Home » Posts tagged 'nuclear weapons'

Tag Archives: nuclear weapons

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

July 5, 2024 Readings

July 5, 2024 Readings

Move Over, Disaster Capitalism–Make Room for Addiction Capitalism–Charles Hugh Smith

No Escape From Unchecked Government Spending and Deficits…Here’s The Proof–Crisis Investing

Doug Casey on Revisionist History and How the Good Guys Don’t Always Win

Houthi Attacks On Ships Soar Most This Year In June As Critical Maritime Chokepoint Ablaze In Conflict | ZeroHedge

Cat 4 Hurricane Beryl Heads Towards Texas, Threatening Major Oil Refineries | ZeroHedge

Craig Murray’s Campaign Against Empire – Read by Eunice Wong

Egypt Teeters On Brink Of Economic Ruin As Public Debt Mounts, Poverty Rate Soars | ZeroHedge

Green New Scam Is Dying – The Daily Reckoning

The Massive Harm of LNG Fracking, Tallied | The Tyee

The Status of U.S. Oil Production: 2024 Update Everything Shines By Dimming – resilience

The Systems Within–Earth4All

From Milk Runs to MAD to Madness | Mises Institute

Borneo’s Dayak adapt Indigenous forestry to modern peat management–MongaBay

Brace for Peak Impact | Do the Math

It’s Too Hot For Trains In Canada–Guy McPherson

This Civilization Is Deeply Unnatural–Caitlin Jonstone

The Media Don’t Get Degrowth–Degrowth Is The Answer

From Milk Runs to MAD to Madness | Mises Institute

The Awesome, Terrifying Power of the Press

Scientists And Farmers Restore Aztec-Era Floating Farms That House Axolotls–MongaBay

Rebuilding the flax / textile industry as a commons: Fantasy Fibre Mill

Reporters Blame “Right-Wing Media” for Their Failure to Disclose Biden’s Infirmity – JONATHAN TURLEY

Video: Hiroshima-Nagasaki Dress Rehearsal. The Dangers of Nuclear War. Michel Chossudovsky with James Corbett

Today, Michel Chossudovsky of GlobalResearch.ca joins us to discuss his recent article: “The Hiroshima Nagasaki ‘Dress Rehearsal’: Oppenheimer and the U.S. War Department’s Secret September 15, 1945 ‘Doomsday Blueprint’ to ‘Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map.’”

We talk about the original, genocidal plan of the US War Department for a genocidal nuclear slaughter of the Soviets, how that plan has continued to the present day, the existential threat of nuclear holocaust and the prospects for an anti-war movement that can actually stand up to the military-industrial complex.

For more details see:

The Hiroshima Nagasaki “Dress Rehearsal”: Oppenheimer and the U.S. War Department’s Secret September 15, 1945 “Doomsday Blueprint” to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 28, 2024

Featured image is a screenshot from the video


WWIII ScenarioTowards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102

PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Nuclear Weapons Are the Biggest Single Danger for Humanity and All Forms of Life

Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 : Father Kleinsorge, a German missionary, heard pathetic voices of people asking for water. When he managed to reach the place from where the voice had come, he saw nearly 20 persons, all of them in similar condition – their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their checks.

Temperature at the hypocentre of the explosion reaching the double of what it takes to melt iron, the face of a schoolgirl sitting almost a kilometre away from this hypocentre being burnt beyond recognition, skin sloughing off scalded bodies, badly injured starving people unable to swallow anything because of the stench of dead bodies – this was the devastation caused by a 12.5 Kiloton bomb in Hiroshima which killed and wounded as many people as a mass raid of 279 aircrafts, laden to capacity with bombs, striking at a city ten times as populous.

Nearly one hundred thousand people were killed within a few minutes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after being hit by nuclear weapons in 1945, but if we count the longer-term deaths, those caused by internal bleeding, leukaemia, various other forms of cancer, then the death toll is likely to be as high as 3,50,000. In addition the next generation continued to pay for this cruelty in the form of children born with mental retardation, physical deformities and other serious health problems.

So cruel was the devastation that all of us must necessarily ask – we certainly do not want Hiroshima to happen to our friends, but do we want it to happen even to our worst enemies?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The US Empire Is Accelerating Toward Global Conflict On Two Fronts

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Missiles on the Doorstep and Impending Nuclear Winter

Nobody in their right mind would advocate what is called ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons.

‘Nuclear winter’ is defined in Britannica as “the environmental devastation that certain scientists contend would probably result from the hundreds of nuclear explosions in a nuclear war.” One immediately direct effect of such a conflict would be to block out the sun’s rays, which would lead to “a massive death toll from starvation, exposure, and disease. A nuclear war could thus reduce the Earth’s human population to a fraction of its previous numbers.” There have been innumerable portrayals of what would happen in a nuclear-devastated world of which the most evocative are the film Threads, made in 1984, depicting the ghastly aftermath in the United Kingdom, and the U.S. ABC television movie The Day After, of the previous year, which was even more horrifying, even though there was a lot of censorship before it was permitted to be shown.

It is only too apparent that a nuclear war would be catastrophic — and also that a nuclear exchange would be encouraged, indeed initiated, by the country that first fired or otherwise despatched one of these systems. No nuclear-armed country could accept nuclear devastation in its own lands without retaliating in force. The conclusion is that nobody in their right mind would advocate what is called ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons.

So step forward U.S. legislator, Senator Roger Wicker, who was reported as declaring that if there were conflict between Russia and Ukraine then the U.S. would have to be involved to the extent that this “could mean American troops on the ground.” And taking a massive leap backwards for mankind the senator declared on Fox News on December 8 that in the event of engagement against Russia “we don’t rule out first use nuclear action.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Will America’s New Nuke Deter War, Or Bring It On?

Will America’s New Nuke Deter War, Or Bring It On?

In a bit of irony, a Twitter comment by Jill Hruby Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) pointed to a new nuclear bomb as proof America is committed to nuclear deterrence. This is where it is important to remember that deterrence means, the action of discouraging an action or event through instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. See her Twitter post below;

@NNSAHruby
Last week, #NNSA successfully completed the B61-12 First Production Unit @PantexPlant. This is a huge milestone for stockpile modernization and demonstrates our Nation’s commitment to #nuclear deterrence.
 
The B61-12 Is Light And Accurate

It could be argued that reworking a nuclear bomb to make it easier to justify using it and widening out the opportunities for its use is nothing to brag about. This all falls under the category of, “once it’s out of the bottle it will be hard to put back in”

An article in The National Interest on October 9th, 2018 by Zachary Keck indicates this bomb may be the most dangerous nuclear weapon in America’s arsenal. The combination of accuracy and low-yield make the B61-12 the most usable nuclear bomb in America’s arsenal. It also makes using nuclear weapons thinkable for the first time since the 1940s.
 
To be clear, the reason it is such a monster is not because of its power. The bomb has a maximum yield of just 50-kilotons, the equivalent of 50,000 tons of TNT. By contrast, the B83 nuclear bomb has a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons which is 24 times greater. The B61-12 may only be able to carry low-yield nukes but is guided by an advanced Boeing tail kit.
Can Anyone Win A Nuclear War?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

US Experts to Trudeau: Your Nuclear Dream May Turn Nightmare

US Experts to Trudeau: Your Nuclear Dream May Turn Nightmare

Rethink backing the Moltex reactor, urge nine non-proliferation heavyweights.

A blue-ribbon group of American nuclear non-proliferation experts warns that Canada’s investment in new nuclear technology could lead to the spread of nuclear weapons and new threats to the environment.

“We write as U.S. non-proliferation experts and former government officials and advisors with related responsibilities to express our concern about your government’s financial support of Moltex — a startup company that proposes to reprocess CANDU spent fuel to recover its contained plutonium for use in molten-salt-cooled reactors.”

The warning came in the form of an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that was delivered on Tuesday and signed by the nine experts.

The group is spearheaded by Frank von Hippel, professor and senior research physicist at Princeton University; it includes Matthew Bunn, the Schlesinger professor of the practise of energy, national security, and foreign policy at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Thomas Countryman, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation.

“We understand your government’s motivation to support nuclear power and to reduce fossil fuel use but saving the world from climate disaster need not be in conflict with saving it from nuclear weapons. Also, like other reprocessing efforts, Moltex, even in the R&D stage, would create a costly legacy of contaminated facilities and radioactive waste streams, and require substantial additional government funding for cleanup and stabilization prior to disposal,” they wrote.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Spending More on Nukes: STRATCOM’s Nuclear Death Wish

Spending More on Nukes: STRATCOM’s Nuclear Death Wish

Photograph Source: Sgt Samuel Rogers (USAF/Barksdale Air Force Base) – CC BY 2.0

Being sufficiently able at your job is a good thing.  But beware the trappings of zeal.  When it comes to the business of retaining an inventory for humanity’s annihilation, the zealous should be kept away.  But there Admiral Charles Richard was in April this year, with his siren calls, urging the US Senate to consider a simple proposition.  “Sustainment of modernization of our modern nuclear forces … has transitioned from something we should do, to something we must do.”  As Commander of the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM), he was aching to impress the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the nuclear deterrent was there to be polished and improved.

Much of his address as part of the Posture Statement Review should be treated as the conventional lunacy that comes with that cretin-crusted field known as nuclear deterrence.  “Peace is our profession” remains the somewhat obscene motto of STRATCOM, and it is a peace kept by promising the potential extinction of the human species.

For the Admiral, strategic deterrence is the holy of holies.  If it fails, “we are prepared to deliver a decisive response, decisive in every possible way.”  This decisiveness will be achieved “with a modern resilient, equipped, and trained combatant-ready force.”  To avoid the failure of such deterrence also required revisiting “a critical forgotten lesson that deterrence operates continuously from peacetime, through the gray zone, worldwide, across all domains, and into conflict” [Richard’s emphasis].

The fate of the US (Richard humourlessly calls it safety and security) is indelibly linked to an “effective nuclear triad; a reliable and modern nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) architecture; and a responsive nuclear weapons infrastructure.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doomsday ex Machina: Daniel Ellsberg and the Nuclear Gang

Doomsday ex Machina: Daniel Ellsberg and the Nuclear Gang

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

You hide in your mansion
While the young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world

– Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” (1963)

October 15, 1969.

That’s the day the world might have ended, had Madman Richard Nixon had his druthers.

In his recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg paints a doom and boom picture of the future, unless we immediately engage in negotiations with other nuclear armed nations to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and begin the dismantling of the Doomsday Machine that is programmed to destroy as much life as possible on the planet once global nuclear war begins — a perilously close possibility under the current postures and protocols of nuclear-armed governments. (Even as late as last week, NATO rejected a UN call for the elimination of these omnicidal weapons.)

In the above example, Richard Nixon was inspired by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s strong arming tactics in securing an armistice in Korea. Citing Nixon Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, Ellsberg writes,

Nixon “saw a parallel in the action President Eisenhower had taken to end another war. When Eisenhower arrived in the White House, the Korean War was stalemated. Eisenhower ended the impasse in a hurry. He secretly got word to the Chinese that he would drop nuclear bombs on North Korea unless a truce was signed immediately. In a few weeks, the Chinese called for a truce and the Korean War ended.”

Like Ike, Nixon knew that there was no point in bluffing; your future credibility was on the line. Diminished credibility, if you’re a super power, could be a dangerous thing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hair-Trigger Nuclear Alert Over Kashmir

HAIR-TRIGGER NUCLEAR ALERT OVER KASHMIR

Two of the world’s most important powers, India and Pakistan, are locked into an extremely dangerous confrontation over the bitterly disputed Himalayan mountain state of Kashmir. Both are nuclear armed.

Kashmir has been a flashpoint since Imperial Britain divided India in 1947. India and Pakistan have fought numerous wars and conflicts over majority Muslim Kashmir. China controls a big chunk of northern Kashmir known as Aksai Chin. 

In 1949, the UN mandated a referendum to determine if Kashmiris wanted to join Pakistan or India. Not surprisingly, India refused to hold the vote. But there are some Kashmiris who want an independent state, though a majority seek to join Pakistan.

India claims that most of northern Pakistan is actually part of Kashmir, which it claims in full. India rules the largest part of Kashmir, formerly a princely state. Pakistan holds a smaller portion, known as Azad Kashmir. In my book on Kashmir, ‘War at the Top of the World,’ I called it ‘the globe’s most dangerous conflict.’ It remains so today.

I’ve been under fire twice on the Indo-Pak border in Kashmir, known as the ‘Line of Control,’ and once at 15,000 feet atop the Siachen Glacier on China’s border. India has over 500,000 soldiers and paramilitary police garrisoning its portion of Kashmir, whose 12 million people bitterly oppose often corrupt and brutal Indian rule – except for local minority Hindus and Sikhs who support it. A bloody, bitter uprising has flared on against Indian rule since 1989 in which some 42,000 people, mostly civilians, have died.

About 250,000 Pakistani troops are dug in on the other side of the ceasefire line.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UN Arms Chief Says Nuclear War is Closer Than Ever Since WW2

UN ARMS CHIEF SAYS NUCLEAR WAR IS CLOSER THAN EVER SINCE WW2

A United Nations arms official has declared nuclear war to be closer than it has ever been since World War II. The geopolitical climate is so divisive and disturbing right now, that globalists are actually telling us a nuclear war could be coming.

The head of the United Nations’ Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) Director Renata Dwan said in an interview that the use of nuclear weapons is more likely today than any time since the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in 1945, adding that the use of such weapons today carried a greater risk than ever, according to Reuters. 

“I think that it’s genuinely a call to recognize — and this has been somewhat missing in the media coverage of the issues — that the risks of nuclear war are particularly high now, and the risks of the use of nuclear weapons, for some of the factors I pointed out, are higher now than at any time since World War II,” she told the news service, speaking about a call from 122 nations to ban such weapons entirely. Dawn says that the UN should be doing more to ban nuclear weapons. “How we think about that, and how we act on that risk and the management of that risk, seems to me a pretty significant and urgent question that isn’t reflected fully in the (U.N.) Security Council,” she told Reuters according to The Hill.

Of course, a ban only works if countries are going to obey. Should nations defy a UN nuclear weapons ban, there is literally nothing the UN can do about it. There are far too many nukes out there for the UN’s words to matter.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth

Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth

“I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.”

These words of Manhattan Project physicist Emilio Segre, quoted by Richard Rhodes in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, refer to the Trinity blast on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M., the first atomic explosion in history and, so it appears, a turning point for all life on this planet.

The atmosphere didn’t catch fire at 5:30 that morning, but Segre’s words remain relevant, sort of like radioactive fallout. They encapsulate what may be history’s ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof.

Turns out the Trinity test set into motion something even more profound than the nuclear era. The bomb didn’t just “defeat” Japan and define the Cold War, with its suicidal nuclear arms race. It is also, at least symbolically, marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene: an era of profound climate and “Earth system” destabilization caused by human activity and therefore, like it or not, establishing humans as co-equal participants in activity of the natural world.

There’s more to this “co-equal” status than nuclear weapons, of course. They may be the tip of our arrogance, but we’ve been exploiting and rearranging the planet for nearly 12,000 years, since the beginning of the era we are now leaving, the Holocene, an era of climate stability in which human civilization and all written history emerged.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Many Minutes to Midnight?

How Many Minutes to Midnight?

Consider it a marriage made in hell. Start with the groom, Donald Trump, the man who once wondered why in the world we make nuclear weapons if we can’t use them; who wouldn’t rule out using nukes, even in Europe; who insisted that a president should be “unpredictable” on the subject; who suggested that it might not be “a bad thing for us” if Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea all became nuclear powers; who threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” before he became a chummy correspondent with its dictator; and who called for a nearly 10-fold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal (among many other, often contradictory, comments he’s made on nuclear matters).

Now, think about the bride, National Security Advisor John Bolton, a “statesman” who never saw a nuclear agreement he didn’t want to nuke. Those included President Richard Nixon’s Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, President Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework with North Korea, President Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal (all of which he helped to deep-six), and most recently President Ronald Reagan’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, Treaty (a pact that had actually resulted in thousands of ready-to-use nuclear weapons being scrapped). With the help of his neocon bro, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Bolton recently succeeded in sticking a knife directly in the back of that treaty. He’s undoubtedly now eying the New START treaty, which put limits on long-range nukes and is up for renewal in 2021. (The president has already called it “one of several bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.”)

As TomDispatch regular and former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll points out today, the first new member of Trump’s and Bolton’s nuclear family, a “low-yield” nuke, was only recently born and given the less-than-apocalyptic name, W76-2.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How A U.S. Nuclear Strike Works

How A U.S. Nuclear Strike Works

If President Trump decided to launch a nuclear strike, how swiftly could he put things in motion? Would he have the sole power alone to launch a nuclear missiles?

Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that, according to an analysis undertaken by Bloomberg, the U.S. president’s power is absolute in this situation – he or she gives the order and the Pentagon is obliged to go along with it. 

The following infographic provides an overview of the steps necessary to make it happen.

Infographic: How A U.S. Nuclear Strike Works  | Statista

You will find more infographics at Statista

It can take as little as five minutes from the president’s decision to strike to intercontinental missiles launching from their silos.

When it comes to submarine-launched weapons, however, it takes a little bit longer – approximately 15 minutes.

Dismantling the Doomsday Machines

Dismantling the Doomsday Machines

“From a technical point of view, he (Stanley Kubrick) anticipated many things. … Since that time, little has changed, honestly. The only difference is that modern weapons systems have become more sophisticated, more complex. But this idea of a retaliatory strike and the inability to manage these systems, yes, all of these things are relevant today. It (controlling the systems) will become even more difficult and more dangerous.” (Emphasis, jw)

Vladimir Putin commenting on the film, Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, in an interview with Oliver Stone, May 11, 2016. Putin had not seen the movie and did not know of it before Stone showed it to him.

The Doomsday Machinethe title of Daniel Ellsberg’s superb book is not simply an imaginary contraption from a movie masterpiece. A Doomsday Machine uncannily like the one described in Dr. Strangeloveexists right now. In fact, there are two such machines, one in US hands and one in Russia’s. The US seeks to hide its version, but Ellsberg has revealed that it has existed since the 1950s. Russia has quietly admitted that it has one, named it formally, “Perimetr,” and also tagged it with a frighteningly apt nickname “Dead Hand.” Because the US and Russia are the only nations with Doomsday Machines to date we shall restrict this discussion to them. 

The Doomsday Machine was published just a little more than a year ago, but its terrifying message has failed to provoke action. And Daniel Ellsberg is a man who knows whereof he speaks; the subtitle of the book is “Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” which is how Ellsberg spent the early part of his career. What follows on this first anniversary of the book’s publication is a brief restatement of the main argument of the book and then a summary of Ellsberg’s plan of action.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress