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nuclear war
Trump Wants 'Denuclearization,' But Does Washington?
The only hope for peace, and particularly for a reduction of nuclear arsenals, is that American citizens will relentlessly pressure their elected representatives to stop marching toward Armageddon and act to ensure human survival.
Sep 17, 2025
In the grim competition between environmental destruction and nuclear war over which one will cause the demise of civilization, the nuclear option gets considerably less media coverage than global warming. This is unfortunate, for nuclear weapons are no less of a threat. In fact, given how many close calls there have been since the 1950s, it’s miraculous that we’re still around to discuss the matter at all. In a global geopolitical environment that continues to see rising tensions between the West and both China and Russia, as well as between India and Pakistan and between a genocidal nuclear-armed Israel and much of the Middle East, few political agendas are more imperative than, to quote US President Donald Trump in early 2025, denuclearization.
The signs are not auspicious, however. For one thing, the last remaining missile treaty between Russia and the US, New START, expires in February 2026. New START limits both countries to 1,550 deployed warheads on no more than 700 long-range missiles and bombers. If Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin don’t come to an agreement before then, the end of this treaty could lead to a dangerous increase of deployed nuclear arsenals, and possibly a new arms race. On the other hand, if the two countries embrace the opportunity presented by the impending expiration of New START to forge a new and ambitious arms control regime, that could at least set the Doomsday Clock back a few seconds.
Russia wants a new treaty to limit arms, as it proposed that topic for discussion at the Alaska summit in August between Trump and Putin. Sadly, it is doubtful that Washington wants the same thing. On multiple occasions Trump has said he wants “denuclearization” talks with Russia and China, but the Washington establishment is much more ambivalent. In October 2023, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the US endorsed a very belligerent stance. Among other things, it recommended that the US fully modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal; mount on delivery vehicles “some or all” of the nuclear warheads it holds in reserve; increase the planned procurement of B-21 bombers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and nuclear-armed air-launched cruise missiles; “re-convert” SLBM launchers and B-52s that New START rendered incapable of launching a nuclear weapon; deploy nuclear delivery systems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific; and prepare for a two-theater war against China and Russia.
Similarly, in February 2024 the head of the US Strategic Command recommended a return to deploying intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multiple nuclear warheads. Incredibly, some officials even advocate resuming explosive nuclear testing, on which the US declared a moratorium in 1992. Such a resumption would doubtless encourage other nuclear states to do the same thing, which could trigger an arms race.
If there is a danger of a two-front war with Russia and China, as the Congressional Commission reported in 2023, the obvious way to avoid such a horror is through diplomacy. Not through a massive arms race that could precipitate this very war.
It is worth noting that Washington’s aggressive posture is nothing new. Since the start of the Cold War, the US has been by far the most globally imperialistic state and by far the most responsible for escalating arms races. Its military and Central Intelligence Agency interventions in countries around the world have been on a vastly larger scale than the Soviet Union’s or Russia’s, and it has typically rebuffed Russia’s frequently expressed desire for peace. In their magisterial book The Limits of Power (1972), the historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko argued that as early as the 1940s, “Russia’s real threat [to Washington] was scarcely military, but [rather] its ability to communicate its desire for peace and thereby take the momentum out of Washington’s policies.” Because of the Soviet Union’s relative economic and military weakness, Joseph Stalin sponsored international peace conferences and made numerous peace overtures to the Truman administration, all of which were dismissed. Such overtures continued in the months and years after Stalin’s death, but in most cases they met with a chilly reception.
Decades later, Mikhail Gorbachev enraged American officials by pursuing “public diplomacy” around nuclear disarmament. In 1985 he unilaterally declared a moratorium on nuclear weapons tests, hoping the US would follow suit. It didn’t. The following year, he announced his hope of eliminating all nuclear weapons everywhere by the year 2000. The Reagan administration was flabbergasted and generally appalled by the idea, though Ronald Reagan himself was sympathetic. But at the summit later that year, Reagan followed his advisers’ recommendations and rejected Gorbachev’s pleas to eliminate nuclear weapons. At least something was salvaged the following year, when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty.
In our own century, as NATO expanded ever farther east—blatantly threatening Russia—the Kremlin responded, yet again, with what amounted to peace initiatives. Putin floated the idea of joining NATO (as Boris Yeltsin and even Gorbachev had), but the US had no interest in that. A few years later, in 2008, Moscow proposed a pan-European security treaty, arguing that this was necessary in order to overcome all vestiges of the Cold War. That idea went nowhere, much like Moscow’s 2010 proposal of an EU-Russia free-trade zone to facilitate a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, “which would provide mutual economic benefits and contribute to mitigating the zero-sum format of the European security architecture,” to quote the analyst Glenn Diesen. In the end, the US rebuffed all Russian attempts to thaw relations.
Evidently, for many decades the US has rarely had much interest in respectful coexistence with Russia. As outlined in a very revealing RAND Corporation report from 2019, its priority has been to “stress” Russia, to “overextend” it, for instance by provoking it to invade Ukraine. Because “some level of competition with Russia is inevitable,” Washington has to wage a “campaign to unbalance the adversary” and “caus[e] the regime to lose domestic and/or international prestige and influence.” This campaign has been going on since the 1940s.
Indeed, in its report RAND even tentatively suggested that “US leaders could probably goad Russia into a costly arms race by breaking out of the nuclear arms control regime. Washington could abrogate New START and begin aggressively adding to its nuclear stockpile and to its air and missile delivery systems. Moscow would almost certainly follow suit, whatever the cost.” In 2023, as we have seen, the Commission on the US Strategic Posture endorsed these recommendations.
The only hope for peace, and particularly for a reduction of nuclear arsenals, is that American citizens will relentlessly pressure their elected representatives to stop marching toward Armageddon and act to ensure human survival. After all, if there is a danger of a two-front war with Russia and China, as the Congressional Commission reported in 2023, the obvious way to avoid such a horror is through diplomacy. Not through a massive arms race that could precipitate this very war.
From the anti-war left to the MAGA right, we all must demand that, for once, politicians choose the path of sanity.
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'We Will Not Be Silent:' Hearing Stilled Voices of the Gaza Genocide
As Israel routinely murders the healthcare workers and journalists who witness its genocide, we must raise our own voices in protest.
Sep 08, 2025
In his last minutes of freedom before Israel Defense Forces arrested him, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, clad in a medic's white coat, walked alone toward two Israeli tanks. His captors awaited him amid the rubble of Gaza's Kamal Adwan hospital. An artist swiftly created a dramatic poster showing Dr. Safiya striding through the ruins of the hospital he directed. The artist, David Solnit, recently updated the poster's caption. It now reads: Free Dr. Abu Safiya Eight months in prison Dec. 27, 2024 - August 27, 2025.
Dr. Safiya had already endured agonizing losses at the Kamal Adwan hospital. In late October 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed his son, also a doctor. In a November 2024 attack on the hospital, Dr. Safiya was wounded by shrapnel, but continued working, insisting he would not close the hospital. He witnessed his colleagues being humiliated, beaten, and marched off to prison. By December 27, 2024, when Dr. Safiya's ordeal as a prisoner began, most hospitals in Gaza were nonfunctional.
On August 28, 2025, Dr. Safiya's lawyer, Ghaid Ghanem Qassem, visited him in the Ofer Prison. She reports he has lost one-third of his body weight. While imprisoned in in the Sde Teiman military Detention Center, located in an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, he showed signs of torture. Subjected to beating with electric shocks and batons, he sustained blows which may also cause him to lose his right eye. Yet his message remains intact:
I entered in the name of humanity, and I will leave in the name of humanity… We will remain on our land and continue to provide healthcare services to the people, God willing, even from a tent.
Regimes conducting a genocide have more than one reason to eliminate brave professionals attempting, life by precious life, to undo their inhuman work: Doctors not only seek to slow down the dying, but they, like the journalists the Israeli regime so frantically targets, are specially positioned and specially qualified to accurately report on the intensity and nature of Israel's extermination campaign. Silencing the citizens most capable of reporting on genocidal savagery is a key objective of genocide.
In one of the most egregious efforts to eliminate a key eye witness, Israeli naval forces, on May 10, 2025, killed 12-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, who, as a passerby alongside his father, had witnessed Israel's March 23rd pre-dawn execution of 15 unarmed emergency rescue workers. The murdered paramedics had driven their clearly marked ambulances to a spot where they intended to retrieve victims of an earlier attack. The bullets that killed them were fired over six minutes as Israeli soldiers advanced to shoot directly into the survivors' heads and torsos, afterwards using earth-moving equipment to bury their corpses and vehicles. On that day, Mohammed and his father were detained and made to lie face down near a burning ambulance. He is listed as a source in a well-documented New York Times video on the massacre, dated May 2. Eleven days later, an Israeli gunboat fired on his father's fishing boat, killing Muhammed in his father's presence off the coast of Gaza's southern Rafah governate.
Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.
It was two weeks ago, on August 25, that Israel killed Reuters camera operator Hussam Al Masri and 19 others, four of them also journalists, in a series of double-tap precision-guided aerial attacks on buildings and a stairway of the Al Nasser Hospital. Al Masri was easily targetable as he broadcast a live video feed from a Reuters outpost on a top hospital floor. Describing the second wave of the attack, Jonathan Cook writes: "And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists—al-Masri's friends—who were nearby and rushed to the scene… Nothing was a 'mishap.' It was planned down to the minutest detail."
Snipers and weaponized drone operators routinely kill Palestinians who courageously continue to don bullet proof press jackets, set up cameras, and report on Israel's atrocities. Israel refuses entry to foreign journalists, and when brave, grieving, impassioned young Palestinians insist on carefully documenting their people's agony for Western news outlets, Israel carefully targets them using the traceable phone and broadcasting equipment necessary to their work, before posthumously branding them Hamas operatives. Craven Western officials watch from within Israel's patron states, discounting brown lives on whatever flimsy pretexts white authorities offer them. Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed.
Healthcare workers and journalists who are still alive do their work amid struggles to prevent their families, their colleagues, their neighbors, and of course themselves, from deaths not just by direct massacre but by militarily imposed starvation and its handmaiden, epidemic disease. Surgeons speak of being too weak to stand throughout an operation. Reporters document their own starvation.
Palestinians long for protection, but even the prospect of United Nations mandated protective forces carries terrifying possibilities. What if "peacekeepers" assigned to monitor Palestinians collect data the Israelis will use to control them? Weaponized "stabilizing forces," equipped with US surveillance technology, could be used to target, imprison, assassinate, and starve even more Palestinians.
In the summer of 1942, in Munich, Germany, five students and one professor summoned astonishing courage to defy a genocidal regime to which we, reluctantly, have to look if we want to find a racist cruelty comparable to that currently seizing not just Israel's leadership but, in poll after poll, strong majorities of its non-native population. The students' collective, called The White Rose, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities. "We will not be silent" was the final line of each leaflet. Hans Scholl, age 24, and his sister, Sophie Scholl, age 21, hand delivered the leaflets to their university campus in February of 1943. The Gestapo arrested them after a janitor spotted them disseminating the leaflets. Four days later, Hans and Sophie, as well as their colleague Christopher Probst, were executed by guillotine.
With Israel's nuclear arsenal capable of outkilling the Nazi regime over the course of a few minutes, and in the process inciting humanity's final war; and with its leadership and populace radicalized through decades of fascist impunity to the point of endorsing not just a genocide but multiple, preemptive military strikes upon most of its neighbors at once, we may well be arriving at the moment when, as a result of our having let Israel assassinate, with impunity, the reporters of its crimes, there will be no one in the outside world left to receive reports.
The silence we allow ourselves today may soon be involuntary, and absolute. Let us summon up a fraction of Dr. Safiya's, of young Mohammad's, of Sophie Scholl's and Hussam al-Masri's courage and speak while we can.
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Land-Based ICBMs: America’s Maginot Line
Instead of updating these missiles in the prairie states, policymakers should create jobs by building a clean energy infrastructure of wind turbines and solar panels.
Sep 07, 2025
Here’s a lesson from the past. During the 1930s, France built the Maginot Line in hopes of deterring an anticipated invasion from Nazi Germany. The line ran north from the point where France touches Switzerland but stopped at the Belgian border, where the Belgians objected to its continuation to the English Channel.
But Nazi Germany never intended to invade by way of the Franco-German border. Instead, it did exactly what Imperial Germany did in World War I by cutting into France through Belgium. France fell in six weeks.
Since then, the Maginot Line has been a byword for military stupidity. Regular readers of this column probably know all of this, but what’s interesting now is that America has created its own Maginot Line: the land-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system in Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, complete with a new generation of missiles—the Sentinels—now under construction.
Several justifications have been offered for the continued operation of this latter-day Maginot Line. Many of our federal officials, both in and out of the armed forces, believe that land-based ICBMs are a necessary part of a triad of land, air, and sea-based weapons which can best assure our safety from a potential enemy attack. They argue that if a potential enemy has several missile systems to contend with, it will have to spread its own forces too thinly to defeat us. Thus any attack on its part will fail.
However, any usefulness which land-based missiles have vanishes when one remembers how vulnerable they are. They’re set in stationary underground silos whose locations are well known. For them to be effective, we would have to fire them at an enemy before his missiles could hit us. The result of this situation is a world on hair-trigger alert, complete with a strong temptation to launch a so-called preemptive nuclear strike which would escalate into a world war.
Another rationale which proponents of land-based ICBMs offer is that even if the missiles are impractical as weapons, they would act as a nuclear sponge. An enemy would have to waste so many missiles attacking our ICBMs that our population, infrastructure, and government centers would be spared while our sea and air missiles would destroy his country entirely. The delusion in this case is that nuclear war is winnable.
Replacing an infrastructure that threatens wholesale death would be a job creating and community-sustaining infrastructure which promotes life.
But the nuclear sponge argument fails to account for both the adjacent and downwind effect of any large-scale nuclear exchange, which would bring forth a nuclear winter deadly enough to kill hundreds of millions, if not billions, of human beings. In fact, each nuclear superstate has enough firepower to wipe out almost all life on Earth six or seven times over. Any single part of their missile systems—air, sea, or land—would be more than enough for the grisly work.
The final assertion which proponents of land-based missile systems offer is that of economic security. Building, maintaining, and updating those missiles creates jobs. Even if the missiles themselves are worthless and provocative, there are entire communities whose well-being depends on keeping these systems up and running. The alternative is economic collapse, given the relative lack of natural wealth on the high plains of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, where they are based.
Forgotten in that claim is that the high prairie is a cornucopia of wind and sunlight, a pair of resources on which to build a clean energy infrastructure of wind turbines and solar panels which would answer the challenge of global warming. Replacing an infrastructure that threatens wholesale death would be a job creating and community-sustaining infrastructure which promotes life. As the National Priorities Project has shown over and over again, the number of jobs so created would double the number created by the Sentinel program.
How to do it? We already know how to build, operate, and maintain wind turbines and solar panels, the materials for which have become less expensive by the year. Build them now, and do it at a pace which keeps people at work while we put our own worthless and dangerous contemporary Maginot Line in the past, alongside the long-failed, historical Maginot Line. Whatever remains of them can serve us as both a monument to and a caution against our own sometime stupidity.
We need not be so stupid.
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