Who Has Been ‘Begging for War’?

US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley says North Korea’s tests of increasingly sophisticated nuclear weapons and missiles amounts to “begging for war.”

So THAT’S what testing increasingly sophisticated nuclear weapons and missiles is! Thank you for the clarification, Ambassador Haley.

Is that what the US and the other nuclear weapons states have been doing for the past 70 years? Perhaps now we have some inkling of how we have been viewed by the rest of the world as we have brandished weapon after weapon after weapon . . . ?

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#Nuclearban: How Will China Play Its Hand?

From the moment the global nuclear ban treaty initiative first got under way, it was clear that China’s role would be pivotal.

I wrote yesterday to begin a conversation about possible ways that the treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons may come to dominate the global discourse in the months ahead.

An extremely important question is how China will engage with this new development. People frequently assume that China is a country trying to catch up with and surpass the United States, and so China’s behavior in the world must necessarily be a near version of how the US behaves. However, a growing school of thought has begun to notice that the best way to understand what China might do is to ask, “What could China do that in one fell swoop would put them three steps ahead of the US?”

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Nuclear Weapons Abolition: What Will Be Different After September 20?

The global treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons will be available for countries to sign when the UN General Assembly begins its session September 20. The treaty enters into force 90 days after 50 countries have signed it.

The treaty text was drafted during a three week conference in June and July. One hundred and twenty-two (122) countries who participated in the special conference voted in favor of the text. (There was one voted against and one abstention.)

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Time To Call the Question: Is Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons Constitutional?

Adam Liptak wrote in the New York Times several days ago that law schools are preparing to delve into numerous Constitutional questions that have been brought to a head by the Trump presidency, not the least of which is:

“Must Congress authorize a nuclear strike against North Korea?”

(See “New on This Fall’s Law School Syllabus: Trump.”)

Case in point: a conference taking place in Cambridge on November 4 will address the question, “Presidential First Use of Nuclear Weapons:  Is it Legal? Is it Constitutional? Is it Just?”  The affiliations of the speakers – including Yale Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT – tend to affirm Liptak’s suggestion that this is a question that is being taken up in law schools and on campuses nationwide.

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Rein In Trump’s Power to Launch a Nuclear First Strike: Contact Your Representative

Ever since nuclear weapons were first invented and the United States used them against Japan, ordinary citizens have been subjected to an unrelenting campaign of obfuscation and confusion about their true nature and what’s at stake. If any of us stopped long enough to think about nuclear weapons, we realized that everything possible must be done to get rid of them, and to make sure no one is every able to cause them to be used. But our ability to think has been challenged by a smokescreen of state propaganda: the state needs them, the state has everything under control, the state will take care of it. (Just feel lucky you’re a citizen of such a big, strong state.)

Now along comes Donald Trump, who has sole authority to order a nuclear first strike and is tossing out threats left and right against North Korea.

People are waking up. Nuclear war is not an abstraction. It is a real possibility, and it is in the hands (right now) of a single person.

There are now forty-four (44) co-sponsors on Rep. Ted Lieu’s House bill to rein in presidential first use of nuclear weapons. (And nine (9) co-sponsors on the corresponding bill in the Senate sponsored by Ed Markey.) Now is the time to demand a tidal wave of support for this bill, and get the unilateral authority over these weapons out of the hands of a single person.

Please use this script to call and get YOUR representative on that list!

Reprinted with permission from Scarry Thoughts.