Friday, August 28, 2015

International Day against Nuclear Tests

International Day against Nuclear Tests
"Together, let us demand an end to all nuclear tests and get on with the unfinished business of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons."
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Message on the International Day against Nuclear Tests,
July 2014
http://www.un.org/en/events/againstnucleartestsday/ 
Since nuclear weapons testing began in the mid-twentieth century, with the first test on 16 July 1945, nearly 2,000 have taken place. There has been little consideration of the devastating effects of testing on human life, let alone the understanding of nuclear fallout from atmospheric tests. Early on, having nuclear weapons was a measure of scientific sophistication or military might. Hindsight and history have shown us the terrifying and tragic effects of nuclear weapons testing, especially when controlled conditions go awry, and in light of today’s nuclear weapons which are far more powerful and destructive Subsequent incidents world-wide have provided compelling reasons for the need to observe the International Day against Nuclear Tests - a day in which educational events, activities and messages aim to capture the world’s attention and underscore the need for a unified attempt in preventing further nuclear weapons testing.
The international instrument to put an end to all forms of nuclear testing is the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which has however yet to enter into force.
On 2 December 2009, the 64th session of the United Nations General Assembly declared 29 August the International Day against Nuclear Tests by unanimously adopting resolution 64/35. The resolution calls for increasing awareness and education “about the effects of nuclear weapon test explosions or any other nuclear explosions and the need for their cessation as one of the means of achieving the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world.” The resolution was initiated by the Republic of Kazakhstan, together with a large number of sponsors and cosponsors with a view to commemorate the closure of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test site on 29 August 1991.The Day is meant to galvanize the United Nations, Member States, intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, youth networks and the media to inform, educate and advocate the necessity of banning nuclear weapon tests as a valuable step towards achieving a safer world.
2010 marked the inaugural commemoration of the International Day against Nuclear Tests. Each year, since then, the day has been observed by coordinating various activities throughout the world, such as symposia, conferences, exhibits, competitions, publications, instruction in academic institutions, media broadcasts and others. A number of events have been held at United Nations Headquarters, as well. Similar activities are planned for the 2013 observance.
Since its establishment, many bilateral and multilateral governmental level developments as well as broad movements in civil society and efforts of the UN Secretary-General himself have helped to advance the cause of banning nuclear tests.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has stated with great clarity: “A world free of nuclear weapons would be a global public good of the highest order.” Defining a ban on nuclear weapons as “vital”, in May of 2010, all the States Parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, committed themselves to aim to “achieve the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
The International Day against Nuclear Tests, together with other events and actions, has fostered a global environment with more optimistic prospects towards a world free of nuclear weapons. There have been visible signs of progress on various fronts but, equally, challenges remain. It is the hope of the UN that one day all nuclear weapons will be eliminated. Until then, there is a need to observe International Day against Nuclear Tests as we work towards promoting peace and security world-wide.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

992 Held in 9th Day of Protest at Nuclear Test Site April 16, 1989

MERCURY, Nev. — Nearly 1,000 anti-nuclear protesters were arrested on misdemeanor trespass charges at the nation's nuclear testing grounds Saturday.
Energy Department spokesman Jim Boyer said 992 demonstrators had been arrested as of late afternoon and protesters promised more arrests later in the evening.
Boyer estimated that 1,500 people turned out Saturday for the ninth day of the annual "Reclaim the Test Site" protest at the Nevada Test Site. The event ends today.
Those arrested were taken to the Nye County sheriff's office in Beatty, 55 miles away, where they were to be released after being cited on the misdemeanor charge, Boyer said.
Nye County officials announced earlier this month that they would no longer prosecute the trespassers because of the growing number of protests and arrests at the remote desert site.
A total of 2,818 arrests were reported at the site last year, including 2,065 during the 1988 "Reclaim the Test Site" action.
More than 100 law officers were on hand to collect and handcuff the demonstrators as they walked across a cattle guard on the main road leading to the test site.
The cattle guard has been a rallying point for protests the last eight years, and law officers have arrested activists who crossed that point onto test site property.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Originally Published: http://dkeenan.com/NvT/16/16.9.txt
Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa
the Nuclear Resister, January 19, 1990.



Record Number of Arrests in 1989 for Anti-Nuclear Protest

The latest statistics,  compiled annually by the Nuclear Resister, reveal that
the 5,500 arrests for anti-nuclear protests in the United States and Canada in
1989 exceed the number reported for any previous year.

"Reports of the death of the anti-nuclear movement were greatly exaggerated in
the second half of the 1980's," notes Felice Cohen-Joppa, co-editor of the
Nuclear Resister newsletter.  "The numbers testify to the vitality of a
nonviolent movement that made the 1980's a decade of unprecedented
anti-nuclear civil resistance, resulting in more than 37,000 arrests in North
America."

The annual statistics show that 5,010 such arrests were made in the United
States, and nearly 500 in Canada, during almost 150 protests at more than
seventy nuclear power and weapons plants, test sites, along transportation
routes and at military bases, government offices and proposed nuclear waste
dumps.

As a result of these anti-nuclear arrests, in 1989 alone more than ninety
people served or are serving from two weeks to seventeen years in prison,
while hundreds more served lesser sentences.

The Nuclear Resister, published since 1980, is a comprehensive chronicle of
anti-nuclear civil disobedience and peace prisoner support.  It is recognized
within the peace and justice movement as THE source for information, referals
and networking about nonviolent direct action for disarmament and safe energy.

In June, federal officials of the Bureau of Land Management evicted the Test
Site Peace Camp, arresting three.  Resolute peace campers have nonetheless
sustained the three-year old continuous vigil by re-locating their camp on the
public rally site adjacent to the main gate.  This proximity enabled peace
campers in July to hastily blockade the entrance road, and for the first time
actually stop a truck convoy likely bringing nuclear weapons to the test site.

Also in June, federal and state agents arrested four Arizona residents in an
alleged conspiracy to topple electrical transmission lines leading from the
Palo Verde (Arizona) and Diablo Canyon (California) nuclear power plants, and
the Rocky Flats (Colorado) nuclear weapons plant.  The four are all active in
the radical environmental movement, Earth First!  The arrests exposed a major
undercover operation against Earth First! involving infiltrators and wiretaps
in at least seven western states.  Three of the four were jailed for two
months before bond was set. In December, a fifth Arizonan was also indicted on
related charges.  Ironically, Earth First! has never focused their attention
on nuclear issues.

In an apparent effort to discredit both the anti-nuclear and radical
environmental movements, prosecutors branded the original four as
"terrorists."  FBI anti-terrorist agent David Small justified that claim with
the sweeping assertion that terrorism "includes any individual committing
criminal acts under federal, state or local laws in furtherance with (sic)
their political or social goals."  No firm trial date has been set, as defense
attorneys review hundreds of hours of wiretap transcripts and recorded
conversations.

While the government has escalated its response to direct action movements,
nonviolent activists are also exploring different ways to advance their
resistance.  While each year scores of resisters refuse to pay fines or
cooperate with terms of probation or parole, in 1989 activists charged in
Michigan, Georgia, Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania actions refused even to
answer summons or appear voluntarily in court.  This refusal upheld the claim
of many who do go willingly to court that nonviolent resistance to U.S.
nuclear policies is no crime.  The recalcitrant activists carried on instead
with their peace and justice vocations.  In the case of two people arrested at
missile silos during the 1988 Missouri Peace Planting actions, federal
authorities in 1989 resorted to intimidating the activists' friends and
relatives until the resisters surrendered.

The U.S. Supreme Court was presented in 1989 with the opportunity for the
first time to hear a major nuclear resistance case.  The appeal of the
Plowshares Eight, Catholic peace activists who in 1980 first employed hand
tools to damage nuclear weapons parts, claimed that they were denied a fair
trial in Pennyslvania state court because their defense of justification and
the supporting testimony of various experts had not been allowed.  On October
2, the US Supreme Court declined without comment to hear the case.  In an
earlier appeal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had invalidated their original
sentences of 1.5 to 10 years.  The Eight, Rev. Daniel Berrigan, Philip
Berrigan, Dean Hammer, Fr. Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Sr. Anne Montgomery, Molly
Rush and John Schuchardt - now await resentencing in early 1990.

Civil resistance has also played a major role in the Canadian movement in
1989. A major nonviolent resistance campaign is being led by the Innu, native
people of Northern Quebec and Labrador.  The Canadian government is giving
favorable consideration to a NATO proposal for expanded low-level training
flights of nuclear and conventional NATO warplanes over traditional Innu
hunting ranges, from an airbase at Goose Bay, Labrador.  Innu families have
repeatedly occupied the base runway and camped on the bombing ranges in
protest, facing arrest and jail, while their supporters have engaged in a
series of civil disodedience actions at government offices in Ottawa and
Toronto.  The struggle continues, with over 300 related arrests in 1989.

In the next year, a major challenge facing anti-nuclear activists will be to
expose the illusion of a diminished nuclear threat.  Image-makers in the Bush
administration will strive to finally silence nuclear critics by offering
"cosmetic disarmament", in the form of an "arms reduction" treaty to eliminate
up to half of the strategic nuclear arsenal.

Yet the weapons most likely to be disarmed under the terms of a potential
treaty - the land-based force of 1,000 Minuteman nuclear missiles in silos
throughout the heartland of the United States - are in fact the least
threatening. While offering to sacrifice silo-based missiles to public demand
for nuclear weapons cuts, the Pentagon has clearly stated its intent to
continue production of the more modern, less vulnerable weapons which are
suitable to first-strike strategies; weapons such as Trident submarines, air-
and sea-launched cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber and mobile, land-based
missiles (the MX rail-garrison and/or Midgetman).

While direct actionists have opposed all of these systems to varying degrees,
it is the Trident nuclear submarine and its highly-accurate D-5 missile which
are being most vigorously opposed.  At the Trident's east coast homeport at
Kings Bay, Georgia, the Metanoia Community has supported an increasing level
of nonviolent resistance over the last three years.  Arrests (105 in 1989) and
jail terms have increased as the base comes into full operation.  Across the
southern states, communities of resistance are preparing to protest and
blockade the "nuclear train," expected to return to the tracks in early 1990
to transport warheads to Kings Bay from the Pantex assembly plant near
Amarillo, Texas.  Trident resistance will also continue at sites in California
and Utah, where the D-5 missile is designed, tested and assembled; at the west
coast homeport at Bangor, Washington; and in Groton, Connecticut, where
Trident submarines are built.

In the spring of 1990, civil resisters at the Nevada test site will
demonstrate in concert with nuclear testing opponents in Kazakhstan, the
Soviet Union, who call theirs the "Nevada Movement", in solidarity with direct
actionists in the United States.

In this next decade, anti-nuclear resisters will be joined by citizens groups
concerned with the environmental hazards of weapons production and nuclear
waste disposal.  Nuclear weapons plants remain closed in several states as the
secret poisoning of surrounding communities over the last forty years has come
to light.  Activists are preparing direct action campaigns to "Stop the
Restart" of these facilities, and prevent replacement factories from being
built.  And at the end of the nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear waste dumps nearly
completed in New Mexico and under consideration in New York and Nevada are
facing nonviolent opposition at the dump sites and along transportation
routes.

If the l99O's are truly to be the "Decade of the Environment", nonviolent
direct action and civil disobedience will play a significant role in making
the environment of the third millenium a non-nuclear one, as well.

Jack and Felice Cohen-Joppa
the Nuclear Resister, January 19, 1990.
PO Box 43383
Tucson
AZ 85733
(602)323-8697

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Livermore, thirty years on

Originally published by: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/livermore-thirty-years-on/ 

Livermore, thirty years on

Direct Action, by Luke Hauser.
Thirty years ago today a handful of us nonviolently blocked the South Gate of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a top-secret nuclear weapons lab in Northern California.  Most of us were sentenced to a week in the local county jail. It was my first arrest.
Though LLNL successfully fended off years of mounting opposition—it continues to operate to this day—a surge of global anti-nuclear resistance in those years created the conditions for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which 157 nations have signed) and a string of arms control agreements. Our little action, organized by the Livermore Action Group (LAG), was a modest contribution to that groundswell.
As the Occupy movement gears up for its second wave—and as people from around the world ready themselves to protest the NATO and G8 summits in Chicago in May—my thoughts turn to that winter morning three decades ago when another movement was beginning to gain traction and when I, who had stood at the water’s edge for some time, gingerly waded in. While civil disobedience is only one of many tools with which to make social change, it was this particular practice that quite rapidly introduced me to a way of being that, to me, was a foreign but increasingly meaningful path with its own language, lineage, set of expectations, and peculiar ability to be taken seriously under the right conditions.
In his novel Direct Action, Luke Hauser captures the heady intensity of Livermore Action Group from 1982 to 1984, when it organized dozens of actions and built a network of nuclear resisters organized in hundreds of affinity groups throughout Northern California.
Livermore Action Group was part of a planetary network in the early 1980s that created a new wave of the global anti-nuclear movement employing nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience, including indigenous communities, women’s communities (e.g., Greenham Common Peace Camp maintained for years at the edge of a U.S. air base in Britain), Greenpeace, The Freeze, SANE, CND, American Peace Test, Abolition 2000, Atomic Veterans and the Nevada Desert Experience.
With roots in the women’s movement, the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, LAG in turn nourished the U.S. Central America peace movement, the LGBTQ movements, the disability rights movement, the anti-globalization movement and many others.
After the civil disobedience action on March 1, 1982, I joined Spirit Affinity Group.  My life was changed irrevocably by this circle of passionate and wise people—Terry Messman, Darla Rucker, Sandee Yarlott, Ron Stief, Kathy (later, T’Shala) Vahsen, Bruce Turner, Jim Bridges, Bob Russell, Pat Runo and the late Rick Cotten—as most of us, like the characters in Hauser’s book, lived the life of nonviolent resistance full on for those few, intense years.
Against the backdrop of the times—the accelerating arms race, the total war of so-called low intensity conflict and the bitter sting of Reaganomics— we created or participated in a string of actions for change. We joined the flotilla of rowboats that Shelley and Jim Douglass organized to nonviolently confront the first Trident submarine in the waters of Puget Sound in the summer of 1982; we chained ourselves to a 25-foot mockup of the MX missile in the roadway at LLNL; and we repeatedly occupied the offices of the Salvadoran consulate in San Francisco to engage the U.S.-backed wars in Central America.
In June 1983, we joined 1,100 others who were arrested at LLNL as part of the International Day of Resistance. We were held for two weeks in makeshift tents on the grounds of the county jail as most of us stayed put rather than submit to a sentence of two years probation, which likely would have severely undermined the local anti-nuclear movement. The authorities finally relented on this issue, and we were brought to endless rounds of arraignments in groups of fifty.
I will never forget my 3 a.m. arraignment.  As I waited for my name to be called, a young man sitting in the row in front of me was summoned. When he was given a chance to speak, he said, “Your honor, I did this action totally as a lark. My friends were going to get busted, and so I decided to go along for the ride.  I didn’t really know anything about it. But after two weeks of workshops on the national security state by Daniel Ellsberg (who had been arrested with us), practicing consensus and living with hundreds of men in a non-competitive way—thanks to you, judge, now I’m an anti-nuclear activist!”
In her foreword to Direct Action, long-time activist Starhawk wrote:
Hauser’s novel recreates the emotional and political milieu of the anti-nuclear blockades at Livermore Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the San Francisco Financial District. The nonviolent direct actions of the 70s and early 80s against nuclear power and nuclear weapons were the forerunner of a style of organizing that came to fruition in the blockade of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. Many of the assumptions about nonhierarchical organizing, and many of the tactics and strategies that inform the global justice movement today were pioneered at that time.
As we take the next step in this global justice system—including the 99% Spring and its call for 100,000 people to be trained in April in nonviolent direct action—we recall a few of the roots of the contemporary emerging worldwide movement, even as we have the opportunity to build something more powerful and enduring.

Friday, December 5, 2014

The Power of Non-violence

The Power of Non-violence

Martin Luther King, Jr.
June 04, 1957
From the very beginning there was a philosophy undergirding the Montgomery boycott, the philosophy of nonviolent resistance. There was always the problem of getting this method over because it didn’t make sense to most of the people in the beginning. We had to use our mass meetings to explain nonviolence to a community of people who had never heard of the philosophy and in many instances were not sympathetic with it. We had meetings twice a week on Mondays and on Thursdays, and we had an institute on nonviolence and social change. We had to make it clear that nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. It does resist. It is not a method of stagnant passivity and deadening complacency. The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent resister but he resists without violence. This method is nonaggressive physically but strongly aggressive spiritually.
NOT TO HUMILIATE BUT TO WIN OVER
Another thing that we had to get over was the fact that the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.
Then we had to make it clear also that the nonviolent resister seeks to attack the evil system rather than individuals who happen to be caught up in the system. And this is why I say from time to time that the struggle in the South is not so much the tension between white people and Negro people. The struggle is rather between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. And if there is a victory it will not be a victory merely for fifty thousand Negroes. But it will be a victory for justice, a victory for good will, a victory for democracy.
Another basic thing we had to get over is that nonviolent resistance is also an internal matter. It not only avoids external violence or external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. And so at the center of our movement stood the philosophy of love. The attitude that the only way to ultimately change humanity and make for the society that we all long for is to keep love at the center of our lives. Now people used to ask me from the beginning what do you mean by love and how is it that you can tell us to love those persons who seek to defeat us and those persons who stand against us; how can you love such persons? And I had to make it clear all along that love in its highest sense is not a sentimental sort of thing, not even an affectionate sort of thing.
AGAPE LOVE
The Greek language uses three words for love. It talks about erosEros is a sort of aesthetic love. It has come to us to be a sort of romantic love and it stands with all of its beauty. But when we speak of loving those who oppose us we’re not talking about eros. The Greek language talks about philia and this is a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends. This is a vital, valuable love. But when we talk of loving those who oppose you and those who seek to defeat you we are not talking about eros or philia. The Greek language comes out with another word and it is agapeAgape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you come to love on this level you begin to love men not because they are likeable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them and here we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. It is the type of love that stands at the center of the movement that we are trying to carry on in the Southland—agape.
SOME POWER IN THE UNIVERSE THAT WORKS FOR JUSTICE
I am quite aware of the fact that there are persons who believe firmly in nonviolence who do not believe in a personal God, but I think every person who believes in nonviolent resistance believes somehow that the universe in some form is on the side of justice. That there is something unfolding in the universe whether one speaks of it as a unconscious process, or whether one speaks of it as some unmoved mover, or whether someone speaks of it as a personal God. There is something in the universe that unfolds for justice and so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship. And this was one of the things that kept the people together, the belief that the universe is on the side of justice.
God grant that as men and women all over the world struggle against evil systems they will struggle with love in their hearts, with understanding good will. Agape says you must go on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness but you must keep moving. We have a great opportunity in America to build here a great nation, a nation where all men live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. We must keep moving toward that goal. I know that some people are saying we must slow up. They are writing letters to the North and they are appealing to white people of good will and to the Negroes saying slow up, you’re pushing too fast. They are saying we must adopt a policy of moderation. Now if moderation means moving on with wise restraint and calm reasonableness, then moderation is a great virtue that all men of good will must seek to achieve in this tense period of transition. But if moderation means slowing up in the move for justice and capitulating to the whims and caprices of the guardians of the deadening status quo, then moderation is a tragic vice which all men of good will must condemn. We must continue to move on. Our self—respect is at stake; the prestige of our nation is at stake. Civil rights is an eternal moral issue which may well determine the destiny of our civilization in the ideological struggle with communism. We must keep moving with wise restraint and love and with proper discipline and dignity.
THE NEED TO BE “MALADJUSTED”
Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word “maladjusted.” Now we all should seek to live a well—adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, “Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, “All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

A history of nonviolence

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: http://www.salon.com/2006/09/13/kurlansky_nonviolence/


A history of nonviolence

The author of "Cod" suggests that the world's most dangerous idea could have derailed the American Revolution, the Civil War and possibly even World War II.


George Orwell was never much for pacifists. He wrote of his nonviolent political adversaries during World War II: If they “imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.” To Mohandas Gandhi, his Indian contemporary and fellow anti-imperialist, he accorded only a grudging and critical respect. Yet because he viewed many pacifists as specialists in evading unpleasant truths, Orwell did admire Gandhi’s unflinching honesty with regard to the Holocaust: When asked about resistance to the Nazis, Gandhi argued that the Jews should have prepared en masse to sacrifice their lives in nonviolence — something Orwell regarded as “collective suicide” — in order to “[arouse] the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence.”
No doubt Orwell would have been skeptical of the contentions advanced by author Mark Kurlansky in his new primer, “Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea.” Compared with the standard histories offered in American public education, these arguments can safely be described as contrarian: “The case can be made that it was not the American Revolution that secured independence from Britain,” Kurlansky writes; “it was not the Civil War that freed the slaves; and World War II did not save the Jews.”
“For every Crusade and Revolution and Civil War,” he explains further, “there have always been those who argued, with great clarity, that violence not only was immoral but that it was even a less effective means of achieving laudable goals.” Joining the chorus of dissidents, Kurlansky attempts to shed light on the epic failures of warfare to secure peace, as well as to cultivate a new understanding of “the way in which things actually happen” in history.
Author of previous works including “Salt: A World History” and “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” Kurlansky has established himself as a pioneer in the field of micro-history, producing idiosyncratic investigations into small topics that bloom into tales of broad general interest. In his new book, he shows a command of a sweeping body of pacifist history, and he makes centuries of material flow into an overview that is far more combative than its protagonists’ peaceful ways might suggest.


A standard narrative of nonviolence as a modern political instrument — especially in the United States — might start around the time of Henry David Thoreau, who, sitting in jail for war tax resistance, first argued that civil disobedience could undermine the legitimacy of the state and provoke a crisis in governance. The story might mention “peace churches” like those of the Quakers and their creation of a pacifist way of life based on Jesus’ teachings. But it would soon rush forward to figures like Gandhi, who pioneered the strategy of how to apply nonviolent disruption on a mass scale, and to Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi’s most famous American importer.
In Kurlansky’s history, however, Jesus himself is a relative latecomer to the scene. Well before him there appear individuals like Mozi, the Chinese rebel-philosopher who lived from about 470 to 390 B.C. Mozi was an opponent of Confucius who championed the concept of “mutual love” and was exasperated by the prevalence of warfare: “To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold,” he argued. “This the rulers of the earth all recognize and yet when it comes to the greatest crime — waging war on another state — they praise it!”
Kurlansky spends the bulk of his short book progressing from ancient China to the dawn of the 20th century, profiling groups that rejected the “ideology of warfare.” The ranks of the war resisters include early Christians, the French Cathars, Protestants like the Anabaptists, Mennonites and Quakers, white Americans in the abolitionist movement (African-Americans tended to be more open to supporting violent slave rebellions), and the international peace organizations of the 19th century.
Statements of nonviolent doctrine appear in each of the major world religions, and Kurlansky prepares a succinct and useful survey of them. The Hindu principle of “ahimsa,” or “not doing harm,” is an old tenet that Gandhi would later find significant and that is taken to extremes by the Jainists, who “keep their mouths masked to insure that they do not accidentally inhale a tiny insect.” Kindred sentiments range from Buddhist prohibitions on taking life, to Taoism’s invocations of water wearing away stone, to Mohammed’s complete ban on violence in his model society at Mecca, to Moses’ “Thou shalt not kill” and Jesus’ “Turn the other cheek.”
Early on in the book the distinction between two closely related ideas, pacifism and nonviolence, becomes important. “Pacifism is passive,” Kurlansky acknowledges; it is a “state of mind” that rejects war and aggression. “Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing”; it uses tactics such as marches, boycotts, strikes and sit-ins to provoke social conflict to advance a cause. The author purports to be concerned with the latter. But in fact the groups he traces are generally active only in the sense that they might preach against war and face sometimes severe persecution for their refusal to take up arms. They are not nonviolent in the manner of the lunch-counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement, which forced a confrontation around desegregation.
By the end of the book, it’s clear that Kurlansky himself is a pacifist, although he never admits it outright. While he may well be supportive of active nonviolence, time and again his attention returns to pacifism. His primary concern is to “end war” in toto, not to use nonviolent persuasion to advance other causes. Tactical innovators in nonviolence consistently receive short shrift: Thoreau is among the many theorists he mentions only in passing. Gandhi and Martin Luther King receive just a few pages each, and it would be difficult for a reader to understand their distinctive contributions. The subtitle’s promise of a tutorial notwithstanding (Kurlansky’s “25 lessons” are scattered throughout the text and only enumerated explicitly in an appendix), there is little in the book of concrete usefulness for a modern-day practitioner of nonviolence seeking to engage in creative social disruption.
The book has rather more to offer a conscientious objector heading for a draft interview. Kurlansky can be heavy-handed at times, especially when he’s drawing parallels between his lessons from history and our present state of war. (When he uses historical examples to show that warmongers will inevitably denounce nonviolent critics as immoral traitors and will always claim to have God on their side, the implications for today are plenty clear without him calling out Karl Rove and President Bush by name.) Yet Kurlansky can also be a compelling narrator, willing to dive into age-old debates without intellectual hesitation. At the core of “Nonviolence” lies a series of “What if ?” scenarios questioning whether the major wars of U.S. history might have been averted. Many of the book’s arguments were famously foreshadowed 25 years ago in Howard Zinn’s war-resister-friendly “A People’s History of the United States.” Still, they remain rare and relevant in our current political discussion. Once the guns start firing, Kurlansky observes, debate about the necessity of a war ceases, at least for a time. To that we can add: Once a war is enshrined and justified in the history textbooks, popular reappraisal will be long in coming.
The American Revolution, from the pacifist’s perspective, “was a brutal civil conflict” where “[c]ivilians would run in terror at the approach of either army. Homes were sacked and women were raped.” Worse yet, it was arguably superfluous. As John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson years afterward, “The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before the hostilities commenced.” Kurlansky concludes from this that colonists could have expelled the British by continuing a program of nonviolent protests and acts of economic resistance like the Boston Tea Party.
The same quotes from Adams appeared not long ago in Jonathan Schell’s “The Unconquerable World,” although Schell used them only to say that, since the revolution had been completed before military engagement commenced, the war was therefore one of self-defense against recolonization. Kurlansky goes much further in suggesting that the war was altogether unnecessary. This is a bold proposition, something that could no doubt keep a conference of historians indoors debating through a sunny weekend. But it is also an important challenge to America’s founding myth, opening the door for a wider reinterpretation of who we are, and what we might become, as a nation.
Kurlansky goes on to take issue with the idea that the Civil War was an effective means of ending slavery. The Union Army, of course, did not set out to free the slaves. Such a cause would not have been well received in the North as a justification for the conflict. President Lincoln pronounced that his objective was “not either to save or destroy slavery If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.” When the Emancipation Proclamation finally came, it cynically applied only to rebel territory and not to border states within the Union that permitted slavery, like Maryland. Could the abolitionist movement of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison have won a more decisive end to slavery without the war? We can’t know. It is worth noting, though, that the freedom ultimately afforded to Southern blacks by the war proved limited, and it took a nonviolent movement, a century later, to secure any genuine protection for their basic civil rights.
As a rejoinder to pacifism, no one is cited more frequently than Hitler. But even with regard to World War II Kurlansky makes some provocative proposals. The claim that the war was launched to stop the Holocaust only became widespread years after the war ended. “Neither Roosevelt, Churchill, nor most of all Stalin wanted to make the war about saving the Jews,” Kurlansky writes, “because, as with freeing the slaves, going to war to save the Jews would not have been popular.” Despite urgings from groups like the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Allied leaders refused to bomb the rail lines leading to Auschwitz because, they said, “We have a war to win.”
It’s not hard to think of objections to Kurlansky’s reading of this war. He argues that nonviolent resistance in Denmark proved far more effective at saving Jews than did militaristic uprisings in other countries. True, the Germans succeeded in deporting only about 400 of Denmark’s 6,000 Jews, while in the Netherlands, where there was armed resistance, over 100,000 members of a Jewish community of 140,000 were killed. But certainly the Nazis might have made a more concerted effort if the Danish had a larger Jewish population — and if their army was not preoccupied with fighting a war on multiple fronts. Moreover, Kurlansky contends that only in the isolation and brutality of wartime did Hitler launch the “final solution”; he had previously entertained ideas of merely deporting all Jews to Madagascar. Be this as it may, it remains fanciful to think that the fate of Jewish Europeans would have been rosy had fascism progressed unchecked by military force.
What is missing from the book is just the sort of reckoning with the price of nonviolence that Orwell respected in Gandhi. “If you are not prepared to take a life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way,” Orwell wrote. Yet Kurlansky ultimately dodges the question of how the spread of fascism could have been stopped without the force of arms. He never sketches a strategy of nonviolent resistance that might have sacrificed many thousands of lives to stop the Nazis. Absent this, the alternate history he implies seems unrealistically bloodless in a way that hard-nosed advocacy of nonviolence need not be. After all, the war itself required millions of sacrificed lives and also ushered in the age of nuclear war. However grotesque the demands of nonviolence might be, they might still compare favorably.
Kurlansky’s arguments are valuable not because they are always airtight, but rather because such contentions are rarely considered at all. It would never cross the minds of most Americans to question the necessity of the patriots taking up arms against the British or U.S. soldiers landing on the beaches of Normandy. Given that our government was all too easily able to obtain support for launching its current war, and that Iraq is unlikely to be our last military adventure of the 21st century, this is surely a costly failure of imagination.
Mark Engler, a writer based in New York City, is an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be reached via the web site http://www.democracyuprising.com.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Historical nuclear weapons stockpiles and nuclear tests by country

Historical nuclear weapons stockpiles and nuclear tests by country

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_stockpiles_and_nuclear_tests_by_country 

This article shows various estimates of the nuclear weapons stockpiles of various countries at various points in time. This article also shows the number of nuclear weapons tests conducted by each country at various points in time.Nuclear weapons stockpiles[edit]


Graph of nuclear testing
The United States nuclear stockpile increased almost exponentially between 1945 and 1965, but then began declining after peaking in 1966.[1] In 2012, the United States had several times fewer nuclear weapons than it had in 1966.[2] The Soviet Union joined the nuclear club in 1949 and had its nuclear stockpile increase very rapidly until 1986, when it peaked under Mikhail Gorbachev.[1]After the decrease of Cold War tensions and eventually the end of the Cold War, the Soviet and Russian nuclear stockpile decreased by over 80% between 1986 and 2012.[2] The U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles are projected to continue decreasing over the next decade.[3]The United Kingdom joined the nuclear club in 1952 while France joined it in 1960. The British and French nuclear stockpiles peaked at about 500 nuclear weapons in 1981 and 1992, respectively.[1]

U.S. and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles/inventories, 1945–2006. The failing Soviet economy and the dissolution of the country between 1989-91 which marks the end of theCold War and with it the relaxation of the arms race, brought about a large decrease in both nations stockpiles. The effects of the Megatons to Megawatts can also be seen in the mid 1990s, continuing Russia's reducing trend. A similar chart focusing solely on quantity of warheads in the multi-megaton range is also available.[4]Moreover total deployed US & "Russian" strategic weapons increased steadily from the 1980s until the Cold War ended.[5]
China joined the nuclear club in 1964 while its nuclear stockpile increased until the early 1980s, when it stabilized.[1] India joined the nuclear club in 1974, while Pakistan joined the nuclear club in the 1980s.[1][6] Both India and Pakistan currently have around one hundred nuclear weapons.[2] Pakistan's nuclear stockpile has been increasing at a very fast rate, and it is speculated that Pakistan might have more nuclear weapons than the United Kingdom within a decade.[7] South Africa successfully built six nuclear weapons in the 1980s, but dismantled all of them by the end of the 1990s after the end of apartheid.[8] North Korea joined the nuclear club in 2006 or before.[9][1] Without negotiations and "other proper measures", North Korea could increase its current nuclear weapons stockpile by several times by 2016.[10] A United States Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1999 projected that both Iran and Iraq will join the nuclear club and have 10-20 nuclear weapons in 2020.[11] However, it is worth pointing out that this report was written before the overthrow of Iraqi dictatorSaddam Hussein and before info indicating that Iraq already gave up its nuclear weapons program by 1999 was released.[11]

Over 2,000 nuclear explosions have been conducted, in over a dozen different sites around the world. Red Russia/Soviet Union, blue France, light blue United States, violet Britain, black Israel, orange China, yellow India, brown Pakistan, green North Korea and light green (territories exposed to nuclear bombs)
Global Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles (1945-2025)[1]
Country19451950195519601965197019751980198519901995200020052013[2]Future projections
United States United States of America22992,42218,63831,13926,00827,51924,10423,36821,39210,90410,5778,3607,7003,620 (for 2022)[3]
Russia Russia/The Soviet Union052001,6056,12911,64319,05530,06239,19737,00027,00021,50017,0008,5003,350 (for 2022)[3]
United Kingdom United Kingdom001442436394492492422422422281281225180 (for around 2025)[12]
France France00003236188250360505500470350300
China China0000575180205243232234232235250150-220 (for 2020)[11]
Israel Israel000008203142536372808065-85 (for 2020)[11]
India India0000000[9]1[9]3[9]7[9]14[9]28[9]4490-11050-70 (for 2020)[11]
South Africa South Africa00000000[9]3[9]6[9]0[9]0000[11]
Pakistan Pakistan000000000[9]4[9]13[9]28[9]38100-120150-200 (for 2021)[13]
North Korea North Korea000000000[9]0[14]-1[9]0[14]-2[9]0[14]-2[9]8[9]6-828-48 (for 2016)[10]
Iran Iran0000000000000010-20 (for 2020)[11]
Even before the United States of America started the nuclear club in 1945, some countries (most notably Nazi Germany) unsuccessfully attempted to build nuclear weapons.[15]

Nuclear weapon tests[edit]

Number of Nuclear Weapons Tests by Country (1945-2013)[16]
Country1945-491950-541955-591960-641965-691970-741975-791980-841985-891990-941995-992000-042005-092010-14Cumulative total
All countries96322836234427727326517443140212,055
United States United States of America8431451982301369684712100001,032
Russia Russia/The Soviet Union11765147851011261165610000715
United Kingdom United Kingdom03184114842000045
France France000121932375141126000210
China China00019610627400045
Israel Israel000000000000000
India India000001000050006
South Africa South Africa000000000000000
Pakistan Pakistan000000000060006
North Korea North Korea00000000000021[17]3
From the first nuclear test in 1945, worldwide nuclear testing increased rapidly until the 1970s, when it peaked.[16] However, there was still a large amount of worldwide nuclear testing until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.[16] Afterwards, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was signed and ratified by the major nuclear weapons powers, and the number of worldwide nuclear tests decreased rapidly.[16] India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998, but afterwards only North Korea conducted nuclear tests—in 2006, 2009, and 2013.[18][16]