OMNI WORLD WAR III Anthology #1 April 6, 2023

 

OMNI

WORLD WAR III Anthology #1

April 6, 2023

Collected by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

https://omnicenter.org/donate/

 

CONTENTS WORLD WAR III ANTHOLOGY #1

Chris Wright.   The Second Cold War is more dangerous than the first. 
Andrew Bacevich.  “On Missing Dr. Strangelove.”  [Introduced by
    TomDispatch.]
Art Hobson.  “A planet on high-alert.”
Steve Taylor.   “ ‘We’ve never been closer to nuclear catastrophe’: Activist
   Helen Caldicott.”    (interview)
“Notes from the Editors” of Monthly Review. discusses C. Wright Mills, The
   Causes of World War III, and Foster, et al. Washington’s New Cold War.
Andrew J. Bacevich.  On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to
    the American Century.
Tom Engelhardt.   “Prophecies.” Engelhardt, creator of  TomDispatch, has
   focused “ on the two world-ending ways humanity had discovered to do
   itself in and how to begin to deal with them.”
John Rachel.  “The Never Ending Cycle of Nuclear Insanity.”  “The only
        way we’ll have peace is if we REMOVE FROM POWER every single
        one of the warmongers.”
OMNI’S SUPPORT FOR THE MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS includes 21 newsletters (anthologies), see end..

 

TEXTS

Chris Wright (Posted Apr 04, 2023).  The Second Cold War is more dangerous than the first.  Common Dreams.  April 2, 2023.

Americans have to ask themselves: Is it worth risking nuclear war—and an apocalyptic nuclear winter—for no loftier purpose than to maintain their country’s violently enforced grasp of overwhelming global power?

Culture, Empire, Imperialism, WarAmericas, Asia, Australia, Europe, Global, Latin America, Middle East, United StatesNewswireNuclear War

Twenty years ago, Noam Chomsky published a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the stark choice he posed has only become more urgent. Depending on how humanity responds to the challenges of ecological destruction and imperialistic war, in the coming decade that terrifying question “Hegemony or survival?” may well be answered.

 

Tom Engelhardt.  “Andrew Bacevich, Duck and (Re)Cover?”  TomDispatch, March 19, 2023. I can still remember sneaking into one of those old Broadway movie palaces (of the sort you can see in Edward Hopper's classic painting) with two friends. It was 1959, in the midst of a global "Cold War," and I was 15 years old, too young as I recall to be allowed in to see Stanley Kramer's On the Beach without a grown-up. We sat in the first row of the balcony (it was a thrill!) and watched the movie version of Neville Shute's 1957 novel about -- yes, there's no way to prettify it (though a cast including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and -- a blast from the past -- Fred Astaire didn't hurt) -- World War III. As that movie opens the northern hemisphere has been totally nuked and wiped out, while the fallout is now being carried south -- the film is set in Australia -- and will, sooner or later, extinguish the rest of humanity, including Peck, Gardner, and Astaire. And no, it didn't actually happen (not yet anyway), but like TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, I grew up in a world whose end seemed eerily in sight. After all, as he reminds us today, On the Beach was just one of so many end-of-the-world movies, books, and magazine articles of that "duck and cover" era. In our present world, some sixty-odd years later, no schoolchildren are taught to save themselves from atomic destruction by leaping under their desks, hands over their heads. We're in a world where "the end," the potential dystopian finale of human civilization via the fossil-fuelized overheating of this planet, won't come in a moment. No ducking and covering like Bert the Turtle of my school childhood years when climate change is the culprit. But cheer up, as Bacevich suggests, those old nuclear war films may still have something to teach us in the Ukrainian moment of the twenty-first century. Tom     On Missing Dr. Strangelove Or How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Forgot the Bomb By Andrew Bacevich Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film had its hilarious moments, Crowther found its overall effect distinctly unnerving. What exactly was Kubrick’s point? “When virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane -- or, what is worse, psychopathic -- I want to know what this picture proves.” We may find it odd for an influential critic to expect a movie to “prove” anything. Kubrick’s aim was manifestly not to prove, but to subvert and discomfit. Click here to read more of this dispatch. TOMGRAM Andrew Bacevich, “Duck and (Re)Cover?”  POSTED ON MARCH 19, 2023. I can still remember sneaking into one of those old Broadway movie palaces (of the sort you can see in Edward Hopper’s classic painting) with two friends. It was 1959, in the midst of a global “Cold War,” and I was 15 years old, too young as I recall to be allowed in to see Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach without a grown-up. We sat in the first row of the balcony (it was a thrill!) and watched the movie version of Neville Shute’s 1957 novel about — yes, there’s no way to prettify it (though a cast including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and — a blast from the past — Fred Astaire didn’t hurt) — World War III. As that movie opens the northern hemisphere has been totally nuked and wiped out, while the fallout is now being carried south — the film is set in Australia — and will, sooner or later, extinguish the rest of humanity, including Peck, Gardner, and Astaire. And no, it didn’t actually happen (not yet anyway), but like TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, I grew up in a world whose end seemed eerily in sight. After all, as he reminds us today, On the Beach was just one of so many end-of-the-world movies, books, and magazine articles of that “duck and cover” era. In our present world, some sixty-odd years later, no schoolchildren are taught to save themselves from atomic destruction by leaping under their desks, hands over their heads. We’re in a world where “the end,” the potential dystopian finale of human civilization via the fossil-fuelized overheating of this planet, won’t come in a moment. No ducking and covering like Bert the Turtle of my school childhood years when climate change is the culprit. But cheer up, as Bacevich suggests, those old nuclear war films may still have something to teach us in the Ukrainian moment of the twenty-first century. Tom “On Missing Dr. Strangelove; Or How Americans Learned to Stop Worrying and Forgot the Bomb.”  [US False Assumptions regarding Russia and Nuclear War.]  BY ANDREW BACEVICH Bosley Crowther, chief film critic for the New York Times, didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Strangelove at the time of its release in January 1964. Stanley Kubrick’s dark antiwar satire was “beyond any question the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across,” he wrote. But if the film had its hilarious moments, Crowther found its overall effect distinctly unnerving. What exactly was Kubrick’s point? “When virtually everybody turns up stupid or insane — or, what is worse, psychopathic — I want to know what this picture proves.” We may find it odd for an influential critic to expect a movie to “prove” anything. Kubrick’s aim was manifestly not to prove, but to subvert and discomfit. With feature-length hyperbole — not a wisp of subtlety allowed — Dr. Strangelove made the case that a deep strain of madness had infected the entire U.S. national security apparatus. From the “War Room” that was the Pentagon’s holiest of holies all the way to the cockpit of a B-52 hurtling toward its assigned Russian target with a massive nuclear bomb in its belly, whack jobs were in charge. A mere two years after the Cuban missile crisis, few Americans viewed the prospect of nuclear Armageddon as a joking matter. Yet here was Dr. Strangelove treating this deadly serious topic as suitable for raucous (and slightly raunchy) comedy. That’s what bothered Crowther, who admitted to being “troubled by the feeling, which runs through the film, of discredit and even contempt for our whole defense establishment, up to and even including the hypothetical Commander-in-Chief.”   Buy the Book If the nation owed its very survival to that defense establishment — a widely accepted supposition during the Cold War — Kubrick’s contemptuous attitude was nothing short of blasphemous. We may imagine other inhabitants of the circle in which Crowther lived and worked sharing his unease. Collectively, they comprised a world of believers — not a faith community in a religious sense but an elite establishment. Members of that establishment accepted as gospel an identifiable set of political, cultural, and moral propositions that defined mid-twentieth-century American life. Chief among them was a conviction that communism — monolithic, aggressive, and armed to the teeth — posed an existential threat to what was then known as the Free World. In the face of that, it had become incumbent upon the United States to arm itself to the teeth. The preeminent symbol of U.S. readiness to thwart that Red threat was a massive nuclear strike force held on hair-trigger alert to obliterate the entire Soviet empire. (A typical 1961 report from the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that a full-scale U.S. nuclear attack on the Soviet Union would kill half its population, or 108 million people. An analysis the Joint Chiefs provided to the Kennedy White House that same year put the dead for Russia and China together at upwards of 600 million.) Instant readiness to wage World War III thereby held the key to averting World War III. Politicians, generals, and PhD-wielding “defense intellectuals” all affirmed the impeccable logic of such an arrangement. As the menacing motto of the Strategic Air Command, which controlled America’s nuclear bombers and missiles, put it: “Peace Is Our Profession.” Kubrick was not alone in expressing concern that such a saber-rattling pursuit of peace might yield an altogether different outcome. Could policies supposedly designed to prevent a nuclear holocaust actually produce it? Arbiters of American culture like Crowther might have bridled at such a thought but proved unable to prevent it from gaining purchase. For authors of pulp fiction thrillers and Hollywood studio executives, the anxieties induced by the possibility of nuclear war were pure catnip. In 1964 alone, in addition to Dr. Strangelove, major movie releases included Fail Safe (Moscow and New York City are vaporized) and Seven Days in May (a military plot to overthrow a dovish U.S. president is barely averted). The near-miss of the Cuban missile crisis endowed such fictional plots with an eerie element of verisimilitude. So, too, did the USSR’s atmospheric detonation of a 50-megaton nuclear weapon in October 1961. That “Tsar Bomba” was over 1,500 times more powerful than both of the obliterating atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end World War II. As long as the Cold War continued, popular worries about a single spasm of violence extinguishing humankind persisted, with national leaders obliged to offer at least gestures of sympathetic concern. Thus was born the project that came to be known as “nuclear disarmament,” which dated from President John F. Kennedy’s justifiably famous June 1963 speech at American University. Here was his inaugural “pay any price, bear any burden” speech of 1961 turned inside out and upside down. As if anticipating the cultural mood of our own day, the commander-in-chief vowed to “help make the world safe for diversity.” What followed was JFK at his most eloquent: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” From that moment on, Washington’s enthusiasm for ever larger nuclear arsenals containing ever more powerful weapons began to ebb. So, too, did public deference to the proponents of “overkill.” Crucially, however, the U.S. military’s ability to incinerate millions at a moment’s notice remained intact — as it does to this day, with a “modernization” of the American arsenal at a cost of a couple of trillion dollars now well underway. In a sense, the “disarmament” movement of those years compares to the collective American response to the climate crisis of our own day. Sometimes the most expeditious approach to preserving the status quo, after all, is to make a pretense of embracing change. Think of Frank Sinatra partnering with Elvis Presley in a duet of “Love Me Tender.” Even without Irving Berlin and the Gershwins, Old Blue Eyes kept on selling records well into the era of rock-and-roll. Putin Spoils the Party Then came the collapse of communism. As if at a stroke, worries about World War III dissipated. American schoolchildren soon forgot all about mandatory duck-and-cover drills. Dr. Strangelove became a curiosity from another era like The Maltese Falcon or Gone with the Wind. And while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists continued to update its creepy “Doomsday Clock,” the public ceased to pay much attention. Considered in retrospect, Bosley Crowther had seemingly gotten the better of Stanley Kubrick in their little tiff. After all, a quarter-century after Dr. Strangelove appeared, the Cold War ended peacefully without a hint of World War III. Yes, a nuclear holocaust remained hypothetically possible, but it was no longer something worth fretting about. Yet as nuclear nightmares faded, blissful dreams of peace did not take their place. Indeed, the ensuing post-Cold-War era, extending from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, found the United States perpetually at war or verging on war. During that period, however, few paid serious attention to the possibility that any of our conflicts might involve the use of nuclear weapons. Nukes did retain occasional utility as a rationale for war. Consider, for instance, the decision of President George W. Bush and crew to invade Iraq in 2003, supposedly to eliminate Saddam Hussein’s (non-existent) nuclear arsenal. Still, among the subjects that riled up American politicians, newspaper columnists, and late-night TV hosts, nuclear worries seldom made the cut. Even as the Pentagon embarked on that multi-trillion-dollar program of nuclear (re)armament — marketed as needed safety upgrades — few seemed to notice. For Americans, culture wars, real and ongoing, took precedence over the theoretical prospect of replaying Hiroshima on a grander scale. One might have thought that Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the protracted conflict that followed would have revived the nuclear nightmares of an earlier era. After all, Vladimir Putin has shown no reticence when it comes to sowing death and destruction (nor to implicitly threatening the use of “tactical” nuclear weapons). His determination to achieve Russia’s political objectives regardless of cost seems readily apparent. Furthermore, U.S. officials and major media outlets have concurred in classifying the Russian president as uniquely dangerous. For example, a recent front-page news article in the New York Times — not an editorial or opinion piece — described Putin as beset by “grievances, paranoia and [an] imperialist mind-set” (that is, as an embittered nutcase). Putin’s ostensible paranoia in combination with Russia’s gigantic nuclear arsenal would seem to justify a hair-on-fire response from Washington national security officials. Certainly, the danger of nuclear weapons use today greatly exceeds that of 20 years ago when the Bush administration argued that the Iraqi nuclear threat justified a Ukraine-style invasion. The Biden administration’s insouciance regarding Russian nukes therefore qualifies as, at the very least, odd. According to my colleague at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft Anatol Lieven, “The greatest threat of nuclear catastrophe that humanity has ever faced is now centered on the Crimean peninsula.” His understanding of all things Russian greatly exceeds my own, but that assessment strikes me as about right. And while Planet Earth dangles on the edge of an abyss, the U.S. response is to debate whether or not to supply Ukraine with F-16s. As far as I can tell, Biden administration policy regarding that embattled land rests on one crucial assumption: in the face of an open-ended, incremental U.S. escalation, the Kremlin will ultimately submit. In turn, Ukraine’s inevitable victory will endow Europe with peace and security until the end of time. How that assumption meshes with the conviction that Putin is mentally unbalanced isn’t clear. Counting on an irrational actor to behave rationally is an inherently risky proposition. Who’s in Charge Here? Ukraine has become the locus of a conflict that, willy-nilly, pits Russia against the West — which means against the United States. How far can Washington push Putin before he tries to retaliate in some fashion against his primary adversary? Does President Biden even recognize the urgency of that question? If he does, he’s chosen not to share his concerns with the American people. Granted, Biden has made clear his determination to prevent any direct American involvement in combat with Russia. The president likely calculates that the willingness of Americans to support Ukraine with billions of dollars in weapons and munitions stems in part from the fact that no U.S. troops are fighting and dying. But there may well be another assumption that underlies popular support for U.S. involvement in Ukraine — namely, that the people in charge, beginning with the man in the White House, know what’s actually going on. Dr. Strangelove confronted that assumption head-on 69 years ago and rejected it utterly, depicting the people then in charge as somewhere between clueless and just plain dangerous. Not for a moment would I liken Mr. Biden to that movie’s President Merkin Muffley, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to Buck Turgidson, or any senior officer on active duty to Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, the crazed commander of that film’s Burpelson Air Force Base. (Although I do wonder why the four-star Air Force General who recently told his troops to get ready for war with China in two years wasn’t immediately canned.) Here’s the problem, at least as I see it: however smart and well intentioned, the people in charge in Washington today don’t know everything they think they know — and everything they need to know either. Detailed studies of the Cuban missile crisis have revealed that Kennedy and his men were acting on information that was all too often inadequate or simply wrong. They thought themselves in a position to control events when they weren’t. To a considerable extent, the U.S. and the Soviet Union avoided war in October 1962 through sheer dumb luck — and the selective disobedience of certain U.S. and Soviet junior officers who knew a stupid order when they heard one. Of course, that was way back in the 1960s, ancient history as far as most Americans are concerned. Today, thanks to the wonders of advanced technology, U.S. intelligence and decision-making are much improved, right? Alas, recent screwups, including the disastrous termination of the Afghan War, don’t treat that claim kindly. A proxy war pitting the United States against a paranoid adversary with a massive nuclear arsenal at his command: What could possibly go wrong? Kubrick’s timeless masterpiece invites us to reflect on that question — and the sooner we do, the better. Copyright 2023 Andrew Bacevich Featured image: Tiki Bijou : Dr. Strangelove by H. Michael Karshis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Flickr Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story. Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is chairman and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new Dispatch book, On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, has just been published. See All Articles https://tomdispatch.com/on-missing-dr-strangelove/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=ac6f2dc072-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-ac6f2dc072-308836209#more

UKRAINE FROM THE WEST, TAIWAN FROM THE EAST

Art Hobson.  “A planet on high-alert: Pondering the effects of nuclear war.”  NWADG, 15 March 2022.

 [First of 3 articles; see end.]

On February 8, during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an alarming answer to a reporter's question:  If Ukraine joined NATO, and if war erupts between Russia and Ukraine, then NATO will join with Ukraine against Russia. In this case, Russia would be unable to match NATO's military might, and would need to resort to nuclear weapons. 

As outlined in several recent columns, a certain segment of Russian culture, including Putin, is paranoid about attack from the west.  It's an obsession born of such terrifying experiences as Hitler's and Napoleon's invasions. 

If this all seems bizarre, you aren't alone.  Will we really risk the end of civilization in order that Ukraine can retain the option to possibly, at some uncertain future date, join NATO?  

It's time for all of us to note a few realities:.  

In 1979, the US government published "The Effects of Nuclear War."  Among other things, it reported on the effects of a single one-megaton nuclear bomb dropped on the center of a typical city such as Detroit.  There would be over one million immediate casualties, half of them fatalities, in this city of (in 1979) four million,. This excludes longer-term casualties due to radioactivity on the ground and in dust lofted into the mushroom cloud that later falls out downwind.  Nothing significant will be left standing out to 2 miles (in all directions) from the central point on the ground.  At 5 miles out, fifty percent of the people suffer casualties and most structures, such as the automobile plants, are destroyed or severely damaged.  There is significant damage and casualties out to 10 miles from the center. 

Starting about an hour after the blast, radioactive fallout begins in some areas, depending on wind speed, wind direction, and rain.  In these areas, and during at least the first week, fallout is fatal within a few hours of outdoor exposure.  Nuclear radiation will remain dangerous out to 10 miles from the center for about 10 years, after which it will slowly decay to lower levels comparable to the natural radiation we all receive daily from our environment.  

 A one megaton nuclear fusion bomb or "hydrogen bomb" packs the energy of 60 fission bombs or "atomic bombs" of the type that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in 1945, killing 200,000--50 percent of the city's population.  Today's nuclear weapons are somewhat smaller than one megaton.  Russia, for example, has 2,565 nuclear weapons including 500 in the 0.5-0.8 megaton range and most of the remainder at 0.1 megaton (6 Hiroshimas) or less.  The U.S. has a similar arsenal. 

For further perspective, consider a single U.S. Navy Trident submarine. It can carry 24 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each packing eight hydrogen bombs ("re-entry vehicles")  that can be directed to different locations.  Each bomb releases 0.12 megatons of energy. Thus one Trident submarine can destroy 192 targets, each target receiving the equivalent of seven Hiroshima bombs.  

The United States has 18 missile-launching submarines, of which 14 are Tridents. Generally, four are deployed underwater at any one time, although more would be deployed under high alert.  They are essentially invulnerable. 

Russia and the U.S. both have a "strategic triad" of nuclear-weapons vehicles:  Land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles, and bombers.  Russia and presumably the U.S. have now put their triads on high-alert--a kind of hair trigger that is dangerous even if there is no war. 

War between the U.S. and Russia could destroy much or all of what we are pleased to call "civilization."  Humankind is treading perilous territory.  Right now, the greatest danger lies in the skies above the battlefield.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appealed to NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and strongly criticized NATO's rejection of this request. A no-fly zone would bring NATO, and hence the United States, into battle with Russia.

Alarmingly, Russia began yesterday shelling an airbase in western Ukraine only 15 miles from Poland's (and thus NATO's) border.  Although NATO supplies a steady flow of weapons to Ukraine, US Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned America would respond if Russia's strikes traveled outside Ukraine and hit any NATO members, even accidentally. 

There is one ray of sunshine.  Zelensky recently told Germany's Bild newspaper "We are ready to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine ... and, of course, for the security of Russia."  This touches on what Russia has asked for all along but we have foolishly ruled a "non-starter":  a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality.  

 Art Hobson is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Arkansas.  He spent a 6-month sabbatical leave at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and co-authored and co-edited "The Future of Land-Based Strategic Missiles" (Am. Inst. of physics, 1989).  Email him at ahobson@uark.edu.   

 References;

• Putin on NATO membership and nuclear war: https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/putin-says-ukraine-membership-in-nato-would-make-nuclear-war-more-likely/

• Lavrov on nuclear war, NWADG 3 March 22, article on page 1.

• Russian Deputy Foreign Minister's statement: https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/russia-says-ukraine-could-turn-into-re-run-cuban-missile-crisis-2021-12-09/

• The Effects of Nuclear War, US Office of Technology Assessment, Washington, DC, 1979.

• Russian nuclear weapons: https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-how-many-nuclear-weapons-does-russia-have-in-2022/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter02272022&utm_content=NuclearRisk_RussiaNuclearNotebook_02232022

• Russia puts nucl weapons on high alert: NWADG 2 March 2022, p. 5 "Russian nuke alert spurs drills."  

• Zelenskyy's statement to Bild:  NWADG 11 Mar 22, toward end of story beginning page 1. 

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Steve Taylor.   “ ‘We’ve never been closer to nuclear catastrophe’: Activist Helen Caldicott.”    Originally published: NewsClick.in  on February 9, 2023 by Steve Taylor (more by NewsClick.in)  |  (Posted Feb 10, 2023).   Environment, Inequality, Strategy, WarGlobalInterviewDr. Helen Caldicott

This interview took place on January 25, 2023, one day after the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists advanced the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight—in large part due to developments in Ukraine. Dr. Helen Caldicott, an Australian peace activist and environmentalist, discussed the extreme and imminent threat of a nuclear holocaust due to a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in Ukraine. She also addressed the announcement by the U.S. Department of Energy of a controlled nuclear reaction and outlines the relationship between the nuclear power industry and nuclear weapons.

Caldicott is the author of numerous books and is a recipient of at least 12 honorary doctorates. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize by physicist Linus Pauling and named by the Smithsonian as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. Her public talks describing the horrors of nuclear war from a medical perspective raised the consciousness of a generation.  Caldicott believes that the reality of destroying all of life on the planet has receded from public consciousness, making doomsday more likely. As the title of her recent book states, we are “sleepwalking to Armageddon.”

Steve Taylor: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently set the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight. What is the Doomsday Clock, and why is it now set to 90 seconds to midnight?

Helen Caldicott: For the last year, it’s been at 100 seconds to midnight, which is the closest it’s ever been. Each year they reset the clock according to international problems, nuclear problems. Ninety seconds to midnight—I don’t think that is close enough; it’s closer than that. I would put it at 20 seconds to midnight. I think we’re in an extremely invidious position where nuclear war could occur tonight, by accident or by design. It’s very clear to me, actually, that the United States is going to war with Russia. And that means, almost certainly, nuclear war—and that means the end of almost all life on Earth.

ST: Do you see similarities with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis?

HC: Yes. I got to know John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, later in his life. He was in the Oval Office at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. He once told me, “Helen, we came so close to nuclear war—three minutes.” Three minutes. We’re in a similar situation now.

ST: So back then, though, famously, the world held its breath during the missile crisis.

HC: Oh, we were terrified. Terrified, absolutely terrified.

ST: That doesn’t seem to be the case today.

HC: Today, the public and policymakers are not being informed adequately about what this really means—that the consequences would be so bizarre and so horrifying. It’s very funny; New York City put out a video as a hypothetical PSA in July 2022 showing a woman in the street, and it says the bombs are coming, and it’s going to be a nuclear war. It says that what you do is go inside, you don’t stand by the windows, you stand in the centre of the room, and you’ll be alright. I mean, it’s absolutely absurd.

ST: That is what you were fighting against back in the ’70s and ’80s—this notion that a nuclear war is survivable.

HC: Yes. There was a U.S. defence official called T.K. Jones who reportedly said, don’t worry; “if there are enough shovels to go around,” we’ll make it. And his plan was if the bombs are coming and they take half an hour to come, you get out the trusty shovel. You dig a hole. You get in the hole. Someone puts two doors on top and then piles on dirt. I mean, they had plans. But the thing about it is that evolution will be destroyed. We may be the only life in the universe. And if you’ve ever looked at the structure of a single cell, or the beauty of the birds or a rose, I mean, what responsibility do we have?

ST: During the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. did not want missiles pointed at it from Cuba, and the Soviet Union did not want missiles pointed at it from Turkey. Do you see any similarities with the conflict in Ukraine?

HC: Oh, sure. The United States has nuclear weapons in European countries, all ready to go and land on Russia. How do you think Russia feels—a little bit paranoid? Imagine if the Warsaw Pact moved into Canada, all along the northern border of the U.S., and put missiles all along the northern border. What would the U.S. do? She’d probably blow up the planet as she nearly did with the Cuban missile crisis. I mean, it’s so extraordinarily unilateral in the thinking, not putting ourselves in the minds of the Russian people.

ST: Do you feel we’re more at risk of nuclear war now than we were during the Cold War?

HC: Yes. We’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve ever been. And that’s what the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists indicated by moving the clock to 90 seconds to midnight.

ST: Does it seem like political leaders are more cavalier about nuclear exchange now?
HC: Yes, because they haven’t taken in what nuclear war would really mean. And the Pentagon is run by these cavalier folks who are making millions out of selling weapons. Almost the whole of the U.S. budget goes to killing and murder, rather than to health care and education and the children in Yemen, who are millions of them starving. I mean, we’ve got the money to fix everything on Earth, and also to power the world with renewable energy. The money is there. It’s going into killing and murder instead of life.

ST: You mentioned energy. The Department of Energy has announced a so-called fusion breakthrough. What do you think about the claims that fusion may be our energy future?

HC: The technology wasn’t part of an energy experiment. It was part of a nuclear weapons experiment called the Stockpile Stewardship Program. It is inappropriate; it produced an enormous amount of radioactive waste and very little energy. It will never be used to fuel global energy needs for humankind.

ST: Could you tell us a little bit about the history of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where scientists developed this fusion technology?

HC: The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was where the first hydrogen bombs were developed. It was set up in 1952, by Edward Teller, a wicked man.

ST: There is this promotion of nuclear energy as a green alternative. Is the nuclear energy industry tied to nuclear weapons?
HC: Of course. In the ’60s, when people were scared stiff of nuclear weapons, there was a Pentagon psychologist who said, look, if we have peaceful nuclear energy, that will alleviate the people’s fear.

ST: At the end of your 1992 book If You Love This Planet, you wrote, “Hope for the Earth lies not with leaders, but in your own heart and soul. If you decide to save the Earth, it will be saved. Each person can be as powerful as the most powerful person who ever lived—and that is you, if you love this planet.” Do you stand by that?

HC: If we acknowledge the horrifying reality that there is an extreme and imminent threat of nuclear war, it’s like being told that as a planet, we have a terminal disease. If we’re scared enough, every one of us can save the planet. But we have to be very powerful and determined.

---

Steve Taylor is the press secretary for Global Justice Ecology Project and the host of the podcast Breaking Green. Beginning his environmental work in the 1990s opposing clearcutting in Shawnee National Forest, Taylor was awarded the Leo and Kay Drey Award for Leadership from the Missouri Coalition for the Environment for his work as co-founder of the Times Beach Action Group.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. A video of the description of nuclear war from the interview can be viewed on Vimeo. Listen to the entire interview, available for streaming on Breaking Green’s website or wherever you get your podcasts. Breaking Green is produced by Global Justice Ecology Project.

 Dr. Helen Caldicott

 

February 2023 (Volume 74, Number 9)

The Editors Monthly Review (February 3, 2023)

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As C. Wright Mills wrote in 1958, “the immediate causes of World War III are the preparations for it.” This month’s “Notes from the Editors” situates Wright in a contemporary context, with a New Cold War in full swing and imperial powers pushing us ever closer to a Third World War. | more…

This “Notes from the Editors” discusses C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, and Foster, et al. Washington’s New Cold War: A Socialist Perspective; increasing US preparations for war in the nuclear arms race,  booming military-industrial complex, and “US media system …turned into a propaganda system” for war.  Most disturbing is p. 64 on US “pursuit of a first-strike or counterforce strategy as its main nuclear objective.”  All of this is converging in the US “proxy war in Ukraine on Russia’s border.”  For the solution, the editors return to Mills’ advocacy of “a world anti-imperialist movement as the guarantor of peace.”

 

On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century  by Andrew J. Bacevich, November 2022.  368.

On Shedding an Obsolete Past provides a much-needed and comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have produced a series of costly disappointments and outright failures that have destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world and cost US taxpayers astronomical sums of money.

Bacevich provides urgent and critical insights into how these failures occurred and what needs to be done to prevent similar failures in the future. He reminds us that, by understanding the past, we can alter our current trajectory and transform the world for the better. 

Review 
"Bacevich is less interested in exploring the hypocrisy as he is in examining the waste. The squandering of resources and blood. The hollowing of America while we pretend to be something we’re not. The sense that we’ve failed a generation clinging to an obsolete idea, and that failure is tearing us apart. In that, his true conservative nature comes out: why do something stupid, he asks, when we can just not do that?"   Chicago Review of Books

 

“Prophesies, Then and Now: My Life at World's End”

BY TOM ENGELHARDT

Indulge me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City.  

“Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now.

“First of all, let me introduce myself. I am THOMAS M. ENGELHARDT, world-renowned historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful, contented existence in the private shelter I had built and was completing the ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century, when I was seized by a strange desire to emerge from my shelter, have a look at the world, and find some companions. Realizing the risk I was taking, I carefully opened the hatch of the shelter and slowly climbed out. It was morning. To my shock, I was in a wide field overgrown with weeds; there was no sign of the community that had been there…”

As I wander, I finally run into one of my classmates, now “a skinny old man with bushy white hair, wearing a loose deer skin.” And yes, whatever happened (that “great invasion”) while I was underground in — as anyone of that period would have known — a private nuclear-fallout shelter, is unclear. Still, in the world I find on emerging, all my former classmates, whom I meet one after another in joking fashion, now live in caves. In other words, it had obviously been devastated.

True, in those high school years, I was something of a Civil War nut and my classmates ragged me for it. I couldn’t stop reading grown-up books on the subject. (Thank you, Bruce Catton, for your popular histories of that war and for the magazine you founded and edited, American Heritage, to which I was a teen subscriber!) They obviously thought I was a history wonk of the first order. But more than 60 years later, it strikes me that we kids who had learned to “duck and cover” at school — to dive under our desks, hands over our heads (with CONELRAD warnings blaring from the radio on our teacher’s desk) — in preparation for a Russian nuclear attack, already had a deep sense not of future promise but of doom to come. In those days, it wasn’t that hard to imagine ourselves in a future devastated world returned to the Stone Age or worse.

And at the time, I suspect that was hardly out of the ordinary. After all, there were, in a sense, mushroom clouds everywhere on the horizon of our lives to come. By 1962, America’s victory weapon that, in two blinding flashes in August 1945, took out the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, had become a weapon (in other hands) of potential defeat. Everywhere in our lives there lurked the possibility that “we,” not “they,” might be the next victims of nuclear extermination. Consider it an irony indeed that our country’s nukes would chase Americans through the decades to come, infiltrating so many parts of our world and our lives.

Back in 1954, our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, already had its own nukes (though as yet little effective way of delivering them). No one thought it worth a comment then that, in Walt Disney’s cinematic retelling of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, when Captain Nemo blows up his island, what’s distinctly a mushroom cloud rises over it. Of course, in those years, end-of-the-world movies would become everyday affairs.

 

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In the 1950s and early 1960s, a now-forgotten bunker-culture mentality enveloped this country and my classmates caught the moment perfectly. In fact, that “shelter” I emerged from would, in 1962, still have been far too recognizable to need further description. After all, we grew up in a time when the Cold War was only intensifying and the very idea of building private nuclear shelters had become a commonplace. As an article in Smithsonian Magazine reminds us, right after the first Russian nuclear test went off in 1949, “[General] Douglas MacArthur’s ex-wife said she was furnishing the former slave quarters beneath her Georgetown mansion as a bomb shelter” and, only six years later, the head of Civil Defense began urging every single American “to build an underground shelter right now.'”  

By 1961, faced with a crisis over a divided Berlin, President John F. Kennedy himself urged Americans to do just that. (“The time is now,” he insisted.) In those years, Life magazine typically ran a feature on constructing “an H-bomb Hideaway” for a mere $3,000! And real-estate ads even promised “good bomb immunity,” while Science News warned of “hucksters who were peddling backyard shelters, burn ointments, dog tags, flashbags, and ‘decontaminating agents.'” Naturally, once you had built your private shelter, there was the question of whether, should a nuclear war be about to begin, you should let the neighbors in or arm yourself to stop them from doing so.  (A friend of mine still remembers one of his schoolmates and neighbors warning him that, in a crisis, according to his parents, his family better not try to come to their nuclear shelter or they would regret it.)

And that yearbook passage of mine was written in the winter or spring of 1962, months before the Cuban missile crisis shook us all to our bones. That October, I remember fearing the East Coast, where I was then attending my freshman year of college, might indeed go up in a giant mushroom cloud. And keep in mind that, in those years, from popular magazines to sci-fi novels to the movies, the bomb either exploded or threatened to do so again and again. In my youth, atomic war was, culturally speaking, all around us. It was even in outer space, as in the 1955 film This Island Earth in which another planet goes up in a version of radioactive flames, scaring the living hell out of the 11-year-old Thomas M. Engelhardt.  

So, yes, my classmates were messing around and having fun, but underneath it all lurked a sensibility (probably only half-grasped at the time) about the world we were to graduate into that was anything but upbeat. The planet that our leaders were then assuring us was ours for the taking seemed to us anything but. 

World-Endings, Part Two

It’s true that, in the years between then and now, the world didn’t go up in a mushroom cloud (with an accompanying nuclear winter killing billions more of us, a probability we knew nothing about in 1962). Still, whether you’re talking about actual war or potential nuclear catastrophe, it’s certainly looking mighty ugly right now.

Worse yet, if you’re 18 as I was then (and not 78, as I am now), you undoubtedly know that the future isn’t looking cheery these days either, even without a nuclear war. Sadly, in the years since I graduated high school, we discovered that humanity had managed to come up with a second slower but potentially no less devastating way to make this world unlivable. I’m thinking, of course, of climate change, a subject deeply on the minds of the young on this embattled planet of ours.

I mean, from unparalleled floods to unprecedented melting ice, staggering megadroughts to record wildfires, sweltering heat waves and ever fiercer storms to… well, increasingly extreme weather of almost any imaginable sort, this planet is an ever less comfortable place on which to live, even without a mushroom cloud on the horizon. And that’s especially true, given how humanity is dealing with the crisis to come. After all, what makes more sense right now than a never-ending war in Europe to create an energy crisis (though that crisis is also helping fuel the rapid growth of alternative energy)? What makes more sense than an escalating arms race globally or the world’s two greatest greenhouse gas producers, the United States and China, facing off against each other in an increasingly militarized fashion rather than cooperating to stop our planet from burning up?

What makes more sense than the Biden administration giving the nod to an oil drilling project on federal land in Alaska expected to produce an estimated 576 million barrels of oil over the next 30 years, despite the president’s previous promise not to do such a thing? (“No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”) What makes more sense than China using more coal, that monstrous greenhouse-gas producer, than the rest of the world combined?  What makes more sense than the major oil companies garnering greater profits in 2022 than in any previous moment in history as they broil the planet without mercy? What makes more sense than, as the Guardian reported, more than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites, mostly at oil and natural gas facilities, continuing to gush the potent greenhouse gas methane into the global atmosphere in 2022, the worst of those sites spewing “the pollution at a rate equivalent to 67 million running cars”?

And no less daunting, so Michael Birnbaum reported at the Washington Post recently, as various countries begin to explore the possibility of “solar geoengineering” (spraying a sun-blocking mist into the earth’s atmosphere to cool their overheating countries), they might also end up messing with atmospheric conditions in other lands in a fashion that could lead to… yes, as the “U.S. intelligence community” has come to fear, war. So add potential climate wars to your list of future horrors.

It’s true that alternative energy sources are also ramping up significantly, just not yet fast enough, but there’s certainly still hope that, in some fashion, humanity will once again figure out how to come up short of The End. Still, if you’re young today and looking at the world, I suspect it’s not a pretty sight.

Prophesies to Come

Let me now offer my own little summary of the very future that I, like so many of my classmates, did live through to this moment:  No, Thomas M. Engelhardt never wrote that classic book The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century, but he did author The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (published in 1995) in which he wrote about the victory weapon of World War II, the “bunker culture” of the 1950s and 1960s that it produced, and what (as best he could tell) to make of it all.

In addition, with that end-of-the-world sensibility still in mind, while an editor at the publishing house Pantheon Books, he would make more visible something Americans had largely been prevented from seeing after August 1945. As it happened, a friend would show him a book put out by a Japanese publisher that collected the memories of some of the survivors of Hiroshima along with drawings they had done of that experience. Yes, in his childhood, Thomas M. Engelhardt had indeed seen giant irradiated ants and an incredible shrinking man on screen in science-fictionalized versions of an irradiated future. But missing from his all-American world had been any vision of what had actually happened to the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that all-American past.

In 1979, not long before an antinuclear movement that would make use of it revved up in this country, he published that Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, which all too vividly laid out the memories of those who had experienced world’s end in an up-close-and-personal fashion. And several years later, thanks to that book’s Japanese editor (amazed that any American would have considered publishing it), he actually went to Hiroshima and visited the Peace Memorial Museum, something he’s never forgotten.  [The book has inspired OMNI’s annual Remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

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And in the next century, the one my high school classmates and I hadn’t even begun to imagine and weren’t at all sure we’d live to see, he would, almost by happenstance, start a website called (not by him) TomDispatch that would repeatedly focus on the two world-ending ways humanity had discovered to do itself in and how to begin to deal with them.

And honestly, all of this leaves me wondering today what that “prophesy” might look like for the high school graduates of 2023 or those of my grandchildren’s generation in an even more distant future. I certainly hope for the best, but also fear the worst.  Perhaps it, too, would begin: “Being an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing for those who shall come a long time from now. First of all, let me introduce myself.  I am [NAME TO BE FILLED IN], world-renowned historian of the twenty-first century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this account….”

More than 60 years later, even writing that, no less remembering the world of once-upon-a-time, and imagining what it will be like after I’m long gone sends chills down my spine and leaves me hoping against hope that, someday, one of my grownup grandchildren will read this and not think worse of the class of 1962 or their grandfather for it.

Copyright 2023 Tom Engelhardt

Featured image: Fallout shelter by Kelly Michals is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He was also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.  A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth book is A Nation Unmade by War.

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A Polemic to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Abolishing Their Advocates
John Rachel.   “The never ending cycle of nuclear insanity.” 
Originally published: Dissident Voice on September 24, 2021  (more by Dissident Voice)  |  (Posted Sep 25, 2021).   Empire, Imperialism, WarUnited StatesNewswireNuclear.
Amidst all of the sensible and sane cries to eliminate nuclear weapons, we are caught in a self-sustaining, self-reinforcing feedback loop. Call it the Death Spiral of Human Annihilation.

Yes, the U.S. throughout its history, despite official denials even among historians who should know better–maybe they do but prefer being manufacturers of myth rather than chroniclers of history–has been territorial, possessive and aggressive. The Monroe Doctrine declared the entire Western hemisphere as America’s backyard. The U.S. was hardly shy about grabbing as much as it could from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War, lands as far away as the Philippines. Through treaties and hard-headed diplomacy, it has effectively turned most European nations, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan into vassal states, which promote and serve the interests of the U.S., including using their military assets and personnel to take to the battlefield in undeclared wars and provocations against those countries the U.S. perceives as enemies or obstacles to its imperial rule.

This is not particularly extraordinary or surprising. Competition defines and drives much of what goes on between countries, each nation vying for advantage and improvements in its own standing and accumulation, regardless of what hardships it might impose on other countries and their populations. Thus U.S. adventurism and colonization was pretty much business-as-usual for much of its history, as it was for every other ambitious nation on the rise.

However, beyond predictable overt aggressiveness, it was at the end of, and immediately after, WWII that a seismic change occurred in Washington DC that has elevated our country to become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world“, and propelled the entire planet toward the unstable, chaotic mess we now find ourselves in.

Politically there was the marginalization of Henry Wallace, and the installation of Harry Truman as president. Institutionally it was the creation of the extremely independent security organization, the CIA, as successor to the OSS (Office of Security Services). Programmatically, it was bringing 1600 Nazi scientists into the U.S. under Operation Paperclip. Economically, it was the continuation of a war economy and the expansion of the MIC–the military industrial complex — cementing in place the core elements of “forever war” even in times of peace. Dwight D. Eisenhower saw what was happening and in January 1961 warned the country of the dangers of this in his farewell speech.

The U.S. pursuit of empire and global hegemony now had the mechanisms, the funding, the know-how, the institutional momentum, the “right stuff”, to take the world stage. All of the toxic premises and preconditions were now circulating in the bloodstream of the military and diplomatic channels, a cocktail of pathogens for the madness that infected and captivated those in power, and still does to this day.

This virulence culminated in the 90s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The U.S. turned its back on an unprecedented historical opportunity, the chance for peace and cooperation on a global scale, one that had the potential of initiating a millennium where wars were the rare exception, and the colonial power struggle paradigm would be consigned to history books. Instead it embraced the “end of history“, a baseless claim of ultimate superiority and entitlement based on America’s victory over the world’s only other superpower.

By the late 90s the U.S. pulled out all of the stops. It would leave no technology untapped, no opportunity unexploited, no promise or treaty unbroken, UN resolutions and world opinion be damned, international law deemed irrelevant. The trajectory we are now on was set in stone. It’s our way or bombs away.

Let’s not get distracted or deluded by claims of noble intent and appeals to the twisted logic of empire.

And our mental discipline starts with our never ever forgetting who started this mess. And thus who must take the lead in fixing it.

Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan sent a message to the world, particularly the Soviet Union.

We have the ultimate weapon and we will use it. Don’t mess with us, don’t doubt our resolve, no one can stop us.

The Soviet Union had no choice. Either develop a sufficient nuclear potential to counter that of the U.S. or be held hostage to bullying and coercion.

That unfortunate dynamic unleashed a nuclear arms race that at one point saw enough nuclear weaponry in the stockpiles of the U.S. and the USSR, to destroy the planet 50 times over. This madness has been tempered slightly with treaties but it’s still insanity by any rational measure. Russia and the U.S. still have over 13,000 nuclear weapons–much more powerful and “usable” than when they were at peak numerical levels–and other nuclear nations add another 1,125 to the mix. This is an improvement. The same improvement we could claim if a person only got shot 14 times instead of 50 times. The coroner’s work reconstructing the body for viewing might be a little easier. Should we count our blessings?

Listen, folks. It’s on us! Both the U.S. as a nation and the U.S. as citizens. There’s no passing the buck here, not when the survival of life on Earth is at stake.

Until the U.S. steps forward and leads the effort, nuclear warfare will always be with us. And annihilation of the human species will always hover over us as a real, increasingly probable result.

Moreover, please never forget: Those now in power will never backtrack on this suicidal course. It is what defines them, drives them. It’s as much a part of them as their hearts and brains and the void where their souls would be if they weren’t morally bankrupt, sociopathic mutants.

The only way we’ll have peace is if we REMOVE FROM POWER every single one of the warmongers.

No excuses. No compromise. No fear.

I recommend a massive awakening of 150-200 million U.S. citizens as to the personal costs of war, the inevitable product of: our military adventurism and expansion; our endless, unnecessary, illegal, immoral wars; our completely wasteful procurement of unneeded weapon systems, upgrading our nuclear arsenal, now putting weapons is space in violation of existing treaties; a commitment without the approval of the citizenry to “full- spectrum dominance“; i.e., world rule by an unchallengeable empire.

For decades the DOD and their rah-rah imperialists in office have had a blank check. And like anyone with a blank check, they’ve spent OUR MONEY with wild abandon. THIS is a strategy for defunding the military just enough so that it can properly defend our nation and its people, but no longer use everyday citizens as an ATM machine for its delusional, monomaniacal pursuit of hegemony over the entire planet. We the people never voted for this psychopathic agenda, one which smacks of master race conquest. THIS MECHANISM will sufficiently drain the Treasury so that unnecessary DOD spending is impossible, and most importantly, extricate the crazies from the toxic dump they’ve turned our once-democratic institutions into.

Please repeat after me: No excuses. No compromise. No fear.

John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books. His most recent polemic is “The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal in the History of the World.” His political articles have appeared at many alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but promising vegetable garden. “Scribo ergo sum.” Read other articles by John, or visit John’s website.

OMNI’S SUPPORT FOR THE MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS includes 21 newsletters/anthologies and a 22^nd under construction.

Contents of Nuclear Weapons Abolition Newsletter #20, July 20, 2014

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/07/nuclear-weapons-abolition-newsletter-20.html

Presidents Obama and Medvedev Commitment 2009

Plan to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

Statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Global Zero Movement

Two Reviews of Elaine Scarry’s Nuclear Monarchy

 

 

Contents Nuclear Weapons Abolition Newsletter #21, March 13, 2015

http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2015/03/nuclear-weapons-abolition-newsletter-21.html

Anti-Nuclear War Organizations: Get Involved

Nuclear Zero, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Marshall Islands Lawsuits at ICC and US Court, Sign Petition, Join the Coalition

ICAN and IPPNW International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and International Physicians for the Prevention of  Nuclear War (Nobel Prize)

Dick, Ground Zero Organization and Magazine:  End Trident Submarines

Dick, Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Space Alert!

Democracy Now! Reports, Rally Outside White House Against Obama’s Nuclear Weapons Upgrades

Global Zero, Sign the Zero by 2030 Pledge for a World Without Nuclear 
     Weapons

Council for a Livable World (CLW) (founded by Leo Szilard)

Soka Gakkai International (SGI)

 

Diverse, Numerous World of Nuclear Weapons Abolition
Gusterson, People of the Bomb:  Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex

SGI Exhibit, 'Everything You Treasure-For a World Free From Nuclear
      Weapons' at Little Elm Public Library

 Dr. Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, et al., NYC Symposium

Amy Goodman with Dennis Moynihan, Democracy Now (August 7, 2014), Hiroshima and  Nagasaki 69 Years Later

Shiloh Krupar, Satire of US Toxic State

Scotland’s Independence Vote and Nuclear Weapons

 Bill Griffin, In Memoriam:  Jonathan Schell  

Nuclear Weapons Abolition #22 in preparation