#nuclear disarmament

[grupaok]

Keith Haring, No Nukes poster, 1982, on the occasion of the Rally for Nuclear Disarmament, New York City, June 12, 1982

#keith haring #agitprop #art #nuclear war #nuclear disarmament #poster #drawing #1980s #pop art #grupaok

[sixth-light]

*slides you money* I heard you were three seconds from a treatise on David Lange and Mururoa and the Rainbow Warrior?

BY POPULAR DEMAND (ok you and like three other people asked)...

The core fact that you gotta know if you want to talk about New Zealand and nuclear weapons is that campaigning for nuclear disarmament and maintaining a legal nuclear-free zone in our territorial waters has been the core of our independent foreign policy as a country for nearly forty years, since the mid-1980s. This developed over the 60s and 70s from a popular groundswell of anti-nuclear sentiment focused around continued atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific by France as well as visits from nuclear-powered (and potentially nuclear-armed) American warships. It evolved into government action; left-wing governments took France to court to demand an end to testing and sent naval frigates to the nuclear test area to protest with Government ministers on board.

This was crystallised in 1985 when a photographer was killed in the state-sponsored terrorist bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship conducting protests at the French nuclear test site of Mururoa. The bombing was carried out by French spies who were decorated when they returned to France (after France promised they would be jailed) and led to a prolonged diplomatic rift between New Zealand and France. The subsequent passing of nuclear-free legislation in 1987, banning nuclear-powered or armed ships visiting our waters, led to New Zealand's suspension from the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, and the United States) military alliance. David Lange, the Prime Minister at the time, opined famously that "The only thing worse than being incinerated by your enemies, is being incinerated by your friends." The ban still has such wide bipartisan support that it's simply not on the table now for even our right-wing parties; infamously, in the early 2000s one Leader of the Opposition told an American congressional delegation that the ban would be 'gone by lunchtime' if he became Prime Minister. This wasn't the DIRECT cause of his eventual toppling but it certainly didn't help. Nobody else has gone near it since.

I am, however, excrutiatingly aware that while our nuclear-free stance is viewed internally by New Zealanders as central to our national identity - there's a well-known song and it was even controversially used this year in a beer ad as a signifier of national pride - nobody else remembers. Particularly the Americans and the French. Seared into my brain is Scott Brown (yes that one) arriving here as the new US Ambassador in 2016 and going on the radio to talk earnestly about how Kiwis didn't realise that nuclear fallout wasn't restricted by national borders, c.f. North Korea, as if anti-nuclear campaigning wasn't...well...see all of the above. READ YOUR GODDAMN BRIEFING PACKETS ON THE PLANE, SCOTT, IT'S A FOURTEEN-HOUR FLIGHT.

So what does that mean for the Locked Tomb books?

As the linked article about the beer ad notes, anti-nuclear protesting has been a site not only of national identity formation but specifically Indigenous protest in the Pacific. It is Pasifika peoples who have borne the brunt of nuclear testing and much of the early anti-nuclear movement in Aotearoa was led by Māori and Pasifika, and closely tied to the anti-apartheid movement which focused on the removal or restriction of Māori and Pasifika rugby players on tours to apartheid South Africa.

In Nona the Ninth, it becomes clear that John (a Māori man) and G- (whose ethnicity is not specified but 'reads' as most likely Māori or Pasifika in context), as well as their friends, blackmailed the US government for a suitcase nuke and eventually used it to bomb Melbourne, with John then causing nuclear armageddon around the world. This is, uh, emphatically not the same thing as "Twitch streamers [John & co] nuking New Zealand", as chill as I generally am with the eliding of detail for joke posts. This is a Māori man from and in New Zealand nuking first Australia and then the rest of the world.

This is, obviously, if you're coming from the historical context, hugely transgressive in a way I can only describe as a...horror of agency? The horror of saying, what if we were willing to do the thing that we identify ourselves as a nation as being against under all circumstances? What if instead of standing nobly against nuclear weapons, for reasons of moral indefensibility, we were the ones to pull the trigger? What if our culture and our people survived the apocalypse because one of us started it, instead of us surviving by virtue of being so small, so on the edge of the world, so carelessly left off world maps?

And as to why it matters that it's Melbourne - New Zealand has a...complicated relationship with Australia that's hard to directly parallel to anywhere else (it's sort of like Canada and the US but also not like Canada and the US in any way that Canadians or Americans ever interpret that statement in my experience). In particular, there is huge anxiety in Australia about New Zealand as a source of non-white (and specifically Māori and Pasifika) emigration to Australia. Australian immigration policy, while technically retaining free movement between the two nations, has grown more and more restrictive over the last twenty years. Right now the central point of conflict is a policy of deporting mostly Māori and Pasifika New Zealand-born prisoners back to New Zealand on completion of their sentences, regardless of how old they were when they came to Australia, resulting in a large body of traumatised people with zero community ties being dumped back here and - no surprises! - frequently turning to crime. There's A Lot Going On There. Added to which the Christchurch mosque shooter deliberately travelled here from Australia to carry out his terrorism. And yet also, hundreds of thousands of us live there and many more have relatives and friends there.

And Melbourne? Melbourne is like....the cool Australian city, if you're a New Zealander. Sydney is too big (the same population as our whole country!) and too...everything, Brisbane and the Gold Coast are tropical and so kinda weird, Adelaide and Perth? we don't know them, but Melbourne is aspirational. Melbourne is the kind of city Wellington and Auckland would like to be when they grow up, maybe. They have laneways and culture and a working tram system. But it's also a very...white kind of cool. The kind enjoyed by rich Pākehā who can afford to go on weekend shopping holidays there.

So yeah. John and G- and the crew nuke Melbourne and it's a nexus of all these tensions old and new, of who we think we are as people and as a nation, of how we relate to Australia which is our friend and nearest neighbour and our rival and our scapegoat (because they're the really racist ones, aren't they? If we say that loud enough, does it drown out the sounds of our own sins?)

It's a fantasy of power and a horror of it at the same time. I hope someone right now is writing a monograph on this, there's so much to dig into. But it deserves to be framed as what it is, as a response from a Kiwi author to our own history and identity. It deserves to be understood in context.

#the locked tomb #ntn spoilers #new zealand #history #nuclear disarmament

[classyclips]

“If tomorrow Russia goes into Crimea, no one will raise an eyebrow. Besides… promises, no one ever planned to give Ukraine any guarantees.” Leonid Kuchma

It is no accident that Kuchma mentioned the possible invasion of Crimea in 1994, not Donbas or any other region of Ukraine. Already in the spring of 1994, Russia seriously attempted to invade Crimea for the first time, just seven months before signing the Budapest Memorandum.

#ukraine #nuclear disarmament #clinton administration #budapest memorandum #crimea #1994 #history #politics #background information

[vintagepromotions]

‘Could you stomach this?’

Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament poster (1983). Art and design by Peter Kennard.

#vintage poster #1980s #Peter Kennard #Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament #Nuclear Disarmament #anti-war #anti-nuclear #photomontage #gas mask #missiles #warheads #nuclear warhead #weapons

[bea-lele-carmen]

#nuclear disarmament #ND #For #Peace and love #Flowers #Pacific #Pacifism

[personal-blog243]

#oppenheimer #nuclear disarmament #war what is it good for #give peace a chance #war pigs #war machine #oscar’s 2024

[wack-ashimself]

Know what has never made sense to me from the first time I heard of them till now? Nuclear weapons. Because there's only two scenarios, both cartoonishly exaggerated, where they could even be used properly. The first is on an enemy base. But it would have to be an isolated enemy base with a ton of weapons, and it would be more to destroy the weapons than the people. But with the blast radius and nuclear fallout, that's near impossible to say it wouldn't have innocent casualties eventually. Which makes the use of it morally wrong. The other is a threat out in space. Like a meteor or something like that. And at that point it would have to be a worldwide consensus to use them. Because no one country should be able to just nuke the sky on a whim. But besides that every other excuse for nukes is garbage. It's not a deterrent. It's not a defense mechanism. Because the end of the day next person to use it, knows they're going to get nuked back. It's tit for tat. But that is a very faulty logic. Because a bad guy somewhere decided to kill a bunch of your people, you decide to be the good guy and kill a bunch of their innocent people? Seriously you could not name a group of people on this planet that I would find nuking be okay. None. Because there's always innocent people somewhere. And the fact that there's never been a real consideration of tearing them apart shows where we are in humanity. We're more ready to get everybody a nuclear weapon than clean drinking water that's safe. And that's my summary of the human race. You're fucking failures. By choice. By every goddamn choice.

Side note. The World War II nukes were literally just a deterrent to scare off Russia and push us into the cold war. Yeah I did say deterrent. But sarcastically. We had no idea they wouldn't retaliate. People were scared for how many decades that a nuke could come at any second? What a great fucking plan. Hide under your desks so you can vaporize quicker. Japan actually hates us more for all the fire bombs we also did in sync with the nuke weapons. Look into it. There's a lot of shit that most people don't look into with all that went down. I'm not saying Japan was innocent, I am saying most of the people we killed in the nukes were innocent.. most inevitably will be...

<don't forget that Israel is still using white phosphorus. Probably supplied by us. We're literally the only country to use it that I can find of recent. We're usually the only country to use the most barbaric means to kill people. Because we're the good guys of freedom right? The freedom to step aside and let a genocide happen that we paid for. I will never be a proud USA Citizen and anybody who is doesn't know USA's history or is at least honest about it.>

#nuke #nukes #ww2 #fire bombs #japan #nuclear disarmament

[heartfullofpony]

Did I just watch a My Little Pony episode about collectivizing a former defense contractor's factory?

I think I did.

G5 may not be perfect, but this plot development is proof that Equestria is still a model for the ideal society, perhaps more than ever.

You hear that, Raytheon? We're coming for you, and we're gonna turn your death factories into a totally rad gimmicky playset.

Discuss.

-Sprocket

#my little pony #nuclear disarmament #g5 #make your mark #mlp

[melias-cimitiere]

Do you think nuclear disarment in all nations is possible? And if so how do you think we could achieve it? I feel like since these weapons of mass destruction were created it is just a net negative for humanity as a whole and leaves us all with a terrifying mass extinction and doom scenario hanging over our heads at the hands of psychopaths. I can't rest easy from it. It's insane that humans allowed this considering how so many world leaders right now are geriatric and highly unstable, only seeking power.

Yes, you are correct in that one cannot rest easy anymore. But whether they are unstable psychopaths, or elderly, or simply greedy and egotistical, wanting to create glory for themselves or to expand their empire - it all boils down to the same problem: if they have such power through nukes, and if they are willing to use them, the world is most likely doomed. I don't think many people can argue against that; to believe one can survive in a nuclear apocalypse like in Mad Max scenario is simply not something to be desired (or even possible). Let me elaborate; people think they can prepare for such a doomsday scenario - or that bullets or tin food will save them.

Ok, here are some basics:

1) ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) take approximately 25-40 minutes to cross the Atlantic, depending on where they launch. If they are launched from submarines or airplanes that are closer to the target, it could be even quicker. Assuming one gets warning through air-raid siren (or the news), there's nowhere to go (unless there is a nuclear shelter next to their house). Thousands will panic and trample one another on the streets, trying to get somewhere. Huge traffic jams will stop the traffic, block tunnels, causing chaos. All these people are doomed, if the nuke hits home.

2) if the nuke hits further away, and assuming it's smaller yield, kilotons instead of megatons, it can still cause chaos, EMP (the electromagnetic pulse will fry your electronics, no internet, no cellphone service etc) and the fireblast would engulf whole territory; the radioactive fallout will be in two stages: a) the immediate radiation emitted will kill, or cause skin burns and hair loss, including cancer; the rain (if it happens to rain) will be deadly to drink (people in Japan found out when they started to drink it, due to their thirst). Also, b) the fallout that will happen over several months, which will be part of the nuclear winter (if enough nukes are exploded globally). This scenario is very likely, as NORAD and other divisions are programmed to respond with deadly force, if attacked first; the same goes for the other side. In the nuclear exchange, even if many bombs or missiles fail to hit, getting exploded in the air, the world will become 80% uninhabitable.

 But let's suppose that it's a smaller scale war, and that more people survive after a limited nuclear exchange is done. Let's assume these people are still healthy, and able to go out. Go where? Petrol stations will empty in two days, and supermarkets will empty their shelves within a week, same as pharmacies. There will be nothing to buy; and no-one to go to work, to offer services. So looting will take place, and extreme violence. I believe that people are totally unprepared for anything like that, as neither them nor their parents have even lived through a conventional war, let alone such an armageddon. What will they do? 95% of those living in big cities will be doomed, in most scenarios, due to lack of services, starvation, thirst, and falling victim to extreme violence from other desperate people, that have now turned into raiders. The army or the police (if they are still functional) may try to contain some of it but the chances are they will be unable to stop the horror in the many millions of people that will be desperate and needing help; no electricity, no greengrocery, lack of petrol or medication... Even if people have stored ammo or tins, these can only provide for a small scenario - they can never truly have what is needed to survive. Many people will resort to suicide or will fall victim to ruthless others, or even cannibals.

 THE SOLUTION IS:  D O   N O T   H A V E   A   N U C L E A R   W A R.

 Nuclear disarmament is the only sane choice; but in an insane world, where people do not care enough for the world or even for themselves, I have ceased to believe that ALL the countries and their leaders are suddenly going to behave responsibly. It's naïve to think that; in fact, they seem all too eager to do their thing, and to hell with the consequences. So it falls to the people, to wake up and understand that their chances to change something are running out. They should apply pressure to their leaders to be listened to, and to take active involvement in such drastic measures; I know, many will think, "that's the politician's job, not mine". Yeah, but what do you do when your politician doesn't give a damn? It's YOUR world too, after all.

#asks #nuclear war #armageddon #russia #ukraine war #nuclear disarmament #peace #war #atomic warfare #EMP #current events #third world war #crisis

[potholefullofsoup]

#hiroshima #john hersey #new journalism #nuclear disarmament #the thing speaks

[jughead-is-canonically-aroace]

do you think the president and the guy with the nuclear launch codes surgically implanted in his heart ever explored each other's bodies

#isay #unreality #nuclear disarmament

[da-at-ass]

Nuclear Inktober #1 - Fat Man

Plutonium fission bomb of the Fat Man type. Fat Man was the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on 9 August 1945. Its yield was 22 kilotons.

I've never completed (maybe never started?) an Inktober before, and nuclear brinksmanship is making me wonder whether I ever will. So I give you Nuclear Inktober, a series of studies from the US Nuclear Forces and Capabilities Databook that I bought once to, I don't know, give me nightmares? But we have to stare this in the face and not turn away.

Every day I'll be drawing a different nuclear armed device, many of which are still around today, either as active arms or as stored waste.

#nuclear disarmament #nuclear weapons #fat boy #nuclear war #peace in ukraine #inktober #inktober 2022

[noneedtofearorhope]

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

[...]

As Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States, New START, stands in jeopardy. Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026. This would eliminate mutual inspections, deepen mistrust, spur a nuclear arms race, and heighten the possibility of a nuclear exchange.

#doomsday clock #nuclear disarmament #war in ukraine #bulletin of the atomic scientists

[allengreenfield]

#Putin #Third Rome #nuclear deterrence #Nuclear Disarmament

[oodlenoodleroodle]

Nato is starting a nuclear deterrence exercise called Steadfast Noon and that is the single most perverse name they could have come up with x_X

The noon part refers to the nuclear clock idea, like how close we are to "midnight" which would be a nuclear war.

Practicing nuclear war, playing nuclear war, showing Russia that we got nukes and know how to use them is moving the clock closer to midnight, not noon, ffs -_-

Steadfast Noon would be achieved with nuclear dearmament.

#nuclear disarmament #disband nato #fun fact the peace sign ☮ is flag semaphore code for ND aka nuclear disarmament #both flags down and a little bit out to the sides is N. one flag straight up one flag straight down is D.

[bea-lele-carmen]

#Pacific #pacifism #peace and love #nuclear disarmament #Nd #Anti war movement #unjust war #Fraudulent war #san francisco #Sf