Protests at Büchel Air Base

From END Info 17 | July 2020 (Download)

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From July 4 to 7, activists protested against the US nuclear weapons stationed at Büchel Air Base, Germany. The third anniversary of the nuclear weapons ban treaty was also celebrated.

“Germany has been debating the successor to the Bundeswehr tornadoes for months, with which, in an emergency, German soldiers would drop US atomic bombs over their destination. That is why our protest against nuclear weapons and nuclear participation is particularly important this year,” said Johannes Oehler (30), ICAN member of the organization team. On the occasion of the third anniversary of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the Kantar polling institute carried out a survey on behalf of Greenpeace which showed that 78 percent of those questioned opposed buying new fighter jets for atomic bombs.

Activists from the Netherlands and Germany spent four days protesting against nuclear weapons with a colorful program. In numerous workshops on Saturday, the participants dealt, among other things, with the modernization of nuclear weapons in Germany, with the criticism of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the connection between civil and military use of nuclear power.

On Sunday there was an approximately 3.5 km long peace hike around the air base. On Monday, some activists blocked various gates spontaneously. “Through our action of civil disobedience, we have expressed our rejection of nuclear weapons. With a creative music group at one gate, we disrupted operations, blocked another gate for six hours, and made our presence known at the main gate because of our permanent presence on the nearby meadow.

Speeches followed in the evening and the third anniversary of the TPNW was celebrated - this was adopted on July 7, 2017 as part of the United Nations. Since then, 38 states have ratified it. The treaty enters into force three months after the 50th ratification.

Translated from and photographs downloaded via www.ippnw.de

As Covid-19 rages US agrees $740 billion for war, nukes and troops in Europe . . .

...but still no official explanation for withdrawal from the INF Treaty!

From END Info 16 | July 2020 (Download)

The Armed Services Committee of the United States House of Representatives has approved the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), after passing a number of amendments designed to limit the ability of President Trump to reduce troop numbers deployed overseas. It is likely that a similar Senate committee will pass the Act without major modification.

Of specific interest is the amendment that blocks Trump’s plan to remove 10,000 US troops stationed in Germany. It should be noted that this Committee is dominated by Democrats, who worked closely with the outspokenly pro-war Republican Representative Liz Cheney (daughter of Bush’s Vice President), to implement these hawkish policies. According to reports by Glen Greenwald and others, this same faction failed to back other amendments designed to hold the Trump administration to account, rather than blocking ‘undesireable’ policy proposals. For instance, Cheney and her Democrat co-thinkers failed to support an amendment supported by Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D), who spoke to an amendment calling for the White House to provide a ‘national security rationale’ for withdrawing from the INF Treaty - something they have so far failed to do, despite previous commitments.

The 2021 NDAA contains plans for military spending on a colossal scale. The $740.5 billion earmarked is more than three times China’s budget, ten times that of Saudi Arabia, fifteen times that of Russia and a greater amount than the next fifteen counties combined. As Greenwald notes, the Committee “authorized this kind of budget in the midst of a global pandemic as tens of millions ... struggle even to pay rent.” The US spends billions on war as millions of Americans suffer.

Nuclear Testing Alert

The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation initiated the following ‘Nuclear Testing Alert’ letter in response to mounting threats from the Trump administration that it will resume nuclear testing. We will publish any responses received and will cover the issues in more detail in the next issue of End Info (July 2020).

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Recipients:

State Signatories to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty

Josep Borrell Fontelles, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs

António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations


 29th June 2020

Nuclear Testing Alert

  Dear Ambassador/High Commissioner,


The United States last exploded a nuclear device in 1992. For several years, there was an international halt to nuclear testing until 2006, when North Korea exploded the first of six devices. Now, the Trump Administration openly discusses the US also conducting new nuclear tests.

Of approximately 2,000 nuclear tests to date, more than 1,000 were carried out by the US. Each nuclear test not only has geopolitical significance and associated risks, but also causes substantial human and environmental consequences. The legacies of harm from such testing are widespread and well documented.

President Trump may view nuclear testing as a means by which to boost his standing – domestically and internationally. It is deeply worrying that, during election year, deterioration in President Trump’s domestic support makes it thinkable that he will resort to even more extreme measures.

 We call on the United States to abide by the international prohibition on nuclear testing. We call on those many states that have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty to uphold and defend its provisions. We call on all concerned parties to raise the alarm on the risks associated with a resumption of nuclear testing before it is too late.

 Yours sincerely,

 Tony Simpson                                                                                  Tom Unterrainer

Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation                                          Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation

 

Supporting Organisations:

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (UK)

International Peace Bureau

 

Signatories:

Dr Becky Alexis-Martin, Author of Disarming Doomsday, L.H.M.Ling Outstanding First Book Prize Winner, UK.

Colin Archer, Secretary-General, International Peace Bureau (Retired), UK.

Ludo De Brabander, Vrede vzw, Belgian Peace Organization, Belgium.

Reiner Braun, International Peace Bureau, Germany.

Christopher Butler, Chair, Shipley CND, UK.

Noam Chomsky, USA.

Dr Jenny Clegg, National Council, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, UK.

Tamara Coates, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

John Daniels, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

Marguerite Doyle, Greece.

Dennis DuVall, First U.S. citizen to be convicted of protesting against H-bombs at NATO base Büchel, Germany.

Commander Robert Forsyth RN (Ret’d), 2nd in Command Polaris submarine, commanded two other submarines and the Commanding Officer’s Qualifying Course, UK.

Benjamin Gottberg, Coordinating Group, TIME FOR PEACE - active against war, Denmark.

Commander Robert Green RN (Ret’d), author of Security without Nuclear Deterrence, New Zealand.

John Hallam, UN Nuclear Disarmament Campaigner, Co-Chair of Abolition 2000 Nuclear Risk Reduction working group, Australia.

Geir Hem, Norway.

Dr Kate Hudson, General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, UK.

Kristine Karch, co-chair international network "No to war - no to NATO", Germany.

Ulla Klötzer, Coordinator of Women Against Nuclear Power, Finland.

Lizette Lassen, Coordinating Group, TIME FOR PEACE - active against war, Denmark.

Lea Launokari, Coordinator of Women for Peace, Finland.

Jeremy Lester, Clerk of the Quaker Council for European Affairs, Belgium.

Professor Catherine Rowatt, former Green MEP, UK.

Alice Slate, World Beyond War, USA.

Allan Soeborg, Coordinating Group, TIME FOR PEACE - active against war, Denmark.

Rae Street, Peace Activist, UK.

Earl Turcotte, Chair, Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Canada.

Carol Turner, Vice Chair, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, UK.

Andy Vermaut, Human Rights Activist, President of {PostVersa}, Belgium.

Professor Dave Webb, Chair, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, UK.

Julie Ward, former Labour MEP, UK.

Lucas Wirl, Executive Director International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, Germany.

Michael Youlton, Chairperson of the Irish Anti War Movement, Ireland.

Safardeen Yusuf, Student and Activist, Cyprus.

From the archives: Arms Production and Trends in Technology

From END Info 16 | June 2020. Download here

by Ken Coates

Introduction: In March 1987, the Transport and General Workers Union (now part of Unite) in the UK convened a European Trade Union Conference on Arms Jobs Conversion. Ron Todd, TGWU General Secretary at the time, wrote: “duty surely calls upon us to look for the next steps in our work for peace, and specifically for arms jobs conversion. We need now to start to build international trade union commitment to these aims, involving working people directly and actively in this vital work for humanity’s future.” More than thirty years on, interest in the work envisaged by Todd and others is increasing, including amongst a large layer of trade unionists. Are the successors of the TGWU willing to take up this important work again? It is to be hoped that they are. We reprint an extract from Ken Coates’ paper to the conference as part of ongoing efforts from END Info to contribute to the debate around arms conversion, socially useful production and nuclear disarmament.

The arms economy takes up somewhere between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the whole worlds's income, at least a quarter of all manufacturing production. This is the kind of proportion that has been used by nations in the past to set aside annually for their economic development. The industrially developed nations, in fact, set aside today much larger proportions of their income for investment (around 25 per cent); but when arms expenditure is added to this, then current consumption is reduced to take up two-thirds only of all economic activity. Since the less developed nations spend similar proportions on arms, their investment in development has to be restrained to allow for current consumption adequate for bare survival. It is a fact which Seymour Melman has regularly demonstrated that the countries even at high levels of development which spend the highest proportion of their income on arms (e.g. the USA and UK) spend much lower proportions on investment than others (e.g. Japan and Denmark) whose arms bill is much less. As a result, increases in productivity are least in the USA and most in Japan .

However we look at it, such a waste of up to one tenth of human effort can only be regarded as insane, and the implications of nuclear arms escalation are positively suicidal. What is more, arms production is a less and less labour intensive industry. Even the real increases in arms spending of the last few years - of about 3 per cent a year - have resulted in average cuts in unemployment of 4 per cent a year. In the UK 47 per cent of the arms budget is now spent on equipment, 33 per cent on personnel. Ten years ago 33 per cent went on equipment and 47 per cent on personnel.

The employment effects of this kind of expenditure are quite complex. World-wide, unemployment runs at some ninety million, while a further three-hundred million people are working precariously in underemployed occupations. But the population explosion means that the workforce is going to rise very rapidly, from its present level of 2.2 billion to at least 2.8 billion at the end of the century. World-wide, then, we must create six hundred million jobs for the newly arriving workforce, and nearly four hundred million for those out of work or inadequately employed. Ninety per cent of this billion job short fall is in the underdeveloped south, which is gripped in a massive debt crisis, that eats up every possibility of productive investment for many years to come. This is the context in which military expenditure must be evaluated. Ruth Leger Sivard calculates that war budgets generate employment for one hundred million people worldwide. Why do we not see these jobs as at any rate a small step towards the solution of the problem?

Fewer jobs

The answer is that military spending undercuts other investment and displaces it. Arms expenditure creates many fewer jobs than those which could be seeded by a similar investment in labour intensive occupations, in education , health , transport or community care. More employment in these sectors creates an immediate increase in civilian demand, and therefore stimulates economic growth in all other sectors of the economy. There are only two ways in which military expenditure can stimulate growth, and both of them are exceptionally painful. It can enter a technological race in which ever more capital is burned up in the production of ever more elaborate weapons systems, employing ever fewer workers. This is the process which Mary Kaldor has called “Baroque Technology”. Such a process will enlarge arms corporations at the tax payer's expense, but it will do nothing for jobs and real growth in useable goods and services. The second option is to have an actual war, which will certainly create big destruction, and if we survive it, big demand for re-construction.

Up to now, since 1945 mankind has been “lucky” in that such wars have been confined to conventional weapons and “limited” zones: even though they have been incredibly costly in human life ... The grotesque butchery [of the] battlefield is carefully sustained by arms manufacturers, who cheerfully sell to [all] sides.

Whether we have such wars or not , is not an economic decision , but we are entitled, as trade unionists, to say that this is a political option which we reject. If we should reject it when it involves the slaughter of our own populations, we should reject it no less when it involves the export of mass-destruction to Third World peoples. Human politics is impossible if we do not oppose war, and also military build-ups and the cynical trade in arms. In this sense, of course, the political war is the prior domain, and should determine economic choices.

There are also, however, very solid economic reasons why military spending worsens the employment situation. It can outbid civilian industry for resources, because it is funded by central state provision, whilst others must usually assemble their resources in the competitive market place. It imposes strict secrecy which can only impede the spread of technological knowledge, and hinder the development and application of new techniques. And it seeds inefficiency as every student of the military is abundantly aware. This last problem is the worst, because it dooms its victims to lose out in competition, and thus raises levels of crisis, deepening economic slumps.

Because military investment is now so capital intensive, it skews every effort to redistribute income. One billion dollars create 8,250 jobs in the manufacture of Trident missiles, while for the same cost, 52,000 people could be employed in education and 102,500 in public services. The multiplier or knock-on effect of 102,500 jobs is obviously highly significant in all other sectors of the economy, whether public or private. Military spending thus reinforces social, geographical and sectoral inequalities, and locks those engaging in it into growing structural crises. To move out of mass unemployment, the advanced economies have to generate redistribution between classes, spatially between rich and poor areas nationally and internationally, and industrially towards new projects and modern technologies.

The worst feature of military spending is that, in addition to debilitating the present economy, it devastates the future. As military R&D gobbles up more and more of the social investment in future technologies, it lays waste the opportunities of new generations...

Key Factors

The possibilities of converting arms production and research to peaceful use depend on a number of factors which need to be held in mind together:

1. Arms production and research is financed by nation state governments which have a popular concensus behind this expenditure, however much such support may be artificially encouraged by the propaganda of authoritarian or military regimes.

2. It is much more difficult to develop a concensus behind state expenditure on non-arms production, since opinion tends to be divided between many alternative directions for state spending, e.g. health education, housing, transport, etc.

3. The very large companies have a vested interest in arms production because a) arms quickly become obsolete and have to be replaced; b) the cost of military goods is very difficult for governments to control by comparison with other costs; and c) arms do not compete with the other products of big companies, as, e.g. public transport does with the private car.

4. Although, in fact, state spending on arms employs fewer people for any sum spent than does state spending on peaceful purposes, nevertheless, workers in the arms industry have no confidence in their re-employment as a result of arms conversion.

5. There are some real technical problems in converting production from military to peaceful use, though these tend to be exaggerated and are far less important than the structural reasons, by which arms production is built into the military industrial complexes of company and government, which can be seen to dominate the economy of the USA and of other states.

It follows from consideration of these factors that the main requirement of any programme of arms conversion is that clear alternatives should be put forward for the use of the productive capacity now devoted to arms. Such alternatives have been put forward by a number of company wide committees of trade unions in Britain, especially by Lucas Aerospace and Vickers combine committees. The essential elements in such alternative programmes are:

a) taxpayers can be assured that “their” money is going to meet needs that they feel to be equally or more demanding than defence;

b) non-taxpayers (pensioners, unemployed, etc.) can believe that they will benefit in goods or services and in employment opportunities from the conversion policy;

c) workers can be assured that as many (or more) jobs will be generated by the alternative programmes.

None of this can be left to the market and private enterprise; but will require planning by governments with strong involvement of both unions and local government authorities, encouraging local community organisations to think through and agree on alternative claims for resource use. Conversion from the present arms economy can only be successful as part of a wider programme of popular economic activity. The alternative to arms has to grow in the hearts and minds of the people, as they explore new and exciting ways of using the vast resources at the disposal of human beings in the world today. The strongest moral appeal must be to raise the incomes of the people in the Third World. In the Socialist International's report Global Challenge it is estimated that a cut of just one tenth in the current level of spending on armaments could not only create 20 million new jobs in Europe in a decade, but could also raise output in the Third World by more than 50 per cent over the same period.

The Coronavirus Crisis and the New Cold War on China

From END Info 16 | June 2020. Download here

by Jenny Clegg

As the coronavirus rages across the world pushing the global economy into possibly the deepest recession since the 1930s, yet another crisis is brewing between the US and China.

To divert attention from his own callous incompetence, Trump has turned on China, reprising his winning formula of “China, China, China - its all China’s fault” as the date of the November election approaches. Trump, Pompeo, Pence - they all have racialised the pandemic agenda with their insistent references to the ‘China virus’ or ‘Wuhan virus’. China, unsurprisingly, if not always appropriately, has bristled. But this is far more than a ‘war of words’.

If there is one thing the Trump administration has succeeded in doing over the last four years it is in turning US China policy around from engagement to a more active containment, bringing it to the centre of the foreign policy agenda. Shifting from the so-called ‘war on terror’ to so-called ‘great power competition’ with Russia and China, US strategists have become ever more obsessed with China as the deadliest rival for global supremacy, more formidable even than the Soviet Union ever was. For at least one former Senior Director of Strategic Planning in the Trump administration, China poses ‘the most consequential existential threat since the Nazi Party in World War 2’.

The ‘China threat’ has justified massive increases in US military expenditure, with bilateral agreement last year to pump $1.3 trillion into the development of new ‘usable’ or low yield nuclear warheads, the militarisation of space and much else besides. Shockingly, as US states are forced into a life-and-death competition for ventilators, military officials have just put in a further bid of $20bn to bolster ‘deterrence’ against China.

Trump’s ‘blame China’ rhetoric is entering dangerous territory where ideology overwhelms rationality: in the disagreements over trade, it was possible to reach some sort of an agreement, but now, when one side just calls the other a liar, there can be no basis for negotiation.

Is China to blame? Some mistakes were made at first but the Wuhan lock-down, imposed on January 23rd, proved effective. The crucial question to ask is: why were some governments, for example in East Asia, able to contain the virus quickly whilst across Europe and the US the death rate mounts by thousands upon thousands? The fact is that our governments got the priorities badly wrong, we were ‘defended’ against the wrong threats even when the NHS failed the pandemic practice run in 2016. For all the hundreds of £billions spent on ‘hard power’ in Britain, we were not kept safe.

In Britain an influential group of Tory Party hawks have joined the ‘blame China’ chorus. They seek closer alignment with Trump and, post pandemic, will fight tooth and nail to defend, and even demand an increase in, military spending in a delusional commitment to ‘Global Britain’. Pushing against any public pressure to shift government spending priorities, they will insist on the £14bn needed to pay for fleets of F-35 fighter jets to equip our aircraft carriers so as to stand shoulder to shoulder with the US against China’s rise.

Trump’s racist offensive has reverberated around the world, framing China as the new enemy in a campaign of demonisation. Here in Britain, sinophobia is rife across the media, creating a climate of suspicion, fear, anger and hatred. East Asians are targeted in hate crimes; mysterious fires destroy 5G masts across Britain and Europe; Chinese people are made to appear less than human; and a stream of fake news about China fills the political vacuum where racism and jingoism breeds. The situation is not unlike the lead up to the Iraq war over its non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

The new narrative of China’s plot to take over the world is in fact a not-so-new revival of the old familiar ‘Yellow Peril’ trope: some one hundred years ago, the public on both sides of the Atlantic were held in horrified thrall by Hollywood fictional tales featuring the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu and his treacherous schemes for world dictatorship.

International cooperation is desperately needed: the virus knows no borders and cannot be tackled by national action alone. Global powers need to come together to share information, exchange good medical practice and develop a vaccine to be made accessible to all. Scientists from different countries working together are spearheading the way forward. The fact that the Chinese government is sending medical specialists to help in our emergency makes a nonsense of attempts to portray the country as our ‘adversary’. But the bitter truth is that anti-China propaganda stands in the way of the fight against the virus.

Tensions with China may well get even worse as economies around the world deteriorate and governments try to avoid blame for the epidemic. Open hostility will make it harder to limit economic damage. And ahead, climate change threatens new catastrophes. We need a complete reassessment of what security means.

The case for peace and international cooperation could not be stronger. Yet right now British foreign policy is under pressure as the Tory anti-China ideologues seize on the crisis as an opportunity to break with China and follow Trump on the path to confrontation.

Labour’s Atlanticist ‘opposition’ front benchers are out of their depth. Peace campaigners in the US are now speaking out against the deadly ‘blame China’ game, warning of a second Cold War. Britain’s anti-war and peace campaigners must prepare to join them: the enemy is not China; it’s the virus.

Dr Jenny Clegg is a researcher and writer, author of China’s Global Strategy: towards a multipolar world (Pluto Press, 2009); activist in StWC and CND. A version of this article first appeared at www.stopwar.ork.uk

Return of the European Missile Duel?

From END Info 16 | June 2020. Download here

By Joachim Wernicke

In the period 1985-87 Europe was the scene of a nuclear missile duel between the USA and the former Soviet Union. In 1983 US intermediate-range ballistic missiles, Pershing-II, were deployed in Western Germany, followed in 1985 by the deployment of Soviet short-range missiles, SS-23, in the former GDR and Czechoslovakia. The nominal range of the Pershing-II was 1850 km, reaching the Moscow region. A technical innovation was the terminal guidance of the missile’s warhead with a hit accuracy of some ten meters. This precision allowed for the destruction of deep underground hardened shelters by nuclear hits, even with so-called low yield warheads comparable to the Hiroshima bomb of 1945.

In the Soviet Union the political-military command system was concentrated in the Moscow area. The talk was about 100 underground shelters. Due to the improved hit accuracy of the missiles since late 1980s the term of decapitation strike came into the official military vocabulary of the USA, meaning a surprise attack in order to destroy the Soviet leadership. A precondition would be the rush to overthrow the Soviet warning system. The ten-minute flight time of Pershing-II from Western Germany would leave the Moscow leadership no time for situation assessment and ‘rational reaction’.

In order to destroy a target with sufficient confidence, at least two missiles have to be fired on it. Thus a total of about 200 missiles would have been required for a decapitation strike against Moscow. The number of Pershing-II in Western Germany, according to NATO announcements, would be 108. In its open and unprotected deployment in the field these missiles were highly vulnerable and therefore unsuitable for a counterstrike after a Soviet attack: Use them or lose them.

As expected, the Soviet side reacted accordingly, deploying SS-23’s, with a flight time about 5 minutes. The purpose of the SS-23 was presumably to destroy by a nuclear first strike the Pershing-II sites before they could be used. Knowledge that a Pershing-II attack was imminent would have been based on espionage information which possibly would be incorrect, perhaps intentionally incorrect, but plausible for a government declaration in the international media. Following a Soviet first strike on Western Germany, a counterstrike by the USA would have been rather questionable. The Soviet Union, by striking first, would have experienced heavy damage to its international reputation. But the willingness of Continental European NATO countries to allow further US military installations and hardware on their territory would probably have been reduced. Thus the danger of a decapitation strike would have been diminished for the Soviet Union.

In 1987 the Soviet leader Gorbachev and US president Reagan agreed the INF Treaty for the destruction of all land-based intermediate-range missiles on both sides. In the process of agreeing the treaty it was revealed that the number of Pershing-II missiles was not 108 but 234.

Since 2018 Russia has deployed Iskander-M missiles in Kaliningrad, formerly part of the German province of Eastern Prussia. After US president Trump unilaterally withdrew from the INF Treaty, Russia is permitted to deploy land-based intermediate-range missiles. The approximately 500kg Iskander-M conventional warhead can probably be replaced by a nuclear warhead of lower weight, increasing the range.

Germany is the only Continental European country which provides territory to the USA for military bases at large scale. The USA is using these facilities in their wars in Africa and Asia. All their European command centres are located on German soil, including deep underground shelters in Stuttgart, Ramstein and Wiesbaden. Such shelters cannot be destroyed by conventional bombs but by precise nuclear hits, the detonation of which would cause considerable radioactive fallout. Is it unrealistic to assume that amongst the targets of the missiles in Kaliningrad there are US military installations in Germany, with the priority on command shelters? The distance is about 1000 km, an intermediate range.

Today there are no US intermediate-range missiles in European countries, and it is questionable if any European government still would give the US permission for a new deployment on its territory. However, a development in going on which Europe hardly is noticed: In the Pershing-II era sea-launched ballistic missiles were not precise enough to destroy deep underground shelters. Today, with satellite navigation, they are sufficiently precise. Since 2017 tendencies from the US Navy and their supporting industries have introduced intermediate-range ballistic missiles with conventional warheads for surface ships into military discussions2. Sovereignty over the South China sea is given as the reason. As an example of the missile type required, the Pershing-II of 1983 is referenced. It could be redesigned with modern technology and adapted to the launch techniques used in surface ships. The working title employed is Pershing-III2, at a different source Sea Pershing3.

A missile like Pershing-III would offer a new capability: at similar weight as Pershing-II it could be built more compact, in order to fit into the launcher geometry of naval ships. In this weight of a typical conventional warhead also a nuclear warhead can be placed. A main strength of the US Navy’s surface ships are cruisers and destroyers in the global Aegis system. Its European command centre is located in Ramstein, Germany. For the direct radio coordination of the ships such a regional centre is indispensable, because the time-critical commanding of the ships in European waters via satellite communication from the USA would be too sluggish, due to the signal propagation delay.

An Aegis destroyer contains 96 vertical launcher tubes usable for SM-3 air defense missiles or Tomahawk cruise missiles. From the launcher space available it should be feasible to accommodate in such a ship (or a similar type of ship) about 25 Pershing-III missiles in modified launcher tubes. Eight such ships would be sufficient in order to launch a decapitation strike against the Russian leadership, using a total of about 200 missiles from the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea or the Barents Sea, with about 10 minutes flight time. However, this describes a technical feasibility, not any real military conclusions.

It might take some years until missiles of a Pershing-III type will be deployed on US Navy ships. But in this case the nuclear duel of the 1980s would be revived in Europe, instead of Pershing-II/SS-23 this time it will be with Pershing-III and medium-range ballistic missiles from Kaliningrad. The question is: Independent of the real intentions of the US leadership, after observing the first medium-range ballistic missiles on US surface ships, would the Russian military wait until the number of these missiles is sufficient for a decapitation strike before taking action?

These are the tensions and dangers that are building. In order to avoid the dangers, could Germany negotiate a deal with Russia? Could Germany copy the example of neighbouring countries and NATO members France, Denmark or Czech Republic – no foreign military in the country – in exchange for Russia retracting its missiles from Kaliningrad? In the same sense on the European level: could a treaty between the EU and Russia, for instance in the frame of OSCE, be arrived at? The verified ban on intermediate-range ballistic missiles not only in the European countries but also on the European seas? Here the geographical map and the international sea law gives a means to force such a ban towards Non-European states too, via the right for peaceful passage. Thus a new European missile duel would be permanently prevented. Indispensable for the success of such an effort would, however, be to bring the subject of a nuclear war danger into broad public discussion in Europe.

Notes

1. Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine – Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, New York 2017: Bloomsbury USA, ISBN 978-1-6081-9670-8.

2. Captain Sam J. Tangredi U.S. Navy (Retired) (2017), Fight Fire with Fire, Proceedings U.S. Naval Institute, August 2017, www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2017/august/fight-fire-fire.

3. Gabriele Collins, US Naval War College, Time to Put China’s Rocketeers on Notice, The National Interest, February 8, 2017, www.nationalinterest.org/feature/time-put-chinas-rocketeers-notice-19372?page=0%2C1.

Trump’s dangerous nuclear test threat

From END Info 16 | June 2020. Download here

On 1 March 1954, the United States carried out its largest ever nuclear test. Named ‘Castle Bravo’, the test was part of a series of similar events, ‘Operation Bravo’, designed to assess the feasibility of high-yield and therefore high-energy devices.

‘Castle Bravo’ was expected to produce a yield of six megatons (375 times larger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima) but the scientists involved miscalculated. The actual yield was fifteen megatons, 2.5 times higher than predicted and more than 900 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Becky Alexis-Martin, author of Disarming Doomsday, describes the test as “the most significant radiological incident in US history.” How so?

The test resulted in a massive nuclear radiation fallout that contaminated the inhabitants of the various atolls close to Bikini Atoll, where the test took place. Coral reefs were vapourised. Radioactive gas spread across the planet. It took three days for nearby residents to be evacuated from the area. The legacies of harm from this test, and others like it, endure.

The tests that Trump is proposing are likely to involve ‘low-yield’ or what the US military likes to call ‘useable’ nuclear weapons. Regardless of the size, any nuclear testing is not only criminally wasteful in terms of the resources involved. Nuclear testing also has an enormously destructive long-term environmental and human impact. For these reasons alone, any moves towards future testing must be vigorously opposed.

The US last conducted an explosive nuclear test in September 1992. Four years later it signed up to, but did not ratify, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Since then, the US has not conducted any nuclear testing. If the US has not tested since 1992, why start again now?

The only technical reason for conducting explosive nuclear tests is to assess new warhead designs. Data from previous tests and sophisticated computer modelling made ‘live’ testing redundant. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that the US intends to fully develop and deploy a new class of warheads.

Of course, Trump does not need a ‘technical’ excuse to violate global arms control agreements. He requires no excuse to ditch yet another multilateral treaty. Such facets of the ‘old’ global order do not seem to concern him very much as he is engaged in desperate and desperately dangerous efforts to assert US power on the global stage.

Any new tests would further destabilise the situation and feed into the already existing, technologically supercharged arms-race. It is possible that any US test would be followed by similar such tests from major nuclear powers.

Opposition to testing should unite peace and anti-war activists, environmentalists, rights campaigners and other. The time to voice our united opposition is now.