Helen Caldicott - Sleepwalking to Armageddon: the Threat of Nuclear Annihilation

Also by Helen Caldicott

Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe

If You Love This Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth

War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space

Loving This Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World

Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer

The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bushs Military-Industrial Complex

Nuclear Madness

Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War

2017 by individual contributors

What Would Happen If an 800-Kiloton Nuclear Warhead Detonated Above Midtown Manhattan? 2015 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Julian Borger, Nuclear weapons: how foreign hotspots could test Trumps finger on the trigger reprinted courtesy of Guardian News and Media.

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Caldicott, Helen, editor of compilation.

Title: Sleepwalking to Armageddon: the thread of nuclear annihilation / edited by Helen Caldicott.

Other titles: Threat of nuclear annihilation

Description: New York: The New Press, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017004869 | ISBN 9781620972472 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear warfare. | Nuclear weapons. | Nuclear disarmament. | Nuclear warfare--Prevention. | World politics--21st century.

Classification: LCC U263 .S595 2017 | DDC 355.02/17--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004869

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Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Table of Contents

D espite Donald Trumps vows to seal the U.S. border and eradicate ISIS, the real terrorists of the world today are the United States and Russia. They possess 94 percent of the nuclear weapons on the planet, and they hold the rest of the world hostage to their provocative and self-serving foreign policies and misadventures. As a result, we are closer to nuclear war now, at the start of the twenty-first century, than weve ever been before, even during the height of the Cold War.

While we must be concerned about global warmingthe other existential threat to the planetit is imperative that we do not take our eyes off the nuclear threat. To do so is to risk sleepwalking to Armageddon. Nine countries around the globe are known to have nuclear weapons, many of them on hair-trigger alert. In at least five separate locations in the world, two or more nuclear-armed countries are in actual or proxy wars or standoffs that could escalate at any time. And the United States has elected to the presidency a man who seems to feel that, because they exist, nuclear weapons ought to be used. Donald Trump has implied that he feels tactical nuclear weapons can be effectively employed in battle and seemed to imply in comments about Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia that he had few concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional countries.

Tony Schwartz, the co-writer of Trumps bestselling book Trump: The Art of the Deal, who spent eighteen months camping out in [Trumps] office, joining him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and spending weekends with him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida estate, listening in on Trumps business meetings and phone conversations, told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker that if he were titling Trumps book today, instead of The Art of the Deal, Schwartz would call it The Sociopath. Schwartz has tweeted, Trump is totally willing to blow up the world to protect his fragile sense of self. Please God dont give this man the nuclear codes. And Mayer reports that Schwartz said, I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.

During the Cold War, there were restraints on either side between Russia and America. Now, for the first time since the Cold War ended, Russia and America are confronting each other militarily with seemingly no restraints. During the political debate preceding the 2016 American presidential election, Marc Rubio, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton were overtly discussing the notion of bombing such countries as Syria, Iran, Yemen, and others. And all of them have discussed the use of nuclear weapons.

To understand what drives Americas frighteningly militaristic stance and warmongering, follow the money. After the Cold War ended, U.S. negotiators promised Mikhail Gorbachev that America would not enlarge NATO, and the world enjoyed a period of relative peace. But the United States reneged on its promise a few short years later: No war was bad for business! In 1997 Norman Augustine, the head of Lockheed Martin, traveled to Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other newly liberated Eastern European countries and asked: Do you want to join NATO and be a democracy? (Joining NATO doesnt make you a democracy.) But in order to join NATO, these small countries had to spend billions of dollars to buy weapons.

Thats the dynamic that instigated NATOs expansion from the end of the Cold War to the present timeright up to the border of Russia. Imagine if Russia expanded its territory to the border of Canada with the United States. Remember what America did when Russia placed nuclear weapons in Cuba? We were minutes from nuclear war.

More recently, Hillary Clinton has been a recipient of huge amounts of money from the military-industrial complex. So are most members of the U.S. Congress and Senate, with the top donors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE Systems, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Airbus in Western Europe. America now wants to enlarge NATO forces and equipment to the tune of $3.4 billion. America also plans to spend $1 trillion over the next thirty years, replacing every single hydrogen bomb, submarine, ship missile, and airplane. In order for Barack Obama to persuade the U.S. Senate to ratify the START III treaty in 2010, he had to promise Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a leading conservative on military issues, that he would replace every single nuclear weapon and delivery system. In the context of these provocations, Vladimir Putins speeches are actually very restrained.

During the Obama administration, conservatives in the U.S. State Department, including Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and her husband Robert Kagan, founder of the Project for a New American Century, as well as Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and others, have adopted a policy to prod and provoke Putin, and have overtly stated that they want regime change in Russia. Predictably, Russia is renewing its nuclear weapons in response, and so is China. Yes, the United States always sets the trend. Donald Trump, perhaps for nefarious reasons, has seemed more inclined to court Putin, which, in a small silver lining for his election as president, may actually defuse the situation in Ukraine and elsewhere.