#Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons

[nucleartestsday]

17th Meeting, Preparatory Committee for NPT Review Conference 2026.

The Preparatory Committee for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will hold its second session from 22 July to 2 August 2024 at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. This will be the second of three planned sessions that will be held prior to the 2026 Review Conference.

The Preparatory Committee, open to all States parties to the Treaty, is responsible for addressing substantive and procedural issues related to the Treaty and the forthcoming Review Conference. The Chair of the second session is Ambassador Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan. UN Web TV

Watch the 17th Meeting, Preparatory Committee for NPT Review Conference 2026!

[denimbex1986]

'Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project. The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s hit film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.

Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of The Day After about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)

The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.

Nolan’s impetus was rooted in his early exposure to the nuclear disarmament movement in Europe. As he said recently:

“It’s something that’s been on my radar for a number of years. I was a teenager in the ‘80s, the early ‘80s in England. It was the peak of CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Greenham Common [protest]; the threat of nuclear war was when I was 12, 13, 14 — it was the biggest fear we all had. I think I first encountered Oppenheimer in… Sting’s song about the Russians that came out then and talks about Oppenheimer’s ‘deadly toys.’”

A feature film on the genesis of nuclear weapons may not strike you as an obvious candidate for box-office blockbuster status. As Nolan’s teenage son said when his father told him he was thinking about making such a film, “Well, nobody really worries about nuclear weapons anymore. Are people going to be interested in that?” Nolan responded that, given what’s at stake, he worries about complacency and even denial when it comes to the global risks posed by the nuclear arsenals on this planet. “You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict… [and so] accepting, normalizing… the danger.”

These days, unfortunately, you’re talking about anything but just tens of thousands of people dying in a nuclear face-off. A 2022 report by Ira Helfand and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated that a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan that used roughly 3% of the world’s 12,000-plus nuclear warheads would kill “hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions” of us. A full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, the study suggests, could kill up to five (yes, five!) billion people within two years, essentially ending life as we know it on this planet in a “nuclear winter.”

Obviously, all too many of us don’t grasp the stakes involved in a nuclear conflict, thanks in part to “psychic numbing,” a concept regularly invoked by Robert Jay Lifton, author of Hiroshima in America: A History of Denial (co-authored with Greg Mitchell), among many other books. Lifton describes psychic numbing as “a diminished capacity or inclination to feel” prompted by “the completely unprecedented dimension of this revolution in technological destructiveness.”

Given the Nolan film’s focus on Oppenheimer’s story, some crucial issues related to the world’s nuclear dilemma are either dealt with only briefly or omitted altogether.

The staggering devastation caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is suggested only indirectly without any striking visual evidence of the devastating human consequences of the use of those two weapons. Also largely ignored are the critical voices who then argued that there was no need to drop a bomb, no less two of them, on a Japan most of whose cities had already been devastated by U.S. fire-bombing to end the war. General (and later President) Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote that when he was told by Secretary of War Henry Stimson of the plan to drop atomic bombs on populated areas in Japan, “I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

The film also fails to address the health impacts of the research, testing, and production of such weaponry, which to this day is still causing disease and death, even without another nuclear weapon ever being used in war. Victims of nuclear weapons development include people who were impacted by the fallout from U.S. nuclear testing in the Western United States and the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific, uranium miners on Navajo lands, and many others. Speaking of the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, which represents that state’s residents who suffered widespread cancers and high rates of infant mortality caused by radiation from that explosion, said “It’s an inconvenient truth… People just don’t want to reflect on the fact that American citizens were bombed at Trinity.”

Another crucially important issue has received almost no attention. Neither the film nor the discussion sparked by it has explored one of the most important reasons for the continued existence of nuclear weapons — the profits it yields the participants in America’s massive nuclear-industrial complex.

Once Oppenheimer and other concerned scientists and policymakers failed to convince the Truman administration to simply close Los Alamos and place nuclear weapons and the materials needed to develop them under international control — the only way, as they saw it, to head off a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union — the drive to expand the nuclear weapons complex was on. Research and production of nuclear warheads and nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines quickly became a big business, whose beneficiaries have worked doggedly to limit any efforts at the reduction or elimination of nuclear arms.

The Manhattan Project and the Birth of the Nuclear-Industrial Complex

The Manhattan Project Oppenheimer directed was one of the largest public works efforts ever undertaken in American history. Though the Oppenheimer film focuses on Los Alamos, it quickly came to include far-flung facilities across the United States. At its peak, the project would employ 130,000 workers — as many as in the entire U.S. auto industry at the time.

According to nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the seminal work on the financing of U.S. nuclear weapons programs, through the end of 1945 the Manhattan Project cost nearly $38 billion in today’s dollars, while helping spawn an enterprise that has since cost taxpayers an almost unimaginable $12 trillion for nuclear weapons and related programs. And the costs never end. The Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) reports that the U.S. spent $43.7 billion on nuclear weapons last year alone, and a new Congressional Budget Office report suggests that another $756 billion will go into those deadly armaments in the next decade.

Private contractors now run the nuclear warhead complex and build nuclear delivery vehicles. They range from Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin to lesser-known firms like BWX Technologies and Jacobs Engineering, all of which split billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon (for the production of nuclear delivery vehicles) and the Department of Energy (for nuclear warheads). To keep the gravy train running — ideally, in perpetuity — those contractors also spend millions lobbying decision-makers. Even universities have gotten into the act. Both the University of California and Texas A&M are part of the consortium that runs the Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory.

The American warhead complex is a vast enterprise with major facilities in California, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. And nuclear-armed submarines, bombers, and missiles are produced or based in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, North Dakota, Montana, Virginia, Washington state, and Wyoming. Add in nuclear subcontractors and most states host at least some nuclear-weapons-related activities.

And such beneficiaries of the nuclear weapons industry are far from silent when it comes to debating the future of nuclear spending and policy-making.

Profiteers of Armageddon: The Nuclear Weapons Lobby

The institutions and companies that build nuclear bombs, missiles, aircraft, and submarines, along with their allies in Congress, have played a disproportionate role in shaping U.S. nuclear policy and spending. They have typically opposed the U.S. ratification of a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban treaty; put strict limits on the ability of Congress to reduce either funding for or the deployment of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); and pushed for weaponry like a proposed nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile that even the Pentagon hasn’t requested, while funding think tanks that promote an ever more robust nuclear weapons force.

A case in point is the Senate ICBM Coalition (dubbed part of the “Dr. Strangelove Caucus” by Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball and other critics of nuclear arms). The ICBM Coalition consists of senators from states with major ICBM bases or ICBM research, maintenance, and production sites: Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. The sole Democrat in the group, Jon Tester (D-MT), is the chair of the powerful appropriations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, where he can keep an eye on ICBM spending and advocate for it as needed.

The Senate ICBM Coalition is responsible for numerous measures aimed at protecting both the funding and deployment of such deadly missiles. According to former Secretary of Defense William Perry, they are among “the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president, if warned of a possible nuclear attack on this country, would have just minutes to decide to launch them, risking a nuclear conflict based on a false alarm. That Coalition’s efforts are supplemented by persistent lobbying from a series of local coalitions of business and political leaders in those ICBM states. Most of them work closely with Northrop Grumman, the prime contractor for the new ICBM, dubbed the Sentinel and expected to cost at least $264 billion to develop, build, and maintain over its life span that is expected to exceed 60 years.

Of course, Northrop Grumman and its 12 major ICBM subcontractors have been busy pushing the Sentinel as well. They spend tens of millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying annually, while employing former members of the government’s nuclear establishment to make their case to Congress and the executive branch. And those are hardly the only organizations or networks devoted to sustaining the nuclear arms race. You would have to include the Air Force Association and the obscurely named Submarine Industrial Base Council, among others.

The biggest point of leverage the nuclear weapons industry and the arms sector more broadly have over Congress is jobs. How strange then that the arms industry has generated diminishing job returns since the end of the Cold War. According to the National Defense Industrial Association, direct employment in the weapons industry has dropped from 3.2 million in the mid-1980s to about 1.1 million today.

Even a relatively small slice of the Pentagon and Department of Energy nuclear budgets could create many more jobs if invested in green energy, sustainable infrastructure, education, or public health – anywhere from 9% to 250% more jobs, depending on the amount spent. Given that the climate crisis is already well underway, such a shift would not only make this country more prosperous but the world safer by slowing the pace of climate-driven catastrophes and offering at least some protection against its worst manifestations.

A New Nuclear Reckoning?

Count on one thing: by itself, a movie focused on the origin of nuclear weapons, no matter how powerful, won’t force a new reckoning with the costs and consequences of America’s continued addiction to them. But a wide variety of peace, arms-control, health, and public-policy-focused groups are already building on the attention garnered by the film to engage in a public education campaign aimed at reviving a movement to control and eventually eliminate the nuclear danger.

Past experience — from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that helped persuade Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer to the “Ban the Bomb” and Nuclear Freeze campaigns that stopped above-ground nuclear testing and helped turn President Ronald Reagan around on the nuclear issue — suggests that, given concerted public pressure, progress can be made on reining in the nuclear threat. The public education effort surrounding the Oppenheimer film is being taken up by groups like The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Council for a Livable World that were founded, at least in part, by Manhattan Project scientists who devoted their lives to trying to roll back the nuclear arms race; professional groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility; anti-war groups like Peace Action and Win Without War; the Nobel Peace prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons; nuclear policy groups like Global Zero and the Arms Control Association; advocates for Marshall Islanders, “downwinders,” and other victims of the nuclear complex; and faith-based groups like the Friends Committee on National Legislation. The Native American–led organization Tewa Women United has even created a website, “Oppenheimer — and the Other Side of the Story,” that focuses on “the Indigenous and land-based peoples who were displaced from our homelands, the poisoning and contamination of sacred lands and waters that continues to this day, and the ongoing devastating impact of nuclear colonization on our lives and livelihoods.”

On the global level, the 2021 entry into force of a nuclear ban treaty — officially known as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — is a sign of hope, even if the nuclear weapons states have yet to join. The very existence of such a treaty does at least help delegitimize nuclear weaponry. It has even prompted dozens of major financial institutions to stop investing in the nuclear weapons industry, under pressure from campaigns like Don’t Bank on the Bomb.

In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.'

[agreenroad]

Pacific island States support the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – a problem for Australia in joining AUKUS nuclear military alliance

Pacific island States support the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – a problem for Australia in joining AUKUS nuclear military alliance

[fading-event-608]

Recently the syndicate of chemists in Lebanon has issued a statement warning people to not go near the blast sites due to alleged use of depleted uranium by Israel. (link - you need to scroll till the statement in Arabic). The screenshot of their statement on twitter was shared here on Tumblr and I’ve seen multiple people expressing scepticism regarding the source. Some people linked an article (link) from anti-Hezbollah 'democratic' newspaper 'L’Orient Today' to ‘fact-check’ - because of course they can’t read Arabic and are discontent with a twitter link.

This is my short summary of the article: they confirm that Israel has used Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, not only in Lebanon but also in Gaza in June of this year and between October and December of last year. They establish a history of the use of Depleted Uranium, and include examples of its use in Iran in 2003. Israel doesn't directly talk about their use of DU, but neither are they hiding it - because there is no law that forbids the use of these bombs by Israel, there is no treaty regulating the use of DU weapons. There were several resolutions calling for a moratorium on the use of DU weapons in the UN and EU Parliament, the latest of which was in 2022, but these have failed to stop their use (those who have used them also includes both Russia and Ukraine). The article ends with an ominous addition that the Israeli army has been found guilty multiple times of using white phosphorus, which IS prohibited against civilians or civilian property under international law. (You probably can already tell that their defense is that they do not use it against civilians)

There is another article that was published in early September this year - LINK - I highly encourage you to read this one yourself, as it is quite short, especially when considering the amount of information it contains. As this one is more easily accessible, I won’t summarize it - please take it in yourself. I will say, however, that this article’s author, one Dr. Busby, worked with colleagues to conduct several investigations into the use of uranium-based weapons in both Lebanon and Gaza. In 2006, Dr. Busby asked his colleague to collect multiple samples from a crater left by what was suspected to be Depleted Uranium weapons. Samples from an ambulance air filter were also taken. Dr. Busby and company found not only the  presence of depleted uranium but also of Enriched Uranium. Here’s the paper: link.

Enriched Uranium. In 2006.

By 2024, all of the laboratories that Dr. Busby had used to Conduct the investigation have closed their doors either to him or in general. Busby’s letters to the UN, as well as papers detailing evidence of the use of enriched and depleted uranium are either dismissed or ignored, rendering it unlikely that there will ever be the “official” source for these claims that certain people now see fit to demand. And even if the UN did accept those letters and did push for ban of those weapons - would Israel comply? Genocide is ‘illegal’ under international law, and Israel still faces the case in ICJ, but what will that ICJ do if they rule that Israel is guilty? What would UN do if they accept evidence of Israel using uranium-based weapons? Scold them and write a fine?

The aspect of the deployment of nuclear weapons considered the most horrific is - and has always been - the fallout. The idea that all nuclear weapons would leave evidence - again, fallout - behind was born into the cultural consciousness through various cold war era PSAs, as well as other media inspired by these horrors, potential and otherwise. The weapons Israel is using here do not create fallout, however. But do not mistake them as harmless - they are still highly carcinogenic. They cause birth defects, as well as various other illnesses - mysterious illnesses, or at least mysterious until doctors attempting to treat them register that their patients have been exposed to enriched uranium, after which point the mystery goes away. 

In a sense, the horrors advertised by cold war PSAs and films like Doctor Strangelove, the promise of some explosive end brought about by some fool in the US pushing the wrong button - these serve to draw a veil over the continued use of nuclear weapons that have been ongoing since this technology was first harnessed for violence. This is a severe danger to the people of Gaza, and we can’t ignore it simply because we have developed in our minds too much faith in the loosest understandings of nuclear warfare.

I think many of you are familiar with a boiling frog story. The story goes that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will try to climb out. But if you put it in warm water and very slowly heat it, it will be so accustomed to the temperature it will eventually be boiled alive. It’s not very authentic, of course - in reality the frog will try to jump out as soon as it deems the water temperature uncomfortable. Just like you would try to get out of the bathtub as soon as it gets too hot for you or try to warm yourself up when you spend too much time outside in winter. 

But some of it still rings true. At what point will the UN, or ICJ, or some other white savior wannabe decide that Israel has done too much? What is that ‘too-much’ point that makes them try to protest, and what would that protest be?

As in case with Tumblr, it seems that the boiling point, in fact, has already passed and people grew accustomed to deaths of Palestinians. There are thousands of posts about the situation in Gaza, and the whole Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria… They get a lot of attention by both zionists and Palestine supporters. There are also hundreds of Gazans that came to Tumblr in hopes to escape the genocide by asking people to cover evacuation and survival costs. Do they get the same attention? Barely. Arguably zionists are more invested in interacting with those posts - they mass report them and harass Palestinians. And even if the fundraiser post gets a lot of attention, it does not necessarily translate into a lot of donations - people just assume that someone else will donate instead of them.

You can’t stop Israel all by yourself. You can’t convince the UN or try to progress the ICJ case by yourself. You can, however, do small acts that will contribute to Palestinian resistance. Go protest, go boycott, and please, please, please, go donate to Palestinian fundraisers.

Falastin’s family are under constant threat in Gaza. She’s been fundraising to save them since late June, and yet they’ve only recently gotten to just over 5% of their total goal - a little short of $10,000 USD. They’re still in Gaza, and still in need of funds for survival. The longer they are trapped there, the more they need - not just for food and water, but also for medicine, shelter, and clothes. Each time they’re displaced, due to inadequate time to pack, they lose more supplies, and their needs increase. Give what you can so that they can survive this, and please share their fundraiser as much as you’re able regardless of whether you can donate, just in case someone you know might be able to help. Not just here on Tumblr, on other social media, talk to your friends, coworkers, family, in group chats and in discord servers.

Please keep in mind conversion rates before donating:

10$ = 103 SEK

25$ = 260 SEK

50$ = 519 SEK

100$ = 1,038 SEK

[disarmamentawarenessday]

Holy See Statement During The General Exchange Of Views At The United Nations Disarmament Commission.

First, allow me to congratulate you on your election as Chair of this commission and assure you of my delegation’s support. 

In one week’s time, we will mark the 60th anniversary of the promulgation of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical letter, Pacem in Terris, written in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

Earlier this year, Pope Francis emphasized the letter’s continued relevance in a world that sadly feels fear and anguish due to the renewed prominence of the nuclear threat in the context of the war in Ukraine.[1] Pope Francis went on further to reaffirm the immorality of possessing nuclear weapons, given that their employment, even by accident, could lead to “appalling slaughter and destruction.”[2] Such a risk, as well as the growing consciousness of the catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons, necessitates a reconception of security that moves away from a balance of arms toward integral disarmament. In this regard, the Holy See calls on all States to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). 

Tragically, the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis are being forgotten and numerous arms control treaties have been discarded, reflecting a paucity of trust internationally and accelerating a worrying trend toward rearmament. 

This growing mistrust even reaches beyond Earth’s atmosphere into the celestial domain. In this regard, the Holy See welcomes the General Assembly’s recent adoption of resolution 77/41, which “calls upon States to commit not to conduct destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite missile tests.” Indeed, my delegation hopes that this commission can foster dialogue to build consensus on this issue, while also promoting transparency and confidence-building measures (TCBMs) in outer space. Such measures would not preclude, but rather lay the groundwork for an eventual legally binding agreement prohibiting the weaponization of outer space and weapons that threaten space objects. An agreement along these lines would prevent an arms race in outer space and ensure that all outer space activity fosters cooperation, rather than mistrust, and serves the common good.

Mr. Chair, 

Let us not forget that “existing disarmament treaties are more than just legal obligations. They are also moral commitments based on trust among States and among their representatives, rooted in the trust that citizens place in their governments, with ethical consequences for current and future generations of humanity.” Therefore, adherence to, and respect for, international disarmament agreements and international law is not a form of weakness but rather, it is a source of strength and responsibility since it increases trust and stability.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

By H. E. Archbishop Gabriele CacciaApostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations.

Statement of the Holy See at the General Exchange of Views at the United Nations Disarmament Commission during the 77th Session of the United Nations General Assembly.

[mapsontheweb]

Nuclear Weapon Ban treaty

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is an international agreement where countries promise to not have or work towards getting rid of nuclear weapons.

by geo.ranking

[zvaigzdelasas]

[IFPNews is Iranian Private Media]

Mohammad Eslami, the director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), on Thursday wrote a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general, demanding the UN nuclear watchdog to inform the United Nations Security Council about dangers of possible use of nuclear weapons by the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people in Gaza.[...]

Iran’s nuclear chief categorically condemned Israel’s crimes and brutal onslaught against Gazans, demanding a firm reaction to the recent threatening statement by the illegal entity’s minister about nuking the coastal silver and reflection of its consequences to the UN Security Council. Eslami also pointed to other “similar alarming threats” made by Moshe Feiglin, a former Knesset member, and also by Tally Gotliv, a Knesset member, on social media platform X. “Needless to mention, the Israeli regime is not a party to any of the treaties governing nuclear disarmament and prohibition of the Weapons of Mass Destruction particularly NPT. This regime has prevented achieving the goal of a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone,” Eslami wrote.

“Additionally, Israel has not placed its nuclear facilities under the Agency`s safeguards regime and also it has a clandestine program to develop nuclear weapons. Therefore, the Israeli regime by undermining the internationally recognized principles directly weakens the effectiveness and efficiency of the NPT as well as the IAEA safeguards regime,” he added. The threats “revealed that the regime possesses nuclear weapons,” he said, adding that by threatening the oppressed and helpless people of Gaza, the regime has “challenged the fundamental principles of the International Humanitarian Law.”

10 Nov 23

[starseedpatriot]

So far, almost nobody in the west fully comprehends the Oreshnik weapon system just demonstrated by Russia. Hat tip to Ted Postol, Scott Ritter and Brian Berletic, the only 3 people I've found so far who fully understand this. I've done the math on the kinetic energy of the submunitions (using estimates for mass), and I've studied up on what's publicly known about these weapons so far. My conclusion? NATO is done. The west has no idea what just hit them. Russia's Oreshnik weapon system is checkmate for NATO and the USA. All U.S. aircraft carriers can be destroyed in minutes. All U.S. military bases, all underground bunkers, all ICBM launch sites, naval shipyards, etc., can be destroyed with NON-NUCLEAR kinetic energy via the Oreshnik. There are no active treaties (that I'm aware of) prohibiting this weapon system, and it doesn't destroy surrounding infrastructure or masses of civilians. It is a devastating, unstoppable surgical strike weapon that basically drops metal lightning out of the sky like Thor's Hammer or the comets of God. Nobody has any defense against it, and the range of these weapons, once mounted on intercontinental boosters, is global. The west must now either back off or go nuclear. They will probably choose to go nuclear out of desperation, be warned. Russia has just changed the course of warfare and achieved global dominance. NOBODY in the western press even has a clue. They are too stupid, too woke or too arrogant to realize what just happened. This is like playing chess with Putin and thinkin you might be competitive, then suddenly Putin's queen unleashes a flamethrower across the chess board and roasts all your pieces, setting them on fire. You thought you were playing "chess" but Putin was playing a different game called "flamethrower." It's that big of a deal.

[mariacallous]

The myth of Russian humiliation

Looking back over the past quarter-century, it isn’t easy to name a Western policy that can truly be described as a success. The impact of Western development aid is debatable. Western interventions in the Middle East have been disastrous.

But one Western policy stands out as a phenomenal success, particularly when measured against the low expectations with which it began: the integration of Central Europe and the Baltic States into the European Union and NATO. Thanks to this double project, more than 90 million people have enjoyed relative safety and relative prosperity for more than two decades in a region whose historic instability helped launch two world wars.

These two “expansions,” which were parallel but not identical (some countries are members of one organization but not the other), were transformative because they were not direct leaps, as the word “expansion” implies, but slow negotiations. Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since.

But times change, and the miraculous transformation of a historically unstable region became a humdrum reality. Instead of celebrating this achievement on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is now fashionable to opine that this expansion, and of NATO in particular, was mistaken. This project is incorrectly “remembered” as the result of American “triumphalism” that somehow humiliated Russia by bringing Western institutions into its rickety neighborhood. This thesis is usually based on revisionist history promoted by the current Russian regime — and it is wrong.

For the record: No treaties prohibiting NATO expansion were ever signed with Russia. No promises were broken. Nor did the impetus for NATO expansion come from a "triumphalist" Washington. On the contrary, Poland's first efforts to apply in 1992 were rebuffed. I well remember the angry reaction of the U.S. ambassador to Warsaw at the time. But Poland and others persisted, precisely because they were already seeing signs of the Russian revanchism to come.

When the slow, cautious expansion eventually took place, constant efforts were made to reassure Russia. No NATO bases were placed in the new member states, and until 2013 no exercises were conducted there. A Russia-NATO agreement in 1997 promised no movement of nuclear installations. A NATO-Russia Council was set up in 2002. In response to Russian objections, Ukraine and Georgia were, in fact, denied NATO membership plans in 2008.

Meanwhile, not only was Russia not "humiliated" during this era, it was given de facto "great power" status, along with the Soviet seat on the U.N. Security Council and Soviet embassies. Russia also received Soviet nuclear weapons, some transferred from Ukraine in 1994 in exchange for Russian recognition of Ukraine's borders. Presidents Clinton and Bush both treated their Russian counterparts as fellow "great power" leaders and invited them to join the Group of Eight — although Russia, neither a large economy nor a democracy, did not qualify.

During this period, Russia, unlike Central Europe, never sought to transform itself along European lines. Instead, former KGB officers with a clearly expressed allegiance to the Soviet system took over the state in league with organized crime, seeking to prevent the formation of democratic institutions at home and to undermine them abroad. For the past decade, this kleptocratic clique has also sought to re-create an empire, using everything from cyberattacks on Estonia to military invasions of Georgia and now Ukraine, in open violation of that 1994 agreement — exactly as the Central Europeans feared.

Once we remember what actually happened over the past two decades, as opposed to accepting the Russian regime’s version, our own mistakes look different. In 1991, Russia was no longer a great power in either population or economic terms. So why didn’t we recognize reality, reform the United Nations and give a Security Council seat to India, Japan or others? Russia did not transform itself along European lines. Why did we keep pretending that it had? Eventually, our use of the word “democracy” to describe the Russian political system discredited the word in Russia itself.

The crisis in Ukraine, and the prospect of a further crisis in NATO itself, is not the result of our triumphalism but of our failure to react to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and its military spending. Why didn’t we move NATO bases eastward a decade ago? Our failure to do so has now led to a terrifying plunge of confidence in Central Europe. Countries once eager to contribute to the alliance are now afraid. A string of Russian provocations unnerve the Baltic region: the buzzing of Swedish airspace, the kidnapping of an Estonian security officer.

Our mistake was not to humiliate Russia but to underrate Russia’s revanchist, revisionist, disruptive potential. If the only real Western achievement of the past quarter-century is now under threat, that’s because we have failed to ensure that NATO continues to do in Europe what it was always meant to do: deter. Deterrence is not an aggressive policy; it is a defensive policy. But in order to work, deterrence has to be real. It requires investment, consolidation and support from all of the West, and especially the United States. I’m happy to blame American triumphalism for many things, but in Europe I wish there had been more of it.

[wumblr]

finally, a good point

this comes at it from the opposite direction (from all of the other times i've said "we're walking right up to the brink of this problem and not acknowledging it") and recognizes that nukes are the means by which the problem is administrated... without fully identifying the problem itself: this is why the UN has no route to effective governance, which is what the article appeals to at the end

it also makes the assumption that every state with nukes has them for the same reason. i do not believe this to be the case, as i've said before, if the rosenbergs hadn't sacrificed their lives to leak the design from the manhattan project, we would already be in a nuclear winter. calling for "mass nonviolent hits on a xi, or a vlad, or a jung-un, or a joe" is a ludicrously naive false equivalence, a laughably ineffective tactic, and a failure to recognize the nature of the nuclear standoff we are currently in. how is nonviolent resistance going to alleviate an issue that led to executions without trial right at the outset? tragic, delusional, unstrategic

would love to see one other person connect those dots but i guess the bigger picture is just not for us, huh? it's for the ivies, so they can invent handwringing explanations to massage the illusion

[nucleartestsday]

16th Meeting, Preparatory Committee for NPT Review Conference 2026.

The Preparatory Committee for the 2026 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) will hold its second session from 22 July to 2 August 2024 at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. This will be the second of three planned sessions that will be held prior to the 2026 Review Conference.

The Preparatory Committee, open to all States parties to the Treaty, is responsible for addressing substantive and procedural issues related to the Treaty and the forthcoming Review Conference. The Chair of the second session is Ambassador Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan. UN Web TV

Watch the 16th Meeting, Preparatory Committee for NPT Review Conference 2026!

[denimbex1986]

'After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Oppenheimer saw immediately that any nation with adequate resources would be eventually able to build a weapon, and that something as gargantuan as an H-bomb had no possible military function. It could only be a mechanism for genocide.

As he tried to use his immense stature to positively influence nuclear policy, he was quickly steamrolled by McCarthyism and national overconfidence. The Christopher Nolan film dramatizes Truman’s smug certainty that the U.S. had a monopoly on the bomb, including the soon to be built H-bomb. Almost immediately spies spirited the technical knowledge for both fission and thermonuclear weapons to the Soviets. The U.S. monopoly dissolved, and the arms race Oppenheimer feared had begun.

In 1959 my Princeton roommate and I were pressed into service in an odd effort to provide sufficient bodies for a birthday party for one of the Oppenheimer children.

Becoming aware of our interest in art, Oppenheimer invited us into a small windowless room to show off a radiant Van Gogh, one of the late paintings of the fields outside the asylum of St. Remy.

Was it possible that this soft-spoken reed of a man with melancholy eyes was the legendary force that had corralled a vast and fractious team of scientific egos into building (in one of the all-time great euphemisms) a world-ending “gadget”?

The birthday ended sadly. Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, alcoholically blurry and drink in hand, descended from upstairs into the entryway as we were departing. “What the hell are you staring at?” she said to me, only she didn’t say “hell.” Hell was what the Washington establishment had visited upon her husband by removing his security clearance as the price for his misgivings about what he had wrought, including his refusal to fully assent to the H-bomb project. Kitty had been ravaged alongside him.

The biography on which the film is based quotes a section of an essay Oppenheimer published in The New York Times on June 9, 1946 laying out his ideas for the control of nuclear weapons:

“[Our plan] proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law.”

Idealistic? Perhaps. But if anyone then could have peered down the time stream, they might have given it a shot, to avoid what Oppenheimer knew loomed ahead. What do we see ahead of us? An accelerating drift toward a twin nuclear/ecological waterfall, the avoidance of which requires a spirit of cooperation equaling that of Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos.

Were he alive today, he would be appalled by just how many nuclear weapons had been built by the early 1980s. But he would be happy that arms control treaties had reduced their numbers. He would be relieved that so far they have not been used on people again. He would rejoice in the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And surely he would be over the moon about the success of the Webb telescope, a multinational scientific feat as positive as the bomb was negative.

Insufficiently acknowledged by sovereign powers, both authoritarian and democratic, nuclear and non-nuclear, is the fact that sovereignty has already eroded far more than it ever would have been through any international agreement to renounce nuclear weapons. Sovereignty is an administrative necessity that protects national identity, sometimes existentially (e.g., Ukraine does not belong to Putin), but is now increasingly transcended by the reality that we live on one small planet facing challenges that can only be solved transnationally.

Specific to weapons and war, sovereignty is growing more and more shaky in the context of inadvertent computer and human error. Our security depends upon the professionalism of the Russian military, and vice versa. So too with all the nuclear powers, even as they spend vast sums to renew their nuclear weapons. No expert or general, however tactically brilliant, would be in full control of a slide into the kind of catastrophe that nearly occurred during the Cuban crisis of 1962, and could happen again in a conflict with China over Taiwan or Putin v NATO on Ukraine.

Even on the level of conventional war, Mr. Putin is discovering he will have to destroy Ukraine in order to “save” it. Let’s pray that he understands that escalating to nukes won’t help him.

Our distracted political culture in the U.S. does not encourage dialogue around such difficult issues. The popularity of Nolan’s film is an opportunity for citizens to ask probing questions of the presidential candidates that spur fresh thinking on nuclear policy. For example, would Former Secretary of Defense William Perry’s idea of standing down our entire aging fleet of land-based ICBMs be destabilizing “appeasement” of Russia and China, or a unilateral initiative that could elicit further positive responses?

The anguish of Robert Oppenheimer, who unleashed destruction beyond measure… and then tried his best to stop its further spread… reminds us that America bears special responsibility for creating the kind of world he hoped for, where the nuclear curse is finally lifted.'

[head-post]

79th anniversary of Hiroshima deadly bombing: Not a word about US

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida emphasised in a speech on Tuesday that the suffering experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “must never happen again,” but did not mention which country carried out the deadly bombing 79 years ago.

Kishida said in his speech at the commemorative ceremony:

It is our country’s mission as the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings in war to steadily continue our efforts toward realizing a world without nuclear weapons. The calamities that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki 79 years ago and the suffering endured by the people must not repeated.

Kishida also said deepening divisions in the international community over arms control measures, as well as nuclear threats from Russia, have created an “increasingly difficult” environment around nuclear disarmament. Adding that Japan would move forward with “realistic and practical initiatives” as part of a global effort building support for nuclear disarmament, he claimed:

But no matter how difficult the journey toward a world without nuclear weapons may be, we cannot afford to halt our progress.

Noting that the number of nuclear weapons could soon increase for the first time since the peak of the Cold War, Kishida emphasised the urgency of nuclear disarmament and pledged to continue to promote the long-stalled Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, which prohibits the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.

Read more HERE

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bill Bramhall

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 12, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 12, 2024

Today’s big story continues to be Trump’s statement that he “would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if those countries are, in his words, “delinquent.” Both Democrats and Republicans have stood firm behind NATO since Dwight D. Eisenhower ran for president in 1952 to put down the isolationist wing of the Republican Party, and won.

National security specialist Tom Nichols of The Atlantic expressed starkly just what this means: “The leader of one of America’s two major political parties has just signaled to the Kremlin that if elected, he would not only refuse to defend Europe, but he would gladly support Vladimir Putin during World War III and even encourage him to do as he pleases to America’s allies.” Former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark called Trump’s comments “treasonous.”

To be clear, Trump’s beef with NATO has nothing to do with money. Trump has always misrepresented NATO as a sort of protection racket, but as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN put it today: “NATO is not an alliance based on dues: it is the largest military bloc in history, formed to face down the Soviet threat, based on the collective defense that an attack on one is an attack on all—a principle enshrined in Article 5 of NATO’s founding treaty.”

On April 4, 1949, the United States and eleven other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration. It established a military alliance that guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead. 

Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once: after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan. 

In 2006, NATO members agreed to commit at least 2% of their gross domestic product (GDP, a measure of national production) to their own defense spending in order to make sure that NATO remained ready for combat. The economic crash of 2007–2008 meant a number of governments did not meet this commitment, and in 2014, allies pledged to do so. Although most still do not invest 2% of their GDP in their militaries, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014 motivated countries to speed up that investment.

On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 31 member nations.

Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that last year it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law.

But as Russia specialist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic last month, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a long-standing treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless. Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholtz called the attack on NATO’s mutual defense guarantee “irresponsible and dangerous,” and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said, “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines our security.”

Applebaum noted on social media that “Trump's rant…will persuade Russia to keep fighting in Ukraine and, in time, to attack a NATO country too.” She urged people not to “let [Florida senator Marco] Rubio, [South Carolina senator Lindsey] Graham or anyone try to downplay or alter the meaning of what Trump did: He invited Russia to invade NATO. It was not a joke and it will certainly not be understood that way in Moscow.”

She wrote last month that the loss of the U.S. as an ally would force European countries to “cozy up to Russia,” with its authoritarian system, while Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) suggested that many Asian countries would turn to China as a matter of self-preservation. Countries already attacking democracy “would have a compelling new argument in favor of autocratic methods and tactics.” Trade agreements would wither, and the U.S. economy would falter and shrink.

Former governor of South Carolina and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley, whose husband is in the military and is currently deployed overseas, noted: “He just put every military member at risk and every one of our allies at risk just by saying something at a rally.” Conservative political commentator and former Bulwark editor in chief Charlie Sykes noted that Trump is “signaling weakness,… appeasement,…  surrender…. One of the consistent things about Donald Trump has been his willingness to bow his knee to Vladimir Putin. To ask for favors from Vladimir Putin…. This comes amid his campaign to basically kneecap the aid to Ukraine right now. People ought to take this very, very seriously because it feels as if we are sleepwalking into a global catastrophe…. ” 

President Joe Biden asked Congress to pass a supplemental national security bill back in October of last year to provide additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, as well as for the Indo-Pacific. MAGA Republicans insisted they would not pass such a measure unless it contained border security protections, but when Senate negotiators actually produced such protections earlier this month, Trump opposed the measure and Republicans promptly killed it. 

There remains a bipartisan majority in favor of aid to Ukraine, and the Senate appears on the verge of passing a $95 billion funding package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. In part, this appears to be an attempt by Republican senators to demonstrate their independence from Trump, who has made his opposition to the measure clear and, according to Katherine Tulluy-McManus and Ursula Perano of Politico, spent the weekend telling senators not to pass it. South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, previously a Ukraine supporter, tonight released a statement saying he will vote no on the measure.

Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News recorded how Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) weighed in on the issue during debate today: “This is not a stalemate. This guy [Putin] is on life support… He will not survive if NATO gets stronger.” If the bill does not pass, Tillis said, “You will see the alliance that is supporting Ukraine crumble.” For his part, Tillis wanted no part of that future: “I am not going to be on that page in history.” 

If the Senate passes the bill, it will go to the House, where MAGA Republicans who oppose Ukraine funding have so far managed to keep the measure from being taken up. Although it appears likely there is a majority in favor of the bill, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tonight preemptively rejected the measure, saying that it is nonstarter because it does not address border security.  

Tonight, Trump signaled his complete takeover of the Republican Party. He released a statement confirming that, having pressured Ronna McDaniel to resign as head of the Republican National Committee, he is backing as co-chairs fervent loyalists Michael Whatley, who loudly supported Trump’s claims of fraud after the 2020 presidential election, and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of Trump’s second son, Eric. Lara has never held a leadership position in the party. Trump also wants senior advisor to the Trump campaign Chris LaCivita to become the chief operating officer of the Republican National Committee.

This evening, Trump’s lawyers took the question of whether he is immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election to the Supreme Court. Trump has asked the court to stay last week’s ruling of the Washington, D.C., Circuit Court of Appeals that he is not immune. A stay would delay the case even further than the two months it already has been delayed by his litigation of the immunity issue. Trump’s approach has always been to stall the cases against him for as long as possible. If the justices deny his request, the case will go back to the trial court and Trump could stand trial.  

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil pays off its debt to UN and other multilateral institutions

Brazil announced Thursday that it had paid off its debts to major international institutions, including the United Nations, the Organization of American States, the World Trade Organization, and the World Health Organization. In a joint statement issued by the Foreign Affairs and Planning ministries, Brazil said it had repaid BRL 4.6 billion (USD 937 million) in debt to international institutions in 2023. This includes BRL 289 million to the UN and a separate BRL 1.1 billion to UN peacekeeping operations.

The payments ensure that Brazil will maintain its voting rights in bodies such as the UN, as well as restore its right to vote in the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Continue reading.

[razelssacredplace]

Oh geez okay so.

Killing a fleeing enemy contact.

Violating The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Blowing up what I can only equate to a life-giving facility.

Illegal use of flamethrowers.

Of course, all these things would be illegal and utter violations of the Geneva Convention if Super Earth didn't believe in doing what is absolutely right!