Published 2017 Strategic Demands Editor, Steven Schmidt: It is time to recall my memories of Dan Ellsberg of nearly 50 years ago… From a nondescript building in Santa Monica to a house on the beach in Malibu, from a basketball court in Pacific Palisades to a Parade editor’s tennis court on Sunset Boulevard… My […]
2024 Multiplying Pits ‘n Triggers Multiplying Pits Mean Multiplying Nukes Read more about the Academy Award winning movie Oppenheimer — the tragic legacy of ‘the Bomb’ StratDem: A Legacy of ‘Perpetual Insecurity’ Those who envisioned, designed and built the Bomb began warning of nuclear dangers and proliferation […]
PBS ‘American Experience’ documentary film in 2023 brings into light how the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium peace movement acted to prevent the President Nixon – Henry Kissinger plan to use nuclear weapons
The Russia-Ukraine Crisis… February 19, 2022… ‘Ratcheting Up’, tactical nukes in the field… Nuclear ‘Drills’ as Russian Forces Run ‘Firing Exercises’
As readers of Strategic Demands may recall, your editor as a younger man was close to Dan Ellsberg during his Rand research days in Santa Monica. Dan’s role with the “Pentagon Papers” was historic, but few know of Dan Ellsberg’s role as a U.S. nuclear war planner…
Press reports of the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki converged quickly on a dominant narrative — Putin advanced Russian interests and the US president inexplicably supports (or doesn’t support) Putin’s interests. At Strategic Demands, as an independent voice distinct from news cycle narratives, we focus here on our interests, the ‘issue of issues’, nuclear weapons
U.S. nuclear national laboratories at Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico are the world’s foremost facilities for the production of mass destruction and death… Over the past 60 years, our country has spent over $7 trillion to generate 70,000 nuclear warheads at an average cost of about $100 million apiece… 10,400 such weapons […]
‘Modernization’ of U.S. nuclear weapons systems is racing forward, budgets booming, artificial intelligence and gyrations of command & control rolling. Meanwhile in Los Alamos, the ‘birthplace of the Bomb’ and main location of the Academy award-winning film “Oppenheimer”, Bomb-makers are beginning to prep next gen “nuke ’em pits ‘n triggers”
GreenPolicy360 & Strategic Demands Snapshot of Reviews the Day After Oppenheimer’s Premiere (with a personal memory of a father’s flight over the Trinity site days after ‘the Bomb’ was first tested by Los Alamos scientists) ♦
The Doomsday Clock, first unveiled in the late 1940s when atomic scientists who built the first nuclear weapons were having second thoughts, is now closer to a midnight of disaster than ever before. We’ve arrived, humanity has arrived. The clock’s hands of fate display we’re on the brink of paroxysm and unimaginable cataclysm
As the international nuclear arms control architecture collapses, the progenitors of nuclear weapons control meet up at their annual DC confab to talk of strategic issues and academically shake their heads witnessing a descent toward a nuclear precipice … Nukes in the new era of proliferation … The 2019 Carnegie Nuclear Policy Conference
The new Nuclear Posture Review signals a new nuclear arms race. Luck of the draw. “Do you feel lucky?” The question of generational, existential risk takes on new dimension as strategic arms experts ask deadly end game questions. Nuclear tensions are turning to nuclear threats, an international ramp up of nuclear weapons development, ‘usable’ nukes, […]
‘On Nuclear Weapons’… ‘The U.S. is now spending annually, in constant dollars, more than three times what the US did for comparable activities during the Cold War.’ (2022/LASG) 2024 WASHINGTON – MARCH 11, 2024 The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) released its portion of President Biden’s Fiscal Year […]
