OMNI
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION NEWSLETTER #25, April 2, 2021.
STRUGGLE FOR THE TOTAL ELIMINATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
OF MASS DESTRUCTION
UN Treaty on the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace,
Justice, and Ecology
THE KEY QUESTION: Why Should Biden―or Anyone―Be Able to Launch
a Nuclear War?
ONE STEP, TWO STEP……
THE NUCLEAR WEAPON DEPENDS UPON THE MISSILE
Have you asked, what can I
do about nuclear weapons?
Well, most citizens, even most members of Congress know very little
about how nuclear weapons could blow up the world. The weapons are composed of two parts: the
bomb and the rocket to carry it to its target.
This message is about the missile, the ICBM, the Intercontinental
Ballistics Missile (ballistics, the science of projectiles; bm: a long-range
missile propelled to high speed).
We can change ignorance.
Knowledge is within our power.
The first step is to inform ourselves.
The second step is to inform our Senators and Representative.
The third step is to inform our friends.
And if you are not already a member, join OMNI, where you will find
people who are informed or at least do not turn away from realities.
One
STEP AT A TIME.
The method is a significant new report within the immediate reach of
your computer.
The Report is called “Inside
the ICBM Lobby.” Written by weapons expert William
Hartung, the report provides substantial details about the profit power the multibillion-dollar weapons contractors have over U.S. policies.
Read the Report and tell your Senators and Representative to read it.
Summary of William Hartung’s
“Inside the ICBM Lobby” report
>> William Hartung, Center for International Policy: “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special
Interests or the National Interest?”
Call your Senators and Representative directly. It’s easy:
Phone the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121. A
switchboard operator will connect you directly with Senator Bozeman, Senator
Cotton, or Representative Womack. Give
your name and address and say you are calling to request your representative to
be informed about nuclear weapons and to read Hartung’s report. Express as you wish. Repeat the calls this week, make your voice
heard!
The
report should be required reading on Capitol Hill.
Former
Pentagon Secretary William Perry knows that ICBMs are “some of the most
dangerous weapons in the world.”
Why are
those missiles so dangerous for all of humanity? Because [Hartung] “under
current policies the president would have only a matter of minutes to decide
whether to launch them in a crisis, increasing the risks of an accidental
nuclear war.”
But
“despite this reality proposals for reducing this risk have routinely been
blocked by a group of [profit power] Senators from states that host ICBM bases
or ICBM maintenance and development activities, often referred to as the ICBM
Coalition.” Thanks to RootsAction Educational Fund.
Of
course, there’s a larger necessary STEP we must aim for: the abolition of nuclear weapons altogether, if we are to be
protected from them. STEPS: The Treaty: End the Missiles: End the Bombs. NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION NEWSLETTER
#24, transition to
NUCLEAR
ABOLITION TREATY ON THE PROHIBITION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, OMNI NEWSLETTER
#1,JANUARY 22, 2021
https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2021/01/nuclear-abolition-treaty-on-prohibition.html
Compiled by
Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
WE
KNOW WHAT TO DO AND HOW, STEP BY STEP.
OUR NEXT STEP IS TO FIND ENOUGH PEOPLE TO MOVE OUR CIVIC LEADERS AND
POLITICIANS TO OBEY THE LAW. SEE YOU
APRIL 27, BUT DON’T WAIT UNTIL THEN TO TAKE ACTION. –Dick Bennett
President,
Kelly Mulhollan
Director,
Gladys Tiffany
Nuclear Weapons
Committee, Abel Tomlinson
Founder and
Research Director, Dick Bennett
RECENT HISTORY OF STRUGGLE TO ABOLISH WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION,
(Question to Arkies: How well have our
newspapers and tv news stations informed us?)
HERE’S AN IMPORTANT SOURCE OF WEEKLY INFORMATION from the Quaker FCNL
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Calendar | Nuclear Issues | Subscribe | Submit Calendar Items EXAMPLE Sponsor: Royal
United Services Institute. Speakers: Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian,
Princeton University; Keyhan Barzegar, Islamic Azad University. EVENT INFORMATION ETC. |
THE PEOPLE: LIBERATE OUR POLITICIANS
The conclusion of a 1981 speech by Prof. Johan Galtung, “Ten Proposals for Concrete Peace Politics,” – TRANSCEND Media Service. Speech given at the reception for the Peace
March 6 Aug 1981, UNESCO, Paris; and for the Perugia-Assisi Peace March 24-27
Sep 1981 https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/10/after-nuclear-disarmament-what/
“So, let us liberate our politicians from their thought prisons,
they are prisoners of their own much-too-simple logic. The situation is
dangerous, difficult, but not yet hopeless. What has been mentioned above is
completely possible – and so are many other peace policies. There are so many
things that could be done; and, I think, more realistic than what we read from
our politicians every day. Time to start doing them is now. If the politicians
do not want or are unable to do so from the top level of the countries and the
alliances, then others have to show the way. “
THE UNITED NATIONS--THE COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD—HAVE SHOWN THE
WAY IN THE JANUARY 22 TREATY TO BAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS. Forward to banning the weapons possessed by the nuclear nations.
THE BIRTH OF GLOBAL ZERO 2008
Michael E.
O’Hanlon Brookings Instit., May
4, 2010 Can mankind uninvent the nuclear bomb, and rid
the world of the greatest military threat to the human species and the
survival of the planet ever created?
Logic
might seem to say of course not. But the president of the United States and a
number of key foreign-policy dignitaries are now on record saying yes. They
acknowledge that a nuclear-weapons-free world remains a vision, not immediately
attainable and perhaps not achievable within the lifetimes of most contemporary
policy makers. But they believe that the vision needs to be shared, in a
vibrant, powerful way.
A
movement known as Global Zero has gained in strength to attempt just that.
It was established in the wake of a January 2007 newspaper column by George
Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn advocating a nuclear-free
world. A group of 100 signatories (not
including the above four) established Global Zero in Paris in December 2008. The
organization’s goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons by 2030 through a
multilateral, universal, verifiable process, with negotiations on the Global
Zero treaty beginning by 2019. MORE https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/is-a-world-without-nuclear-weapons-really-possible/
TREATY
BECAME INTERNATIONAL LAW, JANUARY 22, 2021: US NOW IN VIOLATION NOT ONLY OF
WORLD OPINION BUT OF WORLD LAW.
WHAT CAN
WE DO? Read and recommend books that get under the skin and
lead to sustained action.
Two Books
Francis Boyle, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, 2002
Elaine Scarry, Thermonuclear
Monarchy, 2014
Francis Boyle. The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence: Could
the US War on Terrorism Go Nuclear? [Boyle is one of our greatest advocates for a just
society. –Dick]
http://www.claritypress.com/files/BoyleI.html
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AN EMINENT ANALYSIS, BUT
HAVE OUR POLITICIANS READ IT OR EVEN A BRIEF REVIEW? Go for it.
Thermonuclear
Monarchy: CHOOSING
BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND DOOM
by Elaine Scarry.
Harvard UP, 2014.
From one of our leading social thinkers, a compelling case for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
During his impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted,
"I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five
minutes seventy million people will be dead." Nixon was accurately
describing not only his own power but also the power of every American
president in the nuclear age.
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each
contemplated using nuclear weapons—Eisenhower twice, Kennedy three times,
Johnson once, Nixon four times. Whether later presidents, from Ford to Obama,
considered using them we will learn only once their national security papers
are released.
In this incisive, masterfully argued new book, award-winning
social theorist Elaine Scarry demonstrates that the power of one leader to
obliterate millions of people with a nuclear weapon—a possibility that remains
very real even in the wake of the Cold War—deeply violates our constitutional
rights, undermines the social contract, and is fundamentally at odds with the
deliberative principles of democracy.
According to the Constitution, the decision to go to war
requires rigorous testing by both Congress and the citizenry; when a leader can
single-handedly decide to deploy a nuclear weapon, we live in a state of
“thermonuclear monarchy,” not democracy.
The
danger of nuclear weapons comes from potential accidents or acquisition by
terrorists, hackers, or rogue countries. But the gravest danger comes from the
mistaken idea that there exists some case compatible with legitimate
governance. There can be no such case. Thermonuclear Monarchy shows
the deformation of governance that occurs when a country gains nuclear weapons.
In bold
and lucid prose, Thermonuclear Monarchy identifies
the tools that will enable us to eliminate nuclear weapons and bring the decision
for war back into the hands of Congress and the people. Only by doing so can we
secure the safety of home populations, foreign populations, and the earth
itself.
ENDORSEMENTS &
REVIEWS
“Eloquent.”
— Richard Rhodes, The New York Times
“The
premise of this book is as relevant as it is horrifying, that the power to
inflict great harm doesn’t belong to those that it supposedly protects. I
congratulate Elaine Scarry on her intellectual courage and moral clarity and in
proposing the only possible way out.” — Marcelo Gleiser, author of A Tear at the Edge of Creation
“A really
remarkable work, ranging across ethics, law and politics to pose genuinely
radical challenges to the confused and potentially lethal systems that pass for
democracy in our world. A painfully timely intervention.” — Rowan Williams,
Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and former Archbishop of Canterbury
“Elaine
Scarry offers a coruscating critique of current policies, arguing that they are
antithetic to the spirit of the U.S. constitution, and indeed to basic
democratic principles. This eloquent and scholarly book offers a compelling
case for swifter progress toward their elimination.” — Martin Rees, astronomer
royal of England
“Even
someone unpersuaded by Elaine Scarry’s constitutional analysis cannot avoid
being gripped by her stark depiction of how utterly incompatible our
eighteenth-century constitutional structure and the social contract it embodies
are with our twenty-first-century weapons of mass destruction, weapons that can
annihilate tens of millions of human souls in the blink of an eye and at the
whim of a single individual, consulting with no one. A sober and haunting
meditation on this tension between our institutions and our capacities,
Scarry’s book requires any thoughtful reader to revisit the basic postulates
and the deepest human purposes of our system of government.” — Laurence H.
Tribe, professor of constitutional law, Harvard Law School
“A few
years ago General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, condemned
the ‘faith in nuclear weapons’ to which his life had been wrongly dedicated and
the ‘breathtaking audacity’ in maintaining them when ‘we should stand trembling
in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most
deadly manifestations.’ In this fascinating study, Elaine Scarry adds rich
historical, philosophical, literary, and legal depth to Butler’s grim warnings,
with novel and provocative insights. That we have escaped disaster so far is a
near miracle. Scarry’s remarkable contribution should inspire us to abolish
this colossal folly.” — Noam Chomsky
“[U]rgent
and lucid … [a] prolonged rallying cry of a book.” — Kenneth Baker, San
Francisco Chronicle
“Elaine
Scarry is right: Americans live in a thermonuclear monarchy.” — Kennette
Benedict, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
“Scarry’s
assault on the reigning complacency about nuclear weapons rests on her belief
in the capacity of an interpretation to reconfigure the world.” — Nathan
Schneider, Chronicle of Higher Education
“Thermonuclear Monarchy is a work of deadly serious
political science by an analyst dwelling on the constitutional implications of
giving a democratically elected president sovereign-like autocracy.” — Nick
Smith, Engineering & Technology (U.K.)
“Scarry’s
book requires any thoughtful reader to revisit the basic postulates and the
deepest human purposes of our system of government.” — Laurence H. Tribe,
Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School
AN
INFLUENTIAL PEACEMAKER SCHOLAR
Lawrence Wittner, PeaceVoice – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 March 2017.
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/03/why-should-trump%E2%80%95or-anyone%E2%80%95be-able-to-launch-a-nuclear-war/
The accession of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency brings us
face-to-face with a question that many have tried to avoid since 1945:
Should anyone have the right to plunge the world into a nuclear holocaust?
Trump, of course, is an unusually angry, vindictive, and
mentally unstable American president. Therefore, given the fact that,
acting totally on his own, he can launch a nuclear war, we have entered a very
perilous time. The U.S. government possesses approximately 6,800 nuclear weapons,
many of them on hair-trigger alert. Moreover, the United States is but
one of nine nations that, in total, possess nearly 15,000 nuclear weapons.
This nuclear weapons cornucopia is more than enough to destroy virtually all
life on earth. Furthermore, even a small-scale nuclear war would produce
a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Not surprisingly, then,
Trump’s loose statements about building and using nuclear weapons have horrified
observers.
In an apparent attempt to rein in America’s new, erratic White
House occupant, Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA)
recently introduced federal legislation to require Congress to declare war
before a U.S. president could authorize nuclear weapons strikes. The only
exception would be in response to a nuclear attack. Peace groups are
rallying around this legislation and, in a major editorial, the New
York Times endorsed
it, noting that it “sends a clear message to Mr. Trump that he should not be
the first since World War II to use nuclear weapons.”
But, even in the unlikely event that the Markey-Lieu legislation
is passed by the Republican Congress, it does not address the broader
problem: the ability of the officials of nuclear-armed nations to launch
a catastrophic nuclear war. How rational are Russia’s Vladimir Putin, or
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, or Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, or the leaders of
other nuclear powers? And how rational will the rising politicians of
nuclear armed nations (including a crop of rightwing, nationalist ideologues,
such as France’s Marine Le Pen) prove to be? “Nuclear deterrence,” as
national security experts have known for decades, might serve to inhibit the
aggressive impulses of top government officials in some cases, but surely not
in all of them.
Ultimately, then, the only long-term solution to the problem of
national leaders launching a nuclear war is to get rid of the weapons.
This was the justification for the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968, which constituted a
bargain between two groups of nations. Under its provisions, non-nuclear
countries agreed not to develop nuclear weapons, while nuclear-armed countries
agreed to dispose of theirs.
Although the NPT did discourage proliferation to most
non-nuclear countries and did lead the major nuclear powers to destroy a
substantial portion of their nuclear arsenals, the allure of nuclear weapons
remained, at least for some power-hungry nations. Israel, India,
Pakistan, and North Korea developed nuclear arsenals, while the United States,
Russia, and other nuclear nations gradually backed away from disarmament.
Indeed, all nine nuclear powers are now engaged in a new nuclear arms race,
with the U.S. government alone beginning a $1 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.
These factors, including Trump’s promises of a major nuclear weapons buildup,
recently led the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of their famous
“Doomsday Clock” forward to 2-1/2 minutes to midnight, the most
dangerous setting since 1953.
Angered by the collapse of progress toward a nuclear
weapons-free world, civil society organizations and non-nuclear nations joined
together to press for the adoption of an international treaty banning nuclear weapons,
much like the treaties already in place that ban chemical weapons, landmines,
and cluster bombs. If such a nuclear ban treaty were adopted, they
argued, it would not itself eliminate nuclear weapons, for the nuclear powers
could refuse to sign or comply with it. But it would make possession of
nuclear weapons illegal under international law and, therefore, like the
chemical and other weapons ban treaties, put pressure on nations to fall into
line with the rest of the world community.
This campaign came to a head in October 2016, when the member
states of the United Nations voted on a proposal to begin negotiations for a
treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Although the U.S. government and the
governments of other nuclear powers lobbied heavily against the measure, it was adopted by an overwhelming vote:
123 countries in favor, 38 opposed, and 16 abstaining. Treaty
negotiations are slated to begin in March 2017 at the United Nations and to be
concluded in early July.
Given the past performance of the nuclear powers and their
eagerness to cling to their nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely that they will
participate in the UN negotiations or, if a treaty is negotiated and signed,
will be among the signatories. Even so, the people of their nations and
of all nations would gain immensely from an international ban on nuclear
weapons, a measure that, once in place, would begin the process of stripping
national officials of their unwarranted authority and ability to launch a
catastrophic nuclear war.
[JANUARY 22, 2021 WE HAVE THE TREATY!)
·
Dr.
Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. Rebels Against War: The American Peace
Movement, 1941-1960. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1969. Revised, expanded edition published as: Rebels
Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1984.
·
(Editor) MacArthur. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1971. Paperback edition, 1971.
·
Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate. New York: Praeger Publishers, Revised,
expanded edition: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978.
·
American
Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
·
(Associate
Editor) Biographical Dictionary of Modern Peace Leaders. Westport,
CN: Greenwood Press, 1985.
·
One
World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through
1953. (Vol. 1 of The
Struggle Against the Bomb.) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993.
·
(Editor, with five
others) Peace/Mir: An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War. Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Paperback edition, 1994. Russian language
edition: Mir/Peace. Al'ternativy voine ot Antichnosti do knotsa mirovoi
voiny. Antologiia. Moscow: Nauka Press, 1993.
·
Resisting
the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954-1970. (Vol. 2 of The Struggle Against
the Bomb.) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
·
Toward
Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to
the Present. (Vol. 3 of The
Struggle Against the Bomb.) Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
·
(Co-editor, with Glen
H. Stassen) Peace Action: Past, Present, and Future. Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007.
·
Confronting
the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009.
·
Working
for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee
Press, 2012.
·
What's
Going On at UAardvark? Albany,
NY: Solidarity Press, 2013. Second edition, 2014.
CONTENTS of NUCLEAR ABOLITION
NEWSLETTER #24
History from the Inside:
Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine.
Organizing to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons
United Nations
United Nations' Treaty
on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
Anticipating the Treaty
September 26: United Nations International Day
for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
Hopes for NEW START Treaty
Non-Governmental
Organizations (see previous newsletters)
New: Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security
Sr. Ardeth Platte and Plowshares
Feminist Critique of
Patriarchy
END NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION
NEWSLETTER #25, 2021.
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