08/03/15 Len Ackland: Obama Breaking His Pledge Not to Build Nukes

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up today is Len Ackland.
He is a former newspaper reporter and editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists magazine, and he wrote a book about the Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory near Denver.
Ain't that interesting, and that factory actually plays a part in this article.
The article is at revealnews.org, the title, Obama Pledged to Reduce the Nuclear Arsenal.
Then came this weapon, the B61-12.
Welcome to the show, Len.
How are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you on the show here.
What is the B61-12?
The B61-12 is a guided nuclear bomb.
It will be the first guided nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, and it is currently being developed and tested at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The B61-12 is just one U.S. nuclear weapon, but its development really illustrates a much larger issue, which is the power and influence of the nuclear weapons industry, which has been rebranded or has rebranded itself in recent years as the nuclear enterprise.
You'll recall that President Eisenhower warned the nation in his farewell address about the military-industrial complex, and the story of the B61-12 really talks about the military-industrial-congressional complex.
All right.
Well, so a lot of things go over there already.
First of all, just on the name, I thought when I read that in your article that that seems to me a big blunder on their part, even admitting they exist under any name, especially admitting to this concept of a military-industrial complex, but giving it the name enterprise instead as some kind of chintzy euphemism, whereas before, at least in my mind, Len, I've got to tell you, and I've been very cynical about American foreign policy for a long time, but still it took a long time to really get through to me that the nuclear weapons lobby in America acts exactly in the same way as tobacco or the big pharma or the banks and insurance companies or any other arms dealers, that as far as they're concerned, they would like to sell one million hydrogen bombs, and they will push to just, they don't care, and maybe they'll even push to create a nuclear weapons policy friendly toward that end, just like any other industry would as well, but there's no limit on how many nukes they want to sell, and they don't look at it from any other point of view, then that's their job, selling nukes, and they don't look at it from a, well, you know, come on, humans only need so many nukes, right, kind of point of view, but I'm sorry, what I'm trying to get to is I think that most Americans are like me, they never even really imagined that you would have like the most cynical lawyer lobbyist kind of people up there lobbying, pushing to sell H-bombs, they figure that that is a demand side equation only, where the military says exactly how many they need for defense purposes, but no other cynical conflicts of interest, you know, at all, so for them to say, well, okay, but we're not a complex, we're just an enterprise, to me is a huge admission, you know, that such a thing is even real, to me it's a great talking point to point to for people to imagine what was previously probably unimaginable to them.
Well, you know, there's a lot unimaginable that, you know, have to do with nuclear weapons.
You know, this week is the 70th anniversary of the United States having dropped two nuclear weapons of mass destruction on Japan, so two bombs, more than 200,000 people died in the short term, many more died from radiation sickness after that, so, you know, it's a good time to reflect on, all right, now, 70 years later, and particularly after President Obama and Cold War warriors, including Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry, have all called for the elimination of nuclear weapons because of the high risk to the world, and yet, you know, the United States plans to spend some $348 billion, and that's just for starters, over the next 10 years to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons, so, you know, one of the questions that my colleague Bert Hubbard and I wanted to look at was, where is that going?
Who's winning, who's losing, and New Mexico, which three weeks ago, 70 years ago, in other words, July 16th, 1945, was where the very first atomic bomb of mass destruction was developed and tested, so, you know, it was a good time to look at the way the so-called enterprise operates.
All right, now, as far as the B61, back to that for just a second, because you guys are talking about how, you know, this is really, they've kind of exploited a loophole in the policy here, where by making this, by basically adding a JDAM tail kit, sort of a satellite guided tail kit to what was previously a dumb ballistic bomb, right, and, but what that means, though, is it's a giant shift, as you explained, in the usability of this weapon, and I think you say it even has a dial on it, where you can dial down the yield to acceptable for a politician to go ahead and hit the button on, is that it?
Well, that's the concern.
I mean, you know, this bomb, you know, it's called a life extension program, and it's part of, it's supposed to be part of the notion that as long as nuclear weapons exist, we have to make sure that they are reliable, because now there are no more or nine countries with with nuclear weapons.
And, you know, you don't want to encourage any of those countries to use such weapons.
So the, at the at the maximum explosive force of this bomb, it's 50,000 tons of TNT equivalent, but it can be dialed down reduced to 300 tons.
Now, the concern there from from the experts, and, you know, I'm, I'm a journalist reporting on this and not an expert, but the experts, you know, say, Oh, you know, there's big concern here.
Because if the military argues that, all right, here's a 300 ton, you know, equivalent, with much less collateral damage, much less fallout, therefore, in a conflict, you might be able to use this bomb against the target without having radioactive fallout that would fall on your allies, and, and friends, that that could encourage the military to indeed recommend to a president that nuclear weapons be used.
So, you know, that's the concern nuclear weapons be used.
And once that were to happen, you know, there's great concern among among everyone who's studied nuclear weapons, that if nuclear weapons are again used, no one knows what the outcome is going to be, you know, is that going to start a regional nuclear war, a global nuclear war?
Because the 15,000 weapons that are out there, it's, it's a good drop.
And, you know, we should all be happy that it's much less than the 64,000 peak that we hit back in the 80s.
But still, those 15,000 weapons have the explosive equivalent of well more than 100,000 Hiroshima bombs.
So you know, we're, we're not out of danger when it comes to nuclear weapons yet, you know, the Cold War ended, but the nuclear weapons age didn't.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we just finished this interview with Chris Woods about the air war in Iraq.
And previously, he had done all this work on the drone wars.
And part of that whole discussion is the lessons of Iraq war two are that the Americans really don't want to lose a bunch of infantry and Marines, but air war sure.
And so I worry that that argument that you just made about the usability of these tactical nukes and that kind of thing to have that much more play in that same, you know, post Iraq war two era, where man, you really want to do a Bush style invasion?
Well, here's an alternative, Mr. President.
I'm sorry, hang on one second.
We'll be right back.
Everybody with Len Ackland wrote this great article about the nuclear weapons industrial complex.
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All right, guys, welcome back to the show.
Talking with Len Ackland about this great article.
You really got to read this thing, man.
I'm serious.
It's at reveal news dot org reveal news dot org.
Obama pledged to reduce nuclear arsenal.
Then came this weapon.
And then I love this quote is straight out of Henry Hazlitt, right?
There's no question that the labs are a major portion of the economy, especially in Albuquerque and northern New Mexico.
They employ thousands of people.
And we'll taste of the scene and and not a question of the unseen there.
But of course, we're talking about really Uncle Sam holding humanity hostage here with a gun to its head.
You guys talk about and I want to get to the the revolving door stuff here in a second.
But you guys bring up what Daniel Ellsberg has talked about on the show as well.
Even a very limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could mean what exactly for humanity?
Well, it could mean disaster.
That has been shown.
There are scientists who worked on nuclear winter back in the 1980s, who have have done recalculations.
Brian Toon at the University of Colorado has worked with colleagues and and their analysis analysis shows that if India and Pakistan, for example, were to fire 100 100 nuclear weapons at each other, that the explosions would generate so much dead dust and particles and, and crud into the air that in fact, you would have a nuclear winter kind of outcome for the earth with a relatively small quote, unquote, nuclear war.
So, you know, the nuclear weapons, I mean, just the idea that they're weapons is such a misnomer.
I mean, these are devices that are made to for mass destruction.
You know, they're not weapons in any common sense of the word.
So, you know, it's something that people forget about, don't think about.
And yet, they still, it's the greatest short term risk to the to the planet.
Because if if there were a, well, you probably remember this back in the 80s, we used to talk about fast death and slow death.
So people who worked on nuclear weapons issues worked on fast death in those days, we thought about, you know, 15 or 20 minutes before launch time.
So that for my generation was, you know, the constant nuclear fear.
Slow death was environmental degradation.
Well, these days, you know, I think a lot of people pay attention to climate change and global warming, and environmental problems, but have forgotten that, you know, in the absence of attention, the nuclear weapons enterprise has, you know, gone along its merry way making weapons and profits.
Yeah.
Well, and again, you know, as you said, these, you know, you mentioned the term weapons of mass destruction there, which is always kind of a silly way to try to conflate mustard gas with an H bomb, which could, of course, kill all of Houston, right?
All of some massive city out there like that, or, you know, a huge chunk of the eastern seaboard, some of these larger multi tens of megaton H bombs that they have, that our enemies have, or our would be adversaries, like Russia and China have, that could just wipe our major cities completely off the map.
And as you say, it's just kind of an issue in the background, hardly anyone ever even talks about it.
And they go on their merry way, as you say, nobody really ever even questioning the policy, except for it seems like the worst people in the world, like Henry Kissinger, and George Shultz, and all these, you know, so-called gray beard, senior former State Department officials and Defense Department officials, they're coming together and saying, in a nutshell, hey, we actually know about these things.
And before we die, we want to try to see if we can, you know, provide you all a little wisdom now that it's too late, now that we don't have power anymore.
And let's advise a severe reduction nuclear weapons, but their cries are falling on deaf ears, right?
Nobody even seems to notice them.
Well, that's, that's the big concern.
Absolutely.
You know, how do you, you know, how do you wake people up?
People have, you know, so many concerns.
And of course, in a mass consumption society, people have many trivial concerns as well.
But how do you get them and the policymakers to, to address these issues?
And one of the concerns, you know, that we found with New Mexico is, and you know, over the debate of, about the, the B61-12 bomb, you know, was it really a full debate?
Or was it skewed by the power of the, of the defense contractors and their allies?
So that questions weren't raised?
I mean, you know, if you look at it, just the language, the idea that there are to be no new nuclear weapons with new military capabilities.
Well, if you have a bomb that's a free fall gravity bomb, and suddenly you make it a guided accurate bomb, how is that not a new military capability?
Right.
Yeah, sure.
Sounds like it.
But yeah, again, they can do what they want.
Laws are for little people, not for how the government is to operate, really, you know.
And now, so this seems like an important talking point to use, too, is that Robert Gates's office put out a report saying we only need 14 nukes.
That's enough to threaten any powerful nation state that they better not mess with us.
But that's few enough that we're not really threatening all of mankind with extinction.
So seems like a reasonable compromise for starters, right?
14.
And it's a Republican, former head of the CIA, Secretary of Defense under Bush and Obama and neocon and realist seals of approval on him and everything, right?
Yeah, I'm not familiar with that report, but I'll look at it.
Oh, yeah, it was the Office of the Secretary of Defense put out.
Some Air Force generals wrote it up.
I guess it's been 2007 or eight.
This could have been eight.
Right.
Well, you know, obviously, when you get down to the low numbers of nuclear weapons, 15,000 is, I guess, something of a low number if you compare it to the 64,000 that were there.
But and of those 15,000, some 90 to 93% of those are in the hands of the United States and Russia.
So clearly, the US and Russia are the are the countries that people should be focusing on to to reduce the arsenals as well as trying to, you know, keep other nations like Iran from joining the so called nuclear club.
The problem is that if the United States, one of the one of the two nuclear superpowers and arguably the one economic superpower left, if the United States is developing bombs that look like they are valuable, and you know, might be possibly considered in a conflict, then how are other countries going to react, both nuclear nation states, as well as those who aspire to nuclear weapons?
You know, if you say, hey, this is so valuable that we have to make it, then why not everybody?
And that's a big concern.
Well, they decide is it a matter of consensus?
Or how do they decide whether they've achieved what they think is first strike capability, meaning the nullification of the mutually assured destruction doctrine?
Because, you know, it's always argued, there's this one guy that's been commenting on my show entries for years and years saying the same thing every time, as soon as we think we got first strike capability, that means that they have to launch on warning the Russians that they have to launch on an even lighter hair trigger than before, if they even think something is wrong, because of the balance being tipped so far in that favor.
Are we there yet?
Is that right?
Well, I hope not.
You know, one of the one of the great, again, you know, unresolved issues is, you know, how many of the nuclear weapons in the US arsenal are on alert, and on alert for what?
You know, we've, we've seen instances, there was 25 years ago, the launch of a missile in Norway that the Russians mistook for a, the beginning of a missile attack.
They were very close to calling, you know, a retaliatory strike.
I mean, you know, the world, the world is too precious to have these kinds of risks there.
I mean, if you if you care about a sustainable Earth, then you have to say, we've got to get rid of nuclear weapons.
And the best way to start is, you know, to reduce the arsenals.
But, of course, that goes against the interests, you know, the profit sheets of the, of the defense contractors, the bureaucratic interests of the, of the Air Force and Navy, the nuclear arms in, in those branches of the service, you know, so, you know, there are a lot of countervailing forces that really have to be met by public opinion.
And if the public is silent, then the military-industrial-congressional complex is going to, you know, simply proceed and the world is going to become ever riskier.
And now, could we end with that?
Could you give us an example or two, a couple of the more obvious ones of the complex at work, that revolving door, Iron Triangle there, where politicians become lobbyists and all that kind of thing in this area?
Right.
Well, my, my, my colleague, Bert Hubbard did a, did a really great job.
And if your listeners go to the revealnews.org website, they can, there's an interactive graphic that takes just six figures, you know, who are part of the nuclear weapons enterprise, and shows all the various connections between the positions that they've held and both in, you know, in the defense industry, as well as in the public sphere.
So, for example, you have a congressionally appointed panel, 12-member panel, appointed by Senator Tom Rudolph of New Mexico.
And, well, not appointed by him, but he was the person who, along with John Kyle of Arizona, proposed that this panel be instituted.
So the panel, you know, half of the members of this panel have connections with the weapons lab.
You know, the chairman of the, of the panel was the former chairman of Lockheed Martin.
You know, so, so you've got this kind of, and they, of course, in their report, which was titled, interestingly enough, A New Foundation for the Nuclear Enterprise, essentially criticizes the National Nuclear Security Agency administration that's under the Department of Energy, criticizes it for having, being, in their words, dysfunctional, because it doesn't have proven management practices.
You know, they basically are calling for less oversight of the nuclear enterprise, and that is good for the contractors, but what's good for contractors isn't necessarily good for the nation.
Yeah.
In this case, couldn't possibly be worse, even if you were just making it up.
I mean, we're talking, again, about H-bombs here.
It's just, it's incredible.
And, and, you know, the, the fact of, of how alone you and your co-authors stand in, in doing this kind of journalism is almost as shocking as what you report here.
I mean, this, obviously, just kind of not even as a matter of opinion, right?
It's almost a mathematical fact that assuming that the future of humanity's survival is important, then this is the most important issue facing all of us all day, every day, until they're all gone.
Simple as that.
What else could be more important, especially when it comes to our relationship with Russia, for example, this kind of thing?
I mean, forget India and Pakistan.
Yeah.
Again, in the, in the short term, you know, it's, we're talking about the fast death.
You know, there are other issues that are very important, and, and I applaud people who are engaged in, in so many socioeconomic issues.
But, you know, when we're talking about the survival of the planet, we're really talking about nuclear weapons, the threat to survival.
We're talking about nuclear weapons and climate change.
All right.
Hey, listen, thanks very much for your time on the show.
I sure appreciate it, Len.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That is Len Acklin.
And, again, he was formerly the editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists magazine and wrote a book about the Rocky Flats nuclear bomb factory near Denver.
And this article, very important article, really long, really worth the read, is at revealnews.org.
Obama pledged to reduce the nuclear arsenal.
Then came this weapon.
Revealnews.org.
And that's it for the show.
Over time.
See y'all tomorrow.
Thanks.
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