'저는 그들의 땅을 지키기 위하여 싸웠던 인디안들의 이야기를 기억합니다. 백인들이 그들의 신성한 숲에 도로를 만들기 위하여 나무들을 잘랐습니다. 매일밤 인디안들이 나가서 백인들이 만든 그 길을 해체하면 그 다음 날 백인들이 와서 도로를 다시 짓곤 했습니다. 한동안 그 것이 반복되었습니다. 그러던 어느날, 숲에서 가장 큰 나무가 백인들이 일할 동안 그들 머리 위로 떨어져 말과 마차들을 파괴하고 그들 중 몇몇을 죽였습니다. 그러자 백인들은 떠났고 결코 다시 오지 않았습니다….' (브루스 개그논)





For any updates on the struggle against the Jeju naval base, please go to savejejunow.org and facebook no naval base on Jeju. The facebook provides latest updates.
Showing posts with label START. Show all posts
Showing posts with label START. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Text Fwd: U.S. trims its nuclear arsenal while upgrading production


* Text fwd from Frank Cordaro on Feb. 26, 2011
The Kansas City Star
Posted on Sat, Feb. 26, 2011 10:15 PM
U.S. trims its nuclear arsenal while upgrading production
By DONALD BRADLEY

The construction site of the new billion-dollar Honeywell plant in
south Kansas City is quite the head-turner.

Workers everywhere, trucks scurrying about like mice, monster earth
movers, cranes reaching to the sky and enough trailers to start a
retirement community. All on 185 acres inside a perimeter fence and
under a wind-whipped Old Glory.

But drive past the former bean field on Missouri 150 enough times and
the thought occurs: Kansas City produces parts for every nuclear
weapon now in our arsenal. The country is making more nuclear bombs,
has been building them virtually non-stop for 65 years, hasn’t used
one against an enemy since 1945, and a significant new arms reduction
treaty went into effect just this month.

Nine thousand warheads, about a quarter capable of being triggered
tomorrow, is a lot of product sitting around.

Any is too many, critics said. “Modernization” is a joke, just more of
the world-threatening, same-old, same-old madness.

Others counter that the world cannot “disinvent” the bomb. What the
country needs, they said, is to scrap the big nukes in the stockpile —
hardly a deterrent — for smaller, tactical ones that potential enemies
think we would actually use.

The $85 billion upgrade of our bomb-making infrastructure in Kansas
City with Honeywell and at other locations is occurring 50 years after
President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the
military-industrial complex and its “potential for the disastrous rise
of misplaced power.”

It’s also taking place two years after President Barack Obama told the
world in a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, that the United States
was committed to ridding itself of nuclear weapons.

“Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to
seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” he
said to the cheers of 20,000 people.

He had the backing of the so-called “Gang of Four” — former
secretaries of state George Shultz, William Perry and Henry Kissinger
and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, all foreign policy heavyweights — who
called in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2007 for worldwide nuclear
disarmament.

Then late last year, Obama won Senate approval of the New START
(Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). Under it, strategic nuclear missile
launchers will be cut in half in seven years. More than 100 missile
silos, bomber wings and submarine launch tubes will be taken off-line.

America’s immediately usable warheads will be halved to 1,550, with
the option of possibly jamming a few hundred more onto bombers.

So what happened? How did the administration get from Prague to that
soybean field in south Kansas City, where ever more non-nuclear
warhead components — the electronics, arming, fusing, firing packages
— will be churned out?

The answer, said experts, even those opposed to nuclear weapons, is
that no matter how many START treaties are ratified, complete
disarmament is unlikely to ever happen because the knowledge and
technology are in the open.

The realistic and responsible course now is to maintain a safe,
reliable deterrent to nuclear attack, they said.
More specifically, the experts go on, Obama needed Republican votes to
get New START approved, so he agreed to continue the expensive
modernization plan.

U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, in explaining his
vote on the Senate floor in December made no effort to make the deal
sound anything but quid pro quo:

“I will vote to ratify the New START treaty with Russia because it
leaves our country with enough nuclear warheads to blow any attacker
to kingdom come and because the president has committed to an $85
billion, 10-year plan to make sure that those weapons work.”

A major protest by Midwest Catholic Worker groups is scheduled for May
2 at the new Honeywell site. Frank Cordaro, a Des Moines anti-nuke
protester who has been arrested at the construction site, agrees a
deal was made.

“Obama needed the war mongrels to go along,” Cordaro said. “It was
easy to flim flam Americans because the public is so militarized, so
caught up in being an empire.”

But James Carafano, a defense expert for the Heritage Foundation, said
talk of a nuclear-free world was fantasy.

“Disarmament is like cops giving up their guns,” he said.

Noting that a nuclear blast over a major American city would kill
thousands and cost trillions, he said, “The consequences of getting it
wrong are too great.

“If you ask people if they want nuclear weapons to be safe and
reliable, they’re going to say yes. Old ones that may or may not work
are not a credible deterrent.”

Experts agree that Obama’s Prague speech was more global posturing
than realistic policy goal and that our nation is unlikely ever to
fold its top hand in the high stakes game of nuclear deterrent.

Uncertain shelf life

Since August 1945, when “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” ushered in the
nuclear age, the United States and the Soviet Union have spent
billions of dollars building and stockpiling nuclear weapons.

The U.S. arsenal peaked with about 30,000 warheads in the 1960s; the
Soviets topped out at about 40,000 in the 1980s.
Conventional wisdom is that a nuclear bomb has a shelf life. They go
bad ... maybe … we think. Since nuclear testing has been banned since
1991, it’s hard to know for sure.

The uncertainty has kept plants like Kansas City’s busy. The military
didn’t want to risk “duds,” so bombs routinely were refit with new
parts.

“We used to think parts wore out after 20 years or so,” said Steven
Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. “So we were
constantly dismantling and putting on new parts.”

Having even less confidence in their bombs, the Soviets assumed a
10-year shelf life.

Now, most experts think the U.S. components actually could be good for
a hundred years.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 didn’t change much, although
Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine decided against being nuclear powers
and turned their warheads over to Moscow.

Still, the nuclear club has grown, from the United States, Russia,
France, Britain and China originally, then India, Pakistan, Israel
and, most worrisome, North Korea.

Iran reportedly is enriching uranium but is believed to be some years
from its first warhead.

Owen Cote at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it may be good
politics to talk disarmament but the worry was that some weapons
states could agree to dismantle but then keep those parts close to
alert status.

“We can’t create conditions to get to zero,” Cote said.
Cordaro disagrees. Other countries are simply following the U.S. lead,
he argued.

“Those other countries are no threats to us,” he said. “They are only
aping us. They would stop if we would.”

Although anti-missile systems are being debated and deployed against
some nations, many believe the first nuclear attack on U.S. soil is
more likely from an enemy undeterred by what sits in our silos or
undersea-launch tubes.

The biggest worry is that a terrorist group, such as al-Qaida, could
lay hands on a black market nuke or create a radiation-spewing “dirty
bomb.” Even in that case, it would be hard to find a target at which
to fire nuclear weapons in response.

Terrorism is a poor man’s war, Cordaro noted. War is a rich man’s terrorism.

The modernizing effort

On Feb. 18, 1943, with the outcome of World War II unsettled, ground
was broken in Bear Creek Valley in rural Tennessee for a factory to
enrich plutonium. A month later, J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived in New
Mexico to discover that Los Alamos housing for his bomb designers
wasn’t ready, but the Army had arranged stays at dude ranches.


Sixty-five years later, those two facilities today remain vital to
America’s nuclear weapons infrastructure.

The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge will get $6 billion in
improvements and expansion as part of the modernization. The plant,
which employs about 6,000 workers, makes the “secondary” for bombs —
the part that makes them thermonuclear.


The Los Alamos National Laboratory, with 11,700 employees, is home to
the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility, which is
key to creating new plutonium pits, the “primary” components of
warheads. New facilities there will cost about $5 billion.

The rest of the modernization funding will go over time for smaller
facilities, clean-ups and for the new or refurbished weapons
themselves.

From 2000 to 2010, the Kansas City plant shipped nearly 1,000 MSAD
(mechanical safe arming detonator) kits, a safety component that
prevents accidental or unintended detonation of a nuclear warhead.

According to the National Nuclear Security Administration, in recent
years the plant, built during World War II to make engines for Navy
fighter planes, has evolved into “science-based manufacturing.”

Now the facility is under fire by current and former employees,
environmentalists and residents about issues of massive pollution and
illnesses that remain unresolved. A cleanup could cost hundreds of
millions of dollars.

Here’s a quirk about the new plant:

“Kansas City will be the only city in world that owns a weapons plant
— let alone a nuclear weapons plant,” said Chris Paine of the Natural
Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group.

“There is absolutely no reason to build this plant. This place will
have ponds and bike paths, a suburban monument to nuclear weapons.”

Jay Coghlan of Nukewatch said the Clinton administration considered
closing the Kansas City plant.

“This terrified Kansas City politicians, even though it made no sense
to build the new plant. They wanted to keep those jobs.”
Bombs at Whiteman

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, formed by
Manhattan Project veterans who started the Doomsday Clock, more than
9,000 warheads are stored at 18 locations in 12 states and six
European countries.
Today, about 2,700 are considered operational, 2,500 in reserve and
the rest awaiting dismantlement.

The biggest concentration of the operational nukes is at the Strategic
Weapons Facility Pacific at Bangor, Wash., which sends out Ohio-class
submarines operating in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The Air Force has about 500 warheads on long-range bombers, such as
the B-2A Spirits clustered at Whiteman Air Force Base east of Kansas
City.
An additional 450 or so warheads are on ballistic missiles in the
American West; the remainder at eight military bases spread through
Europe. The United States is the only country that deploys nuclear
weapons in other countries.

That means the push for more sophisticated weapons and delivery
systems will continue because, as if in response to the famous Rodney
King question, no, countries of the world cannot all get along.

But then doesn’t that mean that this country will forever be building
nuclear bombs?

Not forever, Carafano said.

“Some day the sun’s going to burn out.”

How many nukes?

The exact number of nuclear weapons is not known, as each country
guards the number closely. The Federation of American Scientists
estimates that the global nuclear inventory is approximately 22,400.
Most are in possession by the United States or Russia.

12,000 Nukes in Russia’s arsenal
9,400 Nukes in the United States’ arsenal

To reach Donald Bradley, call 816-234-4182 or send e-mail to
dbradley@kcstar.com. Source: Federation of American Scientists

Monday, December 20, 2010

Text Fwd: Obama vows to pursue US missile defense plans

* Text sent from Bruce Gagnon on Dec. 19, 2010

Agence France-Presse

Obama vows to pursue US missile defense plans
December 18, 2010

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama vowed Saturday to pursue the deployment of US missile defense systems and rejected Russia's claim that doing so would justify withdrawing from a new nuclear arms control treaty.

"Regardless of Russia's actions in this regard, as long as I am president, and as long as the Congress provides the necessary funding, the United States will continue to develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect the United States, our deployed forces, and our allies and partners," he said.

Obama's strong message on an issue that has at times deeply angered Moscow came in a letter to top senators as his Republican foes called for killing the new Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty (START) over missile defense concerns.

Republicans have rallied behind an amendment by Republican Senator John McCain to strip out language in START's preamble tying offensive nuclear weapons to defensive systems.

The preamble is non-binding but, because it resulted from talks between Washington and Moscow, passing the amendment would have forced the accord back to the negotiating table, effectively killing the agreement.

The amendment would need nine of Obama's Democratic allies in the Senate to join all 42 Republicans to pass - meaning the measure was all-but-certain to go down to defeat.

Republicans have pointed to Russia's unilateral statement, when the treaty was signed by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in April, that a rise in US missile defenses could lead Moscow to back out of the accord.

Russia said reasons to quit the treaty under a clause saying that either side may do so if their national security is threatened "include a build-up" of US missile defenses "such that it would give rise to a threat to the strategic nuclear force potential of the Russian Federation."

"The United States did not and does not agree with the Russian statement," Obama said in the message, which the White House made public.

Republicans appeared to be caught off guard by the letter, which Democratic Senator John Kerry read to his colleagues, though McCain responded: "Presidents don't last forever, but binding treaties do."


Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
http://www.space4peace.org/
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

Thursday, July 22, 2010

[Text Fwd] [ Reply to Cordaro Hiroshima Day Vigil in Souix City.... (Links to DM and Omaha/STRATCOM observances)

* Text fwd from Frank Cordaro on July 22, 2010

Link to DM observance of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
http://groups.google.com/group/iowa-peace-list/browse_thread/thread/e51967e77acf9476


Link to Omaha/STRACTOM observance of Hiroshima/Nagasaki
http://groups.google.com/group/iowa-peace-list/browse_thread/thread/9755ce1e532f75ab


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gerald Iversen geraldiversen@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 21, 2010

What: Hiroshima Day Vigil
Date: Friday, Aug 6
Time: 11:30 a.m.
Place: Federal Building at 6th and Douglas Streets in Sioux City

The Siouxland Peace Coalition invites you to a vigil on Hiroshima Day
Friday, Aug. 6th, to raise awareness of the need for the U.S. to
ratify START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). The general public is
welcome to meet at 11:30 in front of the Federal Building at 6th and
Douglas Streets in Sioux City. After a brief visit to Senator
Grassley’s office to deliver a petition urging his support of START,
the group will demonstrate on the sidewalk until 12:30. Signs will be
provided.


Visit SiouxlandPeaceCoalition.com.

Contact person:
Gerald Iversen
geraldiversen@yahoo.com

712-274-2549 (Please leave a message.)

-----------------------------

Hiroshima Day Vigil Promotes START


The Siouxland Peace Coalition invites you to a vigil on Hiroshima Day,
Friday, August 6th to raise awareness of the need for the U.S. to
ratify START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty).

The general public is welcome to meet at 11:30 in front of the Federal
Building at 6th and Douglas Streets in Sioux City. After a brief visit
to Senator Grassley’s office to deliver a petition urging his support
of START, the group will demonstrate on the sidewalk until 12:30.
Signs will be provided.

Hiroshima Day commemorates August 6, 1945, when an American B-52
dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later another
atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

Representatives of the media are welcome. A spokesperson will be available.

For more information visit the coalition’s website at
SiouxlandPeaceCoalition.com.

Background information about the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki from Greg P. Guelcher, Associate Professor of History,
Morningside College

On August 6, 1945, an American B-52 bomber named Enola Gay lifted off
from the Pacific island of Tinian, flew to the city of Hiroshima,
Japan, and without warning around 9:15 a.m. dropped a new and vastly
deadlier bomb on its unsuspecting inhabitants. Hiroshima itself was
obliterated within minutes; what the shockwaves didn't destroy fell
victim to the massive fires that followed. The human toll was
staggering: some 70,000 men, women, and children were killed
instantly, while many more (another 130,000 or so by 1950) would
perish as the result of their injuries or illnesses, especially
mysterious radiation sickness. Even fetuses still in the womb were
affected adversely.

Three days later, on August 9 (and only a day after a full report from
a devastated Hiroshima had finally reached Japan's leaders in Tokyo),
the U.S. dropped a second, unannounced atomic bomb on the port city of
Nagasaki. Again, the human toll was astounding, with an estimated
70,000 killed in the explosion, and an equal number dying of radiation
sickness within five years. The second atomic bomb had been moved up
from its originally scheduled date, due to fears of overcast weather
later on.

While the bombings did, in fact, help speed Japan's leaders to
surrender, among scholars today there's still great debate about both
the motives for dropping the bombs (intimidating the Soviet Union is
one commonly accepted rationale, for instance), as well as the actual
necessity of having dropped such fearsome weapons on a country that
was already arguably on the brink of total collapse.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Text Fwd: START places no limit on US missile defense: Clinton, Gates

* Text sent from Bruce Gagnon on May 21, 2010

START places no limit on US missile defense: Clinton, Gates
Google
(AFP)

WASHINGTON — The new START arms control treaty imposes no limits on US missile defense weapons despite concerns voiced by Russia, President Barack Obama's deputies told lawmakers on Tuesday.

At a senate hearing on the START treaty, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates sought to counter criticism from some Republicans that the agreement could undermine US plans for missile defense.

"Nothing in the treaty will constrain our missile defense efforts," Clinton said.

The United States was "not bound" by a Russian statement opposing missile defense and had declared plans "to continue improving and deploying its missile defense systems," she said.

Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev signed the new arms reduction deal in an elaborate ceremony in Prague in April.

But the treaty must be ratified by the Senate, where it faces Republican opposition.

Republican Senator Bob Corker expressed skepticism, saying Moscow had a different interpretation of how the treaty applied to missile defense.

"Shouldn't it trouble us that, before we ever get started, that each of the countries has a very different opinion of what we've negotiated as it relates to missile defense?" Corker said.

Russia has said it reserves the right to withdraw from the treaty if Washington presses ahead with missile defense systems in a way that Moscow opposes.

But Gates dismissed concerns about Russian opposition, saying Moscow has always objected to anti-missile programs.

The defense secretary, a Washington veteran and former CIA director, said "the Russians have hated missile defense ever since the strategic arms talks began in 1969."

"And so the notion that this treaty has somehow focused this antagonism on the part of the Russians, toward missile defense, all I would say is it's the latest chapter in a long line of Russian objections to our proceeding with missile defense," he said.

He said Russia had always opposed it probably "because we can afford it and they can't."

Gates cited major funding in next year's budget to bolster US missile defense systems as proof that "we are putting our money where our beliefs are."

The budget for 2011 sets aside 19.9 billion dollars for missile defense radars, interceptors and launch sites.

The testimony came as a new study questioned the Pentagon's portrayal of the anti-missile program, saying it was based on "technical myths."

Two university scientists reviewed 10 tests of the SM-3 "kill vehicle," designed to take out ballistic missiles, and concluded that the interceptor succeeded in directly hitting mock warheads in only one or two cases, according to the latest issue of "Arms Control Today."

But the US Missile Defense Agency on Tuesday rejected the study findings, calling them "flawed, inaccurate and misleading."

Gates and Clinton were joined at the hearing by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, who also told senators that the treaty would have no impact on missile defense programs.

Clinton acknowledged treaty language that bars the conversion or use of offensive missile launchers for anti-missile interceptors.

But she said the US military never planned to use those existing launchers and instead wanted to build smaller, cheaper missile defense silos.

The START treaty would significantly cut US and Russian nuclear weapons to about 1,550 each.

That figure represents a 74 percent reduction from the arsenal size agreed in the original START deal, signed in 1991, which expired at the end of 2009.

Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)