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The Dangerous Silence on Nuclear War 60 Years After Famous 'Daisy Ad'
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech in Chicago, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Sep 09, 2024
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then came a man’s somber voiceover, counting down from ten to zero. Then an ominous roar and a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb explosion.
The one-minute TV spot reached its climax with audio from President Lyndon Johnson, concluding that “we must love each other, or we must die.” The ad did not mention his opponent in the upcoming election, Sen. Barry Goldwater, but it didn’t need to. By then, his cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons was well established.
Goldwater’s bestseller The Conscience of a Conservative, published at the start of the decade, was unnervingly open to the idea of launching a nuclear war, while the book exuded disdain for leaders who “would rather crawl on knees to Moscow than die under an Atom bomb.” Closing in on the Republican nomination for president, the Arizona senator suggested that “low-yield” nuclear bombs could be useful to defoliate forests in Vietnam.
His own words gave plenty of fodder to others seeking the GOP nomination. Pennsylvania Gov. William Scranton called Goldwater “a trigger-happy dreamer” and said that he “too often casually prescribed nuclear war as a solution to a troubled world.” New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller unloaded with a rhetorical question: “How can there be sanity when he wants to give area commanders the authority to make decisions on the use of nuclear weapons?”
- YouTubeyoutu.be
So, the stage was set for the “daisy ad,” which packed an emotional wallop -- and provoked a fierce backlash. Critics cried foul, deploring an attempt to use the specter of nuclear annihilation for political gain. Having accomplished the goal of putting the Goldwater camp on the defensive, the commercial never aired again as a paid ad. But national newscasts showed it while reporting on the controversy.
Today, a campaign ad akin to the daisy spot is hard to imagine from the Democratic or Republican nominee to be commander in chief, who seem content to bypass the subject of nuclear-war dangers. Yet those dangers are actually much higher now than they were 60 years ago. In 1964, the Doomsday Clock maintained by experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was set at 12 minutes to apocalyptic midnight. The ominous hands are now just 90 seconds away.
Yet, in their convention speeches this summer, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were silent on the need to engage in genuine diplomacy for nuclear arms control, let alone take steps toward disarmament.
Trump offered standard warnings about Russian and Chinese arsenals and Iran’s nuclear program, and boasted of his rapport with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Left unmentioned was Trump’s presidential statement in 2017 that if North Korea made “any more threats to the United States,” that country “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Nor did he refer to his highly irresponsible tweet that Kim should be informed “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
When Harris delivered her acceptance speech, it did not include the words “atomic” or “nuclear” at all.
Now in high gear, the 2024 presidential campaign is completely lacking in the kind of wisdom about nuclear weapons and relations between the nuclear superpowers that Lyndon Johnson and, eventually, Ronald Reagan attained during their presidencies.
Johnson privately acknowledged that the daisy commercial scared voters about Goldwater, which “we goddamned set out to do.” But the president was engaged in more than an electoral tactic. At the same time that he methodically deceived the American people while escalating the horrific war on Vietnam, Johnson pursued efforts to defuse the nuclear time bomb.
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding of each other’s thinking on a number of questions,” Johnson said at the conclusion of his extensive summit meeting with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, on June 25, 1967. But fifty-seven years later, there is scant evidence that the current or next president of the United States is genuinely interested in improving such understanding between leaders of the biggest nuclear states.
Two decades after the summit that defrosted the Cold War and gave rise to what was dubbed “the spirit of Glassboro,” President Reagan stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.” But such an attitude would be heresy in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“These are the stakes,” Johnson said in the daisy ad as a mushroom cloud rose on screen, “to make a world in which all God’s children can live, or to go into the dark.”
Those are still the stakes. But you wouldn’t know it now from either of the candidates vying to be the next president of the United States.
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Memorial Day Is a Day for Remembering the Victims of War
We remember all those who our sociopathic, delusional leaders told us were "the enemy." We remember the multitudes of women, children, the old, and the sick they obscenely wrote off as "collateral damage." We don't forget them.
May 27, 2024
Members of Veterans For Peace remember America's war dead not just once a year, but every day of our lives, with the solemnity they deserve, not the crass commercialism Memorial Day has become.
We remember the war dead and the far greater number of wounded with missing limbs and the even greater number living with invisible, lifelong devils and injuries in their heads.
We remember the lost contributions they could have made to society that they literally bottled up or destroyed in the epidemic of suicide rampant among veterans.
We remember the domestic violence caused by their devils. We remember their children whose lives were more painful and less joyful than they could have been because of those devils. We remember the way the pain echoes through generations, refreshed by each new war. We remember how our communities and our nation are so much less than they should be because of this underserved burden.
We remember all those that our sociopathic, delusional leaders told us were "the enemy." We remember the multitudes of women, children, the old and the sick they obscenely wrote off as "collateral damage."
We remember our innumerable brothers and sisters of Mother Earth who were killed and wounded: the birds, the four-legged, our family in the seas, the trees and life-giving plants destroyed without thought, the crops and animals that sustain human life.
We remember the billions of people who go without clean water, education and health care because war has stolen the money.
This year we also remember the few winners in what Marine Corp General Smedley Butler called the racket of war, the elite who delight in telling their puppets in government to order up another one. And we remember the winners’ mantra, "Even losing wars make money."
We remember all the losers of that racket, too; we remember each one. We do not remember some and ignore others. Nor do we glorify warriors or war because there is no glory in war. On Memorial Day we remember all the folly and all the costs of war.
We remember what Jeanette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, said as she voted against declaring war in 1917, “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”
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Vietnam Sentences Billionaire to Death for White Collar Fraud
The trials of Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan and 84 others are part of an anti-corruption campaign led by the head of Vietnam's Communist Party.
Apr 11, 2024
As global billionaires see their wealth soar to record heights, one Vietnamese real estate tycoon was sentenced to death on Thursday in the Southeast Asian nation's largest-ever financial fraud case, part of a government crackdown on corruption.
Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan, founder of the real estate developer Vạn Thịnh Phát Group, was arrested in October 2022 for illegally controlling and embezzling money from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) for a decade after a 2011 merger she arranged.
"Lan embezzled $12.5 billion, but prosecutors said Thursday the total damages caused by the scam now amounted to $27 billion—a figure equivalent to 6% of the country's 2023 [gross domestic product]," according to Agence France-Presse. "The court ordered Lan, 67, to pay almost the entire damages sum in compensation."
The BCCreported that "according to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4 billion in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement. That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam's largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes."
AFP spoke with one of the 42,000 victims of the scandal identified by authorities:
Nga, a 67-year-old Hanoi resident... told AFP Thursday that she had hoped for a life sentence for Lan so she could live to fully witness the pain her actions had caused ordinary people.
"Many people worked hard to deposit money into the bank, but now she's received the death sentence and that's it for her," said Nga, using a pseudonym to protect her identity.
"She can't see the suffering of the people."
Nga has so far been unable to retrieve the $120,000 she invested with SCB.
Human rights advocates consider Vietnam to be a global leader in death penalty sentences and executions, though data on the topic are considered state secrets, so precise figures are not known.
"From January to early October 2023, at least 189 people have been sentenced to death in Vietnam," The Vietnamese Magazinereported last year, citing state media reports. Among them, "44 were convicted of murder (23%), while the remaining 145 (77%) were involved in illegally trading or transporting narcotic substances."
Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty in all cases, released its latest annual report on sentences and executions worldwide last May. While noting the Vietnamese government's limits on official data, the group found that in 2022, there were at least 102 sentences handed down and over 1,200 people on death row in the country.
"The death penalty in Vietnam is used to intimidate those who would break the law, while also showing the power of the ruling party," Human Rights Watch's Asia deputy director Phil Robertson toldCNN in 2022. "This is a government that chases down dissidents, runs roughshod over civil society, sentences and imprisons people after kangaroo court trials, and now we know, executes far more people than anyone else in [the region]."
"Vietnam's horrendous record of executions dwarfs that of any of its neighbors but it is not surprising that the government has systematically implemented the death penalty and kept executions out of the public eye," Robertson added.
As the BCC noted:
The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.
The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Tru'o'ng Mỹ Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.
All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended.
The trials were part of the ongoing "Blazing Furnace" anti-corruption campaign spearheaded by Nguyễn Phú Trọng, secretary-general of Vietnam's Communist Party.
Multiple top officials have left office during the campaign, including Vietnamese President Võ Văn Thưởng, who resigned last month. The Communist Party did not offer details about the reason for his departure but said that "Thưởng's violations and shortcomings have caused bad public opinion, affecting the reputation of the party, the state, and him personally."
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