Nuclear Alert

...Like Caldicott, Wittner warns that thousands of nuclear weapons "remain on alert, ready to massacre hundreds of millions of men, women, and children and turn what is left of the Earth into a radioactive wasteland...

...And even though the Soviet Union is more than a decade in the grave, 2,260 of those targets are in Russia...

...With the end of the Cold War, which lessened the dangers even further, the movement receded again, Wittner notes...

...Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive...

...Caldicott highlights perhaps the most dangerous risk today, that of accidental nuclear war...

...In an unprecedented use of prior restraint, a federal judge accepted the government's arguments and gagged this magazine for eight months in 1979, prohibiting it from publishing "The H-Bomb Secret: How We Got It, Why We're Telling It," by Howard Morland...

...My modest ambition is only to help people see through the abstract haze of policy debate and think about them in concrete terms," he writes...

...His purpose is to demystify nuclear weapons...

...And as the article explained, to make an H-bomb, you would need to have "the resources of at least a medium-sized government" and the expertise that is "beyond the capability of all but the most industrially sophisticated nations...

...In The New Nuclear Danger, published in 2002, she does so again, recapitulating the devastating consequences of such a conflict, including nuclear winter...

...In this, he has succeeded...

...Recounting the history of nuclear arms control and disarmament without referring to the anti-nuclear movement is like telling the story of civil rights legislation without referring to the civil rights movement," he argues in the last volume...

...Wittner also gives direct action groups their due, citing the work of the Berrigan brothers and Women's Strike for Peace, among others...

...He contends, though, that "the nuclear arms control provisions were modest" since "the warheads could simply be placed in storage, thus enabling the two nations to reconstitute their previous nuclear arsenals fairly quickly...

...militarism must be used to protect American global business interests, that Russia is not to be trusted, and that China may need provoking into a new Cold War arms race...

...A working nuclear shield above the United States would be the equivalent of giving a sniper a bulletproof vest," she writes...

...The judge, Robert W. Warren, in granting the injunction, said, "I want to think a long, hard time before I'd give a hydrogen bomb to Idi Amin...

...At the last moment, the missile veered off course...

...The theme throughout The Struggle Against the Bomb is that anti-nuclear activism played a large-and at times, criticalpart in slowing the arms race and saving us from catastrophe, at least so far...

...The weapons contractors, the labs, and the rightwing think tanks all fuel the nuclear madness, Caldicott says, with Star Wars being a case in point...

...government...

...In an age of increasing government repression under George W Bush and John Ashcroft, Knoll's spirit of defiance is all the more needed today...

...Any country with the wherewithal to build such a bomb could easily obtain the information that Morland, a freelance writer, gathered himself...

...In 1982, 48 percent of the American people believed that nuclear war was likely in the near future, according to one poll...

...688 pages...

...And the buzz about the H-Bomb case was still reverberating around the office...

...She maintains that "the world is in a position even more dangerous than it was at the height of Reagan's buildup of nuclear weapons and Star Wars dreams...

...There is now enough explosive power in the combined nuclear arsenals of the world to 'overkill' every person on Earth thirty-two times," she writes...

...The anti-nuclear movement in the United States never completely faded, however...

...While Reagan and Gorbachev did not disarm the world, they did end up making significant reductions in some of the most threatening weapons systems, and Gorbachev led the way in halting nuclear testing and production...

...Or take Plate 9, which shows two of these bombs on a forklift ready to go into the hangar, and a soldier tugging on one of them with a rope as if the weapon were some recalcitrant horse that doesn't want to go into the barn...

...One way he did that was through his Star Wars initiative...

...nuclear war maze, which he completed prior to September 11 at a time when access was astonishingly easy...

...Even then it would be no easy task...

...Most Americans are probably unaware that the United States and Russia each have about 2,000 nuclear weapons that are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired at an instant's notice...

...U.S...

...It pitted this magazine against the mighty power of the U.S...

...This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Progressive's H-bomb story, which prompted a classic First Amendment battle...

...But she is right on the money about the hawks in the Bush Administration, who believe "that America is the heart of the universe, that U.S...

...And he calls us to organize once more to meet this challenge...

...President Boris Yeltsin, sitting at that computer being advised on how to launch a nuclear war by his military officers, had only a three-minute interval to make a launch decision...

...The result was predictable enough: a gradually escalating nuclear arms race," he writes...

...Debunking the rhetoric of a defensive nuclear umbrella, she recognizes it as an offensive device...

...He presents eighty-seven color plates from his journey through the U.S...

...This mass fear made the Nuclear Freeze Campaign of the 1980s so popular that even Reagan was forced to hear- and try to coopt-its anti-nuclear message...

...Face to Face with the Bomb: Nuclear Reality After the Cold War Photographs and Text by Paul Shamb-room, With an introduction by Richard Rhodes...

...policy shifted because of pressure generated by the anti-nuclear campaign," Wittner writes...

...And Plate 56 is a beautiful fall scene in a northern Wisconsin forest, marred only by an antenna wire that crosses the picture like a laundry line...

...In his prologue, Shambroom recognizes, as Morland did before him, how secrecy and shroudedness conspire to keep Americans unaware of the dangers...

...This is the analogy that you must now apply to the planet and in particular to your country...

...His first volume, One World or None, goes through 1953...

...Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present By Lawrence S. Wittner Stanford University Press...

...peace movement interests me most...

...He says the protests against the Vietnam War diverted attention from the nuclear issue...

...Wittner provides impressive detail on the disarmament movements in Europe, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Brazil, among other places...

...And new groups began to take shape during the 1970s: Greenpeace, the Center for Defense Information, Mobilization for Survival, the Rocky Flats Action Group, the Clamshell Alliance, and a revived Physicians for Social Responsibility...

...He was arrested more than twenty-five times and served two six-month sentences for his actions...

...Volume Two, Resisting the Bomb, takes us from 1954 through 1970...

...Plate 50, in Washington State, depicts a lake in the front, with evergreen trees on the hills behind, and white clouds in the sky, while a Trident submarine floats next to a pier on the far right...

...We must, instead, revive what Wittner calls "the biggest mass movement in modern history...

...For instance, the cover photo consists of a row of nine shiny white one-megaton nuclear bombs in a Louisiana hangar lying on their bellies, as a soldier sweeps the floor next to them...

...It's natural to want, to need, not to believe that hardware for our extinction exists, is made of real nuts and bolts, and is kept at the ready by living, breathing, human beings," Shambroom writes in his powerful prologue...

...A year after the big case, he left The Progressive to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against nuclear weapons...

...Plate 35 shows a winter landscape at dawn or dusk on the prairies of North Dakota, with a railroad train in the distance and a Minuteman II missile silo in the right foreground...

...That is why these books are so valuable, and why the effort that Howard Morland and The Progressive made back in 1979 is still as urgent today as ever...

...Eventually, these weapons are going to be used, just as every other weapon that's been developed by humankind eventually has been used," he told me in 1996...

...And we still have no conception-we, as a society-of the incredible, uniquely devastating, destructive force of nuclear weapons...

...But public opinion remained overwhelmingly opposed to nuclear weapons...

...citizens...

...The Pentagon now is targeting 3,000 sites for nuclear attack, up from 2,500 in 1989, she writes...

...Taught in journalism and law school classes around the country, the H-bomb story has become a landmark First Amendment case...

...We can't leave nuclear policy in the hands of politicians and arms contractors...

...Even though Morland had obtained all his data from public sources and interviews, the government insisted that he was "breaching security...

...Seeing is believing...

...Ronald Reagan's nuclear saber rattling galvanized the peace movement, Wittner writes...

...Another was to discuss at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986 the possibility of getting rid of all nuclear weapons...

...he underscores the hellishness by focusing on the immaculate...

...It was not a blueprint for a hydrogen bomb, and it did not let some terrorist make one in his basement...

...All in all, though, he defends his thesis well...

...She ends with a special plea to U.S...

...Helen Caldicott has spent the last twenty-five years trying to make vivid the threat of nuclear war...

...Had the movement been stronger, he argues, "substantially more might have been accomplished...

...But his discussion of the U.S...

...She also engages in hyperbole when she says Lockheed Martin "literally controls the fate of the Earth...

...He shows us the triad: the bombers, the intercontinental ballistic missiles, and the submarines that carry nuclear weapons...

...And his third and final volume, Toward Nuclear Abolition, just completed last year, brings it all up to the present...

...Warren, like many other commentators, mischaracterized The Progressive's story...

...We can't hide from the threat of nuclear war...

...For the first time in history, the Russian computer containing nuclear-launch codes was opened," she writes...

...For Sam Day, who was our managing editor and played an instrumental role in the Morland story, the First Amendment fight was secondary...

...He wanted to pierce the veil of nuclear secrecy so as to shock the American people into an awareness of the horror in our midst...

...Like the H-Bomb story, this book is designed to awaken Americans who may be lulled into believing that the threat has passed...

...144 pages...

...Unlike other historians who focus on the intricacies of arms control agreements and the actors involved in drafting them, Wittner keeps his eyes trained on the grassroots movements for peace...

...Given the myriad assaults of the Bush Administration, including the mendacious war against Iraq, it is perhaps too easy to lose sight of the nuclear threat that still envelops us...

...32.95...

...He cites one poll in the late 1990s that showed 87 percent of Americans supported a nuclear weapons ban...

...During most of the Carter Administration, nuclear arms control policies "at key junctures" were "affected by the pressure of anti-nuclear public opinion and by its organizational expression, the anti-nuclear movement...

...Recent revelations have borne this out: The difficulty that Iraq, Iran, and Libya have had in making a nuclear weapon while investing years and billions of dollars to do so testifies to the enormity of the scientific and technical challenges...

...She provides a helpful chapter, as well, on the use of depleted uranium in the first Gulf War and in Kosovo...

...This places the Earth on a razor's edge...

...If you or your child was threatened with a lethal disease, you would do everything in your power to save that life," she writes...

...To drive home the reality of nuclear weapons, photographer Paul Shambroom has come out with his amazing book, Face to Face with the Bomb...

...The government invoked the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which made it illegal to disclose any data concerning the "design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic weapons," unless the government itself had declassified it...

...For Erwin Knoll, who was the editor of The Progressive back then, it was his shining moment...

...I've seen that nuclear weapons are real, and I'm terrified in a way that I never was before...

...Wittner has a little bit of trouble explaining why George W Bush and Vladimir Putin agreed to reduce their number of nuclear warheads by two-thirds at a time when grassroots pressure was at a low ebb...

...On that day, the United States had sent up a scientific missile over Norway, but Russian military technicians at a radar station thought it was the beginning of an all-out attack...

...For clues about how to save the planet from nuclear extinction, there is no better place to turn than to Lawrence S. Wittner's monumental three-volume study of the world disarmament movement from 1945 to the present...

...Morland's point was simple: "Secrecy itself," he wrote, "especially the power of a few designated 'experts' to declare some topics off limits, contributes to a political climate in which the nuclear establishment can conduct business as usual, protecting and perpetuating the production of these horror weapons...

...Often in the same picture, he juxtaposes the eerie with the quotidian...

...While she may be right that the use of depleted uranium created the first "radioactive battlefield" in history, that battlefield does not resemble the devastated one she describes in her account of what an all-out nuclear war would look like...

...Real in an everyday, familiar, undeniable way...

...And so Shambroom lets us see...

...But she detracts from her point by exaggerating: She calls them both "nuclear wars...

...On January 25, 1995, "we were within minutes of global annihilation," Caldicott writes...

...That antenna communicates launch orders to nuclear submarines...

...Johns Hopkins University Press...

...And his only regret, he told me, was that he did not defy the injunction and go to press with the story...

...It would not be the executives of Lockheed Martin who press the nuclear button...

...By Matthew Rothschild When I arrived at The Progressive twenty-one years ago as a young associate editor, nuclear war was "Topic A." Month in and month out, the magazine devoted editorials and feature stories to the issue of disarmament...

...34.95...