nuclear-news

Project 2025’s stance on nuclear testing: A dangerous step back

By Tom Armbruster | September 6, 2024,
https://thebulletin.org/2024/09/project-2025s-stance-on-nuclear-testing-a-dangerous-step-back/

There are few places more peaceful than a Pacific island. At 6:45 am on a March morning in 1954, that peace was shattered by the largest nuclear test in American history: Operation Bravo.

The Bravo test was a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Now, 70 years later, Project 2025 is proposing a resumption of testing. That should alarm every military service member, downwinder, Pacific Islander, and taxpayer.

As US Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, I joined in the solemn observance of “Remembrance Day,” the Marshallese national holiday that pays tribute every March 1 to those who lost their homeland, fell victim to cancer, or were otherwise affected by the Bravo shockwave and fallout.

The shorthand for the 67 nuclear tests from 1946 to 1958, including two undersea tests that wiped out rich Pacific marine life, is the “Nuclear Legacy.” It would be more accurate to call it the “Nuclear Wound.” The tests on Bikini, Enewetak, and Kwajalein wounded the land and the ocean, the people—both Marshallese and American servicemen—and the relationship between our two countries. Healing is marked in decades, if not centuries.

We’ve had the nuclear tiger by the tail for a long time. No leader of any country would want their legacy to be the use of such indiscriminate and destructive weapons. When I joined the Foreign Service from Hawaii, Ronald Reagan was President. A chance for nuclear disarmament came and went with his summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Today, the Soviet Union is gone but nuclear weapons are still here. We’ve made progress, but Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-free world remains out of reach. Until we achieve that goal, maintaining a test ban is in everyone’s interest. It is part of the legacy we leave our children.

I’ve stood on the Runit Dome concrete cap that covers the nuclear scrap that was bulldozed into a pit. That is also part of the legacy. As Nuclear Affairs Officer at the US Embassy in Moscow, I also visited some of the vast Russian nuclear architecture. I joined the late Sen. Pete Domenici (R-New Mexico) on a trip to Arzamas-16, a once-secret Russian nuclear city now known as Sarov. We saw abandoned ballrooms with torn curtains and dusty grand pianos, a testament to the empty result of spending on nuclear weapons. A waste of millions of dollars, rubles, or whatever currency used by the nuclear actor.

On page 431, Project 2025 calls for the United States to “Reject ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and indicate a willingness to conduct nuclear tests in response to adversary nuclear developments if necessary. This will require that the National Nuclear Security Administration be directed to move to immediate test readiness… .”

The Project 2025 proposal is a tremendous step backwards. We should be negotiating further cuts in the world’s nuclear arsenals, a prohibition of weapons in outer space, and cleanup of the “legacy” test sites around the world. It would help if Russia were a responsible partner in denuclearization but sadly that is not the case. We could be working together to find ways to mend the planet, rather than inflict further damage that will last for thousands of years.

The planet is resilient. Even sharks have returned to Bikini, although the sons and daughters of those displaced by testing have not. Pacific Islanders would never allow a return to testing in the Pacific, but no one on Earth should ever wake up again to a test like Bravo.

September 10, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

White House pushes for AUKUS to move to ‘pillar two’ weapons focus

SMH, By Peter Hartcher, September 9, 2024

The US is pushing for the AUKUS partnership to launch some world-leading new military technology projects before Joe Biden’s presidency ends, amid signs of growing impatience with the initiative.

The US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, revealed in an interview at the White House that he wanted to see “two or three signature projects launched and under way by the time the administration finishes” on January 20.

While he expressed satisfaction with progress on so-called pillar one of AUKUS, the submarine program, his timeline for pillar two’s cutting-edge tech scheme puts new pressure on the three countries’ military and scientific agencies to deliver in the next five months.

It is three years ago this month that the leaders of the US, UK and Australia announced the joint technology initiative. In the meantime, China has extended its advantage in critical technologies, according to a report last week by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

A former senior official in the Trump administration expressed frustration: “On the science and technology side, I think there are problems because we’re not moving fast enough,” said Nadia Schadlow, Deputy National Security Adviser to the former president.

“If AUKUS doesn’t perform, if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do and what we said it would do, we almost might be better off without it because if we can’t fulfil our objectives, we almost look weaker.”

Pillar two of AUKUS was assigned eight priority research fields: advanced cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, undersea capabilities, hypersonics, electronic warfare, innovation, and information sharing……………………

officials said privately that there were problems of co-ordination, that each of the country’s systems was different and moved at different speeds………………………….  https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/white-house-pushes-for-aukus-to-move-to-pillar-two-weapons-focus-20240908-p5k8s5.html

September 9, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear Roulette: The U.S. Nuclear Employment Guideline

CounterPunch, by Mark Muhich, 6 Sept 24

The U.S. Nuclear Employment Guideline Report, according to Department of Defense websites, appears to be a detailed target menu in the event the president orders a nuclear attack. It is required of the executive by Congress, Section 491, when the president alters the nuclear weapons strategy of the U.S. As alluded to by top-ranking administration leaders and reported in the New York Times, the revised Nuclear Employment Guideline signed by President Biden reflects China’s expanding nuclear arsenal.

The president sets the nation’s nuclear strategy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff develop the tactical plans to achieve the president’s strategy, according to DOD literature.

As China, People’s Republic of China, has increased its manufacture of nuclear weapons in the past five years much faster than defense analysts had predicted, the U.S. has turned the focus of its nuclear guideline toward the PRC.  China now possesses around 500 nuclear warheads. And while the U.S. and Russia each currently deploy around 1,700 nuclear warheads each, China is on pace to equal that number by 2035.

Similarly threatening to the U.S. is the prospect of China coordinating its nuclear capability with that of Russia, and even with North Korea, now harboring around 60 nuclear warheads and a growing fleet of intercontinental missiles to deliver them.

China has also made aggressive territorial claims to the South China Sea and vows to gain control of Taiwan by any means necessary, definitively by 2049. This July China suspended nuclear weapons control talks with the U.S. citing increased military arms sales to Taiwan by the U.S.

Yet, China has recently dissuaded Russia from threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, or against western states that might deploy soldiers to Ukraine. And China repeated its call for the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula in joint meetings with Japan and South Korea in May of this year.

Significantly, China maintains its posture of No First Use of nuclear weapons and repeated calls last week for the other leading nuclear-armed nations, Russia, France, U.K and the U.S. to adopt a No First Use nuclear policy. India and China are the only nuclear-armed nations to affirm NFU.

One of the architects of the revised U.S. Nuclear Employment Guidelines is Vipin Narang, Acting Assistant Director of Department of Defense Space Agency. During his retirement speech from DOD this August, Narang blamed China and Russia for failed arms control talks. Before returning to lecture at M.I.T. Narang said China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal was threatening, and that moving its nuclear-armed missiles to “launch on warning” status was provocative.

Narang did not share that the U.S. possesses more than ten times the number of nuclear warheads, 5,580, as China has. Nor that the entire fleet of U.S. Air Force  Minuteman missiles has been on “launch on alert” status for sixty years.

Failing arms control negotiations with Russia result from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s announced withdrawal from the NewSTART nuclear weapons treaty in 2026, according to Narang. NewSTART is the only remaining arms control treaty now in effect between Russia and the U.S. It successfully decommissioned thousands of nuclear warhead and missile launchers from each arsenal since its ratification in 2010.  For the deteriorating state of U.S. Russia talks, Narang did not cite the failure of the U.S. to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1996, the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty in 2001 or withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, INF in 2019.

Narang’s bleak address to his DOD colleagues warned them to “prepare for a world where constraints on nuclear weapons arsenals disappear entirely”……………………………………………………………….

Missing from Narang’s calculus, is the decision many countries have already made to forgo nuclear arsenal all together. Indeed, the majority of nation-states, pursuant of their own security, have rejected the deployment of nuclear weapons on their soil. The majority of humankind regard nuclear weapons as inherently destabilizing and dangerous and of no military value.

When 193 countries voted for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty, NPT, in 1970, they agreed not only to halt the spread of nuclear weapons but to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, and “cease the nuclear arms race”. The NPT places the onus on the nuclear powers to eliminate all nuclear weapons at an “early date”. All nuclear weapons would eventually come under the control of an international agency as agreed in the NPT’s Article VI.

The international control of military arms and especially nuclear weapons was the lifelong goal of Albert Einstein…………………………………………………………………………..

Even more consequential is the growing effort begun in the United Nations General Assembly to outlaw nuclear weapons, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, TPNW. Endorsed by 122 countries in the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 is now ratified or acceded to by 70 countries, banning nuclear weapons from their jurisdictions.

As the U.S. and the other nuclear powers drift further and further from the goal of nuclear disarmament, they double down on their nuclear arsenals and invest in new platforms to deliver their nuclear payloads. Is it too late to build credible assurances that these awful weapons will never be used? It will never be too late to eschew these horrible weapons, unless or until some brilliant leader orders a nuclear attack.

……………………………………………………………………………………………… “Nuclear weapons are totally irrational”, said Ronald Reagan, they are “totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing people, possible destruction of life on Earth and civilization.” There is no theory that will change the brutal absurdity of nuclear weapons nor transform them into logical agents of peace and security.

In Thomas Schelling’s application of game theory to nuclear weapons the object of deterrence is to convince the adversary not to use their weapons and vice versa. If nuclear deterrence is the stated goal of the U.S. nuclear posture, then adopting a No First Use of nuclear weapon either by treaty or unilaterally is the clear choice. China and India have done so for decades. No First Use makes perfect sense. Repelling conventional assaults should not be part of the nuclear employment equation. Nuclear weapons are not just more powerful conventional weapons. If they are ever used in war again the consequences are unpredictable and beyond any risk assessment.

 It is past time to end the U.S.’ “nuclear ambiguity”. Take the nuclear option off the table. Abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty; refuse to renew the nuclear arms race.  We cannot win security or freedom in a game of nuclear roulette. But we can and will lose everything if we continue to bet on nuclear weapons. What folly.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/nuclear-roulette-the-u-s-nuclear-employment-guideline/

September 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment