Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: air force

  • The Indoctrination of Missile Launch Officers

    David KriegerThe US Air Force has a history of indoctrinating its missile launch officers to assure that these officers will have no moral qualms about following orders to use weapons of mass annihilation.  In a PowerPoint presentation used in the training, the Air Force makes absurd arguments for the morality of war and the use of nuclear weapons.  It includes numerous quotations from both the Old and New Testaments to make the case for the morality of war.  For example, “Jesus Christ is the mighty warrior.” (Revelation 19:11)

    The Air Force training acknowledges the devastation caused at Hiroshima and then raises questions for the young officers to contemplate, in seeking to assure that they are not hindered in their assignment to launch nuclear weapons if ordered to do so.  Among the questions are those below with my own response to each of them in italics.

    Can you imagine a set of circumstances that would warrant a nuclear launch from the U.S., knowing it would kill thousands of noncombatants?

    No, I can’t imagine such a circumstance, and with nuclear weapons, the number of civilians killed could reach far beyond thousands into the millions.

    Can we exercise enough faith in our decision makers, political and military, to follow through with the orders that are given to us?

    No, I can’t exercise such faith in our decision makers.  I know, for example, that in my lifetime, US leaders have not always been honest and have led us into aggressive and illegal wars on false grounds.

    Can we train physically, emotionally, and spiritually for a job we hope we never have to do?

    Why not put our efforts where our hopes and our consciences are instead of training for a job that would cause untold death and suffering?

    To accomplish deterrence, we must have the capability and the will to launch nuclear weapons.  Do we have the will now?  What about fifty years from now?

    Deterrence has many flaws.  The capability and the will to launch nuclear weapons are not sufficient to assure that nuclear deterrence will be effective.  It requires, for example, rationality and clear communications.  The will required is the will to massively slaughter innocent people.  Nuclear weapons are immoral instruments and nuclear deterrence is an immoral doctrine that could result in mass annihilation.  We profess to have the will to use nuclear weapons now, and I can only respond by continuing to work to assure that we will have moved beyond nuclear weapons and the theory of deterrence long before fifty years have passed.

    Bonus question: Are we morally safer in other career fields, leaving the key turning to someone else?

    Bonus answer: We are morally safer working to eliminate all nuclear weapons than to maintain them, assuring that no one has either the capacity or the moral indoctrination to launch these weapons of mass annihilation.

    To bolster its argument for the morality of using nuclear weapons, the Air Force training quotes former Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun: “We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.”  It is a fine touch to turn to a former Nazi scientist for moral standards.

    Captain Charles Nicholls, Electronic Warfare Officer of the 328th Bombardment Squadron, is quoted in the PowerPoint as stating: “Each of us in the strategic nuclear deterrence force must establish a moral foundation for our service.  Our will to unhesitatingly fulfill our duty will strengthen deterrence, the morally best choice of action to assure peace and freedom.”  He calls, in essence, for a moral foundation to unhesitatingly choose the morality of massive nuclear annihilation.

    The PowerPoint presentation also includes a quote from General Omar Bradley: “Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.  We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.  We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”  The Air Force would do well to reflect upon General Bradley’s statement.

    The Air Force seems to have been comfortable with attempting to demonstrate its nuclear prowess in combination with its ethical infancy.  It has just announced, however, that it has taken this PowerPoint out of its curriculum “to have a good hard look at it and make sure it reflected views of modern society.”  It would be a significant step forward if it were to find that society’s views, long after the end of the Cold War, reflected the morality of a desire to urgently achieve the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

  • Air Force Cites New Testament, Ex-Nazi, to Train Officers on Ethics of Launching Nuclear Weapons

    This article was originally published by Truthout.


    The United States Air Force has been training young missile officers about the morals and ethics of launching nuclear weapons by citing passages from the New Testament and commentary from a former member of the Nazi Party, according to newly released documents.


    The mandatory Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare session, which includes a discussion on St. Augustine’s “Christian Just War Theory,” is led by Air Force chaplains and takes place during a missile officer’s first week in training at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.


    St. Augustine’s “Qualifications for Just War,” according to the way it is cited in a 43-page PowerPoint presentation, are: “to avenge or to avert evil; to protect the innocent and restore moral social order (just cause)” and “to restore moral order; not expand power, not for pride or revenge (just intent).”


    The Air Force documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and provided to Truthout by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), a civil rights organization. MRFF President Mikey Weinstein said more than 30 Air Force officers, a majority of whom describe themselves as practicing Protestants and Roman Catholics, have contacted his group over the past week in hopes of enlisting him to work with the Air Force to have the Christian-themed teachings removed from the nuclear weapons ethics training session. [Full disclosure: Weinstein is a member of Truthout’s Board of Advisers.]


    Included with the PowerPoint presentation are more than 500 pages of other documents pertaining to a missile officer’s first week of training, which takes place before they are sent to one of three Air Force bases to guard the country’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) arsenal and, if called upon to do so by the president, launch their nuclear-armed Minuteman IIIs.


    One of the most disturbing slides quotes Wernher Von Braun, a former member of the Nazi Party and SS officer. Von Braun is not being cited in the PowerPoint as an authority on a liquid hydrogen turbopumps or a launch vehicle’s pogo oscillations, rather he’s specifically being referenced as a moral authority, which is remarkable considering that the Nazi scientist used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, captured French anti-Nazi partisans and civilians, and others, to help build the V-2, a weapon responsible for the death of thousands of British civilians.


    “We knew that we had created a new means of warfare and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision [emphasis in document] more than anything else,” Von Braun said upon surrendering to American forces in May 1945. “We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.” [emphasis in document]


    Von Braun was part of a top-secret military program known as “Operation Paperclip,” which recruited Nazi scientists after World War II who “were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for [Adolf] Hitler’s Third Reich, [Nazi Party] and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas,” according to the Operation Paperclip web site.


    Von Braun and about 500 or so other Nazi scientists who were part of the classified program worked on guided missile and ballistic missile technology at military installations in New Mexico, Alabama and Texas.


    Ethical Questions and The Bible


    The Air Force has been mired in numerous religious scandals over the past decade and has been sued for allowing widespread proselytization at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It has been citing Christian teachings in its missile officer training materials since at least 2001.


    One Air Force officer currently on active duty, who spoke to Truthout on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media, said he was trained as a missile officer in 2001 and vividly recalls how the chaplain leading the training session on the ethics of launching nuclear weapons said, “the American Catholic Church and their leadership says it’s ok in their eyes to launch nukes.”


    Last year, however, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican representative to the United Nations, said in speeches in Washington and New York City that “nuclear weapons are no longer just for deterrence but have become entrenched in the military doctrines of the major powers.”


    “The conditions that prevailed during the Cold War, which gave a basis for the [Catholic] Church’s limited toleration of nuclear deterrence, no longer apply in a consistent and effective manner,” the Archbishop said.


    The 381st Training Group and 392nd Training Squadron are responsible for training every Air Force Space and Missile Officer. Several emails and phone calls left for spokespeople at Vandenberg Air Force Base, where the squadron is based, were not returned. The PowerPoint identifies Chaplain Capt. Shin Soh of the 381st Training Group as leading the nuclear ethics presentation.


    One of the ethical questions contained in the PowerPoint presented to missile officers asks: “Can you imagine a set of circumstances that would warrant a nuclear launch from the US, knowing that it would kill thousands of non-combatants?


    Another question trainees are confronted with asks: “Can we train physically, emotionally and spiritually for a job we hope we never have to do?”


    To help the missile officers answer these ethical queries, the PowerPoint presentation cites numerous examples of characters from the New and Old Testament fighting “just” wars.


    For example, in the Old Testament, “Abraham organized an army to rescue Lot,” God motivated “judges (Samson, Deborah, Barak) to fight and deliver Israel from foreign oppressors,” and “David is a warrior who is also a ‘man after God’s own heart.’”


    In the New Testament, citing Timothy 2:3, according to the PowerPoint, “Paul chooses three illustrations to show what it means to be a good disciple of Christ”:


        Farmer–work hard and be patient
        Athlete–be self-disciplined, train
        Soldier–be willing to put up with hardship


    Moreover, in Romans 13:4, the PowerPoint notes, “In spite of personal blemishes, God calls the emperor to be an instrument of justice,” [emphasis in document.]


    A PowerPoint slide also contains a passage from the Book of Revelation attempts to explain how Jesus Christ, as the “mighty warrior,” believed war to be just. The PowerPoint goes on to say that there are “many examples of believers [who] engaged in wars in Old Testament” in a “righteous way” and notes there is “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”


    Constitutional Violation?


    The documents’ blatant use of religious imagery and its numerous citations of the Bible would appear to be a violation of the First Amendment establishing a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution, which specifically prohibits a “religious test.”


    Weinstein, a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a former Air Force Judge Advocate General (JAG), said a section of the PowerPoint presentation that has been cited by MRFF clients as being at the top of the list of “unconstitutional outrages” is the one “which wretchedly asserts that war is both ethical and part of ‘the natural order’ of man’s existence on earth.”


    “Astonishingly, the training presentation grotesquely attempts to justify that unconscionable concept of ‘war is good because Jesus says it is’ by specifically textually referencing allegedly supportive bible passages from the New Testament Books of Luke, Acts, Hebrews, Timothy and, finally even Revelation,” said Weinstein, a former White House counsel during the Reagan administration. “If this repugnant nuclear missile training is not Constitutionally violative of both the ‘no religious test’ mandate of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s No Establishment Clause then those bedrock legal principles simply do not exist.”


    A senior Air Force Space and Missile officer who reviewed the materials, said the teachings are “an outrage of the highest order.”


    “No way in hell should this have been presented as a mandatory briefing to ALL in the basic missiles class,”  the officer, who requested anonymity, said in an email. “It presumes ALL missile officers are religious and specifically in need of CHRISTIAN justification for their service.


    “If they wanted to help people with their spiritual/religious/secular justification for serving as missile officers, then they should’ve said something like ‘for those of you with religious concerns about missile duty, we’ve arranged the following times to chat with chaplains from your particular faith group.’ For those with secular concerns about the morality of missile duty, we’ll have a discussion moderated by a professor [and/or] counselor, a noted ethicist, too. If you’re already good with your role and duty as a missile officer, then you’re welcome to hit the golf course or gym.”


    The senior Air Force officer added that the commander of the training squadron “that approved this, along with the Training Group Commander at Vandenberg, should be fired instantly for allowing it.”


    “Jesus Loves Nukes”


    Former Air Force Capt. Damon Bosetti, 27, who attended missile officer training in 2006 and was stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, said he and his colleagues used to call the religious section of the ethics training the “Jesus loves nukes speech.”


    “What I went through in 2006 didn’t have that level of inappropriateness in it, but it was still strongly religious,” he said of the PowerPoint presentation the Air Force now uses for training missile officers.


    Bosetti, who is represented by MRFF, said he believes the intent of quoting Bible passages was to make officers feel “comfortable” about launching nuclear weapons and signing a legal document stating they had “no moral qualms” about “turning the key” if ordered to do so.


    The legal document from the Department of the Air Force, Air Education and Training Command, which was also released under the FOIA, states, in part, “I will perform duties involving the operation of nuclear-armed ICBMs and will launch them if lawfully ordered to do so by the President of the United States or his lawful successor.” [emphasis in document]


    Bosetti, an officer who left active duty in the Air Force last year, said officers were immediately presented with the three-page document to sign after the end of the training session on nuclear ethics.


    “I think the average American would be and should be very disturbed to know that people go through training where the Air Force quotes the Bible,” Bosetti said. “This type of teaching sets a dangerous precedent because no one above you is objecting. It shifts the group definition of acceptable behavior more and more off track.”


    Weinstein said the combination of citing fundamentalist Christianity and a Nazi scientist as a way of explaining to missile officers why launching nuclear weapons is ethical is a new low for the Air Force.


    “Leave it to the United States Air Force to find a way to dictate the ‘ethical’ value of nuclear war and it’s inevitable role in the ‘natural order’ of humanity’s existence, to it’s missile launch officer trainees by merging unadulterated, fundamentalist Christian end times Armageddon doctrines with the tortured ‘people who are guided by the bible endorsements of a former, leading Nazi SS official,” Weinstein said.

  • My Once-in-a-Generation Cut? The Armed Forces. All of them.

    This article was originally published by The Guardian.

    I say cut defence. I don’t mean nibble at it or slice it. I mean cut it, all £45bn of it. George Osborne yesterday asked the nation “for once in a generation” to think the unthinkable, to offer not just percentage cuts but “whether government needs to provide certain public services at all”.

    What do we really get from the army, the navy and the air force beyond soldiers dying in distant wars and a tingle when the band marches by? Is the tingle worth £45bn, more than the total spent on schools? Why does Osborne “ringfence” defence when everyone knows its budget is a bankruptcy waiting to happen, when Labour ministers bought the wrong kit for wars that they insisted it fight?

    Osborne cannot believe the armed forces are so vital or so efficient as to be excused the star chamber’s “fundamental re-evaluation of their role”. He knows their management and procurement have long been an insult to the taxpayer. The reason for his timidity must be that, like David Cameron, he is a young man scared of old generals.

    I was content to be expensively defended against the threat of global communism. With the end of the cold war in the 1990s that threat vanished. In its place was a fantasy proposition, that some unspecified but potent “enemy” lurked in the seas and skies around Britain. Where is it?

    Each incoming government since 1990 has held so-called defence reviews “to match capabilities to policy objectives”. I helped with one in 1997, and it was rubbish from start to finish, a cosmetic attempt to justify the colossal procurements then in train, and in such a way that any cut would present Labour as “soft” on defence.

    Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and George Robertson, the then defence secretary were terrified into submission. They agreed to a parody of generals fighting the last war but one. They bought new destroyers to defeat the U-boat menace. They bought new carriers to save the British empire. They bought Eurofighters to duel with Russian air aces. Trident submarines with nuclear warheads went on cruising the deep, deterring no one, just so Blair could walk tall at conferences.

    Each weekend, the tranquillity of the Welsh countryside is shattered by inane jets screaming through the mountain valleys playing at Lord of the Rings. With modern bombs, no plane need fly that low, and the jets are said to burn more fuel in half an hour than a school in a year. Any other service wasting so much money would be laughed out of court. Yet the Treasury grovels before the exotic virility of it all.

    Labour lacked the guts to admit that it was crazy to plan for another Falklands war. It dared not admit that the procurement executive was fit for nothing but appeasing weapons manufacturers. No armies were massing on the continent poised to attack. No navies were plotting to throttle our islands and starve us into submission. No missiles were fizzing in bunkers across Asia with Birmingham or Leeds in their sights. As for the colonies, if it costs £45bn to protect the Falklands, Gibraltar and the Caymans, it must be the most ridiculous empire in history. It would be cheaper to give each colony independence and a billion a year.

    Lobbyists reply that all defence expenditure is precautionary. You cannot predict every threat and it takes time to rearm should one emerge. That argument might have held during the cold war and, strictly up to a point, today. But at the present scale it is wholly implausible.

    All spending on insurance – be it on health or the police or environmental protection – requires some assessment of risk. Otherwise spending is open-ended. After the cold war there was much talk of a peace dividend and the defence industry went into intellectual overdrive. It conjured up a new “war” jargon, as in the war on drugs, on terror, on piracy, on genocide. The navy was needed to fight drug gangs in the Caribbean, pirates off Somalia and gun-runners in the Persian Gulf. In all such “wars” performance has been dire, because each threat was defined to justify service expenditure rather than the other way round.

    Whenever I ask a defence pundit against whom he is defending me, the answer is a wink and a smile: “You never know.” The world is a messy place. Better safe than sorry. It is like demanding crash barriers along every pavement in case cars go out of control, or examining school children for diseases every day. You never know. The truth is, we are now spending £45bn on heebie-jeebies.

    For the past 20 years, Britain’s armed forces have encouraged foreign policy into one war after another, none of them remotely to do with the nation’s security. Asked why he was standing in an Afghan desert earlier this year, Brown had to claim absurdly that he was “making London’s streets safer”. Some wars, as in Iraq, have been a sickening waste of money and young lives. Others in Kosovo and Afghanistan honour a Nato commitment that had nothing to do with collective security. Like many armies in history, Nato has become an alliance in search of a purpose. Coalition ministers are citing Canada as a shining example of how to cut. Canada is wasting no more money in Afghanistan.

    Despite Blair’s politics of fear, Britain entered the 21st century safer than at any time since the Norman conquest. I am defended already, by the police, the security services and a myriad regulators and inspectors. Defence spending does not add to this. It is like winning the Olympics – a magnificent, extravagant national boast, so embedded in the British psyche that politicians (and newspapers) dare not question it. Yet Osborne asked that every public service should “once in a generation” go back to basics and ask what it really delivers for its money. Why not defence?

    There are many evils that threaten the British people at present, but I cannot think of one that absolutely demands £45bn to deter it. Soldiers, sailors and air crews are no protection against terrorists, who anyway are not that much of a threat. No country is an aggressor against the British state. No country would attack us were the government to put its troops into reserve and mothball its ships, tanks and planes. Let us get real.

    I am all for being defended, but at the present price I am entitled to ask against whom and how. Of all the public services that should justify themselves from ground zero, defence is the first.