OMNI
WORLD WAR III Anthology #1
April 6, 2023
Collected by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and
Ecology
https://omnicenter.org/donate/
CONTENTS WORLD WAR III ANTHOLOGY #1
Chris Wright. The Second Cold War is more dangerous than the first.
Andrew Bacevich. “On Missing Dr. Strangelove.”
[Introduced by
TomDispatch.]
Art Hobson. “A
planet on high-alert.”
Steve Taylor. “ ‘We’ve never been closer to nuclear
catastrophe’: Activist
Helen Caldicott.” (interview)
“Notes
from the Editors” of Monthly Review. discusses
C. Wright Mills, The
Causes of World War III, and
Foster, et al. Washington’s New Cold War.
Andrew J. Bacevich. On Shedding an
Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to
the American Century.
Tom Engelhardt. “Prophecies.”
Engelhardt, creator of TomDispatch, has
focused “ on the two world-ending ways
humanity had discovered to do
itself in and how to begin to deal
with them.”
John Rachel. “The Never Ending Cycle of Nuclear
Insanity.” “The only
way we’ll have peace is if we
REMOVE FROM POWER every single
one of the warmongers.”
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SUPPORT FOR THE MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS includes 21 newsletters (anthologies),
see end..
TEXTS
Chris Wright (Posted Apr
04, 2023). The Second Cold War is more
dangerous than the first. Common Dreams. April 2, 2023.
Americans have to ask
themselves: Is it worth risking nuclear war—and an apocalyptic nuclear
winter—for no loftier purpose than to maintain their country’s violently
enforced grasp of overwhelming global power?
Culture,
Empire, Imperialism, WarAmericas, Asia, Australia, Europe, Global, Latin America, Middle East, United StatesNewswireNuclear War
Twenty years
ago, Noam Chomsky published
a bestselling book called Hegemony or Survival. Since then, the stark choice
he posed has only become more urgent. Depending on how humanity responds to the
challenges of ecological destruction and imperialistic war, in the coming
decade that terrifying question “Hegemony or survival?” may well be answered.
|
UKRAINE FROM THE WEST,
TAIWAN FROM THE EAST
Art Hobson. “A
planet on high-alert:Pondering the effects of nuclear war.” NWADG,
15 March 2022.
[First of 3
articles; see end.]
On
February 8, during a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel
Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave an alarming answer to a
reporter's question: If Ukraine joined NATO, and if war erupts between
Russia and Ukraine, then NATO will join with Ukraine against Russia. In this
case, Russia would be unable to match NATO's military might, and would need to
resort to nuclear weapons.
As
outlined in several recent columns, a certain segment of Russian culture,
including Putin, is paranoid about attack from the west. It's an
obsession born of such terrifying experiences as Hitler's and Napoleon's
invasions.
If
this all seems bizarre, you aren't alone. Will we really risk the end of
civilization in order that Ukraine can retain the option to possibly, at some
uncertain future date, join NATO?
It's
time for all of us to note a few realities:.
In
1979, the US government published "The Effects of Nuclear War."
Among other things, it reported on the effects of a single one-megaton nuclear
bomb dropped on the center of a typical city such as Detroit. There would
be over one million immediate casualties, half of them fatalities, in this city
of (in 1979) four million,. This excludes longer-term casualties due to
radioactivity on the ground and in dust lofted into the mushroom cloud that
later falls out downwind. Nothing significant will be left standing out
to 2 miles (in all directions) from the central point on the ground. At 5
miles out, fifty percent of the people suffer casualties and most structures,
such as the automobile plants, are destroyed or severely damaged. There
is significant damage and casualties out to 10 miles from the center.
Starting
about an hour after the blast, radioactive fallout begins in some areas,
depending on wind speed, wind direction, and rain. In these areas, and
during at least the first week, fallout is fatal within a few hours of outdoor
exposure. Nuclear radiation will remain dangerous out to 10 miles from
the center for about 10 years, after which it will slowly decay to lower levels
comparable to the natural radiation we all receive daily from our
environment.
A
one megaton nuclear fusion bomb or "hydrogen bomb" packs the energy
of 60 fission bombs or "atomic bombs" of the type that destroyed the
city of Hiroshima in 1945, killing 200,000--50 percent of the city's
population. Today's nuclear weapons are somewhat smaller than one
megaton. Russia, for example, has 2,565 nuclear weapons including 500 in
the 0.5-0.8 megaton range and most of the remainder at 0.1 megaton (6
Hiroshimas) or less. The U.S. has a similar arsenal.
For
further perspective, consider a single U.S. Navy Trident submarine. It can
carry 24 intercontinental ballistic missiles, each packing eight hydrogen bombs
("re-entry vehicles") that can be directed to different
locations. Each bomb releases 0.12 megatons of energy. Thus one Trident
submarine can destroy 192 targets, each target receiving the equivalent of
seven Hiroshima bombs.
The
United States has 18 missile-launching submarines, of which 14 are Tridents.
Generally, four are deployed underwater at any one time, although more would be
deployed under high alert. They are essentially invulnerable.
Russia
and the U.S. both have a "strategic triad" of nuclear-weapons
vehicles: Land-based missiles, submarine-based missiles, and
bombers. Russia and presumably the U.S. have now put their triads on
high-alert--a kind of hair trigger that is dangerous even if there is no
war.
War
between the U.S. and Russia could destroy much or all of what we are pleased to
call "civilization." Humankind is treading perilous
territory. Right now, the greatest danger lies in the skies above the
battlefield. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has appealed to NATO
to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and strongly criticized NATO's rejection
of this request. A no-fly zone would bring NATO, and hence the United States,
into battle with Russia.
Alarmingly,
Russia began yesterday shelling an airbase in western Ukraine only 15 miles
from Poland's (and thus NATO's) border. Although NATO supplies a steady
flow of weapons to Ukraine, US Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned America
would respond if Russia's strikes traveled outside Ukraine and hit any NATO
members, even accidentally.
There
is one ray of sunshine. Zelensky recently told Germany's Bild newspaper
"We are ready to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine ... and, of
course, for the security of Russia." This touches on what Russia has
asked for all along but we have foolishly ruled a
"non-starter": a Ukrainian pledge of neutrality.
Art Hobson is professor emeritus of physics at
the University of Arkansas. He spent a 6-month sabbatical leave at the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and co-authored and co-edited
"The Future of Land-Based Strategic Missiles" (Am. Inst. of physics,
1989). Email him at ahobson@uark.edu.
References;
• Putin on NATO
membership and nuclear war: https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/putin-says-ukraine-membership-in-nato-would-make-nuclear-war-more-likely/
• Lavrov on nuclear war, NWADG 3 March 22, article on page 1.
• Russian Deputy Foreign
Minister's statement: https://www.reuters.com/markets/rates-bonds/russia-says-ukraine-could-turn-into-re-run-cuban-missile-crisis-2021-12-09/
• The Effects of Nuclear War, US Office of
Technology Assessment, Washington, DC, 1979.
•
Russian nuclear weapons: https://thebulletin.org/premium/2022-02/nuclear-notebook-how-many-nuclear-weapons-does-russia-have-in-2022/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter02272022&utm_content=NuclearRisk_RussiaNuclearNotebook_02232022
• Russia puts nucl
weapons on high alert: NWADG 2 March
2022, p. 5 "Russian nuke alert spurs drills."
• Zelenskyy's statement
to Bild: NWADG 11 Mar 22,
toward end of story beginning page 1.
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Steve Taylor. “ ‘We’ve never been
closer to nuclear catastrophe’: Activist Helen Caldicott.” Originally published: NewsClick.in on February 9, 2023 by
Steve Taylor (more by NewsClick.in) | (Posted Feb 10,
2023). Environment, Inequality, Strategy,
WarGlobalInterviewDr. Helen Caldicott
This interview took place on January
25, 2023, one day after the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists advanced the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 90
seconds before midnight—in large part due to developments in Ukraine. Dr. Helen
Caldicott, an Australian peace activist and environmentalist, discussed the extreme and imminent threat
of a nuclear holocaust due to a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia in
Ukraine. She also addressed the announcement by the U.S. Department of
Energy of a controlled nuclear reaction and outlines the relationship between
the nuclear power industry and nuclear weapons.
Caldicott is the author of numerous books and is a recipient of at
least 12 honorary doctorates. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize by
physicist Linus Pauling and named by the Smithsonian as one of the most
influential women of the 20th century. Her public talks describing the horrors
of nuclear war from a medical perspective raised the consciousness of a
generation. Caldicott believes that the
reality of destroying all of life on the planet has receded from public
consciousness, making doomsday more likely. As the title of her recent book states, we are “sleepwalking to
Armageddon.”
Steve Taylor: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
recently set the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight.
What is the Doomsday Clock, and why is it now set to 90 seconds to
midnight?
Helen Caldicott: For the last year, it’s been at 100 seconds to
midnight, which is the closest it’s ever been. Each year they reset the clock
according to international problems, nuclear problems. Ninety seconds to
midnight—I don’t think that is close enough; it’s closer than that. I would put
it at 20 seconds to midnight. I
think we’re in an extremely invidious position where nuclear war could occur
tonight, by accident or by design. It’s very clear to me, actually, that the
United States is going to war with Russia. And that means, almost certainly,
nuclear war—and that means the end of almost all life on Earth.
ST: Do you see similarities with the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis?
HC: Yes. I got to know John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of
Defence, Robert McNamara, later in his life. He was in the Oval Office at the
time of the Cuban missile crisis. He once told me, “Helen, we came so close to
nuclear war—three minutes.” Three minutes. We’re in a similar situation now.
ST: So back then, though, famously, the world held its
breath during the missile crisis.
HC: Oh, we were terrified. Terrified, absolutely
terrified.
ST: That doesn’t seem to be the case today.
HC: Today, the public and policymakers are not being
informed adequately about what this really means—that the consequences would be
so bizarre and so horrifying. It’s very funny; New York City put out a video as
a hypothetical PSA in July 2022 showing a woman in the street, and it says the
bombs are coming, and it’s going to be a nuclear war. It says that what you do
is go inside, you don’t stand by the windows, you stand in the centre of the
room, and you’ll be alright. I mean, it’s absolutely absurd.
ST: That is what you were fighting against back in the
’70s and ’80s—this notion that a nuclear war is survivable.
HC: Yes. There was a U.S. defence official called T.K.
Jones who reportedly said, don’t worry; “if there are enough shovels to go
around,” we’ll make it. And his plan was if the bombs are coming and they take
half an hour to come, you get out the trusty shovel. You dig a hole. You get in
the hole. Someone puts two doors on top and then piles on dirt. I mean, they
had plans. But the thing about it is that evolution will be destroyed. We may
be the only life in the universe. And if you’ve ever looked at the structure of
a single cell, or the beauty of the birds or a rose, I mean, what
responsibility do we have?
ST: During the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. did not
want missiles pointed at it from Cuba, and the Soviet Union did not want
missiles pointed at it from Turkey. Do you see any similarities with the
conflict in Ukraine?
HC: Oh, sure. The United States has nuclear weapons in
European countries, all ready to go and land on Russia. How do you think Russia
feels—a little bit paranoid? Imagine if the Warsaw Pact moved into Canada, all
along the northern border of the U.S., and put missiles all along the northern
border. What would the U.S. do? She’d probably blow up the planet as she nearly
did with the Cuban missile crisis. I mean, it’s so extraordinarily unilateral
in the thinking, not putting ourselves in the minds of the Russian people.
ST: Do you feel we’re more at risk of nuclear war now
than we were during the Cold War?
HC: Yes. We’re
closer to nuclear war than we’ve ever been. And that’s what the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists indicated
by moving the clock to 90 seconds to midnight.
ST: Does it seem like political leaders are more
cavalier about nuclear exchange now?
HC: Yes, because they haven’t taken in what nuclear war would really
mean. And the Pentagon is run by these cavalier folks who are making millions
out of selling weapons. Almost the whole of the U.S. budget goes to killing and
murder, rather than to health care and education and the children in Yemen, who
are millions of them starving. I mean, we’ve got the money to fix everything on
Earth, and also to power the world with renewable energy. The money is there.
It’s going into killing and murder instead of life.
ST: You mentioned energy. The Department of Energy
has announced a so-called fusion breakthrough. What do you think about the claims
that fusion may be our energy future?
HC: The technology wasn’t part of an energy experiment. It
was part of a nuclear weapons experiment called the Stockpile Stewardship Program. It is inappropriate; it
produced an enormous amount of radioactive waste and very little energy. It
will never be used to fuel global energy needs for humankind.
ST: Could you tell us a little bit about the history of Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, where scientists developed this
fusion technology?
HC: The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory was where the first
hydrogen bombs were developed. It was set up in 1952, by Edward Teller, a
wicked man.
ST: There is this promotion of nuclear energy as a
green alternative. Is the nuclear energy industry tied to nuclear weapons?
HC: Of course. In the ’60s, when people were scared stiff of nuclear
weapons, there was a Pentagon psychologist who said, look, if we have peaceful
nuclear energy, that will alleviate the people’s fear.
ST: At the end of your 1992 book If You Love This Planet, you wrote, “Hope for the
Earth lies not with leaders, but in your own heart and soul. If you decide to
save the Earth, it will be saved. Each person can be as powerful as the most
powerful person who ever lived—and that is you, if you love this planet.” Do
you stand by that?
HC: If we acknowledge the horrifying reality that there is
an extreme and imminent threat of nuclear war, it’s like being told that as a
planet, we have a terminal disease. If we’re scared enough, every one of us can
save the planet. But we have to be very powerful and determined.
Steve Taylor is the press secretary for Global Justice
Ecology Project and the host of the podcast Breaking Green.
Beginning his environmental work in the 1990s opposing clearcutting in Shawnee
National Forest, Taylor was awarded the Leo and Kay Drey Award for Leadership
from the Missouri Coalition for the
Environment for his work as co-founder of the Times Beach
Action Group.
This article was
produced by Earth | Food |
Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. A
video of the description of nuclear war from the interview can be viewed on Vimeo.
Listen to the entire interview, available for streaming on Breaking Green’s website or wherever you get your
podcasts. Breaking Green is
produced by Global Justice
Ecology Project.
February 2023 (Volume 74, Number 9)
The Editors Monthly Review (February 3, 2023)
As C. Wright Mills wrote in 1958, “the immediate causes of World
War III are the preparations for it.” This month’s “Notes from the Editors”
situates Wright in a contemporary context, with a New Cold War in full swing
and imperial powers pushing us ever closer to a Third World War. | more…
This “Notes from the Editors” discusses C.
Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III,
and Foster, et al. Washington’s New
Cold War: A Socialist Perspective; increasingUSpreparations for war
in the nuclear arms race, booming
military-industrial complex, and “US media system …turned into a propaganda
system” for war. Most disturbing is p.
64 on US “pursuit of a first-strike or counterforce strategy as its main
nuclear objective.” All of this is
converging in the US “proxy war in Ukraine on Russia’s border.” For the solution, the editors return to
Mills’ advocacy of “a world anti-imperialist movement as the guarantor of
peace.”
On Shedding an
Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the
American Century by Andrew J. Bacevich, November 2022.
368.
On Shedding an Obsolete Past provides a much-needed and
comprehensive critique of recent US national security policies in both the
Trump and Biden administrations. These policy decisions have
produced a series of costly disappointments and outright failures that have
destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands around the world and cost US
taxpayers astronomical sums of money.
Bacevich provides urgent and critical insights into how these failures occurred
and what needs to be done to prevent similar failures in the future. He reminds
us that, by understanding the past, we can alter our current trajectory and
transform the world for the better.
Review
"Bacevich is less interested in exploring
the hypocrisy as he is in examining the waste. The squandering
of resources and blood. The hollowing of America while we pretend to be
something we’re not. The sense that we’ve failed a generation clinging to an
obsolete idea, and that failure is tearing us apart. In that, his true
conservative nature comes out: why do something stupid, he asks, when we can
just not do that?" Chicago
Review of Books
“Prophesies,
Then and Now: My
Life at World's End”
Indulge
me for a moment. This is how “The Prophecy” in my 1962 high school
yearbook began. It was written by some of my classmates in the year we
graduated from Friends Seminary in New York City.
“Being
an historian, I am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced
two days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am
writing for those who shall come a long time from now.
“First
of all, let me introduce myself. I am THOMAS M. ENGELHARDT, world-renowned
historian of the late twentieth century, should that mean anything to whoever
reads this account. After the great invasion, I was maintaining a peaceful,
contented existence in the private shelter I had built and was completing the
ninth and final volume of my masterpiece, The Influence of the Civil
War on Mexican Art of the Twentieth Century, when I was seized by a strange
desire to emerge from my shelter, have a look at the world, and find some
companions. Realizing the risk I was taking, I carefully opened the hatch of
the shelter and slowly climbed out. It was morning. To my shock, I was in
a wide field overgrown with weeds; there was no sign of the community that had
been there…”
As
I wander, I finally run into one of my classmates, now “a skinny old man with
bushy white hair, wearing a loose deer skin.” And yes, whatever happened (that
“great invasion”) while I was underground in — as anyone of that period would
have known — a private nuclear-fallout shelter, is unclear. Still, in the world
I find on emerging, all my former classmates, whom I meet one after another in
joking fashion, now live in caves. In other words, it had obviously been
devastated.
True,
in those high school years, I was something of a Civil War nut and my
classmates ragged me for it. I couldn’t stop reading grown-up books on the
subject. (Thank you, Bruce Catton, for your popular histories of that war and
for the magazine you founded and edited, American Heritage, to
which I was a teen subscriber!) They obviously thought I was a history wonk of
the first order. But more than 60 years later, it strikes me that we kids
who had learned to “duck and cover” at school — to dive under our desks, hands over our heads (with CONELRAD warnings blaring from the radio on our
teacher’s desk) — in preparation for a Russian nuclear attack, already had a
deep sense not of future promise but of doom to come. In those days, it wasn’t
that hard to imagine ourselves in a future devastated world returned to the
Stone Age or worse.
And
at the time, I suspect that was hardly out of the ordinary. After all, there
were, in a sense, mushroom clouds everywhere on the horizon of our lives to
come. By 1962, America’s victory weapon that, in two blinding flashes in August
1945, took out the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War
II, had become a weapon (in other hands) of potential defeat. Everywhere in our
lives there lurked the possibility that “we,” not “they,” might be the next
victims of nuclear extermination. Consider it an irony indeed that our
country’s nukes would chase Americans through the decades to come, infiltrating
so many parts of our world and our lives.
Back
in 1954, our Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union, already had its own nukes (though
as yet little effective way of delivering them). No one thought it worth a
comment then that, in Walt Disney’s cinematic retelling of Jules Verne’s Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, when Captain Nemo blows up his island,
what’s distinctly a mushroom cloud rises over it. Of course, in those
years, end-of-the-world
movies would become
everyday affairs.
In
the 1950s and early 1960s, a now-forgotten bunker-culture mentality enveloped
this country and my classmates caught the moment perfectly. In fact, that
“shelter” I emerged from would, in 1962, still have been far too recognizable
to need further description. After all, we grew up in a time when the Cold
War was only intensifying and the very idea of building private nuclear
shelters had become a commonplace. As an article in Smithsonian
Magazine reminds us,
right after the first Russian nuclear test went off in 1949, “[General] Douglas
MacArthur’s ex-wife said she was furnishing the former slave quarters beneath
her Georgetown mansion as a bomb shelter” and, only six years later, the head
of Civil Defense began urging every single American “to build an underground
shelter right now.'”
By
1961, faced with a crisis over
a divided Berlin, President John F. Kennedy himself urged Americans
to do just that. (“The time is now,” he insisted.) In those years, Life magazine
typically ran a feature on constructing “an H-bomb Hideaway” for a mere $3,000! And real-estate ads even promised “good
bomb immunity,” while Science News warned of “hucksters who
were peddling backyard shelters, burn ointments, dog tags, flashbags, and
‘decontaminating agents.'” Naturally, once you had built your private shelter, there
was the question of whether, should a nuclear war be about to begin, you should
let the neighbors in or arm yourself to stop them from doing so. (A friend of mine still
remembers one of his schoolmates and neighbors warning him that, in a crisis,
according to his parents, his family better not try to come to their nuclear
shelter or they would regret it.)
And
that yearbook passage of mine was written in the winter or spring of 1962,
months before the Cuban missile
crisis shook us all to
our bones. That October, I remember fearing the East Coast, where I was then
attending my freshman year of college, might indeed go up in a giant mushroom
cloud. And keep in mind that, in those years, from popular magazines to
sci-fi novels to the movies, the bomb either exploded or threatened to do so
again and again. In my youth, atomic war was, culturally speaking, all around
us. It was even in outer space, as in the 1955 film This Island
Earth in which another
planet goes up in a version of radioactive flames, scaring the living hell out
of the 11-year-old Thomas M. Engelhardt.
So,
yes, my classmates were messing around and having fun, but underneath it all
lurked a sensibility (probably only half-grasped at the time) about the world
we were to graduate into that was anything but upbeat. The planet that our
leaders were then assuring us was ours for the taking seemed to us anything
but.
World-Endings, Part Two
It’s
true that, in the years between then and now, the world didn’t go up in a
mushroom cloud (with an accompanying nuclear winter killing billions more of us, a probability we knew nothing
about in 1962). Still, whether you’re talking about actual war or potential
nuclear catastrophe, it’s certainly looking mighty ugly right now.
Worse
yet, if you’re 18 as I was then (and not 78, as I am now), you undoubtedly know
that the future isn’t looking cheery these days either, even without a nuclear
war. Sadly, in the years since I graduated high school, we discovered that
humanity had managed to come up with a second slower but potentially no less
devastating way to make this world unlivable. I’m thinking, of course, of
climate change, a subject deeply on the minds of the young on this embattled planet of ours.
I
mean, from unparalleled
floods to unprecedented melting ice, staggering megadroughts to record wildfires, sweltering heat
waves and ever fiercer storms to… well, increasingly extreme weather of almost any imaginable sort, this planet is an ever less
comfortable place on which to live, even without a mushroom cloud on the
horizon. And that’s especially true, given how humanity is dealing with the
crisis to come. After all, what makes more sense right now than a never-ending
war in Europe to create an energy crisis (though that crisis is also helping fuel the rapid growth of alternative energy)? What makes
more sense than an escalating arms race globally or the world’s two greatest greenhouse
gas producers, the United States and China, facing off against each other in an increasingly
militarized fashion rather than cooperating to stop our planet from burning up?
What
makes more sense than the Biden administration giving the nod to an oil
drilling project on federal land in Alaska expected to produce an estimated 576 million barrels of oil over the next 30
years, despite the president’s previous promise not to do such a thing? (“No more drilling on federal
lands, period. Period, period, period.”) What makes more sense than China using more coal, that monstrous greenhouse-gas producer, than the rest of the
world combined? What makes more sense than the major oil companies
garnering greater profits in 2022 than in any previous moment in history as they
broil the planet without mercy? What makes more sense than, as the Guardian reported,
more than 1,000 “super-emitter” sites, mostly at oil and natural gas
facilities, continuing to gush the potent greenhouse gas methane into the
global atmosphere in 2022, the worst of those sites spewing “the pollution at a
rate equivalent to 67 million running cars”?
And
no less daunting, so Michael Birnbaum reported at
the Washington Post recently, as various countries begin to
explore the possibility of “solar geoengineering” (spraying a sun-blocking mist
into the earth’s atmosphere to cool their overheating countries), they might
also end up messing with atmospheric conditions in other lands in a fashion
that could lead to… yes, as the “U.S. intelligence community” has come to fear,
war. So add potential climate wars to your list of future horrors.
It’s
true that alternative energy sources are also ramping up significantly,
just not yet fast enough, but there’s certainly still hope that, in some fashion,
humanity will once again figure out how to come up short of The End. Still, if
you’re young today and looking at the world, I suspect it’s not a pretty sight.
Prophesies to Come
Let
me now offer my own little summary of the very future that I, like so many of
my classmates, did live through to this moment: No, Thomas M. Engelhardt
never wrote that classic book The Influence of the Civil War on Mexican
Art of the Twentieth Century, but he did author The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a
Generation (published
in 1995) in which he wrote about the victory weapon of World War II, the
“bunker culture” of the 1950s and 1960s that it produced, and what (as best he
could tell) to make of it all.
In
addition, with that end-of-the-world sensibility still in mind, while an editor
at the publishing house Pantheon Books, he would make more visible something
Americans had largely been prevented from seeing after August 1945. As it
happened, a friend would show him a book put out by a Japanese publisher that
collected the memories of some of the survivors of Hiroshima along with
drawings they had done of that experience. Yes, in his childhood, Thomas M.
Engelhardt had indeed seen giant irradiated
ants and an incredible shrinking man on screen in science-fictionalized versions of an
irradiated future. But missing from his all-American world had been any
vision of what had actually happened to the inhabitants of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in that all-American past.
In
1979, not long before an antinuclear movement that would make use of it revved
up in this country, he published that Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, which all too vividly laid out the memories
of those who had experienced world’s end in an up-close-and-personal fashion.
And several years later, thanks to that book’s Japanese editor (amazed that any
American would have considered publishing it), he actually went to Hiroshima
and visited the Peace Memorial Museum, something he’s never forgotten. [The book has inspired OMNI’s annual
Remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]
And
in the next century, the one my high school classmates and I hadn’t even begun
to imagine and weren’t at all sure we’d live to see, he would, almost by
happenstance, start a website called (not by him) TomDispatch that would
repeatedly focus on the two world-ending ways humanity had discovered to do
itself in and how to begin to deal with them.
And
honestly, all of this leaves me wondering today what that “prophesy” might look
like for the high school graduates of 2023 or those of my grandchildren’s
generation in an even more distant future. I certainly hope for the best, but
also fear the worst. Perhaps it, too, would begin: “Being an historian, I
am jotting down these notes out of habit, but what I saw and experienced two
days ago I am sure no one else as civilized as I am will ever see. I am writing
for those who shall come a long time from now. First of all, let me introduce
myself. I am [NAME TO BE FILLED IN], world-renowned historian of the
twenty-first century, should that mean anything to whoever reads this
account….”
More
than 60 years later, even writing that, no less remembering the world of
once-upon-a-time, and imagining what it will be like after I’m long gone sends
chills down my spine and leaves me hoping against hope that, someday, one of my
grownup grandchildren will read this and not think worse of the class of 1962
or their grandfather for it.
Copyright
2023 Tom Engelhardt
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Tom Engelhardt created and runs the
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the Type Media Center, his sixth book is A Nation Unmade by War.
A Polemic to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by
Abolishing Their Advocates
John Rachel. “The never ending cycle of nuclear insanity.”
Originally published: Dissident
Voice on September 24, 2021 (more by Dissident Voice) | (Posted Sep 25,
2021). Empire, Imperialism, WarUnited StatesNewswireNuclear.
Amidst all of the
sensible and sane cries to eliminate nuclear weapons, we are caught in a
self-sustaining, self-reinforcing feedback loop. Call it the Death Spiral of
Human Annihilation.
Yes, the U.S. throughout its history, despite official denials
even among historians who should know better–maybe they do but prefer being
manufacturers of myth rather than chroniclers of history–has been territorial,
possessive and aggressive. The Monroe Doctrine declared the entire Western hemisphere as America’s
backyard. The U.S. was hardly shy about grabbing as much as it could from Spain
at the end of the Spanish-American War, lands as far away as the Philippines.
Through treaties and hard-headed diplomacy, it has effectively turned most
European nations, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan into vassal
states, which promote and serve the interests of the U.S., including using
their military assets and personnel to take to the battlefield in undeclared
wars and provocations against those countries the U.S. perceives as enemies or
obstacles to its imperial rule.
This is not
particularly extraordinary or surprising. Competition defines and drives much
of what goes on between countries, each nation vying for advantage and
improvements in its own standing and accumulation, regardless of what hardships
it might impose on other countries and their populations. Thus U.S. adventurism and colonization was
pretty much business-as-usual for much of its history, as it was for every
other ambitious nation on the rise.
However, beyond predictable overt aggressiveness, it was at the
end of, and immediately after, WWII that a seismic change occurred in
Washington DC that has elevated our country to become the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world“, and propelled the entire planet toward the
unstable, chaotic mess we now find ourselves in.
Politically there was the marginalization of Henry Wallace, and the installation of Harry Truman as president.
Institutionally it was the creation of the extremely independent security
organization, the CIA, as successor to the OSS (Office of Security Services). Programmatically, it was bringing 1600 Nazi
scientists into the U.S. under Operation
Paperclip. Economically, it was
the continuation of a war economy and the expansion of the MIC–the military industrial complex — cementing in place the core elements of “forever
war” even in times of peace. Dwight D. Eisenhower saw what was happening and
in January 1961 warned the country of the dangers of this in his farewell speech.
The U.S. pursuit of
empire and global hegemony now had the mechanisms, the funding, the know-how,
the institutional momentum, the “right stuff”, to take the world stage. All of
the toxic premises and preconditions were now circulating in the bloodstream of
the military and diplomatic channels, a cocktail of pathogens for the madness
that infected and captivated those in power, and still does to this day.
This virulence culminated in the 90s with the
collapse of the Soviet Union. The U.S. turned its back on an unprecedented
historical opportunity, the chance for peace and cooperation on a global scale,
one that had the potential of initiating a millennium where wars were the rare
exception, and the colonial power struggle paradigm would be consigned to
history books. Instead it embraced the “end of history“,
a baseless claim of ultimate superiority and entitlement based on America’s
victory over the world’s only other superpower.
By the late 90s the
U.S. pulled out all of the stops. It would leave no technology untapped, no
opportunity unexploited, no promise or treaty unbroken, UN resolutions and
world opinion be damned, international law deemed irrelevant. The trajectory we
are now on was set in stone. It’s our way or bombs away.
Let’s not get
distracted or deluded by claims of noble intent and appeals to the twisted
logic of empire.
And our mental
discipline starts with our never ever forgetting who started this mess. And
thus who must take the lead in fixing it.
Dropping the atomic
bombs on Japan sent a message to the world, particularly the Soviet Union.
We have the ultimate
weapon and we will use it. Don’t mess with us, don’t doubt our resolve, no one
can stop us.
The Soviet Union had
no choice. Either develop a sufficient nuclear potential to counter that of the
U.S. or be held hostage to bullying and coercion.
That unfortunate
dynamic unleashed a nuclear arms race that at one point saw enough nuclear
weaponry in the stockpiles of the U.S. and the USSR, to destroy the planet 50
times over. This madness has been tempered slightly with treaties but it’s
still insanity by any rational measure. Russia and the U.S. still have over
13,000 nuclear weapons–much more powerful and “usable” than when they were at
peak numerical levels–and other nuclear nations add another 1,125 to the mix.
This is an improvement. The same improvement we could claim if a person only
got shot 14 times instead of 50 times. The coroner’s work reconstructing the
body for viewing might be a little easier. Should we count our blessings?
Listen, folks. It’s on us! Both the U.S. as a nation and the
U.S. as citizens. There’s no passing the buck here, not when the survival of
life on Earth is at stake.
Until the U.S. steps forward and leads the
effort, nuclear warfare will always be with us. And annihilation of the human
species will always hover over us as a real, increasingly probable result.
Moreover, please never
forget: Those now in power will never backtrack on this suicidal course. It is
what defines them, drives them. It’s as much a part of them as their hearts and
brains and the void where their souls would be if they weren’t morally bankrupt,
sociopathic mutants.
The only way we’ll have peace is if we REMOVE
FROM POWER every single one of the warmongers.
No excuses. No
compromise. No fear.
I recommend a massive awakening of 150-200 million U.S. citizens as
to the personal costs of war, the inevitable product of: our military adventurism and
expansion; our endless, unnecessary, illegal, immoral wars; our completely
wasteful procurement of unneeded weapon systems, upgrading our nuclear arsenal,
now putting weapons is space in violation of existing treaties; a commitment without the approval of the citizenry to “full- spectrum dominance“; i.e., world rule by an unchallengeable empire.
For decades the DOD and their rah-rah imperialists in
office have had a blank check. And like anyone with a blank check, they’ve
spent OUR MONEY with wild abandon. THIS is a strategy
for defunding the military just enough so that it can properly defend our
nation and its people, but no longer use everyday citizens as an ATM machine
for its delusional, monomaniacal pursuit of hegemony over the entire planet. We
the people never voted for this psychopathic agenda, one which smacks of master
race conquest. THIS MECHANISM will sufficiently drain the Treasury so
that unnecessary DOD spending is impossible, and most importantly, extricate the crazies from the toxic dump they’ve turned our once-democratic
institutions into.
Please repeat after
me: No excuses. No compromise. No fear.
John Rachel has a B. A. in Philosophy, has traveled
extensively, is a songwriter, music producer, neo-Marxist, and a bipolar
humanist. He has written eight novels and three political non-fiction books.
His most recent polemic is “The Peace Dividend: The Most Controversial Proposal
in the History of the World.” His political articles have appeared at many
alternative media outlets. He is now somewhat rooted in a small traditional
farming village in Japan near Osaka, where he proudly tends his small but
promising vegetable garden. “Scribo ergo sum.” Read other articles by John, or visit John’s website.
OMNI’S
SUPPORT FOR THE MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS includes 21
newsletters/anthologies and a 22nd under construction.
Contents of
Nuclear Weapons Abolition Newsletter #20, July 20, 2014
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2014/07/nuclear-weapons-abolition-newsletter-20.html
Presidents Obama
and Medvedev Commitment 2009
Plan to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons
Statement by UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Global Zero
Movement
Two Reviews of
Elaine Scarry’s Nuclear Monarchy
Contents Nuclear
Weapons Abolition Newsletter #21, March 13, 2015
http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2015/03/nuclear-weapons-abolition-newsletter-21.html
Anti-Nuclear War
Organizations: Get Involved
Nuclear Zero,
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Marshall Islands Lawsuits at ICC and US
Court, Sign Petition, Join the Coalition
ICAN and IPPNW
International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Nobel Prize)
Dick, Ground Zero Organization and Magazine: End Trident
Submarines
Dick, Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in
Space, Space Alert!
Democracy
Now! Reports, Rally Outside White
House Against Obama’s Nuclear Weapons Upgrades
Global Zero,
Sign the Zero by 2030 Pledge for a World Without Nuclear
Weapons
Council for a
Livable World (CLW) (founded by Leo Szilard)
Soka Gakkai International (SGI)
Diverse,
Numerous World of Nuclear Weapons Abolition
Gusterson, People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex
SGI Exhibit, 'Everything You Treasure-For a World Free From Nuclear
Weapons' at Little Elm Public Library
Dr. Helen Caldicott, Noam Chomsky, et al., NYC Symposium
Amy Goodman with
Dennis Moynihan, Democracy Now (August 7, 2014), Hiroshima
and Nagasaki 69 Years Later
Shiloh Krupar,
Satire of US Toxic State
Scotland’s
Independence Vote and Nuclear Weapons
Bill
Griffin, In Memoriam: Jonathan Schell
Nuclear
Weapons Abolition #22 in preparation