Author: Jeffrey W. Mason

June 1, 1952 – “George,” the seventh of eight atmospheric nuclear test blasts in a series conducted from April 1 to June 5, 1952 designated Operation TUMBLER-SNAPPER took place at the Nevada Test Site under the auspices of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The nuclear device exploded on top of a 300-foot high tower yielded a blast of approximately 15 kilotons – equivalent roughly to the August 6, 1945 Hiroshima atomic bomb.  Phase One, the TUMBLER blasts provided U.S. nuclear weapons makers with a more comprehensive description of nuclear blast phenomena and provided vital information about the dust “sponge” effects and the relationship of dust to radiation.  The purpose of the Phase Two SNAPPER tests, which included “George,” was to test potential warhead designs for inclusion in the nuclear stockpile and to study techniques to be used in future nuclear test series.  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 (over 10,000 U.S. soldiers participated in this test series).  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. 152-153.)

June 8, 2016 – An article by Edward Kee, the CEO of the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group, in the online World Nuclear News, “Carbon Pricing Not Enough to Help Nuclear Power,” was published on this date.  The article is written from the nuclear industrial complex perspective that mistakenly believes that nuclear energy is “zero carbon electricity,” that there are no significant global warming impacts from nuclear power generation.  This is technically true during the thirty years or longer that a nuclear plant is operating, but patently wrong when we assess 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.  CEO Kee argues that a tax on carbon is not likely to provide long-term revenue to support existing or new nuclear power plants and argues that other subsidies or investments are needed to “drive investments in new nuclear power plants.”  A May 2, 2017 article in the same publication points out that even the drill-drill-drill-forget about climate change-oriented American Petroleum Institute is lobbying in some states to “reject legislation that would subsidize nuclear power.”  Comments:  It is clear that both the nuclear and fossil fuel industries have focused on optimizing huge profits in current and future dirty energy generation projects rather than working toward reversing climate change or preventing inevitable nuclear power plant accidents and meltdowns like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.  Decades of judicial, legislative, and executive decisions, on all levels, have unfortunately reinforced the corporate mindset that environmental damage and public health impacts are mere externalities that only governments or charities are charged with mitigating and resolving.  This has to change and change quickly if our species is to survive and prosper on this fragile Pale Blue Dot.  The nuclear threat and the climate change crisis must be addressed in a New Paradigm that over the next decade or so accelerates the phase-out of these catastrophically harmful energy extraction technologies and substitutes community-based and large-scale government-subsidized green renewables on a global scale even at the risk of running large spending deficits.  Global corporate, military, and profit-making entities should be forced to convert to greener alternatives before it is too late. (Sources: Edward Kee. “Carbon Pricing Not Enough to Help Nuclear Power.” World Nuclear News. June 8, 2016      http:/www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Carbon-pricing-not-enough-to-help-nuclear-power-10061601.html and “Gloves Are Off in Fossil Fuel Fight Against Nuclear.”  World Nuclear News. May 2, 2017 http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossil-fuel-fight-against-nuclear-0205171.html both accessed May 15, 2017.)

June 15, 2017 – After decades of pressure by activists, citizens, politicians, religious authorities, and scientists and in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution A/RES/71/258 initiated by a core group of six nations (Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa) and adopted by 113 nations on December 23, 2016, an international conference, with the participation and contributions of not only government leaders but also international organizations and civil society representatives, will meet at U.N. Headquarters in New York City from this date through July 7^th to negotiate “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.”  This conference will build on earlier negotiations that took place March 27-31 of this year which saw more than 2,000 scientists, including many Americans, sign an open letter endorsing these U.N. talks.  Also in that same month, Pope Francis expressed support for this global effort to eliminate nuclear arsenals. In addition, over the last few decades countless individuals and organizations in wide-ranging fields including academia, government, the military, and the nonprofit world have supported the effort.  One of many examples is the International Red Cross which stated at the third humanitarian conference on the impact of nuclear conflict in 2014, “Nuclear weapons can only bring us a catastrophic and irreversible scenario that no one wishes and to which no one can respond in any meaningful way.”  The nuclear weapons ban is an initiative to prohibit the use, possession, development, testing, deployment, and transfer of nuclear weapons under international law just as other weapons of mass destruction have been banned by treaty such as biological and chemical weapons as well as other unconscionable weapons such as anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions.  Nine nations possess an estimated 14,900 nuclear weapons led by Russia with 7,000 and the United States with 6,800.  Unfortunately none of these nine nation-states are participating in this conference.  However, since this potential treaty is not subject to approval by the U.N. Security Council, no veto by any or all of the five nuclear-armed permanent members of this council can block the agreement.  The legal construct and rationale for such a nuclear ban rests on these two concrete foundations:  First, as a consequence of their destructive power and radioactive fallout, nuclear weapons inherently violate several articles of the Geneva Conventions meant to protect the victims of international conflicts.  Second, many non-nuclear countries and disarmament proponents believe that nations possessing nuclear weapons have been unwilling to pursue good faith disarmament negotiations mandated by Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).  Comments:  Success in these negotiations could prove the beginning of the end of the nuclear threat.  Failure is clearly not an option. (Sources:  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “Nuclear Ban Treaty Negotiations.” March 2017 http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ican-2017.pdf and The Nuclear Threat Initiative. “Proposed Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.” http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/proposal-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty/ both accessed May 15, 2017.)

June 16, 1976 – After decades of leaked information revealed numerous U.S. nuclear weapons accidents, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) begrudgingly issued a press release on this date quoting Lieutenant General William Young Smith, an assistant to the Chairman of the JCS, which stated that, “There has been a total of 33 accidents involving nuclear weapons throughout the period that the U.S. has had these weapons although none has resulted in a nuclear detonation.”  Comments:  Over the last forty years, a plethora of Freedom of Information Act requests by journalists, anti-nuclear activists, and nonprofit organizations, along with more leaks by retired U.S. military personnel, have revealed dozens of other nuclear accidents until the total of Broken Arrows and related nuclear incidents now number in the hundreds.  And that total is just for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  Journalistic accounts and other authorized and unauthorized releases of information about military nuclear accidents in the other eight nations that possess nuclear weapons are also quite numerous.  Accidents have happened, are happening and will continue to happen and relying on luck to avoid a nuclear catastrophe has its limits.  This represents an additional reason why global nuclear arsenals should be drastically reduced in the short-term and eliminated completely by 2025. (Sources:  Louis Rene Beres. “Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.” Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1980 and Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

June 20, 1963 – Learning the shockingly frightening lessons of near-nuclear war after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, one of which was how antiquated the high-level U.S.-Soviet communication links were (during the standoff, official diplomatic messages between Washington and Moscow typically took six or more hours to deliver), the U.S. and Soviet Union negotiated, signed, and entered into force a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in Geneva to establish a direct communications link or “hot line” between the two governments for use in the event of crisis.  The “Hot Line Agreement” was updated in 1971, again in 1984, and made into a modern secure computer link in 2008 in which messages are exchanged by email.  Similar hot lines have been set up between the U.S. and China (1998), India and Pakistan (2004), South Korea and China (2008), and China and India (2010).  Comments:  It is hoped that increased communication in times of crisis will help circumvent genocidal conflicts and prevent unauthorized, accidental, or unintentional nuclear war.  An additional essential step for lessening the odds of a nuclear Armageddon is the de-alerting of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, as well as the nuclear forces of other nations.  The 45^th President of the U.S. ought to publicly announce the de-alerting on one squadron of land-based ICBMs and encourage Russia to reciprocate and de-alert more squadrons in concert with the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Command.  After several days or a week or so, both nations’ entire hair-trigger arsenals will be removed from alert status, giving each side at least 72 hours to think about it before being able to launch World War III.  This is just one of several steps (including the President recommending that the Senate ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [CTBT]) necessary to reduce the global risk of nuclear war. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 28-29 and “Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link.” U.S. Department of State.  http://www.state.gov/isn/4785.htm and “Hot Line Agreements.”  Arms Control Association. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Hotlines both accessed May 15, 2017.)

June 25, 1950 – The Korean War began when a force of approximately 75,000 soldiers of the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea, invaded the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea, South Korea, by crossing the 38^th Parallel.  By July, soldiers sent from the U.S. occupation force in Japan entered the war on behalf of South Korea.  Other Western allies joined the fighting as part of a U.N. military force.  Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) warned the U.N. forces, commanded by World War II hero U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, not to approach China’s border with North Korea but an allied counteroffensive did reach that border at the Yalu River, which triggered a massive attack by Chinese forces invading southward.  After direct Chinese involvement, General MacArthur appealed to President Harry Truman to use nuclear weapons against China but Truman refused and fired MacArthur.  Later in the war, after the election of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, nuclear threats by the newly sworn-in president were seen by some experts as one of the major reasons why the North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets relented on several sticking points holding up the armistice agreement.  It should be noted that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff pre-planned the deployment of nuclear weapons for use against China if it sent troops or bombers into Korea or against the Soviet Union if they came to the aid of the North Koreans, although America’s European allies opposed such escalation fearing that the Soviets would retaliate by invading Western Europe.  The fighting lasted over three years until the July 27, 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by both sides.  Five million people died in the conflict, over half of which were civilians.  Almost 40,000 Americans were killed and more than 100,000 wounded.  Comments:  Today, the Korean War is technically still being fought as the armistice does not represent a permanent peace treaty ending the conflict.  Negotiating such a treaty should be one of the top priorities of the 45^th President and 115^th Congress but this isn’t even considered a talking point by mainstream news media, the Pentagon, and State Department. The growing risk of a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula makes ending the war an imperative priority not only for the U.S. and both Koreas but also for the global community of nations.  (Sources:  “Korean War.”  History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/korean-war, “Korean War 1950-53.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Korean-War, and David W. Brown.  “10 Facts About the Korean War.” MentalFloss.com. http://mentalfloss.com/article/4972/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-korean-war all accessed on May 15, 2017.)

June 29, 1918 – One of the founders of the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization the Center for Defense Information, Admiral Gene Robert La Rocque (pronounced la-ROCK), was born on this date in Kankakee, Illinois.  After attending the University of Illinois, he joined the U.S. Navy, survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and fought in over a dozen battles in the Pacific winning the Bronze Star and many other citations during his distinguished 32-year naval career which included serving as one of the top strategic planners for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  In the early 1950s, La Rocque refused to sign a loyalty oath during the height of McCarthyism. When he was teaching at the Naval War College, he insisted that his students read not only the American Constitution but also The Communist Manifesto.  After a 1968 visit to Vietnam, he filed a report critical of the U.S. mission in Indochina.  In a 1986 profile in The New Yorker, he explained that, “Fundamentally, I couldn’t find anyone to tell me why the United States was in Vietnam and what it was we were trying to accomplish.”  Passed over for promotion because of rocking the boat, he retired and joined other like-minded retired military officers like Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr. (1923-2003) and navy captain Arthur D. Berliss, Jr. (1914-2010) in establishing the Center for Defense Information (CDI), an arm of the Fund for Peace in April of 1972.  CDI’s early thrust was to avert a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, end the Vietnam War, and monitor-critique the military-industrial-congressional complex.  Over the three-plus decades of the organization’s existence, until it operated under the umbrella of Dr. Bruce Blair’s World Security Institute and then merged with the Project on Government Oversight in 2012, its mission statement expanded accordingly, “The Center for Defense Information believes that strong social, economic, political, and military components and a healthy environment contribute equally to the nation’s security.  CDI opposes excessive expenditures for weapons and policies that increase the dangers of war.”  During the Cold War, Admiral La Rocque and his senior aides, CDI’s staff of a few dozen academics, retired soldiers, and former Congressional aides, joined by tens of thousands of supporters, embraced strong opposition to the threat of nuclear annihilation, opposed excessive global deployment of U.S. forces, and advocated the dissolution of not only the Soviet Warsaw Pact but the western NATO Alliance as well.  He told The New Yorker, “There are unfortunately some in the United States who believe that the Soviets are the enemy that we must defeat by war.  I think the enemy is nuclear war.”  His intelligent, well-reasoned rhetoric was at odds with mainstream military and political views that such a war could be won.  “If we are to have a nuclear war, we can’t win it.  Can we survive it?  I don’t know.  Nobody knows.  That’s the tragedy of it – nobody knows.  Anybody that tells you that this many people are going to be killed and this many are going to survive doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”  Admiral La Rocque passed away at the age of 98 on October 31, 2016.  (Sources:  Miles D. Wolpin. “Alternative Security and Military Dissent.”  San Francisco: Austin & Winfield Publishers, 1994, pp. 130-145 and Anita Gates.  “Gene La Rocque, Decorated Veteran Who Condemned Waste of War, Dies at 98.”  New York Times. November 4, 2016.  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/gene-la-rocque-decorated-veteran-who-condemned-waste-of-war-dies-at-98.html?_r=0 accessed May 16, 2017.)

May 2-12, 2017 –The First Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2020 NPT Review Conference will be held in Vienna, Austria as we approach the 49^th anniversary of one of the most seminal arms control treaties of the Nuclear Age – the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) first signed on July 1, 1968 by the U.S., U.K., the Soviet Union, and 59 other nations and entered into force on March 5, 1970.  Currently, the treaty has 191 participating nation-states.  Comments:  While the Cold War-era world didn’t have to deal with a worst-case scenario of dozens of nuclear weapons states warned about by Democratic presidential candidate John Kennedy during the third Nixon-Kennedy Debate on Oct. 13, 1960, today things have reached a crisis point again.  While the nuclear test blasts and ballistic missile tests of North Korea in the last decade and fears of future Iranian nuclear weapons development are legitimate concerns, the campaign rhetoric and recent policy responses by President Donald Trump are equally disturbing.  The 45^th President’s pre-election statements promoting the idea that Japan, South Korea, and other allies should join the Nuclear Club set U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy back decades.  But more frightening are recent U.S. military moves ordered by the President including threats to send a carrier battle group to the waters off North Korea combined with rhetoric about possible U.S.-launched regime change, along with belligerent responses by Kim Jong-un’s government.  An attack on North Korea with the intent of destroying their weapons of mass destruction and/or assassinating that nation’s political leadership could purposely or more likely inadvertently break the tripwire that triggers the first use of nuclear weapons in combat since 1945.  However, even if no nuclear weapons are discharged, a conventional war between the North and South could heighten U.S.-Russia/China nuclear tensions and result in a tremendous and catastrophic loss of human life.  And, while it is possible that North Korean WMD could be eliminated in such a war, the long-term prognosis, like that of the war to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s WMD, could be increased regional chaos and terrorism.  (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p.1, United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/npt accessed April 14, 2017.)

May 8, 1999 – The Kargil Conflict between India and Pakistan, which had fought three previous wars in 1947, 1965 and 1971, began on this date and continued until July 26.  This war occurred just one year after both countries detonated nuclear explosives, a first for Pakistan.  After two months of intense high-altitude fighting in and around mountain peaks and valleys of the Great Himalayan Range, each side suffered more than 1,000 casualties before Pakistan withdrew from contested territory and India regained those mountain posts.  While some claim nuclear forces were mobilized by each side, other experts disagree.  Nonetheless, it became known years after the war ended that Indian troops were within days of opening another front along the Kashmir Line of Conflict, an act that may have triggered a wider war that would likely have seen the deployment and possible use of nuclear weapons.  The threat of a South Asian nuclear conflict increased dramatically again during a military crisis between the two nations from December 2001 through June 2002 after India’s parliament was attacked by Islamist militants who allegedly had ties to the Pakistani government.  Yet another tripwire to nuclear war was avoided in 2008 after a terrorist attack on Mumbai, India was linked to intelligence agencies in Pakistan.  For a number of years, regular artillery exchanges have been common in the extremely volatile region of Kashmir.  India’s nuclear doctrine mandates that if its conventional forces suffer a nuclear attack, it would respond with an all-out nuclear counterstrike targeting Pakistani population centers.  Pakistan has threatened to respond in a similar fashion.  Comments:  A nuclear war in South Asia would have a devastating impact not just on the region but on the planet.  With India’s strong ties to the United States and Pakistan’s growing relationship with China, such a war could escalate to a global one.  This situation represents yet another paramount reason why global nuclear arsenals should be dramatically reduced without delay and eliminated at the earliest possible opportunity.  (Sources:  “The Growing Threat of Nuclear War and the Role of the Health Community.” World Medical Journal.  Vol. 62, No. 3, October 2016. http://lab.arstubiedriba.lv/WMJ/vol62/3-october-2016/slides/slide-8.jpg and “The Kargil Conflict.” Encyclopedia of India.  Thomson Gale Publishers, 2006. http://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kargil-conflict both accessed April 14, 2017.)

May 9, 1970 – One of the most notable labor leaders, human rights advocates (and participant in Civil Rights-era protests including the March on Selma in 1965), peace activists (and opponent of the Vietnam War), and anti-nuclear spokesmen of the 20^th century was silenced on this date when Walter P. Reuther, along with his wife and a number of friends and colleagues, perished in a plane crash near Pellston, Michigan.  Reuther was born in Wheeling, W.Va. on Sept. 1, 1907 and as a young man he moved to Detroit where he became an expert tool and die maker in the auto industry.  Later, he was elected president of an influential auto workers’ union local group and led several strikes in 1937 and 1940, became president of the United Auto Workers in 1946, and helped found the Americans for Democratic Action organization.  In 1952, he was elected president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and within three years he was a key player in the merger of both unions to form the AFL-CIO.  In the 1960s, he marched with Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in Delano, California and also strongly showed his support for the Civil Rights movement by participating in the August 1963 March on Washington led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  The Republican candidate for president in 1964, a staunchly conservative Barry Goldwater, once declared Reuther “a more dangerous menace than the Sputnik or anything Soviet Russia might do in America.”  In a Labor Day speech in 1966, Reuther presented a strong case for utilizing rapid technological advances not for war but for improving the human condition:  “The question that challenges the wisdom and the sense of human solidarity of the whole human family is the overriding question:  To what purpose do we commit the potential power of the 20^th century technological revolution?  Do we harness the potential power to the madness of nuclear war or can we build a rational and responsible world community and harness the rising star of science and technology to man’s peaceful purposes?  The 20^th century technological revolution has no ideology and it has no morality.  We must bend it to man’s peaceful purposes or we shall perish.” In another speech, Reuther proclaimed, “The people of the whole world are the prisoners of the Cold War and the insanity of the escalation of the nuclear arms race.  And that’s why I believe America has the responsibility for providing both the political and moral leadership to try to move the world out of this prison of the Cold War and the arms race towards reductions in the levels of armament because I believe that in the long run, peace is the only condition of human survival.” (Source:  The Reuther Library. “No Greater Calling: The Life of Walter P. Reuther.” Wayne State University. http://reuther100.wayne.edu accessed April 14, 2017.)

May 17, 2015 – On this date, Wikileaks published a frightening account of a nuclear whistleblower, a sailor in the British Royal Navy, Able Seaman William McNeilly, whose formal title was Engineering Technician, Weapons Engineer, Submarines.  The 25-year old recruit from Belfast was serving onboard one of the UK’s Trident II strategic nuclear submarines, the ones equipped with the D-5 strategic weapons system carrying 16 nuclear-tipped, long-range Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) capable of single-handedly obliterating dozens of targets with multi-megatons of nuclear devastation.  Seaman McNeilly blew the whistle on the terrifying vulnerabilities of the UK’s sea-based nuclear submarine force, revealing serious safety and security issues including the Trident force’s susceptibility to possible terrorist attack.  He revealed how easy it was to use a Samsung Galaxy II phone to actually obtain top secret information on nuclear safety and security.  Not long after these revelations were publicized, William McNeilly was dishonorably discharged from the Royal Navy.  He charged that this occurred in order to protect the public image of that military organization, “It is shocking that some people in a military force can be more concerned about public image than public safety.”  A year later in June of 2016 more problems with the Royal Navy’s Trident fleet surfaced when the The Sunday Times later revealed that a dummy, unarmed Trident II D5 missile launched from the submarine HMS Vengeance somewhere off the coast of Florida malfunctioned and, instead of heading eastward toward the mid-Atlantic Ocean, was misdirected on a trajectory toward the Florida coast.  This misfire was kept secret and not revealed by The Times until after the British Parliament voted overwhelmingly (472-117) on July 19, 2016 to approve $53 billion in funding to continue the UK’s investment in the Trident II system.  Comments:  The chances of an unintentional, unauthorized, or accidental nuclear war are disturbing enough without also factoring in the risks of nuclear terrorism.  For these reasons, the flawed assumptions of nuclear deterrence should be reevaluated, while at the same time global nuclear arsenals should be dramatically reduced. (Sources:  “Trident Whistleblowing: Nuclear ‘Disaster’ Waiting to Happen.” Wikileaks. May 17, 2015.  http://www.wikileaks.org/trident-safety/, Rob Edwards. “Trident Whistleblower William McNeilly Discharged from Royal Navy.” The Guardian. June 17, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/17/trident-whistleblower-william-mcneilly-discharged-from-royal-navy and Weston Williams. “Trident Missile Misfire off Florida.” Christian Science Monitor. January 22, 2017. http://www.csmonitor.com all accessed April 14, 2017.)

May 21, 1946 – 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, a Jewish scientist from Canada working for the U.S. government became one of these unfortunate casualties.  At a laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Louis Alexander Slotin was working with a new beryllium tamper installed around a plutonium bomb core, when he inadvertently allowed the screwdriver separating the tamper from the bomb assembly to fall and land squarely on the assembly which resulted in what is referred to as a “neutron criticality incident” or “blue flash.”  Slotin reacted quickly to jerk the tamper off the assembly and drop it instantly to the floor which saved the lives of General Lesley Groves and five other witnesses. However, Slotin received a lethal radioactive dose of 2,100 rems and experienced agonizing pain and suffering until he died nine days later.  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 a unforeseen, catastrophic nuclear event 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, p. 61-66.)

May 27, 1968 – A 3,500-ton, 252 foot-long U.S. nuclear attack submarine, the U.S.S. Scorpion (SSN-589), after leaving Rota, Spain to escort a Polaris Missile submarine to deep water, was reported lost at sea on this date after being six days overdue at Norfolk naval base and was not found until October 29^th of that year lying on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean at a depth of almost 10,000 feet about 400 miles southwest of the Azore Islands on the edge of the Sargasso Sea.  Onboard the nuclear-powered vessel (powered by a S5W reactor) were at least two Mark 45 Astor anti-submarine torpedoes equipped with W34 nuclear warheads.  Ninety-nine sailors perished in an accident of undetermined nature including possibly the malfunction and resulting explosion of a conventional Mark 37 torpedo inside the hull or possibly after being jettisoned from the craft.  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:  William Arkin and Joshua Handler. “Neptune Papers II: Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990 and Spencer Dunmore.  “Lost Subs.”  Cambridge, MA:  Da Capo Press, 2002, p. 140-145.)

April 3, 2016 – In an interview on this date on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace followed up on statements presidential candidate Donald Trump made previously when he indicated it might be a good idea for U.S. allies like Japan and South Korea to develop nuclear weapons by asking the candidate, “You want to have a nuclear arms race on the Korean peninsula?”  The future 45^th president replied, “In many ways the world is changing.  Right now, you have Pakistan and you have North Korea and you have China and you have Russia and you have India and you have the United States and many other countries have nukes.  It’s not like, gee whiz, nobody has them.”  Comments:  This is just one of many uneducated, irresponsible, and reckless statements the future president made about the nuclear threat, mischaracterizing long-term U.S. and international arms control efforts to limit and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.  Currently, with thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status, the world was a dangerous enough place before the Nov. 8, 2016 election that threw an inexperienced but manipulative flim-flam man into the White House with his unstable hands on the nuclear button.  The recent moving of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock to 2 ½ minutes to Midnight signaled that other responsible U.S. and world leaders and, most importantly, an educated anti-nuclear global citizenry needs to step up and strengthen greatly efforts to reverse the new Cold War II and the revived nuclear arms race before it is too late. (Source:  Judd Legum. “9 Terrifying Things Donald Trump Has Publicly Said About Nuclear Weapons.”  ThinkProgress.org, Aug. 4, 2016. https://thinkprogress.org/9-terrifying-things-donald-trump-has-publicly-said-about-nuclear-weapons-99f6290bc32a#.I44ys3h17 accessed March 17, 2017.)

April 4, 1949 – After a communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade-Airlift, twelve nations including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the U.K., and U.S. signed the North Atlantic Treaty creating a military alliance, NATO, against the Soviet Union and its communist bloc Eastern European allies.  The U.S.S.R. responded on May 14, 1955 with the creation of the eight-nation Soviet-led Warsaw Pact mutual defense agreement.  Two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolutions that overthrew pro-Soviet communist governments in Eastern Europe, and eight months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Warsaw Pact alliance broke up on April 1, 1991.  Nevertheless, NATO expanded from its Cold War era membership of 16 nations to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in July of 1997.  Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR), a future president of the nonprofit Pentagon watchdog anti-nuclear organization, the Center for Defense Information, prophetically stated after the Senate approved this round of NATO expansion on April 30, 1998 that Russia felt (and today this is even more true) increasingly threatened by a nuclear-armed adversarial military alliance along its western borders.  Bumpers stated that, “We’re forcing them to rely more and more heavily on nuclear weapons.  And the more you rely on nuclear weapons, the lower the hair trigger for nuclear war.”  After adding more Baltic and Eastern European countries in 2004 and 2009, NATO has expanded to its current size of 28-member nations today.  Comments: More and more arms control experts and a concerned global citizenry are urging the U.S. to bring home tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, allowing NATO to move to a safer, more secure non-nuclear means of deterring Russian military adventures as occurred during the recent Crimea-Ukraine Crisis.  For example, Steve Andreasen and Isabelle Williams, two analysts with the Global Nuclear Policy Program at the Nuclear Threat Initiative organization in Washington, DC, recently noted that, “Even taking into account what some perceive to be more “usable” (nuclear) weapons (the B61-11 bomb or its follow-on B61-12), it is hard to envision the circumstances under which a U.S. President would initiate nuclear use for the first time in 70 years with a NATO dual-capable aircraft flown by non-U.S. pilots delivering a U.S. B61 nuclear bomb,” and its seems unlikely that any such mission would go forward “given the political and operational constraints involved.”  It is imperative that the U.S. and other nuclear weapon states not only drastically reduce and eliminate tactical nuclear weapons but all such doomsday devices including obviously strategic nuclear warheads and their accompanying launch platforms. (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 117, 125, 132-33 and Steve Andreasen and Isabelle Williams. “Bring Home U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons from Europe.” In “Ten Big Nuclear Ideas for the Next President,” edited by Tom Z. Collina and Geoff Wilson, Ploughshares Fund, November 2016.)

April 6, 1993 – A pressure buildup inside a 34 cubic meter stainless steel reaction vessel buried under a building of the radiochemical works at Tomsk-7, Siberian Chemical Enterprise plutonium and uranium processing facility, led to a powerful conventional explosion that blew a hole in the building’s roof.  The vessel contained 8,757 kilograms of uranium and 449 grams of plutonium along with a mixture of radioactive waste from a previous extraction cycle.  This serious atmospheric release of deadly radioactive contaminants affected an area of at least 120 square kilometers causing entire villages to be evacuated.  160 on-site workers, 2,000 cleanup workers, and tens of thousands of nearby inhabitants were exposed to radiation levels two and a half times the maximum allowed.  Comments:  Although the Tomsk explosion happened almost 25 years ago, it highlights a continuing, growing global nuclear problem.  Paul Brown of Ecologist.org pointed out last year that worldwide stockpiles of plutonium are on the rise with hundreds of tons of the most toxic metal ever produced in current global inventories.  A mere spec or microgram of plutonium, if inhaled, can trigger a fatal dose of cancer.  Brown points out that, “there is no commercially viable use for this toxic metal and there is increasing fear that plutonium could fall into the hands of terrorists or that governments could be tempted to use it to join the nuclear arms race,” – a prophetic statement as virtually all nine nuclear weapon states plan to spend trillions of dollars in the next 30 years to build more sophisticated and usable doomsday weapons.  Brown notes that civilian uses of plutonium, supposedly to address global warming by cutting fossil fuel energy production in favor of nuclear power in fast breeder and commercial reactors, have so far failed to keep pace with the amounts of this highly radioactive metal being produced by approximately 15 nations that run uranium-fueled nuclear power plants.  He also points out that, “the small amounts of plutonium that have been used at conventional and fast breeder reactors have produced very little electricity – at startling high costs.”  (Sources:  “Too Much of a Bad Thing?  World Awash With Waste Plutonium.”  Paul Brown. TheEcologist.org. Jan. 24, 2016. www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2986959/too_much_of_a_bad_thing_world_awash_with_plutonum.htm and Timeline: Nuclear Plant Accidents.  BBC News, July 11, 2006 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2hi/science/nature/5165736.stm both accessed March 18, 2017 and other information available on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s website, https://www.iaea.org)

April 11, 1862 – Henry Adams (1838-1918), a U.S. historian, journalist, and educator who was related to two former U.S. Presidents, after reading the press reports of the terrible slaughter at the Civil War battle of Shiloh, wrote a letter to his brother with this dire prediction, “I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man.  The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control.  Someday, science will have the existence of mankind in its power and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.”  Comments:  155 years later, some seventy-plus years since Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, Adams’ prophetic glimpse into the future seems unfortunately a most accurate assessment of humanity’s present and future living under a Nuclear Sword of Damocles.  The choice for Homo sapiens is pure and simple, renounce war and eliminate global nuclear arsenals now and forever or our civilization, our species, and perhaps all higher forms of life on the Earth are on an inevitable slide towards doomsday. Omnicide or nuclear abolition is humanity’s paramount decision to make. (Source: Alfred Kazin. “The Fascination of Henry Adams.”  New Republic. August 1, 1983. https://newrepublic.com/article/104616/the-fascination-henry-adams  accessed March 17, 2017.)

April 18, 1959 – The radioactive threat posed by naval nuclear weapons and nuclear reactor accidents is a continuing and grave environmental and public health concern over the last seventy years.  One of many international examples of this threat is one such incident that occurred on this date when the U.S. Navy responded to a serious nuclear reactor accident by dumping a damaged sodium-cooled liquid metal reactor vessel and other reactor plant components of the submarine U.S.S. Seawolf into the 9,000 feet deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean about 120 miles off the Delaware-Maryland coastline.  Comments:  In the Atomic Age, eight nuclear submarines, six of them Soviet/Russian and the other two American, have sunk with dozens of nuclear ballistic missiles also lost at sea.  Some of the nuclear reactors and warheads in these and other military vessels or aircraft 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. (Source: William Arkin and Joshua Handler. “Neptune Papers II: Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/International/planet-2/report/2006/2/naval-nuclear-accidents-arkin.pdf accessed March 20, 2017.)

April 26, 2016 – An article by Kurt Nimmo, “U.S. Plans First Use of Nuclear Weapons Against North Korea,” was published on this date on the Infowars.com website.  It quoted Robert Einhorn, a former special advisor for nonproliferation and arms control at the U.S. Department of State, “The U.S. has said that it is prepared, if necessary, to use nuclear weapons first, whether in Europe or in East Asia, to support South Korea and Japan –this remains U.S. policy.” Unfortunately, this opinion is entirely consistent with the long history of U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula (and elsewhere) from presidents Eisenhower to Clinton and now to include the 45^th President who once during the election campaign horrified the entire planet with the query, “Why can’t we use nukes?” But was this just hypothetical nuclear saber-rattling?  Whatever it was, it has been going on for some time. Last October, even the usually diplomatically-focused Council on Foreign Relations advocated using military force to cause regime change in North Korea. More recently, President Trump’s newly confirmed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson mentioned the possible use of U.S. military force against North Korea.  In a speech in Seoul, South Korea while standing alongside South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se, Secretary Tillerson proclaimed, “The policy of strategic patience has ended.  We are exploring a new range of diplomatic, security, and economic measures.  All options (in regards to North Korea) are on the table.  If they elevate the threat of their (nuclear) weapons program to a level that we believe requires (military) action, then that option’s on the table.”  Adding fuel to this fire is that fact that the Pentagon has, over the last couple decades,  publicly discussed (albeit sometimes in a low key manner after an unauthorized leak) using tactical, low-kiloton, ground-penetrating nuclear weapons, like the B-61, to attack Quaddafi’s underground chemical weapons  factories in Libya in 1996, to strike Al Qaeda cave bunkers in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan weeks after the 9-11 terrorist attack,  and to take out Saddam Hussein’s deep underground WMD and leadership bunkers in the 2003 Iraq War.  A strike against “high value” leadership and WMD targets in nuclear-armed North Korea is an even more frightening possibility because of the horrendous resulting fatalities and the tremendous health and environmental impacts on the Korean peninsula and Japan of a so-called “small-scale” nuclear conflict, not to mention the globally catastrophic precedent of breaching the nuclear threshold for the first time since 1945.  And it is not too far-fetched to believe that any such supposedly “limited” nuclear war could also precipitate or trigger a larger-scale nuclear Armageddon. (Sources:  Prof. Michel Chossudorsky.  “Remember Hiroshima: No Danger of Nuclear War?  The Pentagon’s Plan to Blow Up the Planet.”  Global Research.  Oct. 10, 2016.  http://www.globalresearch.ca/there-is-no-danger-of-nuclear-war-or-is-there/5500276 and Bill Chappell. “Tillerson Says ‘All Of The Options Are On The Table’ In Dealing With North Korea.” NPR.org. March 17, 2017. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/17/520515168/tillerson-says-all-of-the-options-are-on-the-table-in-dealing-with-north-korea both accessed March 19, 2017.)

April 30, 2015 – “Former U.S. Commander:  Take Nuclear Missiles Off High Alert,” an article by Robert Burns that was published in Air Force Times on this date sent some significant shock waves into the foundation of long-held nuclear deterrence theory.  This article reported that retired General James Cartwright, who served as the former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) from 2004-07 and later served as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before retiring in 2011, chaired a study panel that concluded that the 450 land-based Minuteman III ICBMs did not need to remain on a decades-long hair-trigger, launch-on-warning alert status.  He and his military colleagues proposed that the missiles’ command-and-control system be adjusted to require that it should take at least 24 to 72 hours to prepare the missiles to achieve launch status – thereby giving America (and Russia, if they agreed to reciprocate in this vital task) a breathing space to avoid launching an irreversible, globally catastrophic, possibly species-ending, nuclear war, especially one triggered due to accidental, unauthorized, or unintentional circumstances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 1, 1992 – It was not only a New Year but it seemed like a new century as the almost fifty-year Cold War, which began in 1946, ended.  The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Velvet Revolutions against Soviet-imposed communism in Eastern Europe in 1989-90, the ending of the Warsaw Pact Soviet-Eastern European military alliance in February 1991, and finally the Christmas Day 1991 dissolution of the U.S.S.R, all seemingly meant that peace was at hand.  In 1991, global nuclear arsenals totaled around 58,300 warheads.  A quarter century later, in January of 2017, there remain roughly 15,375 nuclear warheads (Russia with 7,300 and the U.S. with 6,970, respectively, which represent 93 percent of the global arsenal) of which 4,200 are deployed with operational forces with about 1,800 warheads on a hazardous hair-trigger alert status and ready to be used on short notice, including a shocking number of doomsday weapons deployed by both NATO and Russia near the borders of the former Soviet Union.  Comments:  Surprisingly, despite all the myriad of other global problems facing humankind (climate change, the largest number of war refugees since World War II, growing international as well as domestic terrorism, overpopulation, poverty, a growing gap between rich and poor, and many other concerns), the risks of nuclear war are not significantly lower today than they were during the Cold War.  While it has been 20 years since Cornell University astrophysicist, cosmologist, and world-renowned science-popularizer Carl Sagan passed away, his warning about the nuclear threat is as relevant in 2017 as it was more than 25 years ago:  “On our small planet, at this moment, we face a critical branch point in history.  What we do with our world right now will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants.  It is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well.  If we capitulate to superstition, greed, or stupidity, we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissance.  But we’re also capable of using our compassion, our intelligence, our technology, and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.” (Sources:  Hans Kristensen and Stan Norris. “Status of World Nuclear Forces.”  Federation of American Scientists, 2016 http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/ and The Carl Sagan Portal.  http://carlsagan.com accessed Dec. 16, 2016.)

January 11, 2007 – An extensive study, designated JSR-06-335, paid for by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration and conducted by the contract firm the MITRE Corporation of McLean, Virginia titled “Pit Lifetime” was released on this date.  A group of nuclear weapons experts in the JASON Program Office including Freeman Dyson and Sidney Drell as well as other employees of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) concluded that their multi-year assessment of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile showed, “no degradation in performance of primaries (plutonium pits) of stockpile systems due to plutonium aging that would be a cause for concern regarding their safety and reliability.  Most primary types have credible minimum (author’s emphasis) lifetimes in excess of 100 years…”  Comments:  In addition to the fact that dramatic reductions and the eventual elimination (sooner than later is highly recommended due to the ongoing and increasing daily risk of nuclear war) of global nuclear arsenals is supported by the vast majority of humanity, this JASON study is still relevant today as it casts extreme doubt on the current Obama and future Trump administration’s imperative to modernize and improve the reliability of the nuclear arsenal.  While many Pentagon, DOE, and civilian hawks criticized this 2007 study, most U.S. Department of Energy staffers, as well as the former director of LANL, Harold Agnew, agreed with the conclusions.  The JASON scientists also concluded that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would not negatively impact nuclear weapons safety and reliability.  Therefore, in order to prevent wasting hundreds of billions of dollars, if not more, as well as protecting Americans and global populations from the detrimental health and environmental impacts of renewed nuclear testing, the 45^th President of the United States should strongly recommend to the newly sworn-in Congress that:  (1) U.S. nuclear modernization be severely curtailed or even eliminated (except for relatively inexpensive steps to make the arsenal safer and more protected from hacking threats) and (2) that the U.S. join the majority of world nations by having the Senate ratify the CTBT in the first 100 days of his administration.  (Source:  JASON Program Office.  “Pit Lifetime.” MITRE Corporation, JSR-06-335, Jan. 11, 2007 http://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/pit.pdf accessed Dec. 17, 2016.)

January 13, 1975 – A New York Times article, “Air Force Panel Recommends Discharge of Major Who Challenged Failsafe System,” published on this date, discussed an incident in 1973 when a U.S. nuclear missile launch control officer-in-training, Major Harold L. Hering, asked one of the seminal questions in the history of the human species – what the U.S. Air Force considered a forbidden question – “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”  Comments:  The order, like all military orders to blindly and unquestioningly obey a superior’s command authority without any reservation whatsoever, to launch genocidal nation-destroying, nuclear winter-species threatening Armageddon-causing weapons represents the very fundamental foundation of the nuclear deterrence assumption – a supposedly ultra-rational, unerring means of preventing the U.S., Russia, China, or other nuclear powers and their allies from ever facing wholesale destruction at the hands of a foreign enemy.  The massive and extremely hazardous flaws in this system, which has almost failed too many times to count (if we include hundreds or thousands of nuclear incidents and accidents which narrowly triggered accidental or unintentional nuclear warfare), have been written about and debated extensively for over seventy years – and have been dramatized in many books and films including Fail Safe and Doctor Strangelove and other works.  It’s clearly an open secret to the vast majority of humanity that deterrence will eventually fail catastrophically resulting in unintentional megadeath on an unforeseen scale and most probably the end of human civilization if not the entire species.  Global citizenry are increasingly verbalizing opposition to this state of affairs by stating most forcefully, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”  There is an ever growing global consensus that nuclear arms threaten everyone and that this situation must be reversed before it is too late.  (Source:  Ron Rosenbaum.  “How the End Begins:  The Road to a Nuclear World War III.”  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.)

January 14, 2017 – Eighteen months ago on July 14, 2015, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China, the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (P5 + 1), and the European Union announced an agreement with Iran that is commonly referred to as the “Iran nuclear deal,” a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action  endorsed by over 70 global nonproliferation experts to lift sanctions on that nation in return for an Iranian commitment to curtail their nuclear enrichment activities and significantly eliminate the risk that the Islamic Republic would be able to build a nuclear weapon for at least ten years or more.  In September of 2015, a Republican-controlled Congress approved this international agreement.  The November 8, 2016 election of Republican Donald Trump as president put the first nail in the coffin of the Iran nuclear deal, and the second major blow to the agreement was President-elect Trump’s selection of Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) as CIA Director.  Pompeo has stated that, “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal…”  Current CIA Director John Brennan called this potential move a mistake.  He warned Trump that scrapping the agreement with Iran would undermine U.S. foreign policy, embolden hardliners in Iran and threaten to set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.  Brennan said, “I think it would be the height of folly if the next administration were to tear up that agreement.”  Comments:  Even if the U.S. withdraws from the Iran nuclear deal, it is unlikely that the agreement will also be scuttled by all or most of the other signatories.  America will become an international pariah again, ironically along with hardline Iranian advocates of an accelerated nuclear program.  Nonproliferation will also suffer a significant setback and the risk of a regional nuclear conflict involving Iran, Israel, or possibly India and Pakistan will increase substantially.  Trump-supported Israeli air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities could spur a wider regional war and increase the risk of not just more terrorism but of nuclear terrorism with the U.S. and Israel as the most likely targets.  (Sources:  U.S. Department of State.  “Nuclear Agreement With Iran.” July 14, 2015 http://www.state.gov/p/nea/p5/ and Dan Bilefsky.  “CIA Chief Warns Donald Trump Against Tearing Up Iran Nuclear Deal.”  New York Times. Nov. 30, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/world/americas/cia-trump-Iran-nuclear-deal.html?smid=fb-n… both accessed December 19, 2016.)

January 21, 1968 – A fire that broke out in the navigator’s compartment of a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber, carrying four Mark-28 nuclear bombs each with a yield of 1.1 megatons, caused the crew to quickly eject before the aircraft crashed at a speed of 600 miles-per-hour impacting seven miles southwest of Thule Air Base onto the ice of North Star Bay in Greenland, a Danish possession.  High explosives jacketing the nuclear warheads and their plutonium pits detonated on impact igniting an estimated 225,000 pounds of jet fuel which triggered a catastrophic fire that burned over an area of three square miles.  Extreme weather conditions made comprehensive recovery and decontamination of the crash zone impossible.  Nevertheless, an extremely large volume of contaminated ice and debris (that eventually filled 147 freight train cars and represented an estimated 237,000 cubic feet of material) was flown back to the Atomic Energy Commission facility in Aiken, South Carolina and buried while bomb fragments were recycled at the Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas.  This incident spurred massive protests in Denmark as the Danish government had forbidden U.S. deployment of nuclear weapons on its territory.  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 which potentially threatens the health and well-being of large numbers of people.  These near-nuclear catastrophes provide an additional justification for reducing dramatically and eventually eliminating an estimated 15,375 warheads in existing global nuclear arsenals.  (Sources:  The Center for Defense Information.  “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents:  Dangers In Our Midst.”  The Defense Monitor, Vol. 10, No. 5, 1981. http://www.nukestrat.com/us/CDI_BrokenArrowMonitor1981.pdf accessed Dec. 17, 2016 and Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

January 24, 1946 – The very first resolution of the newly created United Nations General Assembly, passed on this date, called for the elimination of atomic weapons. Over the ensuring seven decades, hundreds of other U.N. resolutions have addressed the global threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.  Last October at the U.N. General Assembly First Committee for Disarmament, 123 nations, including amazingly North Korea, voted to support negotiations in 2017 to prohibit and ban nuclear weapons just as the vast majority of world nations in the past made biological and chemical weapons’ production and use illegal.  Unfortunately in this vote, the United States joined Israel, Russia, the U.K., France, the NATO countries (with the exception of The Netherlands which abstained due to grassroots public lobbying), Australia, South Korea, and Japan in a bloc of 38 opposing nations.  Surprisingly, China joined non-NPT nuclear weapons states Pakistan and India in a group of 16 abstaining nations.   All nine nuclear weapon states, unfortunately, did vote as a bloc to boycott a special U.N. Open Ended Working Group for Nuclear Disarmament held in the summer of 2016.  Comments:  The vast majority of global populations (including many that live in the nine nuclear weapons states) and nation-states have recognized the urgent imperative of eliminating nuclear weapons or at least reducing global nuclear stockpiles below the nuclear winter threshold with the utmost timeliness and speed.  Every day we delay this essential prerequisite to continued human survival, we risk the unthinkable – the first use of nuclear weapons in combat since 1945, the first-ever use of genocidal thermonuclear weapons against human populations, and the triggering of an unprecedented global catastrophe – nuclear war.  It is an extremely slippery slope to argue that a “small” bunker-busting nuclear weapon used against underground Iranian or North Korean nuclear facilities will not be the tripwire that opens the door to the use of other types and sizes of nuclear weapons by other nation-states or actors.  Once Pandora’s Box is opened, it may be too late to save our global civilization and the human species.  Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon presented a forceful argument against the nuclear deterrence “blinders” employed by nuclear weapons states and their allies in a 2013 speech in Monterey, California, “I urge all nuclear-armed states to reconsider their national nuclear posture.  Nuclear deterrence is not a solution to international peace and stability.  It is an obstacle.  The longer we procrastinate, the greater the risk that these weapons will be used, will proliferate, or be acquired by terrorists.  But our aim must be more than keeping these weapons from “falling into the wrong hands.”  There are no right hands for nuclear weapons.”  (Source:  United Nations General Assembly.  Resolution UNGA 1, 24 January 1946 and Alice Slater.  “Seeking Nuclear Disarmament in Dangerous Times.”  In Depth News. Nov. 28, 2016.)

December 2, 1942 – A group of Allied physicists led by Enrico Fermi achieved the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a makeshift laboratory constructed on a squash court under the west stands at the University of Chicago Stadium.  Thirty-one months later, the top secret U.S.-funded and directed Manhattan Project successfully tested a 15-20 kiloton nuclear device, code-named Trinity, on July 16, 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico.  Despite protests from some scientists, military leaders, and government officials, the first use of nuclear weapons in combat occurred when U.S. B-29 bombers dropped a 15 kiloton uranium-fueled nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and a plutonium-fueled 21 kiloton bomb on Nagasaki killing and injuring hundreds of thousands of predominantly civilian victims.  Comments:  Thus began the nuclear arms race which still continues today to threaten humanity with extinction.  The man who originally convinced President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1939 letter to deter a possible Nazi German A-bomb with one of our own, may have said it best, “Humanity is going to require a substantially new way of thinking if it is to survive.”  (Source:  Randy Alfred. “Dec. 2, 1942:  Nuclear Pile Gets Going.”  Wired.com. Dec. 2, 2010.  https://www.wired.com/2010/12/1202nuclear-milestones/ accessed Nov. 10, 2016.)

December 8-9, 2014 – As a result of concerns by a group of nation-states attending the 2010 NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) Review Conference of “the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from the use of nuclear weapons,” the last of three conferences (the first was in Oslo, Norway on March 4-5, 2013 and the second was in Nayarit, Mexico on Feb. 13-14, 2014) on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons was held on these dates in Vienna, Austria.  The Vienna Conference, as well as the other two meetings, produced a wealth of fact-based materials about the horrendous short- and long-term globally detrimental impact of even so-called “limited” nuclear war on individuals, societies, and the global common.  The meeting also generated valuable legal analyses, building on seven decades of international humanitarian legal protections, that characterize the use of nuclear weapons as illegal and utterly unjustifiable.  One of the most valuable concrete results of the Vienna Conference was the crafting of The Humanitarian Pledge for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons which was adopted as U.N. General Assembly Resolution 70/48 on December 7, 2015 with 139 nations approving, 29 opposing, and 17 abstaining.  Comments:  Before leaving office, President Barack Obama should take a cue from President Kennedy’s creation of the ExComm (Executive Committee) to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and create an Executive Committee to Address the Environmental Crises of Global Climate Change and the Growing Threat of Nuclear Weapons to meet once or twice a week to brief the President on policies and actions to mitigate and work towards a resolution of these catastrophic trends.  The President should staff this committee with not only his Chief of Staff and main political advisors but more importantly with several scientific experts such as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, environmentalists such as Bill McKibben, and prominent bipartisan/nonpartisan retired political statesmen and women like President Jimmy Carter, and former Secretary of State George P. Schultz.  The committee’s charter will mandate the Committee’s continuance after President Obama steps down on January 20, 2017 as a permanent nonprofit organization (which would also mandate absolutely no corporate funding or donations)  meeting in public settings once or twice a month at revolving sites such as the Carter Center in Atlanta and at locations outside the United States as well.  Each meeting will also include a number of local experts and community activists.  The nuclear threat and climate change are the main issues facing humanity in the 21^st century and much more time, money, brain power, and focus needs to be harnessed to address these global crises.  (Sources:  Patricia Lewis, Beyza Unal, and Sasan Aghlani.  “Nuclear Disarmament:  The Missing Link in Multilaterialism.” The Royal Institute of Chatham House, International Security Department, October 2016 and “The Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.”  8-9 December 2014.  https://ww.bmeia.gv.at/en/european-foreign-policy/disarmament/weapons-of-mass-destruction/nuclear-weapons-and-nuclear-terrorism/vienna-conference-on-the-humanitarian-impact-of-nuclear-weapons/ accessed on Nov. 10, 2016.)

December 10, 1967 – As part of the Operation Plowshare program created by the Atomic Energy Commission (now known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to explore “peaceful” uses of nuclear weapons as initiated by President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace December 8, 1953 plan, a 29 kiloton nuclear device code-named Gasbuggy was detonated 60 miles from Farmington, New Mexico on this date.  The purpose of the blast was to learn whether a small underground nuclear explosion would stimulate the release of natural gas trapped in dense shale deposits.  Initially the test was considered a success until it was discovered that the immense volume of gas produced was highly radioactive and therefore unusable.  Unfortunately, the contaminated gas was vented and flared which released radioactive krypton-85 into the atmosphere.  In addition, groundwater was contaminated with other radioactive elements such as strontium-90.  Comments:  Thankfully this was one of the last Atoms for Peace test explosions, however nuclear testing has continued for decades and the U.S. has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.  This appears unlikely during the Donald Trump presidency with a Republican-controlled Congress.  The testing of over 2,000 nuclear devices over the last seven decades has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations especially native peoples.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people to this day due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  Colonel Derek L. Duke as told to Fred Dungan.  “Chasing Loose Nukes.”  Dungan Books, 2007, pp. 10-11.  http://www.fdungan.com/duke.htm accessed Nov. 10, 2016.)

December 12, 1952 – The NRX nuclear research reactor at Chalk Point Laboratories in Ontario, Canada suffered a partial meltdown after a power surge caused some fuel rods to rupture and melt which resulted in a flood of millions of liters of radioactive water spilling into the reactor building’s basement.  A young U.S. naval officer serving in the nuclear submarine service, James (Jimmy) Earl Carter, the future 39^th President of the United States, was charged with directing a unit of nearly two dozen sailors to stabilize the reactor and begin cleaning up the highly radioactive contamination.  Carter and each member of his team limited themselves to only a few seconds of exposure during their forays into the reactor building.  Nevertheless, the President noted in a 2008 interview that, “They let us get probably a thousand times more radiation than they would now.  We were fairly well instructed then on what nuclear power was but for about six months after that I had radioactivity in my urine.”  Decades later in August of 2015, doctors removed a cancerous mass from the President’s liver.  He was also diagnosed with a form of melanoma that was discovered on parts of his brain which required him to undergo radiation treatments and immune-based therapy.  During his presidency, Jimmy Carter had to deal with the March 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.  President Carter recognized the importance of addressing the nuclear threat as he promised to work toward the elimination of nuclear weapons during his inaugural address and his administration worked with the Soviets to negotiate and sign the SALT II Treaty.  In his December 10, 2002 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, President Carter said, “…we will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.  The bond of our common humanity is stronger than the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.  God gives us the capacity for choice.  We can choose to alleviate suffering.  We can choose to work together in peace.  We can make these changes and we must.”  Comments:  In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear reactor accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage conundrum, as well as the terrorist targeting potential, the economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an accelerated phase-out of global civilian nuclear power plants over the next decade.  President Barack Obama should publicly announce this initiative and begin to launch this phase-out before he leaves office.  (Sources:  Arthur Milnes.  “Jimmy Carter’s Exposure to Nuclear Danger.” CNN.com, April 5, 2011.  http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/05/milnes.carter.nuclear/ and Clyde Hughes.  “Jimmy Carter:  Didn’t Say Cancer is Cured, Treatment Continues.”  The Wire. Jan. 26, 2016.  http://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/jimmy-carter-cancer-treatment/2016/01/26/id/710859/ both accessed Nov. 10, 2016.)

December 20, 1993 – The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) issued Directive 5230.16 “Nuclear Accident and Incident Public Affairs Guidance” that mandated a Pentagon policy of neither confirming nor denying the presence or absence of nuclear weapons on U.S. naval vessels which reinforced the fact that two years after the Cold War ended, military secrecy, particularly regarding nuclear weapons, was as tight-lipped as ever, if not becoming even more restrictive.  Journalists and nuclear experts had been clamoring for years for more information on all manner of U.S. and allied nuclear weapons incidents, but despite the passage of decades of time and the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact Soviet military alliance, the Pentagon was not forthcoming.  DoD Public Affairs officers continued to point to a minimalist list of 32 nuclear accidents and incidents that was released in 1980.  Nevertheless Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which can take as long as several years for the Pentagon to respond to (and sometimes the response is negative, due to existing or upgraded secrecy classification protocols), have seen just one branch of the armed services – the U.S. Navy – release details of 381 nuclear weapons incidents that occurred between 1965 and 1977.  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 an estimated 15,500 warheads in existing global nuclear arsenals.  (Source:  http://www.abovetopsecret.com accessed Nov. 10, 2016.)

December 22, 1983 – The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a publication founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists who “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work,” moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock, which has tracked humanity’s proximity to Nuclear Armageddon since 1947, from four minutes to three minutes to Midnight.  The moving of the clock’s hands was necessitated by ever growing tensions in U.S.-Soviet relations spurred by actions by both superpowers.  Examples included President Ronald Reagan’s announcement on March 23, 1983 of the “Star Wars” (SDI – Strategic Defense Initiative) system, a greatly accelerated land- and space-based effort to intercept the overwhelming majority of Soviet ICBMs before they impacted U.S. targets.  This plan threatened the relatively stable nuclear deterrence system and convinced the Soviet leadership that the U.S. actually intended a huge defensive buildup to allow them to escape relatively unscathed after a Soviet counterstrike to a suspected American first strike attack plan.  The Soviets later heightened tensions by shooting down Korean Airlines Flight 007 near Sakhalin Island on September 1, 1983.  Comments:  With the election of Donald Trump, the first president without any government or military experience, as the 45^th Commander-in-Chief, it seems extremely possible that the Doomsday Clock may be advanced to its historic high of two minutes until Midnight as experienced from 1953-60.  During the past year of campaigning, President-elect Trump has expressed a profound and frightening ignorance on the nuclear threat best exemplified by his shocking query, “Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?” Even the fact that 50 leading Republican national security experts warned in an open letter published this past September that Trump possesses “dangerous qualities in an individual with command of the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” did not dissuade the American electorate from selecting Donald Trump as president.  One can only hope that President Trump will follow the pattern of Cold War hawk President Ronald Reagan who for decades talked of destroying Soviet communism but eventually proclaimed publicly that “a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought,” and talked openly with Soviet General Secretary Gorbachev of eliminating nuclear weapons entirely.  (Sources:  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website.  http://thebulletin.org/background-and-mission-1945-2016 and Ira Helfand and Robert Dodge.  “Op-Ed:  Should We Let An Unstable Person Have Control of the Nuclear Arsenal? No, But That’s Not The Right Question.”  Los Angeles Times. Sept. 23, 2016.  http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-helfand-dodge-nuclear-weapon-question-2016-september-23 both accessed Nov. 10, 2016.)

November 3, 1945 – Before the creation of the CIA, the National Security Council or even the OSS (Office of Strategic Services), the American Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), founded at the onset of U.S. entry into World War II with the task of producing intelligence reports for the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), was working on critical estimates involving the military capabilities and future intentions of the Soviet Union.  Based on a number of studies that concluded that Soviet ideology promoted inevitable conflict between Soviet and non-Soviet nations, the Joint Intelligence Committee reports convinced the JCS of dire Soviet military intentions against the U.S. and its allies in Europe and Asia.  On this date, a new JIC estimate, JIC-329, focused on Soviet vulnerability to a limited attack with nuclear weapons.  The estimate identified 20 industrial cities in the U.S.S.R., including Moscow, Gorki, Leningrad, Tashkent, Tbilisi, and Baku, that should be targeted for atomic destruction in an effort to blunt a Red Army offensive in Europe or Asia.  JIC-329 was the basis for the earliest known of many subsequent nuclear war plans against the Soviet Union and its allies.  Comments:  Unfortunately, seven decades into the Nuclear Age, there is little doubt that U.S., Russian, and other military establishments continue to devise ever more sophisticated and extensive planning and practice for the unthinkable – nuclear warfighting in a frighteningly large array of scenarios.  Meanwhile, every hour, day, week, month, and year, the risk of nuclear war imperceptibly increases.  Nuclear Armageddon is inevitable unless we resolve to end this insanity by eliminating once and for all these doomsday weapons.  (Source:  Larry A. Valero.  “The American Joint Intelligence Committee and Estimates of the Soviet Union, 1945-47.”  Studies in Intelligence (Unclassified Edition), No. 9, Summer 2000, pp. 65-80.)

November 9, 1934 – Today is the birthdate of Carl Sagan (who passed away on Dec. 20, 1996), a U.S. astronomer, astrophysicist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, cosmologist, science communicator (he produced and wrote the popular Cosmos PBS-TV series which first aired in 1980) who was a consultant and advisor to NASA since the 1950s.  He also helped guide and direct the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo robotic space missions.  This David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, made seminal contributions to the study of planetary atmospheres, planetary surfaces, the history of the Earth and exobiology and his list of international scientific and humanitarian honors is too long to list here.  Dr. Carl Sagan received the NASA Medal for Distinguished Public Service twice and was a recipient of the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences for “distinguished contributions in the application of science to public welfare.”  Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Sagan along with four other scientists – R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, and J.B. Pollack – conducted extensive unprecedented research (reported in a December 23, 1983 article published in the journal Science, titled, “Nuclear Winter:  Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions”) on the global atmospheric and climate impacts of nuclear war.  Their discovery, which has been expanded and explained in more detail over the decades by many other similar scientific analyses, was that the explosion of as few as 100-200 nuclear weapons during a period of a day or so, would inject extremely large amounts of dust and smoke into the Earth’s upper atmosphere causing substantial reductions in light and temperature levels triggering a “nuclear winter.”  This previously unexpected impact of nuclear warfighting would substantially increase the magnitude of nuclear war deaths in a so-called “limited war” (100-200 explosions) and possibly lead to human extinction in an extensive all-out global nuclear war (a 5,000 megaton war).  Comments:  Carl Sagan was also one of the most prominent and vociferously outspoken proponents of ending the nuclear arms race and he spent quite a bit of his valuable time publicizing his views on this and other global threats to humanity.  In a Cosmos episode entitled, “Who Speaks for Earth?” Dr. Sagan expounded magnificently on this and related topics which are, of course, still very relevant today, “The global balance of terror, pioneered by the United States and the Soviet Union, holds hostage all the citizens of the Earth…The hostile military establishments are locked in some ghastly mutual embrace.  Each needs the other, but the balance of terror is a delicate balance, with very little margin for miscalculation.  And the world impoverishes itself by spending a trillion dollars a year on preparations for war and by employing perhaps half the scientists and high technologists on the planet in military endeavors.  How would we explain all this to a dispassionate extraterrestrial observer?  What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth?  From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces – preserving the lives and well-being of its citizens and the future habitability of the planet…Nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth.  Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled impractical or contrary to human nature – as if nuclear war were practical or as if there was only one human nature.  But fundamental changes can clearly be made – we’re surrounded by them…The old appeals to racial, sexual, and religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work.  A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself – is doomed!  We are one planet.  Our loyalties are to the species and the planet.  We speak for Earth.  Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring.” (Source:  The Carl Sagan Portal.  http://www.carlsagan.com/ accessed October 15, 2016.)

November 10, 1950 – Enroute from a Canadian air base at Goose Bay to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, a U.S. Air Force B-50 Superfortress bomber, carrying a U.S. Mark IV nuclear bomb that had previously been secretly deployed in Canada, developed engine trouble near Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec and was forced to jettison the 5 ½ ton nuclear weapon at 10,500 feet altitude approximately 300 miles northeast of Montreal.  The crew set the bomb to self-destruct at 2,500 feet as it dropped over the St. Lawrence River.  The conventional blast of the bomb’s high-explosive shaped charges disturbed thousands of area residents and scattered nearly 100 pounds of radioactive uranium (U-238) used in the weapons’ tamper over a large area.  Thankfully, the bomb’s plutonium core or “pit” had been removed.  The aircraft made an emergency landing at a U.S. base in Maine.  But the U.S. Air Force covered up the incident explaining it away as the military practice explosion of a 500-pound conventional bomb.  This secret Broken Arrow was not revealed until the 1980s.  Comments:  Many of the hundreds, if not thousands of nuclear accidents involving all nine nuclear weapon 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 global nuclear weapons arsenals.  (Sources:  “Broken Arrows: Nuclear Weapons Accidents.”  AtomicArchive.com. http://atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows_static.shtml accessed Oct. 13, 2016 and Robert S. Norris, William M. Arkin, and William Burr. “Where They Were.” The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. November/December 1999.)

November 19, 1985 – In their first face-to-face meeting in Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev spoke about moving beyond their nations’ mutual mistrust and suspicions of the past to begin a new stage of U.S.-Soviet relations.  Mr. Gorbachev stressed the need for ending the nuclear arms race while President Reagan expressed his concern about Soviet intentions in the Third World.  Later though at a dinner with Gorbachev and his wife, the President did acknowledge the importance of the nuclear issue as one that “would unite all the peoples of the world.”  Comments:  While both leaders at the later October 1986 Reykjavik, Iceland Summit spoke publicly about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the military-industrial complex in both nations circumvented these leaders’ desire to negotiate a nuclear abolition treaty.  President Reagan died in June of 2004 but Mikhail Gorbachev, today at age 85, is still concerned that renewed Cold War tensions have brought the world to “a dangerous point.”  On Oct. 10, 2016, Gorbachev criticized both the Obama and Putin administrations for their rhetoric over Syria, the U.S. suspension of talks with Russia regarding a Syrian ceasefire, Putin’s announcement that Russia was withdrawing from a bilateral arms control agreement aimed at reprocessing weapons-grade plutonium, and U.S. support of continued military deployments in NATO countries near Russia’s western border.  The 1990 Nobel Peace Prize winner said that, “It is necessary to return to the main priorities.  These are nuclear disarmament, the fight against terrorism, the prevention of an environmental disaster.  Compared to these challenges, all the rest slips into the background.” (Sources:  Roland Oliphant.  “Mikhail Gorbachev Warns World Is At ‘Dangerous Point’ Amid U.S.-Russian Face-Off Over Syria.”  The Telegraph.  Oct. 10, 2016  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/10/gorbachev-warns-world-is-at-dangerous-point and  Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton. “The Gorbachev File:  National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 544.”  Document-07, (“Dinner Hosted by the Gorbachevs in Geneva”) Nov. 19, 1985, http://nsaarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB544-The-Gorbachev-File-85th-Birthday/ both accessed Oct. 13, 2016.)

November 20, 2013 – An Associated Press story by Robert Burns titled, “Nuke Troubles Run Deep,” summarized a new Rand Corporation study on the performance levels of U.S. Air Force officers assigned to duties relating to nuclear warfighting.  The news was not good.  The Rand report found that overall these officers suffered low job satisfaction and very high rates of “burnout.”  The study also found unusually high rates of court martials in the ICBM force, 129 percent higher in 2011 than the previous year and, just a year later, 145 percent higher in 2012 than in the Air Force as a whole.  One nuclear warfighter reportedly was quoted as saying, “We don’t care if things go properly, we just don’t want to get in trouble.”  Comments:  The combination of human fallibility juxtaposed with the most destructive weapons ever invented yields unfortunately very dire consequences not only for America but for the entire human species as well.  This is why a dramatic and swift reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear weapons must be the top global priority.  Continuing delays in addressing this global imperative are not only irrational but omnicidal.  (Source:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20131120/us-nuclear-missteps/ accessed Oct. 13, 2016.)

November 24, 1961 – When all communications links, including a number of seemingly redundant ones, between the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC) and NORAD suddenly and inexplicably went dead, cutting SAC off from three early warning radar stations in England, Greenland, and Australia, the only explanation possible, it was reasoned, was that a full-scale Soviet nuclear first strike had begun.  As a direct result, all SAC bases were put on high alert and nuclear-armed B-52 bombers scrambled and prepared to counterattack the Soviet Union with hundreds of megatons of nuclear weapons.  Luckily, the order for World War III to begin was never given when it was ascertained that the allegedly redundant communication circuits all ran through one relay station located in Colorado.  The cause for the communication breakdown was the overheating of a single motor.   Comments:  Such false alarms are still possible today although technological verification is more sophisticated and supposedly more foolproof.  It is still true however that the very short response times in nuclear crises, make accidental, unintentional, or unauthorized nuclear warfare a frighteningly real possibility now and in the future.  That is why short of the elimination of all nuclear weapons arsenals, a crucial preliminary step is for the nuclear weapons states to de-alert these doomsday weapons, making it impossible to fire these civilization-destroying devices for at least 72 hours during which time it is hoped that rational minds will circumvent such a catastrophe.  (Sources:  “Seven Close Calls in the Nuclear Age.”  Mental_Floss.com http://mentalfloss.com/article/25685/7-close-calls-nuclear-age accessed Oct. 13, 2016 and Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

November 26, 1991 – Britain exploded the last of 45 nuclear weapons ending a forty-year period (1952-1991) of testing at the U.S. Nevada Test Site on this date.  Nuclear testing by Britain and other nuclear weapons states (which continues today by North Korea) of more than 2,000 nuclear devices has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations, especially native peoples.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people to this day due to nuclear testing.   The United Kingdom signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) the same day as the United States on Sept. 24, 1996 but unlike the U.S., which has failed to ratify the agreement, the U.K., like most global nations, ratified the CTBT on April 6, 1998.  Recently the United Nations Security Council voted almost unanimously (14 affirmative votes and one abstention) to pass a U.S. draft resolution calling on all nation states to end nuclear weapons testing and to expedite the final ratification of the CTBT.  Ironically, the U.S. and a bloc of 44 nuclear capable nations including China, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan (but not Russia, the U.K, and France) are holding up the permanent end of nuclear testing.  The Republican-controlled Congress has consistently opposed ratification (despite overwhelming evidence that hundreds of global sensing stations have credibly eliminated the possibility of hiding a clandestine nuclear blast) since the U.S. Senate narrowly rejected CTBT ratification by a vote of 51-48 on Oct. 13, 1999.   Even today, some Republicans are so adamantly against the CTBT that they have threatened to prevent the authorization of about $37 million annually that the U.S. contributes to the organization that administers the treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, which represents about a quarter of its budget.  Comments:  The citizenry of the United States and the global community, in the last days before the Nov. 8^th presidential election, can still pressure President Obama, the Congressional leadership, and other key U.S. political figures, as well as the newly elected 45^th President, to make CTBT ratification a top priority in the current or newly sworn-in Congress, along with nuclear de-alerting, ending the Global War on Terrorism (the longest war in U.S. history which, if it continues, increases the risks of nuclear terrorism over the long-term), phasing out civilian nuclear power by 2025, and converting the U.S. energy grid from fossil fuels and nuclear power to green energy in the next 10 to 15 years.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 15, 22, 24 and Kambiz Foroobar.  “U.N. Adopts U.S.-Drafted Plea for Stalled Nuclear Test Treaty.”  Bloomberg.com, Sept. 23, 2016,  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-23/un-adopts-u-s-drafted-plea-for-stalled-nuclear-test-treaty accessed Oct. 13, 2016.)

October 2, 1981 – During his tenth month in office, President Ronald Reagan announced his strategic program and signaled the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history. His nuclear buildup plan stated that the U.S. would “strengthen and modernize the strategic nuclear triad with the highest priority of improving the command-and-control system.”  President Reagan proposed a new cruise missile program that included the deployment of long-range nuclear attack cruise missiles on submarines, two new strategic bombers, 100 long-range Peacekeeper MX missiles carrying a total of 1,000 nuclear warheads, and a new class of Trident strategic nuclear submarines.  Many analysts and observers at the time were alarmed that this program confirmed the administration’s commitment to a nuclear war-fighting doctrine that included MX missiles, anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, and extensive ABM Treaty-violating ballistic missile defenses (which were announced later in President Reagan’s March 23, 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative “Star Wars” speech).  Although supporters of the plan justified the buildup as a means of addressing growing Soviet nuclear parity, many other nuclear experts expressed the grave concern that this buildup would increase the risks of global thermonuclear war.  Comments:  And indeed those concerns were realized as the world came dangerously close to nuclear war, several times during the Reagan presidency.   Contributing factors were the September 1, 1983 Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 near Sakhalin Island, a September 26, 1983 Soviet false nuclear alert, the November 1983 Able Archer military exercise that Soviet leadership widely misinterpreted as a warmup for an eventual U.S. first strike nuclear attack, and the August 11, 1984 off-the-cuff sound check gaffe by President Reagan (“we begin bombing Russia in five minutes”).  After the Cold War ended in 1991, the promised Peace Dividend resulted in the cutting of nuclear arsenals by only a fraction.  Unfortunately, the recent return of Cold War tensions, particularly after the 2014-2015 Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, have substantially increased the risks of nuclear Armageddon.  (Source:  Raymond Garthoff.  “The Great Transition:  American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War.”  Washington, DC:  The Brookings Institution Press, 2000, p. 36.)

October 9, 2002 – At a Congressional hearing on Capitol Hill held on this date, the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs discussed the purposeful use of chemical, biological, and nuclear agents against U.S. military personnel, as part of a Defense Department program known as Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense) from 1962-73.  The purpose of the SHAD tests was to identify U.S. warships’ vulnerabilities to attacks with biological, chemical, or radioactive warfare substances and to develop procedures to respond to such attacks while maintaining a warfighting capability.   During the hearing, approximately 5,000 U.S. sailors were identified by the VA as victims of these previously classified tests.  The Chairman of the Committee, Rep. Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, testified that, “Back in the 1980s, I was contacted by a widow of a sailor who served onboard the U.S.S. McKinley when it was sprayed with a plutonium mist as part of ‘Operation Wig Wam.’”  A nonsmoker, the sailor nevertheless died several years later of a very rare form of lung cancer, most probably as a direct result of inhaling just a minuscule portion of the deadliest poison ever invented by mankind.  Comments:  In a 1995 interview with Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Ma.), this member of Congress summed up the impact of decades of Pentagon testing on U.S. military and civilian subjects during the Cold War (1945-1991):  “A certain number of soldiers and civilians were used as human guinea pigs in order to determine what the effects of exposure to radiation, to plutonium, to other radioactive materials would be, and then those lessons would be applied to the planning for a nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union…And unfortunately the government knew how dangerous radiation was before most of these people were ever put into those experimental situations.”  In conclusion, Rep. Markey said, “And so, to a certain extent, one of the unfortunate, ironic twists of the Cold War is that the U.S. did more damage to American citizens and soldiers in their use of nuclear material than they ever did to the Soviet Union.”  Comments:  One can’t help but wonder if the nuclear weapons states are still conducting such tests, perhaps in much more subtle, nontransparent ways, to set the stage for future nuclear war-fighting.  This represents yet another frightening reason why nuclear weapons must be reduced immediately and eliminated in the very near future.  (Sources:  America’s Defense Monitor.  Program No. 847, “The Legacy of Hiroshima.”  Center for Defense Information, aired August 6, 1995 and U.S. Congress. “Military Operations Aspects of SHAD and Project 112.”  Hearing before the Subcommittee on Health of the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, 107^th Congress, 2^nd Session, Oct. 9, 2002, pp. 1-8 [Serial No. 107-43].)

October 11, 1957 – As a B-47 bomber departed Homestead Air Force Base, Florida, one of the aircraft’s outrigger tires exploded causing the plane to crash during takeoff into an uninhabited area just 3,800 feet from the end of the runway.  The aircraft was carrying one nuclear weapon in ferry configuration in the bomb bay and one nuclear capsule in a carrying case in the crew compartment.  The nuclear capsule was recovered mostly intact later but when the plane’s fuel ignited at the time of the crash, intense heat triggered two explosions of the conventional high explosive charges jacketing the full-fledged hydrogen bomb.  Radioactive materials contaminated a large area of the crash zone and an extensive cleanup had to be conducted.  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 global nuclear weapons arsenals.  (Sources:  Bethan Owen.  “13 Times the U.S. Almost Destroyed Itself With Its Own Nuclear Weapons.”  Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 13, 2014 at http://www.deseretnews.com/top/2605/10/October-11-1957-Homestead-Air-Force-Baser-Florida-13-times-the-U.S.-almost-destroyed-itself-with.html    and U.S. Department of Defense.  “Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving Nuclear Weapons, 1950-1980.”  National Security Archives at George Washington University http://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/653.pdf both accessed on September 15, 2016.)

October 20, 2015 – Two nuclear waste dump fires reported by journalists on this date at two different locations in the U.S., one near St. Louis and the other outside Beatty, Nevada, highlight a growing concern about the large number of nuclear waste dumps that originally were established during the Cold War to sequester away toxic contaminants from the nation’s nuclear weapons production complex.  Almost all of those waste sites have been transferred over the last couple decades from strong U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) stewardship to local, privately-managed companies with weaker DOE scrutiny.  In addition to the hundreds of toxic nuclear dumps generated by decades of nuclear weapons production (most notable is the Hanford Reservation in Washington state which contains several leaking million-plus gallon highly radioactive waste tanks), there are also growing amounts of spent fuel and a huge volume of other nuclear wastes produced daily by around 100 U.S. civilian nuclear power plants.   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 the terrorist targeting potential, the economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an accelerated phase-out of global nuclear power plants over the next decade.  Another priority is a new strategic government plan to have military weapons manufacturers like Lockheed Martin and many other firms significantly scale back their arms production and refocus on new technologies and strategies to address the nuclear waste transport, storage, and clean-up problem while at the same time addressing an accelerated nuclear weapons dismantlement imperative consistent with a global zero plan of action.  (Sources:  Keith Rogers.  “Fire That Shut Down US 95 Called Hot, Powerful.”  Las Vegas Review-Journal. October 20, 2015 at http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada/fire-shut-down-us-95-called-hot-powerful and Matt Pearce.  “Officials Squabble as Underground Fire Burns Near Radioactive Waste Dump in St. Louis Area.”  Los Angeles Times. October 20, 2015 at http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nuclear-fire-20151020-story.html both accessed on September 15, 2016.)

October 27, 1969 – As part of President Richard Nixon’s and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s detailed top secret “Madman Strategy” encompassing the period from October 13-30, 1969, on this date a squadron of 18 B-52 strategic bombers carrying dozens of multi-megaton hydrogen bombs departed from the western U.S., were refueled by KC-135 tanker aircraft near the Canadian Arctic, and proceeded to fly to the eastern borders of the Soviet Union in perhaps the biggest, most destabilizing, and horrendously dangerous case of nuclear saber-rattling in Cold War history.  A 2015 book by William Burr and Jeffrey P. Kimball titled, “Nixon’s Nuclear Specter:  The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy and the Vietnam War,” detailed President Nixon’s new Vietnam War strategy to threaten the Soviet Union with a massive nuclear strike and persuade its leaders, especially General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, to believe that the President was actually crazy enough to go through with a first strike.  The ultimate purpose of this extensively planned series of global military moves (which included military operations in the U.S., Western Europe, the Mideast, and the Atlantic and Pacific regions) was to coerce the Soviets to pressure North Vietnamese leaders to make significant military concessions at the negotiating table to allow the U.S. breathing space it needed to withdraw its military forces from Indochina, Vietnamize the war, and prevent a quick victory by the communist North.  Comments:  At risk was the future of the human species because many Soviet leaders actually knew about previously leaked nuclear first strike plans by the Pentagon.  Ironically, a pre-emptive Soviet nuclear first strike became much more likely due to Nixon and Kissinger’s Strangelovian “logic.”  This situation represented another example of how extremely fortunate the human race has been to avoid a nuclear Armageddon.  But one’s luck eventually runs out!  The penultimate issue facing our world today is:  Will the growing risks of nuclear war finally be zeroed out?  Only a growing global citizens’ movement can coerce our leaders to do what is right and eliminate forever the nuclear threat.  The alternative is inevitable omnicide.

October 30, 1961 – The Soviet Union’s “Tsar Bomba,” the most powerful nuclear weapon ever constructed was detonated after being dropped from a TU-95 bomber at approximately four kilometers altitude over Novaya Zemlya Island in the Russian Arctic Sea.  This hydrogen bomb formally designated RDS-220, which weighed about 27 tons and was eight meters long, had an estimated yield of 50 megatons or the equivalent of 3,800 Hiroshima bombs.  The tremendous blast triggered a seismic shock wave, equivalent to an earthquake registered at 5.0 on the Richter Scale, that travelled around the world.  The bomb’s zone of total destruction measured 35 kilometers in radius and the mushroom cloud generated rose to the altitude of 60 kilometers.  Third degree burns would have been possible at a distance of hundreds of kilometers.  Comments:  This blast was just one of 715 nuclear explosive tests conducted by the U.S.S.R./Russia from 1949-1990 and over 2,000 such tests conducted by all nine nuclear weapons states.  Although both the U.S. and Russia signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), only Russia ratified the agreement.  A U.S. vote for ratification failed in the U.S. Senate on October 13, 1999 by a vote of 51-48.  Clearly, ratifying the CTBT ought to be a top priority of the incoming 45^th President of the United States, along with other essential steps to address the global nuclear threat such as de-alerting U.S. nuclear weapons (and persuading Russia, China, and other powers to follow suit), reversing planned improvements in nuclear weapons development (which will cost our nation over $1 trillion over the next 30 years), beginning the phase-out of civilian nuclear energy (not just in our nation but worldwide), and many other critical unilateral and multilateral moves.  (Source:  “30 October 1961 – The Tsar Bomba.”  Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Preparatory Commission website.  https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/30-october-1961-the-tsar-bomba accessed on September 15, 2016.)

September 2, 1981 – On this date, Dr. Alice Stewart (1906-2002), a distinguished epidemiologist who possessed recognized expertise on radioactivity in the environment which resulted in her winning the Right Livelihood Award in 1986, was interviewed in Birmingham, England by Robert Del Tredici (or one of his representatives or assistants), author of the 1987 book “At Work in the Fields of the Bomb.”  In the interview, Dr. Stewart expressed very serious concerns about not only the long-term health and environmental impacts of nuclear bomb tests (over 2,000 of which were conducted between 1945 and the mid-1990s) but also of the continued use of civilian nuclear power plants, “…the (nuclear) bomb tests have had a measurable effect because you can measure it in your own bones.  And if we allow every nation in this world to become dependent on nuclear energy for its electricity – you’re literally going to set the clock back.  It could come to a point where biosphere development, which has taken millennia to produce human beings, will be put slowly into reverse, and humans won’t be the first to go…(the) amoebae and the things that feed on them, then the next, and the next, and the next…and then us.”  Her warnings about the frightful impact of contamination from nuclear weapons production, storage, deployment, and accidents as well as from utilizing nuclear energy in today’s 400 global nuclear power plants is as relevant in 2016 and beyond as it was at the time of this interview 35 years ago, “Radioactive waste is bound to increase not only the population load of cancers, but more importantly the population load of congenital defects of future generations of the human race…studies of low-dose effects…(including) a study of nuclear workers in America…show(ed) the effects of age on the risk, the effects of latency on the risk, and the effects of dose level on the risk.  The key finding here is that the lower the dose, which in practice means the slower the delivery of radiation to the public, the more cancer risk there is per unit dose.  In other words, it doesn’t make it safer to deliver the radiation slowly; it in fact makes it more dangerous…By relying on the technology of (nuclear) fission, we’re going against the very processes that make life possible.”

September 11, 1974 – At a Congressional hearing, former CIA director and then Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger testified on the safeguards and protections afforded to Americans in the event of a counterforce attack (aimed only at U.S. military facilities not civilian population centers) to minimize the impact of a nuclear strike on the United States.  Much of the information presented was at least partially classified with specific details denied to the American public.  But the reply by Secretary Schlesinger or one of his assistants to a question inquiring about the effect on our nation’s medical infrastructure of such a nuclear attack as “slight,” triggered a news media backlash.  Comments:  Numerous studies by global medical experts and those with first-hand knowledge of the impact of exposure to a nuclear explosion (studied extensively at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and elsewhere by the 1950 Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, other U.S. bodies, and subsequent independent, nongovernmental scientific and medical entities) have concluded that even one very limited nuclear attack on the wealthiest country on the planet, the U.S., would have devastatingly horrendous impacts on our medical response.  Burns, radiation and related casualties numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands would dramatically overtax the capabilities of our nation’s extensive medical infrastructure. This represents yet another critical reason why global nuclear weapons arsenals should be substantially reduced and eliminated as soon as possible.  (Sources:  Louis Rene Beres.  “Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.”  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 162; Ira Helfand, MD; Lachlan Forrow, MD; Michael McCally, MD, PhD: and Robert K. Musil, MPH, PhD, Physicians for Social Responsibility, “Projected U.S. Casualties and Destruction of U.S. Medical Services From Attacks by Russian Nuclear Forces.”  Medicine and Global Survival. Vol. 7, No. 2, February 2002, http://psr.org/resources/projected-us-casualties-and-destruction.html, and Solomon F. Marston, editor, “The Medical Implications of Nuclear War.”  Washington, DC:  National Academies (U.S.) Press, 1986, http://www.ncbi.nih.gov/books/NBK219165/ both accessed August 16, 2016.)

September 17, 1966 – After years of Cold War-fueled bluff and bluster (that began in the late 1950s and continued in 1964 with statements by then Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev boasting of a “fantastic new weapon” and “a monstrous new terrible weapons,” respectively), it was determined later that on this date, the Soviet Union had, in fact, begun a series of nearly a dozen tests on the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) which continued through late 1967.  The FOBS was a nuclear-armed, de-orbital satellite that would be undetectable by early warning radars built in Canada and facing northward.  Because of their low orbits, there would be less time to detect the orbiting H-Bombs as they came in from a southern trajectory as compared to nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles that had to travel thousands of miles over the Arctic Circle to reach U.S. targets.  This threat convinced nuclear strategists and scientists to consider countering Soviet FOBS with similar U.S. orbital H-Bombs.  Thankfully, it was determined that orbiting systems didn’t have the payload capacity or accuracy of weapons launched in a ballistic trajectory.  And the 1967 Outer Space Treaty prohibited Cold War nuclear arms racing in outer space or on celestial bodies such as the Moon.  Comments:  Unfortunately with renewed Cold War II tensions apparent today, FOBS may be just one area of nuclear weapons development that may be considered in the future, despite their illegality in international law.  More likely is the threat of FOBS development by a rogue nation such as North Korea.  Another related threat has recently been uncovered by the news media.  Both the U.S. and Russia are planning to develop hypersonic nuclear weapons platforms that could strike earthbound targets from above the atmosphere.  A few weeks ago, Colonel General Sergei Karakayev, Russian Commander of the Strategic Missile Forces (SMF), confirmed statements made earlier by Lt. Col. Aleksei Solodovinikov to the Russian news media that the SMF Academy is developing a hypersonic strategic bomber capable of striking with nuclear weapons from outer space.  This state of affairs represents yet another reason why these doomsday weapons should be sharply reduced immediately and eliminated completely as soon as possible.  (Sources:  John Pike, Eric Stambler, Christopher Bolckom, Lora Lumpe, David C. Wright, and Lisabeth Gronlund.  “Chicken Little and Darth Vader:  Is the Sky Really Falling?”  Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 1, 1991, pp. 6-7 and “New Russian Bomber to be Able to Launch Nuclear Attacks From Outer Space.”  Sputnik News.  July 13, 2016, http://sputniknews.com/military/20160713/1042888473/russia-space-bomber-engine.html accessed August 16, 2016.)

September 19, 2004 – On this date, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Dr. Bruce Blair, a former Minuteman nuclear missile launch control officer, Brookings Institution nuclear policy analyst, and president of the Center for Defense Information/World Security Institute in Washington, DC.   Titled, “The Wrong Deterrence:  The Threat of Loose Nukes is One of Our Own Making,” the piece noted that, “Even the U.S. nuclear control apparatus is far from fool-proof.  For example, a Pentagon investigation of nuclear safeguards conducted several years ago made a startling discovery – terrorist hackers might be able to gain back-door electronic access to the U.S. naval communications network, seize control of radio towers such as the one in Cutler, Maine, and illicitly transmit a launch order to U.S. Trident ballistic missile submarines armed with 200 nuclear weapons apiece.  This exposure was deemed so serious that Trident launch crews had to be given new instructions for confirming the validity of any launch order they receive.  They would now reject certain types of firing orders that previously would have been carried out immediately.  Both countries (the U.S. and Russia) are running terrorist risks of this sort for the sake of an obsolete deterrent strategy.  The notion that either the U.S. or Russia would deliberately attack the other with nuclear weapons is ludicrous, while the danger that terrorists are plotting to get their hands on these arsenals is real.  We need to kick our old habits and stand down our hair-trigger forces.”  Comments:  Dr. Blair’s point is still valid today twelve years after he wrote this op-ed although U.S.-Russian relations have worsened due to the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, NATO expansion, and the deployment of military forces, including nuclear weapons, by both sides along their common borders in Europe.  In fact, it is even more valid in an era when cyberattacks have increased exponentially by all the major nuclear powers and by non-state actors, and terrorist groups.   Andrew Fuller’s recent Arms Control Today article points out that, “Top military and defense officials in the U.S. are currently contemplating plans to use cyberattack capabilities against enemy missile and command-and-control systems as part of a new push for full-spectrum missile defense.”  There is clearly a growing danger that leaked documents including procedures or methodologies regarding cyberattack successes may serve as a road map for terrorists to facilitate their hacking into nuclear launch systems.   Another concern is that messing around with other nuclear powers’ command-and-control systems might inadvertently trigger an accidental, unintentional, or inadvertent nuclear missile attack, especially if that power perceives that their early warning system is being interfered with or shutdown by a nation that may be about to launch a first strike.  All these issues speak to the importance of not only working toward global zero nuclear forces but to immediately instituting global de-alerting of all nuclear arsenals.  (Source:  Andrew Fuller.  “The Danger of Using Cyberattacks to Counter Nuclear Threats.”  Arms Control Today.  July/August 2016, http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT/2016_07/Features/The-Dangers-of-Using-Cyberattacks-to-Counter-Nuclear-Threats accessed August 16, 2016.)

September 25, 1959 – A U.S. Navy P-5M antisubmarine aircraft carrying an unarmed nuclear depth charge developed mechanical problems but was unable to reach land to make an emergency landing and crashed into the Puget Sound near Whidbey Island, Washington.  The nuclear weapon was never recovered despite an extensive search.  Comments:  While it is very unlikely that a long-lost and probably corroded nuclear warhead would detonate, there remains deadly serious concerns about the very long-term radioactive contamination from this incident and hundreds of other similar Broken Arrows.  These nuclear threats can impact human and other species virtually forever unless such devices are found and disposed of properly.  After all, the radioactive isotopes found in nuclear weapons or in the reactor cores of naval surface ships, submarines, and in the payload bays of aircraft lost at sea since 1945 possess an extremely long half-life of decay – 713 million years for uranium-235 and 4.5 billion years for uranium-238!  (Source:  Richard Halloran.  “U.S. Discloses Accidents Involving Nuclear Weapons.”  New York Times.  May 26, 1981.)

September 29-30, 2015 – After Jeremy Corbyn won a landslide leadership vote to head the British Labour Party, he stated publicly his opposition to spending over 100 billion pounds to replace Britain’s current Trident force with a new generation of nuclear submarines.  Not only that, he won the renewed support of countless numbers of global antinuclear politicians, activists, and citizenry by going further, “187 countries don’t feel the need to have a nuclear weapon to protect their security, why should those five (U.S., Russia, Great Britain, France, and China) need it themselves?”  He also noted that, “nuclear weapons didn’t do the U.S.A. much good on 9/11,” and even more impressively he shocked some of his own party members by saying on BBC Radio on September 30^th that if he was elected prime minister, he would never press the nuclear button.  Corbyn concluded that interview by saying, “I am opposed to the use of nuclear weapons.  I want to see a nuclear-free world.  I believe it is possible…I think we should be promoting an international nuclear weapons convention which would lead to a nuclear-free world.”  Comments:  Unfortunately the ultra-powerful, entrenched British Military-Industrial-Parliamentary Complex viciously responded to Corbyn’s optimistic views on ending the nuclear arms race with personal attacks and appeals to the so-called logic and reasonableness of seventy flawed years of nuclear deterrence theory.  Even a Labour Party MP John Woodcock fueled the firestorm of attacks by hypocritically claiming that, “Mr. Corbyn’s position would make the grotesque horror of a nuclear holocaust more likely.” As the weeks and months passed since Corbyn’s brave pronouncements, more and more British MPs and other spokesmen and women of the status quo fell into line and last month on July 18, 2016 members of the House of Commons including the entire ruling Conservative Party and a majority of opposition Labour Party members cast their vote (472-117) to spend at least the equivalent of up to 250 billion U.S. dollars by 2036 to build new strategic nuclear submarines.  New Conservative Party Prime Minister Theresa May was wholeheartedly behind heightening Britain’s participation in a renewed global nuclear arms race by adding she would be willing and able to order a nuclear attack anytime it was necessary.  The only ray of light was the bloc voting support of the Scottish National Party MPs who voted with the minority against upgrading the British nuclear arsenal.  (Sources:  “Jeremy Corbyn Row After ‘I’d Not Fire Nuclear Weapons’ Comment.” BBC.  Sept. 30, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/new/uk-politics-34399565 and Dan De Luce.  “British Parliament Votes to Spend Big on Nukes.” Foreign Policy. July 18, 2016, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/18/british-parliament-votes-to-spend-big-on-nukes/ both accessed on August 16, 2016.)