World war III ANTHOLOGY #2 SEPTEMBER 29, 2024

https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2024/09/omni-world-war-iii-anthology-2.html

Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

What’s at Stake:  On January 24, 2023, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock was moved to 90 seconds (1 minute, 30 seconds) before midnight, the closest it has ever been set to midnight since its inception in 1947. This adjustment was largely attributed to the risk of nuclear escalation that arose from the US/NATO/Ukraine vs. Russia War.  Only the threatening chaos of the climate emergency poses an equal or greater danger to our evolution.

CONTENTS

Daniel Ellsberg.  The Doomsday Machine.

Dawn Stover.  “Facing Nuclear Reality. . . .”Garrett Graff.  “…US Government’s Secret Plan[s] to Save Itself….”

John Pilger.  “A World War Has Begun” (is being planned).
Tom Dispatch.  Tomgram.  “Michael Klare.  On the Road to World War III?” 
Michael Klare.  “The New Global Tinderbox.”
Rick Wayman.  “Tell Your Senators to Oppose Trump’s War Cabinet.”
John Avery.  Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil.
Tom Engelhardt.  “The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War?”

Jeremy Kuzmarov.   “Talk of War with China Is Total Insanity.”

Judith Ehrlich.  “Daniel Ellsberg: A Profound Voice against the Doomsday Machine.”

Elaine Scarry.  Thermonuclear Monarchy. Choice between Democracy and Doom.

Istvan Mészáros.  “Militarism and the Coming Wars.”
Jeffrey Sachs.  “One War Party v. Jill Stein and Green Party.”

SOURCES

Bloomsbury Pub.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Counterpunch

Danish Peace Academy

Harvard UP

Jeffrey Sachs

Monthly Review

mronline.org

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

OMNI

Roots Action

Simon & Schuster

Tom Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt

TEXTS

These essays and books, published between 2016 and 2024, expose the threat of WWIII, its preparation and planning, and suggest ways to prevent it    See separate OMNI anthologies on preparing for WWIII and stopping it.

Daniel Ellsberg. 

The Doomsday Machine:

Confessions of a Nuclear War plannerby: Daniel Ellsberg

Bloomsbury,    12-05-2017.

Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Best of the Year List
Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year 
In These Times “Best Books of the Year”
Huffington Post’s Ten Excellent December Books List 
lithub’s “Five Books Making News This Week”
Publisher’s Abstract:
From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America’s Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day.

Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America’s nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization–and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration–threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.

Framed as a memoir–a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating–this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing “doomsday machine” and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful–and powerfully important–book about not just our country, but the future of the world.

Reviews
“The Doomsday Machine is being published at an alarmingly relevant moment, as North Korea is seeking the capability to target the United States with nuclear missiles, and an unpredictable president, Donald Trump, has countered with threats of ‘fire and fury.’” –  New York Magazine

“A groundbreaking and nightmare-inducing account of how the whole mad system works.” –  Esquire“One of the best books ever written on the subject–certainly the most honest and revealing account by an insider who plunged deep into the nuclear rabbit hole’s mad logic and came out the other side.” –  Fred Kaplan, Slate“Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine (Bloomsbury) unpacks the power of our atomic arsenal.” –  Vanity Fair“Ellsberg, the dauntless whistle-blower, has written a timely plea for a reassessment of a weapons program that he describes as ‘institutionalized madness.’” –  Best Books of the Year 2017, The San Francisco Chronicle

Dawn Stover.   “Facing Nuclear Reality: 35 Years after The Day After.”    Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Dec. 21, 2018).

In 1982, a 40-year-old insurance salesman who sold policies to professional athletes traveled from his home in Lawrence, Kansas, to New York City on a business trip. Shortly before he left, Bob Swan, Jr.—the father of two young daughters, and a man increasingly concerned about the possibility of a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union—mentioned to his then-wife Jane that he had had a dream about a film that portrayed an American family and a Russian family in the aftermath of nuclear war and “showed the total absurdity” of such a war. While he was in New York, Swan attended a huge march for nuclear disarmament that was life-changing for him. “When I got back from this amazing experience,” Swan told me when I visited him at his home a few months ago, one of the first things his wife said was: “They announced while you were gone, they’re going to make that film you dreamed about. They’re going to film it in Lawrence.”

The television movie The Day After depicted a full-scale nuclear war and its impacts on people living in and around Kansas City. It became something of a community project in picturesque Lawrence, 40 miles west of Kansas City, where much of the movie was filmed. Thousands of local residents—including students and faculty from the University of Kansas—were recruited as extras for the movie; about 65 of the 80 speaking parts were cast locally. The use of locals was intentional, because the moviemakers wanted to show the grim consequences of a nuclear war for real middle Americans, living in the real middle of the country. By the time the movie ends, almost all of the main characters are dead or dying.

ABC broadcast The Day After on November 20, 1983, with no commercial breaks during the final hour. More than 100 million people saw it—nearly two-thirds of the total viewing audience. It remains one of the most-watched television programs of all time. Brandon Stoddard, then-president of ABC’s motion picture division, called it “the most important movie we’ve ever done.” The Washington Post later described it as “a profound TV moment.” It was arguably the most effective public service announcement in history.

“For those of us who live in Lawrence, it was personal… And it didn’t have a happy ending.”

It was also a turning point for foreign policy. Thirty-five years ago, the United States and the Soviet Union were in a nuclear arms race that had taken them to the brink of war. The Day After was a piercing wakeup shriek, not just for the general public but also for then-President Ronald Reagan. Shortly after he saw the film, Reagan gave a speech saying that he, too, had a dream: that nuclear weapons would be “banished from the face of the Earth.” A few years later, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the first agreement that provided for the elimination of an entire category of nuclear weapons. By the late 1990s, American and Russian leaders had created a stable, treaty-based arms-control infrastructure and expected it to continue improving over time.

Now, however, a long era of nuclear restraint appears to be nearing an end. Tensions between the United States and Russia have risen to levels not seen in decades. Alleging treaty violations by Russia, the White House has announced plans to withdraw from the INF Treaty. Both countries are moving forward with the enormously expensive refurbishment of old and development of new nuclear weapons—a process euphemized as “nuclear modernization.” Leaders on both sides have made inflammatory statements, and no serious negotiations have taken place in recent years.   MORE https://thebulletin.org/facing-nuclear-reality-35-years-after-the-day-after/?utm_source=Bulletin%20Newsletter&utm_medium=iContact%20email&utm_campaign=DayAfter_Dec13

Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan[S] to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die.  By Garrett M. Graff.  Simon and Schuster, 2017.

The eye-opening true story of the government’s secret plans to survive and rebuild after a catastrophic attack on US soil—a narrative that spans from the dawn of the nuclear age to today. 

Every day in Washington, DC, the blue-and-gold 1st Helicopter Squadron, code-named “MUSSEL,” flies over the Potomac River. As obvious as the presidential motorcade, the squadron is assumed by most people to be a travel perk for vips. They’re only half right: while the helicopters do provide transport, the unit exists to evacuate high-ranking officials in the event of a terrorist or nuclear attack on the capital. In the event of an attack, select officials would be whisked by helicopters to a ring of secret bunkers around Washington, even as ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves.

For sixty years, the US government has been developing secret Doomsday plans to protect itself, and the multibillion-dollar Continuity of Government (COG) program takes numerous forms—from its plans to evacuate the Liberty Bell from Philadelphia and our most precious documents from the National Archives to the plans to launch nuclear missiles from a Boeing 747 jet flying high over Nebraska.

In Raven Rock, Garrett Graff sheds light on the inner workings of the 650-acre compound (called Raven Rock) just miles from Camp David, as well as dozens of other bunkers the government built its top leaders during the Cold War, from the White House lawn to Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado to Palm Beach, Florida, and the secret plans that would have kicked in after a Cold War nuclear attack to round up foreigners and dissidents, and nationalize industries.

Equal parts a presidential, military, and political history, Raven Rock tracks the evolution of the government’s plans and the threats of global war from the dawn of the nuclear era through the present day. Relying upon thousands of pages of once-classified documents, as well as original interviews and visits to former and current COG facilities, Graff brings readers through the back channels of government to understand exactly what is at stake if our nation is attacked, and how we’re prepared to respond if it is.

JOHN PILGER .  “A World War has Begun: Break the Silence.”   Counterpunch (MARCH 23, 2016). 

Http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence/

Extended Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?V=rpnbckjxhho&feature=youtu.be

I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”

Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini Island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.

Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated.  Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.

Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.

On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.”  A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.

Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious  superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.

I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us.  The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.

How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.

In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was all fake. He was lying.

The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories.  Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.

A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”

In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier.  Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.

Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union –  has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.

This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.

What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.  MORE

Http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/23/a-world-war-has-begun-break-the-silence/

This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun.   Join the debate on Facebook

John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.johnpilger.com

·        Archive

·        Authors

Tomgram: Michael Klare, On the Road to World War III?

Posted by Michael Klare at 7:37am, October 30, 2018.
Follow tomdispatch on Twitter @tomdispatch. Http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176489

Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a warning. As the New York Times described it: “If the United States deploys new intermediate-range missiles in Europe after withdrawing from a nuclear treaty prohibiting these weapons, European nations will be at risk of ‘a possible counterstrike.’” It was the sort of threat that, in the previous century, would have raised the level of everyday nuclear fears in this society, too. I remember them well — from the “duck-and-cover” experiences of schoolchildren huddling under desks that were somehow to protect them from nuclear annihilation to the vivid nightmares of my teen years. (Yes, in a dream at least, I saw and felt an atomic blast.) This was the world of the Cold War in which I grew up.

I’ve always believed that the last of such Cold War nuclear fears manifested themselves on September 11, 2001, when those towers in lower Manhattan collapsed amid a horrifying cloud of smoke and ash — and the place where it all happened was promptly christened Ground Zero, a term previously reserved for the spot where a nuclear blast had gone off. Somehow, on that day, something was called back to life from those Cold War years in which newspapers regularly drew imagined concentric circles of atomic destruction from fantasy Ground Zeros in American cities, while magazines offered visions of our country as a vaporized wasteland. In the chaos and destruction of that moment, there was perhaps a subliminal feeling that the U.S., the first country to use an atomic weapon, had finally experienced some kind of payback. As Tom Brokaw, chairing NBC’s nonstop news coverage, said that day, it looked “like a nuclear winter in lower Manhattan.”

In Donald Trump’s upside-down world, the trek of a few thousand desperate migrants, some carrying tiny children or even babies, across thousands of miles of Honduras, Guatemala, and now Mexico is treated as if it were potentially a major invasion of (if not a nuclear attack on) the United States. As the president dispatches the U.S. military to the border, claims that ISIS-like Middle Easterners lurk in that caravan, and blames the Democrats for it all, who has time to think about an actual catastrophe?

Fortunately, tomdispatch regular Michael Klare does and he has news for us. As the U.S. prepares to withdraw from a classic Cold War nuclear treaty, it’s time to start ramping up those fears again. After all, we’re now in a new world of expanding global rivalries and potential madness in which impoverished migrants from Honduras are the least of our problems. Tom

“The New Global Tinderbox: It’s Not Your Mother’s Cold War” by Michael T. Klare. When it comes to relations between Donald Trump’s America, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Xi Jinping’s China, observers everywhere are starting to talk about a return to an all-too-familiar past. “Now we have a new Cold War,” commented Russia expert Peter Felgenhauer in Moscow after President Trump recently announced plans to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The Trump administration is “launching a new Cold War,” said historian Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal, following a series of anti-Chinese measures approved by the president in October. And many others are already chiming in.

Recent steps by leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing may seem to lend credence to such a “new Cold War” narrative, but in this case history is no guide. Almost two decades into the twenty-first century, what we face is not some mildly updated replica of last century’s Cold War, but a new and potentially even more dangerous global predicament.

The original Cold War, which lasted from the late 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, posed a colossal risk of thermonuclear annihilation. At least after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, however, it also proved a remarkably stable situation in which, despite local conflicts of many sorts, the United States and the Soviet Union both sought to avoid the kinds of direct confrontations that might have triggered a mutual catastrophe. In fact, after confronting the abyss in 1962, the leaders of both superpowers engaged in a complex series of negotiations leading to substantial reductions in their nuclear arsenals and agreements intended to reduce the risk of a future Armageddon.

What others are now calling the New Cold War — but I prefer to think of as a new global tinderbox — bears only the most minimal resemblance to that earlier period. As before, the United States and its rivals are engaged in an accelerating arms race, focused on nuclear and “conventional” weaponry of ever-increasing range, precision, and lethality. All three countries, in characteristic Cold War fashion, are also lining up allies in what increasingly looks like a global power struggle.

But the similarities end there. Among the differences, the first couldn’t be more obvious: the U.S. now faces two determined adversaries, not one, and a far more complex global conflict map (with a corresponding increase in potential nuclear flashpoints). At the same time, the old boundaries between “peace” and “war” are rapidly disappearing as all three rivals engage in what could be thought of as combat by other means, including trade wars and cyberattacks that might set the stage for far greater violence to follow. To compound the danger, all three big powers are now engaging in provocative acts aimed at “demonstrating resolve” or intimidating rivals, including menacing U.S. and Chinese naval maneuvers off Chinese-occupied islands in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, rather than pursue the sort of arms-control agreements that tempered Cold War hostilities, the U.S. and Russia appear intent on tearing up existing accords and launching a new nuclear arms race.

These factors could already be steering the world ever closer to a new Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came within a hairsbreadth of nuclear incineration. This one, however, could start in the South China Sea or even in the Baltic region, where U.S. and Russian planes and ships are similarly engaged in regular near-collisions. 

Why are such dangers so rapidly ramping up? To answer this, it’s worth exploring the factors that distinguish this moment from the original Cold War era.   MORE   http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/michaelklare/

Michael T. Klare, a tomdispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National Security, will be published in 2019.

OMNI NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION NEWSLETTER #23, JANUARY 15, 2017.   Http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2018/01/omni-nuclear-weapons-abolition.html

Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil by John Scales Avery, Danish Peace Academy, 25 Jan 2018 . 
NUCLEAR WEAPONS: AN ABSOLUTE EVIL

Fredsakademiet  http://www.fredsakademiet.dk › library › nuclear

By JS Avery · 2017 · — The threat of nuclear war is very high today. This book is a

Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Https://www.wagingpeace.org › review-john-scales-aver…

Feb 7, 2018 — This is the lacuna that Professor Avery’s book sets out to fill in an admirably clear and comprehensive way, enriching it with photographs and …
NUCLEAR WEAPONS: An Absolute Evil – Lulu  lulu.com   https://www.lulu.com › paperback › product-23501755  This book advocates the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. It discusses the dangers of accidental nuclear war due to technical or human errors.  
Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil 
Eqbal Ahmad Centre for Public Education   https://eacpe.org › Books 
Nov 20, 2017 — Download (PDF, 3.02MB) · This book is a collection of articles and book chapters that John Scales Avery, a renowned intellectual, EACPE board …
Anne Baring.  “Nuclear Weapons: An Absolute Evil.”  – TRANSCEND Media Service .    Https://www.annebaring.com/anbar73_bookreview.html

”

The Slow-Motion Equivalent of a Nuclear War ?  A ‘New Cold War’ on an Ever-Hotter Planet” By Tom Engelhardt.

Tell me, what planet are we actually on?  All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything.

But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. (Check it out at Wikipedia.) Admittedly, unlike John F. Kennedy, Joe Biden has not actually spoken about bearing “the burden of a long, twilight struggle.” Still, the actions of his foreign policy crew — in spirit, like the president, distinctly old Cold Warriors — have helped make the very idea that we’re in a new version of just such a conflict part of everyday media chatter.

And yet, let’s stop and think about just what planet we’re actually on. In the wake of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two atomic bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was little doubt about how “hot” a war between future nuclear-armed powers might get. And today, of course, we know that, if such a word can even be used in this context, a relatively modest nuclear conflict between, say, India and Pakistan might actually obliterate billions of us, in part by creating a — yes, brrr — “nuclear winter,” that would give the very phrase “cold” war a distinctly new meaning.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.

Jeremy Kuzmarov.   “Talk of War with China is Total Insanity—Everybody’s Finished if it Takes Place,” says Noam Chomsky. 

Mronline.org (5-30-23). 

“Major world powers need to shift from confrontation to accommodation soon; otherwise, we’ll go off the precipice together.”

Originally published: Covertaction Magazine  on May 26, 2023 (more by covertaction Magazine).   Empire, Imperialism, Strategy, waramericas, Asia, China, United statesnewswirenoam Chomsky

The renowned linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky gave a grim prognosis on international politics at a webinar hosted by Massachusetts Peace Action on April 26.

Chomsky told the audience that he was dismayed to read in the pages of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, that we “can have a small nuclear war with Russia…who cares.”

This kind of talk, said Chomsky, is “beyond insanity.” A nuclear war will result in mass suffering and destruction of much of the planet—as whoever strikes first will engender retaliation.

Chomsky said that Albert Einstein was once asked what weapons would be used to fight World War III. He responded that he didn’t know, but that “World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.” Which appears to be where we are headed.

U.S. generals, who Chomsky said should know better, are talking openly about war with China, almost as if it is a fait accompli. . . .  MORE

“Daniel Ellsberg: a Profound Voice Against the Doomsday Machine”

BY JUDITH EHRLICH.  Roots Action, APRIL 27, 2023.

Photograph Source: Gotfryd, Bernard – Public Domain

The current Daniel Ellsberg Week celebrates the achievements and inspirational spirit of the most significant whistleblower of the 20th century. Daniel Ellsberg’s recent announcement of a terminal diagnosis broke my heart, but his remarkable response gave me great hope. To quote Ellsberg: “As I just told my son Robert: he’s long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline!”

Daniel Ellsberg has done just that; an avalanche of interviews and webinars have followed his announcement. And now the Rootsaction Education Fund has teamed up with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy to co-sponsor Daniel Ellsberg Week, April 24-30, to celebrate his life’s work and “to honor peacemaking and whistleblowing.”

Known as the insider who blew the whistle on U.S. government lying about the Vietnam War, Ellsberg’s high level military planning experience began earlier. Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and ’60s. For decades he has put himself on the line to oppose those evil plans; writing, speaking, standing up and sitting-in against the threat of nuclear annihilation. Ellsberg has been hauled off to jail for civil disobedience against war over 80 times. Here he offers chilling clarity about “the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill billions of people,” calling it “a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near omnicide, the death of everyone.” He asks us, “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”

This quote is from one of several eye-opening podcasts being released this week (which I directed in partnership with the rootsaction Education Fund), enabling people to hear Ellsberg directly. In these half dozen two-to-three-minute animated musings, Daniel Ellsberg offers up a succinct analysis of the calamity posed by nuclear weapons and a possible way to reduce their risk. You can watch and listen here.

When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Henry Kissinger (then President Nixon’s national security advisor) called him “the most dangerous man in America.” But those closely held secrets of the war in Vietnam were less explosive than the nuclear secrets that Ellsberg held in his safe. Then a top strategist for the Defense Department, he had been party to plans for a nuclear holocaust. After being buried for safekeeping, those documents disappeared in a hurricane that literally blew away his secrets, but that didn’t dampen Ellsberg’s desire to share what he knew.

At 92, with mind sharp as ever, Ellsberg remains an undisputed expert on “national security.” In this unusual illustrated podcast, he shares his unvarnished thoughts about the threat of nuclear annihilation and how it might be defused.

Can we simply ignore the reality of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger alert — amid escalation of a new cold war with heightened nuclear dangers? Indeed, the U.S. just enacted its biggest military budget in history, with unprecedented investment in weapons of mass destruction and their deployment.

We ignore this impending disaster and its impassioned opponent, Daniel Ellsberg, at our own peril.

Here’s a chance to honor him by listening and heeding his words.

Judith Ehrlich co-directed and produced “The Most Dangerous Man in America, Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” which was nominated for an Oscar and Emmy and won the Peabody Award. Her recent film, “The Boys Who Said NO!” Features Daniel Ellsberg, Joan Baez and a cast of war resisters who chose prison over killing in the Vietnam War. To watch the Oscar-nominated film on Daniel Ellsberg, please go to: www.mostdangerousman.org. To host a screening of “The Boys Who Said NO!” See here, and to read Ellsberg’s 2017 gripping expose “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” see: https://www.ellsberg.net.

Thermonuclear Monarchy:  CHOOSING BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND DOOM by Elaine Scarry.  Harvard UP, 2016.

From one of our leading social thinkers, a compelling case for the elimination of nuclear weapons.

During his impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon boasted, “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone and in twenty-five minutes seventy million people will be dead.” Nixon was accurately describing not only his own power but also the power of every American president in the nuclear age.

Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon each contemplated using nuclear weapons—Eisenhower twice, Kennedy three times, Johnson once, Nixon four times. Whether later presidents, from Ford to Obama, considered using them we will learn only once their national security papers are released.

In this incisive, masterfully argued new book, award-winning social theorist Elaine Scarry demonstrates that the power of one leader to obliterate millions of people with a nuclear weapon—a possibility that remains very real even in the wake of the Cold War—deeply violates our constitutional rights, undermines the social contract, and is fundamentally at odds with the deliberative principles of democracy.

According to the Constitution, the decision to go to war requires rigorous testing by both Congress and the citizenry; when a leader can single-handedly decide to deploy a nuclear weapon, we live in a state of “thermonuclear monarchy,” not democracy.

The danger of nuclear weapons comes from potential accidents or acquisition by terrorists, hackers, or rogue countries. But the gravest danger comes from the mistaken idea that there exists some case compatible with legitimate governance. There can be no such case. Thermonuclear Monarchy shows the deformation of governance that occurs when a country gains nuclear weapons.

In bold and lucid prose, Thermonuclear Monarchy identifies the tools that will enable us to eliminate nuclear weapons and bring the decision for war back into the hands of Congress and the people. Only by doing so can we secure the safety of home populations, foreign populations, and the earth itself.

BOOK DETAILS

·        Hardcover

·        February 2014

·        6.5 × 9.6 in / 592 pages

ENDORSEMENTS & REVIEWS

“Eloquent.” — Richard Rhodes, The New York Times

“The premise of this book is as relevant as it is horrifying, that the power to inflict great harm doesn’t belong to those that it supposedly protects. I congratulate Elaine Scarry on her intellectual courage and moral clarity and in proposing the only possible way out.” — Marcelo Gleiser, author of A Tear at the Edge of Creation

“A really remarkable work, ranging across ethics, law and politics to pose genuinely radical challenges to the confused and potentially lethal systems that pass for democracy in our world. A painfully timely intervention.” — Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and former Archbishop of Canterbury

“Elaine Scarry offers a coruscating critique of current policies, arguing that they are antithetic to the spirit of the U.S. constitution, and indeed to basic democratic principles. This eloquent and scholarly book offers a compelling case for swifter progress toward their elimination.” — Martin Rees, astronomer royal of England

“Even someone unpersuaded by Elaine Scarry’s constitutional analysis cannot avoid being gripped by her stark depiction of how utterly incompatible our eighteenth-century constitutional structure and the social contract it embodies are with our twenty-first-century weapons of mass destruction, weapons that can annihilate tens of millions of human souls in the blink of an eye and at the whim of a single individual, consulting with no one. A sober and haunting meditation on this tension between our institutions and our capacities, Scarry’s book requires any thoughtful reader to revisit the basic postulates and the deepest human purposes of our system of government.” — Laurence H. Tribe, professor of constitutional law, Harvard Law School

“A few years ago General Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, condemned the ‘faith in nuclear weapons’ to which his life had been wrongly dedicated and the ‘breathtaking audacity’ in maintaining them when ‘we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestations.’ In this fascinating study, Elaine Scarry adds rich historical, philosophical, literary, and legal depth to Butler’s grim warnings, with novel and provocative insights. That we have escaped disaster so far is a near miracle. Scarry’s remarkable contribution should inspire us to abolish this colossal folly.” — Noam Chomsky

“Militarism and the Coming Wars.”

István Mészáros.  Mronline.org (4-20-23). 

Originally published in the June 2003 issue of Monthly Review. Read the full article at the Monthly Review website.

It is not for the first time in history that militarism weighs on the consciousness of the people as a nightmare. To go into detail would take far too long. However, here it should be enough to go back in history only as far as the nineteenth century when militarism, as a major instrument of policy making, came into its own, with the unfolding of modern imperialism on a global scale, in contrast to its earlier—much more limited—varieties. By the last third of the nineteenth century the British and French Empires were not the only prominent rulers of vast territories. The United States, too, made its heavy imprint by directly or indirectly taking over the former colonies of the Spanish Empire in Latin America, adding to them the bloody repression of a great liberation struggle in the Philippines and installing themselves as rulers in that area in a way which still persists in one form or another. Nor should we forget the calamities caused by “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck’s imperialist ambitions and their aggravated pursuit later on by his successors, resulting in the eruption of the First World War and its deeply antagonistic aftermath, bringing with it Hitler’s Nazi revanchism and thereby very clearly foreshadowing the Second World War itself.

The dangers and immense suffering caused by all attempts at solving deep-seated social problems by militaristic interventions, on any scale, are obvious enough. If, however, we look more closely at the historical trend of militaristic adventures, it becomes frighteningly clear that they show an ever greater intensification and an ever-increasing scale, from local confrontations to two horrendous world wars in the twentieth century, and to the potential annihilation of humankind when we reach our own time. . . .  MORE

Jeffrey Sachs.  “ONE WAR PARTY V. JILL STEIN AND GREEN PARTY.”  Https://www.jillstein2024.com/jeffrey_sachs_endorses_jill_stein

Jeffrey D. Sachs.   “WAR PARTIES, THE PEACE CANDIDATE, AND THE NOVEMBER ELECTION.”
The Democrats and the Republicans are outdoing each other to prove who can get us to World War III fastest.  Joe Biden and the Congressional Democrats are making a convincing bid to be the leading warmongers.  The Congressional Democrats just voted unanimously in a vote of 210 – 0 to extend the Ukraine War with another $61 Billion to kill more Russians and Ukrainians, and by a lopsided majority of 173-37 for another $14 Billion to extend Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.  Donald Trump weighed in before the vote that Ukraine’s survival and strength is “important to us”, and that Europe should pay more.  Republican Speaker Mike Johnson did his part for warmongering by calling Russia, China, and Iran the updated axis of evil.  The slur was just in time for Secretary of State Blinken to fly to China to threaten more US sanctions if China trades with Russia in ways the US disapproves.  

The strongest Presidential candidate for peace is Jill Stein of the Green Party, who is on track to appear on ballots across the country.  The Green Party is well advanced in gaining full national access and is working very hard to complete that task.  Cornel West, another passionate candidate for peace, is on the ballot in a few states but as an independent candidate faces prohibitive expenses for ballot access because of an unfair system rigged by the two main parties.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alas, is only half a peace candidate, strong on ending the Ukraine War through diplomacy, but stridently backing Israel’s war in Gaza rather than the diplomacy that is urgently needed and capable of ending the war.

On a bipartisan basis, the White House and Congress are driving the world towards a global war.  Washington has absolutely no strategy for Ukraine to win the war, but is intent on arming Ukraine to kill as many Russians as possible, even as the war kills vastly more Ukrainians.  From the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, I called for a negotiated peace, emphasizing Ukrainian neutrality and an end to NATO enlargement – which is vociferously, and understandably, opposed by Russia as an existential threat. Yet Biden and Congress continue to insist on NATO enlargement to Ukraine and hence on more war.  The result?  Ukraine has suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties and ongoing territorial losses. 

 At the same time, Biden is now arming Israel to commit unconscionable war crimes, with more support now on the way.  The US complicity in Israel’s slaughter of Gazans is strongly rejected by the American people, especially young people, yet Biden and Congress aren’t listening to the people.  The Government of South Africa, in an application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has powerfully asserted that Israel is committing genocide.  Yet when US students say the same, they are now being arrested.  In fact, the ICJ quickly ruled that Israel’s actions might well violate the 1948 Genocide Convention, pending a final ruling that will take more time. 

If all this were not enough, the US continues to escalate its many provocations towards China.  The US is imposing new unilateral trade, financial, and technology measures to hinder China’s economy.  These measures are in violation of American commitments under international trade rules, yet the US brazenly imposes them in any event.  In another paranoid and vindictive action, Congress also voted today that tiktok must be sold by its Chinese owners to a US owner.  

The US also has the gall to attack China for its “over-capacity” in manufacturing production. The term “over-capacity” really just means that China produces large volumes of high-quality manufactured goods at very low prices.  China’s production processes for electric vehicles, for example, are astoundingly efficient.  

Most recently, Biden has put US troops into Kinmen Island, an island of Taiwan, in violation of the one-China policy that underpins US relations with China, and therefore peace.  The US has also gratuitously upped the anti-China rhetoric together with the leaders of Japan and Korea.   

The Biden Administration’s antagonism to Iran is similarly relentless and hypocritical.  On April 1, Israel bombed Iran’s diplomatic compound, in a stark violation of international law.  Yet instead of condemning Israel’s actions, the US blocked criticism of Israel by the UN Security Council the next day.  When Iran counter-attacked on April 14, the US harshly criticized Iran and even put on new sanctions.  Washington goes out of its way to assert such double standards. 

So, let’s add it all up regarding the alleged “axis of evil.”  The US rejects negotiations with Russia because the US wants to use the Ukraine War to weaken Russia, even as the war destroys Ukraine in the process.  The US refuses to take any action to rein in Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza.  The US flagrantly provokes China in multiple ways.  The US punishes Iran for escalation started by Israel.  There is no axis of evil.  Rather, the US has pushed Russia, China, and Iran ever more tightly together in the face of unrelenting and misguided US militarism.  

Americans are profoundly unhappy about all of this warmongering.  Only 33 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s foreign policy.  Biden is a life-long neocon, supporting NATO expansion, military adventures, and regime change operations for decades.  He is also unfit to lead the country for another four years and should not be running for re-election in any event.   Meanwhile, Trump as president armed Ukraine, dissed the Minsk II agreement that would have defused the crisis, and went out of his way to antagonize and abandon diplomacy with both China and Iran.  The world is closer to nuclear Armageddon than ever, just 90 seconds to midnight according to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.   

America’s two main parties offer Americans no real say on the life-and-death issues of war and peace.  Both are war parties.  Both continue to shovel in more money and munitions to try to hide their past reckless miscalculations.  Both parties also serve the same paymasters: Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and the mega-rich, who fund the two parties to deliver tax cuts and subsidies cuts for the wealthy, and NATO enlargement and arms contracts for the military industries.  Peace and economic justice therefore go hand in hand.  

The true hope for foreign policy sanity and a fair economy is the lead peace candidate, Jill Stein.  The main work for peace activists in the next few weeks is to ensure that Stein is indeed on the ballot in every state in November, despite the brazen attempts by the two major parties to keep the Green Party and peace candidates off the ballot.  As Americans in record numbers call for a political choice outside the failed parties of war and Wall Street, and for diplomatic solutions to the wars raging around the world, a voter surge for peace could well occur in November. If Stein is on the ballot across the nation, voters will have that choice.

*Professor at Columbia University, is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as adviser to three UN Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres.

OMNI WORLD WAR III Anthology #1, April 6, 2023

CONTENTS WORLD WAR III ANTHOLOGY #1

Chris Wright.   The Second Cold War is more dangerous than the first. 
Andrew Bacevich.  “On Missing Dr. Strangelove.”  [Introduced by
    tomdispatch.]
Art Hobson.  “A planet on high-alert.”
Steve Taylor.   “ ‘We’ve never been closer to nuclear catastrophe’: Activist
   Helen Caldicott.”    (interview)
“Notes from the Editors” of Monthly Review. Discusses C. Wright Mills, The
   Causes of World War III, and Foster, et al. Washington’s New Cold War.
Andrew J. Bacevich.  On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to
    the American Century.
Tom Engelhardt.   “Prophecies.” Engelhardt, creator of  tomdispatch, has
   focused “ on the two world-ending ways humanity had discovered to do
   itself in and how to begin to deal with them.”
John Rachel.  “The Never Ending Cycle of Nuclear Insanity.”  “The only
        way we’ll have peace is if we REMOVE FROM POWER every single
        one of the warmongers.”
OMNI’S SUPPORT FOR THE MOVEMENT TO ABOLISH NUCLEAR WEAPONS includes 21 newsletters (anthologies), see end..

END OMNI WORLD WAR III Anthology #2