For
the 35th year, the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee will remember the
atomic bombings of Japan on August 6 & 9, 1945, which killed more than
200,000 people. It has been 74 years since these awful events occurred.
Other organizations involved in the commemorations will be Homewood Friends
Meeting, Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, Prevent Nuclear
War/Maryland and the Baltimore Nonviolence Center.
HIROSHIMA
COMMEMORATION on Tuesday, August 6, 2019
5 PM Commemorate the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima by demonstrating at 34th & N. Charles Streets against
Johns Hopkins University’s weapons contracts, including research on killer
drones. Note that the Air Force
Nuclear Weapons Center has a strategic partnership with JHU’s Applied Physics
Laboratory.
6:30 PM At Homewood Friends
Meetinghouse, 3107 N. Charles St., Baltimore 21218, get an update on the Back From the Brink movement and how to be
involved with Prevent Nuclear War/Maryland. Ms. Michiko Kodama, a Hibakusha who
was 7 years old when she experienced the Hiroshima bombing will do a
presentation by. As the Assistant Secretary General of the Japan Confederation
of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations (Nihon Hidankyo), she will appeal for
the abolition of nuclear weapons.
8 PM Depart for a community
dinner at 18-8 Sushi, 727 W. 40th St., Suite 138,
Baltimore 21211.
Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
How About Raising
the Issue of How to Avert Nuclear War?
Lawrence
Wittner
July
28, 2019
History
News Network
You mass media
folks lead busy lives, I’m sure. But you must have heard something
about nuclear weapons―those supremely destructive devices that, along with
climate change, threaten the continued existence of the human race.
Yes, thanks to
popular protest and carefully-crafted arms control and disarmament agreements,
there has been some progress in limiting the number of these weapons and
averting a nuclear holocaust. Even so, that progress has been
rapidly unraveling in recent months, leading to a new nuclear arms race and
revived talk of nuclear war.
Do I
exaggerate? Consider the following.
In May 2018, the
Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the
laboriously-constructed Iran nuclear agreement that had closed off
the possibility of that nation developing nuclear weapons. This U.S.
treaty pullout was followed by the imposition of heavy U.S. economic sanctions
on Iran, as well as by thinly-veiled threats by Trump to use nuclear weapons to
destroy that country. Irate at these moves, the Iranian government
recently retaliated by exceeding the limits set by the shattered
agreement on its uranium stockpile and uranium enrichment.
At the beginning
of February 2019, the Trump administration announced that, in August,
the U.S. government will withdraw from the Reagan era Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty―the historic agreement that had banned U.S. and Russian
ground-launched cruise missiles―and would proceed to develop such
weapons. On the following day, Russian President Vladimir Putin
declared that, in response, his government was suspending its observance of the
treaty and would build the kinds of nuclear missiles that the INF treaty had
outlawed.
The next nuclear
disarmament agreement on the chopping block appears to be the 2010 New
START Treaty, which reduces U.S. and Russian deployed strategic nuclear
warheads to 1,550 each, limits U.S. and Russian nuclear delivery vehicles, and
provides for extensive inspection. According to John Bolton, Trump’s
national security advisor, this fundamentally flawed treaty, scheduled to
expire in February 2021, is “unlikely” to be extended. To preserve
such an agreement, he argued, would amount to “malpractice.” If the
treaty is allowed to expire, it would be the first time since 1972 that there
would be no nuclear arms control agreement between Russia and the United
States.
One other key
international agreement, which President Clinton signed―but, thanks to
Republican opposition, the U.S. Senate has never ratified―is
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Adopted with
great fanfare in 1996 and backed by nearly all the world’s nations, the CTBT
bans nuclear weapons testing, a practice which has long served as a
prerequisite for developing or upgrading nuclear
arsenals. Today, Bolton is reportedly pressing for the
treaty to be removed from Senate consideration and “unsigned,” as a possible
prelude to U.S. resumption of nuclear testing.
Nor, dear
moderators, does it seem likely that any new agreements will replace the old
ones. The U.S. State Department’s Office of Strategic Stability and Deterrence
Affairs, which handles U.S. arms control ventures, has been whittled
down during the Trump years from 14 staff members to four. As a
result, a former staffer reported, the State Department is no longer “equipped”
to pursue arms control negotiations. Coincidentally, the U.S. and
Russian governments, which possess approximately 93 percent of the
world’s nearly 14,000 nuclear warheads, have abandoned
negotiations over controlling or eliminating them for the first time since
the 1950s.
Instead of honoring
the commitment, under Article VI of the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation
Treaty, to pursue negotiations for “cessation of the nuclear arms race” and for
“nuclear disarmament,” all nine nuclear powers are today modernizing
their nuclear weapons production facilities and adding new, improved types of
nuclear weapons to their arsenals. Over the next 30 years, this
nuclear buildup will cost the United States alone an
estimated $1,700,000,000,000―at least if it is not obliterated first in a
nuclear holocaust.
Will the United
States and other nations survive these escalating preparations for nuclear
war? That question might seem overwrought, dear moderators, but, in fact,
the U.S. government and others are increasing the role that nuclear
weapons play in their “national security” policies. Trump’s
glib threats of nuclear war against North Korea and Iran are
paralleled by new administration plans to develop a low-yield ballistic
missile, which arms control advocates fear will lower the threshold for nuclear
war.
Confirming the new
interest in nuclear warfare, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, in June 2019,
posted a planning document on the Pentagon’s website with a more upbeat
appraisal of nuclear war-fighting than seen for many
years. Declaring that “using nuclear weapons could create conditions
for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability,” the document
approvingly quoted Herman Kahn, the Cold War nuclear theorist who had argued
for “winnable” nuclear wars and had provided an inspiration for Stanley
Kubrick’s satirical film, Dr. Strangelove.
Of course, most
Americans are not pining for this kind of approach to nuclear
weapons. Indeed, a May 2019 opinion poll by the Center for
International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland found that
two-thirds of U.S. respondents favored remaining within the INF Treaty, 80
percent wanted to extend the New START Treaty, about 60 percent supported
“phasing out” U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles, and 75 percent backed
legislation requiring congressional approval before the president could order a
nuclear attack.
Therefore, when it
comes to presidential debates, dear moderators, don’t you―as stand-ins for the
American people―think it might be worthwhile to ask the candidates some
questions about U.S. preparations for nuclear war and how best to avert a
global catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude?
I think these
issues are important. Don’t you?
Dr. Lawrence
Wittner (https://www.lawrenceswittner.com/)
is Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author
of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).
'Non-Violence' sculpture by Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Reutersward, United Nations Headquarters in New York City, New York, USA
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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