{"id":53477,"date":"2015-02-09T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-02-09T12:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=53477"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:08","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:08","slug":"february-this-month-in-nuclear-threat-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/february-this-month-in-nuclear-threat-history\/","title":{"rendered":"February: This Month in Nuclear Threat History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"armas-nucleares-4.jpg_1718483346<\/a><\/p>\n

February 1, 1955<\/strong> \u2013 President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after a White House meeting in which top Army leaders lobbied for large U.S. troop increases in Europe, replied, \u201cThe Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos [if a war started with the Soviet Union]. You can\u2019t have this kind of war, there just aren\u2019t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.\u201d (Source: Eric Schlosser. \u201cCommand and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.\u201d New York: Penguin Press, 2013, p. 144.)<\/p>\n

February 1, 2011<\/strong> \u2013 David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt\u2019s New York Times<\/em> article, \u201cPakistan Nuclear Arms Pose Challenges to U.S. Policy\u201d revealed that recent leaks by Pakistani or other South Asian sources put the number of nuclear warheads in that nation\u2019s nuclear arsenal as 110 with enough fissile material to make 40-100 more warheads. If true, this would allow Pakistan to eclipse France as the world\u2019s fifth largest nuclear power. Comments: While it is possible that disinformation may be inflating the arsenals of long-time antagonists India and Pakistan (who fought three wars in 1947, 1965, and 1971 and nearly came to nuclear blows at the turn of the millennium), it is nevertheless also true that tensions between not only India-Pakistan but also the United States and Pakistan could one day trigger a nuclear conflict in the region unless all nations push for global zero reductions and, in the shorter-term, a South Asian NWFZ (nuclear-weapon-free-zone).<\/p>\n

February 2, 1993<\/strong> \u2013 Semipalatinsk, the main Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan where 456 (340 underground and 116 above ground) of the Soviet\/Russian total of 715 nuclear tests were conducted between 1949 and 1989, was officially closed. On October 3, 1995, the U.S., under the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, agreed to help permanently shut down the site and in the period 1997-2000, 181 test tunnels and 13 test shafts at the site were sealed in a cooperative U.S.-Kazakhstan effort. The site was declared \u201csafe\u201d by U.S. authorities according to a 2012 Department of Defense Fact Sheet, although the resulting short- and long-term radioactive fallout from these tests have negatively impacted generations of peoples living in the surrounding region.<\/p>\n

(Sources:\u00a0\u00a0 Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors. \u201cArms Control Chronology.\u201d Washington, DC: Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 15-16, 24 and Nuclear Threat Initiative website http:\/\/www.nti.org\/facilities\/<\/a> accessed January 7, 2015.)<\/p>\n

February 8, 1982<\/strong> \u2013 In the second edition of a three-part series published in The New Yorker<\/em>, which later appeared as the award-winning, best-selling book \u201cThe Fate of the Earth,\u201d New York city native and staff writer of that publication Jonathan Schell (August 21, 1943 \u2013 March 25, 2014) disagreed with Christian fundamentalists who argued that the nuclear holocaust that the U.S. threatened to unleash is the Armageddon threatened by God in the Bible. \u201cIt is not God who threatens us but we ourselves.\u201d Shell argued. \u201cExtinction would be utterly meaningless. There can be no justification for it and therefore no justification for any nation to push the world into nuclear hostilities.\u201d And he also warned that, \u201c\u2026gigantic insane crimes are not prevented merely because they are \u2018unthinkable.\u2019 We must recognize the peril, dismantle the weapons and arrange the political affairs of the earth so that the weapons will not be built again.\u201d (Source: http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/1982\/02\/08\/the-fate-of-the-earth-ii-the-second-death<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

February 13-14, 1950<\/strong> \u2013 A U.S. Convair B-36 bomber, equipped with a Mark IV nuclear bomb, took off from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska en route to Carswell Air Force Base, New Mexico on a mission simulating a nuclear attack on the city of San Francisco. The plane was forced down when a design flaw caused three of its engines to catch fire near Vancouver Island off the Canadian coast. The Mark IV, which was made of uranium but thankfully had a nonworking lead nuclear pit, was jettisoned and the bomb\u2019s 5,000 pound high explosive charge detonated at around 3,000 feet altitude. 12 of the crew of 16 personnel survived the crash. This incident was allegedly the first known loss of a nuclear weapon in history and it constitutes just one example of hundreds of nuclear accidents, near-misses, and \u201cBroken Arrows\u201d \u2013 any one of which could have accidentally triggered an unintentional nuclear war.\u00a0\u00a0 That risk still exists today.\u00a0\u00a0 (Sources:\u00a0\u00a0 Eric Schlosser. \u201cCommand and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident, and the Illusion of Safety.\u201d New York: Penguin Press, 2013 and website http:\/\/introtoglobalstudies.com\/2012\/10\/broken-arrow-lost-nuclear-weapon-in-Canada accessed January 8<\/a>, 2015.)<\/p>\n

February 17, 1953<\/strong> \u2013 Years after serving as the civilian director of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave one of many speeches opposing the growing nuclear arms race, this one at the Council on Foreign Relations. \u201cWe may anticipate a state of affairs in which [the U.S. and U.S.S.R.] will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and the life of the other, though not without risking its own\u2026We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.\u201d (Sources: Craig Nelson. \u201cThe Age of Radiance.\u201d New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 259 and note that Oppenheimer\u2019s speech excerpts were published in the July 1953 edition of Foreign Affairs<\/em>: \u201cAtomic Weapons and American Policy,\u201d p. 529.)<\/p>\n

\"peace<\/a><\/p>\n

February 20, 1971<\/strong> \u2013 At 9:33 a.m. EST, the National Emergency Warning Center at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado Springs allegedly transmitted an emergency teletype message directing all U.S. radio and television stations to cease normal broadcasting by order of President Richard Nixon. The message was not cancelled for more than 40 minutes. This incident may have been caused by a teletype operator loading the wrong tape instead of the routine Emergency Broadcast Network test broadcast. Nevertheless, newsrooms across America were in turmoil and the public was unnecessarily panicked. (Source: Jesus Diaz. This Message From NORAD Announced Global Nuclear War \u2013 In 1971. <\/em>July 5, 2012. http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5923528\/this-message-from-norad-announced-world-nuclear-war-in-1971<\/a> accessed January 7, 2015.)<\/p>\n

February 23, 2013<\/strong> \u2013 The Washington Post<\/em> reported that Governor Jay Inslee had publicly announced that six of the 177 million gallon nuclear waste tanks at Hanford Reservation in south-central Washington state were experiencing significant leaks. The tanks are long-past their 20-year life span and the federal government is spending just a few billion dollars annually cleaning up dozens of legacy nuclear bomb-making sites nationally.\u00a0\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0\u00a0 In addition to the large military nuclear waste problem at sites like Hanford, Paducah, Kentucky, Fernald, Ohio, Oak Ridge, Tennessee and other locations, civilian nuclear power plant wastes, including thousands of spent fuel rods kept in water storage pools at nuclear reactor sites, and wastes shipped to the flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Project facility in New Mexico, represent a decades-long growing problem for not only the United States but for dozens of other nations that oversee the world\u2019s 400 civilian nuclear power plants. This is yet another reason to call for not only the elimination of thousands of nuclear weapons but also the dangerous, economically unsustainable, and unhealthy global civilian nuclear power infrastructure. The huge clean up conundrum is growing exponentially worse year after year but policymakers continue to ignore or downgrade this crisis.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wagingpeace.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

February 17, 1953 \u2013 Years after serving as the civilian director of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer gave one of many speeches opposing the growing nuclear arms race, this one at the Council on Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53477","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=53477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}