Nuclear dangers

Please watch the video below carefully. You’ll see what could – could, and most likely will – become a piece of world peace history. Note the body language of the two leaders – warm smiles and long handshakes. In spite of being one and the same nation, they meet at the hardest border in the world. Why is it so? Because everybody else around – the US, Japan, Russia, China – to varying degrees want them to be divided and feel threatened by their possible unification. And yes, a unified Korea would be a formidable economic power but a huge, dangerous conflict would be gone, the US could withdraw, Japan would get a chance to reconciliate in substantive terms. What is most amazing in this clip is that Kim first steps over the border line into the South. Then – seemingly surprising Moon – invites Moon to step into the...

  By Gareth Porter Published on Apr 3, 2014     National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” Presentation at the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship” on March 7, 2014 at the National Press Club. Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian who specializes in U.S. national security policy. He writes regularly for IPS and has also published investigative articles on Salon.com, the Nation, the American Prospect, Truthout and The Raw Story. His blogs have been published on Huffington Post, Firedoglake, Counterpunch and many other websites. Porter was Saigon bureau chief of Dispatch News Service International in 1971 and later reported on trips to Southeast Asia for The Guardian, Asian Wall Street Journal and Pacific News Service. He is the author of four books on the Vietnam War and the political system of Vietnam. His most recent book is Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story...

  By Gareth Porter, TFF Associate March 30, 2018 Via theamericanconservative.com In my reporting on U.S.-Israeli policy, I have tracked numerous episodes in which the United States and/or Israel made moves that seemed to indicate preparations for war against Iran. Each time – in 2007, in 2008, and again in 2011 – those moves, presented in corporate media as presaging attacks on Tehran, were actually bluffs aimed at putting pressure on the Iranian government. But the strong likelihood that Donald Trump will now choose* John Bolton as his next national security advisor creates a prospect of war with Iran that is very real. Bolton is no ordinary neoconservative hawk. He has been obsessed for many years with going to war against the Islamic Republic, calling repeatedly for bombing Iran in his regular appearances on Fox News, without the slightest indication that he understands the consequences of such a policy. His is not...

  Like it not we find that we’re having to get used to the paradoxes, contradictions and confusions of the Trump era. None is more apparent than his attack on the landmark Iran de-nuclearisation agreement, fashioned by the Obama Administration and the Iranian government. President Donald Trump wants to unwind it, even though it has the 100% support of the UN Security Council which in an unanimous vote enshrined the agreement in international law. At the same time he is trying to lure the North Koreans into a de-nuclearization policy, at the least into a nuclear freeze to stop it developing its rocket science any further, so that it’s incapable of hitting the US with a nuclear-tipped missile. But, given Iran, why should the North Koreans go along with such a deal? Why should it make such a deal when it knows there is a chance that the US might...

  Elisabeth Eaves of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists talks with Siegfried Hecker, one of the most well-informed experts on the US-Korean nuclear issues.   Via thebulletin.org It was an extraordinary week in North Korean nuclear affairs. First, high-level South Korean envoys met with the North’s leader Kim Jong-un, returning to Seoul with promises of an inter-Korean summit and other seemingly conciliatory statements. That news was quickly eclipsed, though, when later in the week, one of the South Korean envoys turned up in Washington with a personal invitation from Kim Jong-un to US President Donald Trump to meet him in Pyongyang. Trump agreed to meet “at a place and time to be determined.” It would be the first-ever meeting between a sitting US president and a North Korean head of state. But just as everyone was getting their heads around the idea that these two leaders – who just last...

”En häpnadsväckande utveckling”, skriver brittiska The Guardian om beskedet att Donald Trump och Kim Jong-un ska mötas vid ett toppmöte i maj. Nu är det diplomati som gäller, inte kärnvapenhot. Beskedet om att Nordkoreas Kim Jong-un ska möta Donald Trump på ett toppmöte i maj var fredagens stora glädjande nyhet, en total kontrast mot höstens eskalerande utveckling mot ett tänkbart kärnvapenkrig mellan två konfliktanalfabeter. Först tryckt här på Kultur-Sörens blogg – en av Sveriges absolut mest läsvärda Brittiska The Guardian skriver engagerat om  ”a stunning development following months of tension and mutual sabre-rattling …” och det är lätt att instämma och glädjas. Amerikanska The New Yorker uttrycker sig på liknande vis: ”In a breathtaking gambit that surprised his closest advisers, President Trump, almost impulsively, accepted an invitation on Thursday to meet the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un … I höstas genomförde Nordkorea en rad kusliga tester med missiler som kan bära...

March 3, 2018 The CIA’s “Operation Merlin,” which involved providing Iran with a flawed design for a nuclear weapon and resulted in an alleged whistleblower going to prison, was the perfect example of creating intelligence in order to justify operations, reports Gareth Porter. Originally published by ConsortiumNews here By Gareth Porter Jeffrey Sterling, the case officer for the CIA’s covert “Operation Merlin,” who was convicted in May 2015 for allegedly revealing details of that operation to James Risen of the New York Times, was released from prison in January after serving more than two years of a 42-month sentence. He had been tried and convicted on the premise that the revelation of the operation had harmed U.S. security. The entire case against him assumed a solid intelligence case that Iran had indeed been working on a nuclear weapon that justified that covert operation. But the accumulate evidence shows that the...

Image credit below   Introduction TFF believes it is of utmost importance to abolish nuclear weapons. While some may maintain that the risk that nuclear weapons will be used is small, others will argue that the consequences – no matter the risk – would be catastrophic beyond imagination and morally unacceptable and that no political goal can legitimate their use. Therefore, its an imperative to educate ourselves about these things – the media in generally having abdicated their responsibility to provide public education about this and other controversial themes. No matter what knowledge and opinion each of us has, there is no doubt that the risk of nuclear weapons use has increased in 2017-2018 due to a series of developments and political statements that must be judged to be grossly irresponsible and could, whether intended or not, lead to catastrophic misinterpretations, fear and panic reactions. If you use the Search...

  By Jan Oberg Comment on PressTV, February 17, 2018  

  Robert J. Burrowes February 18, 2018 • The United States Department of Defense released its latest ‘Nuclear Posture Review 2018’ (NPR) on 2 February, updating the last one issued in 2010 during the previous administration. See ‘Nuclear Posture Review 2018’. The Executive Summary of the NPR is also available, if you prefer. See ‘Nuclear Posture Review 2018 Executive Summary’. Several authors have already thoughtfully exposed a phenomenal variety of obvious lies, invented threats, strategic misconceptions and flaws – such as the fallacious thinking behind ‘deterrence’ and significantly increased risk of nuclear war given the delusional ‘thinking’ in the document – as well as the political fear-mongering in the NPR. For example, eminent scholar Professor Paul Rogers has pointed out: ‘The risk now is that we are on a slippery slope towards “small nuclear wars in far-off places”, which themselves could either escalate or at the very least break the...

  By Gunnar Westberg February 16, 2018   This is how I would summarize the new US Nuclear Posture Review, issued last week by the Trump administration: • We can fight and win a nuclear exchange • We are prepared to use nuclear weapons against a conventional attack, e.g. a cyberattack • We may consider using nuclear weapons against a nuclear-weapons-free country • We care not to mention our obligations under NPT Art VI • We have never heard of the climate effects of nuclear war.   In January 2017, President Donald Trump ordered a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The report is now available. It is 75 pages long. Most of the material repeats earlier NPRs. I will here concentrate on the new aspects.   “Escalate to de-escalate” Russian military writers have discussed the possibility of using “small” nuclear weapons if the country is attacked by an adversary with...

  Paul Rogers   8 February 2018   The what, when, where of nuclear danger – and the good news about dispelling it.   In the past couple of weeks, the details of the new United States nuclear posture have been published, Trump has delivered a belligerent state-of-the-union address and, most significant of all, the authoritative Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight. Originally published at openDemocracy   This is the closest the clock has been to “doomsday” since the US and Soviet Union started testing immensely destructive H-bombs in the early 1950s. Now, after thirty years of an apparent easing of nuclear tensions since the end of the cold war, fear of nuclear war is real and pressing. In recent months I’ve written some specific pieces on the nuclear issue for openDemocracy, mostly related to North Korea...