Compiled by Dick Bennett https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2025/02/omni-war-watch-wednesdays-216-february.html
Dick Bennett. Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION
The best introduction to Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (2024) is probably a book published 39 years ago–Dr. Helen Caldicott’s Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War (rev. 1986). Here is a key passage from Missile Envy: “The logical consequence of the preparation for nuclear war is nuclear war. The behavior that perpetuates this race to oblivion can be changed only when people actually allow themselves to contemplate the true medical and ecological implications of such an event. Only then will they make a conscious decision to devote their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to save the creation” (7).
What Caldicott presented almost 4 decades ago in one chapter, “The Terminal Event”—knowledge that enables us “to contemplate the true medical and ecological implications” of nuclear war–, Jacobsen immensely, circumstantially, minutely reinforces. Witness her chapters: Part I: The Buildup (Or, How We Got There). 2: The first 24 Minutes. 3: The next 24 Minutes. 4: The next (and Final) 24 Minutes. 5: The Next 24 Months and Beyond (Or, Where We Are Headed after a Nuclear Exchange).
She concludes her text with these words that all of us should repeat to all we know:
“With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group. It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.” (297). (–Dick).
Come to Nuclear Ban Treaty Week
nukewatch1 nukewatch1@lakeland.ws
Dear Nukewatch supporters, This year, Nukewatch will again attend the nuclear ban treaty meetings at the United Nations, known as the 3rd Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty is the first able to coordinate global, verifiable nuclear disarmament, yet no nuclear armed state is interested. The meetings will be held March 3-7 in New York. Are you coming? There is still time to make your plans. Let’s meet up. Again, we will be on the streets and inside the United Nations promoting the end of nuclear weapons…. We hope to meet up with any of you that will be there and look forward to continued collaboration for a nuclear-free future!
Kelly Lundeen, Co-director
Nukewatch, 740A Round Lake Road
Luck, WI 54853 (715) 472-4185, www.nukewatchinfo.org
(Or create your own Prohibition Treaty event!)
Robert Keeler. Sacred Soldier: The Dangers of Worshiping Warriors. Simon and Schuster, 2024.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and military veteran examines both the realities of the U.S. military and the worshipful attitude of members of the U.S. public toward it. How can the United States stop fighting needless wars, if it keeps worshiping the warriors? Why do presidents so easily fool people by using “support the troops” to justify war? Is “Thank you for your service” merely meaningless, or a meaningful sign of a dangerous modern idolatry? Are today’s soldiers truly defending freedom, or suppressing the freedom of other peoples? If the U.S. military is so powerful, why has it not definitively won a major war since 1945?
These are questions we seldom hear. Instead, what we see is ballplayers wearing military-style camouflage caps, baseball teams handing out a flag to the “veteran of the game,” and the Pentagon paying the National Football League to stage elaborate military displays like fighter-jet flyovers.
Sacred Soldier: The Dangers of Worshiping Warriors offers a more clear-eyed, warts-and-all view of the U.S. military. It argues that we owe warriors more than those five empty words of gratitude. We owe them honesty as they enlist; we owe them protection from rampant sexual abuse by other members of the military; hesitance to shed their blood in multiple deployments to unwinnable wars; and the highest possible quality of care when they return from battle, wounded in mind, body, and spirit.