Via Democracy Now
Tag Archives | Nuclear War
Atomic Doomsday Clock Moves Closer To Midnight
Citing danger of nuclear proliferation and climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hand of it’s ‘Doomsday Clock’ to five minutes to midnight.
The Condo at the End of the World: Life Inside a Nuclear Missile Bunker (Video)
Via The Verge:
Edward Peden purchased a former U.S. military launch site in the 1980s, and has been living in it ever since. Meanwhile, Larry Hall is building million-dollar condominiums inside of an underground missile silo.
Duck And Cover: The Citizen Kane Of PSAs
Few films, let alone ones running under ten minutes, have been as frequently referenced, reproduced and satirized as Duck and Cover, yet it is never regarded seriously. Conelrad gives this key piece of cinematic history the treatment it deserves:
We have spent the last two years thoroughly researching DUCK AND COVER’s production history as well as its initial public reception in 1952. Interviews were conducted with living participants involved in the making of the film as well as surviving family members of those key players who had passed away.
Just how did the term “Duck and Cover” become universal shorthand for the paranoid excesses of the Cold War and for every geo-political panic attack since? The film is, after all, the Citizen Kane of American civil defense motion pictures. Clips from this movie are used almost every time a news piece is produced on the 1950′s or the Cold War.
British Astronomers Warn World May End This Century
Top U.K. astronomers give civilization only a 50 percent chance of surviving to 2100, reports Scottish STV. To voice the obvious questions: How can anyone calculate the date of the apocalypse, really? And, what does the end of the world mean for the Royal Family?
The end of the world is nigh. That’s what top astronomers will claim during a debate to end the 2011 Edinburgh International Science Festival.
Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, believes civilisation has only a 50 per cent chance of surviving to 2100 without suffering a man-made catastrophe. And the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor John Brown, has an equally bleak outlook, fearing a random event from outer space is the most likely cause of our demise.
Despite having widely differing views, these two titans of astronomy between them offer global warming, over-population, terrorism, an asteroid falling to earth and a solar blast as potential reasons to panic.
Britain’s Stylishly Mod Secret Underground City
How To Be A Retronaut has an arresting set of images of Burlington, the 35-acre “Cold War City” lying twelve stories beneath Wiltshire, England. Built during the 1950s, it was to be home to the prime minister and a few thousand others in the event of nuclear apocalypse. With record players, rotary phones, and Singer sewing machines folding out from enclosures in the walls, it makes the prospect of a post-disaster future seems quite charming:
It was equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain and a BBC studio from where the prime minister could make broadcasts to what remained of the nation. 100,000 lamps that lit its streets and guided the way to a pub modeled on the Red Lion in Whitehall. The bunker’s very existence was meant to be top secret until it was decommissioned in 2004.
Military Lost Communication With 50 Nuclear Missiles
Dr. Strangelove, anyone? Via Wired:
The Air Force swears there was no panic. But for three-quarters of an hour Saturday morning, launch control officers at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming couldn’t reliably communicate or monitor the status of 50 Minuteman III nuclear missiles. Gulp.
Backup security and communications systems, located elsewhere on the base, allowed the intercontinental ballistic missiles to be continually monitored. But the outage is considered serious enough that the very highest rungs on the chain of command — including the President — are being briefed on the incident today.
A single hardware failure appears to have been the root cause of the disruption, which snarled communications on the network that links the five launch control centers and 50 silos of the 319th Missile Squadron. Multiple error codes were reported, including “launch facility down.”
The incident comes at a particularly tricky time for the Obama administration, which is struggling to get the Senate to ratify a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia.
Preparing for World War III in 1925
The “Extraordinary claim” that Barack Hussein Obama, Ahmadinajad and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (the group behind the Mosque at Ground Zero) are setting the world up for World War III can be supported with facts, and therefore is not a conspiracy theory.
Google Trends confirms the U.S. is openly considering a raid on Iranian’s (non-existent) nuclear weapons facilities.
My articles on this subject have resonated throughout the anti-war community:
- August 9 The Maxine Waters Investigation: What is Iran Doing in this Picture?
- August 27 Waxman, Waters and Iran, Connect the Dots
We could be living in the most dangerous times the world has seen since the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis.
Here are the facts:
- A letter written before 1925 (AKA The Pike Letter). Albert Pike, author of “Morals and Dogma” in 1871 proposed the following plan in a letter to Giuseppe Mazzini:
“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World.
Atomic Bomb Book Author Admits He Was Duped
You have to feel sorry for the author I guess, but shouldn’t his publisher have checked the facts? From the New York Times:
A new book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima has won critical acclaim with its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb’s survivors and is set to be made into a movie by James Cameron.
“The Last Train from Hiroshima,” published in January by Henry Holt, also claims to reveal a secret accident with the atom bomb that killed one American and irradiated others and greatly reduced the weapon’s destructive power.
There is just one problem. That section of the book and other technical details of the mission are based on the recollections of Joseph Fuoco, who is described as a last-minute substitute on one of the two observation planes that escorted the Enola Gay.
But Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor…
