The nuclear threat has been a reality since 1945 when the first atomic bombs were developed in Los Alamos, and detonated at the Alamogordo Test Range in New Mexico and then on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On 24 January, 1946, the UN called for the elimination of nuclear weapons. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear bomb. In 1952, the British exploded several atomic bombs in Australia. And then, on 1 November 1952, the US tested the first hydrogen detonation (10 megatons of TNT). It was 500 times more powerful that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki Then, on 30 October 1961, the Soviets tested the largest nuclear bomb ever (50-58 megatons), called the Tsar Bomba in northern Russia.

The nuclear threat (and climate threat, as well), reflect a deep psychological illness that has led to the normalization of behavior that has put the entire living world in danger of extinction.

Now, 60 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and 40 years after nuclear tension that existed between the US and USSR, we are faced with a new threat from the current war in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has raised the level of anxiety about the use of nuclear weapons. After he launched his illegal and murderous invasion of Ukraine, he used his nuclear arsenal to threaten the world. He said that if any country that got in his way they would “face consequences greater than any you have faced in history.” Putin also put his nuclear forces on high alert as another way to remind everyone that he has at least 1,600 nuclear weapons at his disposal. Some have suggested that he might use the nuclear option by launching tactical nuclear bombs, smaller and battlefield ready, but just as murderous as any other atomic weapon.

Donald Trump is one of the few American presidents who threatened to use nuclear weapons (Truman dropped two bombs on Japan and Richard Nixon threatened to use them on China). Trump asked a foreign policy expert on multiple times, “if we have all these weapons, why don’t we use them.” When he was President he expressed his desire for a tenfold increase in nuclear weapons. We have about 1,700 nuclear weapons and Trump wanted 17,000 weapons. Trump threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons. He said, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States.” If they do, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Thank the American voters that Trump is no longer in office, although he lingers by continuing is pathetic fable that he lost the 2020 presidential election. He’s still a threat. He’s trying to influence 2022 elections and is threatening to run for president in 2024. Trump is not as much a threat as Vladimir Putin. At least for now. But as you’ll learn ahead, Trump is not to be trusted with nuclear weapons.

All nations that possess nuclear weapons are a threat to humanity and other living things. It’s easy to point the finger at Putin right now because of his insane war against Ukraine. But the United States also needs to come under scrutiny with regard to nuclear weapons. I describe this in more detail further ahead in this post.

We Keep Making More Nuclear Weapons

Why is America getting a $100 billion nuclear Weapon? is a 2021 article by Elisabeth Eaves, contributing editor for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and has been a contributing editor since 1999 at Reuters, London, Forbes, Slate, Harper’s, the New York Times and Washington Post.

Her article not only exposes the utter madness of the US Air Force’s plan, but the entire history of weapons development among the nine member states of the nuclear club.

Eaves explains that the weapon of mass destruction the Air Force has ordered will be as long as a bowling lane, be able to travel 6,000 miles and carry a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

She adds that the Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them. In my own research into the nuclear risk, I found that the United States spent $5.5 trillion from 1940-1998 on nuclear weapons, and from 1999 on, we have authorized the government to spend on average between $45 to $60 billion per year. The cost of the “bowling lane” missile will be at least $100 billion. Underscoring all nuclear bomb development is the acronym MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), the deeply psychological deterrent to annihilation.

The Nuclear Risk

What follows is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Trump Files: An Account of the Trump Administration’s Effect on American Democracy, Human Rights, Science and Public Health. I’ve included it here to give an overview of nuclear weapons development in the United States and socio-political issues that bring, once again, the threat of nuclear weapons to survival of life on Earth.

Protest at Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base

St. Mary’s is a small town on the coast of Georgia at the border with Florida. In a graduate environmental education course, thirty students accompanied me as we boarded the Cumberland Island Ferry at St. Mary’s dock to reach the barrier island of the same name. It’s home to loggerhead turtles and feral horses, and very few humans. It’s one of fifteen barrier islands along the Georgia coastline. Barrier islands are coastal landforms made of a type of sand dune system that are formed by wave and tidal action parallel to the coastline. They typically occur in chains, as they do along the Georgia coast.[1] Barrier islands are separated from the mainland usually by bays or rivers leading to the open ocean.

Separating Cumberland Island and the mainland is Kings Bay, which opens to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s also home to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, the US Atlantic Fleet’s home port for Navy fleet ballistic missile nuclear submarines armed with Trident missile nuclear weapons. Trident is a submarine-launched ballistic missile armed with multiple nuclear bombs. Kings Bay has been in use since 1979. It’s a big base with more than 16,000 acres of land, including 4,000 acres of protected wetlands.

Peace Activists

On April 4, 2018, a group of seven Catholic peace activists broke into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base and engaged in a nuclear weapons protest. They cut through a wire barrier and left symbolic messages to convey their belief that nuclear weapons would result in omnicide—the destruction of all people. In their 2019 trial, they were found guilty on three felony counts and a misdemeanor charge. Critics of the trial believe the judge, Lisa Godbey Wood, prevented the defendants from mounting a full defense. They were not allowed to mention their religious motivations or any mention of international law or treaties restricting nuclear weapons. They were sentenced to two to five years in prison.

The US government implemented a program for the peaceful use of nuclear weapons and called it Project Plowshares (the USSR did the same thing). Exploding nuclear bombs in the atmosphere or underground and calling this “peaceful nuclear explosions” was part of a larger goal of exploiting the “peaceful” uses of the atom.

Antinuclear Activity

An antinuclear group began the Plowshares movement. They initially broke into the General Electric Division in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. Re-entry vehicles for the Minuteman II missiles were made here. The Plowshares group hammered on two re-entry vehicles, poured blood on documents, and offered prayers for peace.

Ever since atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, scientists and citizens around the word began to be increasingly concerned about the destructive power of these weapons. A scientist that I met at the Unitarian-Universalist Church in Atlanta (of which I was a member) worked at the Centers for Disease Control, which was located just a few miles from our church. While in a group discussion, he told us he had been a young scientist working at Los Alamos when the atom bomb was developed. He was ashamed that he worked with others to develop the bomb. People in the group gave him great comfort, but he wanted us to know that he wasn’t the project’s only scientist who felt this way.

The goal of antinuclear activists is to ban nuclear weapons and work toward the elimination of them. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted in 2017 and is a comprehensive treaty to attain a nuclear free world agreed to by eighty-six nations. Although the treaty is in effect, all the nations that have nuclear weapons abstained from voting. The two nuclear weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the worldwide testing that was done created great risk to people living in areas where testing was done, especially Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the South Pacific.

Nuclear Weapons in the World

The nuclear threat is rarely discussed.[2] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed this. These are weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and for leaders to threaten the use of WMD is unconscionable. I decided to examine the cost of the US spending on its nuclear program. Here is what I found. From 1940 to 1998, the United States spent $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and weapon-related programs.[3] Most of this money (86 percent) was spent on launch systems—B52 bombers, nuclear submarines, and missiles.

During the period 1999–2019, the US spent on average $45 billion each year. The Congressional Budget Office is required by law to project the ten-year costs of nuclear forces every two years. For the period 2021–2030, the Department of Defense’s and the Department of Energy’s combined costs would be $634 billion, or slightly more than $60 billion a year.[4] Over two-thirds of the costs would be for ballistic missiles and nuclear laboratories.

In 2016, the Congress approved a nuclear weapons spending plan that will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion between 2017 and 2046. This expenditure represents 6 percent of all national defense spending for that period. The plan calls for improved nuclear delivery systems, nuclear warheads, and supporting infrastructure. China and Russia are also investing in their nuclear capabilities continuing the Cold War arms race. This is mad.

The United States possesses 1,650 strategic nuclear warheads, while Russia has 1,700 nuclear warheads. There are seven additional countries that have nuclear arsenals: China (350 weapons), France (300), UK (225), India (150), Pakistan (150), Israel (80), and North Korea (20).

Atmospheric Testing

The United States conducted 1,032 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992: at the Nevada Test Site (NTSW), at sites in the Pacific Ocean, in Amchitka Island of the Alaska Peninsula, and in Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Fallout downwind contained radionuclides and gases transported thousands of miles away from the Nevada National Security Site by wind. A radionuclide is a radioactive form of an element. When a nuclear explosion occurs, about twelve different radionuclides are produced, including iodine and cobalt-60. People living in the US during these years were exposed to varying levels of radiation. The American government released very little information warning people of potential effects of nuclear fallout. Fallout of radiation moved through the food chain causing cancerous diseases.

Carole Gallagher, a photojournalist and writer, documented, through portraits and interviews of men and women whose lives were crossed by radioactive fallout. Her book, American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, which she wrote over a period of ten years beginning in 1983, is an amazing portrait of the most reckless program of scientific experimentation in United States history. You will be shocked by the stories she wrote by visiting six downwind states meeting with radiation survivors’ groups and finding people being willing to be photographed and interviewed. Her research included test site victims and atomic veterans. She describes casualties of what she calls an “undeclared war.”

US atmospheric testing was relentless and produced tons of radioactive fallout that spread across the US, but particularly affected a few states downwind from the America’s Nevada Test Site. The chart below graphs ten nuclear tests and the percentage of total radioactive fallout from each test.

Underground Nuclear Testing

British Bomb Tests

Roger Cross, Australian science educator and author, wrote two books describing the British bomb tests in the atmosphere over Australia and the harmful effects of radioactive fallout. Fallout “is the strange but true story of a celebrated Australian scientist’s involvement in the 1956 British atomic bomb tests. Hedley Marston, an idol with his own feet of clay, was determined not only to reveal official lies and chicanery, but to expose as charlatans the Australian scientists who were appointed to protect the nation from any possible harm.” The same chicanery occurred in the United States during its atomic and nuclear bomb testing.

Cross’ second book, co-authored with Avon Hudson, Beyond Belief is a provocative historical work providing a voice for the forgotten victims of the British atomic bomb tests conducted in Australia during the 1950s. Raising disturbing questions about the authorities who conducted the tests, this investigative work reveals how successive British and Australian governments have denied their understanding of the dangers of ionizing radiation in the 1950s.

Cuban Missile Crisis

In 1962, when I was a high school teacher in Weston, MA, the US and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear holocaust when the US learned that the USSR was installing medium- and intermediate-range missiles in Cuba. Although the United States held an overwhelming nuclear weapons advantage over the Soviet Union, the nuclear age became front and center of international policy and politics. The American and Soviet people did not know the truth about nuclear weapons until many years later. We shielded ourselves with aluminum foil and newspaper and hid in bathtubs. Weapons were being used like chess pieces as one side confronted the other. Finally, little has been done to make the world safer from nuclear weapons. No country should have these weapons.

Richard Nixon

In 1969, President Richard Nixon ordered nuclear bombers to be put on standby for an immediate strike after North Korea shot down an American spy plane.[5] Recent documents show that there was a plan to target twelve military targets each with a nuclear bomb. These bombs were at least twenty times as powerful of those used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The plan was scrapped soon after it was ordered.

However, in 1974 on the eve of Richard Nixon resigning as president, many were so concerned about his state of mind. The nuclear football that normally accompanies the president was removed from his presence during his last two hours before flying Nixon back to California after he resigned.[6]

Nuclear False Alarms

In September 1983, I was in Moscow in a meeting among American and Soviet researchers just days after Korean Airline 007 was shot out of the skies by the Soviets. A Soviet satellite report showing incoming US nuclear missiles was received at Serpukhov-15, the secret bunker outside Moscow. Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov, the duty officer, felt the report was a false alarm.

He acted on a hunch that the report, which indicated only five incoming American missiles, was wrong. If it were an attack, he reasoned there would have been hundreds of missiles. He was right. And because he reported a false alarm to his superior officers, the world escaped nuclear war.[7] The false alarm was triggered by reflections from the tops of clouds. The incident was a 2013-feature-length Danish documentary film, named The Man Who Saved the World. A similar episode happened in 1995 when, again, Russia thought it was under attack and nearly launched a nuclear strike.

Hawaii Missile Alert

On January 13, 2018, a ballistic missile alert was accidentally issued over television, radio, and cellphones in Hawaii. The alert stated that there was an incoming ballistic missile threat to the state and that citizens should seek shelter. The message concluded, “This is not a drill.” After more than a half an hour, officials called off the alert, blaming the message on a miscommunication during a drill. However, millions of people were traumatized. Cynthia Lazaroff, founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy and NuclearWakeUpCall, was in Hawaii. She actually made phone calls to loved ones.[8] Cynthia is also founder of the US-Russia Exchange Initiatives a project. It began in 1983 at the same time that the AHP-Soviet Exchange Program began.

Since the advent of these weapons, the US has had dozens of nuclear accidents. One was the dropping to two live atomic bombs on North Carolina on January 23, 1961 [9]

In fact, a commander of US nuclear forces said that the real nuclear threat on America is an accident.

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[1] I have taken graduate students (mostly Atlanta area middle and high school teachers) to four of Georgia’s barrier islands including Skidaway, Sapelo, Jekyll, and Cumberland Islands.

[2] There are more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world spread unevenly among nine countries. The US and Russia account for more than 90 percent of them. There are several organizations that report on nuclear weapons. These include the Ploughshares Fund, Federation of American Scientists, and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook.

[3] Stephen I. Schwartz, “The Hidden Costs of Our Nuclear Arsenal: Overview of Project Findings,” presented to the Brookings Institution August 1998, retrieved September 15, 2021, https://www.brookings.edu/the-hidden-costs-of-our-nuclear-arsenal-overview-of-project-findings/.

[4] Congressional Budget Office, May 2021, retrieved September 15, 2021, https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-05/57130-Nuclear-Forces.pdf.

[5] Chris McGreal, “Papers Reveal Nixon Plan for North Korea Nuclear Strike,” The Guardian, July 7, 2010, retrieved September 17, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/07/nixon-north-korea-nuclear-strike.

[6] Garrett M. Graff, “The Madman and the Bomb,” Politico Magazine, August 11, 2017, retrieved September 17, 2021, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/11/donald-trump-nuclear-weapons-richard-nixon-215478/.

[7] Tony Long, “Sept. 26, 1983: The Man Who Saved the World by Doing…Nothing,” Wired, September 26, 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/09/dayintech-0926-2/.

[8] Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy: nuclearwakeupcall.earth/women-s-project

[9] Bill Newcott, B, Remembering the Night Two Atomic Bombs Fell-on North Carolina, January 26, 2022, National Geographic: History & Culture. Retrieved February 12, 2022, from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/remembering-night-two-atomic-bombs-dropped-on-north-carolina