on Monday, John Kerry became the first secretary of state to visit Hiroshima, the Japanese city destroyed by a U.S. nuclear bomb on August 6, 1945. Three days later, the U.S. dropped another nuclear bomb on the city of Nagasaki. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese people were killed. The United States is the only country to ever drop an atomic bomb. Kerry toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, but offered no apology for the U.S. nuclear attack.
Marylia Kelley talking:
symbolism is important, so we certainly support that and support Obama—excuse me—and support Obama going. But it can’t be mere symbolism and photo op. Kerry went empty-handed. The United States needs to go with a concrete plan to roll back its own nuclear weapons program. You cannot preach abstinence, in terms of nuclear weapons, from the biggest bar stool in the room. And so, we are pressing President Obama to go to Hiroshima, but to go with an announcement that he will cancel a new warhead and new cruise missile—together, they’re called the Long-Range Standoff weapon.
As you noted, there’s a trillion-dollar plan over the next 30 years to upgrade every single part of the United States nuclear weapons stockpile. And right now, as we’re speaking, at Livermore Lab, an hour, hour-15 minutes from here, they’re designing a new warhead, a particularly destabilizing new warhead, to sit atop a new cruise missile. This Long-Range Standoff weapon, if you think about what that name means, it means that an airplane will be able to stand off its intended target by thousands of miles, launch a smart nuclear weapon that will hug the terrain and be radar-evading and will arrive as a surprise nuclear attack. It is a weapon that goes beyond deterrence. No matter what you may think of deterrence, positively or negatively, it goes beyond deterrence. This is about nuclear war fighting. This is about potentially initiating a nuclear war. Additionally, the conventional version and the nuclear version will be indistinguishable. So if it is picked up on radar, a country will not know whether it’s being attacked by a nuclear or a conventional weapon. And that could trigger a nuclear response if it’s a nuclear-armed state.
So we’re actually in a very, very dangerous place. And the United States is initiating a new nuclear arms race, because the other nuclear-armed states, of course, when they look at our, quote-unquote, “modernization program,” are now beginning their own. So we need this to be rolled back. If Obama goes to Hiroshima, he needs to use that as an opportunity, not to speak empty promises and rhetoric about an eventual world free of nuclear weapons, but to make concrete proposals about how the United States is going to take steps in that direction and how we’re going to change course, because right now we’re taking giant steps in the opposite direction.
the trillion-dollar trainwreck is a plan that would upgrade every single nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal. It will design new nuclear weapons. I talked about one, the Long-Range Standoff warhead. We’re also designing a new nuclear bomb that will be forward-deployed in NATO countries, called the B-6112. This—it’s getting a new tail fin kit so that it will become the first gravity-dropped bomb that then becomes a guided nuclear weapon. There are new options being put into nuclear weapons—submarine-launched ICBMs, land base-launched, all legs of the triad. And they’re getting new heights of burst option. They’re getting new precision options. They’re getting new dial-a-yield options.
The alternative is to cancel this aggressive new nuclear weapons program. And we can curate the United States nuclear weapons stockpile, maintaining the existing safety and reliability until such time as the nuclear weapons are dismantled, pursuant to U.S. obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And the world is gathering in May, next month, May 2nd, in Geneva at the United Nations to discuss the steps to doing this and to discuss the legal requirements of global disarmament. And the United States is boycotting.
The United States is boycotting it because it doesn’t believe these discussions are useful or productive. But, of course, they are the most important discussions on the planet. And we need to close the legal gap, and we need to actually get the United States and all of the other nuclear weapons states to live up to their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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Marylia Kelley
executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, or Communities Against a Radioactive Environment. The organization and the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability recently published the report “Trillion Dollar Trainwreck,” which dissects the Obama administration’s plans to spend more than $1 trillion over the next 30 years on the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
— source democracynow.org