It is remarkable how speedily history has been transformed. Further developments will come as fast. As Thunberg stressed, we need now to believe in change. Not just scientific change, but also social. You will hear people say that you can’t change human nature. But you can change human behaviour, as we must.
As early as 1945 leading scientists – Szilard and Nobel laureate James Franck among them – realised that world history had undergone a fundamental transformation. They stated this clearly, despite the fact that they were prevented from speaking publicly by secrecy.
What these scientists were saying, in advance of the first A-bomb, was the following (I quote from their report, given in secret): “Unless an effective international control…is instituted, a race for nuclear armaments is certain to ensue following the first revelation of our possession of a nuclear weapon.”
They were right. Seventy years later, we still find ourselves in the midst of that arms race. As their report foresaw, such a race isn’t likely to end spontaneously, but disastrously – unless we deliberately curb armaments. And that we must do by law.
The notion that war should be subject to law, is not new. It is as old as war. What is altogether new today is the scale on which we can kill, which leaves us no alternative but to curb war by law.
This change became clearly evident through the years of the Second World War, when thousands of bombers were engaged in dispersing death indiscriminately. Opposition to this murderous development was at first muted. Today, when plans for war can no longer be distinguished from plans for genocide, the changed circumstance should be evident. Not for the first time, mankind has reached a historic moral divide.
Our task is to make people aware of this new reality. It is a noble task. We should rejoice that it falls to us. Rejoice or not, the obligation is ours. And it is clearly a task of education.
Let me say a word about my own education regarding the nuclear age. This was an inescapable topic when I was a young scientist at Princeton University, in the early 1950s. Today, it should be an inescapable topic for all scientists.
As so often happens, one discovery was in the process of triggering another. At the time of my arrival in Princeton, there was talk of an altogether new weapon, the H-bomb, more powerful by a further factor of a thousand than the A-bomb. The new weapon was to be based not on nuclear fission, but on the fusion of hydrogen nuclei – the reaction that powers the sun. The scientists in the know agonised over this awful development.
That same year, 1950, President Truman determined to proceed with the H-bomb, despite virtually unanimous opposition from his most senior scientific advisors. Importantly, the source of their opposition was not technical, but moral.
The basis for the scientists’ opposition was set out in an article by a leading nuclear physicist, my friend Hans Bethe. Despite all attempts at censorship, it was published in Scientific American in early 1950. “Can we who insist on morality and humanity,” he wrote, “introduce this weapon of total annihilation into the world?…Shall we convince the Russians of the value of the individual, by killing millions?”
Bethe, I remind you, was speaking before even a single H-bomb existed. For the second time in a few years, the scientists were being asked to look ahead, and to think beyond their area of expertise. Half a century later, we still struggle to comprehend the truth of Bethe’s warning.
In retrospect you may be amazed that Truman ignored the advice of his scientists. Truman made his decision to proceed from atomic bombs to H-bombs, impelled by the terrible logic of the arms race. The Soviet Union had just tested an A-bomb and was designing an H-bomb. To the US, having been the first to make an A-bomb in 1945, it seemed imperative to be the first with the H-bomb, too. And so it was, in 1952. But this advantage, as should have been anticipated, was short-lived. Two years later, the Soviet Union tested its own H-bomb. Within a few years H-bombs were being built on both sides, in their thousands.
How, you will ask, could nations be persuaded to engage in such folly? The most prominent reason was the desire to keep ahead of their opponents. Moreover, since each party was obliged, in such a crucial matter, to leave a margin of error, that competition would be unending. Accordingly, in 1952, for the second time in the space of a few years, the world was launched on a quest for vastly increased destructive power. This time, to our shame, the development was in peace, rather than in war.
It would have been much saner to negotiate an agreement for mutual restraint with the single nuclear opponent at the time, the Russians. The option was discussed, but the voice of reason was too faint to be heard. What was missing, because of secrecy, was the clamour of popular demand.
The scientists, then as now, have a special responsibility to raise the alarm. Their voices were heard in the several appeals, most clearly in the Russell-Einstein manifesto of 1955, which called for international meetings of scientists, with clear public recommendations. Cyrus Eaton, a Canadian industrialist, offered to finance such meetings, starting in his hometown of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. In 1960, one of what became known as the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs was held in Russia for the first time. I was in attendance.
The participants agreed that, as an unmistakable step toward disarmament, the sides should have only a “minimum deterrent”. They even suggested that this minimum comprise a single bomb located under Washington DC, and another under Moscow. This macabre proposal is worth recalling in today’s world of thousands of H-bombs.
But the number of nuclear weapons, far from stopping at a minimum level that might be justified by mutual deterrence, reached 30,000 on either side by the end of the Cold War in 1990. At that time, Moscow, as we now know, was targeted by 400 nuclear weapons, so that it could be destroyed a hundred times over.
This madness was followed by significant restraint. The “New Start” agreement of 2011 at present limits the two countries to 1,550 deployed (plus some 6,000 stored) nuclear weapons each, with, importantly, provision for intrusive inspection. The agreement lapses in February 2021, and negotiations for its renewal need urgently to be under way. But, tragically, there is no evidence of negotiations.
Reason is not dead. But the restraint that remains is a consequence of repeated close calls. This is a game of roulette too dangerous to continue. We would do well to recall the closest of close calls, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The crisis occurred two years after the Moscow Pugwash meeting. For 13 days, the world found itself at the brink of all-out nuclear war.
The danger came suddenly, as can happen when nations are poised at the brink of war. On 16 October 1962, a stunned public heard President Kennedy announce on television that the USSR was installing nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. Kennedy responded that the launch of a single missile from Cuba against the US would lead to “a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union”. This meant unrestricted nuclear war, and the deaths of hundreds of millions. At stake was the fate of civilisations.
During those 13 days, we largely stopped work in our lab. What was the point? Because of my involvement with Pugwash, I was asked by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to comment. I arrived with a manuscript, which the show’s producer examined. He remarked, “I’m glad that you are giving this talk, not me”.
I knew that what I was planning to say would be controversial. I felt it important to insist, contrary to accepted opinion, that the world had not been transformed by Khrushchev’s action. We in the West had been totally vulnerable to Soviet nuclear weapons before his ill-judged act and were now, in addition, vulnerable to weapons in Cuba. But a colossal deterrent force still remained in the hands of the West: US missiles and the US air force maintained a threat of total devastation against the USSR. It would be reckless, therefore, for the US to invade Cuba to “restore the balance”. The balance did not need restoring. We had best not start something we could not stop.
But this was not at all what people wanted to hear. Nor, indeed, was it the whole story.
Khrushchev had chosen to secretly ship nuclear missiles from Russia to Cuba. He thought he had good reason to do that. The Russian missiles that he sent closely resembled those that the US had the previous year installed in Turkey, a few minutes’ flight from Russia. Khrushchev supposed Kennedy would see his move as restoring the balance. After all, Kennedy had been reported as saying that “geography doesn’t make much difference today. What does it matter if you got blown up by a missile based in Cuba, or the Soviet Union?”
It turned out it mattered a lot. Politics is not mathematics. Had Kennedy not responded forcefully to Khrushchev, he would have been seen to be weak, tempting Khrushchev to take still greater risks probably in Berlin, where the sides tensely confronted one another.
The two principals in the Cuban Missile crisis, it should not need to be said, were extremely anxious to avoid war. Yet purely defensive actions taken by the US against Soviet submarines approaching Cuba seemed to Russia to carry a message of US readiness to launch nuclear war. For those submarines, entirely unknown to the US, were nuclear-armed. This was an unintended confrontation of nukes by nukes. The sides were inching closer to the brink.
At the same time, Kennedy was under heavy pressure from his military to send troops to attack the Russian missiles in nearby Cuba. Something he did not know was that the missiles in Cuba were nuclear-armed. Something else he did not know was that the local commanders in Cuba had been empowered to fire them.
It was the world’s good fortune that Kennedy had the strength of character to hold back his generals. An attack, we now realise, would have resulted in nuclear war.
By the 13th day, it was clear that Khrushchev was ordering his missiles out of Cuba. This was the end of the crisis and also of Khrushchev’s career – a matter of importance to him.
The 1962 crisis may seem remote. Today, we have nine independent nuclear powers, not two. But we can all recall the Korean missile crisis of 2017-18. Instead of a nuclear power rashly shifting weapons across the board, what we were experiencing was the advent of a new nuclear power, North Korea.
Prominent among North Korea’s opponents were nations that had long had nuclear weapons, and zealously guarded their privileged status. They blithely assured the North Koreans that the existing nuclear weapons would not constitute a threat to their country, if only North Korea would end its reckless behaviour and disarm. The argument was sufficiently weak that the aspiring nuclear power lied year after year about its intentions, and, at the same time, raced to achieve the goal of nuclear invulnerability to a US first strike. Incredibly, on the backs of its destitute population, North Korea managed to achieve that – by building mobile ICBMs that could not be reliably targeted, supplemented today by submarine-launched ICBMs similarly invulnerable to attack.
In its vain attempt to thwart this development, the US had threatened nuclear war at intervals for the 30 years, starting in the 1990s, that it took North Korea to achieve its objective of becoming a nuclear superpower with a guaranteed second strike capability. This spectacle of the helplessness of the most powerful nation on earth in the face of one of the weakest has not had the attention it deserves.
It has two sources. The first is that the existing nuclear weapons states have no special right to possess nuclear weapons. Indeed, they should have no such moral right. Secondly, although powerful, these existing nuclear powers are vulnerable, being bound together by fragile networks of nuclear obligations. The guarantees of nuclear retaliation that they have given to their allies ensure that a small nuclear match can set aflame a large tinderbox. It is our great good fortune – nothing more – that has spared us from nuclear war.
How close did we come to nuclear war in the recent North Korean crisis?
The impasse was only resolved, as in the case of the Cuban crisis, by one side backing down. But this time it was the US that retreated, accepting the fact that a new country had joined the Nuclear Club. The risks of nuclear war, were, however, real. The foreign minister of North Korea was stating a fact when he declared at the UN that “the slightest miscalculation could have led to all-out war”.
This account, alarming as it is, glosses over an important further source of danger. It stems from the fact that the two principal actors in this story, President Trump and North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un, were individually empowered to initiate nuclear war. This appalling circumstance comes about through the belief, in a dictatorship or a democracy, that nuclear war should not be subject to delay. The button, as the leaders repeatedly termed it, must always be at hand.
We have for too long acceded to this perilous situation, rendered still more dangerous by secret delegations of power that subsequently come to light when and if history is written.
These observations are fraught with lessons. The first is that the risk of nuclear war from miscalculation, even when all parties are alert to the danger, is intolerably high. The second is that restraint can be counted on to bring unforeseen rewards.
In regard to the second point, we realise today that in addition to the millions killed directly by a nuclear war, millions more will die in subsequent years from famine, as crops fail due to the “nuclear winter” caused by the blocking of the sun’s rays by soot from fires. We cannot calculate the precise numbers, but it is not an experiment we should ever dare conduct.
The hazards do not end there. Today, as never before, miscommunication heightens the danger. Miscommunication comes not only by chance but by intent, since it has become a weapon. An escalating arms race in cyberspace is forever compounding the risk of war.
We take heart from the fact that despite increasing risks, for three-quarters of a century there has been no nuclear war. Most mistakenly attribute this to the solidity of deterrence. But deterrence is less stable than it appears. If deterrence were indeed stable, why would nuclear powers compete so vigorously to strengthen their armaments, as they are doing? What is the lack that calls constantly for weapons modernisation and diversification? Why is it that the supposed equilibrium of deterrence is accompanied by its opposite, a race for dominance?
The reason is as simple as it is alarming. It is that the parties who claim to be deterred are not. They have yet to hear the voices of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declaring that “A nuclear war cannot be won, and must never be fought.” Instead, although they seldom advertise it, they nurture the ambition to be nuclear victors.
This, too, is the reason they keep their “strategic” arsenals ready for launching in a matter of minutes. Their objective of this “launch-on-warning” is to first degrade the opponent’s attack by a disarming first strike, followed by missile defence of their own territory.
This is not the only way in which the concept of deterrence is being eroded. A second development in the same direction is to reduce the explosive power of nuclear weapons so that they can be seen as suitable for achieving limited objectives. This “tactical” use of nuclear weapons was proposed decades ago and was rejected when military exercises convinced the parties that what was being protected by such means would have been destroyed.
So what is the path forward? I return to the steps I mentioned at the outset. First, we must demand that the nuclear weapons states move to the situation that most imagine, quite wrongly, already exists, namely deterrence based on shared vulnerability. A clear-sighted Robert Oppenheimer likened this to a pair of scorpions in a bottle, each able to kill the other but only at the cost of its own life.
We shall know deterrence actually exists when only a few nuclear weapons remain. We shall also know deterrence is the aim when these weapons are no longer kept on alert, being instead separated from their warheads. This is not a preposterous demand. China has for years limited itself to a deterrent of a few hundred nuclear weapons, with its missiles and warheads visibly separated.
This step must be followed by a second more demanding one. We must set aside the perilous notion (expressed by Winston Churchill) that “peace can be the sturdy child of terror”. The risks of such a course, as should be evident, are intolerable. Instead, we must resolve, at last, to implement a solemn agreement made by almost all the nuclear and non-nuclear states as long as half a century ago. It is an agreement to outlaw nuclear weapons. This lies at the heart of the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, the central arms control agreement of the age.
The objective spelled out in Article 6 commits the five then existing nuclear powers to complete nuclear disarmament. This was a logical necessity since the five had no basis whatsoever for arguing that their nuclear weapons, in contrast to others’, served the cause of peace.
In the intervening years, those five have been joined by a further four, and all nine can be seen to be extending their nuclear arsenals. Yet in the New START agreement, limiting the number of nuclear warheads deployed by the superpowers, the central assertion is that more weapons would be accompanied by less security. This is an important step on the path to acknowledging that the continued existence of these weapons poses an unacceptable threat to humankind.
Importantly, at the UN General Assembly on 7 July 2017, an overwhelming majority of nations, 122 of the UN’s 190, voted to frame a global “Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty”. Once ratified by 50 UN states, this treaty would prohibit nations developing, testing, possessing, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons. So far, 33 have ratified.
Is this nuclear weapon ban beyond the realm of the possible? Surely, not. In 1968, the entire region of Latin America declared itself a nuclear weapon-free zone, under the Treaty of Tlatelolco. That prohibition remains. The framers of that agreement, in common with today’s proponents of a nuclear weapons prohibition, were acting out of moral repugnance against weapons of indiscriminate slaughter. That repugnance, as it should be, is already present in international law, giving rise to such measures as the existing bans on chemical and biological weapons, cluster bombs and anti-personnel mines.
But where, it will be asked, does such legal commentary on moral matters get us? The answer is that, little by little such laws inevitably come to govern behaviour. That has proved to be the case in regard to such issues as slavery, apartheid and genocide.
It goes without saying that the existing nuclear powers and their allies scorn the proposed nuclear weapons ban as undermining the international order. The government of my country, Canada, deems it “unrealistic” and “premature”. Better premature, perhaps, than too late. As for “unrealistic”, we pass through unreality on the way to new realities. Consider the fact that Canada, a member of a nuclear alliance, has for half a century refused to have nuclear weapons on its soil. Canadians take pride in that protest against a reality so clearly in need of change.
What is the circumstance that most compellingly calls for change? It is our present enslavement to barbaric instruments of war. To a few they bring wealth, to most impoverishment, and to all, peril. Essential to the earlier escape from slavery was moral revulsion; this cannot help but be the case again.
President Kennedy’s life was cut short by a crazed assassin, yet he left us with a guide to our common future. “We all inhabit this small planet,” he remarked. “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal.”

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-must-do-more-prevent-nuclear-war

In 2010, 50 nuclear-armed Minuteman missiles sitting in underground silos in Wyoming mysteriously disappeared from their launching crews’ monitors for nearly an hour. The crews could not have fired the missiles on presidential orders or discerned whether an enemy was trying to launch them. Was this a technical malfunction or was it something sinister? Had a hacker discovered an electronic back door to cut the links? For all the crews knew, someone had put all 50 missiles into countdown to launch. The missiles were designed to fire instantly as soon as they received a short stream of computer code, and they are indifferent about the code’s source.

It was a harrowing scene, and apprehension rippled all the way to the White House. Hackers were constantly bombarding our nuclear networks, and it was considered possible that they had breached the firewalls. The Air Force quickly determined that an improperly installed circuit card in an underground computer was responsible for the lockout, and the problem was fixed.

But President Obama was not satisfied and ordered investigators to continue to look for similar vulnerabilities. Sure enough, they turned up deficiencies, according to officials involved in the investigation.

One of these deficiencies involved the Minuteman silos, whose internet connections could have allowed hackers to cause the missiles’ flight guidance systems to shut down, putting them out of commission and requiring days or weeks to repair.

These were not the first cases of cybervulnerability. In the mid-1990s, the Pentagon uncovered an astonishing firewall breach that could have allowed outside hackers to gain control over the key naval radio transmitter in Maine used to send launching orders to ballistic missile submarines patrolling the Atlantic. So alarming was this discovery, which I learned about from interviews with military officials, that the Navy radically redesigned procedures so that submarine crews would never accept a launching order that came out of the blue unless it could be verified through a second source.

Cyberwarfare raises a host of other fears. Could a foreign agent launch another country’s missiles against a third country? We don’t know. Could a launch be set off by false early warning data that had been corrupted by hackers? This is an especially grave concern because the president has only three to six minutes to decide how to respond to an apparent nuclear attack.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and there will always be some doubt about our vulnerability. We lack adequate control over the supply chain for nuclear components — from design to manufacture to maintenance. We get much of our hardware and software off-the-shelf from commercial sources that could be infected by malware. We nevertheless routinely use them in critical networks. This loose security invites an attempt at an attack with catastrophic consequences. The risk would grow exponentially if an insider, wittingly or not, shares passwords, inserts infected thumb drives or otherwise facilitates illicit access to critical computers.

One stopgap remedy is to take United States and Russian strategic nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert. Given the risks, it is dangerous to keep missiles in this physical state, and to maintain plans for launching them on early indications of an attack. Questions abound about the susceptibility to hacking of tens of thousands of miles of underground cabling and the backup radio antennas used for launching Minuteman missiles. They (and their Russian counterparts) should be taken off alert. Better yet, we should eliminate silo-based missiles and quick-launch procedures on all sides.

But this is just a start. We need to conduct a comprehensive examination of the threat and develop a remediation plan. We need to better understand the unintended consequences of cyberwarfare — such as possibly weakening another nation’s safeguards against unauthorized launching. We need to improve control over our nuclear supply chain. And it is time to reach an agreement with our rivals on the red lines. The reddest line should put nuclear networks off limits to cyberintrusion. Despite its allure, cyberwarfare risks causing nuclear pandemonium.”

We had such an Achilles’ heel not so long ago. Minuteman missiles were vulnerable to a disabling cyberattack, and no one realized it for many years. If not for a curious and persistent President Barack Obama, it might never have been discovered and rectified.

In 2010, 50 nuclear-armed Minuteman missiles sitting in underground silos in Wyoming mysteriously disappeared from their launching crews’ monitors for nearly an hour. The crews could not have fired the missiles on presidential orders or discerned whether an enemy was trying to launch them. Was this a technical malfunction or was it something sinister? Had a hacker discovered an electronic back door to cut the links? For all the crews knew, someone had put all 50 missiles into countdown to launch. The missiles were designed to fire instantly as soon as they received a short stream of computer code, and they are indifferent about the code’s source.

It was a harrowing scene, and apprehension rippled all the way to the White House. Hackers were constantly bombarding our nuclear networks, and it was considered possible that they had breached the firewalls. The Air Force quickly determined that an improperly installed circuit card in an underground computer was responsible for the lockout, and the problem was fixed.

But President Obama was not satisfied and ordered investigators to continue to look for similar vulnerabilities. Sure enough, they turned up deficiencies, according to officials involved in the investigation.

One of these deficiencies involved the Minuteman silos, whose internet connections could have allowed hackers to cause the missiles’ flight guidance systems to shut down, putting them out of commission and requiring days or weeks to repair.

These were not the first cases of cybervulnerability. In the mid-1990s, the Pentagon uncovered an astonishing firewall breach that could have allowed outside hackers to gain control over the key naval radio transmitter in Maine used to send launching orders to ballistic missile submarines patrolling the Atlantic. So alarming was this discovery, which I learned about from interviews with military officials, that the Navy radically redesigned procedures so that submarine crews would never accept a launching order that came out of the blue unless it could be verified through a second source.

Cyberwarfare raises a host of other fears. Could a foreign agent launch another country’s missiles against a third country? We don’t know. Could a launch be set off by false early warning data that had been corrupted by hackers? This is an especially grave concern because the president has only three to six minutes to decide how to respond to an apparent nuclear attack.

This is the stuff of nightmares, and there will always be some doubt about our vulnerability. We lack adequate control over the supply chain for nuclear components — from design to manufacture to maintenance. We get much of our hardware and software off-the-shelf from commercial sources that could be infected by malware. We nevertheless routinely use them in critical networks. This loose security invites an attempt at an attack with catastrophic consequences. The risk would grow exponentially if an insider, wittingly or not, shares passwords, inserts infected thumb drives or otherwise facilitates illicit access to critical computers.

One stopgap remedy is to take United States and Russian strategic nuclear missiles off hair-trigger alert. Given the risks, it is dangerous to keep missiles in this physical state, and to maintain plans for launching them on early indications of an attack. Questions abound about the susceptibility to hacking of tens of thousands of miles of underground cabling and the backup radio antennas used for launching Minuteman missiles. They (and their Russian counterparts) should be taken off alert. Better yet, we should eliminate silo-based missiles and quick-launch procedures on all sides.

But this is just a start. We need to conduct a comprehensive examination of the threat and develop a remediation plan. We need to better understand the unintended consequences of cyberwarfare — such as possibly weakening another nation’s safeguards against unauthorized launching. We need to improve control over our nuclear supply chain. And it is time to reach an agreement with our rivals on the red lines. The reddest line should put nuclear networks off limits to cyberintrusion. Despite its allure, cyberwarfare risks causing nuclear pandemonium.”

And US President Donald Trump has been roundly condemned for “a racist remark” after describing the deadly disease as “a Chinese virus.”
But one hard fact remains: the potentially destructive power of biological weapons, which were banned by an international convention, going back to 1975.

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates predicted in a TED talk in 2015: “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it is likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than a war.”

They will not be missiles, he warned, but microbes.

And two years later, according to GeekWire, Gates repeated the same warning at a side event during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos: “It’s pretty surprising how little preparedness there is for it,” Gates was quoted as saying in 2017.

Addressing the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Seattle last month, Gates said the impact of COVID-19 could be “very, very dramatic,” particularly if it spreads to areas like sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.

Meanwhile, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged about $100 million to fight the virus, “as part of its broader efforts in global health”.

Dr Filippa Lentzos, Associate Senior Researcher, Armament and Disarmament Programme, at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told IPS a biological weapon comprises a biological agent and a delivery mechanism.

In theory, she pointed out, any virus could be used as a weapon, but historically some agents have been viewed as more effective than others, e.g. anthrax, brucellosis, Q fever, tularaemia, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, glanders, plague, Marburg virus disease and smallpox.

She pointed out that much will depend on what ends or purpose the weapons are being used for.

“In terms of the coronavirus, there would no longer be a surprise factor, and resistance to the virus may in future have been built up, though the jury is still out on that one”.

As of March 19, the coronavirus has accounted for over 208,000 positive cases worldwide and over 8,700 deaths—and rising.

In the United States, there have been 49 deaths so far, and over 10,000 positive cases of the spreading virus.

The New York Times of March 18 cites a study by Imperial College, London, which estimates the virus can kill over 250,000 in the UK and more than a million in the US –- “unless officials took action to slow its spread.”

Asked if there are any countries identified as still manufacturing or hoarding biological weapons despite their ban, Dr Lentzos said over the past 100 years, about 25 countries are believed to have possessed a biological weapons programme for some period of time.

“Most programmes were of a short duration. They were small and developed limited, unsophisticated capabilities”.

Only two countries are known to have had sophisticated capabilities that could inflict mass casualties or extensive economic harm: the United States and the Soviet Union (now Russia), said Dr Lentzos, who is also a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London and a biosecurity columnist at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Today, she said, “there is limited public information on possible illicit biological weapons activity. The main concern today is not really that countries have offensive biological warfare programmes, but that they are building dual use capabilities.”

https://thebulletin.org/2018/07/darpas-prepare-program-preparing-for-what/

Asked about the use of biological weapons as part of germ warfare during World War I, she said there was some covert use by Germany during World War I to infect horses with biological agents to block their use by Allied military forces.

“In World War II, there were substantial covert attacks on China by Japan, as well as some clandestine use in Europe against Germany. There has been very limited known use since 1945”, said Dr Lentzos, who is also an Associate Editor of the journal BioSocieties, and the NGO Coordinator for the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

https://www.ipsnews.net/2020/03/coronavirus-biological-weapon-not-distant-future/

According to the Washington-based Arms Control Association, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is a legally binding treaty that outlaw biological arms.

Opened for signature on April 10, 1972, the BWC entered into force on March 26, 1975. It currently has 182 states-parties. Ten states have neither signed nor ratified the BWC, including Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Israel, Kiribati, Micronesia, Namibia, South Sudan and Tuvalu.”

This is far from the worst-case scenario. In 1982, the Ronald Reagan administration conducted a war game dubbed “Proud Prophet” that concluded that even a limited nuclear attack on the then-Soviet Union would almost certainly elicit a massive response, resulting in a half-billion people killed in the initial exchanges and many more from radiation and starvation over following decades. To be sure, the nuclear threat has been around for a while. Why worry about it now more than usual, when we have so much else to worry about?

Because developments of late have made the “unthinkable”—nuclear Armageddon—more probable than ever; factors that led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Jan. 23 of this year to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock up to 100 seconds to midnight, closer than ever before. Over the past few years, nuclear-armed states have embarked on a new nuclear arms race, precipitated by the U.S. under the banner of “modernization.” Russia and the U.S. have produced missiles that can travel up to 27 times the speed of sound and are considered to be unstoppable. There has been steady deterioration of the nuclear arms control regime with U.S. withdrawal and subsequent unravelling of the nuclear deal with Iran; U.S., then Russian withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty; and U.S. refusal to renew the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia that is set to expire in 2021, to name just a few.

Add to the mix rising tension among nuclear-armed states, ongoing testing by North Korea, signs that Iran, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea might also pursue nuclear weapons capability, the possibility that one or more terrorist groups will acquire nuclear weapons and the ever-present potential for human miscalculation or accident. Canada is to be congratulated for recently joining 15 other non-nuclear armed nations in the Stockholm Initiative—led by Sweden—that calls upon nuclear-armed states to “advance nuclear disarmament and ensure in the interest of humanity, nuclear weapons will never be used again.”

Does this represent a more forceful posture on nuclear disarmament more generally? We pray it does. Our lives and indeed the future of our planet could depend upon it.”

If The Hill Times version is behind a paywall, the article is additionally available on CNANW’s website here: https://www.cnanw.ca/2020/04/

All the armies in the world can’t stop COVTD-19. It’s a dark and scary moment when a bunch of microbes brings humanity to its knees. We’ve come to a turning point in world history. The old ways of building security—bigger and better weapons—are completely irrelevant now.

So what do we do when a virus blatantly crosses borders and ignores strategic weapons systems? More of the same thinking that deceived people into believing that as long as we had big guns we would be safe won’t do. We have to overhaul our thinking.

“Big thinking” is not just a bromide. It’s now essential for survival. We have to build a system to provide common security. In the midst of the Cold War four decades ago, an all-star international panel led by Swedish prime minister Olof Palme established the principle that, in the age of weapons of mass destruction, no nation by itself can find security. Nations can only find security in cooperation and not at one another’s expense. Common security, Palme argued, requires an end to arms competitions, national restraint, and a spirit of collective responsibility and mutual confidence.

Over the following years, the idea of common security broadened out beyond military measures to include new streams of cooperation in economic and social development and protection of the environment.

Suddenly, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union imploded.The Cold War ended. In 1992, the UN secretary-general at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote a stunning document, Agenda for Peace, incorporating the ideas of common security into practical programs for peacebuilding, preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping.

But instead of overhauling the global security system to provide common security for everyone, governments lumbered on and threw the peace dividend they had in their hands out the window. The Western countries expanded NATO up to Russia’s borders. Russia invaded Crimea. Arms expenditures shot up. Governments squandered a magnificent opportunity to build a world of peace.The culture of war was too strong and the moment was lost.

Three decades ago, the great historian Barbara Tuchman and author of The March of Folly was right when she wrote: “Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of pre-conceived notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.”

Now, in the current crisis, Guterres is telling us that continuation of the “folly” of war is jeopardizing the security for all—the rich as well as the marginalized.The Trump administration’s call for $46-billion more for nuclear weapons when the country can’t even provide enough masks for health workers in treating COVID-19 is obscene beyond words.

And what about Canada? The government plans to increase defence spending to $32-billion by 2027. Why? To appease U.S. Donald President Trump’s gargantuan military appetite driving NATO states to spend two percent of their GDP on weaponry and all that goes with it. We can beat COVID-19 by spending money on health and development measures, not arms.

Far better to cut Canada’s planned defence spending by 10 per cent and put an extra $2-billion to $3-billion into the UN’S Sustainable Development Goals, the 17-point program centring around huge improvements in maternal health, water systems and sustainable agriculture. But we can’t get there with a continuation of “ordinary” planning. We need truly bold thinking to beat back the threat posed to common security by COVID-19.

The Canadian government wants to show what it could do on the Security Council. Switching political thinking from the culture of war to a culture of peace would be worthy of the greatest health challenge Canada has faced in the past hundred years.”

This question introduces Kaplan’s other protagonist: the rabbit hole. To convince an adversary that you really would nuke him, you had to convince yourself that you would keep fighting after he hit you back, until he gave up or you destroyed each other (and maybe the rest of the world). “The compelling, and frightening, thing about the logic was that once you bought into its premises, you fell into the rabbit hole; there seemed no exit” (p. 298).

Perkovich works primarily on nuclear strategy and nonproliferation issues; cyberconflict; and new approaches to international public-private management of strategic technologies.

This can be dismal and dense stuff, but Kaplan’s narration is so brisk and keen that you speed through it. A longtime reporter at Slate, and the author of the seminal 1983 study of nuclear deterrence and war planning, “The Wizards of Armageddon,” Kaplan knows this story well. The earlier chapters come to life through quotations from recently released White House audio files and declassified documents. The chapters on the George H.W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations benefit vividly from extensive interviews with key aides and policymakers.

Several themes stand out.

Successive presidents are briefed about extant nuclear war plans. They are shocked by the scale of destruction and death they would cause. Presidents—via their civilian advisers—then order changes. Often they believe these changes really make a difference. Yet their successors arrive and discover that operational plans still call for more weapons to be detonated over more targets with more destruction than the new president can abide.
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Henry Kissinger wrote several (famous, though overrated) books and articles on nuclear strategy before he became national security adviser in Nixon’s first term. After receiving his initial briefings on nuclear war plans, he demanded changes. Four years later, in a meeting with 15 officials from the relevant military and civilian agencies, Kissinger grumbled: “We have come to no conclusions …. What … does ‘control of escalation’ mean? … To have [as] the only option that of killing 80 million people is the height of immorality” (pp. 114-116).

Nearly 15 years later, in the Reagan administration, two young Defense Department policymakers—Franklin Miller and Gil Klinger—scrubbed the nuclear war plan in a similar attempt at reform. Klinger “drew a fifty-mile circle around [Moscow] and counted the number of weapons that were aimed at targets within the circle,” Kaplan writes. “There were 689 of them, many releasing more than a megaton of explosive power” (pp. 186-187).

Many presidents have turned to arms control to limit or reduce the costs and destructive risks of nuclear enterprise. But from Nixon onward they found that militarists in Congress, officers in the logrolling Navy and Air Force, and scientists in the logrolling nuclear weapons laboratories demanded more spending for new nuclear weapon systems in return for supporting Senate ratification of treaties.

For Democratic presidents, the price was usually higher. Carter and Clinton could not secure enough senatorial votes to get the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) ratified. (The U.S. and Russia still abided by SALT II until 1986 and agreed on the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [START I] five years after that. The U.S. continues to abide by the CTBT’s terms today, with little prospect of ratifying it or violating its terms—a strange type of rationality).

Even Ronald Reagan and (less surprisingly) Mikhail Gorbachev could not overcome the gravitational force of the rabbit hole. At Reykjavik, in 1986, the two leaders agreed to each cut their ballistic missile stockpiles by 50 percent within five years, followed by elimination of the rest over the next five years. The catch was that the Soviets wanted the U.S. to confine testing of ballistic missile defenses (the Strategic Defense Initiative) to the laboratory for 10 years. No testing in outer space.
Reagan could not agree to that; Gorbachev’s military would not let him accept anything less. And so 34 years later, the United States still does not have a reliable defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles and has entered a renewed missile arms race with Russia.

Barack Obama understood the problem. “Let’s stipulate that this is all insane,” he said at the beginning of a National Security Council meeting on nuclear policy, Kaplan writes (p. 243). But Obama also knew he lacked the political capital to overcome the resistance in Washington and Moscow and concluded he could not achieve more than was done in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review and the New START Treaty of the same year.

Kaplan reports from the rabbit hole; he does not try to guide readers out of it. But the documents and people he quotes provide at least two clues for deciding how much nuclear weaponry and war would be too much.

When the aforementioned Franklin Miller and Gil Klinger were doing their targeting review in the late 1980s, Klinger quipped to Miller: “If (God forbid) there’s a nuclear war, and if (God forbid) you and I survive it, and if (God forbid) the Russians win, we’re going to be put on trial at Nuremberg” (p. 180). (Presumably they would have been just as guilty if the U.S. won but would not have faced trial.)

Fast forward 30 years. The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (like the Obama administration’s before it) affirms the United States’s commitment to “adhere to the law of armed conflict [in any] initiation and conduct of nuclear operations.” Yet U.S. officials never detail how this would be done. (The other eight nuclear-armed states, nota bene, are even less forthcoming.) Kaplan recounts how numerous war-planning documents declare obligatorily that these weapons are not aimed “at population per se,” or that operations would spare urban areas “to the degree practicable,” but nevertheless call for hundreds of detonations on cities (p. 176).

To move beyond false legal consciousness, we might ask whether compliance with the law of armed conflict (or at least less unnecessary human and environmental destruction) would be more likely with a smaller arsenal of lower-yield weapons that were not meant to be used in a first strike against Russian or Chinese nuclear deterrents. Of course, the U.S. would not unilaterally change its arsenal this way. But the question could guide a way out of the rabbit hole, prompting the U.S. to seek reciprocal moves from Russia, and an agreement from China not to expand its smaller and more restrained nuclear posture.

The second clue, like the dog that doesn’t bark, is the silence of nuclear policy-makers regarding the environmental consequences of nuclear war. The larger the yield and the more urban the target, the greater the risk that soot from fires will be chimneyed up into the stratosphere where it can persist and block sunlight, reducing evaporation and rain on which agriculture depends. This prospect—“nuclear winter”—was widely reported and publicly debated in the early 1980s. Kaplan ignores it because the U.S.’s (and other nuclear countries’) nuclear policy-makers have ignored it. They would reckon with it only if they were pressed to answer the question: How much is too much?

The science of nuclear winter is uncertain, so an obvious move would be for the U.S. and other states to commission scientific bodies to model the most plausible nuclear war scenarios and assess the climatologic (and other) effects. These studies could then be made available for international experts to analyze and debate. If some types of arsenals and targeting plans are not so threatening to the global food chain, this finding should be used as a benchmark for making deterrents more accountable to the interests of all humankind. (Advocates of nuclear prohibition could still make other arguments for complete disarmament.)

For all the new, often vivid details “The Bomb” offers, it brings the reader—at least this one—back to two old observations and a conclusion. First, nuclear deterrence is rational. Second, escalatory nuclear war would be murderous, suicidal and irrational. Therefore, as long as states retain nuclear weapons, the physical potential for escalation must be severely limited.

Kaplan shows in this book that the Americans and Russians who built the doomsday machine will not allow it to be dismantled. The more pertinent question is whether they could be motivated to meaningfully downsize and constrain it, as the United Kingdom and France, arguably, have done. Don’t hold your breath, but don’t look away either. Your future may depend on it.

https://tass.com/politics/107347By
This article was originally published by Lawfare Blog.

“The administration has already pulled out of the INF Treaty with Russia and has not committed to extending New START, the last U.S.-Russian arms control treaty standing. It also deployed a new, more ‘useable’ warhead on U.S. submarines and is planning for a new, nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile.

“The administration’s latest scheme is the W93 nuclear warhead for Navy missiles, even though both existing Navy warheads are in excellent shape, with the W76-1 just completing an upgrade and the W88 now being thoroughly overhauled. Both warheads should be good for decades, so what is the rush to build a new warhead now, particularly when the National Nuclear Security Administration already has so much on its plate?

“According to press reports, President Trump personally signed off on an extra $2 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration after Representative Liz Cheney told him it would mean ‘unilateral disarmament’ if he didn’t. Most of that $2 billion came out of the Pentagon’s budget, and likely at the cost of a Navy Virginia-class attack submarine. Worse yet, that $2 billion will only seem like loose change when the full bill for the entire plan to maintain and replace the U.S. nuclear arsenal comes due, at a likely cost of $2 trillion over the next 30 years.

“These new weapons and excessive spending will not make the United States safer. The world was lucky to survive one global nuclear arms race. We can’t count on luck to save us again. We need saner heads to stop this buildup and reduce the role that nuclear weapons play in U.S. security policy.”

Young, Stephen
Union of Concerned Scientists
Link: https://www.ucsusa.org/about/news/trump-administration-charging-ahead-new-nuclear-weapon-systems-and-joining-new-nuclear

Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
However, with regards to the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons –– the first legally binding international agreement to ban nuclear weapons entirely –– Canada did something very un-Canada-like: we picked a side.

When the treaty was being negotiated in 2017, Canada never formally engaged in the process. Along with nearly every other NATO member, we abstained from negotiations at the behest of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France –– our other nuclear-armed allies.

What has picking this side gotten us? A fair amount of anger and frustration, from both domestic and international activists who feel that Canada has abrogated its moral responsibility on the global stage. At the same time, picking the other side would have set up a bitter and unprecedented fight between Canada and the United States; it could have even called Canada’s NATO membership into question.

In the nuclear policy world, the treaty was billed as a zero-sum decision: the nuclear-armed states and their allies were on one side, and the abolitionists were on the other. And both sides employed similar language: if you aren’t with us, you’re against us.

But it didn’t have to be a zero-sum decision. As always, there was a middle ground to be found, and there is still time for Canada to occupy it.

Today, despite the treaty boasting 70 signatories and nearing entry into force (it now has exactly half of the 50 ratifications needed), Prime Minister Trudeau has characterized it as “sort of useless.” But the treaty contains a number of humanitarian provisions that are right up Canada’s alley.

In particular, the treaty obligates countries to provide age- and gender-sensitive medical aid to victims of nuclear testing, offer financial assistance to those affected, and to provide environmental remediation to contaminated areas like the Marshall Islands, where countless Bikinians were irradiated and displaced by Cold War nuclear tests, yet remain basically forgotten by the nuclear superpowers. These are policies on which Canada can –– and should –– take the lead.

Trudeau’s Liberal government prides itself on its feminist foreign policy, and particularly its promotion of women and girls around the globe. This emphasis should also be applied to the nuclear context. It is a well-established fact that nuclear weapons detonations disproportionately affect women –– not only in terms of the biological effects of ionizing radiation, but also in terms of the social, economic, and psychological impacts of the weapons themselves. For example, a UN study found that the American military subjected Marshallese women to uniquely humiliating examinations after U.S. nuclear weapons tests, which resulted in the social stigmatization of those women.

Canada is uniquely poised to lead on these humanitarian initiatives by providing financial, medical, and environmental aid to those most harmed. Doing so falls firmly within our foreign policy priorities, it wouldn’t affect our existing defence commitments, and, crucially, it would establish Canada as a bridge-builder between two sides that continue to view the nuclear issue as a zero-sum game.

Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
We are also already a party to every other major nuclear non-proliferation treaty, including the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear weapons testing. This was easy for us to join in 1998; we had no nuclear weapons to test. However, engaging with the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons would give Canada an opportunity to go beyond our existing, relatively painless, obligations. And we would also be the first nuclear umbrella state to do so, thus setting a meaningful and lasting precedent.

Perhaps most importantly, Canada has a moral obligation to provide aid to victims and environments affected by nuclear testing. We don’t like to talk about it much, but Canada played a critical role in the development of these horrific weapons: scientists at the Montréal Laboratory were an essential part of the Manhattan Project, and the first atomic bombs were made with uranium shipped from the Northwest Territories.

These are unfortunate truths that Canadians have yet to truly reckon with, but committing to a platform of nuclear reparations would be a good start. “

And I think you saw the same things here. There was enough uncertainty early on that people could argue about how contagious the virus is, or how deadly it is. That uncertainty hampered the response at a critical moment.”

Link: https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-is-like-a-nuclear-attack-an-interview-with-jeffrey-lewis/

The United States sparked fears of a new nuclear arms race when it pulled out of a key missile treaty with Russia little more than six months ago. Hopes of preventing a race are now focused on another pact credited with helping keep us safe since the height of the Cold War – the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which came into force 50 years ago this month. More importance now attaches to a five-yearly treaty review conference set to be held at the United Nations headquarters in New York next month.

The US pulled out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) signed in 1987 after Washington and Nato accused Russia of violating it by deploying a new type of cruise missile, which Moscow has denied. Russia suspended its own obligations to the treaty shortly afterwards. It is reassuring therefore that the five permanent members of the Security Council, including the US and Russia, have marked the anniversary of the NPT with a joint declaration celebrating “the immeasurable contributions” this landmark treaty has made to international security and prosperity and reaffirming their commitment to it. Such a consensus is increasingly rare these days.

With more countries having become de facto nuclear powers or acquiring nuclear technology, and with huge investment in the next generation of nuclear weapons, it is understandable that old fears were revived by the collapse of the US-Russia pact. At the same time, technological advances have lowered the bar for producing weapons-grade material. How to manage that remains a challenge.

Current nuclear arsenals are only about one-fifth their size when the NPT came into effect, thanks largely to arms control and the end of the Cold War. But the reductions were unlikely to have been achieved without the moral pressure channelled through the NPT, apart from its goal of preventing proliferation.

The arsenals of the US and Russia still account for more than 90 per cent of the total number of warheads. Nine countries are known to possess nuclear weapons, but fears of much greater proliferation by the 21st century have, thankfully, not been borne out.

With international tensions rising, disarmament deals can play an important part in maintaining stability. The demise of the INF treaty is a setback. There has to be concern about the survival of perhaps the most important Cold War agreement – the New Start treaty limiting long-range nuclear weapons, which is due to expire next February. The NPT may not be perfect but next month’s conference is a chance to refocus on stopping nuclear weapons becoming a nightmare for humanity and to restore confidence in international arms control.”

A new US policy on landmines “will authorize Combatant Commanders, in exceptional circumstances, to employ advanced, non-persistent landmines specifically designed to reduce unintended harm to civilians and partner forces.”

The United States has not signed the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines (otherwise known as the Ottawa Treaty or Mine Ban Treaty), although 164 other countries have done so.

In a statement from Human Rights Watch, Steve Goose, director of HRW’s arms division said, “Most of the world’s countries have embraced the ban on antipersonnel landmines for more than two decades, while the Trump administration has done a complete about-face in deciding to cling to these weapons in perpetuity. Using landmines, which have claimed so many lives and limbs, is not justified by any country or group under any circumstances.”

HRW points out that “in recent years, landmines have only been used by regimes known for their human rights abuses in Burma and Syria, and by non-state armed groups like ISIS” and that the US has not actually used landmines since 1991, exported them since 1992, produced them since 1997, and have, in fact, destroyed millions that were stockpiled.

In an op-ed in the Globe and Mail, former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and John English, a former special ambassador on landmines, address the “reducing risk” rationale, which was, as they put it, “debunked effectively during the debate on the landmine treaty negotiations in the 1990s, when the International Committee of the Red Cross, supported by senior U.S. army commanders … pointed out that the weapons were a huge risk to civilians and soldiers alike.”

They also say that the US is not acknowledging the impact and effectiveness of the Ottawa Treaty, including the drop in annual rates of those injured or killed by landmines which have accompanied the major de-mining projects still in process.

The lifting of US restrictions “gives licence to rogue combatants around the world, to say nothing of major powers such as Russia and China, which will now feel free to amend their own no-use policies.”

In an op-ed published by Postmedia in their various newspapers, Erin Hunt (Mines Action Canada) and Liz Bernstein (Nobel Women’s Initiative), in addition to raising similar points to Axworthy and English about the reduction in casualties and demining projects, also discuss the failure of “technological fixes,” such as the the self-destruct mechanism in non-persistent landmines, to reduce casualties.

Hunt and Bernstein also call on the Canadian government to publicly support the ban and fund demining projects, as well as assist victims. They suggest that Canada take on the role of president of the Ottawa Treaty, an annual commitment Canada has never assumed.

What you can do

Write to Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne and suggest that Canada publicly re-affirm its commitment to upholding the Ottawa Treaty Banning Anti-Personnel Landmines, and confirm its financial support for de-mining activities around the world.

Title: TakeAction: United States removes restrictions on landmine use: What should Canada do?
Author: World Federalist Movement (Canada Chapter)
Publication(s): World Federalist Movement (Canada Chapter)
Date: 12 March 2020
Link: https://www.wfmcanada.org/2020/03/3345/

So, the problem is not that young folks aren’t scared enough, or that nuclear weapons aren’t in the cultural zeitgeist. Rather, young people don’t see themselves as agents of change when it comes to nuclear weapons: for many the problem is thought of as too big, too outdated, and too intractable.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the case with other systemic issues like climate change, gun violence, or health care, for which millions of young people around the world are striking, marching, and — most importantly —voting.

Why don’t they do the same for nukes? Some blame lies with the nuclear community, which has both an exclusivity and an elitism problem. In stark contrast to the climate change and gun violence movements, we almost never hear from those on the front lines of the nuclear issue. In fact, when talking about nuclear weapons, the community generally prefers a wonky, fetishistic lexicon that elevates the weapons over their victims.

Additionally, the nuclear community often demands that people care about nukes more than they care about any other issue. This is an understandable instinct, given that nuclear war is arguably the greatest existential threat that humanity faces. However, emphasizing the existential nature of nuclear weapons often makes people switch off, as our brains have a tough time processing non-proximate threats. By treating nuclear weapons as a standalone, singular issue that trumps all others, we lose the chance to connect with folks who feel more viscerally threatened by things like climate change, lack of access to health care or education, and police brutality.

To illustrate this point, consider the Green New Deal. Its proponents understand that an effective response to the climate crisis cannot rely solely on building solar farms or scaling back factory farming. Incremental policies like these barely scratch the surface of the problem, and they are too wonky to bring the imperative for climate justice into the mainstream. This is why Green New Deal advocates constantly tie the issue to more proximate concerns, like health care, education, public housing, capitalism, militarism, and social justice.

This strategy works: the Green New Deal has broad majority support across the country, including in states that voted for Trump in 2016. On top of that, emphasizing the intersections between these issues has proven highly effective in building a broad coalition that elevates the voices of those most affected.

We need to emphasize that nuclear weapons exacerbate all of these issue areas as well, and that nukes, therefore, must be considered as elements of a larger ecosystem that must be tackled in tandem:

CLIMATE CHANGE

As I have written in The Nation, climate change and nuclear weapons have a symbiotic relationship: climate change is making nuclear war more likely, and a nuclear war would devastate our climate in ways we cannot fully fathom. Not to mention the fact that decades of uranium mining, nuclear testing, and nuclear waste dumping have already contaminated some our planet’s ecosystems, displacing entire communities––often communities of color––in the process. Nuclear weapons are undoubtedly a climate justice issue.

HEALTH CARE

Nuclear weapons must also be inextricably tied to discussions about health care. During the Cold War, US atomic veterans, Marshall Islanders, and “Downwinders” (communities throughout the American Southwest located downwind from the Nevada Test Site), among others, were exposed to harmful doses of radiation that dramatically raised the rates of cancer for those communities. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which has thus far awarded over $2 billion to a small portion of these populations, expires in 2022. Not only should this program be extended and expanded, but nuclear disarmament advocates must also unequivocally advocate for universal health care as a means for addressing those past and present nuclear harms.

CAPITALISM

As political philosopher Michael Hardt has written, “capital needs military spending and cannot survive without it.” This is because weapons — and especially nuclear weapons — are not kept in check by the typical limits of consumption. As Hardt explains, “a society’s appetite for arms can be limitless, and capital turns a profit even when weapons are ultimately unused.” Simply put, if your goal is invulnerability, then you can never have enough weapons, missile defenses, or nukes.

However, this framing is obviously flawed: no one — especially not an entire country — can ever achieve invulnerability. Therefore, the “arms race” has no finish line. Instead, it’s just an endless loop: we constantly seek out “deterrence gaps” and rush to fill them with new weapons, regardless of whether those gaps are real or fabricated. The arms race is not the means to an end. For those who profit from these weapons, it is an end in itself.

Therefore, just as the most effective resistance to climate change encourages struggle against our fossil-fuel based economic system, we must tie nuclear disarmament to a parallel, anti-capitalist struggle against our internalized pursuit of military invulnerability.

CORRUPTION

When it comes to big money items like oil, guns, or nukes, corruption is basically legal in the United States. You only need to look at the case of “senator-turned-lobbyist-turned-senator-turned lobbyist,” Jon Kyl, to understand how the Washington revolving door enables profit to drive nuclear decision-making. Disarmament will always be a pipe dream so long as nuclear policy remains a business decision.

TRADEOFFS

For more indirect issues like education, infrastructure, and poverty, the link to nuclear weapons is easy: nukes will cost the United States $100,000 per minute over the next 30 years –– where could that money be better spent? We could end homelessness for $20 billion –– the price of 36 B-21 bombers. We could trade in the proposed new $85 billion intercontinental ballistic missile program to cancel Puerto Rico’s $74 billion debt––and even have a “little” left over! That new low-yield warhead that the Navy just deployed? It cost five times more than the entire country’s $10 million student lunch debt crisis.

Imagine this: your political candidate of preference unveils an ambitious social program, and when they are inevitably asked how they plan to pay for it, they respond not by presenting alienating and overly-wonky cost measurements –– but by drawing a link between the potential success of their initiative and the excesses of the nuclear weapons budget.

That is how you galvanize people –– and especially young people –– around the nuclear issue: by demonstrating that their lives could be tangibly improved by eliminating unnecessary weapons programs that they never voted for in the first place. In short, we shouldn’t seek to scare young folks, we should seek to activate them.”

Link: https://inkstickmedia.com/do-young-people-care-about-nuclear-weapons/

Following this announcement, updated estimates of Iran’s breakout time—the amount of time needed to amass enough fissile material to produce one nuclear weapon—ranged from approximately four to six months. These estimates depend on assumptions about the type of design Iran might be capable of initially using. Implosion systems require less fissile material than gun-type designs. Whatever the exact breakout time might be, most estimates fall within a timespan that health officials seem to indicate might be the duration of the Covid-19 threat.

Whether Iran would attempt to use the cover of Covid-19 to begin a dash for a nuclear weapon is uncertain. However, the loss of “eyes on the ground” in the form of IAEA inspections would probably heighten the worst fears about Iranian proliferation and possibly worsen already dim prospects for cooperation. Even before the coronavirus breakout, Iran had expanded its production of enriched uranium, probably in an attempt to exert pressure and improve its negotiating leverage following the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal and its reimposition of sanctions in 2018.

A second and related danger is that, absent the IAEA inspections, there is a greater possibility of miscalculation regarding Iran and its nuclear potential and intentions. Without hard data, US policy makers could begin to fear the worst and assume that Iran was dashing toward a bomb, and it would be difficult to prove otherwise. Other nations, both Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East and other global powers, might also react in unexpected ways, based on insufficient information and fear that Iran was breaking out to produce a nuclear weapon. In any event, lack of information generally leads to instability and whenever nuclear weapons, or the threat of nuclear weapons, is involved, instability could be exceedingly dangerous.

What could, or should, Director General Grossi and the IAEA member states do about this situation to mitigate any potential risks? First, it is essential that any hazards to the health of IAEA inspectors be minimized. The agency must pre-screen its inspectors before they travel to identify those at heightened risk. In addition, inspectors should be equipped to deal with potential contact with the virus by using proper disposable clothing and disinfecting procedures. Inspectors should also be accompanied by medical personnel and should strive to be self-sufficient with food and housing. It is also possible that enhanced technical oversight systems could be installed to temporarily decrease or eliminate the need for inspectors. Although the IAEA has apparently used remote surveillance systems in Iran, the effectiveness of those systems in a situation where inspectors cannot enter Iran will need to be evaluated, and new or upgraded systems may be needed. Such installations would need to be installed by the IAEA in order to be considered reliable, and that would involve the same risks to those personnel as to inspectors in dealing with the virus.

IAEA member states should fully support such efforts so that inspections can continue. Though it might require extraordinary efforts by the IAEA and its board of governors, it is in the world’s interest to have the nuclear watchdog continue its verification programs in Iran despite whatever level of hazard the Covid-19 outbreak presents. Failure to do so could have dire consequences.”

Should unfortunately this worst case prevail, we could have the worst pandemic in human history, even exceeding the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 that killed 50 million people. Under the above scenario, in the United States there could be up to 130 to 230 million cases of COVID-19, with up to 2.5 to 3.5 million fatalities. Obviously, these are the worst “worst case” predictions and likely will not come true, but still an abundance of caution is advisable and unnecessary large conferences and gatherings of people should be avoided. Hence, all the more reason to postpone the 2020 NPT review conference to 2021.”

[…]

What is the NPT?

“The NPT is the world’s most widely adhered to multilateral nuclear arms reduction and non-proliferation treaty. It is considered to be a resounding success in limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to five States that have signed the Treaty and to four others that are not bound by it. Mainly as a result of the NPT, some 10% of the electricity generated in the world is by nuclear power reactors contributing to clean energy, and billions of people benefit daily from the applications of nuclear technologies in such areas as medicine, agriculture, water and animal husbandry.

The principal failing of the NPT has been lack of progress towards eliminating nuclear weapons. Despite a half-century having elapsed since the NPT entered into force, as I have written previously, “The grim reality is that more than 14,000 nuclear warheads of the nine nuclear-armed States are deployed at more than 100 locations in 14 States, the dangers of nuclear weapon use are increasing, and there are stocks of nearly 1,400 tonnes (or 1,400,000 kg) of weapon-grade uranium and 500 tonnes (or 500,000 kg) of weapon-usable plutonium good for more than 130,000 nuclear warheads. Remember, it takes 25 kg or less of highly-enriched uranium and 8 kg or less of plutonium for one nuclear warhead.””

[…]

“Furthermore, some delegations have been complaining about visa denials by U.S. authorities to attend UN conferences and this year’s session of the UN Disarmament Commission had to be postponed. Costs of hotel accommodation in New York are soaring, as are the costs of food and eating out in restaurants. The expertise for nuclear verification, safety and security, and peaceful uses lies in Vienna (Austria), while that of negotiating multilateral nuclear arms control in Geneva (Switzerland). New York has no diplomatic expertise related to the NPT. Thus, there are no compelling reasons at all to convene the presently scheduled NPT review conference in New York this year.”

[…]

“An NPT review conference this year though desirable for meeting the five yearly cycle is not absolutely necessary; rather under the circumstances it poses unacceptable health risks and is a luxury that the international community can ill afford.

The best option is to formally announce the postponement of the 2020 NPT review conference to 2021 with the venue being Vienna, as soon as possible – the earlier the better. The longer this decision is delayed the greater the costs incurred in cancelling flights and hotel rooms – while government and IAEA/CTBTO delegates may well be able to afford such penalties as tax dollars pay for their expenses, for civil society participants the cancellation costs would be onerous and unaffordable as they either self-finance or rely on charitable donations.

For all the reasons noted above, including especially the continuing spread of the COVID-19 virus designated by WHO as a very high global risk, it would not only be inexcusable but also immoral on the part of the UN and the NPT Secretariats to delay any further the announcement of the postponement of the NPT review conference to 2021 and to initiate the logistical preparations for holding it in Vienna next year. ”

And that’s just the beginning. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Finnmark region of Norway and adjacent Russian territory have become one of the most likely battlegrounds for the first use of nuclear weapons in any future NATO-Russian conflict. Because Moscow has concentrated a significant part of its nuclear retaliatory capability on the Kola Peninsula, a remote stretch of land abutting northern Norway—any US-NATO success in actual combat with Russian forces near that territory would endanger a significant part of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and so might precipitate the early use of such munitions. Even a simulated victory—the predictable result of Cold Response 2020—will undoubtedly set Russia’s nuclear controllers on edge.

To appreciate just how risky any NATO-Russian clash in Norway’s far north would be, consider the region’s geography and the strategic factors that have led Russia to concentrate so much military power there. And all of this, by the way, will be playing out in the context of another existential danger: climate change. The melting of the Arctic ice cap and the accelerated exploitation of Arctic resources are lending this area ever greater strategic significance.

ENERGY EXTRACTION IN THE FAR NORTH
Look at any map of Europe and you’ll note that Scandinavia widens as it heads southward into the most heavily populated parts of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. As you head north, however, it narrows and becomes ever less populated. At its extreme northern reaches, only a thin band of Norway juts east to touch Russia’s Kola Peninsula. To the north, the Barents Sea, an offshoot of the Arctic Ocean, bounds them both. This remote region—approximately 800 miles from Oslo and 900 miles from Moscow—has, in recent years, become a vortex of economic and military activity.

Once prized as a source of vital minerals, especially nickel, iron ore, and phosphates, this remote area is now the center of extensive oil and natural gas extraction. With temperatures rising in the Arctic twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet and sea ice retreating ever farther north every year, offshore fossil-fuel exploration has become increasingly viable. As a result, large reserves of oil and natural gas—the very fuels whose combustion is responsible for those rising temperatures—have been discovered beneath the Barents Sea and both countries are seeking to exploit those deposits. Norway has taken the lead, establishing at Hammerfest in Finnmark the world’s first plant above the Arctic Circle to export liquified natural gas. In a similar fashion, Russia has initiated efforts to exploit the mammoth Shtokman gas field in its sector of the Barents Sea, though it has yet to bring such plans to fruition.

For Russia, even more significant oil and gas prospects lie further east in the Kara and Pechora Seas and on the Yamal Peninsula, a slender extension of Siberia. Its energy companies have, in fact, already begun producing oil at the Prirazlomnoye field in the Pechora Sea and the Novoportovskoye field on that peninsula (and natural gas there as well). Such fields hold great promise for Russia, which exhibits all the characteristics of a petro-state, but there’s one huge problem: The only practical way to get that output to market is via specially designed icebreaker-tankers sent through the Barents Sea past northern Norway.

The exploitation of Arctic oil and gas resources and their transport to markets in Europe and Asia has become a major economic priority for Moscow as its hydrocarbon reserves below the Arctic Circle begin to dry up. Despite calls at home for greater economic diversity, President Vladimir Putin’s regime continues to insist on the centrality of hydrocarbon production to the country’s economic future. In that context, production in the Arctic has become an essential national objective, which, in turn, requires assured access to the Atlantic Ocean via the Barents Sea and Norway’s offshore waters. Think of that waterway as vital to Russia’s energy economy in the way the Strait of Hormuz, connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean, is to the Saudis and other regional fossil-fuel producers.

THE MILITARY DIMENSION
No less than Russia’s giant energy firms, its navy must be able to enter the Atlantic via the Barents Sea and northern Norway. Aside from its Baltic and Black Sea ports, accessible to the Atlantic only via passageways easily obstructed by NATO, the sole Russian harbor with unfettered access to the Atlantic Ocean is at Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. Not surprisingly then, that port is also the headquarters for Russia’s Northern Fleet—its most powerful—and the site of numerous air, infantry, missile, and radar bases along with naval shipyards and nuclear reactors. In other words, it’s among the most sensitive military regions in Russia today.

Given all this, President Putin has substantially rebuilt that very fleet, which fell into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union, equipping it with some of the country’s most advanced warships. In 2018, according to The Military Balance, a publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, it already possessed the largest number of modern cruisers and destroyers (10) of any Russian fleet, along with 22 attack submarines and numerous support vessels. Also in the Murmansk area are dozens of advanced MiG fighter planes and a wide assortment of anti-aircraft defense systems. Finally, as 2019 ended, Russian military officials indicated for the first time that they had deployed to the Arctic the Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, a weapon capable of hypersonic velocities (more than five times the speed of sound), again presumably to a base in the Murmansk region just 125 miles from Norway’s Finnmark, the site of the upcoming NATO exercise.

More significant yet is the way Moscow has been strengthening its nuclear forces in the region. Like the United States, Russia maintains a “triad” of nuclear delivery systems, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), long-range “heavy” bombers, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). Under the terms of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), signed by the two countries in 2010, the Russians can deploy no more than 700 delivery systems capable of carrying no more than 1,550 warheads. (That pact will, however, expire in February 2021 unless the two sides agree to an extension, which appears increasingly unlikely in the age of Trump.) According to the Arms Control Association, the Russians are currently believed to be deploying the warheads they are allowed under New START on 66 heavy bombers, 286 ICBMs, and 12 submarines with 160 SLBMs. Eight of those nuclear-armed subs are, in fact, assigned to the Northern Fleet, which means about 110 missiles with as many as 500 warheads—the exact numbers remain shrouded in secrecy—are deployed in the Murmansk area.

For Russian nuclear strategists, such nuclear-armed submarines are considered the most “survivable” of the country’s retaliatory systems. In the event of a nuclear exchange with the United States, the country’s heavy bombers and ICBMs could prove relatively vulnerable to pre-emptive strikes as their locations are known and can be targeted by American bombs and missiles with near-pinpoint accuracy. Those subs, however, can leave Murmansk and disappear into the wide Atlantic Ocean at the onset of any crisis and so presumably remain hidden from US spying eyes. To do so, however, requires that they pass through the Barents Sea, avoiding the NATO forces lurking nearby. For Moscow, in other words, the very possibility of deterring a US nuclear strike hinges on its ability to defend its naval stronghold in Murmansk, while maneuvering its submarines past Norway’s Finnmark region. No wonder, then, that this area has assumed enormous strategic importance for Russian military planners—and the upcoming Cold Response 2020 is sure to prove challenging to them.

WASHINGTON’S ARCTIC BUILDUP
During the Cold War era, Washington viewed the Arctic as a significant strategic arena and constructed a string of military bases across the region. Their main aim: to intercept Soviet bombers and missiles crossing the North Pole on their way to targets in North America. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Washington abandoned many of those bases. Now, however, with the Pentagon once again identifying “great power competition” with Russia and China as the defining characteristic of the present strategic environment, many of those bases are being reoccupied and new ones established. Once again, the Arctic is being viewed as a potential site of conflict with Russia and, as a result, US forces are being readied for possible combat there.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was the first official to explain this new strategic outlook at the Arctic Forum in Finland last May. In his address, a kind of “Pompeo Doctrine,” he indicated that the United States was shifting from benign neglect of the region to aggressive involvement and militarization. “We’re entering a new age of strategic engagement in the Arctic,” he insisted, “complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our interests in that region.” To better protect those interests against Russia’s military buildup there, “we are fortifying America’s security and diplomatic presence in the area…hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet, expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs inside of our own military.”

The Pentagon has been unwilling to provide many details, but a close reading of the military press suggests that this activity has been particularly focused on northern Norway and adjacent waters. To begin with, the Marine Corps has established a permanent presence in that country, the first time foreign forces have been stationed there since German troops occupied it during World War II. A detachment of about 330 Marines were initially deployed near the port of Trondheim in 2017, presumably to help guard nearby caves that contain hundreds of US tanks and combat vehicles. Two years later, a similarly sized group was then dispatched to the Troms region above the Arctic Circle and far closer to the Russian border.

From the Russian perspective, even more threatening is the construction of a US radar station on the Norwegian island of Vardø about 40 miles from the Kola Peninsula. To be operated in conjunction with the Norwegian intelligence service, the focus of the facility will evidently be to snoop on those Russian missile-carrying submarines, assumedly in order to target them and take them out in the earliest stages of any conflict. That Moscow fears just such an outcome is evident from the mock attack it staged on the Vardø facility in 2018, sending 11 Su-24 supersonic bombers on a direct path toward the island. (They turned aside at the last moment.) It has also moved a surface-to-surface missile battery to a spot just 40 miles from Vardø.

In addition, in August 2018, the US Navy decided to reactivate the previously decommissioned Second Fleet in the North Atlantic. “A new Second Fleet increases our strategic flexibility to respond—from the Eastern Seaboard to the Barents Sea,” said Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson at the time. As last year ended, that fleet was declared fully operational.

DECIPHERING COLD RESPONSE 2020
Exercise Cold Response 2020 must be viewed in the context of all these developments. Few details about the thinking behind the upcoming war games have been made public, but it’s not hard to imagine what at least part of the scenario might be like: a US-Russian clash of some sort leading to Russian attacks aimed at seizing that radar station at Vardø and Norway’s defense headquarters at Bodø on the country’s northwestern coast. The invading troops will be slowed but not stopped by Norwegian forces (and those US Marines stationed in the area), while thousands of reinforcements from NATO bases elsewhere in Europe begin to pour in. Eventually, of course, the tide will turn and the Russians will be forced back.

No matter what the official scenario is like, however, for Pentagon planners the situation will go far beyond this. Any Russian assault on critical Norwegian military facilities would presumably be preceded by intense air and missile bombardment and the forward deployment of major naval vessels. This, in turn, would prompt comparable moves by the United States and NATO, probably resulting in violent encounters and the loss of major assets on all sides. In the process, Russia’s key nuclear retaliatory forces would be at risk and quickly placed on high alert with senior officers operating in hair-trigger mode. Any misstep might then lead to what humanity has feared since August 1945: a nuclear apocalypse on Planet Earth.

There is no way to know to what degree such considerations are incorporated into the classified versions of the Cold Response 2020 scenario, but it’s unlikely that they’re missing. Indeed, a 2016 version of the exercise involved the participation of three B-52 nuclear bombers from the US Strategic Air Command, indicating that the American military is keenly aware of the escalatory risks of any large-scale US-Russian encounter in the Arctic.

In short, what might otherwise seem like a routine training exercise in a distant part of the world is actually part of an emerging US strategy to overpower Russia in a critical defensive zone, an approach that could easily result in nuclear war. The Russians are, of course, well aware of this and so will undoubtedly be watching Cold Response 2020 with genuine trepidation. Their fears are understandable—but we should all be concerned about a strategy that seemingly embodies such a high risk of future escalation.

Ever since the Soviets acquired nuclear weapons of their own in 1949, strategists have wondered how and where an all-out nuclear war—World War III—would break out. At one time, that incendiary scenario was believed most likely to involve a clash over the divided city of Berlin or along the East-West border in Germany. After the Cold War, however, fears of such a deadly encounter evaporated and few gave much thought to such possibilities. Looking forward today, however, the prospect of a catastrophic World War III is again becoming all too imaginable and this time, it appears, an incident in the Arctic could prove the spark for Armageddon.”

Speaking to The Journal.ie for the general election podcast The Candidate, Howlin said the Labour Party would go head-to-head with President Donald Trump and end the use of Shannon for US military planes unless those troops were involved in UN-sanctioned military operations.

Howlin’s calls follow concerns about inspections of US aircraft that land at Shannon being raised on numerous occasions in the last Dáil.

The issue was highlighted again last week when US Vice President Mike Pence met with US troops during a stopover at Shannon Airport.

So, today we’re asking you: Should the Irish government push for an end to the US military use of Shannon Airport?
Link: https://www.thejournal.ie/us-military-shannon-4984136-Jan2020