Updates from September 2015: U. S. Builds More Nuclear Weapons with Enormous Cost and Danger

UPDATES from September 2015:
U.S. Builds More Nuclear Weapons with Enormous Cost and Danger
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, most peace folks and the general public did not pay enough attention to the nuclear arms race, which was escalating while we were distracted by the Vietnam War. Likewise, now while people are distracted by other parts of the world, the U.S. is provoking Russia into a new Cold War and increasing the dangers of nuclear war. The Olympia FOR’s October-November 2015 newsletter and www.olympiafor.org are publicizing realities that deserve our attention and action.
 Look for occasional updates on this “Nuclear Weapons” part of the Olympia Fellowship of Reconciliation’s website, www.olympiafor.org
 “The U.S. Is Risking Nuclear War with Russia over Ukraine” – Watch this Olympia FOR’s July 2015 TV program at your convenience at any time at www.olympiafor.org/tv_programs.htm Click the “TV Programs” link and scroll down to the July 2015 link, where you can read an informative summary and/or watch the interview with Olympia’s Bernie Meyer and Seattle’s Mary Hanson.
 Yes, we could organize locally against nuclear weapons! Although nuclear weapons seriously threaten the world every day, they are largely invisible to the general public, mainstream media, and governmental decision-makers, because we have not made nuclear weapons a hot issue that demands attention and action. The public, media and governments would deal more realistically with nuclear weapons if we had a grassroots group organizing around these issues and dangers. Who would like to start a local effort to educate ourselves and the greater Olympia area’s public, media and governmental decision-makers about nuclear weapons? We could also increase participation and carpooling for Olympia area people at the activities of the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action next to the Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor in Kitsap County (www.gzcenter.org). Who would like to organize a local group in Thurston County to work on nuclear weapons? Contact Glen Anderson [phone] [e-mail] and let’s get together.
Iran was never a danger: Despite the manipulative fear-mongering by Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, many U.S. politicians, and the compliant mainstream news media, Iran was not trying to build a nuclear weapon. Actually, Iran signed – and fully complies with – the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In contrast, Israel does have nuclear weapons and has never signed the NPT. The U.S. has no moral high ground either, because the U.S. been violating the NPT ever since it went into effect in 1970. The NPT’s grand bargain was that signatory nations without nuclear weapons pledged not to acquire them, and those that did have nuclear weapons pledged to abolish them soon. The U.S., Russia, England, France, and China (all signatories) have persisted to maintain their nuclear weapons in violation of the NPT, while India and Pakistan refused to sign and did acquire nukes. North Korea withdrew from the NPT and built nukes. If you believed the politicians and mainstream media you’d think that Iran was a nuclear threat. But the real threats are the U.S., Russia, and the other countries that actually do have nuclear weapons.
Iran's foreign minister calls for OTHER nuclear nations to stop their nukes too: See www.tinyurl.com/otzphwg
U.S. plans to spend A TRILLION DOLLARS on new nuclear weapons: Instead of obeying the NPT’s requirement to abolish nuclear weapons, the Obama Administration and Congress are planning to build new factories for making nuclear weapons and to actually build new nuclear weapons. The cost to taxpayers will be fantastic – estimates range to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS during the next 30 years. Meanwhile, Congress has claimed it can’t afford to fund programs that help people and protect the environment. Some giant corporations are making billions of dollars – with “cost-plus” contracts that guarantee huge profits regardless of how high the cost overruns escalate. And escalating they are!
Big corporations get rich by endangering the whole world: In light of the paragraph above, you can see why these corporations lobby Congress to continue provoking a new nuclear arms race. Also, they subcontract these weapons projects into many local communities in order to turn local communities and elected officials into lobbyists too. A Sept. 22, 2015, article by Richard Krushnic and Jonathan Alan King (posted at www.TomDispatch.com) was titled, “Privatizing the Apocalypse: How Nuclear Weapons Companies Gobble Up Your Tax Dollars.” Their article provides interesting and infuriating information about the corruption at taxpayers’ expense. It includes this sentence: “Recently, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) produced a striking report, “Don’t Bank on the Bomb,” documenting the major corporate contractors and their investors who will reap those mega-profits from the coming nuclear weapons upgrades.” The report begins, “ICAN has identified more than 300 banks, pension funds, insurance companies and asset managers in 30 countries with substantial investments in nuclear arms producers.” You can read a short article about it at www.icanw.org/projects/dont-bank-on-the-bomb and read the entire report at www.dontbankonthebomb.com
Utter incompetence generates huge profits and wastes our tax dollars: A conscientious non-profit organization that monitors governmental activities and protects whistleblowers, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO, www.pogo.org) discovered that Babcock & Wilcox, a huge contractor at nuclear facilities around the country, including the Y-12 nuclear complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had subcontracted to four other companies the work for designing the new Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at Y-12, but B&W failed to consolidate or supervise them, so the resulting design had to be scrapped because the building they designed was not big enough to contain all of the equipment that needed to go inside. American taxpayers wasted $600 million on this totally useless project, but of course the contractors and subcontractors got paid. Oak Ridge’s UPF is far, far over budget, but a secret meeting between Tennessee’s Senator Lamar Alexander, the contractors, and the federal agency determined that it’s all OK, but they kept all information secret. They also masked some of the cost overruns by deferring some of Phase I’s aspects into Phase II in order to pretend that Phase I is closer to the budgeted target. The whole UPF project is escalating to become bigger, more expensive, and also more dangerous (shifting some nuclear processing into inadequate older buildings that cannot be retrofitted to meet earthquake standards). These kinds of incompetence and cost overruns are especially severe in projects that the U.S. Dept. of Energy funds for nuclear weapons. You can read much more information about the horrible waste, provocative nuclear weapons, and nonviolent civil disobedience at Oak Ridge by connecting with the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA), which has been opposing nuclear weapons at the monstrously expensive and inefficient nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. See www.orepa.org or contact OREPA at PO Box 5743, Oak Ridge TN 37831. I’ve been reading their newsletters for many years and find them as informative and fascinating as those from the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. (See below)
Closer to home, the Trident nuclear submarine base in Kitsap County is escalating too: The government awarded a $4.6 billion contract to General Dynamics Electric Boat Division to design and develop the next generation of nuclear submarines, beyond the Trident, which already is capable of destroying the world. The Navy is expanding the base farther into Hood Canal in Kitsap County, just 60 miles north of Olympia and 20 miles west of Seattle. See www.gzcenter.org
Congratulations to Olympia’s Alice Zillah for editing yet another issue of Ground Zero’s informative, attractive newsletter: You can read the summer issue at www.gzcenter.org
Peace activists cited international law when arrested at our nearby Trident nuclear submarine base on 70^th anniversary of U.S. atomic bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Twelve persons from the Pacific NW were arrested on August 10, 2015, when they nonviolently protested nuclear weapons at the Navy base holding the biggest concentration of operational nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. A news release from the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action (www.gzcenter.org) reported, “Each of the 8 Trident submarines at Bangor carries as many as 24 Trident II (D-5) missiles, each loaded with up to 8 independently targetable thermonuclear warheads. Each warhead has an explosive yield up to 32 times the yield of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” The news release also reported, “Two of those who entered the base attempted to deliver a letter to the commanding officer urging him to use every power available to him to call for an immediate halt to the updating and expansion of the Trident fleet under his command. The two were among those arrested.” The letter stated that the U.S. is violating “international and humanitarian law that specifically prohibits the use and threat of use of any nuclear weapon (International Court of Justice decision, 1996). If we want to regain international respect we need to conform to what we expect of other nations: stop building and deploying these illegal and immoral weapons.”
Trident nuclear submarine “modernization” and replacement are expensive and are recklessly provoking Russia into a dangerous new Cold War: Trident’s nuclear warheads are being thoroughly upgraded at huge expense. The news release cited in the paragraph above also stated that, “The entire Trident fleet is slated for replacement, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the cost of building twelve replacement submarines to be $100 billion.” Leonard Eiger, coordinator for Ground Zero Center’s NO TO NEW TRIDENT campaign, stated, “Trident has been deployed at near-Cold War levels since the fall of the Berlin Wall as a major symbol of global power projection. This, together with the continuing Trident modernization efforts, has led to the resurgence of Russia’s ballistic missile submarine force. A new Cold War is developing that, in a completely different and less stable global context than the previous Cold War, poses a new and even greater threat of nuclear war. Trident is at the heart of this new Cold War and must be addressed now, before production begins on New Trident. It is critical that the U.S. and Russian leaders change postures and come together to begin the necessary dialogue to lead the way to a nuclear weapons free world. 70 years is long enough; future generations are counting on it.”
Navy militarizes more of Hood Canal for Trident and also abuses Olympic Peninsula’s environment and habitat for land and water animals for other purposes: This pristine area is recognized by a United Nations agency, UNESCO, as a “World Heritage Site” that deserves protection. See this Seattle Times article: www.tinyurl.com/pwnrfzl and the website www.savetheolympicpeninsula.org for a non-profit org that tries to protect the Olympic Peninsula.
Read powerful interviews and an article about Jim Douglass, co-founder of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action: David Hartsough, who recently spoke in Olympia as Olympia FOR’s guest, encourages people to read these amazing and inspiring items. Jim and Shelley Douglass have profoundly challenged the insanity of nuclear armaments and the nuclear arms race. Read one article and two interviews, and you will be inspired and feel the power of active nonviolence and an amazing life committed to nonviolent living and nonviolent action and “Speaking Truth to Power.”
Read the article at www.thestreetspirit.org/life-at-ground-zero-of-the-nuclear-arms-race
and the first interview at www.thestreetspirit.org/street-spirit-interview-with-james-douglass
and the second interview at www.thestreetspirit.org/street-spirit-interview-with-jim-douglass-part-2
U.S. keeps preventing a “Nuclear-Free Zone” in the Middle East because the U.S. supports Israel’s nuclear weapons, so the U.S. prevented the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) 5-year review from producing a final document: See background and updates at the national FOR’s blog at www.tinyurl.com/o9qvkm5 and also at www.tinyurl.com/prf9rmc Also see this substantive article – www.tinyurl.com/qe8czn4 – by Joseph Gerson, a nuclear weapons expert at the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Gerson actually says the Obama Administration “sabotaged” the NPT review conference.
Royal Navy submariner says Trident is a nuclear “disaster waiting to happen” – A June 1, 2015, news release from the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action (www.gzcenter.org) reported the bold statements by William McNeilly, an Engineering Technician Weapons Engineer Submariner for the UK's Trident II D5 Strategic Weapons System that Britain’s Trident nuclear missiles could accidentally detonate. His most serious allegation is about the risk of a catastrophic failure of the system's nuclear-armed missiles, the Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile, deployed on both UK and US ballistic missile (Trident) submarines. See https://wikileaks.org/trident-safety/
A great many non-profit organizations work against nuclear weapons: One list of such groups is posted at the website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: www.wagingpeace.org/resources/links Of course, Wikipedia also has a list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_groups_in_the_United_States
An official from the Joint Chiefs of Staff blows the whistle on nukes as irrelevant: The “Privatizing the Apocalypse” article mentioned in an earlier paragraph in this collection reports that in 2012, a report from a high-level committee chaired by former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright concluded that “no sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face [including] threats posed by rogue states, failed states, proliferation, regional conflicts, terrorism, cyber warfare, organized crime, drug trafficking, conflict-driven mass migration of refugees, epidemics, or climate change. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.” The report cited is at this link: www.globalzero.org/files/gz_us_nuclear_policy_commission_report.pdf The sponsoring organization, Global Zero is a respected non-profit organization that describes itself as “the international movement for the elimination of all nuclear weapons” and “has grown to 300 leaders and more than 450,000 citizens worldwide, developed a step-by-step plan to eliminate nuclear weapons, built an international student movement with 100 campus chapters in ten countries, and produced an acclaimed documentary film, Countdown to Zero.”
Of course, if any government ever actually USES the nuclear weapons, it would likely kill hundreds of millions of people and make the earth uninhabitable: How is that “defense”? The psychosis of nuclear weapons – and the political corruption that perpetuates them – is suicidal. The world’s people must say “NO!” and reject any politician who fails to work hard to abolish nuclear weapons.

The Real Nuclear Dangers Are Not Iran or North Korea. They're the US and Russia: This August 4, 2015, article by Joe Cirincione for Al Jazeera America lays out the facts. While the US points fingers at other nations, the US and Russia threaten the world with vastly more nuclear weapons than all other nations combined. Here are the numbers:

Russia	7,500
US	7,100
France	300
China	260
Great Britain	225
Pakistan	120
India	110
Israel	80
North Korea	Fewer than 10

The article’s table did not mention that Iran has absolutely zero. But it does say, “Seventy years after the first atomic explosion lit up the New Mexican desert and nearly 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, both Russia and the United States retain nuclear postures from the darkest days of their rivalry. There are almost 16,000 nuclear weapons still in the world today, and the U.S. and Russia possess 94 percent of them. Worse, 1,800 of these Russian and American weapons sit atop missiles on hair-trigger alert, ready to launch on a few minutes notice.” The article also points out, “Few people are even aware of these dangers. Most have forgotten about the weapons. They think the only nuclear threat is the chance that Iran might get a bomb.” Actually, “Apart from the eight countries with established programs there are no other governments racing to get the capability to build nuclear weapons.” Nevertheless, “Even as proliferation risks decrease, however, the risks of accident, miscalculation or intentional use of one of the existing nuclear weapons is unacceptably high. Indeed, since the end of the Cold War, we have come closer to Armageddon than many realize.” The article mentions several accidents and other mistakes that nearly caused nuclear weapons to explode. “One has to be a true optimist to believe that we can leave 16,000 nuclear bombs in fallible human hands indefinitely and nothing will go wrong.” The article warns against “modernizing” our nuclear weapons and replacing them with new ones. The U.S. is doing both!


Two serious issues deserve strong immediate action: nuclear weapons and the climate: See a short article at www.tinyurl.com/ornekr2
Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight: A few months ago the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their Doomsday Clock closer to midnight because of the danger of the climate crisis and the danger of nuclear war caused by the U.S.’s provocative meddling in Ukraine and pushing Russia into a new Cold War.

A critique of “improving” tactical nuclear weapons to be smaller with alleged pin-point accuracy: The U.S.’s new smaller nuclear weapon with alleged pin-point accuracy means it is much more likely to be used. This “improved” tactical nuclear weapon makes nuclear war more likely: www.tinyurl.com/o5zz7cl
The stupidity of tactical nuclear weapons: See the article above and: www.tinyurl.com/pw62n54
John Oliver’s 15-minute video report is very funny as well as interesting and important. It includes some profanity, but it is worth watching: www.tinyurl.com/qy7x6r7
Instead of abolishing nuclear weapons, President Obama is building new ones and new bomb-making factories and provoking Russia into a new Cold War, but you can sign a petition: See the articles earlier in this list. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize partly because the world was relieved to be without Bush and Cheney and partly because he created the impression that he would move boldly to eliminate nuclear weapons. In his highly publicized speech in Prague, Czech Republic, in April, 2009 he committed the U.S. to this goal: “I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Instead – as the excellent non-profit org Peace Action said in June 2015 – Obama has done the opposite. He has committed to completely rebuilding all three legs of the U.S. nuclear triad – strategic bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and nuclear-armed submarines (SLBMs) and calls for spending $350 billion over the next decade and up to $1 trillion over the next 30 years.  Military experts agree that we cannot afford these costs and we can be just as secure, and probably more so, with far fewer nuclear weapons. Therefore, Peace Action has started a petition calling on Obama to keep his promise to lead us to a nuclear weapons free future.  See information and petition at www.tinyurl.com/omaqz8t
The U.S. knew Japan was already defeated before our government dropped two atomic bombs: Gar Alperovitz has written well informed articles about this for several decades, but still the public does not know the truth. Here is his latest article about this for The Nation magazine: www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima or www.tinyurl.com/q34achy
Learn the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from 70 years ago: AFSC’s expert Joseph Gerson wrote a great article at www.tinyurl.com/phdf69k


A mother and child in Hiroshima, Japan, four months after the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb