Armageddon Shall Happen (Revelation 16)

Nuclear Weapons: Making Us Feel Secure by “Threatening Armageddon”

“We prepare for our extinction in order to assure our survival” – Jonathan Schell (American author)

By Jim McCluskey
Global Research, May 26, 2015

Laying the Foundations for Preemptive Nuclear War Against Iran

The terrifying film ‘The man who saved the world’ has been showing in London. Stanislaw Petrov, who appears himself in the film, was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Russian early warning system when the electronic alarms blared deafeningly and insistently in his command centre. All checks confirmed that there was no malfunction. They confirmed a nuclear attack from the US was on its way. It was not possible to wait for radar confirmation of the incoming ballistic missiles because by that time it would be too late to retaliate. Petrov knew that if he reported the alarm to the high command they would immediately order a retaliatory strike1 initiating a global nuclear war and the end of most of the human race. On his own imitative he decided that he did not trust the computers and did nothing.

The author Steve Taylor, in his book ‘The Fall’, expresses the view that the human race became, to a significant degree, insane about six thousand years ago when we introduced warfare as a way of ‘solving’ disputes. It is difficult to deny that it is insane to set up a system in which it is down to the humanity of one man to save the planet. The insanity is compounded when we realise that, rather than learning from the past, we have perpetuated the same mad system. We even call it MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction).

Over a thousand nuclear weapons are held, right now, ready for launch at the press of a button. Missiles travel at more than fifteen thousand miles an hour so we are entirely dependent on computers to warn of an attack. We know that computers malfunction. But those manning the early warning centres are rigorously trained to follow orders to the letter. They have a protocol and they are trained to follow it robotically. It seems most unlikely that the next time the alarms go off there will be a Stanislaw Petrov present with the immense courage to go against his training. Putting his humanity first under enormous pressure to obey orders was heroism of the highest order. This was recognised when he was honoured at the United Nations and it is reiterated by Kevin Costner in the film (Stanislaw Petrov is a fan of Costner and Costner is a fan of Petrov so they met when Petrov visited the US). Introducing Stanislaw to his film crew Kostner said ‘I act heroes. Here is the real thing’.

There will be a next time. Unbelievably, in spite of this terrifying experience, we continue to perpetuate the same arrangement; with missiles ready for immediate launch at the press of a button and the only way of deciding to do this is on the basis of incoming electronic signals from a system which we know cannot be trusted!

The threat is escalating

The more nuclear weapons states there are the more likely that the weapons will be launched by accident or malfunction. The number has been escalating since the US used nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945. Already there are nine; US, Russia, China, UK, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. Inevitably the leaders of other states want them. The leaders think it gives them status. According to a Sunday Times report Saudi Arabia has given Pakistan billions of dollars in subsidized oil, while the latter has unofficially agreed to supply the Gulf state with nuclear warheads2. An anonymous British military official told the Sunday Times “The fear is that other Middle Eastern powers — Turkey and Egypt — may feel compelled to do the same and we will see a new, even more dangerous, arms race”2

Yet not all states want to take the nuclear path. A wide range of countries capable of building nuclear weapons, including many living in actual or potential “conflict zones,” have elected not to pursue this option, including Japan and South Korea. Countries such as South Africa and Ukraine have dismantled existing arsenals.

Deterrence

The logic of the deterrence concept leads to more and more states wanting nuclear weapons. If one state needs a deterrent then, of course, other states need a deterrent. It also leads to the ones which have these weapons upgrading and extending them since it is thought that the more in number and the more in destructive power your arsenal is the more it will be an effective deterrent.

Apart from the appalling risks from malicious and inadvertent use, misunderstandings and terrorist attacks, there are major safety risks. A recent Whistleblower, a Royal Navy submariner, William McNeilly, exposed the safety risks in an 18 page report and says the Trident deterrent is a ‘Disaster Waiting To Happen’. He tells us “ We are so close to a nuclear disaster it is shocking, and yet everybody is accepting the risk to the public.” He also tells us that poor security checks could leave the door open for the “worst terrorist attack the UK and world has ever seen”.

The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty

In an attempt to stop the spread of nuclear weapons and to get rid of the existing ones The Nuclear Non proliferation Treaty (NPT) was drawn up and came into force in 1970.

The NPT is an international treaty of which a primary goal is to rid the world of nuclear weapons. A treaty review conference is held every five years and this year it extended from 27th April to 22nd May. This treaty is the only binding international commitment to the goal of nuclear disarmament of all states. 190 states are now party to the treaty. Four UN member states have never joined the NPT: India, Israel, Pakistan and South Sudan.

Nuclear states who are signatories to the treaty undertake to pursue nuclear disarmament aimed at the ultimate elimination of their nuclear arsenals. The UK has been legally bound by the treaty since 1970. In spite of this the signatories to the Treaty, including the UK, essentialy ignore the obligation they have incurred.

In view of the refusal of the nuclear states to disarm the matter was taken to the International court of justice for an Advisory Opinion on the obligations of the states which have signed up to the treaty. Their opinion was unequivocal. They declared ‘There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control’. Can’t be much clearer than that.

Never mind. In terms of getting the nuclear states to honour their obligations to humanity and their treaties, the recent NPT Review Conference has been another disastrous failure. It contains no meaningful commitments on nuclear disarmament. Our leaders are following their own power/influence focussed agenda and are ignoring the wishes and wellbeing of the people just as they did with the Iraq war.

The primary nuclear weapons states, all founder members of the United Nations Security (!) Council, are doing the exact opposite of ridding us of this curse. They are all rebuilding their nuclear arsenals; US, Russian, China, UK and France. The determination of the main ‘Security’ Council state leaders to ignore the wishes and real security of peoples of the world has become clear as a result of the 2015 NPT Conference. The leaders of these states are parking their humanity and putting their power politics before the safety of the people. The enormity of this crime is arguably even greater than that of Blair and Bush in starting the Iraq war.

It is even more clear now, after this conference, that the non-nuclear weapons states must make nuclear weapons illegal without the participation of the nuclear weapons states. And this is what they are doing.

A crime against humanity

There are 193 states in the United Nations. So there are 184 states which do not have nuclear weapons. Realising the intransigence of the nuclear states many of the non-nuclear states decided on another approach to having them banned. The existence of nuclear weapons threatens the commission of crimes against humanity. They are weapons for committing genocidal-scale attacks on civilian populations. There have now been three conference on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons (in Oslo, Nayarit and Vienna). At these the non nuclear and less wealthy states were able to have a much greater impact than at the NPT conferences which were dominated by the nuclear states 159 states supported a joint statement on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons arguing that nuclear weapons have catastrophic humanitarian consequences and must never be used again under any circumstances. These states have affirmed that elimination is the only way to prevent use.

Having nuclear weapons is, of itself, a crime against humanity. It implies the willingness to use them ‘if our vital interests are threatened’ as ex-Prime Minister Blair put it in his 2006 White Paper, ‘The future of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent’. It is also criminal because it puts us all at totally unnecessary risk. As President John F Kennedy put it:

“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

This is as true now as it was when he declared it.

The Humanitarian Pledge

The non-nuclear states are putting the interests of humanity before power in the teeth of opposition from the nuclear states.

Consequently the major outcome of the 2015 NPT is the Humanitarian Pledge which has over 100 endorsements3by states round the planet. It was proposed by the Austrian government and includes the pledge to join efforts to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons in light of their unacceptable humanitarian consequences and associated risks.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) tells us,

‘Based on the evidence of the humanitarian impacts from any nuclear weapon detonation and an acknowledgment of the increasing risk of use of nuclear weapons, the humanitarian pledge reflects a fundamental shift in the international discourse on nuclear disarmament over the past five years…
The wide and growing international support for this historic pledge sends a signal that a majority of the world’s governments are ready to move forward with the prohibition of nuclear weapons, even if the nuclear weapon states are not ready to participate.’

The executive Director of ICAN, Beatrice Fihn, said from the conference,

“Regardless of what has happened here today, the humanitarian pledge must be the basis for the negotiations of a new treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. It has been made clear that the nuclear weapon states are not interested in making any new commitments to disarmament, so now it is up to the rest of the world to start a process to prohibit nuclear weapons by the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

What citizens must do

600 million people demonstrated round the world to stop the Iraq War. But the war happened. Blair and Bush were determined that it would. The leaders had their own agenda. The lust to kill won out. It has been said that one of the reasons that this massive demonstration was not successful is because it only happened once. Stopping the rabid militarists and MAD yielders of nuclear weapons will require massive people-power. And protesting will have to be relentless; it must persist until the goal is achieved. Mass demonstrations cannot happen everyday but they could happen once a month. They can be supplemented by vigils, acts of civil disobedience, bombarding the media with letters and articles promoting the passion of the people for peace. We are many and they are few.

The Next Disaster Won’t Be Averted (Rev 15:2)

A Nuclear Nightmare, Averted

A decades-old treaty offers clues to evaluating the potential deal with Iran.
Library of Congress / Reuters
GRAHAM ALLISON
MAY 22, 2015

This week, with little fanfare, one of the world’s key restraints on the spread of nuclear weapons came under scrutiny, as a month-long review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) concluded at the United Nations. Negotiated over the 1960s, the NPT was signed in 1968 and became international law in 1970. As specified by the treaty, members hold a conference every five years to assess the agreement. The exercise offers insight into our nuclear age, and perspective ahead of the coming debate about a deal to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, President John F. Kennedy determined that the nuclear order of the time posed unacceptable risks to mankind. “I see the possibility in the 1970s of the president of the United States having to face a world in which 15 or 20 or 25 nations may have these weapons,” he warned the world. “I regard that as the greatest possible danger.”

Kennedy’s estimate reflected the conventional wisdom during that period. As nations acquired the advanced technological capability to build nuclear weapons, most analysts expected them to follow in the footsteps of the first five nuclear powers and build their own arsenals. Kennedy’s purpose in stating his fears so starkly was to call for imaginative, unprecedented initiatives to avoid that future.

In response to this call, the United States and Soviet Union established a hotline to allow direct communication during crises; signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which outlawed nuclear tests in the atmosphere; and began negotiations to limit the spread of nuclear weapons. That effort eventually produced the NPT. States that joined the treaty foreswore nuclear weapons in exchange for other states, including their adversaries or potential enemies, making an equivalent pledge. In addition, the five nuclear-weapons states of that time promised to provide other members with technological assistance including nuclear-generated electricity and additional benefits of peaceful nuclear energy, as well as to work to reduce and ultimately eliminate their own nuclear arsenals.

Ever since the NPT became international law, skeptics in the United States have opposed successive arms-control agreements with arguments that have become virtually canonical. This canon begins by rejecting the concept of striking deals with sworn enemies. If the real objective is to change an adversary’s regime, or even destroy it, these skeptics say, how can the U.S. accept their commitments in agreements?
Ronald Reagan, for instance, was challenged by fellow conservatives when he began negotiating deals like the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the nation he named the “evil empire.” As George Will wrote in 1987, “Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West—actual disarmament will follow.” William F. Buckley’s National Review editorial asked: “Why is [the INF Treaty] bad enough to be called a ‘suicide pact’?” Because “the Soviets do not intend it to contribute to a general lessening of their worldwide operations.” Reagan insisted that he was capable of brokering agreements to reduce the risks of accidents or unauthorized actions that risked nuclear war with one hand, while redoubling his efforts to undermine the Soviet regime with the other. And he did just that. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
One argument advanced by critics of the NPT noted that many nations who signed up for the treaty were known cheaters; expecting them to comply with their commitments was naive, and verifying whether they were actually doing so would be impossible. Moreover, it was delusional to presume that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the official watchdog for the NPT, would be able to identify violations in states that could hide nefarious activity in hundreds of thousands of miles of territory. The IAEA has undoubtedly found that assignment challenging, and it has failed in this regard on several occasions. On balance, however, its record compares favorably with that of national intelligence agencies whose budgets are hundreds of times larger.
Critics also argued in the case of the NPT, as well as subsequent arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union, that success in signing agreements would lead the U.S. government to imagine that the problem of nuclear proliferation had been solved and shift its attention elsewhere—that it would, in effect, make leaders less vigilant about such a high-priority threat. But four and a half decades on, the U.S. intelligence community is hugely more capable and more focused on the spread of nuclear weapons than it was when the NPT was born.
The results, reflected in the chart above, are hard to deny. As of today, 185 states have signed up to the NPT and voluntarily renounced nuclear weapons. That is, virtually every state other than the declared nuclear-weapons states and a few outliers: India, Israel, Pakistan, South Sudan, and depending on who you ask, North Korea (Iran is a signatory). Members of the treaty include many countries that set out on the road to nuclear weapons and had the technical capability to complete the journey, but reversed course: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Libya, Romania, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, and the former Yugoslavia. In contrast to the 15 or 25 nuclear-weapons states JFK envisaged, today just nine have nukes: Britain, China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States. One state, South Africa, built nuclear weapons in the 1980s but then eliminated them during the transition from apartheid.
The NPT, of course, has been only one pillar of the global nuclear order. Others include the American “nuclear umbrella” (pledges to defend allied, non-nuclear states), U.S. security guarantees to Germany, Japan, and NATO members, credible military threats like those posed to Iran if it should seek to build a bomb, and even wars. Ironically, the U.S.-led military response to Saddam Hussein’s attempt to annex Kuwait in 1991 uncovered his secret nuclear-weapons program and destroyed it.
Still, given JFK’s nightmare that could have been, it’s worth recognizing the forces that bent this arc of history. The negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program represent a distinct case that must be examined on its own terms with careful attention to its specific facts. But the NPT’s record provides a backdrop against which to assess the latest round of canonical objections.

Middle East Nuclear War Averted In Egypt in 1973

The Last Nuclear Moment

Nuclear Jericho Missiles Were Ready to Be Launched in the Yom Kippur War of 1973

 

By Avner Cohen
 

Published: October 6, 2003

Since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the world has come to the nuclear brink only twice. The first, and better known, was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. The second, and much less discussed, occurred in the early days of the Yom Kippur war, which began 30 years ago today.

The shock Israelis felt at the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on Oct. 6, 1973, can best be compared to that felt by Americans after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Israel was caught totally unprepared: the government had assumed that its intelligence services would be able to alert it at least 48 hours before any invasion.

Yet, while Israeli intelligence had detailed knowledge of Egyptian and Syrian war plans, and Prime Minister Golda Meir had even been secretly warned of an imminent war by King Hussein of Jordan on Sept. 25, the information was not translated into military preparedness. This colossal failure — due to a combination of arrogance, self-deception and misperception — is part of Golda Meir’s legacy.

Only in the early morning of Oct. 6 did the Israeli leadership finally understand that it was facing a full-scale attack by Egypt and Syria that very evening. (And even then they had the estimated time of the attack wrong; the war actually started at 2 p.m.) By the next morning, the Egyptian Army had crossed the Suez Canal and columns of Syrian tanks had penetrated deep into the Golan Heights. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers had died in a heroic but hopeless effort to save small, isolated strongholds along Israel’s borders.

The hope was that with the arrival of Israel’s reserve troops, the military situation would turn around. While this happened to some extent on the Syrian front, things were still a disaster at the Suez. Israel’s first attempted counterattack on Oct. 8 was a miserable failure. At the end of that day, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan was heard murmuring about ”the end of the Third Kingdom.” The commander of the air force, Gen. Benny Peled, warned that with the rate of losses his forces were enduring, within a week Israel might no longer have any effective air power. It was arguably the darkest day in the history of the Israeli Army.

It was in the early hours of Oct. 9 that senior Israeli military leaders brought up the idea of using Israel’s doomsday weapons. By that time Israel had lost some 50 combat planes and more than 500 tanks — 400 on the Egyptian battlefield alone. According to a new book by the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, when the prime minister’s top military aide heard those ideas, he begged the army’s deputy chief of staff, tears in his eyes, ”You must save the people of Israel from these madmen.”

Later that morning, at the end of a somber briefing before the war cabinet, Mr. Dayan raised the nuclear option with the prime minister. No detailed record has surfaced as to what exactly Mr. Dayan proposed, but we know he gave an overall assessment that Israel was fast approaching the point of ”last resort.” And certainly Mr. Dayan wanted the United States to take notice that things had reached such a point. That he meant using nuclear weapons (albeit in coded language, as at the time nobody dared call them by name) was confirmed in an interview last week by Naftali Lavie, who was Mr. Dayan’s spokesman during the war.

This set the stage for a moment that defined Golda Meir’s other legacy, her nuclear legacy. Supported by other members of her war cabinet — notably the ministers Israel Galili and Yigal Allon — she refused to concede to Mr. Dayan’s gloom and doom rhetoric. Her idea, instead, was to fly secretly to Washington and, as Henry Kissinger later wrote, ”for an hour plead with President Nixon.”

Mr. Kissinger flatly rejected that idea, explaining such a rushed visit ”could reflect only either hysteria or blackmail.” By that time, American intelligence had signs that Israel had put its Jericho missiles, which could be fitted with nuclear warheads, on high alert (the Israelis had done so in an easily detectible way, probably to sway the Americans into preventive action).

Mr. Kissinger instead started to arrange air supply to Israel, and within three days a tremendous United States airlift to Israel was in action. The tide was turned. By Oct. 21 the Israelis were within 20 miles of Damascus and had crossed the Suez Canal, encircling the Egyptian Third Army. A permanent cease-fire was established within a few days.

Like John F. Kennedy a decade earlier, Golda Meir had stared into the nuclear abyss and found a path back to sanity. Mrs. Meir’s decision not to accept Mr. Dayan’s pessimism not only avoided a nuclear catastrophe, it demonstrated to the world that Israel was a responsible and trusted nuclear custodian.

Ultimately, Mrs. Meir’s nuclear legacy goes far beyond those days in October 1973. Her prudence contributed significantly to the creation of the nuclear taboo — the recognition that nuclear weapons are not like any other weapons humanity has ever invented; that under virtually any circumstances they must never be used.

In this sense, her legacy is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.