Retaliation
Let’s consign this concept to the dustbin of ugly human history
Regarding a recent article published by The Bulletin:
“Rethinking the US strategic triad: When it comes to nuclear platforms, how many are enough?”
By Stephen J. Cimbala, Lawrence J. Korb | December 20, 2023
Stephen J. Cimbala is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State University, Brandywine.
Lawrence J. Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. He is also an adjunct professor of security studies at Georgetown University.
The Bulletin mission statement:
“Together, we make the world safer.”
“The Bulletin elevates expert voices above the noise.”
“…we promise our coverage will be understandable, influential, vigilant, solution-oriented, and fair-minded.”
“Together we can make a difference.”
Are You Kidding me? Safer? Make a difference?
This article contains more of the same, the same male-brain military group-think thought processes that got us into nuclear weapons in the first place.
Look at these sentences from this article:
”…leave the United States without a robust response to nuclear attack.”
“…what is necessary for deterring, or for fighting and surviving, a nuclear war.”
“…imposing a counterforce defeat that would forestall any American decision to retaliate.”
“…retaliation against Russian military forces and society.”
“... capable of timely movement to positions for retaliation once authorized to do so.”
So, Russia or some other nuclear state launches an attack, and naturally, according to male-brain thinking, you MUST immediately pull a Netanyahu and click into retaliation mode, with a nuclear counter-attack or even a preemptive strike. I have thought long and hard about this (which takes me less than two minutes). What if I were President, and an aide comes in in the wee hours of the morning asking for authorization to retaliate - Russia (or China, or whoever) has launched their missiles. At that point I would say, “Authorization denied - Jeremy, go back to bed.” Why on earth would you decide to destroy a second major area of this small planet to follow on another leader’s stupidity? “Surviving” a nuclear attack by doubling its size (wiping out two countries)?
This article is a terrible alternative to the one in the December 2023 Scientific American, which was good journalism; this article is not.
The Bulletin article states:
“The containment of nuclear weapons spread will be a major challenge but a necessary requirement for strategic stability. Global nuclear disarmament may not be achievable by deliberate political agreement among nuclear weapons states and others. But it is not inconceivable that better conventional weapons, including non-nuclear antimissile defenses, may become more competitive with prospective weapons for attack.”
Can we ever get over the need to attack? Is this a civilization or not? We pretend to wish for an improving climate and increased biodiversity and yet keep blowing whole countries up, mass killings, soil littered with mines, tons of broken buildings going to landfills and more and more death, injury and grief? On this small blue planet?
A recent (Dec 23, 2023) press release from The Canadian Press regarding Energy Fuels Inc. and their uranium mining efforts indicates that it is ramping up uranium production from its five mines (in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming) due to the 16-year high in the spot-price for uranium, to hit 2 million pounds per year by 2025. To this 2 million pounds of eventual nuclear waste, add millions more in contaminated accessory materials in production as well as in reactor facilities and that all has to be safely stored for hundreds of generations, requiring social stability and education in the methods of safe storage for a few thousand years. Nuclear - power or weapons - is not worth it, try to vote against politicians who keep promoting this poison.
Any country can decide to take its nuclear weapons off of perpetual readiness and begin dismantling the whole nuclear weapons regime. It can be done unilaterally.
Look at the photo of Andrei Gromyko (facing page 287 in his _Memoirs_ book, Doubleday, 1989) and if you can also read faces, you cannot tell me this man is a liar. Yet he made it quite clear that Russia was every time responding to increases in the USA’s nuclear arsenal, while the popular notion in US military circles paints the opposite picture. Just as the countries with the highest historic CO2 emissions should bear the greatest share of mitigation and adaptations costs, so too should those who initiated and lead in deployment of nuclear weapons take the first steps, unilaterally if need be, to eliminate them. This scheme of “deterrence” is and never was appropriate.
While I’m writing this, here’s what’s playing on my YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=pkXGtE8_cig …..Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in C major, op. 56: Israel Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta, Yefim Bronfman (piano), Pinchas Zukerman (violin) and Amanda Forsyth (cello). Don’t miss this concert!
While on the topic of Gromyko, I would like to underscore this: that young folks have been missing a major amount of history since what you read in history and the media is filtered through a thick lens of propaganda, as is being done presently with the Middle East saga. We had fifty years of peace, not as a result of nuclear deterrence, but rather by the ceaseless work of Mr. Gromyko. Can you imagine walking the fine line between talking Stalin down from one of his episodes of anger and being fired (or worse: think Siberia)? And daily, at times, and for several Soviet leaders following Stalin? Andrei Gromyko attended university in New York, so he understood American thought processes (such as they are). He insisted that the United Nations Headquarters be in New York to counter the frequent American regression into isolationism. (Herr Drumpf are you listening?) It was Gromyko’s task to keep the Soviet leaders calm in the face of ongoing American military advancement into hundreds of bases around the world. All this militarization was done because of the prevalent American military group-think which survives to this day. Sorry, but none of this has any place on this planet. If you delete the concept of retaliation and as well decline to do preemptive first strikes, then what is the purpose of all these nuclear weapons? Is anyone really thinking this through, especially in light (darkness?) of an absolutely certain nuclear winter which will follow any nuclear “exchange”?
If you are promoting nuclear weapons then you yourself are our biggest existential threat. You are a danger to humanity, a danger to life, a danger to Earth. Get over it. This planet is all we have, show a little respect for it.
This post is getting rather curmudgeony, so I will appropriate Paul Harvey’s signoff:
Good day.
Photo Credit:
This Earthrise photo is derived from the first of the series of Earth photos taken by the astronauts on Apollo 8, this was William (Bill) Anders’ first shot (AS08-13-2329), taken on December 24, 1968, while he had black & white film in the camera. Then they loaded color film to take the later photos of the Earth higher above the horizon. This version was colorized by Justin Cowart on December 25, 2017 using color data from the photo AS08-14-2383. Image Copyright: Justin Cowart, CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia Commons.
upload information:
<a title="Justin Cowart, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Earthrise_-_Apollo_8_(27516429729).png"><img width="512" alt="Earthrise - Apollo 8 (27516429729)" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Earthrise_-_Apollo_8_%2827516429729%29.png/512px-Earthrise_-_Apollo_8_%2827516429729%29.png"></a>