The brutal invasion of Ukraine that Vladimir Putin has had Russia launch and he is leading is an international crime. As the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy declared yesterday, it is "an illegal war of aggression."
The UN Charter, it notes, prohibits the "threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state."
Also, "The invasion constitutes an act of aggression under general international law," it said. The Nuremberg Charter under which top Nazis were tried by an International Military Tribunal after World War II ended states that "waging a war of aggression is a crime against peace, and leaders of the Third Reich were convicted of that crime," said the organization.
Further, Putin's declaration as the invasion began that if any nation "tries to impede us"the Russian response will be immediate and lead to consequences you have never seen in history" -- a brazen threat of starting nuclear war -- was also illegal, said the group.
"Putin's thinly veiled references to resort to nuclear weapons," it said, were also "unlawful threats of force under the UN Charter."
"Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy stands against Russia's unlawful acts of war and threats of nuclear force," said the New York City-based organization founded in 1981. "We call for both sides to comply with international humanitarian law, respect human rights, and provide access to humanitarian aid. We further call for an immediate cease-fire, dialogue and diplomacy, and fulfillment of the requirements of the UN Charter."
It is extremely unlikely that Putin will agree.
And that doesn't surprise me.
I have spent a good deal of time in Russia.
However, as Putin grabbed more and more power and seized dictatorial rule, I wouldn't go back there under any condition.
My involvement in Russia began after I broke the story in The Nation magazine after the Challenger blew up in 1986 about how on its the next mission, the ill-fated space shuttle was to loft a space probe fueled with plutonium, the most lethal of all radioactive substances. If the explosion had happened then, in May 1986, four months later, and the plutonium dispersed, the impacts could have been horrendous.
My follow-up writings on the use of nuclear power in space included authoring a book The Wrong Stuff, writing many articles and presenting TV programs.
And I was contacted by Dr. Alexey Yablokov, the most eminent environmentalist in Russia, former environmental advisor to Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev. He was long concerned about the space nuclear activities of Russia and previously the Soviet Union. There were accidents like those in the U.S. program, including one in 1978 when the Soviet's Cosmos 954 satellite with a nuclear reactor onboard crashed to Earth, breaking apart and spreading radioactive debris over 500 miles -- from Great Slave Lake to Baker Lake -- in northern Canada.
Yablokov, described in one publication when he died in 2017 as the "towering grandfather of Russian ecology," invited me to Russia to share information on the nuclear-in-space issue.
There would be many visits -- seven in all -- and presentations including, in 1998, in Voronezh, organized by Yablokov's Center for Russian Environmental Policy on "Toward a Sustainable Russia: Environmental Policy;" speaking in 1999 at the "All-Russia Congress on Protection of Nature" -- in a packed sports stadium along the Volga River in Saratov -- and, in 2000, presenting at a conference on "Health of the Environment" at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
My last presentation in Russia was a keynote speech, "Parallel Atomic Universes," at a "Russian-American Women's Leadership and Nuclear Safety Activism" conference in Tomsk in Siberia in 2002.
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