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Why Not Just Pay the Fine for Resisting the B61s?

By John LaForge

My refusal to pay fines imposed for resisting nuclear weapons at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base raises a lot of questions, principally: Why not avoid prison and just pay?

One reason is because my protest was not wrong or a mistake in any sense, whereas paying the court-imposed penalty implies I’m guilty of some sort of offense or misconduct. Further, paying the fine has the appearance of an apology or remorse on my part when none is warranted. Any nonviolent action against preparations to commit mass destruction with nuclear weapons is honorable. An upsurge of such actions would be in the public interest. Further, my so-called “trespass” was an attempt at crime prevention, or interference with ongoing government criminality, and as such was a civic duty.

A recent test of the new US B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb. Photo by US Air Force.

Refusing to pay fines for nonviolent resistance to nuclear war preparations is, from my position of privilege, also an act of solidarity with the poor, the undocumented, and the outcasts who often don’t have resources or connections enough to purchase their way out of pre-trial detention or incarceration for minor offenses.

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law. The ongoing threat to attack people with nuclear weapons (known as “deterrence”) is prohibited by international law. My go-in actions at Büchel were based on international legal obligations, which in the words of the Nuremberg Principles “bind every citizen just as does ordinary municipal law.” Plans for massacres inherent in nuclear sharing and deterrence policy are prohibited and have been criminalized by the combined obligations — considered as a whole — set out in the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, the Nuremberg Charter, Principles, and Judgment, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), and the US and German federal constitutions.

The NPT in particular explicitly prohibits any transfer whatsoever of nuclear weapons from one state to another. I hope never to pay respect to governments that declare treaties are the “supreme law” but then proceed to wantonly violate them.

It can never be a crime to interfere with the deployment, rehearsals for use, or the threatened use of nuclear weapons, or to resist our governments’ joint plans to commit indiscriminate, uncontrollable mass destruction using firestorms and radiation. No criminal conspiracy of any kind anywhere compares to the level of deliberate public lawbreaking inherent in nuclear weapons threats. Rather than a trespass, my peaceful interference with nuclear attack machinery is justifiable, preventative, precautionary, and lawful.

Court systems in Germany and the US have labored to dismiss this lawful defense of necessity and to ignore their own constitutional command to abide by international treaties. Instead, when courts in both countries have been confronted with the treaty obligations outlined above, they have routinely denied their applicability in protest cases involving nuclear weapons. Courts in Germany have gone so far as to say that because Germany and the US have agreed to “nuclear sharing” the practice is therefore legitimate.

I have presented to the courts in Cochem, Koblenz, and Karlsruhe the facts about nuclear weapons, their effects, the government’s preparations for using them against civilians, and the treaties that forbid all such planning for massacres. By ignoring or denying these facts, the judges are guilty of pretending the criminality of deterrence is lawful, and they are complicit in the self-destructive maintenance of prohibited and suicidal nuclear threats. It is naïve or mentally unbalanced to act as if this charade is not homicidal and suicidal, and to ignore the criminal intent of the governments of Germany and the United States regarding nuclear sharing. I hope to be able to stand up to the courts’ coercion and intimidation, and to refuse to cooperate with such a government that is also the nuclear weapon’s government.

— This statement is in the Winter Nukewatch Quarterly, and ran Dec. 16 2022 at CounterPunch.org.

If you write to John at the prison, remember mail takes two weeks to reach Germany. After January 10 check nukewatchinfo.org or Nukeresister.org for other mail restrictions.
JVA Glasmoor
Am Glasmoor 99
22852 Norderstedt
Germany

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Nukewatch Co-Director to Report to Prison in Germany

Nukewatch staffer and Quarterly co-editor John LaForge has been sentenced to a 50-day jail term in Germany, for refusing to pay fines resulting from trespass convictions for several “go-in” nuclear weapons protests involving uninvited entry into Germany’s Büchel Air Base, where up to 20 US hydrogen bombs are stationed. The sentence will begin January 10 at the Billwerder prison in Hamburg.

LaForge appealed the convictions all the way to the Constitutional Court, which has yet to issue a decision. The appeal complains that expert witnesses — who were prepared to validate LaForge’s defense of “crime prevention” — were not allowed to testify. That decision, LaForge argues, effectively eliminated his right to present a defense.

The trial court in Cochem fined LaForge 1,500 Euros, which the appeal court in Koblenz later reduced to 600 Euros. In the US court system, refusal to pay the court-ordered fines is often ruled to be “contempt of court,” which can be considered a separate offense. Over four decades, LaForge has been jailed in the United States many times in anti-nuclear and anti-war actions.

Billwerder prison houses up to 734 adult male prisoners with relatively short sentences or held on pre-trial detention. It also holds up to 96 female adults or juveniles. Over a dozen German anti-nuclear resisters and one Dutch citizen have been jailed recently for nonviolent actions taken at the controversial NATO “nuclear sharing” base.

John LaForge entering Billwerder prison in Germany on January 10, 2023 (Photo by Marion Küpker)

If you write to John, remember mail takes two weeks to reach Germany.

John LaForge
JVA Glasmoor
Am Glasmoor 99
22852 Norderstedt
Germany

Before entering prison he was joined by other activists that have endured jail time for their anti-nuclear protests in a zoom meeting. Watch it here: John’s Jail Send-Off Zoom Meeting
Nukewatch Talks – an Exclusive

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Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine?

By Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold

 

In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well-deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.

Sheliazhenko, who heads up the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and is a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, accused the Center for Civil Liberties of embracing the agendas of such problematic international donors as the US Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy supports NATO membership for Ukraine; insists that no negotiations with Russia are possible and shames those who seek compromise; wants the West to impose a dangerous no-fly zone; says that only Putin violates human rights in Ukraine; never criticizes the Ukrainian government for suppressing pro-Russian media, parties, and public figures; never criticizes the Ukrainian army for war crimes and human rights violations; and refuses to stand up for the human right, recognized under international law, to conscientious objection to military service.

Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out, even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.

The Ukrainian Pacifist Movement was founded in 2019 when fighting in the separatist-ruled Donbas region was at a peak and Ukraine was forcing its citizens to participate in the civil war. According to Sheliazhenko, Ukrainian men were “being given military summonses off of the streets, out of night clubs and dormitories, or snatched for military service for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public drunkenness, or casual rudeness to police officers.”

To make matters worse, when Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine suspended its citizens’ right to conscientious objection and forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country; nevertheless, since February, over 100,000 Ukrainian draft-eligible men managed to flee instead of fight. It’s estimated that several thousand more have been detained while trying to escape.

“The Knotted Gun,” by Carl Fredrik. Photo Credit: Reuters

International human rights law affirms people’s right, due to principled conviction, to refuse to participate in military conflict and conscientious objection has a long and rich history. In 1914 a group of Christians in Europe, hoping to avert the impending war, formed the International Fellowship of Reconciliation to support conscientious objectors. When the US joined WWI, social reformer and women’s rights activist Jane Addams protested. She was harshly criticized at the time but, in 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Russia, hundreds of thousands of young men are refusing to fight. According to a source inside Russia’s Federal Security Service, within three days of Russia’s announcement that it was drafting 300,000 more recruits, 261,000 men fled the country. Those who could, booked flights; others drove, bicycled, or walked across the border.

Belarusians have also joined the exodus. According to estimates by Connection e.V., a European organization that supports conscientious objectors and deserters, an estimated 22,000 draft-eligible Belarusians have fled their country since the war began.

The Russian organization Kovcheg, or The Ark, helps Russians fleeing because of anti-war positions, condemnation of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and/or persecution they are experiencing in Russia. In Belarus, the organization Nash Dom runs a “NO means NO” campaign to encourage draft-eligible Belarusians not to fight. Despite refusing to fight being a noble and courageous act for peace — the penalty in Russia for refusing the draft is up to ten years in prison and in Ukraine, it is at least up to three years, and likely much higher, with hearings and verdicts closed to the public — neither Kovcheg, Nash Dom nor the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, were announced as Nobel Peace Prize winners yesterday.

The US government nominally supports Russia’s war resisters. On September 27, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared that Russians fleeing Putin’s draft were “welcome” in the US and encouraged them to apply for asylum. But as far back as October 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, amid tit-for-tat US-Russia tensions, Washington announced it would henceforth only issue visas to Russians through the US Embassy in Warsaw, 750 miles away from Moscow.

To put a further damper on Russian hopes of refuge in the US, on the same day as the White House held its press conference where it encouraged draft-eligible Russians to seek US asylum, the Biden administration announced that it would be continuing into fiscal year 2023 its FY2022 global refugee cap of 125,000.

You would think that those resisting this war would be able to find refuge in European countries, as Americans fleeing the Vietnam war did in Canada. Indeed, when the Ukraine war was in its early stages, European Council President Charles Michel called on Russian soldiers to desert, promising them protection under EU refugee law. But in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked his Western allies to reject all Russian emigres. Currently, all non-visa travel from Russia to EU countries is suspended.

As Russian men fled after Putin’s draft announcement, Latvia closed its border with Russia and Finland said it was likely going to be tightening its visa policy for Russians.

Had the Nobel Peace Prize awardees been the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian organizations that are supporting war resisters and peacemakers, it would have drawn global attention to the courageous young men taking this stand and perhaps opened more avenues for them to get asylum abroad. It could have also initiated a much-needed conversation about how the US is supplying Ukraine with an endless flow of weapons but not pushing for negotiations to end a war so dangerous that President Biden is warning of “nuclear Armageddon.” It certainly would have been more in line with Alfred Nobel’s desire to bring global recognition to those who have “done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies.”

— Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK, and author of several books including War In Ukraine (with Nicolas Davies). Ariel Gold is the national co-director of CODEPINK and manages the group’s Middle East Program.

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Nuclear Threats in Ukraine: Real and Hyped

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
By John LaForge

Is it possible that all the press about the highly elevated the risk of nuclear weapons being detonated in Ukraine is a lot of smoke? US political and military leaders have downplayed the risk of nuclear attacks in Ukraine many times.

The United States, Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom possess most of the world’s nuclear weapons. Last January 3rd, these five states jointly declared, “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Consequently the five governments should be racing to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on nuclearism after defunding their vast nuclear weapons infrastructures.

Instead, most are spending enormous sums on expanding their nuclear arsenals, and publicly announcing plans for the “first use” of the devices under certain conditions. The spending and strategies flatly contradict their public pledge that nuclear weapons can’t win anything and must never be used.

Yet it is possible that the military and political authorities in control of nuclear weapons know they must not explode them. It could be that nuclear attack planners understand that the effects of such detonations boomerang and bite back, poisoning and killing their own forces, contaminating the sought-after territories and that of neutral states.

The White House, the Pentagon and other experts have repeatedly assured the world they don’t think nuclear attacks are likely.

November 30:“Why Zelensky thinks Putin won’t use nukes on Ukraine” (Axios)

November 2: “US sees no indications Russia readying nuclear weapons, White House says.” (Reuters)

October 24: “No indication Russia has decided to use nuclear weapon in Ukraine, says senior US official.” (The Guardian & Financial Times)

October 9: “White House Sees No Indication Russia Is Preparing Nuclear Attack After Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ Warning.” (Forbes)
October 9: “…the White House emphasized on Friday that the United States has seen no signs that Russia is gearing up to use nuclear weapons.” (New York Times)

October 9: “Pentagon spokesperson tamps down concerns over nuclear ‘Armageddon.’” (The Guardian)

October 7: “Pentagon: No sign Putin is planning to use nukes after Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ comment.” (Politico)

Sept. 30: “US has not seen acts indicating Russia contemplating nuclear attack.” (Reuters)

Sept. 28:“US believes it’s unlikely Putin will use a nuclear weapon but threat has ‘elevated.’” (CNN)

Sept. 24: “The US says Russia isn’t preparing to use nuclear weapons, yet.” (New York Times)

Sept. 16: “I don’t see Putin using nuclear weapons” [says] British military strategist Sir Lawrence Freedman. (Euromaidan Press)

When asked about it on October 28, 2022 before the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow, even Russian President Vladimir Putin himself made clear that it’s useless to detonate nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Putin answered, “There is no point in that, neither political, nor military.”

The truly terrifying threat from nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war is the risk of an accidental or unintentional detonation. Nearby nuclear weapons are in the hands of Russia, France, Britain, and the United States, which deploy them on submarines, bombers, fighter jets and in “nuclear sharing” with NATO members Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Turkey — which station US B61 H-bombs at six separate bases. Computer glitches, false alarms, mistakes identifying shooters (as happened November 15 when Ukraine blamed Russia in error for a blast caused by one its own air-defense missiles striking Poland), or panicked commanders misreading communications, could all lead to catastrophe; a good reason to demand universal denuclearization.

The other truly consequential nuclear threats in Ukraine stem from the country’s 15 operational nuclear power reactors, those sitting-duck time bombs in this first-ever reactors-in-a-war zone conflict. These radiation grenades with their pins ready to be pulled should spark global anti-nuclear militancy — as did the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe in the same place 36 years ago.

 

— A version of this opinion ran at Counterpunch.org on November 21, and at L.A. Progressive December 2, 2022

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Goldmine of International Nuclear Reactor News

World Nuclear Industry Status Report:
All the empirical data we need to know about nuclear power’s decline

By Linda Pentz Gunter

The annual goldmine of empirical data on nuclear power that is the World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) was unveiled on October 5 in Berlin. The 2022 edition is available for download and is an indispensable reference source.

Beyond its in-depth overview of the status of nuclear power worldwide, the report also provides sections focused on particular areas of the technology or on certain countries or regions of the world.

As its principal author Mycle Schneider pointed out during the rollout, the report’s co-authors are fans of empirical data. Many of the findings in the report are taken from the nuclear industry itself. Facts and physics are pretty much immutable when it comes to nuclear power, and neither favors the industry very well. No amount of industry aspirational rhetoric can hide the truth about a waning and outdated technology.

The over-riding finding of the WNISR is that nuclear power’s share of global commercial gross electricity generation in 2021 dropped to below 10 percent for the first time ever, sinking to its lowest in 40 years.

[Journalist Elisa Serret on Radio Canada noted that this is a 40 percent drop from 1996, when nuclear’s share of global electricity generation peaked at 17.5 percent.]

As in past years, if you take China out of the picture — a country with 21 new reactors under construction as of mid-2022 — the decline of nuclear power worldwide is even more dramatic.

At close to 400 pages, the WNISR is a tome, but it is packed full of essential detail on every important topic related to nuclear power and its decline.

Whether you are interested in new reactors or closures, decommissioning or small modular reactors, the world or a specific country, there is something in the report that will flesh out the details.
In addition, there is an important chapter — Nuclear Power and War — dealing with the fate of nuclear reactors caught up in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the warfare that is exploding around them.

We have of course been talking, writing, and warning about the perils of reactors in a war zone since the time a Russian invasion was first intimated late in 2021. But the WNISR helpfully lays out all the possible causes and consequences of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. It answers the many questions we have about the robustness, or not, of reactors, fuel pools, and radioactive waste casks to withstand and survive a bombardment or even a prolonged power outage.

As former IAEA director of nuclear safety, Aybars Gurpinar told Bloomberg when addressing the risks to reactors in Ukraine: “Even if structures are extremely well designed, you cannot expect them to withstand a military-style attack. They are not designed for this.”

The WNISR concludes:

“Nuclear power plants are immediately vulnerable in war situations. This is directly due to the constant and permanent need for cooling. Extensive failure of the necessary electrical power or destruction of the cooling systems would lead to overheating of the reactor core. It is relatively unimportant whether this damage is intentional, unintentional, or of indeterminate cause and motivation.

“On the other hand, with increasing duration, the specific stress on the personnel and poorer maintenance worsens the operating conditions which also increases the probability of triggering serious accidents.”

In addition to covering the most obviously disastrous impacts, such as loss of coolant leading to fires and meltdowns, the report also explores some of the other essentials that could be lost during war but that are less often discussed.
These include lack of access to the site due to the destruction of roadways; absence of diesel fuel supplies for backup generators; the continued presence of a fire department with necessary equipment and access; the availability of skilled operating personnel and the consequences of staff working under duress or takeover; and the necessity of continued maintenance, repairs, and inspections.

These add to the already long list of technical things that could go wrong at a reactor under war conditions. This makes it particularly important to focus on the prevention of such a disaster, rather than speculating about who is at fault.

Speculation is not to be found in the WNISR. Accordingly, the authors chose to point out in conclusion that the news reports, about who is firing on what and why, are not necessarily reliable. All they, and we, can assess, is what the damage might be and what the consequences of that damage could lead to.

“In a war situation, it is particularly difficult to verify whether certain reports cover indisputable facts, are exaggerated, or false,” the WNISR authors write. “The warring parties, as well as organizations and individuals interacting with them, have an interest in a representation that is not necessarily objective.”

Wars will happen, and the fog of war will mask and confuse what is actually going on. But the one abiding problem is the nuclear reactors being there in the first place. And that’s the one thing we do have the power to change.

— Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International, where this report first appeared.

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