Like the mythical Phoenix, Chernobyl rises from the ashes.

A recent… “Surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex” is alarming scientists that monitor the ruins of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. (Source: Nuclear Reactions at Chernobyl are Spiking in an Inaccessible Chamber, NewScientist, May 11, 2021).

It is known that this significant renewal of fission activity is located in Sub-Reactor Room 305/2, which contains large amounts of fissile material from the initial meltdown. The explosion brought down walls of the facility amongst tons of fissile material within the reactor as extreme heat melted reactor wall concrete and steel combined with sand used to control the explosion to form a lava-like intensely radioactive substance that oozed into lower floors, e.g., Room 305/2. That room is so deadly radioactive that it is inaccessible by humans or robots for the past 35 years.

Since 2016, neutron emissions from Room 305/2 have been spiking and increased by 40% over the past 5 years. It signals a growing nuclear fission reaction in the room. According to Neil Hyatt/University of Sheffield-UK: “Our estimation of fissile material in that room means that we can be fairly confident that you’re not going to get such rapid release of nuclear energy that you have an explosion. But we don’t know for sure… it’s cause for concern but not alarm,” Ibid.

If it is deemed necessary to intervene, it’ll require robotically drilling into Room 305/2 and spraying the highly radioactive blob with a fluid that contains gadolinium nitrate, which is supposed to soak up excess neutrons and choke the fission reaction. Meanwhile, time will tell whether the monster of the deep in Room 305/2 settles down on its own or requires human interaction via the eyes and arms of a robot, which may not survive the intense radioactivity. Then what?

Meanwhile, an enormous steel sarcophagus, a $1.8bn protective confinement shelter, the New Safe Confinement (NCS) was built in 2019 to hopefully prevent the release of radioactive contamination. NCS is the largest land-based object ever moved, nine years construction in Italy delivered via 2,500 trucks and 18 ships. It is expected to last for 100 years. Thenceforth, who knows?

Nevertheless, according to nuclear professionals, the question arises whether this recent fission activity will stabilize or will it necessitate a dangerously difficult intervention to somehow stop a runaway nuclear reaction.

Inescapably, the bane of nuclear power, once dangerously out of control, remains dangerously out of control, forever and on it goes, beyond human time. Unfortunately, one nuclear accident is equivalent to untold numbers, likely thousands, of non-nuclear accidents.

“We thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” (Albert Einstein)

The Doomsday Clock

Along those lines, the world-famous Doomsday Clock, initially based upon the threat of nuclear warfare, measures humanity’s nearness to utter annihilation: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (“BAS”) a global organization of science and policy experts, has set the famous clock at 100 seconds to midnight: “The bad news is that we’re still closer to midnight than we’ve been at any time since the clock was introduced more than 60 years ago because: (1) widespread mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic in nations worldwide (2) little progress in eliminating nuclear weapons (3) insufficient mitigation of destructive climate change, and (4) threats to national security by rightwing extremists, the BAS decided to hold the clock at the present unsettling time slot, as a warning and “wake-up call.” (Source: Do0msday Clock Stands at 100 Seconds to Midnight, LiveScience)

The perilous setting of the clock so close to midnight is warranted on several counts, e.g., COVID pulled back the wizard’s curtain, revealing a cartoonish figurine of irresponsibility by governments of the world to handle emergencies: “An historic wakeup call that governments are woefully unprepared to handle pandemics,” Ibid.

Moreover, “global carbon emissions, a major driver of human-induced climate change, temporarily dropped about 17% due to the pandemic, but have largely bounced back… still, the impacts of escalating climate change led NASA scientists to declare 2020 the hottest year on record,” according to Susan Solomon, a professor of environmental studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a BAS Science and Security Board member, Ibid.

And, of utmost concern, the nuclear threat remains “unacceptably high,” according to Steve Fetter, professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, with the U.S. allocating more than $1T to modernizing its nuclear weapons programs, as China, India, No. Korea, and Pakistan expand arsenals. “By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war — an ever-present danger over the last 75 years — increased in 2020,” Ibid.

Of special note, the forward momentum in the clock’s proximity to midnight occurred recently, with the advent of Trump’s presidency. In 2018, it ticked to two minutes to midnight. The only other time it advanced that far was in 1953 when the U.S. and Russia conducted their first hydrogen bomb detonations within 6 months of each other.

The Doomsday Clock stood still in 2019, but ticked forward again in 2020, to reflect humanity facing “a true emergency — an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay,” Ibid.

Thus, the world is at risk on multiple fronts never before seen throughout the history of the Doomsday Clock (est. 1947) initially set at seven minutes to midnight when nuclear weapons were humanity’s biggest threat. Now, nuclear war shares that formidable baton in an on-going hazardous marathon with: (1) climate change, (2) inept governments, and (3) widespread use of social media platforms that spread misinformation that erodes trust in media and science, throughout the world.

Moreover, according to the BAS, the enlarging rightwing movement threatens U.S. national security: “These extremists represent a unique danger because of their prevalence in federal institutions such as the military and the potential that they might infiltrate nuclear facilities, where they could access sensitive information and nuclear materials,” BAS representatives said. “Officials need to act decisively to better understand and mitigate this threat,” Ibid.

Throughout history, political parties that rely upon lies bring society down to its knees with shameless destruction, for example, the fall of Rome, the 5^th century AD: “By the time of Augustine (354-430 AD), the Roman Empire had become an Empire of lies. It still pretended to uphold the rule of law, to protect the people from the Barbarian invaders, to maintain the social order. But all that had become a bad joke for the citizens of an empire by then reduced to nothing more than a giant military machine dedicated to oppressing the poor in order to maintain the privileges of the rich. The Empire itself had become a lie: that it existed because of the favor of the Gods who rewarded the Romans because of their moral virtues. Nobody could believe in that anymore: it was the breakdown of the very fabric of society; the loss of what the ancient called the auctoritas, the trust that citizens had toward their leaders and the institutions of their state.” (Source: Cassandra’s Legacy, The Empire of Lies, February 8, 2016).

counterpunch.org

A new study out this week reports a massive increase in civilian deaths in Afghanistan from U.S.-led air strikes under Trump’s watch. The death toll leapt by 330 per cent since he took office in early 2017, attributed to Trump and his cabinet loosening the “rules of engagement” for U.S. forces.

While the Trump administration has latterly cobbled a tenuous peace deal with the Afghan Taliban, which may see U.S. troops withdrawing from the country over the next year (or maybe not), the fact remains that this president oversaw an expansion of lethal American military power. The number of civilians killed by U.S.-led air strikes in 2019 was the highest in the nearly two-decade-old war.

Civilian deaths from U.S.-led forces were also reportedly at all-time highs in other countries where the Pentagon is intervening, including Iraq and Syria, ostensibly in the name of “fighting terrorism”. In capturing the Iraqi city of Mosul by U.S.-led Iraqi and Kurdish forces in 2017, it is estimated that 40,000 were killed in a blitzkrieg. U.S. allies were told to “kill anything that moves”.

In Syria’s Raqqa, it is reckoned the death toll from U.S. air strikes also in 2017 was at least 1,600, most of the victims buried under rubble.

In Yemen, Trump has extended that disastrous war which the Obama administration supported from the outset in 2015 by supplying air power and logistics to Saudi Arabia. Millions of children are prone to starvation and disease because of Washington’s support for the Saudi coalition aerial bombardment in Yemen. Trump has vetoed at least five Congressional bills calling for an end to American military involvement.

Bear in mind that this horrendous legacy is bestowed on a president who campaigned for election in 2016 on the basis that he would “end endless wars” and bring U.S. troops home.

Trump’s record of militarism and aggression can be measured in other ways too.

Under his watch, the Pentagon moved from its so-called war on terrorism mission to prioritizing the return of “great power rivalry” with Russia and China, nominating Moscow and Beijing explicitly as adversaries.

Trump thus did more than any other president over the past generation to revive the Cold War and its looming threat of nuclear “mutually assured destruction”.

His administration walked away from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia, thereby undermining security in Europe and paving the way for the possible installation of short and medium-range tactical nuclear warheads near Russia’s borders.

Trump also recently dumped the Open Skies Treaty, furthering eroding trust over arms control and international security. He has also all but consigned the New START treaty with Russia – the last remaining Cold War-era arms control measure – to the scrapheap.

The world is consequently a much more dangerous and insecure place because of the Trump White House.

His administration has sold more offensive weapons to Taiwan, the breakaway Chinese territory, than any other past administration, thereby stoking unprecedented tensions with Beijing. China has warned it is ready to invade Taiwan militarily if its sovereignty is further undermined. Those tensions have been ratcheted up by Commander-in-Chief Trump overseeing a U.S. military build-up in the South China Sea challenging Beijing’s territorial claims as “unlawful”.

Countless other aggressions have been instigated by Trump towards Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Cuba, among others. The use of unilateral economic sanctions – economic warfare – has increased exponentially under Trump, including against Russia, China and Iran. On Iran, Trump threatened to obliterate the country while encircling it with nuclear-capable bombers and personally ordering the assassination of its top military commander, Major-General Qassem Soleimani, in January this year.

No wonder the U.S.-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock to the closest point before apocalyptic midnight due to the mounting tensions and risks of conflict that have been bequeathed by the Trump presidency. It’s the closest to worldwide disaster over a seven-decade period, according to the respected scientists.

Here’s the appalling thing. If this is the vile record of a president who promised to “end endless wars”, then what does that tell you about the endemic, unrelenting nature of American warmongering? A president who appeared to lament “American carnage” when he was inaugurated in January 2017 went on to wreak even more bloody carnage.

And now he is being succeeded by President-elect Joe Biden who is not vowing to end wars, but instead to “strengthen” U.S. global power and interventions. One can only shudder at the pernicious prospect of more American wars, mass killing and destruction.

Yet were the Doomsday Clock to be reset today, eight months after that last announcement, the time gap to midnight would have to be further reduced, perhaps to a little more than one minute, but not by much – 70 or 75 seconds before midnight probably – or even less.

For the remorseless escalation of tension between the United States and Russia – a process built on a long-rising tsunami of 25 years of shattered pledges, and double crosses by the West of supposedly solemn binding agreements – cannot be turned on a dime, to use the famous American saying. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks it can.

On July 23, Pompeo gave a speech at the Nixon Center in California that assured his place alongside Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright as the most fatuous and stupid of all U.S. secretaries of state.

Even Frank Kellogg, who in the 1920s really thought he had outlawed war when Hirohito already ruled in Tokyo and Hitler was rising fast in Germany, did not sink so far.

Pompeo imagined that he could persuade President Vladimir Putin to take him at his word and turn against China, when the United States and not China has remorselessly eroded Russia’s margins of security in the West ever since the end of the Cold War . And the process continues with Pompeo’s eager indeed fervent support to this day.

The U.S. Mainstream Media – run by arrogant, self-righteous fools to lead hundreds of millions of complacent, ignorant sheep – blandly continues to ignore the ever hostile probing of Russia’s defensive airspace by nuclear-armed, long-range bombers equipped withstand off weapons from the north, the west and the south. But when Russia scrambles its own defensive combat fighters to buzz the intruders and serve due warning of their vulnerability, they are invariably cast in the aggressor’s role.

This is a far more deadly, terrifying state of affairs than any that occurred between the development of thermonuclear hydrogen bomb super-weapons of unlimited power by both the United States and Soviet Union in the period 1952 to 1954. For over the next two decades, the dangers of Armageddon were vividly recognized and well understood in both Moscow and Washington and by the populations of both superpowers alike.

But today, the leaders of the West have totally repressed the dangers of thermonuclear Armageddon.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both houses of Congress vie with each other in striking fake macho roles of fraudulent heroism and non-existent principle to support ever more reckless and simply insane adventures on behalf of Neo-Nazi and other racist gangster cliques in Ukraine and Georgia.

Outright clowns like President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul – a particular favorite of former Secretary of State Clinton – are sent to insult the leader of one of the world’s premier thermonuclear superpowers and to embrace openly those who hate the leaders of their own country and seek to topple him, and this behavior is seen as perfectly normal, acceptable and even admirable by the thousands of cockroaches who staff the great “think tanks” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) in the city of Washington.

The 100 Seconds to Midnight warning was announced on January 23 – a full eight months ago. Yet I have no doubt that no more than five of the 100 sitting United States senators from both parties know that fact – or take it seriously for a second. It is this astonishing ignorance, a psychological mechanism of willful ignorance and denial that Sigmund Freud himself would be hard put to explain, that is our greatest danger.

In late August, a U.S. B-52H Superfortress strategic bomber carried out a simulated bombing of the Russian Baltic Fleet’s base in the exclave of Kaliningrad, the aircraft monitoring resource Plane Radar has reported, citing tracking data.

Every year, NATO regularly carries out full-scale military exercises unabashedly aimed against Russia with such reassuring titles as “Anaconda.”

What is an anaconda? It is a colossal 20 to 30 foot long fearful snake in the Amazon jungle that first encircles its prey, then crushes and devours it, often still alive. This then, is the strategic message we have been sending to Russia, one of the two most powerful nuclear powers on our planet.

Russia has responded. The development of hypersonic weapons that the West cannot yet match is one loud tolling of Thomas Jefferson’s Fire Bell in the Night. A second, and most grave development is the shifting of Russian strategic forces to a potential first strike posture.

The Russians do not seek to conquer the West or the World. But they are truly fearful that the West is determined to conquer and destroy them. And every message that flows out of the Republican and Democratic national leaderships alike in Congress and the U.S. media and think tanks is consistent with this message.

Western leaders, policymakers and so-called “pundits” – in reality a tame cheering section of trained hyenas – should not therefore be surprised that the Russians have responded as they have.

The Sputnik News Agency noted earlier this month, “Recently, episodes of aircraft interception over the Baltic, the Black and the Barents seas have become more frequent.

“On 31 August,” the Sputnik report continued, “three Russian Su-27 fighters were scrambled as three U.S. B-52 strategic bombers approached the Russian state border over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea. The bombers were accompanied until they changed course and moved away from the Russian border. On 1 September, a Russian Northern Fleet MiG-31 was scrambled to accompany a Norwegian P-3C Orion reconnaissance aircraft.”

Hysterical, always unsubstantiated claims that Russia is intervening in the U.S. domestic election cycle could not be more misplaced. In 1996, the Clinton administration proudly and openly boasted of decisively swinging the Russian presidential election to re-elect Boris Yeltsin.

The Russians remember this. They are determined not to let it happen again. They are determined not to let their country be dismembered. Yet the U.S. body politic, its policy-shaping institutions and media remain locked on their mad suicidal course of needless confrontation and childish fake-macho bullying and posturing towards Russia.

President Donald Trump, for all the calumnies thrown against him, has made repeatedly clear he does recognize the imminent dangers of world war. Every time he tries to reduce tensions and open new lines of dialogue with Moscow however, some new wave of slander and outright lies is concocted against him, each as outrageous, shameless, ridiculous and virulent as anything Joseph Goebbels ever concocted.

On the other side, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, personally the most humane and decent of men, went along with the mad and wicked Hillary Clinton warmongering that sought to topple stable, lawful governments across the Middle East, Latin America and Eurasia at a cost of millions of lives without a whisper of protest. It is too much to hope for anything better if he is elected in November.

Indeed, all we can reasonably look forward to is a resetting of the symbolic Doomsday Clock by 10 or 20 seconds over the next few months. That really isn’t going to be enough. The Cause of warning the West not to risk setting off a thermonuclear world war certainly demands a bit more.

Late last month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveiled its “Doomsday Clock” for the 26th time since its creation in 1947, declaring that the hands on the clock would remain where they had been at the last setting, in 2018. Rachel Bronson, the bulletin’s president, described the environment in which the bulletin assesses the threats faced by the world today (which have expanded beyond nuclear to include climate change and cyber) as the “new abnormal,” and noted that no one should take comfort from the fact that the hands of the clock have not moved.

“This new abnormal,” Bronson wrote in her statement explaining the decision, “is a pernicious and dangerous departure from the time when the United States sought a leadership role in designing and supporting global agreements that advanced a safer and healthier planet. The new abnormal describes a moment in which fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction, undermining our very abilities to develop and apply solutions to the big problems of our time.”

William Perry, former secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, helped unveil the 2019 iteration of the Doomsday Clock. In his remarks, he highlighted President Donald Trump’s declaration to withdraw from the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty as an indication of the collapsing relationship between the U.S. and Russia. “When you withdraw from treaties, you are losing this important vehicle of dialogue,” Perry observed. “My own judgment is, relative to a year ago, we are slightly worse off.”

I agree with Perry—the world is worse off today than it was a year ago. I disagree, however, with his use of the word “slightly” to describe the situation we face, and I dissent from the bulletin’s decision to stay the hands of the Doomsday Clock. Humanity is sleepwalking toward global annihilation, furthered by a collective amnesia about the threat posed by nuclear weapons, especially in an environment void of meaningful arms control. On Feb. 2, the United States suspended its obligations under the INF Treaty, beginning a 180-day process that, once concluded, will lead to the abandonment of that agreement. Russia soon followed suit. The death of the INF Treaty represents far more than simply the end of an era. It is the end of a process—a mindset—that recognized nuclear weapons for their globe-killing reality and sought their reduction and eventual elimination.

The danger of nuclear weapons has always been at the center of the Doomsday Clock. According to its mission statement, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 by Manhattan Project scientists who “could not remain aloof to the consequences of their work.” Two years later, in 1947, the bulletin unveiled its iconic clock, the hands of which were ominously set to seven minutes before midnight. “The Bulletin’s clock,” the late Eugene Rabinowitch, one of the bulletin’s founding editors, noted, “is not a gauge to register the ups and downs of the international power struggle; it is intended to reflect basic changes in the level of continuous danger in which mankind lives in the nuclear age, and will continue living, until society adjusts its basic attitudes and institutions.”

In 1953, the Soviet Union acquired the hydrogen bomb. That act, on the back of the Korean War, caused the bulletin to ruminate about the unrestrained development of nuclear weapons and the lack of any meaningful arms control efforts to hold nuclear proliferation in check, and prompted it to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight.

Since then, the hands of the Doomsday Clock have been moved back and forth on numerous occasions; retreats were due largely to arms control efforts undertaken by the major nuclear powers and advances due to the failures of these efforts to achieve any lasting change. At the height of the Cold War, in 1984, with the U.S. and the Soviet Union locked in a massive arms race, the Doomsday Clock’s hands were moved to three minutes past midnight; in 1988, in recognition of the INF Treaty, the hands were moved back to six minutes, then further to 10 minutes in 1990, marking the end of the Cold War, and to 17 minutes in 1994, on the occasion of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). The common denominator in this retrograde movement (which, in the context of the meaning of “midnight,” is a good thing) was the embrace of meaningful arms control and the calming effect it had on relationships between nations.

Within three years, the optimism that prompted the bulletin to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock back began to falter; the failure of the U.S. and Russia to conclude the START 3 treaty and the expansion of NATO moved the hands to 14 minutes in 1994, while the nuclear tests conducted by India and Pakistan in 1998 caused the bulletin to advance a further five minutes, to nine minutes (its largest forward move since 1968, when nuclear tests by France and China produced a similar result). The demise of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 moved the hands to seven; the failure of the nonproliferation treaty in the context of North Korea and Iran pushed them to five in 2007. The election of President Barack Obama injected rare optimism at the bulletin, which moved the hands of the clock back to six minutes in 2010. But his administration’s failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 2014 brought the hands back to five minutes, and the election of Donald Trump caused the hands to be moved to 2.5 minutes. The failure of the U.S. and Russia to return to the arms control negotiating table brought the hands to their current position in 2018—two minutes before midnight.

The demise of the INF Treaty is symptomatic of a larger problem—the collapse of arms control as an institution. Viktor Mizin, one of the Soviet negotiators involved in the INF Treaty, made note of this reality, and its consequences. “[Soviet arms control negotiators] got their start with the first negotiations for the partial test-ban treaties [in the 1950s]. These were the people with whom the partial [U.S.-Soviet] detente and the idea of peaceful coexistence began … [t]his was an entire generation of brilliant diplomats, soldiers, and defense industry specialists. It’s no coincidence that most competent people around then were the ones who participated in all these negotiations … [w]e don’t have anyone like them now. Both here and in America, there’s been a collapse of institutional memory, and no one remembers what happened at these negotiations, and there’s nobody who has the same negotiating skills.” Worse, Mizin noted, “We’re absolutely failing to raise the next generation.”

The INF Treaty grew out of an idea—“double zero”—put forward in 1982 by President Reagan in a speech at his alma mater, Eureka College. The ideas presented in the speech were the brainchild of Richard Perle, the archconservative assistant secretary of defense for global strategic affairs. The crux of the proposition made by Reagan was that the Soviet Union would eliminate the totality of its SS-20 intermediate-range missile force. The SS-20 was a new road-mobile missile armed with three 750-kiloton nuclear warheads, and its deployment in 1976 was seen by the U.S. and NATO as a game-changer. In exchange for the Soviets agreeing to eliminate these weapons, the U.S. would forego the deployment of two missiles—the Pershing II and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile—that were still under development. In short, the U.S. position was that the Soviet Union would get rid of more than 1,400 missiles, while the U.S. got rid of nothing. That proposal, according to Thomas Graham, a senior U.S. arms control official at the time, “was seen as impossible and ridiculous.”

Converting the “impossible and ridiculous” into reality was the job of a team of negotiators led by two experienced U.S. diplomats—Paul Nitze and Maynard Glitman. Nitze, best known as the architect of America’s Cold War policy of containment of the Soviet Union, was a member of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) delegation, considered the most distinguished negotiating delegation the U.S. has ever fielded. This experience served him well during his tenure as chief INF negotiator. In an effort to break the impasse created by the American “Zero Option” position, Nitze undertook his now famous “walk in the woods” with his Soviet counterpart, Yuliy Kvitinsky, where the two, on their own, agreed to a disarmament formula that would reduce the threat posed by the INF systems. Reagan was initially supportive of Nitze’s proposal but backtracked when Richard Perle vehemently objected. “The trouble with you,” Perle told Nitze afterward, “is you are just an inveterate problem solver.”

In 1983, the Soviets walked out of the INF talks, frustrated at the lack of progress being made. Three years later, after the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the Soviet Union, the talks resumed, this time led by Glitman, who had been Nitze’s deputy during the first round of talks from 1981 to 1983. Glitman proved a steady, sobering presence, and by the end of 1987 had negotiated a treaty that saw the elimination of all U.S. and Soviet INF weapons—a true “Zero Option” (Perle, who opposed the INF Treaty, resigned in protest).

The INF Treaty has gone through its fair share of trials and tribulations. As one of the first U.S. inspectors assigned to monitor the Votkinsk missile plant in the Soviet Union, where SS-20 missiles had been assembled, I was involved in helping turn back the efforts of such conservative lawmakers as Sen. Jesse Helms, who sought to use delays in the implementation of inspection procedures at Votkinsk as an excuse to kill the treaty. That these delays were brought on by shortcomings on the American side were of no moment to Helms and his allies. Fortunately, sober minds prevailed, and the inspections were conducted in total conformity with the treaty.

The 2002 decision by the U.S. to withdraw from another foundational arms control agreement—the ABM Treaty—stoked frustration inside Russia over what it viewed as the unbalanced nature of the INF Treaty, which prohibited its possession of intermediate-range missiles while the U.S. expanded NATO and fielded missile defense systems in Europe, and other nations, such as China, India and Pakistan, were allowed to develop INF-capable systems without restriction. Russian President Vladimir Putin gave voice to these concerns in 2007, saying, “We need other international participants to assume the same obligations which have been assumed by the Russian Federation and the US.”

The next year, U.S. intelligence observed a missile test in Russia that it assessed as a violation of the INF range limitations. Additional tests were observed, which led the Obama administration, in 2014, to report Russia to Congress as being in violation of the INF Treaty. Russia vehemently denied these allegations and demanded that the U.S. provide it with the evidence the allegations were derived from, something the U.S. has refused to do. A series of accusations and counteraccusations followed, culminating in the U.S. identifying the offending missile system—the 9M729—and demanding that Russia come into compliance.

There is a solution to be had—the INF Treaty provides for the existence of the Special Verification Commission (SVC) for the express purpose of resolving disputes that may arise during the life of the treaty. The SVC has been engaged on this issue, but the refusal of the U.S. to back up its claims of noncompliance with evidence, and the repeated denials by Russia that it has violated the INF Treaty, have made diplomacy difficult. The primary problem, however, isn’t the technical aspects of any controversy over treaty compliance—as a veteran of several such controversies, I can attest that they can be resolved to mutual satisfaction, provided both parties are committed to the process. The issue today is that the U.S. no longer has in its diplomatic arsenal arms control negotiators of the caliber of Nitze or Glitman. These men have passed, and, as Mizin laments, no effort has been undertaken to groom their successors.

The last serving American expert on arms control, Thomas Countryman, was unceremoniously fired by Trump shortly after he took office. I knew Countryman from when he was the U.S. mission in New York’s liaison to the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. By the time of his firing, Countryman was charged with negotiating, implementing and verifying international arms control agreements. “The world doesn’t stop turning just because there is a new U.S. administration,” Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, observed in the aftermath of Countryman’s firing. “There is an entire global arms regime to maintain. Without U.S. leadership, decisions won’t get made or will get taken in ways that harm our national security.”

The woman appointed to fill Countryman’s role as chief arms negotiator, Andrea Thompson, is a 25-year veteran of the Army who specialized in intelligence but had no arms control background. She came to the White House in 2017 from the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute, an advisory organization formed by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for whom Thompson worked in both Iraq and Afghanistan. At the White House, Thompson served as the deputy assistant to the president and national security adviser to the vice president, positions that emphasize political loyalty over subject matter expertise.

During his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump outlined the position he has taken regarding the INF Treaty. “Under my administration,” he declared, “we will never apologize for advancing America’s interests. For example, decades ago the United States entered into a treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capability. While we followed the agreement to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms. It’s been going on for many years. That is why I announced that the United States is officially withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF Treaty. We really have no choice.”

There was a choice—meaningful negotiations—but Thompson is no Nitze, and her approach toward arms control negotiations was counterproductive. She met with her Russian counterparts in Geneva in January in a last-ditch effort to save the INF Treaty. “I outlined that to my Russian counterparts on specifically what Russia would need to do in order to return to compliance in a manner the United States could confirm,” Thompson said in a press briefing after the meeting. “And at the end of the day, this includes the verifiable destruction of Russia’s noncompliant missile system.”

The Russians, Thompson noted, “paid lip service to transparency. They offered a briefing and demonstration, a static demonstration, of its noncompliant missile system. They continued to dodge questions. They continued to push false information regarding the missile’s capabilities and the testing activity. For example, a demonstration that Russia can’t possibly address the fact that they previously tested the missile, again I reiterate, they previously tested this missile to Treaty-prohibited ranges.”

The physical inspection of missiles has always been a part of arms control agreements. The Russians did put the 9M729 missile on display after Thompson’s briefing, inviting military attaches to inspect it and its launcher. The U.S. refused to attend and pressured its European allies to likewise boycott the demonstration. A videotape of the event backed up the Russian claim that the 9M729 was little more than an improved version of an INF Treaty-compliant missile, the 9M728, making use of the exact same solid fuel motor. While the static display alone would not be enough to mollify U.S. concerns, it would have been a giant step toward reaching a resolution of the U.S. allegations.

But Thompson wasn’t looking for resolution. She was looking for capitulation. “As the undersecretary for arms control and international security and a leader within this administration,” she said at her briefing, “for arms control to serve its purpose, violations must have consequences. And as I told Russian counterparts yesterday, Russia faces a choice: It can either have its noncompliant missile system, or it can have the INF Treaty. But it cannot have both.”

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has declared that Russia tested the 9M729 missile at the range allowed under the INF Treaty, and that the U.S. has provided no proof of the alleged violation. “Only last fall, [the United States] named two dates when, according to their estimates, tests that violated the INF Treaty took place. We explained to them that the tests had indeed taken place, but the range was allowed by the treaty. We asked them to provide some concrete proof of the range violation, such as satellite pictures or something else, but have not received anything,” Lavrov said at a news conference.

That the pending demise of the INF Treaty hasn’t sent shockwaves around the world is, in and of itself, disturbing. The casual reaction on the part of Congress and America’s NATO allies to what is, in effect, the end of arms control is alarming. It is one thing for Congress and NATO to accept without question the unsustained contention on the part of both the Obama and Trump administrations about Russian INF Treaty violations—European relations with Moscow have been strained since the 2014 annexation of the Crimea, and Russia-bashing has been in vogue in the U.S. since the intelligence community’s allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election were published in January 2017.

But the termination of the INF Treaty is part and parcel of the total unwinding of the last remaining vestiges of U.S.-Russian arms control—the New START treaty, which caps the number and type of strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems that can be deployed by both parties. New START expires in 2021, and the unceremonious approach Thompson has taken toward resolving INF Treaty compliance issues has detrimentally affected any chance of an extension to that treaty being negotiated before it expires. “The environment isn’t in a place where I can discuss the New START treaty,” Thompson said at her INF press conference. For his part, Lavrov observed, “The entire architecture of arms control, including the New START, including the prospects for further nuclear disarmament and the sustainability of the nonproliferation treaty, is in jeopardy.”

The Russians have always feared American intermediate-range missiles based in Europe. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was driven in large part by the Russian need to respond to the threat posed by the presence of U.S. Jupiter missiles based in Turkey. And the INF Treaty was signed largely because of Russian concerns over the American Pershing II missile, which could strike Moscow in seven minutes or less after being launched from Germany, eliminating any possibility of Moscow being able to determine whether a notification of missile launch was real or false. Moreover, Russia’s nuclear posture—launch on detection (meaning Russia would fire its missiles once a nuclear attack had been verified)—would need to be altered to “launch on warning” or, worse, “pre-emptive nuclear attack.” The desire to avoid creating the conditions for a nuclear holocaust drove the Soviet Union to sign the INF Treaty in 1987. “The INF treaty was put there in the first place to stop there being a nuclear strike with very little warning time,” British security expert Annie Machon has observed. “And that was a step forward at the time—that it is being torn up now is very worrying.”

The U.S. nuclear posture review published by the Trump administration has postulated specific scenarios in which nuclear weapons could be used—including against Russia in Europe. With the INF Treaty gone, and the caps on strategic nuclear weapons soon to be eliminated due to the expected demise of the New START treaty, there is real concern that the U.S. and Russia are about to enter into a nuclear arms race that would rival that of the U.S. and Soviet Union in the 1980s. The difference this time is that neither side has a stable of seasoned arms control experts working on the sidelines to avoid catastrophe. Instead, led by the likes of Andrea Thompson, the U.S. is whistling blithely while sauntering down the path of nuclear destruction.

Thompson would do well to digest the words of Putin during a presentation of the Valdai Discussion Club last October. Confronted with a scenario involving an American nuclear attack, he noted that “the aggressor must know that retribution is inevitable, that it will be destroyed.” The Russian president did not mince words when it came to recognizing the consequences of any Russian nuclear retaliation. “We are victims of aggression, as martyrs we will go to heaven,” Putin told the audience. “And they will just die.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is wrong to keep the hands of the Doomsday Clock stuck at two minutes to midnight. The situation is far more grave than its assessed “new abnormal” would suggest. The United States is in the process of creating the conditions for a nuclear war with Russia, and the Russian president is calmly talking about global annihilation if such an event transpires.

The world is on the edge of the nuclear abyss. It’s one minute before midnight, and we are acting as if we still have time. We don’t.

truthdig.com

In the summer of 1945, President Harry Truman found himself searching for a decisive blow against the Empire of Japan. Despite the many Allied victories during 1944 and 1945, Truman believed Emperor Hirohito would urge his generals to fight on. America suffered 76,000 casualties at the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Truman administration anticipated that a prolonged invasion of mainland Japan would bring even more devastating numbers. Even so, plans were drawn up to invade Japan under the name Operation Downfall.

The estimates for the potential carnage were sobering; the Joint Chiefs of Staff pegged the expected casualties at 1.2 million. Staff for Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Douglas MacArthur both expected over 1,000 casualties per day, while the personnel at the Department of the Navy thought the totals would run as high as 4 million, with the Japanese incurring up to 10 million of their own. The Los Angeles Times was a bit more optimistic, projecting 1 million casualties.

With those numbers, it’s no wonder the US opted to (literally) take the nuclear option by dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima on August 6, and then Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9. Japan formally surrendered 24 days later, sparing potentially millions of U.S. servicemen, and vindicating the horrifying-yet-necessary bombings.

At least this is the common narrative that we’re all taught in grade school. But like so many historical narratives, it’s an oversimplification and historically obtuse.

When Truman signed off on the deployment of the newly-developed atomic bombs, he was convinced that the Japanese were planning to prosecute the war to the bitter end. Many have argued that the casualty estimates compelled him to err on the side of caution for the lives of his boys in the Pacific. But this ignores the fact that other significant figures surrounding Truman came to the opposite conclusion. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, chief among the naysayers, said, “I was against (use of the atomic bomb) on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.” Although he made this statement publicly in 1963, he made the same argument to then Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1945, as recounted in his memoirs: “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”

Another prominent figure who echoed Eisenhower’s sentiments was Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy. He ranked as the senior-most United States military officer on active duty during World War II and was among Truman’s chief military advisors. In his 1950 book I Was There, Leahy wrote, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.” With mainland Japan under a blockade, Japanese forces in China and Korea were effectively cut off from reinforcements and supplies.

Ward Wilson of Foreign Policy wrote that the most solemn day for Japan was August 9, which was the first day that the Japanese Supreme Council met to seriously discuss surrender. The date is significant because it wasn’t the day after the Hiroshima bombing, but rather the day the Soviet Union entered the Pacific Theatre by invading Japanese-occupied Manchuria on three fronts. Prior to August 8, the Japanese had hoped that Russia would play the role of intermediary in negotiating an end to the war, but when the Russians turned against Japan, they became an even bigger threat than America, as indicated by documents from leading Japanese officials at the time.

Russia’s move, in fact, compelled the Japanese to consider unconditional surrender; until then, they were only open to a conditional surrender that left their Emperor Hirohito some dignity and protections from war-crimes trials. Ward concludes that, as in the European theatre, Truman didn’t beat Japan; Stalin did.

Harry Truman never expressed regret publicly over his decision to use the atomic bombs. However, he did order an independent study on the state of the war effort leading up to August of 1945, and the strategic value of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In 1946, the U.S. Bombing Survey published its findings, which concluded as follows: “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” This is an intensive condemnation of Truman’s decision, seeing as Russia did enter the war, and that plans for an invasion had been developed.

As Timothy P. Carney writes for the Washington Examiner, the fog of war can be a tricky thing. But if we’re forced to side with Truman, or Eisenhower and the other dissenting military leaders, the Eisenhower position isn’t merely valid; it actually aligns better with some fundamental American values. Given all the uncertainty, both at the time and with modern historical revisionism, it’s better to look to principle rather than fortune-telling. One principle that should be near the top of everyone’s list is this: it’s wrong to target civilians with weapons of mass destruction. The deliberate killing of innocent men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands cannot be justified under any circumstances, much less the ambiguous ones Truman encountered. Whether his decision was motivated by indignation toward Japanese “ pigheadedness” or concern for his troops, Truman’s use of such devastating weapons against non-combatants should not be excused. Americans must strive for complete and honest analysis of the past (and present) conflicts. And if she is to remain true to her own ideals, America must strive for more noble and moral ends—in all conflicts, domestic and foreign—guided by our most cherished first principles, such as the Golden Rule. At the very least, Americans should not try so hard to justify mass murder.

mises.org

General James Mattis, the US Secretary of Defence, discussed Washington’s recently composed Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) with the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives on February 6. He was attempting to justify the vast expansion and upgrading of the US nuclear arsenal which the Congressional Budget Office has estimated will cost some 1.2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years and described in detail some of the projects that have been planned. The entire exercise does not fit well with the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in which it is agreed by almost every country in the world that the nuclear arms race should be halted and that all possible measures should be taken towards achievement of nuclear disarmament.

But Washington’s notions of global nuclear disarmament are curiously ambivalent, as there is total support for Israel’s highly developed nuclear weapons’ capabilities, yet concurrently there is obsessive criticism of North Korea’s programme to arm itself with nuclear missiles. Nobody can defend or approve of North Korea’s wild nuclear ambitions which are beggaring an already downtrodden and poverty-stricken population on the verge of starvation, but Pyongyang’s rationale is that its policy “is the best way to respond with powerful nuclear deterrent to the US imperialists who are violent toward the weak and subservient to the strong.”

The language is straight out of a 1950s propaganda textbook, but the North Koreans are perfectly serious about their perception of world affairs as seen through the Washington lens. The North Korean government’s perception of the Nuclear Posture Review may be less measured than those of several other nations, but there was no mistaking the disapproval

of China, Germany, Iran and Russia, all of which condemned the NPR in no uncertain terms. Germany’s then foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel (moved in the recent political reshuffle) reflected the stance of much of Europe when he said the NPR indicated that “the spiral of a new nuclear arms race is already underway,” but France and Britain, with their irrelevant but proudly brandished nuclear weapons capabilities, were non-committal, although the UK’s policy apparently remains that “we've made it very clear that you can't rule out the use of nuclear weapons as a first strike.”

As to the body of the Review, one analyst wrote that “the 2018 NPR fully supports the retention and modernization of the current triad of delivery systems; emphasizes the importance of a modernized and strengthened nuclear command, control, and communications system; and reiterates the need to invest in US nuclear weapons infrastructure, primarily in the national laboratories,” which sums up the overall intention to expand the entire systems of procurement and delivery. The BBC noted that the NPR “argues that developing smaller nuclear weapons would challenge that assumption [of its arsenal becoming obsolete]. Low-yield weapons with a strength of under 20 kilotons are less powerful but are still devastating.” It reported that proposals include the update of land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, and air-delivered weapons, modification of some submarine-launched nuclear warheads to give a lower-yield or less powerful detonation, and reinstitution of sea-based nuclear cruise missiles.

Washington’s message is clear, in that the NPR is an extension of the US National Defense Strategy which advises vast military expansion to supposedly counter “growing threat from revisionist powers” such as China and Russia. The Cold War is back with a nuclear rush, and the US Military-Industrial complex has been given a major boost, with the Review making 62 references to North Korea, 47 to China, 39 to Iraq and — leaving no doubt where it wishes to strike first — mentioning Russia 127 times, which makes nonsense of the claim by the State Department that “we do not want to consider Russia an adversary… This not a Russia-centric NPR.”

Washington now rejects both “sole purpose” (nuclear weapons to be used to deter only nuclear attacks) and “no first use” (nuclear weapons only to be used if another state uses such weapons first) policies. The message to China and Russia is that if the US considers there is a non-nuclear threat to its interests, then there could be a nuclear strike. The example set to nuclear-armed nations such as India, Israel and Pakistan is unambiguous, in that the deterrence aspect of nuclear weapons has been superseded by what might be called “First Threat”, meaning that the more nuclear weapons that can be deployed by a country, the more assured will be its security. In the words of the State Department, “the declaratory policy of the United States [is] that we would consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances — the language on that that you will find in this Nuclear Posture Review is identical to what you will have found: that the United States would employ nuclear weapons only in extreme circumstances, to defend the vital interests of the United States, allies and partners.”

The Pentagon and the State Department, energetically aided by a compliant Congress, are trying to portray the United States as a peace-loving defender of “vital interests” but when global military spending is examined it is obvious that even without the massive increase in financial allocations for development of yet more nuclear weapons, the US is outlaying vast sums on maintaining and expanding its military bases and operations around the world. The recent military budget increases approved by Congress are staggering, and go well beyond what even Trump wanted. He had asked for 603 billion dollars for “normal” expenditure and 65 billion for the various wars being fought by the US round the world, but Congress allocated 716 billion, and shares in major military equipment contractors took an upward leap.

The threat to world peace from expanding US military operations and nuclear development is increasing day by day. The New Cold War emphasis on massive destruction has brought the world closer to Doomsday, as noted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which states that “nuclear weapons are poised to become more rather than less usable because of nations’ investments in their nuclear arsenals.” Since that was written the threat has been increased by Washington’s intentions as laid out in its Nuclear Posture Review.