Song lyrics tell me to be proud to be an American, yet war and profligate preparations for more of the same are omnipresent here. My government spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined (and most of them are allies). In this century, our leaders have twice warned of an “axis of evil” intent on harming us, whether the fantasy troika of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cited by President George W. Bush early in 2002 or a new one — China, Russia, and North Korea — in the Indo-Pacific today. Predictably given that sort of threat inflation, this country is now closing in on a trillion dollars a year in “defense spending,” or close to two-thirds of federal discretionary spending, in the name of having a military machine capable of defeating “evil” troikas (as well as combatting global terrorism). A significant part of that huge sum is reserved for producing a new generation of nuclear weapons that will be quite capable of destroying this planet with missiles and warheads to spare.

My country, to be blunt, has long been addicted to war, killing, violence, and massive preparations for more of the same. We need an intervention. We need to confront our addiction. Yet when it comes to war and preparations for future conflicts, our leaders aren’t even close to hitting rock bottom. They remain in remarkable denial and see no reason to change their ways.

To cite two recent examples: Just before Easter weekend this year, President Biden swore he was personally devastated by Palestinian suffering in Gaza. At the same time, his administration insisted that a United Nations Security Council resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza that it allowed to pass was “non-binding” and, perhaps to make that very point, reportedly shipped 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs off to Israel, assumedly to be used in — yes! — Gaza.

The Biden administration refuses to see the slightest contradiction in such a stance. Men like Joe Biden and his chief diplomat Antony Blinken confess to being disturbed, even shocked, by the devastation our bombs deliver. Who knew Israel would use them to kill or wound more than 100,000 Palestinians? Who knew that they’d reduce significant parts of Gaza to rubble? Who knew that a blank check of support for Israel would enable that country to — it’s hard not to use the phrase — offer a final solution to the Gaza question?

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Not to be outdone by the Democrats, Republican Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan recently cited the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in seeking a “quick” end to the conflict in Gaza (before walking his comments back somewhat). For him, Israel remains America’s greatest ally, whatever its actions, even as he argues that Palestinians in Gaza merit no humanitarian aid from the United States whatsoever.

With that horrifying spectacle — and given the TV news and social media, it truly has been a spectacle! — of genocide in Gaza, America’s leaders have embraced the very worst of Machiavelli, preferring to be feared rather than loved, while putting power first and principle last. Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, recently deceased, rightly vilified for pursuing a Bismarckian Realpolitik, and deeply involved in the devastation of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, might even have blanched at the full-throttled support for war (and weapons sales) now being pursued by this country’s leaders. Dividing the world into armed camps based on fear seems basic to our foreign policy, a reality now echoed in domestic politics as well, as the Democratic blue team and the MAGA Republican red team attack each other as “fascistic” or worse. In this all-American world of ours, all is conflict, all is war.

When asked about such an addiction to war, your average government official will likely claim it’s not our fault. “Freedom isn’t free,” so the bumper sticker says, meaning in practice that this country stands prepared to kill others without mercy to ensure its “way of life,” which also in practice means unbridled consumption by an ever-shrinking portion of Americans and unapologetic profiteering by the richest and greediest of us. Call it the “moderate” bipartisan consensus within the Washington Beltway. Only an “extremist” would dare call for restraint, tolerance, diplomacy, and peace.

A Common Cause to Unify Humanity

Short of an attack on Earth by aliens, it’s hard to imagine the U.S. today making common cause with “enemies” like China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia. What gives? Isn’t there a better way and, if so, how would we get there?

In fact, there is a common foe — or perhaps a common cause — that should unite us all as humans. That cause is Earth, the health of our planet and all the life forms on it. And that foe, to state the obvious (even if it regularly goes unsaid), is war, which is unhealthy in the extreme not just for us but for our planet, too.

War turns people into killers — of our fellow humans, of course, but also of all forms of life within our (often very large) blast radii. In addition, war is a mass distraction from what should truly matter to us: the sacredness of life and the continued viability of our planet and its ecology. Call it a cliché but there’s no way to deny it: there is indeed only one Spaceship Earth. As far as we know now, our planet is the sole body in the universe teeming with life. Of course, the universe is incomprehensibly vast and there could well be other forms of life out there, but we don’t know that, not with certainty anyway.

Imagine, in a dystopic future, America’s “best and brightest” (or the “best and brightest” of another country) acting in a nuclear fury, employing the very weaponry that continues to proliferate but hasn’t been used since the destruction of two Japanese cities on August 6 and 9, 1945, and so crippling Spaceship Earth. Imagine also that our planet is truly the universe’s one magnificent and magical spot of life. Wouldn’t it be hard then to imagine a worse crime, not just against humanity, but life itself cosmically? There would be no recompense, no forgiveness, no redemption — and possibly no recovery either.

Of course, I don’t know if God (or gods) exists. Though I was raised a Catholic, I find myself essentially an agnostic today. Yet I do believe in the sacredness of life in all its diversity. And as tenacious as life may be, given our constant pursuit of war, I fear the worst.

If you’re of a certain age, you may recall when the astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed earthrise as their spaceship orbited the moon in 1968. The crew read from Genesis, though in truth it could have been from any creation story we humans have ever imagined to account for how we and our world came to be. Specific religions or creeds didn’t truly matter at that moment, nor should they now. What mattered was the sense of awe we felt as we first viewed the Earth from space in its full glory but also all its fragility.

For make no mistake, this planet is fragile. Its ecosystems can be destroyed. Not for nothing did the inventor of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, turn to the Hindu scriptures to intone, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” when he saw the first atomic device explode and expand into a mushroom cloud during the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945.

In the febrile postwar climate of anti-communism that would all too soon follow, America’s leaders would decide that atomic bombs weren’t faintly destructive enough. What they needed were thermonuclear bombs, 1,000 times more destructive, to fight World War III against the “big fat commie rat.” Now nine (9!) nations have nuclear weapons, with more undoubtedly hankering to join the club. So how long before mushroom clouds soar toward the stratosphere again? How long before we experience some version of planetary ecocide via a nuclear exchange and the nuclear winter that could follow it?

Genocide and Ecocide on a Planetary Scale

The genocide happening in Gaza today may foreshadow one possible future for this planet. The world’s lone superpower, its self-styled beacon of freedom, now dismisses U.N. Security Council resolutions to stop the killing as “non-binding.” Meanwhile, Israel, whose founding was a response to a Holocaust inflicted during World War II and whose people collectively said Never Again, is now killing, starving, and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the name of righteous vengeance for Hamas’s October 7th attack.

If the U.S. and Israel can spin mass murder in Palestine as not just defensible, but even positive (“defeating Hamas terrorists”), what hope do we have as a species? Is this the future we have to look forward to, an endless echoing of our murderous past?

I refuse to believe it. It truly should be possible to imagine and work toward something better. Yet, in all honesty, it’s hard to imagine new paths being blazed by such fossilized thinkers as Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

“Don’t trust anyone over thirty” was a telling catchphrase of the 1960s. Now, we’re being told as Americans that we’ll have to place our trust in one of two men almost at or exceeding 80 years of age. Entrusting and empowering political dinosaurs, however, represents an almost surefire path toward future extinction-level events.

Let me turn instead to a 25-year-old who did imagine a better future, even as he protested in the most extreme way imaginable the genocide in Gaza. This February, fellow airman Aaron Bushnell lit himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. He sacrificed his life in a most public way to challenge us to do something, anything, to stop genocide. America’s “leaders” answered him by ignoring his sacrifice and sending more bombs, thousands of them, to Israel.

Aaron Bushnell did, however, imagine a better world. As he explained last year in a private post:

“I’ve realized that a lot of the difference between me and my less radical friends is that they are less capable of imagining a better world than I am. I follow YouTubers like Andrewism that fill my head with concrete images of free, post-scarcity communities and it makes me so much more prepared to reject things about the current world, because I’ve imagined how things could be and that helps me see how extremely bullshit things are right now.

“What I’m trying to say is, it’s so important to imagine a better world. Let your thoughts run wild with idealistic dreams of what the world should look like and let the pain and anger at how it’s not that way flow through you. Let it free your mind and fuel your rage against the machine.

“It’s not too late for you or anyone. We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.”

His all-too-public suicide was a fiery cry of despair, but also a plea for a better future, one free of mass murder.

Earlier this week, millions of people across America witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. It’s awe-inspiring, even a bit alarming, to see the sun disappear in the middle of the day. Those watching took comfort in knowing that it would reappear from behind the moon in a matter of seconds or minutes and so gloried in that fleeting moment of preternatural darkness.

But imagine if the moon and sun were somehow to become permanently stuck in place. Imagine that darkness was our future — our only future. Sadly enough, however, it’s not the moon but we humans who can potentially cast the Earth into lasting darkness. Via the nuclear winter that could result from a nuclear conflict on this planet, we could indeed cast a shadow between the sun and life itself, a power of destruction that, tragically, may far exceed our current level of wisdom.

We know from history that it’s far easier to destroy than to create, far easier to kill than to preserve. Yet when countries make genocide or ecocide (from nuclear winter) possible and defensible (as a sign of uncompromising “toughness” and perhaps the defense of “freedom”), you know that their leaders are, in some sense, morally obtuse monsters. And who or what are we if we choose to follow such monsters?

As human populations rise, as vital resources like water, food, and fuel shrink, as this planet grows ever hotter thanks to our intervention and our excesses, we’ll need to cooperate more than ever to ensure our mutual survival. Far too often, however, America’s strategic thinkers dismiss cooperation through diplomacy or otherwise as naïve, unreliable, and impractical. “Competition” through zero-sum games, war, or other hyperviolent urges seems so much more “reasonable,” so much more “human.”

To the victor goes the spoils, so it’s said. But a planet despoiled by thermonuclear war, cast into darkness, ravaged by radiation, disease, and death, would, of course, offer no victory to anyone. Unless we put our efforts into ending war, rather than continuing to war on one another, such conflicts will, sooner or later, undoubtedly put an end to us.

In reality, our worst enemy isn’t some “axis” or other combination of imagined foes from without, it’s within. We remain the world’s most dangerous species, the one capable of wiping out most or all of the rest, not to speak of ourselves, with our folly. So, as Aaron Bushnell wrote, free your mind. Collectively, there must be a better way for all creatures, great and small, on this fragile spaceship of ours.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com) – It’s sure to be a blood-soaked spring in Ukraine. Russia’s winter offensive fell far short of Vladimir Putin’s objectives, leaving little doubt that the West’s conveyor belt of weaponry has aided Ukraine’s defenses. Cease-fire negotiations have never truly begun, while NATO has only strengthened its forces thanks to Finland’s new membership (with Sweden soon likely to follow). Still, tens of thousands of people have perished; whole villages, even cities, have been reduced to rubble; millions of Ukrainians have poured into Poland and elsewhere; while Russia’s brutish invasion rages on with no end in sight.

The hope, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is that the Western allies will continue to furnish money, tanks, missiles, and everything else his battered country needs to fend off Putin’s forces. The war will be won, according to Zelensky, not through backroom compromises but on the battlefield with guns and ammo.

“I appeal to you and the world with these most simple and yet important words,” he said to a joint session of Great Britain’s parliament in February. “Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom.”

The United Kingdom, which has committed well over $2 billion in assistance to Ukraine, has so far refused to ship fighter jets there but has promised to supply more weaponry, including tank shells made with depleted uranium (DU), also known as “radioactive bullets.” A by-product of uranium enrichment, DU is a very dense and radioactive metal that, when housed in small torpedo-like munitions, can pierce thickly armored tanks and other vehicles.

Reacting to the British announcement, Putin ominously said he would “respond accordingly” if the Ukrainians begin blasting off rounds of DU.

While the UK’s decision to send depleted-uranium shells to Ukraine is unlikely to prove a turning point in the war’s outcome, it will have a lasting, potentially devastating, impact on soldiers, civilians, and the environment. The controversial deployment of DU doesn’t pose faintly the same risks as the actual nuclear weapons Putin and his associates have hinted they might use someday in Ukraine or as would a potential meltdown at the embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility in that country. Still, its use will certainly help create an even more lethal, all too literally radioactive theater of war — and Ukraine will end up paying a price for it.

The Radioactive Lions of Babylon

Stuart Dyson survived his deployment in the first Gulf War of 1991, where he served as a lance corporal with Britain’s Royal Pioneer Corps. His task in Kuwait was simple enough: he was to help clean up “dirty” tanks after they had seen battle. Many of the machines he spent hours scrubbing down had carried and fired depleted uranium shells used to penetrate and disable Iraq’s T-72 tanks, better known as the Lions of Babylon.

Dyson spent five months in that war zone, ensuring American and British tanks were cleaned, armed, and ready for battle. When the war ended, he returned home, hoping to put his time in the Gulf War behind him. He found a decent job, married, and had children. Yet his health deteriorated rapidly and he came to believe that his military service was to blame. Like so many others who had served in that conflict, Dyson suffered from a mysterious and debilitating illness that came to be known as Gulf War Syndrome.

After Dyson suffered years of peculiar ailments, ranging from headaches to dizziness and muscle tremors, doctors discovered that he had a severe case of colon cancer, which rapidly spread to his spleen and liver. The prognosis was bleak and, after a short battle, his body finally gave up. Stuart Dyson died in 2008 at the age of 39.

His saga is unique, not because he was the only veteran of the first Gulf War to die of such a cancer at a young age, but because his cancer was later recognized in a court of law as having been caused by exposure to depleted uranium. In a landmark 2009 ruling, jurors at the Smethwick Council House in the UK found that Dyson’s cancer had resulted from DU accumulating in his body, and in particular his internal organs.

“My feeling about Mr. Dyson’s colon cancer is that it was produced because he ingested some radioactive material and it became trapped in his intestine,” Professor Christopher Busby, an expert on the effects of uranium on health, said in his court testimony. “To my mind, there seems to be a causal arrow from his exposure to his final illness. It’s certainly much more probable than not that Mr. Dyson’s cancer was caused by exposure to depleted uranium.”

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The U.S. Department of Defense estimated that American forces fired more than 860,000 rounds of DU shells during that 1991 war to push Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s military out of Kuwait. The result: a poisoned battlefield laced with radioactive debris, as well as toxic nerve agents and other chemical agents.

In neighboring southern Iraq, background radiation following that war rose to 30 times normal. Tanks tested after being shelled with DU rounds had readings 50 times higher than average.

“It’s hot forever,” explains Doug Rokke, a former major in the U.S. Army Reserve’s Medical Service Corps who helped decontaminate dozens of vehicles hit by DU shells during the first Gulf War. “It doesn’t go away. It only disperses and blows around in the wind,” he adds. And of course, it wasn’t just soldiers who suffered from DU exposure. In Iraq, evidence has been building that DU, an intense carcinogenic agent, has led to increases in cancer rates for civilians, too.

“When we were moving forward and got north of a minefield, there were a bunch of blown-out tanks that were near where we would set up a command post,” says Jason Peterson, a former American Marine who served in the first Gulf War. “Marines used to climb inside and ‘play’ in them … We barely knew where Kuwait was, let alone the kind of ammunition that was used to blow shit up on that level.”

While it’s difficult to discern exactly what caused the Gulf War Syndrome from which Dyson and so many other soldiers suffered (and continue to suffer), experts like Rokke are convinced that exposure to depleted uranium played a central role in the illness. That’s an assertion Western governments have consistently downplayed. In fact, the Pentagon has repeatedly denied any link between the two.

“I’m a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission,” Rokke, who also suffers from Gulf War Syndrome, told Vanity Fair in 2007. “I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use DU safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can’t do this safely in combat conditions. You can’t decontaminate the environment or your own troops.”

Death to Uranium

Depleted uranium can’t produce a nuclear explosion, but it’s still directly linked to the development of atomic weaponry. It’s a by-product of the uranium enrichment process used in nuclear weapons and fuel. DU is alluring to weapons makers because it’s heavier than lead, which means that, if fired at a high velocity, it can rip through the thickest of metals.

That it’s radioactive isn’t what makes it so useful on the battlefield, at least according to its proponents. “It’s so dense and it’s got so much momentum that it just keeps going through the armor — and it heats it up so much that it catches on fire,” says RAND nuclear expert and policy researcher Edward Geist.

The manufacturing of DU dates back to the 1970s in the United States. Today, the American military employs DU rounds in its M1A2 Abrams tanks. Russia has also used DU in its tank-busting shells since at least 1982 and there are plenty of accusations, though as yet no hard evidence, that Russia has already deployed such shells in Ukraine. Over the years, for its part, the U.S. has fired such rounds not just in Kuwait, but also in Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo, Syria, and Serbia as well.

Both Russia and the U.S. have reasons for using DU, since each has piles of the stuff sitting around with nowhere to put it. Decades of manufacturing nuclear weapons have created a mountain of radioactive waste. In the U.S., more than 500,000 tons of depleted-uranium waste has built up since the Manhattan Project first created atomic weaponry, much of it in Hanford, Washington, the country’s main plutonium production site. As I investigated in my book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, Hanford is now a cesspool of radioactive and chemical waste, representing the most expensive environmental clean-up project in history with an estimated price tag of $677 billion.

Uranium, of course, is what makes the whole enterprise viable: you can’t create atomic bombs or nuclear power without it. The trouble is that uranium itself is radioactive, as it emits alpha particles and gamma rays. That makes mining uranium one of the most dangerous operations on the planet.

Keep It in the Ground

In New Mexico, where uranium mines were primarily worked by Diné (Navajo People), the toll on their health proved gruesome indeed. According to a 2000 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, rates of lung cancer in Navajo men who mined uranium were 28 times higher than in those who never mined uranium. The “Navajo experience with uranium mining,” it added, “is a unique example of exposure in a single occupation accounting for the majority of lung cancers in an entire population.”

Scores of studies have shown a direct correlation between exposure to uranium and kidney disease, birth defects in infants (when mothers were exposed), increased rates of thyroid disease, and several autoimmune diseases. The list is both extensive and horrifying.

“My family had a lot of cancer,” says anti-nuclear activist and Indigenous community organizer Leona Morgan. “My grandmother died of lung cancer and she never smoked. It had to be the uranium.”

One of the largest radioactive accidents, and certainly the least reported, occurred in 1979 on Diné land when a dam broke, flooding the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico, with 94 million gallons of radioactive waste. The incident received virtually no attention at the time. “The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco and burned the feet of a little boy who went wading. Sheep keeled over and died, while crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream,” writes Judy Pasternak in her book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajo.

Of course, we’ve known about the dangers of uranium for decades, which makes it all the more mind-boggling to see a renewed push for increased mining of that radioactive ore to generate nuclear power. The only way to ensure that uranium doesn’t poison or kill anyone is to leave it right where it’s always been: in the ground. Sadly, even if you were to do so now, there would still be tons of depleted uranium with nowhere to go. A 2016 estimate put the world’s mountain of DU waste at more than one million tons (each equal to 2,000 pounds).

So why isn’t depleted uranium banned? That’s a question antinuclear activists have been asking for years. It’s often met with government claims that DU isn’t anywhere near as bad as its peacenik critics allege. In fact, the U.S. government has had a tough time even acknowledging that Gulf War Syndrome exists. A Government Accountability Office report released in 2017 found that the Veterans Affairs Department had denied more than 80% of all Gulf War illness claims by veterans. Downplaying DU’s role, in other words, comes with the terrain.

“The use of DU in weapons should be prohibited,” maintains Ray Acheson, an organizer for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy. “While some governments argue there is no definitive proof its use in weapons causes harm, it is clear from numerous investigations that its use in munitions in Iraq and other places has caused impacts on the health of civilians as well as military personnel exposed to it, and that it has caused long-term environmental damage, including groundwater contamination. Its use in weapons is arguably in violation of international law, human rights, and environmental protection and should be banned in order to ensure it is not used again.”

If the grisly legacy of the American use of depleted uranium tells us anything, it’s that those DU shells the British are supplying to Ukraine (and the ones the Russians may also be using there) will have a radioactive impact that will linger in that country for years to come, with debilitating, potentially fatal, consequences. It will, in a sense, be part of a global atomic war that shows no sign of ending.

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

Putin said, according to Reuters,

“The United States is the only country in the world that has twice used nuclear weapons, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and setting a precedent.”

“Even today, they actually occupy Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries, and at the same time cynically call them allies of equal standing.”

Putin’s implication is that it would be hypocritical for the US to denounce Russia for using nukes, when Washington itself has done so twice. He is further implying that the presence of U.S. troops in allied countries is just a fig leaf for a form of occupation no different than what he has just imposed on the four provinces of Ukraine.

Putin’s analogies are screwy and you wonder if, by all that whispering back and forth with Trump on the sidelines of summits, he somehow caught whatever brain disease it is that has driven the former guy so bat shit insane.

The US bases in Japan, South Korea and Germany are there on the basis of bilateral understandings. When Charles De Gaulle demanded that the US withdraw its military forces from France in 1966, the US left. (I was a US military dependent at the Foret D’Orleans base 1962-1965). When the Philippines’ Senate asked the US to close its Subic Bay naval base in 1991, the U.S. promptly did so. The U.S. has not always behaved this well. The Iraqi parliament demanded that the prime minister make arrangements for US troops to leave Iraq in January 2020, but 2500 non-combat troops are still there. The prime minister feels differently than parliament, however, and I think the US would acquiesce to a united Iraqi government demand of this sort.

In any case, the US would certainly depart the three countries Mr. Putin singled out if it were asked to do so. Will Putin depart all of Ukraine, as he has been asked to by Kyiv? No, I thought not.

Although it is true that the US did use nuclear weapons against Japan to end the Pacific War, the current US nuclear posture is that the US would not under any circumstance use, or even threaten to use, nuclear weapons “against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.”

Ukraine does not have nuclear weapons, and in fact quite responsibly gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1994, so it would not be the sort of country against which the US would use nukes even if Washington went to war with Ukraine.

Kyiv had had the third largest such stockpile in the world! In response to this step, the Budapest Memorandum signed by the Russian Federation, the U.K. and the U.S. pledged these powers to respect the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine.

Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum the first time in 2014 with its invasion of Crimea, and now again in 2022 with its war on Ukraine. The current US and UK military supplies to Ukraine are in accordance with their obligations under the Memorandum.

Both Iraq, which also gave up a not-very-advanced nuclear weapons program in the 1990s, and Ukraine, which relinquished its nukes in 1994, have been invaded. Already, the optics are very bad for nuclear proliferation. If you were Iran, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, what would you be thinking? Wouldn’t you notice that North Korea, which went hell bent for leather in developing a nuclear stockpile, has not been invaded?

If Ukraine were not only invaded but also nuked, that would convey to the world the message that a country without nuclear weapons is a sitting duck before any country that does possess that capability. So far, the US, Britain, France, China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan all have nuclear weapons.

We have nine nuclear states in part because of inter-state rivalry. Once the US had a nuclear bomb, Russia had to have one, since the two superpowers were then locked in global struggle for dominance. Once Russia and the US had a bomb, China had to have one, since it had tense relations at many points with both the superpowers. Israel wanted the bomb to forestall any further pan-Arab attempt to push it into the sea, and also as an implied threat to Arab rivals. In 2003 as the US invaded Iraq, the Israelis warned Iraq not to retaliate against US ally Israel with rockets with poison gas in their noses, threatening to nuke Baghdad if it did so. Once India had a bomb, its primary rival Pakistan had to have one, too. North Korea’s bomb was a response to the nuclear umbrella the US military had extended over South Korea and Japan.

One of the reasons US officials typically give for not wanting to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon is that they fear if Tehran had one, Saudi Arabia would insist on having one, as well. Washington manages to ignore that Israel is the country that kicked off the nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and that Iraq’s feeble experiments in that direction were a response to the Israeli bomb and the forms of hegemony it gave Israel in the region.

If simple rivalries can impel countries to go nuclear, rivalries plus real-world examples of how dangerous it is to be without a nuke would turbocharge this tendency.

A nuclear strike on Kyiv would make Ukraine’s 1994 leadership look like complete and utter fools for giving up the protection of their own nuclear arsenal. Putin would never have dared invade Ukraine if it had remained a nuclear state.

But it could also make countries like Iran, South Africa, and Argentina, which have had the scientific expertise to create a nuclear weapon but who have chosen not to, reconsider.

Iran’s clerical Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has given numerous fatwas that forbid the creating, making and stockpiling of nuclear weapons as contrary to Islamic law. Classical Islamic law forbids the killing of noncombatants in war.

No one in the US takes Khamenei’s fatwas on the subject seriously but they should. Iran only has a civilian nuclear enrichment program and not a military one precisely because of the anti-nuke fatwas of the ayatollah. Those in Iran’s military and scientific establishment who want a bomb have to content themselves with acquiring the know-how to make one without actually starting up a nuclear weapons program. Gaining capabilities without actually going for a weapon is called the “Japan option” or “nuclear latency,” and it has some benefits for deterrence. Getting up an invasion of a country that could have a bomb by the time your troops landed on its soil would obviously be unwise.

Khamenei, however, is old and allegedly ill or very frail. A new leadership is emerging. They may feel differently about at least making and stockpiling nuclear weapons than did the older generation of ayatollahs, who excoriated them as works of the devil.

It isn’t just Iran, though. Any country with a major enemy that fears invasion may take a lesson from Putin’s use of nukes that they would rather be pariahs like North Korea than victims like Ukraine. If Iran got a nuke, Saudi Arabia would certainly want one, and Riyadh is in a position just to buy the scientists to make one. Southeast Asian countries afraid of an increasingly assertive China would be in the same boat.

The use of nuclear weapons is not only a threat because such explosions would kill hundreds of thousands or nowadays even millions of people. The journal Science points out that they would set forests and buildings on fire, putting enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Ironically, they could put so much particulate matter into the atmosphere that they could cause a nuclear winter, killing off all plant life by plunging the earth into two or three years of darkness, and perhaps killing off most large mammals as well. (Hint: humans are large mammals.) That nuclear winter would be a cold spell, but when the earth came out of it and the atmosphere cleared up, it would immediately go tropically hot because the CO2 and methane would still be up there, from all the forest and other fires. A nuclear winter followed by a rapid melting of the ice sheets at the poles and hot surface temperatures in the ocean, producing devastating mega-storms that will make Ian look like a kitten, would await anyone who survived the nuclear winter.

Even a relatively small nuclear war would create a worldwide food crisis lasting at least a decade in which hundreds of millions would starve, according to our new modelling published in Nature Food.

In a nuclear war, bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere. This soot would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet.

Although the war might only last days or weeks, the impacts on Earth’s climate could persist for more than ten years. We used advanced climate and food production models to explore what this would mean for the world’s food supply.

Catastrophic scenarios

Conflicts between nuclear-armed powers are an ongoing concern in multiple parts of the world. If one of these conflicts escalated to nuclear war, how would it affect the world’s food supply? And how would the impacts on global food production and trade scale with the size of such a war?

To try to answer these questions, we used simulations of the global climate coupled with models of major crops, fisheries and livestock production. These simulations let us assess the impacts of nuclear war on global food supply for 15 years after the conflict.

We simulated six different war scenarios, because the amount of soot injected into the upper atmosphere would depend on the number of weapons used.

The smallest war in our scenarios was a “limited” conflict between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons (less than 3% of the global nuclear arsenal). The largest was a global nuclear holocaust, in which Russia and the United States detonate 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.

The six scenarios injected between 5 million and 150 million tonnes of soot into the upper atmosphere. For context, the Australian summer bushfires of 2019–20, which burned an area greater than the United Kingdom, injected about one million tonnes of smoke into the stratosphere.

Although we focused on India and Pakistan for our regional-scale war scenarios, nuclear conflict involving other nations could result in similar amounts of smoke and thus similar climate impacts.

Widespread starvation

Across all scenarios, impacts on the world’s climate would be significant for about a decade after a nuclear war. As a consequence, global food production would decline.

Even under the smallest war scenario we considered, sunlight over global crop regions would initially fall by about 10%, and global average temperatures would drop by up to 1-2℃. For a decade or so, this would cancel out all human-induced warming since the Industrial Revolution.

In response, global food production would decrease by 7% in the first five years after a small-scale regional nuclear war. Although this sounds minor, a 7% fall is almost double the largest recorded drop in food production since records began in 1961. As a result, more than 250 million people would be without food two years after the war.

Unsurprisingly, a global nuclear war would be a civilisation-level threat, leaving over five billion people starving.

In this scenario, average global temperatures would fall by 10-15℃ for the first five years after the war, while sunlight would crash by between 50–80% and rainfall over crop regions would drop by over 50%. As a result, global food production from land and sea would fall to less than 20% of pre-war levels and take over a decade to recover.

No such thing as a limited nuclear war

Behavioural change could avert some starvation after a relatively small nuclear war, but only regionally. We found that reducing household food waste and diverting feed from livestock to humans would lessen a regional nuclear war’s effect on food supply, but only in major food-exporting countries such as Russia, the United States and Australia.

Although great improvements have been made in recent decades, global food distribution remains a major challenge. Despite present-day food production being more than sufficient to nourish the world’s population, over 700 million people suffered from undernutrition worldwide in 2020.

In a post-nuclear-war world, we expect global food distribution would cease entirely for several years, as exporting countries suspend trade and focus on feeding their own populations. This would make war-induced shortages even worse in food-importing countries, especially in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Our results point to a stark and clear conclusion: there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war, where impacts are confined to warring countries.

Our findings provide further support for the 1985 statement by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, reaffirmed by the current leaders of China, France, the UK, Russia and the US this year:

A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.

Ryan Heneghan, Lecturer in Mathematical Ecology, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: US Department of Energy

The site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine has been surrounded for more than three decades by a 1,000-square-mile (2,600-square-kilometer) exclusion zone that keeps people out. On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl’s reactor number four melted down as a result of human error, releasing vast quantities of radioactive particles and gases into the surrounding landscape – 400 times more radioactivity to the environment than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Put in place to contain the radioactive contaminants, the exclusion zone also protects the region from human disturbance.

Apart from a handful of industrial areas, most of the exclusion zone is completely isolated from human activity and appears almost normal. In some areas, where radiation levels have dropped over time, plants and animals have returned in significant numbers.

Some scientists have suggested the zone has become an Eden for wildlife, while others are skeptical of that possibility. Looks can be deceiving, at least in areas of high radioactivity, where bird, mammal and insect population sizes and diversity are significantly lower than in the “clean” parts of the exclusion zone.

I’ve spent more than 20 years working in Ukraine, as well as in Belarus and Fukushima, Japan, largely focused on the effects of radiation. I have been asked many times over the past days why Russian forces entered northern Ukraine via this atomic wasteland, and what the environmental consequences of military activity in the zone might be.

Why invade via Chernobyl?

In hindsight, the strategic benefits of basing military operations in the Chernobyl exclusion zone seem obvious. It is a large, unpopulated area connected by a paved highway straight to the Ukrainian capital, with few obstacles or human developments along the way. The Chernobyl zone abuts Belarus and is thus immune from attack from Ukrainian forces from the north. The reactor site’s industrial area is, in effect, a large parking lot suitable for staging an invading army’s thousands of vehicles.

The power plant site also houses the main electrical grid switching network for the entire region. It’s possible to turn the lights off in Kyiv from here, even though the power plant itself has not generated any electricity since 2000, when the last of Chernobyl’s four reactors was shut down. Such control over the power supply likely has strategic importance, although Kyiv’s electrical needs could probably also be supplied via other nodes on the Ukrainian national power grid.

The reactor site likely offers considerable protection from aerial attack, given the improbability that Ukrainian or other forces would risk combat on a site containing more than 5.3 million pounds (2.4 million kilograms) of radioactive spent nuclear fuel. This is the highly radioactive material produced by a nuclear reactor during normal operations. A direct hit on the power plant’s spent fuel pools or dry cask storage facilities could release substantially more radioactive material into the environment than the original meltdown and explosions in 1986 and thus cause an environmental disaster of global proportions.

Environmental risks on the ground in Chernobyl

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is among the most radioactively contaminated regions on the planet. Thousands of acres surrounding the reactor site have ambient radiation dose rates exceeding typical background levels by thousands of times. In parts of the so-called Red Forest near the power plant it’s possible to receive a dangerous radiation dose in just a few days of exposure.

Radiation monitoring stations across the Chernobyl zone recorded the first obvious environmental impact of the invasion. Sensors put in place by the Ukrainian Chernobyl EcoCenter in case of accidents or forest fires showed dramatic jumps in radiation levels along major roads and next to the reactor facilities starting after 9 p.m on Feb. 24, 2022. That’s when Russian invaders reached the area from neighboring Belarus.

Because the rise in radiation levels was most obvious in the immediate vicinity of the reactor buildings, there was concern that the containment structures had been damaged, although Russian authorities have denied this possibility. The sensor network abruptly stopped reporting early on Feb. 25 and did not restart until March 1, 2022, so the full magnitude of disturbance to the region from the troop movements is unclear.

If, in fact, it was dust stirred up by vehicles and not damage to any containment facilities that caused the rise in radiation readings, and assuming the increase lasted for just a few hours, it’s not likely to be of long-term concern, as the dust will settle again once troops move through.

But the Russian soldiers, as well as the Ukrainian power plant workers who have been held hostage, undoubtedly inhaled some of the blowing dust. Researchers know the dirt in the Chernobyl exclusion zone can contain radionuclides including cesium-137, strontium-90, several isotopes of plutonium and uranium, and americium-241. Even at very low levels, they’re all toxic, carcinogenic or both if inhaled.

It’s hard to predict the effects of radioactive fallout on people, but the consequences to flora and fauna have been well documented. Chronic exposure to even relatively low levels of radionuclides has been linked to a wide variety of health consequences in wildlife, including genetic mutations, tumors, eye cataracts, sterility and neurological impairment, along with reductions in population sizes and biodiversity in areas of high contamination.

There is no “safe” level when it comes to ionizing radiation. The hazards to life are in direct proportion to the level of exposure. Should the ongoing conflict escalate and damage the radiation confinement facilities at Chernobyl, or at any of the 15 nuclear reactors at four other sites across Ukraine, the magnitude of harm to the environment would be catastrophic.

Timothy A. Mousseau, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the Air Force acquires those future B-21s, the B-2s will be retired along with the older B-1B bomber, although the venerable B-52 (of the Cold War era), much modified, will remain in service for the foreseeable future. At $550 million per plane (before the inevitable cost overruns even kick in), the Air Force plans to buy as many as 200 B-21s. That’s more than $100 billion in procurement costs alone, a boon for Northrop Grumman, the plane’s primary contractor.

If history is any judge, however, a boon for Northrop Grumman is likely to prove a bust for the American taxpayer. As a start, the United States has no real need for a new, stealthy, super-expensive, nuclear-capable, deep-penetrating strategic bomber for use against “peer” rivals China and Russia. But before tackling that issue, a little history is in order.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

A long time ago (1977, to be exact), in a country far, far away, President Jimmy Carter did a brave thing: he cancelled a major Pentagon weapons system just before it was due to start production. That was the B-1 bomber, a plane with sophisticated — that is, expensive — avionics designed to allow it to penetrate Soviet airspace in the event of a nuclear war and survive. Carter cancelled it for the most sensible of reasons: it wasn’t needed.

The Air Force had already developed air-launched cruise missiles that allowed bombers like the B-52 to strike enemy targets with precision from hundreds of miles away. It was also, like all modern weapons systems, outrageously expensive. Why spend vast sums on a new bomber, Carter reasoned, when the plane added little to the nation’s nuclear deterrent? In addition, that cancellation was meant to send a message to the military-industrial complex — that he would neither be beholden to nor intimidated by defense hawks who touted each and every new weapons system, no matter how expensive or redundant, as “essential.”

I was then a teenager with a yen for American warplanes. I’d even made a model of the B-1, complete with “variable geometry” wings that could be extended forward for low-speed flight and swept backward for high-speed, supersonic flight. In my mind’s eye, I can still see it, almost all white like the prototype that Rockwell International, its primary contractor, actually built. In a symbolic act of protest against Carter’s action, I took my model, taped a couple of firecrackers to it, and dropped it from the top floor of our house, blowing it up in a most satisfying way. So much for the B-1, I thought.

I was too young to know better. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, as part of a massive defense buildup (that Carter, ironically enough, had actually begun), he revived the B-1. The Air Force soon committed itself to buying 100 of them at a then-astronomical $280 million each. The B-1B Lancer (as it became known) has served in the Air Force for the last three decades, never (thankfully) fulfilling the purpose for which it was built: a nuclear attack. Plagued by accidents, high operating costs, and maintenance issues, the B-1 has been a disappointment to an Air Force now eager to replace it with an entirely new bomber, more or less guaranteed to have a similar history.

However much I loved the prospective plane as a teenager, I felt quite differently once I was myself in the Air Force. As a young lieutenant in 1986, I even wrote a paper for a contest within the service in which I argued that the concept of a manned, “penetrating,” strategic nuclear bomber was deeply flawed. In essence, I took the Carter position, suggesting that the other “legs” of America’s nuclear triad (ballistic missiles launched from silos and similar missiles on nuclear submarines) were more than enough to deter and defeat enemies (no less destroy the world), and that new “precision” technologies like cruise missiles rendered risky manned bombing missions deep into enemy airspace not just obsolete but antediluvian.

Not surprisingly, my paper didn’t win and the B-1B did. But it was an absurd addition, even by Air Force standards, given that the U.S. had an overwhelming arsenal of missiles at its command, together with a fleet of B-52s that, though lacking in speed and stealth, was aging rather well. In fact, B-52s are still flying today, which isn’t that surprising when you consider the development of highly accurate missiles that allow such a plane to “standoff” from targets and so limit its exposure to enemy air defenses.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, never a service to say no to expensive, high-tech weapons systems, no matter how redundant, was hard at work on a stealthy bomber that would achieve its vision of “global reach, global power, and global strike.” What emerged was the B-2 Spirit, a stealth bomber so expensive ($2.1 billion a pop) that only 21 were ever built. It was also pricier than the B-1 to operate and less reliable thanks to its fragile “stealth” coatings, which required lengthy, high-cost maintenance. In other words, both planes proved expensive disappointments that, fortunately, were never tested on the primary mission for which they were built: incinerating millions of people in a nuclear war.

Enter the B-21, whose very name is supposed to indicate its cutting-edge nature, as the first bomber of a new century. It’s already being readied to reprise the grim, predictable histories of its predecessors.

Will the Bomber Go the Way of the Dodo?

Old ideas and hallowed traditions die hard, especially when they’re so lucrative for the military-industrial-congressional complex. Just look at the staying power of the disastrously overpriced F-35 stealth fighter, projected to cost $1.45 trillion over the life of the program. Put bluntly, today’s future-driven Air Force still wants to be capable of taking the fight to the enemy in a manned bomber, just as in the past. It still wants its air crews to put bombs on target. At a time when remotely piloted drones like the Predators and Reapers are rendering redundant so many human fighter pilots sitting in real cockpits, the Air Force has no intention of allowing its strategic bombing force to go the way of the dodo. Its leaders will always fight for manned strategic bombers because it fits their image of themselves: dodging enemy fighters, missiles, and flak, and taking the fight to the enemy’s doorstep.

In fact, not only does the Air Force want the B-21 as its “fifth generation” bomber, it also wants a new fighter jet to escort it on deep penetrating missions into China, Russia, or other countries. Think here of the legendary P-51 Mustangs, which accompanied U.S. strategic bombers deep into Nazi Germany during World War II. In other words, the Air Force’s vision of future aerial war bears an eerie resemblance to the action scenes in the classic 1949 war movie Twelve O’Clock High, except instead of the B-17s and P-51s of World War II, fifth generation bombers will join with sixth-generation fighters to claw their way through enemy airspace.

Of course, Pentagon officials have an array of talking points to support their case for the B-21. These include: maintaining parity, if not supremacy, vis-à-vis China or Russia or some future, ill-defined enemy and the need of our heroic troops for the latest and best in weaponry. They emphasize that canceling a major weapons system like the B-21 is tantamount to unilateral disarmament, that it would betray weakness to rivals and foes, and that manned bombers provide maximum flexibility since, unlike missiles, they can be recalled or redirected after being launched.

In truth, however, Twelve O’Clock High scenarios look increasingly ridiculous and outmoded in the twenty-first century. But don’t tell that to the U.S. Air Force. When its strategists visualize bombers, all they see is potential, promise, and even fulfillment. But history shows us something else: the potential for widespread and indiscriminate destruction and massive casualties. If anything, since World War II, America’s arsenal of bombers has emboldened the U.S. to strike in places and in ways clearly counterproductive to just about any definition of national security, even as untold numbers of innocents have perished from the ordnance fired or dropped from those planes. The Vietnam War — during which the U.S. dropped seven million tons of bombs — is a perfect example of this.

Here’s the nightmarish reality of actually bringing such weapons systems online: when the U.S. military develops a capability, it seeks to use it, even in cases where it’s wildly inappropriate. (Again, think of the massive B-52 bombings in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in a counterinsurgency campaign classically meant to win “hearts and minds.”) Fielding a new strategic bomber for global strike, including potential thermonuclear attacks, will not so much enhance national security as potentially embolden future presidents to strike whenever and wherever they want in a fashion devastating to human life. The B-21 isn’t a force-multiplier. It’s an Armageddon-enabler.

Flying High in our B-21s

Having marketed himself as a savvy military critic, is there any possibility that Donald Trump will have the smarts of Jimmy Carter when it comes to the B-21 program? Will he save America at least $100 billion (and probably far more) while eliminating yet another redundant weapons system within the Department of Defense? Fat chance. Even if he wanted to, The Donald doesn’t stand a chance against the Pentagon these days.

Flush with billions and billions of new taxpayer dollars, including funds for those F-35s and for new nukes from a bipartisan coalition in an otherwise riven Congress, America’s military services will fight for any and all major weapons systems, the B-21 included. So, too, will Congress, especially if Northrop Grumman follows the production strategy first employed by Rockwell International with the B-1: spreading the plane’s subcontractors and parts suppliers to as many states and Congressional districts as possible. This would, of course, ensure that cuts to the B-21 program would impact jobs and so drive votes in Congress in its favor. After all, what congressional representative would be willing to vote against high-paying jobs in his or her own state or district in the name of American security?

So here’s my advice to young model-builders everywhere: don’t blow up your B-21s anytime soon. Rest assured that the real thing is coming. If the Air Force wants to ensure that it has a new bomber, in the name of blasting America’s enemies to oblivion, so be it. It worked (partially and at tremendous cost) in 1943 in the flak- and fighter-filled skies of Nazi Germany, so why shouldn’t it work in 2043 over the skies of who-knows-where-istan?

Why does “your” Air Force think this way? Not just because it loves big bombers, but also because its biggest rivals aren’t in Russia or China or some “rogue” state like Iran. They’re right here in “the homeland.” I’m talking, of course, about the other military services. Yes, interservice rivalries remain alive and well at the Pentagon. If the U.S. Navy can continue to build breathtakingly expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carriers (like the much-troubled USS Gerald R. Ford) and submarines, and if the Army can have all its tanks, helicopters, and associated toys, then, dammit, the Air Force can have what truly makes it special and unique: a new stealthy strategic bomber escorted by an even newer long-range stealthy fighter.

And don’t just blame the Air Force for such retrograde thinking. Its leaders know what’s easiest to sell Congress: big, splashy projects that entail decades of funding and create tens of thousands of jobs. As congressional representatives line up to push for their pieces of the action, military contractors are only too happy to oblige. As the lead contractor for the B-21, Northrop Grumman of Falls Church, Virginia, has the most to gain, but other winners will include United Technologies of East Hartford, Connecticut; BAE Systems of Nashua, New Hampshire; Spirit Aerosystems of Wichita, Kansas; Orbital ATK of Clearfield, Utah, and Dayton, Ohio; Rockwell Collins of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; GKN Aerospace of St Louis, Missouri; and Janicki Industries of Sedro-Woolley, Washington. And these are just the major suppliers for that aircraft; dozens of other parts suppliers will be needed, and they’ll be carefully allocated to as many Congressional districts as possible. Final assembly of the plane will likely take place in Palmdale, California, integrating components supplied from sea to shining sea. Who says America’s coastal enclaves can’t join with the heartland to get things done?

Even if President Trump wanted to cancel the B-21 — and given his recent speech to graduates of the Naval Academy, the odds are that there isn’t a weapons system anywhere he doesn’t want to bring to fruition — chances are that in today’s climate of militarism he would face enormous push-back. As a colleague who’s still on active duty in the Air Force puts it, “What makes today worse than the Carter days is our flag-humping, military-slobbering culture. We can’t even have a discussion of what the country’s needs are for fear of ‘offending’ or ‘disrespecting’ the troops. Today, Carter would be painted as disloyal to those troops he was consigning to an early death because every procurement decision centers on a ‘grave’ or ‘existential’ threat to national security with immediate and deadly consequences.”

And so the Air Force and its flyboy generals will win the fight for the B-21 and take the American taxpayer along for the ride — unless, that is, we somehow have the courage to pry the control sticks from the cold, dead hands of hidebound military tradition and lobbying firepower. Until we do, it’s off we go (yet again), into the wild blue yonder, flying high in our B-21s.

A TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, William Astore taught history for 15 years at the Air Force Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and in Pennsylvania at a technical college. He’s never forgotten his visit to the Trinity site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where the first atomic device was tested in 1945, nor his time in Cheyenne Mountain Complex, hunkering down under 2,000 feet of granite, waiting for a nuclear war that never happened. His personal blog is Bracing Views.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead.

Copyright 2018 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

As The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald noted in response to the exchange between Cuomo and Netanyahu, “Kudos to @ChrisCuomo for pressing Netanyahu on that little uncomfortable fact that is typically ignored: the only country in the Middle East with a proven, clandestine nuclear weapons stockpile is . . . Israel. And the rogue state refuses to join the NPT.”

While the Trump Administration professes possible progress toward “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula” and worries about purported Iranian violation of its anti nuclear deal, virtually no one in government or the media is paying attention to the multiple megaton elephant in the room. That is the Israeli nuclear weapons program, estimated as the 6th largest in the world, after the US, Russia, China, England, and France. As with the US, the development of an aggressive, expanding nuclear program is an expression of and contributes to a repressive and ever more militarized society.

Why do the media ignore this question? For one thing they ignore questions about the safety and purpose of the US nuclear weapons arsenal. And nuclear secrecy itself is a good way to keep questions about the safety or use of these weapons out of politics. Secondly Israel generally is a force for US corporate interests in the region.

Thirdly, Israel is a major purchaser of US arms. Fourth, asking embarrassing questions is a good way to lose access to the influential newsmakers, as Michelle Wolf has learned. There is a range of acceptable debate inside the beltway, such as whether Iran is clandestinely building nuclear missiles. But dare not ask if a close ally has been doing the same for a generation. Here American exceptionalism comes into play.

Nuclear weapons are a force for good only in morally pure hands, with ours being the most pure. Israel, a nation whose Old Testament theology helped inform and inspire our Judaic-Christian civilization, is a fully trusted junior partner. (Both nations, just like Iran, have hard right factions eager to annihilate opponents and even deploy nuclear weapons.)

Questioning Israel’s nuclear arsenal or even discussing it is all too rare in Israel and can be harmful to one’s health. If Chris Cuomo wanted to do some ground- breaking journalism he would bring Americans the story of Israeli nuclear defector Mordecai Vanunu, a man whom Daniel Ellsberg called “the preeminent hero of the nuclear era.” Vanunu’s work and sacrifice have given those who care a definitive answer to the question of whether Israel has nuclear weapons.

Vanunu is a former nuclear technician who worked at the Negev Nuclear Research south of Damona. (Wikipedia has a well sourced summary of his life and career.) In 1986, concerned that the facility was developing weapons of mass destruction, Vanunu secretly smuggled in a camera and covertly took 57 photographs. He later passed this material on to British journalists. Vanunu was subsequently lured to Italy, drugged and then abducted to Israel, where he was tried and convicted of treason.

On 15 April 2015, The National Security Archive of George Washington University published documents corroborating Vanunu’s statements regarding the Dimona Negev Nuclear Research Center. As Wikipedia summarizes their findings: “The archived documents detail the discovery of Israel’s nuclear deceptions, debates over Israel’s lack of candor and efforts to pressure the Israelis to answer key questions about the Dimona facility.”

Vanunu’s trial in Israel was reminiscent of star chambers in Stuart era Britain. Forced to wear a helmet so that no one could recognize him, the trial was closed to the public, and transcripts were not available for many years and were only released after legal challenges and heavy redacting. The few reporters allowed in court were warned that any substantive reporting would result in charges against them.

Vanunu spent 18 years in prison, including more than 11 in solitary confinement. Released from prison in 2004, he is still subject to a broad array of draconian restrictions on his speech and movement. Since then he has been arrested several times for violations of those restrictions, including giving various interviews to foreign journalists and attempting to leave Israel.

Based on a considerable body of evidence in addition to Vanunu’s,’Most worldwide intelligence agencies estimate that Israel developed nuclear weapons as early as the 1960s, but the country has intentionally maintained a “nuclear ambiguity”, neither acknowledging nor denying that it possesses nuclear weapons.” Netanyahu only follows that script in his replies to Cuomo. That nuclear ambiguity serves Israel well. By not acknowledging weapons it avoids charges of hypocrisy, and by not denying the possession of such weapons it fosters insecurity and fear in opponents.

Israel follows the conventional nuclear script in one other important way. The charge is that any disclosures about its programs or technologies will aid its enemies in developing their own nuclear weapons. The best way to retain nuclear superiority is through the strictest secrecy possible.

I have had occasion to see deployment of this argument up close and personal. I worked as an associate editor of The Progressive and in 1979 had a cameo role in a widely publicized nuclear secrecy case. Howard Morland, a talented investigative journalist armed only with two physics and two chemistry courses as background showed that using only publicly available sources one could design an H=Bomb. The Carter Administration, largely under the influence of James Schlesinger, tried—eventually unsuccessfully—to block publication of the article on the grounds, as one district court judge put it, that it would give Idi Amin (remember him?) the bomb. The Carter Administration worked on the unspoken assumption that the best way to maintain peace is through nuclear superiority and that superiority can be preserved by nuclear secrecy.

In the course of preparation for the litigation our lawyers learned just how widespread within the world physics community knowledge of nuclear weapons technology is. Physicists even in so- called third world nations were discussing the most sophisticated fusion technologies.

Similarly, Israel claims that Vanunu’s disclosures endangered Israel’s security, but as Ray Kidder, then a senior American nuclear scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has said:

“On the basis of this research and my own professional experience, I am ready to challenge any official assertion that Mr. Vanunu possesses any technical nuclear information not already made public.”

As Nukewatch, an organization founded in 1979 out of The Progresive H Bomb case, puts it:

“Government secrecy and misinformation keep the nuclear industry alive… In the mid 1980s Nukewatch organized hundreds of volunteers across the country to find and document the location of all 1,000 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Prior to our mapping project, U.S. Citizens were never informed of the missiles’ locations, although the information was available to foreign governments through satellite surveillance and treaty agreements.”

Those sites are strategically obsolete but a source of great danger to surrounding communities. In both the United States and Israel the quest to assure nuclear secrecy serves only to remove from politics an issue that should be at its center.

——-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Israel’s 54 year old nuclear reactor a safety risk”

As far as I can figure, the US presently has about 6,800 nuclear warheads, though it aims at going down to 4018 once it dismantles those scheduled to be decommissioned, by 2023.

The Russian Federation has about 7,000 nuclear warheads, though it aims at going down to 4,300 once it dismantles those scheduled to be decommissioned, by 2023.

This small missile gap of, practically speaking, 282 bombs appears to be sticking in Donald Trump’s craw.

Last summer he was shown a chart like this one (h/t Wikimedia Commons) in a security meeting at the Pentagon:

Trump appears to have been disturbed that the US stockpile had dropped from over 30,000 in the early 1960s and to have shouted at his National Security Council that he wanted a ten-fold increase in the number of nuclear warheads the US holds. Maybe he wanted 40,180, ten times the number of actual strategic warheads in the active US arsenal. That would be over 8,000 more than the US ever had.

NBC reports that it was over this exchange that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sighed that Trump is a “fucking moron.”

Trump wants to bother poor little Iran, which does not have a bomb and has given up the possibility of getting one. But he wants to manufacture thousands of the things? Where are the sanctions on Trump?

Trump tweeted out, predictably, that the NBC story is fake news and that the National Broadcasting Corporation should have its license revoked, and that it is terrible that journalists can just write whatever they want. Never mind that under the 1st Amendment NBC does not need a license, though the FCC did grant them a perch on the limited national airwaves when people mainly got their signal via rabbit ears. Never mind that the Constitution allows journalists to write what they like, short of egregious libel (and it is really hard to libel a public figure according to US case law).

But let’s not let ourselves be distracted by this flak.

Let us take seriously that Trump did urge a ten-fold increase in nuclear weapons. Of course, that would violate numerous existing treaties and kick off a massive arms race with Russia and China, maybe with India (and Pakistan would want to keep up with India).

Today there are roughly 14,000 nuclear warheads in the world. All are much more powerful than the bombs dropped in WW II.

Let’s say a single high tonnage nuclear warhead dropped on a major city like New York or Beijing or Moscow could kill 700,000 people.

Then ten could kill 7 million. A hundred could kill 70 million. If the US and Russia let off all of their stockpile they could kill more than the entire combined population of the US and the Russian Federation. No one would survive such an exchange in either country.

Those are direct hits. There would be massive amounts of radiation affecting neighboring countries (Canada, Mexico, eastern Europe, northern China). When The Chernobyl plant melted down in 1986, we were living in London and were instructed not to drink milk because the radiation had spread on British grass from over in Ukraine and gotten into British cow udders. How many miscarriages would there be? Cases of cancer?

And of course urban infrastructure would be devastated, which in today’s complex world would also cause more deaths. Look at Puerto Rico, where there is still largely no electricity and where patients in hospitals without back-up generators are endangered.

A nuclear exchange would inevitably kick a lot of dust into the atmosphere and there’d be several bad summer growing seasons because of the cold and reduced sunlight. Millions more could die from this cause, a small nuclear winter.

Going down to as few nuclear warheads as possible is highly desirable. If Trump got his huge arsenal,maybe he would want some high megaton bombs of the sort that have been phased out, bringing back the threat of a true nuclear winter.

I now think Tillerson’s response to Trump’s tirade at the Pentagon last summer was ‘way too restrained.

Maybe everyone figures that Trump was only blowing off steam and that nothing will change. But they should take a gander at how the EPA has been turned into an evil bizarro anti-EPA dedicated to spreading around poisonous pollution and farting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, so as to produce even more violent hurricanes.

When someone is president, you have to take them seriously, however hard it may be.

Appendix: The current state of the US and Russian stockpiles:

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that Russia has

7,000 nuclear warheads, with 2,700 decommissioned and being dismantled

4,300 or so nuclear weapons in its military stockpile.

1,958 are on ballistic missiles and at heavy bomber bases.

500 are in storage.

1,850 nonstrategic warheads are in storage.

Some 2,700 warheads have been decommissioned and are awaiting dismantlement.

On the United States of America side of the ledger, Armscontrol.org estimates

6,819 total warheads, with 2800 decommissioned and being dismantled

1,393 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on 660 ICBMs, SLBMs, and strategic bombers.

Approximately 2,300 non-deployed strategic warheads and

roughly 500 deployed and non-deployed tactical warheads.

In a January 2017 speech, Vice President Joe Biden announced that as of September 30, 2016, the United States possessed

4,018 active and inactive nuclear warheads.

Biden also announced in January 2017 that the US is retiring 2,800 warheads

——

Related video added by Juan Cole:

What Advisors Explained To President Donald Trump About Nuclear Weapons | Morning Joe | MSNBC

Has there ever been a nation as dedicated to preparing for doomsday as the United States? If that’s a thought that hasn’t crossed your mind, maybe it’s because you didn’t spend part of your life inside Cheyenne Mountain.  That’s a tale I’ll get to soon, but first let me mention America’s “doomsday planes.”

Last month, troubling news emerged from U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) that two of those aircraft, also known as E-4B National Airborne Operations Centers, were temporarily disabled by a tornado, leaving only two of them operational.  And that, not surprisingly, caught my attention.  Maybe you don’t have the world’s end on your mind, not with Donald Trump’s tweets coming fast and furious, but I do.  It’s a kind of occupational hazard for me.  As a young officer in the U.S. Air Force in the waning years of the Cold War, the end of the world was very much on my mind.  So think of this piece as the manifestation of a disturbing and recurring memory.

In any case, the reason for those doomsday planes is simple enough: in a national emergency, nuclear or otherwise, at least one E-4B will always be airborne, presumably above the fray and the fallout, ensuring what the military calls “command and control connectivity.”  The E-4B and its crew of up to 112 stand ready, as STRATCOM puts it, to enable America’s leaders to “employ” its “global strike forces” because… well, “peace is our profession.” Yes, STRATCOM still references that old SAC motto from the glory days of former Strategic Air Commander Curtis LeMay who was so memorably satirized by director Stanley Kubrick in his nuclear disaster film, Dr. Strangelove.

The Pentagon reassuringly noted that, despite those two disabled planes, the E-4B’s mission — including perhaps the implementation of a devastating nuclear strike or counter-strike that might kill tens of millions and even cause a “nuclear winter” (a global nightmare leading to a billion deaths or more) — could be accomplished with just two of them operational.  Still, relieved as I was to hear that, it did get me thinking about the other 190 or so nations on this planet.  Do any of them have even one “doomsday” plane to launch?  And if not, how will they coordinate, no less survive, the doomsday the U.S. government is so willing to contemplate and ready to fund?

When it comes to nuclear weapons and what once was called “thinking about the unthinkable,” no other nation has as varied, accurate, powerful, deadly, or (again a word from the past) “survivable” an arsenal as the United States.  Put bluntly, the nation that is most capable of inflicting a genuine doomsday scenario on the world is also the one best prepared to ride out such an event (whatever that may turn out to mean).  In this sense, America truly is the exceptional nation on planet Earth.  It’s exceptional in the combination of its triad of nuclear weapons, its holy trinity of sorts — nuclear missile-carrying Trident submarines, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and strategic bombers still flown by pilots — in the thoroughness of its Armageddon plans, and especially in the propagation of a lockdown, shelter-in-place mentality that fits such thinking to a T.

My Lockdown, Shelter-in-place, Cold War Moment

Once upon a time, I thought I was exceptional, or at least exceptionally well protected.  My job as an Air Force software engineer granted me regular access to the innards of the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, America’s nuclear command center.  In the 1960s, the complex had been tunneled out of granite at the southern edge of the Front Range of mountains, dominated by Pike’s Peak, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

I can still remember military exercises in which the mountain would be “buttoned up.” That meant the command center’s huge blast doors — think of bank vault doors on steroids — would be swung shut, isolating the post from the outside world.  I don’t recall hearing the word “lockdown” in those days (perhaps because back then it was a term generally applied to prisons), but that was certainly our reality.  We sheltered in place in that mountain redoubt, the most literal possible version of a Fortress USA.  We were then cut off (we hoped) from the titanic blasts and radioactive fallout that would accompany any nuclear attack, most likely by that Evil Empire, the Soviet Union.  In a sense, we were a version of a doomsday plane, even if our mountain couldn’t be sent aloft.

My tour of duty lasted three years (1985-1988), the specifics of which I’ve mostly forgotten.  But what you don’t forget — believe me, you can’t — is the odd feeling of having 2,000 feet of granite towering over you; of seeing buildings mounted on huge springs intended to dampen the shock and swaying caused by a nuclear detonation; of looking at those huge blast doors that cut you and the command center off from the rest of humanity (and nature, too), theoretically allowing us the option both of orchestrating and surviving doomsday.

I sometimes think the decision in the 1960s to bury a command center for nuclear war under megatons of solid granite was America’s original lockdown moment.  Then I remember the craze for building small, personal, backyard bomb shelters in the 1950s.  There was a memorable Twilight Zone episode from 1961 in which neighbors fight bitterly over who will take refuge in just such a shelter as the threat of nuclear war looms.  Indeed, the idea of a mountain of a bomb shelter to keep out nuclear war was no more anomalous in those years than Donald Trump’s “big, fat, beautiful wall” to keep out Mexicans is today.  Both capture a certain era of fear, whether of exploding nukes or rampaging immigrants, and an approach to that fear — controlling it by locking it out and us in — that was folly then and is folly now.

For soon after Cheyenne Mountain was completed, the Soviets developed improved missiles sufficiently accurate and powerful to obliterate the command center.  Assuming Trump’s dream wall was ever completed, immigrants would assuredly develop the means to subvert its intent as well.  But no matter: Cheyenne Mountain became a symbol of American resolve as well as fear, the ultimate shelter, just as Trump’s wall has become a symbol of a different sort of resolve and fear. (Keep “those people” out!)

Eventually decommissioned, Cheyenne Mountain lives on as a manifestation of an American bunker mentality in the age of doomsday that’s suddenly back in vogue.  Or rather what’s in vogue now is not the militarized mountain I remember, which was dark, dank, and depressing, or those crude, tiny, private backyard nuclear shelters of the 1950s, but a craze that fits a 1% era with a bizarre billionaire as president.  A new urge is growing among the ultra-wealthy for what are, in essence, privatized mini-Cheyenne Mountains for the super-rich. Think: billionaire bunkers with all the perks of “home,” including a pet kennel, a gun safe, and a small gym, as well as “12-and-a-half-foot ceilings, sumptuous black leather couches, wall art featuring cheerful Parisian street scenes, towering faux ferns, and plush carpets.”  Surviving doomsday never looked so good.

And who can blame the richest among us for planning to outlast doomsday or a Trumpocalypse in the style to which they are already accustomed?  With the world’s “doomsday clock” ticking ever closer to midnight, seeking (high-priced) shelter from the storm has a certain logic to it.  If it’s not full-scale nuclear war that beckons, then perhaps major climate catastrophe and social collapse.  As Naomi Klein recently put it at The Intercept, “high-end survivalists” from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are “buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand.”  I don’t normally pity the Kiwis, but I will if legions of doomsday-fleeing uber-rich start hunkering down there like so many jealous dragons guarding what’s left of their gold.

The Department of Homeland Security Card: Don’t Leave Home

Remember those old American Express card commercials with the tag line “Don’t leave home without it”?  If America’s Department of Homeland Security had its own card, its tag would be: “Don’t leave home.” 

Consider the words of retired General John Kelly, the head of that department, who recently suggested that if Americans knew what he knew about the nasty terror threats facing this country, they’d “never leave the house.”  General Kelly, a big bad Marine, is a man who — one would think — does not frighten easily.  It’s unclear, however, whether he considers it best for us to “shelter in place” just for now (until he sends the all-clear signal) or for all eternity.  

One thing is clear, however: Islamic terrorism, an exceedingly modest danger to Americans, has in these years become the excuse for the endless construction and funding of an increasingly powerful national security state (the Department of Homeland Security included), complete with a global surveillance system for the ages.  And with that, of course, goes the urge to demobilize the American people and put them in an eternal lockdown mode, while the warrior pros go about the business of keeping them “safe” and “secure.”   

I have a few questions for General Kelly: Is closing our personal blast doors the answer to keeping our enemies and especially our fears at bay?  What does security really mean?  With respect to nuclear Armageddon, should the rich among us indeed start building personal bomb shelters again, while our government continues to perfect our nuclear arsenal by endlessly updating and “modernizing” it?  (Think: smart nukes and next generation delivery systems.)  Or should we work toward locking down and in the end eliminating our doomsday weaponry?  With respect to both terrorism and immigration, should we really hunker down in Homeland U.S.A., slamming shut our Trumpian blast door with Mexico (actually long under construction) and our immigration system, or should we be working to reduce the tensions of poverty and violence that generate both desperate immigrants and terrorist acts?

President Trump and “his” generals are plainly in favor of you and yours just hunkering down, even as they continue to lash out militarily around the globe.  The result so far: the worst of both worlds — a fortress America mentality of fear and passivity domestically and a kinetic, manic urge to surge, weapons in hand, across significant parts of the planet.

Call it a passive-aggressive policy.  We the people are told to remain passive, huddling in our respective home bunkers, sheltering in place, even as America’s finest aggressively strike out at those we fear most.  The common denominator of such a project is fear — a fear that breeds compliance at home and passivity before uniformed, if often uninformed, experts, even as it generates repetitive, seemingly endless, violence abroad.  In short, it’s the doomsday mentality applied every day in every way. 

Returning to Cheyenne Mountain

Thirty years ago, as a young Air Force officer, Cheyenne Mountain played a memorable role in my life.  In 1988 I left that mountain redoubt behind, though I carried with me a small slab of granite from it with a souvenir pen attached.  Today, with greying hair and my very own time machine (my memories), I find myself returning regularly to Cheyenne Mountain, thinking over where we went wrong as a country in allowing a doomsday-lockdown mentality to get such a hold on us.

Amazingly, Barack Obama, the president who made high-minded pleas to put an end to nuclear weapons (and won a Nobel Prize for them), pleas supported by hard-headed realists like former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, gave his approval to a trillion-dollar renovation of America’s nuclear triad before leaving office.  That military-industrial boondoggle will now be carried forward by the Trump administration.  Though revealing complete ignorance about America’s nuclear triad during the 2016 election campaign, President Trump has nevertheless boasted that the U.S. will always be “at the top of the pack” when it comes to doomsday weaponry.  And whether with Iran or North Korea, he foolishly favors policies that rattle the nuclear saber.

In addition, recent reports indicate that America’s nuclear arsenal may be less than secure.  In fact, as of this March, inspection results for nuclear weapons safety and security, which had been shared freely with the American public, are now classified in what the Associated Press calls a “lockdown of information.”  Naturally, the Pentagon claims greater secrecy is needed to protect us against terrorism, but it serves another purpose: shielding incompetence and failing grades.  Given the U.S. military’s nightmarish history of major accidents with nuclear weapons, more secrecy and less accountability doesn’t exactly inspire greater confidence.    

Today, the Cheyenne complex sits deactivated, buried inside its mountain, awaiting fresh purpose.  And I have one.  Let’s bring our collective fears there, America.  Let’s bury them under all that granite.  Let’s close the blast doors behind us as we walk out of that dark tunnel toward the light.  For sheltering in place shouldn’t be the American way.  Nor should we lock ourselves down for life.  It would be so much better to lockdown instead what should be truly unthinkable: doomsday itself, the mass murder of ourselves and the destruction of our planet.

A retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and history professor, William Astore is a TomDispatch regular.  He blogs at Bracing Views.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, as well as John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2017 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Tech Insider: “These are the secret bunkers government officials will go to in the event of an attack”