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No Nukes for Power, Posturing or Destruction

Karl Grossman, COUNTERPUNCH, August 8, 2025

(This is a presentation, titled “No Nukes for Power, Posturing or Destruction,” that I gave at the 2025 Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemorative Event on Long Island this week organized by the South Country Peace Group and co-sponsored by other peace organizations and also religious institutions including the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stony Brook; Bellport United Methodist Church; and Old South Haven Presbyterian Church. Peace groups included Pax Christi LI; LI Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives; North Country Peace Group; Veterans for Peace Long Island Chapter 138; and Peace Action New York State).

“We are in the hands of lunatics and at the crossroads of time,” Dr. Helen Caldicott said several years ago. A medical doctor, the author of books including Nuclear Madness published in 1978 and The New Nuclear Danger out three years ago, she declared: “It’s time we rise up and say ‘this is our world, we want to live.’”

It’s high time, very high time.

Indeed, we’re now on borrowed time.

This past Friday, President Trump stated: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the former president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev…now…deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.”

Medvedev, upon Trump’s demand reducing a ceasefire deadline in Russia’s war on Ukraine, said Trump was playing an “ultimatum game” with Russia. “Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. “Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.”

Medvedev said Trump should “revisit his favorite movies about the living dead and recall just how dangerous the mythical ‘Dead Hand’ can be.”

Russia’s “Dead Hand” system, as has been reported in recent days, is an automatic nuclear retaliation mechanism going back to the Cold War designed to launch a counterstrike even if the Russian leadership is wiped out in a first strike.

Trump shot back: “Tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still president, to watch his words. He’s entering very dangerous territory!”

Russian President Putin of course has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons by Russia since its invasion of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un earlier was present when, as the headline of the Associated Press dispatch reported, “North Korea launches new intercontinental ballistic missile designed to threaten the U.S.,” said North Korea “will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces.”

Indeed, “We are in the hands of lunatics and at the crossroads of time.” By the skin of our teeth, the world, since the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, has avoided a global nuclear holocaust.

But as the heading of the announcement on January 28, 2025 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it’s Doomsday Clock is: “Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight.” The Bulletin defines midnight on its Doomsday Clock as “nuclear annihilation.”

The announcement by the Bulletin, founded by Albert Einstein and former Manhattan Project scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer immediately following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, began: “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned” the Bulletin have “continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe” since being set up in 1947.

The Bulletin’s announcement continued: “Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and take bold action….In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.”

It went on: “In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation….The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization.”

“Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness,” it said. “The United States, China, and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization. These three countries have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and they can do so if their leaders seriously commence good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined here. Despite their profound disagreements, they should take that first step without delay. The world depends on immediate action.”

“After 80 years, nuclear threat remains grave,” was the headline of a piece this week by Ira Helfand of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Helfand began: “As we approach the 80^th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…on Aug 6 and 9, respectively, the danger of nuclear war is great and growing….The world can no longer indulge in the denial which has marked our thinking since the end of the Cold War. Nuclear war is a real and present danger that we must acknowledge and confront.”

“A large-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, according to best available science, would kill hundreds of millions of people in the first afternoon, and lead to a global famine that kills some 6 billion people, three quarters of humanity, in the first two years,” it continued. “Even a more limited nuclear war, as might have taken place between India and Pakistan, could trigger a global famine that kills 2 billion people worldwide, including 130 million in the United States.”

I host a television program broadcast nationally and a while back interviewed Commander Robert Green formerly of the British Navy. He said: “I do feel that we’re in more dangerous times than in the Cold War at the moment and people don’t realize it.”

He was deeply involved in British readiness to use nuclear weapons……………………………

He said there has been a “systematic effort to play down the appalling side effects and ‘overkill’…with even the smallest modern nuclear weapons,” how they are “not weapons at all. They are utterly indiscriminate devices that combine the poisoning horrors of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, plus effects…of radioactivity, with almost unimaginable explosive violence.” Green is devoted to working for a “nuclear-free world.”

There is an illusion, a false notion that continues in many government quarters and among those with a vested interest in nuclear weapons—that nuclear war is feasible and winnable.

In my book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, I quote from Legacy of Hiroshima, a book by Edward Teller, “father” of the hydrogen bomb.

Teller asserts that “we can survive a nuclear attack.” There is “no doubt” that millions of people would die, he concedes, but “most people” can be saved. ……………………………….

Nuclear power provides a direct link to nuclear weaponry. With more nations having the ability to construct nuclear weapons—and any country with a nuclear power facility has the materiel and trained personnel to make nuclear weapons—the likelihood of this luck running out is high. Any nuclear power facility can serve as a nuclear bomb factory……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/08/no-nukes-for-power-posturing-or-destruction/

August 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear | Leave a comment