Nuclear Abolition is Focus of UN Meetings in New York
Photograph Source: xiquinhosilva – CC BY 2.0
All this week, professional dreamers who insist on the abolition of nuclear weapons have been meeting at the United Nations in New York. The very upbeat gathering was the 3rd “Meeting of States Parties,” a treaty-speak for the 73 UN member states that ratified the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
What’s so extraordinary about the TPNW, in the words of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons which helped shepherd the treaty through the UN negotiating process and won a Nobel Prize for it, is that “it is the first globally applicable treaty that categorically prohibits the most destructive, inhumane instruments of war ever created.”
The prohibition applies only to states that ratify, so the U.S. can continue its 80-year H-bomb frenzy of radioactive pollution and global bomb threats — known quaintly as “deterrence” — a collapsed charade of terror and unimaginable risk-taking that most of the world has renounced.
Among the 73 “states parties” at this week’s meetings are major players on the world stage including Brazil. There are also over a dozen treaty “signatory states” from the Americas — putting the USA’s absence to shame — including Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Chile, Bolivia, Cuba, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Combined, the TPNW’s parties and signers total 94, one-half of the United Nations’ 193 members. This treaty is a colossal accomplishment of common sense, defogging and popular good will which has triumphed over relentless public and private pressure, threats and backroom villainy by nuclear weapons states that pretend their doomsday devices still serve a necessary function.
While 122 UN member voted in 2017 to adopt the TPNW, nicknamed the “nuclear ban treaty,” and global enthusiasm for it is most pronounced in the developing world whose economies, environments, and health statistics would improve following the renunciation of their civilization-ending weapons by the increasingly isolated nuclear-armed states.
The treaty’s international appeal can be understood by reading its preamble:
Reaffirming that any use of nuclear weapons would be abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience…
Cognizant that the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons cannot be adequately addressed, transcend national borders, pose grave implications for human survival, the environment, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations, and have a disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation.…
This year, Nukewatch co-director Kelly Lundeen is in New York leading a small delegation of colleagues. Their particular focus among NGO side events is Article 6 of the treaty, which requires providing adequate medical care, rehabilitation and psychological support for individuals affected by the use or testing of nuclear weapons. Widespread radioactive fallout from Bomb testing has harmed millions of individuals in the Marshall Islands and Nevada (bombed by the US), Australia (UK), Algeria (France), Kazakhstan (USSR), and Lop Nor in the Gobi desert (China).
Article 6 is partly where the 3rd MSP’s dreaming comes in, because the governments responsible for the bomb testing’s radioactive poisoning, maiming, and debilitation of individuals even in their own countries, have so far refused to sign on.
This belligerent scofflaw gangsterism on the part of nuclear weapons states grows more odious, fraudulent, and transparently absurd with every new ascension of another TPNW state party.
Today, D. Trump shoots his mouth off about nuclear disarmament, so the craziness of what Rex Tillerson called the “fucking moron” might accidentally result in something with a shred of value.
Does anyone still believe that “nuclear deterrence” policy retains validity? Considering just the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one knows Western nuclear weapons have always been rationalized as the “deterrent” that kept Russia from taking military action in Europe. This fraud can be abandoned.
Another grim and mortifying reason that nuclear weapons can be abandoned is that they are unnecessary for war-making powers bent on mass destruction. Today’s photographs of a rubblized Gaza, and 2003 photos of the rubblized streets of Baghdad, show nuclear bomb-like devastation caused by modern Israeli and U.S. “conventional” explosives. The new chemical bombs are so devastating that nuclear attacks are stupidly redundant, only make the rubble bounce, and can be trashed.
A Single Drone Can Turn the “Peaceful Atom” Into World War 3
March 6, 2025
Getty Images and Unsplash+.
Vladimir Putin right now has in his sights nearly 300 pre-deployed atomic weapons set to easily launch a radioactive apocalypse with a single drone strike.
He may already have crashed an early warning into the sarcophagus at Chernobyl.
And taken as a whole, the “Peaceful Atom” lends a terrifying reality to Donald Trump’s Oval Office threat of an impending World War 3.
Some 180 operational “Peaceful Atom” reactors now operate throughout Europe. There are 93 more in the US, 19 in Canada, two in Mexico.
Putin, or anyone else of his ilk, would need precisely one technician with one weaponized drone to turn any “peaceful” nuke into a radioactive apocalypse.
When Donald Trump brought Ukraine’s Volodymir Zelensky into the Oval Office to accuse him of flirting with “World War 3,” atomic reactors were among the specifics he failed to cite.
As of today, more than 50 commercial nuclear power plants are considered operable in France. Another 130+ operate in Belarus; Belgium; Bulgaria; the Czech Republic; Finland; Hungary; the Netherlands; Romania; Slovakia; Slovenia; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland; Ukraine; the UK (Germany, Italy and Lithuania have gone nuke-free).
Six reactors are under unstable Russian control at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia; two more are in Kursk, now a hotly contested war zone. Russia has a further three dozen.
Each could blanket the globe with atomic radiation, as has Chernobyl Unit 4 since it exploded on April 26, 1986.
The still-hot Chernobyl core could explode yet again.
Europe has collectively spent more than $2 billion to cover that core with a giant sarcophagus, the world’s largest movable structure.
On February 14, 2025, it was struck by a military drone.
Putin denies ordering the hit. His supporters say it could have been a “false flag.” But the drone itself was of an Iranian design widely used by the Russians.
On-going maintenance at Chernobyl has been conflicted and highly suspect, especially as impacted by the Russian invasion. After decades of denial, nuke supporters admit that what’s left of Chernobyl #4 could explode again. A definitive 2007 study by the Russian Academy of Sciences put the downwind human death toll at more than 985,000…and rising.
Three melt-downs and four explosions at American-designed reactors at Fukushima have raised the stakes. Caused by an earthquake and tidal wave, their lost cores still send unfathomable quantities of radioactive poisons into the Pacific, with no end in sight.
Both Fukushima and Chernobyl have released far more radioactive cesium and other deadly isotopes than did the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No western insurer will gamble against the likelihood of a new catastrophe caused by natural disasters, faulty designs, operator error, or acts of terror…drone-inflicted or otherwise.
Even without drone attacks, America’s 21st century reactor projects are catastrophic economic failures. Two at VC Summer, South Carolina, are dead, at a cost of $9 billion. Two more at Vogtle, Georgia, came in years behind schedule, billions over budget and completely incapable of competing with renewables. Talks of reviving shut reactors like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Michigan’s Palisades and Duane Arnold in Iowa all depend on huge federal subsidies to cover vastly inflated market prices.
Parallel projects in France, Britain and Finland are also very late and far beyond budget.
Soaring costs and lagging production schedules have already killed the first order from NuScale, the first licensed US producer of Small Modular Reactors.
No significant supply from SMRs can be realistically expected in less than a decade. None can be protected from drone attacks.
But the billions SMR (Silly Mythological Rip-offs) backers want to squander on this pre-failed technology will help keep Europe dependent on Putin’s gas.
Germany has shut all its reactors, as have Italy and Lithuania. Putin’s war has destabilized their fossil fuel supply, especially complicating Germany’s transition to 100% renewables, still likely within the next decade.
Corporate hype will not can’t deliver any new nukes, big or small, that can compete with wind, solar, battery backup or increased efficiency, all of whose cost projections continue to plummet.
And no explosion at a wind turbine or solar panel will ever cause a radioactive apocalypse.
But whoever attacked the Chernobyl sarcophagus has made it clear that as long as atomic reactors continue to operate, World War 3 is just a drone strike away.
We Urgently Need a Global Peace Movement to Combat Climate Change and Avoid Nuclear Apocalypse
Image by Valeriia Miller.
Reading all the news in my temporary flat at Cambridtge University, where my wife is on a year’s sabbatical leave, I’m able to view all the slaughter in the world and the chaos, increasingly blatant presidential power-grabbing and corporate influence in the US with a certain degree of detachment. That has made me think that it is time for a reassessment of the whole international political situation we’ve been mired in since the end of World War II.
These days seem so reminiscent of 1938, or even 1913, those years leading up to the two World Wars, when there was a grim, seemingly inevitable slog towards war in Europe and, in the case of WWII, also in the western Pacific. During both those antebellum times there were interlocking webs of mutual assistance treaties that had been created as bulwarks against a war, premised on the notion that if attacking a weak country would mean going to war against a number of countries bound by treaty to come to that country’s assistance, such an initial attack would not happen.
In the end, that idea failed catastrophically and in fairly short succession. Instead of preventing war, such treaties instead assured that any first attack would spread like the spark of a prairie fire that under dry climate conditions, or, in a political context, an environment of mutual distrust and paranoia, spreads out of control. In a span of just 31 years during the first half of the 20th Century, that resulted in a total of 85-107 million civilian and military deaths — 70-85 million of these occurring in WWII, and 15-22 million in WWi.
With the benefit of hindsight, I have to say it looks like the tired trope that WWII happened because British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased Adolf Hitler, has it wrong. Chamberlain was mindful of the incredible destructive power of the modern military war machines of the major powers in the late ‘30s and was trying to prevent a war from happening. He failed not because he was naive but because the network of treaties obliged Britain and France to go to war against Germany once Hitler and Stalin attacked Poland which then meant a war across virtually all of Europe and in its colonial possessions. Similarly, in 1914, a massive war was assured by the interlocking mutual assistance treaties among the European powers, who ended up having to go to war over a single anarchist’s assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne since not responding would have besmirched the honor of those bound by the treaties.
But surely both those wars could have been avoided and over 100 million lives saved — 100 million men, women and children!. As war clouds began to loom on the horizon both times, the governments of the various potential combatants should have held a grand meeting and worked out a rational solution to their disagreements, grievances, fears and perceived threats. Doing so would not have been seen by the populations of the nations as appeasement but as cause for relief.
In today’s world, where we have incomparably more destructive weapons that would make a global conflict vastly more lethal, with death tolls numbered in the billions, not millions, and could potentially wipe out what passes for “civilization,” quite possibly humanity, and even potentially life on Earth. (The total tonnage of explosives used in all of WWII, including the two atomic bombs dropped by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was 3 megatons. Since the largest thermonuclear bomb in the US nuclear arsenal at present, the B83 is 1.2 megatons, that means just three of these bombs, each designed to be delivered by a low-flying B-1 bomber moving at supersonic speed, would alone significantly exceed the destructive power of all weapons used by all sides in WWII. And there would be hundreds or even thousands of nuclear bombs used in a global nuclear war, or even in a war between two of the larger nuclear nations. )
Back in the most scary days of the Cold War and nuclear arms race, British philosopher and Nobel Peace Laureate Bertrand Russell, in calling for nuclear disarmament, was widely linked to the protest chant “Better Red than Dead!” Though he insisted it wasn’t his phrase, he said he agreed with its rationality. Certainly in the era of nuclear weapons its opposite, “Better dead than Red,” makes no sense at all, since opposing launching a nuclear war is not an act of individual courage, but rather of mass murder/suicide. Meanwhile, the problem with mutual assistance treaties is that they automate the decision to go to war once one country attacks another that is protected by such a pact. No matter the reason for the invasion, the signers all are bound to join the fray. That is unacceptable madness where nuclear weapons are involved.
Given this reality, and the numbers of human beings who would die in even a limited war between two nuclear nations, it is time for the nations of Europe and the Asia-Pacific and the United States, to come together in a global conference to de-escalate the rhetoric, the threats, and the paranoia and to work out a way to get along. The starting point is a global ceasefire in all conflicts and the calling of a global peace conference. The people of the world need to demand this of their leaders.
There is, we know, a crisis facing humanity that is much bigger than any crisis faced by individual nations. A crisis of survival that while it may not be felt yet or acknowledged by many, is inexorably approaching. That is the climate catastrophe of global heating which will make the world unlivable at worst, and certainly incapable of supporting even the current population of 8.31 billion people alive today.
That crisis is daunting already and will become increasingly daunting as the years slip by with no concerted global action to address it. Humanity has thus far done little and in many cases has been slipping backwards, particularly in the US. In fact quite the opposite, the nations of the world together spent $2.1 trillion on war and preparation for war in 2024 and are on track to spend more this year even if a major war doesn’t break out.
The US, by conservative estimates, spent $811 billion that year, almost three times China, the second biggest arms spender at $298 billion. America’s arms spending also exceeds the spending of the next nine biggest military spenders, including China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea.
it is thus incumbent on the US, the country with the largest and most powerful military the world has ever known—one which enjoys the most geographically protected location, bounded as it is by thousands of miles of ocean separating it from countries that could even contemplate attacking it—to take the first step in moving towards a world without war.
How such a winding down of the threat of war can be worked out at the United Nations remains to be seen. But the first task, which would set things moving in the right direction, would be to end the very dangerous war between Ukraine and Russia, and the Israeli war on Gaza. and the West Bank.
Both these conflicts should be resolvable. In the case of Ukraine, it is clear that Russia invaded Ukraine, but it is also clear that the invasion of Ukraine was driven by a legitimate fear Russia — a nation repeatedly attacked over its history by powerful nations to its west — had of the US-promoted drive to sign up nations that were formerly under the control of the Soviet Union or were part of the old Soviet Union, bringing them under the protection of NATO and even placing US military equipment and nuclear weapons and delivery systems at bases in those countries near to or even bordering Russia, and was pushing to do the same with Ukraine, a former soviet (state) of the USSR.
There had been a golden opportunity, with the 1991 collapse of the Communist government of the USSR and its dissolution into the Russian Federation and a group of smaller new independent states. At that point Russia, whose economy was in collapse, would have welcomed being brought into the European Union and NATO (the military pact created expressly to “contain” the USSR), but the US was not interested in doing that, so it didn’t happen.
Even Henry Kissinger, the hardline Secretary of State and national security advisor to Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, a committed anti-Communist and no soft-hearted peacenik, at that historical inflection point in world history, had argued against the US “taking advantage” of Russian weakness to expand NATO and against continuing with the “containment strategy” of the Cold War. Instead of listening to him, a series of US presidents beginning with Bill Clinton and on through Joe Biden did just that, with the result that Russia recovered economically and rearmed in response to the threat posed by NATO and turned towards a increasingly powerful ally, China, leading to the situation we have today.
“Stupid’ is the only word to apply to US policy since the Reagan-Gorbachev summit that brought an end to the Cold War and the only major nuclear disarmament agreement of that frightening era.
With Russia having invaded and conquered 20% of Ukraine and with the US and a number of major NATO allies having provided Ukraine with over a billion dollars’ worth of advanced weaponry to combat Russian troops and even to launch missiles and drones deep into Russian territory, it will be difficult now to get back to a condition of mutual trust, but it must be done. And again, it has to be the US that takes the lead. It is not the US that is threatened, it is the European countries that remember being attacked by Germany (and in Poland’s case, the Germany and the Soviet Union) in 1939, and it is Russia, attacked by France in 1812 and by Germany in 1941-45 ad that the we were threatening with nuclear missiles and in nuclear-capable bombers and supersonic fighter bombers placed in NATO countries throughout the Cold War, and that was having NATO bases placed in countries right on its borders in the more recent 1991-2022 period.
So let’s, as citizens of the US, start letting our government — Senators, Representatives and President Trump and the mass media — know that we want an honest peace in Europe. The US and the European nations of NATO need to offer an end to all the sanctions that have been plaguing Russia in return for an immediate ceasefire, a neutral an independent Ukraine, recognition of the majority Russian regions of eastern Ukraine as either an autonomous state or as part of Russia, following an internationally supervised plebiscite, and a dismantling of the anachronistic NATO, with the proviso that NATO could be revived if Russia were to return to hostilities against Ukraine. In return, Russia would be invited to become part of the European Economic Community.
Turning to the Gaza war, the solution is relatively simple: That festering sore of a captive and subjugated Palestinian population under the thumb of the Israeli state has been allowed to go on for way too long. Again its roots go back to the Cold War that followed World War II, which saw the US adopt and bankroll the new state of Israel founded in 1948 as a reliable ally in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East and North Africa at a time that the Arab nations and the Persian nation of Iran were trying to rid themselves of the colonial bonds and legacy of France and the UK. So important to the US was Israel during that era of US-USSR global rivalry that Washington allowed Israel to establish a theocratic apartheid and specifically Jewish state, with Palestinians suffering political exclusion, second-class status, pogroms, property expropriation, and expulsions.
All that abuse of a captive people has to end in order for peace to come to that powder-keg region. The US alone has the power to stop it. Israel’s genocidal leveling of Gaza over the last two years had been perpetrated largely using the planes, howitzers, tanks, rockets, bombs and diplomatic cover provided by the United States. If the Trump administration and Congress were to cut off those weapons and the spare parts needed to keep American planes flying, Israel would have to back off. The US could demand that Jewish Israeli settlers who been allowed to expropriate and move into territory in the conquered and Israeli-occupied West Bank must be compelled to return stolen lands, IDF forces would have to leave Palestinian territory, and a major redevelopment program to enable the creation of a viable Palestinian state would have to be undertaken.
After those two conflicts are resolved, the world can move on to solving other smaller conflicts, and proceed with a phased reduction by all countries of their outsized military forces, beginning with the US, which should offer an immediate unilateral 25% reduction in its military budget, including offering to a negotiate major reduction in its and Russias’s still absurdly huge nuclear stockpiles. (Russia has 5977 nuclear weapons and the US has 5428 — numbers so large that if even a significant percent of them were used by only one country in a successful first-strike, would destroy both countries and much of the world.)
The time for such action to move towards global peace is now!
President Trump claims he wants peace, both in Ukraine and in Gaza, but he’s going about it wrong. It’s not “Peace through American strength” that the world needs; it’s leadership towards global peace through example by the world’s most powerful nation“ that is called for at this historic time. And that will only happen if the American people, many of whom are fed up with massive military spending of needed funds, demand it.
Then we can really start to confront the real enemy of mankind: climate apocalypse.
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