Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that if a Third World War were to take place, it would be a nuclear war. His comments come just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert and after Russian nuclear submarines set sail for tests in waters near Norway. Meanwhile, voters in Belarus have approved a referendum opening the door for Russia to station nuclear weapons in Belarusian territory, and Russia has called on the U.S. to remove its nuclear weapons from European soil. “We need to acknowledge that nuclear weapons are clearly not a cause of stability in the world, as we’re often told,” says Daniel Högsta, campaign coordinator for the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. “They don’t deter conflicts; they in fact have the potential to exacerbate them.” Högsta also explains the dangers of imposing a no-fly zone in Ukraine despite Russia’s continued threats of using nuclear weapons, which he says amount to a kind of “nuclear blackmail.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
There is one question today that is more important than any other question that could possibly be asked, and it’s this:
“Is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?”
Russian state media have confirmed that Vladimir Putin’s orders to move the nation’s nuclear deterrent forces into “special combat duty mode” have been carried out, citing “aggressive statements from NATO related to the Russian military operation in Ukraine.”
“Russia’s ground, air and submarine-based nuclear deterrent forces have begun standby alert duty with reinforced personnel, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has informed President Putin,” Sputnik reports.
This comes days after Putin issued a thinly veiled threat of an immediate nuclear strike should western powers interfere in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying, “Whoever tries to hinder us, and even more so, to create threats to our country, to our people, should know that Russia’s response will be immediate. And it will lead you to such consequences that you have never encountered in your history.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
so… the implications of an isolated, angry Putin presiding over a grinding, existential conventional war and an economy devastated by sanctions are really terrifying. The chances of his accepting "defeat" are far lower than the chances he escalates dramatically.
This also comes as the US and EU countries commit to sending fighter jets and stinger missiles to assist Ukraine in fighting an unwinnable war against a longtime target of the US empire, perhaps with the hope of dragging Moscow into a costly military quagmire like it deliberately worked to do in Afghanistan and in Syria.
This also comes as the ruble crashes following crushingsanctions and the banning of Russian banks from the international money transfer system SWIFT by the US and its allies. The economic hardship that follows will hurt ordinary people and may foment unrest, and it is here worth noting that in 2019 then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted that the goal of brutal sanctions on Iran was to push people to rise up and overthrow their government.
We’re also seeing the all-too-familiar phrase “regime change” used in reference to Putin by prominent western narrative managers like Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas, European Council on Foreign Relations Co-Chair Carl Bildt, Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute and Hoover Institution, as well as USA Today.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
"This is the most dangerous situation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. How can we reduce the risk of catastrophic escalation?"
All of this has made nuclear war in the near term a whole lot more likely than it was just a few days ago… which is a really strange thing to type.
As I’m always saying, the primary risk of nuclear war is not that anyone will choose to start one, it’s that one could be triggered by any combination of miscommunication, miscalculation, misunderstanding or technical malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of escalating cold war tensions. This nearly happened, repeatedly, in the last cold war. The more tense things get, the greater the likelihood of an unthinkable chain of events from which there is no coming back.
Cold war brinkmanship has far too many small, unpredictable moving parts for anyone to feel confident that they can ramp up aggressions without triggering a nuclear exchange. Anyone who feels safe with these games of nuclear chicken simply does not understand them.
To get some insight into how easily an unpredictable scenario can lead to nuclear war I recommend watching this hour-long documentary or reading this article about Vasili Arkhipov, the Soviet submariner who single-handedly saved the world from obliteration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He was one of three senior officers aboard a nuclear-armed sub that was cornered near Cuba by US war ships who did not know the sub had a nuclear weapon on board.
The US navy was dropping explosives onto the sub to get it to surface, and the Soviets didn’t know what they were doing as they had cut off all communications. It took all three senior officers to launch the nuke their ship was armed with, and two of them, thinking this was the beginning of World War 3, saw it as their duty to use it. Only Arkhipov, who had witnessed the horrific effects that radiation can have on the human body during a nuclear-powered submarine meltdown years earlier, refused.
You, and everyone you know, exist because Arkhipov made that decision. Had his personal history and conditioning been a little bit different, or had another officer been on board that particular ship on that particular day, nothing around you right now would be there. We got lucky. So lucky it’s uncomfortable to even think about it. But it’s important to.
This again is just one of the many nuclear close calls we’ve experienced since our species began its insane practice of stockpiling armageddon weapons around the world. We survived the last cold war by sheer, dumb luck. We were never in control. Not once. And there’s no reason to believe we’ll get lucky again.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
one thing that's worryingly different now as opposed to during the cold war (as I understand it) is that thousands of people are just confidently yelling that Russia will never use nukes and therefore we should make aggressive moves against them
— i bless the rains down in castamere (@Chinchillazllla) February 28, 2022
So I repeat again the world’s most important question: is what the US and its allies are trying to accomplish in Ukraine worth continually risking nuclear armageddon for?
Well? Is it?
It’s not really a question you can just compartmentalize away from if you have integrity. It demands to be answered.
Is it worth it to continue along this trajectory? Is it? Is it really? Perhaps there might be some things that would be worth risking the life of every creature on earth to obtain, but is refusing to concede to Moscow’s demands in Ukraine one of them?
Whatever your values are, whatever your analysis is, whatever beliefs you’ve been holding to justify your support for the west’s side of this conflict, will you still proudly stand by them if you look outside and see a mushroom cloud growing in the distance?
Well? Will you?
Here’s a hint: if your answer to this question is premised on the assumption that nuclear war can’t or will never happen, then you don’t have a position that’s grounded in reality, because you’re not accounting for real possibilities. You’re justifying your position with fantasy.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
For those on this platform giddy about the plummet of the ruble, a word of caution: the severity of this will create forces beyond everyone's control. It could get very scary and not have the outcome you suspect.
I understand the argument that if we let tyrants do whatever they want just because they have nukes they’ll just do whatever they want. I understand the argument that if we don’t stop Putin now he’s going to take over all of Europe because he’s literally Hitler and blah blah blah. I understand why people ask “Well if we don’t stand up to him now, then when? Where is your line??” I really do.
But the US has been making risk-to-benefit calculations based on the fact that Russia has nuclear weapons every single day since Stalin got the bomb. There are things Russia has been permitted to do that weaker nations would have been forcefully stopped from doing, like annexing Crimea and intervening in Syria, exactly because they have nukes. If those weren’t the line, why specifically does Ukraine have to be? Surely there’s a line somewhere, but it would have to exist at a point where it would be worth risking the life of every living creature for.
So is it? Is keeping the possibility of NATO membership open and retaining control of the Donbas really so important that we should roll the dice on the existence of the entire human species on it? Is maintaining a hostile client state on Russia’s border truly worth gambling the life of every terrestrial organism for? Are the desperate unipolarist grand chessboard maneuverings of a few powerful people in Washington, Langley and Arlington really worth risking the life of everyone you know and love?
If the answer is no, then building some opposition to what we’re seeing here becomes a very urgent matter. Very urgent indeed.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to order troops into the separatist-controlled areas of Ukraine has triggered a new wave of sanctions against Russia, amid fears the situation could spiral into an all-out war. We speak with Dr. Ira Helfand, former president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, who warns a war could lead to the use of nuclear weapons that would annihilate millions and cause total collapse of world ecosystems. “We have found it almost impossible to imagine, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, that there could be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, but the crisis in Ukraine is putting exactly that possibility on the table again,” says Helfand.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
A year-and-a-half after a scathing Government Accountability Office (GAO) report revealed that the US Department of Energy (DoE) has no coherent plan in place to manage nuclear waste from weapons manufacturing piling up at more than 150 sites across the country, the DoE has made little progress in developing a safe and strategic plan to handle the waste. Meanwhile, the estimated cost of handling the material is rising steadily — $512 billion at last count — and the federal government hasn’t yet figured out how to pay for it.
Green groups on Friday celebrated as Germany prepared to shut down three of its six remaining nuclear power plants, part of that country’s ambitious goal of transitioning to mostly renewable energy by the end of the decade.
The nuclear phaseout—which was proposed by the center-left government of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the turn of the century and accelerated under former Chancellor Angela Merkel following the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan—is a key component of a plan by Germany’s new Social Democrat, Green, and Free Democrat governing coalition to produce 80% of the country’s power from renewable sources by the end of the decade.
A review of the safety and security of the country’s only nuclear reactor has been submitted to regulators as the facility gears up for more work under Australia’s new defence alliance and nuclear submarines plan. On Monday, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) announced it had completed the largest coordinated safety and security…
When the nukes start flying, when we see the mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, when reality comes crashing down in the most overt way possible, when the realization slowly dawns that this really is the end, none of our old stuff will matter anymore.
It will not matter if you are American, Russian or Chinese. It will not matter if your skin is darker or lighter. It will not matter if you feel like a man or a woman or both or neither. It will not matter if your politics are left, right or center. It will not matter who you voted for. All that will matter, in that final moment, is that it is ending.
We will behold that final moment standing alongside progressives and conservatives, racists and radlibs, socialists and soldiers, communists and cops, and all our irreconcilable differences will suddenly dissolve into nothing.
Against the suddenly visible backdrop of total annihilation, the existence of any human anywhere is a miracle, and the existence of life on this planet is a priceless gift. We won’t even care whose fault it was, whether it was deliberate or accidental, or whether it was the result of some malfunction, miscommunication, or misunderstanding. All we will care about is that it is ending.
And in that final moment we will hug our loved ones tight, whether we are Christian or atheist, Jew or Arab, Indian or Pakistani, anti-vaxxer or Antifa.
And in that final moment we will say, in our heart of hearts, with our innermost voices, “Oh, I see it now! I see how easy it is to stand together! I see how small our differences are compared to this great commonality! I see where we went wrong, and how very easy it would be to fix it!”
And in that final moment we will say, “We see it now! We see the mistakes we made, and made and made and kept on making! We understand our fundamental error! Just give us one do-over and we can correct it immediately! Could we have a do-over please? Could we have a do-over please?”
In that final moment, we will ask, “Could we have a do-over please?”
_________________________
_________________________
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The US and its allies feigned impartiality on the conflict in Ethiopia this whole time and then someone literally just recorded a Zoom conference of western diplomatic insiders casually chatting about wanting the TPLF to topple the sitting government and leaked the video.
❖
“Should the US and its allies intervene militarily in-”
No. The answer is no. The answer is always no. As evidenced by generations of unbroken history in the modern world. How fucking hard is that?
❖
Issues that make sense to focus on a lot:
Our imminent doom via nuclear war or environmental collapse
Imperialism
Dystopian authoritarianism
Abuses of capitalism
Issues that don’t make sense to focus on a lot:
Electoral politics
Society getting “too woke”
Social media feuds
❖
“Eww China has reeducation camps, can you believe that? Imagine, a program for systematically changing the thoughts people think to make them obedient. It’s so creepy and Orwellian. Can’t wait to find out what else CNN has to tell me about the world after this commercial break!”
❖
As the US ramps up brinkmanship with Russia and China it has simultaneously upgraded its nuclear arsenal to make nuke blasts more destructive and thereby capable of eliminating an enemy’s underground warheads. This will make an enemy more likely to strike first to avoid being disarmed.
❖
I keep tripping on how weird it is that the US empire is charging into new cold wars with two nuclear-armed nations simultaneously for the first time ever and hardly anyone seems to think humanity’s most imminent threat could be all those armageddon weapons we’ve been stockpiling. I mean, how stupid would we feel for missing that one?
❖
“There’s no threat of nuclear war,” said the smart person. “I trust the US war machine which consistently makes the worst possible decisions in every instance to perfectly navigate a hair-trigger nuclear standoff on two fronts every hour of every day for the foreseeable future.”
❖
People who think MAD will continually keep the world safe from nuclear armageddon (A) don’t understand the factors that are most likely to lead to nuclear war and (B) haven’t thought very hard about what the “M” and the “D” stand for.
The belief that Mutually Assured Destruction will protect us even amid reckless cold war escalations is insane. Only detente can provide safety, with the ultimate goal of complete disarmament.
❖
The US is going to start a nuclear war with Russia or China and the online left will still be focused on the Leftist Heretic of the Day for several minutes after the first bombs hit.
❖
FYI it doesn’t matter how correct you were about Russiagate being bullshit if you are now deep throating MSM China narratives with zero gag reflex.
❖
FYI it’s not okay to be a grown adult at the end of the year 2021 and still believe Joe Biden is a good president.
❖
Some people enjoy being whipped bare ass whilst receiving humiliating verbal insults. Some people enjoy publicly proclaiming that Democrats will surely do the right thing this time and getting their hopes up high that they will. Don’t kink shame.
❖
The opinion that there should be literally no dissent anywhere at all about government Covid policies which affect everyone is one of the most bat shit insane beliefs you could possibly come up with.
❖
Racism is a real problem that must be made conscious AND ALSO the issue is often manipulated to protect the status quo.
Climate change is real AND ALSO manipulative plutocrats are looking to benefit from it.
Covid is dangerous AND ALSO it’s being used to advance unjust agendas.
Because our brains are wired to reject any information which could threaten our worldview, it provides more cognitive ease to simply dismiss every part of any idea that might add layers of complexity to your position. But doing so distorts our perspective.
❖
It’s gotten to the point where any time I see exciting new anti-imperialist voices emerge in left media I start inwardly cringing because I know there’s going to be a vicious hate campaign directed against them using leftist-sounding language and given leftist-looking legitimacy.
Highly effective anti-imperialist voices will always be attacked and undermined and leftists will always be manipulated into distrusting them. There will always be a reason found for doing this. And people fall for it every damn time.
❖
All of humanity’s problems are ultimately due to ego. Ego is ultimately born of a desire for control. The desire for control is ultimately a maladaptive impulse which we’re all eventually going to have to relinquish in order to have a healthy world.
_____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Charles Bukowski has a quote: “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
Terrorized and flattened by trivialities, eaten up by nothing. I think about this quote a lot not just as pertains to the inevitability of our individual deaths, but to the looming death of the entire world.
The website Antiwar.com has been doing a good job keeping track of all the many US cold war escalations against Russia and China, which seem to be coming out on a near-daily basis now. Just right off their front page today there’s a story about how the US considering is putting more military aid in Ukraine on the allegation that Russia is plotting an invasion, another about Moscow claiming that US bombers just practiced a simulated nuclear strike on Russia and have have greatly increased their activity along its border, another about Beijing’s anger over increased US war ship activity in the Taiwan Strait, another about Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton’s assurance that Australia would join the US in a war against China to defend Taiwan, and yet another about Beijing and Moscow signing an agreement to deepen their military cooperation to counter hostilities from Washington.
Erm I Know You're Busy But Nuclear War Is Getting Increasingly Likely
Few people seem to believe the most pressing threat to humanity might be all those armageddon weapons we've stockpiled and how increasingly irresponsibly our leaders are treating them.https://t.co/NHYHQgCdfO
This, along with the myriad symptoms our biosphere is showing us of impending collapse, and we still somehow manage to remain terrorized and flattened by trivialities. Eaten up by nothing.
Divisions and hostilities are hotter than ever, even in those political sectors where people are fully aware of just how bad our ecological situation is and the horrifying realities of cold war nuclear brinkmanship. We should rationally all be coming together at this point in history. Our collective plight alone should make us love each other. But instead we’re at each other’s throats more than ever before.
And it’s not just this ideological faction versus that ideological faction. Even among socialists and anti-imperialists there are subfactions, sub-subfactions and sub-sub-subfactions, all of whom despise each other, and all of those divisions are far worse and far more inflamed in online forums. People will spend months on end engaging in online sniping at others over some perceived difference that would be undetectable by someone with a more mainstream perspective, like that episode of Star Trek where a group of aliens who are black on the right side and white on the left are warring with a group whose colors are the opposite and only they notice the difference. Our precious newfound ability as a species to network and share ideas with each other like never before gets bogged down in petty squabbling instead of organization toward a movement into health.
Part of it is information; because the only large-scale distributors of information in our society are controlled and manipulated by the powerful, most people see very little evidence of just how much trouble the systems sustained by the powerful have gotten us into. Part of it is perspective; because most human behavior is driven by ego, a lot more of our interest and attention goes toward the petty differences between ourselves and other humans than large-scale problems which threaten all of us.
So you’ll see even relatively lucid minds spending their time talking about obscure sectarian disagreements, or about the dangers of political “wokeness”, or about the entirely empty theatrics of mainstream electoral politics, even as the destruction of our entire world dangles above our heads suspended by a rapidly eroding thread.
That alone should make us love each other. That alone should make us focus on what matters. That alone should bring us together to move as one against the globe-dominating forces that are going to end us all if they are not stopped.
_______________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
While mainstream western media have been spending their time concern trolling about a “missing” Chinese tennis player who is not actually missing, hardly any coverage has gone toward NATO’s announcement that if the new German government does not continue to allow US nuclear weapons on its soil those weapons will be relocated to the east of Germany. This would put them closer to Russia’s border, a major provocation of Moscow and yet another step forward in the western empire’s steadily escalating game of nuclear brinkmanship.
“Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in (its) country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week.
“Should NATO decide to move U.S. nuclear weapons to Poland, for example, that would likely be seen as a step towards angering Moscow by bringing them closer to the Russian border,” Reuters reports.
Meanwhile the US is considering sending more weapons to Ukraine as tensions mount between Moscow and Kiev, and Vladimir Putin is warning that western powers are ignoring Russia’s red lines which are meant to serve as a deterrent to prevent escalation into full-blown nuclear war. The cold war against China has been continually ramping up as well and appears likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Half of Americans would now reportedly favor going to war against Russia in defense of Ukraine and a majority would now favor going to war with China in defense of Taiwan. These drastic spikes in opinion are not an accident; the consent has been forcefully manufactured by an aggressive propaganda campaign against those two nations. They are not manufacturing that consent for fun; they are doing it for a reason.
A majority of Americans support going to war with Russia over Ukraine, and to war with China over Taiwan. Church attendance may be down sharply, but millenarian dreams are stronger than ever here. And who can blame us? Shit jobs, shit lives—who wants to go on living like this? pic.twitter.com/OszuFZd0Sw
And I just keep tripping on how weird it is that so few people see the US empire’s headlong charge into cold war conflict with two separate nuclear-armed nations as the single most urgent concern of our day. It probably doesn’t even make most people’s top ten. Very few people seem to believe the most pressing threat to humanity might be all those armageddon weapons we’ve been stockpiling and how increasingly irresponsibly our leaders are treating them.
I write about this issue a lot because to me it seems obvious that when you really look at the facts of the matter it’s the most worrying thing of all worrying things in this world. It is entirely possible that climate chaos causing heat spikes and flash freezes which destroy plant life could be the thing which sends us the way of the dinosaur, or it could be the reckless development of weaponized artificial intelligence, but those fates are a bit further down the track. There’s only one threat facing us which could technically wipe us all out tomorrow, and it’s the rapidly increasing likelihood of boring old nuclear holocaust.
I write about it a lot, but it’s never shared particularly well. I could get a lot more traction telling people the most urgent threat of the day is government abuses related to Covid, or white supremacists, or one of the two mainstream political factions which so much energy goes into amplifying the enmity between. But when I write about what I see as the actual greatest threat to our world it’s like yelling into the wind. People don’t want to hear it. My words get swallowed up by a big black hole in the ground and their energy just kind of fizzles.
A big part of it is probably due to the fact that this isn’t something which fits neatly into any of the partisan filters we’ve been trained to view the world through. Detente is no longer an issue promoted by the mainstream parties which present themselves as the “left” end of the spectrum; when aggressions against Russia or China come up it’s usually in an argument over which one we should hate more. Nobody’s self-reinforcing ideological social media echo chamber is going to help them amplify the message that we’re getting way too close to nuclear war; it’s even a back burner issue for most socialists and anti-imperialists.
Detente: The Vital Word Missing From Discourse On Russia And China
A recent 60 Minutes interview with Tony Blinken illustrates the way the concept of detente (the easing of hostilities between nations) is being deliberately hidden from public awareness.https://t.co/CvrodmLr8H
Another reason is that people simply aren’t being told about the rising threat of nuclear war with any regularity. Western mass media exist first and foremost to protect and promote the interests of the US-centralized empire, and it’s in that empire’s interests not to have the public too keenly aware of the fact that it is gambling the life of every terrestrial organism on geostrategic agendas of unipolar global domination.
Another part of it is just garden variety psychological compartmentalization from an uncomfortable idea; nobody likes to think of everyone they know and love being vaporized or dying of nuclear radiation.
Another part might be because people simply cannot wrap their heads around the idea of billions of people dying and what that would mean. It’s been pointed out that most people lack an intuitive understanding of how much more a billion is than a million, which is often cited to highlight the extreme difference between a billionaire and a common millionaire. But it also applies to human lives; we can barely wrap our minds around the idea of a million lives having been snuffed out in the Iraq invasion, much less billions perishing in nuclear war.
People don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million. 1 million seconds is about 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years.
Perhaps the biggest part of it, though, is the fact that this threat has been around a long time. I can’t tell you how many older people I’ve had pish-poshing my concerns saying “Bah, I remember doing duck-and-cover drills as a kid! Turned out to be a whole lotta nothing.”
But it was never nothing. We came extremely close to wiping ourselves out multiple times in the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union because nuclear brinkmanship is an inherently unpredictable affair with far too many small moving parts to control, any one of which could set off an apocalyptic chain of events due to something as simple as miscommunication, technical malfunction, or misinterpretation by any of the thousands of individuals involved amid the chaos and confusion of escalating aggressions.
It just doesn’t sit well with people’s understanding of the world that it could all end through the same nuclear armageddon scenario their grandparents used to worry about. If two men were holding guns to each other’s heads it would be experienced as very dangerous at first, but after a while if nobody pulled the trigger the emotional tension would begin to diminish. If years went by and the men got older it would diminish even further. If they got so old they couldn’t hold the guns anymore and had their children take over for them, and then their children’s children years later, the emotional experience of the standoff would be all but forgotten.
But the guns never got any less deadly. And now the grandchildren of those who initiated the standoff are starting to get careless.
The Day The World Ended
"Then it happened. A nuclear weapon was deployed by one side, setting off a chain reaction that had been set in place ready to be triggered long ago, from which there was no coming back. And the funny thing is, it was an accident."https://t.co/JzMKlrV4oY
I keep having this scene go through my head where something happens and the nukes start flying and everyone’s surprised, because of all the things they’ve been herded into worrying about the idea that actual nuclear war could happen was nowhere near the forefront of their awareness. And someone looks out the window and sees a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon and says “What?? This is how it all ends? With all those weapons we’ve been deliberately building with the full knowledge that they can end it all?”
I mean, how stupid would we feel for having missed that one?
And now there’s a massive push to weaponize space to stay ahead of Russia and China, opening up a whole new dimension of unpredictable moving parts where things can go cataclysmically wrong. You’d think our place on such a precipice would be drawing us all together, but because we’re so manipulated by such deeply malignant forces, we’re instead more divided than ever.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
Taiwan has been in the news a lot lately, and it’s really bringing out the crazy in people.
The mass media have been falsely reporting that China has been encroaching on Taiwan’s “air defense zone”, which gets stretched into the even more ludicrous claim that China “sent warplanes flying over Taiwan”. In reality Chinese planes simply entered an arbitrarily designated area hundreds of miles from Taiwan’s coast it calls its “Air Defence Identification Zone”, which has no legally recognized existence and contains a significant portion of China’s mainland. This is likely a response to the way the US and its allies have been constantly sailing war ships into disputed waters to threaten Beijing.
As Moon of Alabama reports, US warmongers inflamed this non-controversy even further by feeding a story to the press about the already public information that there are American troops in Taiwan training the military there, citing “concern” about the danger posed by China.
This past weekend, warships from six countries entered the South China Sea. Nearly all came from the other side of the world.
Chinese aircraft also briefly entered the "Taiwan ADIZ" — an air defense zone unrecognized by international law.
Now headlines are blaring about President Tsai Ing-wen responding to this non-event with the announcement that Taiwan will “do whatever it takes to defend its freedom and democratic way of life.” Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott just visited Taipei to advocate that “democracies stand shoulder to shoulder” with Taiwan against China. The CIA has announced the creation of a new spy center that will focus solely on China, which CIA Director William Burns says will “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st century: an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”.
A recent poll says that now more than half of Americans would support sending US troops to defend Taiwan from an invasion by the mainland, plainly the result of the aggressive propaganda campaign that has greatly escalated public hysteria about China. In Australia the mass media are cranking out unbelievably insane 60 Minutes episodes ridiculously pushing the idea that China may attack Australia and that Australians should be willing to go to war to protect Taiwan. I’ve been having many disturbing interactions with people online who emphatically support the idea of the US and its allies going to war with China over Taiwanese independence.
This is clearly nuts, and anyone who buys into this line of thinking is a brainwashed fool.
This isn’t some kind of complicated anti-imperialist issue, and it has nothing to do with which side you take in the debate over what government Taiwan belongs under. The US and its allies engaging in a full-scale war with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan is a prospect that should be vehemently opposed out of simple, garden variety self-preservation.
Obviously if Beijing decides to launch a military assault on Taiwan in its bid to reunify China that would be a terrible thing which would cause a lot of suffering. I don’t think that will happen unless western powers push Taipei into declaring independence or otherwise upset the delicate diplomacy dance in some major way, but if it does happen under any circumstances that would be awful.
But Taiwanese independence is not worth fighting a world war that could kill millions, and potentially billions if things go nuclear. This should be extremely obvious to everyone.
War proponents will reference Hitler, as they literally always do whenever there’s talk of war against someone the United States doesn’t like, arguing that China taking Taiwan would be like the Nazis invading Poland after which they’ll just keep invading and conquering until they are stopped. But there’s no evidence that China has any interest in invading Japan, much less Australia, still less everyone else, or that it has any ambitions on the world stage beyond reunification and securing its own economic and security interests.
The idea that China wants to take over a bunch of foreign lands, make you live under communism and give you a social credit score is the same kind of foam-brained bigoted othering which told previous generations that Black men want to take over your neighborhood so they can have sex with your wives. It’s the sort of belief that can only find purchase in an emotionally primitive mind that lacks the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand that not everyone wants what you have.
The jarring amount of pushback I’ve been getting for my very sane and moderate position that we should not be willing to start World War Three between nuclear powers over Taiwanese independence makes it abundantly clear that many people don’t truly understand that starting a war means you have to actually send actual human beings to go fight that war. All the big brave warrior men bloviating about the need to stand up to China know they’ll never find themselves on the front line of that conflict because they’re too old, but they’ll happily send my kids and the kids of countless of other mothers to go and fight in it. It’s like a video game or a movie to them.
Propaganda has made us so compartmentalized and detached from the realities of the horrors of war. If people could really see what war is and what it does, truly grok deep down in their guts how their own governments are inflicting those horrors on people right now, they’d fall to their knees in anguish and never again advocate for such things. No sane person would support a war of this scale if they truly understood what it would mean.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here.
The federal government’s surprise decision to scrap a $90 billion submarine project for a new one based on closer ties with the US and nuclear technology has “profound” industrial and geopolitical consequences for Australia and has received a mixed reception. Manufacturers, tech companies and employers have welcomed the potential for more advanced domestic capabilities through…
While a Paris roundtable about the legacy of nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls is eagerly awaited by the French Polynesian government, the nuclear veterans organisations wonder whether the victims are really represented at the talks. Like every year, they will instead mark tomorrow — July 2 — as the day in 1966 when France detonated its first nuclear bomb in the South Pacific. Walter Zweifel reports.
A high-level roundtable on France’s nuclear legacy in French Polynesia is being held in Paris this week, aimed at “turning the page” on the aftermath of the weapons tests.
Between 1966 to 1996, France carried out 193 tests in the South Pacific, yet 25 years later there are still outstanding claims for compensation and the test sites remain no-go zones monitored by France.
Analysing declassified French documents, the study Toxique by the news website Disclose concluded that the fallout affected the entire population and not only the immediate testing zone around Moruroa as the public had been led to believe.
Macron’s initiative to put the recent history on the table has been welcomed by French Polynesia’s president Edouard Fritch, but has been dismissed by the opposition, nuclear veteran groups and the dominant Maohi Protestant Church, which will stay away, saying the delegation from Tahiti lacks credibility and legitimacy.
For Fritch, the problems thrown up by the nuclear test era have been discussed with French politicians for the past 25 years but he says it is Macron who at last wants to deal with this “pebble in the shoe” in the relationship with Tahiti.
This harks back to Macron’s 2017 presidential election campaign when his team promised Tahitians that Paris would assume key responsibility for health care and to pay in full for the medical costs incurred by those suffering from radiation-induced illnesses.
Tests’ impact on health, environment
Fritch told media that the upcoming talks should bring ‘truth and justice’, with an agenda looking at the tests’ impact on health and the environment, and the financial costs.
The Tahitian delegation also wants France to acknowledge its nuclear legacy in the constitution.
French President Emmanuel Macron and French Polynesian President Edouard Fritch … the initiative to put the recent history on the table has been welcomed – and dismissed. Image: RNZ
Fritch said he would “ask the President of the Republic to give us a precise timetable and above all to send us competent people in the matters that will be discussed”.
Accompanying Fritch is a representative of the Territorial Assembly and the territory’s members of the French legislature, such as Lana Tetuanui, as well as employer and union delegates.
Among the French participants will be the health minister but the defence minister is not certain to attend.
French Polynesia’s former president Gaston Flosse, who for decades defended France’s testing regime, was not invited.
Reflecting the simmering dissonance in Tahiti, the pro-independence Tavini Huiraatira party of Oscar Temaru rejected the invitation to Paris outright, labelling the planned talks a sham.
Temaru said any such talks should not be held in the capital of the colonising power, but rather in New York under the auspices of the United Nations.
While France refuses to acknowledge the 2013 UN decision to reinscribe French Polynesia on the decolonisation list, Temaru insists that “the right of peoples to self-determination is a sacred right, and there is no mixing the sacred and the vile, that is money. Our people are not for sale, Mā’ohi Nui is not for sale.”
The main nuclear test veterans organisation, Moruroa e tatou, decided to boycott the talks.
Its leader Hiro Tefaarere said that after 50 years of people suffering from the test legacy, those going to Paris put money at the forefront of their demands and not ethics.
He said Fritch would not have joined the roundtable had not it been for the release of Toxique which identified the French state’s “secrecy, lies and negligence”.
‘Crime against humanity’ Rejecting the French invitation, the Māohi Protestant Church, which is the main denomination in Tahiti, has in turn invited Macron to attend its synod when he is expected to visit Tahiti in the next few weeks.
The head of the church, Francois Pihaatae, said that by going to Paris, they would have the “wool pulled over their eyes”, but once Macron was in Tahiti the presence of the local people would create a counterweight.
The church has been critical of the French state, saying it proceeded with the tests in full knowledge of the impact of nuclear testing since before 1963.
Both the church and Temaru’s Tavini Huiraatira Party alleged that this amounted to a crime against humanity.
Three years ago, they announced that they had taken their case to the International Criminal Court (ICC), but it is not known if the court has accepted jurisdiction for their complaint.
Paris roundly rejected the claims, condemning what it called the misuse of the court’s international jurisdiction for local political purposes.
The French High Commissioner Rene Bidal said at the time the definition of a crime against humanity centred on the Nuremburg trials after the Second World War and referred to killings, exterminations, and deportations.
Soon after making his charge, Temaru was forced out of office over an election campaign irregularity, which his Tavini Huiraatira party said was orchestrated by France to “politically assassinate” him in retribution for the ICC case.
Until 2009, France claimed that its tests were clean and caused no harm, but in 2010, under the stewardship of Defence Minister Herve Morin, a compensation law was passed.
Over a decade, it proved to be a source of frustration because most claimants, who suffered from any of the 23 recognised types of cancer, failed with their applications.
This prompted a loosening of the eligibility criteria and then again a tightening, leaving it still open for further amendments.
French Polynesia’s social security agency CPS has repeatedly called on the French state to reimburse it for the medical costs caused by its tests.
It said that since 1995 it had paid out US$800 million to treat a total of 10,000 people suffering from cancer as the result of radiation.
Temaru said the money was a debt, pointing out that if a crime was committed it was not up to the victims to have to pay.
Remnants of the French nuclear testing infrastructure on Moruroa atoll where tests were staged until the ended in 1996. Image: RNZ/AFP
Risks around Moruroa The question of the tests’ lasting intergenerational effects remains unanswered.
In 2018, a study was planned after the former head of child psychiatry in Tahiti, Dr Christian Sueur, reported pervasive developmental disorders in zones close to the Moruroa weapons test site.
The findings — reported in the Le Parisien newspaper — caused an uproar in Tahiti and Fritch accused Dr Sueur of causing panic.
The psychiatrist had reported that a quarter of children he treated for pervasive developmental disorders had intellectual disabilities or deformities which he attributed to genetic mutations.
However, three years on a study by a geneticist is yet to be commissioned.
Calls for a clean-up of the Moruroa test site continue.
Although France stopped its weapons tests in 1996, it has refused to return the excised atoll to French Polynesia and declared it a no-go zone.
The Tavini’s Moetai Brotherson, who is also a member of the French National Assembly, said France might lack either the technology or the financial means to remove radioactive sediments.
He also said the cracks on Moruroa were a concern which might explain why France’s biggest investment in the region is the US$100 million Telsite monitoring system against a possible tsunami.
There are fears the atoll could collapse as result of the more than 140 underground nuclear blasts.
Plans for a memorial to be built in Pape’ete have had lacklustre support from those who keep mistrusting France.
While the roundtable is eagerly awaited by the French Polynesian government, the nuclear veterans organisations wonder whether the victims are really represented at the talks.
Like every year, they will instead mark tomorrow — July 2 — as the day in 1966 when France detonated its first nuclear bomb in the South Pacific.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The fight to define what counts as clean energy has grown more contentious as the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill takes shape. Many activists, scientists and lawmakers agree that nuclear energy — which provides one fifth of power in the U.S — is by definition not “clean” or renewable, given that spent fuel remains radioactive and dangerous for thousands of years. But a rift remains around the role that nuclear power, and state support for it, should play in phasing out fossil fuels, given that it does not directly produce climate-altering carbon dioxide but is more expensive than cleaner alternatives. A group of staunch advocates say billions in state and federal subsidies that prop up the nuclear industry — payments that the Biden administration has signaled it may continue to support — may be slowing the transition to a truly clean energy economy.
On April 30, New York State’s last downstate reactor — the Indian Point Energy Center Unit 3 — went dark, a closure that was much celebrated by environmentalists who have been pushing to close the plant for decades on account of a slew of safety concerns: groups like Waterkeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council had long noted that a potential accident could have delivered a fatal blow to 25 million people living within a 50 mile radius of the reactor. Additional ongoing concerns included a 2015 transformer fire that led to the release of thousands of gallons of oil into the Hudson River and the subsequent impact on local fisheries.
But the fate of other nuclear power plants is far from certain. Four days after Indian Point shuttered, on May 4, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved a 20-year license renewal for two Dominion Energy reactors in Virginia, now slated to run until May 25, 2052. Half of the United States’ nuclear fleet of 93 remaining reactors will similarly be required to seek license extensions by 2040, or retire.
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) supported the closure of Indian Point, Steve Clemmer, director of research and analysis for the organization’s climate and energy program, told Truthout, noting that other nuclear plants must be considered on a case-by-case basis. Based on data from a September 2019 presentation by a state task force, increases in energy efficiency and renewable generation spanning 2011-2021 were projected to not only replace but exceed Indian Point’s capacity. But Clemmer notes that according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), output by the shuttered reactor has ultimately been replaced by three new natural gas plants built over the past three years.
Clemmer said California is similarly projected to burn more natural gas when its last nuclear plant closes mid-decade, which would cumulatively raise global warming and air pollution emissions over the next 10 years. But, Clemmer added, it doesn’t have to be that way. “With sufficient planning and strong policies, existing nuclear plants like Diablo Canyon can be replaced with renewables and energy efficiency without allowing natural gas generation and heat-trapping emissions to increase,” he said. In the case of California, a February 2021 UCS analysis called for more rigorous emissions standards, and accelerating wind build-outs while slightly slowing solar and battery storage build-outs.
Elizabeth Moran, environmental policy director for the New York Public Interest Research Group characterized New York’s failure to replace Indian Point’s energy output with clean energy as “a total lack of planning.” Moran is among a group of clean energy advocates who have deemed New York’s ongoing reliance on both nuclear energy and natural gas as unnecessarily postponing the work required to achieve what’s laid out in the state’s climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. “These are bridges to nowhere,” Moran said. “They delay investment in what we truly need to be putting money towards, which is safe, clean, green renewable energy like solar, wind and geothermal.”
With Indian Point now closed, New York has four remaining nuclear reactors at three power stations upstate, all on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. The plants — which are indirectly owned and operated by Exelon Corporation — receive millions in annual subsidy payments — a total of $7.6 billion to be paid from 2017 to 2029. That’s upwards of $1.6 million dollars per day, which Moran estimates shows up on ratepayers’ bills as about three dollars extra each payment period. New York residents pay among the highest rates for electricity in the U.S.
Under the subsidy system, which other states, including Maryland and Pennsylvania, have since considered and is currently under negotiation in Illinois, subsidies for “zero carbon” power, which the nuclear facilities qualify for, have far eclipsed financial support for wind and solar. According to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s latest financial status report, the state’s nuclear facilities received over $500 million in 2020, where renewable energy facilities received only $5 million.
Clean energy advocates highlight that ratepayers’ dollars would stretch further if spent supporting the most affordable energy options. According to a 2020 analysis by the asset management firm Lazard, each megawatt hour of nuclear power generated without subsidy payments cost $129-$198 in comparison with the price of generating the same amount of energy via wind power, estimated at $26-$54, or community solar power, at $63-94. Amory Lovins, founder of energy think tank the Rocky Mountain Institute, explained in Forbes that curbing climate change requires saving the most carbon in the least amount of time, a calculus in which price plays a major role. “Costly options save less carbon per dollar than cheaper options. Slow options save less carbon per year than faster options. Thus, even a low- or no-carbon option that is too costly or too slow will reduce and retard achievable climate protection,” Lovins wrote.
Energy policy analyst and activist Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear reinforced Lovins’s point. “Operating economically distressed and deteriorating nuclear power stations diverts critical resources and wastes what precious little time remains for deploying more carbon reduction quicker, more cost effectively,” he told Truthout. Gunter also suggested that replacing nuclear plants with efficiency upgrades to cut down on demand, and renewables, can be a one-to-three-year process. If the owners of the plants don’t give enough public notice about their closure, more natural gas may be burned, but that can be offset over the following years by other carbon-free substitutes, Gunter said.
Jessica Azulay is executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for a Green Economy. She told Truthout state regulators should find a way to end contracts with the nuclear plants earlier than planned, which would enable an accelerated phase-out and save consumers money. “We think that will be more advantageous than delaying the renewable energy transition until 2029 when the nuclear subsidies end.”
Similarly, Tim Judson of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, said paying subsidies to keep nuclear plants open is based on the assumption that we can’t build renewable energy and increase energy efficiency fast enough to replace nuclear and fossil fuels without trading off between them. “That might have been true 20 years ago, before wind and solar had really taken off,” he said, [but] “the situation has totally changed.” Judson notes tremendous wind potential in Central and Western New York, the Thousand Lakes region and the Tug Hill Plateau, in addition to offshore wind potential in the Great Lakes, which he said “hasn’t even been tapped yet.”
Clemmer, of the UCS, pointed to UC Berkeley and Princeton decarbonization studies suggesting that existing nuclear plants could play an important role in reaching energy goals in 2030 and 2050, emphasizing however that under these projections, nuclear generation might play a more modest role and would come from the continued operation of existing plants, not new nuclear plants. He said the UCS is not opposed to extended licenses for existing reactors if they meet high safety standards and if investments needed to replace aging equipment are cost-effective in comparison with other low-carbon alternatives. “However, proposals by the nuclear industry and the NRC to reduce inspections and weaken safety standards so plant owners can lower their costs takes us in the wrong direction and [are] a potential threat to public safety,” he said. One of New York’s four remaining reactors, the FitzPatrick, within 50 miles of Syracuse, is among only five reactors across the country that do not rank in the NRC’s highest safety category, according to Clemmer.
Activists who have dedicated decades to pushing for the closure of Indian Point, like Manna Jo Greene, environmental director of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, have said they are not aware of or planning efforts to shut down the state’s remaining nuclear plants ahead of schedule. Rather, helping to ensure a safe decommissioning process at Indian Point is already an all-hands-on-deck effort. “There’s a direct danger to the workers as they’re cutting equipment apart — radioactive dust and isotopes — and that can cause worker and community exposure,” Greene said.
Greene noted that activists are also pushing Congress to closely oversee the NRC, which she described as having a history of granting waivers and exemptions and not following their own safety regulations during decommissioning.
While the millions of people living within 50 miles of Indian Point are undoubtedly safer with the reactor now closed, Greene said, there’s still a lot of radioactive material to figure out what to do with. “That is the legacy of 40 years of generating electricity using nuclear power. It’s a very toxic and dangerous legacy with a lot of unanswered questions,” she said. “If we didn’t have all these other solutions, some of this risk might be worth undertaking, but we’ve got plenty of opportunity for renewable energy with storage and efficiency and that’s where we should be investing.”
The day the world ended began like any other day. People woke up, had their coffee, checked their social media, kissed their loved ones, went to work.
Nobody knew it was coming. The news reporters and pundits hadn’t been informing them that the US and its allies had been simultaneously ramping up aggressions against two nuclear-armed nations in a way that could easily lead to something going catastrophically wrong, or explained to them what this could mean for them and their loved ones. The mass media had never let the truth interfere with the military agendas of their government before, and, as it turns out, they never would.
Nobody knew it was coming, so nobody opposed the dangerous acts of brinkmanship that led up to it. Nobody resisted as the Democrats manufactured consent for escalation after escalation against Russia. Nobody resisted as the Republicans manufactured consent for escalation after escalation against China. Nobody objected as war ships were moved, as troops were deployed, as Nuclear Posture Reviews became more and more hawkish and aggressive, as new armageddon weapons were manufactured and fielded, as proxy conflicts were backed, as war planes encroached upon sovereign airspace, as missiles were readied for swift deployment.
So it simply did not feature in anyone’s mind that this could be the day they and their loved ones die in a nuclear holocaust.
They just went about their day, like it was any other day. Working, texting, thinking pointless thoughts, arguing about nonsense with strangers on the internet.
Then it happened. A nuclear weapon was deployed by one side, setting off a chain reaction that had been set in place ready to be triggered long ago, from which there was no coming back.
And the funny thing is, it was an accident. Just a stupid, innocent mistake. One of the thousands of people responsible for the operation of those horrific weapons got a little careless with their part in the day-to-day management of the imperfect technology used in an international nuclear standoff that had become increasingly tense and confusing amid rapidly rising cold war chaos.
That’s all it took. Nothing grand or dramatic. Just a bad decision, made at the wrong time.
One minute it seemed fine. The next minute it was the end. The end of everything.
Nothing rearranges your mental priorities like looking outside and seeing a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon. Suddenly your particular political ideology doesn’t feel so significant anymore. Your personal beef with your coworker loses its importance. That heated argument you were having online slips forgotten from your mind. In fact, nearly everything you’d spent your mental mental energy on that day up until that point feels like a ridiculous, pathetic joke.
There was fear of course. Panic of course. People ran. People hid. But the realization spread very quickly that there was no escaping this one. That this was the end.
And, in that brief moment of helpless surrender to the inevitable, humanity was the most awake it’s ever been. The most tuned in. The most compassionate. The most loving. The most united. If there’d been anyone outside of it to witness it, the beauty of our species in that moment would have taken their breath away.
The earth shook. The flames spread. Black carbon was hurled into the stratosphere for decades. All the earth’s creatures perished in the darkness and radiation.
And then it was all still. Still and silent.
It was a mistake. A stupid, silly mistake, just like all the other stupid silly mistakes we’ve made since the moment we first stood upright. It’s just that this mistake was our last one.
The only difference between our final mistake and all the innumerable others which preceded it was that there was nobody left to fix this one. To try and course correct. To say “Ah, I see where you went wrong there, let’s make some adjustments and try a different approach.”
No one left to recognize the mistake, to grow as a result of that recognition, and to rise above it. No one left to realize how staggeringly insane it was to flirt with the end of the world for the sake of power, how arrogant it was to think that we could remain in perfect control of all those weapons for decades on end without something going wrong amid our reckless games of nuclear chicken.
No one left to realize there’s no good reason we need to live in a world where governments brandish such weapons at each other just because a few sociopaths decided that US unipolar domination needs to be preserved at all cost. No one left to realize we could all just lay down our weapons and get along with each other, and begin collaborating with each other toward a peaceful and harmonious world.
It would be so, so wonderful if that had happened. But it didn’t. And now it’s all gone.
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you canbuy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
US Strategic Command, the branch of the US military responsible for America’s nuclear arsenal, tweeted the following on Tuesday:
“The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option.”
The statement, which STRATCOM called a “preview” of the Posture Statement it submits to US Congress every year, was a bit intense for Twitter and sparked a lot of alarmed responses. This alarm was due not to any inaccuracy in STRATCOM’s frank statement, but due to the bizarre fact that our world’s increasing risk of nuclear war barely features in mainstream discourse.
#USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option. pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L
STRATCOM has been preparing not just to use its nuclear arsenal for deterrence but also to “win” a nuclear war should one arise from the (entirely US-created) “conditions” which are “neither linear nor predictable”. And it’s looking increasingly likely that one will as the prevailing orthodoxy among western imperialists that US unipolar hegemony must be preserved at all cost rushes headlong toward America’s plunge into post-primacy.
STRATCOM commander Charles Richard told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that China’s nuclear capabilities are advancing so rapidly that they’re not even bothering with intelligence vetted more than a month ago in their briefings because it’s probably already out of date, urging an upgrade in America’s nuclear infrastructure. Richard reportedly testified that a portion of China’s nuclear arsenal has been recently primed for ready use.
The fact that those in charge of US nuclear weapons now see both Russia and China as a major nuclear threat, and the fact that US cold warriors are escalating against both of them, is horrifying. The fact that they’re again playing with “low-yield” nukes designed to actually be used on the battlefield makes it even more so. This is to say nothing of tensions between nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India, between nuclear-armed Israel and its neighbors, and between nuclear-armed North Korea and the western empire.
While China keeps the majority of its forces in a peacetime status, increasing evidence suggests China has moved a portion of its nuclear force to a Launch on Warning (LOW) posture and are adopting a limited “high alert duty” strategy. @US_Stratcom testimony at SASC right now.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has the 2021 Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, citing the rising threat of nuclear war:
“Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world into less stable and manageable territory last year. Development of hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and weapons-delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in times of tension. Events like the deadly assault earlier this month on the US Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks. 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. An extremely dangerous global failure to address existential threats—what we called ‘the new abnormal’ in 2019—tightened its grip in the nuclear realm in the past year, increasing the likelihood of catastrophe.”
In a recent interview with Phoenix Media Co-op‘s Slava Zilber, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft nuclear policy specialist Joe Cirincione described a ramp-up in weapons technology among all nuclear-armed nations in the world, the future of which he described as “bleak”:
“We right now have a global nuclear arms race. Each of the nine nuclear-armed nations are building new weapons. Some are replacing weapons that are getting old. Others are expanding their arsenals. But all of these new weapons represent new capabilities for these countries. So you’re seeing a qualitative and a quantitative arms race that is completely unchecked.
“If you look at the data that’s collected by the Federation of American Scientists, for example, you see that – since the 1980s at the height of the Cold War – we have slashed the global nuclear arsenals. We went from a world in 1986 where there were almost 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world down to where we are now where there’s just about 13,500 nuclear weapons. Tremendous progress. 85% reduction in the stockpile…
“But it’s flattened out. There really haven’t been significant reductions for years. The 2010 New START agreement was the last successful arms control agreement. That was 11 years ago. There’s been no reduction agreement since then. There’ve been no talks about new reductions agreements. Now I think the future of arms control is bleak. It’s bleak. And I see no interest really in a new round of arms control either from the United States or from Russia. So I’m pessimistic about our prospects.”
As I all too frequently find myself having to remind people, the primary risk here is not that anyone will choose to have a nuclear war, it’s that a nuke will be deployed amid heightening tensions as a result of miscommunication, miscalculation, misfire, or malfunction, as nearly happened many times during the last cold war, thereby setting off everyone’s nukes as per Mutually Assured Destruction.
The more tense things get, the likelier such an event becomes. This new cold war is happening along two fronts, with a bunch of proxy conflicts complicating things even further. There are so very many small moving parts, and it’s impossible to remain in control of all of them.
People like to think every nuclear-armed country has one “The Button” with which they can consciously choose to start a nuclear war after careful deliberation, but it doesn’t work that way. There are thousands of people in the world controlling different parts of different nuclear arsenals who could independently initiate a nuclear war. Thousands of “The Buttons”. It only takes one. The arrogance of believing anyone can control such a conflict safely, for years, is astounding.
A 2014 report published in the journal Earth’s Future found that it would only take the detonation of 100 nuclear warheads to throw 5 teragrams of black soot into the earth’s stratosphere for decades, blocking out the sun and making the photosynthesis of plants impossible. This could easily starve every terrestrial organism to death that didn’t die of radiation or climate chaos first. China has hundreds of nuclear weapons; Russia and the United States have thousands.
This should be the main thing everyone talks about. There is literally no more urgent matter on earth than the looming possibility that everyone might die in a nuclear war.
But people don’t see it.
On a recent Tucker Carlson Tonight appearance, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard did a solid job describing the horrors of nuclear war and the very real possibility that it could be inflicted upon us due to America’s insane brinkmanship with Russia. She spoke earnestly about how “such a war would come at a cost beyond anything we can really imagine,” painting an entirely accurate picture of “hundreds of millions of people dying and suffering, seeing their flesh being burned from their bones.”
Gabbard is correct, and was right to give such a confrontational account of what we are looking at right now. But if you read the replies to Gabbard’s tweet in which she shared a clip from the interview, you’ll see a deluge of commenters accusing her of “hyperbole”, saying she’s being soft on Putin, and admonishing her for appearing on Tucker Carlson. It’s like they can’t even hear what she’s saying, how real it is, how significant it is.
People’s failure to wrap their minds around this issue is a testament to the power of normalcy bias, a cognitive glitch which causes us to assume that because something bad hasn’t happened in the past, it won’t happen in the future. We survived the last cold war by the skin of our teeth, entirely by sheer, dumb luck; the only reason people are around to bleat “hyperbole” is because we got lucky. There’s no reason to believe we’ll get lucky in this new cold war environment; only normalcy bias says we will. Believing we’ll survive this cold war just because we survived the last one is as sane as believing Russian roulette is safe because the guy passing you the gun didn’t die.
It’s also a testament to the power of plain old psychological compartmentalization. People can’t handle the idea of everything ending, of everyone they know and love dying, of watching their loved ones die in flames or from radiation poisoning right in front of them, all because someone made a mistake at the wrong time after a bunch of imperialists decided that US planetary domination was worth rolling the dice on the life of every terrestrial organism for.
But mostly it’s a testament to the ubiquitous malpractice of the western media. It’s inconvenient to the agendas of the imperial war machine to have people protesting these insane cold war games of nuclear brinkmanship, so their media stenographers barely touch on this issue. If mainstream journalism actually existed, this flirtation with nuclear war would be front and center in everyone’s awareness and people would be flooding the streets in protest against their lives being toyed with as casino chips in an insane all-or-nothing gamble.
This is so much bigger than any of the petty little things we spend our mental energy on from day to day. It’s bigger than whatever your number one pet issue is. It’s bigger than your disdain for Moscow or Beijing. It’s bigger than my disdain for the US empire. It’s bigger than our political opinions. It’s bigger than whatever argument we might be having on the internet. It’s bigger than whether or not we’ve got a problem with Tulsi Gabbard appearing on Tucker Carlson.
Because once the nukes start flying, none of that will matter. None of it. All that will matter is the fact that this is all ending. If you open the door and see a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, all of your mental priorities will rearrange themselves real quick.
We should not be in this situation. There is no good reason governments should be playing these games with these weapons. There is no good reason we can’t just get along with each other and collaborate toward a healthy world together. Only the psychopathic agendas of power-hungry imperialists perpetuate this insane balancing act, and it benefits none of us ordinary people in any way.
The rising threat of nuclear war is the most urgent matter in the world, and it’s absolute madness that we’re not talking about it all the time.
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you canbuy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Leaked documents from the government’s review of foreign and defence policy show it will increase the number of nuclear missiles the UK can possess, amid anger over cuts to foreign aid.
The integrated review of defence and foreign policy intends to remove the cap on the number of Trident warheads that can be stockpiled by more than 40%. This is the first time the UK could increase its nuclear arsenal since the Cold War.
The decision comes after previous leaked documents showed the extent of foreign aid cuts to countries like Yemen and Syria. The leak received considerable opposition from charities such as Save the Children and Care International.
Campaigners have criticised the review and the UK’s approach to foreign policy.
The review
The review contains a foreword from the prime minister that promises to increase foreign aid spending to 0.7% of gross national income “when the fiscal situation allows”, after it was cut to 0.5%. However, the review later states:
As governments become able to finance their own development priorities, we will gradually move towards providing UK expertise in place of grants
The review also says there is a “realistic possibility” that a terrorist group could “launch a successful CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear] attack” by 2030.
The document restates the creation of a “national cyber force” which uses military and intelligence knowledge for offensive hacking. It’s further expected that the UK will expand its drone fleet to include “lethal loitering drones”.
Criticism
Kate Hudson of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) said:
This is no time to start a new nuclear arms race. As the world wrestles with the pandemic and climate chaos, it beggars belief that our government is opting to increase Britain’s nuclear arsenal.
Last month, Presidents Biden and Putin agreed to further reduce their nuclear arsenals by renewing the New START Treaty. Johnson should not be increasing ours.
With the government strapped for cash, we don’t need grandiose, money-wasting spending on weapons of mass destruction. We need essential investment in health, jobs and dealing with the climate catastrophe.
If this is part of a ‘Global Britain’ narrative, then Johnson needs to reframe it: we need to be at the heart of global cooperation to deal with the challenges the entire international community faces. Racheting up global tensions and squandering our resources is an irresponsible and potentially disastrous approach.
This is the time to get out of nuclear weapons not escalate the problem.
Daniel Willis, campaigns and policy manager at Global Justice Now, said:
Far from looking to the future, this review is taking us back to the Cold War, treating international policy as a zero-sum game and embarking on a new wave of colonial sabre-rattling and nuclear militarisation.
Tackling major challenges like Covid-19 and climate change requires co-operation and multilateralism. Yet the government is intent on cynically using international aid to wield ‘soft power’ rather than tackling poverty and inequality.
We were promised a radical reassessment of Britain’s place in the world, but all we have is confirmation of the Prime Minister’s schoolboy view of foreign policy and deluded imperial fantasies.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans took part in nuclear tests after World War II, and into the Cold War. Many of these vets suffer long-term health issues including lung problems and cancer, and many haven’t received compensation for their injuries and feel abused, neglected and forgotten by the government and a country that exposed them to unforeseen risks. This story of the veterans who witnessed secret atomic testing is a co-production with our friends at the RetroReport.
