OMNI
World war III ANTHOLOGY #2
SEPTEMBER 29, 2024
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture
of Peace, Justice, and Ecology
What’s at Stake: On
January 24, 2023, The Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was
moved to 90 seconds (1
minute, 30 seconds) before midnight, the closest it has ever been set to midnight since its
inception in 1947. This adjustment was largely attributed to the risk of
nuclear escalation that arose from the US/NATO/Ukraine vs. Russia War. Only the threatening chaos of the climate emergency poses an
equal or greater danger to our evolution.
CONTENTS
Daniel Ellsberg. The Doomsday Machine.
Dawn Stover. “Facing Nuclear Reality. . . .”
Garrett Graff. “…US Government’s
Secret Plan[s] to Save Itself….”
John Pilger. “A World War Has Begun” (is being planned).
Tom Dispatch. Tomgram. “Michael Klare. On the Road to World War III?”
Michael Klare. “The New Global
Tinderbox.”
Rick Wayman. “Tell Your Senators to
Oppose Trump’s War Cabinet.”
John Avery. Nuclear Weapons: An
Absolute Evil.
Tom Engelhardt. “The Slow-Motion
Equivalent of a Nuclear War?”
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “Talk of War with China Is Total Insanity.”
Judith Ehrlich. “Daniel Ellsberg: A Profound Voice against
the Doomsday Machine.”
Elaine Scarry. Thermonuclear Monarchy. Choice between
Democracy and Doom.
Istvan Mészáros. “Militarism and the Coming Wars.”
Jeffrey Sachs. “One War Party v. Jill
Stein and Green Party.”
SOURCES
Bloomsbury Pub.
Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists
Counterpunch
Danish Peace Academy
Harvard UP
Jeffrey Sachs
Monthly Review
mronline.org
Nuclear Age Peace
Foundation
OMNI
Roots Action
Simon & Schuster
Tom Dispatch, Tom
Engelhardt
TEXTS
These essays and
books, published between 2016 and 2024, expose the threat of WWIII, its preparation
and planning, and suggest ways to prevent it See separate OMNI anthologies on preparing
for WWIII and stopping it.
Daniel Ellsberg.
The
Doomsday Machine:
Confessions of a
Nuclear War plannerby: Daniel Ellsberg
Bloomsbury,
12-05-2017.
Shortlisted for the Andrew
Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Finalist for The California
Book Award in Nonfiction
The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List
Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year
In These Times “Best Books of the Year"
Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List
lithub's “Five Books Making
News This Week”
Publisher’s Abstract:
From the legendary
whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of
the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that
continues to this day.
Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg
reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the
1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered
that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to
the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed,
would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of
this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its
proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival.
No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear
strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has
fundamentally changed since that era.
Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this
gripping exposé reads like a thriller
and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday
machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as
whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately
hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the
future of the world.
Reviews
“The Doomsday Machine is being published at an alarmingly
relevant moment, as North Korea is seeking the capability to target the United
States with nuclear missiles, and an unpredictable president, Donald Trump, has
countered with threats of 'fire and fury.'” – New York Magazine
“A groundbreaking and nightmare-inducing account of how the whole
mad system works.” – Esquire“One of the best books ever written on the subject--certainly the
most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the
nuclear rabbit hole's mad logic and came out the other
side.” – Fred Kaplan, Slate“Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine (Bloomsbury) unpacks the power of our
atomic arsenal.” – Vanity Fair“Ellsberg, the dauntless whistle-blower, has
written a timely plea for a reassessment of a weapons program that he describes
as 'institutionalized madness.'” – Best Books of the Year
2017, The San Francisco Chronicle
Dawn Stover. “Facing Nuclear Reality: 35 Years after The
Day After.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Dec. 21, 2018).
In
1982, a 40-year-old insurance salesman who sold policies to professional
athletes traveled from his home in Lawrence, Kansas, to New York City on a
business trip. Shortly before he left, Bob Swan, Jr.—the father of two young
daughters, and a man increasingly concerned about the possibility of a nuclear
war between the United States and the Soviet Union—mentioned to his then-wife
Jane that he had had a dream about a film that portrayed an American family and
a Russian family in the aftermath of nuclear war and “showed the total
absurdity” of such a war. While he was in New York, Swan attended a huge march
for nuclear disarmament that was life-changing for him. “When I got back from
this amazing experience,” Swan told me when I visited him at his home a few
months ago, one of the first things his wife said was: “They announced while
you were gone, they’re going to make that film you dreamed about. They’re going
to film it in Lawrence.”
The
television movie The Day After depicted a full-scale nuclear
war and its impacts on people living in and around Kansas City. It became
something of a community project in picturesque Lawrence, 40 miles west of
Kansas City, where much of the movie was filmed. Thousands of local residents—including
students and faculty from the University of Kansas—were recruited as extras for
the movie; about 65 of the 80 speaking parts were cast locally. The use of
locals was intentional, because the moviemakers wanted to show the grim
consequences of a nuclear war for real middle Americans, living in the real
middle of the country. By the time the movie ends, almost all of the main
characters are dead or dying.
ABC
broadcast The Day After on November 20, 1983, with no
commercial breaks during the final hour. More than 100 million people saw
it—nearly two-thirds of the total
viewing audience. It remains one of the most-watched television programs
of all time. Brandon Stoddard, then-president of ABC’s motion picture
division, called it “the most important
movie we’ve ever done.” The Washington Post later described it as “a profound TV
moment.” It was arguably the most effective public service announcement in
history.
“For those of us who live in Lawrence, it
was personal... And it didn’t have a happy ending.”
It was
also a turning point for foreign policy. Thirty-five years ago, the United
States and the Soviet Union were in a nuclear arms race that had taken them to
the brink of war. The Day After was a piercing wakeup shriek,
not just for the general public but also for then-President Ronald Reagan.
Shortly after he saw the film, Reagan gave a speech saying that he,
too, had a dream: that nuclear weapons would be “banished from the face of the
Earth.” A few years later, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed
the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the first agreement that
provided for the elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons. By the
late 1990s, American and Russian leaders had created a stable, treaty-based
arms-control infrastructure and expected it to continue improving over time.
Now,
however, a long era of nuclear restraint appears to be nearing an end. Tensions
between the United States and Russia have risen to levels not seen in decades.
Alleging treaty violations by Russia, the White House has announced plans to
withdraw from the INF Treaty. Both countries are moving forward with the
enormously expensive refurbishment of old and development of new nuclear
weapons—a process euphemized as “nuclear modernization.” Leaders on both sides
have made inflammatory statements, and no serious negotiations have taken place
in recent years. MORE https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after/?utm_source=Bulletin%20Newsletter&utm_medium=iContact%20email&utm_campaign=DayAfter_Dec13
Raven
Rock: The Story of the U.S.
Government’s Secret Plan[S] to Save Itself--While the Rest of Us Die. By Garrett
M. Graff. Simon and Schuster,
2017.
The eye-opening true story of the government’s secret plans to
survive and rebuild after a catastrophic attack on US soil—a narrative that
spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today.
Every day in Washington, DC, the blue-and-gold 1st Helicopter Squadron,
code-named “MUSSEL,” flies over the Potomac River. As obvious as the
presidential motorcade, the squadron is assumed by most people to be a travel
perk for vips. They’re only half right: while the helicopters do provide
transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a
terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select
officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around
Washington, even as ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves.
For sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday plans
to protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG)
program takes numerous forms—from its plans to evacuate the Liberty Bell
from Philadelphia and our most precious documents from the National Archives to
the plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing 747 jet flying high over
Nebraska.
In Raven Rock, Garrett Graff sheds light on the inner workings of
the 650-acre compound (called Raven Rock) just miles from Camp David, as
well as dozens of other bunkers the government built its top leaders during the
Cold War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm
Beach, Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War
nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents, and nationalize
industries.
Equal parts a presidential, military, and political history, Raven Rock tracks
the evolution of the government’s plans and the threats of global war from the
dawn of the nuclear era through the present day. Relying upon thousands of
pages of once-classified documents, as well as original interviews and visits
to former and current COG facilities, Graff brings readers through the back
channels of government to understand exactly what is at stake if our nation is
attacked, and how we’re prepared to respond if it is.
JOHN PILGER . “A World War has Begun: Break the Silence.” Counterpunch (MARCH 23, 2016).
Http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence/
Extended Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?V=rpnbckjxhho&feature=youtu.be
I have been filming in the
Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If
I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the
swimsuit.”
Few seem aware that the bikini
swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini Island.
Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall
Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day
for twelve years.
Bikini is silent today, mutated
and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing
moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with
radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.
Standing on the beach, I watched
the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the
crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned
people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.
On my return journey, I stopped
at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s
Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the
headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the
Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini
bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.
Unlike the smiling woman in the
magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a
rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.
I relate this experience as a
warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us.
The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this
phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and
opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.
How many people are aware that a
world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and
distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order,
the first missile.
In 2009, President Obama
stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe.
He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People
cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama
was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was all fake. He was lying.
The Obama administration
has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery
systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose
higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty
years is more than $1 trillion.
A mini nuclear
bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything
like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more
thinkable.”
In the last
eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two —
led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western
frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops
presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.
Ukraine – once part of
the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a
coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and
hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent
parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious
OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution
and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.
This is seldom news in the West,
or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
— next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks,
heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear
power is met with silence in the West.
What makes the prospect of
nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against
China. MORE
Http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence/
This is an
edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney,
entitled A World War Has Begun. Join the debate on Facebook
John Pilger can be reached through his
website: www.johnpilger.com
·
Archive
·
Authors
Tomgram: Michael Klare, On the Road to World War
III?
Posted by Michael Klare at 7:37am, October 30, 2018.
Follow tomdispatch on Twitter @tomdispatch. Http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176489
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin
issued a warning. As the New York Times described it: “If the United States deploys new
intermediate-range missiles in Europe after withdrawing from a nuclear treaty
prohibiting these weapons, European nations will be at risk of ‘a possible
counterstrike.’” It was the sort of threat that, in the previous century, would
have raised the level of everyday nuclear fears in this society, too. I
remember them well -- from the “duck-and-cover” experiences of schoolchildren huddling under desks that were somehow to protect them from nuclear
annihilation to the vivid nightmares of my teen years. (Yes, in a dream at
least, I saw and felt an atomic blast.) This was the world of the Cold War in
which I grew
up.
I’ve always believed
that the last of such Cold War nuclear fears manifested themselves on September
11, 2001, when those towers in lower Manhattan collapsed amid a horrifying cloud of smoke and ash -- and the place
where it all happened was promptly christened Ground Zero, a term previously
reserved for the spot where a nuclear blast had gone off. Somehow, on that day,
something was called back to life from those Cold War years in which
newspapers regularly drew imagined concentric circles of atomic destruction from
fantasy Ground Zeros in American cities, while magazines offered visions of our
country as a vaporized wasteland. In the chaos and destruction of that moment,
there was perhaps a subliminal feeling that the U.S., the first country
to use an atomic weapon, had finally experienced some kind of
payback. As Tom Brokaw, chairing NBC's nonstop news coverage, said that day,
it looked “like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan."
In Donald Trump’s
upside-down world, the trek of a few thousand desperate migrants, some carrying
tiny children or even babies, across thousands of miles of Honduras, Guatemala,
and now Mexico is treated as if it were potentially a major invasion of (if not
a nuclear attack on) the United States. As the president dispatches the U.S. military to the border, claims that ISIS-like Middle Easterners lurk in that caravan,
and blames the Democrats for it all, who has time to think about an
actual catastrophe?
Fortunately, tomdispatch regular Michael Klare
does and he has news for us. As the U.S. prepares to withdraw from a classic Cold War nuclear treaty, it’s time to start
ramping up those fears again. After all, we’re now in a new world of expanding
global rivalries and potential madness in which impoverished migrants from
Honduras are the least of our problems. Tom
“The New Global Tinderbox: It’s Not Your Mother’s Cold War” by Michael
T. Klare. When it comes to relations between Donald
Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China, observers
everywhere are starting to talk about a return to an all-too-familiar past.
“Now we have a new Cold War,” commented Russia expert Peter Felgenhauer in Moscow after President Trump
recently announced plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty. The Trump administration is "launching a new Cold
War," said historian Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street
Journal, following a series of anti-Chinese measures approved by the
president in October. And many others are already chiming in.
Recent steps by
leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing may seem to lend credence to such a
“new Cold War” narrative, but in this case history is no guide. Almost two
decades into the twenty-first century, what we face is not some mildly updated
replica of last century’s Cold War, but a new and potentially even more
dangerous global predicament.
The original Cold War, which lasted from the
late 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, posed a colossal
risk of thermonuclear annihilation. At least after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, however, it also proved a
remarkably stable situation in which, despite local conflicts of many sorts,
the United States and the Soviet Union both sought to avoid the kinds of direct
confrontations that might have triggered a mutual catastrophe. In fact,
after confronting the abyss in 1962, the leaders of both superpowers
engaged in a complex series of negotiations leading to substantial reductions
in their nuclear arsenals and agreements intended to reduce the risk of a future Armageddon.
What others are now
calling the New Cold War -- but I prefer to think of as a new global
tinderbox -- bears only the most minimal resemblance to that earlier
period. As before, the United States and its rivals are engaged in an
accelerating arms race, focused on nuclear and “conventional” weaponry of
ever-increasing range, precision, and lethality. All three countries, in
characteristic Cold War fashion, are also lining up allies in what increasingly
looks like a global power struggle.
But the similarities
end there. Among the differences, the first couldn’t be more obvious:
the U.S. now faces two determined adversaries, not one, and a far more complex
global conflict map (with a corresponding increase in potential nuclear
flashpoints). At the same time, the old boundaries between “peace” and “war”
are rapidly disappearing as all three rivals engage in what could be thought of
as combat by other means, including trade wars and cyberattacks that might set
the stage for far greater violence to follow. To compound the danger, all three
big powers are now engaging in provocative acts aimed at “demonstrating
resolve” or intimidating rivals, including menacing U.S. and Chinese naval maneuvers off Chinese-occupied islands in the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, rather than pursue the sort of arms-control agreements that tempered
Cold War hostilities, the U.S. and Russia appear intent on tearing up
existing accords and launching a new nuclear arms race.
These factors could
already be steering the world ever closer to a new Cuban Missile Crisis, when
the world came within a hairsbreadth of nuclear incineration. This one,
however, could start in the South China Sea or even in the Baltic region, where
U.S. and Russian planes and ships are similarly engaged in regular
near-collisions.
Why are such dangers
so rapidly ramping up? To answer this, it’s worth exploring the factors that
distinguish this moment from the original Cold War era. MORE
http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/michaelklare/
Michael T. Klare,
a tomdispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of
peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting
fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All
Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National
Security, will be published in
2019.
|
Rick Wayman. “Tell your senators to oppose
Trump's war cabinet.” Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 3-30-18. Dangerous new
appointments by President Trump have added even more urgency to the effort to
take away the president’s ability to use nuclear weapons first. John Bolton is an extreme hawk, and is set to become
National Security Advisor on April 9. He has advocated military action
against North Korea and Iran. Bolton was a top advocate of the regime change
war in Iraq in 2003, which has had catastrophic consequences for Iraq and the
wider Middle East, as well as for the U.S. His unbridled enthusiasm to repeat
the debacle of preventive military action and regime change in both North
Korea and Iran is a huge concern. Bolton’s new position unfortunately does
not require Senate confirmation. Trump also nominated
Mike Pompeo to become the new U.S. Secretary of State. Pompeo is a
staunch opponent of the nuclear deal that was negotiated among the U.S.,
Iran, Russia, UK, France, China, and Germany. In July 2017, Pompeo spoke in
favor of regime change in North Korea. He said, “I am hopeful we will find a
way to separate the [North Korean] regime from this [nuclear weapons] system…
The North Korean people, I’m sure, are lovely people and would love to see
him go.” A regime change war in North Korea would put the lives of millions
of people across Northeast Asia, including U.S. soldiers and civilians, at
risk. While our members of
Congress cannot do anything to block Bolton’s appointment, the Senate does
have to confirm Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Having Pompeo as our
nation’s top diplomat would be disastrous. The Iran deal showed the power of
diplomacy and true negotiations. Scrapping it would harm U.S. relations with
the rest of the world, especially in the current opportunity for making
progress with North Korea. U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal would cast
doubt on all international agreements we have made in the past and will try
to make in the future. Please take a moment
to contact your
senators and urge them
to vote “no” to Mike Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State, and let them know
that you support Sen. Ed Markey’s bill to restrict the president’s first use
of nuclear weapons. |
OMNI NUCLEAR WEAPONS
ABOLITION NEWSLETTER #23, JANUARY 15, 2017.
Http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2018/01/omni-nuclear-weapons-abolition.html
Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil by
John Scales Avery, Danish Peace Academy, 25 Jan 2018 .
NUCLEAR WEAPONS: AN ABSOLUTE EVIL
Fredsakademiet http://www.fredsakademiet.dk ›
library › nuclear
By JS
Avery · 2017 · — The threat of nuclear war
is very high today. This book is a
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paperback › product-23501755 This book advocates the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. It discusses the
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Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil
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https://eacpe.org › Books
Nov 20, 2017 — Download (PDF, 3.02MB) · This
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Anne
Baring. “Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil.” –
TRANSCEND Media Service . Https://www.annebaring.com/anbar73_bookreview.html
”
The
Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War ?
A ‘New Cold War’ on an Ever-Hotter Planet” By Tom
Engelhardt.
Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really
involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as
the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the
United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War,
something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a
“hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear
arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything.
But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the
phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media
vocabulary. (Check it out at Wikipedia.) Admittedly, unlike John F. Kennedy, Joe
Biden has not actually spoken about bearing “the
burden of a long, twilight struggle.” Still, the actions of his foreign policy
crew — in spirit, like the president, distinctly old Cold Warriors — have
helped make the very idea that we’re in a new version of just such a conflict
part of everyday media chatter.
And yet, let’s stop and think about just what
planet we’re actually on. In the wake of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two
atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was
little doubt about how “hot” a war between future nuclear-armed powers might
get. And today, of course, we know that, if such a word can even be used in
this context, a relatively modest nuclear conflict between, say, India and
Pakistan might actually obliterate billions of us, in part by
creating a — yes, brrr — “nuclear winter,” that would give the very
phrase “cold” war a distinctly new meaning.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Jeremy Kuzmarov. “Talk
of War with China is Total Insanity—Everybody’s Finished if it Takes Place,”
says Noam Chomsky.
Mronline.org
(5-30-23).
“Major world powers need to
shift from confrontation to accommodation soon; otherwise, we’ll go off the
precipice together.”
Originally published: Covertaction Magazine on May 26, 2023 (more by covertaction Magazine). Empire, Imperialism, Strategy, waramericas, Asia, China, United statesnewswirenoam Chomsky
The renowned linguist
and political dissident Noam Chomsky gave a grim prognosis on international
politics at a webinar hosted
by Massachusetts Peace Action on April 26.
Chomsky told the
audience that he was dismayed to read in the pages of Foreign Affairs,
the journal of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, that we “can have
a small nuclear war with Russia…who cares.”
This kind of talk,
said Chomsky, is “beyond insanity.” A nuclear war will result in mass suffering
and destruction of much of the planet—as whoever strikes first will engender
retaliation.
Chomsky said that
Albert Einstein was once asked what weapons would be used to fight World War
III. He responded that he didn’t know, but that “World War IV would be fought
with sticks and stones.” Which appears to be where we are headed.
U.S. generals, who
Chomsky said should know better, are talking openly about war with China,
almost as if it is a fait accompli. . . .
MORE
“Daniel Ellsberg: a
Profound Voice Against the Doomsday Machine”
BY JUDITH EHRLICH. Roots Action,
APRIL 27, 2023.
Photograph
Source: Gotfryd, Bernard – Public Domain
The current Daniel Ellsberg Week celebrates the achievements and inspirational
spirit of the most significant whistleblower of the 20th century. Daniel
Ellsberg’s recent announcement of a terminal diagnosis broke my heart, but his
remarkable response gave me great hope. To quote
Ellsberg: “As I just told my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor) that I
work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!”
Daniel Ellsberg has done just that; an
avalanche of interviews and webinars have followed his announcement. And now
the Rootsaction Education Fund has
teamed up with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy to co-sponsor Daniel Ellsberg Week, April 24-30, to celebrate his life’s work and “to honor peacemaking and
whistleblowing.”
Known as the insider who blew the whistle on
U.S. government lying about the Vietnam War, Ellsberg’s high level military
planning experience began earlier. Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner
during the 1950s and ’60s. For decades he has put himself on the line to oppose
those evil plans; writing, speaking, standing up and sitting-in against the
threat of nuclear annihilation. Ellsberg has been hauled off to jail for civil
disobedience against war over 80 times. Here he offers chilling clarity about
“the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill
billions of people,” calling it “a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near
omnicide, the death of everyone.” He asks us, “Can humanity survive the
nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
This quote is from one of several eye-opening
podcasts being released this week (which I directed in partnership with the rootsaction
Education Fund), enabling people to hear Ellsberg directly. In these half dozen
two-to-three-minute animated musings, Daniel Ellsberg offers up a succinct
analysis of the calamity posed by nuclear weapons and a possible way to reduce
their risk. You can watch and listen here.
When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon
Papers in 1971, Henry Kissinger (then President Nixon’s national security
advisor) called him “the most dangerous man in America.” But those closely held
secrets of the war in Vietnam were less explosive than the nuclear secrets that
Ellsberg held in his safe. Then a top strategist for the Defense Department, he
had been party to plans for a nuclear holocaust. After being buried for
safekeeping, those documents disappeared in a hurricane that literally blew
away his secrets, but that didn’t dampen Ellsberg’s desire to share what he
knew.
At 92, with mind sharp as ever, Ellsberg
remains an undisputed expert on “national security.” In this unusual illustrated podcast, he shares his unvarnished thoughts about the threat of nuclear
annihilation and how it might be defused.
Can we simply ignore the reality of the
world’s largest nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert — amid escalation of a
new cold war with heightened nuclear dangers? Indeed, the U.S. just enacted its
biggest military budget in history, with unprecedented investment in weapons of
mass destruction and their deployment.
We ignore this impending disaster and its
impassioned opponent, Daniel Ellsberg, at our own peril.
Here’s a chance to honor him by listening and heeding his words.
Judith Ehrlich co-directed
and produced “The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg and
the Pentagon Papers,” which was nominated for an Oscar and Emmy and won
the Peabody Award. Her recent film, “The Boys Who Said NO!” Features
Daniel Ellsberg, Joan Baez and a cast of war resisters who chose prison over
killing in the Vietnam War. To watch the Oscar-nominated film on Daniel
Ellsberg, please go to: www.mostdangerousman.org. To host a
screening of “The Boys Who Said NO!” See here, and to read
Ellsberg’s 2017 gripping expose “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear
War Planner” see: https://www.ellsberg.net.
Thermonuclear
Monarchy: CHOOSING BETWEEN
DEMOCRACY AND DOOM by Elaine Scarry. Harvard UP, 2016.
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.
BOOK DETAILS
·
Hardcover
·
February 2014
·
6.5 × 9.6 in / 592
pages
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
“Militarism and the
Coming Wars.”
István Mészáros. Mronline.org (4-20-23).
Originally published in the June 2003 issue of Monthly Review. Read the full article at the Monthly Review website.
It is not for the
first time in history that militarism weighs on the consciousness of the
people as a nightmare. To go into detail would take far too long. However, here
it should be enough to go back in history only as far as the nineteenth century
when militarism, as a major instrument of policy making, came into its own,
with the unfolding of modern imperialism on a global scale, in contrast to its
earlier—much more limited—varieties. By the last third of the nineteenth
century the British and French Empires were not the only prominent rulers of
vast territories. The United States, too, made its heavy imprint by
directly or indirectly taking over the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in
Latin America, adding to them the bloody repression of a great liberation
struggle in the Philippines and installing themselves as rulers in that area in
a way which still persists in one form or another. Nor should we forget the
calamities caused by “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck’s imperialist ambitions and
their aggravated pursuit later on by his successors, resulting in the eruption
of the First World War and its deeply antagonistic aftermath, bringing with it
Hitler’s Nazi revanchism and thereby very clearly foreshadowing the Second
World War itself.
The dangers and
immense suffering caused by all attempts at solving deep-seated social problems
by militaristic interventions, on any scale, are obvious enough. If, however,
we look more closely at the historical trend of militaristic adventures, it
becomes frighteningly clear that they show an ever greater intensification and
an ever-increasing scale, from local confrontations to two horrendous world
wars in the twentieth century, and to the potential annihilation of humankind
when we reach our own time. . . . MORE
Jeffrey
Sachs. “ONE WAR PARTY V. JILL STEIN AND
GREEN PARTY.” Https://www.jillstein2024.com/jeffrey_sachs_endorses_jill_stein
Jeffrey D. Sachs. “WAR PARTIES, THE PEACE CANDIDATE, AND THE
NOVEMBER ELECTION.”
The Democrats and
the Republicans are outdoing each other to prove who can get us to World War
III fastest. Joe Biden and the Congressional Democrats are making a
convincing bid to be the leading warmongers. The Congressional Democrats
just voted unanimously in a vote of 210 – 0 to extend
the Ukraine War with another $61 Billion to kill more Russians and Ukrainians,
and by a lopsided majority of 173-37 for another $14
Billion to extend Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Donald
Trump weighed in before the vote that Ukraine’s survival and strength is “important to us”, and that Europe should pay
more. Republican Speaker Mike Johnson did his part for warmongering by
calling Russia, China, and Iran the updated axis of evil. The slur was just in time for
Secretary of State Blinken to fly to China to threaten more US
sanctions if China trades with Russia in ways the US
disapproves.
The strongest Presidential candidate
for peace is Jill Stein of the Green Party, who is on track to appear on ballots
across the country. The Green Party is well advanced in gaining full
national access and is working very hard to complete that task. Cornel
West, another passionate candidate for peace, is on the ballot in a few states
but as an independent candidate faces prohibitive expenses for ballot access
because of an unfair system rigged by the two main parties. Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., alas, is only half a peace candidate, strong on ending the Ukraine
War through diplomacy, but stridently backing Israel’s war in Gaza rather than
the diplomacy that is urgently needed and capable of ending the war.
On a bipartisan basis, the White
House and Congress are driving the world towards a global war. Washington
has absolutely no strategy for Ukraine to win the war, but is intent on
arming Ukraine to kill as many Russians as possible, even as the war kills
vastly more Ukrainians. From the start of Russia’s special military
operation in Ukraine, I called for
a negotiated peace, emphasizing Ukrainian neutrality and an end to NATO
enlargement – which is vociferously, and understandably, opposed by Russia
as an existential threat. Yet Biden and Congress continue to insist on
NATO enlargement to Ukraine and hence on more war. The result?
Ukraine has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and ongoing
territorial losses.
At the same time, Biden is
now arming Israel to commit unconscionable war crimes, with more support
now on the way. The US complicity in Israel’s slaughter of Gazans is
strongly rejected by the American people, especially young people, yet Biden
and Congress aren’t listening to the people. The Government of South
Africa, in an application to the International Court of
Justice (ICJ), has powerfully asserted that Israel is committing
genocide. Yet when US students say the same, they are now being
arrested. In fact, the ICJ quickly ruled that Israel’s actions might
well violate the 1948 Genocide Convention, pending a final ruling that will
take more time.
If all this were not enough, the US
continues to escalate its many provocations towards China. The US
is imposing new unilateral trade, financial, and technology measures to hinder
China’s economy. These measures are in violation of American commitments
under international trade rules, yet the US brazenly imposes them in any
event. In another paranoid and vindictive action, Congress also voted today that tiktok must be sold by its
Chinese owners to a US owner.
The US also has the gall to attack
China for its “over-capacity” in manufacturing production. The term
“over-capacity” really just means that China produces large volumes of
high-quality manufactured goods at very low prices. China’s production
processes for electric vehicles, for example, are astoundingly efficient.
Most recently, Biden has put
US troops into Kinmen Island, an island of Taiwan, in violation of the one-China
policy that underpins US relations with China, and therefore peace. The
US has also gratuitously upped the anti-China rhetoric together with the
leaders of Japan and Korea.
The Biden Administration’s antagonism
to Iran is similarly relentless and hypocritical. On April 1,
Israel bombed Iran’s diplomatic compound, in a stark violation of international
law. Yet instead of condemning Israel’s actions, the US
blocked criticism of Israel by the UN Security Council the next day. When Iran
counter-attacked on April 14, the US harshly criticized Iran and even put on
new sanctions. Washington goes out of its way to assert such double
standards.
So, let’s add it all up regarding the alleged “axis of
evil.” The US rejects negotiations with Russia because the US wants to
use the Ukraine War to weaken Russia, even as the war destroys Ukraine in
the process. The US refuses to take any action to rein in Israel’s mass
slaughter in Gaza. The US flagrantly provokes China in multiple
ways. The US punishes Iran for escalation started by Israel. There
is no axis of evil. Rather, the US has pushed Russia, China,
and Iran ever more tightly together in the face of unrelenting and misguided US
militarism.
Americans are profoundly unhappy
about all of this warmongering. Only 33
percent of Americans approve of Biden’s foreign policy. Biden is a
life-long neocon, supporting NATO expansion, military adventures, and regime
change operations for decades. He is also unfit to lead the country for
another four years and should not be running for re-election in any event.
Meanwhile, Trump as president armed Ukraine, dissed the Minsk II
agreement that would have defused the crisis, and went out of his way to
antagonize and abandon diplomacy with both China and Iran. The world
is closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever, just 90 seconds to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock
of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
America’s two main parties offer
Americans no real say on the life-and-death issues of war and peace. Both
are war parties. Both continue to shovel in more money and munitions
to try to hide their past reckless miscalculations. Both parties also
serve the same paymasters: Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and
the mega-rich, who fund the two parties to deliver tax cuts and subsidies cuts
for the wealthy, and NATO enlargement and arms contracts for the military
industries. Peace and economic justice therefore go hand in
hand.
The true hope for foreign policy sanity
and a fair economy is the lead peace candidate, Jill Stein. The main work for peace activists in
the next few weeks is to ensure that Stein is indeed on the ballot in every
state in November, despite the brazen attempts by the two major parties to keep
the Green Party and peace candidates off the ballot. As Americans in
record numbers call for a political choice outside the failed parties of war
and Wall Street, and for diplomatic solutions to the wars raging around the
world, a voter surge for peace could well occur in November. If Stein is on the
ballot across the nation, voters will have that choice.
*Professor at Columbia University, is
Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and
President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as
adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG
Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.
OMNI WORLD WAR III Anthology #1,
April 6, 2023
Https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/04/omni-world-war-iii-anthology-1-april-6.html
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..
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