An article on the Counterpunch site mentions a new Joint Chiefs of Staff report – JP 3-72 – which was briefly posted for public consumption on the Pentagon website. It concerns nuclear weapons, and the US military’s plans for using them.
The report was made available last week – then abruptly disappeared.
Fortunately the Federation of American Scientists had downloaded a copy and have made the Pentagon report available here.
Why not download a copy and have an enjoyable read?
Most of it is waffle and military/bureaucratic doublespeak, as you might expect. But explicit is the notion, expressed for the the first time in some decades, that nuclear weapons may be valuable assets in a “conventional” war. Much is made of the decision to go “NUDET” (the Pentagon’s charming acronym for “nuclear detonation”) being the President’s and his alone. Daniel Ellsberg demolishes that myth in his salutory book The Doomsday Machine.
All this is to make money, of course – there is a good report on which corporations, specifically, profit from nuclear weapons manufacture and suppport, here. The full title is Producing Mass Destruction: Private Companies and the Nuclear Weapon Industry. For Boeing, Lockheed, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Airbus, et al. the Obama/Trump nuclear weapons refurb (costing how much? 1.7 trillion?) and bipartisan support for more of the same, are wonderful things.
Perhaps not so for the rest of us. Natalye S. Baldwin writes a very sensible piece about American complacency in regards to nuclear weapons and the likelihood of nuclear war here. (Of course it is not only people in the U.S. who are complacent about this.) She writes:
“… Both the U.S. and Russia still have over 1,700 nuclear weapons combined on hair trigger alert. With so much antipathy, rancor and distrust having been recklessly stoked by the political class and much of the media toward Russia over relatively minor (and/or false) issues in the big picture – yes, they are minor in the big picture of a nuclear holocaust – don’t give a lot of reason for optimism…”
This invented hostility hostility towards Russia benefits who, exactly? The said nuclear contractors. The “intelligence” agencies, which were in serious disgrace, thanks to Snowden, Wikileaks, and others, prior to the Russiagate invention. The media and political assets of the above. Nobody else that I can think of gains anything from the nuclear weapons complex. We sacrifice our money, our land, and our futures to it, as if to a demon god. Even its “beneficiaries” cannot escape its consequences.
So I can be a little proud, as an Oregonian, that Oregon’s House of Representatives voted to approve Senate Joint Memorial 5 (SJM 5), which urges congress to lead a global effort to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Oregon is the the second state in the nation, after California, to pass such legislation in both chambers. The bill passed the Oregon Senate on May 20th 2019. New Jersey’s Assembly has also passed a similar bill.
Meanwhile, fifty countries have signed and ratified the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Many more countries have signed up (only the nuclear weapons states and NATO refuse to do so) and the treaty becomes international law – and nuclear weapons states international criminals – ninety days after the fiftieth ratification (which was Honduras, on United Nations Day).
The nuclear powers and NATO did their best to prevent any of their satraps from ratifying the Treaty. But here we are. ! Among the countries which have signed and ratified are Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Austria, Mexico, New Zealand, Panama, El Salvador, Bolivia, Palestine, Gambia, Uruguay, Thailand, Vietnam, and Jamaica.
[Revised January 2020 to reflect eleven more signed-up countries, and nine more states ratifying the Treaty.]
[Revised again March 2020 to reflect Namibia and Paraguay ratifying the Treaty.]
[Revised again November 2020 to reflect the 50th ratification, and the Treaty’s entry into force.]
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