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US Nuclear Weapons Handouts Illegal

By John LaForge

The US military practice of placing nuclear weapons in five other countries (no other nuclear power does this) is a legal and political embarrassment for US diplomacy. That’s why all the governments involved refuse to “confirm or deny” the practice of “nuclear sharing” or the locations of the B61 free-fall gravity bombs in question.

Expert analysts and observers agree that the United States currently deploys 150-to-180 of these nuclear weapons at bases in Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Turkey and Belgium. The authors of the January 2018 report “Building a Safe, Secure, and Credible NATO Nuclear Posture” take for granted the open secret that nuclear sharing is ongoing even though all six countries are signatory parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, or NPT.

In a paper for the journal Science for Democratic Action, the German weapons expert Otfried Nassauer, director of the Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security, concluded, “NATO’s program of ‘nuclear sharing’ with five European countries probably violates Articles I and II of the Treaty.”

Article I prohibits nuclear weapon states that are parties to the NPT from sharing their weapons with non-nuclear states. It says: “Each nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly….”

Article II, the corollary commitment on the part of non-nuclear states says: “Each non-nuclear weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly … or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices….”

What nuclear sharing means in practice

The five NATO countries currently hosting US H-bombs on their air bases are officially “non-nuclear weapons states.” But as Nassauer reports, “Under NATO nuclear sharing in times of war, the US would hand control of these nuclear weapons over to the non-nuclear weapon states’ pilots for use with aircraft from non-nuclear weapon states. Once the bomb is loaded aboard, once the correct Permissive Action Link code has been entered by the US soldiers guarding the weapons, and once the aircraft begins its mission, control over the respective weapon(s) has been transferred. That is the operational, technical part of what is called ‘nuclear sharing.’”

This flaunting of the NPT is what peace activists on both sides of the Atlantic refer to when calling the US bombs in Europe “illegal.” Nassauer notes, “The pilots for these aircraft are provided with training specific to use nuclear weapons. The air force units to which these pilots and aircraft belong have the capability to play a part in NATO nuclear planning, including assigning a target, selecting the yield of the warhead for the target, and planning a specific mission for the use of the bombs.”

“NATO nuclear sharing,” Nassauer writes, “was described in 1964 by one member of the US National Security Council … as meaning that ‘the non-nuclear NATO-partners in effect become nuclear powers in time of war.’ The concern is that, at the moment the aircraft loaded with the bomb is on the runway ready to start, the control of the weapon is turned over from the US, a nuclear weapon state, to non-nuclear weapon states. … To my understanding, this is in violation of the spirit if not the text of Articles I and II of the NPT.” [Emphasis added]

How Do the US and its Allies Explain their Lawlessness?

An undated, 1960s-era letter from then-US Secretary of State Rusk explained the US ‘interpretation’ of the NPT. The pretext for ignoring the treaty’s plain language, the Rusk letter “argues that the NPT does not specify what is allowed, but only what is forbidden. In this view, everything that is not forbidden by the NPT is allowed,” Nassaure explained.

In its most absurd section, Rusk simply denies the treaty’s obvious purpose and intent. “Since the treaty doesn’t explicitly talk about the deployment of nuclear warheads in countries that are non-nuclear weapon states,” Nassaure writes, “such deployments are considered legal under the NPT.”

It is so easy to show that the United States and its nuclear sharing partners are in violation of the NPT, the governments involved work hard pretending there are nothing to worry about, no lawbreaking underway, no reason to demand answers. This is why so many activists across Europe have become nonviolently disobedient at the air bases involved.

The transparent unlawfulness of NATO’s nuclear war planning is also the reason why prosecutors in Germany don’t dare bring serious charges against civil resisters; even those who have cut fences and occupied hot weapons bunkers in broad daylight. Some Air Force witness might testify at trial that US nuclear weapons are on base.

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The Tip of the Radiation Disaster Iceberg

In 1959, a partial reactor meltdown struck the Sodium Reactor Experiment at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (pictured), in the Simi Hills 30 miles from Los Angeles, CA. The incident was successfully kept secret until 1979. According to the 1997 “Epidemiologic Study to Determine Possible Adverse Effects,” Santa Susana Field Lab workers showed higher than expected rates of some cancers. Dept. of Energy photo.

The World Nuclear Association (WNA) says its goal is “to increase global support for nuclear energy” and it repeatedly claims on its website: “There have only been three major accidents across 16,000 cumulative reactor-years of operation in 32 countries.” The WNA and other nuclear power supporters acknowledge Three Mile Island in 1979 (US), Chernobyl in 1986 (USSR), and Fukushima in 2011 (Japan) as “major” disasters.

But claiming that these radiation gushers were the worst ignores the frightening series of large-scale disasters that have been caused by uranium mining, reactors, nuclear weapons, and radioactive waste. Some of the world’s other major accidental radiation releases indicate that the Big Three are just the tip of the iceberg.

CHALK RIVER (Ontario), Dec. 2, 1952: The first major commercial reactor disaster occurred at this Canadian reactor on the Ottawa River when it caused a loss-of-coolant, a hydrogen explosion and a meltdown, releasing 100,000 curies of radioactivity to the air. In comparison, the official government position is that Three Mile Island released about 15 curies, although radiation monitors failed or went off-scale.

ROCKY FLATS (Colorado), Sept. 11, 1957: This Cold War factory produced plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons 16 miles from Denver. It caused 30 to 44 pounds of breathable plutonium-239 and plutonium-240 to catch fire in what would come to be known as the second largest industrial fire in US history. Filters used to trap the plutonium were destroyed and it escaped through chimneys, contaminating parts of Denver. Nothing was done to warn or protect downwind residents.

WINDSCALE/SELLAFIELD (Britain), Oct. 7, 1957: The worst of many fires burned through one reactor igniting three tons of uranium and dispersed radionuclides over parts of England and northern Europe. The site was hastily renamed Sellafield. Another large radiation leak occurs in 1981 and leukemia rates soared to triple the national average.

KYSHTYM/CHELYABINSK-65 (Russia), Sept. 29, 1957: A tank holding 70 to 80 metric tons of highly radioactive liquid waste exploded, contaminating an estimated 250,000 people, and permanently depopulating 30 towns which were leveled and removed from Russian maps. Covered up by Moscow (and the CIA) until 1989, Russia finally revealed that 20 million curies of long-lived isotopes like cesium were released, and the release was later declared a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The long covered-up explosion contaminated up to 10,000 square miles making it the third- or 4th-most serious radiation accident ever recorded.

SANTA SUSANA (Simi Valley, Calif.), July 12, 1959: The meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment just outside Los Angeles caused “the third largest release of iodine-131 in the history of nuclear power,” according to Arjun Makhajani, President of the Institute for Energy & Environmental Research. Released radioactive materials were never authoritatively measured because “the monitors went clear off the scale,” according to an employee. The accident was kept secret for 20 years.

CHURCH ROCK (New Mexico), July 16, 1979: Ninety-three million gallons of liquid uranium mine wastes and 1,000 tons of solid wastes spilled onto the Navajo Nation and into Little Puerco River, and nuclear officials called it “the worst incident of radiation contamination in the history of the United States.” The Little Puerco feeds the Little Colorado River, which drains to the Colorado River, which feeds Lake Mead—a source of drinking water for Los Angeles.

TOMSK-7 (Russia), April 7, 1993: In “the worst radiation disaster since Chernobyl,” Russian and foreign experts said a tank of radioactive waste exploded at the Tomsk nuclear weapons complex  and that wind blew its plume of radiation  toward the Yenisei River and 11 Siberian villages, none of which were evacuated.

MONJU (Japan), Dec. 8, 1995: This sodium-cooled “breeder reactor” caused a fire and a large leak of sodium coolant into the Pacific. Liquid sodium coolant catches fire on contact with air and explodes on contact with water. Costly efforts to engineer commercial models have failed. Japan’s Monju experiment was halted in 2018 after over 24 years of false starts, accidents and cover-ups.

TOKAI-MURA (Japan), Sept. 30, 1999: A uranium “criticality” which is an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction caused a “neutron burst” that killed three workers and dispersed neutron radiation throughout the densely populated urban area surrounding the factory.

Not to be slighted, deliberate contamination has also been enormous: Five metric tons of plutonium was dispersed over the earth by nuclear bomb testing, and other nuclear weapons processes; Over 210 billion gallons of radioactive liquids were poured into the ground at the Hanford reactor complex in Washington State; and 16 billion gallons of liquid waste holding 70,000 curies of radioactivity were injected directly into Idaho’s Snake River Aquifer at the Idaho National Lab.

—Sources: Nuclear Roulette: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth, by Gar Smith (Chelsea Green, 2012); Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment, by  Joseph Mangano (OR Books 2012); In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age, by Stephanie Cooke (Bloomsbury, 2009); Criticality Accident at Tokai-mura, by Jinzaburo Takagi (Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, 2000); Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons Production & Its Health & Environmental Effects, by Arjun Makhijani, et al (MIT Press, 1995); The Nuclear Power Deception , by Arjun Makhijani & Scott Saleska (Apex Press, 1999); Nuclear Madness, Revised, by Helen Caldicot (Norton, 1995); Multiple Exposures: Chronicles of the Radiation Age, by Catherine Caufield  (Harper & Row, 1989); Greenpeace Book of the Nuclear Age, by John May (Pantheon, 1989); Deadly Defense: Military Radioactive Landfills, edited by Dana Coyle, et al (Radioactive Waste Campaign 1988); and No Nukes, by Anna Gyorgy (South End Press, 1979).

— John LaForge

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Fictions and Facts

by John LaForge
About the US atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, popular accounts still stick to the false but “greatest generation” story that, “Without [them], more Japanese would have died in a US assault on the islands, as would have tens of thousands of Americans,” as Mike Hashimoto wrote in the Dallas Morning News in 2016.

The New York Times reported that year, “Many historians believe the bombings [of] Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed.” Many historians, perhaps; but not that many.

On the contrary the chief historian of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, J. Samuel Walker, wrote in the journal Diplomatic History in 1990, “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. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.”

Historian Martin Sherwin has debunked the tale of the “good” atom bombs, citing in his 2003 book A World Destroyed “a ‘considerable body’ of new evidence that suggested the bomb may have cost, rather than saved, American lives. That is, if the US had not been so determined to complete, test, and finally use the bomb, it might have arranged the Japanese surrender weeks earlier, preventing much bloodshed on Okinawa.”

Historian Gar Alperovitz wrote in Atomic Diplomacy (Vintage Books, 1967), “available evidence shows the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war or to save lives — and that this was understood by American leaders at the time.” Further declassification of wartime secrets and 28 additional years of research make Alperovitz’s definitive 1995 history The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb even stronger on this point. 

Admirals and Generals Destroy the Myth

Combat veterans and bomber crews defeated Japan well before August 6, 1945 by fighting and dying in dreadful battles over Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and elsewhere, a fact corroborated by dozens of military commanders, as Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the 21st Bomber Command, boasted. LeMay said publicly on Sept. 20, 1945: “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” Asked to clarify, the general who directed the destruction of 67 Japanese cities using mass incendiary attacks doubled down saying, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Gen. George Kenny, who commanded parts of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific, was asked in 1969 for his opinion and said, “I think we had the Japs [sic] licked anyhow. I think they would have quit probably within a week or so of when they did quit.” Alperovitz notes further that Adm. Lewis Strauss, an assistant to WW II Navy Secretary James Forrestal, wrote to historian Robert Albion in 1960: “[F]rom the Navy’s point of view, there are statements by Admiral King, Admiral Halsey, Admiral Radford, Admiral Nimitz and others who expressed themselves to the effect that neither the atomic bomb nor the proposed invasion of the Japanese mainland were necessary to produce the surrender.”

In Mandate for Change, President Dwight Eisenhower admitted that when Sec. of War Henry Stimson told him atomic bombs were going to be used, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary….”

President Truman’s Chief of Staff, Adm. William Leahy, agreed. As Robert Lifton and Greg Mitchell, report in Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial, Leahy said, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.…” Even official histories have debunked the fiction. “[T]he US Strategic Bombing Survey published its conclusion that Japan would likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an American invasion,” Alperovitz recounted in The Decision. 

Still, the myth that the mass destruction of 200,000 was necessary to save lives is believed by millions in the US who refuse to consider or accept the historical record. This greatest of the “greatest generation’s” yarns may help some sleep at night, and to think better of killing civilians than does the rest of the world, but it doesn’t help abolish nuclear weapons.

Also published on Counterpunch.

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the Nuclear War Base

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.” — Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, WWII Air Force Commander of the 21st Bomber Command, Sept. 20, 1945

By John LaForge

BÜCHEL AIR BASE, Germany — I am still reporting from the peace camp near this NATO base in Germany, where anti-war activists will blockade the main entrance on August 6 and 9, the 73nd anniversaries of the US atomic bombings of Japan. Similar protests against the Bomb will take place at nuclear bases all over the world (including the British Trident submarine base in Faslane, Scotland, and the US Trident submarine base on Puget Sound near Seattle, Wash.). But here in Germany the US does something brazenly self-contradictory, it deploys about 20 modern hydrogen bombs in someone else’s country, each of them 10-to-20 times the explosive force of the crude atomic weapons used on the Japanese by the United States in 1945. That’s why your weekly nukewatcher, and a lot of others, have taken the trouble to travel to this bucolic region, amidst the dairy cows, and the fields of wheat, corn and sunflowers — to demand an end to the craziness.

With banners, flags, posters, chairs, and summer hats, activists from around Germany and a few from the US will stand or sit, sing or play instruments, all the while blocking the main gate during morning rush hour when hundreds of cars and trucks enter the base on weekdays. The German military guards here are calmly familiar with these peaceful interruptions which have become regular occurrences over the last 20 years. The guards automatically set out a well-used sandwich board directing traffic to another gate. Of course base personnel and civilian contractors who are late for work get irked and often grouch at having to turn around and find another entrance. The protesters calmly wave back and take the hostility in stride. Last Tuesday, Susan Crane, a six-week volunteer camp staffer who travelled from her home in Redwood City, California, was verbally confronted by a couple of local villagers angry about our signs (“U.S. H-bombs Out of Germany!”) and about the inconvenience we cause the military. One yelled, “Let the air force do its job!” and “Go to Berlin; they don’t make decisions here!”

Yet it’s the air force’s job that must not be done, and crucial decisions are made here. One sign, made by 18-year-old Max Smay, who was delegate here from the Snake River Alliance in Boise, Idaho, reads: “Trump can order a nuclear attack! Pilots, Will you obey?” Indeed, two US generals testified in public last year that they might disobey a nuclear attack order from the Tweeting Dotard. With pilots roaring off the runway and raising the shattering howl of their Tornado fighter jets all week long — often two-at-a-time – nuclear war decisions are actually practiced in this place. I think it’s safe to say that plenty of lawmakers in Berlin have no idea what goes on here, where German pilots train to use US nuclear bombs. Eight years ago the Bundestag overwhelmingly agreed, across all parties, to tell the Chancellor’s coalition government to get rid of the US nukes. Since then however, the issue has been ignored except for responses to the ongoing protests at this base. Last summer, for instance Green Party member Tabea Rossner complained in open session that go-in actions by protesters here give the impression that this supposedly high-security base is “an amusement park.” That quip in turn reminded both the Foreign Minister and the head of the Social Democratic Party to repeat their calls for removal of the bombs.

So the “Buechel Is Everywhere — Nuclear Weapons-Free Now” peace camp stays on task. For six very hot days in a row, Victor White, from Veterans for Peace in Oceanside, California, has been keeping a silent vigil near the main gate with his “Vets for Peace” flag, his Tibetan prayer flags, and his framed enlargement of a peace prayer. He was joined on Monday by the Rev. Rainer Schmid, a Lutheran minister from the area, who is making his own vigil at the same entrance, holding a 12-foot-tall, wooden cross with the demand printed on the horizontal, as if from the Biblical Jesus: “Atomwaffen Abschaffen Jetzt!” (Abolish Nuclear Weapons Now!).

With peace camp ending on Nagasaki Day, August 9, artists, religious leaders, veterans, tax resisters, Parliamentarians, and various reporters are all playing a part in stigmatizing, castigating, and excoriating the Bomb. Wildfires in California, Sweden, Russia, Australia, England, and Greece, and the heat-wave breaking records all over the world, remind us every day that nuclear war practice is worse than a waste; it kills people now without launch orders, by stealing resources from the war on climate change, the one that should be fought.

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The Eye of a Tornado

Through the razor wire July 23, 2018

John LaForge

BÜCHEL AIR BASE, Germany — Your loyal nuke watcher is acting as correspondent this month, writing from Germany where I’m working with activists at the “Büchel Is Everywhere: Nuclear Weapons-Free Now!” peace camp. The well-equipped camp is a 20-week-long reminder to military and civilian personnel working there, and to thousands of passersby who can’t avoid our big banners in the Main Gate, that nuclear weapons are profoundly unethical, internationally illegal, and militarily useless. The campground — complete with working kitchen, 8-tap wash station, four caravans, a hot shower, and a dozen tents for storage, meeting space, and sleeping — stands just across the road from the German NATO base which houses about 20 nuclear bombs belonging to the United States. (Spoiler alert: this is not legal.)

This year more than 50 small groups and major organizations in Germany have endorsed the Büchel Is Everywhere campaign, agreeing to make their voices heard using nonviolent civil resistance at the base. Hundreds of individuals and dozens of groups have committed time and organizing resources to the protests which began here last March 26. The groups have engaged in peaceful defiance of official nuclear and conventional war preparations emanating from this eye-of-the-tornado — so to speak. The base is a launch platform and training facility for German Tornado fighter jets which train to use the US H-bombs.

Leading anti-nuclear weapons NGOs from Germany and other countries have come to the camp to join in a wide variety of nonviolent actions, or will do so before Aug. 9 when the “20 weeks for 20 bombs” concludes. The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (with 150,000 members in 50 countries), Mayors for Peace (from 7,614 cities in 163 countries), and Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (with 700 members in 75 countries), have or will send members to camp this year — all convinced that now is the time to get US H-bombs out of Germany for good.

Live Runway Occupied July 23

The latest in the long series of protests saw seven anti-nuclear activists, led by one of Germany’s Quaker groups, got through fences and onto the air base’s live runway July 23, just as the Tornado jet bombers were preparing for another day of practice runs. The seven runway occupiers, German citizens all, were eventually detained, ID’d and released after being told they face charges.

Although the intruders’ support team warned the base by phone that there were “seven people on the runway,” conventional and social media are this week humming with accusations that the “protesters endangered themselves and the fighter pilots.” Who said irony is dead?

The complaints stem from news of an unprecedented visit to the peace camp. Well after the runway protesters were released, a high-ranking air force pilot and a local police commander came to complain. The runway occupation had obviously struck a real nerve. It was the first time in 20 years of protests here that any pilot had ever approached the protesters. The officer scolded the organizers saying that the “go-in” protesters could have been burned by jet engine blast, and that pilots may have had to make a risky “abort” of take offs. The peacenik’s rebuttal is obvious: “The base’s 20 thermonuclear bombs and its pilots’ training and mission to use them are a danger to the entire biosphere — so get your priorities in order.”

While some are calling for heavy charges and severe penalties for the peaceful trespassers, the German Air Force here “shares” the 20-or-so US nuclear gravity bombs (called B61s), and stand ready for a US presidential order to drop them somewhere. Exactly who is endangering whom, when the hydrogen bombs are dangerous to US producers, dangerous to transferring US handlers, dangerous to receiving German Air Force personnel and the surrounding community, dangerous to crews that regularly practice their doomsday missions, and dangerous to people the world over who could be targeted? How many of us have contemplated the deliberate, ongoing planning and preparation necessary for our German air force friends to commit massacres (the only thing nuclear weapons can do) with bombs made in the USA?

Headed to the runway July 23, 2018

Some who call for harsh punishment of the July 23 runway occupiers have referred to “law and order.” Yet the highest law of the land in both Germany and the United States is ratified treaty law — like the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons which both Germany and the United States have ratified. Article I forbids the transfer of US nuclear weapons to Germany; Art. II forbids Germany from receiving nuclear weapons from the United States. (The treaty’s language is more general, but it translates this way since it’s binding on states that ratify.)

While the United States and German governments regularly condemn North Korea and Iran for blatantly violating United Nations Resolutions, the detailed anti-nuclear UN General Assembly Res. 1653 from 1961 says, “Any State using nuclear and thermo-nuclear weapons is to be considered as violating the Charter of the United Nations, as acting contrary to the laws of humanity, and as committing a crime against [hu]mankind and civilization.” Not just the “go-in” activists, but 93 percent of German polled want the B61s ousted, and UN resolutions, the Nonproliferation Treaty, and the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons are reason enough to stop practicing nuclear attacks and finally get rid of the US bombs.

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