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“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

 

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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

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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 40th 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

 

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Cape Cod Bay in the Crosshairs — Holtec’s Reactor Waste Water Threat

By John LaForge

Still dreaming of a nuclear reactor that is clean, safe and cheap? Holtec Decommissioning International Corp. is trying to turn that dream to a nightmare.

The newly minted subsidiary intends to dump roughly one million gallons radioactively contaminated nuclear reactor waste water into Cape Cod Bay, which happens to be a part of the protected Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The million gallons are stagnating in the shutdown Pilgrim reactor’s waste fuel pool, formerly used to cool extremely hot uranium fuel rods which are taken from the reactor core (at around 5,092 degrees Fahrenheit)  when fresh fuel is emplaced.

Holtec’s pollution plan has produced such a tsunami of public opposition that Massachusetts Senator Ed Marky convenes a congressional subcommittee field hearing in Plymouth, Massachusetts Friday, May 6, to air questions about an array of vexing problems with decommissioning the Pilgrim reactor, which is on the northwest shore of Cape Cod Bay. Markey is Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air, Climate, and Nuclear Safety.

Diane Turco is director of Cape Downwinders, a grassroots watchdog group working to protect local communities from the radiation risks created by Pilgrim. The group has helped bring critical attention to Holtec’s scandalous proposal and has organized gut-reaction outrage into a broad-based coalition of resistance that includes the fishing community, the labor movement, the real estate industry, as well as country’s major environmental organizations.

While Markey’s field hearing is being arranged, and Holtec works the bribery zone trying to win support, Turco has had to spend countless hours preparing to defend against trumped-up trespass charges resulting from a tour of the Pilgrim site she gave to a pair of National Public Radio reporters. The charge is crass political harassment, since neither of the reporters were charged, and attorneys have told Turco that a motion to dismiss based on selective prosecution is a no-brainer. But the court has not agreed to hold a motion hearing, so she has to prepare testimony and expert witnesses for a May 9 trial, even though the court could do the right thing and dismiss.

Waste water’s contents still secret

In a phone interview, Turco told me that Holtec has not even made public the radioactive character of the waste water it wants to spew to the public commons. If the state department of environmental protection has been informed, it has not divulged either the sorts of isotopes in the water or their concentration. This secrecy makes impossible an valid assessment of the risks involved and only aggravates public fear and hostility.

“If Holtec had true concern for public health and the environment and worked with transparency as they promised, it would halt any dumping until a viable solution is found acceptable”, Turco told the Cape Cod Times last December. “[D]umping into Cape Cod Bay just highlights the fact that the [US] Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Holtec don’t have a solution for what to do with nuclear waste. Contaminating our environment is …is immoral.”

The thought of Holtec’s river of poison being poured into Cape Cod brings to mind a wartime atrocity like poisoning wells. Holtec says it intends to dilute the radioactive waste water (like Tepco Corp’s plan to pour 1 million tons of radioactive waste water into the Pacific beginning next spring), but this is an irrelevant distraction.

The volume of radioactive chemicals, metals, or isotopes will not be changed or reduced at all by diluting. The same total of radioactive materials and their radioactivity are merely spread through a larger volume of water — all of which will then be poisoned for a very long time. Strontium-90 taints the water for 300 years (ten half-lives); iodine-129 for 160 million years; carbon-14 for 57,000 years. All such cancer-causing radionuclides cio-accumulate and bio-concentrate in the ocean’s web of life and can contaminate seafood like Cape Cod’s famous mussels, clams and oysters — becoming internal radiation emitters.

Last January 12, Sen. Markey and three other members of congress wrote to Holtec opposing the proposed discharge into Cape Cod Bay. The letter encouraged Holtec to consider alternative methods of disposal, none of which are good answers to nuclear power’s endless waste dilemma. Operators of the closed Vermont Yankee reactor shipped its poison water out of state, which moved the radiation risk to someone else’s water table. Evaporation is an option that risks spewing radionuclides on the wind. Nuclear power stories just don’t have happy endings. ####

— A version of this piece ran at CounterPunch (https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/06/cape-cod-bay-in-the-crosshairs-holtecs-reactor-waste-water-threat/) May 6-8, 2022

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Reducing Tensions, Building Trust, De-escalating

German warplanes routinely practice attacking Russia using US hydrogen bombs, like this new B61 model 12, set to replace the B61s now in Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands and Turkey.

By John LaForge

The United States could immediately take direct actions that would de-escalate the over-arching nuclear threat that haunts Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. A few such actions would demonstrate good will and indicate a real intention to reduce tensions in the crisis which seems every day to grow more dangerous.

 

1. U.S. hydrogen bombs stationed in Europe could be withdrawn and their planned replacement cancelled.

The United States and Germany are formal states parties to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Articles I and II of the NPT flatly prohibit the transfer of nuclear weapons from one states party to another. Any fourth grader can understand that the NATO practice of “nuclear sharing” with Germany, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Turkey — which together have over 100 U.S. nuclear weapons — is an open violation of the clear, unambiguous, unequivocal and binding prohibitions of the NPT.

The United States stations an estimated 20 of its B61-3 and B61-4 thermonuclear gravity bombs at the German Air Force Base Büchel, 80 miles southeast of Cologne. These B61 H-bombs at Büchel are identified as “intermediate-yield strategic and tactical thermonuclear” bombs, and “the primary thermonuclear gravity bomb in the U.S.” according to the NuclearWeaponArchive.org.

Calling these weapons “intermediate” or “tactical” is shocking disinformation. The maximum yield of the B61-3 is 170 kilotons, and the maximum B61-4 yield is 50 kilotons, as reported by the Bulletin of the atomic Scientists. These H-bombs respectively produce over 11 times and 3 times the explosive blast, mass fire, and radiation of the 15-kiloton Hiroshima bomb that killed 140,000 people. (For background, see Lynn Eden’s “Whole World on Fire,” or Howard Zinn’s “The Bomb.”

The effects of detonating B61-3 or B61-4 bombs would inevitably be catastrophic mass destruction involving disproportionate, indiscriminate and long-lasting devastation. Plans to replace the current B61 with a new “model 12” could be cancelled now, and constitute a real ratcheting down of tensions in Europe.

2. The U.S. can discontinue its nuclear attack courses underway at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

The U.S. studies and plans nuclear weapon attacks at classrooms of its Defense Nuclear Weapons School (DNWS), and the one branch school outside the U.S. is at Ramstein in Germany, the largest U.S. military base outside the country, headquarters of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and NATO Allied Air Command. Outlines of nuclear attack coursework can be read on the DNWS website, which boldly declares the school: “is responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters …every day.”

One class outlined on the DNWS website is for “Theater Nuclear Operations,” described as “a 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting. The course provides an overview of nuclear weapon design, capabilities, and effects as well as U.S. nuclear policy, and joint nuclear doctrine…. Objectives: … Understand the U.S. nuclear planning and execution process…; Understand the targeting effects of nuclear weapon employment….”

Dispensing with this nuclear attack planning school would reduce tensions and help eliminate Russia’s dread of the U.S./NATO nuclear posture.

3. NATO can suspend its provocative military exercises.

Attacks with U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe are regularly simulated or “rehearsed,” as is often reported. Recent headlines noted: “German Air Force training for nuclear war as part of NATO” (Kazakh Telegraph Agency 2020), “Secret nuclear weapons exercise ‘Steadfast Noon” (German Armed Forces Journal 2019), “NATO nuclear weapons exercise unusually open” (2017), and “NATO nuclear weapons exercise Steadfast Noon in Büchel” (2015).

Giant NATO war games routinely zero in on Russia. In 2018, there was “Trident Juncture” with 50,000 troops in Norway, and “Atlantic Resolve” was conducted in Eastern Europe. In 2016, some 16,000 troops gathered in Norway for “Cold Response,” and in “Anaconda 2016” another 31,000 troops from 24 countries were again in motion across Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. In 2015, there was “Atlantic Resolve,” “Dragoon Ride,” and “Spring Storm,” all conducted across Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. In 2014, the routine “Cold Response” game in Norway involved 16,000 troops, and “Atlantic Resolve” took place in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

Beyond the annual “Steadfast Noon” simulations, complex, multinational NATO exercises in Eastern European countries just recently ballooned in number. In 2019, there was a single big exercise called “Atlantic Resolve.” In 2020 there were five. In 2021 the number leaped to eleven, and NATO that year made plans for a total of 95 exercises. Individual NATO states had plans for another 220 of their own war games. Nothing justifies Putin’s naked aggression, but the marked increase in NATO war practices would even make the Dali Lama defensive.

4. The U.S. and NATO could end their nuclear weapon “first-use” policy.

The public policy of readiness to initiate attack with nuclear weapons — not as a deterrent against being attacked with nuclear weapons, but its exact opposite — is at the heart of both U.S. and NATO “nuclear posture.” This perpetual threat to start nuclear attacks during a conventional conflict, especially in the context of routine NATO nuclear war exercises, is unnecessarily destabilizing and reckless. In view of the enormously overwhelming power of U.S. and NATO conventional military forces, the nuclear option is grossly redundant and militarily useless.

After he retired, Paul Nitze, a former Navy Secretary and personal advisor to President Ron Reagan, wrote “A Threat Mostly to Ourselves” where he observed: “In view of the fact that we can achieve our objectives with conventional weapons, there is no purpose to be gained through the use of our nuclear arsenal.”

Now that the U.S. public as a whole has been transformed into one big anti-war group, it should recognize that it can influence our own government but not Russia’s. Our demands for negotiation, cease-fire, de-escalation and a peace agreement need to be directed in a way that has some chance of success. ###

Published at CounterPunch, APRIL 29, 2022

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