Author: Jeffrey W. Mason

August 1, 1976 – Protesters occupied part of the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power plant site to protest the dangers of nuclear power.  This was just one of thousands of nonviolent protests or demonstrations staged worldwide over the last sixty years since dangerous nuclear power reactors were introduced into the energy grid.  In addition to high-profile deadly accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, many other frequent leaks, accidents, discharges to water aquifers, rivers and oceans, along with the terrorist targeting threat and proliferation risks make civilian nuclear power plants a completely unreasonable, nontransparent risk to global populations.  Comments:  Although California has taken the lead in declaring itself the first nuclear-free-state after the last nuclear plant in that state at Diablo Canyon is scheduled to shut down permanently in 2025, there remain serious concerns about nuclear safety at many U.S. civilian power plants and military nuclear weapons production facilities (such as the leaking million gallon nuclear waste tanks at Hanford Reservation, Washington), private for-profit nuclear waste dumps in Texas, and even at research reactors across the nation and the planet.  The dramatic decrease in solar energy costs have largely made nuclear  power uneconomical despite the fact that the nuclear lobby, the Obama Administration, and many in Congress continue to support using government-funded taxpayer subsidies to build new reactors such as the Bechtel Corporation’s multi-billion dollar Unit 2 reactor at Watts Bar, Tennessee, completed in 2015.  (Sources:  Harold Marcuse.  “Seabrook, NH Plant Occupation Page.”  July 30, 2007 updated Feb. 18, 2012, http://www.marcuse.org/harold/page/seabrook.htm, Aaron Miguel Cantu.  “New Yorkers Fear Gas Pipeline Near Nuclear Reactors Could Spell Disaster.”  Dec. 3, 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/ny-pipeline-near-nuclear-reactor-sparks… and Fred de Sousa.  “Bechtel Salutes TVA, Work Force on Major Milestone for U.S. Nuclear Plant.”  Aug. 15, 2015,  http://www.bechtel.com/newsroom/releases/2015/08/bechtel-milestone-watts-bar-substantially-complete/ accessed July 21, 2016.)

August 8, 1994 – – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile materials in the last 25 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, security officials at Munich International Airport in Germany arrested individuals who were caught in possession of 363.4 grams of plutonium – enough to make one or more radiological weapons or dirty bombs. Extensive forensic analysis by U.S. and French nuclear scientists have shown that several samples of fissile materials offered up for sale in the past two decades in a number of Western and former Soviet bloc nations have reportedly come from the same stockpile – the Russian nuclear weapons facility known as Mayak Production Association located in Ozersk in the Ural Mountains almost 1,000 miles east of Moscow.  Athough Russian President Putin has steadily cut back his nation’s overall nuclear security cooperation with Washington in 2015-16 on the grounds that it no longer needs U.S. financial or technical assistance to safeguard its fissile material stockpile, a recent CIA report reaffirmed a long-held U.S. position that it is unlikely that Russian authorities have been able to recover all of the stolen nuclear materials.  Comments:  Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the United Nations and other international fora to prevent the use of fissile materials to unleash weapons of mass destruction whether the materials diverted come from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapons facilities.  In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.   (Source:  Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith.  “The Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.”  Center for Public Integrity, November 12, 2015 reprinted in Courier:  The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)

August 9, 1945 – Before Japanese leaders had time to assess the tens of thousands of deaths (130,000) and injuries that resulted from the August 6^th U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and after the Soviet Union’s August 8^th declaration of war against Japan and resulting extensive attack on Japanese-occupied Manchuria (also on August 8), the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on the largely civilian population of Nagasaki killing another 70,000 people and injuring tens of thousands more.  U.S. Army Air Force Major Charles Sweeney commanded the B-29 bomber nicknamed “Bock’s Car” which dropped the plutonium-fueled atomic bomb (“Fat Man”) at 11:02 a.m. local time.  The bomb exploded 1,650 feet above the city of Nagasaki with the equivalent force of 22,000 tons of TNT.  Many military and scientific leaders believed the atomic bombings were unnecessary and excessively cruel.   Before the bombings, General and later President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, argued, “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing…”  Years after the war ended, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy publicly stated, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”  Nevertheless President Truman and his closest advisers disregarded these objections focusing instead on the need to intimidate the Soviet Union in the postwar years by demonstrating this super weapon in time of war. The human impact of these two atomic bomb attacks was horrendous, from the initial super-heated vaporizing blast to other terrifying effects including the impact of thermal radiation on people farther from ground zero.  Other results of the explosions were the shock wave and the short- and long-term biological impacts of the ionizing radiation as well as the long-lasting social and psychological impacts on the surviving habakushas.  In subsequent decades, tens of thousands more Japanese died as a result of debilitating cancers and long-term illnesses inflicted on hundreds of thousands of survivors of the August 1945 atomic bombings. (Sources:  Dan Drollette, Jr. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki:  The Many Retrospectives.”  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. Aug. 8, 2014.  http://thebulletin.org/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-many-retrospectives7366, Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb:  And the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 3-6, 15, 672, and Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

August 15, 1984 – A Vladivostok-based Soviet army unit was reportedly issued a coded message placing units on a war-footing but the order was withdrawn a short time later.  This followed a joking reference the previous day by President Ronald Reagan that he had signed legislation “outlawing the Soviet Union,” adding that, “We begin bombing in five minutes.”  Comments: President Reagan unwisely made this radio gaffe despite serving for over three years as President and after holding the office of Governor of California.   Although he reportedly was emotionally scarred by the November 20, 1983 ABC-TV dramatization of a nuclear war (“The Day After”), with these reckless comments, he nevertheless made light of a possible nuclear world war.  Consider the tasteless jokes, the off-the-cuff or made-in-anger rash public comments, tweets, and unabashedly reckless and/or inaccurate statements made over the last few decades by Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, a person who has never in his entire life served the public interest in any political office.  Now imagine this individual as Commander-in-Chief of all U.S. armed forces with access to the Nuclear Codes.  Objectively it appears certain that the ongoing risks of accidental, unintentional, inadvertent, or even intentional nuclear war will increase if Donald Trump is elected the 45^th President of the United States.  While the Democratic Presidential candidate supports spending $1 trillion over the next thirty years to modernize and expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal and laboratory complex and has made a few objectionable nuclear threats against Iran, the risks of nuclear war increasing are not nearly as high with Hillary Clinton as President as compared to Donald Trump.  (Source:  “Soviet War Alert in August Reported by Japanese Newspaper.”  The Baltimore Sun.  Oct. 2, 1984, p. 4.)

August 20, 2010 – In a Scientific American article titled, “Laying the Odds on the Apocalypse,” former National Security Agency director Admiral Robert Inman estimated that there was a one in thirty chance of a global thermonuclear war in the next decade in which hundreds of millions of people would die.  An even less optimistic assessment by MIT Professor of Cryptography and Information Theory, Dr. Martin Hellman, placed the odds of such a war at ten percent!  Comments:  Mainstream news media and politicians, especially since the Cold War ended in 1991, predominantly downgrade the odds of a nuclear war and charge those expressing concerns about its likelihood as appeasers or unrealistic peaceniks, but serious thinkers including historians, political scientists, philosophers, and other scientists clearly recognize that time is not on humanity’s side in regards to the nuclear threat.  John Scales Avery, a theoretical chemist and historian of science, Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist, and Associate Professor of Quantum Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen makes a powerful argument along these lines, “The elimination of nuclear weapons is a life or death question.  We can see this most clearly when we look far ahead.  Suppose that each year, there is a certain finite chance of a nuclear catastrophe, let us say two percent.  Then in a century, the chance of survival will be 13.5 percent, and in two centuries, 1.8 percent, in three centuries, 0.25 percent, in four centuries, there would be only a 0.034 percent chance of survival and so on.  Over many centuries, the chance of survival would shrink almost to zero.  Thus, by looking at the long-term future, we can clearly see that if nuclear weapons are not entirely eliminated, civilization will not survive.”

August 27, 2016 – Approximate date that the initial eight-week long advertising campaign (which began in late June) on 14 King County Metro Transit buses by the local peace group Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action publicizing the U.S. Navy’s construction of a new $294 million taxpayer-funded underground nuclear storage complex located just 20 miles west of the city of Seattle will end.  This massive facility will eclipse a similar base with six nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) located at Kings Bay in Georgia which houses the SWFLANT (Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic) storage facility.  The new Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific (SWFPAC) and the eight Ohio-class SSBNs with Trident II nuclear-armed missiles, homeported at the adjacent Bangor Submarine Base, are located just a few miles outside downtown Seattle.  The SWFPAC and the locally based submarines are thought to store more than 1,300 nuclear warheads with a combined explosive power equal to more than 14,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.  After the New START Treaty requires a downsizing of the submarine missile tubes from 24 to 20, the warhead total will drop to about a thousand.  Nevertheless, this Naval Base Kitsap Complex (the SWFPAC and the Bangor Submarine Base) will remain the largest and most important nuclear weapons base in the U.S. in the ensuring decades.  Comments:  A growing citizen’s movement to substantially reduce and make significant progress toward zeroing out global nuclear arsenals is not only an American phenomenon but a planet-wide one as well.  The newly-elected 45^th President of the U.S. will be heavily pressured to not only enforce existing arms control agreements such as the New START Treaty but to push harder for even greater multilateral, bilateral, and unilateral actions that will:  (1) De-alert the hair-trigger alert status of U.S., Russian, Chinese and other nuclear arsenals including Israel’s; (2) Declare a No-First-Use Policy; (3) Ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; (4) Reduce Overseas Basing of Military Forces; (5) Phase-Out Global Nuclear Power By 2030; and enact other changes to realize a truly global peace dividend that was never fully implemented after the Cold War ended in 1991. (Source: Hans M. Kristensen. “Navy Builds Underground Nuclear Weapons Storage Facility; Seattle Buses Carry Warning.” Federation of American Scientists.  June 27, 2016, http://fas.org/blogs/security/2016/pacific-ssbn-base/ accessed July 21, 2016.)

August 29, 2007 – Six nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded onboard a B-52 bomber named “Doom 99” at Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota and flown 1,500 miles to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana and offloaded where they sat unguarded on the tarmac for nine hours.  This incident violated a long-standing rule that live nuclear weapons should not overfly U.S. territory.  Another serious violation of security protocols was the fact that no one noticed the weapons were missing for 36 hours or more.  A February 2008 Defense Science Board report on the incident concluded that investigators found “a basic lack of understanding on the safety and authorization required to handle nuclear weapons.”   Comments:  Many of the thousands of serious violations of security protocols, accidents, and other nuclear weapons incidents 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: Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013 and U.S. Department of Defense.  Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.  “The Defense Science Board Permanent Task Force on Nuclear Weapon Surety:  Report on the Unauthorized Movement of Nuclear Weapons.” February 2008. http://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/features/defenseReviews/NPR/DSB_TF_on_NWS_Welch_Feb_2008.pdf  accessed July 23, 2016.)

July 1, 1991 – On this date, the Warsaw Pact (established in 1955 as a response to the 1949 establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), also known in the Soviet bloc as The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance signed by Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union, formally dissolved as a communist military alliance.  Yet NATO, 1949-present, not only continues to exist but has grown and expanded in order to further “contain Russia and protect former Soviet republics and Eastern European nations from Russian military aggression.”  But from Moscow’s perspective, not just current President Putin but former General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and many other Russians and Western scholars too, this eastern NATO expansion has violated an agreement made during the George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) presidency.  According to long-time Soviet/Russian scholar Professor Stephen Cohen, “President George H.W. Bush and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl made an agreement (May 17, 1990) with General Secretary Gorbachev that if the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Eastern Europe and East Germany in particular and ended the Warsaw Pact, in return NATO would not expand east.  Gorbachev also allowed the reunification of Germany (September 12, 1990 treaty), and that nation’s inclusion in NATO as long as the Western Alliance would not expand as then U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised, ‘one inch east.’”  Although a number of other experts say there was no such written agreement or even a so-called “verbal gentleman’s agreement” to circumvent NATO military expansion east (see Steven Pifer.  “Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge?  Gorbachev Says No.” The Brookings Institution, Nov. 6, 2014), the debate continues.  Nobel Peace Prize winner and retired Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s testimony has been used by both sides to argue the case.  In October 2014, Gorbachev stated, “The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993.  I called this a big mistake from the very beginning.  It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.”  Comments:  Professor Cohen and a plethora of other anti-nuclear scholars, activists, politicians, experts, and global citizenry are deeply concerned that this expansion (and Russian moves in Ukraine and elsewhere) have substantially increased the risk of nuclear war.  The buildup of NATO forces (including the unprecedented stationing of a German regiment “on the Eastern front”), accompanying Russian countermeasures, and the deployment of tactical nuclear forces by both sides brings the world a step closer to unintentional, accidental, unauthorized, or even intentional nuclear conflict triggered by another “trip wire” like the Ukraine Crisis of 2014-15.  (Sources:  Thom Hartmann. “Why is the Western Media Ignoring the New Cold War? with Professor Stephen Cohen.”  RT.com, June 8, 2016, Maxim Korshunov.  “Mikhail Gorbachev:  I am Against All Walls.” Russia Beyond the Headlines. http://rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbachev_i_am_against_all_walls_40673.html, and Editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  “Warsaw Pact.” www.britannica.com/event/Warsaw-Pact accessed June 15, 2016.)

July 9, 1962 – Before the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, negotiated by President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev and approved by Congress in an amazingly short period of approximately six weeks, outlawed nuclear testing in the atmosphere and in outer space, the U.S. conducted one of five nuclear weapons test explosions hundreds of miles above Earth.  A test, code-named Starfish Prime, was conducted on this date at approximately 240 miles altitude with a magnitude of 1.4 megatons from a Thor missile launched from Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean.  The atomic blast caused unanticipated electromagnetic pulse (EMP) impacts over a large region knocking out 300 street lights and shutting down telephone lines in Hawaii and damaging six satellites.  Comments:  This incident brings to light a serious concern.  Would the U.S. or other members of the Nuclear Club resist responding with nuclear strikes on nations or subnational entities responsible for exploding nuclear weapons in outer space high above those nations’ territories despite the extensive EMP damage inflicted on e-commerce as well as other elements of the targeted nation’s military and civilian infrastructure?  In the interests of peace and the paramount avoidance of future nuclear escalation and conflicts, not to mention the need for public transparency, the U.S. and other Nuclear Club members should open this matter to public scrutiny and debate in order to seek broad international consensus opposing nuclear retaliation to EMP or other related attacks such as cyberwar infrastructure strikes as clear violations of international and humanitarian law.  (Source:  Phil Plait.  “The 50^th Anniversary of Starfish Prime:  The Nuke That Shocked the World.”  Discover Magazine.  July 9, 2012, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/09/the-50th-anniversary-of-starfish-prime-the-nuke-that-shook-the-world/#.V2Ge1eTmqM8 accessed June 15, 2016.)

July 14, 2015 – The Iran nuclear deal negotiated in the “P5 + 1 Talks” by China, France, Germany, the U.K., U.S., and Russia with the Islamic State was concluded in Vienna on this date and was later approved as “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” by the U.S. Congress in September.  According to the U.S. Department of State website “Under the agreement, Iran agreed to eliminate its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, cut its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent, and reduce by about two-thirds the number of its gas centrifuges for 13 years. For the next 15 years, Iran will only enrich uranium up to 3.67 percent.  Iran also agreed not to build any new heavy-water facilities for the same period of time. Uranium-enrichment activities will be limited to a single facility using first-generation centrifuges for 10 years. Other facilities will be converted to avoid proliferation risks. To monitor and verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will have regular access to all Iranian nuclear facilities. The agreement provides that in return for verifiably abiding by its commitments, Iran will receive relief from U.S., European Union, and the U.N. Security Council’s nuclear-related sanctions.”  Comments: Statements by presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (pending the final vote of the Super Delegates on July 25, 2016) over the last decade give cause for concern, especially her nuclear-saber rattling on ABC-TV’s Good Morning America program on April 22, 2008, “…if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel, the U.S. would retaliate against the Iranians,”  adding, “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”  This criticism comes despite the recognition of the seriousness of Iran’s longstanding public pronouncements to destroy Israel.  More recently at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) meeting in Washington, D.C., Ms. Clinton stated that, “The U.S. should provide Israel with the most sophisticated defense technology so that it can deter and stop any threats.  That includes bolstering Israeli missile defenses with new systems like Arrow Three and David’s Sling.”  While this statement is much less confrontational and troubling, it does bring up the issue of America’s quiet, covert support of Israel’s nuclear arsenal (numbering 50-300 warheads).  While it is certainly true that publicly the U.S. government has never openly supported an Israeli nuclear capability, it is also true that it has rarely mentioned this issue creating a silent assent to the Jewish State’s arsenal.  However by not acknowledging Israel’s nuclear arsenal, the U.S. can’t ever hope to reduce and eliminate it.  And, inadvertently, by not publicly forcing Israel to acknowledge its existence, it creates a hidden incentive for Iran and other Arab nations to acquire its first nuclear weapon in order to deter Israel, or, in the case of Pakistan, an incentive to enlarge its arsenal to counter both traditional rival India and a potential future rival in Israel.  (Source:  “Hillary Clinton’s AIPAC Speech.” Time.com, March 2, 2016, http://time.com/4265947/hillary-clinton-aipac-speech-transcript accessed June 15, 2016.)

July 21, 1948 – A top secret Pentagon briefing on the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s future war plans was given on this date.   The briefing discussed Operation Halfmoon, a short-range emergency war plan to prevent Soviet takeover of Western Europe by dropping 50 (a figure later amended to 133) atomic bombs on Soviet cities including eight warheads on Moscow and seven on Leningrad.  Comments:  Over the last 70 years, in addition to false alerts, Broken Arrows and hundreds of nuclear accidents by the members of the Nuclear Club as well as extensive planning for preemptive nuclear war, and related nuclear crises like the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the NATO Able Archer exercise of November 1983, and the Black Brant Incident of January 1995, the world is extremely fortunate that no nuclear weapons have been used in combat since the two atomic bombings of Japan in August 1945.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, p. 83.)

July 25-28, 2016 – One week after the Republican Party’s National Convention is to meet (July 18-21) in Cleveland to select their party’s presidential candidate, the Democratic Party will hold their presidential nominating convention in Philadelphia during these dates. Comments:  While secret presidential policy positions on the seminal political issues confronting the American people won’t become public knowledge until later, the official website of the Democratic Party (https://www.democrats.org) lists just 12 issues and nuclear weapons, the nuclear threat, or reducing the U.S. and/or global nuclear arsenals are not mentioned! Note that under the banner “National Security” are the words, “…modernizing our nuclear arsenal is a top priority.”  And this is consistent with President Obama’s recent commitment (publicly supported by Hillary Clinton) to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize our nuclear arsenal by building new nuclear weapons platforms like a new long-range bomber and new cruise missiles.  Also part of this package are new smaller “more usable” nuclear warheads.  The only positive is under the same banner of national security:  “…strengthen our ability to keep nuclear and biological weapons out of the hands of terrorists.”  Although Bernie Sanders has committed to campaigning for Hillary Clinton and he has allegedly done so only after obtaining a promise that the party platform will be far more progressive in scope than that envisioned by mainstream Democrats, even he has not extensively mentioned reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons during his campaign speechmaking.  One of possible many exceptions (as the mainstream media usually has a bias against reporting progressive topics) to this is Sanders’ statement during his April 8, 2016 appearance on The Today Show:  “The goal is to move to get rid of nuclear weapons, not to get into an arms race.  We have other more important things to spend our money on.”  Four years ago, the 2012 Democratic Party Platform did mention “preventing the spread and use of nuclear weapons,” but such platitudes weren’t backed up by actual executive or legislative action during the two terms of the Obama Administration to substantially work toward Global Zero.  For the sake of the planet, human civilization, our species and  countless other creatures living on this Pale Blue Dot, let’s all hope that the 45^th  President of the United States and the newly elected Congress will make substantial progress on these critical nuclear issues:  ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, forging a newly enhanced Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty, eliminating nuclear weapons modernization with the exception of extensive improvements in safeguarding the existing arsenal by enhancing safety protocols until it can be substantially reduced through a new multilateral agreement with Russia, de-alerting the U.S. arsenal in concert with similar Russian moves, phasing out all civilian nuclear power plants globally by 2025-30 with the U.S. military-industrial-complex converting substantially from arms production to nuclear remediation, dismantling, decommissioning and cleaning up thousands of global military and civilian nuclear and related toxic wastes, and other similar tasks.  (Source:  “Bernie Sanders on the Issues.” http://berniesanders.com/issues accessed June 15, 2016.)

July 28, 1957 – Two of the three Mark V hydrogen bombs on board a U.S. Air Force C-124 Globemaster cargo aircraft, which departed from Dover Air Force Base, were jettisoned from the plane when two of the four engines lost power and the aircraft suffered a significant loss of altitude.  To ensure the survival of the aircraft and its crew, the pilot had no choice but to quickly lessen the weight of the plane by dropping two H-bombs into the Atlantic Ocean.  Thankfully, no nuclear or conventional (of the high explosive charges bracketing the core of the warhead) explosions ensued.  This incident occurred about 100 miles southeast of Naval Air Station, Pomona, New Jersey, where the aircraft landed safely. One bomb is believed to have sunk 50 miles off the coast of Atlantic City and the other 75 miles away from land.  Although the U.S. Air Force, over the years since this incident (and others), claims the bombs did not contain plutonium capsules, many nuclear experts like retired Colonel Derek Duke have pointed out that in November of that same year, SAC Commander General Thomas Powers bragged to the news media that, “Day and night, I have a certain percentage of my command in the air (and the), planes are bombed up and they don’t carry bows and arrows.” Comments:  While it is very unlikely that these long-lost and probably corroded nuclear bombs could detonate in a fusion explosion, there remain deadly serious concerns about 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 these devices are found and disposed of properly. After all, the radioactive isotopes found in thermonuclear weapons or in the reactor cores of naval surface ships and submarines 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:  Colonel Derek L. Duke, Retired, “Chasing Loose Nukes.” Dungan Books, 2007, http://www.fdungan.com/duke.htm  accessed June 15, 2016.)

July 30, 1980 – In an Independent News Alliance article (“Flaws in Systems of Command and Control: Nuclear War by Accident.”) published on this date, Professor Louis Rene Beres noted that a spring 1977 test, code-named Prime Target, of the Pentagon’s World Wide Military Command and Control System found that serious computer problems and failures occurred 62 percent of the time.  These failures included false alerts and incidents of detection of nonexistent Soviet first strike nuclear attacks on the U.S. and/or its allies.  Comments:  While most observers would reasonably assume that much more sophisticated, accurate, and modern high-tech hardware and software has virtually eliminated these problems with the U.S. nuclear command and control system, such an assumption would be in error.  In point of fact, a recent GAO (Government Accountability Office) report released on May 25, 2016 (“Information Technology:  Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems.”) noted that a Pentagon system used to send and receive emergency action messages for U.S. nuclear forces is running on a 1970s-era IBM computing platform that still requires the use of antiquated eight-inch floppy disks to store data.  Comments:  So it appears that saving money is more important than the safety, security, and reliability of the most dangerous weapons ever invented.  The same was true in 1980 and unfortunately in today’s world.  Because of this revelation and other flaws in the command and control systems of the Nuclear Club members, there remain very credible concerns that an unauthorized, accidental, or unintentional nuclear war could be triggered especially today during the heightened tensions of Cold War II.  (Source: Louis Rene Beres. “Apocalypse:  Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.” Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press, 1980.)

June 2, 1992 – An Associated Press article published on this date, authored by Steve Kline and titled “SAC (Strategic Air Command), America’s Nuclear Strike Force is Retired,” quoted then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, “The long bitter years of the Cold War are over.  America and her allies have won – totally, decisively, overwhelmingly.”  Comments:  Many Americans hoped that the ending of the Cold War in December 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact Soviet bloc military alliance would result in a new era of a true Peace Dividend.  Although in the ensuing years, U.S. military spending was reduced by a small percentage, the Western military alliance, NATO, not only continued to “contain” Russia but grew in size to include a growing list of Eastern European and Soviet bloc nations.  Even more disappointing was the fact that the expectation of not only many Americans but a large portion of global populations that the world would dramatically demilitarize allowing money previously devoted to bloated military budgets to be converted from “guns to butter” never occurred on a large scale.  A global agenda for rebuilding infrastructure, providing employment particularly to ethnic, religious, and racial minorities in urban areas, educating large numbers of students including the indigent, funding Head Start programs, addressing poverty and disease outbreaks, remediating and cleaning up governmental and corporate toxic wastes (including civilian and military nuclear production and storage sites), and creating nonmilitary solutions to potential future conflict zones (such as the Mideast and Africa) never materialized.  Over the last two and a half decades, the hegemonic U.S. superpower devised a “New World Order” that has helped precipitate wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, destabilized the Middle East, caused China and Russia and other powers to challenge this order with larger than ever global military budgets, triggered a Cold War II, and enhanced a new growth spurt in nuclear weapons and other WMD development.  With the dire economic impact of trillions of Cold War and post-Cold War military dollars spent and the neoliberal speculative mortgage fraud crisis (the 2008 Great Recession) which highlighted an even larger gap between rich and poor, America has unfortunately learned that, like Russia, it too has “lost the Cold War” and the chance for a Peace Dividend. But it is not too late to come to our global senses, renounce nuclear weapons and war and embrace a new paradigm of peaceful rebirth and change.

June 10, 1960 – Polaris Action, a group of concerned Americans organized by members of the Committee for Non Violent Action held an antinuclear march that began in New York City on June 1 and ended on this date at the gates of the nuclear submarine builder for the U.S. Navy – Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut.  This group, allied with countless other organizations in the coming years, demonstrated their opposition to the development and deployment of nuclear weapons.  Comments:  There have been many thousands of global protests, vigils, hunger strikes, acts of civil disobedience, and demonstrations over the last seventy years appealing to corporate, military, governmental, political, and other leaders to recognize that eventually the global nuclear Armageddon machine, based on the flawed concept of deterrence, will fail resulting in the likely destruction of human civilization and the possible eradication of the entire human species (and a multitude of other species).  Growing numbers of the world population are recognizing this immense threat and working to dramatically reduce nuclear arsenals with a goal to eliminate them entirely.  (Source:  Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa.  https://www.swarthmore.edu/library/peaceDG001-025/dg017.cnva.xml)

June 13, 1995 – President Jacques Chirac announced an end to a French moratorium on nuclear testing with a planned series of eight tests in the South Pacific to last from September 1995 to May 1996.  However, worldwide protests forced the French to scale back those tests, although they did explode a 20-kiloton warhead at the Moruroa Atoll.  On January 27, 1996, President Chirac announced that his nation had finished testing, “once and for all.”  In September 1996, France became one of 70 nations, including the U.S., China, and Russia, to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which it later ratified on April 6, 1998.  France conducted a total of 210 nuclear tests in the period from 1960 to 1996 which inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to populations in an immense region of the South Pacific and North Africa.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague global populations decades after over 2,000 nuclear bombs were exploded below ground or in the atmosphere by members of the Nuclear Club.  Comments:  Although President Clinton signed the CTBT on September 24, 1996, the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty on October 13, 1999 by a vote of 51-48.  Few candidates in this 2016 presidential election cycle, Bernie Sanders being the exception, have discussed the threat of nuclear weapons.  No one has addressed the need to join dozens of other nations including Russia (which ratified the CTBT on April 21, 2000) in pushing the Senate to ratify this critical treaty.  This and other critical nuclear issues should be at the forefront of American and global political debate.  The 45^th President of the United States should announce that ratification of the CTBT is one of his/her top priorities upon taking office.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 17, 18, 22.)

June 18, 2000 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Radioactive America,” produced by the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization and independent monitor of the Pentagon, founded in 1972, whose board of directors and staff included retired military officers (Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr.), former U.S. government officials (Philip Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of defense), and civilian experts (Dr. Bruce Blair, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer).  The program investigated issues associated with the underfunded (then and now) cleanup of current as well as legacy U.S. nuclear weapons production facilities.  The press release for the program noted, “Historically, nuclear weapons production has generated massive amounts of radioactive waste.  Poor disposal and containment practices have allowed toxic nuclear waste to contaminate the soil and groundwater surrounding a plethora of nuclear facilities and weapons laboratories.”  These sites include Fernald, Ohio, Paducah, Kentucky, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and others too numerous to list here.  Comments:  Today there remain serious concerns about the continuing health and environmental risks of not only these military nuclear sites but of approximately 100 civilian nuclear power reactor sites and the accompanying infrastructure including the government’s flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant waste storage site near Carlsbad, New Mexico and other privately managed, mostly nontransparent,  nuclear storage sites.

June 23, 1942 – The first nuclear weapons-related accident occurred on this date in the city of Leipzig, Germany involving Nazi atomic scientists Werner Heisenberg and Robert Doepel.  While demonstrating Germany’s first neutron propagation experiment, workers checked the atomic pile for a heavy water leak.  During the inspection, air leaked in igniting the uranium powder inside.  The burning uranium boiled the water jacket which generated enough steam pressure to blow the reactor apart.  Burning uranium was dispersed throughout the laboratory which triggered a fire at the facility causing an unknown number of casualties.  While Albert Einstein’s August 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about the need to weaponize the atom before Nazi scientists could do so had successfully started the ball rolling on the top secret U.S. Manhattan Project, scientists working on the first U.S. atomic pile in Chicago suspected that Germany was ahead of them in the race to build the first atomic bomb.  Even if the Nazis didn’t actually build a bomb, there were fears of German aircraft dropping radioactive dust on cities.  Comments:  Later in the war, when it was discovered that the German atomic bomb project had fizzled, many U.S. and European scientists working on the Manhattan Project spoke out against dropping the bomb on Japanese civilians.  Despite this opposition, the postwar desire to intimidate the Soviets and the accelerated bureaucratic and military momentum to demonstrate a weapon that cost billions of dollars to manufacture trumped moral concerns and even military necessity when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.  (Sources:  S.A. Goudsmit.  “Heisenberg on the German Uranium Project.” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. November 1947 and Spencer R. Weart.  “Nuclear Fear:  A History of Images.”  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988. p. 89.)

June 27, 2011 – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile materials in the last 25 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, local police arrested Teodor Chetrus (who was later convicted and sentenced to five years in prison) in the former Soviet city of Chisinau, Moldova.  The buyer, secretly working as an undercover policeman, Ruslan Andropov, deposited $330,000 as an initial payment in exchange for the first of several shipments of highly-enriched uranium totaling 10 kilograms (22 pounds) – enough to power an “implosion-style” nuclear weapon.  Extensive forensic analysis by U.S. and French nuclear scientists have shown that several samples of fissile materials offered up for sale in the past two decades in a number of Western and former Soviet bloc nations have reportedly come from the same stockpile – the Russian nuclear weapons facility known as Mayak Production Association located in Ozersk in the Ural Mountains almost 1,000 miles east of Moscow.  In fact, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Deputy Director Anne Harrington, who testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces in April 2015, “Of the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have come out of the former Soviet Union.”  Ten years earlier at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, then-CIA Director Porter Goss responded to a query about whether enough fissile materials had vanished from Russian stockpiles to build a nuclear weapon, “There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon.”  When asked if he could assure the American people that the missing nuclear materials was not in terrorist hands, Goss replied, “No, I can’t make that assurance.” Although Russian President Putin has steadily cut back his nation’s overall nuclear security cooperation with Washington in 2015-16 on the grounds that it no longer needs U.S. financial or technical assistance to safeguard its fissile material stockpile, a recent CIA report reaffirmed a long-held U.S. position that it is unlikely that Russian authorities have been able to recover all of the stolen nuclear materials.  Comments:  Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the United Nations and other international fora to prevent the use of fissile materials to unleash weapons of mass destruction whether the materials diverted come from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapons facilities.  In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.   (Source:  Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith.  “The Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.”  Center for Public Integrity, November 12, 2015 reprinted in Courier:  The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)

May 1974 – An attempt at nuclear extortion occurred sometime this month when an individual identified only as “Captain Midnight” forwarded a letter to the FBI claiming he would detonate an improvised nuclear device in the city of Boston unless he was paid $200,000.  In response to the threat, William Chambers, a physicist with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, was tasked to organize a special team composed of scientific personnel from Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories along with several other experts to determine if the threat was a credible one.  After a preliminary investigation, it was determined that the incident was a hoax. The Boston incident led to the creation of the U.S. Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), which was activated in November 1975 to deal with another nuclear terrorism threat in Spokane, Washington.  Managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nevada Operations Office, NEST personnel worked in a number of areas including threat weapon design, diagnostics, and health physics and they often participated in exercises as well as actual threat deployments.  Today, NEST is just one of many “assets” for emergency response mentioned on the DOE’s NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) website.  Comments:  The world has been lucky that there have been relatively few instances of WMD attack such as the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult Tokyo subway nerve gas attack, the 9-11 attack, numerous truck and car bombings that have killed hundreds at a time, and other incidents.  Due to catastrophic property damage as well as extensive human health impacts caused by nuclear weapons or the potential harm of other weapons of mass destruction such as “dirty bombs” (conventional explosives jacketed with radiological material) as well as natural disasters such as the 2011 Japanese tsunami and Fukushima nuclear accident, a large and permanently staffed nonpartisan International Crisis Response Force ought to be established.  Funded by proportional donations mandated by the U.N. General Assembly, the multinational military division-sized organization would consist of key experts with military, medical, scientific, humanitarian, first-response, and nuclear-chemical-biological WMD development experience and scaled-up NEST capabilities.  (Sources:  Richard A. Falkenrath, Robert D. Newman, and Bradley A. Thayer.  “America’s Achilles Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack.”  Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 1998; Jeffrey T. Richelson, ed., The Nuclear Emergency Search Teams, 1974-96.  “The Nuclear Vault:  Resources from the National Security Archives’ Nuclear Documentation Project.”  The National Security Archives, George Washington University, Washington, DC.  http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb267/ and “Responding to Emergencies.”  NNSA, DOE, http://nnsa.energy.gov/aboutus/ourprograms/emergencyoperationscounterterrroism/respondingtoemergencies both accessed April 14, 2016.)

May 1, 1962 – On this date, a nuclear test code-named Beryl was conducted in French-occupied Algeria at an underground site inside Ekker Mountain in the Sahara Desert located 100 miles north of Tamanrasset and 1,250 miles south of the Algerian capital, one of 17 such tests conducted by France at this and another site in the Reggane region of the Algerian desert over a period of several years.  However, due to improper sealing of the underground shaft, a spectacular mushroom cloud burst through the concrete cap venting highly radioactive dust and gas into the atmosphere.  The plume reportedly climbed to 8,500 feet high and radiation was detected hundreds of miles away.  Approximately 100 soldiers and officials including two government ministers were irradiated along with an indeterminate number of desert-dwelling Algerians, who later reported seeing the test blast.  As recently as 2010, Algerian government scientists detected radiation levels twenty times normal near the test sites.  Comments:  This was just one of 210 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the French government in north Africa and the Pacific region in the period from 1960-96.  The resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests and the aggregate total of over 2,000 nuclear weapons test explosions conducted by the nine nuclear weapons-states over the last seventy years has negatively impacted large numbers of the global population.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, Washington, DC. and Lamine Chikhi. “French Nuclear Tests in Algeria Leave Toxic Legacy.”  Reuters News Service.  May 4, 2010.  http://in.reuters.com/article/idNIndia-46657120100304 accessed April 14, 2016.)

May 11, 1979 – Lord Louis Mountbatten, Earl of Burma, an admiral of the British Fleet, and the former Supreme Allied Commander of South Asia Command during the Second World War, gave an address on the occasion of the awarding of the Louise Weiss Foundation Prize to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Strasbourg, France.  Lord Mountbatten proclaimed, “The nuclear arms race has no military purpose.  Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons.  Their existence only adds to our perils…In the event of nuclear war, there will be no chances.  There will be no survivors – all will be obliterated.”  Killed by an Irish Republican Army bomb placed on his fishing boat on August 27, 1979, Admiral Mountbatten’s last speech discredited the doctrine of robust nuclear deterrence with these words, “There are powerful voices around the world who still give credence to the old Roman precept – if you desire peace, prepare for war.  This is absolute nuclear nonsense.”  (Source:  Gwyn Prins., editor, “The Nuclear Crisis Reader.” New York:  Vintage Books, 1984, pp. 5, 27.)

May 14, 1948 – The nation-state of Israel was founded on this date and has survived today despite four large-scale wars with neighboring Arab nations in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.  Although the September 17, 1978 Camp David Accords finally put an end to conflict between Egypt and Israel, neighboring Muslim nations and nonstate actors have continued to threaten Israel’s existence.  The Jewish state, with the support of decades-long U.S. arms sales and extensive military assistance, has continued to conduct military operations in Lebanon, Gaza, and in the region despite widespread international opposition.  Despite Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres’ assurance to President Kennedy in 1963 that Israel “would not introduce nuclear weapons into the region,” the Israelis did indeed develop nuclear weapons as an insurance policy in order to survive a region dominated by adversaries.  Their nuclear program apparently began at the Dimona reactor site in the 1950s and 1960s and is rumored to have obtained fissile weapons-grade materials through theft or illicit covert sale of U.S. or allied plutonium and/or highly enriched uranium.  A non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Israelis have considered long-standing United Nations’ calls for their country to join the NPT and/or participate in a Middle East nuclear-free-zone as unacceptably “flawed and hypocritical proposals.”  The estimate for Israel’s nuclear arsenal today extends from a low of 65-85 warheads cited in a recent Rand Corporation study to President Carter’s estimate of 150-300+ bombs and includes a probably biased figure of 400 warheads as guesstimated by Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during the 2014-2015 P5 + 1 Iran nuclear talks.  Some analysts fear that Israel may be the most likely nation to break the seventy year prohibition against the use of nuclear weapons.  Ron Rosenbaum’s 2011 book “How the End Begins” points out that since its founding, Israel has endeavored to prevent a second Holocaust using whatever means may be necessary.  His dire prediction is that, “sooner or later Israel will unleash nuclear weapons (possibly to destroy hypothetical Iranian underground nuclear weapons production or warhead storage facilities) and risk the inauguration of World War III to prevent what they perceive as an impending nuclear strike” on their Jewish state.  He continues, “They will not wait for the world to step in.  They may not even wait to be sure their intelligence on the strike that they wish to preempt is rock solid certain.  They feel they can’t afford to take that chance.”  More chillingly Rosenbaum presents credible evidence that, “even if Israel has been obliterated, its (German-made) Dolphin-class nuclear missile subs hiding stealthily in the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Persian Gulf will carry out genocidal-scale retaliation.”  Comments:  While the Iran nuclear agreement of July 2015 may have stabilized Mideast nuclear instability for the short-term, much more needs to be done diplomatically and politically to ensure that the Mideast is permanently denuclearized including, at the very least, Israel being persuaded or cajoled by its American ally to confirm its arsenal, sign the NPT, and open its facilities to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections.  This represents yet another reason why Global Zero has a long and arduous pathway to reach fruition.  (Sources:  Julian Borger. “The Truth About Israel’s Secret Nuclear Arsenal.”  Guardian.com, January 15, 2014.  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal and Daniel R. DePetris.  “Welcome to Israeli Nuclear Weapons 101.”  Nationalinterest.org, September 20, 2015  http://nationalinterest.org/feature/welcome-israeli-nuclear-weapons-101-13882  both accessed April 14, 2016.)

May 17, 2014 – A serious U.S. Air Force nuclear accident characterized by the code phrase “Bent Spear” occurred on this date at the Juliet-07 Minuteman III ICBM silo nine miles west of Peetz, Colorado by three airmen of the 320^th Missile Squadron of the 90^th Missile Wing based at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne, Wyoming.  While troubleshooting the nuclear-tipped missile, the three airmen, who it was later determined failed to follow technical safety protocols, inadvertently caused $1.8 million in damages to the intercontinental ballistic missile.  But more disturbing was the fact that this incident (and possibly others) was purposely omitted from a three month-long safety review of U.S. nuclear forces completed on June 2, 2015 by an independent Accident Investigations Board due to Air Force secrecy restrictions.  Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists noted that when this fact was inadvertently revealed to the public in January 2016 that, “By keeping the details of the accident secret and providing only vague responses (to subsequent Freedom of Information Act requests by news media and organizations like FAS), the Air Force behaves as if it has something to hide and this undermines public confidence in the safety of the ICBM mission.”  Comments:  Cold War secrecy and non-transparency on nuclear weapons accidents, Bent Spears, Broken Arrows, and other incidents continue not only for alleged reasons of “protecting national security” but to prevent public scrutiny on tremendously expensive, globally destabilizing, dangerous, and completely unnecessary and unusable nuclear arsenals by the U.S. and other members of the Nuclear Club. (Source: Robert Burns.  “Air Force Withheld Nuclear Mishap From Pentagon Review Team.” Bigstory.org. January 23, 2016.  http://bigstory.ap.org/article/e9367f645d894bd1b743cccb79592478/report-says-errors-air… accessed April 14, 2016.)

May 22, 1957 – The crew of a U.S. Air Force B-36 bomber ferrying a nuclear weapon, a Mark 17 ten megaton hydrogen bomb weighing 42,000 pounds, from Biggs Air Force Base to Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico, experienced a serious Broken Arrow accident on this date.  As the aircraft dropped to 1,700 feet altitude and lined up to approach the landing strip, a crew member tasked to manually remove the locking pin designed to prevent the in-flight release of the bomb (a standard operating procedure at the time) was jostled suddenly by unexpected air turbulence causing him to accidentally depress a lever releasing the H-bomb.  The nuclear weapon struck the ground 4.5 miles south of Kirtland control tower and a third of a mile west of the Sandia Base reservation and about sixty miles southeast of Los Alamos.  The weapon was completely destroyed by the detonation of its high explosive charges creating a crater 25 feet in diameter and 12 feet deep.  While no one was injured in the incident, an extensive clean-up of radioactively contaminated material in and around the crater ensued.  The incident was not publicly revealed until the Air Force complied with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and provided information on the nuclear accident almost thirty years later in 1986.  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:  “Accident Revealed After 29 Years:  H-Bomb Fell Near Albuquerque in 1957.”  Los Angeles Times. August 27, 1986.  http://articles.latimes.com/1986-08-27news/mn-14421_1_hydrogen-bomb and Les Adler.  “A Hydrogen Bomb Was Accidentally Dropped From A Plane Just South of Kirtland AFB in 1957.”  Albuquerque Tribune. January 20, 1994.  http://www.hkhinc.com/newmexico/albuquerque/doomsday/ both accessed April 14, 2016.)

May 26-27, 2016 – Meeting in Tokyo, the Group of Seven (G-7) economic summit of world leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, will address their usual “steady as she goes” western-dominated economic and political agenda amidst public concerns that all nine nuclear weapons states plan on increasing funding for the research, design, development, production, and deployment of new nuclear weapons and their accompanying production infrastructure including new or expanded nuclear arsenal laboratories at a time when these trillions of dollars could have instead gone to addressing global warming, educating large numbers of young people, improving crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges, and urban residences, and other critical global needs.  Comments:  The peoples of the world would be better served if not only this forum but other international fora such as the U.N. Security Council approved a major denuclearization of the planet including easily verified substantial reductions and eventually an elimination of not only deployed but inactive and stored tactical and strategic nuclear weapons as well as all fissile materials (with a small internationally verified exception for radioactive medical isotopes).  At the very least, the U.S. president should comply with a symbolically important request from a Japanese A-bomb survivor, Kiko Oguro, an eight-year old victim of the August 6, 1945 U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima, who recently noted that, “President Obama should come here (to Hiroshima) and see for himself.  He and other leaders would realize that nuclear weapons are not about making allies and enemies, but about joining hands and fighting this evil together.  We don’t want to tell the world leaders what to think, or make them apologize. They should just view it as an opportunity to lead the world in the right direction, because only they have the power to do that.”  (Source:  Justin McCurry.  “Hiroshima Survivor Urges Obama to Visit Site of World’s First Atomic Bombing.”  The Guardian.  March 23, 2016.)

April 1, 2016 – A two-day meeting in Washington of 52 nations (but not Russia which two years ago announced it would not attend), the United Nations, and four international organizations (the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], Interpol, The Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism [GICNT], and the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction) wraps up on this date ending the fourth and final biennial Summit on Nuclear Security first hosted by President Barack Obama in April of 2010. Comments: Although these summits have resulted in the number of countries with weapons-usable nuclear material dropping from 32 to 24 in the last six years (including Uzbekistan which surrendered its remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium last September due to the combined efforts of Russia, the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, and the IAEA), many observers are concerned that the momentum of the nuclear security agenda will fade after the summit process terminates. Other experts have criticized the six-year old regime for not focusing more intensely on reducing civilian stockpiles of separated plutonium as well as large stockpiles of nuclear materials categorized for military uses. This latter fissile arsenal makes up more than eighty percent of the dangerous global stockpile of weapons-usable material. Yet another concern as expressed by an anonymous German government official in a February 18^th email is the critically important need “to build up sustainable and robust protection against cyberattacks for civilian nuclear reactors and other nuclear installations.” (Source: “Nuclear Summit Seeks Sustainable Results.” Arms Control Today. March 2016. http://www.armscontrol.org/ACT2016_03/News/Nuclear-Summit-Seeks-Sustainable-Resul… accessed March 11, 2016.)

April 6, 2010 – President Barack Obama’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released on this date, assured non-nuclear weapons states that the U.S. would not attack them with nuclear arms as long as those nations complied with their nuclear nonproliferation obligations. The NPR also removed from the U.S. arsenal an entire class of nuclear-armed Tomahawk sea-launched land attack cruise missiles, called for deeper bilateral Russian-American arms reductions, and promised that the U.S. would only use nuclear weapons in response to nuclear attacks against the U.S. or its allies. The short-term results of the NPR were overwhelmingly positive with Russia downgrading its strategic doctrine to include nuclear options only in response to attacks that threaten Russia’s “very existence.” Another impact of the review was an increasing tendency for NATO allies like Germany, Norway and Belgium to push for the removal of tactical nuclear weapons remaining on U.S. bases in NATO territories. It also seemed likely that the NPR would halt the accelerating erosion of the viability of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). When the President and then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the New START treaty that same month, limiting each side to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and no more than 700 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy nuclear-capable bombers, it seemed that the future looked fairly bright. There was also significant hope for accelerated progress on eliminating all nuclear weapons within a decade or so.   Comments: However, in the last few years almost all these trends have not only stopped but been reversed to a very large degree. Despite President Obama’s continued but increasingly hollow commitment to eliminate nuclear weapons made in his April 5, 2009 Prague speech, the nuclear reduction regime has been hugely sidetracked. U.S.-Russian tensions over the 2014-15 Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, an increasingly partisan growingly hawkish Republican-controlled Congress, and other negative global trends (Chinese and Russian nuclear modernization responses to increased U.S. nuclear weapons spending, the rise of ISIS, continued North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile testing and saber-rattling war rhetoric) have not only scuttled anti-nuclear progress, but lead to revisited Cold War-era nuclear arms racing.   Under extreme and unrelenting pressure from the military-industrial-Congressional-nuclear weapons laboratories complex, the President has appeased the Nuclear Hawks with an overly expensive, unnecessary $1 trillion nuclear modernization program to be implemented over the next 30 years. The U.S. nuclear triad will be “enhanced” by the inclusion of 1,000 new strategic missiles with adjustable nuclear capacity (including a new generation of nuclear-capable cruise missiles), 100 new long-range bombers, and a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines. Even moderates like former Defense Secretary William Perry (who was quoted as saying, “if the plan becomes real, disputes among nations will be more likely to erupt in nuclear conflict than during the Cold War.”) and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen (who noted that, “we’re spending ourselves into oblivion. Our skyrocketing national debt represents the most significant threat to our national security.”) oppose the plan. The incoming 45^th President of the United States must recognize that the only viable global nuclear posture that ensures humanity’s survival in the 21^st century is Global Zero! (Sources: Scott Sagan. “After the Nuclear Posture Review: Obama’s Disarming Influence.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. April 19, 2011. http://thebulletin.org/after-nuclear-posture-review-Obama’s-disarming-influence, Steven Pifer. “Obama’s Faltering Nuclear Legacy: The 3R’s.” The Washington Quarterly. Summer 2015. https://twq.elliott.gwu.edu/sites/twq.elliott.gwu.edu/files/downloads/Pifer_Summer%202015.pdf, and Stephen Kinzer. “Rearming for the Apocalypse.” The Boston Globe. January 24, 2016. https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/01/24/beware-obama-nuclear-weapons-plan/IJP9E48w3cjLPITqMhZdFL/st accessed March 11, 2016.)

April 7, 1978 – After the U.S. Congress voted on October 11, 1977 to pass HR 11686 – Public Law 95-509 to authorize the production of a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons including the “neutron bomb” – a nuclear warhead to be used on the U.S. Army 60-mile range Lance missile and its 8 inch and 155 mm howitzer artillery pieces to attack large massed Soviet tank formations in a hypothetical large-scale invasion of western Europe – on this date President Jimmy Carter announced he would defer production of the neutron bomb while, at the same time, continuing with the modernization of the U.S. stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons approved by Congress in the Fiscal Year 1979 budget. The neutron warhead would have produced the same surge of lethal radiation as other nuclear weapons but it would have only one-tenth the explosive power limiting blast and fire damage to a few hundred yards while creating a lethal radioactive kill zone of more than a half mile wide. Comments: During the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the U.S. developed and deployed tens of thousands of shorter-range “tactical” as well as longer-range “strategic” nuclear weapons which unwittingly brought the world closer to global thermonuclear war. Unfortunately, today in the U.S., Russia, China, and other nuclear weapons states there has been a renewed push for smaller “more usable” nuclear weapons including President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2017 budget proposal released in February 2016 which called for the development of hundreds of new nuclear-tipped cruise missiles and modernization of the B61 tactical “bunker buster” nuclear warhead that many War Hawks envision as a weapon that could “take out” deep underground nuclear facilities in North Korea or Iran.   Using tactical or even very small nuclear warheads would nevertheless breach the nuclear threshold and bring the world much closer to global nuclear Armageddon. (Sources: Contemporary mainstream and alternative news media reports and “Neutron Bomb Sparks Controversy Regarding Next Generation Nuclear Weapons.” CQ Almanac. 1978. https://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal78-1238840 accessed March 11, 2016.)

April 10, 1963 – The nuclear submarine U.S.S. Thresher, the first submarine in its class, sank during deep-diving trials after flooding, loss of propulsion, and an attempt to blow the emergency ballast tanks failed. The disabled ship, which would not have been carrying nuclear weapons, ultimately descended to crush depth and imploded about 190 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts killing all 129 men onboard the vessel and most probably exposing some radioactive components of the ship’s reactor core to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Comments: In the past, eight nuclear submarines, six of them Soviet/Russian and the other two, including the Thresher, American, have sunk with dozen 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: “Major Sub Disasters: Thresher: Going Quietly.” NationalGeographic.com. 1996. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/k19/disasters_detail2.html accessed March 11, 2016.)

April 16, 1953 – Although the 34^th U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower threatened to use nuclear weapons against North Korea in 1953 and endorsed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ buildup of huge stockpiles of hydrogen bombs as part of the “Massive Retaliation” strategic doctrine to ensure that the U.S. had “more bang for the buck,” the Denison, Texas-born Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and hero of the Second World War realized that peace and diplomatic approaches were a much wiser course of action. For instance, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference then General Eisenhower expressed the view that dropping atomic bombs on Japan was an unnecessary, inhumane decision. On this date before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the President gave his famous “Cross of Iron” speech in which he said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, and the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Comments: President Eisenhower’s speech is as starkly accurate today as it was more than sixty years ago. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditures, including nuclear weapons spending, in 2014 was 1.776 trillion dollars. The opportunity cost of not only maintaining, upgrading, and modernizing tens of thousands of tactical, strategic, standby and reserve nuclear weapons, while also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on an incredibly wasteful array of conventional weaponry is unconscionable. If just nuclear weapons alone were dramatically reduced or even eliminated, money would be freed up for cancer and chronic disease R&D, addressing Global Warming climate impacts as well as regional environmental disasters, phasing out and cleaning up hundreds of dangerous civilian nuclear power plants while also mitigating and sequestering a huge volume of toxic radioactive waste from a plethora of global civilian and military sites, educating  and employing millions of people all over the planet and particularly in the Third World, rebuilding and innovating more energy-efficient and productive transportation networks, medical facilities, agricultural projects, and other crumbling global civilian infrastructures, and solving other worldwide societal problems. (Sources: “Cross of Iron Speech: Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Information Clearing House. April 16, 1953. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9743.htm and “Military Spending and Armaments, 2015.” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex both accessed March 11, 2016.)

April 26, 1986 – A fire in the core of the No. 4 unit and a resulting explosion that blew the roof off the reactor building of the Chernobyl Nuclear Complex located about 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Kiev, capital of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the U.S.S.R., resulted in the largest ever release of radioactive material from a civilian reactor, with the possible exception of the Fukushima Dai-chi accident of March 11, 2011 in northeast Japan. Two were killed and 200 others hospitalized, but the Soviet government did not release specific details of the nuclear meltdown until two days later when Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and other European neighbors detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity. 8,000 died and 435,000 people were evacuated from the region in the ensuring days, weeks, months, and years. Although West Germany, Sweden, and other nations provided assistance to the Soviet Union to deal with the deadly, widespread radioactive fallout from the accident, some argue today that the U.S, China, Russia, France, Japan, and other nations should establish a permanent, multilateral civilian-military-humanitarian response force to quickly address such serious nuclear and natural disasters in a time-urgent, nonpartisan manner. Thirty years later, a sarcophagus encloses the deadliest radioactive site on the planet which contains approximately 200 tons of radioactive corium, 30 tons of contaminated dust, and a very large indeterminate amount of uranium and plutonium. Radiation levels inside the sarcophagus still run as high as 5,000 to 10,000 roentgens per hour. A 2016 report by Greenpeace on the local and regional impacts of the disaster found that in many cases, in grain stocks for instance, radiation levels in the contaminated area, where about five million people live today, are still surprisingly high. According to scientific testing conducted by Greenpeace consultants and experts, overall contamination from key isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 have fallen somewhat, but continue to linger at prohibitive levels especially in forested areas of the contaminated zone. Comments: In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and others too numerous to list here, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage conundrum as well as 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: “Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacies of Chernobyl and Fukushima.” Greenpeace. March-April 2016. http://greenpeace.org/france/PageFiles/266171/Nuclear_Scars_report_WEB_final_version_20160403.pdf and Gleb Garanich. “30 Years After Chernobyl, Locals Are Still Eating Radioactive Food” Reuters (also published on Newsweek website). March 9, 2016. http://www.newsweek.com/30-years-after-chernobyl-locals-are-still-eating-radioactive-food-435253 both accessed March 11, 2016.)

March 8, 1963 – In an article published on this date in Life magazine titled, “Everybody Blows Up,” author David E. Scherman extolled the virtues of the best-selling book Red Alert by former RAF officer Peter George.  The book’s theme was a frighteningly realistic scenario of an unintended nuclear war.  In the following year, two U.S. motion pictures based on this novel were released to wide acclaim in the U.S. and abroad:  Director Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” a black comedy starring Peter Sellers and the more serious thriller “Fail Safe” starring Henry Fonda and directed by Sidney Lumet.  Comments:  Over the seven decades since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hollywood as well as independent producers have provided many more films, miniseries, and documentaries about the unfortunately all too real threat of nuclear war.  However, the still growing strength of the military-industrial-Congressional-nuclear weapons laboratories complex and the mainstream media’s reluctance to report anti-nuclear and anti-militarist stories has resulted in a decades-long trend of growing militarism in American society.  This is seen in a number of areas:  Congress’ rhetoric of “the nuclear option” in reference to budget debates, the strong association of military terms to entertainment, sporting, and political events, the growing popularity of the video-computer game industry with titles embracing nuclear conflict and post-apocalyptic “play scenarios,” and in many other segments of American life.  Fortunately, a growing proportion of Americans and world citizenry are increasingly cognizant that nuclear conflict is not a game and must be prevented at all costs if our global civilization is to survive.  (Sources:  Mainstream and alternative media sources including CNN, The New York Times, Democracy Now, and RT.com.)

March 9, 1945 – More than 25 years after the U.S. Army Air Force dropped 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs (containing napalm, thermite, and white phosphorus) on Tokyo destroying an area of some 16 square miles and killing 80,000 to 100,000 men, women, and children on this date, General Curtis Le May, in a filmed interview with the producers of an acclaimed BBC-TV documentary series “The World At War,” noted that, “It wasn’t until U.S. Army General Hap Arnold asked (me) the direct question, ‘How long’s the war going to last?’  And then we sat down and did some thinking about it.  And (our study) indicated that we would be pretty much out of targets by around the first of September (1945).  And with the targets gone, we couldn’t see much of any war going on at the time.”  Comments:  This statement by General Le May, a military hawk who later endorsed preemptive nuclear war against both the Soviets and Chinese and criticized President Kennedy for not bombing Cuba during the October 1962 missile crisis, almost single-handedly discredits the long-held assumption that a full-scale land invasion of Japan would have resulted in massive U.S. military casualties on the order of half a million Americans.  This flawed assumption justified the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during a time period that historians like Gar Alperovitz and others have proven that the Japanese were willing to accelerate their surrender declaration (if the U.S. had guaranteed that the Japanese emperor would not be put on trial).  However, Le May’s statement proves that the unnecessary use of this horrendous weapon was likely intended to intimidate the Soviet Union into accepting U.S. postwar global hegemony.  (Sources:  BBC-TV. “The World at War:  Episode 24:  The Bomb (Feb.-Sept.1945),” 1973 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM0Ezh8CMb4  accessed February 11, 2016 and Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb:  And the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 3-6, 15, 672.)

March 11, 2011 – After a large magnitude earthquake and a powerful tsunami struck northeast Japan, three of the six nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-chi facility suffered partial meltdowns resulting in the evacuation of tens of thousands of nearby residents.  Five years later, the disaster which has claimed more than 15,000 lives so far is an ongoing catastrophe.  During a February 2016 press tour of the site, the plant’s director Akira Ono informed reporters that it may take another 40 years to complete the clean-up process.  Currently, at the facility, around 300-400 tons of contaminated water are generated each day as groundwater flows into the plant.  To contain this threat, TEPCO pumps the contaminated water into storage tanks.  There are now over 1,000 tanks that contain a total of more than 50,000 tons of radiated water.  Despite the continuing serious crisis and ever-growing concerns about the impact of radiation leaks on the population of the region, the government of Japan has approved TEPCO’s restart of a second nuclear plant.  Originally all of Japan’s nuclear power plants were shut down shortly after the accident and some spoke about the need to eliminate nuclear power in that nation.   But reactor restarts have proceeded despite public protests.  Comments:  In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), 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:  Eric Ozawa.  “Fukushima’s Invisible Crisis.”  The Nation, Aug. 19, 2013.  http://www.thenation.com/article/fukushima-invisible-crisis and Yoko Wakatsuki and Elaine Yu.  “Japan:  Fukushima Clean-Up May Take Up to 40 Years, Plant’s Operator Says.”  CNN.com, Feb. 11, 2016.  http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/asia/japan-inside-fukushima-cleanup/ both accessed February 11, 2016.) 

March 12, 2013 – At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on a January 2013 Defense Science Board report titled, “Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat,” that warned of the possible vulnerability of the military’s command-and-control of nuclear weapons to large-scale cyberattack, General C. Robert Kehler, head of U.S. STRATCOM, testified that in his opinion “no significant vulnerabilities exist.”  Nevertheless, General Kehler did report that he had ordered an “end-to-end comprehensive review” of the threat.  When asked if Russia and China was vulnerable to nuclear missile command-and-control cyberattack, he replied, “I don’t know.”  Comments:  Unfortunately the American public were unable to discover what was said on this extremely critical issue in the closed door, classified segment of this hearing.  Cyber threats might result not only in deactivating parts of or even the entirety of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but theoretically could also result in the launch of unauthorized nuclear strikes anywhere in the world.  While many experts consider this possibility far-fetched, it nevertheless represents a current and future area of concern that must be addressed by all of the nuclear weapons states.  This is yet another reason why the global nuclear doomsday machine must be permanently dismantled before the unthinkable happens.  (Source:  U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense – Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.  Defense Science Board Task Force Report.  “Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat.”  January 2013.  Washington, DC  20301-3140.  http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ResilientMilitarySystems.CyberThreat.pdf , accessed February 12, 2016.)

March 14, 1961 – A U.S. B-52F-70 BW Stratofortress carrying two Mark-39 hydrogen bombs departed Mather Air Force Base near Sacramento, California and experienced an unexpected decompression event that caused it to fly at a lower altitude, miss its rendezvous with a tanker aircraft, and as a result run out of fuel much earlier than expected.  The aircrew was forced to eject only after steering the aircraft away from populated areas.  The aircraft crashed 24 kilometers west of Yuba City, California tearing the nuclear weapons from the plane on impact.  The nuclear weapons and the high explosive conventional charges jacketing the nuclear components did not explode due to failsafe protections installed on the bombs.  But it was never revealed how many fail safe switches were tripped in this Broken Arrow nuclear accident.  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.  (Source:  Elizabeth Hanes.  “Nine Tales of Broken Arrows:  Thermonuclear Near Misses Throughout History.”  History.com, May 22, 2012.  http://www.history.com/news/9-tales-of-broken-arrows-thermonuclear-near-misses-throughout-history   accessed February 11, 2016.)

March 21, 2007 – Two crew members of the Royal Navy’s Trafalgar class nuclear submarine, HMS Tireless, were killed and another crewman injured in an explosion in the forward compartment of the submarine in the onboard air purification equipment during the submarine’s cruise under the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean.  Although the Royal Navy promptly announced that the accident did not affect the ship’s nuclear reactor, many nuclear experts disagreed with this assertion arguing that any explosion onboard a nuclear-controlled submarine is a deadly serious scenario.  Comments:  In the past, at least eight nuclear submarines, two American and the others Soviet/Russian, have sunk with dozens of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles also lost at sea.  Some of the nuclear reactors and warheads in these and other sunken military vessels or aircraft 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:  BBC-TV America and other mainstream and alternative news media reports and 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 November 18, 2015.)

March 27, 1983 – Four days after President Ronald Reagan announced during a national television address that he wanted to see a world where nuclear weapons would be rendered “impotent and obsolete,” by means of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) ballistic missile defense program (later dubbed “Star Wars” by the news media and critics), Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov responded in a speech published in Pravda, “Defenses against ballistic missiles might appear attractive to the layman, but those who are conversant in such matters could not view them in the same way…an inseparable relationship exists between offensive and defensive strategic systems and the implementation of Reagan’s SDI would open the flood gates in a runaway (nuclear arms) race including all types of strategic weapons – both offensive and defensive.”  Comments:  In the decades after President Reagan’s speech, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent by the U.S. and other nations to militarize and weaponize outer space despite an overwhelming global consensus against such wasteful, destabilizing, and unnecessary expense.  The member states of the United Nations General Assembly have voted at least twice against space militarization.  In 2000, the voting margin was 163-0 with the U.S. and Israel abstaining and six years later the final tally was 166-1 with only the United States opposed.  There is little doubt that, although the U.S. ramped down SDI significantly many years ago, missile defense (strategic and tactical systems) research and development funding but also continued deployments may be partially responsible for renewed Cold War II spending by the U.K., Russia, China, and other nations.  An appreciable part of the estimated one trillion dollars in increased U.S. military spending in the next 30 years, recently announced by the Obama Administration, will include nuclear weapons and missile defense systems.  (Sources:   Mainstream and alternative news media reports from CNN, PBS, Democracy Now, and RT.com, Gwyn Prins, editor.  “The Nuclear Crisis Reader.”   New York:  Vintage Books, 1984, p. 115, and Bob Preston, Dana J. Johnson, Sean J. A. Edwards, Michael Miller, and Calvin Shipbaugh.  “Space Weapons, Earth Wars.”  Santa Monica, Calif., Rand Corporation – Project Air Force, 2002.)

February 1, 1958 – As part of the U.S. strategy of massive (nuclear) retaliation, the United Kingdom agreed to station 60 nuclear-armed Thor intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) at four U.K. military bases.  Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command personnel staffed the bases, but all the nuclear weapons that were provided remained in full U.S. ownership, custody, and control.  These same missiles were put on high-alert status during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and were withdrawn shortly thereafter.  However NATO and Russia have continued to deploy tactical nuclear weapons on European soil not only throughout the Cold War, but in the present day as well.  This includes the tense period of the 2014-15 Crimea-Ukraine Crisis.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahme, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 45.)

February 2, 1998 – General George Lee Butler, a retired four-star U.S. Air Force general who was in charge of the Strategic Air Command (SAC)/U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) from 1991-94, became the first commander of U.S. nuclear forces to ever call for their abolition in a speech titled, “The Risks of Deterrence:  From Superpowers to Rogue Leaders,” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.  “My purpose in entering the debate was to help legitimize (nuclear) abolition as an alternative worthy of serious and urgent consideration.  My premise was that my unique experience in the nuclear weapons arena might help kindle antithesis for these horrific devices and the policies which continue to justify their retention by the nuclear weapon states…it is distressingly evident that for many people, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy, and of legitimacy that justifies their existence well into the future…(Nuclear weapons) corrode our sense of humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage, and make thinkable, the unthinkable…our present day policies and plans and postures governing nuclear weapons make us prisoners still to an age of intolerable danger.  We cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it…we cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded homilies of the nuclear priesthood.  It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason, and the rightful interests of humanity.”  (Source:  General George Lee Butler.  “The Risks of Deterrence:  From Superpowers to Rogue Leaders.”  National Press Club, February 2, 1998.  http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/archive/nucweapons/deter  accessed January 12, 2016.)

February 5, 1958 – A B-47 bomber jettisoned a 7,600 pound Mark-15 hydrogen bomb into a Savannah River swamp off Tybee Island, Georgia after colliding with an F-86 fighter jet.  The weapon, which contained 400 pounds of conventional high explosives and highly enriched uranium, was never recovered despite an extensive two month-long search by U.S. Navy personnel.  Comments:  There have been hundreds, if not more, of Broken Arrow nuclear accidents involving all of the nuclear weapon states – many of which still remain partially or completely classified and hidden from public scrutiny.  If global nuclear arsenals are not dramatically reduced and eliminated as soon as possible, an accident, unintended, or unauthorized (perhaps terrorist-caused) nuclear detonation will likely trigger a nuclear Armageddon.  (Sources: “Broken Arrows:  Nuclear Weapons Accidents.”  http://www.atomicarchive.com/Almanac/Brokenarrows_static.shtml

and National Public Radio.  “For 50 Years, Nuclear Bomb Lost in Watery Grave.”  August 16, 2010.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18587608 both accessed January 12, 2016.)

February 11, 1971 – The Seabed Arms Control Treaty was opened for signature in Washington, London, and Moscow and on May 18, 1972, the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union deposited their instruments of ratification causing the treaty to be entered into force.  Article I of the treaty prohibited, “placing any nuclear weapons or other types of weapons of mass destruction as well as structures, launching installations, or any other facilities specifically designed for storing, testing, or using such weapons on the seabed or on the ocean floor beyond a 12-mile coastal zone.”  Comments:  While other treaties like the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, 1967 Outer Space Treaty, nuclear-free-zone agreements, and other bilateral U.S.-Russian and multilateral accords have reigned in the nuclear threat, much more needs to be accomplished to reduce and eventually eliminate the frightening probability of a nuclear apocalypse.  U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), an international fissile materials production prohibition, a U.S-Russian-Chinese or larger multilateral agreement to de-alert land- and sea-based nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, and a Global Zero Treaty should be at the top of the agenda in the first term of the 45^th president of the United States.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahme, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 63.)

February 13, 1960 – France exploded the first of 210 nuclear devices at a test site in the Sahara Desert in Algeria.  The test, code-named Gerboise Bleue, had a yield of 60-70 kilotons.  The last nuclear test explosion by the French occurred on November 26, 1991.  Thankfully, France signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) on September 24, 1996 and ratified the CTBT on April 6, 1998.  Comments:  More than 2,050 nuclear tests were conducted by the nine nuclear weapon states over the last 70 years causing increased cancer rates, groundwater and ocean contamination, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts that still plague global populations.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahme, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 9, 24.)

February 17, 1992 – The U.S., Russia, and Germany agreed to establish an International Science and Technology Center (ISTC) in Moscow to aid Russia and the former Soviet bloc nuclear scientists and engineers providing them with “opportunities to redirect their talents to nonmilitary endeavors [and to] minimize any incentives to engage in activities that would result in the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and missile delivery systems.”  A similar center was set up a few years later in Kiev, Ukraine.  However, in January 2015, as a result of tensions relating to the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis and a rejuvenated Cold War, Russian Federation representatives informed their U.S. counterparts that Russia would no longer accept U.S. assistance to continue funding the centers.   Comments:  It is unfortunate that similar centers have not been established globally, especially in the U.S., China, and in the other nuclear weapons states.  Such centers could redirect 90 percent of conventional and nuclear weaponry research and development into peaceful, civilian areas of investment such as medical cures for cancer, AIDs, and other diseases; improving nonlethal incapacitating weaponry for use by community police forces and military units; dismantling, remediating, and cleaning up civilian and military nuclear plants and storage sites worldwide; developing new economically viable, environmentally safe renewable energy technologies including improved wind, solar, geothermal, and other sources; providing clean water and improved agricultural yields to Third World populations; and resolving political crises and long-lived wars in conflict zones throughout the world including the Mideast, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahme, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 3, 69 and Bryan Bender.  “Russia Ends U.S. Nuclear Security Alliance.”  The Boston Globe.  January 19, 2015.  https://www.bostonglobe.com/new/nation/2015/01/19/after-two-decades-russia-nuclear-security-cooperation-becomes-casualty-deteriorating-relations/5nh8NbtjitUE8UqVWFlooL/story.html  accessed January 12, 2016.)

February 19, 2003 – Long-time nuclear abolitionist and antiwar advocate retired Rear Admiral Eugene “Gene” J. Carroll, Jr. passed away on this date at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  A naval aviator and veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars, who served in the U.S. Navy for 35 years before retiring in 1980, spent the rest of his career as a senior staffer, vice president, and director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization and independent monitor of the Pentagon – the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C.  Admiral Carroll was one of 62 generals and admirals from 17 nations to sign a public statement calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons in 1996.  The former Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policies, and Operations, who earned a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University, was an excellent orator, published author of op-eds, letters-to-the-editor, and book chapters, and served as the host of CDI’s award-winning “America’s Defense Monitor” PBS weekly documentary television series.  In an article, “Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence” in Gwyn Prins’ (editor) “The Nuclear Crisis Reader” (New York:  Vintage Books, 1984), Admiral Carroll wrote, “Nuclear deterrence based upon the development of nuclear war-fighting forces is a failed doctrine.  There is no safety, no survival, if both sides continue to build and deploy war-fighting forces designed to prevail in nuclear conflict.  Safety lies ultimately in changing our way of thinking about the role of military power in the nuclear age.  Armed with new insights, rather than new weapons, we then may be able to reduce or eliminate the basic causes of conflict in a vulnerable, interdependent world.”   Three decades later in 2002, the Admiral’s support for the global abolition of these doomsday weapons was as strong as ever, “Far from being the benign artifacts of the Cold War, tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons remain a clear and present danger to human survival.  Unfortunately, the United States continues to invest billions of dollars each year to maintain and enhance the world’s preeminent nuclear arsenal in the mistaken belief that it adds to our national security.”  (Sources:  Douglas Martin.  “E.J. Carroll, 79, Antinuclear Admiral, Dies.”  New York Times.  March 3, 2003.  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/03/us/ej-carroll-79-antinuclear-admiral-dies-html and Bruce G. Blair.  “Nuclear Recollections.”  The Defense Monitor.  Vol. 32, No. 2, April/May 2003.  http://www.globalzero.org/files/bb_nuclear-recollections_may_2003.pdf  both accessed on January 12, 2016.)

February 28, 2015 – The Helen Caldicott Foundation for a Nuclear Free Future held a two-day symposium at the New York Academy of Medicine beginning on this date.  The symposium addressed one of the most if not the most important issue facing the human species – “The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction.”  A distinguished panel of international experts in the fields of disarmament, political science, existential risk, artificial intelligence, anthropology, medicine, nuclear weapons, nuclear winter, and related subjects addressed a fascinating agenda that included: “What are the human and technological factors that could precipitate nuclear war between Russia and the U.S., how many times have we come close to nuclear war and how long will our luck hold?”  Other seminal topics of the presentations were:  “What are the medical and environmental consequences of either a small or large scale nuclear war?” and “What is the pathology within the present political situation that could lead us to extinction and how can this nuclear pathology be cured?”  Comments:  Several of the speakers mentioned the unbelievably difficult barriers that humanity faces in achieving a permanent global paradigm shift away from not only nuclear deterrence and sustained high levels of nuclear forces but also from the perceived and sustained need for continuing interstate wars, civil conflicts, or military actions against nonstate actors (Global War on Terrorism, etc).  Entrenched interests in the military-industrial-Congressional-weapons laboratories complex are adamantly inflexible and not only unwilling to change but certain their worldview has “won the Cold War” and “kept America safe in the post-Cold War world and the foreseeable future” and that any opposing views (nuclear abolition) are either hopelessly naïve or worse, unpatriotic, overly idealistic, and completely antithetical to the future survival of our nation, our allies, and Western civilization.  Therefore, it will take sustained, long-term committed political work at the grassroots level and in every other arena of human activity (in the fields of economics, philosophy, science, ethics, medicine, popular culture, art, and entertainment) to convince significant actors as well as the mass of humanity to make these seismic shifts before the unthinkable happens – a nuclear omnicide.  (Sources:  Helen Caldicott Nuclear Symposium, Feb. 28-March 1, 2015. http://nuclearfreeplanet.org/symposium-the-dynamics-of-possible-nuclear-extinction-l-february-28-march-1-2015-at-the-new-york-academy-of-medicine.html and “Helen Caldicott Symposium:  Possible Nuclear Extinction.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVud0p4aGRo both accessed January 12, 2016.)

January 4, 2007 – In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, one of five similarly themed pieces written by these four distinguished leaders, titled “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” two Republicans – former Secretary of State (1973-77) Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Schultz (who also served as Secretary of State from 1982-89) joined two Democrats – former Secretary of Defense (1994-97) William J. Perry and retired U.S. Senator Sam Nunn (who served as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee before stepping down in 1997) – in promoting a growing political consensus that the “world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era.”  The authors wrote that, “…long-standing notions of nuclear deterrence are obsolete.”  They also called for removing U.S. and Russian nuclear missiles from their hair-trigger alert status.  Comments:  Unfortunately, even this powerful bipartisan message did not result in concrete steps taken toward substantial nuclear reductions by presidents Bush and Obama and the Congress.  Follow-on START and Moscow treaty reductions that were implemented seem insignificant especially after recent actions by the Nuclear Club members to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals.  For example, the Obama Administration recently committed to spending a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to expand U.S. nuclear capabilities.   Unfortunately, a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and other arms control and reduction scenarios seem less likely since the Crimea-Ukraine crisis of 2014-2015.  With about a year left in office, President Barack Obama could act unilaterally to help reverse this state of affairs by announcing that the U.S. will de-alert one squadron of land-based ICBMs while challenging Russia to do the same or better.  Largely symbolic, such a move, standing down a small portion of our nuclear forces for just 72 hours, could help trigger further reductions and rejuvenate public interest in the global zero imperative. (Source:  “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.”  Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2007, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116787515251566636 accessed December 15, 2015.)

January 9, 1987 – Dean Rusk (1909-1994), a former Secretary of State (1961-69) under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who received many awards during his career including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, spoke out against nuclear weapons with a statement that, “Nuclear war not only eliminates all the answers, but eliminates all the questions.”  Comments:  Rusk’s antinuclear comments were not unusual as a plethora of celebrities (Martin Sheen, Stacy Keach), government leaders (George Kennan), whistleblowers (Daniel Ellsberg), scientists (Margaret Mead, Albert Einstein), military leaders (Lord Mountbatten, Air Force General George Lee Butler), and countless others spoke publicly about the dangers of nuclear conflict during the Cold War (1945-1991).  However, with the risk of nuclear war perceived (incorrectly) as dramatically reduced since the Cold War ended, it seemed that less mainstream voices were continuing to speak out.  In fact, it is much more likely that corporate media has tuned out a growing chorus of proponents of nuclear weapons reduction.   Meanwhile, some long-time advocates of global zero continue to make their voices heard.  For example, U.K. Labour Party opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, a decades-long advocate of antinuclear causes, has publicly reiterated recently that if he was elected prime minister, there would be no possibility of him ever pushing the nuclear button.  (Sources:  Mainstream and alternative media sources including CNN, PBS, RT.com, and Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now.”)

January 10, 1984 – In one of the many known incidences of near accidental nuclear war, U.S. Air Force officers hurriedly parked an armored vehicle atop a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silo at Warren Air Force Base near Cheyenne, Wyoming when a computer malfunction resulted in one of the nuclear-tipped missiles being readied for launch.   Comments:  Although U.S. and Russian politicians and strategic military leaders maintain that such incidents are increasingly unlikely with today’s more sophisticated fail safes and software protections, most observers however remained concerned that serious and growing cyber threats still pose an appreciable risk of triggering an accidental or unintentional nuclear war.  This state of affairs represents probably the most powerful rationale for eliminating all global nuclear weapons.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

January 17, 1966 – Several hours after leaving its air base near Goldsboro, North Carolina, a U.S. B-52 strategic bomber carrying four Mark-28 hydrogen bombs collided in mid-air with a KC-135 tanker aircraft near Palomares, on the southern coast of Spain.  The bomber crashed causing the high explosives jacketing at least one of the thermonuclear warheads to detonate spreading highly radioactive plutonium over a very large area.  A long and expensive search and clean-up operation by U.S. military and civilian authorities was undertaken.  Comments:  Hundreds of nuclear incidents including Broken Arrow accidents have occurred over the decades despite some innovative safety measures pushed on the Pentagon by U.S nuclear weapons laboratories and nongovernmental experts.  Nevertheless, the resulting leakage of nuclear toxins, due to accidents (many still underreported or even completely undisclosed for “national security” reasons) by members of the Nuclear Club have threatened the health and safety of large numbers of world citizenry.  (Source:  Tony Long.  “January 17, 1966:  H-Bombs Rain Down on a Spanish Fishing Village.”  Wired.com, January 17, 2012.  http://www.wired.com/2012/jan-17-1966-h-bombs-rain-down/ accessed December 15, 2015.)

January 22, 2015 – The prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an independent, nonpartisan organization established by Manhattan Project scientists in 1945, moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock, founded in 1947, from its 2012 level of Five Minutes to Midnight to the frightening time of Three Minutes to Midnight.  The Bulletin’s press release explained the change with these words, “Unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity and world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.”  Comments:  Despite a vast proliferation of major and alternative (including social) media sources of information on the nuclear threat over the last few decades, most Americans are either unaware or unconcerned about a threat they believe virtually ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of the Cold War in 1991.  In reality, seventy-plus years after Hiroshima, the nuclear risks to global civilization and the human species are as frighteningly dangerous as ever.  The time for action is now.  Drastic reductions and a time-urgent elimination of all nuclear weapons and nuclear power is a firm, unalterable requirement for human survival. (Source:  http://thebulletin.org/clock/2015 accessed December 15, 2015.

January 28, 1982 – During the height of the Cold War, at a Congressional hearing on defense expenditures held in the Joint Economic Committee on Capitol Hill on this date, Admiral Hyman Rickover (1900-1986), the founder of the U.S. nuclear navy who was involved in the design and production of the first nuclear-powered submarine engines, the launching of the first U.S. Navy nuclear submarine – the U.S.S. Nautilus in 1955, and the development of the first large-scale civilian power reactor in Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957, surprised the audience with strong antinuclear testimony.  Admiral Rickover stated that, “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth…there was so much radiation…Now when we use nuclear weapons or nuclear power, we are creating something which nature has been eliminating…it’s important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.”  After a shocked silence in the hearing room, Rickover added, “Then you might ask me, why do I have nuclear-powered ships?  I’m not proud of the part I played in it…That’s why I’m such a great proponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war.  I think from a long-range standpoint – I’m talking about humanity – The most important thing we could do is…first outlaw nuclear weapons to start with, then we outlaw nuclear reactors, too.”  Comments:  Admiral Rickover was just one of many U.S. and international military leaders during the seventy year nuclear arms race who have spoken out against nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.  As concerns about global warming grow stronger daily, those environmentalists who see nuclear power as one solution to the climate crisis should revisit Rickover’s comments at this hearing:  “I believe that nuclear power for commercial purposes shows itself to be more economical, but that’s a fake line of reasoning because we do not take into account the potential damage the release of radiation may do to future generations.”  (Source:  Robert Del Tredici.  “At Work in the Fields of the Bomb.”  New York:  Harper & Row Publishers, 1987, pp. 164-165.)

January 31, 1950 – President Harry Truman agreed with calls by atomic scientists like Edward Teller and particularly military leaders serving on the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff that a super bomb (H-bomb) was “necessary to have within the arsenal of the U.S.  Such a weapon would improve our defense in its broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, but (also) a potentially retaliatory weapon as well as a defense against enemy forces.”  Accordingly, on this date, President Truman “directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super bombs.”  However, privately, the President later told his assistant press secretary Eben Ayers that, “We had to do it, but no wants to use it.”  Almost three years later on November 1, 1952, the U.S. detonated its first thermonuclear device, a 10 megaton bomb code-named “Mike” at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands.  The Soviets followed on August 12, 1953 with a 400-kiloton device exploded at the Semipalatinsk site in Kazakhstan.  Comments:  Those were just two of the over 2,000 nuclear tests conducted above or below ground during the last seventy years by members of the Nuclear Club.   The resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests have negatively impacted generations of people, worldwide.   And, with the advent of thermonuclear weapons, thousands of times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the possibility of the destruction of human civilization and the human species itself became a real possibility. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahme, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5-6 and Richard Rhodes.  “Arsenals of Folly:  The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, pp. 76-77.)

December 5, 1965 – A U.S. naval aircraft, a 4E Skyhawk fighter jet rolled off an elevator on board the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Pacific Ocean 70-80 miles east of the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa, Japan drowning the pilot.  The aircraft carried a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb which was lost in the three mile deep ocean waters of the Pacific.  When the U.S. Defense Department first admitted this accident in 1981 it claimed the accident happened “more than 500 miles off the coast of Japan.”  Comments:  There are dozens of lost nuclear warheads and nuclear reactors on the ocean floor from sunken naval vessels and crashed aircraft.   Some of these 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.   This is but one of the many deadly legacies of the ongoing seventy year-long nuclear arms race.  (Source:  Michael W. Maggelet and James C. Oskins.  “Broken Arrow:  The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents.”  Raleigh, NC:  Lulu Publishing.  2007, p. 217 and William Arkin and Joshua Handler.  “Neptune Papers III:  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 November 18, 2015.)

December 5, 2012 – The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) conducted its 27^th subcritical nuclear test, designated Pollux, in which chemical high explosives were detonated next to samples of weapons-grade plutonium (plutonium-239), at the Nevada Test Site.  The NNSA says the test was performed in order to “test the ongoing safety and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear weapons.” However, this test was conducted without significant commentary or criticism by the mainstream news media despite the fact that many arms control experts and critics of U.S. nuclear deterrence policies see such tests as violating the spirit of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which was signed by President Bill Clinton on September 24, 1996 but rejected by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 51-48 on October 13, 1999 (and not ratified thereafter despite the Russian Duma’s approval of the treaty on April 21, 2000 by a vote of 298-74).  Since the CTBT was not ratified by the U.S., supporters of a robust U.S. nuclear arsenal claim that these subcritical tests are being conducted legally.  However, the Iranian Foreign Ministry, as well as the mayor of the city of Hiroshima, Japan, both condemned the test.  Mayor Kazumi Matsui noted that, “the test proves that the U.S. could use nuclear weapons anytime.”  Comments:  Six and a half years after President Barack Obama’s April 2009 Prague speech on eliminating nuclear weapons, the Administration has done little to act on the President’s promise to “aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the CTBT,” or to work toward accelerated nuclear arms reductions.  In fact, the President has given his blessing to spending a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize and expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal!  Even military hawk President Ronald Reagan, in a December 19, 1985 letter to Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, noted that, “A comprehensive test ban…is a long-term objective of the United States…”  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 9, 13, 19, 22 and William Broadman. “U.S. Nuke Test Draws Few Protests.”  ConsortiumNews.com. December 10, 2012.  https://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/10/us-nuke-test-draws-few-protests/ and “U.S. Nuclear Test Condemned by Iran, Japan.”  RT.com. https://www.rt.com/news/US-nuclear-test-nevada-criticism-582/ both accessed on November 18, 2015.)

December 8, 1953 – Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, President Dwight D. Eisenhower proposed the concept of Atoms for Peace, which called for the creation of an international atomic energy agency that would receive contributions from nations holding stocks of nuclear materials and utilize such contributions for peaceful purposes.   Although this plan led to the July 29, 1957 creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which later became an important component of the international nonproliferation regime as actualized in the July 11, 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Atoms for Peace and Project Ploughshares, another program to use nuclear weapons for “peaceful purposes,” spawned some incredibly naïve and reckless Soviet and U.S. proposals to build nuclear-powered aircraft and locomotives, to create artificial harbors by using nuclear demolitions, even to use small nuclear power plants to heat and cool residences, as well as many other irrational health-threatening schemes.  According to nuclear historian Spencer Weart, the U.S. alone spent over a billion dollars on Atoms for Peace before President John Kennedy ended the program in 1961.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 61 and Spencer R. Weart. “Nuclear Fear:  A History of Images.”  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 173.)

December 12, 1991 – President George H. W. Bush signed the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act (the Nunn-Lugar legislation) which approved U.S. monetary and technical assistance to aid the Commonwealth of Independent States (the former Soviet Union) with the storage, transportation, dismantlement, and destruction of nuclear and chemical weapons.  It also provided spending to promote defense conversion and U.S.-C.I.S. military-to-military exchanges.  Over the next two decades over $4 billion was budgeted by the U.S. for these nonproliferation activities sponsored by Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN).  As a result of this and related programs, the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan became nuclear-weapon-free nations.  Over 500 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nearly that many ICBMs silos were destroyed along with thousands of other missiles and weapons platforms including 27 nuclear submarines.  In addition, approximately 58,000 former weapons scientists from C.I.S. countries were reemployed in peaceful R&D programs organized with the assistance of U.S.-funded International Science and Technical Centers.  However in January 2015, as a result of tensions relating to the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis and a rejuvenated Cold War II, Russian Federation representatives informed their U.S. counterparts that Russia would no longer accept U.S. Nunn-Lugar assistance and that they would continue the program on their own.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 3 and Bryan Bender.  “Russia Ends U.S. Nuclear Security Alliance.”  The Boston Globe.  January 19, 2015.  https://www.bostonglobe.com/new/nation/2015/01/19/after-two-decades-russia-nuclear-security-cooperation-becomes-casualty-deteriorating-relations/5nh8NbtjitUE8UqVWFlooL/story.html. accessed on November 18, 2015.)

December 15, 1995 – Ten Southeast Asian nations signed the Bangkok Treaty establishing the Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone (SEANWFZ).  The treaty has a protocol that allows nuclear weapons states to participate in the regime, however, so far no member of the Nuclear Club has signed onto the treaty.  Nevertheless, the treaty entered into force on March 28, 1997.  The agreement obliges its members not to develop, manufacture, or otherwise acquire, possess, or have control over nuclear weapons.  Other NWFZs include the December 1, 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the February 14, 1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco covering Latin America, the August 6, 1985 Raratonga Treaty creating a South Pacific Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone, the April 11, 1996 Pelindaba Treaty covering Africa and NWFZs covering a large number of the world’s metropolitan areas including some U.S. cities.   Comments:  One goal of the growing Global Zero movement is to expand these existing NWFZs to include the entire planet, with the proviso that Nuclear Club Members and recalcitrant non-NPT participants like Israel must all embrace, without caveat, a Worldwide Nuclear-Weapon-Free-Zone. (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 3, 62, 65, 75-76 and “Southeast Asia Nuclear-Weapons-Free-Zone.”  Monterey Institute of International Studies.  http://cns.miis.edu/inventory/pdfs/seanwfz.org.  accessed November 18, 2015.)

December 22, 1975 – During the Gerald Ford presidential administration, at a National Security Council meeting held on this date, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) director Fred Ikle agreed with the thesis of a new Rand Corporation study that concluded that, “launching the ICBM force on attack assessment (launch-on-warning policy) is the most simple and cost-effective way to frustrate a Soviet nuclear counterforce attack on the U.S. – but as a declared policy, we believe it would be vigorously opposed as both dangerous and unstable (i.e., that an accident could theoretically precipitate a nuclear war).”  But Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft disagreed.  Scowcroft argued that, “It is not to our disadvantage if we appear irrational to the Soviets in this regard.”  Comments:  The “rationality” of pressing a button to commit unprecedented, irreversible nuclear genocide has still not been sufficiently discredited and relegated to the scrap heap of human history.  Strategic calculations based on irrationality are extremely unwise, tremendously destabilizing, and clearly counterproductive to the long-term sustainability of the human species.  (Sources:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

December 23, 1983 – A seminal scientific study on the previously unknown but most critical global climate consequences of even a so-called “limited” nuclear war, titled “Nuclear Winter and Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions,” was published on pages 1283-1300 in the journal Science by a group of scientists identified by the acronym TTAPS (R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan).  Using data from studies of the climatic cooling impacts of volcanic eruptions throughout recorded history, the authors concluded that the explosion of hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons within a short period of time (hours, days) would result in the injection of very large amounts of debris into the upper atmosphere which would block the sun’s rays and cool the planet, particularly the northern hemisphere if a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange occurred.  The global impact of this event would be the drastic reduction of agricultural yields resulting in the starvation of a large proportion of the world’s population, particularly in the Third World.   The worst-case scenario of a large nuclear exchange could be the extinction of the human species.  The threshold for the triggering of this “nuclear winter,” the authors concluded, could be very low, possibly as little as 100 megatons of nuclear weapons yield.   Many subsequent studies have verified the TTAPS’ conclusions including work by Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University.   Comments:  Nonetheless, the nuclear doomsday machine, maintained and expanded in future military budgets by members of the Nuclear Club, has a life of its own, unfortunately.   A paradigm shift that would discredit the flawed doctrine of deterrence and force the drastic reduction of global nuclear arsenals may be the most critical evolutionary advance in the history of the human species.   Otherwise, omnicide is a likely scenario.  (Source:  “Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict: Nuclear Winter Is Still A Danger.”  Professor Alan Robock, Rutgers University, 2014.  http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/ accessed on November 18, 2015.)

December 31, 1948 – By the end of 1948, the U.S. Strategic Air Command possessed 56 atomic bombs as disassembled cores and component parts that could be reconfigured to explode within a day or so.  In these days, before the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested on August 29, 1949, a number of U.S. military leaders such as SAC’s commander General Curtis E. LeMay, were counseling President Truman to launch a preemptive nuclear first strike bomber attack on the Soviet Union particularly before they could develop their own nuclear weapons.  Comments:  As a plethora of historians, commentators, scholars, activists, and political leaders have concluded, the human race is lucky to be alive during this ongoing seventy year-long nuclear arms race.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

October 4, 1957 – The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, as the Space Age began.   U.S. government leaders concerned that a missile capable of launching satellites (particularly follow-on Soviet space missions that carried animals and hundreds of pounds of equipment) might soon be able to place a nuclear warhead on U.S. or allied territory led to fears of a “missile gap.”  Inflated estimates from the U.S. Air Force and intelligence community predicted that the Soviets might deploy up to 500 operational intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) by 1961.  However, some of the first U.S. military spy satellites, including CORONA, determined by 1960 that the Soviets, in fact, possessed only four operational ICBMs.   In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. military and scientific communities studied the deployment of nuclear weapons into outer space including a Deep Space Force nuclear-armed manned program, a nuclear-powered spacecraft (Project Orion), and the testing of nuclear weapons on the Moon.   The Soviets also worked on antisatellite weapons as well as orbital nuclear weapons platforms called FOBs (Fractional Orbit Bombardment system).  On October 17, 1963, multilateral negotiations culminated in the passage of U.N. General Assembly Resolution No. 1884 (XVIII) which called on nation-states “to refrain from placing in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction or from installing such weapons on celestial bodies.”  More negotiations followed which resulted in the signing and ratification of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.   Comments:  However, there are still active military plans by the U.S. and other nations to weaponize outer space.  Also, nuclear weapons are considered by some as a last ditch option to divert asteroids or comets that may one day threaten to collide with our planet.  (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 28 and Bob Preston, et al., “Space Weapons:  Earth Wars.”  Santa Monica, CA:  Rand Corporation and Project Air Force, 2002, p. 11.)

October 7, 2001 – Al-Ahram, an Egyptian weekly newspaper reported that nuclear experts warned that depleted uranium (DU) munitions used against Iraqi forces in the First Gulf War of 1991 and by NATO against Serbian military forces in Bosnia in 1999 have resulted in an outbreak of cancers, birth defects, and other toxic-related health impacts among the populations of those nations. U.S. and allied military forces along with opposing forces have also been impacted.  The newspaper alleged that 15 European peacekeeping troops suddenly died from leukemia after inspecting former military sites in the Balkans where DU munitions were used.   Dr. Helen Caldicott’s 2002 book “The New Nuclear Danger” noted that the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority issued a warning after Operation Desert Storm in 1991 that 40 tons of uranium debris from DU weapons could potentially cause the long-term deaths of up to half a million people.  Comments:  Over the last 14 years additional journalistic accounts, often fueled by leaks from U.S. or allied military participants and partially acknowledged by public health information found on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website, have verified that DU munitions were used not only in the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia but also by U.S. and allied forces in the 2003 Iraq War and in operations in Afghanistan.   And there are allegations by Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post that Israeli military forces have used DU munitions in Gaza, Syria, and possibly elsewhere.   Comments:  Depleted uranium (DU) munitions, a different kind of nuclear threat with allegedly 40 percent less radioactivity but the same chemical toxicity as natural uranium, has been used in the last few decades by U.S. and allied militaries, but evidence of its negative health and environmental impact in combat areas has not been widely reported by the overwhelming majority of mainstream Western news media sources.  (Sources:  U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs. Public Health.  “Depleted Uranium.” http://www.publichealth.va.gov/exposures/depleted_uranium, RT.com.  “Depleted Uranium Used By U.S. Forces Blamed for Birth Defects and Cancer in Iraq.”  July 22, 2013, http://www.rt.com/news/iraq-depleted-uranium-health-394, Rob Edwards.  “U.S. Finds Depleted Uranium at Civilian Areas in 2003 Iraq War Report Finds.”  The Guardian.  June 19, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-uranium-weapons-civilian-areas-iraq all accessed on September 14, 2015.)

October 16, 1962 – The 13-day long Cuban Missile Crisis began on this date after President John Kennedy discovered that a U.S. U-2 spy plane had detected evidence of Soviet nuclear-tipped medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic missiles on the island.  Most historians and nuclear experts believe this incident is the closest the world has ever come to a thermonuclear World War III with the possible exception of the 1983 NATO Able Archer exercise, interpreted by Soviet leaders as a military exercise disguising a nuclear first strike by the U.S.   In 2003, Robert L. O’Connell, a former member of the U.S. Delegation to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, wrote a frighteningly realistic hypothetical account of what might have happened in October 1962 if cooler heads hadn’t prevailed.   For instance, if a Soviet naval commander had fired a nuclear torpedo at U.S. military vessels enforcing the Cuban Quarantine Line and/or if SAC General Curtis Le May, on his own authority, had launched a “surgical strike” to wipe out Cuban missiles killing hundreds of Soviet technicians, those actions would have triggered an uncontrollable nuclear escalation, O’Connell credibly argued.   As a result of these unintended consequences, he envisioned the survival of a handful of Soviet nuclear missiles which were then quickly launched from Cuba against U.S. targets, “The SS-4 missile warhead detonated approximately 2,000 feet above the Lincoln Memorial.  The resulting nuclear blast, 640 kilotons, leveled the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon – the entire National Command Authority.  Now, without President Kennedy and his key advisors able to respond in a measured and judicial manner, the entire Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) would be executed against the Soviet Union without regard for the consequences.  Approximately half an hour after the initiation of the SIOP and after Russian nuclear-armed Frog missiles obliterated the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, SAC bombers dropped nuclear weapons over Cuba, ultimately killing 95 percent of the population and creating serious fallout problems in South Florida and the Caribbean region.”  The Two Days’ War, as O’Connell called the hypothetical World War III, resulted in “the near-simultaneous explosion of more than 1,300 nuclear devices which resulted in approximately 100 million tons of fine radioactive dust being expelled into the upper atmosphere, spreading a cloud that within a month girdled the northern hemisphere.  This nuclear twilight set off severe famine in India and China and very serious food shortages across Europe and North America.  Of the initial population of 233 million people, around 80 million Soviets were alive a month after the war and roughly two-thirds of this number would succumb to starvation and the effects of radiation during the following year.”  An extremely fortunate United States suffered only a few million casualties but the resulting global consensus of world opinion settled on the firm belief that the U.S. was primarily responsible for the outbreak and consequences of the Two Days’ War.   Thankfully, this what-if scenario never occurred but unreasonably high risks of nuclear conflict remain a deadly serious global problem in 2015 and beyond.  Comments:  Even military hawk President Ronald Reagan eventually pronounced that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.  Today’s global political leaders still haven’t truly embraced George Santayana’s dictum:  Those who forget the past, are condemned to repeat it.  (Source:  Robert L. O’Connell.  “The Cuban Missile Crisis:  Second Holocaust.”  in Robert Cowley, editor.  What Ifs? of American History.  New York:  Berkley Books, 2003, pp. 251-272.)

October 24, 1990 – After 42 years of testing (1949-1990), the Soviet Union conducted its last of 715 nuclear tests before entering into a unilateral moratorium.  On September 26, 1996, Russia joined the U.S. and 70 other nations in the signing of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the Russian Duma ratified the CTBT by a vote of 298-74 on April 21, 2000 despite the U.S. Senate’s rejection of that treaty six months before on October 13, 1999 (by a vote of 51-48).  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, and other detrimental health and environmental contamination still plague global populations decades after over 2,000 nuclear bombs were exploded below ground or in the atmosphere by members of the Nuclear Club.   Comments:  With a sure fire global verification regime, in the form of hundreds of seismic monitoring stations, as well as reliable national technical means of verification in place, there is no credible reason for the U.S. not to ratify the CTBT.  A newly elected Congress should place this at the top of its agenda in January of 2017.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 14, 19, 22.)

October 31, 2014 – French security officials, according to an Associated Press story dated November 3, 2014, investigated a series of illegal drone flights, at least 15 in number, over more than a dozen civilian nuclear power stations in the month of October with five alone on this date of October 31^st.   No arrests were made and speculation on the origins of the drone flights ranged from would-be terrorists to a prank by drone hobbyists.   Comments:  Besides the obvious long-term serious health and public safety concerns coincidental with running a nuclear power plant, the natural (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunami, tornadoes, etc) and manmade (terrorist takeover of reactor sites or crashing airliners or armed drones into containment domes or reactor waste collection ponds) disasters make dangerous, overly expensive toxic waste-generating, and uneconomical nuclear power a deadly global risk that calls for the immediate dismantling of the international nuclear power infrastructure in the next decade.  (Sources:  Various press accounts including Associated Press and alternative news media sites.)