“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
Oct 06, 2024
Nuclear Weapons Pointed At Each Other Over Earth (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
LLAW’s NUCLEAR VIEWS, ISSUES & COMMENTS, Sunday, (10/06/2024)
This article from “Salon” by Norman Solomon is what I would guess to be the most comprehensive, intelligent, and knowledgeable explanation to date of what this world of human “madness” is doing to ensure the end of human lives, as well as most innocent other life, that any concerned person who wants to more thoroughly understand our problem with “All Things Nuclear”, and how it all came to be that way.
The roots of this story describe what this daily blog’s Posts, and other contributors, such as the thoroughly documented doomsday story told in Annie Jacobsen’s recent book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario”, have been trying to get across to the wide world(s) of humanity every day now for 2-plus years. My story is broad and rambling in an effort to tell you all more of the ugly details about how this likely tragedy came to be and how it continues to grow more lethal every day, but this “Salon” article is the capsule of it all and, fittingly, to survive we need to swallow the correct pill . . .
A nuclear war would be planet Earth’s 6th Extinction and the 1st that we humans had anything at all to do with because there weren’t any of us back then, but in this case we are making sure we unmistakably take full credit and that we do it all up right — by killing a beautiful blue and green living oxygen-breathing planet that can no longer support life of virtually any kind for a minimum of thousands of years other than a few cold-blooded creatures and maybe 1 to 2 percent of severely damaged animals like us. ~llaw
COMMENTARY
“Escalation dominance” and the new nuclear threat: We face more than 1,000 Holocausts
Nuclear arsenals are vastly more powerful today than during the Cold War — and the risk of apocalypse keeps growing
By Norman Solomon
Contributing Writer
Published October 6, 2024 5:15AM (EDT)
Nuclear Weapons Pointed At Each Other Over Earth(Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
This article is adapted from the keynote speech given by the author at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, Sept. 24, 2024.
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on Communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.” And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could somehow hover over this planet? And see what had become a global crematorium and an unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words attributed to both Nikita Khrushchev and Winston Churchill, “the living would envy the dead.”
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What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023, the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing: “escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Sen. William Fulbright, called “the arrogance of power.”
Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” nukes in Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion — by Russian military and political elites — of putting nuclear weapons in space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms control agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three treaties that the United States abrogated — ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state in the Middle East. On Sept. 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The U.S. keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead, and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals and systems, programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break the rules.”
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away. And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey: “We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan — formerly a supreme Cold Warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno, standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted under the euphemism of “modernization.”
And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to issue urgent warnings about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The U.S. should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge of nuclear war.
We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.
That’s a zero-sum view of the world. A one-way ticket to omnicide.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to green-light NATO-backed Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
Consider what John F. Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban missile crisis, in his historic speech at American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Daniel Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that was hand-delivered to the offices of every senator and House member, he wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for reconstruction of the nuclear arms control infrastructure? Yes, the Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is in the interests of global security.
And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of all ICBMs.
The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the triad is actually the opposite of deterrence — it’s an invitation to be attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five Western states.
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a set of missiles — or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill message that’s mistaken for the real thing.
Former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral disarmament.”
Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as “unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Secretary Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.”
The U.S. should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancellation of the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs, they also called for getting rid of the entire land-based leg of the triad.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way, the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”
I want to close with some words from Daniel Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” summing up the preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:
No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.
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TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Sunday, (10/06/2024)
All Things Nuclear
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Supreme Court steps into a fight over plans to store nuclear waste in rural Texas and New Mexico
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Could Ohio go nuclear? Both its nuclear and coal plants could be part of a nuclear renaissance
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Federal government says 8 Ohio coal plants are good sites for new nuclear power reactors.
‘Chernobyl Roulette’ Review: Reckless Nuclear Endangerment – WSJ
The Wall Street Journal
The Russian occupiers showed little concern either about the hazards of the environment or the health of their soldiers.
Nuclear Power
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Kazakhstan votes on whether to build first nuclear plant | Reuters
Reuters
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World’s top uranium miner votes on returning to nuclear power – MINING.COM
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Voters in Kazakhstan will decide on Sunday whether to allow construction of a nuclear power plant amid worries over the environmental impact.
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Japan to ink LNG deal with Italy for emergencies amid supply concerns – Kyodo News
Kyodo News
Japan increased LNG imports to run more thermal plants in the absence of nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis. LNG prices …
Nuclear War
NEWS
“Escalation dominance” and the new nuclear threat: We face more than 1000 Holocausts
Salon.com
Nuclear arsenals are vastly more powerful today than during the Cold War — and the risk of apocalypse keeps growing.
Oct. 7 and the Iranian Nuclear Threat – WSJ
The Wall Street Journal
Hamas’s barbaric attack hardened Israeli attitudes, and the world has yet to appreciate the stakes.
To build a nuclear bomb, Iran may need more than weeks post-Hezbollah fallout
The Economic Times
Israel-Iran War: Rising Tensions Following Hezbollah and Hamas Losses. The missile attack follows a series of developments in the region, including …
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
“Escalation dominance” and the new nuclear threat: We face more than 1000 Holocausts
Salon.com
“Escalation dominance” and the new nuclear threat: We face more than 1,000 Holocausts … Nuclear War Planner,” summing up the preparations for nuclear …
Oct. 7 and the Iranian Nuclear Threat – WSJ
The Wall Street Journal
… nuclear–threat-mideast-israel-war-2ff532ce. Opinion · Commentary. Follow … Among myriad Iranian threats of extinguishing the “Israeli tumor …
Russia Issues Nuclear Threat to US – MSN
MSN
Russia Issues Nuclear Threat to US … Russia “will not hesitate” to resume nuclear weapons testing if similar steps are taken by the United States, ..
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
Streams, springs, and volcanic lakes for volcano monitoring | U.S. Geological Survey
USGS.gov
Lakes are present at level 4 volcanoes, including Crater Lake and Newberry Volcano in Oregon; Yellowstone Caldera in Wyoming; Long Valley Caldera, …
ERUPTION AT 20241005/0332Z FL080 EXTD SW REPORTED OBS VA DTG: 05/0340Z
Volcano Discovery
… caldera between 01:10 AM and 04:37 PM yesterday. … Read … List and interactive map of current and past earthquakes near Yellowstone volcano.