Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • Reagan’s Ambassador to Moscow Says US Suffers from Autistic Foreign Policy

    martin_hellman1This article was originally published by Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    Three days ago, I posted excerpts I had found in news articles from an important but overlooked speech by Ambassador Jack Matlock. Today I found both a full transcript of his speech and its YouTube video. Matlock was our Ambassador to Moscow under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

    I compared the transcript to the video and found the transcript to be accurate. Other than cleaning up some verbal comments to make them more readable, I only found a few, inconsequential errors. I’ve attached what I saw as the most important parts of Ambassador Matlock’s speech below my signature line.

    If you think this speech deserve greater attention, please let friends know of this post via email, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In, or other social media. This speech by one of America’s most respected experts on foreign relations – Matlock represented us in key negotiations to end the Cold War – still has not been covered by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and I suspect most other major American media. (An OpEd in the Washington Post did mention it, but only in passing and in derogatory terms. Another OpEd in the Post reported on the speech in favorable terms.)

    Martin Hellman

    === BEGIN EXCERPTS FROM AMBASSADOR MATLOCK’S SPEECH ===

    … as things have developed, and as I see debates now as to whether the United States should supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, I wonder what is going on.

    I see all these debates, and saying, “Oh, Russia’s only a regional power.” … I think the elephant in the room, which nobody is referring to, is the nuclear issue. No country which has ICBMs … is a regional power.* …

    The most important thing we did in ending the Cold War was cooling the nuclear arms race. If there are any issues for this country to face that are existential, that’s it. …

    If the United States gets further involved in what is, in the minds of the Russians, territory [Ukraine] which has historically been part of their country, given the present atmosphere, I don’t see how we are going to prevent another nuclear arms race. And that’s what scares me.

    … when we ended the Cold War, we had a coherent policy … Our goal, and that of our allies, and that of the Soviet leaders, and their successor Russian leaders, was a Europe whole and free. …

    Now, there’s been a lot of debate as to whether President Gorbachev was promised that there would be no NATO expansion to the East. There was no treaty signed saying that. But as we negotiated an agreement to end the Cold War, first President [George H.W.] Bush, at a Malta meeting in 1989, and then later, in 1990, almost all the Western leaders, told Gorbachev: If you remove your troops from Eastern Europe, if you let Eastern Europe go free, then we will not take advantage of it.

    Now, there’s no way, by moving an alliance that was originally designed to protect Western Europe from the aggression of the East, you move it to the East—how are you going to keep a Europe whole and free? If you have a Europe whole and free, Russia and all the others have to be part of the system.

    So later, not out of design, but simply, I think, largely because of domestic politics, and the East Europeans wanting protection against a threat that at that point didn’t exist, but [which] might in the future, we started expanding NATO.

    The Russian reaction at first was not that negative, but then other things began to happen. After 9/11, then President Putin was the first foreign President to call President [George W.] Bush, and offer their cooperation and support. And we got it when we invaded Afghanistan. We got their vote in the UN. We got intelligence support and other support, logistics support, in getting there.

    What did they get in return? … We walk out of the ABM Treaty, which was the basis of all of our arms control treaties, and the one in which we could deal with each other as equals. We keep on expanding NATO, and not only expand it, we begin to talk about bases there [in Eastern Europe], about deploying anti-ballistic missiles, for no good reason at all. Supposedly it was to defend the Europeans against the Iranians—the Iranians at that point didn’t have missiles that could attack them, nor was it apparent to many of us why the Iranians would ever want to attack the Europeans. What are they going to get out of that? …

    We didn’t set out … to stick it to Russia. I don’t think there was any intent. We had a lot of reasons, mainly domestic political reasons, to follow these courses. But, we were simply ignoring the Russian reaction, the inevitable Russian reaction.

    And so what we began to get was a reaction from what you could say was, at best, inconsiderate American actions, to a Russian over-reaction. And you know, when you set up these vibrations, they can be amplified. …

    But the process was, that we developed an atmosphere, which, even before this Ukrainian crisis broke upon us, was one of … perceived hostility … between us. Something that we had [ended], when we ended the Cold War. …

    [When President Reagan was working to end the Cold War, he wrote a memo that] said we’re much too upfront on human rights. We will get a lot of cheers from the bleachers by beating up on them on human rights, but it will not help the people involved. In fact, it could hurt them. And he went on to say, we’ve got to go private. It’s too important to confront them.

    And he concluded this memo by saying, whatever we achieve, we must not consider it victory, because that will simply make the next achievement more difficult.

    You have, in a nutshell, a description, I would say, of what, in the last 15 years at least, we have been doing the opposite. And I think what Reagan understood … was human relations. And he also understood, unlike many of the people on his staff, that the other side are made up also of human beings, with their own politics, their own requirements. And number one, you’ve got to deal with them with respect, and you’ve got to deal with them in a way that you don’t expect them to do something that is not in the true interest of their country.

    So, our effort then was simply, that we needed to convince the Soviet leader—and in this case, eventually, Gorbachev—that their past policy was not serving their interests. And it was not! …

    Now, what do we see has happened [today to make a new Cold War possible]? … I would say it’s not just the President—in fact, the worst offender by far is the U.S. Congress. And what Russia has been reacting to is what they consider insufferable arrogance and humiliation for several years. … we’re reading op-eds right now—to save the world system of peace, we must provide arms to Ukraine so that they can defend themselves. …

    Let me add another element now, which I find particularly disturbing, and that is the personalization of the whole relationship. It’s hard to read anything in most of our press that doesn’t attribute all the Russian actions to one man, and that man is usually characterized in the most unflattering terms, with various names. This is true both of the media, which, of course, can call things as they wish, but also, of our officials. You know, it seems to me that if you really want to settle the situation, you don’t set up, in effect, a public duel between your President and another person, particularly when the other President has most of the marbles in the nation at issue.

    When President Putin says we’re not going to allow the Ukrainian situation to be resolved by military means, he means it. And no amount of shouting about this is going to change that. And for the President of the United States to appear to challenge him to do other things, simply has a negative effect. …

    So, I think that one thing that we need to do, is to get this personal debate at the top of the government out. We really have to stop that, because it’s got a negative effect! When you say, “I’ve isolated him, he’s losing. Look, you didn’t like what I was doing, but this guy’s losing.” What’s his reaction? “I’ll show him if I’m losing!”

    So, who wins from that sort of exchange?

    But the biggest problem really hasn’t been the President. He’s been much better on many of these issues than Congress. And I would say one of the most outrageous things, that did much to create the atmosphere that we are in, which is one that nobody is going to benefit from, was the Magnitsky Act. [Search this blog on Magnitsky and Jackson-Vanik (its predecessor) for details.]

    Here you have the United States Congress, which, in that year [2012], could not even pass a budget, passing a law about a court case in Moscow, where it was alleged that the lawyer was mistreated, and he died while he was in detention. That was potentially a real scandal in Moscow.

    So, what does the U.S. Congress do? They pass legislation requiring the Administration to identify publicly, and take action … [against] specific people who might have been involved. One of the things, when I was ambassador in Moscow, I would talk about a lot, is how we really need to respect the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Here we have a case, in another jurisdiction—there may have been a scandal there, there may not have been—a law is passed, limited to Russia, by name, and when one Congressman was asked about it, he said, “Oh, it’s not about Russia, it’s about human rights.”

    If it’s not about Russia, why did you limit it to Russia? And I would point out, this was at a time when the United States had torturers and was not prosecuting them. Was that any concern to the American Congress? It was a time where, since then, we have learned that were several prisoners on death row who were proved to be innocent. … It would seem to me that the U.S. Congress should pay a little more attention [to those violations of human rights]. … human rights are important, very important. But you do not protect them by public pressure on another country, particularly when you are unwilling to judge yourself.

    The State Department, now for decades, has to report on human rights in every country in the world, but one—want to guess which one that is?

    … it seems to me when I really looked at what our policies have been … what we have gotten has been action/reaction, insults followed by insults answered, and so on. I wonder, when I think about how the policy is made, I was wondering, how do you characterize this?

    We’ve heard a lot recently about autism, and whether there’s any connection with vaccination and so on. And suddenly, I said, you know, we have an autistic foreign policy! Let me read you—I went back and looked at the actual definition of autism:

    “Autism is characterized by impaired social interaction, verbal and non-verbal communication, and restricted and repetitive behavior.”

    When the Congress of the United States votes over 30 times in a legislation they know is never going to become law, I would say that is restricted and repetitive behavior, and our problem is really an autistic foreign policy.

    ___________

    * Ambassador Matlock was referring to President Obama’s March 25, 2014, speech at The Hague, in which he said: “With respect to Mr. Romney’s assertion that Russia’s our number one geopolitical foe, the truth of the matter is that, you know, America’s got a whole lot of challenges. Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors — not out of strength, but out of weakness.”

  • A Dangerous Trend Line

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    martin_hellman1For a number of years I have advocated a risk framework for reducing the danger of a Russian-American crisis escalating out of control to nuclear threats. One tool in that approach is to highlight early steps in accident chains which could lead to catastrophe and, instead of ignoring them, to treat them as early warning signs needing remedial action. Doing that is one goal of this blog, but a recent Gallup poll shows how miserably I (and others) are succeeding. Gallup’s accompanying news release starts out:

    Russia now edges out North Korea as the country Americans consider the United States’ greatest enemy. Two years ago, only 2% of Americans named Russia, but that increased to 9% in 2014 as tensions between Russia and the U.S. increased, and now sits at 18%.

    An article in yesterday’s Moscow Times notes a similar trend in Russia:

    Meanwhile, the results of a recent Russian survey shows the feelings are mutual. Some 81 percent of Russians view the United States negatively, independent Moscow-based pollster the Levada Center revealed earlier this month. The findings represented an all-time high for the pollster, which has been conducting similar studies since 1990.

    The Gallup news release concludes with a possible prescription for halting this accident chain before it progresses any closer to the nuclear abyss (emphasis added):

    However, because Americans’ attitudes about Russia have changed substantially in the past and have been quite positive at times — which has not been the case for countries such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea — if Russian and American policy interests find more common ground, Americans’ views of Russia could recover quickly.

    While the release doesn’t say what that “common ground” might be, mutual survival in the nuclear age would seem to top the list. Another common interest would be to alleviate the human suffering in Ukraine, something which can only be done by reining in both the pro-Russian separatists and the most virulently nationalistic elements within the Ukrainian militias.

  • More Russians Fear Nuclear War

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    martin_hellman1The risk analysis approach I have advocated for reducing the threat of nuclear war doesn’t wait for a catastrophe to occur before taking remedial action since, clearly, that would be too late. Instead, it sees catastrophes as the final step in a chain of mistakes, and tries to stop the accident chain at the earliest possible stage. The news coming out of Ukraine for over a year has given us many options for doing that, but few in this country seem aware of the nuclear dimension to the risk. Russians are more aware, with a recent poll showing 17% who fear a nuclear war, versus 8% two years ago. 

    I suspect that much of the difference in American and Russian perspectives is due to our relative distances from the carnage. The Ukrainian civil war is being fought on Russia’s doorstep, and has flooded Russia with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.

    Unfortunately, those very different perspectives also create the possibility for one side to inadvertently threaten the perceived vital interests of the other. To a large extent, that’s how the Cuban Missile Crisis started.

    Numerous examples of such misperception have been highlighted in this blog (search on Ukraine to find them), and a recent article in the Nixon Center’s journal The National Interest provides additional examples. These examples focus on the West’s mistakes not because Putin is blameless, but because our mistakes are the only ones which we have the power to correct.

    Looking at the ways we could help stop the violence in Ukraine illustrates another advantage of risk analysis: It doesn’t just reduce the risk of catastrophe. It also helps build a more peaceful world.

    If you agree that these ideas need wider consideration, please add a link on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter, and use other social media to help get the word out. Thank you!

  • February: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    February 1, 1955 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after a White House meeting in which top Army leaders lobbied for large U.S. troop increases in Europe, replied, “The Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos [if a war started with the Soviet Union]. You can’t have this kind of war, there just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.” (Source: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013, p. 144.)

    February 1, 2011 – David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt’s New York Times article, “Pakistan Nuclear Arms Pose Challenges to U.S. Policy” revealed that recent leaks by Pakistani or other South Asian sources put the number of nuclear warheads in that nation’s nuclear arsenal as 110 with enough fissile material to make 40-100 more warheads. If true, this would allow Pakistan to eclipse France as the world’s fifth largest nuclear power. Comments: While it is possible that disinformation may be inflating the arsenals of long-time antagonists India and Pakistan (who fought three wars in 1947, 1965, and 1971 and nearly came to nuclear blows at the turn of the millennium), it is nevertheless also true that tensions between not only India-Pakistan but also the United States and Pakistan could one day trigger a nuclear conflict in the region unless all nations push for global zero reductions and, in the shorter-term, a South Asian NWFZ (nuclear-weapon-free-zone).

    February 2, 1993 – Semipalatinsk, the main Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan where 456 (340 underground and 116 above ground) of the Soviet/Russian total of 715 nuclear tests were conducted between 1949 and 1989, was officially closed. On October 3, 1995, the U.S., under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, agreed to help permanently shut down the site and in the period 1997-2000, 181 test tunnels and 13 test shafts at the site were sealed in a cooperative U.S.-Kazakhstan effort. The site was declared “safe” by U.S. authorities according to a 2012 Department of Defense Fact Sheet, although the resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests have negatively impacted generations of peoples living in the surrounding region.

    (Sources:   Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 15-16, 24 and Nuclear Threat Initiative website http://www.nti.org/facilities/ accessed January 7, 2015.)

    February 8, 1982 – In the second edition of a three-part series published in The New Yorker, which later appeared as the award-winning, best-selling book “The Fate of the Earth,” New York city native and staff writer of that publication Jonathan Schell (August 21, 1943 – March 25, 2014) disagreed with Christian fundamentalists who argued that the nuclear holocaust that the U.S. threatened to unleash is the Armageddon threatened by God in the Bible. “It is not God who threatens us but we ourselves.” Shell argued. “Extinction would be utterly meaningless. There can be no justification for it and therefore no justification for any nation to push the world into nuclear hostilities.” And he also warned that, “…gigantic insane crimes are not prevented merely because they are ‘unthinkable.’ We must recognize the peril, dismantle the weapons and arrange the political affairs of the earth so that the weapons will not be built again.” (Source: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/02/08/the-fate-of-the-earth-ii-the-second-death.)

    February 13-14, 1950 – A U.S. Convair B-36 bomber, equipped with a Mark IV nuclear bomb, took off from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska enroute to Carswell Air Force Base, New Mexico on a mission simulating a nuclear attack on the city of San Francisco. The plane was forced down when a design flaw caused three of its engines to catch fire near Vancouver Island off the Canadian coast. The Mark IV, which was made of uranium but thankfully had a nonworking lead nuclear pit, was jettisoned and the bomb’s 5,000 pound high explosive charge detonated at around 3,000 feet altitude. 12 of the crew of 16 personnel survived the crash. This incident was allegedly the first known loss of a nuclear weapon in history and it constitutes just one example of hundreds of nuclear accidents, near-misses, and “Broken Arrows” – any one of which could have accidentally triggered an unintentional nuclear war.   That risk still exists today.   (Sources:   Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013 and website http://introtoglobalstudies.com/2012/10/broken-arrow-lost-nuclear-weapon-in-Canada accessed January 8, 2015.)

    February 17, 1953 – Years after serving as the civilian director of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave one of many speeches opposing the growing nuclear arms race, this one at the Council on Foreign Relations. “We may anticipate a state of affairs in which [the U.S. and U.S.S.R.] will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and the life of the other, though not without risking its own…We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” (Sources: Craig Nelson. “The Age of Radiance.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 259 and note that Oppenheimer’s speech excerpts were published in the July 1953 edition of Foreign Affairs: “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” p. 529.)

    February 20, 1971 – At 9:33 a.m. EST, the National Emergency Warning Center at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado Springs allegedly transmitted an emergency teletype message directing all U.S. radio and television stations to cease normal broadcasting by order of President Richard Nixon. The message was not cancelled for more than 40 minutes. This incident may have been caused by a teletype operator loading the wrong tape instead of the routine Emergency Broadcast Network test broadcast. Nevertheless, newsrooms across America were in turmoil and the public was unnecessarily panicked. (Source: Jesus Diaz. This Message From NORAD Announced Global Nuclear War – In 1971. July 5, 2012. http://gizmodo.com/5923528/this-message-from-norad-announced-world-nuclear-war-in-1971 accessed January 7, 2015.)

    February 23, 2013 – The Washington Post reported that Governor Jay Inslee had publicly announced that six of the 177 million gallon nuclear waste tanks at Hanford Reservation in south-central Washington state were experiencing significant leaks. The tanks are long-past their 20-year life span and the federal government is spending just a few billion dollars annually cleaning up dozens of legacy nuclear bomb-making sites nationally.   Comments:   In addition to the large military nuclear waste problem at sites like Hanford, Paducah, Kentucky, Fernald, Ohio, Oak Ridge, Tennessee and other locations, civilian nuclear power plant wastes, including thousands of spent fuel rods kept in water storage pools at nuclear reactor sites, and wastes shipped to the flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Project facility in New Mexico, represent a decades-long growing problem for not only the United States but for dozens of other nations that oversee the world’s 400 civilian nuclear power plants. This is yet another reason to call for not only the elimination of thousands of nuclear weapons but also the dangerous, economically unsustainable, and unhealthy global civilian nuclear power infrastructure. The huge clean up conundrum is growing exponentially worse year after year but policymakers continue to ignore or downgrade this crisis.

  • The Caretaker and the Plague: British Nuclear Weapons Testing in Australia

    Ursula Gelis, Executive director of the ‘Global Women’s Association against Nuclear Testing’ works for the rights and needs of victims of nuclear weapons explosions and nuclear testing. Her partners are in Kazakhstan and other states, affected by the long-term effects of nuclear weapons testing. At the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in December 2014[1], she interviewed an anti-nuclear activist and nuclear test victim from Australia.

    Sue Haseldine
    Sue Haseldine in front of the Black Death column in Vienna in December 2014. Photo: Ursula Gelis

    The Plague column in Vienna convincingly depicts human suffering; in this case – the tragedy of the Black Death epidemic from 1679 in Austria which killed about 30 000 to 75 000 souls. A Black Death does not distinguish between a noble and a beggar, and a nuclear weapon explosion does not either.

    In today’s Australia, Aboriginal communities are still suffering from European racism that came in the aftermath of Captain Cook (1770) who looked at the Aborigines as lucky people, even if they did not own many material goods!

    The first inhabitants of Australia, the people who were there ab origine, from the beginning, were food-gathering and hunting people. They arrived about 50,000 years ago.[2]

    From region to region, Aboriginal tribes have clear cultural distinctions and their ability to co-exist with nature in a sustainable way could serve as a paradigm for human survival.

    Western cultures, still proud of their technological achievements, and apparently committed to poison and to destroy the whole Earth, should listen to indigenous civilizations in order to prevent human extinction.

    Aborigines survived best by avoiding contact with ‘White people’. The invaders brought diseases indigenous people had no immunity to resist. Children were taken away by missionaries, claiming that the parents were infidels.[3] Interestingly enough, the church and social Darwinism partnered in suppressing Aborigines. Evolution theory served to justify any brutality: massacres, plundering of goods, rape, etc. The ‘savage’ had to be domesticated and was defined as a race doomed to be extinct.[4]

    In 1947 the British government decided to develop their own nuclear weapons program. “In August 1954, the Australian Cabinet agreed to the establishment of a permanent testing ground at a site that became named Maralinga, […] in southwestern South Australia.”[5]

    The United Kingdom conducted 12 atmospheric tests between 1952 and 1957 on Australian territories at Maralinga, Emu Fields and Monte Bello Islands. […] During the testing period, roughly 16,000 Australian civilians and servicemen involved in the tests and 22,000 British servicemen were exposed to nuclear fallout.[6]

    “Aboriginal people living downwind of the tests and other Australians more distant […] came into contact with airborne radioactivity.”[7]

    “Plutonium and uranium fallout […] contaminated Aboriginal lands. Although the British government declared the Maralinga site safe following a 1967 cleanup, surveys in the 1980s proved otherwise, prompting a new cleanup project. Conflicts of interest, cost-cutting measures, shallow burials of radioactive waste, and other management “compromises” have left hundreds of square kilometers of Aboriginal lands contaminated and unfit for rehabilitation.”[8]

    Civil disobedience

    Sue Coleman-Haseldine (64) from the Kokatha-Mula nation is a survivor of British nuclear weapon testing and spoke at the Vienna conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in December 2014[9].

    Sue was born in Ceduna, a city about 1000 kilometers straight west from Adelaide, South Australia. Her community, including the local farmers, consists of approximately 4000 people. She grew up nearby, lived in the region all her life and can trace back the family’s history up to her great grand-mother.

    “Our knowledge about colonialism started with Captain Cook. My grand grand-father was an Irish man who eventually went back to the white people. Our old people told us not to hate him. They were singing Irish songs to us around the camp fire. My first language was Kokatha, which is also my tribe’s name. Later at school, we had to learn English.”

    Sue’s mother’s generation had to follow the colonizer’s order of only speaking English, so Sue was educated to speak her native tongue by her grand-parents as the cultural tradition-keeper. She went to an English school and grew up at a German mission.[10]

    Sue always tried to combine traditional life-style with the governmental request of following the ‘British way’. She went out in the bush, kept Aboriginal traditions and educated herself and others. “This was maybe already an act of resistance, I guess”, she said smiling. Sue won the South Australian premier’s award for excellence in indigenous leadership in 2007 for her work as an activist, cultural teacher and environmental defender.[11]

    “The elderly people had talked about the Nullarbor[12] dust storm, not knowing that they had seen the fall-out from Maralinga. I knew about Maralinga and started questioning the amount of cancer deaths. This was at the time when I started my own family.

    More and more people were dying of leukemia and thyroid cancer. I had doctors remove my thyroids. My grand-daughter got it as well. The official city doctors offered us a radioactive drink to kill the cancer cells but we refused. My husband has heart problems and his family members died from leukemia too. Sometimes people die from ‘unknown causes’.

    We learned that the effects of radiation can pass from one generation to the other and can also ‘jump further’ to the third one. When I taught about bush food I felt terribly guilty because I knew about the contamination of the soil. When I spoke to our doctor he simply said that I should carry on teaching about traditional food because we could not do anything about the contamination.”

    Entertaining workers of the nuclear program

    British servicemen could feel at home among friendly people from the Kokatha-Mula nation. Soldiers were accompanied to the beach during their holidays and Sue vividly remembers those encounters. “They were just ordinary soldiers, away from home and lonely. We became simply friendly with them. Also they had been misused as guinea-pigs. We had no clue that dying might have been already begun.

    We were just innocent. We were not allowed to go to Maralinga. I know that the area was poisoned yet we did not know a lot. The old people could feel it, I guess.” –

    Recently, “a […] case-control study examined miscarriage in wives and congenital conditions in offspring of the 2007 membership of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, a group of ex-servicemen who were stationed at atmospheric nuclear weapon test sites between 1952-67 [was conducted]…”[13]

    Sue talks about the ‘Seven Sisters’, the Pleiades star constellation which plays also a role in Aboriginal traditions. The stars are girls who were travelling through Australia being chased by a man. One was caught and killed. Eventually she went up to the skies, followed by her free sisters.

    “When we see them from September to March in the Australian skies, we think of them as strong. We are saying that what the sisters bury, man should never dig up because everything buried was poisoned.

    My people are still living on contaminated land, because clean-up operations were not sufficient. Before testing, we had to leave our territories. Officials told us that our displacement is for governmental purposes. We had no idea what really was going on in terms of nuclear explosions.

    After testing people were sent back, for instance to a place called ‘Old Valley’ on Maralinga lands but Maralinga village was closed off. The government is now thinking to open it as a tourist site.

    In terms of measuring radioactivity we are totally cut off from acquiring information because it is illegal to have a Geiger counter! We are particular concerned of the uranium mining industry, exploiting sands found near the former testing site. Plutonium testing took place at the Woomera rocket range site. The place is military territory and we do not know what actually is going on there.”

    Overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one)

    “There was a fellow called Eddie Koiki Mabo fighting for that the native Australians had a prior title to land” ‘taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770’.[14]

    “Normally rules are not very nice for Aboriginal people. Property rights are splitting communities and devastate families. The government wanted us to prove that we had lived on our land for the last two hundred years. I said no, because this land was given to me by birth and not by the British government. So finally we could seek recognition but the minerals belong to the Crown.”

    The Australian Nuclear Free Alliance. ANFA (http://anfa.org.au).

    “Our alliance is well connected and once a month the community leaders link up by phone and we talk about what to do next. During meetings, governmental people are absent. We have international visitors from France, Japan and so on. People from all over the world should know that we do exist, that we are humans (laughter).

    We want to stop uranium mining, let us start with banning it for a year first. Then we could probably breathe better…and of course, I do not want any nuclear weapon testing. Nuclear weapons should not exist.

    In order to understand our complex societies, it is best to be with us for a while. Our strong connection to the land might be valuable for you to experience. We do not own the land, the land owns us. Come over, a week is plenty of time to convert you into one of us.”

    Endnotes

    [1]http://www.bmeia.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/Zentrale/Aussenpolitik/Abruestung/HINW14/HINW14_Austrian_Pledge.pdf.

    [2] (http://www.visitmungo.com.au/aboriginal-remains).

    [3] Gerhard Leitner. Die Aborigines Australiens. München 2006, p. 8.

    [4] Leitner, p. 21/22.

    [5] Chapter 16: A toxic legacy: British nuclear weapons testing in Australia. Published in:
    Wayward governance : illegality and its control in the public sector / P N Grabosky
    Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989 (Australian studies in law, crime and justice series); pp. 235-253. http://aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/lcj/1-20/wayward/ch16.html.

    [6] From 1957 to 1958, nine atmospheric tests followed over Christmas Island (Kiritimati) and Malden Island in the central Pacific Ocean, some of which were considerably more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The remaining 24 UK nuclear tests were conducted jointly with the United States at the Nevada Test Site.

    [7] http://aic.gov.au/publications/previous%20series/lcj/1-20/wayward/ch16.html.

    [8] M&GS 2002;7:77-81. http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/mgs/7-2-parkinson.pdf.

    [9] http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/vienna-2014/8Dec_Coleman.pdf.

    [10] Occasional Paper 3: The struggle for souls and science, constructing the fifth continent: German missionaries and scientists in Australia. The 16 papers in this volume, edited by Professor Walter Veit, explore the contribution of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German scientists and missionaries in the emerging fields of Australian ethnography and linguistics.

    Themes within the papers include the study of Aboriginal religion, language, and art, and the conflict between missionaries and the emerging discipline of academic anthropology in Australia and Britain.

    Occasional Papers Number 3 also addresses the academic influences, research agendas and methodologies of the German scholars who worked in Australia, as well as the extent to which those scholars dominated the creation of an image of Australia in Europe in both theory and practice. http://artsandmuseums.nt.gov.au/museums/strehlow/manuscripts/publications.

    [11] Black Mist. The Impact of Nuclear Weapons on Australia. http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/BlackMist-FINAL-Web.pdf.

    [12] http://www.exploringaustralia.com.au/showplace.php?p=176.

    [13] http://omicsonline.org/epidemiology-open-access-abstract.php?abstract_id=30829.

    [14] The Mabo decision altered the foundation of land law in Australia by overturning the doctrine of terra nullius (land belonging to no-one) on which British claims to possession of Australia were based. This recognition inserted the legal doctrine of native title into Australian law. The judgments of the High Court in the Mabo case recognized the traditional rights of the Meriam people to their islands in the eastern Torres Strait. The Court also held that native title existed for all Indigenous people in Australia prior to the establishment of the British Colony of New South Wales in 1788. In recognizing that Indigenous people in Australia had a prior title to land taken by the Crown since Cook’s declaration of possession in 1770, the Court held that this title exists today in any portion of land where it has not legally been extinguished. The decision of the High Court was swiftly followed by the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) which attempted to codify the implications of the decision and set out a legislative regime under which Australia’s Indigenous people could seek recognition of their native title rights.

    http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/ntru/resources/resourceissues/mabo.pdf.

  • Are the U.S. and Russian Governments Once Again on the Nuclear Warpath?

    This article was originally published by History News Network.

    Lawrence WittnerA quarter century after the end of the Cold War and decades after the signing of landmark nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, are the U.S. and Russian governments once more engaged in a potentially disastrous nuclear arms race with one another? It certainly looks like it.

    With approximately 15,000 nuclear weapons between them, the United States and Russia already possess about 93 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, thus making them the world’s nuclear hegemons. But, apparently, like great powers throughout history, they do not consider their vast military might sufficient, especially in the context of their growing international rivalry.

    Although, in early 2009, President Barack Obama announced his “commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” the U.S. government today has moved well along toward implementing an administration plan for U.S. nuclear “modernization.” This entails spending $355 billion over a ten-year period for a massive renovation of U.S. nuclear weapons plants and laboratories. Moreover, the cost is scheduled to soar after this renovation, when an array of new nuclear weapons will be produced. “That’s where all the big money is,” noted Ashton Carter, recently nominated as U.S. Secretary of Defense. “By comparison, everything that we’re doing now is cheap.” The Obama administration has asked the Pentagon to plan for 12 new nuclear missile-firing submarines, up to 100 new nuclear bombers, and 400 land-based nuclear missiles. According to outside experts and a bipartisan, independent panel commissioned by Congress and the Defense Department, that will bring the total price tag for the U.S. nuclear weapons buildup to approximately $1 trillion.

    For its part, the Russian government seems determined to match―or surpass―that record. With President Vladimir Putin eager to use nuclear weapons as a symbol of Russian influence, Moscow is building, at great expense, new generations of giant ballistic missile submarines, as well as nuclear attack submarines that are reportedly equal or superior to their U.S. counterparts in performance and stealth. Armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles, they periodically make forays across the Atlantic, heading for the U.S. coast. Deeply concerned about the potential of these missiles to level a surprise attack, the U.S. military has already launched the first of two experimental “blimps” over Washington, DC, designed to help detect them. The Obama administration also charges that Russian testing of a new medium-range cruise missile is a violation of the 1987 INF treaty. Although the Russian government denies the existence of the offending missile, its rhetoric has been less than diplomatic. As the Ukraine crisis developed, Putin told a public audience that “Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers,” and foreign nations “should understand it’s best not to mess with us.” Pravda was even more inflammatory. In an article published in November titled “Russia prepares a nuclear surprise for NATO,” it bragged about Russia’s alleged superiority over the United States in nuclear weaponry.

    Not surprisingly, the one nuclear disarmament agreement signed between the U.S. and Russian governments since 2003―the New START treaty of 2011―is being implemented remarkably slowly. New START, designed to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons (the most powerful ones) in each country by 30 percent by 2018, has not led to substantial reductions in either nation’s deployed nuclear arsenal. Indeed, between March and October 2014, the two nations each increased their deployed nuclear forces. Also, they maintain large arsenals of nuclear weapons targeting one another, with about 1,800 of them on high alert―ready to be launched within minutes against the populations of both nations.

    The souring of relations between the U.S. and Russian governments has been going on for years, but it has reached a very dangerous level during the current confrontation over Ukraine. In their dealings with this conflict-torn nation, there’s plenty of fault on both sides. U.S. officials should have recognized that any Russian government would have been angered by NATO’s steady recruitment of East European countries―especially Ukraine, which had been united with Russia in the same nation until recently, was sharing a common border with Russia, and was housing one of Russia’s most important naval bases (in Crimea). For their part, Russian officials had no legal basis for seizing and annexing Crimea or aiding heavily-armed separatists in the eastern portion of Ukraine.

    But however reckless the two nuclear behemoths have been, this does not mean that they have to continue this behavior. Plenty of compromise formulas exist―for example, leaving Ukraine out of NATO, altering that country’s structure to allow for a high degree of self-government in the war-torn east, and organizing a UN-sponsored referendum in Crimea. And possibilities for compromise also exist in other areas of U.S.-Russian relations.

    Failing to agree to a diplomatic settlement of these and other issues will do more than continue violent turmoil in Ukraine. Indeed, the disastrous, downhill slide of both the United States and Russia into a vastly expensive nuclear arms race will bankrupt them and, also, by providing an example of dependence on nuclear might, encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional nations. After all, how can they succeed in getting other countries to forswear developing nuclear weapons when―47 years after the U.S. and Soviet governments signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, in which they pledged their own nuclear disarmament―their successors are engaged in yet another nuclear arms race? Finally, of course, this new arms race, unless checked, seems likely to lead, sooner or later, to a nuclear catastrophe of immense proportions.

    Can the U.S. and Russian governments calm down, settle their quarrels peacefully, and return to a policy of nuclear disarmament? Let’s hope so.

    Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, “What’s Going On at UAardvark?”
  • The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence: A Short Animated Video from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

    The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence: A Short Animated Video from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

    This short animated video from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation outlines many of the reasons why nuclear deterrence cannot be proven to work and represents an existential threat to humanity.

     

  • 3 Minutes to Midnight

    This article was originally published by Common Dreams.

    Three Minutes to Midnight
    Image: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (www.thebulletin.org)

    The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just announced its latest nuclear Doomsday Clock moving ahead the minute hand to three minutes till midnight. The clock represents the count down to zero in minutes to nuclear apocalypse – midnight. This significant move of TWO minutes is the 22nd time since its inception in 1947 that the time has been changed.

    In moving the hand to 3 minutes to midnight, Kennette Benedict the Executive Director of the Bulletin, identified in her comments: “the probability of global catastrophe is very high”… “the choice is ours and the clock is ticking”…”we feel the need to warn the world” …”the decision was based on a very strong feeling of urgency”. She spoke to the dangers of both nuclear weapons and climate change saying, “they are both very difficult and we are ignoring them” and emphasized “this is about doomsday, this is about the end of civilization as we know it”. The Clock has ranged from 2 minutes to midnight at the height of the Cold War to 17 minutes till midnight with the hopes that followed the end of the Cold War. The decision to move the minute hand is made by the Bulletin’s Board of Directors in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates.

    What is clear is that the time to ban nuclear weapons is now. Today’s announcement by the Bulletin further corroborates the dangers confirmed by recent climate science. These studies identify the much greater dangers posed by even a small regional nuclear war using just 100 Hiroshima size bombs out of the 16,300 weapons in today’s global stockpiles. The ensuing dramatic climate changes and famine that would follow threaten the lives of up to 2 billion on the planet with effects that would last beyond 10 years. There is no escaping the global impact of such a small regional nuclear war.

    Medical science has weighed in on the impacts and devastation of even the smallest nuclear explosion in one of our cities and the reality is there is no adequate medical or public health response to such an attack. We kid ourselves into a false sense that we can prepare and plan for the outcome of a bomb detonation. Every aspect and facet of our society would be overwhelmed by a nuclear attack. Ultimately the resultant dead at ground zero would be the lucky ones.

    Probability theorists have long calculated the dismal odds that the chance for nuclear event either by plan or accident are not in our favor. Recent documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act detail over 1000 mishaps that have happened in our nuclear arsenals. Time is not on our side and the fact that we have not experienced a nuclear catastrophe is more a result of luck than mastery and control over these immoral weapons of terror.

    The time to act is now. There is so much that can and must be done. Congress will soon begin budget debates that include proposals to increase nuclear weapons spending for stockpile modernization by $355 Billion over the next decade and up to a Trillion in the next 30 years. Expenditures for weapons that can never be used and at a time when the economic needs for our country and world are so great.

    Around the world, there is a growing awareness of the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, and a corresponding desire to rid the world of these weapons.The Vienna Humanitarian Impacts of Nuclear Weapons conference last month saw 4/5 of the nations of the world participating. In Oct., 2014, at the UN, 155 nations called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. At Vienna, 44 nations plus the pope advocated for a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

    The people are making their voices heard and demanding a change of course from the status quo.

    In this week’s State of the Union address, President Obama emphasized that we are one people with a common destiny. He said this both in reference to our nation and our world. The threat of nuclear weapons unites us even as it threatens our very existence. This reality can also be remembered in the words of Martin Luther King when he said,

    “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

    The time for action is now, before it is too late. It’s 3 minutes till midnight.

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

    Robert Dodge is a family physician practicing full time in Ventura, California. He serves on the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles serving as a Peace and Security Ambassador and at the national level where he sits on the security committee. He also serves on the board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions. He writes for PeaceVoice.

  • January: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    January 5, 1991 – Shoshone native American leaders Corbin Harney and Chief Raymond Yorrell helped organize, along with other organizations such as Greenpeace, a mass protest of 3,000 people at the Nevada Test Site in response to the approximately 700 U.S. nuclear weapons tests conducted in and around Shoshone and other native peoples’ lands (of the 1,030 total U.S. nuclear test explosions conducted from 1945-1992) during the Cold War.   Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague global populations, most especially indigenous peoples, decades after over 2,000 nuclear bombs were exploded below ground or in the atmosphere by members of the Nuclear Club.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 24 and “3,000 Urge Test Ban,” Desert Voices:  The Newsletter of the Nevada Desert Experience, No. 9, Spring 1991, p. 3.)

    January 9, 2013 – An article released on this date by Bob Brewin on Nextgov.com, “Air Force Eyes Return to Mobile Nuclear Missiles,” triggered a number of critical responses by many nuclear experts including Philip E. Coyle, former director of the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation division (1994-2001), and Associate Director for National Security and International Affairs (NSIA) at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)(2010-2011) who now serves as a Senior Science Fellow at The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC.   Coyle noted that, “The U.S. Air Force needs to be careful not to stir up a hornet’s nest.  Mobile basing or advanced deployment concepts could cause Russia or China to redouble their efforts on mobile basing of ICBMs and set off a new kind of arms race and weaken U.S. defenses.”  Comments:  According to numerous press accounts, including a November 10, 2014 Los Angeles Times article as well as Pentagon press releases, a new nuclear arms race has, in fact, begun.  Russia, which just tested the new Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile this autumn, is planning on spending $560 billion on military modernization over the next six years with one-fourth of that total devoted to modernizing its nuclear arsenal.  The United States, is planning to spend at least $355 billion in the next few years (although analysts like Jeffrey Lewis of the Monterey Institute point out that a more realistic price tag is likely to be a trillion dollars over the next 30 years) to upgrade its strategic forces.   China, North Korea, Pakistan, India, and presumably Israel are doing the same.  Unfortunately, these circumstances equate to an increased likelihood of a nuclear confrontation somewhere in the world, including possibly a full-scale nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia.  (Source:  W.J. Hennigan and Ralph Vartabedian.  “As U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Ages, Other Nations Have Modernized.”  Los Angeles Times.  November 10, 2014.)

    January 10, 2000 – Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a new National Security Concept which eliminated a 1997 conception that allowed for the first use of nuclear arms only “in case of a threat to the existence of the Russian Federation.”  The new 2000 nuclear strategy document criticized “the attempt to create a structure of international relations based on the dominance of western countries led by the USA…with the use of military force, in violation of the fundamental norms of international law.”   It also endorsed “the use of all available means and forces, including nuclear weapons, in case of the need to repel an armed aggression when all other means of settling the crisis have been exhausted or proved ineffective.”   Comments:  Despite a formal ending to the Cold War with the breakup of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the fact that both the U.S. and Russia still possess thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status and that those nuclear sabers have been rattled over Ukraine very recently, the world still remains highly at risk of a nuclear Armageddon.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 43.)

    January 12, 1954 – President Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the U.S. policy of massive (nuclear) retaliation “in response to communist aggression anywhere in the world…applied at places and with means of [our] own choosing.”   Comments:  While U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear deterrence is not as heavy-handed as during the heart of the Cold War in the Fifties, a nuclear confrontation between the two nations is a frighteningly real possibility today.   Therefore each nation’s leaders should join a renewed global push to eliminate all nuclear weapons before it is too late.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 27.)

    January 14, 1994 – At a strategic summit meeting in Moscow, U.S. President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin reaffirmed their support for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by calling for the completion of the treaty, “as soon as possible.”  Within a few years, France (January 27, 1996) and China (July 29, 1996) joined the U.S. and Russia in a nuclear test ban moratorium, the United Nations’ General Assembly voted to adopt the CTBT (158-3) on September 10, 1996, and two weeks later, the first world leaders, with President Clinton being the very first, signed the CTBT.  Britain and France became the first declared nuclear weapon states to ratify the treaty by April 6, 1998, but the U.S. Senate rejected ratification on October 13, 1999 by a 51-48 vote.  On April 21, 2000, the Russian Duma approved ratification of the CTBT by 298 votes to 74, with three abstentions.   Comments:  Despite the Ukraine-Crimea Crisis, it is hoped that the new 114th U.S. Congress will recognize that, with an extensive international monitoring system in place as well as improved national technical means of verification,  ratifying the CTBT is essential to U.S.-Russian and global strategic stability.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 16, 18-19, 20, 22.)

    January 16, 1984 – In a nationally televised address, President Ronald Reagan stated, “…my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.”  Comments:  Ten months earlier on March 23, 1983, the President expressed similar sentiments while at the same time announcing a multi-trillion dollar long-term effort to intercept ballistic missiles in the atmosphere or in outer space – the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars” as media critics dubbed the plan, which triggered yet another round of destabilizing offensive and defensive nuclear weapons/missile defense developments that continue until this day.  (Source:  President Reagan’s Speech at the White House, January 16, 1984 at www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/11684a.htm accessed December 9, 2014.)

    January 25, 1995 – The launching of a joint U.S.-Norwegian scientific sounding rocket, the Black Brant XII, weeks after Russian authorities had been notified of the impending mission, almost caused World War III!   The missile, which appeared to Russian radar technicians as matching the signature of a U.S. Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile intended to blind their defenses in preparation for a first strike, triggered a nuclear alert.  Thankfully, a sober, rational President Boris Yeltsin resisted virulent, time-urgent recommendations from at least one of his military advisers to immediately launch a nuclear counterattack.   Comments:   Hundreds of false nuclear alerts and Broken Arrow nuclear accidents over the decades since the dawn of the nuclear age, have taken the world to the edge of global catastrophe.  This state of affairs represents possibly the most powerful rationale for eliminating all global nuclear arsenals.   (Source:  CATO Policy Analysis No. 399, Dr. Geoffrey Forden, March 3, 2001.)

    January 26, 2012 – President Obama’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, chaired by Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft, issued its final report on this date.  The report did not address critical issues such as the tremendous threat of radioactive waste and routine nuclear reactor operations to American’s health and environmental safety (such as groundwater contamination, increased cancer risk, and the threat to the human gene pool).  It did however conclude that, “No currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenge this nation confronts over at least the next several decades if not longer.”   Comments:  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 (with a very limited exception possibly for nuclear fusion research) over the next decade.  (Source:  Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, January 26, 2012, www.brc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/brc_finalreport_jan2012.pdf, accessed on December 9, 2014.)

    January 27, 1967 – The Outer Space Treaty, prohibiting the placement of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in orbit, on the moon, or on any celestial body, was signed on this date.  The treaty entered into force on October 10, 1967.  Comments:  Although this treaty has served mankind well, there remain suspicions that orbiting nuclear weapons can be easily and quickly deployed by the U.S., Russia, and other powers.  The Russians experimented with the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) during the Cold War.  Unfortunately, U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2002 spawned a renewed strategic defensive race and revived asymmetrical responses such as FOBS while also accelerating a push for the modernization of U.S. and Russian strategic offensive arsenals.  As part of the Global Zero push to eliminate all nuclear weapons, the Outer Space Treaty should be broadened to prohibit the launch, transfer or deployment of WMD through the atmosphere and outer space as well.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 1.)

  • December: This Month In Nuclear Threat History

    December 1-12, 2014 – The United Nations Climate Change Summit, COP20/CMP10, a meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol of December 11, 1997 will be held in Lima, Peru. More than 90 percent of world climatologists, ecologists, and environmental scientists have established a strong consensus that climate change – global warming — is an ongoing human-caused catastrophe in the making. While some news media outlets, pundits, and scientists such as The New York Times, James Hansen, Tom Wigley, Ken Caldeira, and organizations like the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions have argued that nuclear power is one alternative to dirty carbon emissions generated by coal-fired plants and dirty Alberta tar sands oil burning, many other experts vehemently disagree. Distinguished climatology professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University has joined a growing chorus of voices that say ‘No’ to the ‘nuclear alternative.’ Robock and others argue that: the position that once switched on, nuclear reactors have absolutely no carbon footprint, is technically correct but factually wrong. The mining and remediation of uranium, a serious environmental and health risk, and the building of large containment domes and the accompanying support and waste storage and transportation requirements result in nuclear power carbon emissions 10-20 times that of wind power. Also, the risk of catastrophic accidents and the unsafe routine operation of nuclear plants has been seen in at least 20 major core melt events (as well as a plethora of other incidents, leaks, and shutdowns) including well-publicized accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, in addition to more obscure but deadly serious events like those that occurred at Lelieveld, Kunkel, and Lawrence.   Dealing with the tremendous amount of highly radioactive waste including reactor cores and spent fuel rods, the vulnerability of plants to terrorist targeting, and the incredible economic unsustainability of nuclear energy, represent key arguments against the so-called ‘nuclear alternative’ to global warming. But, the nuclear proliferation risk of 400+ global nuclear power plants as well as dozens of other military and research nuclear facilities may be the trump card that makes nuclear power not only a false solution to climate change, but a deadly catastrophe-in-waiting that currently threatens our global civilization’s present and future just as much if not more than global warming. (Sources: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change website accessed November 7, 2014: unfccc.int/meetings/lima_dec_2014 and Alan Robock, “Nuclear Energy is Not a Solution for Global Warming.” Huffington Post Blog, May 12, 2014: www.huffingonpost.com/alan-robock/nuclear-energy-is-not-a-solution_b_5305594.html )

    December 1, 1959 – In Washington, DC, the Antarctic Treaty was signed by the United States, Soviet Union, and ten other nations to internationalize and demilitarize the Antarctic continent in what became the world’s first nuclear-weapons-free-zone (NWFZ). The treaty entered into force on June 23, 1961.   This treaty was an important precedent for other follow-on treaties of a similar vein such as the January 27, 1967 Outer Space Treaty, prohibiting the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit, on the moon, or on any celestial body. Nuclear-weapon-free-zones were also established in Latin America (The Treaty of Tlatelolco, 1967), the South Pacific (The Raratonga Treaty, 1985), Southeast Asia (The Bangkok Treaty, 1995), Africa (The Pelindaba Treaty, 1996), and elsewhere.   (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 1-4, 62.)

    December 2, 1960 – Without requesting any major revisions, President Dwight Eisenhower approved the first SIOP – Single Integrated Operational Plan – to become effective in April of 1961. One thousand ground zeroes in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and North Korea were to be targeted with 3,423 nuclear warheads with 80 percent of those strikes directed against military sites.   The resulting fatalities were estimated to be 54 percent of the entire population of the Soviet Union and 16 percent of the People’s Republic of China with a grand total of 220 million enemy dead. The TTAPS nuclear winter study of the early 1980s and subsequent build-on analyses have proven the likelihood that if as few as several dozen nuclear warheads were exploded in a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange or even a so-called limited nuclear war, such as India vs. Pakistan, the global impact of tremendous nuclear firestorms and millions of tons of dust and debris thrown into Earth’s atmosphere by these explosions would cause a significant drop in world temperatures triggering a mass starvation. Billions would die with a strong possibility of accelerated human extinction if larger numbers of nuclear weapons were exploded.   (Source:   Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013, p. 206 and Carl Sagan and Richard Turco. “A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race.” New York: Random House, 1990.)

    December 8, 1987 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty to eliminate all ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, which represented an important step toward the denuclearization of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe. The treaty entered into force on June 1, 1988 and was fully implemented on June 1, 1991. Even a fervent Cold Warrior like President Reagan was able to achieve a significant nuclear arms control milestone in his last 14 months in office. Despite the ongoing Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, let’s hope that President Barack Obama, with Congressional support, can finalize an agreement to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in Iran, convince the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (reversing its October 13, 1999 51-48 vote that rejected ratification of the treaty), and push for a more accelerated Global Zero agenda. (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 2, 22.)

    December 10, 1950 – In the midst of the Cold War and the Korean Conflict, William Faulkner, an American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in his acceptance speech at the City Hall in Stockholm on this date noted, “Our tragedy today is a general and universal fear [of the Bomb]…There is only one question – When will I be blown up?” In the Cold War era, an impressive number of politicians, educators, scientists (Thor Heyerdahl: “We must lose faith in arms as the only means of security, for this time, the risks are total”), authors, celebrities, and actors (Martin Sheen: “Until we begin to fill the jails with protest, our governments will continue to fill the silos with weapons.”), from East and West, spoke out against nuclear weapons. And while the end of the Cold War (1945-91) did bring a substantially reduced risk of nuclear war, especially in terms of popular perceptions, the danger obviously still exists.   While some believe that there are fewer public voices calling for further reductions and the near-term elimination of nuclear weapons, in fact, more and more global citizens are joining the movement.   Recently actor Michael Douglas declared, “The only way to eliminate the global nuclear danger is to eliminate all nuclear weapons.” Queen Noor of Jordan has also promoted Global Zero, “The sheer folly of trying to defend a nation by destroying all life on the planet must be apparent to anyone capable of rational thought.”   (Source: Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of William Faulkner: www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html, accessed November 7, 2014 and Global Zero website accessed November 9, 2014: www.globalzero.org.)

    December 18, 1974 – European Stars and Stripes featured an article, “Ex-GI Says He Used Hashish at German Base,” detailing Corporal Don Meyers’ comments to a Milwaukee Journal reporter while serving at the 74th U.S. Army Field Artillery detachment in the early 1970s, that almost every one of the 200 personnel in his unit were high while handling nuclear weapons. The warheads, 10 to 20 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, were deployed as the payload component for a squadron of Pershing missiles deployed on that NATO base in West Germany. While military drug use is not as serious a problem as it once was, there still exist 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. (Source: Eric Schlosser. “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and Illusion of Safety.” New York: Penguin Press, 2013.)

    December 22, 2008 – Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News TV, “The President is followed at all times by a military aide carrying the nuclear codes that he would use in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S. He doesn’t have to check with anybody. He doesn’t have to call the Congress. He doesn’t have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.” While the facts about the President’s 24-7-365 access to the nuclear “football” have been well established by many news media sources as well as being dramatized on stage, in films, and on television for some time, it is nevertheless highly disconcerting to realize that miscalculation, false nuclear alerts, irrational decision-making, combined with human infallibility under the dictates of extremely short time constraints, can, despite a plethora of safeguards, fail safes, and verification protocols, credibly result in what the late Jonathan Schell (“The Fate of the Earth”) called, “A republic of insects and grass” – the possibility of human extinction. A short-term mitigating solution, until Global Zero is achieved, is to de-alert U.S., Russian, Chinese, European, Israeli, Pakistani and Indian nuclear arsenals. Give the human race at least 72 hours to think about it and change course before unleashing a nuclear Armageddon. (Source: Numerous news media outlets including Fox News and Democracy Now, 2008 to present.)

    December 26, 1975 – The United States realized the implementation of the Biological Weapons Convention, signed on April 10, 1972 and ratified by the U.S., U.K., and Soviet Union on March 26, 1975, on this date when it completed the destruction of its entire stock of biological weapons.   This is one of many precedents for the hoped for future date when Global Zero successfully results in the mutually verified destruction of the last of thousands of nuclear warheads in global arsenals.   (Source: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 100.)