Portside

This week representatives from more than 100 countries began work on an international treaty to ban nuclear weapons. By boycotting this process the U.S. and other nuclear armed nations showed they have no intention of giving up the power to annihilate planetary life. A world in arms is theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed; it steals the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

For decades there’s been interest by some U.S. administrations—the Reagan administration with its “Star Wars” plan a leading example—in placing weapons in space. The Obama administration has mainly been opposed. With the Trump administration, a drive to weaponize space appears in the offing.

The United States keeps nuclear weapons in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Turkey, in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which bans the transfer of nuclear weapons from a nuclear weapon state to a non-nuclear weapon state. Now, the U.S. wants to upgrade its nukes in Europe, to make them "precision" and "guided," and therefore more likely to be used, even as tensions build between the United States and Russia.

Last year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board concluded, "We can manage our technology, or become victims of it. The choice is ours, and the [Doomsday] Clock is ticking." This year, the board moved the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight and added, "The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon."