Nuclear

    Comment “We deeply regret the re-imposition of sanctions by the US, due to the latter’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)” – say High Representative Federica Mogherini and Foreign Ministers of E3 (Jean-Yves Le Drian of France, Heiko Maas of Germany, Jeremy Hunt of the United Kingdom). That’s an important statement. But more is needed. While the EU needs to protect its member states against US attempts to bully and punish everyone who from today deals with Iran, it needs to step up all kinds of co-operation with Iran and be ready to endure whatever conflicts with the U.S. this may entail. The future of the EU is at stake. No less. Also – says Oberg – it is peculiar that the US has chosen August 6, Hiroshima Day, to re-impose its sanctions on Iran in the wake of its decision to withdraw from the...

  • Iran’s foreign minister says the US is addicted to imposing sanctions on other countries but the Iranian nation, through its unity and resistance, can force Washington to give up such habit. The comments by Mohammad Javad Zarif come as the US is set to restore sanctions on Iran after pulling out of the 2015 nuclear deal in May. Zarif said the world has also come to the understanding that Washington needs to stop using sanctions to pressurize others. He said the US economic pressure has been unable to hamper Iran’s progress in the past and that the new sanctions would prove futile as well. The top diplomat urged the Iranian people to stand united in the face of the United States in order to preserve the country’s dignity. I was asked to comment on Zavad Zarif’s statement and added that it could be seen as the start of...

  TFF PressInfo # 470 Lund, Sweden – July 27, 2018 Forgive us for saying it but the coverage of the Putin-Trump meeting in the mainstream press has been painful to witness – the US media in particular. Navel-gazing in the extreme and turning the Presidential Summit meeting about their relations and international affairs into a US domestic policy affair. The Western media questions -also the so-called respected media – matched the rest in their narrow-minded tabloid attitude – one super fool believing he could get Putin to talk about what he “has” on Trump concerning alleged prostitute hiring in Moscow years ago – prestitutes about prostitutes! Write to tff@transnational.live and get TFF PressInfo from now on – it’s free because TFF is free And – which your free press has hardly mentioned – one journalist, Sam Husseini, who intended to ask about nuclear disarmament was forcefully ejected from the...

  By Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev June 16, 2018 • Russia and the United States are not condemned to confrontation. We must now make up for lost time! Mikhail Gorbachev’s Address to Participants in the Conference Marking the 30th Anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s Visit and the Moscow Summit. Originally published at the homepage of the Gorbachev Foundation on June 4, 2018 I welcome all who have gathered to mark the thirtieth anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Moscow and the US-Soviet summit. I think it was a truly historic event. It was a kind of summing up of the work we had done, starting in Geneva and then going through Reykjavik and Washington to Moscow. It was not an easy path. Its first major milestone was the Joint US-Soviet Statement which declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” and that “the two sides will...

  • On July 6, 2018 there was a meeting in Vienna concerning the JCPOA, or the Iran nuclear deal, and how to handle it after the U.S. withdrawal from the deal and the U.S. attempts to isolate Iran further and suffocate its 85 million people even more by trying to prevent it from selling its oil and simultaneously have Saudi Arabia increase its production. The participants were China, Russia, Germany, France and the UK and the meeting was chaired by the EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini. Here is a PressTV report about it. And here is the EU’s document that was produced at the meeting. According to TFF director, Jan Oberg, the major problems with this is that the EU, Russia and China have known for many months that President Trump would withdraw from the deal and also has an almost personal hate of the country and of...

  By Gunnar Westberg June 21, 2018 The North Korea – USA nuclear crisis should teach us several lessons regarding nuclear weapons: 1. Nuclear weapons do not prevent nuclear proliferation. In 1970, the nuclear weapon states accepted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT. In this treaty, they agree to negotiate the complete disarmament of their own nuclear weapons. They have – equally completely – disregarded this pledge and insist that they must retain nuclear weapons in order to prevent other countries from acquiring them. The North Korea example shows us that this does not work.   2. Nuclear weapons are contagious. The nuclear weapons states also insist, contrary to their pledge in the NPT, that they must keep their nukes “for their own security”. This provides an excuse for other states to acquire them. A small country such as North Korea, DPRK, has stronger reasons to build nuclear weapons than a...

Here is what the Guardian’s critic, Peter Bradshaw, has to say about it as film, as drama.  One wonders what role such a “Destiny Pictures” production has to do with handling and solving one of the most dangerous issues facing humanity – that of a country loaded with nuclear weapons telling a military dwarf that it should not have a single of these weapons? One wonders whether Mr. Trump, who during his long press conference after the meeting seemed very proud of having shown this on his iPad to the allegedly impressed Chairman Kim, sees this as a way of bonding? Whether it comes out of a reality  show master’s way of thinking – or it was made to impress Kim, alternatively threaten him into submission by a medium that is known to fascinate him: movies. At another level, we are here facing the complete intellectual decay of US international...

  June 19, 2018 • The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the leading information sources on a series of issues related to nuclear weapons, technologies, issues and doctrines. In conjunction with the Kim/Trump meeting in Singapore, the Bulletin produced this video conversation with Siegfried Hecker who is probably the American who knows most about North Korea’s nuclear programs and problems. On the link you can find a lot of other background resources related to this particular issue. One of several points Hecker makes is that the U.S. must change its approach to the whole issue and try to also work with others, such as Russia – which has a lot of knowledge and experience.     It’s about 27 minutes and, regrettably, the words of this world expert has been listened to by a few hundred (as of mid-June 2018) when thousands upon thousands ought to listen very very carefully....

  • Give the man a break. Donald Trump found out in Singapore that, as Churchill said, “Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War”. If war can be avoided by a warm, long, very private chat without advisers, with effusive body gestures and promises of a world stage when his opponent, Kim Jong Un, is invited to the White House, then Trump has showed the way. It was learning the hard way because a few months ago when Trump threatened to incinerate North Korea he met counter threats from North Korea that could have led to the deaths of 30 million people in South Korea alone, never mind what numbers might die in an attack on American troops stationed in Japan and Guam naval base. I have no proof but I do think Trump can make a grand peace with North Korea, unlike his predecessors. They too had the will but were...

  Commenting on PressTV on the occasion of the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, in Vienna confirming once again that Iran is in full compliance with the nuclear deal, the JCPOA, that the US withdrew from. Oberg argues that this is a defining moment for the Union: Either it is able to stand up for international law and it’s commitments vis-a-vis Iran – and that means not giving in to U.S. pressure to drop the deal – or the level of statesmanship is such that one must question whether the EU will survive in the longer run. See the video here.

Photo by Nadav Kander   By Marzhan Nurzhan The CTBTO Youth Group (CYG) holds its second international conference in Kazakh capital city Astana from August 28-30, 2018. The author is a CYG member from Kazakhstan, a convener of Abolition 2000 Youth Network and a PNND Coordinator for CIS countries. This article first appeared in The Astana Times on May 29, 2018 with the title ‘Kazakhstan’s Nuclear Legacy and Importance of CTBTO’. It is being reproduced with the author’s permission. – The Editor.   PRAGUE (IDN) – I am coming from Kazakhstan, the country which inherited around 1,500 nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union making it the 4th biggest nuclear arsenal in the world at the time. For almost half a century, from 1949 until 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests above and underground at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, known also as Semey polygon, in the eastern part...

A review of the evidence points to Israeli and MEK disinformation, not an open-and-shut case. By Gareth Porter May 25, 2018   Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at UN in 2012. (You Tube)   Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which has set the stage for another Iran crisis, has opened a new round of domestic political struggle, as Democrats in Congress, the anti-Trump television networks, and the tattered remains of the old anti-war movement try to push back. But that effort has a fatal weakness at its core. It concedes to Trump and opponents of the Iran deal an effective argument: that the Iranians have been lying when they say they’ve never had a covert nuclear weapons program. Originally published by The American Conservative here The theme of Iran’s duplicity has been the emotional core of the assault on the JCPOA....