weapons of mass destruction - Quaker Ranter

Warriors against the War

Martin Kelley — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 21:22:44 +0000

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 Nonviolence.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

Martin Kelley — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 14:25:59 +0000

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

Martin Kelley — Wed, 06 Aug 2003 09:14:25 +0000

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 Nonviolence.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

Martin Kelley — Mon, 07 Jul 2003 17:44:22 +0000

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.