The rest of the big five need to match Moscow’s commitment to avoiding nuclear war, the Foreign Ministry insists. Moscow is “strictly and consistently” guided by the principle that a nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought, the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, calling on other atomic powers to “demonstrate in practice” their own commitment to this.
Since 1945 the Korean people have been at war. Shortly after the establishment by anti-Japanese resistance fighters of the Korean People's Republic that was to become the government of North Korea, in Seoul, the US has been at war with North Korea both technically and in reality. The most bloody chapter in that war was the three year war between 1950 and 1953. In this war, approximately 20% of the population of North Korea perished in fighting under aerial bombardment, through biological warfare and flooding. Many hundreds of thousands of their allies in the South also perished at the hands of the American occupiers and their south Korean puppets. The Korean Peninsula was divided up between the United States and Russia after the defeat of the Japanese. Under President Roosevelt the arrangement might have been temporary, but President Truman's cold war politics furthered the desires of military-industrial-complex's ambition to enforce capitalism on the whole world and the Korean War was a part of this.
It's back to the 1960s. In 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis, children learned that they might be snuffed out at any time. The assassination in November 22, 1963, of President John F Kennedy, who prevented the threatened atomic war with Russia over Cuba, seemed to make this clearer.
Someone we knew who was 11 when Kennedy was assassinated, suicided in their late 20s because they had never recovered from despair at the prospect of the nuclear holocaust destroying all the forests and creatures in the world, along with the species that had unleashed this insanity.
But the first and the last nuclear attack on a country for war purposes was when America bombed Hiroshima in August 1945, although many 'tests' have since been conducted. (See Arms Control Org's nuclear test tally.)
So we had begun to relax. ...
Until August 7th, 2017, when President Trump lashed out at Kim Jong-un, leader of North Korea, promising "fire and fury" if North Korea persisted with its nuclear program. North Korea has been conducting nuclear tests since 1990 (See again Arms Control Org's nuclear test tally.)
President Trump presented no reflection about North Korea's motivation to acquire these nuclear weapons. In that sense, if you knew the story, it was like hearing a drunk threaten to punch his wife if she tried to protect herself.
Trump is sitting on top of a mountain of nuclear warheads and the US has armadas of warships constantly patrolling Korean waters in a threatening fashion. That is what Kim Jong-un is responding to; the current US military presence and the past record of occupation and war by the same presence. North Korea does not have ships patrolling US waters.
A few years ago the United States threatened to annihilate Libya if Gaddafi did not give up defending the state against rebel attacks. He insisted that he had complied, but the United States financed people to go in and assassinate him and tear his country to pieces anyway. (See "Book Review: Destroying Libya and World Order by Francis A. Boyle")
Basically, the United States invades any country it wants to, unless that country has nuclear weapons. It has done this on similar pretexts already to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and constantly threatens Iran. It would do it to Russia if Russia had no nuclear weapons. Indeed it has Russia quasi surrounded by US military bases, many situated in Europe in countries where the local populations may not want them. The United States has "800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad," yet it pretends that Russia, which has ten foreign military bases, close to its own borders, is the one bent on military expansion. China has one military base in Djibouti and several in process in the Pacific on artificially augmented islands.
When President John Kennedy stopped nuclear war on Russia via Cuba, President Kruschev and he talked on the phone and began a nuclear weapons disarmament program in 1963. See https://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty.aspx. In 1996, 71 nations, including those possessing nuclear weapons, signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited all nuclear test explosions including those conducted underground. Though it was signed by President Bill Clinton, the Senate rejected the treaty by a vote of 51 to 48. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 much of the impetus for a nuclear program seemed to disappear. Perhaps the United States really thought that Russia was going to become a subservient client state, like Australia, but Russia has its own history and traditions. It has not gone back to communism, but it does not seek the same kind of free-market regime as America and does not want NATO on its borders.
The United States does not appear to accept this political and economic independence in Russia or China or, indeed, in any state. Hence their ramping up of nuclear threat when people hoped it was reducing. Now, today's young people must live in that terrible shadow of nuclear holocaust again, and some will lose hope.
North Korea has been under siege for about 72 years since the Japanese colony of the Korean Peninsula was divided in two between Soviet and American occupation forces after Japan surrendered in 1945. In August 1948 the Republic of Korea was established in the south with Syngman Rhee as President. In September 1948 the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was established with Kim Il-sung as Premier. In 1949 Kim Gu, a Korean independence activist who wanted a unified Korea was shot in his home by a South Korean Army lieutenant.
The United States say that North Korea invaded South Korea and so the United States went to war against North Korea. North Korea says the war started when the South launched an attack against the North and so the North counter-attacked. But that in itself is not the critical issue. The critical issue is that sovereignty in the south was violated by the US occupation and thousands, maybe tens of thousands of supporters of the 'North' Korean government were murdered and jailed by the South Korean government with the help of the Americans.
Something like 20% of North Koreans died in the subsequent war. They were victims of America's massively disproportionate firepower. America only agreed to a truce because China and North Korea were able to resist with their own firepower until US loss of lives (much fewer than those of North Korean soldiers) became unpopular in America. Australians also participated in this war and at one stage Australian warfies blackbanned supplies to the Australian armed forces.
Understandably North Korea sees the continuing presence of US military armadas for the threat that they are, along with annual US military 'exercises' on South Korean soil.
As John Pilger explains in his Coming war on China the US threats against North Korea may also be interpreted as threats against China. The United States is demanding that China take military action against North Korea if North Korea fails to disarm its nuclear program. But North Korea is useful for China by providing a bullwark against US aggression. And Russia and China share a defensive attitude to US expansionism.
Meanwhile just about every US ally (or are we US hostages?) mass media and much of the supposed alternative newsmedia, including Infowars, Hannity and Tucker Carlson, is reporting all this as Trump portrays it, vis, that North Korea is insane and threatening America with no reason at all.
No, Kim Jong-un does have a reason.
If America does not lead nuclear disarmament and stop its expansionism, which is what Trump led people to believe he would do, then who can lead it?
 99 Red Balloons & Robert Bowman's talk embedded within this article.
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In 1984, the hit song 99 Red Balloons, the English language version of 99LuftBallons released in 1983 by the German band Nena, expressed the dread of nuclear war, the outbreak of which many believed to be imminent. As explained by retired United States Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Robert M. Bowman (1934-2013) who, at the same time, during the years of the Reagan Presidency, started campaigning against the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI aka "Star Wars"), the fears expressed in 99 Red Balloons were well founded.
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Much of the truth and significance of the presidencies of FDR and JFK has been buried by mainstream and supposedly progressive and left newsmedia. In 1991, Oliver Stone began to rectify this when when he released the film JFK. JFK was based on the book On the Trail of the Assassins by the Attorney of the District of New Orleans Jim Garrison (1921-1992).
In spite of the efforts to bury the truth, Oliver Stone has persisted with his priceless work. The latest is his TV documentary and accompanying book The Untold History of the United States of 2012.
Even though JFK was tragically murdered by agents of the military-industrial complex only 900 days after his inauguration, his election and, before him, the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) show that, for all the flaws and corruption of western parliamentary democracy, it can be made to work. When it works, decent, caring and capable people like JFK and FDR can be elected to high office.
Whilst I have not yet read the chapter on JFK (but have seen his movie of 1991), his earlier chapter on FDR is a stunning revelation of President Roosevelt and the New Deal by which he revived the US economy from the Great Depression in the face of advice by the neoliberal economists of his day. (The same neoliberal economic doctrine has been implemented since 1983 by the 'Labor' governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating Government in Australia and in the UK by Margaret Thatcher and by the 'Labor' UK government of Tony Blair.)
Untold History, with extraordinary insight and knowledge gives the best analysis I have yet read of what was at stake during that terrible Second World War in which as many as 70 million may have died. Whilst FDR's manouevres to overcome the aversion felt by the overwhelming majority of Americans to entry into another bloody European war may have appeared Machiavellian, Stone shows that the survival of human civilisation in the face of Nazism and Japanese imperialism was at stake and that therefore FDR's actions were right.
Sadly FDR died in 1944 before the war was won and before he could have ensured a just and enduring peace. As a result of misfortune and undemocratic manoeuvres by Democratic Party apparatchiks, Roosevelt was succeeded by the uninspired and malleable Harry Truman in place of Henry Wallace, who most had assumed would become the next President.
Stone shows conclusively with the testimonies of a large number of generals and politicians, that the dropping of even the first Atom bomb on Hiroshima, let alone the second Atom bomb on Nagisaki, was unnecessary to get the Japanese to surrender. The Japanese were defeated because of a naval blockade, conventional bombing and defeat in the Pacific and Asian land war, and they knew it, and had sent out numerous peace feelers. On top of that Russia had planned to attack Japan in Manchuria as agreed to at Yalta in May 1945.
Nonetheless Truman was manoeuvred by forces opposed to peace. within the Democratic Party, corporate bosses and government bureaucrats, to order the dropping of the two Atomic bombs and to start the Cold War with America's former Soviet allies.
President Kennedy did much to reduce the threat of war which had been boosted by Truman's and Eisenhower's presidencies. Sadly, he was murdered and so was unable to prevent the escalation of the Vietnam war or to conclusively end the nuclear arms race.
Today, 29 May 2013, marks 96 years since the birth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) in the 50th anniversary year of his assassination. JFK grew up to show astonishing bravery, firstly in the Second World War as commander of PT109 in the Solomon Islands to the north of Australia and secondly as President of the United States, where he tried to bring about international and domestic justice and to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war.
Once again, we come upon another poignant anniversary. December 7, the day that the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked Pearl Harbor some 70 years ago. Like 9/11, it is traditionallly marked as a significant historical event. But I believe that it is significant for entirely different reasons than what we have been given. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese government undertook a desperate gamble. The questions we need to ask are several. What made them desperate? What would make nations desperate today? What do desperate nations and desperate people do when they reach desperation? And what do we do when these desperate nations and people are armed with nuclear weapons?
We are often told that if we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. The problem is, however, that history often teaches lessons quite different from those that the puppeteers of patriotic propaganda would have us believe. Such is the case whenever December 7th approaches. That is the day when my life experience collides with the official narrative. Let me tell you why.
Nevil Shute's book On The Beach was mandatory reading for my generation. It was read by school-children across the province (B.C.). Subsequently, of course, we were subjected to a raft of movies about nuclear war and what it would mean. Two stand out for me.
"Testament" with Jane Alexander in a lead role, was unique in that it did not depict a blast or even a hint of what lead up to the war. Instead, it showed how a typical middle class suburb would try to cope with nuclear fallout, and how inexorably, people would die off to the point that the community would collapse. Like "On the Beach", the audience was left with an over-powering sense of futility, made more powerful by the absence of infrastructure damage, firestorms and bodies trapped in rubble.
These movies actually simulate our predicament too. We face a threat----scarcity----which will breech every wall, border or nuclear umbrella. The virtue of the analyses like those of Jack Alpert and Chris Clugston is that they remind us that we are all tied into a global resource base. The depletion of the minerals and metals and fuels (NNRs) which Chris has inventoried will affect everyone on this planet as surely as the radiation did in Nevil Shute's book (and movie) and in "Testament". We can hide behind our gated communities, or behind militarized borders, but scarcity will come calling and will not be kept out. Not even a trillion dollar-a-year military budget can save us.
This in fact, was the case with the walled cities, fortresses and castles that were beseiged by Alexander, by Caesar, by the Crusaders (and their adversaries) by the Mongols and countless other intruders throughout history. Hiding behind walls gives you respite from privation and death, but not permanent sanctuary. Typically, the besieged end up eating each other. Don't get me wrong. I am an immigration-reductionist. I believe that unfettered mass migration will accelerate our collective demise. (cf. Bill Rees' "Globalization, Migration and Trade"). But strong borders in the context of remorseless global scarcity will be like speed bumps. I want speed bumps in my neighbourhood to discourage commuter traffic----but they will not address the problem of overwhelming traffic volume in the city. We can act locally---as is our responsibility----but Chris Clugston and Jack Alpert remind us that the problem we face is beyond local solutions. Its global or bust. And that was the case during the Cold War. The effects of a nuclear exchange could not have been quarantined to one region, or avoided by finding a secluded haven. My mother understood this.
I remember, as a boy, begging my parents to build a bomb shelter. I firmly believed that Russian bombers would one day appear over the horizon. After all, the air raid siren just two blocks away would sound off at random just to keep us on our toes. On one occasion, I was walking home from school with a group of other 6 year old kids---including my classmate Daphne---- when it sounded off as we were walking by it. We sprinted home in panic and Daphne was in hysterics by the time she reached her mother.
The school authorities too did their part in fostering this tension. We practiced duck-and-cover drills which today are often the subject of humour among those who did not live through it. I don’t remember laughing. It didn't help when Sputnik was launched either. To hype the fear of Russian military and scientific dominance, the Vancouver Sun featured a front page photograph of Soviet children all raising their hands in a science class to show that they all had the correct answer. Our teachers waved the newspaper in our faces to impress us with the need to "keep up" with the Russians. School curricula was beefed up and we all felt the pressure to pack our brains with knowledge. In those years, the stress was such that I could not eat breakfast until well after Christmas. Trust me, if you are going to traumatize people, best to scare the Beejesus out of them when they’re young. I never needed to read Stephen King.
My folks were endowed with much common sense. I remember my mother asking me, "Tim, suppose we build a bomber shelter, and the Russians drop an atom bomb on Vancouver. What if other parents didn't build a shelter, or stock it with food and water. How would we keep them out? And if we could, would you want to? Would you keep your friends out? Would you keep Ronnie, Doug, Daphne and her sister out? And if we survived, how long would our food and water last? When it ran out, where would we get our vegetables and milk?" I was about 7 or 8 at the time, and Mom always used the Socratic approach with me--- she was my best teacher. I learned, very early, that we are all in this thing together. There are no personal escape hatches. And if there was, I don't think I would want to survive anyway. I don't own a gun, and I am never shot anyone (or any animal for that matter). In the face of starvation, I do not believe that the better angels of our nature will prevail. Starving marauders will kill without mercy. If murder is the price for living, count me out. In fact, if an upheaval of that order unfolds, I'd like to get my hands on the pill that Australians used in "On The Beach". Stuff your Second Amendment. Guns won't grow food. But I am a Canadian, and I guess that is a typical Canadian attitude.
The other movie of great poignancy was the 1984 British docudrama "Threads", about a nuclear attack on the city of Sheffield. It is simply the best dissection of the aftermath of nuclear war ever made. It should have been required viewing for every Congressman in the United States and every politician in the Warsaw Pact. See that movie, and you will understand that nuclear war is, always was, and always will be the ultimate disaster for humanity. I am sorry, but climate change doesn't even come close. In fact, I find it ironic that Severn Suzuki’s generation should assume the mantle of being the first generation to actually face the prospect of species extinction in their lifetime. Generation Y did not invent doomsday. Boomers lived with it.
I cannot understand why the possibility of nuclear war is virtually off the radar screen. In the desperate scramble for scarce resources governments will do desperate things. Think about what Japan did in December of 1941. They provoked a war with a superpower that was many times its industrial superior, all because its oil supply source was cut off. I can’t believe that Pakistan, India, Israel, Iran .....among others, would stand still and watch their citizenry starved to death. I can't believe that the United States would stand by and watch the Chinese commandeer our oil. How is this for setting the stage for conflict: We are determined to build one crude oil pipeline to Kitimat (the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project) to serve the Chinese market and another---Keystone-- for the US market, after the Chinese recently launched their first aircraft carrier. So much for Canada the Peacemaker. If you think oil spills would be an environmental disaster, try nuclear winter.
The conventional lesson that Americans drew from the Pearl Harbor attack was “Never again should we let our guard down, we must always be prepared”. And 9/11 has been served up as a refresher course. But we can never defend ourselves from the consequences of growing scarcity. Desperation breeds desperados, and this time, they have WMD.
It seems like we are at a carnival show watching a shell game. There are four peas---one representing Peak Oil and non-renewable resource scarcity, one representing biodiversity collapse, one representing climate change, and one representing a holocaust from nuclear/biological/chemical war---all hiding under four different shells. Environmentalists seem to be fixated on the third shell, the one that conceals climate change. I think that is a dangerous fixation. I think that the most imminent and lethal danger is scarcity, because as Jack Alpert has tried to tell people, scarcity leads to conflict. And conflict in turn leads to scarcity, as the haves will invest precious resources trying to protect what they and the have-nots will spend resources in trying to get it. This is what Jack calls "The Death Spiral of Civilization". Scarcity is the trigger.
The question that confronts us then is, "How do we solve Scarcity?", or if we can't---as Chris Clugston would argue---how do we mitigate it to reduce the carnage? My answer is that since the economic pie will shrink dramatically, we must dramatically reduce the number of people who demand slices, for contrary to eco-socialist mythology, there is not enough to go around to indefinitely support our population. If we could manage the descent in a graduated fashion, we might avoid the conflict which would ignite Armageddon. I know it is a faint hope, but I rather like civilization. I'd like to hang on to it as long as possible.
That is the lesson that Pearl Harbor teaches me. What about you?
Tim Murray
December 2/2011
PS
If you want to see Threads the movie, try this link.
A better way to view it would be to obtain the DVD and see it without breaks.
The world owes President John F Kennedy, who was slain by the US military-industrial complex on 22 November 1963, an unrepayable debt of gratitude for stopping not once, but three times, the unthinkable horror of global nuclear war. He also prevented an invasion of Cuba, and did what he could to prevent the Vietnam War. Those unfamilar with JFK's achievements and plans, which were thwarted by his murder, must see Oliver Stone's JFK.
The real story of JFK runs counter to the peer-maintained wisdom of many a proud bearer of the label 'left wing'. According to the culture in such circles, no-one of principle and decency could reach the positions of power and influence attained by John F Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby (Robert). They must therefore have been corrupt, the thinking goes. Anyone who reaches such political heights could only have done so through unprincipled deals. Anyone capable of making the necessary deals could not possibly be a force for good once they had won high office, the theory suggests.
Whilst this is certainly true of most who rise in pubic office, it seems there really are exceptions to this, and that John F Kennedy was clearly one of those exceptions.
The rise to high office of a person like JFK gives ordinary people reason to hope that they might still regain control of their destiny. If Kennedy or his younger brother had lived, the power of the greedy elite in control of America would almost certainly have been broken. America would now be a much fairer society and much of the world would have been at peace since then as most of the wars, particularly those caused by the US elites in the past five decades, would have been avoided.
To deny this and to deny the Kennedys' essential good intentions, as so many fashionable "bleeding hearts", have done since JFK's death only serves the wealthy and greedy elites such people claim to oppose. Those of the 'left', who, in effect, conceal the truth of the US military-industrial complex's role in Kennedy's murder (against which even Kennedy's predecessor, Eisenhower, warned) only help maintain its consolidation of power and its ability to do harm.
As Charles Drago wrote:
Anyone with reasonable access to the JFK evidence who does not conclude that conspirators killed the president is cognitively impaired and/or complicit in the crime.(see The Anti-James Douglass Appears[1] of 14 Feb 2009)
FOOTNOTES
1. Linked article was previously at https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sendmessage.php, where a 'google' search of "anti-James Douglass" will still find it as well as this article. James Douglass is the author of the towering JFK and the unspeakable -Why he died and why it matters of 2008- JS, 19 Jan 11
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