April 19th – Mobilizing Meeting with Jonathan Schell & Organizers (Nuclear Disarmament)

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http://peaceandjusticenow.org/wordpress/2010/04/april-19-meeting-with-jonathan-schell/

APRIL 19 – Mobilizing Meeting with Jonathan Schell & Organizers
last updated: 14 April 2010
Monday, April 19th, 7– 8:30 PM
Will the nuclear powers give up their nukes?
Yes, if we organize!


Jonathan Schell in the April 19, 2010 edition of The Nation wrote, “Are nations in general safer when they aim nuke weapons at one another? Each nation cites the arsenal of another or others as the rational for possessing its own in multiple chains that link them together in network of threats and counter threats.”

On April 19, Monday 7 – 8:30 PM join Jonathan Schell and organizers of a massive May 2 NYC rally and march to discuss the strategy for organizing the 21st century nuclear abolition movement.

Date: April 19, Monday
Time: 7 – 8:30 PM
Place: 235 West 23 Street, 2nd Floor (Between 7th & 8th Avenue)

Take the #1, E, or C to 23rd Street subway stop.

Buses and “peace trains” are being filled from around the country to come to NYC on May 2 to rally for nuclear abolition, peace and justice.

Join us on Monday, April 19 at 7 PM to find out what you can do to bring out thousands of people to join 60 Hibakusha, survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, and thousands of nuclear abolitionists from around the world, 2,000 from Japan alone.

The May 2 march and rally is one day of a weekend of activities organized by an international coalition. Please take a moment to find out more and register for the April 30 – May 1 international conference For a Nuclear Free, Peaceful, Just and Sustainable World. Registration

This is Jonathon Schell's April 19th article:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/schell

Reaching Zero
By Jonathan Schell

This article appeared in the April 19, 2010 edition of The Nation.
April 1, 2010

Listen to Jonathan Schell and Tom Engelhardt discuss America's nuclear trajectory and the dilemma of nuclear weaponry in the Obama era.

What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular, has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of something like despair regarding their art. For example, Bernard Brodie, one of the originators of nuclear strategy in the 1940s, was forced near the end of his life to realize that "nuclear strategy itself--the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate--was something of an illusion," according to historian Fred Kaplan. In the introduction to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman airs the suspicion that the phrase "nuclear strategy" may be a "contradiction in terms." Henry Kissinger, a leading figure in nuclear strategizing for a half-century, has expressed a similar feeling of futility. In a remarkable reconsideration, amounting to an oblique recantation of his past thinking, he has written recently in Newsweek:

The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the "mutual assured destruction" theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s.

Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country's nuclear forces.

It will give the administration's answer to the key questions: What nuclear forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the United States propose to do with them? On April 8 the United States and Russia will sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. Also in early April, President Obama will hold a Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-four other nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.

The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will meet the mounting perils of the new situation. What's needed for success, I will suggest, is a revival precisely of the discredited art of nuclear strategic thinking, which may, with suitable adjustments, yet have something to offer us. Strategy, military thinkers have long told us, is the art of marrying up tactical means with broad political ends. That is exactly what is most sorely missing in nuclear policy today. Certainly, no mere piecemeal examination will suffice. A comprehensive approach is needed.

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Here is the April 6th radio interview with Jonathon Schell on Tom Engelhardt's show mentioned in the April 19th article:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/schell_engelhardt_audio

America's Nuclear Trajectory
By TomDispatch

April 6, 2010

In his article in this week's Nation, "Reaching Zero," Schell argues that the disarmament movement needs a clear strategic architecture if we are to move toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. Listen to Tom Engelhardt and Jonathan Schell discuss American involvement in Vietnam and Afghanistan, US nuclear policy from the 1960s to the present and the dilemma of nuclear weaponry in the Obama era.

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Here is an April 15th radio interview with Jonathon Schell and David Hoffman on Brian Lehrer's show:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100503/schell_audio
The Nuclear Reality
By The Brian Lehrer Show

April 15, 2010

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The Brian Lehrer Show : To discuss the threat of nuclear war, Jonathan Schell, Nation Institute fellow and author of "Reaching Zero," guests on the Brian Lehrer Show with David Hoffman, Foreign Policy contributing editor.

Earlier this week, President Obama met with more than forty of the world's leaders to launch a new global effort to prevent nuclear terrorism. To discuss the threat of nuclear war, Jonathan Schell, Nation Institute fellow and author of "Reaching Zero," is a guest on the Brian Lehrer Show with David Hoffman, Foreign Policy contributing editor and winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for his book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.

As Hoffman alludes to the end of the cold war between the United States and Russia, Schell responds that US nuclear strategy is out of step with reality. "In other words, there's a compete lack of connection between the strategic reality of aiming," he says. "Even after the START treaty, it will be 1550 nuclear war heads at one another.... Our weaponry and even our nuclear strategy of mutually assured destruction which survives to this day is completely out of synchronization with the geopolitical reality." Although it may seem as if the non-nuclear proliferation movement is at a standstill, Schell is somewhat optimistic, as President Obama moves slowly toward fulfilling the dream of a world without nuclear weapons.

--Clarissa Leon

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