Category: Nuclear Threat

September 1, 2014 – An article authored by Ray Henry in the Washington Post titled, “U.S. Seeks Trains to Carry Nuclear Waste, But There’s Nowhere For Them to Go Yet,” was published on this date.  Henry reported that he discovered a public solicitation filed by the Department of Energy that proposed purchasing or leasing rail cars to haul 150 ton casks filled with irradiated spent fuel and other nuclear waste from over 90 existing U.S. civilian nuclear power plants.  The solicitation noted that the rail cars would have to last for up to thirty years and would run at standard speed on regular railroad tracks.  The protective casks, which would be reused up to eight times a year, would carry an estimated 70,000 tons of nuclear waste from 30 states to a permanent underground repository site that does not actually exist yet.  Decades-long plans enacted after Congress passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 focused on shipping this huge volume of waste by both rail and road to the Yucca Mountain, Nevada site located two hours northeast of Las Vegas.  But the site proved scientifically unsound and politically unworkable.  Meanwhile, more and more nuclear waste is piling up in spent fuel ponds and storage areas in and around U.S. nuclear power plants. Even proposals to move the waste to a smaller number of regional above ground storage facilities, until a permanent site can be tested, scientifically approved, and politically agreed to, will take many years of effort and cost tens of billions of dollars.  Comments:  While almost every antinuclear supporter welcomed the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a godsend, there is one significant caveat to this sentiment, the treaty’s preamble which recognizes nations’ “inalienable right” to peaceful uses of nuclear energy.  The global nuclear waste long-term storage conundrum is just one of several critical reasons (another is that nuclear power plants do, in fact, have significant, long-term pre-cradle to grave greenhouse signatures) why nuclear power along with nuclear weapons must both be phased out of existence as soon as possible.  The proliferation threat and the terrorist attack dangers inherent in nuclear power plant operation and especially during nuclear waste transport and long-term storage are other penultimate considerations.  (Sources:  Gregg Levine and Caroline Preston. “Pilgrim’s Progress: Inside the American Nuclear Waste Crisis.” The New Yorker.  Nov. 25, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/pilgrims-progress-inside-the-american-nuclear-crisis accessed Aug. 14, 2017 and other alternative media sources.)

September 12, 1984 – Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning actress Joanne Woodward served as chairperson of the first National Women’s Conference to Prevent Nuclear War held in the Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.  Retired U.S. Navy Admiral Gene R. La Rocque, director of the antinuclear, antiwar Pentagon watchdog nonprofit organization, the Center for Defense Information (CDI), encouraged board member Woodward to coordinate and host the historic meeting of 250 invitees from the fields of education, science, politics, sports, and entertainment including First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Coretta Scott King, Bella Abzug, Eleanor Smeal, actresses Sally Field, Lily Tomlin, and Jane Alexander, as well as noted tennis superstar Billie Jean King and women Congressional representatives and staff.  Admiral La Rocque noted that, “My generation has failed to stop the arms race.  But it’s really the men who have failed.  Now it’s up to the women…”  Woodward noted that, “We’re not anti-men, we’re pro-survival. We just thought it would be best for women to hear what other women have to say on the subject because we certainly aren’t being heard in those behind-the-doors meetings where the decisions are made about war and peace.”  Comments:  While much has changed in the 33 years since this conference was held and women have long held meaningful political and military leadership roles in many nations and in international organizations such as the United Nations, one can argue that women have played and should continue to play influential roles in the antinuclear and related peace and social change movements on a global scale.  An opponent of the Vietnam War, like her spouse actor Paul Newman (1925-2008) who also served as a CDI board member, Woodward labored to join with Soviet women in the cause of preventing nuclear conflict by supporting the Nuclear Freeze Movement and other similar efforts to reduce and eliminate the nuclear threat to humanity.  (Source:  Judy Klemesrud.  “Rallying Women on Nuclear War Issues.”  New York Times. Sept. 9, 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/09style/rallying-women-on-nuclear-war-issues.html accessed Aug. 14, 2017.)

September 14, 1954 – In a military exercise designated Light Snow, 45,000 Soviet soldiers and officers, told only that they would be involved in an exercise involving a new weapon, were purposely exposed to a ground detonation of a 30-kiloton nuclear device, twice as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, at the Totskoye Military Range in Orenburg Oblast, Russia.  The bomb was dropped by a Tu-4 bomber while Deputy Defense Minister and hero of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) Georgy Zhukov observed from a safe distance in an underground bunker.  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.  (Source:  James Mahaffey.  “Atomic Accidents.”  New York:  Pegasus Books, 2014, p. 79.)

September 20, 2017 – The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, as initiated in U.N. General Assembly Resolution A/RES/71/258 after first being proposed by a core group of six nations (Austria, Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa), adopted by 113 nations on Dec. 23, 2016, with the final round of negotiations taking place earlier this summer at U.N. Headquarters in New York City, will be opened for signature on this date.  Article 15 of the treaty requires that it will enter into force 90 days after 50 nation-states ratify the agreement.  The treaty, which was approved after an overwhelmingly favorable vote in the General Assembly on July 7, 2017 (122 countries voted in favor, the Netherlands against, and Singapore abstained), prohibits development, testing, production, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, transporting, and deployment of nuclear arms, as well as assisting other nations in any nuclear weapons-related activities and forbidding the use or threat to use these doomsday weapons.  While the treaty has been negotiated by countries that do not have nuclear weapons, Article 4 of the agreement offers the nine members of the Nuclear Club the opportunity to join the treaty with nuclear arms still in their possession whether based on their own territory or an allied nation’s territory.  However, Article 4 mandates that if Nuclear Club members want to join, the weapons must be immediately removed from operational status and the nation must agree to a “legally binding, time-bound plan for the verified and irreversible elimination of all such weapons” as approved by the treaty’s members.  Comments:  Led by the U.S. and Russia, which possess more than 90 percent of the world’s total nuclear arsenal, most of the Nuclear Club members have expressed strong opposition to this treaty, arguing that not only is the treaty overly idealistic and utopian in nature, but also a danger to the system of supposedly “stable, reliable nuclear deterrence that has prevented the use of such weapons for more than seventy years.”  A growing plethora of global critics including academics, the military, arms control experts, politicians, and the general public have responded that the U.S., Russia and other nuclear weapons possessing nations have unfortunately fooled themselves into believing that deterrence is perfect or nearly so, and that the existing nuclear status quo ante will remain robust, stable, and unerring for the indefinite future of the human species.  This stance is highly illogical and counterintuitive as far as the history of civilization and great power politics is concerned.  Perhaps George Wilhelm Engel’s statement from 1827 says it best, “What experience and history teach is this:  that people and governments never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it.”  Nevertheless, let us hope that the Nuclear Ban Treaty will enter into force this fall and mark the beginning of the end of the threat of global thermonuclear Apocalypse.  (Sources:  Zia Mian. “After the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty:  A New Disarmament Politics.”  Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  July 7, 2017. http://thebulletin.org/after-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty-new-disarmament-politics10932 and Matthew Bolton. “A Brief Guide to the New Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.” JustSecurity.org. July 14, 2017. https://www.justsecurity.org/43004/guide-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty both accessed Aug. 14, 2017.)

September 23, 1992 – On this date, the U.S. concluded 47 years of nuclear testing (which included a total of 1,030 test blasts) that began with the first test code-named Trinity on July 16, 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico and ended with a 20 kiloton underground nuclear test code-named Divider at the Nevada Test Site.  Less than two weeks after this test, President George H. W. Bush signed the Hatfield Amendment into law which mandated a nuclear test moratorium.  President Bill Clinton extended the moratorium until September 1996 at which time he signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).  On Oct. 13, 1999, the Senate rejected the CTBT by a vote of 51-48 and has not brought the treaty back to the floor for a vote even though six months after the Senate CTBT rejection, the Russian Duma approved the ratification of the agreement by a vote of 298-74 on April 21, 2000.  For more than 20-plus years, it seemed to be a given that nuclear testing was not only unnecessary but counter to U.S. and international nuclear non-proliferation policies (seen today in widespread opposition to Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons development and testing).  In addition to decades of agreement seen in statements by U.S. defense officials and nuclear weapons laboratory directors, there was a 2012 National Academy of Sciences report, “The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty – Technical Issues for the United States,” which laid out a clear-cut technical agreement that concluded that the U.S. did not need nuclear tests to maintain its arsenal.  And in September 2016, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution urging hold out countries to ratify the CTBT.  The United States actually voted in favor of this resolution.  Comments:  Unfortunately some Republicans in Congress as well as President Trump apparently believe U.S. nuclear testing should return.  Republican Congressmen and allies of the 45^th President, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC), proposed legislation (including S.332) in February 2017 to cut the U.S. share of 25 percent funding ($30 million annually) to the Vienna-based Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization which runs a network of 337 monitoring stations to help enforce the CTBT ban on nuclear explosions.  Not only would this bill set the stage for renewed U.S. nuclear testing, it would also dilute nonproliferation efforts to publicize and sanction countries involved in unauthorized nuclear tests such as North Korea or other nations.  U.S. and other Nuclear Club members’ plans to spend trillions of dollars over the next 30 years to build new generations of nuclear weapons as well as upgrade existing arsenals might benefit from an end to nuclear testing prohibition.  But this would also dramatically increase the risk of nuclear warfighting in the 21^st century, making human extinction more likely.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5, 15, and 22; Darryl G. Kimball and Tom Z. Collina.  “No Going Back: 20 Years Since Last Nuclear Test.”  Issue Briefs, Vol 3. Issue 14, Arms Control Association. Sept. 20, 2012. http://www.armscontrol.org/issuebriefs/No-Going-Back-20-Years-Since-the-Last -US-Nuclear-Test%20 and David Axe.  “Republicans Move to Strip Away Nuclear Test Ban Funding.” Daily Beast. Feb. 13, 2017. http://www.thedailybeast.com/republicans-move-to-strip-away-nuclear-test-ban-funding both accessed Aug. 15, 2017.)

September 26, 1983 – During a time of great Cold War tension and perhaps the second most dangerous time in human history (after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962), an event occurred that could have resulted in the unthinkable – a global thermonuclear World War III.  Weeks after the Soviets shot down an unarmed civilian South Korean airliner, KAL Flight 007, killing 269 people near Sakhalin Island in the Sea of Japan on September 1, 1983 and weeks before NATO’s Able Archer military exercise (interpreted by a large number of Soviet military and political leaders as a precursor for an actual first strike nuclear attack), this incident took place.  In the early hours of the morning of September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, on duty at Serpukhov-15, a top-secret nuclear command and control station in a rural area just south of Moscow, was monitoring data from a relatively new Soviet early warning satellite.  At 0015 hours, bright red warning lights suddenly lit up the room and a loud klaxon horn directed Petrov to a display showing a U.S. nuclear missile launch from America’s western coast.  Then quickly several more U.S. missile launches were detected.  Petrov asked his colleagues manning the satellite telescopes for “visual confirmation.”  But with the atmosphere cloudy, it was impossible to confirm or deny the alleged nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.  Precious time was speeding by.  He had only 15 minutes or less to make the most important decision of his life.  He was duty bound to report this likely attack, which was registering as the “highest” level of reliability, to his top commanders to recommend an instantaneous nuclear counter-strike.  “All I had to do was to reach for the phone, to raise the direct line (for a counter-strike)…but I couldn’t move.  I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan,” he said later.  Instead, Lt. Col. Petrov called the duty officer in the Soviet army’s headquarters and reported a system malfunction.”  If he was wrong, within minutes he would feel the shock wave of U.S. nuclear weapons impacting the Kremlin and hear an alert message on other impacts targeting his nation.  “Twenty-three minutes later, I realized that nothing had happened…It was such a relief,” His sweating, terrified colleagues gathered around him to proclaim him a hero.  Several days later, however, Petrov received an official reprimand for what happened that night – not for what he did, but for mistakes in the log book. “They were lucky it was me on shift that night,” was his understated comment.  This story remained unknown and unreported to the outside world until 1998 when his commanding officer Yury Votintsev revealed details of the incident in a memoir.  Comments:  This is yet another of the very numerous reasons why all nuclear weapons must be eliminated, the sooner the better. (Sources: Pavel Aksenov.   “Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World.”  BBC.com. Sept. 26, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24280831 and Colin Freeman.  “How Did One Grumpy Russian Halt Armageddon.”  The Telegraph. May 11, 2015. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/the-man-who-saved-the-world/nuclear-war-true-story/ both accessed Aug. 15, 2017.)

What kind of civilization have we developed when two mentally unstable national leaders, in an escalating confrontation with each other, threaten one another―and the world―with nuclear war?

That question arises as a potentially violent showdown emerges between Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Donald Trump of the United States.  In recent years, the North Korean government has produced about 10 nuclear weapons and has been making them increasingly operational through improvements in its missile technology.  The U.S. government first developed nuclear weapons in 1945, when it employed them to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and currently possesses 6,800 of them, mostly deployed on missiles, submarines, and bombers.

According to the North Korean government, its nuclear weapons are necessary to defend itself against the United States.  Similarity, the U.S. government argues that its nuclear weapons are necessary to defend itself against countries like North Korea.

Although, in recent decades, we have grown accustomed to this government rhetoric about the necessity to possess nuclear weapons as a deterrent, what is particularly chilling about the current confrontation is that Kim and Trump do not appear deterred at all.  Quite the contrary, they brazenly threaten nuclear war in an extremely provocative fashion.  Responding on August 8 to North Korean threats, Trump publicly warned that North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”  Later that day, North Korea’s state media announced that its government was considering a strategy of striking the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam with mid- to long-range nuclear missiles―a strategy that a spokesman for the Korean People’s Army said would be “put into practice” once Kim authorized it.

This kind of reckless and potentially suicidal behavior is reminiscent of the game of “Chicken,” which achieved notoriety in the 1950s.  In the film Rebel Without a Cause (1955), two rebellious, antisocial male teenagers (or juvenile delinquents, as they were known at the time) played the game before a crowd of onlookers by driving jalopies at top speed toward a cliff.  Whoever jumped out of the cars first was revealed as “chicken” (a coward).  A more popular variant of the game involved two teenagers driving their cars at high speed toward one another, with the first to swerve out of the way drawing the derisive label.  According to some accounts, young James Dean, a star of Rebel Without a Cause, actually died much this way.

With news of the game spreading, Bertrand Russell, the great mathematician and philosopher, suggested in 1959 that the two sides in the Cold War were engaged in an even crazier version:  nuclear “Chicken.”  He wrote:  “As played by irresponsible boys, this game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked.”  But the game became “incredibly dangerous” and “absurd” when it was played by government officials “who risk not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings.”  Russell warned that “the moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of `Chicken!’ from the other side.”  When that moment arrived, “the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.”

It was a fair enough warning, and only several years later, during the Cuban missile crisis, the game of nuclear “Chicken” played by Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy could have resulted in a disastrous nuclear war.  However, at the last minute, both men backed off―or, perhaps we should say, swerved to avoid a head-on collision―and the crisis was resolved peacefully through a secret compromise agreement.

In the current situation, there’s plenty of room for compromise between the U.S. and North Korean governments.  The Pyongyang regime has offered to negotiate and has shown particular interest in a peace treaty ending the Korean War of the 1950s and U.S. military exercises near its borders.  Above all, it seems anxious to avoid regime change by the United States.  The U.S. government, in turn, has long been anxious to halt the North Korean nuclear program and to defend South Korea against attack from the north.  Reasonable governments should be able to settle this dispute short of nuclear war.

But are the two governments headed by reasonable men?  Both Kim and Trump appear psychologically disturbed, erratic, and startlingly immature―much like the juvenile delinquents once associated with the game of “Chicken.”  Let us hope, though, that with enough public resistance and some residual sanity, they will back away from the brink and begin to resolve their differences peacefully.  That’s certainly possible.

Even if the current confrontation eases, though, we are left with a world in which some 15,000 nuclear weapons exist and with numerous people who, in the future, might not scruple about using them.  And so the fundamental problem continues:  As long as nuclear weapons exist, we teeter on the edge of catastrophe

Fortunately, this past July, in an historic development, the vast majority of the world’s nations voted at a UN conference to approve a treaty banning nuclear weapons.  Nations will begin the process of signing onto the treaty this September.  Although, sadly, all of the nuclear powers (including the United States and North Korea) oppose the treaty, it’s long past time for nuclear weapons to be prohibited and eliminated.  Until they are, government officials will remain free to play nuclear “Chicken” with their lives . . . and with ours.

August 1, 2016 – As part of a routine ongoing series of strategic deterrence exercises, a U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) mission called POLAR ROAR, in conjunction with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and NATO allies, began when five bombers from all three of the U.S. strategic bomber bases commenced a military exercise designed to test STRATCOM’s long-range, global-strike capability as three synchronized flight plans encompassed more than 55,000 miles. One B-52 bomber from the 2^nd Bomb Wing at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada flew with Danish, Swedish, and Canadian fighter aircraft to the North and Baltic Seas before returning to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana.  Two B-52s from the 5^th Bomb Wing, Minot AFB, North Dakota flew over the North Pole and mainland Alaska where they conducted intercept training with NORAD-assigned U.S. F-22 aircraft and an inert weapons drop at the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex (JPARC).  At the same time, two B-2 bombers from the 509^th Bomb Wing, Whiteman AFB, Missouri flew over the Pacific Ocean to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska where they practiced intercepts with NORAD-assigned U.S. F-15 aircraft and an inert weapons drop at JPARC.  Meanwhile Russia has stepped up similar nuclear war preparation exercises including a 2013 practice mission that allegedly targeted NATO bases in Sweden.  In 2015-16, Secretary-General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg charged that “…over the past three years, Russia has conducted at least 18 large-scale “snap” (no advanced notice) exercises, some of which have involved more than 100,000 troops…as part of its overall military buildup, the pace of Russia’s maneuvers and drills have reached levels unseen since the height of the Cold War.” Also, there are numerous press reports in 2016-2017 of sometimes intimidating U.S./NATO and Russian intercepts of opposing aircraft on the Asian and European borders of both sides.  Comments:  The odds of an accidental, unintentional, or unauthorized nuclear war are greater today than they have been since the Cold War, especially due to confrontations between aircraft on or near the borders of both nations and in conflict zones such as Syria or Ukraine.  While there have been valuable confidence-building and conflict-reducing agreements in the past like the June 1989 U.S.-U.S.S.R.  Agreement on the Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities, much more needs to be done today and in the near future to help prevent events that might heighten the chance of nuclear escalation.  Many policy experts, politicians, activists, and military officials have argued for no-fly zones around volatile regions like Syria, the Persian Gulf, and the Korean peninsula.  In addition, it is critical that there be a global agreement to wall off cyber capabilities from all military and civilian nuclear operations and early warning systems to prevent a cyber-caused nuclear crisis that could escalate to a nuclear World War III.  (Sources: U.S. Strategic Command Public Affairs.  “Strategic Bomber Force Showcases Allied Interoperability During POLAR ROAR.”  Aug. 3, 2016.  http://www.stratcom.mil/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/983671/strategic-bomber-force-showcases-allied-interoperability-during-polar-roar/ and Roland Oliphant.  “Russia ‘Simulated A Nuclear Strike’ Against Sweden, NATO Admits.”  The Telegraph. Feb. 4, 2016.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/12139943/Russia-simulated-a-nuclear-strike-against-Sweden-Nato-admits.htm both accessed July 17, 2017.)

August 3, 1940 – Ramon Antonio Gerardo Estevez, a.k.a. Martin Sheen, a highly acclaimed, award-winning actor in films, television, and on the stage, and a life-long peace, justice, and anti-nuclear activist, was born on this date in Dayton, Ohio, a product of an Irish immigrant mother and Spanish father.  Raised as a Catholic, he once played the role of Peter Maurin, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement after he experienced a real-life meeting with the renowned activist Dorothy Day.  Arrested over 60 times for participating in a wide variety of nonviolent actions including protests against the Iraq War, he was also detained after participating in an April 1, 2007 anti-nuclear testing protest, along with 38 others, at the Nevada Test Site.  “Acting is what I do for a living, activism is what I do to stay alive,” he once remarked.  In the spring of 1989, he was named honorary mayor of Malibu, California and one of his first decrees was a proclamation declaring the area a nuclear-weapons-free-zone.  Awarded a slew of honorary degrees such as the Degree of Doctor of Letters from Marquette University in 2003, he served as one of two U.S. representatives at the first International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Conference in Oslo, Norway in 2013, which issued a final declaration on the elimination of these deadly doomsday machines.  He played a judge in the documentary “In the King of Prussia: The Trial of the Ploughshare 8,” a film about the trial of Jesuit priest Father Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip, and six other activists, who on September 9, 1980 broke into a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania and damaged two Mark 12-A nuclear warhead nose cones and poured blood on warhead documents and order forms.  Martin Sheen’s sympathetic support of this action was seen in this quote, “Until we begin to fill the jails with protest, our governments will continue to fill the silos with weapons.”  More recently, he proclaimed, “We are the generation that brought the bomb in, we have got to be the generation that should take it out.”  (Sources: David Kupfer. “Martin Sheen Interview.”  The Progressive. July 1, 2003.  http://progressive.org/magazine/martin-sheen-interview/#sthash.x0yvs6a7.dpuf and other alternative media sources.)

August 6, 1985 – Exactly forty years after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan killing or injuring over 100,000 people, the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone (SPNFZ) Treaty, also known as The Treaty of Raratonga, was signed at that location in the Cook Islands.  The Treaty bans the production, acquisition, possession, testing, or control of nuclear explosive devices within the zone and it outlaws the provision of fissile material or related equipment to states or territories within the zone unless they are under NPT and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regulations.  The agreement currently has 13 full members: Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.  France and the U.K. have ratified all three treaty protocols and Russia and China have only ratified Protocols II and III.  While the United States has signed all three protocols (I – requiring states with territories in the region to respect the treaty; II – not to threaten nuclear weapons use against parties to the treaty; and III – not to carry out nuclear tests within the zone), it has not ratified any of the three treaty protocols, under the rubric that it does not accept any limitation on the right of passage of its nuclear vessels and aircraft in the region.  Unfortunately, one can envision that since the U.S. regularly conducts ICBM testing with its Minuteman III test launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California to impact the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, located in the Central Pacific region, U.S. Strategic Command does not want to set a precedent by prohibiting possible future testing of nuclear launch platforms in the adjoining South Pacific region covered by the Treaty of Raratonga.  Nevertheless, on May 3, 2011, President Barack Obama submitted the protocols of this treaty to the U.S. Senate for advice and consent to ratification and less than a year later, on Feb. 15, 2012, the 44^th President urged the U.S. Senate to ratify the treaty.  Comments:  Along with the Feb.1967 Treaty of Tlatelolco creating a Latin American nuclear-weapons-free-zone (NWFZ), the Dec.1995 Bangkok Treaty mandating a Southeast Asian NWFZ, the April 1996 Pelindaba Treaty creating an African NWFZ, and hundreds of municipal NWFZs established in a number of global cities including several in the United States, the Treaty of Raratonga and other such agreements reflect a growing global campaign to significantly reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons.  It is imperative that all U.N. members, especially the nine nuclear weapon states, ratify these NWFZs and other critical nuclear arms control agreements including the newly negotiated July 2017 U.N. nuclear weapons ban.  Therefore, the 45^th President of the United States should lead the way in persuading the U.S. Senate to ratify these agreements as well as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and initiate renewed negotiations for a treaty extending the New START Treaty, which expires in February of 2021. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, p. 65 and The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies for the Nuclear Threat Initiative.  “South Pacific Nuclear-Free-Zone (SPNFZ):  Treaty of Raratonga.”  Monterey, California, June 30, 2017. http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/south-pacific-nuclear-free-zone-spnfz-treaty-raratonga/ accessed July 17, 2017.)

August 12, 2000 – K-141 Kursk, a 14,000 ton, 505-foot long Russian Oscar II class nuclear-powered submarine, the world’s largest class of cruise missile launching undersea vessels, sank in the Barents Sea off Russia’s northwest coast when a leak of hydrogen peroxide in the forward torpedo room led to the detonation of a conventional torpedo warhead, which in turn triggered the explosion of half a dozen or more other such warheads with a total yield of about 3-7 tons of TNT.  These explosions, which were large enough to register on seismographs across Northern Europe, killed most of the crew of 118 sailors although all hands lost their lives when 23 survivors were not rescued in time to prevent their demise due to a flash fire or lack of oxygen.  Comments: This deadly accident was just one example of dozens or even hundreds of accidents involving submarines, surface ships, and aircraft involving the loss of nuclear propulsion units and/or nuclear weapons.  Some of these nuclear reactors and warheads lost at sea are leaking highly radioactive toxins affecting not only the flora and fauna of the deep, but the health and well-being of millions of people.  (Sources:  William Arkin and Joshua Handler.  “Neptune Papers II:  Naval Nuclear Accidents at Sea.”  Greenpeace International, 1990 and Michael Wines.  “None of Us Can Get Out, Kursk Sailor Wrote,” New York Times. Oct. 27, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/27/world/none-of-us-can-get-out-kursk-sailor-wrote.html accessed July 17, 2017.)

August 21, 1945 – In the early days of the Nuclear Age before automated technologies and heavy shielding made nuclear weapons assembly procedures significantly safer, a number of individuals in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union paid the ultimate price for errors in judgement or merely a slip of the hand and as a result suffered excruciatingly painful injuries and death due to mere seconds of exposure to deadly radioactive materials.  On this date, Haroutune “Harry” K. Daghlian, Jr. working at the “Omega site” section of the Area 2 laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico experienced such an accident.  While manipulating a 6.2 kilogram plutonium bomb core, he inadvertently exposed the core causing a “neutron criticality accident” or “blue flash.”  He received a very heavy radioactive dose of 20,000-40,000 rems to one hand and 5,000-15,000 rems to the other.  After 25 days of agonizing pain and suffering, extreme nausea, and weight loss, he slipped into a coma and perished in the early morning hours of Sept. 15, 1945.  Daghlian is believed to be the first person to die accidentally of acute radioactive poisoning since the Nuclear Age began.  Comments:  Seventy-plus years of nuclear accidents, tests, and experiments have injured or killed countless thousands of individuals, but our species has continued to rely on good fortune to prevent an unforeseen catastrophic nuclear war which could trigger the deaths of millions or even billions of people (through a Nuclear Winter event after a full-scale nuclear exchange) and send humanity back into the Dark Ages or worse, result in the termination of our species.  We can’t rely forever on luck to save the human race.  We must affirmatively act now to drastically reduce and eventually eliminate these doomsday weapons before it is too late.  (Source: James Mahaffey.  “Atomic Accidents.”  New York:  Pegasus Books, 2014, pp. 56-61.)

August 27, 1958 – The first of three very-high altitude clandestine nuclear tests were carried out on this date by the Pentagon in the South Atlantic Ocean about 1,100 miles southwest of Capetown, South Africa.  The Argus I test, like Argus II on Aug. 30 and Argus III on Sept. 6, involved the launch of a low-yield, 1-2 kiloton warhead, on a modified X-17 three-stage ballistic missile fired from the U.S.S. Norton Sound to the height of 300 miles altitude where the resulting nuclear blast was designed to provide information on the trapping of electrically-charged particles in the Earth’s magnetic field in order to assess how very-high altitude nuclear detonations might interfere with communications equipment and ballistic missile performance.  Three other high-altitude nuclear tests were conducted earlier in the month of August by the U.S. in the Pacific Ocean near Enewetak and Johnston Island as part of the Operation Hardtack I series of 35 nuclear explosions.  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 veterans who participated in observing these 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 today due to nuclear testing.  (Source:  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, pp. 157-158.)

July 1, 1998 – A New York Times article by Matthew L. Wald, “U.S. Nuclear Arms Costs Put At $5.48 Trillion,” published on this date summarized the conclusions of a new book by nuclear analyst Stephen Schwartz, who then worked as the director of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Cost Study Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.  The book “Atomic Audit,” itemized in great detail the cost to U.S. taxpayers in 1996 dollars, for the period from 1940-96, of the research, development, storage, upkeep, maintenance, deployment, and dismantling of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons,. including the partial cleanup of huge volumes of the resulting radioactive and toxic wastes generated in this expensive, hazardous, and dangerous U.S. enterprise in the first six decades of the nuclear arms race.  Comments:  Trillions more have been spent and may be spent in future decades by the nine nuclear weapons states to accomplish what mainstream advocates of deterrence claim is war prevention by threatening to murder hundreds of millions of denizens of this Pale Blue Dot.  However, an increasing number of nuclear strategists, global politicians, scientists, soldiers, philosophers, medical professionals, and ordinary citizens are questioning the saneness of this irrational mindset.  The risks of failure of deterrence are far too great to rely on this flawed equation indefinitely.  The extinction of the human species or at least global civilization is likely unless we drastically reduce nuclear armaments with the goal to eliminate these doomsday weapons by 2025.  In doing so, we not only end the horrendous waste of our precious global wealth and treasure, but make great strides in preserving our species and redirecting military expenditures to mitigate and reduce global warming, eliminate poverty, educate our youth, and cure disease and ignorance.

July 8-9, 2016 – At the NATO Summit in Warsaw, Poland, President Barack Obama expressed an “unwavering commitment to the defense of Europe.”  He also chided his European allies for not spending a higher percentage of GDP (two percent or more) on military defenses against Russia.  The 44^th President also encouraged NATO member states to purchase U.S. arms and trade only with U.S. dollar allies and not Russia.  In response, former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev warned, “The world has never been closer to nuclear war than it is at present.”  German politicians including Social Democrats and Christian Democrats accused NATO of “war mongering.”  Even more conservative voices such as former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry declared that, “NATO is threatening and trying to provoke nuclear war in Europe by putting bombers and nuclear missiles on the border with Russia.”  Comments:  Except for a plethora of terrifying comments about accelerating the nuclear arms race and promoting the proliferation of nuclear weapons to allies like Japan and South Korea, President Trump’s relations with Russia (including possibly illegal pre-election collusion with Russian officials to influence U.S. election results) could be interpreted by some as less aggressive than the policies of his predecessor.  However, that assessment is highly debatable for it seems that, taken as a whole, the 45^th President’s first 20 weeks in office have evidenced a clearly higher risk of expanding the failed Global War on Terrorism as well as accelerating the risk of nuclear Armageddon. (Source:  Jessica Desvarieux Interview with Professor Michael Hudson. “U.S.-NATO Border Confrontation with Russia Risks Nuclear War and Loss of European Partners.”  The Real News Network.  July 17, 2016 http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&ltemid=74&jumival=16755 accessed June 19, 2017.)

July 15, 1962 – The nonviolent, peace organization, Women Strike for Peace, founded in 1961 by lawyer, social activist, and future Congressional representative (20^th District of New York, 1973-77) Bella Abzug (1920-1998) and illustrator of children’s books Dagmar Wilson (1916-2011), conducted a two-hour peace march to Camp Mercury, New York to protest nuclear testing.  Eight months prior to this action, on November 1, 1961, the organization helped guide another nuclear protest that counted 50,000 women participating in sixty global cities (including a crowd of 1,500 at the Washington Monument) under the slogan “End the Arms Race, Not the Human Race.”  Organizers of the march received support letters from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and the wife of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.  Later, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant and President Kennedy acknowledged that the group was a factor in the adoption of the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  Representatives of Women Strike for Peace were among the first Americans to oppose the Vietnam War.  On June 12, 1982, they helped organize one million people who marched in Central Park to call for an end to the nuclear arms race.  In 1991, they protested the first Persian Gulf War.  Comments:  Many women, and their spouses, friends, family members, supporters, and colleagues are continuing the tradition of antiwar and antinuclear protests as evidenced by last month’s Women’s March to Ban the Bomb held in downtown Manhattan on June 17, 2017.  (Sources:  Amy Swerdlow.  “Women Strike for Peace:  Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s.” University of Chicago Press, 1993 and Elaine Woo.  “Dagmar Wilson Dies at 94; Organizer of Women’s Disarmament Protesters.”  Los Angeles Times.  Jan. 30, 2011 http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-dagmar-wilson-20110130-story.html  accessed June 16, 2017.)

July 16, 1945 – In the first-ever test of what Manhattan Project scientists referred to as the “Gadget”, a fission bomb designed as a plutonium implosion device, was detonated before dawn at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, 230 miles south of the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico in a remote area of the Jornada Desert.  The code name of the test, Trinity, was created by the Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer – it was a reference to a poem by John Donne.  President Truman’s personal journal of July 25 recorded that, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world…An experiment in the New Mexico desert…caused the complete disintegration of a steel tower 60 feet high, created a crater six feet deep and 1,200 feet in diameter, knocked down a steel tower half a mile away and knocked down men 10,000 yards away.  The explosion was visible for more than 200 miles and audible for 40 miles and more.”  Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson’s report to the president noted that, “I estimate that the energy generated to be in excess of the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT…there were tremendous blast effects…there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds.  This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over 10,000 feet.”   Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, an eyewitness to the blast, described his experience of a, “gigantic ball of fire rising rapidly from the earth…The grand, indeed almost cataclysmic proportion of the explosion produced a kind of solemnity in everyone’s behavior immediately afterwards.  There was a restrained applause, but more a hushed murmuring bordering on reverence in manner as the event was commented upon…”  The “Gadget,” which exploded with an estimated force of 15-20 kilotons, slightly more than the Hiroshima bomb, was a rehearsal for the August 6-9 atomic bombings of two Japanese cities and it represented the first of 1,030 nuclear tests conducted by the United States and one of over 2,000 such tests conducted by the nine Nuclear Weapons Club members in the last 72 years.   Before the blast, a wager was made by Manhattan Project scientist Enrico Fermi that the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and devastate New Mexico and possibly the whole of the planet’s biosphere.  Thankfully, Fermi lost his wager.  But that vision of deadly apocalypse came true for hundreds of thousands of people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9^th who were vaporized, burned to death, blown into objects and buildings at horrific speed, lacerated, mutilated, and irradiated.  They suffered and some continue to suffer today from the unconscionable use of fission weapons on civilian noncombatants.  Comments:  While many U.S. military and scientific observers celebrated the beginning of the Nuclear Age, others realized that this event may have represented the beginning of the end of the human species.  (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.  “Arms Control Chronology.”  Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 5, 24. and Gar Alperovitz.  “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of An American Myth.”  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, pp. 250-251 and “Trinity Test – 1945.” Atomic Heritage Foundation.  June 18, 2014.  http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/Trinity-Test-1945 accessed June 20, 2017.)

July 25, 1980 – Despite Jimmy Carter’s pre-election and inauguration rhetoric about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons, the 39^th President was convinced by Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and his hawkish National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski to sign Presidential Directive (PD) – 59 on this date.  Referred to as “The Countervailing Strategy,” this directive placed renewed emphasis on counterforce “limited” nuclear war targeting (attacking military formations and defenses, particularly nuclear weapons sites rather than countervalue targets, i.e., populated areas) against Soviet-led Warsaw Pact military forces.  It also reinforced the ability to launch U.S. nuclear weapons on warning rather than waiting until Soviet nuclear warheads impacted U.S. military assets or population centers.  The new directive supposedly increased the flexibility and survivability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent by pushing the development of the mobile MX missile (later ironically renamed the “Peacekeeper”), the Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile (which was already being sent to NATO forces in Europe), the B-2 bomber, the Trident submarine, and the Tomahawk cruise missile for possible first use “against a broad spectrum of targets,” during a theoretical, protracted nuclear war that somehow avoided escalation to an all-out conflict.  Comments:  PD-59, when combined with the more extreme anti-Soviet rhetoric and much larger military buildup of the next administration, that of President Ronald Reagan, led to the second most dangerous period of Cold War tensions and near-nuclear war in human history (next to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962) in the early to mid-1980s.  Today, unfortunately, we may be living in another similar high-risk period as evidenced by a commitment by all nine nuclear weapon states to modernize and upgrade their nuclear arsenals over the next thirty years or so.  Humanity has been fortunate to avoid a thermonuclear doomsday before, but our luck won’t hold out forever.  That is why it is imperative that nuclear weapons be drastically reduced in the short-term and eliminated entirely in the next decade or so.

July 29, 1993 – In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile materials in the last 25 years, especially since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, local police arrested several suspects in Andreeva Guba, Russia on this date for the attempted transfer of 1,800 grams of highly enriched uranium to a group of buyers who were in actuality undercover policemen.  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.” Another area of concern is the fact that in 2015-16, President Putin began cutting back his nation’s overall nuclear security cooperation with Washington as part of the long-standing Nunn-Lugar nuclear reduction partnership program, also known as the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act, on the grounds that it no longer needed U.S. financial or technical assistance to safeguard its fissile material stockpile.  However, in June 2015, Kirill Komarov, the first deputy director of Rosatom, the state-owned corporation that runs Russia’s nuclear energy and weapons plants, countered that, “You know very well that a very operational system of controlling nuclear materials has been established worldwide, none of them are out of control.  Their movements are always strictly controlled.”  Nevertheless, the Center for Public Integrity’s 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 to prevent the use of fissile materials in dirty bombs or primitive small-yield fission weapons whether the materials diverted come from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapon 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.)

June 1, 1952 – “George,” the seventh of eight atmospheric nuclear test blasts in a series conducted from April 1 to June 5, 1952 designated Operation TUMBLER-SNAPPER took place at the Nevada Test Site under the auspices of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The nuclear device exploded on top of a 300-foot high tower yielded a blast of approximately 15 kilotons – equivalent roughly to the August 6, 1945 Hiroshima atomic bomb.  Phase One, the TUMBLER blasts provided U.S. nuclear weapons makers with a more comprehensive description of nuclear blast phenomena and provided vital information about the dust “sponge” effects and the relationship of dust to radiation.  The purpose of the Phase Two SNAPPER tests, which included “George,” was to test potential warhead designs for inclusion in the nuclear stockpile and to study techniques to be used in future nuclear test series.  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 veterans (over 10,000 U.S. soldiers participated in this test series).  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. (Source:  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, pp. 152-153.)

June 8, 2016 – An article by Edward Kee, the CEO of the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group, in the online World Nuclear News, “Carbon Pricing Not Enough to Help Nuclear Power,” was published on this date.  The article is written from the nuclear industrial complex perspective that mistakenly believes that nuclear energy is “zero carbon electricity,” that there are no significant global warming impacts from nuclear power generation.  This is technically true during the thirty years or longer that a nuclear plant is operating, but patently wrong when we assess the huge carbon signature of nuclear power plants during their entire life cycle.  Significant greenhouse emissions are the result of mining, transporting, processing, and mitigating harmful environmental impacts before uranium fuel is loaded into a reactor.  Then there are the emissions resulting from the construction and maintenance of large nuclear complexes including waste removal, sequestration, and very long term storage (potentially requiring thousands or even tens of thousands of years), not to mention decommissioning, decontaminating, and restoring a nuclear site to the public commons.  The nuclear industrial complex also fails to factor into the equation the long-term environmental and public health costs as well as the terrorist attack or blackmail threat and the dangerous risk of nuclear proliferation when considering the creation, operation, and decommissioning of a nuclear power plant.  CEO Kee argues that a tax on carbon is not likely to provide long-term revenue to support existing or new nuclear power plants and argues that other subsidies or investments are needed to “drive investments in new nuclear power plants.”  A May 2, 2017 article in the same publication points out that even the drill-drill-drill-forget about climate change-oriented American Petroleum Institute is lobbying in some states to “reject legislation that would subsidize nuclear power.”  Comments:  It is clear that both the nuclear and fossil fuel industries have focused on optimizing huge profits in current and future dirty energy generation projects rather than working toward reversing climate change or preventing inevitable nuclear power plant accidents and meltdowns like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.  Decades of judicial, legislative, and executive decisions, on all levels, have unfortunately reinforced the corporate mindset that environmental damage and public health impacts are mere externalities that only governments or charities are charged with mitigating and resolving.  This has to change and change quickly if our species is to survive and prosper on this fragile Pale Blue Dot.  The nuclear threat and the climate change crisis must be addressed in a New Paradigm that over the next decade or so accelerates the phase-out of these catastrophically harmful energy extraction technologies and substitutes community-based and large-scale government-subsidized green renewables on a global scale even at the risk of running large spending deficits.  Global corporate, military, and profit-making entities should be forced to convert to greener alternatives before it is too late. (Sources: Edward Kee. “Carbon Pricing Not Enough to Help Nuclear Power.” World Nuclear News. June 8, 2016      http:/www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Carbon-pricing-not-enough-to-help-nuclear-power-10061601.html and “Gloves Are Off in Fossil Fuel Fight Against Nuclear.”  World Nuclear News. May 2, 2017 http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossil-fuel-fight-against-nuclear-0205171.html both accessed May 15, 2017.)

June 15, 2017 – After decades of pressure by activists, citizens, politicians, religious authorities, and scientists and in accordance with 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) and adopted by 113 nations on December 23, 2016, an international conference, with the participation and contributions of not only government leaders but also international organizations and civil society representatives, will meet at U.N. Headquarters in New York City from this date through July 7^th to negotiate “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.”  This conference will build on earlier negotiations that took place March 27-31 of this year which saw more than 2,000 scientists, including many Americans, sign an open letter endorsing these U.N. talks.  Also in that same month, Pope Francis expressed support for this global effort to eliminate nuclear arsenals. In addition, over the last few decades countless individuals and organizations in wide-ranging fields including academia, government, the military, and the nonprofit world have supported the effort.  One of many examples is the International Red Cross which stated at the third humanitarian conference on the impact of nuclear conflict in 2014, “Nuclear weapons can only bring us a catastrophic and irreversible scenario that no one wishes and to which no one can respond in any meaningful way.”  The nuclear weapons ban is an initiative to prohibit the use, possession, development, testing, deployment, and transfer of nuclear weapons under international law just as other weapons of mass destruction have been banned by treaty such as biological and chemical weapons as well as other unconscionable weapons such as anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions.  Nine nations possess an estimated 14,900 nuclear weapons led by Russia with 7,000 and the United States with 6,800.  Unfortunately none of these nine nation-states are participating in this conference.  However, since this potential treaty is not subject to approval by the U.N. Security Council, no veto by any or all of the five nuclear-armed permanent members of this council can block the agreement.  The legal construct and rationale for such a nuclear ban rests on these two concrete foundations:  First, as a consequence of their destructive power and radioactive fallout, nuclear weapons inherently violate several articles of the Geneva Conventions meant to protect the victims of international conflicts.  Second, many non-nuclear countries and disarmament proponents believe that nations possessing nuclear weapons have been unwilling to pursue good faith disarmament negotiations mandated by Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).  Comments:  Success in these negotiations could prove the beginning of the end of the nuclear threat.  Failure is clearly not an option. (Sources:  International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “Nuclear Ban Treaty Negotiations.” March 2017 http://www.icanw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ican-2017.pdf and The Nuclear Threat Initiative. “Proposed Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.” http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/proposal-nuclear-weapons-ban-treaty/ both accessed May 15, 2017.)

June 16, 1976 – After decades of leaked information revealed numerous U.S. nuclear weapons accidents, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) begrudgingly issued a press release on this date quoting Lieutenant General William Young Smith, an assistant to the Chairman of the JCS, which stated that, “There has been a total of 33 accidents involving nuclear weapons throughout the period that the U.S. has had these weapons although none has resulted in a nuclear detonation.”  Comments:  Over the last forty years, a plethora of Freedom of Information Act requests by journalists, anti-nuclear activists, and nonprofit organizations, along with more leaks by retired U.S. military personnel, have revealed dozens of other nuclear accidents until the total of Broken Arrows and related nuclear incidents now number in the hundreds.  And that total is just for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  Journalistic accounts and other authorized and unauthorized releases of information about military nuclear accidents in the other eight nations that possess nuclear weapons are also quite numerous.  Accidents have happened, are happening and will continue to happen and relying on luck to avoid a nuclear catastrophe has its limits.  This represents an additional reason why global nuclear arsenals should be drastically reduced in the short-term and eliminated completely by 2025. (Sources:  Louis Rene Beres. “Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics.” Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1980 and Eric Schlosser.  “Command and Control:  Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.” New York:  Penguin Press, 2013.)

June 20, 1963 – Learning the shockingly frightening lessons of near-nuclear war after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, one of which was how antiquated the high-level U.S.-Soviet communication links were (during the standoff, official diplomatic messages between Washington and Moscow typically took six or more hours to deliver), the U.S. and Soviet Union negotiated, signed, and entered into force a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in Geneva to establish a direct communications link or “hot line” between the two governments for use in the event of crisis.  The “Hot Line Agreement” was updated in 1971, again in 1984, and made into a modern secure computer link in 2008 in which messages are exchanged by email.  Similar hot lines have been set up between the U.S. and China (1998), India and Pakistan (2004), South Korea and China (2008), and China and India (2010).  Comments:  It is hoped that increased communication in times of crisis will help circumvent genocidal conflicts and prevent unauthorized, accidental, or unintentional nuclear war.  An additional essential step for lessening the odds of a nuclear Armageddon is the de-alerting of U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, as well as the nuclear forces of other nations.  The 45^th President of the U.S. ought to publicly announce the de-alerting on one squadron of land-based ICBMs and encourage Russia to reciprocate and de-alert more squadrons in concert with the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Command.  After several days or a week or so, both nations’ entire hair-trigger arsenals will be removed from alert status, giving each side at least 72 hours to think about it before being able to launch World War III.  This is just one of several steps (including the President recommending that the Senate ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty [CTBT]) necessary to reduce the global risk of nuclear war. (Sources:  Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. “Arms Control Chronology.” Washington, DC:  Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 28-29 and “Memorandum of Understanding Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Regarding the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link.” U.S. Department of State.  http://www.state.gov/isn/4785.htm and “Hot Line Agreements.”  Arms Control Association. https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Hotlines both accessed May 15, 2017.)

June 25, 1950 – The Korean War began when a force of approximately 75,000 soldiers of the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea, invaded the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea, South Korea, by crossing the 38^th Parallel.  By July, soldiers sent from the U.S. occupation force in Japan entered the war on behalf of South Korea.  Other Western allies joined the fighting as part of a U.N. military force.  Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) warned the U.N. forces, commanded by World War II hero U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, not to approach China’s border with North Korea but an allied counteroffensive did reach that border at the Yalu River, which triggered a massive attack by Chinese forces invading southward.  After direct Chinese involvement, General MacArthur appealed to President Harry Truman to use nuclear weapons against China but Truman refused and fired MacArthur.  Later in the war, after the election of President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, nuclear threats by the newly sworn-in president were seen by some experts as one of the major reasons why the North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets relented on several sticking points holding up the armistice agreement.  It should be noted that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff pre-planned the deployment of nuclear weapons for use against China if it sent troops or bombers into Korea or against the Soviet Union if they came to the aid of the North Koreans, although America’s European allies opposed such escalation fearing that the Soviets would retaliate by invading Western Europe.  The fighting lasted over three years until the July 27, 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement was signed by both sides.  Five million people died in the conflict, over half of which were civilians.  Almost 40,000 Americans were killed and more than 100,000 wounded.  Comments:  Today, the Korean War is technically still being fought as the armistice does not represent a permanent peace treaty ending the conflict.  Negotiating such a treaty should be one of the top priorities of the 45^th President and 115^th Congress but this isn’t even considered a talking point by mainstream news media, the Pentagon, and State Department. The growing risk of a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula makes ending the war an imperative priority not only for the U.S. and both Koreas but also for the global community of nations.  (Sources:  “Korean War.”  History.com. http://www.history.com/topics/korean-war, “Korean War 1950-53.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Korean-War, and David W. Brown.  “10 Facts About the Korean War.” MentalFloss.com. http://mentalfloss.com/article/4972/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-korean-war all accessed on May 15, 2017.)

June 29, 1918 – One of the founders of the nongovernmental, nonprofit organization the Center for Defense Information, Admiral Gene Robert La Rocque (pronounced la-ROCK), was born on this date in Kankakee, Illinois.  After attending the University of Illinois, he joined the U.S. Navy, survived the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and fought in over a dozen battles in the Pacific winning the Bronze Star and many other citations during his distinguished 32-year naval career which included serving as one of the top strategic planners for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  In the early 1950s, La Rocque refused to sign a loyalty oath during the height of McCarthyism. When he was teaching at the Naval War College, he insisted that his students read not only the American Constitution but also The Communist Manifesto.  After a 1968 visit to Vietnam, he filed a report critical of the U.S. mission in Indochina.  In a 1986 profile in The New Yorker, he explained that, “Fundamentally, I couldn’t find anyone to tell me why the United States was in Vietnam and what it was we were trying to accomplish.”  Passed over for promotion because of rocking the boat, he retired and joined other like-minded retired military officers like Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr. (1923-2003) and navy captain Arthur D. Berliss, Jr. (1914-2010) in establishing the Center for Defense Information (CDI), an arm of the Fund for Peace in April of 1972.  CDI’s early thrust was to avert a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, end the Vietnam War, and monitor-critique the military-industrial-congressional complex.  Over the three-plus decades of the organization’s existence, until it operated under the umbrella of Dr. Bruce Blair’s World Security Institute and then merged with the Project on Government Oversight in 2012, its mission statement expanded accordingly, “The Center for Defense Information believes that strong social, economic, political, and military components and a healthy environment contribute equally to the nation’s security.  CDI opposes excessive expenditures for weapons and policies that increase the dangers of war.”  During the Cold War, Admiral La Rocque and his senior aides, CDI’s staff of a few dozen academics, retired soldiers, and former Congressional aides, joined by tens of thousands of supporters, embraced strong opposition to the threat of nuclear annihilation, opposed excessive global deployment of U.S. forces, and advocated the dissolution of not only the Soviet Warsaw Pact but the western NATO Alliance as well.  He told The New Yorker, “There are unfortunately some in the United States who believe that the Soviets are the enemy that we must defeat by war.  I think the enemy is nuclear war.”  His intelligent, well-reasoned rhetoric was at odds with mainstream military and political views that such a war could be won.  “If we are to have a nuclear war, we can’t win it.  Can we survive it?  I don’t know.  Nobody knows.  That’s the tragedy of it – nobody knows.  Anybody that tells you that this many people are going to be killed and this many are going to survive doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”  Admiral La Rocque passed away at the age of 98 on October 31, 2016.  (Sources:  Miles D. Wolpin. “Alternative Security and Military Dissent.”  San Francisco: Austin & Winfield Publishers, 1994, pp. 130-145 and Anita Gates.  “Gene La Rocque, Decorated Veteran Who Condemned Waste of War, Dies at 98.”  New York Times. November 4, 2016.  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/gene-la-rocque-decorated-veteran-who-condemned-waste-of-war-dies-at-98.html?_r=0 accessed May 16, 2017.)