Dr. Joseph Berkson
Op-Ed for the day of TPNW (Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons) Ratification
When will we listen and act on extreme peril to our country? On October 24, the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons today should be a warning to the United States and the other eight countries who possess them. The majority of Americans believe any use of these weapons of mass destruction is unacceptable. The 84 signatories to this treaty wish to completely ban nuclear weapons. On October 24, the 50th country ratified the treaty. By the rules of the treaty it will be in force by international law in 90 days. By ratifying this treaty, the signing countries agree not to acquire or threaten the use of these bombs which threaten our survival in this country and worldwide.
The treaty is the result of decades of frustration that the nuclear powers have not disarmed, despite pledges to do so in the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
The world’s nuclear arsenal is nearly 13,500 warheads, the U.S. has 5,800.
Worse, Russia and the United States have recently deployed “low yield” nuclear weapons, sometimes called “tactical” nuclear weapons. Some politicians and military leaders look at these weapons as more usable, but that is an extremely dangerous idea which could lead to a large-scale nuclear weapon exchange. It has been the policy of U.S. administrations for the past 18 years that the U.S. reserves the right to use nuclear weapons first, not just in retaliation for a nuclear attack on us, but also if a conventional war is getting “out of control.” These “limited” nuclear weapons make us less secure.
Nuclear weapon accidents have happened here in the U.S., also in Russia. As Eric Schlosser wrote in his definitive book, Command and Control, an accidental liquid fuel explosion of a Titan missile in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980 was an extremely close call. One military officer was killed and 20 more injured, the nuclear warhead was missing for hours, and would have detonated if a single simple switch had failed. There have been innumerable incidents of near misses with our nuclear arsenal over the past 75 years.
The world celebrates the International Day for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons on Sept. 26. This commemorates a 1983 incident when a nuclear war was almost launched due to malfunctions in the Soviet early warning system. The Soviet officer, Stanislav Petrov, was told there was an incoming missile strike seen on radar, and then told five more missiles were on their way. He was obliged to launch a retaliation, but he disobeyed orders. He decided it could be a false image and did not launch the Russian nuclear weapons. Now he is celebrated as “the man who saved the world,” with the commemorative holiday on the date of the incident.
The results of an actual nuclear exchange in war are so horrible, many of us become emotionally traumatized contemplating these results: hundreds of millions (or more) people dead, environmental collapse of crops for over a decade, shortages of most goods. We cannot prepare for or prevent nuclear catastrophe unless we think about the unthinkable.
How do we act on this “low probability” risk? As a nation, we have not yet faced our current climate crisis, and had a bad record of acting early on the current COVID-19 pandemic. Imagine hearing that nobody could have predicted the coronavirus pandemic, if you wrote a book and gave talks warning about it 5 years ago. That happened to Bill Gates, philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, and Michael T. Osterholm, epidemiologist and infectious disease expert. They both predicted a pandemic with a new or “novel” virus to which nobody would have immunity. Many infectious disease and public health doctors warned we were not prepared for it. Bill Gates told Donald Trump in December, 2016 that we needed to get ready for dealing with a pandemic.
It is clear we are not good at dealing with nuclear dangers either. Albert Einstein sent a telegram in 1946, warning, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Let’s overcome this tendency to do nothing about impending risk, by making real changes in policy and act. We must start taking seriously the threat of the collapse of our country and human civilization if nuclear weapons are used. The best way to improve our security is for our country to negotiate now with other nuclear powers to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons.
Dr. Dave Hall
Tired of COVID-19? Tired of communities burned to the ground? Tired or smoke-filled summers? These are harbingers of our growing susceptibility to natural disasters fueled by a warming planet and indolent efforts globally to arrest the major causes.
But these tragedies and inconveniences will pale before even a tiny nuclear disaster.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received the 50th ratification vote from a member nation, on October 24, 2020 meaning that it will go into effect in 90 days. It’s powerful condemnation of nuclear weapons, but it’s still just a formality until nations like ours with nuclear weapons acknowledge the world’s condemnation of their dangerous arsenals.
History can teach how important it is to recognize the harms that we are courting by building and possessing nuclear weapons.
You may remember the Chernobyl nuclear reactor incident. Well, the Soviet Union had three major disasters well before Chernobyl that warn us what disregard for nuclear consequences will cost us.
The Techa River near their plutonium production plant became uninhabitable. They evacuated hundreds of villages after the river residents had been radiologically contaminated for years. When ? a delegation from Washington Physician for Social Responsibility? Or who? visited there in 1993, our geiger counter buzzed at a rate extreme enough to give a child cancer in three to four months. Russian officials dumped high level nuclear waste in the river after filling single shell tanks like we have at Hanford. Then in 1957 one of those tanks exploded like one of ours nearly did and there was a 180 kilometer plume that created a “nuclear preserve” that was still uninhabitable when we were there.
But that wasn’t all. Officials had been dumping hot nuclear waste in Lake Karachay, which like the Dead Sea, had no outlets. Safe place to put it, right? Well a drought and windstorm in 1968 dropped the lake level and the windstorm dispersed radioactive sediment from the exposed lake bed over a huge downwind plume that created another “nuclear preserve.” Along with nuclear testing and engineering use of nuclear explosives to build canals and the like, Soviet physicians calculated that 15% of the Soviet landmass was radiologically contaminated at levels unsafe for human life. All three disasters were as big or bigger than Chernobyl.
We in the United States are lucky our country has the wealth to manage nuclear waste better. But we, too, have huge downwind contamination from nuclear testing and nuclear waste. The Hanford Reservation in Eastern Washington is the largest Superfund site in the Western Hemisphere. That’s where we processed uranium to create plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb. There are 177 nuclear waste tanks there and more than half of them are leaking radioactivity toward the Columbia River. Uranium mining on Native American land near Spokane and throughout Arizona has left thousands of Native American workers with multiple health problems. Same for U.S. servicemen who were detailed to witness nuclear tests in the 1940s and ’50’s.
So that’s a brief summary of what happens during the production of nuclear weapons, and it pales by comparison to what has already happened when nuclear weapons are exploded.
The U.S. has tested atomic and hydrogen bombs on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb every day for 12 years and whole communities, like on the Techa River, had to be relocated. Radiological contamination from the Nevada Test Site reached Troy, New York. The Soviets had similar testing contamination from Novaya Zemlya in the arctic and Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.
That brings us to the Damocles sword that hangs over all of us every day. In the 1960s the U.S. plan for responding to a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union called for destroying both Russia and China at the calculated cost of 600 MILLION lives lost.
Despite all the efforts at reining in nuclear proliferation, we still have 15,000 nuclear weapons shared between nine nuclear nations with 90% held by the U.S. and Russia. We in the Puget Sound region live within 20 to 50 miles of the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Roughly a thousand nuclear weapons roam the world’s oceans on our Trident warships home based at Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor on Hood Canal.
If any one of these thousands of nuclear weapons is used in perceived hostility against a country allied with Russia or the U.S., retaliation designed to mutually destroy the aggressor is the threatened war plan of response. India and Pakistan have fought five wars already and both possess atomic bombs sufficient to block the sun with fallout and debris and starve out billions of people.
The notion that “fire and fury” is in any way sane exposes the ignorance of real consequences of using nuclear weapons. It’s on all of us to demand diplomatic reduction of these horrific weapons toward elimination. Soon we will see these weapons outlawed by the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. If we don’t stand up now to ensure the treaty comes into full force, none of us will be standing if this genie is unleashed.
Ash Maria
The 50th Country Just Ratified the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons – What Now?
I am writing this letter to both celebrate a monumental step in nuclear disarmament, as well as make a plea on behalf of young folks everywhere. Having attended Shorecrest High School and grown up in Lake Forest Park, I am now a current first-generation student at Pomona College in Claremont, California hoping to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. program in Medical Anthropology. Instead of college classes over Zoom, I instead chose to spend my fall semester supporting Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility’s anti-nuclear weapon advocacy work. With October 23rd’s historic milestone of 50 countries ratifying the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), I wanted to share from a pre-med student’s perspective the importance of acting upon this moment’s momentum to best ensure the health and safety of nuclear-affected communities in our country.
As you may be aware, in 2020 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have determined we are “100 seconds to midnight”, the closest the clock has ever been to “doomsday” in the organization’s 75-year history. Given the threats of present climate change and potential nuclear war amplified by corrupt political desires and technology-enabled propaganda, we as a global people are closer to the eradication of civilization than even at the height of the Cold War (for reference, the clock was 120 seconds to midnight in 1953 after the U.S. and U.S.S.R. tested thermonuclear weapons for the first time).
These growing threats have largely been met with near meaningless measures taken by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, especially China, Russia, and the U.S. Knowing that leading world powers would not adequately step up to the challenge of maintaining a habitable Earth, on July 7, 2017, a UN conference adopted the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Now with the 50th country ratifying it, the treaty will begin to take effect in 90 days, a momentous step in the global denuclearization effort. This historic treaty was led by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
The TPNW was created with both the short and long-term goals of providing a legal instrument to hold countries accountable in denuclearization efforts and fully abolishing these weapons of mass destruction respectively. According to ICAN’s website, the treaty specifically “prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory…[as well as] assisting, encouraging or inducing anyone to engage in any of these activities.”
Even if the importance of this unprecedented treaty’s ratification is not something that can be overstated, there are still other aspects of the anti-nuclear struggle that need to be urgently addressed. All of the nuclear-weapons states have to join the rest of the world in the effort to ban the bomb.
Here in the U.S., we have communities that have/are at high risk of experiencing nuclear violence that we must prioritize political and social support for going forward. These include the Marshallese and other Pacific Islander Compact of Free Association (COFA) migrants whose homelands were used for nuclear weapons testing, people living in the area around Washington State’s Hanford Site, and those inside the “nuclear sponge” regions of the American heartland.
In 1996 under a federal “welfare reform” act, COFA communities lost their access to Medicaid leading to poverty-driven extreme health disparity. Greatly impacted by COVID-19, diabetes, and high cancer rates caused by radiation poisoning from U.S. nuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands, Marshallese activists and allies have worked tirelessly to both cleanup remaining nuclear waste on the atolls and regain access to federal healthcare programs.
Cleaning up the Hanford Site in southern Washington State is critical. Many experts have deemed it a ticking time bomb with the potential to far exceed Chernobyl’s nuclear fallout. The facility storing 56 million gallons of radioactive material originally designed for the atomic bombs is decaying, the only way to prevent this impending disaster is to move the waste from wet to dry storage. Without our action, the area around the Hanford Site would become uninhabitable for upwards of 800 years.
The central states of Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming are considered by the U.S. military as our “nuclear sponge”. The Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) stored in these states serve the primary tactical use of absorbing any incoming attacks, greatly putting nearby communities at risk. Instead of removing the bait for Russia and protecting civilians, the U.S. has recently decided to replace and modernize our ICBMs via a brand new $13.3 contract with Northrop Grumman to be completed in 2029 and remain until 2075.
Nuclear weapons pose one of the greatest public health crises globally. It is a public health issue that may not pose an everyday threat to many of us (although an accident, miscalculation, or unhinged leader could change that instantly), but is inseparably intertwined with ones that do such as the climate crisis and economic inequity. If there is one issue young people like me cannot afford to be defeatist on it is this –the fate of our species is depending on it. This November I not only implore you to vote for candidates against nuclearization, but also to use the momentum of the TPNW’s ratification to educate others about these issues, organize anti-nuclear lobbying events in your area, and take part in organizations led by frontline communities like the Marshallese, who do live with the dangers of nuclear weapons every day
Dan Worthen
The U. N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has just been ratified by the governments of 50 nations – a key threshold in the treaty’s advancement toward becoming international law. The treaty “prohibits nations from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed on their territory.” In a year full of bad news, this is most welcome.
The nations currently possessing nuclear weapons have made it clear that they will not recognize the treaty. However, the ability to stigmatize those nations – officially singling them out as rogue states operating outside the norms of the world community – is perhaps the treaty’s greatest power. The nine nations must be named: the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
Most of us (those born after 1945) have been living under the threat of nuclear annihilation for our entire lives. I remember participating in “duck and cover” drills in primary school in the early 1960s. And I recall, during that same period, seeing the fear in my parents’ eyes as they watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold.
Today I see that same fear in the eyes of the younger generation — but the fear is not about nuclear annihilation, which, for most of them, is an issue that has faded tragically into the background. Their fear is about that other great existential peril: climate change.
My own children are young adults. One is in college and the other just had a baby. They are good, purposeful people whose lives brim with possibility, and they deserve every opportunity to live full, happy lives. But, more than with past generations, the earth’s accelerated warming is forcing them to face an ominous, uncertain future.
Sadly, the continuing presence of nuclear weapons on our planet makes that future exponentially more ominous. Indeed, in an awful twist, it makes the future more, not less, certain, for this I know: The longer nuclear weapons exist, the more inevitable is their use. It is how the world works. Sooner or later, the dumb luck that has helped to save us since 1945 is going to run out.
How will it happen? The spark will come intentionally as a result of a flareup between nations, or it will strike as a sudden accident — a bolt out of the blue — through a false alarm or technical malfunction. Then, as nearly all creditable response/retaliation scenarios tell us, the spark will ignite a conflagration that initiates nuclear winter and plunges the world into darkness.
The inevitability is stunning. It constrains us to act with all urgency to eliminate the hazard. If we do not, once the event takes place, the notion of combating climate change will lapse into sudden, archaic irrelevancy as nuclear winter fast tracks humanity down the road to extinction.
Nuclear weapons and climate change share this in common: They each threaten the entire planet-wide ecosystem and our own species’ survival. But climate change, vast in scope, is as intractable as it is global; there is nothing we can do to stop it in its tracks.
Nuclear weapons, in that sense, are different. While they have proven extraordinarily difficult to contend with since their inception 75 years ago, they are a puzzle that can be solved in the comparatively near term. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, I believe, is the place to start. It presents a feasible way forward in humanity’s quest to bury something that should have never seen the light of day. Therein lies hope.
