{"id":74535,"date":"2016-06-06T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=74535"},"modified":"2016-06-06T13:17:05","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T12:17:05","slug":"this-month-in-nuclear-threat-history-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/06\/this-month-in-nuclear-threat-history-2\/","title":{"rendered":"This Month in Nuclear Threat History"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"napf_logo-150x150<\/a>June 2, 1992<\/strong> \u2013 An Associated Press<\/em> article published on this date, authored by Steve Kline and titled \u201cSAC (Strategic Air Command), America\u2019s Nuclear Strike Force is Retired,\u201d quoted then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, \u201cThe long bitter years of the Cold War are over.\u00a0 America and her allies have won \u2013 totally, decisively, overwhelmingly.\u201d\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0 Many Americans hoped that the ending of the Cold War in December 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact Soviet bloc military alliance would result in a new era of a true Peace Dividend.\u00a0 Although in the ensuing years, U.S. military spending was reduced by a small percentage, the Western military alliance, NATO, not only continued to \u201ccontain\u201d Russia but grew in size to include a growing list of Eastern European and Soviet bloc nations.\u00a0 Even more disappointing was the fact that the expectation of not only many Americans but a large portion of global populations that the world would dramatically demilitarize allowing money previously devoted to bloated military budgets to be converted from \u201cguns to butter\u201d never occurred on a large scale.\u00a0 A global agenda for rebuilding infrastructure, providing employment particularly to ethnic, religious, and racial minorities in urban areas, educating large numbers of students including the indigent, funding Head Start programs, addressing poverty and disease outbreaks, remediating and cleaning up governmental and corporate toxic wastes (including civilian and military nuclear production and storage sites), and creating nonmilitary solutions to potential future conflict zones (such as the Mideast and Africa) never materialized.\u00a0 Over the last two and a half decades, the hegemonic U.S. superpower devised a \u201cNew World Order\u201d that has helped precipitate wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere, destabilized the Middle East, caused China and Russia and other powers to challenge this order with larger than ever global military budgets, triggered a Cold War II, and enhanced a new growth spurt in nuclear weapons and other WMD development.\u00a0 With the dire economic impact of trillions of Cold War and post-Cold War military dollars spent and the neoliberal speculative mortgage fraud crisis (the 2008 Great Recession) which highlighted an even larger gap between rich and poor, America has unfortunately learned that, like Russia, it too has \u201clost<\/u> the<\/u> Cold<\/u> War<\/u>\u201d and the chance for a Peace Dividend. But it is not too late to come to our global senses, renounce nuclear weapons and war and embrace a new paradigm of peaceful rebirth and change.<\/p>\n

June 10, 1960<\/strong> \u2013 Polaris Action, a group of concerned Americans organized by members of the Committee for Non Violent Action held an antinuclear march that began in New York City on June 1 and ended on this date at the gates of the nuclear submarine builder for the U.S. Navy \u2013 Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut.\u00a0 This group, allied with countless other organizations in the coming years, demonstrated their opposition to the development and deployment of nuclear weapons.\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0 There have been many thousands of global protests, vigils, hunger strikes, acts of civil disobedience, and demonstrations over the last seventy years appealing to corporate, military, governmental, political, and other leaders to recognize that eventually the global nuclear Armageddon machine, based on the flawed concept of deterrence, will fail resulting in the likely destruction of human civilization and the possible eradication of the entire human species (and a multitude of other species).\u00a0 Growing numbers of the world population are recognizing this immense threat and working to dramatically reduce nuclear arsenals with a goal to eliminate them entirely.\u00a0 (Source:\u00a0 Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pa. \u00a0https:\/\/www.swarthmore.edu\/library\/peaceDG001-025\/dg017.cnva.xml<\/a>)<\/p>\n

June 13, 1995<\/strong> \u2013 President Jacques Chirac announced an end to a French moratorium on nuclear testing with a planned series of eight tests in the South Pacific to last from September 1995 to May 1996.\u00a0 However, worldwide protests forced the French to scale back those tests, although they did explode a 20-kiloton warhead at the Moruroa Atoll.\u00a0 On January 27, 1996, President Chirac announced that his nation had finished testing, \u201conce and for all.\u201d\u00a0 In September 1996, France became one of 70 nations, including the U.S., China, and Russia, to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which it later ratified on April 6, 1998.\u00a0 France conducted a total of 210 nuclear tests in the period from 1960 to 1996 which inflicted extremely harmful short- and long-term health impacts to populations in an immense region of the South Pacific and North Africa.\u00a0 Increased cancer rates, groundwater contamination, destruction of land and ocean ecosystems, and other detrimental health and environmental impacts still plague global populations decades after over 2,000 nuclear bombs were exploded below ground or in the atmosphere by members of the Nuclear Club.\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0 Although President Clinton signed the CTBT on September 24, 1996, the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty on October 13, 1999 by a vote of 51-48.\u00a0 Few candidates in this 2016 presidential election cycle, Bernie Sanders being the exception, have discussed the threat of nuclear weapons.\u00a0 No one has addressed the need to join dozens of other nations including Russia (which ratified the CTBT on April 21, 2000) in pushing the Senate to ratify this critical treaty.\u00a0 This and other critical nuclear issues should be at the forefront of American and global political debate.\u00a0 The 45th<\/sup> President of the United States should announce that ratification of the CTBT is one of his\/her top priorities upon taking office.\u00a0 (Source:\u00a0 Jack Mendelsohn and David Grahame, editors.\u00a0 \u201cArms Control Chronology.\u201d\u00a0 Washington, DC:\u00a0 Center for Defense Information, 2002, pp. 17, 18, 22.)<\/p>\n

June 18, 2000<\/strong> \u2013 America\u2019s Defense Monitor<\/em>, a half-hour documentary PBS-TV series that premiered in 1987, released a new film, \u201cRadioactive America,\u201d produced by the Center for Defense Information, a non-partisan, nonprofit organization and independent monitor of the Pentagon, founded in 1972, whose board of directors and staff included retired military officers (Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr.), former U.S. government officials (Philip Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of defense), and civilian experts (Dr. Bruce Blair, a former U.S. Air Force nuclear missile launch control officer).\u00a0 The program investigated issues associated with the underfunded (then and now) cleanup of current as well as legacy U.S. nuclear weapons production facilities.\u00a0 The press release for the program noted, \u201cHistorically, nuclear weapons production has generated massive amounts of radioactive waste.\u00a0 Poor disposal and containment practices have allowed toxic nuclear waste to contaminate the soil and groundwater surrounding a plethora of nuclear facilities and weapons laboratories.\u201d\u00a0 These sites include Fernald, Ohio, Paducah, Kentucky, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and others too numerous to list here.\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0 Today there remain serious concerns about the continuing health and environmental risks of not only these military nuclear sites but of approximately 100 civilian nuclear power reactor sites and the accompanying infrastructure including the government\u2019s flawed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant waste storage site near Carlsbad, New Mexico and other privately managed, mostly nontransparent,\u00a0 nuclear storage sites.<\/p>\n

June 23, 1942<\/strong> \u2013 The first nuclear weapons-related accident occurred on this date in the city of Leipzig, Germany involving Nazi atomic scientists Werner Heisenberg and Robert Doepel.\u00a0 While demonstrating Germany\u2019s first neutron propagation experiment, workers checked the atomic pile for a heavy water leak.\u00a0 During the inspection, air leaked in igniting the uranium powder inside.\u00a0 The burning uranium boiled the water jacket which generated enough steam pressure to blow the reactor apart.\u00a0 Burning uranium was dispersed throughout the laboratory which triggered a fire at the facility causing an unknown number of casualties.\u00a0 While Albert Einstein\u2019s August 1939 letter to President Franklin Roosevelt about the need to weaponize the atom before Nazi scientists could do so had successfully started the ball rolling on the top secret U.S. Manhattan Project, scientists working on the first U.S. atomic pile in Chicago suspected that Germany was ahead of them in the race to build the first atomic bomb.\u00a0 Even if the Nazis didn\u2019t actually build a bomb, there were fears of German aircraft dropping radioactive dust on cities.\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0 Later in the war, when it was discovered that the German atomic bomb project had fizzled, many U.S. and European scientists working on the Manhattan Project spoke out against dropping the bomb on Japanese civilians.\u00a0 Despite this opposition, the postwar desire to intimidate the Soviets and the accelerated bureaucratic and military momentum to demonstrate a weapon that cost billions of dollars to manufacture trumped moral concerns and even military necessity when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.\u00a0 (Sources:\u00a0 S.A. Goudsmit.\u00a0 \u201cHeisenberg on the German Uranium Project.\u201d The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. <\/em>November 1947 and Spencer R. Weart.\u00a0 \u201cNuclear Fear:\u00a0 A History of Images.\u201d\u00a0 Cambridge, MA:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 1988. p. 89.)<\/p>\n

June 27, 2011<\/strong> \u2013 In one of the twenty known incidents of the attempted illicit sale of Russian bomb-grade fissile materials in the last 25 years since the breakup of the Soviet Union, local police arrested Teodor Chetrus (who was later convicted and sentenced to five years in prison) in the former Soviet city of Chisinau, Moldova.\u00a0 The buyer, secretly working as an undercover policeman, Ruslan Andropov, deposited $330,000 as an initial payment in exchange for the first of several shipments of highly-enriched uranium totaling 10 kilograms (22 pounds) \u2013 enough to power an \u201cimplosion-style\u201d nuclear weapon.\u00a0 Extensive forensic analysis by U.S. and French nuclear scientists have shown that several samples of fissile materials offered up for sale in the past two decades in a number of Western and former Soviet bloc nations have reportedly come from the same stockpile \u2013 the Russian nuclear weapons facility known as Mayak Production Association located in Ozersk in the Ural Mountains almost 1,000 miles east of Moscow.\u00a0 In fact, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration\u2019s Deputy Director Anne Harrington, who testified at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces in April 2015, \u201cOf the roughly 20 documented seizures of nuclear explosive materials since 1992, all have come out of the former Soviet Union.\u201d\u00a0 Ten years earlier at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing chaired by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, then-CIA Director Porter Goss responded to a query about whether enough fissile materials had vanished from Russian stockpiles to build a nuclear weapon, \u201cThere is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon.\u201d\u00a0 When asked if he could assure the American people that the missing nuclear materials was not in terrorist hands, Goss replied, \u201cNo, I can\u2019t make that assurance.\u201d Although Russian President Putin has steadily cut back his nation\u2019s overall nuclear security cooperation with Washington in 2015-16 on the grounds that it no longer needs U.S. financial or technical assistance to safeguard its fissile material stockpile, a recent CIA report reaffirmed a long-held U.S. position that it is unlikely that Russian authorities have been able to recover all of the stolen nuclear materials.\u00a0 Comments:\u00a0 Although some significant progress in securing and protecting nuclear materials from theft or diversion has been allegedly confirmed by Russia and other Nuclear Club nations at the four biennial nuclear security summits (2010-16), much more needs to be accomplished in the United Nations and other international fora to prevent the use of fissile materials to unleash weapons of mass destruction whether the materials diverted come from civilian nuclear plants or military nuclear weapons facilities.\u00a0 In addition to concerns about the resulting mass casualties and short- and long-term radioactive contamination from such a catastrophe, there is also the frightening possibility that in times of crisis such an attack might inadvertently trigger nuclear retaliation or even precipitate a nuclear exchange.\u00a0\u00a0 (Source:\u00a0 Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith.\u00a0 \u201cThe Fuel for a Nuclear Bomb is in the Hands of an Unknown Black Marketeer from Russia, U.S. Officials Say.\u201d\u00a0 Center for Public Integrity, November 12, 2015 reprinted in Courier:\u00a0 The Stanley Foundation Newsletter, <\/em>Number 86, Spring 2016, pp. 7-14.)<\/p>\n

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

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

June 23, 1942 \u2013 The first nuclear weapons-related accident occurred on this date in the city of Leipzig, Germany involving Nazi atomic scientists Werner Heisenberg and Robert Doepel. While demonstrating Germany\u2019s first neutron propagation experiment, workers checked the atomic pile for a heavy water leak. During the inspection, air leaked in igniting the uranium powder inside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74535","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=74535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}