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July 19, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Activists Challenge US Nukes In Germany, Occupy Nuclear Weapons Bunker

Activists prepare to enter Büchel Air Base in Büchel, Germany to challenge US nuclear weapons deployment. From left, Bonnie Urfer, Steve Baggarly, Susan Crane, John LaForge, and Gerd Buentzly. (photo by Ralph Hutchison)

By John LaForge

Büchel, Germany — The theory that nuclear weapons provide state security is a fiction believed by millions. Last night Monday, July 17, five of us proved that the story of ”high security” nuclear weapon facilities is just as fictitious.

After nightfall, an international group of five peace activists, me included, got deep inside the Büchel Air Base here, and for the first time in a 21-year long series of protests against its deployment of US nuclear bombs, we occupied the top of one of the large bunkers which stores nuclear weapons. We could scarcely believe we’d reached the inner sanctum of a nuclear war planning zone.

After hiking along two shadowy farm roads, shushing down a dark row of tall corn, crossing a brightly lit air base road, and tramping noisily through a few wooded brambles, our small group cut through two chain-link fences, bumbled past a giant hanger, and under the wing of a jet fighter bomber, to reach a double fence surrounding the giant earth-covered bunkers. After we cut through the two non-electrified exterior fences without tripping a single alarm or even causing the lights to snap on, the five of us scurried up to the top of the sod-padded, wide-topped concrete quonset hut. Totally unnoticed, we spent over an hour chatting, star gazing, checking our radiation monitor, and enjoying being flabbergasted that our implausible plan had worked. This was supposedly one of the most tightly controlled places in the world.

No motion detector or alarm, no Klieg light or guard had noticed our intrusion at all. Then it started getting cold. We’d come prepared for days, weeks or months in jail, but not for being outside all night. So two members of the group climbed down to scratch “DISARM NOW” on the bunker’s giant metal front door, setting off an alarm. They hustled back up to the others and were soon surrounded by vehicle spot lights and guards searching on foot with flashlights. We decided to alert guards to our presence by singing ‘The Vine & Fig Tree,’ prompting them for the first time to look up. We were eventually taken into custody, more than two hours after entering the base. After being detained, searched, photographed for an hour, we were released without charges, although some may be pending.

The five, Baggarly, Susan Crane, 73, of California, Bonnie Urfer, 65, of Wisconsin, Gerd Buentzly, 67, of Germany, and I, said in a prepared statement, “We are nonviolent and have entered Büchel Air Base to denounce the nuclear weapons deployed here. We ask Germany to either disarm the weapons or send them back to the United States for disarming….” The US still deploys up to 20 B61 gravity bombs at the air base and German pilots train to use them in war from their Tornado jet fighter bombers.

The bunker occupation, known as a “go-in” action by German anti-nuclear campaigners, was the fourth act of civil resistance during “international week” at the base, organized by “Non-violent Action to Abolish Nukes” (GAAA). More than 60 people from around the world — Russia, China, Mexico, Germany, Britain, the US, the Netherlands, France and Belgium — participated. The effort was in turn part of a 20-week-long series of actions — “Twenty Weeks for Twenty Bombs” — that was begun March 26, 2017 by a 50-group Germany-wide coalition called Büchel is Everywhere, Nuclear Weapons Free Now!”

A combination of two earlier actions succeeded in winning a meeting with the base commander ”Oberstleutnant” Gregor Schlemmer. At the site of a base blockade earlier July 17, the commander personally approached the protesters — something unheard of in the United States — and accepted a copy of the newly-adopted UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons from Sister Ardeth Platte, OP, of Baltimore, Maryland. A day earlier, as 25 activists walked through shockingly unlocked main entrance gates, spontaneously lowered the US flag, and ”put bread not bombs” around the retired jet bombers on display, Sr. Platte and Sr. Carol Gilbert, OP also of Baltimore, demanded a meeting with Schlemmer so they could deliver the treaty. The next day’s appearance of the commander made me joke: ”Yesterday we took down the flag, and today the commander surrendered.”

Eleven activists from the United States came to Büchel to put a spotlight on government plans to replace the B61. Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Tennessee — where a new thermonuclear core for the “B61-Model 12” will be manufactured — said, “It is important that we show this is a global movement. The resistance to nuclear weapons is not limited to one country.” The new B61-12 program will cost more than $12 billion, and “when production starts sometime after 2020, Büchel is scheduled to get new nuclear bombs. Nothing could be stupider when Germany wants the out and the world wants to abolish nuclear weapons,” he said.

US delegate Susan Crane, a Plowshares activist and member of the Redwood City, Calif. Catholic Worker, said, “Around 3:00 a.m. while we were detained, Schlemmer the Commander came to meet us and said what we did was very dangerous and that we might have been shot. We believe the greater danger comes from the nuclear bombs that are deployed at the Base.”

June 30, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Rockets’ Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air

Library image: US Marines fire a Howitzer in northern Syria on March 24th 2017 in support of Coalition operations. (Photo: Airwars.org, via USMC/ Cpl. Zachery C. Laning)

A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.

With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. US drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from super-carriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Sat., June 24 when US bombs destroyed four houses.

Every child killed or maimed by US-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013 in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “US military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”

Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass US military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.

If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by US drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017 directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.

US offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]

In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a US gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.

The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The US dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.

Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”

Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.

This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as US drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” —John LaForge

June 27, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Legal Evolution: World Welcomes Draft Treaty Ban on Nuclear Weapons

By John LaForge

Summer Quarterly 2017

The United Nations General Assembly, New York, New York.

Last March, over 130 countries joined in long-sought after negotiations for a global treaty ban on nuclear weapons, successfully fending off coercive efforts by the United States and other nuclear-armed states to de-fund and derail the campaign. On May 22, 2017, the language of a “Draft Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” was delivered to the United Nations for final negotiations taking place from June 15 to July 7 in New York.

Notwithstanding a president who opposes the treaty and who may know less about nuclear weapons than most highschoolers, the vast majority of the world’s people welcome the draft treaty.

Last summer, Donald Trump famously asked, “If we have ‘em [nuclear weapons], why can’t we use ‘em?” although tens of thousands of citizens, along with generals, legal experts, governments, churches, religious leaders and UN resolutions have for decades been explaining exactly why.

At the National Press Club on Feb. 2, 1998, General George Butler, a former commander of US Strategic Air Command, authoritatively answered Mr. Trump: “The likely consequences of nuclear weapons have no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification.”

Gen. Butler’s famously startling speech was informed by countless books, articles, archives and studies. His experience and reflection led him to say about H-bombs that, “The unbounded wantonness of their effects … transcend time and space, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation. They leave us wholly without defense, expunge all hope for meaningful survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations but the very meaning of civilization.” The same year, Gen. Butler joined 60 other retired generals and admirals calling for nuclear weapons abolition.

What the military retirees have pointedly left unsaid about nuclear weapons is that their use is illegal according to their own Service Manuals. International law scholars have argued at length, some successfully, that together the manuals and the law of nations make any use of H-bombs a crime. Experts including Peter Weiss, Richard Falk, Ann Fagan Ginger, Francis Boyle, John Burroughs, and Matthew Lippman, etc., movement attorneys like Anabel Dwyer, Bill Durland, Bill Quigley, John Bachman, and Kary Love, etc., thousands of legal rights advocates from former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and England’s George Delf, to life-long war resister Dave McReynolds, and hundreds of plowshares disarmament activists from Carl Kabat to Angie Zelter, have all made the case.

The language of the new Draft Convention is comprehensive, compelling and even awe-inspiring. It includes the legally unprecedented acknowledgement that women and girls are more seriously harmed by radiation than the rest of the population. The draft’s Preamble says in part:

“Deeply concerned about the catastrophic consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons and the consequent need to make every effort to ensure that nuclear weapons are never used again under any circumstances,

“Cognizant that the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons transcend national borders, pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and for the health of future generations, and of the disproportionate impact of ionizing radiation on maternal health and on girls, …”

“Affirming that there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control…”

The ban negotiations build on a long history of international treaty development that has challenged the legitimacy of nuclear weapon effects for decades without explicitly outlawing them by name.

In 1907, the Hague Regulations banned the use of poison. Radioactive fallout is poisonous to say the least. Because attacks that are “analogous to gas” warfare are banned by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, nuclear war’s effects, and consequencly any use of them, can be considered illegal. The 1945 Nuremberg Charter, written by US judges, outlaws “planning and preparation” of massacres—a monumental change in treaty law, since it implicates nuclear war planners before their weapons cause mass destruction. Indiscriminate destruction is explicitly forbidden by the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

In 1961, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 1653, “Recalling that the use of weapons of mass destruction, causing unnecessary human suffering, was in the past prohibited…” This early UN resolution declared in part:

“The use of nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons is … a direct violation of the Charter of the United Nations; … would exceed even the scope of war and cause indiscriminate suffering and destruction … and, as such, is contrary to the rules of international law and to the laws of humanity; …. is a war directed not against an enemy or enemies alone but also against mankind [sic] in general, since the peoples of the world not involved in such a war will be subjected to all the evils generated by the use of such weapons; [and] Any State using nuclear and thermonuclear weapons is to be considered as … acting contrary to the laws of humanity and as committing a crime against mankind and civilization…”

In 1996, the UN’s International Court of Justice, or World Court heard arguments from UN Member States on whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons was legal. The judges concluded that “the threat of use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law…” The World Court also reminded the world that the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) requires treaty signers to “bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

The United Sates ratified the NPT which obligates signatories to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” [Emphasis added] Forty-nine years later, “an early date” has finally arrived.

New Treaty Would Ban Nuclear Weapons by Name

The Articles in the new draft treaty declare in part:

“Each State Party undertakes never under any circumstances to: Develop, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; Transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons … directly, or indirectly; Receive the transfer or control over nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices directly, or indirectly; Use nuclear weapons;” or test nuclear weapons.

There are eight pages of detailed rules regarding Obligations, Declarations, Safeguards, Implementation, Costs, Amendments, Disputes, Universality, Duration, Ratification, and Reservations. Dozens of contested issues remain.

Beatrice Fihn, Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, celebrated the progress. “The release of a draft treaty to ban nuclear weapons is a milestone in the decades-long effort to ban these indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction because of their inhumane and catastrophic impacts. Once adopted, the treaty will constitute an important step toward their eventual elimination,” she said.

How about a toast!

June 27, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Chomsky on North Korea’s Provocations & Ours

Editor’s Note: In the context of a broader discussion, M.I.T. Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky, speaking in April in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was asked by Democracy Now news anchor Amy Goodman: “Do you think there is a possibility that the US would attack North Korea?” Chomsky’s answer is instructive in view of the ongoing US/South Korean wargames off the Korean coast which now involve two US aircraft carrier battle groups.

Noam Chomsky: I doubt it very much. The reason is very simple.

An attack on North Korea would unleash … a massive artillery bombardment of Seoul, the biggest city in South Korea and right near the border, which would wipe it out including plenty of American troops. As far as I can see, there is no defense against that.

Furthermore, North Korea could retaliate against American bases in the region where there are plenty of US soldiers. They’d be devastated; North Korea would be finished; so would much of the region. But if attacked, presumably they would respond, very likely. In fact the responses might be automatic. [National Security Advisor, General Herbert Raymond] McMaster at least, and [Secretary of Defense, General James] Mattis understand this. How much influence they have, we don’t know. So I think an attack is unlikely.

But the real question is: Is there a way of dealing with the problem? There are a lot of proposals. Sanctions. A big new missile defense system—which is a major threat to China and will increase tensions there. Military threats of various kinds. Sending an aircraft carrier, the [USS Carl] Vinson to North Korea…. Those are the kind of proposals as to how to solve it.

Actually there’s one proposal that’s ignored. It’s a pretty simple proposal. Remember: the goal is to get North Korea to freeze its weapons and missiles systems.

So, one proposal is to accept their offer to do that. It sounds simple. They have made a proposal—China and North Korea—have proposed to freeze the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons systems and the US instantly rejected it. And you can’t blame that on Trump. Obama did the same thing. A couple of years ago the same offer was presented, I think it was 2015, the Obama administration instantly rejected it.

And the reason is that it calls for a quid pro quo. It says in return the US should put an end to threatening military maneuvers on North Korea’s borders, which happen to include, under Trump, sending of nuclear-capable B52s [and B1 and B2 bombers] flying right near the border.

Maybe Americans don’t remember very well, but North Koreans have a memory of, not too long ago, when North Korea was absolutely flattened, literally, by American bombing. There were literally no targets left.

I really urge people who haven’t done it to read the official American military histories, the Air Quarterly Review, the military histories describing this. They describe it very vividly and accurately. They say there just weren’t any targets left. So what could we do? Well, we decided to attack the dams, the huge dams—a major war crime. People were hanged for it at Nuremberg, but put that aside. And then comes an ecstatic, gleeful description of the bombing of the dams and the huge flow of water which was wiping out valleys and destroying the rice crop, “upon which Asians depend for survival”—lots of racist comments—but all with exaltation and glee. You really have to read it to appreciate it. The North Koreans don’t have to bother reading it. They lived it.

So when nuclear-capable B52s [etc.] are flying on their border, along with other threatening military maneuvers, they’re kind of upset about it. Strange people. And they continue to develop what they see as a potential deterrent that might protect the regime, and the country in fact, from destruction. …

Activists Challenge US Nukes In Germany, Occupy Nuclear Weapons Bunker

Rockets’ Red Glare and Bombs Bursting in Air

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