SPECIAL: THE THREAT OF MASS DESTRUCTION AND THE CONTINUING ARMS RACE

" [T]he danger facing the world is that the superpowers have institutionalized a major nuclear showdown. They have built the most complex technological apparatus ever conceived, without thinking through its purpose or how to control it. The resulting conflict system is strongly reminiscent of the institutionalized conflict mechanisms of the early twentieth century. World War I was a war waiting to happen at any time in the decade before 1914. Remarkably enough, during the very time when the general staffs of Europe were working out the interlocking mobilization programs, a feeling of security and complacency dominated popular and elite opinion. Although the war was waiting to happen, the fact that it hadn't happened was taken as a sign that all was well. [Lulled into confidently projecting peace into the indefinite future, people] felt that no one would be so irrational as to initiate a major war. The abrupt suddenness of World War I surprised everyone, yet in retrospect, almost nothing else could have occurred, given the institutionalized mobilization plans and firepower developed in the preceding decade. "
- Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (Yale UP, 1983).

Arms race speeding up again Still 12,000 nuclear warheads worldwide (2024)

• Richard Falk & David Krieger - US plans for nuclear war fighting: taming the nuclear monster
• Joseph Rotblat (Pugwash) - The nuclear threat from the US
• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists - Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight
• Pugwash - Impasse in nuclear disarmament | Stockpiles | What can happen | More
• Rebecca Johnson (Disarmament Diplomacy) - Sleepwalking towards nuclear war
• David Krieger (NAPF) - Dangers of nuclear proliferation and terrorism
• Jonathan Schell (Boston Review) - The second age of nuclear danger: arms control ended with the Cold War
• Jonathan Power - Pakistan and India play with nuclear fire | Salman Rushdie (NY Times) - Defuse Kashmir
• Duane Shank (Sojourners) - The subcontinent goes nuclear, arms race in South Asia imminent
• William Pfaff (International Herald Tribune) - No nonproliferation without nuclear reduction
• Peter Beinart (New Republic) - Return of the bomb: learning to live with nuclear weapons again
• David Krieger (TFF) - Amalgam of nuclear weapons and nuclear power spreads to Asia
• Dan Plesch (Guardian) - Global disarmament instead of pre-emptive wars and Japanese nuclear weapons
• Greenpeace et al. - Japan amasses weapons-usable plutonium, enough for 5000 nuclear weapons
• Ben Cohen (Sojourners) - Excessive defense budget reveals American values and priorities
• Dwight Eisenhower - Warning against the military-industrial complex (Farewell Address)
• Herbert York - Eisenhower's other warning against the scientific-technological elite (from Race to Oblivion)

Nuclear war by accident and misjudgment Strategic nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert (launch-on-warning)

• Peter Montague (Rachel's EHW) / NEJM - Growing threat of nuclear war
• Bruce Blair (Brookings) - Russian breakdown increases risk of nuclear war
• Jonathan Schell (The Nation) - Bruce Blair's logic of accidental nuclear war
• Bruce Blair et al. (Scientific American) - Taking nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert
• Bruce Blair - The launch-on-warning system is an apocalypse waiting to happen
• Bruce Blair - Terrorism can trigger all-out nuclear war between US and Russia
• Bruce Blair (New York Times) - Why our nuclear weapons can be hacked
• Bruce Blair (Politico) - What exactly would it mean to have Trump's finger on the nuclear button? | More
• Union of Concerned Scientists - Russia's nuclear hair trigger: de-alerting primer
• Ian Traynor (Guardian) - New Russian defense doctrine raises nuclear threat | More
• David Krieger (NAPF) - NATO: abandon first-strike doctrine, de-alert nuclear weapons
• Stephen Cimbala (Parameters) - "The fog of information war" destabilizes nuclear deterrence
• Geoffrey Forden, Pavel Podvig & Theodore Postol (IEEE Spectrum) - False alarm, nuclear danger
• Arjun Makhijani (The Progressive) - Stepping back from the nuclear cliff
• Jonathan Schell (The Nation) - Robert McNamara's lesson: abolish nuclear weapons
• Alan Philips - 20 Mishaps that might have started accidental nuclear war
• Louis Menand (New Yorker) - Nukes of hazard (on Eric Schlosser's Command and Control)
• Eric Schlosser (New Yorker) - World War Three by mistake. Harsh political rhetoric, combined with the vulnerability of the nuclear command-and-control system, has made the risk of global catastrophe greater than ever
• William Perry (Arms Control Today) - The risk of "blundering" into nuclear war: lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis
• US National Security Archive - The Cuban Missile Crisis
• Scott Sagan (Foreign Affairs) - The Korean missile crisis is "the Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion" – and even more dangerous

Ballistic missile defense is counterproductive The false security of a technical quick fix

• Bruce Blair - Hair-trigger alert continues: missile defense increases the threat of a disarming surprise attack
• Matthew Rothschild (The Progressive) - Missile offense
• Union of Concerned Scientists & MIT - Countermeasures
• Michelle Ciarrocca & William Hartung (In Focus) - Star Wars revisited: still dangerous, costly, and unworkable
• Karl Grossman - Not just missile defense: the real plan is space warfare and world domination
• Oscar Arias (Miami Herald) - Missile defense is misdirected: the true enemy of peace is poverty

Biological weapons: the poor man's atom bomb

• Gilbert Achcar (Le Monde Diplomatique) - The specter of bioterrorism
• PBS Frontline - Plague war (transcript)
• Heritage Foundation - Microbes and mass terrorism

Cyber attack: a second Pearl Harbor? "The best strategist subdues his enemy without fighting." - Sun Tzu

• Barton Gellman (Washington Post) - Cyber attacks by Al Qaeda feared | PBS - Cyber war
• US National Security Agency - Cyber threat overtakes nuclear threat
• US Army War College - Information warfare tutorial
• US Defense Science Board - Report on information warfare-defense
• The White House - Critical infrastructure protection

Some experiences with nuclear war

• Extra! - Media tell atom bomb historians to be silent
• Sojourners - Historian Gar Alperovitz on The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb | Excerpt
• Howard Zinn (The Progressive) - Hiroshima and the myth of "the good war" | More
• John Dower (Technology Review) - Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the politics of memory
• Akihiro Takahashi - My atom bomb experience and the spirit of Hiroshima
• Bruce Blair - Recollections of a nuclear missile launch officer
• General Lee Butler (former US CINC strategic nuclear forces) - Chaining the nuclear beast
• General Lee Butler (Resurgence) - Death by deterrence: time for conscience, reason, and humanity
• General Lee Butler & David Cortright (Sojourners) - An unexpected calling: Cold Warrior pleads nuclear abolition
• General Lee Butler - The absurdity of it all: the nuclear war plan, the narrow escape, and how MAD continues
• National Security Archive - Top military commanders called highly-secret nuclear war plan "a hazard to ourselves as well as our enemy"
• Steven Shapin (London Review of Books) - The Manhattan Project: science and conscience
• Elaine Scarry (Harper's Magazine) - Nuclear citizenship (On Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom)
• Robert Jay Lifton - Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (pdf)

International court prohibits the threat with nuclear weapons

• David Krieger (NAPF) - The legal case for nuclear weapons abolition
• John Burroughs (IALANA) - The legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons | More
• David Krieger - The Nuremberg Principles and nuclear weapons (from Ending the Nuclear Weapons Era)
• Angie Zelter (Disarmament Diplomacy) - Disarming Trident: protesters put illegal nuclear submarines on trial
• Angie Zelter (Disarmament Diplomacy) - People's disarmament: dismantling outlaw nuclear weapon systems

Chances for pacifism?

• Bernard Lown (Technology Review) - Declare genocidal weapons the exclusive property of the savage 20th century
• David Cortright (Sojourners) - Ban the bomb II: a new movement emerges to abolish nuclear weapons
• Jonathan Schell - From The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now
• John Holdren - Getting to zero: Is pursuing a nuclear weapon free world realistic?
• Johan Galtung & Dietrich Fischer - Towards a nuclear weapons free world
• John Tirman (The Nation) - How peace activists ended the Cold War
• Jonathan Steele (Guardian) - The peace movement caused the fall of the Berlin wall
• Richard Falk (TFF) - Can Gandhi's nonviolence be a more effective political strategy? | More
• Arundhati Roy (Frontline) - The end of imagination
• David Krieger - Awakening America, before it is too late

War on terrorism

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