J Robert Oppenheimer advocated for the regulation of nuclear energy after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and attempted to communicate with Jawaharlal Nehru about this in 1951.
Director Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer has once again put the spotlight on one of history’s most controversial figures, and by Nolan’s own estimation, ‘the most important person who ever lived’. Oppenheimer was in charge of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, a American endeavor which resulted in the creation of the world’s first atomic bombs.
Oppenheimer often spoke about the guilt that he feltafter two bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and dedicated the rest of his days to advocating for the regulation of nuclear power. He refused to participate in the creation of the hydrogen bomb, and urged his government to tread very carefully. These themes are prominently explored in Nolan’s film, which ends with a guilt-ridden Oppenheimer having a vision of the world’s destruction.
And according to writer Nayantara Sahgal, Oppenheimer attempted to communicate with then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru about the US government’s efforts to build a weapon ‘far more deadly than the atomic bomb’, and begged Nehru to not trade all-important thorium with the Americans in exchange for the wheat that India needed at the time. In her book Nehru: Civilizing A Savage World, Sahgal, who is Nehru’s niece, reproduced a letter that received in 1951 from her mother and his sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was serving at the time as India’s envoy in Moscow, Washington and London.
In the letter, she told him about a conversation she had with Oppenheimer, who’d rung her up from Princeton, and told her that he had ‘something very urgent to communicate’ and was sending an emissary, Amiya Chakravarti, who brought the ‘chilling message that the United States was developing a weapon far more deadly than the atom bomb.’ For this purpose, the US needed access to India’s ‘inexhaustible supply’ of thorium, and was prepared to offer wheat in exchange. Oppenheimer begged of India not to sell any thorium to the US voluntarily or through pressure, but Nehru wouldn’t have done it either way, as he ‘abhorred nuclear weapons and strove passionately to seek their total elimination’, as Sahgal wrote.
“We believe,” he wrote in 1945, “that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess.”
Amere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.
Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies—our former allies—were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon.
Hello, H-bomb!
War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?
Oppenheimer challenged this official policy and shattered his career. Indeed, he saw immediately, as the newly developed bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, that Planet Earth was in danger. A team of physicists had just exposed its ultimate vulnerability and he famously noted, as he witnessed the mushroom cloud, that words of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita entered his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
He had not opposed dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as some of the Manhattan Project scientists, such as Leo Szilard, did, but when the war ended he became deeply committed to eliminating all possibility of future wars. One of the first actions he took, a week after the bombings, was to write a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging him to embrace common sense regarding further development of nuclear weapons.
“We believe,” he wrote, “that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.”
Making future wars impossible! What if American political forces had sufficient sanity to listen to Oppenheimer? Several months after writing this letter, he paid a visit to President Harry Truman, attempting to discuss the placement of international control over further nuclear development. The president would have none of that. He kicked Oppenheimer out of the Oval Office.
Oppenheimer maintained his commitment to the transcendence of war, working with the Atomic Energy Commission to control the use of nuclear weapons—and standing firm in his opposition to the creation of the hydrogen bomb. He continued his opposition even as the bomb’s development progressed and nuclear tests began spreading fallout over “expendable” parts of the world. But, uh oh. Along came the McCarthy era and the accompanying Red Scare.
…………………………………………………………………. It took them about 16 years. They finally succeeded in clearing his name.
And while I applaud their enormous effort and its result, I also note it isn’t finished yet. This is more than simply a personal matter: the righting of a bureaucratic wrong done to one man. The future of humanity remains at stake. The U.S. government has spent multi-trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons development over the years, conducted a thousand-plus nuclear tests, and is currently in possession of 5,244 nuclear warheads, out of an insane global total of some 12,500. Perhaps it’s time to start listening to—and hearing—Oppenheimer’s words. https://scheerpost.com/2023/07/21/what-we-can-still-learn-from-j-robert-oppenheimer/
Karina Lester knows the fallout nuclear weapons can cause.
Her father, the late Yami Lester, went blind as a young man after the British tested atomic weapons in Emu Field.
“The scars are still felt on our Country,” said Ms Lester, a Yankunytjatjara Anangu woman from north-west South Australia.
“And the scars are still evident on our people.”
A group of Australian atomic survivors and relatives visited Canberra on Wednesday to speak with government decision-makers about their experiences of the British nuclear testing program in WA and SA.
They are calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
In 1953 the British initiated a program of nuclear testing in Australia at the Montebello Islands, off the coast of WA and in Emu Field in South Australia.
Two years later, the British government announced a larger site for the tests at Maralinga.
Ms Lester carries her family’s stories about the impacts of the tests on her people.
“I had a grandmother of mine needing to dig a grave to bury her parents because soon after the radiation fallout, the elderly people started to suffer and die,” she said.
“My father never saw me or my children.
“It’s all because of a decision by governments of the day to say ‘That is no man’s country, go and test your bombs’.
“It’s been a huge, painful journey for us but it’s such an important story that needs to be told.”
Maxine Goodwin is the daughter of an Australian nuclear veteran who became ill as a result of his involvement in the first atomic test in WA.
“Signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is a significant step towards addressing the harm experienced by individuals and communities,” she said.
In October 1953 when the British detonated the Totem I and II nuclear bombs at Emu Field, Yankunytjatjara, Antikarinya and Pitjantjatjara woman June Lennon was only a few months old.
Her family witnessed the tests and have suffered from ill-health since.
“The government didn’t tell the truth about the nuclear testing program,” she said.
“There were so many lies. They didn’t tell people what they were doing.”
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Australia director Gem Romuld said it was important for policy makers to hear stories firsthand.
“Nuclear survivors are experts on the devastating humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons,” she said.
“Australia’s experience with nuclear weapons testing is a powerful motivation to join the nuclear weapon ban treaty.”
The delegation will be in Canberra on Wednesday and Thursday to meet parliamentarians, including Foreign Minister Penny Wong and speak at an event hosted by the Parliamentary Friends of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
or nearly five years, publisher and journalist Julian Assange has fought extradition to the United States where he faces 175 years in prison for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes.
Instead of protecting freedom of the press, to which he pledged allegiance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, Joe Biden is continuing Donald Trump’s prosecution of Assange under the infamous Espionage Act. Journalist James Ball is one of at least four journalists that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI are pressuring to cooperate with the prosecution of Assange, Ball wrote in Rolling Stone.
Biden’s DOJ is apparently attempting to bolster its prosecution of Assange in the event he is extradited to the United States. Ball said that all three of the other journalists being pressured to provide a statement told him they have no intention of helping the prosecution.
Assange, who is in frail physical and mental health after years of confinement, is contesting the U.K. High Court’s rejection of his appeal. If he loses in the U.K., Assange’s last resort is to the European Court of Human Rights to litigate several violations of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
But even if the European court issues an injunction against extradition, the U.K. courts may not honor that ruling. Assange is “dangerously close” to extradition, according to his family and observers.
“Julian Assange and Wikileaks were responsible for the exposure of criminality on the part of the U.S. Government on a massive and unprecedented scale,” including “torture, war crimes and atrocities on civilians,” Assange’s Perfected Grounds of Appeal states.
“Assange’s work, dedicated to ensuring public accountability by exposing global human rights abuses, and facilitating the investigation of and prosecution for state criminality, has contributed to the saving of countless lives, stopped human rights abuses in their tracks, and brought down despotic and autocratic regimes,” his appeal papers say. Human rights defenders who expose state crimes suffer “political retaliation and persecution from the regimes whose criminality they expose. Julian Assange is no exception.”
The War Crimes That Assange and WikiLeaks Exposed
In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided WikiLeaks with documents containing evidence of U.S. war crimes. They included the “Iraq War Logs,” which were 400,000 field reports describing 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces “handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad.” They contained the “Afghan War Diary,” 90,000 reports of more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they also included the “Guantánamo Files” — 779 secret reports with evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantánamo Bay for years, and 800 men and boys had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Manning also furnished WikiLeaks with the notorious 2007 “Collateral Murder Video,” which shows a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter targeting and killing 11 unarmed civilians, including two Reuters journalists, as well as a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. The video reveals evidence of three violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.
This is the first time a publisher has been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets. In December 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel signed a joint open letter calling on the U.S. government to dismiss the Espionage Act charges against Assange for publishing classified military and diplomatic secrets. “Publishing is not a crime,” the letter says. “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
Extradition Initially Denied on Mental Health Grounds
On January 4, 2021, U.K. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States because of the repressive prison conditions in the U.S. and the threat that imprisonment would pose to his mental health, including the likely risk of suicide. The Biden administration’s DOJ appealed.
The U.K. High Court reversed Baraitser’s ruling after the DOJ presented questionable “assurances ” that Assange would be held in humane conditions if extradited.
Assange asked the High Court to consider his other grounds of appeal which Baraitser had rejected when she denied extradition for mental health reasons.
On June 8, 2023, British Judge Sir Jonathan Swift rejected Assange’s appeal in a cursory three-page denial with almost no analysis of the issues raised in Assange’s 150-page submission.
Assange appealed Swift’s ruling to the U.K. High Court and his appeal is pending.
The U.K.-U.S. Extradition Treaty Prohibits Extradition for Political Offences
The Espionage Act charges in the indictment include the following:
Conspiracy to obtain, receive and disclose national defense information (Count 1);
Unauthorized obtaining and receiving of national defense information (Counts 3 to 9); and
Unauthorized disclosure of national defense information (Counts 10 to 18).
In addition, Assange is charged with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” with intent to “facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information related to the national defence of the United States.”
Article 4(1) of the U.K.-U.S. Extradition Treaty provides that “extradition shall not be granted if the offence for which extradition is requested is a political offence.” In their appeal, Assange’s lawyers note that espionage is a “pure political offence” as it is an offence against the state.
As Assange’s legal team wrote, “The gravamen (and defining legal characteristic) of each of the charges is thus an alleged intention to obtain or disclose US state secrets in a manner that was damaging to the security of the US state,” which makes them political offences.
In his denial, Swift wrote that the 2003 Extradition Act trumps the binding treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. The act doesn’t include the “political offences” bar to extradition.
The Extradition Request Was Made for Ulterior Political Motives and Not in Good Faith
Article 4(3) of the Extradition Treaty forbids extradition if the request was “politically motivated.”
The legally unprecedented and selective nature of the prosecution in focusing on leaked national security information speaks to the political character of the prosecution and request for extradition, the appeal says.
Assange’s lawyers wrote that “this prosecution is motivated by matters other than the proper and usual pursuit of criminal justice. It is motivated instead by a concerted intent to destroy or inhibit the publishers of evidence of state criminal ability, and thereby put a stop to the process of investigating, prosecuting and preventing such international crimes in the future.”
The appeal papers point out that Assange is being prosecuted for exposing “wholescale abuse and war crimes” committed by the United States. If instead he had “exposed war crimes or crimes against humanity committed by a state such as the Russian Federation,” the defense lawyers write, “there can be no doubt that his prosecution for such revelations would be regarded as both a political offence (within the Treaty) and an impermissible prosecution motivated by a desire to punish him for his political opinions/acts.”
“While the leakers of such materials have been prosecuted albeit selectively, no prosecution for the act of obtaining or publishing state secrets has ever occurred,” the appeal says.
That is “[b]ecause the First Amendment protects the free press and it is vital that the press expose rather than ignore … not because journalists are somehow privileged but because the citizenry has a right to know what is going on,” Mark Feldstein, journalism professor at University of Maryland, testified at Assange’s extradition hearing.
Extradition Would Violate Freedom of Expression Guaranteed by the ECHR
Article 10 of the ECHR protects freedom of expression.
Columbia Law Professor Jameel Jaffer testified that the indictment is focused “almost entirely” on things that national security journalists do “routinely and as a necessary part of their work,” including “cultivating sources, communicating with them confidentially, soliciting information from them, protecting their identities from disclosure, and publishing classified information.”
The conviction of Assange would chill journalists from fulfilling their function as watchdog for the public. The appeal quotes the 1996 case of Goodwin v. the United Kingdom:
Press freedom assumes even greater importance in circumstances in which State activities and decisions escape democratic or judicial scrutiny on account of their confidential or secret nature. The conviction of a journalist for disclosing information considered to be confidential or secret may discourage those working in the media from informing the public on matters of public interest. As a result, the press may no longer be able to play its vital role as “public watchdog” and the ability of the press to provide accurate and reliable information may be adversely affected.
There Is New Evidence Not Considered by the District Judge
The ECHR protects the right to life (Article 2) and forbids torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (Article 3). The appeal argues that there is a real risk of violation of Article 2 and/or Article 3 if Assange is extradited.
In September 2021, a Yahoo! Newsreport revealed that while Assange was living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London under a grant of asylum, senior CIA and Trump administration officials asked for “sketches” and “options” for assassinating him. Trump himself “asked whether the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide him ‘options’ for how to do so.”
“If these state agencies were prepared to go to these lengths whilst he was under the protection of an embassy and located in the UK, there must be a real risk of similar extra-judicial measures or reprisals if he is extradited to the US,” the appeal says.
The High Court’s ruling on Assange’s appeal could be issued any day.
Father of atomic bomb” paid price for renouncing his “child”
By Lawrence S. Wittner, Beyond Nuclear International 16 Jul 23
The July 21, 2023 theatrical release of the film Oppenheimer, focused on the life of a prominent American nuclear physicist, should help to remind us of how badly the development of modern weapons has played out for individuals and for all of humanity.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus, written by Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin, the film tells the story of the rise and fall of young J. Robert Oppenheimer, recruited by the U.S. government during World War II to direct the construction and testing of the world’s first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. His success in these ventures was followed shortly thereafter by President Truman’s ordering the use of nuclear weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
During the immediate postwar years, Oppenheimer, widely lauded as “the father of the atomic bomb,” attained extraordinary power for a scientist within U.S. government ranks, including as chair of the General Advisory Committee of the new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
But his influence ebbed as his ambivalence about nuclear weapons grew. In the fall of 1945, during a meeting at the White House with Truman, Oppenheimer said: “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” Incensed, Truman later told Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Oppenheimer had become “a crybaby” and that he didn’t want “to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”
Oppenheimer was also disturbed by the emerging nuclear arms race and, like many atomic scientists, championed the international control of atomic energy. Indeed, in late 1949, the entire General Advisory Committee of the AEC came out in opposition to the U.S. development of the H-bomb―although the president, ignoring this recommendation, approved developing the new weapon and adding it to the rapidly growing U.S. nuclear arsenal.
In December 1953, shortly after becoming chair of the AEC, Lewis Strauss, a fervent champion of a U.S. nuclear buildup, ordered Oppenheimer’s security clearance suspended. Anxious to counter implications of disloyalty, Oppenheimer appealed the decision and, in subsequent hearings before the AEC’s Personnel Security Board, faced grueling questioning not only about his criticism of nuclear weapons, but about his relationships decades before with individuals who had been Communist Party members.
Ultimately, the AEC ruled that Oppenheimer was a security risk, an official determination that added to his public humiliation, completed his removal from government service, and delivered a shattering blow to his meteoric career.
Of course, the development of nuclear weapons had far broader consequences than the downfall of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In addition to killing more than 200,000 people and injuring many more in Japan, the advent of nuclear weaponry led nations around the world to enter a fierce nuclear arms race. By the 1980s, spurred on by conflicts among the major powers, 70,000 nuclear weapons had come into existence, with the potential to destroy virtually all life on earth.
……………………………………………………….All nine nuclear powers (Russia, the United States, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) are currently engaged in upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new production facilities and new, improved nuclear weapons.
During 2022, these governments poured nearly $83 billion into this nuclear buildup. Public threats to initiate nuclear war, including those by Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin, have become more common. The hands of the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, established in 1946, now stand at 90 seconds to midnight―the most dangerous setting in its history.
……………………………………………………To head off a looming nuclear catastrophe, non-nuclear nations have been championing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). Adopted by an overwhelming vote of nations at a UN conference in July 2017, the TPNW bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons.
As a former intelligence officer, I’ve been wondering why has no one done an investigation about Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine?
His rise to power, in my opinion, represents an incredible manipulation of world opinion that will go down in history as a classic case study in social psychological engineering: an ordinary comedian who came to power because he promised a long-awaited peace, who then dragged his fellow citizens into a bloody war that can only be described as a massacre.
With the help of colleagues and experts with first-hand insights into Zelensky, I have pored over documents and video to produce a film that captures this investigation. This story has so many twists and turns that I had to break it into two parts. In the first episode, presented here, I will answer the question about Zelensky’s improbable rise to power, and how the Ukrainian President accumulated his vast wealth, a sum that has only become larger since the war with Russia began. And, perhaps most importantly, why I decided to call this film “Agent Zelensky.” https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/agent-zelensky-part-1?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=6892&post_id=134489342&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.
Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies – our former allies – were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon.
Hello, H-bomb!
War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?
Oppenheimer challenged this official policy and shattered his career. Indeed, he saw immediately, as the newly developed bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, that Planet Earth was in danger. A team of physicists had just exposed its ultimate vulnerability and he famously noted, as he witnessed the mushroom cloud, that words of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita entered his mind: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
He had not opposed dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as some of the Manhattan Project scientists, such as Leo Szilard, did, but when the war ended he became deeply committed to eliminating all possibility of future wars. One of the first actions he took, a week after the bombings, was to write a letter to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, urging him to embrace common sense regarding further development of nuclear weapons.
We believe,” he wrote, “that the safety of this nation – as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power – cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.”
Making future wars impossible! What if American political forces had sufficient sanity to listen to Oppenheimer? Several months after writing this letter, he paid a visit to President Truman, attempting to discuss the placement of international control over further nuclear development. The president would have none of that. He kicked Oppenheimer out of the Oval Office……………………………………………………………………………….
The future of humanity remains at stake. The U.S. government has spent multi-trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons development over the years, conducted a thousand-plus nuclear tests, and is currently in possession of 5,244 nuclear warheads, out of an insane global total of some 12,500. Perhaps it’s time to start listening to – and hearing – Oppenheimer’s words.
[Ed note. In this IAEA’s internal document the IAEA is seen coaching TEPCO about what to tell and what not tell to the public regarding the « treated » water to be soon discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
One thing that can be drawn from that document’s content is that the IAEA and TEPCO have no intention to be fully transparent about the radioactive contamination of the said « treated water », only the one to cushion insidiously the real facts to the public eyes.]
BY MARI YAMAGUCHI, July 5, 2023
FUTABA, Japan (AP) — The head of the U.N. atomic agency toured Japan’s tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant on Wednesday and said he is satisfied with still-contentious plans to release treated radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean…………………………………
The wastewater release still faces opposition in and outside Japan.
Earlier Wednesday, Grossi met with local mayors and fishing association leaders and stressed that the IAEA will be present throughout the water discharge, which is expected to last decades, to ensure safety and address residents’ concerns. He said he inaugurated a permanent IAEA office at the plant, showing its long-term commitment.
The water discharge is not “some strange plan that has been devised only to be applied here, and sold to you,” Grossi said at the meeting in Iwaki, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the plant. He said the method is certified by the IAEA and is followed around the world…………………….
Local fishing organizations have rejected the plan because they worry their reputation will be damaged even if their catch isn’t contaminated. It is also opposed by groups in South Korea, China and some Pacific Island nations due to safety concerns and political reasons.
The fishery association chief, Tetsu Nozaki, urged government officials at Wednesday’s meeting “to remember that the treated water plan was pushed forward despite our opposition.”
Grossi is expected to also visit South Korea, New Zealand and the Cook Islands to ease concerns there. He said his intention is to explain what the IAEA, not Japan, is doing to ensure there is no problem.
In an effort to address concerns about fish and the marine environment, Grossi and Tomoaki Kobayakawa, president of the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, signed an agreement on a joint project to determine whether they are impacted by tritium, the only radionuclide officials say cannot be removed from the wastewater by treatment.
In South Korea, officials said in a briefing Wednesday that it’s highly unlikely that the released water will have dangerous levels of contamination. They said South Korea plans to tightly screen seafood imported from Japan and that there is no immediate plan to lift the country’s import ban on seafood from the Fukushima region.
Park Ku-yeon, first vice minister of South Korea’s Office for Government Policy Coordination, said Seoul plans to comment on the IAEA findings when it issues the results of the country’s own investigation into the potential effects of the water release, which he said will come soon.
China doubled down on its objections to the release in a statement late Tuesday, saying the IAEA report failed to reflect all views and accusing Japan of treating the Pacific Ocean as a sewer.
“We once again urge the Japanese side to stop its ocean discharge plan, and earnestly dispose of the nuclear-contaminated water in a science-based, safe and transparent manner. If Japan insists on going ahead with the plan, it will have to bear all the consequences arising from this,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.
SCHEERPOST, By Kevin Gosztola / The Dissenter, 20 June 23
Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower and peace activist who released the Pentagon Papers that exposed the Vietnam War, has died at the age of 92. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer on February 17, and doctors gave him three to six months to live.
He was a subscriber to The Dissenter Newsletter. So it is only appropriate that I share some of my personal memories in honor of who he was and because he meant so much to so many people.
Nearly two weeks after his diagnosis, Dan messaged his friends and supporters. That message was republished by various news media outlets as it circulated.
“I feel lucky and grateful that I’ve had a wonderful life far beyond the proverbial three-score years and ten,” Dan wrote. “I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else).”
Dan mentioned that his cardiologist had given him permission to abandon his salt-free diet, and that his energy level was high. He had done “several interviews and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues.” He had two more scheduled interviews.
One of those interviews was with me. In fact, around the same time that Daniel learned that he had cancer, I contacted him to ask if he would help me with the launch of my book, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange. He already had given me a blurb for the book.
Dan graciously agreed to talk with me once again about the Assange case. He even asked for a hard copy so that he could review the book. My publisher Censored Press quickly mailed a copy to him, and we planned to record on Wednesday, March 1.
That became the day that friends and supporters of Dan were notified by him that he had cancer……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Seeing Dan’s life announcement, and the warm responses to it, made it easier for me to accept that one of the best human beings I have ever known had come to the end of his life.
Dan was not at peace with the world around him. Wars and the threat of nuclear armageddon motivated him to do several more interviews while he could still speak with reporters. But he did feel joy and gratitude having lived his life unapologetically as a peace activist and truth-teller—someone who embodied the idea of the moral imperative…….. https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/20/the-loving-truth-teller-that-was-daniel-ellsberg/ —
Dan Ellsberg was a brave man. In an effort to end the Vietnam War, he risked spending the rest of his life in jail by leaking the Pentagon Papers. In so doing, he changed history—and our knowledge of our own history.
I’ve been privileged to know Dan for almost 40 years, as a friend and as an activist who is trying to save humanity from our self-created nuclear Doomsday Machine. So it was with sadness and a sense of impending loss that I read his March 2 post, where he revealed that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and had been given less than six months to live. When the Bulletin invited me to write this piece about Dan, I had a conversation with him so he could tell us what he would like to say to us and to future generations, upon his death. (He died on June 16 at his home in Kensington, Calif., at age 92.)
What do you think should be done to bring stated and actual policy in line with one another?
Dan’s laughter was sparked by seeing the goal stated so baldly, especially since both Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden had stated that, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
Dan then noted that America’s nuclear posture is “directed toward meeting that mission” (that is, winning a nuclear war), even though such a mission is “infeasible and impossible.” He decried the American nuclear establishment for giving “no importance whatever to expressing in public what their actual aims and interests and options are.” He also noted that Russia does roughly the same thing and that this refusal to acknowledge reality has to change.
In The Doomsday Machine, Dan recommends a two-step process to make the world safer (see pages 335-350). First, he notes, current, bloated nuclear arsenals and unrealistic war fighting plans would destroy the planet if used. He then says that:
… you can’t eradicate the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons and delivery systems. But you can dismantle a Doomsday Machine [that would destroy the planet]. … the existence of one such machine [does not] compel or even create a tangible incentive for a rival or enemy to have one. In fact, having two on alert against each is far more dangerous for each and for the world than if only one existed.
… the current danger of Doomsday could be eliminated without the United States or Russia coming close to total nuclear disarmament, or the abandonment of nuclear deterrence, either unilaterally or mutually (desirable as the latter would be). …
This dismantlement of the Doomsday Machines is not intended as an adequate long-term substitute for more ambitious, necessary goals, including total universal abolition of nuclear weapons. We cannot accept the conclusion that abolition must be ruled out “for the foreseeable future” or put off for generations.
Our subsequent conversation dealt with a variety of aspects of nuclear risk and how to reduce it.
The Pentagon Papers, Vietnam, and nuclear risk……………………………………………………………………….
Nuclear weapons are a Sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads
Marty: Let’s come back to what you would like to say to future generations—or people right now even.
Dan: Right now, that there is, and has been for 70 years, a very significant danger of the end of civilization: the death of most humans on Earth within a year by the effects of nuclear winter and nuclear fallout. And that almost nothing has succeeded in lowering that probability, although there are many things that could be done and should have been done. But perhaps it is not too late to accomplish those things now.
We are living, as John F. Kennedy put it, “under a sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads.” And that thread has not been strengthened in the slightest over the years.
What is happening now in the new Cold War is that the chance of reducing that risk is vanishing, the door is in the process of closing.
Is it already too late? We don’t know. But I choose to act, and I urge others to act as if it’s not too late. And I can be very specific on what that would mean.
We need coordination of action that also applies to climate change. It is hard to imagine a way of reducing the global emissions of CO2 that does not involve coordinated action between the major emitters like the US, China, India, Russia, and Europe.
Coordinated action of a kind that seems almost impossible after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, exploited as that has been by the West to reintroduce a Cold War in which the aims of the adversary are magnified, in which military solutions are looked for. So the chance of lowering the arms budget has virtually disappeared. But, even more importantly, the chance of doing any of the things that would lower the risk of nuclear winter has been almost eliminated at this point.
For over half a century, the existence on both sides of vulnerable land-based ICBMs[5] has been the hair trigger to the Doomsday Machine. They pose a use-it-or-lose-it mentality which encourages each side to launch its missiles on ambiguous warning, lest they be destroyed—in order to attack the ICBMs of the other side.
Coordinated action of a kind that seems almost impossible after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, exploited as that has been by the West to reintroduce a Cold War in which the aims of the adversary are magnified, in which military solutions are looked for. So the chance of lowering the arms budget has virtually disappeared. But, even more importantly, the chance of doing any of the things that would lower the risk of nuclear winter has been almost eliminated at this point.
For over half a century, the existence on both sides of vulnerable land-based ICBMs[5] has been the hair trigger to the Doomsday Machine. They pose a use-it-or-lose-it mentality which encourages each side to launch its missiles on ambiguous warning, lest they be destroyed—in order to attack the ICBMs of the other side.
The numbers [of nuclear warheads] per se don’t matter so much, except for reducing them down to a level that could not produce Doomsday, could not produce omnicide. The potential for that catastrophe has existed for decades and can be eliminated without giving up deterrence.
Does any nation have the right to threaten to kill billions of people? I would say they don’t, and they cannot possibly justify it by a need to deter nuclear attack on themselves, since much smaller arsenals would serve that purpose.
But it gets very tricky when you add that little thing of deterring a nuclear attack against your allies. That produces a very strong incentive to make it look as though you believe you could lower the damage to your own nation, and God knows we have acted as though we believe that hoax since the ’50s or ’60s.
When it comes to that, it’s a total license, as McNamara found, to build a first-strike weapon, to try and make it credible that you’ll respond to an attack on your ally by initiating nuclear war against a nuclear weapon state. And there’s no limit to what you can spend under that crazy assumption.
In other words, it’s been a madman threat from the very beginning……………………….. How do you move people from a totally insane plan to which they’re committed? ……………….. How do you persuade them away from a plan that is batshit crazy?
The risk of a nuclear war
,………………………………………………………….. My guess is that there is not a high likelihood of nuclear war in the current stalemate in Ukraine, so long as Putin is not confronted with losing Crimea or all of the Donbas. But if American troops or Polish troops or German troops were to maintain those tanks and planes that are being given to Ukraine by the West, or to man them, that would be a very significant change, because it could confront Russia with actually losing the Donbas or Crimea. And I think, in those circumstances, Putin would be strongly tempted, as we would be in similar circumstances, to break through that with “small” nuclear weapons in an effort to bring people to their senses and say, “This can’t go on. You’ve got to negotiate at our terms.” Putin’s use of nuclear weapons in that kind of scenario could succeed, but probably would not.
And another thing that I’ve learned, Marty, and that I think is not sufficiently appreciated, is that men in power are willing to risk world annihilation rather than to accept a short-term loss. And it’s not a question of realism or unrealism, it’s a willingness to gamble. They know it’s not likely to succeed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it, because there is a chance that it may succeed, which is enough to get them to gamble the world.
Our presidents have that power every hour of every day.
Dan’s father’s awakening………………………………………………………….
The need for action: a fool’s errand?
Dan: People just don’t realize how big this is. What do they do? They don’t do anything one way or the other. The death of humanity is not something that moves them to vote. They act as if there is no chance to make any difference. As if it’s impossible to change things.
Yet, we all thought the Berlin Wall coming down was impossible. Nelson Mandela becoming president of South Africa without a violent revolution seemed impossible.
In the same way, I currently cannot see any chance of getting rid of ICBMs, or of no-first-use. But miracles do happen. I choose to act as if it makes a difference. And it’s just a choice. I can’t defend that. It’s just a better way to live. It’s the way I choose to live. We can work to prevent the cataclysm.
And I think one aspect of that is, 12 months into this Ukraine war, suggesting anything that involves a chance to end it is seen as being on the wrong side. Yet going on as we have has risks vastly disproportionate to any advantage that would be gained in another 12 months of stalemate. The latest leaks indicate exactly what The Pentagon Papers showed: that the people inside perceive themselves as in a stalemate for at least the next 12 months. So what will the effort to break through the stalemate in the 12 months be likely to accomplish? Very little. And what’s the possible downside? The end of everything, essentially.
And likewise, on Taiwan. It’s outrageous. We are risking everything over the issue of the control of Taiwan. When I say risking everything, I mean we are risking all-out nuclear war. And would people, a thousand years ago, have taken such a risk? I think if they could have, they would have. So we’re not worse than people were. We just have a lot more at stake. This is not a species to be trusted with nuclear weapons.
Concluding the interview
Marty: In your email to me, you said, “Other than dying, I’m okay.” I like your humor.
Dan: Well, we’re all dying. I’m in very good shape. For my best friends, I would not wish better than to have the last month I’m having with my wife and my friends like you.
Editor’s note: A 2018 Bulletin interview with Daniel Ellsberg about his book, The Doomsday Machine, can be found here.
“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”
My parents’ house sits at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos facing west toward the setting sun and the Jemez Mountains. I still remember nights looking out across the vast darkness at the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, the secret city, “a place,” as the late anti-nuclear activist and Ohkay Owingeh elder Herman Agoyo put it, “with no public memory.”
As the crow flies, Truchas is 30 miles from Los Alamos, separated by the great Tewa Basin and arid badlands checkerboarded by Hispano settlements and Indigenous Pueblos. For most of my young life, I took the Lab for granted. It was there in the background, omnipresent like a low-frequency hum.
But it didn’t always just exist. It was forced onto our homeland and into our consciousness, even if most origin stories about the Manhattan Project and the Lab’s continued presence in the region treat local people like extras in a movie.
“For the several hundred workers required to man these plants, there must also be several thousand service and supporting personnel,” a 1950 internal report read. Its writer was debating whether Los Alamos was the best place for the weapons Lab moving forward.
Scientists performed clandestine work here, yes, but that work required and continues to require the effort of so many others — “supporting personnel” — who can also be on the frontlines of exposure.
I am reminded, for instance, of an experiment that went horribly wrong just nine months after American forces decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs. A Canadian physicist, Louis Slotin, was trying to gather data on nuclear chain reactions when the screwdriver he was holding as a wedge between a beryllium tamper and a plutonium core accidentally slipped. For a brief second, the beryllium and plutonium reached fission, sending out a blast of blue light and radioactivity.
Slotin’s death in 1946 has been famously recorded in histories of the Lab. But there were several other people in the room that day, including several colleagues and a security guard whose fate has largely been eclipsed. All that was noted in records of the event was his fear. Apparently, it was said, the security guard ran out of the room and up a hill. And that’s where his part in the story ends.
But he was there, a witness — and one, I imagine, who was exposed to the same plutonium that within a matter of nine days killed Slotin. I’ve long wondered: Who was he? What was his story?
When I think of that man, I think of my Grandpa Gilbert. Many auxiliary staff were local people who got their start on “the hill” as security guards for the Atomic Energy Commission. That was his story — a career begun as a security guard in 1946 and ended some three decades later as a staff member of the Lab and the University of California, which managed it. The position was a distinction that not many Hispanos held at the time. My mom says he felt dignified by his work there — the only means he had to raise five kids after World War II. But there was a trade-off, including discreet trips to the doctor where he was screened for cancer on a more-than-routine basis.
Many family members would follow in his footsteps — my Uncle Jerry among them. Los Alamos was a place abounding in conspiracy theories and Uncle Jerry found himself at the center of one of them. He believed that racism had created a culture of retaliation, so toxic that it led to his being framed for intentionally dosing his supervisor with plutonium-239. After my uncle’s death two years ago, the Santa Fe New Mexican published a column narrating the sordid events — his boss ultimately recanted the allegations and my uncle and others won a settlement — but he was haunted by a lasting specter. The multiple cancers that consumed his body decades later were products of the Lab, in his opinion, like sleeper fires set within him.
I only recently came to know the fragments of my Uncle Pat’s story. During his three years at the Lab in the late 1970s, he was flown on two occasions to California with a locked box chained to his wrist. His destination was TRW, the predecessor of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, and his cargo, he told me, was top-secret technology that could detect nuclear weapons testing from outer space.
There’s a kind of mental acrobatics required to compartmentalize these different realities — the opportunity and the harm, the secrets and the consent. I know this compartmentalization well, this desire to draw a line in the sand between the good and the bad. When I was 19, I spent a summer working as an undergraduate intern in the Lab’s explosives division, a building perched behind a maze of fences and guards. I didn’t have a security clearance at the time, nor could I foresee getting one, so I spent most days marooned at my desk in the front office, filing papers and sending emails. I couldn’t even take a bathroom break without a chaperone accompanying me.
Nothing of that work rings more clearly than a memory of two scientists stumbling out into the hallway, covered in blood. An experiment had gone awry — nothing radiation related — but it was so shrouded in mystery that parsing what actually happened is like trying to put a puzzle together that’s missing half the pieces. I watched in horror from the doorframe.
After that, I transferred to the Bradbury Science Museum, also in Los Alamos, where I walked by replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man daily to get to my desk. I spent that summer, among other things, writing exhibition text about the Manhattan Project’s early architects — J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman. I wrote not the history of mi gente, but of those agents of immense creation and destruction, those who’d exacted what Myrriah Gómez in her book, “Nuclear Nuevo México,” calls nuclear colonization. The irony.
It was only when I left the state that I had the distance to understand the debt our communities pay for the good jobs. I began to unpack what it means for New Mexico to be what the writer D.H. Lawrence once called the moon of America. This place was distant enough in America’s consciousness to be foreign, exotic even. But as that “tierra incognita,” the unknown and unknowable blankness stretched across mental maps of the Southwest, our world became America’s wasteland. We continue to sit at the periphery of centers of power, yet we have been forced into the epicenter of this nation’s nuclear weapons complex.
Now, as I write about the role of nuclear weapons across New Mexico, the nation and the globe, Toni Morrison’s words come to mind: “The subject of the dream is the dreamer.” Her ideas about literature were deeply influenced by psychoanalysis. Indeed, to her mind, the act of dreaming was not unlike the act of writing. Or, to put it another way, the subject of the writing is the writer. Here, that is me.
My family and community’s own tangled history with the Lab sits in my subconscious like an inchoate thought. Only when I hold it up to scrutiny does that thought form into the imperative, allowing me to fully fathom what the Manhattan Project birthed in our backyard. Perhaps this is what Gómez refers to as an “innate knowing,” our local “sixth sense.”
“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”
I know all of this when I drive along Highway 84/285, an artery that connects Pojoaque Pueblo to Española and the Pueblos of Santa Clara and Ohkay Owingeh, below a billboard sprawled against sienna-hued bluffs. A woman with a complexion like my own holds radiation detection equipment and smiles down at me.
“Radiation Control Technicians are vital to operations at LANL,” the billboard proclaims. “Start your career as an RCT at Northern NM College now.”
My worldview will always shape my writing on a topic that hits so close to home, but the focus of this series — The Atomic Hereafter — is to highlight all the communities most impacted by 80 years of nuclear presence, from the most recent attempts to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the long, drawn-out ways radiation can transmit from mother to child. Nuclear issues in this state are generational. I will take them one story at a time.
Cher , 9 June 23, Tucker Carlson wants to start a nuclear war with China. He is from a very rich rightwing family. He is no independent thinker. He preached overt racism, and hate propaganda, for Murdoch, for years. Murdochs ego, could not take the competiton, so Murdoch fired him. He continues his racist hate.
Carlson took the side of mass shooters that killed many school children and innocents, in the large uptick of racist mass shootings and murders, that has occured because of, and since Trump started more rampages.
Carlson defended anyone, being able to get military assault rifles. He has put so many children, black people, chinese people, brown people, women, gay people at risk for harm and murder, with his subtle and not so subtle bigotry and propaganda, that it it is beyond belief
Hiroshima, Japan – “It looked like a bright orange light, like the first sunrise of the year,” says Sadae Kasaoka, remembering the moment when the first nuclear bomb to ever be used was dropped by the United States on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Now 90, she was 12 years old that August day at the tail end of World War II, but she still remembers it vividly.
Sadae was home alone with her grandmother. When the blast hit, she was pushed against the wall by the massive force of the explosion and covered in broken glass. The two then fled into an air raid shelter for safety.
Sadae pauses, her voice trembling as she goes on to recall the events of August 6, 1945. “A neighbour told us the whole city was on fire,” she says.
For hours she did not know whether her parents had survived. When her brother brought her father’s body home, he was alive, but so severely burned that she could not recognise him.
“He was all black. His eyes were popping out. Finally, I recognised him by his voice. He said ‘Give me water’. And he asked me to go looking for my mother,” Sadae says, taking a breath. “Someone told me you shouldn’t give them water, so I did not give him any water, but that is something I still regret deeply.”
The exact number of deaths from the uranium bomb remains unclear to this day, with a large gap between the lowest and highest estimates. The City of Hiroshima reports that by the end of 1945 up to approximately 140,000 people – out of a population of 350,000 – had died either in the explosion itself or from the effects of acute radiation poisoning. Most were civilians.
Days later, on August 9, a larger plutonium bomb was then dropped on Nagasaki – some 400km (248 miles) away from Hiroshima. According to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), around another 74,000 people lost their lives there by December 1945. Many of those who survived suffered from long-term illnesses.
The first and last atomic bombs ever dropped on a civilian population, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks are often seen as a uniquely horrible moment in human history. But with countries building up weapons capabilities and threats of nuclear options in Russia’s war against Ukraine, many fear that humanity is not doing enough to avoid repeating itself. With the Group of Seven (G7) summit taking place in Hiroshima this week, some survivors see it as an opportunity to remind world leaders what the real costs are.
‘All my friends died’
Toshiko Tanaka grew up in Hiroshima. When the explosion hit, the then-six-year-old suffered burns as well as exposure to radiation, but miraculously survived.
Today the 84-year-old uses a stick to help herself walk, but otherwise seems to be in good health. However, the traumatic memories of that fateful day will forever be imprinted in her mind.
It was a school day, Toshiko remembers. On their way to class, she and a friend noticed a plane overhead. When someone yelled “enemy”, Toshiko looked up to the sky. Then she saw the light.
“I instinctively covered my face,” she says, recalling that she used her right arm to protect herself. That night she developed a high fever. “I don’t remember much. I lost consciousness.”
One of her most vivid memories from that time was the smell of burning corpses in the days after the explosion. The authorities had started cremating the bodies of those who died.
“I was traumatised,” she says. “All my friends from school died and for a very long time I couldn’t speak about what happened.”
When she was 70, Toshiko went on a boat trip organised by the Japanese non-profit Peaceboat, an initiative inviting survivors of the atomic bomb on a journey around the world telling their stories. That is when she realised she had to speak up and finally share her testimony, she says.
Today she wants everyone to know how dangerous nuclear weapons are to mankind and the unimaginable suffering they cause. “I want our leaders to see what happened in Hiroshima and imagine what would happen to your family, to your friends, if a bomb was dropped on them.”
Toshiko started travelling to the US and learned a little English to tell her story; she’s made 10 such trips in the past seven years.
She speaks as a “hibakusha” – a Japanese term for those affected by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the last count in 2021, an estimated 42,000 hibakushas were still living in Hiroshima, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health. The average age then was 84. Soon what happened in Hiroshima will pass beyond living memory.
……………………………………………………… Daniel Högsta, the interim executive director of ICAN, wants to see leaders of the G7 commit to a “credible, actionable plan” on nuclear disarmament, one that involves a treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. “Anything less than that would be insulting to the hibakusha,” he tells Al Jazeera. “It would also be a failure of leadership.”
“I want them to really pay attention to what happens when you use a nuclear weapon,” she says. “There is a war in Ukraine now and this summit should not be a place where you make military preparations.” She wants this meeting to be about finding a way back to peace.
By Haig Hovaness, World BEYOND War, May 7, 2023https://worldbeyondwar.org/a-tribute-to-daniel-ellsberg/ Presented during the May 4, 2023, Vietnam to Ukraine: Lessons for the US Peace Movement Remembering Kent State and Jackson State! Webinar hosted by the Green Party Peace Action Committee; Peoples Network for Planet, Justice & Peace; and Green Party of Ohio.
Presented during the May 4, 2023, Vietnam to Ukraine: Lessons for the US Peace Movement Remembering Kent State and Jackson State! Webinar hosted by the Green Party Peace Action Committee; Peoples Network for Planet, Justice & Peace; and Green Party of Ohio
Today I will pay tribute to Daniel Ellsberg, a man who has been called one of the most significant whistleblowers in American history. He sacrificed his career and risked his freedom to bring to light the truth about the Vietnam War and spent subsequent years working for peace. In March Dan posted online a letter announcing that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is likely to die this year. This is a fitting time to appreciate his life’s work.
………………………………………………. In 1969, Ellsberg made the decision to leak the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by the Department of Defense. The study showed that the government had lied to the American people about the progress of the war, and it revealed that the government had been involved in secret operations in Laos and Cambodia.
After fruitless attempts to interest members of Congress in the report, he provided the documents to the New York Times, which published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the papers were significant and damaging to the US government, as they revealed that successive administrations had systematically lied to the American people about the progress and objectives of the war.
The Pentagon Papers showed that the US government had secretly escalated its military involvement in Vietnam without a clear strategy for victory. The papers also revealed that government officials had deliberately misled the public about the nature of the conflict, the extent of US military involvement, and the prospects for success.
The publication of the Pentagon Papers was a turning point in American history. It revealed the government’s lies about the war and shook the American people’s faith in their leaders. It also led to a Supreme Court ruling that upheld the right of the press to publish classified information.
Ellsberg’s actions had serious consequences. He was charged with theft and espionage, and he faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison. But in a stunning turn of events, the charges against him were dismissed when it was revealed that the government had engaged in illegal wiretapping and other forms of surveillance against him. The dropping of charges against Ellsberg was a significant victory for whistleblowers and the freedom of the press, and it underscored the importance of government transparency and accountability……………………
The release of the Pentagon Papers overshadowed Ellsberg’s parallel efforts to expose the dangerous consequences of America’s nuclear weapons planning. In the 1970s, his attempts to release classified materials on the danger of nuclear war were frustrated by the accidental loss of a trove of classified documents related to the nuclear threat. Eventually he was able to reassemble this information and publish it in 2017 in the book, “The Doomsday Machine.”
“The Doomsday Machine,” is a detailed exposé of the US government’s nuclear war policy during the Cold War. Ellsberg reveals that the US had a policy of using nuclear weapons preemptively, including against non-nuclear countries, and that this policy remained in effect even after the end of the Cold War. He also revealed that the U.S. had regularly threatened adversaries with use of nuclear weapons. Ellsberg exposed a dangerous culture of secrecy and lack of accountability surrounding US nuclear policy, He revealed that the US had developed plans for a “first strike” nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, even in the absence of a Soviet attack, which he argues would have led to the deaths of millions of people. Ellsberg further revealed that the US government had delegated authority to use nuclear weapons far more widely than was known to the public, greatly increasing the danger of accidental nuclear war. He argued that the poorly managed nuclear arsenal of the United States constituted a “doomsday machine” that represented an existential threat to humanity. The book provides a stark warning about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the need for greater transparency and accountability in nuclear policy to prevent a catastrophic global disaster……………………
Today, the U.S. government continues to prosecute whistleblowers aggressively. Many have been jailed and some, like Edward Snowden, have fled to avoid rigged trials. Julian Assange continues to languish in prison awaiting extradition and possible lifetime imprisonment. But, in the words of Assange, courage is contagious, and leaks will continue as government misdeeds are exposed by principled people. The voluminous information Ellsberg photocopied over many hours can be copied today in minutes and distributed worldwide immediately over the Internet. We have already seen such leaks in the form of classified U.S. information on the war in Ukraine contradicting optimistic U.S. public claims. The exemplary actions of Dan Ellsberg will inspire countless future acts of courage in the cause of peace……………………
J Robert Oppenheimer was a physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, which developed the world’s first nuclear bomb. He witnessed the destructive power of the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite his role in the creation of the most destructive force the world has ever seen, he became an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament. Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic, Oppenheimer, promises to explore the scientist’s complicated life and legacy.
In the early morning of July 16, 1945, J Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist, and director of the Manhattan Project, watched as the world’s first nuclear bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert. The blast was so powerful that it lit up the sky like a second sun, and Oppenheimer later recalled that he thought of a verse from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita just then: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one.” It was one other verse from the scripture that he spoke of and has come to be deeply associated with him. Lord Krishna, an incarnation of Vishnu, is in his universal form, and proclaims to Arjun: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The technology that Oppenheimer helped develop served as the basis of Little Boy and Fat Man, two atomic bombs that laid waste to the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The bombings effectively ended World War II, as Imperial Japan surrendered. [Ed. note – Japan was going to surrender already, anyway]
Oppenheimer had been instrumental in the development of nuclear weapons, but witnessing the destructive power of the bomb he helped invent made him question the morality of what he had done. In the years that followed, he became an outspoken advocate for nuclear disarmament, a stunning transformation that actually came very quickly after the destruction in Japan.
Who was J Robert Oppenheimer?
……………………….Oppenheimer was appointed as the director of the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, where the bomb was designed and built. He oversaw a team of thousands of scientists, engineers, and support staff, and he worked tirelessly to ensure that the bomb was ready for use as soon as possible.
Oppenheimer, the unlikely apostle of peace
Only 11 days after the bombings in Japan, Oppenheimer urged then-US president Harry S. Truman to ban nuclear weapons. But the president was by now worried about Soviet Union’s aggression [although Russia was USA’s ally in WW2 losing 20 million soldiers] and paid him no heed. Oppenheimer also told Truman that he (Oppenheimer) had blood on his hands.
……………………Oppenheimer had become disillusioned with the technology he had helped create. He began to publicly speak out against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and he became an advocate for arms control and disarmament.
He strongly opposed the development and test of the H-bomb, a weapon with far greater destructive power than the original atomic bomb, in 1952. But his opposition to the bomb did not go down well with the government. It was the time of McCarthyism, after all — a time of intense anti-communist suspicion and persecution of dissenting voices. He was removed from the Atomic Energy Commission.
In 1954, Oppenheimer’s political views came under scrutiny when he was accused of being a security risk by the US government. During the height of the Cold War, Oppenheimer’s past associations with left-wing political groups and his vocal opposition to nuclear testing made him a target of suspicion for many in the government.
Despite his contributions to the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was ultimately stripped of his security clearance and barred from further government work. In the years that followed, Oppenheimer continued to speak out against nuclear weapons, and became a prominent voice in the anti-nuclear movement.
The threat of nuclear weapons in the present time
The devastating impact of nuclear weapons is something that cannot be understated, with the potential to annihilate entire cities and leave a lasting impact on the environment for years to come. A full-fledged nuclear war would obliterate all life from earth Moreover, the rise of non-state actors and terrorist groups has added a new dimension to the threat of nuclear weapons………………
Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer’s story will be explored on the big screen with Christopher Nolan’s upcoming biopic of the scientist, titled simply Oppenheimer. The film, which is set to star Cillian Murphy in the role, promises to be a thought-provoking and insightful exploration of Oppenheimer’s life and legacy. The film also features Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Rami Malek, Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Michael Angarano, Josh Hartnett, and Kenneth Branagh in the cast. https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/hollywood/news-explained-i-the-mind-of-oppenheimer-inventor-of-nuclear-bomb-who-turned-pacifist-587081
nuclear-news 