Nuclear Arms, Hiroshima, Peace, War, August 5, 2009

60-years after Hiroshima

From: Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, 64 Years Too Late and Not a Moment Too Soon
posted August 03, 2009 4:30 pm

Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, 64 Years Too Late and Not a Moment Too Soon
As another August 6th approaches, let me tell you a little story about Hiroshima and me:

As a young man, I was probably not completely atypical in having the Bomb (the 1950s was a great time for capitalizing what was important) on my brain, and not just while I was ducking under my school desk as sirens howled their nuclear warnings outside. Like many people my age, I dreamed about the bomb, too. I could, in those nightmares, feel its searing heat, watch a mushroom cloud rise on some distant horizon, or find myself in some devastated landscape I had never come close to experiencing (except perhaps in sci-fi novels).

Of course, my dreams were nothing compared to those of America's top strategists who, in secret National Security Council documents of the early 1950s, descended into the charnel house of future history, imagining life on this planet as an eternal potential holocaust. They wrote in those documents of the possibility that 100 atomic bombs, landing on targets in the United States, might kill or injure 22 million Americans and of an American "blow" that might result in the "complete destruction" of the Soviet Union.

And they were pikers compared to the top military brass who, in 1960, found themselves arguing over the country's first Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear strategy. In it, a scenario was laid out for delivering more than 3,200 nuclear weapons to 1,060 targets in the Communist world, including at least 130 cities which would, if all went well, cease to exist. Official, if classified, estimates of possible casualties from such an attack -- and by then, nuclear weaponry and its delivery systems had grown far more powerful -- ran to 285 million dead and 40 million injured (and this probably underestimated radiation effects).
Read more:

http://www.tomdispatch.com:80/post/175102/frida_berrigan_64_years_too_late_and_not_a_moment_too_soon


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Wage Peace Campaign

I am pleased to share the following email that I have received the following email from a friend, it has come with the following caveate -
CAUTION: This email is subject to secret retrieval and review by Federal Law Enforcement Agents without a court-ordered warrant.

To learn more: http://www.bordc.org

HUMANITARIAN IMPERIALISM
Using Human Rights to Sell War
by Jean Bricmont
Translated by Diana Johnstone

“In this stimulating book, Jean Bricmont effectively deconstructs ‘humanitarian interventionism’ and makes a good case that leftists who support it are the ‘useful idiots’ of imperialism. He also provides a broader critique of the Western left and offers a number of constructive suggestions. This insightful book is chock full of enlightening case studies and provocative arguments.”
—Edward S. Herman, Professor Emeritus of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

“Jean Bricmont’s provocative and carefully argued book deserves to be widely read and debated in the progressive, ecological, peace, and human rights movements. It may not be the last word on this subject but the issues Bricmont raises cannot be ignored.”

—Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics, New York University

Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers—above all, the United States—in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention-discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.

Jean Bricmont’s Humanitarian Imperialism is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries.
Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont’s book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.

About the Author

JEAN BRICMONT is professor of theoretical physics at the University of Louvain, Belgium. He is the author of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (with Alan Sokal) and other political and scientific publications.