TFF Associates & Themes Blog

Archive for September, 2017

Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran – Tragic news that US citizens accept nuking non-combatants
By Gunnar Westberg, TFF Board

Opinion study tells that a majority of US citizens accept killing 2 million civil Iranians if it could save 20.000 US soldiers there.

Plus links to urgently important articles about US-Iran relations and the nuclear deal.

This is TFF PressInfo # 427.

We have changed – a little – TFF PressInfo.
This is the new format – and # 426.
Hope you like it.

Click the envelop at the bottom to subscribe and it will come winging into your mailbox 4-5 times a month.

What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants

By Gunnar Westberg
TFF Board member

“Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants”
Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino
International Security, August 2017

This is a summary and a few reflections upon reading a very comprehensive academic study recently published in International Security. See it’s full text here.


The nuclear taboo is no longer strong

In this extensive and scholarly report of 67 pages the authors report on several opinion polls they have conducted in order to learn about the attitudes of Americans to the use of nuclear weapons compared to conventional weapons.

They also review the field extensively comparing with other studies.

Shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Americans strongly supported the use of nuclear weapons in that situation. The approval rate decreased to a large degree over the years.

However, when questions were asked regarding the possibility of using nuclear weapons in a contemporary conflict, such as that between USA and Iran, the attitude to the use of nuclear weapons was still surprisingly positive. The “nuclear taboo” is no longer strong.

An attack with nuclear weapons on a major city is accepted by a not much lower percentage of respondents than is a conventional attack.

A clear majority of Americans would approve of using nuclear weapons against the civilian population of an adversary that does not possess nuclear weapons.

It was seen as acceptable by the respondents to kill 2 million civilian Iranian if they believed that such a nuclear strike would save the lives of 20,000 U.S. soldiers fighting in Iran.

About 60% of the American people support this opinion.

In contrast, a 2010 Chicago Council on Global Affairs survey found that 57 per cent of the public agreed that “the U.S. should only use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack by another nation” and that 20 per cent agreed that “the U.S. should never use nuclear weapons under any circumstances”.

The principle of “non-combatant immunity”, a central principle in international humanitarian law, requires that the military activities should avoid as far as possible damage to the civilian population, compared to the combatant soldiers.

This principle had no strong support by the public opinion in these studies.

It was found that women support nuclear weapons use and violations of noncombatant immunity no less (and in some cases more) than male respondents.

The authors were not surprised by the finding that most Americans place a higher value on the life of an American soldier than the life of a foreign noncombatant.

What was surprising, however, was the radical extent to which they adhered to that preference.

The experiments suggest that the majority of Americans find a 1:100 risk ratio to be morally acceptable.

It should be strongly emphasized that no comparable study has been found for any other population in any other country. It is not known if attitudes in other countries differ from those in the USA.

The Abstract of the study

Numerous polls demonstrate that U.S. public approval of President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has declined significantly since 1945.

Many scholars and political figures argue that this decline constitutes compelling evidence of the emergence of a “nuclear taboo” or that the principle of noncombatant immunity has become a deeply held norm.

An original survey experiment, recreating the situation that the United States faced in 1945 using a hypothetical U.S. war with Iran today, provides little support for the nuclear taboo thesis.

In addition, it suggests that the U.S. public’s support for the principle of noncombatant immunity is shallow and easily overcome by the pressures of war.

When considering the use of nuclear weapons, the majority of Americans prioritize protecting U.S. troops and achieving American war aims, even when doing so would result in the deliberate killing of millions of foreign noncombatants.

A number of individual-level traits – Republican Party identification, older age, and approval of the death penalty for convicted murderers – significantly increase support for using nuclear weapons against Iran.

Women are no less willing (and, in some scenarios, more willing) than men to support nuclear weapons use.

These findings highlight the limited extent to which the U.S. public has accepted the principles of just war doctrine and suggest that public opinion is unlikely to be a serious constraint on any president contemplating the use of nuclear weapons in the crucible of war.

The full text here.

By Johan Galtung

Editorial #500

TRANSCEND Media Service & TFF Associate

We made it! Five hundred Mondays [from 3 Mar 2008] has Antonio from Brazil-Portugal posted an editorial by me from Norway and the world – sometimes with a coauthor. With the good support of the other members of our editorial committee, Malvin Gattinger from Germany, Naakow Grant-Hayford from Ghana and Erika Degortes from Italy. THANKS!

Five hundred times have I had the challenge of exploring what the UN wisely calls a “situation” – unlike me, avoiding the word “crisis”. Five hundred times have I tried to follow what I absorbed from when I was 2 years old at dining tables listening to my physician father and nurse mother–daughter of the director of health care in Norway–the program implicit in the three magic words Diagnosis-Prognosis-Therapy. DPT.

Five hundred analyses of something problematic to put it mildly; five hundred efforts to forecast, foresee what will happen if we do nothing, and five hundred efforts to end creatively with a proposal.

The editorials seem to have been widely read, particularly in the old superpowers, USA and USSR, today mainly Russia. Since most of them have been about something geopolitical, perhaps these two are the most geopolitically minded, trying for a long time to run the world. It could also be that they are simply the most literate in world affairs.

Anyhow, maybe I would have liked to have seen more readers from the new superpowers, China and India; not middle-sized like the old ones, but 37% of humanity. Hopefully more at peace than not.

And one bigger than even China: Islam, 1,650 million Muslims.

It has been a fascinating weekly challenge. Scanning the world for what is new, projecting a DPT on the wall, or the screen rather. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

September 26th 2017

Out of the blue the war in Vietnam is in the news. Yet it is not the fiftieth anniversary of America’s defeat in Vietnam when North Vietnam caused it to flee. It’s only the forty second.

Part of this must be fearful parallels with the moral and strategic blindness of President Donald Trump who seems to believe in uttering his life and death rhetoric, akin to President Richard Nixon’s on Vietnam, he can frighten the enemy into submission – in his case North Korea.

Many people are worried that Trump is ready to fight America’s biggest war since Vietnam. As did Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, he appears to be considering the use of nuclear weapons.

The second reason for Vietnam-consciousness are the rave reviews that are being given to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s 10 part documentary on the Vietnam War.

It is being mentioned all over the place.

To my mind one of the big questions is, is Trump ready to be branded a war criminal by present and future generations? Read the rest of this entry »

By Farhang Jahanpour, TFF Board member

Professor Farhang Jahanpour, Member of Kellogg College at the University of Oxford says “despite the strong affection and admiration that I feel towards the long-suffering Kurds, I believe that the plan to hold a referendum for independence in Iraq is wrong and potentially very dangerous.”

Former Senior Research Fellow at Harvard University also adds that “as part of their attempts to partition and weaken the Middle East, the Israelis have been trying to use the Kurds in their conflict against Iran, without much success.”

Former lecturer at the University of Cambridge says “the Israelis believe that the independence of the Kurds as another non-Arab group, especially if they can turn them against Iran, would be helpful to them.”

Following is the full text of the interview.

People have different preferences and TFF respects that.

We also want it to be easy and safe for you. And, third, not too expensive for us and/or you.

Here are the links to the various options:

1. PayPal and the Swedish Swish mechanism

2. The more traditional bank transfer options depending a little on where you live:

Transfer to TFF’s Swedish bank and bank giro, to our Norwegian bank account, to our Germany account and via Moneygram.

3. And there is FundRazr on Facebook

Finally, may we recommend that you consider making a smaller but regular monthly contribution rather than one-time donations. It helps us a lot in planning our activities.

For sure there is one that suits you!

While making a payment you may be asked for some info about TFF.

Here it is, just copy and paste:

TFF – The Transnational Foundation (Transnationale Stiftelse för Freds- Och Framtidsforskning)
TFF@transnational.org
Vegagatan 25
S-224 57 Lund, Sweden
Tel. +46-(0)738 525200
Registered public-not-for-profit organization under Swedish law # 855001-4637

Thank you in advance for your goodwill and trust. Every sum means a lot!

Jan Oberg
Co-founder and director

By Johan Galtung

Liu Xiaobo passed away. What is the – not so hidden – truth about him?

Answer: His speeches and writings show enthusiasm for the 100-year English colonization of Hong Kong, wishing 300 years colonization of China, celebrating the US war in Afghanistan, hoping for atomic weapons. He got the Nobel Peace Prize for democratization of China, had the freedom of speech, but the prize communicated as a provocation. The prize could easily have been given to their Charter, not to Liu Xiaobo.

Norway’s security – what are the threats?

Answer: Given the location, an invasion by USA or Russia to prevent the other from doing so. The situation is reminiscent of the threat from England, Germany and USSR to prevent one of the other from doing so in 1940; what happened was England and Germany violating Norwegian neutrality, fighting a battle on Norwegian territory. USSR nothing till they fought German troops in the extreme North losing more soldiers to liberate Norway than Norway during the war, stopping when the Norwegian government in refuge in London told them to do so, thereby making it possible for Germany to destroy Northern Norway.

Norway’s defense today – what is the story?

Answer: A one-sided offensive capacity directed at Russia for a first or second strike, the coast and inland defenseless with 248 of 249 districts (“Heimevernet“, home land defense) incapable of their job.

Why Russia as Chosen Enemy; the real story, the alternatives? Read the rest of this entry »

11 September 2017

A world map shows the West is big, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean-Black Sea-Russian border; but not that big. However, that is only Europe. Add Anglo-America, USA-Canada, from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans, from the Arctic Ocean to Mexico. The West is huge, enormous.

It covers geographically the Northern Arctic and temperate zones.

It houses religiously the three Christianities, much of Judaism, but not Islam. Muslims and all others count as minorities, here and there.

It is the seat of another major faith, Enlightenment: humanism-liberalism-marxism-nationalism-statism-capitalism-regionalism.

It is the seat of the major IGOs, NGOs and TNCs in the world.

It identifies West as “developed”, and Rest as “developing”.

West has attacked, invaded, conquered, colonized almost all the Rest of the world (China only partly, Japan only recently, from 1945).

The overwhelming majority of wars are intra-West, or West-Rest. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Power

“What did these vain and presumptuous men intend? How did they expect to raise their lofty mass against God, when they had built it above all the mountains and clouds of the earth’s atmosphere?” This is St. Augustine writing about Babylon in his “City of God”. In more modern times Jonathan Raban has written in “Soft City”, “The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of festering guilt: A dream pursued, and found vain, wanting and destructive.”

St. Augustine wrote the “City of God” in a state of sorrowful contemplation. The city of man, he believed, ought to be a harmonious reflection of the City of God. In actuality it is vulgar, lazy and corrupt, a place so brutish that it lacks even the dignity of the satanic. St Augustine would surely write the same way if reincarnated in Atlanta, Johannesburg, Mumbai or Riyadh.

Johannesburg? Who can forget Alan Paton’s dark description of that city in his beautiful but painful novel, “Cry the Beloved Country”. The old, liveable, city got overtaken in the 1950s. “We shall live from day to day. And put more locks on our doors, and get a fine, fierce dog when the fine, fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously, and the beauty of the trees by night and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things shall we forgo.

We shall forgo the coming home drunken through the midnight streets and the evening walk over the starlit veldt. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives and that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution.”

Johannesburg, it is true has its own peculiar burden, but which of us city dwellers would be brave enough to say this does not touch some primeval instinct we have that tells us this is the way our own city might go, if indeed it has not already gone, as many have the last 20 years. Read the rest of this entry »