Category: Nuclear Threat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 5, 1965 – A U.S. naval aircraft, a 4E Skyhawk fighter jet rolled off an elevator on board the U.S.S. Ticonderoga and fell into the Pacific Ocean 70-80 miles east of the Ryukyu Islands, Okinawa, Japan drowning the pilot.  The aircraft carried a Mark 43 hydrogen bomb which was lost in the three mile deep ocean waters of the Pacific.  When the U.S. Defense Department first admitted this accident in 1981 it claimed the accident happened “more than 500 miles off the coast of Japan.”  Comments:  There are dozens of lost nuclear warheads and nuclear reactors on the ocean floor from sunken naval vessels and crashed aircraft.   Some of these are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep, but the health and well-being of millions of people.   This is but one of the many deadly legacies of the ongoing seventy year-long nuclear arms race.  (Source:  Michael W. Maggelet and James C. Oskins.  “Broken Arrow:  The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents.”  Raleigh, NC:  Lulu Publishing.  2007, p. 217 and William Arkin and Joshua Handler.  “Neptune Papers III:  Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.” Greenpeace International, 1990.  http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/planet-2/report/2006/2/naval-nuclear-accidents-arkin-pdf  accessed November 18, 2015.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 1, 2014 – William Broad’s New York Times article, “Which President Cut the Most Nukes?” noted that father and son presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush were responsible, through years of hard-fought bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union/Russia (which of course also cut their nuclear weapons stockpiles dramatically) and thanks to Congressionally ratified and Russian Duma-supported START treaties, for the greatest reduction in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  Combined, both presidents cut nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons from the U.S. nuclear triad.  Not mentioned in the article is that both Bush administrations were responsible for precipitating two major wars in Iraq and the resulting regional instability that is still with us today and in the indefinite future as a result of those wars.  The George W. Bush Administration, in responding to the 9-11 attacks, also with the support of Congress (though not unanimous support), triggered the longest war in American history, the 14-year long Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) (a war that has been continued and expanded by the current Obama Administration) which U.S. military and political leaders, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have acknowledged as “a war which may never end (in our lifetimes).” In reference to U.S., Russian, Chinese, British, and other members of the Nuclear Club’s recently announced plans to modernize, improve, and increase their current nuclear arsenals and infrastructure, to the tune of $1 trillion over the next 30 years just by the United States, the article quotes a sampling of a large number of prominent global nonprofit organizations that have criticized this unnecessary buildup.  The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability condemned President Obama’s nuclear modernization program as “the largest expansion of funding of nuclear weapons since the fall of the Soviet Union (in 1991).”  Comments:  In recent years, the risk of nuclear war has clearly increased.   Unless a global paradigm shift occurs and reverses these trends culminating in a Global Zero ethic, a nuclear war will probably occur sometime in the 21^st century. (Source:  www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/sunday-review/which-president-cut-the-most-nukes.html?_r=0   accessed on October 21, 2015.)

November 2, 1984 – On this date, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued the first license for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plants (two units) located on 750 acres of land adjacent to the Pacific Ocean at Avila Beach, 12 miles south of San Luis Obisbo, California.   The power plants, which began operating in 1985 and 1986, were located within proximity to approximately two million residences.  An additional concern is that in the last few decades it has been determined that these dual reactors are located near a series of offshore seismic faults.  After the permanent shutdown of the San Onofre nuclear power station in 2013, it is the only nuclear power plant still operating in the state of California.   Many Californians oppose the plant’s operations but the NRC has stood by PG&E in noting that Diablo Canyon’s license does not expire until 2024-25.  According to news media reports in July of 2015 (see Sources below), Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) started applying to the NRC for a 20-year license extension in 2009.   Despite lessons learned from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster which was triggered by seismic action and a tsunami, PG&E remains confident that the plant can safety withstand any natural disaster.  Its September 2014 seismic study concluded that the facility was “designed to withstand and perform its safety function during and after a major seismic event.”   Environmental experts in government, academia, and in nonprofit organizations have cast doubt on these findings.   Comments:  In addition to the dangerous risks of nuclear power plant accidents due to a plethora of causes, to include human error, mechanical breakdown, unexpected fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other unpredictable incidents as seen in places like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and many other global sites, 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:  www.nrc.gov/info-finder/reactor/diab1.html and www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/NRC-to-Consider-Relicensing-Diablo-Canyon-Nuclear-Plant-Through-2045  accessed on October 21, 2015.)

November 6, 2013 – Mark Urban of BBC Newsnight ran a story titled, “Saudi Nuclear Weapons on Order From Pakistan,” which admittedly used mainly circumstantial evidence to conclude that Saudi Arabia may have been planning to secretly acquire nuclear weapons from Pakistan or even establish its own covert nuclear weapons program with Pakistan’s scientific/technical assistance.  The report acknowledged that it has been more credibly proven that the government of Saudi Arabia has, in fact, provided financial support to aid Pakistan’s nuclear program and that the Saudis did indeed purchase nuclear-capable ballistic missiles from China in the 1980s.   Comments:  These facts, combined with proven long-term Saudi support for anti-Western extremist Wahhabism and terrorism (15 of the 19 9-11 attack hijackers were Saudi nationals), lead to the conclusion that a nation trumpeted by mainstream news media and the U.S. government as a strong U.S. ally may actually be on the verge of joining the Nuclear Club or more frightening still it may be secretly aiding or even promulgating a future nuclear terror attack on the U.S., Israel, or Western Europe.   The best way to address the dual issues of climate change and the nuclear proliferation threat is by reducing dramatically the use of fossil fuels like Saudi oil, while at the same time announcing a global phase-out of civilian nuclear power over the next decade.  If ninety some percent of global nuclear power and research reactors, both civilian and military, are eliminated, the nuclear weapon threat would be drastically diminished.  (Source:  www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24823846  accessed on October 21, 2015.

November 13, 1963 – A huge conventional explosion of approximately 61.5 tons of nonnuclear highly explosive materials removed from obsolete nuclear weapons being disassembled at an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC, the forerunner of NRC) storage facility at Medina Base (now referred to as Lackland Training Annex) near San Antonio, Texas injured three AEC employees and a number of other workers at the site.  Allegedly none of the radioactive materials stored elsewhere in the building were affected but in the chaotic hours after the large explosion it is possible that radiation monitoring was not performed in a comprehensive manner.  Nuclear weapons disassembly and other time urgent modification work was subsequently transferred to the Pantex, Texas facility.  Comments:  Hundreds of nuclear incidents including Broken Arrow accidents have occurred over the decades despite some innovative safety measures pushed on the Pentagon by U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and nongovernmental experts.  Nevertheless, the safest long-term solution to preventing an accidental or unintentional nuclear war is the total or near-total global elimination of these weapons of mass destruction.  (Sources:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013 and http://ww.city-data.com/forum/san-antonio/27062-gone-but-not-forgotten-san-antonio-555.html accessed on October 21, 2015.)

November 16, 1994 – After receiving formal promises of security assurances from the leaders of the U.S., Russia, and Britain, President Leonid Kuchma recommended to his parliamentary representatives that the nation of Ukraine formally accede to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nonnuclear weapons state and agree to transfer its stockpile of strategic nuclear warheads to Russia, which was accomplished on June 1, 1996.   Comments:  Removing strategic nuclear weapons from former Soviet republics after the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was an important step toward reducing the risks of nuclear war.  The events surrounding the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis of 2014-15 reinforces the wisdom of these steps.  However, the global eradication of these doomsday weapons will serve humanity to a much greater degree in this century rather than continuing the flawed conflict-driven rhetoric of the current international policy of nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation which validates and reinforces the belief that it is legitimate for select members of the Nuclear Club to maintain and even increase and modernize their nuclear arsenals while allowing other nations, such as Israel, a free pass to flaunt the NPT regime entirely.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 39-40.)

November 22-23, 1983 – The West German parliament approved U.S. Pershing II nuclear missile deployments on November 22^nd and the first squadron of these U.S. intermediate-range nuclear weapons arrived in Europe the next day causing the Soviet delegation to walk out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations in Geneva.  The talks did not resume for nearly a year and a half until March 12, 1985.  This period of time represented the height of U.S.-Soviet nuclear tensions.  Some other contributing factors included:  the September 1, 1983 Soviet shootdown of Korean Airlines Flight 007 near Sakhalin Island; a September 26, 1983 Soviet false nuclear alert; the November 1983 NATO Able Archer military exercise that Soviet leadership widely misinterpreted as a warmup for an eventual U.S. First Strike nuclear attack; and the August 11, 1984 off-the-cuff sound check gaffe by President Ronald Reagan (“We begin bombing Russia in five minutes.”)  (Sources:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012, and Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 47.)

November 26, 1958 – At Chennault Air Force Base, Louisiana, a grounded U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber with a nuclear weapon onboard experienced a fire which engulfed the nuclear bomb.  Thankfully failsafe protections prevented a nuclear explosion, but the weapon’s high explosive charges detonated spreading radioactive materials over a large area.   Comments:  Over the last 70 years, humanity has been extremely fortunate that any one of hundreds of nuclear incidents has not resulted in an accidental discharge of a nuclear device which could have triggered an inadvertent, accidental, or unintentional nuclear conflict.  (Source:  Rebecca Grant.  “The Perils of Chrome Dome.”  Air Force Magazine.  Vol. 94, No. 8, August 2011, http://www.airforcemag.com/magazinearchive/pages/2011/august%202011/0811dome.aspx accessed on October 21, 2015.)

November 29, 1998 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Military Nuclear Mess: Out of Sight, Out of Mind?” produced by the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan, 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 press release for the program noted that, “For the past 50 years, the U.S. government has produced hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of nuclear waste.  The Department of Energy has created an underground disposal facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), to permanently store military-generated waste that contains among other deadly toxins, plutonium.  Whether this facility will safely store the nuclear materials for the 24,000 year half-life of plutonium, is greatly debated.”   Comments:  Huge amounts of dangerously radioactive military and civilian generated nuclear waste remain a growing global environmental and public health conundrum.  It represents yet another paramount reason why nuclear weapons and nuclear power must be eliminated at the earliest possible opportunity.

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

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

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

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

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

September 4, 1978 – War Resisters League (WRL) members and their supporters demonstrated against nuclear weapons and civilian nuclear power plants simultaneously in Red Square near the Kremlin in Moscow and on the White House front lawn in Washington, DC. WRL’s antinuclear protests, marches, and demonstrations such as the one above helped the organization become one of the leaders of the June 12, 1982 Mobilization for Survival U.N./Central Park peace demonstration that drew approximately one million participants. That protest was followed two days later by simultaneous civil disobedience actions at the U.N. missions of the five admitted nuclear powers.   Founded in 1923, WRL is just one of many global organizations that are working for the elimination of the nuclear threat.  (Source:  War Resisters League History, https://www.warresisters.org/wrl-history accessed August 10, 2015.)

September 5, 1995 – Three months after French President Jacques Chirac announced a resumption of nuclear testing in the South Pacific and after worldwide protests forced the French to scale back those tests, a 20-kiloton test explosion was conducted at the Moruroa Atoll. Further international condemnation forced France’s hand. Five days after that nation’s last test explosion was conducted 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.  In all, France conducted 210 nuclear tests from 1960-1996 which inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to populations in an immense region of the South Pacific.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, 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.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 17, 18, 24.)

September 11, 1957 – A fire in a plutonium processing building broke out at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, a sprawling facility with about 800 buildings spread out over 6,500 acres, located 17 miles from Denver, Colorado.  Due to the failure of various safety systems, the fire spread through a ventilation system and reached a cache of highly radioactive plutonium.  Contamination spread throughout the plant.  Due to an official cover-up of the extent of the catastrophe by the Dow Chemical Company, and the Atomic Energy Commission, knowledge of the specific damage and contamination caused by the accident was kept from the public for years.  Another fire in 1969 sent toxic smoke over Denver.  Thirteen years after the 1957 accident, an independent group of scientists found much more extensive radioactive contamination than previously believed – of a magnitude 400-1,500 times higher than normal background radiation as far away as 30 miles from the plant.  On June 6, 1989, FBI agents and representatives of the EPA raided the plant to uncover suspected environmental crimes resulting in the closure of a facility that had been part of the U.S. nuclear bomb-making complex since 1952.   Many of the 40,000 people who worked at the plant became Cold War casualties as cancers and other diseases were tied to excessive exposure to chemicals and radioactive toxins.   Rockwell International Corporation, DOE’s contractor at the site, pleaded guilty in 1992 to ten environmental crimes and paid an $18.5 million fine.   Federal government-controlled clean-up of the site began with large amounts of contaminated soil and concrete entombed in the Central Operable Unit.   While the U.S. government claims it has been providing monetary compensation since around 2001 to former Rocky Flat employees, it is reported that only a small number of those claims have been adequately paid due to the unreasonably strict burden of proof imposed on those nuclear workers.  (Sources:  Andrew Cohen.  “A September 11^th Catastrophe You’ve Probably Never Heard About.”  The Atlantic. September 10, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/09/a-september-11th-catastrophe-youve-probably-never-heard-about/261959/ and Electra Draper.  “Feds Raided Rocky Flats 25 Years Ago.”  Denver Post.  June 1, 2014, www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25874064/feds-raided-rocky-flats-25-years-ago-signaling, both accessed August 10, 2015.)

September 11, 2001 – Nineteen hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudi nationals, crashed four commercial aircraft onto U.S. territory destroying the World Trade Center in New York City and partially damaging the Pentagon in Washington, DC in an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people.  If the 9-11 attack had been conducted using a nuclear weapon, the impact would have been incredibly worse.  For instance, if Manhattan Island was struck by a 150 kiloton terrorist-fabricated nuclear fission bomb (although experts think it more likely the yield would be significantly smaller) exploded in the heart of downtown during daytime hours, the results would be devastating.  Estimated fatalities would be over 800,000 people with at least another 900,000-plus injuries not including those caused by later post-blast firestorms.  The bombing would result in 20 square miles of property damage not to mention catastrophic impacts on global financial markets if Wall Street was located in or near ground zero.   Comments:  While over a decade of nuclear threat reduction and similar multilateral and bilateral agreements and intergovernmental actions of sequestering and removing vulnerable nuclear materials and weapons from the former Soviet Union and other areas of the world has been overwhelmingly successful in circumventing nuclear terrorism, more must be done to prevent the criminal use of nuclear weapons by non-state actors.   World citizenry must push the U.S., the United Nations, NATO, the other members of the Nuclear Club, and other global entities to find a viable, comprehensive negotiated end to the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) as well as a renewed Cold War II.   Otherwise, the risks of another Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or a significantly deadlier nuclear Armageddon increases every day!  (Source:  Carrie Rossenfeld, Chris Griffith, et al., “New York City Example.”  Nuclear Pathways Project, National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library.  See www.atomicarchive.com/Example/Example1  accessed August 10, 2105.)

September 14, 1961 – Within months after first being authorized by President Dwight Eisenhower’s December 2, 1960 signature, the first U.S. SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) nuclear targeting plan went into effect around April 1.   Months later on this date, President John F. Kennedy was given his first expanded, comprehensive, “top secret” briefing on the SIOP which featured 3,720 targets grouped into more than 1,000 ground zeros that would be struck by 3,423 nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.  After the briefing, the President commented to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race!”  (Sources:   Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012, p. 287 and Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

September 17, 1987 – U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze announced in a joint statement that in addition to concluding the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty for the Elimination of the Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Nuclear Missiles (later signed by President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev on December 8, 1989), both nations signed an agreement to establish Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers (NRRCs) in Washington and Moscow to reduce the risk of conflict between the U.S. and Soviet Union that might result from accidents, miscalculations, or misinterpretations.   The 24-hour, seven-days-a-week centers, which formally opened on April 1, 1988, featured a new dedicated communication link and included information exchange and a provision for military exercise and test launch notifications in addition to supporting the follow-through and verification requirements of a number of bilateral arms control treaties between the two sides.  Today, the U.S. NRRC, which is staffed by the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance within the U.S. Department of State, is located in the Harry S. Truman Building in Washington, DC.   The State Department’s website notes that, “The U.S. NRRC exchanges an average of 7,000 notifications annually with its international partners.   The U.S. and Russian NRRCs have exchanged nearly 5,000 New START Treaty notifications since entry into force in 2011.”   In 1998, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin announced plans to build a Joint U.S.-Russian Data Exchange Center (JDEC) to further reduce the risks of unintentional nuclear war and specifically address Russia’s faulty radar warning system that almost triggered World War III during the January 1995 Black Brant Incident (whereby a U.S.-Norwegian scientific sounding rocket launch was misinterpreted by Russian military radar officers as a possible U.S.-NATO nuclear first strike decapitation attack on Moscow).   But before the center could be completed, NATO’s war in Kosovo in 1999 and the Pentagon’s insistence that radar data be filtered first through the U.S. Strategic Command before going to Moscow created a climate of bilateral tension that doomed further progress in the matter.  This led to an unfinished facility sitting unused in a Moscow residential neighborhood.   The JDEC languished further during the remainder of the Clinton Administration and for all of the years of the George W. Bush presidency as well.   The Obama Administration tried to revive the JDEC initiative in the form of a “Data Fusion Center” but that proposal went nowhere.  Comments:   However, the risks of nuclear conflict remain intolerably high as seen in the recent Crimea-Ukraine Crisis of 2014.   Despite what some envision as the beginnings of a Cold War II, politicians, military leaders, nuclear experts, activists, and a large number of nonprofit peace and antinuclear organizations continue to push for more concrete ways to reduce and eventually eliminate the risks of a nuclear Armageddon including reviving and strengthening a robust JDEC, and the priority de-alerting of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at the earliest possible opportunity.   (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 50 and “U.S. Nuclear Risk Reduction Center” U.S. Department of State website:  www.state.gov/t/avc/nrrc and Alexander Zaitchik.  “Old Nukes Don’t Die, They Just Sit Around and Wait To Be Launched.”  February 20, 2004, Rense.com website, www.rense.com/general49/wewi.htm accessed August 10, 2015.)

September 19, 1953 – A New York Times article published on this date quoted U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who warned that, “The central problem now is to save the human race from extinction.”  By 1953, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union had successfully tested a hydrogen bomb for the first time, the U.S. had contemplated using nuclear weapons in the recent Korean Conflict, and nuclear force levels were climbing steadily.   The Chicago-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock (1947-2015) was set at two minutes until midnight, meaning two minutes before a global thermonuclear war.  The 1953 press release by the Bulletin read, “Only a few more swings of the pendulum and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western Civilization.”   This dire time was the closest the world would come to doomsday in the last 68 years since the clock was started.   The next two most dangerous time periods, when the clock’s hands were set at three minutes to midnight, were in 1984 and 2015.   Comments:  Despite a vast proliferation of major and alternative (including social) media sources of information on the nuclear threat over the last few decades, most Americans are either unaware or unconcerned about a threat they believe virtually ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of the Cold War in 1991.   In reality, seventy years after Hiroshima, nuclear risks to global civilization and the human species are as frighteningly dangerous as ever.   The time for action is now.  Drastic reductions and a time-urgent elimination of all nuclear weaponry and nuclear power is a firm, unalterable requirement for human survival in the 21^st century!  (Sources:  Louis Rene Beres.  “Apocalypse:  Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.”  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980 and Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  “Doomsday Clock Timeline.”  www.thebulletin.org/timeline accessed on August 10, 2015.)

September 25, 1990 – The U.S. Senate ratified the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) signed by the U.S. and Soviet Union on July 3, 1974, which banned underground nuclear tests that exceeded 150 kilotons and obligated the parties to continue negotiations for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and also ratified the so-called “Peaceful” Nuclear Explosions Treaty (PNET) signed by both nations on May 28, 1976.   Importantly the PNET, which reinforced the 150 kiloton TTBT test limit, also provided for verification by national technical means, information exchange, and access to test sites.  The Supreme Soviet ratified the two treaties on October 9, 1990.   The leadership of past presidents and then President George Bush was important but even more critical was the push for peace by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who was announced as that year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner in October of 1990.  Comments:  While today it is recognized that any nuclear tests, no matter how small the yield or magnitude of the blast, have an overwhelmingly negative impact on public health and safety, environmental protection, and on world public perception of the testing nation(s), these treaties were nevertheless valuable in promoting continued negotiations toward a CTBT which was signed by President Bill Clinton on September 24, 1996 and by representatives of 70 other nations including the U.K., China, France, and Russia by September 26^th.  Despite broad international consensus among the scientific and arms control community that seismic monitoring and other national technical means of verification were becoming more and more foolproof in detecting test cheaters, the U.S. Senate rejected the CTBT on October 13, 1999 and hasn’t reversed course on this unreasonable stance even with the ratification of the treaty by an overwhelming vote of 298-74 on April 21, 2000 by the Russian Duma.  In 2015 there is no longer any legitimate excuse for the U.S. Senate not to proceed with ratification.  Encouraging Congress to ratify the CTBT and the recent Iran nuclear deal, as well as having that body direct the Pentagon to de-alert hair-trigger U.S. strategic nuclear missiles and begin the accelerated phase-out of the U.S. nuclear triad (all through bilateral negotiations with Russia) ought to be top priority issues in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 11, 14, 22.)