Nuclear War: No Cure - Only Prevention (A Call to Medical Professionals)

Editor's Note: This is an important perspective from physicians deeply invested in ridding the world of the scourge of nuclear weapons. They know quite well that for nuclear war, there is no cure - only prevention. Medical professionals have a particular responsibility to support the movement to abolish nuclear weapons, and this letter is a direct appeal. It was recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine

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Perspective
Docs and Nukes — Still a Live Issue
Ira Helfand, M.D., and Victor W. Sidel, M.D.
October 14, 2015 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1509202

Seventy years ago, the medical profession alerted the world to the devastating effects of nuclear weapons. Just weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima, Dr. Marcel Junod, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Japan, visited the devastated city and sent back one of the first eyewitness reports to reach the outside world: “The center of the city was a sort of white patch, flattened and smooth like the palm of a hand. Nothing remained.”

Ever since that time, members of the medical profession have played a key role in warning governments and the public about the danger of nuclear war and the urgent need to abolish nuclear weapons. During the period of intense international tension that preceded the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Journal devoted the issue of May 31, 1962, to articles prepared by members of the newly formed Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), detailing the medical consequences of nuclear war.

During the period of increased Cold War tension in the early 1980s, the medical community mobilized again to educate the public about the enormous threat to public health posed by the arms race. Working with PSR, medical schools throughout the country organized public symposia to explain what would actually happen if nuclear weapons were used. A newly formed global federation called the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), of which PSR became the U.S. affiliate, carried out similar educational work around the world. Doctors met with Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev to urge them to end the arms race that had brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

These efforts had a profound impact. In his memoirs, Gorbachev described the effect his meetings with physicians had on his thinking about nuclear weapons when he was launching the series of initiatives, ultimately embraced by the United States, that led to the end of the arms race. For this work, and in recognition of the special role and responsibility that physicians have had in preventing nuclear war, the IPPNW was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

In the years since the end of the Cold War, the medical community has paid far less attention to this issue. We, like most of the world, have acted as though the danger of nuclear war were a thing of the past. To the extent that we have considered the matter, we have focused on the possibility that terrorists or “rogue states” such as North Korea and Iran will acquire nuclear weapons. Although these are important threats, it is critical that we understand that the greatest danger is posed by the arsenals of the countries that already have nuclear weapons. There remain in the world today more than 15,000 nuclear warheads, 95% of which are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia.(1) Of these warheads, some 2000 are on hair-trigger alert. They can be fired in less than 15 minutes and can destroy their targets across the globe 30 minutes later.

These weapons pose an existential threat to humanity. A 2002 study showed that if just 300 Russian warheads got through to targets in the United States, 75 million to 100 million people would die from the blast and heat effects in the first half hour.(2) In addition, the entire economic infrastructure on which we depend would be destroyed. The public health system, the communications network, the electric grid, the banking system, the food distribution system — all would be gone. In the months after such an attack, the vast majority of Americans not killed in the initial attack would die from starvation, radiation sickness, epidemic disease, or exposure to the elements. A corresponding U.S. attack would create the same devastation in Russia, and if NATO were drawn into the war, much of Europe would suffer the same fate.

As incomprehensible as these direct effects are, they are only a part of the picture. The fires created by the use of nuclear weapons over urban targets would loft enormous quantities of black soot into the atmosphere, disrupting climate worldwide. A war involving the strategic weapons deployed today by the United States and Russia would generate some 150 million tons of soot, enough to reduce temperatures around the world by an average of 8°C. In the interior regions of North America and Eurasia, temperatures would drop by as much as 30°C, to levels not seen in 18,000 years, since the coldest point of the last ice age.(3) Food production would collapse, the vast majority of the human race would starve, and it's possible that our species would become extinct.

For 25 years, since the end of the Cold War, we have been told that we did not need to worry about war between the United States and Russia. The deepening crisis in Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin's repeated nuclear threats give the lie to these assurances: armed conflict between the nuclear superpowers remains a real possibility. Even if neither side ever uses its nuclear weapons deliberately, there remains the very real danger of accidental nuclear war. We know of at least five times since 1979 when either Moscow or Washington prepared to launch nuclear weapons in the mistaken belief that it was already under attack by the other side. U.S. military leaders now warn that cyberterrorists might be able to launch a U.S. or Russian nuclear missile.

Even a much more limited, regional nuclear war, as might take place between India and Pakistan, would have catastrophic consequences worldwide. Studies have shown that a war involving only 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons, less than 0.3% of the world's nuclear arsenals, would cause temperatures to fall an average of 1.25°C around the world.(4) Climate disruption of this magnitude would cause major declines in world agricultural output. At this time, there are some 800 million people who are malnourished and 300 million who get adequate nutrition but live in countries that depend on food imports that would not be available in the event of such a war. There are also about 1 billion people in China, which would see particularly severe effects on food production, who have not shared in China's recent economic growth. All these people, some 2 billion, would be at risk in the “nuclear famine” that would follow even a limited nuclear war.(5)

In recognition of this grave threat to human survival, governments around the world have come together over the past 3 years in a series of extraordinary conferences to discuss the medical consequences, what they have called the humanitarian impact, of nuclear war. A total of 116 countries have signed the Humanitarian Pledge to seek a new treaty to fill a key gap in international law, which does not yet prohibit the possession of these weapons, and to push for their abolition.

We believe the medical community has a responsibility to support this movement. The American Medical Association recently passed a resolution calling on all nations to “ban and eliminate nuclear weapons,” and the World Medical Association is considering a similar resolution at its Moscow meeting in October. Physicians need to act on these resolutions, sounding the alarm for a world that has grown dangerously complacent about the nuclear peril as we drift closer to an unimaginable catastrophe. We need to again educate our patients, the general public, and our political leaders about the medical consequences of nuclear war and the urgent need to abolish these weapons before they are used.

Disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.

This article was published on October 14, 2015, at NEJM.org. Source URL: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1509202#t=article

From Physicians for Social Responsibility, Washington, DC (I.H., V.W.S.); the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Somerville (I.H., V.W.S.), Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Leeds (I.H., V.W.S.), and the Family Care Medical Center, Springfield (I.H.) — all in Massachusetts; and the Department of Social Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center, New York (V.W.S.).

References

1) Federation of American Scientists. Status of world nuclear forces (http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/).

2) Helfand I, Forrow L, McCally M, Musil R. Projected US casualties and destruction of US medical services from attack by Russian nuclear forces. Med Glob Surviv 2002;7:68-76

3) Robock A, Oman L, Stenchikov GL. Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: still catastrophic consequences. J Geophys Res 2007;112:xD13107-xD13107 (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1029/2006JD008235/full).

4) Robock A, Oman L, Stenchikov GL, Toon OB, Bardeen C, Turco RP. Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts. Atmos Chem Phys 2007;7:2003-2012
CrossRef | Web of Science

5) Helfand I. Nuclear famine: two billion people at risk? International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (http://www.ippnw.org/nuclear-famine.html).

Remembering the bomb that changed the world

The use of nuclear bombs on Japan should be a time of national reflection.

By David P. Barash & Judith Eve Lipton

Special to the [Seattle] Times, Originally published August 5, 2015

WE Americans like celebrations. We prefer happy holidays, not downers. Even Veterans Day and Memorial Day are opportunities for patriotic reflection and gratitude, not regrets or remorse.

Since many Americans consider the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to have been legitimate, it isn’t surprising that Hiroshima Day (Aug. 6) and Nagasaki Day (Aug. 9) haven’t made it onto the national calendar. But they should. We propose Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 should be “Nuclear Awareness Days.”

There is much to be said for reflecting on these events, and not simply for their historical significance. Aug. 6, 1945, was the first time a nuclear weapon was used to kill people deliberately, and Aug. 9, 1945, was the last — so far. On this, everyone agrees. In addition, use of nuclear weapons would constitute a tragedy of immense proportions. Nearly everyone agrees with this, too.

An Allied correspondent stands in front of the shell of a building that once
was a movie theater in Hiroshima, Japan, a month after an atomic bomb
was dropped by the United States. (Stanley Troutman/The Associated Press)

Although there is debate about whether nuclear weapons “keep the peace” via their avowed role as deterrents, informed opinion — including increasing numbers of military and strategic authorities — has been moving toward the position that these weapons are a liability (to everyone, including their possessors) rather than an asset.

Seventy years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world is still not a peaceful place. There is no evidence that possessing more than 16,000 bombs and warheads have made the nuclear states any more secure than their non-nuclear counterparts.

Nuclear arsenals have not provided any discernible leverage. Imagine a policeman armed with a backpack nuclear weapon, confronting a bank robber. His “deterrent” would simply be too blunt, destructive and lacking in credibility to provide any benefit. Thus, nuclear weapons have not helped Russia in Ukraine, the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, the United Kingdom in the Falkland Islands, France in Algeria, nor China in Tibet or Taiwan.

Nuclear North Korea is a nightmare, but what good has armament done? India and Pakistan are less safe in their struggles over Kashmir, with nuclear weapons aimed at each other. Israel has a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, but this hasn’t prevented decades of war — and when other states or terrorists get the bomb, only one or two warheads could effectively destroy Israel. Only nuclear abolition and careful verification could ultimately protect anyone.


A massive column of billowing smoke
mushrooms over Nagasaki, Japan,
after the United States dropped
an atomic bomb on Aug. 9, 1945. (AP)

Taking the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki seriously by establishing Nuclear Awareness Days would give us an opportunity to meditate on the terrible reality of what transpired in 1945 and condemn the world’s worst weapons before they are used again. Chemical and biological weapons, land mines and cluster munitions are illegal, so why aren’t nuclear weapons? Some 112 countries have signed a petition calling for nuclear weapons to be banned.

The U.S. nuclear arsenal is especially relevant to Puget Sound — Trident submarines are based at Naval Base Kitsap Bangor. A single vessel can carry 24 nuclear missiles (restricted to 20 by treaty), each capable of delivering eight to 12 independently targetable warheads, each roughly 40 times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. To repeat: This is the potential output of just one Trident submarine — eight are currently deployed west of Seattle, and an additional five at Kings Bay, Ga., and one in Portsmouth, Va.

Even if the theory of deterrence has any validity at all, how much extinction is enough? Bangor and other sites in Washington that house nuclear weapons are not just sources of planetary destruction, but also targets.

Maybe the United States will eventually wake up, abandon nuclear arms and embrace fundamental decency and basic planetary hygiene. Toward that end, we fervently recommend Nuclear Awareness Days as an opportunity to reflect not only on what has happened but also what might yet be achieved — and preserved.
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Original Source URL: http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/remembering-the-bomb-that-changed-the-world/

David P. Barash, professor of psychology at University of Washington, is the author of “Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science.” Judith Eve Lipton, a retired psychiatrist, is the founder of the Washington state chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.


Keeping Alive the Voices of the Hibakusha

Dear Friends,

In just a few days people around the world will commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The historical importance of these anniversaries is of special significance because we must maintain the collective consciousness of the bombings or humankind is certainly doomed to the consequences of continuing as slaves to the myth of the necessity of nuclear weapons for our protection.

Of special standing in the telling of this history are the Hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. Some have told their stories to be recorded to share with future generations, while some have yet to do so. As the Hibakusha reach the end of their lives, it becomes imperative that we record the stories of those who are still willing to tell them.

In 2010 I hosted a large delegation representing the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo) on their way home after the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)Review Conference in New York. The delegation consisted of Japanese citizens from many cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most venerable member of the delegation, Tokie MIZUNO, is a Hibakusha of Hiroshima.

Ms. MIZUNO was 5 years old when the bomb exploded over her city, and she has never forgotten that day. She still bears the scars both visible and invisible that have affected her life and health. I could tell you more, but the story should be told by Ms. MIZUNO (in her own words). This is her story, and she wrote it down and then stood before people in Seattle, and then in Tacoma, and with great conviction told her story, gave her testimony, and called on everyone to work together for a nuclear weapon-free world.

Ms. MIZUNO honored us with her testimony, and as witness to that testimony I feel a responsibility to pass on her words exactly as she spoke them on both occasions. You may read them here, and I hope that you will be touched by her words and pass them on to others, especially those who are still unaware that the nuclear-armed nations still brandish thousands of nuclear weapons, and are prepared to use them; the results of such action would be horrific.

This year, which is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings, I was in New York for many activities surrounding the NPT Review Conference. Once again I met with many representatives of the Gensuikyo, including a number of Hibakusha. Each of their stories is compelling, and it gave me a renewed sense of the importance of our responsibility to honor them.

The voices of the Hibakusha help keep the memory of those terrible events in 1945 alive so that we may choose (if we find our own conviction) to not allow such things to ever happen again. For if we do not remember history, we are doomed to repeat it; this terrible history must never be repeated. Let us hear the voices of the Hibakusha with our hearts and minds so that we may carry their message with us wherever we go...

No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis!
 

Heiwa (Peace),

Leonard

Toki Mizuno with offering at Seattle's Sadako Statue, May 2010

 

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This is the testimony of Tokie MIZUNO as it was written by Ms. MIZUNO in April 2010, and translated by Nobue KUGIMIYA; and presented by Ms. MIZUNO at First United Methodist Church of Seattle, Washington on May 5, 2010 and at the University of Washington Tacoma on May 6, 2010. The two black and white photos were also included with her testimony.

My name is Tokie MIZUNO and I am a survivor of Hiroshima. 65 years ago, when I was 5 years old, the atomic bomb was dropped on my city, Hiroshima. I was near my grandmother’s house, 1.2 kilo-meters from ground zero.

The City of Hiroshima was completely destroyed and was turned into rubble by the enormous destructive power of the atomic bomb. As other survivors, I was barely alive and the damage on my body and mind was unbearable.

I might have been lucky to survive but life hasn’t been easy on me financially, physically and mentally. This agony should not be repeated on anybody else on earth. That’s why I have become involved in anti-nuclear actions with other Hibakusha as well as many other Japanese people.

We have been collecting signatures for a nuclear-weapon-free world, and engaging in activities to defend the Japanese Constitution, especially the Preamble and Article 9, which pledges never to wage war again.

Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution clearly states “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat of use of force as means of settling international disputes.”

And it adds “In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Article 9 is our treasure.

This treasure for Japan was achieved with the sacrifice of precious lives of 20 to 30 million people in Asia and Pacific. This is one of the greatest achievements for the world, too, and we will hold on to it forever.

Let me talk about that day.......

On the morning of August 6th, 1945, just before Hiroshima was hit by the atomic bombing, one of the women in my neighbourhood came to my house and said “We have some sweets. Why don’t you come and have some?”

So my little 3-year-old brother and I happily followed her. In those days it was very difficult to have sweets. My neighbour’s son, a soldier, was back from the battlefront to treat his wounds. He brought some sweets with him for his family and the neighbour invited us in.

We were about to eat our sweets when the bomb exploded.

With a blinding flash, the whole house was flattened.

I found myself trapped under the rubble. I tried to look out from my little prison and saw my younger brother, rescued by a soldier, standing there with blood on his face and head.

I myself was pulled out of the rubble. My right arm was heavily injured and I had several cuts on my face. My neighbour tore her underwear into pieces and covered my arm to stop it bleeding. Later I was told that it was her treatment that saved my right arm.

I don’t remember how many hours had passed, but I saw my mother crawling to me over piles of rubble. She was desperately looking for me and my younger brother. She looked awful with only tattered patches of her clothing on her body and her hair standing on end.
My 12-month-old baby brother was still buried under the rubble. My mother and grandmother were desperate and were removing the debris saying they should get him back home, even if he was dead.

They also called out for help to people walking by but nobody stopped. They went on their way absentmindedly - they were like ghosts.

We saw flames in the distance coming towards us. Terrified, my younger brother and I were both crying. I don’t remember the pain of my injury, but many collapsed houses around us horrified me, although my father thought I was just stunned.

Fortunately, my baby brother was alive, and we managed to escape to a raft on the river. There were countless dead bodies floating and fire balls were falling all around. Red-hot galvanized plates darted towards us and made a huge noise when they dropped into the river. It was not a safe place to be.

At that time I was so young that I don’t remember exactly what happened. But my deceased parents and grandmother told me a lot about that day.

There was a woman on the raft who gave us food and water. She also gave my mother part of a Kimono to use as bandages and as a strap to carry me on her back.

In the evening, cooling our bodies with river water, we finally found a place to evacuate to. It was a shrine near a railway station called Koi.

Because my grandmother and I were seriously injured, we two were left at the shrine while my mother and brothers escaped to my aunt’s house in Itsukaichi City. My uncle who rushed to Hiroshima to search for us carried them on his handcart.Grandmother thought we could have some treatment at the shrine but nothing was available. We were given only one rotten rice ball. We finally evacuated to my aunt’s house.

They were farmers and gave us good food. I had tomatoes, cucumbers, pickled shallots etc. to my heart’s content. It may be this diet that has kept me healthy.

My father had to spend several nights at shelters in Hiroshima. He died abruptly from TB in August 1956, which we believe was due to residual radiation. Later when I was working to collect survivors’ stories, I learned that there were many Hibakusha who suffered from TB during those difficult times.

My mother died in Oct. 1967. I believe that both of my parents were killed by the atomic bomb. At that time I thought that it was our fate and that because Japan was at war we couldn't complain about it.

I also thought we were just unfortunate because we were in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. Later I learned history, which completely changed my mind. I knew why the US had done it.

The US government has kept saying that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and saved millions of people’s lives. That’s what they teach at schools.

However, in 1944 there was scarcely any food left for Japanese people. People were dying from hunger. Japan’s ground and air forces and navy were almost completely destroyed. It was obvious that Japan was finished.

Nonetheless, 210,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why?

In 1945 the war ended, but another war, the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union had already started. The US wanted to have an advantage over the Soviet Union militarily and politically by showing the power of nuclear weapons. They also wanted to test their newly developed technology, atomic bombs.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as testing grounds with real live people.

Let me share with you what the atomic bombing had done to us. The atomic bomb caused massive destruction and killed tens of thousands instantly and indiscriminately. It also emitted massive amounts of radiation which has afflicted us for decades.

Hibakusha describe the moment of the bombing as “The Sun dropped on us and burnt us”. When Bomb exploded, a huge fireball, 280 meters in diameter, was generated in the air.

Heat rays emitted from it raised the ground temperature, from 3000 to 4000 degrees Celsius (5500 to 7300 degrees Fahrenheit) near the hypocenter.

This was a boy, the charred remains. 700 meters from the hypocenter (Aug. 10. Nagasaki).

This is the shadow of a man (Shadow burnt into the granite steps).

Within 1.2 kilo-meters of ground zero, those who were directly affected by the heat rays suffered terrible burns and their internal tissues and organs severely damaged. Most of them died instantly or within a few days.

The explosion also created a powerful blast and destroyed most of the wooden houses in 2-kilometer radius of ground zero. People were blown through the air and many crushed to death under collapsed buildings.

Radiation left the human body with serious damage. It penetrated deeply into our bodies, damaged cells and diminished the blood generation function of bone marrow.

It also damaged inner organs. Even those who looked uninjured later became ill and died.

Residual radiation left on the ground affected many long after the explosion. Those who entered the city to search for their families/friends or for relief operations eventually developed similar symptoms and died.

Nuclear weapons are unspeakable weapons. They don’t allow us to live nor die as humans. They are weapons of absolute evil which can never co-exist with human beings.

3.2 million Japanese people lost their lives in the Asia-Pacific War. 20 to 30 million people were victimized by the Japanese military in Asia.

Learning from it, we have acquired the war-renouncing Japanese Constitution. However, military spending in the world is growing. Trillions of dollars are being spent for military purposes. If used for peaceful purposes, this money could solve many problems for human-kind.

20th century war is gone. Our responsibility is to hand over a peaceful and cultivated 21st century to the next generation. I strongly believe that we can hand over a nuclear-weapon-free world to future generations if we work together in solidarity with the people of the U.S. and with the people of the world.

Thank you.

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Click here to download the original program for Ms. Mizuno's presentation with the complete translation.

Click here to learn more about the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo).

Why Americans Believe that Bombing Hiroshima was Necessary

Editor's Note: This is a guest column by Gary Kohls, MD. Gary G Kohls. Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic mental health care, dealing extensively with the totally preventable and difficult to treat reality known as posttraumatic stress disorder, which is always a consequence of violence. He is a member of the Community of the Third Way (a local Every Church A Peace Church affiliate) and the Just Peace Committee of Peace Church UCC in Duluth, Minnesota.

August 6, 2015, is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a civilian city that had minimal military value, despite the claims of President Truman when he announced the event to the American people.

The whole truth of what the Nuremburg tribunal would later help define as an international war crime and a crime against humanity has been heavily censored and mythologized ever since war-weary Americans in 1945 accepted the propaganda that the bombings were necessary to shorten the war and prevent the loss of a million US soldiers during the allegedly planned November 1945 invasion.

Of course, the reason that the United States wasn’t sanctioned like Germany was for the Jewish holocaust was that America was the victor and the occupier and thus it was in charge of making and enforcing the rules in the New World Order.

The United States military ambushed the equally defenseless Nagasaki City three days later with the second atomic bomb to ever be used against a civilian population (that no longer had any military value to Japan). “Fat Man”, the plutonium bomb named after Winston Churchill, was detonated before the Japanese leadership fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima.

My high school history teachers all seemed to be ex-jocks who weren’t athletically talented enough to make it to the majors. The main chance for them to continue playing games for pay was to join the teaching profession and coach high school athletics. American history was of secondary importance in many small town high schools but it hardly made the list of interests for coaches, who reluctantly accepted the job; and so my classmates and I “learned” our lessons from some very uninspired, very bored and/or very uninformed teachers who would rather have been on the playing field.

In my coach’s defense, the history books that they had to teach from had been highly censored in order to promote patriotism; and so we “learned” that most everything that the “noble” British colonizers and “honorable” US empire builders ever did in the history of warfare was self-sacrificing, democracy-promoting and Christianizing - and that everything their freedom-seeking, revolutionary colonial victims did was barbaric, atheistic and evil. Anybody who resisted colonial oppressors was treated as a terrorist.

It was from these history books that we learned about the “glorious” end of the war against Japan via nuclear incineration. Everybody in my high school, including myself, swallowed the post-war propaganda hook, line and sinker.

Of course, I now realize that my classmates and I, just like most other Americans (including the volunteer or conscripted members of the military), have been naïve victims of “lies our history teachers taught us”. In their defense, those teachers had been misled in their own schooling by equally mis-informed teachers who got their information from a variety of dis-informers who wrote the books: and those authors were the war- and empire-justifying militarists and assorted uber-patriotic pseudo-historians who had been duped into believing the myth of American exceptionalism.

Not included in that group of true believers were the 50,000 WWII American soldier-members of the “Greatest Generation” who, in many cases, logically and understandably deserted or went AWOL during their war service, a reality that has been conveniently censored out of our consciousness.

One of General Douglas MacArthur’s first acts after taking over as Viceroy of Japan was to confiscate or otherwise destroy all the photographic evidence documenting the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He imposed total censorship over journalists who wanted to report to the world about what had really happened at Ground Zero, again proving the old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth”. Embedding journalists in the US military so that only America-friendly reportage happened wasn’t the original idea of General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf in Gulf War I.

Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institution was preparing to correct some of the 50-year-old pseudo-patriotic myths about the Pacific War by staging an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the atomic bombings from the Japanese civilian perspective.

Swift, vehement and well-orchestrated condemnations directed at the Smithsonian historian’s plans to tell unwelcome truths about war came from right-wing pro-war veterans organizations, the GOP-dominated Congress at the time, and other militarist groups (such as Newt Gingrich’s paymaster Lockheed Martin, one of many war-profiteering merchants-of-death multinationals whose profits and products depend on Congressional and Pentagon largesse). Gingrich actually threatened to stop federal funding of the Smithsonian, thus forcing it to censor-out all of the contextually important parts of the real story. And so the pseudo-patriotic myths about Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to be preserved to this very day.

We historically-illiterate Americans are blocked, again and again, from learning historical truths about the American Empire - and the control that the military and multinational corporations have over it. Anything that might shake voter confidence in – or incite grassroots revolution against - the unelected ruling elites, the Pentagon or the conscienceless transnational corporations (that control our two major party politicians, the mainstream media and the “invisible hand of the market”) is verboten.

The Smithsonian historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, we voters failed to learn an important historical point, and that is this: the war in the Pacific could have ended in the spring of 1945 without the need for the August atomic bombings, and therefore there might have been no Okinawa bloodbath that senselessly doomed thousands of American Marines.

And there would have been no need for an American land invasion of Japan in November. Indeed, in the 1980s, released top secret records revealed that the contingency plans for a large-scale US invasion (planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary.

To the victors go the spoils, and the American victors were the ones running the war crimes tribunals and thus also determined the content of my history text books.

American intelligence agencies, with the full knowledge of President Roosevelt’s and President Truman’s administrations, were fully aware of Japan's search for ways to honorably surrender months before Truman gave the fateful order to incinerate Hiroshima.

Japan was working on peace negotiations through its ambassador in Moscow as early as April of 1945, with surrender feelers from Japan occurring as far back as 1944. Truman knew of these developments because the US had broken the Japanese code even before Pearl Harbor, and all of Japan's military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo wrote: "Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty, including the deposing of Emperor Hirohito) is the only obstacle to peace."

Truman’s advisors knew about these efforts, and the war could have ended through diplomacy by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor (who was regarded as a deity in Japan). That reasonable concession was - seemingly illogically - refused by the US in their demands for unconditional surrender, which was first demanded at the 1943 Casablanca Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and then reiterated at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill and Stalin. Still, the Japanese continued searching for an honorable peace through negotiations.

Even Secretary of War Henry Stimson said: “the true question was not whether surrender could have been achieved without the use of the bomb but whether a different diplomatic and military course would have led to an earlier surrender. A large segment of the Japanese cabinet was ready in the spring of 1945 to accept substantially the same terms as those finally agreed on.” In other words, Stimson knew that the US could have ended the war before Hiroshima.

After Japan officially surrendered on August 15, 1945, MacArthur allowed the emperor to remain in place as spiritual head of Japan, the very condition that forced the Japanese leadership to refuse to accept the earlier, humiliating, “unconditional surrender” terms.

So the two essential questions that need answering in order to comprehend what was going on behind the scenes are these: 1) Why did the US refuse to accept Japan's only demand concerning its surrender (the retention of the emperor) and 2) why were the atomic bombs used when victory in the Pacific was assured?

There are a number of factors that contributed to the Truman administration’s fateful decision to use the atomic bombs.

1) Investment. The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money (a massive 2 billion in 1940 dollars) to produce three bombs, and there was no inclination - and no guts - to stop the momentum.

2) Revenge. The US military and political leadership – as did many ordinary Americans - had a tremendous appetite for revenge because of the Pearl Harbor “surprise” attack. Mercy wasn't in the mindset of the US military, the war-weary populace or even of average American Christians and their churches. The missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accepted as necessary, with no questions asked, by most of those folks who only knew the sanitized, national security state version of events. Most Americans wanted to believe the cunningly-orchestrated propaganda.

3) A “use it or lose it” mentality and scientific curiosity. The fissionable material in Hiroshima's bomb was uranium. The Trinity test bomb (exploded on July 16, 1945) and the Nagasaki bomb were plutonium bombs. Scientific curiosity was a significant factor that pushed the project to its deadly completion. The Manhattan Project leaders were curious. “What would happen if a city was leveled by a single uranium bomb?” “What would happen if plutonium was used?” Now that the war against Nazi Germany (the original intended target) was over, the most conscientious scientists felt that the bombs should not be used against civilian targets.

4) “Orders are orders”. Actually, the military decision to drop both bombs had been made well in advance of August 1945. Accepting the surrender of Japan prior to their use was not an option if the experiment was to go ahead. It should be obvious to anybody that the three-day interval between the two bombs was unconscionably short if the purpose of the first bomb was to force immediate surrender. Japan’s communications and transportation capabilities were in shambles, and no one, neither the US military nor the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima. (It is a fascinating fact that the Manhattan Project had been so top secret that even MacArthur, commanding general of the entire Pacific theatre, had been kept out of the loop - until July 1)

5) The Russians. Stalin had proclaimed his intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945), which would have been two days after Hiroshima was bombed. Indeed, Russia did declare war on Japan on August 8 and was advancing eastward across Manchuria when Nagasaki City, the center of Japanese Christianity, was incinerated.

Certainly Russia was still feeling the sting of humiliating defeat and the loss of territory from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1905 when they were beaten by upstart Japan. Elephants and ego-bloated nation-states have long memories, especially when they lose an argument, lose a fight or are embarrassed in public. Witness the 150 year old enduring promise from segregationist devotees of the Confederate flag like Dylan Roof, the KKK, and the White Citizen’s Councils that “The South Will Rise Again”; or consider the rabid right-wing, sociopathic NeoNazis all around the world in their devotion to Adolf Hitler and their symbol of fascism, the Swastika.

The US didn't want Japan surrendering to Russia and thus sharing the spoils of war. Russia was soon to be one of only two world superpowers - and therefore a future enemy of the United States. So the first "messages" of the Cold War were sent by the US to the USSR on August 6 and 9, 1945: “Stalin, stay away from Japan’s carcass. We own it. And besides, we have the bomb.”

Russia didn’t receive the spoils of the Pacific War that they had anticipated, and the two superpowers were instantly mired in the multi-trillion dollar stalemated nuclear arms race and the multitude of proxy wars that regularly risked the total extinction of humanity. What also happened along the way was the moral bankruptcy of both of the paranoid super-power nations that insisted on fighting the stupid cold war, a war that was fueled by war-profiteering corporations and borrow and spend economics.

An estimated 80,000 innocent civilians, plus 20,000 weaponless young Japanese conscripts died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing raid. Hundreds of thousands more suffered slow deaths and disabilities from agonizing burns, radiation sickness, leukemia, anemia, thrombocytopenia and untreatable infections. The Japanese survivors and their progeny suffered a fate similar to the survivors and progeny of America’s “Atomic Soldiers”. (Atomic Soldiers were those soldiers who were exposed, in the line of duty, to the hundreds of nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s or to the depleted uranium that the US military used in the two Gulf Wars.) Each of those groups were afflicted with horrible radiation-induced illnesses, congenital anomalies, genetic mutations, immune deficiencies, cancers and premature deaths, still going on to this very minute.

(Another shameful reality that has been covered up is the fact that 12 American Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command prior to the bombing, were instantly incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on that fateful day.)

So the official War Department-approved, highly censored version of the end of the war in the Pacific was added to an ever-lengthening list of myths that we Americans have been continuously fed by our corporate-controlled military, political and media opinion leaders. In the process, the gruesomeness and cruelty of war has been cunningly propagandized so that we consumers of information see only the glorification of American militarism.

Among the other censored out realities include what really happened in the US military’s participation in the destabilize-and-conquer campaigns and coups d’etat in Ukraine, Honduras, Venezuela, Libya, and bloody invasions and/or occupations of Korea, Iran, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, the Philippines, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, Colombia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc. This list doesn’t necessarily cover the uncountable secret Pentagon/CIA covert operations and assassination plots in the rest of the world, where some 150 “sovereign” nations have been coerced into allowing the building of American military bases (permission lavishly paid for by bribes or threats of economic or military sanctions).

But somehow most of us still hang on to our shaky "my country right or wrong" patriotism, desperately wanting to believe the cunningly-orchestrated myths that say that the war-profiteering corporate elite (and the politicians, military leaders and media talking heads who are in their employ) only work for peace, justice, equality, liberty and “making the world safe”, not for democracy, but for predatory capitalism.

While it is true that the US military has faced down the occasional despot, with necessary sacrifice from dead and incurably-wounded (in body, mind and spirit) American soldiers and veterans, more often than not the rationalizations for going to war are the same as those of the "godless communists", the anti-American “insurgents” and “freedom fighters” who just want us Yankees to go home where we belong.

August 6 and 9, 1945 are just two more examples of the brain-washing that goes on in all "total war” political agendas, which are consistently accompanied by the inevitable human death and destruction that is euphemistically labeled “splendid slaughter”, "collateral damage" or "friendly fire".

It might already be too late to rescue and resuscitate the (mythical?) moribund humanitarian, peacemaking America that we used to know and love. It might be too late to effectively confront the corporate hijacking of liberal democracy in America. It might be too late to successfully bring down the arrogant and greedy ruling elites who are selfishly dragging our planet down the road to destruction. The rolling coups d’etat orchestrated by the profiteers of what I call Friendly American Fascism may have already accomplished its goal.

But I suppose there is always hope. Rather than being silent about the destabilizing conflicts that the war-mongers are provoking all over the planet (with the very willing assistance of Wall Street, the Pentagon, the weapons industries and their lapdogs in Congress), people of conscience need to start learning the whole truth of history, despite the psychological discomfort that they may feel (cognitive dissonance) when the lies that they had been led to believe can’t be believed any more. We need to start owning up to America’s uncountable war crimes that have been orchestrated in our names.

And so the whistle-blowers among us need to rise up in dissent, go to the streets in protest and courageously refuse to cooperate with those sociopathic personalities that have gradually transformed America into a criminal rogue state. Like Nazi Germany or Fascist Japan, rogue nations throughout history have been eventually targeted for downfall by its billions of angry, fed-up, suffering victims who live both inside and outside its borders. That fate awaits America unless its leaders confesses their sins, honestly ask for forgiveness and truly promise to join the peace-loving human race.

Doing what is right for the whole of humanity for a change, rather than just doing what is profitable or advantageous for our over-privileged, over-consumptive, toxic and unsustainable American way of life, would be real honor, real patriotism and an essential start toward real peace.

The Nuclear Age at 70; Time for Mandatory Retirement!

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the day in which the world entered the atomic age. On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 AM at the Alamogordo Test Range, on the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert, in the test named Trinity, the experimental device known as the "Gadget" was detonated, creating a light "brighter than a thousand suns." A mere 6 kilogram (13.2 pound) sphere of plutonium, compressed to supercriticality by the surrounding high explosives, created an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT (20 Kilotons). It was a stunning sight.

No one who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display.
- Kenneth Bainbridge, physicist

Was this, as thought nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the beginning of the end? These scientists had "become death", and they had created what could become (quite literally) "the destroyer of worlds"(Oppenheimer quoted a verse from the Bhagavad Gita which read, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.")

Less than a month after the Trinity test, the United States dropped two atomic bombs - on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - that killed over 100,000 people in less time than it took me to type a few of these words. As many as 220,000 were dead from the effects of radiation by the end of 1945. Even today, 70 years later, survivors (the Hibakusha) and subsequent generations suffer the effects of radiation.

From its horrific beginnings the nuclear arms race has led humanity down a perilous road of preparation for its own destruction. Scientists have continued to seek the power of gods, creating ever more destructive nuclear devices over the years, and military planners continued asking for more of these awful weapons in every shape and form (and method of delivery).

The fall of the Berlin Wall provided an extraordinary opportunity for the U.S. to reach out to Russia to begin the process of bilateral disarmament that would have sent a clear signal to other nuclear armed nations, as well as the non-nuclear nations, that it was time to rid the world of the weapons of humanity's demise.

So why didn't this happen? The U.S. was so set on taking hold of the former Soviet republics, controlling resources in the region, and weakening the new Russian state that it barely throttled back on its nuclear weapons program. Oh yes, we cut back on the overall numbers of nuclear warheads and some delivery vehicles, Yet, the ICBM forces stayed (for the most part) on alert, and ballistic missile submarine (Trident) patrols have remained at near-Cold War levels to this day.

The nuclear weapons infrastructure has been in the process of rebuilding in recent years, a new generation of ballistic missile submarines is in the works, and other delivery systems are on the drawing boards. Is it any wonder then that other nations, including Russia, are building up their nuclear forces?

Of course, for the U.S., all this nuclear weapons modernization is about projecting force in our insane colonial quest to control resources around the world. The irony is that nuclear weapons do not provide any real security at all; they are only a liability, and their eventual use will mean the end of life on Earth as we know it. Don't future generations deserve better?

With the very real threats posed by Global Warming and its associated Climate Change, shouldn't we be spending our precious human and financial capital on works that will help humanity adapt and find sustainability in what will be a difficult enough future?

A new Cold War is brewing as the bomb approaches its 70th birthday. Is it not time to send this demonic creature into forced retirement and to transition the entire nuclear weapons infrastructure to sustainable industries and jobs to build a positive future for humankind?

Here in Washington State we have Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor and the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific. Bangor is home port to 8 of the nation's 14 ballistic missile (Trident) submarines, and the two facilities together represent the largest operational concentration of nuclear weapons in the U.S., and possibly anywhere in the world.

Trident is a first-strike weapon system designed during the height of the earlier Cold War in the bad old days of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Those days are long gone, and with them any possible argument for the concept of Strategic Deterrence that continues to justify our nation's continued nuclear weapons modernization.

The Navy's plans for a successor to Trident, known as the OHIO Class Replacement, SSBN(X) or as I call it, "New Trident," are moving full speed ahead. Of course, the Russians are responding and building their submarine fleet (and the associated missiles) back up.

This madness must stop, or we will be assuring the eventual destruction of everything we hold dear. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action has, for nearly four decades, resisted the Trident nuclear weapons system and worked for the abolition of all nuclear weapons, while grounding its work in the study and practice of nonviolence.

This August we will remember the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on this 70th anniversary and continue to work to retire Trident and all nuclear weapons. 70 years is long enough (or perhaps I should say far too long).

Wherever you may be this August, I invite you to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings and begin or continue your work (in whatever way you are able) to rid the world of the scourge of nuclear weapons. There are events around the country, and you click here to find one thanks to Physicians for Social Responsibility.

While you're reading this, consider taking one of the actions (at the top of the right-hand column of this blog) to help build a nuclear weapons free world. You can also check out (and get involved at) our campaign to stop production of New Trident at NO To NEW TRIDENT.

Towards a peaceful retirement for the nuclear age,

Leonard

Nuclear weapons contradict every principle of humanitarian law (Judge Weeramantry)

Editor's Note: I recently attended the Peace and Planet Conference in New York, held just prior to the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.  At its first plenary, Jackie Cabasso, director of Western States Legal Foundation, read the following message on the illegality of nuclear weapons from Judge Christopher Weeramantry. Judge Weeramantry was one of the 15 judges on the International Court of Justice that rendered the famous advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons in 1996.

The Total Illegality of Nuclear Weapons

and

The Imperative Need for Their Abolition

 

24 April 2015

 

Judge Christopher Weeramantry

Former Vice-President, International Court of Justice

Co-President, International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms

Weeramantry International Center for Peace Education and Research

Colombo, Sri Lanka

 

It gives much pleasure to send a message to the Peace and Planet Conference, held by civil society on the eve of the 2015 NPT Review Conference.

Never since the human race evolved has it faced a danger so devastating to all its past achievements and so destructive of its future expectations as it faces today. Thousands of weapons are today assembled in the arsenals of the world, each of which, even by itself, is fraught with greater peril to all humanity and to future generations then all the brutality of all the weapons cumulatively used in the wars of past centuries. The cruelty of all the tyrants of the past pales into insignificance in comparison with the proven cruelty of the nuclear weapon.

Yet, the legal professions of the world, the governments of the world, the religious assemblies of the world, the educational systems of the world and the general public of the world, who should be crying out from the rooftops for the immediate abolition of the weapon, are not even heard in the corridors of power.

It is amazing that this danger should have continued not merely to exist but also to expand in intensity through nearly three generations after the brutality of the weapon was demonstrated to all the world through its use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We, who should now be at the very apex of human civilization, seem on the contrary to be ready at a moment’s notice to plunge all humanity into the very depths of brutality.

This is what the nuclear weapon means to every citizen on planet earth and every citizen who will inhabit the planet for a thousand generations to come. Future generations, whose inherent rights to health and a pure environment are being trampled under-foot by our generation, would raise their hands in disbelief that a weapon of such known brutality should have been permitted to remain on the planet. They would be even more shocked to know that these weapons were permitted to increase in intensity through three generations, and even more surprisingly through three generations during which human rights and the rights of future generations have been the subject of much attention.

The next time a nuclear weapon is used it will not be on a helpless target, with no possibility of retaliation. In a world of multiple conflicts, of proliferation of nuclear weapons, of
burgeoning terrorist movements, of spreading knowledge regarding their manufacture, of easy availability of raw materials and of a plenitude of funds for this purpose, the need for control and elimination of nuclear weapons is a thousand times greater than it was in the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Moreover, when the weapons start flying in both directions, all scientific studies make it patently clear that a nuclear winter will result, blotting out sunlight from large sections of the planet, devastating crops, depriving all humanity of food and reducing human life to the darkness of the Stone Age.

It is remarkable also that world religions and systems of humanitarian thought for thousands of years have condemned the use of hyper-destructive weapons. For example Hinduism, over three thousand years ago, condemned the use of a hyper-destructive weapon which was said to have the potential to ravage the enemy’s countryside and decimate its population. The Lateran Council in the twelfth century condemned the use of even the crossbow as being too cruel to be used in warfare. Islamic law condemned even the use of a poisoned arrow.

Humanitarian law has for centuries condemned the use of weapons that cause unnecessary suffering. Yet, strangely enough, the nuclear weapon defies all these prohibitions and hangs like the sword of Damocles over the entire human race. The Dum-dum bullet which explodes on entering the victim’s body was condemned in the 19 century as too cruel to be used amongst civilized nations, yet strangely enough the nuclear weapon persists.

The weapon contradicts every principle of humanitarian law, every principle of international law and every principle of religious teaching. Either its days are numbered or the days of human civilisation are numbered.

It is for us to make the choice.

A Brief Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

By David Hall, MD*

Nuclear arsenals are a big deal again: extravagantly expensive, militarily unusable, environmentally devastating, morally reprehensible, and now being rebuilt for threatened, accidental, or intentional use to the next century.

Nuclear weapon states have reversed course. In 2010 the USA committed to modernizing its entire nuclear weapons complex as a condition for signing the New START treaty with Russia with its small reductions in both nuclear arsenals. India and Pakistan have been steadily enlarging their small arsenals for years. China and Russia are now building new ballistic missile submarines.

We are in a new global nuclear arms race as the nuclear weapon states continue to follow the US modernization initiative. The hostile or even accidental use of just one modern nuclear bomb would be globally catastrophic, many times the devastation and death toll of the 911 attacks on the US World Trade Center. If used they would violate every international humanitarian law and treaty, would constitute a crime against humanity, and so-called deterrence would have failed. Security through “deterrence” in a multilateral suicidal nuclear world is “specious and illusory.” (Pope Francis)

The trillion dollar modernization of the US arsenal does not meet basic standards for ethical, moral, or rational behavior. The driving force behind modernization is the military-industrial-Congressional complex protecting jobs building these weapons of mass murder.

“The truth is that the President only had a superficial understanding” of what would happen in a nuclear war, [Ex-Chief of Nuclear Forces General Lee ] Butler says. Congress knew even less because no lawmaker has ever had access to the war plan, and most academics could only make ill-informed guesses.”

In place of this specious and potentially suicidal policy, we must pursue cooperative global security initiatives that can address serious global threats to life on Earth - the root causes of a potential nuclear war - climate change, severe poverty, ethnic and religious intolerance - and access to loose fissile materials to make a bomb.

Continuing to upgrade and build new weapons of mass destruction invites a world like Johannesburg during apartheid with nuclear armed barriers between rich and poor.

We need a global Truth and Reconciliation Commission to bring us together before we blow ourselves back to the Dark Ages.

*Dr. David Hall is a child and family psychiatrist and a past president of local and national PSR. For over 20 years he has campaigned for the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction. He is active with Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action and its work to abolish the Trident nuclear weapon system.

The Real Problem with Defense Contracting

Op-Ed by Glen Milner*

Representative Kilmer’s op-ed, “Fix broken defense contracting,” failed to address the real problem with defense acquisition (Seattle Times, April 23, 2015)

Kilmer stated that the defense sector is an economic driver in Washington State and that Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM) and Naval Base Kitsap combine for more than $12 billion in economic impact per year. But this figure belies the fact that the two bases (not including 324,000 acres for JBLM at the Yakima Training Complex) take up 97,400 acres of prime real estate in Pierce and Kitsap Counties including valuable waterfront on Puget Sound. This is more acreage than the entire City of Seattle and would likely bring a greater economic gain if used by the private sector.

We are told that greater efficiency for defense acquisition will benefit our local economy. First on Kilmer’s list is to fully reverse automatic spending cuts known as sequestration for the military. However, no mention is made of the tax increases and/or cuts to social programs needed to end sequestration and increase funds for military programs.

Kilmer and other members of Congress are promoting a six-year process to streamline acquisition that will “maximize the capabilities and strengths of our military.”

The bigger problem with defense acquisition is the promotion and procurement of multiple weapons programs that become more expensive with each successive year. Nuclear weapons programs provide an example. The Air Force is currently planning for new long range nuclear bombers and replacement intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) while the Navy is building a replacement SSBN-X nuclear submarine.

These nuclear weapons delivery systems and other plans to upgrade our nuclear arsenal will cost nearly $1 trillion over the next 30 years. Many of these long range programs have already begun even though their combined costs are too expensive to complete.

 

Kilmer is a strong proponent of the Navy’s Trident nuclear submarine base in his 6th Congressional District. According to a 2015 Congressional Research Service report, the projected budget for the SSBN-X replacement submarine program for FY 2016 is $1.39 billion with the planned procurement of the first submarine in 2021. The 12 replacement submarines are expected to cost nearly $100 billion with the last submarine being placed into service in 2042.

The $100 billion for replacement submarines does not include the $1.2 billion the Navy is currently spending each year for upgrades to the existing Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. By 2042, the end of the service life of the D-5 missiles, new missiles will have to be designed, tested, and deployed. The Navy has not publicly discussed the cost for the replacement missiles for the new SSBN-X submarines.

Last year Congress created a new military account for the replacement submarines, called the “National Sea-Based Deterrence Fund.” Congress has yet to allocate funds to the account.

Never mind if our nation actually needs more advanced weapon systems. As Kilmer and other members of Congress ponder ways to simplify and streamline the acquisition process for the military, costs will continue to spin out of control.

The way to fix defense acquisition is to start making cuts in defense spending, the sooner the better.

*Glen Milner lives in Lake Forest Park and is a researcher and activist with Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo. See www.gzcenter.org. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action is also on Facebook.

A partial list of references:

http://choosewashingtonstate.com/why-washington/our-key-sectors/military-defense

http://www.defenseone.com/management/2015/04/pentagon-we-cant-afford-replace-aging-icbms-bombers-subs/110134

http://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/fix-broken-defense-contracting

http://kilmer.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/major-defense-bill-passes-house-with-kilmer-backed-initiatives

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/02/obamas-trillion-dollar-nuclear-weapons-gamble/104217

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2015/01/07/pentagon-ohio-replacement-funding-300-ship

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/R41129.pdf

http://www.armscontrol.org/blog/ArmsControlNow/2015-03-12/Nuclear-Weapons-Could-Require-10-percent-of-Defense-Budget

http://www.answers.com/Q/How_many_acres_is_the_city_of_Seattle  Seattle is 91,200 acres compared to the 97,400 acres for the two military bases. I checked this figure with the 142.5 square miles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle and other sources.

Arresting the Wrong Suspects

Contributed by John LaForge

NEW YORK, NY – Here at the United Nations, talk is focused on the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (N-P.T.). At about 11 a.m. Apr. 28, I was handcuffed with 21 other nuclear realists after blocking an entrance to the US Mission. I say “realists” because US media won’t pay much attention to US violations of nuclear weapons treaties unless somebody is taken off to jail.
Barrels of ink are used detailing Iran’s non-existent nuclear arsenal. The US has about 2,000 nuclear weapons ready to launch and used as ticking time bombs every day by presidents — the way gunslingers can get the dough without ever pulling the trigger. Deterrence it is not.

(l to R) Carol Gilbert, John LaForge and Ardeth Platte showing the 450 U.S.
land-based missiles that hold the world under the threat of nuclear omnicide.

When we were ordered to leave or face arrest, we called ourselves crime-stoppers and asked the officers to arrest the real scofflaws. We were packed into vans and driven to the 17th Precinct. Our band of nuclear abolitionists concluded long ago that US nuclear banditry and pollutionism was worth dramatizing for a day, or a month, or a lifetime.

We talked while the cops worked through the booking routine. David McReynolds, 85, the long-time staff member of War Resisters League (Ret.), asked us all to watch when he exited the van to see that he didn’t lose his balance. I wondered if I’d have the guts to keep doing these actions if I get to the wobbly decades.

The day before, Sec. of State John Kerry double-spoke to the Gen. Assembly, promising both to continue with US nuclear posturing and to dream of a nuclear-free world. I skipped his puffery and went to hear Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico explain the US government’s plans for three new H-bomb factories (one each in Tenn., Kansas and New Mexico), and plans for building 80 new plutonium warheads every year until 2027. In 1996, the World Court declared the N-P.T.’s pledge to eliminate nuclear weapons to be a binding, unequivocal and unambiguous legal obligation. Our arrest citation is ironic because it’s the US that has “refused a lawful order.”

Back in the police truck, time dragged. Somebody said we should share a few political jokes. Q: “Why are statistics just like prison inmates?” A: “If you torture them enough, they’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” Bad prison puns are easy to come by among political dissidents.

Finally inside the precinct, I sat in the holding cell next to Jerry Goralnick, a playwright with The Living Theatre, who is trying to get a script staged involving the jail-house relationship between Dorothy Day and a colleague who shared a cell for 90 days. Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and her friend were jailed in New York City for refusing to obey civil defense officers and go down into fallout shelters. It was during the delusional era of “winnable” nuclear war. Their defiance was a simple case of refusing to lie about nuclear weapons. They were realists who knew that the 10-square-mile firestorms ignited by H-bombs suck all the air out of fallout shelters where the huddled then suffocate. They knew there is no defense under such nuclear conflagration, that survivors would envy the dead.

These days, nuclear war planning goes on 6 stories below Strategic Command HQ at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha. Deep in Strat-Com’s sub-basements, technicians with the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff select people and places to be incinerated if need be. The targets are lands belonging to US trading partners, allies and friends that have the Bomb — China, Russia, India, Pakistan — and non-nuclear countries like Iran and North Korea (which may have 3 nukes but have no way to deliver them).

This target planning has been going on for decades. A few thousand hard-bitten, nuclear-obsessed optimists have been crying “foul” about it the whole while. I was in custody with 21 of them for a few hours. It was a relief to be there.

Our complaint, which should be on display at the June 24 court arraignment, is that nuclear weapons producers, deployers and trigger men in the US (the ones we’re responsible for), are criminal gangsters, dangerous sociopaths, members of a global terror cell making non-stop bomb threats that they disguise with a theatrical hoax called “deterrence.”

I’ve seen this legal argument succeed in court only twice, but those two not-guilty verdicts convince me that the law is on our side. Dum-dum bullets, nerve gas, landmines, cluster bombs, chemical agents, biological weapons and poison are all illegal — banned by Treaties. Nuclear warheads do all the harm of these outlawed weapons combined — plus mutagenic and teratogenic damage to multiple generations. Our State Department man says the Bomb is unfortunate and legal — but the Secretary Has No Clothes.

The Isaiah Wall, across the street from the UN, during the vigil prior to the
nonviolent blockade of the U.S. Mission to the UN

While UN member states argue over whether the possession of H-bombs violates the N-P.T., I’ll stay with the realists just out of handcuffs — at least until the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff and Mr. Kerry are charged with disturbing the peace.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
— John LaForge works for Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, edits its Quarterly newsletter, and is syndicated through PeaceVoice.

- Photos in this post by Leonard Eiger

We the people: for a better world

Editor's Note: I have just returned from New York where I participated in a host of activities surrounding the Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. I am not naïve; I know that the NPT was conceived out of avarice and power, and a desire of the nuclear weapons states (led by the U.S.) to keep others out of the exclusive nuclear club. 45 years of empty promises has convinced me that the nuclear weapons states will not live up to their moral or legal responsibilities to disarm without a groundswell of global citizen-led pressure. Ray Acheson's editorial below is a concise perspective on our responsibility in navigating the road ahead.

Ray Acheson is Director of Critical Will, a project of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Learn more (and keep up with this year's NPT Review Conference) at the Reaching Critical Will website.

*******************

Editorial: We the people

Ray Acheson | Reaching Critical Will of WILPF

Last week more than 900 women and men from 80 countries gathered in The Hague to celebrate 100 years of peacemaking with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and to set a new agenda for peace for the 21st century. Now WILPF is in New York at the NPT Review Conference. Our participation in these very different conferences has one thing in common: our intention is to confront and challenge the structures of power that privilege the few over the many, that undermine international law, and that impede human security.

WILPF’s 100th anniversary conference strongly confronted the corporate and military take-over of governments and the resulting preservation of power over the protection of human beings. “The UN Charter states ‘We the people,’ not ‘I, the hegemonic nation state’,” declared Madeleine Rees, WILPF’s Secretary General. The Charter and the rest of the UN system and body of international law surrounding it are designed to promote peace over violence, law over war.

But this system is not working effectively against the structures of power that prevent the achievement of peace and justice. The NPT has also failed in this regard.

The NPT demands that every effort be made to “avert the devastation of a nuclear war” and to take measures that would “safeguard the security of peoples”. It requires the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons and the total elimination of all stockpiles of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems.

Yet five states parties continue to possess and even modernise and extend the lives of their nuclear weapons, while another 30 or so include nuclear weapons in their security doctrines.

The possession of nuclear weapons, argued South Africa’s delegation, privileges the security interests of a few states “at the expense of the rest of humanity.” And these few are so far unwilling to relinquish this particular tool of domination. The five NPT nuclear-armed state parties reiterated last week that “an incremental, step-by-step approach is the only practical and realistic option for making progress towards nuclear disarmament, while upholding global strategic security and stability.” 26 of their nuclear-dependent allies proclaimed the need to work “methodically and with realism,” imperiously asserting, “There are no short cuts.”

If these states were actually engaged in serious, concrete, time-bound, transparent, verifiable actions for nuclear disarmament, they might have a leg to stand on. But they are not. And their security doctrines assert the importance of nuclear weapons for security—principally, for deterring conflict by threatening massive nuclear violence.

The idea that nuclear weapons can prevent conflict or afford security to anyone has been firmly rejected by the vast majority of governments. And there is a new sense of empowerment developing amongst the peoples and governments of countries that reject nuclear weapons. While some states, such as Belgium, continue to believe that “nuclear disarmament will happen when nuclear-weapon states will no longer feel the need to have them,” most have shaken off this submissive position and are demanding real change, now.

We are told that we are being divisive by doing so. But just as we must stand up to those who abuse and then blame their victims for their abhorrent behaviour, we must reject this accusation. We must not accept a framing that a ban treaty is polarising or divisive, said the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) in its statement to the Review Conference. “Adopting a new international legal standard to prohibit nuclear weapons is a responsibility.”

It is everyone’s responsibility to challenge power and privilege and to fight for the rights of humanity over the interests of a few states. Whether we are at a women’s peace conference aimed at stopping war and violence or at a treaty review conference focused on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation, this responsibility lies at the centre of all of our actions. Whether banning nuclear weapons or standing up to patriarchy we are demanding and designing a better world for all.

Who Are the Nuclear Scofflaws? by Lawrence Wittner

Editor's Note: Almost every day I find something in the corporate news media about Iran and its (alleged) quest for nuclear weapons. With so many wringing their hands and sounding the alarm about a nuclear Iran, one might think we're all going to need Prozac (FDA-approved for panic disorder) any day now. A major irony of this situation is that we are completely ignoring the elephant in the room - the already existing warheads (approximately 15,645) of the confirmed nuclear nations, many of which are deployed on missiles, ready to launch.

That nations (led by the US and Israel) scream and shout about Iran while essentially ignoring the clear and present danger posed by the existence of so many nuclear weapons (by nations prepared to use them) in an increasingly tense, new Cold War that is brewing, is madness and is a crime against humanity.

Enter the calm, clear voice of the respected historian of the nuclear age and the movement to abolish nuclear weapons. Lawrence Wittner wrote the following article to offer an important perspective on the current nuclear conundrum, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and the Upcoming NPT Review Conference. The big question is, "What will it take to move the nuclear weapons states in a positive direction (towards disarmament)?"

In his book Confronting the Bomb, Wittner wrote that it is not the conventional explanation of "deterrence" that has saved the world from nuclear annihilation over the past 65 years, but a "massive nuclear disarmament movement." Let us hope that we will have a “massive” presence in New York City this April to send a clear message to the nuclear weapons states that the time for disarmament is NOW!

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Who Are the Nuclear Scofflaws? 

By Lawrence S. Wittner

Dr. Lawrence Wittner (http://lawrenceswittner.com) is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. He is the author of "Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement" (Stanford University Press).

Test launch of a Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile

Given all the frothing by hawkish U.S. Senators about Iran’s possible development of nuclear weapons, one might think that Iran was violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

But it’s not. The NPT, signed by 190 nations and in effect since 1970, is a treaty in which the non-nuclear nations agreed to forgo developing nuclear weapons and the nuclear nations agreed to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons. It also granted nations the right to develop peaceful nuclear power. The current negotiations in which Iran is engaged with other nations are merely designed to guarantee that Iran, which signed the NPT, does not cross the line from developing nuclear power to developing nuclear weapons.

Nine nations, however, have flouted the NPT by either developing nuclear weapons since the treaty went into effect or failing to honor the commitment to disarm. These nine scofflaws and their nuclear arsenals are Russia (7,500 nuclear warheads), the United States (7,100 nuclear warheads), France (300 nuclear warheads), China (250 nuclear warheads), Britain (215 nuclear warheads), Pakistan (100-120 nuclear warheads), India (90-110 nuclear warheads), Israel (80 nuclear warheads), and North Korea (10 nuclear warheads).

Nor are the nuclear powers likely to be in compliance with the NPT any time soon. The Indian and Pakistani governments are engaged in a rapid nuclear weapons buildup, while the British government is contemplating the development of a new, more advanced nuclear weapons system. Although, in recent decades, the U.S. and Russian governments did reduce their nuclear arsenals substantially, that process has come to a halt in recent years, as relations have soured between the two nations. Indeed, both countries are currently engaged in a new, extremely dangerous nuclear arms race. The U.S. government has committed itself to spending $1 trillion to “modernize” its nuclear facilities and build new nuclear weapons. For its part, the Russian government is investing heavily in the upgrading of its nuclear warheads and the development of new delivery systems, such as nuclear missiles and nuclear submarines.

What can be done about this flouting of the NPT, some 45 years after it went into operation?

That will almost certainly be a major issue at an NPT Review Conference that will convene at the UN headquarters, in New York City, from April 27 to May 22. These review conferences, held every five years, attract high-level national officials from around the world to discuss the treaty’s implementation. For a very brief time, the review conferences even draw the attention of television and other news commentators before the mass communications media return to their preoccupation with scandals, arrests, and the lives of movie stars.

This spring’s NPT review conference might be particularly lively, given the heightening frustration of the non-nuclear powers at the failure of the nuclear powers to fulfill their NPT commitments. At recent disarmament conferences in Norway, Mexico and Austria, the representatives of a large number of non-nuclear nations, ignoring the opposition of the nuclear powers, focused on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war. One rising demand among restless non-nuclear nations and among nuclear disarmament groups is to develop a nuclear weapons ban treaty, whether or not the nuclear powers are willing to participate in negotiations.

To heighten the pressure for the abolition of nuclear weapons, nuclear disarmament groups are staging a Peace and Planet mobilization, in Manhattan, on the eve of the NPT review conference. Calling for a “Nuclear-Free, Peaceful, Just, and Sustainable World,” the mobilization involves an international conference (comprised of plenaries and workshops) on April 24 and 25, plus a culminating interfaith convocation, rally, march, and festival on April 26. Among the hundreds of endorsing organizations are many devoted to peace (Fellowship of Reconciliation, Pax Christi, Peace Action, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Veterans for Peace, and Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom), environmentalism (Earth Action, Friends of the Earth, and 350NYC), religion (Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Unitarian Universalist UN Office, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist General Board of Church & Society), workers’ rights (New Jersey Industrial Union Council, United Electrical Workers, and Working Families Party), and human welfare (American Friends Service Committee and National Association of Social Workers).

Of course, how much effect the proponents of a nuclear weapons-free world will have on the cynical officials of the nuclear powers remains to be seen. After as many as 45 years of stalling on their own nuclear disarmament, it is hard to imagine that they are finally ready to begin negotiating a treaty effectively banning nuclear weapons―or at least their nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, let us encourage Iran not to follow the bad example set by the nuclear powers. And let us ask the nuclear-armed nations, now telling Iran that it should forgo the possession of nuclear weapons, when they are going to start practicing what they preach.

Originally published in History News Network, original source URL:  http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158896