The HOUR is getting late!!!

Friends,

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists says "It is Now 5 Minutes to Midnight."

It should come as no surprise that this respected organization has moved the clock (on January 10th) an inch closer to the witching hour.  It is black magic, indeed, that causes the clock to inch closer to midnight.  As described on their Website:

The Doomsday Clock conveys how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction--the figurative midnight--and monitors the means humankind could use to obliterate itself. First and foremost, these include nuclear weapons, but they also encompass climate-changing technologies and new developments in the life sciences that could inflict irrevocable harm.

Just two years ago The Bulletin spoke hopefully as it set the clock back one minute (away from Midnight) saying,"We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons." That tempered enthusiasm was rooted in negotiations between Washington and Moscow for a follow-on agreement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, along with ongoing negotiations for further reductions in the U.S. and Russian nuclear nuclear arsenals.  There were also "pockets of progress" addressing climate change.

Yet, in just two years those hopes quickly faded as it has become evident that nations, in particular the United States and Russia, are not only hesitant to disarm, but are re-arming at an alarming rate; not much of an example for the rest of the world. As for climate change, it is clearly evident that Nero fiddles even while Rome burns.  As The Bulletin summarizes the situation:

The challenges to rid the world of nuclear weapons, harness nuclear power, and meet the nearly inexorable climate disruptions from global warming are complex and interconnected. In the face of such complex problems, it is difficult to see where the capacity lies to address these challenges.

The Bulletin's Doomsday Clock is in a very real sense a prophetic voice, a clarion call to all who will listen.  And listen we must, or turn away at humanity's peril.  The longer we put off facing these issues, the greater the probability that the clock will once again start ticking,moving closer to midnight. 

In 1953 the clock reached 2 minutes to midnight, the closest in its history, after the U.S. tested its first thermonuclear bomb.  In its 1953 statement The Bulletin said:

Only a few more swings of the pendulum, and, from Moscow to Chicago, atomic explosions will strike midnight for Western civilization.

Disarmament is obviously not forthcoming from the halls of The White House, Congress or the Pentagon (or the Kremlin for that matter).  It is up to We The People to rise up and demand good faith efforts toward disarmament, and of course simultaneous efforts to control global proliferation and move all nations toward a nuclear weapons free world.  It is time to re-energize the global movement toward that goal.

Watch from Hiroshima

It is time to shout out in every capital city,

"Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Never Again!!!"

Peace,

Leonard

Read the announcements at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Doomsday Clock Moves 1 minute closer to midnight

Doomsday Clock moves to five minutes to midnight

Read the timeline of the Doomsday Clock: http://thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline

Beyond New START in the New Year

When the star in the sky is gone and the shepherds are back with their flocks, the REAL work of Christmas begins – feeding the hungry, healing the broken, and bringing peace to the people. – theologian Howard Thurman.

Friends,

May we all be re-energized, as we move into the New Year, to expand on the small victory represented by ratification of the New START Treaty, keeping our eyes on the prize.

Peace,

Leonard

Photo: (from left) The Subversive Peacemaker, Leonard; Scottish Trident Ploughshares activist Angie Zelter; Steven Leeper, Chairperson of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation; Retired Col. Ann Wright and Father Bill "Bix" Bichsel, member of Disarm Now Plowshares, during the recent Disarm Now Plowshares trial week.

DISARM NOW!!! Pass New START!

Friends,

I woke up this morning at Jean's House of Prayer in Tacoma, Washington where I am helping prepare for the trial of the Disarm Now Plowshares 5 that begins today in U.S. District Court. As I looked out the window around 6:00AM I saw the bright lights of the Port of Tacoma, and wondered what it must have been like just before dawn on November 2, 2009 as the Disarm Now Plowshares 5 topped the hill overlooking the Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific (SWFPAC), bathed in bright light, looking like the mythical Mordor in J.R. Tolkein's stories.

Mordor was a terrible, dark place, as is SWFPAC, which (along with the Trident nuclear submarines based at Bangor) contains enough nuclear weapons to end life as we know it on our small planet. Every step taken, whether by Plowshares activists like the Disarm Now Plowshares 5 or by our elected leaders to ratify treaties like New START are IMPORTANT.

Here is an important letter from past presidents of Physicians for Social Responsibility stressing the need to ratify the New START. Please read this and then take action to push the U.S. Senate to ratify New START now! And please hold the Disarm Now Plowshares 5 in your thoughts and prayers as they go on trial for attempting to do what all citizens are called to do - abolish these immoral and illegal nuclear weapons.

There will regular updates each day this week at the Disarm Now Plowshares Website and Blog.

Peace,

Leonard

The diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks this past week show a dangerously escalating nuclear confrontation in South Asia. This growing danger is one more reason why the US Senate should ratify new START without further delay.

Both US and British intelligence experts believe that Pakistan is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, which now numbers 70 to 90 bombs, despite increasing economic and political instability. India has 60-80 warheads in its nuclear arsenal. According to the leaked reports, Pakistan fears that it would be overwhelmed in a conventional war, and looks to establish nuclear superiority to offset India’s advantage in conventional weapons.

The leaked cables also describe an Indian contingency plan, code named Cold Start, to launch just the kind of conventional invasion the Pakistanis fear. While Cold Start is meant to be a purely non-nuclear attack, the Pakistani nuclear build up suggests that it is likely that any future conflict in South Asia would escalate to nuclear war.

A regional nuclear war in South Asia would be catastrophic for the whole world.

Recent climate studies have shown that if only 100 warheads were directed at urban areas, the resulting fire storms would inject upwards of five terragrams ( 5 million tons) of soot into the upper atmosphere. In a matter of days temperatures across the globe would drop an average of 1.3 degrees C., more than twice the warming that has occurred in the last 130 years. There would also be a major decline in rainfall worldwide. These changes would persist for nearly a decade.

While there are no detailed studies of the decline in food production that would result from these climate changes, there is reason to believe that it would be very significant. A cooling event caused by the Pinatubo volcano eruption in 1815 dropped global temperatures only .7 degrees, and the fall in temperature lasted only 1 year, but that was enough to cause widespread famine in Europe and Asia, and the “Year Without a Summer” here in New England when killing frosts throughout the summer devastated crops.

There are over one billion people in the world today who live on the brink of starvation, and global food stockpiles are perilously low. A study that we presented at the Royal Academy of Medicine in 2007 concludes that we have reason to fear that all of these people might starve to death in the event of a nuclear war in South Asia.

What has this to do with New START? Everything.

US efforts to limit nuclear proliferation have been hobbled by our own continued reliance on nuclear weapons despite our having the strongest conventional forces in the world.

New START does not eliminate our arsenal. The 1550 warheads we still retain are enough to destroy India, Pakistan, Iran, North Korea, China and Russia—and to kill most of the people on Earth in the process. But New START is an important next step in limiting the US and Russian arsenals, and it is essential to the improved relations with Russia necessary for us to work with the Russians to limit nuclear proliferation. Further it restores our ability to monitor Russia’s nuclear arsenal, an ability we lost when the original START expired just one year ago.

The treaty is seen as vital to US security by our entire military leadership and a veritable “Who’s Who” of Republican defense experts. The original START treaty received overwhelming bi-partisan support in 1992, passing 93-6. But today’s Senate Republicans are threatening to block this replacement treaty unless the Senate agrees to extend the Bush era tax cuts for people making more than $1 million a year.

Republicans, including Senator Gregg, need to stop playing partisan politics with our national security and support this treaty NOW.

John Pastore, MD

Ira Helfand, MD

The authors are past Presidents of Physicians for Social Responsibility, US Affiliate of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize

Contact: Ira Helfand, MD at ihelfand@igc.org or 413 320 7829

Wadioactive Wabbits ah no waughing matter!

Dear Friends,

No, I haven't lost my mind (contrary to popular opinion); I was just channeling Elmer Fud for a brief moment in response to recent radioactive reports about pesky wadioactive wabbits.

In south central Washington state, tucked away behind barbed wire fences, lies an accumulation of radioactive substances that are byproducts of decades of the U.S. nuclear weapons program; some legacy indeed. The U.S. Government is spending vast sums of money in an attempt to clean up the radioactive contamination; a daunting task considering the extent of contamination of soil, groundwater (seeping into the Columbia River), and the bizarre mix of highly radioactive and reactive substances in the aging underground storage tanks.

Yesterday's headline in the Tri-City Herald, Radioactive rabbit trapped near Richland, is a sobering reminder that radioactive substances, once released into the environment, are difficult, and sometimes impossible) to remove or render "safe". And while the government pays people to keep contaminated animals from escaping the boundaries of one of the planets significantly contaminated places, there is another place where it is more than the occasional radioactive rabbit that is of concern.

The Chernobyl disaster, which for most people is no more than a historical footnote, is still just that - a disaster - for the people living in areas where they continue to be exposed to the residual radiation from the catastrophic events of April 26, 1986. The radioactive Cesium found in that cute, little Hanford bunny (assuming it was Cesium 137) has a half-life of roughly 30 years, and if one ingested rabbit stew made from the little critter one would end up distributing Cesium 137 around the body where it would continually (and fairly intensely) irradiate (from within) muscle cells and organs; think CANCER!

The Cesium 137 released from the Chernobyl accident has most likely affected millions of people downwind of the accident as it was deposited (along with a variety of other radioactive substances) in various concentrations, and silently and invisibly irradiated its victims and increased the risk of radiation-related genetic damage and subsequent cancers and birth defects.

As bad as Chernobyl was, one or more modern thermonuclear weapons detonated anywhere on Earth would unleash an even worse, horrific mixture of deadly radioisotopes that would, beyond the immediate effects in areas of high radioactivity, leave a legacy of chronic health effects affecting countless generations. Any measure that brings stability to the relationship between the nuclear powers and reduces the numbers of nuclear arms reduces the probability of this unthinkable event.

Now that the U.S. elections are over it is high time that the Senate get to work once again on ratifying the New START Treaty. Although the treaty contains only modest reductions in U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons stocks, more importantly it improves and extends the verification and monitoring measures of the original START Treaty, which have been important in maintaining nuclear stability after the end of the Cold War.

With U.S. military leaders supporting ratification there is no reason for Republicans to stonewall. It has been nearly a year since the original treaty lapsed, and the clock is ticking; if the Senate doesn't ratify the treaty before year's end the ratification process has to start all over, casting a shadow over its fate, and thus a shadow over the planet.

Even if you previously wrote your Senators in support of the New START Treaty, DO IT AGAIN! Click here to urge them to ratify the New START Treaty now! Keep the heat on; the time for New START is NOW!

Peace,

Leonard