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NATO’s Nuclear Attack Threats on Display in Europe

Commentary by John LaForge

NATO’s standing threat to attack Russia with nuclear weapons is put on parade every autumn. This year’s thermonuclear dry run — dubbed Steadfast Noon — got started October 13 according to NATO’s press office and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, or SHAPE, in Mons, Belgium.

NATO’s euphemism for its yearly doomsday rehearsal is “exercise,” and this year’s dress Armageddon included warplanes from fourteen of NATO’s 32 states, 71 aircraft (11 more than last year), and 2,000 military personnel.

In the words of NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the run-through is “to make sure that our nuclear deterrent remains as credible … and as effective as possible.” Translation: We’re testing our readiness to commit mass destruction.

NATO forces gather for the annual Steadfast Noon war games, including coordinating and rehearsing for nuclear operations.
Photo: zuercher-presse.com.

NATO’s Oct. 13 announcement had more gibberish: “Service members will rehearse the procedures related to the deployment of dual-capable [nuclear & non-nuclear] aircraft and the employment of conventional support assets in nuclear operations, ensuring all participating forces can coordinate effectively in a nuclear scenario.” Translation: We’re going to prepare for war using thermonuclear blasts, firestorms, and radiation.

Col. Daniel Bunch, Chief of Nuclear Operations at SHAPE, said to the press: “There is focus in … getting the strikes planned, … getting … all of those elements synchronized to deliver…” Translation: Steadfast Noon’s purpose is to plan a complex, coordinated radioactive mass attack.

As if to put readers at ease, NATO said, “No live nuclear weapons will be used.” Evidently only dummies would be in the fighter jets.

The nuclear attack drill took place at Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, Lakenheath base in
England, Kleine-Brogel in Belgium, and Skrydstrup in Denmark, while Finland, Poland, the U.S., Germany, and others also dressed up as executioners.

The Netherlands Air Force recently debuted its newly purchased F-35A jet fighter-bombers which have been “certified” to carry the new U.S. B61-12 air-dropped H-bombs, which have reportedly now been stationed in Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, England, and Germany.

NATO’s annual exercise includes the use of non-nuclear aircraft, like surveillance planes, reconnaissance planes, refueling planes (for the long haul to Moscow), and giant KC-135 Stratotankers, all of which, according to NATO, “serve in a conventional support to nuclear operations.” Translation: “Nuclear operations” means attacking with uncontrollable, indiscriminate, poisoned warheads.

NATO’s inclusion of non-nuclear “support” personnel means the whole Air Force can share the ethical burden of risking the obliteration of civilization, so it isn’t carried only by the trigger men and pilots.

Is the planning and preparing of nuclear attacks sane, or is it suicidal ideation and madness?

No less an authority than Gen. George L. Butler (USAF Ret.), a former head of Strategic Air Command — which controls all U.S. nuclear weapons — has condemned all such nuclear attack preparedness, which he himself molded and rehearsed for years. Gen. Butler is the first SAC commander to reject and abandon nuclear “deterrence” — in dozens of speeches, articles, and a memoir Uncommon Cause — and to call for abolition.

Lambasting “the obscene power of a single nuclear weapon,” Gen. Butler wrote in the Fall 1996 and Spring 1999 journal of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation that the military’s nuclear attack plans are “a pernicious anachronism.”

Gen. Butler wrote, “Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are insanely destructive agents of physical and genetic terror… They’re some species of biological time bombs whose effects transcend time and space, poisoning the Earth and its inhabitants for generations to come.”

NATO’s ceaseless nuclear attack threats were on parade in Europe, and its ring leaders talk as if they are rational. Gen. Butler, who is one of dozens of retired nuclear war planners who disagree, says, “Deterrence suspended rational thinking in the Nuclear Age.”

The commander denounced deterrence, in theory and practice, using words that could still stir desertion or mutiny among the nuclearists: “The likely consequences of nuclear war have no politically, militarily, or morally acceptable justification, and therefore the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible.”

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Venezuela, wars of aggression, and Nuremberg law

By John LaForge, for Nukewatch

“To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

These words, spoken by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the opening of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, might give pause to White House and Pentagon strategists who appear anxious to launch a U.S. war on Venezuela, if only they had a fear of violating international law.

With a U.S. President who self-enriches and hurls insults like a gangland mob boss, it’s become routine to watch the White House orchestrate criminal acts in broad daylight: kidnapping college students using masked agents and unmarked vans; ordering mass arrests and detention of Spanish speakers without charges; flying kidnapped persons in chains to foreign countries and foreign prisons without due process or appeal rights; blowing up dozens of unknown persons in Caribbean fast boats and broadcasting the murders like a bloody video arcade.

The Trump Administration’s vicious crime spree in the Caribbean, and its videotaped made-for-TV propaganda, appears to be the conditioning of public opinion regarding state-sponsored killing of nameless suspects. At the same time, the yahoo murders may be a new version of the Pentagon’s endless “war on terrorism.” The civilian fast boat victims being killed are of course labeled “terrorists”” the broad-brush painting of all targeted persons or groups which is precisely where George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four begins at page one. “Terrorist” is the universally applicable smear and epithet that justifies any and all manner of political and military murder.

Last weekend the gangster prez hinted at possible U.S. military strikes inside Venezuelan territory, and last week the White House declared Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to be the “head of a foreign terrorist organization.”

This patent absurdity is an echo of the State Department’s February decision to return Cuba to the State Sponsor of Terrorism list, and is reminiscent of drug trafficking charges leveled against President Manuel Noriega of Panama as a pretext for the 1990 U.S. military invasion of his country. Demonizing the state and heads of state to be attacked is historically a necessary precursor to all such U.S. invasions, be it Vietnam, Panama, Somalia, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, or Syria.

Outlawing not only aggression but preparing aggression

Significantly, Justice Jackson and the Nuremberg Tribunal went far beyond condemning wars of aggression as the “supreme international crime.” The Nuremberg Charter, Tribunal and Judgment explicitly set out to criminalize the inchoate crimes of planning and preparing illegal wars.

In his opening statement at trial, Justice Jackson said: “A fundamental provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.” (This then-new binding preventative language may have moved the U.S. War Department in 1947 to change its name to the Department of Defense.)

Nuremberg’s U.S.-sponsored and binding international prohibition of military “plans and preparations” for wars of aggression is being blown to bits like the boats in the Caribbean, shredded by the Navy’s string of high-tech multiple murders.

President Trump said on Sept. 5, “I sort of made up my mind” about initiating U.S. war on Venezuela. While Venezuela has not attacked or threatened the United States, the Pentagon has 15,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors, an aircraft carrier battle group with its 75 fighter jets, seven Navy warships including missile-firing destroyers, and a Special Forces Operations “mother ship” positioned in the Caribbean. And the naval armada has even been dubbed “Operation Southern Spear” rather than “Southern Shield” by a Secretary of Defense who’d prefer being titled the far uglier and more menacing Secretary of War.

The White House claims to justify its massive tinder box of war machinery with obvious lies about fighting U.S. fentanyl deaths which are being caused by “narco-terrorists” and “unlawful combatants” from Venezuela. That country’s 300 billion barrels in oil reserves are never spoken of publicly by President Drill Baby, but U.S. corporate control of this gargantuan prize is the only reason the White House promotes the fiction that U.S. drug problems come from anywhere other than Mexico, Columbia, and Afghanistan.

Mohandas Gandhi reminded us of the very least that we should expect of ourselves when inside a tyrannical political environment powered by a firehose of lies. “The first principle of valid political action in such a society then becomes non-cooperation with its disorder, its injustices, and more particularly with its deep commitment to untruth.” ###

— this commentary was syndicated by PeaceVoice, December 4, 2025.

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Apply Nuremberg Law to Nuclear Weapons Before They are Used Again

By John LaForge, for Nukewatch

With another film depiction of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal story being debuted, today’s plans and preparations involving thermonuclear weapons should be adjudged in this historical context, before they are used again.

The United States was instrumental in creating the Nuremberg Charter, Principles and Judgment, and in orchestrating the Tribunals. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, made clear that the Tribunal’s function was to prosecute and punish the architects of the “final solution,” the designers, developers, and administrators that produced and implemented the gigantic apparatus of the holocaust which destroyed at least 10 million civilian victims.

Justice Jackson said in his opening remarks to the Tribunal that if the law it was about to enforce was to be viewed as legitimate, it must be applied universally, and not only to the defeated. Justice Jackson said: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” Justice Jackson continued:

“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

Jackson then pointedly announced the novel, unprecedented, and war-shattering aspect of the Nuremberg Principles, saying:

“A fundamental provision of the Charter is that to plan, prepare, initiate, or wage a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances, or to conspire or participate in a common plan to do so, is a crime.”

The Nuremberg prosecutors adopted this new class of universally prohibited criminality, the “planning and preparation” of illegal warfare, and the Tribunal enforced this new prohibition against the Nazi authorities in the dock. This new prohibition means today, that inchoate crimes, or crimes in-the-making, of conspiracy, incitement, aiding, and abetting, etc. — planning and preparing of unlawful war — can be prosecuted before the nuclear weapons are detonated, before the fire storms ensue.

Wars that violate treaties include unprovoked wars of aggression, wars that are indiscriminate as to civilian or “protected” populations, wars that employ banned weapons such as poison or weapons whose effects cross neutral borders, or wars that do severe, long-term damage to the environment. Nuclear detonations produce all these outlawed effects.

Nuremberg’s monumental criminalization of certain “planning and preparation” should have sounded the death knell for nuclear weapons, because their indiscriminate and catastrophic explosive force — thoroughly understood, exhaustively tested, and officially declared “credible” — can only produce massacres.

This past October’s nuclear attack rehearsal known as “Steadfast Noon,” conducted by European allies, was publicized by NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte himself as a way “to make sure that our nuclear deterrent remains as credible … and as effective as possible.” NATO’s Col. Daniel Bunch, Chief of Nuclear Operations at SHAPE, said to the press October 13: “There is focus in … getting the strikes planned, … getting … all of those elements synchronized to deliver…”

The mass destruction being admitted to, planned, and prepared, is the deliberately indiscriminate incineration of civilians and using mass fire and radiation. This “planning and preparation of wars … in violation of treaties, agreements or assurances” is precisely the inchoate criminality for which the Nuremberg Tribunal imposed death by hanging or sentences of life in prison.

If only it were true of the United States today that, “We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”

– This commentary was used by Counterpunch.org, Nov. 17, 2025

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U.S. Atomic Bombings Didn’t Save Lives or End the War

By John LaForge

August 6 and 9 were the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima was the effect of detonating a 60-million-degree Celsius explosion (ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun) over the city. Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) reported, “People exposed within half a mile of the … fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away…”

The use of atomic bombs was rationalized after-the-fact using myths that transformed the burning of children into a positive good. President Truman and government propagandists justified the attacks claiming they “ended the war” and “saved lives” ⸺ stories still believed today ⸺ but, as historian Gar Alperovitz has demonstrated in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995), the pretext of “saving lives” was fabricated.

General Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, notes in his book Mandate for Change (1963) that he told Secretary of War Henry Stimson at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference ⸺ just before the bombings ⸺ that he opposed using the bomb because it was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” Ike told Sec. Stimson, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Broad declassification of wartime documents has made the facts accessible to everyone, leading the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, J. Samuel Walker, to report in the winter 1990 edition of the journal Diplomatic History, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time.”

Dozens of leaders who ran the war agree. Winston Churchill wrote in his six-volume history of WWII (1953), “It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell.”

Admiral William Leahy, the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, declared in his memoir I Was There (1950), “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Major General Curtis LeMay, who directed the devastating incendiary destruction of Japan’s 67 largest cities prior to August 1945, was more emphatic. Asked by a reporter at a Sept. 20, 1945 press conference, “Had they [Japan] not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” Gen. LeMay declared, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Gen. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force, wrote in Global Mission (1949), “It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” Likewise, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers reported in the July 1947 Reader’s Digest, “Obviously … the atomic bomb neither induced the emperor’s decision to surrender nor had any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war.” And the renowned Gen. Douglas MacArthur, said “he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb.”

Religious and cultural leaders contemporaneously condemned the attacks, as on March 5, 1946, when the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement signed by 22 prominent Protestant religious leaders saying in part, “the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible. … Both bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for winning the war.”

Nuclear weapons are still protected by lies like “limited nuclear war” and “flexible response.” So, August’s anniversaries remind us to rebel against such lies, to demand that the United States apologize to Japanese and Korean survivors and their descendants for the massacres; that the U.S. abandon its nuclear attack plans and preparations; and that it finally stand down and eliminate the crown jewels and poisoned foundation of all government waste, fraud, and abuse ⸺ nuclear weapons.

⸺A version of this commentary appeared at Z-Network August 5 and Counterpunch August 29, 2025

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Environmental Review Begins for Massive Project to Produce New Nuclear Weapon Cores

By John Burroughs

In 2021, this billboard was installed on Interstate 25, facing traffic traveling toward Albuquerque, New Mexico, and seen by 451,000 drivers per month. What do nuclear weapons cores or “pits” cost these days? At least $50 million each. Photo: Los Alamos Study Group, lasg.org

The United States is planning to establish an infrastructure capable of producing at least 80 plutonium pits for the W87-1 nuclear warhead per year. The project is well described and criticized in a comprehensive report released in May by the Union of Concerned Scientists. In the current approach, facilities would be located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and the Savannah River Site, in South Carolina. In a settlement of a lawsuit brought by activist groups, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) agreed to conduct programmatic environmental review of this major project. This summer the NNSA accepted public comments on the scope of the review.

Many Non-Governmental Organizations submitted comments, including the groups that brought the lawsuit resulting in the review: Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, South Carolina; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, based in Livermore, Calif.; and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia. Other submissions included one from Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and Western States Legal Foundation. Their comment focused on the nuclear disarmament obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and argued that the NNSA must consider a true no-action alternative of no pit production.

According to the comment: “If the United States and other nuclear-armed states, in particular China and Russia, in accordance with Article VI, take a negotiated path to the global elimination of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future, there will be no need, perceived or real, for plutonium pit production. While the current international landscape is not conducive to that enterprise, it should not be assumed that pit production will take place over the next several decades. The negotiation of the abolition of nuclear arms is a legal obligation of extraordinary practical and moral importance. The PEIS [Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement] should not assume non-compliance with the obligation.”

The comment also observed: “Additionally, a sometimes-overlooked element of Article VI is cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date. Production of pits for new-design warheads on a new delivery system, the Sentinel ICBM, and on submarine-based ballistic missiles, has aspects of nuclear arms racing, both in reality and, importantly, as it is perceived by rival nuclear-armed states. If the W87-1 serves to enable the placement of multiple warheads [on] the Sentinel ICBM, it would contribute to quantitative arms racing; it also would be destabilizing. Moreover, according to the Department of Defense, the Sentinel ICBM will have enhanced capabilities and thus its development and deployment amounts to qualitative arms racing. It also appears that the W93 warhead for submarine-based missiles will add some military capability….”

It concluded: “The PEIS should not rule out the possibility that nuclear arms racing will cease and nuclear disarmament will be implemented in accordance with Nonproliferation Treaty Article VI….”

⸺ John Burroughs is the Senior Analyst of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, and Board Member, Western States Legal Foundation. This article appeared in “Currents,” the newsletter of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons for Peace and Justice.

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