Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation

214 Pages·2017·2.88 MB·English

by  Helen Caldicott

Also by Helen Caldicott Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological
Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe If You Love This
Planet: A Plan to Save the Earth War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer
Space
Loving This Planet: Leading Thinkers Talk About How to Make a Better World
Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer
The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush’s Military-Industrial Complex
Nuclear Madness
Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War

© 2017 by individual contributors “What Would Happen If an 800-Kiloton Nuclear Warhead Detonated
Above Midtown Manhattan?” © 2015 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Julian Borger, “Nuclear weapons:
how foreign hotspots could test Trump’s finger on the trigger” reprinted courtesy of Guardian News and
Media.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.
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Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017
Distributed by Perseus Distribution
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Caldicott, Helen, editor of compilation.
Title: Sleepwalking to Armageddon: the thread of nuclear annihilation / edited by Helen Caldicott.
Other titles: Threat of nuclear annihilation
Description: New York: The New Press, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017004869 | ISBN 9781620972472 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Nuclear warfare. |
Nuclear weapons. | Nuclear disarmament. | Nuclear warfare--Prevention. | World politics--21st century.
Classification: LCC U263 .S595 2017 | DDC 355.02/17--dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2017004869
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Contents Introduction by Helen Caldicott
Part One: Twenty-First-Century Nuclear Weaponry
1. Assessing Global Catastrophic Risk
Seth D. Baum
2. Modernization of Nuclear Weaponry
Hans Kristensen
3. Nuclear Smoke and the Climatic Effects of Nuclear War
Alan Robock
4. Addicted to Weapons
Bruce Gagnon
5. The Plutonium Problem
Bob Alvarez
6. Nuclear Weapons and Artificial Intelligence
Max Tegmark
7. Weapons Scientists Up Close
Hugh Gusterson
8. What Would Happen If an 800-Kiloton Nuclear Warhead Detonated
Above Midtown Manhattan?
Steven Starr, Lynn Eden, Theodore A. Postol
Part Two: Twenty-First-Century Nuclear Politics
9. National Politics Versus National Security
Noam Chomsky
10. Escalation Watch: Four Looming Flash Points Facing President Trump
Michael T. Klare
11. Nuclear Politics
William D. Hartung
12. Ignition Points for Global Catastrophe: A Legacy of U.S. Foreign Policy
Richard Broinowski
13. Nuclear Weapons: How Foreign Hotspots Could Test Trump’s Finger on
the Trigger
Julian Borger
14. The Existential Madness of Putin-Bashing
Robert Parry
15. Unthinkable? The German Proliferation Debate
Ulrich Kühn
Part Three: Nuclear Remedies
16. Law and Morality at the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact
of Nuclear Weapons
Ray Acheson
17. A New Movement to Ban Nuclear Weapons
Tim Wright
18. Don’t Bank on the Bomb
Susi Snyder
19. The Heroic Marshall Islanders: Nuclear Zero Lawsuits
David Krieger
20. Persistent Violence and Silent Suffering: Marshallese Migrants in
Washington State
Holly Barker
21. Adding Democracy to Nuclear Policy
Kennette Benedict
Notes
Contributor Biographies
Introduction
Helen Caldicott
D
espite Donald Trump’s vows to seal the U.S. border and eradicate ISIS,
the real terrorists of the world today are the United States and Russia.
They possess 94 percent of the nuclear weapons on the planet, and they hold the
rest of the world hostage to their provocative and self-serving foreign policies
and misadventures. As a result, we are closer to nuclear war now, at the start of
the twenty-first century, than we’ve ever been before, even during the height of
the Cold War.
While we must be concerned about global warming—the other existential
threat to the planet—it is imperative that we do not take our eyes off the nuclear
threat. To do so is to risk sleepwalking to Armageddon. Nine countries around
the globe are known to have nuclear weapons, many of them on hair-trigger
alert. In at least five separate locations in the world, two or more nuclear-armed
countries are in actual or proxy wars or standoffs that could escalate at any time.
And the United States has elected to the presidency a man who seems to feel
that, because they exist, nuclear weapons ought to be used. Donald Trump has
implied that he feels tactical nuclear weapons can be effectively employed in
battle and seemed to imply in comments about Japan, South Korea, and Saudi
Arabia that he had few concerns about proliferation of nuclear weapons to
additional countries.
Tony Schwartz, the co-writer of Trump’s bestselling book Trump: The Art of
the Deal, who spent eighteen months “camping out in [Trump’s] office, joining
him on his helicopter, tagging along at meetings, and spending weekends with
him at his Manhattan apartment and his Florida estate,” listening in on Trump’s
business meetings and phone conversations, told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker
that if he were titling Trump’s book today, instead of The Art of the Deal,