{"id":44402,"date":"2023-10-22T07:07:15","date_gmt":"2023-10-22T15:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=44402"},"modified":"2023-10-22T13:04:28","modified_gmt":"2023-10-22T21:04:28","slug":"natos-steadfast-noon-is-ready-made-doom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/22\/natos-steadfast-noon-is-ready-made-doom\/","title":{"rendered":"NATO’s Steadfast Noon Is Ready-Made Doom"},"content":{"rendered":"

On October 16, during the NATO-supplied, nuclear-armed hot war in Ukraine, the alliance began its annual nuclear attack rehearsal dubbed \u201cSteadfast Noon<\/a>.\u201d This practice involves air forces from 13 countries, the \u201cexercising\u201d of fighter jets and U.S. B-52s, lasts until October 26, and will be roaring over Italy, Croatia and the eastern Mediterranean \u2014 not far from two aircraft carrier battle groups charging toward the war over the Gaza Strip.<\/p>\n

A hundred people joined an October 13 protest<\/a> outside Germany\u2019s N\u00f6rvenich Air Base calling for cancellation of the rehearsal, to no avail.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

NATO Sec. Gen. Jens Stoltenberg naturally said, \u201cOur exercise will help to ensure the credibility, effectiveness and security of our nuclear deterrent.\u201d This is shrewd, silk tie talk about threatening nuclear attacks, threats barely distinguishable from Putin\u2019s verbal warnings. NATO claims<\/a>, \u201c[T]he fundamental purpose of NATO\u2019s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aware that this fundamental purpose was disproved and vaporized by Russia\u2019s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, NATO practices nuclear attacks. Steadfast Noon is a role-play for pilots, a dry run to test classroom preparations made at the German branch of the U.S. Air Force Nuclear College on Ramstein Air Base. According to the AFNC website<\/a>, the school \u201cis responsible for delivering, sustaining and supporting air-delivered nuclear weapon systems for our warfighters \u2026 every day.\u201d Some such air-delivered nuclear weapons are the U.S. \u201cB61\u201d free-fall gravity bombs stationed in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Turkey.<\/p>\n

One Nuclear College course named \u201cTheater Nuclear Operation\u201d was described this way (before the page was taken down):<\/p>\n

\u201c[A] 4.5-day course that provides training for planners, support staff, targeteers, and staff nuclear planners for joint operations and targeting.\u201d Another class is said to provide: \u201cproficiency in importing and creating target models, developing attack plans using conventional or nuclear weapons, performing consequence assessment to WMD scenarios.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

If you imagined that nuclear war is unthinkable, this school says its fighter jet pilot students, \u201cwill be able to import, edit, and modify target sites\u201d; \u201ccalculate probabilistic attacks against predefined targets; [and] \u201cdevelop attack plans using either conventional or nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

These B61s are just the U.S. nukes closest to Moscow. Add to these the French, British and U.S. thermonuclear weapons on submarines, long-range missiles, and bombers (totals are approximately 5244 U.S<\/a>., 225 British, and 290 French).<\/p>\n

At the protest in N\u00f6rvenich, Ludo De Brabander, from the Belgian peace group Peace Now, spoke of the 10 to 20 B61s stationed at Kleine Brogel Air Base in Belgium:<\/p>\n

\u201cThese bombs will soon be replaced by new B61-12 nuclear bombs. Because of their \u2018precision\u2019 and \u2018low yield,\u2019 these nuclear weapons are considered \u2018operational,\u2019 lowering the threshold for nuclear war. All of this is happening without any official explanation or public debate.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The concept of suicidal ideation applies to steadfast planning or the actual launch of nuclear weapons attacks. Daniel Ellsberg, in Things That Can and Cannot Be Said<\/em> (Haymarket Books 2016), said, \u201c[O]ur private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single U.S. or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Steadfast Noon is not just code language, or public relations. The event is a large-scale, psychological operation intended to teach us to pretend that nuclear attacks can do good. Of course if nuclear firestorms saved lives and ended war \u2014 as U.S. mythology goes with Hiroshima and Nagasaki \u2014 then the Pentagon would have used them in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. People love to be fooled.<\/p>\n

John LaForge, syndicated by <\/em>PeaceVoice<\/em><\/a>, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On October 16, during the NATO-supplied, nuclear-armed hot war in Ukraine, the alliance began its annual nuclear attack rehearsal dubbed \u201cSteadfast Noon.\u201d This practice involves air forces from 13 countries, the \u201cexercising\u201d of fighter jets and U.S. B-52s, lasts until October 26, and will be roaring over Italy, Croatia and the eastern Mediterranean \u2014 not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-44402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44402"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44410,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44402\/revisions\/44410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44402"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=44402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}