|
|
|
February 3, 2024 Bulletin 355: Francis Boyle, RIP / New START countdown Permalink for this bulletin (please forward!). Bulletins like this one go to our main mailing list. If you missed our most recent emails, they come in three forms and here they are:
Dear friends and colleagues: 1. Francis Boyle, RIP We were very sorry to hear over the weekend that eminent legal scholar and professor Dr. Francis Boyle had passed. He was as courageous as he was brilliant in his quest to save humanity from the scourge of nuclear and biological weapons. He stood for humanitarian law, and he stood against genocide and genocidal intent, in Palestine as well as in nuclear weapons policies. He was a real hero who never shied away from speaking truth to power. He represented nuclear protestors against the state many times -- and he sometimes won. His Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence is classic, but the breadth of his published books (and Amazon does not have them all listed) indicates the universality of his humanitarian vision. He was always approachable and he always had time. His death is a great loss for the nuclear disarmament field. Hopefully other scholars and activists will be inspired to follow his example in their own way, place, and time. This past October 12, Francis provided attendees of a public meeting organized by the Study Group a succinct summary (~19 minutes, recommended) of "The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence." 2. New START countdown One year from tomorrow, February 4, the last treaty limiting nuclear arsenals -- New START -- will expire. Currently the U.S. and Russia are observing New START's quantitative limits on deployed strategic weapons, although on-site inspections have ceased. Unless replaced by a new treaty, those limitations will end one year from now. Apart of the general admonitions of Article VI of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which do carry significant political weight, there will then be no specific international law proscriptions on the development and increased deployment of nuclear weapons by the U.S. or Russia. There already are none applicable to China or any of the other nuclear weapon states. We place nearly the entire blame for the collapse of nuclear arms control regime and the end of progress in nuclear disarmament squarely on the United States. It is the U.S. which withdrew from key treaties -- notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (in 2002), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (in 2019), and the Open Skies Treaty (in 2020) -- and it is the U.S. which has articulated and attempted to implement, across several U.S. administrations, the goal of strategically defeating Russia. Nuclear arms control and disarmament are conditioned by the broader security context. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, like Scott Ritter, Peter Kuznick, and others, has provided excellent talks and interviews on why U.S.-Russian relations collapsed after the Cold War. Here is one. Others by Sachs, Ritter, Mearsheimer, Kuznick, Diesen, and others can be found here and there on our Ukraine War web page. Scott Horton's recent tome Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine documents this intentional collapse of relations in detail. Glenn Diesen's Russophobia: Propaganda in International Politics provides an analytical basis for understanding why and how our attitudes have changed, or rather been changed for us. (Search for Diesen's talks and essays on our Ukraine page or elsewhere on-line for the gist of this expensive book.) The U.S. will sooner or later have to get along with Russia and China. Sooner would be good. Realities on the ground are telling us, or would be telling us if we had ears to hear, that the U.S. will need to rethink its current theories of nuclear deterrence, which require increasing and diversifying nuclear forces to maintain. Some of the reasons for this were discussed in our talk last summer ("Proposals for a U.S. nuclear weapons buildup; to what extent will they succeed?, Aug 15, 2024). We brought forth some reasons for this in that August talk, some of which have been subsequently confirmed by recent disclosures. The point is, change is here and more is coming. What kind of change is the question. Attempting to double down on the old deterrence paradigm will produce disaster -- at worst, nuclear war; at best, an arms race and national bankruptcy. This New START countdown comes at -- and is part of -- a real hinge of history. Even Secretary of State Rubio just said, loud and clear, that the U.S. unipolar moment has passed. We in civil society need to throw our weight on the side of peace, undercutting the ridiculous Russophobia that has been so useful to the budget of nuclear-military state. Plans for a nuclear arms race like those recommended in the Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States (Oct 2023) pull the U.S. toward war and bankruptcy. There will be no serious arms race because the truth, once the strutting is over, is that the U.S. can't run that race. The nuclear emperor, while not entirely naked, has fewer clothes than advertised. Unfortunately -- and this is not yet clear to many people -- the nuclear-military establishment has meanwhile captured the government. There is no longer any significant push-back from Congress, its auditors, or executive agencies. That seems to have petered out a decade ago. Democracy, in this field, does not exist. We in civil society must rethink how we are going to respond to these changes. 3. At Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), a draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) emerges from its lair We have covered some of this in two recent New Mexico activist letters and will not belabor those points here. Talking points and more will be sent to that New Mexico list this week and next as we gear up with public training sessions and other planning. To subscribe to that list, send a blank email here.
Thank you for your attention and best wishes, Greg Mello, for the Study Group |
|||
|
|
|||
|