nuclear weapon – Speak Your Mind

In Search Of An Arms Race

Will Murphy — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 13:00:12 +0000

President Trump proposes a $54 billion increase in the U.S. military budget, with sharp cuts in environmental protection, diplomacy, and aid to the poor in the U.S. and globally. The U.S. already spends more on the military than the next seven nations combined. One billion people live on $1.25 a day. 20 million are on the brink of famine. The United States spends less than one percent of the Federal budget on assistance to the global poor. Defense Secretary James Mattis said in 2013: “If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.” Desperate people also become migrants.

Trump has not said how he plans to spend the $54 billion military increase, leading some analysts to call it “a budget in search of a strategy.” How would costly weapons help in Yemen, facing famine because U.S.-armed Saudi Arabia is blockading its port?

Mr. Trump welcomes a nuclear arms race and says he wants to be “top of the pack.” In conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, he rejected Putin’s proposal to extend the START Treaty capping U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals at 1,500 nuclear weapons. Those already represent levels of destructiveness that would devastate both nations and endanger life on Earth. Russia might put its forces on launch-on-warning, increasing the risk of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.

Trump’s proposal is as dangerous as it is cruel. Congress should reject it.

New Nuclear Risks

Yaël Ksander — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 13:45:56 +0000

Since the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has escaped nuclear catastrophe only because leaders on all sides understood that nuclear weapons must never be used. Today, there are nine countries with nuclear weapons and more than 15,000 warheads combined. President Obama pledged to work for a nuclear weapons free world, a goal shared by many strategic thinkers as well as Pope Francis.

Yet the Pentagon has been testing a precision nuclear warhead that can be delivered by cruise missile.

Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry has warned that the cruise missile might sway a future president to contemplate “limited nuclear war.” Worse yet, because the missile comes in nuclear and non-nuclear varieties, a foe under attack might assume the worst and overreact, initiating nuclear war.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has decided to deploy heavy U.S. weapons in Eastern Europe. To do so would break a crucial pledge the United States made at the end of the Cold War that we would not expand NATO and would not place our weapons near the Russian border. Putting such weapons in nations such as Hungary – whose right wing government has fascist overtones – is morally debatable and strategically dangerous. Russia is sure to react asymmetrically, perhaps moving closer to nuclear launch-on-warning.

In the 21st century, which faces climate chaos and social and political turmoil, we must modernize our thinking, not our nuclear weapons.

Sources

https://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/FAQs#sthash.mIHjyUut.dpuf

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/as-us-modernizes-nuclear-weapons-smaller-leaves-some-uneasy.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/opinion/breaking-the-taboo-on-the-use-of-nuclear-arms.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/02/world/europe/us-fortifying-europes-east-to-deter-putin.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

American Nuclear Weapons

Yaël Ksander — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 21:30:36 +0000

President Barack Obama, speaking in Prague, Czech Republic, said in April, 2009, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. First, the United States will take concrete steps toward a world without nuclear weapons. To put an end to Cold War thinking, we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy and urge others to do the same.” (1)

In October of the same year, 2009, President Obama received the Nobel Peace prize, in part for his vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons. (2)

However, the United States armed forces are now considering nuclear upgrades and modernizations as much as 40 or 50 years into the future, with expenditures of up to one trillion dollars. (1) It is true that Obama has not yet approved these expenditures, but he has not disavowed them either.

A conference will be held in Vienna, Austria, in December on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. (1) President Obama should attend this conference and make clear his continued support for a goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Despite American differences with Russia over the Ukraine, the United States should resume negotiations with Russia for a large mutual reduction of their nuclear arsenals. A deep reduction, coupled with the example it would set for other nations, would go a long way toward achieving President Obama’s goal of a world without nuclear weapons.

Sources:

(1) Democracy Now, Friday, Oct. 24, 2014
(2) Nobel Peace prize

Derailing Diplomacy With Iran

Betsy Shepherd — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 16:14:25 +0000

Last November, the United States, with other leading world powers, reached an interim accord with Iran to curb that country’s nuclear program in return for modest relief from sanctions that have hurt Iranian civilians.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama warned: “The sanctions that we put in place helped make this opportunity possible. But let me be clear: If this Congress sends me a new sanctions bill now that threatens to derail these talks, I will veto it.”

Yet Indiana’s Senators, Joe Donnelly and Dan Coats, are sponsoring just such a bill, the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act (S.1881). It demands that Iran totally give up enriching uranium—a requirement that most arms control experts consider unnecessary and that Iranians reject as violating Iran’s right to civilian nuclear energy under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

The bill also says that if Israel attacks Iran, the United States should provide military support, in effect delegating to a foreign leader the decision to take the U.S. to war.

Senators Donnelly and Coats received five-figure campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hawkish groups. But J Street, the pro-Israel, pro-peace organization, strongly opposes this bill.

With a common adversary in al Qaeda, the United States and Iran need not be eternal enemies.

As President Obama said, “We must give diplomacy a chance to resolve one of the leading security challenges of our time without the risks of war.”

Sources

“A Step, if Modest, Toward Slowing Iran’s Weapons Capability” (NYT)

“Obama’s 2014 State of the Union address: Full text” (CBS News)

“Analysis of Faults in the Menendez-Kirk Iran Sanctions Bill (S. 1881)” (The Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation)

“Revealing Money’s Influence On Politics: Pro-Israel” (MapLight)