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Büchel Resisters Choose Jail Over Fines

By the Nuclear Resister

Three more Europeans have gone to prison in Germany this year for their protests inside the Büchel Air Base, where US nuclear weapons are deployed. They are the 27th, 28th, and 29th resisters to choose prison over payment of fines during the long campaign to send those nukes back home. COVID had delayed the imposition of their sentences.

In May, Ria Makein, 70, surrendered to serve 30 days for her April 2019 arrest. She chose prison because she wanted to “continue our campaign.” Asked after her release what gave her the strength “to swim against the tide,” she replied, “Through all the mail I received during those four weeks, I became aware of this great network.”

In July, Amsterdam Catholic Worker Frits ter Kuile reported and served 30 days.

Holger-Isabelle Jänicke lost his appeal for taking part in an April 2019 action at Büchel and began serving his 30-day sentence in mid-August. Jänicke, a legal aid worker, dedicated his arrest to the late Fr. Carl Kabat, noting that, “In 1983, he also took part in the ploughshares campaign in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany in which a tractor for the Pershing II [nuclear missile] was damaged. From 1987 to 1995, I lived in Mutlangen in a community of peace workers. We named our house after Carl Kabat.”

Next in lockup for actions at Büchel may well be US activist John LaForge, who has refused to pay and has been ordered to serve 50 days in a German prison starting Jan. 10, 2023. Last spring, following his convictions in district and appeal courts for twice entering the base in 2018, LaForge appealed to the Constitutional Court. However, in Germany, imposition of sentence is separate from the legal appeal. The appeal argues that two lower courts erred by refusing to consider his defense of “crime prevention,” thus violating his right to present a defense. LaForge argues that Germany’s stationing of US nuclear weapons is a criminal violation of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which forbids transferring nuclear weapons to other countries. He also asserts that attempting to stop their use is not unlawful but a justified act to prevent the crime of threatening vast, disproportionate, and indiscriminate destruction from the US nuclear weapons.

While LaForge may become the first US activist to be jailed in Germany for protesting the US nuclear weapons there (Kabat having been released on his own recognizance and never returning to Germany for trial), at least two more Americans, both Catholic Workers who have joined the international protests at Büchel, could follow him into prison next year if they refuse to pay.

Susan Crane from Redwood City, California was convicted on January 18 on four counts of trespass from 2019. Once again, the Cochem court rejected her defenses of international law and competing harms, instead focusing for the record on the cost of hardware to repair the fence she’d helped to cut through. On September 20 Crane was retried in Koblenz Regional Court, contesting the trial court’s refusal to consider her defenses to the four 2019

charges as well as the charges for twice entering the base in 2018. She was convicted and given a sentence of 230 days or a fine of €1,000 ($968.00) and is considering another appeal.

While vigiling at Büchel in July for this summer’s international week of protest, Brian Terrell from Maloy, Iowa was served papers to appear in court on November 23 for the appeal of his conviction from a 2019 fence-cutting action there. He is weighing his options.

A final update: Uwe Lutz-Scholten was summoned to court in his hometown of Korbach, a three-hour drive from Büchel, on September 8, charged with inciting an illegal act. His name was on the website for the July 2021 “Digging for Life” action at Büchel as manager of the solidarity account to support the activists who were arrested.

Last winter the prosecutor discontinued the investigation of those arrested at the scene. Lutz-Scholten, drew a young judge who expressed interest in the issues, admitting she didn’t know anything about them before the trial but had learned a lot in preparation. She allowed him to speak at length about the consequences of nuclear war and the weapons stockpiled at Büchel, and at the end simply terminated the proceedings with no judgment or penalty.

—Felice & Jack Cohen-Joppa, editors of The Nuclear Resister in Tucson, Arizona, where this article first appeared, gave us permission to reprint.

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Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable

US plans to produce about 500 new tactical nuclear bombs - experts - ВПК.name

The United States intends to produce at least 500 of these new B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs, many of which are scheduled to be deploy at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Turkey.
by John LaForge
Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2022
LA Progressive, July 26, 2020

Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as “deterrence” when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or “terrorism” if Russia, China, or North Korea does.

U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about 100-to-150 of them known as B61s, are stationed at two NATO bases in Italy, and at one NATO base each in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. These 170-kiloton H-bombs — 11 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — are always described euphemistically as “theater” nuclear weapons, defensive ones that are a “deterrent” to aggression.

Of course, Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown nuclear “deterrence” to be an expensive, destabilizing, terroristic fraud. That our high, holy, sacrosanct, and unquestionable arsenal of “deterrence” did not deter Russia on February 24, 2022 is dreadfully, painfully, catastrophically obvious. Yet the nakedness of the deterrent-less Emperor has hardly been acknowledged.

In the ghastly maw of ongoing war in Ukraine, the needless provocation of stationing U.S. thermonuclear B61 H-bombs at six NATO base’s facing Russia could hardly be more frightening. Then, as if to scream “fire” in the crowded auditorium, NATO’s ministers on June 30 issued their latest “Strategic Concept,” a public relations version of the alliance’s ongoing threat to wage indiscriminate, uncontrollable, and poisonous mass destruction using U.S., French and British nuclear warheads.

The Strategic Concept’s soothing, cotton candy version of NATO’s open embrace of nuclear terrorism is this: “NATO will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

At the moment however, the B61 hydrogen bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel air base cannot credibly be a part of the “mission” since they can’t be attached to Germany’s Tornado fighter jets. This is because the base’s runway is being rebuilt. Until 2026, Büchel’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing of Tornado jets are based at the nearby Nörvenich air base.

For Kathrin Vogler, a Left Party member of the German Parliament in 2021, this is a chance to denuclearize Germany. The politician told the daily paper Rhein-Zeitung last year that “From June 2022 to February 2026, flight operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued and transferred to the Nörvenich military airfield…. This was confirmed to us by the German government in our minor inquiry. As far as we know, the 20 or so nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain there.”

“This means that German nuclear sharing will effectively not take place for four years from 2022,” Volger told the paper.

“This exposes the argumentation of the German government, which repeatedly claims that nuclear sharing is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining it and thus also the Büchel nuclear weapons site is pure symbolic politics, albeit with high risks for the population. Therefore: The suspension of nuclear sharing must become a phase-out, [and] now would be a good opportunity to do so,” Volger said last year.

Proven useless, nuclear weapons can now be discarded

The June 30 NATO “concept” says, “The fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

As of February 24, 2022, NATO’s nuclear weapons arsenal’s “fundamental purpose” has been utterly delegitimized, politically pulverized, and militarily reduced to ashes. The alliance’s nuclear arsenal can finally be removed without any loss of face, much less any loss of security.

NATO’s latest “concept” accidentally acknowledges the uselessness of retaining nuclear weapons in its recognition that, “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance.”

This is the terrible farce of nuclearism. If nuclear weapon threats guaranteed any security at all, none of the tens of billions of Euro-dollars’ worth of military training, weapons, mercenaries, cyber warfare, or intelligence assistance that NATO partners and Russia are now pouring into Ukraine would be necessary.

Nuclear-armed alliances are a thing of the past which must be and now can be abolished. Under the auspices of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, along with the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, international law provides a pathway, training wheels, guide rails and a motorcade — courtesy of the great majority of the world’s governments — to a world where conflict and even wars don’t endanger whole civilizations and the biological integrity of life on earth.

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Chorus Condemning Russia Sings Song of Hypocrisy, Risks Wider War

By Greg Mello
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-western-military-aid-ukraine-target/31749659.html

 

The drums of war are getting louder by the day here in the West, and we should be criticizing them. Joining the shrill voices demonizing Russia has a cowardly ring to it.

The US and its NATO allies are now bombing Russia. Let that sink in. Not every day, but often enough. This, after scuttling peace talks in March. The US and its NATO allies are running a war against Ukrainian provinces with millions of ethnic Russians who look to Russia for protection and safety from years of persecution and mass murder — over 10,000 have died; the usual estimate is 14,000 — by neo-Nazi formations and genocidal national laws that outlaw the Russian language and culture. A US artillery shell was aimed at a busy spot in Donetsk [in late September]. The US and its NATO allies have sunk a Russian warship, aging but still the flagship of its Black Sea fleet…. Let that sink in, so to speak. The US and its NATO allies are shelling the grounds of a large nuclear power complex and have conducted terrorist operations in Russia proper. With NATO training and assistance, Ukraine launched an amphibious operation against a nuclear reactor site [Zaporizhzhia] while International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors were present. Total US aid to Ukraine, in dollars, looks like it exceeds the total military budgets of all but two countries in the world.

This is a major war effort by NATO. It is not defensive. It is not aimed at “protecting Ukraine” or the dragooned, poorly-trained and equipped cannon fodder that Zelensky is sending to be chewed up on the front lines. NATO’s 50-country “Ukraine Defense Contact Group” supplies the arms, Ukraine supplies the bodies.

NATO worked hard to widen the eight-year conflict in Ukraine, building up Ukraine as a kind of “anti-Russia” — a conflict which the Minsk [agreement to end the conflict] guarantor states did nothing to stop, for years. NATO continued to expand — why? Missile launchers were installed a few minutes from Moscow. What did anybody think would happen? Well lots of people, like us, knew more or less exactly what would come of this — war. Western leaders and many NGOs were blinded by chauvinism and group-think. Finally the US neocons, which now control US foreign policy, succeeded in getting the war they have worked toward and have said all along that they wanted.

What Russian President Putin and Defense Minister Shoigu said Sept. 21st [“When the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will use all the means at our disposal to defend Russia and our people…Those who are trying to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the winds may blow in their direction.”], was nothing more than what is implied, or stated, in Washington, DC every day. Have you been in the conferences when nuclear weapons executives and Air Force generals start spontaneous war whoops at the stirring patriotic videos of the day when US nuclear missiles are finally launched at their targets? The US has made countless nuclear threats, from congressional hearings all the way down to speeches at Chambers of Commerce. Everybody involved in the enterprise understands that if conventional means of deterrence fail, the nuclear triad can and will be used. That’s the nature of the beast,in every country that has these weapons. That’s why nuclear weapons are built.

More specifically, Putin and Shoigu said they were responding to US nuclear threats with their own nuclear deterrence. What happens when or if NATO loses this war? What will NATO do? I have no idea. We have seen plenty of US nuclear threats, including at the UN.

Why was the W76-2 “low-yield” Trident warhead just built and deployed? What is the B61-12 for? People should know that there is now a 24/7 rush to build nuclear weapons here in the US, with plants in Missouri, Texas, and New Mexico among those with regular graveyard shifts. Why do German and Dutch and Italian and Belgian pilots train to drop those tactical weapons? Why were nuclear-capable B-52s just brought to RAF Fairford in the UK? What do you think that was? Fun and games? Where was the outcry then, or now? Why aren’t we all over the enduring problem of US nuclear weapons deployments in Europe, as Europeans were in the 1980s? Or is NATO a “good nuclear alliance?” Where are the nuclear umbrella relationships today? How many, with which countries? It’s a bit one-sided, isn’t it? What about the “missile defense” installations in Poland and Romania? All these are very real nuclear threats.

If you want to oppose nuclear weapons, you have to oppose them in your own country, not join in your country’s propaganda against other countries.

Putin and Shoigu are absolutely right in noting that the objective of the West, since long before the current conflict — and as a cause of it — is to “break” Russia, as the aged [former Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger put it. It’s a real threat, now voiced from many sources in the West, with hundreds of billions of dollars invested in it, and it’s visibly ramping up week by week. You can see the blood lust in the mainstream press. Something has to be done to cool that lust, and in the absence of opposition in the West, we are going to get nuclear warnings from those being targeted.

Russia, like any other country, would not have launched such a high-risk, high-cost operation unless its ruling political elites were sufficiently united in understanding that there was an existential threat to the Russian Federation. If a hostile army — by 2022 the most potent in Europe — was being groomed on the US border, my country would not have waited eight years to act.

The broader point is that nuclear weapons cannot be seen in a narrow silo. For disarmament, peace is needed. You can’t existentially threaten a country from a position of enormous military and hybrid war advantage (NATO spends more on armaments than the entire rest of the world combined, plus all its economic power and soft power), and then expect to have fruitful nuclear disarmament talks. If you threaten any creature and their offspring, or any country, with annihilation — which is what has been going on — you will see teeth and claws.

I would go further to say that what we are seeing is a reawakening of an aggressive form of European colonialism. NATO, which the US leads by the nose, or wallet, is an aggressive alliance that has been bombing here and there for far too long, serving as cover for a US imperial project that is now meeting resistance in Ukraine and many other places. The dying US empire is dangerous, as dying empires always are. When the purpose of NATO was expanded a few years back to include gaining or protecting access to energy resources, it was an important admission.

With the likely annexation of parts of Ukraine — which perhaps should have been done in 2014 — the war there is entering a new phase. Again Russia is drawing a line. “Ukraine” as an independent state ended in the 2014 coup; now it will shrink further, territoriality, from the boundaries that Lenin and others negotiated back in the day.

If the West can stop fanning the flames of war, and shipping more and more weapons into Ukraine, providing targeting services etc., there could be peace. That would be more likely if there was a peace movement.

Europe is now going to be much poorer, permanently, thanks to the war fever that has gripped its elites, which masks growing global energy scarcity.

We need to get our feet on firmer ground and work for peace, not just join the chorus condemning Russia.

Now go back to the beginning. The US and NATO are bombing Russia and sinking Russian ships. Let the implications of that sink in.

— Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Fukushima: Novel Fixes Repeatedly Fail, Dumping Threatens Pacific Commons

By John LaForge

 

During the 11-year-long, $57.4 billion partial decontamination efforts at the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi reactor site in Japan, almost every novel program invented to deal with the complex, unprecedented triple catastrophe has initially failed and then needed to be re-invented. Unworkable schemes instigated to repair, decontaminate, plug-up, or prevent ongoing radioactive contamination, along with cover-ups and corruption by the Tokyo Electric Power Co. which runs the operation, have left the Japanese public wary of the company’s plans and of safety assurances from the government.

Japan’s extensive bull-dozing and mass collection of contaminated topsoil and debris, poisoned by the meltdowns’ radioactive fallout, has filled approximately 20 million one-ton bags. These millions of tons of cesium-contaminated waste are standing outdoors in mountainous stacks scattered across seven states. Some of the heavy bags have been jostled and broken open by torrential rains during typhoons.

Attempts to locate and examine the total of 900 tons of melted reactor fuel (which possibly burned through the wrecked “containments” and foundations of the three units) have failed, because robotic cameras have repeatedly been destroyed by the ferociously hot and radioactive melted wastes. Eleven years after the catastrophe, the condition and location of the melted fuel masses, known as “corium,” is still uncertain because Tepco has yet to develop a robust enough camera.

South Korean fishing boats joined nationwide protests to demand Japan reverse its decision to release contaminated water from its crippled Fukushima nuclear complex into the sea. The banners read “Condemning Japan’s decision to release Fukushima water into the sea.” Photo by Reuters/Kim Hong-Ji

The reactors’ concrete foundations were so severely broken up by the record 9.0 magnitude earthquake, that groundwater rushes through cracks and broken pipes, pours over the three huge masses of corium and becomes highly contaminated with a mix of at least 62 radioactive materials. Tepco’s installation of an expensive “ice wall” that was dug into the ground behind the wrecked reactors, was intended to divert the groundwater keeping it away from the foundations. This fix has also failed.

Tepco has slowed the direct flow of the contaminated water into the Pacific by filtering it and then collecting it in giant tanks. But the tank farm is plagued by leaks and by the discovery that the filter system has failed. In 2018, Tepco admitted that its “Advanced Liquid Processing System” or ALPS had not removed iodine-129, ruthenium-106 and technetium-99, as well as carbon-14, and 60 other long-lived poisons, putting the lie to its repeated assurances that ALPS would remove everything but tritium. The company then promised that it would re-treat the collected water, before dumping all 1.3 million tons of the waste water into the Pacific.

In July, Japan’s nuclear regulator formally approved Tepco’s plan to dump the water into the ocean beginning in spring 2023 and continuing for 30 years. (The reactors produce 140 cubic meters of contaminated water every day, a combination of ground- and rainwater that seeps into the wreckage, and cooling water mechanically poured over the three corium piles.) While independent scientists and environmental historians have charged that dumping would constitute the worst premeditated maritime pollution in recorded history, Tepco’s ocean pollution solution has already been okayed by the government in Tokyo and by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Ocean dumping would violate international law

In August, Tepco announced that it would begin constructing a tunnel to the sea for releasing the waste water. Complaints from scientists, environmental groups and Pacific rim countries, particularly South Korea and China, have not forced Japan to reconsider the plan.

Certain international treaties forbid such deliberate pollution of the global commons. The “Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter,” or London Convention, prohibits any intentional release of radioactive wastes into the sea. Writing in The Korea Times, environmental attorney Duncan Currie and nuclear specialist Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace Germany noted that ocean dumping would also violate the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea by posing a direct threat to the marine environment and the jurisdictional waters of the Korean peninsula.

Tepco says the tritium concentration in the wastewater will be lowered before dumping by diluting it with seawater. However, dilution is basically a public relations scheme since the total amount of radioactive tritium will remain the same. Greenpeace’s Burnie and Currie and others have warned about tritium’s ability to form organically-bound tritium, and that if ingested with seafood the biological power of its beta radiation can damage human DNA.

 

-The Guardian, July 13  & June 29; Hankyoreh, June 9, 2022

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Alliances Unite in Fight Against Foreign Fossil Fuel Giant

By Kelly Lundeen
Treaty walker Sherry Couture, Fond du Lac Ojibwe, walks to protect water, honor treaties, and oppose Enbridge tar sands pipelines.
Photo: Indigenous Environmental Network

 

Canadian oil transport company Enbridge has a tough task ahead of it in Wisconsin and Michigan. Keeping their 69-year-old Line 5 pipeline flowing with tar sands requires the approval of two major projects: the reroute of the pipeline around the Bad River Reservation of the Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe), in Wisconsin, and a tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow strip of water connecting Lake Michigan and Lake Huron.

Opposition to pipelines has been fueled by growing awareness that climate chaos can be diminished by rejecting coal, oil, and gas projects. Furthermore, the Indigenous-led movement against fossil fuel infrastructure reminds US citizens that it is everyone’s responsibility to uphold Article 6 of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, which states that international law, such as treaties with native nations, takes priority over conflicting state laws.

Sherry Couture spoke at the Treaty People Convergence August 6, which her organization R.I.S.E. Coalition, Nukewatch, and several other groups helped organize through the Wisconsin Building Unity network. “I come from Fond du Lac, the 1854 Treaty territory [of the Lake Superior Chippewa] … I’m known as a Treaty walker … I’ll do anything for the nibi [“water” in Ojibwe]. I’ll live in a ditch. I’ll walk to the Capitol. I’ll sleep on the pipeline. [We] will chase Enbridge down and make sure that they leave our reservation,” she said. The US government violates the Treaty signed with the Fond du Lac by allowing Enbridge’s pipeline to run through the Treaty territory. At the Convergence, on the anniversary of Hiroshima day, Nukewatch linked the issues of the targeting of Indigenous populations and people of color both by nuclear weapons and environmental racism.

Nonviolent action against the Line 5 projects has been ongoing, and Enbridge also faces legal challenges by the Bad River Band and the State of Michigan. In 2013, the Bad River Band refused to renew pipeline easements across their reservation in northern Wisconsin, and in 2019 the Band sued to have the pipeline removed, forcing Enbridge to propose a reroute. On September 7, US District Judge William Conley found Enbridge to be trespassing on the Reservation for nearly a decade, yet didn’t go as far as shutting down the pipeline. Enbridge is working to obtain permits for a reroute while a Final Environmental Impact Statement is being completed. In order to demonstrate union support, Enbridge has already secured project labor agreements with four labor unions and a construction company that was partially owned by Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels (when the contract was signed). Enbridge, a foreign company, is on track to spend as much as $1.7 million on US lobbying for a second consecutive year.

A 2010 Enbridge oil spill into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, the largest inland oil spill in US history, called into question the Line 5 pipeline’s safety, particularly where it runs under the Straits of Mackinac in the Great Lakes, which contain 20% of the world’s freshwater. In 2018, a boat anchor was dragged across the pipeline, causing damage but not a rupture. Even those concerned about energy independence would wonder if putting the Great Lakes at peril is worth the 10% of oil from Line 5 reaching the US market, while 90% returns to Canada. Former Michigan governor Rick Snyder approved Enbridge’s plan to pass the pipeline through a tunnel under the Straits. Enbridge is still hoping to acquire state and local permits.

Nukewatch has supported Indigenous-led objections to both regional Enbridge pipeline projects, Line 3 and Line 5, including Camp Makwa starting in 2017, and a walk supporting Treaty rights last year. This spring Nukewatch organized local events as part of the March Forth to Earth Day actions opposing Line 5, which took place throughout Wisconsin. Pushback against the pipelines will continue in order to protect the water, the Earth, and the people.

What you can do:

• The Army Corps of Engineers is taking comments through October 14 on the proposed tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac for the Environmental Impact Statement scoping process. Participate in a public meeting on October 6, noon Central time, here: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82961743672; or by phone (309) 205-3325 (zoom ID 829 6174 3672).

• Submit comments online with a sample letter here: oilandwaterdontmix.org/submit_army_corps_tunnel_comment.

• See updates at rise-coalition.com, and at communitiesunitedbywater.org.

— Wisconsin Public Radio, Sep. 8, June 8, 2022 & July 20, 2016: GazetteXtra, Apr. 13, 2022; Open Secrets, 2022

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