nuclear-news

On the road to nuclear war

February 5, 2026, https://beyondnuclear.org/on-the-road-to-nuclear-war/

It’s 85 seconds to midnight. The collapse of the New START Treaty hasn’t helped but there is still time to turn things around, writes Lawrence S.Wittner

On January 27, 2026, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest setting, since the appearance of the clock in 1946, to nuclear annihilation.

This grim appraisal has impressive evidence to support it.

The New Start Treaty, the last of the major nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia, expired on February 5, without any serious attempt to replace it.  New Start’s demise enables both nations, which possess about 86 percent of the world’s 12,321 nuclear weapons, to move beyond the strict limits set by the treaty on the number of their strategic nuclear weapons (the most powerful, most devastating kind), thus enhancing the ability of their governments to reduce the world to a charred wasteland.

Actually, a nuclear arms race has been gathering steam for years, as nearly all the governments of the nine nuclear powers (which, in addition to Russia and the United States, include China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) scramble to upgrade existing weapons systems and add newer versions.  China’s nuclear arsenal is the fastest-growing among them.  “The era of reductions in the number of nuclear weapons in the world . . . is coming to an end,” observed Hans Kristensen, a highly regarded expert on nuclear armament and disarmament.  “Instead, we see a clear trend of growing nuclear arsenals, sharpened nuclear rhetoric, and the abandonment of arms control agreements.”

The U.S. government is currently immersed in a $1.7 trillion nuclear “modernization” program that President Donald Trump has championed and repeatedly lauded.  As early as February 2018, he boasted that his administration was “creating a brand-new nuclear force.  We’re gonna be so far ahead of everybody else in nuclear like you’ve never seen before.”  In late October 2025, to facilitate the U.S. nuclear buildup, Trump ordered the Pentagon to prepare to resume U.S. nuclear weapons testing, which had ceased 33 years before.  In line with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of 1996, signed by 187 nations (including the United States), no nuclear power (other than the rogue nation of North Korea) has conducted explosive nuclear testing in over 25 years.

Another sign of the escalating nuclear danger is the revival of implicit and explicit threats to initiate nuclear war.  Such threats, which declined with the end of the Cold War, have resurfaced in recent years.  When angered by the policies of other nations, Donald Trump, Kim Jong Un, and Vladimir Putin have repeatedly and publicly threatened them with nuclear destruction.  According to the U.S. government’s Voice of America, the Russian government, in the context of its invasion of Ukraine, issued 135 nuclear threats between February 2022 and December 17, 2024.  Although some national security experts have discounted most Russian threats as manipulative rather than serious, in November 2022 Chinese leader Xi Jinping thought the matter serious enough to publicly chide his professed ally, Putin, for threatening to resort to nuclear arms in Ukraine.

Underlying this drift toward nuclear war are the growing conflicts among nations―conflicts that have significantly weakened international cooperation and the United Nations.  As the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put it, rather than heed past warnings of catastrophe, “Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic.”  Consequently, “hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war.”

But this is not necessarily the end of the story―or of the world.

After all, much the same situation existed in the second half of the twentieth century, when conflicts among the great powers fueled a dangerous nuclear arms race that, at numerous junctures, threatened to spiral into full-scale nuclear war.  And, in response, a massive grassroots campaign emerged to save the world from nuclear annihilation.  Although that campaign did not succeed in banning the bomb, it did manage to curb the nuclear arms race, reduce the number of nuclear weapons by more than 80 percent, and prevent a much-feared nuclear catastrophe.

Furthermore, in the early twenty-first century, there have been new and important developments.  The worldwide remnants of the nuclear disarmament movement regrouped as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and, joined by farsighted officials in smaller, non-nuclear nations, drew upon the United Nations to sponsor a series of antinuclear conferences. In 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1 (with 1 abstention), delegates at one of these UN conferences adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).  Although all nine nuclear powers strongly opposed the TPNW―which banned the use, threatened use, development, manufacture, acquisition, possession, stockpiling, stationing, and installation of nuclear weapons―the treaty secured sufficient national backing to enter into force in January 2021.  Thus far, it has been signed by 99 countries―a majority of the world’s nations.

In addition to the efficacy of public pressure for nuclear disarmament and the existence of a treaty banning nuclear weapons, at least one other factor points the way toward a non-nuclear future:  the self-defeating nature—indeed, the insanity―of nuclear war.  With even a single nuclear bomb capable of killing millions of people and leaving the desperate survivors crawling painfully through a burnt-out, radioactive hell, even a nuclear “victory” is a defeat.  In the aftermath of a nuclear war, as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is believed to have said, “the survivors would envy the dead.”  It’s a lesson that most people around the world have learned, although not perhaps the lunatics.

Lunatics, of course, exist, and some of them, unfortunately, govern modern nations and ignore international law.

Even so, although we are on the road to nuclear war, there is still time to take a deep breath, think about where we are going, and turn around.

Lawrence S. Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/ ) is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).

February 12, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Eight Decades Later, It Remains One World or None

“The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.” And given the effect of radiation, those who made “remarkable escapes,” the “lucky” ones, would die all the same. Imagining a prospective strike on New York City, he wrote of the survivors who “died in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Saint Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages… of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh.” Ultimately, he concluded, “If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together… there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.”

By Eric Ross,  February 8, 2026, https://tomdispatch.com/eight-decades-later-it-remains-one-world-or-none/

On February 5th, with the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, the only bilateral arms control treaty left between the United States and Russia, we are guaranteed to find ourselves ever closer to the edge of a perilous precipice. The renewed arms race that seems likely to take place could plunge the world, once and for all, into the nuclear abyss. This crisis is neither sudden nor surprising, but the predictable culmination of a truth that has haunted us for nearly 80 years: humanity has long been living on borrowed time.

In such a context, you might think that our collective survival instinct has proven remarkably poor, which is, at least to a certain extent, understandable. After all, if we had allowed ourselves to feel the full weight of the nuclear threat we’ve faced all these years, we might indeed have collapsed under it. Instead, we continue to drift forward with a sense of muted dread, unwilling (or simply unable) to respond to the nuclear nightmare. In a world already armed with thousands of omnicidal weapons, such fatalism — part suicidal nihilism and part homicidal complacency — becomes a form of violence in its own right.

Given such indifference, we risk not only our own lives but also the lives of all those who would come after us. As Jonathan Schell observed decades ago, both genocide and nuclear war are distinct from other forms of mass atrocity in that they serve as “crimes against the future.” And as Robert Jay Lifton once warned, what makes nuclear war so singularly horrifying is that it would constitute “genocide in its terminal form,” a destruction so absolute as to render the earth unlivable and irrevocably reverse the very process of creation.

Yet for many, the absence of such a nuclear holocaust, 80 years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is taken as proof that such a catastrophe is, in fact, unthinkable and will never happen. These days, to invoke the specter of annihilation is to be dismissed as alarmist, while to argue for the abolition of such weaponry is considered naïve. As it happens, though, the opposite is true. It’s the height of naïveté to believe that a global system built on the supposed security of nuclear weapons can endure indefinitely.

That much should be obvious by now. In truth, we’ve clung to the faith that rational heads will prevail for far too long. Such thinking has sustained a minimalist global nonproliferation regime aimed at preventing the further spread of nuclear weapons to so-called terrorist states like Iraq, Libya, and North Korea (which now indeed has a nuclear arsenal). Yet, today, it should be all too clear that the states with nuclear weapons are, and have long been, the true rogue states.

A nuclear-armed Israel has, after all, been committing genocide in Gaza and has bombed many of its neighbors. Russia continues to devastate Ukraine, which relinquished its nuclear arsenal in 1994, and its leader, Vladimir Putin, has threatened to use nuclear weapons there. And a Washington led by a brazen authoritarian deranged by power, who has declared that he doesn’t “need international law,” has stripped away the fragile façade of a rules-based global order.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the leaders of the seven other nuclear-armed states possess the unilateral capacity to destroy the world, a power no country should be allowed to wield. Yet even now, there is still time to avert catastrophe. But to chart a reasonable path forward, it’s necessary to look back eight decades and ask why the world failed to ban the bomb at a moment when the dangerous future we now inhabit was already clearly foreseeable.

Every City is Hiroshima

With Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldering ruins, people everywhere confronted a rupture so profound that it seemed to inaugurate a new historical era, one that might well be the last. As news of the atomic bombings spread, a grim consensus took shape that technological “progress” had outpaced political and moral restraint. Journalist Norman Cousins captured the zeitgeist when he wrote that “modern man is obsolete, a self-made anachronism becoming more incongruous by the minute.” Human beings had clearly fashioned themselves into vengeful gods and the specter of Armageddon was no longer a matter of theology but a creation of modern civilization.

In the United States, of course, a majority of Americans greeted the initial reports of the atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities in a celebratory fashion, convinced that such unprecedented weapons would bring a swift, victorious end to a brutal war. For many, that relief was inseparable from a lingering desire for retribution. In announcing the first atomic attack, President Harry Truman himself declared that the Japanese “have been repaid many fold” for their strike on Pearl Harbor, which inaugurated the official American entry into World War II. Yet triumph quickly gave way to a more somber reckoning.

As the scale of devastation came into fuller view, the psychological fallout radiated far beyond Japan. The New York Herald Tribune captured a growing unease when it editorialized that “one forgets the effect on Japan or on the course of the war as one senses the foundations of one’s own universe trembling a little… it is as if we had put our hands upon the levers of a power too strange, too terrible, too unpredictable in all its possible consequences for any rejoicing over the immediate consequences of its employment.”

Some critics of the bombings would soon begin to frame their concerns in explicitly moral terms, posing the question: Who had we become? Historian Lewis Mumford, for example, argued that the attacks represented the culmination of a society unmoored from any ethical foundations and nothing short of “the visible insanity of a civilization that has ceased to worship life and obey the laws of life.” Religious leaders voiced similar concern. The Christian Century magazine typically condemned the bombings as “a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very basis of moral existence.”

As the apocalyptic imagination took hold, others turned to a more self-interested but no less urgent question: what will happen to us? Newspapers across the country began running stories on what a Hiroshima-sized bomb would do to their downtowns. Yet Philip Morrison, one of the few scientists to witness both the initial Trinity Test of the atomic bomb and Hiroshima after the bombing, warned that even such terrifying projections underestimated the danger.

Deaths in the hundreds of thousands were, he insisted, far too optimistic. “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or twos. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands.” And given the effect of radiation, those who made “remarkable escapes,” the “lucky” ones, would die all the same. Imagining a prospective strike on New York City, he wrote of the survivors who “died in the hospitals of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and Saint Louis in the three weeks following the bombing. They died of unstoppable internal hemorrhages… of slow oozing of the blood into the flesh.” Ultimately, he concluded, “If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together… there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.

One World or None

Morrison wrote that account as part of a broader effort, led by former Manhattan Project scientists who had helped create the bomb, to alert the public to the newfound danger they themselves had helped unleash. That campaign culminated in the January 1946 book One World or None (and a short film). The scientists had largely come to believe that, if the public had their consciousness raised about the implications of the bomb, a task for which they felt uniquely responsible and equipped, then public opinion might shift in ways that could make policies capable of averting catastrophe politically possible.

Scientists like Niels Bohr began calling on their colleagues to face “the great task lying ahead,” while urging them to be “prepared to assist in any way… in bringing about an outcome of the present crisis of humanity worthy of the ideals for which science through the ages has stood.” Accepting such newfound social responsibility felt unavoidable, even if so many of those scientists wished to simply return to their prewar pursuits in the insulated university laboratories they once inhabited.

As physicist Joseph Rotblat observed, among the many forms of collateral damage inflicted by the bomb was the destruction of “the ivory towers in which scientists had been sheltering.” In the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that rupture propelled them into public life on an unprecedented scale. The once-firm boundary between science and politics began to blur as formerly quiet and aloof researchers spoke to the press, delivered public lectures, published widely circulated articles, and lobbied members of Congress in an effort to secure some control over atomic energy.

Among them was J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory where the bomb was created, who warned that, “if atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world… then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima,” a statement that left some officials perplexed. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, who had known Oppenheimer as both the director of Los Alamos and someone who had directly sanctioned the bombings, recalled that “he seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent,” adding, “the guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

Yet the scientists pressed ahead in their frantic effort to avert future catastrophe by preventing a nuclear arms race. They insisted that there was no doubt the Soviet Union and other powers would acquire the weapon, that any hope of a prolonged atomic monopoly was delusional, and that espionage was incidental to such a reality, since the fundamental scientific principles needed to build an atomic bomb had been established by 1940. And with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the secret that a functioning bomb was possible was obviously out.

They argued that there would be no effective defense against a devastating atomic attack and that the U.S., as a highly urbanized society, was uniquely vulnerable to such “city killer” weapons. With vast, exposed coastlines, they warned that such a bomb, not yet capable of being delivered by a missile, could simply be smuggled into one of the nation’s ports and lie dormant there for years. For the scientists, the implications were unmistakable. The age of national sovereignty had ended. The world had become too dangerous for national chauvinism, which, if humanity were to survive, had to give way to a new architecture of international cooperation.

Teaching Us to Love the Bomb

Such activism had its intended effects. Many Americans became more fearful and wanted arms control. By late 1945, a majority of the public consistently supported some form of international control over such weaponry and the abolition of the manufacturing of them. And for a brief moment, such a possibility seemed within reach. The first resolution passed by the new United Nations in January 1946 called for exactly that. The publication of John Hersey’s Hiroshima first as a full issue of the New Yorker and then as a book, with its intense portrayal of life and death in that Japanese city, further shifted public sentiment toward abolition.

Yet as such hopes crystallized at the United Nations, the two global superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were already preparing for a future nuclear war. Washington continued to expand its stockpile of atomic weaponry, while Moscow accelerated its work creating such weaponry, detonating its initial atomic test four years after the world first met that terrifying new weapon. That Soviet test, followed by the Korean War, helped extinguish the early promise of an international response to such weaponry, a collapse aided by deliberate efforts in Washington to ensure that the United States grew its atomic arsenal.

In that effort, former Secretary of War Henry Stimson was coaxed out of retirement by President Truman’s advisers who urged him to write one final, “definitive” account defending the bombings to neutralize growing opposition. As Harvard president and government-aligned scientist James Conant explained to Stimson, officials in Washington feared that they were losing the ideological battle. They were particularly concerned that mounting anti-nuclear sentiment would prove persuasive “among the type of person that goes into teaching,” shaping a generation less inclined to regard their decision as morally legitimate.

Stimson’s article, published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947, helped cement the official narrative: that the bomb was a last resort rooted in military necessity that saved half a million American lives and required neither regret nor moral examination. In that way, the opportunity to ban the bomb before the arms race took off was squandered not because the public failed to recognize the threat, but because the government refused to heed the will of its people. Instead, it sought to secure power through nuclear weapons, driven by a paranoid fear of Moscow that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. What followed were decades of preemptive escalation, the continued spread of such weaponry globally, and, at its height, a global arsenal of more than 60,000 nuclear warheads by 1985.

Forty years later, in a world where nine countries — the U.S., Russia, China, France, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — already have nuclear weapons (more than 12,000 of them), there can be little doubt that, as things are now going, there will be both more countries and more weapons to come.

Such a global arms race must, however, be ended before it ends the human race. The question is no longer what is politically possible, but what is virtually guaranteed if we refuse to pursue the “impossible.” Nuclear weapons are human creations and what is made by us can be dismantled by us. Whether that happens in time is, of course, the question that now should confront everyone, everywhere, and one that history, if there is anyone around to write or to read it, will not excuse us for failing to answer.

February 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The risk of nuclear war is rising again. We need a new movement for global peace.

This enormous nuclear construction program is euphemistically termed “modernization” in Washington. It is more properly understood as a vast program for enhancing the capacity to use nuclear weapons.

With the end of the New Start treaty, we face a potentially catastrophic arms race. It can still be prevented

David Cortright, 9 Feb 26, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/08/nuclear-war-risk-rising-global-peace

The risk of nuclear war is greater now than in decades – and rising. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently set its famous Doomsday Clock closer to midnight, indicating a level of risk equivalent to the 1980s, when US and Soviet nuclear stockpiles were increasing rapidly. In those years, massive waves of disarmament protest arose in Europe and the United States. Political leaders responded, the cold war ended and many people stopped worrying about the bomb.

Today, the bomb is back. Political tensions are rising, and nuclear weapons have spread to other countries, including Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal. The US-Russia arms competition may accelerate soon with the expiration on 5 February of the last remaining arms control agreement, the New Start treaty. To prevent the growing nuclear threat, we need a new global peace movement.

Donald Trump had a chance to prevent nuclear escalation in the months preceding the expiration of New Start. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, offered to voluntarily maintain the limits established by the treaty and invited the US to follow suit, but the White House refused. The administration has proposed instead to negotiate an entirely new strategic arms treaty, a process that could take years.

Political leaders and security experts talk about nuclear weapons as if they are mere pieces on a chessboard, to be brandished and maneuvered for strategic advantage. We are told that nuclear weapons are necessary for peace, but there can be no genuine peace if security rests on the threat of using instruments of indiscriminate mass annihilation. One large bomb detonated over a modern city could kill millions of people from the catastrophic blast and the spread of genetically damaging radioactive fallout. Research estimates that a nuclear war between the US and Russia could kill up to 5 billion people.

Nuclear deterrence does not create peace. It has not prevented major wars, by Russia in Ukraine, or by the US in Iraq and Vietnam. The number of armed conflicts in the world today is at an all-time high. The supposed deterrent effect of nuclear weapons lacks credibility. Deterrence is achievable by non-nuclear means, the scholar Mary Kaldor reminds us. Wars can be avoided by strengthening mechanisms of global cooperation and applying proven methods of conflict prevention and peacemaking diplomacy.

Current leaders in Washington ignore these realities and are pushing ahead with a massive weapons upgrade, at a cost of trillions of dollars. The US is creating an entirely new fleet of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, new ballistic missile-firing submarines, updated strategic aircraft and air-launched cruise missiles, a new system of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles, and enormous new facilities to produce plutonium components for an estimated 80 new nuclear warheads per year.

This enormous nuclear construction program is euphemistically termed “modernization” in Washington. It is more properly understood as a vast program for enhancing the capacity to use nuclear weapons. “A nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought,” the then US president, Ronald Reagan, and Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, memorably declared in the 1980s. Political leaders often repeat the phrase, but their actions betray their words.

Nuclear arms control agreements traditionally provided guardrails against unconstrained arms racing, but those protections have been discarded in recent decades and are gone completely now with the expiration of the New Start treaty. In the absence of agreed weapons restrictions, US and Russian officials could deploy hundreds of warheads in the coming months.

An accelerated arms race can still be prevented if the US would agree to maintain current weapons limits as it pursues potential negotiations. Moscow expressed regret that Washington did not accept its offer to maintain weapons restrictions, but it did not withdraw the proposal. The deal could still be on the table.

All that’s needed is for the White House to state that the US will not exceed current strategic weapons limits as long as the Kremlin agrees to exercise similar restraint. This small but important mutual step could reduce the near-term threat of nuclear escalation. It could open political space for more fundamental change.

An agreement to refrain from weapons increases would create a positive atmosphere for negotiating a new arms reduction treaty. Ideally, it could also lead to a statement of support for the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons, as specified in the UN treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons.

To build pressure for such steps, renewed peace activism is needed. Change will require political pressure from the bottom up. In the history of the arms race, steps for weapons limitation and disarmament usually have been the result of citizen pressure and grassroots political action. We need more of the same now.

February 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Last arms control treaty expires

 February 5, 2026 by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/02/05/last-arms-control-treaty-expires/

A dangerous nuclear escalation could follow, spelling doom, warns IPPNW and other groups

Nuclear weapons abolition groups around the world have expressed their alarm at the expiration of the New START Treaty between the US and Russia this week. It marks the first time since 1971 that there are no legally binding constraints on the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals following the expiration of New START.

A statement released by the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize winning group, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War reads:

The U.S. and Russia possess roughly 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, giving their decisions catastrophic global consequences. A full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would kill an estimated 5 billion people worldwide. No leader has the right to place humanity in such danger.

IPPNW and our global affiliate network have been pushing back in public and private measures against this reckless and short-sighted development.

More than 50 prominent individuals and organizations across the United States, including IPPNW and Physicians for Social Responsibility (IPPNW’s US affiliate), came together to express disappointment “that, since taking office for a second time, President Trump has failed to engage Russia (or China) in what he has called ‘denuclearization’ talks.” The letter continues:

Without new nuclear restraints, Russia and the United States could increase the size of their deployed arsenals (limited by New START to no more than 1,550 warheads) by uploading additional warheads on their existing long-range missiles. This would mark the first increase in the sizes of their deployed nuclear arsenals in more than 35 years. According to independent estimates, Moscow and Washington could double the number of strategic deployed warheads after New START.

Many members of the nuclear-weapons establishment, some of whom would stand to benefit financially or who are funded by those who would, are lobbying for such a buildup.

“Increases in Russian and U.S. strategic forces would further destabilize the mutual balance of nuclear terror, push China to accelerate its ongoing nuclear buildup, and open the door to an unconstrained, three-way arms race no one can win. Contrary to hype, deploying additional U.S. nuclear weapons would not change President Xi Jinping’s or Vladimir Putin’s fundamental deterrence calculus in a future war.

The letter was sent to House and Senate offices on Monday.

This dangerous development born of a lack of dialogue and cooperation among nuclear-armed states casts an alarming shadow over the future of arms control, namely in relation to the upcoming Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference. In the lead-up to and during the Review Conference, IPPNW will continue to raise the alarm and call for immediate action by the P-5, centering the humanitarian impacts of these indiscriminate weapons.

February 10, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump’s $1.5 Trillion “Dream Military”

Or What National Nightmares Are Made Of

By William J. Astore. Tomgram, February 5, 2026

What constitutes national security and how is it best achieved? Does massive military spending really make a country more secure, and what perils to democracy and liberty are posed by vast military establishments? Questions like those are rarely addressed in honest ways these days in America. Instead, the Trump administration favors preparations for war and more war, fueled by potentially enormous increases in military spending that are dishonestly framed as “recapitalizations” of America’s security and safety.

Such framing makes Pete Hegseth, America’s self-styled “secretary of war,” seem almost refreshing in his embrace of a warrior ethos. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham is another “warrior” who cheers for conflict, whether with Venezuela, Iran, or even — yes! — Russia. Such macho men revel in what they believe is this country’s divine mission to dominate the world. Tragically, at the moment, unapologetic warmongers like Hegseth and Graham are winning the political and cultural battle here in America.

Of course, U.S. warmongering is anything but new, as is a belief in global dominance through high military spending. Way back in 1983, as a college student, I worked on a project that critiqued President Ronald Reagan’s “defense” buildup and his embrace of pie-in-the-sky concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as “Star Wars.” Never did I imagine that, more than 40 years later, another Republican president would again come to embrace SDI (freshly rebranded as “Golden Dome”) and ever-more massive military spending, especially since the Soviet Union, America’s superpower rival in Reagan’s time, ceased to exist 35 years ago. Amazingly, Trump even wants to bring back naval battleships, as Reagan briefly did (though he didn’t have the temerity to call for a new class of ships to be named after himself). It’ll be a “golden fleet,” says Trump. What gives?………………………………………………

In America, nothing — and I mean nothing! — seems capable of reversing massive military spending and incessant warfare. President Ronald Reagan, readers of a certain (advanced) age may recall, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because scandals just didn’t seem to stick to him (at least until the Iran-Contra affair proved tough to shed). Yet history’s best candidate for Teflon “no-stick” status was never Reagan or any other president. It was and remains the U.S. warfare state, headquartered on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. And give the sclerotic bureaucracy of that warfare state full credit. Even as the Pentagon has moved from failure to failure in warfighting, its war budgets have continued to soar and then soar some more………………………………….

The Shameless Embrace of Forever War and Its Spoils

………………………………………….In case you’ve forgotten them (or never read them), here are Ike’s words from that televised address in January 1961, when he put the phrase “the military-industrial complex” in our language:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”…………………………..

Those were the prescient words of the most senior military man of his era, a true citizen-soldier and president, and more than six decades later, we should and must act on them if we have any hope left of preserving “our liberties and democratic processes.”

………………………………..More, More, More!

Not only is such colossal military spending bad for this country, but it’s also bad for the military itself, which, after all, didn’t ask for Trump’s proposed $500 billion raise. America’s prodigal son was relatively content with a trillion dollars in yearly spending. In fact, the president’s suggested increase in the Pentagon budget isn’t just reckless; it may well wreck not just what’s left of our democracy, but the military, too………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Americans, we must act to cut the war budget, shrink the empire, embrace diplomacy, and work for peace. Sadly, however, the blob has seemingly become our master, a well-nigh unstoppable force. Aren’t you tired yet of being its slave?

On the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, which was predicated on resistance to empire and military rule, it should be considered deeply tragic that this country has met the enemy — and he is indeed us. Here the words of Ike provide another teachable moment. Only Americans can truly hurt America, he once said. To which I’d add this corollary: Only Americans can truly save America.

As we celebrate our nation’s birthday this July 4th, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could save this deeply disturbed country by putting war and empire firmly in the rearview mirror? A tall task for sure, but so, too, was declaring independence from the mighty British Empire in 1776. https://tomdispatch.com/trumps-1-5-trillion-dream-military/

February 7, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

It is 85 seconds to midnight

By Sarah Starkey | January 27, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/01/press-release-it-is-85-seconds-to-midnight/#post-heading

“Failure of Leadership:” Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight as Global Existential Threats Worsen. Experts Cite New START Expiration, Record-Breaking Climate Trends, AI, Various Biosecurity Concerns Among Other Factors.

WASHINGTON, DC – January 27, 2026 – The Doomsday Clock was set at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (SASB), which sets the Clock, called for urgent action to limit nuclear arsenals, create international guidelines on the use of AI, and form multilateral agreements to address global biological threats.

Alexandra Bell, president and CEO, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “The Doomsday Clock’s message cannot be clearer. Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time. Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”

The Doomsday Clock time is annually determined by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (SASB) in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes eight Nobel Laureates. Major factors in 2026 included growing nuclear weapons threats, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), multiple biological security concerns, and the continuing climate crisis. The Clock’s time changed most recently in January 2025, when the Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight.

Daniel Holz, PhD, professor at the University of Chicago in the departments of Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, and SASB chair, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “The dangerous trends in nuclear risk, climate change, disruptive technologies like AI, and biosecurity are accompanied by another frightening development: the rise of nationalistic autocracies in countries around the world. Our greatest challenges require international trust and cooperation, and a world splintering into ‘us versus them’ will leave all of humanity more vulnerable.”

Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Rappler, professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, said: “Without facts, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no trust. And without these, the radical collaboration this moment demands is impossible. We are living through an information Armageddon—the crisis beneath all crises—driven by extractive and predatory technology that spreads lies faster than facts and profits from our division. We cannot solve problems we cannot agree exist. We cannot cooperate across borders when we cannot even share the same facts. Nuclear threats, climate collapse, AI risks: none can be addressed without first rebuilding our shared reality. The clock is ticking.”

The 2026 Doomsday Clock statement says:

A year ago, we warned that the world was perilously close to global disaster and that any delay in reversing course increased the probability of catastrophe. Rather than heed this warning, Russia, China, the United States, and other major countries have instead become increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic. Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers. Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe …

Even as the hands of the Doomsday Clock move closer to midnight, there are many actions that could pull humanity back from the brink:

• 
  The United States and Russia can resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals. All nuclear-armed states can avoid destabilizing investments in missile defense and observe the existing moratorium on explosive nuclear testing.
• Through both multilateral agreements and national regulations, the international community can take all feasible steps to prevent the creation of mirror life and cooperate on meaningful measures to reduce the prospect that AI be used to create biological threats.
• The United States Congress can repudiate President Trump’s war on renewable energy, instead providing incentives and investments that will enable rapid reduction in fossil fuel use.
• The United States, Russia, and China can engage in bilateral and multilateral dialogue on meaningful guidelines regarding the incorporation of artificial intelligence in their militaries, particularly in nuclear command and control systems.

Nuclear Weapons: Sliding further down a slippery nuclear slope

Jon B. Wolfsthal, director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) and SASB member, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “In 2025, it was almost impossible to identify a nuclear issue that got better. More states are relying more intently on nuclear weapons, multiple states are openly talking about using nuclear weapons for not only deterrence but for coercion. Hundreds of billions are being spent to modernize and expand nuclear arsenals all over the world, and more and more non-nuclear states are considering whether they should acquire their own nuclear weapons or are hedging their nuclear bets. Instead of stoking the fires of the nuclear arms competition, nuclear states are reducing their own security and putting the entire planet at risk. Leaders of all states must relearn the lessons of the Cold War – no one wins a nuclear arms race, and the only way to reduce nuclear dangers is through binding agreement to limit the size and shape of their nuclear arsenals. Nuclear states and their partners need to invest now in proven crisis communication and risk reduction tools, recommit to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, refrain from nuclear threats, and pursue a more predictable and stable global security system.”

Disruptive Technologies: Competition crowds out cooperation 

Steve Fetter, PhD, professor of public policy and former dean, University of Maryland, fellow, American Physical Society (APS), member, National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC), and SASB member, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “As uses of AI expand and concerns grow about potential risks, Trump revoked Biden’s AI safety initiative and banned states from crafting their own AI regulation, reflecting a ‘damn the torpedoes’ approach to AI development. The emphasis on technological competition is making it increasingly difficult to foster the cooperation that will be needed to identify and mitigate risks, and attacks against universities and cuts in federal funding are eroding our ability to come up with effective solutions.”

Climate Change: A troubling outlook

Inez Fung, ScD, professor emerita of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science and the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, and SASB member, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “Reducing the threat of climate catastrophe requires actions both to address the cause and to deal with the damage of climate change. First and foremost come reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy. Many technologies for renewable energy are now mature and cost effective, and governments should ramp up the wide deployment of these clean energy technologies by providing incentives to produce them on a large scale and to create markets for them. Equally important in the fight against climate change is renewed reliance on science that tracks and guides emission reduction and mitigation efforts. This return to science-based climate policy includes the collection, validation, and sharing of climate and greenhouse gas information around the world, as well as the enhancement of model projections of climate impacts on the wellbeing of all inhabitants of the planet.”

Biological Threats: Degraded capacity and major concerns

Asha M. George, DrPH, executive director, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at the Atlantic Council, and SASB member, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “This year featured degraded capacity to respond to biological events, further development and pursuit of biological weapons, poorly restrained synthetic biology activities, increasingly convergent AI and biology, and the specter of life-ending mirror biology. Partnerships–between countries, between industry and government, and between the public health and national security communities–will be key to managing these risks. With the right tools and determination, we need not fall prey to the diseases that threaten us.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and University of Chicago scientists who helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project. The Bulletin created the Doomsday Clock two years later to convey man-made threats to human existence and the planet. The Clock is a reminder of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe and a symbol that there is still time left to act.

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February 4, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment