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“Modernization” of Cold War-Era B61 Proceeding Over Broad Objections

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2016-2017

The Obama administration has approved, and Congress in January 2014 fully funded, production of a new thermonuclear warhead under a program dubbed “Life Extension”—the latest version of the B61 known as the B61-12. If completed, it is to be used in war plans involving gravity bombs, as Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris reported in the May 2, 2014 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 

The $537 million 2014 authorization is only a down-payment on the new B61. With a projected cost of $12.2 billion (up from $4 billion in 2010, and $8 billion in 2012), the authors note, the B61-12 is probably the most expensive nuclear bomb in US history. At approximately $25 million apiece, and weighing 700 pounds, each one is estimated to cost more than if it were made of solid gold ($14.6 million).

Reportedly a 300-to-500 kiloton “variable yield” thermonuclear device, the B61-12 will have 24 to 40 times the destructive power of the bomb that turned seven square miles of Hiroshima into powder and ash in 1945. Yet in the jargon of today’s nuclear war planners, the B61 is called a “low yield” nuclear weapon.

For 50 years the B61 has been a reliable federal jobs program for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, which has engineered 15 different versions. Five B61 types are still in the US arsenal: the B61-3, -4, -10 and -7; along with the B61-11 “earth-penetrating” bomb. The administration has announced plans to retire three of these and “convert” the B61-4 into the B61-12.

Of the roughly 820 B61s still in use today, the Bulletin reports, 300 are kept at bases with B61-capable aircraft, “including 184 B61s deployed in Europe.” About 250 B61-7 and 50 B61-11 bombs are stored at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The B61-12 has been in an engineering phase since 2013, and the first production bombs are set to roll out in 2020. About 480 could be built through the mid-2020s.

Storage depots at Büchel Air Base in west-central Germany where up to 20 US Air Force B61 thermo-nuclear gravity bombs are stored for use on German Tornado jet fighter/bombers. The base has been the object of nuclear weapons protests for 20 years.

The US Air Force ‘s B61-3s and -4s are deployed at European NATO bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Turkey—the United States being the only state in the world to deploy its nuclear weapons in other countries.

In their July/Aug. 2014 Foreign Affairs article “Bombs Away: The Case for Phasing Out US Tactical Nukes in Europe,” Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh point out that “One NATO exercise in 1962 estimated that 10-15 million German civilians would be killed in a tactical nuclear exchange.” This self-destructiveness of nuclear war plans helps explain why the US European Command (EUCOM) has given up “advocating for maintaining nuclear weapons in Europe,” the authors report. EUCOM leaders told an oversight task force in 2008 there would be “no military downside to the unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe.” Indeed, “prominent critics … have long argued that the military rationale for keeping nuclear weapons in Europe is an anachronism,” they wrote. In its 2012 posture review, NATO’s ministers pledged to work for a world without nuclear weapons.

In “The Problem With NATO’s Nukes,” in the Feb. 9, 2016 Foreign Affairs, Richard Sokolsky and Gordon Adams report that Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called the B61s “redundant,” and that Gen. Colin Powell favored eliminating them in the 1990s when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Rush to Deploy Before Critics Kill Program

Opposition to the rebuild program is gaining depth and breadth in the US and Europe. US Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., and Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo., tried to curtail the program in 2013. In 2010, five of the US’s NATO partners (Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Norway) asked that the B61s be permanently removed from Europe. In Germany, every major political party has been forced by popular demands to formally call for the permanent withdrawal of the 20 bombs still in Germany.

Major US allies in Europe and high-level European politicians have said that the B61s are “militarily useless.” In a widely published op/ed in 2010, former NATO secretary-general Willy Claes and three senior Belgian politicians wrote, “The US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe have lost all military importance.”

Another reason for the push to deploy rather than retire is that Germany is planning to replace its fleet of Tornado jet fighter/bombers. The enormous expense of building in a B61-12 capacity for the new replacement jet is not lost on the German parliament.

As Der Spiegel online reported Dec. 9, 2016: “By becoming a signatory to the Non-Proliferaton Treaty in 1975, the Germans committed ‘not to receive the transfer of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly.’

“During negotiations over German reunification in 1990, then-Chancellor Kohl also affirmed Germany’s ‘renunciation’ of the manufacture, possession and control of nuclear weapons.’”

 

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War Crimes Charges Against US Citizens Viewed by ICC

“U.S. Drones Hit Civilians, U.N. Says” 
— New York Times, Sept. 30, 2016

“NATO and government forces are increasingly
responsible for Afghan civilian deaths”
— Washington Post, Nov. 3, 2016

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2016-2017

US armed forces and the CIA may have committed war crimes by torturing detainees in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor says in a preliminary report, raising the possibility that US citizens could be indicted.

“Members of US armed forces appear to have subjected at least 61 detained persons to torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity on the territory of Afghanistan between 1 May 2003 and 31 December 2014,” according to the November 14th ICC report issued by Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s office in The Hague.

The report says that between December 2002 and March 2008, CIA operatives may have subjected at least 27 detainees at its secret prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania to “torture, cruel treatment, [and] outrages upon personal dignity” including rape. Individuals captured by US forces in Afghanistan were transferred to secret CIA prisons, sometimes referred to as “black sites.” Prisoners were chained to ceilings, “chained to walls and forgotten [one of them for 17 days] froze to death on concrete floors, and were waterboarded until they lost consciousness” according to the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Report on the torture program.

On Dec. 9, 2005, the State Department’s deputy spokesman Adam Ereli, said the United States would continue to deny the Red Cross access to prisoners it was holding secretly around the world, claiming they were terrorists who were not guaranteed any rights under the Geneva Conventions. The Red Cross complained that its central purpose is to protect the human rights of prisoners, all of whom deserve protection under international humanitarian law—binding treaty laws that include an absolute, unambiguous prohibition against torture under all circumstances.

Over 120 countries are members of the ICC, but the US is not. Although the US refused to join the 2002 Rome Statute that created the ICC and established its authority, US military personnel and CIA agents could still face prosecution because their crimes were allegedly committed within Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, all members of the ICC.

The ICC’s jurisdiction can be invoked when allegations of war crimes are not investigated and prosecuted by the home governments of the accused. The Guardian reported that the “ICC is a court of last resort that takes on cases only when other countries are unable or unwilling to prosecute.” Writing in Foreign Policy magazine last October, David Bosco noted, “The [ICC] prosecutor’s office has repeatedly called attention to alleged abuses of detainees by US personnel between 2003 and 2005 that it believes have not been adequately addressed by the United States.”

“Committed with particular cruelty”

Bensouda’s report about alleged US war crimes says they, “were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals. Rather, they appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract ‘actionable intelligence’ from detainees. The information available suggests that victims were deliberately subjected to physical and psychological violence, and that crimes were allegedly committed with particular cruelty and in a manner that debased the basic human dignity of the victims.”

Reuters noted that the Senate committee released 500 pages of excerpts from its report which found that torture was committed. Official photographs of the abuse are evidently so incriminating that the military, as recently as February 9, 2016, refused to release 1,800 photos never seen by the public.

The Bush/Cheney administration, which authorized and implemented a torture program in Iraq, Afghanistan, secret sites, and the offshore prison at Guantanamo Bay, was fiercely opposed to the ICC, but Afghanistan, Lithuania, Poland and Romania are all members, giving the court jurisdiction over crimes committed within those territories. In 2002, Bush signed into law the American Servicemembers Protection Act which authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a US-allied country being held by the court.

Both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have boasted in public about waterboarding which was sanctioned, “legalized,” and practiced widely under their command authority. Asked during a televised interview about what he called this “enhanced interrogation technique” Mr. Cheney said, “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

During a Republican primary debate Donald Trump said, “I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” a statement he often repeated. Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the NSA, reacted in a televised interview: “If he [Trump] were to order that, once in government, the American armed forces would refuse to act. You are required to not follow an unlawful order. That would be in violation of all the international laws of armed conflict.” President-elect Trump also repeatedly called for targeted assassinations of children and family members of suspected terrorists. Both actions are prohibited by US military service manuals and by international treaty law, crimes ultimately prosecuted by the ICC.

—JL

—Sources: AP; the Guardian, Democracy Now, & Al Jazeera, Nov. 15, 2016; Reuters, Nov. 14, 2016; Foreign Policy, Oct. 31, 2016; “‘Hague Invastion Act’ becomes law,” Human Rights Watch, Aug. 3, 2002

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Dirty Bombs, Undeclared Wars Raise Prospect of US Criminal Culpability

US Uranium Weapons Used in Syria

Nukewatch Quarterly  Winter 2016-17

In October, the Pentagon admitted it used “depleted” uranium weapons in attacks inside Syria—violating its public promise last year that it would not use DU there, and contradicting the government’s promise that US bombing is done in defense of the Syrian people, according to the International Campaign to Ban Uranium Weapons.

US military officials have repeatedly assured the public that US uranium munitions are not known to cause health problems. Made from waste uranium-238—left from H-bomb and reactor fuel production—the heavy shells are called “depleted uranium” or DU. Ironically, the best evidence that DU weapons are dangerously toxic and radioactive, comes from the Pentagon itself. A June 1995 report to Congress by the Army’s Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI) concluded: “Depleted uranium is a radioactive waste and, as such, should be deposited in a licensed repository.”

Military studies done in 1979, ‘90, ‘93, ‘95 and ‘97, make clear that uranium weapons are chemically toxic, alpharadiation-emitting poisons that are a danger to target populations and to invading/occupying US forces alike. In spite of this cautionary written record, the military has been shooting its radioactive waste all over the world: into population centers in Iraq in 1991 (380 tons), in Afghanistan in 2001 (amounts unknown); in Bosnia in 1994-‘95 (five tons); in Kosovo in 1999 (10 tons), in Iraq again in 2003 (170 tons); and now in Syria.

The AEPI report above also says that DU has the potential to generate “significant medical consequences” if it enters the body. The Army’s Office of the Surgeon General, in its Aug. 16, 1993 “Depleted Uranium Safety Training Manual,” says that the expected effects of DU exposure include a possible increase of cancer and kidney damage.

The manual also warns, “When soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust, they incur a potential increase in cancer risk … (lung or bone) and kidney damage.” The Army’s Mobility Equipment, Research & Development Command reported way back in 1979 that, “Not only the people in the immediate vicinity but also people at distances downwind from the fire are faced with potential over exposure to air-borne uranium dust.” This uranium “dust” is generated when DU shells hit and burn through hard targets like tanks or armored vehicles. The uranium is spread for miles by the wind, contaminating everything is its path including food, water, soil, schools, hospitals, etc., and DU is radioactive forever, or ten times 4.5 billion years, whichever comes first.

In 1990, the Army’s Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command radiological task group said that DU is a “low level alpha radiation emitter … linked to cancer when exposures are internal, [and] chemical toxicity causing kidney damage.” It added that “there is no dose so low that the probability of effect is zero.”

With evidence of its radio-toxicity so clear and redundant, any use of uranium weapons today appears to flaunt the military’s own Field Manual prohibition— absolute and universal—against the use of poison or poisoned weapons.

Historical disregard revisited

The military has a long history of deliberately exposing US citizens and others to deadly risks without their knowledge or consent, beginning with the open-air nuclear bomb tests it knew would contaminate vast areas.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chose not to evacuate or even warn downwind populations it knew would be hard-hit by radioactive fallout. (“Fallout risk near atom tests was known, documents show,” New York Times, March 15, 1995.) These bomb tests exposed Nevada Test Site workers to levels of radiation that the AEC knew could cause harm, but the agency chose not to reduce workers’ exposures or to even inform them of the risks because doing so would have scandalized and halted the bombing tests. (“Records say workers faced high radiation: Suit contends US used no safeguards,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, Dec. 14, 1989.)

Likewise, the government refused to inform some 600,000 H-bomb factory workers that workplace radiation exposures posed serious health risks, although enough was known about radiation to warn them in 1948. (“N-plant workers not told of risks: Report says US arms program exposed many to radiation,” Associated Press, Dec. 19, 1989.) Between 1944 and 1974, “medicalized” human radiation experiments were even conducted on unwitting US citizens, 16,000 of them. (The Plutonium Files, by Eileen Welsome, Delta, 1999.)

Today, the Pentagon extends this ghastly history into Syria where it is deliberately exposing human beings to weaponized radiation that it knows can cause cancer and other diseases. As if the undeclared, unconstitutional war in Syria weren’t unlawful enough, now add the crime of using poison in violation of military law, the Hague Regulations of War on Land, and the Geneva Conventions.

Arguing that uranium weapons are poison, a group of four non-lawyers, myself included, convinced a Minneapolis jury in 2004 that AlliantTechsystems Corporation’s manufacture of the shells is unlawful, and potentially criminal enough to excuse a misdemeanor trespass. We argued our minor offense was justified in order to prevent the greater harm of DU weapons production. The use of poison in war is always prohibited, as is the case with gas warfare and torture. This latest US government crime of war must be condemned in the harshest terms. —JL

For more information on DU weapons and the global effort to have them banned, see ICBUW.org.

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What’s Wrong with a Few Nuclear Weapons?

Editor’s Note: In an open letter to President-elect Trump about nuclear weapons and nuclear winter published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dr. Alan Robock, of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University, explained the current state of scientific knowledge regarding the self-destructive effects of nuclear weapons detonations. Science informs much of the drive for a nuclear weapons treaty ban that would prohibit their production, possession, sale and use. Dr. Robock wrote in part:

“In the 1980s, American and Russian scientists, working together, discovered that smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the sun, turning Earth cold, dark, and dry, killing plants, and preventing agriculture for at least a year. In the last decade, working with some of the same scientists, particularly Richard Turco, Brian Toon, and Georgiy Stenchikov, and using modern climate models, I found that this nuclear winter theory was correct, that the effects would persist for more than a decade, and that the New START-reduced nuclear arsenals will still be able to produce this nuclear winter.

“It is an unfortunate fact that cities burn. San Francisco burned for three days and nights after the earthquake in 1906. Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden, Darmstadt, and multiple Japanese cities burned after bombing in World War II. Some modern buildings burn even more easily, as can be seen in the skyscraper fires started with discarded cigarettes in Dubai. Modern megacities would produce a lot more smoke than the assumptions made in previous studies.

“We also found that if either the United States or Russia attacked the other with their current arsenal, it would produce so much climate change that it would kill everyone in the country that did the attacking, even if there was no retaliation. This means we live in a world of Self-Assured Destruction (SAD) in addition to Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Thus any nation threatening a first strike attack would be acting as a suicide bomber.

“In addition, we found that a very small nuclear war between any two nuclear nations, using only 100 or so small, Hiroshima-size atomic bombs, with a total explosive power of much less than one percent of the current global arsenal, could produce enough smoke to cause climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. It would not be full nuclear winter, but it could sentence 1 to 2 billion people to death by starvation.

“To prevent the possibility of a nuclear winter, the United States and Russia need to immediately reduce their arsenals to the same levels as all the other nuclear states, a couple hundred. After all, how many do you need to use as a deterrent? A couple? To prevent the nuclear famine that would result from even a very small number of weapons targeted on cities and industrial areas, arsenals need drastic reductions.”

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Nuclear Disarmament in Court

By John LaForge

Two major judicial decisions on nuclear weapons policy came down this autumn. On October 5 the International Court of Justice or UN World Court dismissed a suit filed by the Marshall Islands against the world’s nuclear-armed governments alleging that the eight declared nuclear weapons states and Israel are in open violation of international law by ignoring their binding legal obligation to abolish nuclear weapons. The provisions of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) include a promise to end the arms race “at an early date” and to negotiate a treaty on “complete disarmament.”

The suit by the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI)—a nation of Pacific islands and atolls that was devastated by 67 US nuclear bomb tests—also asked the World Court to establish a timetable within which to pursue the NPT’s promised ban on nuclear weapons. The NPT applies to the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, and hundreds of nonnuclear states. Three countries with nuclear weapons that have not adopted the NPT—Israel, India, Pakistan (and North Korea which withdrew from it)—are still obliged to eliminate nuclear weapons under customary international law, according to attorneys for the RMI.

“All the nuclear weapons states are modernizing their arsenals instead of negotiating, and we want the court to rule on this,” said Phon van den Biesen, the leader of the RMI’s legal team, to the New York Times.

But the World Court’s president Ronny Abraham said the Marshal Islanders suit had not proved that an actual dispute existed between the RMI and the nuclear-armed states. The court’s judges ruled 9-to-7 to dismiss the suit. Conversely, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals in California has agreed that a separate lawsuit—filed solely against the United States by the Marshallese in US federal district court—could move forward.

UN Votes to start nuclear weapons treaty ban talks

While the main thrust of the suit was thrown out by the divided court, the Republic’s demand that negotiations be scheduled for a nuclear weapons ban treaty was taken up by the General Assembly separately.

In sharp contrast to the World Court’s decision, 123 nations voted October 27 at the UN Committee for Disarmament to move forward in 2017 with negotiations to ban nuclear weapons. The global campaign for a “ban treaty” is modeled on the grass roots efforts to ban land mines (completed in 1997), and cluster munitions (banned in 2008). Treaty bans also apply to biological weapons (1972) and chemical weapons (1993).

As Alice Slater reported for The Nation, for the first time ever, China broke ranks with the nine-state nuclear terror club by voting with 16 other states—along with India and Pakistan—to abstain. North Korea, a state regularly denigrated as “unstable” and “irrational” voted Yes in support of negotiations going forward to outlaw nuclear weapons. Israel joined 38 other countries in voting against the resolution. The Netherlands also abstained, the only NATO member to break ranks with the alliance. (Five NATO states still deploy about 180 US nuclear weapons in Europe.)

The negotiations will start to move forward in March 2017, just as a 20-week-long campaign of nonviolent resistance kicks off near the Buchel Air Force Base in Germany. Buchel is an airstrip where German Tornado jets and their pilots train to deliver the remaining 20 US H-bombs still deployed there. The base has been the object of a 20-year-long anti-nuclear effort to rid Germany of the US nuclear bombs.

“A threat mostly to ourselves”

Abolitionists can take encouragement in their efforts from the number of former nuclear weapons proponents that have been converted to nuclear disarmament advocates thanks to the movement’s long-standing drumbeat. General George L. Butler, a retired commander of all US nuclear weapons at Strategic Air Command (now StratCom), broke the mold in a 1998 newspaper interview saying, “… nuclear weapons are a pernicious anachronism, and they are the greatest threat to our survival.” Anti-Soviet hard-liner and Reagan presidential adviser Paul Nitze followed suit in 1999 calling nuclear weapons “A threat mostly to ourselves.”

Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and commander at StratCom, chaired a blue ribbon nuclear weapons study group in 2012. Its final report declared, “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face …. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.”

Likewise, Lt. General James Kowalski, Vice Commander of StratCom, said in 2014, “The greatest threat to my force is an accident. The greatest risk to my force is doing something stupid.”

In his new book My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (Stanford Security Studies 2016) former Secretary of Defense William Perry echoes these warnings, declaring, “[N]uclear weapons no longer provide for our security—they now endanger it.”

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