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March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Weapons Treaty Ban Needs Bold Advocacy

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021
By John LaForge

The newly established Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) finally prohibits the development, testing, possession, and deployment of nuclear weapons among nations that ratify it.

After 70 years of campaigns to “ban the bomb,” “freeze” the arms race, create “nuclear-free zones,” and curb nuclear weapons proliferation — and after dozens of agreements among nuclear-armed states in which the perpetrators granted themselves permission for their ghastly arsenals — the TPNW makes concrete, detailed, and indelible an absolute, globally recognized rejection of what’s been called “the ultimate evil.”

Profoundly, the TPNW goes further and specifically forbids the illogical, civilization-endangering practice of “nuclear deterrence” by explicitly outlawing its terrifying definitional essence — the threat to use nuclear weapons.

In addition, the treaty also explicitly recognizes victims and survivors of the dirty and deadly uses to which nuclear weapons have been put — the human radiation experiments and globe-contaminating testing of, and rehearsals for nuclear attacks — that require specific reparations and compensation measures.

As with other struggles for justice and peace that have lasted multiple generations — the abolition of slavery, torture, the death penalty, child labor — the TPNW’s campaigners call the new law a major breakthrough, but still just “the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons.”

The new ban treaty follows earlier international prohibitions that outlaw lesser weapons of mass destruction: the Geneva Protocol (outlawing gas warfare), the Hague Conventions (forbidding poisoned weapons), the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the (land) Mine Ban.

The new Treaty’s compelling language nearly stings the ears, like an ambulance siren or a fire alarm, blaring repudiation of the world’s most despicable and appalling weapons, devices whose horrifying effects differ from the previously banned arms only in that they exceed beyond comprehension the accumulated evil of all the rest. (Respects to Justice Jackson at Nuremberg)

The long-delayed arrival of the TPNW is evidence of the enormous anti-democratic political and financial power and influence that the giant military industries — the only beneficiaries of continuously rebuilding nuclear arsenals — wield over whole nation states. How else to explain the time it’s taken for the community of nations to finally add nuclear weapons to the list?

The scope and power of the TPNW — and even the doddering incoherence of its rejection by nuclear-armed states — are cause for great celebration. The treaty’s detailed, comprehensive articles themselves constitute the best rebuttal of the scofflaws’ reckless endangerment. From the preamble:

“Cognizant that the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons cannot be adequately addressed, transcend national borders, pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation…”

Still, nuclear-armed states all insist that their plans and threats to commit atomic violence are legal. The US Navy Field Manual says, “There is at present no rule of international law expressly prohibiting States from the use of nuclear weapons in warfare. In the absence of express prohibition, the use of such weapons … is permitted.”

No more. The TPNW rebukes and nullifies this artful dodge and its entry into force is a monumental accomplishment. Forbidding nuclear weapons by name is also a triumph of harrowing urgency, considering the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” having been set at 100 seconds to midnight.

Countries with nuclear arsenals ignored the UN negotiations that produced the TPNW and they ignore the law. They and over 30 allies were led in a boycott of the talks by then US UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, who said the treaty would end up disarming the nations “trying to keep peace and safety.” While she spoke, the United States was militarily occupying or at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger. Haley’s fairy tale didn’t fool 122 UN ambassadors that voted to adopt the treaty July 7, 2017, the 86 current Signatory States, or the 54 States Parties that have seen to its ratification.

Our broadcast and defense of the TPNW must now be emboldened and amplified to expand awareness, and the law’s mandate must be fearlessly employed to confront widespread ignorance, denial, and forgetfulness about not just nuclear weapons, but the establishment’s ongoing preparations for nuclear war.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Weapons Treaty the Right Way Forward, Has Already Strengthened Peace and Safety in 50 Countries

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

Editor’s note: A model of public engagement, Nukewatch volunteer Joel Bransky had this excellent letter published in his local paper….

Fifty nations just outlawed nuclear weapons forever. The international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, came into force on January 22 after the 50th country, Honduras, ratified it. The people of these countries will never have to worry about cancer-causing weapons tests or pay for the secretive governmental nonsense required to manufacture and store nuclear warheads.

The treaty’s entry into force comes at a critical time. Just three years ago, while living in South Korea, I watched our president joke about the size of his launch button and challenge a volatile dictator to a game of nuclear chicken. Congress held hearings on how a nuclear strike would be carried out. The world was one miscalculation away from nuclear war, it seemed — yet many people have already forgotten. The enormity of the problem makes it seem unsolvable.

But we can solve this problem, and the TPNW maps the path to nuclear disarmament. The treaty has already strengthened peace and safety in 50 countries. This is remarkable, given the opposition to the Treaty from the US government and weapons manufacturers. It shows that a nuclear-free future is coming. In fact, for the citizens of those 50 countries, it is already here.

I am tired of our government wasting taxpayer money on weapons that are never used and that, if used, would kill us through incineration, radiation poisoning, or starvation. We must tell our government that this is absurd and outdated. Now is the time. Please call or email your US senators and representative and tell them you support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.— Joel Bransky, Duluth News Tribune, Feb. 25, 2021

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

German Lawmaker Says “Nuclear Sharing Suspension” Must Become Phase-out

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021

Kathrin Vogler, peace policy spokeswoman for Germany’s Left party confirmed March 3 that Tornado fighter jet operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued from June 2022 to February 2026, due to extensive construction work, and transferred to the Nörvenich airfield. Vogler said, “As far as we know, the approximately 20 US nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain at the air base during the construction phase. This means that German ‘nuclear sharing’ will de facto not take place for four years from 2022.”

Ms. Vogler said the pause invalidates the government’s “repeated claims that ‘nuclear sharing’ is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining the nuclear weapons site at Büchel is pure symbolic politics — with high risks for the population.”

Urging other lawmakers to address real crises facing Germany, Vogler said, “We do not need nuclear weapons and we do not need a ‘modernization’ of the nuclear weapons site in Büchel. We need every cent in the coming years to secure the social future of the people in our country. … Therefore, the suspension of ‘nuclear sharing’ must become a phase-out. Now would be a good opportunity to do that. Germany must end nuclear sharing, and join the nuclear weapons ban treaty — and do it now.”

— Rhein-Zeitung daily, March 4, 2021

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Court Orders Veterans Affairs Department to Replace Flawed Science Used to Deny Benefits to Vets Poisoned in Plutonium Disaster

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021
By John LaForge

In a major class action ruling issued Dec. 17, 2020, the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in Washington, DC, has ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to re-examine how it evaluates disability claims from veterans exposed to deadly alpha radiation during cleanup operations following a disastrous nuclear weapons accident at Palomares, Spain.

The ruling follows oral arguments made Sep. 2, 2020, and comes one year after the court’s historic decision to certify “class action” status for the veterans of the radioactive disaster response effort. The Veterans Legal Services Clinic of Yale Law School, which since 2016 has assisted in litigating the case, Skaar v. Wilkie, along with the New York Legal Assistance Group, announced the decision.

On Jan. 17, 1966, during an airborne refueling gone wrong, an Air Force B-52 bomber exploded over the village of Palomares. Seven crew members were killed and four hydrogen bombs were thrown to the Earth. Upon impact, conventional explosives inside two of the H-bombs detonated, blasting two giant craters and spreading as much as 22 pounds of highly radioactive, carcinogenic pulverized plutonium across the Spanish village and countryside. (See Dec. 18 report, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/18/air-force-veterans-of-plutonium-dust-disaster-win-class-action-standing)

Air Force personnel worked where nuclear bomb explosions dispersed plutonium dust. Credit USAF

In its new decision, the court said the VA violated federal law requiring that its assessment of veterans’ radiation exposures be based on sound science. The VA has so far relied on faulty methods to deny disability benefits to veterans for radiation-related illnesses caused by the nuclear weapons disaster, the legal services clinic said, calling the decision “a long-awaited step toward recognizing the Palomares veterans’ service and ensuring they have access to the benefits they earned,” it said. Even a single particle of plutonium if inhaled or ingested can cause cancer.

The injured veterans’ lawsuit is led by Chief Master Sergeant Victor Skaar (USAF, Ret.) of Nixa, Missouri, who participated in the cleanup. Skaar and the class argue that the VA’s radiation exposure methodology “ignored 98 percent of the radiation measurements taken from veterans after the incident,” an error so grave that, “Dr. von Hippel and even the VA’s own consultant have faulted the method,” the law clinic said.

Skaar and at least 1,500 others were sent to clean up plutonium-contaminated debris and lived amidst the wreckage and the plutonium dust for weeks — handling it, cleaning it from clothes, washing it off of village surfaces, placing contaminated soil in barrels, and even incinerating truckloads of poisoned debris. Now, “many of the veterans have radiation-related illnesses that require medical treatment. Others have died from these conditions…” the law clinic said.

Referring to a December 2017 report by Princeton University physicist Frank von Hippel about 26 GIs who were identified in 1966 as having received the highest exposures, the court wrote: “Dr. von Hippel concluded that ‘The Air Force’s dose estimates have huge uncertainties and the maximum doses incurred by those not in the “High 26” could be hundreds of times higher than those that the Air Force has recommended to the VA for determination of benefits.’”

The court said further that the VA never explained why it adopted the flawed methodology. The court’s opinion, written by Judge Michael Allen, admonished the Board of Veterans’ Appeals declaring that it may not “abdicate its responsibility to assess whether the evidence before it is ‘sound.’” The court ordered the VA to review the parties’ evidence and provide considered analysis of the methodology to ensure that only sound scientific evidence is used to determine veterans’ eligibility for disability benefits.

John Rowan, Air Force Veteran and National President of Vietnam Veterans of America said in a statement, “Thanks to the court’s decision and the continuing advocacy of Mr. Skaar and other class members, the VA must now justify its practice of arbitrarily dismissing the exceedingly high levels of radiation these veterans encountered and continue to suffer from … [and] fulfill its duty under law to assist these veterans and ensure their claims are evaluated using methods that are both scientifically and legally sound.”

Startlingly, the Air Force has never included the weeks-long Palomares plutonium cleanup on its list of “radiation risk activities” which it uses to rule on disability claims, in spite of its own 1967 finding that service members’ “health is in no jeopardy from retention of radioactive materials as a result of participation in the [Palomares] operation.” Asked how the Air Force can keep such an admittedly radiation-heavy cleanup operation off the list, the law clinic’s Molly Petchnik told me the list was drawn up long ago and the military is reluctant to expand it.

The official list in the Code of Federal Regulations recognizes only four service-related radiation risk areas since 1966, including work at nuclear weapon production sites in Paducah, Kent.; Portsmouth, Ohio; and Oak Ridge, Tenn. in 1991; and on Amchitka Island, Alaska in 1974, involving underground hydrogen bomb tests.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Radiation Exposure, Radioactive Waste

March 29, 2021 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Early Opposition to the Atomic Bomb Came from Black America

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2021
By Dan Park

Editor’s note: On August 17, 1945, only days after the US atomic bombings, David Lawrence, the conservative columnist and editor of US News, put it this way: “Last week we destroyed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities with the new atomic bomb. …We shall not soon purge ourselves of the feeling of guilt. …We…did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children. … Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done. If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who experienced the firebombing of Dresden first hand and described it in Slaughterhouse Five, said, “I know a single word that proves our democratic government is capable of committing obscene, gleefully rabid, racist, yahoo-istic murder of unarmed men, women, and children, murders wholly devoid of military common sense. The word is a foreign word. The word is Nagasaki.”

While the Japanese faced widespread, extreme racism during World War II, Black leftists were among the first critics of the US atomic bombings of Japan.

Three days after the initial attack, the United States dropped a plutonium bomb on the port city of Nagasaki, killing at least 40,000 and as many as 70,000 people, or more. Within months, almost a quarter million would be dead from just the two attacks — with the victims being overwhelmingly civilians. Much has been written about the morality and military expediency of using the bomb, but missing from many of these discussions is a critical examination of the extreme racist hatred that rapidly developed in the United States against people of Japanese descent, and how that led to the annihilation of two cities.

Also missing is the recognition that African-Americans were some of the first in the country to voice concern about or even condemn the bomb, and that Black leftists were some of the first to draw the connections between colonialism, racism, capitalism and war. 

The general American hatred for the Japanese during World War II cannot be overstated. Thanks to the tireless activism of younger Japanese-Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans now know about the inhumane internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII — fewer know that Nazi POWs held in American camps were often treated with musical, theatrical, and movie showings on most nights, set up volleyball leagues with their guards, were invited to dances and other social events, and were able to visit shops and restaurants in town that Black American G.I.s could not. Some historians have pointed out that most Americans at the time could differentiate between Nazis and Germans, fascists and Italians — but with Japan, all Japanese people were not only suspect, but by their very nature, the enemy. Everything was done to dehumanize Japanese people, from seemingly all major forces of society:

• From a January 1945 issue of Newsweek: “Never before has the nation fought a war in which our troops so hate the enemy and want to kill him.”

• From Time magazine around the same period: “The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing … indicates it.”

• From General Joseph Stilwell in a letter to his wife: “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.”

• From commander of the South Pacific Force, Admiral William Halsey: “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” 

• From a US Marine Corps slogan of the time: “Remember Pearl Harbor — keep’em dying.”

• From the popular press, public discourse, and military culture: “yellow monkeys,” “apes,” “gorillas,” “demons,” “savages,” “subhumans.”

Indeed, by the end of the war and even well past it, the general mood in the United States was one of vicious and unrestrained vengeance for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which claimed 2,403 American lives, 50 of whom were civilians.

Polls were conducted periodically after the end of the war regarding citizens’ attitudes toward this new weapon of mass destruction, the results of which are somewhat disturbing. Less than a week after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 85 percent of Americans approved of the attacks according to a Gallup poll. Indeed, historian Lawrence Wittner notes that through late 1945, in all the polls conducted on the issue, none saw more than 4.5 percent of respondents opposing the use of the atomic weapons.

Baritone, athlete, actor, and activist Paul Robeson speaks to the crowd in Trafalgar Square in London, June 28, 1959, demonstrating against nuclear weapons. Some 10,000 had marched from Hyde Park for the rally. Photo: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

In fact, when one Roper poll asked whether we should have: 1) not used the bombs at all, 2) dropped the first in an unpopulated area and the second on a city if they don’t surrender, 3) used the bombs as we did, 4) used many more bombs before they could surrender, or 5) don’t know, 22.7 percent of respondents answered with option four. Two months after defeating the enemy, almost a quarter of respondents prioritized killing as many Japanese people as possible. 

Meanwhile, a new generation of African-Americans had won positions in the sciences, in certain parts of the military, and in other previously inaccessible fields. After the Japanese surrender, Black newspapers and magazines of the time frequently made note of Black chemists, physicists and other scientists who had worked on the atomic bomb. Many Black moderates had believed that such contributions to the war effort — from normal Black soldiers fighting valorously, to Black scientists harnessing the power of the atom — would win greater freedoms and opportunities for Black people in America after the war.

But some of the earliest criticisms of the atomic bomb came from African-American communities. Of course Black America is not monolithic but contains a multiplicity of diverse opinions. Even so, concern about the bomb was noticeably higher in Black communities than in white ones. Indeed, the warnings and recommendations of the racially integrated National Committee on Atomic Information more closely followed Black concerns about atomic weapons than they did general white-dominant American concerns.

Conservative journalist George Schuyler wrote about the horrors of the “murder of men wholesale” and “being able to slaughter whole cities at a time.” …. Clergy members also began to speak up. Rev. J.E. Elliot of St. Luke Chapel said, “I have seen the course of discrimination throughout the war and the fact that Japan is of a darker race is no excuse for resorting to such an atrocity.” Rev. Louis F. Lomax of Taber Presbyterian Church, said “[The atomic bomb is a] diabolical weapon [and we have] more scientific knowledge than religion to control it.”

In 1946, the NAACP called for nuclear disarmament at its annual conference. Poet Langston Hughes, author Zora Neale Hurston, NAACP leader Walter White, and many others were early critics of atomic weapons. 

But it was really the Black leftists who saw the connections between racism, colonialism and war early on. For many of them, it started with the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia — the last holdout of African resistance to European colonialism. The invasion made it clear to Black leftists that colonialism was at its core a perpetual war of racial domination. The event radicalized many African-Americans. Singer and actor Paul Robeson noted that since the invasion, “The parallel between his [African Americans’] own interests and those of oppressed peoples abroad had been impressed upon him daily.” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about his fear that “If power can be held through atomic bombs, colonial peoples may never be free.”

In 1942, James Farmer along with A.J. Muste, George Houser, and others founded the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, which grew out of the pacifist movement, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Harlem Ashram. Marjorie Swann, co-founder of the Committee for Nonviolent Action, or CNVA, which started the Voluntown Peace Trust, was also a charter member. Bayard Rustin gave support as an “uncle” to CORE, a role he played for so many organizations.

Six years later, CORE joined two hundred other activists in Chicago to form a new movement of “revolutionary pacifism” which included campaigning against building nuclear weapons. From this conference emerged the Peacemakers — one of the very first groups outside of the scientific community to organize opposition to nuclear-arms proliferation. Among the founders were Wally Nelson, one of CORE’s first nonviolence trainers, as well as his partner Juanita Morrow Nelson. Both would become dear friends of CNVA/Voluntown Peace Trust. The Peacemakers and CNVA became influential groups that would train countless activists and organizers in the peace, justice and civil rights movements.

In 1946, Paul Robeson gave a scathing, brilliant speech about the connections between nuclear weapons, racism against the Japanese, and Black liberation. He said, “it is all part of one problem, this matter of discrimination, and it may be the foremost question facing us today in the atomic age.”

Robeson puts the crux of the problem not on the weapon itself, but on the ideologies and prejudices that compel its use. As a rising Black performer with much to lose, Robeson made these dangerous connections between racism, capitalism, colonialism, war, and ultimately, extinction.

“Our government is getting uranium from the Belgian Congo for atomic bombs. American companies are prospecting for oil in Ethiopia and for minerals in Liberia,” he said. “But, although the enemy has all the advantage and has a head start in the race, it is yet possible for us to catch up and win. It is possible to win if the majority of the American people can be brought to see and understand in the fullest sense the fact that the struggle in which we are engaged is not a matter of mere humanitarian sentiment, but of life and death. The only alternative to world freedom is world annihilation.” 

— Dan Park (he/they) is an educator and historian who does Communications and Outreach for the Voluntown Peace Trust, which produced this story in 2020.

Filed Under: Newsletter Archives, Nuclear Weapons, Quarterly Newsletter, Uncategorized

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