Category: Nuclear Threat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 10, 1963 – The nuclear submarine U.S.S. Thresher, the first submarine in its class, sank during deep-diving trials after flooding, loss of propulsion, and an attempt to blow the emergency ballast tanks failed. The disabled ship, which would not have been carrying nuclear weapons, ultimately descended to crush depth and imploded about 190 nautical miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts killing all 129 men onboard the vessel and most probably exposing some radioactive components of the ship’s reactor core to the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Comments: In the past, eight nuclear submarines, six of them Soviet/Russian and the other two, including the Thresher, American, have sunk with dozen of nuclear ballistic missiles also lost at sea. Some of the nuclear reactors and warheads in these and other military vessels or aircraft lost at sea are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep, but the health and well-being of millions of people. (Source: “Major Sub Disasters: Thresher: Going Quietly.” NationalGeographic.com. 1996. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/k19/disasters_detail2.html accessed March 11, 2016.)

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

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

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

What’s the number one military threat to the U.S.?

1. Terrorism
2. A deliberate nuclear attack
3. Accidental nuclear war with Russia

Based on the recent political debates, you’d think it would be 1 or 2, but if you do the numbers, 3 wins hands down. Here’s why. Let’s compare the expected number of Americans killed during the year ahead, i.e., the number of Americans who’d get killed if the threat comes true times the probability of this happening during the coming year. For terrorism, one of the worst-case scenarios is a nuclear explosion in downtown New York killing millions of people. If we very pessimistically multiply this by a 10% chance of happening in 2016 (it’s probably much less likely), the expected number of casualties is a few hundred thousand per year.

For an all-out nuclear war with Russia, there’s a huge uncertainty in casualties. If nuclear winter is as severe as some modern forecasts and ruins global food production with freezing summers for years, then it’s plausible that over 5 billion of the 7.4 people on Earth will perish. If for some poorly understood reason there’s no nuclear winter at all, we can use a 1979 report by the U.S. Government from before nuclear winter was discovered, estimating that 28%-88% of Americans and 22%-50% of Soviets (150-450 million people with today’s populations) would die.

What’s the chance of this happening during the year ahead? Before answering, please check out this timeline of near-misses when it almost happened by mistake (highlights below). John F. Kennedy estimated the probability of the Cuban Missile Crisis escalating to nuclear war between 33% and 50%, and near-misses keep occurring regularly. Even if the risk of accidental nuclear war is as low at 1% per year, the expected deaths are 1.5-50 million people per year depending on your nuclear winter assumptions, way more than for terrorism. It’s likely that the chance of a deliberate unprovoked all-out nuclear attack by the U.S. or Russia is much smaller than 1%, given that this entails national suicide with over 7,000 nuclear weapons on the opposing side, many on hair-trigger alert.

A robust defense against terrorism and belligerent adversaries is clearly crucial, but U.S. military strategy can’t afford to be soft against the greatest threat of all: accidental nuclear war. When you hear about the U.S. plan to spend about $1 trillion modernizing and upgrading our nuclear arsenal, it at first sounds like a step in the right direction, reducing this risk. Unfortunately, looking at what the money is actually for reveals that it instead increases the risk. Please check out the disturbing incidents below: Which of these risks would be reduced by the planned more accurate missile targeting, improving first-strike incentive? By the new nuclear-tipped cruise missile? By the new gravity bomb? None! We’re spending money to make ourselves less safe by fueling a destabilizing arms race. We’ll be safer if those 1 trillion dollars were spent on non-nuclear parts of the U.S. military and on strengthening our society in other ways.

Top-10 list of near-misses

(Sources and more incidents here.)

10) January 1, 1961: H-bombs Dropped on North Carolina
A bomber was flying over North Carolina, when it lost a wing, and two of its nuclear bombs fell to the ground in Goldsboro, NC. One of the bombs broke on impact after its parachute failed. The other landed unharmed, but five of its six safety devices also failed. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had this to say: “by the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted.” (Center for Defense Information 1981; McNamara et al. 1963, p. 2). If this Hydrogen bomb would have detonated, could it have been misinterpreted as Soviet foul play?

9) October 24, 1962: Soviet Satellite Explodes During Cuban Missile Crisis
In the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet satellite entered its orbit but exploded soon after. Not much is known about the event or U.S. reaction to it because the records are still classified. However, many years later, Sir Bernard Lovell of the Jodrell Bank Observatory noted that, “the explosion of a Russian spacecraft in orbit during the Cuban missile crisis… led the U.S. to believe that the USSR was launching a massive ICBM attack.”

8) January 25 1995: Norwegian Rocket Mistaken for ICBM
After the Cold War had ended, a Russian early warning radar detected a missile launch off the coast of Norway with flight characteristics similar to those of a U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile. Fearing that it could be the first move in a larger attack, Russian nuclear forces quickly went on full alert. Russian President Boris Yeltsin activated his “nuclear football” and retrieved launch codes, preparing for a retaliatory launch. Fortunately Russian satellites monitoring U.S. missile fields did not show any additional launches, and Russian leaders declared the incident a false alarm. The event detected was actually the launch of a Norwegian scientific rocket on a mission to study the aurora borealis. Norway had notified countries, including Russia, in advance of the launch, but the information had failed to reach the correct Russian personnel.

7) October 26, 1962: US F102A Fighters vs. Soviet MIG interceptors
On the evening of October 26, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a U.S. U2 spy plane accidentally entered Soviet air space. Soviet MIG interceptors took flight, with orders to bring it down. The U.S. pilot was ordered by commanders to fly back to Alaska as quickly as possilble, but he ran out of fuel while still over Siberia. He sent out an SOS, and F-102A fighters were sent up to escort him on his glide back to U.S. ground. The F-102A jets were loaded with nuclear missiles and the pilots had been given orders to shoot at their own discretion.

6) June 6, 1980: Faulty Chip Signals Soviet Attack
Early in the morning of June, 3, the warning displays at command centers began showing varying number of missiles had been launched toward the United States, and nuclear retaliation immediately commenced. However, personnel were able to determine in time that this was a false alarm as the varying missile numbers weren’t logical. Three days later, before the cause could be determined, the same thing happened again, and again B-52 crews and missiles were nearly sent out in retaliation. A faulty chip in the computers was finally found to be the cause of the display problems at the command posts.

5) November 11, 1983: Soviets Misinterpret U.S. Nuclear War Games
NATO conduced a massive command post exercise simulating a period of conflict escalation November 2-11 1983, culminating in a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack against the Soviet Union. The exercise was highly realistic and debuted a new, unique format of coded communication, radio silences, and the participation of heads of government. Unbeknownst to NATO, this triggered extreme alarm on the Soviet side, where analysts feared that it was a cover for an actual nuclear attack, conveniently timed to coincide with their Revolution Holiday. Soviet nuclear missiles were placed on high alert, readied for launch. The climax came on the morning of November 11, when the Soviets intercepted a NATO message saying that U.S. nuclear missiles had been launched against them. Robert Gates, then deputy director of intelligence at the CIA, later said: “We may have been at the brink of nuclear war and not even known it.”
This incident is the subject of the British 1988 documentary The Brink of Apocalypse. It’s sobering to consider what might have happened if an independent incident such as the September 26, 1983 false alarm or the 1995 Norwegian Rocket Launch would have randomly occurred on November 11, 1983 instead.

4) November 9, 1979: Simulated Soviet Attack Mistaken for Real
Computers at NORAD headquarters indicated a large-scale Soviet attack on the United States. NORAD relayed the information to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and other high-level command posts, and top leaders convened to assess the threat. Within minutes, U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) crews were put on highest alert, nuclear bombers prepared for takeoff, and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post–the plane designed to allow the U.S. president to maintain control in case of an attack–took off (but without President Jimmy Carter on board). After six minutes, satellite data had not confirmed the attack, leading officials to decide no immediate action was necessary. Investigations later discovered that the incident was caused by a technician who had mistakenly inserted a training tape containing a scenario for a large-scale nuclear attack into an operational computer. In a comment about this incident in a letter designated Top Secret (since declassified), senior U.S. State Department adviser Marshall Shulman said that “false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence. There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me.”

3) September 9, 1983: Soviet Union Detects Incoming Missiles
A Soviet early warning satellite showed that the United States had launched five land-based missiles at the Soviet Union. The alert came at a time of high tension between the two countries, due in part to the U.S. military buildup in the early 1980s and President Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet rhetoric. In addition, earlier in the month the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airlines passenger plane that strayed into its airspace, killing almost 300 people. Stanislav Petrov, the Soviet officer on duty, had only minutes to decide whether or not the satellite data were a false alarm. Since the satellite was found to be operating properly, following procedures would have led him to report an incoming attack. Going partly on gut instinct and believing the United States was unlikely to fire only five missiles, he told his commanders that it was a false alarm before he knew that to be true. Later investigations revealed that reflection of the sun on the tops of clouds had fooled the satellite into thinking it was detecting missile launches. This event was turned into the movie The Man Who Saved the World, and Petrov was honored at the United Nations and given the World Citizen Award.

2) October 27, 1962: Soviet Sub Captain Decides to Fire Nuclear Torpedo During Cuban Missile Crisis
This may be the closest call of all – so far. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, eleven U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph had cornered the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba, in International waters outside the U.S. “quarantine” area. What they didn’t know was that the temperature onboard had risen past 45ºC (113ºF) as the submarine’s batteries were running out and the air-conditioning had stopped. On the verge of carbon dioxide poisoning, many crew members fainted. The crew had had no contact with Moscow for days and didn’t know whether World War III had already begun. Then the Americans started dropping small depth charges at them which, unbeknownst to the crew, they’d informed Moscow were merely meant to force them to surface and leave. “We thought – that’s it – the end”, crewmember V.P. Orlov recalled. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.”

What the Americans also didn’t know was that the B-59 crew had a nuclear torpedo that they were authorized to launch without clearing it with Moscow. Indeed, Captain Savitski decided to launch the nuclear torpedo. Valentin Grigorievich, the torpedo officer, exclaimed: “We will die, but we will sink them all – we will not disgrace our Navy!” Fortunately, the decision to launch had to be authorized by three officers on board, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, said no. It’s sobering that very few have heard of Arkhipov, although his decision was perhaps the single most valuable contribution to humanity in modern history. PBS made the movie The Man Who Saved the World about this incident.

1) The incidents that keep happening
These are only a sample of over two dozen close calls that we’ve catalogued in this timeline, and there are almost certainly more, since some have been revealed only decades later. Also, although most nuclear incidents were reported by U.S. sources, there’s no reason to believe that the opposing superpower had fewer incidents, or that there have been zero incidents in China, the UK, France, Israel, India, Pakistan or North Korea. Moreover, near-misses keep happening. Although some argue that the superpowers should keep their current nuclear arsenals forever, simple mathematics shows that nuclear deterrence isn’t a viable long-term strategy unless the risk of accidental nuclear war can be reduced to zero: Even if the annual risk of global nuclear war is as low as 1%, we’ll probably have one within a century and almost certainly within a few hundred years. This future nuclear war would almost certainly take more lives than nuclear deterrence ever saved. If you want to reduce the risk of accidental nuclear war, please help raise awareness by sharing this timeline.

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

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

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

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

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

March 21, 2007 – Two crew members of the Royal Navy’s Trafalgar class nuclear submarine, HMS Tireless, were killed and another crewman injured in an explosion in the forward compartment of the submarine in the onboard air purification equipment during the submarine’s cruise under the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean.  Although the Royal Navy promptly announced that the accident did not affect the ship’s nuclear reactor, many nuclear experts disagreed with this assertion arguing that any explosion onboard a nuclear-controlled submarine is a deadly serious scenario.  Comments:  In the past, at least eight nuclear submarines, two American and the others Soviet/Russian, have sunk with dozens of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles also lost at sea.  Some of the nuclear reactors and warheads in these and other sunken military vessels or aircraft are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep, but the health and well-being of millions of people.   (Sources:  BBC-TV America and other mainstream and alternative news media reports and William Arkin and Joshua Handler.  “Neptune Papers II:  Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990.  http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/planet-2/report/2006/2/naval-nuclear-accidents-arkin-pdf   accessed November 18, 2015.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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