Nukewatch

July 24, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable

US plans to produce about 500 new tactical nuclear bombs - experts - ВПК.name

The United States intends to produce at least 500 of these new B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs, many of which are scheduled to be deploy at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Turkey.

by John LaForge, LA Progressive, July 26, 2020

Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as “deterrence” when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or “terrorism” if Russia, China, or North Korea does.

U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about 100-to-150 of them known as B61s, are stationed at two NATO bases in Italy, and at one NATO base each in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. These 170-kiloton H-bombs — 11 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — are always described euphemistically as “theater” nuclear weapons, defensive ones that are a “deterrent” to aggression.

Of course, Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown nuclear “deterrence” to be an expensive, destabilizing, terroristic fraud. That our high, holy, sacrosanct, and unquestionable arsenal of “deterrence” did not deter Russia on February 24, 2022 is dreadfully, painfully, catastrophically obvious. Yet the nakedness of the deterrent-less Emperor has hardly been acknowledged.

In the ghastly maw of ongoing war in Ukraine, the needless provocation of stationing U.S. thermonuclear B61 H-bombs at six NATO base’s facing Russia could hardly be more frightening. Then, as if to scream “fire” in the crowded auditorium, NATO’s ministers on June 30 issued their latest “Strategic Concept,” a public relations version of the alliance’s ongoing threat to wage indiscriminate, uncontrollable, and poisonous mass destruction using U.S., French and British nuclear warheads.

The Strategic Concept’s soothing, cotton candy version of NATO’s open embrace of nuclear terrorism is this: “NATO will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

At the moment however, the B61 hydrogen bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel air base cannot credibly be a part of the “mission” since they can’t be attached to Germany’s Tornado fighter jets. This is because the base’s runway is being rebuilt. Until 2026, Büchel’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing of Tornado jets are based at the nearby Nörvenich air base.

For Kathrin Vogler, a Left Party member of the German Parliament in 2021, this is a chance to denuclearize Germany. The politician told the daily paper Rhein-Zeitung last year that “From June 2022 to February 2026, flight operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued and transferred to the Nörvenich military airfield…. This was confirmed to us by the German government in our minor inquiry. As far as we know, the 20 or so nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain there.”

“This means that German nuclear sharing will effectively not take place for four years from 2022,” Volger told the paper.

“This exposes the argumentation of the German government, which repeatedly claims that nuclear sharing is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining it and thus also the Büchel nuclear weapons site is pure symbolic politics, albeit with high risks for the population. Therefore: The suspension of nuclear sharing must become a phase-out, [and] now would be a good opportunity to do so,” Volger said last year.

Proven useless, nuclear weapons can now be discarded

The June 30 NATO “concept” says, “The fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

As of February 24, 2022, NATO’s nuclear weapons arsenal’s “fundamental purpose” has been utterly delegitimized, politically pulverized, and militarily reduced to ashes. The alliance’s nuclear arsenal can finally be removed without any loss of face, much less any loss of security.

NATO’s latest “concept” accidentally acknowledges the uselessness of retaining nuclear weapons in its recognition that, “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance.”

This is the terrible farce of nuclearism. If nuclear weapon threats guaranteed any security at all, none of the tens of billions of Euro-dollars’ worth of military training, weapons, mercenaries, cyber warfare, or intelligence assistance that NATO partners and Russia are now pouring into Ukraine would be necessary.

Nuclear-armed alliances are a thing of the past which must be and now can be abolished. Under the auspices of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, along with the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, international law provides a pathway, training wheels, guide rails and a motorcade — courtesy of the great majority of the world’s governments — to a world where conflict and even wars don’t endanger whole civilizations and the biological integrity of life on earth. ###

— John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.

July 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“No One is Paying Attention to Your Protests”

On the 77th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test and the 43rd anniversary of the catastrophic Church Rock, New Mexico uranium mine waste spill, four US citizens (Susan Crane, Dennis DuVall, John LaForge, Brian Terrell) attempted to blockade the main gate at nuclear weapons base Buchel in west-central Germany.

BÜCHEL, Germany

This pointed insult was shouted without a trace of irony through a chain-link fence toward a group of nuclear weapons opponents last Tuesday by a military guard equipped with binoculars and wearing a camera strapped around his neck.

The protest group was at the perimeter of Büchel Air Force Base in west-central Germany on July 12, the 205th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau — the naturalist and theorist of conscientious defiance of illegitimate authority.

It’s safe to say no one was paying much attention to Thoreau either when he went to jail in July 1846 rather than pay poll taxes that were going to support the expansion of slavery into the western United States and President James Polk’s war on Mexico. It was only later that attention was paid, as Thoreau’s essay “On Resistance to Civil Government” would become a world literary classic regarding principled individual refusal to obey orders in violation of one’s personal integrity. After the Concord, Mass. constable demanded he pay his back taxes, Thoreau explained, “I cannot for an instant recognize … as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also.”

None of the anti-war activists went to jail last Tuesday for picnicking near the Büchel NATO base, but a colleague, Frits ter Kuile, of the Amsterdam Catholic Worker, had just begun a 30-day sentence in Germany’s Wittlich prison, for refusing to pay fines imposed for protests at the same base. Frits is the first non-German citizen jailed in the 26-year-long campaign of civil resistance at the controversial site, where 15-to-20 U.S. hydrogen bombs, known as B61s, are stationed. The old-fashioned, 170-kiloton gravity bombs are called “theatre” nuclear weapons war planners although the terrorism and provocation they produce in Moscow, 1,500 miles east, are anything but theatrical. The Hiroshima bomb that turned 140,000 people to powder and ash was ten times smaller an explosive, 15 kilotons.

German Air Force Tornado fighter jets regularly rehearse nuclear weapons attacks on Russia using weighted replicas of these U.S. nuclear weapons. The exercises, 95 of them in 2021 alone, have names like Cold Response, Defender-Europe 21, Anaconda, Locked Shields, Dragon Ride, Atlantic Resolve, Steadfast Noon, and Iron Wolf. Many of the military practices take place in the former Soviet Bloc countries Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Why Russia, invaded from the West three times in the last century, would be alarmed at these overt demonstrations of aggressive hostility is never considered by our gung-ho commercial media.

Another nuclear weapons resister, Ria Makien, a Quaker from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recently finished a 30-day sentence in a women’s prison for a similar action at the base. Ria’s protest and jail-going has been noticed, as her example of radical nonviolence in opposition to suicidal weapons is recognized across Germany.

Objections to the stationing and threatening posture of U.S. nuclear weapons in Germany (and four other European partners) are based on legal principles and simple common sense which stands aghast at NATO’s eastern expansion and nuclear war games. The 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty prohibits the United States, Germany, and other states parties from transferring nuclear weapons to or receiving them from another NPT state. This makes NATO’s quaintly named “nuclear sharing” an ongoing criminal violation of binding international law. The destabilizing deployments, rehearsals, and threatened use of the U.S. B61s — rationalized in NATO’s newly issued “Strategic Concept” — cannot be distinguished from Russia’s recent nuclear threat-mongering, except in terms of nuance. “NATO’s … posture is based on an appropriate mix of nuclear … capabilities”, the Concept states.

“NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture relies on the United States’ nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe ….” And “NATO will … ensure the credibility … of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

NATO’s cold-blooded “strategic” preparation for meaningless, genocidal atomic violence is cosmetically presented in defensive, sanctimonious, antiseptic language depicting hydrogen bombs as reasonable, measured, protective security blankets. This is a childishly naïve mindset that the wargamers promote but do not share.

Realists like Vicki Elson of NuclearBan.US, who spoke June 21 at a Washington, DC press conference promoting their abolition, described them honestly: they are “climate wrecking, indiscriminate weapons of mass extinction that don’t keep us secure but exacerbate the plunge toward environmental collapse, even without war.” At least Elson is paying attention.

–This column appeared at CounterPunch July 15, 16, 17, 2022

June 26, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Hypocrisies and Successes at Meeting of Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

German Representative Rüdiger Bohn (center) speaking as an “observer” June 22nd at the First Meeting os States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of NuclearWeapons, Vienna, Austria. Photo by John LaForge, for Nukewatch

By John LaForge

VIENNA, Austria — The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 65 governments, known in diplomatic circles as States Parties. The treaty’s first Meeting of States Parties (1MSP) concluded here June 23, after painstakingly working out — in the words of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons — “a blueprint for the end of nuclear weapons.” The new Treaty is the extraordinary, crowning achievement of ICAN, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

At 1MSP, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany — all three of whom use U.S. nuclear weapons on their air force bases — participated as Observer States. The three have not ratified the TPNW, having acquiesced with a string of U.S. administrations — Obama’s, Trump’s, and Biden’s — that conspired at every opportunity to derail, prevent, delay, weaken, and boycott the new ban — in spite of broad public support for nuclear disarmament. Mr. Trump demanded that States Parties withdraw their ratifications. None did. Biden’s White House reportedly urged Japan not to attend the 1MSP as an Observer, and they stayed away.

German and Dutch representatives took their turn and spoke to the MSP on June 22, but both NATO members used exactly the same words to note their government’s explicit disapproval of the TPNW, and to voice their supposed support for the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both representatives said their governments “will not accede to” the nuclear ban treaty “because the TPNW is inconsistent with NATO doctrine.”

The hypocrisy in German and Dutch opposition is that their “sharing” of U.S. nuclear weapons, while consistent with “NATO doctrine” is totally inconsistent with their hallowed Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In fact, their 50-year-long dismissal of the NPT’s binding (Art. VI) obligation to begin negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament “at an early date” is also completely inconsistent with their feigned support for the NPT.

As German Representative Rüdiger Bohn said June 22, NATO “doctrine” includes the doleful edict, “As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear Alliance.” This embrace of genocidal atomic violence is not an Article of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty or NATO Charter. It was manufactured entirely by its nuclear-armed members, and there is no legal obligation for NATO to remain a nuclear-armed terrorist organization.

NATO “doctrine” is fluid, strictly advisory, and accepted voluntarily by its members. Even the NATO Charter’s famous Article 5, regarding collective response to a military attack on a member state, declares only that the NATO membership “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking … such action as it deems necessary.”

In comparison, the Non-Proliferation Treaty is binding international law and includes explicit, unambiguous prohibitions and clear, binding obligations. NATO’s ongoing planning, preparations and ever-present threat to launch nuclear attacks (known as “deterrence”), is simply a ritualized practice which can be ended at any time — say by complying with the NPT’s Articles I and II which prohibit any transfer or reception of nuclear weapons between states, or its Article VI pledge to negotiate nuclear disarmament. Indeed, it is the 50-year-long postponement, or rejection of Art. VI that has prompted and propelled the overwhelming success of the new TPNW.

What might have been a week-long celebration of the TPNW’s progress in seeking a world free of nuclear threats, was dimmed by Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. It was the war’s spoken and unspoken reminders of ready nuclear arsenals in Russia and NATO that moved the MSP to say, in its final Declaration, that it “condemn[s] unequivocally any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances.”

The Declaration castigates nuclear weapons and echoes Daniel Ellsberg’s 1959 essay “The Threat and Practice of Blackmail,” noting that the Bomb is used to coerce, intimidate, plague, curse, and terrify. “This highlights, now more than ever, the fallacy of nuclear deterrence doctrines, which are based and rely on the threat of the actual use of nuclear weapons and, hence, the risks of the destruction of countless lives, of societies, of nations, and of inflicting global catastrophic consequences.”

The Parties agreed to push ahead with resolve to eventually see the nuclear weapons states sign on, saying “In the face of the catastrophic risks posed by nuclear weapons and in the interest of the very survival of humanity, we cannot do otherwise.” ###

— This column ran June 26 at Commondreams, and June 27 at Counterpunch

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Sen. Markey: ‘It’s possible they don’t know what they’re doing’

Company Plans to Dump Radioactive Water from Pilgrim Reactor Into Cape Cod Bay

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By Linda Pentz Gunter

At the conclusion of a close to four-hour public “field hearing” held in the community of Plymouth, Massachusetts on May 6, 2022, Senator Ed Markey, D-MA, pulled no punches.

The Senate hearing invited a number of witnesses to testify on “Issues Facing Communities with Decommissioning Nuclear Plants,” with this session specifically focused on the nearby Pilgrim nuclear reactor, which closed in 2019.

As part of the decommissioning process, Holtec International, the company that purchased the Pilgrim nuclear reactor from previous owner, Entergy, is preparing to dump a million gallons of radioactive water from the site into Cape Cod Bay as part of its decommissioning activities.

As the hearing drew to a close, Markey questioned Holtec’s competency and the leniency of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal regulator ostensibly tasked with protecting public health and safety.

“It’s possible these problems may be more a reflection of its inexperience, and not arrogance,” Markey said of Holtec. “That they don’t know what they are doing.”

A proposed NRC rule-making is in the works that would “update” (read “weaken”) federal decommissioning regulations for the nuclear industry.

“The commission’s proposed decommissioning rule shows it to be a captive agency,” said Markey, one that “shows no interest in engaging the public, which would provide even a semblance of accountability.”

Referring to the NRC’s failure to stop Holtec from looting its own taxpayer-funded decommissioning funds for company profit, Markey added that “without a stronger regulator, I fear that the only thing that will be emptier than the decommissioning trust fund will be the public’s trust in our government.”

Markey serves on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and is chair of its Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety.

John Lubinski, director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, and Holtec International founder, president and CEO Kris Singh, were the key witnesses in Markey’s crosshairs at the hearing.

U.S. Representative Bill Keating, a Massachusetts Democrat whose district includes Plymouth where the Pilgrim reactor is located, joined Senator Markey in questioning the witness panel.

With the license now transferred from Entergy to Holtec, the New Jersey-based company has begun to decommission Pilgrim, dismantling and disposing of the reactor hulk and “cleaning up” the radioactive site.

The decommissioning work includes draining the “spent fuel” pool that sits atop the reactor building and that is presently filled with a million gallons of radioactive water. The water was used to cool and shield hundreds of tons of extremely hot high-level [radioactive] waste (the used irradiated fuel) for the past fifty years.

Any decision-making about the fate of a decommissioned reactor such as Pilgrim, said Markey, should include the meaningful participation of all impacted communities. Instead, he saw decision-making being left solely in the hands of Holtec, the apparent preference of the NRC and its current regulations, together with the agency’s decidedly “hands-off” oversight.

Alternatives to ocean dumping

Both Lubinski and Singh agreed during the hearing that there were alternative ways of dealing with the radioactive water that did not involve directly dumping it into Cape Cod Bay. These would include evaporating the contaminated water into the atmosphere or shipping it off-site by truck or rail to another community.

But these “solutions” are of course far from such, and involve transport risks and environmental justice issues as well.

Currently, one of the two sites being considered to take all of the country’s high-level nuclear waste indefinitely — at what are misleadingly termed Consolidated Interim Storage Sites [emphasis added] — is in New Mexico and owned by, yes, Holtec.

That is indeed where Holtec would like to send the high-level radioactive waste transferred from Pilgrim into its on-site casks. But the liquid waste water left in the fuel pool is what the company wants to dump into the Bay.

That’s because it’s clearly the fastest, cheapest, and easiest method. Indeed, Singh bragged about the rapidity of Holtec’s decommissioning activities at Pilgrim, as if speed f

ills one with confidence. Quite the reverse.

The risks around this greed for speed were already flagged by Union of Concerned Scientists physicist Ed Lyman, who told NBC Boston in January, “The danger, of course, is that in their attempt to reduce the costs and timeline for decommissioning, that they will cut corners in a way that might jeopardize public health and safety.”

When questions arose during the May 6 hearing about the safety of Holtec’s onsite radioactive waste storage casks, Singh said they were not only impermeable to missile attack or a crashing airplane but that one could later “have a barbecue” on top of a cask — a strange choice given the images of fire and nuclear waste do not make happy company.

Naturally, the Cape Cod fishermen and lobster- men’s associations, along with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office and area resident organizations, are vehemently opposed to the radioactive water dumping given the impact it could have on their livelihoods.

Bivalves — especially, oysters, clams and mussels — serve as filters for radioactive isotopes and bioaccumulate radiation.

Two bills that would endeavor to block Holtec’s plan to dump the radioactive water are making their way through the Massachusetts House and Senate.

However, according to reporting by Cape and Islands, it is not clear that a state ban would be sufficient and the radioactive water dump might still go ahead. “The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said repeatedly that Holtec is allowed to do so, within federal limits, and needs no further permits,” the publication reported.

— Linda Pentz Gunter is the editor and curator of BeyondNuclearInternational.org and the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear.

–CounterPunch, May 11, 2022