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…]

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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.

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U.S.-backed Syrian rebels refuse to fight ​Nusra Front after kidnappings

The Guardian reports: A group of Syrian rebels that includes fighters trained by the United States have declared their refusal to fight al-Qaida’s affiliate in the country, the Nusra Front, following a series of kidnappings by the militant group.

A source in Division 30, which has endured a campaign of kidnappings by the Nusra Front, said they also oppose the American airstrikes carried out in the last few days against the al-Qaida-linked fighters.

The statements complicate the American strategy in Syria, which has suffered a string of setbacks and delays, deploying just over 50 fighters dedicated to fighting the terror group Islamic State in the year since its programme to train and equip rebels began. [Continue reading…]

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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…]

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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…]

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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…]

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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…]

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It’s either Iran nuclear deal or ‘some sort of war,’ Obama warns

The New York Times reports: President Obama took on critics of the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers in an aggressive speech on Wednesday, saying they were the same people who created the “drumbeat of war” and played on public fears to push the United States into the Iraq war more than a decade ago.

“Let’s not mince words: The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy and some sort of war — maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon,” Mr. Obama told about 200 people in a speech at American University. “How can we in good conscience justify war before we’ve tested a diplomatic agreement that achieves our objectives?”

Mr. Obama, opening a new, more overtly political phase of his public campaign for the accord, portrayed the coming vote in Congress to approve or reject the deal as the most consequential foreign policy decision for lawmakers since Congress voted in 2003 to authorize the invasion of Iraq. He implored them to “shut out the noise” and back the deal. [Continue reading…]

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Former Argentine president on trial for bombing cover-up

The Associated Press reports: On the home page of Argentina’s largest Jewish community center is a counter that keeps track of the “days of impunity” since a bomb ripped through the organization’s central building, causing it to collapse and leaving 85 dead amid the rubble.

On Thursday, 7,689 days since the 1994 attack on the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, former President Carlos Menem, a former top judge and several others will go on trial for allegedly derailing the investigation.

Prosecutors have accused Iranian officials of being behind the bombing. But no one has been convicted in this South American country’s worst terrorist attack, which many Argentines believe has come to symbolize an inept and corrupt justice system that operates at the whims of politicians and can be bought off.

“After 21 years of no justice, deception and defrauding the families (of victims), we hope that the truth will emerge about everyone who plotted to cover up and derail the investigation,” said Olga Degtiar, whose son was killed in the blast.

The 13 facing charges include two former prosecutors, a former top intelligence official, former police officers, a Jewish community leader and a mechanic who owned the truck carrying the explosives. The charges carry between three and 15 years.

The trial, expected to go on for months, will focus on how and why Menem and the others might have wanted to bury the initial investigation. Testimony will likely delve into geopolitics of the 1990s, and even into Menem’s Syrian ancestry and how that might have influenced him. [Continue reading…]

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Justice Dept. hit with lawsuit after refusing to disclose rules for spying on journalists

AllGov reports: The U.S. Department of Justice has refused to reveal its rules for spying on the media, prompting one group representing journalists to sue the agency in federal court.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco seeking documents under the Freedom of Information Act that document Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) procedures for issuing national security letters to spy on the media. The Justice Department has so far refused to release the information or even respond to the FOIA request the foundation made in March.

Victoria Baranetsky, the foundation’s attorney, told Courthouse News Service obtaining the records and publishing them “is necessary to deter chilling effects on the press and its sources, especially given recent years during which the Obama Administration has increased surveillance of reporters.” [Continue reading…]

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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…]

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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…]

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In further blow to training program, U.S.-backed rebels abducted in Syria

The Washington Post reports: The debut of a new U.S.-trained force in Syria suffered another setback on Tuesday when five American-backed rebels were apparently abducted by al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the latest of several attacks on that group in the past week.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss events in Syria, said it appeared that five Syrian fighters allied with the United States had been taken prisoner in the past few days by another armed group, probably Jabhat al-Nusra. Military officials said the Syrians appeared to have been abducted after they set out from their compound near the Syrian town of Azaz.

But with no U.S. troops on the ground to track the situation more closely, the official cautioned that the details of what took place remained murky. “It is a dynamic situation on the ground there,” he said.

News of the abduction comes several days after the leader of Division 30, the Syrian opposition unit from which the United States has pulled cadets for its new training program, and other members of his unit were captured by the Islamist group. At the time, U.S. officials stressed that none of those abducted had gone through recent training in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Cleric Anjem Choudary charged with encouraging support for ISIS

The Guardian reports: Radical cleric Anjem Choudary has been charged with encouraging support for Islamic State, Scotland Yard has said.

Choudary, 48, of Ilford, faces a charge of inviting support for a proscribed organisation, namely Isis.

It is alleged he committed the offence between 29 June 2014 and 6 March 2015. [Continue reading…]

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Officials divided over which poses the greater threat to the U.S: ISIS or Al Qaeda?

The New York Times reports: The Obama administration’s top intelligence, counterterrorism and law enforcement officials are divided over which terrorist group poses the biggest threat to the American homeland, the Islamic State or Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

The split reflects a rising concern that the Islamic State poses a more immediate danger because of its unprecedented social media campaign, using sophisticated online messaging to inspire followers to launch attacks across the United States.

Many intelligence and counterterrorism officials warn, however, that Qaeda operatives in Yemen and Syria are capitalizing on the turmoil in those countries to plot much larger “mass casualty” attacks, including bringing down airliners carrying hundreds of passengers.

This is not an academic argument. It will influence how the government allocates billions of dollars in counterterrorism funds, and how it assigns thousands of federal agents, intelligence analysts and troops to combat a multipronged threat that senior officials say is changing rapidly. [Continue reading…]

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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…]

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Scenes from inside Aleppo: How life has been transformed by rebel rule

Marwan Hisham writes: I first moved to Aleppo 10 years ago. At that time, the city was the world for me: the glorious past and the present, the bitter and the sweet. I attended university in mid-Aleppo’s wealthy neighborhoods. To get there, I took the bus from my apartment in the crowded Al-Myassar, one of Aleppo’s poorest slums. We rode by the ancient gates of Bab Al-Hadid and Bab Al-Nasr, through which the Silk Road once curved. Old Aleppo’s walls had vanished over the years, but its gates survived as if to remind residents of their history: the city may have been destroyed before, by Mongols and by earthquakes, but every time it got up on its feet again.

Aleppo wore its heritage with pride, but beneath its beauty lurked darker contradictions. Aleppo’s western half was a rapidly modernizing playground for the elite. But inhabitants of the city’s east, who had fled their villages to seek better prospects in the city’s outskirts, stayed mired in poverty. While the government labeled these slums agricultural plains, on the ground they were a maze of concrete cells, run by clans of organized criminals who dealt drugs and extracted “taxes.” The government used these clans as enforcers—especially when the revolution’s wind briefly blew on Aleppo in 2011.

During this time, I was a student at Aleppo University. My classmates and I saw the campus transformed by these enforcers and by the Mukhabarat, or the Syrian secret police. They planted informants amongst students and persecuted student protesters. Hundreds would disappear forever into the Mukhabarat’s dungeons. Despite this, students kept challenging the security forces. Revolutionaries across the country nicknamed the school “The Revolution’s University.”

But most of Aleppo regarded the Arab Spring with indifference. When the revolution broke out in earnest later that year, much of the city distanced itself from the turbulence. Demonstrations remained confined mostly to slums like Al-Saladin, Bustan Al-Qasr, and Al-Marijah. Protests were brief, with demonstrators chanting before running from the security forces. [Continue reading…]

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