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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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Unsealed Documents Show Pinochet 'Directly' Involved in Embassy Row Assassinations
Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt became 'symbols of the broader human rights catastrophe of the Pinochet dictatorship'
Oct 08, 2015
Loved ones have long charged that U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet had a direct hand in the 1976 assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his Institute for Policy Studies colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Now, they may finally be vindicated.
The administration of President Barack Obama on Thursday publicly released documents that appear to show that Pinochet was behind the murders of Letelier and Moffitt, who have become "symbols of the broader human rights catastrophe of the Pinochet dictatorship," Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at IPS, told Common Dreams.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave Chilean President Michelle Bachelet the materials, which include CIA papers, on Tuesday.
"While we're looking forward to a detailed analysis of these documents, they appear to vindicate our long-held belief that it would have been inconceivable for this assassination to have taken place without the authorization of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet," said IPS Director John Cavanagh.
Letelier's son, Chilean Senator Juan Pablo Letelier, is one of the few people who has reviewed the trove and confirmed to the Guardian that they conclusively show Pinochet directly ordered the killing. In addition, the documents reportedly reveal that Pinochet had intended to cover up his role in the assassination by killing his spy chief.
"In [Pinochet's] predisposition to defend his position, he planned to eliminate Manuel Contreras to keep him from talking," Senator Letelier told the Mesa Central show on Tele13 Radio.
From 1973, when it overthrew the government of socialist President Salvador Allende in a U.S. government-backed coup, until 1990, the Pinochet regime disappeared more than 3,000 people. It subjected another 40,000 to arbitrary detention and torture.
Letelier served under Allende as an ambassador and was imprisoned and tortured once Pinochet took power. He fled to the United States, where he was an active and vocal opponent of the dictatorship and became the director of the Transnational Institute for IPS.
On September 21, 1976, he and IPS development associate Moffitt were killed by a car bomb as they rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. Moffitt, who was 25 at the time of her death, "ran a 'Music Carryout' program to make musical instruments accessible to all, and her fundraising work demonstrated that we will not further democracy and equity in this country unless we stand with those seeking justice abroad," according to IPS.
Many say this latest trove of documents would have never seen sunlight without a relentless, international campaign.
"The efforts of family members, human rights activists, bold lawyers, and a handful of committed elected officials have changed the course of history," said Cavanagh in a statement released Thursday. "They have charted new ground in international human rights, including the 'Pinochet Precedent' established when British courts stripped the former dictator of his 'sovereign immunity' and ruled that Spain could extradite him for torture."
The book Orlando Letelier: Testimony and Vindication charged that Pinochet ordered the murder. In 1999, The Clinton administration released over 16,000 documents regarding the Pinochet dictatorship but withheld those related to the Letelier-Moffitt case, claiming they were necessary for an ongoing federal investigation. However, a draft indictment for the killings prepared under the Clinton administration was ultimately dropped by George W. Bush.
According to IPS, Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives demanded the declassification of the remaining Letelier-Moffitt documents when the investigation stalled.
"While Pinochet never faced trial, there have been many measures of justice over the years in the Letelier-Moffit case," said Cavanagh. "This is just the latest step in a long and inspiring struggle for justice."
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