{"id":103201,"date":"2017-12-11T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=103201"},"modified":"2017-12-06T15:02:46","modified_gmt":"2017-12-06T15:02:46","slug":"what-kind-of-nuclear-attack-would-be-legal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/12\/what-kind-of-nuclear-attack-would-be-legal\/","title":{"rendered":"What Kind of Nuclear Attack Would Be Legal?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c<\/em>US general says order to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if illegal.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014Chicago Tribune, Nov. 18<\/p>\n

\u201cUS nuclear commander would balk at any <\/em>\u2018illegal\u2019 order.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014MSNBC, Nov. 18<\/p>\n

\u201cGeneral heading Strategic Command says illegal nuclear launch order can be refused.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014NBC News, Nov. 18<\/p>\n

\u201cTop general says he would resist <\/em>\u201cillegal\u201d nuke order from Trump.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014CBS News, Nov. 18<\/p>\n

\u201cTop US general says he would resist illegal nuclear strike order from Donald Trump.\u201d<\/em>
\n\u2014The Independent, Nov. 18<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

6 Dec 2017 – <\/em>All these headlines give the direct impression that a nuclear attack could be legal in some circumstances. But is this possible?<\/p>\n

Air Force General John Hyten, commander of Strategic Command, told the Halifax International Security Forum Nov. 18, that an order from the president to launch nuclear weapons can be refused if that order is determined to be illegal. In the face of an unlawful order, Gen. Hyten said, he would tell Trump he couldn\u2019t carry it out. \u201cIf it\u2019s illegal, guess what\u2019s going to happen?\u201d Hyten asked the gathering. \u201cI\u2019m going to say, \u2018Mr. President, that\u2019s illegal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Four days earlier, retired Gen. Robert Kehler, who previously held Gen. Hyten\u2019s top job at Strategic Command, testified likewise to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, saying that nuclear war commanders could \u201cignore any unlawful order by the president to launch a nuclear strike.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generals Hyten and Kehler both said in their unprecedented public comments that the legal principles of \u201cmilitary necessity,\u201d \u201cdiscriminate destruction,\u201d and \u201cproportionality\u201d all apply to decisions about nuclear attacks. Senator Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, asked Gen. Kehler if he meant that Strategic Command could disobey a president\u2019s ordering a nuclear attack. \u201cYes,\u201d Kehler said.<\/p>\n

That military officers \u201ccould\u201d disobey, or \u201ccan\u201d refuse unlawful orders are actually understatements in this context. US military service manuals explicitly require military personal to refuse illegal orders. As everyone sworn-in to the service is taught, disobeying illegal orders is mandatory; following them is a crime worthy of court martial. As CNN reported: \u201cUnder US military law, troops are obligated to not obey an unlawful order. If they received such an order, they could resign or force Trump to fire them.\u201d The point was made during last year\u2019s presidential campaign, when Trump promised to unlawfully torture prisoners, kill the families of suspected militants, and bomb civilians. CNN reported then that \u201cPentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook noted on [Nov. 17, 2016] that all US troops have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certain Weapons Effects Always Unlawful <\/strong><\/p>\n

But more importantly, there is a deep and startling absurdity and a shocking ignorance in these public nuclear war conversations. Any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and illegal by definition. Only the uninitiated, uninformed or willfully blind can still imagine that today\u2019s nuclear weapons could be used \u201cproportionately\u201d to produce more military good than evil. The uncontrollable, unlimited, and unfathomable magnitude of nuclear weapons effects have been established as unlawful in countless text books, law journals, government studies and independent analyses.<\/p>\n

The use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances would be illegal because international covenants, treaties, and protocols forbid indiscriminate destruction, attacks that are disproportionate to a military objective, and weapons\u2019 effects that \u201ctreacherously wound,\u201d harm neutral states, or do long-term damage to the environment.<\/p>\n

In her book Thermonuclear Monarchy<\/em> Professor Elaine Scarry of Harvard reminds us that as long ago as 1995, Sweden, Iran and Egypt argued before the International Court of Justice that since nuclear weapons cause disproportionate suffering, they are prohibited by the 1868 Declaration of St. Petersburg and the Geneva Protocols of 1925, 1949, and 1977. The Republic of the Marshall Islands argued that using nuclear weapons would violate the 1907 Hague Conventions prohibiting weapons with effects that cross into neutral states. Both North Korea and India, neither of which possessed nuclear weapons in 1995, wrote to the World Court insisting that it judge them unlawful. India argued that any use of nuclear weapons, including the mere possession of them, is illegal under the Charter of the United Nations and international \u201crules of proportionality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles Moxley, in his 813-page study Nuclear Weapons & International Law<\/em>, puts this list of treaty violations in perspective: \u201cNuclear weapons are not illegal just because they violate these laws of war, as exhaustively proven in this volume. They are illegal because they cause widespread and indiscriminate destruction without promoting the purpose of war: resolving conflict \u2026 They are not weapons but only wanton machines of symmetric destruction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Physical Effects: <\/strong>\u201cComplete ruin\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

What the generals and the congressional bureaucrats fail to grasp in their fantasies of legal nuclear attacks, is the vastness of the difference between conventional and nuclear weapons, and that the latter cannot be used in war without slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians\u2014that is, without committing war crimes. Some uncomfortable background information might be necessary.<\/p>\n

Moxley\u2019s Nuclear Weapons & International Law<\/em> reports that, \u201cA nuclear detonation generates temperatures of 100 million degrees while a dynamite explosive about 3000 degrees.\u201d What this unimaginable heat does to cities is explained by Lynn Eden in her book Whole World on Fire<\/em>. \u201cMass fire and extensive fire damage would occur in almost every circumstance in which nuclear weapons were detonated in a suburban or urban area. \u2026damage from mass fire would extend two to five times farther than blast damage.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1977, the Federal Emergency Management Agency\u2019s 653-page book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons <\/em>notes with understatement, \u201cpersons in buildings or tunnels close to ground zero may be burned by hot gases and dust entering the structure\u2026\u201d In its lengthy consideration of radiation effects, taken from the US Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the FEMA study says in part, \u201cAmong them, apart from genetic effects, are the formation of cataracts, nonspecific life shortening, leukemia, other forms of malignant disease, and retarded development of children in utero at the time of the exposure.\u201d As Ann Fagan Ginger reported in her book Nuclear Weapons are Illegal<\/em>, \u201cThey continue to maim and kill long after they explode in a test or in a war.\u201d<\/p>\n

A mass fire or \u201cfirestorm\u201d Eden writes, is \u201cthe simultaneous combustion of many fires over a large area, which causes a great volume of air to heat, rise, and suck in large amounts of fresh air at hurricane speeds from the periphery,\u201d Eden notes. \u201cWithin ten minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event\u2014the development of a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. This fire would quickly increase in intensity. In a fraction of an hour it would generate ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water (212\u00b0F, 100\u00b0C). This would produce a lethal environment over a vast contiguous area.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eden\u2019s research is worth quoting at length. \u201cThe first mass fire in history was created by allied incendiary raids at Hamburg on the night of July 27-28, 1943. Within 20 minutes, two of three buildings within an area of 4.5 square miles were on fire. In three to six hours, this fire so completely burned out an area of more than 5 square miles that the area was referred to by damage analysts as the \u2018Dead City.\u2019 Well-documented accounts describe wind speeds of hurricane force within the city. Air temperatures were calculated to be between four and five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hundreds of degrees above the temperature of boiling water. [Up to] 100,000 people were killed in the attack. A mass fire resulting from a modern nuclear weapon could be expected to burn out an urban or suburban area of considerably larger size in a similarly brief time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Legal scholar George Delf\u2019s Humanizing Hell! The Law V. Nuclear Weapons<\/em> is concise, bold, and direct. \u201c[A]rmed forces are committed by military, domestic and international law not to attack non-combatants. Any government which adopts a defense policy implying such an attack is therefore inciting its own forces to commit war crimes on a gigantic and suicidal scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>John LaForge, syndicated by <\/em>PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and illegal by definition. Only the uninitiated, uninformed or willfully blind can still imagine that today\u2019s nuclear weapons could be used \u201cproportionately\u201d to produce more military good than evil. The uncontrollable, unlimited, and unfathomable magnitude of nuclear weapons effects have been established as unlawful in countless text books, law journals, government studies and independent analyses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":97252,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}