Photograph Source: James Stencilowsky – CC BY 2.0

(This is a presentation, titled “No Nukes for Power, Posturing or Destruction,” that I gave at the 2025 Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemorative Event on Long Island this week organized by the South Country Peace Group and co-sponsored by other peace organizations and also religious institutions including the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stony Brook; Bellport United Methodist Church; and Old South Haven Presbyterian Church. Peace groups included Pax Christi LI; LI Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives; North Country Peace Group; Veterans for Peace Long Island Chapter 138; and Peace Action New York State).

“We are in the hands of lunatics and at the crossroads of time,” Dr. Helen Caldicott said several ago. A medical doctor, the author of books including Nuclear Madness published in 1978 and The New Nuclear Danger out three years ago, she declared: “It’s time we rise up and say ‘this is our world, we want to live.’”

It’s high time, very high time.

Indeed, we’re now on borrowed time.

This past Friday, President Trump stated: “Based on the highly provocative statements of the former president of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev…now…deputy chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.”

Medvedev, upon Trump’s demand reducing a ceasefire deadline in Russia’s war on Ukraine, said Trump was playing an “ultimatum game” with Russia. “Each new ultimatum is a threat and a step towards war. “Not between Russia and Ukraine, but with his own country.”

Medvedev said Trump should “revisit his favorite movies about the living dead and recall just how dangerous the mythical ‘Dead Hand’ can be.”

Russia’s “Dead Hand” system, as has been reported in recent days, is an automatic nuclear retaliation mechanism going back to the Cold War designed to launch a counterstrike even if the Russian leadership is wiped out in a first strike.

Trump shot back: “Tell Medvedev, the failed former President of Russia, who thinks he’s still president, to watch his words. He’s entering very dangerous territory!”

Russian President Putin of course has repeatedly threatened the use of nuclear weapons by Russia since its invasion of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un earlier was present when, as the headline of the Associated Press dispatch reported, “North Korea launches new intercontinental ballistic missile designed to threaten the U.S.,” said North Korea “will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces.”

Indeed, “We are in the hands of lunatics and at the crossroads of time.” By the skin of our teeth, the world, since the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago, has avoided a global nuclear holocaust.

But as the heading of the announcement on January 28, 2025 of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it’s Doomsday Clock is: “Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight.” The Bulletin defines midnight on its Doomsday Clock as “nuclear annihilation.”

The announcement by the Bulletin, founded by Albert Einstein and former Manhattan Project scientists including J. Robert Oppenheimer immediately following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, began: “In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned” the Bulletin have “continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe” since being set up in 1947.

The Bulletin’s announcement continued: “Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and take bold action….In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.”

It went on: “In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation….The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization.”

“Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness,” it said. “The United States, China, and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization. These three countries have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and they can do so if their leaders seriously commence good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined here. Despite their profound disagreements, they should take that first step without delay. The world depends on immediate action.”

“After 80 years, nuclear threat remains grave,” was the headline of a piece this week by Ira Helfand of the International Steering Group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

Helfand began: “As we approach the 80th anniversary of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…on Aug 6 and 9, respectively, the danger of nuclear war is great and growing….The world can no longer indulge in the denial which has marked our thinking since the end of the Cold War. Nuclear war is a real and present danger that we must acknowledge and confront.”

“A large-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, according to best available science, would kill hundreds of millions of people in the first afternoon, and lead to a global famine that kills some 6 billion people, three quarters of humanity, in the first two years,” it continued. “Even a more limited nuclear war, as might have taken place between India and Pakistan, could trigger a global famine that kills 2 billion people worldwide, including 130 million in the United States.”

I host a television program broadcast nationally and a while back interviewed Commander Robert Green formerly of the British Navy. He said: “I do feel that we’re in more dangerous times than in the Cold War at the moment and people don’t realize it.”

He was deeply involved in British readiness to use nuclear weapons. As a bombardier-navigator, he flew in a Buccaneer nuclear strike jet—with its planned target the Soviet Union—specifically St. Petersburg. Then he worked in the U.K. Ministry of Defense.

He was staff officer for intelligence to the Commander-in-Chief Fleet during the 1982 Falklands War. That war was a turning point for Green. He said: “The Falklands War raised major concerns relating to nuclear weapons.” During the war, there was what he described as “a very secret contingency plan” to “move a Polaris submarine…within range of Buenos Aires” and the possibility of it conducting a “nuclear strike” on Argentina.

“Fortunately there was no need for that plan to be implemented because we won,” said Green. But that experience caused him to retire from the British Navy in 1982 and became an opponent of nuclear warfare.

He chaired the U.K.’s affiliate in the World Court Project, a campaign that led the International Court of Justice in 1996 to rule the threat and use of nuclear weapons were illegal. He authored the book “Security without Nuclear Deterrence.” He is co-director of the Disarmament and Security Centre in New Zealand.

He said there has been a “systematic effort to play down the appalling side effects and ‘overkill’…with even the smallest modern nuclear weapons,” how they are “not weapons at all. They are utterly indiscriminate devices that combine the poisoning horrors of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, plus effects…of radioactivity, with almost unimaginable explosive violence.” Green is devoted to working for a “nuclear-free world.”

There is an illusion, a false notion that continues in many government quarters and among those with a vested interest in nuclear weapons—that nuclear war is feasible and winnable.

In my book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, I quote from Legacy of Hiroshima, a book by Edward Teller, “father” of the hydrogen bomb.

Teller asserts that “we can survive a nuclear attack.” There is “no doubt” that millions of people would die, he concedes, but “most people” can be saved. He proposes that bulldozers be used to push aside debris and topsoil saturated with radioactivity and outlines ways of storing food and reconstructing factories. Teller speaks of survivors emerging “from their shelters” into a “kind of world man has never known.” Still, with adequate preparation and organization after an “all-out war” the United States could, claims Teller, “re-establish economic strength sooner than Russia—and so the United States would remain by far the strongest nation in the world.”

Feeding into nuclear proliferation and nuclear conflict is the push underway to revive nuclear power, a “nuclear renaissance” its proponents call it—despite the disasters at the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants.

Nuclear power provides a direct link to nuclear weaponry. With more nations having the ability to construct nuclear weapons—and any country with a nuclear power facility has the materiel and trained personnel to make nuclear weapons—the likelihood of this luck running out is high. Any nuclear power facility can serve as a nuclear bomb factory.

That’s how India got The Bomb in 1974. Canada supplied a reactor for “peaceful purposes” and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission trained Indian engineers. And lo and behold, India had nuclear weapons.

As for the connection between purportedly “peaceful” atomic energy and nuclear weapons, physicist Amory Lovins and attorney Hunter Lovins spell it out well in their book Energy/War: Breaking the Nuclear Link. “All nuclear fission technologies both use and produce fissionable materials that are or can be concentrated. Unavoidably latent in those technologies, therefore, is a potential for nuclear violence and coercion which may be exploited by governments, factions,” they write. “Little strategic material is needed to make a weapon of mass destruction. A Nagasaki-yield bomb can be made from a few kilograms of plutonium, a piece the size of a tennis ball,” they note. A large nuclear power plant “annually produces hundreds of kilograms of plutonium; a large fast breeder reactor would contain thousands of kilograms; a large reprocessing plant may separate tens of thousands.”

Nuclear power technology, they emphasize, provides the way to make nuclear weapons, furnishing the materiel and personnel. Nuclear weapons non-proliferation, they say, requires “civil denuclearization.”

Some will say putting the atomic genie back into the bottle is impossible. However, anything people have done other people can undo—especially if the reason is good. And the prospect of massive loss of life from nuclear destruction is the best of reasons.

There’s a precedent in the outlawing of poison gas after World War I when its terrible impacts were tragically demonstrated. Chlorine gas, mustard gas, phosphene gas killed thousands on both sides of the conflict. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Chemicals Weapons Convention of 1933 outlawed chemical warfare and to a large degree the prohibition has held.

Helfand’s International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, the same year the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was passed at the UN, much due to the work of ICAN.

The treaty declares that because of the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any use of nuclear weapons, and recognizing the consequent need to completely eliminate such weapons, which remains the only way to guarantee that nuclear weapons are never used again under any circumstances,” nations agree not to “develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons.” Further, no country may “threaten to use” them.

The treaty is termed by the UN as “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination.”

The website of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons declares: “Nuclear weapons are the most inhumane and indiscriminate weapons ever created. They violate international law, cause severe environmental damage, undermine national and global security, and divert vast public resources away from meeting human needs. They must be eliminated urgently.”

Please visit the website of ICAN at www.icanw.org

Join in with ICAN. Become a member.

The TPNW went into force in 2021. But a big problem: the so-called “nuclear weapons states” including the U.S., Russia, China, France and Great Britain have not signed on to it.

This is where pressure must be focused—directed at these states.

Another TV program I did in recent times was with Seth Shelden, UN liaison for ICAN, an attorney and a professor of law. Check it out, please, by going to EnviroVideo.com and scrolling down my now more than 700 programs to **“**Seth Shelden of ICAN and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

He discusses the years of work that have led to the TPNW, facts about it—and details what people can do, in addition to all that’s on the ICAN website. He says ICAN has put together “resources for all ICAN campaigners—or anyone who is willing to take action.”

“Eighty Years of Nuclear Terror” is the title of an essay published four days ago written by Lawrence S. Wittner, syndicated online by PeaceVoice. Wittner is a professor of history emeritus at SUNY Albany and author of the book Confronting the Bomb.

He concludes speaking of how “none of the nuclear powers has signed” the treaty but, says Professor Wittner, “with widespread popular pressure and enhanced international security, they could ultimately be brought on board. They certainly should be,” he declares, “for human survival depends upon ending the nuclear terror.”

For 20 years, I was a member of the Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict Resolution and Peace sponsored by the United Nations and the International Association of University Presidents. I traveled the world with the commission. The abolition of nuclear weapons has been a focus of the UN since its formation, the subject of its first resolution, passed on January 24, 1946—for “the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons.”

The TPNW is a key step “toward our shared goal of a world free of nuclear weapons,” says the current UN secretary general, Antonio Gutteres, the practical and realistic former prime minister of Portugal. “Let’s eliminate these weapons before they eliminate us,” he says.

Gutteres says: “In a world rife with geopolitical tensions and mistrust, this is a recipe for annihilation. We cannot allow the nuclear weapons wielded by a handful of States to jeopardize all life on our planet. We must stop knocking at doomsday’s door.”

We must, as Dr. Caldicott has said, “rise up and say ‘this is our world, we want to live.’” And act on that.

We must outlaw nuclear weapons—and the other side of the same deadly coin, end the lethal technology of nuclear power and fully shift to safe green energy that we can live with.

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