[Occupymendocino] Is the US Military Preparing Us for Starting a "Limited" Nuclear War?

[Lewallen]

Is the US Military Preparing Us for Starting a "Limited" Nuclear War?

--by John Lewallen <avoidingnuclearwar.com>

                The June 11, 2019 public release of Joint Publication 3 72
"US Joint Operations Nuclear Strategy" 

http://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_72.pdf
<https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_72.pdf>  is a terrifying escalation of
US nuclear war threat. This plan to integrate "limited" nuclear weapon use
with "conventional" US warfighting, with the assertion that nuclear weapons
may be used in any conflict involving the US, its allies or partners, makes
a nuclear war risking catastrophic attack against the US homeland much more
likely.

            Coming now, with active military confrontations between the
United States and Russia, China, and Iran, and an ongoing war on North Korea
involving the US and United Nations, it amounts to a threat to use "limited"
nuclear war against these nations. Without strong opposition from the US
Congress and an informed public outcry, I'm afraid our military leaders will
believe they have enough public support to escalate threat of nuclear war on
many fronts.

            The following facts and analysis are intended to inform and
stimulate people to study this strategic statement which explicitly makes
nuclear weapons the foundation of US strategy "to preserve peace and
stability by deterring aggression against the US, our allies, and our
partners." The document clearly states that the President has sole command
of nuclear strategy and operations, and goes to great lengths to assure that
the President will have reliable command and communication means to direct
an ongoing nuclear war at all phases. It revives long-debunked theories
based on the idea that a phased escalation of nuclear war would cause an
enemy to surrender, rather than launching a nuclear counter-strike.

            In brief, it is a blueprint risking national suicide and global
omnicide (destruction of everything), based on a fantasy world where nuclear
weapons are limited and controllable, and human beings follow the rules set
by the nuclear attacker.

            To me, the craziest thing about this "US Joint Operations
Nuclear Strategy" is that it continues to drive the US toward a nuclear
field of battle, the only domain of war where the US is at a catastrophic
disadvantage, and possibly could see its whole nation and civilization
destroyed at the blink of an eye, for no reason at all. A sane nuclear
posture would see US "hawks" and "doves" working together to de-escalate
nuclear threat, support treaties limiting nuclear weapons, and move toward a
complete ban on nuclear weapons.  

            Nuclear Bombs are Instruments of All-Destroying Suicide, Not
Weapons of War

            There are no "limited" nuclear bombs. Modern thermonuclear
weapons have unlimited destructive power. Fission weapons such as were used
to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 are now used as triggers to
detonate thermonuclear weapons. A single nuclear missile strike could cause
tens of millions of casualties, with uncontainable consequences of deadly
radioactivity and firestorms threatening "nuclear winter," years of global
darkness caused by stratospheric debris.

            President Trump is the first president to face the fact that a
single nuclear bomb detonated in space could damage or destroy global
computerized civilization with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). His directive
calling on government agencies to protect US electronics from nuclear EMP
will take some time to carry out, and may be impossible to achieve. Nations
on the US "adversaries" list, notably Russia, China, North Korea, and
possibly Iran, are fully prepared to wipe out US electronic civilization
with a nuclear EMP strike. This threat is indefensible, and would surely
become possible if any of these nations believe US nuclear attack against
them is imminent. Here the only sane US option is an end of nuclear
confrontation and the beginning pf peace talks, such as President Trump
started with North Korea.

 

 

            Nuclear weapons now are "The Great Equalizer." Now there are
nine nuclear-armed nations who can threaten catastrophic damage with a
single nuclear weapon. Peace conversion of the nuclear-industrial complex
will take awhile to achieve, but really is the only survival option for all
of us.

 

            The Omnicidal Illusion of Limited Nuclear War

            The key elements of "US Joint Operations Nuclear Strategy" are
concepts of how to fight "limited" nuclear war developed over many decades
by a small group of strategists. The best book describing these strategies
and the men who made them is Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon
(Stanford University Press, 1983) All current nuclear strategists would do
well to read Kaplan's exciting, fully documented history of attempts to make
a rational weapon of war out of an uncontrollable apocalyptic bomb. Most
notable are the Berlin Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis" of the 1960s, when
even the key architects of "limited" nuclear war, knowing they had huge
superiority over Soviet nuclear forces, drew back from the brink of using
nuclear weapons. There will never be a time when one, just one, nuclear
weapon might slip by the best defenses after surviving the most destructive
attack, risking the death of millions or even the destruction of
computerized civilization. 

            As one reads the coolly confident plans for a limited nuclear
war, constantly controlled by the President, a winnable war which follows
the laws of war and minimizes casualties, it is well to keep in mind the
conclusion of Kaplan's book amid the nuclear strategists of the Reagan
administration.

            "In the absence of any reality that was congenial to their
abstract theorizing," Kaplan concluded, "the strategists in power treated
the theory as if it were reality. For those mired in thinking about it all
day, every day, in the corridors of officialdom, nuclear strategy had become
the stuff of a living dreamworld..It was, after all, only rational to try to
keep a nuclear war limited if one ever broke out, to devise plans and
options ahead of time that might end the war quickly and favorably, to keep
the scope of damage not too far out of tune with the importance of the
political objectives over which the war was declared to begin with. Yet over
the years, despite endless studies, nobody could find any options that
seemed practical or made sense.

            "In 1946, in the beginning, Bernard Brodie wrote, 'Everything
about the atomic bomb is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and
that its destructive power is fantastically great.' The story of nuclear
strategy, from that moment on, has been the story of intellectuals-not least
of them, for many years anyway, Brodie himself-trying to outmaneuver the
force of those axioms, trying to make the atomic bomb and later the hydrogen
bomb manageable, controllable, to make it conform to human proportions..They
contrived their options because without them the bomb would appear too
starkly as the thing they had tried to prevent it from being but that
ultimately it would become if it ever were used-a device of sheer mayhem, a
weapon whose cataclysmic powers no one really had the faintest idea how to
control. The nuclear strategists had come to impose order-but in the end,
chaos still prevailed."

 

            Key Elements of JP3 72,"Joint Operations Nuclear Strategy"

"National Security Strategy of the United States of America: This
presidential document states that nuclear weapons are the foundation of our
strategy to preserve peace and stability by deterring aggression against the
US, our allies, and our partners." (pages I3 and V)

            Comment: This suicidal strategy bases national defense on bombs
so uncontrollably destructive they can never be used, and extends a "nuclear
umbrella" to deter any attack against US "allies and partners" which commits
the US to use nuclear weapons in conflicts over which it has no control.

            President Trump, who has complete command and control over
nuclear strategy according to JP3 72, should immediately announce that the
US has no intention of ever being the first to use nuclear weapons in
conflict, and does not offer nuclear protection to all allies and partners.

            US Congress should assert its constitutional responsibility over
war declaration to declare that the US has no intention of fighting any
"limited" nuclear war. Both House and Senate should move quickly to enact
the one-sentence law to establish the policy of no first use of nuclear
weapons, now introduced as H 921 by Rep. Adam Smith, and S272 by Senator
Elizabeth Warren, which reads: "It is the policy of the United States to not
use nuclear weapons first."

            The rest of us are invited to join me in declaring that we
refuse to be used as helpless hostages in the war of nuclear threat, and
demand a complete conversion of the nuclear-industrial complex to free human
resources to deal with urgent human problems.

 

Chapters on "Nuclear Forces and Support Structures" and "Planning and
Targeting" assert that a diversity of nuclear weapons and scenarios for
their use permits the US "the capability of escalating or de-escalating the
level of conflict" (page II 1)

            Comment: These plans enter the dangerous dreamworld where
nuclear weapons are controllable, not what they really are, instruments of
all-destruction. The US should reverse its recent history of abandoning arms
control treaties, and join the worldwide movement to ban and eliminate
nuclear weapons.

 

Emphasis is on presidential control over all nuclear strategy, and command
of nuclear operations at all phases. Focus is on the vital maintenance of a
reliable communication system to enable presidential command in a nuclear
war environment.

            Comment:  "US Joint Operations Nuclear Strategy," now available
to anyone in the world, seems to make the US President the hottest nuclear
target in the world. If the whole strange architecture of nuclear weapons
completely dependent on indefensibly vulnerable electronics breaks out into
the global battlefields, there's going to be cyber mayhem and nuclear EMP
mayhem. Our civilization may be collateral damage, but the US President, as
sole and indispensable commander, may be the first target, or even the
target of a pre-emptive strike by a nation believing it faces imminent
nuclear attack by the US.

            Public awareness and outcry has convinced US Presidents not to
use nuclear weapons several times in the past. Now it's our turn. Consider
the consequences if we get this one wrong. Peace will prevail if we inform
the president and public.

 

 

               

 

 

 

 

 

 



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.mcn.org/pipermail/occupymendocino/attachments/20190629/a286bcda/attachment.html