First published by World BEYOND War
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with the advice of Albert Einstein and other scientists from the Manhattan Project who developed the atomic bomb, established a Doomsday Clock, in 1947 to illustrate the annihilating danger the earth has faced since the creation of the diabolical nuclear bomb. At that time, the clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight, their estimate of how much time we had left before nuclear war would wreak catastrophic devastation on our planet and all living things in existence.Over the years, the hands of the clock have been reset, forward and backward, as scientists and policy makers estimated how immediate the nuclear danger loomed, based on the perils posed by other countries obtaining nuclear weapons, as well as new arms control measures, weapons limitations, and agreements, particularly between the US and Russia for disarmament measures. At its most optimistic, the Doomsday hands were moved to 17 minutes to midnight in 1991when the US and USSR announced the complete cessation of nuclear testing.
Shockingly, despite years of nuclear arms control measures, resulting in arsenals down from a high of 70,000 bombs at the peak of the world’s nuclear insanity, to about 12,000 today, 11,000 of which are in the US and Russia with nearly 4,000 poised and ready to go, with another 1000 held by the six other nuclear weapons states—UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea–the clock has never been set closer to Doomsday than it is today—at 90 seconds to midnight!
Instead, we must demand their abolition, as we move to a nuclear free world at peace unthreatened by catastrophic annihilation. Indeed, scholars writing of the sad story of endless negotiations to control arms but never to abolish them have even coined a new term for the meaningless steps to nowhere–anti-preneurism–where instead of the US proposing abolition, or total and complete disarmament, or elimination of weapons, it is always proposing new meaningless steps towards illusory progress!
When the wall came down in Germany and Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact and freed all of occupied Eastern Europe, he proposed to Reagan that the US and Russia eliminate all our nuclear weapons, provided the US would end its “Star Wars” program to dominate and control the military use of space. Reagan turned him down and Gorbachev withdrew Russia’s offer.4
Gorbachev, anxious about the fate of East Germany, urged Reagan not to take a united Germany into NATO. The Russians lost 27 million people to the Nazi onslaught of WWII! The US assured him that NATO would not expand “one inch to the east.”5
Despite repeated request to the US from Russian President Putin to honor those US promises made to Gorbachev and again to Yeltsin, the US, driven by visions of Empire steadily expanded Nato eastward. It began with Clinton’s expansion of NATO to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, and Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia between 2009 and 20176. And during the war in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland joined NATO.
The US stations nuclear weapons in 5 states: Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and Turkey. Russia, during the Ukraine war, put nuclear weapons in Belarus.
Clinton led NATO in the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, bypassing Russia’s veto in the Security Council, violating the UN treaty we signed never to commit a war of aggression against another nation unless under imminent threat of attack;
Clinton refused Putin’s offer to each cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1000 bombs each and call all the others to the table to negotiate for their elimination, provided we stopped developing missile sites in Romania;
Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and Obama put the new missile base in Romania while Trump built another in Poland;
Obama pledged over one trillion dollars for the next 30 years for two new nuclear bomb factories, missiles, submarines, airplanes and warheads which was upped even more by Trump and Biden.7
Despite repeated requests from Russia and China to negotiate treaties to ban weapons in space and cyberwar in UN resolutions and negotiating forums, the US refuses to cooperate.8
Here are a series of steps that are most likely to lead to peace on earth if the US is ready to mobilize against what has been described as the MICIMATT (Military, Industrial, Congressional, Intelligence, Media, Academic Think Tank complex) and work for peace.
Take up repeated Russian and Chinese proposals for treaties to ban weapons in space and cyberwar
Reinstate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia and remove U.S. missiles from Romania and Poland
Remove US nuclear weapons from five NATO states in a deal for Russia removing its recently placed nuclear weapons in Belarus
Take all nuclear weapons off high alert and separate the warheads from their delivery systems as China does– the wisdom of the East
Dismantle NATO and respect and honor the United Nations
There’s little doubt that Russia and China would be willing partners in these initiatives. They have been proposing them to the United States and voting on them in the UN for more than ten years.
Alice Slater serves on the boards of World BEYOND War and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space and is an NGO representative to the United Nations for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. She is a member of the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Abolition Working Group and helped draft the Veterans For Peace Nuclear Posture Review.
