Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: book review

  • The Hanford Plaintiffs

    The Hanford Plaintiffs

    Trisha T. Pritikin’s powerful book, The Hanford Plaintiffs, tells a quintessential American story. A rural community in Washington state is among the first to experience the terrifying consequences of the nuclear age. Beginning in the 1940s, locals began to take notice of strange and unexplainable happenings. Without warning, people began to suffer more frequent nose bleeds, and headaches, muscular weakness and sore throats, thyroid conditions, leukemia, and numerous other sicknesses. New moms suffered miscarriages, and neonatal deaths. More people were dying from heart attacks, and various forms of cancer. In their farmlands, they observed lambs born weakened with terrible deformities, sheep and cattle dying.

    Why was all this happening? What they didn’t know was that a nearby facility producing plutonium for the atomic bomb, was releasing radioactive wastes into the wind, and the water of the Columbia River.

    In a futile effort over many decades, they tried to tell their stories, but were denied justice, by court indifference, interminable bureaucratic delay, and lies by the US government. Now, decades later, through the unrelenting efforts of Pritikin and her colleagues, twenty-four of the Hanford Plaintiffs at last tell their stories, told in their own words, that serve as a stark warning to our world: this can happen to you.

    Frank C. Bognar, D.P.A. is Chair of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Review of David Krieger’s Book Portraits

    This is the sixth collection of poems by David Krieger, an American peace leader and poet who has lived through and been impacted by the events since the Second World War. This unique collection of 70 poems is not just about well known figures but also ordinary folks, the People Between.

    The poems are poignant and powerful, reminding us of personalities from the poet’s humanist perspective that probe the state of global affairs while questioning those who end as its leaders. David Krieger’s pen has irony, it reveals both hurt and sorrow as well as hope and compassion for the world we live in and its frailties.

    The first and last poems of the book, ‘To Be Human’ and ‘The One-Hearted’, describe   the book’s overarching spirit:

    “To be human is to recognize the cultural perspectives that bind us to tribe, sect, religion, or nation, and to rise above them….

    To be human is to breathe with the rhythm of life. It is to stand in awe of who we are and where we live. It is to see the Earth with the eyes of an astronaut.”

    The final poem, ‘The One Hearted’ demonstrates the same optimism:

    “They are warriors of hope, navigating
    oceans and crossing continents.
    Their message is simple: Now
    is the time for peace. It always has been.”

    Portraiture in writing involves etching personality in a moment giving us insight into the subject of observation. It’s their action in such a moment in Krieger’s collection which defines his protagonist as peacemaker or warmonger. Krieger is a story teller. Most poems are about the courage of a nonviolence activist where the protagonist like Gandhi’s Satyagraha adherent defies the oppressor standing fiercely to face up to the evil.

    On Bishop Romero’s assassination (p.10), Krieger writes:

    “But the politicians and the generals
    know what they do
    when they give their orders
    to murder at the altar.”

    He speaks of the Bishop:

    “Bishop Romero saw this clearly,
    Lay down your arms, he said.
    This, the day before his assassination.

    the day before they shot him at the altar,
    God, forgive them, they only follow orders
    They know not what they do.” 

    Norman Morrison’s self-immolation as a protest in front of the Pentagon (p.44):

    “When it happened, the wife of the YMCA director said,
    “I can understand a heathen doing that but not a Christian”.
    Few Americans remember his name, but in Vietnam
    children still sing songs about his courage.”

    On Rosa Park’s bus seat protest in his poem, ‘A Day Like Any Other Day’ (p.37):

    “By not moving, you began a movement,
    like a cat stretching, then suddenly alert.”

    Cindy Sheehan’s waiting answer from U.S. President Bush about her soldier son’s death in a war of no meaning, the Iraq war where “my son died for nothing” , In ‘I Refuse’ (p.41) dedicated to activist Camila Mejio, the voices of resistance unite in solidarity refusing to be silenced, refusing to suspend their conscience or giving up their humanity.

    The poems can be grouped along the lines of post- Second World War American military adventures — Vietnam War, Iraq War, Israel-Palestine War, and Nuclear Weaponization.  These include astute observations about warmongers. On Robert McNamara’s mea culpa in 1995 about the body count in Vietnam War (p.8), Krieger writes: “You broke the code of silence. Your silence was a death sentence to young Americans – to young men who believed in America.” In the same vein, in his portrait of  US Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney from Bush era he notes (p.32):

    “It is a dangerous, deceitful face
    the face of a man with too many secrets.

    ….

    It is the face not of a sniper,
    but of one who orders snipers into action.
    It is a face hidden behind a mask,
    the face of one who savors lynchings
    It is the face of one who hides in dark bunkers
    and shuns the brightness of the sun
    It is a frightened face, dull and without color,
    the face of one consumed by power.”

    In his poem on ‘Bombing Gaza: A pilot speaks’: (p.43)

    “They tell me I am brave, but
    how brave can it be to drop bombs
    on a crowded city? I am a cog, only that,
    a cog in a fancy machine of death.”

    Krieger does not hide his bitterness about those responsible for building and dropping Atomic Bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1945, forcing upon the humanity the unwanted Nuclear Weapons Age we live in.  In ‘An Evening with Edward Teller,’ he derides the “father of the H-bomb’:

    “He wore such claims like a crown,
    like a cloak of death, like a priest kneeling
    at the altar of the temple of doom.”

    —

    “It was difficult to grasp that
    he must have been born an innocent child, and only
    slowly, step by step, became what he became.”

    Another priest at the altar of the temple of doom, the Atom Bomb builder Robert Oppenheimer expresses this more cataclysmically in a poem, “On Becoming Death” (p.19), citing from The Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Standing in front of a US President, Oppenheimer had spoken of having “blood on my hands”. To which Truman responds: “Blood? What Blood?” When Oppenheimer leaves, Truman orders his White House officials, “Don’t ever let him in here again.”

    Krieger can be humorous.  “Greeting Bush in Baghdad” is about the Iraqi journalist Muntader Al-Zaidi’s “farewell kiss” to Bush in the form of his shoes  hurled at the visiting President at a press conference. Al-Zaidi muses that his left shoe hurled at the U.S. President is for his “lost and smirking face” and the right shoe for a “face of no remorse” of caused death and destruction of his country.

    There are many poems in the collection especially those of remembrance written as an elegy for a friend, colleague, child, old man, and a dead soldier, written with fine sensitively and subtlety. My favourite is a short poem, ‘Standing with Pablo’ (p.40).  It’s about the poet’s admiration for his three Pablos: Picasso, Neruda, and Peredes. The first painted Guernica, the second wrote poems of love and dignity, and the third, Pablo Peredes whom we know little about, refused to fight war in Iraq.  Unlike the other two, the little known Peredes, “refused to kill or be killed”.

    Krieger’s poetry is direct, honest, and without pretense. It depicts the social reality surrounding us, invoking our shared humanity to bring about imminent peace needed globally. – An important collection.

    David Krieger (2017),  PORTRAITS: Peacemakers, Warmongers and People Between, Santa Barbara, California: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, pp.83 . The book can be ordered from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, California, USA. Website: www.wagingpeace.org  and email: wagingpeace@napf.org

  • Review of John Scales Avery’s Book Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil

    The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has recently announced (25/1/18) that they have moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to mid-night. A few days before this announcement was made a statement by General Sir Nick Carter appeared in The Times in the United Kingdom: “Our ability to pre-empt or respond to threats will be eroded if we don’t keep up with our adversaries.” (The Times 22/1/2018) This statement encapsulates the mind-set that drives the Military-Industrial Complex in the nuclear nations and its interminable preparations for and anticipation of a future war. It could ultimately lead to one of these nations, whether deliberately or inadvertently, unleashing on the world the catastrophe of a nuclear war.

    Many decades ago General Eisenhower warned America about the unwarranted power of the Military-Industrial Complex. Today, the entire planet is held hostage to this Complex whose lethal tentacles control the nine nuclear nations as well as those nations and corporations engaged in the lucrative arms trade. This Complex is one of the major causes of war and the persistence of war. Here is Eisenhower’s comment on war in general:

    Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. (1)

    America paid no attention to his warnings and, in its hubristic will to power, continues to be complicit in expanding the greatest evil that has ever come upon this planet, threatening war with Russia and China and, most recently North Korea.

    …………..

    Most of the planet’s inhabitants, even those who are highly educated and working in governments and organizations like the United Nations have very little awareness of what an exchange of nuclear weapons would be like or what its immediate and long-term effects would be in terms of the massive numbers of civilian deaths and the rapid deterioration of the planetary environment. This is the lacuna that Professor Avery’s book sets out to fill in an admirably clear and comprehensive way, enriching it with photographs and quotations from men who have, from the outset, expressed their opposition to nuclear weapons. The book is an education in itself on the many facets of this complex subject including how these weapons first came into being in first five, then nine nuclear nations. It addresses both the amorality and the illegality of nuclear weapons. Many people like myself who are appalled by the existence of nuclear weapons but insufficiently informed of their history and the threat they pose to the planetary biosphere, could benefit by reading its highly informative chapters.

    The Sacrifice of Civilians

    The first chapter, “The Threat of Nuclear War”, explores the important subject of how existing ethical principles about avoiding the bombing of civilians were eroded during the Second World War with the carpet bombing of cities by German and British air forces, culminating in the incendiary raids on Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden that destroyed those and other German cities and many thousands of their helpless inhabitants. Not long after these, in August 1945, came the horrific obliteration of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the first atom bombs, together with most of their civilian inhabitants. It is noteworthy that the First and Second World Wars cost the lives of 26 million soldiers but 64 million civilians. We live, Professor Avery  comments, in an age of space-age science but stone-age politics.

    Instead of drawing back in horror from the evil it had unleashed, America and then the Soviet Union embarked on an arms race that has led, step by step, to the current existence of nine nuclear nations and some 17,000 nuclear weapons, with the greater part of these situated in the United States and Russia. Thousands of these are kept on permanent “hair-trigger” alert. 200 of these nuclear bombs are situated in Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, available for use by NATO and placed there by the United States principally to deter a Russian attack. The danger of the launch of one of these weapons in error is a constant possibility and would precipitate a genocidal catastrophe.

    His first chapter also addresses the important concept of nuclear deterrence and shows how, according to the historic 1996 decision by the International Court of Justice in the Hague, this was declared to be not only unacceptable from the standpoint of ethics but also contrary to International Law as well as the principles of democracy. The latter have been reflected in the pattern of voting at the United Nations (originally founded to abolish the Institution of War) which has consistently shown that the overwhelming majority of the world’s people wish to be rid of nuclear weapons.

    The basic premise of this chapter and indeed, the entire book, is that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil and that no defense can be offered for them, particularly the defense that they act as a deterrent. He brings evidence to show that the effects of even a small nuclear war would be global and all the nations of the world would suffer. Because of its devastating effects on global agriculture, even a small nuclear war could result in a ‘nuclear winter’ and in an estimated billion deaths from famine.  A large-scale nuclear war would completely destroy all agriculture for a period of ten years. Large areas of the world would be rendered permanently uninhabitable because of the ‘nuclear winter’ and the radioactive contamination affecting plants, animals and humans.

    Summarising at the end of this chapter Professor Avery writes: “In the world as it is, the nuclear weapons now stockpiled are sufficient to kill everyone on earth several times over. Nuclear technology is spreading, and many politically unstable countries have recently acquired nuclear weapons or may acquire them soon. Even terrorist groups or organized criminals may acquire such weapons, and there is an increasing danger that they will be used.”

    To believe that deterrence is a preventive to their being used is to live in a fool’s paradise. It only needs one inadvertent mistake, one mis-reading of a computer, one terrorist nuclear bomb to unleash unimaginable horror on the world. There have already been several near disasters. (2) Governments claim to protect their populations by holding these weapons. Instead, they offer them as hostages to the greed and will to power of the giant corporations, of arms manufacturers such as BAE and the Military-Industrial Complex in general. Professor Avery refers to the greed for power that drives each of these as “The Devil’s Dynamo”.

    As an example of this will to power, concealed beneath the mask of deterrence, there is the existence of a Trident submarine which is on patrol at all times, armed with an estimated eight missiles, each of which can carry up to five warheads. In total, that makes 40 warheads, each with an explosive power of up to 100 kilotons of conventional high explosive—eight times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 which killed an estimated 240,000 people from blast and radiation. One nuclear submarine can incinerate more than 40 million human beings. This capacity for mass murder is presented as essential for our defense but it begs the question: ‘How many people are we prepared to exterminate in order to ensure our security?’ We would have no protection against a reciprocally fired nuclear missile directed at us. The concept of deterrence puts us at risk of instant annihilation.

    In subsequent chapters, “Lessons from the Two World Wars”, “The Social Responsibility of Scientists” and “The Illegality of Nuclear Weapons”, Professor Avery expands on the different aspects of the danger that nuclear weapons present as well as the concerted efforts of many individuals and nations to eliminate them, culminating in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that was passed by 122 nations in the United Nations General Assembly in July 7th, 2017. “Today”, he writes, “War is not only insane but also a violation of international law.”

    The Illegality of War

    Many people are not aware that the illegality of war was established in 1946 when the United Nations General Assembly unanimously affirmed “The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal.” These set out the crimes that henceforth were punishable under international law. It is obvious that the nine nuclear nations, in developing and holding their weapons, have ignored and violated these principles.

    In 1968 there was a further attempt to contain the growing nuclear threat. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), drawn up during the Cold War and signed by 187 countries, was designed to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading beyond the five nations that already had them. It has now been in force as international law since 1970 and is convened every five years to pursue further negotiations towards total nuclear disarmament. In Article VI of the Treaty, the non-nuclear states insisted that definite steps towards complete nuclear disarmament would be taken by all states, as well as steps towards comprehensive control of conventional armaments. These steps have not been taken by the nuclear states. Israel (which has still not acknowledged that it holds them), India and Pakistan have not signed the Treaty and North Korea, having originally signed, withdrew in 2003. (3) Pakistan, a dangerously unstable country, presents the very real danger of nuclear technology or bombs falling into the hands of Islamic Fundamentalists. (4) The 2015 meeting of the NPT ended in disarray with no agreement reached on further commitments to disarm.

    Professor Avery draws attention to the significant fact that NATO’s nuclear weapons policy violates both the spirit and the text of the NPT. An estimated hundred and eighty US nuclear weapons, all of them B-61 hydrogen bombs, are still on European soil with the air forces of the nations in which they are based regularly trained to deliver the US weapons. These nations are Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands as well as the United Kingdom with its Trident submarines. Turkey, one of the 29 nations that have joined NATO holds about 50 hydrogen bombs at a US base at Incirlik. (5) (6) The aim of all these weapons is to intimidate Russia. This “nuclear sharing” as he points out, “violates Articles 1 and 11 of the NPT, which forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear-weapon states.” And, he continues, “The principle of no-first-use of nuclear weapons has been an important safeguard over the years, but it is violated by present NATO policy, which permits the first-use of nuclear weapons in a wide variety of circumstances. This is something that every citizen of the EU should be aware of.

    The Danger of Nuclear Reactors

    In another most important chapter “Against Nuclear Proliferation” Professor Avery draws attention to the danger of nuclear reactors, a danger that is very rarely reflected on by the governments who have committed vast sums to building them and is virtually unknown to the general public. Nuclear reactors constructed for “peaceful” purposes to generate electricity nevertheless constitute a danger in that they generate fissionable isotopes of plutonium, neptunium and americium and, are not under strict international control. Since 1945, more than 3,000 metric tons (3,000,000 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium and plutonium have been produced, of which a million kilograms are in Russia, where they are inadequately guarded. A terrorist could create a simple atom bomb, capable of killing 100,000 people if he were able to access a critical amount of uranium. He notes that “no missile defense system can prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists since these weapons can be brought into a country via any one of the thousands of containers loaded onto ships whose contents cannot be exhaustively checked.” This fact, as he says, undermines the argument in favor of deterrence.

    More specifically, the danger lies with the fact that reactors can be used to manufacture both uranium and plutonium from the fuel rods that are an intrinsic part of every reactor and these elements can be used by anyone with sufficient expertise to create a nuclear bomb. Because this is such an important subject and largely unknown to the layman, it is worthwhile quoting his exact words:

    By reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods, a nation with a power reactor can obtain weapons-usable Pu-239 (a fissionable isotope of plutonium that was used to create the bomb dropped on Nagasaki). Even when such reprocessing is performed under international control, the uncertainty as to the amount of Pu-239 obtained is large enough so that the operation might superficially seem to conform to regulations while still supplying enough Pu-239 to make many bombs…  Fast breeder reactors are prohibitively dangerous from the standpoint of nuclear proliferation because both the highly enriched uranium from the fuel rods and the Pu-239 from the envelope are directly weapons-usable… If all nations used fast breeder reactors, the number of nuclear weapons states would increase drastically… If nuclear reactors become the standard means for electricity generation [as is planned in Saudi-Arabia, for example] the number of nations possessing nuclear weapons might ultimately be as high as 40.

    At the moment, there are no restrictions pertaining to the control of the enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of fuel rods in the reactors throughout the world. In Professor Avery’s view, this is a very dangerous situation which invites the manufacture of nuclear weapons by default. (7)

    The Effects of Radiation

    There were 2053 nuclear tests that took place between 1945 and 1998, the majority by the United States and the Soviet Union. All of them emitted radiation. The United States used the Pacific chain of islands as the site of 67 nuclear tests from 1946 to 1958. Of these the hydrogen bomb dropped on Bikini Atoll in 1954 was 1300 hundred times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It gave rise to devastating radiation that affected and still affects the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, 120 miles from Bikini. They experienced radiation sickness and deaths from cancer and women still give birth to babies who do not resemble humans and have no viable life.

    In April 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands filed actions in the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the United States and the eight other nations that possess nuclear weapons. The actions focus mainly on the Nuclear Nine’s alleged failure to “fulfill the obligations of customary international law with respect to cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament.” As of March 2014 only the cases against the UK, India, and Pakistan have reached the current preliminary stage of proceedings before the court, because the other six nations have refused to participate. True to form, the United States has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

    In addition to the radiation emitted by nuclear testing there has been the radiation emitted by the Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011) disasters. At Fukushima, between 300 and 400 metric tonnes a day of this radioactive water has been and still is flowing into the Pacific, contaminating the fish, algae and the birds who feed on the fish — and ultimately affecting humans. Contaminated fish have already been found off the coast of Alaska and the west coast of America. According to a report by the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, the initial breakdown caused “the largest single contribution of radio-nuclides to the marine environment ever observed.”

    In support of the graphic description of what would happen to the world in the event of a nuclear exchange, elaborated in Professor Avery’s chapter “The Social Responsibility of Scientists,” Professor Chris Busby, one of the world experts on the effects of ionising radiation, now living in Latvia, has warned about the catastrophic effects of nuclear radiation. He says that even a limited nuclear exchange between the US and Russia would have these effects. “We know from the nuclear test effects of radiation on the veterans exposed to the fall-out from them that the damage to the human genome and the genome of all species on earth will be terminal.” People exposed to radiation will become infertile and their children with be genetically damaged and this includes the millions of cancers that will also be part of these effects. He says that generals such as General Shirreff, a former head of NATO, who has written a book published in 2016 with the title 2017 War with Russia, are not aware of the catastrophic long-term effects of nuclear radiation. They don’t understand that nuclear radiation contaminates a huge area of ground, rendering the people and animals living on it infertile or genetically damaged. Constantly ramping up the threat of Russia to the West, they themselves constitute one of the major dangers confronting us.

    Professor Busby exposes the fallacy behind the currently accepted model of exposure hazard adopted by governments and the nuclear industry since the 1950’s. He says the ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection) is in error by about 1,000 times. Through nuclear testing (over 2,000, see above) and the accidents at Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the world has been increasingly bathed with radioactivity since 1945. We are now seeing the result in a virtual epidemic of cancer in many parts of the world. These cannot all be set at the door of lifestyle and diet or genetic inheritance. In the 1950’s one in nine people developed cancer. In the 1990’s it was one in five. In the last few years it is one in three and in 2020 it is estimated by WHO that it will be one in two. The chief underlying cause of this increase in cancers is, according to Professor Busby, ionising radiation. All this is not known to the general public. (8)

    Summing up the effects on the world of a nuclear war, Professor Avery writes:

    The danger of a catastrophic nuclear war casts a dark shadow over the future of our species. It also casts a very black shadow over the future of the global environment. The environmental consequences of a massive exchange of nuclear weapons have been treated in a number of studies by meteorologists and other experts from both East and West. They predict that a large-scale use of nuclear weapons would result in fire storms with very high winds and high temperatures [similar to what happened in Hamburg and Dresden]… The resulting smoke and dust would block out sunlight for a period of many months, at first only in the northern hemisphere but later also in the southern hemisphere. Temperatures in many places would fall far below freezing, and much of the earth’s plant life would be killed. Animals and humans would then die of starvation.

    The Expenditure on Weapons and the Impoverishment of the world

    In subsequent chapters, Dr. Avery draws attention to the colossal sums that are spent on weapons and preparations for war on the part of the Military-Industrial Complex and how these impoverish the nations that are committed to them and impoverish the people of the world as a whole. “War,” as he says, “creates poverty”. If even a small fraction of these sums were directed by an organization such as WHO or UNICEF towards improving health, eradicating disease, providing education and technical assistance such as basic hygiene, access to water and electricity in the poorer parts of the world, the lives of billions could be immeasurably improved. $1.7 trillion dollars is currently spent by the richest nations on armaments. An enormous river of money, he says, buys the votes of politicians and the propaganda of the media that continually announces the existence of a new enemy and the defensive preparations needed to counteract its menace.

    As proof of what he has described in his book which was published before he could include it, it was announced in 2015 that the Pentagon plans to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years on a new generation of nuclear bombs, bombers, missiles and submarines, including a dozen submarines carrying more than a 1,000 warheads. During his presidency Obama ordered 200 new nuclear bombs to be deployed in Europe. Russia has revealed plans for a new kind of weapon – a hydrogen bomb torpedo – that can traverse 6,000 miles of ocean just as a missile would in the sky. On impact, the bomb would create a “radioactive tsunami” designed to kill millions along a country’s coast.

    A World Federation of Nations

    In his final chapter, “Against the Institution of War”, Professor Avery suggests that “the tribalism deeply embedded in the concept of the sovereign nation-state makes it an anachronism in a world of thermonuclear weapons, instantaneous communication and economic interdependence.” He puts forward the idea of a United Nations developed into a stronger World Federation of Nations with a legislature having the ability to make laws which are binding on individuals, and to arrest and try individual political leaders for violation of these laws. Such a strengthened United Nations would need to be independent of the income currently given to it by the most affluent nations which generally falls far below what is required to run such an institution effectively. He suggests this income could be provided by a “Tobin tax” raised from international currency exchanges at a rate between 0.1 and 0.25% – an amount that would hardly be noticed by those involved in today’s enormous currency transactions. It could provide the new World Federation of Nations with between 100 and 300 billion dollars annually. Endowed with this amount, the World Federation could strengthen all the current UN agencies that suffer from a chronic lack of funds and make their intervention in conflicts more effective. In the recent Syrian catastrophe, the world has seen how ineffective he United Nations has been, mainly due to the blocking of proposed humanitarian action by the Security Council.

    Appendices

    In the first of a number of important Appendices, Professor Avery has included the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to ICAN (The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) which took place on December 10th, 2017. He has also included the Nobel lecture given at the Award ceremony by Beatrice Fihn, the Executive Director of ICAN, together with the lecture by Setsuko Thurlow, one of the very few survivors (hibakusha) of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima whose deeply moving words everyone concerned about nuclear weapons should read.

    Another Appendix gives a review of a highly important book on Hiroshima by Josei Toda which gives the testimonies of the survivors and the memorable statement: “Nuclear Weapons are an absolute evil. Their possession is criminal under all circumstances.”

    A third Appendix is devoted to a book review of an important book: The Path to Zero, (2012) by Richard Falk and David Krieger in which these two men engage “In a stunningly eloquent dialogue on a range of nuclear dangers, and our common responsibility to put an end to them.” This book should be essential reading for citizens, scientists, policy-makers and above all, political leaders whose so-called ‘rational’ decisions too often take nations into war. Dr. Krieger is founder of The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation which is actively supporting the ‘David and Goliath’ suit of the Republic of the Marshall Islands against the Nuclear Nations.

    The fifth Appendix gives the text of the important Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 and the last one is a Call for an Arctic Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.

     

    In summary, Professor Avery says that we live at a crucial time of choice. We have the innate capacity for both good and evil but lack the moral awareness of how far down the path of evil our nuclear technology has taken us. Will we choose to continue down the fatally dangerous nuclear path or will we choose to free our beautiful planet and our children and grandchildren from the scourge of these weapons.

    He calls for a new global ethic, “where loyalty to one’s family and nation will be supplemented by a higher loyalty to humanity as a whole… We know that nuclear war threatens to destroy civilization and much of the biosphere. The logic is there. We must translate it into popular action which will put an end to the undemocratic, money-driven, power-lust-driven war machine. The peoples of the world must say very clearly that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil, that their possession does not increase anyone’s security; that their continued existence is a threat to the life of every person on the planet; and that these genocidal and potentially omnicidal weapons have no place in a civilized society… Civilians have for too long played the role of passive targets, hostages in the power struggles of governments. It is time for civil society to make its will felt. If our leaders continue to support the institution of war, if they will not abolish nuclear weapons, then let us have new leaders… What is needed is the universal recognition that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil, and that their continued existence is a threat to human civilization and to the life of every person on the planet.”

    Twenty years ago, General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) which controls nuclear weapons and strategy, wrote this: By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear-weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently, why does such breathtaking audacity persist at a moment when we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestations? (9)

    I cannot recommend this book too highly. It has given me what I wanted to know and what I had no immediate access to: the complete picture of how we have lost our humanity and how we could regain it by ridding the earth of these demonic weapons.

    Notes:

    1. Address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953.
    2. Notably the night of September 26th, 1983, when a young software engineer, Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov was on duty when suddenly, the computer screen turned bright red with alarms going off simultaneously, Indicating that the United States had launched a missile strike on the Soviet Union. Miraculously, Petrov disobeyed orders and reported the incident as a computer error, which indeed it was.

    There is also the terrifying accident at a missile silo in Arkansas, recorded in Eric Schlosser’s book, Command and Control (2013) where a handful of men struggled to prevent the explosion of a ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead ever built by the United States.

    A third example is the US air force B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear weapons that crashed in Palomares in south-eastern Spain. On 19 Oct 2015 – Nearly 50 years after the crash – Washington  finally agreed to clean up the radioactive contamination that resulted from it.

    1. On January 6th, 2016 Kim Jong-un triumphantly announced that North Korea had detonated a hydrogen bomb and in December 2017 threatened to detonate one over the Pacific.
    2. Most of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon storage facilities are located in the north western part of the country, near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.
    3. According to Hans M. Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, underground vaults at Incirlik hold about fifty B-61 hydrogen bombs—more than twenty-five per cent of the nuclear weapons in the NATO stockpile. The nuclear yield of the B-61 can be adjusted to suit a particular mission. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had an explosive force equivalent to about fifteen kilotons of TNT. In comparison, the “dial-a-yield” of the B-61 bombs at Incirlik can be adjusted from 0.3 kilotons to as many as a hundred and seventy kilotons.
    4. See the article by Eric Schlosser in the New Yorker, July 17th, 2016 about the danger and also the ease of a terrorist attack on this base.
    5. 449 reactors already exist in the world and 60 are currently under construction.
    6. article by Chris Busby in Caduceus magazine issue 93, Spring 2016
    7. quoted in Noam Chomsky’s book Who Rules the World? 2016

    Professor Avery’s official title at the University of Copenhagen is Associate Professor Emeritus. He has a  Ph.D. and D.I.C. degrees from Imperial College of Science and Technology (theoretical chemistry, 1965). He also has a B.Sc. (physics, MIT, 1954) and an M.Sc. (theoretical physics, University of Chicago, 1955). He is a Foreign Member of the Danish Royal Society of Sciences and Letters, and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. Since 1990 he has been Chairman of the Danish National Group of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (Nobel Peace Prize, 1995).

    Nuclear Weapons: an Absolute Evil can be purchased at http://www.lulu.com/home

    or downloaded from  http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/library/nuclear.pdf

    See also his articles at https://human-wrongs-watch.net/2016/03/15/peace/

    Anne Baring is an author and a Jungian Analyst: www.annebaring.com

  • Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Machine

    The man who so famously cast light onto the truths of the Vietnam War has now revealed a much larger threat to not only the United States but to all the citizens of our world. Mr. Ellsberg’s new work has the initial effect of scaring the rational reader out of their wits. His personal encounters with the nuclear age have yielded a multitude of warnings for those still holding the illusion that deterrence can save us. He skillfully elevates the faults of our nuclear programs, using his narrative of careful research and silenced horror to show the qualifications he has for raising these concerns. From the interviews he conducted as an employee of the RAND corporation to the war plans he read in the Department of Defense, Daniel Ellsberg’s book is filled with the factors that complete his titular Doomsday Machine. He describes a broken system of retaliation, a history of unnecessary risks, and a government whose morals were lost to the concept of a “just war.”

    In the era of barbed insults regarded as precursors to nuclear threat, the warnings yielded by The Doomsday Machine have become required reading. Many of the circumstances of Ellsberg’s early fears (delegation of first-use capabilities, casualty counts that fail to recognize the theory of nuclear winter, and the space left within deployment of the arsenal for human error) haven’t been fixed or addressed since his time at the Pentagon. We live under the threat of a force the danger of which we cannot comprehend. What Doomsday Machine attempts to do is comprehend this danger, so as to start to dismantle it.

    Tracing the nuclear bomb to its early days on a blackboard at UC Berkeley, he speaks to the uncertainty even its creators had as to what the detonation of this weapon would cause. He speaks to the family men and young physicists who, on the eve of the Trinity tests, took bets as to whether or not their first test would be the end of life on Earth. The atomic flash at the outset of this earliest ever detonation was momentarily mistaken for atmospheric ignition, a seconds-long death of all life, where “the earth would blaze for less than a second in the heavens and then forever continue its rounds as a barren rock.” Even Hitler’s administration did not think the risk worth it, choosing not to pursue scientific research on the creation of such a weapon. Yet now the United States, upheld as the world police for all things moral and ethical, has stockpiled thousands of thermonuclear warheads, while the use of a mere three hundred of their number could cause just as devastating a finale to humanity’s time on Earth.

    Ellsberg asks, “Does the United States still need a Doomsday Machine? Does Russia? Did they ever?”

    He tells us, “The mortal predicament did not begin with Donald J. Trump, and it will not end with his departure.”

    Daniel Ellsberg’s title evokes Kubrick’s film on purpose, a metaphor that culminates in his definition of the “Strangelove Paradox.” The United States has thousands of “Doomdsay Machine” weapons and hundreds of “fingers on the button.” The question the reader must ask, now mortified by the necessary horrors of Ellsberg’s masterpiece, is how to save the world.

    You can find Ellsberg’s book at your local bookshop, or click here to purchase on amazon.com.

  • Book Review: Almighty

    “Nukes, in other words, would be America’s third-highest national priority, ever. Along the way, the weapons would evolve from a strategy into a policy into a faith.” –Dan Zak, Almighty, p. 23

    almightyAlmighty, by Dan Zak, is a compelling new book that exposes the intimate truths behind the 2012 Y-12 break-in through the lens of the peace-activist perpetrators.  Fluidly weaving between the past and the present, this intriguing true-story resembles more of a thriller novel than that of a mundane biography. As the unique background of all three activists, Sister Megan Rice, Michael Walli, and Greg Boertje-obed, unfolds the egregious history of nuclear weapons elucidates the United States’ futile attempt at non-proliferation.

    A house painter, a Vietnam War veteran, and an 82 year old Catholic sister, broke into the “Fort Knox of Uranium” (Y-12) in an act of civil disobedience for the sake of mankind. Considered to be one of the most secure facilities in the world, Y-12 was easily penetrated with wire cutters and a courageous death wish. The three peace activists hoped to stop the production of nuclear weapons or, simply, bring awareness to their cause. However, inadvertently, the success of their mission spawned significant national security concerns and shed light on the inherent fault in nuclear facilities: human error.

    The novel is broken down into three sections: action, reaction, and relativity/uncertainty. In Part I, Action, Zak describes the history and intricacies of the Manhattan Project as well as provides an in-depth description of the Y-12 break-in. Created by the intellectual elite of Columbia University, the Manhattan Project outlined a clear and destructive path to combat the fear and rise of the Third Reich. The atom became a destructive force displayed in the acts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, “ All the while, a counterforce pushed back. Men and women of science, and of faith, believed that humanity was too fragile to tangle with the almighty. The mere possession of nuclear weapons, to them, was a wish for death” (p. 24). In the time of scientific innovation, Manhattan became the soil in which Megan Rice sprouted her anti-nuclear activism.

    One of the most intriguing sections in Almighty is Part II, Reaction. In this section, an entire chapter is dedicated to the background and history of Oak Ridge.  Oak Ridge, an eerie Cold-War era community dedicated to the production of Uranium at Y-12, prides itself on ‘protecting America’s future’.  City festivals and moments of silence commemorate the city’s important role in producing nuclear weapons as well as act as a tool of societal enforcement with regards to the acceptance of nuclear weapons. Historically, Y-12 was a community secret and often employees were unknowingly contributing to the production of uranium. One Oak Ridge citizen recalls, “Her grandmother, who worked at Y-12, was told she was helping to make ice cream” (p.185).

    Almighty continues into the aftermath of the Y-12 break-in where the three peace activists were tried for criminal trespassing and destruction of federal property. The court trials touch on the American nuclear weapons paradox regarding morality and the façade of national security. As the judge deliberates between motive, morality, and actions, the reader is taken through the labyrinth that is the jaded American nuclear debate.  To illustrate the complexities of the American nuclear relationship, Zak references the youthful Barack Obama in 1983 at Columbia University. In Obama’s student newspaper article Breaking the War Mentality, “His last sentence envisioned a peace ‘that is genuine, lasting, and non-nuclear (p.148).” Yet, the Obama administration has provided little support towards this approach. Clearly the discourse regarding both the struggle to justify nuclear weapons or encourage non-proliferation is inadequate. The activists answered this challenge with radical action.

    Almighty covers substantial nuclear weapon modern history, and the morality behind these destructive human designs. Topics further discussed include the court proceedings, life and background of the activists, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Marshall Islands, and the Iran-Nuclear Deal.

    Armed with a few hammers and a heavy conscience, these religiously motivated peace-activists hung banners, graffitied biblical verses, and streaked human blood across the exterior of Y-12.  Their motivations and respective moral compasses are eloquently revealed in the pages of such chaos. Binding American power, the case for nuclear weapons transforms into 2016 relevance through Almighty.

  • Review: Nuclear Heartland, revised edition: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States

    nuclearheartlandBuried beneath the “Land of the Free” are 450 land-based nuclear missiles that hold American democracy and the future of humanity hostage. Hidden from the public eye, the dangers of the nuclear age are eclipsed by a perception of safety – ushered into the American consciousness by a small group of beneficiaries. Twenty-seven years after its initial release, Nukewatch’s Nuclear Heartland, revised edition serves as a chilling reminder that hundreds of indiscriminate weapons still lurk beneath the surface of American soil. These “metal gods” wait patiently out of sight for a signal that would plunge our world into a state of total destruction.

    Between the covers of Nuclear Heartland, the reader will encounter the untold stories of those sacrificed to the Nuclear Age. We’ve all heard of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but most of us are unfamiliar with the people of America’s Great Plains, whose lands, lives, and safety have been hijacked by a Federal Government pledging “national security.” The military economy that has exploded in the American Heartland has rendered the lands of Midwestern farmers barren, agricultural policy combined with Air Force pesticides forcing two-thirds of North Dakota farmers to lose their livelihoods. The lives of the silo-county residents are also at stake. Nukewatch co-founder Samuel H. Day writes, “One of the realities that has yet to sink in on the residents of missile silo county [. . .] is that their part of the United States was chosen long ago by distant strategists to serve as a national sacrifice area.” He continues, “The theory is that the remote and wide open spaces of the Great Plains were to be sacrificed so that California, New York, Washington, DC, and other centers of more importance to the planners could fight on in a nuclear war.”

    Despite this, the people of the American Midwest are largely in support of the warheads that sleep in their backyards. Unaware of the dangers that sleep beneath their gardens, most silo-county residents believe that the local economy benefits from the existence of local Air Force bases. Nuclear Heartland warns us otherwise, revealing that the augmented job market in silo counties was only temporary. By the 1960s, only half a decade after the Atlas missile program began, the economic boom resulting from missile production was already beginning to lull. Today, there are no employment opportunities for locals looking to capitalize on the military missiles. Repair work has been outsourced to specialists thousands of miles away, leaving silo counties across the Midwest dry of economic fruit.

    The Native American tribes of the Great Plains have also been subjected to numerous abuses by the U.S. Federal Government. Their lands are replete with unwanted missile silos that threaten their lives, land, identity, and culture, all of which are inextricably intertwined. The nuclear weapons scattered across the ancient Cherry Creek Trail and Black Hills, areas sacred to the Lakota-Sioux Nation, demonstrate that Native American lives are disposable in the face of U.S. security. The deployment of nuclear missiles on sacred Native American lands denies the Native American people their sovereignty, in effect reproducing the “us” and “them” narrative required for the accepted deployment of these destructive machines.

    However, Nuclear Heartland not only uncovers the untold oppression of today’s nuclear missile regime. The book also operates as a manual for disarmament, detailing the accounts of civil disobedience and direct action that have challenged the missiles since 1958. In the current age, when nuclear outrage has slipped beneath the radar of the general public, Nuclear Heartland abolishes silence, returning with a voice and a name to those courageous enough to face the ICBMs head on. Documenting earlier protests, like the 1984 symbolic disarmament of the N-5 by the Silo Pruning Hooks, alongside more recent ones, such as the 2006 Ploughshares “Weapons of Mass Destruction Here!” Protest, in which activists hammered and poured blood on a nuclear silo, Nuclear Heartland shows readers that the crusade against nuclear missiles is not a lost cause, but rather an expedition that marches on.

    With its definitive guide to the 450 remaining land-based missiles, the 2015 re-release of Nuclear Heartland serves as a cutting-edge guidebook, leading us out of the current age of nuclear complacency. Through its publication of the Missile Mapping Project, Nukewatch virtually unearths the remaining land-based missiles, opening them out to public scrutiny. The project, undertaken by hundreds of Nukewatch volunteers, places a geographical fix on all remaining US missile fields. Listed within the pages of Nuclear Heartland, revised edition, are the discoveries of this project: updated maps, directions, and photos, all documenting the continued existence, location, and condition of these fields. Towards the end of the book, there are short journal entries written by Barb Katt and John LaForge, the two anti-nuclear activists recruited to travel 30,000 miles across the nuclear heartlands to verify the location of each land-based missile site. The entries cover LaForge and Katt’s encounters with Air Force personnel, silo-county residents, and the nuclear warheads themselves.

    The Missile Mapping project operates as a participatory tool. By sharing with the public the existence, location, and condition of all U.S. land-based missiles, Nukewatch encourages the public to turn away from passive acceptance, embracing instead democratic discovery. “Given the will, we can fashion instruments of peace from the deadly warheads in our soil,” Sam Day wrote. And that is exactly what the authors of Nuclear Heartland are asking us to do: utilize our democratic right to participate and our collective power to demand an end to the Nuclear Age that plagues our world with its threat of uncertainty.

    Nuclear Heartland is available for purchase from Nukewatch at www.nukewatchinfo.org and from Amazon.com. Each copy is priced at $25, with an additional $5 charge for shipping and handling. Payments are also accepted by Nukewatch via mail at 740A Round Lake Road, Luck, WI 54853.

  • Wake Up! by David Krieger

    Wake Up! is a book of powerful poems by nuclear disarmament champion and civil society activist Dr. David Krieger, founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF).  The book divided into five parts comprising 86 thought-provoking poems. They paint evocative images of wars and killings yet giving us hope through possibility of self-correction in finding our shared humanity.

    How does one write a review of such a collection where each poem stands out drawing the reader into a vortex of inhumanity of man by man and at the same time wanting to make sense of existential themes like Truth, War, Peace, Nuclear Weapons, and even a section called Imperfection.

    David challenges the notion of Theodor Adorno that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric asserting that in fact poetry after Auschwitz is needed today more than ever, it has no longer the luxury of being trivial. Those who write poetry must confront the ugliness of our human brutality. His exhortation to the poets is that: “They must express the heart’s longing for peace and reveal its grief at our loss of decency. They must uncover the truth of who we are behind our masks and who we could become.”  He adds: “Poetry can uncover truths that can reconnect us with ourselves and with our lost humanity.”

    Laudable in all this is the vision of a poet challenging his countrymen and others to change the status quo and work towards building a Nonkilling America as a model example to the world. Yet he is realistic about progress as he writes in one of  his poems, “Time carries no pretense of progress nor perfection… It (time) is a patient teacher whose voice by force must be our own.”

    In the section on Truth is Beauty, in the poem ‘A Sage Walks Slowly’, David contrasts the human condition with the sage in us: “We are the weavers and the woven. In tenacity of being, we’ve been chosen.” But “A sage walks slowly, straight and proud, faces life with head unbowed.”

    In a larger section of poems on War, the poem, ‘Little Changes’  reflects on his compatriot soldiers: “Our brave young soldiers shot babies at My Lai – few remember…Then it was gooks. Now it is hajjis – little changes.”

    In another place in his poem Archeology of War, he describes:

    “The years of war numb us, grind us
    down as they pile up one upon the other
    forming a burial mound not only
    for the fallen soldiers and innocents
    who were killed, but for the parts of us
    once decent and bright with hope
    and now deflated by the steady fall of death
    and sting of empty promises. “

    On Bush II, the poet in ‘Staying the Course’ writes:

    “The race has been run
    and he lost
    Yet he swaggers
    around the track as though
    it were a victory lap
    It is hard not to think
    How pathetic is power.”

    In another poem ‘Greeting Bush in Baghdad’, David reflects upon the mind of creative nonviolent Iraqi shoe thrower Muntader al-Zaifdi who among his various reasons for disliking the American President as “a maker of widows and orphans” has the following to say:

    “I have only this for you, my left shoe that I hurl
    at your lost and smirking face,

    and my right shoe that I throw at your face
    of no remorse.”

    The most significant section of the collection is entitled, Global Hiroshima with 9 poems on the dropping of Atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and subsequent nuclear arms race:

    “They are weapons with steel hearts.
    There is no bargain with them.”

    The title poem of the collection Wake Up! is a long one, and in the nuclear disarmament section of the book entitled Global Hiroshima. It concludes:

    “Now, before the arrow is let loose,
    before it flies across oceans
    and continents.

    Now, before we are engulfed in flames,
    while there is still time, while we still can,
    Wake up!’

    David Krieger has a keen sense of irony and parody (schadenfreude). In a poem “Einstein Sticks out his Tongue”, he delves into the mind of the great scientist whose brilliant E= MC2 equation contributed to development of the Atom Bomb. David writes:

    “When asked for a pose, Einstein turned
    toward the camera and stuck out his tongue

    ……

    He was Albert. He was Einstein. He was
    his own man, first and always.

    He was lovely. He was real. And behind
    his dark eyes, there was fear.”

    Krieger’s inspirational collection reminds a reader that its time for the world to awaken to the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. A must read poetry that illumines dark corners to show presence of truth and thereby possibilities for peace. For further information on the collection, check out Nuclear Age Peace Foundation website: www.wagingpeace.org ; phone:805-965-3443

    Reviewed by: Bill Bhaneja, a former Canadian diplomat. His two recent books are: Quest for Gandhi: A Nonkilling Journey and Troubled Pilgrimage: Passage to Pakistan. He is Vice-Chair of Center for Global Nonkilling, Honolulu (www.nonkilling.org).

  • Book Review of ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition

    In his remarkably readable and informative book on why abolishing nuclear weapons is an imperative for a safe and secure world, David Krieger points out there is a growing consensus among the peoples of the world that ZERO nuclear weapons is the only option.  David Krieger, a founder of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation in Santa Barbara, California and President of the Foundation since 1982, has devoted his life to educating, inspiring and urging world leaders and ordinary citizens to act with a sense of urgency in a quest to abolish nuclear weapons.

    The United States’ nuclear strategy was built on the notion of mutually assured destruction: if any nation attacked the United States, we would respond by total and complete destruction of the attacking nation. To pursue such a strategy the United States built an enormous nuclear arsenal with various response capabilities. To be able to withstand a first strike and retaliate, the US plan was to deploy our nuclear arsenal in the air, at sea and from land-based missiles scattered across the country. With such an overwhelming ability to destroy any adversary, we were coaxed into believing no one would dare attack us. Such a false sense of security left other nations deciding they too must arm themselves with nuclear weapons, thus further perpetuating the false notion of security.  In spite of the fact that the US and Russia have actually reduced their nuclear weapons, other nations continue to seek, or are believed to be seeking, a nuclear capability.

    In his book ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, David Krieger’s piece by piece analysis of the arguments in support of our continued reliance on nuclear deterrence convincingly demonstrates that it is a doomed and failed long-range strategy for world peace and security.  He grapples with such questions as:  Do we really want to have the fate of the world and future generations entrusted to an ever changing cadre of world leaders who often govern under intense pressure (politically and emotionally) and stress?; Under such circumstances can these leaders be trusted to act prudently for the well-being of all humankind?; If nuclear deterrence is so effective, why has the United States spent billions of dollars on missile defense systems?; Have those systems and nuclear arsenal stopped the attacks of 9/11? On the USS Cole? On our embassies in Africa and elsewhere?

    With the fall of the Soviet Union, perhaps we have become complacent about the danger posed by nuclear weapons. ZERO awakens us to the dangers, costs, and absurdity of our reliance on these weapons for our security because, in reality, with them we are less secure. Krieger astutely observes that as long as the nine nations of the world’s “nuclear club” rely on the false notion of nuclear deterrence, we can expect nuclear war to loom over the future of the world.

    Remembering the Hibakusha (the name given a person who survived the atomic bombs dropped on Japan), ZERO draws on the all too real, personal and intimate horrors nuclear war inflicts on all, individually and collectively, by relating the story of Miyoko Matsubara, a Hibakusha. Miyoko, 13 years old when the US dropped its atomic bombs on her country, describes how after the explosions her friend, Takiko, “simply disappeared from my sight.” Miyoko learned English so she could tell her story not to heap on us a sense of guilt and shame, but simply and quietly to give us a deeper understanding of the impact of weapons of mass destruction. She challenges us to become more aware of the world and a future we must avoid. Krieger’s book accepts that challenge by attempting to raise our consciousness and calling us to act in reducing nuclear weapons so there will not be a future of Hibakusha and others simply disappearing from our sight.

    In the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu::

    “This book makes a clear and persuasive case for why we must move urgently and globally to zero nuclear weapons. It should be required reading for all citizens of Earth.”

    No matter your level of understanding on this all-important issue, ZERO is a concise and thoughtful book which will better your understanding of the development, history and proliferation of nuclear weapons and why nuclear disarmament is necessary for a secure world. It is an essential addition to your list of must reads.

    ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition is available online at the NAPF Peace Store or fromamazon.com.

    Barry Ladendorf is a lawyer based in San Diego and is a member of Veterans for Peace Hugh Thompson Chapter 091.

  • Envisioning a World Without Nuclear Weapons

    Book Review

    ZERO: THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION by David Krieger (published in 2013 by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation); $14.95

    I have known David Krieger for the past twenty-five years, and he has never wavered, even for a day, from his lifelong journey dedicated to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war. If I were given to categorization, I would label such an extraordinary engagement with a  cause as an instance of ‘benign fanaticism.’ Unfortunately, from the perspective of the human future, it is a condition rarely encountered, posing the puzzle as to why Krieger should be so intensely inclined, given his seemingly untraumatized background. He traces his own obsession back to his mother’s principled refusal to install a nuclear bomb shelter in the backyard of their Los Angeles home when he was 12 years old. He comments in the Preface to ZERO that even at the time he “hadn’t expected” her to take such a stand, which he experienced as “a powerful lesson in compassion,” being especially moved by her unwillingness “to buy into saving herself at the expense of humanity.” (xiv). Nine years later after Krieger graduated from college his mother was again an instrumental force, giving him as a graduation present a trip to Japan to witness first-hand “what two nuclear weapons had done to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (xiv) The rest is, as they say, ‘history.’ Or as Krieger puts it in characteristic understatement, “[t]hose visits changed my life.” (xiv)

    On a psychological level, I remain perplexed by two opposite observations: we still lack the key that unlocks the mystery of Krieger’s unwavering dedication and why so few others have been similarly touched over the years. What ZERO does better than any of Krieger’s earlier books on nuclear weapons, and indeed more comprehensively and lucidly than anyone else anywhere, is to provide the reader with the reasons for thinking, feeling, and acting with comparable passion until the goal of abolishing the totality of nuclear weaponry is finally reached. Krieger himself extensively explores and laments the absence of widespread anti-nuclear dedication and tries to explain it by calling attention to a series of factors: ignorance, complacency, deference to authority, sense of powerlessness, fear, economic advantage, conformity, marginalization, technological optimism, tyranny of experts. (90-92) The argument of the book, concisely developed in a series of short essays is reinforced by some canonical documents in the struggle over the decades to rid the world of nuclear weaponry, including Obama’s Prague Speech of 2009, the Einstein/Russell Manifesto of 1955, and Joseph Rotblat’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech of 1995.

    Krieger’s approach as an author is multi-layered, and includes analytic critiques of conventional strategic wisdom that finds a security role for nuclear weapons, a worked out conception of how a negotiated international treaty could safely by stages move the world toward the zero goal of abolition, poems that seek to recapture the various existential horrors of nuclear war, essays of appreciation for the courage, commitment, and insight of the hibakusha (Japanese survivors of the 1945 atomic attacks), and a concerted inquiry into what needs to happen to make nuclear disarmament a viable political project rather than nothing more than a fervent hope. For a short book of 166 pages this is a lot of ground to cover, but Krieger manages to do it with clarity, a calm demeanor, and an impressive understanding and knowledge of all aspects of this complex question of how best to deal with nuclear weapons given the realities of the early 21st century.

    Krieger is not afraid to take on critics, even those who tell him that his quest is ‘silly’ because the nuclear genie, a favorite metaphor of liberal apologists for the status quo, is out of the bottle, and cannot be put back. Krieger acknowledges that the knowledge is now in the public domain, and cannot be eliminated, but makes a measured and informed case for an assessment that the nuclear disarmament process poses far fewer risks than does retaining the weaponry, and that retaining the weaponry exposes humanity to what he believes to be the near certainty that nuclear weapons will be used in the future with likely apocalyptic results. For Krieger the stakes are ultimate: human survival and the rights of future generations. In other words, given his strongly held opinion that the weaponry will be used at some point in the future with disastrous results, there is for him no ethically, politically, and even biologically acceptable alternative to getting rid totally of nuclear weapons. Krieger argues both from a worldview that regards nuclear weapons as intrinsically wrong because of the kind of suffering and devastation that they cause and consequentially because of their threat to civilization and even species survival.

    Ever since I have known David Krieger he has been deeply influenced by Albert Einstein’s most forceful assertion: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Krieger even gifts his readers with an imagined dialogue between Einstein and the most celebrated interrogator of all time, Socrates. In their exchange, Socrates is convinced by Einstein that the necessary adjustments “won’t come from our leaders.”(85) Socrates gets the point in a manner that unsurprisingly resonates with Krieger: “Then the people must be awakened, and they must demand an end to war, and a world free of nuclear weapons.” (85) There is a certain ambiguity in this statement when placed in the larger context of Krieger’s thought and work: is it necessary to end war as a social institution in order to get rid of nuclear weapons? In one way, most of Krieger’s efforts seem to separate nuclear weapons from the wider context of war making, but from time to time, there is a fusion of these two agendas.

    Krieger realizes that changing our modes of thinking is a necessary step toward zero but it is not sufficient. He also believes that we cannot achieve a world without nuclear weapons unless we act “collectively and globally” (97) to create a sustainable future. In the end, there is some ground for hope: “We have the potential to assert a constructive power for change that is greater than the destructive power of the weapons themselves.”  In effect, Krieger is telling us that what we can imagine we can achieve, but not without an unprecedented popular mobilization of peace minded people throughout the entire planet. Above all, Krieger wants to avoid a counsel of despair: “We must choose hope and find a way to fight for the dream of peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons. Achieving these goals is the great challenge of our time, on their success rests the realization of all other goals and for a more and decent world.” (105). Certainly Krieger has founded and brilliantly administered the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation over the course of more than 25 years maintaining faith of its growing band of followers with this uplifting vision. Such single mindedness is probably essential to motivate people of good will to support the endeavor, and to keep his own compass fixed over time, even in the face of many discouragements, on the destination he has identified as the one sanctuary capable of ensuring a desirable future for humanity. Although sharing all of Krieger’s assessments, values, and visions, I am both less hopeful and not as focused, being committed to other indispensable policy imperatives (addressing the global challenge of climate change) and to more proximate ends that involve current injustices (seeking realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people; seeking a UN Emergency Peace Force to intervene to protect vulnerable people facing humanitarian or natural catastrophes), but I would not for a minute encourage Krieger to dilute his anti-nuclear posture. This country and the world needs his message and dedication, and at some point, there may emerge a conjuncture of forces that is unexpectedly receptive to the vision of a world without nuclear weapons and even entertains the prospect of ending the war system as the foundation of national and global security. I can only pray that it will not emerge in the aftermath of some intended or accidental use of nuclear weapons, which seems sadly to be the only alarm bell that is loud enough to have an awakening effect for the sleeping mass of humanity.

    From my vantage point such an anti-nuclear moment is not yet visible on the horizon of possibilities. After all, the Kissinger, Shultz, Nunn, and Perry call a few years ago for abolition, emanating from these high priests of political realism, despite being widely noticed at the time, had no lasting impact on the pro-nuclear consensus that guides the policymaking elites of the nine nuclear weapons states, and most of all the American establishment. And then Barack Obama’s 2009 call in Prague for a world without nuclear weapons, although qualified and conditional, was essentially abandoned even in the recent articulation of the president’s goals for his second term. Presumably, Obama’s advisory entourage pushed him to concentrate his energy on attainable goals such as immigration and tax reform, protecting entitlements, and retreating from the several fiscal cliffs, and not waste his limited political capital on the unattainable such as nuclear disarmament and a just peace between Israel and Palestine. Short-term political calculations within the Beltway almost always trump long-term visionary goals, “and so it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut taught us to say in our helplessness in the face of the unyielding cruelty of human experience.

    In the end, after this adventure of response to the life and work of a dear friend, admired collaborator, and inspirational worker for peace and justice, I can only commend David Krieger’s ZERO to everyone with the slightest interest in what kind of future we are bestowing upon our children and grandchildren. The book can be obtained via the following two links: it is preferred that ZERO is ordered through the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at its online Peace Store:https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/menu/store/books/zero_the_case.htm

    It can also be ordered at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Zero-Nuclear-Weapons-AbolitionVolume/dp/1478342846/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1361902143&sr=8-2&keywords=zero+krieger

    Richard Falk is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and NAPF Senior Vice President.
  • War No More: A Book Review

    War No More: A Book Review

    War No More by Robert Hinde and Joseph Rotblat.
    London: Pluto Press, 2003. 228 pages.

    This book is a service to humanity. It makes the case that war is no longer a viable way of resolving conflicts and that the institution of war must be abolished. Both of the authors are scientists who have given considerable thought to the role that science and technology have played in increasing the dangers of war and bringing humanity to the brink of annihilation. The authors bring broad experience and wisdom to their task of finding a way out of the culture of war.

    Joseph Rotblat was a Manhattan Project scientist during World War II. He left the project in its latter stages when he understood that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic bomb and, therefore, that a US atomic bomb would not be necessary to deter them from using one. Under the circumstances of World War II, he was willing to help create an atomic weapon to deter the Nazis, but he was not willing to contribute to the creation of such a weapon for any other purpose. He was the only scientist to leave the project as a matter of conscience.

    After walking away from the US project to create an atomic weapon, Rotblat has spent more than 50 years working against nuclear weapons and against war. In 1955, he was one of the original eleven signers of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto that tried to warn the world about the extreme dangers of continuing the nuclear arms race. Shortly after this, he was instrumental in forming the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, an international organization of scientists that has worked diligently to bring to the public scientific perspectives on the dangers of the nuclear arms race and other manifestations of militarism. In 1995, Rotblat and Pugwash were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

    On his 90th birthday, Professor Rotblat announced that his short-term goal was to abolish nuclear weapons and that his long-term goal was to abolish war. You have to admire this vision and determination in someone entering his tenth decade of life.

    Robert Hinde, who served as a Royal Air Force pilot in World War II, is a distinguished professor at Cambridge University and long-time participant in the Pugwash movement. He is noted for his work in biology and psychology.

    This book grew from a Pugwash Conference at Cambridge in the year 2000 on “Eliminating the Causes of War.” The authors describe the book as an attempt to disseminate the message of the conference more widely. It is also, of course, a concrete step in attempting to realize Professor Rotblat’s long-term goal of a world without war.

    The authors believe that to bring the institution of war to an end, it is necessary to understand it better. They pose the questions: “What are the factors that contribute to the outbreak of war? Why are people willing to go to war? What can be done to prevent war?” The book then provides important facts, figures, charts and perspectives in an attempt to answer these questions. In the first major section of the book the authors deal with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, making it abundantly clear why 21st century wars jeopardize the future of civilization and humanity itself.

    In the second major section of the book, the authors explore the factors that make war more likely. In doing so, they look at the role of political systems and political leaders, culture and tradition, resources, economic factors and human nature. The authors find that none of the traditional explanations are sufficient in and of themselves to an understanding of why wars occur. They suggest that insights may be found in the complex interrelationships between nations, political and economic systems, and the personalities of political leaders. One of their conclusions is: “Every war depends on multiple, interacting causes, but one factor is essential – the availability of weapons.”

    In the third major section of the book, the authors examine what should be done to eliminate war. In this section they delve into possible solutions to ending war, including factors that stop countries from going to war, arms control, peace education, organizations (from the United Nations to civil society groups), and intervention and means of conflict resolution. This section offers a fascinating overview of the direction in which humanity must move if it is to succeed in ending “the scourge of war.”

    In the final chapter in the book, an epilogue on “Eliminating Conflict in the Nuclear Age,” the authors offer a sense of how far we are from realizing the noble and necessary goals they seek. “At the time of writing, in 2003,” they state, “the general world situation is far from being a happy one; indeed, as far as the nuclear peril is concerned it is much worse than would have been expected 14 years after the end of the nuclear arms race…. To a large extent this is a result of the policies of the only remaining superpower, the United States of America, particularly the George W. Bush administration.” The authors express concern that the Iraq War, “threatening the guidelines of…morality in the conduct of world affairs and adherence to the rules of international law,” may be “a portent of the shape of things to come.”

    The authors plead that this must not be allowed to happen: “We cannot allow the products of billions of years of evolution to come to an end. We are beholden to our ancestors, to all the previous generations, for bequeathing to us the enormous cultural riches that we enjoy. It is our sacred duty to pass them on to future generations. The continuation of the human species must be ensured. We owe an allegiance to humanity.” They recognize that it is in the competing allegiances, to the nation and to humanity, that a solution to the immense problem of war may be found. They argue that “a process of education will be required at all levels: education for peace, education for world citizenship.” This is undoubtedly the greatest challenge of our time: how can we educate the people of the world to give their loyalty to humanity and withdraw their consent from war?

    I have only two concerns regarding the book. First, I think the subtitle, “Eliminating Conflict in the Nuclear Age,” is not quite accurate. It is likely that there will always be conflicts. The challenge is assuring that these conflicts are resolved by peaceful rather than violent means. Second, I fear that the book will not reach a wide enough audience. Its message is so critical to our common future that it deserves as broad a readership as possible.

    This book can play a role in the process of education. Were I to teach a course on Peace and War, I would happily select this book as a text. It would be an exciting prospect to explore with students the issues of peace and war set forth by Professors Hinde and Rotblat. The book is a challenge to our political imaginations, to our understanding of the world, and to our personal responsibility for exercising, in the words of the authors, “our paramount duty to preserve human life, to ensure the continuity of the human race.” But reaching students is not enough; the ideas in the book must reach ordinary citizens throughout the world and, through them, their leaders.

    A short Foreword to the book was written by Robert McNamara, who was the US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. McNamara offers this advice: “It is not good enough to leave it to the politicians. The politicians are in reality servants of the people, not their masters.” In the film, “Fog of War, Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara,” this important insight about the role of citizens in relation to politicians does not make it into the eleven lessons. Yet, it may, in fact, be McNamara’s most important insight.

    I would like to see a filmmaker such as Errol Morris, who was responsible for the McNamara documentary, prepare a similar film on Rotblat and Hinde. The lessons they set forth in War No More, if understood broadly enough, just might save our world.

     

    *David Krieger is the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and the Deputy Director of the International Network of Scientists and Engineers for Global Responsibility (INES).