Democrats and Christian Democrats accused NATO of “war mongering.”  Even a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Perry, joined the chorus of voices against Alliance threats, “NATO is threatening and trying to provoke a nuclear war in Europe by putting bombers and nuclear missiles on the border with Russia.”  Although tensions seemed to have relaxed a bit after President Trump took office due to his complimentary rhetoric about Russian President Vladimir Putin, more recently relations have sunk much deeper with revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the poisoning of a Russian émigré Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain, stepped up U.S. economic sanctions, British expulsions of Russian diplomats, counter responses by Russia, and renewed nuclear threats by Trump and Putin as both leaders announced further qualitative and quantitative increases in long-term nuclear weapons modernization programs.

(Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp, 133-134 and numerous articles from mainstream and alternative news media websites.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 1, 2006 – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile material in the last 25 years, especially since the breakup of the Soviet Union, law enforcement officials arrested a number of suspects in Tbilisi, Georgia, a former Soviet republic, on this date, for the attempted sale of 79.5 grams of highly enriched uranium to one or more buyers, who were in actuality undercover security forces.  In April 2015, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Deputy Director Anne Harrington testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Strategic Forces that, “Of the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have come out of the former Soviet Union.”  Despite recent assurances from Rosatom, the state-owned corporation that runs Russia’s nuclear energy and weapons plants, that their nuclear materials, “are always strictly controlled” and accounted for, a Center for Public Integrity November 2015 investigative report concluded that, “In fact, some 99 percent of the world’s weapons-grade materials have been secured.  But one percent or more is still out there, and it amounts to several thousand pounds that could be acquired by any one of several terrorist organizations.”  Comments:  Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the U.N. and other international fora, as well as bilaterally by the Trump and Putin administrations, to prevent the use of fissile materials in dirty bombs or primitive small-yield fission weapons whether the material diverted comes from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapons facilities.  In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis, such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.  (Source: Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith. “The Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.”  Center for Public Integrity, Nov.12, 2015 reprinted in Courier: The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)

February 5, 1987 – The Soviet Union ended a nuclear testing moratorium due to continued U.S. testing but expressed a willingness to revisit such a moratorium if the Americans followed suit.  Forty-four months later, on October 24, 1990, the Soviets conducted their last of an estimated total of 715 nuclear explosive tests that began in 1949.  The French, British, and Americans later committed to end their testing programs (the last U.S. test was Sept. 23, 1992) and although the Russian Duma ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (signed by the U.S., Russia, and more than sixty other nations on Sept. 24, 1996) on April 21, 2000, the U.S. Congress has failed to do so since the Senate rejection of the CTBT by a vote of 51-48 on Oct. 13, 1999.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by 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 a relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing.  President Trump should convince the Senate to ratify the CTBT, which would increase international pressure on North Korea to cease their nuclear testing program.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 13-15; 19; 22.)

February 11, 2004 – Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column on the Center for Defense Information website which featured an article titled, “Keeping Presidents in the Dark – Episode 1:  The Case of the Missing Permissive Action Links,” was published on this date.  Along with information provided in Daniel Ellsberg’s new book “The Doomsday Machine:  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” we learned that after John H. Rubel, deputy director of defense research and engineering, discovered that operators of Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBMs had circumvented a design feature to protect against a possibly unauthorized launch of World War III by a single launch control center, he urged then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to require an electronic lock on the missiles.  Decades later, a former Minuteman launch control officer and now prominent nuclear weapons expert and scholar, Dr. Bruce Blair, notified a retired McNamara, “…that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.  The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the ‘locks’ to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard…SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.  And so, the ‘secret unlock code’ during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.”  Daniel Ellsberg, famously known for his release of the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, who earlier in his career served as a Rand Corporation analyst, a consultant to the Pentagon and White House, and drafted McNamara’s plans for nuclear war in 1961, noted that, “…the Joint Chiefs of Staff tolerated the shortcomings of the (nuclear command and) control system (in order) to put up fierce and prolonged resistance to measures that would tighten control of nuclear weapons up and down the line.  That was their distrust, above all in a crisis, of the judgement of civilian commanders and their staff and advisors, especially their willingness to launch nuclear attacks when military commanders believed them to be urgently necessary.  That distrust had emerged under Harry Truman during the Korean War and intensified under Eisenhower (both presidents vetoed the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and in other crises)…It was to become even more intense under JFK and McNamara.”  Comments:  Today serious concerns still exist on how to prevent the unauthorized, accidental, or irrational use of nuclear weapons and unfortunately not much has changed, in terms of U.S. nuclear policy, since the early decades of the Nuclear Age as Ellsberg explained, “The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago:  Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert…The declared official rationale for such a system…the supposed need to deter…an aggressive Russian first strike…That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception…The nature, scope, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes:  to attempt to limit the damage to the U.S. from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the U.S.S.R. or Russia.  This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them – U.S. threats of ‘first use’ – to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces and their allies.”  (Sources:  Daniel Ellsberg. “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” New York:  Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 12, 61-63 and Bruce Blair’s 2004 article is available at http://www.webarchive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm)

February 16, 1904 – George F. Kennan, a U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union who became famous for his “Mr. X” July 1947 article in Foreign Affairs magazine titled, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” that recommended the policy of “containment” rather than war with America’s former World War II ally, was born on this date.  The Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at  Princeton University for six decades, who passed away on March 17, 2005, wrote several books but one of the most prominent and relevant in the Nuclear Age and beyond was his 1982 work, “The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age.”  In this book, Kennan noted that, “War itself as a means of settling differences…will have to be in some ways ruled out; and with it there will have to be dismantled the greater part of the vast military establishments now maintained…the recognition that the weapons of this age – even the so-called conventional ones – are of such great destructiveness that there can be no clear line between the discriminate ones and the weapons of mass destruction.”  Comments:  Even a war fought in this technologically advanced 21^st century, without resorting to the use of weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons, have had devastating human, environmental, societal, and financial impacts as have been proven in many conventional wars fought since World War II.  The use of depleted uranium munitions, phosphorous bombs, modern precision-guided weapons such as Hellfire missiles, cluster bombs, and many other devices such as the Assad regime’s use of barrel bombs have not only killed and injured large numbers of combatants and civilians, but also caused cancers and other long-term mortal diseases.  It also seems increasingly likely that when a regime’s survival is at stake, nuclear weapons will also likely be used.  Therefore not only must we reduce dramatically and eliminate nuclear weapons, as well as enforce existing treaty prohibitions against the use of chemical and biological weapons, but we must also redouble global efforts to make war itself illegal, untenable, and obsolete as a means of settling disputes.  In return, our global civilization will prosper as trillions of dollars in military expenditures are redirected to fighting climate change, eliminating poverty and malnutrition, providing a free education to every person, finding cures for cancer and other chronic diseases, and insuring the survival of the human race indefinitely.  (Source:  George F. Kennan.  “The Nuclear Delusion:  Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age.” New York: Pantheon, 1982 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1982-12-01/nuclear-delusion-soviet-american-relations-atomic-age accessed Jan. 20, 2018.)

February 20, 1950 – A New York Times article published on this date titled, “Second Capital Urged in Atom Era: Underground Plan to Be Broached,” reported that Congressmen Chet Holifield and John Rankin, cognizant that a recent Atomic Energy Commission report concluded that three atomic bombs of the yield dropped on Hiroshima would “tear the guts out of Washington,” proposed creating an alternative seat of government located possibly in an underground cave such as Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave.  Ten months later on Dec. 1, 1950, President Truman signed Executive Order 10186 establishing the Federal Civil Defense Administration (which in 1958 merged with the military’s Office of Defense Mobilization to become a new agency, the Office of Defense and Civil Mobilization, which eventually became the Federal Emergency Management Agency).  Comments:  For almost seventy years, the U.S. and the other eight nuclear weapons states have spent many billions of dollars on programs to preserve their nations’ leadership or at least a representative sample of such leadership in the midst of a nuclear or WMD attack.  Over several decades, the U.S. government built a top secret Congressional bomb shelter under The Greenbrier resort hotel in West Virginia and secret bunkers for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at Raven Rock near Camp David, Maryland, Mount Weather, Virginia and at dozens of other locations.  A 24-hour airborne command post dubbed Looking Glass was created along with other extensive means of maintaining Continuity of Government (COG) and Continuity of Operations (COOP).  The rest of us, the vast majority of American and global populations were left to fend for ourselves, to find a large public shelter or build our own private bunker.  But the dirty little secret, long indisputably known by all thinking persons around the world, is that surviving a nuclear war is virtually impossible, an unviable option when we consider that even a so-called “limited” nuclear war can destroy global agriculture and result in the starvation of billions.  Now after the false “incoming ballistic missile” alerts in Hawaii on Jan. 13th and in Japan on Jan. 16^th, as well as the Center for Disease Control’s recent public relations boondoggle of informing Americans what to do in a nuclear war, it seems clear that continuing to waste even more of our global treasure on not only preparing for nuclear war but surviving such a unprecedented catastrophe is illogical and counterproductive.  This is obviously yet another reason why global citizenry should continue to pressure the leaders of the nine nuclear weapons states to reverse course, eliminate these doomsday weapons, and redouble international efforts to demilitarize the planet.  (Source:  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, p. 31.)

February 29, 2012 – A supposed breakthrough occurred on this date when U.S. negotiators convinced those from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) to sign on to an agreement in which all North Korean missile and nuclear testing would be suspended in exchange for extensive food aid assistance (targeting the poorest, most disadvantaged population groups in that nation).  However, somewhat predictably and not unlike a plethora of other agreements between the U.S. and its allies and the North Korean regime over the last several decades, this deal collapsed when a satellite launched by the North Koreans in April of 2012 was interpreted not as a commercial scientific advance, but as another step towards militarizing its ballistic missile capabilities.  Comments:  What many politicians, military leaders, arms control experts, and a growing segment of the global public see as a top U.S. priority – ending the Korean War with a peaceful, nonmilitary solution that not only demilitarizes but unites the two Koreas, rebuilding the North’s economy and redoubling its technological and commercial ties with Western and other nations – is apparently not a priority of the Trump Administration.  The 45^th President’s extreme rhetoric and military-focused responses have ratcheted up tensions on the Korean peninsula and throughout Northeast Asia since he took office.  However, recent bilateral successes by the two Koreas, including peaceful cooperation in the upcoming Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, hold promise, long-term, for a peaceful end to the seven-decade long Korean Conflict.  (Sources: Suzanne DiMaggio. “Learn from Iran, Engage North Korea,” pp. 37-40 in Tom Z. Collina and Geoff Wilson, editors. “10 Big Nuclear Ideas for the Next President.”  Ploughshares Fund Study Report No. 2, The Ploughshares Fund, November 2016 and Steven Lee Myers and Choe Sang Hun.  “North Koreans Agree to Freeze Nuclear Work; U.S. to Give Aid.”  New York Times.  Feb. 29, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/world/asia/us-says-north-korea-agrees-to-curb-nuclear-work.html accessed Jan. 20, 2018.)

January 1, 1947 – President Harry Truman, who ordered the U.S. Army Air Force to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 17 months previously, signed legislation on this date transferring the nation’s supply of nuclear bombs and production facilities to a new civilian agency – the Atomic Energy Commission headed by David Lilienthal.  The idea for the AEC came from Manhattan Project scientists, engineers, and nuclear physicists who had lobbied Congress to take the control of nuclear weapons away from Pentagon commanders.  Comments:  Unfortunately, another critical idea which would have internationalized the development and possession of nuclear weapons, the Baruch Plan, did not materialize in the postwar world.  Despite the valuable precedent of civilian control of nuclear weapons, the Nuclear Club members today continue to reject calls to dramatically reduce and eliminate these doomsday devices as an affront to their national sovereignty and ironically they argue that such moves will actually increase the risk of war.  Meanwhile a growing majority of global citizenry vehemently disagree with these assertions and continue to push for a world without nuclear weapons.  Perhaps Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, said it best, “It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.” (Source:  Craig Nelson. “The Age of Radiance.” New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 229.)

January 3, 1976 – As part of the Operation Anvil series of 19 underground nuclear test blasts at the Nevada Test Site, a test designated Muenster was conducted on this date at the bottom of a nearly mile deep shaft (4,759 feet).  This “Intermediate” magnitude test had an estimated yield of 160 kilotons, more than ten times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  Comments:  Although underground nuclear tests, mandated by the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, were obviously not as harmful as earlier atmospheric tests, contamination of underground water and mineral resources was a long-term risk as well as the possibility of the accidental venting of radioactive elements into the atmosphere which occurred on Dec.18, 1970 during the Baneberry ten kiloton test at the Nevada Test Site.  Nevertheless, the testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by 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 a relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook:  Volume II, Appendix B.” National Resources Defense Council, Inc. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, p. 171.)

January 11, 2012 – At the National Press Club in Washington, DC, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, Co-Chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), and Dr. Page Stoutland, Vice President for Nuclear Materials Security at NTI, unveiled the first-ever Nuclear Materials Security Index of Nations, comparing security conditions on a country-by-country basis in 176 nations.  Prepared with the assistance of The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the Index’s function was to persuade nations to strengthen nuclear security and reduce risks of thefts, diversions, and accidents.  On Jan.14, 2016 the third edition of the NTI Index was released assessing security conditions in 24 nations with one kilogram or more of weapons-usable nuclear materials.  An additional 152 countries with less than one kilogram of such materials or none at all were also assessed.  This “theft ranking” was included in the first and second editions of The Index in 2012 and 2014, respectively.  The 2016 NTI Index also examined a third set of nations, 45 in all, in a new “sabotage ranking” which assessed the risk of an act of sabotage or terrorism against a nuclear facility on the same or larger scale as the radioactive contamination seen in the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident.  Comments:  It is critical that the U.S., the other eight nuclear weapons states, and other nations with nuclear capabilities and fissile material inventories lift the heavy veil of secrecy and cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and other global nongovernmental entities such NTI to prevent proliferation and nuclear terrorism.  In future decades, as nuclear weapons and fissile materials inventories are dramatically reduced, such cooperation and transparency will be essential in moving toward global nuclear abolition.  (Source:  Nuclear Threat Initiative.  “Nuclear Security Index:  Building a Framework for Assurance, Accountability, and Action.”  http://www.nti.org/about/projects/nti-index/ accessed Dec. 19, 2017.)

January 20, 2017 – Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as the 45^th President of the United States despite serious concerns expressed during and after the election campaign that either he and/or his campaign officials had suspicious ties to Russian governmental representatives.  In addition to multiple allegations of criminal misconduct going back decades (including sexual harassment/assault, violations of the Domestic and Foreign Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution, and conflict of interest charges tied to his refusal to release his tax returns to the American people), before and after taking the oath of office, countless articles and media stories (from mostly non-mainstream media sources) expressed concerns about the mental stability of one of the oldest persons to ever serve as President – he turned 71 years of age on June 14, 2017.  Recently 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health professionals, led by Professor Bandy Lee, released a book on October 3, 2017 titled, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which concluded that, based on the speech, behavior, and daily tweets of the President over the long course of his public life, he is “a serious danger to the country and the world.”  They continued, “He places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war and of undermining democracy itself because of his pathological narcissism and sociopathy.”  Comments:  Along with his recent history of unwise, belligerent, and sometimes contradictory statements about nuclear weapons and his rants against Kim Jong-un and the North Korean regime, taken with the clear knowledge that he might do the unthinkable and press the nuclear button, sending a nuclear holocaust impacting not only North Korea or Iran but also many neighboring nations, including our allies, or other unknown, unpredictable targets, President Trump represents one of the most serious threats to world peace in this century and ultimately to the extremely fragile seven-decade old global nuclear deterrent system since 1945!  Unfortunately, efforts to convince him to resign, to impeach him, or to legally remove him from power appear as unlikely as does the milder action of persuading him to seek immediate psychotherapy.  But, if the global community and the largest majority of Americans possible redouble their efforts, there is increasing optimism that something can be done to prevent breaking the nuclear threshold and increasing the risk of a purposeful, accidental, or unintentional nuclear Armageddon.  Let us hope that in the President’s January 30, 2018 State of the Union Address he announces a clearly peaceful alternative to his previous nuclear saber rattling with North Korea and Iran and the beginning of the end of a renewed Cold War II and nuclear arms race with Russia.  (Sources: Multiple mainstream and alternative news media websites and articles.)

January 24, 1961 – As part of the 24-hour Operation Coverall U.S. Strategic Air Command plan, consistent with the first Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), to always have one-third of the strategic bomber fleet airborne in order to have available a nuclear strike option against the Soviet Union and its allies, a B-52G Stratofortress bomber carrying two 2.5 megaton Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs left Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina.  When a wing fuel tank leak was detected, the bomber headed back to base but the plane caught fire, exploded in mid-air, and crashed 12 miles north of the airbase near the town of  Goldsboro killing three of the eight-man crew and releasing the two hydrogen bombs from the plane’s payload bay.  Three of the arming devices on one of the bombs activated causing it to trigger the arming mechanisms and deploy a 100-foot diameter retardation parachute which allowed that bomb to hit the ground with little damage.   However, only one of six arming safety devices prevented the warhead from detonating in a nuclear explosion.  The second bomb plunged into a muddy field at about 700 miles-per-hour and disintegrated – although the tritium bottle and plutonium core were later partially recovered from 20 feet underground.  This bomb was in the “armed” setting because of the impact of the crash.  U.S. government reports, including a declassified report from Sandia National Laboratories published by the National Security Archive on June 9, 2014, concluded that the same safety switch involved in this 1961 crash had also failed in other incidents.  In a related development, Eric Schlosser’s 2013 book “Command and Control” presented a declassified 1969 document which quoted Parker F. Jones, a nuclear safety supervisor at Sandia National Laboratories, who said that, “One simple dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe.”  Comments:  If one or both of these multi-megaton hydrogen bombs had exploded four days into the Kennedy Administration, a nuclear war might have inadvertently been triggered.  If not, the U.S. still would have suffered an unprecedented nuclear disaster hundreds of times more significant than the Hiroshima bombing.  With hundreds of thousands killed within a zone of 17 miles and similar numbers injured, millions more people would have been irradiated as prevailing winds would have sent a huge radioactive cloud hundreds of miles northeast to the nation’s capital and on to New York City leaving a large, permanent evacuation zone in and around what some experts claim would have become a new Bay of North Carolina.  Comments:  Many of the hundreds, if not thousands of nuclear accidents involving all nine nuclear weapons states still remain partially or completely classified and hidden from public scrutiny.  These near-nuclear catastrophes provide an additional justification for reducing dramatically and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons arsenals.  (Sources:  Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, William Burr.  “The Nuclear Vault” National Security Archive at The George Washington University. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb475/ and “1961 Goldsboro B-52 Crash.”  Military Wiki. http://wikia.com/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash both accessed Dec.19, 2017.)

January 31, 1935 – Birthdate of Kenzaburo Oe, a renowned Japanese author and winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature.  This contemporary novelist, short story writer, and essayist has long dealt with social, political, and philosophical issues including social nonconformist theory, existentialism, nuclear weapons, and nuclear power.  Born in Ose, a village now in Uchiko, Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku, he is a pacifist and historian who revealed that Japanese military officers had coerced many Okinawan civilians into committing suicide during the Allied invasion of that island in 1945.  He also authored books and articles on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as on Article 9, the War Renunciation clause of the Japanese Constitution.  After the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, he urged Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to rethink the restart of Japanese nuclear reactors and abandon nuclear energy entirely.  In January 2014 he wrote that, “Hiroshima must be engraved in our memories.  It is a catastrophe more dramatic than natural disasters because it’s man-made.  To repeat it by showing the same disregard for human life in nuclear power stations is the worst betrayal of the memory of the victims of Hiroshima.”  (Sources:  Many mainstream and alternative news media articles and Akira Tashiro. “Japan: Finally No to Nuclear Power.”  The Progressive. http://progressive.org/dispatches/japan-finally-nuclear-power accessed Dec. 19, 2017.)

December 1, 2016 – Alex Wellerstein’s Washington Post article, “No One Can Stop President Trump From Using Nuclear Weapons,” concluded that, “When the legal framework for nuclear weapons was developed, the fear was not about an irrational president, but trigger-happy generals,” which was resolved long ago, Wellerstein noted, to mandate civilian control over the military and most importantly its possible firing of nuclear weapons.  Yet he also remarked that, “There is no way today to keep (President) Trump from launching a nuclear attack under the existing system.”  This article was certainly not the first of its kind but it surely helped fuel a continued ongoing debate expressed earlier in a most partisan way by Hillary Clinton’s statement at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2016, “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”  More recently at a Nov. 14, 2017 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) titled “Authority to Order the Use of Nuclear Weapons,” despite the admonition of chairman Bob Corker (R-TN) that the proceeding was not intended to target the 45^th President, “This is not specific to anybody,” many Democrats on the committee were not so reticent in expressing their concerns.  Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) stated that, “We are concerned that the President of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national interests.” Comments:  Despite seemingly comforting statements during this hearing by Brian McKeon, former Chief Counsel to the Democratic members of the SFRC for 12 years (“Article II of the Constitution mandating the President as sole Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces does not give him carte blanche to take the country to war.”) and General Robert Kehler, former head of U.S. Strategic Command (“The military can refuse to follow what it considers an illegal order, even a nuclear one.”), the entirety of the human species remains deeply concerned about the current very high risk of nuclear conflict involving the U.S.  Even if recent legislation from Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) on “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017” or a future, more bipartisan version of such a bill reached Donald Trump’s desk, it is likely he would veto it and it appears unlikely that Congress could override that veto. Nevertheless, it is time to redouble global efforts to prevent a Nuclear Armageddon.  (Sources:  U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations website and a variety of mainstream and alternative media sources such as Democracy Now and RT.com.)

December 7, 1993 – On this date, U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel R. O’Leary announced her Openness Initiative in “a deliberate effort to rebuild a basic level of trust between the American people and their government that is necessary for a democracy to function.”  As part of this initiative, she released documents describing previously classified U.S. nuclear tests, facts about bomb-grade plutonium, and related information.  The most startling release of information related to human radiation experiments, specifically the 1945-47 injections of 18 human subjects with plutonium.  More details on a wide variety of 48 different radiation experiments conducted on uninformed and/or uneducated members of the public came in a June 1994 press release.  Through the efforts of hundreds of Department of Energy (DOE) staff, private stakeholders, and long-time activists, a years-long effort to find, declassify, evaluate, and substantiate abuses by DOE and their subcontractors were revealed in a number of subsequent reports that were published in the ensuing years of the Clinton Administration. One such report was released in February of 1995.  Titled, “Human Radiation Experiments: The Department of Energy Roadmap to the Story and Records” (document number DOE/EH-0445), this report catalogued dozens of experiments conducted on not only adults but also children from the 1930s to 1970s.  One series of tests, which were conducted on unsuspecting hospital patients including the critically ill, pregnant women and their fetuses, the poor, the middle class, the mentally ill, and institutionalized children, resulted in the injection, irradiation, or other exposure to radioactive elements with the compiled data from the resultant cancers and even radioactive body parts forwarded for final analysis to Los Alamos National Laboratory or other DOE or governmental facilities.  Comments:  Such experiments probably represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of countless, purposeful experiments, tests, and radioactive exposures conducted by representatives of the nine nuclear weapons states and possibly other nations that considered or are today considering acquiring nuclear weapons and/or fissile materials.  This is yet another paramount reason why nuclear weapons and nuclear power should be dramatically reduced and eliminated entirely (except for legitimate medicinal uses or very limited internationally-sanctioned civilian nuclear fusion reactor research) by 2030.  (Source:  Eileen Welsome.  “The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War.”  New York:  Dial Press, 1999.)

December 10, 2017 – Setsuko Thurlow, an 85 year-old hibakusha survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, along with Executive Director Beatrice Fihn, as dual representatives of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), will receive the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway.  ICAN is being rewarded “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons (a reference to the overwhelming approval by U.N. member countries, except the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states, of the July 7, 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons- TPNW).”  ICAN is a coalition of 468 nonprofit organizations in 101 nations founded in 2007.  Comments:  Two years ago, Setsuko Thurlow honored the victims of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima on the 70^th anniversary of the attack by remarking that, “Former German President Richard von Weizeker once said, ‘We must look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion,’ The truth is, we all live with the daily threat of nuclear weapons.  In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes, every second of every day, nuclear weapons, thousands on high alert, are poised for deployment threatening everyone we love and everything we hold dear.  How much longer can we allow the nuclear weapons states to wield this threat to all life on earth?  Let us make the 70^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the appropriate milestone to achieve our goal:  to abolish nuclear weapons, and safeguard the future of our one shared planet earth.” (Sources:  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.  “Atomic Bomb Survivor to Jointly Accept Nobel Peace Prize on ICAN’s Behalf.”  Press Release, Oct. 26, 2017. http://www.ican.org/campaign-news/atomic-bomb-survivor-to-jointly-accept-nobel-peace-prize accessed Nov.16, 2017 and The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  “70 Years After Hiroshima, It’s Time to Confront the Past.” Sunflower Newsletter, September 2015.)

December 13, 2001 – The George W. Bush Administration announced that it would withdraw the United States from the 1972 ABM Treaty in six months – the first formal renunciation of an international arms control agreement since 1945.  Months later, in 2002, the President announced he would give the green light to the rapid deployment of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) missile defense system with the goal of having an initial operational capability by late 2004.  Unfortunately, the 43^rd President justified building the GMD system by arguing that the need for strategic missile defense was acute and required exempting the system from many of the mandatory oversight, accountability, and financial transparency procedures that Congress and the Pentagon had learned through decades of experience are critical to successfully developing viable, successful, and effective military systems.  The same can be said for the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system which currently has six “operational” batteries deployed.  Both THAAD and the GMD (the latter with a total of 44 deployed interceptors at Ft. Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California) systems’ exemption from the proven fly-before-you-buy process and track record of extremely limited real world capability (as seen in drastically flawed testing programs) has had an impact on the viability and reliability of missile defense systems that the Pentagon falsely claims are “proven.”  Comments:  Not only have unwise accelerated deployments of strategic missile defenses been incredibly expensive and wasteful of hundreds of billions of tax dollars, before and after President Reagan’s March 23, 1983 “Star Wars” speech, these deployments also helped fuel a renewed offensive nuclear arms race as the U.S., Russia, China, and other members of the Nuclear Club commit to spend trillions in the next few decades on new generations of ICBMs, submarine-launched and mobile land-based ballistic missiles, and air-launched cruise missiles, not to mention accelerated research and development on more exotic and destabilizing nuclear weapons systems.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 98 and Laura Grego, George N. Lewis, and David Wright. “Shielded From Oversight: The Disasterous U.S. Approach to Strategic Missile Defense.”  Union of Concerned Scientists, July 2016 and U.S. Department of Defense.  Missile Defense Agency. “Elements: Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD).” and “THAAD.” https://www.mda.mil/system/gmd.html and https://www.mda.mil/system/thaad.html both accessed Nov. 15, 2017.)

December 18, 1970 – At the Nevada Test Site in Area 8 on Yucca Flat, the eighth of 12 tests in the Operation Emery series of nuclear blasts, code-named Baneberry, caused an unexpected and unprecedented result for an underground explosion – a significant release of radioactive elements.  The ten kiloton blast, detonated at the bottom of a sealed vertical shaft 900 feet deep, created a fissure near the surface of the shaft cap that resulted in the leak of approximately six percent of the explosive’s radioactive products into the atmosphere.  Hot gas and radioactive fallout rained down on workers at the site but the release not only had a local impact but a global one.  The plume released 6.7 MCi of radioactive material including 80 kCi of Iodine-131 and other toxic noble gases that rose to the upper atmosphere and jet stream settling down later in areas of northeastern California, northern Nevada, southern Idaho, and eastern sections of Oregon and Washington with some radionuclides spreading across the U.S., to Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by 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 a relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook:  Volume II, Appendix B.” National Resources Defense Council, Inc. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, p.169 and “Estimated Exposures and Thyroid Doses Received by the American People from Iodine-131 in Fallout Following Nevada Atmospheric Nuclear Bomb Tests: History of the Nevada Test Site and Nuclear Testing Background.” National Cancer Institute. Chapter 2, September 1997. NIH 97-4264. https://www.cancer.gov.)

December 24, 1950 – Fifteen days after General Douglas MacArthur first requested that President Truman provide him with atomic bombs to turn back a massive Chinese attack on U.N. forces, he upped the ante on Christmas Eve by submitting to the President a more detailed strategic plan calling for a nuclear first strike. MacArthur’s operational plans included a list of 26 targets in mainland China to be hit by atomic blasts.  He also proposed dropping 30-50 such weapons in a path along the Manchurian border to prevent future invasions into North Korea from Red China for sixty years!  In April of 1951, Truman had had enough and he ordered MacArthur to step down as commander of Allied Forces in Korea.  However, top U.S. military planners continued to focus on using nuclear weapons to break the stalemate on the Korean peninsula.  MacArthur’s replacement, General Matthew Ridgway, requested the use of 38 atomic bombs against enemy targets in May of that year.  Comments:  While some would argue that events two-thirds of a century in the past have little relevance today, in fact recent U.S.-North Korean tensions include unfortunately a renewed dose of nuclear threat and bluster, this time on both sides.  The Korean War that was curtailed dramatically after the July 1953 Armistice has nevertheless been reenergized.  There is a desperate need for global intervention to forestall a 21^st century Korean War by signing a permanent peace treaty ending the conflict for good.  All parties at risk should be coerced, persuaded, cajoled, or begged to resolve the crisis through an enlarged “1.5 talks” process that expands this small private channel endeavor to a large-scale negotiating protocol shepherded by neutral nations such as Brazil, India, and South Africa.  The alternative could be the species-threatening breach of the nuclear threshold for the first time since 1945 – possibly the beginning of the end for global civilization.  (Sources:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013 and numerous mainstream and alternative news media sources.)

November 5, 1951 – Easy, the fourth nuclear test explosion of Operation Buster-Jangle in a series of seven test blasts sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory, was conducted at the Nevada Test Site.  A U.S. Air Force B-45 bomber dropped the warhead and it was detonated at an altitude of 1,314 feet with a magnitude of 31 kilotons, about twice as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  The objective of these tests was to evaluate new devices that might be included in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by 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 a relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook:  Volume II, Appendix B.” National Resources Defense Council, Inc. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, p. 152.)

November 8, 2016 – In one of the closest elections in U.S. history, Republican Donald J. Trump was elected the 45^th President of the United States by virtue of his Electoral College margin of 304-227 over Democrat Hillary Clinton despite the fact that he lost the popular vote by over 2.8 million votes (48.0 to 45.9 percent).  As a result, the nuclear threat to the U.S. and the world has undisputedly risen based on Trump’s pre-election statements:  “You want to be unpredictable (with nuclear weapons),” CBS-TV, Jan. 13, 2016; “Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?” MSNBC, Aug. 3, 2016, as well as his comments made during the transition period and after he took the oath of office.  Six days after his inauguration, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, in consultation with that organization’s Board of Sponsors, which included 15 Nobel Laureates, “…decided to act, in part, based on the words of a single person: Donald Trump.” The organization’s press release continued, “Donald Trump made disturbing comments about the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons…Both his statements and actions as President-elect have broken with historical precedent in unsettling ways.  He has made ill-considered comments about expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  He has shown a troubling propensity to discount or outright reject expert advice related to international security (and arms control)…”  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists used this language about Trump (as well as pointing to other negative global nuclear trends) to justify moving the Doomsday Clock from three minutes to two and a half minutes until Midnight.  Comments:  Unfortunately most scholars would argue that historical precedent does not allow for the consideration of threatening nuclear Armageddon as a sufficient constitutional justification for the impeachment of a President.  Many other presidents have used nuclear threats and gotten away with it, notably President Nixon’s 1969 actions consistent with his ‘Madman Theory of International Relations’ of threatening an attack on the Soviet Union in order to convince the Vietnamese communist leadership that he was irrational and unable to compromise at the Paris Peace Talks.  Since becoming president, Donald Trump has expressed strong hostility toward two critical nuclear agreements negotiated by his predecessor: the 2010 New START Treaty with Russia and the multilateral nuclear deal with Iran.  Kingston Reif and Kelsey Davenport noted additionally that, “He has impulsively and recklessly threatened to respond to North Korean provocations (nuclear tests and ballistic missile test launches) with ‘fire and fury,’” and stated that the U.S. military might be forced to destroy all of North Korea.  Indeed, how can one be absolutely sure that like other presidents, Trump is only threatening to use nuclear weapons, not actually planning to do the unthinkable and cross the nuclear threshold plunging the world into an abyss it may never recover from?  Last year and then again a few weeks ago, over 20 prestigious psychiatrists and mental health professionals analyzed Trump’s personality and character and determined that he suffers from “malignant narcissism,” and that, “his speech and behavior show signs of significant mental derangement,” concluding that, “anyone as mentally unstable as Trump should not be entrusted with the life and death powers of the presidency.”  For these paramount reasons, along with many others noted by legal and constitutional scholars (his violation of the Foreign Emoluments Clause for one), it seems reasonable that Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and all other political entities in this nation and abroad should press firmly for the resignation or impeachment of President Trump with all deliberate speed!  On the other hand, even if this unlikely series of events achieves success – what guarantee is there that Vice President Mike Pence or others in the line of presidential succession won’t also endanger the world with their own nuclear threats and actions?  In actuality, individual leaders are not the main problem.  Humanity faces destruction from climate change and nuclear war mostly because of a flawed global system that must adapt, reform, and evolve into a more egalitarian model before it is too late.   (Sources:  Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Press Release.  “It is Now Two and A Half Minutes to Midnight.”Jan.25, 2017 (Embargoed until Jan. 26, 2017). http://thebulletin.org/press-release/it-now-two-and-half-minutes-midnight10432, Mehdi Hasan. “Worried About Trump’s Mental Stability?  The Worst is Yet to Come.”  The Intercept.org, Oct. 7, 2017, Dave Leip’s Atlas of Presidential Elections.  https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=2016&off=0&elect=0&f=0, and Kingston Reif and Kelsey Davenport.  “Trump’s Threat to Nuclear Order.”  War on the Rocks.  Oct. 12, 2017. http://warontherocks.com/2017/10/trumps-threat-to-nuclear-order/ all accessed on Oct. 20, 2017.)

November 17-18, 1980 – “The Medical Consequences of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War,” a PSR travelling symposium sponsored by the Bay Area Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and the Council for a Livable World Education Fund, was held on these dates at the Herbst Theater in the War Memorial Veterans Building at the Civic Center in San Francisco.  Under the leadership of Dr. Helen Caldicott, PSR’s symposium series went from one U.S. city to another illustrating in stark detail the specific and horrendous impacts of nuclear war on each of the nation’s metropolitan areas.  Participants in this San Francisco conference included Herbert Scoville, Jr., President of the Arms Control Association, Dr. Sidney Drell, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Deputy Director of The Stanford Linear Accelerator, Dr. Stuart Finch, former Director of Research, Radiation Effects Research Foundation, Hiroshima, and retired Rear Admiral Gene R. La Rocque, Director of the Center for Defense Information.  The symposium wrapped up with this concluding statement, “There are no winners in a nuclear war, worldwide fallout would contaminate much of the globe for generations and atmospheric effects would severely damage all living things.”  Comments:  Three years after this conference, the TTAPS Study, one of whose authors included science popularizer and Professor of Astronomy at Cornell Carl Sagan, provided even stronger evidence that a nuclear war would not only be catastrophic for global civilization but could possibly trigger the end of all human life on the planet due to the Nuclear Winter phenomenon.  Nevertheless, presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump have argued and continue to argue that might makes right and that building up the U.S. nuclear arsenal is not only good for the economy but ensures our nation’s survival in an unstable world.  Thankfully, a growing global constituency is demanding a shift to a New Paradigm that promotes an end to all wars, the phase-out of not only nuclear weapons but also nuclear power plants in favor of green, sustainable non-carbon-producing forms of energy, the redistribution of wealth to ensure the survival and prosperity of all the world’s inhabitants, and an end to the warped conception of “Peace through Strength.” (Source:  University of California at San Francisco.  News/Public Information Series Press Release. Nov. 6, 1980 and a plethora of alternative news media sources.)

November 20, 1983 – The Day After, a Nicholas Meyer-produced film was broadcast nationwide on ABC Television.  Starring Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams, John Lithgow and others, this film was one of the first realistic dramatic presentations that explored the specific impacts of nuclear war on an actual American city – Lawrence, Kansas.  It is estimated that approximately 100 million Americans, half of the adult population of the country, watched the televised event.  Even a dedicated Cold Warrior like President Ronald Reagan, who may have seen an early rough cut of The Day After, acknowledged that his administration’s preparations to triumph in a nuclear war were naïve and unrealistic when he publicly stated in a speech to the Japanese Diet, “I believe there can be only one policy for preserving our precious civilization in this modern age.  A nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.”  Comments:  Over the seven decades since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hollywood as well as independent producers have provided many more films, miniseries, and documentaries about the unfortunately all too real threat of nuclear war.  However, the still growing strength of the military-industrial-Congressional-nuclear weapons laboratories complex and the mainstream media’s reluctance to report anti-nuclear and anti-militarist stories has resulted in a decades-long trend of growing militarism in American society.  This is seen in a number of areas:  Congress’ rhetoric of “the nuclear option” in reference to budget debates, the strong association of military terms to entertainment, sporting, and political events, the growing popularity of the video-computer game industry with titles embracing nuclear conflict and post-apocalyptic “play scenarios,” and in many other segments of American life.  Fortunately, a growing proportion of Americans and world citizenry are increasingly cognizant that nuclear conflict is not a game and must be prevented at all costs if our global civilization is to survive.  (Sources:  Mainstream and alternative media sources including CNN, The New York Times, Democracy Now, and RT.com.)

November 24, 1975 – Enroute to the Pacific Missile Test Range Facility in Hawaii, the U.S. Navy destroyer DD-950 U.S.S. Richard S. Edwards suffered an accidental explosion when an ASROC anti-submarine rocket propulsion system ignited causing injuries to at least one or more crew members.  The Navy did not categorize this incident as a Broken Arrow or nuclear accident most probably because the missile, while nuclear-capable, was in this particular circumstance not armed with an atomic warhead.  However, this incident illustrates that it was certainly possible that a nuclear-armed ASROC igniting accidentally could trigger a serious leak of radioactive materials or even the loss of the warhead overboard.  Comments:  This serious accident was just one example of dozens or even hundreds of accidents, involving weapons systems that are nuclear-capable, that have occurred underwater or on the high seas by naval forces of the nine nuclear weapons states.  In cases where nuclear reactors and warheads are lost at sea, there is the deadly serious concern about the leakage of highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep but the health and well-being of millions of people.  (Sources:  John Pike, et al., “Chicken Little and Darth Vader: Is the Sky Really Falling?” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 1, 1991, pp. 57-58 and William Arkin and Joshua Handler.  “Neptune Papers II:  Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990.)

November 28, 1993 – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile material in the last 25 years, especially since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, local authorities arrested a number of suspects in Polyarny, Russia on this date for the attempted transfer of 4,500 grams of highly enriched uranium to a group of buyers who were in actuality undercover security forces – this was the largest amount seized in the last two decades or so.  In April 2015, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Deputy Director Anne Harrington testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Strategic Forces that, “Of the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have come out of the former Soviet Union.” Despite recent reassurances from Rosatom, the state-owned corporation that runs Russia’s nuclear energy and weapons plants, that their nuclear materials, “are always strictly controlled” and accounted for, a Center for Public Integrity November 2015 investigative report concluded that, “In fact, some 99 percent of the world’s weapons-grade materials have been secured.  But one percent or more is still out there, and it amounts to several thousand pounds that could be acquired by any one of several terrorist organizations.” Comments:  Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from  theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the U.N. and other international fora, as well as bilaterally by the Trump and Putin administrations, to prevent the use of fissile materials in dirty bombs or primitive small-yield fission weapons whether the materials diverted come from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapon facilities.  In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis, such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.  (Source:  Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith.  “The Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.” Center for Public Integrity, Nov. 12, 2015 reprinted in Courier: The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)

October 3, 1942 – At the Peenemunde Army Research Center located on an island in the Baltic Sea, aerospace engineers commanded by the German Wehrmacht for the first time successfully launched a long-range guided single-stage, liquid-fueled ballistic missile.  The 46-foot long Aggregat 4 (A4) rocket, also known as Vergeltungswaffe 2 (V-2), which translates as “Vengeance Weapon 2,” weighing in at 27,600 pounds and capable of carrying a one-ton conventional high explosive warhead, reached a height of 52.5 miles.  Almost two years later beginning in September of 1944, some 3,000 of these weapons were launched at Allied targets in London, Antwerp, and Leiden, within their range limit of approximately 200 miles, killing almost 10,000 civilians and military personnel.  Also, tens of thousands of Jewish and other slave laborers were worked to death building not only the rocket components but the huge launch complex.  Comments:  Over the last three quarters of a century, the development of long-range ballistic missiles on hair-trigger alert status and nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear fusion weapons with yields up to thousands of times that of the Hiroshima bomb, have led to an untenable, irrational, and unstable world where at any moment, a global nuclear catastrophe can be triggered through accident, miscalculation, madness, or unintentional means, which could very well result in the end of civilization and very possibly the extinction of the human species.  We have been very fortunate so far, but our luck won’t last forever, therefore these doomsday weapons must be eliminated at the earliest possible opportunity.  (Source:  Wernher von Braun and Frederick Ordway III.  “Space Travel: A History.”  New York:  Harper & Row, 1985, p. 45.)

October 6, 1986 – A Soviet nuclear-powered Yankee-I-class submarine K-219, that had experienced an accidental explosion in one of its SS-N-6 long-range nuclear-tipped ballistic missile tubes three days earlier approximately 480 miles east of Bermuda, sank in the Atlantic Ocean while under tow in 18,000 feet of water.  At least three crew members were killed in the initial explosion and it is likely that leakage from the damaged nuclear warheads may have irradiated other members of the crew and the personnel of five Soviet rescue vessels despite assurances by the Soviet government that there was “no risk of triggering the weapons onboard, or of a nuclear explosion, or of radioactive contamination.”  However, Western sources reported at the time that 16 nuclear missiles and two reactors were on board the vessel when it sank.  Comments:  This deadly incident was just one example of dozens or even hundreds of accidents involving submarines, surface ships, and aircraft involving the loss of nuclear propulsion units and/or nuclear weapons.  Some of these 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.  (Sources:  John Pike, et al., “Chicken Little and Darth Vader:  Is the Sky Really Falling?” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 1, 1991 and William Arkin and Joshua Handler. “Neptune Papers II:  Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990.)

October 17, 2015 – At a meeting of the World Medical Association (WMA) General Assembly held in Moscow, this grouping of global physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals unanimously updated its Statement on Nuclear Weapons originally adopted in 1998 and amended in 2008, requesting that all National Medical Associations take extensive steps to educate their publics and governments about the incredibly horrendous, species-threatening health impacts of nuclear conflict and “to join the WMA in supporting this Declaration and to urge their respective governments to work to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.”  Comments:  A plethora of scientific papers, conferences, and symposia over the last several decades on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war have concluded that even a relatively small number of thermonuclear explosions can almost entirely negate reasonable medical responses, even for a large, wealthy nation such as the United States.  This represents yet another reason why nuclear weapons must be abolished.  (Source:  “The Growing Threat of Nuclear War and the Role of the Health Community.”  World Medical Journal, Vol. 62, No. 3, October 3, 2016.  http://lab.arstubiedriba.lv/WMJ/vol62/3-october-2016/slides/slide-7.jpg accessed Sept. 22, 2017.)

October 18, 1998 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Can We Learn to Live Without Nuclear Weapons,” produced by The Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan, 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).  The chief issue addressed in this episode was, “Must the world continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for stability and security or should nuclear weapons be abolished altogether, and if so, how?”  Most of the prominent experts interviewed for the film, including David Krieger, the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; Senator Alan Cranston (Retired), President of the Gorbachev USA Foundation; Admiral Noel Gaylor, former Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, USN (Retired); and Paul Warnke, Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1967-69, and Chief U.S. Arms Control negotiator, 1977-78, argued for the elimination of global nuclear arsenals.

October 21-22, 2008 – At the “Cyber War, Cyber Terrorism, and Cyber Espionage” IT Security Conference held in Fargo, North Dakota, many threats were contemplated, hypothesized, and projected but at least one real world nuclear threat was reported.  At least two independent sources corroborated this story.  One is Ron Rosenbaum’s 2011 book “How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III” and the other is a paper by Professor Joe St Sauver which specifically quotes long-time nuclear expert Dr. Bruce Blair.  “Blair cites one scary example:  the discovery of an unprotected electronic backdoor into the naval broadcast communications network used to transmit launch orders by radio to the U.S. Trident deterrent submarine fleet.  Unauthorized persons including terrorists might have been able to seize electronic control of shore-based radio transmitters … and actually inject a (nuclear) launch order into the network.  The deficiency was taken so seriously that new launch order validation protocols had to be devised, and Trident crews had to undergo special training to learn them.”  Comments: Cyber security and anti-hacking protocols, especially to prevent unauthorized access to nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, should be the focus of a strong internationally binding set of agreements among all the world’s nations, especially the nine nuclear weapons states. (Sources:  Ron Rosenbaum.  “How the End Begins:  The Road to a Nuclear World War III.” New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 109 and Professor Joe St Sauver.  “Cyber War, Cyber Terrorism, and Cyber Espionage:  Report of IT Security Conference held Oct. 21-22, 2008 in Fargo, ND https://www.stsauver.com/~joe/cyberwar/cyberwar.pdf accessed Sept. 22, 2017.)

October 23-27, 2017 – The Fourth International Conference on Nuclear Power Plant Life Management, organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in coordination with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the Electric Power Research Institute, will be held on these dates in Lyon, France (the nation with the greatest percentage of electricity generated by nuclear power).  This meeting will allegedly build on three previous conferences on the same subject held in Budapest in 2002, Shanghai in 2007, and Salt Lake City in 2012 with the aim to address, “the management of the safe, cost-effective operation of the world’s fleet of (civilian) nuclear power plants (NPPs) which are on average 20 years old even though the design life of such plants is typically 30-40 years or more.”  Comments:  While it may seem prudent for nuclear engineers and plant operation professionals to exchange essential information and procedures that might mitigate, lessen, or even prevent nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and many other such incidents, it is more likely that such conferences are chiefly designed to persuade the public that nuclear plant operations are routine, economical, safe, and a critical alternative to dirty fossil fuel power plants.  Wrong on all four counts!  For instance, solar, wind, and geothermal energy systems have proven, especially in the last few years, much more economically feasible and competitive than nuclear power plants.  Then there is the nuclear industry mantra that nuclear energy is “zero carbon electricity,” and that there are no global warming impacts from nuclear power generation, which represents an elaborate delusion.  Zero carbon?  This is technically true during the thirty years or longer that a nuclear plant is operating, but patently wrong when we recognize the huge carbon signature of nuclear power plants during their entire life cycle.  Significant greenhouse emissions are the result of mining, transporting, processing, and mitigating harmful environmental impacts before uranium fuel is loaded into a reactor.  Then there are the emissions resulting from the construction and maintenance of large nuclear complexes including waste removal, sequestration, and very long-term storage (potentially requiring thousands or even tens of thousands of years), not to mention decommissioning, decontaminating, and restoring a nuclear site to the public commons. The nuclear industrial complex also fails to factor into the equation the long-term environmental and public health costs as well as the terrorist attack or blackmail threat and the dangerous risk of nuclear proliferation when considering the creation, operation, and decommissioning of a nuclear power plant.  (Sources:  International Atomic Energy Agency. http://www.pub.iaea.org/iaeameeting/50811/Fourth-International-Conference-On-Nuclear-Power-Plant-Life-Management, The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. http://ieer.org, and The Helen Caldicott Foundation. http://helencaldicottfoundation.org/ accessed Sept. 25, 2017.)

September 1, 2014 – An article authored by Ray Henry in the Washington Post titled, “U.S. Seeks Trains to Carry Nuclear Waste, But There’s Nowhere For Them to Go Yet,” was published on this date.  Henry reported that he discovered a public solicitation filed by the Department of Energy that proposed purchasing or leasing rail cars to haul 150 ton casks filled with irradiated spent fuel and other nuclear waste from over 90 existing U.S. civilian nuclear power plants.  The solicitation noted that the rail cars would have to last for up to thirty years and would run at standard speed on regular railroad tracks.  The protective casks, which would be reused up to eight times a year, would carry an estimated 70,000 tons of nuclear waste from 30 states to a permanent underground repository site that does not actually exist yet.  Decades-long plans enacted after Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 focused on shipping this huge volume of waste by both rail and road to the Yucca Mountain, Nevada site located two hours northeast of Las Vegas.  But the site proved scientifically unsound and politically unworkable.  Meanwhile, more and more nuclear waste is piling up in spent fuel ponds and storage areas in and around U.S. nuclear power plants. Even proposals to move the waste to a smaller number of regional above ground storage facilities, until a permanent site can be tested, scientifically approved, and politically agreed to, will take many years of effort and cost tens of billions of dollars.  Comments:  While almost every antinuclear supporter welcomed the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a godsend, there is one significant caveat to this sentiment, the treaty’s preamble which recognizes nations’ “inalienable right” to peaceful uses of nuclear energy.  The global nuclear waste long-term storage conundrum is just one of several critical reasons (another is that nuclear power plants do, in fact, have significant, long-term pre-cradle to grave greenhouse signatures) why nuclear power along with nuclear weapons must both be phased out of existence as soon as possible.  The proliferation threat and the terrorist attack dangers inherent in nuclear power plant operation and especially during nuclear waste transport and long-term storage are other penultimate considerations.  (Sources:  Gregg Levine and Caroline Preston. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Inside the American Nuclear Waste Crisis.” The New Yorker.  Nov. 25, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/pilgrims-progress-inside-the-american-nuclear-crisis accessed Aug. 14, 2017 and other alternative media sources.)

September 12, 1984 – Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning actress Joanne Woodward served as chairperson of the first National Women’s Conference to Prevent Nuclear War held in the Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.  Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Gene R. La Rocque, director of the antinuclear, antiwar Pentagon watchdog nonprofit organization, the Center for Defense Information (CDI), encouraged board member Woodward to coordinate and host the historic meeting of 250 invitees from the fields of education, science, politics, sports, and entertainment including First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Coretta Scott King, Bella Abzug, Eleanor Smeal, actresses Sally Field, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Alexander, as well as noted tennis superstar Billie Jean King and women Congressional representatives and staff.  Admiral La Rocque noted that, “My generation has failed to stop the arms race.  But it’s really the men who have failed.  Now it’s up to the women…”  Woodward noted that, “We’re not anti-men, we’re pro-survival. We just thought it would be best for women to hear what other women have to say on the subject because we certainly aren’t being heard in those behind-the-doors meetings where the decisions are made about war and peace.”  Comments:  While much has changed in the 33 years since this conference was held and women have long held meaningful political and military leadership roles in many nations and in international organizations such as the United Nations, one can argue that women have played and should continue to play influential roles in the antinuclear and related peace and social change movements on a global scale.  An opponent of the Vietnam War, like her spouse actor Paul Newman (1925-2008) who also served as a CDI board member, Woodward labored to join with Soviet women in the cause of preventing nuclear conflict by supporting the Nuclear Freeze Movement and other similar efforts to reduce and eliminate the nuclear threat to humanity.  (Source:  Judy Klemesrud.  “Rallying Women on Nuclear War Issues.”  New York Times. Sept. 9, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/09style/rallying-women-on-nuclear-war-issues.html accessed Aug. 14, 2017.)

September 14, 1954 – In a military exercise designated Light Snow, 45,000 Soviet soldiers and officers, told only that they would be involved in an exercise involving a new weapon, were purposely exposed to a ground detonation of a 30-kiloton nuclear device, twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, at the Totskoye Military Range in Orenburg Oblast, Russia.  The bomb was dropped by a Tu-4 bomber while Deputy Defense Minister and hero of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) Georgy Zhukov observed from a safe distance in an underground bunker.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by 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 a relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  James Mahaffey.  “Atomic Accidents.”  New York:  Pegasus Books, 2014, p. 79.)

September 20, 2017 – The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, as initiated in U.N. General Assembly Resolution A/RES/71/258 after first being proposed by a core group of six nations (Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa), adopted by 113 nations on Dec. 23, 2016, with the final round of negotiations taking place earlier this summer at U.N. Headquarters in New York City, will be opened for signature on this date.  Article 15 of the treaty requires that it will enter into force 90 days after 50 nation-states ratify the agreement.  The treaty, which was approved after an overwhelmingly favorable vote in the General Assembly on July 7, 2017 (122 countries voted in favor, the Netherlands against, and Singapore abstained), prohibits development, testing, production, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, transporting, and deployment of nuclear arms, as well as assisting other nations in any nuclear weapons-related activities and forbidding the use or threat to use these doomsday weapons.  While the treaty has been negotiated by countries that do not have nuclear weapons, Article 4 of the agreement offers the nine members of the Nuclear Club the opportunity to join the treaty with nuclear arms still in their possession whether based on their own territory or an allied nation’s territory.  However, Article 4 mandates that if Nuclear Club members want to join, the weapons must be immediately removed from operational status and the nation must agree to a “legally binding, time-bound plan for the verified and irreversible elimination of all such weapons” as approved by the treaty’s members.  Comments:  Led by the U.S. and Russia, which possess more than 90 percent of the world’s total nuclear arsenal, most of the Nuclear Club members have expressed strong opposition to this treaty, arguing that not only is the treaty overly idealistic and utopian in nature, but also a danger to the system of supposedly “stable, reliable nuclear deterrence that has prevented the use of such weapons for more than seventy years.”  A growing plethora of global critics including academics, the military, arms control experts, politicians, and the general public have responded that the U.S., Russia and other nuclear weapons possessing nations have unfortunately fooled themselves into believing that deterrence is perfect or nearly so, and that the existing nuclear status quo ante will remain robust, stable, and unerring for the indefinite future of the human species.  This stance is highly illogical and counterintuitive as far as the history of civilization and great power politics is concerned.  Perhaps George Wilhelm Engel’s statement from 1827 says it best, “What experience and history teach is this:  that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”  Nevertheless, let us hope that the Nuclear Ban Treaty will enter into force this fall and mark the beginning of the end of the threat of global thermonuclear Apocalypse.  (Sources:  Zia Mian. “After the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty:  A New Disarmament Politics.”  Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  July 7, 2017. http://thebulletin.org/after-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty-new-disarmament-politics10932 and Matthew Bolton. “A Brief Guide to the New Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.” JustSecurity.org. July 14, 2017. https://www.justsecurity.org/43004/guide-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty both accessed Aug. 14, 2017.)

September 23, 1992 – On this date, the U.S. concluded 47 years of nuclear testing (which included a total of 1,030 test blasts) that began with the first test code-named Trinity on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico and ended with a 20 kiloton underground nuclear test code-named Divider at the Nevada Test Site.  Less than two weeks after this test, President George H. W. Bush signed the Hatfield Amendment into law which mandated a nuclear test moratorium.  President Bill Clinton extended the moratorium until September 1996 at which time he signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).  On Oct. 13, 1999, the Senate rejected the CTBT by a vote of 51-48 and has not brought the treaty back to the floor for a vote even though six months after the Senate CTBT rejection, the Russian Duma approved the ratification of the agreement by a vote of 298-74 on April 21, 2000.  For more than 20-plus years, it seemed to be a given that nuclear testing was not only unnecessary but counter to U.S. and international nuclear non-proliferation policies (seen today in widespread opposition to Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development and testing).  In addition to decades of agreement seen in statements by U.S. defense officials and nuclear weapons laboratory directors, there was a 2012 National Academy of Sciences report, “The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – Technical Issues for the United States,” which laid out a clear-cut technical agreement that concluded that the U.S. did not need nuclear tests to maintain its arsenal.  And in September 2016, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution urging hold out countries to ratify the CTBT.  The United States actually voted in favor of this resolution.  Comments:  Unfortunately some Republicans in Congress as well as President Trump apparently believe U.S. nuclear testing should return.  Republican Congressmen and allies of the 45^th President, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC), proposed legislation (including S.332) in February 2017 to cut the U.S. share of 25 percent funding ($30 million annually) to the Vienna-based Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization which runs a network of 337 monitoring stations to help enforce the CTBT ban on nuclear explosions.  Not only would this bill set the stage for renewed U.S. nuclear testing, it would also dilute nonproliferation efforts to publicize and sanction countries involved in unauthorized nuclear tests such as North Korea or other nations.  U.S. and other Nuclear Club members’ plans to spend trillions of dollars over the next 30 years to build new generations of nuclear weapons as well as upgrade existing arsenals might benefit from an end to nuclear testing prohibition.  But this would also dramatically increase the risk of nuclear warfighting in the 21^st century, making human extinction more likely.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5, 15, and 22; Darryl G. Kimball and Tom Z. Collina.  “No Going Back: 20 Years Since Last Nuclear Test.”  Issue Briefs, Vol 3. Issue 14, Arms Control Association. Sept. 20, 2012. http://www.armscontrol.org/issuebriefs/No-Going-Back-20-Years-Since-the-Last -US-Nuclear-Test%20 and David Axe.  “Republicans Move to Strip Away Nuclear Test Ban Funding.” Daily Beast. Feb. 13, 2017. http://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-move-to-strip-away-nuclear-test-ban-funding both accessed Aug. 15, 2017.)

September 26, 1983 – During a time of great Cold War tension and perhaps the second most dangerous time in human history (after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962), an event occurred that could have resulted in the unthinkable – a global thermonuclear World War III.  Weeks after the Soviets shot down an unarmed civilian South Korean airliner, KAL Flight 007, killing 269 people near Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan on September 1, 1983 and weeks before NATO’s Able Archer military exercise (interpreted by a large number of Soviet military and political leaders as a precursor for an actual first strike nuclear attack), this incident took place.  In the early hours of the morning of September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, on duty at Serpukhov-15, a top-secret nuclear command and control station in a rural area just south of Moscow, was monitoring data from a relatively new Soviet early warning satellite.  At 0015 hours, bright red warning lights suddenly lit up the room and a loud klaxon horn directed Petrov to a display showing a U.S. nuclear missile launch from America’s western coast.  Then quickly several more U.S. missile launches were detected.  Petrov asked his colleagues manning the satellite telescopes for “visual confirmation.”  But with the atmosphere cloudy, it was impossible to confirm or deny the alleged nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.  Precious time was speeding by.  He had only 15 minutes or less to make the most important decision of his life.  He was duty bound to report this likely attack, which was registering as the “highest” level of reliability, to his top commanders to recommend an instantaneous nuclear counter-strike.  “All I had to do was to reach for the phone, to raise the direct line (for a counter-strike)…but I couldn’t move.  I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan,” he said later.  Instead, Lt. Col. Petrov called the duty officer in the Soviet army’s headquarters and reported a system malfunction.”  If he was wrong, within minutes he would feel the shock wave of U.S. nuclear weapons impacting the Kremlin and hear an alert message on other impacts targeting his nation.  “Twenty-three minutes later, I realized that nothing had happened…It was such a relief,” His sweating, terrified colleagues gathered around him to proclaim him a hero.  Several days later, however, Petrov received an official reprimand for what happened that night – not for what he did, but for mistakes in the log book. “They were lucky it was me on shift that night,” was his understated comment.  This story remained unknown and unreported to the outside world until 1998 when his commanding officer Yury Votintsev revealed details of the incident in a memoir.  Comments:  This is yet another of the very numerous reasons why all nuclear weapons must be eliminated, the sooner the better. (Sources: Pavel Aksenov.   “Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World.”  BBC.com. Sept. 26, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831 and Colin Freeman.  “How Did One Grumpy Russian Halt Armageddon.”  The Telegraph. May 11, 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-man-who-saved-the-world/nuclear-war-true-story/ both accessed Aug. 15, 2017.)

August 1, 2016 – As part of a routine ongoing series of strategic deterrence exercises, a U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) mission called POLAR ROAR, in conjunction with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and NATO allies, began when five bombers from all three of the U.S. strategic bomber bases commenced a military exercise designed to test STRATCOM’s long-range, global-strike capability as three synchronized flight plans encompassed more than 55,000 miles. One B-52 bomber from the 2^nd Bomb Wing at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada flew with Danish, Swedish, and Canadian fighter aircraft to the North and Baltic Seas before returning to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana.  Two B-52s from the 5^th Bomb Wing, Minot AFB, North Dakota flew over the North Pole and mainland Alaska where they conducted intercept training with NORAD-assigned U.S. F-22 aircraft and an inert weapons drop at the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex (JPARC).  At the same time, two B-2 bombers from the 509^th Bomb Wing, Whiteman AFB, Missouri flew over the Pacific Ocean to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska where they practiced intercepts with NORAD-assigned U.S. F-15 aircraft and an inert weapons drop at JPARC.  Meanwhile Russia has stepped up similar nuclear war preparation exercises including a 2013 practice mission that allegedly targeted NATO bases in Sweden.  In 2015-16, Secretary-General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg charged that “…over the past three years, Russia has conducted at least 18 large-scale “snap” (no advanced notice) exercises, some of which have involved more than 100,000 troops…as part of its overall military buildup, the pace of Russia’s maneuvers and drills have reached levels unseen since the height of the Cold War.” Also, there are numerous press reports in 2016-2017 of sometimes intimidating U.S./NATO and Russian intercepts of opposing aircraft on the Asian and European borders of both sides.  Comments:  The odds of an accidental, unintentional, or unauthorized nuclear war are greater today than they have been since the Cold War, especially due to confrontations between aircraft on or near the borders of both nations and in conflict zones such as Syria or Ukraine.  While there have been valuable confidence-building and conflict-reducing agreements in the past like the June 1989 U.S.-U.S.S.R.  Agreement on the Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities, much more needs to be done today and in the near future to help prevent events that might heighten the chance of nuclear escalation.  Many policy experts, politicians, activists, and military officials have argued for no-fly zones around volatile regions like Syria, the Persian Gulf, and the Korean peninsula.  In addition, it is critical that there be a global agreement to wall off cyber capabilities from all military and civilian nuclear operations and early warning systems to prevent a cyber-caused nuclear crisis that could escalate to a nuclear World War III.  (Sources: U.S. Strategic Command Public Affairs.  “Strategic Bomber Force Showcases Allied Interoperability During POLAR ROAR.”  Aug. 3, 2016.  http://www.stratcom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/983671/strategic-bomber-force-showcases-allied-interoperability-during-polar-roar/ and Roland Oliphant.  “Russia ‘Simulated A Nuclear Strike’ Against Sweden, NATO Admits.”  The Telegraph. Feb. 4, 2016.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/12139943/Russia-simulated-a-nuclear-strike-against-Sweden-Nato-admits.htm both accessed July 17, 2017.)

August 3, 1940 – Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez, a.k.a. Martin Sheen, a highly acclaimed, award-winning actor in films, television, and on the stage, and a life-long peace, justice, and anti-nuclear activist, was born on this date in Dayton, Ohio, a product of an Irish immigrant mother and Spanish father.  Raised as a Catholic, he once played the role of Peter Maurin, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement after he experienced a real-life meeting with the renowned activist Dorothy Day.  Arrested over 60 times for participating in a wide variety of nonviolent actions including protests against the Iraq War, he was also detained after participating in an April 1, 2007 anti-nuclear testing protest, along with 38 others, at the Nevada Test Site.  “Acting is what I do for a living, activism is what I do to stay alive,” he once remarked.  In the spring of 1989, he was named honorary mayor of Malibu, California and one of his first decrees was a proclamation declaring the area a nuclear-weapons-free-zone.  Awarded a slew of honorary degrees such as the Degree of Doctor of Letters from Marquette University in 2003, he served as one of two U.S. representatives at the first International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Conference in Oslo, Norway in 2013, which issued a final declaration on the elimination of these deadly doomsday machines.  He played a judge in the documentary “In the King of Prussia: The Trial of the Ploughshare 8,” a film about the trial of Jesuit priest Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six other activists, who on September 9, 1980 broke into a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and damaged two Mark 12-A nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood on warhead documents and order forms.  Martin Sheen’s sympathetic support of this action was seen in this quote, “Until we begin to fill the jails with protest, our governments will continue to fill the silos with weapons.”  More recently, he proclaimed, “We are the generation that brought the bomb in, we have got to be the generation that should take it out.”  (Sources: David Kupfer. “Martin Sheen Interview.”  The Progressive. July 1, 2003.  http://progressive.org/magazine/martin-sheen-interview/#sthash.x0yvs6a7.dpuf and other alternative media sources.)

August 6, 1985 – Exactly forty years after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan killing or injuring over 100,000 people, the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone (SPNFZ) Treaty, also known as The Treaty of Raratonga, was signed at that location in the Cook Islands.  The Treaty bans the production, acquisition, possession, testing, or control of nuclear explosive devices within the zone and it outlaws the provision of fissile material or related equipment to states or territories within the zone unless they are under NPT and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations.  The agreement currently has 13 full members: Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.  France and the U.K. have ratified all three treaty protocols and Russia and China have only ratified Protocols II and III.  While the United States has signed all three protocols (I – requiring states with territories in the region to respect the treaty; II – not to threaten nuclear weapons use against parties to the treaty; and III – not to carry out nuclear tests within the zone), it has not ratified any of the three treaty protocols, under the rubric that it does not accept any limitation on the right of passage of its nuclear vessels and aircraft in the region.  Unfortunately, one can envision that since the U.S. regularly conducts ICBM testing with its Minuteman III test launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California to impact the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, located in the Central Pacific region, U.S. Strategic Command does not want to set a precedent by prohibiting possible future testing of nuclear launch platforms in the adjoining South Pacific region covered by the Treaty of Raratonga.  Nevertheless, on May 3, 2011, President Barack Obama submitted the protocols of this treaty to the U.S. Senate for advice and consent to ratification and less than a year later, on Feb. 15, 2012, the 44^th President urged the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty.  Comments:  Along with the Feb.1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco creating a Latin American nuclear-weapons-free-zone (NWFZ), the Dec.1995 Bangkok Treaty mandating a Southeast Asian NWFZ, the April 1996 Pelindaba Treaty creating an African NWFZ, and hundreds of municipal NWFZs established in a number of global cities including several in the United States, the Treaty of Raratonga and other such agreements reflect a growing global campaign to significantly reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons.  It is imperative that all U.N. members, especially the nine nuclear weapon states, ratify these NWFZs and other critical nuclear arms control agreements including the newly negotiated July 2017 U.N. nuclear weapons ban.  Therefore, the 45^th President of the United States should lead the way in persuading the U.S. Senate to ratify these agreements as well as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and initiate renewed negotiations for a treaty extending the New START Treaty, which expires in February of 2021. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 65 and The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative.  “South Pacific Nuclear-Free-Zone (SPNFZ):  Treaty of Raratonga.”  Monterey, California, June 30, 2017. http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/south-pacific-nuclear-free-zone-spnfz-treaty-raratonga/ accessed July 17, 2017.)

August 12, 2000 – K-141 Kursk, a 14,000 ton, 505-foot long Russian Oscar II class nuclear-powered submarine, the world’s largest class of cruise missile launching undersea vessels, sank in the Barents Sea off Russia’s northwest coast when a leak of hydrogen peroxide in the forward torpedo room led to the detonation of a conventional torpedo warhead, which in turn triggered the explosion of half a dozen or more other such warheads with a total yield of about 3-7 tons of TNT.  These explosions, which were large enough to register on seismographs across Northern Europe, killed most of the crew of 118 sailors although all hands lost their lives when 23 survivors were not rescued in time to prevent their demise due to a flash fire or lack of oxygen.  Comments: This deadly accident was just one example of dozens or even hundreds of accidents involving submarines, surface ships, and aircraft involving the loss of nuclear propulsion units and/or nuclear weapons.  Some of these 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.  (Sources:  William Arkin and Joshua Handler.  “Neptune Papers II:  Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990 and Michael Wines.  “None of Us Can Get Out, Kursk Sailor Wrote,” New York Times. Oct. 27, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/27/world/none-of-us-can-get-out-kursk-sailor-wrote.html accessed July 17, 2017.)

August 21, 1945 – In the early days of the Nuclear Age before automated technologies and heavy shielding made nuclear weapons assembly procedures significantly safer, a number of individuals in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union paid the ultimate price for errors in judgement or merely a slip of the hand and as a result suffered excruciatingly painful injuries and death due to mere seconds of exposure to deadly radioactive materials.  On this date, Haroutune “Harry” K. Daghlian, Jr. working at the “Omega site” section of the Area 2 laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico experienced such an accident.  While manipulating a 6.2 kilogram plutonium bomb core, he inadvertently exposed the core causing a “neutron criticality accident” or “blue flash.”  He received a very heavy radioactive dose of 20,000-40,000 rems to one hand and 5,000-15,000 rems to the other.  After 25 days of agonizing pain and suffering, extreme nausea, and weight loss, he slipped into a coma and perished in the early morning hours of Sept. 15, 1945.  Daghlian is believed to be the first person to die accidentally of acute radioactive poisoning since the Nuclear Age began.  Comments:  Seventy-plus years of nuclear accidents, tests, and experiments have injured or killed countless thousands of individuals, but our species has continued to rely on good fortune to prevent an unforeseen catastrophic nuclear war which could trigger the deaths of millions or even billions of people (through a Nuclear Winter event after a full-scale nuclear exchange) and send humanity back into the Dark Ages or worse, result in the termination of our species.  We can’t rely forever on luck to save the human race.  We must affirmatively act now to drastically reduce and eventually eliminate these doomsday weapons before it is too late.  (Source: James Mahaffey.  “Atomic Accidents.”  New York:  Pegasus Books, 2014, pp. 56-61.)

August 27, 1958 – The first of three very-high altitude clandestine nuclear tests were carried out on this date by the Pentagon in the South Atlantic Ocean about 1,100 miles southwest of Capetown, South Africa.  The Argus I test, like Argus II on Aug. 30 and Argus III on Sept. 6, involved the launch of a low-yield, 1-2 kiloton warhead, on a modified X-17 three-stage ballistic missile fired from the U.S.S. Norton Sound to the height of 300 miles altitude where the resulting nuclear blast was designed to provide information on the trapping of electrically-charged particles in the Earth’s magnetic field in order to assess how very-high altitude nuclear detonations might interfere with communications equipment and ballistic missile performance.  Three other high-altitude nuclear tests were conducted earlier in the month of August by the U.S. in the Pacific Ocean near Enewetak and Johnston Island as part of the Operation Hardtack I series of 35 nuclear explosions.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by the nine nuclear weapons states has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations especially native peoples and veterans who participated in observing these tests at a relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people today due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook:  Volume II, Appendix B.”  National Resources Defense Council, Inc. Cambridge, MA:  Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, pp. 157-158.)

July 1, 1998 – A New York Times article by Matthew L. Wald, “U.S. Nuclear Arms Costs Put At $5.48 Trillion,” published on this date summarized the conclusions of a new book by nuclear analyst Stephen Schwartz, who then worked as the director of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.  The book “Atomic Audit,” itemized in great detail the cost to U.S. taxpayers in 1996 dollars, for the period from 1940-96, of the research, development, storage, upkeep, maintenance, deployment, and dismantling of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons,. including the partial cleanup of huge volumes of the resulting radioactive and toxic wastes generated in this expensive, hazardous, and dangerous U.S. enterprise in the first six decades of the nuclear arms race.  Comments:  Trillions more have been spent and may be spent in future decades by the nine nuclear weapons states to accomplish what mainstream advocates of deterrence claim is war prevention by threatening to murder hundreds of millions of denizens of this Pale Blue Dot.  However, an increasing number of nuclear strategists, global politicians, scientists, soldiers, philosophers, medical professionals, and ordinary citizens are questioning the saneness of this irrational mindset.  The risks of failure of deterrence are far too great to rely on this flawed equation indefinitely.  The extinction of the human species or at least global civilization is likely unless we drastically reduce nuclear armaments with the goal to eliminate these doomsday weapons by 2025.  In doing so, we not only end the horrendous waste of our precious global wealth and treasure, but make great strides in preserving our species and redirecting military expenditures to mitigate and reduce global warming, eliminate poverty, educate our youth, and cure disease and ignorance.

July 8-9, 2016 – At the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, President Barack Obama expressed an “unwavering commitment to the defense of Europe.”  He also chided his European allies for not spending a higher percentage of GDP (two percent or more) on military defenses against Russia.  The 44^th President also encouraged NATO member states to purchase U.S. arms and trade only with U.S. dollar allies and not Russia.  In response, former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev warned, “The world has never been closer to nuclear war than it is at present.”  German politicians including Social Democrats and Christian Democrats accused NATO of “war mongering.”  Even more conservative voices such as former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry declared that, “NATO is threatening and trying to provoke nuclear war in Europe by putting bombers and nuclear missiles on the border with Russia.”  Comments:  Except for a plethora of terrifying comments about accelerating the nuclear arms race and promoting the proliferation of nuclear weapons to allies like Japan and South Korea, President Trump’s relations with Russia (including possibly illegal pre-election collusion with Russian officials to influence U.S. election results) could be interpreted by some as less aggressive than the policies of his predecessor.  However, that assessment is highly debatable for it seems that, taken as a whole, the 45^th President’s first 20 weeks in office have evidenced a clearly higher risk of expanding the failed Global War on Terrorism as well as accelerating the risk of nuclear Armageddon. (Source:  Jessica Desvarieux Interview with Professor Michael Hudson. “U.S.-NATO Border Confrontation with Russia Risks Nuclear War and Loss of European Partners.”  The Real News Network.  July 17, 2016 http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&ltemid=74&jumival=16755 accessed June 19, 2017.)

July 15, 1962 – The nonviolent, peace organization, Women Strike for Peace, founded in 1961 by lawyer, social activist, and future Congressional representative (20^th District of New York, 1973-77) Bella Abzug (1920-1998) and illustrator of children’s books Dagmar Wilson (1916-2011), conducted a two-hour peace march to Camp Mercury, New York to protest nuclear testing.  Eight months prior to this action, on November 1, 1961, the organization helped guide another nuclear protest that counted 50,000 women participating in sixty global cities (including a crowd of 1,500 at the Washington Monument) under the slogan “End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race.”  Organizers of the march received support letters from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the wife of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.  Later, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant and President Kennedy acknowledged that the group was a factor in the adoption of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  Representatives of Women Strike for Peace were among the first Americans to oppose the Vietnam War.  On June 12, 1982, they helped organize one million people who marched in Central Park to call for an end to the nuclear arms race.  In 1991, they protested the first Persian Gulf War.  Comments:  Many women, and their spouses, friends, family members, supporters, and colleagues are continuing the tradition of antiwar and antinuclear protests as evidenced by last month’s Women’s March to Ban the Bomb held in downtown Manhattan on June 17, 2017.  (Sources:  Amy Swerdlow.  “Women Strike for Peace:  Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s.” University of Chicago Press, 1993 and Elaine Woo.  “Dagmar Wilson Dies at 94; Organizer of Women’s Disarmament Protesters.”  Los Angeles Times.  Jan. 30, 2011 http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-dagmar-wilson-20110130-story.html  accessed June 16, 2017.)

July 16, 1945 – In the first-ever test of what Manhattan Project scientists referred to as the “Gadget”, a fission bomb designed as a plutonium implosion device, was detonated before dawn at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, 230 miles south of the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico in a remote area of the Jornada Desert.  The code name of the test, Trinity, was created by the Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer – it was a reference to a poem by John Donne.  President Truman’s personal journal of July 25 recorded that, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world…An experiment in the New Mexico desert…caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater six feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked down a steel tower half a mile away and knocked down men 10,000 yards away.  The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.”  Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s report to the president noted that, “I estimate that the energy generated to be in excess of the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT…there were tremendous blast effects…there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds.  This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over 10,000 feet.”   Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, an eyewitness to the blast, described his experience of a, “gigantic ball of fire rising rapidly from the earth…The grand, indeed almost cataclysmic proportion of the explosion produced a kind of solemnity in everyone’s behavior immediately afterwards.  There was a restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence in manner as the event was commented upon…”  The “Gadget,” which exploded with an estimated force of 15-20 kilotons, slightly more than the Hiroshima bomb, was a rehearsal for the August 6-9 atomic bombings of two Japanese cities and it represented the first of 1,030 nuclear tests conducted by the United States and one of over 2,000 such tests conducted by the nine Nuclear Weapons Club members in the last 72 years.   Before the blast, a wager was made by Manhattan Project scientist Enrico Fermi that the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and devastate New Mexico and possibly the whole of the planet’s biosphere.  Thankfully, Fermi lost his wager.  But that vision of deadly apocalypse came true for hundreds of thousands of people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9^th who were vaporized, burned to death, blown into objects and buildings at horrific speed, lacerated, mutilated, and irradiated.  They suffered and some continue to suffer today from the unconscionable use of fission weapons on civilian noncombatants.  Comments:  While many U.S. military and scientific observers celebrated the beginning of the Nuclear Age, others realized that this event may have represented the beginning of the end of the human species.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5, 24. and Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 250-251 and “Trinity Test – 1945.” Atomic Heritage Foundation.  June 18, 2014.  http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/Trinity-Test-1945 accessed June 20, 2017.)

July 25, 1980 – Despite Jimmy Carter’s pre-election and inauguration rhetoric about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the 39^th President was convinced by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and his hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to sign Presidential Directive (PD) – 59 on this date.  Referred to as “The Countervailing Strategy,” this directive placed renewed emphasis on counterforce “limited” nuclear war targeting (attacking military formations and defenses, particularly nuclear weapons sites rather than countervalue targets, i.e., populated areas) against Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military forces.  It also reinforced the ability to launch U.S. nuclear weapons on warning rather than waiting until Soviet nuclear warheads impacted U.S. military assets or population centers.  The new directive supposedly increased the flexibility and survivability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent by pushing the development of the mobile MX missile (later ironically renamed the “Peacekeeper”), the Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile (which was already being sent to NATO forces in Europe), the B-2 bomber, the Trident submarine, and the Tomahawk cruise missile for possible first use “against a broad spectrum of targets,” during a theoretical, protracted nuclear war that somehow avoided escalation to an all-out conflict.  Comments:  PD-59, when combined with the more extreme anti-Soviet rhetoric and much larger military buildup of the next administration, that of President Ronald Reagan, led to the second most dangerous period of Cold War tensions and near-nuclear war in human history (next to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962) in the early to mid-1980s.  Today, unfortunately, we may be living in another similar high-risk period as evidenced by a commitment by all nine nuclear weapon states to modernize and upgrade their nuclear arsenals over the next thirty years or so.  Humanity has been fortunate to avoid a thermonuclear doomsday before, but our luck won’t hold out forever.  That is why it is imperative that nuclear weapons be drastically reduced in the short-term and eliminated entirely in the next decade or so.

July 29, 1993 – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile materials in the last 25 years, especially since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, local police arrested several suspects in Andreeva Guba, Russia on this date for the attempted transfer of 1,800 grams of highly enriched uranium to a group of buyers who were in actuality undercover policemen.  In April 2015, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Deputy Director Anne Harrington testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Strategic Forces that, “Of the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have come out of the former Soviet Union.” Another area of concern is the fact that in 2015-16, President Putin began cutting back his nation’s overall nuclear security cooperation with Washington as part of the long-standing Nunn-Lugar nuclear reduction partnership program, also known as the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act, on the grounds that it no longer needed U.S. financial or technical assistance to safeguard its fissile material stockpile.  However, in June 2015, Kirill Komarov, the first deputy director of Rosatom, the state-owned corporation that runs Russia’s nuclear energy and weapons plants, countered that, “You know very well that a very operational system of controlling nuclear materials has been established worldwide, none of them are out of control.  Their movements are always strictly controlled.”  Nevertheless, the Center for Public Integrity’s November 2015 investigative report concluded that, “In fact, some 99 percent of the world’s weapons-grade materials have been secured.  But one percent or more is still out there, and it amounts to several thousand pounds that could be acquired by any one of several terrorist organizations.” Comments:  Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from  theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the U.N. and other international fora to prevent the use of fissile materials in dirty bombs or primitive small-yield fission weapons whether the materials diverted come from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapon facilities.  In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis, such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.  (Source:  Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith.  “The Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.” Center for Public Integrity, Nov. 12, 2015 reprinted in Courier: The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)