And yes, in case you think that, as in his novel 1984, published in 1949, a year before his death and just as the Cold War (a term he was the first to use in an essay in October 1945) was getting underway, our world, too, seems to be heading for a nightmarish future, I suspect that — were he capable of returning to this planet of ours — he wouldn’t disagree with you for a moment. Phew! Sorry for such a long, complicated sentence, but little wonder given the way our world is now tying itself in knots. Yes, just last week, with the election of climate-change denier and (to steal from Orwell) our very own Big Brother Donald Trump as president of the United States (again!), we just paved the way for an instant all-American nightmare. Still, even without him, the world was anything but peachy keen.

As a matter of fact, we live in a country on the brink of who knows what, on a planet on the brink of… well, yes, who has any idea anymore? One thing, however, is obvious (even if not to The Donald, who plans to “drill, baby, drill” on day one back in the White House): it’s getting hotter by the year (after year after year) in every sense imaginable, as heat records are broken, week by week, month by month around the world. After all, 2024 is expected to be the hottest year in human history, beating out 2023 for that record, and yet, all too sadly, it’s not likely to hold that record for more than a year. As Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out recently: “The latest scientific data shows a devastating scientific duality: not only is 2024 slated to be the hottest year on record to date, but it could also be one of the coolest years we’ll see in the decades ahead.”

Yikes!

War, War, and More War

Just consider that, so many thousands of years after we humans first began making war on each other, we’re on a planet that seems to be going down big-time in ways Orwell couldn’t have imagined. And no matter its state, we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from, or even evidently stop wanting to make war again… and again… and again.

At this point, in fact, at least three thoroughly nightmarish, seemingly never-ending conflicts are being fought (and fought and fought) on this planet of ours. There is, of course, the war in Ukraine that began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s painful decision in February 2022 to invade that country. More than two and a half years later, with perhaps 200,000 or more deaths and the destruction of significant parts of Ukraine, it seems as if that particular war is in a nightmarish slog of endless devastation leading who knows where or to who knows what end (including, possibly, the first use of nuclear weapons since August 1945, something Orwell was already thinking about in that Cold War essay of his only months after the U.S. nuked the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II).

And oh yes, only recently, a third country, also nuclear-armed like the Russians, and its leader, like Vladimir Putin, also willing to threaten the use of such weaponry, decided to directly enter the fray. I’m thinking, of course, about the neighboring state of North Korea. And don’t be confused by that “neighboring.” After all, that country’s only about 4,500 miles away from Ukraine, but it’s certainly a neighbor of Russia’s, right?

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Whoops, sorry about that! After a glance at a map, I realize that I must have meant a neighbor of China, which is indeed a neighbor of Russia, which is more or less the same thing. Under the circumstances, why shouldn’t North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have sent 8,000 to10,000 of his crack troops to more or less the other side of the planet (or do I mean the universe?) to help an atomic near-neighbor? And I certainly have no right to be critical of such a decision, since in this century my own country has dispatched its military endless thousands of miles away to fight (losing) wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.

Of course, whatever my country did, what’s now going on in Ukraine should still be the definition of a nightmare first class, a war without end that only seems to be growing more severe. But perhaps when compared to what’s now taking place in the Middle East, it might have to be seen as a nightmare second class. After all, another nuclear-armed country, Israel, in response to a horrifying terror attack on its citizens by the Palestinian group Hamas on October 7, 2023, has spent more than a year (14 months!) devastating and decimating just about anything left standing, including human beings, in the tiny Gaza Strip. It has by now killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, including staggering numbers of children, destroyed most of the infrastructure there, promoted famine, and well… honestly, that’s just a start, since Vladimir Putin…oh, sorry, my mistake, I meant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been spreading the war on Gaza in a thoroughly — yes! — devastating way to Lebanon (where, forget the growing numbers of dead, more than 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced from their homes and turned into refugees in next to no time at all). Meanwhile, he’s been going face to face, or perhaps I mean bomb to bomb and missile to missile — and keep in mind that most of those bombs and missiles come from my own remarkably generous country, since Israel is “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. military aid since World War II” — with Iran. And who knows where that set of wars may, in fact, go from here (though undoubtedly, nowhere good), or where else in the Middle East the Israelis might still want to expand their military campaigns.

And if all of that isn’t enough for you, or this deeply battered planet of ours, then don’t forget Sudan, where a devastating civil war has been raging for a year and a half, killing untold tens of thousands of Sudanese, displacing eight and a half million more of them from their homes, and causing a brutal famine affecting millions that could destroy an inconceivable number of lives. And like the horrifying conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, that war between two local military factions shows not the slightest sign of ending any time soon.

So, three devastating regional wars on one small planet. If that isn’t distinctly an achievement of sorts for a humanity that continues to arm itself to the teeth, then I’m not sure what is.

Planetary War

And sadly, all three of those wars, which have essentially nothing to do with each other — you seldom see even two of them, no less all three, in the same news coverage — are distracting us remarkably well from what might be considered the real, or at least the most devastating war on Planet Earth. I’m thinking, of course, of the war that, thanks to us, this planet is now waging on — yes! — us.

After all, even where there hasn’t been horrific war-making, all too often there have been other kinds of devastation. Take Spain recently, where in the neighborhood of the city of Valencia, a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours in a stunning weather event leading to floods that killed hundreds and destroyed much property. Consider that a reminder, amid humanity’s seemingly unending wars (and our unending ability to keep on waging them), that thanks to the greenhouse gases we humans, especially the two great global powers, the United States and China, are still pouring into the atmosphere at — all too sadly — a record pace, this planet is essentially responding by making war on us. (And don’t forget that our wars and the militaries that fight them are another devastating way we humans have discovered to pour yet more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, heating this planet further, and the U.S. military, even when not at war, remains a gigantic emitter of such gases.)

While my country is historically the greatest producer of greenhouse gases ever, in our own moment it’s fallen into second place to China, which (despite its impressive investment in the production of green energy) continues to increase its use of coal, in particular, pouring yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in a fashion never before seen on Planet Earth.

It’s not that we haven’t been warned, not just by scientists, but by the weather itself. And you don’t have to be in Spain to notice it. After all, if you live in the southeastern United States, you’re not likely to soon forget the devastation caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton, after they revved up while passing over the record-hot waters of the Gulf of Mexico, before clobbering Florida and the Southeast. And that’s just one example among so many, including for instance the stunning fires that swept across Canada in the summer of 2023 (and again in 2024), sending devastating clouds of smoke south into the United States.

Let’s face it, whether we’re talking about fire, drought, floods, unprecedented storms, or so much else, we increasingly live on a different planet. After all, in 2023, the average global rise in temperature hit 1.48 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. Worse yet, by July of this year, it had hit the ultimate 1.5 degree mark that the 2015 Paris climate accord set as the level not to be reached by the end of this century 12 (yes, 12!) months in a row. Worse yet, scientists are now talking about a possible devastating rise of 3 degrees or more by century’s end. With that in mind, just imagine what future hurricanes are going to feel like when they sweep across parts of this country.

In short, while we humans have anything but given up our old ways of making war on ourselves, it seems that we’ve found a new way of doing so as well, and if that isn’t dystopian, what is? I suspect that George Orwell would be stunned by the planet we now seem to be on and the climate-denying president Americans just sent back into the White House to create an all-too-literal hell on Earth.

And given all of that, I wonder what this planet could prove to be like in 2084, if we don’t change our habits, whether it comes to making war or burning fossil fuels? Will we still be slaughtering each other on a planet that could be truly experiencing truly devastating weather in ways we may not yet be able to imagine? It’s hard even to dream (as in having a nightmare, of course) of a future in which neither those recent hurricanes, nor the flooding in Spain will seem all that disastrously out of the ordinary, anything but — and that’s assuming none of the nine countries on this planet that have already gone nuclear (or others which may be heading in that direction) decide to atomize the planet instead.

Now, mind you, it’s also possible that (thanks to some miracle) by 2084, we humans will have figured out how to truly green ourselves and this planet, leaving all those greenhouse gases to the history books, along with our endless centuries of increasingly devastating war-making.

But given our past and the recent American election, I wouldn’t count on it.

Honestly, who would have guessed that we humans might prove capable of making Orwell’s 1984 seem like an upbeat fantasy a century later when, whatever wars might then be underway, the planet itself could prove to be a genuine hell on earth?

And here’s the truth of it all: it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yep, it’s me again with the same old, same old. Sigh. And instantly in a far worse world with Donald Trump on his way back to the White House. And there’s no question that I need your help to keep TomDispatch going under increasingly grim global circumstances. Anything you can offer will mean so much to me (and to the writers who continue to produce pieces for this site that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere). Anyway, if the mood strikes you, do visit our donation page and think about what you could do. Tom]

Via Tomdispatch.com

A former aircraft carrier is the perfect location, as in not too distant waters, the San Diego-based aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln deployed to the Gulf of Oman, off the coast of Iran, in July 2024. In 2019, it was the same carrier strike group then-President Donald Trump deployed to deter Iran.

The conversation with Stone on the Midway will examine how America’s relationship with war, both before and after Vietnam, have informed and influenced his work over the past 40 years, most notably beginning with “Platoon” in 1986. He will discuss how those wars have influenced U.S. foreign policy and American society, how they provoked Americans to think about concepts and consequences of empire and military power overseas, and how they ultimately helped establish the framework for the “forever wars” in which the United States now participates.

One of the forever wars continues more than a year after violence that began on Oct. 7, 2023, between Israel and Hamas, making the Mediterranean Sea a combat theater. American forces are still deployed off the coast of Lebanon to deter Hamas’ ally Hezbollah, even though it is mostly on the defensive after Israel began its offensive, and to withdraw American citizens from there, despite that the U.S. left some behind.

Normally, the Lincoln is the flagship of a carrier strike group deployed in the Pacific, but its mission to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman was extended even further in September to deter Iran.

Furthermore, over the last year the U.S. and Israel have expanded their war to the Red Sea to attack the Yemeni Houthi militia for targeting international shipping in solidarity with Hamas, bringing war to the three seas in the region.

Over the last year the U.S. has mobilized local personnel and military assets, from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Naval Base Coronado and Marine Corps Air Station Miramar (otherwise known as “Top Gun”). The Lincoln’s aircraft includes an  F-35C strike aircraft squadron from Miramar, (the planes often seen flying over Interstates 15 and 805), and two helicopter squadrons from Coronado’s Naval Air Station North Island.

The Lincoln is escorted by the San Diego-based destroyer USS O’Kane, which carries long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, costing $2 million each, Washington’s preferred weapon to strike the Houthis.

“Carrier,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

Just the deployment of those two vessels represents 6,500 personnel. Carrier group deployments are routine, and the Lincoln will return to San Diego in mid-November, only to be replaced with more B-52s and destroyers. The possibility of American forces being targeted or lost has increased exponentially, just as a Houthi missile almost hit the USS Eisenhower last June, demonstrating that American strikes have not degraded their ability to attack vessels in the Red Sea.

If American forces were lost in combat, Washington would escalate its presence in the region, rather than withdrawing from the conflict, succumbing to “mission creep.” In these three naval conflict theaters there is no articulated end goal as to when “mission accomplished” can be declared.

The presidential election will not change the number of forces deployed to these theaters, which are likely to be maintained or even increase.

During Trump’s first presidency, he routinely deployed B-52 bombers and the Lincoln off the coast of Iran to deter the Islamic Republic in 2019, almost going to war in January 2020 after the U.S. assassinated one of Iran’s generals.

The U.S. left Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan 2021. It seemed the forever wars had ended. Yet they continued to shape San Diego County, with veterans making it home after serving multiple tours in both places. The wars also sent a whole generation of Afghan and Iraqi refugees fleeing those conflicts to San Diego.

Finally, the 2023 war has led to another sort of mobilization: protests in San Diego, on its campuses, even in front of the Midway itself, on the anniversary of Oct. 7. The war that began in October 2023 has the potential to serve as the third forever war of the 21^st century, ironically giving Stone further material for his next film.

Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at Cal State San Marcos and a visiting scholar at University of San Diego and San Diego State University, and lives in Encinitas.

Reprinted from The San Diego Union-Tribune with the author’s permission.

According to Save the Children, about 468 million children — about one of every six young people on this planet — live in areas affected by armed conflict. Verified attacks on children have tripled since 2010. Last year, global conflicts killed three times as many children as in 2022. “Killings and injuries of civilians have become a daily occurrence,” U.N. human rights chief Volker Türk commented in June when he announced the 2023 figures. “Children shot at. Hospitals bombed. Heavy artillery launched on entire communities.”

It took four decades for the United Nations Security Council to catch up to Schneider. In 2005, that global body identified — and condemned — six grave violations against children in times of war: killing or maiming; recruitment into or use by armed forces and armed groups; attacks on schools or hospitals; rape or other grave acts of sexual violence; abduction; and the denial of humanitarian access to them. Naming and shaming, however, has its limits. Between 2005 and 2023, more than 347,000 grave violations against youngsters were verified across more than 30 conflict zones in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, according to UNICEF, the U.N. agency for children. The actual number is undoubtedly far higher.

From the extreme damage explosive weapons do to tiny bodies to the lasting effects of acute deprivation on developing brains, children are particularly vulnerable in times of conflict. And once subjected to war, they carry its scars, physical and mental, for a lifetime. A recent study by Italian researchers emphasized what Schneider intuitively knew — that “war inflicts severe violations on the fundamental human rights of children.” The complex trauma of war, they found, “poses a grave threat to the emotional and cognitive development of children, increasing the risk of physical and mental illnesses, disabilities, social problems, and intergenerational consequences.”

Despite such knowledge, the world continues to fail children in times of conflict. The United States was, for instance, one of the members of the U.N. Security Council that condemned those six grave wartime violations against children. Yet the Biden administration has greenlit tens of billions of dollars in weapons sales to Israel, while U.S. munitions have repeatedly been used in attacks on schools, that have become shelters, predominantly for women and children, in the Gaza Strip. “Make no mistake, the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel,” President Joe Biden said recently, even though his administration acknowledged the likelihood that Israel had used American weaponry in Gaza in violation of international law.

And Gaza is just one conflict zone where, at this very moment, children are suffering mightily. Let TomDispatch offer you a hellscape tour of this planet, a few stops in a world of war to glimpse just what today’s conflicts are doing to the children trapped by them.

Gaza

The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place on Earth to be a child, according to UNICEF. Israel has killed around 17,000 children there since the current Gaza War began in October 2023, according to local authorities. And almost as horrific, about 26,000 kids have reportedly lost one or both parents. At least 19,000 of them are now orphans or are otherwise without a caregiver. One million children in Gaza have also been displaced from their homes since October 2023.

In addition, Israel is committing “scholasticide,” the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Palestinian education system in Gaza, according to a recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian advocacy group. More than 659,000 children there have been out of school since the beginning of the war. The conflict in Gaza will set children’s education back by years and risks creating a generation of permanently traumatized Palestinians, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge, the Centre for Lebanese Studies, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East.

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Even before the current war, an estimated 800,000 children in Gaza — about 75% of the kids there — were in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Now, UNICEF estimates that more than one million of them — in effect, every kid in the Gaza Strip — needs such services. In short, you can no longer be a healthy child there.

Lebanon

Over four days in late September, as Israel ramped up its war in Lebanon, about 140,000 children in that Mediterranean nation were displaced. Many arrived at shelters showing signs of deep distress, according to Save the Children staff. “Children are telling us that it feels like danger is everywhere, and they can never be safe. Every loud sound makes them jump now,” said Jennifer Moorehead, Save the Children’s country director in Lebanon. “Many children’s lives, rights and futures have already been turned upside down and now their capacity to cope with this escalating crisis has been eroded.”

All schools in that country have been closed, adversely affecting every one of its 1.5 million children. More than 890 children have also been injured in Israeli strikes over the last year, the vast majority — more than 690 — since August 20th, according to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health. Given that Israel has recently extended attacks from the south of the country to the Lebanese capital, Beirut, they will undoubtedly be joined by all too many others.

Sudan

Children have suffered mightily since heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. More than 18,000 people have reportedly been killed and close to 10 million have been forced to flee their homes since the civil war there began. Almost half of the displaced Sudanese are — yes! — children, more than 4.6 million of them, making the conflict there the largest child displacement crisis in the world.

More than 16 million Sudanese children are also facing severe food shortages. In the small town of Tawila in that country’s North Darfur state, at least 10 children die of hunger every day, according to a report last month in the Guardian. The population of the town has ballooned as tens of thousands fled El Fasher, North Darfur’s besieged capital. “We anticipate that the exact number of children dying of hunger is much higher,” Aisha Hussien Yagoub, the head of the health authority for the local government in Tawila told the Guardian. “Many of those displaced from El Fasher are living far from our clinic and are unable to reach it.”

More than 10 million Sudanese children, or 50% of that country’s kids, have been within about three miles of the frontlines of the conflict at some point over the past year. According to Save the Children, this marks the highest rate of exposure in the world. In addition, last year, there was a five-fold increase in grave violations of Sudanese children’s rights compared to 2022.

Syria

More than 30,200 children have been killed since the Syrian Civil War began in 2011, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. Another 5,200 children were forcibly disappeared or are under arrest.

However little noticed, Syria remains the world’s largest refugee crisis. More than 14 million Syrians have been forced from their homes. More than 7.2 million of them are now estimated to be internally displaced in a country where nine in 10 people exist below the poverty line. An entire generation of children has lived under the constant threat of violence and emotional trauma since 2011. It’s been the only life they’ve ever known.

“Services have already collapsed after 14 years of conflict,” Rasha Muhrez, Save the Children’s Response Director in Syria, said last month. “The humanitarian crisis in Syria is at a record level.” More than two-thirds of the population of Syria, including about 7.5 million children, require humanitarian assistance. Nearly half of the 5.5 million school-aged children — 2.4 million between the ages of five and 17 — remain out of school, according to UNICEF. About 7,000 schools have been destroyed or damaged.

Recently, Human Rights Watch sounded the alarm about the recruitment of children, “apparently for eventual transfer to armed groups,” by a youth organization affiliated with the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria and the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, its military wing.

Ukraine

Child casualties in Ukraine jumped nearly 40% in the first half of this year, bringing the total number of children killed or injured in nearly 900 days of war there to about 2,200, according to Save the Children. “This year, violence has escalated with a new intensity, with missiles, drones, and bombs causing an alarming rise in children being injured or killed in daylight blasts,” said Stephane Moissaing, Deputy Country Director for Save the Children in Ukraine. “The suffering for families will not stop as long as explosive weapons are sweeping through populated towns and villages across Ukraine.”

There are already 2.9 million Ukrainian children in need of assistance — and the situation is poised to grow worse in the months ahead. Repeated Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure could result in power outages of up to 18 hours a day this winter, leaving many of Ukraine’s children freezing and without access to critical services. “The lack of power and all its knock-on effects this winter could have a devastating impact not only on children’s physical health but on their mental well-being and education,” said Munir Mammadzade, UNICEF representative to Ukraine. “Children’s lives are consumed by thoughts of survival, not childhood.”

Ukraine also estimates that Russian authorities have forcibly removed almost 20,000 children from occupied territories there since the February 2022 invasion. A Financial Times investigation found that Ukrainian children who were abducted and taken to Russia early in the war were put up for adoption on a Russian government-linked website. One of them was shown with a false Russian identity. Another was listed using a Russian version of their Ukrainian name. There was no mention of the children’s Ukrainian backgrounds.

West and Central Africa

Conflicts have been raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades. World Vision has called the long-running violence there “one of the worst child protection crises in the world.” A 2023 U.N. report on children and armed conflict documented 3,377 grave violations against children in the DRC. Of these, 46% involved the recruitment of children — some as young as five — by armed groups.

Violence and intercommunity tensions in the DRC have forced 1,457 schools to close this year alone, affecting more than 500,000 children. And sadly, that country is no anomaly. In May, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, reported that more than 5,700 schools in Burkina Faso had been closed due to insecurity, depriving more than 800,000 children of their educations. And by mid-2024, conflicts had shuttered more than 14,300 schools in 24 African countries, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. That marks an increase of 1,100 closures compared to 2023. The 2024 closures were clustered in West and Central Africa, mainly in Burkina Faso, the DRC, Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, and Niger. They have affected an estimated 2.8 million children.

“Education is under siege in West and Central Africa. The deliberate targeting of schools and the systemic denial of education because of conflict is nothing short of a catastrophe. Every day that a child is kept out of school is a day stolen from their future and from the future of their communities,” said Hassane Hamadou, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa. “We urgently call on all parties to conflict to cease attacks on and occupation of schools and ensure that education is protected and prioritized.”

Feet of Clay

It’s been six decades since Lorraine Schneider unveiled her poster and her common-sense wisdom to the world. She’s been proven right at every turn, in every conflict across the entire planet. Everywhere that children (not to mention other living things) have been exposed to war, they have suffered. Children have been killed and maimed. They have been physically, psychologically, and educationally stunted, as well as emotionally wounded. They have been harmed, assaulted, and deprived. Their bodies have been torn apart. Their minds – the literal architecture of their brains – have been warped by war.

In the conflict zones mentioned above and so many others — from Myanmar to Yemen — the world is failing its children. What they have lost can never be “found” again. Survivors can go on, but there is no going back.

Schneider’s mother, Eva Art, was a self-taught sculptor who escaped pogroms in Ukraine by joining relatives in the United States as a child. She lost touch with her family during World War II, according to her daughter Kleven, and later discovered that her relatives had been killed, their entire shtetl (or small Jewish town) wiped out. To cope with her grief, Art made clay figurines of the dead of her hometown: a boy and his dog, an elderly woman knitting, a mother cradling a baby. And today, the better part of 100 years after the young Art was forced from her home by violence, children continue to suffer in the very same ways — and continue to turn to clay for solace.

Israa Al-Qahwaji, a mental health and psychosocial support coordinator for Save the Children in Gaza, shared the story of a young boy who survived an airstrike that resulted in the amputation of one of his hands, while also killing his father and destroying his home. In shock and emotionally withdrawn, the boy was unable to talk about the trauma. However, various therapeutic techniques allowed him to begin to open up, according to Al-Qahwaji. The child began to talk about games he could no longer play and how losing his hand had changed his relationship with his friends. In one therapy session, he was asked to mold something out of clay to represent a wish. With his remaining hand, he carefully shaped a house. After finishing the exercise, he turned to the counselor with a question that left Al-Qahwaji emotionally overwhelmed. “Now,” the boy asked, “will you bring my dad and give me my hand back?”

Copyright 2024 Nick Turse

Via Tomdispatch.com

Case in point: We Americans tend to disregard the possibility (however modest) that weapons of war could even destroy our own lives here at home, despite how many of us own destructive weaponry. A few years ago, my military spouse and I were looking for a house for our family to settle in after over a decade of moving from military post to military post. We very nearly bought an old farmhouse owned by a combat veteran who mentioned his deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq. We felt uncertain about the structure of his house, so we arranged to return with our children to take another look after he had moved out. The moment we entered the garage with our two toddlers in tow, we noticed a semi-automatic rifle leaning against the wall, its barrel pointing up. Had we not grabbed our son by the hand, he might have run over to touch it and, had it been loaded, the unthinkable might have occurred. Anyone who has raised young children knows that a single item in an empty room, especially one as storied as a gun (in today’s age of constant school shootings and lockdowns) could be a temptation too great to resist.

That incident haunts me still. The combat vet, who thought to remove every item from his home but a rifle, left on display for us, was at best careless, at worst provocative, and definitely weird in the most modern meaning of that word. Given the high rates of gun ownership among today’s veterans, it’s not a coincidence that he had one, nor would it have been unknown for a child (in this case mine) to be wounded or die from an accidental gunshot. Many times more kids here die that way, whether accidentally or all too often purposely, than do our police or military in combat. Boys and men especially tend to be tactile learners. Those of them in our former war zones are also the ones still most likely to fall victim to mines and unexploded ordnance left behind, just as they’re more likely to die here from accidental wounds.

Scenes not that different from the one I described have been happening in nearly 70 countries on a regular basis, only with deadlier endings. Hundreds of people each year — many of them kids — happen upon weapons or explosives left over from wars once fought in their countries and are killed, even though they may have been unaware of the risks they faced just seconds before impact. And for that, you can thank the major warmakers on this planet like the U.S. and Russia that have simply refused to learn the lessons of history.

A Deadly Glossary

Many kinds of explosives linger after battles end. Such unexploded ordnance (UXO) includes shells, grenades, mortars, rockets, air-dropped bombs, and cluster munition bomblets that didn’t explode when first used. Among the most destructive of them are those cluster munitions, which can spread over areas several football fields wide, often explode in mid-air, and are designed to set objects on fire on impact. Militaries (ours among them) have been known to leave behind significant stockpiles of such explosive ordnance when conflicts cease. Weapons experts refer to such abandoned ordnance as AXO and it’s not uncommon for militaries to have stored and then abandoned them in places like occupied schools.

Close cousins of UXO are landmines designed to explode and kill indiscriminately upon contact, piercing tanks and other vehicles, as well as what came to be known as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), jerry-rigged homemade bombs often buried in the ground, that kill on impact. IEDs gained notoriety during the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they accounted for more than half of reported U.S. troop casualties. And both unexploded landmines and IEDs can do terrible damage years later in peacetime.

As many of us are aware, long before this century’s American-led wars on terror started, militaries had already established just such a deadly legacy through their use of unexploded ordnance and mines. In Cambodia, which the U.S. bombed heavily during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s, about 650 square kilometers remain contaminated with cluster-munition remnants from American aerial attacks, while a still larger area contains landmines. It’s estimated, in fact, that leftover landmines and other exploding ordnance killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians in what passed for “peacetime” between 1979 and 2022, also giving that country the dubious distinction of having one of the highest number of amputees per capita on the planet. Likewise, half a century after the U.S. littered neighboring Laos with cluster bombs, making it, per capita, the most bombed country in the world, less than 10% of its affected land has been cleared.

Similarly, dud bomblets, which failed to detonate in mid-air, are estimated to have killed or maimed somewhere between 56,000 and 86,000 civilians globally since Hitler’s air force first tested them out on Spanish towns during that country’s civil war in the 1930s. Despite concerted international advocacy by governments and human rights groups beginning in the 2000s, hundreds of new cluster munition casualties are reported yearly. In 2023, the most recent year on record globally, 93% of cluster munition casualties were civilians, with 47% of those killed and injured by such remnant explosives children.

Cluster munitions are known for killing broadly on impact, so it’s not easy to get firsthand accounts of just what it’s like to witness such an attack, but a few such unflinching accounts are available to us. Take for instance, a report by Human Rights Watch researchers who interviewed survivors of a Russian cluster munitions attack in the eastern Ukrainian village of Hlynske in May 2022. As one man reported, after hearing a rocket strike near his home, “Suddenly I heard my father screaming, ‘I’ve been hit! I can’t move,’ he said. I ran back and saw that he had fallen on his knees but couldn’t move from the waist down, and there were many metal pieces in him, including one sticking out of his spine and another in his chest. He had these small metal pellets lodged in his hands and legs.”

According to the report, his father died a month later, despite surgery.

How did a noise outside that survivor’s home so quickly become shrapnel lodged in his father’s body? Maybe someone growing up in America’s poorer neighborhoods, littered with weapons of war, can relate, but I read accounts like his and realize how distant people like me normally remain from war’s violence.

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After the international Cluster Munitions Convention took effect in 2010, 124 countries committed to retiring their stockpiles. But neither the U.S., Russia, nor Ukraine, among other countries, signed that document, although our government did promise to try to replace the Pentagon’s cluster munitions with variants that supposedly have lower “dud” rates. (The U.S. military has not explained how they determined that was so.)

Our involvement in the Ukraine war marked a turning point. In mid-2023, the Biden administration ordered the transfer of cluster munitions from its outdated stockpile, sidestepping federal rules limiting such transfers of weapons with high dud rates. As a result, we added to the barrage of Russian cluster-munition attacks on Ukrainian towns. New cluster-munition attacks initiated in Ukraine have created what can only be seen as a deadly kind of time bomb. If it can be said that the U.S. and Russia in any way acted together, it was in placing millions of new time bombs in Ukrainian soil in their quest to take or protect territory there, ensuring a future of mortal danger for so many Ukrainians, no matter who wins the present war.

Afghanistan, Every Step You Take

At the Costs of War Project, which I helped found at Brown University in 2010, a key goal continues to be to show how armed conflict disrupts human lives, undermining so much of what people need to do to work, travel, study, or even go to the doctor. Afghanistan is a case in point: An area roughly 10 times the size of Washington, D.C., is now thoroughly contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Prior to the U.S. attack in 2001, Afghans already had to contend with explosives from the Soviet Union’s disastrous war there in the 1980s. And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that casualties from that war’s unexploded ordnance and mines only rose after the U.S.-led invasion further unsettled the country. It’s estimated that well over half of that country’s 20,000 or so injuries and deaths between 2001 and 2018 were due to unexploded ordnance, landmines, and other explosive remnants of war like IEDs. Contaminated Afghan land includes fields commonly used for growing food and letting livestock graze, schools, roads, tourist sites, and former military bases and training ranges used by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Worse yet, the damage isn’t only physical. It’s also psychological. As Costs of War researchers Suzanne Fiederlein and SaraJane Rzegocki have written, “The fear of being harmed by these weapons [unexploded ordnance] is magnified by knowing or seeing someone injured or killed.” In her ethnography of Afghan war widows, Anila Daulatzai offered a gripping illustration of how loss, death, and psychological terror ripple outward to a family and community after a young boy dies in a bomb blast on his way to school and his parents turn to heroin to cope.

When I read such accounts, what stands out to me is how long such unexploded ordnance makes the terror of war linger after the wars themselves are in the history books. Think about what life, stressful as it might be in times of peace, would be like if every step you took might be your last because of unseen threats lurking under the ground. That would include threats like certain bomblets, attractive with their bell-like appearance, which your young child might pick up, thinking they’re toys.

The U.S. Arming of Ukraine (“We Start When It All Ends”)

And we still haven’t learned. Today, with 26,000 square kilometers (an area roughly the size of my home state of Maryland) contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, Ukraine is the most mined country in the world. I recently spoke with a founding director of the Ukrainian Association for Humanitarian Demining (UAHD), an umbrella organization based in Kyiv and responsible for information-sharing on mines and other unexploded ordnance, as well as future demining, and humanitarian aid based on such an ongoing nightmare.

From our conversation, what stood out to me was how people’s ordinary lives have come to a halt because of this war. For example, much has been written about how interruptions in the Ukrainian grain supply impacted food prices and famine globally, but we pay less attention to how and why. As the UAHD representative told me, “For two years, most Ukrainian farmers in occupied territory have had to halt their work because of mines and unexploded ordnance. This past Thursday, the Ukrainian government issued their first payment so that one day, these farms might be able to keep doing their work.” If the history of Laos is any marker and if the Ukraine war ever ends, just the cleanup will prove a long slog.

When I asked how civilian lives in Ukraine were affected by cluster munitions, the response from the UAHD representative was brief: “I don’t know, because war zones are off-limits to us right now. Once the fighting finally ends, we can survey the land and talk to people living there. We start when it all ends.” My interlocutor’s comments reminded me of a superb recent novel on modern warfare, Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. It focuses on a beekeeper who stays behind in his eastern Ukrainian farming village after his neighbors have evacuated to escape the fighting. The novel conveys the poverty and physical danger war brings with it, as well as how isolated from one another civilians in war zones grow, not least because of the dangers of just moving around along once-quiet fields and roads. For instance, the one gift that a Ukrainian soldier offers the beekeeper in passing is a grenade for his own protection, which he ultimately uses to destroy his bees, nearly hurting himself in the process. His other brush with near-death occurs when a traumatized Ukrainian veteran threatens him with an axe during a flashback to combat. War, in other words, returns home, again and again.

Like the beekeeper, we all need to pay attention to what’s left in the wake of our government’s exploits. We need to ask ourselves what future generations may have to deal with thanks to what our leaders do today in the name of expediency. That’s true when it comes to those horrifying cluster munitions and essentially every other militarized response governments concoct to grapple with complex problems.

In this context, let me suggest that there are two messages readers should take away from this piece: It couldn’t be more important to bear witness to what’s being done to destroy our world and, when the fighting ends, it’s also vital to pay attention to what has been left behind.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

( The National ) – A series of pager explosions across Lebanon, and secondary attacks on walkie-talkies the following day, have killed and maimed a number of Hezbollah operatives, as well as many civilians, including children. The attacks have also injured thousands, including Iran’s ambassador to Beirut.

Israel normally does not claim responsibility for attacks on foreign soil – and it did not do so in this case either – but Defence Minister Yoav Gallant gave strong indications in a speech on Wednesday of Mossad’s role in the sabotage.

Mr Gallant also said that Israel, which has been battling Hamas in Gaza for almost a year, was opening a new phase in the war. “The centre of gravity is shifting northward, meaning that we are increasingly diverting forces, resources and energy towards the north,” he added.

The Lebanon attacks demonstrate Israel’s ability to strike from a distance, establishing a form of deterrence, while claiming plausible deniability, and avoiding a US rebuke at a time when Washington is pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to strike Hezbollah. Nevertheless, the Lebanese group does have the ability to weaponise the digital, raising the possibility of violent non-state actors retaliating against their adversaries and taking digital warfare into the realm of AI across the Middle East.

Notwithstanding the vague allusions to the attacks over the past couple of days, historical precedent does demonstrate that weaponising communications is a modus operandi of the Israeli state.

In 1972, in retaliation for the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, Mossad operatives detonated an explosive in the phone of the Palestinian official Mahmoud Hamshari in his Paris apartment. While that telephone was an analogue device, the digital revolution made long-distance assassinations easier for Israel. Another telephone was weaponised in 1996, when Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, targeted the Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash’s Motorola Alpha mobile phone. Working with a Palestinian collaborator, Shin Bet placed 50 grams of explosives in the device, enough to kill him when he held the phone to his ear.

The recent deaths in Lebanon are the epitome of the postmodern, a product of the digital culture of the easy-edit, a time when science and technology allow us to change and manipulate information easily through code, making distances relatively obsolete.

The book Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weaponrefers to Israel’s ability to destroy parts of Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility in 2010 with a malicious digital code known as Stuxnet. This code, sneaked into a USB drive, caused nuclear centrifuges to accelerate to the point that they destroyed themselves.

In 1981, by contrast, Israeli F-15 and F-16 aircraft had to fly long distances, refuel in mid-air and drop bombs on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility to destroy it, with some even missing their target. Israeli pilots risked being shot down or even crashing, which almost happened when the planes narrowly missed telephone wires on the way to their target outside Baghdad.

Stuxnet did not put any Israeli operatives at risk when they sought to target Iran’s nuclear facility. The code, unlike a conventional bomb, could be easily edited, put onto a USB drive, travel a far distance, achieve its objective, and give Israeli deniability.

“Cyberwar,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Notwithstanding the technological sophistication and difficulty to tamper with thousands of communications devices, Israel over the past two days was able to strike targets all over Lebanon, even in neighbouring Syria, with relative ease, in that none of its operatives had to be present to target individuals. It was assassination by remote control.

Establishing deterrence is based on signalling and demonstrating the ability to inflict hurt on an adversary. While the death toll is relatively low, Israel has been able to warn Hezbollah that its members are not safe anywhere in their country, without having to violate the sovereignty of Lebanon.

Tragically, it has also had another effect, in that it has disrupted the civilians’ ontological security, meaning the mental state derived from a sense of order and continuity, even banality of everyday life. Even medical workers in the country use pagers due to electrical outages, and every citizen is bound to be left wondering if their mobile phone has been weaponised.

Deterrence cannot be measured, however, and instead of Israel having deterred Hezbollah, the group will be under pressure to save face by striking back. Israel should have learnt a lesson from when it introduced drone technology to the region in the 1970s, which only led to its proliferation among its adversaries, including the Houthis, who struck Israel directly with a long-distance drone in July.

Israel was the first to use drones in the Middle East in 1973 and had a monopoly on them in the region. But as Rami Khouri, the American University of Beirut professor, once told Peter W Singer, the world’s foremost expert on drones: “The response to drones is to get your own drones. They are just tools of war. Every tool generates a counterreaction.” Indeed, by 2024, Hezbollah released videos of its drones having violated Israel’s sovereignty, having reached the city of Haifa.

While it is uncertain if AI-enabled drones have ever been used, Israel did use an AI programme named Gospel to generate targets for its military campaign in Gaza.

With the digital domain having been weaponised, Hezbollah will feel the need to retaliate. The retaliation, however, is unlikely to be a brute rocket or missile strike that Israel can intercept. The group might play the long game of scoring its own digital victory, perhaps pursuing its own weaponisation of AI to achieve this goal.

Reprinted from The National with the author’s permission.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.

This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.

That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”

Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.

Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.” 

This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase. 

Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.

The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup. 

Who Decides? The Role of the ICBM Lobby

A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles.  Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.

Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.

In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.

Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.

Lobbying Dollars and the Revolving Door

The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.

During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.

While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.

Playing the Jobs Card

The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located. 

As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a miniscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.

Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.

A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.

There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.

Unwarranted Influence in the Nuclear Age

Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case.  (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:

“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”

The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”

Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.

Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.

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

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung and Hekmat Aboukhater

Via Tomdispatch.com

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – As I write, five of nine governments with arsenals of nuclear weapons – capable of destroying life on our planet many times over – are engaged in war: the United States (in multiple wars and stoking one with China), Israel, Russia, and NATO members Britain and France in a proxy war with Russia. For decades now, respected nuclear weapons scientists and policymakers have estimated each January how close we are as a world to civilization-ending disaster, by setting the hands of the Doomsday Clock, where Midnight represents apocalyptic nuclear war. In January 2024, the Doomsday clock was set at 90 seconds to Midnight, the closest it has ever been since its inception in 1947. Throughout 2023 nuclear nations spent 13% more than in 2022 on necrophilic nuclear weapons with the US accounting for 80% of this increase–all while we rush headlong into climate disaster, so palpable this summer. How much closer to Midnight will we be in January 2025?

As a counterbalance to this insanity, we have the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted in 2017 by 122 sensible non-nuclear weapon States. The Treaty entered into force in 2021. By January 2024, 93 countries had signed the Treaty and 70 countries ratified it with more on the way. This UN Treaty is our best insurance as a world against any nuclear weapons use and has as its goal their complete elimination.

“Hiroshima,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024

But, what can we do as citizens living in a country whose government first developed nuclear weapons; used them on Japanese civilians on August 6 and 9, 1945; and led the arms race ever since? The U.S. spent nearly $98,000 per minute in 2023 on modernizing nuclear weapons and now stands on the brink of using them again given its war-prone posture in the world.

Back from the Brink, a national nuclear weapons abolition organization “believes that we all deserve a say on policies that pose a direct threat to our lives, our families, our communities, our planet, humanity’s future.” A major priority of Back from the Brink is to engage and cultivate leadership in local cities, towns and states to influence federal legislation and policy ultimately to abolish nuclear weapons. One creative suggestion they urge is to ask our local and state politicians to issue a Proclamation on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), signaling that “abolishing nuclear weapons and preventing nuclear war is every community’s business.”

In that spirit, here is the Resolution we have asked Greenfield, MA Mayor Ginny Desorgher to send to the city’s state and federal elected officials on behalf of her citizens.

“Whereas, a world in which nuclear weapons exist and threaten our community and humanity’s very existence is a deeply unjust world;

Whereas, seventy-nine years ago, on August 6th and August 9, hundreds of thousands of human beings died – many instantly– or suffered severe health consequences in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan when the United States dropped atomic bombs;

Whereas, many people and communities within the United States have been and continue to be grievously harmed and suffer health consequences from the development, production and testing of nuclear weapons and uranium mining;

Whereas, nine nations collectively have approximately 12,100 nuclear weapons in their arsenals, most of which are far more destructive than those used against the people of Japan. The detonation of even a small number of these weapons could affect everyone on the planet, causing catastrophic human and environmental consequences that would threaten human civilization itself;

Whereas, current Cold War-era nuclear policies and spending are contributing to a costly new global arms race, do not make any nuclear-armed country safer and increase the risk of nuclear war;

Whereas, in 2023 U.S. taxpayers in Greenfield spent $4,033,796.19 cents on nuclear weapons–funds which would be better spent addressing urgent community needs for housing, education, infrastructure, jobs, health care, poverty alleviation, climate resilience and environmental protection;

Whereas, the people of Greenfield join with the people of Hiroshima in their plea “that all cities and citizens of the world unite together in expanding the circle of solidarity transcending national boundaries, partisan politics, and religious creeds to strengthen the bond of human friendship and solidarity.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I THE MAYOR OF GREENFIELD, DO HEREBY PROCLAIM AUGUST 6 AND AUGUST 9 TO BE:
LIFTING COMMUNITY VOICES FOR A WORLD FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS DAY

Consider asking your Mayor or Town Council to issue a similar proclamation, if not for this year, then for 2025. But start now.

(The Conversation) – After 14 months of escalating internal conflict, Sudan is now confronting its most severe food security crisis on record. The latest situation report, released on 27 June, reveals a grim picture: more than half the population of 47.2 million is facing acute food insecurity. This signifies severe lack of food, high malnutrition and starvation leading to death.

There is also a high risk of famine in multiple regions if immediate action is not taken. Famine is a severe and widespread lack of food that leads to extreme hunger, malnutrition and increased mortality in a population.

Food insecurity is measured on the widely accepted five-stage Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). The five phases range from “minimal” (people have enough food) through “stressed”, “crisis” and “emergency” to “famine” (extreme lack of food, starvation, very high death rates). This scale is intended to help governments and other humanitarian actors quickly understand a situation and take action.

Sudan’s deteriorating situation stems from an escalation in conflict and organised violence among Sudanese armed factions in the civil war that started in April 2023. This has also made the work of monitoring the food crisis particularly hard. The IPC’s technical working group for Sudan has faced huge challenges in updating its assessment analysis. These include security threats, lack of physical access, and data gaps in hotspot areas.

Nonetheless, in March, it published an alert about the situation and the urgent need for action to prevent famine. The new analysis, conducted between late April and early June, confirms the worst fears.

We are agricultural economists with more than 50 years of research between us. Our recent work includes Famine in Gaza, questions for research and preventive action and Food security and social assistance in Sudan during armed conflict. It is our view that with no end to the conflict in sight and difficulties to provide humanitarian assistance, the prospects are dire for tens of millions in Sudan.

Rapidly rising acute food insecurity

In its December 2023 analysis of the situation, the IPC projected that 17.7 million people (37% of the population) could face crisis-level conditions or worse between October 2023 and February 2024. Of these, 4.9 million were in food “emergency” conditions. The situation has since worsened dramatically.

During April and May nearly 21.3 million people across Sudan were estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity. These included 153,000 people in famine-like conditions, the most severe phase of food insecurity classification. It’s plausible that between June and September 2024, the number of people facing crisis-level acute food insecurity will rise to 25.6 million. This is a 45% increase from the previous projection period (October 2023 to February 2024).

This scenario anticipates:

• Ongoing conflict, particularly in North Darfur, West and South Kordofan, Khartoum, and Al Jazirah states, leading to increased displacement, with heavily populated south-eastern states also being affected.

• Economic shocks, due to conflict-related disruptions, resulting in a contracting economy, rising inflation and below-average food production.

• Market disruptions, particularly in key trade hubs, worsening food shortages and price hikes.

• Restricted humanitarian access, especially in conflict-affected areas, and above-average rainfall which may cause flooding, further complicating food security but offering some agricultural opportunities in accessible regions.

• An elevated risk of famine during the same period for 14 areas in nine states. Greater Darfur, Greater Kordofan, Al Jazirah states, and parts of Khartoum are the most affected areas.

• The IPC projects that there could be some improvement in food security conditions during the harvest season from October 2024 to February 2025. As a result, the total of those facing crisis-level or worse food insecurity could fall to about 21 million people. But this will still leave 109,000 people under famine-like conditions.

Key drivers

The main driver of this rapidly worsening situation is the intensification of Sudan’s conflict and insecurity situation. The conflict has restricted movements of goods and services, disrupted markets, and hindered agricultural production and humanitarian access, thus severely reducing the availability and access to food for millions of Sudanese.

Al Jazeera English: “Sudan: UN warns of famine threat as fighting escalates in northern Darfur”

The food crisis is not a new phenomenon. It is part of a recurring syndrome of triple crises comprising protracted civil conflicts, climate shocks and economic instability. Beside the ongoing war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, the country has a recent history of severe civil conflicts. These include Africa’s longest civil war (1983-2005) and the Darfur crisis (2003) among others.

These have triggered economic woes, including skyrocketing prices of basic commodities, severely eroding food access for much of the population.

Additionally, climate shocks such as prolonged droughts and severe flooding have devastated crop yields and livestock. The national cereal production in 2023 was estimated to be 46% below levels of the previous year.

The conflict has forced the displacement of more than 10 million people. Sudan now counts 10.1 million internally displaced persons and 2.2 million refugees. This makes it the country with the highest number of forcibly displaced people in the world. The internally displaced persons and refugees have lost their livelihoods and are largely dependent on humanitarian assistance. As the conflict is hampering access to such assistance, these are among the people most at risk of famine.

Economic conditions have recently worsened further. Disrupted supply chains and production capacity have pushed up already very high prices of food and all other basic necessities. In some areas of the country prices of staple commodities have tripled since May compared with the most recent five-year period average.

Can widespread famine be averted?

To avert a famine, a de-escalation of the conflict is needed to create better security conditions and put an end to the current disruptions in markets, supply chains and distribution channels. The IPC working group on Sudan also makes these recommendations for immediate action:

Restore humanitarian access so that humanitarian agencies can get safe and sustained access to areas with populations most in need.

Substantially increase the amount of food assistance and other essential supplies to prevent loss of life and support livelihoods.

Scale up nutrition interventions, particularly for vulnerable groups such as children and pregnant women.

Support livelihoods, including distribution of agricultural inputs and creating safe zones for farming.

It is crucial for the international community to respond swiftly to avert a humanitarian disaster in Sudan.

Rob Vos, Unit Director, Markets, Trade, and Institutions, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Khalid Siddig, Senior Research Fellow and Program Leader for the Sudan Strategy Support Program, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As someone who has studied Russian culture and history for decades, I think of Nazi Germany’s nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war’s ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.

We’ve been taught since childhood that war is mainly about troops fighting, no matter that we live in a world in which most military funding actually has little to do with people. Instead, war treasure chests go disproportionately into arms production rather than troops and (more importantly) their wider communities at home. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons are being developed with little or no ethical oversight or regulation, potentially removing many soldiers from future battlefields but not from the disastrous psychological scars of war. Meanwhile, in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).

Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don’t get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war’s supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine’s war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.

America’s Post-9/11 Forever Wars

As one of the co-founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, I often think about the largely unrecognized but far-reaching impact of America’s post-9/11 war on terror (still playing out in dozens of countries around the world). Most of the college students who made news this spring protesting U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza hadn’t even been born when, after the 9/11 attacks, this country first embarked on our decades-long forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and all too many other places. By our count at the Costs of War Project, those wars directly killed nearly one million people in combat, including some 432,000 civilians (and still counting!), and indirectly millions more.

Our forever wars began long before local journalists in war zones first started to post bombings and so many other gruesome visions of the costs of war, including starvation, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media sites, as they did during the first days of the Russian bombing of Kyiv and, as I write, Israel’s seemingly never-ending assault on Gaza. Those journalists haven’t been fettered by the U.S. military’s embed programs, which initially hamstrung war reporters trying to offer anything but a sanitized version of the war on terror. In other words, Americans have, at least recently, been able to witness the crimes and horrors other militaries commit in their war zones (just not our own).

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And yet the human rights violations and destruction of infrastructure from the all-American war on terror were every bit as impactful as what’s now playing out before our eyes. We just didn’t see the destruction or slow-motion degradation of roads and bridges over which food was distributed; the drone attacks that killed Afghan farmers; the slow contamination of agriculture in war zones thanks, in part, to American missiles and rockets; the sewage runoff from U.S. bases; the bombings in everyday areas like crowded Iraqi marketplaces that made grocery shopping a potentially deadly affair; and the displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis because of U.S.-led drone attacks — to take just a few of so many examples. Of course, these aren’t problems as easily captured in a single picture, no less a video, as hospitals full of starving children or the flattened cities of the Gaza Strip.

America’s longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country’s poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.

In the U.S., we haven’t seen antiwar protests on anywhere near the scale of the recent Gaza campus ones since the enormous 2003 protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after which those hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators thinned to a mere trickle in the years to follow. Sadly, Americans have proven selective indeed when it comes to reckoning with conflict, whether because of short attention spans, laziness, or an inability to imagine the blood on our own hands.

Denials of Humanitarian Aid

So, too, the U.S. has been complicit in denying aid shipments to people in the greatest need — and not just today in Gaza. Yes, Congress and the Biden administration decided to cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because of the alleged participation of some of its Gaza staff members in Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. But don’t think that was unique. For example, in 2009, our government prevented more than $50 million in aid from entering Somalia, including aid from the World Food Program, even though aid groups were warning that the country stood on the precipice of mass starvation. In 2011, the U.N. officially declared a famine there and, to this day, Somalia’s hunger crisis continues, exacerbated by climate change and wider regional conflicts.

And that’s hardly the only way this country has been involved in such crises. After all, thanks to America’s forever wars, some 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died not from bullets or bombs but, during those wars and in their aftermath, from malnutrition, disease, suicide, and other indirect (but no less real) causes. In such situations, hunger factors in as a multiplier of other causes of death because of how it weakens bodies.

Now, Gaza is a major humanitarian catastrophe in which the U.S. is complicit. Armed far-right Israeli groups have repeatedly blocked aid from entering the enclave or targeted Gazans clamoring for such aid, and Israeli forces have fired on aid workers and civilians seeking to deliver food. In a striking irony, Palestinians have also died because of food aid, as people drowned while trying to retrieve U.S. and Jordanian airdrops of aid in the sea or were crushed by them on land when parachutes failed.

This country’s complicity in Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has been disastrous: an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.

A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.

Hunger as a Cause of War

Famine is the nightmarish version of the gift that just keeps giving. Hungry people are more likely to resort to violence to solve their problems. War-afflicted Yemen is a case in point. In that country, the U.S. funded and armed the Saudi military in its air strikes against the Houthi-led rebels that began in 2015 and went on for years (a role now taken over by my country). One child under five is still estimated to die every 10 minutes from malnutrition and related causes there, in large part because war has so decimated the country’s food production and distribution infrastructure. Since war first struck Yemen, the country’s economy has halved, and nearly 80% of the population is now dependent on humanitarian aid. A direct consequence of the unrest has been the flourishing of Islamic extremist groups like the Houthis. Countries facing hunger and food instability are, in fact, more likely to be politically unstable and experience more numerous protests, some of them violent.

Nowadays, I find that I can’t help imagining worst-case scenarios like the risk of nuclear war, a subject that has come up in a threatening manner recently in relation to Ukraine. The scale of hunger that the smallest nuclear conflagrations would create is hard to imagine even by today’s grim standards. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, for example, would distribute soot into the atmosphere and disrupt the climate globally, affecting food and livestock production and probably causing death by starvation in a “nuclear winter” of three billion people. Were there to be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, an estimated five billion people might die from hunger alone in the famine that would ensue. It’s not an outcome I even care to imagine (though we all should probably be thinking about it more than we do).

Hunger at the Heart of Empire

Though this country is not (yet) a war zone, it’s not an accident that Americans are facing high food prices and record levels of hunger. The more than $8 trillion our government has spent over the past two decades on our distant wars alone has sapped resources for investment in things like transportation and better water systems here, while ensuring that there are more than 1.4 million fewer jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, military families struggle with far higher rates of food insecurity than those among the general population. Progressives and anyone interested in the preservation of this country’s now fragile democracy shouldn’t ignore the wasting of the lives of those of us who are hungrier, have a harder time affording daily prices, and have more in common with civilians in war zones than we normally imagine.

Seen in this light, the overwhelming focus of young Americans on the Gaza war and their lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy, as they consider voting for third-party candidates (or not voting at all) and so handing Donald Trump the presidency, becomes more understandable to me. What good is a democracy if it hemorrhages resources into constant foreign wars? Certainly, the current administration has yet to introduce a viable alternative to our endless engagement in foreign conflicts or meaningfully mitigate the inflation of basic necessities, among them food and housing. President (and candidate) Biden needs to articulate a more robust vision for preserving democracy in America, which would include ways to solve the problems of daily life like how to afford groceries.

Still, while I’ll give our youngest generation of antiwar progressives kudos for holding elected officials to task for their myopic priorities, especially on Gaza, let’s also get real and look at the alternative rapidly barreling toward us: another Trump presidency. Does anyone really think that Gaza would be better off then?

What would happen to anyone protesting wars in Gaza or elsewhere? How would we pressure a president who has advocated violence to overthrow the results of a peaceful election?

Concerns about foreign wars can’t be solved by staying home on November 5th or voting for a third-party candidate or Donald Trump. The 2024 election is about preserving our very ability to protest America’s wars (or those this country is backing abroad), as opposed to creating a potential Trumpian forever hell here at home.

Think of Donald Trump, in fact, as the potential fifth horseman of the apocalypse, now riding toward us at full speed.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com