Category: Nuclear Threat

July 1, 1968 – The U.S., U.K., the Soviet Union, and 58 other nations signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).  The Preamble of the agreement, which today includes 191 state parties, referred explicitly to the need for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which has not yet been realized due mostly to the U.S. Senate’s unwillingness to ratify the treaty (as manifested by that body’s rejection of the CTBT on October 13, 1999 by a vote of 51-48).   Comments:  While the NPT’s focus on preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been only marginally successful, the other purpose of the treaty, to seek negotiations in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear disarmament has been a dismal failure.  There does not appear to be much light at the end of the tunnel after the conclusion of another NPT Review Conference on May 22, 2015 in which the United States and Britain blocked a consensus agreement to establish a deadline date to hold a conference on mandating a nuclear-weapon-free-zone in the Middle East and Canada objected as well on the basis that the agreement does not include participation by Israel – a nonsignatory to the NPT that possesses an unacknowledged secret arsenal of approximately 100-200 nuclear weapons.  Nevertheless, one positive trend resulting from this year’s review conference was what the Washington Post called, “an uprising of 107 states and civil society groups that are seeking to reframe the disarmament debate as an urgent matter of safety, morality, and humanitarian law,” and are committing to dramatically step up efforts to work toward Global Zero.   (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 10-11, 22 and Dan Zak. “U.N. Nuclear Conference Collapses Over WMD-Free Zone in the Middle East.” Washington Post.  May 22, 2015.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wmd/national-security/un-nuclear-conference-collapses-over-wmd-free-zone-in-the-middle-east/2015/05/22/8c568380-fe39-11e4-8c77-bf274685e1df_story.html.)

July 4, 1999 – At a Blair House meeting on this holiday morning, President Bill Clinton met with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan at a time when India and Pakistan (which had fought each other in three wars:  1947, 1965, and 1971) were fighting again, this time in an undeclared war (later referred to as the Kargil Conflict) over Northern Kashmir.  Tensions were high as top Indian leaders warned the U.S. that their nation was convinced that Pakistan was ‘operationalizing’ its nuclear missiles and that they intended to blockade the Pakistani port of Karachi.   President Clinton later testified that, “I knew my only real job on the Fourth of July was to get Pakistan back across the line of control…because otherwise, we’re just out there rolling the dice, hoping to goodness that nothing terrible would happen.”   Comments:  Although this crisis did not escalate into a nuclear conflict, it is just one of many global close calls as nuclear Armageddon was yet avoided again.  However, recent events reveal ongoing nuclear tensions between the two nations.   The United States and the larger international community must redouble its efforts to persuade India and Pakistan to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals.  (Sources:  “Avoiding Armageddon:  Our Future, Our Choice.”  PBS-TV, Ted Turner Documentaries, 2003.  www.pbs.org/avoidingarmageddon and Tim Craig and Annie Gowen.  “Indian Border Operation Rattles Nuclear Neighbor.”  Washington Post. June 12, 2015.  www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-38395110.html. )

July 7, 1961 – Former Harvard University economics professor and Rand Corporation analyst Carl Kaysen sent a memorandum on this date to President John Kennedy’s National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy reporting that a Soviet nuclear strike of just 100 warheads (a very small portion of today’s Russian nuclear arsenal) against U.S. cities, in the absence of large-scale civil defense bunkers and shelters, would kill an estimated 62-100 million of the total (then) U.S. population of 180 million people.   Comments:  More than half a century later, with a current U.S. population of over 300 million people and with each side possessing thousands of nuclear weapons, the figures for U.S. and global nuclear war deaths dramatically exceed Kaysen’s calculations.  Including the paramount factor of resulting nuclear winter global climate impacts, a major nuclear war would kill billions and seriously threaten our species’ existence.  Civil defenses and missile defenses would not significantly alter this calculus of megadeath. (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, p. 547.)

July 16, 1945 – The top secret U.S. Manhattan Project culminated with the successful test of the world’s first nuclear weapon in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico before dawn.  Code-named Trinity, it was the rehearsal for the August 6-9 atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it represented the first of 1,030 nuclear tests conducted by the United States and one of over 2,000 such tests conducted by the nine Nuclear Weapons Club members in the last seventy years.   President Truman’s personal journal of July 25 recorded that, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world…An experiment in the New Mexico desert…caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater six feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked down a steel tower half a mile away and knocked down men 10,000 yards away.  The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.”  Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s report to the president noted that, “I estimate that the energy generated to be in excess of the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT…there were tremendous blast effects…there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds.  This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over 10,000 feet.”   Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, an eyewitness to the blast, described his experience of a, “gigantic ball of fire rising rapidly from the earth…The grand, indeed almost cataclysmic proportion of the explosion produced a kind of solemnity in everyone’s behavior immediately afterwards.  There was a restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence in manner as the event was commented upon…”   Comments:  While many U.S. military and scientific observers celebrated the beginning of the Nuclear Age, others realized that this event may have represented the beginning of the end of the human species.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5, 24. and Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb:  And the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 250-251.)

July 27, 1956 – During a training exercise, a U.S. B-47 bomber crashed into a storage bunker holding three Mark 6 nuclear bombs at Lakenheath Air Force Base near Suffolk, England killing the entire crew.  Bomb disposal experts later determined that it was a miracle that one Mark 6 bomb (with a potential yield in the range of 6-180 kilotons) with an unprotected, exposed nuclear detonator did not explode.  If it had, this “Broken Arrow” nuclear accident might have inadvertently triggered World War III!   Many years later, Sandia National Laboratory reported that at least 1200 nuclear weapons were involved in significant accidents just in the period between 1950-1968.  By 1968 approximately seventy missiles armed with nuclear warheads had been struck by lightning.   Comments:  If global nuclear arsenals are not dramatically reduced and eliminated as soon as possible, an accidental, unintended, or unauthorized nuclear detonation will likely trigger a nuclear Armageddon.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 170, 327-329, 556.)

July 28, 2012 – The alleged airtight security of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, promulgated over the decades by numerous U.S. government representatives from the Oval Office, the nuclear weapons laboratories, to include the Department of Energy and Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that unauthorized access to and theft of U.S. nuclear weapons was virtually impossible suffered yet another blow when a small group of Christian pacifists belonging to the anti-nuclear Ploughshares movement (an organization involved in dozens of protests over the years at the Nevada Test Site and other components of the U.S. nuclear complex) breached the Y-12 National Security Complex  in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  On this Saturday evening, Sister Megan Rice, 82 years old, Michael Walli, 63, and Gregory Boertje-Obed, 57, cut through the barbed-wire fences at the Oak Ridge complex, which holds enough highly-enriched uranium to make thousands of nuclear warheads, and proceeded to splash human blood on the windowless uranium processing building’s walls, spray-paint peace symbols, and drape the access doors with crime-scene tape.   After being convicted in May 2013, Sister Rice and the two men spent two years in prison before a May 8, 2015 appellate court ruling held that the U.S. government had overreached in charging them with sabotage and ordered them released.  Comments:  Sister Rice follows in the footsteps of a long line of other nonviolent anti-nuclear activists, both religious and secular, who feel that the U.S. and other Nuclear Club members are violating global disarmament pledges and unwittingly threatening the world with nuclear disaster.  “It’s making countries feel compelled to have weapons.  If you have them, we have to have them.  We don’t want to end the (nuclear) industry.  We want to transition it into something that’s useful.  What could be better than making something that’s life-enhancing rather than life-destroying?”

(Source:  William J. Broad.  “Sister Megan Rice, Freed From Prison, Looks Ahead to More Anti-Nuclear Activism.”  New York Times. May 26, 2015.  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/science/sister-megan-rice-anti-nuclear-weapons-activist-freed )

June 1, 1924 – William Sloane Coffin, a U.S. Army captain, CIA officer, 1960s Freedom Rider, Yale University chaplain after being ordained in the Presbyterian Church (he later received ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ) who became Senior Minister of the Riverside Church in his hometown of New York City, was born on this date.   He opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and as president of SANE/Freeze (which later became Peace Action) he supported the Nuclear Freeze and opposed President Reagan’s space- and land-based strategic missile defense plan referred to as the Strategic Defense Initiative (and as “Star Wars” by the mainstream news media) as well as the nuclear arms race as a whole.  One of his many sermons criticized the abuse of power by political leaders, which still holds true today, “People in high places make me really angry, because they are so callous.  When you see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be as mad as hell.”  In regards to the nuclear threat, he cautioned that we are living in “the shadow of Doomsday.”  Shortly before his death on April 12, 2006, Reverend Coffin founded Faithful Security, a coalition of people of faith committed to working for a world free of nuclear weapons.  (Source:  Marc D. Charney.  “Reverend William Sloane Coffin Dies at 81; Fought for Civil Rights and Against a War.”  New York Times, April 13, 2006.  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/us/13coffin.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.)

June 1, 1996 – President Leonid Kuchma announced that the Ukraine had transferred it last strategic nuclear warhead to the territory of Russia and was nuclear free.  Two other former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan, on April 25, 1995, and Belarus, on November 23, 1996, also became former nuclear weapons states.  Yet another example of nuclear weapons elimination was the unilateral announcement in March of 1993 that South Africa had manufactured seven nuclear warheads but then chose to dismantle them before joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime in July of 1991.  Comments:  These important precedents give hope that not only will smaller nuclear powers agree to eliminate these doomsday devices, but that the U.S. and Russia, in particular, will accelerate dramatically nuclear reductions and pursue global zero initiatives in earnest before the unthinkable happens.  An example would be a unilateral stand down of one squadron of U.S. land-based ICBMs on hair trigger alert status, delaying any possible launch of those missiles by 72 hours or more in order to convince Russia to follow suit and expand the stand down to increasing numbers of these deadly weapons including eventually the entire U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 39-40; 67, 71.)

June 3, 1980 – President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was awakened by his military assistant, General William Odom, around 2:30 a.m. and informed that NORAD’s computers had detected a launch of 2,200 Soviet ICBMs heading for U.S. targets.  The incident was one of many so-called “false warnings.”  When early warning radars and satellites could not verify the fictional Soviet first strike, Brzezinski determined that the attack was a false alarm.  Later it was discovered that this doomsday scare was caused by a faulty computer chip – which cost a mere 46 cents.  Comments:  Such false warnings are still possible today although technological verification is more sophisticated and supposedly more foolproof.  It is still true however that the very short response times in nuclear crises, make accidental, unintentional, or unauthorized nuclear warfare a frighteningly real possibility now and in the future.  (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 367-368.)

June 8, 1960 – George Barrett’s article in the New York Times, “Jersey Atom Missile Fire Stirs Brief Radiation Fear,” reported that after a helium tank ruptured at an air defense site in Jackson Township, New Jersey, a fire started which triggered an explosion inside a nuclear shelter for a 10 kiloton BOMARC missile.  After the high explosives were accidentally triggered by the fire, the warhead was discharged from the nose cone of the missile and the nuclear core melted resulting in a plutonium leak.  Although the nuclear warhead did not explode, the entire area was contaminated by the deadly, highly radioactive plutonium core, which was cleaned up at a cost of millions of dollars.  Comments:  This is just one of dozens of acknowledged, as well as a potentially greater number of still classified, nuclear accidents and Broken Arrows that have occurred involving the arsenals of the Nuclear Club nations.

June 14, 1946 – Bernard Baruch, a financier and philanthropist chosen by President Truman to create an “International Atomic Development Authority” (known as “The Baruch Plan”) that would control all phases of the development and use of atomic energy from uranium mining to reactor operations and nuclear weapons research and development, told a gathering of United Nations Atomic Energy Commission representatives at Hunter College gymnasium in the Bronx, “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead…We must elect world peace or world destruction.”  Influenced by Manhattan Project scientist Niels Bohr and others, the Baruch Plan proposed to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of sovereign nations by placing them under the supervision of a supranational international entity that would have the power to, as Baruch himself explained, “mete out immediate swift, and sure punishment” to any nation that attempted to acquire nuclear weapons.  Due to opposition from the Soviet Union, the U.S. military, and the American public, the plan never materialized into actuality.  Comments:  However, some parameters of the plan may still have viability in a future Global Zero or near-Global Zero world.  (Source:  Michael Mandelbaum.  “The Nuclear Question:  The United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1946-1976.”  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 23-34.)

June 17, 1967 – The Chinese conducted their first thermonuclear test when military scientists exploded a three megaton nuclear weapon at the Lop Nor test site only 32 months after their very first nuclear weapons test conducted on October 16, 1964, which measured about 15 kilotons.  In all, a total of 45 nuclear tests were staged by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the last one occurring on July 29, 1996.  Although the Chinese conducted fewer tests by far than the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., it still bears responsibility for increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plaguing global populations.   Comments:  In the last several years, the PRC has pointed to increased future funding for U.S. and Russian conventional and nuclear weapons as justifying their accelerated military spending on similar weapons systems.  And, in turn, the U.S. and its allies (NATO, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and other ASEAN member states) continue to seek an improved and expanded nuclear umbrella against Chinese and Russian military threats.  Therefore, the unending, dangerously destabilizing nuclear arms race cycle, that many so-called experts claimed ceased to exist after the Cold War ended in 1991, persists into the 21^st century.  One failure in this extremely fragile “house of cards” deterrence system could spell global doom.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 10, 18.)

June 24, 2013 – Elbridge Colby reported in the journal The National Interest in an article titled, “Cyberwar:  The Nuclear Option,” that U.S. military and political officials reached a consensus (unfortunately apparently without Congressional debate or extensive agreement by the American public) that in the event of “large-scale, brutally effective cyber attacks on critical elements of U.S. military and civilian infrastructure that would impose significant loss of life and tremendous degradation of our national welfare,” that the United States could credibly retaliate with nuclear weapons against the cyber attacking nation or subnational entity.  Ten days before this article appeared, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Steve Andreasen, one of President Clinton’s top NSC officials, put forth a much more reasoned and sane argument against “the nuclear option” in a Washington Post op ed.  Clarke and Andreasen renounced any nuclear retaliatory responses to cyber attack by arguing that Russia and/or China would probably adopt a similar policy which would increase the chances of a future nuclear conflict.  Comments:  This issue brings to light another related concern.  Would the U.S. or other members of the Nuclear Club resist responding with nuclear strikes on nations or subnational entities responsible for exploding nuclear weapons high above those nation-states (100 miles or more) despite the extensive EMP (electromagnetic pulse) damage inflicted on e-commerce and other elements of the targeted nation’s military and civilian infrastructure?   In the interests of peace and the paramount avoidance of future nuclear conflicts, not to mention the need for public transparency and feedback, the U.S. and other Nuclear Club members should open this matter up to public scrutiny and debate in order to seek broad international consensus opposing nuclear retaliation to EMP or other cyberwar infrastructure attacks as a clear violation of international and humanitarian law.  (Sources:  Elbridge Colby.  “Cyberwar and the Nuclear Option,” The National Interest.  June 24, 2013.  http://www.nationalinterest.org/commentary/cyberwar-the-nuclear-option-8638. and Richard Clarke and Steve Andreasen.  “Cyberwar’s Threat Does Not Justify a New Policy of Nuclear Deterrence.” Washington Post. June 14, 2013.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cyberwars-threat-does-not-justify-a-new-policy-of-nuclear-deterrence/2013/06/14/91c01bb6-d50e-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html.)

May 1, 1982 – The Washington Post featured an article by Bill Prochnau titled, “With the Bomb, There Is No Answer,” in which he reported that marijuana was discovered in one of the underground missile control launch centers of a Minuteman ICBM squadron at Malmstrom Air Force Base, Montana.  Comments:  While military drug use is not as serious a problem as it once was, there still exists serious concerns about U.S. and foreign military personnel’ handling of nuclear weaponry and, in broader terms, about the command and control of these potential doomsday weapons.   All it takes is one failure in the nuclear deterrence system to trigger unprecedented human catastrophe and possibly the end of the human species.

May 5, 1959 – After almost 10,000 scientists signed a January 1958 petition to stop nuclear testing, a March 31, 1958 Soviet nuclear testing moratorium announcement, an August 1958 report by a U.S. “conference of experts” concluded that a test ban could be reliably verified, and after two U.S.-initiated nuclear testing cessation proposals were forwarded to Soviet Premier Khrushchev, on this date President Dwight Eisenhower again submitted another test ban proposal to the Soviets which included a provision for a predetermined number of inspections in the territories of the United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union.  While both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. enacted nuclear test moratoriums thereafter, the May 2, 1960 shoot down of a Gary Powers-piloted U-2 reconnaissance plane over Sverdlovsk in the Soviet Union, combined with initial American denials of spying, led Khrushchev to scuttle the Paris Summit and to end further test ban negotiations until Eisenhower left office.  Comments:  It took the awful events of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the closest the world has ever come to thermonuclear warfare, to spur Kennedy and Khrushchev to speed up negotiations to reduce nuclear tensions by implementing the Hot Line Agreement and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.   The Kennedy assassination and 1964 Politburo ouster of Khrushchev, unfortunately, dramatically slowed momentum for further progress in this area.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 7-9.)

May 14, 2002 – An article by Matt Wald in the New York Times titled, “Demolition of Nuclear Plant Illustrates Problems Involved,” pointed out the little known and little publicized facts about the immensely complicated issues associated with decommissioning, dismantling, and environmentally remediating the site of a civilian nuclear power station.  Wall referred to the specific example of the Maine Yankee plant which was shut down in 1996.  Composed of only a single reactor unit, the plant cost $231 million, in 1972 dollars, to build.  Demolishing the plant and shipping away an estimated 65,000 tons of light-, medium-, and highly-radioactive materials (including the reactor core, spent fuel rods, other contaminated industrial equipment, and an incredible inventory of 25 years of related radioactive junk) would cost an estimated half a billion dollars!  Comments:  Besides the obvious long-term serious health and public safety concerns coincidental with running a nuclear power plant, natural (earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, tornadoes, etc) and manmade (terrorist takeover of reactor sites or crashing airliners into containment domes or reactor waste water collection ponds) disasters make dangerous, overly expensive, toxic waste-generating, and uneconomical nuclear power a deadly global risk that calls for the immediate dismantling of the international nuclear power infrastructure in the next decade.  Nuclear proliferation risks provide an additional paramount rationale for phasing out civilian nuclear power in favor of accelerated R&D on solar, geothermal, wind, and other clean, green, and sustainable energy solutions to global warming.

May 18, 1974 – India conducted its first nuclear test, with an announced yield of 12 kilotons, at the Pokharan underground site in the Rajasthan Desert proclaiming the event, “a peaceful nuclear explosion.”  Although the U.S. intelligence community later downgraded the yield to four to six kilotons, a South Asian nuclear arms race had begun.  After five more Indian nuclear tests on May 11-13, 1998, the Pakistanis responded on May 28-30, 1998 with five of their own nuclear test blasts.  Comments:  Despite international condemnations, economic sanctions, and other repercussions, both nations have ratcheted up the regional arms race with further testing of launch platforms and occasional nuclear saber rattling.   A near-miss nuclear exchange at the turn of the millennium has increased international pressure to push both countries to reduce and eventually eliminate their nuclear arsenals – now estimated to be in the range of several dozen warheads on each side.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 11, 20-21.)

May 19, 2011 – In the journal Nature, Volume 473, Professor Alan Robock, building on studies initially reported by the TTAPS group (which included the late astronomer Carl Sagan) in 1982-83, concluded that, “Nuclear Winter is a real and present danger.  As few as 50 nuclear bombs exploding in urban areas would cause enough black carbon smoke to trigger another Little Ice Age.”  Comments:  If deterrence fails, even on a relatively small-scale, for example:  a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, the direct results of tens of millions of war deaths might pale in comparison to 10-100 times that many fatalities as a result of mass starvation caused by such a nuclear climate catastrophe.

May 22, 2015 – The Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (also known as the NPT Review Conference) at United Nations Headquarters in New York City, which began April 27, concludes on this date.  Comments:  Conference participants must step up their efforts to think out of the box and address issues beyond the usual agenda of convincing Iran and North Korea to reverse their alleged nuclear weapons activities.  Pressuring America and Russia to accelerate their nuclear disarmament obligations, as spelled out in the NPT, is but one example.  Another is persuading the U.S. and its allies to pressure Israel to announce the generalities of their nuclear arsenal (estimated to be 100-200 warheads) and commit to reduce their warhead inventory, as a crucial step in establishing a credible Middle East nuclear weapon free zone.

May 25, 1953 – In the 10^th of the UPSHOT-Knothole series of 11 nuclear test firings, the shot GRABLE nuclear weapons test was conducted at Frenchman Flat, Area 5, of the Nevada Test Site.   The M65 280mm Atomic Cannon launched a nuclear projectile 6.25 miles where it exploded with a yield of about 15 kilotons.   Comments:  This was just one of the 1,030 total U.S. nuclear test explosions conducted from 1945-1992.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague global populations, most especially military veterans and indigenous peoples, decades after over 2,000 nuclear bombs were exploded below ground or in the atmosphere by members of the Nuclear Club.  (Sources:  “Firing the Atomic Cannon.”  www.military.com/video/nuclear-bombs/nuclear-weapons-firing-the-atomic-cannon-1953/2789775714  accessed April 9, 2015 and Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 24.)

May 28, 2000 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Dark Cloud:  Our Strange Love Affair With the Bomb (Program No. 1338).”  It was 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 an assistant secretary of defense), and civilian experts (Dr. Bruce Blair, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer).  A news release described the film in these terms:  “Nukes as portable infantry weapons.  Nukes for digging tunnels.  Nuclear decontamination with a whisk broom.  Declassified government films of the 1940s, 50’s and 60’s form the back drop of this darkly entertaining exploration of America’s fascination with the Bomb.  This program provides a valuable lesson in media literacy by exploring the nature of propaganda and deconstructing its messages.”  Comments:  While obviously nuclear war is not a laughing matter, news media representatives, entertainers, and even politicians (Congress’ budgetary rhetoric of “the nuclear option”) continue to celebrate these doomsday weapons downgrading and even disregarding their deadly potential to end the world as we know it.  It remains the responsibility of activists, educational organizations, and other nonprofit entities to remind the world daily that the global nuclear arsenal remains a constant threat to human civilization.

May 31, 1962 – Frank Ervin of Physicians for Social Responsibility and several of his colleagues published a study in The New England Journal of Medicine describing the impact of a 20 megaton nuclear explosion on a major metropolitan area, “The fireball extends two miles in every direction.  Out to four miles, the blast would produce overpressures of 25 pounds per square inch and winds in excess of 650 miles per hour.  Out to distances of 16 miles, the bomb’s heat would ignite all homes, paper, cloth, leaves, gasoline, starting hundreds of thousands of fires, creating a giant firestorm in excess of 100 miles per hour and measuring 30 miles across, covering 800 square miles.   A 20 megaton ground burst on downtown Boston would seriously damage reinforced concrete buildings to a distance of 10 miles and demolish all other structures.  Within a circle of radius of 16-21 miles, second-degree burns would be produced.  Human survival in this area would be practically impossible and an estimated 2.25 million deaths would occur in metropolitan Boston from blast and heat alone.  If impacted on San Diego, California with a (then) population of 2.8 million people, one million would die within minutes and 500,000 would sustain major injuries.”  Comments:  Some commentators have suggested that a first-class, state-of-the-art film, utilizing modified stock footage of nuclear blasts and featuring top-notch computer-generated enhanced imagery and graphics, along with staged but realistic interviews of “survivors” (portrayed by little-known, but skilled actors) should be updated and shown annually to global political, military, and civic leaders as well as journalists, scholars, and the general public through media as diverse as TV, the Internet, social media, and other platforms.   Broadcast each year by the United Nations and by all the governments of the Nuclear Club members as well as by a cross-section of independent media on the August 6 anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and titled, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons on Humans and Their Environment” such a short film might have some positive impact on accelerating global zero efforts while reducing the overall risks of a nuclear Armageddon.  (Source:  F. Ervin, et al., “The Medical Consequences of Thermonuclear War.”  The New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 266, May 31, 1962.  www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/4770929  accessed April 9, 2015.)

April 3, 1978 – Norwegian scholar and explorer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002), as a protest against warfare and the nuclear threat, particularly in the Middle East, burned his reed ship “Tigris” after his fourth and final transoceanic voyage, in which his crew of ten sailed from the Tigris River to the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and back, some 4,200 miles in five months.  Afterward, at a press conference he stated, “We must wake up to the insane reality of our time.  We are all irresponsible unless we demand from the responsible decision makers that modern armaments must no longer be made available to people whose former battle axes and swords our ancestors condemned.  Our planet is bigger than the reed bundles that have carried us across the seas, and yet small enough to run the same risks unless those of us alive open our eyes and minds to the desperate need of intelligent collaboration to save ourselves and our common civilization from what we are about to convert into a sinking ship.”  (Source:  Heyerdahl Burns “Tigris” Reed Ship to Protest War.”  Azerbaijan International, Spring 2003.  http://www.azer.com accessed March 6, 2015.)

April 5, 2009 – In a speech in Prague, the newly elected, first ever African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama, announced his administration “is seeking a world without nuclear weapons.”  The rhetoric was stirring and powerful:  “If we believe the spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then we’re admitting that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.”   Comments:  While several other U.S. presidents, including most prominently Jimmy Carter, have pronounced similar sentiments, either while in office or after leaving the presidency, President Obama’s speech was so heralded globally, that he later won the Nobel Peace Prize.  However, as the years passed since this speech, it became clear that the President has not followed through on this promise.  His overall record in the Global Zero imperative is not particularly impressive.  His administration’s nuclear cooperation agreement with India, a continued embrace of dangerous, cost-ineffective, and environmentally hazardous civilian nuclear power (which does actually generate greenhouse gases during the production and decommissioning phases of plant operations, in addition to representing a deadly proliferation and terrorism risk), and the unwillingness to de-alert a small portion of the U.S. nuclear triad as a challenge to Russia to follow suit, are just some of the examples of these failures.  In an era when new, more efficient and entirely reliable international sensing technologies make verification 100 percent certain, it is extremely disappointing that the President has not pushed for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by President Clinton in 1996 and ratified by the Russian Duma thereafter.   This administration has not lobbied for a fissile materials cutoff agreement, or pushed the envelope for more accelerated strategic warhead reductions below the 1,550 level of the 2010 new START I Treaty.  While President Obama has held nuclear security summits and resisted calls to bomb North Korean or alleged Iranian nuclear weapons sites, he has recently surrendered to neo-con hardliner’s calls to spend a trillion dollars or more by 2045 to build a new generation of nuclear weapons including new launch platforms, upgrade the nuclear laboratories, and generally continue the seventy year old nuclear arms race along with Russia and China.  (Source:  “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague.”  April 5, 2009.  http://www.whitehouse.gov accessed March 6, 2015.)

April 7, 1958 – Four years after announcing the U.S. policy of massive retaliation, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was concerned that the U.S. had become “prisoners of our strategic concept” and “caught in a vicious circle.”  It was the beginning of a U.S. strategic shift of a new, less provocative policy of flexible response and counterforce strategy.   Yet, key military leaders thought that the current strategy hadn’t gone far enough.   General Curtis LeMay, head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC), wanted to deploy higher yield nuclear warheads on his aircraft – a sixty megaton bomb as powerful as 4,000 Hiroshima-sized weapons.   (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 199-202.)

April 11, 1950 – Thirteen crew members aboard a U.S. B-29 Superfortress strategic bomber died when the plane crashed near Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico shortly after takeoff.  The aircraft was carrying a nuclear warhead with its core component stored separately.  On impact a fire destroyed the outer casing of the bomb and its high explosives detonated when exposed to the burning fuel.   Comments:  This is just one of dozens of acknowledged as well as a potentially greater number of still classified nuclear accidents and Broken Arrows that have occurred involving the arsenals of the Nuclear Club nations.  (Source:  Aerospace Web, http://www.aerospaceweb.org accessed March 8, 2015.)

April 11, 1963 – Pope John XXIII, in an encyclical pronouncement, “Pacem in Terris,” stated that, “Nuclear weapons must be banned…While it is difficult to believe that anyone would dare to assume responsibility for initiating the appalling slaughter and destruction that war would bring in its wake, there is no denying that the conflagration could be started by some chance and unforeseen circumstance…Hence justice, right reason, and the recognition of man’s dignity cry out insistently for a cessation to the arms race.”  (Source:  “Encyclical ‘Pacem in Terris’ of John XXIII” http://w2.vatican.va accessed March 6, 2015.)

April 13, 2014 – At a press conference in Berlin, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the world has 15 years to stave off a devastating, inevitable, and deadly catastrophe caused by decades of continuing human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.   Comments:  Relying on increased use of flawed, dangerous, economically and environmentally unsustainable civilian nuclear power, instead of pushing for a dramatic increases in green energy sources like geothermal, solar, and wind power, as a solution to global warming, is analogous to arguing that human security is enhanced by ever-growing arsenals of nuclear weapons.  For Global Zero to be successful, the nuclear threat represented not only by nuclear weapons and their proliferation but also by civilian nuclear power, must be eliminated.  The nuclear peace dividend from this effort will not only be enough to clean-up thousands of global nuclear contamination zones but also to immediately increase government and nongovernment funding on accelerated global warming reversal.   Putting some of our eggs in the “nuclear basket” is not a viable insurance policy when it comes to climate change.   It is, in fact, a suicide pact.   (Source:  “Fifteen Year Climate Countdown.”  http://www.350nyc.org/15-year-climate-countdown accessed on March 6, 2015.)

April 22, 2008 – On ABC-TV’s Good Morning America program, U.S. presidential candidate (and later President Obama’s Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton pledged that if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel, the U.S. would retaliate against the Iranians, “In the next ten years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”  Comments:  Risky, high-profile nuclear saber-rattling persists among leaders, American and otherwise, many of whom have also publicly professed a desire to see nuclear weapons eliminated some day.  But it is clear that such nuclear threats sabotage short- and long-term global efforts to build confidence that a world without nuclear weapons will include all nations without exception (even the closest U.S. ally – Israel) in a world that is also without war as a means to settle disputes.  (Source:  David Morgan.  “Clinton Says U.S. Could ‘Totally Obliterate’ Iran.”  Reuters News, April 22, 2008.  http://www.reuters.com accessed March 6, 2015.)

April 24, 2014 – The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), located in the Pacific Ocean region, an area of the world where hundreds of nuclear weapons tests were conducted by the U.S., Great Britain, and France for half a century, 1946-96, brought a lawsuit against the nine nuclear-armed nations at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world’s highest court, as well as in U.S. federal district court in northern California.   The lawsuit accused members of the Nuclear Club of violating their obligations under international law to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and to commit to total nuclear disarmament under the provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and other multilateral agreements.   While the case is still pending in the ICJ, on February 13, 2015 George H.W. Bush appointee Judge Jeffrey White granted the U.S. motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the RMI, although a party to the NPT, lacked standing to bring the case and that the lawsuit was barred by the political question doctrine.  Comments:   Fortunately, the history of jurisprudence illustrates that it is often true that judicial rulings lag behind public sentiment.   A growing global consensus that nuclear weapons represent a clear and present danger to the human species may yet convince those in charge to acknowledge their catastrophic violation of international legal norms and reverse course before it is too late.  It’s just a question of when.  (Sources:  NAPF’s Sunflower Newsletter and various news media outlets.)

April 25, 1982 – In a New York Times Magazine article, retired U.S. Admiral Noel Gaylor warned that, “Everyone understands that nuclear weapons are the most deadly things ever invented by man.  If they were ever to be used, the chances are overwhelming that they would be used in great numbers.  And that would mean the slaughter of innocents in the hundreds of millions, the end of Western civilization, perhaps the end of a livable world.”

This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

In Russian roulette, you have one chance in six of dying – provided you pull the trigger only once. If you pull it once a day, or even once a year, it’s not a question of IF you’ll be killed, only WHEN. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pres. Kennedy said he thought the odds of war were somewhere between 1-in-3 and even. If he was right, that crisis was equivalent to playing nuclear roulette – a global version of Russian roulette – with a 2- or 3-chambered revolver. While most events have a much smaller chance of escalating to nuclear war, even a small probability per event can add up to an unacceptable risk if repeated often enough. For that reason, I was shocked to find an article in today’s New York Times that reported Japanese fighters are scrambling more than once per day to intercept Chinese aircraft near some small, uninhabited, disputed islands.

Each such incident puts the world at risk that an error in the judgment by a single fighter pilot will create an international incident with the potential to escalate to a nuclear crisis. There’s only a small risk of that happening, but with 379 such incidents in the nine-month period ending December 31 last year, those risks add up. And the risk appears to be growing since the article noted that this was a six-fold increase from the same period four years earlier.

What’s needed is some hard-nosed critical thinking – re-examining the assumptions that underlie our current policy with respect to China and Japan. Examples of some factors we need to consider include:

An article in TIME magazine from October 2014, Return of the Samurai, quotes Japanese officials as wanting their nation to “finally evolve into a normal country with a normal armed forces.” Critical thinking would examine not only the short-term gain to our nation of that evolution, but also its potential long-term losses. One short-term gain might be reduced US expenditures to protect Japan. A long-term loss might be Japan becoming more aggressive toward China and dragging us into a nuclear crisis, possibly even a war.

Rising Japanese militarism can be seen in that article when it quotes a conservative Japanese Diet (parliament) member as denying both the Rape of Nanking and the Japanese military’s use of sex slaves (so-called “comfort women”) during the war.

A New York Times article last December talked of the plight of a Japanese professor who is being hounded by rightists for his efforts to illuminate Japan’s wartime atrocities. The article notes, “Ultranationalists have even gone after his children, posting Internet messages urging people to drive his teenage daughter to suicide,” and continues, “This latest campaign, however, has gone beyond anything postwar Japan has seen before, with nationalist politicians, including [Prime Minister] Abe himself, unleashing a torrent of abuse that has cowed one of the last strongholds of progressive political influence in Japan [the progressive Asahi Shimbun newpaper].”

Critical thinking also would re-examine the tradeoffs involved in our giving Japan nuclear guarantees over the disputed, uninhabited islands which are the frequent site of the games of aerial chicken involving Chinese and Japanese aircraft. It’s time to stop playing nuclear roulette!

March 1, 1982 – President Ronald Reagan watched the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center rehearse a full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union. Thousands of red dots appeared on the map of the United States, each indicating the impact of thermonuclear warheads on U.S. territory and each symbolizing the resulting deaths and injuries of hundreds of millions of Americans. The same was true for the map of the Soviet Union. The 40^th President eventually pronounced that, “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” (Source: Craig Nelson. “The Age of Radiance.” New York: Simon & Shuster, 2014, p. 328.)

March 3, 1980 – The Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials, which set out levels of physical protection during the transport of nuclear materials and established a framework of international cooperation in the recovery and return of stolen nuclear material, was signed at U.N. Headquarters in New York City on this date, ratified by the U.S. on December 13, 1982 and by the Soviet Union of May 25, 1983, and entered into force on February 8, 1987. Comments: These and other agreements could be substantially strengthened with the multilateral negotiation and ratification of a comprehensive fissile materials elimination agreement and an international campaign, ideally initiated by President Barack Obama, to phase out and clean up all global civilian nuclear power generating plants as well as all global nuclear weapons production facilities by the year 2030. (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 64.)

March 10, 1956 – A U.S. Air Force B-47 bomber, carrying two capsules of payload pits for nuclear warheads, crashed and was lost at sea while flying from MacDill Air Force Base, Florida to a NATO base in Western Europe. Comments: This incident represents yet another example of hundreds of nuclear accidents, near-misses, and “Broken Arrows,” only some of which the Pentagon and other members of the Nuclear Club have formally acknowledged. (Source: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013.)

March 11, 1985 – After the demise of Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev was selected to serve as General Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee (and eventually as President of the Soviet Union).   This new generation Soviet leader promoted glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) and other reforms including reductions in the size of the Soviet military. On March 24, 1985, Gorbachev wrote the first of a series of letters to President Reagan pleading for peaceful coexistence. On January 15, 1986, he announced a three-stage proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2000 but, influenced by hardline advisors, President Reagan rejected this plan. Eventually both sides, including Reagan’s successor George H. W. Bush, signed the START I treaty and the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991. The Cold War was over. Gorbachev accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and retired from politics. In January of 2015, Gorbachev warned that the current confrontation between NATO and Russia in Ukraine could trigger an all-out war. “I can no longer say that this Cold War will not lead to a ‘Hot War’,” he said, “I fear that they (U.S./E.U., Ukraine, and Russian governments) could risk it.”   Comments: The risks of nuclear war are as high as ever and yet politicians, pundits, and so-called “experts” on both sides continually downgrade and disregard the threat of Omnicide. (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 30-31.)

March 12, 1995 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Managing America’s Nuclear Complex” 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 discussed issues associated with the underfunded (then and now) cleanup of dozens of major sites (such as Fernald, Ohio, Hanford, Washington, Paducah, Kentucky, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee) and hundreds of smaller Pentagon and Department of Energy installations involved in nuclear weapon production. Comments: Today, there remain serious concerns about the continuing health and environmental risks of not only these military nuclear sites but of nearly one hundred civilian nuclear power reactors and the accompanying infrastructure including the flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant nuclear waste storage site near Carlsbad, New Mexico.

March 15, 1954 – Although President Dwight Eisenhower later rejected a Joint Chiefs of Staff Advanced Study Group recommendation that the United States, “deliberately precipitate (nuclear) war with the U.S.S.R. in the near future…before the U.S.S.R. could achieve a large enough thermonuclear capability to be a real menace to the continental U.S.,” on this date, consistent with that study, a Strategic Air Command briefing given by General Curtis LeMay advocated the use of 600-750 atomic bombs in a two-hour period so that, “all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking radioactive ruin.” (Source: Richard Rhodes. “Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.” New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996, pp. 563-564.)

March 21, 1997 – At the Helsinki Summit, Presidents William Clinton and Boris Yeltsin issued a Joint Statement on the Parameters of Future Reductions in Nuclear Forces with significant START II reductions to 2,000 to 2,500 deployed strategic nuclear warheads by December 31, 2007 and with a bilateral goal of making the START treaties permanent. Presidents Obama and Medvedev reduced strategic nuclear weapons further in the New START Treaty however, despite Obama’s April 2009 Prague speech rhetoric about eliminating nuclear weapons, both nations have recently proposed increased spending for nuclear weapons, laboratory upgrades, and a new generation of launch platforms with the U.S. potentially spending $1 trillion in the next 30 years. (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 40-44, and mainstream and alternative news media reports from November 2014-February 2015.)

March 26, 1999 – With the start of the NATO campaign of air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces, the Russian Duma postponed a vote on the START II Treaty (which was later ratified on April 14, 2000 by a vote of 288-131).   Comments: Just as today, NATO considers direct Russian military intervention in Ukraine a violation of the 35-nation August 1975 Helsinki Final Act, so too did Russia consider NATO military action against her Serbian allies in the Balkans as a similar violation of the 1975 agreement to prevent future nation-state conflict in Europe.   The U.S., NATO, Russia, and Ukraine all need to make major concessions to de-escalate the current Ukraine Crisis, which could conceivably trigger a wider European war or even a nuclear conflict!   (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 42, 119.)

March 28, 1979 – A partial meltdown of two reactors at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg was one of the most serious nuclear accidents in history. It caused a massive release of radioactive products endangering residents in the region in the immediate aftermath and for decades after this incident. The “cleanup” of the accident between August 1979 and December 1993 cost taxpayers approximately $1 billion.   The incident came four years after the Norman C. Rasmussen-chaired Nuclear Regulatory Commission-sponsored report (designated “WASH-1400”), which downgraded the nuclear accident consequences noted in previous government and nongovernmental reports.   German-American nuclear physicist Hans Bethe (1906-2005) wrote an article in the January 1976 edition of Scientific American, which provided a more realistic threat assessment of a catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown than the Rasmussen Report. Bethe’s analysis concluded that a serious nuclear accident would claim 3,300 prompt fatalities, create 45,000 instances of early radiation illness, impact 240,000 individuals with cancerous thyroid nodules over a 30-year period, produce 45,000 latent cancer fatalities over the same time period, and trigger approximately 30,000 genetic defects spanning a 150-year period. His estimated cost (in 1976 dollars) of such an accident was $14 billion. Comments: In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, 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: “14 Year Cleanup at Three Mile Island Concludes.” New York Times. Aug. 15, 1993 accessed on February 6, 2015 at www.nytimes.com and various news media reports.)