What America spent money on during the Cold War instead of actual security in the daily lives of its citizens (#22789297):
"Throughout the world, our strategic focus stand guard over our way of life. But, if a general war engulfed the world, all our military power could be helpless.
Unless our leaders could survive and control our forces before and during the holocaust, an aggressor could strike without fear of reprisal.
Only the belief that we could control our forces throughout the entire spectrum of a general nuclear war would deter him from striking the first blow."
1969 US Air Force film, declassified thanks to the National Security Archive.
Grateful for the complex and detailed review of my book Nuclear bodies: the global hibakusha by Sonali Huria in the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament.
THE ASSASSINATION OF PATRICE LUMUMBA, first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, explored in this timely, fascinating, intensely researched work with emphasis on US Cold War strategy and the role of the CIA. A MINUS
NYT video about the Palomares nuclear accident over Spain in 1966.
A US h-bomber was refueling in mid-air over Southern Spain. Both exploded and four h-bombs fell onto a small Spanish beach town (2 into the Mediterranean). This film examines health consequences to the clean up crew.
The power of art to communicate complex information easily.
You can see charts of the total number of nuclear weapon tests (2,000+), or of the locations of those tests, or the years. However, this video communicates that history in a visceral, embodied way.
"In Operation Desert Rock, the military conducted a series of nuclear tests in the Nevada Proving Grounds between 1951 and 1957. In total, more nearly 400,000 American soldiers and civilians would be classified as 'atomic veterans.'"
There are two forms of nuclear colonialism. The extraction of natural resources from traditional indigenous and colonized lands. And the colonialism of treating a place as empty, as "no place" where there is "no one" and there are no consequences for nuclear testing. Nuclear weapon states have always very intentionally "selected the irradiated." Read, Nuclear Bodies: The Global #Hibakusha.
The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union lasted from the end of World War II until the end of the 1980s. Over the course of five decades, they never came to blows directly. Rather, these two world superpowers competed in other arenas that would touch almost every corner of the globe.
A powerful case that the economic shocks of the 1970s hastened both the end of the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism by forcing governments to impose austerity on their own people.
Why did the Cold War come to a peaceful end? And why did neoliberal economics sweep across the world in the late twentieth century?
Petrov-Day is September 26th and named after Stanislav Petrov. This Man single handedly stopped total Nuclear War with his scepticism. His concerns about the credibility of incoming missile attack signals via the air-defense computer prohibited the self-genozide of humans. Our portrait may help a little to awareness.
share, boost and remember all friends and foes about this important #PetrovDay
Fallout cloud from a nuclear weapon test at the Nevada Test Site during the Upshot-Knothole series (1953).
This is about an hour after the test, and the cloud is in the process of spreading into Southern Utah where it will dump a significant portion of its radioactive fallout on houses, farms and ranches.
Scientists calculate that four specific tests (out of almost 500) were responsible for the majority of the radioactive fallout deposited downwind of the Polygon nuclear test site in Kazakhstan (the primary test site of the former USSR).