Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Articles by David Krieger

  • Why Waltz is Wrong

    David KriegerThe lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.”  The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb.  He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have.  There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states.  Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.”


    In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms.  But the history is short and there have been many close calls.  During the 67-year period since the dawn of the Nuclear Age there have been numerous accidents, miscalculations and threats to use nuclear weapons.  Fifty years ago, the US and Soviet Union stood at the precipice of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Waltz’s faith in nuclear deterrence reflects a belief in rationality, a belief that all leaders will behave rationally at all times, including under conditions of extreme stress.  This defies our understanding of human behavior and the ever-present potential for human fallibility. 


    Another way to view the historical data from which Waltz finds comfort is by an analogy of a man jumping off a hundred-story building.  As he passes floor after floor, he wonders why people on the ground are showing concern for his well-being.  He ignores the approaching ground and focuses his attention on the fact that nothing bad has happened to him yet.  In Waltz’s theory of nuclear deterrence, there is no hard ground below, nor gravity acting upon the jumper.  He argues that “history has shown that where nuclear capabilities emerge, so, too, does stability.  When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more may be better.”  While having more may be better, it may also be far worse. 


    Martin Hellman, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in risk analysis, argues that a child born today has a ten percent or greater chance of having his or her life cut short by nuclear war.  Unlike Waltz’s analysis, risk analysis takes into account the odds of an event occurring and doesn’t base its analysis of the future simply on what the historical record shows at a given point in time.  Ten coin flips may produce ten straight “heads,” but it would be unwise to assume that the results between heads and tails would not even out over time.  With nuclear weapons, the consequences of being wrong in one’s projections are, of course, far more dire than with coin tosses.


    Another analogy that has been used to describe the standoff between nuclear-armed powers, particularly the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, was of two men standing up to their waists in the same pool of gasoline and each man being ready to strike an unlit match.  If either man struck the match, both men would be consumed by the fire that would result.  With nuclear weapons, the conflagration would not stop at the two men – it would include their families, their communities, their countries and the world. 


    Waltz makes the bet that no leader of a nuclear weapon state will ever strike the match or allow the match to fall into hands that will strike it.  It is a foolish bet to make.  The two men, and the rest of us, would be far safer if the gasoline were drained from the pool.  In the same way, the world would be much safer if nuclear weapons were abolished, rather than shared in the hope they would enhance security in the Middle East or elsewhere.


    Waltz may believe that it is precisely the threat of conflagration that keeps the men from striking the matches.  For many, even most, men he may be correct, but the fact is that neither Waltz nor anyone else can predict human behavior under all conditions.  There may be some leaders in some circumstances for whom striking the match would seem rational.  In addition, even if neither man were to strike a match, lightning may strike the pool of gasoline or other sparks may ignite the pool from unforeseen causes.  Instances of accidents, madness and human fallibility abound.


    Nuclear weapons have brought humankind to the precipice.  These weapons threaten cities, countries, civilization and complex life on the planet.  It is the responsibility of those of us alive on the planet now to abolish these weapons of mass annihilation, not justify their spread, as Waltz would have us do.

  • Fear of Nuclear Weapons

    David KriegerI was recently asked during an interview whether people fear nuclear weapons too much, causing them unnecessary anxiety.  The implication was that it is not necessary to live in fear of nuclear weapons.


    My response was that fear is a healthy mechanism when one is confronted by something fearful.  It gives rise to a fight or flight response, both of which are means of surviving real danger.


    In the case of nuclear weapons, these are devices to be feared since they are capable of causing terrifying harm to all humanity, including one’s family, city and country.  If one is fearful of nuclear weapons, there will be an impetus to do something about the dangers these weapons pose to humanity.


    But, one might ask, what can be done?  In reality, there is a limited amount that can be done by a single individual, but when individuals band together in groups, their power to bring about change increases.  Individual power is magnified even more when groups join together in coalitions and networks to bring about change.


    Large numbers of individuals banded together to bring about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa.  The basic building block of all these important changes was the individual willing to stand up, speak out and join with others to achieve a better world.  The forces of change have been set loose again by the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement across the globe.


    When dangers are viewed rationally, there may be good cause for fear, and fear may trigger a response to bring about change.  On the other hand, complacency can never lead to change.  Thus, while fear may be a motivator of change, complacency is an inhibitor of change.  In a dangerous world, widespread complacency should be of great concern. 


    If a person is complacent about the dangers of nuclear weapons, there is little possibility that he will engage in trying to alleviate the danger.  Complacency is the result of a failure of hope to bring about change.  It is a submission to despair.


    After so many years of being confronted by nuclear dangers, there is a tendency to believe that nothing can be done to change the situation.  This may be viewed as “concern fatigue.”  We should remember, though, that any goal worth achieving is worth striving for with hope in our hearts.  A good policy for facing real-world dangers is to never give up hope and never stop trying.


    Nuclear weapons threaten the future of the human species and other forms of complex life on the planet.  Basically, we have three choices: active opposition to nuclear weapons, justification of the weapons, and complacency.  These are three choices that confront us in relation to any great danger. 


    It is always easier to choose, often by default, justification or complacency than it is to mount active opposition to a danger.  But dangers seldom melt away of their own accord and there is no reason to believe that policies of reliance on nuclear weapons will do so.  These policies need to be confronted, and such confrontation requires courage.  Fear can be most useful when it gives rise to the courage and commitment to bring about change for a safer and more decent future for humanity.

  • Cartwright Report Calls for Nuclear Reductions and Elimination of US Land-Based ICBM Force

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerGen. James Cartwright chaired a recently released report by the nuclear disarmament group Global Zero on “Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture.” General Cartwright is a retired vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and former commander of the US Strategic Command. In the latter capacity, he was in charge of all US nuclear weapons.


    The Cartwright report argues for reducing the number of US nuclear weapons, taking deployed weapons off high alert and eliminating all land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). The report proposes an illustrative nuclear force of 900 total nuclear weapons, half deployed and half in reserve. The report recommends that, of the 450 deployed weapons, 360 be submarine-based and 90 carried on bombers. The deployed weapons would be de-alerted so that they would require 24 to 72 hours to be made launch-ready.


    This is a proposal based upon a thorough review of current US nuclear strategy and posture. It calls for reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 450 by 2022 and reinforces the belief that current US nuclear policy, which the report critiques, remains stuck in the cold war era despite the world having moved on in the 21st century.


    The report finds that, “ICBMs in fixed silos are inherently targetable and depend heavily upon launch on warning for survival under some scenarios of enemy attack.” It goes on to state that the current ICBM rapid reaction posture, “runs a real risk of accidental or mistaken launch.” Thus, the report calls for elimination of the US ICBM force and for reliance for deterrence upon the invulnerable submarine and bomber forces instead.


    The report’s call for eliminating the US ICBM force elicited a bizarre response from the Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, who said that the plan “introduces the likelihood of instability in the deterrence equation, which is not healthy.” Schwartz continued: “Here’s the reality: Why do we have a land-based deterrent force? It’s so that an adversary has to strike the homeland.”


    Why would any country need or want to maintain such land-based weapons, which provide an attractive target for an adversary in a time of high tension? It would make far more sense for US military leaders to be thinking about how to prevent potential adversaries from striking the US with nuclear weapons.


    The dangers of General Schwartz’s convoluted concept of deterrence can best be understood by reference to the reflections of former commander of the US Strategic Command, Gen. George Lee Butler. In 1999, General Butler wrote, “Nuclear deterrence was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence and fragile human relationships.” In other words, the heavily flawed theory of nuclear deterrence is subject to failure in the real world. General Schwartz’s concept of deterrence “so that an adversary has to strike the homeland” shows how deterrence itself can be more focused on strategy than on people and can undermine security.


    The Cartwright report gives backing to President Obama’s call for US leadership to achieve “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” It should be noted, though, that atmospheric scientists have modeled a “small” nuclear war between India and Pakistan, in which each side uses 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities. As a consequence of such a war, soot from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere, where it would remain for a decade, blocking warming sunlight, shortening growing seasons and causing crop failures, leading to global famine and potentially 1 billion deaths from starvation worldwide.


    This “nuclear famine” study suggests that even a reduction to 450 deployed nuclear weapons by both the United States and Russia would still leave too many nuclear weapons. Since these 450 thermonuclear weapons would be far more powerful than the Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons modeled in the nuclear-famine study, they could potentially do far more damage than a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, as terrible as that would be.


    The Cartwright report provides a fresh look at US nuclear policy and is a valuable contribution to the debate on necessary next steps in moving toward the urgent goal of achieving zero nuclear weapons on the planet.

  • Nuclear Insanity: A Brief Outline

    David KriegerAlbert Einstein, at the request of his friend and fellow physicist, Leo Szilard, sent a letter dated August 2, 1939 to President Franklin Roosevelt, in which he expressed concern about the potential for an atomic weapon and the possibility that the Germans would develop such a weapon.  Einstein recommended increased scientific efforts and better funding in the US.  This led to the establishment of a low-budget Uranium Project and then, in 1942, to the large-scale Manhattan Engineering Project to develop atomic weapons.


    The Nuclear Age began in the summer of 1945 with the first test of a nuclear device at Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed within a month by the destruction of two undefended Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The bombings demonstrated the direct effects of nuclear weapons: blast, fires and radiation.  Approximately 90,000 people in Hiroshima died immediately and 145,000 by the end of 1945.  Approximately 40,000 people in Nagasaki died immediately and 75,000 by the end of 1945.  The survivors of these bombings continue to suffer from radiation-related illnesses.


    By early 1946 the US had tested nuclear weapons in its Trust Territory, the Marshall Islands.  For the next three years, until the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapons, the US engaged in a unilateral nuclear arms race.  Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands with the equivalent explosive power of one-and-a-half Hiroshima bombs each day for 12 years.  The Marshall Islanders continue to suffer from radiation-related illnesses.


    In 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon, breaking the US nuclear monopoly and opening the way for a nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union. 


    In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) entered into force.  The parties to the treaty agreed that, in exchange for non-nuclear weapon states committing not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapon states would engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament.


    At the height of the nuclear arms race, in 1986, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with over 97 percent in the arsenals of the US and Soviet Union.


    In 1995, 25 years after the NPT entered into force, the parties to the treaty held a Review and Extension Conference, at which they agreed to extend the treaty indefinitely, despite the fact that the nuclear weapon states had made virtually no progress toward fulfilling their nuclear disarmament obligations. 


    A year later, in 1996, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an Advisory Opinion to the United Nations General Assembly in which they stated, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”


    In 2012, some 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons in the world has been reduced, but there remain more than 19,000 of them, 95 percent of which are in the arsenals of the US and Russia, but some of which are in the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.


    From the beginning of the Nuclear Age to the present, the US alone has spent more than $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons, their delivery vehicles and their command and control systems.  The US is continuing to spend some $50 to $70 billion annually on its nuclear arsenal.  All nuclear weapon states, including the US, are engaged in modernizing (qualitatively improving) their nuclear arsenals.


    In the 1980s, scientists warned of Nuclear Winter, but their models were not highly sophisticated and were challenged.  In the past several years, though, their findings have been validated using more sophisticated models.


    Leading atmospheric scientists now warn of nuclear famine from the effects of even a small nuclear war.  They modeled a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities.  Smoke from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere, where it would reduce warming sunlight for up to ten years, dropping temperatures on Earth to the lowest levels in the past 1,000 years and shortening growing seasons across the planet.  The result would be crop failures and a nuclear famine, which could result in the deaths of hundreds of millions to a billion people globally.


    In the modeled India-Pakistan nuclear exchange, less than one-half of one percent of the explosive power in the deployed nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia would be used.  A nuclear war between the US and Russia, in which the cities and industrial areas of the two countries were attacked, could result in lowering global temperatures to those of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago, leading to the extinction of most or all complex life on the planet. 


    Launch-ready, land-based nuclear-armed missiles are particularly dangerous, because there would be very little time for decision makers to determine whether an alarm were real or false.  The presidents of the US and Russia would have 12 minutes or less to decide whether to launch a retaliatory attack to what could be a false warning.


    Nuclear weapons and human fallibility are a dangerous mix, particularly when extinction could be the result of human or technological error.


    The possibility of nuclear famine makes nuclear weapons abolition imperative, since the future of human survival on the planet may well depend upon it.


    To end the threat of nuclear omnicide (death of all) by means of nuclear famine, a three-step process is needed.


    First, a major education program to warn policy makers and the public of the dangers of nuclear famine.


    Second, an advocacy program to obtain commitments from the nuclear weapon states of No Use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states and No First Use of the weapons against other nuclear weapon states.  If no country used their nuclear weapons first, they would not be used.


    Third, an advocacy program to achieve a new treaty for complete nuclear disarmament, as required by the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice.  The new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, would provide for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.


    Achieving such a treaty will require leadership from the US, the only country to have used nuclear weapons and the most technologically advanced country on the planet.  Pressure from US citizens and from non-nuclear weapon states will be needed in support of US leadership.


    To put pressure on the nuclear weapon states to commit to No First Use and a Nuclear Weapons Convention, bold action is needed.  At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we propose that, if the nuclear weapon states have not already begun negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention by the start of the 2015 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, the non-nuclear weapon states boycott the Review Conference and initiate a process for negotiating a Nuclear Weapons Convention.

  • Once Upon a Time Can Be Now: Rescuing Planet Earth and Restoring Paradise

    David KriegerFairy tales often begin with the words, “Once upon a time….”  For example, “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess….”  In a fairy tale, the hero, perhaps a handsome prince, may kill the dragon and rescue the princess, and they “live happily ever after.”  I want to suggest a fairy tale in which there is a beautiful planet and the heroes and heroines who save it are us.  So, here is a fairy tale about saving a planet in distress.  Our challenge is to bring this fairy tale to life.


    Once upon a time there was a beautiful and pristine planet.  It was the third planet in a remote solar system in a vast galaxy of stars.  While it might have seemed like an ordinary planet, if anything, rather on the small side, it was far from ordinary.  It was, in fact, a very special planet, for it had just the right climate and temperature to support life.  On this planet there were oceans and continents and mountains and rivers, and they teemed with life.  There were broad plains with grasses that rippled in the winds; hillsides covered with wildflowers; trees that spread their branches and bore fruits.  And there were animals of every shape and kind: fish that swam, birds that flew, and animals that hopped and jumped and ran.  This planet had sunrises and sunsets and a night sky filled with twinkling stars.  Compared with the harsh, lifeless planets that filled the solar system, it was a paradise. 


    And into this paradise came a featherless bi-ped capable of knowing.  He called himself man, and he called the paradise he inhabited Earth.  He devised stories about his own creation, stories that helped to explain the mystery of being — the mystery of something emerging from nothing.  Man was clever and he created tools that gave him power over other creatures, even though he was not as strong or fast or agile as they were.  He created powerful gods in his own image and then had those imaginary creatures bestow upon him dominion over all that swam and flew and ran.  Man took charge of the planet.


    Man’s most recent creation story, the science-based creation story, is that the universe grew from a “Big Bang” some 15 billion years ago, and it has been expanding ever since.  Earth was created 4.5 billion years ago and a half-billion years later simple forms of life emerged on Earth.  Early forms of man in this creation story came into existence only a few million years ago and more modern forms of man only some 50,000 years ago.  Only in the past eight to ten thousand years have human civilizations emerged.


    While the science-based creation story gives a skeletal outline of the development of the universe, its large numbers are difficult to grasp.  It is helpful to think of them in terms of a very big 15,000-page book.  Each page of the book represents a million years in the history of the universe.  The “Big Bang” occurs at the top of page one.  It is not until page 10,500 that the Earth is created and not until page 11,000 that life begins on Earth.  It is not until page 14,997 that primitive forms of man come into being.  Assuming that each word on each page represents 1,000 years, it is only in the final ten words on the final page of the book that civilization begins.  Civilization reflects a larger-scale ordering of society, characterized by agriculture, hierarchy and specialization.  Civilization gives rise to larger and larger tribal loyalties, to competing social systems and to increasingly virulent warfare. 


    It is only within the last two or three words of the book that Isaiah, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Zoroaster, Jesus and other spiritual leaders walk the planet.  But, despite their lives and the moral lessons they teach, warfare becomes more prominent within and among human societies.  Man increases his skill in organizing to engage in the large-scale slaughter of other men.  Over the millennia, man develops ever more powerful weapons with which to kill his fellow man.  He advances in the technology of weaponry from stones to spears to arrows to swords to guns to modern artillery and bombs, and finally, to nuclear and then thermonuclear weapons. 


    In describing our time, the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges, writes, “The planet had been parceled out among various countries, each one provided with loyalties, cherished memories, with a past undoubtedly heroic, with rights, with wrongs, with a particular mythology, with bronze forefathers, with anniversaries, with demagogues and symbols.  This arbitrary division was favorable for wars.”  Our time has been favorable for wars, but the development of our technologies of warfare and the resources we have devoted to war and its preparations have made wars unfavorable for us.


    It is not until the final punctuation mark on the final page of the 15,000-page book that the Nuclear Age begins with three explosions: a test explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed by the destruction of Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki.  In only seven or eight more years, man had created thermonuclear weapons, and two of the many “arbitrary divisions” of the planet that man calls countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, were engaged in a mad nuclear arms race.  It was in this period, the Nuclear Age, that man arrived at a new juncture in his history, one in which his weaponry had become powerful enough to destroy himself and most other forms of complex life on the planet.  In doing so, man had made himself a godlike creature, a god of savagery and destruction.  He now held his fate in his own hands. 


    The final punctuation mark in the 15,000-page book is now being determined.  It may be thought of as a question mark, and the question is: will man be able to summon the will and strength to control his most dangerous technologies and continue his own history, along with that of the remarkable planet on which he lives, on page 15,001?  It may instead be a dramatic exclamation point, another “Big Bang,” this one created by man himself, bringing a cataclysmic end to human life on the planet.
    In many ways, man has taken the beautiful and pristine planet that he inherited from the cosmos and undermined its sustainability.  Man’s powerful technologies combined with his greed threaten the climate and health of the planet.  His waste and pollution are poisoning the planet and its creatures.  Disparities in wealth have turned the planet into a hell for many of the poorest among us.  Man has not been a good trustee of the planet for future generations.  But the most urgent issue of sustainability confronting man is the threat posed by the nuclear arsenals he has created, an issue that has received very little public attention, particularly since the end of the Cold War some two decades ago. 
    The principal points that I want to make are these: first, we are destroying our paradise by our own actions; second, nuclear weapons are incompatible with a sustainable future; and third, the future is in our collective hands.  We must abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.  We must also abolish war as a means of settling our conflicts.  By doing so, we would release vast amounts of capital and human creativity.
    At the height of the nuclear arms race in the mid-1980s, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, primarily in the arsenals of the United States and Soviet Union.  These weapons were capable of destroying complex life on Earth many times over.  On many occasions, man has come close to a nuclear war – by accident, miscalculation or design – that could have ended the human future on the planet.  Perhaps the most serious of these occasions was the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the US and former Soviet Union almost stumbled over the precipice.  The Nuclear Age has been characterized by its policies of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), with opposing sides locked in a life-and-death struggle that would be both suicidal (death of self) and omnicidal (death of all).


    Although the world’s nuclear arsenals have been reduced by over 50,000 nuclear weapons in the past 25 years, there are still slightly under 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  These remain largely in the arsenals of the US and Russia, but also in those of seven other countries: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.  Two decades after the end of the Cold War, large numbers of nuclear weapons remain on high alert 24 hours a day, and there has been an unfortunate lack of political leadership for ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.


    Most of us are aware of the direct effects of nuclear weapons that result from blast, fire and radiation.  At Hiroshima, some 90,000 people died immediately from the US atomic bombing on August 6, 1945, some being vaporized and leaving shadows etched into stone walls behind where they had been at the time of the explosion.  By the end of 1945, the death toll in Hiroshima had risen to 145,000.  For the survivors of the atomic bombings, the suffering and trauma continues even until today.  Soon the survivors will all be gone, and there will be no first-hand witnesses to the horror of nuclear weapons.


    The indirect effects of nuclear weapons use, we now know from the studies of atmospheric scientists, would be even worse than the direct effects.  A regional war between India and Pakistan, for example, in which each side used 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities and industrial areas, would have devastating global effects.  The smoke from burning fires would rise into the stratosphere, blocking warming sunlight, lowering global temperatures to the lowest experienced in the last 1,000 years, and shortening growing seasons.  Hundreds of millions of people would likely perish in the resulting global famine. 


    These consequences, as horrendous as they are, would pale in comparison to those in a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, whose launch-ready, operational nuclear arsenals have a combined explosive power more than 500 times greater than those of India and Pakistan.  Such an exchange would result in global temperatures becoming colder than those experienced in the last Ice Age, some 18,000 years ago.  This radical climate change, along with the destruction of the ozone layer, would create conditions on Earth that would likely result in the extinction of most or all complex forms of life on the planet.


    This is the threat that we live with every moment of each day.  Could it happen?  Of course, it could.  We ignore it at our peril.  We cannot be naïve enough to believe that humans can create fool-proof systems.  To understand this, we need only recall the accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, or the many close calls we have had with nuclear weapons, including accidents and false warnings of nuclear attacks.


    Not long ago, I was arrested for protesting the launch of a US Minuteman III missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base, not far from where I live in California.  The Minuteman III is a land-based, nuclear-armed missile.  There are 450 of them in silos in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota.  They are launch-ready, first-strike weapons.  If there is a warning – including a false warning – of attack against the United States, there will be pressure for the US to use these weapons before they are destroyed in their silos.  The same is true of the Russian land-based, nuclear-armed missiles.  They will have the same pressure to use them before incoming missiles could destroy them in their silos.  The land-based, nuclear-armed missile forces of both sides should be thought of as Nuclear Doomsday Machines.  They are triggers for World War III, what would undoubtedly be a short and cataclysmic war.


    The US and Russian presidents would have only a few minutes, perhaps 12 minutes at the most, to evaluate a warning of attack and decide whether or not to launch their own missiles and initiate World War III.  This is an intolerable situation.  President Mikhail Gorbachev recognized this when he said, “It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.”  This is sound advice.  We mortals, all of us, are not gods, and none of us should be trusted with nuclear weapons when the future of our planet, our species and other forms of life are in our hands.  All of us are threatened by the power of our nuclear arsenals and the all-too-real possibilities of nuclear proliferation, nuclear war and nuclear famine.


    When I began, I spoke about the paradise of our Earth, the only place we know of in the universe where there is life.  Our minimum responsibility, in return for living on this planet, is to pass the planet on intact and sustainable to the next generation.  Our technologies of warfare have made this far more challenging than in the past, but we must not fail in confronting the threats posed by nuclear weapons and war. 


    To end the urgent threats of nuclear proliferation, nuclear war and nuclear famine, we must abolish nuclear weapons.  This will require leadership from great states and from great individuals within those states.  Nuclear weapons are illegal under international law, immoral and costly.  Rather than being considered a source of prestige, they should be taboo, like cannibalism and slavery.  We should demand that all states begin negotiations immediately on a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  In the meantime, while this treaty is being negotiated, we should demand that all nuclear weapon states adopt policies of No Use of these weapons against non-nuclear weapon states and No First Use against other nuclear weapon states.  To support such policies and give them credence, nuclear weapon states should separate their warheads from delivery vehicles on land-based missiles, so there will not be temptation to use them first in the event of a false warning.  Finally, before the US proceeds with further deployment of missile defense installations in Europe, it should take seriously Russian security concerns and conduct a joint threat assessment with Russia.


    The abolition of nuclear weapons is our responsibility.  We should take care of it promptly, with the urgency it demands, and not allow this global threat to be passed on to our children and grandchildren.  Then we should dedicate ourselves to doing more than this minimum for survival and take steps to assure the restoration of Earth to being the paradise it was and could be again.  An international appeal for the 2012 RIO + 20 conference, initiated by the International Peace Bureau and the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, points out these important linkages: “Without disarmament, there will be no adequate development; without development, there will be no justice, equality and peace.  We must give sustainability a chance.”


    In 1955, a group of scientists, led by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, issued the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which stated, “There lies before us, if we choose, continued progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom.  Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels?  We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.  If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”


    It is up to us to choose.  Let us choose peace and hope and a sustainable future.  May we show by our actions that we take seriously our roles as trustees of the Earth for our children and their children and all children of the future – that they may enjoy a peaceful and harmonious life on our planetary home. 

  • Earth Day

    David Krieger


    Vaya aquí para la versión española.


    We live in a vast universe made up of billions of galaxies, each of which is made up of billions of stars.  Our home is a small planet that revolves around a small sun in a remote galaxy.  It is just the right distance from the sun that it is not too hot and not too cold to support life.  It has air that is breathable, water that is drinkable, and topsoil suitable for growing crops.  In the immensity of space, it is a very small dot, what astrophysicist Carl Sagan referred to as a “pale blue dot.”  Our Earth is the only place we know of that harbors life.  It is precious beyond any riches that could be imagined. 


    One would think that any sane, self-reflecting creatures that lived on this planet would recognize its beauty and preciousness and would want to tend to it with care.  In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic book, The Little Prince, the prince says, “It’s a matter of discipline.  When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend to your planet.”  But that is an imaginary planet with an imaginary little prince.  On the real planet that supports life, the one we inhabit, there aren’t enough of us who exercise such discipline and tend to our planet with loving care.


    Think about how we have managed our planet.  We have allowed the planet to become divided into rich and poor, where a few people have billions of dollars and billions of people have few dollars.  While some live in greed, the majority live in need.  We have parceled the planet into entities we call countries and created borders that countries try to protect.  We have created military forces in these countries and given them enormous resources to prepare for war and to engage in war.  Annual global military expenditures now exceed $1.6 trillion, while hundreds of millions of humans live without clean water, adequate nutrition, medical care and education.


    We have eagerly exploited the planet’s resources with little concern for future generations or for the damage we cause to the environment.  Instead of using renewable energy from the sun to provide our energy needs, we exploit the Earth’s stores of oil and transport them across the globe.  We have turned much of the world into desert.  We have polluted the air we breathe and the water we drink.  In our excess, we have pushed the planet toward the point of no return in global warming, and then argued global warming as a reason to build more nuclear power plants.


    We keep relearning in tragic ways that we humans are fallible creatures.  That is the lesson of our recurrent oil spills.  It is also the lesson of the accidents at Chernobyl a quarter century ago and at Fukushima one year ago.  It is a lesson that we urgently need to learn about nuclear weapons – weapons we have come close to accidentally using on many occasions and have twice used intentionally. 


    Nuclear weapons kill directly by blast, fire and radiation.  The nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small in comparison with today’s thermonuclear weapons.  In recent years, we have learned some new things about nuclear war.  Atmospheric scientists have modeled a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side uses 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons on the other side’s cities.  In addition to the direct effects of the weapons, there would be significant indirect effects on the environment.  Smoke from the burning cities would rise into the stratosphere and reduce warming sunlight for ten years, which would lower average surface temperatures, reduce growing seasons and lead to global famine that could kill hundreds of millions of people. 


    That would be the result of a small nuclear war, using less than one percent of the operationally deployed nuclear weapons on the planet.  A nuclear war between the US and Russia could lead to the extinction of most or all complex life on Earth, including human life.  As we celebrate Earth Day this year, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, both the US and Russia maintain hundreds of launch-ready, land-based inter-continental ballistic missiles on high-alert status, ready to be fired in moments.


    We who are alive today are the trustees of this planet for future generations.  We’re failing in our responsibility to pass it on intact.  We need a new Earth ethic that embraces our responsibility for fairness to each other and to the future.  We need new ways of educating that do not simply accept the status quo.  We need to trade in our patriotism for a global humatriotism.  We need a new approach to economics based on what is truly precious – life and the conditions that support it. 


    Earth Day will have its greatest value if it reminds us to care for our Earth and each other all the other days of the year, individually and through our public policy.  We need to inspire people throughout the world, young and old alike, with a vision of the beauty and wonder of the Earth that we can now enjoy, restore and preserve for future generations if we tend to our planet with the discipline of the little prince. 

  • Día de la Tierra 2012

    Click here for the English version.


    David KriegerVivimos en un vasto universo con miles de millones de galaxias, cada una de ellas compuesta de miles de millones de estrellas. Nuestra casa es un pequeño planeta que gira en torno a un pequeño sol en una galaxia remota.   Se localiza a la distancia justa del sol, no es demasiado caliente ni demasiado fría para albergar vida.   Dispone de aire respirable, agua que es potable, y suelo apto para los cultivos.  En la inmensidad del espacio, es un objeto muy pequeño, al que el gran astrofísico y comunicador Carl Sagan se refería como un “punto azul pálido”.   Nuestra Tierra es el único lugar que conocemos que alberga vida.   Es la más preciada de las riquezas que podamos imaginar. 
     
    Uno podría pensar que cualquier criatura con cordura viviendo en este planeta reconocería su belleza y hermosura, y lo trataría con cuidado.  En el libro clásico de Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, El Principito, el príncipe dice: “Es una cuestión de disciplina. Cuando hayamos terminado de lavarnos y vestirnos cada mañana, hay que atender el planeta.”   Pero ese es un planeta imaginario con un pequeño príncipe imaginario.   En el planeta real que sustenta la vida, en el que habitamos, no hay suficientes de nosotros que ejerzan esta disciplina y traten a nuestro planeta con amoroso cuidado.
     
    Veamos cómo manejamos este tesoro único.Hemos permitido que el planeta se divida en ricos y pobres, donde pocas personas tienen miles de millones de dólares y miles de millones de personas tienen pocos dólares.   Algunos viven en la codicia, y la mayoría vive en la necesidad.   Hemos repartido el planeta en entidades que llamamos países y creado las fronteras que los países tratan de proteger.   Hemos creado las fuerzas militares en estos países, dándoles enormes recursos para prepararse para la guerra y la destrucción.   Los gastos militares mundiales exceden más de mil seiscientos millones de billones de dólares, mientras que cientos de millones de seres humanos viven sin agua potable, nutrición adecuada, atención médica y educación.
     
    Hemos explotado con avidez los recursos del planeta sin importarnos las generaciones futuras o el daño que causamos al medio ambiente. En lugar de utilizar la energía renovable del sol para proveer nuestras necesidades de energía, explotamos las entrañas de la Tierra por petróleo y lo transportamos a través del globo.   Hemos convertido gran parte del mundo en un desierto.   Hemos contaminado el aire que respiramos y el agua que bebemos.   En nuestro exceso, hemos empujado el planeta hacia el punto de no retorno en el calentamiento global, y luego argumentamos que el calentamiento global es una razón para construir más centrales nucleares.
     
    Continuamos aprendiendo de una manera trágica que los seres humanos somos criaturas falibles. Esa es la lección de nuestros recurrentes derrames de petróleo.   Es también la lección de los accidentes de Chernobyl hace un cuarto de siglo y en Fukushima hace un año.   Es una lección que necesitamos urgentemente aprender acerca de las armas nucleares, las armas que hemos estado muy cerca de utilizar en muchas ocasiones y dos veces usado intencionalmente. 
     
    Las armas nucleares matan directamente por la explosión, el fuego y la radiación. Las bombas nucleares usadas en Hiroshima y Nagasaki eran pequeñas en comparación con las armas termonucleares de hoy.   En los últimos años, hemos aprendido algunas cosas nuevas sobre la guerra nuclear.   Los científicos atmosféricos han modelado una hipotética guerra nuclear entre la India y Pakistán en la que cada parte utiliza 50 armas nucleares del tamaño de la de Hiroshima para devastar sus ciudades. Además de los efectos directos de las armas,habría importantes efectos indirectos sobre el medio ambiente.   El humo de las ciudades en llamas se elevaría a la estratosfera disminuyendo la luz del sol durante diez años, lo que reduciría las temperaturas medias de la superficie, afectando las temporadas de cultivo y dando lugar a una hambruna mundial que podría matar a cientos de millones de personas. 
     
    Ese sería el resultado de una guerra nuclear pequeña, utilizando menos del uno por ciento de las armas nucleares desplegadas operacionalmente en el planeta. Una guerra nuclear entre los EE.UU. y Rusia podría dar lugar a la extinción de la mayor parte de la vida compleja sobre la Tierra, incluyendo a nosotros los humanos   Al celebrar el Día de la Tierra de este año, 20 años después del fin de la Guerra Fría, los EE.UU. y Rusia aún mantienen cientos de misiles balísticos intercontinentales listos para ser lanzados en cualquier momento .
     
    Nosotros, los que estamos vivos hoy en día somos los custodios de este planeta para las generaciones futuras. Estamos fracasando en nuestra responsabilidad de heredarlo intacto.   Necesitamos una ética nueva terrestre que abarque nuestra responsabilidad de ser justos con los demás y con el futuro.   Necesitamos nuevas formas de educar a los que no se limitan a aceptar el status quo.   Es necesario cambiar nuestro patriotismo por un humanismo mundial. Necesitamos un nuevo enfoque de la economía sobre la base de lo que es verdaderamente valioso: la vida y las condiciones que la apoyan. 
     
    El Día de la Tierra tendrá su mayor valor si nos recuerda que debemos cuidar de ella durante todos los demás días del año, de forma individual y global. Tenemos que inspirar a la gente en todo el mundo, jóvenes y viejos por igual, con una visión de la belleza y las maravillas de la Tierra que ahora podemos disfrutar, restaurarla y preservarla para las generaciones futuras, si atendemos a nuestro planeta con la disciplina del pequeño príncipe.

  • Nuclear Zero: Getting to the Finish Line

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    David KriegerAlmost five decades ago, I first visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was 18 years after the atomic bombings flattened the cities, and the cities had returned to a kind of normalcy.  At the memorial museums, though, a very different perspective on nuclear weapons was presented than that taught in American schools.  It was the perspective from below the bombs – that of the victims – not the technological perspective of having created and used the bombs.


    Nuclear weapons are not simply a technological achievement, as the West has tended to portray them.  They kill indiscriminately – children, women and men.  They are not weapons of war; they are tools of mass annihilation.  No matter what we call them, they are not truly weapons, but instruments of unbridled mass destruction.  Their threat or use is illegal under international law.  Surely, their possession, like chemical or biological weapons, should be as well.  They are immoral, as has been concluded by all the world’s great religions.  And they have cost us dearly, in financial and scientific resources and in compromises of the soul.


    Three decades ago, in 1982, we founded the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Its vision is a just and peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons.  The Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.  So we educate, advocate and empower – that’s what we do.  We speak out.  We are a voice of conscience.  We advocate for sane policies and for leadership to achieve a world without nuclear dangers.  Our goal is to educate and engage millions of people to move the world to nuclear disarmament and peace.


    We challenge bad theory, such as the theory of nuclear deterrence, a theory that justifies reliance on nuclear weapons, but has many faults.  For nuclear deterrence to work successfully, leaders of nuclear-armed states must be rational at all times and under all circumstances, particularly under conditions of stress when they are least likely to be rational.  Also, nuclear deterrence cannot deter those who have no territory to retaliate against or who are suicidal.  Thus, nuclear deterrence has no possibility of success against terrorist organizations.  To see one of many ways that deterrence can fail, I encourage you to watch the 1964 movie, Fail-Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet, based upon the 1962 novel of the same name by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler.


    The Foundation also challenges bad nuclear policies, including those that tolerate a two-tier structure of nuclear “haves” and “have-nots.”  We believe that the ultimate consequence of this two-tier structure will be nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war.  We also advocate for nuclear policies that reduce risks and move us toward a world without nuclear weapons, policies such as security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states of: no first use of nuclear weapons; no launch on warning of nuclear attack; lowering the alert status of nuclear weapons; a comprehensive test ban treaty; and a fissile material cut-off treaty.  These are all elements of the critical goal of nuclear weapons abolition and must be viewed in that context.


    Scientists tell us that even a small nuclear war with an exchange of a hundred Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons, destroying cities and sending smoke into the stratosphere, could result in blocking sunlight and lowering the earth’s temperature, leading to massive crop failures and famine, resulting in some one billion deaths.  This would be the kind of nuclear war that could occur in South Asia between India and Pakistan.  A larger-scale nuclear war, fought with a few hundred thermonuclear weapons, the kind that could occur between the US and Russia, could destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human species and most other forms of complex life on the planet.  We all share a responsibility to assure there are no small- or large-scale nuclear wars, but as long as nuclear weapons exist in any substantial numbers, the possibility of nuclear war also exists.


    In October 1962, the world held its collective breath as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded.  The world was poised on the brink of a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.  John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev managed to navigate those dangerous currents, but many of their advisors were pushing them toward nuclear war.  Decisions on all sides were made with only partial knowledge, which could have resulted in disaster.  Robert Kennedy’s eye-witness account of the crisis, Thirteen Days, is sobering reading.


    In 1982, the year the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was created, there was considerable concern in the world about nuclear dangers.  There were more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  More than one million people gathered in Central Park in New York calling for a nuclear freeze.  Of course, they were right to do so.  The nuclear arms race was out of control, and the leaders of the US and USSR were not talking to each other.  An uncontrollable nuclear arms race coupled with a failure to communicate were and are a recipe for disaster.


    By 1986, the nuclear arms race reached its apogee with over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and USSR.  But by this time Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the USSR and was talking about abolishing nuclear weapons by the year 2000.  Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, who shared Gorbachev’s view about nuclear weapons, came heartbreakingly close to agreeing to abolish their nuclear arsenals at a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986.  Their attempt to find their way to zero nuclear weapons foundered on the issue of the Strategic Defense Initiative, now commonly referred to as missile defense.  Reagan wanted it; Gorbachev didn’t.


    So, in 1986 there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world.  Since then, we have made progress in substantially reducing nuclear arsenals to the current number of under 20,000 worldwide, having shed some 50,000 nuclear weapons.  Of the 8,500 nuclear weapons in the US arsenal, about 3,500 are awaiting dismantlement and fewer than 2,000 are deployed, about the same number deployed in Russia.  The US and Russia have agreed that they will each reduce their deployed strategic weapons to 1,550 by the year 2017.  Neither country has conducted an atmospheric or underground nuclear weapon test since 1992 (other than underground subcritical nuclear tests in which the nuclear material does not reach the criticality necessary for a nuclear chain reaction). 


    We have made progress.  We are now on relatively positive terms with Russia, since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Through solid US negotiating, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus agreed to give up the nuclear arsenals that the former Soviet Union had left on their territories and to give these weapons over to Russia for dismantlement. 


    A significant event occurred in 1996 when US Secretary of Defense William Perry met with the Russian and Ukrainian Defense Ministers at a former missile base in Ukraine to plant sunflowers.  Secretary Perry said on the occasion, “Sunflowers in the soil instead of missiles will ensure peace for future generations.”  We adopted the sunflower as a symbol of a nuclear weapons-free world.  The sunflower symbolizes everything that a nuclear-armed missile is not, being natural, nutritious, healthy, beautiful, grounded in the earth and powered by the sun.


    We have come a long way, but we haven’t reached the finish line, which is a world without nuclear weapons.  The issue we face now is to educate decision makers and the public that the dangers of nuclear weapons have not gone away.  There are still many flash points of nuclear danger in the world: India-Pakistan, North Korea, the continued possession of nuclear weapons by the UK and France, the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel and the incentive for nuclear proliferation this creates in the Middle East, and the relationship of the nuclear energy fuel cycle to nuclear proliferation.


    The greatest problem related to nuclear weapons is not that Iran might develop such weapons.  It is that the countries with nuclear weapons are not taking seriously enough their obligations to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and achieve nuclear disarmament.  Nuclear weapons do not make their possessors more secure.  When a country has nuclear weapons or seeks to acquire them, that country will also be a target of nuclear weapons.  This goes for both the US and Iran, and for all other countries with nuclear weapons or seeking to develop them.  Nuclear weapons turn cities and countries into targets for mass annihilation.


    What shall we do to advance to zero?  In the spirit of Gorbachev and Reagan, the US and Russia must lead the way. They still possess over 95 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world.  It was recently revealed that President Obama has requested a study of reductions of deployed strategic nuclear weapons to three levels: 1000 to 1,100 weapons; 700 to 800 weapons; and 300 to 400 weapons.  This is significant.  It is worth advocating for US leadership to reduce the US nuclear arsenal to the lower level, to 300 nuclear weapons, as a next step.  But, of course, this would not be the desired end result.  First, it is not low enough; it is not zero.  It still would be more than enough to destroy civilization and potentially cause the extinction of complex life on the planet.  Second, it is unilateral; it must be bilateral and moving toward multilateral.


    At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, we have never called for unilateral nuclear disarmament.  Going down to 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons would be a significant reduction, but it should be a joint endeavor with Russia. To get Russia to join us in this next step will require the US to move its missile defense installations away from the Russian border, so that Russia does not feel threatened by these defenses, particularly at lower levels of offensive weapons.  US officials tell Russia not to worry about these missile defense installations, but the Russians are wary.  It is easy to understand this, if one imagines the Russians placing missile defense installations on the Canadian border and telling the US not to worry.  Missile defenses, if they are needed, must be a joint project, just as reductions in the numbers of offensive nuclear weapons must be a joint project.


    The US and Russia must cooperate on continuing to pare down their nuclear arsenals for their own security and for global security.  At the level of 300 deployed strategic nuclear weapons each, they would then be in a position of rough parity with the other nuclear weapon states and in a position to effectively negotiate a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.  The number that matters most in the nuclear disarmament arena is zero. It is the most secure and stable number of nuclear weapons.  It must be achieved carefully and in phases, but it must be achieved for the benefit of our children, grandchildren and all future generations.

  • For Nuclear Security Beyond Seoul, Eradicate Land-Based ‘Doomsday’ Missiles

    This article was originally published by the Christian Science Monitor.

    David KriegerPresident Obama and other world leaders gathered at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, this week to address threats posed by unsecured nuclear material. If Mr. Obama is truly concerned about nuclear safety, he should seriously consider doing away with the 450 inter-continental ballistic missiles deployed and ready to fire at Russia on a moment’s notice.

    Last month we were among 15 protesters who were arrested in the middle of the night at Vandenberg Air Force Base, some 70 miles north of Santa Barbara, Calif. We were protesting the imminent test flight of a Minuteman III inter-continental ballistic missile.

    The Air Force rationale for doing these tests is to ensure the reliability of the US nuclear deterrent force; but launch-ready land-based nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are the opposite of a deterrent to attack. In fact, their very deployment has the potential to launch World War III and precipitate human extinction – as a result of a false alarm.

    We’re not exaggerating. Here’s why: These nuclear missiles are first-strike weapons – most of them would not survive a nuclear attack. In the event of a warning of a Russian nuclear attack, there would be an incentive to launch all 450 of these Minuteman missiles before the incoming enemy warheads could destroy them in their silos.

    If the warning turned out to be false (there have been many false warnings), and the US missiles were launched before the error was detected, World War III would be underway. The Russians have the same incentive to launch their land-based missiles upon warning of a perceived attack.

    Both US and Russian land-based missiles remain constantly on high-alert status, ready to be launched within minutes. Because of the 30-minute flight times of these missiles, the presidents of both the US and Russia would have only approximately 12 minutes to decide whether to launch their missiles when presented by their military leaders with information indicating an imminent attack (after lower-level threat assessment conferences).

    That’s only 12 minutes or less for the president to decide whether to launch global nuclear war.  While this scenario is unlikely, it is definitely possible: Presidents have repeatedly rehearsed it, and it cannot be ruled out due to the graveness of its potential consequences.

    Russia came close to launching its missiles based on a warning that came Jan. 25, 1995. President Yeltsin was awakened in the middle of the night and told a US missile was headed toward Moscow. Fortunately, Yeltsin was sober and took longer than the time allocated for his decision on whether to launch Russian nuclear-armed missiles in response.

    In the extended time, it became clear that the missile was a weather sounding rocket from Norway and not a US missile headed toward Moscow. Disaster was only narrowly averted.

    Here is the really compelling part of the story: If all 450 US land-based Minuteman III missiles with thermonuclear warheads were ever launched at Russia – with many of the targets in or near cities, as now planned – most Americans would die as a result, along with most of humanity.  Our own weapons would contribute as much or more to these deaths in America and the rest of the globe as any Russian warheads launched.

    This is because smoke from the enormous nuclear firestorms created by even a “successful” US nuclear first-strike would cause catastrophic disruption of global climate and massive destruction of the Earth’s protective ozone layer, leading to global famine.

    Recent peer-reviewed studies, done by atmospheric scientists Alan Robock (Rutgers), Brian Toon (University of Colorado-Boulder), Richard Turco (UCLA) and colleagues, predict that such an attack would create immense firestorms that would quickly surround the planet with a dense stratospheric smoke layer.

    The black smoke would be heated by the sun, lofted like a hot air balloon, and would remain in the stratosphere for at least 10 years. There it would block and prevent a large fraction of sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface. The sharp reduction of warming sunlight would rapidly produce global Ice Age weather conditions. This would eliminate or dramatically reduce growing seasons for a decade and would likely cause the starvation of most or all humans.

    Along with other effects – including prolonged destruction of the ozone layer – most complex life on Earth could be destroyed. Scientists say the process would be similar to when an asteroid hit the Earth some 65 million years ago, raising a global dust cloud that reduced sunlight, lowering temperatures and killing vegetation. That caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and 70 percent of the Earth’s species.

    The cause of extinction in our case would not be an external, celestial event, but rather the launching of thermonuclear weapons we had created by our own cleverness, supposedly for our own security.

    The Minuteman III missile tests from Vandenberg Air Force Base are thus really tests of an American Nuclear Doomsday Machine.

    Nuclear weapons do not make the US or the world more secure. In particular, the Minuteman III missiles – land-based, vulnerable, on high alert, and susceptible to being triggered by a false alarm – make us less secure. Anyone who cares about humankind having a future should protest these tests and call for the elimination of all nuclear-armed inter-continental ballistic missiles as an initial step toward the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

    If the US did away now with its nuclear-armed land-based missile force, it would still have 288 invulnerable submarine-launched ballistic missiles (armed with approximately 1,152 warheads) to act as a retaliatory threat to nuclear attack. But it would no longer have tempting targets for the Russians to strike preemptively in a time of tension or in the event of a false warning of attack.

    It would still be imperative to reduce US (and Russian) total warheads to levels that do not threaten the possibility of causing human extinction.

    And even the smaller existing nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan threaten global disaster. Professor Robock and his colleagues have estimated that in a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which each side used 50 Hiroshima-size bombs (each side now has more than that number), the smoke rising into the stratosphere could cause a global reduction of sunlight and destruction of ozone leading to crop failures and global famine.

    By comparison, the launch-ready thermonuclear forces of the US and Russia contain roughly 500 times the explosive power of the 100 atomic bombs of India and Pakistan.

    Now is the time for the people and nations of the world to stand up against the potential extinction of the human species and demand that political leaders pursue the path to zero nuclear weapons, a path mandated by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Court of Justice. Until then, protest and civil resistance will be necessary.

    We should seek two principal goals: first, a commitment by the existing nuclear weapon states to forego launch-on-warning and first use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances; and second, good faith negotiations for a new treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible, and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

    It is our hope that by committing nonviolent civil resistance, being arrested, going to federal court, and explaining our actions to the public, we will help to awaken and engage the American people on this issue of utmost importance to our common future.

  • 2012 Kelly Lecture Introduction

    David KriegerThis is the 11th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future.  The lecturer is Daniel Ellsberg, a true American hero.

    This lecture series honors the memory of Frank Kelly, a founder and senior vice president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  Frank had great optimism about the human future.  He thought that we humans were “glorious beings” and that we all deserve a seat at humanity’s table.

    Each year the Foundation invites a distinguished individual to deliver this lecture.  Past lecturers have included Richard Falk, Robert J. Lifton, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Dame Anita Roddick, Jakob von Uexkull and Francis Moore Lappe.

    Last year’s Kelly Lecturer was Commander Robert Green, who spoke on “Breaking Free from Nuclear Deterrence.”  The booklet of his lecture led to him being invited to address the British Trident Commission, where he argued that the UK should lead the way toward zero nuclear weapons by being the first country to eliminate its nuclear arsenal.

    Daniel Ellsberg is one of the greatest living Americans and citizens of the world.  He is a graduate of Harvard University with a B.A. and Ph.D. in Economics.  Between his undergraduate degree and his graduate studies, Dan spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps.  He was a platoon leader, operations officer and rifle company commander.

    In his early career, Dan worked at the highest levels of the American government.  In 1959, he joined the RAND Corporation as a strategic analyst and consultant to the Defense Department and White House, focusing on problems of command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans and crisis decision-making.  In 1961, he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war.  He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

    In 1964, he joined the Defense Department as Special Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.  He worked on the escalation of the war in Vietnam.  The following year he transferred to the State Department to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field.

    When Dan returned to the Rand Corporation in 1967, he went to work on the top secret McNamara study of US Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68.  This later became known as the Pentagon Papers.  Dan came to believe that this information was vital for the public to know and understand in evaluating the war in Vietnam.  In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  In 1971, he gave the study to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other papers.  For doing so, he was put on trial for 12 felony counts for which he faced a possible 115 years in prison.  The charges against him were dismissed based upon US government misconduct.

    Daniel Ellsberg is one of the brightest men I know and one of the most moral and courageous.  He is the recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award and also the Right Livelihood Award, which is presented in the Swedish Parliament and known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.”

    He is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.  He is working on a new book based upon his experiences as a US strategic nuclear policy analyst and their application to current US nuclear policy.  He serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.