Nuclearism

Today, Ivana Nikolic Hughes, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, NAPF, sent us this message: Our determination to carry on David’s legacy through NAPF and beyond is even stronger. For me personally, it will be impossible to ever fill his shoes, but deeply meaningful to at least try to do so.  The family has written a beautiful obituary that you can read here.  Also, as a reminder of David’s many, many, many accomplishments, contributions, and more, please see here.   In the coming months, there will be opportunities to celebrate David’s life and example, and we will keep you posted on them. In sympathy, Ivana Ivana Nikolić Hughes, Ph.D.President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation David – one of the world’s leading nuclear abolition advocates – was with TFF since 1992 – you can see most of his writings for TFF here. In addition to my gratitude for several personal encounters, including...

Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many.  The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy. I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen US Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United...

© Sputnik / Maksim Blinov Russian President Vladimir Putin delivers his annual address to the Federal Assembly, including lawmakers of the State Duma, members of the Federation Council, regional governors and other officials, in Moscow, Russia, on February 21, 2023. Dmitry Trenin March 8, 2023 The West’s failed Ukraine strategy has empowered the Global Majority to reject US domination In his recent landmark address to Russia’s parliament, President Vladimir Putin cited the war in Ukraine and US/NATO involvement in the conflict as the main reason for his decision to “suspend” Moscow’s participation in the 2010 New START Treaty on strategic nuclear weapons. Putin also suggested that Russia should be ready to resume nuclear testing. Effectively, this announcement, promptly turned into law by the Russian parliament, means a formal end to the long-ailing institutions of strategic arms control that began over 50 years ago. If New START is followed by the...

President Bush and Russian President Yeltsin announce the end of the cold war during a press conference at Camp David, February 1, 1992. Source: Bush Library on Twitter @Bush41Library. Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton February 7, 2023 Russian President Proposed Far-Reaching Nuclear Reductions, Bush Not So Sure U.S. ambassador on Yeltsin: Russians “want a tsar with a common touch” Russian leaders sensitive to Ukrainian concerns but saw Ukraine as the “main destabilizing factor” Washington D.C., January 30, 2023 – The George H.W. Bush administration was reluctant to embrace the “relations of deep mutual trust and alliance” proposed by the newly independent Russian Federation and its leader, Boris Yeltsin, in early 1992, according to declassified U.S. documents published today by the National Security Archive. The Bush administration’s cautious management of U.S.-Soviet relations at the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 had focused primarily on command and control of the remaining Soviet...

Baher Kamal, Human Wrongs Watch January 23, 2023 Or the perversities of the nuclear age priorities. We could help hundreds of millions of children with a fraction of the money that goes into warfare and nukes As if the 100 billion dollars that the United States has so far provided to Ukraine in both weapons and aid were not enough, the US has now started to install in Europe its brand new, more destructive nuclear warheads. The US 100 billion dollars are to be added to all the weapons and aid that 40 Washington’s ‘allies’ –Europe in particular– have been sending to Ukraine since it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. The US spending on the Ukrainian war in less than a year amounts to the desperately needed funding that the United Nations require to partially alleviate some of the horrifying suffering of over one billion human beings over...

Kenny Stancil November 28th, 2022 This escalation of U.S. hostility comes just days after the Biden administration released a Nuclear Posture Review that nonproliferation advocates said makes catastrophe more, rather than less, likely. Originally posted on Consortium News on October 31st 2022 here In what critics are calling a “dangerous escalation,” the United States is reportedly preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China. “The ability to deploy U.S. Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the U.S. Air Force told “Four Corners,” a television program of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), on Sunday. Becca Wasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, told ABC that “having bombers that could range and potentially attack mainland China could be very important in sending a...

By Connor Echols October 17, 2022 A recent piece in Foreign Affairs revealed that Kyiv and Moscow may have had a tentative deal to end the war all the way back in April. Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April, according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs. “Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.” Originally published at Responsible Statecraft on September 2, 2022 The news highlights the impact of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s efforts to stop negotiations, as journalist Branko Marcetic noted on Twitter....

Jackie Cabasso September 8, 2022 Hypocrisy & outright lying by nuclear-armed states The 10th NPT Review Conference didn’t fail because it couldn’t produce a final document. It failed because the nuclear-armed states haven’t made good on their fundamental nuclear disarmament obligation under Article VI of the Treaty, undertaken 52 years ago, nor on the promises and commitments to action items that would lead to nuclear disarmament they agreed to in connection with the indefinite extension of the Treaty in 1995 and in the 2000 and 2010 final documents. Originally published at The peace and health blog on August 30, 2022 To the contrary, it’s almost as if these commitments have gone into reverse. All of the nuclear-armed states are diverting vast sums of human and economic resources by engaging in programs to qualitatively, and in some cases, quantitatively upgrade their nuclear arsenals; the role of nuclear weapons in “security” policies...

TFF Associate It’s tricky to oppose both sides of a war, and rarer even than supporting both sides. The weapons dealers support both sides. In obedience to their televisions, people all over the world spend a great deal of time expressing the opinions dished out by those televisions regarding a particular war that is far from the worst war at the moment. It is the war that creates the greatest risk of nuclear apocalypse, but that does not typically enter into the opinions. You cannot just state that you oppose both sides, because that will quite literally be understood by almost everyone as asserting the unrelated and ridiculous proposition that the two sides are identical, and that will be understood as outrageous propaganda on behalf of whichever side the listener opposes. So, you have to denounce specific outrages by Russia while in the same breath denouncing specific outrages by the...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to TFF@transnational.org or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...

Together We Are Wrong — by Mr Fish By Chris Hedges August 4, 2022 The massive expansion of NATO, not only in Eastern and Central Europe but the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia, presages endless war and a potential nuclear holocaust. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits, has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet. Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.  Originally published in The Chris Hedges Report on July 10, 2022 NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow, once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance. It will soon add Finland and Sweden. It bombed Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo. It launched wars in...

Arms Control Today June 30, 2022 On June 26, 1997, a group of 50 prominent foreign policy experts that included former senators, retired military officers, diplomats and academicians, sent an open letter to President Clinton outlining their opposition to NATO expansion. Stanley Resor, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Arms Control Association, spoke at the press conference announcing the letter, focusing on the arms control implications of expansion. Resor’s remarks and the group’s letter are printed below. Remarks by Stan Resor: A key, if not the key, U.S. interest in Russia is a rapid and substantial reduction in the tens of thousands of Russian strategic and tactical nuclear weapons and the hundreds of tons of nuclear material which are still deployed or stored throughout that nation some six years after the end of the Cold War. Progress towards these goals will require comprehensive and sustained cooperation between the...