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Nuclear War ON Drugs: Air Force ICBM Guards Took, Distributed LSD, Cocaine, Ecstasy, Court Records Show

Whether Air Force guards are tripping on LSD, high on pot, or zoned on cocaine and ecstasy, they are a long way away from the Minuteman missile launch sites or “silos” that they “secure.” The underground launch pads have easily and often been occupied by protesters, as in this January 1990 photo of a North Dakota missile site, because they are unguarded, surrounded by a single chain link fence, and are often 20 miles from the guard posts. L to R in photo: the author, Barb Katt, Mark Rogness, Jason Loughead, and Dan Schector. Photo by Chris LaForge.

During the 1991 Gulf War, after we learned that US pilots were taking amphetamines to keep them alert during bombing runs into Iraq and Kuwait. I called it our “War on drugs.”

Last week’s US Air Force revelations prompted an updated version. According to records obtained by the Associated Press, Air Force guards in charge of protecting Minuteman III long-range nuclear-armed missiles in Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska bought, distributed and used LSD “and other mind-altering illegal drugs as part of a ring that operated undetected for months.” Call it, “Nuclear war on drugs.”

The other drugs included ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana, and altogether, 14 Air Force personnel at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base’s 90th Missile Wing near Cheyenne, Wyoming were disciplined for their off-duty drug use, and six were court martialed for LSD use, or distribution or both.

Remember, these people trained to race out to the remote missile silos from their posts in remote Launch Control Centers and “force their way into and regain control of a captured missile silo.” Adding insult to addiction, it was a similar team of Air Force missile silo guards from the Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota that recently lost a 42-pound box of grenades for their grenade launcher. Driving between two missile silos, the back hatch of their APC popped open and it fell out. After two weeks, 100 AF searchers couldn’t find it, so the Air Force has offered a reward.

The AP got hold of transcripts of seven court martial proceedings in the Wyoming cases and they show that the airmen who used the illegal drugs were “supplied by colleagues with connections to civilian drug dealers.” According to the AP, Airman 1st Class Nickolos Harris testified that he had no trouble getting LSD and other drugs from civilian sources. Reportedly the leader of the drug ring, Harris pleaded guilty to using and distributing LSD and using ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana” and was sentenced to 12 months in jail.

While none of the 14 including Harris was accused of using drugs while in duty, Air Force prosecutor Capt. C. Rhodes Berry argued that Harris should be jailed for 42 months for “using hallucinogens and other drugs on a nuclear weapons base.” Air Force investigators found those implicated in the drug ring “used LSD on base and off.”

Another Airman 1st Class, Devin Hagarty, admitted in court to using LSD four times in 2015-16 and distributing it once, the AP said. “He also admitted to using cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana multiple times.” He was sentenced to 13 months in a military jail.

The AP reported that one airman’s blunder on social media (posting a pic of himself smoking pot) alerted investigators to the illegal partying, and they were then able “to crack the drug ring at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in March 2016.”

Tedium of mission-free service

It’s an old story that “missile field” duty in the Great Plains states is known as a “backwater” assignment, a string of months or years filled with boredom, tedium, and monotony with little chance for advancement. The cow town outposts of the country’s 450 land-based missiles offer little to Air Force personnel who see their counterparts assigned to US war zones in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Libya where their “betters” can even earn hazard pay.

The fact that the land-based, Cold War missiles have no mission partly explains how drug use could become a means of escape. Airman Kyle Morrison testified at his court martial that “… colors seemed more vibrant and clear. In general, I felt more alive,” the AP reported. For his part, Harris said to a military judge, “I absolutely just loved altering my mind,” according to the AP.

Morrison admitted distributing LSD on the missile base in February 2016, and with a plea deal involving ratting out 10 other druggies, Morrison was sentenced to five months in jail, 15 days of hard labor and loss of $5,200 in pay.

Full disclosure: I was sentenced to three weeks in jail in 1981, two months in prison in 1982, and six months in prison in 1987 for separate misdemeanor trespass protests at Offutt Air Base in Omaha. Offutt controls all the Minuteman missile bases (FE Warren, Malmstrom, and Minot) and chooses the cities and bases that are targeted by the weapons guarded by the drug-addled Air Force.

Having known prison, I don’t advocate it as punishment for anyone, but both Harris and Morrison “avoided punitive discharges” from the service. What message does the Air Force send when drug ring leaders in the nuclear missile fields aren’t slapped with a less-than-honorable discharge?

What Airman Morrison told the judge must be true. Lying about prior drug use was “normal” in the Air Force. — John LaForge

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Senate Puts CIA Back on Torture Track

By John LaForge
CIA director Gina Haspel (L), dubbed “Bloody Gina” by her colleagues, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis (R), who was called “Mad Dog Mattis” Nov. 20, 2016 by President “Dotard.” The three will now be in charge of detaining prisoners captured in 14 countries where the US has ongoing combat operations.

The new CIA Director, Ms. “Bloody Gina” Haspel, is the focus of much of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 torture report because she oversaw the waterboarding, etc. of at least two suspects — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — at her secret, off-the-books, off shore, off-the-rails CIA dungeon in Thailand in 2002.

Official logs of CIA internet chats show that Ms. Haspel “appeared to raise no objections to the interrogation program,” the New York Times reported May 8. At her May 9 Senate confirmation hearing, Haspel defended her abuse of suspects and repeatedly refused to say that the torture was either immoral or unlawful, claiming instead that the torture had been legal at the time.

Haspel testified that her superiors assured her that CIA’s sickening battery and abuse were all legal interrogation methods and swore that she was following orders approved by her superiors and by lawyers. John Grant with the online newspaper “ThisCan’tBeHappening” wrote for CounterPunch, “Of course, the holocaust was technically legal, so that kind of argument is widely recognized as garbage.”

Ms. Haspel of course knows that torture is a crime under US and international law which is why she saw to it that 92 videotapes of her “interrogations” were destroyed. Haspel’s destruction of evidence took place in 2005 only days after the Senate committee launched its investigation into the torture regime.

Since Haspel’s oversight of prisoner abuse was not immoral in her view (even though she had the records burned), her testimony under oath never to “allow the CIA to undertake activity that I thought was immoral” is perfectly meaningless. Haspel testified that “under my leadership, CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.” This only means that if restarted it will be under a new name, say Preventive Investigation. Then it’s back to having suspects beaten, chained to ceilings and floors, sleep deprived for weeks, doused naked with ice water, confined in crouch boxes for days, waterboarded, and forced to endure rectal feeding.

The Senate committee colluded with Ms. Haspel’s cover-up of these tortures by agreeing that the nominee herself could decide what parts of her 33-year-long CIA career would be made available to its members. Jeffrey St. Clair, editor of CounterPunch wrote in response that the confirmation “hearings were a charade, where the subject determined what documents could be released about her own criminal actions and the Senate passively went along with it — she alone decided what her infatuated ‘interrogators’ could and couldn’t ask her. The culpability for the next torture victims will reside with those who knowing all this put her in power instead of prison.”

Promoted Inside the “Torture Works” Administration

Although torture is a ghastly, inexcusable war crime if US enemies in Iran, or Syria, or ISIS practice it (five US citizens are currently in Iranian prisons), Ms. Haspel’s new boss, President Trump, has said to Sean Hannity, “In my opinion, it works.”

Naturally the Dotard, alliterate and TV-educated, would believe this after watching eight seasons of “24” which celebrated torture in every episode. During the 2016 campaign Trump repeatedly called for “waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse.” Sen. Kamala Harris, D-CA, asked Haspel, “The president has asserted that torture works. Do you agree?” Haspel answered no, but the contradicted herself by claiming that “interrogation” produced useful information.

In January 2017, Mike Pompeo, Haspel’s predecessor at CIA and now the Secretary of State wrote this resounding denunciation of torture in a letter to the Senate: “If experts believed current law [forbidding torture] was an impediment to gathering vital intelligence to protect the country, I would want to understand such impediments and whether any recommendations were appropriate for changing current law.”

Columnist Maureen Dowd reported that Trump lavished praise on Haspel, tweeting after her evasive testimony, “Gina Haspel did a spectacular job today.” And Dowd reminded readers that “the jackbooted Dick Cheney [reared] his poisonous head to call for the reboot of Torture Inc.” In a May 10 interview on Fox Business Cheney said about his archipelago of torture chambers: “[I]f it were my call, I’d do it again. I’d have them active and ready to go… I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time.”

What Cheney meant is that it wasn’t deemed torture by his administration and therefore wasn’t torture to anyone. If he gets his way, CIA will return to torturing prisoners held in CIA cages incommunicado, indefinitely, and later reward the perpetrators with prestigious promotions for destroying evidence of capital felonies and war crimes.

Cheney, Trump and Pompeo all disregard the likely revenge to be taken against future US prisoners held by groups or state parties in the 14 countries currently entertaining US combat troops. But ordering the torture of suspects comes easy for Cheney. He worked in the Nixon in White House from 1969 to ’75 while the CIA was torturing suspects in Southeast Asia under the Phoenix Program.

Ignorance of the Law

On Weekend Edition May 13, Sen. Joe Manchin, R-WV, said, “She didn’t break any laws. No one said she’s broken a law.”

Wrong. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, said the Trump administration was orchestrating a “cover-up from A to Z” regarding Haspel’s actions in Thailand. Earlier Wyden accused Pompeo’s CIA of breaking an Executive Order against keeping information hidden to conceal “violations of law.” On Dec. 1, 2015 Human Rights Watch published “No More Excuses: A Roadmap to Justice for CIA Torture” setting out “the main criminal charges that can be brought against those responsible.” And Sept. 9, 2015, Amnesty International declared, “Torture is unambiguously illegal, and the United States’ international legal obligations require accountability and redress.”

The US Torture Statute (18 USC 2340) says, “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

The Convention Against Torture, ratified by the United States in 1994, is a global prohibition against torture that is both absolute and “non-derogable”– that is, a law so fundamental to the international legal order that it cannot be set aside or suspended for any reason whatsoever.

The convention also bans states from deporting or extraditing, people where there are substantial grounds for believing they will be tortured, which by definition prohibited the Cheney/Haspel “extraordinary rendition” program which kidnapped and transferred suspects to torture states including Poland, Romania, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt and Syria.

Tell it to the judge

Jeffrey St. Clair asked in his piece, “Who will hold them accountable?” and there is some hope in the International Criminal Court. On Nov. 20, 2017, chief ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked its judges to approve an investigation into alleged criminal abuses by the US military and CIA around the world. CBS News reported that “Bensouda wants to investigate the activities of CIA operatives in secret detention facilities…”

Bensouda said in her request that “[I]nformation available provides a reasonable basis to believe” that US military personnel and CIA personnel “committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations….” The Senate committee’s torture report says for example, “A detainee who had been held partially nude and chained to a concrete floor died from suspected hypothermia at the facility.”

A year earlier Bensouda reported that “CIA operatives may have subjected at least 27 detainees in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania to “torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape” between Dec. 2002 and March 2008, CBS News reported Nov. 14, 2016.

This intriguing case is ongoing. This past February 20, a final report on victims’ testimony was submitted to pre-trial ICC judges who “will now assess all representations received from victims, and in due course” issue its decision on the Prosecutor’s request for an investigation.

But justice is slow, and meanwhile as professor Laleh Khalili of the University of London warns, “What [Haspel’s] confirmation … is going to signal is that all of those countries in the world that acted as black sites…as well as those countries that acted as countries of extraordinary rendition …are essentially going to see this as a carte blanche for conducting torture.”

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War Deaths, and Taxes

Photo credit unavailable/unknown
By John LaForge

Are the federal taxes coming out of your wages and due this week killing you? Sadly what’s rhetorical for US tax payers is gravely literal for people of eight countries currently on the shooting end of the US budget.

This year at least 47% of federal income taxes goes to the military (27%, or $857 billion, for today’s bombings and occupations, weapons, procurement, personnel, retiree pay & healthcare, Energy Dept. nuclear weapons, Homeland Security, etc.); and 20%, or $644 billion, for past military bills (veterans’ benefits — $197 billion, and 80% of the interest on the national debt — $447 billion).

A ceasefire, drawdown and retreat from the country’s unwinnable wars would reduce this tax burden, and didn’t the president promise to end the foreign “nation-building” that’s breaking the bank? Of course, that was a Trump promise, so:

Seven US airmen were killed on March 15 when a US Pave Hawk helicopter crashed in western Iraq, with 5,200 soldiers and as many contract mercenaries fighting there.

When VP Mike Pence visited Afghanistan last December he said with perfect meaninglessness: “we are here to see this through.” About 11,000 US soldiers are currently seeing it, and the Pentagon will be sending thousands more this spring. US bombing runs have almost tripled since the Obama/Trump handover, and Pence claimed “we’ve put the Taliban on the defensive” — but during Pentagon chief Jim Mattis’s visit the Taliban shot dozens of rockets at the Kabul airport where the general’s plane was parked.

In Syria, dozens of Russian soldiers were killed Feb. 7 and 8 by US-led forces fighting near Al Tabiyeh. Master Sgt. Jonathan J. Dunbar was killed by an IED blast March 29 in Manbij. The US now has about 2,000 soldiers at war in Syria, and in January then Sec. of State Rex Tillerson promised they will be there long after the war with the Islamic State is over. Although Trump said March 29, “we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon,” Pentagon officials leaked news April 2 that dozens of additional troops will be sent in soon, CNN reported. The United States’ World War could hardly be more confounding or self-defeating as US ally Turkey has begun bombing US-supported Kurdish fighters inside Syria.

The 16-year-old war in Afghanistan is now broadly understood to be militarily unwinnable, so a ceasefire and withdrawal would be a quick way to save billions of tax dollars. But US B-52s bombers flying from Minot Air Base in North Dakota are still creating new terrorists every day; the 3,900 US bombs and missiles exploded on the country in 2017 caused countless of civilian casualties.

In Pakistan January 25, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs charged that remote-controlled US bombing had targeted an Afghan refugee camp, worsening relations with that government even beyond Trump’s cutoff of “security aid.”

Saudi Arabian aircraft, refueled en route by US tanker aircraft, have killed 4,000 civilians in Yemen, according to UN estimates. Suspending arms sales to the Saudis would end its war and begin to alleviate the Saudi-made humanitarian disaster in Yemen, and a cease-fire and stand-down would allow for the urgent relief required to prevent famine.

An end to today’s US bombing and/or military occupation of eight countries — Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq (all ongoing), Somalia (bombed Apr. 1), Libya (8 airstrikes since Jan. 2017), Niger (Oct. 4 battle, four dead; 500 US soldiers in country, now with armed drones), and Yemen (127 bomber & drone strikes in 2017) — would save billions, save lives, slow the wartime creation of terrorists, and reduce anti-US sentiment everywhere. In January, an extensive Gallop survey found 70% of the people interviewed in 134 countries disapprove of US foreign policy — 80% in Canada, 82% in Mexico.

To paraphrase Dr. King, who was assassinated by the FBI 50 years ago this month (“Orders to Kill: The Truth Behind the Murder of Martin Luther King,” by William F. Pepper, 1995, Carroll & Graf Publishers): “The great initiative in these wars is ours. The initiative to stop them must be ours.”

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New Nuclear War “Posture” Degrades National Security

By John LaForge
Spring Quarterly 2018
Engineers lay hands on a cruise missile warhead.

Editor’s note: The Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is the government’s most detailed unclassified nuclear weapons and war planning document. The latest NPR provides smart-sounding euphemistic and abstract terminology to journalists and others who study or report on nuclear weapons. Since such weapons produce firestorms and mass destruction on such a vast scale that adequate medical responses are impossible, the government uses bland, nondescript terminology to advocate the “need” and “usefulness” of H-bombs.

In Santa Fe, Nuclear Watch New Mexico keeps a critical eye on nuclear policy programs and problems at the state’s two national laboratories that design and produce nuclear weapons—Los Alamos and Sandia. In the following article, the group provides expert analysis of the latest official NPR gibberish.

The new NPR begins with, “Many [had] hoped [that] conditions had been set for deep reductions in global nuclear arsenals, and, perhaps, for their elimination. These aspirations have not been realized. America’s strategic competitors have not followed our example. The world is more dangerous, not less.” The Review then points to Russia and China’s ongoing nuclear weapons modernization programs and North Korea’s “nuclear provocations.” It concludes, “We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it be.”

If the US government were to really “look reality in the eye and see the world as it is,” it would recognize that it is failing miserably to lead the world toward the abolition of the only class of weapons that is a true existential threat to our country. As an obvious historic matter, the US is the first and only country to use nuclear weapons. Since WWII the US has threatened to use nuclear weapons in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and on many other occasions.

Further, it is hypocritical to point to Russia and China’s “modernization” programs as if they are taking place independently. The US has been upgrading its nuclear arsenal all along. In the last few years our country has embarked on a $1.7 trillion modernization program to completely rebuild its nuclear weapons production complex and all weapons based on land, in the air and at sea.

Moreover, Russia and China’s modernization programs are driven in large part by their perceived need to preserve strategic stability and deterrence by having the ability to overwhelm the US’s growing ballistic missile defenses. Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of “Star Wars” (fed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s false promises of success) blocked a nuclear weapons abolition agreement in 1988 with the former Soviet Union. In 2002, George W. Bush unilaterally withdrew the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which has been a source of constant friction with the Russian government ever since.

More recently, at Israel’s request, the US blocked the 2015 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the UN in New York from agreeing to a summit on creating a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East (Israel has never signed the treaty). As an over arching matter, the US and other nuclear-armed treaty signatories have never honored the Treaty’s Article VI mandate “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…,” in effect since 1970. As a consequence, last year more than 120 countries at the UN passed a nuclear weapons ban treaty.

The US government boycotted and denounced the treaty negotiations, despite the fact that there have long been similar bans on chemical and biological weapons which the US has supported.

With respect to North Korea, its ruling regime is clearly seeking deterrence against the US. North Korea’s infrastructure was completely destroyed during the Korean War, and its people later witnessed the destruction of the Iraqi and Libyan regimes—neither of which had nuclear weapons.

The NPR claims to be about “deterrence” against hostile threats, but nuclear weapons’ accuracy replaces deterrence with plans to conduct nuclear attacks, including pre-emptive first strikes. This is why the US and Russia keep thousands of nuclear weapons—instead of the few hundred that China, England, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel keep for retaliation. Improving the ability to use nuclear weapons is the reason for the $1.7 trillion so-called “modernization” (a euphemism for developing new nuclear weapons), instead of retaining a few hundred, which are known to be “good” for 50 years.

Beyond preserving and upgrading US nuclear weapons, the NPR calls for:

1) Near-term development of a new “smaller” nuclear warhead for existing Trident missiles launched from new submarines;

2) New sub-launched nuclear-armed Cruise missiles;

3) Keeping the 1.2 megaton B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb (think: Hiroshima times 80) “until a suitable replacement is identified;”

4) Provide the enduring capability and capacity to produce plutonium ‘pits’ [warhead cores] at a rate of no fewer than 80 pits per year by 2030; and

5) Advancing the W78 warhead replacement and investigating the feasibility of fielding the nuclear warheads in a Navy missile.

One of 14 US Trident submarines, with two of its 24 nuclear missiles visible. A fleet of replacement subs will cost over $313 billion.
Problems with these plans include:

1) Any belief in a “limited” or “low-yield nuclear war is a fallacy that shouldn’t be tested. Once the nuclear threshold is crossed at any level, lower-yield nuclear weapons are all the more dangerous for being potentially more usable;

2) Being the perfect weapon for a nuclear first-strike or the proverbial “bolt out of the blue,” nuclear Cruise missiles are inherently destabilizing, as well as being redundant since they are already developed for heavy bombers;

3) The National Nuclear Security Administration largely justified the ongoing program to create the B61-12 (the world’s first “smart” nuclear gravity bomb) by being a replacement for the 1.2 megaton B83-1 bomb. The NPR implies doubts about the $13 billion B61-12 program and the B83’s possible retention;

4) To date, plans have indicated “up to 80 pits per year,” rather than “no fewer than” 80. And the 2015 Defense Authorization Act required that the capability to produce up to 80 pits per year be demonstrated by 2027. The NPR’s later date of 2030 could be indicative of long-standing plutonium pit production problems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In any event, future plutonium pit production is unnecessary since existing warheads are viable for 50 to 100 years. New pits can only be intended for future new-design nuclear weapons; and

5) “W78 warhead replacement… in a Navy flight vehicle” is code for the so-called Interoperable Warheads, whose planned three versions could cost around $50 billion. These are arguably huge make-work projects for the nuclear weapons labs (particularly Livermore), which ironically the Navy doesn’t even want. They are also driving the needless future production of “no fewer than” 80 new pits per year.

Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said, “We need to eliminate the one class of weapons of mass destruction that can destroy our country. [The NPR] instead sets back arms control efforts and further hollows out our country by diverting more huge sums of money to the usual giant weapons contractors at the expense of public health, education, and environmental protection. Under Trump and this NPR, expect Medicare and social security to be attacked to help pay for a false sense of military superiority.”

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Panic In Hawai‘i and the Nuclear Posture Review

By Ralph Hutchison
Spring Quarterly 2018

The morning after the Trump Administration’s draft Nuclear Posture Review was leaked to the public via the Huffington Post, Hawaiians across the islands stared in horror at their cell phones:

Emergency Alert

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT

INBOUND TO HAWAII.

SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

“Missile Alert in Error. There is No Threat” read signs in Honolulu on January 13. Source: Anthony Quintano

It took 38 minutes for the state of Hawai‘i to issue the “False Alarm” message. Later, talking to CNN, Hawai‘i Governor David Ige said, “Like everyone else, I woke up to the message.” He meant literally, as the alert went out at 8:00 a.m.

But the question is, did the message, in fact, wake people up? Those minutes of terror and tears in Hawai‘i are a grim reminder that we all, every one of us, live on the edge of the end of life for us and everyone we love. That’s lesson one—the nuclear threat is real, it promises death to entire populations, it could happen at any second, and it gives you 20 to 30 minutes, at most, to say your good-byes.

The second lesson is no less frightening. The message was a result of human error. In this case, the error was in the public alert system—there are literally dozens and dozens of ways human errors could lead to an actual nuclear weapons disaster. Accidents, miscalculations and false alarms have nearly done so many times.

For the same reasons we don’t generally contemplate the ever-present nuclear threat, we also don’t know about the many near-misses: times in the last 30 years when one country or another almost launched nuclear war due to human error, communication glitches, or other flaws in the system.

And then there is a third lesson that goes to the deep denial and ignorance our current nuclear policy depends on. Following the false alarm, a Senator appeared on TV to remind people that if there is ever a real attack, “we should shelter in place.” In reality, it matters little what you do if there is an H-bomb attack. If it makes you feel better to shelter in place, go for it. Just be aware that if the bomb detonates within a few miles of you, the place you shelter in will likely be vaporized, and a millisecond later, you will, too. It sounds horrible, but with any luck, you won’t ever know it.

I say “with any luck,” because, as has been said before, possibly by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, in the case of nuclear war, the survivors will envy the dead. This is not exaggeration or hyperbole because firestorms, radiation, disease and famine inevitably follow any “nuclear exchange” as the NPR antiseptically calls it.

The irony writ large is this. The Nuclear Posture Review prepared for Donald Trump is the document that broadcasts our official nuclear weapons policy and outlines plans for the US nuclear weapons complex, our stockpile, and our delivery systems. The new NPR warns Congress that billions of dollars will be required to upgrade nuclear weapons, build newly designed nuclear weapons, and construct new nuclear bomb plants—in short the NPR adopts a threatening and belligerent posture, one that increases the risk of that ballistic missile attack for every one of us.

The NPR is striking in its capacity to completely ignore the impact of US nuclear policy on the behavior of other countries, allies and enemies alike. The document cites activities in North Korea, China and Russia as though they have made decisions in isolation; it ignores the fact that virtually every one of their actions is a reaction to the US’s $1.7 trillion plan to modernize its nuclear weapons, infrastructure, and delivery systems.

There is a clear and direct correlation between the false alarm in Hawai‘i and the release of the Nuclear Posture Review. The NPR does not just describe the world we live in; it forms that world. In this case, the Trump Administration continues to escalate bipartisan efforts to expand US nuclear weapons capacity.

There is a clear and compelling relationship between the NPR and the risk we all bear every day, a threat most choose not to think about, the denial of which makes it no less real. An intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Russia or a Russian sub will reach its target in 30 minutes or less. That’s the maximum notice we might have. A thermonuclear war will destroy not only cities and military bases, but will initiate a nuclear winter rendering the earth uninhabitable.

We don’t have to load that terrible, existential risk onto the shoulders of our children and grandchildren. We can insist that Congress and the Administration work together to craft a Nuclear Posture Review that reduces the nuclear threat that pursues complete disarmament in good faith, an obligation the government assumed in 1969 that prepares for the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Another world is possible. Hawai‘i reminds me that it is necessary.

The Nuclear Posture Review should be far more terrifying to us than the Hawaiian false alarm. The NPR is not a false alarm. It is a real and present danger. It escalates the risk for all of us and dooms future generations to live under the shadow of a mushroom cloud—one we have created ourselves.

—Ralph Hutchison is Coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Coalition in Tennessee and drew out attention to the original spelling of Hawai‘i including the ‘okina.

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