Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Jeffrey W. Mason

  • November: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    November 1, 1952 – The U.S. exploded its first thermonuclear device, code-named “Ivy Mike,” near the island of Elugelab in the Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands.  It produced a yield of approximately 10 megatons – more than 700 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  The blast left a crater deeper than the height of the Empire State Building.  Today, the victims of dozens of nuclear tests in the Pacific, evacuated and removed from their ancestral lands, then returned sometimes prematurely to suffer serious health and environmental impacts, have banded together with anti-nuclear scholars, activists, and sympathetic legal authorities to file the Nuclear Zero lawsuits against the nine members of the Nuclear Club.  In April of 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands filed the lawsuits against the nuclear armed powers, including the United States, in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands and in U.S. district court in San Francisco.  The resolutions, alleging that the nuclear powers have not fulfilled their international nuclear disarmament promises, have been endorsed by many governments, prominent individuals, and organizations including the June 23, 2014 Statement of Support from the U.S. Conference of Mayors.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 5 and “The Sunflower Newsletter” produced by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Issue #204, July 2014, www.wagingpeace.org)

    November 7-8, 1991 – As a result of a nuclear review announced in the July 1990 London Declaration, NATO unveiled a new strategic concept which specifically stated that, “the circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated by [NATO] are remote.”  Comments:  Despite the later elimination of the Soviet Warsaw Pact anti-NATO alliance and accommodations made between NATO and Russia in the subsequent post-Cold War years, today both the Alliance and Russia still deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, which credibly might be inadvertently used by unauthorized individuals during ongoing crises such as the Ukraine-Crimea dispute of 2013-14.   False alerts might also trigger the unexpected use of these weapons, again during especially tense crisis situations occurring near the borders of Russia and NATO.   These factors explain the critical need to completely denuclearize Europe and the region.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 35.)

    November 9, 1979 – In the so-called “Training Tape Incident,” computers at NORAD’s National Military Command Center at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex as well as at the Alternate National Military Command Center at Fort Ritchie, Maryland showed that a massive Soviet missile attack had been launched against the United States triggering the U.S. land-based ICBM force to go on immediate alert and the president’s “doomsday plane” to be launched.  Thankfully, Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites were unable to confirm the fictional Soviet missile launches.  It was later determined that a training tape had inadvertently been loaded into NORAD’s computers.  TASS, the official Soviet press agency later criticized the error, warning that, “another such episode could have irreparable consequences for the whole world.”  (Source:   Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

    November 15, 1957 – “We are facing a danger unlike any danger that has ever existed!” warned a full-page advertisement in the New York Times.  The warning was pronounced by a newly created organization – The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) which was launched on this date.   By the summer of 1958, SANE grew to 130 chapters with 25,000 members and by the 1960s and 1970s the organization expanded its membership significantly.  In November 1987, SANE merged with the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign to form SANE/FREEZE (later called Peace Action).  Norman Cousins and Clarence Pickett were the first chairman and co-chairman, respectively, of the organization (1957-64).  Later chairman and directors included many prominent scholars and thinkers including Seymour Melman and Sanford Gottlieb, among others.  The latter went on to become the narrator of the Center for Defense Information’s documentary public television series:  “America’s Defense Monitor” which produced programs that explored anti-nuclear themes, military overspending, as well as the peaceful resolution of conflict.    (Source:  SANE, Inc. Records [Document Group 58] housed at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania accessed online on October 7, 2014.)

    November 19, 2013 – The Dutch parliament adopted a resolution “to end the nuclear task,” in other words, to eliminate all NATO stocks of deployed or stored tactical or strategic nuclear weapons located on the territory of The Netherlands by the year 2023.  Comments:  Europeans are increasingly recognizing that nuclear deterrence may not be as stabilizing and permanent as they have been lead to believe by NATO and U.S. “experts.”  Increasingly, the momentum to denuclearize their national territories and circumvent a possible nuclear conflict, nuclear terrorist attack including the use of “dirty bombs,” or even a catastrophic nuclear accident, is growing.  (Source:  IKV, Pax Christi, “Netherlands Now on the Unstoppable Path toward Denuclearization.”  November 2013.)

    November 21-22, 1975 – The aircraft carrier U.S.S. John F. Kennedy, commanded by Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr. (who later became one of the directors of the Center for Defense Information, an organization that opposed excessive military expenditures and supported nuclear weapons reductions including Global Zero) and the cruiser Belknap collided off the coast of Sicily creating fires on both ships that killed eight sailors.   Admiral Carroll quickly declared a Broken Arrow nuclear incident when it was discovered that nuclear weapons were present on both ships.  The fires reportedly burned within 40 feet of several W-45 nuclear warheads, a weapon to be deployed on the Terrier SAM missile.  Although technical failsafe safeguards most probably would have prevented a nuclear explosion from occurring, had those warheads been engulfed by fire a conventional explosive detonation would have ruptured the warhead casings resulting in the radioactive contamination of the vessel.  This is yet another example of countless instances of nuclear accidents and incidents occurring during the last 70 years of the nuclear era. (Source:  Andrew Rosenthal.  “Fire Threatened A Ship’s A-Bombs.”  New York Times, May 25, 1989.)

    November 24, 1961 – The United Nations General Assembly’s 16th Session declared in Resolution No. 1653 that, “any state using nuclear or thermonuclear weapons is to be considered as violating the charter of the United Nations, acting contrary to the law of humanity, and as committing a crime against mankind and civilization.”  (Source:  Documents of the U.N. General Assembly, www.un.org/documents/ga/res/16/ares16.htm  accessed October 7, 2014.)

    November 29, 2007 – The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. had not given Pakistanis the technology to prevent unauthorized use of any of its then estimated arsenal of 50-60 nuclear warheads.   This technology, known as Permissive Action Links or PALs, had been used to safeguard U.S. nuclear weapons since the 1960s and 1970s.  U.S. Navy Admiral Michael G. Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters, “I don’t see any indication right now that security of those weapons is in jeopardy.”   But, Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, a large source of scientists for the Pakistani nuclear program, said, “It’s a source of worry that secret institutions are seized with religious fervor.”   Comments:  Because of extreme secrecy and lack of transparency regarding global nuclear weapons, it is not credibly known whether this information was, in fact, true.  It is even possible that this state of affairs exists today, at least for some of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.   (Source:  Peter Wonacott.  “Inside Pakistan’s Drive to Guard Its A-Bombs.”  Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2007.)

    November 30, 1950 – After Chinese entry into the Korean War, U.S. President Harry Truman threatened nuclear retaliation at a news conference on this date:  “There has always been active consideration of its [A-Bomb] use.  I don’t want to see it used.  It is a terrible weapon and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing to do with this military aggression.”  Comments:  But President Truman didn’t equivocally rule out the future use of the Bomb and presidential threats to use nuclear weapons continued into the Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, and other presidential administrations.  (Source:  Craig Nelson.  The Age of Radiance.  New York:  Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 244.)

  • October: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    October 3, 1952 – The first British nuclear test, code-named Hurricane, took place near the Monte Bello Islands off the northwest coast of Australia as a 25-kiloton warhead was exploded inside of the warship HMS Plym. This nuclear test was one of 315 nuclear test explosions conducted by the U.S., France, and the U.K. in the Pacific region during a half-century, 1946-96, according to a 2014 report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 5.)

    October 5, 1960 – While visiting NORAD’s underground Colorado Springs headquarters as part of a public relations campaign extolling the Pentagon’s ability to defend against a Soviet nuclear attack, Peter Peterson, the executive director of Bell and Howell, the firm’s president Charles Percy, as well as IBM president Thomas J. Watson, Jr. were flabbergasted when U.S. Air Force personnel informed them that there was a 99.9 percent certainty that the Soviet Union had just launched a salvo of ICBMs at the U.S., triggering a DefCon 1 alert.  This false alert, one of many over the nearly seventy years of the nuclear era, occurred as a result of the new Thule Air Force Base, Greenland’s Ballistic Missile Early Warning System radars mistakenly identifying the rising moon over Norway as a spread of Soviet missiles.  (Source:   Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 253-54; 542.)

    October 11-12, 1986 – President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev (who later won the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize) met at a strategic summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.  Although Reagan had espoused serious anti-communist rhetoric calling the Soviet Union “the focus of evil in the modern world” and joking that “we begin bombing Russia in five minutes,” by this time, even the 40th U.S. President, acknowledging the true horror of nuclear war as portrayed in the film The Day After, had actually stated that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”  In that spirit, the President surprised Gorbachev, when both men met alone with only their translators present without military and diplomatic aides in tow, by proposing that they eliminate all nuclear weapons.  Ultimately, Gorbachev’s insistence that the U.S. eliminate or curtail the space- and ground-based Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed “Star Wars” by the press) missile defense shield caused the President to backtrack on his offer.  An agreement for limits of 1,600 on strategic nuclear delivery systems and 6,000 on ICBM and submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as air-launched cruise missile warheads was put off until the December 1987 Washington Summit.  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.” New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    October 16, 1964 – The People’s Republic of China exploded its first nuclear weapon, producing a yield of approximately 15 kilotons, at the Lop Nor test site on the Qinghai Plateau in Sinkiang Province.  Less than three years later, on June 17, 1967, the PRC tested their first thermonuclear device, a three megaton bomb dropped over the Lop Nor test site.  Sixteen years after their first nuclear test, China promised that their October 16, 1980 atmospheric test would be their last.  Like other members of the Nuclear Club, China’s atmospheric nuclear tests were responsible for serious negative global and regional health and environmental impacts, some of which have persisted to this day.  Thankfully, 34 years later, no other nation has exploded a nuclear weapon in Earth’s atmosphere thanks to arms control successes like the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the latter of which the U.S. Senate (which voted to reject CTBT ratification by a vote of 51-48 on October 13, 1999) should ultimately ratify now that verification technologies have advanced to reliably detect any nuclear test cheaters.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp.10, 12, 22.)

    October 22, 2013 – GOP fundraiser and billionaire Sheldon Adelson, speaking to a crowd at New York’s Yeshiva University, advised President Barack Obama to explode a nuclear warhead in Iran’s desert region in order to coerce that nation’s leaders in Tehran to halt uranium enrichment and alleged nuclear-bomb making.  Iran continues to insist that it is not interested in building nuclear weapons, but even if these declarations aren’t credible, negotiations are a much more peaceful and reasonable means to persuade Iran to curtail these activities.   In the past, nuclear brinksmanship and threats by the Nuclear Club members have often resulted in long-term dangerous, destabilizing asymmetrical responses by smaller nations as well as delaying or even preventing nuclear agreements from reaching fruition as in the case of North Korea.   (Sources:  Press reports from mainstream media such as the Washington Post and New York Times as well as alternative media such as Democracy Now.)

    October 23, 1994 – The U.S. and Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea) signed an agreed framework to freeze the North Korean nuclear program and halt that nation’s withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.   Unfortunately, over the last 20 years, a series of setbacks have resulted in several North Korean underground nuclear tests and no end to nuclear tensions on the Korean peninsula in the foreseeable future.  Comment:  A new nuclear agreement with Korea and a formal treaty ending the state of war that has existed since 1950 (that the Armistice of 1953 has not officially ended) between North and South Korea should be a paramount priority during the last two years of the Obama Administration.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  The Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 3.)

    October 28, 1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis ended on this date.  “It was perhaps the most dangerous issue which the world has had to face since the end of the Second World War” according to then British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.  Today this is still true, 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.   During the very tense thirteen days of October 1962, the world came the closest it has ever come to thermonuclear war when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev secreted 42 SS-4 nuclear-tipped medium-range ballistic missiles (range: 1,200 miles) along with approximately 100 tactical nuclear warheads including nuclear torpedoes, cruise missiles, and short-range rockets to the island of Cuba.  Several times during the crisis, unexpected events like the Russian shoot down of a U.S. U-2 spy plane over the island or the U.S. Navy’s firing of depth charges at Soviet submarines, nearly triggered World War III.  Secret diplomacy between lower-level representatives of both nations helped President John Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev agree to finally end the stalemate and remove the Cuban missiles (along with a secret quid-pro-quo promise by Kennedy to remove obsolete Jupiter missiles from Turkey at a later date).  (Sources:  Michael Mandelbaum.  “The Nuclear Question: The U.S. and Nuclear Weapons, 1946-76.”  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 129 and Robert L. O’Connell.  The Cuban Missile Crisis: Second Holocaust.  in  Robert Cowley, ed. “What Ifs? of American History.”  New York:  Berkley Books, 2003, pp. 251-272.)

    October 30, 1949 – Led by Manhattan Project scientific director Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (a forerunner to today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission) voted unanimously to oppose building hydrogen bombs as those weapons constituted, “a threat to the future of the human race.”  But President Truman and other atomic scientists like Edward Teller disagreed and pushed hard to beat the Soviets in the race to build a new, significantly more powerful generation of nuclear weapons.   The U.S. exploded its first H-bomb on November 1, 1952 and the Soviets on August 12, 1953.  (Sources:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012 and Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  The Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5-6.)

  • September: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    September 6, 2007 – On the same day that Israeli warplanes bombed a site near al-Kibar, Syria where an allegedly not yet operational uranium-fueled nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear weapons and supposedly modeled on North Korea’s Yongbyon facility was located, in another part of the world renewed Cold War tensions were flaring.   Eight Russian Tu-95 nuclear-capable bombers flew from the Barents Sea into the north Atlantic Ocean shadowed by 20 NATO fighter aircraft, some of which flew within 20 feet of the wingtips of the Russian planes.  Comments:  Most Americans and many Europeans mistakenly believe that the possibilities of a large-scale nuclear war are long past.  Unfortunately this is wishful thinking.  However, concrete steps including a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Senate ratification of the U.S.-signed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, negotiating a fissile material cut-off treaty, an international arms sale prohibition agreement, and a permanent two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace accord will go far toward decreasing tensions and circumventing an increasingly likely 21st century nuclear apocalypse.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 17.)

    September 14, 1987 – A long-respected and admired Canadian military figure – Major General Leonard Johnson – a veteran of World War II, a 1966 graduate of the U.S. Armed Forces Staff College, and commandant of the Canadian National Defense College, joined with representatives of the Group of 78 nonaligned nations in releasing a letter that called for the creation of a nuclear war prevention center, the dissolution of NATO and NORAD, establishment of a Nordic nuclear-weapons-free-zone, and the promotion of global security through increased Allied nations’ support of U.N. disarmament actions.  After retiring from the military, Major General Johnson served as Chairman of the Board of Project Ploughshares from 1989-94.  (Sources:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012 and www.ploughshares.ca/pl_ publications/len-johnson-a-general-for-peace, accessed August 8, 2014.)

    September 18-19, 1980 – At nuclear launch complex 374-7 located near Little Rock Air Force Base, in Southside, a few miles north of Damascus, Arkansas, a maintenance accident involving a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) resulted in three separate explosions that caused a W53 nine megaton nuclear warhead to be thrown several hundred feet from its silo.  A technician from the 308th Strategic Missile Wing of the U.S. Air Force, while manipulating an airborne disconnect pressure cap, accidentally dropped a socket wrench which fell 70 feet and ricocheted off the Titan II missile causing a fuel leak that later triggered the explosions that killed or injured several airmen.  Thankfully fail-safe devices on the warhead prevented an unintended nuclear explosion.  Comments:  Hundreds of nuclear incidents including Broken Arrow accidents, involving many armed nuclear devices, 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 safest long-term solution to preventing an accidental or unintentional nuclear war is the total or near-total global elimination of these weapons of mass destruction.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

    September 20, 1963 –  At a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in New York, his last, President John F. Kennedy pronounced, “The science of weapons and war has made us all one world and one human race with one common destiny.  We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world or to make it the last.”  Comments:  Fifty one years later, the 35th President’s speech still resonates in a world today suffering from a reborn Cold War II, renewed sectarian religious-ethnic-political strife, Israeli-Palestinian struggles, a continuing number of civil wars raging in many regions such as the Ukraine, and, critically, a world that includes global arsenals of thousands of nuclear weapons!  (Sources:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012 and www.jfklibrary.org accessed August 8, 2014.)

    September 23, 2007 – Journalists Walter Pincus and Joby Warrick published an article in The Washington Post, “Missteps in the Bunker,” which reported that four years previously half of U.S. Air Force Strategic Command units responsible for nuclear weapons command and control failed their safety inspections despite being notified 72 hours in advance of such inspections.   Comments:  An increase in recent U.S. military nuclear safety incidents has reportedly occurred during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations convincing many arms control and deterrence experts that excessive secrecy has insulated the military not only from justified criticism but from receiving vital constructive suggestions regarding the need to improve nuclear weapons handling and safety.   (Sources:  Press reports from mainstream media such as the Washington Post and New York Times as well as alternative media such as Democracy Now.)

    September 24, 1996 – Almost four years to the day (September 23, 1992) after the United States conducted its last nuclear weapons test, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) was opened for signature.  U.S. President Bill Clinton was the first head of state to sign, followed by the other four declared nuclear powers, and a number of other nonnuclear states.  However, in October 1999, the U.S. Senate rejected treaty ratification over concerns that the prohibition of nuclear testing could not be reliably verified.   Comments:  Over the last several years, a number of journalists (see Joby Warrick. “Built to Detect Nuclear Test, System Has Knack for Science.”  Washington Post, January 7, 2014) and arms control experts (see pronouncements by Thomas Muetzelburg, a CTBTO spokesperson, and Dr. Rose Gottemoeller, the U.S. State Department’s assistant secretary for arms control, verification, and compliance) have noted that the evolution of an extensive International Monitoring System involving over 270 global detection sites, which detected North Korea’s secret nuclear tests in 2006 and 2013 along with other related nuclear incidents such as the Fukushima nuclear accident’s massive radiation release beginning in March 2011, justifies the Senate and other governmental agencies reversing their earlier opposition to the ratification and implementation of the paramountly important CTBT.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  The Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 4, 15.)

    September 27, 1991 – President George H. W. Bush announced a Presidential Nuclear Initiative (PNI) calling for the unilateral U.S. withdraw from overseas bases and operational deployment of all land- and sea-based tactical nuclear weapons.   Weeks later, the Soviet Union responded with unilateral nuclear reductions of its own.   Comments:  Today President Obama could enact similar unilateral initiatives to de-alert a portion of U.S. land-based ICBMs and challenge the Russians to meet or exceed those initiatives expanding de-alerting, over a period of weeks or months, to require a minimum of 72 hours or more for either side to fire nuclear weapons in anger.  Other possibilities include U.S. unilateral moves to publicly call for Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and announce their nuclear weapons stockpile, as well as accelerating moribund negotiations to establish a two-state Mideast peace treaty that includes a nuclear-free-zone in the region  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  The Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 3.)

    September 29, 1957 – A massive explosion, equivalent to 70-100 tons of TNT, at the Mayak nuclear weapons processing facility in central Russia, at the Chelyabinsk-65 site, which impacted a plutonium weapons production reactor and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, resulted in the release of 20MCi of radioactive products into the environment, severely contaminating the hundreds of thousands of residents in the region centered on the nearby town of Kyshtym.  (Source:  Craig Nelson.  “The Age of Radiance:  The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era.”  New York:  Scribner, 2014.)

  • August: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    August 4, 1995 – The U.S. Department of Energy released a major study on the U.S. nuclear stockpile prepared not by that agency or by the Defense Department or by nuclear weapons laboratories such as Los Alamos. The report was crafted by an independent group of senior nongovernmental scientists referred to as the JASON group. The study concluded that, “the United States can, today, have high confidence in the safety, reliability, and performance margins of the nuclear weapons that are designated to remain in the enduring stockpile.”  Comments:  Nevertheless, Eric Schossler’s 2013 book Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, The Damascus (Titan ICBM 1980 silo explosion) Incident, and the Illusion of Safety and many other studies from the last few decades have expressed legitimate concern about the potentially deadly combination of nuclear weapons and human infallibility.  Incidents in the last several years, including the mishandling of nuclear weapons by trained military personnel such as the August 29, 2007 unauthorized loading of nuclear-armed cruise missiles onto a B-52 bomber flying a domestic route from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, which resulted in a frightening scenario whereby the nuclear weapons sat unguarded on the tarmac for nine hours, have created serious concerns about nuclear safety.   And both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations have expressed doubts about the long-term reliability of the U.S. stockpile resulting in the implementation of plans to build a new generation of nuclear weapons including the B61-12 bunker-busting bomb (although Bush’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program was killed in 2009). (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 17.)

    August 6, 1945 – Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets piloted the 509th Composite Group’s B-29 Superfortress bomber named Enola Gay, in honor of the pilot’s mother, from Tinian in the Marianas chain of Pacific Ocean islands to Hiroshima, Japan where the enriched uranium-fueled fission bomb code named “Little Boy” was dropped over a city of a quarter million inhabitants at 8:15:17 a.m. local time.  43 seconds after release and 1,850 feet over the city, the bomb exploded registering an air temperature, for a fleeting millisecond, of 100 million degrees.  In the city below, 5,400 degree temperatures vaporized thousands of human beings, melted granite, clay roofing tiles, and gravestone mica for three-quarters of a mile in all directions from the explosion’s epicenter.  A blast wave of 1,100 feet-per-second blew down everyone and everything left standing that was not previously destroyed by the tremendous heat of the explosion.  The firestorm from the blast, as a result of a huge displacement of air, began to flow back to the epicenter at up to 200 miles-per-hour raising radioactive dust and debris into a mushroom cloud.  78,150 died, 13,983 were missing, and 37,425 injured as an immediate result of the blast.  But tens of thousands more would die of horrendous burns and associated direct radiation impacts within days and weeks and from longer-term radiation-caused cancers for decades afterward.  Enola Gay’s co-pilot, Robert Lewis, wrote in his journal, “My God, what have we done?”  Two days later, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched a massive invasion of Manchuria, and on August 9th hundreds of thousands more Japanese suffered a second atomic bombing, from the plutonium-fueled “Fat Man” warhead, at Nagasaki.   About three months later, Manhattan Project scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer warned that, “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”  (Sources:  Craig Nelson, “The Age of Radiance:  The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era.”  New York:  Scribner, 2014, pp. 211-220.)

    August 11, 2013 – Anti-nuclear activists and citizens at the German military base at Boechel, blocked entry to the base where reportedly twenty U.S. B61 nuclear bombs are housed in 11 storage vaults.  German peace organizations and the Dutch group IKV Pax Christi participated in the blockade.  Comments:  According to the Federation of American Scientists’ Hans M. Kristensen, roughly 370 of 825 remaining U.S. B61 nuclear bombs are active with 645 stored in the U.S. and 180 in Europe.   The ones deployed at Boechel (a.k.a. Buchel) Air Base represent one of six NATO tactical fighter base locations of B61s which will soon include a new variant of the B61, the B61-12, a more accurate, smaller yield bunker-busting bomb – 10-kilotons versus an older version, B61-7, with a 360-kiloton warhead – with capabilities to strike at alleged Iranian underground uranium enrichment facilities such as the Fordow (Fordo) site.  Kristensen and other nuclear experts dispute the Pentagon’s claim that this is not a “new” nuclear bomb but simply a life extension of an existing version.   These critics also point out that the B61-12 represents “the most expensive nuclear bomb project ever; many costs are still unknown.”    Most disturbing perhaps is the conclusion that, “Lower yield means less radioactive fallout and a more “useable” weapon.”  Besides European and American anti-nuclear weapons activists, more and more citizenry should be educated about the extreme perils of planned Israeli or American use of tactical nuclear weapons as a means of punishing Iran (or North Korea) as well as eliminating major parts of their alleged nuclear weapons production facilities.  Crossing the threshold of nuclear weapons use for the first time since 1945 would be tremendously counterproductive not only to nonproliferation policy but to preserving a more important principle – nearly 70 years of nuclear peace and the prevention of an upgraded nuclear arms race that would most likely include additional nuclear strikes in the Near East, Mideast, South Asia (India vs. Pakistan) or elsewhere on the planet.  This scenario must be avoided at all costs!  (Sources:  Hans M. Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists, “The Future of the B61:  Perspectives From the United States and Europe:  Briefing organized by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at the Third Preparatory Committee Meeting for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the United Nations.” May 2, 2014 and various press accounts including www.democracynow.org accessed August 12, 2013.)

    August 18, 2004 – The Times of London reported that eight men suspected of having ties with Al Qaeda were charged in Britain with plotting terrorist attacks “using radioactive dirty bombs, poison gas, and chemicals.”  Comments:  Many such plots have been discovered and circumvented since the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) began in 2001.  Despite scores of mainstream media and Western government pronouncements expressing supreme confidence in the supposedly robust and perfect nuclear deterrence system that has been in place since 1945, many experts nonetheless feel it is almost certain that the nuclear terror threshold will be breached, sometime in this century, unless all nuclear weapons states and near-nuclear weapons states reduce world arsenals to zero or at least near-zero and, at the same time, phase out all 400+ global nuclear power facilities as soon as feasibly possible.  America’s and the entire global arms sales/weapons industry complex can be converted from conventional weapons design and construction to technologies focused on state-of-the-art denuclearizing, decommissioning, and safe, secure sequestering away of nuclear fissile materials and related products.  There can be a dramatic surge in nuclear warhead dismantlement, nuclear reactor decommissioning, as well as remediating extremely large volumes of dangerous radioactive civilian and military-generated wastes.   Former “defense” industry complexes can be converted permanently to denuclearization industries while simultaneously refocusing military-dedicated resources toward designing new, more efficient clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, geothermal, and other innovative approaches.   (Source:  “Dispatch:  A Bi-Monthly Report” by the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute.”  No. 228, August 16-31, 2004, www.cbacl.org).

    August 23, 2011 – Five months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused by a large undersea earthquake and tsunami, an unprecedented 5.9 magnitude earthquake with its epicenter in Central Virginia was felt from New England to the Carolinas.  Several nuclear power plants in Virginia and Maryland, within proximity to the nation’s capital, as well as plants located within a few dozen miles of New York City, were shut down out of safety concerns.  Physicist and nuclear expert Michio Kaku was quoted as saying, “We dodged a bullet.”  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 into containment domes or reactor waste water 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:  Press reports from March 2011 including mainstream media such as the Washington Post and New York Times as well as alternative media such as Democracy Now.)

    August 29, 1949 – The first Soviet nuclear weapons test, code-named “First Lightning,” was conducted at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.  The explosion’s yield was approximately 22 kilotons.  This was one of some 456 detonations, equal to about 2,500 Hiroshimas, in the Polygon test area in Soviet Kazakhstan that occurred in the period from 1949 to 1989, which resulted in devastatingly harmful short- and long-term health impacts to native peoples in an immense region.  In a November 9, 1949 speech, Politburo member Georgi Malenkov noted the new strategic situation, “Can there be any doubt that, if the imperialists start a third world war, it will mean the end not of individual capitalist states, but of all the capitalist world.”  Comments:  As a result of the Soviets shocking the West by building an atomic bomb only four short years after the Americans first developed nuclear weapons (in part, due to atomic espionage), first strike preemptive nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union became a staple of Pentagon military planning in the 1950s.  (Sources:  Craig Nelson.  “The Age of Radiance.”  New York:  Scribner, 2014, p. 336 and Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 5.)

    August 30, 1984 – During a time of extreme Cold War nuclear tensions more serious than at any time in history with the possible exception of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and two weeks after President Reagan’s radio check gaff in which he jokingly announced, “We start bombing Russia in five minutes,”  former MIT President and science advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson – Jerome Wiesner – wrote an op-ed that was published in the Los Angeles Times titled, “Should a Jokester Control Our Fate?”  In the piece, Wiesner questioned Reagan’s competence to continue as commander-in-chief with his finger poised menacingly on the nuclear button.  (Source:  Walter A. Rosenblith, editor.  “Jerome Wiesner:  Scientist, Statesman, Humanist:  Memories and Memoirs.”  MIT Press, 2003, p. 555.)

  • July: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    July 1, 1946 – The U.S. conducted its first “peaceful” nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll – one of 315 nuclear test explosions by the U.S., U.K., and France during the half century, 1946-96 (the last atmospheric test was a French nuclear explosion on January 27, 1996), in the Pacific Region according to a 2014 report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).  Over this period of time, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders were forcibly removed from their ancestral islands by the nuclear powers.  The resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests have negatively impacted generations of these peoples.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002.)

    July 2, 1945 – On this date, U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s memorandum to President Harry S. Truman concluded that, “…we have enormous factors in our favor and any step which can be taken to translate those advantages into a prompt and successful conclusion of the war should be taken.”  Stimson reiterated to President Truman his earlier belief that the Japanese would react positively to a warning or ultimatum for conditional surrender which also offered appropriate assurances that the Japanese emperor Hirohito (considered by almost the entirety of the Japanese people as the godhead of their Shinto religion – the 124th in direct line of descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu – in other words, a divine being or Son of Heaven) would not be charged with war crimes, deposed, or subjected to imprisonment or execution.   Also critical was the Emperor’s almost unprecedented secular intervention in the form of cables (intercepted and translated by the Allies) that were sent from the Japanese Foreign Minister Togo to Ambassador Sato in Moscow on July 13-14 which stated, “His Majesty, the Emperor…desires from his heart that it [the war] may be quickly terminated.”   These and related facts could have created momentum for the U.S. and its allies (with the possible exception of the Soviet Union which was bound by agreements signed with the U.S. and Britain to enter the war with Japan [which it did on August 8, 1945] spurred on in part by its desire to reacquire territory it lost in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War) to end the war with Japan before the August 6 and 9 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   Instead, the excuse of dropping the bombs to prevent huge hypothetical casualties (both American and Japanese) in an upcoming invasion of Japan, an argument made largely irrelevant by the Soviet declaration of war against Imperial Japan, which convinced the Japanese that continued fighting was even more pointless, held sway both then and today.   The President, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Manhattan Project director General Leslie R. Groves, a majority of the Congress (incensed with the possibility that two billion dollars were spent for a superweapon that would not be used), and other hardliners felt it was essential to demonstrate the destructiveness of the Bomb and press America’s atomic diplomatic strength in its future postwar dealings with the Soviet Union.   (Source:  Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 35, 232-35, 667-68.)

    July 8, 1996 – The International Court of Justice, also known as The World Court, in The Hague, issued an advisory opinion that concluded that, “…the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal and states are obliged to bring to a conclusion negotiations on nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.”  In effect, the advisory opinion held that the entire nuclear deterrence system represented a war crime.  (Source:  International Court of Justice, The Hague, www.icj-cij.org accessed on June 9, 2014.)

    July 9, 1955 – The Bertrand Russell – Albert Einstein Manifesto was signed by the principal authors and nine other prominent world scientists including a total of nine Nobel Laureates.  It warned of “universal death by nuclear world war if war is not renounced.”  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    July 16-22, 1994 – 21 fragments of the shattered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the largest of which was approximately 2.5 miles in diameter, impacted the planet Jupiter with an approach speed of sixty kilometers a second (130,000 miles-per-hour).  The explosions that followed were estimated to total in the range of six to twenty million megatons of TNT, hundreds of times more powerful than all of the world’s nuclear weapons.  Temperatures rose as high as the surface of the sun (10,000+ degrees centigrade) and fireballs 5,000 miles across spewed out through chimneys the comet fragments drilled into the gas giant planet’s atmosphere.   Comment:  In retrospect, humanity should realize that the tremendous chaos and violence of the Cosmos, including not only comet/asteroid impacts, but immense stellar explosions, entire galaxies wracked by deadly gamma ray bursts, and huge black holes and quasars, all pervade this gigantically large universe.  Cannot humans with their intellect, wisdom, and morality recognize that our planet was always meant to be an oasis from this violence.  That one purpose of our species’ evolution is to preserve, protect, and expand this zone of stability and peace.  For, in our ego and superego, should we choose nuclear violence, our intellect knows that our puny efforts pale before the violence of nature.  Therefore, we choose peace!  (Sources:  James R. Asker.  “Jupiter Comet is a Smash Hit.”  Aviation Week & Space Technology.  July 24, 1994, pp. 20-22, and James Reston, Jr. “Collision Course:  Jupiter is About to be Walloped by a Comet.”  Time, May 23, 1994, pp. 54-61.)

    July 20, 1969 – U.S. Apollo astronauts became the first humans to land on another heavenly body placing a plaque on the lunar surface that read, “We Came in Peace for All Mankind.”  Approximately a decade before this event, the U.S. Strategic Command’s General Thomas Power envisioned a Deep Space Force consisting of 20 manned spaceships armed with nuclear weapons to remain in orbit near the Moon for a period of several years.  The spaceships would be propelled by the detonation of small atomic bombs.  This proposal spawned a research and development program known as Project Orion (1958-65).  Although nuclear space weaponry was circumvented by U.S. negotiation, signature, and entry into force of the October 10, 1967 Outer Space Treaty, there are still active U.S. and other nations’ military plans 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:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, p. 529.)

    July 29-30, 2009 – U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) held its First Annual Strategic Deterrence Symposium, “Waging Deterrence in the 21st Century” at the Qwest Center Convention Hall in Omaha, Nebraska.  Open source literature on these and subsequent U.S. military conferences have revealed that participants at such colloquia rarely consider the health, environmental, and global humanitarian impacts if deterrence, in fact, fails.  Deterrence, bolstered by nearly seventy years of “success” is usually considered so robust and flexible that failure is not considered a credible scenario.  However, human infallibility, when combined with the horrendously destructive nuclear force, is a prescription for unprecedented and possibly species-ending global disaster. (Source:  U.S. STRATCOM, www.stratcom.mil/events/ accessed June 9, 2014.)

  • June: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    June 3, 1983 – Director John Badham’s frightening motion picture “War Games,” starring actor Matthew Broderick, premiered at U.S. theaters. The antiwar film was released in a period during which U.S.-Soviet nuclear tensions were at their highest point since the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some of the contributing factors included:

    • The September 1, 1983 Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 near Sakhalin Island;
    • A September 26, 1983 Soviet false nuclear alert;
    • The November 1983 NATO Able Archer military exercise that Soviet leadership widely misinterpreted as a warm-up for an eventual U.S. First Strike nuclear attack; and
    • The August 11, 1984 off-the-cuff sound check gaffe by President Ronald Reagan (“We begin bombing Russia in five minutes.”)

    Another terrifyingly realistic look at nuclear war occurred just five months after “War Games” was released when Nicholas Meyer directed a made-for-TV film “The Day After” which aired nationally on ABC-TV that November. This starkly realistic movie portrayed the horrendous human impact of a Soviet nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas. In “War Games,” movie-goers learned that accidental or unintentional nuclear war through human or computer error was entirely conceivable. In point of fact, hundreds of U.S. false alerts or nuclear Broken Arrow accidents have occurred over the last few decades, in addition to an unknown number of such incidents impacting the arsenals of the other eight nuclear-weapon armed states. (Sources:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013 and Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    June 10, 1963 – President John F. Kennedy made his seminal, historic American University speech in which he said:

    “I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in World War II. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by the wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations unborn…What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war…not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

    On this exact same day in history, after the world has just barely avoided a devastating nuclear war over Cuban missiles placed there by the Soviet Union the previous October, the 35th President was working earnestly in concert with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to push against tremendous opposition by the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex as well as the Politburo for a long-term resolution of the Cold War as well as permanent prevention of a Hot War. For on this date, the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union formally announced that high-level talks would be held in Moscow to seek a nuclear test ban.  And, in an amazingly short period of time, in a span of only seven weeks, on August 5, 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) outlawing nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater was signed and later entered into force on October 10, 1963.  (Source:  American University Archive, www1.media.american.edu/speeches/Kennedy.htm, accessed May 2, 2014 and Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 1.)

    June 18, 1979 – The United States and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT II) Treaty in Vienna.  It built on the successful SALT I Treaty, cutting strategic offensive nuclear weapons even further.  However, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, it became impossible, according to U.S. policymakers, for the U.S. to ratify the treaty.  Today, the Ukraine-Crimea Crisis has begun to undermine U.S.-Russian cooperation and follow-through regarding nuclear arms control treaty reductions.  Other critical and vitally essential military cooperation paradigms and confidence-building measures between the two nations have been negatively impacted as well.  Accordingly, it can be credibly argued that the chances of accidental or unintentional nuclear war have incrementally increased due to the crisis. (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 2.)

    June 19, 1957 – The Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as part of Project Plowshare, a U.S. government-focused effort to persuade the American people to support nuclear power and weapons because of their supposedly “peaceful, beneficial uses,” announced a number of future projects.  A year later, in June of 1958, one of those projects was revealed publicly for the first time.  Project Chariot was announced as a plan to create a 300-foot wide harbor at the mouth of the Ogotoruk Creek near Cape Thompson on the Chukchi Sea coastline of Alaska.  Four hydrogen bombs were to be exploded to create the artificial harbor.  Thankfully, extensive bioenvironmental studies, possibly the first example of a federal government environmental impact statement in American history, described the overwhelmingly negative consequences of such a Strangelovian experiment.  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012, p. 283 and Douglas Vandergraft.  “Project Chariot:  A Visual Presentation.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, May 6, 1993, Anchorage, Alaska.)

    June 25, 2008 – An article published on this date titled, “Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor’s Massive Safety Vessel Installed.” is authored by T.S. Subramanian and appears in the Indian periodical The Hindu.  It is one of many past and current positive media portrayals of today’s global inventory of about 20 fast neutron reactors that have been operating since the 1950s in Russia, France, Japan, India, and the U.S. with some supplying commercial electrical power according to the World Nuclear Association website.  Although some designs are net consumers of fissile material including U-235, Pu, and other fission products, the fast breeder variant are designed to produce more plutonium than they consume. However, Stanford professor, Dr. Robert Laughlin’s 2011 book, “Powering the Future” (page 59) points out the starkly negative impact of fast breeder reactors,  “…After we run these [breeder] reactors a long time, the world becomes awash in highly dangerous plutonium (half-life of decay:  24,000 years), all for the sake of allowing nuclear fuel to last for thousands of years.”  This represents yet another overwhelmingly powerful reason why global citizenry are increasingly pushing for the dismantlement of some 400 global commercial nuclear power reactors, with breeders at the top of the list!

  • May: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    May 3, 1983 – The U.S. Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, promulgated by sixty distinguished bishops, noted that, “Nuclear weaponry has drastically changed the nature of warfare and the arms race poses a threat to human life and human civilization which is without precedent.”  In their conclusions the bishops asserted that, “The [nuclear] arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race.”  The letter called for the elimination of nuclear weapons and global militarization.  Today, there still exists tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world including strategic, tactical, reserve, and standby warheads. The arms race may not be growing uncontrollably as it did during the Cold War, but it is not inexorably moving toward Global Zero either.  Recent tensions in Russian-American relations hint that a renewed Cold War may be possible.  (Source:  Philip Louis Cantelon, Richard Hewitt, and Robert C. Williams, editors.  “The American Atom:  A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present.”  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, second edition, pp. 267-68.)

    May 5, 1962 – Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, at a speech before NATO ministers in Athens warned the representatives that “NATO should never be forced to choose between suffering a military defeat or starting a nuclear war.”  He also expressed concern that the existence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe increased the threat of nuclear war.  In 2014, especially with increased tension levels with the Russian Federation over the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, there remain serious concerns about U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.  There are still about 200 U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands for use by NATO aircraft.  And, of course, Russia also has tactical nuclear weapons deployed close to their borders with Europe and Turkey. (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 287, 476-77.)

    May 15, 1957 – The United Kingdom tested its first thermonuclear weapon at a Christmas Island test site in the Pacific.  The Grapple 1/Short Granite test produced a yield of 200-300 kilotons.  It was one of 45 nuclear weapons tests by Britain in the Pacific region along with another 24 conducted in the U.S. at the Nevada Test Site.  Those tests were a small sample of thousands of nuclear weapons tests conducted by the U.S., Russia, China, and other members of the Nuclear Club.   As of this writing, according to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s website, 183 nations have signed and 162 countries have ratified a treaty that bans all nuclear testing.  The CTBT was initially signed by the U.S., U.K., and almost seventy other nations on September 24, 1996.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 4, 6, and CTBT Organization’s website, www.ctbto.org accessed April 14, 2014.)

    May 16, 2000 – New York Times journalist William Broad reported the release of declassified documents relating to a staff study by the U.S. Air Force Special Weapons Center conducted in January of 1959.  One of the participants in the study, the late astronomer-physicist Carl Sagan, was among several scientists tasked to assess the feasibility of conducting a nuclear weapons test on the lunar surface.  Sagan and the other participants concluded that the blast would “ruin the pristine environment of the moon.”  On January 27, 1967, the multilateral Outer Space Treaty was signed and the agreement was later entered into force on October 10 of that same year.  The treaty prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit, on the moon, or on any celestial body.  The only recent dilution of the international consensus to prevent nuclear weapons from being deployed or exploded outside Earth’s atmosphere has been debate about utilizing nuclear weapons, as a last resort, to prevent a possible future asteroid or comet collision with our planet.  (Source:  B612 Foundation, www.b612foundation.org accessed April 14, 2014.)

    May 22, 2011 – Islamic militants attacked, penetrated the defensive perimeter, and seized at least one building at a naval aviation base, PNS Mehran, outside Karachi, Pakistan. It took approximately one day for Pakistani military forces to kill or capture the assailants.  While it is believed that there were no nuclear weapons stored at this base, a similar attack staged about 15 miles away at a suspected nuclear weapons storage facility near Masroor could result in the theft of nuclear warheads or materials which could be used in a future WMD attack on Pakistan, India, or any nation including the United States.  Nuclear terrorism represents perhaps the most likely threat that would be dramatically reduced or eliminated if global nuclear arsenals were reduced to less than 200-500 warheads.  (Source:  Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, www.ctc.usma.edu accessed April 14, 2014.)

    May 26, 1972 – In Moscow, President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) Interim Agreement which placed a ceiling on strategic offensive nuclear weapons.  Also signed was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM-I) which limited strategic anti-ballistic missile defenses.  More recently, building on the SALT I and II as well as START and SORT agreements, the two nations signed on to the New START Treaty on April 8, 2010.  That treaty entered into force on February 5, 2011.  This agreement limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 while also limiting each side’s deployed strategic missiles and bombers to 700.  However, President George W. Bush’s December 13, 2001 announced withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which was culminated six months later, combined with deployments of missile defense systems in Europe during the Bush and Barack Obama administrations has helped introduce a significant level of strategic instability into nuclear relations between Russia and America.  The U.S. and NATO have justified ABM systems as a way to circumvent breakout by Iran and the possible launching of future nuclear-capable ballistic missiles by that nation.   However, Russia views U.S. plans for missile defenses in Europe as a threat to Moscow.  Recently, because of the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, both sides have either delayed or cancelled planned future discussions/negotiations on the matter leading many to believe that a possible Cold War II may be eminent.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 2, 4.)

  • April – This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    April 1, 1961 – The approximate date, after President Dwight Eisenhower signed the formal authorization on December 2, 1960, that the first U.S. SIOP – Single Integrated Operational Plan – went into effect.  According to Eric Schlosser’s 2013 book, “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of  Safety” (New York:  Penguin Press), the SIOP featured 3,720 targets grouped into more than 1,000 ground zeros that would be struck by 3,423 nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe.  Eisenhower’s order was kept secret from the American people, the Congress, and even the NATO military alliance.  The President later confided to his naval aide Pete Aurand that the casualty estimates, the sheer number of targets, the redundant bombs for each, “frighten the devil out of me.” (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.” New York:  Gallery Books, 2012, p. 287.)

    April 7, 1989 – The 6,400-ton Soviet nuclear submarine, the Komsomolets (K-278) became the fourth nuclear vessel of the U.S.S.R. to sink during the Cold War (1945-1991).  42 sailors were lost, as well as two torpedoes equipped with nuclear warheads, when the ship sank into mile-deep water in the Barents Sea.  A 1994 expedition detected some plutonium leakage from one of the nuclear-tipped torpedoes.  Dozens of warheads and nuclear reactors lie at the bottom of Earth’s oceans from predominantly American and Soviet submarines, aircraft, and other naval vessels constituting a long-term radioactive environmental and public health threat to the globe.  (Source:  Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew.  “Blind Man’s Bluff:  The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage.”  New York:  Public Affairs, 1998, p. 243.)

    April 8, 2009 – Hans M. Kristensen, Robert S. Norris, and Ivan Oelrich released a report entitled, “From Counterforce to Minimum Deterrence: A New Nuclear Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons,” Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council Occasional Paper No. 7 which argued that the United States needs only 500 nuclear weapons for deterring all possible global adversaries.  A group of high-ranking U.S. Air Force officers, including James Wood Forsyth, Jr., Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, and Gary Schaub, Jr. in the Spring 2010 issue of the journal Strategic Studies Quarterly (Vol. 4, No. 1 – page 82), were even more optimistic calling for a total minimum deterrence force of only 311 U.S. nuclear weapons.   Today, there exists over 10,000 nuclear weapons, including strategic, tactical, and reserve warheads, in global nuclear arsenals.   (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 476-77, 483, 582)

    April 21, 1964 – NASA’s Transit 5bn satellite failed to reach orbit after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida dispersing 2.1 pounds of plutonium (half-life:  24,400 years) from its SNAP-RTG – Radio Isothermic Generator – into Earth’s atmosphere.  This is just one of many examples of inadvertent and usually underreported incidents of manmade radioactive contamination of the atmosphere, surface, and oceans due to the activities of U.S. and other military and civilian space agencies.  Although considered essential for deep space missions, where use of solar power is problematical, such as Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, and Cassini, RTGs powered by plutonium or similar dangerous radioactive materials do constitute a definable risk to human populations.  A more notable example is the RTG-equipped Apollo 13 lunar module, used as a lifeboat by the three astronauts after an explosion destroyed oxygen and vital supplies in the command module, jettisoned into the South Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of the Tonga Trench in April of 1970.  (Source:  Day of the Week.org and Dr. Karl Grossman’s BeyondNuclear.org)

    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 ensuing 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, 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.  (Sources:  “Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year for 1987.”  Chicago:  Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1987, pp. 61, 168 and “The Untold History of the United States.” 2012, p. 450.)

    April 30, 1976 – Chicago Sun-Times’ reporter Robert R. Jones, after conducting an extensive series of interviews with nuclear experts and Atomic Energy Commission (now known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) representatives, concluded that, “Licensee and AEC officials agree that a security system at a licensed civilian nuclear power plant could not prevent a takeover or sabotage by a small number of people, perhaps as few as two or three.”   Today despite reported efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to shore up such defenses, the strong threat of nuclear terrorism reinforces the belief that U.S., as well as global civilian nuclear reactors, should be phased out and shut down by the year 2025, if not sooner.  (Source:  Louis Rene Beres.  “Apocalypse:  Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.”  Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1980.)

  • March: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    March 1, 1954 – In the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands, the U.S. military conducted the BRAVO nuclear weapons test, one of thousands conducted by Nuclear Club Members, in the atmosphere, on the ground, and underground, during the Cold War and Post-Cold War period.  The yield, of approximately 15 megatons from the solid fuel lithium deuteride fusion warhead, was 2-3 times what was expected and unusual prevailing winds carried the radioactive fallout to unexpected places including a Japanese fishing trawler, Lucky Dragon sailing outside the exclusion zone.  All 23 Japanese crewmen were later hospitalized and one of the unfortunate men died as a result of radioactive exposure from an immense blast that produced a fireball four miles wide and a mushroom cloud 60 miles wide.  (Source:  Chuck Hansen.  “The Swords of Armageddon.”  Chuklea Publications:  Sunnyvale, CA, 2007.)

    March 4, 1969 – MIT and 30 other universities called for a national research stoppage to alert the public to how the “misuse of science and technology knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind.”  Concerns not only about nuclear weapons, radioactive and chemical toxic leaks from U.S. military and civilian nuclear production and bombmaking sites but also about Agent Orange, and biological/chemical WMDs led scientists and academics to sign on to this pledge.  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    March 11, 2011 – After a historically large earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan, three of the six nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electrical Power Company’s Fukushima Dai-chi facility suffered partial meltdowns resulting in the evacuation of tens of thousands of nearby residents.  The accident was the worst nuclear meltdown since the April 1986 Chernobyl Incident.  Nearly three years later, large volumes of radioactive-contaminated water continue to spill into the Pacific Ocean from the plant site as a long-term solution to the crisis has yet to be reached. (Source:  Various news media reports including Democracy Now, 2011-2014).

    March 22, 1963 – At a broadcast press conference, President John F. Kennedy speaks about the possibility that by the 1970s “…of the U.S. having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these [nuclear] weapons…I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”  While those fears were not quite realized, it is nevertheless true that nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere remains a deadly serious problem in the 21st century.  Some experts believe that only by phasing out nuclear power in the next few decades, can the world head off the actualization of our 35th President’s worst fears.
    (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    March 23, 1983 – In a nationally televised speech, President Ronald Reagan expressed the desire to “make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” by committing the U.S. to develop a national missile defense system based on the ground and in outer space.   Media critics derisively referred to the plan as “Star Wars” and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on attempts to deploy modest theater and national missile defenses in the coming decades.  In 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty with Moscow signaling a new destabilizing, uncertain strategic defensive arms race that continues today.  (Source:  Bradley Graham.  “Hit to Kill:  The New Battle Over Shielding America From Missile Attack.”  New York:  Public Affairs, 2001.)