Three minutes to midnight no time to rebuild Trident missiles (Op-Ed)

Editor’s Note: Dr. David Hall is a longtime, active member of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. Ground Zero has resisted the Trident nuclear weapon system for near 40 years. Hall has been a constant voice for abolishing Trident over the years, and continues to speak out against the government’s plans to build a new generation of ballistic missile submarines to replace the current Trident fleet. This guest commentary was first published in Saturday's Everett Herald newspaper.

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Three minutes to midnight no time to rebuild Trident missiles

Guest commentary in The Herald of Everett, Washington, January 30, 2016, By David C. Hall

A year ago the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock to 3 minutes to midnight, responding to “entirely insufficient” global efforts to check nuclear weaponry and global warming or to address the risks inherent to both. “Midnight” means the end of 2.4 million years of human civilization. This week the organization kept the clock at 3 minutes to midnight, sending “an expression of dismay that world leaders continue to fail to focus their efforts and the world's attention on reducing the extreme danger posed by nuclear weapons and climate change.”

I am a psychiatrist who has served severely stressed children and families for decades while haunted by what I learned as an intern about the horrors of atomic bombs on Japan. Everything I work for and my father, uncles and grandfathers served for in the World Wars goes for nothing if we ever allow nuclear weapons to be used again. This is especially true now that these weapons are seven to 30 times more powerful, nuclear nations keep their launchers on hair-trigger alert, and the climatological threshold for nuclear famine is in the hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Dr. David Hall

There are still 15,000 weapons in nine arsenals. Global warming left unchecked will desicate some of us and drown others, making millions of refugees. Nuclear war could incinerate millions in a flash and starve out billions by blocking out the sun. The scientists with BAS are asking us to squarely face these potentialities.

Current modernization plans for U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons come at a time when Russia is economically strapped while facing pressure on its western border, like the pressures America faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis with Soviet nuclear weapons 90 miles away.

Planned for 2020 are twenty U.S. B61-12 nuclear dial-a-bombs ( delivering 0.3 to 340 kilotons of destruction) for deployment on German fighter bombers, and Russian nuclear-armed drone submarines capable of traveling 6,200 miles underwater to evade U.S. missile defenses.

Most troubling to me locally is “modernization” (rebuilding) of the Trident nuclear submarine fleet that is based on Hood Canal. What's missing in the current conversation? Each Trident warship is designed with the capacity to end civilized life on Earth. Each of the 12 new Tridents now planned for replacing the current fleet will be built to launch within minutes on presidential command 128 hydrogen bombs carried in packs of eight on 16 missiles with a 7,000 mile-range and pinpoint accuracy.

The W-76 warhead is built to explode with 100,000 tons of dynamite equivalent (100 kilotons); the W-88 warhead, 455,000 tons (455 kilotons). The Hiroshima atomic bomb that killed outright about 100,000 human beings exploded with about 12 kilotons. That was an ugly time that we as a human community have fortunately managed to grow beyond. We no longer have Hitler, Hirohito, Stalin or Mao Tse-tung. Germany, Japan, Russia and China are vastly different countries. Germany and Japan are allies. Russia fought al Qaida with us in Afghanistan and is fighting ISIS. China is a major tradingpartner.

U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Washington, holds a key vote on rebuilding Trident and has yet to speak out. He's hearing “deterrence” from military contractors and military advisers who fail to tally U.S. provocations, but reap contracts returning 1,000 to 1 on their political investments.

Our adversaries see us with ever expanding conventional and nuclear military capabilities. Nuclear weapons help them, not us, level the military playing field. America is fueling a new nuclear arms race. Trident warships are first-strike weapons of mass murder. Horrible idea, immoral jobs. We can (and must) do better. Mr. Larsen?

David C. Hall, M.D., lives on Lopez Island and works in Anacortes. Past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, he currently leads the state chapter's nuclear abolition task force.

Source URL (originally published in The Everett Herald): http://www.heraldnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20160130/OPINION03/160139979&template=PrinterFriendly

Calling on Congress to say NO To NEW TRIDENT!

Do we really need to replace the current Trident ballistic missile submarine fleet - an archaic, Cold War, first strike nuclear weapons system carrying enough nuclear warheads to incinerate millions of human beings, leave lethal radiation for generations, and cause nuclear winter and global famine???

Dr. David Hall, a member of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, wrote the following open letter to U.S. Representatives Rick Larsen and Adam Smith, both of whom serve on the House Armed Services Committee.  In it he asks our elected representatives to consider the costs - economic and human of Trident.

Dr. Hall's letter was originally published in the Opinion page of The Journal of the San Juan Islands on December 3, 2013.

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Military might; priorities misplaced | Guest column

By David C. Hall, MD

Special to the Journal

Gentlemen:

We Americans have built the strongest military force in history; also history’s most lethal weapons of mass destruction complex, much of it based on Hood Canal, 25 miles from Seattle, so I ask you:

What is the face we Americans truly wish to present to the rest of the world? How inhumane and destructive are we Americans willing to be to remain “secure”?

Today we project our nuclear weapons capabilities around the globe with our Trident submarine warships, each a first strike weapon, and each armed under current treaty restrictions with sufficient firepower to incinerate hundreds of cities and black out the sun for weeks to months (“nuclear winter”).

Dr. Hall protesting at Bangor, 2011

Iran seeks to build its first nuclear weapon and the political noise in Congress sounds like the EA-18G Growler over Anacortes. Israel with our support has amassed over 80 nuclear warheads, and we are modernizing ours.

Congress has already spent over a billion dollars to design the new Trident fleet for Cold War level patrolling of the world’s oceans through 2080, at costs estimated at $347 billion.

We managed to avoid the financial cliff created by a fractured Congress that could not agree in 2011 on a solution to outspending our resource base. Japan and China each hold over one trillion dollars of our national debt, yet the Trident fleet can only be justified, if at all, against an adversary like China. Certainly not North Korea, Pakistan or Iran. Russia remains our only serious nuclear adversary and we are cooperating with them and with China.

American Cold War policies reflexively supported military budget requests as a way to spend the Soviet Union into oblivion. For President Gorbachev, another critical piece in backing away from the nuclear arms race was learning about nuclear winter and the devastating effect it would have on all life on Earth.

We now have climate models for a possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan which predict a global catastrophe that could kill a billion people, many of whom already face malnutrition. New data from China double the possible death toll due to declines in China’s winter wheat and the resulting economic chaos.

One Trident warship loaded within current treaty restrictions to half its capacity carries 10 times the nuclear firepower of this modeled two-nation war.

Trident submarine carrying 24 missiles, ready to launch 24/7

We don’t need 12 new Trident warships each capable of creating nuclear winter. Support for this omni-cidal weapons system derails us from essential investments in our spiritual, physical, emotional, and economic health as a nation. Our credibility further erodes among those who rightly or wrongly mistrust our dedication to a peaceful planet.

Now is the time to stop the rebuild of the first-strike Trident nuclear weapons fleet, and instead to model intolerance for all weapons of mass destruction, expand our investments in diplomacy and foreign assistance, support truly democratic institutions worldwide, and live by treaties we have signed that outlaw weapons of mass destruction for the very reason that they cause indiscriminate calamity for innocents and destroy ecosystems essential to life.

We owe it to our grandchildren to act now. The two of you have a special role to play on our behalf.

Sincerest thanks for your years of generous public service.

— Editor’s note: Dr. David C. Hall of Lopez Island has been a board member of the national Physicians for Social Responsibility (‘91-’03), Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (‘83-’11), and volunteer coordinator with Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.

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Source URL: http://www.sanjuanjournal.com/opinion/234303141.html#storyComments