Image courtesy CODEPINK.
Once again the ‘Gloomsday’ Machine is reporting the awful news about the growing nuclear threats, the widening nuclear proliferation, and ongoing modernization and development of new weapons most recently in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor which defines itself as “a research project managed by Norwegian People’s Aid with contributions from a broad range of external experts and institutions, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Norwegian Academy of International Law”.
There is never any attempt to make people aware of how the nuclear arms race and new forms of proliferation are being driven and the many missed opportunities, over the 80-year course of the nuclear age to reverse the Doomsday machine and move forward to a new world at peace.
A simple study of history would make it apparent that it is the United States, the only country to actually drop the bomb in the tragic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has been driving the nuclear arms race from the very beginning of the nuclear age.
It began when US President Harry Truman turned down USSR Prime Minister Joseph Stalin’s proposal to turn the bomb over to United Nations, which was formed “to end the scourge of war” with its first resolution calling for nuclear disarmament. After the US refusal, Russia then went ahead to get its own nuclear bomb, and the arms race was off and running!
One need only recall the sorry history of rejected agreements, broken treaties, conditions that would have moved nuclear abolition forward, to know that something’s amiss in how the establishment is talking about nuclear dangers, merely assailing us with reports that the numbers of nuclear weapons available for use is continuously increasing and new countries are considering acquiring these deadly weapons.
Nor are we reading about how Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s offer to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down. Nor are we hearing about the repeated motions from China and Russia in the UN for the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space, opposed by the US, as well as their draft treaty proposals tabled in 2008 and 2014 in the consensus-bound Committee on Disarmament in Geneva for negotiations on a space weapons ban, vetoed by the United States, which refused to permit even discussion on a space weapons ban treaty.
The Gloomsday bunch never mention how Putin was turned down by Obama when he asked the US to negotiate a Cyberwar Ban Treaty after the US and Israel hacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility with the Stuxnet virus, or that China and Russia support UN resolutions for such a treaty which the US opposes.
Nor are we hearing about how Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Treaty which required the US and the USSR to have only one anti-ballistic missile base in each nation, and since that time, the US has now put new missile bases in Romania and Poland.
And while we hear of Putin having recently placed Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, during the Ukraine war, it is never mentioned together with the fact that the US has had nuclear weapons for years in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey as part of its NATO agreement to use our nuclear weapons on their behalf!
Indeed, at a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists webinar announcing the world’s closest advance to doomsday, a speaker mentioned that Russia walked out of the CTBT, but he never mentioned that the US never joined the treaty. Although Clinton signed the treaty, the US, unlike Russia never ratified it.
If we’re going to ban the bomb and get nuclear weapons states to support the new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, we have to tell the truth about who is the perpetrator in the ever expanding nuclear arms race! For another way to talk about the bomb, see Code Pink’s Peace Clock. Peace Clock – CODEPINK – Women for Peace.
The post New Report Warns of Increasing Nuclear Dangers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alice Slater.