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national security archive
Nuclear Brinkmanship Is Back: Why We Need a New Peace Movement
Nuclear modernization is one of the most wasteful aspects of a bloated military budget and drains the economy of persons and resources needed to mitigate the damage climate change is already inflicting
Mar 05, 2019
MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is truly mad. At the height of the Cold War some military analysts and planners maintained that parity in weapons that would destroy civilization prevented either side from resort to those weapons. Parity, however, is a slippery concept, especially in an environment where science and engineering are continually evolving. Each side may have moments when it believes or imagines that it has a decisive edge. Trusting in MAD is especially foolish when the participants still refuse to pledge no first use of atomic or thermonuclear weapons.
MAD poses other dilemmas as well. How do you convince current or potential adversaries that in the event of nuclear attack you will respond in kind? The best and only sure way to show you are serious about and would use nuclear weapons is actually to launch a nuclear attack. But short of that apocalyptic act one can demonstrate proficiency and willingness to act by playing "war games."
On the surface this may seem a safer outlet for the military's elevated testosterone, but just as fantasies often morph into ugly acts of aggression, nuclear war games stand on the edge of the real thing. This is especially the case when the games are staged in contested territory and/or during periods of great stress. War games are meant to send a message, but there is often a gap between message sent and message received. The gap can have tragic consequences. Nuclear weapons cannot be used. Winners join the losers in an unlivable world. They need to be abolished. Abrogating INF only fuels the fantasy, which war games help sustain, that such weapons can be employed to win a war.
One war game with cautionary lessons for today is the Able Archer exercise at one of the Cold War's most tense moments. We learn of this incident only through the diligent work over many years by a nuclear whistle blower,, Nate Jones, director of the Freedom of Information Act Project for the National Security Archive in Washington DC,, The BBC has provided a concise summary of the findings. BBC: According to the fictional scenario behind the Able Archer 83 war game, turmoil in the Middle East was putting a squeeze on Soviet oil supplies.
Meanwhile, Yugoslavia - which wasn't aligned to either side of the Cold War - decided to back the West. The Soviet leaders in the game feared this would lead to a cascade of other eastern European countries following suit, switching allegiance from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, and putting the entire communist system at risk. The imagined 'war' started when Soviet tanks rolled across the border into Yugoslavia. Scandinavia was invaded next, and soon troops were pouring into Western Europe. Overwhelmed, NATO forces were forced into retreat.
A few months after the pretend conflict began, Western governments authorised the use of nuclear weapons. Role-playing NATO forces launched a single medium range nuclear missile, wiping Ukrainian capital Kiev from the map. It was deployed as a signal, a warning that NATO was prepared to escalate the war. The theory was that this 'nuclear signalling' would help cooler heads to prevail. It didn't work.By 11 November 1983, global nuclear arsenals had been unleashed. Most of the world was destroyed. "
The kicker in this BBC story, the part US nuclear planners fought so hard to withhold, is what was actually occurring on the Soviet side. In 1983, the leader of the Soviet Union was Yuri Andropov. As BBC put it, he was: "A former head of the KG he wasas seriously ill. And seriously paranoid."
"There was a paranoia," says Martin Chalmers, deputy director general of London-based security think-tank RUSI. "The Soviet leadership could remember the trauma of Hitler's surprise attack in 1941 t."
I find the choice of the noun paranoia misleading, a word that reduces the policy issues to highly personal virtues or pathologies. As even the BBC points out suspicions were intensified by war gamers' determination to make the play as close to the real thing as possible, right down to wheeling out pretend nuclear warheads, use of encrypted messages, and periods of total silence., all warlike actions. BBC reports that the Soviet response was to ground all flights and begin a process of prioritizing targets.
Fortunately this time around even Reagan and Thatcher became appalled when they learned of this incident. The fears that it evoked - along with the rise of Gorbachev and a growing anti-nuclear movement-played a role in incentivizing retreat from nuclear brinksmanship. It does, however, raise issues that are just as salient today.
Why does the national security establishment work so hard to conceal information about this old war game? Surely the Russians are fully aware of this near miss. The only conclusion I draw is that concerns about war games and accidental nuclear war would give aid and comfort to anti-nuclear movements here and around the world.
Besides the grave risks of miscalculation, don't these "games" run the long- term danger of normalizing these weapons? Just another part of the arsenal to be trotted out at the appropriate time.
Unfortunately, at least until recently, superiority in nuclear weaponry has been an article of faith for both political parties. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, every President since Truman has wanted to assert and preserve nuclear superiority as a bargaining chip. In addition, military contracting is a disproportionately generous source of corporate profits and campaign contributions. Thus bipartisanship is alive and well on issues that pose an existential threat to all life on this planet. At the least advocates of the Green New Deal should elevate nuclear arms reduction and rapid elimination to an immediate concern.
Former Boston Globe columnist James Carroll highlights one very promising endeavor that Green New Deal advocates should consider joining. : " In 2017, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with Physicians for Social Responsibility, launched Back from the Brink: The Call to Prevent Nuclear War, "a national grassroots initiative seeking to fundamentally change U.S. nuclear weapons policy and lead us away from the dangerous path we are on." Back From the Brink and Green New Deal share concerns and many policy objectives. The enthusiasm of each can reverberate back and forth, lending more strength to both.
Nuclear modernization is one of the most wasteful aspects of a bloated military budget and drains the economy of persons and resources needed to mitigate the damage climate change is already inflicting. The Cold War is over. Nuclear weapons did not win it. Spend that money on the other gravest threat to our existence.
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Reality Winner Is Latest to Face Prosecution Under Awful World War I Espionage Act
Jul 11, 2017
Reality Winner, a 25-year-old employee of a contractor that does work for the NSA, was arrested in June and charged with transmitting classified information, widely suspected to be an intelligence document about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election that was published by The Intercept. The precise facts surrounding her actions, and their consequences (if any), would come out in a fair trial--but unfortunately, she won't have a fair trial because she's being prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Espionage Act is a fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional law. As the ACLU argued in an amicus brief in the Chelsea Manning appeal, and has argued with reference to Edward Snowden, this act is unconstitutionally vague because it allows the government to prosecute leakers and whistleblowers that it dislikes, while leaving untouched the many leakers within the security state who release classified materials to advance those agencies' bureaucratic aims. Perhaps worse, it doesn't allow leakers to defend their leaks by trying to demonstrate in court that they served the public interest. As my colleagues Dror Ladin and Esha Bhandari have detailed, that is how a whistleblower like Chelsea Manning ended up with a 35-year prison sentence (later commuted by President Obama, but still imprisoned for 7 years).
Many people worry about a world where any twentysomething serving in government feels they can unilaterally declassify the nation's secrets without consequences. At the same time, in a context where the out-of-control national security state has abused its secrecy powers in profoundly undemocratic ways, individual leakers throughout our history have provided valuable services to our democracy, including but by no means limited to Daniel Ellsberg and his release of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed profound government lying to the public about the Vietnam War. Whistleblowers are an important check and balance in our democracy.
Nobody is saying that leakers should never face consequences for their actions. But as the actions of people like Reality Winner are evaluated in court, that process must, as my colleague Ben Wizner has argued, respect principles such as:
- Leakers should not be punished more severely than the wrongdoers they expose.
- Leakers must be permitted to argue that the benefit of leaks to the public and our democracy outweigh any alleged security harms.
- Leaks of information that reveals government fraud, corruption, or illegal activities must not be prosecuted at all.
- The government must prove that it was actually justified in withholding the leaked information from the public it serves, at a cost to our democracy, by classifying it.
- The government must not prosecute its critics while looking the other way when it comes to leakers who are friendly to the bureaucratic aims of various agencies.
As it stands, the Espionage Act makes NO distinction between a civic-minded whistleblower who releases something that should never have been classified and which reveals illegal government activities, and a spy who sells genuinely damaging documents to a foreign government for cash.
The blunt unfairness of the Espionage Act reflects its awful history. It was passed by Congress in June 1917, just two months after the United States entered World War 1, at a time of war fever, hyper-nationalism, repression of anti-war views, and the early stages of the First Red Scare. The original law was expanded by Congress in May 1918 through the Sedition Act to cover a sweeping range of offenses. That act made it a crime to engage in "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" directed at the U.S. government, its armed forces, or the flag, or to "advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of" various acts including "curtailment of production."
In this era people were literally being thrown in prison just for writing letters to the editor. The Espionage and Sedition Acts were vigorously used by Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his young aide, a 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, to persecute left-wing activists and critics, and were integral to the Red Scare, including the violent Palmer Raids several years later in which ten thousand non-citizens were arrested and hundreds deported based on their political views and membership in organizations.
The Red Scare wound down in 1920, and Congress repealed the Sedition Act that year--but not the rest of the Espionage Act, which remains with us today, and in its fundamental bluntness and unfairness reflects the terrible time in which it was crafted.
As bad as it was, the Espionage Act lay dormant for many years. As my former colleague Gabe Rottman has laid out, before 2010 there were only four leakers prosecuted under the Espionage Act: two who had their charges dropped, one who was pardoned by President Clinton, and one who was sentenced to 10 months at a halfway house and 100 hours of community service. Beginning in 2010, however, eight have been charged under the act, including Chelsea Manning (sentenced to 35 years), Edward Snowden, and four others who received sentences of 13, 20, 30, and 43 months, respectively.
Now Winner has become the subject of the ninth Espionage Act prosecution, and is facing a sentence of 10 years in prison. She should have the right to have her case heard in accordance with the principles outlined above. The Espionage Act needs to be repealed and replaced with a fairer law.
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Iowa Presidential Race Targeted by Military Vets and Anti-Drone Television Commercials on Major News Networks
Military veterans attempting to inject "murder drones" into the Presidential Race discussion in Iowa are running a series of sometimes graphic television commercials on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC in the Des Moines area asking military personnel to "refuse" to follow orders to "fly" drones.
The spots can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=2lXLFIE8fEQ
Sep 29, 2015
Military veterans attempting to inject "murder drones" into the Presidential Race discussion in Iowa are running a series of sometimes graphic television commercials on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC in the Des Moines area asking military personnel to "refuse" to follow orders to "fly" drones.
The spots can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=2lXLFIE8fEQ
https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=2lXLFIE8fEQ
The :15 second paid commercials - which show images of dead children killed by U.S. drones - have now been shown in seven U.S. cities, all located near drone operating centers, from New York to California. One internet provider in New Mexico, with links to the defense industry, refused to run the spots. The Iowa ads are sponsored by KnowDrones.com, and Veterans for Peace/Des Moines.
"We are very pleased to introduce the television spots to Iowans and the Presidential candidates," said Nick Mottern, KnowDrones.com coordinator, "Through the images of children killed in drone attacks American people can see the illegality and immorality of the U.S. policy of systematically killing people without due process."
Earlier this month, in what is probably a first, the Air Force Times published a controversial half page advertisement from 54 U.S. military veterans and veterans organizations urging Air Force drone operators and other military personnel to refuse their orders...and not fly drone surveillance/attack missions.
https://tinyurl.com/RefuseToFlyAFTimesAd or https://tinyurl.com/RefuseToFlyAFTimesAdPage28
Additionally, anti-war critic and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley are touring Iowa to talk about drones and national security issues. Sponsored by Iowa Veterans for Peace, and seeks to raise the level of Iowans' understanding of national security issues, they speak at the Ames Public Library at 7 p.m.Tuesday, and at 101 Olin Hall at Drake University at 7 p.m.Wednesday.
They have spoken to groups in Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls and Waterloo. On Sunday they spokes at St. Ambrose University in Davenport and to a consortium of Mennonite congregations near Parnell. On Monday, they spoke at the Englert theater in Iowa City, in an event sponsored by the University of Iowa Lecture Series and Veterans for Peace. They were joined at that event via live video by Edward Snowden, who is in exile in Russia.
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