Weekly Column

September 9, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Reactors and Weapons Electrify a Warzone

By John LaForge, for Nukewatch

The risk of catastrophic radiation releases is in the news again. But it’s not because the frequent earthquakes re-jolting the site of three simultaneous reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi, in Japan threaten to break open the giant tanks there holding 1.2 million tons of radioactive wastewater and dump it all in the Pacific.

Today’s radiation risk focus is the shooting war in Ukraine, a country with 15 operational nuclear reactors, in particular the Zaporizhzhia complex in the city of Enerhodar. The site has six large reactors lined up like dominoes, and hundreds of tons of ferociously radioactive and devilishly hot waste that must be continuously cooled in huge engineered pools or in 174 heavy outdoor casks on site. As of September 1, five of the six reactors have been put to cold shut down for a multitude of reasons, but their radioactively and thermally hot cores and waste all still require millions of gallons of cooling water every day.

Shrouding the risks of reactor meltdowns in a cloud of grim apprehension are the thinly veiled threats of attacks using nuclear weapons. Major news services repeatedly showcase nuclear weapons threats hinted at by Russian authorities, while NATO’s and the United States’ long-standing threat of nuclear first-use — and its stationing of U.S. nuclear bombs in five European NATO states — doesn’t warrant mentioning. The risk of nuclear weapons attacks is said to be as high as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this is due as much to NATO’s threatening “Strategic Concept” declaration of June 29 as to anything President Vladimir Putin of Russia has said.

News reports repeatedly claim that the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex, which is on the Dnieper river and close to the fighting in the south, is being shelled and rocketed by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. CNN reported August 18, “Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian forces of storing heavy weaponry inside the complex and using it as cover to launch attacks, knowing that Ukraine can’t return fire without risking hitting one of the six reactors. Moscow, meanwhile, has claimed Ukrainian troops are targeting the site. Both sides have tried to point the finger at the other for threatening nuclear terrorism.”

However, this “both” sounds like an absurdity, since Russian troops control the whole area, surrounded the vast reactor complex soon after invading, and seized it in March. These occupying Russian forces have kept the reactor site running using its Ukrainian engineers. For Russia to attack it would be to fire on its own personnel, endanger the operating technicians, and risk catastrophe. As such, news reports that Russia is firing on the complex appear to be disinformation or propaganda.

The Mayor of Enerhodar on August 31 accused Russia of doing the shelling, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said during his visit there the next day, “We don’t have the elements to assess that.” What’s more likely is that the Russians are using the huge reactor zone as a safe area, amassing equipment and munitions on the sprawling compound, as CNN noted.

“It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant”

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, asserted August 14, “It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant, and the dam, and hydroelectric facility on the Dnieper [River], which are necessary for its operation and safety even in a shutdown condition.” With Ukraine forces shelling the area on a regular basis, there is an ongoing chance that munitions aimed at the Russian forces surrounding site could strike one of the reactors, one of its high-level waste storage units, or power lines that supply the site with electricity to circulate cooling water.

Robert Mardini, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Guardian, “The slightest miscalculation could trigger devastation we will regret for decades,” adding that the stakes were “immense … When hazardous sites become battlegrounds, the consequences for millions of people and the environment can be catastrophic and last many years.”

In this context, Reuters reported September 1, “Russia’s defense ministry said up to 60 Ukrainian troops had crossed the Dnipro in boats at 6:00 a.m. local time, in what it said was a ‘provocation’ aimed at disrupting the IAEA visit” referring to an International Atomic Energy Agency delegation. It said ‘measures had been taken’ to destroy the opposing troops…. Reuters could not verify those reports.

Additional risks were highlighted the week of August 25, when wildfires knocked out electricity power to the complex. Energoatom, Ukraine’s state reactor agency, said fires at a nearby thermal power plant caused the complex’s last remaining electric power line to disconnect twice. The site’s three other lines were “lost earlier during the conflict,” the agency said, according to CNN, and the cut-off caused emergency electric generators to start up in order to keep cooling water circulating, preventing potentially disastrous overheating and even reactor meltdown(s).

Electricity was restored to the site the next day, but the shutoff spread fear among observers who were reminded that massive radiation releases can be caused by a power outage — like the station blackout that caused the three reactor meltdowns in Fukushima in 2011.

It is clear that Russia’s invasion is an international crime under the Charter of the United Nations, the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and a multitude of UN General Assembly resolutions. The world has justifiably condemned it, and Russian’s attack should recall the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which declared: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Of course this thundering denunciation applies as well to U.S. militarism and its undeclared, internationally criminal attacks on Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Panama, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the first bombardment and invasion of a country with operational nuclear power reactors. For the global anti-nuclear movement — whose teachers, scientists, physicians and parliamentarians have warned that reactors are sitting-duck dirty bombs, perpetually threatening major radiation releases — its worst-case scenario of deadly risks have been realized, foisted upon the world in an enormously dangerous powder keg some call “nuclear Russian roulette.” The U.S. role so far has been to play weapons trade show host, and as Chris Hedges reports: “Including humanitarian assistance, replenishing depleting U.S. weapons stocks and expanding U.S. troop presence in Europe, Congress has approved over $53.6 billion ($13.6 billion in March and a further $40.1 billion in May) since Russia’s February 24 invasion.” This U.S. war with Russia only enriches the arms industry and throws gas on the burning roulette table.

The tragic irony of warzone nuclear hazards is Ukraine’s zealous embrace of nuclear power on one hand, and its catastrophic experience of Chernobyl on the other. Chernobyl’s 1986 unit 4 reactor explosions, 40-day graphite fire, and hemisphere-wide radioactive fallout have possibly killed between half-a-million and 900,000 people depending on what study you want to believe. In a world not turned upside-down, Ukrainians would be last people on Earth to risk damaging a nuclear reactor. ###

July 24, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable

US plans to produce about 500 new tactical nuclear bombs - experts - ВПК.name

The United States intends to produce at least 500 of these new B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs, many of which are scheduled to be deploy at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Turkey.

by John LaForge, LA Progressive, July 26, 2020

Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as “deterrence” when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or “terrorism” if Russia, China, or North Korea does.

U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about 100-to-150 of them known as B61s, are stationed at two NATO bases in Italy, and at one NATO base each in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. These 170-kiloton H-bombs — 11 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — are always described euphemistically as “theater” nuclear weapons, defensive ones that are a “deterrent” to aggression.

Of course, Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown nuclear “deterrence” to be an expensive, destabilizing, terroristic fraud. That our high, holy, sacrosanct, and unquestionable arsenal of “deterrence” did not deter Russia on February 24, 2022 is dreadfully, painfully, catastrophically obvious. Yet the nakedness of the deterrent-less Emperor has hardly been acknowledged.

In the ghastly maw of ongoing war in Ukraine, the needless provocation of stationing U.S. thermonuclear B61 H-bombs at six NATO base’s facing Russia could hardly be more frightening. Then, as if to scream “fire” in the crowded auditorium, NATO’s ministers on June 30 issued their latest “Strategic Concept,” a public relations version of the alliance’s ongoing threat to wage indiscriminate, uncontrollable, and poisonous mass destruction using U.S., French and British nuclear warheads.

The Strategic Concept’s soothing, cotton candy version of NATO’s open embrace of nuclear terrorism is this: “NATO will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

At the moment however, the B61 hydrogen bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel air base cannot credibly be a part of the “mission” since they can’t be attached to Germany’s Tornado fighter jets. This is because the base’s runway is being rebuilt. Until 2026, Büchel’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing of Tornado jets are based at the nearby Nörvenich air base.

For Kathrin Vogler, a Left Party member of the German Parliament in 2021, this is a chance to denuclearize Germany. The politician told the daily paper Rhein-Zeitung last year that “From June 2022 to February 2026, flight operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued and transferred to the Nörvenich military airfield…. This was confirmed to us by the German government in our minor inquiry. As far as we know, the 20 or so nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain there.”

“This means that German nuclear sharing will effectively not take place for four years from 2022,” Volger told the paper.

“This exposes the argumentation of the German government, which repeatedly claims that nuclear sharing is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining it and thus also the Büchel nuclear weapons site is pure symbolic politics, albeit with high risks for the population. Therefore: The suspension of nuclear sharing must become a phase-out, [and] now would be a good opportunity to do so,” Volger said last year.

Proven useless, nuclear weapons can now be discarded

The June 30 NATO “concept” says, “The fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

As of February 24, 2022, NATO’s nuclear weapons arsenal’s “fundamental purpose” has been utterly delegitimized, politically pulverized, and militarily reduced to ashes. The alliance’s nuclear arsenal can finally be removed without any loss of face, much less any loss of security.

NATO’s latest “concept” accidentally acknowledges the uselessness of retaining nuclear weapons in its recognition that, “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance.”

This is the terrible farce of nuclearism. If nuclear weapon threats guaranteed any security at all, none of the tens of billions of Euro-dollars’ worth of military training, weapons, mercenaries, cyber warfare, or intelligence assistance that NATO partners and Russia are now pouring into Ukraine would be necessary.

Nuclear-armed alliances are a thing of the past which must be and now can be abolished. Under the auspices of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, along with the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, international law provides a pathway, training wheels, guide rails and a motorcade — courtesy of the great majority of the world’s governments — to a world where conflict and even wars don’t endanger whole civilizations and the biological integrity of life on earth. ###

— John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.

July 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

“No One is Paying Attention to Your Protests”

On the 77th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test and the 43rd anniversary of the catastrophic Church Rock, New Mexico uranium mine waste spill, four US citizens (Susan Crane, Dennis DuVall, John LaForge, Brian Terrell) attempted to blockade the main gate at nuclear weapons base Buchel in west-central Germany.

BÜCHEL, Germany

This pointed insult was shouted without a trace of irony through a chain-link fence toward a group of nuclear weapons opponents last Tuesday by a military guard equipped with binoculars and wearing a camera strapped around his neck.

The protest group was at the perimeter of Büchel Air Force Base in west-central Germany on July 12, the 205th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau — the naturalist and theorist of conscientious defiance of illegitimate authority.

It’s safe to say no one was paying much attention to Thoreau either when he went to jail in July 1846 rather than pay poll taxes that were going to support the expansion of slavery into the western United States and President James Polk’s war on Mexico. It was only later that attention was paid, as Thoreau’s essay “On Resistance to Civil Government” would become a world literary classic regarding principled individual refusal to obey orders in violation of one’s personal integrity. After the Concord, Mass. constable demanded he pay his back taxes, Thoreau explained, “I cannot for an instant recognize … as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also.”

None of the anti-war activists went to jail last Tuesday for picnicking near the Büchel NATO base, but a colleague, Frits ter Kuile, of the Amsterdam Catholic Worker, had just begun a 30-day sentence in Germany’s Wittlich prison, for refusing to pay fines imposed for protests at the same base. Frits is the first non-German citizen jailed in the 26-year-long campaign of civil resistance at the controversial site, where 15-to-20 U.S. hydrogen bombs, known as B61s, are stationed. The old-fashioned, 170-kiloton gravity bombs are called “theatre” nuclear weapons war planners although the terrorism and provocation they produce in Moscow, 1,500 miles east, are anything but theatrical. The Hiroshima bomb that turned 140,000 people to powder and ash was ten times smaller an explosive, 15 kilotons.

German Air Force Tornado fighter jets regularly rehearse nuclear weapons attacks on Russia using weighted replicas of these U.S. nuclear weapons. The exercises, 95 of them in 2021 alone, have names like Cold Response, Defender-Europe 21, Anaconda, Locked Shields, Dragon Ride, Atlantic Resolve, Steadfast Noon, and Iron Wolf. Many of the military practices take place in the former Soviet Bloc countries Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Why Russia, invaded from the West three times in the last century, would be alarmed at these overt demonstrations of aggressive hostility is never considered by our gung-ho commercial media.

Another nuclear weapons resister, Ria Makien, a Quaker from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recently finished a 30-day sentence in a women’s prison for a similar action at the base. Ria’s protest and jail-going has been noticed, as her example of radical nonviolence in opposition to suicidal weapons is recognized across Germany.

Objections to the stationing and threatening posture of U.S. nuclear weapons in Germany (and four other European partners) are based on legal principles and simple common sense which stands aghast at NATO’s eastern expansion and nuclear war games. The 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty prohibits the United States, Germany, and other states parties from transferring nuclear weapons to or receiving them from another NPT state. This makes NATO’s quaintly named “nuclear sharing” an ongoing criminal violation of binding international law. The destabilizing deployments, rehearsals, and threatened use of the U.S. B61s — rationalized in NATO’s newly issued “Strategic Concept” — cannot be distinguished from Russia’s recent nuclear threat-mongering, except in terms of nuance. “NATO’s … posture is based on an appropriate mix of nuclear … capabilities”, the Concept states.

“NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture relies on the United States’ nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe ….” And “NATO will … ensure the credibility … of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

NATO’s cold-blooded “strategic” preparation for meaningless, genocidal atomic violence is cosmetically presented in defensive, sanctimonious, antiseptic language depicting hydrogen bombs as reasonable, measured, protective security blankets. This is a childishly naïve mindset that the wargamers promote but do not share.

Realists like Vicki Elson of NuclearBan.US, who spoke June 21 at a Washington, DC press conference promoting their abolition, described them honestly: they are “climate wrecking, indiscriminate weapons of mass extinction that don’t keep us secure but exacerbate the plunge toward environmental collapse, even without war.” At least Elson is paying attention.

–This column appeared at CounterPunch July 15, 16, 17, 2022

June 26, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Hypocrisies and Successes at Meeting of Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

German Representative Rüdiger Bohn (center) speaking as an “observer” June 22nd at the First Meeting os States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of NuclearWeapons, Vienna, Austria. Photo by John LaForge, for Nukewatch

By John LaForge

VIENNA, Austria — The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has been ratified by 65 governments, known in diplomatic circles as States Parties. The treaty’s first Meeting of States Parties (1MSP) concluded here June 23, after painstakingly working out — in the words of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons — “a blueprint for the end of nuclear weapons.” The new Treaty is the extraordinary, crowning achievement of ICAN, which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts.

At 1MSP, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany — all three of whom use U.S. nuclear weapons on their air force bases — participated as Observer States. The three have not ratified the TPNW, having acquiesced with a string of U.S. administrations — Obama’s, Trump’s, and Biden’s — that conspired at every opportunity to derail, prevent, delay, weaken, and boycott the new ban — in spite of broad public support for nuclear disarmament. Mr. Trump demanded that States Parties withdraw their ratifications. None did. Biden’s White House reportedly urged Japan not to attend the 1MSP as an Observer, and they stayed away.

German and Dutch representatives took their turn and spoke to the MSP on June 22, but both NATO members used exactly the same words to note their government’s explicit disapproval of the TPNW, and to voice their supposed support for the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both representatives said their governments “will not accede to” the nuclear ban treaty “because the TPNW is inconsistent with NATO doctrine.”

The hypocrisy in German and Dutch opposition is that their “sharing” of U.S. nuclear weapons, while consistent with “NATO doctrine” is totally inconsistent with their hallowed Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In fact, their 50-year-long dismissal of the NPT’s binding (Art. VI) obligation to begin negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament “at an early date” is also completely inconsistent with their feigned support for the NPT.

As German Representative Rüdiger Bohn said June 22, NATO “doctrine” includes the doleful edict, “As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear Alliance.” This embrace of genocidal atomic violence is not an Article of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty or NATO Charter. It was manufactured entirely by its nuclear-armed members, and there is no legal obligation for NATO to remain a nuclear-armed terrorist organization.

NATO “doctrine” is fluid, strictly advisory, and accepted voluntarily by its members. Even the NATO Charter’s famous Article 5, regarding collective response to a military attack on a member state, declares only that the NATO membership “will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking … such action as it deems necessary.”

In comparison, the Non-Proliferation Treaty is binding international law and includes explicit, unambiguous prohibitions and clear, binding obligations. NATO’s ongoing planning, preparations and ever-present threat to launch nuclear attacks (known as “deterrence”), is simply a ritualized practice which can be ended at any time — say by complying with the NPT’s Articles I and II which prohibit any transfer or reception of nuclear weapons between states, or its Article VI pledge to negotiate nuclear disarmament. Indeed, it is the 50-year-long postponement, or rejection of Art. VI that has prompted and propelled the overwhelming success of the new TPNW.

What might have been a week-long celebration of the TPNW’s progress in seeking a world free of nuclear threats, was dimmed by Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. It was the war’s spoken and unspoken reminders of ready nuclear arsenals in Russia and NATO that moved the MSP to say, in its final Declaration, that it “condemn[s] unequivocally any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances.”

The Declaration castigates nuclear weapons and echoes Daniel Ellsberg’s 1959 essay “The Threat and Practice of Blackmail,” noting that the Bomb is used to coerce, intimidate, plague, curse, and terrify. “This highlights, now more than ever, the fallacy of nuclear deterrence doctrines, which are based and rely on the threat of the actual use of nuclear weapons and, hence, the risks of the destruction of countless lives, of societies, of nations, and of inflicting global catastrophic consequences.”

The Parties agreed to push ahead with resolve to eventually see the nuclear weapons states sign on, saying “In the face of the catastrophic risks posed by nuclear weapons and in the interest of the very survival of humanity, we cannot do otherwise.” ###

— This column ran June 26 at Commondreams, and June 27 at Counterpunch

June 17, 2022 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

The Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty in the Footsteps of 1982’s Million-Person March

by John LaForge

VIENNA, Austria — June 17 — Last Sunday marked the 40^th anniversary of the June 12, 1982 million-person march in New York City for a “freeze” on nuclear weapons building, followed two days later by a mass nonviolent action at the consular offices of nuclear weapons states. Some 1,700 people, myself included, were arrested as we sat in the street blockading the nuclear-armed consulates, confronted by horse-mounted cops literally chomping at the bit while we nervously sang We Shall Not Be Moved and stared up at the menacing police.

We were moved out of the street that day in 1982, but the movement wasn’t deterred. We’ve pushed on for decades in spite of ridicule, harassment, and imprisonment, seeing to the slashing of the U.S. nuclear arsenal from over 60,000 in those days, to today’s approximately 5,000 — an amount still grotesque enough to incinerate and contaminate most of the living beings on Earth.

After millions marched in England and across Europe in the 1980s, tens of thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons were withdrawn from the Continent — nuclear gravity bombs, artillery shells, land mines, missiles (Pershing and Cruise) and more. (Roughly 100 are still positioned in NATO states, about 20 apiece at air bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Turkey — all in violation of the letter of the Nonproliferation Treaty.) After hundreds of nonviolent protests, the number of U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles has also been cut from 1,000 to 400.

These numbers are as meaningless in military terms now as they were then, because the detonation of even one modern thermonuclear warhead causes such vast, uncontrollable, and indiscriminate blast, fire and poison that binding international humanitarian law (Hague Regulations and Geneva Conventions) prohibits any deliberate use of them. Military authorities who order such use would be subject to war crimes prosecutions for committing massacres.

Fast-forward 40 years, and this week Vienna, Austria is hosting the First Meeting of States Parties, UN member states that have agreed to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). More than 100 governments will participate.

The great majority of the world’s representatives — 122 countries — voted their approval of the TPNW in 2017, 86 have formally signed, and 62 have since ratified it. The treaty has entered into force, and only the tiny minority of nuclear-armed governments and their military allies continue to reject it — for “deterrence” reasons that have been shown to be irrational and unachievable.

Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine prove that nukes don’t deter war. Instead, they needlessly create the real possibility of globalized, radioactive catastrophe, all the while stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, and mountains of brain power, away from programs that are crucial and urgently needed.

A colossally expensive nuclear arms race is again underway among the richest militaries in spite of global climate chaos, refugee crises, pandemics and other medical emergencies, and food shortages, all of which must be confronted if we want to survive. The world’s nine nuclear-armed countries spent $82.4 billion upgrading their arsenals in 2021, the biggest spender being the United States, according to “Squandered,” the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons’ annual report on nuclear spending.

Nuclear weapons states always claim their H-bomb budgets are for “refurbishment” of old, dangerous systems — something that their bedfellows in the nuclear reactor biz never admit about their old units. The power industry’s dangerous, outdated GE and Westinghouse junkers are never said to need retirement, but “license extensions,” and 93 out of 94 have been allowed to blow past their engineered 40-year shutdown mandates and into today’s deadly game of Fukushima Roulette — a crap shoot with suicide the public never agreed to join.

Germany’s clean phase-out of its 17 power reactors, and South Africa’s and Libya’s abandonment of nuclear weapons, have shown that both sides of denuclearization are possible. Now the TPNW presents the world with the practical, international means of eliminating the Bomb. With enough million-person marches, we can still shame the twin nuclear devils and bring the era of nuclear threats to an end. ###

— This column ran at Counterpunch June 17 and in LA Progressive June 22, 2022