‘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.

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

April 2, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, resources - print, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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.

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.

April 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, Legal, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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/

April 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA | Leave a comment

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……………………………

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/

March 31, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, USA | Leave a comment

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.

March 31, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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 26^th? 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!

March 31, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, USA | Leave a comment

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

March 31, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

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.

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.

March 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Finland, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

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.”

March 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Most Americans now disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza new poll reveals as tensions rise between allies.

By Ryan King, March 27, 2024, https://nypost.com/2024/03/27/us-news/most-americans-now-disapprove-of-israels-military-action-in-gaza-poll/

A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s military operations against the Hamas terror group in the Gaza Strip.

A Gallup survey released Wednesday found that 55% of US adults disapprove of the Jewish state’s actions in Gaza while just 36% approve — a dramatic turnaround from November, when 50% approved of Israeli action in Gaza while 45% disapproved in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack.

The poll was published as relations between the Biden administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hit a new low over the conduct of the nearly six-month-old war — including plans for the Israel Defense Forces to conduct operations in the densely populated southern Gaza city of Rafah.

Wednesday’s poll found that just 18% of self-identified Democrats approved of Israeli action in Gaza, down from 36% in November, while 75% disapproved.

Pro-Israel feeling has also waned among self-identified Republicans, with 64% approving of the military response (down from 71% in November) and 30% disapproving.

Fewer than three in 10 self-described independents approve of Israel’s actions, while 60% say they disapprove.

Support for Israel was higher among respondents who said they were following the war in the Middle East “very closely.”

Among that group, 43% said they approved of Israel’s action, compared with 37% approval among those tracking events “somewhat closely” and 27% who said they were “not following closely.”

Last week, Gallup revealed that Biden’s approval rating for his handling of the Middle East conflict stood at just 27%, his lowest for any major issue.

On Monday, the US allowed the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution calling for an “immediate” cease-fire in Gaza by abstaining rather than exercising its veto. The measure notably did not condition a cease-fire on the release of an estimated 100 hostages held in Gaza since Oct. 7, along with the remains of around 30 prisoners believed to have died in captivity.

Top Israeli officials publicly lashed out at the Biden administration over the move and Netanyahu scrapped plans to dispatch a delegation to Washington to discuss the Rafah situation.

Still, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and national security adviser Jake Sullivan this week.

Negotiations taking place in Qatar meant to secure the release of hostages also quickly broke down after Hamas demanded Israel withdraw its troops from Gaza and approve an exchange of Palestinian prisoners.

The Gallup poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points and was taken from March 1 to 20 among 1,016 adults.

March 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | public opinion, USA | Leave a comment

US, Germany Supplied 99% of Israel Weapons Import Despite Pressure: Data

JOE SABALLA, MARCH 26, 2024, https://www.thedefensepost.com/2024/03/26/us-germany-israel-weapons/

“At the end of 2023, the US rapidly delivered thousands of guided bombs and missiles to Israel,” the SIPRI report noted, adding that 61 combat aircraft from the US and four submarines from Germany are pending delivery.

SIPRI claimed that the weapons Israel imported from its allies have played a major role in its military actions against Hamas and Hezbollah.

Global Pressure

The data was released amid international calls to stop arming Israel, which has been carrying out relentless ground and aerial attacks on Gaza.

Since the war broke out between Hamas militants and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in October last year, more than 32,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed.

Canada recently ordered a halt in arms exports to Jerusalem as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau weighed in on Israel’s right to defend itself and the alleged lack of action to protect civilian lives.

Eight American senators have also sent a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to stop supplying weapons to the country’s Middle Eastern ally.

They said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s actions against humanitarian operations have prevented Washington from safely and easily delivering aid to Gaza.

Media reports have claimed that the relationship between the two leaders has been strained following Biden’s call to scale down the Israeli offensive in the Palestinian territory.

March 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Germany, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Spending Unlimited – The Pentagon’s Budget Follies Come at a High Price.

More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.

BY JULIA GLEDHILL AND WILLIAM D. HARTUNG, MARCH 26, 2024, https://tomdispatch.com/spending-unlimited-2/

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.

Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.

Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.

And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.

Defending “the Free World”?

President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.

Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.

As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.

Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less

Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increase

Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.

Defending “the Free World”?

Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less

Take the Navy’s top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the “ultimate backstop” for global deterrence. As a key part of this country’s never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy’s most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn’t implemented a single one of the GAO’s six recommendations to help keep it on track.

As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time — a wildly unrealistic goal — despite it being the “largest and most complex submarine” in its history.

Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as “concurrent development.” Building systems before they’re fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer’s expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that’s not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America’s most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.

Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 million. Annual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.

Reining in the Military-Industrial Complex

One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.” Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon’s already enormous budget.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department’s wish list that have little to do with “defense” in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country’s “defense industrial base” and further supersize the military-industrial complex — an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders — from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress — benefit from such spending sprees.

Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration’s stubborn continuation of support for Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.

The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.
The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse — particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America’s major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.

Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won’t change that.

March 28, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US to Palestinians: ‘Tighten your belts, our food pier still 2 months away’

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 27 Mar 24

US ships heading toward Gaza to build American’s food delivering pier are sputtering along at 10 to 15 knots. The USVA Gen. Frank Besson Jr has been refueling in the Azores since Friday. Once underway it still has 5,000 miles to traverse before reaching destination. All other ships are behind the Besson, with 2 not having left the US yet.

With starvation rampant in Gaza, thanks to US enabling the Israeli genocide there, Uncle Sam sure is taking his sweet time creating infrastructure to deliver food aid. It won’t do much good even if completed since Israel blocks most aid in entering Gaza. Might be that our benevolent Uncle is giving Israel time to complete their genocidal ethnic cleansing so we can just pack up and go home.

If the US treated the Berliners being starved by the Russians in 1948 like they’re treating the Palestinians being starved in Gaza, Berlin would have fallen to the Russkies pretty damn quick.

March 28, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, USA | Leave a comment

House Democrats Tell Biden To Enforce US Law and Suspend Military Aid to Israel

Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons stockpile also violates US foreign assistance laws that prohibit US aid to nuclear-armed states that don’t sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US gets around this law by not officially acknowledging that Israel has nukes

Foreign assistance laws prohibit military aid to countries that are blocking humanitarian aid

by Dave DeCamp March 24, 2024 https://news.antiwar.com/2024/03/24/house-democrats-tell-biden-to-enforce-us-law-and-suspend-military-aid-to-israel/

Six senior House Democrats sent a letter to President Biden on Saturday urging him to invoke US foreign assistance laws to suspend military aid to Israel due to the country’s starvation blockade on Gaza

“Given the catastrophic and devolving humanitarian situation in Gaza, we urge you to enforce the Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act (Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act) and, as required by that law, make clear to the Israeli government that so long as Israel continues to restrict the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the continued provision of US security assistance to Israel would constitute a violation of existing US law and must be restricted,” the letter reads.

Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act says that no assistance shall be given “to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

Israel’s blockade and restrictions on aid have put Gaza’s population on the brink of famine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently acknowledged that 100% of Gaza’s population is “experiencing severe levels of acute food insecurity,” but the Biden administration continues to provide unconditional military support for the Israeli campaign.

The letter to Biden comes as Blinken is supposed to certify whether Israel has made credible and reliable written commitments to use US weapons according to US and international law. Israel submitted a letter this month claiming it will comply with the law, and the deadline for the US certification is Monday.

Subsection (b) of Section 620I says that the president can waive the restriction if he believes providing military aid is in the US’s “national security interest.” US support for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza provoked an uptick in attacks on US forces in the region and Houthi attacks on Israel-linked commercial shipping, which the US has responded to by launching a new bombing campaign in Yemen. The risk of a major regional war continues to rise, but American politicians still claim that supporting Israel’s genocidal campaign is in the US national interest.

The letter sent to Biden was signed by Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), James P. McGovern (D-MA), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Chellie Pingree (D-ME). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and seven Democratic senators sent a similar letter to Biden earlier this month.

March 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

NRC admits San Onofre Holtec nuclear waste canisters are all damaged

San Onofre Safety.org, 29/11/2018

The San Onofre Holtec nuclear waste thin-wall storage canisters and system are lemons and must be replaced with thick-wall casks. There are no other safe options.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) admits in their November 28, 2018 NRC Inspection Report and Notice of Violation, ML18332A357 (page 8 and 9) every Holtec canister downloaded into the storage holes is damaged due to inadequate clearance between the canister and the divider shell in the storage hole (vault). The NRC states canister
walls are already “worn”. This results in cracks. Once cracks start, they continue to grow through the wall.

The NRC stated Southern California Edison (and Holtec) knew about this since January 2018, but continued to load 29 canisters anyway. Edison’s August 24, 2018 press release states they plan to finish loading mid 2019.
The NRC states Edison must stop loading canisters until this issue is resolved. However, there is no method to inspect or repair cracking canisters and the NRC knows this.
The NRC should admit the Holtec system is a lemon — a significant defective engineering design. They should revoke both San Onofre and Holtec dry storage system licenses.
The NRC should require all San Onofre thin-wall canisters be replaced with thick-wall transportable storage casks.
These are the only proven dry storage systems that can be inspected, maintained, repaired and monitored in a manner to prevent major radiological releases and explosions.

California state agencies should revoke San Onofre permits and withhold Decommissioning Trust Funds until these issues are resolved.
The Navy should consider revoking the San Onofre Camp Pendleton lease until Edison agrees to replace thin-walled canisters with proven thick-wall transportable storage casks. This is a national security issue…………………………………………https://sanonofresafety.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/nrc-allholteccanistersdamaged2018-11-29.pd

March 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

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