However, that’s begun to change. As it happens, like so many other New Yorkers, I only recently experienced a June heat dome over my city. Here in Manhattan, where I walk many miles daily for exercise, it was simply brutal. The sort of thing you might expect in a truly bad week in August.

This June, though, it was hot nationally almost beyond imagining. As I began this piece, it was estimated that more than 270 million Americans, 80% of us, were experiencing a heatwave of a potentially unprecedented sort extending over significant parts of the country. There were devastating early wildfires in the Southwest and West (not to speak of the ones burning long-term in Canada). Ruidoso, a small mountain town in New Mexico that my wife, who grew up in El Paso, Texas, once loved, had at least 1,400 of its structures damaged or destroyed by fire and two people killed.

Meanwhile, as I began writing this, the first tropical storm of this overheated season was already forming in the Gulf of Mexico and heading for Texas, not to speak of those record rainstorms that only recently flooded the Ft. Lauderdale and Miami areas in a distinctly unsettling fashion. And then, of course, there was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s prediction that, given how hot the tropical waters of the Atlantic Ocean had become, this year’s hurricane season could prove to be an all-too-literal hell on Earth. There might possibly be 25 named storms (itself a record prediction). And I was thinking about all of this as I sat at my desk in New York City, stripped to my undershirt in the rising heat of a June day from hell. 

Honestly, it’s not that complicated. In fact, we should give ourselves credit. We humans have certainly proved to be remarkable — or at least remarkably destructive. Yes, we’ve long been that way, but the levels of that destructiveness have, in recent history, grown in a striking fashion. If you feel in a negative enough mood, humanity’s time on this planet can be seen as a history of ever more horrific wars that, in the last century, became global. And, of course, the second of those world wars ended in an historically unprecedented fashion with the destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a new weapon, the atom bomb, that all too soon proved capable not just of devastating urban areas but of possibly wiping out civilization itself. And that, in a sense, couldn’t be more deeply us. (There are, of course, other histories that could also be written that would be far more encouraging, including a history of literature and of healing, but at least for now let’s leave them aside.)

I mean, give us full credit. In these decades, we’ve discovered — once by the deepest sort of planning and experimentation (think “Trinity,” the code name for the first nuclear test in the desert of Los Alamos, New Mexico, that Robert J. Oppenheimer became so famous for) and then by the inadvertent, if deeply profitable use of fossil fuels — two ways of potentially destroying Earth, at least as a livable place for you-know-who. I’m talking, of course, about the very planet that nurtured humanity for endless millennia.

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Nuclear war between great (or even lesser) powers could, of course, quickly produce an apocalyptic scenario that might kill millions of human beings and create a nuclear winter on planet Earth capable of starving most of the rest of us. Climate change, while potentially no less destructive, offers us that apocalypse in slow motion. And that’s obviously why it’s taken me so long, despite all that I’ve written on the subject, to truly feel it myself in broiling Manhattan.

Death by Heat

Oh, and as I sat there sweating profusely in front of my computer on that overheated day, I was struck by a little cheery news when it comes to doing in the planet. As the Guardian recently reported, nuclear spending actually rose globally by 13% in 2023. How farsighted of us!

Congratulations are certainly in order, don’t you think? And to give credit where it’s due, among the nine nuclear powers on this planet, my own country leads the list in increased spending, pouring more billions of dollars into such weaponry than the next eight nuclear powers combined. And mind you, at this very second, two of the planet’s nine nuclear powers, Russia and Israel, are actually at war. While one, Israel, doesn’t mention its nuclear arsenal, the other has repeatedly threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons (some more powerful than the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in Ukraine or even assumedly elsewhere in Europe.

A third nuclear power, North Korea, has been implicitly threatening to atomize its southern neighbor and foe. Oh, and just for a little even cheerier news, Russian President Vladimir Putin now needs North Korean weaponry so badly to fight his war in Ukraine that he may be willing to aid Kim Jong-un’s scientists in designing “a warhead that could survive re-entry into the atmosphere and threaten its many adversaries, starting with the United States.” So, at the moment, if anything, the possibilities of future nuclear war seem to be on the rise.

Meanwhile, in this planet’s slow-motion version of Armageddon, while we Americans have been experiencing our own extreme weather events from coast to coast, so have other countries, sometimes in an even more devastating fashion. Take Greece, part of a Europe that experienced extreme heat last summer. Only recently, it’s had an early heatwave that scientists say could “go down in history” (at least until next year!) in which at least five tourists have died. And that, in truth, was nothing, not if you shift your focus to Saudi Arabia. There, during this year’s Hajj religious pilgrimage in which 1.8 million well-robed visitors took part, more than 1,300 pilgrims died of heat exposure as the temperature hit 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, South Asia has been broiling, with temperatures there all too literally going sky high — up to 127 degrees Fahrenheit in India and Pakistan — and resulting in increasing numbers of deaths. In India, only perhaps 12% of the population even has air conditioning (which, in any case, simply puts more fossil fuels into the atmosphere). Scores of people have died there from extreme temperatures, including dozens of poll workers during India’s recent election.

Such extremes are becoming a global phenomenon, as is ever wilder weather. Take, for instance, recent record temperatures and a grim drought across significant parts of northern China along with record flooding in the southern part of that country. And mind you, China has done more than any other nation to switch to non-fossil-fuel-producing renewable forms of energy and yet, in 2023, it was also continuing to build new coal-powered plants at a rate of two per week.

Whether cheaper solar and wind energy, which are indeed growing faster than any energy source ever, will leave oil, coal, and natural gas in a historic ditch remains to be seen. In the meantime, our planet is a growing climate mess, with (let’s not forget) us humans continuing to make war on each other in Ukraine and Gaza, efforts that only pour yet more fossil fuels into the atmosphere.   

A Slow-Motion Conflagration

This is just the start of a process of climate devastation that, barring surprises, is scheduled to grow ever more severe in the years to come. And if you want to look for a moment at causation (as with nuclear spending), rather than the death-dealing results of it all, consider my country. It’s still setting startling records when it comes to the production of fossil fuels. In fact, in 2023, for the sixth year in a row, the United States set a global record for oil production (an average of 12.9 million barrels a day) and it’s also now the largest exporter of natural gas on the planet.

Meanwhile, the major fossil-fuel companies and their CEOs continue to make absolute fortunes. As the CEO of Chevron put it last year: “In 2023, we returned more cash to shareholders and produced more oil and natural gas than any year in the company’s history.” Hooray! And think of all of that as possibly the ultimate form of warfare on planet Earth. Consider it, in fact, a slo-mo version of atomic war, even if no one normally talks about fossil-fuelized war or anything of the sort.

Those mind-boggling American records took place under a president who has at least attempted to curb climate change. And yet, keep in mind that my fellow citizens, sweating across the country right now, could elect a man in 2024 who has sworn to wipe out our modest steps towards a greener future on the very first day he gets back into the Oval Office (and essentially ignored a question about climate change during the debate Thursday without being seriously challenged for doing so). He’s proudly met with just about every fossil fuel CEO in sight, promising to “end a freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas,” reverse any steps President Biden took to limit fossil-fuel usage, and is even more proudly ready, as he’s bragged more than once, to “drill, baby, drill” from his first day in office. Meanwhile, of course, many of the countries of Europe, which until now have moved more decisively against the use of fossil fuels, just elected all too many far-right representatives to the European Parliament and may do the same thing in state-by-state elections, and so, as in this country, could reverse course on climate change.

Imagine this then: next June, if I’m still writing TomDispatch pieces, it may be without even that undershirt on. (Excuse me for a moment, while I wipe the sweat from my face.)

The future, as they say, is now and, believe me, I feel it. Right now! (And I don’t often use exclamation points.) And yet, in the slow-motion apocalypse that climate change represents, the one that’s already starting to slaughter human beings before it even truly hits its stride, this is clearly just the beginning, perhaps — though we don’t yet know — just the beginning of the beginning.

It saddens me beyond words to imagine the future world my grandchildren might find themselves in. It’s true that we should never underestimate ourselves — and not just when it comes to destruction. The switch to non-fossil-fuel forms of energy is distinctly on the rise and they are indeed becoming ever less expensive to install and use. And you never know — you truly don’t — what else the human brain can come up with. Nor, of course, do we know whether, in the grimmest fashion imaginable, we could end all this slow-motion suffering on planet Earth in a nuclear conflagration.

Given our history, who knows what we could do? And I haven’t even mentioned artificial intelligence, have I? I fear I may simply be too old to take all of this in or the ways in which we humans could still prove destructive beyond compare.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

It took me some time to realize that the triad was anything but the trinity, that it was instead a product of historical contingency. Certainly, my mind was clouded because two legs of that triad were the prerogative of the U.S. Air Force, my chosen branch of service. When I was a teenager, the Air Force had 1,054 ICBMs (mainly Minutemen missiles) in silos in rural states like Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, along with hundreds of strategic bombers kept on constant alert against the Soviet menace. They represented enormous power not just in destructive force measured in megatonnage but in budgetary authority for the Air Force. The final leg of that triad, the most “survivable” one in case of a nuclear war, was (and remains) the Navy’s SLBMs on nuclear submarines. (Back in the day, the Army was so jealous that it, too, tried to go atomic, but its nuclear artillery shells and tactical missiles were child’s play compared to the potentially holocaust-producing arsenals of the Air Force and Navy.)

When I said that the triad wasn’t the trinity, what I meant (the obvious aside) was this: the U.S. military no longer needs nuclear strategic bombers and land-based ICBMs in order to threaten to destroy the planet. As a retired Air Force officer who worked in Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt, during the tail end of the first Cold War, and as a historian who once upon a time taught courses on the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy, I have some knowledge and experience here. Those two “legs” of the nuclear triad, bombers and ICBMs, have long been redundant, obsolete, a total waste of taxpayer money — leaving aside, of course, that they would prove genocidal in an unprecedented fashion were they ever to be used.

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Nevertheless, such thoughts have no effect on our military. Instead, the Air Force is pushing ahead with plans to field — yes! — a new strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider, and — yes, again! — a new ICBM, the Sentinel, whose combined price tag will likely exceed $500 billion. The first thing any sane commander-in-chief with an urge to help this country would do is cancel those new nuclear delivery systems tomorrow. Instead of rearming, America should begin disarming, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

A Brief History of America’s Nuclear Triad

It all started with atomic bombs and bombers. In August 1945, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by two atomic bombs carried by B-29 bombers, ending World War II. However, in the years that followed, as the Cold War with the Soviet Union heated up, the only “delivery system” the military had for its growing thermonuclear arsenal was the strategic bomber. Those were the glory days of the Strategic Air Command, or SAC, whose motto (believe it or not) was “Peace Is Our Profession” — the “peace” of a mass nuclear grave, had those hydrogen bombs ever been dropped on their intended targets in the Soviet Union and China.

However, as this country’s weapons makers produced ever more powerful hydrogen bombs and strategic bombers, a revolution was afoot in missile technology. By the late 1950s, missiles tipped with nuclear warheads became a practical reality. By the 1960s, the Air Force was already lobbying for 10,000 ICBMs, even if my old service had to settle for a mere thousand or so of them during the administration of President John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, the Navy was maneuvering its way into the act by demonstrating that it was indeed possible for mobile, difficult-to-detect submarines to carry nuclear-tipped missiles.

By the late 1960s, that triad of potentially ultimate nuclear death had become so sacrosanct that it was untouchable. More than half a century later, America’s nuclear triad has endured and, all too sadly, is likely to do so far longer than you or me (if not, of course, used).

You might wonder why that should be so. It’s not for any sensible military or strategic reason. By the 1980s, if not before, bombers and ICBMs were obsolete. That was why President Jimmy Carter canceled the B-1 bomber in 1977 (though it would be revived under President Ronald Reagan, with the Air Force buying 100 of those expensive, essentially useless aircraft). That was why the Air Force developed the “peacekeeper” MX ICBM, which was supposed to be mobile (shuffled around by rail) or hidden via an elaborate shell game. Such notions were soon abandoned, though not the missiles themselves, which were stuffed for a time into fixed silos. The endurance of such weapons systems owes everything to Air Force stubbornness and the lobbying power of the industrial side of the military-industrial complex, as well as to members of Congress loath to give up ICBM and bomber bases in their districts, no matter how costly, unnecessary, and omnicidal they may be.

In that light, consider the Navy’s current force of highly capable Ohio-class nuclear submarines. There are 14 of them, each armed with up to 20 Trident II missiles, each with up to eight warheads. We’re talking, in other words, about at least 160 potentially devastating nuclear explosions, each roughly five to 20 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, from a single sub. In fact, it’s possible that just one of those submarines has an arsenal with enough destructive power not just to kill millions of us humans, but to tip the earth into a nuclear winter in which billions more of us could starve to death. And America has 14 of them!

Why, then, does the Air Force argue that it, too, “needs” new strategic bombers and ICBMs? The traditional arguments go like this: bombers can be launched as a show of resolve and, unlike missiles, recalled. They are also allegedly more flexible. In Air Force jargon, they can be rerouted against “targets of opportunity” in a future nuclear war. Of course, generals can always produce a scenario, however world-ending, to justify any weapons system, based on what an enemy might or might not do or discover. Nonetheless, strategic bombers were already nearing obsolescence when Stanley Kubrick made his classic antinuclear satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), so prominently featuring them.

And what about land-based ICBMs? Once the claim was that they had more “throw-weight” (bigger warheads) than SLBMs and were also more accurate (being launched from fixed silos rather than a mobile platform like a submarine). But with GPS and other advances in technology, submarine-launched missiles are now as accurate as land-based ones and “throw-weight” (sheer megatonnage) always mattered far less than accuracy.

Worse yet, land-based ICBMs in fixed silos are theoretically more vulnerable to an enemy “sneak” attack and so more escalatory in nature. The U.S. currently has 400 Minuteman III ICBMs sitting in silos. If possible incoming enemy nuclear missiles were detected, an American president might have less than 30 minutes — and possibly only 10 or so — to decide whether to launch this country’s ICBM force or risk losing it entirely.

That’s not much time to determine the all-too-literal fate of the planet, is it, especially given the risk that the enemy attack might prove to be a “false alarm“? Just before I arrived at Cheyenne Mountain, there were two such alarms (one stemming from a technical failure, the other from human error when a simulation tape was loaded into computers without any notification that it was just a “war game”). Until they were found to be false alarms, both led to elevated DEFCONs (defense readiness conditions) in preparation for possible nuclear war.

New ICBMs will only add “use them or lose them” pressure to the global situation. Mobile, elusive, and difficult to detect, the Navy’s submarine force is more than sufficient to deter any possible enemy from launching a nuclear attack on the United States. Strategic bombers and ICBMs add plenty of bang and bucks but only to the Air Force budget and the profits of the merchants of mass nuclear death who make them.

A Sane Path Forward for America’s Nuclear Force

I still remember the nuclear freeze movement, the stunningly popular antinuclear protest of the early 1980s. I also remember when President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in 1986 and seriously discussed total nuclear disarmament. I remember Barack Obama, as a 2008 presidential candidate, being joined by old Cold War stalwarts like Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn in calling for the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons.

Today, we’re not supposed to recall any of that. Instead, we’re told to focus on the way a developing “new cold war” with Russia and China is driving a “requirement” for a “modernized” U.S. nuclear triad that could cost $2 trillion over the next 30 years. Meanwhile, we’re discouraged from thinking too much about the actual risks of nuclear war. The Biden administration, for example, professes little concern about the possibility that arming Ukraine with weaponry capable of hitting deep inside Russia could lead to destabilization and the possible use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield (something Vladimir Putin has threatened to do). Nor are we to fret about surrounding China with ever more U.S. military bases and sending ever more weaponry to Taiwan, while the Chinese are enlarging their own force of ICBMs; or, for that matter, about the fact that the last nuclear agreement limiting the size of the American and Russian arsenals will run out in less than 1,000 days.

To such issues, the only response America’s “best and brightest” ever have is this one: give us more/newer strategic bombers, more/newer ICBMs, and more/newer nuclear submarines (whatever the cost)! To those men, it’s as if nuclear war were a theoretical (and distinctly money-making) chess match — and yes, they are indeed still mostly men! — a challenging game whose only components are profits, jobs, money, and power. Yet when the only story to be told is one featuring more nuclear warheads and more delivery systems, it’s hard not to conclude that, in some horrific fashion, nuclear Armageddon is indeed us (or at least them).

And though few spend much time thinking about it anymore, that’s madness personified. What’s needed instead is a new conviction that a nuclear Armageddon must not be our fate and, to make that so, we must act to eliminate all ICBMs, cancel the B-21 bomber, retire the B-1s and B-2s, work on global nuclear disarmament, start thinking about how to get rid of those nuclear subs, and begin to imagine what it would be like to invest the money saved in rebuilding America. It sure beats destroying the world.

And again, in the most practical terms possible, if we’re set on preserving Armageddon, America’s existing force of Ohio-class nuclear submarines is more than enough both to do so and undoubtedly to “deter” any possible opponent.

There was a time, in the early stages of the first Cold War, when America’s leaders professed fears of “bomber” and “missile” gaps vis-à-vis the Soviet Union — gaps that existed only in their minds; or rather only in the reverse sense, since the U.S. was ahead of the Soviets in both technologies. Today, the bomber and missile “gaps” are, in fact, gaps in logic wielded by a Pentagon that insists strategic bombers and ICBMs remain a “must” for this country’s safety and security.

It’s all such nonsense and I’m disgusted by it. I want my personal thermonuclear odyssey to come to an end. As a kid in the 1970s, I built a model of the B-1 bomber. As a ROTC cadet in the early 1980s, I made a presentation on the U.S./Soviet nuclear balance. As a young Air Force officer, I hunkered down in Cheyenne Mountain, awaiting a nuclear attack that fortunately never came. When I visited Los Alamos and the Trinity Test Site at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1992, I saw what J. Robert Oppenheimer’s original atomic “gadget” had done to the tower from which it had been suspended. When the Soviet Union collapsed, I genuinely hoped that this country’s (and the world’s) long nuclear nightmare might finally be coming to an end.

Tragically, it was not to be. The gloomy Los Alamos of 1992, faced with serious cuts to its nuclear-weapons-producing budget, is once again an ebullient boom town. Lots of new plutonium pits are being dug. Lots more money is flooding in to give birth to a new generation of nuclear weapons. Of course, it’s madness, sheer madness, yet,this time, it’s all happening so quietly.

Even as the nuclear clock ticks ever closer to midnight, nobody is ducking and covering in America’s classrooms anymore (except against mass shooters). No one’s building a nuclear bomb shelter in their backyard (though doomsday shelters for the ultra-rich seem to have become status symbols). We’re all going about our business as if such a war were inconceivable and, in any case, akin to a natural disaster in being essentially out of our control.

And yet even as we live our lives, the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon remains somewhere in our deepest fears and fantasies. Worse yet, the more we suppress the thought of such horrors and the more we refuse even to think about acting to prevent them, the more likely it is that such an Armageddon will indeed come for all of us one day, and the “trinity” we’ll experience will be a horrific version of the blinding flash of light first seen by J. Robert Oppenheimer and crew at that remote desert site nearly 80 years ago.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

Actually, let me correct that thought slightly: it certainly does matter, but what matters so much more is that we humans simply can’t stop fighting them. That is (or at least should be) a stunning and deeply saddening reality. What obvious lessons we seem congenitally incapable of learning! In the previous century, after all, there were two truly global wars, World War I and World War II, that were estimated to have left significantly more than 100 million military personnel and civilians dead, while decimating parts of the planet. The second of those conflicts ended with the obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945, with the loss of possibly 200,000 dead, and the arrival in our world of a shattering new weapon, the atomic bomb. After so many centuries of endless warfare, it finally brought humanity to the edge of future annihilation.

And since those fateful August days so long ago, ever more nations — with the addition of North Korea early in this century, the number has risen to nine — have acquired nuclear weapons, while the nations that had them only continue to “improve” and expand their arsenals. My own country, in fact, is planning to spend something like $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) “modernizing” its already vast arsenal of nukes deliverable from the land, the sea, or the air, and undoubtedly, in the years to come, from space. Russia is doing the same and the Chinese are hustling to “catch up” in their ability to take down this planet in a big-time fashion.

It is — or at least should be — incredible to think that today, 78 years after the first test atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico, even a relatively modest nuclear war between two countries like India and Pakistan (as opposed to powers like the United States and Russia with monster nuclear arsenals) could induce a global nuclear winter that would be likely to starve to death most of humanity. Worse yet, at this point, that’s undoubtedly not even the worst nuclear scenario imaginable.

The Most Remarkable Accomplishment

Not so very many years ago, in the period after the Cold War officially ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, I would have found it strange to be writing a piece about nuclear weapons. I mean, yes, they were still obviously around in Russia, and in the U.S. But after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, those two powers had at least started signing nuclear pacts, including the START agreement in 1991 to reduce the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals significantly. And that seemed so hopeful then.

Given who we are, I’ve always found it somewhat miraculous that, since those atomic bombs were dropped on two Japanese cities, even as nuclear weapons spread and grew ever more powerful, another never was used (unless you count the above-ground nuclear tests of the 1950s that did indeed harm small numbers of human beings). Now, however, the great powers on the planet are once again in a global nuclear arms race; key arms treaties have been left in the dust of history; rumors are rife about such weaponry spreading into space; and two nuclear powers — Russia and Israel — are at war at this very moment (even if not with each other). The Russian leadership has indeed threatened to use what are now called “tactical” nuclear weapons in its conflict with Ukraine, though most of them are significantly more powerful than the bombs that took out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Only recently, in fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin similarly threatened to use nuclear weaponry against European countries and the possible “destruction of civilization.”

And yes, a mildly antinuclear movie, a biopic of Robert Oppenheimer, the man who first developed such weaponry, did come out in this country and was a massive hit (right up there with a nuclear movie of another sort, Barbie). In a sense, someday, if there are any of us left to look back on this past we’re now living through, the greatest “achievement” of humanity might be viewed as our ever more stunning ability to nuke ourselves and everything else in sight, the works, the whole shebang. Honestly, that might be the most remarkable accomplishment of our species, if, of course, we don’t use them again.

Oh, wait, I almost forgot! In our strange brilliance, we humans came up with not one but two ways to utterly devastate humanity and the planet we live on. While the first, atomic weaponry, remains an ongoing threat of instantaneous destruction and horror, the second, a slow-motion version of ultimate destruction, the literal broiling of this planet over decades rather than minutes or hours, was launched almost two centuries ago. It was then that we humans began burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, and later natural gas — to power our industrialization and then our world. Today, the heating of this planet continues to accelerate day by day, month by month, year by year, decade by decade. Heat records of a surprising sort are now regularly being set locally and globally, while storms are becoming more devastating, droughts ever more “mega,” and forest fires fiercer, longer-lived, and more destructive.

And remind me, what have we learned from such a world? Well, the United States certainly learned that it needed a military beyond compare and began pouring what would, in the end, be untold trillions of dollars into it. (As of 2023, our yearly “defense” spending would add up to more than that of the next 10 countries combined.) Between the end of World War II and this moment, my country would also fight wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq (twice), and on a smaller (or do I mean larger?) scale its so-called war on terror stretching from Pakistan across South Asia to the Middle East (where only lately the Biden administration has been launching multiple air strikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen), and deep into Africa. Today, in the wake of all that and having assumedly learned something from more than a century of war-making, death, and destruction (and since the end of World War II, not a significant victory anywhere on the planet), my country has — yep, you guessed it! — been upping its “defense” budget in a big-time fashion, heading for the trillion-dollar mark annually.

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It all makes perfect sense, right?

Meanwhile, having discovered that nukes were capable of obliterating life as we knew it on Planet Earth, we also came to realize that, by mining for, drilling for, producing, and then burning fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — in a distinctly unprecedented fashion, we were, in fact, engaging in a war not on, but of terror against this planet and every living thing, us included. The casualties from climate change (and it is indeed changing this planet in an all too disastrous fashion) are growing more numerous, as are the refugees from places that are already becoming too uncomfortably hot to handle. And yet, with that now common knowledge and the last 10 months — month by sweltering month — of record heat globally, the hottest months, one after another, in human history, a leading candidate for president of the United States is running on a platform of, as he puts it, “drill, drill, drill,” ensuring that, should he win, the country that’s already the largest producer of oil and natural gas on Planet Earth will be leading us all ever more directly into hell in a proverbial handbasket.

A Planetary War of Terror

Mind you, given that, in some fashion, we’re all involved in what can only be thought of as a war of terror aimed at this planet, it’s not just the Trumpists who are all too ready to ignore the reality of what we’re actually doing in the twenty-first century. After all, with the planet on edge and war itself an all-too-obvious contributor to global warming, Russia, Ukraine, Hamas, and Israel are all now engaged in conflicts without any obvious end in sight that won’t just ensure the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people but help heat the Earth to the boiling point. And let me add that my own president, Joe Biden, has put significant energy into feeding the Gazan war (including hundreds of millions of dollars of arms shipments to Israel), no matter that doing so might help turn our part of the planet over to President Drill, Drill, Drill!

And lest I sell humanity short by focusing too much on my own country, let’s not forget the devastating internal conflicts in lands ranging from Pakistan to Sudan to Ethiopia, where yet more of us are being slaughtered every day. And who knows where war will break out next? Venezuela and Guyana? North and South Korea (after all, the leader of North Korea only recently threatened the South with an atomic fate)? Or perhaps the South China Sea or Taiwan? The Biden administration, for instance, only recently deployed five of this country’s 11 aircraft carriers to the Pacific in a clear challenge to China, just in case major wars in Europe and the Middle East weren’t enough for us. No one knows, but given our history, one thing seems painfully certain — war will undoubtedly break out again and again and again.

And of course, war can now erupt in new ways, not just the old-fashioned ones. After all, though it’s never thought of in this fashion, the United States is indeed at war right now. And no, I’m not thinking about the vast quantities of weaponry that we’re delivering to Israel (or not at the moment delivering to Ukraine). I’m thinking instead about the fact that my country produced record levels of oil in 2023 and has become the world’s largest supplier of natural gas (and, mind you, that’s with a president who has taken crucial steps to whittle down our use of such fuels).

And yes, significant moves are being made in Europe and elsewhere (though not in major fossil-fuel producer Russia) to repower humanity in a fashion that will indeed cut fossil-fuel use in a major way, but it’s simply not enough. China, for instance, is moving faster than any other country when it comes to installing renewable energy and so changing its energy landscape. Unfortunately, it still uses more coal and continues to build far more new coal power plants than all the other countries on this planet combined. And consider it anything but strange that the major private fossil-fuel companies are still making absolute fortunes producing products that might as well be slow-motion versions of atomic weaponry and, unbelievably enough, some of them are still expanding their search for more of the same.

So, both apocalyptic war and war on the planet itself are now, sadly enough, ever more deeply woven into the human constellation. Meanwhile, it seems all too obvious that we can’t stop fighting older-style wars either, killing staggering numbers of people, destroying lands, and devastating parts of this world and those living on it.

Isn’t it strange that, after all these millennia, we humans just keep on keeping on, that we can’t seem to truly face, no less truly deal with, who and what we are and what we repeatedly do to ourselves, not to speak of the rest of this planet? The logic of what should be done and how we should live with one another seems all too obvious in a world that today finds itself entering an ever more hellish state. It’s time not just for a “cease fire” in Gaza, but for the declaration of some kind of planetary cease fire.

But can we truly imagine such a thing?  Who knows?

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

( Tomdispatch.com) – Yes, the Doomsday Clock keeps ticking — it’s now at 90 seconds to midnight, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — but the ultimate time bomb never gets the attention that it deserves. Even as the possibility of nuclear annihilation looms, this century’s many warning signs retain the status of Cassandras.

Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump withdrew the United States from vital pacts between the U.S. and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers, shutting down the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaties. And despite promising otherwise, Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden did nothing to revive them.

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Under the buzzword “modernization,” the American government, a thermonuclear colossus, spent $51 billion last year alone updating and sustaining its nuclear arsenal, gaining profligate momentum in a process that’s set to continue for decades to come. “Modernizing and maintaining current nuclear warheads and infrastructure is estimated to cost $1.7 trillion through Fiscal Year 2046,” the office of Senator Edward Markey (D-MA) pointed out, “while the Congressional Budget Office anticipates that current nuclear modernization would cost $494 billion through Fiscal Year 2028.”

Such bloated sums might prove a good argument against specific weapons systems, but Uncle Sam has incredibly deep pockets for nuclear weaponry and a vast array of other military boondoggles. In fact, compared to the costs of deploying large numbers of troops, nuclear weapons can seem almost frugal. And consider the staggering price of a single aircraft carrier that went into service in 2017, the Gerald R. Ford: $13.3 billion.

Militarism’s overall mega-thievery from humanity has long been extreme, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower made clear in a 1953 speech: 

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

The Nuclear Complex and “Crackpot Realism”

In the case of budgets for nuclear arms, the huge price tags are — in the most absolute sense imaginable — markers for a sustained, systemic, headlong rush toward omnicide, the destruction of the human species. Meanwhile, what passes for debate on Capitol Hill is routinely an exercise in green-eyeshade discourse, assessing the most cost-effective outlays to facilitate Armageddon, rather than debating the wisdom of maintaining and escalating the nuclear arms race in the first place.

Take, for instance, the recent news on cost overruns for the ballyhooed Sentinel land-based missile system, on the drawing boards to replace the existing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) in 400 underground silos located in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Northrop Grumman has already pocketed a $13.3 billion contract to begin moving the project forward. But the costs have been zooming upward so fast as to set off alarm bells in Congress, forcing a reassessment.

“The U.S. Air Force’s new intercontinental ballistic missile program is at risk of blowing past its initial $96 billion cost estimate by so much that the overruns may trigger a review on whether to terminate the project,” Bloomberg News reported in mid-December. Since then, the estimated overruns have only continued to soar. Last month, Northrop Grumman disclosed that the per-missile cost of the program had climbed by “at least 37 percent,” reaching $162 million — and, as Breaking Defense noted, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin would need to “certify the program to stave off its cancellation.”

At one level, cancellation would vindicate the approach taken by disarmament-oriented groups a couple of years ago when they tried to stop the creation of the Sentinel by arguing that it would be a “money pit missile.” But at a deeper level, the cost argument — while potentially a winner for blocking the Sentinel — is a loser when it comes to reducing the dangers of nuclear war, which ICBMs uniquely boost as the land-based part of this nation’s nuclear triad.

As Daniel Ellsberg and I wrote in the Nation in 2021, “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.” Eliminating ICBMs would be a crucial step when it comes to decreasing those dangers, because “unlike the nuclear weapons on submarines or bombers, the land-based missiles are vulnerable to attack and could present the commander in chief with a sudden use-them-or-lose-them choice.” That’s why ICBMs are on hair-trigger alert and why defeating just the Sentinel would be a truly Pyrrhic victory if the purported need for such land-based missiles is reaffirmed in the process.

In theory, blocking the Sentinel by decrying it as too expensive could be a step toward shutting down ICBMs entirely. In practice, unfortunately, the cost argument has routinely led to an insistence that the current Minuteman III ICBMs could simply be upgraded and continue to serve just as well — only reinforcing the assumption that ICBMs are needed in the first place.

The author of the pathbreaking 2022 study “The Real Cost of ICBMs,” Emma Claire Foley, is now a colleague of mine at RootsAction.org, where she coordinates the Defuse Nuclear War coalition’s new campaign to eliminate ICBMs. “News of dramatic cost overruns on the Sentinel program is unsurprising, but I don’t think that in itself should encourage disarmament advocates,” she told me recently. “Cancellation of the Sentinel program does not equal a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, or the risk of nuclear war. It will take an organized mass movement to make good on this opportunity to meaningfully reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

The re-emerging ICBM controversy is yet another high-stakes example of the kind of gauntlet that disarmament advocates regularly face in official Washington, where presenting an analysis grounded in sanity is almost certain to be viewed as “not realistic.” On the other hand, when it comes to nuclear issues, accommodating to “crackpot realism” is a precondition for being taken seriously by the movers and shakers on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch.

Such accommodation involves adjusting to a magnitude of systemic insanity almost beyond comprehension. Disarmament advocates are often confronted with a tacit choice between seeming unserious to the nuclear priesthood and its adherents or pushing for fairly minor adjustments in what Daniel Ellsberg, in the title of his final landmark book, dubbed all too accurately The Doomsday Machine.

This country’s anti-nuclear and disarmament groups have scant presence in the mainstream media. And the more forthright they are in directly challenging the government’s nonstop nuclear recklessness — with results that could include billions of deaths from “nuclear winter” — the less media access they’re apt to get. When President Biden reneged on his 2020 campaign pledge to adopt a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons, for instance, critical blowback in the media was meager and fleeting. Little news coverage occurred when a small number of members of Congress went out of their way to object.

“Unfortunately,” Markey said in a speech on the Senate floor two years ago, “our American democracy and Russia’s autocracy do share one major thing in common: Both our systems give the United States and Russian presidents the godlike powers known as sole authority to end life on the planet as we know it by ordering a nuclear first strike.”

Nuclear Madness and Psychic Numbing

Any nuclear first strike would likely lead to a full-scale nuclear war. And the science is clear that a “nuclear winter” would indeed follow — in Ellsberg’s words, “killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1% of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98% or 99% would not.”

Such a steep plunge in planetary temperatures would exceed the worst prognoses for the effects of climate change, even if in the other direction, temperature-wise. But leaders of the climate movement rarely even mention the capacity of nuclear arsenals to destroy the planet’s climate in a different way from global warming. That omission reflects the ongoing triumph of nuclear madness and the “psychic numbing” that accompanies it.

During the more than three-quarters of a century since August 1945, when the U.S. government dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear genie has escaped from the bottle to eight other countries — Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea — all now brandishing their own ultimate weapons of mass destruction. And the biggest nuclear powers have continuously undermined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

Key dynamics have scarcely changed since, in 2006, the Centre for International Governance Innovation published a cogent analysis that concluded: “Europe and North America are busy championing nuclear weapons as the ultimate security trump card and the preeminent emblem of political gravitas, thereby building a political/security context that is increasingly hostile to non-proliferation.”

Like Barack Obama before him, Joe Biden promised some much-needed changes in nuclear policies during his successful quest to win the White House, but once in office — as with Obama’s pledges — those encouraging vows turned out to be so much smoke. The administration’s long-awaited Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), issued in October 2022, was largely the usual dose of nuclear madness. “Although Joe Biden during his presidential election campaign spoke strongly in favor of adopting no-first-use and sole-purpose policies, the NPR explicitly rejects both for now,” the Federation of American Scientists lamented. “From an arms control and risk reduction perspective, the NPR is a disappointment. Previous efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals and the role that nuclear weapons play have been subdued by renewed strategic competition abroad and opposition from defense hawks at home.”

Stymied by the Biden administration and Congress, many organizations and activists working on nuclear-weapons issues were heartened by the blockbuster movie Oppenheimer, promoted from the outset as an epic thriller about “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it.” For several months before the film’s release last July, activists prepared to use it as a springboard for wider public discussion of nuclear weapons. The film did indeed make a big splash and sparked more public discussion of nukes in the United States than had occurred in perhaps decades. The movie had notably stunning production values. Unfortunately, its human values were less impressive, especially since people on the receiving end of the scientific brilliance at Los Alamos in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and even downwinders in New Mexico) remained off-screen.

Watching the movie, I thought of my visit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory about 60 years after the triumphant Trinity atomic test. During an interview, one of the public relations specialists there explained that the legal entity managing the Los Alamos lab was “a limited liability corporation.” That seemed to sum up our government’s brazen lack of accountability for the nuclearization of our planet.

Six months after Oppenheimer arrived at multiplexes, its political impact appears to be close to zero. The film’s disturbing aspects plowed the ground, but — in the absence of a strong disarmament movement or effective leadership among officials in Washington on nuclear weapons issues — little seeding has taken place.

At the end of January, supporters marked the first anniversary of H. Res. 77, a bill sponsored by Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and cosponsored by 42 other members of the House, “embracing the goals and provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.” The nonbinding measure aptly summarizes the world’s nuclear peril and offers valuable recommendations, beginning with a call for the United States to actively pursue and conclude “negotiations on a new, bilateral nuclear arms control and disarmament framework agreement with the Russian Federation” as well as purposeful talks “with China and other nuclear-armed states.”

Specific recommendations in the bill include: “renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first; ending the President’s sole authority to launch a nuclear attack; taking the nuclear weapons of the United States off hair-trigger alert; and canceling the plan to replace the nuclear arsenal of the United States with modernized, enhanced weapons.”

The fact that only 10% of House members have even chosen to sponsor the resolution shows just how far we have to go to begin putting the brakes on a nuclear arms race that threatens to destroy — all too literally — everything.

Copyright 2024 Norman Solomon

Tomdispatch.com

The “peacetime” that followed the devastation of those two cities and the killing of at least 100,000 Japanese civilians in them would, for the next 46 years, be stoked by what came to be known as the Cold War. In it, a nuclear-armed America and a soon-to-be-nuclear-armed Soviet Union, as well as its “commie” — the term of the time — allies, faced off against each other globally. (Estimates done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1961 suggested that a full-scale U.S. nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and Communist China would then have killed between 200 million and 600 million people.) Both sides would rush to create vast nuclear arsenals able not just to obliterate the United States and the Soviet Union, but the planet itself, while, in the course of the next three-quarters of a century, seven other countries would, cheerily enough, join the nuclear “club.”

Two of the countries waging war at this moment, Russia and Israel, are nuclear powers. And today, more than 78 years after those atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with perhaps 1,700 nuclear weapons deployed (most of them staggeringly more powerful than those first atomic bombs), the U.S. is in the midst of a multi-decade “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal to the tune of at least $1.5 trillion and possibly far more.

All in all, consider that quite an inheritance from that childhood of mine.

We kids grew up then amid what I came to call a “victory culture” — and what a potentially devastating culture that proved to be! Doesn’t the very thought of it leave you with the urge to dive under the nearest desk (something that, in my youth, was called “duck and cover” and that we kids practiced at school in case a Russian nuclear bomb were to go off over New York City)? Yes, there would indeed be a certain amount of ducking and covering of all kinds during that 40-odd year-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. After all, for the U.S., it involved a deeply unsatisfying war in Korea in the early 1950s and a bitter disaster of a war in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, fearsome anti-communist crusades at home, and Washington’s support across the planet not just for democracies but for quite a crew of autocrats (like the Shah of Iran).

Still, domestically the U.S. became a distinctly well-off land. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement grew to challenge the racial hell that was the inheritance of slavery in this country and, by the end of the Cold War, Americans were generally living better than ever before.

Of course, a grotesque version of inequality was already starting to spiral out of control as this country gained ever more billionaires, including a fellow named — yes! — Donald Trump who would be no one’s apprentice. But in all those years, one thing few here would have imagined was that American-style democracy itself might, at some moment, prove increasingly out of fashion for a distinct subset, if not a majority, of Americans.

If I Had Told You…

Now, let’s take a leap from the end of the Cold War in 1991 to the present moment and the question is: What are we headed for? Sadly, the answer (no given, but certainly a possibility) could indeed be an all-American version of fascism, brownshirts included, should Donald Trump be reelected in a chaotic November to come, including — absolutely guaranteed! — a contested election result (and god knows what else) if he isn’t.

Honestly, tell me that you even believe this world we’re supposedly living in exists!

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As I approach 80, I find just being in it increasingly unnerving. Wherever I look, nothing seems to be faintly working right. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about our secretary of defense disappearing as this year began (yes, at my age I can empathize with an older guy who doesn’t want to share information about his prostate cancer, but still…); the increasingly extreme and disturbingly fascistic — a word I once reserved for Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and the war my father fought in — bent to what’s still called the “Republican” Party; the utter madness of one whale of a guy, Donald Trump, and the possibility that such madness could attract a majority of American voters in 2024; the urge of “my” president, that old Cold Warrior Joe Biden, to bomb his way into a larger, far more disastrous war in the Middle East (and who cares whether that bombing is faintly “working” or not?); oh, and (to make sure this is my longest paragraph ever) when some of that bombing is being done to “protect” American troops in Iraq and Syria (not to speak of those who recently were wounded or died in — yes! — Jordan), who cares why in the world our soldiers are stationed there in the first place; not to speak of the all-too-unstoppable human urge to set parts of our globe aflame with war after war (and don’t forget the way those wars throw staggering amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, so that it isn’t just Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Ukraine, or Gaza burning but, in some sense, our whole planet); and, of course, the fact that we humans seem bent on all too literally heating this world to the boiling point in a fashion that, historically speaking, should (but for all too many of us doesn’t) seem beyond devastating. I mean, give us credit, since 2023 was the hottest year by far in human history and yet, some years down the line, it may seem almost cool in comparison to what’s coming.

And consider that paragraph — possibly the longest I’ve ever written — my welcome mat to the 2024 version of our world. And welcome, as well, to a country whose leaders, in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, felt distinctly on top of this planet of ours in every imaginable sense. They saw the U.S. then as the ultimate superpower (or perhaps I mean: THE ULTIMATE SUPERPOWER!!!), a power of one and one alone. After some rugged years on the foreign policy front, including that disastrous war in Vietnam that left Americans feeling anything but triumphant, victory culture was back in a big-time fashion. And that, unbelievably enough, was only a little more than three decades ago. Yet today, while the Biden administration pours weaponry into Israel and bombs and missiles into Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East, who would claim that the United States (or any other country for that matter) was the “lone superpower” on this planet?

In fact, in 2007, with this country’s post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq already dragging on disastrously, I wrote a new introduction to my book on victory culture and it was already clear to me that “perhaps when the history of this era is written, among the more striking developments will have been the inability of a mighty empire to force its will or its way on others in the normal fashion almost anywhere on the planet. Since the Soviet Union evaporated, the fact is that most previously accepted indices of power — military power in particular — have been challenged and, in the process, victory has been denied.”

In historical terms, that should be seen as a remarkably swift fall from grace in a world where this country hasn’t been able to win a war in living memory (despite having something like 750 military bases scattered across the globe and a near-trillion-dollar “defense” budget that leaves the next 10 countries combined in the dust). These days, in fact, the former lone superpower seems in danger of coming apart at the seams domestically, if not in an actual civil war (though there are certainly enough weapons of a devastating kind in civilian hands to launch one), then in some kind of a strange Trumpbacchanalia.

Yes, if we were in 1991 and I told you that, in an election season 32 years later, the very phrase “civil war” would no longer just be a reference to a distant historical memory of the Blue and the Gray, but part of everyday conversation and media reportage, you would have laughed me out of the room. Similarly, if I had told you that a strange yellow-haired man sporting an eerie grimace, a former 14-season TV apprentice (rocked by divorces and bankruptcies), would have won the presidency and then, three years after leaving office, be back at it again, reveling in the mere 91 criminal charges outstanding against him in four cases (not to speak of two civil trials) and campaigning on a promise of a one-day dictatorship on his first day back in office when he would, above all else, just “drill, drill, drill,” you would undoubtedly have thought me mad as a hatter.

If I had told you then that North Korea — yes, North Korea! — might have a missile that could reach the United States with a nuclear weapon and that its ruler (the man President Trump first called “a sick puppy” and later a “great leader”) was threatening his southern neighbor with nuclear war, would you have believed it? If I had told you then that the U.S. was fervently backing its ally Israel, after its own version of 9/11, in a war in Gaza in which staggering amounts of housing, as well as hospitals and schools in that 25-mile strip of land were being destroyed, damaged, or put out of action, more than 27,000 Palestinians (including thousands of children) slaughtered, 85% of the population turned into refugees, and perhaps half of them now in danger of starvation, would you have believed me? I doubt it. If I had told you that, more than 22 years after its own 9/11, my country would still be fighting the “war on terror” it launched then, would you have believed me? I doubt that, too.

If I had told you that, in 2024, the two candidates for president would be 81 and 77 years old (keep in mind that the oldest American president previously, Ronald Reagan, left office at age 77); that one of them would look ancient wherever he went and whatever he did, while the other, on the campaign trail, would begin slurring his words, while mixing up his Republican opponent with the former Democratic House leader, what might you think? (Oh, and don’t forget that the leader of the Senate Republicans, Mitch McConnell, is almost 82 and last year froze twice while speaking with reporters.)

Honestly, could you have ever imagined such an ancient version of an all-American world — the world of a distinctly disintegrating superpower? And yet given how we humans are acting, the U.S. could well prove to be the last superpower ever. Who knows if, in a future that seems to be heading downhill fast in an endless blaze of heat, any country, including China, could become a superpower.

Kissing It All Goodbye?

In all those years past, the one thing few could have imagined was that democracy itself might begin to go out of fashion right here in the U.S. of A.

Of course, the question now is: What are we headed for? And the answer could indeed be an all-American version of fascism, should Donald Trump be reelected this year, or an unimaginably chaotic scene if he isn’t.

And by the way, don’t blame Donald Trump for all of this. Consider him instead the biggest Symptom — and given that giant Wendy’s burger of a man, the word does need to be capitalized — around!

Imagine this: in a mere 30-plus years, we’ve moved from a world with a “lone superpower” to one in which it’s becoming harder to imagine a super anything on a planet that’s threatening to go down in a welter of wars, as well as unprecedented droughts, fires, floods, storms, and heat.

And if Donald Trump were to be elected, we would also find ourselves in an almost unimaginable version of — yes! — defeat culture (and maybe that will have to be the title of the book I’ll undoubtedly never write after I turn 80 and am headed downhill myself).

But don’t make me go on! Honestly, you know just as well as I do that, if the man who only wants to “drill, drill, drill” ends up back in the White House, you can more or less kiss this country (which already happens to be the biggest oil producer and natural gas exporter around) and possibly this planet goodbye. And if he doesn’t… well, you may have to kiss it goodbye anyway.

And that would be defeat culture, big time.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

We’ve owned this house for nearly 12 years, since just weeks before our son was born. In all that time, I’ve regularly gone down there to do the laundry and store my things (which never seem to stop accumulating). And somehow, it went from being empty when we bought it to chock-a-block full today in a way that would make Marie Kondo’s perfect hair stand straight up. 

One day recently, I noticed two booklets attached by a screw with an outdated head to one of the beams under the basement stairs. That roused my curiosity since I had no memory of putting them there and, without laundry to distract me, I tried to free them, using a dozen different screwdrivers, none of which had that old-fashioned head, so eventually I pulled them loose with the claw end of a hammer.

Keep Calm and Head West

The top one was entitled “Emergency Planning at Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Plants: A Guidebook for Our Neighbors” and was addressed to “Resident.” Nowhere in that 23-page booklet was there a date, but it referred to our power company as Connecticut Light and Power and mentioned Connecticut Yankee, a local nuclear power plant that closed nearly 30 years ago.

We still get a similar booklet every couple of years, because we live seven miles from the area’s remaining nuclear power plant, all too aptly named Millstone and situated on a picturesque peninsula that juts into Long Island Sound. I sat in my kitchen, holding that ancient booklet and listening to the hum of the refrigerator (powered by — yes! — nuclear energy). The current PR line on nuclear power is that it’s a cheap and reliable bridge to renewable energy and a crucial partner in generating a carbon-free future. Here in Connecticut, half of all our power comes from Millstone, which is managed by Dominion Energy.

On its peninsula between Pleasure Beach and Hole in the Wall Beach, Millstone draws 2.2 billion gallons of water from Long Island Sound daily to use in its cooling towers. That water, according to a report from the Yale School of Management, is then returned to the Sound 32 degrees warmer than when it was pulled out. Scientists are now studying warm water plumes from Millstone, Indian Point, and other East Coast nuclear power plants to try to understand their impact on oxygen and nutrient levels in those waters. The Yale report notes that “populations of several commercially important species, including lobster and winter flounder, have steeply declined in Long Island Sound over the past two decades, but scientists are unsure whether overfishing, habitat degradation, disease, or warm water discharge from Millstone is to blame.”

Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, just about 80 miles due north of Baltimore, my childhood home, suffered a meltdown three days before my fifth birthday. So, I have a visceral fear of cooling towers and nuclear radiation. The booklet I found didn’t exactly allay my anxieties. It suggested that, in the event of a crisis at the plant, we should evacuate along a series of two-lane roads that have only gotten more congested in the decades since that booklet was published. “If possible, use only one car. If you have room, please check to see if any of your neighbors need a ride. Keep your car windows and air vents closed.” It suggested packing for a three-day trip and included a helpful list of things not to forget like pillows and toiletries. The booklet advised calm again and again, offering these (cold) comforting words, “Contrary to some popular misconceptions, a nuclear plant emergency would not be a sudden event. A severe nuclear accident would take considerable time to develop, enabling state and local officials to take the necessary protective actions in a timely fashion.” Tell that to the people of Chernobyl and Fukushima. How much time is time enough?

Build a Bunker, Survive the Fallout (But Not the Blast)

The second booklet was emblazoned with the all-caps title “FALLOUT PROTECTION FOR HOMES WITH BASEMENT” and was sent to our address in May 1967 by the Department of Defense’s Office of Civil Defense with the descriptor “Family Residing At.” As I leafed through the 60-year-old pages, I realized that the long-time homeowner had screwed it to the underside of the basement stairs in response to a suggestion on the back of the booklet: “For quick reference, hang this booklet in the corner of your basement having the best fallout protection.”

The booklet was personalized for our very basement based on a questionnaire the homeowner must have filled out once upon a time, because we were instructed to follow plans C through F to increase our “Protection Factor,” or PF, from radiation by 40%. Any “Home Handy Man,” we were assured, could construct a permanent shelter in the basement or at least pre-plan one to be quickly constructed after a nuclear attack. The booklet also had recommendations for how to improvise a shelter once you were cowering in that post-nuclear basement of yours. It did warn, however, that even if you had indeed constructed one, a “fallout shelter provides only limited protection against blast.”

There was, as it happened, no third booklet offering instruction to the home handyman on just how to protect his family from a future neighborhood nuclear blast and, of course, all these years later, there’s no fallout shelter in our basement and no stack of materials to make one with. Still, as someone whose parents were well-known anti-nuclear activists and who’s always feared the possibility of a future nuclear war, I found myself riveted to the spot in the basement of my 1905 home, imagining my family of five seeking shelter here during some kind of nuclear catastrophe. The walls are stones cobbled together with mortar and painted. That painted mortar regularly flakes onto the cement floor, coating it in a sort of crumbly dry snow. We occasionally squirt expanding foam into the holes in the foundation, but there’s still one corner where my kids like to hold their hands and exclaim: “I can feel the breeze” and “it smells like mud right here.” According to our Fallout Protection booklet, that corner is the “strongest” one, so before a nuclear attack, I do hope that I’ll get around to closing up all those holes.

In truth, it would be a mighty grim existence in that basement of ours. Especially if I don’t fix the corner where the kids feel the breeze. There are lots of bikes, a massive canoe and life preservers, plenty of canning supplies, a dehydrator, heat lamps and other accessories for raising chickens, and my husband’s beer-making and distilling supplies. Most of these cool homesteadish things are useless without electricity, heat, or potable water. 

The booklet offers no advice on how to supply a fallout shelter with water or beer or anything else, nor does it tell us how long we’d need to be down there. It does say: “Until the extent of the radiation threat in your town is determined by trained monitors using special instruments, you should stay in your shelter as much as possible. For essential needs, you can leave your shelter for a few minutes.” It suggests we get a battery-powered radio.

Of course, the information in that booklet is now 57 years old, long before the world of modern media arrived. I could go online and stream untold numbers of DIY tutorials on bunker-building and provisioning. By now, prepping for disasters, whether nuclear, conventional, or farcical is a multibillion-dollar business. You can even attend a weekend course on wilderness survival techniques for $800. However, nothing I read about that class offered guidance on surviving “a war, societal collapse, or some other calamity” with three kids, so I’m probably staying put. A battery-operated radio might not be a bad idea, though.

You Can’t Hide from Nukes

I mostly head down to the basement in a “keep the laundry-train running” fog. Nuclear war is a constant hum in the back of my mind. It’s a fear that won’t go away and that sets me apart from most Americans. It seems as if most of us deal with nuclear issues by — should the thought even occur to us — trying to push them away as quickly as possible. In an annual survey, Chapman University has been tracking American fears for nearly a decade now. Government corruption and economic collapse top the list, which also includes loved ones getting sick and dying. Fears of war are similarly prevalent, but the specific fear that stalks my dreams isn’t there — the possibility that the nightmare that rained down on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing more than 100,000 of them, when the United States became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons, could happen again.

I know I’m an odd duck with my nuclear preoccupation. Of course, I live in the self-declared “Submarine Capital of the World.” New London/Groton has been building nuclear submarines since the 1950s and the U.S. naval base here is home port to 15 nuclear attack submarines. So that’s one reason nukes are on my mind.

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Then there are those two terrible wars raging right now between nuclear-armed invaders (Russia and Israel) and non-nuclear entities (Ukraine and Hamas).  Those nuclear-tinged wars worry me. And am I the only person who noticed that, just recently, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists decided to keep its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds (yes, 90 seconds!) to midnight? I also read enough to know that our government is going to spend more than $55 billion on nuclear weapons research, development, and testing in 2024 alone. And that figure doesn’t even include the whopping sums being invested in new nuclear delivery systems like Columbia class submarines or the upgrading of the B2 Spirit Stealth Bomber. I can get stuck there sometimes, especially when schools, clinics, and homeless shelters around me are struggling to keep their doors open.

Watching the (Nuclear) Clock at Family Gatherings

Such facts swirl in my head all the time — sometimes emitting a low hum, sometimes growing uncomfortably shrill. But I work hard to have other interests and worries. My anti-nuclear activist mother was constitutionally unable not to talk about nuclear weapons and that’s a cautionary tale for me. I can still remember how we wouldn’t go to family weddings or reunions or anything else scheduled in the first 10 days of August, because we were memorializing the bombings of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Since my mother was one of seven siblings in a big Irish Catholic family and had dozens of nieces and nephews, we missed a lot of family summer gatherings thanks to that principle.

Perhaps it was for the best, though, since I do remember one truly awkward exchange between my mother and a relative:

“Oh hi, Liz, good to see you. You look lovely. How have you been?”

And my mom replied: “Well, I’ve been better. We’re three minutes to nuclear midnight, you know. It keeps us very busy.” (In those days, the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock was slightly farther from “midnight.”)

An uncomfortable silence followed, spreading like nuclear winter and eventually the relative excused herself to get another martini.

I try not to do that myself to unsuspecting friends and relatives, but I’d be lying if I told you that sometimes I didn’t think like my mom.

Unlike me, most people have, I suspect, stuck the whole history, science, and politics of that world-killing technology in the proverbial basement (though not ours, of course). So, imagine my surprise when I found all that strange history stuck in my own basement!

The Only Protection is Prohibition

Now that I think about it, the best protection to be found in that basement of mine is our stash of anti-nuclear protest signs. In one corner are all the ones the Connecticut Committee to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons uses in its protests. There are “disarm now” signs, a sturdy yellow banner with quotes from the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and a stack of 70 “Thank You” posters for each of the nations that are party to that Treaty. My kids, some of our friends, and I made those signs to express our gratitude to countries like Benin, Honduras, and Thailand that have agreed (unlike the nine countries with such weaponry) not to develop, test, produce, manufacture, acquire, or possess, no less stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, or accept nuclear weapons from other countries, or allow them to be stored on their territory.

Mark Twain supposedly said that war is how Americans learn geography. In making those signs and waving them near the local General Dynamics complex contracted to design the next generation of nuclear-capable submarines, my kids and I are learning a different kind of geography. As we resist, we celebrate the geography of the true superpowers on this planet, the nations that are trying to lead the way to a nuclear-free, bunker-free future where children won’t have to even imagine hiding in their basements.

In the meantime, I’m going to hang these two booklets back up under the basement stairs as relics of what I’d love to think of as a bygone era. I just have to find the right screwdriver.

Copyright 2024 Frida Berrigan

Via Tomdispatch.com

I mean, give us credit as the new year begins. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about humanity isn’t our literature, our theater, our movies, the remarkable food we cook, the cities we’ve built, or the endless other things we’ve created. To my mind, it’s the fact that, in our relatively brief time as rulers of this planet, amid a chaos of never-ending wars and conflicts, we’ve come up with not just one but two different ways of doing ourselves (and much of the rest of our world) in.

And that, to my mind, is no small achievement.

Go back a couple of centuries and, even amid humanity’s wars and other conflicts, someone suggesting such a possible future would undoubtedly have been laughed out of the room. It took science fiction — especially H.G. Wells imagining the arrival of murderous Martians — to begin to conceive of such all-too-modern, all-too-apocalyptic world-ending possibilities. 

Now, however, there’s no need for fiction at all. There can be no question that, in its “wisdom” (and yes, that definitely needs to be in quotation marks), humanity has indeed come up with two different ways of utterly destroying this planet as a livable habitat.

And there’s no mystery here, either. One is, of course, atomic weaponry. First tested out in the New Mexican desert in July 1945, atomic bombs were then dropped on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that August with devastating effect. Ever since, such weaponry has been held in what might be thought of as an ultimate reserve of potential total destructiveness. Yes, in its two times in use, such weaponry lit up the skies in a blinding fashion, destroying much of those two Japanese cities and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of human beings, both in the moment and in the years that followed from the long-term effects of radiation.

And yet, to put that in perspective, those A-bombs, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” as their American creators dubbed them, used on August 6 and 9, 1945, would today be considered the most modest of “tactical” or “low-yield” nuclear weapons. The major weapons now in the American and Russian arsenals, hydrogen bombs, are — perhaps the best word might be — blindingly more powerful. As the Union of Concerned Scientists explains, “The warheads on just one U.S. nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of all the bombs dropped during World War II, including the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan. And the United States usually has ten of those submarines at sea.”

And while, in 1945, only the United States had such weapons, that was bound to change all too quickly. Today, nine countries have nuclear arsenals and there are, at present, nearly 13,000 nuclear weapons on this planet. In the years to come, it’s not likely to end there either, though that would be more than enough weaponry to destroy not just the Earth but untold numbers of other planets. And keep in mind that the major nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, are both in the process of “modernizing” their arsenals, while China is visibly rushing to catch up. The U.S. is, in fact, expected to put up to $2 trillion (no, that is not a misprint!) into updating its supply of nukes in the decades to come.

A Nuclear Little Ice Age?

On another cheery note, North Korea, which only joined that crew of nine relatively recently, tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile as 2023 ended. (And don’t think it’s the last country that’s going to go nuclear either.) In addition, what nuclear agreements once existed between the great powers are now largely extinct. Worse yet, with both the major and minor nuclear powers still working hard to build up or “modernize” those arsenals into the distant future, the ability to destroy most life on this planet remains mind-numbingly present and, because we’ve never experienced anything like it, all too hard to grasp.

Among other things, the massive smoke cloud that even a relatively modest — if such a word can be used in this context — nuclear exchange between, say, India and Pakistan would put into the atmosphere could result in a global “nuclear winter” in which billions of people would starve to death. A larger-scale nuclear conflict might even lead to a “nuclear little ice age” that could last thousands — yes, thousands! — of devastating years.

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While it’s true that, in the last 78 years, such weaponry has never again been used (except in “peaceful” nuclear tests), it’s hard not to imagine that something suicidal lurks in the make-up of humanity. Otherwise, why would nine countries now possess weapons that could all too literally end it for the rest of us? And sadly, there’s nothing new about any of this. As the superb Jonathan Schell wrote in his classic book The Fate of the Earth in 1982, “Since we have not made a positive decision to exterminate ourselves but instead have chosen to live on the edge of extinction, periodically lunging toward the abyss only to draw back at the last second, our situation is one of uncertainty and nervous insecurity rather than of absolute hopelessness.”

More than 40 years after he wrote that, it remains no less accurate. Somehow, despite our eternal conflicts, not one has ever yet tipped over into a nuclear conflagration, but the danger remains. After all, it seems that, among our other traits, we humans are all too incapable of not making war. At this moment, in fact, one side in each of the two major wars on this planet, in Ukraine and Gaza — Russia and Israel — is nuclear armed. Last July, a senior Russian official, Dmitry Medvedev, fearing a coming Ukrainian “counteroffensive,” said: “Just imagine that the offensive… in tandem with NATO, succeeded and ended up with part of our land being taken away. Then we would have to use nuclear weapons by virtue of the stipulations of the Russian Presidential Decree. There simply wouldn’t be any other solution. Our enemies should pray to our fighters that they do not allow the world to go up in nuclear flames.”

Pray, indeed.

Not Noticing the Ultimate Threat to Humanity?

Nor, in truth, is there anything new about the second way we humans have discovered to turn our world into a burning ember. As Schell also noted in 1982, while describing the nuclear horror that we could visit on ourselves and this planet: “Nuclear explosions are far from being the only perturbations in question; a heating of the global atmosphere through an increased greenhouse effect, which could be caused by the injection of vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air (for instance, from the increased burning of coal), is another notable peril of this kind.”

Notable indeed! And it’s no less notable, I think, that Schell was aware of such a second human-induced, planet-destroying possibility so long ago, though most of us have only become aware of climate change later. He was early indeed in his recognition of that reality (though the way greenhouse gases could heat our atmosphere had been known to a few of us from the end of the nineteenth century). And sadly, while humanity’s nuclear weapons have been relegated to what might be considered the back burner, that “greenhouse effect” hasn’t. Anything but, in fact.

Unlike those thousands of devastating weapons, the weather bomb that has now visibly burst over this planet was a creation of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, launched with the burning of coal and then other fossil fuels. Of course, industrial civilization, as it spread across the planet, began to use those slow-motion equivalents of nuclear weapons ever more widely. In the intervening two centuries, greenhouse gases have grown devastatingly abundant in our atmosphere and the planet has heated by nearly 1.5 degrees Centigrade over pre-industrial days. In fact, in November, we even experienced the first (and second) days in our planet’s recorded history when temperatures averaged more than 2 degrees Centigrade and, in that same month, the global average temperature hit 1.75 degrees above pre-industrial times.

Yes, you and I might not be Jonathan Schell, but today, more than four decades after he wrote that side note in his work on the nuclear dangers we then faced, climate change has become an everyday affair. Last year — the hottest in recorded history and possibly in the last 125,000 years — heat records were regularly broken across the planet, month after month, while climate-change-causing greenhouse gases reached record highs in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, record-shattering heatwaves, wildfires, and floods swept across the planet in 2023. My own country had the honor of setting a new single-year record for billion-dollar climate disasters — and that was before the year was even close to over. (It is, by the way, strangely painful to find myself using that word “record” over and over again in this context.)

Last year, during 12 months of — and yes, here I go again! — record heat, each month from June through November set a new average global high. And you know the story all too well (if you’ve been paying any attention at all). Of course, I could go through it all again — the megafires, the droughts, the ever more powerful and devastating storms, those unbelievable 55 days at 110 degrees or above for Phoenix, Arizona — and that’s only to begin down an ever longer list of “records” that, sadly, is unlikely to seem all that long or impressive in the intemperate future we face.

Worse yet, in the wake of the global COP28 climate meeting in the petro-heart of the Middle East, where the delegates couldn’t agree on a goal of “phasing out,” or even “phasing down” fossil fuel use, but only on “transitioning” away from it, my own country, the United States, the planet’s largest oil and natural gas producer, set another record year in 2023 as its oil production hit an all-time high. And as Roishetta Ozane and Bill McKibben pointed out recently at the Guardian, “The U.S. Department of Energy must decide whether to stop rubber-stamping the single biggest fossil-fuel expansion on earth, the buildout of natural gas exports from the Gulf of Mexico. So far they have granted every export license anyone has requested, and as a result the U.S. has become the biggest gas exporter on planet earth.”

And that’s with Joe Biden at the helm in the White House. At least, he’s made an effort to invest real money in climate change and labeled it “the ultimate threat to humanity.” Just imagine for a moment if the victor in this year’s election is the man who recently swore, on his first day as “dictator” in the Oval Office in 2025, that, above all else, he will “drill, drill, drill.” Or the striking numbers of Americans voting for him who refuse to even believe that the obvious is happening to us. And let’s not forget that, though it’s seldom mentioned, Donald Trump would also once again be the man in charge of America’s nuclear arsenal.

The Blistering of This Planet

Consider climate change, then, a slow-motion version of atomic warfare and, unlike those nukes, greenhouse gases haven’t yet faintly been pushed to one side. Yes, there’s no question that ever less expensive renewable forms of energy that don’t use fossil fuels are on the rise — and a quick rise at that! — but sadly, not quick enough it seems, while the giant fossil-fuel companies simply plough on (as do their profits).

In other words, of the two ways humanity has so far discovered to destroy this planet and everything on it, one is now in something like cold storage (though that could change at any moment), while the other — the slow-motion version of ultimate destruction — isn’t faintly so. In a sense, think of us as in a slow-motion process of burning ourselves out of house and home — and, as is already obvious, it’s only going to get worse before it has any chance of getting better.

It would, of course, be a remarkable achievement for us to turn our backs on the possible destruction of this planet. Unfortunately, as we humans continue to fight our wars in a blistering fashion (themselves, by the way, significant contributors to the ongoing blistering of this planet), we seem strangely incapable of facing what we’re doing in an ultimate sense. Yes, our news programs could in recent months make the war in Gaza — distinctly, a nightmare of the first order — the top news story, day after day after day. But somehow, the news about climate change, the slow-motion but devastating blasting of the planet we live on, never seems to get that kind of attention. Even when the top story of the day or week may be record storms, floods, fires, you name it, the link to the heating of this planet is, if made at all, normally only done so in passing.

And yet that should be the story of all times. We’re talking about the end of the world as we’ve known it. And that should be, but isn’t, the news of our time or of any time.

Welcome to 2024.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Top American officials in the “national security” establishment are notably good at smooth rhetoric and convenient silences. Their scant regard for truth or human life has changed remarkably little since 1971 when Daniel Ellsberg risked decades in prison to leak the Pentagon Papers to the world. During the years between then and his death six months ago, he was a tireless writer, speaker, and activist.

Most people remember him, of course, as the whistleblower who exposed voluminous official lies about the Vietnam War by providing 7,000 top-secret pages of classified documents to the New York Times and other newspapers. But throughout his adult life, he was transfixed above all by the imperative of preventing nuclear war.

One day in 1995, I called Dan and suggested he run for president. His reply was instant: “I’d rather be in prison.” He explained that, unlike typical candidates, he couldn’t stand to offer opinions on subjects he really knew little or nothing about.

However, for more than five decades, Ellsberg didn’t hesitate to publicly address what he really did know all too much about — the patterns of government secrecy and lies that sustained America’s wars in one country after another, along with the chronic deceptions and delusions at the core of the nuclear arms race. He had personally seen such patterns of deceit at work in the upper reaches of the warfare state. As he told me, “That there is deception — that the public is evidently misled by it early in the game… in a way that encourages them to accept a war and support a war — is the reality.”

And how difficult was it to deceive the public? “I would say, as a former insider, one becomes aware: it’s not difficult to deceive them. First of all, you’re often telling them what they would like to believe — that we’re better than other people, we are superior in our morality and our perceptions of the world.”

Dan had absorbed a vast array of classified information during his years working near the top of the U.S. war machine. He knew countless key facts about foreign policy and war-making that had been hidden from the public. Most importantly, he understood how mendacity could lead to massive human catastrophes and how routinely the key figures in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Oval Office openly lied.

His release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — revealing crucial history about the Vietnam War while it was still underway — exposed how incessant deception got wars started and kept them going. He had seen up close just how easy it was for officials like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to suppress doubts about American war-making and push ahead with policies that would, in the end, lead to the deaths of several million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. And Dan was haunted by the possibility that someday such deception might lead to a nuclear holocaust that could extinguish almost all human life on this planet.

In his 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, he highlighted this all-too-apt epigraph from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Madness in individuals is something rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” The ultimate madness of policies preparing for thermonuclear war preoccupied Dan throughout his adult life. As he wrote,

“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians, and other humans can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”

A Global Firestorm, a Little Ice Age

I don’t know whether Dan liked Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s aphorism about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” but it seems to me an apt summary of his approach to the specter of nuclear annihilation and an unfathomable end to human civilization. Keeping his eyes relentlessly on what few of us want to look at — the possibility of omnicide — he was certainly not a fatalist, yet he was a realist about the probability that a nuclear war might indeed occur.

Such a probability now looms larger than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, but its most essential lessons seem to have been lost on President Biden and his administration. Eight months after that nearly cataclysmic faceoff six decades ago between the United States and the Soviet Union, President John Kennedy spoke at American University about the crisis. “Above all,” he said then, “while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the world.”

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But Joe Biden has seemed all too intent on forcing his adversary in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, into just such “a humiliating retreat.” The temptation to keep blowing a presidential bugle for victory over Russia in the Ukraine war has evidently been too enticing to resist (though Republicans in Congress have recently taken a rather different tack). With disdain for genuine diplomacy and with a zealous desire to keep pouring huge quantities of armaments into the conflagration, Washington’s recklessness has masqueraded as fortitude and its disregard for the dangers of nuclear war as a commitment to democracy. Potential confrontation with the world’s other nuclear superpower has been recast as a test of moral virtue.

Meanwhile, in U.S. media and politics, such dangers rarely get a mention anymore. It’s as if not talking about the actual risks diminishes them, though the downplaying of such dangers can, in fact, have the effect of heightening them. For instance, in this century, the U.S. government has pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile, Open Skies, and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces arms-control treaties with Russia. Their absence makes nuclear war more likely. For the mainstream media and members of Congress, however, it’s been a non-issue, hardly worth mentioning, much less taking seriously.

Soon after becoming a “nuclear war planner,” Dan Ellsberg learned what kind of global cataclysm was at stake. While working in the Kennedy administration, as he recalled,

“What I discovered, to my horror, I have to say, is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first [nuclear] strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then, because they weren’t including fire which they felt was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So, the real effect would have been over a billion not 600 million, about a third of the Earth’s population then at that time.”

Decades later, in 2017, Dan described research findings on the “nuclear winter” that such weaponry could cause:

“What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983, confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists, is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you called them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities, like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn’t be rained out in the stratosphere, it would go around the globe very quickly, and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.”

Facing the Hell of Thermonuclear Destruction

In his book The Doomsday Machine, Dan also emphasized the importance of focusing attention on one rarely discussed aspect of our nuclear peril: intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. They are the most dangerous weapons in the arsenals of the atomic superpowers when it comes to the risk of setting off a nuclear war. The U.S. has 400 of them, always on hair-trigger alert in underground silos scattered across Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming, while Russia deploys about 300 of its own (and China is rushing to catch up). Former Defense Secretary William Perry has called ICBMs “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world,” warning that “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”

As Perry explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched, they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes to make that terrible decision.” So, any false indication of a Russian attack could lead to global disaster. As former ICBM launch officer Bruce Blair and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright wrote: “By scrapping the vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning disappears.”

During an interview with me in 2021, Dan made a similar case for shutting down ICBMs. It was part of a recording session for a project coordinated by Judith Ehrlich, co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” She would go on to create an animated six-episode “Defuse Nuclear War Podcast with Daniel Ellsberg.” In one of them, “ICBMs: Hair-Trigger Annihilation,” he began: “When I say that there is a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs, I’m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.”

He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they’re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (“use them or lose them”). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and

“can be called back — in fact they don’t even have to be called back, they can… circle until they get a positive order to go ahead… That’s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians… Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don’t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning… to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

And he concluded: “To remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.”

While especially hazardous for human survival, ICBMs are a humongous cash cow for the nuclear weapons industry. Northrop Grumman has already won a $13.3 billion contract to start developing a new version of ICBMs to replace the currently deployed Minuteman III missiles. That system, dubbed Sentinel, is set to be a major part of the U.S. “nuclear modernization plan” now pegged at $1.5 trillion (before the inevitable cost overruns) over the next three decades.

Unfortunately, on Capitol Hill, any proposal that smacks of “unilateral” disarmament is dead on arrival. Yet ICBMs are a striking example of a situation in which such disarmament is by far the sanest option.

Let’s say you’re standing in a pool of gasoline with your adversary and you’re both lighting matches. Stop lighting those matches and you’ll be denounced as a unilateral disarmer, no matter that it would be a step toward sanity.

In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared, “I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction.”

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless on the subject. The narratives — and silences — offered by government officials and most media are perennial invitations to just such feelings. Still, the desperately needed changes to roll back nuclear threats would require an onset of acute realism coupled with methodical activism. As James Baldwin wrote: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Daniel Ellsberg was accustomed to people telling him how much he inspired them. But I sensed in his eyes and in his heart a persistent question: Inspired to do what?

Copyright 2023 Norman Solomon

Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Israel’s robust military, the fourth-strongest in the world, is ravaging Gaza and, along with armed settlers, terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank following the brutal Hamas massacres of October 7th. Like so many other colonial projects, Israel was born of terror and has necessitated the use of violence to occupy Arab territory and segregate Palestinians ever since. The realization that its existence was dependent on a superior military in an unfriendly region also encouraged Israel to pursue a nuclear weapons program shortly after the state’s founding in 1948.

Even though Israel was a young nation, by the mid-1950s, with the aid of France, it had secretly begun the construction of a large nuclear reactor. That two allies had teamed up to launch a nuclear weapons program without the knowledge of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned out to be a colossal (and embarrassing) American intelligence failure.

Not until June 1960, the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency, did U.S. officials catch wind of what was already known as the Dimona project. Daniel Kimhi, an Israeli oil magnate, having undoubtedly had one too many cocktails at a late-night party at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, confessed to American diplomats that Israel was indeed constructing a large “power reactor” in the Negev desert — a startling revelation.

“This project has been described to [Kimhi] as a gas-cooled power reactor capable of producing approximately 60 megawatts of electric power,” read an embassy dispatch addressed to the State Department in August 1960. “[Kimhi] said he thought work had been underway for about two years and that a completion date was still about two years off.”

The Dimona reactor wasn’t, however, being built to deal with the country’s growing energy needs. As the U.S. would later discover, it was designed (with input from the French) to produce plutonium for a budding Israeli nuclear weapons program. In December 1960, as American officials grew more worried about the very idea of Israel’s nuclear aspirations, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville admitted to U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had, in fact, helped Israel get the project off the ground and would also provide the raw materials like uranium the reactor needed. As a result, it would get a share of any plutonium Dimona produced.

Israeli and French officials assured Eisenhower that Dimona was being built solely for peaceful purposes. Trying to further deflect attention, Israeli officials put forward several cover stories to back up that claim, asserting Dimona would become anything from a textile plant to a meteorological installation — anything but a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.

Atomic Denials

In December 1960, after being tipped off by a British nuclear scientist concerned that Israel was constructing a dirty (that is, extremely radioactive) nuke, reporter Chapman Pincher wrote in London’s Daily Express: “British and American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb.”

Israeli officials issued a terse dispatch from their London embassy: “Israel is not building an atom bomb and has no intention of doing so.”

With Arab countries increasingly worried that Washington was aiding Israel’s nuclear endeavors, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission John McCone leaked a classified CIA document to John Finney of the New York Times, claiming that the U.S. had evidence Israel, with the help of France, was building a nuclear reactor — proof that Washington was none too pleased with that country’s nuclear aspirations.

President Eisenhower was stunned. Not only had his administration been left in the dark, but his officials feared a future nuclear-armed Israel would only further destabilize an already topsy-turvy region. “Reports from Arab countries confirm [the] gravity with which many view this possibility [of nuclear weapons in Israel],” read a State Department telegram sent to its Paris embassy in January 1961.

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As that nuclear project began to make waves in the press, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion moved quickly to downplay the disclosure. He gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admitting the country was developing a nuclear program. “The reports in the media are false,” he added. “The research reactor we are now building in the Negev is being constructed under the direction of Israeli experts and is designed for peaceful purposes. When it’s complete, it will be open to scientists from other countries.”

He was, of course, lying and the Americans knew it. There was nothing peaceful about it. Worse yet, there was a growing consensus among America’s allies that Eisenhower had been in on the ruse and that his administration had provided the know-how to get the program off the ground. It hadn’t, but American officials were now eager to prevent United Nations inspections of Dimona, fearful of what they might uncover.

By May 1961, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, things were changing. JFK even dispatched two Atomic Energy Commission scientists to inspect the Dimona site. Though he came to believe much of the Israeli hype, the experts pointed out that the plant’s reactor could potentially produce plutonium “suitable for weapons.” The Central Intelligence Agency, less assured by Israel’s claims, wrote in a now-declassified National Intelligence Estimate that the reactor’s construction indicated “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”

And, of course, that’s precisely what happened. In January 1967, NBC News confirmed that Israel was on the verge of a nuclear capability. By then, American officials knew it was close to developing a nuke and that Dimona was producing bomb-worthy plutonium. Decades later, in a 2013 report citing U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency figures, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists revealed that Israel possessed a minimum of 80 atomic weapons and was the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Pakistan wouldn’t acquire nukes until 1976 and is, in any case, normally considered part of South Asia.

To this day, Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a “major project” at Dimona was underway in 2021 and that Israel was by then actively expanding its nuclear production facilities. The lack of U.N. or other inspections at Dimona has, however, meant that there has been no public Israeli acknowledgment of its nuclear warheads and no threat of accountability.

A Rogue Nuclear Power?

Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel seized large tracts of Arab land, including the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Not coincidently, that year was also the moment Israel crossed the nuclear threshold. (In 2017, it was revealed that, on the verge of the Six-Day War, the Israelis had even contemplated exploding a nuclear bomb in Egypt’s Sinai Desert as the ultimate threat to its neighbors.)

At that time, as human rights attorney Noura Erakat explained to Daniel Denvir on The Dig, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration came to see in Israel “a significant Cold War asset and [pivoted] very quickly and [established] this new policy of ensuring Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region whereby it can defeat singularly or collectively any Middle Eastern powers.” And that, she added, was done in those Cold War years “to ensure its sphere of influence across the Middle East in competition with the Soviet Union.”

As Israel and the U.S. remained the closest of allies, the thinking in Washington went, it could act as Washington’s military proxy in the Middle East. “From 1966 through 1970, average aid per year increased to about $102 million, and military loans increased to about 47% of the total,” the Congressional Research Service reported in 2014. “Israel became the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in 1974… From 1971 to the present, U.S. aid to Israel has averaged over $2.6 billion per year, two-thirds of which has been military assistance.”

Despite Washington’s wish for a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship, Israel wasn’t afraid to go rogue when its leaders believed it would serve their interests. In June 1981, for instance, with the assistance of France and Italy, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor, then under construction in Iraq.

Top officials in the administration of President Ronald Reagan weren’t pleased that the strike had been carried out with American F-16s, as Israel was legally required to utilize the fighter jets only in cases of “legitimate self-defense.” After some backroom wrangling, however, they decided to chalk the matter up as a diplomatic dispute, having come to believe that erasing Iraq’s nuclear program and maintaining Israel’s sole nuclear arsenal in the region justified the airstrike.

By the late 1980s, as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Israel joined the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia in forming Operation Cyclone to supply arms to the anti-Soviet mujahideen resistance fighters. As the Cold War ended and the first Gulf War in Iraq began in 1990, Israel quietly assisted President George H.W. Bush’s administration from the sidelines, believing that directly entering the conflict would only embolden Arab countries to back Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Despite the once-tenuous nature of the U.S.-Israeli bond, it’s long been understood that Israel can, at times, play an impactful role in the service of American operations in the region by providing intelligence and other covert support.

A Developing Dangerous Situation

Following the 9/11 attacks, Israel counseled the George W. Bush administration on how best to handle Osama bin Laden (and apparently later provided intelligence for the ambush that would kill him). As the planes struck the World Trade Center, Israel was experiencing a new Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. Its leaders came to believe that they could benefit from the “Global War on Terror” President Bush had just announced. When Benjamin Netanyahu, then a former prime minister, was asked what it meant for the U.S.-Israel relationship, he replied, “It’s very good.” Then, lest he sound too optimistic about 9/11, he added, ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy… [it will] strengthen the bond between our two peoples because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”

A year later, Israel became a booster of an American war on Iraq, helping spread the falsehood that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat not only to Israel and America but to the rest of the world as well.

“[Saddam] is a tyrant who is feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu declared to the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform in September 2002, six months before the invasion of Iraq. “And today, the United States must destroy [Saddam’s] regime because a nuclear-armed Saddam will place the security of our entire world at risk. And make no mistake about it: if and once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons. And once the terror network has nuclear weapons, it is only a matter of time before those weapons will be used.”

Israel would later use a similar line of reasoning to justify its 2007 strike on a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. Over the years, Israel has purportedly targeted Iran’s nuclear objectives in various ways as well, from cyberattacks to bombings. In 2010, Iran accused Israel of murdering physicist Masoud Ali Mohammadi and engineer Majid Shariariby in two separate incidents, as well as other scientists believed to be integral to Iran’s nuclear program. In 2021, Iran also claimed that Israel had struck a facility in the city of Karaj that its officials believed was being used to build nuclear centrifuges.

Many are concerned that Israel’s cruel war on Gaza, if it were to expand regionally to include Hezbollah in Lebanon, would drag Iran, a prominent Hezbollah supporter, into the fray. And that, in turn, might be all the justification Netanyahu would need to strike Iran’s supposed nuclear sites. In fact, in response to drone and rocket attacks on American personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militants, the U.S. recently destroyed a weapons facility in Syria.

As for the situation in Gaza, right-wing Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, a member of Netanyahu’s coalition government, recently commented that “one way” to eliminate Hamas would be the nuclear option. “[T]here’s no such thing as innocents in Gaza,” he added. In response to those comments, Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu — a largely meaningless act — in an attempt to quiet criticisms at home and abroad that the war was harshly impacting innocent civilians. Or, perhaps, it had more to do with Eliyahu inadvertently admitting to Israel’s nuclear capabilities.

No doubt fearing a broader war in the Middle East, the Biden administration is committing itself heavily to Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas: not only by delivering interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system and upwards of 1,800 Boeing-made JDAMs (guidance kits for missiles) but also by replenishing stocks of weapons for Israel’s American-made F-35 fighter jets and CH-53 helicopters as well as KC046 aerial refueling tankers. In addition, two U.S. aircraft carrier task forces have been deployed to the Middle East, as has an Ohio-class nuclear submarine. To top it off, according to a New York Times investigation, the U.S. is providing commandos and drones to help locate Israeli (and American) hostages in Gaza.

While the Biden White House seems anything but eager for an expanded Middle Eastern war, it is nonetheless preparing for just such a scenario. Of course, any military escalation, especially one that leaves Israel fighting on multiple fronts, would only increase the chances that things could get much worse. A cornered, nuclear-armed Benjamin Netanyahu would be the definition of a perilous situation in a war where nothing, not journalists, schools, or even hospitals, has proven off-limits. Indeed, well over 25,000 tons of bombs had already been dropped on Gaza by early November, the equivalent of two Hiroshima-style nukes (without the radiation). Under such circumstances, a nuclear-capable Israel that blatantly flouts international law could prove a clear and present danger, not only to defenseless Palestinians but to a world already in ever more danger and disarray.

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Tomdispatch.com