September 23, 2012

Akahata editorial (excerpts)

U.S. President Barack Obama proclaimed soon after he was elected that he would seek to achieve “a world free of nuclear weapons” and promised to gradually reduce dependence on nuclear weapons. However, his nuclear policy contradicts what he stated. He is putting forward a policy that allows the U.S. to keep possessing “safe, reliable, and efficient” nuclear weapons as long as nuclear weapons exist in the world. “A safe nuclear weapon” is a contradiction in terms.

“President Obama has increased the budget for nuclear weapons and the weapons complex. The president doesn’t like to talk about it as much - he prefers the lofty speech about a world free of nuclear weapons - but the truth is that in this realm he’s a big spender,” the Washington Post editorial on September 1 counter argued the Republicans claiming that the president has not spent enough money on nuclear weapons. The editorial revealed the reality of Obama’s nuclear weapons policy.

To “modernize” the nuclear weapons made decades ago, the U.S. government replaces parts of the bombs and executes nuclear tests under the pretext of not developing a new weapon but just keeping existing ones in good working condition.

However, “modernization” sometimes changes old bombs into ones of a new type.

The B61 nuclear bomb has the capability to select its explosive yield from one fiftieth to twenty four times the explosive power of a Hiroshima-type A-bomb. The U.S. plans to combine four versions of the B61 and create a new variant, the B61-12. The government is quietly working on developing small scale nuclear weapons which provoked much criticism under G. W. Bush’s administration as the then president called it as a “usable nuclear weapon”.

U.S. nuclear weapons are deployed in 5 European nations, including Germany. People there have long demanded the removal of the weapons from their countries. Their movements became stronger after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and even some of the cabinet members of the N-arms host nations expressed opposition to nuclear weapons in the wake of the Obama anti-A-bombs speech.

Some say that the U.S. plans to replace the existing nuclear bombs in Europe with the B61-12 by the end of the 2010s. The deployment of the B61-12 goes directly against world public opinion.