Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: nuclear attack

  • Scenarios for Nuclear Catastrophe

    In a recent article that I wrote, “British Petroleum, Imagination and Nuclear Catastrophe,” I argued we should use the occasion of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to imagine scenarios in which a nuclear catastrophe could take place.  The reason for imagining such scenarios should be obvious: to keep them from occurring.  

    Here is a proposition: Continued offshore oil drilling runs the risk of future offshore oil leak catastrophes that will destroy large aquatic and shoreline habitats.  Applied to nuclear weapons, the proposition could be restated in this way: Continued reliance on nuclear weapons runs the risk of future nuclear catastrophes that will destroy cities, countries and civilization.

    In my article, I proposed four of many possible scenarios that could be envisioned.  These scenarios involved a terrorist bomb on a major city somewhere in the world; an Indo-Pakistan nuclear war; an accidental nuclear launch by Russia, leading to a nuclear exchange with the US; and a nuclear attack by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il on Japan and South Korea.  

    These scenarios elicited responses that I would like to share.  The first response, from South Korea, expressed the opinion that Kim Jong-Il would not make a preemptive nuclear attack.  The writer said, “I agree with your imagined scenarios except for the following: …Kim Jong-Il is not so irrational that he would attack Japan and South Korea for not receiving development assistance.  He and North Korean officials usually say that they would attack only in the case of being attacked….”  This may be true, but it remains difficult to predict which leaders will act rationally and which will not.  It seems certain, though, that all leaders will not act rationally at all times with regard to nuclear weapons, and that deterrence theory, at a minimum, requires rational decision makers.

    The second and third responses imagine other scenarios.  The second response focuses on Israel: “You forget one other horrible scenario: Israel decides to preemptively bomb Tehran and Isfahan, because they ‘fear for their own safety.’ Armed with nukes, and in the name of ‘Civil Defense,’ rogue Israel thumbs its nose at the world again and takes out parts of Iran….”  Would Israel initiate a nuclear attack under certain circumstances, such as a major threat from Arab countries?  The truth is that we do not know under what conditions Israel, or any other nuclear weapon state, would initiate such an attack.

    The third response, from South Africa, focuses on the possibility of a US initiated nuclear attack: “In your scenarios you do not imagine the US pressing the nuclear button.   The United States is beyond question the most aggressive nation in the world and remains among the most recalcitrant in signing peace and environmental protocols.  As a person who lives outside the United States, I feel most threatened by the US.  The US does not negotiate, at the heart of which is compromise for the greater good.   Narrow interests are pursued relentlessly – even to the detriment of US citizens.”

    The response continued, “I was appalled to receive by email photos of a US warship recently launched.   It was built from the scrap metal of the Twin Towers and named ‘Never Forget’ or some such title.   I don’t believe that honors the lives lost.  What would have honored them would be a ship custom built to deliver aid, medical services, etc. to disaster areas and developing countries.   I do believe citizens in the US, so many of whom are brought up on the myth that the US is always in the right, should recognize their own potential to be the ultimate aggressors in the use of nuclear weapons.  They use every other weapon of destruction – Agent Orange, cluster bombs, etc.  Why should they hold back on nuclear weapons?”

    Would the US initiate a nuclear attack?  The answer is the same for the US or any other nuclear weapon state: We don’t know.  What we do know is that the leaders of countries that possess nuclear weapons are essentially holding the world, including their own citizens, hostage to the potential catastrophic consequences of using these weapons.

    Deterrence can fail in many ways, some of which we cannot foresee, and it may be the unforeseeable scenarios that are most dangerous.  We don’t know what the trigger may be, only that we are playing with nuclear fire.  The Gulf of Mexico recovery from the British Petroleum oil spill may take decades.  For civilization to recover from nuclear war could take centuries and might not be possible.  The oil spill in the Gulf has provided us an opportunity to awaken to the nuclear dangers that confront us and to act.  The question remains: Will we seize this opportunity?

  • Nuclear Disarmament Now

    This paper was presented to the 2009 meeting of the Federation of Analytical Chemistry and Spectroscopy Societies

    Our topic today is “Nuclear Disarmament Now.” In speaking on that subject, I will address four key points, the first being a discussion of some of the main reasons why nuclear disarmament is urgently needed. The second point will focus on an action plan developed by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation of Santa Barbara, California for advancing President Obama’s nuclear disarmament agenda. (Incidentally, for the remainder of this presentation I shall refer to the organization as the Foundation). Thirdly, we will discuss U.S. plans for the weaponization of space as an obstacle to global nuclear disarmament; and finally, I will discuss the campaign for a nuclear-free world which was recently launched by the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Security, and what you can do to help with that effort.

    At the outset, lets take a look at some of the critical issues that surround nuclear weapons and why they need to be eliminated from Planet Earth. First, they are extremely dangerous, and literally threaten to make human beings an endangered species. The exact number of nuclear weapons in possession of each of the nine nuclear weapons states is a closely held national secret. Nevertheless, publicly available information and occasional leaks make it possible to obtain best estimates about the size and composition of the national nuclear weapon stockpiles. More than a decade and a half after the Cold War ended, the world’s combined stockpile remains at a very high level, i.e., more than 23,300 warheads. According to Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists more than 8,109 of these warheads are considered operational, of which approximately 2,200 U.S. and 2,200 Russian weapons are on high alert, ready for use on short notice. (1)

    In case of a nuclear weapons alert, the Russian President has three minutes to decide whether or not to launch an attack on the U.S. The U.S. president has 8 minutes to decide if he receives such an alert. Launch to landing time for Russian missiles is about 25 minutes. Launch to landing time for U.S. missiles is approximately 10 minutes. (2)

    During the past 64 years, there have been dozens of incidents, accidents and errors with nuclear weapons, including several near misses. One of those near misses occurred in early September, 1983, when tension between the Soviet Union and the United States was very high. Not only had the Soviet military downed a Korean passenger plane, but the United States was also conducting exercises in Europe that focused on the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the Soviets – a situation that led some Soviet leaders to worry that the West was planning a nuclear attack. To make matters worse, an unanticipated variable was thrown into the mix. On September 26, 1983, the alarms in a Soviet early warning bunker, just South of Moscow sounded as computer screens indicated that the United States had launched a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The officer in charge of the bunker and its 200 officers and enlisted personnel was Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov. It was his job to monitor incoming satellite signals and to report directly to the Russian early warning headquarters if indicators revealed that a U.S. missile attack was underway. Years later, Col. Petrov said: ” I felt as if I had been punched in my nervous system. There was a huge map of the States with a U.S. base lit up, showing that the missiles had been launched.”

    ” For several minutes Petrov held a phone in one hand and an intercom in the other as alarms continued blaring, red lights blinking, and computers reporting that U.S. missiles were on their way. In the midst of this horrific chaos and terror, with the prospect of the end of civilization itself, Petrov made a historic decision not to alert higher authorities, believing in his gut and hoping with all that is sacred, that contrary to what all the sophisticated equipment was reporting, this alarm was an error… As agonizing minutes passed, Petrov’s decision proved correct. It was a computer error that signaled a U.S. attack.” (3)

    “Had Petrov obeyed standard operating procedures by reporting the erroneous attack, Soviet missiles could have devastated all major U.S. cities and the Pentagon would have retaliated. In reviewing the incident, Petrov concluded that a nuclear war could have broken out and the whole world could have been destroyed. On Dateline NBC, November 12, 2000, Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, and himself a former U.S. Minuteman missile launch officer said: ” I think this is the closest we’ve come to accidental nuclear war.” (4)

    On January 25, 1995, another potentially disastrous early warning error occurred when a Russian radar mistook a U.S. weather research rocket launched from Norway as an incoming nuclear strike from a U.S. Trident submarine. Even though the United States had notified Russia it would launch a non-military weather research rocket, those in control of Russia’s strategic nuclear weapons did not receive the message. Fortunately, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, a man with a drinking problem, who had three minutes to order a retaliatory strike, elected to “ride out” the crisis and did not launch the thousands of nuclear tipped missiles available on his command. (5) As previously mentioned, there have been many serious mishaps since the beginning of the nuclear age. For a comprehensive list by date, see: www.nuclearfiles.org.

    In addition to the dangers posed by the nuclear threat systems, there are other basic reasons for abolishing them. Not only are they extremely dangerous, they are also illegal, immoral, environmentally destructive and very expensive. They kill men, women and children indiscriminately and are virtually unlimited in their effects.

    In addressing the illegality of nuclear deterrence, University of Illinois Professor of International Law, Frank Boyle quotes the 1996 World Court Advisory Opinion on Nuclear weapons which says: ” States must never make civilians the object of attack, and must consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets.” He goes on to say: “… U.S. strategic nuclear weapons systems do indeed make civilians the direct object of attack, and because of their incredible explosive power are also incapable of distinguishing between civilian and military targets.” (6)

    In analyzing the immorality of nuclear weapons, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church has developed a resolution titled “Nuclear Disarmament The Zero Option”, which states: ” Now is the time to exercise the zero option to eliminate all nuclear weapons throughout the globe.” In keeping with that pronouncement, the Conference approved the following statement of commitment and action which says: ” We affirm the finding that nuclear weapons, whether used or threatened, are grossly evil and morally wrong. As an instrument of mass destruction, nuclear weapons slaughter the innocent and ravage the environment. When used as instruments of deterrence, nuclear weapons hold innocent people hostage to political and military purposes. Therefore, the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is morally corrupt and spiritually bankrupt. Therefore, we affirm the goal of total abolition of all nuclear weapons throughout Earth and Space.” I don’t think there is a better way to say it. Nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence are unquestionably morally corrupt and spiritually bankrupt. (7)

    In 1983, Cornell University Professor Carl Sagan and four other NASA scientists conducted an in-depth study of the possible atmospheric consequences of nuclear war. The study concluded that the gigantic fires caused by nuclear detonation in cities and industrial areas would cause millions of tons of smoke to rise into the Earth’s atmosphere. There the smoke would block most sunlight, causing average temperatures on Earth’s surface to rapidly cool to Ice Age levels.

    The 1983 study was repeated by Professor R.P. Turco of UCLA and Professor O.B. Toon of the University of Colorado, and others. The new research modeled a range of nuclear conflicts beginning with a “regional” nuclear war between India and Pakistan, then a “moderate” nuclear war which used about one third of the current global nuclear arsenals (equivalent to the nuclear weapons now kept on launch-ready, high alert status by the U.S. and Russia), and lastly, a full scale nuclear conflict using the entire global arsenal. The new research substantiated the original 1983 findings, and found that smoke could actually remain in the stratosphere for at least a decade. A large nuclear conflict would cause crop-killing nightly frosts for more than a year in the world’s large agricultural regions, destroy massive amounts of the protective ozone layer, and lead to the collapse of many ecosystems and starvation among most people.

    Recently, my University of Missouri colleague, Steven Starr published a summary of the 2006 studies in the Bulletin of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation. In that article, Steve states: ” U.S. researchers have confirmed the scientific validity of “nuclear winter” and have demonstrated that any conflict which targets even a tiny fraction of the nuclear arsenal against large urban centers will cause disruption of the global climate.” To view that summary, simply Google www.nucleardarkness.org. (8)

    A final reason for abolishing nuclear weapons is the high cost of nuclear security spending. According to Stephen Schwartz and Deepti Choubey ” nuclear security spending is the amount of money the United States spends to operate, maintain and upgrade its nuclear arsenal; defend against nuclear attack; prevent the further spread of nuclear weapons, weapons materials, technology, and expertise; manage and clean up radioactive and toxic waste left over from decades of nuclear production, and compensate victims of past productive and testing activities; and prepare for the consequences of a nuclear or radiological attack.”

    “Total appropriations for nuclear weapons and related programs in fiscal year 2008 were at least 52.4 billion dollars. That’s not counting related costs for classified programs, air defense, anti-submarine warfare, and most nuclear weapons-related intelligence programs, of which only 5.2 billion dollars is spent on preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, weapons materials, technology and expertise” (9) Since the dawn of the nuclear age, the cost of U.S. nuclear weapons research, development, testing, deployment and maintenance has exceeded 7.5 TRILLION dollars. Clearly the abolition of nuclear weapons will free up billions of dollars for health, education and other human development programs.

    So, what is needed to rid the world of these deadly, obscene devices? In June, 2009, the Board of Directors of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation adopted a five-point action plan to guide the Foundation’s work through the end of 2010. The preface to the plan states: ” The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation seeks a world free of nuclear weapons. We believe that nuclear arms reductions and the stabilization of nuclear dangers are not ends in themselves, but must be viewed in the context of achieving the total elimination of nuclear weapons. This is a matter that affects the future well-being , even survival, of the human race.” In this light the Foundation is pursing the following five-point action program:

    First, we support a meaningful replacement treaty for the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty between the United States and Russia. This treaty expires on December 2009. Under President Obama’s leadership, the U.S. and Russia have embarked upon negotiations for a replacement treaty. The Foundation will press for a replacement treaty that has deep and verifiable reductions in the number of nuclear weapons on each side; one that reduces the high-alert status of the weapons on each side, and one that includes a legally binding commitment to NO FIRST USE of nuclear weapons. To this end, we will seek to form a coalition of like-minded organizations to put forward recommendations for a new treaty, to educate the public on the importance of such a treaty, and to lobby the Senate for the treaty’s ratification.

    Second, we hope to secure a NO FIRST USE commitment from the United States. President Obama has called for reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, but he has not referred to the possibility of making a legally binding commitment to NO FIRST USE of nuclear weapons. We believe that such a commitment would be an essential step in downplaying the role of nuclear weapons in military strategy. We will educate the public and lobby the Obama Administration to make a legally binding commitment to NO FIRST USE of nuclear weapons and seek such commitments from other nuclear weapons states as well.

    Third, We seek U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The U.S. has signed but not ratified the CTBT. President Obama has said, ‘To achieve a global ban on nuclear testing, my administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.’ The Foundation will work with other national organizations to achieve Senate ratification of the treaty.

    Fourth, We will promote a broad agenda for President Obama’s proposed Global Summit on Nuclear Security. President Obama has pledged to hold a Global Summit on Nuclear Security within the next year. He has called for this Global Summit in the context of preventing nuclear terrorism. We will seek to broaden the agenda of the Summit to include a full range of nuclear security issues beyond only the issue of nuclear terrorism. This would include consideration of the security risks of the current nuclear arsenals and the need to open negotiations on a treaty banning all nuclear weapons. The Foundation will engage in public education, including interviews and op-eds, and networking with other organizations to lobby the Obama administration.

    The fifth and final point of the 2009-10 Action Plan calls for a highly strengthened Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by assuring a successful NPT Review Conference in 20l0. The NPT is at the heart of efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The treaty also requires the nuclear weapons states to engage in good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament in all its aspects. We believe that the key to achieving the goals of the NPT rests upon the commitment of the nuclear weapons states to take meaningful actions to achieve their Article VI nuclear disarmament obligations. Following the 2009 Preparatory Committee meeting for the 2010 NPT Review Conference, the five nuclear weapons states (who are parties to the treaty, i.e., the U.S., Russia, UK, France and China), also known as the P5, issued a joint statement in which they said: ‘ Our delegations reiterate our enduring and unequivocal commitment to work towards nuclear disarmament, an obligation shared by all NPT states parties.’ These P5 states expressed their commitment to a new U.S.-Russian agreement to replace the Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty and to the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), as well as negotiations for a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. We believe that their case for strengthening the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will be far more persuasive if they also join in assuring a broad agenda for a Global Summit on Nuclear Security and join in making legally binding commitments to NO FIRST USE of nuclear weapons. Thus, these prospects for a successful NPT Review Conference in 2010 will be considerably enhanced if the first four points of the Foundation’s Action Plan are successful. (10)

    Clearly the Foundation’s Action Plan will require strong support by U.S. scientists and many other citizens if it is to have any chance for implementation. The good news is that most Americans are in favor of seriously addressing the various issues related to nuclear disarmament. A 2004 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Americans to be highly concerned about nuclear weapons. Clear majorities favored reducing their role and ultimately eliminating them under provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Eighty-four percent said that doing so was a “good idea”. An even higher 86 percent wanted the United States “… to do more to work with other nations toward eliminating their nuclear weapons. In each case, more that 70 percent of Republicans and 80 percent of Democrats and independents favored working toward elimination.” (11)

    The bad news is that some Americans, including several key Members of Congress are still victims of Cold War-era fear based thinking which argues that getting rid of nuclear weapons – even with open inspection and verification – would make us vulnerable. Additionally, there is another potential roadblock to genuine nuclear disarmament which centers on U.S. plans to deploy offensive weapons, including lasers, particle beams and rockets in outer space. The U.S. Air Force’s long term proposal known as ” Vision for 2020″ is a plan for the U.S. to weaponize outer space for military and commercial purposes and to deny access to outer space to other states. The provisions of the plan clearly show missile defenses for what they truly are: an early phase of militarization of space and, as such, part of an unprecedented, global offensive system masquerading as defense. (12) If the United States insists on the deployment of offensive weapons in outer space, it will be nearly impossible to convince Russia, China, and others to agree to the zero nuclear weapons option.

    On the U.S. domestic front there have also been a number of nuclear deterrence advocates and military analysts who have been highly critical of disarmament measures such as those outlined in the Foundation’s Action Plan, and of any efforts to halt the U.S. weapons in space program. The critics, including corporate producers of nuclear weapons, and other members of the military-industrial-academic-congressional complex, want absolutely no reduction in the tens of billions of dollars spent annually on nuclear weapons. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council: ” Hundreds of companies, large and small, are involved in nuclear weapons research, development, production and support. Each Department of Energy (DOE) facility is managed and operated by a corporate contractor. And, nuclear weapons components and delivery systems are manufactured by hundreds of prime and subcontractors” (13). Thus, lobbyists for giant companies such as Lockheed Martin, TRW, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and dozens of others will do everything in their power to prevent significant efforts for the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide. Consequently, a highly mobilized citizen movement will be needed to counter those vested interests.

    Therefore, we must speak out now to protect our nation, other nations, and our entire planet. We must challenge those who believe that ANYONE has a right to genocidal weapons. We must also challenge those who want to build a new generation of nuclear weapons and offensive killing devices in outer space. In doing so, we must vigorously seek support for the provisions of the Foundation’s Action Plan with its emphasis on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, full implementation of Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the elimination of all nuclear weapons from our Planet.

    In addressing challenges to the zero option, we must emphasize the fact that such thinking is no longer the sole possession of the historic nuclear disarmament organizations, nor those only on the political left. Neither is it a Utopian dream. To date, several retired U.S. generals, including Eugene Habiger and George Lee Butler, both former chiefs of the U.S. Strategic Command, have voiced support for measures such as those outlined in the Foundation’s Action Plan. Other well known political figures of both major political parties are also making the case for nuclear weapons abolition. For example, in a January 8, 2007 Wall Street Journal commentary titled ” A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, with former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia wrote: ” Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage – to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing this proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world… ”

    ” Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage. The effect could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible. We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.” (14)

    In my opinion, it is critical that scientists and engineers lead the way in achieving nuclear weapons abolition as suggested by Kissinger, Schultz, Perry, and Nunn. In 1995, when Joseph Rotblat received the Nobel Peace Prize, he appealed to his fellow scientists with the following statement: ” At a time when science plays such a powerful role in the life of society, when the destiny of the whole of mankind may hinge on the results of scientific research, it is incumbent on all scientists to be fully conscious of that role, and conduct themselves accordingly. I appeal to my fellow scientists to remember their responsibility to humanity …. The quest for a war-free world has a basic purpose: survival. But if in the process we learn to combine the essential with the enjoyable, the expedient with the benevolent, the practical with the beautiful, this will be an extra incentive to embark on this great task. Above all, remember you humanity.”

    On August 6, 2009 the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES) launched a campaign in support of that zero option. The first act of the campaign was the signing of an appeal titled “Scientists for a Nuclear Free World” by forty individuals, 28 of whom are Nobel Laureates. The goal of the campaign is to increase scientific as well as public awareness of nuclear weapons issues, and to add weight to calls for an international Nuclear Weapons Convention which obligates all states to achieve complete nuclear disarmament by 2020. The last four paragraphs of the appeal state:

    “Nuclear weapons were created by humans, and it is our responsibility to eliminate them before they eliminate us and much of the life on our planet. The era of nuclear weapons must be brought to an end. A world without nuclear weapons is possible, realistic, necessary and urgent.”

    “Therefore, we the undersigned scientists and engineers, call upon the leaders of the world, and particularly the leaders of the nine nuclear weapons states, to make a world free of nuclear weapons an urgent priority.”

    ” We further call on these leaders to immediately commence good faith negotiations as required by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, with the goal of achieving a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020.”

    ” Finally we call upon scientists and engineers throughout the world to cease all cooperation in the research, development, testing, production and manufacture of new nuclear weapons.” (14)

    For those who wish to participate in the INES campaign, there are several things you can do:

    – Sign the appeal individually or as an organization;

    – Publish the appeal on your website, or in your newsletter, and forward it to members of organizations to which you belong;

    – Collect as many signatures as possible within your network;

    – Promote the appeal through your organizations; and

    – Issue your own statement in support of our common cause.

    For those of you who wish to sign the petition immediately, please see me following this symposium. I will have copies for your reading, signing and distribution. I will also have copies of Nuclear Age Peace Foundation materials which suggest other nuclear disarmament eduction activities, including information on our newly produced DVD which is titled: ” U.S. Leadership for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World”.

    In closing, I want to quote my colleague, Rick Wayman, who is the Foundation’s Director of Programs: ” Now is the time to create a new equilibrium in the thinking of Americans. Public support is essential for strong U.S. leadership on the issue of nuclear weapons abolition. U.S. leadership is essential if progress is going to be made on the world stage. So the answer is simple. To change the reality of nuclear weapons, to reduce and then eliminate them, we must change thinking and grow the movement to support a new approach. Such a massive change in the public’s thinking is a major undertaking. But it is necessary. Otherwise, fear will carry the day. And the nuclear hawks will play on American insecurity to stymie progress and enshrine the status quo of thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons. True security will come only from global cooperation. We must be proactive. We must pioneer a new way of thinking in society. The goal of zero nuclear weapons must be accepted as the starting point of all discussions. To achieve this, we must rally the public”

    I sincerely hope you will join this effort.

     

    References

    1. Kristensen, Hans, Status of World Nuclear Forces 2009, http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html

    2. “Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert -Timeline to Catastrophe”, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Nov. 1997, pp. 74-81.

    3. Association of World Citizens, ” A Forgotten Hero of Our Time Honored with Special World Citizen Award”, ASSOCIATION OF WORLD CITIZENS NEWSLETTER, Fall 2004, p.1.

    4. Ibid., p-2

    5. Tri-Valley Committee Against Radioactive Environment (1999), Back from the Brink Aims to Reduce the Risk of Accidental Launch”, Press Release, http://www.trivalleycares.org/prnov99.htm

    6. Boyle, Francis A., “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence”, Nov. 14, 1997, https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/1997/11/14_boyle_criminality.htm

    7. United Methodist General Conference Resolution: ” Saying No to Nuclear Deterrence”, 1998, http://www.bishops.umc.org/interior_print.asp?mid=1038

    8. Starr, Steven “Catastrophic Climate Consequences of Nuclear Conflict, International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation, Information Bulletin 28, 2008; To view a pdf version of the article, Google www.nucleardarkness.org

    9. Schwartz, Stephen I. and Deepti Choubey, “How $52 Billion on Nuclear Security is Spent”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Fact Sheet, January 12, 2009.

    10. Krieger, David, 2009-10 Action Plan, Nuclear Peace Foundation, https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/articles/2009/06/17_krieger_action_plan.php

    11. Program on International Policy Attitudes, “Survey Says: Americans Back Arms Control”, reported by the Arms Control Association, http://www.armscontrol.org/print/1580

    12. U.S. Space Command, Vision for 2020, http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usspac/visbook.pdf

    13. Nunn Sam, Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry, ” A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 8, 2007.

    14. International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility, a petition titled: ” Scientists for a Nuclear Weapons-Free World”, http://www.inesglobal.com/campaigns.phtml

    Bill Wickersham is Adjunct Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia and a NAPF Peace Leader.

  • American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts

    This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg’s personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy, which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War.

    Click here for our special page containing Ellsberg’s memoir installments as they are released.

    One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.

    What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.”

    The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top Secret—Sensitive” document.

    Later, working in the Pentagon as the special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, I often found myself reading copies of cables and memos marked “Eyes Only” for someone, though I was not that addressee, nor for that matter was my boss. And already by the time I read this one, as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it was routine for me to read “Top Secret” documents. But I had never before seen one marked “For the President’s Eyes Only,” and I never did again.

    The deputy assistant to the president for national security, my friend and colleague Bob Komer, showed it to me. A cover sheet identified it as the answer to a question President John F. Kennedy had addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff a week earlier. Komer showed it to me because I had drafted the question, which Komer had sent in the president’s name.

    The question to the JCS was: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

    Their answer was in the form of a graph (see representation below). The vertical axis was the number of deaths, in millions. The horizontal axis was time, indicated in months. The graph was a straight line, starting at time zero on the horizontal—on the vertical axis, the number of immediate deaths expected within hours of our attack—and slanting upward to a maximum at six months, an arbitrary cutoff for the deaths that would accumulate over time from initial injuries and from fallout radiation.

    The lowest number, at the left of the graph, was 275 million deaths. The number at the right-hand side, at six months, was 325 million.

     

    That same morning, with Komer’s approval, I drafted another question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs over the president’s signature, asking for a total breakdown of global deaths from our own attacks, to include not only the whole Sino-Soviet bloc but all other countries that would be affected by fallout. Again their answer was prompt. Komer showed it to me about a week later, this time in the form of a table with explanatory footnotes.

    In sum, 100 million more deaths, roughly, were predicted in East Europe. There might be an additional 100 million from fallout in West Europe, depending on which way the wind blew (a matter, largely, of the season). Regardless of season, still another 100 million deaths, at least, were predicted from fallout in the mostly neutral countries adjacent to the Soviet bloc or China: Finland, Austria, Afghanistan, India, Japan and others. Finland, for example, would be wiped out by fallout from U.S. ground-burst explosions on the Soviet submarine pens at Leningrad. (The total number of “casualties”—injured as well as killed—had not been requested and was not estimated; nor were casualties from any Soviet retaliatory strikes.)

    The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily at the Soviet Union and China, would be roughly 600 million dead. A hundred Holocausts.

    * * *
    I remember what I thought when I held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, this piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project that had ever existed. There should be nothing on Earth, nothing real, that it referred to.

    But I knew what it dealt with was all too real. I had seen some of the smaller bombs myself, H-bombs with an explosive yield of 1.1 megatons each—equivalent to 1.1 million tons of high explosive, each bomb half the total explosive power of all the bombs of World War II combined. I saw them slung under single-pilot F-100 fighter-bombers on alert at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, ready to take off on 10 minutes’ notice. On one occasion I had laid my hand on one of these, not yet loaded on a plane. On a cool day, the smooth metallic surface of the bomb was warm from the radiation within: a bodylike warmth.

    I was in Okinawa in the fall of 1959 as part of a task force organized by the Office of Naval Research, which was there to study and improve nuclear command and control for the commander in chief of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), Adm. Harry D. Felt. I was on loan from the RAND Corp., which I had joined as a full-time employee in June 1959 after a previous summer there as a consultant. This particular study took us to every command post in the Pacific that year and the next—from Oahu to Guam, Tokyo, Taiwan and the command ship of the Seventh Fleet—with license from Adm. Felt to “talk to anyone, see anything” in the field of nuclear command and control.

    At Kadena, the pilots weren’t in the planes on alert or in the hut on the alert strip; they were allowed to be elsewhere, at the post exchange or in their quarters, because each was accompanied at all times by his individual jeep and driver to return him in minutes to the strip when an alert was sounded. They practiced the alert at least once a day. The officer in charge told our research group that we could choose the time for that day’s rehearsal. When our leader said “OK, now,” the klaxons sounded all over the area and jeeps appeared almost instantly on all the roads leading to the strip, rushing around curves, pilots leaping out as they reached the strip and scrambling into the cockpits, still tightening their helmets and gear. Engines started in 10 planes, almost simultaneously. Ten minutes.

    These were tactical fighter-bombers, with limited range. There were more than a thousand of them, armed with H-bombs, in range of Russia and China on strips like this or on aircraft carriers surrounding the Sino-Soviet bloc (as we still thought of it in 1961, though China and the Soviets had actually split apart a couple of years before that). Each of them could devastate a large city with one bomb. For a larger metropolitan area, it might take two. Yet the Strategic Air Command (SAC), which did not command these planes (they were under the control of theater commanders), regarded these tactical theater forces as so vulnerable, unreliable and insignificant as a factor in all-out nuclear war that SAC planners had not even included them in their calculations of the outcome of attacks in a general war until that year.

    Before 1961, planners at SAC headquarters took into consideration only attacks by the heavy bombers, intermediate-range ballistic missiles and ICBMs commanded by SAC, along with Polaris submarine-launched missiles. In the bomb bays of the SAC planes were thermonuclear bombs much larger than those I saw in Okinawa. Many were from five to 20 megatons in yield. Each 20-megaton bomb—1,000 times the yield of the fission bomb that destroyed Nagasaki—was the equivalent of 20 million tons of TNT, or 10 times the total tonnage the U.S. dropped in World War II. Some 500 bombs in the arsenal each had the explosive power of 25 megatons. Each of these warheads had more power than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.

    These intercontinental bombers and missiles had come to be stationed almost entirely in the continental U.S., though they might be deployed to forward bases outside it in a crisis. A small force of B-52s was constantly airborne. Many of the rest were on alert. I had seen a classified film of an incredible maneuver in which a column of B-58s—smaller than B-52s but still intercontinental heavy bombers—taxied down a runway and then took off simultaneously, rather than one at a time. The point—as at Kadena and elsewhere—was to get in the air and away from the field as fast as possible, on warning of an imminent attack, before an enemy missile might arrive. In the time it would normally have taken for a single plane to take off, a squadron of planes would be airborne, on its way to assigned targets.

    In the film these heavy bombers, each as big as an airliner, sped up in tandem as they raced down the airstrip, one behind the other so close that if one had slackened its pace for an instant the plane behind, with its full fuel load and its multiple thermonuclear weapons, would have rammed into its tail. Then they lifted together, like a flock of birds startled by a gunshot. It was an astonishing sight; it was beautiful.

    The planned targets for the whole force included, along with military sites, every city in the Soviet Union and China.

    On carriers, smaller, tactical bombers would be boosted on takeoff by a catapult, a kind of large slingshot. But since the general nuclear war plan, as I knew, called for takeoff around the world of as many U.S. planes and missiles as were ready at the time of the execute order—as near-simultaneously as possible—to attack targets that were all assigned in prior planning, the preparations contemplated one overall, inflexible global attack as if all the vehicles, with more than 3,000 warheads, were launched by a single catapult. A sling made for Goliath.

    The rigidity of the single, coordinated plan—which by 1961 included tactical bombers—in what was termed the Single Integrated Operational Plan, or SIOP, meant that its underlying “strategy” amounted to nothing more than a vast trucking operation to transport thermonuclear warheads to Soviet and Chinese cities and military sites. The latter were the great majority of targets, since all the cities could be destroyed by a small fraction of the attacking vehicles.

    One of the principal expected effects of this plan—partly intended, partly (in allied, neutral and “satellite” countries) unavoidable “collateral damage”—was summarized on the piece of paper I held that day in the spring of 1961: the extermination of over half a billion people.

    (In fact, this was certainly a vast underestimate of the fatalities. Dr. Lynn Eden, a scholar at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, has revealed in “Whole World on Fire” (Cornell, 2004) the bizarre fact that the war planners of SAC and the Joint Chiefs have—throughout the nuclear era, to the present day—deliberately omitted entirely from their estimates of the destructive effects of U.S. or Russian nuclear attacks the effects of fire. They have done so on the grounds that these effects are harder to predict than the effects of blast or fallout on which their estimates of fatalities are exclusively based. Yet the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons are known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war! Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks would surely have been double the figure on the summary I held in my hand—a billion people or more.)

    The declared intent of this planning deployment and rehearsal was to deter Soviet aggression. I knew by this time something that was rarely made clear to the American public, that what was to be deterred by all this was not only nuclear attacks by the Soviets but conventional, non-nuclear Soviet aggression, in Europe in particular. In both cases, the story went, it was all designed to prevent such Soviet attacks from ever taking place. This global machine had been constructed in hopes that it would never be set in motion: or, as it was often put, so that it would never be used. The official motto of SAC, on display at all its bases, was “Peace Is Our Profession.”

    Deterring Soviet non-nuclear aggression in Europe—say, a military occupation of West Berlin—depended ultimately on a presidential commitment to direct, if necessary, a U.S. nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union. SAC’s profession would shift near-instantaneously from Peace to War. The Strategic Air Command trained daily, and effectively, to be ready to carry out that order. The American commitment to defend NATO (with Berlin its most vulnerable element) by nuclear threats, and if necessary by strategic first-strike nuclear attacks, effectively passed the trigger for such U.S. attacks to the Soviets.

    The real possibility that the Soviets might pull that trigger lay at the heart of all our nuclear planning and preparations. It was understood that although deterrence was the principal objective of our nuclear posture, it was not foolproof. It might fail. That applied both to deterrence of nuclear attack and to deterrence of a conventional Soviet attack in Europe. In either case, it was not impossible that the Soviets would attack despite our threats and our best efforts to dissuade them.

    What to do then was a matter of highly classified discussion over the years. But on this question the official top-secret plans approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower were unequivocal: the demolition of the Sino-Soviet bloc.

    A striking and highly secret characteristic of the existing plans was that they called for essentially the same strategic response and targeting list for each of three quite distinct ways in which general war might come about. The first, and most likely in the judgment of the JCS, was a U.S. nuclear first strike as an escalation of conflict between U.S. and Soviet conventional forces, perhaps originating in conflict over Berlin or an uprising in East Europe. Second was U.S. pre-emption of an imminent Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S., or as I’d heard it described in the Pentagon, “striking second first.” Third—and least likely in the eyes of the JCS—was a retaliatory response to a successful Soviet surprise attack.

    Although the size of the U.S. force available for attack would be different in each of these cases, the Eisenhower-approved plans called for the same target list—which included 151 “urban-industrial targets,” i.e. cities, along with military targets—to be attacked under all conditions.

    The circumstances of war initiation, by determining the size of the force, would influence only the amount of coverage of the target list. Initial attacks would be as massive and as nearly simultaneous in arrival as possible. Attacks by all nonalert forces would follow as quickly as they could be launched. No forces would deliberately be held in reserve: an arrangement perhaps unique in the history of war planning.

    And in all three cases, all large cities of both the Soviet Union and China (even if China had no part in the crisis or hostilities triggering execution of this plan) were high on the list for initial, simultaneous missile attacks, and for subsequent coverage by bombers—along with the highest-priority Soviet missile sites, air bases, air defenses and command centers.

    In the White House in January 1961 I had informed the newly arrived assistant to the president for national security, McGeorge Bundy, of a number of little-known facts and problems. (How I came to this knowledge will be recounted later in this series.) One of these was the focus on U.S. first-strike plans in American preparations for any conflict with the Soviet Union involving forces above the level of a brigade. Another was Eisenhower’s approval of operational planning to destroy an “optimum mix” of population targets along with military sites no matter how the conflict had originated.

    A third subject in my briefing was the variety of ways in which the strategic forces might be triggered “by accident”: by false alarm, miscalculation, miscommunication, or actions not directly authorized by the president or perhaps by any high-level commander. (Exploring these possibilities in the field had been my special mission in the CINCPAC task force, and later as a RAND specialist in nuclear weapons “command and control.”)

    The last point in particular caught Bundy’s attention. I reported what I had learned in the Pacific, one of the most sensitive secrets in the system: that to forestall the possibility that our retaliatory response might be paralyzed either by a Soviet attack on Washington or by presidential incapacity, President Eisenhower had as of 1958 secretly delegated to theater commanders the authority to launch nuclear operations in a crisis, either in the event of the physical unavailability of the president—Eisenhower himself had suffered both a stroke and a heart attack in office—or if communications with Washington were cut off.

    I had further learned that CINCPAC, Adm. Felt, had likewise delegated that authority downward in his command, under like conditions. That put many fingers on the button if communications went out between Washington and Hawaii, or Hawaii and the Western Pacific. In those years such an outage occurred for each of these links, on average, once a day. Thus this arrangement magnified greatly the possibilities listed above for “inadvertent, accidental” nuclear war, especially when outages occurred during a potential nuclear crisis such as the Taiwan Straits (Quemoy) confrontation of 1958. (The response of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to this information will be addressed in my next installment.)

    The combined message of these reports was that our overall system for strategic response had the character of a giant thermonuclear mousetrap on a hair trigger. For a wide variety of provocative circumstances—definitely not requiring and most not involving either Soviet-initiated nuclear attacks or imminent expectation of them—it was set inflexibly to annihilate a large fraction of the civilian population of the Soviet Union and China, and of many allies and neutrals.

    My one-on-one briefing of Bundy in his first weeks in office—arranged by Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs—was in part the reason I was in a position to draft questions for the White House soon after. As it happened, I had drafted the question about estimated deaths from execution of the general war plans in the belief that the JCS did not know an answer to it. Officers I worked with in the planning staff of the Air Force were convinced that no one, either in the Joint Staff or the Air Staff, had ever calculated the overall human consequences of carrying out their plans. That encouraged me to ask the JCS in the name of a higher authority for an estimate, in the expectation they would be embarrassed by having to admit they could not answer it promptly.

    The authority I had in mind initially was the secretary of defense. (Although funding for RAND, including my salary, came mainly from the Air Force at that time, I was in effect on loan to the Office of the Secretary of Defense for much of 1961.) But as I’ve said, the question was picked up by the White House and sent in the president’s name. I had deliberately limited it, initially, to effects in the Soviet Union and China alone, instead of worldwide or in the Sino-Soviet bloc. That was to keep the Joint Staff from disguising its lack of any estimates at all by pleading a need for time to calculate casualties, say, in Albania, or the Southern Hemisphere.

    Alternatively, I expected the Joint Staff to improvise an estimate which could easily be exposed, to its embarrassment, as unrealistically low. The point of eliciting either of these expected responses was to gain bargaining power for the secretary of defense in a bureaucratic effort (discussed later) to change the JCS plans in the direction of guidance I had drafted for the secretary earlier that month.

    But my expectations were wrong. The Joint Chiefs were embarrassed neither by the question nor by their answer. That was the surprise, along with the answer itself. The implications, as I saw them, were literally existential, bearing on the nature and future of our species.

    I myself at that time was neither a pacifist nor a critic of the explicit logic of deterrence or its legitimacy. On the contrary, I had been urgently working with my colleagues to assure a survivable U.S. capability to threaten clearly unacceptable damage to the Soviet Union in response to the most successful possible Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S. But planned slaughter of 600 million civilians—10 times the total death count in World War II, a hundred times the scale of the Holocaust? That aimed-for accomplishment exposed a dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity, at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning and apparatus.

    I said earlier that I saw that day how the northern civilized world would end. I might have thought instead how it could end or might do so, but that wasn’t the conclusion I drew then. The chart I held in my hand that spring morning said to me that any confidence—worse, it seemed, any realistic hope—that the alert forces on either side might never be used was ill-founded.

    The Americans who had built this machine, knowing, it turned out, that it would kill more than half a billion people if it were turned on—and who were unabashed in reporting this to the president—humans like that would not fail to pull the switch if ordered to do so by a president, or, as I mentioned above and will discuss in the next installment, possibly by a superior other than the president.

    And the presidents themselves? A few months earlier, Dwight Eisenhower had secretly endorsed the blueprints of this multi-genocide machine. He had furthermore demanded largely for budgetary reasons that there be no other plan for fighting Russians. He had approved this single strategic operational plan despite reportedly being, for reasons I now understood, privately appalled by its implications. And the Joint Chiefs had responded so promptly to his successor’s question about the human impact of our planned attacks because they clearly assumed that John Kennedy would not, in response, order them to resign or be dishonorably discharged, or order the machine to be dismantled. (In that, it turned out, they were right.)

    Surely neither of these presidents actually desired ever to order the execution of these plans, nor would any likely successor want to take such an action. But they must have been aware, or should have been, of the dangers of allowing such a system to exist. They should have reflected on, and trembled before, the array of contingencies—accidents, false alarms, outages of communications, Soviet actions misinterpreted by lower commanders, unauthorized action—that might release pent-up forces beyond their control; and on possible developments that could lead them personally to escalate or launch a pre-emptive attack.

    Eisenhower had chosen to accept these risks. To impose them on humanity, and all other forms of life. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to my direct knowledge did likewise. So did Richard Nixon. To bring this story up to the present, there is much evidence—and none to the contrary—that the same has been true of every subsequent president.

    Two more aspects of their gambles were not known to me in 1961. Later accounts in this series will reveal that in the Quemoy crisis three years earlier and the Cuban missile crisis one year later—and to lesser extent in a couple of dozen other episodes—these risks came secretly closer to being realized than almost anyone recognizes to this day.

    Moreover, the scale of the potential catastrophe was and remains vastly greater than I or the JCS or any presidents imagined over the next 20 years. Not until 1982-83 did new calculations—recently confirmed—reveal that hemispheric and possibly global clouds of smoke and soot from the burning cities attacked by U.S. or Russian forces would block out sunlight for a prolonged period, lowering temperature drastically during spring and summer, freezing lakes and rivers and destroying crops worldwide. This “nuclear winter” could extinguish many forms of life and starve to death billions of humans.

    Yet the “option” of massive attacks on cities (or, euphemistically, upon industrial and military targets within or near cities) almost surely remains one among many planned alternatives, ready as ever to be carried out, within the strategic repertoire of U.S. and Russian plans and force readiness: this, a quarter-century after the discovery of the nuclear winter phenomenon.

    The U.S. and Russia currently each have about 10,000 warheads, over 2,000 of them operationally deployed. (Each has several thousand in reserve status—not covered in recent negotiations—and an additional 5,000 or so awaiting dismantlement). Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev have agreed to lower the operational warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 by the year 2012. But the explosion of 1,000 warheads together by the U.S. and Russia could trigger a full-scale nuclear winter. And recent studies show the possibility of ecological catastrophe from smoke effects on the ozone layer after a very much smaller exchange, such as could occur between India and Pakistan.

    A 2007 peer-reviewed study concluded that “the estimated quantities of smoke generated by attacks totaling little more than one megaton of nuclear explosives [two countries launching 50 Hiroshima-size bombs each] could lead to global climate anomalies exceeding any changes experienced in recorded history. The current global arsenal is about 5000 megatons.” A December 2008 study in Physics Today estimates that “the direct effects of using the 2012 arsenals [1,700 to 2,200 Russian and American warheads each] would lead to hundreds of millions of fatalities. The indirect effects [long-term, from smoke] would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.”

    It is the long-neglected duty of the American Congress to test these scientific findings against the realities of our secret war plans. It is Congress’ responsibility to investigate the nature of the planned targets for the reduced operational forces proposed by Obama and Medvedev—1,500 to 1,675—or some lower but still huge number like 1,000, and the foreseeable human and environmental consequences of destroying those targets with the attacks currently programmed.

    The questions to be addressed initially are simple: “How many cities would burn under our various preplanned ‘options’? How many humans would die from these various attacks—from blast, fire, fallout, smoke, soot and ozone depletion—in the target country, in its regional neighbors, in America, and worldwide?”

    And these, less simple: “For each of these possible attack options and exchanges, what is the likely, and the range of possible, impact on the regional and global environment? Which of our options, if any, threaten to produce regional or worldwide nuclear winter? Do we—or does any state—have a right to possess such an ‘option’? Should a U.S. or Russian president have the authority—or the power, as each now has—to order attacks that might have the global effects described above?”

    Our representatives in Congress should—for the first time—take on responsibility for learning about and influencing the possible human and environmental consequences of carrying out our operational nuclear war plans. But past experience makes clear that Senate or House members will not hold real investigative hearings, using committee subpoena powers, to penetrate the curtains of secrecy around these matters without a new level of pressure from American citizens. (To join some worthy efforts—which have not heretofore, in my judgment, focused sufficiently on congressional investigation or war planning—see here, here and here.)

    This is not a responsibility only for Americans and their representatives. The stakeholders directly threatened by the possibility, however unlikely, that Americans and Russians might launch a major fraction of their presently deployed nuclear forces against each other comprise all the citizens of every state on Earth.

    Every parliament in the world has an urgent need to know what its constituents have to expect—in the way of homicidal and environmental damage—from a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange: or for that matter, from an India-Pakistan exchange. These assemblies have a stake in discovering—and changing—the societal and ecological impact of the existent contingency war plans of every nuclear weapons state, the U.S. and Russia above all but the others as well. What is needed is a worldwide movement. Fortunately there are several efforts to join (see here, here, here, here and here), in keeping with President Obama’s declared goal of a world free of nuclear weapons.

    I felt sure in 1961 that the existent potential for moral and physical catastrophe—our government’s readiness to commit multi-genocidal extermination on a hemispheric scale by nuclear blast and fallout (no one knew yet of the global danger of ecocide and mass extinctions from smoke and ozone depletion)—was not only a product of aberrant Americans or a peculiarly American phenomenon. I was right. A few years later, after the Soviets were humiliated by the Cuban missile crisis and Nikita Khrushchev was ousted, the Kremlin set out to imitate our destructive capacity in every detail and surpass it when possible.

    To be sure, Americans, and U.S. Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. In World War II and for years afterward, there were only two air forces in the world, the British and American, that could so much as hope to do that.

    But the nuclear era put that demonic temptation—to deter, defeat or punish an adversary on the basis of an operational capability to annihilate most of its population—eventually within the reach of a great many nations. By the spring of ’61, four states (soon to be five, now nine) had, at great expense, bought themselves that capability. Humans just like these American planners—and presidents—were surely at work in every nuclear weapons state producing plans like these for nuclear attacks on cities. I knew personally many of the American planners, though apparently—from the fatality chart—not quite as well as I had thought. What was frightening was precisely that I knew they were not evil, in any ordinary, or extraordinary, sense. They were ordinary Americans, capable, conscientious and patriotic. I was sure they were not different, surely not worse, than the people in Russia who were doing the same work, or the people who would sit at the same desks in later U.S. administrations. I liked most of the planners and analysts I knew. Not only the physicists at RAND who designed bombs and the economists who speculated on strategy (like me), but the colonels who worked on these very plans, whom I consulted with during the workday and drank beer with in the evenings.

    That chart set me the problem, which I have worked on for nearly half a century, of understanding my fellow humans—us, I don’t separate myself—in the light of this real potential for self-destruction of our species and of most others. Looking not only at the last eight years but at the steady failure in the two decades since the ending of the Cold War to reverse course or to eliminate this potential, it is hard for me to avoid concluding that this potential is more likely than not to be realized in the long run.

    Are further proliferation and—what I have focused on here—the persistence of superpower nuclear arsenals that threaten global catastrophe a near-certainty? Is it too late to eliminate these dangers, in time? Some dark days I think so, as I did that morning in the White House. Most of the time I don’t, or I would not have tried as I have and still do to eliminate them, and I would not be using my time to begin this account of them.

    The story does get worse; see, for example, my next installment, “How Many Fingers on the Buttons?” The more one learns about the hidden history of the nuclear era—this is the cumulative message of this ongoing series—the more miraculous it seems that the doomsday machines which we and the Russians have built and maintained have not yet triggered each other. At the same time, the clearer it becomes that we could and that we must dismantle them.

     

    Daniel Ellsberg is a member of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Advisory Council and is currently a Foundation Distinguished Fellow. He worked in the State and Defense departments under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. He released the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg is the recipient of the Foundation’s 2005 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award.

  • A Criminal Idea

    Originally appeared in The Guardian’s Comment Is Free, January 25, 2008

     

    Attacking other countries to stop them acquiring nuclear weapons repudiates a key principle of international law

    Five former Nato generals, including the former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, have written a “radical manifesto” which states that “the West must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the ‘imminent’ spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.”

    In other words, the generals argue that “the west” – meaning the nuclear powers including the United States, France and Britain – should prepare to use nuclear weapons, not to deter a nuclear attack, not to retaliate following such an attack, and not even to pre-empt an imminent nuclear attack. Rather, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons by a non-nuclear state. And not only that, they should use them to prevent the acquisition of biological or chemical weapons by such a state.

    Under this doctrine, the US could have used nuclear weapons in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, to destroy that country’s presumed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons – stockpiles that did not in fact exist. Under it, the US could have used nuclear weapons against North Korea in 2006. The doctrine would also have justified a nuclear attack on Pakistan at any time prior to that country’s nuclear tests in 1998. Or on India, at any time prior to 1974.

    The Nuremberg principles are the bedrock of international law on war crimes. Principle VI criminalises the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression …” and states that the following are war crimes:

    “Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”

    To state the obvious: the use of a nuclear weapon on the military production facilities of a non-nuclear state will mean dropping big bombs on populated areas. Nuclear test sites are kept remote for obvious reasons; research labs, reactors and enrichment facilities need not be. Nuclear bombs inflict total devastation on the “cities, towns or villages” that they hit. They are the ultimate in “wanton destruction”. Their use against a state with whom we are not actually at war cannot, by definition, be “justified by military necessity”.

    “The west” has lived from 1946 to the present day with a nuclear-armed Russia; no necessity of using nuclear weapons against that country ever arose. Similarly with China, since 1964. To attack some new nuclear pretender now would certainly constitute the “waging of a war of aggression …” That’s a crime. And the planning and preparation for such a war is no less a crime than the war itself.

    Next, consider what it means to determine that a country is about to acquire nuclear weapons. How does one know? The facilities that Iran possesses to enrich uranium are legal under the non-proliferation treaty. Yes, they might be used, at some point, to provide fuel for bombs. But maybe they won’t be. How could we tell? And suppose we were wrong? Ambiguity is the nature of this situation, and of the world in which we live. During the cold war, ambiguity helped keep both sides safe: it was a stabilising force. We would not use nuclear weapons, under the systems then devised, unless ambiguity disappeared. But the generals’ doctrine has no tolerance for ambiguity; it would make ambiguity itself a cause for war. Thus, causes for war could be made to arise, wherever anyone in power wanted them to.

    The generals’ doctrine would not only violate international law, it repudiates the principle of international law. For a law to be a law, it must apply equally to all. But the doctrine holds that “the west” is fundamentally a different entity from all other countries. As the former Reagan official Paul Craig Roberts has pointed out, it holds that our use of weapons of mass destruction to prevent the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction is not, itself, an illegal use of weapons of mass destruction. Thus “the west” can stand as judge, jury and executioner over all other countries. By what right? No law works that way. And no country claiming such a right can also claim to respect the law, or ask any other country to respect it.

    Conversely, suppose we stated the generals’ doctrine as a principle: that any nuclear state which suspects another state of being about to acquire nuclear weapons has the right to attack that state – and with nuclear weapons if it has them. Now suppose North Korea suspects South Korea of that intention. Does North Korea acquire a right to strike the South? Under any principle of law, the generals’ answer must be, that it does. Thus their doctrine does not protect against nuclear war. It leads, rather, directly to nuclear war.

    Is this proposed doctrine unprecedented? No, in fact it is not. For as Heather Purcell and I documented in 1994, US nuclear war-fighting plans in 1961 called for an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union, as soon as sufficient nuclear forces were expected to be ready, in late 1963. President Kennedy quashed the plan. As JFK’s adviser Ted Sorensen put it in a letter to the New York Times on July 1, 2002:

    “A pre-emptive strike is usually sold to the president as a ‘surgical’ air strike; there is no such thing. So many bombings are required that widespread devastation, chaos and war unavoidably follow … Yes, Kennedy ‘thought about’ a pre-emptive strike; but he forcefully rejected it, as would any thoughtful American president or citizen.”

    It’s not just citizens and presidents who are obliged to think carefully about what General Shalikashvili and his British, French, German and Dutch colleagues now suggest. Military officers – as they know well – also have that obligation. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

    “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

    Any officer in the nuclear chain of command of the United States, Britain or France, faced with an order to use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state would be obliged, as a matter of law, to ponder those words with care. For ultimately, as Nuremberg showed, it is not force that prevails. In the final analysis, it is law.

    James K Galbraith holds the Lloyd M Bentsen Jr chair of government/business relations at the Lyndon B Johnson school of public affairs, the University of Texas at Austin. He is a senior scholar with the Levy Economics Institute, and chair of the board of Economists for Peace and Security, an international association of professional economists.