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February 28, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear-weapons treaty the right way forward: The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries.

Note: A model of public engagement, Nukewatch volunteer Joel Bransky had this excellent letter published in his local paper, the Duluth News Tribune:

Fifty nations just outlawed nuclear weapons forever. The international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, came into force on Jan. 22 after the 50th country, Honduras, ratified it. The people of these countries will never have to worry about cancer-causing weapons tests or pay for the secretive governmental nonsense required to manufacture and store nuclear warheads.

The treaty’s entry into force comes at a critical time. Just three years ago, while living in South Korea, I watched our president joke about the size of his launch button and challenge a volatile dictator to a game of nuclear chicken. Congress held hearings on how a nuclear strike would be carried out. The world was one miscalculation away from nuclear war, it seemed — yet many people have already forgotten. The enormity of the problem makes it seem unsolvable.

But we can solve this problem, and TPNW maps the path to nuclear disarmament. The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries. This is remarkable, given the opposition to the treaty from the U.S. government and weapons manufacturers. It shows that a nuclear-free future is coming. In fact, for the citizens of those 50 countries, it is already here.

I am tired of our government wasting taxpayer money on weapons that are never used and that, if used, would kill us through incineration, radiation poisoning, or starvation. We must tell our government that this is absurd and outdated. Now is the time. Please call or email your U.S. senators and representative and tell them you support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

— Joel Bransky, Duluth, Minnesota, Feb. 25, 2021

January 20, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Treaty Banning the Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction Enters Into Force

By 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/

January 15, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

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 Ralph Hutchison, John LaForge, 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 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.

January 2, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Growing Criticism of Unlawful Rad Waste Storage Plans

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

By Christine Manwiller

Proposals targeting Texas and New Mexico for above-ground centralization of the nation’s high-level radioactive waste (dubbed Consolidated Interim Storage) under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), face broad opposition. In 2017, Holtec International and partners proposed what they call a “temporary” dump in New Mexico for the waste reactor fuel. The companies claims that storage of this waste will only last 40 years, but the fine print allows for 80 years of “renewals.” In 2018, Interim Storage Partners, Inc., and Waste Control Specialists (WCS) requested that the NRC “resume evaluation” of a separate proposal to store up to 40,000 tonnes of the waste, along with other radioactive waste referred to as “low-level,” in Andrews County, West Texas.

Beyond Nuclear, in Takoma Park, Maryland, notes that both the WCS and Holtec plans are proceeding unlawfully. Under the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act (as amended), the federal government may not take title to high-level radioactive waste from commercial nuclear reactors until a permanent geologic dumpsite is operating. Under this law, the federal government cannot authorize funds for the transportation or “interim” storage of the waste, as Holtec and WCS propose, because there is no operating federal abandonment site. A license cannot be lawfully issued to WCS or Holtec until either a permanent site is operating, or the NWPA statute is again amended. Beyond Nuclear’s lawsuit in the case is on appeal.

Broad public resistance to the dumps was joined by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott who wrote November 3 to the NRC outlining the plan’s negative consequences: the risks of allowing volatile waste to sit on the surface in casks; the danger of the waste being close to the “largest producing oilfield in the world”: the potential for the site to attract terrorist acts; and the likelihood of the waste remaining in Texas for much longer than the proposed limit.

Risky transport of such dangerous waste is also under attack, and 19 resolutions have been adopted by communities across Texas and New Mexico, several of which are municipal resolutions banning the transportation. —Carlsbad Current-Argus, Nov. 10; Office of Governor of Texas letter, Nov. 3, 2020

Nuclear-weapons treaty the right way forward: The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries.

Treaty Banning the Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction Enters Into Force

Treaty Seeks End to Nuclear Madness

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

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

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2020-2021

By Christine Manwiller

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