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With its latest editorial calling for more nuclear weapons and more weapons spending, the Wall Street Journal has gone over a journalistic cliff. The serious factual errors in its Jan. 5 screed, "A False Nuclear Start," raise serious questions about the newspaper's credibility and integrity. By claiming that U.S. nuclear weapons are in serious disrepair and that removing any of the 9,400 nuclear weapons in the arsenal would threaten national security, the Journal's editors help create public fear of changing obsolete Cold War nuclear policies. That fear could motivate senators to oppose U.S.-Russian efforts to decrease the number of weapons, convince them to increase from $54 billion a year the amount spent on nuclear weapons-related programs, and persuade voters that the U.S. president is weak, naive, and untrustworthy.

With its latest editorial calling for more nuclear weapons and more weapons spending, the Wall Street Journal has gone over a journalistic cliff. The serious factual errors in its Jan. 5 screed, "A False Nuclear Start," raise serious questions about the newspaper's credibility and integrity. By claiming that U.S. nuclear weapons are in serious disrepair and that removing any of the 9,400 nuclear weapons in the arsenal would threaten national security, the Journal's editors help create public fear of changing obsolete Cold War nuclear policies. That fear could motivate senators to oppose U.S.-Russian efforts to decrease the number of weapons, convince them to increase from $54 billion a year the amount spent on nuclear weapons-related programs, and persuade voters that the U.S. president is weak, naive, and untrustworthy.

"The world's anti-war activists, including parliamentarians, civil society groups and diplomats, have succeeded in creating international treaties to ban a wide array of deadly weapons: anti-personnel landmines, blinding laser weapons, cluster munitions, dum-dum bullets and chemical and biological weapons. But "the most iniquitous weapon of all" - the nuclear weapon - has continued to escape a treaty aimed at eliminating its use, spread and production. Asked why a proposed nuclear weapons convention (NWC) has failed to get off the ground, Alyn Ware, global coordinator for Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (PNND), told IPS: "The nuclear weapon is both a military and a political weapon." "It projects power," he said, singling out the world's five most powerful, and by definition, permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - who are also the five declared nuclear powers. "

"Next week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet in New York with diplomats from more than 180 countries at the eighth review conference of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (pdf), the Cold War pact that determines who can have nuclear weapons and who can't. The nuclear accord obliges the five original nuclear powers to disarm while exacting a pledge from other countries not to pursue nuclear weapons. In exchange, those that foreswore atomic weapons were assured the right to develop nuclear energy programs, under the monitoring of U.N. inspectors. The Obama administration will seek to use the nearly month-long conference to plug gaps in a landmark agreement that has significantly limited the spread of nuclear weapons but enabled a small number of nuclear proliferators, including Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il, to develop clandestine atomic weapons programs under the nose of U.N. weapons inspectors. The nuclear conference has gained increased urgency as concerns about global warming have fueled renewed interest in nuclear power, and the prospects of lucrative international trade in nuclear fuel."

The leaders of the nuclear weapon states, led by President Barack Obama, are promising to abolish nuclear weapons. It is a good sign. But we have been here before. This time the world needs more than promises. To demonstrate that they are serious, nuclear weapon states should announce clear policies to move irreversibly and quickly toward nuclear weapons elimination. In his now famous Prague speech in April, President Obama said: "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act… So today, I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons." Obama is not the first American president to offer a vision of nuclear disarmament. Many now recall that Ronald Reagan agreed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 to abolish nuclear weapons.

A new nuclear weapons report by a panel of scientists and two new books by weapons scientists show just how deeply the nuclear genie still haunts the scientific heirs of the Manhattan Project. "Scientists have always felt a special responsibility for nuclear weapons, the one weapon they have created of such import," says physicist John Browne, a former head of Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory. Now, amid pressing economic and wartime worries, nuclear weapons are poised once again to enter public debate, fueled by warnings from Congress and a campaign pledge by President-elect Barack Obama to support the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The treaty, which bans nuclear weapon test explosions, has been ratified by 143 nations, but not the United States.

A coalition of six anti-nuclear groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Livermore's Tri-Valley CAREs, on Wednesday released its in-depth blueprint for steering Obama administration policy toward a nuclear weapons-free future. The timing of the report's release was deliberate: It was intended to get to President Barack Obama's desk before a bipartisan congressional committee releases its own report in early May to guide the president's thinking as he prepares a new nuclear weapons policy. Obama's eagerly-anticipated "2009 Nuclear Posture Review" is due this year, and will lay out the nation's guiding principles for a reduction of its nuclear weapons stockpile and for maintaining the viability of existing warheads to serve as a credible nuclear deterrent. The anti-nuclear coalition, called the Nuclear Weapons Complex Consolidation Policy Network, calls for slashing the U.S. nuclear stockpile to 500 weapons from 2015 to 2020, and for scaling down the nuclear weapons complex from eight sites to three.

Obama wants a world without nuclear weapons. But what, exactly, do we do with all those warheads? Speaking in Prague on April 5, U.S. President Barack Obama called the thousands of nuclear weapons sitting in world arsenals "the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War." He proposed deep cuts in U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles. But when policymakers talk about nuclear reductions, what do they mean in practice? After all, you can't just leave the warheads out on the curb on Tuesday morning for the garbage collector to pick up. The first answer is, nothing much. Retiring a weapon is accomplished through paperwork. If the weapon is in storage, it continues to sit there. Eventually, small steps begin to indicate its fate on the nuclear weapons equivalent of death row. Workers come along to remove the batteries and other so-called "limited-life components" that have to be regularly changed in active nuclear weapons.

In early April 2009, on his first trip to Europe as president, Barack Obama made good on his campaign promises and took the first steps toward fundamentally reshaping U.S. nuclear weapons policy. On April 1, the president and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev released a joint statement in which both nations agreed to "demonstrate leadership in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the world." On April 5, President Obama gave a groundbreaking speech on nuclear weapons in Prague, Czech Republic, which signaled his administration's intent to significantly reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy and laid out a bold yet pragmatic plan to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons. He also stated that the United States was committed to the visionary goal of "the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."

As the threat of nuclear weapons looms large over the very existence of life on earth, Dr Sue Wareham, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons' (ICAN) Australian board member, is calling for a speedy abolition of these weapons and the rejection of nuclear power as a solution to climate change. Speaking at the sessions on nuclear abolition and disarmament at the 2009 Parliament of the World's Religions here, Wareham said the power of religion should be harnessed to bring peace in the world through disarmament, abolition of nuclear weapons, eradication of poverty and action on climate change. The six-day Parliament, which ends on Dec 9, is a gathering of religious and spiritual communities from different parts of the world to discuss issues relating to peace, diversity and sustainability.

As the threat of nuclear weapons looms large over the very existence of life on earth, Dr Sue Wareham, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons' (ICAN) Australian board member, is calling for a speedy abolition of these weapons and the rejection of nuclear power as a solution to climate change. Speaking at the sessions on nuclear abolition and disarmament at the 2009 Parliament of the World's Religions here, Wareham said the power of religion should be harnessed to bring peace in the world through disarmament, abolition of nuclear weapons, eradication of poverty and action on climate change. The six-day Parliament, which ends on Dec 9, is a gathering of religious and spiritual communities from different parts of the world to discuss issues relating to peace, diversity and sustainability.

Russia has no plans to completely abandon nuclear weapons, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday. "If there were only five nuclear powers in the world and they abandoned their nuclear weapons, after which only conventional weapons - muskets, cannons, and pistols - would remain, we would have disarmed ourselves a long time ago," Sergei Lavrov told a news conference after a meeting with his British counterpart David Miliband in Moscow. He added that there were unofficial nuclear powers, and that it was not ruled out that nuclear technology, which "is virtually available via the Internet," would spread. He stressed the importance of nonproliferation efforts and said that nuclear disarmament "means many things, including practical agreements that will prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology anywhere in the world."

Russia has no plans to completely abandon nuclear weapons, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday. "If there were only five nuclear powers in the world and they abandoned their nuclear weapons, after which only conventional weapons - muskets, cannons, and pistols - would remain, we would have disarmed ourselves a long time ago," Sergei Lavrov told a news conference after a meeting with his British counterpart David Miliband in Moscow. He added that there were unofficial nuclear powers, and that it was not ruled out that nuclear technology, which "is virtually available via the Internet," would spread. He stressed the importance of nonproliferation efforts and said that nuclear disarmament "means many things, including practical agreements that will prevent the acquisition of nuclear weapons technology anywhere in the world."

After a tragedy we often ask: Why did this happen? How did this happen? Could we have prevented it? The tragedies of Sept. 11, 2001, still raise these questions. In looking ahead as much as looking back, imagine how much worse those losses would have been if the terrorists had used a nuclear weapon. For decades, nuclear weapons were thought to make us safer by deterring the first strike by another nation. Today we need to re-evaluate the roles and dangers of nuclear weapons in the world. Let's ask ourselves: Does it help the United States to have nuclear weapons? Would the whole world be safer if no one and no nation had even one of these weapons? Is the mere existence of nuclear weapons a threat?

Archbishop Edwin F. O'Brien of Baltimore, Maryland asked attendees at a nuclear deterrence conference to work to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Speaking at the symposium, the archbishop said that the abolishment of nuclear weapons was an issue of "fundamental moral values that should unite people across national and ideological boundaries." The deterrence symposium was sponsored by the Strategic Command based at Offut Air Force Base, south of Omaha, Nebraska. Archbishop O'Brien spoke to an audience of 500, telling them that "Our world and its leaders must stay focused on the destination of a nuclear weapons-free world and on the concrete steps that lead there." He said. "Especially in a world with weapons of mass destruction and at a time when some nations ... are reportedly seeking to build such weapons, we must pursue a world in which fewer nuclear states have fewer nuclear weapons."

I've always been interested in nuclear weapons. They are a small device that can cause a disproportionally large effect. Not only the sheer power of a nuclear explosion, but their role as a deterrent, the formation of the "nuclear club", and the political psychology that goes along with them are all aspects about nuclear weapons that fascinate me. It's kind of a morbid fascination, I know. But cut me some slack-what red-blooded guy doesn't like big explosions? I have read criticisms before of America's large nuclear arsenal-the largest in the world, and predictably so. I have never been in favor of complete nuclear disarmament, partially because there are many nuclear weapons out there that are unaccounted for that could end up in the hands of the bad guys, and partially because I think they could have their uses in a conventional conflict. I'm sure we've all heard, though, the quips that the US has the power to destroy the entire world X times over if we used every weapon in our nuclear arsenal. If that's true, I think it's a fair question to ask why it is so, when just one nuclear weapon is so effective.

When We Almost Nuked Savannah Things go missing. It's to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon's inspector general reported that the military's accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL. Those anomalies are bad enough. But what's truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons, a hydrogen bomb. The thermonuclear weapon, designed to incinerate Moscow, has been sitting somewhere off the coast of Savannah, Georgia for the past 40 years. The Air Force has gone to greater lengths to conceal the mishap than to locate the bomb and secure it. On the night of February 5, 1958 a B-47 Stratojet bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb on a night training flight off the Georgia coast collided with an F-86 Saberjet fighter at 36,000 feet. The collision destroyed the fighter and severely damaged a wing of the bomber, leaving one of its engines partially dislodged. The bomber's pilot, Maj. Howard Richardson, was instructed to jettison the H-bomb before attempting a landing. Richardson dropped the bomb into the shallow waters of Wassaw Slough, near the mouth of the Savannah River, a few miles from the city of Tybee Island, where he believed the bomb would be swiftly recovered. The Pentagon recorded the incident in a top secret memo to the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The memo has been partially declassified: "A B-47 aircraft with a [word redacted] nuclear weapon aboard was damaged in a collision with an F-86 aircraft near Sylvania, Georgia, on February 5, 1958. The B-47 aircraft attempted three times unsuccessfully to land with the weapon. The weapon was then jettisoned visually over water off the mouth of the Savannah River. No detonation was observed."

Most DU weapons manufactured in the United States show a distinct difference between conventional weapons and those that contain DU and other toxic elements such as Tungsten etc. The warhead clearly shows the Rod with a Sabot sitting just below the point. It must be clearly understood that despite any re classification that may have taken place by the US Government these truly are nuclear related weapons. You can clearly see that the Israel's IMI is manufacturing weapons that are almost identical to the US weapons that are displayed in the left hand picture above.

"The Obama administration is expected to make final decisions as early as today about the Nuclear Posture Review, the official policy document that will define U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the next five to 10 years. This will take place at what is called a "principals meeting" attended by Cabinet members whose departments are involved in the review. The congressionally mandated review will set the role nuclear weapons will play in overall U.S. security policy, how many nuclear weapons the United States needs to fulfill those roles, and whether the United States should produce new nuclear warheads. "The administration's decisions on the Nuclear Posture Review will not only set U.S. policy, they will shape the future of nuclear weapons globally," said Lisbeth Gronlund, senior scientist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). "President Obama, who has the final word, can choose to make the transformational changes needed to address the real threats of the 21st century, or can allow bureaucratic inertia and the parochial interests of the federal nuclear weapons labs to hold sway." "

"In anticipation of a major nuclear weapons policy review expected to be completed March 1, former government officials, nuclear weapons experts, and leaders of arms control organizations representing more than 1 million Americans have sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to fulfill his April 2009 pledge to "put an end to Cold War thinking" and "reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy." In the letter, sent to the White House and key cabinet members on February 1, the group called on the president to ensure that the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) "advances the highest security priorities: preventing terrorists or additional states from obtaining of using nuclear weapons; reducing global stockpiles, and moving toward a world without nuclear weapons.""

It was a bombshell by any measure. Since it was signed 40 years ago, Indian leaders have been firmly against joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an agreement that prohibits nonnuclear states from acquiring such weapons, commits nuclear-weapons states to disarmament, and regulates the peaceful use of nuclear energy to prevent the weaponization of nuclear technology. But in a move that will have significant implications for India as a rising power, and for global diplomacy, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reversed course publicly on Nov. 29, saying that India is willing to join the NPT as a nuclear-weapons state. Whether India follows through remains an open question, but pursuing NPT status would confer enormous benefits to the country

It was a bombshell by any measure. Since it was signed 40 years ago, Indian leaders have been firmly against joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), an agreement that prohibits nonnuclear states from acquiring such weapons, commits nuclear-weapons states to disarmament, and regulates the peaceful use of nuclear energy to prevent the weaponization of nuclear technology. But in a move that will have significant implications for India as a rising power, and for global diplomacy, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reversed course publicly on Nov. 29, saying that India is willing to join the NPT as a nuclear-weapons state. Whether India follows through remains an open question, but pursuing NPT status would confer enormous benefits to the country

Way back when I was in college, someone gave me a book that they thought I should read. "You've been working with plutonium, and you have an interest in nuclear weapons. You really ought to read this book." The book was The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. He was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for that book, and it is well deserved. It's my belief that anyone who wants to truly understand the American legacy of the first two nuclear bombs, and the consequences of their use, should read that book, as well as Rhodes two subsequent books on nuclear weapons: Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Since I've been writing quite a bit about current-day nuclear weapons issues, I thought it would be good to step back and take a look at the big picture again. What better way to do that than to talk to Richard Rhodes, nuclear weapons historian and journalist extraordinaire?

Way back when I was in college, someone gave me a book that they thought I should read. "You've been working with plutonium, and you have an interest in nuclear weapons. You really ought to read this book." The book was The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. He was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for that book, and it is well deserved. It's my belief that anyone who wants to truly understand the American legacy of the first two nuclear bombs, and the consequences of their use, should read that book, as well as Rhodes two subsequent books on nuclear weapons: Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Since I've been writing quite a bit about current-day nuclear weapons issues, I thought it would be good to step back and take a look at the big picture again. What better way to do that than to talk to Richard Rhodes, nuclear weapons historian and journalist extraordinaire?

For decades, the authorities have denied that nuclear weapons were present in Japan; yet it allowed United States to stockpile and transport them on Japanese soil. The credibility of the Liberal Democratic Party, now in the opposition, sinks further. Tokyo - The people of Japan was deceived for decades, this according to declassified documents that are only now coming to light about secret deals between Washington and Tokyo with regards to the presence of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil. Since 1960, the government led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has repeatedly denied that nuclear weapons were ever present in Japan or that any agreement existed to that effect. In mid-October, the National Security Archives in Washington released declassified telegrams, background papers and top-secret minutes regarding US nuclear weapons policy in Okinawa and, more broadly, Japan between the 1950s and 1972. Information about secret deals comes from this source, but it is neither the only nor the main one.

For decades, the authorities have denied that nuclear weapons were present in Japan; yet it allowed United States to stockpile and transport them on Japanese soil. The credibility of the Liberal Democratic Party, now in the opposition, sinks further. Tokyo - The people of Japan was deceived for decades, this according to declassified documents that are only now coming to light about secret deals between Washington and Tokyo with regards to the presence of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil. Since 1960, the government led by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has repeatedly denied that nuclear weapons were ever present in Japan or that any agreement existed to that effect. In mid-October, the National Security Archives in Washington released declassified telegrams, background papers and top-secret minutes regarding US nuclear weapons policy in Okinawa and, more broadly, Japan between the 1950s and 1972. Information about secret deals comes from this source, but it is neither the only nor the main one.