Friday, July 27, 2012

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND WAR NEWSLETTER #13

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND GENOCIDE NEWSLETTER # 13, July 27, 2012. OMNI Building a Culture of PEACE, Compiled by Dick Bennett. (See #1, June 14, 2007; #2, January 8, 2008; #3 May 16, 2008; #4 June 10; 2009, #5 July 23, 2009, ; #6 Sept. 21, 2009; #7 August 29, 2010; #8 April 11, 2011; #9 August 4, 2011; #10 Feb. 27, 2012; #11 April 4, 2012; #12 June 27, 2012.) Imagine a world free of nuclear weapons, be committed to that goal.



US NATIONAL SECURITY STATE: CORPORATE-PENTAGON-CONGRESS-PRESIDENT-SECRECY-SURVEILLANCE-NUCLEAR Complex


See: Nuclear Abolition Day June 2. International Day against Nuclear Tests (29 August). OMNI NUCLEAR FREE AND INDEPENDENT PACIFIC DAY AND MARSHALL ISLANDS NUCLEAR VICTIMS DAY, MARCH 1. NEWSLETTER #1. March 1, 2012. Expressions of OMNI’s NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL DAYS PROJECT.







Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:

http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/ The dozens of newsletters provide OMNI and the peace and justice movement with subject-focused information and criticism. Editors are wanted for these Newsletter who can devote adequate attention to the subjects.





Contents of Nos. 9-11 at end.



Contents of #12

The SANE Act

Schell, Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Uranium Double Standards

Wittner, Deterrence?

Falk and Krieger Dialogue



Contents of #13

Contact President: Take Nukes Off Alert

FCNL Washington Newsletter

The Nuclear Resister

Hartung, MAD Still

ICAN



[CLW] 13 Minutes to Doomsday? Tell the President to Reduce the Threat of Nuclear War

John Isaacs, Council for a Livable World advocacy@clw.org via uark.edu

July 27, 2012

Dear Dick,

Our good friends at Peace Action, our allies on so many issues, urge you to take action on taking our nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert. Peace Action has long been involved in trying to stop the nuclear arms race, having been originally formed to oppose nuclear weapons explosive testing.

Please consider their message.

John Isaacs & Guy Stevens



Dear Friend,

I don't find myself agreeing with the Washington Post's editorial board all that often. What used to be known as a liberal newspaper has become more and more conservative, especially on war and peace issues, over the years.

But, a recent lead editorial was a nice surprise over my morning coffee. 13 Minutes to doomsday outlines what should be a no-brainer, the case for the U.S. and Russia to take our nuclear weapons off hair-trigger, launch-ready alert.

Of course we at Peace Action want all nuclear weapons abolished worldwide, by 5:00 this afternoon if possible! But de-alerting is one of the single most effective steps we could take to reduce the danger of nuclear war.

Tell the president he needs to do it, right away! http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=11098



The title of the editorial, 13 Minutes to Doomsday, refers to the time a president would have to make a decision to launch our nuclear missiles in response to a report that the US is under nuclear attack. Not a lot of time to prevent doomsday.

Today, you can prevent doomsday before it's too late. To quote the Post, "the president will soon sign off on instructions to the military to implement the posture review," referring to the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which set overall current U.S. nuclear weapons policy.

Tell the President to take action to decrease the likelihood of an accidental or hasty decision to launch a nuclear attack. Over two decades after the end of the Cold War, this simple step of "de-alerting" nuclear weapons is long overdue.

Help me convince President Obama to take this simple step to make our country-- and the world-- safer.

Humbly for Peace,



Kevin Martin

Executive Director

Peace Action

PS : There is no sane reason for keeping nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert. Acting together as the President prepares his instructions to the military will impact this important decision. Get your friends involved by forwarding them this message.







FCNL Washington Newsletter

[This excellent Quaker newsletter no. is all about controlling nuclear weapons. D]

• Washington Newsletter



Nuclear Weapons: Congress at a Turning Point

May/June 2012

In the last 16 months, lawmakers have ratified the New START treaty to reduce the number of nuclear weapons, increased funding to prevent these weapons’ spread, and blocked the start of a $5 billion nuclear weapons facility. Yet lawmakers need to hear that constituents want more or this progress could be rolled back.

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July 8, 2012

Tomgram: William Hartung, Why No One Notices Our MAD Planet

I can still remember sneaking with two friends into the balcony of some Broadway movie palace to see the world end. The year was 1959, the film was On the Beach, and I was 15. It was the movie version of Neville Shute’s still eerie 1957 novel about an Australia awaiting its death sentence from radioactive fallout from World War III, which had already happened in the northern hemisphere. We three were jacked by the thrill of the illicit and then, to our undying surprise, bored by the quiet, grownup way the movie imagined human life winding down on this planet. (“We're all doomed, you know. The whole, silly, drunken, pathetic lot of us. Doomed by the air we're about to breathe.”)



It couldn’t hold a candle to giant, radioactive, mutant ants heading for L.A. (Them!), or planets exploding as alien civilizations nuclearized themselves (This Island Earth), or a monstrous prehistoric reptile tearing up Tokyo after being awakened from its sleep by atomic tests (Godzilla), or for that matter the sort of post-nuclear, post-apocalyptic survivalist novels that were common enough in that era.



It’s true that anything can be transformed into entertainment, even versions of our own demise -- and that there’s something strangely reassuring about then leaving a theater or turning the last page of a book and having life go on. Still, we teenagers didn’t doubt that something serious and dangerous was afoot in that Cold War era, not when we “ducked and covered” under our school desks while (test) sirens screamed outside and the CONELRAD announcer on the radio on the teacher’s desk offered chilling warnings.



Nor did we doubt it when we dreamed about the bomb, as I did reasonably regularly in those years, or when we wondered how our “victory weapon” in the Pacific in World War II might, in the hands of the Reds, obliterate us and the rest of what in those days we called the Free World (with the obligatory caps). We sensed that, for the first time since peasants climbed into their coffins at the millennium to await the last days, we were potentially already in our coffins in everyday life, that our world could actually vanish in a few moments in a paroxysm of superpower destruction.



Today, from climate change to pandemics, apocalyptic scenarios (real and imaginary) have only multiplied. But the original world-ender of our modern age, that wonder weapon manqué, as military expert, TomDispatch regular, and author of Prophets of War: Lockheed and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex Bill Hartung points out, is still unbelievably with us and still proliferating. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1568586973/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20&utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=8463b3e7f7-TD_Hartung7_8_2012&utm_medium=email Yes, logic -- and the evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- should tell us that nuclear weapons are too staggeringly destructive to be usable, but in crisis moments, logic has never been a particularly human trait. How strange, then, that a genuine apocalyptic possibility has dropped out of our dreams, as well as pop culture, and as Hartung makes clear, is barely visible in our world. Which is why, on a landscape remarkably barren of everything nuclear except the massive arsenals that dot the planet, TomDispatch considers it important to raise the possibility of returning the nuclear issue to the place it deserves in the human agenda. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Hartung discusses the upside-down world of global nuclear politics, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

Beyond Nuclear Denial

“How a World-Ending Weapon Disappeared From Our Lives, But Not Our World” By William D. Hartung http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/williamhartung?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=8463b3e7f7-TD_Hartung7_8_2012&utm_medium=email

There was a time when nuclear weapons were a significant part of our national conversation. Addressing the issue of potential atomic annihilation was once described by nuclear theorist Herman Kahn as “thinking about the unthinkable,” but that didn’t keep us from thinking, talking, fantasizing, worrying about it, or putting images of possible nuclear nightmares (often transmuted to invading aliens or outer space) endlessly on screen.

Now, on a planet still overstocked with city-busting, world-ending weaponry, in which almost 67 years have passed since a nuclear weapon was last used, the only nuke that Americans regularly hear about is one that doesn’t exist: Iran’s. The nearly 20,000 nuclear weapons on missiles, planes, and submarines possessed by Russia, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea are barely mentioned in what passes for press coverage of the nuclear issue.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.Visit our sister sites: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175565/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_why_no_one_notices_our_mad_planet/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=8463b3e7f7-TD_Hartung7_8_2012&utm_medium=email#more





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• The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is a global grassroots movement for the total elimination of nuclear weapons through a legally binding, verifiable Nuclear Weapons Convention.

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CONTENTS OF OMNI NUCLEAR WEAPONS NEWSLETTERS NOS. 9-11.

Contents of #9

Weapons Budgets Compared: Obama, Ryan, People

Book: Nuclear WWIII

Facts about Nuclear Weapons

Cost Study Project

Countdown to Zero Film

El Baradei’s The Age of Deception

Nonproliferation Funding

Health Effects of Nuclear Weapons Production and Testing



Contents of #10

Nuke Spending Increased

O’Hanlon’s Book on Disarmament

Weinstein, Nuclear Weapons Locations in US

Mitchell, Atomic Cover-up

Wittner, Scrapping Two Nuclear Plans

Banerjee, A Victory in New Mexico



Contents of #11

Norton, Bill to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

The Nuclear Resister

End Missile Tests at Vandenberg

International Campaign to Abolish

Pres. Obama’s Contradictions

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