Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • This Spring in Nuclear Threat History – 2019

    March 23, 1983– President Ronald Reagan, influenced by Manhattan Project scientist Edward Teller and other hawkish Cold Warriors and speaking before a national television audience, announced his dream of making Soviet nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” by proposing the research, development, and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), later nicknamed “Star Wars” by news media representatives.  Over $100 billion was spent in the next two decades researching exotic space-based X-ray lasers and other orbital SDI sensors and weapons.  Cost estimates for the program spiraled as high as several trillion dollars as it became clear that a strategic defensive buildup would fuel even more of an offensive nuclear arms race.  This led to the program being downsized in the 1990s to tackle shorter-range missile threats from nations such as Iran and North Korea.  Under President Clinton, the program was renamed National Missile Defense (NMD) in 1996 and focused on using Ground-Based Interceptors to intercept threat missiles in mid-trajectory.  Then, President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty despite widespread criticism that this move would increase nuclear instability and ratchet up the risk of nuclear war by lifting restrictions on defensive weapons.  In late 2002, the Bush Administration announced the newly named Missile Defense Agency (MDA) would, despite inadequate R&D and a large number of test failures, begin building a Ground-Based Missile Defense (GMD) system.  Today in 2019, with 44 ground-based interceptors deployed in Alaska and California, the program’s price tag is at least $40 billion and possibly as high as $67 billion.  Its test record is poor, oversight of the program has been wholly inadequate, and according to a plethora of defense experts, inside and outside the government, it has no demonstrated ability to stop an incoming missile under real-world conditions.  In recent months, history has unfortunately repeated itself as President Trump has put another dagger into long-held international legal precedent, particularly the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which prohibits militarizing outer space, by advocating the creation of a sixth branch of the U.S. military – a Space Force and the development of space-based missile defenses or “Star Wars – The Sequel” if you will.  Comments:  Once again the 45th President has ignored or purposefully rejected broad-based multilateral scientific and military consensus by releasing a January 2019 “Missile Defense Review” that increases investments in space-based sensors and lasers while also proposing a third site for ground-based interceptors on the East Coast.  This will inevitably fuel the growth of larger and larger numbers of strategic offensive nuclear weapons making the U.S. and the world a tremendously more unstable place where the risks of accidental or unintentional nuclear war will increase dramatically.  Also, the deployment and testing of military weapons including possibly nuclear devices in orbit will fuel an exponential increase in orbital space debris and possibly disrupt e-commerce and communication through the electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) impacts of high altitude nuclear tests.  Even if we somehow avoid most or all of these negative impacts including nuclear war, our nation and others will squander precious resources that could have otherwise have been used to address real problems such as global warming, crumbling infrastructure, the global migrant crisis, international terrorism, hunger, disease, and poverty.  (Sources:  Laura Grego, George N. Lewis, and David Wright.  “Shielded From Oversight:  The Disastrous U.S. Approach to Strategic Missile Defense.”  Union of Concerned Scientists. July 2016. pp. 1, 6, Sarah Kaplan and Dan Lamothe. “Trump Says He’s Directing Pentagon to Create A New Space Force.”  Washington Post. June 18, 2018, Paul Sonne. “Pentagon Seeks to Expand Scope and Sophistication of U.S. Missile Defenses.” Washington Post. Jan. 16, 2019, Deb Riechman and Lolita C. Baldor.  “Trump Says U.S. Will Develop Space-Based Missile Defense.”  AP News. Jan. 17, 2019, and “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space.”  United Nations. Office of Outer Space Affairs, https://www.unoosa.org accessed Jan. 29, 2019.)

    April 4, 1949 – Seventy years ago, after a communist coup in Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Blockade-Airlift, twelve nations including Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the U.K., and U.S. signed the North Atlantic Treaty creating a military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, against the Soviet Union and its communist bloc Eastern European allies.  The U.S.S.R. responded on May 14, 1955 with the creation of the eight-nation Soviet-led Warsaw Pact mutual defense agreement.  Two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolutions that overthrew pro-Soviet communist governments in Eastern Europe, and eight months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the Warsaw Pact alliance broke up on April 1, 1991.  Despite some assurances to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made by Western and particularly American leaders that NATO would not expand and thereby threaten Russian security, in actuality, NATO did indeed expand from its Cold War era membership of 16 nations to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in July of 1997.   After adding more Baltic and Eastern European countries in 2004 and 2009, NATO has expanded again to its current size of 28-member nations and there is some support for eventually including Ukraine and Georgia as members of the Alliance.  Another concern is a recent Trump Administration push to increase spending on U.S. Air Force military construction and pre-positioning of strike aircraft close to Russian borders in Estonia, Slovakia, Norway and several other NATO countries.   Comments: More and more arms control experts and a concerned global citizenry are urging the U.S. to bring home tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, allowing NATO to move to a safer, more secure non-nuclear means of deterring Russian military adventures as occurred during the Crimea-Ukraine Crisis.  Russian president Putin has responded by deploying even more nuclear-capable forces near his Western borders with both sides increasing the risks of miscalculation which might trigger a nuclear Armageddon.  Another reason to consider scaling down if not eliminating NATO is that according to many experts like antiwar blogger and author David Swanson, “NATO is used within the U.S. and by other NATO members as a cover to wage war under the pretense that (such actions) are somehow more legal or acceptable…Placing a primarily U.S. war under the banner of NATO also helps to prevent Congressional oversight of that war (including possible use of the 1973 War Powers Resolution).”  He then cites some specific examples, “…NATO has waged aggressive wars far from the North Atlantic bombing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya.  NATO has added a partnership with Colombia abandoning all pretense of its purpose being (solely) in the North Atlantic.” (Sources: Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information. 2002, pp. 117, 125, 132-33, Steve Andreasen and Isabelle Williams. “Bring Home U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons from Europe.” Ten Big Nuclear Ideas for the Next President, edited by Tom Z. Collina and Geoff Wilson. Ploughshares Fund. November 2016, Joe Gould. “Poking the Bear: U.S. Air Force Builds in Russia’s Backyard.” Defense News. June 25, 2018 and David Swanson. “Top 10 Reasons Not to Love NATO.”  Counterpunch.org. Jan. 18, 2019.)

    April 14, 1948 – The United States conducted its fourth of an eventual Cold War total of over a thousand nuclear explosive tests at a new location – Enewetak Atoll – detonating a 37 kiloton bomb atop a 200-foot high tower.  It was the first of some forty such tests done in this region of the Central Pacific Ocean which includes Runit and other Marshall Island locations (another 23 atomic tests were staged at nearby Bikini Atoll).  At the time, the native population of these islands were forcibly removed from the test sites.  However some of them were still exposed to nuclear fallout they referred to as “snow.”  A $2.3 billion compensation fund established by the U.S. government has had a minimal impact on the islanders for only a small portion, four million dollars, has actually been distributed to local test victims.  In the late 1970s, U.S. military personnel such as Ken Kasik and Jim Androl worked on cleaning up the radioactive remnants of the nuclear blasts, by bulldozing nuclear waste, including approximately 400 “lumps” of the deadliest substance on Earth, plutonium, onto Runit’s coral atoll.  They then encased the deadly pile beneath a concrete circle which is referred to by locals as “The Dome.”  The soldiers shifted radioactive debris for many months without the benefit of radiation-protective clothing which has resulted in a large number of the men dying from cancers and related diseases.  Unfortunately, the U.S. government ruled that since they were not actually involved directly in witnessing nuclear tests, that they weren’t recognized as “atomic veterans.”   The locals are justifiably upset that it now appears that the Dome is cracking and leaking and that a powerful typhoon might break the entire waste dump apart and spill plutonium and other highly radioactive contaminants into their ecosystem.  The Marshall Islanders led by their Foreign Minister, the late Tony deBrum (1945-2017), filed a lawsuit against all nine nuclear weapons states in April of 2014 at the International Court of Justice and against the United States government in U.S. federal court.  But the former lawsuit was dismissed by the International Court of Justice on October 5, 2016 and the latter action was similarly dismissed by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Appeals on July 31, 2017.  The Marshallese legitimately feel abandoned, ignored, and disrespected, “We’re disposable. Our lives don’t matter.  War matters.  Nuclear bombs matter,” proclaimed poet and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices over the last seven decades by the nine nuclear weapons states has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations especially native peoples and hundreds of thousands of military “participants.”  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people today due to nuclear testing.  (Sources:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook: Volume II, Appendix B.”  National Resources Defense Council, Inc., Cambridge, MA:  Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, page 151, and “The Dome.” ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). December 5, 2017 http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/the-dome/9198340 and “Marshall Islands Lawsuit.”  Nukewatch:  Nuclear Watch New Mexico. https://nukewatch.org/Marshall_Islands_lawsuit.html both accessed Jan. 29, 2019.)

    April 23, 30, 2007 – The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was first established in Australia on April 23rd and then formally launched internationally in Vienna during the NPT PrepCom meeting a week later on April 30th.  Campaign coordinator Felicity Hill urged all countries to begin negotiations without delay on a nuclear weapons convention.  During that week, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams who spearheaded the campaign in the 1990s to prohibit anti-personnel landmines proclaimed, “In a world of increasing nuclear danger, it’s time for an international convention to abolish nuclear weapons.  We are told by some governments that a nuclear weapons convention is premature and unlikely.  Don’t believe it.  We were told the same thing about a landmine ban treaty.”  ICAN, which grew exponentially to encompass a plethora of nongovernmental organizations in 100 nations, including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, helped rejuvenate a decades-long avalanche of planetary anti-nuclear activism which culminated on July 7, 2017 with a landmark vote in the United Nations General Assembly for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) approved by two-thirds of the world’s nations. Although the nine nuclear weapons states including the United States disavowed the treaty, global support for the convention is growing stronger as time passes.  Comments:  ICAN won a Nobel Peace Prize for its prominent role in the U.N. nuclear weapons prohibition treaty.  Like other successful political movements of the past such as the international effort to end African slavery of the 19th century and the worldwide women’s suffrage and liberation movements of the 19th through 21st centuries, nuclear abolition evolved from the objections of a small group of people – Manhattan Project scientists – to encompass a growing consensus of philosophers and thinkers of the 1950s through 1970s, increasing its popularity among larger and larger numbers of politicians, scientists, celebrities and citizens thanks to SANE/FREEZE, Global Zero and other similar international campaigns in the last forty years to reach a tipping point – the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.  However, at the same time, we’ve entered one of the most dangerous periods in all of human history, a renewed offensive and defensive nuclear arms race fueled by belligerent, unstable, and impulsive leaders and accepted by hundreds of millions of distracted, unaware supporters who erroneously believe that “nuclear deterrence” and “peace through strength” are the only legitimate and safe pathways for centuries to come.  As Albert Einstein warned, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watched them without doing anything.”  The entire citizenry of the planet must redouble their efforts to persuade, cajole, and convince the leaders and populace of the nine nuclear nations that eventually the unthinkable will happen unless humanity joins together to stop it.  Failure is not an option.  (Sources:  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.  https://www.ican.org/campaign/campaign-overview/campaign-milestones-2007/ accessed Feb. 2, 2019 and other alternative news media websites.)

    May 8, 2018 – President Donald Trump unilaterally, and against the advice of several of America’s strongest European allies (France, Germany and the U.K.) who were also parties to the deal, signed a presidential memorandum to withdraw the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, popularly known as the Iran Nuclear Deal of 2015.  It appears to most observers that the 45th President was against this deal for a long period of time claiming that he personally knew that Iran was lying about their desire to only develop a peaceful nuclear program.  He also argued that the recent trove of Iranian documents provided by the Israelis proved he was correct.  In actuality, the vast majority of international nuclear experts, including inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, continued to believe that Iran was complying with the terms of the deal, that in fact, the documents released around this time by Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu did not provide any previously unknown revelations about Iranian nuclear activities from 10-15 years ago.  Several weeks later in July, Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian President, responded to the U.S. going back on its word through the sudden and unexpected withdraw from the agreement and by renewed economic sanctions imposed on his nation by warning the Trump Administration “not to pursue hostile policies toward Iran.”  Predictably, the Tweeter-in-Chief then exploded in anger by texting what amounts to a nuclear threat, “Never, ever threaten the United States again or you will suffer consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before.”  Comments:  It seems likely that Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal may have ironically pushed the Iranians to redirect assets from civilian nuclear pursuits in order to more quickly develop a nuclear warhead under the reasoning that a nuclear-armed regime like North Korea is much more likely to deter U.S. attempts to overthrow their government through overt or covert means.  More importantly, while many nuclear analysts note that Cold War tensions have been building during the Bush and Obama presidencies with the complicity of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it is clear that Donald Trump has almost single-handedly redoubled the risks of a potential nuclear conflict through his commitment to increase Obama-era spending on nuclear modernization, threaten Russia and China by promoting a stepped up push for strategic missile defenses on the ground and in outer space, end U.S. participation in the ultra-successful three decade-old INF Treaty which helped eliminate over two thousand Russian and American intermediate and medium-range nuclear missiles and refuse to commit the U.S. to extend the New START Treaty before it expires in February of 2021.  Defeating President Trump in the upcoming election in November of 2020, a task that addresses many domestic and international concerns near and dear to the American people (including ending U.S.-support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, restricting the President’s escalation of drone strikes which have increased “collateral” deaths and injuries to civilians in the nations targeted, restoring the critical role of peaceful diplomatic negotiations to U.S. foreign policy, stopping wasteful spending on an unnecessary border wall, restoring domestic safety net programs to aid the elderly, retired, poor, handicapped, and other minorities, and resolving many other issues), is looking more and more like a global imperative in order to prevent an increasingly likely nuclear war occurring somewhere in the world and caused directly or indirectly by Trump’s dangerously unstable finger on the nuclear trigger. (Sources: Jon Greenberg, John Kruzel, and Amy Sherman. “Trump Withdrawals U.S. From the Iran Nuclear Deal: Here’s What You Need to Know.”  May 8, 2018 https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/may/08/trump-withdrew-us-iran-deal-heres-what-you/ and Lawrence Wittner.  “Lurching Toward Catastrophe:  The Trump Administration and Nuclear Weapons.”  Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Nov. 26, 2018 https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/lurching-toward-catastrophe-the-trump-administration-and-nuclear-weapons/ both accessed on Feb. 19, 2019.)

    May 18, 1974 – India conducted its first nuclear explosive test – an underground test conducted at Pokharan in the Rajasthan Desert, codenamed Smiling Buddha.  The Indian government falsely claimed that their 12 kiloton test (later downgraded by the U.S. intelligence community to four to six kilotons) was a “peaceful nuclear explosion.” Twenty-four years later India conducted two more sets of nuclear tests totaling a combined five explosions on May 11th and 13, 1998 with the highest yield of 43 kilotons followed by five Pakistani nuclear tests, four on May 28th and another blast on May 30th with yields in the 15-35 kiloton range at the Chagai Hill region near their border with Iran.  Just a year later in May-July 1999, a near-nuclear conflict ensued between those nations in the mountainous Kargil region of Kashmir as both sides traded artillery and small arms fire, and conducted air strikes that saw the loss of several aircraft and total casualties that reached about 1,000 personnel.  If India had not prevailed in this so-called ‘Kargil War’ it is possible they may have resorted to the use of one or more small yield nuclear weapons which were in fact readied for possible use during this crisis, according to some experts. The threat of a South Asian nuclear conflict increased dramatically again during a military crisis between the two nations from December 2001 through June 2002 after India’s parliament was attacked by Islamist militants who allegedly had ties to the Pakistani government.  Yet another tripwire to nuclear war was avoided in 2008 after a terrorist attack on Mumbai, India was linked to intelligence agencies in Pakistan.  Since then, there is even more cause for concern as two militant attacks struck two Indian army bases in 2016 (the Uri Attack on Sept. 18th that killed 20 soldiers and the Nagrota attack on Nov. 29th that killed seven) and the Indians responded on Sept. 29th with “surgical strikes by special forces across the Line of Control in Kashmir   And just a few weeks ago on Feb. 14, 2019 a suicide bomber and member of the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed struck an Indian convoy killing 40 Indian security personnel in the Pulwana district of Kashmir.  In late February India retaliated for recent attacks by launching the first air strikes outside the Line of Control in Kashmir since 1971.  Then Pakistan announced it had captured two pilots from planes it says it shot down, but thankfully in a move to deescalate tensions Pakistani authorities said they would return the men to India.  However it is a known fact that violence has been going on for quite a while as regular artillery exchanges between Pakistani and Indian troops have been common for many years in this extremely volatile region.  India’s nuclear doctrine mandates that if its conventional forces suffer a nuclear attack, it would respond with an all-out nuclear counterstrike targeting Pakistani population centers.  Pakistan has threatened to respond in a similar fashion.  Comments:  A nuclear war in South Asia would have a devastating impact not just on the region but on the planet.  With India’s strong ties to the United States and Pakistan’s growing relationship with China, such a war could escalate to a global one.  This situation represents yet another paramount reason why global nuclear arsenals should be dramatically reduced without delay and eliminated at the earliest possible opportunity.  (Sources:  Various mainstream and alternative news media sources and Kumar Sundaram. “20 Years of Nuclear Tests by India and Pakistan:  The Real Nuclear Danger in Asia That Nobody Is Talking About.”  Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. May 25, 2018 https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/20-years-nuclear-tests-india-pakistan-real-nuclear-danger-asi…, The Growing Threat of Nuclear War and the Role of the Health Community.” World Medical Journal.  Vol. 62, No. 3, October 2016 http://lab.arstubiedriba.lv/WMJ/vol62/3-october-2016/slides/slide-8.jpg, “The Kargil Conflict.” Encyclopedia of India.  Thomson Gale Publishers. 2006 http://www.encyclopedia.com/international/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/kargil-conflict all of which were accessed Feb. 20, 2019 and David Grahame and Jack Mendelsohn, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information. 2002, pp. 11, 20-21.)

    May 23, 1967 – Nuclear war was barely avoided on this date, one of at least dozens and possibly hundreds of near-misses that almost triggered a nuclear World War III.  Such a nuclear holocaust not only would have killed hundreds of millions of targeted civilians west and east of the Iron Curtain, in North America, and all over Eurasia, but also precipitated global nuclear winter killing billions globally as temperatures plummeted because of huge amounts of dust and debris ejected into the stratosphere by the nuclear blasts.  Such an eventuality would have led to the breakdown of global agriculture and the end of civilization, if not the entirety of the human species.  Ironically the source of this near-nuclear fusion bomb Armageddon came from the nearest star – our nuclear-powered sun which experienced one of the largest solar storms of the late 20th century on this date.  The near-catastrophe occurred when the U.S. Strategic Air Command detected the sudden failure of multiple radars operated in the Arctic and at other sites around the world by the Air Force’s Ballistic Missile Early Warning System.  It was apparently a scenario envisioned by some nuclear war planners – a massive Soviet electronic jamming offensive to cover a bolt-from-the-blue nuclear first strike by the Kremlin.  Thankfully and luckily, minutes before a large U.S. nuclear bomber force was launched, the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD), thanks to information provided by the newly established Solar Forecasting Center, ordered commanders to stand down as massive solar flares and radio bursts were correctly judged as being responsible for the collapse of early warning communication systems.  But had those U.S. planes launched before the warning was relayed by land line phones, there would have been no way to recall them due to the disruption of all radio traffic by the storm.  Comments:  The human race has been very lucky in avoiding a devastating nuclear war, but it is not wise to rely on good fortune forever.  It would be much more prudent if the people of the Earth were able to convince the leaders of the nine nuclear weapons nations to immediately de-alert strategic nuclear forces, dramatically reduce those and all other nuclear weapons and permanently dismantle this nuclear doomsday machine before it is too late. (Source:  Avery Thompson.  “How a Solar Flare Almost Triggered a Nuclear War in 1967.”  PopularMechanics.com. Aug. 10, 2016 https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a22265/solar-flare-nuclear-war/ accessed Feb. 14, 2019.)

    June 12, 1982 – An estimated one million people gathered in Central Park on Manhattan Island in support of the Second United Nations’ Special Session on Disarmament and as a reaction to the largest military buildup since the beginning of the Cold War as ordered by President Reagan.  It was one of the largest ever antiwar and antinuclear demonstrations in global history and some believe that it signaled the beginning of the end of the Cold War (1945-1991), just as previous demonstrations had helped convince leaders to end other conflicts such as the divisive Vietnam War.  Comments:  Global citizenry have staged many other protests and demonstrations both before and after this event and it is hoped that antinuclear activism will grow substantially thanks to the successful negotiation and signing of the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).  Every citizen on the planet must redouble their efforts to speak out or protest against the existence of nuclear weapons as it is the paramount priority of our species (along with addressing accelerating global climate change).  Jane Addams (1860-1935), the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize winner, may have said it best, “Nothing could be worse than the fear that one has given up too soon and left one effort unexpended which might have saved the world.” (Sources:  Paul L. Montgomery.  “Throngs Fill Manhattan to Protest Nuclear Weapons.”  New York Times. June 13, 1982 https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/13/world/throngs-fill-manhattan-to-protest-nuclear-weapons.html and “Nuclear Weapons Timeline.’  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/the-nuclear-age/ both accessed Feb. 19, 2019.)

    June 30, 1975 – In a report issued approximately on this date, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (referred to then as the Atomic Energy Commission) estimated that a serious civilian nuclear reactor mishap, not unlike the partial meltdown of three reactors on March 11, 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, could result in 45,000 fatalities, 100,000 injuries, and $17 billion dollars in property damage.  A similar analysis that was reported in 1977 by the prestigious, mainstream Ford Foundation’s Nuclear Energy Policy Study Group concluded that, “a single major nuclear incident could produce as many as several thousand immediate fatalities and several tens of thousands of latent cases of cancer that would be fatal within 30 years.”  Comments:  Over the last five decades and even longer – since the first nuclear power plants were commissioned in the Fifties – we’ve seen numerous so-called “small-scale” reactor breaches, significant radioactive contamination events, leakage of toxins into drinking aquifers, and many other incidents—some hushed up by the very industry that today lobbies for and represents nuclear power as safe, clean, and inexpensive.  Wrong on all three counts!  Evidence of higher cancer rates and negative health impacts around hundreds of worldwide military and civilian reactor sites abound.  Industry “experts” always point to statements like “except for three events in the last forty years, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nuclear power has proven itself again and again.” Proven what exactly? Another flawed argument is the industry line that “nuclear power is a green alternative to other carbon heavy sources of energy.”  Supposedly once switched on, the reactor has absolutely no carbon footprint.  Technically correct but factually wrong.  It is the equivalent of saying that a man jumping off a tall building only risks death when his body reaches the ground!  There is, in fact, a huge impact.  These impacts come from the mining of vast amounts of uranium, remediating uranium mill tailings, using heavy construction and excavation equipment to build large, expensive containment domes as well as all the support facilities accompanying a nuclear power plant including future temporary and very long-term nuclear waste storage sites.  Even the supposedly technologically sophisticated smaller “new” reactor designs are still a problem, smaller means more and more is not necessarily better when we are talking about nuclear energy.   Also noteworthy is the expense and pollution caused by hauling away tons of light-, medium-, and highly-radioactive contaminated clothing, gloves, containers, manipulator arms, and the actual reactor cores, control rods, and other “hot” material.  All of this has a huge carbon signature not to mention the tremendous monetary cost of securing radioactive materials and the large accompanying physical plant from attack by suicidal terrorists (including the risk of fuel-filled jumbo jets crashing into reactor buildings at their least fortified point of entry).  And what about the pesky problem of what to do with staggering amounts of contaminated waste piling up at reactor sites, including sometimes quite vulnerable off-site high-level waste pools,  all over the planet—transporting it, guarding it during and after transit until safely deposited deep underground.  All these required steps involve unknown levels of planning and expense (most appropriately because it is entirely possible accidents or purposeful mischief—terrorism—during pick-up, transit, and deep underground placement is a distinct possibility) and represent a significant threat level to a large number of Americans and their long-term sources of safe, clean drinking water.  For how long?   The answer is chilling.  One of the radioactive elements we’re dealing with, plutonium, has a radioactive half-life of 24,400 years! Remember the words of someone even the nuclear industry cannot characterize as a radical, tree-hugging leftie—the founder of America’s nuclear navy—the late Admiral Hyman Rickover who noted during a Congressional hearing in January 1982 that, “Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth…there was so much radiation.  Now when we use nuclear weapons or nuclear power, we are creating something which nature has been eliminating…the most important thing we could do is…first outlaw nuclear weapons to start with, then we outlaw nuclear reactors too.” But the nuclear industry’s line of “safe, clean and reliable” is so powerful that politicians  have gone along with the industry gravy train (accepting their huge political campaign contributions) and put their collective heads in the sand in regards to the tremendous impact of nuclear accidents—that though unforeseen are, in fact, reliably predictable over the long-term.  This represents yet another reason why we need to not only rid the world of nuclear weapons but also nuclear power plants (with the possible exception of small-scale nuclear medical facilities and international scientific attempts to create stable nuclear fusion).  An ancillary and truly wonderful benefit of phasing out nuclear power by 2030 worldwide would be the impact this would have on greatly reducing the weapons proliferation risk of all nuclear reactors—from small research reactors at many college campuses to larger electrical power units, including reducing the threat of terrorists acquiring “dirty bombs” or radiological weapons.  (Sources:  Mainstream and alternative news media sources and Louis Rene Beres.  “Apocalypse:  Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.”  Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. 1980, Jeffrey W. Mason. “Letter to the Editor:  Deadly Risks of Civilian Nuclear Power Are Too High.”  Maryland Independent. March 18, 2011 and Miles Traer.  “Fukushima Five Years Later: Stanford Nuclear Expert Offers Three Lessons From The Disaster.”  Stanford News. March 4, 2016 https://news.stanford.edu/2016/03/04/fukushima-lessons-ewing-030416/ accessed Feb. 21, 2019.)

  • Humanity Is Flirting with Extinction

    Humanity Is Flirting with Extinction

    The most stunning and frightening truth about the nuclear age is this: Nuclear weapons are capable of destroying civilization and most complex life on the planet, yet next to nothing is being done about it. Humanity is flirting with extinction and is experiencing the “frog’s malaise.” It is as though the human species has been placed into a pot of tepid water — metaphorically with regard to nuclear dangers and literally with regard to climate change — and appears to be calmly treading water while the temperature rises toward the boiling point. In this piece, I focus on the metaphorical pot of heating water, heading toward a boil, representing the increasing nuclear dangers confronting all humanity.

    Disconcertingly, there is virtually no political will on the part of nations in possession of nuclear arsenals to alter this dangerous situation; and, despite legal obligations to negotiate in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament, there is no major effort among the nuclear-armed and umbrella countries to achieve nuclear zero. While the non-nuclear-armed countries have negotiated a Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and are working to bring this treaty into force, those countries that possess the weapons and those sheltering under their nuclear umbrella have not supported the new treaty.

    All nine nuclear-armed countries boycotted international negotiations on banning and eliminating nuclear weapons. In addition, each of these countries is in the process of modernizing its nuclear arsenal, thereby wasting valuable resources on weapons that must never be used, and doing so while basic human needs for billions of people globally go unmet and unattended. Despite this unjust and deplorable situation, most of the 7 billion people on the planet are complacent about nuclear weapons. This only adds fuel to the fire under the frogs.

    In the nuclear age, humanity is challenged as never before. Our technology, and particularly our nuclear weapons, can destroy us and all that we hold dear. But before we can respond to the profound dangers, we must first awaken to these dangers. Complacency is rooted in apathy, conformity, ignorance and denial — a recipe for disaster. If we want to prevail over our technologies, we must move from apathy to empathy; from conformity to critical thinking; from ignorance to wisdom; and from denial to recognition of the danger. But how are we to do this?

    The key is education — education that promotes engagement; education that forces individuals and nations to face the truth about the dangers of the nuclear age. We need education that leads to action that will allow humanity to get out of the metaphorical pot of heating water before it is too late.

    Education can take many forms, but it must begin with solid analysis of current dangers and critiques of the lack of progress in stemming the dangers of the nuclear age. We need education that is rooted in the common good. We need education that provides a platform for the voices of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We need education that makes clear the instability and dangerous nature of nuclear deterrence. We need education that challenges the extreme hubris of leaders who believe the global nuclear status quo can survive indefinitely in the face of human fallibility and malevolence.

    We need education that can break through the bonds of nuclear insanity and move the world to action. We need the public to speak out and demand far more of their leaders if we are to leap from the pot of heating water, avert disaster and reach the safe haven of nuclear zero.

    This article was originally published by The Hill on March 5, 2019.

    David Krieger is a founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and has served as its president since 1982. He is the author and editor of many books on nuclear dangers, including “ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition.”

  • Trump Withdraws U.S. from INF Treaty

    Trump Withdraws U.S. from INF Treaty

    NUCLEAR AGE PEACE FOUNDATION

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    Contact: Sandy Jones  (805) 965-3443; sjones@napf.org

    Rick Wayman  (805) 696-5159; rwayman@napf.org

     

    The Trump administration announced that it will formally suspend the United States’ obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, effective February 2nd. This crucial treaty requires the United States and the former Soviet Union (now Russia) to eliminate all nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

    The INF Treaty was the first agreement between the two nuclear superpowers that eliminated entire categories of nuclear weapons. As a result of the INF Treaty, the U.S. and the Soviet Union destroyed a total of 2,692 missiles by the treaty deadline of June 1, 1991 (1,846 Soviet missiles and 846 U.S. missiles).

    David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, commented on the imminent withdrawal, saying, “This is a massive mistake. The withdrawal moves the world closer to sounding a death knell for humanity. Rather than withdrawing from the treaty, U.S. leaders should be meeting with the Russians to resolve alleged treaty violations. Rather than destroying arms control and disarmament agreements, the U.S. should be taking the lead in bolstering such agreements, including providing support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

    Since July 2014, the U.S. has alleged that Russia was in violation of its INF Treaty obligation not to “possess, produce, or flight-test a ground-launched cruise missile having a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers” or “to possess or produce launchers of such missiles.” In late November 2017, a senior U.S. national security official stated that the Novator 9M729, a land-based cruise missile, was the weapon that the United States believed violates the INF Treaty. The Russian Foreign Ministry asserts there is absolutely no evidence to support these claims.

    For its part, Russia alleges that the U.S. has violated the INF Treaty by deploying a component of a missile defense system — the Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) — that is capable of launching offensive missiles. It also claims that the U.S. has used prohibited missiles in defense tests and that some U.S. armed drones are effectively unlawful cruise missiles. To date, the U.S. has not made public any evidence to disprove these claims.

    Where does this leave us should Trump go forward as planned with the withdrawal?

    It brings us to the brink of a new and dangerous arms race. Russia could move to deploy new short-range and intermediate-range cruise missiles and ballistic missiles on its territory as well as on that of its allies, such as Belarus. If the U.S. were to respond with new intermediate-range missiles of its own, they would be based either in Europe or in Japan or South Korea to reach significant targets in Russia. This would spell the beginning of a new arms race in Europe on a class of especially high-risk nuclear weapons.

    The INF Treaty is just the latest treaty the Trump administration will have walked away from. He has been systematically undermining the longstanding framework of European and global security. He has withdrawn the U.S. from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (commonly referred to as the Iran Nuclear Agreement) and The Paris Accord (on climate change). He has also contemplated withdrawing the U.S. from NATO.

    Krieger went on to say, “The country would be well-served to look at what Trump is doing with regard to withdrawing from the INF treaty, and do the opposite – that is, strengthening the treaty and building upon it.”

    #        #         #

    If you would like to interview David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, or Rick Wayman, Deputy Director of the Foundation, please call (805) 696-5159.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s mission is to educate, advocate and inspire action for a just and peaceful world, free of nuclear weapons. Founded in 1982, the Foundation is comprised of individuals and organizations worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations. For more information, visit wagingpeace.org.

  • India’s (Im)modest Nuclear Quest in 2018: The Measured ‘Normalization’ of a Nuclear State?

    India’s (Im)modest Nuclear Quest in 2018: The Measured ‘Normalization’ of a Nuclear State?

    The passing year marked the 20th year of the May 1998 nuclear tests in Pokhran, the 10th year of the unprecedented exception from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) that the Indian government achieved in 2008, and the last effective year of the ultra-nationalist Modi government as it enters its lame-duck phase early next year. An overall look at the nuclear-related developments in India in 2018 reveals no remarkable development this year – neither have any exceptional acquisitions or advancements been made by the government, nor has any massive anti-nuclear people’s mobilization taken place at the grassroots compared to the immediate post-Fukushima years. On all these counts, the observable surface-reality appears less remarkable than what most observers would have expected.

    The 20th anniversary of the nuclear tests remained rather low-key, at least in comparison to the chest-thumping frenzy and hyperbole that the Modi government has come to be known for. The release of a commemorative Bollywood movie, insipidly titled Parmanu(atom), was announced to coincide with the occasion, but it was silently and inexplicably postponed by a few weeks and the film remained a non-starter despite its over-dramatic nationalist treatment of the subject. While in his pre-election rallies prior to 2014, Narendra Modi had promised a radical alteration of India’s nuclear posture and the shunning of the country’s long-standing policies of ‘no-first-use’ and ‘minimum credible deterrence’ with regard to nuclear weapons, his government did not go beyond heightened nuclear rhetoric against Pakistan.

    On the nuclear energy front, progress has been tediously slow and prospects for even the revised short and medium-term projections look grim although the government remains committed to pursuing both, imported and locally-designed nuclear plants. This year, the government announced an ambiguous nuclear plan for the year 2030 and beyond, which was widely perceived as a scaling down of its nuclear ambitions. Despite the NSG opening the doors of international nuclear supplies for India in 2008, and in effect, rewarding the country for its 1998 nuclear tests, not a single foreign-imported reactor construction, sanctioned since 2008, has started in India.

    However, it is precisely this deceptive calm and seeming indolence on the part of the Indian government that makes it easy to miss out the details and the deeply worrying patterns of an unmistakable push for a massive nuclear weaponization and energy expansion that we should all be concerned about.

    Even as the international gaze is set firmly on the increased nuclear instability owing to the misadventures of the American President vis-à-vis Russia, North Korea, and Iran on the one hand, and desperate attempts by the global nuclear industry to stage a comeback from perhaps its deepest crisis so far, by painting itself as an ‘urgent’ and ‘imperative’ solution to climate change, India is engaged in a steady albeit understated consolidation of its capacities and postures in terms of both, its civilian and military nuclear programs.

    The Unquestioned ‘Normalization’ of a Nuclear State?

    The uncharacteristic and confounding absence of hyped official celebrations of the 20th anniversary of India’s nuclear weapons tests were met with an equal silence on the part of the political opposition and civil society. Surprisingly, the 2018 Pokhran anniversary did not occasion any protests by either the major left-wing parties or civil society groups. This however, can also be explained by the fact that the political opposition, activists and civil society in India have found themselves unremittingly firefighting other, more immediate issues that have hogged the limelight during the BJP government’s tenure – its gross mishandling of the economy and public offices as well as the havoc unleashed by Hindutva groups on the streets almost every other week on ever newer issues ever since Modi’s ascendance. However, this is definitely a reflection on the fact that nuclear weapons have fallen off the radar of public concern in India. In effect, this has meant an almost unquestioned and matter-of-fact acceptance of nuclear weapons and the relentless pursuit of a maximization of India’s nuclear capacities.

    India has consistently expanded its missile program, both qualitatively and quantitatively and has tested as many as eight nuclear-capable delivery vehicles this year itself. Besides, India launched an ‘Advanced Area Defense (AAD) missile this year, capable of intercepting incoming missiles, which the government has claimed as part of the country’s home-grown missile defense system. India also operationalized the nuclear-armed submarine Arihant’s patrolling in the Indian Ocean. Observers have raised concerns about the Indian nuclear triad – land, sea and air-based nuclear capabilities further provoking Pakistan, which is already engaged in miniaturizing its nuclear arsenal to make it more ‘usable’, thus, fueling an arms race in South Asia. India also figured as among the key reasons for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moving its famed ‘Doomsday Clock’ closest-ever to midnight since its inception. However, the international response has been far more muted than the outcry on Iran and South Korea. This has also allowed India to maintain its low-key posturing as well as the government’s strategy to perpetuate the image of “good nukes” and a “responsible nuclear state”, which the US and other big powers have willingly and actively permitted India to adopt and proclaim. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has highlighted the very real dangers of such nuclear hypocrisy. Resultantly, the nuclear escalation in South Asia continues unabated and perhaps enjoys far more political consensus than in 1998 when nuclear weapons were tested by India and Pakistan. Questioning the nuclear arms and military build-up has also become rather perilous, since in recent years, civil society activists and dissenters of all shades have been unrestrainedly labeled ‘anti-national’ by the ruling BJP government on the flimsiest pretexts.

    Besides the military nuclear sector, the nuclear power industry is also being steadily expanded by India even as it lags behind in terms of the ambitious announcements made earlier. Even as the global nuclear industry faces bankruptcies and terminal economic crises, the Indian authorities have used the opportunity in the most perverse manner. Rather than occasioning a serious rethink about the viability and risks of nuclear power, the situation has led the Indian government to ask the imperiled nuclear corporations in the West for technology transfers with the outrageous claim that these nuclear projects can be constructed by engaging private domestic companies, with absolutely no experience in nuclear construction. The French nuclear industry, now snowed under a steep decline, has been more than willing to oblige, and, Prime Minister Modi has announced ‘maximum localisation’ of the EPR design that has been questioned across the world and has been a crucial reason for the meltdown of Areva in France. This year, America’s GE also entered the Jaitapur project and signed strategic cooperation agreements with EDF and Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL). This patch-work approach to salvage the world’s largest nuclear project and promote Modi’s ‘Make in India’ pitch has understandably raised serious concerns. Even as the future of the Jaitapur project on India’s western coast remains uncertain, the Indian government in December this year announced the completion of its land acquisition which has meant the forced eviction of villagers on ground and suppression of the local communities’ agitation by stick-and-carrot tactics. Despite losing their lands, the villagers continue to protest the loss of livelihoods and safety risks that the nuclear project has and will bring to them. This year in August, hundreds of people in the Jaitapur region courted voluntary arrest – ‘jail bharo’ as a form of protest.

    Both the Kovvada and MithiVirdi project sites, allotted to the US corporations GE and Westinghouse since 2008 continue to figure in the government’s projections despite running into serious trouble. The ruling party’s own Chief Minister in the State of Gujarat has assured the people that the MithiVirdi project will never be started as the safety concerns and farmers’ protests are ‘legitimate’, and after GE’s exit from Kovvada, citing liability in 2015, the government has allotted the site to Westinghouse and the uncertainties of the ongoing negotiations have not stopped the Indian government from pushing ahead with land acquisition.

    While the future of the US and French nuclear projects in India remains uncertain, Russia has come to India’s rescue. This year, the government signed design contracts with Russia for Units 5 and 6 of VVER reactors in Koodankulam and launched the construction of Units 3 and 4 despite glaring failures of Units 1 and 2. India has also signed a new nuclear deal with Russia for six more reactors at a new site that remains officially unannounced.

    Given the complications of starting Western-imported nuclear projects, the Indian government seems to have shifted its focus to the domestically-built ‘indigenous’ Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs). Last year, the government repackaged the plans for 10 such reactors with 700 MW capacity each. This year, excavation work has started in Gorakhpur and the government has continued land acquisition and environmental clearance efforts for Mahi-Banswara and pre-project activities in Chutka. The localised nuclear expansion has also included construction of more PHWRs in existing plants like Kaiga where the government recently conducted a farcical public hearing on the Environmental Impact Assessment report, which has been criticized by independent experts. Despite the generally slow growth of the nuclear sector, India has steadily increased its import of uranium fuel from Canada, Kazakhstan and other countries.

    India’s nuclear arsenal and missile capabilities continue to grow quietly, under an otherwise grandiloquent and ultra-nationalist regime. And even though the nuclear power sector’s growth appears to be painfully slow, the Indian government has firmly set the country on a course of a full-spectrum technology-ownership in the nuclear sector, and, is using every available opportunity, including the decline of international nuclear industry, towards this grandiose ambition.

    One might ask then, if it is by design that the Indian government ignores the attendant problems of an unrelenting pursuit of nuclear projects like the EPR, even as the horror of Fukushima continues to unfold before us, and whether, the growth of its nuclear sector, no matter how snail-paced, ensures a ‘legitimate’ and comprehensive growth of nuclear technology, which in turn provides India not just military wherewithal, but also diplomatic stature and the leverage to enhance its long-term power projection, as well as withstand any sanctions in the future in the event that the country conducts nuclear tests? As nuclear power in the present situation does not make sense on either financial or safety grounds, it is only this super-power ambition which is plausibly guiding India’s overall nuclear strategy. India’s chequered nuclear past is reason enough to believe so.

  • Lurching Toward Catastrophe: The Trump Administration and Nuclear Weapons

    Lurching Toward Catastrophe: The Trump Administration and Nuclear Weapons

    In July 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1, with one abstention, nations from around the world attending a United Nations-sponsored conference in New York City voted to approve a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.  Although this Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received little coverage in the mass media, its passage was a momentous event, capping decades of international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements that, together, have reduced the world’s nuclear weapons arsenals by approximately 80 percent and have limited the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war.  The treaty prohibited all ratifying countries from developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.

    Curiously, though, despite official support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by almost two-thirds of the world’s nations, the Trump administration―like its counterparts in other nuclear-armed countries―regarded this historic measure as if it were being signed in a parallel, hostile universe.  As a result, the United States and the eight other nuclear powers boycotted the treaty negotiations, as well as the final vote.  Moreover, after the treaty was approved amid the tears, cheers, and applause of the UN delegates and observers, a joint statement issued by the UN ambassadors of the United States, Britain, and France declared that their countries would never become party to the international agreement.

    One clear indication that the nuclear powers have no intention of dispensing with their nuclear arsenals is the nuclear weapons buildup that all of them are now engaged in, with the U.S. government in the lead.  Although the Trump administration inherited its nuclear weapons “modernization” program from its predecessor, that program―designed to provide new weapons for nuclear warfare, accompanied by upgraded or new facilities for their production―is constantly increasing in scope and cost.  In October 2017, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the cost for the planned “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex over the next three decades had reached a staggering $1.2 trillion.  Thanks to the Trump administration’s plan to upgrade the three legs of the U.S. nuclear triad and build new cruise and ballistic missiles, the estimated cost of the U.S. nuclear buildup rose in February 2018 to $2 trillion.

    In this context, the Trump administration has no interest in pursuing the nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements, discussed or signed, that have characterized the administrations of all Democratic and Republican administrations since the dawn of the nuclear era.  Not only are no such agreements currently being negotiated, but in October 2018 the Trump administration, charging Russian violations of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, announced a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from it.  Signed in 1987 by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty removed all medium range nuclear missiles from Europe, established a cooperative relationship between the two nations that led to the end of the Cold War, and served subsequently as the cornerstone of U.S.-Russian nuclear arms controls.

    Although some Allied leaders joined Trump in questioning Russian compliance with the treaty, most criticized the U.S. pullout, claiming that treaty problems could be solved through U.S.-Russian negotiations.  Assailing the U.S. action, which portended a nuclear weapons buildup by both nations, a spokesperson for the European Union declared:  “The world doesn’t need a new arms race that would benefit no one and on the contrary would bring even more instability.”  Nevertheless, Trump, in his usual insouciant style, immediately announced that the U.S. government planned to increase its nuclear arsenal until other nations “come to their senses.”

    Of course, as Daniel Ellsberg has noted in his book, The Doomsday Machine, nuclear weapons are meant to be used―either to bully other nations into submission or to wage a nuclear war.  Certainly, that is President Trump’s view of them, as indicated by his startling nuclear threats.  In August 2017, angered by North Korea’s nuclear missile progress and the belligerent statements of its leaders, Trump warned that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States” or “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”  In January 2018, referring to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, Trump boasted provocatively that “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his.”  Fortunately, largely thanks to the skillful diplomatic maneuvers of South Korean President Moon Jae-in―Trump’s threats of nuclear war against North Korea have recently ground to a halt, at least temporarily.

    But they are now being redirected against Iran.  In May 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, an agreement with Iran that had been negotiated by the governments of the United States and other major nations.  Designed to ensure that Iran did not develop nuclear weapons, the agreement, as UN inspectors reported, had been strictly complied with by that nation.  Even so, Trump, angered by other actions of the Iranian regime, pulled out of the agreement and, in its place, instituted punitive economic sanctions on Iran, accompanied by calls to overthrow its government.  When, in July, the Iranian president cautioned Trump about pursing policies hostile to his nation, the U.S. president tweeted, in bold capitals:  “NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”  Just in case Iranians missed the implications of this extraordinary statement, Trump’s hawkish national security advisor, John Bolton, followed up by declaring:  “President Trump told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid.”

    This obsession of the Trump administration with building nuclear weapons and threatening nuclear war underscores its unwillingness to join other governments in developing a sane nuclear policy.  Indeed, it seems determined to continue lurching toward unparalleled catastrophe.

    [Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://www.lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).]

  • Hacking Nuclear Weapons Is a Global Threat

    Hacking Nuclear Weapons Is a Global Threat

    [Originally published by The Hill]

    There are many ways a nuclear attack could be initiated. These include the four “m’s” of malice, madness, mistake and miscalculation. Of these ways of initiating a nuclear attack, only malice could possibly be inhibited by nuclear deterrence (fear of nuclear retaliation).

    For example, if a leader doesn’t believe that nuclear retaliation will occur, he or she may not be inhibited from attacking and nuclear deterrence will not be effective.

    Madness, mistake and miscalculation all operate independently of nuclear deterrence. These pose great concern for the human future. An insane or suicidal leader could launch his or her nuclear arsenal without concern for retaliation. A mistake could also lead to the launch of a nuclear arsenal without concern for retaliation. Likewise, miscalculation of the intent of a nuclear-armed country could lead to a nuclear launch without concern for retaliation.

    A new, and possibly even greater, concern is coming over the horizon. That concern, related to cyberattacks on an enemy’s nuclear systems, could be labelled as “manipulation.” It is emerging due to the growing sophistication of hackers penetrating cyber-security walls in general. It would be disastrous if hackers were able to penetrate the walls protecting nuclear arsenals.

    Imagine a cyberattack on a nuclear weapons system that allowed an outside party to launch a country’s nuclear arsenal or a portion of it at another country. This could occur by an outside party, working with or independently of a state, hacking into and activating the launch codes for a country’s nuclear arsenal. Can we be sure that this could not happen to any of the nine current nuclear-armed countries? It would pose a particular danger to those nuclear-armed countries that keep their nuclear arsenals on high-alert status, ready to be fired on extremely short notice, often within minutes of a launch order.

    The Royal Institute of International Affairs in the UK, issued a research paper recently noted, “As an example of what is possible, the US is reported to have infiltrated parts of North Korea’s missile systems and caused test failures. Recent cases of cyber-attacks indicate that nuclear weapons systems could also be subject to interference, hacking, and sabotage through the use of malware or viruses, which could infect digital components of a system at any time. Minuteman silos, for example, are believed to be particularly vulnerable to cyber-attacks.”

    Even if eight of the nine nuclear-armed countries had adequate cybersecurity, the weakest link could potentially have vulnerabilities that would allow for a cyberattack. It is also probable that new means of penetrating cybersecurity will be developed in the future. It is within the realm of imagination that terrorist groups could have skillsets that would allow them to breach the cybersecurity of one or more nuclear-armed countries, and set in motion a nuclear attack with highly threatening and dangerous consequences.

    The gaps in nuclear deterrence theory cannot be filled by throwing money at them, or with more new missiles with larger or smaller warheads. The problem with nuclear deterrence is that it cannot be made effective, and the potential for breaching the cybersecurity of nuclear arsenals only adds to the vulnerabilities and dangers.

    The only meaningful response to nuclear weapons is to stigmatize, delegitimize, and ban them. This is exactly what the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons seeks to accomplish. This treaty deserves the full support of the world community. As of now, however, it is only receiving the support of the countries without nuclear arms, and is being opposed by the countries possessing nuclear arms and those sheltering under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. This must change, for the benefit of all the world’s people and especially the citizens of the nuclear-armed countries who would likely be the first victims of a nuclear attack.

  • July: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    July: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text]July 1, 1968 – The U.S., U.K., the Soviet Union and 58 other nations signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which entered into force on March 5, 1970.  The Preamble of the agreement, which today includes 191 state parties, but not key nonparticipants like nuclear weapon states Israel (with at least 80 and possibly as many as hundreds of warheads), India (130 warheads), Pakistan (140 warheads), and North Korea (which used Article X of the NPT to withdraw from the treaty several years ago), referred explicitly to the need for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which 50 years later has still not been realized due to the U.S. Senate’s unwillingness to ratify the treaty (as evidenced by that body’s rejection of the CTBT on Oct. 13, 1999 by a vote of 51-48) and the embrace of a renewed nuclear arms race by President Trump and his Republican allies in Congress that includes the possibility of more U.S. nuclear testing.  Comments: While the NPT’s focus on preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been only marginally successful, the other original impetus for the treaty, under Article VI, to seek negotiations in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and achieve nuclear disarmament, represents merely a rhetorical support column constructed by the Nuclear Club to justify their denial of nuclear weapons to all other nations.  Evidently, they do not take Article VI seriously, because when push came to shove in July of last year when over 120 nations signed the new U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the Nuclear Club members not only refused to participate in those treaty negotiations, in fact they spent and continue to spend quite a bit of political capital in a continuing campaign to convince supporting nations not to sign or ratify the TPNW.  It is fortunate that the nuclear weapons states now represent a very small but obviously powerful minority.  Global citizenry are working even harder for the Nuclear Club to conform to the language their leaders embraced half a century ago to “undertake to pursue…effective measures relating to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at any early date and to nuclear disarmament…and complete disarmament.”  The longer We the People of this Pale Blue Dot have to wait for the Nuclear Club to relent and do the right thing, the more likely it is that the nuclear threshold will be crossed again – with extremely dire consequences.  Time is of the essence. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 10-11, 22 and other mainstream and alternative sources such as the Federation of American Scientists and SIPRI.)

    July 7, 2017 – Despite decades of failure in countless United Nations’ disarmament negotiating sessions, in many cases due to sabotage by the nuclear weapons states led by the U.S., on this date as a culmination of a multi-year effort by the General Assembly, a United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was approved by an affirmative vote of 122 nations with the Netherlands voting against the resolution and Singapore abstaining.  The treaty was opened for signature at U.N. Headquarters in New York on September 20, 2017 and will remain open indefinitely.  The Preamble of the TPNW emphasized an extensive list of rationales for banning nuclear weapons to include humanitarian, legal, ethical, pragmatic (focusing on the global risks posed by accident, miscalculation, and the unintentional use of these doomsday devices) and historical factors, the latter of which is seen in the following excerpt, “Recalling also the first resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, adopted 24 January 1946 and subsequent negotiations which call for the elimination of nuclear weapons.”  Predictably, all nine nuclear weapons states opposed participating in the TPNW negotiations and the U.S., U.K., and France led this attack on sanity by stating, “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it…This initiative clearly disregards the realities of the international security environment.”  Nevertheless, dozens of global governmental and private civil society organizations led the way in defeating the status quo ante of the Nuclear Club in a series of conferences after the Dec. 23, 2016 adoption of U.N. General Assembly Resolution A/RES/71/258 initiated by a core group of six nations (Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa).  Non-state actors like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and its partnering organizations pushed the U.N., its governments and leaders to achieve this essential treaty and accordingly won the Nobel Peace Prize for its incredible work.  Comments:  The vast majority of the human species is hopeful that, despite a continuing uphill struggle against the nuclear weapons interests and supporters, the TPNW truly represents the beginning of the end of the nuclear threat.  The only flawed part of the treaty, in this writer’s opinion, is the language embracing, “…the inalienable right of its States Parties to develop research, production, and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes…”  Civilian nuclear energy is not only cost ineffective (as compared to solar, wind, geothermal and other green sources of energy) but also inaccurately described as a global warming solution.  The mining of uranium and the construction of extensive nuclear plant infrastructure adds tremendously to global warming as does the costly effort to decommission and dismantle these power plants, and transport a large volume of low, medium, and highly radioactive materials (to include routine day-to-day equipment as well as the reactor cores and components) to permanent, stable, long-term storage sites that have yet to be established.  Nuclear energy directly increases the risk of proliferation and plant infrastructure must include a hugely expensive security component to protect against terrorist attack, seizure, or purposeful exposure of the reactor cores.  Civilian power plants (with the exception of smaller, more secure reactors that provide critical medical isotopes) represent short- and long-term threats to not only human health and well-being but to global ecosystems and countless species of flora and fauna.  (Sources:  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (full text).” May 2018 http://www.icanw.org/status-of-the-treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons/ and David Krieger. “U.S., U.K., and France Denounce Nuclear Ban Treaty.” July 13, 2017 https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/13/u-s-uk-and-france-denounce-nuclear-ban-treaty/ both accessed May 8, 2018.)

    July 9, 2002 – A New York Times article, “Senate Approves Nuclear Waste Site in Nevada Mountain,” by Alison Mitchell noted that a 60-39 procedural vote allowed Senators by a voice vote to approve the establishment of a nuclear waste repository for civilian nuclear power waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.  The article mentioned that high-level radioactive waste shipments of up to 77,000 tons from 100 civilian reactors would begin being shipped to the facility by 2010.  After technical delays and increased political opposition from the public, Native Americans living near the site, and numerous politicians, the Obama Administration cut off federal funding and closed the site in 2011.  Meanwhile, the continuing and growing problem of nuclear waste has led U.S. nuclear power plants to resort to indefinite on-site dry cask storage of waste in vulnerable, far from secure, concrete containers.  A report produced in July 2011 by the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, chaired by former Indiana Congressman Lee Hamilton and Brent Scowcroft, a retired U.S. Air Force general who served two presidents as national security advisor, recommended finding a central storage site that would be studied much more extensively than Yucca Mountain.  But not all the report’s recommendations were applauded.  Dr. Arjun Makhijani of the Institute of Energy and Environmental Research and other nongovernmental experts criticized one of the committee’s recommendations to store spent nuclear fuel in reactor site fuel ponds, which would be more vulnerable to terrorist attack.  Comments:  President Trump, as part of his campaign to forsake the consensus of environmentalists and policy experts and build more nuclear bombs and power plants, tried to restore the so-called Yucca Mountain solution but Nevada state officials authorized $5 million to fight the president’s proposal.  The nuclear waste problem is obviously an international conundrum that affects many nations in the European Union – Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, and the U.K. – and elsewhere around the world.  Although one-third of Europe’s operating nuclear plants will be shut down by 2025, funding for radioactive and related toxic waste disposal can’t be zeroed out.  In France, Britain, and the U.S., a temporary fix of maintaining swimming pool-size tanks of dangerously unstable high-level waste is a risky proposition.  The privatization of the nuclear waste equation through the building of nongovernmental for-profit nuclear dumps in Texas and other U.S. states is an even more problematical way to address the problem.  Injection of wastes into deep sea vents or the eventual launching of such wastes into space are long-term but also possibly prohibitively expensive and potentially dangerous solutions to this ever-growing problem. (Sources:  Paul Brown. “Mountains of Nuclear Waste Just Keep Growing.” Truthdig.com. March 7, 2018, www.truthdig.com/articles/nuclear-waste-mountains-keep-growing, Sacred Land Film Project. “Yucca Mountain.”  April 1, 2010, http://sacredland.org/yucca-mountain-united-states/ and Matthew L. Wald. “How to Pick a Site for Nuclear Waste Dump.” New York Times.  July 29, 2011, http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/how-to-pick-a-site-for-a-nuclear-waste-dump all of which were accessed on June 11, 2018.)

    July 13, 1950 – According to a declassified report, “DOD Mishaps,” released by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in March of 1986, on this date, a U.S. Air Force B-50 Superfortress bomber, on a training mission from Biggs Air Force Base, Texas and carrying a nuclear weapon, crashed near Lebanon, Ohio killing all 16 crew members. Although the nuclear bomb did not contain a nuclear capsule (plutonium pit), the conventional high explosives surrounding the empty core of the warhead detonated on impact, creating a huge fireball.  Comments:  This incident represents yet another example of thousands of nuclear accidents, near-misses, and “Broken Arrows,” only some of which the United States and other members of the Nuclear Club have formally acknowledged.  The fact that such accidents continue to occur and could possibly result in an inadvertent nuclear explosion misinterpreted as a First Strike or an incident of nuclear terrorism leading to nuclear threats and even counter nuclear strikes is all the more reason to redouble global efforts to eliminate these doomsday weapons.  (Source: “Broken Arrow Nuclear Weapons Accidents.” Aerospaceweb.org. www.aerospaceweb.org/question/weapons/q0268shtml accessed June 11, 2018.)

    July 20, 2017 – In an important briefing for Donald Trump by the highest ranking U.S. military officials, the President reacted strongly to a slide that showed a reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the 1960s by indicating that he wanted a bigger arsenal, not a reduced one.  President Trump stated that he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal!  The military officials who provided the briefing explained the legal and practical barriers to such a buildup and later informed the press that no such expansion was planned.  Soon after the meeting broke up, then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reportedly characterized the nuclear-mad Trump as a “moron.”  Comments:  The 45th President of the U.S. has gone even beyond the rhetoric and actions of his predecessor Barack Obama (who spoke of nuclear elimination but ultimately advocated modernizing and expanding the U.S. arsenal by proposing a trillion dollar investment over the next generation) in accelerating the nuclear arms race along with his partners, the other Nuclear Club member nations, despite the irrational risks and dangers that such a strategy entails.  A seventy-plus year fixation on myths like ‘more is better’ and ‘nuclear weapons have kept the peace’ have virtually insured that another reckless round of nuclear arms racing is in humanity’s future.  Although the following quote by President John Kennedy was not in reference to the nuclear arms race, it seems most appropriate here, “As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our time, for the greatest enemy of the truth, is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived, and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.  Here the myths are legion.  And the truths are defined.”  The truth is that our species is doomed unless we finally eradicate these nuclear myths and misperceptions forever.  (Sources:  Peter and Nick Davis, Writers-Producers and Tom Haneke, Editor-Co-Producer.  Jack: The Last Kennedy Film. CBS, Inc., 1993 and Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, Carol E. Lee, and Savannah Guthrie.  “Trump Wanted Ten Fold Increase in Nuclear Arsenal, Surprising Military.”  NBC News. October 11, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/trump-wanted-dramatic-increase-nuclear-arsenal-meeting-military-leaders-n809701 accessed June 11, 2018.)

    July 27, 1943 – Some say that the Age of Nuclear Terror that the world has suffered through since nuclear weapons were first invented began on this date with the first purposeful firebombing by air of a predominantly civilian target during the Second World War.  The British Royal Air Force’s nighttime raid on Hamburg, Germany, conducted in revenge for earlier Nazi military air strikes on Coventry and other British towns, aimed for the maximum amount of civilian casualties by creating a massive city-wide conflagration.  Specially designed instruments of death, incendiary magnesium-thermite bombs, were dropped that night in a pattern designed to create a firestorm and for the first-time in the war with Hitler, success was achieved.  The entire urban area of Hamburg was converted into a blast furnace fed by 150 mile-per-hour winds and 1,500 degree Fahrenheit temperatures that killed 40,000 infants, children, women and men – noncombatant civilians.  Most victims died from asphyxiation and bodies found in underground shelters were discovered to be lying in a thick greasy black mass of melted fat tissue or in some cases large piles of ash.  The U.S. Army Air Force conducted its first successful firebombing of Dresden, Germany on Feb. 13, 1945 with similar devastatingly inhuman results as 25,000 died in that attack.  Comments:  Over the centuries, the terror of the butchering of enemy soldiers and entire villages, towns, and cities of innocent noncombatants went on bloody year after bloody year until modern industrial technology made the massacres more acceptable, especially when the perpetrators were flying tens of thousands of feet above the firestorm or in today’s terms, thousands of miles away as when a remotely-controlled Predator or Reaper drone unleashes a Hellfire missile on suspected terrorist or insurgent forces, but unfortunately also an appreciable number of noncombatants as well in a seemingly inordinate number of cases.  In the nuclear era, the dirty little question that no military leader ever wants to consider as representing a legitimate doubt in the mind of a soldier is ‘Should a human being push a nuclear button that will annihilate untold thousands or millions of people, all in the name of national security, patriotism and/or vengeance?’  Our species must evolve beyond war or it is likely that a global nuclear catastrophe is humanity’s fate.  (Sources:   Daniel Ellsberg.  “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”  New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 247-249 and John Horgan. “The End of War.”  San Francisco:  McSweeney’s Books, 2012, and other works.)[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container][fusion_global id=”13042″]

  • June: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    June: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    June 1, 2006 – Hans Blix, the Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s WMD Commission, which included 13 other prominent global experts such as former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry and Dr. Alexei Arbatov, a member of the Soviet delegation to the START I Treaty negotiations and a long-time Russian parliamentarian, released its final report titled, “Weapons of Terror:  Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Arms.”  Its 231 pages presented sixty concrete proposals to the world’s nation-states to rein in destabilizing spending on WMD, stop the proliferation of these weapons, and create a future climate for continued reductions and the eventual elimination of these threats to global peace.  Blix’s concluding remarks stated that, “It seems to me that not only successes in the vital work to prevent proliferation and terrorism, but also progress in the additional areas could transform the current gloom into hope.  Bringing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) into force would significantly impede the development of new nuclear weapons.  The weapons that exist today are bad enough.  Negotiating a global treaty to stop the production of fissile material for weapons would close the tap for new such material and help hinder possible arms races notably in Asia.  In both these areas, the U.S. has the decisive leverage.  If it takes the lead, the world is likely to follow.  If it does not take the lead, there could be more nuclear tests and new nuclear arms races.”  Comments:  Twelve years later, Blix’s prediction proved to be very accurate.  Despite some limited efforts by the Bush Administration and even more push and rhetoric by President Barack Obama, the CTBT and a worldwide fissile materials ban never became U.S. priorities and today under the Trump Administration and a neo-con dominated Republican Congress, the “current gloom” is not only back but grower darker every day.  However, a growing global public consensus on reducing and eliminating WMDs may yet prevail as protests, marches, and specific action by global municipalities and even legislatures continues the uphill fight to reorient planetary priorities away from nuclear war, the use of chemical or biological weapons, and wars in general toward a New Paradigm of Peace.  One shining example of this movement is the tremendous support by global citizenry for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  (Sources: Press Conference by Hans Blix Upon the Release of “Weapons of Terror:  Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Arms.” IranWatch.org. June 1, 2006, https://www.iranwatch.org/library/international-organization/other-international-organization/press-conference-hans-blix-upon-release-weapons-terror-freeing-world-nuclear and “Weapons of Terror.” International Atomic Energy Agency’s WMD Commission.  https://ycsg.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/weapons_of_terror.pdf, both accessed May 7, 2018.)

    June 4, 2009 – In his first few months in office as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama gave a historic speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt that primarily focused on a more pragmatic, internationalist perspective in U.S. relations with the whole of the Muslim world, repairing the damage caused during the previous Bush Administration.  Critically, the President also stated that, “I strongly reaffirm America’s commitment to seek a world in which no nations hold nuclear weapons.”  This continued the President’s early rhetoric to push for the end of the nuclear arms race, which was stated much more forcefully two months earlier in his speech on April 5, 2009 in Prague, The Czech Republic, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War…Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not.  In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of nuclear attack has gone up…The technology to build a bomb has spread…Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere.  One nuclear weapon exploded in one city – be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague – could kill hundreds of thousands of people.  And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be – for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival…the United States has a moral responsibility to act…So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to see the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”  Later that year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee on October 9th surprised the commander-in­-chief by announcing he had won the Nobel Peace Prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”  They also cited “his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation,” as well as “the President’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”  Nevertheless despite the fact that Barack Obama’s anti-nuclear rhetoric remained strong, the Pentagon did convince him to begin spending a trillion dollars over the next 30 years to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  In a March 30, 2016 editorial in The Washington Post, the President noted that, “I said in Prague that…As the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons, the United States has a moral obligation to continue to lead the way in eliminating them.”  Comments:  Unfortunately President Obama’s attempt to work towards the elimination of these doomsday weapons was primarily circumvented, although his administration did negotiate and follow-through with Russia in agreeing to the 2010 New START agreement.  The fact that a well-meaning Barack Obama was derailed not only by opposition from a Republican-dominated Congress but also by the military-industrial-news media-corporate complex was not so surprising.  It has happened to other U.S. presidents including Eisenhower, who first warned Americans of the threat in his 1961 Farewell Address; Kennedy, who just barely avoided having to act on a unanimous Joint Chiefs of Staff recommendation to invade Cuba in October 1962, most probably triggering a nuclear war, but overcoming that near-miss with the assistance and advice of similar-minded peace advocates, both in government and through private channels (one example is Mary Pinchot Meyers), to push Congress to accept then ratify the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963; Carter, who first proposed denuclearizing and demilitarizing the Korean Peninsula despite being roundly criticized as an appeaser to the Communists; Reagan, who at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986 almost agreed to Gorbachev’s proposal to eliminate all nuclear weapons; and Clinton, who signed the CTBT but ultimately failed to convince Congress to ratify the agreement even though the Russian Duma accomplished this historic task.  (Sources: “Obama’s Prague Speech on Nuclear Weapons: Full Text.”  HuffingtonPost.com. May 5, 2009, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/05/obama-prague-speech-on-nu_n_183219.html, “Obama’s Speech in Cairo.” New York Times. June 4, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html, “President Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize.” CBSNews.com. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-wins-nobel-peace-prize/ all accessed May 7, 2018.)

    June 11, 1945 – Several scientists, including Leo Szilard, in the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, who were working on the Manhattan Project and had formed a committee chaired by Jerome Franck, formulated and distributed the draft of a petition for submittal to President Truman written by Eugene Rabinowitch titled, “The Franck Report” that argued against dropping an atomic bomb on Japan.  The report concluded that using the atomic weapon on a Japanese target without warning and without direct Soviet participation in the testing of the weapon would make international control of nuclear weapons very unlikely while also inflicting on the world a never-ending arms race that would put U.S. and other world cities in “continuous danger of sudden annihilation.”  The petition argued that even if the bomb might shorten the war and save the lives of U.S. troops, its use was still not justified on not only moral grounds but also for the sake of the long-term survival of civilization itself.  Comments:  The awful and seemingly inevitable momentum of the Manhattan Project and the alleged need to intimidate the Soviets is evident from the fact that General Lesley Groves, the military director of the A-bomb project, had the petition classified “Secret” and purposely kept it from getting to President Truman and Secretary of War Henry Stimson until after the bomb was dropped.  The petition was also withheld from the American people for reasons of national security.  The war crime committed against the Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly because military experts before and after August 6 and 9 said there was no military necessity requiring the use of nuclear weapons, must never be repeated again.  Its use against another human population must be strictly and for all time forbidden.  The best way to ensure this is to redouble global efforts to dramatically reduce and eliminate these doomsday weapons at the earliest possible opportunity or it is likely that Omnicide will be the result.  (Sources:  “Atomic Bomb Decision – The Franck Report.” Dannen.com. http://www.dannen.com/decision/franck.html, and Daniel Ellsberg. “Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” New York:  Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 287.)

    June 22, 1987 – On this date, The Washington Post published a brief article titled, “MIT Nuclear Study Figures Aftermath If Soviets Attack,” quoting an Associated Press story that reported that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had conducted a study that was directed by Dr. Kostas Tsipis of MIT’s Program in Science and Technology for International Security.  The study called “Nuclear Crash” was based on four years of computer-simulated attacks and the results indicated that even a “limited” nuclear attack on the United States, involving only one percent of  the Soviet nuclear arsenal, that targeted only liquid fuels such as petroleum, and other nationwide energy production, transportation, and distribution points as well as other related U.S. industries, would cause the collapse of the American economy for decades which would precipitate the mass starvation of most of the U.S. population in a very short period of time.  Comments:  While overall levels of U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons have declined significantly in the last generation since this study was completed, it is still true that so-called limited or tactical nuclear strikes could not only destroy a nation but also trigger nuclear winter scenarios that can impact huge regions of the globe if not the entire planet – destroying civilization and possibly the vast majority of humanity.  Therefore, ridding the world of the main stocks of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons is not sufficient to ensure the long-term survival of our species.  Thousands of other tactical nuclear weapons and other warheads held in reserve or storage as well as those awaiting decommission must also be eliminated from the arsenals of all nine nuclear weapons states.

    June 26, 2017 – On the fourth and final day of the 85th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, held in Miami Beach, Florida, a set of resolutions were adopted and released for distribution to the press and public.  Relevant to the nuclear threat was a series of resolutions titled, “Calling on President Trump to Lower Tensions, Prioritize Diplomacy, and Redirect Nuclear Weapons Spending to Meet Human Needs and Address Environmental Challenges.”  One of the resolutions pointed to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock being advanced earlier that year to 2.5 minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since 1953 and the language emphasized that, “Wise public officials should act immediately, guiding humanity away from the brink.”  Another related resolution discussed the May 5, 2017 creation of a Nuclear Crisis Group composed of retired diplomats, generals, and national security experts from key nations such as the U.S., Russia, China, South Korea, India, Japan, Pakistan, and Poland to “engage in high-level efforts to prevent these flashpoints from escalating to the use of nuclear weapons.”  Another entreaty by the Conference was stated as, “Mindful that no national or international response capacity exists that could adequately respond to the human suffering and humanitarian harm that would result from a nuclear explosion in a populated area, and that such capacity most likely will never exist, 127 countries have endorsed the Humanitarian Pledge to stigmatize, prohibit, and eliminate nuclear weapons.”  Yet another resolution remarked that, “Whereas, Mayors for Peace, which calls for the global elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020, has grown to 7,295 cities in 162 nations and regions, with 210 U.S. members, representing in total over one billion people.”  Comments:  Despite tremendous concern and fear about the actions of the governments, militaries, and politicians of the nine nuclear weapons states and their allies, it seems clear that more and more global citizenry are taking matters into their own hands and directing municipalities, local, state, provincial, and regional governmental entities to say “enough is enough.”  Increasingly it seems apparent that growing numbers of denizens of this Pale Blue Dot are remembering the words of Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” and Mahatma Gandhi, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”  (Source:  “85th Annual Meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.” Miami Beach, Florida, June 23-26, 2017, http://legacy.usmayors.org/resolutions/85th_Conference/proposedcommittee.asp?committee-InternationalAffairs accessed May 8, 2018.)

    June 28, 1958 – As part of the Operation Hardtack I series of 35 nuclear test blasts, 32 of which occurred at either Bikini or Enewetak, a test designated Oak was conducted on a barge in the Enewetak Lagoon in this Marshall Islands chain of the Pacific Ocean – one of the most powerful U.S. nuclear tests with a magnitude of 8.9 megatons, almost six hundred times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.  This tremendous blast, one of a total of 67 tests conducted in the late 1950s which resulted in a total yield of around 30 megatons exploded in and around that atoll by the U.S. contaminating a huge inhabited region with cesium-137 and strontium-90 for generations, produced a crater 4,400 feet in diameter and 183 feet deep.  It is believed that the B/W53 nuclear device used in this test blast was eventually incorporated into the Titan II ICBM system.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear explosives over the last seven decades by nine nuclear weapons states has inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to global populations, especially native peoples and veterans who participated in observing tests at relatively close range.  Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague large numbers of people due to nuclear testing.  (Sources:  Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris, and Milton M. Hoenig.  “Nuclear Weapons Databook:  Volume II, Appendix B.”  Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987, pp. 157-58 and Michael B. Gerrard.  “A Pacific Isle, Radioactive and Forgotten.”  New York Times. Dec. 3, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/a-pacific-isle-radioactive-and-forgotten.html, accessed May 8, 2018.)

  • 20 Years of Nuclear tests by India and Pakistan: the Real Nuclear Danger in Asia That Nobody is Talking About

    20 Years of Nuclear tests by India and Pakistan: the Real Nuclear Danger in Asia That Nobody is Talking About

    [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”no” equal_height_columns=”no” menu_anchor=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=”” background_color=”” background_image=”” background_position=”center center” background_repeat=”no-repeat” fade=”no” background_parallax=”none” parallax_speed=”0.3″ video_mp4=”” video_webm=”” video_ogv=”” video_url=”” video_aspect_ratio=”16:9″ video_loop=”yes” video_mute=”yes” overlay_color=”” video_preview_image=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” padding_top=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” padding_right=””][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ layout=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” border_position=”all” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding_top=”” padding_right=”” padding_bottom=”” padding_left=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” center_content=”no” last=”no” min_height=”” hover_type=”none” link=””][fusion_text]While the global diplomatic circuits, international media and opinion makers are busy discussing whether North Korea would de-nuclearise itself, or if Iran would go nuclear, there seems to be a complete silence this month as the world’s only nuclear-armed neighbours with ongoing conflicts complete 20 years of their nuclear tests conducted in May 1998.

    Real and escalating danger

    Even a cursory look at these 20 years would dispel the carefully-crafted myths around nuclear weapons, and would bring out their sheer absurdity. Far from providing security and strategic stability, introduction of nuclear weapons in the region has pushed both the countries into an ever-spiraling arms race – of both nuclear and conventional kinds.

    Ever since the 1998 nuclear tests – in the Pokharan desert by India on 11th and 13th May and in Chagai Hills by Pakistan on 28th May – both countries have spent heavily on expanding military infrastructure mostly imported from the US, Russia, Israel, and China. As per the March 2018 SIPRI Report titled ‘Trends in International Arms Transfer’, India leads the global imports of conventional weapons while Pakistan is on the 9th position this year. India has become the world’s largest arms importer, with a share of 14% in the entire world’s weapons’ trade. India’s weapons imports have grown by 90%, between 2006-10 and 2011-15. There is a steep upward curve in this trend and India has topped global weapons imports for most years since 1998. The security that the nuclear weapons were supposed to bestow is conspicuously absent.

    The overall military expenditure has also grown in this period. In terms of military budget, India is now the world’s fifth largest spender on the military, spending $55.5 billion in 2017, a hike of 6% since the previous year. The country’s defence expenditure has escalated sharply particularly since 2006, its share in the world’s military expenditure rose from 2.5%-3%. This amounts to 2.3% of India’s total GDP.

    The obscenity of this massive militarism becomes apparent when compared with the widening wealth gap, and the steep decline in government expenditure in crucial sectors such as health and education. More than 194 million Indians go hungry daily and 37% of deaths in India are still caused by “poor country” diseases such as TB and malaria. Even India’s middle classes – flag-bearer of nuclear nationalism – are actually poor as shown by recent data and their numbers are often inflated.  Similarly, Pakistan’s 22% population is hungry and it was ranked 107 in a ranking of 118 developing nations in the Global Hunger Index. On other indices, such as child undernourishment and mortality rates, education, sanitation, both India, and Pakistan are among the worst-performing nations on the world map.

    On average, India and Pakistan have flight-tested one nuclear-capable missile every year since 1998. A 2012 report by the Nobel-winning International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear Weapons(IPPNW) warned of a severe nuclear war-induced famine in South Asia that would kill a staggering two billion people in its hypothetical study on the consequences of a nuclear exchange in the region.

    Rising belligerence and nuclear war-drums

    The risk in South Asia has become worse with the rise of ultra-nationalist politics in both India and Pakistan with avowed religious fervour. Open nuclear threats to each other by top-most political and military leaders have severely undermined faith in strategic stability in the recent years.  While the former Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar made a dangerously frivolous statement in 2016 about revising India’s nuclear doctrines of No-First-Use and credible minimum deterrence, his counterpart in Pakistan raised concerns internationally when he threatened Israel with nuclear war, merely over a fake tweet! Revision of the ‘No-First-Use’ policy and a ‘credible minimum deterrence’ posture, that India adopted in 2003 as part of its Nuclear Doctrine, is being openly discussed by strategic experts and political leaders as the incumbent PM Narendra Modi fought his elections in 2014 with a poll promise to revise the nuclear posture.

    The Doomsday Clock statement this year mentioned the “simmering tensions between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan”. It refers to the “threats of nuclear warfare” hanging in the background “as Pakistan and India faced each other warily across the Line of Control in Kashmir”, a reference to the surgical strikes by the Indian military across the LoC on September 29. The 2017 statement also mentioned the militant attacks on two Indian army bases in 2016 – the September 18 Uri attack that killed 20 soldiers and the Nagrota attack on November 29, in which seven soldiers died – that led to the exchange of not-so-veiled nuclear threats in South Asia.

    Inching closer to nuclear midnight

    Unsurprisingly, the escalating nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan have been cited in the Atomic Doomsday Clock in the past two consecutive years, as the clock reached closest ever to midnight.

    Even as the world saw some progress towards disarmament last year as the UN adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or the Nuclear Ban Treaty, India and Pakistan joined the Nuclear Weapons States(NWS) in boycotting the negotiations and voting. This went against India’s carefully crafted image of a reluctant nuclear-armed nation ready to disarm if the world discusses it seriously going beyond the NPT. When the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons(ICAN) was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo last year, diplomats of both India and Pakistan remained away from the ceremony, citing rather lame excuses.

    Celebration of murderous weapons

    A few weeks ago, when the doctors of IPPNW organised an international seminar in New Delhi on the Nuclear Ban Treaty, they met with shockingly disappointing treatment devoid of basic courtesy. The Indian government did not just deny the visa for participants from Pakistan and Bangladesh, the government-appointed Chair of the cross-party Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence refused to meet their delegation despite prior approval. While the world has made progress in criminalising nuclear weapons, a Bollywood movie glorifying nuclear tests is getting released this month to commemorate the Pokharan nuclear tests of 1998. Such apathy towards nuclear insanity does not bode well for the region, and calls for an urgent attention by the international civil society.[/fusion_text][/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container][fusion_global id=”13042″]

  • May: This Month in Nuclear Threat History

    May 3, 1947 – Twenty one months after the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a new postwar Japanese constitution, promulgated on Nov. 3, 1946, was established on this date.  The most notable section of this document, and one tied inexorably to the fact that Japanese militarism eventually resulted in their people being subjected to the horrors of nuclear attack, was and is Chapter 2: The Renunciation of War, which is framed by Article 9:  “…the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes…the right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”  Nevertheless, the Japanese did recognize the need to establish Self-Defense Forces, as well as participate in United Nations’ peacekeeping operations in the ensuing decades after the Second World War ended.  However, in July of 2014, due in part to long-time pressure applied by the U.S. and other Western allies, the government of Japan approved a reinterpretation of this clause to allow Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to defend other nations, although some Japanese politicians and citizens argued that this change was illegitimate or unconstitutional.  Then, in September of 2015, the Japanese National Diet made the reinterpretation of Article 9 official by passing several laws to allow Japanese military units to provide material support to allies engaged in combat.  Comments:  Despite these changes to the War Renunciation section of the Japanese Constitution, that historic clause represents a precedent internationally for the eventual end of not only all nation-state war but even all resort to the use of military force – a development that is necessary, along with the phasing-out of national sovereignty, and the transition to peaceful global sovereignty that must include full and universal democratic representation in a global parliament of all peoples, ethnicities, racial and cultural groupings of humanity.  Global military forces will be transitioned to a planetary defense component essential to peacefully exploring the solar system and defending our planet from threats such as diverting incoming asteroids.  A parallel and equally powerful precedent, along with the War Renunciation Clause, was the July 7, 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  Obviously, much more progress needs to be made before the era of armaments and war ends, but at least our species can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  (Sources:  “The Constitution of Japan (1947).”  Hanover Historical Texts Project.  https://history/hanover.edu/texts/1947con.html, Reuters. “Japan Takes Historic Step From Postwar Pacifism, Okays Fighting For Allies.” July 1, 2014 and Erik Slaven.  “Japan Enacts Major Changes to Its Self-Defense Laws.  Stars and Stripes.  Sept. 18, 2015. https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-enacts-major-changes-to-its-self-defense-laws-1.3688783 all of which were accessed on April 17, 2018.)

    May 11, 1969 – On this date, one of the key components of the U.S. nuclear bomb making complex suffered a serious accident.  The sprawling Rocky Flats production facility, run by the Atomic Energy Commission’s contractor Dow Chemical Company, and its large buffer area which covered eleven square miles, located in Golden, Colorado about 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver, experienced a serious fire in Building 776-777 when five kilograms of plutonium ignited and spread from a containment area causing what was then the costliest industrial accident ever to occur in the United States.  It took two years to complete the clean-up of this toxic event which involved the dispersal of highly radioactive particles of plutonium 239-240, uranium, beryllium, a carcinogenic cleaning solvent called carbon tetrachloride, and other dangerous chemicals too numerous to list here.  This was possibly the first time that people living in and around Denver became aware of containment releases from the plant where it was later revealed that since 1952 workers had been fabricating nuclear weapons triggers called “pits,” which were, in turn, shipped to the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas to be incorporated into thermonuclear warheads.  Twenty years later, on June 6, 1989, FBI, Justice Department, and EPA representatives raided the Rocky Flats plant to investigate allegations of environmental crimes.  After large-scale public outcry, nuclear weapons production at the plant was stopped and clean-up of the site began in 1992.  Comments:  This is just one of dozens if not hundreds of serious accidents that have occurred in the bomb making factories of the nine nuclear weapons states and with a commitment by all or most of these nations to modernize and expand the production of their nuclear arsenals in the next 20-30 years, there is the need to strengthen growing opposition by global citizenry against the renewed Cold War II effort to build even more doomsday weapons.  Recently the Pentagon told the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) that it must produce 80 new plutonium cores per year by 2030 just to sustain existing nuclear weapons and obviously even more “pits” consistent with a renewed nuclear modernization and expansion commitment made by both Presidents Obama and Trump.  But NNSA has responded that only Los Alamos National Laboratory is able now to produce the cores even though a Center for Public Integrity analysis found that there were not enough personnel able to safely handle plutonium at the laboratory.  This is just one of many related concerns that justify the logical conclusion that it is well past time to reduce and eliminate global nuclear arsenals rather than ratchet up the already high risks of nuclear war, deadly radioactive accidents, and further contamination of our fragile ecosystem.  (Sources:  David Brennan.  “U.S. Nukes Will Be Useless Without More Plutonium, Military Warns.”  Newsweek.  March 22, 2018, Government of the State of Colorado. “What is the History of Rocky Flats:  A Study of Rocky Flats Exposures.”  https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/HM_st-rocky-flats-exposures-study-history-of-site.pdf, and Laura Snider.  “Looking Back on Mother’s Day Fire at Rocky Flats.”  Boulder Daily Camera. May 10, 2009.)

    May 12, 2018 – “Two Minutes to Midnight: How Do We Move from Geopolitical Conflict to Nuclear Abolition?” a conference organized by the International Peace Bureau, Peace and Planet, the Campaign for Peace Disarmament and Common Security, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, American Friends Service Committee, Peace Action New York State, and Brooklyn for Peace will be held at the Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South & Thompson Street, in New York City. Speakers include Noam Chomsky, University of Arizona; Daniel Ellsberg; Christine Hong, UC-Santa Cruz and others.  Comments:  This conference’s subject matter is of utmost importance and its paramount topic should be routinely discussed in U.N. and other forums as well as in the U.S. and the other eight nuclear weapons states at regular conferences that include top military, political, and scientific participants as well as arms control and civil society activists.  The nuclear threat is growing due to large-scale nuclear modernization by the Nuclear Club members and thus the world is facing an increasing risk of the triggering of the nuclear doomsday machine through miscalculation, misperception, accident or unintentional causes, or the growing likelihood of a terrorist WMD event that might also trigger a larger nuclear catastrophe.  Even if humanity’s luck continues to hold out and we avoid such disasters (an increasingly unlikely scenario as each year passes, unfortunately), the growing radioactive threat caused by existing and new enrichment activities associated with a new generation of nuclear bomb making and the continued buildup of toxic nuclear wastes associated with military and civilian nuclear power plants, which contaminates the human gene pool as well as the larger ecosphere, makes the abolition of nuclear weapons and nuclear power the penultimate priority for the human species in the early 21st century.  (Source:  Anthony Wier and Abigail Stowe-Thurston, Editors.  “Nuclear Calendar.”  Friends Committee on National Legislation, April 2018. http://www2.fcnl.org/Nuclear/Calendar/index/php accessed April 17, 2018.)

    May 26, 1972 – On the same day that the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the SALT I Treaty that placed a ceiling on the number of offensive nuclear weapons, both Cold War antagonists also signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty which limited strategic defense launchers and interceptors.  A later July 3, 1974 ABM Treaty Protocol cut the number of ABM deployment areas permitted to each side from two to one and the number of launchers and interceptors from 200 to 100.  The SALT II Treaty signed in 1979 further reduced strategic offensive nuclear weapons.  Despite President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative proposal of March 23, 1983 and subsequent commitments to spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars on space- and land-based strategic defenses, the ABM Treaty survived and further strategic offensive reductions were mandated in the July 31, 1991 START Treaty and the January 3, 1993 START II agreement.  However, on Dec. 13, 2001, President George W. Bush announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty and carried forward with this promise in 2002.  Although another offensive reduction treaty, New START, was signed by the U.S. and Russia in 2010, that treaty’s reductions have lapsed since February of this year.  Comments:  Due to missile defense developments by both Russia and the U.S. and its allies, especially the deployment of dozens of U.S. strategic defense interceptors in Alaska and California, as well as tactical missile defense systems deployed along the borders separating NATO countries and Russia, it appears that the lifting of restrictions on missile defenses, triggered by U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002, has accelerated not only strategic defenses but also the strategic offensive arms race.  Comments:  In a March 1, 2018 address to the Russian Federal Assembly, President Vladimir Putin outlined the development of new Russian nuclear weapons systems including the Sarmat ICBM equipped with multiple warheads, an intercontinental undersea drone, new long-range cruise missiles and two hypersonic weapons – the Kinzhal air-launched cruise missile and the Avangard glide vehicle.  Putin specifically described the rationale for the weapons largely in terms of U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 ABM Treaty and concern about U.S. missile defense systems.  In turn, American military and political leaders are demanding from Congress even more funding for strategic offensive and defensive weapons.  The arms race cycle continues and now without restrictions on defenses, even more money will be spent to fuel riskier strategic instability.  The only alternative is to end this 21st century race to nuclear Armageddon before it is too late. (Sources:  “Missile Defense Agency Fact Sheet:  Ground-based Midcourse Defense.”  Jan. 12, 2018. https://mda.mil/global/documents/pdf/bmds.pdf, Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp, 2-4, 84-85, Kingston Reif.  “New Russian Weapons Raise Arms Race Fears.”  Arms Control Today. Arms Control Association.  April 2018.  https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-04/news-russian-weapons-raise-arms-race-fears, both websites accessed April 17, 2018.)

    May 28, 2000 – America’s Defense Monitor, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, “Dark Cloud:  Our Strange Love Affair With the Bomb,” produced by the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan and nonprofit organization and independent monitor of the Pentagon, founded in 1972, whose board of directors and staff included retired military officers (Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr.), former U.S. government officials (Philip Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of defense), and civilian experts (Dr. Bruce Blair, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer).  This episode, as described in a press release, focused on, “Nukes as portable infantry weapons, Nukes for digging tunnels, Nuclear decontamination with a whisk broom.  Secret government films of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s form the backdrop for this darkly entertaining exploration of America’s fascination with the Bomb.  At times, humorous, strange, and disturbing, these films reveal how the culture of nuclear weapons shaped American society during the Cold War, and how the advocates of nuclear culture sought to make atomic weapons a part of everyday life.  This show provides a valuable lesson in media literacy by exploring the nature of propaganda and deconstructing its messages.”  Comments:  Public acceptance and even affection for militarism and the myth that nuclear weapons have “kept the peace” and “made America great” is commonplace in 2018. Films and television programs increasingly focus on post-apocalyptic nuclear scenarios and even the language of officialdom is contaminated by militarism and love of the Bomb.  The term used for over a decade to describe changing U.S. Senate procedural rules to enable judicial and executive nominees to be confirmed with 51 votes, a simple majority, rather than 60 is termed, “the nuclear option.”  The good news is, as this television documentary proposed almost twenty years ago, through peace education and literacy, a growing number of denizens of our Pale Blue Dot are seeing war, doomsday weapons, and military speak as counterproductive to the long-term survival of our species.

    Late May-Early June 2018 – A hopeful breakthrough for peace on the Korean Peninsula may occur sometime in this time period when U.S. President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.  Essential precursor steps toward a permanent treaty ending the nearly seventy year old Korean Conflict were taken in March when Mr. Kim secretly visited Beijing, China and met with President Xi Jinping and when South Korean President Moon Jae-in proposed and Mr. Kim accepted an offer to meet Mr. Moon at Peace House, a South Korean building inside the truce village at Panmunjom on April 27th.  When the North Korean leader met with the Chinese President in March, Mr. Kim proposed “phased, synchronized moves toward denuclearization,” which is the same approach that saw negotiating successes as well as setbacks in past discussions with Washington.  Comments:  President Trump would be wise to accept the advice of 93-year old former President Jimmy Carter who helped prevent two wars during his tenure – a possible violent insurgency in Panama nipped in the bud by his push for the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977 and another Mideast war between Egypt and Israel circumvented by his personal diplomacy culminating in the Camp David Accords of 1978.  The 39th President, who called President Trump’s selection of war hawk John Bolton to the post of National Security Adviser, “a disaster for our country,” nevertheless urged that Trump’s negotiators listen closely to the North Koreans for the core of their demands.  The best-selling author, Carter Center founder, and former peace envoy who travelled to Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for the 1994 Agreed Framework denuclearization deal signed by North Korea, delivered this specific advice to the 45th President, “What the North Koreans have wanted for a long time is just assurance confirmed by the Six Powers Agreement – with China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and so forth – that the U.S. will not attack North Korea as long as North Korea stays at peace with its neighbors.”  President Carter noted that this may require concessions by the U.S. including a draw-down of U.S. troop levels in South Korea or an agreement to forego annual military exercises conducted off the coast of North Korea.  Considering Mr. Trump’s past belligerent rhetoric toward Mr. Kim and vice versa, as well as the history of failed Korean negotiations, it seems unlikely that the result of the Trump-Kim meeting will be a resolution of long-standing issues, but it is obviously better for the two men to meet peacefully rather than mutually escalate past nuclear threats.  (Sources:  Susan Page. “Jimmy Carter Calls Trump’s Decision to Hire Bolton ‘A Disaster’ for Our Country.” USA Today. March 26, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/26/jimmy-carter-decries-donald-trump-decision, Choe Sang-Hun. “North and South Korea Set a Date for Summit Meeting at Border.  The New York Times. March 29, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/world/asia/north-korea-south-summit-border.html, and Anthony Wier and Abigail Stowe-Thurston, Editors.  “Nuclear Calendar.”  Friends Committee on National Legislation, April 2018. http://www2.fcnl.org/Nuclear/Calendar/index/php, all of which were accessed April 17, 2018.)