Tag Archives: anti-nuclear-proliferation

八月六日 And America’s Cult of (Military) Superiority

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August 6— It’s an overcast and windy morning. There was an occasional drizzle on my way into work.  The school and the city just observed the anniversary of the first nuclear carpet bombing.  74 years ago today this city was reduced to smoldering, irradiated rubble in carpet-bombing targeting civilians, designed to strike terror and hopelessness into the hearts of the Japanese population and win the Pacific War ahead of a Russian invasion of the Japanese mainland.  It was a unique bombing only in terms of the type of weapon used.  Otherwise, it is I think fair to say that bombings like these continue into the present day, initiated by the American Executive, left unchecked by the Congress and largely ignored by the American populace.  These bombings still target civilians and kill tens of thousands of innocent people every year in places like Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia.  End the American Capitalist Death Cult!

Portrait of Sadako Sasaki - a young girl who became the symbol of the innocent lives lost in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and to the brutalities of World War II. Artwork by Joëlle Jones.

Portrait of Sadako Sasaki – a young girl who became the symbol of the innocent lives lost in the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and to the brutalities of World War II. Artwork by Joëlle Jones. From Red Flag Magazine: https://redflag.org/magazine/issue-6/wish-upon-a-crane/

 

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This piece I found on consortiumnews.com was written in June by William J. Astore. It’s a great summary of America’s obsession with “air supremacy.”  Astore calls the American Military Industrial Complex a “cult,” as do the authors of the “Eyes Left” podcast, which I highly recommend.

 

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/10/the-american-cult-of-bombing/

 

White House Assails Donald Trump Proposal to Let Asian Allies Get Nuclear Weapons – First Draft. Political News, Now. – The New York Times

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WASHINGTON — A White House official said on Thursday that it would be “catastrophic” to adopt a proposal by Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner, that Japan and South Korea manufacture their own nuclear bombs to deter North Korea.

Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser and one of President Obama’s closest aides, said, “Frankly, it would be catastrophic were the United States to shift its position and indicate that we somehow support the proliferation of nuclear weapon to additional countries.”

Source: White House Assails Donald Trump Proposal to Let Asian Allies Get Nuclear Weapons – First Draft. Political News, Now. – The New York Times

As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy – The New York Times

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The B61 Model 12, the bomb flight-tested last year in Nevada, is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of an atomic revitalization estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.

Source: As U.S. Modernizes Nuclear Weapons, ‘Smaller’ Leaves Some Uneasy – The New York Times

This is disgusting!  ‘Small and ‘precise’ apparently means the ability to kill only a few thousand people at a time instead of a few hundred thousand.  These new bombs will supposedly be able to be “dialed down” to 2% of the level of destruction of Hiroshima.  As if this somehow approaches some magical threshold where killing innocent people becomes ethical!

Also, if the people involved in creating these new bombs recognize, as they seem to do, the necessity for “dialing down” the destructive power of these weapons to near zero, why is it such a difficult leap to outlawing them altogether?