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June 26, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Hypocrisies and Successes at Meeting of Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

German Representative Rüdiger Bohn (center) speaking as an “observer” June 22nd at the First Meeting os States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of NuclearWeapons, Vienna, Austria.  Photo by John LaForge, for Nukewatch

By John LaForge

VIENNA, Austria — The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 65 governments, known in diplomatic circles as States Parties. The treaty’s first Meeting of States Parties (1MSP) concluded here June 23, after painstakingly working out — in the words of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons — “a blueprint for the end of nuclear weapons.” The new Treaty is the extraordinary, crowning achievement of ICAN, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

At 1MSP, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany — all three of whom use U.S. nuclear weapons on their air force bases — participated as Observer States. The three have not ratified the TPNW, having acquiesced with a string of U.S. administrations — Obama’s, Trump’s, and Biden’s — that conspired at every opportunity to derail, prevent, delay, weaken, and boycott the new ban — in spite of broad public support for nuclear disarmament. Mr. Trump demanded that States Parties withdraw their ratifications. None did. Biden’s White House reportedly urged Japan not to attend the 1MSP as an Observer, and they stayed away.

German and Dutch representatives took their turn and spoke to the MSP on June 22, but both NATO members used exactly the same words to note their government’s explicit disapproval of the TPNW, and to voice their supposed support for the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both representatives said their governments “will not accede to” the nuclear ban treaty “because the TPNW is inconsistent with NATO doctrine.”

The hypocrisy in German and Dutch opposition is that their “sharing” of U.S. nuclear weapons, while consistent with “NATO doctrine” is totally inconsistent with their hallowed Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In fact, their 50-year-long dismissal of the NPT’s binding (Art. VI) obligation to begin negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament “at an early date” is also completely inconsistent with their feigned support for the NPT.

As German Representative Rüdiger Bohn said June 22, NATO “doctrine” includes the doleful edict, “As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear Alliance.” This embrace of genocidal atomic violence is not an Article of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty or NATO Charter. It was manufactured entirely by its nuclear-armed members, and there is no legal obligation for NATO to remain a nuclear-armed terrorist organization.

NATO “doctrine” is fluid, strictly advisory, and accepted voluntarily by its members. Even the NATO Charter’s famous Article 5, regarding collective response to a military attack on a member state, declares only that the NATO membership “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking … such action as it deems necessary.”

In comparison, the Non-Proliferation Treaty is binding international law and includes explicit, unambiguous prohibitions and clear, binding obligations. NATO’s ongoing planning, preparations and ever-present threat to launch nuclear attacks (known as “deterrence”), is simply a ritualized practice which can be ended at any time — say by complying with the NPT’s Articles I and II which prohibit any transfer or reception of nuclear weapons between states, or its Article VI pledge to negotiate nuclear disarmament. Indeed, it is the 50-year-long postponement, or rejection of Art. VI that has prompted and propelled the overwhelming success of the new TPNW.

What might have been a week-long celebration of the TPNW’s progress in seeking a world free of nuclear threats, was dimmed by Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. It was the war’s spoken and unspoken reminders of ready nuclear arsenals in Russia and NATO that moved the MSP to say, in its final Declaration, that it “condemn[s] unequivocally any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances.”

The Declaration castigates nuclear weapons and echoes Daniel Ellsberg’s 1959 essay “The Threat and Practice of Blackmail,” noting that the Bomb is used to coerce, intimidate, plague, curse, and terrify. “This highlights, now more than ever, the fallacy of nuclear deterrence doctrines, which are based and rely on the threat of the actual use of nuclear weapons and, hence, the risks of the destruction of countless lives, of societies, of nations, and of inflicting global catastrophic consequences.”

The Parties agreed to push ahead with resolve to eventually see the nuclear weapons states sign on, saying “In the face of the catastrophic risks posed by nuclear weapons and in the interest of the very survival of humanity, we cannot do otherwise.” ###

— This column ran June 26 at Commondreams, and June 27 at Counterpunch

Filed Under: B61 Bombs in Europe, Military Spending, Nuclear Weapons, US Bombs Out of Germany, Weekly Column

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

2022 Summer of Anti-Nuclear Revival

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By Kelly Lundeen

As you are reading your Nukewatch Quarterly, Joe Biden may be reading his daily Delaware News Journal noticing the ad with the statement (below), “The Existential Threat of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” (TPNW). The Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative, of which Nukewatch is a member, placed the ad and is working to raise awareness of the nuclear ban treaty by calling on U.S. media to recognize the existence of the Treaty and to include it in news coverage regarding the nuclear threat and solutions. If your organization hasn’t signed onto this statement, visit <nuclearbantreaty.org> to do so.

This summer is set to be one of anti-nuclear actions with the commemoration of the 1982 million-person nuclear-abolition march, the first Meeting of States Parties (MSP) about the TPNW, both in June, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Review Conference in August. The latter two meetings have been postponed due to coronavirus restrictions but are now scheduled within two months of each other. In the lead-up to these events, the Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative has coordinated a nationwide media event to release the statement on June 7, as groups around the country call on news outlets to boost coverage of the TPNW. June 12 marks the 40th anniversary of the largest peace demonstration in U.S. history in 1982, the nuclear disarmament protest that contributed to the end of the cold war — when more than a million people gathered in New York City. A New York-based live-stream by RootsAction.org will serve as a catalyst for grassroots organizing to remember our history and re-imagine our future.

You can get involved by organizing a local event to align with the MSP to the TPNW, which takes place in Vienna, Austria June 21-23 with 60 nations meeting to discuss universalizing the Treaty, assistance to survivors of nuclear weapons use and testing, and environmental remediation of contaminated areas — issues that have never before been addressed by an international treaty.

Nukewatch’s John LaForge will attend the MSP and report “live-stream” from Vienna. Look for the date and time to be determined, sign your organization onto the statement, and watch for action alerts to commemorate the Trinity bomb test, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings at nuclearbantreaty.org.

 

The Existential Threat of Nuclear Weapons & the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

Please join hundreds of other groups, and sign on to this Statement here: <nuclearbantreaty.org>

The power to initiate a global apocalypse lies in the hands of the leaders of nine nations.

As 122 nations of the world indicated when they adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in July, 2017, this is unacceptable.

As concerns about the threat of nuclear weapons re-enter the public consciousness, it is important to know that humankind is not without an answer to the nuclear threat. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force on January 22, 2021, provides a clear pathway to the elimination of the nuclear threat.

We call on all nuclear-armed states to take immediate steps to:

• Engage the Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons;
• Attend the First Meeting of States Parties;
• Sign, ratify, and implement the Treaty.

We also call on the U.S. media to recognize the existence of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to include the Treaty in discussions, articles, and editorials regarding the nuclear threat and methods available to address it.

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

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Shorts

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
Shorts compiled by Lindsay Potter, Bonnie Urfer, Kelly Lundeen, and John LaForge.
On Earth Day, April 22, a coalition coordinated by the Japan Council Against A and H Bombs submitted petitions to Japan’s Foreign Ministry with 960,538 signatures urging the government to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Several prominent members of the campaign used the petition delivery ceremony, pictured, to condemn Japan’s recent promotion of “nuclear sharing” and “enemy base attack capability.”
Ultra-fast Missile Tested by U.S. Air Force

The U.S. Air Force reported its first successful “hypersonic” missile test, overseen by Edwards Air Force Base in northern California on May 14th. After the potentially nuclear-armed missile, dubbed “Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon” (ARRW), was launched from a B-52 bomber, its “booster ignited … achieving a speed five times the speed of sound” [about 3,835 mph], according to the Air Force. Russia and China have reportedly tested similar ultra-fast weapons. “U.S. defense officials have said that Russia has used hypersonic weapons an estimated 10 to 12 times in its invasion of Ukraine,” according to CBS News, and Democracy Now reported that Russian President Putin confirmed the report. Because of its speed and maneuverability, the ARRW is hard to follow or obstruct. But in a statement to Congress, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, couldn’t identify any other benefits that the weapon offers. “We are not seeing really significant or game-changing effects to date with the delivery of the small number of hypersonics that the Russians have used,” Milley said, according to CBS. — Reuters, CBS News, May 16, 2022 and Democracy Now, May 19, 2022

Accident at Deep Military Waste Dump

Troubles continue to plague the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), a deep burial site carved out of an ancient salt formation half a mile beneath Carlsbad, New Mexico. Workers had to hastily leave the above-ground facilities April 9, 2022, when radioactive liquid was found inside an outer shipping container. WIPP officials announced before an investigation had even begun that there was “no risk of radiological release and there is no risk to the public or the environment.” The 2,000-foot deep waste dump scheme has been excavated for burial of plutonium-contaminated radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production. The Energy Department (DOE) says the waste is “mostly clothing, gloves, lab coats, tools and other debris” from the Cold War, raising questions about the presence of liquid involved in the contamination accident.

The site hasn’t fully recovered from a February 2014 accident — when a waste barrel burst and spewed contamination throughout the whole complex — and now the dump must contend with yet another accident. WIPP was closed for several years after the 2014 barrel explosion in which a drum “self-heated” to almost 1,600 degrees, ripped open and scattered uranium, plutonium, and americium throughout the underground burial rooms, the whole ventilation shaft, and the above-ground buildings. At the surface, 22 workers were internally contaminated after inhaling the radioactive poisons, and independent monitors recorded radiation a half-mile away. Construction of a new ventilation system, three years behind schedule, and costing up to $486 million, still prevents employees from fully utilizing the site. The (DOE) investigation of the April contamination is ongoing. — Carlsbad Current-Argus, Apr 14;  Cortez, Colo. Journal, Apr 11, 2022; AP, April 11 & March 15, 2022; New Mexican, Apr. 23, 2015; Albuquerque Journal, Aug. 23, 2015; New York Times, May 31, & Oct. 30, 2014

Ohio Rad Waste Handler Spreading Contamination

Austin Master Services (AMS) is a radioactive waste management firm with offices in Martins Ferry, Ohio. The grassroots group Concerned Ohio River Residents (CORR) sent soil samples from around the firm’s site to a laboratory for tests that found radium-226 over ten times normal background levels. Radium-226 persists in the environment for 16,000 years. Results for lead-214 and bismuth-214 showed radioactivity also “approaching or exceeding regulatory limits,” said Beverly Reed of CORR. The lab analysis showed the hottest radioactivity near the firm’s entrance. AMS, with operations in ten states, handles and transports materials largely from oil and gas industry projects like fracking. While AMS operates without regulation by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), the agency insists some of its waste must be shipped to Utah because it’s too radioactive for regular state landfills. The AMS site, about 2,500 feet from a school stadium and a regional hospital, and several hundred feet from a water plant and homes, sits above the public drinking water aquifer and within a flood plain. In 2014, AMS relocated to Martins Ferry from Youngstown, Ohio after Fire Chief Silverio Caggiano opened an investigation into its facility. When approached by news station WTRF in April, Martins Ferry Mayor John Davies said, “I believe [CORR is] spreading mistruths… I drink the water every day. My kids drink it. My grandkids drink it.” CORR stands by its scientific findings and warns of the contamination’s threat to groundwater. The group hopes the ODNR will halt AMS’s operations and that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will name the area as a Superfund site to encourage clean-up. — CORR Original Documents; WTRF-TV, Apr. 6; The Times Leader, May 19, 2022; and AustinMasterServices.com

U.K. Activists See Return of U.S. Nuclear Bombs

The Guardian reports that bunkers at Britain’s Lakenheath Air Base, operated by the United States, are being refurbished “to be used again after 14 years to house U.S. nuclear weapons,” according to Pentagon defense documents unearthed by Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. U.S. nuclear weapons like the B61 gravity H-bombs in five European NATO states were withdrawn from Britain in 2008 after massive protests. “At the time of the withdrawal, gravity bombs were widely considered militarily obsolete, and hopes of further disarmament by the nuclear-armed powers were high,” the Guardian reported. With the new B61-model 12 now in production, the United States plans to replace over 100 B61-3 and -4 models now in Europe. The 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty prohibits any such sharing of nuclear weapons. Peace activists protested the reported return of U.S. nuclear weapons May 21 at Lakenheath, and the group Stop the War’s Chris Nineham “reminded the crowd that it was people power that forced nuclear missiles to be removed from Lakenheath in 2008” Popular Resistance reported. “It is because of what ordinary people did — what you did — and we can do it all again,” Nineham said.
— Popular Resistance, May 22; The Guardian, Apr. 12; and Federation of American Scientists, April 11, 2022

Poland “Might be open” to Hosting U.S. Bombs

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of Poland’s ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party, said April 3 that he “might be open” to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons in Poland, in spite of prohibitions enshrined in the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) that explicitly forbid it. “If the Americans asked us to store American nuclear weapons in Poland, we would be open to it,” Kaczynski told the German Sunday paper Welt Am Sonntag. “The initiative would have to come from the Americans. In principle, however, it makes sense to extend nuclear weapons sharing to the eastern flank,” Kaczynski said, according to Newsweek. Both Poland and the United States are signatories to the NPT. — New York Post, April 4; and Newsweek, April 3, 2022

Protest and Resistance Continues in Germany

This year’s International Week gathering, focused on the U.S. nuclear weapons stationed at Büchel air base in southeast Germany, is set for July 11 to 17. Peace activists from Germany, the U.S., Holland, and elswhere will also travel north to Nörvenich Air Base where Tornado jet fighters from Büchel will temporarily be stationed while their home base runway is refurbished. The Büchel base’s bunkers that hold U.S. nuclear gravity bombs are also being rebuilt to handle the delivery of the new B61-model 12 bombs now in production.

Meanwhile, nuclear weapons abolitionists continue to appear in court for go-in actions resulting in trespass charges. Susan Crane of the Redwood City California Catholic Worker will appear for an appeal hearing in Koblenz Regional Court September 20, as she is contesting her earlier conviction in Cochem District Court. Frits ter Kuile of the Amsterdam Catholic Worker has been ordered to self-report to jail in Germany after the authorities failed to coerce his payment of the civil penalty for a go-in trespass conviction. In a case that stems from the same July 15, 2018 go-in action as Frits and Susan — when eighteen resisters got through the fence at Büchel in broad daylight — Nukewatch’s John LaForge has formally appealed lower court convictions for trespass to Germany’s highest tribunal, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. Attorney Anna Busl in Bonn submitted a 36-page appeal brief to Germany’s “Supreme Court” on April 24. The appeal centers on the lower courts’ refusal to hear testimony from expert witnesses, arguing that the courts erred by denying LaForge his right to present a defense. Like many other resisters, LaForge argues that because planning nuclear attacks is an international criminal conspiracy to commit massacres, the defense of “crime prevention” excuses the trespass. The court won’t rule before August.

Filed Under: Environment, Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radioactive Waste

June 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty in the Footsteps of 1982’s Million-Person March

by John LaForge

VIENNA, Austria — June 17 — Last Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the June 12, 1982 million-person march in New York City for a “freeze” on nuclear weapons building, followed two days later by a mass nonviolent action at the consular offices of nuclear weapons states. Some 1,700 people, myself included, were arrested as we sat in the street blockading the nuclear-armed consulates, confronted by horse-mounted cops literally chomping at the bit while we nervously sang We Shall Not Be Moved and stared up at the menacing police.

We were moved out of the street that day in 1982, but the movement wasn’t deterred. We’ve pushed on for decades in spite of ridicule, harassment, and imprisonment, seeing to the slashing of the U.S. nuclear arsenal from over 60,000 in those days, to today’s approximately 5,000 — an amount still grotesque enough to incinerate and contaminate most of the living beings on Earth.

After millions marched in England and across Europe in the 1980s, tens of thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons were withdrawn from the Continent — nuclear gravity bombs, artillery shells, land mines, missiles (Pershing and Cruise) and more. (Roughly 100 are still positioned in NATO states, about 20 apiece at air bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Turkey — all in violation of the letter of the Nonproliferation Treaty.) After hundreds of nonviolent protests, the number of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles has also been cut from 1,000 to 400.

These numbers are as meaningless in military terms now as they were then, because the detonation of even one modern thermonuclear warhead causes such vast, uncontrollable, and indiscriminate blast, fire and poison that binding international humanitarian law (Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions) prohibits any deliberate use of them. Military authorities who order such use would be subject to war crimes prosecutions for committing massacres.

Fast-forward 40 years, and this week Vienna, Austria is hosting the First Meeting of States Parties, UN member states that have agreed to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). More than 100 governments will participate.

The great majority of the world’s representatives — 122 countries — voted their approval of the TPNW in 2017, 86 have formally signed, and 62 have since ratified it. The treaty has entered into force, and only the tiny minority of nuclear-armed governments and their military allies continue to reject it — for “deterrence” reasons that have been shown to be irrational and unachievable.

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine prove that nukes don’t deter war. Instead, they needlessly create the real possibility of globalized, radioactive catastrophe, all the while stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, and mountains of brain power, away from programs that are crucial and urgently needed.

A colossally expensive nuclear arms race is again underway among the richest militaries in spite of global climate chaos, refugee crises, pandemics and other medical emergencies, and food shortages, all of which must be confronted if we want to survive. The world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $82.4 billion upgrading their arsenals in 2021, the biggest spender being the United States, according to “Squandered,” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ annual report on nuclear spending.

Nuclear weapons states always claim their H-bomb budgets are for “refurbishment” of old, dangerous systems — something that their bedfellows in the nuclear reactor biz never admit about their old units. The power industry’s dangerous, outdated GE and Westinghouse junkers are never said to need retirement, but “license extensions,” and 93 out of 94 have been allowed to blow past their engineered 40-year shutdown mandates and into today’s deadly game of Fukushima Roulette — a crap shoot with suicide the public never agreed to join.

Germany’s clean phase-out of its 17 power reactors, and South Africa’s and Libya’s abandonment of nuclear weapons, have shown that both sides of denuclearization are possible. Now the TPNW presents the world with the practical, international means of eliminating the Bomb. With enough million-person marches, we can still shame the twin nuclear devils and bring the era of nuclear threats to an end. ###

— This column ran at Counterpunch June 17 and in LA Progressive June 22, 2022

 

Filed Under: B61 Bombs in Europe, Nuclear Weapons, US Bombs Out of Germany, Weekly Column

May 12, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Senator Calls Nuclear Fallout an Act of War

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2022
By John LaForge

Rhode Island U.S. Senator Jack Reed, the Democratic chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, reportedly said on March 23 that if Putin used a nuclear against Ukraine “there would be consequences,” adding that radioactive fallout from such a detonation could drift across nearby NATO countries and be considered an attack on NATO. (New York Times, March 23, 2022)

Senator Reed’s warning partly explains why nuclear weapons must not be detonated for any reason. Radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb test explosions is notorious for traveling long distances on the wind — sometimes around the world — and has indiscriminately contaminated far-off countries of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.

Bikini Lagoon, bombed by the United States July 1, 1946.

The fallout from nuclear weapons blasts has been scrutinized extensively by military analysts, who have known about its deadliness for decades.

In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg of The Pentagon Papers fame, reports that he and other nuclear war theorists in the Pentagon had estimated in the 1960s that “we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single U.S. or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe” [emphasis added].

“Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million.…”, Ellsberg wrote. The estimate illustrates the self-destructive consequences of nuclear weapons detonations, and the fact that military officers planning war with nuclear weapons have known for decades that they are devastating boomerangs that cannot be used without destroying the people and the territories being defended.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, War

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