Nuclear

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Tehran Dec 9, 2014 The First Conference on ”World Against Violence and Extremism” is inaugurated here in Tehran this morning by President Rouhani. His idea was endorsed unanimously by the UN General Assembly last year. This PressInfo was written before I came to Iran. The last round of negotiations between Iran and the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council + Germany about the future possibility that Iran would acquire nuclear weapons should have resulted in no agreement but a 7 months postponement. It is a waste of everybody’s time in one of the most urgent issues on the international agenda. An a-symmetric conflict Here are 5 countries bristling with thousands of nuclear weapons themselves and planning to spend trillions of dollars on more and more sophisticated nukes – unanimous in telling a country that does not have nukes to not acquire them: ”What we can’t live without...

TFF wants to express its gratitude to Yoshikazu Sakamoto who served for many years as TFF Associate. Prefatory Note This post is dedicated to my remembrance of Yoshi Sakamoto who died recently. Yoshi was a deeply valued friend and an important public intellectual in Japan who exerted a strong influence on the post-war generation. His political orientation, rejecting extremes of right and left, while questioning the militarist premises of the Cold War and Japan’s willingness to become America’s Asian poodle, gave him a distinctive political profile. I am sharing these words of appreciation, and hope that anyone from Japan who comes across this text will contact me, especially if they have a way of putting me in touch with either Yoshi’s family or Japanese media. I would like to believe that ‘an American appreciation’ of Professor Sakamoto would be of interest to those who knew and admired him. I first...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> Just before former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on Saturday made his stunning criticism of the West that, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it had engaged in “triumphalism”, I was in Moscow. Everyone I talked to said the West had set out to humiliate Russia (not to help rebuild it as it did in Germany after the Second World War). Gorbachev has long been the West’s pet political darling, (although the New York Times didn’t report this speech) – for undoing the straitjacket that enveloped Soviet society, for allowing the reunification of Germany and for being the major contributor to ending the Cold War. So the question is will the West listen to him now? Will it listen to his point that the expansion of NATO has made Russia feel threatened? Will it understand that there is a good reason why he and an overwhelming majority of Russians...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> President Vladimir Putin is often painted as an ogre in the world’s media. The seemingly eternal president of Russia has an iron grip on his nation and a foreign policy to match. Yet a large majority of Russians give him their support. Is it his early economic success? Or is it because of a new stability? Or the nation’s growing self-respect after the ignominious years that followed the demise of the Soviet Union? Or is it a sense of besieged defensiveness because of the advantage the West undoubtedly took of Russia after that demise. The answer is a bit of all these. Few in the outside world seem to talk much about what happened after President Boris Yeltsin pushed aside Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union. Few recall the political and economic upheavals of that time and why the stability of Putin’s governance is welcomed by...

to tell the world that we must stop denying, stop taking huge risks and stop wasting incomprehensibly large sums so much needed for human welfare instead. A nuclear-free world is eminently possible. And better. The nuclear states are committed to it through the Non-Proliferation Treaty and countless statements and UN resolutions. But they deny their responsibility. There’s been enough documented technical and human failures with nuclear weapons. We ought to be scared. Most media shed light on potential nuclear weapons, those Iran for instance don’t have. That’s the proliferation problem. But non-existing nukes can’t kill everything we love. Existing nukes can. That’s the problem of possession. And then there is state terrorism. Remember, until 9/11 nuclear arsenals were part of the ‘balance of terror’? Terrorism is the deliberate wounding or killing of innocent people to achieve a political purpose and to instill fear. No nuclear weapon can be used without...

By Gunnar Westberg ”Ukraine is going to make nuclear weapons. You’ll see. There is strong support in the parliament. All the intercontinental missiles in the Soviet Union were made in Ukraine, and there are at least 25 of them left. And we have uranium. And we have the know-how. Just wait, you’ll see!” So said an officer in the Ukrainian army whom I met about a month ago. This prediction, that Ukraine is going to make nukes, can also be found in some Western news media. Fortunately, this is not going to happen. There is no uranium of weapons grade in the country. To produce a sufficient amount of high grade uranium thousands of centrifuges for enrichment are needed. Only Pakistan could sell them, as was done to Iran, but both the USA and Russia will stop this trade. Ukraine could

/10/janoberg.jpg”>[/caption] Lund, Sweden October 7, 2014 Part A – Some principles (yesterday) here This two-part PressInfo offers a pro-peace perspective on the present war on ISIS in Iraq and Syria. First some principles to stimulate another discourse, another way of thinking that is not militarist – and then the concrete proposals below – 27 in all for your deliberation, discussion with friends and perhaps to share through your social and other media. The proposals are not numbered – there is no linearity, some of it can be done simultaneously. How to make the bombing and wars irrelevant Stop the financing of ISIS – sadly it is non-democratic allies of the West – Saudi-Arabia, Qatar, UAE etc – that seem to pay its bills. Joe Biden apologised – for being truthful. Allegedly, ISIS has an income of US$ 3 million per day from oil resources they now control. Oil fields should...

By David Krieger and others A long list of prominent individuals has signed, a number of organizations will be promoting next week, and you can be one of the first to sign right now, a petition titled “Call For Independent Inquiry of the Airplane Crash in Ukraine and its Catastrophic Aftermath.” The petition is directed to “All the heads of states of NATO countries, and of Russia and the Ukraine, to Ban-ki Moon and the heads of states of countries on the UN Security Council.” And it will be delivered to each of them. The petition reads . . continue here. And please sign it!

Af Birgitte Rahbek Trykt i Kristeligt Dagblad 11. juli 2014 Lige fra den syriske krigs begyndelse har det været et standende emne, om krigen kunne vindes – og dermed standses – ved at sende våben til oprørerne eller ved at gribe ind med flyveforbudszoner eller direkte intervention. På et meget tidligt tidspunkt gjorde NATO det klart, at en intervention ikke kunne komme på tale; det er der megen fornuft i, bortset fra at det måske havde været klogere ikke at sige det højt, for det fremmede ikke just det syriske regimes fredsvilje. I mellemtiden har den overvejende holdning været, at Vesten hverken kan eller skal gribe ind, og at vejen til en fredelig løsning går gennem forhandlinger. FN har to gange sat erfarne diplomater til at føre forhandlingerne, men uden at de har kunnet komme igennem med en fredsplan, især fordi der blandt vestlige ledere og mellemøstlige autokrater hersker en...

By TFF’s Board Lund, Sweden August 6, 2014 – Hiroshima Day The Nuclear Age – risk of omnicide and our new responsibilities Nuclear weapons came into the world and were used for the first time in 1945. Their specific feature as weapons of mass destruction and “omnicide” – able to kill us all – has changed what it means to be alive on this earth and to be responsible for its existence. Until nuclear weapons, human beings could not decide whether or not to end project humankind and project planet earth. Today we know that the arsenals and missile projection methods are such that a few decision-makers, or a technical malfunction, could blow up enough of the world to make the living – if any – envy the dead. We live in the Nuclear Age. It means living with the permanent daily threat of extinction.

Introduction He was a tall man and a great man, a visionary, pacifist, civil resister, educator and philosopher. He took life more seriously than most and he could be playful and fun like a child. His life’s guiding principle was ”Engage in your time!” and while he wrote and talked a lot he also did it. His name was Aage Bertelsen, he was born in Denmark in 1901 and died on August 15, 1980. Bertelsen’s imprint on history is two-fold. First, with his wife Gerda he was a prime mover of one of the groups, the Lyngby Group, which organised the rescue of altogether 7.220 Danish Jews into safety in Sweden in October 1943 during the German occupation of Denmark – more here. The Lyngby Group – Lyngby is north of Copenhagen – got about 1.000 of these in safety by organising their nightly transport onboard small fisher boats over the Sound between Denmark...

Comments by Hans-C. von Sponeck Former UN Assistant Secretary General, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq & TFF Associate Hearing at the UK House of Commons, London Intro 1. HoC/HoL have repeatedly held Iraq hearings as have British NGOs such as CASI (Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq) and Stop the War Coalition/UK. In Europe these are considered models for responsible public action. 2. My contribution at this hearing is not about the crimes of dictatorship or the details of Iraqi suffering. For both well researched data is available. The objective of my participation is to make two detailed observations about externally-driven Iraq politics during the period 1990-2014. Observation 1 3. Today’s tragic Iraq reality can only be understood if the additive impact of the years before and the years following the US/UK Governments’ illegal invasion and occupation is fully taken into account.