Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • July: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    July 1, 1946 – The U.S. conducted its first “peaceful” nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll – one of 315 nuclear test explosions by the U.S., U.K., and France during the half century, 1946-96 (the last atmospheric test was a French nuclear explosion on January 27, 1996), in the Pacific Region according to a 2014 report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).  Over this period of time, tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders were forcibly removed from their ancestral islands by the nuclear powers.  The resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests have negatively impacted generations of these peoples.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002.)

    July 2, 1945 – On this date, U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s memorandum to President Harry S. Truman concluded that, “…we have enormous factors in our favor and any step which can be taken to translate those advantages into a prompt and successful conclusion of the war should be taken.”  Stimson reiterated to President Truman his earlier belief that the Japanese would react positively to a warning or ultimatum for conditional surrender which also offered appropriate assurances that the Japanese emperor Hirohito (considered by almost the entirety of the Japanese people as the godhead of their Shinto religion – the 124th in direct line of descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu – in other words, a divine being or Son of Heaven) would not be charged with war crimes, deposed, or subjected to imprisonment or execution.   Also critical was the Emperor’s almost unprecedented secular intervention in the form of cables (intercepted and translated by the Allies) that were sent from the Japanese Foreign Minister Togo to Ambassador Sato in Moscow on July 13-14 which stated, “His Majesty, the Emperor…desires from his heart that it [the war] may be quickly terminated.”   These and related facts could have created momentum for the U.S. and its allies (with the possible exception of the Soviet Union which was bound by agreements signed with the U.S. and Britain to enter the war with Japan [which it did on August 8, 1945] spurred on in part by its desire to reacquire territory it lost in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War) to end the war with Japan before the August 6 and 9 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   Instead, the excuse of dropping the bombs to prevent huge hypothetical casualties (both American and Japanese) in an upcoming invasion of Japan, an argument made largely irrelevant by the Soviet declaration of war against Imperial Japan, which convinced the Japanese that continued fighting was even more pointless, held sway both then and today.   The President, Secretary of State James Byrnes, Manhattan Project director General Leslie R. Groves, a majority of the Congress (incensed with the possibility that two billion dollars were spent for a superweapon that would not be used), and other hardliners felt it was essential to demonstrate the destructiveness of the Bomb and press America’s atomic diplomatic strength in its future postwar dealings with the Soviet Union.   (Source:  Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 35, 232-35, 667-68.)

    July 8, 1996 – The International Court of Justice, also known as The World Court, in The Hague, issued an advisory opinion that concluded that, “…the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal and states are obliged to bring to a conclusion negotiations on nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.”  In effect, the advisory opinion held that the entire nuclear deterrence system represented a war crime.  (Source:  International Court of Justice, The Hague, www.icj-cij.org accessed on June 9, 2014.)

    July 9, 1955 – The Bertrand Russell – Albert Einstein Manifesto was signed by the principal authors and nine other prominent world scientists including a total of nine Nobel Laureates.  It warned of “universal death by nuclear world war if war is not renounced.”  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    July 16-22, 1994 – 21 fragments of the shattered comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, the largest of which was approximately 2.5 miles in diameter, impacted the planet Jupiter with an approach speed of sixty kilometers a second (130,000 miles-per-hour).  The explosions that followed were estimated to total in the range of six to twenty million megatons of TNT, hundreds of times more powerful than all of the world’s nuclear weapons.  Temperatures rose as high as the surface of the sun (10,000+ degrees centigrade) and fireballs 5,000 miles across spewed out through chimneys the comet fragments drilled into the gas giant planet’s atmosphere.   Comment:  In retrospect, humanity should realize that the tremendous chaos and violence of the Cosmos, including not only comet/asteroid impacts, but immense stellar explosions, entire galaxies wracked by deadly gamma ray bursts, and huge black holes and quasars, all pervade this gigantically large universe.  Cannot humans with their intellect, wisdom, and morality recognize that our planet was always meant to be an oasis from this violence.  That one purpose of our species’ evolution is to preserve, protect, and expand this zone of stability and peace.  For, in our ego and superego, should we choose nuclear violence, our intellect knows that our puny efforts pale before the violence of nature.  Therefore, we choose peace!  (Sources:  James R. Asker.  “Jupiter Comet is a Smash Hit.”  Aviation Week & Space Technology.  July 24, 1994, pp. 20-22, and James Reston, Jr. “Collision Course:  Jupiter is About to be Walloped by a Comet.”  Time, May 23, 1994, pp. 54-61.)

    July 20, 1969 – U.S. Apollo astronauts became the first humans to land on another heavenly body placing a plaque on the lunar surface that read, “We Came in Peace for All Mankind.”  Approximately a decade before this event, the U.S. Strategic Command’s General Thomas Power envisioned a Deep Space Force consisting of 20 manned spaceships armed with nuclear weapons to remain in orbit near the Moon for a period of several years.  The spaceships would be propelled by the detonation of small atomic bombs.  This proposal spawned a research and development program known as Project Orion (1958-65).  Although nuclear space weaponry was circumvented by U.S. negotiation, signature, and entry into force of the October 10, 1967 Outer Space Treaty, there are still active U.S. and other nations’ military plans to weaponize outer space.  Also, nuclear weapons are considered by some as a last ditch option to divert asteroids or comets that may one day threaten to collide with our planet. (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, p. 529.)

    July 29-30, 2009 – U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) held its First Annual Strategic Deterrence Symposium, “Waging Deterrence in the 21st Century” at the Qwest Center Convention Hall in Omaha, Nebraska.  Open source literature on these and subsequent U.S. military conferences have revealed that participants at such colloquia rarely consider the health, environmental, and global humanitarian impacts if deterrence, in fact, fails.  Deterrence, bolstered by nearly seventy years of “success” is usually considered so robust and flexible that failure is not considered a credible scenario.  However, human infallibility, when combined with the horrendously destructive nuclear force, is a prescription for unprecedented and possibly species-ending global disaster. (Source:  U.S. STRATCOM, www.stratcom.mil/events/ accessed June 9, 2014.)

  • June: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    June 3, 1983 – Director John Badham’s frightening motion picture “War Games,” starring actor Matthew Broderick, premiered at U.S. theaters. The antiwar film was released in a period during which U.S.-Soviet nuclear tensions were at their highest point since the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Some of the contributing factors included:

    • The September 1, 1983 Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 near Sakhalin Island;
    • A September 26, 1983 Soviet false nuclear alert;
    • The November 1983 NATO Able Archer military exercise that Soviet leadership widely misinterpreted as a warm-up for an eventual U.S. First Strike nuclear attack; and
    • The August 11, 1984 off-the-cuff sound check gaffe by President Ronald Reagan (“We begin bombing Russia in five minutes.”)

    Another terrifyingly realistic look at nuclear war occurred just five months after “War Games” was released when Nicholas Meyer directed a made-for-TV film “The Day After” which aired nationally on ABC-TV that November. This starkly realistic movie portrayed the horrendous human impact of a Soviet nuclear attack on Lawrence, Kansas. In “War Games,” movie-goers learned that accidental or unintentional nuclear war through human or computer error was entirely conceivable. In point of fact, hundreds of U.S. false alerts or nuclear Broken Arrow accidents have occurred over the last few decades, in addition to an unknown number of such incidents impacting the arsenals of the other eight nuclear-weapon armed states. (Sources:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013 and Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    June 10, 1963 – President John F. Kennedy made his seminal, historic American University speech in which he said:

    “I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in World War II. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by the wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations unborn…What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war…not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”

    On this exact same day in history, after the world has just barely avoided a devastating nuclear war over Cuban missiles placed there by the Soviet Union the previous October, the 35th President was working earnestly in concert with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to push against tremendous opposition by the Military-Industrial-Congressional complex as well as the Politburo for a long-term resolution of the Cold War as well as permanent prevention of a Hot War. For on this date, the U.S., U.K., and the Soviet Union formally announced that high-level talks would be held in Moscow to seek a nuclear test ban.  And, in an amazingly short period of time, in a span of only seven weeks, on August 5, 1963, the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) outlawing nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater was signed and later entered into force on October 10, 1963.  (Source:  American University Archive, www1.media.american.edu/speeches/Kennedy.htm, accessed May 2, 2014 and Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 1.)

    June 18, 1979 – The United States and Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT II) Treaty in Vienna.  It built on the successful SALT I Treaty, cutting strategic offensive nuclear weapons even further.  However, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, it became impossible, according to U.S. policymakers, for the U.S. to ratify the treaty.  Today, the Ukraine-Crimea Crisis has begun to undermine U.S.-Russian cooperation and follow-through regarding nuclear arms control treaty reductions.  Other critical and vitally essential military cooperation paradigms and confidence-building measures between the two nations have been negatively impacted as well.  Accordingly, it can be credibly argued that the chances of accidental or unintentional nuclear war have incrementally increased due to the crisis. (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 2.)

    June 19, 1957 – The Atomic Energy Commission, the predecessor of today’s Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as part of Project Plowshare, a U.S. government-focused effort to persuade the American people to support nuclear power and weapons because of their supposedly “peaceful, beneficial uses,” announced a number of future projects.  A year later, in June of 1958, one of those projects was revealed publicly for the first time.  Project Chariot was announced as a plan to create a 300-foot wide harbor at the mouth of the Ogotoruk Creek near Cape Thompson on the Chukchi Sea coastline of Alaska.  Four hydrogen bombs were to be exploded to create the artificial harbor.  Thankfully, extensive bioenvironmental studies, possibly the first example of a federal government environmental impact statement in American history, described the overwhelmingly negative consequences of such a Strangelovian experiment.  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012, p. 283 and Douglas Vandergraft.  “Project Chariot:  A Visual Presentation.” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, May 6, 1993, Anchorage, Alaska.)

    June 25, 2008 – An article published on this date titled, “Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor’s Massive Safety Vessel Installed.” is authored by T.S. Subramanian and appears in the Indian periodical The Hindu.  It is one of many past and current positive media portrayals of today’s global inventory of about 20 fast neutron reactors that have been operating since the 1950s in Russia, France, Japan, India, and the U.S. with some supplying commercial electrical power according to the World Nuclear Association website.  Although some designs are net consumers of fissile material including U-235, Pu, and other fission products, the fast breeder variant are designed to produce more plutonium than they consume. However, Stanford professor, Dr. Robert Laughlin’s 2011 book, “Powering the Future” (page 59) points out the starkly negative impact of fast breeder reactors,  “…After we run these [breeder] reactors a long time, the world becomes awash in highly dangerous plutonium (half-life of decay:  24,000 years), all for the sake of allowing nuclear fuel to last for thousands of years.”  This represents yet another overwhelmingly powerful reason why global citizenry are increasingly pushing for the dismantlement of some 400 global commercial nuclear power reactors, with breeders at the top of the list!

  • May: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    May 3, 1983 – The U.S. Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter on War and Peace, promulgated by sixty distinguished bishops, noted that, “Nuclear weaponry has drastically changed the nature of warfare and the arms race poses a threat to human life and human civilization which is without precedent.”  In their conclusions the bishops asserted that, “The [nuclear] arms race is one of the greatest curses on the human race.”  The letter called for the elimination of nuclear weapons and global militarization.  Today, there still exists tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world including strategic, tactical, reserve, and standby warheads. The arms race may not be growing uncontrollably as it did during the Cold War, but it is not inexorably moving toward Global Zero either.  Recent tensions in Russian-American relations hint that a renewed Cold War may be possible.  (Source:  Philip Louis Cantelon, Richard Hewitt, and Robert C. Williams, editors.  “The American Atom:  A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of Fission to the Present.”  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, second edition, pp. 267-68.)

    May 5, 1962 – Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, at a speech before NATO ministers in Athens warned the representatives that “NATO should never be forced to choose between suffering a military defeat or starting a nuclear war.”  He also expressed concern that the existence of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe increased the threat of nuclear war.  In 2014, especially with increased tension levels with the Russian Federation over the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, there remain serious concerns about U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe.  There are still about 200 U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Turkey, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands for use by NATO aircraft.  And, of course, Russia also has tactical nuclear weapons deployed close to their borders with Europe and Turkey. (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 287, 476-77.)

    May 15, 1957 – The United Kingdom tested its first thermonuclear weapon at a Christmas Island test site in the Pacific.  The Grapple 1/Short Granite test produced a yield of 200-300 kilotons.  It was one of 45 nuclear weapons tests by Britain in the Pacific region along with another 24 conducted in the U.S. at the Nevada Test Site.  Those tests were a small sample of thousands of nuclear weapons tests conducted by the U.S., Russia, China, and other members of the Nuclear Club.   As of this writing, according to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s website, 183 nations have signed and 162 countries have ratified a treaty that bans all nuclear testing.  The CTBT was initially signed by the U.S., U.K., and almost seventy other nations on September 24, 1996.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 4, 6, and CTBT Organization’s website, www.ctbto.org accessed April 14, 2014.)

    May 16, 2000 – New York Times journalist William Broad reported the release of declassified documents relating to a staff study by the U.S. Air Force Special Weapons Center conducted in January of 1959.  One of the participants in the study, the late astronomer-physicist Carl Sagan, was among several scientists tasked to assess the feasibility of conducting a nuclear weapons test on the lunar surface.  Sagan and the other participants concluded that the blast would “ruin the pristine environment of the moon.”  On January 27, 1967, the multilateral Outer Space Treaty was signed and the agreement was later entered into force on October 10 of that same year.  The treaty prohibits the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit, on the moon, or on any celestial body.  The only recent dilution of the international consensus to prevent nuclear weapons from being deployed or exploded outside Earth’s atmosphere has been debate about utilizing nuclear weapons, as a last resort, to prevent a possible future asteroid or comet collision with our planet.  (Source:  B612 Foundation, www.b612foundation.org accessed April 14, 2014.)

    May 22, 2011 – Islamic militants attacked, penetrated the defensive perimeter, and seized at least one building at a naval aviation base, PNS Mehran, outside Karachi, Pakistan. It took approximately one day for Pakistani military forces to kill or capture the assailants.  While it is believed that there were no nuclear weapons stored at this base, a similar attack staged about 15 miles away at a suspected nuclear weapons storage facility near Masroor could result in the theft of nuclear warheads or materials which could be used in a future WMD attack on Pakistan, India, or any nation including the United States.  Nuclear terrorism represents perhaps the most likely threat that would be dramatically reduced or eliminated if global nuclear arsenals were reduced to less than 200-500 warheads.  (Source:  Combating Terrorism Center, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, www.ctc.usma.edu accessed April 14, 2014.)

    May 26, 1972 – In Moscow, President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) Interim Agreement which placed a ceiling on strategic offensive nuclear weapons.  Also signed was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM-I) which limited strategic anti-ballistic missile defenses.  More recently, building on the SALT I and II as well as START and SORT agreements, the two nations signed on to the New START Treaty on April 8, 2010.  That treaty entered into force on February 5, 2011.  This agreement limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 while also limiting each side’s deployed strategic missiles and bombers to 700.  However, President George W. Bush’s December 13, 2001 announced withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which was culminated six months later, combined with deployments of missile defense systems in Europe during the Bush and Barack Obama administrations has helped introduce a significant level of strategic instability into nuclear relations between Russia and America.  The U.S. and NATO have justified ABM systems as a way to circumvent breakout by Iran and the possible launching of future nuclear-capable ballistic missiles by that nation.   However, Russia views U.S. plans for missile defenses in Europe as a threat to Moscow.  Recently, because of the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis, both sides have either delayed or cancelled planned future discussions/negotiations on the matter leading many to believe that a possible Cold War II may be eminent.   (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 2, 4.)

  • April – This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    April 1, 1961 – The approximate date, after President Dwight Eisenhower signed the formal authorization on December 2, 1960, that the first U.S. SIOP – Single Integrated Operational Plan – went into effect.  According to Eric Schlosser’s 2013 book, “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of  Safety” (New York:  Penguin Press), the SIOP featured 3,720 targets grouped into more than 1,000 ground zeros that would be struck by 3,423 nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Eastern Europe.  Eisenhower’s order was kept secret from the American people, the Congress, and even the NATO military alliance.  The President later confided to his naval aide Pete Aurand that the casualty estimates, the sheer number of targets, the redundant bombs for each, “frighten the devil out of me.” (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.” New York:  Gallery Books, 2012, p. 287.)

    April 7, 1989 – The 6,400-ton Soviet nuclear submarine, the Komsomolets (K-278) became the fourth nuclear vessel of the U.S.S.R. to sink during the Cold War (1945-1991).  42 sailors were lost, as well as two torpedoes equipped with nuclear warheads, when the ship sank into mile-deep water in the Barents Sea.  A 1994 expedition detected some plutonium leakage from one of the nuclear-tipped torpedoes.  Dozens of warheads and nuclear reactors lie at the bottom of Earth’s oceans from predominantly American and Soviet submarines, aircraft, and other naval vessels constituting a long-term radioactive environmental and public health threat to the globe.  (Source:  Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew.  “Blind Man’s Bluff:  The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage.”  New York:  Public Affairs, 1998, p. 243.)

    April 8, 2009 – Hans M. Kristensen, Robert S. Norris, and Ivan Oelrich released a report entitled, “From Counterforce to Minimum Deterrence: A New Nuclear Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons,” Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council Occasional Paper No. 7 which argued that the United States needs only 500 nuclear weapons for deterring all possible global adversaries.  A group of high-ranking U.S. Air Force officers, including James Wood Forsyth, Jr., Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, and Gary Schaub, Jr. in the Spring 2010 issue of the journal Strategic Studies Quarterly (Vol. 4, No. 1 – page 82), were even more optimistic calling for a total minimum deterrence force of only 311 U.S. nuclear weapons.   Today, there exists over 10,000 nuclear weapons, including strategic, tactical, and reserve warheads, in global nuclear arsenals.   (Source:  Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 476-77, 483, 582)

    April 21, 1964 – NASA’s Transit 5bn satellite failed to reach orbit after its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida dispersing 2.1 pounds of plutonium (half-life:  24,400 years) from its SNAP-RTG – Radio Isothermic Generator – into Earth’s atmosphere.  This is just one of many examples of inadvertent and usually underreported incidents of manmade radioactive contamination of the atmosphere, surface, and oceans due to the activities of U.S. and other military and civilian space agencies.  Although considered essential for deep space missions, where use of solar power is problematical, such as Pioneer 10 and 11, Voyager 1 and 2, Galileo, and Cassini, RTGs powered by plutonium or similar dangerous radioactive materials do constitute a definable risk to human populations.  A more notable example is the RTG-equipped Apollo 13 lunar module, used as a lifeboat by the three astronauts after an explosion destroyed oxygen and vital supplies in the command module, jettisoned into the South Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of the Tonga Trench in April of 1970.  (Source:  Day of the Week.org and Dr. Karl Grossman’s BeyondNuclear.org)

    April 26, 1986 – A fire in the core of the No. 4 unit and a resulting explosion that blew the roof off the reactor building of the Chernobyl Nuclear Complex located about 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Kiev, capital of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the U.S.S.R., resulted in the largest ever release of radioactive material from a civilian reactor with the possible exception of the Fukushima Dai-chi accident of March 11, 2011 in northeast Japan.  Two were killed and 200 others hospitalized, but the Soviet government did not release specific details of the nuclear meltdown until two days later when Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and other European neighbors detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity.  8,000 died and 435,000 people were evacuated from the region in the ensuing weeks, months, and years.   Although West Germany, Sweden, and other nations provided assistance to the Soviet Union to deal with the deadly, widespread radioactive fallout from the accident, some argue today that the U.S., China, Russia, Japan, and other nations should establish a permanent, multilateral civilian-military-humanitarian response force to quickly address such serious nuclear and natural disasters in a time-urgent, nonpartisan manner.  (Sources:  “Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year for 1987.”  Chicago:  Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1987, pp. 61, 168 and “The Untold History of the United States.” 2012, p. 450.)

    April 30, 1976 – Chicago Sun-Times’ reporter Robert R. Jones, after conducting an extensive series of interviews with nuclear experts and Atomic Energy Commission (now known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) representatives, concluded that, “Licensee and AEC officials agree that a security system at a licensed civilian nuclear power plant could not prevent a takeover or sabotage by a small number of people, perhaps as few as two or three.”   Today despite reported efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to shore up such defenses, the strong threat of nuclear terrorism reinforces the belief that U.S., as well as global civilian nuclear reactors, should be phased out and shut down by the year 2025, if not sooner.  (Source:  Louis Rene Beres.  “Apocalypse:  Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.”  Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1980.)

  • Ukraine and the Danger of Nuclear War

    The need for restraint and balance

    john_averyThe current situation in Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula is an extremely dangerous one. Unless restraint and a willingness to compromise are shown by all of the the parties involved, the crisis might escalate uncontrollably into a full-scale war, perhaps involving nuclear weapons. What is urgently required is for all the stakeholders to understand each other’s positions and feelings. Public understanding of the points of view of all sides is also very much needed.

    We in the West already know the point of view of our own governments from the mainstream media, because they tell us of nothing else. For the sake of balance, it would be good for us to look closely at the way in which the citizens of Russia and the Crimean Peninsula view recent events. To them the overthrow of the government of Viktor Yanukovitch appears to be another in a long series of coups engineered by the US and its allies. The list of such coups is very long indeed. One can think, for example of the the overthrow Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, or the coup that overthrew Chile’s democratically elected President, Salvador Allende, and replaced him with General Pinochet. There are very many other examples:

    During the period from 1945 to the present, the US interfered, militarily or covertly, in the internal affairs of a large number of nations: China, 1945-49; Italy, 1947-48; Greece, 1947-49; Philippines, 1946-53; South Korea, 1945-53; Albania, 1949-53; Germany, 1950s; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1953-1990s; Middle East, 1956-58; Indonesia, 1957-58; British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64; Vietnam, 1950-73; Cambodia, 1955-73; The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65; Brazil, 1961-64; Dominican Republic, 1963-66; Cuba, 1959-present; Indonesia, 1965; Chile, 1964-73; Greece, 1964-74; East Timor, 1975-present; Nicaragua, 1978-89; Grenada, 1979-84; Libya, 1981-89; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1990-present; Afghanistan 1979-92; El Salvador, 1980-92; Haiti, 1987-94; Yugoslavia, 1999; and Afghanistan, 2001-present, Syria, 2013-present. Egypt, 2013-present. Most of these interventions were explained to the American people as being necessary to combat communism (or more recently, terrorism), but an underlying motive was undoubtedly the desire to put in place governments and laws that would be favorable to the economic interests of the US and its allies.

    For the sake of balance, we should remember that during the Cold War period, the Soviet Union and China also intervened in the internal affairs of many countries, for example in Korea in 1950-53, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and so on; another very long list. These Cold War interventions were also unjustifiable, like those mentioned above. Nothing can justify military or covert interference by superpowers in the internal affairs of smaller countries, since people have a
    right to live under governments of their own choosing even if those governments are not optimal.

    In the case of Ukraine, there is much evidence that the Western coup was planned long in advance. On December 13, 2013, US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Victoria Nuland said: “Since the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the United States has supported the Ukrainians in the development of democratic institutions and skills in promoting civil society and a good form of government… We have invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine to achieve these and other goals.” Furthermore, Nuland’s famous “Fuck the EU” telephone call, made well in advance of the coup, gives further evidence that the coup was planned long in advance, and engineered in detail.

    Although Victoria Nuland’s December 13 2013 speech talks much about democracy, the people who carried out the coup in Kiev can hardly be said to be democracy’s best representatives. Many belong to the Svoboda Party, which had its roots in the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU). The name  was an intentional reference to the Nazi Party in Germany. According to Der Spiegal’s article about SNPU, “anti-Semitism is part of the extremist party’s platform”, which rejects certain minority and human rights. The article states that in 2013, a Svoboda youth leader distributed Nazi propaganda written by Joseph Goebels. According to the journalist Michael Goldfarb, Svoboda’s platform calls for a Ukraine that is “one race, one nation, one Fatherland”.

    The referendum regarding self-determination, which will soon take place in Crimea is perfectly legal according to international law. A completely analogous referendum will take place in Scotland, to determine whether Scotland will continue to be a part of the United Kingdom, or whether the majority of Scots would like their country to be independent. If Scotland decides to become independent, it is certain to maintain very close ties with the UK. Analogously, if Crimea chooses independence, all parties would benefit by an arrangement under which close economic and political ties with Ukraine would be maintained.

    We should remember that for almost all the time since the reign of Catherine the Great, who established a naval base at Sevastopol, the Autonomous Republic Republic of Crimea has been a part of Russia. But in 1954 the Soviet government under Nikita Krushchev passed a law transferring Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia still maintained its naval base at Sevastopol under an agreement which also allowed it to base a military force in Crimea.

    It seems to be the intention of the US to establish NATO bases in Ukraine, no doubt armed with nuclear weapons. In trying to imagine how the Russians feel about this, we might think of the US reaction when a fleet of ships sailed to Cuba in 1962, bringing Soviet nuclear weapons. In the confrontation that followed, the world was bought very close indeed to an all-destroying nuclear war. Does not Russia feel similarly threatened by the thought of hostile nuclear weapons on its very doorstep? Can we not learn from the past, and avoid the extremely high risks associated with the similar confrontation in Ukraine today?

    Lessons from the First World War

    Since we are now approaching the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, it is appropriate to view the crisis in Ukraine against the background of that catastrophic event, which still casts a dark shadow over the future of human civilization. We must learn the bitter lessons which World War I has to teach us, in order to avoid a repetition of the disaster.

    We can remember that the First World War started as a small operation by the Austrian government to punish the Serbian nationalists; but it escalated uncontrollably into a global disaster. Today, there are many parallel situations, where uncontrollable escalation might produce a world-destroying conflagration.

    In general, aggressive interventions, in Iran, Syria, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere, all present dangers for uncontrollable escalation into large and disastrous conflicts, which might potentially threaten the survival of human civilization.

    Another lesson from the history of World War I comes from the fact that none of the people who started it had the slightest idea of what it would be like. Science and technology had changed the character of war. The politicians and military figures of the time ought to have known this, but they didn’t. They ought to have known it from the million casualties produced by the use of the breach-loading rifle in the American Civil War. They ought to have known it from the deadly effectiveness of the Maxim machine gun against the native populations of Africa, but the effects of the machine gun in a European war caught them by surprise.

    Today, science and technology have again changed the character of war beyond all recognition. In the words of the Nobel Laureate biochemist, Albert Szent Györgyi, “ The story of man consists of two parts, divided by the appearance of modern science…. In the first  period, man lived in the world in which his species was born and to which his senses were adapted. In the second, man stepped into a new, cosmic world to which he was a complete stranger….The forces at man’s disposal were no longer terrestrial forces, of human dimension, but were cosmic forces, the forces which shaped the universe. The few hundred Fahrenheit degrees of our flimsy terrestrial fires were exchanged for the ten million degrees of the atomic reactions which heat the sun….Man lives in a new cosmic world for which he was not made. His survival depends on how well and how fast he can adapt himself to it, rebuilding all his ideas, all his social and political institutions.”

    Few politicians or military figures today have any imaginative understanding of what a war with thermonuclear weapons would be like. Recent studies have shown that in a nuclear war, the smoke from firestorms in burning cities would rise to the stratosphere where it would remain for
    a decade, spreading throughout the world, blocking sunlight, blocking the hydrological cycle and destroying the ozone layer. The effect on global agriculture would be devastating, and the billion people who are chronically undernourished today would be at risk. Furthermore, the tragedies of Chernobyl and Fukushima remind us that a nuclear war would make large areas of the world permanently uninhabitable because of radioactive contamination. A full-scale thermonuclear war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe. It would destroy human civilization and much of the biosphere.

    Finally, we must remember the role of the arms race in the origin of World War I, and ask what parallels we can find in today’s world. England was the first nation to complete the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. Industrialism and colonialism are linked, and consequently England obtained an extensive colonial empire. In Germany, the Industrial Revolution occurred somewhat later. However, by the late 19th century, Germany had surpassed England in steel production, and, particularly at the huge Krupp plants in Essen, Germany was turning to weapons production. The Germans felt frustrated because by that time there were fewer opportunities for the acquisition of colonies.

    According to the historian David Stevensen (1954 – ), writing on the causes of World War I, “A self-reinforcing cycle of heightened military preparedness… was an essential element in the conjuncture that led to disaster… The armaments race… was a necessary precondition for the outbreak of hostilities.”

    Today, the seemingly endless conflicts that threaten to destroy our beautiful world are driven by what has been called “The Devil’s Dynamo”. In many of the larger nations of the world a military-industrial complex seems to have enormous power. Each year the world spends roughly 1,700,000,000.000 US dollars on armaments, almost 2 trillion. This vast river of money, almost too large to be imagined, pours into the pockets of weapons manufacturers, and is used by them to control governments. This is the reason for the seemingly endless cycle of threats to peace with which the ordinary people of the world are confronted. Constant threats are needed to justify the diversion of such enormous quantities of money from urgently needed social projects into the bottomless pit of war.

    World War I had its roots in the fanatical and quasi-religious nationalist movements that developed in Europe during the 19th century. Nationalism is still a potent force in todays world, but in an era of all-destroying weapons, instantaneous worldwide communication, and global economic interdependence, fanatical nationalism has become a dangerous anachronism. Of course, we should continue to be loyal to our families, our local groups and our nations. But this must be supplemented by a wider loyalty to the human race as a whole. Human unity has become more and more essential, because of the serious problems that we are facing, for example climate change, vanishing resources, and threats to food security. The problems are soluble, but only within a framework of peace and cooperation.

    We must not allow the military-industrial complex to continually bring us to the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war, from which our civilization would never recover. The peoples of the earth must instead realize that it is in their common interest to join hands and cooperate for the preservation and improvement of our beautiful world.

  • March: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    March 1, 1954 – In the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands, the U.S. military conducted the BRAVO nuclear weapons test, one of thousands conducted by Nuclear Club Members, in the atmosphere, on the ground, and underground, during the Cold War and Post-Cold War period.  The yield, of approximately 15 megatons from the solid fuel lithium deuteride fusion warhead, was 2-3 times what was expected and unusual prevailing winds carried the radioactive fallout to unexpected places including a Japanese fishing trawler, Lucky Dragon sailing outside the exclusion zone.  All 23 Japanese crewmen were later hospitalized and one of the unfortunate men died as a result of radioactive exposure from an immense blast that produced a fireball four miles wide and a mushroom cloud 60 miles wide.  (Source:  Chuck Hansen.  “The Swords of Armageddon.”  Chuklea Publications:  Sunnyvale, CA, 2007.)

    March 4, 1969 – MIT and 30 other universities called for a national research stoppage to alert the public to how the “misuse of science and technology knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind.”  Concerns not only about nuclear weapons, radioactive and chemical toxic leaks from U.S. military and civilian nuclear production and bombmaking sites but also about Agent Orange, and biological/chemical WMDs led scientists and academics to sign on to this pledge.  (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    March 11, 2011 – After a historically large earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan, three of the six nuclear reactors at Tokyo Electrical Power Company’s Fukushima Dai-chi facility suffered partial meltdowns resulting in the evacuation of tens of thousands of nearby residents.  The accident was the worst nuclear meltdown since the April 1986 Chernobyl Incident.  Nearly three years later, large volumes of radioactive-contaminated water continue to spill into the Pacific Ocean from the plant site as a long-term solution to the crisis has yet to be reached. (Source:  Various news media reports including Democracy Now, 2011-2014).

    March 22, 1963 – At a broadcast press conference, President John F. Kennedy speaks about the possibility that by the 1970s “…of the U.S. having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these [nuclear] weapons…I regard that as the greatest possible danger and hazard.”  While those fears were not quite realized, it is nevertheless true that nuclear proliferation in Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere remains a deadly serious problem in the 21st century.  Some experts believe that only by phasing out nuclear power in the next few decades, can the world head off the actualization of our 35th President’s worst fears.
    (Source:  Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick.  “The Untold History of the United States.”  New York:  Gallery Books, 2012.)

    March 23, 1983 – In a nationally televised speech, President Ronald Reagan expressed the desire to “make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” by committing the U.S. to develop a national missile defense system based on the ground and in outer space.   Media critics derisively referred to the plan as “Star Wars” and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on attempts to deploy modest theater and national missile defenses in the coming decades.  In 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty with Moscow signaling a new destabilizing, uncertain strategic defensive arms race that continues today.  (Source:  Bradley Graham.  “Hit to Kill:  The New Battle Over Shielding America From Missile Attack.”  New York:  Public Affairs, 2001.)

  • Nuclear Warfare as Genocide

    Sixty-five years ago, on December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a convention prohibiting genocide. It seems appropriate to discuss nuclear warfare against the background of this important standard of international law.

    Article II of the 1948 convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

    Cannot nuclear warfare be seen as an example of genocide? It is capable of killing entire populations, including babies, young children, adults in their prime and old people, without any regard for guilt or innocence. The retention of nuclear weapons, with the intent to use them under some circumstances, must be seen as the intent to commit genocide. Is it not morally degrading to see our leaders announce their intention to commit the “crime of crimes” in our names?

    The use of nuclear weapons potentially involves not only genocide, but also omnicide, the death of all, since a large-scale thermonuclear war would destroy human civilization and much of the biosphere.

    If humanity is to survive in an era of all-destroying nuclear weapons, we must develop an advanced ethic to match our advanced technology. We must regard all humans as our brothers and sisters, More than that, we must actively feel our kinship with all living things, and accept and act upon our duty to protect both animate and inanimate nature.

    Modern science has, for the first time in history, offered humankind the possibility of a life of comfort, free from hunger and cold, and free from the constant threat of death through infectious disease. At the same time, science has given humans the power to obliterate civilization with nuclear weapons, or to make the earth uninhabitable through overpopulation and pollution. The question of which of these paths we choose is literally a matter of life or death for ourselves and our children.

    Will we use the discoveries of modern science constructively, and thus choose the path leading towards life? Or will we use science to produce more and more lethal weapons, which sooner or later, through a technical or human failure, may result in a catastrophic nuclear war? Will we thoughtlessly destroy our beautiful planet through unlimited growth of population and industry? The choice among these alternatives is ours to make. We live at a critical moment of history – a moment of crisis for civilization.
    No one living today asked to be born at such a moment, But history has given our generation an enormous responsibility, and two daunting tasks: We must stabilize global population, and, more importantly, we must abolish both nuclear weapons and the institution of war.

    The human brain has shown itself to be capable of solving even the most profound and complex problems. The mind that has seen into the heart of the atom must not fail when confronted with paradoxes of the human heart.

    The problem of building a stable, just, and war-free world is difficult, but it is not impossible. The large regions of our present-day world within which war has been eliminated can serve as models. There are a number of large countries with heterogeneous populations within which it has been possible to achieve internal peace and social cohesion, and if this is possible within such extremely large regions, it must also be possible globally. We must replace the old world of international anarchy, chronic war and institutionalized injustice, by a new world of law.

    The Nobel laureate biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi once wrote: “…Modern science has abolished time and distance as factors separating nations. On our shrunken globe today, there is room for one group only: the family of man.”

  • Two Billion at Risk: The Threat of Limited Nuclear War

    This article was originally published by Common Dreams.

    As physicians we spend our professional lives applying scientific facts to the health and well being of our patients. When it comes to public health threats like TB, polio, cholera, AIDS and others where there is no cure, our aim is to prevent what we cannot cure. It is our professional, ethical and moral obligation to educate and speak out on these issues.

    That said, the greatest imminent existential threat to human survival is potential of global nuclear war. We have long known that the consequences of large scale nuclear war could effectively end human existence on the planet. Yet there are more than 17,000 nuclear warheads in the world today with over 95% controlled by the U.S. and Russia. The international community is intent on preventing Iran from developing even a single nuclear weapon. And while appropriate to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, there is precious little effort being spent on the much larger and more critical problem of these arsenals.

    Despite the Cold War mentality of the U.S. and Russia with their combined arsenals and a reliance on shear luck that a nuclear war is not started by accident, intent or cyber attack, we now know that the planet is threatened by a limited regional nuclear war which is a much more real possibility.

    A report released Tuesday by the Nobel Laureate International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and its US counterpart Physicians for Social Responsibility documents in fact the humanitarian consequences of such a limited nuclear war. Positing a conflict in South Asia between India and Pakistan, involving just 100 Hiroshima sized bombs— less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear arsenal— would put two billion people’s health and well being at risk. The local effects would be devastating. More than 20 million people would be dead in a week from the explosions, firestorms and immediate radiation effects. But the global consequences would be far worse.

    The firestorms caused by this war would loft 5 million tons of soot high into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and dropping temperatures across the planet. This climate disruption would cause a sharp, worldwide decline in food production. There would be a 12% decline in US corn production and a 15% decline in Chinese rice production, both lasting for a full decade. A staggering 31% decline in Chinese winter wheat production would also last for 10 years.

    The resulting global famine would put at risk 870 million people in the developing world who are already malnourished today, and 300 million people living in countries dependent on food imports. In addition, the huge shortfalls in Chinese food production would threaten another 1.3 billion people within China. At the very least there would be a decade of social and economic chaos in the largest country in the world, home to the world’s second largest and most dynamic economy and a large nuclear arsenal of its own.

    A nuclear war of comparable size anywhere in the world would produce the same global impact. By way of comparison, each US Trident submarine commonly carries 96 warheads each of which is ten to thirty times more powerful than the weapons used in the South Asia scenario. That means that a single submarine can cause the devastation of a nuclear famine many times over. The US has 14 of these submarines, plus land based missiles and a fleet of strategic bombers. The Russian arsenal has the same incredible overkill capacity. Two decades after the Cold War, nuclear weapons are ill suited to meet modern threats and cost hundreds of billions of dollars to maintain.

    Fueled in part by a growing understanding of these humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, there is today a growing global movement to prevent such a catastrophe. In 2011, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement called for its national societies to educate the public about these humanitarian consequences and called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Seventeen nations issued a Joint Statement in May 2012 on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons that called for their total elimination. By this fall the number rose to 125 nations.

    The international community should continue to take practical steps to prevent additional countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. But, this effort to prevent proliferation must be matched by real progress to eliminate the far greater danger posed by the vast arsenals that already exist.

    Simply put, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear war or risk of an accidental launch or mishap is to eliminate nuclear weapons. This past year the majority of the world’s nations attended a two-day conference in Oslo on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. The United States and the other major nuclear powers boycotted this meeting. There will be an important follow up meeting in Mexico in February. It is time for us to lead the nuclear weapons states by example in attending this meeting and by embracing the call to eliminate nuclear weapons.

  • A Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in February 2014

    On February 13 and 14, 2014, the government of Mexico will host a conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. The global peace movement must think carefully about how best to use the opportunities offered by the Mexico conference and by other recent breakthroughs in the struggle to eliminate the danger of a catastrophic thermonuclear war.

    The urgent need for nuclear disarmament:

    Nuclear disarmament has been one of the core aspirations of the international community since the first use of nuclear weapons in 1945. A nuclear war, even a limited one, would have disastrous humanitarian and environmental consequences.

    The total explosive power of today’s weapons is equivalent to roughly half a million Hiroshima bombs. To multiply the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a factor of half a million changes the danger qualitatively. What is threatened today is the complete breakdown of human society.

    Although the Cold War has ended, the dangers of nuclear weapons have not been appreciably reduced. Indeed, proliferation and the threat of nuclear terrorism have added new dimensions to the dangers. There is no defense against nuclear terrorism.

    There are 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, several thousand of them on hair-trigger alert. The phrase “hair trigger alert” means that the person in charge has only 15 minutes to decide whether the warning from the radar system was true of false, and to decide whether or not to launch a counterattack. The danger of accidental nuclear war continues to be high. Technical failures and human failures have many times brought the world close to a catastrophic nuclear war. Those who know the system of “deterrence” best describe it as “an accident waiting to happen”.

    A nuclear war would produce radioactive contamination of the kind that we have already experienced in the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima and in the Marshall Islands, but on an enormously increased scale.

    Also, recent studies by atmospheric scientists have shown that the smoke from burning cities produced by even a limited nuclear war would have a devastating effect on global agriculture. The studies show that the smoke would rise to the stratosphere, where it would spread globally and remain for a decade, blocking sunlight, blocking the hydrological cycle and destroying the ozone layer. Because of the devastating effect on global agriculture, darkness from even a small nuclear war could result in an estimated billion deaths from famine. This number corresponds to the fact that today, a billion people are chronically undernourished. If global agriculture were sufficiently damaged by a nuclear war, these vulnerable people might not survive.

    A large-scale nuclear war would be an even greater global catastrophe, completely destroying all agriculture for a period of ten years. Such a war would mean that most humans would die from hunger, and many animal and plant species would be threatened with extinction.

    Recent breakthroughs:

    On on 4-5 March 2013 the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Espen Barth Eide hosted an international Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. The Conference provided an arena for a fact-based discussion of the humanitarian and developmental consequences of a nuclear weapons detonation. Delegates from 127 countries as well as several UN organisations, the International Red Cross movement, representatives of civil society and other relevant stakeholders participated. Representatives from many nations made strong statements advocating the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. The conference in Mexico in 2014 will be a follow-up to the Oslo Conference.

    Recently UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has introduced a 5-point Program for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In this program he mentioned the possibility of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, and urged the Security Council to convene a summit devoted to the nuclear abolition. He also urged all countries to ratify the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty.

    Three-quarters of all nations support UN Secretary-General Ban’s proposal for a treaty to outlaw and eliminate nuclear weapons. The 146 nations that have declared their willingness to negotiate a new global disarmament pact include four nuclear weapon states: China, India, Pakistan and North Korea.

    On April 2, 2013, a historic victory was won at the United Nations, and the world achieved its first treaty limiting international trade in arms. Work towards the ATT was begun in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which requires a consensus for the adoption of any measure. Over the years, the consensus requirement has meant that no real progress in arms control measures has been made in Geneva, since a consensus among 193 nations is impossible to achieve.

    To get around the blockade, British U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant sent the draft treaty to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and asked him on behalf of Mexico, Australia and a number of others to put the ATT to a swift vote in the General Assembly, and on Tuesday, April 3, it was adopted by a massive majority.

    The method used for the adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty suggests that progress on other seemingly intractable issues could be made by the same method, by putting the relevant legislation to a direct vote on the floor of the UN General Assembly, despite the opposition of militarily powerful states.

    According to ICAN, 151 nations support a ban on nuclear weapons, while only 22 nations oppose it. Details can be found on the following link: http://www.icanw.org/why-a-ban/positions/ Similarly a Nuclear Weapons Convention might be put to a direct vote on the floor of the UN General Assembly. The following link explores this possibility: http://www.cadmusjournal.org/article/issue-6/arms-trade-treaty-opens-new-possibilities-un.

    The key feature of these proposals is that negotiations must not be allowed to be blocked by the nuclear weapons states. Asking them to participate in negotiations would be like asking tobacco companies to participate in laws to ban cigarettes, or like asking narcotics dealers to participate in the drafting of laws to ban narcotics, or, to take a recent example, it would be like inviting big coal companies to participate in a conference aimed at preventing dangerous climate change.

    In 2013, the United Nations has established an Open Ended Working Group on Nuclear Disarmament, which consisted both of nations and of individuals. The OEWG met in the spring of 2013 and again in August, to draft a set of proposals to be sent to the UN General Assembly.

    On 28 September, 2013, a High Level Meeting of the 68th Session of the UN General Assembly took place. It was devoted to nuclear disarmament. Although the nuclear weapon states attempted to label the new negotiations as “counterproductive”, the overwhelming consensus of the meeting was that nuclear abolition must take place within the next few years, and that the humanitarian and environmental impact of nuclear weapons had to be central to all discussions. The detailed proceedings are available on the following link: http://www.un.org/en/ga/68/meetings/nucleardisarmament/ .

    The opportunity presented by the conference in Mexico in February 2014 must not be wasted. We must use it to take concrete steps towards putting legislation for the abolition of nuclear weapons to a direct vote on the floor of the UN General Assembly.

  • Are Nuclear Weapons Really the U.S.’s Instruments of Peace?

    David KriegerThere are serious problems with communications in a society when mainstream media sources, such as the Washington Post, will publish articles touting nuclear weapons as instruments of peace and ignore serious rebuttals.  The Post recently published an op-ed, “Nuclear weapons are the U.S.’s instruments of peace,” by Robert Spalding, a Military Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.  The title really speaks for itself.  The article can be read here.

    I sent a response to the Washington Post in the form of a letter to the editor, but it was not published by them.  My letter, which is under their 200-word limit, sought to point out some of the fallacies in Mr. Spalding’s op-ed.  Here it is:

    “Robert Spalding’s enchantment with nuclear weapons would keep the US prepared to refight the Cold War for decades.  But nuclear weapons do not make the U.S. more secure.  Rather, they make us targets, and they spur nuclear proliferation.   A major nuclear war would destroy civilization and possibly all complex life on the planet.  A regional nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan using 50 Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons each on the other side’s cities would put enough soot into the stratosphere to block warming sunlight, shorten growing seasons, cause crop failures and result in a billion deaths worldwide.

    “Nuclear deterrence is not foolproof because we humans, despite our best efforts, are fallible, as convincingly demonstrated at Fukushima.  Spalding is dead wrong.  It is not only through strength that peace can be obtained; it is also through diplomacy, cooperation, international law and a generosity of spirit in our foreign policy.  Nuclear weapons are illegal, immoral and ultimately uncontrollable.  They are a path not to peace, but to catastrophe.  In our own interests, the US should lead in negotiating their elimination from the planet.”

    Nuclear weapons place at risk everyone we love and everything we treasure.  They have no place in a civilized society, and US leaders should be doing all they can to fulfill our obligation under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue negotiations for their total elimination from the planet.  But this will not happen if the mainstream media provides a one-sided view that “nuclear weapons are the U.S.’s instruments of peace.”  They are hardly that, and our continued reliance upon them will encourage nuclear proliferation and eventually result in nuclear war by accident or design.