Monday, July 31, 2023

It’s Always a ‘Difficult Decision,’ They Tell Us

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

Stanley Kunitz observed: “In a murderous time / the heart breaks and breaks / and lives by breaking.”

In the current murderous time, amid the dim media swirl, acuity arrived for some with the news that President Joe Biden had approved sending cluster munitions to Ukraine. For entrenched elites in Washington, using taxpayer money to shred the bodies of children and other civilians isn’t a big deal when there’s serious geopolitical work to be done.

The same White House that correctly put cluster munitions in the category of a war crime when Russia began using them in Ukraine last year is now saying they’re just fine — when the U.S. supplies them to an ally.

Top administration officials have been quick to emphasize the toughness of the choice. “It was a very difficult decision on my part,” Biden said.

That reminds me of the infamous 60 Minutes interview with Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in May of 1996. CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl brought up impacts of the U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq, saying “we have heard that a half a million children have died,” and then asked: “Is the price worth it?”

Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.”

Eight months later, acting on the nomination of Albright to be secretary of state, the Senate confirmed her. The vote was 99-0. Maybe it would not have been unanimous if any of the senators’ children had died while she declared their deaths to be “worth it.”

Like Albright’s “very hard choice,” Biden’s “very difficult decision” was based on convenient abstractions and, ultimately, a willingness to sacrifice the lives of countless others, while claiming pristine virtue. Defending the president’s cluster-munitions decision, no one on the Biden team need worry that one of their own children might pick up a U.S.-supplied “bomblet” someday, perhaps mistaking it for a toy, only to be instantly assaulted with shrapnel.

The Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill who’ve been trying for the last week to justify shipping cluster weapons to Ukraine are evading a basic truth that BBC correspondent John Simpson reported long ago, in May 1999, while U.S.-led NATO forces were dropping cluster bombs onto the streets of Nis, Serbia’s third-largest city: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”

At the time, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.”

Today, with political fashion treating “diplomacy” as a dirty word, the resolute militarism of the U.S. government is bipartisan. While we should emphatically condemn Russia’s vicious war on Ukraine, we should be under no illusions about the moral character of U.S. foreign policy.

For example: During three presidencies, beginning with Barack Obama, the U.S. government has aided and abetted the Saudi-led war on Yemen, where the death toll since 2015 is now estimated at close to 400,000. Biden’s high-profile fist bump with Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman a year ago tells us a lot about the extent of the U.S. commitment to basic human decency in foreign affairs.

The murderous time that we live in now, organized as war, is reflexively blamed only on the barbarism of others. But President Biden’s decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine is shocking to many Americans because it has undermined illusions with no more actual solidity than sand castles before the tide of truth comes in.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

Author: Norman Solomon

Norman Solomon's Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State is out now. View all posts by Norman Solomon

Cluster Munitions for Ukraine

Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.

News that the Biden administration is sending cluster munitions to Ukraine highlights the dangerous escalatory nature of wars. These are special bombs and artillery shells with hundreds of “bomblets” that disperse to kill or maim as many people as possible. They persist in the environment; children have been known to pick them up and to be killed or grievously wounded as a result.

The apparent rationale behind this decision is that cluster munitions will help Ukraine in its counteroffensive against Russia. While these munitions will certainly increase the body count, probably on both sides, they are unlikely to be militarily decisive.

There are other issues as well, notes Daniel Larison at Eunomia:

The decision also opens the U.S. up to obvious charges of hypocrisy. US officials have condemned the Russian use of these weapons and said that they have no place on the battlefield, but now the administration is saying that they do have a place. Providing cluster munitions to Ukraine makes a mockery of the administration’s earlier statements and creates more political problems for its effort to rally support for Ukraine. Many states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are parties to the treaty banning the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, and now they will have one more reason to dismiss US appeals to defending the “rules-based order” as so much hot air. The decision will probably embarrass and antagonize some of our allies in Europe, as most members of NATO are also parties to the treaty.

It’s rather amazing to think about the incredible variety of weaponry being sent to Ukraine in the name of “victory.” At first, the Biden administration spoke only of providing defensive weaponry. Biden himself declared that sending main battle tanks, jet fighters, and the like was tantamount to provoking World War III. More than a year later, the US has committed to sending Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets, and offensive weapons of considerable potency like depleted uranium shells and now cluster munitions. And always with the same justification: the new weapons will help break the stalemate and lead to total victory for Ukraine.

This is nothing new, of course, in military history. Think of World War I. Poison gas was introduced in 1915 in an attempt to break the stalemate of trench warfare. It didn’t. But it did stimulate the production of all sorts of dangerous chemical munitions and agents such as chlorine gas, phosgene, and mustard. Tanks were first introduced in 1916. Stalemate persisted. Flamethrowers were introduced. Other ideas to break the stalemate included massive artillery barrages along with “creeping” barrages timed to the advancing troops.

But there was no wonder weapon that broke the stalemate of World War I. After four years of sustained warfare, the German military finally started to falter in the summer of 1918. The Spanish Flu, the contagion of communism from Russia, and an effective allied blockade also served to weaken German resolve. The guns finally fell silent on November 11, 1918, a calm that wasn’t produced by magical weapons.

I wonder which weapon will next be hailed as crucial to Ukrainian victory? Who knows, maybe even tactical nukes might be on the minds of a few of the madmen advising Biden.

William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He writes at Bracing Views.

Stop Biden From Sending Cluster Bombs to Ukraine

President Biden may have crossed a new red line for the Democratic Party when he announced he would send banned cluster munitions to shore up Ukraine’s slow counter-offensive against Russian troops.

On Friday, 19 House Democrats, led by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA-7), signed a letter to Biden warning that his decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine “severely undermines our moral leadership.”

This time it’s not just left-leaning activists in CODEPINK and the Peace in Ukraine Coalition who recoil in horror at Biden’s escalation in Ukraine, but congressional Democrats who previously stood by their President. These are the same Democrats who voted to approve over $100 billion in Ukraine spending, an estimated half for weapons and military assistance for which there is no accountability.

Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN-4), ranking member of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told Politico: “The decision by the Biden administration to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine is unnecessary and a terrible mistake…The legacy of cluster bombs is misery, death and expensive cleanup generations after their use.”

On Sunday other prominent Democrats took to the airwaves, with Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), a former Vice Presidential candidate, telling Fox News he had “real qualms” about the President’s decision, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA-13), Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations and U.S. Senate candidate, telling CNN, “Cluster bombs should never be used. That’s crossing a line.” Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and former Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who visited Vietnam following the U.S. withdrawal, joined the chorus with a Washington Post OpEd explaining how they had witnessed firsthand the “devastating and long-lasting effects these weapons have had on civilians.”

Even before the official White House cluster bomb announcement, House Democrats Sara Jacobs (D-San Diego) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minneapolis) introduced an amendment to the 2024 military budget to ban the issuance of export licenses for cluster munitions.

Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, was one of the first to co-sponsor the bill. McGovern told the New York Times that cluster munitions, “disperse hundreds of bomblets, which can travel far beyond military targets and injure, maim and kill civilians — often long after a conflict is over.”

The amendment, however, will need overwhelming bipartisan support to pass – as well as a President who will obey the law should the ayes have it.

In greenlighting cluster munitions, Biden thumbed his nose at 18 NATO partners that joined with over 100 other state parties to sign the 2008 UN Convention on Cluster Munitions. As Biden headed to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the NATO summit this week, Newsweek reported representatives of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Spain were not on board for cluster bombs.

Biden also chooses to bypass current U.S. law that restricts the use of cluster munitions to only those with a failure to detonate rate of less than one percent. In its last publicly available estimate, the Pentagon estimated a “dud rate” of 6%, meaning that at least four of the 72 submunitions from each shell failed to explode when unleashed.

With a bow to hawkish Republicans, such as Alabama’s Tom Cotton on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Biden invokes the exception to the rule embedded in the statute against the use of cluster munitions. This exception allows for shipment of cluster munitions in the interest of vital national security.

Who controls eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, the Russian army or the Ukrainian army, is hardly a US national security interest on par with mitigating the threat of climate catastrophe or providing clean water to those with lead in their pipes or investing in housing for the unsheltered living under freeway overpasses.

Nonetheless, the same President Biden who a year ago warned of the risk of nuclear Armageddon, has reversed himself yet again to up the ante. Biden first said no, then flip flopped on a host of weapons: Stinger missiles, HIMARS rocket launchers, advanced missile defense systems, M1 Abrams tanks, F-16 fighter jets. Each one of these has been a kind of Russian roulette, testing Putin’s “red lines.”

With Biden’s latest decision to send cluster bombs to Ukraine, anti-nuclear activists wonder if the President – whose Nuclear Posture Review approves of “first use” – might also cross the nuclear red line, even though it’s Putin who has issued veiled nuclear threats – and Biden and Putin in June of 2021 signed a statement that said, “Nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

The impetus for the 2008 landmark UN Convention on Cluster Munitions came precisely from the indiscriminate U.S. use of these weapons in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. In Laos, the U.S. military blanketed the country with almost 300 million bomblets, many that failed to immediately detonate, only to later – after the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia – maim adults and children who accidentally stepped on the cluster bombs or picked up the shiny balls thinking they were toys.

Both Ukraine and Russia have already used cluster bombs in Ukraine, a development roundly condemned by human rights groups documenting the resulting deaths and serious injuries of civilians. The hundreds of thousands of rounds that Biden is planning to send would significantly increase the use of these banned weapons.

Biden’s appalling decision to send cluster bombs can be seen as a sign of desperation in the face of Ukraine’s failing counteroffensive in southern and eastern Ukraine. Biden told CNN it was a “difficult decision” but Ukraine is “running out of ammunition.” The truth is that adding this new indiscriminate weapon will not miraculously break the stalemate to achieve “military victory” but guarantee the unexploded bombs eventually kill and wound Ukrainian civilians for years to come while encouraging other countries to also violate the cluster munitions ban.

In the next week or so, the House may consider Jacobs and Omar’s NDAA amendment as Congress tackles a $920 billion military budget. Now is a critical time for constituents to click on CODEPINK’s action alert requesting House representatives co-sponsor the amendment to ban the export license for cluster munitions. While skeptics may question whether Biden would respect any law limiting his power to wage war, only loud and vigorous opposition can pull the political levers that control our destiny.

Rather than escalating an arms race to risk nuclear war, the Biden administration should promote a ceasefire and negotiations without preconditions. Instead of breaking international law, the U.S. should break the military stalemate by joining the global call for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Peace in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.

Marcy Winograd serves as the Co-Chair of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition and Coordinator of CODEPINK Congress.

Author: Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin (medea@globalexchange.org) is cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and Global Exchange. View all posts by Medea Benjamin

ANTIWAR.COM

Oppenheimer Reignites Debunked Arguments in Support of Nuking Whole Cities

I finally got around to seeing the Oppenheimer biopic this weekend, fully expecting to be met with debunked talking points about how dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities was absolutely necessary. In this regard, I was sadly proven correct, and while I was mildly pleased to see a very slight counterbalance depicting atomic horrors, none of these depictions involved images from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the unfortunate civilians on the ground.

Perhaps worse, the film’s release has seen the emergence of the kind of crowd eager to defend to the death America’s right to nuke cities without remorse, partly justified by an “all is fair in love and war” mentality and partly justified by exhausted arguments that it was the only other option aside from a ground invasion where millions of young men would be sent to die.

First, even if one believes “all is fair” in war, eventually that war will come to an end, with that war’s winners being the judge as to how the losers handled themselves. Such was the case with Germany’s defeat, where genocidal Nazis found themselves noosed up and swinging by their necks, and such may have also been the case had the US lost the war after instantaneously vaporizing over a hundred thousand Japanese citizens with atomic weapons in the span of roughly 72 hours. Our “debates” around whether the bombs were necessary – let alone a war crime – are a sick privilege only afforded to us because we came out on top, with minimal credit for that victory owed to the use and development of nuclear weapons.

But the more prominent and overwhelming viewpoint expressed in Oppenheimer paints the nukes as a “necessary evil” essential to quickly ending the war, an argument strongly at odds with both historical fact along with some pretty heavy hitters in the World War II scene.

For example, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in Europe during World War II, recalled a meeting with Secretary of War Henry Stimson, where, "I told him I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon."

Eisenhower’s views were given further credit in 1946 when the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

Others involved in the war effort expressed similar views. For instance, the personal pilot of General Douglas MacArthur recorded in his diary that MacArthur was "appalled and depressed” by this “Frankenstein” monster. MacArthur believed that Japan would have surrendered as early as May 1945 had the US had not insisted upon unconditional surrender, with his biographer, William Manchester, writing that he knew the Japanese “would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it.” He went on to point out that, ironically, when the surrender did come, “it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.”

Admiral Leahy, Truman’s chief military advisor, wrote in his memoirs: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”

Admiral William Halsey, who participated in the US offensive against the Japanese home islands in the final months of the war, publicly stated in 1946 that "the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment." The Japanese, he noted, had put out a lot of peace feelers through Russia “long before" the bomb was used.

Yet, such peace efforts were ignored, and instead, Japan became a showcase for the United States to demonstrate its new power to the Russians: “If the bomb won the war, then the perception of US military power would be enhanced, US diplomatic influence in Asia and around the world would increase, and US security would be strengthened,” writes Ward Wilson over at Foreign Policy. “The $2 billion spent to build it would not have been wasted. If, on the other hand, the Soviet entry into the war was what caused Japan to surrender, then the Soviets could claim that they were able to do in four days what the United States was unable to do in four years, and the perception of Soviet military power and Soviet diplomatic influence would be enhanced.”

As such, on August 6th, and again on August 9th, the bombs were used against Japanese cities.

“The entire population of Japan is a proper military target,” Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, an intelligence officer in the US Fifth Air Force, said in a July 1945 report. “There are no civilians in Japan.”

Similarly, there were no Japanese civilians featured in Oppenheimer, nor any footage of the bombings. Instead, the film lazily regurgitates the tired narrative that these cities had to be nuked to end the war, with director Christopher Nolan perhaps spending more time focusing on creating a nuclear explosion without CGI than effectively demonstrating why using these weapons was entirely unnecessary.

“We intend to demonstrate [the bomb] in the most unambiguous terms – twice,” says Matt Damon in the film, playing the part of Lieutenant General Leslie Groves. “Once to show the weapon’s power, and the second to show that we can keep doing this until Japan surrenders.” James Remar, playing Secretary of War Henry Stimson, then points out the US has a list of “twelve cities” to choose from. “Sorry, eleven. I’ve taken Kyoto off the list due to its cultural significance to the Japanese people. Also, my wife and I honeymoon there.” That last line may have been added in for comic relief, which it succeeded in evoking from some in the theater during my visit despite feeling wildly inappropriate given the topic at hand.

Remar’s character then adds: “According to my intelligence, which I cannot share with you, the Japanese people will not surrender under any circumstances, short of a successful and total invasion of the home islands. Many lives will be lost, American and Japanese. The use of the atomic bombs on Japanese cities will save lives.”

Ultimately, my issue with the film has less to do with getting history wrong and more to do with making sure it isn’t repeated. In the absence of refusing to wholeheartedly condemn the use of nuclear weapons, we are left with moral ambiguity around their use. Sure, these weapons might be terrible, but maybe, sometimes, it’s okay to use them. And if we can be propagandized into believing that using nuclear weapons against cities is sometimes necessary, the limits are truly endless on what else we can be propagandized into supporting.

If we’re not drawing the line at nukes, we’re definitely not drawing the line at wholescale invasions of countries based on false claims, at waterboarding and other forms of torture, and at drone strikes on weddings and funerals. We’re not drawing that line anywhere meaningful if it doesn’t at least start with a refusal to stand behind nuking whole cities, and in a country with a vast biochemical and nuclear arsenal, with military bases on every corner of the planet, and with a long record of brutal coups and interventions, this is truly asking for the absolute bare minimum.

Oppenheimer succeeds in starting a conversation around this topic, yet still ultimately falls victim to parroting narratives that risk leaving viewers not entirely convinced that these weapons should never have been used, and should never be used again.

Jon Reynolds is a freelance journalist covering a wide range of topics with a primary focus on the labor movement and collapsing US empire. He writes at The Screeching Kettle at Substack. Reprinted with permission.

Opinion: Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ marred by 5 historical inaccuracies

Blockbuster movie is sometimes distressingly errant in dealing with scientists and science

This image released by Universal Pictures shows actor Cillian Murphy, left, and filmmaker Christopher Nolan on the set of “Oppenheimer.”

(Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

By BARTON J. BERNSTEIN |

MERCURY NEWS
July 29, 2023

Over the years, the distinguished movie director Christopher Nolan, whose films have grossed over $5 billion, has expressed interest in science and scientists, his respect for science, as well as his worries about science.

Unfortunately, Nolan’s blockbuster movie, “Oppenheimer,” on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the A-bomb,” is sometimes distressingly errant in dealing with scientists and science. Though Nolan claims in general to be often relying on the prize-winning Oppenheimer biography, “American Prometheus,” by Kai Bird and Martin J.Sherwin, Nolan creates at least five sets of events — about scientists and science — not in the Bird-Sherwin book and that, strong evidence indicates, never occurred.

Put bluntly, Nolan has basically created false history.

1) His “Oppenheimer” film unfairly portrays the Cambridge experimentalist P. M. S. Blackett as forcing Oppenheimer, then a young graduate student, to stay in the physics lab and not allowed to hear, or to delay Oppenheimer in hearing, the great theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, who was lecturing that day at the University of Cambridge. There is no evidence that Blackett was so callous and that Oppenheimer was so impeded. Neither Oppenheimer’s archived papers, nor Blackett’s, nor recollections by Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, indicate any support that such a set of events occurred or that Blackett was callous in his relationship with Oppenheimer.

2) Oppenheimer, unhappy with experimental physics and rather clumsy in the lab, left Cambridge and shifted in 1926 to Gottingen, in Germany, to study with the theoretician Max Born. Oppenheimer had been invited by Born to move to Gottingen and into theoretical physics. Contrary to Nolan’s film, there is no evidence that Born had even suggested such a move to Oppenheimer. That’s a Nolan creation and is also unfair to Born, a 1954 Nobelist.

3) In September 1939, when Oppenheimer, with his graduate student (Hartland Snyder), published in Physical Review a paper on massively dying stars (under the impact of gravity) basically ceasing to exist, there was — contrary to Nolan — no one celebrating at Berkeley, or anywhere, that 1939 publication. Papers by Oppenheimer, by his famous Berkeley colleague, physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, and by others at Berkeley appearing in the rather prestigious Physical Review were not unusual. That Oppenheimer-Snyder paper — which helped pioneer what decades later was called ”black holes” — was not, contrary to Nolan, recognized in 1939, or for many years, as profoundly significant.

Also contrary to Nolan’s film, no one in 1939 would have used the phrase “black holes.” That phrase was not even devised until about three decades later, and then at Princeton, not at Berkeley, and substantially first employed by Princeton physicist John A. Wheeler. There is an important question, thoughtfully addressed by physicist Manuel Ortega, a handful of years ago in the journal Physics in Perspective: Why wasn’t the significance of that 1939 Oppenheimer-Snyder paper recognized then or soon thereafter? Nolan’s distortion and misunderstanding of important science history unknowingly eliminates that very significant question. Nolan, intentionally or not, has created a false history.

4) In summer 1942, when the theoretical physicist Edward Teller concluded, in a special A-bomb-study group at Berkeley headed by Oppenheimer, that a fission-bomb explosion might ignite the atmosphere and destroy civilization, Oppenheimer was — for a period — greatly troubled. Contrary to Nolan’s film, Oppenheimer did not go to New Jersey and consult Albert Einstein on this subject. Oppenheimer actually went to Michigan to consult with the Nobel Prize-winning experimentalist Arthur H. Compton. How and why did Nolan go so wrong on this? Multiple published sources, since at least 1956, have described this set of events, including Oppenheimer’s consulting Compton.

5) At Los Alamos, where Bohr was visiting in parts of 1943-44 and thinking about the implications of the soon-to-be-developed A-bomb, Bohr did not endorse the United States actually using the bomb against an enemy — Germany or Japan. Bohr was thinking about the importance of the A-bomb in U.S.-USSR wartime and postwar relations and about the possibility that the development of such a powerful weapon would help persuade nations, ultimately fearing atomic-bomb war, to seek collective peace. Nolan, greatly misrepresenting Bohr’s thinking, falsely has Bohr endorsing wartime use of the bomb. That seems to be Nolan’s invention.

Creating five false events is dismaying. Any claim of “artistic license,” if offered, seems unpersuasive as a justification. Why create false history? Has Nolan any explanation?

Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” film also merits scrutiny and criticism for its treatment of important political matters in Oppenheimer’s life. As a guide to history, Nolan’s movie, though garnering many enthusiastic reviews, might well carry a needed warning: “Beware — often poorly informed and markedly errant on history.”

Barton J. Bernstein is a professor of history emeritus at Stanford University.

Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

Yes, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, would kill staggering numbers of people and be an eerily (if all too grimly) appropriate ending to the war that started with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and, by August 1945, had resulted in the saturation bombing of 64 Japanese cities.

The scientist who led the team responsible for creating the bombs that destroyed those two cities (and for the initial nuclear test in New Mexico that, as we only recently learned, spread fallout over 46 states, Canada, and Mexico), the 41-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, would later borrow a line from the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu scriptures, to describe his mood at the time: "Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." And eerily enough, the use of the weapon that would prove to be the second way humanity found to destroy our planet – the first, climate change, was already in effect but not yet known – would find all too few in the U.S. government hesitant to use it at that time. As historian John Dower would put it in his memorable book Cultures of War,

"The policy makers, scientists, and military officers who had committed themselves to becoming death… never seriously considered not using their devastating new weapon. They did not talk about turning mothers into cinders or irradiating even the unborn. They brushed aside discussion of alternative targets, despite the urging of many lower-echelon scientists that they consider this. They gave little if any serious consideration to whether there should be ample pause after using the first nuclear weapon to give Japan’s frazzled leaders time to respond before a second bomb was dropped."

They just did it, twice, and the world changed radically. Almost 80 years later, at a moment when a global leader is once again evidently considering the possible use of what are now called "tactical nuclear weapons" (but can be several times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Oppenheimer is having his moment in the sun (or is it a blaze of atomic light?) in a film that, to the surprise of many, has hit the big time in an almost nuclear fashion. And as TomDispatch regular and Pentagon expert William Hartung reminds us while considering that three-hour odyssey of a film, what "Oppie" began then has by now become a full-scale nuclear-industrial complex on a planet where ultimate destruction, it often seems, always lurks just around the corner. ~ Tom Engelhardt

The Profiteers of Armageddon

By William D. Hartung

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the "father of the atomic bomb" for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as "Barbieheimer" by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

Nolan’s impetus was rooted in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:

"It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 – it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’"

A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, "Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?" Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. "You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger."

These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill "hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions" of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a "nuclear winter."

Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to "psychic numbing," a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as "a diminished capacity or inclination to feel" prompted by "the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness."

Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.

The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in Japan, "I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary."

The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said "It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity."

Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons – the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.

Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control – the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union – the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.

The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer directed was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American history. Though the Oppenheimer film focuses on Los Alamos, it quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the United States. At its peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers – as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.

According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.

Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running – ideally, in perpetuity – those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.

The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.

And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.

Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby

The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.

A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the "Dr. Strangelove Caucus" by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.

The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. According to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among "the most dangerous weapons we have" because a president, if warned of a possible nuclear attack on this country, would have just minutes to decide to launch them, risking a nuclear conflict based on a false alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.

Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.

The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.

Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.

A New Nuclear Reckoning?

Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.

Past experience – from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the "Ban the Bomb" and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue – suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, "downwinders," and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, "Oppenheimer – and the Other Side of the Story," that focuses on "the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods."

On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty – officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.

In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of More Money, Less Security: Pentagon Spending and Strategy in the Biden Administration.

ANTIWAR.COM

Facing The Climate Crisis From a Texas Prison Cell

BY KWANETA HARRIS

JULY 31, 2023
Facebook

Photograph Source: H. Michael Karshis – CC BY 2.0

This story was originally published by The Appeal.

For the past seven summers, I have lived in solitary confinement without air conditioning. A trip to medical during a heat wave helped put the climate crisis into perspective.

Even some of the most right-wing evangelical Texans acknowledge that climate change is real. They may debate the cause, but at a certain point, it becomes hard to argue with the effects. I know this because many of the guards who watch over me in my solitary confinement cell in a women’s prison in Texas are in this demographic. And they, like me, have had a front-row seat to the unfolding crisis.

Over the past seven years in solitary, I’ve seen magazine images of the aftermath of hurricanes and wildfires. These climate disasters have a way of feeling impossibly distant from inside these four cinder block walls. But a trip to medical after fainting during a heat wave last year helped put everything into perspective.

I have lived without air conditioning in this cell for the past seven summers. I wasn’t even allowed to shade my window from the sun. On a hot day in July, cells regularly reached 110 degrees. I’d heard stories of it getting up to 129. When the temperature would start to spike, I’d lie on the cement floor in wet underclothes and try not to move. In these conditions, women in my unit who are over 50—myself included—experience heart issues at alarming rates. These incidents are never reported as heat-related. Prison officials just explain it as a woman over 50 having a heart attack or stroke.

Guards don’t come into the cell blocks when it gets this hot. With their thick uniforms, many succumb to heat exhaustion. They do everything they can to stay in the air-conditioned parts of the prison. This environment might help explain the more than 7,000 vacancies for corrections officers in Texas prisons. The staffing shortage means we may not even get a reprieve to shower or for recreation. Nor is there a break for eating: In solitary, all food is served to us in our cells. For those in general population, staff shortages mean brown bag meals in your cell. Sometimes, there’s no one around to notice if we pass out or die.

When I fainted last year, I had to convince the guards to take me to medical. They’re always accusing people of faking symptoms so we can get into the air conditioning. At the infirmary, I saw images of Hurricane Ian’s aftermath playing on the television: houses torn apart, families standing in the rubble of their dismantled lives, water swallowing towns whole, and wind blowing away the temporary and feeble machinations of humankind. As I sat, sucking on ice cubes, I watched news anchors interview people who had lost everything and were barely hanging onto life. Outside the prison, grass fires burned.

These fires typically go unnoticed until the smoke drifts over to the building. Then, guards start yelling for help and run to the burning grass, where they begin stomping like an uncoordinated cowboy Riverdance troupe. Eventually, someone comes out with a fire extinguisher and sprays chemical foam on the ground. The guards who have ruined their shoes finish their shifts in their socks. The administration tries to blame these fires on us. How could we start a fire outside from within our cells, you might ask? Better not to ask questions like that in prison.

The recent summer heat wave finally brought conditions too dangerous to ignore. Between mid-June and mid-July, at least nine incarcerated people in Texas died of heart attacks or cardiac events in uncooled prisons where the outdoor heat indexes were above 100 degrees, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of prison death reports and weather data. The Tribune documented another 14 deaths due to “unknown causes” during the extreme heat, with prison staff often finding the deceased unresponsive in their cells. Two women recently died at Lane Murray Unit, where I’m incarcerated, though the causes have not yet been confirmed.

Officials recently installed temporary air conditioning in my unit following demands from the incarcerated population and staff. It offers a light breeze—enough to break the sweltering heat but too weak to actually cool my cell. Thousands of incarcerated Texans are suffering through much worse. Roughly 70 of the state’s 100 prisons do not have air conditioning in most living areas, according to a 2022 report by the Texas Tribune. State lawmakers have refused to provide funding to address this issue, and their inaction is costing people their lives.

Our collective futures will be filled with more and more scenes and stories like this. The United Nations recently announced that there was no way to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius—a target set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just a few years ago. We’re already over 1 degree.

But climate change will trigger extreme weather events that extend far beyond heat. During the Great Texas Freeze in 2021, our cells dropped to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Prison officials gave us heat intermittently. They gave us blankets. We put on all the clothes we had at once. There was no water or electricity, which we are used to in prison. But the timing of these outages is critical. Being unable to flush toilets or turn on the tap or a fan in the summer is excruciating and nauseating.

Once, we had so much rain that the entire facility flooded. Sewage was knee-deep on the first floor. The prison kept us in our cells and did nothing to help us clean. We shared bath towels and passed around a mop and bucket as the mess receded.

Everyone agrees addressing climate change will cost money. But there’s so much hesitation to spend it—on this particular problem, at least. According to recent data, Texas spends over $3 billion annually to incarcerate more than 120,000 people in state prisons.

That money could be helpful to transition our energy system away from fossil fuels, provide low-carbon housing, insulate homes, or invest in bike lanes, greenways, and reforestation. People recoil at this sort of spending. But there’s always more money for prisons—because incarceration “keeps us safe.” The reality is that the devastation of the climate crisis will do far more harm than the folks who are locked up.

Before being sent to solitary, I worked in the fields doing the same unpaid forced labor as my enslaved ancestors. Sometimes, this meant picking, planting, and tending crops under the authority of armed white men on horseback. Mostly, we “cleared the fields,” chanting aloud to entertain our captors as we used dull gardening hoes to uproot the grass that would otherwise die in the drought and ignite from the heat.

We were human lawnmowers working against the intensifying forces of nature. But with so many little fires everywhere, we’ll eventually all get burned.

The Appeal is a nonprofit newsroom that exposes how the U.S. criminal legal system fails to keep people safe and perpetuates harm.

Kwaneta Harris is an incarcerated writer in solitary confinement in Texas focusing on the intersection of race, gender and place. She focuses on illuminating how different incarceration is for women. She is working on a book about youth transferred to adult solitary confinement.

AFTER THE PHILIPPINES

Typhoon Doksuri brings heavy rain to China, highest alert issued for 2nd time since 2010

Tens of thousands of people relocated to safer places as 5th typhoon hits China this year

Riyaz ul Khaliq |31.07.2023 -

Local authorities in Beijing and several other provinces in northern China have issued the highest alert as Typhoon Doksuri brought heavy rainfall to the country.

It is the fifth typhoon to have hit China this year and tens of thousands of people have been relocated to safer places. Beijing and its surrounding regions, including Tianjin and Hebei province, were mostly affected by the typhoon.

According to China Daily, the National Meteorological Center renewed the red alert for heavy rains in the country’s north on Sunday evening.

“This is the second time a red alert has been issued since the warning mechanism was put in place in 2010,” the daily reported.

The Beijing-based Global Times reported that 18 provinces had issued alerts for heavy rains since Sunday morning.

“Approximately 130 million residents across the country are expected to be impacted,” it added.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment