Hiroshima
Unlearned: Time To Tell the Truth About US Relations with Russia
August 6th and 9th mark 74
years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where only one
nuclear bomb dropped on each city caused the deaths of up to 146,000 people in
Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki. Today, with the US decision to walk
away from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) negotiated with the
Soviet Union, we are once again staring into the abyss of one of the most
perilous nuclear challenges since the height of the Cold War.
With its careful
verification and inspections, the INF Treaty eliminated a whole class of
missiles that threatened peace and stability in Europe. Now the US is leaving
the treaty on the grounds that Moscow is developing
and deploying a missile with a range prohibited by the treaty. Russia denies
the charges and accuses the US of violating the treaty. The US rejected
repeated Russian requests to work out the differences in order to preserve the
Treaty.
The US withdrawal should be
seen in the context of the historical provocations visited upon the Soviet Union
and now Russia by the United States and the nations under the US nuclear
“umbrella” in NATO and the Pacific. The US has been driving the nuclear arms
race with Russia from the dawn of the nuclear age:
·
In 1946 Truman rejected Stalin’s offer to
turn the bomb over to the newly formed UN under international supervision,
after which the Russians made their own bomb.
·
Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s offer to give up Star
Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons
when the wall came down and Gorbachev released all of Eastern Europe from
Soviet occupation, miraculously, without a shot.
·
The US pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders,
despite promises when the wall fell that NATO would not expand it one inch
eastward of a unified Germany.
·
Clinton bombed Kosovo, bypassing Russia’s veto in
the UN Security Council and violating the UN treaty we signed never to commit a
war of aggression against another nation unless under imminent threat of
attack.
·
Clinton refused Putin’s offer to each cut our
massive nuclear arsenals to 1000 bombs each and call all the others to the
table to negotiate for their elimination provided we stopped developing
missile sites in Romania.
·
Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty and put the new missile base in Romania with another to open shortly
under Trump in Poland, right in Russia’s backyard.
·
Bush and Obama blocked any discussion in 2008 and
2014 on Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the consensus-bound
Committee for Disarmament in Geneva.
·
Trump now walked out of the INF Treaty.
·
From Clinton through Trump, the US never ratified
the 1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as Russia has and has performed more
than 20 underground sub-critical tests on the Western Shoshone’s sanctified
land at the Nevada test site. Since plutonium is blown up with chemicals that
don’t cause a chain reaction, the US claims these tests don’t violate the
treaty.
·
Obama, and now Trump, pledged over one trillion
dollars for the next 30 years for two new nuclear bomb factories in Oak Ridge
and Kansas City, as well as new submarines, missiles, airplanes, and warheads!
What has Russia had to say
about these US affronts to international security and negotiated treaties?
Putin at his State of the Nation address on March 2018 said:
I will speak about the
newest systems of Russian strategic weapons that we are creating in response to
the unilateral withdrawal of the United States of America from the
Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the practical deployment of their missile
defense systems both in the US and beyond their national borders.
I would like to make a
short journey into the recent past. Back in 2000, the US announced its
withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Russia was categorically
against this. We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone
of the international security system. Under this treaty, the parties had the
right to deploy ballistic missile defense systems only in one of its regions.
Russia deployed these systems around Moscow and the US around its Grand Forks
land-based ICBM base. Together with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the
ABM Treaty not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either
party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have endangered humankind,
because the limited number of ballistic missile defense systems made the
potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.
We did our best to dissuade
the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty.
All in vain. The US pulled
out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that, we tried to develop constructive
dialogue with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease
concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a
compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, absolutely
all of them, were rejected. And then we said that we would have to improve our
modern strike systems to protect our security.
Despite promises made in
the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the five nuclear weapons state –
US, UK, Russia, France, China – would eliminate their nuclear weapons while all
the other nations of the world promised not to get them (except for India,
Pakistan, and Israel, which also acquired nuclear weapons), there are still
nearly 14,000 nuclear bombs on the planet. All but 1,000 of them are in the US
and Russia, while the seven other countries, including North Korea, have about
1000 bombs between them. If the US and Russia can’t settle their differences
and honor their promise in the NPT to eliminate their nuclear weapons, the whole world will continue to live under what President Kennedy described as a
nuclear Sword of Damocles threatened with unimaginable catastrophic
humanitarian suffering and destruction.
To prevent a nuclear
catastrophe, in 2016, 122 nations adopted a new Treaty for the Prohibition of
Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It calls for a ban on nuclear weapons just as the world
had banned chemical and biological weapons. The ban treaty provides a pathway
for nuclear weapons states to join and dismantle their arsenals under strict
and effective verification. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear
Weapons, which received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts, is working for
the treaty to enter into force by enrolling 50 nations to ratify the treaty. As
of today, 70 nations have signed the treaty and 24 have ratified it, although
none of them are nuclear weapons states or the US alliance states under the
nuclear umbrella.
With this new opportunity
to finally ban the bomb and end the nuclear terror, let us tell the truth about
what happened between the US and Russia that brought us to this perilous moment
and put the responsibility where it belongs to open up a path for true peace
and reconciliation so that never again will anyone on our planet ever be
threatened with the terrible consequences of nuclear war.
Here are some actions you
can take to ban the bomb:
·
Distribute Warheads To Windmills, How to Pay for the Green
New Deal, a new study addressing the need to prevent the two greatest dangers
facing our planet: nuclear annihilation and climate destruction.
Alice Slater, author and
nuclear disarmament advocate is a member of the Coordinating Committee
of World Beyond War and UN NGO
Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
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