Category: Nuclear Threat

April 7, 1954 – An article in the New York Times by William Lawrence titled, “Cobalt Bomb Can Be Built,” was published on this date.  The article quoted Albert Einstein and Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard who both expressed concern that 400 one-ton deuterium-cobalt bombs could release enough radiation to end all life on Earth.  About ten months after this article appeared, German nuclear scientist Otto Hahn publicly noted that only ten very large cobalt bombs could also trigger global catastrophe.  Comments:  Over the past seven-plus decades of the Nuclear Age, there have been many real and imagined ways for humanity to commit omnicide.  However, as Daniel Ellsberg’s 2017 book, “The Doomsday Machine:  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” points out that due to the discovery in the early 1980s of the nuclear winter scenario by Carl Sagan and his colleagues and subsequent reinforcing studies by Rutgers Professor Alan Robock and other scholars, we can realize today that such exotic doomsday devices like those envisioned in the Fifties aren’t required to extinguish the human race, or at least destroy global civilization.  Because we now know that only a small fraction, perhaps 200 or so warheads, of the existing stocks of global nuclear arsenals (which now number over 10,000 devices) can do the trick.  So, even in a so-called “limited” nuclear exchange between say India and Pakistan, dozens of warheads exploding in a period of a few hours or a day could inject millions of tons or more of smoke and debris into the upper atmosphere, cooling the Earth significantly and triggering the subsequent collapse of global agriculture and the ensuing starvation of billions of people.  Unfortunately, this critical information largely has not been conveyed to the general public, especially the American people, by the mainstream news media.   Instead, American cable news networks and an array of mainstream newspapers has conveyed to the public a warped fascination with the spy vs. spy and tit-for-tat cyber warfare “games” played by both America and Russia, Trump and Putin.  As for doomsday scares, the American media loves to stoke fear and anger toward Russia every chance it gets.  For instance, recently a plethora of media sources pointed out that the Pentagon revealed that Russia is developing a “ultra-deep, stealthy nuclear-armed undersea, autonomous torpedo,” which it plans to deploy off the eastern coast of the United States.  Mainstream media viewers are told that the torpedo carries a highly radioactive cobalt warhead that could contaminate large areas of the East Coast making the region unsuitable for military, economic, or other activity for a long period of time.  While, of course, this is a frightening threat, the 800-pound gorilla in the room, that both America and Russia as well as most of the other nuclear weapons states can trigger global nuclear winter and thereby extinguish 99 percent of our species without resort to exploding one alleged doomsday weapons system, is at the same time ignored or downplayed.  However, a growing movement of global citizenry and an increasing number of scientists, politicians, and military leaders are performing a public service by describing the unvarnished truth about the nuclear threat while also arguing for drastic reductions and the eventual elimination of extremely dangerous global nuclear arsenals.

(Sources:  Jeffrey Lewis. “Putin’s Doomsday Machine.”  Foreign Policy.  Nov. 12, 2015 http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/12/putins-doomsday-machine-nuclear-weapon-us-russia/ and Lucy Pasha-Robinson. “U.S. Says Russia Developing ‘Doomsday’ Autonomous Nuclear Torpedo as Trump Administration Announces More Aggressive Stance to Moscow.”  The Independent.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/russia-doomsday-nuclear -armed-undersea-torpedo-pentagon-defense-department-nuclear-posture-review-a8192541.html both accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 10, 1945 – Three months before the first-ever test of an atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16^th, the medical staff of the U.S. Manhattan (Project) Engineering District in Oak Ridge, Tennessee secretly injected highly radioactive plutonium into the bodies of victims of an automobile accident without their consent.  It was the first of over a dozen other injections of unknowing human subjects over the next two years in order to gather vital information for U.S. military and civilian scientists on how much exposure to the deadly substance would cause harm.  Over a period of 40 years and perhaps longer, the U.S. Department of Energy catalogued over 48 different radiation experiments conducted not only on adults but also on children including racial and ethnic minorities, the indigent, as well as the mentally ill, pregnant women and their fetuses, all in the name of national security.  Comments:  Such experiments represent only the tip of the iceberg in terms of countless purposeful experiments, tests, and radioactive exposures inflicted on civilians and soldiers by representatives of the nine nuclear weapons states and possibly other nations that considered or are today considering acquiring nuclear weapons and/or fissile materials.  It is also extremely possible that these secret experiments may still be occurring through perhaps more subtle or hidden methodologies.  This is yet another paramount reason why nuclear weapons and nuclear power should be dramatically reduced and eliminated entirely (except for legitimate medicinal uses or every limited internationally-sanctioned civilian nuclear fusion reactor research) by 2030.

(Sources:  U.S. Department of Energy.  “Human Radiation Experiments:  The Department of Energy Roadmap to the Story and Records.” Document Number DOE/EH-0445, February 1995 and Eileen Welsome. “The Plutonium Files:  America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War.”  New York:  Dial Press, 1999.)

April 12, 2018 – The Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) 2018 Capstone Conference, the final conference of the 2017-2018 PONI Conference Series, now in its 14^th year, sponsored by the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies of Washington, DC, will be held at the Offutt Inn at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.  “The conference will feature presentations from emerging nuclear experts covering topics such as nuclear strategies, rising threats in the East, arms control and proliferation challenges, and threats to alliances and institutions.  The PONI Conference series, which is unique in its emphasis on featuring rising experts and young professionals in the nuclear field, draws emerging thought leaders from across the nuclear enterprise and provides them a visible platform for sharing their new thinking on a range of nuclear issues.”  Comments:  One of the key cogs of the Congressional-military-industrial-corporate-think tank complex are academic-sounding conferences like this meeting held annually at one of the most secure U.S. military bases in the world, where anti-nuclear activists would not have direct access (although of course, protest actions are still possible outside the main gates of the base).  The list of speakers and the agenda are not provided and STRATCOM’s website notes that, “Conference presentations and keynote speakers are off-the-record.”  However, the site does mention that the keynote address will be given by General John E. Hyten, current commander of U.S. STRATCOM.  But the media and the public does have access to the 2016 PONI Capstone Conference comments of a former commander of STRATCOM, Admiral Cecil D. Haney who remarked that, “…we must be thoughtful going forward, because deterring in today’s multi-polar world requires us to view threats across the “spectrum of conflict,” where escalation may occur with more than one adversary, and will be transregional, multi-domain and multifunctional…Strategic deterrence is a complex subject that is foundational to our nation’s security.  Deterrence depends on the situation and one size never fits all, yet it is bounded in the understanding that adversaries will not gain the benefit they seek…Adversaries cannot escalate their way out of a failed conflict…the U.S. will respond in a time, place, and domain of our choosing.”  Admiral Haney also noted that, “Our strategic capabilities are routinely demonstrated or exercised,” and referred to B-2 bomber threats against North Korea (which he specifically mentioned as “B-2 deployment to U.S. Pacific Command”) and remarked that, “we flight-tested two ICBMs from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota” (which most of the world’s population sees no differently than such tests staged irregularly by China, Russia, or North Korea, as rehearsals for a nuclear Armageddon).  Of course, no speech by STRATCOM’s commander would be complete without a pitch to Congress for more doomsday weaponry as the Admiral added that, “We must not jeopardize strategic stability by failing to sustain, to modernize, and, in some cases, expand our deterrent forces.  In the 2020s to 2030s recapitalization (a euphemism for a new generation of nuclear bomb-making with more sophisticated and thus actually more globally destabilizing weapons and nuclear platforms) will grow to between six and seven percent (of the annual bloated U.S. military budget), a modest price to pay to deter Russia and North Korea.”  The only other speaker mentioned on the website for this year’s conference is of course a representative of the “corporate” or “think-tank” sponsor of the 2018 PONI Capstone Conference – The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), whose trustees include top Cold Warriors from past presidential administrations such as Dr. Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage, and Brent Scowcroft.  The conference speaker for CSIS is Rebecca Hersman, a former assistant secretary of defense and Congressional staffer for the House Armed Services Committee, whose body of work includes papers that support “Building a Compelling Rationale for the Role and Value of U.S. Nuclear Weapons” (2016), and an article on the February 2018 Trump Administration’s nuclear posture review (NPR), which she characterizes as, “the retention and modernization of the current nuclear triad largely proposed and supported by the Obama Administration.”  Professor Edward Herman’s 1989 work “The Terrorism Industry” and many more recent academic and journalistic accounts have proven that think-tanks like CSIS have extensive direct ties to U.S. weapons contractors as well as the U.S. intelligence community.  It is clear that such conferences reinforce and justify, in terms of public perceptions, that “American exceptionalism” and U.S. global nuclear hegemony go hand-in-hand and will continue indefinitely (as its adherents fervently hope) as did other “enlightened” hegemons in history like the Roman and British empires.  However, as disastrous as it was for the world when those past empires fell, the growing likelihood of nuclear Armageddon today threatens the very existence of our species and countless others on the planet.  Thankfully, a growing consensus of world leaders and global citizenry are committed to preventing that from happening.  When the majority of U.S. leaders join the movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons and if, in fact, that goal is someday reached thanks largely to American leadership, then perhaps on that day one can really embrace the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism.”

(Sources:  “Nuclear Calendar” Natural Resources Defense Council. http://www2.fcnl.org/NuclearCalendarindex.php, “PONI 2018 Capstone Conference.” https://www.CSIS.org/events/poni-2018-capstone-conference, “Project on Nuclear Issues Capstone Conference, April 13, 2016. http://www.stratcom.mil/Media/Speeches/Article/986478/project-on-nuclear-issues-capstone-conference/(2016)back all of which were accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 19, 2015 – On this date, two former Cold War adversaries published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “How to Avert a Nuclear War.”  U.S. Marine Corps General James E. Cartwright, the former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, and Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, a former director of the research institute of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, both of whom then worked on the Global Zero Commission on Nuclear Risk Reduction, argued that, “Russia and the United States are still living with the nuclear strike doctrine of the Cold War which dictated three strategic options:  first strike, launch-on-warning, and post-attack retaliation.”  The two Cold Warriors noted particularly that, “For either side, the decision to launch-on-warning…after an alert of an apparent attack must be made in minutes.  This is therefore the riskiest scenario, since provocations or malfunctions can trigger a global catastrophe.  Since computer-based information systems have been in place, the likelihood of such errors has been minimized.  But, the emergence of cyber warfare threats has increased the potential for false alerts in early warning systems.  The possibility of an error cannot be ruled out.”  These military experts also point to another related concern that due to the loss of all of Russia’s early warning satellites, that nation’s haphazard system of prefabricated border radars allow even less time to react to false warning of a potential U.S. nuclear first strike.  Generals Cartwright and Dvorkin concluded that, “Launch-on-warning puts enormous strain on the nuclear chains of command in both countries…the risk, however small, of cataclysmic error remains…This risk should motivate the presidents of Russia and the United States to decide in tandem to eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies, (for it) is a relic of Cold War strategy whose risk today far exceeds its value…Our leaders…need…(to) agree to scrap this obsolete protocol before a devastating error occurs.”  Comments:  Over the last few years, other military and civilian leaders in the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states have shocked the Congressional-military-industrial complex by pushing for the elimination of all land-based ICBMs, the establishment of a no-first use policy, and other restrictions limiting any use of nuclear weapons including post-attack retaliation, low threshold bunker-busting bombs, or other smaller yield nuclear devices that some have proposed using to attack Iranian or North Korean underground nuclear facilities.  But the Nuclear Genie’s minions continue their solitary focus on continuing past risky behavior as “defense” contractors, their CEOs, and other institutions continue to profit despite their flawed perception that the chance of accidental or unintentional nuclear war is so infinitesimally small that they are justified in supporting “the maintenance of robust deterrence.”  And unfortunately today, three years after Cartwright and Dvorkin’s op-ed, the presidents of Russia and the United States both take every opportunity to rattle their nuclear sabers and err on the side of pushing for more nukes, more options for their use, and more strategic instability to counterintuitively ‘make Russia and America great again.’

(Source:  Numerous mainstream and alternative news media sources and http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/opinion/how-to-avert-a-nuclear-war-html?_r=0 accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 26, 1986 – At the Chernobyl Nuclear Complex located about 130 kilometers (80 miles) north of Kiev, capital of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic of the U.S.S.R., a fire developed in the core of the number four reactor unit which triggered an explosion that blew the roof off the building resulting in the largest ever release of radioactive material from a civilian reactor, with the possible exception of the Fukushima Dai-chi accident on March 11, 2011 in northeast Japan.  Two were killed and 200 others hospitalized, but the Soviet government did not release specific details of the nuclear meltdown until two days later when Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and other European neighbors detected abnormally high levels of radioactivity.  8,000 died and 435,000 people were evacuated from the region in the ensuing days, weeks, months, and years.  Although West Germany, Sweden, and other nations provided assistance to the Soviet Union to deal with the deadly, widespread radioactive fallout from the accident, some argue today that the U.S., China, Russia, France, Japan, and other nations should establish a permanent, multilateral civilian-military-humanitarian response force to quickly address such serious nuclear and natural disasters in a time-urgent, nonpartisan manner.  In November of 2016, a massive shelter, costing 1.5 billion euros and measuring 843 feet wide and 354 feet tall, which was constructed by 10,000 workers, was sealed shut over the number four reactor unit at Chernobyl.  Inside the deadliest radioactive structure on the planet is approximately 200 tons of radioactive corium, 30 tons of contaminated dust, and a very large indeterminate amount of uranium and plutonium.  Radiation levels inside the shelter still run as high as 5,000 to 10,000 roentgens per hour.  A 2016 report by Greenpeace on the local and regional impacts of the disaster found that in many cases, in grain stocks for instance, radiation levels in the contaminated zone surrounding the shelter where about five million people live today, are still surprisingly high.  According to scientific testing conducted by Greenpeace consultants and experts, overall contamination from key isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 may have fallen somewhat, but continue to linger at prohibitive levels especially in forested areas of the contaminated zone.  Comments:  In addition to the dangerous risk of nuclear power plant accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and others too numerous to list here, the tremendously out-of-control civilian and military nuclear waste sequestration, remediation, and permanent storage conundrum as well as terrorist targeting potential, the economic unsustainability of civilian nuclear power, and the potential for nuclear proliferation points logically to an accelerated phase-out of global civilian nuclear power plants over the next decade as well as an absolute halt to massive plans by most of the nuclear weapons states to accelerate production of fissile materials in order to build a new, unneeded generation of destabilizing nuclear weaponry, while polluting our fragile ecosphere with more radioactivity.

(Sources:  “Nuclear Scars: The Lasting Legacy of Chernobyl and Fukushima.” Greenpeace.  March-April 2016. http://greenpeace.org/france/PageFiles/266171/Nuclear_Scars_report_WEB_final_version_20160403.pdf and Gleb Garanich. “30 Years After Chernobyl, Locals Still Eating Radioactive Food.” Reuters (also published on Newsweek website). March 9, 2016. http://www.newsweek.com/30-years-after-chernobyl-locals-still-eating-radioactive-food-435253 and “Chernobyl Arch Moved into Place in Historic Engineering Feat.”  World Nuclear News. Nov. 14, 2016. http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-Chernobyl-arch-moved-into-place-in-historic-engineering-feat-14111602.html all of which were accessed March 16, 2018.)

April 30, 1998 – The U.S. Senate, by a vote of 80-19, approved NATO’s eastern expansion to the former Soviet Warsaw Pact military alliance countries of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th members of the Alliance, a move that was later formalized at a ceremony at NATO headquarters in Brussels on March 16, 1999.  Nevertheless, there were and still are dissenting opinions about how unchecked NATO expansion is interpreted as a threat to Moscow.  Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR), who after retiring from Congress became the director of the Center for Defense Information, noted that, “We are forcing them to rely more and more heavily on nuclear weapons (to make up for the advantage over Russia in conventional arms deployed on or near Russia’s western borders by larger and larger numbers of NATO countries).  And the more you rely on nuclear weapons, the lower the hair trigger for nuclear war.”  As the years passed several other European nations, most of them also former Warsaw Pact countries, joined NATO which has now increased its membership to 29 nations.  NATO expansion, which has correlated with increasing tensions between the Alliance and Russia as illustrated in the recent Crimea-Ukraine Crisis and renewed episodes, over the last several years, of close aerial and naval encounters between NATO and Russian craft, has proven Bumpers and many other observers correct as nuclear war risks have escalated leading scholars to refer to contemporary times as “a second Cold War.”  Comments:  Tensions are still on the rise as seen by the comments in 2016-17 of many observers including former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev who warned, “The world has never been closer to nuclear war than it is at present.”  At the same time, German politicians including Social Democrats and Christian Democrats accused NATO of “war mongering.”  Even a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Perry, joined the chorus of voices against Alliance threats, “NATO is threatening and trying to provoke a nuclear war in Europe by putting bombers and nuclear missiles on the border with Russia.”  Although tensions seemed to have relaxed a bit after President Trump took office due to his complimentary rhetoric about Russian President Vladimir Putin, more recently relations have sunk much deeper with revelations of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the poisoning of a Russian émigré Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain, stepped up U.S. economic sanctions, British expulsions of Russian diplomats, counter responses by Russia, and renewed nuclear threats by Trump and Putin as both leaders announced further qualitative and quantitative increases in long-term nuclear weapons modernization programs.

(Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp, 133-134 and numerous articles from mainstream and alternative news media websites.)

March 1, 1954 – After more than three years of research and development by physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and despite strong opposition from many former Manhattan Project scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “super” or hydrogen bomb was first detonated on this date in a test designated Bravo as part of the Operation Castle series of nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.  Quoting a 2013 Alex Wellerstein article from the blog NuclearSecrecy.org, Daniel Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday Machine” described the impact and significance of the first U.S. thermonuclear weapon, “The yield for the first droppable H-bomb…was fifteen megatons. That is a million times more explosive power than the largest blockbusters in World War II…The yield was 250 percent greater than the largest yield that had been predicted for it, six megatons resulting – along with an unexpected shift of wind – in heavy radioactive fallout contaminating inhabitants of the Marshall Islands and the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon, one of (the crew of 23 hospitalized sailors) whom died.  The reason for the great underestimate of yield, with its serious human consequences, was precisely the kind of scientific error or unforeseen reactivity that (Manhattan Project scientist Enrico) Fermi had feared in the connection with the possibility of atmospheric ignition (impacting the entire surface of the Earth) from the Trinity test (the first atomic bomb blast on July 16, 1945 near Alamogordo, New Mexico).  Los Alamos bomb designers had neglected or greatly underestimated the contribution of the production of neutrons and to the yield from one of the isotopes including in the hydrogen fuel, lithium-7, which had been thought to be relatively inert but proved not to be under the unprecedented condition of the dry-fuel thermonuclear detonation.”  Bravo produced a crater in the atoll with a diameter of 6,000 feet and a depth of 240 feet as the blast created a fireball four miles wide and a mushroom cloud 60 miles across.  Comments:  The frightening 1949 characterization of such doomsday machines by nuclear bomb designers Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi justify renewed efforts by global citizenry today to eliminate these weapons before it is too late, “By its very nature, it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.  It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he (or she) happens to be a resident of an enemy country.”

(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, p. 154 and Daniel Ellsberg.  “The Doomsday Machine:  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.”  New York:  Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 285; 289-290.)

March 11, 1999 – Retired General George Lee Butler, who was selected as head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command on Jan. 25, 1991 and served in that capacity until stepping down in 1994 and became one of the first high-ranking U.S. military officers to call for the elimination of nuclear weapons in a December 1996 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, gave a speech on this date to the staff and supporters of the Canadian Network Against Nuclear Weapons in Montreal.  In his remarks, Butler described the Pentagon’s nuclear war plan or SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in this manner, “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life.”  Comments:  In his later years, General Butler said this about nuclear weapons, “Rather than being concerned about the moral implications of these devices, we continue to pursue them as if they were our salvation – as opposed to the prospective engine of our utter destruction…As long as these weapons exist, and people hold them in such high regard for reasons of national esteem, they act as a brake on our capacity for advancing our humanity…The cold hard fact of the matter is that a nuclear weapon is, at its very core, anti-ethical…Nuclear conflict is essentially an irrational activity, because essentially what you’re doing is signing your own death notice.”

(Sources:  George Lee Butler.  “General Lee Butler Addresses The Canadian Network Against Nuclear Weapons.”  WagingPeace.org. Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.  March 11, 1999 https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/general-lee-butler-addresses-the-canadian-network-against-nuclear-weapons/ accessed Feb. 15, 2018 and Norman Kempster. “Ex-Chief of U.S. Nuclear Forces Seeks Total Ban.”  Los Angeles Times, Dec. 5, 1996.)

March 15, 1980 – One of four SS-N-6 Serb (R-27 Zyb) submarine-launched-ballistic-missiles, launched as part of a training exercise from a Soviet submarine sailing in the Sea of Okhotsk bordering the Pacific Ocean between the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island in the far northeastern zone of the Soviet Union, pursued a trajectory that potentially threatened Japan or Alaska.  This quickly resulted in the U.S. Strategic Air Command convening a threat assessment conference which determined that no Soviet missile attack was in progress.  Comments:  Many of the numerous false warnings of nuclear attack (another prominent example being the Jan. 25, 1995 Black Brant Incident involving a Norwegian sounding rocket which almost caused Russian President Boris Yeltsin to launch a nuclear counterstrike) that have occurred in all nine nuclear weapons states over the decades since the dawn of the nuclear age, have taken the world to the edge of global catastrophe.  This state of affairs represents one of the most powerful rationales for eliminating world nuclear arsenals.

(Source:  John Pike, et al., “Chicken Little and Darth Vader:  Is the Sky Really Falling?” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 1, 1991, p. 61.)

March 20, 2003 – The United States began a large-scale air assault and land invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq on this date.  After the collapse of Hussein’s government, efforts to find substantial evidence of weapons of mass destruction however proved unsuccessful (proving what representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency had confirmed after more than a decade of in-country inspections).  Eventually the dissolution of the Iraqi military helped fuel a long-term, robust and deadly insurgency that went on bloody year after bloody year.  By the time of large-scale U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in December of 2011, there were almost 4,500 U.S. soldiers and anywhere between 150,000 and one million Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed.  Many millions of other Iraqis were wounded or forced to flee the country as refugees.  Over 32,000 U.S. soldiers were wounded in the fighting with at least 10,000 suffering the effects of PTSD.  The cost estimates for the war, which include ongoing long-term medical treatment for tens of thousands of U.S. troops, range from one to three trillion dollars.  Comments:  Despite former President Barack Obama’s statement that, “The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have made America stronger,” it is likely that the “cure” for the problem of suspected, surviving WMD (which were not destroyed by U.S./allied forces in the first Persian Gulf War of 1991 or thereafter by intermittent air strikes in the years preceding the second Gulf War) in Iraq was worse than the “disease.”  Hopefully the lesson of the U.S. experience in Iraq that military invasion and occupation is not a wise course of action to prevent nuclear proliferation will convince the Trump Administration not to go the same route in North Korea and/or Iran.  But even smaller-scale conventional or tactical nuclear strikes on those nations’ nuclear and ballistic missile infrastructure will likely only fuel long-term conflict and heighten the risk of acts of terrorism, particularly WMD terrorism.  A better solution is to embrace the new United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and work toward universal ratification of this treaty and other verifiable nuclear weapons elimination agreements to reduce the chance of perpetual conventional war or a nuclear doomsday.

(Sources:  Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. “The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond.” Washington Post, Sept. 5, 2010 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/03/AR2010090302200.html accessed Feb. 19, 2018 and numerous mainstream and alternative news media sources.)

March 28, 1960 – On this date, the French oceanographer, explorer, and co-inventor of the Aqua-Lung, Jacques Cousteau (1910-1997) appeared on the cover of Time magazine.  Cousteau devoted his life to studying and preserving diverse ocean environments on our planet and promoting responsible treatment of the flora and fauna of the seas by recording his trips on the ABC-TV series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.  He was one of the first environmentalists to witness the negative impact of global warming on fragile ocean ecosystems and Cousteau also opposed the building of nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants because of their deleterious impacts on humanity and the environment.  In 1959, he helped organize the First World Oceanic Congress and a year later he lobbied his native France and other countries to stop dumping radioactive waste into the Mediterranean Sea which led to an eventual ban on such activities.  In 1977 he was awarded the United Nations International Environmental Prize.

(Sources:  “Jacques Cousteau.”  Biography.com http://www.biography.com/people/jacques-cousteau-9259496 and The Gale Group.  “Opposing Viewpoints In Context:  Environmental Science In Context:  Radioactive Waste.” 2009.)

March 31, 1998 – The United Kingdom withdrew from service the last of its estimated 100 WE-177 tactical nuclear free-fall bombs, making the U.S. the only nation with tactical nuclear weapons deployed outside its own territory.  Comments:  While the U.S. drastically reduced the numbers of tactical nuclear weapons deployed outside U.S. borders from several thousand during the height of the Cold War to its current total of approximately 150 warheads stationed in five European countries (Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey), there nevertheless remain serious concerns of the increased risk of unauthorized, accidental, or unintentional nuclear war with Russia.  Many scholars and arms control experts today feel that NATO’s expansion (and the deployment of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons ever closer to Russia’s western borders) since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and increased tensions relating to recent crises in Crimea and Ukraine, have helped trigger a renewed Cold War.  Also, there is speculation that with the recent release of the Trump Administration’s new Nuclear Posture Review this past February, which supports building smaller yield, more usable tactical weapons (and possibly deploying them in places like South Korea and Japan where they might be used against North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile sites), that the overall risk of nuclear war has actually increased.

(Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 57 and Kingston Reif. “U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Turkey Raise Alarms.”  Arms Control Association, November 2017.)

February 1, 2006 – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile material in the last 25 years, especially since the breakup of the Soviet Union, law enforcement officials arrested a number of suspects in Tbilisi, Georgia, a former Soviet republic, on this date, for the attempted sale of 79.5 grams of highly enriched uranium to one or more buyers, who were in actuality undercover security forces.  In April 2015, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Deputy Director Anne Harrington testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Strategic Forces that, “Of the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have come out of the former Soviet Union.”  Despite recent assurances from Rosatom, the state-owned corporation that runs Russia’s nuclear energy and weapons plants, that their nuclear materials, “are always strictly controlled” and accounted for, a Center for Public Integrity November 2015 investigative report concluded that, “In fact, some 99 percent of the world’s weapons-grade materials have been secured.  But one percent or more is still out there, and it amounts to several thousand pounds that could be acquired by any one of several terrorist organizations.”  Comments:  Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the U.N. and other international fora, as well as bilaterally by the Trump and Putin administrations, to prevent the use of fissile materials in dirty bombs or primitive small-yield fission weapons whether the material diverted comes from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapons facilities.  In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis, such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.  (Source: Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith. “The Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.”  Center for Public Integrity, Nov.12, 2015 reprinted in Courier: The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)

February 5, 1987 – The Soviet Union ended a nuclear testing moratorium due to continued U.S. testing but expressed a willingness to revisit such a moratorium if the Americans followed suit.  Forty-four months later, on October 24, 1990, the Soviets conducted their last of an estimated total of 715 nuclear explosive tests that began in 1949.  The French, British, and Americans later committed to end their testing programs (the last U.S. test was Sept. 23, 1992) and although the Russian Duma ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (signed by the U.S., Russia, and more than sixty other nations on Sept. 24, 1996) on April 21, 2000, the U.S. Congress has failed to do so since the Senate rejection of the CTBT by a vote of 51-48 on Oct. 13, 1999.  Comments:  The testing of over 2,050 nuclear devices 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 a 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.  President Trump should convince the Senate to ratify the CTBT, which would increase international pressure on North Korea to cease their nuclear testing program.  (Source:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 13-15; 19; 22.)

February 11, 2004 – Bruce Blair’s Nuclear Column on the Center for Defense Information website which featured an article titled, “Keeping Presidents in the Dark – Episode 1:  The Case of the Missing Permissive Action Links,” was published on this date.  Along with information provided in Daniel Ellsberg’s new book “The Doomsday Machine:  Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” we learned that after John H. Rubel, deputy director of defense research and engineering, discovered that operators of Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBMs had circumvented a design feature to protect against a possibly unauthorized launch of World War III by a single launch control center, he urged then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to require an electronic lock on the missiles.  Decades later, a former Minuteman launch control officer and now prominent nuclear weapons expert and scholar, Dr. Bruce Blair, notified a retired McNamara, “…that the locks had been installed, but everyone knew the combination.  The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the ‘locks’ to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard…SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders.  And so, the ‘secret unlock code’ during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at 00000000.”  Daniel Ellsberg, famously known for his release of the Pentagon Papers to the media in 1971, who earlier in his career served as a Rand Corporation analyst, a consultant to the Pentagon and White House, and drafted McNamara’s plans for nuclear war in 1961, noted that, “…the Joint Chiefs of Staff tolerated the shortcomings of the (nuclear command and) control system (in order) to put up fierce and prolonged resistance to measures that would tighten control of nuclear weapons up and down the line.  That was their distrust, above all in a crisis, of the judgement of civilian commanders and their staff and advisors, especially their willingness to launch nuclear attacks when military commanders believed them to be urgently necessary.  That distrust had emerged under Harry Truman during the Korean War and intensified under Eisenhower (both presidents vetoed the use of nuclear weapons in Korea and in other crises)…It was to become even more intense under JFK and McNamara.”  Comments:  Today serious concerns still exist on how to prevent the unauthorized, accidental, or irrational use of nuclear weapons and unfortunately not much has changed, in terms of U.S. nuclear policy, since the early decades of the Nuclear Age as Ellsberg explained, “The basic elements of American readiness for nuclear war remain today what they were almost sixty years ago:  Thousands of nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert…The declared official rationale for such a system…the supposed need to deter…an aggressive Russian first strike…That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception…The nature, scope, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes:  to attempt to limit the damage to the U.S. from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the U.S.S.R. or Russia.  This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them – U.S. threats of ‘first use’ – to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces and their allies.”  (Sources:  Daniel Ellsberg. “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.” New York:  Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 12, 61-63 and Bruce Blair’s 2004 article is available at http://www.webarchive.org/web/20120511191600/http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm)

February 16, 1904 – George F. Kennan, a U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union who became famous for his “Mr. X” July 1947 article in Foreign Affairs magazine titled, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” that recommended the policy of “containment” rather than war with America’s former World War II ally, was born on this date.  The Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at  Princeton University for six decades, who passed away on March 17, 2005, wrote several books but one of the most prominent and relevant in the Nuclear Age and beyond was his 1982 work, “The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age.”  In this book, Kennan noted that, “War itself as a means of settling differences…will have to be in some ways ruled out; and with it there will have to be dismantled the greater part of the vast military establishments now maintained…the recognition that the weapons of this age – even the so-called conventional ones – are of such great destructiveness that there can be no clear line between the discriminate ones and the weapons of mass destruction.”  Comments:  Even a war fought in this technologically advanced 21^st century, without resorting to the use of weapons of mass destruction including nuclear weapons, have had devastating human, environmental, societal, and financial impacts as have been proven in many conventional wars fought since World War II.  The use of depleted uranium munitions, phosphorous bombs, modern precision-guided weapons such as Hellfire missiles, cluster bombs, and many other devices such as the Assad regime’s use of barrel bombs have not only killed and injured large numbers of combatants and civilians, but also caused cancers and other long-term mortal diseases.  It also seems increasingly likely that when a regime’s survival is at stake, nuclear weapons will also likely be used.  Therefore not only must we reduce dramatically and eliminate nuclear weapons, as well as enforce existing treaty prohibitions against the use of chemical and biological weapons, but we must also redouble global efforts to make war itself illegal, untenable, and obsolete as a means of settling disputes.  In return, our global civilization will prosper as trillions of dollars in military expenditures are redirected to fighting climate change, eliminating poverty and malnutrition, providing a free education to every person, finding cures for cancer and other chronic diseases, and insuring the survival of the human race indefinitely.  (Source:  George F. Kennan.  “The Nuclear Delusion:  Soviet-American Relations in the Atomic Age.” New York: Pantheon, 1982 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1982-12-01/nuclear-delusion-soviet-american-relations-atomic-age accessed Jan. 20, 2018.)

February 20, 1950 – A New York Times article published on this date titled, “Second Capital Urged in Atom Era: Underground Plan to Be Broached,” reported that Congressmen Chet Holifield and John Rankin, cognizant that a recent Atomic Energy Commission report concluded that three atomic bombs of the yield dropped on Hiroshima would “tear the guts out of Washington,” proposed creating an alternative seat of government located possibly in an underground cave such as Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave.  Ten months later on Dec. 1, 1950, President Truman signed Executive Order 10186 establishing the Federal Civil Defense Administration (which in 1958 merged with the military’s Office of Defense Mobilization to become a new agency, the Office of Defense and Civil Mobilization, which eventually became the Federal Emergency Management Agency).  Comments:  For almost seventy years, the U.S. and the other eight nuclear weapons states have spent many billions of dollars on programs to preserve their nations’ leadership or at least a representative sample of such leadership in the midst of a nuclear or WMD attack.  Over several decades, the U.S. government built a top secret Congressional bomb shelter under The Greenbrier resort hotel in West Virginia and secret bunkers for the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at Raven Rock near Camp David, Maryland, Mount Weather, Virginia and at dozens of other locations.  A 24-hour airborne command post dubbed Looking Glass was created along with other extensive means of maintaining Continuity of Government (COG) and Continuity of Operations (COOP).  The rest of us, the vast majority of American and global populations were left to fend for ourselves, to find a large public shelter or build our own private bunker.  But the dirty little secret, long indisputably known by all thinking persons around the world, is that surviving a nuclear war is virtually impossible, an unviable option when we consider that even a so-called “limited” nuclear war can destroy global agriculture and result in the starvation of billions.  Now after the false “incoming ballistic missile” alerts in Hawaii on Jan. 13th and in Japan on Jan. 16^th, as well as the Center for Disease Control’s recent public relations boondoggle of informing Americans what to do in a nuclear war, it seems clear that continuing to waste even more of our global treasure on not only preparing for nuclear war but surviving such a unprecedented catastrophe is illogical and counterproductive.  This is obviously yet another reason why global citizenry should continue to pressure the leaders of the nine nuclear weapons states to reverse course, eliminate these doomsday weapons, and redouble international efforts to demilitarize the planet.  (Source:  Garrett M. Graff. “Raven Rock:  The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself – While the Rest of Us Die.”  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017, p. 31.)

February 29, 2012 – A supposed breakthrough occurred on this date when U.S. negotiators convinced those from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) to sign on to an agreement in which all North Korean missile and nuclear testing would be suspended in exchange for extensive food aid assistance (targeting the poorest, most disadvantaged population groups in that nation).  However, somewhat predictably and not unlike a plethora of other agreements between the U.S. and its allies and the North Korean regime over the last several decades, this deal collapsed when a satellite launched by the North Koreans in April of 2012 was interpreted not as a commercial scientific advance, but as another step towards militarizing its ballistic missile capabilities.  Comments:  What many politicians, military leaders, arms control experts, and a growing segment of the global public see as a top U.S. priority – ending the Korean War with a peaceful, nonmilitary solution that not only demilitarizes but unites the two Koreas, rebuilding the North’s economy and redoubling its technological and commercial ties with Western and other nations – is apparently not a priority of the Trump Administration.  The 45^th President’s extreme rhetoric and military-focused responses have ratcheted up tensions on the Korean peninsula and throughout Northeast Asia since he took office.  However, recent bilateral successes by the two Koreas, including peaceful cooperation in the upcoming Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, hold promise, long-term, for a peaceful end to the seven-decade long Korean Conflict.  (Sources: Suzanne DiMaggio. “Learn from Iran, Engage North Korea,” pp. 37-40 in Tom Z. Collina and Geoff Wilson, editors. “10 Big Nuclear Ideas for the Next President.”  Ploughshares Fund Study Report No. 2, The Ploughshares Fund, November 2016 and Steven Lee Myers and Choe Sang Hun.  “North Koreans Agree to Freeze Nuclear Work; U.S. to Give Aid.”  New York Times.  Feb. 29, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/world/asia/us-says-north-korea-agrees-to-curb-nuclear-work.html accessed Jan. 20, 2018.)