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June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Ukraine in the Age of Self-Delusion

The U.S. & Russia, faded relics of the Cold War, unable to accept their terminal decline, launch futile & self-defeating wars to reclaim their lost imperial power.

Nukewatch Quarterly  Summer 2022
By Chris Hedges

 

Blinded by what Barbara Tuchman calls “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,” we are marching ominously towards war with Russia. How else might we explain Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public declaration that the U.S. goal is to “weaken Russia” and Joe Biden’s request for another $33 billion in “emergency” military and economic aid (half of what Russia spent on its military in 2021) for Ukraine?

The same cabal of generals and politicians that drained the state of trillions of dollars in the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia and learned nothing from the nightmare of Vietnam, revel in the illusion of their omnipotence. They have no interest in a diplomatic solution. There are billions in profits to be made in arms sales. There is political posturing to be done. There are generals itching to pull the trigger. Why have all these high-priced and technologically advanced weapons systems if you can’t use them? Why not show the world this time around that the U.S. still dominates the globe?

The masters of war require an enemy. When an enemy cannot be found, as George Orwell understood in Nineteen Eighty-Four, an enemy is manufactured. That enemy can become an ally overnight. We allied ourselves with Iran in the Middle East to fight the Taliban and later the Caliphate, before instantly reinstating Iran as the incarnation of evil. The enemy is not about logic or geopolitical necessity. It is about stoking the fear and hatred that fuel perpetual war.

In 1989, I covered the revolutions that toppled the communist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe. President Mikhail Gorbachev, like his successor Boris Yeltsin and like Vladimir Putin in the early stages of his rule, hoped to integrate Russia into the western alliance. But the war industry places profits before national defense. It needed an antagonistic Russia to push the expansion of NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany in violation of a promise made to Moscow. There were billions of dollars to be made from a Russian enemy, as there are billions more to be made from the proxy war in Ukraine. There would be no “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War. The war industry was determined to continue to bleed the U.S. dry and amass its obscene profits. They provoked and antagonized Russia until Russia filled its preordained role.

The humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan and two decades of military disasters in the Middle East have magically been atoned for in Ukraine, although we have yet to place any troops on Ukrainian soil. We have taken ownership of the Ukrainians, as we did with the mujahideen we funded to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

“For the first time in decades, an American president is showing that he, and only he, can lead the free world,” wrote George Packer, one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq, in The Atlantic.

“NATO has been revitalized, the United States has reclaimed a mantle of leadership that some feared had vanished in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the European Union has found a unity and purpose that eluded it for most of its existence,” The New York Times crowed.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, The New York Times wrote, carries around a map of Ukraine, marked with tactical details. “With aides, he drills down for details about the location and combat readiness of specific Russian ground units and ship movements,” the paper noted.

Former NATO commander Richard Shirreff told BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program the West should prepare to fight Russia.

“The worst case is war with Russia,” he said. “By gearing itself up for the worst case, it is most likely to deter Putin because ultimately Putin respects strength.”

War is a drug. It cripples your body. It fogs your brain. It reduces you to poverty. But each new hit sends you back to the euphoric heights where you began.

More weapons mean more fighting. More fighting means more death and destruction. More death and destruction mean more antagonization of Moscow. More antagonization of Moscow means we circle closer and closer to open warfare with Russia. Following Ukraine’s strikes on Russian military and energy facilities, Moscow threatened to attack incoming NATO weapons shipments. Reeling from sanctions, Moscow halted gas supplies to two European countries. It warned that the risk of a nuclear war is very “real” and that any direct foreign intervention in Ukraine would provoke a “lightning fast” response. As Finland and Sweden prepare to join NATO, Russia has called further expansion of NATO another dangerous act of provocation, which of course it is. There is mounting pressure for a no-fly zone, a move that would trigger direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, as would a Russian attack on a NATO arms convoy in a Ukrainian neighbor country. Putin’s revanchism is matched by our own.

“Defanged” Russia’s Floundering Invasion

The disorganization, ineptitude, and low morale of the Russian army’s conscripts, along with the repeated intelligence failures by the Russian high command — apparently convinced Russia would roll over Ukraine in a few days — exposes the lie that Russia is a global menace. Russia’s forty-mile long convoy of stalled tanks and trucks, broken down and out of fuel, on the muddy road to Kyiv was not an image of cutting-edge military prowess. Russia has been unable to overwhelm a poorly equipped and numerically inferior force in Ukraine, many of whose troops have little or no military training. Russia poses no threat to the NATO alliance or the United States, barring a nuclear attack.

“The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself,” historian Andrew Bacevich writes in The Nation. “Most embarrassingly for American policy-makers, the failure of Putin’s ‘special operation’ exposes the overall Russian ‘threat’ as essentially fraudulent.”

But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public. Russia must be inflated to become a global menace, despite nine weeks of humiliating military failures. A Russian monster is the raison d’être for increased military spending and the further projection of American power abroad, especially against China. Militarists need a mortal enemy. That enemy may be a chimera, but it will always be led by the new Hitler. The new Hitler was once Saddam Hussein. Today it is Vladimir Putin. Tomorrow it will be Xi Jinping. You can’t drain and impoverish the nation to feed an insatiable military machine unless you make its people afraid, even of phantoms.

The war in Ukraine is intimately linked to the real existential crisis we face — the climate crisis. The latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warns that greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and be nearly halved this decade, to thwart global catastrophe. UN Secretary General António Guterres characterized the report as “an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership.” Triggered by war in Ukraine, soaring energy prices have pushed the U.S. and other countries to call on domestic oil producers to increase fossil fuel extraction and exacerbate the climate crisis. Oil and gas lobbyists are demanding the Biden administration lift prohibitions on offshore drilling and on federal lands.

Black and brown people, who suffered in the brutal wars in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Syria, without the western support and sympathy shown white Ukrainians, will again be targeted. The Indian subcontinent is currently plagued with temperatures as high as 116.6 degrees Fahrenheit, power outages of 10-to-14 hours a day, and dying fields of crops. An estimated 143 million people will be displaced over the next thirty years, nearly all from Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the IPCC writes.

These endless conflicts will inevitably militarize our response to the climate breakdown. Absent measures and resources to halt the rise in global temperatures, curtail our reliance on fossil fuels, foster a plant-based diet, and curb profligate consumption, nations will increasingly use their militaries to hoard diminishing natural resources, including food and water. Russia and Ukraine account for 30 percent of all wheat traded on world markets. Since the invasion, the price of wheat has gone up by between 50 and 65 percent in commodities exchanges. This is a hint of what is to come.

The Ukraine war is part of a world order where the rule of law has been jettisoned for aggressive, preemptive war, a criminal act of aggression. These wars bring with them black sites, kidnapping, torture, targeted assassinations, censorship, and arbitrary detention. Rogue private contractors, along with covert intelligence paramilitary units, carry out off-the-book war crimes. Russia’s Wagner Group (the name Wagner is supposedly the call sign of its founder and commander, an ex-GRU officer called Dmitry Utkin, who reportedly has Waffen-SS insignia tattooed on his collarbones) or the U.S. mercenary group Academi, founded by the Christian Right leader Erik Prince, function as little more than death squads.

War is a spectacular form of social control. It secures a blind, unquestioning mass consent propped up by what Pankaj Mishra calls an “infotainment media” that “works up citizens into a state of paranoid patriotism,” while “a service class of intellectuals talks up the American Revolution and the international liberal order.”

In The London Review of Books, Mishra wrote:

Humiliation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at home by Trump, demoralised the exporters of democracy and capitalism. But Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine have now given them an opportunity to make [the U.S.] seem great again. The Russian bear has long guaranteed, more reliably than ‘Islamofascism’ or China, income, and identity to many in the military-industrial and intellectual-industrial complex. An aging centrist establishment — battered by the far right, harangued by post-Occupy and post-BLM young leftists, frustrated by legislative stalemate in Washington — seems suddenly galvanised by the prospect of defining themselves through a new cold war.

This world of fantasy is sustained by myths — the myth that the people of Afghanistan and Iraq would welcome us as liberators, that Ukraine is not a real nation, that Ukrainians see themselves as pan-Russians, that all that stands between Iraqis, Afghans, Syrians, Somalis, Yemenis and Libyans and ourselves are terrorists, that all that stands between Putin and Ukrainians are neo-Nazis and their supporters in the West.

Those that challenge these fantasies, whether in Russia or the U.S., are attacked, marginalized, and censored. Few notice. The dream is more appealing than reality. Step-by-step these blinded, bloodied cyclops of war stumble forward leaving mounds of corpses in their wake. ###

— Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief of the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and a columnist at ScheerPost where this first appeared. He is the author of several books, including American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

–Scheer Post via Popular Resistance, May 2, 2022;

 

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, War

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

New Study: Cancer Epidemic is Result of Internal Fallout Radiation, Grossly Miscalculated

Peer-reviewed report reveals massive errors in radiation protection law and likely cause of global cancer epidemic.

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022

By the Low Level Radiation Campaign

Fig. 2. Standardised Mortality Ratios for all cancers in three LSS exposure groups, low, medium and high, compared with unexposed Okayama Prefecture [48,49]. Persons age 0–34 at the time of the bomb. Cancer deaths from 1971–1990. (N = 1437 cancer deaths; p-values all <0.0001).

 

A new report by British radiation scientist Christopher Busby shows that current radiation exposure limits are based on a risk model that is totally unsafe when applied to internal irradiation. For the purposes of setting radiation exposure limits for common radioactive materials released to the environment, today’s model is deadly, the study says, and was dishonestly assembled back in the 1950s.

The new paper, “Ionizing radiation and cancer: The failure of the risk model,” was published in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer Treatment and Research Communications.[1] In the paper Dr. Busby, the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, presents comprehensive evidence that today’s radiation protection standards are grossly inadequate, particularly regarding internal radioactive materials that are ingested or inhaled.

The new study also illuminates the way in which the U.S.-influenced international radiation effects model was constructed between 1956 and 1977. The model still used by regulatory agencies today artificially minimized internal radioactivity across the whole human body in such a way that it could be argued that the radiation’s health effects were vanishingly small. In reality, radiation effects at the DNA level and inside the cell (where cancer starts) are thousands of times higher than the official model says. Likewise, the incidence of cancers caused by radiation exposures is also thousands of times greater than the failed risk model predicts.

The official risk model, which wrongfully minimizes radiation’s harmfulness, enabled the development of nuclear weapons, nuclear power reactors, and “depleted uranium” weapons. Today’s “Linear No Threshold absorbed dose” model was assembled before the discovery of DNA as the target for radiation health effects, yet has not been essentially altered since then, in spite of scientific evidence which strictly falsifies it. Consequently, atmospheric nuclear weapons tests have resulted in the global cancer epidemic and caused more than 100 million deaths among those exposed, the paper explains.

“I have worked for more than 30 years on this issue, and I have been attacked on the internet. My Wikipedia entries are constantly changed by trolls in an invisible war against the idea that internal radiation is very dangerous. I have stuck to the issue and refused to back off, because it is critical for life on the planet,” Busby said. A previous journal article by Busby shows that the Japanese lifespan study of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing was dishonestly manipulated to minimize radiation’s health effects.[2]

Dr. Busby, who was previously Visiting Professor at the University of Ulster, together with Professors Alexey Yablokov, Alice Stewart, Inge Shmitz-Feuerhake, Rosalie Bertell, and Molly Scott Cato, set up the independent European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) in Brussels in 1998. The ECRR risk model was published in 2003 and 2010, and a new version is due this year.

— The Low Level Radiation Campaign is a research and lobby group in England promoting a scientific understanding of radiation risk.

– Science Direct, Volume 31, 2022

[1] Christopher Busby, “Ionizing Radiation and Cancer — The failure of the Risk Model,” Cancer Treatment and Research Communications, Vol. 31, April 21, 2022
[2] Christopher Busby, “The Hiroshima A-Bomb Black Rain and the Lifespan Study — Resolution of the Enigma,” Cancer Investigation, Vol. 39, Issue 10, Sep. 16, 2021.

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

New Office in Justice Dept. to Fight Environmental Racism

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
Julia Kane, Grist
https://www.justice.gov/oej

The Biden administration on May 5th unveiled a new government office for communities that have been targeted and plagued by polluters for decades.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is launching its first-ever Office of Environmental Justice, which, along with other federal agencies, will bring cases against polluters, prioritizing the communities most affected by environmental harm.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference, “Communities of color, Indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change.”

The new environmental justice office commits the DOJ to fighting these problems by “vigorously and transparently working to secure environmental justice … in communication with the communities most affected by the underlying violations of federal law,” Garland said.

The Office of Environmental Justice will be led by Cynthia Ferguson, an attorney in the department’s Environmental and Natural Resources Division.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan noted the return of “supplemental environmental projects” as a law enforcement mechanism the Trump administration had banned. The projects allow convicted polluters to fund local anti-pollution initiatives as part of penalties for breaking environmental laws. Regan said the projects were “a tool to secure tangible public health benefits for communities harmed” by illegal pollution.

Jane English, the NAACP’s environmental and climate justice program manager, welcomed the news writing: “As climate change worsens, it is imperative that our leaders produce real, tangible solutions to protect Black and frontline communities and correct existing and past harms, all while initiating direct law enforcement corrective responses to egregious harms and environmental injustices.”

 

–Grist, May 6, 2022; U.S. Department of Justice original document

Filed Under: Environmental Justice, Newsletter Archives, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter

June 21, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Zero-Emission Canada Possible

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2022
By John LaForge
David Suzuki Foundation Study

Canada can achieve 100% carbon-emission-free electricity production by 2035 by urgently promoting renewable energy, energy efficiency, smarter transmission, and by avoiding the cost, pollution, and delays of nuclear power, fossil gas, carbon capture, and carbon offsets. So says the David Suzuki Foundation in a new study. The report details an overhaul of Canada’s electricity sector and identifies vast potential to expand wind and solar capacity, sources cited by the International Energy Agency as “the cheapest sources of new electricity generation in history.” Energy transition pioneer Amory Lovins told the Guardian, “far better to deploy fast, inexpensive, and sure technologies like wind or solar than one that is slow to build, speculative, and very costly. Anything else makes climate change worse than it needs to be.”

— The Energy Mix online, May 27, 2020; the Guardian, Mar 26, 2022

Filed Under: Environment, Newsletter Archives, On The Bright Side, Quarterly Newsletter, Renewable Energy

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