Too Late to Shake NATO Awake?

Posted on Sean Howard

It’s Stockholm, 14 December, 1992, and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has begun to address over 50 of his counterparts at a summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), an institution widely considered instrumental in helping end the Cold War. Just two years after the November 1990 CSCE ‘Charter of Paris for a New Europe’ had boldly declared that the continent was “liberating itself from the legacy of the past,” Kozyrev is worried the chance to build a ‘Common European Home’ is being lost, a ‘peace dividend’ squandered by American-led NATO triumphalism. So, in diplomatic desperation, he decides: no time like the present, to pay a visit from the future…

“Great Russia,” Kozyrev growls, is back, determined to protect its own western flank, defending its Slavic brethren (and suddenly vulnerable Russian minorities) from a NATO wave threatening to wash through the former Warsaw Pact to the shore of the Baltics, or even Ukraine. Given the Alliance’s pursuit of “essentially unchanged” goals – military supremacy and strategic dominance – a counter-Alliance is once again needed; and so, as a “state capable of looking after itself and its friends…using all available means, including military,” Russia will require all “the former Soviet Republics” to “immediately join a new federation or confederation”.

As Trudy Rubin wrote in The Baltimore Sun, what the Foreign Minister “didn’t say, but what every diplomat was all too well aware of, was that Russia still possesses 11,000-plus nuclear weapons.” No wonder, when he “left the room,” most “diplomats stood stunned,” while US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger “rushed after him, demanding, ‘What is going on?’” A long hour later, he found out, when Kozyrev returned the podium to declare:

Neither President Yeltsin nor I will ever agree to what I read out in my previous speech. I did it so that you should all be aware of the real threats on our road to a post-Communist Europe.

Widely dismissed as a joke or hoax, it was instead, veteran New York Times columnist William Safire insisted “a historic performance” by “the young man,” a “slap in the face…to say, ‘Wake up! Stop being so damnably complacent! To avert a return to a divided world, help us now’” – a rude awakening, admittedly, but one to which “the West’s diplomats should reply: ‘Thanks, we needed that.’”

The ‘sleep’, alas, was not broken. As the nightmarish ‘Back to the Future’ decade of the 1990s unfolded, NATO’s war-wagons rolled east, against the urgent, bipartisan advice of many senior retired US politicians, diplomats and officials. As a 1997 Open Letter to President Clinton, signed by 40 national security establishment luminaries, argued, while Moscow “does not now pose a threat to its western neighbors,” expanding the Alliance – a move “opposed across the entire political spectrum” in Russia – would be certain only to “undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West,” and “bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.”

On 1 January 1995, two years after Kosyrev’s performative prophecy, the CSCE became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a change ostensibly intended to institutionalize and advance the pan-European agenda, embracing what the Budapest Declaration of December 1994 called ‘Genuine Partnership in a New Era.’ The day the declaration was signed, however, President Yeltsin foresaw the dawn of a ‘Cold Peace’ unless Washington changed its ‘victory march’ tune, abandoning the “dangerous delusion” that “the destinies of continents and of the world community in general can somehow be managed from one single capital.” While “we hear explanations,” Yeltsin scoffed, that NATO expansion “is allegedly the expansion of stability, just in case there are undesirable developments in Russia,” the real “objective is to bring NATO up to Russia’s borders,” in breach of multiple, unequivocal ‘security assurances’ offered to the Soviet Union in 1990-91 that the Alliance would expand “not an inch eastward”

Writing in the American journal Foreign Policy in 1995, the year before he was replaced in a sharp hardline shift, Kozyrev justified his Stockholm ‘stunt,’ arguing that “although the ideas I presented were far from the most extreme held by Yeltsin’s opponents, they threw my Western counterparts into virtual panic: for a few moments they had a realistic glimpse of the kind of Russia they would have to deal with” if “Western politicians, again Americans in particular” continued to “substitute a strategy of rapid expansion of NATO” for “its fundamental transformation” into a defensive, denuclearized alliance seeking “partnership” with, not absorption of, “Eastern Europe, including Russia.”

On the sidelines of the 1994 Budapest Summit, Russia, the US, the UK, and Ukraine demonstrated the potential of disarmament diplomacy to positively shape the post-Cold War world, signing the ‘Budapest Memorandum’ confirming Ukraine’s relinquishment of Soviet nuclear weapons left on its territory, in return for security guarantees of non-interference in its internal affairs. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a gross violation of these commitments, but also a graphic illustration of “the kind of Russia” the West had by then to deal with, an ultranationalist autocracy embittered by a near-doubling of NATO from 16 states to 28, a surge swallowing most of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The total is now 30, with Bosnia and Herzegovina next in line and the former Soviet Republics of Georgia and Ukraine ‘aspiring’ to join, the latter with political encouragement and practical support (e.g. weapons and training) from Washington. The prospect of Ukrainian accession was at the root of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, designed in part to prevent the absorption of Sebastopol, for centuries the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, into a ‘Western’ Alliance not only enjoying conventional superiority but still claiming its Cold War ‘right’ (outnumbered by the Red Army) to strike first with nuclear weapons. Moscow, too, has claimed that same ‘right’ since the mid-1990s, when Yeltsin renounced the doctrine of ‘No First-Use’ inherited from the last Soviet leader – and champion of a nuclear-weapon-free world – Mikhail Gorbachev.

And not only would both sides strike first to prevent or deter nuclear use; both would ‘go nuclear’ to deter or defeat non-nuclear attacks – conventional, chemical, biological, even cyber. As Admiral Charles Richard, head of US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), stated bluntly during a recent event at the Brookings Institution: “Nuclear is not separate from conventional”; hence the ‘need’, according to Air Force Magazine’s summary of his remarks, for a “new nuclear and conventional integration policy” – new not just for the US, but NATO.

On June 14, NATO leaders will meet at the Alliance’s new, $1.45 billion (!) HQ in Brussels to discuss what Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg all-knowingly defines as “the challenges of today and tomorrow,” a self-serving short list – “Russia’s aggressive actions, the threat of terrorism, cyber attacks, emerging and disruptive technologies, the security impact of climate change, and the rise of China” – inexcusably excluding the danger of nuclear war, or indeed the detrimental impact of astronomical military spending (almost $2 trillion in 2020, the Year of COVID!) on, for example, pandemic preparedness…

Leaders will also be charged with reviewing a report, NATO 2030: United for a New Era, published in November 2020 by a ‘Reflection Group’ appointed by Stoltenberg in the turbulent wake of President Trump’s description of NATO as “obsolete,” and French President Macron’s diagnosis of strategic “brain death.”

The Reflection Group, however (10 pro-NATO “independent experts”) was tasked not to reason ‘why’ – to finally answer the basic questions posed by Kozyrev in 1995: “What is the raison d’être of NATO today?” and “Who is its real enemy?” – but rather explore ‘how’ Alliance “unity, solidarity, and cohesion,” given and taken as a self-evident good, can be increased. For what is too good for a “strategic anchor in uncertain times,” drawing on its “success in the Cold War” to keep at bay not only the Russian ‘Bear’ but now the Chinese ‘Dragon’ (added to the list of NATO adversaries in 2019 at the xenophobic behest of the Trump Administration)?

And to combat, maybe literally, both Russia and China will certainly require – as the report takes pains to stress – a hellish amount of firepower (conventional and nuclear), correspondingly massive ‘investments, and the pursuit of “dominance” in every “arena” opened by emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs), e.g., “big data, Artificial Intelligence, autonomous capabilities, space, cloud technologies, hypersonic and new missile technologies, quantum technologies and biotechnologies, and human augmentation/enhancement.”

A “strategic surge” in all these areas is necessary, we are told, to maintain NATO’s “edge” and “ability to win on the battlefield.” But the jewel in the Alliance’s crown remains its spectrum of nuclear capabilities: the long-range, thermonuclear weapons of the US, UK, and France (thousands of warheads, each capable of killing millions) and around a hundred American short-range, ‘dial-a-yield’ bombs (each capable of killing many thousands), ‘hosted’ at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. In recent years, and particularly since Coronavirus lockdowns literally brought home the importance of ‘human’ rather than ‘national’ security, the popularity in NATO states of nuclear weapons in general, and ‘nuclear sharing’ in particular, has steeply declined, a fall also explained by the ‘new light’ cast on the issue by a fast-rising star, the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition on Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the ‘Ban Treaty’ NATO continues to regard with a cool, porcelain disdain at odds with public sentiment.

In Canada, for example, 74% of 1,007 respondents to a Nanos poll conducted in late March ‘supported’ (55%) or ‘somewhat supported’ (19%) Canada signing and ratifying the Ban. (Quebec – 82% – and Atlantic Canada – 74% –were the most enthusiastic regions, the Prairies – 65% – the least.) Almost the same number, 73%, agreed or somewhat agreed that Canada should join “even if, as a member of NATO, it might come under pressure from the United States not to do so.” And in a striking indication of the Treaty’s stigmatizing impact, 71% declared they “would withdraw money from any investment or financial institution…investing funds in anything related to the development, manufacturing or deployment of nuclear weapons.”

The NATO 2030 Report dutifully rides to the rescue of the status quo, insisting not only that “nuclear-sharing arrangements” are a “critical element” of NATO’s “security guarantees,” but that the “political value of this commitment is as important as the military value it brings”. But what does this mean, except that ‘nukes’ – acting as a kind of atomic adhesive, or Superweapon superglue – are needed as much to prevent internal division as deter external threat? Isn’t that rather a high price to pay, absurd risk to run, for “unity?”

Counting the many blessing of the Bomb is essential, the Report argues, to “counter hostile efforts to undermine” the Alliance’s “vital policy” of nuclear dependence. The ‘hostility’ presumably emanates from the Nobel Peace-Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and other Ban Treaty supporters, an ‘emerging and disruptive’ threat – first the Bear, then the Dragon, now the Dove! – NATO needs to counter by insisting the TPNW “will never contribute to practical disarmament, nor will it affect international law.” In January this year, however, with its 50th ratification, the Treaty became international law, fully-binding on its growing membership. And if that membership, to date, includes none of the nuclear-armed nine (China, France, Israel, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, UK, US) or their 32 pro-Bomb allies, its contribution to disarmament may yet prove decisive if it can generate new perspectives, inspire deep debates – and inform new policies – within NATO and beyond.

The Canadian Government recently insisted that the Ban Treaty’s “provisions are inconsistent with Canada’s collective defensive obligations as a member of NATO.” This is a favourite means of ‘cementing’ the Alliance’s pro-Bomb façade: but is it true? The famous ‘collective defense’ provision (Article V) of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty states only that an attack against one is an attack against all, not how such aggression should be deterred or responded to. As Canadian activist Ray Acheson details in her superb contribution to Peace Research Perspectives on NATO 2030, “a look at how NATO came to identify as a nuclear weapon alliance indicates, rather than ‘compromise’ achieved through ‘statecraft’, the process was more like obedience reached through intimidation.”

To keep hopes of disarmament alive, saner NATO states like Denmark and Canada insisted that the Alliance’s first Strategic Concept (1950) did not embrace or endorse collective nuclear defense. After years of Anglo-American bullying and arm-twisting, the second Strategic Concept (1957) did – a fateful surrender greatly increasing, as Canada complained, the chances “of the atomic sword being unsheathed.”

False narratives – and histories – can generate false consciousness, constraining or eliminating options for change; and such fabrication, as peace researcher Michael Brzoska writes in ‘Bending History, Risking the Future,’ is the dangerous hallmark of the new ‘study’:

Foremost among the events the report does not mention are Russian opposition to the extension of NATO to the East, the illegality of the Western wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and Western contributions to the dismemberments of arms control arrangements.

As a result, Brzoska worries, the report “bodes ill for the future,” strengthening “the view, already accepted in many NATO countries, of a Western world, with NATO as its ‘strategic anchor,’ that has been innocently drawn into the quagmires created by evil others.”

As an exercise in ‘reflection,’ in fact, NATO 2030 rather resembles the narcissistic architecture of the new Headquarters, a 250,000 square-meter complex (comparable in size to UN HQ!) of “shiny glass and steel interlocking buildings,” housing 4,000 staff, with “glazing equivalent to 10 football pitches, sleek, airport terminal-like halls” and an “amphitheatre-like…decision-making chamber”: a high-tech temple with a “central IT brain” –and 60,000 sensors– which I heard a former disarmament diplomat describe as a “glass mausoleum.”

Sixty thousand sensors – and no clue about peace.

What a joke!

Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton.

Canada continuing to fail on cleaning up cluster munitions law

Posted on Earl Turcotte

From The Hill Times, May 17, 2021

Many expected that the Liberals would amend this flawed legislation when they regained power in 2015. This did not happen, despite repeated entreaties by the NDP, Greens, and civil society.

What is arguably worse than not joining an important disarmament treaty? Joining with no intention of complying with its core provisions.

In 2015, Canada’s Prohibiting Cluster Munitions Act came into force—legislation that fails to meet the standards of the historic Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) that it is supposed to uphold.

Cluster munitions are designed to target wide areas, killing and maiming indiscriminately. Typically, more than one-third fail to detonate upon impact, posing a lethal threat to man and beast for decades. Approximately 98 per cent of all known cluster munitions victims have been civilian. Most of them, small farmers in developing nations forced by poverty to cultivate contaminated land, and children, often drawn to the bright colour and shape of the sub-munitions.

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Canada’s support for Nuclear Deterrence and the Right to Life

Posted on editor

Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
UN Human Rights Committee – 132nd session
June 28 – July 23, 2021
Periodic Review of Canada
List of Issues Submission
————
Submission by the Canadian Pugwash Group
April 27, 2021

The Human Rights Committee in its General Comment 36 of October 30, 2018 stated in part:

The threat or use of weapons of mass destruction, in particular nuclear weapons, which are indiscriminate in effect and are of a nature to cause destruction of human life on a catastrophic scale, is incompatible with respect for the right to life and may amount to a crime under international law.

In light of this interpretation it would follow that the policy of nuclear deterrence which threatens under certain, unspecified circumstances to use nuclear weapons is incompatible with the right to life as set out in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

Canada, in its national policy as well as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has supported the policy of nuclear deterrence.

In its 2017 Safe, Secure, Engaged: Canada’s Defence Policy the Canadian Government gives a new prominence to deterrence, stating that “The return of major power rivalry, new threats from non-state actors and challenges in the space and cyber domains have returned deterrence to the centre of defence thinking” and declaring that “Canada benefits from the deterrent effect provided by its alliances (e.g. NATO and NORAD)”. It is made clear that the reference to deterrence embraces both nuclear and conventional forces (“Deterrence has traditionally focused on conventional and nuclear capabilities…”). 1

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Government out of step with Canadians on nuclear weapons

Posted on Paul Meyer

Ottawa refuses to support a UN nuclear weapons ban treaty. Why is there such a disconnect between government policy and public preference?

While most Canadians are aware of the massive destructive power of nuclear weapons, they are rarely asked their opinion about them. Earlier this month, a Nanos poll provided the responses of 1,000 Canadians to a set of nine questions on the theme of nuclear disarmament. The clear preference of 80 per cent of those surveyed was that the world should work to eliminate nuclear weapons.

This sentiment could be seen as merely an abstract aspirational goal, but the poll also addressed levels of support for the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force this January. Overall, 74 per cent of those polled expressed support for Canada adhering to this treaty. This support is at odds with the Canadian government’s current rejection of the TPNW, which it has argued is ineffective and contrary to NATO policies. Still, the polling numbers suggest the public is supportive of a nuclear weapons ban of some sort, regardless of the government’s concerns.

Popular support for the TPNW didn’t fade even when respondents were presented with a scenario of U.S. opposition to Canada embracing the treaty. When asked if “Canada should join the UN TPNW, even if, as a member of NATO, it might come under pressure from the U.S. not to do so,” 73 per cent still agreed or somewhat agreed with Canadian adherence to the treaty.

The support for the elimination of nuclear weapons through a treaty arrangement appeared informed by a widespread recognition among those surveyed that there was no adequate response possible if a nuclear war was unleashed. Eighty-five per cent of those polled agreed or somewhat agreed that “no government, health system or aid organization could respond to the devastation caused by nuclear weapons, and humanity’s only hope is through the elimination of nuclear weapons.”

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Canadians want nuclear disarmament and our government should act

Posted on Douglas Roche

The Hill Times

It is not surprising that 80 per cent of Canadians think that Canada is not prepared to handle a nuclear weapons emergency and that these weapons, now numbering more than 13,000 in the world, should be eliminated.

A strong majority across Canada want the government to join the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, despite pressure it may face from the United States. That’s the highlight of a new national survey conducted by Nanos, the polling organization. The result of this first poll in many years on what Canadians think of nuclear weapons challenges the government to come clean on the reason it won’t join the new Prohibition Treaty.

The treaty was signed by 122 nations in 2017 and entered into force last January. It prohibits, for those who join it, the possession of nuclear weapons. But the U.S. took a hostile stance against it and NATO followed suit. Canada has been dodging the Treaty with one unjustifiable excuse after another as to why it won’t join.

Now Nanos has put a strong spotlight on the issue. Requested by The Simons Foundation, the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition, and le Collectif Echec à la guerre, Nanos conducted a random telephone and online survey of 1,007 Canadians, 18 or older, between March 27 and 30.

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Shining a light on the dark aftermath of nuclear war

Posted on Sean Howard

Cape Breton Observer | 3 March 2021

“We now send greetings and thanks to our eldest Brother, the Sun. Each day without fail he travels the sky from east to west, bringing the light of a new day. He is the source of all the fires of life…” — From Greetings to the Natural World, the Thanksgiving Address of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy

On February 16, Canadian Green Party MP Elizabeth May presented a petition in the House of Commons urging the government to sign the new UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), the ‘Ban Treaty’ which became international law earlier this year. The petition notes that while even a single “nuclear weapons detonation could result in a humanitarian catastrophe so immense that it is impossible to comprehend” – with “results…far worse than any pandemic as there is no known meaningful medical response” – in any major exchange “nuclear winter could be triggered, causing widespread famine throughout the world.”

This is, indeed, what the science tells us: that many of the nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons on earth are capable of turning cities to clouds of high-rise, long-lived, sun-blocking soot. In fact, even a ‘minor’ exchange – e.g. a few hundred Hiroshima-sized detonations – would cause, in addition to millions of deaths from blast and fall-out, climate damage condemning even vaster numbers to starvation.

One of the most impressive aspects of the international Humanitarian Initiative which led to the negotiation of the Ban Treaty in 2017 was the emphasis on new research into the catastrophic impacts of nuclear use, for example (to quote the Treaty preamble), the “disproportionate impact on women and girls…of ionising radiation.”

The world’s nine nuclear-armed nations (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, UK, US) seemed genuinely confused: what more of value could be learned about the monstrous effects of weapons prized precisely for their monstrousness, their supposed ability to ‘deter’ – that is, to intimidate and terrorize – adversaries? Addressing the United Nations First Committee (on Disarmament and International Security) in 2016, France’s Head of Delegation, criticizing attempts to “base the future of nuclear disarmament simply on a humanitarian approach,” insisted that “the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons have been well known for several decades.”

Yet, while the Bomb is indeed pure evil, it is also a Devil of many details, some with the potential to shatter preconceived notions regarding the full environmental costs and consequences of atomic conflagration. Astoundingly, though the basic facts have been clear since the breakthrough nuclear winter studies of the 1980s, the physics of atomic mass fire seem never to have been adequately incorporated into the war plans of the two nuclear superpowers, America and Russia.

In her landmark 2004 study, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, & Nuclear Weapons Devastation, Dr. Lynn Eden of Stanford University sought to answer a terrifying question: “How and why, for more than half a century, has the US government seriously underestimated the damage that nuclear weapons could cause?” The fatal error was easy enough to identify: “The invention of the atomic bomb and the extraordinary blast and fire damage wreaked on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not disrupt the pre-atomic dynamics” of war-planning and damage assessment:

After the bomb, organizational goals remained concentrated on the destruction of specific targets, and government analysts…continued to understand blast damage as more certain, hence more predictable, than fire damage. In short, analysts ‘saw’ atomic weapons as ‘blast’ weapons.

So profound was this neglect that it led to “a total incapacity to predict nuclear fire damage” – “no recognized experts, no manuals, no knowledge-laden organizational routines” – and the acceptance of the circular argument that because such damage was ‘clearly’ unpredictable, it was a waste of time to see if it was! Even before the danger of nuclear winter was known, this was, in the words of historian Paul Edwards, an “astonishing case of self-inflicted institutional blindness.”

And in 2004, Eden stressed, it was still the case that the “conventional wisdom among the scientists, civilians, and military officers who compose what is called the ‘nuclear weapons effects community’ is that damage from blast is predictable but damage from mass fire is not,” despite mounting evidence that the impacts of nuclear firestorms “can indeed be predicted” and “will very often be more extensive than damage from blast.”

Seventeen years later, does that ‘wisdom’ remain conventional? To my knowledge, no one has reported or suggested otherwise; and no independent study has been ever ordered by the US Government to review the adequacies of the orthodox approach. Until, that is, now.

Buried deep in the belly of a very large beast – Section 3171 of the new $740 billion Pentagon budget – the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (the NAS) are commissioned to conduct an “Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War,” to be submitted to relevant agencies and committees “not later than 18 months after the enactment of this Act.”

Delayed by President Trump’s racist veto (protesting provisions renaming bases honoring Confederate Generals), the Act became law on New Year’s Day, so by July 2022, US leaders and legislators – and, hopefully, press and public, in the Republic and beyond – will learn in unprecedented detail about “the non-fallout atmospheric effects of plausible scenarios for nuclear war, ranging from low-quantity regional exchanges to large-scale exchanges between major powers.”

Specifically, the study will examine “the fires such explosions may cause;” “the atmospheric transport of the gases from such explosions;“ the radioactive material from such explosions”; and:

…the soot and other debris from such fires and explosions and the atmospheric, terrestrial, and marine consequences of such effects, including with respect to changes in weather patterns, airborne particulate concentrations, stratospheric ozone, agriculture, and long-term regional ecosystem viability.

The study is further required to identify the “limitations” of existing “models…for assessing the environmental effects of nuclear war” – evaluating “relevant uncertainties” and highlighting “key data gaps” – and to make “recommendations for how such models can be improved to better inform decision making.”

Crucially, the Secretary of Defense is required to provide the NAS with such information “as is necessary,” including granular detail “relating” to the aforementioned “plausible scenarios.” In other words, the Pentagon has to come clean about the range and extent of nuclear damage it is planning on inflicting, including “the yield, type, and number of nuclear weapons,” “the types and locations of targets,” “the time distribution of the explosions,” and the effects of different “atmospheric conditions.” Conversely, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is required to provide “information on foreign adversary capabilities” related to planned nuclear use against the US. (Given the sensitivity of such disclosures, while the final report “shall be submitted in unclassified form,” it may “include a classified index”.)

As opposed to the Hallelujah Chorus it deserved, the passing of Section 3171 was scarcely noted or reported, even in the specialist press. So for the last six weeks, anxious to gauge just how big a moment this might be, I have sought expert reaction and insight. The following quotes are taken from email correspondence, and I am grateful for the generous responses received.

Every defense bill is the outcome of ‘conference’ negotiations reconciling the versions produced by the House of Representatives and the Senate. In this case, only the House mandated a study (adopted in conference with apparently little debate), and I learned that one important figure working with progressive staffers on the House Armed Services Committee to promote the provision was Professor Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor emeritus at Princeton University’s renowned Program on Science & Global Security. Referring to the Herculean labors of one of America’s pre-eminent nuclear winter scientists, Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University, von Hippel wrote:

I have been concerned that the studies by Alan and his colleagues have been ignored by the US government and that an NAS study that concluded that the issue should be taken seriously might help.

Let us pause to register with appropriate horror this astonishing claim, that the specter of nuclear winter has yet to to be “taken seriously” by a government capable, in hours, of plunging the planet into years of cold and dark! “I have no reason,” von Hippel continued:

…to doubt Alan’s calculations but I have wanted to get an expert review of the input assumptions concerning the amount of soot that plausibly would be generated and lofted into the stratosphere by different nuclear wars.

Von Hippel closed by stressing that the “legislation” unambiguously “instructs” the Department of Defense (DOD) “to cooperate,” providing information “that will be particularly important with regard to discussions of the targeting scenarios.”

Dr. Robock told me he warmly welcomed the study, which would happily coincide with recent breakthroughs in modelling:

[O]ur recent results, using actual forest fires in Canada that pumped soot into the stratosphere, validate and strengthen our trust in the models that simulate the impacts of much more soot from fires ignited by nuclear war. The “biggest unknown” remained “the amount of soot that would be injected into the atmosphere,” and in this crucial area:

[W]e are working to, for the first time, simulate urban firestorms to calculate the soot emission based on the ‘fuel load’ (how much there is to burn) and various scenarios of nuclear weapon sizes dropped on cities.

Robock’s long-time colleague Dr. Brian Toon (Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Colorado) likewise acknowledged that “once you get into an extreme case something surprising might occur,” and that “without observations” – without, that is, the ample ‘data’ provided by nuclear war! – “it will be hard to carry climate models further.” But:

We don’t see any indications at the moment of problems with them. Basically, when you put that much smoke into the stratosphere, the physics is not that complicated. It’s like predicting there will be a winter. It gets cold every day when the sun goes down.

Toon identified a number of currently “unresolvable issues” frustrating hopes of more exact predictions: the “amount of fuel” to be ignited, “how much will burn,” “how high the smoke will go,” and “what the targets are in a war that has never been fought.” All of these, however, should become less dark matters as a result of the candor now required of the Pentagon, so Toon’s “hope is that the Academy panel will recommend further research on these issues and get some funding for people to work on the problems.”

Toon concluded with a remark I found both pertinent and poignant. Noting his involvement “in many large science issues, including the ozone hole, planetary studies, and global climate change,” each of which “has had thousands of scientists work on them,” the study of the Earth-shattering impacts of nuclear war “stands out as a place where no science is being funded, and no one wants to work,” in sharp contrast, alas, to the fortunes invested, and legions of scientists employed, in maintaining and developing nuclear weapons. Urge Toon:

Given its importance, we really need to foster an environment where at least a modest science community outside of DOD and DOE [Department of Energy] can provide advice to policy makers.

As a matter of public policy – of establishing and cultivating appropriate relations between science and society in the nuclear age – this strikes me as a profoundly failed state of affairs, a morally-criminal negligence endangering us all. As Dr. Hans Kristensen declared, in a statement issued on behalf of the Federation of American Scientists, “such a study is both long overdue and urgent”:

The threat of nuclear war and its potential effects have loomed over the human race and the natural environment for far too long. The military’s models for the consequences of nuclear war are shrouded in secrecy but the public has a right to know so it can be better informed to make the right choices about nuclear policy. The National Academy of Sciences would be an ideal institution for conducting a scientific and unbiased assessment of the potential effects of nuclear war.

Speaking for the internationally-influential Nuclear Threat Initiative, Dr. Page Stoutland (vice president for scientific and technical affairs) noted that “while there is not agreement as to the magnitude of the climate effects” of nuclear war, “hopefully the NAS study can shed some light on,” for example, “how agriculture, the economy, health and even society/governance may be impacted”:

There are undoubtedly gaps in our knowledge that need to be addressed so that we can have a better informed debate on the role of nuclear weapons and the implications of use.

Stoutland added that “we have also been reviewing the current understanding of the effects of nuclear weapons,” a subject which had “gotten renewed attention in the last few years due to the work of Toon and Robock,” as well as researchers at DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where the Bomb was first built, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which designed and refined a vast array of Cold War warheads.

In November 2020, for example, LLNL published a study examining “the potential for global climate changes from large urban fires ignited in a hypothetical regional exchange of 100 15-kiloton [Hiroshima-scale] nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan,” a scenario already explored by Robock, Toon, and others but now, according to an LLNL summary, taking “new factors into account…using two high-fidelity models for the first time.”

And what the new simulations suggested – while acknowledging “uncertainties” pointing “to the need for further development of nuclear exchange scenarios” – was that “the smoke from 100 simultaneous firestorms would block sunlight for about four years, instead of the eight to fifteen years predicted in other models.”

Two quick reflections. After the COVID traumas of the last year, can anyone begin to imagine what – in a best case scenario! – those four years of blocked sunlight would be like? And has the immense computational firepower of the weapons labs yet been turned on US war plans, examining the likely impacts of the incomparably more devastating thermonuclear exchanges currently envisaged?

I received only one response which, while supportive of the study, voiced skepticism about its potential scientific value, and concern about its possible conduct. Dr. Theodore Postol – Professor of Science, Technology and National Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – is a leading independent expert on nuclear war effects, oft-cited by Lynn Eden in Whole World on Fire. He told me that while:

…the question of a study on the impacts on the atmosphere of large-scale nuclear weapon use is extremely important and should be routinely looked at and revised starting from a baseline…I have serious doubts that we will understand the full physical and biological consequences of significant use of nuclear weapons wherever they occur in the world.

Do we understand, for example, “how the atmosphere would go about healing during the period where soot slowly gets removed from the atmosphere and what could happen when the sun starts re-illuminating the ground below?” And how accurately can we “make estimates of soot removal in an unperturbed atmosphere by water condensation?” As he stressed, however, “none of these concerns are an argument for not pursuing research into this extremely important question;” in fact, they can be seen as strengthening the case for the new study. But can the NAS be trusted to conduct it? Postol wrote “bluntly” that the NAS:

…is a club which has truly outstanding scientists as members along with a large number of members who are less than truly outstanding, but are prominent mostly because of unearned social stature within the academic community. The problem with this is that people who are in the ‘club’ are most interested in protecting the reputation of the club rather than making sure the club be made up of the membership with the stature and non-political standards they claim as the norm.

“This human, but unfortunate circumstance,” he argues, “adds another dimension of uncertainty to any study that involves the application of supposedly neutral scientific analysis to a subject of high political interest.”

Postol is clearly still scarred by the “last NAS report that I thought was important to the question of nuclear war” — its “egregiously flawed” 2012 study of the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) program. But if that report (as many experts agree) was “simply a sham” – failing to expose DOD hype, false advertising and even rigged testing – we should note that Robock referred me to “the NAS study on nuclear winter done in the 1980s,” which “was very valuable in confirming the climate model results.”

On balance, it seems odd to presuppose that the NAS will either produce a superb report or concoct a corrupt one. Much will depend on the composition of the panel, but just as its members will have to work to keep the Pentagon honest, so the work of the panel itself will need to be monitored closely, to verify whether the trust being placed in ‘the club’ is in this instance well founded.

But if the job is well done, it will surely reach the same sane conclusion as the 122 states adopting the Ban Treaty in 2017: that we have simply got to stop playing with nuclear fire.

Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and member of Peace Quest Cape Breton. He may be reached here.

Small modular nuclear reactors and net zero carbon emissions by 2050 – the math doesn’t add up

Posted on M.V. Ramana

The Hill Times | submitted 3 March 2021

In December 2020, Minister of Natural Resources, Seamus O’Regan, released an action plan for small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which assured us that SMRs will enable, among other things, “a net-zero economy by 2050”. Earlier, Minister O’Regan also stated: “We have not seen a model where we can get to net-zero emissions by 2050 without nuclear (power)”. How does one evaluate such assertions?

The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, emphasized that a single negative instance is sufficient to invalidate a theory. Consequently, Minister O’Regan’s second assertion is easily falsified: there are a number of researchers who have developed pathways for purely renewable energy based systems, with zero emissions. Examples include one for North America and a global one.

Germany offers an example of how carbon emissions (and use of coal) can be reduced without relying on nuclear energy. Thanks to its decision to phase out nuclear power, it has expanded renewable energy sources rapidly, resulting in its carbon emissions declining by over 40 percent from 1990 levels. In contrast, Canada’s emissions have increased substantially since 1990.

The potential role of an energy technology in climate mitigation depends on two important parameters: cost and time. Time is critical; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other international bodies have warned that to stop irreversible damage from climate change, emissions have to be reduced drastically by 2030. That is the yardstick to evaluate technologies.
Nuclear power doesn’t even begin to contribute within that time frame. A nuclear plant takes around a decade to go from start of construction to producing electricity. But one can’t start construction of a nuclear reactor immediately. The requisite planning and raising the finances might take another decade.

How about SMRs? These will take even longer because the SMRs being developed in Ontario and New Brunswick are just conceptual designs. To develop full-fledged constructible designs is time consuming and expensive. NuScale, the leading U.S. design, has been under development for nearly two decades; it is still not licensed for construction because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has identified various safety concerns. All this after nearly a billion USD has been spent on the design.

The second parameter influencing climate mitigation potential of a technology is cost. Nuclear power, today, is about the most expensive way of generating electricity. The only reactors being built anywhere in North America are currently forecast to cost 29 billion USD up from a promised 14 billion USD. In the United States, home to the most nuclear plants globally, it costs over 10,000 USD per kilowatt of generating capacity to construct a new nuclear plant, roughly eight to ten times the cost of wind and utility scale solar power plants respectively.

Unfavourable economics has driven nuclear power’s declining share in global electricity generation, from 17.5 percent in 1996 to around 10 percent in 2019. It is also why no nuclear power plants have been built in Canada since the 1990s. The last effort to construct new reactors was abandoned in 2009 once the price tag became clear.

Can SMRs change this economic picture? For both engineering and historical reasons, the answer is no; electricity from SMRs will only be more expensive. The engineering reason is that constructing a 800 megawatt reactor requires much less than four times the amount of concrete or steel used in a 200 megawatt reactor. Thus, the per unit cost of SMRs is much higher than large nuclear plants, which, in turn, are much more expensive than solar and wind.

Historically, such economies of scale are what drove countries around the world to move from smaller to larger reactors. An example is India. Many small reactors built in the United States shut down early because they couldn’t compete economically.
SMR advocates claim that costs would come down rapidly through repeated manufacture in factories and learning. But the evidence for these effects is slim to non-existent. Historically, costs of nuclear plants have gone up, not down, with more experience. Factory manufacture has also not helped reduce the costs of the reactors under construction in the United States.
The bottom line is that the math on SMRs just doesn’t add up. Investing in SMRs is a waste of time and money.

M.V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and Director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

L’Aut’ Journal

Posted on editor

Nations-Unies: le Traité d’Interdiction des Armes Nucléaires entre en vigueur le 22 janvier 2021 appuyé par le Bloc Québécois, le NPD et le Parti Vert …sans le Canada de Trudeau ni les USA de Biden. https://lautjournal.info/20210118/le-traite-dinterdiction-des-armes-nucleaires-entre-en-vigueur-le-22-janvier

1955: Albert Einstein et Bertrand Russell approuvent la fondation des Conférences Pugwash sur la science et les affaires mondiales à la demande du physicien nucléaire Josef Rotblat dans le but de mettre fin à la prolifération nucléaire. Le film UN RÊVE ÉTRANGE d’Éric Bednarski (ONF 2008) raconte la vie de ce physicien démissionnaire de Los Alamos, qui reçoit le prix Nobel de la Paix 1995.

1983-4: Une chaîne humaine de 60 000 Montréalais relie les consulats américains et russes pour protester avec le mouvement nonaligné de la paix fondé par Dimitri Roussopoulos (Black Rose Books, Écosociété) contre les missiles nucléaires des deux pays. Helen Caldicott reçoit un Oscar pour le film de l’ONF censuré par Reagan Si cette planète vous tient à coeur et Martin Duckworth termine au Japon son film sur les Hibakushas (ONF).

Les Artistes pour la Paix sous la présidence de Jean-Louis Roux avec Raymond Lévesque, Gilles Vigneault, Armand Vaillancourt, Yvon Deschamps etc. se joignent aux Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament (Harry Belafonte et Liv Ullman) : Raoûl Duguay et Margie Gillis performent à Hambourg devant cent mille jeunes Allemands unis pour la cause, préfigurant la chute du mur de Berlin.

2010: reçu à l’UQAM par Frédéric Back qui lui remet une gravure de l’homme qui plantait des arbres, Murray Thomson, de Pugwash et Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, collige deux pétitions, l’une de 108 professeurs d’universités et l’autre de + de 1000 membres de l’Ordre du Canada demandant au gouvernement canadien d’appeler une Convention internationale sur l’arme nucléaire, telle que réclamée par Ban Ki-moon, premier Secrétaire général de l’ONU à se rendre un six août à Hiroshima pour commémorer les 140 000 morts de 1945. Il y fut reçu par le maire Akiba, alors président de l’organisme international les Maires pour la Paix, fort de plus de 6000 cités-membres de 144 pays.

7 octobre 2008: une conférence de presse annonce à la Société des Arts Technologiques de Montréal la création du Mouvement Sortons le Québec du nucléaire : Michel Duguay (Université Laval) et Karel Mayrand, le Dr Éric Notebaert et Gordon Edwards PhD derrière; Laure Waridel et Diane Dufresne avec Pierre Jasmin derrière; Ugo Lapointe (Québec meilleure mine) et Christian Simard (Nature Québec) feront fermer Gentilly 2 et déclarer les mines d’uranium non acceptables socialement par le BAPE.

25 septembre 2017: Pierre Jasmin (APLP, Pugwash), Debbie Grisdale (Réseau canadien pour l’abolition de l’arme nucléaire-CNANW) et Steven Staples (Peace Quest, ceasefire.ca) encadrent à Ottawa l’ambassadrice Elayne Whyte Gómez du Costa Rica, qui vient de faire accepter à l’ONU par 122 pays le fameux Traité sur l’Interdiction des Armes Nucléaire en l’inexcusable absence de membres du gouvernement Trudeau.

10 décembre 2017: la directrice d’ICANW.org, Beatrice Fihn et l’hibakusha Setsuko Thurlow admirent le parchemin et la médaille du PRIX NOBEL DE LA PAIX 2017 accordé. 19 novembre 2020 : un débat contre l’arme nucléaire, animé par Bianca Mugyenyi et organisé par le Dr Anton Wagner (HNDC) et Pierre Jasmin avec Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe (Bloc Québécois), Heather MacPherson (NPD) et Elizabeth May (Parti Vert), sera à nouveau à l’ordre du jour d’une conférence de presse le 21 janvier 2021 à 10h pour célébrer avec Doug Roche la situation nouvelle favorable à l’ONU. Le 19 janvier à midi, une alerte par plus de mille signataires sur une pétition d’Elizabeth May au Sénat canadien demande au gouvernement canadien de rejoindre le Traité (TIAN) pour écarter une des trois menaces à l’existence de la planète (+ COVID-19 et changements climatiques) : https://petitions.ourcommons.ca/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-3028. Signatures de plus de 700 personnes et groupes, dont ÉCHEC À LA GUERRE dans le journal Hilltimes, foreignpolicy.ca/hilltimes des 18 et 20 janvier. Webinaire au Sénat : Hannah.stafl@sen.parl.gc.ca . Le 22 janvier à 14h, Noam Chomsky enjoindra le gouvernement canadien de signer et ratifier le TIAN (CFPI).

Six personnalités politiques confrontent avec courage Trudeau

Posted on editor

Par Pierre Jasmin

Depuis ce Prix Nobel de la Paix de 2017, Trudeau a toujours refusé de rencontrer Setsuko

La veille de l’entrée en vigueur à l’ONU du crucial et historique Traité d’Interdiction des Armes Nucléaires (TIAN), une sénatrice indépendante, un ex-sénateur ancien député du parti conservateur et quatre parlementaires des quatre autres partis représentés aux Communes confrontaient le gouvernement Trudeau, qui depuis, a gardé son mutisme complice de l’OTAN. Qui sont ces six braves ? Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe du Bloc québécois, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith du Parti libéral, Elizabeth May du Parti vert, la sénatrice Marilou McPhedran, Heather McPherson du NPD et l’ex-sénateur canadien et Ambassadeur pour le désarmement, Douglas Roche OC, ont tenu une conférence de presse conjointe d’une heure pour marquer l’entrée en vigueur historique du TIAN. À regarder sur le facebook de Heather MacPherson.

Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe a articulé en français une position nettement plus affirmée que celle en anglais du 19 novembre : le BLOC semble plus résolu que jamais en faveur de la signature du Canada au TIAN. Alexis a eu la générosité de souligner le courage du député libéral Erskine-Smith qui comme la sénatrice McPhedran a demandé à Trudeau de faire preuve du même courage que Brian Mulroney anti-apartheid et que Jean Chrétien anti-mines antipersonnel, d’ailleurs partisan de signer au nom du Canada le TIAN. Comment, s’est-on unanimement indigné, comment peut-on hésiter à dénoncer des armes de destruction massive qui s’attaquent en majorité aux civils ? Alexis a en plus ouvert la porte à dénoncer la politique libérale laxiste face aux déchets nucléaires, attaquée par Gordon Edwards, PhD. Le discours de Douglas Roche, plus fort que jamais, a dénoncé la lâcheté des Freeland, Garneau et Trudeau, rappelant que le Canada depuis 75 ans avait plutôt l’habitude de se trouver du côté des initiatives de paix de l’ONU.

COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE A MARI USQUE AD MARE

Le communiqué de presse suivant est resté lettre morte, vu la censure généralisée de nos médias, tout comme ceux des 9 pays armés de bombes nucléaires, nos soi-disant alliés Grande-Bretagne, France et États-Unis + 25 autres pays membres de l’OTAN, dont évidemment le Canada de Trudeau. Voici donc ce communiqué, conçu pour informer la population :
« Des Canadiens d’un océan à l’autre se joignent le 22 janvier à des sympathisants du monde entier pour célébrer l’entrée en vigueur du Traité sur l’interdiction des armes nucléaires, 90 jours après le Honduras, devenu le 50e État à ratifier ce traité historique.

Le Secrétaire général des Nations Unies, Antonio Guterres, a proclamé que l’entrée en vigueur de ce Traité était «l’aboutissement d’un mouvement mondial visant à attirer l’attention sur les conséquences humanitaires catastrophiques de toute utilisation d’armes nucléaires. Le TIAN représente un engagement significatif en faveur de l’élimination des armes nucléaires, la plus haute priorité des Nations Unies en matière de désarmement. »

Mme Setsuko Thurlow, maintenant citoyenne canadienne qui a survécu au bombardement atomique d’Hiroshima à l’âge de 13 ans, a déclaré: «Quand j’ai appris que nous avions atteint notre 50e ratification, je pouvais à peine tenir debout. Je suis donc restée assise sur ma chaise, ma tête entre mes mains et j’ai pleuré de joie. Je me suis imaginée échanger avec les esprits de centaines de milliers de personnes qui avaient perdu la vie à Hiroshima et Nagasaki. Je n’ai que de la gratitude pour tous ceux qui ont œuvré au succès de ce traité ». Mme Thurlow a consacré sa vie à l’abolition de l’arme nucléaire, a reçu l’Ordre du Canada et a été honorée comme co-récipiendaire du prix Nobel de la paix 2017, accordé à la Campagne internationale pour l’abolition des armes nucléaires (ICANW.org) et à sa directrice exécutive, Beatrice Fihn.

PERSPECTIVE

Négocié en 2017, le Traité sur l’interdiction des armes nucléaires interdit légalement en toutes circonstances, le développement, la fabrication, la production, les essais, l’acquisition, le stockage, le transfert, le stationnement, l’utilisation ou la menace d’usage des armes nucléaires. Il oblige également les États parties à fournir une assistance aux victimes, celles des bombardements nucléaires au Japon, et celles des plus de 2000 essais nucléaires menés dans divers endroits du monde depuis 1945.

Bien que le Traité ne lie juridiquement que les nations qui choisissent d’y adhérer, il établit de nouvelles normes mondiales et est largement considéré comme une contribution majeure au droit international humanitaire, complémentaire du Traité sur la non-prolifération des armes nucléaires (TNP), entré en vigueur en 1970.

Approuvé par 122 pays à l’Assemblée générale des Nations Unies en juillet 2017 suite à la présentation par Elayne Whyte-Gomez ambassadrice du Costa Rica, le Traité sur l’interdiction des armes nucléaires compte actuellement 86 signatures et 51 ratifications.

Malheureusement, les neuf États dotés d’armes nucléaires et leurs alliés – y compris le Canada – ont boycotté la négociation de ce traité et continuent de le dénoncer.

Des organismes de la société civile de partout au Canada ont demandé au gouvernement de tenir un débat sur le Traité au Parlement et de permettre au Comité permanent des affaires étrangères et du développement international de tenir des audiences publiques sur le rôle du Canada dans la promotion du désarmement nucléaire. »

PORTE-PAROLES

  • Earl Turcotte, Réseau canadien pour l’abolition de l’arme nucléaire (Ottawa)
  • Paul Meyer, président, Conférences Pugwash Canada (Colombie Britannique)
  • Cesar Jaramillo, directeur exécutif, Project Ploughshares (Waterloo, Ontario)
  • Nancy Covington, Voix des Femmes Canada (Halifax)
  • Pierre Jasmin, Les Artistes pour la Paix, Pugwash Canada (Estrie, Québec)

ACTIONS DIVERSES

1 Les 18 et 20 janvier, la société civile a publié une annonce bilingue dans le Hill Times appelant le gouvernement du Canada à tenir un débat parlementaire sur le Traité et des audiences publiques au Comité permanent des affaires étrangères et du développement international sur le rôle du Canada dans la promotion du désarmement nucléaire. Un lien vers l’annonce se trouve sur le site Web de l’Institut canadien de politique étrangère , ainsi que sur le site des Artistes pour la Paix. On y remarquera la signature de Québec Solidaire.

2 Le 21 janvier à 10 h HNE (lire ce point important au premier paragraphe de l’article).

3 Le 20 janvier, le Réseau canadien pour l’abolition des armes nucléaires lance un appel à l’action sur le désarmement nucléaire adressé au premier ministre et à ses collègues du Cabinet comprenant 17 recommandations pour rendre le Canada efficace dans la campagne mondiale visant à débarrasser le monde des armes nucléaires (voir le site Web CNANW.ca, dont hélas toutes les communications depuis le 19 mai 2019 semblent unilingues anglaises).

4 Pétition en soutien du traité: Elizabeth May parraine une Pétition électronique bilingue demandant au gouvernement du Canada d’adhérer au Traité sur l’interdiction des armes nucléaires. Comptant déjà plus de 1200 signatures, elle reste endossable jusqu’au 6 février. Son contact et initiatrice est la Dr Nancy Covington.

5 Les Artistes pour la Paix ont de plus créé une courte rétrospective en photos de leur lutte avec tant d’alliés non-gouvernementaux contre la bombe nucléaire.

En conclusion, tout comme de nombreux autres alliés tel Échec à la guerre dont l’article dans La Presse a été caviardé, les APLP réclament un débat parlementaire ouvert au public. Que nos médias censurent une demande aussi simple montre qu’ils sont achetés par le complexe militaro-industriel pour agir contre l’ONU et la démocratie (lire notre autre article sur l’OMS).

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