{"id":31795,"date":"2018-03-02T06:51:56","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T11:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31795"},"modified":"2018-03-02T06:51:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-02T11:51:56","slug":"racing-towards-a-low-yield-armageddon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=31795","title":{"rendered":"Racing Towards a Low-Yield Armageddon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racing Towards a Low-Yield Armageddon<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Photo by James Stencilowsky | CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

On February 3\u00a0the Washington Post observed<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cthe United States can deliver a [nuclear] strike anywhere in the world in\u00a030 minutes<\/a>\u00a0with astounding accuracy\u201d and questioned the need for \u201ca new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons,\u201d quoting the commander of the strategic force, General John Hyten,\u00a0as saying<\/a>\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m very comfortable today with the flexibility of our response options.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0But it appears that no matter the quantity and world-destroying capability of the US nuclear arsenal, there is always room for more \u2014 and more devastating \u2014 weapons of mass annihilation.<\/p>\n

General James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, discussed Washington\u2019s recently composed\u00a0Nuclear Posture Review<\/a>\u00a0(NPR) with the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives on February 6.\u00a0\u00a0He was attempting to justify the upgrading and huge expansion of the US nuclear arsenal which the Congressional Budget Office\u00a0has estimated<\/a>\u00a0 will cost some 1.2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years, and described in detail some of the projects that have been planned. The entire exercise does not fit well with the international\u00a0Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)<\/a>\u00a0in which it is agreed by almost every country in the world that the nuclear arms race should be halted and that all possible measures should be taken towards achievement of nuclear disarmament.<\/p>\n

But Washington\u2019s notions of global nuclear disarmament are curiously ambivalent, as there is unconditional support for Israel\u2019s highly developed nuclear weapons\u2019 capabilities, yet obsessive criticism of North Korea\u2019s program to arm itself with nuclear missiles.\u00a0\u00a0Nobody can defend or approve of North Korea\u2019s wild nuclear fandangos which are beggaring an already downtrodden and poverty-stricken population on the verge of starvation, but Pyongyang\u2019s\u00a0rationale is<\/a>\u00a0that its policy \u201cis the best way to respond with powerful nuclear deterrent to the US imperialists who are violent toward the weak and subservient to the strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Racing Towards a Low-Yield Armageddon Photo by James Stencilowsky | CC BY 2.0 On February 3\u00a0the Washington Post observed\u00a0that \u201cthe United States can deliver a [nuclear] strike anywhere in the world in\u00a030 minutes\u00a0with astounding accuracy\u201d and questioned the need for \u201ca new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons,\u201d quoting the commander of the strategic force, General […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12435,5493,19027,525,2583,827,5228,11121],"class_list":["post-31795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-brian-cloughley","tag-counterpunch","tag-low-yield-nuclear-weapons","tag-military","tag-nuclear-weapons","tag-united-states","tag-washington-post","tag-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31796,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31795\/revisions\/31796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}