Are US, Israel Heading for Divorce?
It’s unclear how much longer Netanyahu can hold on to power in Israel in the face of a torrent of bad news for Israel about declining international support for — and dire economic consequences derived from — its ongoing military operation in Gaza
Scott Ritter, Washington, Apr 1, 2024, Energy Intelligence Group, https://www.energyintel.com/0000018e-9900-d183-abef-9f430f020000
The crisis in Gaza that has been ongoing since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel has resulted in a sea change in political opinion on the question of Israeli security prerogatives and Palestinian statehood. While international opinion has decisively shifted to the Palestinian cause, Israel has until recently been ably backstopped by the US, which has wielded its veto at the UN Security Council to shield Israel from any binding consequences. But shifting global priorities, coupled with turbulent domestic political realities, have caused the US stance on Israel to shift, creating the possibility of Israel, for the first time, standing alone in the crosshairs of global condemnation.
On Mar. 25, the 10 non-permanent members of the UN Security Council tabled a draft resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza during Ramadan, the immediate release of hostages and humanitarian access. The resolution was the latest in a succession of similar calls from the Security Council seeking an end to the violence that has wracked Gaza and the region since Oct. 7.
Prior to the Mar. 25 draft resolution being tabled, all previous efforts to bring an end to violence in Gaza had failed, with the draft texts either vetoed by the US or, on one occasion, Russia and China. But the latest call for a ceasefire passed muster, receiving 14 “yes” votes, zero “no” votes, and one abstention — from the US.
The Security Council resolution has no enforcement clause, making it little more than a formal notice of disapproval by the UN of Israeli actions. The administration of President Joe Biden made it clear that it continued to blame Hamas over Israel when it comes to the root cause of the current crisis, and that the US supported the overall Israeli objective of destroying Hamas both militarily and politically. Circumstances at home and abroad, however, raise questions about the sustainability of this policy position.
Changing Times
The Israeli government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu is the most conservative in its history, the byproduct of a desperate politician (Netanyahu) seeking to bury his personal legal problems under the weight of governing what has, for several election cycles, become an increasingly ungovernable state. To accomplish this, Netanyahu made common cause with Israel’s extreme right-wing political element, crafting a coalition that not only rejected the notion of a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian question but also embraced the idea of a greater Israel that would do away with the idea of a Palestinian state in general.
Israel was able to capitalize on the general apathy of the global collective to the plight of the Palestinian people, allowing the dream of a viable Palestinian state to be supplanted by a road map toward regional economic connectivity and prosperity defined by the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world. This generated schemes such as the India-Middle East Economic Corridor (Imec), an ambitious sea-rail collaboration designed to link India with Europe via the Gulf Arab states, Jordan and Israel.
The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 and Israel’s heavy-handed response changed all that. Imec is dead in the water, alongside any notion of normalized relations with Arab countries until the question of Palestinian statehood is resolved. The resilience of Hamas militarily and politically has compelled Israel to undertake military action that has resulted in the deaths in Gaza of over 30,000 civilians (some 19,000 of whom are children). This has prompted allegations of genocide presented to the International Court of Justice. Cities across the world are full of protesters condemning Israel and praising the cause of a free and independent Palestine. More and more US cities are hosting such actions.
The tidal wave of public sentiment has moved the needle of government policy in many nations. The US State Department has put the White House on notice that the US is in danger of losing the support of the Global South at a time when US policy objectives are centered on slowing the pace of multipolarity and preserving the rules-based international order that serves as the centerpiece of US foreign and national security policy. The US abstention at the Security Council reflected a new reality, where the US must weigh its own foreign policy objectives against the established principle of unquestioned support for Israel.
Local Politics
The US and Israel could attempt to ride out the storm of international protest, waiting for a world that had long been indifferent to the plight of the Palestinian people to lose interest again and shift its attention to a new crisis — in a world fully capable of generating one at a moment’s notice.
But as Tip O’Neill, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, once quipped, “all politics is local,” and the Gaza crisis is no exception. The UN abstention was an attempt at damage control which, under normal circumstances, might have allayed the concerns of people more interested in words over action. But 2024 is a US presidential election year, with incumbent Joe Biden set to face former President Donald Trump in a race that is expected to be every bit as heated — or more — than the tumultuous 2020 election.
The 2020 election, like the 2016 one before it, was won on the margins, in so-called “battleground states” where the difference between winning and losing came down to a few thousand votes derived from distinct demographics. One such demographic is the Muslim-American community, which is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
The UN abstention was an effort to dampen the negative feelings of this community. But void of any meaningful follow-on action by the Biden administration to enforce the will of the Security Council, this won’t be enough to secure this demographic come election time. As a result, the US political theater is witnessing previously unimaginable scenes, such as the ardently pro-Israeli Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer calling for the removal of Netanyahu or Biden threatening to withhold military aid, something previously unimaginable in US politics, should Israel not yield to the demand for a ceasefire.
It’s unclear how much longer Netanyahu can hold on to power in Israel in the face of a torrent of bad news for Israel about declining international support for — and dire economic consequences derived from — its ongoing military operation in Gaza. Netanyahu, who failed in his bid to cloak himself with judicial immunity, faces not just political defeat but also personal ruin should he be removed from office.
Netanyahu’s political viability is linked to his ability to sustain the current conflict in the hope that he can pull a miraculous victory over Hamas out of the hat. Netanyahu, however, is running into a brick wall of US political opposition where the presidential political imperative is starting to trump loyalty to Israel. No Israeli prime minister has survived without US political support. And no US presidential candidate has prevailed in an election where the cause of Israel was forsaken. The question now is who will blink first, Netanyahu or Biden — the answer to which remains very much up in the air.
America’s Nuclear War Plan in the 1960s Was Utter Madness. It Still Is.
The Final Solution was enacted. The SIOP never has been—not so far. But a similar, still-classified plan exists today. Over the years, its name has changed. It is now simply the Operational Plan (OPLAN).
We rarely consider the dangers these days, but our existence depends on it.
ANNIE JACOBSEN, MARCH 27, 2024, Mother Jones
This article was adapted from Nuclear War: A Scenario, published March 26, 2024, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright 2024 by Annie M. Jacobsen.
Nuclear war is madness. Were a nuclear weapon to be launched at the United States, including from a rogue nuclear-armed nation like North Korea, American policy dictates a nuclear counterattack. This response would almost certainly set off a series of events that would quickly spiral out of control. “The world could end in the next couple of hours,” Gen. Robert Kehler, the former commander of US Strategic Command, told me in an interview.
We sit on the razor’s edge. Vladimir Putin has said he is “not bluffing” about the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction should NATO overstep on Ukraine, and North Korea accuses the US of having “a sinister intention to provoke a nuclear war.” For generations, the American public has viewed a nuclear World War III as a remote prospect, but the threat is ever-present. “Humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” cautions UN Secretary-General António Guterres. “We must reverse course.”
So far, we haven’t. The Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war remain firmly in place.
The US government has spent trillions of dollars over the decades preparing to fight a nuclear war, while refining protocols meant to keep the government functioning after hundreds of millions of Americans become casualties of a nuclear holocaust, and the annual budgets continue to grow. The nation’s integrated nuclear war plan in the 1960s was utter madness. It almost certainly remains so today. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Atomic bombs were “a threat to mankind and to civilization,” warned the group of admirals, generals, and scientists who authored the report—“weapons of mass destruction” able to “depopulate vast areas of the Earth’s surface.” But they could also be very useful, the group told the Joint Chiefs. “If used in numbers,” they wrote, “atomic bombs not only can nullify any nation’s military effort, but can demolish its social and economic structures and prevent their reestablishment for long periods of time.”……………………………………………….
What America had created presaged its own potential demise. “The United States has no alternative but to continue the manufacture and stockpiling of weapons,” the Joint Chiefs were advised. They took notice and approved……………………………………………………………………….
the atomic bomb—its extraordinary power, its mass-killing capacity—would pale in comparison to what was coming next. American and Russian weapons designers each had radical new plans on their individual drawing boards. What followed was the invention, in 1952, of “the most destructive, inhumane, and indiscriminate weapon ever created,” in the words of a group of Nobel laureates. A climate-altering, famine-causing, civilization-ending, genome-changing, newer, bigger, and even more monstrous nuclear weapon—one that the scientists involved called “the Super.”
Indeed, the Super “works better in large sizes than in small sizes,” its designer, Richard Garwin, told me in an interview, confirming that, yes, “I am the architect of the Super…of this first thermonuclear bomb.” Edward Teller conceived it and Garwin drew it at a time when no one else knew how.
The Super was a two-stage mega-weapon: a nuclear bomb within a nuclear bomb. A thermonuclear weapon, also called a hydrogen bomb, uses an atomic (fission) bomb as its triggering mechanism—as an internal, explosive fuse. The Super’s explosive power is the result of an uncontrolled chain reaction in which the nuclei of hydrogen isotopes combine under extremely high temperatures, releasing tremendous energy.
An atomic bomb will kill tens of thousands of people immediately (and tens of thousands later, from follow-on effects), as did the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whereas a thermonuclear bomb detonated on or over a city like New York or Seoul will kill millions of people in a superheated flash, followed by millions more from blast, firestorms, and radioactive fallout.
Garwin’s 1952 prototype had an explosive power of 10.4 megatons—the near equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs exploding all at once. It was an atrocious weapon. Garwin’s mentor, the Manhattan Project physicist Enrico Fermi, experienced a crisis of conscience at the very thought of such a horrifying weapon being built. Fermi and his colleague I.I. Rabi temporarily broke ranks with their weapons-building colleagues and wrote to President Truman, declaring the Super “an evil thing.”
As they put it: “The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”
But the president ignored the plea to stop building the Super, and Garwin was given the go-ahead to draw the plans. “If the hydrogen bomb was inherently evil, it’s still evil,” Garwin told me.
The Super was built. Its code name was Mike. The series was Ivy. “So it was the Ivy Mike test,” he said.
On November 1, 1952, it was test-fired on Elugelab island in the Marshall Islands. The Ivy Mike prototype weighed around 80 tons, an instrument of destruction so physically enormous it had to be constructed inside a corrugated-aluminum building 88 feet long and 46 feet wide.
Ivy Mike exploded with an unprecedented yield. The crater left behind was described in a classified report as being “large enough to hold 14 buildings the size of the Pentagon.” And while there is much to say about the inhumanely destructive power of thermonuclear weapons in general, two aircraft photographs—before and after shots of the Ivy Mike bomb test—tell the story.
What happened after America’s war planners saw what 10.4 megatons could instantly destroy simply boggles the mind. What came next was a mad, mad rush to stockpile thermonuclear weapons, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands.
In 1952 there were 841 nuclear bombs. The next year there were 1,169.
“The process became industrialized,” historian McDuff explains. “These were not science projects anymore.”………………………………..
By 1967, it hit an all-time high: 31,255.
One nation. Thirty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty-five nuclear bombs.
Why stockpile 31,255 nuclear bombs when a single bomb the size of Ivy Mike, dropped on New York City or Moscow, could wipe out 10 million people? Why continue to mass-produce such weapons when the use of a single thermonuclear bomb will almost certainly ignite an unstoppable, civilization-ending nuclear war?
As the nuclear stockpile multiplied out of control, so did each of the US military branches’ plans for nuclear war. As crazy as this now seems, before December 1960, each Army, Navy, and Air Force chief had control over his own nuclear stockpile, delivery systems, and target lists. In an attempt to rein in the potential for mayhem from these multiple, competing plans, the secretary of defense ordered them all to be integrated into a single plan, which is how the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for General Nuclear War got its name.
……………………………… The secret plan that, if activated, would result in the deaths of at least 600 million people on the other side of the world.
The SIOP showed how the entire US military force would be launched at Moscow in a preemptive first strike. How defense scientists had carefully calculated that 275 million people would be killed in the first hour, and that at least 325 million more people would die from radioactive fallout over the next six or so months. Roughly half of these deaths would be in the Soviet Union’s neighboring countries—countries not at war with America, but that would be caught in the crosswinds. This included as many as 300 million Chinese.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….. No one spoke up to object to the indiscriminate killing of 600 million people in a preemptive, US–led first-strike, Rubel wrote. Not any of the Joint Chiefs. Not the secretary of defense. Not John Rubel. Then, finally, one man did: Gen. David Shoup, the Marine Corps commandant, who’d been awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War II.
“Shoup was a short man with rimless glasses who could have passed for a schoolteacher from a rural mid-American community,” recalled Rubel. He remembered how Shoup spoke in a calm, level voice when he offered the sole opposing view: “All I can say is, any plan that murders 300 million Chinese, when it might not even be their war, is not a good plan. That is not the American way.”
The room fell silent, Rubel wrote. “Nobody moved a muscle.”
Nobody seconded Shoup’s dissent.
No one else said anything.
According to Rubel, everyone just looked the other way.
Decades later, Rubel confessed that the SIOP had reminded him of the Nazis’ plans for genocide. In his memoir, he referred to a time when a group of Third Reich officials met at a lakeside villa in the German town of Wannsee. It was there, over the course of a 90-minute meeting, that this group of allegedly rational men decided among themselves how to move forward with the genocide in a war they were presently winning—World War II—so as to ensure total victory. Millions of people needed to die, these officials agreed.
Millions of them.
The Final Solution called for the extermination of all of Europe’s millions of Jews and millions more people the Nazis considered subhuman. The plan for General Nuclear War that Rubel and his colleagues signed off on—the SIOP—called for the mass extermination of some 600 million Russians, Chinese, Poles, Czechs, Austrians, Yugoslavians, Hungarians, Romanians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Finns, Swedes, Indians, Afghans, Japanese, and others whom US defense scientists calculated would be caught in the crosswinds.
The Final Solution was enacted. The SIOP never has been—not so far. But a similar, still-classified plan exists today. Over the years, its name has changed. It is now simply the Operational Plan (OPLAN).
When the SIOP was created, there were just two nuclear-armed nations. Today there are nine: the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Several of these countries are in direct conflict with one another. There is great instability between Pakistan and India…………………………………………………………….
For the Nuclear Information Project, in consort with the Federation of American Scientists, project director Hans Kristensen and senior researcher Matt Korda have identified the current Operational Plan for nuclear war as OPLAN 8010-12, consisting of “‘a family of plans’ directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.” But like all the Exceptionally Controlled Information in the nuclear command and control domain, the details of what, exactly, these war plans entail are off limits to the public…………………………………………………….
So here we are. Teetering at the edge—perhaps even closer than ever before……………………………….more https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/nuclear-war-scenario-book-siop-weapons-annie-jacobsen/
Radioactive nuclear waste burial ground in Pittsburgh area to be cleaned up by federal government
By Andy Sheehan, April 1, 2024 ,
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/radioactive-nuclear-waste-burial-ground-armstrong-county-parks-township/
KISKIMERE, Pa. (KDKA) — An untold number of 55-gallon drums containing radioactive waste are buried in shallow trenches on a 144-acre site in Armstrong County.
They pose a health and safety danger to those who live nearby. But now after decades of lawsuits and public outcry, the federal government is getting ready to finally clean it up.
Debbie Secreto has lived next to the contaminated field in Parks Township all of her life. She played on it as a kid, unaware of the hidden danger. She was diagnosed with breast cancer at 44 years old.
There are 10 shallow trenches filled with haphazardly disposed of radioactive nuclear waste. Though she and other cancer survivors won a class action settlement years ago, she’s remained in her childhood home.
“It’s hard living like this, but what are you going to do? Move? I don’t want to move. I’m 71 years old,” Secreto of Kiskimere said.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the company MUMEC in nearby Apollo produced nuclear fuels for power plants and nuclear submarines and buried the waste in Parks Township. Now, after decades of fighting for it, neighbors like Secreto have won another major victory.
The United States government is finally taking action, now building the needed infrastructure to commence a six-year, $500-million project to excavate all of that nuclear waste to decontaminate and clean the entire 144-acre site.
Beginning next year, contractors for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will begin the slow and methodical process of excavating an estimated 30,000 cubic yards of contaminated waste. They will unearth a little bit at a time, scanning it with X-rays and radiation detectors before encapsulating it in steel containers.
The waste will then be trucked and shipped by rail to a disposal site in Utah, where it will be permanently buried deep underground.
But while happy the waste is going elsewhere, neighbors are concerned the unearthing could spark a nuclear event, releasing toxins into the air and water.
“Everybody up here is worried about it. It’s going to be dangerous,” said Karen Brenner of Kiskimere.
“I can promise that we are committed to protecting the health and welfare of the community and the environment,” said Steven Vriesen, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In participating in reports like this, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it is committed to transparency with the public and will be holding meetings to assure the community every safeguard to safely remove the waste will be taken.
“We have multiple layers of safety,” said David Romano, deputy district engineer. “From air monitors on the workers that are right on the site, groundwater monitoring, surface water monitoring, air monitors around the perimeter, all to ensure our actions ensure the health and safety of our environment.”
If all goes well, this six-year project will restore the site and make this Armstrong County community a safe place to live again.
Michigan Republican congressman says Gaza should be destroyed with nuclear bomb ‘like Nagasaki and Hiroshima’, as he slams US for sending humanitarian aid
- Michigan Republican Congressman Tim Walberg has suggested using a nuclear bomb on Gaza in order to facilitate Israel’s elimination of Hamas
- He referenced bombs used in World War II on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima
- Walberg’s remarks drew condemnation, with some calling for his resignation while his spokesperson said he was using a metaphor
By JAMES GORDON FOR DAILYMAIL.COM , 31 March 2024, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13255849/Michigan-GOP-congressman-says-Gaza-destroyed-nuclear-bomb-like-Nagasaki-Hiroshima-slams-sending-humanitarian-aid.html
A Michigan Congressman has suggested a nuclear bomb should be dropped on Gaza to ‘support Israel‘s swift elimination of Hamas.’
Speaking during a town hall earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, a Republican from Lenawee County, appeared entirely comfortable advocating for the use of nuclear weapons against the Palestinians.
‘It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick,’ Walberg could be heard stating in a video posted to X in which he mentioned the Japanese cities in which America detonated atomic bombs at the end of World War II.
Walberg, an eight-term Republican congressman from Lenawee County, can also be heard speaking against providing humanitarian aid for those in the Palestinian territory.
‘We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid,’ Walberg stated in response to a question about American troops being deployed into Gaza to build a port that would help aid be delivered to the Palestinians.
Walberg had been responding to a question about an initiative put forward by President Joe Biden to use American tax dollars to construct a port off the Gaza coast that would allow humanitarian aid to be delivered more quickly.
Many recent reports have suggested the Gaza’s two million inhabitants are on the brink of famine as Israel’s war against Hamas approaches the six month mark.
The conflict began after Hamas terrorists launched an attack on Israeli citizens, killing 1,200 and taking 240 hostages.
Walberg’s office has now attempted to explain the GOP congressman’s seemingly straightforward answer as a metaphor.
‘During his community gathering, he clearly uses a metaphor to support Israel’s swift elimination of Hamas, which is the best chance to save lives long-term and the only hope at achieving a permanent peace in the region,’ Walberg spokesman Mike Rorke said on Saturday.
‘Congressman Walberg vehemently disagrees with putting our troops in harm’s way. He has great empathy for the innocent people in Gaza who have been thrust into this situation due to the attack carried out by Hamas leaving 1,163 innocent civilians dead,’ Rorke continued.
‘To this day, Hamas still is holding hostages, including Americans. Hamas should surrender and return the hostages.’
Walberg’s comments have been described as ‘clear call to genocide by a member of Congress’.
The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said his remarks should be ‘condemned by all Americans who value human life and international law.’
‘To so casually call for what would result in the killing of every human being in Gaza sends the chilling message that Palestinian lives have no value,’ CAIR Executive Director Dawud Walid said to Detroit News.
‘It is this dehumanization of the Palestinian people that has resulted in the ongoing slaughter and suffering we see every day in Gaza and the West Bank.’
The U.N. food agency has said famine is ‘imminent’ in northern Gaza, with two-thirds of population experiencing catastrophic hunger.
Later in the town hall, held on March 25 in Dundee, Michigan, Walberg went on to suggest that a nuclear bomb should also be used in Russia’s war with Ukraine in order to ‘defeat Putin quick.’
He said instead of American money being used to provide aid to Ukraine for humanitarian purposes, it should instead be used ‘to wipe out Russia, if that’s what we want to do.’
Walberg has been taken to task over his comments by his Democratic colleagues with some calling for his immediate resignation.
Michigan state Democratic Senator Darrin Camilleri tweeted how Walberg had been caught on video ‘endorsing and calling for a complete genocide in Gaza.’
‘He’s an absolute disgrace and needs to resign,’ Camilleri stated.
‘Threatening to use, suggesting the use of, or, God forbid actually using nuclear weapons, are unacceptable tactics of war in the 21st Century,’ wrote Democratic Michigan Rep. Haley Stevens.
US secretly sending more bombs to Israel – Washington Post.
A US 2000 pound bomb (MK-84) of which the US has sent thousands to Israel to aid the genocide.
Sat, 30 Mar 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/490252-US-secretly-sending-more-bombs-to-Israel-WaPo
Washington is fueling the war in Gaza with new arms supplies despite a rift with West Jerusalem
The US has signed off on the transfer of billions of dollars worth of bombs and aircraft to Israel, despite publicly expressing concerns about a looming Israeli ground incursion into the overcrowded Gaza town of Rafah, the Washington Postreported on Friday.
Around 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs are among the armaments in the handover, anonymous Pentagon and White House officials told the newspaper. On top of that, the State Department reportedly authorized the transfer of 25 F-35A aircraft and engines valued at around $2.5 billion. The transfers had originally been approved by Congress years ago as part of the $3 billion+ annual military assistance to the longtime ally, so did not require a new notification.
The use of US-supplied bombs added to the soaring death toll in Gaza, which by the end of March topped 32,000, according to the latest figures provided by Palestinian health officials.
West Jerusalem is seeking to completely eliminate Palestinian militant group Hamas, which staged an incursion from the enclave into southern Israel last October, killing around 1,200 people and capturing scores of hostages.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) allegedly used the 2,000-pound bunker busters in strikes on Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp and around the Al-Shati refugee camp last year. The Jabalia bombings alone are believed to have claimed more than 100 lives, in what the UN later called “disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes.”
Comment: Bombing a refugee camp with 2000 pound bunker buster bombs is a war crime.
Washington insists that Israel has provided the US with “credible and reliable written assurances” that any military aid provided has been used in accordance with international law. “We have not found them to be in violation,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told the press on Monday.
However, the rift between Washington and the Jewish state has become increasingly evident this week, when the US allowed a resolution urging for an immediate ceasefire to pass in the UN Security Council, instead of vetoing it. In response, Israel canceled the planned visit of a high-level delegation to the US.
The delegation was supposed to discuss the planned Israeli military operation against Rafah, a city in the south of Gaza where more than 1.4 million of the enclave’s total population is currently taking refuge. The UN has warned that the offensive will lead to massive loss of life, and even the White House has publicly urged Israel against the attack.
Israel has “no choice” but to send troops into the overcrowded Palestinian city, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told US lawmakers on Wednesday, reiterating that the remaining Hamas strongholds must be completely eliminated.
Comment: The US is without honor or shame and despite calls for peace and respect for civilians has supplied Israel with ‘carte blanche’ to continue its genocidal campaign. Had the US not supplied the weapons and the money, this war would have stopped long ago.
The Rising Nuclear Threat
Readers respond to the “At the Brink” series of Opinion articles.
March 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/opinion/nuclear-threat.html
To the Editor:
Re the “At the Brink” series (Opinion, March 10):
Thank you for highlighting the existential threat of nuclear weapons.
President Ronald Reagan and the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, issued a joint statement in 1985 saying “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But we squandered the opportunity at the end of the Cold War to abolish these weapons.
Today we are entering an extremely dangerous new arms race and risking direct military confrontation with a revanchist Russia, while other nuclear conflicts loom around the world.
The United States, as you report, is expected to spend up to $2 trillion to “modernize” the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal. More modern weapons are more likely to be used and to take the world over the fateful nuclear threshold.
A group of citizens and experts has proposed an alternative: “Back From the Brink,” a program to reduce nuclear risk. It calls on the United States to 1) declare it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict and invite other nations to make similar pledges; 2) take nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; 3) end the president’s sole, unchecked authority to launch a nuclear attack; 4) cancel plans to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal; and 5) enter negotiations with other nuclear powers toward the verifiable global elimination of nuclear weapons.
An awakened citizenry must demand that our leaders work to end the nuclear threat.
David Keppel
Bloomington, Ind.
‘My jaw dropped’: Annie Jacobsen on her scenario for nuclear war
in such circumstances the president is likely to be subject to “jamming”, a chorus of military voices urging he or she follows protocols which lead inexorably towards a retaliatory launch.
“My jaw dropped at so much of what I learned, which was not classified but had just been removed or rather sanitised from the public discourse,” she said. “I found myself constantly surprised by the insanity of what I learned, coupled with the fact that it’s all there for the public to know.”
in such circumstances the president is likely to be subject to “jamming”, a chorus of military voices urging he or she follows protocols which lead inexorably towards a retaliatory launch.
The author’s new book posits an all-too-possible catastrophe, destruction assured by human frailty as much as by technology
Julian Borger, Sun 31 Mar 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/31/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-war-scenario—
Annie Jacobsen was a high school student in 1983, when ABC television broadcast the film The Day After, about the horrors of nuclear war. She never forgot the experience. More than 100 million Americans watched and were terrified too. One of them lived in the White House. According to his biographer and his own memoirs, it helped turn Ronald Reagan into a nuclear disarmer in his second term.
Not long after, the world’s stockpile of nuclear warheads peaked and began to decline rapidly, from 70,000 to just over 12,000 currently, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
That is still enough however to reduce the Earth to a radioactive desert, with some warheads left over to make it glow. Meanwhile, the global situation is arguably the most dangerous since the Cuban missile crisis, the Russian invasion of Ukraine grinding on mercilessly and China contemplating following Moscow’s example by making a grab for Taiwan.
The danger of nuclear war is as immediate as ever but it has faded from public discourse, which is why Jacobsen, now a journalist and author, felt driven to write her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario.
“For decades, people were under the assumption that the nuclear threat ended when the Berlin Wall went down,” Jacobsen said, before suggesting another reason the existential threat of nuclear weapons has been filtered out of mainstream discourse – it has been turned into a technical debate.
“Nuclear weapons and the whole nomenclature around them have been so rarefied it’s been reserved as a subject for those in the know,” she said.
In her book, Jacobsen seeks to break through jargon and details in order to tell a terrifying story in a devastatingly straightforward way. The spoiler alert is that it doesn’t end well.
As the book promises on the cover, it presents a single scenario for a nuclear war, set in the present day. North Korea, perhaps convinced it is about to be attacked, launches a surprise missile strike against the US, leading Washington to respond with a salvo of 50 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). These are aimed at North Korea’s weapons sites and command centres, but in order to reach their intended targets the missiles have to fly over Russia, because they do not have the range to use any other route.
All too aware of the danger of miscalculation, the US president tries to get hold of his Russian counterpart. But the two men and the countries they run are not getting on, and he fails. Making things even worse, Russia’s dodgy satellite early warning system, Tundra, has exaggerated the scale of the US salvo, and from his Siberian bunker, the Russian president (Vladimir Putin in all but name) orders an all-out nuclear attack on the US.
The scenario is based on known facts concerning the world’s nuclear arsenals, systems and doctrine. Those facts are all in the public domain, but Jacobsen believes society has tuned them out, despite (or perhaps because of) how shocking they are.
Jacobsen was stunned to find out that an ICBM strike against North Korea would have to go over Russia, and that Russia’s early warning system is beset with glitches, an especially worrying fact when combined with the knowledge that both the US and Russia have part of their nuclear arsenals ready to launch at a few minutes’ notice. Both also have an option in their nuclear doctrine to “launch on warning”, without waiting for the first incoming warhead to land.
A US president would have a few minutes to make a decision if American early warning systems signaled an incoming attack. In those few minutes, he or she would have to process an urgent, complex and inevitably incomplete stream of information and advice from top defence officials. Jacobsen points out that in such circumstances the president is likely to be subject to “jamming”, a chorus of military voices urging he or she follows protocols which lead inexorably towards a retaliatory launch.
“My jaw dropped at so much of what I learned, which was not classified but had just been removed or rather sanitised from the public discourse,” she said. “I found myself constantly surprised by the insanity of what I learned, coupled with the fact that it’s all there for the public to know.”
Ultimately, only presidents can make the decision and once it is made, no one has the authority to block it. It is called sole authority, and it is almost certainly the most frightening fact in the world today. It means a handful of men each have the power to end the world in a few minutes, without having to consult anyone.
It is not a group anyone would choose to have that responsibility, including as it does the likes of Putin and Kim Jong-un. In Washington it is a choice this year between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. They all bring a lot of human frailty, anger, fear and paranoia to a potential decision that could end the planet.
You would want to have a commander-in-chief who is of sound mind, who is fully in control of his mental capacity, who is not volatile, who is not subject to anger,” Jacobsen said, referring to this year’s presidential election.
“These are significant character qualities that should be thought about when people vote for president, for the simple reason that the president has sole authority to launch nuclear weapons.”
- Nuclear War: A Scenario is published in the US by Dutton
The Nuclear Explosion That Makes US Aid to Israel Illegal
President Carter noted in his White House dairy at the time, “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.”
Under US law, Israel must be banned from receiving its annual package of billions of dollars and arsenal of bombs.
Americans are being deliberately lied to by their own government as to Israel’s vast and deadly nuclear stockpile, largely built with nuclear materials stolen from the United States.
At the same time that US administrations were failing to enforce the ban on nuclear weapons testing by Israel, they also deliberately engaged in a campaign of censorship, lies, and disinformation to hide the truth from the American public
Israel’s nuclear program has been in violation of international law for decades, rendering it ineligible for American assistance.
JAMES BAMFORD, 1 April 24 https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-nuclear-weapons/
The researchers were startled as they looked up and saw the coal-black sky suddenly turn into a brilliant, multicolored aurora. As geophysicists with Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute, they were wintering over at an isolated ice station near Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land, a place where the temperature has dropped to as low as minus-50 degrees Fahrenheit. At about the same time, half the earth away in Puerto Rico, the giant 1,000-foot Arecibo radio telescope picked up an unusual disturbance. An odd and powerful electromagnetic ripple appeared on the lower surface of the ionosphere. And 1,200 miles to the north on the Atlantic coast of Florida, in a secret US government lab, long thin styluses like a spider’s legs began swinging back and forth tracing two hump-shaped images on a rolling sheet of graph paper.
The computer’s action was triggered by a signal from a satellite in the frigid blackness of deep space, 67,000 miles above Earth. Shaped like a giant, 26-sided Christmas tree ornament and hanging weightlessly in the empty void, VELA 6911 was one of a series of satellites designed to act as America’s sentinels in space, watching for signs of nuclear detonations on any part of the planet. And in the early morning of September 22, 1979, at 00:52:43 UTC, VELA 6911’s sensitive instruments recorded what appeared to be a very bright flash, followed quickly by a second. They were the classic indicators of a powerful nuclear explosion. Somewhere down below, as close as someone can come to terra incognita, a rogue country had set off a nuclear bomb. A rogue country that was hoping not to get caught. It was the first and only time in history that a clandestine nuclear blast has taken place. And based on its analysis, US intelligence agencies concluded that the rogue country was Israel.
Now, 45 years later, that explosion could play a significant role in bringing an end to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza by using American lawfare to halt Israeli warfare—finally enforcing US laws that would cut off all aid, including the billions and billions of dollars and the tons and tons of weapons Israel now receives. For decades, these laws, enacted by Congress to halt harmful and destructive actions by rogue actors, have been deliberately ignored with regard to Israel. Clearly, they must now be enforced.
Just this week, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, issued a report titled, “Anatomy of a Genocide.” It declared that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met.” A few days earlier, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had warned that “any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel” could violate international humanitarian law. This week, a Gallup poll indicated that most Americans disapprove of Israel’s war in Gaza as well as of sending them military aid to fight it.
Hours after the sky lit up from the blast, confirmation that it was a nuclear explosion came from another US government facility, this one on remote Ascension Island. A bleak and rugged volcanic speck in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, it lies near the equator between Africa and South America and is one of the most secret places on the planet. No one is allowed on the island without the approval of the US and British governments. In addition to a massive British eavesdropping base that targets countries on both continents, the island is also home to an American facility that monitors all undersea activity throughout the Atlantic. And because, at a certain depth, hydroacoustic signals travel through the water at about 5,000 feet per second, the sound of the massive blast was detected about 110 minutes after it took place.
In the netherworld of US intelligence, the rogue atomic explosion was shocking. The Jimmy Carter White House was quickly notified, and, following a series of highly classified meetings, spy agencies became unanimous in their view. “The Intelligence Community has high confidence, after intense technical scrutiny of satellite data, that a low yield atmospheric nuclear explosion occurred in the early morning hours of September 22,” said a Secret/Sensitive Department of State document.
Attention, as a result, turned immediately to Israel. Its nuclear facility in the desert at Dimona had long since ceased to be a secret, and the question wasn’t whether Israel could construct a nuclear weapon but how many it had already built. However, while constructing them secretly inside a building is one thing, secretly testing them out in the open without getting caught is much more difficult. Addressing the issue of “A Secret Test by Israel,” another CIA document outlined a number of reasons the state might have wanted to carry out a hidden nuclear test. Among them was “developing the fission trigger [an atom bomb] for a thermonuclear weapon [an hydrogen bomb]…. A low-yield nuclear test conducted clandestinely at sea could have enabled them to make basic measurements of the device’s performance.”
The report concluded, “Indeed, of all the countries which might have been responsible for the 22 September event, Israel would probably have been the only one for which a clandestine approach would have been virtually its only option.” And President Carter noted in his White House dairy at the time, “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.”
The VELA satellite system was designed in particular to watch for rogue tests by nuclear pariah states like Israel, one of the very few countries that had refused to sign both the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention, in spite of the fact that it had an illegal hidden arsenal of nuclear weapons and a secret biological weapons program. The problem for Israel—and a key reason for the secrecy involving the tests—was the Glenn Amendment to the US Arms Export Control Act. Passed by Congress in 1977, the amendment aimed particularly at the nuclear pariah states. It mandated an end to arms assistance, and an automatic application of extensive US sanctions, if the president determined that any state (other than the nuclear states authorized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) detonated a nuclear explosive after 1977. The nuclear test was also a clear violation of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, to which Israel was a party.
Under US law, Israel must be banned from receiving its annual package of billions of dollars and arsenal of bombs. In a 2016 Haaretz column, Victor Gilinsky, a physicist and former commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, laid out the penalties: “The sanctions for detonating a nuclear explosion are tough: termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, termination of sales of defense equipment and military financing, prohibition of loans from US banks, and more. In other words, if the U.S. government were to conclude Israel detonated a nuclear explosion after 1977, the law, unless waived, would effectively end all US aid to Israel.” Newell Highsmith, who spent three decades with the State Department and was responsible for legal issues related to nonproliferation, agrees. “Glenn Amendment sanctions for detonation or receipt of a nuclear explosive device have been viewed as a ‘death sentence’ because of the breadth of sanctions and because there is no presidential waiver,” he wrote last year for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In addition to the violation of the Glenn Amendment, Israel is also in violation of the Symington Amendment, which has similar penalties for any country that delivers nuclear materials and technology to another country. Israel had a long history of friendship and cooperation with apartheid South Africa, and in addition to supplying millions of dollars worth of weapons to help violently suppress the country’s Black majority population, it also provided nuclear weapons materials and offered to sell the racist regime nuclear warheads to keep it in power. In return, Israel received uranium from South Africa to develop its weapons.
For decades, US presidents and members of Congress have willfully turned a blind eye to Israel’s extensive violations of American laws. Earlier this month, Maryland Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen and seven other senators, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jeff Merkley of Oregon, sent a strong letter to President Joe Biden. It urged him to enforce section 6201 of the Foreign Assistance Act by requiring Israel to stop restricting humanitarian aid access to Gaza or forfeit military aid from the US. The law prohibits the sale and transfer of military weapons to any nation that restricts the delivery of US aid, precisely what Israel is doing in its deliberate war of starvation against Palestinian civilians in Gaza. “We need the president and the Biden administration to push harder and to use all the levers of US policy to ensure people don’t die of starvation,” Van Hollen told The Guardian.
At the same time that US administrations were failing to enforce the ban on nuclear weapons testing by Israel, they also deliberately engaged in a campaign of censorship, lies, and disinformation to hide the truth from the American public. The Clinton White House even promulgated a regulation that threatens past and present government employees with harsh actions, including firing, if they publicly acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons. “All US government employees are forced to pretend they know nothing about Israeli nuclear weapons,” former NRC commissioner Gilinsky wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Since everyone knows it’s not true, the pretense hobbles America’s policy on restraining the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East.”
Because of this official gag order, Americans are deliberately kept in the dark regarding the dangerousness of Israel’s illegal stockpile of nuclear weapons—weapons that have never been subject to international inspection and are therefore of questionable safety. And then there is the problem of that secret cache of nuclear weapons being controlled by a number of top Israeli officials whose extreme positions would sanction their use. Last November, Israeli Minister Amichai Eliyahu said one of Israel’s options in the war is to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza. “That’s one way,” he said. Another Israeli official, Revital “Tally” Gotliv, urged her government to use “everything in its arsenal,” including “doomsday” weapons, against Hamas. “Who would have imagined that, just as we have been worrying about Pakistani weapons falling into the hands of Islamic fanatics, we would come to the point where we have to fear Israel’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Israeli fanatics?” said Gilinsky.
With hundreds of drone attacks in the region and missiles flying back and forth, there is also the danger of one of them deliberately or accidentally hitting Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant and setting off a nuclear catastrophe. Last October, according to Israeli reports, “Incoming rocket sirens are sounding in the Southern Negev region, close to the southern city of Dimona.” Adding to the danger is more than half a century’s worth of volatile nuclear waste, numbering hundreds of tons, in shallow trenches at the nuclear weapons complex—material that, unless carefully disposed of, could turn Dimona into another Chernobyl.
Americans are being deliberately lied to by their own government as to Israel’s vast and deadly nuclear stockpile, largely built with nuclear materials stolen from the United States. For those on Capitol Hill and in the White House, the incentive for keeping Israel’s secret—and thus allowing it to avoid US laws—is money and power. Millions in campaign donations from wealthy pro-Israel supporters and PACs, and power from lobbies like AIPAC. In 1979, rather than take any actions against Israel, President Carter, like those in the White House before and after him, did nothing. Carter has acknowledged this in years since, writing that the “reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts” of AIPAC.
The strength of AIPAC is something CNN’s Wolf Blitzer knows a great deal about. Before his gig with cable news, he was a top propagandist for AIPAC. There is, he noted, “a widely held attitude among Israeli officials that Israel can get away with the most outrageous things. There is a notion among many Israelis that their American counterparts are not too bright, that they can be ‘handled.’”
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders apparently agrees, having repeatedly warned that Israel is violating both international and US laws. “To pretend that Israel is not violating international law or interfering with US humanitarian aid is absurd on its face,” he said this week. “The State Department’s position makes a mockery of US law and assurances provided to Congress.” Nevertheless, he concluded that “relatively few Democrats are prepared to pull the trigger and say, ‘You know what, hey, Mr. Netanyahu. You continue that and you’re not getting another nickel in American aid.’ Why’s that so? I guess it has a lot to do with AIPAC.”
Sanders then pointed his finger at the White House. “And it’s a lot to do with the president,” he said. Indeed, Joe Biden, during his time in the Senate, was the number-one recipient in Congress of pro-Israel millions—which apparently put him at the top of Israel’s list of “not-too-bright American politicians” that can be “handled” with bags of cash. While vice president in 2011, Biden gave an address to a group of fundraisers and supporters of the Yeshiva Beth Yehuda school in Detroit. “I’ve raised more money from AIPAC than some of you have,” he said to applause. “You think I’m kidding, don’t you,” he added. “I’m not.”
For the White House and Congress, it’s time to rip off the gag, stop being “handled,” reject the cash, and enforce the law with Israel—including the Glenn and Symington amendments. If its leaders want to secretly explode nuclear weapons, sell nuclear materials to racist countries, violate treaties, commit war crimes, and engage in ethnic genocide, America’s billions, bombs, and backing should not be making it possible.
Bomber Biden Doesn’t Wage Peace, Save Civilians or Listen to American Antiwar Crimes Advocates
By Ralph Nader, SCHEERPOST, March 29, 2024
Joe Biden has long had a problem with PEACE – as in “ceasefires,” “serious peace negotiations,” and conditioning the transfer or sale of major weapons systems as required by five U.S. criminal statutes. From one side of his mouth, Biden urges futilely Israeli compliance with international law while on the other side he supports the daily shipment of weapons of mass destruction to the Israeli government. These weapons are being used in the genocidal killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
A majority in Congress is even more hawkish and lets Biden do whatever he wants in making war abroad. The cornerstone of our Constitution – the separation of powers – has been demolished in area after area. (See, our open letter of November 28, 2023, to the members of the U.S. Congress).
By contrast, American public opinion has turned against U.S. arms shipments to Israel and the annihilation of Palestinian civilians from infants to the elderly. Whole extended families are being wiped out by American-made bombs and missiles. The homeless survivors are injured, starving and suffering from untold illnesses.
The Israeli state terror is producing a Palestinian Holocaust. Netanyahu’s violent anti-semitism against the Arabs of Palestine is out of control. Many courageous Israeli human rights groups protest, to no avail, (See, the December 13, 2023, open letter to Biden that appeared in the New York Times) as Netanyahu and his extremist coalition reveal their long-time objective of driving millions of Palestinians out of what is left of their Palestine…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
What can turn our country around? An organized citizenry of less than one percent of the voters in Congressional Districts, giving voice to the voiceless majority, can free Congress from its captivity imposed by the forces of greed, power and violent Empire, draining resources from our dire domestic needs.
As I wrote in the Capitol Hill Citizen (February/March 2024 issue), Congress has become a weapon of mass destruction with multiple warheads. Only the people can recover their sovereign power, under the Constitution, now delegated to a Congress that sells out to the highest corporatist bidders.
On the Israeli slaughter of Gaza’s people, a small but growing number of Democrats in Congress are standing tall. They need your active backing to expand their numbers. (See, Ceasefire Tracker: https://workingfamilies.org/ceasefire-tracker/).
As for the cruel, vicious, genocidal, maniacal Republicans, they remain disgraced in their full-throttled support for Netanyahu, who is fighting for his job, trying to escape Israeli prosecutors and is hugely unpopular in Israel.
The GOP position was expressed by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton – a lawyer no less – who said last October, for posterity’s eternal damnation: “As far as I’m concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza.” This is exactly what the massacring Israeli juggernauts have done with the weapons, taxpayers’ money and diplomatic cover enabled by corrupt outlaws like Tom Cotton. https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/30/ralph-nader-bomber-biden-doesnt-wage-peace-save-civilians-or-listen-to-american-antiwar-crimes-advocates/
Missing Links in Textbook History: War
According to the Institute for National Strategic Studies: “The most highly prized attribute of private contractors is that they reduce troop requirements by replacing military personnel. This reduces the military and political resources that must be dedicated to the war.”
By Jim Mamer , ScheerPost, 28 Mar 24
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military- industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)
n the late 1980s I had a student in an American history class who said that the United States won the war in Vietnam. I felt dizzy. Maybe I had misunderstood. So, I asked him to explain. “My father,” he told the class, “said that we had won the war because we won most of the battles and we killed more of them than they killed of us.”
My instinct was to attempt to impose logic on the discussion. American aircraft, I said, dropped millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than twice what the U.S. dropped in all of World War II. That, of course, killed a lot of people, but it did not win the war.
That student was not convinced and I quickly realized that I would not change his mind. Not long after, I discovered that he and his father were not alone.
Ignorance or Amnesia?
The late Gore Vidal famously referred to this country as the “United States of Amnesia.” He had a point. As a society, we don’t seem to learn much from past experiences and even what we think we remember is often blurry.
In a 2003 episode of “Democracy Now!” Vidal reported that George W. Bush had managed to have a number of presidential papers put beyond the reach of historians for a great length of time. Making historical records unavailable, he predicted, will worsen America’s amnesia: “There will be no functioning historical memory … we are creating a lobotomized nation wherein the connections between essential parts of our history are severed from what is taught.”…………………………………………………………..
Glenn Greenwald blames some of the misunderstanding on journalists. He began a recent edition of System Update by talking about how journalists report on war. “One of the most important parts of journalism, when it comes to war, is to scrutinize, and investigate and debunk propaganda that comes from every side in every war.” Unfortunately, he concludes, journalists often fail to scrutinize, investigate and debunk.
I have argued some of the blame should be put on state approved textbooks which often fail, in Vidal’s words, to make the vital connections, due to what I call “missing links.
The Often-Invisible Agenda of Corporate Media
In 2005, Norman Solomon wrote an article titled “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex,” where he describes the connections of the military-industrial complex to corporate media.
“Firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment. Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant.”
Because so much of the media is now tied to corporate sponsors or serves the agenda of one political party most Americans are never exposed to real debate. Highly paid broadcasters may be fearful of offending their corporate paymasters when they report on a war involving the United States, especially when their reports have been given a veneer of credibility from “experts” drawn from the ranks of retired military officers, retired CIA personnel and former FBI officials.
As a result, there is virtually no media coverage of weapons manufacturers and the profits they make. Just imagine the impact it would make if reports from war zones that we are deeply involved with, like Gaza or Ukraine, were followed by listings of the profits made by various weapon-making conglomerates like Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Boeing, General Dynamics or Raytheon?
How much do we know about American Wars?
To understand the gravity of the situation it helps to have a sense of how many American wars have been fought and how many conflicts we are currently involved with. The numbers differ according to the source largely because wars are sometimes grouped under umbrella terms like the Caribbean wars, the Cold War or the War on Terror.
According to Wikipedia, the United States has been involved in 107 wars since its founding and 41 of these were fought against the Indigenous peoples of North America. Most of these wars are ignored by schools, textbooks and the media, but the pressure to become involved in additional conflict is ever-present and comes from a variety of sources.
When Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense for President George Bush Sr., he contracted engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root (then part of Halliburton) to identify traditional military jobs that could be taken over by private sector contractors. It turned out there were a lot of jobs for the private sector and ever since the use of contractors has grown in positions like conducting intelligence, training local military, handling security and assisting in drone warfare.
At times the number of private contractors has been larger than that of enlisted troops……………………………
According to the Institute for National Strategic Studies: “The most highly prized attribute of private contractors is that they reduce troop requirements by replacing military personnel. This reduces the military and political resources that must be dedicated to the war.”
Public Citizen reports that “Every year, the defense industry donates millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress, creating pressure on the legislative branch to fund specific weapons systems, maintain an extremely high Pentagon budget, and add ever more military spending.”
They also report that the pressure to spend more is constant, even though “nearly 50% of the Pentagon budget” already goes to private contractors. According to the report, in 2022 the weapons/defense industry donated $10.2 million to the 84 members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
Even the language employed to report on war is structured to confuse. Invented phrases resemble Orwell’s Newspeak, from the novel 1984, meant to prevent too much thought. How else to explain the birth of misleading terms like “protective reaction strike” (an attack) “enhanced interrogation techniques” (torture), “extraordinary rendition” (kidnapping), “collateral damage” (extra dead), or “targeted killings” (usually with a lot of collateral damage).
The Art of Promoting Misunderstanding
What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is,
What can you make people believe that you have done?
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. High school textbooks all discuss early American wars, but usually without analysis. What follows are examples of how three early wars are discussed in textbooks………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Are we headed toward Forever Wars?
Republicans and Democrats disagree today on many issues, but they are united in their resolve that the United States must remain the world’s greatest military power. This bipartisan commitment to maintaining American supremacy has become a political signature of our times.
— Andrew J. Bacevich, American Imperium 2016
……………………………..describing our history as one damn war after another.
How else to respond to the Wikipedia list of 107 wars involving the United States since 1787. And the wars continue. In his book “The United States of War,” David Vine reports that, “In the nearly two decades since U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military has fought in at least 22 countries.”
In his analysis of American wars Andrew Bacevich writes that “the constructed image of the past to which most Americans habitually subscribe prevents them from seeing other possibilities.” This “constructed image” is basically one of the United States as largely innocent of aggression, but forced by circumstance to defend itself.
In order to identify the missing links in the textbook treatments of American wars, it is important to look beyond the minutiae of single events and the unique characteristics of each conflict and look for common threads in the motivations towards engaging in war.
We have a government financed and influenced by Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex idea, and a population which seems either uninformed or uninterested.
The combination invites a future of permanent war.
Common threads include the ever-present assertion that the United States is defending itself whenever it goes to war and that includes wars engaged in while assembling a nation that would span the continent, as the song goes, “from sea to shining sea.”
How accurate were American claims of self-defense regarding American participation in the three early wars I reviewed?
…………………………………………………… If Andrew Bacevich is correct in saying we in the U.S. have a bipartisan congressional commitment to maintaining American supremacy, then more wars are inevitable. If we are to escape a future of forever wars, all justifications for war should be questioned and debated before the killing starts. https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/28/missing-links-in-textbook-history-war/
Biden Is Quietly Funding Nuclear Weapons Upgrades That Could Imperil the Planet
The continued funding of nuclear weapons development is a pork barrel of herculean proportions.
By Jonathan King & Richard Krushnic , TRUTHOUT, March 29, 2024, https://truthout.org/articles/biden-is-quietly-funding-nuclear-weapons-upgrades-that-could-imperil-the-planet/
President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech failed to discuss a critical matter — the administration’s funding for the upgrading of all three legs of the nuclear weapons triad: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), submarines and bomber aircraft. The upgrades, new weapons systems and production of new nuclear warheads are estimated to cost taxpayers over $2 trillion dollars over the next 20 years.
Biden spent some time during the SOTU addressing the deficit and correctly attributed part of it to the Trump tax cuts. But a significant piece of the deficit is due to the extraordinary $886 billion in military spending, more than half of the U.S. government’s discretionary budget. An increasing piece of the bloated military budget is for the nuclear weapons upgrade. The projected cost of the replacement of the 480 land-based missiles with the new “Sentinel” missiles has already risen above $756 billion over the next decade. Building new weapons can only increase the chance of nuclear war — which few of us would survive. Even if those weapons are never used, the enormous cost defers funding for housing, health care, biomedical research, food and nutrition, Veteran’s Affairs and education.
Biden could have included in his “predecessor” critique the desertion of the Iran treaty, withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties. But he didn’t. He could have referred to the passage of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and the fact that the START Treaty is still in force as offering hope for increased security. But he didn’t.
Perhaps Biden, despite his saber-rattling toward Putin in the opening of the SOTU, is not planning on garnering support for these programs by traditional Cold War drumbeating — as did Reagan with his attacks on the Soviet “Evil Empire.” Instead, his administration appears to be following a stealth strategy of keeping Americans from learning how their tax dollars are being misspent.
What’s more likely is that Biden is concerned these expenditures will be recognized as the giant pork barrel that they are. Consider the replacement of the Minuteman ICBMs with the new Sentinels. There is no military justification for this project. The ICBMs are totally vulnerable since their fixed locations are known with precision; in addition, once launched they can’t be recalled or retargeted. If launched, that will lead to the counter launching of missiles targeted at U.S. cities, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of Americans.
Clearly, the biggest contribution of the ICBM force to U.S. national security would be their retirement. However the combined influence of the ICBM caucus of senators from the missile site states, the Air Force, together with major contractor Northrop Grumman, and the other contractors who receive these cost-plus contracts, is driving the funding of replacements. According to analyst William Hartung, “The top 11 contractors working on the new ICBM spent more than $119 million on lobbying in 2019 and 2020 and employed 380 lobbyists.”
Arguments that retiring the ICBMs would weaken the U.S. nuclear deterrent are baseless. The remaining nuclear weapons forces would still represent mind-boggling nuclear overkill.
Because of secrecy, assessing the precise number of U.S. nuclear weapons deployed and in storage using U.S. government sources is difficult. However, a reliable lower limit is provided by the Nuclear Notebook, a publication of the Nuclear Information Project (NIP) of the Federation of American Scientists. These NIP sources are for 2023. The report concludes that there were approximately 5,550 warheads in the U.S. arsenal. This is almost certainly too low, since battlefield weapons like nuclear-armed artillery shells, are probably not included. We estimate that deployed nuclear weapons for the submarine-based and airborne legs of the triad include 2,140 warheads, all of which are many times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan.
The deployed weapons include 700 W76-1 warheads on Trident missile submarines of 90 kiloton yield; 200 W-80-1 warheads on Trident missile submarine of 475 kiloton yield; 170 Bomber bombs with W-80-1 warheads of five and 15-170 kilotons; and 120 Bomber bombs with B61-7 warheads of 10-340 kilotons.
Weapons in reserve include 330 W-80-1 Trident Missile Submarine warheads of 475 kiloton yield; 800 W-76-1 Trident missile submarine warheads of 90 kilotons; 168 B-61-7 bombs for long range bombers of 10-340 kilotons. We estimate 2224 in this category.
The destructive capacity of these thousands of weapons is almost beyond comprehension: Just one of the 14 Ohio-class submarines, with multiple missiles and multiple independently targeted warheads on each missile, can obliterate all the major cities of any nation in the world.
In fact, the continued funding of nuclear weapons development is a pork barrel of herculean proportions, funneling tax dollars from all Americans into the pockets of the nuclear weapons industry. We suspect that the Biden administration’s silence represents their decision to keep this boondoggle out of public view.
Jonathan King and Richard Krushnic are members of the Nuclear Disarmament Working Group of Mass Peace Action, and write frequently on the costs of nuclear weapons production and deployment
A third category includes 1536 “stockpiled” nuclear weapons.
The First Annual Plutonium Trail Caravan is on Saturday April 6th – Join Us!
March 29th, 2024, https://nuclearactive.org/
Did you know that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was supposed to complete its 25-year waste disposal mission and begin closing on Tuesday, March 26th? You may know about it because WIPP officials had a party. https://www.rdrnews.com/news/state/new-mexico-regulators-worry-about-us-plans-to-ship-radioactive-waste-back-from-texas/article_00e04fb6-ed72-5ec6-aabb-cc35a01d12f0.html
But for those living downwind and downstream of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and along the WIPP transportation routes, the risk of the federal Department of Energy (DOE) operations at both facilities will continue to threaten us, and if DOE has its way, for decades to come.
DOE, which owns both facilities, is not planning to close either site. LANL is to continue to generate plutonium-contaminated wastes by fabricating the triggers, or pits, for new nuclear weapons. DOE hopes to leave some of that waste at LANL forever. Some waste would be shipped to WIPP, a journey of 315 miles, for disposal.
Rather than closing WIPP, DOE has no plans for any other repository, so the world’s only operating deep underground facility would also operate forever.
But many New Mexicans oppose “Forever WIPP.” https://stopforeverwipp.org/
On Saturday, April 6th, the first annual Plutonium Trail Caravan will travel along the WIPP transportation route. It will begin at Camel Rock and end with a press conference at the Lamy Train Station. The purpose is to highlight some of the dangers of WIPP and waste transportation and encourage people to join in the effort to Stop Forever WIPP.
The caravan will have literature about WIPP and items for sale. The participants can answer questions about present and future activities. More information is available at https://stopforeverwipp.org/
The caravan will gather at 9:30 am at the Camel Rock geologic formation on the frontage road to U.S. 84/285 in Tesuque for a blessing, a safety briefing, and a group photo.
There will be four stops along the WIPP waste transportation route– in the Tesuque Village, the Solano Shopping Center in Santa Fe, the intersection of Airport Road and the 599 By-pass around Santa Fe, and the Agora Shopping Center in El Dorado.
After the four stops, a press conference will be held at the Lamy Train Station at 3:15 pm. Speakers include Hank Hughes, Santa Fe County Commission Chair; Myrriah Gómez, author of Nuclear Nuevo México; Destiny Ray, of Youth United for Climate Crisis Action, or YUCCA; and Ashley Schannauer, an activist and concerned citizen. They will speak about their concerns and suggest ideas for working together to oppose Forever WIPP. Please join us!
U.S, government to give $1.52 billion loan guarantee to Holtec to resuscitate Palisades Nuclear Plant.
Biden-Harris Administration Announces $1.5 Billion Conditional Commitment to Holtec Palisades to Support Recommission of Michigan Nuclear Power Plant
ENERG.GOV, MARCH 27, 2024
COVERT TOWNSHIP, MI — As part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) through its Loan Programs Office (LPO) today announced the offer of a conditional commitment of up to $1.52 billion for a loan guarantee to Holtec Palisades to finance the restoration and resumption of service of an 800-MW electric nuclear generating station in Covert Township, Michigan. The project aims to bring back online the Palisades Nuclear Plant, which ceased operations in May 2022, and upgrade it to produce baseload clean power until at least 2051, subject to U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing approvals. …………………………………………………
While this conditional commitment demonstrates the Department’s intent to finance the project, the company must satisfy certain technical, legal, environmental, and financial conditions before the Department enters into definitive financing documents and funds the loan. ………………….. https://www.energy.gov/articles/biden-harris-administration-announces-15-billion-conditional-commitment-holtec-palisades
New NATO member Finland admits US pact ‘restricts sovereignty’
The DCA gives the American military access to 15 bases in Finland and allows the deployment of military equipment and supplies on Finnish territory, as well as the free movement of US aircraft, ships, and vehicles. Members of the US military and the facilities they use would also get special legal protections.
29 Mar 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/490230-New-NATO-member-admits-US-pact-restricts-sovereignty
A military agreement with Washington comes at a cost, Helsinki has acknowledged
A new military cooperation deal agreed with Washington will limit Helsinki’s sovereignty, the Finnish Foreign Ministry said on Thursday, advising that its ratification will therefore require a two-thirds majority in the parliament.
Finland joined NATO in April 2023, abandoning a decades-long policy of neutrality. It began negotiating a Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) with the US almost immediately, and signed it last December.
A working group led by the Foreign Ministry was set up to draft the ratification protocols which were formally sent to the country’s parliament for comments on Thursday, the ministry announced.
“The working group concludes that the DCA would restrict Finland’s sovereignty, which is why Parliament’s acceptance of the agreement would require a two-thirds majority of the votes cast,” the ministry press release said. The parliament has until May 12 to comment on the draft proposal.
The DCA gives the American military access to 15 bases in Finland and allows the deployment of military equipment and supplies on Finnish territory, as well as the free movement of US aircraft, ships, and vehicles. Members of the US military and the facilities they use would also get special legal protections.
When the DCA was signed, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Hakkanen said it was “a guarantee from the world’s largest military power that they will defend us.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by saying that Helsinki previously enjoyed cordial relations with Moscow and had no disputes, territorial or otherwise, but chose to side with the US-led bloc anyway.
“There was no trouble. Now there will be,” Putin said in December. “We will now create the Leningrad Military District and concentrate certain military units there.”
Comment: As has happened before, the step from EU to NATO was a matter of time. The Finnish government managed to sell the concept of joining NATO, next is to improve on the level of subjugation, let the US do more of what it wants within Finland, thus moving from being a mere vassal to becoming a more fully occupied state. Finland is not alone, somewhat similar agreements have been concluded between the US and the other Nordic countries.
Trump more blatant about supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza than Biden
Walt Zlotow , 29 Mar 24, https://heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com/2024/03/trump-more-blatant-about-supporting.html
Trump more blatant about supporting Israeli genocide in Gaza than Biden
When it comes Israeli genocide in Gaza, President Biden speaks mutely…but wields a genocidal stick. Fully aware he’s enabling the genocide of 2,300,000 Palestinians there, he conducts his endless support with weapons, vetoes or abstentions of UN ceasefire resolutions by pretending all he’s doing is defending a ‘great ally.’
But no such reticence from Trump. He glories in cheering on the Israeli slaughter there. He boasted he’d have done the same thing as Israel but chides Israel: “You (Israel) gotta get it done. And, I am sure you will do that. And we gotta get to peace, we can’t have this going on. And I will say, Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support, you have to finish up, you have to get the job done”
For Trump, the ongoing US enabled genocide in Gaza boils down to a PR problem. If only Israel finishes off the Palestinians, they will stop losing worldwide support.
Good grief. We have the incumbent presidential candidate quietly enabling genocide in Gaza. We have the challenger publically demanding Israel “get the job (genocide) done.”
1 This Month
No Nuclear in Cwm Llynfi! Stop the nuclear power station near Maesteg.
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- September 2026 (144)
- August 2026 (330)
- July 2026 (355)
- June 2026 (287)
- May 2026 (306)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (267)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (375)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 