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Treaty Banning the Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction Enters Into Force

BUS activists join 2019 protest against US nuclear weapons deployed at Germany's Buechel Air Basey John LaForge

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) takes effect Friday, January 22, 2021.

After decades of campaigns of every kind to “ban the bomb”, to prevent the nuclear arms race, and later to freeze the arms race, and, the nuclear weapons prohibition outlaws not just their development, testing and possession, but forbids any threatened use — commonly known as “nuclear deterrence.” Like with other multi-generational struggles against slavery, torture, the death penalty, child labor, TPNW campaigners justly call it “the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.”

The new international law  — which for the first time in weapons treaty law requires reparations and compensation to victims of H-bomb testing and production — is similar to earlier global prohibitions such as the Geneva Protocol (outlawing gas warfare), the Hague Conventions (forbidding poisoned weapons), the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Ban the Convention on Cluster Munitions and the anti-personnel Mine Ban.

The difference here is that the world community has finally added to the list of despicable, loathsome, appalling and shunned weapons of war those devices whose effects contain and exceed beyond comprehension the accumulated evil of the all the rest—nuclear and thermonuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons have been earnestly condemned for 75 years by legal scholars, religious leaders, peace groups, military commanders, prime ministers, presidents and corporate CEOs. They’ve been called “the ultimate evil” by the International Court of Justice in 1996 and any use of them was declared by the UN General Assembly as early as 1961 “a crime against [hu]mankind and civilization.” The TPNW’s language makes clear why: “Cognizant that the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons cannot be adequately addressed, transcend national borders, pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation…”

Yet nuclear-armed countries all hold that their plans and threats to commit atomic violence are legal. For example, the US Navy Field Manual says, “There is at present no rule of international law expressly prohibiting States from the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. In the absence of express prohibition, the use of such weapons … is permitted.”

No more. The TPNW rebukes and nullifies this artful dodge, which is partly why its establishment is a monumental accomplishment. Forbidding nuclear weapons by name is also a triumph of harrowing urgency, considering the number of doddering heads of state with access to nuclear launch codes and especially in view of the atomic scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” being set at 100 seconds to midnight.

Countries with nuclear arsenals rejected the UN negotiations in 2017 that produced the TPNW, and they dismiss its obligations because the law applies only to states that ratify it. The duplicity of the nuclear-armed governments was displayed by then US UN Ambassador Nicki Haley who led 35 countries in a boycott of the talks. Haley said the treaty would end up disarming the nations “trying to keep peace and safety”. At the time, the United States was militarily occupying and/or at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. Haley’s speech must have reminded the more than two-thirds of the UN Ambassadors that “hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue.”

The power of the new Treaty is worth celebrating for now, but then it must be employed by us all to end the public’s ignorance, denial, forgetfulness, and habituation regarding plans for nuclear war, and to bring the nuclear weapons states into compliance. ###

— John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, and with Kelly Lundeen co-edits its newsletter, Nukewatch Quarterly.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/20/treaty-banning-the-ultimate-weapon-of-mass-destruction-enters-into-force/

http://www.peacevoice.info/2021/01/19/treaty-banning-the-ultimate-weapon-of-mass-destruction-enters-into-force/

 

 

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Treaty Seeks End to Nuclear Madness

The US delegation standing just outside the Büchel Air Base, and in front of inflatable mock B61 nuclear bombs, included from left, Brian Terrell, Andrew Lanier, Susan Crane, Cee’Cee’ Anderson, Ralph Hutchison, Richard Bishop, Cindy Collins, Kevin Collins, and John LaForge. Not pictured, Fred Galluccio and Dennis DuVall.

By ,  15 Jan. 2021

On January 22, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will enter into force. The treaty bans the development, production, possession, deployment, testing, use and just about anything else you can imagine related to nuclear weapons.

Fifty years later, nine nuclear-armed militaries possess more than 13,000 nuclear weapons, arsenals that mock their claimed commitment to disarm “at an early date.”

Approved at the United Nations by 122 countries in 2017, and subsequently signed by 86 and ratified by 51 nations, the nuclear weapons ban will join the venerated status of international prohibitions already established against lesser weapons of mass destruction. These earlier agreements include the Geneva Gas Protocol, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Ottawa Treaty or  Mine Ban Convention and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is no magic wand. Nine nuclear-armed states claim that the treaty doesn’t apply to them, and it’s true that only governments that are “states parties” to the treaty are subject to its prohibitions and obligations. However, the treaty can be a kind of a lever and a beacon for achieving the elimination of nuclear weapons, a goal every government on earth claims to desire.

“the nuclear weapons ban will join the venerated status of international prohibitions already established against lesser weapons of mass destruction”

Decades of refusal to conclude “good faith” negotiations for nuclear disarmament “at an early date,” which the United States and four other nuclear nations agreed to in the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, have left the rest of the world fed up. Fifty years later, nine nuclear-armed militaries possess more than 13,000 nuclear weapons, arsenals that mock their claimed commitment to disarm “at an early date.”

As with bans on other weapons of mass destruction, scofflaw states that continue to produce and use nuclear weapons will increasingly be condemned and shunned as outliers and rogue actors. And nuclear-armed states have already been stung by the treaty’s imminent entry into force. Last October, the Trump White House urged those governments that had ratified the treaty to withdraw their ratifications. Happily, none did.

For more than a decade, public support for the elimination of nuclear weapons remains consistently strong. Current polls — Belgium, 64%; Germany, 68%; Italy, 70%; Netherlands, 62% — show strong majorities in countries that now host U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe. The treaty heralds a new global, civil, diplomatic and economic environment in which nuclear weapons are banned. In Belgium, one of five NATO countries that currently station U.S. nuclear weapons inside their territories, the parliament in January 2020 nearly expelled the U.S. weapons in a close vote. When the first NATO country still hosting the U.S. nuclear bombs demands their removal, others are expected to follow suit.

Elsewhere, financial divestment campaigns in Europe are succeeding, pressing hundreds of institutions to get out of the business of genocidal atomic violence. The Dutch pension fund APB, the fifth largest of its kind in the world, has announced  it will exclude companies involved in production of nuclear weapons. It joins more than seventy other European banks, pension funds, and insurance companies that have already adopted divestment policies.

January 22 marks the culmination of the effort led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, civil society, and non-nuclear-armed states to create the treaty. It is also the beginning of a new movement that will, in the end, see the elimination of the existential nuclear threat.

Given the need to stop the Biden administration from continuing the $2 trillion commitment to “modernize” U.S. nuclear weapons, build new bomb plants, and invest in new nuclear weapons, the treaty and its message could not be timelier or more compelling.

As supporters the world over have noted, this treaty is the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.

Ralph.jpg Ralph Hutchison is coordinator for the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

John LaForge.JPG John LaForge is a co-director of Nukewatch in Wisconsin.

This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.

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First US Citizen Convicted for Protests at Nuclear Weapons Base in Germany

L to R: Dennis DuVall, Chris Danowski, and Susan van der Hijden, before their trial in Cochem District Court in Germany. Photo by Marion Küpker.
By John LaForge
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

COCHEM, Germany — A US Air Force veteran of the US war in Vietnam and two other nuclear weapons protesters were found guilty of trespassing and damage to property in Cochem District Court May 11, 2020, as a result of July 2018 protest action at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, where the United States positions 20 of its nuclear bombs and where German pilots train to use them in possible attacks against Russia.

Dennis DuVall, 78, a long-time member of Veterans for Peace from Arizona and now living in Dresden, Germany, became the first US citizen prosecuted in Germany for civil resistance against the threatened use of the US nuclear weapons. (US Catholic Priest Carl Kabat was thrown out of Germany for a disarmament action against US Pershing missiles deployed there in the 1980s.)

There have been repeated arrests and detentions of US citizens during protests at the Büchel base since 2017, but no charges have been brought to trial until now. Also convicted by Cochem District Court Judge Andre Zimmermann were Susan van der Hijden, 51, from Amsterdam’s Catholic Worker House in The Netherlands, and Chris Danowski, 50, from Dortmund, Germany, a founder of the Hamburg Catholic Worker. The judge sentenced all three to fines equivalent to 30 times their daily income plus court costs. The fines ranged from 150 to 900 Euros ($165 to $990). Refusing to pay could see the defendants jailed for up to 30 days.

The three were among 18 war resisters — seven from the US, six from Germany, four from The Netherlands, and one from England — that gained entry to the base in five groups and in broad daylight on Sunday, July 15, 2018, after cutting five separate holes through its perimeter fence. Three others among the 18 were convicted of similar charges in January, and three are scheduled for trial in June.

In his defense, DuVall read a detailed statement which was in turn read to the judge by an interpreter. DuVall focused on international treaty law that forbids any planning and preparation of mass destruction. In particular, DuVall reminded the court that the Nuremberg Charter and Principles have established individual responsibility for violations of laws of war. “Planning for nuclear war at Büchel AFB is a criminal conspiracy violating international law and the Nuremberg Principles,” he said. DuVall also said in part, “While weapons of mass murder have found their way into the arsenals of nine nations, international law has not found its way into the courtroom.” And in a rebuke of the court’s silence on the question of unlawful war planning going on within Judge Zimmermann’s jurisdiction, DuVall said, “At the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Auschwitz survivor Batsheva Dagan could also have been thinking about Büchel when she asked, ‘Where was the world [which] did nothing?’ ”

DuVall, van der Hijden and Danowski all admitted going into the base, but said that the stationing of US nuclear weapons there was illegal under US, German, and international law, making their action one of crime prevention. In her testimony, Susan van der Hijden asked the court, “Are fences more important than human lives?”

The court found the three guilty of the charges based solely on allegations made by the state prosecutor, without the use of a single witness. The procedure surprised defendants and observers from countries where charging documents are not considered evidence. In explaining his verdicts and the penalties, Judge Zimmermann drew guffaws from the gallery by twice comparing fencing around nuclear weapons to a fence around a garden where, he said, no one would like to have a hole cut. After trial, peace activist Hops Hossbach, of Greifenstein, Germany, noticed Judge Zimmermann in his open courthouse office and walked in to lambast the comparison. “It’s not the fence which is at issue,” Hossbach told the judge, “it’s what’s going on behind the fence.”

The 2018 protest was just one among dozens in a years-long campaign of nonviolent resistance against the 20 US “B61-3” and “B61-4” nuclear bombs stationed at Büchel. Pilots from Germany’s 33rd Tactical Air Force Squadron or Wing at Büchel routinely train in German Tornado jet fighters to detonate the US H-bombs against areas in Russia — in the event they are ordered to do so by a US president. The German base is also home to the US Air Force’s 702 Munitions Support Squadron, which maintains the 20 Cold War-era “dumb” nuclear bombs it calls a “Protection Level 1 Resource.” The US H-bombs are reportedly set to be replaced in the coming years in spite of massive public opposition in Germany and in violation of the 1970 Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

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As Urgent Crises Abound, Pentagon Dreams of Hiroshima

By Bob Mayberry and John LaForge
Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

While the coronavirus and climate change, war, famine, floods, hurricanes and typhoons cause social and economic disruption at home and abroad, some in the United States military plod along with routine nuclear war planning. Instead of mobilizing relief efforts and supplies for Covid-19 response and for refugees and other people displaced or endangered by war or climate chaos, our “great” country—or as Finian O’Toole recently described it in Irish Times, “the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, [and] a military complex with stunning logistical capacity”—is blindly doubling down on its nuclear war readiness.

The German military analyst Otfried Nassauer (director of the Berlin Information Centre for Transatlantic Security) reported recently:

“At the end of 2019, the USA sent a strategic missile submarine [the USS Tennessee] on patrol for the first time, carrying at least one Trident II D5 missile with only a small [sic] W76-2 [nuclear] warhead of about 8 [kilotons] of explosive power. The use of this sub-strategic warhead considered for ‘initial nuclear use’—in response to an assumed Russian tactical nuclear weapons deployment in Europe was announced in February in a small war game at STRATCOM [US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska].”

This ‘war game’ was reported widely, including by Julian Borger in the Guardian, Feb. 24, under the heading: “US staged ‘limited’ nuclear battle against Russia in war game.”[1]

Of course, some of these nuclear war exercises are anything but games.

In August last year, it’s now been reported, the US air force flew all 20 of the thermonuclear bombs it stations in Germany back to the United States for a very short time. According to the April 11 edition of the German weekly Der Spiegel, the H-bombs were loaded aboard a giant US air force C-17 “Globemaster” cargo plane, and sent on the highly secret round trip in order to install new software in the bombs. [2] The new parts reportedly deal with codes used for arming and detonating the bombs.

According to Nassauer, who spoke in a conference call May 4, the US nuclear weapons were flown to Kirtland air force base, in the southeast corner of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The H-bombs went to Kirtland air base because it is home to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center and the so-called Air Delivered Capabilities Directorate, responsible for maintaining air-launched nuclear weapons in the US and Europe.

Kirtland AFB is also the home of the Defense Nuclear Weapons School, which teaches nuclear war. Current courses include “Theater Nuclear Operations,” which the website says “provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners,” and teach, “the targeting effects of nuclear weapon employment.”

Another course is “Integrated Munitions Effects Assessment” which instructs students in “creating target models, [and] developing attack plans using … nuclear weapons,” where they learn to “calculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets,” and “consequence assessment to WMD [weapons of mass destruction] scenarios….”

For the curious, Kirtland air base is also home to the Nuclear Weapons Instructions Museum which  “contains displays of all stockpiled US nuclear weapons and their associated components and delivery systems, as well as related training aids.

This is real, but you don’t have to take Nukewatch’s word for it. You could see the Defense Nuclear Weapons School on-line at nukewatchinfo.org/us-mass-murder-school. The Pentagon recently put it behind a wall but Nukewatch downloaded some relevant sections in time.

[1] The Guardian, 24 February 2020

[2] Der Spiegel, No. 16, 11 April 2020, pp. 26, 28, 29

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Nuclear Weapons Abolitionists Again Convicted of Damage and Trespass in Germany

Marion Küpker, Stephanie Augustine and Margriet Bos were convicted of trespass and damage to property on June 10, 2020 for a 2018 protest at the Büchel Air Force Base in Germany, home to 20 US nuclear weapons.

COCHEM, Germany, June 10, 2020 — Three peace activists were convicted of ‘damage to property’ and ‘trespass’ for their part in a July 15, 2018 protest at the Büchel Air Force Base in west-central Germany, where the United States Air Force deploys 20 hydrogen bombs. The trial of Marion Küpker, of Hamburg, Germany Stephanie Augustine, of Dortmund, Germany and Margriet Bos, of Amsterdam, Netherlands was the latest in a series of trials resulting from a long-running campaign of nonviolent resistance directed against the threatened use of the US nuclear bombs. District Judge Andre Zimmermann sentenced Küpker, Bos and Augustine to fines ranging between 1,200 and 300 Euros, or to a possible 30 days in jail for refusing to pay.

The regional paper Rhein-Zeitung reported, “The three women entered the Büchel air base together with a total of 18 people during an international protest week,” July 15, 2018. The protest was aimed at US nuclear weapons used at the NATO base where the Luftwaffe’s Tornado fighter jet pilots from Germany’s 33rd Tactical Air Force Wing train to drop the US nuclear weapons which are maintained there by the US Air Force’s 702nd Munitions Support Squadron. The widely reported mid-summer action saw five separate openings cut in the base’s chain link fence, through which the 18 resisters entered in small groups unhindered, in broad daylight, on a Sunday morning. One person got through in a wheel chair, and another entered using crutches.

In court, Küpker took the time to read her 10-page personal statement explaining her motive and intention for taking the action. Küpker, the coordinator of Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and a staff member with the German Fellowship of Reconciliation, also read the 11-page formal declaration of Anabel Dwyer, a retired attorney and law school lecturer from Michigan. German legal process requires that documents be read aloud in court, not just submitted in writing, to become part of the trial record.

Küpker told the court in part, “I would like to make a comparison here: If a judge or prosecutor held children on his heavily fenced and armed property (garden) and I became aware of it and, despite intensive disclosure of this illegal activity, the responsible state organs could not be persuaded to intervene, I would. I would have no concern about cutting open their fences and entering this garden together with others. If the courts then view this intrusion only as trespassing and property damage, they become accomplices and henchmen of kidnappers. Even if I find gardens without fences more beautiful, I would only be interested in intervening in the event of such a justifying emergency.” Kupker intends to appeal the conviction.

“The storage of the approx. 20 nuclear weapons in Büchel and the practice and preparation of their use by German pilots — and in the NATO alliance — violate the human right to health. These Büchel atomic bombs enable the practical continuation of ‘nuclear participation’ in Germany. For this illegal nuclear weapons deployment in Germany, the production of atomic bombs was necessary, which has caused and continues to cause serious health damage to all people in our world,” Küpker said.

In her statement to the court, Margriet Bos said in part, “I believe that my actions and the actions of every human being can have great effects. That’s another reason I entered Büchel Air Base, hoping to draw attention to the suffering being prepared there. And I will not remain silent as long as I believe that things can be done differently. That’s why I went to Büchel Air Base, and that’s why I asked you to hear me today.”

At the base pilots of Germany’s the 33rd Tactical Air Force Wing train using their PA-200 Tornado jet fighters to detonate the US H-bombs against areas in Russia if so ordered by a US president. The base is home to the US Air Force’s 702 Munitions Support Squadron which maintains the Cold War-era free-fall “dumb” nuclear bombs — set to be replaced in the coming years with a new, more accurate H-bomb.

Seven of the 18 who joined the July 15 “go-in” action were from a US delegation to the “International Week” organized by Nukewatch in the US and GAAA (Nonviolent Action to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) in Germany. Only two of the seven, Dennis DuVall formerly of Prescott, Arizona and John LaForge of Luck, Wisconsin have been issued similar charges for the action. DuVall was convicted of the same in a May 11 trial in Cochem. ############

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