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President Obama emphasized proliferation issues at his news conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today.

Robert McNamara, who died today, is most noted for presiding over much of the escalation of the Vietnam War during the Johnson administration; he was also an increasingly outspoken advocate on nuclear non-proliferation.

In 2005, former Secretary of Defense McNamara told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “The NPT was signed by a president. It was submitted to the Senate; it was ratified by the Senate. It is today the law of the land. The U.S. government is not adhering to Article VI of the NPT and we show no signs of planning to adhere to its requirements to move forward with the elimination — not reduction, but elimination — of nuclear weapons. That was the agreement, these other countries would not develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers would move to elimination. We are violating that.”

One of the last major pieces written by McNamara was “Apocalypse Soon” in Foreign Policy.

JONATHAN GRANOFF
Granoff is the president of the Global Security Institute. In 2005, Granoff moderated an event at the United Nations that featured McNamara as a speaker. At one point, McNamara stated: “U.S. and NATO nuclear policies today are immoral, illegal, [militarily] unnecessary, very very dangerous in terms of potential accidental or inadvertent use and destructive of the non-proliferation regime.” For video, see here at about 46:30.

JACQUELINE CABASSO
Cabasso is executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, which monitors nuclear weapons policy.

She said today: “With respect to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), McNamara was right. The treaty requires the nuclear weapon states to negotiate in good faith to eliminate — not merely reduce — their nuclear arsenals. Today’s announcement that the U.S. and Russia will negotiate a modest follow-on treaty to START reestablishes the norm of verification in nuclear arms reductions, but leaves in place objectively huge arsenals for years to come, fails to address key security differences that are likely to impede meaningful nuclear disarmament in the future, and does nothing to reduce the central role of nuclear weapons in either country’s national security policies.

“In contrast, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, at their recent annual meeting, unanimously adopted a resolution calling on President Obama to announce at the 2010 NPT Review Conference the initiation of good faith multilateral negotiations on an international agreement to abolish nuclear weapons by the year 2020. I’d like to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, but if he’s serious about getting rid of nuclear weapons, he’s going to have to make a major break with the policies of both the Bush and Clinton administrations, and take on some of the most powerful and entrenched forces on earth.”

Cabasso is also U.S. Coordinator of Mayors for Peace. She is a co-author of Nuclear Disorder or Cooperative Security? U.S. Weapons of Terror, the Global Proliferation Crisis and Paths to Peace and her latest information brief is [PDF] “Rhetoric vs. Reality: Elite Disarmament Proposals and Real Disarmament Prospects.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

With the review conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) continuing at the United Nations, commentators available for interviews include:

ROBERT McNAMARA
Former Secretary of Defense McNamara said today: “The NPT was signed by a president. It was submitted to the Senate; it was ratified by the Senate. It is today the law of the land. The U.S. government is not adhering to Article VI of the NPT and we show no signs of planning to adhere to its requirements to move forward with the elimination — not reduction, but elimination — of nuclear weapons. That was the agreement, these other countries would not develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers would move to elimination. We are violating that.” McNamara wrote the article “Apocalypse Soon” in the current edition of Foreign Policy.
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DANIEL ELLSBERG
Currently in New York City participating in events related to the NPT talks, Ellsberg is author of the book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. He said today: “No one has ever characterized current U.S. nuclear policy so well, succinctly, as Robert McNamara in the current issue of Foreign Policy: ‘Immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous.’ That description has been valid for half a century. And not in one year since the NPT went into effect 35 years ago has any American administration acted effectively to escape those characteristics, nor ever honestly intended even to attempt to fulfill the Article VI ‘commitment’ in that treaty to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Ellsberg added: “No nuclear weapons state could now, or ever, persuasively justify in public possessing even as many nuclear warheads as Israel has — some 200 in 1986, perhaps 400 now — let alone the 2,000 the U.S. still deploys, inexcusably, on hair-trigger alert, still less the 4,000 to 8,000 additional weapons in our stockpile. The same applies to Russia, which maintains comparable numbers on alert and in its arsenal and, like the U.S., refuses to commit itself not to initiate nuclear war at its own discretion. De-alerting, commitment to no-first-use, a ratified comprehensive test ban, and cut-off of production of weapons-usable materials are rightly defined by a vast majority of nations in the world as legal obligations pursuant to Article VI of the NPT and as measures urgently owed by all nuclear weapons states to the survival of civilization. Along with these, immediate massive reductions in U.S. and Russian stockpiles are in order, far below the START II and SORT targets which project indefinitely numbers far above the thousand warheads that each deployed when the treaty was signed in 1968.

“But even huge reductions are not a substitute for the Article VI goal of elimination of nuclear weapons. The measures above must be implemented soon as concrete steps on a definite timetable toward the global, verified nuclear abolition. For at least 40 years it has been clear to thoughtful scientists and officials that in the long run nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation were inextricably linked. That long run will shortly be behind us. It will soon be all or none. Either ALL nations — in particular our own — forego the right to possess and threaten the use of nuclear weapons or EVERY nation will claim that right, and many more nations will act on it, sharply increasing the chance of regional nuclear wars and leakage of nuclear materials and weapons to terrorist groups.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com, @GarethPorter
Porter is co-author of a book on the U.S.-Iran crisis — From CIA Coup to the Brink of War — due out Jan. 24. His past books include Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.

He said today: “It is widely believed in the U.S. that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program, but if you follow the evidence that I documented in Manufactured Crisis, it is clear that Iran’s nuclear program was never designed to produce a nuclear weapon.”

The American Conservative is due to publish a piece by him shortly: “The Killing of Soleimani: Another Gulf of Tonkin Deception,” in which he reports that on Dec. 27 “a rocket attack on the K1 Iraqi base near Kirkuk killed an American contractor, as the ‘Operation Inherent Resolve’ command confirmed. The Trump administration immediately went into crisis mode, discussing both killing Soleimani and retaliatory strikes against Kataib Hezbollah. …

“If there was indeed an investigation that turned up information indicating that Kataib Hezbollah was responsible, it would certainly have been released publicly, but no further information on the incident has been forthcoming from either Iraqi or U.S. commands. The only specific information available was a Reuters report from ‘security sources’ who ‘said security forces found a launchpad for Katyusha rockets inside an abandoned vehicle near the base,’ which further deepened the mystery. But Pompeo was eager for the United States to provoke a military confrontation with Iran, just as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was eager to begin airstrikes against North Vietnamese targets in 1964.”

[RootsAction.org will hold a news conference “NATO and U.S. Foreign Policy: Dangers Ahead” at the National Press Club on Tuesday, which will include former State Department officials Matthew Hoh and Ann Wright. There will also be teach-ins and protests in D.C., see: NoToNato.org.]

JAMES CARDEN, [in D.C.], jamescarden09 at gmail.com
Carden is a contributing writer at The Nation and the executive editor for the American Committee for East-West Accord.

He just wrote the piece “NATO Turns 70“: “On April 4, 1949, representatives of the United States, Canada, and 10 European countries, including the United Kingdom and France, gathered in Washington to sign the North Atlantic Treaty, a defense pact created at the urging of wartime allies France and Britain as a means to, in the words of NATO’s first secretary general, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, ‘keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.’ …

“To mark the 70th anniversary of that occasion, NATO foreign ministers will descend on Washington for a ministerial meeting, various think-tank panels and commemorations, all to be topped off by an address from NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg to a joint meeting of Congress. …

“One of NATO’s first major post-Cold War missions, the 78-day aerial bombing of Serbia, nearly ended in disaster when NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark ordered British General Mike Jackson, commander of NATO’s troops in Kosovo, to retake the airfield in Pristina, the capital, from the Russians — by force if necessary.

“Jackson refused: ‘I’m not going to start Third World War for you.’ …

“In an open letter to the Clinton administration in June 1997, dozens of high-ranking former policy-makers and diplomats, including Senators Bill Bradley, Gary Hart, and Sam Nunn; Paul H. Nitze, Ambassador Jack Matlock, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, warned that ‘NATO expansion is neither necessary nor desirable and that this ill-conceived policy can and should be put on hold.’

“The diplomat-scholar George F. Kennan also foresaw trouble. Writing just after the New Year in 1997, Kennan predicted that ‘the Russians will not react wisely and moderately to the decision of NATO to extend its boundaries to the Russian frontiers.’ For Kennan, the decision was ‘the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period.’ Time has proven the skeptics correct.

“The policy of NATO expansion is largely responsible for the dangerous deterioration in relations between Russia and the West and lies at the heart of the ongoing Ukraine crisis. …

“Instead of a self-serving, self-justifying anniversary celebration, NATO should address what has gone so wrong over the past three decades by reexamining its policies of eastward expansion and non-defensive deployment and seriously consider adopting a nuclear ‘no first use’ policy.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee “has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2017 to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The organization is receiving the award for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons. … Five of the states that currently have nuclear weapons – the USA, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China — have already committed to this objective through their accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 1970.” See text and video. Also see IPA news release from last month: “More Than 40 Nations Sign Nuclear Ban Treaty in First Hour.

While many are already depicting this move as an anti-Trump pronouncement, the Obama administration was similarly opposed to the nuclear ban treaty. See 2013 IPA news release: “Obama’s Nuclear ‘Smoke and Mirrors,’” — also, “Obama at Nuclear Summit: A Call to Respect NPT, Not Pursue New Cold War,” and “Will Obama Renounce His $1 Trillion Nuclear Buildup?”

ALICE SLATER, alicejslater at gmail.com, @aliceslater
Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and serves on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War. In July, she wrote the piece “Democracy Breaks Out at the UN as 122 Nations Vote to Ban the Bomb” for The Nation, which states: “Upon the adoption of the ban treaty, the United States, United Kingdom and France issued a statement that ‘We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it’ as it ‘does not address the security concerns that continue to make nuclear deterrence necessary’ and will create ‘even more divisions at a time … of growing threats, including those from the DPRK’s ongoing proliferation efforts.’ Ironically, North Korea was the only nuclear power to vote for the ban treaty, last October, when the UN’s First Committee for Disarmament forwarded a resolution for ban-treaty negotiations to the General Assembly.”

FREDRIK HEFFERMEHL, [in Norway] fredpax at online.no
Heffermehl is with Nobel Peace Prize Watch and wrote the book The Nobel Peace Prize: What Nobel Really Wanted. He has frequently criticized the selection of Nobel Peace Prize winners who did not actually fit the criteria laid out by Alfred Nobel. This year however, before the award, the group stated: “ICAN will be a worthy laureate in keeping with Alfred Nobel´s testament.”

IRA HELFAND, MD, ihelfand at igc.org
Helfand is past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and is currently co-president of that group’s global federation, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He was featured on an IPA news release in July: “122 Nations Vote to Outlaw Nuclear Weapons, U.S., Russia Collude Against Effort.”

Additional background: Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told IPA in 2005: “The NPT was signed by a president. It was submitted to the Senate; it was ratified by the Senate. It is today the law of the land. The U.S. government is not adhering to Article VI of the NPT and we show no signs of planning to adhere to its requirements to move forward with the elimination — not reduction, but elimination — of nuclear weapons. That was the agreement, these other countries would not develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers would move to elimination. We are violating that.”

The UN Security Council resolution passed Monday on Iran’s nuclear program begins its second paragraph: “Reaffirming its commitment to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the need for all States Party to that Treaty to comply fully with their obligations…”

But nuclear analysts and activists — including former U.S. government officials who negotiated the treaty like Robert McNamara (see below) — have stated that the U.S. is constantly violating the NPT. That treaty — which the U.S. signed in 1968 — was based on the grand bargain that the non-nuclear weapons states, like Iran, would not acquire nuclear weapons and in return, the nuclear weapons states would move toward “cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery.”

On Thursday, Secretary of State John Kerry, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew will discuss the new Iran nuclear deal before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Also on Thursday, Adam Scheinman, U.S. Ambassador to the NPT Review Conference will speak about it at the National Defense University. See accuracy.org/calendar for critical upcoming events.

ALICE SLATER, aslater at rcn.com
Slater is with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the Abolition 2000 coordinating committee. She said today: “The hypocrisy of the U.S. and other nuclear weapons states who are modernizing their nuclear arsenals, with the U.S. having actually tested in Nevada a new dummy nuke bunker buster bomb this month, is breathtaking as we single out Iran for special and more stringent rules for compliance with the NPT than we require of other countries such as Japan and Brazil who have huge uranium enrichment programs, for example.” See reports from earlier this month: “Air force drops dummy nuclear bomb in Nevada in first controversial test to update cold war arsenal” and “Russia Considers U.S. Nuclear Bomb Test ‘Open Provocation.'”

Slater added: “The Obama administration has announced that the U.S. government will be spending $1 trillion dollars over the next 30 years for two new bomb factories, planes, missiles and submarines to deliver new nuclear weapons. That’s totally inconsistent with its pledge under the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty to make ‘good faith efforts’ for nuclear disarmament, a pledge which the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996 requires the U.S. and other NPT nuclear weapons states to ‘bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.'” See IPA release: “As Anti Nuclear Weapons Activists Released, 91 Nations Pressing Abolition.”

Sr. MEGAN RICE, mrice12 at gmail.com
Rice, a nun, is one of the Transform Now Plowshares, a group of three activists who were convicted of allegedly intending to harm national security by entering into a Y-12 National Security Complex, a nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The activists spent two years in prison before their sentences were finally overturned in May. Their actions — which including pouring blood and painting “The Fruit of Justice is Peace” — sparked Congressional hearings on the vulnerability of major nuclear facilities.

She said today: “The facility we entered into at Oak Ridge is illegal — it’s producing weapons of mass destruction. The government calls it ‘modernizing’ — but they’re making some 80 bombs a year. It’s unconscionable that we know the effects of nuclear weapons and continue to build them, threatening all of life. And of course, some are profiteering on these weapons while poor people sleep on the street tonight.

“Instead, we need to all transform now into truly life-enhancing alternative socio-economics and eco-friendly alternatives — which could be disassembling weapons of mass destruction and cleaning up the assembly sites.”

See the Washington Post coverage of their trial, including a video interview of Sister Rice. Also: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge” and “3 Peace Activists Sentenced for Breaking into Nuclear Site.”

Background: The U.S. obligation to disarm under the NPT has been acknowledged by former Secretary of Defense McNamara (the U.S. signed the treaty during the Johnson administration, in which McNamara served). In 2005, he told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “The NPT was signed by a president. It was submitted to the Senate; it was ratified by the Senate. It is today the law of the land. The U.S. government is not adhering to Article VI of the NPT and we show no signs of planning to adhere to its requirements to move forward with the elimination — not reduction, but elimination — of nuclear weapons. That was the agreement, these other countries would not develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers would move to elimination. We are violating that.” In 2009, shortly before his death, McNamara wrote the piece “Apocalypse Soon.”

ANAND GOPAL
Afghanistan correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.
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SONALI KOLHATKAR
Co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence.
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NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon, the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He said today: “Among the ‘best and brightest’ who are set to oversee foreign policy for the next president, there appears to be a consensus for escalating the war in Afghanistan. The assumption bears an ominous resemblance to the political atmosphere and media tone during the mid-1960s, when the conventional wisdom was that everyone with a modicum of smarts knew that upping U.S. troop levels in Vietnam was a necessity.

“No less than in Vietnam several decades ago, the prospects for a military victory in Afghanistan are extremely slim. Far more likely is a protracted version of what CBS anchor Walter Cronkite famously called ‘a bloody stalemate’ in February 1968. But, in 2008, more important than whether the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan can bring ‘victory’ is the question of whether it should continue.

“Right now, the basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place — including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate over Washington’s options. In an atmosphere reminiscent of 1965, when almost all of the esteemed public voices concurred with the decision by newly elected President Lyndon Johnson to deploy more troops to Vietnam, the tenet that the United States must send additional troops to Afghanistan is axiomatic in U.S. news media, on Capitol Hill and — as far as can be discerned — at the top of the incoming administration.

“But the problem with such a foreign-policy ‘no brainer’ is that the parameters of thinking have already been put in the rough equivalent of a lockbox. Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson approached Vietnam policy options no more rigidly than Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and Barack Obama appear poised to pursue Afghanistan policy options. Such destructive group-think, including wonkish faith in the efficacy of massive violence, caused Martin Luther King Jr. to denounce what he called ‘the madness of militarism.'”

Solomon was an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. He will be in Washington, D.C., until December 9.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The White House claims of the Nuclear Security Summit taking place in Washington, D.C. this week: “The Obama administration’s focus on nuclear security is part of a comprehensive nuclear policy presented by the President in Prague in 2009. In that speech, President Obama described a four-pronged agenda to pursue a world without nuclear weapons. He laid out new U.S. policies and initiatives towards nuclear disarmament, nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear security, and nuclear energy.” See accuracy.org/calendar for upcoming events.

Sr. MEGAN RICE, [in D.C.] mrice12 at gmail.com
Rice, a nun, is one of the Transform Now Plowshares, a group of three activists who were convicted of allegedly intending to harm national security by entering into the Y-12 National Security Complex, a nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The activists spent two years in prison before their sentences were finally overturned last year. Their actions — which included pouring blood and painting “The Fruit of Justice is Peace” — sparked Congressional hearings on the vulnerability of major nuclear facilities. See Washington Post coverage of their trial, including a video interview of Sister Rice. Also: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge,” and “3 Peace Activists Sentenced for Breaking into Nuclear Site.”

She said today: “The reality is that the rewards of the nuclear weapons industrial complex are so vast, unaccountable and surely at this stage, ‘a dark hole’ — how can anyone account for close to $10 trillion dollars in 70 years, let alone the next three decades for $1 trillion plus more? The ultimate in profiteering.” See: “The Trillion Dollar Question the Media Have Neglected to Ask Presidential Candidates” about the non-discussion on the $1 trillion allocated toward “modernizing” U.S. nuclear weapons.

GREG MELLO, gmello at lasg.org, @TrishABQ
Mello is executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group and is a leading expert on nuclear weapons.

He said today: “The Nuclear Security Summits are a spectacle designed to enhance the status and power of the United States, using the nuclear security issue as a foil. ‘Nuclear security,’ as a meme, has become much more, and also much less, than it seems. It is much more, because anti-terrorist, nonproliferation agenda has grown to encompass the entire agenda, displacing nuclear disarmament entirely, even as hypocrisy. It is much less than it seems because nuclear disarmament is off the table as a topic for the ‘serious’ people.”

While a letter “35 Nobel Laureates in the Sciences Call on World Leaders to Take Action on Nuclear Terrorism” [PDF] has been made public, Mello counters: “They are only explicitly concerned with SOME nuclear terrorism, that which is still potential, not actual. They are worried about nuclear explosives, and radiation dispersal devices, which do not now exist. They do not mention the thousands of nuclear weapons which DO exist, and which ARE being used in postures of threat.”

Background: Mello, in his detailed review of the latest U.S. Nuclear Posture Review in 2010, noted: “Both the text of the NPR and Secretary [Robert] Gate’s oral remarks were careful to leave open the possibility of nuclear use (either reprisal or preemptive first strike, as present doctrine allows) in the event of planned or actual biological attacks that exceed some unspecified threat or danger threshold.” That is, the U.S. government continues to reserve the right to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

The U.S. obligation to disarm under the NPT has been acknowledged by former Secretary of Defense McNamara (the U.S. signed the treaty during the Johnson administration, in which McNamara served). In 2005, he told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “The NPT was signed by a president. It was submitted to the Senate; it was ratified by the Senate. It is today the law of the land. The U.S. government is not adhering to Article VI of the NPT and we show no signs of planning to adhere to its requirements to move forward with the elimination — not reduction, but elimination — of nuclear weapons. That was the agreement, these other countries would not develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear powers would move to elimination. We are violating that.” In 2009, shortly before his death, McNamara wrote the piece “Apocalypse Soon.”