The U.S. Air Force’s and Navy’s bombardment of Iran June 22 involved seven giant B-2 bombers flying from Missouri for 18 hours, and then dropping 14 giant, 30,000-pound earth-penetrating weapons. A Navy submarine fired Cruise missiles. Such acts of war are criminal conspiracies of the highest order, constituting a slew of domestic and international crimes.

The legal and political magnitude of the attacks can’t be exaggerated. Just imagine the U.S. response to a foreign air force’s attack on a U.S. nuclear weapons lab like Los Alamos, New Mexico or Oak Ridge, Tenn. UN experts condemned the attacks as naked aggression in violation of the UN Charter’s Article 2(4) whcih prohibits the threat or use of force against another state’s territorial integrity or political independence.

U.S. lawmakers called the strikes “patently illegal” and a dangerous escalation, because only Congress has the lawful authority to declare war, and because the 1973 War Powers Resolution requires a vote of the Senate if military attacks are launched without congressional authorization. For the U.S. bombarding of sovereign Iran to have been legal, it needed to be an act of self-defense, or needed UN Security Council approval, neither of which was the case.

White House reasons for military attacks on other countries historically employ lying and exaggeration. Trump claimed the three areas had been “obliterated.” Iran said its sites had sustained “superficial” damage with no “irreversible harm,” and a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report directly contradicted Trump’s typically fantastical puffery and braggadocio, finding that the sites were damaged but not destroyed, and that Iran’s uranium enrichment program was “delayed by a few months.” Trump soon had DIA Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse fired for showing the president is a liar.

Back in the real world, the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Mariano Grossi issued a dire warning about the dangers of bomb and missile attacks on nuclear projects.

“Such attacks have serious implications,” Grossi said, adding, “Attacks on nuclear power plants or spent fuel pools could release large amounts of fission products, such as cesium-137 and iodine-131, with far-reaching contamination.”

Recalling that the shooting war in Ukraine involves catastrophic risks to operating nuclear power reactors, Grossi warned that, “Even well-protected facilities can fail under extreme external force, leading to core meltdowns or other severe accidents. A severe radiological event could necessitate widespread evacuations and long-term health impacts from radiation exposure.” ⸺ JML

Some recent headlines speak volumes of thoughtless mush.

“Europe Is Ready to Shelter Under France’s Nuclear Umbrella” (Foreign Policy); “Can Europe Build Its Own Nuclear Umbrella?” (FirstPost); “France has a nuclear umbrella. Could its European allies fit under it?” (BBC); “To many in Europe, Trump has punched holes in NATO’s nuclear umbrella” (CNN); “Canada’s allies are wondering if they can still shelter under the U.S. nuclear umbrella” (CBS).

The phrase “nuclear umbrella” is designed to evoke the image of an impenetrable shield of protection. In the comforting euphemism of diplomats, the phrase means a promise to “defend” compliant non-nuclear states using nuclear weapons. In military circles, it is one government’s threat to attack a third country with nuclear weapons on behalf of an ally that has no nukes.

The practice of holding a “nuclear umbrella” for allies is sometimes called “extended deterrence.” It’s been offered by the United States to nuclear-free European countries, along with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and others.

CNN reported that Polish President Andrzej Duda, on March 13, called on President Trump to deploy U.S. nuclear weapons in Poland, much like it does in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. CBS News reported on May 7 that current talk of the “nuclear umbrella” is “driven by Trump’s threats not to protect allies that don’t meet his expectations.”

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported recently that Europeans “seriously worry about whether Washington will continue to extend nuclear deterrence — sometimes referred to as a nuclear ‘umbrella’ — to the continent.” The “Europeans” the CEIP refers to are only those who have no understanding of nuclear weapons.

Use of the sugar-coated word “deterrence” hides the ghastly, devastating, suicidal reality of nuclear weapons attacks, and has the additional power of teaching the public to live in fear of other countries. As one vice president of a group called “Liberal International” put it recently, “The U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe is the ultimate defense against hostilities toward NATO countries.” The question “What would a nuclear attack achieve?” never enters the conversation.

The late Daniel Ellsberg, as an advisor to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, drafted plans for nuclear attacks. He wrote in The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, “The plan called for a total of 40 megatons — megatons — on Moscow, about four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima.” In Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, Ellsberg says about this plan, “Our private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single U.S. or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million.”

The self-destructive nature of nuclear war was understood by some Europeans, including Germany’s (future Chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, who warned in his 1962 book Defense or Retaliation that the use of U.S. nuclear weapons “will not defend Europe, but destroy it.”

Today’s editors and heads of state ought to be focused on how to eliminate nuclear umbrellas rather than hundreds of millions of compatriots, allies and friends. — JL