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February 23, 2018 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Threats of Mass Destruction Are All ‘Mentally Deranged’

The US maintains a fleet of heavy long-range B-52 bombers like this one that carry nuclear-armed Cruise missiles and B61 nuclear gravity bombs, among many others, and which regularly fly “exercises” near North Korea.

After Trump’s Sept. 23 bombast at the United Nations where he claimed the US might “have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” the propagandists in Pyongyang responded quickly, calling him a “mentally deranged dotard.” During Trump’s 2017 visit to South Korea, an editorial in the Minju Joson, a state-run newspaper published in Pyongyang, said the president’s speech to the South’s parliament was a “load of rubbish spouted by the old lunatic Trump” and “was all nonsense.”

“Far from making remarks of any persuasive power that can be viewed to be helpful to defusing tension, he made unprecedented rude nonsense one has never heard from any of his predecessors,” the North’s President Kim Jong-un said after Trump’s UN bomb threat.

Of course the imbecility of Trump’s speech is almost always rude nonsense, but his White House predecessors have been nearly as bloodthirsty in their overt threats against North Korea. While Trump certainly speaks like a mentally deranged dotard, his threat to totally destroy a country of 25 million people is only as deranged as those made by earlier presidents.

On July 12, 1993, Bill Clinton was in South Korea and warned that if the North developed and used an atomic weapon, the United States would “overwhelmingly retaliate,” and he adding chillingly, “It would mean the end of their country as they know it.”

George Bush continued the routine, hatefully naming North Korea part of an “axis of evil” during his 2002 State of the Union speech. Bush’s choice of the word “axis” usefully conjured images of Hitler Fascism, against which any atrocity can of course be excused.

Likewise, Barack Obama calmly threatened the North during his April 2014 visit to Seoul, saying, “We will not hesitate to use our military might to defend our allies and our way of life.” Calling the North “a pariah state that would rather starve its people than feed their hopes and dreams,” Obama hearkened back to the country’s terrible 1996-1998 famine — “one of the great famines of the 20th Century” according to UN aid agencies. Obama conveniently neglected to recall much less apologise for any US responsibility in failing to provide adequate emergency food aid to the starving.

Nowadays, Trump gets rightfully condemned for making threats of mass destruction against the tiny, underdeveloped North, especially as he sits at the head of the grandest military empire in the history of the world, with 12 ballistic missile submarines, 19 aircraft carrier battle groups, 450 land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, almost 800 military bases in 70 countries and territories abroad, and shooting wars underway in seven different countries.

Yet jittery trepidation regarding phantom threats by North Korea is routinely, almost universally voiced — even if it’s just as routinely debunked. In 1996, the editors at the New York Times warned, “North Korea could threaten parts of Hawaii and Alaska” in less 10 years. (“Star Wars, the Sequel” May 14) Now 22 years on, the North still can’t do it. In 2000, the same editors said US intelligence agencies “predict that North Korea could have the capacity to launch a handful of nuclear-tipped long-range missiles within five years.” (“Prelude to a Missile Defense,” Dec. 19) Eighteen years later, it still can’t.

Fearmongering about North Korea always lacks any evidence that its ruling regime is suicidal, because there is no such evidence. Never explained by our military-industrial-Congressional weapons merchants, newspaper and TV pundits, or think tank analysts is why the North would precipitate its inevitable self-destruction by attacking the United States or its allies, because it never would.

A few reporters have managed to fit this acknowledgment into their stories, and for this they need to be recognized. Jessica Durando, writing in USA Today Nov. 21, 2017, said North Korea’s leader appears “determined to keep his nuclear arsenal to deter a U.S. attempt to overthrow him.”

And journalist Loretta Napoleoni, author of the brand new “North Korea: The Country We Love to Hate” (2018, University of Western Australia Press), spoke to the London Express Feb. 20, saying about the North’s arsenal of 10 to 12 unusable nuclear bombs: “I don’t think they have any intention to use it. It is a deterrent,” Napoleoni said, “and very much what they wanted to achieve in order to make sure that nobody would attack them ever again.”

In view of the just-announced joint US/South Korean military invasion rehearsals known as “exercises” now set for April, North Korea is the place for legitimate trepidation.

— John LaForge 

 

Filed Under: Military Spending, Nuclear Weapons, Weekly Column Tagged With: deterrence, North Korea, nuclear threats, nuclear weapons, Pentagon, war, weapon

February 6, 2018 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

US NUCLEAR WAR PLAN or “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW” 2018

The “Nuclear Posture Review” is the sterile, abstract, ambiguous, euphemistic government explanation of its plans to commit indiscriminate mass slaughter of civlians using nuclear weapons. The Feb. 2, 2018 is the newest since 2010. Photo: Peter Sellers as “Dr. Strangelove.”

HERE IS THE US GOVERNMENT’S 2018 NUCLEAR WEAPONS POLICY and LANGUAGE ON USING NUCLEAR WEAPONS KNOWN AS THE “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW” 

 

 

Filed Under: B61 Bombs in Europe, Military Spending, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons Tagged With: B61 gravity bombs, deterrence, Euro weapons, ICBMs, nuclear, nuclear submarines, nuclear weapons, Pentagon, war, weapons testing

June 26, 2017 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Counting Carriers, or, When is an F-35B not an aircraft?

Summer Quarterly 2017

In the post-fact US Navy, the USS America, left,  with up to 2,930 personnel and a compliment of 20 F-35B fighter jets, is not an aircraft carrier.

The Pentagon likes to say it has 10 aircraft carriers, the 10 Nimitz-class “super carriers” that displace 100,000 tons, and carry up to 6,000 people. But it actually has nineteen.

The 19 carriers are not for deterrence or defense, considering Russia, China, Brazil, India, France and Thailand each have exactly one. Italy and Spain have two each, but they’re NATO allies.

Not counted by the Pentagon are its Tarawa-class carriers with 2,800 people onboard. Three football fields long, and 20 stories high, the Tarawa ships “have the general profile of an aircraft carrier,” as the website GlobalSecurity.org notes. They carry 35 fighter aircraft, including Harrier fighter jets, Harrier jump jets, helicopters, reconnaissance aircraft and thousands of tons of langing vehicles for invasions.

The eight other giant carriers are 45,000-ton Wasp-class behemoths, known instead as “amphibious assault ships” that the Navy calls “the largest amphibious ships in the world.” They launch helicopters, jump jets, hovercraft, landing craft and assault vehicles, and carry up to 2000 Marines. Used for waging war “forward…from the sea,” and “assault by air,” each of the eight Wasps have a 600-bed hospital.

Two of the newest carriers—the $3.5 billion USS America and USS Tripoli—are “considerably larger than recent aircraft-carrying ships constructed for the Korean, Japanese, and Australian navies,” according to Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School. The America-class will carry up to 20 Marine Corps F-35B fighter jets, plus Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, and helicopter gunships.

Not satisfied with a 19-to-one advantage, the Navy is sea testing the biggest carrier on Earth, the Gerald R. Ford, a 100,000-ton, $10 billion giant that has a crew of 4,300 and carries a fleet of 90 aircraft.

—Lockheed Martin; The Diplomat, April 17, 2014; GlobalSecurity.org, “World Wide Aircraft Carriers – 2014”

Filed Under: Military Spending, Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter Tagged With: nuclear weapons, Pentagon, war, weapon

June 9, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

With Ballistic Missile Defenses, There’s a Secret to Success

The corporate gravy train known as Star Wars, Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), or just Missile Defense—after having spent over $200 billion since 1983—is finally celebrating a successful test. On May 31, 2017 the Pentagon claimed that it hit a missile shot from the Pacific with a missile shot from California.

The veracity of the claim is impossible to confirm because, as always, the military did not provide details. Actual success is highly unlikely. Since 2002, the Pentagon has been allowed to keep secret all key test information, including flight test data on all its BMD experiments. The military’s blanket classification of these testing results was imposed in the face of highly embarrassing scientific evidence of test fakery and two years after the FBI began an investigation into fraud and cover-up inside the program.

Open missile hatches on one of US Navy’s 12 Trident ballistic missile-firing submarines. Each D-5 rocket can carry up to 8 nuclear warheads and have a range of 4,600 miles. 

On June 6, Nukewatch asked Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapon & Nuclear Power in Space if the secrecy rules are still in place. In an email Gagnon wrote: “Sure they are. Many of the tests are scripted, what [City University of New York physicist Dr.] Michio Kaku calls ‘strap down rabbit tests.’ They can’t afford to release [details]. It would sink their boat.”

Secrecy could be the only successful thing in the BMD program. It’s been savaged, by independent and government scientists for over 26 years. In 1997, Professor Gordon Mitchell of Univ. of Pittsburgh blasted “secrecy and misinformation on missile defense research,” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, arguing that the “shackles of secrecy and classification” should be removed so that scientific peer review could protect taxpayers from fraud. Mitchell wrote: “Given the lack of grave or immediate ballistic missile threat to the US … BMD research data should be presumptively public, not born secret.”

One program centers on a rocket known as Standard Missile 3 or SM-3, which the Pentagon claimed in 2010 had succeeded in 84% of its tests. But Dr. Theodore Postol, an MIT physicist, and George Lewis, a Cornell physicist, studied the military’s data and reported that only 10 to 20 percent of the tests worked. “The system … will intercept warheads only by accident, if ever,” Postol told the New York Times May 18, 2010.

Postol has been exposing corruption in the scandal-ridden missile industry since the 1991 US war on Iraq. Back then, he proved that not one Patriot air defense rocket stopped a Scud missile. The Pentagon had claimed then the Patriot’s success rate was 80% in Saudi Arabia and 50% in Israel.

Calling the program “delusional,” Postol, Lewis, Kaku, Mitchell, Gagnon and other long-standing critics remind taxpayers that any enemy sophisticated enough to field intercontinental ballistic missiles will produce decoys and other means confounding defenses. Laura Grego, a physicist with Union of Concerned Scientists, lampooned the Pentagon’s claim of a May 30 success, blogging that the military couldn’t honestly say that the test had actually worked unless it had evaded real countermeasures like decoy warheads.

In 2012, the National Research Council, the nation’s preeminent group of scientists, issued a 260-page report critical of the program, saying current enemy “countermeasures” make the anti-missile system unworkable. The report also called a planned $28 billion group of satellites used to track enemy warheads “unneeded.”

Time magazine nailed the military’s fundamental reason for secrecy with its July 10, 2000 headline: “Missile Impossible: This week’s $100 million test of the space shield is all but fixed.” In June that year, 53 House Democrats asked the FBI to investigate the anti-missile program for “serious allegation of fraud and cover up.” The bureau later looked into allegations that the giant military contractor TRW committed fraud and a cover-up while developing a key component of BMD system.

For a more detailed look at anti-ballistic embezzlement, ask Nukewatch for its Special Report, “Missile Defense Fraud Goes Ballistic.”  — John LaForge

Sources: Global Network, June 6, 2017; New York Times, May 31, 2017, Sept. 12, 2012, & May 18, 2010; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Aug. 26, 2001; Extra!, F.A.I.R., Nov. 1, 2000; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1997.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Weekly Column Tagged With: nuclear weapons, Pentagon, weapons testing

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