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United States to Hurry Transfer of New Nuclear Bombs to Europe

By John LaForge

The United States has sped up the delivery to European NATO bases of its new thermonuclear bomb called the B61-12, Politico reports.

Citing “a US diplomatic cable and two people familiar with the issue,” the outlet reports that the 50-kiloton B61-12 will be flown to six NATO bases in five NATO states in December 2022, rather than the planned springtime delivery.

The individual sources familiar with the upcoming shipment to Europe, who asked not to be named, “confirmed the accelerated time-frame reported in the diplomatic cable,” Politico noted.

Tom Collina, director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund, told Politico that the accelerated transfer of the newest version of the B61 — which the Air Force says is more accurate than the bombs it will replace — “could be escalatory. We’ll see.”

Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told Politico in an email that the $10 to $12 billion plan to “swap out older weapons for the upgraded B61-12” has been “underway for years” and “is in no way linked to current events in Ukraine and was not sped up in any way.”

The B61-12 gravity H-bomb will replace two earlier versions, the B61-3s and -4s, about 100 of which are stationed at NATO bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Turkey, Politico confirmed.

B61-12. Photo Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The giant US Air Base at Ramstein, Germany is also involved in the program. Ramstein Air Base operates the only branch of the US Air Force’s Defense Nuclear Weapons School outside the United States. The DNWS trains pilots in planning and preparing attacks with nuclear weapons. Other branches are in New Mexico, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Ohio. A part of the Air Force Nuclear College, the Ramstein-based DNWS is described on its website as being “responsible for delivering, sustaining, and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters … every day,” and, “Programs managed by the directorate include the B61-12 Life Extension Program.”

None of this nuclear attack madness need proceed any further. Oscar Arias proposed last July 19 that as a good-will gesture of de-escalation and trust-building, NATO could — instead of replacing them with more destabilizing bombs — offer to withdraw all its nuclear weapons from NATO bases in Europe in exchange for Russia’s agreeing to begin peace negotiations.

Caitlin Johnstone made the point Oct. 19 in CounterPunch, noting that, “We survived the Cuban Missile Crisis because US President John F. Kennedy secretly acquiesced (Robert Moore wrote “wisely agreed”) to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s demand that the US remove the Jupiter missiles it had placed in Turkey and Italy, which was what provoked Moscow to move nukes to Cuba in the first place.”

— Sources: German-Foreign-Policy, Oct. 31; Defense Post, Oct. 27; Politico, Oct. 26; and Robert Moore, CounterPunch, Oct. 18, 2022

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Why Not Just Pay the Fine for Resisting the B61s?

By John LaForge

My refusal to pay fines imposed for resisting nuclear weapons at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base raises a lot of questions, principally: Why not avoid prison and just pay?

One reason is because my protest was not wrong or a mistake in any sense, whereas paying the court-imposed penalty implies I’m guilty of some sort of offense or misconduct. Further, paying the fine has the appearance of an apology or remorse on my part when none is warranted. Any nonviolent action against preparations to commit mass destruction with nuclear weapons is honorable. An upsurge of such actions would be in the public interest. Further, my so-called “trespass” was an attempt at crime prevention, or interference with ongoing government criminality, and as such was a civic duty.

A recent test of the new US B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb. Photo by US Air Force.

Refusing to pay fines for nonviolent resistance to nuclear war preparations is, from my position of privilege, also an act of solidarity with the poor, the undocumented, and the outcasts who often don’t have resources or connections enough to purchase their way out of pre-trial detention or incarceration for minor offenses.

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law. The ongoing threat to attack people with nuclear weapons (known as “deterrence”) is prohibited by international law. My go-in actions at Büchel were based on international legal obligations, which in the words of the Nuremberg Principles “bind every citizen just as does ordinary municipal law.” Plans for massacres inherent in nuclear sharing and deterrence policy are prohibited and have been criminalized by the combined obligations — considered as a whole — set out in the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Charter, Principles, and Judgment, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and the US and German federal constitutions.

The NPT in particular explicitly prohibits any transfer whatsoever of nuclear weapons from one state to another. I hope never to pay respect to governments that declare treaties are the “supreme law” but then proceed to wantonly violate them.

It can never be a crime to interfere with the deployment, rehearsals for use, or the threatened use of nuclear weapons, or to resist our governments’ joint plans to commit indiscriminate, uncontrollable mass destruction using firestorms and radiation. No criminal conspiracy of any kind anywhere compares to the level of deliberate public lawbreaking inherent in nuclear weapons threats. Rather than a trespass, my peaceful interference with nuclear attack machinery is justifiable, preventative, precautionary, and lawful.

Court systems in Germany and the US have labored to dismiss this lawful defense of necessity and to ignore their own constitutional command to abide by international treaties. Instead, when courts in both countries have been confronted with the treaty obligations outlined above, they have routinely denied their applicability in protest cases involving nuclear weapons. Courts in Germany have gone so far as to say that because Germany and the US have agreed to “nuclear sharing” the practice is therefore legitimate.

I have presented to the courts in Cochem, Koblenz, and Karlsruhe the facts about nuclear weapons, their effects, the government’s preparations for using them against civilians, and the treaties that forbid all such planning for massacres. By ignoring or denying these facts, the judges are guilty of pretending the criminality of deterrence is lawful, and they are complicit in the self-destructive maintenance of prohibited and suicidal nuclear threats. It is naïve or mentally unbalanced to act as if this charade is not homicidal and suicidal, and to ignore the criminal intent of the governments of Germany and the United States regarding nuclear sharing. I hope to be able to stand up to the courts’ coercion and intimidation, and to refuse to cooperate with such a government that is also the nuclear weapon’s government.

— This statement is in the Winter Nukewatch Quarterly, and ran Dec. 16 2022 at CounterPunch.org.

If you write to John at the prison, remember mail takes two weeks to reach Germany. After January 10 check nukewatchinfo.org or Nukeresister.org for other mail restrictions.
JVA Glasmoor
Am Glasmoor 99
22852 Norderstedt
Germany

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Nukewatch Co-Director to Report to Prison in Germany

Nukewatch staffer and Quarterly co-editor John LaForge has been sentenced to a 50-day jail term in Germany, for refusing to pay fines resulting from trespass convictions for several “go-in” nuclear weapons protests involving uninvited entry into Germany’s Büchel Air Base, where up to 20 US hydrogen bombs are stationed. The sentence will begin January 10 at the Billwerder prison in Hamburg.

LaForge appealed the convictions all the way to the Constitutional Court, which has yet to issue a decision. The appeal complains that expert witnesses — who were prepared to validate LaForge’s defense of “crime prevention” — were not allowed to testify. That decision, LaForge argues, effectively eliminated his right to present a defense.

The trial court in Cochem fined LaForge 1,500 Euros, which the appeal court in Koblenz later reduced to 600 Euros. In the US court system, refusal to pay the court-ordered fines is often ruled to be “contempt of court,” which can be considered a separate offense. Over four decades, LaForge has been jailed in the United States many times in anti-nuclear and anti-war actions.

Billwerder prison houses up to 734 adult male prisoners with relatively short sentences or held on pre-trial detention. It also holds up to 96 female adults or juveniles. Over a dozen German anti-nuclear resisters and one Dutch citizen have been jailed recently for nonviolent actions taken at the controversial NATO “nuclear sharing” base.

John LaForge entering Billwerder prison in Germany on January 10, 2023 (Photo by Marion Küpker)

If you write to John, remember mail takes two weeks to reach Germany.

John LaForge
JVA Glasmoor
Am Glasmoor 99
22852 Norderstedt
Germany

Before entering prison he was joined by other activists that have endured jail time for their anti-nuclear protests in a zoom meeting. Watch it here: John’s Jail Send-Off Zoom Meeting
Nukewatch Talks – an Exclusive

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John’s Letter from Jail – January 15, 2023

Sent by Marion Küpker and typed by Felice Cohen-Joppa.

January 15, 2023

This month has three important political anniversaries, anti-war and anti-nuclear holidays if you will, events I’ll celebrate privately for a change, since I’m temporarily cooling my heels in a German prison on the west end of Hamburg. It’s not that I killed or robbed very many people, but I have acted contemptuously toward the court system here and have refused to cooperate with its deeply corrupt and thoroughly dishonest protection of the nuclear weapons establishment.

Because Susan Crane and I had the gall to occupy the top of a nuclear weapons bunker that holds U.S. hydrogen bombs here in Germany, and then refuse to apologize by paying a fine for trespassing, the court has decided that seven weeks in this modern prison ought to mend my ways, or at least discourage other abolitionists.

The three war-weary events are Martin Luther King Day, January 16; the second anniversary of the Entry into Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, January 22; and the yearly setting of the “Doomsday Clock,” January 24 – that weirdly formulaic gauge of nuclear armageddon’s likelihood concocted by a group of scientific nuclear eggheads.

The establishment of the MLK holiday and of the TPNW were both monumental achievements made against fierce, wealthy, bigoted and colonialist forces of reaction. Advocates of nonviolent action and campaigners for a world free of nuclear weapons this Monday and next Sunday, then get back to work Tuesday when the alarm goes off again on the Doomsday Clock. Of course the clock’s “up one year, down the next” assessment of nuclear war risks has been ignored as a worn out rewrite of the Chicken Little tale. Yet the five metric tons of plutonium dust that was lofted into the upper atmosphere by nuclear weapons tests is all making its way back down to earth. So yes Mr. Watson, in fact the worst part of the sky is falling.

Dr. King and opposition to nuclear weapons will always be connected in my mind because MLK said, “We have guided missiles and misguided men” and “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” and because nuclear weapons are nothing if not genocidal.

Dr. King’s books, and the hard-won triumphs of the fearlessly nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, inspired a group of us in the 1980s to repeatedly blockade the entrance to the Grand Forks air force base in North Dakota which then controlled 150 land-based, long-range nuclear-armed missiles. Over a ten-year period, our band of nuclear resisters served enough county jail time after staging so many marches, protests and stunts – once pouring blood across the 100-ton concrete lid of a locked-and-loaded Minuteman III missile silo – that when the air force later decided to eliminate over half of its land-based missiles, the Grand Forks nukes were some of the first to go.

Our small group efforts were encouraged back then by news of hundreds of thousands across Europe who took to the streets demanding – successfully it turned out – the ouster of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles. Any prospective use of the weapons was almost universally viewed in Europe as suicidal. 

We never know if our demands will be realized — only that nothing is gained without venturing. Anti-nuclear marchers in the ‘80s never guessed they’d see the U.N. General Assembly vote 122-to-3 to endorse a treaty banning nuclear weapons. This overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have agreed that nuclear weapons can only produce massacres, that any chance of a successful medical response to their effects is impossible, that these effects would illegally cross neutral borders, do long-term criminal damage to the environment, and then recoil to maim and destroy the very militaries that unleash them. (That’s why I wrote “B61 = Suicide” on the weapons bunker just before being detained.)

Today, the groundbreaking TPNW has permanently shamed and stigmatized the nuclear weapons states as hypocrites, scofflaws and rogues who ridicule and ignore the treaty’s means, while cynically claiming to desire its ends.

The nine-member thermonuclear cartel, like a gang of coldblooded mobsters, acts outside and above the law by rewarding their judicial, police and prison authorities for the cover they provide, authorities who then wink and pretend that the protection racket is necessary and that the Bomb is legal.

Maybe our marching, our rebellion and the law of nations can’t denuclearize the cabal of atomic weaponeers. Maybe the nuclear mobsters won’t re-direct their war chests to useful purposes before they run our earthly train off the rails. But then nothing changes unless we demand it.

John LaForge
Billwerder Prison, Hamburg

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Misinformed ‘Small’ Talk About Nuclear Weapons

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
By John LaForge

Gideon Rachman claimed October 31 in a Financial Times column that, “… senior US officials point out that the smallest tactical nuclear weapons might kill hundreds of people, rather than thousands — and devastate and irradiate just a few square miles.”

Rachman’s use of the phrases “might kill hundreds” and “just a few square miles” is outrageous in its callous or ignorant trivialization of what would occur inside the kill zone.

The crude “small” atomic bomb the United States used to smash and burn Hiroshima was a 15-kiloton device which incinerated over four square miles and “turned into powder and ash the flesh and bones of 140,000 men, women and children,” as historian Howard Zinn noted in The Bomb (City Lights Books 2010). In Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell reported that the bomb’s detonation resulted in “killing 100,000 people immediately, and fatally injuring at least 50,000 others.”

Today, the “smallest” US nuclear weapons are the B61 gravity bombs deployed in Europe, which have a maximum explosive force of between 50 and 170 kilotons, and as such are between 3.3 and 11.3 times more devastating than the US Hiroshima bomb. There are 2.9 million people in Kyiv, and one 170-kiloton US B61 could potentially kill 1.5 million of them and burn 40 square miles with firestorm.

The creation of firestorm or mass fire — simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, causing a great volume of air to heat, rise, and suck in large amounts of fresh air from the periphery at hurricane speeds — is the unique contribution that nuclear weapons make to humankind’s mechanized, poisoned warfare. In Whole World on Fire (Cornell Univ. Press 2004), Dr. Lynn Eden details how and why the US government vastly underestimates the destructiveness of nuclear weapons by failing to consider damage from firestorms. At Hiroshima, Eden recounts, “The fire covered an area of roughly 4.4 square miles and burned with great intensity for more than six hours.”

Rachman and his unnamed “senior officials” vastly understate the grotesque incendiary force of so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons. They either misunderstand, are uninformed, or lie outright about its effects, and they cynically imply that the deliberate use of uncontrollable, indiscriminate destruction of civilian populations using fire and radiation is a “military tactic.”

Richard Rhodes, in The Making of the Atomic Bomb reports, “People exposed within half a mile of the Little Boy [Hiroshima] fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away…. The small black bundles now stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks of Hiroshima numbered in the thousands.” In The Bomb, Zinn notes that of 1,780 nurses in Hiroshima, 1,654 were killed or so badly injured that they could not work.

CNN reported on September 26 that nuclear weapons called “tactical” have “explosive yields of 10 to 100 kilotons of dynamite, [and] are also called ‘low yield.’” But Pentagon boss General Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, “I don’t think there’s any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used anytime is a strategic game-changer.”

Reuters reported on October 17, “These 12-ft B61 nuclear bombs, with different yields of 0.3 to 170 kilotons, are deployed at six air bases across Italy, Germany, Turkey, Belgium, and The Netherlands.” These “forward deployed” US H-bombs are so provocative and destabilizing that hundreds of European and US dissidents, including Members of the European Parliament and this reporter, have committed acts of civil resistance against air bases hosting them.

Whether conscious or subconscious, the chronic dread of impending catastrophe caused by the manufactured and ceaseless threat to “go nuclear” — known as deterrence — was described in all its homicidal absurdity by the coldblooded Winston Churchill in 1955. He said about our governments’ nonstop readiness to commit massacres with nuclear weapons: “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation.”

By trivializing the effects of today’s nuclear weapons, Rachman, his unnamed senior officials, and his editors at The Financial Times, demonstrate that, unlike Churchill, they either lie about what they know or know nothing at all about the established facts of thermonuclear explosions. Such misinformed or intentional minimization weakens the near universal stigma of criminality that adheres to the Bomb, and increases the possibility that Hiroshima could be repeated. Such horrifying nuclear “small” talk sanitizes and routinizes military schemes for meaningless, genocidal violence — as if such a thing could be tactical.

–Financial Times; Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Reuters Oct. 17, 2022;  CNN Sept. 26, 2022; Defense News Feb. 6, 2018

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