Category Archives: Analysis

Five ways that nuclear weapons could still be used

Alex Wellerstein writes: On 6 August 1945, the first atomic bomb to be used in anger detonated over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, it was Nagasaki’s turn. That was the last such attack. Despite the worst of the cold war’s close calls, like the Cuban missile crisis, no other nuclear weapons have ever been used outside of testing. Seven decades later, it is worth asking: could it happen again? Here are five possible nuclear use scenarios. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post: At 8:15 a.m., Little Boy dropped. The fall to the burst altitude of 1,968 feet lasted 43 seconds. At that moment, Little Boy was moving faster than the speed of sound.

The bomb exploded with a blinding flash above the center of the city.

The burst temperature was estimated at more than 1 million degrees Celsius. It ignited the surrounding air, forming a fireball about 900 feet in diameter.

Thirty seconds after the explosion, the Enola Gay circled to get a better look at what was happening. The city itself was engulfed in black smoke and, although the bomber was flying at 30,000 feet, the mushroom cloud had already risen above it, eventually reaching almost 56,000 feet.

The bomb, which exploded near its target over the center of the city, leveled two square miles. A firestorm incinerated everything within 6,000 feet of ground zero.

The blast wave shattered windows within 10 miles and was felt as far away as 37 miles. More than two-thirds of Hiroshima’s buildings were demolished. The heat ignited fires as far as two miles from ground zero.

The nuclear fireball and the ensuing blast killed 60,000 to 80,000 people in the time it has taken you to read this paragraph, and mortally wounded or seriously injured an estimated 50,000 more. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Susan Southard: Under the mushroom cloud — Nagasaki after nuclear war

The nuclear age. Doesn’t that phrase seem like ancient history? With the twin anniversaries of the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki coming around again, this is its 70th birthday. Just a year younger than me, it was my age-mate, my companion all those years I was growing up. Those unshakeable fears, the “unthinkable,” turned out to be eminently translatable into the world of dreams. I still vividly recall my own world-ending nightmares from my teen years and I know I’m not alone. Thoughts of nuclear destruction were then part and parcel of our lives. Once, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it felt as if we might not even make it out of this lifetime.

The byproducts of that moment — raging dinosaurs, world-ending death rays, giant ants, and destroyed planets — ran rampant in pop culture, the classic stuff of B-movies. In those years, when the U.S. and the USSR were each building their arsenals to unimaginable heights and planning for something like world’s end, all of us were, in a sense, “on the beach.” Who didn’t read Neville Shute’s classic novel (or see the movie) and think about that vast cloud of fallout from the ultimate apocalyptic battle of the Cold War heading south or experience what curtains might mean, even in Australia? Who didn’t read the burgeoning post-apocalyptic mutant pulp fiction of that era even as, with A Canticle for Leibowitz, it became “literature”?

And doesn’t all of that, the fearful and the eerily fun-filled, seem the product of another time, long gone and half-forgotten? And yet here’s the eeriest thing of all: on this very day, nine countries with nuclear arsenals of varying sizes still possess, according to the latest estimates, a total of more than 15,000 such weapons, enough, that is, to obliterate countless Earths. And as it happens, 93% of those weapons are in the hands of either the United States or Russia, both of which are proudly and openly “modernizing” their nuclear stocks — in the case of the U.S. at a planned cost of a trillion dollars over the next three decades. Consider that a reminder that, in August 2045 on the 100th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the former Cold War rivals still have every intention of being nuclear powers.

Most unnerving of all, the planners in those countries simply refuse to acknowledge the most basic nuclear facts — or at least they are utterly unmoved by them and by the thought of the eradication of humanity. It evidently matters little that if those “modest” nuclear powers, India (a mere 110 nuclear weapons) and Pakistan (a mere 120 of them), were to release just part of their arsenals in a South Asian nuclear exchange, the planet would enter “nuclear winter” and humanity would be decimated.

So, on a 70th anniversary in which the madness shows no sign of ending, it’s good to turn to Susan Southard’s monumental new book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, which offers a riveting, if chilling plunge into nuclear realities. Among other things, it reminds us that, unbelievably enough, humanity’s nuclear fate was never just prospective, never just a matter of thoughts, or plans, or dreams, or fantasies. Nuclear destruction of an almost unimaginable sort was the initial reality of the atomic age, with such weaponry actually used on two utterly defenseless cities. Thanks to the kindness of the editors of Viking, TomDispatch today takes you directly beneath the mushroom cloud in an excerpt from Southard’s book that follows five teenage nuclear survivors of the Nagasaki bomb through the very first moments of what has become an unending nuclear age. Tom Engelhardt

Entering the nuclear age, body by body
The Nagasaki experience
By Susan Southard

[This essay has been adapted from chapters 1 and 2 of Susan Southard’s new book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, with the kind permission of Viking.]

Korean and Chinese workers, prisoners of war, and mobilized adults and students had returned to their work sites; some dug or repaired shelters, others piled sandbags against the windows of City Hall for protection against machine-gun fire. In the Mitsubishi sports field, bamboo spear drills in preparation for an invasion had just concluded. Classes had resumed at Nagasaki Medical College. Streetcars meandered through the city.

Hundreds of people injured in the air raids just over a week earlier continued to be treated in Nagasaki’s hospitals, and at the tuberculosis hospital in the northern Urakami Valley, staff members served a late breakfast to their patients. One doctor, trained in German, thought to himself, Im Westen nichts neues (All quiet on the western front). In the concrete-lined shelter near Suwa Shrine that served as the Nagasaki Prefecture Air Defense Headquarters, Governor Nagano had just begun his meeting with Nagasaki police leaders about an evacuation plan. The sun was hot, and the high-pitched, rhythmic song of cicadas vibrated throughout the city.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Grim expert assessments of Syria’s peace process

Aron Lund writes: On July 29, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, stood before the UN Security Council to explain his strategy for peace in Syria. The Swedish-Italian diplomat took office in July 2014, following the resignation of his predecessor, Lakhdar Brahimi, who had attempted to reconcile Syria’s warring parties at a high-stakes peace conference known as Geneva II. Held in two rounds in January and February 2014, these talks failed to produce any results.

Pessimistic about the chances for a countrywide peace deal, de Mistura first tried to negotiate a local ceasefire in the Aleppo area. It failed, for many of the same reasons that Geneva II had failed: lukewarm international support, attempts by President Bashar al-Assad’s government to water down and exploit the deal, and outright hostility from armed rebels who were, in any case, too divided to effectively enforce a ceasefire. In spring 2015, de Mistura gave up on the Aleppo plan, at least for the time being. Acting on instructions from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he instead launched a series of consultative talks with the parties in April 2015, to prepare for a reboot of the peace process.

Meanwhile, the tide of the conflict turned. Assad had enjoyed battlefield success for much of 2014, but by March 2015, his hollowed-out economy and understaffed army began to buckle. The Iranian nuclear deal concluded on June 14, 2015, seemed set to strengthen one of Assad’s key allies. Several opposition conferences have taken place inside and outside of Syria during the year, some of them backed by the Syrian president’s other major ally, Russia, and many have speculated that these meetings are linked to “Geneva III,” as de Mistura’s efforts were inevitably dubbed.

Although de Mistura was reportedly pressured by some countries in the Security Council to convene another conference on the Brahimi model, he finally opted for a more cautious approach. Saying that he does not see any real chance for a peaceful political transition in Syria at this time, de Mistura declared on July 29 that he will try to engage the parties in a less contentious negotiating format, aiming to limit human suffering, identify areas of shared interest, and formulate common principles. If successful, these talks could pave the way for negotiations over core issues in the future. For now, four working groups will be set up to discuss “safety and protection for all, political and constitutional issues, military and security issues, and public institutions, reconstruction and development,” in the words of one news report.

How will de Mistura’s project affect Syria’s future and what is in store for the country in 2015? To answer these questions, I have asked a group of leading Syria specialists to explain how they rate chances of the UN peace bid and how they view Syria’s future more generally. I’m sad but not surprised to see the level of pessimism that prevails. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Barrel bombs, not ISIS, are the greatest threat to Syrians

Kenneth Roth writes: As the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, commits horrendous videotaped executions, it might seem to pose the greatest threat to Syrian civilians. In fact, that ignoble distinction belongs to the barrel bombs being dropped by the military of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The Islamic State has distracted us from this deadly reality.

Barrel bombs are improvised weapons: oil drums or similar canisters filled with explosives and metal fragments. They are dropped without guidance from helicopters hovering just above antiaircraft range, typically hitting the ground with huge explosions and the widespread diffusion of deadly shrapnel. They pulverize neighborhoods, destroy entire buildings and leave broad strips of death and destruction.

The Syrian military has dropped barrel bombs, sometimes dozens in one day, on opposition-held neighborhoods in Aleppo, Idlib, Dara’a and other cities and towns. They have pulverized markets, schools, hospitals and countless residences. Syrians have described to me the sheer terror of waiting the 30 seconds or so for the barrel bomb to tumble to earth from a helicopter hovering overhead, not knowing until near the very end where its deadly point of impact will be. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Is it too late to stop Turkey’s coal rush?

The Guardian reports: The smell is sharp and smoky, with a metallic tinge, and very, very strong. “That,” says Yıldırım Biçici, “is the smell of coal”.

The tea-shop owner’s home is just a couple of hundred metres from a huge, ageing coal-fired power plant in central Turkey, whose red-and-white chimneys spew dirty fumes. Biçici has lived amid the smoke for decades but now finds himself on the frontline of the nation’s new coal rush: the Afşin-Elbistan station is planning to expand into the biggest coal-fired power plant in the world.

Sitting on a little wooden stool in the shabby square of Goğulhan village, Biçici says: “There are warnings on cigarette packets saying don’t smoke, but here we have no choice.” Waving his hand through the pungent air, he says: “We have to smoke.”

Biçici’s mother died of lung cancer – “we figured it was the air pollution” – and his four-year-old daughter Gülbeyaz has chronic bronchitis. “It is so sad, we don’t let her go out even if the weather is nice,” he says.

Turkey has very big plans for coal, with more than 80 new plants in the pipeline, equivalent in capacity to the UK’s entire power sector. The scale of the coal rush is greater than any country on Earth, after China and India. It is pushing forward in a year when the world’s nations must seal a deal to combat climate change at a crunch UN summit in Paris in December and when scientists have warned that 80% of known coal reserves must stay in the ground. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The end of the two-state solution

Avi Issacharoff writes: On Tuesday afternoon I drove to Duma, the village where 18-month-old Ali Dawabsha was murdered in what appears to have been an act of terrorism perpetrated by Jews. At the Shilo junction (I was coming from Ramallah), I headed east along the “Wine Route.” Such a romantic name for a region of illegally constructed outposts, some of them on privately-owned Palestinian land: Ahiya, Kida, Adei Ad, Esh Kodesh. The ruins of what had been the outpost of Geulat Zion were still on one of the hills.

The view is spectacular, breathtaking — and in some cases, so are the homes. For example in Kida, a settlement populated by career and reserve IDF officers, there are several villas so exquisite that residents of Israel’s central region could only dream of such luxury. The combination of stone houses and vineyards gives a feeling almost of a foreign country until we remember that this is the West Bank, and that hardly a week goes by here without reports of violent confrontations between the inhabitants of Esh Kodesh and their Palestinian neighbors from Qusra.

The continuum of Jewish communities stretches from Route 60 to the Allon Road in the direction of the Jordan Valley, making it obvious that the locations of these outposts were not selected at random. The territorial continuity between Nablus and Ramallah is disrupted over and over by numerous Jewish communities, and a Jewish territorial continuity has been created between Beit El, via Ofra, Shilo and Eli and, to the east, Shvut Rahel and the abovementioned outposts. A similar phenomenon exists around Nablus as well: Yitzhar, Bracha, Itamar, Elon Moreh and then a series of outposts descending eastward toward the Jordan Valley. Same goes for the stretch between Bethlehem and Hebron. Conditions are now such that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank has already become impossible.

And here it must be said: The watershed line seems to have been crossed. The two-state solution is no more. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Recognizing whales and dolphins as cultural beings

Barbara J. King writes: The idea that our oceans teem with cultural animals — and have for millions of years — is the central conclusion of a new book by two whale scientists. And it’s a convincing one.

Whales and dolphins, as they forage for food and interact with each other in their social units, may learn specific ways of doing things from their mothers or their pod-mates.

Certain killer whales (orcas), for example, learn to hunt communally with such precision that they cause waves to wash seals — of only certain species, because other seals are rejected as prey — off their ice floes and into the sea. And the complex patterned songs of humpback whales evolve so quickly over time and space that only learning can explain it.

“The song being sung at any location can change dramatically into an entirely new form, with new units, new phrases, and new themes within less than a year,” write authors Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell in their book The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. “A revolution, rather than an evolution.”

The two scientists, who have been studying sperm whales for a collective half century, offer this working definition of culture: Behavior that is shared by some identifiable group such as a family, community or population, and that is acquired by learning from others.

In order for culture to be ruled in as the primary explanation for some behavior, then, genetics and features of the habitat in which the marine mammals live should be ruled out. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Syria approaching de facto partition amid Assad military setbacks

The Guardian reports: The growing anarchy and stalemate in Syria has brought the country closer to de facto partition, as the overstretched and exhausted army of the president, Bashar al-Assad, retreats in the face of a war of attrition that has sapped its manpower.

The regime’s military has sought to retain a footprint in far-flung areas of the country, from Deir Ezzor in Syria’s eastern desert to Aleppo in the north and Deraa in the south, attempting to consolidate its hold over state institutions and protect its officer corps by retreating in the face of overwhelming offensives and subjecting lost territory to relentless and indiscriminate aerial campaigns.

But, facing a manpower shortage as tens of thousands of young men desert, the military has had to rely largely on local militias as enforcers for the regime. It is ceding territory to rebel fighters and the terror group Islamic State in favour of regrouping in its strongholds to the west, slowly paving the way for partition. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Highest number of Syria air strikes recorded in July

Al Jazeera reports: Syrian government has conducted nearly 7,000 air strikes during the month of July, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, making it the most intense bombing reported in one month since the beginning of the conflict in 2011.

At least 6,673 air strikes were recorded during the month of July, including 3,654 barrel bombs dropped by government helicopters on 13 out of 14 Syrian provinces, the UK-based monitoring group said in its report on Saturday.

Damascus suburbs and Idlib province were the most targeted provinces, according the Observatory, which has a network of activists on the ground.

At least 791 civilians were killed due to these air strikes, including 207 children below the age of 18. At least 3,000 others were injured while thousands were forced to flee their homes as a result. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The security disaster for Israel if Congress says no to the Iran deal

James Adler writes: Now that the Iran negotiations have ended with a deal, will US Congress approve or reject it? Opponents think we should have obtained a “better deal,” and demand one.

Clear thinking should show the deal to be security boon and its repudiation a security disaster for Israel.

The first questions pertain to any deal with Iran.

Why would Iran’s own antideal hardliners reject a deal they knew their regime planned to try to violate? It makes no sense. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How Israeli taxpayers subsidize ‘Jewish terror’

Natasha Roth writes: What do Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin, the murderers of Mohammed Abu Khdeir and the arsonists convicted of setting fire to Jerusalem’s Jewish-Arab Hand in Hand school have in common, apart from their violent extremism?

All have received legal representation or some other form of assistance from Honenu, a self-proclaimed “Israeli Zionist legal aid organization.” Based in Kiryat Arba, a settlement next to Hebron that is home to the grave of Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein (itself located in a park named after leader of the Kach terrorist group Meir Kahane), Honenu has tasked itself with a clear vision: to come to the aid of “[s]oldiers and civilians who find themselves in legal entanglements due to defending themselves against Arab aggression, or due to their love for Israel.” In Honenu’s eyes, they are defending “noble citizens” who have “acted on behalf of Am Yisrael [the people of Israel].”

To explore Honenu’s past and present client list of “noble citizens” is to read a timeline of some of the most heinous acts of Jewish terrorism in recent memory. Chances are that if you have read about a “price tag” attack, a violent assault on or killing of Palestinians by Jewish Israelis, or any other “ideological crime” of this nature in recent years, the perpetrators have been assisted in some way by Honenu. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: Israel has taken the unusual step of jailing a suspected Jewish militant without trial, amid a tightening of measures against Jewish extremists.

Mordechai Meyer, a resident of a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, has been placed under administrative detention for six months.

He is suspected of violent activity as part of a “Jewish terror group”. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Younger Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt bridle at nonviolent stance

The New York Times reports: A veteran leader of the Muslim Brotherhood was so alarmed by the rising calls for violence from the group’s youth that he risked arrest to urge the movement to stay peaceful.

Already hunted by the police for his role in a banned organization when he released his online manifesto in May, the leader, Mahmoud Ghuzlan, conceded that shunning violence in the face of the government crackdown on the Brotherhood was “like grasping a burning coal.” But, he said, history taught that “peacefulness is stronger than weapons, and violence is the reason for defeat and demise.”

It was a losing argument, or so it now appears. The police in Cairo soon found and arrested him. A chorus of Islamists mocked him on social media as naïve, unrealistic and hypocritical.

And his manifesto for “peacefulness” was quickly drowned out by official statements that have come closer to endorsing violence than anything the organization has said or done in more than four decades — an ominous turn for both Egypt and the West. Not only is the Brotherhood Egypt’s largest political organization, its long history gives it unique influence among Islamists beyond the Middle East to Europe, North America and elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How the Obama White House runs foreign policy

The Washington Post reports: When Susan E. Rice took over as President Obama’s national security adviser two years ago, she was struck by how the White House had grown. Since she had last served on the National Security Council, during the Clinton administration, its staff had nearly quadrupled in size, to about 400 people.

Earlier this year Rice embarked on an effort to trim that number, hoping to make the policy­making process more agile. By mid-July, she said in an interview, the staff had been cut by 6 percent.

But it may be too late to change impressions of an NSC bureaucracy whose size has come to symbolize an overbearing and paranoid White House that insists on controlling even the smallest policy details, often at the expense of timely and effective decisions.

In the Defense Department, where mistrust of the White House has persisted since the administration began, Obama is described as resolute and bold when a quick executive action is needed on operations such as hostage rescues and targeted captures and killings.

However, when the president has wanted to move swiftly on some of his most ambitious policy initiatives — the opening to Cuba and the early Iran nuclear negotiations — he has circumvented the usual practice for decision-making and kept a close hold within the White House.

Two senior NSC officials — deputy national security adviser Benjamin J. Rhodes and then-Latin American director Ricardo Zuniga — handled secret talks leading to last December’s announced opening to Cuba. The White House did not inform Secretary of State John F. Kerry until the discussions were well underway, and State Department officials in charge of the region found out only as they neared completion.

The success of those policies — along with a climate deal with China, trade agreements and other legacy-building achievements in recent months — have boosted internal morale and for some, at least, validated the way the administration operates.

But on a host of other important issues, the NSC, designed in Harry Truman’s time to coordinate sometimes-conflicting diplomatic and defense views, is still widely seen as the place where policy becomes immobilized by indecision, plodding through months and sometimes years of repetitive White House meetings. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s climate plan goes far, but not nearly far enough

Adele Peters writes: “There’s such a thing as being too late.” So said President Obama as he unveiled the new Clean Power Plan, which aims to fight climate change — and theoretically help prevent catastrophic impact — by cutting emissions from power plants. By 2030, by speeding up the closure of coal power plants, the plan would trim electricity pollution by a third.

It’s a step in the right direction, especially for air pollution in the communities that have to live next to power plants. But is it enough to help avoid 2°C of global warming, the point at which things start looking more apocalyptic? Last year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that in order to stay within the two-degree limit and avoid disaster, we’d have to cut emissions 41%-72% by 2050.

Power plants, unfortunately, are only a fraction of U.S. emissions. “Electricity is only about 20% of all energy, so this translates into reducing only about 6% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030,” says Mark Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere and Energy Program at Stanford University. “This is very insufficient.”

While Obama has also proposed some other new climate standards through the EPA, like tighter fuel-economy standards and cutting methane emissions from oil and gas wells, none of it adds up to what the IPCC says is necessary. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Stop burning fossil fuels now: there is no CO2 ‘technofix’, scientists warn

The Guardian reports: German researchers have demonstrated once again that the best way to limit climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels now.

In a “thought experiment” they tried another option: the future dramatic removal of huge volumes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would, they concluded, return the atmosphere to the greenhouse gas concentrations that existed for most of human history – but it wouldn’t save the oceans.

That is, the oceans would stay warmer, and more acidic, for thousands of years, and the consequences for marine life could be catastrophic.

The research, published in Nature Climate Change today delivers yet another demonstration that there is so far no feasible “technofix” that would allow humans to go on mining and drilling for coal, oil and gas (known as the “business as usual” scenario), and then geoengineer a solution when climate change becomes calamitous. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

World’s glacier melt speeding up

Stuff reports: The world’s glaciers are melting at the fastest rate since record-keeping began and those keeping track say the trend will continue with climate change.

A study published in the Journal of Glaciology on Tuesday combined data from hundreds of glaciers worldwide to show the global trend is one of retreat.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), led by the University of Zurich, gathers glacier data from more than 30 countries. The new analysis shows the rate of retreat between 2001 and 2010 was greater than any decade last century. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Experts slam New York Times for ‘gullible’ puff piece on ‘amazing’ Kochs

Joe Romm writes: The New York Times published a fawning front-page profile of the Koch brothers last Friday. The article never mentions their efforts to secure unfettered fossil fuel consumption, which would destroy humanity’s livable climate. It was quickly criticized by leading experts as “poor journalism” and “gullible.”

The Times wants you to believe that the Kochs are “very private” but “brave,” that they are “sensitive to criticism,” and that “Charles [Koch] obviously is a classical liberal, who believes in the Bill of Rights.” What’s next for the Times — rehabbing the misunderstand Bernie Madoff?

This 1300-word piece never once mentions the Koch’s insidious efforts to fund climate science denial, block all climate action, and roll back clean energy standards at a state level. The Koch’s belief in the First Amendment extends to being the leading funder in the world of efforts to spread disinformation, smear and harass climate scientists, and generally destroy any honest national discussion of how to spare Americans and billions of people worldwide needless misery for centuries to come. Any classical liberal would do the same. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail