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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 We must tell our government that this is absurd and outdated.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

Filed Under: Environment, Military Spending, Nuclear Weapons, Office News, War, Weekly Column

October 11, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Germany: US Nuclear Weapons Shamed in Broad Nationwide Debate

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2020
By John LaForge

“We need a broad public debate … about the sense and nonsense of nuclear deterrence.”  —Social Democratic Party Leader Rolf Mützenich

 Public criticism of the U.S. nuclear weapons deployed in Germany bloomed into a vigorous nationwide debate this past spring and summer focused on the controversial scheme known diplomatically as “nuclear sharing” or “nuclear participation.”

“The end of this nuclear participation is currently being discussed as intensely as was, not so long ago, the exit from nuclear power,” wrote Roland Hipp, a managing director of Greenpeace Germany, in a June article for Welt.

 The 20 US nuclear bombs that are stationed at Germany’s Büchel Air Base have become so unpopular, that mainstream politicians and religious leaders have joined anti-war organizations in demanding their ouster and have promised to make the weapons a campaign issue in next year’s national elections.

Today’s public debate in Germany may have been prompted by Belgium’s Parliament, which in January came close to expelling the US weapons stationed at its Kleine Brogel airbase. By a vote of 74 to 66, the members barely defeated a measure that directed the government “to draw up, as soon as possible, a roadmap aiming at the withdrawal of nuclear weapons on Belgian territory.” The debate came after the parliament’s foreign affairs committee adopted a motion calling for the weapons’ removal from Belgium, and for Belgium’s ratification of the new International Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Belgium’s lawmakers were forced to reconsider the government’s “nuclear sharing,” when in February 2019 three members of the European Parliament were arrested on Belgium’s Kleine Brogel base, after they boldly scaled a fence and carried a banner directly onto the runway (“Europe Free of Nuclear Weapons”).

Back in Germany, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer raised an uproar April 19 after a report in Der Spiegel said she had emailed Pentagon boss Mark Esper saying that Germany planned to buy 45 Boeing Corporation F-18 Super Hornets. Her comments brought howls from the Bundestag and the minister walked back her claim, telling reporters April 22, “No decision has been taken (on which planes will be chosen) and, in any case, the ministry can’t take that decision—only parliament can.”

Nine days later, in an interview with daily Tagesspiegel published May 3, Rolf Mützenich, Germany’s parliamentary leader of the Social Democratic Party’s (SPD)—a member of Angela Merkel’s governing coalition—made a clear denunciation.

“Nuclear weapons on German territory do not heighten our security, just the opposite,” they undermine it, and should be removed, Mützenich said, adding that he was opposed to both “prolonging nuclear participation” and to “replacing the tactical US nuclear weapons stored in Büchel with new nuclear warheads.”

Mützenich’s mention of “new” warheads is a reference to US  construction of hundreds of the new, first-ever “guided” nuclear bombs—the” B61-12s”—set to be delivered to five NATO states in the coming years, replacing the B61-3s, -4s, and -11s reportedly stationed in Europe now.

The SPD’s co-president Norbert Walter-Borjähn quickly endorsed Mützenich’s statement, agreeing that the US bombs should be withdrawn.

Mützenich and Walter-Borjahn were immediately criticized by Foreign Minister Heiko Mass, by US diplomats in Europe, and by NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.

Anticipating the backlash, Mützenich published a detailed defense of his position May 7 in the Journal for International Politics and Society, where he called for a “debate about the future of nuclear sharing and the question of whether the US tactical nuclear weapons stationed in Germany and Europe increase the level of safety for Germany and Europe, or whether they have perhaps become obsolete now from a military and security policy perspective.”

“We need a broad public debate … about the sense and nonsense of nuclear deterrence,” Mützenich wrote.

Commemorating the 75th anniversary of US atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Greenpeace Germany inflated its message balloon near the Büchel Air Force Base, whose jetfighter runway control tower is in the background in this Greenpeace photo.

NATO’s Stoltenberg hastily penned a rebuttal for the May 11 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, using 50-year-old yarns about “Russian aggression” and claiming that nuclear sharing means “allies, like Germany, make joint decisions on nuclear policy and planning …, and “give[s] allies a voice on nuclear matters that they would not otherwise have.”

This is flatly untrue, as Mützenich made clear in his paper, calling it a “fiction” that the Pentagon nuclear strategy is influenced by US allies. “There is no influence or even a say by non-nuclear powers on the nuclear strategy or even the possible uses of nuclear [weapons]. This is nothing more than a long-held pious wish,” he wrote.

Most of the attacks on the SPF leader sounded like the one May 14 from then US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, whose op/ed in De Welt urged Germany to keep the US “deterrent” and claimed that withdrawing the bombs would be a “betrayal” of Berlin’s NATO commitments.

Then US Ambassador to Poland Georgette Mosbacher went round the bend with a May 15 Twitter post, writing that “if Germany wants to reduce its nuclear sharing potential …, maybe Poland, which honestly fulfills its obligations … could use this potential at home.”

Mosbacher’s suggestion was broadly ridiculed as preposterous because the Nonproliferation Treaty forbids such nuclear weapons transfers, and because stationing US nuclear bombs on the Russia border would be an dangerously destabilizing provocation.

On May 30, the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, confirmed Mützenich’s position and put the lie to Stoltenberg’s disinformation, releasing a formerly “top secret” State Department memo affirming  that the US will alone decide whether to use its nuclear weapons based in Holland, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Belgium.

Moral and ethical shaming of the nuclear weapons in Buchel has recently come from high-ranking church leaders. In the deeply religious Rhineland-Pfalz region of the airbase, bishops have begun demanding that the bombs be withdrawn. Catholic Bishop Stephan Ackermann from Trier spoke out for nuclear abolition near the base in 2017; the Peace Appointee of the Lutheran Church of Germany, Renke Brahms, spoke to a large protest gathering there in 2018; Lutheran Bishop Margot Kassmann addressed the annual church peace rally there in July 2019; and this August 6, Catholic Bishop Peter Kohlgraf, who heads the German faction of Pax Christi, promoted nuclear disarmament in the nearby city of Mainz.

More fuel kindled the high-profile nuclear discussion with the June 20 publication of an Open Letter to the German fighter pilots at Büchel, signed by 127 individuals and 18 organizations, calling on them to “terminate direct involvement” in their nuclear war training, and reminding them that “Illegal orders may neither be given nor obeyed.”

The “Appeal to the Tornado pilots of Tactical Air Force Wing 33 at the Büchel nuclear bomb site to refuse to participate in nuclear sharing” covered over half a page of the regional newspaper Rhein-Zeitung, based in Koblenz.

The Appeal had earlier been sent to Colonel Thomas Schneider, commander of the pilots’ Tactical Air Force Wing 33 at Büchel air base, and is based on binding international treaties that forbid military planning of mass destruction.

The Appeal urged the pilots to refuse unlawful orders and stand down: “[T]he use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law and the constitution. This also makes the holding of nuclear bombs and all supporting preparations for their possible deployment illegal. Illegal orders may neither be given nor obeyed. We appeal to you to declare to your superiors that you no longer wish to participate in supporting nuclear sharing for reasons of conscience.”

In February 2019, Members of the European Parliament and others from the Green Parties in Italy, the UK and Belgium boldly scaled a 7-foot fence around the Kleine Brogel air base in Belgium, and carried their banner directly onto the runway used by Belgian pilots in rehearsals for using the US nuclear weapons stored there.

Roland Hipp, a co-director of Greenpeace Germany, in “How Germany makes itself the target of a nuclear attack” published in Welt June 26, noted that going non-nuclear is the rule not the exception in NATO. “There are already [25 of the 30] countries within NATO that have no US nuclear weapons and do not join in nuclear participation,” Hipp wrote.

In July, the debate over the US bombs focused on the colossal financial expense of replacing the German Tornado jet fighters in a time of urgent global crises.

Dr. Angelika Claussen, a psychiatrist a vice president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, wrote in a July 6 posting that “[A] significant military build-up in times of the coronavirus pandemic is perceived as a scandal by the German public … Buying 45 nuclear F-18 bombers means spending [about] 7.5 billion Euro. For this amount of money one could pay 25,000 doctors and 60,000 nurses a year, 100,000 intensive care beds and 30,000 ventilators.”

 Dr. Claussen’s figures were substantiated a July 29 report by Otfried Nassauer and Ulrich Scholz, military analysts with the Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security. The two found the cost of 45 F-18 fighter jets from the US manufacturer Boeing Corp. could be “at a minimum” between 7.67 and 8.77 billion euros, or from $9.1 billion to $10.4 billion, about $222 million each.

Germany’s potential $10 billion payout to US weapons giant Boeing for F-18s is a cherry that the war profiteer dearly wants to pick. Germany’s Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer has said her government also intends to buy 93 Eurofighters, made by the France-based giant Airbus, at the comparably bargain rate of $9.85 billion—$111 million each¾all to replace the Tornadoes by 2030.

SPD leader Mützenich has publicly promised to make the “sharing” of US nuclear weapons a 2021 national election issue. The Suddeutsche Zeitung reported Aug. 12 that he said, “I am firmly convinced that if we ask this question for the election program, the answer is relatively obvious. … we will continue this issue next year.”

Filed Under: Direct Action, Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, US Bombs Out of Germany, War

July 26, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Egypt, 15 Others, Call for Nuclear Weapons Abolition

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2020

Egypt issued a joint statement with 16 countries demanding the elimination of nuclear weapons to mark the 50th anniversary of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The declaration was presented by Egypt, Malaysia, Austria, New Zealand, Ireland, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Indonesia, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Thailand, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and the Philippines, representing 1.15 billion of the world’s people.

The timing of the joint statement also marked the decision to establish a zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

Egypt’s representative to the UN, Mohamed Edrees said that the statement includes clear and strong guidelines on the necessity for nuclear weapons states to comply with the NPT’s obligations. The statement pointed out that the coronavirus pandemic has clearly revealed many countries are investing resources on nuclear arsenals and their modernization, at the expense of economic or healthcare development.

“There should be international cooperation to counter such international cross-border crises, rather than spending on activities that pose an existential threat to humanity,” the statement added. – JL

—MENAFN, Alnaasher.com, and Daily News Egypt, May 20, 2020

Filed Under: Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter

January 10, 2020 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Universities Across the United States Profit from Developing Nuclear Weapons

Nukewatch Winter Quarterly 2019-2020
By Beatrice Fihn

Americans like a good comeback story, but the recent revitalization of the nuclear arms race is not one to be cheered. President Trump plans to charge the US taxpayer nearly $100,000-a-minute to expand the nation’s nuclear weapons capabilities.

Other nuclear-armed countries are doing the same.

A new generation of nuclear weapons requires a new generation of workers to develop and maintain these weapons of mass destruction. The National Nuclear Security Administration reported to Congress that 40 percent of its workforce will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

The US government and its contractors have turned to the nation’s universities to provide this human capital. A new report documents formal ties between nearly 50 college campuses and the nuclear weapons complex.

The extent to which universities have joined this endeavor is surprising. Supporting weapons of mass destruction does not show up in any university mission statements. In fact, it’s often the opposite: universities like to talk about bringing the benefits of knowledge to a global community.

The dangers posed by nuclear weapons are clear. Yet universities still choose to support them.

Students and faculty now face a choice. They can become the next generation of weapons scientists. Or they can refuse to be complicit in this scheme, denying research partnerships or internships at nuclear weapons labs.

Currently, universities across the country receive millions and in some cases billions of dollars to support nuclear weapons development. Universities directly manage nuclear weapons labs, form institutional agreements with these labs and related production sites, pursue research partnerships with nuclear weapons scientists, and provide targeted workforce development for these facilities.

Many of the universities with more extensive connections to nuclear weapons are household names: the University of California, Texas A&M University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of New Mexico. Others, such as local technical and vocational schools, are less well-known.

Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction, just like chemical and biological weapons. They carry devastating humanitarian and environmental consequences that do not stop at national borders.

Thousands still suffer from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thousands more suffer from the effects of nuclear weapons testing in the 20th century, including in the US.

One Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study estimated that radioactive fallout from nuclear tests would kill an additional 11,000 Americans due to an increase in fatal cancers. The United States has paid more than $2.3 billion in compensation to individuals affected by nuclear test fallout. Those most affected by tests around the world have been the already marginalized: indigenous and colonized peoples, women and children.

Some see value in the nuclear weapons complex because it supplies thousands of jobs. These boosters fail to acknowledge the studies that demonstrate how defense spending produces fewer jobs per dollar than investment in other areas, like education, health care or infrastructure. The business of nuclear weapons does not provide jobs; it takes them away.

Our choice today is between a future without nuclear weapons or no future at all. Seventy-nine nations (and counting) have signed the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; American states and cities are voting to urge the US to join them. Universities that support nuclear weapons make the wrong choice and their communities should refuse to be complicit.

Students, faculty, alumni, and community members—who often fund these schools through their tax dollars—can also take concrete action to help their universities join the right side of history.

They can push for transparency around any ties to the nuclear weapons complex, install ethical review processes for basic or dual-purpose research funded by the complex, and prohibit classified research. They can ask University administrations to stop direct management of nuclear weapons production sites and dissolve research contracts solely related to nuclear weapons production.

University communities and administrations together can lobby the federal government to flip its funding priorities, so that nonproliferation and disarmament verification research receive more funding than weapons activities.

A society can—and should—actively debate the extent to which universities are to serve explicitly national interests. But there should be no debate when it comes to supporting weapons of mass destruction. American academia must stop enabling mass murder.

—Beatrice Fihn is the Executive Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize-winners, and wrote this piece for Newsweek, Nov. 13, 2019.

Filed Under: Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

October 29, 2019 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Redundant Space Command Launched

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2019

President Trump announced Aug. 29, the establishment of a “Space Command” and named its first commander, Air Force Gen. Jay Raymond. Trump called it “the 11th combatant command” within the US military and said, “Space Com’ will boldly deter aggression.” The further militarization of NASA “will ensure that America’s dominance in space is never questioned and never threatened…”  The President claimed that Space Command  “will soon be followed by the establishment of the US Space Force as the 6th branch of the US Armed Forces.” But Congress has not yet approved a Space Force, and some have suggested that the program should be a section of the Department of the Air Force. Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis saw plans for a Space Force “as potentially redundant” and a waste of tax dollars, PBS News Hour reported. Trump’s choice of Gen. Raymond as the program’s chief proves this point. Raymond is currently the head of the Air Force Space Command, not to be confused with US Space Force or US Space Command. —Vanity Fair, Aug. 30; Washington Post, Aug. 29, 2019

Filed Under: Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, War

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