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General News    H3'ed 6/6/24

Tomgram: William Astore, Nuclear Armageddon Is Us

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Tom Engelhardt
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This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

It was truly another world.

I'm thinking of my childhood years when to "duck and cover" under our school desks, imagining that those modest structures might somehow protect us from an atomic blast, was a normal part of life. And when you walked the streets of New York then, you couldn't miss the yellow signs for "fallout shelters" or, if you picked up a magazine, disputes over backyard nuclear shelters. (Yes, we were then living in a bunker culture.) And in those years, of course, the U.S. and the Soviet Union practically had it out in a nuclear fashion in the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was at college when, on October 22, 1962, President Kennedy came on the air to tell us that Soviet missile sites were being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere," and I genuinely feared I might be blown away.

Those were the years when I wasn't faintly atypical in imagining that I might someday become burnt toast. As I wrote once upon a time:

"No one could mistake the looming threat: global nuclear war. Few of us listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access to that SIOP, we -- I -- knew well enough what might be coming. After all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies, even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to alien worlds, as in that 1955 science fiction blockbuster This Island Earth, or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging radioactive monsters."

Later in life, while working in publishing, I put out a book by Japanese survivors of the Hiroshima blast, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors. I then visited that city (with the Japanese editor of the book) and viewed, in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the scorched lunch box of an atomized child, among other unforgettable horrors.

So many years later, I find it strange that you can wander our world without, when it comes to nuclear weapons, even imagining ducking, no less covering. It matters little that such weaponry has spread beyond the U.S. and Russia to seven other countries or that, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore makes painfully clear today, the U.S. is once again expanding and (what a horrifying term) "modernizing" its nuclear arsenal in an unnerving fashion. Only the other day, while walking in my New York neighborhood, thinking about this all-too-strange nuclear world of ours, I wandered (as I sometimes do) past a more than life-sized statue of a thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, Shinran Shonin, in front of a local Buddhist church. I suddenly noticed a plaque there that said, in part: "The statue originally stood in Hiroshima, at a site 2.5 kilometers northwest from the center of the first atomic bomb attack. Having survived the full force of the bomb the statue was brought to New York in September of 1955 to be a testimonial to the atomic bomb devastation and a symbol of lasting hope for world peace."

World peace? If only. And with the devastation that those two atomic bombs brought to Japan in 1945 and knowing that today even the sort of "tactical" or battlefield nuclear weapons Vladimir Putin is now threatening to use in Ukraine can be far more powerful, let Astore take you deep into the genuinely human madness of our nuclear world. Tom

The Triad Is Not the Trinity
Or, Ending My Thermonuclear Odyssey

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As a late-stage baby boomer, a child of the 1960s, I grew up dreaming about America's nuclear triad. You may remember that it consisted of strategic bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) like the Minuteman, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) like the Poseidon, all delivery systems for what we then called "the Bomb." I took it for granted that we needed all three "legs" -- yes, that was also the term of the time -- of that triad to ward off the Soviet Union (aka the "evil empire").

It took me some time to realize that the triad was anything but the trinity, that it was instead a product of historical contingency. Certainly, my mind was clouded because two legs of that triad were the prerogative of the U.S. Air Force, my chosen branch of service. When I was a teenager, the Air Force had 1,054 ICBMs (mainly Minutemen missiles) in silos in rural states like Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, along with hundreds of strategic bombers kept on constant alert against the Soviet menace. They represented enormous power not just in destructive force measured in megatonnage but in budgetary authority for the Air Force. The final leg of that triad, the most "survivable" one in case of a nuclear war, was (and remains) the Navy's SLBMs on nuclear submarines. (Back in the day, the Army was so jealous that it, too, tried to go atomic, but its nuclear artillery shells and tactical missiles were child's play compared to the potentially holocaust-producing arsenals of the Air Force and Navy.)

When I said that the triad wasn't the trinity, what I meant (the obvious aside) was this: the U.S. military no longer needs nuclear strategic bombers and land-based ICBMs in order to threaten to destroy the planet. As a retired Air Force officer who worked in Cheyenne Mountain, America's nuclear redoubt, during the tail end of the first Cold War, and as a historian who once upon a time taught courses on the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy, I have some knowledge and experience here. Those two "legs" of the nuclear triad, bombers and ICBMs, have long been redundant, obsolete, a total waste of taxpayer money -- leaving aside, of course, that they would prove genocidal in an unprecedented fashion were they ever to be used.

Nevertheless, such thoughts have no effect on our military. Instead, the Air Force is pushing ahead with plans to field -- yes! -- a new strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider, and -- yes, again! -- a new ICBM, the Sentinel, whose combined price tag will likely exceed $500 billion. The first thing any sane commander-in-chief with an urge to help this country would do is cancel those new nuclear delivery systems tomorrow. Instead of rearming, America should begin disarming, but don't hold your breath on that one.

A Brief History of America's Nuclear Triad

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch (more...)
 

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