In een bericht dat gisteren werd gepubliceerd op CounterPunch (gevonden via het blog van Stan van Houcke) heeft de schrijver John LaForge zware kritiek op de de houding van de Trump administratie t.a.v. kernwapens….. Dit n.a.v. een artikel op de Huffington Post, waarin werd geciteerd uit gelekte concept documenten over het beleid dat de Trump administratie voert ten aanzien van kernwapens en uiteen wordt gezet in de Nuclear Posture Review >> NPR (VS).

Deze NPR wordt vooral gebruikt om journalisten en studenten middels eufemistische termen het gevaar van nucleaire vernietiging te bagatelliseren………..

Vergeet niet dat de VS niet schroomt een (illegale) oorlog te beginnen, zo heeft de (recente) geschiedenis ons wel geleerd, de kans dat zo’n oorlog in de nabije toekomst zal beginnen met één of meerdere kernwapens van de VS is dan ook levensgroot, zeker als je de uitlating van Trump over kernwapens hoort, zoals de uitlating die hij zelfs drie keer herhaalde: “If we have them, why can’t we use them……?”

De VS is druk bezig met de ontwikkeling van kernwapens die op het slagveld en tegen steden ‘gebruikt kunnen worden’ en dat door een land dat als enige het atoomwapen twee keer heeft ingezet tegen burgers………

Lees het prima artikel van LaForge over deze zaak en huiver:

Trump’s
Draft Nuclear Posture Review Degrades National Security

by JOHN
LAFORGEJANUARY
25, 2018

On
Jan. 11, the Huffington Post posted a leaked draft of the Trump
Administration’s Nuclear
Posture Review,
the government’s most detailed unclassified nuclear weapons and war
planning and preparation document, the first since April 2010.

The
NPR is used to provide smart-sounding euphemism and theoretical
distraction to reporters and scholars who sometimes write about
nuclear weapons.  Since such weapons can only produce firestorms
and massacres that neither medics nor hospitals can begin to respond
to, the government uses cool, technical terminology to sell the
“need” and “usefulness” of the devices to tax payers.

Nuclear
Watch New Mexico* in Santa Fe keeps a critical eye on programs and
problems at the state’s two nuclear weapons design and production
laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia. In the following, Nuclear Watch
NM provides expert analysis of the latest official gibberish.

The
new Review begins with “[m]any hoped conditions had been set for
deep reductions in global nuclear arsenals, and, perhaps, for their
elimination. These aspirations have not been realized. America’s
strategic competitors have not followed our example. The world is
more dangerous, not less.” The Review then points to Russia and
China’s ongoing nuclear weapons modernization programs and North
Korea’s “nuclear provocations.” It concludes, “We must look
reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it be.”

If
the US government were to really “look reality in the eye and see
the world as it is,” it would recognize that it is failing
miserably to lead the world toward the abolition of the only class of
weapons that is a true existential threat to our country. As an
obvious historic matter, the US is the first and only country to use
nuclear weapons. Since WWII the US has threatened to use nuclear
weapons in the Korean and Viet Nam wars, and on many other occasions.

Further,
it is hypocritical to point to Russia and China’s “modernization”
programs as if they are taking place in a vacuum. The US has been
upgrading its nuclear arsenal all along. In the last few years our
country has embarked on a $1.7 trillion modernization program to
completely rebuild its nuclear weapons production complex and all
weapons based on land, in the air and at sea.

Moreover,
Russia and China’s modernization programs are driven in large part
by their perceived need to preserve strategic stability and
deterrence by having the ability to overwhelm the US’s growing
ballistic missile defenses. Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of “Star
Wars” (fed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s false
promises of success) blocked a nuclear weapons abolition agreement in
1988 with the former Soviet Union. In 2002, George W. Bush
unilaterally withdrew the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty),
which has been a source of constant friction with the Russian
government ever since.

More
recently, at Israel’s request, the US blocked the 2015
Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference at the UN from agreeing to
a conference on a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East (Israel
has never signed the treaty). As an overarching matter, the US and
other nuclear-armed treaty signatories have never honored the
Treaty’s Article VI mandate “to pursue negotiations in good faith
on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race
at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…,” in effect since
1970. As a consequence, last year more than 120 countries at the UN
passed a nuclear weapons ban treaty which the US vehemently
denounced, despite the fact that there have long been ban treaties on
chemical and biological weapons which the US has not only supported
but also sought to enforce.

With
respect to North Korea’s nuclear provocations, that regime is
clearly seeking deterrence against the US. North Korea’s
infrastructure was completely destroyed during the Korean War, and
its people later witnessed the destruction of the Iraqi and Libyan
regimes neither of which had nuclear weapons.

Finally,
the NPR purports to be about “deterrence” against hostile
threats. However, the US’s true nuclear posture has never been just
deterrence, but rather the ability to conduct nuclear attacks,
including pre-emptive first strikes. This is why the US (and Russia)
keep thousands of nuclear weapons instead of the few hundred the
other nuclear powers keep for just deterrence. Keeping and improving
the ability to use nuclear weapons is the underlying reason for the
$1.7 trillion “modernization” program (another euphemism) that is
actually developing new nuclear weapons, instead of maintaining a few
hundred, known to be “useful” for 50 years, while pursuing
nuclear disarmament.

Beyond
preserving and upgrading the enormous land, sea and air-based nuclear
arsenal, the new NPR calls for:

1)
Near-term development of a low-yield nuclear warhead for existing
Trident missiles launched from new submarines.

2)
New sub-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles.

3)
Keeping the 1.2 megaton B83-1 nuclear gravity bomb “until a
suitable replacement is identified.” [Hiroshima times 80]

4)
“Provide the enduring capability and capacity to produce plutonium
‘pits’ [warhead cores] at a rate of no fewer than 80 pits per
year by 2030.”

5)
“Advancing the W78 warhead replacement to FY19… and investigating
the feasibility of fielding the nuclear explosives package in a Navy
flight vehicle.”

Obvious
problems with these five programs are:

1)
An adversary won’t know whether a Trident sub-launched nuclear
warhead is a new low-yield or an existing high-yield warhead. In any
event, any belief in a “limited’ nuclear war is a fallacy that
shouldn’t be tested. Once the nuclear threshold is crossed at any
level, it is crossed, and lower-yield nuclear weapons are all the
more dangerous for being potentially more usable.

2)
Sub-launched nuclear-armed cruise missiles are inherently
destabilizing as the proverbial “bolt out of the blue,” and can
be the perfect weapon for a nuclear first-strike. Moreover, this is
redundant to nuclear-armed cruise missiles that are already being
developed for heavy bombers.

3)
The National Nuclear Security Administration largely justified the
ongoing program to create the B61-12 (the world’s first “smart”
nuclear gravity bomb) by being a replacement for the 1.2 megaton
B83-1 bomb. Does this indicate doubts in the $13 billion B61-12
program? And will it lead to a bump up in the number of nuclear
weapons in the US’s arsenal?

4)
To date, the talk has been up to 80 pits per year, not “no fewer
than.” Also, the 2015 Defense Authorization Act required that the
capability to produce up to 80 pits per year be demonstrated by 2027.
The NPR’s later date of 2030 could be indicative of longstanding
plutonium pit production problems at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory. That delay and hints of higher than 80 pits per year
could also point to the pit production mission being relocated at the
Savannah River Site, which is under active consideration. In any
event, future plutonium pit production pit production is not needed
for the existing nuclear weapons stockpile, but is instead for future
new-design nuclear weapons.

5)
“W78 warhead replacement… in a Navy flight vehicle” is code for
so-called Interoperable Warheads, whose planned three versions
together could cost around $50 billion. These are arguably huge make
work projects for the nuclear weapons labs (particularly Livermore),
which ironically the Navy doesn’t even want (Navy
memo,
Sept. 27, 2012). It is also the driving reason for unnecessary
future production of more than 80 pits per year.

Jay
Coghlan, Nuclear Watch’s Executive Director, concludes with a grim
prognosis:

“The
new NPR does not even begin to meet our long-term need to eliminate
the one class of weapons of mass destruction that can truly destroy
our country. It will instead set back arms control efforts and
further hollow out our country by diverting yet more huge sums of
money to the usual giant weapons contractors at the expense of public
health and education, environmental protection, natural disaster
recovery, etc. Under the Trump Administration and this NPR, expect
Medicare and social security to be attacked to help pay for a false
sense of military superiority.”

(*Nuclear
Watch New Mexico, 903 W Alameda St #325, Santa Fe, NM 87501)

========================

Zie ook: ‘Top VS generaal stelt dat er een grote oorlog met Rusland op komst is, ofwel: WOIII……‘

        en: ‘Trumps atoomknop is groter dan die van Kim Yung-un, bovendien werkt de VS knop wel……. ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!‘

       en: ‘VN chef Guterrez geeft alarmcode rood af voor de wereld in 2018 en niet alleen vanwege het milieu of klimaat……‘

        en: ‘Trumps uitlating over de atoomknop en de onverschilligheid bij zijn achterban, een dictatuur waardig………‘

        en: ‘VS op weg naar daadwerkelijk gebruik van het kernwapen…………..‘ (plus twee andere Engelstalige artikelen)

        en: ‘VS sluit een nucleaire aanval niet uit als een mogelijke reactie op een ‘cyberaanval…….’‘

        en: ‘NAVO oefent op een nucleaire aanval tegen ‘een denkbeeldige vijand’, ofwel Rusland……….‘

       en: ‘Pompeo (CIA opperhoofd met koperen fluit): heeft alle aanwijzingen dat Rusland de midterm verkiezingen zal manipuleren……‘

Dan nog over het bedreigen van Noord-Korea door Trump met ‘Fire and Fury): ‘Noord-Korea verkeerd begrepen: het land wordt bedreigd door de VS, dat alleen deze eeuw al minstens 4 illegale oorlogen begon……..‘

En om nog even te herinneren aan de enorme agressie van de VS, die niet op een illegale oorlog meer of minder kijkt:  ‘VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen……….‘ en:  ‘List of wars involving the United States‘    

Over de zogenaamde Russische dreiging: ‘NAVO uitbreiding in Oost-Europa is bewezen tegen gesloten overeenkomst met Rusland…….‘