Tag: nuclear weapons

US will keep nuclear weapons in Britain for the first time in 15 YEARS as fears of a European war edge ever closer

The United States is planning to station nuclear weapons in Britain for the first time in 15 years to counter threats from Russia, it emerged last night.

Pentagon documents reveal the US is intending to place warheads three times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb on UK soil. Moscow said it would view the move as an ‘escalation’ that would be met with ‘counter-measures’.

Procurement contracts for a new facility at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk show the US plans to house B61-12 gravity bombs ‘imminently’ at the site. 

US warheads were last stationed in Britain in 2008, when it was judged that the Cold War threat from Russia had decreased.

The plans come as part of a Nato-wide programme aimed at developing and upgrading nuclear sites in response to rising tensions with the Kremlin. 

The unredacted documents from the US Department of Defence’s procurement database show the Pentagon has ordered equipment, including ballistic shields, for Lakenheath, and state that construction of a housing facility for US soldiers at the base will start in June.

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Atomic Radius: The legacy of America’s nuclear weapons testing program

Americans are typically told the story of the scientists who built the atomic bomb as an intellectual race for the world’s most powerful weapon during wartime.

More than 100 atmospheric weapons tests were conducted in the U.S. and its territories between 1945 and 1962. It resulted in widespread radioactive fallout across much of the U.S., largely spread by prevailing winds and rain. In addition, contaminated waste was shipped and haphazardly stored across the country, creating new toxic Superfund sites stretching from Colorado to New York.

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The Pentagon wants a new powerful nuclear bomb. Please don’t give it to them

Just days after China announced that it would double its nuclear arsenal to more than 1,000 warheads by 2030, Pentagon officials revealed plans Tuesday for a new nuclear gravity bomb that would be 24 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. By Thursday, President Vladimir Putin had signed a bill withdrawing Russia from its inclusion in a global nuclear test ban — which was followed this week by a test launch from one of its submarines of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. That means, by default, the U.S. is also no longer part of the treaty, meaning we could once more begin dropping bombs in the New Mexico desert, à la “Oppenheimer,” though (thankfully) no such plans have been announced. 

What (and I say this with all due respect) in the actual f**k is going on here? Is the world teetering off the edge? The hows are easier to explain than the whys when it comes to all this madness, so let’s start there. 

The plans for a new nuke were rolled out almost exactly a year after the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review was published, which advocated for a bigger US nuclear flex to compete with the stockpile they estimated China would have built by 2030. As it turns out, that Chinese stockpile is getting much bigger, much faster than we thought — with “more than 500 operational nuclear warheads” as of May.

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Far-right minister: Nuking Gaza is an option, population should ‘go to Ireland or deserts’

A minister from the extremist Otzma Yehudit party says one of Israel’s options in the war in Gaza is to drop a nuclear bomb on the Strip.

Asked in an interview with Radio Kol Berama whether he was suggesting that some kind of nuclear bomb might be dropped on the enclave, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu says “That’s one way.”

Eliyahu, of Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right party, is not part of the security cabinet which is involved in the wartime decision-making, nor does he hold sway over the war cabinet directing the war against the Hamas terror group.

Eliyahu also voices his objection during the interview to allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza, saying “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid,” and charging that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza.”

He backs retaking the Strip’s territory and restoring the settlements there. Asked about the fate of the Palestinian population, he says: “They can go to Ireland or deserts, the monsters in Gaza should find a solution by themselves.”

He says the northern Strip has no right to exist, adding that anyone waving a Palestinian or Hamas flag “shouldn’t continue living on the face of the earth.”

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Pentagon announces new nuclear bomb 24 times more powerful than one dropped on Japan

The Department of Defense announced its pursuit of a nuclear bomb that will be 24 times more powerful than one of the bombs dropped on Japan during World War II.

The Pentagon is seeking congressional approval and funding to pursue a modern variant of the B61 nuclear gravity bomb, which will be designated the B61-13, according to a DoD press release.

“Today’s announcement is reflective of a changing security environment and growing threats from potential adversaries,” Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb said in the release. “The United States has a responsibility to continue to assess and field the capabilities we need to credibly deter and, if necessary, respond to strategic attacks, and assure our allies.” 

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Air Force Successfully Tested Secret New Stealth Missile With Mock Nuke, Reports Reveal

America’s nuclear weapons are aging and the Pentagon plans to spend more than $600 billion to keep the potentially world-ending weapons in fighting shape. One of these massive investments paid off in 2022 when the Air Force successfully tested a new secret stealth missile armed with a dummy version of a novel nuclear warhead, government reports have revealed.

As first reported by Air & Space Forces Magazine, the Air Force conducted nine successful tests of the classified Long-Range Standoff (LRSO) missile in 2022. One of those tests used a mock version of the new W80-4 nuclear warhead. Many details of the missile are classified and what precious little we’ve just learned comes from the Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition Reports for 2022, an National Nuclear Security Administration report on nukes, and a report from Sandia National Labs.

Altogether, the three reports paint a picture of a military spending billions to upgrade decades-old technology to keep America’s nuclear weapons viable. Both the LRSO and  W80-4 nuclear warheads are replacements for aging weapons systems. The LRSO is a replacement for the AGM-86, an air-to-ground missile first produced in 1980. Raytheon is building the missile and details about it are scarce, but the Air Force is pitching it as a stealthy and long range upgrade to the older missile.

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Nuclear Weapons Turned Wild Boars Into an Irradiated Menace, Study Finds

Nuclear weapons tests that took place in the mid-20th century are still a major source of radioactivity in Germany’s wild boars, accounting for anywhere from 10 to 68 percent of contamination in meat samples from these animals, reports a new study. 

The discovery could help to explain why wild boars have remained so much more radioactive than other species in their ecosystems, which is a longstanding problem known as the “wild boar paradox.” Previously, scientists assumed this radiation was almost entirely produced by the catastrophic meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, but the new research shows that weapons tests are also a substantial and long-lived source of environmental contamination, a finding that is particularly ominous in light of Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling during its invasion of Ukraine.

Nuclear fallout produces radioactive particles, including isotopes of the element cesium, which can still be found in ecosystems today. Radiocesium has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that half of it decays in that time period, so it makes sense that concentrations of the contaminant have been gradually receding in Europe over time. 

Wild boars are the bizarre exception to this rule. Radiocesium levels in these animals have remained constant, a puzzling fact that has rendered them unsafe to eat and has thus contributed to a rampant overpopulation of boars across Europe as demand for their meat has plummeted.

Now, scientists co-led by Georg Steinhauser and Bin Feng, who are radiochemists at the Vienna University of Technology, have discovered that much of this persistent contamination can be traced back to nuclear weapons testing. 

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What Imperial Japan Couldn’t Do in 250 Years American Christians Did in Nine Seconds

Seventy-five years ago today, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki, Japan, instantly annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of them Japanese Christians, and wounding uncountable numbers of others.

For targeting purposes, the bombing crew used St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral, the largest Christian church in East Asia. At 11:02 a.m., on Aug. 9, 1945, when the bomb was dropped over the cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan.

At the time, the United States was arguably the most Christian nation in the world (that is, if you can label as Christian a nation whose churches overwhelmingly have failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the peaceful ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount).

The baptized and confirmed Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently, and they accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with a number of near-fatal glitches. Most Americans in 1945 would have done exactly the same if they had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew, and there would have been very little mental anguish later if they had also been treated as heroes.

Nevertheless, the use of that monstrous weapon of mass destruction to destroy a mainly civilian city like Nagasaki was an international war crime and a crime against humanity as defined later by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Of course, there was no way that the crew members could have known that at the time. Some of the crew did admit that they had had some doubts about what they had participated in when the bomb actually detonated. Of course, none of them actually saw the horrific suffering of the victims up close and personal.

“Orders are orders” and, in wartime, disobedience can be, and has been, legally punishable by summary execution of the soldier who might have had a conscience strong enough to convince him that killing another human, especially an unarmed one, was morally wrong.

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Who Opposed Nuking Japan?

“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. … The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.”

— President Herbert Hoover

“[T]he Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945… up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped. … [I]f such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the bombs.”

— Herbert Hoover

“I told [General Douglas] MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.”

— Herbert Hoover

“MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed. When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”

— Norman Cousins

“General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa. He wants time to think the thing out, so he has postponed the trip to some future date to be decided later.”

— Weldon E. Rhoades
Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s pilot

“[Gen. Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants. … MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off.”

— President Richard Nixon

“The Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and the Swiss. And that suggestion of giving a warning of the atomic bomb was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted. In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb.”

— Ralph Bird, Under Secretary of the Navy

“I concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945. Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands scheduled for 1 November 1945 would have been necessary.”

— Paul Nitze, director, later Vice Chairman of the
Strategic Bombing Survey

“[E]ven without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

— U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1946

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