Avoiding Nuclear War 2018
Jan.8
Congradulations! We, the human race, have made it for more than 72 years since the most recent use of a nuclear weapon in battle. This improbable achievement, along with the Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons signed by 122 U.N. national representatives last year, offer hopeful signs that we will avoid nuclear war this year, and move toward a world where the threat of nuclear destruction no longer hovers, like the angel of death, over the human race.
I spent Winter Solstice reading Daniel Ellsberg’s recent book, The Doomsday Machine, an amazingly revealing, well-researched textbook for understanding where we really are today in a world where thousands of thermonuclear weapons, each one a thousand times more destructive than the fission weapons (atomic bombs) which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, are on hair-trigger alert.
Ellsberg noted that the public image of thermonuclear war is not nearly as bad as the reality would be; the A-bombs that ravaged Japanese cities are now merely the triggers in the H-bombs, also called thermonuclear weapons, which are fission weapons made possible by the great heat generated by nuclear fission. Thermonuclear weapons tap the energy of fusing hydrogen atoms, the same energy which drives the Sun itself.
There is no theoretical limit to the destructive force of a thermonuclear weapon. The largest H-bomb detonated was a 53-megaton device blown off by the Soviet Union (a megaton is a thousand times more powerful than a ton of TNT).
Jan.9: Time for a Peace Treaty with North Korea
President Trump recently said he was ready to talk with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Mr. Trump could be remembered as a great protector of the U.S. homeland if he stops threatening to attack North Korea and opens peace talks.
The Korean war began in 1950; there was cease-fire in 1953, but never a peace treaty. The Cold War politics which drove the Korean conflict have completely changed. Now North Korea poses no threat to the U.S., unless it feels the U.S. might try to “decapitate” its government and destroy the nation, as President Trump threatened to do last year in a speech at the United Nations.
The two Koreas clearly do not want war. They began the year by scheduling the first talks between the nations for two years. South Korea said it would suspend military exercises threatening to North Korea during the Winter Olympics, which they are hosting. North Korea announced it was sending athletes to the Olympics. The South Korean Government also has settled its biggest conflict with China: the placement of U.S. THAAD missiles posing first-strike thermonuclear attack threat to China.
As long as Trump maintains a threat to attack North Korea, the U.S. will be in increasing peril of thermonuclear attack from North Korea and its allies, China and Russia. All three nations are constantly threatened with a disarming first-strike by U.S. forces encircling them. This is a very edgy and dangerous confrontation, with many “flash points” where an “accidental” thermonuclear war might start.
The good news is that the U.S. has the power to make the U.S. homeland much safer from thermonuclear attack than it is now by withdrawing all threatening military forces from around these three nations, starting with North Korea now!
