Western nuclear nations snub Nobel Peace Prize ceremony
Ambassadors of Western nuclear powers to snub Nobel ceremony
Head of anti-nuke group set to receive prize says decision by US, UK and France not to send top envoys shows its campaign is working, Times of Israel, OSLO, Norway, 30 Nov 17, — Breaking with tradition, nearly all ambassadors of the world’s nuclear powers will not attend this year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony which honors efforts to ban atomic weapons, the Nobel Institute said Thursday.
“We are disappointed that the ambassadors from the United Kingdom, the United States and France won’t be there,” the head of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Beatrice Fihn told AFP.
“They claim to be committed to a world without nuclear weapons, and they should be celebrating civil society’s work on the issue,” she said, regretting their “defensive” position, yet noting that it “shows that this treaty and the campaign is already having an impact on them.”
The Peace Prize was awarded on October 6 to ICAN, a coalition of non-governmental organizations lobbying for a historic treaty banning atomic weapons, which was signed in July by 122 countries though none of the nuclear powers.
ICAN will formally receive its prize at a lavish ceremony in Oslo on December 10.
During a meeting in the Norwegian capital last week, the United States, France and Britain all informed the Nobel Institute of their joint decision to be represented by their embassy’s second-in-charge.
“They clearly received instructions to express their reservations towards ICAN and the global treaty” to ban weapons of mass destruction, the head of the Nobel Institute, Olav Njolstad, told AFP.
Of the nine countries believed to have nuclear weapons capabilities, Russia and Israel, which has never acknowledged having nuclear weapons, will be the only ones sending their ambassadors to the ceremony………
The Nobel Institute said the ambassadors of India and Pakistan will be travelling at the time of the ceremony, while China has not attended the prize-giving since 2010, when a Chinese dissident was awarded the honor.
North Korea does not have an embassy in Oslo. The Nobel Institute said the ambassadors of India and Pakistan will be travelling at the time of the ceremony, while China has not attended the prize-giving since 2010, when a Chinese dissident was awarded the honor.
North Korea does not have an embassy in Oslo. https://www.timesofisrael.com/ambassadors-of-western-nuclear-powers-to-snub-nobel-ceremony/
Aboriginal grandmother to testify on nuclear bomb test damage at Maralinga site, in Australia
World spotlight shines on Maralinga horror, https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/38090548/world-spotlight-shines-on-maralinga-horror/ Lisa Martin, 30 Nov 17, Sue Coleman-Haseldine was a toddler crawling around in the dirt when the winds brought the black mist.
Her white nappies on the washing line were burnt.
It was in the 1950s when the British began testing nuclear weapons at Maralinga in the South Australian outback.
The legacy of the bombs dropped continues to haunt the 67-year-old Aboriginal grandmother. “We weren’t on ground zero at Maralinga, otherwise we would all be dead,” she told AAP. “I was born and grew up on a mission at Koonibba, but the winds came to us.”
Ceduna, the main township before the Nullarbor, is the cancer capital of Australia, Ms Coleman-Haseldine says. She’s had her thyroid removed and will be on medication for the rest of her life.
Her 15-year-old granddaughter is also battling thyroid cancer..
There are birth defects and cancers right across the community. “It’s changed our genes,” she said.”These diseases weren’t around before the bombs.”
On December 10, Ms Coleman-Haseldine will be in Oslo for the Noble Peace Prize award ceremony.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is being recognised for its work to achieve a treaty-based ban on nuclear weapons.
So far 122 countries have adopted the treaty, excluding Australia and countries with nuclear weapons – the US, UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.
Only three countries have ratified the treaty and 50 are needed for it to become international law.
ICAN is a grassroots movement that began in Carlton, Melbourne more than a decade ago.
In Norway, Ms Coleman-Haseldine will tell the story of her people and their contaminated land.”You’ve got to keep the past alive to protect the future,” she said.
Ms Coleman-Haseldine hopes Australia will reverse its opposition and sign the treaty.
The Turnbull government has ruled that out but the Labor Party will debate the issue at its national conference next year.
North Korea launches ICBM missile: Trump responds in a relatively restrained manner
Trump on North Korean missile launch: ‘We will take care of it’, By Zachary Cohen, Ryan Browne, Nicole Gaouette and Taehoon Lee, CNN, November 29, 2017 Washington North Korea issued a direct challenge to President Donald Trump with the launch of an ICBM missile that Defense Secretary James Mattis said demonstrates it has the ability to hit “everywhere in the world.”
USA soldiers’ trip to a radioactive hell on Enewetak Atoll
It was supposed to be a trip to paradise, instead it sealed their fate http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-28/the-toxic-legacy-of-a-deadly-paradise/9168422 These soldiers were ordered to clean up the toxic legacy of America’s nuclear program, now they’re dying, and their Government has abandoned them.Foreign Correspondent, By Mark Willacy When Jim Androl landed on a remote central Pacific atoll to take part in the biggest nuclear clean-up in United States history, the only extra items his military superiors gave him were some flea powder and a pamphlet on how to avoid heat stroke.
The army did have special radiation suits and respirators for handling the left-over atomic waste on the atoll, but the young soldiers were only allowed to wear them on special occasions.
“The [protective suits] were for photo ops,” the former communications specialist with the US Army’s 84th Engineer Battalion recalls.
“I know once when I believe 60 Minutes was there, they did [let us wear them]. We were just issued our normal warm weather gear … shorts, tee-shirts, hats and jungle boots and that’s it.”
Androl was one of about 4,000 US troops sent to Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands between 1977 and 1979 to scrape up the contaminated remnants of the United States’ atomic testing program.
The US government decided to use soldiers for the clean-up, because employing specialist nuclear workers would have doubled the cost.
“I’d never even heard of Enewetak. I never knew that there were 43 nuclear tests out there,” Androl, who was 22-years old when he was deployed to the atoll, says.
Some of those bombs were the among the most powerful ever detonated, and they left behind a toxic legacy that will live on for thousands of years.
“One of the attempted nuclear weapons explosions didn’t work,” Michael Gerrard, the director of the Earth Institute at New York’s Columbia University, says. “So the plutonium was just broken apart by the conventional explosion, leading to about 400 little chunks of plutonium that were spread around the atoll.”
The plutonium on Enewetak has a radioactive half-life of more than 24,000 years, and the US clean-up troops were ordered to place the shattered pieces into plastic bags and dump them into a crater left behind by an old atomic bomb test.
One-millionth of a gram of plutonium is potentially harmful, and can cause cancer decades after first exposure.
“They’d have us walk around and pick up loose pieces, and just gather up whatever we could, throw it in a pile,” Androl says.
It’s estimated that 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive material was collected and dumped, including contaminated soil, concrete, and military equipment.
“It was a very dirty operation,” Ken Kasik, another of the men sent to Enewetak as part of the clean-up, says. “[The veterans are] all sick, they’re all dying, and it’s because of the radiation.”
Kasik can barely rise from his chair to greet me when I arrive to see him.
We were supposed to meet at his home in Hawaii.
But by the time I land, he is seriously ill in the intensive care unit in Honolulu’s Straub Medical Centre, and is tethered to drips and monitoring machines.
“About three-and-a-half years ago I had so many cancers on me, I couldn’t work anymore. They ripped me apart,” he says.
This time it’s not cancer that has forced Ken Kasik to be rushed to the ICU, but a brain aneurism he says is directly linked to his time on Enewetak and the atomic fall-out there.
“When those bombs go off, in Enewetak, that’s coral sand,” Kasik says. “That just gets pulverised and comes back down as baby powder, and it was on everything, everywhere. The guys would come home, take off their sunglasses, [and their faces] would be white.”
“I never had any clue that dust could literally get into your lungs,” Jim Androl says from his home in the suburbs of Las Vegas. “You breathe it, you drink it, you eat it, you swim in it. Every day for six months, 24/7.”
The problem for Enewetak clean-up veterans like Androl and Kasik, is that successive United States governments have refused to recognise them and their comrades as atomic veterans. This means they cannot access health benefits or radiation exposure compensation.
Other atomic veterans, like those involved in the original atomic testing program in the Pacific in the 1940s and 1950s that left behind the waste on Enewetak and Bikini atolls, were covered for more than 20 specific types of cancers.
“Our boys worked six-month tours on a dirty island, and the government says, ‘You were never there’,” Kasik says. “We were never acknowledged…we don’t exist.”
Like Kasik, Androl has suffered serious health problems over the years that he blames on his six-month tour at Enewetak.
“He had his gall bladder out … two weeks [later] they found a seven-and-a-half-pound tumour, cancerous tumour in his abdomen,” Androl’s wife Bev says.
“I suffer from roughly 40 to 45 residuals from the cancer,” Androl says. “I’ve got pancreatitis, I’ve got a spot on my liver that they’re watching.”
As well as cancers, veterans complain of brittle bones and even of birth defects in their children.
The US military insists there is no connection between veterans’ illnesses and the clean-up on Enewetak, saying their radiation exposure was well within safe limits.
A two-year campaign by Enewetak veterans to get Congress to give them medical benefits has been unsuccessful.
“I think mostly they’re trying to get health coverage, medical care because they’ve got terrible bills. Really high bills from hospitals, because of their treatment,” Giff Johnson, the publisher of the Marshall Islands Journal, the country’s only newspaper, says.
There has never been a formal study of the health of these men, many of whom are now in their late 50s and early 60s.
But an unofficial social media survey of more than 400 Enewetak clean-up veterans found that 20 percent had reported cancers of some type.
The life they live is a far cry from the photos Ken Kasik took at the time, of young men in their prime.
A poison on our island
The Marshall Islands is once again grappling with its nuclear legacy, as the threat of climate change threatens to break open the dome.
“God, there’s been so many [who have died],” Androl says of his former comrades. “We just lost one two weeks ago. We lost one about six months before that. They told me I’d be dead by now. We’re nobody, we don’t matter, our family’s lives don’t matter.”
The people of the Marshall Islands also suffered terrible heath impacts from 12 years of atomic testing in their homeland, including increased rates of thyroid and other cancers, as well as birth defects.
Whole islands were evacuated, and many people are still not allowed to return to live in their home villages decades on.
Like the US clean-up veterans, the Marshallese who suffered were never properly compensated.
A nuclear claims tribunal set up by the Marshall Islands and the United States awarded more than $2 billion dollars to victims of the atomic testing program — less than $4 million was ever paid.
“America dumped all of their worst rubbish to the Marshallese, and abandoned them with it. And we don’t want to hear about it,” Kasik says.
“It’s a disgusting shame. It makes us look bad.”
North Korea moving fast to complete its nuclear weapons program – could be done within a year
North Korea may announce completion of nuclear program within a year: South Korea minister https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-southkorea-minist/north-korea-may-announce-completion-of-nuclear-program-within-a-year-south-korea-mi SEOUL (Reuters) Reporting by Christine Kim and Hyonhee Shin – North Korea may announce the completion of its nuclear program within a year, South Korea’s unification minister said on Tuesday, as the isolated country is moving more faster than expected in developing its weapons arsenal.
“Experts think North Korea will take two to three more years but they are developing their nuclear capabilities faster than expected and we cannot rule out the possibility Pyongyang may declare the completion of their nuclear program in a year,” said Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon at a media event in Seoul.
Hawaii to test nuclear attack siren
The “without alarm” part gets harder Friday.
That is when the government is set to bring back a statewide nuclear attack siren, a relic of the Cold War that will notify islanders that a missile is headed toward them. Officials will test the system for the first time just before lunchtime Friday, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
If the alarm goes off at any other time, by the way, it means that residents have 15 minutes before a nuclear bomb destroys Hawaii as we know it. The tests will be conducted on the first business day of every month for the foreseeable future……. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/27/hawaii-brings-back-cold-war-era-nuclear-warning-sirens-amid-fears-of-north-korea-strike/?utm_term=.bd5f
Gaol for Australian anti-war protestors at USA’s secret base in theAustralian desert
An American Spy Base Hidden in Australia’s Outback, NYT The trials — and the Australian government’s uncompromising prosecution of the protesters — has put a spotlight on a facility that the United States would prefer remain in the shadows.
— Margaret Pestorius arrived at court last week in her wedding dress, a bright orange-and-cream creation painted with doves, peace signs and suns with faces. “It’s the colors of Easter, so I always think of it as being a resurrection dress,” said Ms. Pestorius, a 53-year-old antiwar activist and devout Catholic, who on Friday was convicted of trespassing at a top-secret military base operated by the United States and hidden in the Australian outback.
From the base, known as the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, the United States controls satellites that gather information used to pinpoint airstrikes around the world and target nuclear weapons, among other military and intelligence tasks, according to experts and leaked National Security Agency documents.
As a result, the facility, dotted with satellite dishes and isolated in the desert, has become a magnet for Australian antiwar protesters. ….Over the past two weeks, Ms. Pestorius and five other Christian demonstrators were convicted in two separate trials of breaching the site’s security perimeter last year. They could face seven years in prison……..
Born at the height of the Cold War, Pine Gap was presented to the Australian public in 1966 as a space research facility. But behind the scenes, the station was run by the C.I.A. to collect information from American spy satellites about the Soviet Union’s missile program……Photos taken from the air show a sprawling campus punctuated by white geodesic domes that look like giant golf balls. Inside these spheres, called radomes, are antenna systems that send and receive information from satellites in constant orbit above the earth…..Today, more than 800 people from both countries are believed to work at the base. But the United States is firmly in control.
“Pine Gap has changed and developed enormously,” said Richard Tanter, a senior research associate at the Nautilus Institute and honorary Melbourne University professor who has investigated and criticized the base for years.
In documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the American intelligence contractor turned whistle-blower, Pine Gap is described as playing “a significant role in supporting both intelligence activities and military operations What that actually means, Professor Tanter said, is that the station is involved in real-time contributions to the United States’ global military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Pine Gap, he added, also “contributes data for C.I.A. drone operations in countries in which the United States is not at war — Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and so forth. It is also critically important in whatever the United States is going to do on the Korean Peninsula.”
Professor Tanter has gleaned information about the secret site from unexpected public records, including the LinkedIn profiles of Pine Gap contractors and satellite photos that reveal new construction at the site.
Professor Tanter, who is president of the Australian board of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, said he wanted the government to “make a very clearheaded assessment” of whether it is in Australia’s best interest to contribute data for drone assassinations and targeting nuclear weapons..”….. Last year, in the early hours of a cold, dark September morning, Ms. Pestorius, Mr. Dowling and three other “peace pilgrims,” as they call themselves, breached Pine Gap’s security perimeter.
As the activists scrambled up a rocky hill to get closer to the base, and with the police moving in, Ms. Pestorius picked up her viola. Another protester strummed his guitar. As they played a lament for those killed in war, Mr. Dowling held up a large, laminated photograph showing a bloodied young woman with her foot missing.
A sixth activist, Paul Christie, 44, carried out his own protest at Pine Gap days later; he was tried separately and convicted last week, charged, like the others, with entering a prohibited area. During the activists’ back-to-back trials this month, a modest band of supporters gathered at the courthouse. Many were members of the country’s antiwar movement, parts of which are religion-infused.
A Quaker knitted flower brooches. A Buddhist brewed coffee from the back of his van. A collection of colorful banners tied to fences read “Close Pine Gap” and “End the U.S. Alliance and Pine Gap Terror Base.” Mr. Dowling, who said he had been arrested between 50 and 100 times, was found guilty once before of trespassing at Pine Gap, in 2005. The conviction was later overturned.
One of his co-defendants this time was his 20-year-old son Franz, the guitar player at the protest last year. The younger Mr. Dowling and two other defendants — Andrew Paine, 31, and Timothy Webb, 23 — live together in a Dorothy Day Catholic Worker House in Brisbane, where they regularly take in homeless people.
All five were found guilty of entering a prohibited area, and Mr. Paine was convicted of an additional charge of possessing a photographic device.
During their trial, the five — who acted as their own attorneys — tried to argue that they had acted in the defense of others, but Justice John Reeves did not allow it.
Pine Gap has “to bear a big responsibility for all the murder and mayhem that has taken place in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Jim Dowling….. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/world/australia/pine-gap-spy-base-protests.html?smid=li-share
A new arms race underway, as USA, then Russia, modernise their nuclear weapons
Special Report: In modernizing nuclear arsenal, U.S. stokes new arms race, Scot Paltrow WASHINGTON (Reuters), 21 Nov 17 – President Barack Obama rode into office in 2009 with promises to work toward a nuclear-free world. His vow helped win him the Nobel Peace Prize that year.
The next year, while warning that Washington would retain the ability to retaliate against a nuclear strike, he promised that America would develop no new types of atomic weapons. Within 16 months of his inauguration, the United States and Russia negotiated the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, meant to build trust and cut the risk of nuclear war. It limited each side to what the treaty counts as 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads.
By the time Obama left office in January 2017, the risk of Armageddon hadn’t receded. Instead, Washington was well along in a modernization program that is making nearly all of its nuclear weapons more accurate and deadly.
And Russia was doing the same: Its weapons badly degraded from neglect after the Cold War, Moscow had begun its own modernization years earlier under President Vladimir Putin. It built new, more powerful ICBMs, and developed a series of tactical nuclear weapons.
The United States under Obama transformed its main hydrogen bomb into a guided smart weapon, made its submarine-launched nuclear missiles five times more accurate, and gave its land-based long-range missiles so many added features that the Air Force in 2012 described them as “basically new.” To deliver these more lethal weapons, military contractors are building fleets of new heavy bombers and submarines.
President Donald Trump has worked hard to undo much of Obama’s legacy, but he has embraced the modernization program enthusiastically. Trump has ordered the Defense Department to complete a review of the U.S. nuclear arsenal by the end of this year.
Reuters reported in February that in a phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump denounced the New START treaty and rejected Putin’s suggestion that talks begin about extending it once it expires in 2021.
Some former senior U.S. government officials, legislators and arms-control specialists – many of whom once backed a strong nuclear arsenal — are now warning that the modernization push poses grave dangers.
“REALLY DANGEROUS THINKING”
They argue that the upgrades contradict the rationales for New START – to ratchet down the level of mistrust and reduce risk of intentional or accidental nuclear war. The latest improvements, they say, make the U.S. and Russian arsenals both more destructive and more tempting to deploy. The United States, for instance, has a “dial down” bomb that can be adjusted to act like a tactical weapon, and others are planned.
“The idea that we could somehow fine tune a nuclear conflict is really dangerous thinking,” says Kingston Reif, director of disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based think tank.
One leader of this group, William Perry, who served as defense secretary under President Bill Clinton, said recently in a Q&A on YouTube that “the danger of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War.”
Perry told Reuters that both the United States and Russia have upgraded their arsenals in ways that make the use of nuclear weapons likelier. The U.S. upgrade, he said, has occurred almost exclusively behind closed doors. “It is happening without any basic public discussion,” he said. “We’re just doing it.”
………. A BUDGET BUSTER?
The U.S. modernization effort is not coming cheap. This year the Congressional Budget Office estimated the program will cost at least $1.25 trillion over 30 years. The amount could grow significantly, as the Pentagon has a history of major cost overruns on large acquisition projects.
As defense secretary under Obama, Leon Panetta backed modernization. Now he questions the price tag.
“We are in a new chapter of the Cold War with Putin,” he told Reuters in an interview, blaming the struggle’s resumption on the Russian president. Panetta says he doubts the United States will be able to fund the modernization program. “We have defense, entitlements and taxes to deal with at the same time there are record deficits,” he said.
New START is leading to significant reductions in the two rival arsenals, a process that began with the disintegration of the USSR. But reduced numbers do not necessarily mean reduced danger……….. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-modernize-specialreport/special-report-in-modernizing-nuclear-arsenal-u-s-stokes-new-arms-race-idUSKBN1DL1AH
THE MOST EXPENSIVE BOMB EVER – USA’s new B61 nuclear hydrogen bomb
Special Report: In modernizing nuclear arsenal, U.S. stokes new arms race, Scot Paltrow, WASHINGTON (Reuters), 21 Nov 17 “………..One example of an old weapon transformed into a more dangerous new one is America’s main hydrogen bomb. The Air Force has deployed the B61 bomb on heavy bombers since the mid-1960s. Until recently, the B61 was an old-fashioned gravity bomb, dropped by a plane and free-falling to its target.
THE MOST EXPENSIVE BOMB EVER
Now, the Air Force has transformed it into a controllable smart bomb. The new model has adjustable tail fins and a guidance system which lets bomber crews direct it to its target. Recent models of the bomb had already incorporated a unique “dial-down capacity”: The Air Force can adjust the explosion. The bomb can be set to use against enemy troops, with a 0.3 kiloton detonation, a tiny fraction of the Hiroshima bomb, or it can level cities with a 340-kiloton blast with 23 times the force of Hiroshima’s. Similar controls are planned for new cruise missiles.
The new B61 is the most expensive bomb ever built. At $20.8 million per bomb, each costs nearly one-third more than its weight in 24 karat gold. The estimated price of the planned total of 480 bombs is almost $10 billion.
……… RUSSIA‘S DIRTY DRONE
Russia, too, is hard at work making deadlier strategic weapons. Ploughshares estimates that both sides are working on at least two dozen new or enhanced strategic weapons.
……… A Russian military official in 2015 disclosed a sort of doomsday weapon, taking the idea of a “dirty bomb” to a new level. Many U.S. analysts believe the disclosure was a bluff; others say they believe the weapon has been deployed.
The purported device is an unmanned submarine drone, able to cruise at a fast 56 knots and travel 6,200 miles. The concept of a dirty bomb, never used to date, is that terrorists would spread harmful radioactive material by detonating a conventional explosive such as dynamite. In the case of the Russian drone, a big amount of deadly radioactive material would be dispersed by a nuclear bomb.
The bomb would be heavily “salted” with radioactive cobalt, which emits deadly gamma rays for years. The explosion and wind would spread the cobalt for hundreds of miles, making much of the U.S. East Coast uninhabitable.
A documentary shown on Russian state TV said the drone is meant to create “areas of wide radioactive contamination that would be unsuitable for military, economic, or other activity for long periods of time.”
Reif of the Arms Control Association says that even if the concept is only on the drawing board, the device represents “really outlandish thinking” by the Russian government. “It makes no sense strategically,” he said, “and reflects a really egregiously twisted conception about what’s necessary for nuclear deterrence.” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-modernize-specialreport/special-report-in-modernizing-nuclear-arsenal-u-s-stokes-new-arms-race-idUSKBN1DL1AH
Grave threat that Trump may be seriously considering a first strike on North Korea
Is the Trump Administration Planning a First Strike on North Korea? Saturday, November 18, 2017 By Gareth Porter, Truthout | News Analysis Ever since the Trump administration began a few months ago to threaten a first strike against North Korea over its continued missile tests, the question of whether it is seriously ready to wage war has loomed over other crises in US foreign policy.
The news media have avoided any serious effort to answer that question, for an obvious reason: The administration has an overriding interest in convincing the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un that Trump would indeed order a first strike if the regime continues to test nuclear weapons and an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Therefore, most media have shied away from digging too deeply into the distinction between an actual policy of a first strike and a political ruse intended to put pressure on Pyongyang.
The use of military threat for “diplomatic coercion” is such a basic tool of US policy in dealing with weaker adversaries that it is almost taken for granted in Washington. Even diplomats who have been deeply involved in negotiating with North Korea are supportive of using that threat as part of a broader diplomatic strategy. Robert Gallucci, the State Department official who negotiated the “Agreed Framework” with North Korean officials in 1994, noted in an email to Truthout, “We do want the North to understand that their actions could lead the US to a preventive strike — wise or not.”
The linkage between the Trump administration’s threat of a “military option” and US diplomatic pressure on North Korea was clear from its first suggestion that it might carry out a first strike. That suggestion came on April 13, immediately upon the completion of the administration’s policy review on North Korea, when NBC News reported that “multiple senior intelligence officials” had said that the administration was “prepared to launch a preemptive strike” if officials “became convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapon test.” A story in the Washington Post published the following day offered a slightly different version: The administration was “prepared to respond to another North Korean nuclear test” and had “a range of options at its disposal” but would not “telegraph its response in advance.”
However, an unnamed military official told the Associated Press that same day that the policy that had been approved by the National Security Council did not envision the use of force in response to a nuclear or missile test, thus revealing that the leaks involving the threat of a preemptive or retaliatory attack over North Korean testing were part of a clumsy effort at “coercive diplomacy.”……
The Trump administration could seek to increase the pressure on North Korea still further by making one or more moves preparing for — but short of — war. For example, it could bring more US ground troops into South Korea or Japan. However, the North Korean regime might well interpret that move as a signal that the US intends to attack and invade the North, since that would seem to be precisely the purpose of moving reinforcements into the theater. In fact, according to Jackson, the North Koreans told US diplomats during the 1994 crisis that they had studied carefully the US large-scale troop movements in preparation for the first Gulf War in 1990-91, and warned that they would respond to a move like that one in their region by launching their own preemptive attack.
It isn’t yet possible to know definitely whether the Trump administration intends to strike first against North Korea. The official threats of such a strike can be discounted as obviously related to an elaborate — if somewhat crude — psychological warfare campaign. But more twists and turns in US policy can be expected in the coming months, and the desperate desire to coerce Pyongyang may also have given rise to wishful thinking on the part of McMaster and, more dangerously, Trump himself, about deterring that regime’s response to a US first strike. That in turn could still pose a grave threat of yet another unnecessary and terrible war. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42640-is-the-trump-administration-planning-a-first-strike-on-north-korea
Reassurance from USA top nuclear general that he would resist an ‘illegal’ Trump strike order
US nuclear general says would resist ‘illegal’ Trump strike order, CNBC, 19 Nov 17 The top U.S. nuclear commander said on Saturday that he would resist President Donald Trump if he ordered an “illegal” launch of nuclear weapons.
Air Force General John Hyten, commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), told an audience at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia, Canada that he had given a lot of thought to what he would say if he received such an order.
“I think some people think we’re stupid,” Hyten said in response to a question about such a scenario. “We’re not stupid people. We think about these things a lot. When you have this responsibility, how do you not think about it?”
As head of STRATCOM “I provide advice to the president, he will tell me what to do,” he said in his remarks, retransmitted in a video posted on the forum’s Facebook page.
“And if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen? I’m going to say, ‘Mr. President, that’s illegal.’ And guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, ‘What would be legal?’ And we’ll come up with options, of a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is, and that’s the way it works. It’s not that complicated.”……. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/19/us-nuclear-general-says-would-resist-illegal-trump-strike-order.html
The hellish reality: what a ‘preventive war’ against North Korea would be like
Ultimately, the larger problem is that President Trump’s policy objectives are unattainable.
Denuclearization is a non-starter from North Korea’s perspective because Kim believes – not without reason – that nuclear weapons are a matter of regime survival, having seen what happens to leaders in countries like Libya when they give up their nuclear programs.
As long as President Trump insists on “complete, verifiable and total denuclearization,” Washington is walking America down a path that leads to (likely nuclear) military conflict
A ‘preventive’ war with North Korea would be total hell. Here’s why http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/11/17/preventive-war-with-north-korea-would-be-total-hell-heres-why.html By Harry J. Kazianis | As the Trump administration continues to rattle sabers at North Korea with rhetoric eerily similar to the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the possibility of a preventive U.S. war with North Korea may be more real than foreign and defense policy experts recognize.
It would be both foolish and naïve to think that all the tough talk coming out of the Trump administration is simply meant to intimidate North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un into giving up his nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
The three so-called “adults in the room” who are apparently the strongest voices influencing President Trump’s foreign policy are National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Mattis is an active duty lieutenant general in the Army. Mattis and Kelly are retired Marine Corps generals. Their common experience is commanding ground forces in the Iraq War. If they are shaping the Trump administration’s North Korea policy, it stands to reason that their views would have a decidedly military tilt.
If President Trump decides to take military action, what might it look like?
Any unprovoked U.S. military action would be a preventive strike. That is, a military strike intended to prevent North Korea from acquiring a future capability to attack the U.S. That is different from a preemptive strike that is launched to stop an imminent military attack from an adversary.
So what military options are truly available to President Trump?
Option 1: Preventive nuclear strikes.
It’s impossible to completely rule out the possibility – however remote – that the U.S. might use nuclear weapons in a preventive strike against North Korea.
If North Korea’s nuclear program and weapons are in deeply buried and hardened bunkers, nuclear weapons might be the only way to destroy them with a high rate of confidence. A relatively little-known fact is that the United States has a nuclear bunker buster: the B61-11 low- yield nuclear gravity bomb.
About 50 B61-11 bombs are believed to be deployed. Theoretically, the B61-11 could be mated with GPS guidance to make it a precision strike weapon. Also, the B61-11 could theoretically be outfitted with the BLU-113 hardened steel-tipped warhead to penetrate more than 30 feet of concrete.
But wouldn’t using nuclear weapons be beyond the pale?
Under ordinary circumstances, yes. But the Trump administration may not believe these are ordinary circumstances. If the administration assumes military conflict with North Korea is inevitable and views North Korea as 1945 Japan, the rationale would be very similar: Using nuclear weapons would bring about a quick resolution and would save thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost in a conventional conflict. As a point of reference, more than 30,000 U.S. soldiers died in the Korean War.
Needless to say, the nuclear option would be a big gamble. If we were not 100 percent successful, we would have to expect that North Korea would retaliate with its full range of conventional and nuclear weapons.
While the U.S. homeland would not be threatened, both South Korea and Japan would be. And the nearly 35,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea would certainly be at risk – as would the estimated 200,000 or more U.S. citizens living in South Korea.
Option 2: Decapitation strikes by bombers or submarines.
Another big gamble would be a decapitating air and missile strike. This would be military action based on the belief that if North Korea’s leadership – Kim Jong Un and his most loyal top military and civilian leaders – could be killed, the regime would implode and collapse.
Success would depend on near-perfect intelligence about all the targets’ whereabouts. Moreover, we would have to assume that many of them – including Kim himself – would be in deeply buried and hardened bunkers that would be difficult to destroy, even with precision conventional missiles and bombs.
And we know from experience that we were not able to immediately take out Saddam Hussein and the other 54 “most wanted Iraqis” when we invaded Iraq in 2003.
If a decapitating strike failed, we would have to assume that North Korea would retaliate and we would be drawn into a protracted ground war.
At a minimum, North Korea would likely unleash a conventional artillery barrage on Seoul, which has a population of 10 million. While such an attack might not level Seoul, it would still cause significant damage and extract untold casualties. Kim might launch his nuclear weapons, believing he had nothing to lose.
Option 3: Conventional ground attack with hundreds of thousands troops.
So that leaves a conventional ground attack, which would likely be preceded and backed up by air and missile strikes.
Given the experience of McMaster, Mattis, and Kelly – as well as the fact that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, is a Marine – such an option makes sense and seems more likely. After all, expeditionary war is exactly what these generals know how to do.
However, almost all the experts believe that any such war would be drawn out and costly –perhaps as many as 20,000 deaths per day in South Korea.
And remember, Kim Jong Un would have the nuclear option at his disposal, along with his chemical and biological weapons. Such is the risk of any military action against a nuclear-armed country.
Option 4: Deterrence.
But the U.S. does have another military option. It just doesn’t involve the actual use of military force. It’s called deterrence.
North Korea has had nuclear weapons for at least a decade and has not used them against either South Korea or Japan. Presumably this is because of the threat of a U.S. nuclear response looms over Pyongyang’s head. If that’s the case, even in the worst case scenario of North Korea having the ability to launch a missile at the continental United States, deterrence would still hold.
Deterrence worked when America and the Soviet Union had thousands of warheads pointed at each other. Supposedly crazy or irrational leaders with nuclear weapons – such as Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong in China – were successfully deterred.
Indeed, Kim Jong Un would have to be suicidal to actually attack the U.S., knowing that we could respond with utterly devastating force that could result in his death and the total annihilation of his country. However, the Kim dynasty has repeatedly demonstrated its larger interest is its own survival and perpetuating the regime.
Ultimately, the larger problem is that President Trump’s policy objectives are unattainable.
Denuclearization is a non-starter from North Korea’s perspective because Kim believes – not without reason – that nuclear weapons are a matter of regime survival, having seen what happens to leaders in countries like Libya when they give up their nuclear programs.
As long as President Trump insists on “complete, verifiable and total denuclearization,” Washington is walking America down a path that leads to (likely nuclear) military conflict
USA govt now spending $billions on cyberweapons and armed drones, in plans against North Korea
Buried in an emergency funding request to Congress lie hints of new ways to confront Pyongyang, like cyberweapons and armed drones. NYT , WASHINGTON — Concerned that the missile defense system designed to protect American cities is insufficient by itself to deter a North Korean attack, the Trump administration is expanding its strategy to also try to stop Pyongyang’s missiles before they get far from Korean airspace.
North Korea building ballistic missile submarine, rejects Trump’s stand on negotiation
North Korea rejects Donald Trump’s call for nuclear talks, as images emerge of ‘ballistic submarine’ under construction, Telegraph, Reuters News Agency 17 NOVEMBER 2017
North Korea has rejected Donald Trump’s call for talks over its nuclear programme just days after the US president completed his high-profile to Asia.
Han Tae Song, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said that negotiations would not happen while America continued “war games” in the region.
The snub occurred as new satellite images suggested North Korea is pursuing an “aggressive schedule” to build its first operational ballistic missile submarine.
The developments mark a double setback for Mr Trump, who is seeking a breakthrough in the stand-off over North Korea after rallying support for his approach in Asia.
During a five-nation tour of the region Mr Trump surprised commentators with a call for North Korea to “come to the table and make a deal” over its nuclear programme.
However speaking to Reuters, Mr Han rejected the proposal and criticised America for carrying out joint military practices with South Korea.
“As long as there is continuous hostile policy against my country by the US and as long as there are continued war games at our doorstep, then there will not be negotiations,” Mr Han said.
“There are continued military exercises using nuclear assets as well as aircraft carriers, and strategic bombers and then…raising such kinds of military exercises against my country.”
Mr Han said North Korea’s nuclear programme was about protection, saying: “This is the deterrent, the nuclear deterrent to cope with the nuclear threat from America.”
He also claimed Mr Trump drive for tighter sanctions was to “overthrow” the regime by “isolating” it and creating a “humanitarian disaster”.
China has contested Mr Trump’s claim that a “freeze for freeze” proposal – where North Korea stops its nuclear development and America ends its military war games – was off the table.
Meanwhile 38 North, a Washington-based project that monitors North Korea, said that satellite images indicate the regime is aggressively pursuing a ballistic missile submarine. ……http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/17/satellite-images-suggest-north-korea-aggressive-work-ballistic/
Dismantling our nuclear weapons is the safest course of action
We should dismantle our nuclear stash, not expand it, WHYY, Aaron Kase,
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