Tag Archives ⇒ weapons of mass destruction

Warriors against the War

January 16, 2007
· Martin Kelley

In the news:  more than 1,000 ser­vice mem­bers sign peti­tion to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), orga­nized by the Appeal for Redress cam­paign spon­sored by a hand­ful of mil­i­tary anti­war groups includ­ing Non​vi​o​lence​.org alums Vet­er­ans for Peace. The sim­ple peti­tion reads:

As a patri­ot­ic Amer­i­can proud to serve the nation in uni­form, I respect­ful­ly urge my polit­i­cal lead­ers in Con­gress to sup­port the prompt with­draw­al of all Amer­i­can mil­i­tary forces and bases from Iraq. Stay­ing in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Sup­port­ing the troops means mak­ing sure Amer­i­can lives aren’t being wast­ed in dead-end wars. Their ser­vice and their sac­ri­fice has been too great to con­tin­ue the lies that have fueled this con­flict since the very begin­ning, start­ing with the myth­i­cal Saddam/Al Qae­da con­nec­tion and the phan­tas­mic weapons of mass destruc­tion. The cur­rent esca­la­tion (euphemised as a “surge”) of troop lev­els is sim­ply an esca­la­tion of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?
*Update*: Pres­i­dent Bush has admit­ted that the Iraq gov­ern­ment “fum­bled the executions.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/washington/17prexy.html. Mean­while, the UN puts the “2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html. When will Bush admit he’s fum­bled this whole war?

Duck Rogers Gamma Ray Bombs

August 14, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Like some­thing out of an old Looney Toons reel, the U.S. mil­i­tary is “try­ing to build a death ray bomb”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1018361,00.html. Part of the next gen­er­a­tion of bou­tique nuclear weapons the Pen­ta­gon craves, this one kills by send­ing nuclear gam­ma rays. The _Guardian_ arti­cle talks about how devel­op­ment of the new weapon might lead to a new arms race. This is of course quite pos­si­ble: new weapons throw off the bal­ance of pow­er and often cre­ate the per­ceived need for new defences in a con­tin­u­ing cycle.
One won­ders why the U.S. needs to be build­ing ever more sophis­ti­cat­ed weapons of mass destruc­tion. It already has enough nuclear weapons to ensure total destruc­tion of a coun­try and the two recent wars have shown that its mil­i­tary is quite effi­cient at inva­sion. A gam­ma ray weapon would­n’t help in a sit­u­a­tion like North Korea, where there are more-conventional weapons they could strike back with that would seri­ous­ly hurt U.S. or its allies (even with­out their renewed nuclear weapon pro­gram their short-range mis­siles would dev­as­tate South Korea and Japan).

Fifty-eight Years of WMDs

August 6, 2003
· Martin Kelley

Today, August 6th, marks the fifty-eighth anniver­sary of one of the sad­dest events in human his­to­ry: the use of weapons of mass destruc­tion against a civil­ian population.
There’s much that’s been writ­ten about the atom­ic bomb­ing of the Japan­ese city of Hiroshi­ma. At the time, U.S. lead­ers said that use of such over­whelm­ing force would prompt a quick Japan­ese sur­ren­der that would save the thou­sands of Amer­i­can and Japan­ese casul­ties that would sure­ly result from an inva­sion. We have since learned the Japan­ese were secret­ly suing for peace even as the bomber planes took off.
We have learned that Pres­i­dent Tru­man was look­ing ahead. He used the bomb­ing (and the attack on Nagasa­ki a few days lat­er) to demon­strate the weapon to the Sovi­et Union. In the post-war world emerg­ing, it was clear the U.S. and the Sovi­et Union were on a col­li­sion course and Tru­man want­ed to start the com­pe­ti­tion off with a bang. The les­son the Sovi­et lead­er­ship learned from the blast was that they’d bet­ter get their own atom­ic weapons and the arms race was on, strain­ing the economies of both coun­tries for the next fifty years.
Amaz­ing­ly, those two bombs remain the only atom­ic weapons ever to be used against peo­ple in an act of war. Through all the years of the Cold War and the break up of the Sovi­et Union, and despite the mul­ti­ply­ing mem­bers of the “nuclear club”:www.fas.org/irp/threat/wmd.htm, no one has ever done what the U.S. did all the Augusts ago. It is a fact that the world should be grate­ful for.
But there is no guar­an­tee that the human race will go anoth­er fifty-eight years with­out mush­room clouds of human ash­es. Or that devel­op­ment of super-bombs that pack Hiroshima-like charges won’t be used to equally-devastating effects. The U.S. is busy devel­op­ing all sorts of low-yield exot­ic nuclear weapons to make their use more palat­able to a queasy pub­lic. “As the cur­rent may­or of Hiroshim Tadatoshi Aki­ba said ear­li­er today”:http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030806p2a00m0fp022000c.html :
bq. A world with­out nuclear weapons and war that the vic­tims of the atom­ic bomb have long sought for is slip­ping into the shad­ows of glow­ing black clouds that could turn into mush­room clouds at any moment. The chief cause of this is the Unit­ed States’ nuclear pol­i­cy which, by open­ly declar­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pre-emptive nuclear strike and by start­ing research into small ‘use­able’ nuclear weapons, appears to wor­ship nuclear weapons as God.
On the Non​vi​o​lence​.org Board, there’s a live­ly com­men­tary on this anniver­sary of “Human­i­ty’s dark­est hour approaching”:www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=3976

Nation developing new Weapons of Mass Destruction

July 7, 2003
· Martin Kelley

News that the coun­try that has recent­ly defied the Unit­ed Nations and start­ed two wars in as many years now has plans to devel­op new types of weapons of mass destruc­tion: “That pol­i­cy paper embraces the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike and on the bat­tle­field; it also says … nuclear test­ing may soon be nec­es­sary.” This renewed devel­op­ment is com­ing from the only coun­try that has used nuclear weapons in wartime against civil­ian populations.