NL -- Manlio Dinucci -- De kunst van oorlogvoering -- De nucleaire race versnelt

 

De kunst van oorlogvoering

 De nucleaire race versnelt 

Manlio Dinucci

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Op de basis Redzikowo in Polen is begonnen met de installatie van het Aegis Ashore-systeem, voor een bedrag van meer dan 180 miljoen dollar. Het wordt de tweede Amerikaanse raketbasis in Europa, nadat die van Deveselu in Roemenië in 2015 operationeel werd. De officiële functie van deze bases is om met het "schild" van SM-3 onderscheppingsraketten de Amerikaanse strijdkrachten in Europa en die van de Europese NAVO-bondgenoten te beschermen tegen "huidige en opkomende ballistische raketdreigingen van buiten het Euro-Atlantische gebied".

Naast de twee landinstallaties doorkruisen vier met hetzelfde Aegis-systeem uitgeruste schepen, die door de Amerikaanse marine op de Spaanse basis Rota zijn gestationeerd, de Middellandse Zee, de Zwarte Zee en de Oostzee. De Amerikaanse marine heeft ongeveer 120 torpedojagers en kruisers die met dit raketsysteem zijn bewapend.

Zowel de schepen als de Aegis-installaties aan land zijn uitgerust met de Mk 41 verticale lanceerinrichtingen van Lockheed Martin: verticale buizen (in de romp van het schip of in een ondergrondse bunker) van waaruit de raketten worden gelanceerd. Lockheed Martin zelf documenteert, ter illustratie van de technische kenmerken, dat hiermee raketten voor alle missies kunnen worden gelanceerd: antiraket, luchtafweer, anti-schip, anti-onderzeeboot en aanval tegen landdoelen. Elke lanceerbuis is aanpasbaar aan elke raket, met inbegrip van "raketten voor langeafstandsaanvallen", waaronder de Tomahawk kruisraket. Hij kan ook worden bewapend met een kernkop.

Het is derhalve onmogelijk te weten welke raketten zich daadwerkelijk in de verticale lanceerinrichtingen van de Aegis Ashore-basis in Roemenië bevinden en welke in die in Polen zullen worden geïnstalleerd. Evenmin welke raketten zich aan boord bevinden van de schepen die de grenzen van de Russische territoriale wateren overschrijden. Omdat Moskou dit niet kan controleren, gaat het ervan uit dat er zich ook kernraketten bevinden.

Hetzelfde scenario in Oost-Azië, waar Aegis-oorlogsschepen van de Zevende Vloot elkaar kruisen in de Zuid-Chinese Zee. De belangrijkste bondgenoten van de VS in de regio - Japan, Zuid-Korea, Australië - hebben ook schepen die zijn uitgerust met het Amerikaanse Aegis-systeem.

Dit is niet het enige raketsysteem dat de VS in Europa en Azië inzet. In zijn toespraak aan de George Washington School of Media and Public Affairs verklaarde generaal McConville, stafchef van het Amerikaanse leger, afgelopen maart dat het Amerikaanse leger een "task force" aan het voorbereiden is met "lange-afstands precisievuur vermogen dat overal heen kan, bestaande uit hypersonische raketten, middellange-afstandsraketten, precisieslag raketten" en dat "deze systemen in staat zijn door luchtafweergeschut heen te dringen".

De generaal wees erop dat "we van plan zijn een van deze task forces in Europa in te zetten en waarschijnlijk twee in de Pacific."

In een dergelijke situatie is het niet verwonderlijk dat Rusland de plaatsing van nieuwe intercontinentale raketten versnelt, met kernkoppen die, na een ballistische baan, nog duizenden kilometers doorglijden met hypersonische snelheid.  Evenmin verbaast het nieuws, gepubliceerd door de Washington Post, dat China meer dan honderd nieuwe silo's bouwt voor intercontinentale ballistische raketten met kernkoppen. De wapenwedloop speelt zich niet zozeer af op kwantitatief niveau (aantal en vermogen van kernkoppen) als wel op kwalitatief niveau (snelheid, penetratievermogen en geografische locatie van nucleaire dragers). De reactie, in geval van een aanval of een veronderstelde aanval, wordt steeds meer toevertrouwd aan de kunstmatige intelligentie, die in enkele seconden moet beslissen over de lancering van kernraketten. Dit vergroot de kans op een nucleaire oorlog per vergissing, een risico dat tijdens de Koude Oorlog meermaals is gelopen.

Het Verdrag inzake het verbod op kernwapens, dat in 2017 door de Verenigde Naties is aangenomen en in 2021 in werking is getreden, is tot dusver door 86 staten ondertekend en door 54 geratificeerd. Geen van de 30 NAVO- en 27 EU-landen (behalve Oostenrijk) heeft het geratificeerd of zelfs maar ondertekend. In Europa hebben alleen Oostenrijk, Ierland, Malta, San Marino en de Heilige Stoel het ondertekend en geratificeerd. Geen van de negen nucleaire landen - de Verenigde Staten, Rusland, Frankrijk, Groot-Brittannië, Israël, China, Pakistan, India en Noord-Korea - heeft het geratificeerd of zelfs maar ondertekend.

 

Manlio Dinucci

(il manifesto, July 13, 2021)

 

Nederlandse vertaling: Martien

EN -- APPEAL TO THE LEADERS OF THE NINE NUCLEAR-WEAPON STATES (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States)

 

APPEAL TO THE LEADERS OF THE NINE NUCLEAR WEAPON STATES

(China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States)

中文   DEUTSCH  ENGLISH FRANÇAIS ITALIAN   PORTUGUESE RUSSIAN SPANISH 

We, the people of good will, of all walks of life, living on all continents and professing different creeds and religions, direct your attention to the threat of an all-out nuclear war that can erupt very easily either due to deliberate actions of any nuclear weapons state or because of unintentional, human, technical or other mistake.

We are witnessing that the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons in a limited or on large-scale attack recently has been dramatically lowered, bringing the entire world to the brink of a nuclear Armageddon.

Many high-ranking military and civilian officials, politicians and experts are openly talking about the possibility of using nuclear weapons in a first strike attack against any nation under many pretexts with low-yield or high-yield nuclear charges.

The United States in fact has withdrawn from a number of rather well-known and useful nuclear arms control treaties and accords for dubious reasons and illogical explanations.

Nuclear arms delivery vehicles are becoming more sophisticated, faster and more precise. They have been combined into a dangerous combination of arms embracing strategic and tactical nuclear weapons with missile defense assets and conventional capabilities, and with a possibility to place strike weapons in space, including missile defense systems and anti-satellite weapons.

Many military exercises that earlier have been conducted with the use of conventional weapons, gradually are being transformed into drills using mock nuclear weapons.

Nuclear arms experts calculate that during an initial massive nuclear attack, at least 34 million people will immediately perish and 57 million people will receive multiple injuries and wounds that will cause horrible pain, suffering, radiation sickness and death. Additionally, various kinds of infrastructure, flora and fauna, nuclear power plants, water resources – including potable water and hydropower dams – will be heavily damaged or destroyed completely by huge firestorms, vast nuclear contamination, powerful explosions, and earthquakes.

But that is just the immediate impact. The nuclear winter that would be created by even a limited nuclear war would threaten all of humanity with starvation and other mortal threats.

We who have voluntarily signed this appeal urge you, as the leaders of all nine nuclear nations, to take the following actions in 2020:

First, as an initial step leading to comprehensive and irreversible nuclear disarmament on a global scale, you pledge not to use and denounce any kind of nuclear weapon use in a first strike against any nation at any time.

Second, sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons with the subsequent commitment specified in the next item.

Third, commit to irreversibly dismantling all nuclear weapons by August 6, 2045 or earlier that date – by all nine nuclear weapon states, in carefully calibrated stages and through well-developed and mutually acceptable mechanisms of inspections, provided that all nuclear weapon states will follow this pattern simultaneously and honestly.

Sign this Petition

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Co-sponsored or signed by: “Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space” (the USA), Analytical Agency“Strategic Stability” (Russia), Comitato No Guerra No NATO (CNGNN Italy)

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What’s on board the C-17 Globemaster III flying from Turkey to Poland?

What’s on board the C-17 Globemaster III flying from Turkey to Poland?

by Belit Onay

February 21, 2020

Air Mobility Command’s C-17A Globemaster III arrived at Incerlik AB, Turkey from Sicily, Italy on February, 20 as part of US-led exercise Defender Europe 2020, Air Mobility Command officials said.

At present the exercise is about to gain momentum. First Defender-Europe 20 equipment has already arrived in Germany where it stands ready to spread out to operational areas in Poland. “We still need to get some equipment to Powidz (Poland) from Turkey,” – Air Mobility Command official said.

Our sources at Incerlik AB confirm that the C-17 Globemaster III is supposed to transport a very important cargo to Poland. The aircraft has been taken to a highly secured area at Incerlik AB.

The arrival of the C-17 transport aircraft at Incerlik AB is thus viewed as a means to recover a certain number of nuclear bombs (that are currently stored at Incerlik AB amid tensions in Syria) to Poland.

And forward-deployed nuclear weapons storage depot during Defender Europe 2020 in Powidz is a proof to that.

Chomsky: Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change & the Undermining of Democracy Threaten Future of Planet

Chomsky: Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change & the Undermining of Democracy Threaten Future of Planet

As President Trump pulls out of key nuclear agreements with Russia and moves to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, Noam Chomsky looks at how the threat of nuclear war remains one of the most pressing issues facing mankind. In a speech at the Old South Church in Boston, Chomsky also discusses the threat of climate change and the undermining of democracy across the globe.

Noam Chomsky

world-renowned political dissident, linguist and author. He is a laureate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue the hour with world-renowned linguist, political dissident Noam Chomsky, who spoke last night here in Boston at the Old South Church.

NOAM CHOMSKY: I want to make a couple of remarks below about the severe difficulty of maintaining and instituting democracy, the powerful forces that have always opposed it, the achievements of somehow salvaging and enhancing it, and the significance of that for the future. But first, a couple of words about the challenges that we face, which you heard enough about already and you all know about. I don’t have to go into them in detail. To describe these challenges as “extremely severe” would be an error. The phrase does not capture the enormity of the kinds of challenges that lie ahead. And any serious discussion of the future of humanity must begin by recognizing a critical fact, that the human species is now facing a question that has never before arisen in human history, question that has to be answered quickly: Will human society survive for long?

Well, as you all know, for 70 years we’ve been living under the shadow of nuclear war. Those who have looked at the record can only be amazed that we’ve survived this far. Time after time it’s come extremely close to terminal disaster, even minutes away. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve survived. Miracles don’t go on forever. This has to be terminated, and quickly. The recent Nuclear Posture Review of the Trump administration dramatically increases the threat of conflagration, which would in fact be terminal for the species. We may remember that this Nuclear Posture Review was sponsored by Jim Mattis, who was regarded as too civilized to be retained in the administration—gives you a sense of what can be tolerated in the Trump-Pompeo-Bolton world.

ICAN -- These 50 universities help build U.S. nuclear weapons

ICAN -- These 50 universities help build U.S. nuclear weapons Universities are meant to teach students how to make the world better, not how to destroy it. But in our new report “Schools of Mass Destruction: American Universities in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex,” we’re exposing nearly 50 U.S. universities that take billions of dollars in research funding to support U.S. nuclear weapons development.

View the full list of universities

The universities in this report are complicit in the new nuclear arms race. They provide the scientific, technical and human capital needed to build U.S. nuclear weapons. And they do so largely in secret: many staff and students of these universities are unaware of their institution’s involvement. That’s why we’re releasing this report today. Students, staff and alumni of these universities must demand that their schools live up to their mission statements to improve the world, instead of working on the creation and maintenance of weapons designed to wipe out entire cities in a heartbeat, leaving lasting catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences. We’re calling on all these universities to follow our recommendations to end their involvement with the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Will you help us hold them accountable?

Ask these universities about their involvement on social media These universities are helping to build U.S. nuclear weapons Nearly 50 U.S. universities are involved in the research and design of U.S. nuclear weapons, largely in secret and in contradiction of their mission statements. Students and faculty must demand their universities stop helping to build weapons of mass destruction. Aiken Technical College Amarillo College Augusta Technical College Augusta University California Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University Cornell University George Washington University Georgetown University Georgia Institute of Technology Johns Hopkins University Kansas State University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Metropolitan Community College Missouri University New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology New Mexico State University Northern New Mexico College Pittsburg State University Purdue University Roane State Community College Stanford University Texas A&M University Texas Tech University University of Arizona University of Arkansas University of California University of California - Berkeley University of California - Davis University of California - Los Angeles University of California - San Diego University of Colorado - Boulder University of Florida University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Kansas University of Michigan University of Missouri - Kansas City University of Nebraska University of Nevada - Las Vegas University of Nevada - Reno University of New Mexico University of Notre Dame University of Rochester University of South Carolina - Aiken University of South Carolina - Salkehatchie University of Tennessee University of Texas at Austin University of Utah University of Wisconsin - Madison Types of involvement by university:

Things you shouldn’t nuke

By Thomas Gaulkin, August 27, 2019

Donald Trump’s interest in dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes, reported by Axios this week, is hard to fathom. (Even, apparently, for Donald Trump.) Setting aside that even the most powerful nuclear weapons ever tested likely lack the energy to disrupt a hurricane (according to the US government’s own hurricane experts), releasing radioactive fallout into a storm headed toward land seems pretty unwise.

But the tornadic US president is not the first to propose the concept. In fact, as Garret Graff explains at Wired, nuclear explosions were considered for a variety of non-combat purposes throughout the Cold War, from melting the polar ice-caps to nuking the moon. The US Atomic Energy Commission launched Project Plowshare in 1958 to pursue peaceful applications of the technology. Some proposed uses of nuclear blasts: harbor, canal, and dam construction; fracking; railroad cuts; sewage disposal; and even generating steam for geothermal power. The Plowshare program produced some three dozen explosive experiments, but none led to feasible applications.

Not to be outdone, the Soviet Union ran its own effort to turn nukes into mining equipment, and detonated hundreds of devices through the late 1980s. Many were focused on obtaining seismic data. Many of the Soviet explosions were intended to generate seismic data, but some focused on natural gas exploration and other mining operations—including a 200-300 kiloton explosion at an eastern Ukrainian coal mine in 1979 that has been irradiating the region’s water ever since.

The 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty prohibits every signatory state from carrying out “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion,” including those for peaceful purposes. But with the demise of the INF treaty, the impending collapse of New START—one of the last pillars of the arms control regime—and the start of a new arms race, will nuclear states get comfortable again nuking stuff for profit?

The Myths, the Silence, and the Propaganda That Keep Nuclear Weapons in Existence

The Myths, the Silence, and the Propaganda That Keep Nuclear Weapons in Existence
By David Swanson, 

http://davidswanson.org/the-myths-the-silence-and-the-propaganda-that-keep-nuclear-weapons-in-existence/

This week, 74 years ago, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each hit with a single nuclear bomb that had the power of a third to a half of what NPR calls a low-yield or “usable” weapon. By NPR I mean both the Nuclear Posture Review and National Public Radio, both the U.S. government and what many people dangerously think of as a free press. These so-called usable nukes are for firing from the submarines based nearby here. They are two to three times the size of what destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the U.S. military’s plans involve using multiple nukes at once. But they really are tiny compared to other nuclear weapons that the United States and other nations have ready just in case some unfortunate scenario makes completely annihilating ours and other species the wisest course of action. Some U.S. nukes are 1,000 times what was used to vaporize Japanese populations. Each submarine can launch 5,000 times what was dropped on Hiroshima.

But the claim has been that the submarines are for so-called deterrence. Putting so-called small nukes on them and calling those “usable,” drops the pretense of deterrence in favor of openly embracing the madness of initiating an exchange of nukes likely to kill us all directly or through the creation of a nuclear winter.

It may sound like I’m joking or mocking when I say that the U.S. government might decide that the apocalypse is the wisest course of action, but in the part of the United States that I live in there are huge bunkers, designed by former Nazis, under hills for various agencies of the government to hide in so as to live marginally longer than the rest of us, and these bunkers would take hours to get to even avoiding rush hour traffic. A decision to kill us all would have to have been made and planned out but not yet acted upon prior to the long commute to the bunkers. This is all part of the policy of first-strike.

And, of course, the President of the United States has tweeted nuclear threats at other countries, something previous U.S. presidents never did. They all made their nuclear threats without the use of Twitter.

When the United States dropped those nuclear bombs on Japan, masses of people were in fact vaporized like water on a hot frying pan. They left so-called shadows on the ground that in some cases are still there today. But some didn’t die at once. Some walked or crawled. Some made it to hospitals where others could hear their exposed bones clacking on the floor like high heels. At the hospitals, maggots crawled into their wounds and their noses and ears. The maggots ate the patients alive from the inside out. The dead sounded metallic when thrown into trashcans and trucks, sometimes with their young children crying and moaning for them nearby. The black rain fell for days, raining death and horror. Those who drank water died instantly. Those who thirsted dared not drink. Those untouched by illness sometimes developed red spots and died so quickly that you could watch the death seep over them. The living lived in terror. The dead were added to mountains of bones now viewed as lovely grass hills from which the smell has finally departed.

Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project”

By Kathleen M. Tucker, Robert Alvarez, July 15, 2019

For the past several years, the controversy over radioactive fallout from the world’s first atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945—code-named Trinity—has intensified. Evidence collected by the New Mexico health department but ignored for some 70 years shows an unusually high rate of infant mortality in New Mexico counties downwind from the explosion and raises a serious question whether or not the first victims of the first atomic explosion might have been American children. Even though the first scientifically credible warnings about the hazards of radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion had been made by 1940, historical records indicate a fallout team was not established until less than a month before the Trinity test, a hasty effort motivated primarily by concern over legal liability.

In October 1947, a local health care provider raised an alarm about infant deaths downwind of the Trinity test, bringing it to the attention of radiation safety experts working for the US nuclear weapons program. Their response misrepresented New Mexico’s then-unpublished data on health effects. Federal and New Mexico data indicate that between 1940 and 1960, infant death rates in the area downwind of the test site steadily declined—except for 1945, when the rate sharply increased, especially in the three months following the Trinity blast. The 21 kiloton explosion occurred on a tower 100 feet from the ground and has been likened to a “dirty bomb” that cast large amounts of heavily contaminated soil and debris—containing 80 percent of the bomb’s plutonium—over thousands of square-miles. (See Figure 1.)

After a nearly half a century of denial, the US Department of Energy concluded in 2006, “the Trinity test also posed the most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project.”[1] Four years later the US Centers for Disease Control gave weight to this assessment by concluding:

“New Mexico residents were neither warned before the 1945 Trinity blast, informed of health hazards afterward, nor evacuated before, during, or after the test. Exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion were measured at levels 10,000- times higher than currently allowed.”[2]

The Pentagon’s new nuclear doctrine is scary as hell

Darius Shahtahmasebi is a New Zealand-based legal and political analyst who focuses on US foreign policy in the Middle East, Asia and Pacific region. He is fully qualified as a lawyer in two international jurisdictions.

Published time: 18 Jul, 2019 11:45

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An unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launches during an operational test, May 1, 2019, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. © Global Look Press / U.S. Air Force

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The Pentagon is actively contemplating the use of nuclear weapons to win wars that need not be fought in the first place. As expected, opposition to the US nuclear doctrine is almost non-existent in the mainstream media.

It used to be the case that the idea of using nuclear weapons in a real-world conflict was such a taboo idea that no one was ever openly to contemplate it. We need only look back to the end of World War II to realize how catastrophic and harmful nuclear weapons can be on civilian populations; yet we shouldn’t have had the blueprint of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to know that the use of nuclear weapons would be a frightening and criminal act. They are deadly and unnecessary, end of story. You can all save me the cliched response “But they ended a war.”

Firstly, the use of nuclear weapons didn’t end a war – it started one (the Cold War). Secondly, anyone who knows even a little bit of history knows that Japan was on the verge of defeat. But don’t take my word for it – I wasn’t there. But those who were typically made statements to the effect that “[t]he use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” But I digress.

The United States military has decided that the only chance it has of maintaining a stranglehold over its empire is to actively contemplate the scenarios and situations in which it should deploy the use of nuclear weapons.

ALSO ON RT.COMDraft NATO-affiliated report reveals number & location of US nukes in Europe

According to the Pentagon’s June Nuclear Operations or Joint Publication 3-72 (which was unsurprisingly made private not long after its release), the US believes that “developing nuclear contingency plans sends an important signal to adversaries and enemies that the US has the capability and willingness to employ nuclear weapons to defend itself and its allies and partners".

“Nuclear weapon capabilities constitute a vital element of national defense,” the document states. “Nuclear operations are those activities within the range of military operations, to include deterrence, crisis response, strike assessment and return to stability.”