Miki you are confused, it is the neutron bomb you speak of, the one that is outlawed. The Hydrogen Bomb needs an A bomb to trigger it and it is dirty very dirty. Places like Bimini an Bikini atolls and Utah attest to the lingering traces of death they leave even today.

Even without it we have DU ammunition, Depleted Uranium which isn’t very depleted at all poisons hundreds of acres and millions of people from Iraq to Serbia and is still in use by certain countries including the USA.

Now we have both sonic based and microwave based human control devices that cause intense pain but without the damage. Some will be used here anytime soon in case the populace gets restive and demands change away from the incipient fascism we have been getting for the past 21 years.

I suspect that when we finally lose what is left of our republic the Afghanis will get a taste of the second most powerful ordinance in the world—-fuel-air bombs. Then the Grave Yard of Empires will itself be killed by a new kind of empire, then it will be rendered as just a huge grave yard itself. But that is only going to happen if the oligarchs here win their battle against democratic-republican gov’t. So far they are winning.

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Sepharad, September 17 at 1:47 am #

ardee,

re “This world of ours, walking on the roof of hell gazing at flowers”—this sounds very familiar but I can’t place the poet

Old Haiku poem, author anonymous…..

ardee,

re “This world of ours, walking on the roof of hell gazing at flowers”—this sounds very familiar but I can’t place the poet. Auden? Rupert Brooke? Surely someone in the belly of the beast, wondering why it’s not general knowledge.

Am a great admirer of G.B. Shaw. (Once chose him and his work as the subject of a first-year English Comp. term paper when, half-way through, one of the grad students told me that my professor was a major Shavian scholar and suggested it would be prudent to select another writer. I didn’t; figured that even if he didn’t like it his criticisms alone might make it unnecessary to read more lit-crit books on the man.) I think he was a little harsh saying that newspapers couldn’t distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization—maybe because he was an ardent Fenian living in the oppressor England?

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009 Bret Stephens

Events are fast pushing Israel toward a pre-emptive military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, probably by next spring.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203917304574410672271269390.html

Sepharad, thank you.  Small world dept.:I was working pt time for LCDC in NOLA, in the mid60s as I began my art career.  (Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee, on Dryades St. across from the Black WYCA.
I did research, art charts for court and “general dogsbody” work. I leaned towards law and teaching history as a student, but the “art” drive was strongest, and I made the break with teaching for art. I was “helped” by the strong bias against women teaching at the college level, when I was a grad student, as well as bias in law firms.
Am still fond of lawyers.)

All of this historical archival material concerning the premeditated murder of humanity, seems like a relic from the cold war era, but is it?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8253822.stm

The sheer arrogance of the leaders of world’s nuclear
powers is rotten enough; but further, they presume to
take on the role of the gods. The absurdity of this
is that they lack the wisdom and the humor of the
gods. They have been consumed by the game they
invented and now even it’s out of their control, and
ultimately, they become victims along with ourselves
of their very own game. MAD (mutually assured
destruction) is the culmination of our nurturing of
sophist thought and couldn’t have been more
appropriately named. Fortunately these megalomaniacs
can only destroy civilizations and not the earth
itself; at least not yet.

The Amerircan people, especially the Educated, do not want to know the simple truth about the US power system.  It is disguised by the Patriotic bullshit in the learned and mass media and other truth organs.  I am using the simple concept of ‘bullshit’ here in a philosophical sense, following the learned droppings of H. G. Frankfort in his trenchant philosophical treatise ON BULLSHIT.

The American tradition is a homicidal tradition.  It was founded on the homicide of the original Amerians, the Indians, and continued in the homicidal slavery of the Africans.  The Founding Fathers were a homicidal ruling class, governing a people who all had guns to hunt and kill game and Indians and each other.

The US Revolution was a business decision taking by the ruling class to disconnect from England.  the 1812 war was an attempt to appropriate Canada.  But of course schoolbook history is largely an exercise in public relations and none of these obvious truths are not only not emphasized, they are excluded from the mainstream truth, and thus from the conscious thought of Americans.

the point is that the major danger of nuclear war in the world comes from the US power system.  It is saddles with an obsolete economic and political system and so tries to maintain its power by war and police violence.  It’s threat of invasion under the War on Terrorism causes the spread of nuclear weapons among small nations to fend it off, or to fend off Israel, which the US uses as a threat. Not that it isn’t a threat on its own, as Seymour Hirsh outlined in THE SAMSON OPTION.

The US is the major danger of nuclear war in the world, and homicide of hundreds of millions of people.  This threat of war is called Defense in the US, or Security.  If the American people want to reduce this threat, the population must oppose its own powere system.  Americans are afriad to do so which contributes to the main problem.  Since we are afraid to talk about it, we are afraid to think about it.  And unless we think about the dirty truth, we can’t mobilize to stop it.

PSmith, September 12 at 12:16 am #

Thanks for the link; excellent! And yes, the 1st 15
minutes was boring but the rest was superb, thanks.

Couldnt verify that particular Zappa quote, but:

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
 
  Frank Zappa
 
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.
 
  Frank Zappa

I’ll give you a simple formula for straightening out the problems of the United States. First, you tax the churches. You take the tax off of capital gains and the tax off of savings. You decriminalize all drugs and tax them same way as you do alcohol. You decriminalize prostitution. You make gambling legal. That will put the budget back on the road to recovery, and you’ll have plenty of tax revenue coming in for all of your social programs, and to run the army.
 
  Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993), Interview with this submitter, New York City, 5/08/1980

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer”

Frank Zappa

The Cold War was an absurd concept to begin with. It was, in fact, a contest between two major Capitalist forces vying to see which would reap the most profit. A contest to win market share if you will.

From the decades of this stupidity to the decades of the stupidity called a “war on terror” leaves in place the profit for the military industrial complex.

Now it seems that, after the short hiatus caused by the disappearance of the USSR the “cold war” is once again ramping up with Russia, again a fight to control market share.

It doesnt help that the people of this world, including our own nation and Russia as well, are in the dark as to motive and method.

The so-called “free press is , in large part, responsible for this, I offer:

“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.” GB Shaw

“This world of ours,
walking on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers”

NYCartist, appreciate all your posts on this topic. If I remember correctly, LBJ became quite sarcastic when someone on the Joint Chiefs suggested a “tactical” nuclear weapon. The idea resurfaced to a friendlier reception under Nixon. And the mind boggles at the JCs under Kennedy who seem to have been actually gaming nuclear attack results on China and the U.S.S.R.

I do remember the Pentagon Papers issue, and helped write an amicus brief on behalf of the NYTimes after they published it (as sr. researcher at the Freedom of Informationn Center).

And I share your feeling that if there ever would be a nuclear exchange involving this country I’d just as soon that me and mine would be at Ground Zero.

NightGaunt, the Holocaust was actually much higher than 11 or 12 million when you add in the Russians, who lost 20 million people (see “Ivan’s War”). I’ve never seen it as an exclusively Jewish tragedy. But some of us Jews took—take—it so seriously because it killed one-third of the world’s Jews. There aren’t that many of us. A camp full of Russian POWs, by the way, were the first human beings exterminated with cyclon B; the Nazi techs were just trying to remove the bugs from the system and the Russian POWs were handy, would stop trying to escape, and would not live to fight another day. Oh—the Russians were the first to liberate a killing camp, Majdenek, and took a lot of photos which were sent to FDR and Churchill, who found them completely unbelievable, and dismissed them as a Russian fake.

@PSmith, Thanks. Help always appreciated.

(Posting this before I read the newer comments, after reading the excerpt/article.)
My reaction was so strong, that having read it in print format (less peripheral visual distraction), I accidentally deleted myself from the internet.

As a woman, on this day, nearing 70, I have some initial thoughts: Memory - said as an adult, if there’s going to be a nuclear attack on NYC, I want to be near the Empire State Building (where I actually do ((st))roll, as my illness permits getting out infrequently with spouse pushing my wheelchair), the reputed “ground zero” (before the WTC got the name).  I want to miss the aftermath.

  Reading the piece, right from the top, as a woman, (who knows something about the “nuclear” problem), I kept thinking how it was kind of a report of the mechanical, the war machines and exercises which I do not relate to, in any way.
As a teacher in my early 20s, I marched in 1961, taking the day off from work, not as a sick day, saying, “fire me, if you must” to get JFK to sign the nuclear testing ban.  A big march of mostly women,in Manhattan.  I was one of the young teachers who refused to take part, telling our junior high school students to go into the hall, and cover their heads at the alarm, for “safety”.  We refused to do it, citywide resistance of teachers because it was stupid, it would not protect anyone.
The NYC Bd. of Education discontinued the drills because of teacher protest.  And JFK signed the ban.
So, it is possible to have some small positive results through resistance.

  My other thought was, while reading this piece, as
Ellsberg, for whom I have HUGE respect, seemed to be
calling on the public to do something to stop the government from using nuclear weapons in the future.
I’m not so sure we can.  I do recall hearing that
Nixon didn’t use nuclear weapons because of the mass protests against the Vietnam War that were going on.
Is it true?

  I also remember that when India and Pakistan were near one of their armed conflicts recently, a showdown time, people in one of the countries, who had no idea of what happens after nuclear bombs are used, were “for” using them on the “enemy”.  So, people need to know, especially the young, what happens to people who are exposed to radiation, as well as what happens when a bomb is dropped.

  The results of the US using depleted uranium in Iraq, for example, as well as the aftermath of Chernoble, and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors and ilness are good “teaching” materials to show what nuclear “does”.  There’s the examples of workers in the US being sickened, and their kids and kids’ kids, from working in, with or near uranium mining in the US.  I have faith in the people of the US and of the world.  (Howard Zinn’s “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” is my favorite book.  He is the ultimate teacher of social change and faith in people.)

“But planned slaughter of 600 million civilians—10 times the total death count in World War II, a hundred times the scale of the Holocaust?”

The Holocaust has the number 11-12 million dead, but the Jews who suffered most from it have taken it as their own. We are to ignore the other 5-6 million people, that is what disgusts me. Every time I see this I am reminded of it and how these others must also be remembered too.

I am glad he is addressing this serious problem that hangs, like a Sword of Damocles over all our heads. So many weapons and so little control. We have missed nuclear war by accident at least 4 times. In our world anyway. [You can bet that various alternate realities didn’t do so well.] Now we are in an even greater risk now with the proliferation of such technology and the lack of safeguards on them. Only a misanthropic self loathing species would put a knife to its collective throat and risk mass suicide.

Blackspeare, September 11 at 10:51 am #
But on the other hand a strategic world wide nuclear
attack coupled with a protective umbrella aka SDI could
very well usher in a thousand years of Pax Americana. 
However, it must be understood that any medical
condition arising from such action will be considered
to be pre-existing.
======================================================
Hey, that’s not funny; it’s hilarious.

But on the other hand a strategic world wide nuclear attack coupled with a protective umbrella aka SDI could very well usher in a thousand years of Pax Americana.  However, it must be understood that any medical condition arising from such action will be considered to be pre-existing.

For my part, little as it is, I joined each of the organizations Ellsberg noted. I was already in one, but these seem good—for what they are…well intentioned. 

“Every little bit helps.”
-Harpo Marx

I have actually been considering the nuclear cascade we see happening around the world these last few months.  It is an unfortunate fact that this genie, released from its bottle in 1945, can never be returned.  The cost of acquiring nuclear weapons goes down with each new generation of development.  The technical knowledge, once the exclusive property of a very small group of very intelligent men and women, has now become all to common.  The specter of Dr. Kahn selling Pakistan’s nuclear secrets to anyone who was interested indicates how far down the rat hole we have fallen.  The very desirable idea of eliminating all nuclear weapons is one we should pursue but I doubt it will ever happen.  Humanity seems all but incapable of making the leap.

Track those who profit from war and ye shall find those who start war.

The liberal arts educated have stolen our $22,036.00.

We’re trying to get it back.

http://www.prosefights.org/nmlegal/ncualove/walters.htm#director

We’re going to try to use LOGIC on them.

Rule 79. Books and Records Kept by the Clerk and Entries Therein
(a) Civil Docket. The clerk shall keep a book known as “civil docket” of such form and style as may be prescribed by the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts with the approval of the Judicial Conference of the United States, and shall enter therein each civil action to which these rules are made applicable. Actions shall be assigned consecutive file numbers. The file number of each action shall be noted on the folio of the docket whereon the first entry of the action is made. All papers filed with the clerk, all process issued and returns made thereon, all appearances, orders, verdicts, and judgments shall be entered chronologically in the civil docket on the folio assigned to the action and shall be marked with its file number. These entries shall be brief but shall show the nature of each paper filed or writ issued and the substance of each order or judgment of the court and of the returns showing execution of process. The entry of an order or judgment shall show the date the entry is made. When in an action trial by jury has been properly demanded or ordered the clerk shall enter the word “jury” on the folio assigned to that action.

“They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.” 

Liberal arts grads think differently, we learned from experience.

http://home.comcast.net/~bpayne37/whitman59/whitman59after.htm#overseers

People educated similar to Ryan Crocker will likely be making the decision as to whether Iran is bombed or not. Be terrified.

pre-read comment: Howard Zinn tells the story of Ellsberg and his wife, coming over to the Zinn’s home
(Roslyn, Zinn’s wife) and the four friends going to the movies.  (I don’t know the name of Ellsberg’s wife.)  Ellsberg asked if he could leave a package while they went to the movies - “Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid”.  The package was the Pentagon Papers and I think it was the night before Ellsberg was going to give them to Congress.  Zinn said he didn’t know
what was in the package.*
  *Sen. Mike Gravel (Alaska,Dem) tells the story,
on DemocracyNow, of how he got to read the Pentagon Papers on the Senate floor - all of it,
I think.  He got it into hearings in a committee
on buildings and went on reading for hours…

While the following might sound Kafkaesq it may be the only tru/practical way to
stop “mna” from obliterating hisself. Still here’s omop’s proposal:

  Have the UN under a Swiss committe ascertain that every nation’s capital city
have placed in it two or more nuclear bomb tha will automatically go off within
minutes of nucekar attack by anone against anyone else. For strict compliance
and technological needs have Japanese technicians certify installations.

A “brave new world” maybe, hopefully could emerge from this final Holocaust!

“Mandrake, do you recall what Clemenceau once said about war? ... He said war
was too important to be left to the generals.  When he said that ... he might have
been right.  But today, war is too important to be left to politicians.  They have
neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought.”