Nukewatch – Page 185

December 14, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

What Kind of Nuclear Attack Would be Legal?

US General Says Order To Launch Nuclear Weapons Can Be Refused If Illegal —Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18; US Nuclear Commander Would Balk at Any “Illegal” Order —MSNBC, Nov. 18; General Heading Strategic Command Says Illegal Nuclear Launch Order Can Be Refused —NBC News, Nov. 18; Top General Says He Would Resist “Illegal” Nuke Order From Trump —CBS News, Nov. 18; Top US General Says He Would Resist Illegal Nuclear Strike Order From Donald Trump —The Independent, Nov. 18.

These headlines all give the impression that a nuclear attack could be legal in some circumstances. But is this possible? Worried about what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president’s moronic understanding of nuclear weapons, two US generals have testified that they could disobey his orders to attack with nuclear weapons if they were unlawful. The question is: What kind of nuclear attack would be legal?

Air Force General John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, told the Halifax International Security Forum Nov. 18, that an order from the president to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if that order is determined to be illegal. Four days earlier, retired General Robert Kehler, who previously held Gen. Hyten’s top job at Strategic Command, testified likewise to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that nuclear war commanders could “ignore any unlawful order by the president to launch a nuclear strike.”

Generals Hyten and Kehler both said in their unprecedented public comments that the legal principles of “military necessity,” “discriminate destruction,” and “proportionality” all apply to decisions about nuclear attacks. Senator Ben Cardin, D-MD, asked Gen. Kehler if he meant that Strategic Command could disobey a president’s order for a nuclear attack. “Yes,” Kehler said.

Legal scholar George Delf scolded military and civilian authorities who practice this “conventionalization” of nuclear weapons, talking as if they were conventional bombs and munitions. In Humanizing Hell: The Law V. Nuclear Weapons, Delf wrote, “There is something incongruous about lawyers who spend their working week concerned with routine [matters], and a few spare hours arguing against mass murder and the destruction of civilization.”

Saying military officers “could” disobey or “can” refuse unlawful orders understates the case. US military service manuals explicitly require military personal to refuse illegal orders. Everyone sworn in to the service is taught that disobeying illegal orders is mandatory, following them is a crime grounds for court martial. As CNN reported, “Under US military law troops are obligated to not obey an unlawful order. If they received such an order, they could resign or force Trump to fire them.” The point was made during last year’s presidential campaign, when Trump promised to illegally torture prisoners, kill the families of suspected militants, and bomb civilians. CNN reported then that “Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook noted on [Nov. 17, 2016] that all US troops have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.”

Certain Weapons Effects Always Unlawful

More importantly, there is a startling absurdity and a shocking ignorance in these public nuclear war conversations because any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and therefore illegal by definition. Only the uninitiated, uninformed or willfully blind can still imagine that nuclear weapons could be used “proportionately” to produce more military good than evil. The uncontrollable, unlimited, and unfathomable magnitude of nuclear weapons effects have been established as unlawful in countless text books, law journals, government studies and independent analyses.

Any use of nuclear weapons would be illegal because international treaties, protocols covenants, and agreements, as well as military field manuals, forbid indiscriminate destruction, attacks that are disproportionate to a military objective, and weapons’ effects that “wound treacherously,” or harm neutral states, or do long-term damage to the environment.

In her book Thermonuclear Monarchy Professor Elaine Scarry of Harvard reminds us that as long ago as 1995, Sweden, Iran and Egypt argued before the International Court of Justice that since nuclear weapons cause disproportionate suffering, they are prohibited by the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg and the Geneva Protocols of 1925, 1949, and 1977. The Republic of the Marshall Islands argued then that using nuclear weapons would violate the 1907 Hague Conventions prohibiting weapons with effects that cross into neutral states. Both North Korea and India, neither of which possessed nuclear weapons in 1995, wrote to the World Court insisting that it judge them unlawful. India argued that the mere possession of nuclear weapons is illegal under the Charter of the United Nations and international “rules of proportionality.”

Charles Moxley, in his 813-page tome Nuclear Weapons & International Law, puts this list of treaty obligations in perspective: “Nuclear weapons are not illegal just because they violate these laws of war, as exhaustively proven in this volume. They are illegal because they cause widespread and indiscriminate destruction without promoting the purpose of war: resolving conflict … They are not weapons but only wanton machines of symmetric destruction.”

Physical Effects: “Complete ruin”

What the generals and the congressional bureaucrats fail to grasp or teach us to ignore is the vast difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, and that nukes cannot be used in war without killing hundreds of thousands of civilians—that is, without committing war crimes.

Moxley’s Nuclear Weapons & International Law reports that, “A nuclear detonation generates temperatures of 100 million degrees, while a dynamite explosive about 3000 degrees.” What this unimaginable heat does to cities is explained by Lynn Eden in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire. “Mass fire and extensive fire damage would occur in almost every circumstance in which nuclear weapons were detonated in a suburban or urban area. …damage from mass fire would extend two to five times farther than blast damage.”

In 1977, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons notes with understatement, “[P]ersons in buildings or tunnels close to ground zero may be burned by hot gases and dust entering the structure.” In its lengthy consideration of radiation effects, taken from the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, FEMA says in part, “Among them, apart from genetic effects, are the formation of cataracts, nonspecific life shortening, leukemia, other forms of malignant disease, and retarded development of children in utero at the time of the exposure.” As Ann Fagan Ginger noted in her book Nuclear Weapons are Illegal, “They continue to maim and kill long after they explode in a test or in a war.”

A mass fire or “firestorm,” Eden writes, is “the simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, which causes a great volume of air to heat, rise, and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery,” Eden notes. “Within ten minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event—the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212°F, 100°C). This would produce a lethal environment over a vast contiguous area.”

Eden’s research is worth quoting at length. “The first mass fire in history was created by allied incendiary raids at Hamburg on the night of July 27-28, 1943. Within 20 minutes, two of three buildings within an area of 4.5 square miles were on fire. In three to six hours, this fire so completely burned out an area of more than 5 square miles that the area was referred to by damage analysts as the ‘Dead City.’ Well-documented accounts describe wind speeds of hurricane force within the city. Air temperatures were calculated to be between four and five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hundreds of degrees above the temperature of boiling water. [Up to] 100,000 people were killed in the attack. A mass fire resulting from a modern nuclear weapon could be expected to burn out an urban or suburban area of considerably larger size in a similarly brief time.”

Delf’s Humanizing Hell is concise, bold, and direct: “[A]rmed forces are committed by military, domestic and international law not to attack non-combatants. Any government which adopts a defense policy implying such an attack is therefore inciting its own forces to commit war crimes on a gigantic and suicidal scale.” Our military forces should not just disobey such orders but refuse this unlawful incitement. — John LaForge

December 5, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Weapons Test Provocations: US 1,054; North Korea 6

December 1, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Retired Nuclear Warriors v. Active Duty Armageddon

Call it a nuclear clash of titans—but not the crude shouting-match between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. It’s an “armed struggle” is between retired Pentagon bigwigs and current US war planners and weapons contractors.

While the Air Force lurches ahead with plans to design, produce and deploy a replacement for long-range, land-based nuclear-armed missiles, a string of retired military leaders have again called them useless, dangerous and exorbitantly expensive.

Reuters correspondent Scot Paltro reported Nov. 22, “Nuclear strategists call for bold move: scrap ICBM arsenal,” and cited former Secretaries of Defense William Perry and Leon Panetta, former missile launch officer Bruce Blair, former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis (although Mattis recently changed his mind and now supports the replacement plan).

Mr. Perry, the Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1997, and retired US Marine Corps General James Cartwright, a Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011, penned a commentary in the Washington Post Nov. 16, calling for the permanent elimination of our land-based missiles or ICBMs. (“Spending less on nuclear weapons could actually make us safer”)

The thought of slowing the weapons gravy train must have set off alarm bells in the executive suites at Boeing Corp. and Northrop Grumman, Inc. The two weapons profiteers are vying for the $130 billion “cost plus” contract to build a brand new land-based ICBM (to replace 450 Minuteman III missiles currently kept on hair-trigger alert in underground launch sites across the Great Plains).

Last summer, the Air Force awarded the two upstanding, public-spirited companies over $325 million each to put together counter proposals for the new so-called “Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent”—today known as the nuclear-armed “Minuteman” rockets that can fly 13,000 miles. When the contractor’s competition was announced, company executives gave the Washington Examiner a manure spreader full of corporate smooth talk.

Wes Bush, Northrop’s chairman, CEO and president, said, “We look forward to the opportunity to provide the nation with a modern strategic deterrent system that is secure, resilient and affordable.” He and Boeing spokesperson Jerry Drelling—who said “We are honored to … provide an affordable, low-risk intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system solution”—must have anticipated the push back from the critics. They kept repeating the words “affordable,” “secure” and “low-risk.”

Mr. Perry and Gen. Cartwright focused on the reckless endangerment caused by land-based missiles. The weapons are easy stationary targets, they say, and historically are the most likely among nuclear weapons to cause accidents. Using alarmingly harsh language, the two wrote, “There are serious concerns about accidental war that are inherent to ICBMs, which certainly would be the first targets of any surprise attack and cannot be recalled should they be launched in response to what turns out to be a false alarm.”

Perry and Cartwright seemed to be joisting with Boeing’s Director of Strategic Deterrence Systems, Frank McCall, who reminded the Examiner that since 1961, the US Air Force “has relied on our technologies for a safe, secure and reliable ICBM.”

Not so, reported the retired military heavy-weights. “Today, the greatest danger is not a Russian bolt but a US blunder—that we might accidentally stumble into nuclear war,” wrote Perry and Cartwright. “As we make decisions about which weapons to buy, we should use this simple rule: If a nuclear weapon increases the risk of accidental war and is not needed to deter an intentional attack, we should not build it.”

Hitting back against the weapons contractors’ flippant references to “affordability,” Perry and Cartwright used language that could have been taken straight from the pages of Nuclear Heartland, Nukewatch’s 2015 book about the land-based missiles. They argue that the United States “should cancel plans to replace its ground-based ICBMs, which would save $149 billion.”

“Certain nuclear weapons,” the two concluded, “such as the cruise missile and the ICBM, carry higher risks of accidental war that, fortunately, we no longer need to bear. We are safer without these expensive weapons, and it would be foolish to replace them.”

P.S. This label “unsafe, foolish and expensive” applies to all the new nuclear weapons inside the Pentagon’s $1.7 trillion production chain rebuild now underway. Yet plans for a new nuclear-armed submarine, a new heavy bomber, and a new H-bomb for NATO in Europe are somehow embraced or ignored by Perry and Cartwright. It seems that nuclear madness doesn’t completely clear up upon retirement. —John LaForge

November 21, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Minnesota Must Stop Ignoring State & Federal Mining Laws

Acid mine drainage from an abandoned gold mining site in Kantishna Mining District, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Governor Mark Dayton told the St. Paul Pioneer in October that he supports the PolyMet copper sulfide mining proposal, “But they still have to meet the environmental permitting requirements.”

The governor’s qualified endorsement of the controversial PolyMet mining plan raises the question of which environmental requirements have to be met.

Chris Knopf, of Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, makes two crucial points in a Nov. 13 counterpoint in the Mpls StarTrib, “How the proposed PolyMet mine project would violate Minnesota regulations.” First, state law requires PolyMet to “permanently prevent substantially all water from moving through or over the mine waste,” after mine closure. But PolyMet’s plan is to leave mine waste in contact with water for hundreds of years. Second, PolyMet’s and the DNR’s own data, based on rock samples from the proposed site, project the amount of toxic heavy metals to be expected in the contaminated water after mine closure. But this research was set aside and ignored, while irrelevant data from a Yukon Territory mine was substituted — in order to minimize the amount of expected contamination. Tellingly, that mine’s water quality continues to deteriorate, yet state officials have allowed this dubious data switch to go unchallenged.

PolyMet’s plans, as outlined in its 2016 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS), also appear to violate the federal Clean Water Act. Section 404 governing discharges into US waterways requires mining firms to use the “least environmentally damaging practicable alternative,” but this would mean underground extraction rather than open pits, and “dry stack tailings” of fine particle mine waste rather than PolyMet’s plan to dump slurry into unlined seepage ponds. Dry stacking is far less environmentally damaging since it doesn’t threaten groundwater contamination, but Paula Maccabee, an attorney for WaterLegacy, explains that PolyMet’s chose the cheaper options, not the least damaging, without adequate .

Maccabee submitted 80 pages of expert comment on the FEIS and she noted that the Clean Water Act also requires that PolyMet to make written guarantees regarding if and when company-funded cleanup programs will be conducted to fix unplanned “adverse impacts.”

Financial assurances and long-term guarantees

In October 2015, Governor Dayton said he wanted to hire an independent analysis of the financing behind the PolyMet Mining Corp. and its foreign owner, Glencore of Switzerland. Patrick Condon reported in the StarTribune that Dayton had “concerns” about Glencore whose environmental record was “mixed.” “That’s why I think the financial assurance part would be essential.”

That November Dayton followed up on his concerns, saying that if the giant mine was eventually permitted, Minnesota should demand “a rigorous system of community oversight,” like the one required of Upper Michigan’s Eagle mine which he visited that fall. The StarTribune’s Tony Kennedy reported that Dayton “was impressed by Michigan’s decision to require the [Eagle] mine’s owner to pay $300,000 annually into an independent oversight fund.”

As I reported here earlier, Michigan’s Eagle mine is 100 times smaller than the proposed PolyMet open pit. Dayton’s suggestion that Minnesota “should demand the same as Michigan,” means that PolyMet Mining Corp./Glencore should be required to pony up $30 million annually for independent, long-term ground water and surface water monitoring. If mine promoters like US Representative Rick Nolan, D-MN, are correct to predict that giant, open-pit sulfide deposits can be mined using “technological innovations that can mitigate mining’s environmental footprint” like acid mine drainage, then PolyMet/Glencore must guarantee it up front with legally binding agreements.

PolyMet’s own waste water modeling data initially stated that potential acid mine drainage would be a 500-year-long problem, so the water monitoring guarantee needs to amount to a guaranteed bond of $15 billion in today’s dollars.

Enter Phyllis Kahn, the long-time member of the Minnesota House. Kahn has raised the issue of paying for cleanup after the mine closes or following a pollution disaster. In a Nov. 14 letter to the StarTrib, Kahn points out that, historically “throughout the country,” after mine closure or a major mishap “the company goes belly up and the bank or financial institution backing it goes bankrupt.” To protect Minnesota’s water against this financial corruption, Kahn recommends that the state “require a bond issued by a reputable institution like Lloyd’s of London,” noting that the insurer’s refusal to offer a policy “or proposal of an unmeetabe rate” would speak volumes about the likelihood, severity and costs of the mine’s inevitable disasters. — John LaForge

November 14, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“Scientists: Nuclear war would mean worldwide famine death of billions”

Even a very “limited” regional nuclear war would cause firestorms in urban areas that would put tons of black carbon into the stratosphere, where it would spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and could trigger a global nuclear famine.

An enlarged copy of this Sept. 13, 1985 headline from the Mpls. “Star and Tribune” has been on my bulletin board for decades. Back then the scientists explained the consequences of a large-scale nuclear war between the former USSR and the United States. “…the primary mechanisms for human fatalities would likely not be from blast effects, not from thermal radiation burns, and not from ionizing radiation, but, rather, from mass starvation” the US National Academy of Sciences study said, resulting in nuclear winter and “the loss of one to four billion lives.”

Left out of those grim calculations was the effect of mass firestorms caused by nuclear weapons being detonated on urban areas. In her book Whole World on Fire (Cornell Univ. Press, 2004) Lynn Eden notes, “For more than 50 years, the US Government has seriously underestimated damage from nuclear attacks.”

“The failure to include damage from fire in nuclear war plans continues today,” Eden wrote. “Because fire damage has been ignored for the past half-century, high-level US decision makers have been poorly informed, if informed at all, about the extent of damage that nuclear weapons would actually cause. As a result, any US decision to use nuclear weapons almost certainly would be predicated on insufficient and misleading information. If nuclear weapons were used, the physical, social, and political effects could be far more destructive than anticipated.”

“For nuclear weapons of 100 kilotons or more, destruction from fire will be substantially greater than from blast. … Air temperatures in the burning areas after the attack would be well above the boiling point of water; winds, hurricane force,” Eden reported.

In a 1995 letter to Eden, Harold Brode of the Defense Nuclear Agency, which conducted research on nuclear weapons effects, wrote, “The fact is that fire tends to lead to complete destruction in this context…. Because of the enhanced likelihood of spread in the event of a nuclear explosion in an urban center, fire damage is very likely to far exceed blast damage.”

Today, with the US president threatening to “totally destroy” North Korea’s 25 million people, and with three US Navy aircraft carrier battle groups conducting large-scale exercises in the Asia-Pacific involving over 22,500 personnel, it’s worth recalling that fires from even a very “limited” use of a small number of modern nuclear weapons would create so much soot and ash that the consequent collapse of agriculture could cause the famine death of two billion people.

This was the conclusion in November 2013, of Ira Helfand, MD, who wrote “Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk,” 2d Edition, for the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

What nuclear war planners in the Navy and the Air Force, or sociopaths like Mr. Trump ignore or fail to grasp is this, from Whole World on Fire: “Within tens of minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the [nuclear] detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event — the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force…”

In April 2014, a group of US atmospheric and environmental scientists published a corroborating paper titled, “Multi-decadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict.” Its co-authors Michael Mills, Owen Toon, Julia Lee-Taylor, and Alan Robock reported that, “A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 [kiloton] weapons could produce about 5 Tg [teragrams] of black carbon” from mass fires. A teragram/Tg is 1 million metric tons.

These five metric tons of black carbon, the report notes, “would self-loft to the stratosphere, where it would spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and intense heating of the stratosphere. … The combined cooling and enhanced UV [ultra violet radiation] would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.” Of course, much of the black carbon would be radioactive as well causing long-lived contamination of water and food.

The authors conclude that with this understanding of the impacts of mere 100 “small” Hiroshima-sized nuclear detonations (actual US bombs are far more powerful), the world should be motivated to demand “the elimination of the more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today.” — John LaForge