Nuclear weapons

042014″>this and this article. I would assume that the debate – facilitated by Iran’s PressTV in an excellent manner – is illustrative of the degree to which the world can be seen from different perspectives and how different we can perceive words such as law, legality, ethics, security, deterrence and peace. I assume also that the debate illustrates the difference between a systems-embedded interpretation of the world and an independent or free perception, including what can and must be changed and what doesn’t have to change to make the world a better place. Enjoy!

And why Russia doesn’t have to be a threat to the West TFF Series ”The New Cold War” # 7 If the Ukraine conflict is the centerpiece of the new 2nd Cold War, it is essential to ask: What really happened? What did NATO countries do to cause it? What did Russia do to cause it? And – if you live in the West, in particular: Did we really have to end in this situation given Russia’s significant weakness over 25 years? This article argues that the superior West could have played its cards differently and it’s time for self-critical soul-searching and just a little living yourself into the shoes of the other. If peace rather than war is your true aim. There was a beginning and a framework The Ukraine conflict has a 25-years history. Instead of dissolving NATO, the alliance was expanded. Relieved from there being a Soviet...

“War is illegal and immoral, it has to end and it can be ended.’ Speech at the international meeting “Thirst For Peace”, Assisi September 18-20, 2016. Promoted by Community of Sant Egidio and Diocese of Assisi and Franciso Families. Dear Friends, I am happy to be here at this International Meeting and I would like to thank our hosts, for their invitation to attend. I have always been inspired by the lives of St. Francis and St. Clare, whom I believe are Icons of Christian Gospel Peace and Nonviolence. Francis the man of action, steeped in empathy and love for all, and Clare a woman of prayer, whose love of God led her into the depth of mysticism and peace. Francis and Clare lived in a time of violence and war, yet they choose to live the nonkilling/nonviolence of Jesus. Francis as a youth fighting in his local military, knew...

This coming Sunday marks the 15th anniversary of what could be called the most counter-productive, if not stupid, war in modern history: The War On Terror. Today that war is much much more dangerous to the world’s future than the terrorists it is allegedly supposed to hunt down. And it has caused thousands of times more suffering, death and destruction – at least a million innocent people killed. It’s not a war on terrorism but on terrorists and that is as smart as trying to fight all diseases by killing patients. It’s a war fought without any consideration of the one big question: Why did they do it and why do they do it? Media and politics only asking: Who did it? How was it done? Where? How to respond? Without an intelligent, comprehensive diagnosis of 9/11 it could only go wrong. And it has. The next problem was that...

The French ambassador to the US from 1902 to 1924, Jean-Jules Jusserand, observed that distant powers could not easily threaten the US because “On the north, she has a weak neighbour; on the south, another weak neighbour; on the east fish and on the west, fish”. The coming of the submarine-based nuclear missile has not changed that. Apart from the fact that no enemy would dare use them for fear of retaliation, and that there is no country in the world that feels that hostile to America (accept North Korea), the fact is America is too big and too far away to be invaded and dominated. There could not be a blitzkrieg by a foreign army across the mid-west or a Vichy America. The real tragedy of 9/11 is just as a majority of the US electorate had settled into a post-Cold War comfort zone with the new president, George...

By Gunnar Westberg Formuleringen “”NATO:s nya, mer aggressiva kärnvapenpolicy” har två grunder, nämligen de nya vapnen och de nya formuleringarna av doktriner. Jag föreslår att vi, när vi talar om NATO och kärnvapen, använder formuleringar liknande den första meningen. Vill man förklara sig ger andra meningen ett svar. Men det är under alla omständigheter bra om man har tillgång till nedanstående argument: De gamla B61 var symboliska vapen. De skulle, enligt ofta upprepade försäkringar, inte användas. De var en pant på att USA inte skulle överge Europa vid ett sovjetiskt/ryskt anfall. USA har föreslagit att dessa vapen skulle tas bort, men öst-europeiska NATO-medlemmar och framför allt Frankrike (!) har starkt reagerat emot. De nya vapnen är B 61-12. Denna bomb skiljer sig från tidigare versioner av B61 som var ”gravity bombs”, d v s föll fritt från bombplanet. B 61-12 är styrbart och har därför en träffsäkerhet inom 30 m...

Jondal, Hardangerakademiet, Norway, August 1, 2016 The Hardanger Academy is focused on the three UN concerns, peace-development-environment. This year’s symposium was brilliantly opened by Vandana Shiva, a gift to the world from India. She encompassed all three themes with deep insights; holistic and very dialectic in her approach, with forces and counter-forces in all her proposed solutions; with her optimistic activism and engagement. The media missed a golden opportunity to tell the Norwegian public. She was imported for a week from India, and met with dedicated counterparts and groups in Norway. They are not very visible in public space either; but the Hardanger Academy will try to change that. What is in public space in Norway? A mirror image of US public space. If the US media say that Russian hacking was behind the enormous WikiLeaks revelations from the Democratic National Committee computer, so do the Norwegian media. If US...

The Incirlik air base in southeast Turkey- from which U.S. pilots launch bombing raids on ISIS forces in Syria – is home to about 50 B-61 hydrogen bombs. That makes it NATO’s largest nuclear storage facility. Each bomb has a yield of up to 170 kilotons, nearly a dozen times more powerful than the weapon that destroyed Hiroshima. The bombs are stored in underground vaults within aircraft shelters that in turn are protected by a security perimeter. Last week Incirlik was in the headlines because it appears it was one of the command centres of the attempted coup, meant to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After the coup had been put down the commander of Incirlik was arrested and charged with complicity in the overthrow attempt. Jonathan Marshall in Consortium News, who has been researching this year the inner workings of the base, reports, “The security of the bombs is...

By Jonathan Power The crime of aggression (“planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”) was described by the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried Nazi leaders as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. President George W. Bush and British prime minister, Tony Blair, have been accused by many as war criminals for starting the war against Iraq and, second, for not watching carefully enough to make sure that war crimes carried out by individual soldiers were not covered up, and for the torture that Bush initiated and Blair appeared to tolerate. Did Blair lie over the reason for going to war with Iraq – the supposed stockpile of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed? It depends how you define lie. If you define lie as saying this cat is black when in...

By Gunnar Westberg After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York on the 11th of September 2001 President George W. Bush felt the need for revenge. Since years back, the US had developed plans to attack Iraq. Its dictator Saddam Hussein had been left in power after the First Gulf War in 1991, a war which the father of George W. Bush had left unfinished. The real reasons for this renewed war on Iraq are not known. Saddam Hussein had previously had a program to produce nuclear weapons. After thorough investigations lead by the UN representatives Rolf Ekéus and Hans Blix it became clear that all weapons of mass destruction had been eliminated. There were no nuclear weapons. However, Saddam Hussein could of course start the production of nuclear weapons at some point in the future. And the US leaders choose to disregard the reports by...

By David Krieger July 7 , 2016 The International Court of Justice (“Court,” or “ICJ”), the world’s highest court, issued its Advisory Opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons on July 8, 1996. Thus, this week marks the 20th anniversary of that momentous opinion. The Court found in a split vote (7 to 7), with the casting vote of the Court’s president Mohammed Bedjaoui deciding the matter, that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be illegal under international law. The Court could not determine whether it would be legal or illegal to threaten or use nuclear weapons “in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” Three of the judges voting to oppose general illegality, however, were concerned with the word “generally” and wanted the Court to go further and remove any ambiguity...

PRESIDENTIAL VISIT


 The President went to Hiroshima,
 the place of the first atomic attack.
 He carried his heart in an old knapsack.

 He went where no sitting president
 ever ventured before, journeyed
 through time to a long ago war.

 He stood at the very place where death 
 fell from the sky, where the mushroom cloud 
 sucked up the earth, rose higher than high.

 His words poured forth like a passionate poem,
 a poem filled with power, as he placed 
 a white wreath on a sea of white foam.

 He bowed before the city’s eternal flame,
 cried out for a world deeply in pain,
 swore we must not let it happen again.

 We must choose our vantage point well,
 above the bomb or beneath, On one side 
is hubris, on the other is grief.


 David Krieger 
June 2016