BBC employees were offered the chance to survive a nuclear holocaust by broadcasting from an underground bunker, but they could not tell their wives, newly released files reveal.
The broadcaster secretly drew up plans during the Cold War for how it would run a Wartime Broadcasting System in the event of a major disaster.
Early versions of the plan – known as the ‘War Book’ – say that staff were “assigned” or “designated” to go underground, but later editions suggest they were “invited”. Chosen workers were informed not to tell their wives or bring them to the bunker, the files released by the BBC reveal.
“My clearest memory is of a discussion about whether people with spouses could bring them along,” Bob Doran, an experienced editor in Radio News in the 1980s, who attended a civil service seminar in Yorkshire said. The answer was no.
BBC bosses planned to set up 11 protected bunkers – known as ‘Regional Seats of Government’ – spread across the UK, each with a studio and five staff from nearby local radio stations.
A bunker at the Engineering Training Department at Wood Norton in Worcestershire would be a headquarters staffed by 90 BBC staff including engineers, announcers, 12 news editors and sub-editors.
The output would be controlled by the government, but the BBC made a collection of cassette tapes of old radio comedies to entertain the public.
Shows chosen to amuse listeners during Armageddon included the Goon Show, Just a Minute and Round the Horne.
China ‘sends message to Trump’ by flying nuclear-capable bomber over South China Sea for the first time since The Donald’s controversial phone call with Taiwan’s leader
Chinese H-6 bomber was escorted by fighter jets over disputed South China Sea
Pentagon officials say move was meant to send a message to Donald Trump
Satellites also detect Chinese surface-to-air missiles being placed on an island
Maneuvers come against backdrop of tensions stoked by call with Taiwan leader
China flew a long-range bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons over the South China Sea in recent days, according to US officials.
The move appears to be Beijing’s way of flexing its military muscles in a worrying show of force that officials in Washington say is a message to President-elect Donald Trump, Fox News reported on Friday.
For the first time since Trump upended decades of diplomatic protocol and spoke on the phone with the leader of Taiwan, China flew aircraft over an area that includes disputed islands which it claims as its own.
The flight route corresponded to the so-called ‘Nine-Dash line,’ the demarcation boundary used by China to mark a number of islands that are also claimed by neighboring countries, including Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei……….
The US suspects that China is expanding its military reach into the South China Sea.
The latest military maneuvers are all the more disconcerting since they come against the backdrop of increasing tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Trump said on Thursday the United States needed to improve its relationship with China, which he criticized for its economic policies and failure to rein in North Korea. ……..
Trump criticized China repeatedly during his presidential campaign and drew a diplomatic protest from Beijing last week after speaking by phone with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, which China considers a wayward province.
What’s standing between Donald Trump and nuclear war?The main barriers to using nuclear weapons are psychological, not legal, The Verge by Rachel Becker Dec 11, 2016 When President-elect Donald Trump officially becomes the president of the United States in January, he will take complete control of America’s nuclear arsenal. Should he decide to start a nuclear war, there are no legal safeguards to stop him. Instead, a much less tangible web of norms, taboos, and fears has reined in US presidents since World War II. But as North Koreaescalates its nuclear weapons tests and the president-elect of the United States openly contemplates using nukes, experts worry that this fragile web could start to tear.
Tale of Two Cities (1946) – Hiroshima & Nagasaki Japan after The Atomic Bombs of World War II
During his campaign, Trump called nuclear proliferation the “biggest problem” in the world. But he also said that Japan and South Koreamight want to get nukes of their own. He wouldn’t take nuking ISIS, or even Europe, off the table. But he’s also characterized himself as “highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely” to ever use nuclear weapons. This calculated ambiguity isn’t unusual for America’s presidents. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush left nuclear first strikes on the table, too.
But for a US president to talk so openly and frequently about using nuclear force is a clear break with history, says Frank Sauer, an international security researcher at the Bundeswehr University Munich and author of the book Atomic Anxiety: Deterrence, Taboo and the Non-Use of U.S. Nuclear Weapons. And it could be potently destabilizing in a world where nations’ nuclear doctrines are shaped more by posture than by policy.
Despite a few close calls, nuclear warheads haven’t been used in armed conflict for more than 70 years. But there’s controversy over the reason why. Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis, put it down to pure luck.
But Nina Tannenwald, director of international relations at Brown University, argues that a taboo gradually emerged from the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This taboo created the shared expectation that using nuclear weapons again would be deeply, morally wrong. International relations professor and author of The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons,T.V. Paul disagrees, arguing that it’s not a taboo but a tradition that’s driven by social and political pressures. And underlying both of these explanations is humankind’s deep-seated fear of going extinct, Sauer says.
While mutually assured destruction — the notion that any country launching nukes would likely also be destroyed by nukes — gets the most ink in terms of deterrence, these cultural and psychological deterrents play powerful roles.
Let’s be very clear: the president alone controls the nukes. There aren’t more checks and balances because our nuclear chain of command was built to speedily deliver mutually assured destruction. In fact, the only real check on the president’s nuclear authority is the election, writes nuclear history professor Alex Wellerstein in a recent blog post. “[D]on’t elect people you don’t trust with the unilateral authority to use nuclear weapons.”
That’s because if the US is attacked, time is precious: early warning teams only have three minutes to determine whether warnings of a missile attack are real. If it looks legitimate enough to take to the president, the president then has less than 12 minutes to open the nuclear briefcase (or “football”), review his tactical options, and authorize a nuclear strike. Or at least, 12 minutes is how long the White House has if a submarine deployed in the Western Atlantic were to fire on DC; if Russia were to launch a nuke from within its borders, there’s maybe 18 additional minutes to react. If the president hesitates, a nuke could hit the White House before the US has a chance to launch a counterstrike.
Still, many experts agree that mutually assured destruction can’t fully explain why no one is using their nukes. After all, the US didn’t use nuclear weapons against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, even though Iraq didn’t have any nuclear weapons to retaliate with.
Other nations do a better job at checking their leaders’ nuclear strength. China and India both pledged to not use nuclear weapons in a first strike. (India changed their policy in 2003 to let them retaliate with nukes against a chemical or biological weapons attack.) Russia walked back their own no-first-use policy in the 1990s, and the US doesn’t have one.
MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION CAN’T FULLY EXPLAIN WHY NO ONE IS USING THEIR NUKES
That’s where the nuclear taboo comes in. It lumps nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons into a category of weapons of mass destruction that are unusable precisely because they’re so powerful and hard to control, says Tannenwald, author of TheNuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945.
The taboo stems from the wreckage of the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan during World War II. We still don’t know how many people were killed by the first blasts, probably between 150,000 and 250,000 in total. The death toll continued to rise over the next five years to nearly 350,000 people, with many dying of cancers from the radioactive fallout.
During his recent visit to Japan, President Obama called Hiroshima “the start of our own moral awakening.” That moral awakening has kept nations like the US from using nukes even as they stockpiled them, Tannenwald argues. The taboo casts nuclear weapons as untouchable, stigmatized tools that only a barbarian would use — shaping public opinion as well as world leaders’ personal conviction. After the bombing of Nagasaki, President Harry Truman reportedly called off any more nuclear attacks, saying, “The thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.”………
Kashmir, climate change, and nuclear war, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Zia Mian , 7 Dec 16 “……..The climate-water conflict. Along with the risks of war triggered by an escalation along the Line of Control in Kashmir or by attacks on Indian cities by Islamist militants backed by Pakistan, a new source of conflict between Pakistan and India has emerged, also centered on Kashmir. It is a struggle over access to and control over the water in the rivers that start as snow and glacial meltwater in the Himalayas and pass through Kashmir on their way to Pakistan as the Indus River Basin, ending in the Arabian Sea.
The Indus River and its tributaries are central to Pakistan’s water supply, food supply, and electricity production, and India relies on some of the same water. Under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan has control over the Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab Rivers, and India manages the Sutlej, Beas, and Ravi rivers until they cross into Pakistan and all merge into the Indus River. The treaty was established in part because of conflicts over water between the two countries following independence in 1947, including an Indian decision in 1948 to block some of the water flowing into Pakistan during the first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir.
As water demand in both countries has grown to meet the needs of rapidly growing populations and increased agriculture and industrial use, large hydroelectric dams have been constructed, and renewed disputes are testing the Indus Waters Treaty. A 2011 United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee report assessed that “water may prove to be a source of instability in South Asia [as] new demands for the use of the river flows from irrigation and hydroelectric power are fueling tensions between India and Pakistan. A breakdown in the [Indus Water] treaty’s utility in resolving water conflicts could have serious ramifications for regional stability.” The report concluded grimly that “the United States cannot expect this region to continue to avoid ‘water wars’ in perpetuity.”………
Pakistan’s government, nationalist and militant organizations, and right-wing media frequently now present India’s construction of dams in Kashmir as a pressing national security threat and one that may call for extreme responses. An editorial in one leading urdu-language Pakistani newspaper in 2011 declared “Pakistan should convey to India that a war is possible on the issue of water and this time war will be a nuclear one.” ………http://thebulletin.org/kashmir-climate-change-and-nuclear-war10261
Does Donald Trump Believe Nuclear War Is Inevitable? The man about to take control of US nukes has a very fatalistic view, Mother Jones, DAVID CORNDEC. 8, 2016n just seven weeks, a man known for being ill-tempered, thin-skinned, narcissistic, and erratic will take control of the US nuclear arsenal. Donald Trump will have the authority and power to launch any combination of the country’s4,500 nuclear weapons. At any time and for any reason he deems fit, Trump could destroy a nation and, through miscalculation, the world.
During the presidential campaign, he uttered several troubling statements about nuclear arms. At a Republican primary debate, he botched a question about the nuclear triad—America’s system of sea-, air-, and land-based nuclear weapons—suggesting he did not understand the most basic information about the structure of the US nuclear command. (He babbled, “For me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”) At other points in the campaign, Trump noted he would support allowing Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia to obtain nuclear weapons and indicated he would be open to using such weapons against ISIS and in other conflicts.
What makes Trump’s loose talk—and ignorance—about nuclear weapons particularly worrisome is that in the past, he has taken a fatalistic approach toward the notion of nuclear war. He has spoken as if he believed such a conflagration was almost inevitable. And now he is about to become one of the few humans on the planet who can decide the fate of the Earth……. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/12/donald-trump-nuclear-war-weapons-inevitable
Russia tests terrifying unmanned ‘drone submarine’ capable of carrying nuclear warheads within range of the US,
Top-secret nuclear-capable submarine is code-named Kanyon by the Pentagon
It is feared to have a range of 6,200 miles with top speeds of up to 56 knots
US officials detected the testing on November 27 at an undisclosed location
It comes after Russia unveiled design of a robot submarine called Surrogat
By JULIAN ROBINSON FOR MAILONLINE, 8 Dec 16, Russia has tested a terrifying new ‘drone’ submarine capable of carrying nuclear warheads unmanned within range of the US, it has emerged.
The top-secret nuclear-capable sub, code-named Kanyon by the Pentagon, is feared to have a range of up to 6,200 miles with top speeds of 56 knots.
US security officials detected the test on November 27 after it was launched from a separate Sarov-class submarine though the location has not been revealed. …..
Kashmir, climate change, and nuclear war, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Zia Mian , 7 Dec 16In April 2016, speaking at the conclusion of the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington DC, which had brought together more than 50 government leaders, President Obama described what he saw as the three major nuclear weapons challenges. Along with difficulties in achieving further nuclear arsenal reductions by the United States and Russia and the problem of North Korea, President Obama listed Pakistan and India and the need, as he put it, for “making sure that as they develop military doctrine that they are not continually moving in the wrong direction.” The White House press secretary later explained that underlying the President’s concern about South Asia was “the risk that a conventional conflict between India and Pakistan could escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons.” It is a well-founded fear and one that has become more urgent as tensions between Pakistan and India have escalated.
Kashmir. A potential trigger for armed conflict that might escalate to nuclear war between Pakistan and India is the dispute over the land and people of Kashmir. Pakistan has claimed this territory since the partition of British India in 1947 that created the borders of India and Pakistan. The dispute has led already to three wars, in 1947, 1965, and 1999, and left Kashmir divided between Pakistan and India along a Line of Control where the armies of Pakistan and India now confront each other in an uneasy stalemate. There are recurring artillery exchanges along this Line of Control, despite a 2003 cease-fire agreement. At times this firing has claimed significant military and civilian casualties.
As part of its efforts to pressure India into giving up Kashmir, Pakistan has backed Kashmiri insurgents and used Islamist militants to launch attacks across the Line of Control. ……
Frustration in the armies on both sides has led to furious, seemingly indiscriminate firing across the Line of Control. The scale of civilian casualties has led hundreds of people to flee their homes on both sides of the line; local villagers say it seems as “if a full-blown war is going on between India and Pakistan.”
Meanwhile many Kashmiris have turned to supporting groups resisting Indian rule and been met with repression from security forces………
It is not just attacks by Pakistan-backed militants on Indian forces in Kashmir and subsequent Indian reprisals that could escalate and tip the two countries into another major war. A related trigger would be an attack on an Indian city by Islamist militant groups, along the lines of the assault on Mumbai in November 2008 that claimed hundreds of casualties and was linked to intelligence agencies in Pakistan. ………
The climate-water conflict……
From tactical weapons to massive retaliation. India anticipates that Pakistan might use nuclear weapons against Indian conventional forces during a war. The Indian Army conducted a massive military exercise in April 2016 in the Rajasthan Desert bordering Pakistan, involving tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and 30,000 soldiers who practiced what they would do if attacked with nuclear weapons on the battlefield. An Indian Army spokesman told the media that “our policy has been always that we will never use nuclear weapons first. But if we are attacked, we need to gather ourselves and fight through it. The simulation is about doing exactly that.” This was not the first such exercise.
Indian nuclear doctrine also calls for massive retaliation directed at Pakistani cities, and Pakistan has threatened to respond in kind. In 2003, India’s cabinet declared nuclear weapons “will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere… [N]uclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” According to Admiral Vijay Shankar, a former head of Indian strategic nuclear forces, such retaliation would involve nuclear attacks on Pakistan’s cities.
General Kidwai from Pakistan describes such Indian threats as “bluster and blunder,” since they “are not taking into account the balance of nuclear weapons of Pakistan, which hopefully not, but has the potential to go back and give the same kind of dose to the other side.” This seems an explicit suggestion of Pakistan planning to target Indian cities with nuclear weapons in retaliation of Indian nuclear attacks on Pakistani cities.
From regional war to great power war. Time is not on our side. The failure to settle the Kashmir dispute despite the passage of 70 years has already triggered three wars. While Pakistan clings grimly to its claims on Kashmir, India seems less inclined to compromise as it grows in economic and military power. Adding to this will be the inevitable pressures from climate change over the coming decades on the Himalayan glaciers, the monsoons, and ground water in the Indus Basin, which will lead to reduced and less reliable access to water in an already water-stressed region, at a time of rapidly growing demand. These drivers have already started to overlap, and conflicts over land, people, blood, and water may become one.
Once initiated, possibly even by the actions of a small militant group, a Pakistan-India conflict may well escalate into a larger war and then bring in allied outside powers, as happened in Europe in World War I.
Pakistan is building ever closer military and economic ties to China; India is becoming a strategic partner of the United States. These alliances with great powers may give policy makers in Pakistan and Indian confidence in escalating a conflict and issuing nuclear threats during a crisis. Because of the increasingly tense and militarized nature of the rivalry between China and the United States, a South Asian conflict that draws them in could escalate into a potentially far more destructive war.
Given these risks, forestalling crises and possible war in South Asia should be a priority. The long history of failures to find a path to peace for Kashmir through United Nations resolutions and bilateral Pakistan-India agreements seems to have sapped the will to try to address the dispute directly. Preventing a South Asian war from becoming nuclear war will require progress on banning the bomb. http://thebulletin.org/kashmir-climate-change-and-nuclear-war10261
Nuclear War Remains a Global Health Threat http://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/generalprofessionalissues/61826 Physicians urged to lobby for worldwide weapons ban by Ira Helfand, MD December 04, 2016 On Oct. 27, the United Nations General Assembly First Committee voted 123 to 38 to commence negotiations next March for a new treaty to prohibit possession of nuclear weapons as the next step towards their complete elimination. The resolution, L.41, specifically cited concerns about “the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.”
Health professionals have played a key role in promoting passage of this resolution by sounding an urgent alarm about the growing danger of nuclear war. In the last year, relations between the U.S. and Russia have deteriorated, tensions have grown between nuclear armed India and Pakistan, and North Korea has tested its growing nuclear arsenal and missile delivery systems. In this context, the health community has worked, with success, to focus the international debate about nuclear weapons policy on the actual medical consequences — the “humanitarian impact” — that will result if these weapons are used.
In May of this year, four international health federations submitted an unprecedented joint working paper to the UN, advocating for a proposed treaty to prohibit possession of nuclear weapons as the next step towards their elimination. The groups, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, World Medical Association, World Federation of Public Health Associations, and the International Nursing Council, cited the extraordinary threat posed by these weapons :
“A proper understanding of what nuclear weapons will do invalidates all arguments for continued possession of these weapons and requires that they urgently be prohibited and eliminated as the only course of action commensurate with the existential danger they pose.”
Presidents of the four federations followed up with an editorial published in The Guardian on Sept. 28 urging the UN General Assembly to take action: “Banning and eliminating nuclear weapons is a high global health priority. The general assembly has the opportunity to move us towards this critical goal. It must not fail to act.”
The statement was part of a campaign launched in 2007 when IPPNW and its U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR,) presented a paper on the global catastrophe that would follow a limited nuclear war. The report built on new research by Alan Robock, Brian Toon and their colleagues, indicating that the use of as few as 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear arsenal, as might take place in a war between India and Pakistan, would cause worldwide climate disruption.
The resulting decline in food production would put up to 1 billion people at risk of starvation, mainly in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Subsequent studies of the actual declines in major food crops that would follow this limited nuclear war led the organizations to warn that a billion people in China might also face famine, raising the global total to 2 billion at risk.
Robock and Toon’s studies also showed that a large-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia would cause a catastrophic nuclear winter that would plunge temperatures across the planet to levels not seen since the last ice age, stopping most food production and killing the vast majority of the human population.
In 2007, IPPNW formed the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) which has now grown to include more than 450 partner organizations in 95 countries.
In 2011 the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement challenged the international community “to pursue in good faith and conclude with urgency and determination negotiations to prohibit the use of and completely eliminate nuclear weapons through a legally binding international agreement, based on existing commitments and international obligations.” Two years later, the Movement adopted an ambitious four-year program to educate the public about the growing danger, and in 2014 it repeated the call for the elimination of these weapons citing “… the new evidence that has emerged in the last two years about the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons.”
The World Medical Association added its voice in 2015, reaffirming prior calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Citing the “immense human suffering … catastrophic effects on the earth’s ecosystem … [and] risk of famine,” the WMA urged governments “to work to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.”
The American Medical Association adopted a similar statement that year resolving to “advise the government of the United States, and all national governments, that even a limited nuclear war would have catastrophic effects on the world’s food supply and would put a significant proportion of the world’s population at risk from a nuclear famine; and to urge the government of the United States, and all national governments, to continue to work to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.”
These recent efforts by the health community mirror the critically important work carried out at the height of the Cold War in the early 1980’s. At that time the World Health Organization supported this work, arguing that doctors and scientists “have both the right and the duty to draw attention, in the strongest possible terms, to the catastrophic results that would follow from any use of nuclear weapons.”
The importance of this work was recognized in the citation awarding IPPNW the 1985 Nobel Peace prize which said that health professionals had performed “a considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.”
The recent UN vote may represent a major step towards the elimination of the nuclear threat, but there is still much work to do, and many ways health professionals can express support. Most of the nuclear-armed nations, including the U.S., have not supported this process, and the nations who sign the ban treaty will need to use it to pressure the nuclear-armed nations into further negotiations for a detailed nuclear weapons convention that sets out the time line, verification, and enforcement procedures for the actual elimination of these weapons.
Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War are urging the healthcare community to play an active role in this process. Visit
www.psr.org andwww.ippnw.org for more information.Ira Helfand, MD, serves on the Board of Directors of Physicians for Social Responsibility and is Co-President, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Radical MPs bid to make Ukraine nuclear again, Rt.com : 6 Dec, 2016 The Radical Party faction of the Ukrainian parliament is seeking to withdraw Ukraine’s membership of the 1968 international treaty which bans the development of nuclear weapons and keeps nuclear technology in check.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) recognizes only five nations as legitimate possessors of nuclear weapons: China, France, Russia, the UK and the US. A handful of UN members are not signatories to the treaty, including Pakistan and India, which were never part of the NPT but have nuclear weapons of their own, and North Korea, which withdrew in 2003 to develop a nuclear arsenal.
Now Kiev may follow Pyongyang’s example if the Radical Party faction in parliament has its way. The party’s leader, Oleg Lyashko, has long called for the government to restore the country’s nuclear capability, which Ukraine briefly possessed in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The number of nuclear warheads deployed on Ukrainian territory by the USSR was only behind those possessed by Russia and the US. But by 1996, all of them had been handed over to Russia, which was busy dismantling a large portion of the costly Soviet nuclear stockpile.
In 1994, Ukraine was given security assurances by Russia, the US and the UK in the so-called Budapest Memorandum in exchange for its accession to the NTP. Similar documents were signed with Kazakhstan and Belarus, which were in a comparable position. China and France gave milder commitments to Ukraine in separate statements……..
Lyashko is a populist politician with a strongly nationalist voter base, and is well known for his publicity stunts. His bill to restore Ukraine’s nuclear status was registered in parliament Tuesday. A date for a committee discussion on the issue is yet to be set.
Ukraine’s ability to actually produce a nuclear weapon remains in question. While numerous research and production facilities based in what now is Ukraine were involved in building the Soviet nuclear arsenal, the country’s current economic troubles and technological backslide would make constructing even a simple nuclear device a major challenge – even if the Ukrainian government does undertake such a project.
James Mattis warned that land-based nuclear missiles pose false alarm danger
Trump’s pick for next US defence secretary has questioned need for US’s ICBMs, which are ready to launch within minutes in event of an attack, Guardian, Julian Borger, 4 Dec 16, James Mattis, the retired general Donald Trump has chosen to be the next US defence secretary, has questioned the need for land-based nuclear missiles on the grounds they represent a higher risk than other weapons of being launched on a false alarm.
Mattis raised doubts about US nuclear orthodoxy in a statement to Congress in 2015, raising the issue over whether nuclear deterrence should continue to rest on a “triad” of weapon types: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched missiles and warheads carried by air force bombers. During the campaign, Trump vowed to proceed with current plans to modernise all three legs of the triad, with an estimated price tag of half a trillion dollars over 20 years.
In his remarks to the Senate about US national security priorities, Mattis struck a more sceptical tone. He asked whether the US should declare that the sole purpose of its nuclear arsenal was to deter nuclear attack, a statement that would narrow its purpose and potentially lower the number of warheads required. The present US nuclear posture states that, in some circumstances, the current, 4,500-warhead arsenal has a role in deterring conventional or chemical weapon attack.
“The nuclear stockpile must be tended to and fundamental questions must be asked and answered,” Mattis told the Senate armed services committee. “We must clearly establish the role of our nuclear weapons: do they serve solely to deter nuclear war? If so we should say so, and the resulting clarity will help to determine the number we need.”
“Is it time to reduce the triad to a diad, removing the land‐based missiles? This would reduce the false alarm danger,” Mattis said.
The US has about 400 ICBMs on a “hair-trigger alert”, ready to launch within minutes if early warning systems show an incoming attack. Several former defence secretaries and generals have argued that they should be taken off this state of readiness because of the danger of false alarms, especially in the age of cyber warfare. Some former officials, including William Perry, defence secretary in the Clinton administration, have argued ICBMs should be scrapped altogether.
Perry said he knew Mattis well, having worked for the marine, then a colonel, for three years during Perry’s time at the Pentagon. The two have since taken part in conferences and panel discussions on nuclear weapons and defence.
“He’s very intelligent, a very serious thinker, nothing frivolous at all about him,” Perry told the Guardian. “My view of him is that he will be a solid addition to Trump’s team. He brings an experience in defence and national security that is lacking.”
“More importantly,” Perry said, “he is a man who says what he thinks. He’s not easily intimidated. He is known for speaking truth to power and that will be a great asset in this administration.”
Power to Speak, Robert Dodge Americans gathered around their Thanksgiving tables last week, reflecting on what they were thankful for this past year. There was the potential for much angst after a year with significant division in our nation, often emphasizing differences and talk of building walls to separate us from our neighbors. In contrast, at our table we gave thanks for our Latin American and Caribbean neighbors, celebrating their courage and the Treaty of Tlatelolco, a little-known treaty that was drafted 50 years ago this February, creating the world’s first nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) and ultimately servingas the model for all subsequent NWFZ.
In the border town of Tijuana, at its historic coastal Friendship Park adjacent to the Mexican side of the wall, a monument commemorating the northwestern point of this NWFZ was unveiled in late November with great fanfare — though no coverage from the neighbor to the north, the United States.
Latin American nations drafted the treaty on Feb. 14, 1967, in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, and it went into force on April 22, 1968. Today all 33 nations of Latin America and the Caribbean have signed the treaty as part of the 80 million square kilometers of the entire southern hemisphere that are free of nuclear weapons.
Quoting from the treaty, these nations are convinced:
“That the incalculable destructive power of nuclear weapons has made it imperative that the legal prohibition of war should be strictly observed in practice if the survival of civilization and the survival of mankind itself is to be assured,
“That nuclear weapons, whose terrible effects are suffered, indiscriminately and inexorably, by military forces and civilian population alike, constitute, through the persistence of the radioactivity they release, an attack on the integrity of the human species and ultimately, may even render the whole earth uninhabitable,
“That general and complete disarmament under effective international control is a vital matter which all the peoples of the world equally demand,
“That the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which seems inevitable unless States, in the exercise of their sovereign rights, impose restrictions on themselves in order to prevent it, would make any agreement on disarmament enormously difficult and would increase the danger of the outbreak of a nuclear “conflagration,
“That the establishment of militarily denuclearized zones is closely linked with the maintenance of peace and security in the respective regions.”
The document establishes Latin America and the Caribbean as a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ). Each country signing the treaty promises, as stated in Article 1, to outlaw within its territory “the testing, use, manufacture, production, or acquisition by any means whatsoever of any nuclear weapons” and “the receipt, storage, installation, deployment, and any form of possession of any nuclear weapons.”
Protocol I of the treaty obligates states with territories in Latin America (France, Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States) to keep the region an NWFZ. The four nations have signed the treaty. Protocol II obligates nuclear-weapon-states (NWS) not to undertake any action that would violate the nuclear-weapons-free status of the region, including using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against any of the states participating in the treaty. The People’s Republic of China, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (now the Russian Federation), France, the United Kingdom and the United States have ratified Protocol II.
For verification purposes the Treaty created the Organization for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL), a regional organization that ensures that all contracting parties are abiding by the treaty. OPANAL is similar to the organization of the United Nations. There is a General Conference that convenes every two years and at special sessions, called if necessary. Among other duties, it establishes “procedures to ensure the adherence to the Control System established by the Treaty of Tlatelolco,” creates accords with governments and international agencies, and elects the Council and the General Secretary to four-year terms.
From the earliest days of the nuclear age to the present, the nations of Latin America have played a significant role in the work to abolish nuclear weapons. During last month’s United Nations First Committee, they were among the sponsoring group of nations that brought forth a resolution, L41, to commence negotiations and passage of a nuclear weapons ban treaty next year, beginning in March. This treaty will outlaw nuclear weapons around the world just as every other weapon of mass destruction has been banned before. No longer will the world be held hostage to these suicidal weapons that have threatened our very survival as a species. These awakened neighbors have done more to bring about a world free of nuclear weapons while the nuclear powers have lived in a trance. Ultimately, nuclear weapons will be eliminated or they will eliminate us. We have much work to do yet much to be thankful for.
Robert F. Dodge, M.D., is a practicing family physician in Ventura, writes for PeaceVoice, and serves on the boards of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Beyond War, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles, and Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions.
No one can stop President Trump from using nuclear weapons Chicago Tribune, Alex WellersteinSpecial to The Washington Post, 1 Dec 16,
Sometime in the next few weeks, Donald Trump will be briefed on the procedures for how to activate the U.S. nuclear arsenal, if he hasn’t already learned about them.
All year, the prospect of giving the real estate and reality TV mogul the power to launch attacks that would kill millions of people was one of the main reasons his opponents argued against electing him. “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons,” Hillary Clinton said in her speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. Republicans who didn’t support Trump — and even some who did, such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — also said they didn’t think Trump could be trusted with the launch codes.
Now they’re his. When Trump takes office in January, he will have sole authority over more than 7,000 warheads. There is no failsafe. The whole point of U.S. nuclear weapons control is to make sure that the president — and only the president — can use them whenever he decides to do so. The only sure way to keep President Trump from launching a nuclear attack, under the system we’ve had in place since the early Cold War, would have been to elect someone else.
When the legal framework for nuclear weapons was developed, the fear was about not irrational presidents but trigger-happy generals. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, passed with President Harry Truman’s signature after nine months of acrimonious congressional hearings, firmly put the power of the atomic bomb in the hands of the president and the civilian components of the executive branch. It was a momentous and controversial law, crafted in the months following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an eye toward future standoffs with the Soviet Union…….
Eventually, the brass adopted the idea that, when it came to nuclear matters, they were at the president’s beck and call. It was not generals’ responsibility to make the order; it was their responsibility to carry it out.
That the president would be the only person competent to use nuclear weapons was never challenged. Even asking the question would throw the entire system into disarray, as Maj. Harold Hering learned in 1973. Hering was a 21-year Air Force veteran who was decorated for his flying in Vietnam before being sent for training as a nuclear missile squadron commander. He had been taught that officers had an obligation to disobey illegal orders. So when he was told how to launch a nuclear attack, he asked what seemed like a simple question: How could he be sure that an order to launch his missiles was lawful? How could he be sure, for example, that the president wasn’t insane? Instead of an answer, he got the boot: an aborted promotion and an administrative discharge for “failure to demonstrate acceptable qualities of leadership” and for indicating “a defective mental attitude towards his duties.”
The Air Force’s problem, in short, is that once a serviceman starts down the rabbit hole of doubt, he becomes an unreliable second-guesser — and suddenly he is one of the few people who can decide whether nuclear weapons are used.
The procedure for ordering a nuclear attack involves more than one person: The president cannot literally press a button on his desk and start World War III. There is no “nuclear button” at all. Instead, the U.S. nuclear command-and-control system is bureaucratically and technically complex, stretching out to encompass land-based missile silos, submarine-based ballistic and cruise missiles, and weapons capable of being dropped from bombers. The chain of command requires that the president order the secretary of defense to carry out a launch; the secretary serves as the conduit for implementation by the military. There are succession policies in place so that the procedure can be continued in the event of the death or incapacitation of either the president or the secretary of defense — or their designated successors.
Most details of how a nuclear war would be started are classified, because an enemy who knew enough about the system could come up with ways to complicate or defeat it. What is known is that an aide is always following the president, carrying at least one large satchel (often two) known as the “nuclear football,” reportedly containing information about nuclear attack possibilities and how the president could verify his identity, authenticate orders and communicate with the military about implementing them……..
It might be worth resurrecting this debate , if we take seriously the idea that presidents — any of them, much less Trump — should not have the legal authority to conduct arbitrary and unilateral nuclear war. Perhaps now, decades after the end of the Cold War, we are past the moment when we need to entrust that power in a single person. One can imagine a law that would allow the president to use nuclear weapons in the face of imminent danger, the sort of situation in which a matter of minutes or even seconds could make a difference, but would enact formal requirements for outside consensus when more options were on the table. It would not require a full renunciation of the possibility of a first-strike nuclear attack (something the United States has never been willing to make) but might add some reassurances that such decisions would not be made unilaterally.
Africa pushes for a 2017 ban on nuclear weapons https://www.issafrica.org/iss-today/africa-pushes-for-a-2017-ban-on-nuclear-weapons
A new UN resolution might spell an end to decades of paralysis in nuclear disarmament negotiations. 01 DEC 2016 / BY ANNIE DUPRE AND NOËL STOTT On 27 October, the First Committee of the United Nations (UN) passed L.41: ‘Taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations’. The resolution calls for negotiations to take place next year on a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, and lead towards their total elimination. It was passed with 123 votes in favour, 38 against and 16 abstentions.
This initiative has been called historic by analysts such as the former Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament to the UN, civil society groupings and international organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross –underscored by the belief that as long as nuclear weapons exist, humankind will risk facing the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear war.
Others, such as France, maintain that such a treaty would be ineffective and could undermine the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as the cornerstone of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The NPT, which entered into force in 1970, prohibits the spread of nuclear weapons.
These differing assessments over the potential impact of a nuclear weapons ban treaty mirror the deep divisions among NPT state parties regarding their disarmament obligations, which has been a source of disagreement since the NPT’s entry-into-force.
The response of African states has been largely positive. Of the 47 African UN member states present at the vote, all but three supported the resolution. From the Africa Group, only Mali, Morocco and Sudan deviating by abstaining – presumably after coming under pressure from some nuclear-weapon states. Benin, Djibouti, Liberia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles and South Sudan were not present for the vote. A number of African states co-sponsored and spearheaded the resolution, including Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa.
If passed by the UN General Assembly in December, negotiations are set to start in early 2017 – a step that would end two decades of paralysis in multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations.
Despite two-thirds of countries present at the vote supporting the resolution, there was significant push-back from virtually all the NPT nuclear-weapon states (the United States, France, Britain, Russia) and most of their allies, such as the 27 North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and Japan and Australia. The Russian representative warned of the damage such a treaty could cause, arguing that the initiative ‘was a destructive and hasty one that undermined and eroded existing disarmament mechanisms [the NPT]’.
His argument was echoed by others, including Morocco – which explained that its abstention was based on how the process and the way it was handled would impact on the NPT review process, and the possibility of all states working together. The Moroccan representative further called for preparatory work to be undertaken before negotiations started.
South Africa, however, expressed the view that the initiative would actually further the goals of the NPT, stating: ‘Such a treaty would also strengthen the NPT and underline the urgency of accelerating the implementation of nuclear disarmament obligations and related commitments’.
Speakers from non-nuclear-weapon states also argued that the use, or threat of use, of nuclear weapons would constitute a violation of international law and a crime against humanity. Malawi declared that it ‘is in the interest of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances. The catastrophic effects of a nuclear weapons detonation, whether by accident, miscalculation or design, cannot be adequately addressed’.
In the statement delivered by Nigeria, the African Group affirmed that the total elimination of nuclear weapons is still ‘the only absolute guarantee against their use or threat of use’. Beyond supporting negotiations in 2017 on a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons, Nigeria’s statement also called on all UN members to support ‘a universal, unconditional and legally binding instrument on negative security assurances by nuclear-weapons states to all non-nuclear-weapons states, pending the total elimination of nuclear weapons’.
Some of the states under the US nuclear umbrella that abstained or voted no – like the Netherlands and Japan – have indicated their willingness to participate in the negotiations in 2017. Others, such as Norway, have subsequently indicated that they would not. Still others seem undecided.
It is unlikely that the NPT nuclear-weapon states would participate in such discussions. Mark Toner, US State Department spokesperson, said: ‘Successful nuclear reductions will require participation from all relevant parties, proven verification measures, and security conditions conducive to cooperation …we lack all three factors at this time.’
The United Kingdom (UK) is also clear on the need for its nuclear deterrence to be maintained ‘for the foreseeable future’ – because of the ‘risk that states might use their nuclear capability to threaten us, try to constrain our decision-making in a crisis or sponsor nuclear terrorism’.
Significantly, three nuclear-armed states, namely China, India and Pakistan, abstained, while the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea voted in favour. However, it remains to be seen whether these states would participate in the negotiations.
And this is the crux of the issue. Despite a sizable number of UN members in favour of negotiations, there is significant skepticism of the opportunities these would present, especially if nuclear-weapons states boycott the talks scheduled for March and June next year.
The question is whether it would be better, strategically, for nuclear-armed states and their allies to participate – if only to try guide the negotiations in their favour? However, African states, who make up a significant portion of the UN membership, could also direct the path towards a world free of nuclear weapons.
According to Article 36, a UK-based organisation, the treaty would serve as a necessary and practical next step towards a world in which all weapons of mass destruction are outlawed and are being eliminated: even without the participation of nuclear-armed states.
Historically, all unacceptable weapons have first been subjected to a global prohibition before they were eliminated. For any international instrument to have a true impact, however, acceptance by a large majority of states is needed.
In most of the recent processes towards banning indiscriminate weapons (such as anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions), Africa has played a leading role. It is possible that the African continent, which also hosts the only country to have unilaterally eliminated its own nuclear arsenal, may again play such a role in the banning of probably the most destructive weapons ever to have been developed. While the effectiveness of such an instrument remains to be seen, the decision to commence negotiations on such a treaty is indeed a historic occasion.
Annie DuPre, Research Consultant and Noël Stott, Senior Research Fellow, Transnational Threats and International Crime Division, ISS Pretoria
So How Close Do You Live to a Nuclear Bomb? http://sploid.gizmodo.com/so-how-close-do-you-live-to-a-nuclear-bomb-1789472521Casey Chan, 29 Nov 16 Hooray. If you live south of the Equator or in any of the countries that light up green in the map above, [on original] you’re good. Keep on living there because you don’t squat next to any nuclear weapons. But if you’re in the countries painted red—like the United States, Germany, Russia, China, India, etc.—you might live closer to a nuclear bomb than you think.
It’s a little scary how many nukes are stored near major cities. For example, the US stores its nukes in 10 states (in addition to a few bystander countries in Europe). Some of them are within spitting distance of cities like Seattle (18 miles away from a facility), Kansas City (55 miles), Denver (77 miles), and Albuquerque (with just happens to have the biggest facility within its city limits). As for Europe, nukes are scattered everywhere on the continent and cities like London, Venice, Milan, Brussels and Rotterdam are all within 50 miles of a nuclear bomb. Let’s not even get into where Russia puts their nukes.
But what’s even more terrifying is that there are lost nuclear bombs where no one is quite sure exactly where they are. The US and Russia have lost more than 50 bombs, and while some are hopefully at the bottom of the ocean, others have landed undetonated near major cities and have still yet to be found. Yikes.
Watch RealLifeLore plot out the location of nuclear bomb facilities in relation to the world in the video below. [on original]
Bikini was just the beginning, bombs still threaten the islanders, New Internationalist DECEMBER 2016 John Pilger visits the Marshall Islands and its bomb survivors, still blighted by US nuclear weapons. “……..The explosion vaporized an entire island, its fall-out spreading over a vast area. There was a ‘miscalculation’, according to the official history; the wind ‘changed suddenly’. These were the first of many lies, as declassified documents and the victims’ testimony have since revealed.
Gene Curbow, a meteorologist assigned to monitor the test site, said, ‘They knew where the radioactive fall-out was going to go. Even on the day of the shot, they still had an opportunity to evacuate people, but [people] were not evacuated; I was not evacuated… The United States needed some guinea pigs to study what the effects of radiation would do.’
The secret of the Marshall Islands was Project 4.1. Official files describe a scientific programme that began as a study of mice and became a study of human beings exposed to the radiation of a nuclear weapon. Most of the women I interviewed had suffered from thyroid cancer; many in their communities did not survive.
The US Navy returned the population of Rongelap atoll, which is downwind of Bikini, even though the food was unsafe to eat and the water unsafe to drink. As a result, reported Greenpeace – which eventually sent a ship to rescue them – ‘a high proportion of their children suffered from genetic effects’.
Archive film refers to them as ‘amenable savages’. A US Atomic Energy Agency official boasts that Rongelap is ‘by far the most contaminated place on earth’, adding, ‘It will be interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.’
Holding a photograph of herself as a child, with terrible facial burns and most of her hair missing, Nerje Joseph told me, ‘We were bathing at the well. White dust started falling from the sky. I reached to catch the powder. We used it as soap to wash our hair. A few days later, my hair started falling out.’
Lemoyo Abon said, ‘Some people were in agony. Others had diarrhoea. We were terrified. We thought it must be the end of the world.’
Human radiation experiments
As a nine-year-old, Tony de Brum witnessed the Bravo bomb. He became foreign minister of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, an indefatigable voice demanding justice for his people. Clutching the evidence, he stood up at the United Nations in 2005 and said, ‘United States government documents clearly demonstrate that its scientists conducted human radiation experiments with Marshallese citizens. Some of our people were injected with or were coerced to drink fluids laced with radiation. Other experiments involved the resettling of people on islands highly contaminated to study how human beings absorbed radiation from the food and environment.’
The Marshall Islands were, until 1986, a Trust Territory administered by the United States with a legal obligation to ‘protect the inhabitants against the loss of their land and resources’ and to ‘protect their health and well-being’. In 2004, the US Cancer Institute reported to Congress that future Marshallese generations were likely to contract 530 cancers.
The US relinquished direct control of the islands only after the Marshallese had agreed to accept a mere $150 million as compensation for their suffering and to allow the huge US base on Kwajalein atoll, with its ‘mission to combat communist China’ and known as the Ronald Reagan Missile Test Facility.
Commanding the Pacific all the way to Asia and China, the base continues to subject the islanders to the testing of weapons of mass destruction. Missiles are launched at night, or fired into the lagoon from California. Following each ‘shot’, islanders fall sick with a ‘mystery illness’. The Environmental Protection Agency says fish in the bay cannot be eaten; fish was once the staple. The cost of firing one missile is $100 million, or two-thirds of the compensation paid to the islanders……..
In 2014, President Obama announced that the US was ‘creating the world’s largest marine reserve in the Pacific, banning fishing and other commercial activities across pristine sea dotted with coral atolls’.
In fact, as part of Obama’s military build-up in the Pacific, known as the ‘pivot to Asia’, the US has taken control of nine million square miles of ocean – an area double the size of the mainland United States. Under cover of a marine reserve, a ‘marine range complex’ will be run by the Pentagon, with torpedoes, underwater mines and numerous other detonations. Bikini was just the beginning. https://newint.org/features/2016/12/01/bikini-was-just-the-beginning/
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