Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • Our Salvation Requires that We Grasp the Danger of Nuclear Weapons

    This article was originally published by Project Syndicate.


    Gareth EvansOne of the most dispiriting features of today’s international debates is that the threat to humanity posed by the world’s 23,000 nuclear weapons – and by those who would build more of them, or be only too willing to use them – has been consigned to the margin of politics.


    U.S. President Barack Obama did capture global attention with his Prague speech in 2009, which made a compelling case for a nuclear weapon-free world. And he did deliver on a major new arms-reduction treaty with Russia, and hosted a summit aimed at reducing the vulnerability of nuclear weapons and materials to theft or diversion.


    But nuclear issues still struggle for public resonance and political traction. It would take a brave gambler to bet on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate any time soon.


    The film “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award, led to a Nobel Prize for Al Gore, and attracted huge international attention to the disastrous impact of climate change. But “Countdown to Zero,” an equally compelling documentary, made by the same production team and making shockingly clear how close and how often the world has come to nuclear catastrophe, has come and gone almost without trace.


    Complacency trumps anxiety almost everywhere. Japan’s Fukushima disaster has generated a massive debate about the safety of nuclear power, but not about nuclear weapons. Fear of a nuclear holocaust seems to have ended with the Cold War.


    Indeed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem an eternity ago; new nuclear-weapons states have emerged without the world ending; no terrorist nuclear device has threatened a major city; and possession of nuclear weapons, for the states that have them, seems to be a source of comfort and pride rather than concern or embarrassment. With only a handful of exceptions, the current generation of political leaders shows little interest in disarmament, and not much more in non-proliferation. And their publics are not pressuring them to behave otherwise.


    Few have worked harder to shake the world out of its complacency than four of the hardest-nosed realists ever to hold public office: former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. In a series of opinion articles over the last five years, they have repeatedly sounded the alarm that the risks of nuclear weapons outweigh any possible usefulness in today’s security environment. Moreover, they have called for a complete rethinking of deterrence strategy, in order to minimize, and ultimately eliminate, reliance on the most indiscriminately destructive weapons ever invented.


    Last week in London, the “gang of four” convened a private meeting with leading think-tank researchers and a worldwide cast of some 30 former foreign and defense ministers, generals, and ambassadors who share their concern and commitment. But our average age was over 65, and the limits of our effectiveness were neatly described by former British Defense Minister Des Browne: “People who used to be something really want to tackle this issue. The trouble is that those who are something don’t.”


    No quick fix will turn all this around. Getting the kind of messages that emerged from the London meeting embedded in public and political consciousness is going to be slow boring through hard boards. But the messages demand attention, and we simply have to keep drilling.


    The first message is that the threat of a nuclear weapons catastrophe remains alarmingly real. Existing global stockpiles have a destructive capacity equal to 150,000 Hiroshima bombs, and in handling them there is an omnipresent potential for human error, system error, or misjudgment under stress.


    Pakistan versus India is a devastating conflict-in-waiting, and North Korea and Iran remain volatile sources of concern. We know that terrorist groups have the capacity to engineer nuclear devices and would explode them anywhere they could; we simply cannot be confident that we can forever deny them access to the fissile material they need to fuel them.


    The second message is that Cold War nuclear-deterrence doctrine is irrelevant to today’s world. So long as nuclear weapons remain, states can justify maintaining a minimum nuclear-deterrent capability. But that can be done without weapons on high alert, and with drastically reduced arsenals in the case of the U.S. and Russia, and, at worst, at current levels for the other nuclear-armed states.


    The third message is that if the existing nuclear powers sincerely want to prevent others from joining their club, they cannot keep justifying the possession of nuclear weapons as a means of protection for themselves or their allies against other weapons of mass destruction, especially biological weapons, or conventional weapons. Indeed, the single most difficult issue inhibiting serious movement toward disarmament – certainly in the case of Pakistan versus India, and Russia and China versus the United States – are conventional arms imbalances, and ways of addressing them must rise to the top of the policy agenda.


    The final message is that neither piecemeal change nor sloganeering will do the job. Nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, and civil nuclear-energy risk reduction are inextricably connected, and they call for sustained commitment around a comprehensive agenda, and detailed argument. Sound bites and tweets are an unlikely route to nuclear salvation.


    Kissinger is no idealist icon. But he’s always worth listening to, and never more so than with respect to the question that he has been asking for years: When the next nuclear-weapons catastrophe happens, as it surely will, the world will have to respond dramatically. Why can’t we start right now?

  • Radiation, Japan and the Marshall Islands

    This article was originally published by CounterPunch.


    When the dangerous dust and gases settle and we discover just how much radiation escaped the damaged Fukushima reactors and spent fuel rods, we may never know how many people are being exposed to radiation from the burning fuel rods and reactor cores, and how much exposure they will receive over time. Minute and above-background traces of Iodine-131 are already showing up in Tokyo’s water supply – 150 miles southwest of the leaking reactors – and in milk and spinach [with a dash of Cesium-137] from 75 miles away. The Japanese government has recently warned pregnant women and children to avoid drinking Tokyo tap water, and I-131 levels 1,200 times above background levels were recorded in seawater near the reactors.


    Aside from sharing the dubious distinction of both nations having been at the receiving end of America’s nuclear weapons, Japan and the Marshall Islands now share another dubious distinction. The unleashed isotopes of concern from the damaged Japanese reactors – Iodine-131, Cesium-137, Strontium-90 and Plutonium-239 – are well known to the Marshall Islanders living downwind of the testing sites at Bikini and Enewetak atolls in the central Pacific, following sixty-seven A- and H-bombs exploded between 1946-58. In fact, it is precisely these isotopes that continue to haunt the 80,000 Marshallese fifty-three years after the last thermonuclear test in the megaton range shook their pristine coral atolls and contaminated their fragile marine ecosystems.


    In fact, it was the irradiated downwind Marshallese on Rongelap and Utrik in 1954 caught in the Bravo fallout – and I-131 – that taught the world about the thyroid effect from the uptake of radioactive iodine.


    The U.S.’ largest [fusion] hydrogen bomb – Bravo – was 1,000 times the Hiroshima atomic [fission] bomb, and deposited a liberal sprinkling of these and a potent potpourri of 300 other radionuclides over a wide swath of the Central Pacific and the inhabited atolls in the Marshalls archipelago in March 1954 during “Operation Castle.”


    The Rongelap islanders 120 miles downwind from Bikini received 190 rems [1.9 Sv] of whole-body gamma dose before being evacuated. The Utrik people 320 miles downwind received 15 rems [150 mSv] before their evacuation. Many of the on-site nuclear workers at Fukushima have already exceeded the Utrik dose in multiples.


    Also entrapped within the thermonuclear maelstrom from Bravo was the not-so-Lucky Dragon [Fukuryu Maru] Japanese fishing trawler with its crew of twenty-three fishing for tuna near Bikini [see The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon by Ralph Lapp]. As the heavily exposed fishermen’s health quickly deteriorated after Bravo, the radio operator Aikichi Kuboyama died of a liver illness six months after his exposure; his is now a household name in Japan and is associated with the “Bikini bomb.”


    Meanwhile, the Japanese fishing industry was rocked when Geiger counters registered “talking fish” [what the Japanese called the clicking sound of the contaminated fish being monitored] from the 800 pounds of tuna catch of the Lucky Dragon in Yaizu and in local fish markets. Much of the Japanese tuna at the time was caught by a fleet of 1,000 fishing boats operating in the fertile tuna waters near the U.S.’ Pacific Proving Ground in the Marshalls.


    In response to the plight and symbolism of the Lucky Dragon, Japanese women collected 34 million signatures on petitions advocating the immediate abolition of both atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1955. Pugwash, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning anti-nuclear organization was founded in 1955 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in response to Bravo. The dangers of radioactive fallout from Bravo inspired Nevil Shute’s classic nuclear dystopia On the Beach, as well as Godzilla.


    To quell the diplomatic furor – whereby the Japanese representative to the U.N. accused the U.S. in March 1954 of “once again using nuclear weapons against the Japanese people” – the U.S. paid two million dollars to the fishing company which owned the Lucky Dragon; each of the 23 fishermen ended up with the princely sum of $5,000 in 1956 and the tuna company kept the rest.


    AEC chair Lewis Strauss (who originally proposed nuclear energy “too cheap to meter” in the post-War Atoms for Peace program) told President Eisenhower’s press secretary James Hagerty in April 1954 that the Lucky Dragon was not a fishing boat at all – it was a “Red spy outfit” snooping on the American nuclear tests.


    The legacy of latent radiogenic diseases from hydrogen bomb testing in the Marshall Islands provides some clues about what ill-health mysteries await the affected Japanese in the decades ahead. Also, the Marshall Islands provide insight about ecosystem contamination of these dangerous radioactive isotopes, and what this means for the affected Japanese.


    Profiles of the four isotopes


    o Iodine-131 [radioactive iodine] has a half life of eight days, and concentrates in the thyroid gland about 5,000 times more efficiently than other parts of the body. Traces of I-131 have been discovered in Tokyo drinking water and in seawater offshore from the reactors. It took nine years for the first thyroid tumor to appear among the exposed Marshallese and hypothyroidism and cancer continued to appear decades later.


    o Cesium-137 has a half life of thirty years and is a chemical analog of potassium; Cs-137 concentrates in muscle and other parts of the body. Rongelap Island has a new layer of topsoil containing potassium to help neutralize the Cs-137 left over from the H-bomb tests, but the Marshallese residents remain unconvinced and suspicious about the habitability of their long abandoned home atoll. Meanwhile, the U.S. is pressuring hard for their repatriation despite the fact that most islands at Rongelap will remain off limits for many decades with strict dietary restrictions of local foods.


    o Strontium-90 has a half life of twenty-eight years, is a chemical analog of calcium and is known as a “bone seeker.” Rongelap and the other downwind atolls have residual Sr-90 in their soils, groundwater and marine ecosystems.


    o Plutonium-239 has a half life of 24,000 years, is considered one of the most toxic substances on Earth, and if absorbed is a potent alpha emitter that can induce cancer. This isotope too is found in the soils and groundwater of the downwind atolls from the Bikini and Enewetak H-bomb tests.


    Lessons from the Marshall Islands


    * It took nine years after exposure to the 1954 Bravo fallout for the first thyroid tumor and hypothyroidism to occur in an exposed Utrik woman from the I-131. Several more tumors [and other radiogenic disorders] among the exposed people appeared the following year and every year thereafter. The latency period for thyroid abnormalities and other radiogenic disorders [see below] endures for several decades.


    * Because a child’s thyroid gland is much smaller than an adult’s thyroid, it receives a higher concentration of I-131 than an adult dose. Also, because a child’s thyroid gland is growing more quickly than an adult’s, it requires and absorbs more iodine [and I-131] than an adult thyroid gland. That is, the thyroid effect is age-related.


    * Radioactive Iodine-129 with a half-life of 15 million years and a well-documented capacity to bioaccumulate in the foodchain, will also remain as a persistent problem for the affected Japanese.


    * The Majuro-based Nuclear Claims Tribunal was established in 1988 to settle all past and future claims against the U.S. for health injury and property loss damages from the nuclear tests. As of 2006, the NCT had paid out $73 million [of the $91 million awarded] for 1,999 Marshallese claimants. There are thirty-six medical conditions that are presumed to be caused by the nuclear tests [http://www.nuclearclaimstribunal.com]. Eligibility for Marshallese citizens consists of having been in the Marshall Islands during the testing period [1946-58] and having at least one of the presumptive medical disorders.


    * The sociocultural and psychological effects [e.g., PTSD] of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will be long-lasting, given the uncertainty surrounding the contamination of their prefecture and beyond. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton eloquently detailed this uncertain future and fears about “invisible contamination” concerning the Hiroshima and Nagasaki “hibakusha” [“A-bomb survivors”] in his award-winning 1968 magnum opus Death in Life.


    * Noted radiation experts John Gofman [co-discoverer of U-232 and U-233 and author of Radiation and Human Health], Karl Z. Morgan [a founder of health physics] and Edward Radford [Chair of the National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR III committee and advisor to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal] stated that there is no threshold dose for low level ionizing radiation:


        Any amount of ionizing radiation – which is cumulative – can pose a health threat for certain individuals, and especially those with compromised immune systems.

  • Nuclear Energy and Weapons: Uncontrollable in Time and Space

    This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.


    Alyn WareThe earthquake and tsunami in Japan devastated a whole region. Radioactive emissions from the damaged nuclear reactors are very serious, and have already contaminated food and water, prompting a ban on food exports from four prefectures and a government warning not to give Tokyo tap water to babies. The crisis could impact human health and the environment on an even wider scale — across Japan and around the globe.


    Whether or not the brave technicians in Fukushima are successful in containing the bulk of the radiation in the six reactors, the message is clear: natural disasters and accidents will happen. If it can go wrong sooner or later it will go wrong, and Murphy’s law and nuclear energy do not mix.


    In Japan, the fear of radiation spreading is connected to the memory of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki over 65 years ago. Over 100,000 people died from radiation exposure — nearly as many as from the blast. The genetic effects continue down through the generations.


    Japan’s nuclear crisis has brought back to public consciousness the basic truth that the effects of nuclear disasters — whether from nuclear energy or nuclear weapons — are uncontrollable in time and space.


    Current events at Fukushima remind us of the negligence of nuclear power companies in building nuclear power plants on earthquake fault lines or vulnerable coastlines. But they should also remind us of the even greater negligence of the nuclear weapon states in maintaining their arsenals of 20,000 nuclear weapons — most with yields over 100 times greater than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and many on hair trigger alert, ready to launch within minutes. Any accidental, unauthorized, inadvertent or intentional use today (or tomorrow) would have a catastrophic, widespread, unprecedented and unimaginable impact on humanity and the environment.


    A recent statement released by international law experts from around the world, including former judges from the International Court of Justice, affirms that maintaining nuclear weapons and a readiness to use them is not only negligent, but given the dire consequences of any use, also against the law. The Vancouver Declaration on “Law’s Imperative for the Urgent Achievement of a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World,” notes that the use of nuclear weapons would be “contrary to the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law (laws governing use of force in wartime) forbidding the infliction of indiscriminate harm and unnecessary suffering.”


    In other words, during war one can attack military targets and personnel, but not civilians. One can inflict harm on military personnel, but not such harm that would last long after the conflict is over. In addition, it is illegal even in wartime to inflict long-term and severe damage on the environment. Nuclear weapons, with their uncontrollable blast, heat and radiation effects, could not be used without violating these laws. And if such an act is illegal, the threat to commit such an act is also illegal.


    Thus, in 1996 the International Court of Justice (a. k. a. the World Court) determined that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal, and that there is an unconditional obligation to achieve the complete prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons through good-faith negotiations.


    Since then, failure of the nuclear weapon states to comply has had predictably disastrous results for global proliferation and nuclear danger, convincing India, Pakistan and North Korea that if they can’t cajole the nuclear weapon states to give up nuclear weapons, then they might as well join their nuclear club. Others are bound to follow suit.


    Until recently, states that wanted to hang onto their nuclear arsenals and their policies to use them argued that such policies were legal by misrepresenting a clause in the Court’s opinion. That clause stated that the ICJ could not reach a conclusion on the legality of threat or use in the extreme circumstance of self-defense when the very survival of a state is at stake. So by stating that they would only use nuclear weapons in “extreme circumstances,” the nuclear weapon states avoided applying the general ruling of illegality to their nuclear weapons policies.


    But they can no longer avoid this. In May 2010, the parties to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which includes the major nuclear weapon states, affirmed that any use of nuclear weapons would cause catastrophic humanitarian consequences, and that states must comply with international humanitarian law “at all times.” They also agreed that all states must make special efforts to build the framework for a nuclear weapons-free world, citing the United Nations Secretary-General’s proposal for negotiations on a global nuclear abolition treaty.


    Now governments have to choose: hang onto their nuclear arsenals, or uphold the rule of law to which they have agreed. They can’t do both. We all know which will make us safer. Nuclear possession is a recipe for proliferation and corrosive to international humanitarian law, which, as the Vancouver Declaration says, “is essential to limiting the effects of armed conflicts, large and small, around the world.”


    The nuclear crisis in Japan has debunked the claims of authorities that their nuclear power stations, built with inferior containment on fault-lines, are safe and fully under control. Before something goes horribly wrong on the weapons front, we must also debunk the claims of the nuclear weapon states that nuclear weapons are safe as long as they are in the ‘right hands.’


    States including the US take the position that we should just trust them to take small steps towards nuclear disarmament sometime in an indefinite future. That’s like trusting the nuclear power industry to police itself and voluntarily phase itself out in deference to public safety. It simply won’t happen without a global prohibition enforced by the rest of the world, like the one outlined in the draft treaty circulated by the UN Secretary-General.


    In 1996, the President of the International Court of Justice called nuclear weapons an “absolute evil.” We have already applied international humanitarian law to other inhumane and indiscriminate (read “evil”) weapons such as landmines and cluster munitions in order to achieve global treaties for banning them. Now it’s time for absolute prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons.

  • From Hiroshima to Fukushima

    This article was originally published by The New York Times.


    Jonathan SchellThe horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters.


    First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris.


    In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people. In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as The New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan 13 feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).


    But this was not all. Another shock soon followed. Succumbing to the one-two punch of the earthquake and the tsunami, eleven of Japan’s 54 nuclear power reactors were shut down. At this writing, three of them have lost coolant to their cores and have experienced partial meltdowns. The same three have also suffered large explosions.


    The spent fuel in a fourth caught fire. Now a second filthy wave is beginning to roll — this one composed of radioactive elements in the atmosphere. They include unknown amounts of cesium-137 and iodine-131, which can only have originated in the melting cores or in nearby spent fuel rod pools. Both are dangerous to human health.


    The Japanese government has evacuated some 200,000 people in the vicinity of the plants and issued potassium iodide pills, which prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine. The U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan had to change course when it sailed into a radioactive cloud.


    The second shock was, of course, different from the first in at least one fundamental respect. The first was dealt by Mother Nature, who has thus reminded us of her sovereign power to nourish or punish our delicate planet, its axis now tipping ever so slightly in a new direction. No finger of blame can be pointed at any perpetrator.


    The second shock, on the other hand, is the product of humankind, and involves human responsibility. Until the human species stepped in, there was no appreciable release of atomic energy from nuclear fission or fusion on earth. It took human hands to introduce it into the midst of terrestrial affairs.


    That happened 66 years ago, also in Japan, when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time, President Harry Truman used language that is worth pondering today.


    “It is an atomic bomb,” he said. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”


    Japan’s prime minister, Naoto Kan, referred to the atomic bombings by implication when he stated that the current crisis was the worst for Japan “since the Second World War.”


    For some years afterward, atomic energy was understood mainly to be an inconceivably malign force — as the potential source of a sort of man-made equivalent of earthquakes, and worse.


    In the 1950s, however, when nuclear power plants were first built, an attempt began to find a bright side to the atom. (In 1956 Walt Disney even made a cartoon called “Our Friend the Atom.”)


    A key turning point was President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace proposal in 1953, which required nuclear-armed nations to sell nuclear power technology to other nations in exchange for following certain nonproliferation rules. This bargain is now enshrined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which promotes nuclear power even as it discourages nuclear weapons.


    As Ira Chernus has chronicled in his book “Atoms for Peace,” the proposal paradoxically grew out of Eisenhower’s distaste for arms control. He had launched a nuclear buildup that would increase the U.S. arsenal from 1,436 warheads at the beginning of his two terms to 20,464 by the end. His strategic nuclear policy was one of “massive retaliation,” which relied more heavily on nuclear threats than Truman’s policy had. Arms control would have obstructed these policies.


    Yet Eisenhower needed some proposal to temper his growing reputation as a reckless nuclear hawk. Atoms for Peace met this need. The solution to nuclear danger, he said, was “to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers” and put it “into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace” — chiefly, those who would use it to build nuclear power plants.


    Of course, the weapon never was taken out of the hands of soldiers, but the basic power of the universe was indeed handed over to nuclear power engineers — including Japanese engineers.


    The long, checkered career of nuclear power began. The promise at first seemed great, but the problems cropped up immediately. The distinction between Disney’s smiling, friendly atom and the frowning, hostile one kept breaking down.


    In the first place, the technology of nuclear power proved to be an open spigot for the spread of technology that also served the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the second place, the requirement of burying nuclear waste for the tens of thousands of years it takes for its radioactive materials to decline to levels deemed safe mocked the meager ingenuity and constancy of a species whose entire recorded history amounts only to some 6,000 years.


    Finally, the technology of nuclear power itself kept breaking down and bringing or threatening disaster, as is now occurring in Japan.


    The chain of events at the reactors now running out of control provides a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control.


    Nuclear power is a complex, high technology. But the things that endemically malfunction are of a humble kind. The art of nuclear power is to boil water with the incredible heat generated by a nuclear chain reaction. But such temperatures necessitate continuous cooling. Cooling requires pumps. Pumps require conventional power. These are the things that habitually go wrong — and have gone wrong in Japan. A backup generator shuts down. A battery runs out. The pump grinds to a halt.


    You might suppose that it is easy to pump water into a big container, and that is usually true, but the best-laid plans go awry from time to time. Sometimes the problem is a tsunami, and sometimes it is an operator asleep at the switch.


    These predictable and unpredictable failings affect every stage of the operation. For instance, in Japan, the nuclear power industry has a record of garden-variety cover-ups, ducking safety regulations, hiding safety violations and other problems. But which large bureaucratic organization does not?


    And if these happen in Japan, as orderly and efficient a country as exists on earth, in which country will they not? When the bureaucracy is the parking violations bureau or the sanitation department, ordinary mistakes lead to ordinary mishaps. But when the basic power of the universe is involved, they court catastrophe.


    The problem is not that another backup generator is needed, or that the safety rules aren’t tight enough, or that the pit for the nuclear waste is in the wrong geological location, or that controls on proliferation are lax.


    It is that a stumbling, imperfect, probably imperfectable creature like ourselves is unfit to wield the stellar fire released by the split or fused atom.


    When nature strikes, why should humankind compound the trouble? The earth is provided with enough primordial forces of destruction without our help in introducing more. We should leave those to Mother Nature.


    Some have suggested that in light of the new developments we should abandon nuclear power. I have a different proposal, perhaps more in keeping with the peculiar nature of the peril. Let us pause and study the matter. For how long?


    Plutonium, a component of nuclear waste, has a half-life of 24,000 years, meaning that half of it is transformed into other elements through radioactive decay. This suggests a time-scale. We will not be precipitous if we study the matter for only half of that half-life, 12,000 years.


    In the interval, we can make a search for safe new energy sources, among other useful endeavors. Then perhaps we’ll be wise enough to make good use of the split atom.

  • How Japan Learned About Nuclear Safety

    This article was originally published on the History News Network.


    Lawrence WittnerAlthough people can be educated in a variety of ways, experience is a particularly effective teacher.  Consider the Japanese, who today are certainly learning how dangerous nuclear power can be.


    Of course, the Japanese people also have had a disastrous experience with nuclear weapons—not only in 1945, when the U.S. government destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, but in 1954, when a U.S. government H-bomb test showered a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, with deadly radioactive fallout, and a vast nuclear disarmament movement began.


    The Lucky Dragon incident occurred in the context of the first U.S. H-bomb test, conducted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in March 1954.  The AEC had staked out a danger zone of some 50,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of New England) around Bikini atoll, the test site in the Marshall Islands, which the United States governed as a UN “trust territory.”  But the blast proved more than twice as powerful as expected, and sent vast quantities of radioactive debris aloft into the atmosphere.  When large doses of this nuclear fallout descended on four inhabited islands in the Marshall chain (all outside the official danger zone), the U.S. government evacuated U.S. weather station personnel and, days later, hundreds of Marshall Islanders.  The islanders quickly developed low blood counts, skin lesions, hemorrhages under the skin, and loss of hair.  Eventually, many came down with radiation-linked illnesses, including thyroid cancer and leukemia.


    Meanwhile, about 85 miles from the test site—and also outside the danger zone—radioactive ash from the H-bomb test fell on a small Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon.  Two weeks later, when the vessel had reached its home port of Yaizu, the crew members had become seriously ill, with skin irritations, burns, nausea, loss of hair, and other radiation-linked afflictions.  In short order, the Japanese government hospitalized the stricken fishermen and destroyed their radioactive cargo.  Although most of the fishermen survived, the Lucky Dragon’s radio operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died during hospital treatment.


    As the news of the Lucky Dragon incident spread throughout Japan, a panic gripped the nation, as well as a fierce determination to end the victimization of people, in Japan and the world, through nuclear weapons.  Nuclear fallout—or, as the Japanese referred to it, “the ashes of death”—became a household term.  A poll found that only two percent of the population approved of nuclear testing unconditionally.  In May 1954, a group of middle class housewives in the Suginami ward in Tokyo began a petition campaign to ban H-bombs.  Carried in their shopping baskets, this “Suginami Appeal” grew into a nationwide movement and, by 1955, had attracted the signatures of 32 million people—about a third of the Japanese population.  Japan’s nuclear disarmament campaign blossomed into the largest, most powerful social movement in that nation’s history.  Polls showed overwhelming popular support for it.


    Naturally, this upsurge of “ban the bomb” sentiment shocked U.S. government officials, who—with their nuclear weapons program at stake—engaged in a systematic policy of denial.  The chair of the AEC, Lewis Strauss, publicly declared that the Marshall Islanders were “well and happy.”  The Japanese fishermen, he conceded, had experienced a few minor problems; but, in any case, he stated falsely, they “must have been well within the danger area.”  Privately, he was more caustic.  The Lucky Dragon, he told the White House press secretary, was really a “Red spy outfit,” a component of a “Russian espionage system.”  At the request of Strauss, the CIA investigated this possibility and categorically denied it.  Nonetheless, Strauss continued to maintain that the irradiation of the Lucky Dragon “was no accident,” for the captain of the vessel must have been “in the employ of the Russians.”  He also told authors to ignore the contention of the “propagandists” that a crew member of the vessel had died of radiation exposure.


    Other American officials, too, saw no justification for the Japanese response to the Lucky Dragon incident.  From Japan, the U.S. ambassador lamented that nation’s “uncontrolled masochism.”  He reported that Japan, “aided by [an] unscrupulous press, seemed to revel in [its] fancied martyrdom.”  According to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower found this message “of great interest and value from [the] standpoint of policy formulation.”  Like Strauss, Eisenhower insisted in his memoirs that the fishermen were within the danger zone.  Commenting on the effects of the Lucky Dragon incident, the acting secretary of state added his own warnings about public attitudes in Japan.  “The Japanese are pathologically sensitive about nuclear weapons,” he told Eisenhower.  “They feel they are the chosen victims.”


    In reality, most Japanese had learned from the tragic events of 1954 that, when it came to nuclear arms, everyone was a potential victim.  Or, to put it another way, there are no safe nuclear weapons.  But many Japanese continued to cling to a belief in safe nuclear energy—at least until this month, when their crippled nuclear reactors began spewing out radioactivity and heading toward a meltdown.


    Plenty of people in other countries, including the United States, remain in denial about the safety of nuclear weapons and nuclear power.  What kind of experience will it take to convince them to rid the world of these monstrous things?  More to the point, is it really necessary to wait for that experience to occur?

  • Civil Society Challenges Nuclear Deterrence Doctrine

    This article was published by Inter Press Service News Agency.


    UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24, 2011 (IPS) – As the world’s nuclear powers continue to drag their collective feet, stalling all attempts at nuclear disarmament, a group of peace activists and civil society organisations is vigourously challenging the long-held myth of “nuclear deterrence”.


    “Nuclear deterrence is a doctrine that is used as a justification by nuclear weapon states and their allies for the continued possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons,” says the coalition, which met in Santa Barbara, California last week.


    Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation and one of the participants at the meeting, told IPS that members of the coalition agreed that the longstanding doctrine must be discredited and replaced with an urgent commitment to achieve global nuclear disarmament.


    “Before another nuclear weapon is used, nuclear deterrence must be replaced by humane, legal and normal security strategies,” she said.


    A declaration adopted by the coalition states: “We call upon people everywhere to join us in demanding that the nuclear weapon states and their allies reject nuclear deterrence and negotiate without delay a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of all nuclear weapons.”


    The participants at the meeting ranged from representatives from the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Disarmament and Security Centre.


    The world’s five “declared” nuclear powers are the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.


    Additionally, there are four “undeclared” nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which studiously maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” nuclear policy).


    Asked if a worldwide campaign for nuclear disarmament by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) would succeed – as it did in the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines years ago – Peter Weiss, president of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the analogy with the international campaign against landmines and cluster munitions must not be overdone.


    Those weapons, unlike nukes, were never seen by the countries that had them as ways of projecting their power to their neighbours or throughout the world, even if they never used them, he said.


    He pointed out that the last word on the difficulty which nuclear weapons countries have in giving them up was spoken years ago by Juan Marin Bosch.


    In his capacity as Mexico’s ambassador for disarmament, he said, in refreshingly undiplomatic language: “The big boys are scared shit that we’re going to take away their toys,” recounted Weiss, who is also a vice president of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA).


    Alyn Ware, director of the New Zealand-based Peace Foundation, said during the past four decades the international community has achieved treaties prohibiting and eliminating inhumane weapons such as anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, biological weapons and chemical weapons.


    However, the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, the most inhumane and destructive of all, remains elusive.


    Ware acknowledged the role played by civil society in achieving the mine ban treaty and the convention on cluster munitions. He said two key factors in the success were a focus on the humanitarian consequences of the use of these weapons, and the application of international humanitarian law.


    Ware also said that civil society action has been effective in changing public attitudes to nuclear weapons, especially in the states possessing nuclear weapons or covered by extended nuclear deterrence.


    Whereas public opinion polls in the 1980s indicated majority acceptance of nuclear weapons, recent public opinion polls indicate the majority now supports the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, he noted.


    However, such a change in public opinion appears to have had only a minimal impact on government policy.


    But there has been a slight shift, in that most governments now accept the vision and responsibility for achieving a nuclear weapons-free world, he added.


    Nonetheless, said Ware, few of the nuclear weapons states or their allies are prepared to abandon nuclear deterrence, prohibit the threat or use of nuclear weapons, or commence negotiations on anything other than minimal steps towards disarmament.


    The real potential of civil society to effect change in nuclear weapons policy is probably somewhere in between two polarised perspectives: public pressure is not irrelevant to a political realist world, but nor is it a magic cure that will by itself deliver the abolition of nuclear weapons, Ware declared.


    Dr Mary-Wynne Ashford of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War said there are many NGOs working on the issue of nuclear disarmament, including the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).


    “Yes, an NGO campaign is practicable and feasible,” she said. “I think consistent pressure from civil society is essential to motivate the nuclear weapons states to move to zero.”


    Doctors continue to raise the issues of the health consequences of the entire nuclear cycle from mining to production of weapons, said Ashford, who is also an associate professor at the University of Victoria in Canada.


    Dr Dale Dewar, executive director of Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), told IPS her organisation has been sustained by donors for 30 years in its campaign for a nuclear weapons-free world.


    “It will continue to do so as long as a donor base is willing to support it,” she added.


    Nancy Covington, also of PGS, told IPS: “I personally don’t see any other option than to mobilise civil society.”


    “If there is enough public education (on nuclear disarmament), then maybe civil society can make a strong enough statement that we can be heard,” she declared.

  • Breaking Free from Nuclear Deterrence

    This speech was delivered by Commander Robert Green at the 10th Annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future on February 17, 2011 in Santa Barbara, CA.


    Commander Robert GreenWhen David Krieger invited me to give this lecture, I discovered the illustrious list of those who had gone before me – beginning with Frank King Kelly himself in 2002. I was privileged to meet him the previous year when my wife Kate Dewes and I last visited Santa Barbara.  So I feel quite a weight on my shoulders. However, this is eased by an awareness of the uplifting qualities of the man in whose memory I have the huge honour of speaking to you this evening.


    As I do so, I invite you to bear in mind the following points made by Frank in his inaugural lecture:


    •  “I believe that we human beings will triumph over all the horrible problems we may face and over the bloody history which tempts us to despair.”


    • Some of the scientists who brought us into the Nuclear Age made us realize that we must find ways of living in peace or confront unparalleled catastrophes.


    • A nun who taught him warned him he would be tested, that he would “go through trials and tribulations.”


    As President Truman’s speechwriter, Frank discussed the momentous decisions Truman had to make – including this one:


    • “When I asked him about the decision to use atom bombs on Japan, I saw anguish in his eyes. He made it clear that he felt the weight of what he had done.”


    • “My experience in the Truman era indicated to me that the American people were not well informed about what was really going on in other countries and in the United States.”


    I have done my best to take all this wisdom to heart in what I now have to say about breaking free from nuclear deterrence.


    First, I will try to answer two challenging personal questions. People often ask why I am the only former British Navy Commander with experience of nuclear weapons to have come out against them. Others in the peace movement ask why it took me so long.


    A Child of the Nuclear Age


    In some ways, I am a child of the Nuclear Age. I was five days past my first birthday when 24-year-old Theodore Van Kirk, navigator of the Enola Gay, helped conduct the first nuclear atrocity, on Hiroshima. In 1968, I too was a 24-year-old bombardier-navigator when told that my Buccaneer strike jet pilot and I had been chosen as a nuclear crew in our squadron aboard the aircraft-carrier HMS Eagle. After being cleared to see top secret information, and indoctrinated about the honour and heavy responsibility of this role, we were given our target: a military airbase on the outskirts of Leningrad. We had to plan how to get there undetected from somewhere in the Norwegian Sea. This meant choosing the shortest route, over Sweden – a neutral country with very capable air defence. Our mission was to deliver a ten-kiloton WE177 tactical nuclear bomb, and then try to get back to our carrier, or at least bale out over Sweden or Norway. When I discovered there would not be enough fuel because the target was at the limit of our aircraft’s range, my pilot shrugged and said: “Well, Rob, if we ever have to do this, by then there won’t be anything to go back for.”  So we submitted our flight plan, and celebrated our initiation into the nuclear elite.


    Thirty years later, I was shocked to land at my target, to attend an anti-nuclear conference on European security on the eve of the 21st century. During the taxi drive into St Petersburg, I understood how my bomb would have caused massive civilian casualties from collateral damage. On TV that evening, I apologized to the citizens of Russia’s ancient capital. Then I told them I had learned that nuclear weapons would not save me – or them.


    Back in 1972, after retraining in anti-submarine warfare, I was appointed as senior bombardier-navigator of a Sea King helicopter squadron aboard the aircraft-carrier HMS Ark Royal. Our task was to use variable-depth sonar, radar and other electronic sensors, plus a variety of weapons, to detect and destroy enemy submarines threatening our ships. However, our lightweight anti-submarine torpedoes were not fast enough and could not go deep enough to catch the latest Soviet nuclear-powered submarines. So we were given a nuclear depth-bomb, an underwater variant of the WE177 design.


    The problem was that, if I had dropped one, it would have vaporized and irradiated one Soviet nuclear submarine, a large volume of ocean – and myself. This was because, unlike a strike jet, a helicopter was too slow to escape before detonation. So it would have been a suicide mission. Also, my leaders ignored the fact that there would have been heavy radioactive fallout from my bomb, plus the submarine’s nuclear power plant and any nuclear-tipped torpedoes it carried. And I might have escalated World War 3 to nuclear holocaust. All this, just to protect my aircraft-carrier.


    This time I did complain. I was reassured there would almost certainly be no need to use nuclear depth-bombs; no civilians would be involved; and the Soviets might not even detect it. Besides, I had a glittering career ahead of me, and did not want to spoil my prospects, did I? As I was ambitious, and no-one else raised concerns, I fell silent. In due course, I was promoted.


    However, the experience of such military incompetence and irresponsibility shocked me into a less trusting, more questioning frame of mind. That potent military tradition, carefully nurtured to carve out and hold down the British Empire, was immortalized in Tennyson’s Crimean war poem The Charge of the Light Brigade about an earlier suicide mission: “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.” That attitude was alive and well, in an all-volunteer Royal Navy. This was when I realized the significance of the fact that, unlike most of my colleagues, I had no military pedigree. My father worked in the Ministry of Agriculture. His father was a priest and divinity teacher at Trinity College, Dublin; and my paternal great-grandfather was an engineer. On my mother’s side, her father came from a line of professional gardeners and horticulturalists.


    UK Polaris Replacement and Falklands War


    In 1979, Margaret Thatcher swept into 10 Downing Street as Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. I was working just across the street as a newly promoted Commander, in the Ministry of Defence. In my position as Personal Staff Officer to the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Policy), I watched my Admiral facilitate the internal debate on replacing the four British Polaris nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines. The nuclear submarine lobby insisted upon a scaled down version of the massively expensive, over-capable US Trident system, despite threatening the future of the Navy as a balanced, useful force. Mrs Thatcher rammed the decision through without consulting her Cabinet; and the Chiefs of Staff, despite misgivings, were brought into line.


    My final appointment was as Staff Officer (Intelligence) to Commander-in-Chief Fleet. It was a stimulating time to work in military intelligence in the command bunker in Northwood, just outside London, where operational control of the British Navy was coordinated. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan; the Polish trade union movement Solidarnosc was pioneering the East European challenge to them; and new Soviet warship designs were emerging almost every month. I ran the 40-strong team providing round-the-clock intelligence support to the Polaris submarine on so-called “deterrent” patrol, as well as the rest of the Fleet.


    In 1981, the Thatcher government, desperate to find savings because of her determination to have Trident, announced a major defence review. With projected cuts to the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates, my chances of commanding a ship – the next step to higher rank – were slim. So I took the plunge and applied for redundancy.


    Notification of my successful application came one week into the Falklands War. In 1982, Britain suddenly went to war with an erstwhile friend, Argentina; and the Royal Navy’s role was pivotal. So the war was directed from Northwood by my boss, Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse. At one point the outcome was in the balance: our ships were being sunk, and some friends and colleagues killed. If Argentine strike aircraft or submarines had sunk an aircraft-carrier or troopship before the landing force got ashore, the British might have risked defeat. What would Mrs Thatcher have done? Until then, she had been the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history. Now she had become the ‘Iron Lady’, and needed a military victory to save her political career.


    Polaris had not deterred Argentine President Galtieri from invading the Falkland Islands. With victory in his grasp, would he have believed, let alone been deterred by, a threat from Mrs Thatcher to use nuclear weapons against Argentina? Yet after I left the Navy I heard rumours of a very secret contingency plan to move the British Polaris submarine on patrol south within range of Buenos Aires. The submarine was fitted with 16 launch tubes, each housing an intercontinental ballistic missile equipped with three 200 kiloton warheads. Then came corroboration, from France. François Mitterrand was President in 1982. In 2005, his psychoanalyst’s memoirs revealed that in his first counselling session Mitterrand had just come from an extremely stressful phonecall with Thatcher. A French-supplied Exocet missile fired from a French-supplied Argentine Navy Super Etendard strike jet had sunk a British destroyer. Mrs Thatcher had threatened to carry out a nuclear strike against Argentina unless Mitterrand ordered his brother, who ran the Exocet factory, to release the missile’s acquisition system frequencies to enable the British to jam them. Mitterrand, convinced she was serious, had complied.


    These nightmarish rumours led me to confront the realities of operating nuclear weapons for a leader in such a crisis. Defeat would have been unthinkable for the British military, and would have ended Mrs Thatcher’s career. She was a true believer in nuclear deterrence. Yet if she had threatened Galtieri with a nuclear strike, he would have publicly called her bluff and relished watching President Reagan try to rein her in. The Polaris submarine’s Commanding Officer, briefed by me before going on patrol, would have been faced with a shift of target. Had he obeyed the order, Britain would have become a pariah state, its case for retaining the Falklands lost in the international outrage from such a war crime, especially against a non-nuclear state. Nuclear deterrence failure would have compounded the ignominy of defeat. 


    Redundancy, Roof-thatching and Murder


    Back in 1982, on terminal leave after the British retook the Falkland Islands, I was 38 years old, with no qualifications except my rank and experience. Tired of weekend commuting to high-pressure jobs in London, I decided to try my luck and find local work which allowed me to be home every night. So I became a roof thatcher, enduring many painful jokes with stunned former colleagues. For eight idyllic years, I loved working with my hands in the open air restoring fine old houses, with a bird’s eye view of some of the most picturesque parts of southwest England. 


    Thatching proved vitally therapeutic in 1984, when my beloved aunt Hilda Murrell was murdered. My mother’s unmarried elder sister, she had become my mentor and close friend after my mother died when I was a 19-year-old Midshipman. Hilda was a Cambridge University graduate, and a successful businesswoman who ran the family rose nurseries. In retirement she became a fearless environmentalist and opponent of nuclear energy and weapons. At the age of 78, she applied to testify at the first British public planning inquiry into a nuclear power plant. Mrs Thatcher was determined to introduce a programme of reactors of a design which failed at Three Mile Island. Hilda, who had a formidable network of establishment contacts, did her homework about the insoluble problems of nuclear waste. A true patriot, she was not prepared to let the nuclear industry ruin and poison her country – and potentially the rest of the planet with nuclear weapons.


    Rumours of nuclear conspiracy swirled around an incompetent police investigation into her bizarre murder. Then in December 1984, a maverick member of parliament announced in the House of Commons that I had been suspected of leaking secret documents about the controversial sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands War, and hiding them with my aunt. I had done nothing so stupidly treasonable; yet several reliable sources agreed that State security agents had allegedly searched her house. A cold case review resulted in the 2005 trial and conviction of a petty thief, who was 16 years old in 1984. I have evidence that he was framed; and I am completing a book about this. 


    First Gulf War and Breakout


    Implicating me in Hilda’s murder radicalized me. Then after Chernobyl, I took up her anti-nuclear energy torch. I learned that the nuclear energy industry had begun as a cynical by-product of the race to provide plutonium for nuclear weapons. My case for supporting nuclear deterrence crumbled with the Berlin Wall. However, it took the 1991 first Gulf War to break me out of my indoctrination.


    From the moment in November 1990 when the US doubled its original figure for ground forces to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, I realised this was to be a punitive expedition. My military intelligence training warned me that the US-led coalition’s blitzkrieg strategy, targeting Iraq’s infrastructure as well as the leadership and military, would give Saddam Hussein the pretext he needed to attack Israel in order to split the coalition and become the Arabs’ champion. If personally threatened, he could order the launch of Scud ballistic missiles with chemical or biological warheads. If such an attack caused heavy Israeli casualties, Prime Minister Shamir would come under massive pressure to retaliate with a nuclear strike on Baghdad. Even if Saddam Hussein did not survive (he had the best anti-nuclear bunkers Western technology could provide), the Arab world would erupt in fury against Israel and its allies, its security would be destroyed forever, and Russia would be sucked into the crisis…


    In January 1991, I joined the growing anti-war movement in Britain and addressed a crowd of 20,000 in Trafalgar Square. A week later, the first Scud attack hit Tel Aviv two days after the Allied blitzkrieg began. For the first time, the second city of a de facto nuclear state was attacked and its capital threatened. Worse still for nuclear deterrence, Iraq did not have nuclear weapons. The Israeli people, cowering in gas masks in basements, learned that night that their so-called ‘deterrent’ had failed in its primary purpose. Thirty-eight more conventionally armed Scud attacks followed, causing miraculously few casualties. When US satellites detected Israeli nuclear armed missiles being readied for launch, President Bush rushed Patriot missiles and military aid to Israel, which was congratulated on its restraint.


    Meanwhile, in Britain, the Irish Republican Army just missed wiping out the entire Gulf War Cabinet with a mortar-bomb attack from a van in central London. A more direct threat to the government could barely be imagined. What if instead they had threatened to use even a crude nuclear device? A counter-threat of nuclear retaliation would have had zero credibility.


    Coming out against nuclear weapons was traumatic. My conversion was no sudden Damascene experience. I knew about indoctrination, the Official Secrets Act and top security clearances, linked to the carrots and sticks of a career requiring me uncritically to accept the nuclear policies of my government. My circumstances were unique. I went through a process of cumulative experiences, including the murder of my aunt and mentor in which British state security agents were allegedly involved. Nuclear weapons and power seem to make superficially democratic governments behave badly.


    Belatedly forced to research the history of ‘the Bomb’, I learned that the British scientific-politico-military establishment initiated and spread the nuclear arms race. Having alerted the United States to the feasibility of making a nuclear weapon, Britain participated in the Manhattan Project. On being frozen out of further collaboration by the 1946 McMahon Act, it began to develop its own nuclear arsenal. Thus Britain became a role model for France, and later Iraq and India: the first medium-sized power with delusions of grandeur to threaten nuclear terrorism. Also, I learned that nuclear deterrence does not work; it is immoral and unlawful, and there are more credible and acceptable alternative strategies to deter aggression and achieve security.


    Legal Challenge to Nuclear Deterrence


    Having given up thatching as the 1991 Gulf War loomed, after my breakout I became Chair of the British affiliate of the World Court Project. This worldwide network of citizen groups helped persuade the United Nations General Assembly, despite desperate countermoves by the three NATO nuclear weapon states, to ask the International Court of Justice for its Advisory Opinion on the legal status of nuclear weapons. In 1996, the Court confirmed that the threat, let alone use, of nuclear weapons would generally be illegal. For the first time, the legality of nuclear deterrence had been implicitly challenged.


    One aspect of the Court’s decision was especially important. It confirmed that, as part of international humanitarian law, the Nuremberg Principles apply to nuclear weapons. This has serious implications for all those involved in operating nuclear weapons – particularly military professionals who, unlike a President or Prime Minister, really would have to “press the button”. What is at stake here is a crucial difference between military professionals and hired killers or terrorists: military professionals need to be seen to act within the law. Nuclear weapons should be stigmatized as chemical and biological weapons have been, so that no military professional is prepared to operate them.


    The next year, recently retired General Lee Butler spoke out far more powerfully than I could. He is still encouraging me to keep going. Then in 1999 I found myself with David Krieger in a delegation to Tokyo not only with Lee Butler, but Robert McNamara too. In a heretical team of that calibre, I knew what I was doing was right.


    Why Nuclear Deterrence is a Scam


    It was the American writer H L Mencken who quipped: “There’s always an easy solution to every problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.” Nuclear deterrence fits this nicely. To make it acceptable to political leaders and those in the military who have to operate them, the appalling effects of even the smallest modern nuclear weapon have been played down, and that “there would almost certainly be no need to use them.” In fact, they are not weapons at all. They are utterly indiscriminate devices combining the poisoning horrors of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, plus inter-generational genetic effects unique to radioactivity, with almost unimaginable explosive violence. Yet nuclear deterrence is not credible without the will to use them. This is why a state practising nuclear deterrence is actually conducting a deliberate policy of nuclear terrorism.


    My next fundamental objection relates to the fact that, if deterrence based on conventional weapons fails, the damage is confined to the belligerent states and the environment recovers. What is at stake from nuclear deterrence failure is the devastation and poisoning of not just the belligerents, but potentially most forms of life on Earth.


    Closely related to this is a crazy reality: nuclear deterrence is a scheme for making nuclear war less probable by making it more probable. The danger of inadvertent nuclear war is greater than we think, when nuclear deterrence dogma demands that the United States and Russia persist with over 2,000 nuclear warheads between them poised for launch at each other inside half an hour. What are they playing at, over twenty years after the Cold War ended and when they are collaborating in the so-called “war on terror”?


    I now suspect that nuclear deterrence is an outrageous scam, devised sixty years ago by the US military-industrial monster dominating US politics and foreign policy. President Barack Obama’s vision for a nuclear weapon-free world, in his Prague speech in April 2009, was immediately contradicted by a caveat. He said: “…as long as these weapons exist, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies…” This is old, muddled thinking, because a rational leader cannot make a credible nuclear threat against a nuclear adversary capable of a retaliatory strike. And a second strike is pointless, because it would be no more than posthumous revenge. This is why enthusiasm for a nuclear weapon-free world is hypocrisy if some nuclear weapons will be kept “for deterrence as long as anyone else has them.”


    The deception deepens when the nuclear weapon states, aware that extremists armed with weapons of mass destruction cannot be deterred, plan pre-emptive nuclear attacks in “anticipatory self-defence” of their “vital interests” – not last-ditch defence of their homeland. Thereby, their unprovable claim that nuclear deterrence averts war is cynically stood on its head.
    Extremists would not only not be deterred by nuclear weapons. They could provoke nuclear retaliation in order to turn moral outrage against the retaliator and recruit more to their nightmarish causes.


    Consequences of Nuclear Deterrence Failure


    With such an irresponsible example from the five recognised nuclear weapon states, it is no surprise that India and Pakistan are trying to emulate it, locked toe to toe in hostile rivalry. Indian governments became convinced that the fetishistic power of nuclear deterrence held the key to guaranteed security and acceptance as a great power; whereupon Pakistan promptly followed suit.


    I will never forget a public meeting in Islamabad in 2001. The nuclear physicist Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy had persuaded General Aslam Beg, one of the “fathers” of Pakistan’s Bomb, to join a panel with himself and me. Beg warned against raising awareness about the effects of a nuclear strike on a Pakistan city, “in case it scares the people.” He had a simplistic faith in nuclear deterrence, ignoring all the added dangers of a nuclear standoff with India. He is not alone: my experience is that most believers in nuclear deterrence refuse to discuss the consequences of failure. I will now confront them.


    Economic Consequences. In April 2005, an internal report for US Homeland Security appeared on the web. Titled Economic Consequences of a Rad/Nuc Attack, the report examined what it would take to recover from the detonation of just one nuclear device in various cities. Much depends on the size of bomb and level of decontamination, but the economic consequences for New York alone would be around $10 trillion. That is roughly the annual Gross Domestic Product of the entire US economy. Just one nuclear bomb, on one city.


    Environmental and Agricultural Consequences. A deeply disturbing article, published in January last year in Scientific American, reported on recent climate research about a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which about only 100 Hiroshima-size nuclear devices would be detonated over cities. Apart from the mutual carnage and destruction across South Asia, enough smoke from firestorms – let alone radioactive fallout – would be generated to cripple global agriculture. Plunging temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere would cause hundreds of millions of people to starve to death, even in countries far from the conflict.


    Health Consequences. In 2004, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War published their findings regarding casualties from a Hiroshima-size nuclear warhead detonated over New York. Total fatalities were estimated at about 60,000.  Another 60,000 would be seriously but non-fatally injured. These would clearly utterly overwhelm any hospitals surviving the explosion. Again, this is just one nuclear weapon on one city.


    In 1985, the Pentagon accepted the theory of ‘nuclear winter’ was valid. However, its response was reflected in this statement to Congress by US Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle: “Rather than eliminating nuclear weapons, the most realistic method of preventing nuclear winter is to build enough weapons to make sure that the Soviets will be deterred from attacking.” Redundant warhead numbers have been cut, but little has changed in such thinking.


    Nuclear Deterrence Does Not Work


    In London in 2008, Kate and I attended one of the last public lectures by Sir Michael Quinlan. Known as the British high priest of nuclear deterrence, he advised successive governments on how to justify nuclear deterrence. Almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War, he asserted that rejecting any threat or use of nuclear weapons amounted to “full-blown pacifism”. Ignoring conventional deterrence options, Quinlan swept aside any objections that:



    • Nuclear deterrence has a credibility problem;

    • It incites nuclear arms racing and the spread of nuclear weapons;

    • Nuclear weapons cannot be used discriminately or proportionately; and

    • Nuclear weapon use would inevitably risk escalation.

    He failed to take into account the environmental and health consequences of even a limited nuclear exchange, avoiding any mention of the word “radioactivity”; and he dismissed abolition as unrealistic. In light of the World Court Advisory Opinion, Kate asked him for a legal use of nuclear weapons. Revealing his disturbing Cold War mindset, he gave the Russian naval base at Murmansk.
     
    The 2009 report Eliminating Nuclear Threats by the Australia-Japan International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament challenged the assumption that nuclear weapons have deterred major war. It acknowledged that avoidance of nuclear war has been due more to luck than deterrence. It agreed that nuclear weapons are worse than useless to deter terrorists.
    It correctly argued that, just because nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, this does not mean they should not be outlawed and abolished as chemical and biological weapons have been.


    Surprisingly, the report, chaired by former Foreign Ministers of Australia and Japan, also questioned the need for extended nuclear deterrence, arguing that conventional deterrence was adequate. Yet, having admitted that extended nuclear deterrence undermines progress towards a nuclear weapon-free world, it failed to follow the logic of its criticisms. No doubt this was because, unlike New Zealand, Australia and Japan continue to fall for the hoax of nuclear deterrence. 


    The report should have concluded that extended nuclear deterrence does not make Japan or Australia secure, and is not credible. The misnamed “nuclear umbrella” has helped the US maintain its military alliances and bases in both countries for its own purposes. However, the “umbrella” is really a lightning rod for insecurity, because the US risks being pushed past the nuclear threshold when its own security is not directly threatened.


    Why would any state attack Australia or Japan, let alone with nuclear weapons? If it did, the US would almost certainly not respond with nuclear weapons because it would risk inevitable, uncontrollable escalation to full-scale nuclear war. Instead, if the US decided it was in its national interest to come to their defence, it would rely on its formidable conventional firepower.


    Nuclear deterrence has not prevented non-nuclear states from attacking allies of nuclear weapon states. Examples include China entering the Korean War when the US had a nuclear monopoly in 1950; Argentina invading the British Falkland Islands in 1982; and Iraq invading close US ally Kuwait in 1990, and attacking nuclear-armed Israel with Scud missiles in 1991. In all these cases nuclear deterrence failed. The US in Korea and Vietnam, and the USSR in Afghanistan, preferred withdrawal to the ultimate ignominy of resorting to nuclear weapons to secure victory or revenge against a non-nuclear state.


    Safer Security Strategies


    The main security threats in the 21st century include climate change, poverty, resource depletion and financial crises as well as terrorism. Nuclear deterrence, provoking hostility and mistrust, prevents rather than assists the global non-military cooperation required to solve them.


    For all these reasons, all but about 35 states feel more secure without depending on nuclear deterrence. After Japan and Australia’s admirable leadership through co-sponsoring their recent report, they, South Korea and NATO’s non-nuclear members should therefore join the 140 states now supporting negotiating a Nuclear Weapons Convention.


    In Britain, a defence budget crisis has revived the debate about replacing Trident, and uncritical British support for US foreign policy. Indeed, the black hole in defence spending has been caused by desperate attempts to keep up with the Americans. Such poor decisions were driven by British nuclear dependence on the US.


    Instead, making a virtue from necessity, the British government should reassert its sovereignty and announce that it will rescue the dysfunctional nuclear non-proliferation regime by becoming the first of the recognized nuclear weapon states to rely on safer and more cost-effective security strategies than nuclear deterrence.


    A new world role awaits the British. By far the best-placed candidate for ‘breakout’, Britain’s nuclear arsenal is the smallest of the five recognized nuclear weapon states; and they are deployed in just one system, a scaled down version of Trident. Its government has to decide by 2016 whether to replace Trident with whatever the US decides. The minority Liberal Democrats, in coalition with the Conservatives, oppose Trident replacement. The alternative – nuclear-tipped Cruise missiles launched from attack submarines – has been ruled out, because the Obama Administration is scrapping its nuclear-armed Tomahawk missiles.


    All Britain has to do is decide not to replace its four Vanguard class Trident-armed submarines. British ‘breakout’ would be sensational, transforming the nuclear disarmament debate overnight. In NATO, Britain would wield unprecedented influence leading the drive for a non-nuclear strategy. British leadership would create new openings for shifting the mindset in the US and France, the other two most zealous guardians of nuclear deterrence. This would heavily influence India, Israel, Pakistan and states intent on obtaining nuclear weapons. The way would then open for a major reassessment by Russia and China, for all nuclear forces to be stood down, and for negotiations to begin on a Nuclear Weapons Convention.


    The key is to see nuclear disarmament as a security-building process, moving from an outdated adversarial mindset to a co-operative one where nuclear weapons are recognized as an irrelevant security liability. Mikhail Gorbachev was the first leader of a nuclear weapon state to understand this. In 1986, three years before the Berlin Wall was torn down, he briefly broke the grip of Cold War security thinking. Tragically, the opportunity to abandon Mutual Assured Destruction at the Reagan/Gorbachev summit in Iceland was defeated by the US military-industrial complex’s vested interests over ballistic missile defence, and the spurious US need to extend nuclear deterrence to its allies. Here was an example of how nuclear deterrence undercuts the political stability its proponents claim it creates. 


    Conclusions


    To conclude, I hope I have explained why I rejected nuclear deterrence, and why it is the last major obstacle to a nuclear weapon-free world.  Finding our way back from the nuclear abyss, on the edge of which nuclear deterrence has held us hypnotised and terrorised for sixty-five years, will not be easy. As with all advances in human rights and justice, the engine for shifting the mindset has to come from civil society.


    I recall what Mahatma Gandhi said in 1938, as he launched the final push towards evicting the British from India: “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” The American anthropologist Margaret Mead added: “Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”


    A surprisingly small network of individuals drove the campaign to abolish slavery. As with nuclear deterrence, slavery’s leading apologists were the power elites of the United States, Britain and France. They argued that slavery was a “necessary evil”, for which there was “no alternative”. They failed, because courageous ordinary British, American and French citizens mobilised unstoppable public and political support for their campaign to replace slavery with more humane, lawful and effective ways to create wealth. The analogy holds for nuclear deterrence, which can and must be discarded for more humane, lawful and safer security strategies if civilisation and the Earth’s ecosystems are to survive.

  • Doubts About Nuclear Deterrence

    Ward WilsonWhat’s striking about nuclear deterrence is not that occasionally people raise doubts about its efficacy, but rather that anyone believes in it at all. The evidentiary basis for nuclear deterrence is so thin as to be almost nonexistent.


    After sixty-five years of peace living under nuclear deterrence we tend to treat it as a certain, almost palpable thing. It is as if it were so real that it was an object you could pick up and handle in three dimensions. But the fact is that there is very little proof that nuclear deterrence even exists, much less works. If nuclear deterrence were on trial for murder, you’d never convict. There’s just not enough evidence.


    Lack of battlefield testing


    Consider: The most important actual test case for nuclear weapons is their use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This weapon, that we are resting so much of our safety and security on, has only been field tested once. This is sobering when you consider that the military establishments had known about machine guns and used them in colonial wars for almost fifty years before World War I, and yet in practice they were almost entirely ignorant of the impact they would have on the battlefield. It took three years and countless battles in which young men were sent across open ground in the face of machine guns before the British, French and Germans began to understand that massed charges would incur enormous costs. It often takes a great deal of experience with a new weapon before its characteristics and impact on war are fully understood. The fact that we have so little real experience with nuclear weapons should be a cause for humility. We don’t really know that much about them.


    Hiroshima


    Historians, over the last twenty years, have begun to doubt the traditional interpretation of Hiroshima. I am not talking about Gal Alperovitz’s effort to show that it was not necessary to drop the bomb – that is separate conversation largely about whether the United States is a good country or not. That is a moral conversation about the United States. What I am talking about is a practical question about nuclear weapons. I’m talking about the question of whether or not the Bomb worked – whether it did in fact coerce Japan into surrendering. Self-centered discussions about whether the United States is morally good or not do not affect the question of whether nuclear weapons coerce.


    Truman’s threat to bring a “rain of ruin” down on Japan if they did not surrender was the first real test of the special psychological “shock value” of nuclear weapons which Stimson claimed so much for after the war. Hiroshima is a major support for nuclear deterrence.


    Yet recent research throws the traditional interpretation into serious doubt. The evidence points toward the Soviet declaration of war as the decisive event. The bombing of one more city (we bombed 68 cities that summer) doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact. Of course, afterward Japan’s leaders used the atomic as a convenient reason to explain why they had lost the war, but that only proves that they were embarrassed about leading their country into a disastrous war.


    If Japan’s leaders essentially ignored the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where does that leave evidentiary proof of the “special shock” value of nuclear weapons? -The unique ability to coerce and deter?


    City attacks


    Of course, one reason we believe nuclear deterrence works is common sense: we are all afraid of the notion of having cities attacked with nuclear weapons. If we’re afraid of cities being blown sky high, then nuclear deterrence must work. There is troubling evidence from history, however. First, this is not the first time people have made extravagant claims for the power of city attacks. In the years between World War I and World War II there was a wave of excited commentators who talked about how bombing cities would either make war impossible or shorten any war to a matter of days. Chief among these was the Italian General, Giulio Douhet,whose basic thesis has been summed up in this way:


    1) Aircraft are instruments of offence of incomparable potentialities, against which no effective defence can be foreseen.
    2) Civilian morale will be shattered by bombardment of centres of population.
    3) The primary objectives of aerial attack should not be the military installations, but industries and centres of population remote from the contact of the surface armies. . . .


    Douhet was certain of the crippling effects of civilian attacks on any nation. Of such attacks he vividly wrote:



    And if on the second day another ten, twenty or fifty cities were bombed, who could keep all those lost, panic-stricken people from fleeing to the open countryside to escape this terror from the air?


    A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war–this before their army and navy had time to mobilise at all!


    American Air Force General William Mitchell agreed, saying, “It is unnecessary that these cities be destroyed, in the sense that every house be leveled to the ground. It will be sufficient to have the civilian population driven out so that they cannot carry on their usual vocation. A few gas bombs will do that.”


    It should stand as a warning to us that these predictions proved wildly wrong. Of course, it may be that the destruction and death simply wasn’t enough and that nuclear weapons will wreck so much havoc that they must surely be decisive. But we ought to be made at least a little cautious by this remarkable failure. It could, after all, also be the case that leaders simply don’ t care much about civilian deaths in war.


    When one reviews the evidence, there is a disturbing amount of evidence supporting the notion that cities and civilians don’t affect the outcome of war very much. A number of cities were destroyed in World War II as completely as if a nuclear weapon had been used (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo), but none of them compelled surrender. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that city destruction ever wins wars. Killing civilians, even on a massive scale, does not seem to deter wartime leaders. In the Thirty Years War when Imperial forces burned Magdeburg to the ground and killed 30,000, it did not lead to the surrender of the Protestant forces. In fact, Protestant recruitment and support actually rose throughout Europe after the destruction of that city. Civilian losses in the Thirty Years War eventually amounted to something like 20 to 30% of Germany’s population.


    Civilians losses seem to almost encourage militant feelings rather than the reverse. Historians note that after word of the destruction of Nagasaki, the members of Japan’s cabinet – who were meeting to discuss surrender when the news came – seemed more militant, more “bullish” than before.


    In the Parguayan War of 1864 to 1870, an estimated 60% of Paraguayans lost their lives. But the war only came to an end when the country’s leader was killed. Killing civilians never seems to lead to surrender, even when it goes on on a massive scale. Even though we feel afraid of nuclear attacks against cities in peacetime, the evidence from war tells a different story. It would be wise to study this evidence more closely before leaping to any conclusions about the efficacy of nuclear deterrence.


    65 years of peace


    Of course, it is often argued – or simply stated as fact – that nuclear weapons have kept the peace for 65 years. This would be a more impressive argument if it weren’t based on such a shaky logical foundation. Saying that since there has been no war therefore nuclear deterrence keeps the peace is a proof by absence. Proof by absence is one of the most demanding forms of proof to successfully prove. The problem is that if there is any other possible cause for the outcome, the proof fails. If I assert that since the glass is empty then Bob must have drunk it, the proof only succeeds if there is no other possible way for the glass to have gotten empty. It can’ t be possible for it to have spilled, for Julie to have drunk it, for the water to have evaporated, and so on.


    The problem with the peace of the last sixty-five years is that it could have been the result of any number of factors. Close economic and trading ties between nations, for example. The strength of alliances and international organizations like NATO, the UN or the European Union. It could have been the result of simple exhaustion. The Soviet Union lost something like 27 million people in World War II and 30 to 40 percent of its industrial capacity. It is hardly a surprise that they didn’t want to fight a war during the next twenty or thirty years. And in fact the study of history provides evidence for this explanation: there are quite lengthy periods of peace after both the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars. It could have been the result of closer ties as the result of jet travel, easier immigration, and television.There is a theory that major wars only come every 100 years: the Thirty Years War in the 16th century, the Seven Years War in the 17th, the Napoleonic Wars in the 18th, and World Wars I and II in the twentieth. Finally, sometimes in history there are just periods of peace. From 1815 to 1848 Europe knew substantial peace for 33 years. But that peace had nothing to do with nuclear weapons.


    People say, “But it makes sense to believe in nuclear deterrence, because if we get rid of nuclear weapons it will just make the world safe for conventional war.” The underlying assumption here is that nuclear weapons prevent conventional war. There was, of course, a good deal of similar thinking before World War II. People said that the threat of aerial attack against cities would prevent war. In the event, all city attacks did was to add about a million additional casualties to the war without affecting the military outcome particularly. It could very well be that nuclear weapons will play a similar role: they won’t deter people from fighting wars but they will add immeasurably to the death and destruction that any war brings with it.


    War will come


    War has been – despite intermittent periods of peace – a remarkably constant part of human history. The appeal of war seems remarkably robust. I often think of the passage from the Iliad that Robert Kennedy quoted to illustrate the appeal of war.



    The wrath of war that makes a man go mad for all his goodness of reason,
    That rage that rises within and swirls like smoke in the heart and becomes 
    in our madness a thing more sweet than the dripping of honey.


    People seem to believe that nuclear weapons ensure that no major wars will ever be fought again. This is a very dangerous way of thinking. If I had to choose between the power of nuclear weapons to transform human nature and prevent major wars (for which there is almost no evidence at all) or the ongoing appeal of war, I would, frankly, put my money on war. As President Kennedy argued, we should base our hopes on a gradual evolution of human institutions rather than a sudden revolution in human nature.


    The question is not, “shouldn’t we keep our nuclear weapons in order to preserve the peace?” Humans have shown themselves capable of remarkable folly throughout history and the folly of fighting a war with nuclear weapons is hardly beyond man’s capacity for being unwise. The question should be, if major war comes, do you want it fought with hand grenades and rifles and tanks, or with nuclear weapons?

  • Consequences of a Single Failure of Nuclear Deterrence

    Only a single failure of nuclear deterrence is required to start a nuclear war, and the consequences of such a failure would be profound.  Peer-reviewed studies predict that less than 1% of the nuclear weapons now deployed in the arsenals of the Nuclear Weapon States, if detonated in urban areas, would immediately kill tens of millions of people, and cause long-term, catastrophic disruptions of the global climate and massive destruction of Earth’s protective ozone layer. The result would be a global nuclear famine that could kill up to one billion people.  A full-scale war, fought with the strategic nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia, would so utterly devastate Earth’s environment that most humans and other complex forms of life would not survive.


    Yet no Nuclear Weapon State has ever evaluated the environmental, ecological or agricultural consequences of the detonation of its nuclear arsenals in conflict. Military and political leaders in these nations thus remain dangerously unaware of the existential danger which their weapons present to the entire human race. Consequently, nuclear weapons remain as the cornerstone of the military arsenals in the Nuclear Weapon States, where nuclear deterrence guides political and military strategy.   


    Those who actively support nuclear deterrence are trained to believe that deterrence cannot fail, so long as their doctrines are observed, and their weapons systems are maintained and continuously modernized. They insist that their nuclear forces will remain forever under their complete control, immune from cyberwarfare, sabotage, terrorism, human or technical error. They deny that the short 12-to-30 minute flight times of nuclear missiles would not leave a President enough time to make rational decisions following a tactical, electronic warning of nuclear attack.


    The U.S. and Russia continue to keep a total of 2000 strategic nuclear weapons at launch-ready status – ready to launch with only a few minutes warning.   Yet both nations are remarkably unable to acknowledge that this high-alert status in any way increases the probability that these weapons will someday be used in conflict.  How can strategic nuclear arsenals truly be “safe” from accidental or unauthorized use, when they can be launched literally at a moment’s notice?  A cocked and loaded weapon is infinitely easier to fire than one which is unloaded and stored in a locked safe.


    The mere existence of immense nuclear arsenals, in whatever status they are maintained, makes possible their eventual use in a nuclear war.  Our best scientists now tell us that such a war would mean the end of human history.  We need to ask our leaders:  Exactly what political or national goals could possibly justify risking a nuclear war that would likely cause the extinction of the human race?


    However, in order to pose this question, we must first make the fact known that existing nuclear arsenals – through their capacity to utterly devastate the Earth’s environment and ecosystems – threaten continued human existence.  Otherwise, military and political leaders will continue to cling to their nuclear arsenals and will remain both unwilling and unable to discuss the real consequences of failure of deterrence.  We can and must end the silence, and awaken the peoples of all nations to the realization that “nuclear war” means “global nuclear suicide”.


    A Single Failure of Nuclear Deterrence could lead to:



    • A nuclear war between India and Pakistan;
    • 50 Hiroshima-size (15 kiloton) weapons detonated in the mega-cities of both India and Pakistan (there are now 130-190 operational nuclear weapons which exist in the combined arsenals of these nations);
    • The deaths of 20 to 50 million people as a result of the prompt effects of these nuclear detonations (blast, fire and radioactive fallout);
    • Massive firestorms covering many hundreds of square miles/kilometers (created by nuclear detonations that produce temperatures hotter than those believed to exist at the center of the sun), that would engulf these cities and produce 6 to 7 million tons of thick, black smoke;
    • About 5 million tons of smoke that would quickly rise above cloud level into the stratosphere, where strong winds would carry it around the Earth in 10 days;
    • A stratospheric smoke layer surrounding the Earth, which would remain in place for 10 years;
    • The dense smoke would heat the upper atmosphere, destroy Earth’s protective ozone layer, and block 7-10% of warming sunlight from reaching Earth’s surface;
    • 25% to 40% of the protective ozone layer would be destroyed at the mid-latitudes, and 50-70% would be destroyed at northern and southern high latitudes;
    • Ozone destruction would cause the average UV Index to increase to 16-22 in the U.S, Europe, Eurasia and China, with even higher readings towards the poles (readings of 11 or higher are classified as “extreme” by the U.S. EPA). It would take 7-8 minutes for a fair skinned person to receive a painful sunburn at mid-day;
    • Loss of warming sunlight would quickly produce average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere colder than any experienced in the last 1000 years;
    • Hemispheric drops in temperature would be about twice as large and last ten times longer then those which followed the largest volcanic eruption in the last 500 years,  Mt. Tambora in 1816. The following year, 1817, was called “The Year Without Summer”, which saw famine in Europe from massive crop failures;
    • Growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere would be significantly shortened.  It would be too cold to grow wheat in most of Canada for at least several years;
    • World grain stocks, which already are at historically low levels, would be completely depleted; grain exporting nations would likely cease exports in order to meet their own food needs;
    • The one billion already hungry people, who currently depend upon grain imports, would likely starve to death in the years following this nuclear war;
    • The total explosive power in these 100 Hiroshima-size weapons is less than 1% of the total explosive power contained in the currently operational and deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear forces.


    A. Robock, L. Oman, G. L. Stenchikov, O. B. Toon, C. Bardeen, and R. Turco, “Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts”, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Vol. 7, 2007, p. 2003-2012.
    B. M. Mills, O. Toon, R. Turco, D. Kinnison, R. Garcia, “Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), Apr 8,2008, vol. 105(14), pp. 5307-12.
    C. I. Helfand, ”An Assessment of the Extent of Projected Global Famine Resulting From Limited, Regional Nuclear War”, 2007, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Leeds, MA.
    D. Starr, S. (2009) “Deadly Climate Change From Nuclear War: A threat to human existence.”


    A Single Failure of Nuclear Deterrence could lead to:



    • The launching of 1000 U.S. and 1000 Russian strategic nuclear weapons which remain on launch-ready, high-alert status, capable of being launched with only a few minutes warning;
    • These 2000 weapons – each 7 to 85 times more powerful than the Hiroshima-size (15 kiloton) weapons of India and Pakistan – would detonate in the United States and Russia, and probably throughout the member states of NATO;
    • The detonation of some fraction of the remaining 7700 deployed and operational U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads/weapons would then follow;
    • Hundreds of large cities in the U.S., Europe and Russia would be engulfed in massive firestorms . . . the explosion of each weapon would instantly ignite tens or hundreds of square miles or kilometers of the land and cities beneath it;
    • Many thousands of square miles of urban areas simultaneously burning would produce up to 150 million tons of thick, black smoke;
    • The smoke would rise above cloud level and form an extremely dense stratospheric layer of smoke and soot, which would quickly engulf the Earth;
    • The smoke layer would remain for at least 10 years, and block and absorb sunlight, heating the upper atmosphere and producing Ice Age weather on Earth;
    • The smoke would block up to 70% of the sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface in the Northern Hemisphere, and up to 35% of the sunlight in the Southern Hemisphere, producing a profound “nuclear darkness”;
    • In the absence of warming sunlight, surface temperatures on Earth become as cold or colder than they were 18,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age;
    • There would be rapid cooling of more than 20°C over large areas of North America and of more than 30°C over much of Eurasia;
    • Average global precipitation would be reduced by 45% due to the prolonged cold;
    • 150 million tons of smoke in the stratosphere would cause minimum daily temperatures in the largest agricultural regions of the Northern Hemisphere to drop below freezing every night for 1 to 3 years;
    • Nightly killing freezes and frosts would occur, no crops could be grown;
    • Growing seasons would be virtually eliminated for at least a decade;
    • Massive destruction of the protective ozone layer would also occur, allowing intense levels of dangerous UV-B light to penetrate the atmosphere and reach the surface of the Earth; as the smoke cleared, the UV-B would grow more intense;
    • Massive amounts of radioactive fallout would be generated and spread both locally and globally. The targeting of nuclear reactors would significantly increase global radioactive fallout of long-lived isotopes such as Cesium-137;
    • Gigantic ground-hugging clouds of toxic smoke would be released from the fires; enormous quantities of industrial chemicals would also enter the environment;
    • It would be impossible for many living things to survive the extreme rapidity and degree of changes in temperature and precipitation, combined with drastic increases in UV light, massive radioactive fallout, and massive releases of toxins and industrial chemicals;
    • Already stressed land and marine ecosystems would collapse;
    • Unable to grow food, most humans would starve to death;
    • A mass extinction event would occur, similar to what happened 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out following a large asteroid impact with Earth (70% of species became extinct, including all animals greater than 25 kilograms in weight);
    • Political and military leaders living in underground shelters equipped with many years worth of food, water, energy, and medical supplies would probably not survive in the hostile post-war environment.

    1. O. Toon , A. Robock, and R. Turco, “The Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War”, Physics  Today, vol. 61, No. 12, 2008, p. 37-42.
    2. A. Robock, L. Oman, G. Stenchikov, “Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences”, Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, Vol. 112, No. D13, 2007. p. 4 of 14.
    3. S. Starr, “Catastrophic Climatic Consequences of Nuclear Conflict”. (2009). ICNND


    See www.nuclearfamine.org or www.nucleardarkness.org for detailed sources of information on the environmental consequences of nuclear war.

  • Apocalypse Never: Assuring a Future for Humanity

    Apocalypse NeverIn Apocalypse Never, Forging a Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), author Tad Daley explores the dangers of the Nuclear Age, argues that the only way to prevent future nuclear catastrophes is to eliminate the weapons and provides a roadmap to achieve this goal. While it is a subject that many Americans prefer to avoid or deny, the threats of nuclear devastation are all too real. 


    When it comes to the serious perils that nuclear weapons pose to the continuation of human civilization that has developed over the past 10,000 years, and to the human future, far too many Americans remain ignorant and apathetic. Perhaps they believe that if they do not think about nuclear dangers, the dangers will disappear. That belief is dispelled by Daley’s important book.


    When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many people thought that the nuclear threat to humanity had ended. In fact, the thaw in US-Russian relations gave that appearance. Large numbers of nuclear weapons were eliminated from US and Russian arsenals, but not enough. There are still some 20,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the two countries. There are also an increasing number of nuclear weapon states and potential nuclear weapon states. Today there are nine countries in possession of nuclear weapons and still other countries that have developed or are developing the capabilities to become nuclear weapon states.


    Apocalypse Never presents a comprehensive overview of the possibilities of nuclear terrorism, accidental nuclear war, mismanagement of a nuclear crisis, and the intentional use of nuclear weapons. One cannot read about these dangers and the close calls that have occurred in the past and remain complacent. The reality is that there must be zero tolerance for nuclear weapons proliferating to terrorist organizations, such as al Qaeda, that cannot be deterred from nuclear attack because they cannot be located. There must also be zero tolerance for accidental nuclear war or errors in crisis management that would allow a crisis to get out of control and go nuclear. 


    While zero tolerance is perhaps an unrealistically high standard, it is the only acceptable standard. Anything less could result in a nuclear catastrophe. And this standard must be maintained not only by the US, which has already had more than its share of slip-ups, but by all nuclear weapon states and all that may emerge in the future. 


    Daley points out that one of the greatest problems of the Nuclear Age is America’s nuclear hypocrisy, its double standards and its do-as-I-say-not as-I-do approach to international treaties and relations among countries. The US, for example, has one standard for its ally Israel’s nuclear arsenal (tolerance and silence) and another for countries such as Iraq and Iran (preventive war and regime change, and threat of attack, respectively). As any parent knows, double standards don’t hold up over time.   As a result, America is failing in what is perhaps its most important leadership role. It is failing to discipline its policy to a single standard for all, including itself, a standard that must be zero nuclear weapons rather than zero tolerance only for the countries disapproved of by the US.


    Roughly half of Daley’s book elucidates the dangers of continuing with the nuclear status quo. It is clear, to quote William Butler Yeats, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold….” Either the world will spin off toward nuclear proliferation and nuclear catastrophe; or, as a far preferable alternative, we will eliminate nuclear weapons from the world. The latter alternative is the subject of the second half of Apocalypse Never. It is the alternative that common sense and rationality dictate.  It is also dictated by international law, specifically by Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which calls for the “good faith” pursuit of nuclear disarmament. This was the principal trade-off in the treaty, promised by the nuclear weapon states to the non-nuclear weapon states, the vast majority of the countries in the world that agreed not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons. 


    As Daley rightly points out, the NPT should properly have been named the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Elimination Treaty. Adding the word “elimination” to the title of the treaty would have made it readily understandable to the public that the treaty was not only about non-proliferation, but also about eliminating the existing weapons. The International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, advised in 1996 that the nuclear weapon states have an obligation to complete the task of achieving nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.


    Of course, it will not be easy to eliminate all nuclear weapons in the world; it is, in fact, the great challenge that we face in the Nuclear Age. Daley makes a strong case, however, that this is a goal that can be accomplished. He assesses the dangers of a “breakout” scenario and finds that a structure could be established with sufficient disincentives so that the costs of breakout would far exceed the benefits. The path we are currently on is nearly certain to lead to future catastrophes. 


    Those who think about the future and have a role in designing it must not shy away from the conclusion, reached by the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist. The weapons are incompatible with a human future. They put all humanity on the endangered species list. We need to awaken to this reality and then, in Daley’s vision, “build the architecture of a nuclear weapon-free world.”


    Another way in which Daley conceptualizes our choices is: apocalypse soon or, as the book is titled, Apocalypse Never. When it comes to nuclear apocalypse, there is no place for neutrality or complacency. It is a life-or-death struggle between humans and the tools we have created, the long-distance devices of mass annihilation we call nuclear weapons. These weapons challenge our humanity. The mere existence of these weapons is a call to action. 


    Daley’s book provides the background and the vision for individuals to become informed and effective citizens of the Nuclear Age and to fulfill our shared responsibility to pass the world on intact to the next generation. We are the first generation in human history to run the risk of failing in that responsibility. To assure that we succeed, individuals must become agents of change.  The existential threat of nuclear weapons is not an issue for leaders alone. In fact, the issue is far too important to be left only in the hands of leaders. The people must care enough to lead their leaders.    


    Apocalypse Never takes the abolition of nuclear weapons out of the realm of utopian dream, pointing the way to a citizen-led political project. I urge you to read this book and, in the interests of all humanity, to become engaged in the great goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons.