Nobel Peace Prize goes to Abolitionists while US Conducts Nuclear War Games

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for its successful effort to establish a global treaty that bans nuclear weapons. Peace, disarmament, and civil society groups around the world celebrated the announcement and congratulated ICAN for its landmark treaty accomplishment.

In a statement, ICAN called the prize “a tribute to the tireless efforts of many millions of campaigners and concerned citizens worldwide who, ever since the dawn of the atomic age, have loudly protested nuclear weapons, insisting that they can serve no legitimate purpose and must be forever banished from the face of our earth.” By employing grassroots organizing and ordinary citizen diplomacy, ICAN, with 468 partner organizations from 100 countries, has permanently stigmatized nuclear weapons and their possessor governments, and helped to achieve their eventual elimination.

The new treaty was concluded on July 7 when 122 United Nations states voted in favor of its adoption. Since Sept. 20, 53 individual heads-of-state have signed the treaty, the first step in a government’s process of ratification which is decided by individual national parliaments. It will enter in force 90 days after at least 50 countries have ratified it.

The United States, the most powerful opponent of the Ban, called the treaty negotiations “unrealistic” and led a boycott, even though the talks are among the explicit mandates or binding “Articles” of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed and ratified by the United States in 1970.

The Ban Treaty prohibits developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, possessing, stockpiling and deploying nuclear weapons, transferring or receiving them from others, using or threatening to use nuclear weapons, allowing any stationing or deployment of nuclear weapons on national territories of signatories, and assisting, encouraging, or inducing any of these prohibited acts. The Treaty requires each signatory state to develop “legal, administrative and other measures, including the imposition of penal sanctions, to prevent and suppress” the prohibited activities.

US Fearmongering and Nuclear War Games Distract

Diverting attention from the Ban Treaty and the Nobel Committee’s abolitionist Peace Prize, the United States has for months been issuing wildly exaggerated warnings about threats posed by North Korea — which may have 20 nuclear warheads but no provably workable rockets for them — and Iran — which has no nuclear weapons at all.

At least the rest of the world is aware that US nuclear weapons are superfluous, conventional weapons being “deterrent” enough and sufficient for the Pentagon takeover of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nuclear weapons are worse than useless in today’s seven US “anti-terror” wars since they embody and teach, but never deter, terrorism. Case in point: Between October 16 – 20, the United States and four NATO partners conducted what they called their “Steadfast Noon” nuclear strike exercises. The annual war game is a NATO practice of nuclear weapons use with bombers and the B61 H-bombs the US deploys in Europe.

The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 16 that one NATO official said the war game involves a “fictional scenario.” The Journal noted that the US keeps about 150 B61 nuclear weapons at six bases in five European countries. The US nuclear weapons practice took place at Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium and Büchel Air Base in Germany, both of which host about 20 of the US B61s. Belgian and German pilots train to use these H-bombs in the event of a Presidential order to go nuclear, i.e., insane.

Joseph Trevithick reported for TheDrive online, “The bombs are technically ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, though experts and advocates routinely debate the validity of this term and whether any nuclear weapon can be seen as a limited, tactical tool.” The B61 is an unguided gravity bomb that has an explosive force of 340 kilotons (27 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb that killed 170,000 people). The nonfiction use of just a single B61 could kill more than 3.7 million people, the vast majority “protected” (civilians).

The Peace Prize increases the stigmatization of nuclear weapons, NATO’s preparations for using them, and the nuclear-armed states’ self-contradictory rationalizations for retaining their arsenals. All three need to be universally publicized and appreciated before a malfunction, miscalculation or “moron” (as Secretary of State called President Trump) kills millions.

Originally published on 2017-10-27

About the author: John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.

Source: Counter Punch

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

Save

READ MORE!

Rapefugees Invasion of Europe

Who are the repefugees coming to Europe as the "immigrants"? Or at least some of them:No comment!Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave

Obama Failed his Coup in Venezuela

The United States, Germany, Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom launched "Operation Jericho"Once again, the Obama administration has tried to force the change of a political regime that resists it. On February 12, an Academi (formerly Blackwater) plane disguised as an aircraft of the Venezuelan army was supposed to bomb the presidential palace and kill President Nicolas Maduro. The plotters had planned to place former MP María Corina Machado in power and have her immediately acclaimed by former Latin American presidents. President Obama had given a warning. In his new doctrine of Defence (National Security Strategy), he wrote: "We ...

Hillary Clinton – A Member of the “Axis of (D)evil”

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]

Selective Amnesia: Croatia’s Holocaust Deniers

The mugshots show Ivo Goldstein, a Jewish librarian and book dealer, looking bright-eyed and calm — even after nine days of confinement in a Croatian police cell. One of the prints bears the number 28888 and a date: April 21, 1941. Seventy-six years after they were taken by a police photographer, the photos hang as a triptych on the bedroom wall of Goldstein’s son, Daniel, in a drab apartment block in Zagreb’s Zaprudje neighborhood. Daniel, 85, is a historian and human rights activist. He was nine when his childhood was shattered by his father’s arrest in the newly created Independent State of ...

The CIA: Nazifying Ukraine since 1953

The recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.The CIA programs spanned some four decades. Starting as a paramilitary operation that provided funding and equipment for such anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR); its affiliates, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), all Nazi Banderists. The CIA also provided support to a relatively anti-Bandera faction ...

How the War in Ukraine Started

Clear and convincing evidence will be presented here that, under U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Government had a detailed plan, which was already active in June 2013, to take over Russia's main naval base, which is in Sevastopol in Crimea, and to turn it into a U.S. naval base. There can now be no question that the war in Ukraine started, and resulted from, the U.S. Government's plan to take over all of Ukraine, and especially to take over that Russian naval base, in Crimea, which then was in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine didn't start at the time when ...

Anne Frank of Kosovo Propaganda Hoax

One of the biggest and most outlandish US infowar and propaganda whoppers of the 1999 Kosovo conflict was the infamous NPR story of the ethnic Albanian Anne Frank. This seems like a mindless, unethical, immoral, and vicious, racist propaganda hoax today, using propaganda to destroy an entire people, Serbian Orthodox Christians. The Anne Frank infowar campaign was manufactured to support an illegal land grab in Kosovo, in support of a Muslim Albanian separatist and secessionist terrorist war against Serbian Christians. But at the time it was very popular and helped sell the US bombing of Yugoslavia in support of Albanian ...

Albanian Terrorists as Official NATO Peacekeeping Mission in Kosovo Members

Remember watching ancient Orthodox Christian monasteries in flames in Kosovo dozen times.Old, noble constructions, spiritual and historical testimonies of past times.I also remember that majority of Orthodox Christian monasteries, churches and relics has been attacked and destroyed after NATO forces (officially: KFOR) took full control of the Serbian province.It amazed me to see how Western soldiers, under full equipment and heavy armament, often didn’t make a single move to stop Albanian violence; over 200 000 Serbs had to flee, in order to save their bare lives, bearing whole their lives in few suitcases if they were lucky enough.It turned out ...

The USA – The Real Reason Why They Are Never Winning Their Wars

This essay is inspired by Professor James Petras’s article, describing that the US never wins wars despite trillions of investments in her war budget and obvious military superiority. Professor Petras is of course right, the United States is currently engaged in seven bloody wars around the globe (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya) and has not been winning one, including WWII. The question is: Why is that? To these wars, you may want to add the totally destructive and human rights adverse war that literally slaughters unarmed civilians, including thousands of children, in an open-air prison, Gaza, the US proxy war ...

Bismarck’s System of Continental Alliances

In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and ...

Endless Atrocities: The US Role In Creating The North Korean Fortress-State

Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary of the history that informs North Korea’s “relations with the United States” and “drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat”. Excerpts from Atwood’s summary are here used as a framework, with other sources where indicated. Atwood notes it is an American “myth” that the “North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders.” In fact, the North/South border “had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949.” Part of what ...

Hidden Manipulators: Who is Behind the “Kosova Independence” Campaign?

The Balkans conflicts of the 1990s saw a massive revival and resurgence of US and Western media propaganda and infowar techniques. The “new” advocacy journalists recalled the “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst, who helped induce the US to engage in the imperialistic or colonial war in Cuba in 1898, the Spanish-American War. This marked the emergence of the US as an expansionist global imperial and colonial power, like Britain, France, Spain, and Germany had been. Hearst was credited with manufacturing or “furnishing” the war in Cuba. Frederic Remington, his correspondent in Cuba, reported that nothing was happening in Cuba, that ...

Iran: Next Target of US Military Aggression

The US has been threatening Iran for more than 20 years. Already during the Clinton administration, US Central Command (USCENTCOM) had formulated “in war theater plans” to invade both Iraq and Iran. This posting which includes selected articles from our archives was originally published by Global Research 12 years ago in May 2005. In the wake of the war on Iraq (2003), the Bush administration officially identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. Bush’s National Security doctrine contained in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a continuation of Clinton’s “strategy of ...

BBC Fake News

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been slammed for mistakenly using a photo taken in Iraq in 2003 to illustrate the Syria 2012 massacre, in which over 100 people, including 32 children, were brutally killed.The picture, taken on March 27, 2003, showed a young Iraqi child jumping over dozens of white body bags containing skeletons found in a desert south of Baghdad.It was posted on the BBC news website under the heading “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows”.According to The Telegraph, the caption stated the photograph was provided by an activist and cannot be independently verified, but said ...

“The American War in Vietnam: Crime or Commemoration?” [Review of John Marciano’s Book]

In classical mythology, the Acheron is one of the rivers of the Underworld. It marks the boundary between the living and the dead. The ferryman Charon ferries the dead across the Acheron to a place where they lose memory. Nothing of what made them human remains—happiness, suffering, love, hatred, guilt, regret, redemption, betrayal, forgiveness. From Gilgamesh to Odysseus to Aeneas, the living heroes of the epic descend into the Underworld at a point of despair in the sense of their quest. Burdened by a fate that requires momentous courage and tragic self-sacrifice for the sake of their people’s survival, they resent ...

Jomo Kenyatta on Africa and Europe

Jomo Kenyatta (c. 1891 – 22 August 1978) was a Kenyan politician and the first President of Kenya. Kenyatta was the leader of Kenya from independence in 1963 to his death in 1978, serving first as Prime Minister (1963–64) and then as President (1964–78). He is considered the founding father of the Kenyan nation. Kenyatta was a well-educated intellectual who authored several books, and is remembered as a Pan-Africanist. He is also the father of Kenya's fourth and current President, Uhuru Kenyatta (Source: Wikipedia)Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate ...

War Crimes Charges for the Hague Tribunal Against NATO Leaders

Accused of War Crimes: The British Prime Minister Tony Blair WAR CRIMES CHARGES FOR THE HAGUE AGAINST THE NATO LEADERS – ONE OF THE INDICTMENTS IN THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL FOR THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA NOTICE OF THE EXISTENCE OF INFORMATION CONCERNING SERIOUS VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW WITHIN THE JURISDICTION OF THE TRIBUNAL; REQUEST THAT THE PROSECUTOR INVESTIGATE NAMED INDIVIDUALS FOR VIOLATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN LAW AND PREPARE INDICTMENTS AGAINST THEM PURSUANT TO ARTICLES 18.1 AND 18.4 OF THE TRIBUNAL STATUTE. TO: Madam Justice Louise Arbour, Prosecutor, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Churchillplein 1, 2501 EW, The Hague, Netherlands. AND TO: President William J. ...

Provoking the Russian Bear: NATO is “Cannon Fodder” for the American Empire

BALTOPS 16 is a military exercise now taking place between June 3 and June 18 in the Baltic Sea region which is in close proximity to Russia. The U.S. Naval Institute (www.usni.org) released an article titled ‘Analysis: Larger NATO Baltic Sea Exercise Sends Important Message to Russia’ stated what BALTOPS 16 will consist of:Over the next three weeks BALTOPS 16 will draw together some 6,000 personnel, 45 warships, and 60 aircraft from 17 nations, including the United States, Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, along with the littoral states of the Baltic States who are NATO members (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, ...

The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality

In a remarkable book, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley describes how, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union repeatedly tried, but finally failed, to conclude a pact of mutual security, in other words a defensive alliance, with Britain and France. This proposed arrangement was intended to counter Nazi Germany, which, under Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, had been behaving more and more aggressively, and it was likely to involve some other countries, including Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had reason to fear German ambitions. The protagonist of this ...

The Russians are Coming!

As 2016 closes, we find ourselves a deeply unsettled nation. We’re unable to draw the lines of our national interest. Is it jobs and economy, is it national security, or is it now in our interest to ensure global security — in other words, act as the world’s policemen?As the “failing” (to quote Trump) New York Times degenerates into a Washington Post organization with its stagnant Cold War vision of a 1950s world where the Russians are to blame for most everything — Hillary’s loss, most of the aggression and disorder in the world, the desire to destabilize Europe, etc. — the Times has added the ...