Ukraine, the United States, and NATO have condemned what they correctly called Russian President Putin’s "dangerous and irresponsible" plan to soon deploy nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus. On June 9, Mr. Putin announced that Moscow would deploy its...
Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable
Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as "deterrence" when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or "terrorism" if Russia, China, or North Korea does. U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about...
Rejection of US Hiroshima Myths Long Overdue
Hiroshima was "a military base." The US atomic bombings "ended the war," and they "prevented an invasion and saved lives." Our government’s tests of atomic weapons on people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago were rationalized using...
Armistice Day First
It gets harder to commemorate World War I, because of time and the public’s embrace of, or indifference to, a permanent war economy. About the Great War British novelist H.G. Wells wrote on August 14, 1914, "This is already the vastest war in history. … For this...
US Bomb Tests and Bidding Wars Herald New (Unlawful) $1.5 Trillion Nuclear Weapons Complex
While much of the world pursues the abolition of nuclear weapons – embraced by the adoption July 7 by 122 nations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – the militarized Trump White House is pursuing plans for a trillion-dollar rebuild of the entire US...
‘We Burned Down Every Town in North Korea’
"We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population?" ~ General Curtis LeMay, in Strategic Air Warfare,...
US Says ‘Yes’ to Nuke Tests, ‘No’ to a Nuke Ban Treaty
Twice in seven days the United States shot nuclear-capable long-range missiles toward the Marshall Islands, but the same government refused in March to join negotiations for a new treaty banning nuclear weapons. Tests conducted April 26 and May 3 from Vandenberg Air...
Wild Turkey With H-Bombs: Failed Coup Heightens Calls for Denuclearization
An explosive cocktail of political instability mixed with 90 U.S. H-bombs raises the specter of accidental or suicidal nuclear detonation in or near Turkey. This risk was brought into sharp relief by the attempted military coup there in mid-July. In June, I warned...
Undeterred: Amid Terror Attacks in Europe, US H-bombs Still Deployed There
“A little more than 60 miles from Brussels airport,” Kleine Brogel Air Base is one of six European sites where the United States still stores active nuclear weapons, William Arkin wrote last month. The national security consultant for NBC News Investigates, Arkin...
Voices of Reason vs. the Doomsday Lobby
In 2010, three high-ranking military officials including Air Force Colonel B. Chance Saltzman, Chief of the US Air Force’s Strategic Plans and Policy Division who had worked directly for the Secretary of the Air Force, published a major policy paper suggesting that...