War – Page 19

August 2, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Iran’s Uranium Processing Site Bombed by Israel?

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021

By Bob Mayberry

On April 11, 2021, an explosion at Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site destroyed the power supply to its underground uranium processing centrifuges. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, called the attack an act of “nuclear terrorism,” and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif condemned the bombing as a “war crime.” Iran said there were no fatalities.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was with former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem April 11, the day Iran’s uranium processing site was bombed most likely by Israeli agents with US approval. Photo: Menahem Kahana/UPI/Pool

The New York Times reported that “American and Israeli intelligence officials said there had been an Israeli role.” The morning of the bombing, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

Israel, which has between 80 and 400 nuclear weapons and has never joined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the attack. Iran has no nuclear weapons and ratified the NPT in 1970.

Prior to the April attack, Iran began using new advanced centrifuges for enriching uranium-235 up to 20 percent. Enriched uranium is produced by feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into centrifuges that separate the uranium-235, the most suitable isotope for nuclear fission. Uranium enriched to 90% or more can be used to make nuclear weapons, the BBC noted. Shortly after the attack, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani announced that Iran would begin enriching uranium to 60%. Although Rouhani repeated that Iran’s nuclear activities were “exclusively peaceful,” France, Germany and the UK all expressed “grave concern” since there is no civilian atomic reactor using uranium enriched to 60%. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki described Iran’s decision — not the bombing of a uranium processing complex — as “provocative.”

On April 29, Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen said, “Israel will not allow Iran to attain nuclear arms.… Our planes reach everywhere in the Middle East, and certainly Iran.” Meanwhile, White House officials met with Israeli delegates and agreed only on the “significant threat” posed by Iran. The Israeli ambassador to the US announced that the Biden administration would consult with Israel about any renewal of the anti-nuclear deal with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreed to in 2015 between Iran, China, France, Russia, the UK, the US and Germany — together with the European Union. What Israel’s act of war provokes from Iran remains to be seen.

— Reuters, “Our warplanes can reach Iran, Israeli minister warns amid nuclear talks,” April 29; Reuters, “Iran to begin 60% uranium enrichment after nuclear site incident,” April 13; Associated Press, “Iran blames Israel for sabotage at Natanz nuclear site,” April 12; and New York Times, “Blackout Hits Iran Nuclear Site in What Appears to Be Israeli Sabotage,” April 11, 2021

August 2, 2021 by Nukewatch 2 Comments

Navy Commanders’ Public Brawl over Legality of Nuclear Attack Orders

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021

By John LaForge

In a rare, publicly aired dispute between Naval command officers over responsibility for nuclear weapons attacks, two retired British submarine commanders have openly attacked each other’s views in writing. The online confrontation opened a window to the tortured thinking inside high-level preparations for attacks using thermonuclear weapons.

The headline in The Ferret in Scotland: “Trident commanders ‘not legally responsible’ for nuclear attack.”

The very public verbal brawl — between Rear Admiral John Gower, a former submarine commander and retired leading ministry official, and retired submarine Commander Robert Forsyth — appeared on the website of the Nautilus Institute, a California-based non profit, in an exchange of six lengthy letters between September 2019 and January 2020.

What caused the uproar was Adm. Gower’s claim that British submarine captains do not have any right to question, much less refuse, an order to launch their nuclear weapons.

A view of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

Adm. Gower wrote: “The military has no formal role in the advice or decision upon whether to launch” nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, which are all on its Trident submarines. “There was then, and there is now, no latitude for a CO (or XO) [commanding officer or executive officer] to delay or refuse a launch order on any basis,” he wrote.

Gower’s position creates — in the phrase coined by Professor Robert J. Lyfton — an “atrocity producing situation” by institutionalizing blind obedience. And the world knows what this led to in Hitler’s fascist regime. The claim that submarine commanders have no choice but to obey when ordered to attack with nuclear weapons is a clear violation of the Nuremberg Charter, Principles and Judgment.

It was Gower’s shocking assertion that such orders cannot be disobeyed that forced Cdr. Forsyth to publicly lambast his comrade in arms.

“We knew our missiles were targeted to take out Moscow — the so called ‘Moscow Criterion’ — and that this would cause appallingly disproportionate and indiscriminate deaths to millions of the civilian population by blast and fire immediately and, for decades to come, through radiation,” Cdr. Forsyth wrote. “We knew that such a strike would be well outside any accepted international humanitarian law.”

“This is factually wrong,” Adm. Gowers replied, although he admitted that authoritative warnings about unlawful indiscriminate destruction have existed for decades, writing, “Although the ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] made statements in 1945 and 1950 on the consequences of atomic weapons use, these were not legal judgments.”

Cdr. Forsyth answered explicitly pointing to the law imposed by the Allies on the defeated Nazis:

“Nuremberg Principle IV states, ‘The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.’ Unquestioning obedience to a superior’s order is not enough. The UK Joint Service Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict itself states that military commanders ‘… have a responsibility to cancel or suspend the attack if it turns out that the object to be attacked is going to be such that the proportionality rule would be breached.’ So it is the CO himself who must make a considered and informed decision as to whether he should obey the order.”

To this Adm. Gower rejoined: “Successive Attorneys General … have maintained confidence in their judgment that in the extreme circumstances where the employment of the nuclear weapons might be justified, they can be so employed in ways consistent with IHL” [International Humanitarian Law].

Cdr. Forsyth rejected this claim writing, “Rear Admiral Gower states that he is prepared to put his faith in the Attorney General’s infallibility, and that a Trident CO can similarly assume that any order to fire will be fully compliant with International Humanitarian Law. He suggests that as a ‘lay’ person I should not question the Government’s legally obtained position. To which I say, ‘What about Iraq 2003 and the Chilcot Inquiry?’” The reference is to the July 2016 House of Commons report that castigated and condemned the UK’s role in the US-led military bombardment and occupation of Iraq.

Forsyth continued: “Rear Admiral Gower suggests that the COs of [nuclear-armed subs] are absolved of any responsibility because they do not have knowledge of the targets or other specifics of the attack nor have any discretion in carrying out the order. However, there is no reference to such words in the Nuremberg Principles.” Cdr. Forsyth reminded Gower of military personnel’s responsibility under international law to disobey unlawful orders “provided a moral choice was in fact possible.” He wrote, “The CO needs to know the facts to make a moral choice; moreover, he has discretion by virtue of his Captain’s Key which must be turned to give his permission to fire. … The CO could well be placed in involuntary legal jeopardy if he obeys without question not knowing the facts.”

Adm. Gower then resorted to name calling, having lost the argument on the legal basis. Gower wrote, “Those who seek unilateral disarmament of the UK have begun to use this personal threat against the [commanding officer] as a means of undermining the moral component of the deterrent.”

But Cdr. Forsyth wasn’t distracted. “The crucial question,” he concluded, “is whether Adm. Gower’s statement that a military commander with the responsibility and discretion to withhold fire is, as he asserts, uniquely exempt from the provisions of the Nuremberg Principles and Article 33 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

In an email, Professor Francis Boyle at the University of Illinois provided one answer to the crucial question: “The Nuremberg Charter and Judgment were unanimously approved by a UN General Assembly Resolution making them customary international law.”

To read the full exchange see: https://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/united-kingdom-nuclear-weapon-command-control-and-communications/

April 26, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Biden’s MacArthur Moment

by John LaForge, Nukewatch

Joe Biden has his own Douglas MacArthur moment, and should replace the head of US Strategic Command, Adm. Charles A. Richard, just as Harry Truman fired the insubordinate commander of the US war in Korea.

Truman biographer David McCullough reports that in November 1950, Gen. “MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the ‘state of war’ imposed by the Chinese, then to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.” MacArthur then urged that the US “‘sever’ Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, ‘the by-products of atomic manufacture,’ all along the Yalu River.” In April 1951, President Truman fired MacArthur, replacing him with Gen. Matt Ridgeway.

Adm. Richard wrote in the US Naval Institute journal Proceedings that the US must, “consider the possibility of great power competition, crisis, or direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer.” The language is more nuanced than MacArthur’s, but just as genocidal. “We’ve assumed strategic deterrence will hold in the future, but as the threat environment changes, this may not be the case,” he said in an interview, as if discussing the strength of a dike and not the death of millions. This terror-mongering must not be allowed to grow deeper roots at StratCom.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based organization is nominally in control of all US nuclear weapons systems. StratCom says its “responsibilities include” overall US nuclear weapons “operations”, “global strike”, and “targeting”. Its day-to-day business is nuclear attack planning, and Adm. Richard is familiar with the preparations as he previously was commander of Submarine Forces, commander of Submarine Force Atlantic, and commander of Allied Submarine Command.

Adm. Richard claims China intends be a “strategic peer” of the US, and that China is “aggressively challenging international norms and global peace using instruments of power and threats of force…,” according to Bill Gertz, in the Washington Times. Yet China’s “near peer” nuclear arsenal totals 350 warheads, while the Pentagon’s stock of 3,800 warheads is 10 times its size. The recent report by Simone Chun points out the Elephant in the Room here, counting 290 US military bases surrounding China in the Asia-Pacific region alone, and the Pentagon’s request for an astounding $27 billion budget increase in its military buildup there.

The admiral’s psychological projection regarding “instruments of power and threats of force” shows an willful (or imbalanced) blindness to the millions that are being or have been devastated, displaced, maimed, dismembered, or killed by US warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and Syria. China hasn’t crossed another state’s border since its 1951 crushing, 300-mile push-back against MacArthur’s forces in North Korea.

“While [China] has maintained a ‘no first-use’ policy since the 1960s — contending it will never use a nuclear weapon first … This policy could change in the blink of an eye,” Adm. Richard says. But why would it? China’s no first-use policy absolutely reduces tensions of all kinds. This is a goal that Mr. Biden the Strategic Command, and NATO could pursue, and an accomplishment they could share with China by making the same pledge — now a bill in Congress.

Like with Gen. MacArthur before him, there is a madness in Adm. Richard’s speech. There is no reason whatsoever for China to reverse its no first-use pledge, except in the minds of the irrationally paranoid. US Strategic Command used to be run by Gen. George L. Butler who since retiring speaks more sanely about the Bomb. In Sept. 1999 Gen. Butler said, “Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are insanely destructive agents of physical and genetic terror” that are “morally indefensible.” This is a description that now applies to Adm. Richard himself, whom the president should relieve of duty.

— A version of this comment ran April 26 at CounterPunch.org.

March 30, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Accidental Apocalypse and Nuclear War on Drugs

Image by Christopher Farrugia.

By John LaForge, Nukewatch

With existential national security threats from floods, droughts, wildfires, water pollution, sea-level rise, and peak oil,[1] the US Air Force, the Air National Guard and nuclear weapons manufacturers could do crucial defense work in the US heartland by building, installing, managing and expanding renewable (wind and solar) electric power systems — instead of polishing their 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and preparing to welcome an astronomically expensive replacement missile dubbed Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. Call such a switch a “Climate Defense Initiative” since it would constitute deterrence against actual threats.

But no. Congress’s “ICBM Coalition,” missile contractors Lockheed Martin, GE, Northrup-Grumman, Boeing, and United Technologies, hundreds of subcontractors, their lobbyists, and public relations departments have conjured implausible but scary sounding reasons for paying an estimated $264 billion for yet another new rocket system. Since 1955, the nuclear-armed rocket gravy train has invented reasons for Atlas missiles, Titan missiles, Minuteman I, II and III missiles, and even a few dozen Peacekeepers.

The proposal to replace today’s 400 land-based ICBMs is so unsound and unpopular that even centrist organizations and individuals have condemned it (most for the wrong reasons), among them the editorial board of Bloomberg News, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Arms Control Association, Defense News, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and a handful of retired military commanders.

Six years ago, the Bulletin referred to “the significant number of ‘expert’ studies that have appeared over the past five years suggesting that the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad should be deactivated”.[2] Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired a 2012 study group whose final report — co-signed by then Senator and later Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel — said in part: “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face …. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.” Secretary Perry warns at his website, in speeches and in his memoir that ICBMs, “are simply too easy to launch on bad information and would be the most likely source of an accidental nuclear war,” and he says the ICBM system is “‘destabilizing’ in that it invites an attack from another power.”

All these critics point to these same fundamental failures and risks of ICBMs: they are redundant; they turn their sitting duck locations in five states into national sacrifice zones; and they robotize military commanders by pushing them to launch “on warning” without knowing whether the warning signals are misreads, mistakes or miscalculations.

Don’t mention the drug busts

Still, the mainstream critiques of the new missile program have ignored the scandals that have rocked the Air Force over the last 15 years[3] resulting in hundreds of demotions, firings, courts martial and forced retirements. Officers among the 9,600 people in the Minuteman III missile system have been punished for sexual assaults, spousal abuse, distributing illegal drugs, violating safety and security rules, failing and/or cheating on exams, sleeping at the controls, and even illegally flying nuclear-armed Cruise missiles cross country. In 2014, the AP referred to, “a flagging sense of purpose”, “stunning breakdowns in discipline, training, morale, security, leadership”, and “a decrepit Minuteman III missile force that few airmen want to join and even fewer view as a career-enhancing mission.”[4]

Missile field duty is understood by those assigned to it as a career cul-de-sac, plagued by years of isolation and boredom in rural outbacks, and haunted by high-level discussions of eliminating the missiles. Lacking a mission beyond sitting in place at attention or rehearsing doomsday drills, and overshadowed for promotion and commendations by warzone colleagues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, missile crews can feel left behind. The variety and depth of staff scandals in the missile fields appears to demonstrate a broad-based disillusionment.

In 2007, three full Colonels, a Lt. Colonel and dozens of low-level personnel at Minot AFB in North Dakota were demoted or sacked after they allowed the fantastically dangerous loading and cross-country air transport of six nuclear-armed Cruise missiles.[5] The nuclear weapons, each holding up to ten times the force of the Hiroshima bomb[6] were flown 1,542 miles from Minot to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana the US staging area for its Middle East wars and an operational bomber base with 44 B-52s.

In 2008, three of the four on-duty Air Force missileers in a Minot missile launch center fell asleep at the controls of a component that holds launch codes. Rules require at least two crewmembers to stay awake while on alert. They were immediately barred from missile duty and were later discharged from the service.[7]

In October 2010, a computer glitch knocked fifty Minuteman missiles offline at F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming “for longer than an hour.” Five launch control centers lost all contact with the fifty far-off Minuteman III missiles they normally control. Most unintentionally, the Air Force’s response to the temporary disarmament demonstrated the missile system’s obsolete and useless status. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson told press that the electronic shutdown had “no real bearing on the capabilities of our nuclear forces.”

In 2013, Air Force missileers, two at Minot and two at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, were reprimanded for leaving blast doors open at missile launch control centers in violation of strict protocols. The lapses were described by former missileer Bruce Blair as having enabled potential saboteurs to access super-secret missile launch codes. Understandably, the blunders were attributed to a lackadaisical mindset among the missileers.

In 2014, two missile launch crew administrators at Malmstrom were accused of operating an illegal narcotics distribution system across six Air Force bases, allegedly sending messages to eleven others, three of whom were members of launch control crews. According to Lt. Gen. James Holmes’ 268-page report on the scandal, the messages mentioned “specific, illegal drug use … [including] synthetic drugs, ecstasy and amphetamines.”[8]

Separately, Gen. Holmes’ investigation uncovered widespread cheating by missileers on launch procedure exams. Consequently, a total of 92 missileers at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Wing were suspended, decertified, and barred from launch control duty. A total of nine missile field Colonels and Lt. Colonels at Malmstrom, nearly the entire chain of command, was removed from duty for failing to detect the mass cheating.

Damn the torpedo makers

How do the ICBMS survive the corruption, accidents, “stunning breakdowns,” and high-level condemnation? One answer is in a February 9 report by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, titled “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or the National Interest?” Hartung details the huge sums lavished by weapons contractors on lobbying and campaign contributions in order to buy votes from lawmakers in states that host the missiles, air bases, or the contractors themselves (Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming), even though, as the report notes, there is “no militarily sound reason to build a new ICBM.” The report says that Northrop Grumman and its major subcontractors have given $1.2 million to the current members of the Senate missile coalition since 2012 and over $15 million more to members of key Congressional committees that help determine how much is to be spent. In addition, the top eleven contractors working on the new missile spent over $119 million on lobbying in 2019 and 2020, and employed 410 lobbyists.

How can the weapons industry seem to smash or buy off everything standing in its way, whether it’s reason, precaution, or spending limits? Part of the answer is in Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the merger of state and corporate power, and in Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the same.

— This piece was originally at Counterpunch.org, March 28, 2021

Notes

See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, 2002; Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, One World Press, 2008; Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers, 2005.
Adam Lowther, “A Year Later: Responding to Problems in the ICBM Force,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2015, http://thebulletin.org/year-later-responding-problems-icbm-force7984.
AP, “California: Navy Commander Admits Taking Bribes,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 2015; David Sanger & William Broad, “Pentagon Studies Reveal Major Nuclear Problems,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2014; “Another Charge in Navy Bribe Case,” New York Times, April 18, 2014; Helene Cooper, “Navy Opens Inquiry into Cheating in Reactor Training,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014; “Fraud in Army Recruiting Bonus Program May Cost Nearly $100 million,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014.
Robert Burns, AP, “Study Finds Troubles Run Deep In Nuclear Missile Force,” Nov. 20, 2013; AP, “Air Force Is Working To Mend Missile Corps,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, June 11, 2014.
Sarah Baxter, “US Hits Panic Button as Air Force ‘Loses’ nuclear missiles,” London Times, Oct. 21, 2007.
“W80-1 Warhead Selected for New Nuclear Cruise Missile,” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 10, 2014, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2014/10/w80-1_lrso/.
Barbara Starr & Larry Shaughnessy, CNN, “Air Force says officers fell asleep with nuke code,” July 24, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/24/missile.error/index.html.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “ND Missile Launch Officers in Drug Scandal,” Jan. 16, 2014; R. Jeffrey Smith, “Aiming High,” Slate, April 14, 2014; and Josh Harkinson, “Death Wears Bunny Slippers,” Mother Jones, Nov./Dec. 2014; “Security troops on U.S. nuclear missile base took LSD, records show”, Associated Press, NBC News, May 24, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/security-troops-u-s-nuclear-missile-base-took-lsd-records-n877056

Biden’s MacArthur Moment

Accidental Apocalypse and Nuclear War on Drugs

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Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021

By Bob Mayberry

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021

By John LaForge

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2021

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