The Guardian view on The Green Planet: verdant and necessary
The Guardian view on The Green Planet: verdant and necessaryGuardian editorial
David Attenborough’s new series takes aim at plant blindness, providing a vital service in the fight against global warming
It is time for Israel to come clean about its nuclear weapons.
It is time for Israel to come clean about its nuclear weapons, America The Jesuit Review, Drew Christiansen, January 14, 2022 Yet again, Covid-19 has led to the postponement of the 10th Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, which was originally scheduled for 2020, the 50th anniversary of the treaty going into effect. The meeting of the state parties to the treaty is now delayed until this coming August. The treaty is the most important in the badly shredded network of arms control agreements that were drawn up in the Cold War and post-Cold War eras to prevent nuclear war and to set the world on the path to abolition of nuclear weapons.
The NPT is the one treaty to which the historic, or legacy, nuclear powers (China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States) all belong. All have opposed the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that explicitly aims for the abolition of nuclear weapons. But non-nuclear states largely support the TPNW, as they believe the legacy states have abused the NPT to defend their own interests and, particularly in the last decade, to evade their own commitments to nuclear disarmament.
Non-nuclear states also perceive legacy states as playing favorites with certain nations outside the NPT, including Israel. In today’s nuclear landscape, however, Israel can no longer justify its evasiveness about its nuclear status, and its aggressive policies toward potential nuclear states among its regional rivals have made it a destabilizing force, constraining progress toward disarmament. It is time for Israel to come clean about its nuclear capacity and to join the international system of arms control.
The new realities of a multipolar nuclear world
While the TPNW establishes a duty for member states to try to universalize the treaty, the NPT has no such requirement. Its members seem content to sustain the status quo with a divide between the legacy nuclear states and non-nuclear states, with four nuclear-armed states outside the treaty (Pakistan, India and North Korea, in addition to Israel). In recent years, however, the bipolar balance of power between the United States and the former Soviet Union that sustained the treaty, with lesser powers in subordinate roles, has evolved dramatically.
This means that in its 52nd year, the NPT, with its current membership, is less useful as a framework for nuclear disarmament than it was only a decade ago. New realities include the fact that China is vying to become a nuclear superpower on par with the United States and Russia by modernizing its nuclear arsenal. Also, North Korea has become a powerful rogue state, developing a variety of weapons and delivery systems, challenging the United States, and threatening America’s East Asian allies of South Korea and Japan.
As for Israel, it remains the sole (though undeclared) possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and seems determined to remain so. Securing its nuclear superiority has become the driving force of its strategic policy. After bombing nuclear reactors in Iraq and Syria, it has reportedly conducted assassinations of nuclear scientists and sabotage operations, and it encouraged the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 international agreement designed to deny Iran the potential for developing its own bomb. Senior Israeli aides now regard those moves as a mistake because the Iranian program has shown surprising resilience. The situation in Iran is also a reminder that in a multipolar nuclear world, with major actors outside the NPT, that treaty fails to provide the nuclear peace it once promised……………….. https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2022/01/14/israel-npt-nuclear-nonproliferation-treaty-242184
Rogue nuclear regulator/former NRC chair Jaczko spills the nuclear beans on Fukushima, reactor “safety,” nuclear politics
January 12, 2022
This Week’s Featured Interview on Nuclear Hotseat Podcast:
- Greg Jaczko, the former Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has published an explosive new book: Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator. (NOTE: Link is to Amazon, but we recommend you order it through your local independent book store.) In it, he gets honest with the American people about the dangers of nuclear technology, which he labels “failed,” “dangerous,” “not reliable.” He particularly comes down against nuclear as having any part in mitigating the problems of climate change/global warming. In this extended Nuclear Hotseat interview, Jaczko brings us inside the NRC’s response to Fukushima, the “precipice” on which nuclear safety balances, his own growing doubts about how safe nuclear reactors are in the United States, and how, ultimately, it was that concern with safety that probably brought him down. Originally recorded on January 10, 2019, just after his book was published.
- “Jaczko Nixes Nukes” – A Backgrounder on Greg Jaczko’s book and the issues he addresses from Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility.
Survey at Fukushima No. 1 reactor container halted.
Jan 12, 2022
Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. halted its investigation of the inside of the containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor at its stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant on Wednesday.
The move came after an issue was found during preparation work for the display of data such as radiation levels from dosimeters inside underwater robots to be used in the survey. The preparations began at noon the same day and were halted around two hours later.
Tepco said that it will resume the survey once measures to resolve the issue are taken.
In the survey, which will continue until around August, Tepco aims to take pictures of melted nuclear fuel debris and other deposits using six types of underwater robots to record their locations and thickness in water that has accumulated at the bottom of the containment vessel.
It will also try to collect deposit samples and take pictures of the inside of the base that supports the reactor pressure vessel. The information obtained in the survey will be used for studies on ways to remove the debris.
The nuclear fuel at the No. 1 reactor’s core is believed to have melted and mostly fallen inside the containment vessel during the triple meltdown disaster at the plant, which was hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.
In its survey of March 2017, Tepco failed to find nuclear fuel debris at the No. 1 reactor, leaving the reactor’s detailed situation unknown, in contrast to the No. 2 and No. 3 reactors, where melted fuel debris was successfully photographed.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/01/12/national/tepco-fukushima-survey-halted/
Is US extradition inevitable for Julian Assange? | The Stream
Aljazeera English, 14 January 2022, It’s been more than a decade since the website WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified documents and videos – some of which revealed possible US war crimes. Now WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has one more chance to appeal a UK ruling that would allow him to be extradited to the US.
Last month, a UK High Court ruled that Assange could be extradited to the US to face charges of hacking and violating the US Espionage Act. The ruling goes against a lower court that previously said harsh US prison conditions would endanger Assange given his worsening mental and physical health.
Assange’s legal team has since filed an appeal to Britain’s Supreme Court, but in order for the appeal to be considered, it must be deemed of “general public importance”.
n 2019, the Trump administration indicted Assange for violating the US Espionage Act on counts related to the WikiLeaks release of secret US military documents and diplomatic cables. The US argues the release of classified information put the lives of American allies in danger.
Twenty-four civil liberties and press freedom groups, including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, PEN America and Reporters Without Borders have called on the Biden administration to stop its prosecution against Assange. In a joint letter to the US Justice Department, they argue that Assange’s prosecution could set a precedent that would harm press freedom and the safety of journalists reporting on national security issues.
Assange spent seven years in refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and was eventually arrested in 2019. Last week, Assange’s supporters marked his 1,000th day of imprisonment at London’s Belmarsh high security prison.
In this episode of The Stream, we’ll discuss the outlook for Assange’s case and its broader implications for press freedom worldwide.
Fukushima Takes a Turn for the Worse.
January 10, 2022by Robert Hunziker
Tokyo Electric Power Company-TEPCO- has been attempting to decommission three nuclear meltdowns in reactors No. 1 No. 2, and No. 3 for 11 years now. Over time, impossible issues grow and glow, putting one assertion after another into the anti-nuke coffers.
The problems, issues, enormous danger, and ill timing of deconstruction of a nuclear disaster is always unexpectedly complicated by something new. That’s the nature of nuclear meltdowns, aka: China Syndrome debacles.
As of today, TEPCO is suffering some very serious setbacks that have “impossible to deal with” written all over the issues.
Making all matters nuclear even worse, which applies to the current mess at Fukushima’s highly toxic scenario, Gordon Edwards’ following statement becomes more and more embedded in nuclear lore: “It’s impossible to dispose of nuclear waste.” (Gordon Edwards in The Age of Nuclear Waste From Fukushima to Indian Point)
Disposing of nuclear waste is like “running in place” to complete a marathon. There’s no end in sight.
As a quickie aside from the horrendous details of the current TEPCO debacle, news from Europe brings forth the issue of nuclear power emboldened as somehow suitable to help the EU transition to “cleaner power,” as described by EU sources. France supports the crazed nuke proposal but Germany is holding its nose. According to German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke: “Nuclear energy could lead to environmental disasters and large amounts of nuclear waste. (Source: EU Plans to Label Gas and Nuclear Energy ‘Green’ Prompts Row, BBC News, Jan. 2, 2022) Duh!
Minister Lemke nailed it. And, TEPCO is living proof (barely) of the unthinkable becoming thinkable and disastrous for humanity. Of course, meltdowns are never supposed to happen, but they do.
One meltdown is like thousands of industrial accidents in succession over generations of lifetimes. What a mess to leave for children’s children’s children over several generations. They’ll hate you for this!
In Fukushima’s case, regarding three nuclear power plants that melted all-the-way (China Syndrome), TEPCO still does not know how to handle the enormously radioactive nuclear fuel debris, or corium, sizzling hot radioactive lumps of melted fuel rods and container material in No. 1, No 2 and No.3, They’re not even 100% sure where all of the corium is and whether it’s getting into underground water resources. What a disaster that would be… what if it is already… Never mind.
The newest wrinkle at TEPCO involves the continuous flow of water necessary to keep the destroyed reactors’ hot stuff from exposure to air, thus spreading explosively red-hot radioactivity across the countryside. That constant flow of water is an absolute necessity to prevent an explosion of all explosions, likely emptying the streets of Tokyo in a mass of screaming, kicking, and trampling event to “get out of town” ASAP, commonly known as “mass evacuation.”
The cooling water continuously poured over the creakily dilapidated ruins itself turns radioactive, almost instantaneously, and must be processed via an Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS) to remove most radioactive materials (???) housed in a 17-meter (56 feet) tall building on the grounds of the disaster zone.
Here’s the new big danger, as it processes radioactive contaminated water, it flushes out “slurry” of highly concentrated radioactive material that has to go somewhere. But where to put it?
How to handle and dispose of the radioactive slurry from the ALPS is almost, and in fact may be, an impossible quagmire. It’s a big one as the storage containers for the tainted slurry quickly degrade because of the high concentration of radioactive slurry. These storage containers of highly radioactive slurry, in turn, have to be constantly replaced as the radioactivity slurry eats away at the containers’ liners.
Radioactive slurry is muddy and resembles a shampoo in appearance, and it contains highly radioactive Strontium readings that reach tens of millions of Becquerel’s per cubic centimeter. Whereas, according to the EPA, 148 Becquerel’s per cubic meter, not centimeter, is the safe level for human exposure. Thus, tens of millions per cubic centimeter is “off the charts” dangerous! Instant death, as one cubic meter equals one million cubic centimeters. Ahem!
Since March 2013, TEPCO has accumulated 3,373 special vessels that hold these highly toxic radioactive slurry concentrations. But, because the integrity of the vessels deteriorates so quickly, the durability of the containers reaches a limit, meaning the vessels will need replacement by mid-2025.
Making matters ever worse, if that is possible, the NRA has actually accused TEPCO of “underestimating the impact issue of the radioactivity on the containers linings,” claiming TEPCO improperly measured the slurry density when conducting dose evaluations. Whereas, the density level is always highest at the bottom, not the top where TEPCO did the evaluations, thus failing to measure and report the most radioactive of the slurry. Not a small error.
As of June 2021, NRA’s own assessment of the containers concluded that 31 radioactive super hot containers had already reached the end of operating life. And, another 56 would need replacement within the next 2 years.
Transferring slurry is a time-consuming highly dangerous horrific job, which exposes yet a second issue of unacceptable risks of radioactive substances released into the air during transfer of slurry. TEPCO expects to open and close the transfers remotely (no surprise there). But, TEPCO, as of January 2, 2022, has not yet revealed acceptable plans for dealing with the necessary transfer of slurry from weakening, almost deteriorated containers, into fresh, new containers. (Source: TEPCO Slow to Respond to Growing Crisis at Fukushima Plant, The Asahi Shimbun, January 2, 2022)
Meanwhile, additional batches of a massive succession of containers that must be transferred to new containers will be reaching the end of shelf life, shortly.
Another nightmarish problem has surfaced for TEPCO. Yes, another one. In the aftermath of the 2011 blowup, TEPCO stored radioactive water in underground spaces below two buildings near reactor No.4. Bags of a mineral known as zeolite were placed to absorb cesium. Twenty-six tons (52,000 lbs.) of bags are still immersed with radiation readings of 4 Sieverts per hour, enough to kill half of all workers in the immediate vicinity within one hour. The bags need to be removed.
TEPCO intends to robotically start removing the highly radioactive bags, starting in 2023, but does not know where the bags should be stored. Where do you store radioactive bags containing enough radioactive power to kill someone within one hour of exposure?
Additionally (there’s more) the amount of radioactive rubble, soil, and felled trees at the plant site totals 480,000 cubic meters, as of 2021. TEPCO is setting up a special incinerator to dispose of this. Where to dispose of the incinerated waste is unknown. This is one more add-on to the horrors of what to do with radioactive material that stays hot for centuries upon centuries. Where to put it?
Where to put it? Which is the bane of the nuclear power industry. For example, America’s nuke plants are full of huge open pools of water containing tons of spent nuclear fuel rods. If exposed to open air, spent fuel rods erupt into a sizzling zirconium fire followed by massive radiation bursts of the most toxic material known to humanity. It can upend an entire countryside and force evacuation of major cities.
According to the widely recognized nuclear expert Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” (see- Nuclear Fuel Buried 108 Feet from the Sea, March 19, 2021)
It’s not just Fukushima that rattles the nerves of people who understand the high-risk game of nuclear power. America is loaded with nuclear power plants with open pools of water that hold highly radioactive spent fuel rods.
What to do with it?
Claim that EDF contract for nuclear emergency generators was rigged.
The contract for nuclear emergency generators was rigged, according to a former EDF top executive. This is what he told the judge of the financial investigations division who is investigating the matter. GRAND SLAM for EDF!
Not only do the emergency generators installed last year on some of the nuclear power plants catch fire when they are started, and not only has the national group had to compensate its supplier, Westinghouse, in secret, to the tune of 110 million euros (“Le Canard”, 8/12 and 15/12), but the contract is also said to have been rigged!
Be that as it may, this is what a former member of EDF’s procurement staff told the French National Financial Division in a statement. The latter is investigating the complaint for favouritism filed by an unsuccessful bidder, which has been joined by Greenpeace. Contacted on Monday, EDF’s management had not responded at the time the “Le Canard” went to press.
Le Canard Enchaine 22nd Dec 2021
Norway Activists Protest After Docking Of US Nuclear Submarine In Tromso: Reports
Norway Activists Protest After Docking Of US Nuclear Submarine In Tromso: Reports, https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/us-news/norway-activists-protest-after-docking-of-us-nuclear-submarine-in-tromso-reports-articleshow.html
Protest intensified in Norway as an American nuclear submarine has docked in Tromso– a city in northern Norway, news agency Sputnik reported.
By Ajeet Kumar 12 Jan 22, Protest intensified in Norway as an American nuclear submarine has docked in Tromso, a city in northern Norway. According to a report by news agency Sputnik, the US nuclear submarine was docked on January 11, the second time in a year. The media report said that the submarine was loaded with arms and missiles and tasked with patrolling the northern waters. As the news of an American submarine docked in Tromso hit headlines of several national media outlets, hundreds of protesters marched towards the guarded gates of the Tonsnes harbour. The protestors termed the recent move of America “a destructive game between superpowers.”
US nuclear submarine arrival in Norway sparks strong reactions
Hakon Elvenes, who represents the protestors, asserted the United States should not dock its submarine in Norway and added the act has a long “symbolic effect”. “This represents a dangerous mix of military and civilian purposes. It is a mixture that may be in conflict with international law, and which hasn’t been assessed well enough by the Norwegian authorities,” Sputnik quoted Elvenes as saying to the national broadcaster NRK. “There is always a risk that something can happen to any nuclear reactor, we have plenty of examples of that. And if something happens first, the consequences will be great,” added Hakon Elvenes.
Tension between two countries soar
Meanwhile, Alberta Tennoe Bekkhus, who represent, the youth wing of the Reds Party argued that the recent action by the US will contribute to unnecessary provocations and further conflict. “The fact that we invite American forces in the way we do makes us more insecure. It contributes to unnecessary provocations and further conflict,” Sputnik quoted Bekkrus as saying. “The way NATO is doing now, I believe it makes the world more insecure. This puts Norway in a more dangerous situation,” she added.
It is worth mentioning that the tension between US and Scandinavian countries has soared in the past few years due to action taken by the US Naval forces. Earlier in November last year, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin met with Norway’s new Defense Minister, Odd Roger Enoksen, in his first visit to the US since taking the position. According to AP, both said the commitment to NATO and the challenges posed by Russia would be topics high on the agenda during their meeting. The duo also discussed the recent activities of the US Navy in northern Norway and added the matter would be solved with discussions.
You thought Rolls Royce’s Small Nuclear Reactors would be for electricity on Earth?
Rolls-Royce team moves into Space Park Leicester to work on nuclear powered space travel, BusinessLive, 13 Jan 22,
Rolls-Royce already signed contract with UK Space Agency to study future nuclear power options for space exploration.
Rolls-Royce has moved a team onto Space Park Leicester to push forward its work on nuclear power for space travel.
The engineering giant has taken space in the new £100 million facility which was launched as a breeding ground for out-of-this-world tech by bringing together industry and academia.
Rolls-Royce is reported to be the only UK company focussing on the line of work and staff with a pedigree in nuclear power will collaborate with new space park head Professor Richard Ambrosi, Professor of Space Instrumentation and Space Nuclear Power Systems at University of Leicester and other experts in space science.
Last January, Rolls-Royce signed a contract with the UK Space Agency to study future nuclear power options for space exploration………………… https://www.business-live.co.uk/technology/rolls-royce-team-moves-space-22728938
Ex-Pentagon, NATO official calls for global Iraq-style coalition of the willing for war with Russia — Anti-bellum
Defense One published an advocacy piece masquerading as an analysis on January 11 by Evelyn Farkas, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia and senior advisor to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, NATO’s top military commander. She flouted the first credential in her article, brinkmanship and modesty rarely coexisting. The title […]
Ex-Pentagon, NATO official calls for global Iraq-style coalition of the willing for war with Russia — Anti-bellum
Al Jazeera fact sheet on NATO expansion and wars, with graphics — Anti-bellum
Infographic: NATO’s members, mission and tensions with Russia Founded in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization now has 30 members and a budget of 1.56 billion euros. By Hanna Duggal On 12 Jan 202212 Jan 2022 Members of the world’s most powerful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), met in Brussels, Belgium on Wednesday to […]
Al Jazeera fact sheet on NATO expansion and wars, with graphics — Anti-bellum
France’s new-generation Flamanville nuclear plant delayed again.
France’s new-generation nuclear plant delayed again, France 24 Paris (AFP) – Electricity giant EDF on Wednesday announced a further delay and cost overruns for France’s flagship new-generation nuclear plant, in a blow to President Emmanuel Macron’s strategy of making atomic power a cornerstone of energy policy.
EDF said that the Flamanville plant on the Channel coast would not be loaded with fuel until the “second quarter of 2023”, instead of late 2022.
The statement came after Macron announced plans for new reactors to provide low-carbon energy and as France backs classing nuclear as a “green” technology under future EU rules.
Projected costs had increased by another 300 million euros ($340 million) to 12.7 billion euros, EDF said — around four times more than the initial forecast of 3.3 billion euros.
Construction on the new-generation EPR plant began in 2007, and was supposed to be finished in 2012.
In November, Macron had announced that “for the first time in decades, we will restart construction of nuclear reactors in our country” — as well as “developing renewable energy”.
The plans would “guarantee France’s energy independence” and help reach its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050, he added.
But the president, who has yet to officially confirm that he plans to stand for re-election in April, was short on details like where or when the new plants would be built.
The Flamanville overruns were “a fiasco at the French public’s expense”, said Greens presidential candidate Yannick Jadot.
Left-wing candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon called the news a “shipwreck for the nuclear sector” — long one of the crown jewels of French industry.
Brussels battle
With 56 reactors providing over 70 percent of France’s electricity, according to EDF, Paris has led the charge for nuclear power to be recognised by the European Union as a green technology eligible for carbon-neutral investment.
Allying with eastern EU member states like Poland and the Czech Republic, the push to include atomic energy in the so-called green “taxonomy” has set it at odds with traditional partner Germany.
Berlin is in the process of shutting all its nuclear plants by the end of this year and Germany’s governing coalition now includes the Green party, rooted in part in opposition to the technology going back to the 1970s.
Environment Minister Steffi Lemke has said it would be “absolutely wrong” to include nuclear energy on the list, as it “can lead to devastating environmental catastrophes”.
“We agree to disagree on the issue” with the French, German Europe Minister Anna Luehrmann told AFP last week……….. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220112-france-s-new-generation-nuclear-plant-delayed-again
UK’s Nuclear Financing Bill – very strange logic – with £40 billion to £60 billion for a new nuclear power station seen as a good thing.
Last week Tim Farron MP sent the following reply to Radiation Free Lakeland when we urged him to vote NO to the public paying for new nuclear build in the Nuclear Financing Bill yesterday. Our MP’s opposition to new nuclear is heartening. But this opposition was not reflected in the vote of
458 for to 53 against (how many others opposed did not vote?) the Bill at third reading.
The Bill will now be considered in the House of Lords. This vote is truly shocking. Alan Brown MP said during the debate Government “has been very good at telling us about the mythical savings that will
accrue via the regulated asset base funding model introduced by this Bill—they are estimated at between £30 billion and £70 billion. What the Government are not so good at is telling us what money they want to commit for the likes of Sizewell C. In effect, they are telling us, ”Let’s save money for bill payers by signing up to a less bad deal for a new nuclear project.”
According to the impact assessment, the capital and financing cost is going to be in the region of £40 billion to £60 billion for a new nuclear power station.
It is a strange logic to tell us that £50 billion being added to our energy bills at the time of a cost of living energy crisis is somehow a good thing. By default, the Government are also confirming just how much of a stinking, rotten deal Hinkley Point C was for bill payers if we are saying that we can save that much money compared with the contracts for difference model for Hinkley C.”
Radiation Free Lakeland 11th Jan 2022
UK’s Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill passes in House of Commons
New funding plan for Sizewell C station clears final hurdle in Commons https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/business/funding-plan-sizewell-c-suffolk-clears-commons-8612482
Matthew Earth January 10, 2022
Plans for a new way of funding nuclear power plants – including Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast – have cleared their final hurdle in the House of Commons.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng described the passing of the Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill on Monday evening as the “path to leadership and innovation”.
The Bill creates a new framework for funding nuclear power plants, after worries from investors have led to current projects stalling.
It would allow pension funds and other institutional investors to provide cash for power stations through a regulated asset base funding model.
Energy bill payers would contribute towards the cost of new power stations during construction through their bills, with the aim of giving investors greater certainty after projects such as Sizewell C faced delays due to concerns over the financial risks of construction.
However, Labour has said bill payers could be exploited as a “milk cow” under the new scheme if power stations face delays during building work.
MPs voted 458 to 53 in favour of the Bill at third reading, and it will now be considered in the House of Lords.
The government has recently agreed a six-week delay to the final decision A final decision on whether the station will be built is expected later this year.
To Avert ‘Global Nuclear Holocaust,’ US Groups Demand Abolition of ICBMs
To Avert ‘Global Nuclear Holocaust,’ US Groups Demand Abolition of ICBMs https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/01/12/avert-global-nuclear-holocaust-us-groups-demand-abolition-icbmsWhistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says no other immediate action would go further “to reduce the real risk of a false alarm in a crisis causing the near-extinction of humanity.”
JAKE JOHNSON More than 60 U.S. organizations issued a joint statement Wednesday calling for the total elimination of the country’s land-based nuclear missiles, warning that the weapons are both an enormous waste of money and—most crucially—an existential threat to humankind.
Organized by the advocacy groups RootsAction and Just Foreign Policy, the statement argues that intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are “uniquely dangerous, greatly increasing the chances that a false alarm or miscalculation will result in nuclear war.”
“There is no more important step the United States could take to reduce the chances of a global nuclear holocaust than to eliminate its ICBMs,” continues the statement, which was signed by Beyond the Bomb, Global Zero, Justice Democrats, CodePink, and dozens of other anti-war groups.
“Everything is at stake,” the groups warn. “Nuclear weapons could destroy civilization and inflict catastrophic damage on the world’s ecosystems with ‘nuclear winter,’ inducing mass starvation while virtually ending agriculture. That is the overarching context for the need to shut down the 400 ICBMs now in underground silos that are scattered across five states—Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.”
The statement comes just two weeks after President Joe Biden signed into law a sprawling military policy bill that allocates billions of dollars to research, development, and missile procurement for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program, an initiative that is expected to replace the current Minuteman III ICBMs in the coming years.
Ahead of the $778 billion legislation’s passage, some progressive lawmakers—most prominently Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—called for a pause in GBSD development, a demand that went unheeded.
Daniel Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower and longtime proponent of nuclear disarmament, told Common Dreams in an email that “most of the so-called ‘defense’ budget is legislative pork.”
“But some of it—in particular, the maintenance and proposed replacement to the current ICBM program—is toxic pork,” he added. “It’s not just unnecessary, it’s positively dangerous, to our own security and that of the rest of the world.”
Before leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, Ellsberg specialized in nuclear weapons and operational planning for a possible nuclear war during his time as a consultant to the Defense Department, an experience he recounts in his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.
“We should have gotten rid of our silo-based ICBMs no less than half a century ago, when they had become totally vulnerable to attack,” Ellsberg told Common Dreams. “Ever since then, deterrence of a nuclear attack should have been based solely on our invulnerable submarine-launched missile force, which is itself far larger than that function requires or should permit.”
Echoing the anti-war coalition’s fear that a potential “false alarm” could spark nuclear catastrophe, Ellsberg noted that “the survival in wartime of hundreds of land-based missiles depends on their being launched, irrevocably (unlike bombers), on electronic and infrared warning before attacking missiles might arrive.”
“Such a warning, however convincing, may be false; and that has actually happened, more times than our public has ever become aware,” he said. “No other strategic weapons besides ground-based ICBMs challenge a national leader to decide, absurdly within minutes, whether ‘to use them or lose them.’ They should not exist.”
“No other specific, concrete American action would go so far immediately to reduce the real risk of a false alarm in a crisis causing the near-extinction of humanity,” Ellsberg concluded.
In a statement, RootsAction national director Norman Solomon lamented that recent public discussion surrounding U.S. nuclear weapons policy “has been almost entirely limited to the narrow question of whether to build a new ICBM system or stick with the existing Minuteman III missiles for decades longer.”
“That’s like arguing over whether to refurbish the deck chairs on the nuclear Titanic,” said Solomon. “Both options retain the same unique dangers of nuclear war that ICBMs involve. It’s time to really widen the ICBM debate, and this joint statement from U.S. organizations is a vital step in that direction.”
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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