For Nuclear Security Beyond Seoul, Eradicate Land-Based 'Doomsday' Missiles

By Daniel Ellsberg and David Krieger, Common Dreams

28 March 12

resident Obama and other world leaders gathered at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea, this week to address threats posed by unsecured nuclear material. If Mr. Obama is truly concerned about nuclear safety, he should seriously consider doing away with the 450 inter-continental ballistic missiles deployed and ready to fire at Russia on a moment's notice. [Protester Daniel Ellsberg, above, is led away by Air Force security forces early Saturday after being arrested inside the Vandenberg Air Force Base main gate for protesting the launch of a Minuteman 3 missile at the base. (Frank Cowan/Contributor)] Protester Daniel Ellsberg, above, is led away by Air Force security forces early Saturday after being arrested inside the Vandenberg Air Force Base main gate for protesting the launch of a Minuteman 3 missile at the base. (Frank Cowan/Contributor)

Last month we were among 15 protesters who were arrested in the middle of the night at Vandenberg Air Force Base, some 70 miles north of Santa Barbara, Calif. We were protesting the imminent test flight of a Minuteman III inter-continental ballistic missile.

The Air Force rationale for doing these tests is to ensure the reliability of the US nuclear deterrent force; but launch-ready land-based nuclear-armed ballistic missiles are the opposite of a deterrent to attack. In fact, their very deployment has the potential to launch World War III and precipitate human extinction - as a result of a false alarm.

We're not exaggerating. Here's why: These nuclear missiles are first-strike weapons - most of them would not survive a nuclear attack. In the event of a warning of a Russian nuclear attack, there would be an incentive to launch all 450 of these Minuteman missiles before the incoming enemy warheads could destroy them in their silos.

If the warning turned out to be false (there have been many false warnings), and the US missiles were launched before the error was detected, World War III would be underway. The Russians have the same incentive to launch their land-based missiles upon warning of a perceived attack.

Both US and Russian land-based missiles remain constantly on high-alert status, ready to be launched within minutes. Because of the 30-minute flight times of these missiles, the presidents of both the US and Russia would have only approximately 12 minutes to decide whether to launch their missiles when presented by their military leaders with information indicating an imminent attack (after lower-level threat assessment conferences).

That's only 12 minutes or less for the president to decide whether to launch global nuclear war. While this scenario is unlikely, it is definitely possible: Presidents have repeatedly rehearsed it, and it cannot be ruled out due to the graveness of its potential consequences.

Russia came close to launching its missiles based on a warning that came Jan. 25, 1995. President Yeltsin was awakened in the middle of the night and told a US missile was headed toward Moscow. Fortunately, Yeltsin was sober and took longer than the time allocated for his decision on whether to launch Russian nuclear-armed missiles in response.

In the extended time, it became clear that the missile was a weather sounding rocket from Norway and not a US missile headed toward Moscow. Disaster was only narrowly averted.

Here is the really compelling part of the story: If all 450 US land-based Minuteman III missiles with thermonuclear warheads were ever launched at Russia - with many of the targets in or near cities, as now planned - most Americans would die as a result, along with most of humanity. Our own weapons would contribute as much or more to these deaths in America and the rest of the globe as any Russian warheads launched.

This is because smoke from the enormous nuclear firestorms created by even a "successful" US nuclear first-strike would cause catastrophic disruption of global climate and massive destruction of the Earth's protective ozone layer, leading to global famine.

Recent peer-reviewed studies, done by atmospheric scientists Alan Robock (Rutgers), Brian Toon (University of Colorado-Boulder), Richard Turco (UCLA) and colleagues, predict that such an attack would create immense firestorms that would quickly surround the planet with a dense stratospheric smoke layer.

The black smoke would be heated by the sun, lofted like a hot air balloon, and would remain in the stratosphere for at least 10 years. There it would block and prevent a large fraction of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface. The sharp reduction of warming sunlight would rapidly produce global Ice Age weather conditions. This would eliminate or dramatically reduce growing seasons for a decade and would likely cause the starvation of most or all humans.

Along with other effects - including prolonged destruction of the ozone layer - most complex life on Earth could be destroyed. Scientists say the process would be similar to when an asteroid hit the Earth some 65 million years ago, raising a global dust cloud that reduced sunlight, lowering temperatures and killing vegetation. That caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and 70 percent of the Earth's species.

The cause of extinction in our case would not be an external, celestial event, but rather the launching of thermonuclear weapons we had created by our own cleverness, supposedly for our own security.

The Minuteman III missile tests from Vandenberg Air Force Base are thus really tests of an American Nuclear Doomsday Machine.

Nuclear weapons do not make the US or the world more secure. In particular, the Minuteman III missiles - land-based, vulnerable, on high alert, and susceptible to being triggered by a false alarm - make us less secure. Anyone who cares about humankind having a future should protest these tests and call for the elimination of all nuclear-armed inter-continental ballistic missiles as an initial step toward the total abolition of nuclear weapons.

If the US did away now with its nuclear-armed land-based missile force, it would still have 288 invulnerable submarine-launched ballistic missiles (armed with approximately 1,152 warheads) to act as a retaliatory threat to nuclear attack. But it would no longer have tempting targets for the Russians to strike preemptively in a time of tension or in the event of a false warning of attack.

It would still be imperative to reduce US (and Russian) total warheads to levels that do not threaten the possibility of causing human extinction.

And even the smaller existing nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan threaten global disaster. Professor Robock and his colleagues have estimated that in a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan in which each side used 50 Hiroshima-size bombs (each side now has more than that number), the smoke rising into the stratosphere could cause a global reduction of sunlight and destruction of ozone leading to crop failures and global famine.

By comparison, the launch-ready thermonuclear forces of the US and Russia contain roughly 500 times the explosive power of the 100 atomic bombs of India and Pakistan.

Now is the time for the people and nations of the world to stand up against the potential extinction of the human species and demand that political leaders pursue the path to zero nuclear weapons, a path mandated by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the International Court of Justice. Until then, protest and civil resistance will be necessary.

We should seek two principal goals: first, a commitment by the existing nuclear weapon states to forego launch-on-warning and first use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances; and second, good faith negotiations for a new treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible, and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.

It is our hope that by committing nonviolent civil resistance, being arrested, going to federal court, and explaining our actions to the public, we will help to awaken and engage the American people on this issue of utmost importance to our common future.

New Heart, New Cheney?

By Alizah Salario, The Daily Beast

27 March 12

The former vice president got a new ticker Saturday, leading some to wonder: could the famous curmudgeon show a change of heart? Alizah Salario on the mysterious ways transplants can transform people.

ick Cheney's troublesome heart history is as lengthy as the list of reasons why he's known as a callous curmudgeon. The man has endured an astounding five heart attacks and numerous heart surgeries—all but forcing one to question the connection between his rotten mass of muscle and what many have written off as, well, a rotten heart.

Last weekend, however, after two years on a waiting list, the former vice president underwent a heart transplant, thanks to an anonymous donor, begging the question: could a new anatomical heart lead to a figurative change of heart? Could Tricky Dick suddenly start championing Obamacare and joining the Occupy Wall Street picket lines?

Not surprisingly, most physicians say: probably not. "It's an interesting theory, but it's one that we have not proven," Tracy Stevens, a transplant cardiologist at Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., told The Daily Beast.

And yet, some transplant recipients swear that a literal change of heart precipitates a metaphorical one. Claire Sylvia, who received a heart and lung transplant at Yale New Haven Hospital in 1988, chronicled her dramatic transformation in her memoir, A Change of Heart.

After leaving the hospital after her surgery, the formerly health-conscious dancer and choreographer claimed to experience intense cravings for Kentucky Fried Chicken and beer, foods she'd previously disliked. Sylvia reported becoming more aggressive and impulsive—traits associated with her donor, an 18-year-old boy killed in a car accident, who, oddly, was said to have chicken nuggets in his jacket at the time of the crash. (Sylvia's story was later turned into a made-for-TV movie starring Jane Seymour.)

Sylvia's case was included in a 2002 study published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies on heart-transplant patients whose character traits, preferences, and memories became uncannily similar to that of their donors' after surgery.

These and other patients' anecdotal evidence form the basis of a theory known as "energy cardiology," which posits that information can be transmitted electromagnetically between the brain and the heart. There's also the theory of cellular memory, which holds that because memory can be stored in individual cells throughout the body and not just the brain, it's plausible that a heart recipient could be gifted with, say, a hankering for fried chicken.

Proponents of the latter can be found across the medical spectrum, from homeopathic practitioners and energy healers to world-renowned physicians like Deepak Chopra. Along with Candace Pert, a Ph.D. in cellular biology and biophysics who has done extensive research on how the emotions and the body are neurologically linked, Chopra has written extensively on how traumatic emotions are stored in "phantom memories" inside cells.

Yet the 2002 study cites only 10 transplants and mentions that, in other instances, changes in food preference and emotion were usually transitory and could be chalked up to medication. (First performed in 1967, heart transplants now tally about 5,000 worldwide every year; 2,000 are performed yearly in the U.S. More than 3,000 people are currently awaiting heart transplants in this country.)

These theories are undoubtedly boosted by society's ingrained belief that the heart acts as a crystal ball of character. From the Tin Man's hopelessly vacant chest in The Wizard of Oz to the "telltale heart" thumping against the floorboards in Edgar Allen Poe's classic tale of murder and conscience, the organ has long served as literary and cinematic shorthand not only for characters' capacity for love, but for their courage, warmth, wisdom, charity, humanity—or lack thereof. Whether or not you believe cupid's arrow can alter the heart as deeply as a cardiologist's scalpel, the organ has always been sutured to fit society's metaphorical needs.

Skeptics cite many probable medical explanations for patients' seemingly uncanny changes, including a sudden, more compassionate outlook on life. "How we present ourselves and behave when faced with very difficult medical problems is complex," says Ashish Shah, a cardiothoracic surgeon and associate professor of surgery at John's Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Md.

He's transplanted the hearts of hardened criminals into sweet and kind individuals, and not a one has experienced a Freaky Friday - like transformation, he says. For patients who learn their donor's identity, he believes they may subconsciously take certain traits to heart.

"I think we can simply explain [these cases] by knowing the clinical scenarios," says Stevens. "Someone will say now they love Mexican food. My argument is that now they can eat it, because [before the transplant], they were so limited in their sodium consumption. Or they find they're very emotional, and people tell them ‘you must've gotten a girlie heart.'"

Post-op sentimentality can often be chalked up to Prednisone, a common drug administered after a transplant that can make people feel like they've "got a hamster wheel going in their chest," explains Stevens.

Profound differences in taste and personality can also be a result of a transplant patients‘ tremendous emotional journey. After all, they face their mortality in ways that few people can truly understand.

"I'm not the same person that I was, but I don't know if that's because of the heart or because of what I've been through," says Susan Senk, a New York publicist who received a heart transplant in 2007 after being stricken with viral myocarditis, a disease that causes the body to attack the heart. In a relatively short period of time, she went from being an active woman in her 50s with a perfectly healthy heart to battling for her life until a donor saved her.

Senk, who doesn't know her donor's identity, hasn't experienced any significant changes in preferences or personality besides buying more shoes and developing a craving for ice cream shortly after surgery, which quickly went away. Says Senk: "Things that are different? I'm a faster driver. What does that mean? I have no idea."

"I'm not the same person that I was, but I don't know if that's because of the heart or because of what I've been through."

Though donors and recipients remain anonymous from one another, either party can reach out via the organ procurement facility and initiate a meeting if both desire. And when donor families and recipients do meet, the impact can be more profound than the discovery of similar food cravings. Stevens tells the story of a patient who brings his donor's mother with him to his check-ups. Every time she takes a stethoscope and listens to her son's heart beat in a different man's chest, there's not a dry eye in the office.

Yet while the notion that a new heart can mean a kinder heart may be comforting, the trauma of surgery can sometimes make patients more irritable. "[Before surgery] people put on this face, like, ‘I'm going to be a great steward for this organ,' and then their behavior changes," says Shah. "You see this as a manifestation of poor coping skills."

Indeed, organ transplants can bring on unique types of emotional stress. In 1999 double-lung transplant recipient Rita Pine launched an online message board, which evolved into TransplantBuddies.com and later spawned the social network TransplantFriends.com. The sites allow organ recipients to connect with others who've been through what they're experiencing, from dealing with the side effects of medications to thanking donor families to contending with what seems like cellular memory.

Pine says that after her first transplant she felt she could intuit her donor's birthday and other random facts, and was generally fascinated by this anonymous individual. Partially due to insights gained through work with energy practitioners, Pine eventually started to wonder if perhaps learning too much about her donor was invasive and none of her business. By the time she underwent her second lung transplant from another donor, she'd gone to the other extreme.

"With my second transplant, I didn't want to know anything I'm not supposed to know," said Pine. "I didn't really notice any personality changes, but I am more intuitive, and I have prophetic dreams. I don't know if I had this gift before the transplant."

What's certain is that a new heart (or kidney or cornea) can lead to a very real sense of gratitude, which is likely the main reason some transplant patients display a new lease on life.

"They take better care of themselves because they feel better, and they feel a sense of responsibility that they are respecting their donor as well," says Stevens. "I think that's the personality of the recipient, and being grateful for this wonderful gift of life they've received."