Category: Nuclear Threat

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

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

October 11, 1957 – As a B-47 bomber departed Homestead Air Force Base, Florida, one of the aircraft’s outrigger tires exploded causing the plane to crash during takeoff into an uninhabited area just 3,800 feet from the end of the runway.  The aircraft was carrying one nuclear weapon in ferry configuration in the bomb bay and one nuclear capsule in a carrying case in the crew compartment.  The nuclear capsule was recovered mostly intact later but when the plane’s fuel ignited at the time of the crash, intense heat triggered two explosions of the conventional high explosive charges jacketing the full-fledged hydrogen bomb.  Radioactive materials contaminated a large area of the crash zone and an extensive cleanup had to be conducted.  Comments:  Many of the hundreds if not thousands of nuclear accidents involving all nine nuclear weapons states still remain partially or completely classified and hidden from public scrutiny.  These near-nuclear catastrophes provide an additional justification for reducing dramatically and eventually eliminating global nuclear weapons arsenals.  (Sources:  Bethan Owen.  “13 Times the U.S. Almost Destroyed Itself With Its Own Nuclear Weapons.”  Deseret News, Salt Lake City, Utah, July 13, 2014 at http://www.deseretnews.com/top/2605/10/October-11-1957-Homestead-Air-Force-Baser-Florida-13-times-the-U.S.-almost-destroyed-itself-with.html    and U.S. Department of Defense.  “Narrative Summaries of Accidents Involving Nuclear Weapons, 1950-1980.”  National Security Archives at George Washington University http://nsarchive.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/653.pdf both accessed on September 15, 2016.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 28, 1957 – Two of the three Mark V hydrogen bombs on board a U.S. Air Force C-124 Globemaster cargo aircraft, which departed from Dover Air Force Base, were jettisoned from the plane when two of the four engines lost power and the aircraft suffered a significant loss of altitude.  To ensure the survival of the aircraft and its crew, the pilot had no choice but to quickly lessen the weight of the plane by dropping two H-bombs into the Atlantic Ocean.  Thankfully, no nuclear or conventional (of the high explosive charges bracketing the core of the warhead) explosions ensued.  This incident occurred about 100 miles southeast of Naval Air Station, Pomona, New Jersey, where the aircraft landed safely. One bomb is believed to have sunk 50 miles off the coast of Atlantic City and the other 75 miles away from land.  Although the U.S. Air Force, over the years since this incident (and others), claims the bombs did not contain plutonium capsules, many nuclear experts like retired Colonel Derek Duke have pointed out that in November of that same year, SAC Commander General Thomas Powers bragged to the news media that, “Day and night, I have a certain percentage of my command in the air (and the), planes are bombed up and they don’t carry bows and arrows.” Comments:  While it is very unlikely that these long-lost and probably corroded nuclear bombs could detonate in a fusion explosion, there remain deadly serious concerns about very long-term radioactive contamination from this incident and hundreds of other similar Broken Arrows. These nuclear threats can impact human and other species virtually forever unless these devices are found and disposed of properly. After all, the radioactive isotopes found in thermonuclear weapons or in the reactor cores of naval surface ships and submarines lost at sea since 1945 possess an extremely long half-life of decay – 713 million years for uranium-235 and 4.5 billion years for uranium-238!  (Source:  Colonel Derek L. Duke, Retired, “Chasing Loose Nukes.” Dungan Books, 2007, http://www.fdungan.com/duke.htm  accessed June 15, 2016.)

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