Nuclear watchdog groups: Washington should rethink plans for multi-billion dollar plutonium complex after discovery of seismic risk in New Mexico

"Nuclear watchdog groups slam New Mexico plan":

The U.S. government should rethink plans for a multi-billion dollar plutonium complex at Los Alamos after the recent nuclear catastrophe in Japan and the discovery of increased seismic risk in New Mexico, nuclear watchdog groups said.

A hearing began on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque on a lawsuit filed by the Los Alamos Study Group seeking to block any further design, construction or funding of the proposed Chemical and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility until adequate studies of environmental impact and alternatives are complete. Arguments are expected to continue on Monday.

"The real question is whether Los Alamos and the country need this facility at all," asked Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group. "Between now and 2023, this facility will generate nothing but cost to national security, to the environment, and to the taxpayer, no matter what design they choose. So the point is: Why build it?"

Learn more at the Los Alamos Study Group website.

Is another Pacific War inevitable? John Feffer says "No" & brings clarity & hope to the issue of changing excessive military spending in the A-P

(Okinawa Network for the Global Day on Action on Military Spending (GDAMS) banner flying at Tent Village, Henoko, Okinawa: Photo: Okinawa Network for the Global Day on Action on Military Spending (GDAMS))

Some pundits tell us the U.S. is going to war with a "rising China" in the near future. That's why they want to spend more on missile defense surrounding China, military expansion in South Korea and Guam, and another U.S. military mega-base on Okinawa (although 30 U.S. bases and facilities already exist on 20% of the island).

But is another Pacific War inevitable?

John Feffer says "No" and brings clarity and hope to a discussion on excessive global military spending and how we can stop the march toward more wars in this great National Public Radio (NPR) interview, with good audience Q&A. (Head's up: a fund-raising drive interrupts the interview; just use the button to scroll through those parts).

Feffer, an editor at Foreign Policy in Focus and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a D.C.-based think tank that focuses on social justice, peace, and environmental issues, explains how the Global Day of Action on Military Spending came into being. Last summer, he and others at IPS got together with people from around the world concerned about excessive global military spending that has doubled over the last decade. Without attention, they didn't see any prospect of change, even with the severe economic recession. People facing crises all over the world like global warming don't have the money to deal with these challenges because of the money wasted on military spending. So they decided to have a global day focused on military spending.

IPS' major partner is the International Peace Bureau (IPB), located in Geneva, first winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and about one hundred other organizations are working with GDAMS; Physicians for Social Responsibility, Pax Christi, Fellowship of Reconciliation, and many nationally based organizations in the 35 countries involved.

They chose April 11 because this is the date the Stockholm International Peace Institute releases its figures for 2010. Their goal: to make sure the photographs in the media accompanying these figures were of people rallying for a reduction in global military spending rather than photographs of fighter jets.

Some notes from the interview...

• Excessive and Wasteful Military Spending; U.S. versus China

Sadly, U.S. military spending has doubled over the last ten years.

Number two is China; its economy has grown and some of that money is going to military spending. China roughly spends between 1/7th and 1/10th of what the U.S. spends on military. Its total military spending equals what the U.S. wastes on military spending according to the General Accounting Office (GAO), which identified $70 billion annual waste on military spending in the U.S. budget. That's how much China spends annually.

Russia's economy has turned around from its collapse at the end of the Cold War, largely because of sales from oil and natural gas; it has returned to high levels of military spending that brought it to economic collapse in the 1990's. India and Saudi Arabia are also in the Top Ten.

There have been a number of scandals involved in Pentagon contracts. There was a student from Florida buying cheap ammunition from China and reselling it to the Pentagon; he was indicted. The Pentagon can't track all the number it spends. Most goes to the major contractors: Boeing, Lockheed, Martin. They get U.S. assistance in selling military equipment overseas. There are private contractors who do much of the same work our soldiers used to do. Money goes to healthcare, benefits. This totals around $650 billion in the base budget alone.

• Limiting a Militarized Economy & Expanding Our Civilian Economy: Jobs & Arms Trade

There's only been one time when there's been a reduction in military spending — after the Cold War. That money went to deficit reduction.

Reducing military spending involves an interwoven set of issues. A jobs conundrum accompanies the military spending issue. Factories for components of weapons systems have been distributed carefully across the United States to make it difficult to cut spending. Politicians don't want to close weapons factories and thereby cut jobs in their states.

The question is how to repurpose those manufacturing facilities. If you look at a comparison, a dollar spent on military industries versus a dollar spent on education, healthcare, infrastructure repair, then you find that the latter produces more jobs than the military industry. There was a lively debate on repurposing military factories during the stimulus spending. Unfortunately that was a one-time amount of money; a lot of it hasn't passed through the pipeline, and it hasn't resulted in any structural changes yet.

Have we gotten past they days of $100 bullets yet? There's still enormous waste that we see in cost-overruns. Manufacturers typically low-ball to get contracts and then bill in cost-overruns.

This is a global problem because the military arms market and trade is global. We have to do this globally, restraining the arms trade as we reduce arms spending. So GDAMS is global: a women's demonstration in Seoul, village protests in Kerala, demonstration in front of the White House. Part of this is to build a movement. Part of this is to discuss what works at the local, regional, national, and global levels. We are in the process of identifying effective political tools and developing alliances.

GDAMS is not about eliminating, but, instead, limiting military spending: a problem since Dwight Eisenhower's famous speech on the military-industrial-congressional complex. There are ways to reduce military spending that can make us safer. One way is to cut back on military exports to countries that end up using those weapons against us.

• More About Wasteful Military Spending

The accident-prone V-22 Osprey is an example of a weapons that has had a lot of cost overruns and is an unnecessary addition. We have a plan to expand the U.S. Navy at a time when this is simply fiscally irresponsible. We have plenty of ships. We don't know what to do with all of our ships. Missile defense is problematic for a number of issues. One is technical: does it work? Another is that it encourages a lot of other countries to build more weapons simply to address U.S. & allied missile defense.

• Is Change Possible?

First of all, we have to remind ourselves that military spending hasn't always been this way. The U.S. economy has only been militarized for the past 40 to 45 years. That's not a long time looking at history.

We can reverse what we created. We can roll it back to what the U.S. had before the Cold War. In the U.S., political campaign finance reform is a necessary step to restrain the influence lobbying has on military spending. We can prevent the collapse of our economy overburdened by military spending and build up viable manufacturing.

Citizens were able to stop the war in Vietnam. We were able to influence the U.S. polices in Iraq and Afghanistan by drawing down those wars. We have been able to change things in this country much more powerful than the military-industrial complex.

Other movements have faced much more challenge. Racism in the U.S. was much more powerful, yet the Civil Rights Movement had tremendous impact. We have this capability.

We can take inspiration from other countries that were able to affect U.S. military bases, whether in Puerto Rico, Latin American, in the Philippines, and other places in which our 1,000-based base empire.

Joseph Stiglitz on the failed risk analysis connection between the nuclear & global credit default swap meltdowns; wasteful military spending

In an interview, "Assault on Social Spending, Pro-Rich Tax Cuts Turning U.S. into Nation "Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent," with Democracy Now!, Joseph Stiglitz discusses the failed risk analysis connection between the Fukushima and credit default swap meltdowns.

The Nobel economist speaks of exorbitant, unaccounted for nuclear energy costs to the public via taxpayer subsidization and disaster clean-ups, adding that such corporate subsidization is "money stolen from the public."

Still on the subject of inefficient, wasteful government policies, Stiglitz discusses irrational, out-of-control military spending: "We are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist. The Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. And yet, if you look at our military, nobody seems to have told it that."

JUAN GONZALEZ: I wanted to ask you about another—something that you’ve written about: the connection, in terms of risk analysis, between the nuclear crisis in Japan and the meltdown of the reactors there and the credit default swaps. And I would even throw in perhaps the BP blowout, which was another example of a risk analysis that said it could never happen.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Yeah. Well, I just wrote an interesting article making a comparison between our ability to judge what are called small probability events, you know, rare—events that are supposed to be rare—those in the financial market said that the kind of collapse that we had should happen once in a thousand years, once in the history of the universe. But we had a collapse in the 1980s, we had a problem in the 1990s, we have them every 10 years. And that shows the models are very bad, our ability to judge rare events is very bad. Now, a lot of research in behavioral economics and psychology have explained why it is that these events that don’t happen very much, we don’t have a lot of experience.

But one of the points that I raised was that these people have an incentive not to see things accurately. You know, the nuclear power industry has an incentive to tell everybody, "Oh, don’t worry. Nothing—no risk there." The financial sector had an incentive to say, "Don’t worry about these derivatives, even if they’re already a quadrillion dollars. Don’t worry, because we can manage that risk. We have systems of diversifying the risk across the economy." Clearly wrong. So, you know, when there’s so much money at stake, people have a way of seeing—of discounting these risks, especially because those risks are borne by everybody else in our society.

And, you know, nuclear power is a really interesting case, because that industry has never been commercially viable. It has always existed on the back of a government-provided insurance, that we provide as taxpayers, that they don’t pay for. And we see now in Japan that, you know, they did the same thing, and we see the cost of that. The rest of society is paying an enormous price. There is no way that the slight savings in energy cost can make up for the loss to the Japanese economy that has resulted from the nuclear explosion. And the same thing could happen here in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: I loved seeing on Meet the Press right after the tsunami and the earthquake and the terrible tragedy in Japan, they had on the head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, so, you know, they represent the nuclear industry, and the host of the show saying, "Thank you so much for running in at the last minute to be here with us." And I could only think about—I mean, here he is speaking to save the butts of the nuclear industry in this country and saying there’s nothing to worry about here, as we’re saying this—well, what is looking like a partial meltdown or more.

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: If the industry really believed it, let them make an unlimited liability and provide us with a guarantee that they would pick up for the financial cost of the kind of disaster that Japan is facing. And I can tell you that if you made them bear those costs, if we didn’t give them that free ride of limited liability, that industry would not exist in the United States today...

AMY GOODMAN: Joe Stiglitz...let’s end on the issue of war. You wrote with Linda Bilmes the book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. That’s not talking about Afghanistan, what, $2 billion a week, the longest ongoing conflict in U.S. history. What about the cost of this?

JOSEPH STIGLITZ: It’s enormous. And since we wrote that book, we did—new numbers came in, and things are worse than we said. The disability rates are higher. The cost of caring for the disabled are higher. Almost one out of two people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan are disabled. This is an unfunded liability of—we calculate now to be almost a trillion dollars, over $900 billion. So, one of the big ways of reducing our deficit is a—is cut back some expenditures.

I believe we could have more security with much less spending. We are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars for weapons that don’t work against enemies that don’t exist. The Cold War ended more than 20 years ago. And yet, if you look at our military, nobody seems to have told it that.

Another way of thinking about it, we spend more money now than all the rest of the countries of the world, or almost as much as all the rest of the countries put together.

And yet, when you have a case where you might arguably want some use of it—you know, to protect people who are being killed—we say we can’t do it, even in a small country of a few million people. We say, "Oh, no. Our military can’t do anything." So we’ve been spending all this money and getting actually very little security for it. So my own feeling is that we could reduce our money, our expenditures markedly—particularly, get out of Afghanistan—and improve our security.

4.12 Global Day of Action on Military Spending (４月１２日：軍事予算を考える世界アクションデイ)

More than 100 endorsers have planned 90 events in 35 countries (including Okinawa) for the Global Day of Action on Military Spending (GDAMS) coming up on April 12, 2011.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending (arms and operations) skyrocketed to $1,531 billion in 2009 (a 5.9% rise in real terms from 2008) — despite worldwide economic decline, rising unemployment, poverty, and hunger rates. Moreover, military spending has been on a steady upward curve for the past decade: national governments spent nearly 50% more in 2010 on arms and military operations than they did in 2000.

The U.S. and Japanese governments, both indebted, continue to borrow heavily to cover increased military spending every year. Recently the U.S. national debt passed $14 trillion for the first time in history. This represents about 93% of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). The U.S. government's leading creditor is China, considered a military "threat," thus Washington is borrowing from a "threat" to arm itself against the same "threat." (Beijing's military budget is only one-sixth of Washington's military spending (half of global military expenditures.) The Japanese national government debt now stands about US$11.35 trillion (9.25 trillion yen. This represents approximately 220% of Japan's GDP.

In 2010, Washington's total military spending catapulted to over $1 trillion annually. Besides the Department of Defense’s yearly budget, ($550 billion (which Obama increased to $708 billion in 2011), the U.S. also spent $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; $122 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs; $65.3 billion for defense-related international affairs;; $43.6 billion for the Department of Homeland Security; $26 billion on defense-related expenses by the Department of the Treasury; nearly $19 billion spent by the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons; $7.6 billion on miscellaneous accounts related to the common defense; and $53.4 billion for interest on the Pentagon’s healthcare fund and defense portion of the national debt. The U.S. military, the world's largest purchaser and consumer of oil, spent $13.4 billion on fuel last year. The Pentagon spent $4.7 billion on public relations and media (employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department) in 2009.

In 2009, Tokyo's military budget was 4.774 trillion yen. Japanese taxpayers provides financial support 75% of the costs of 130 U.S. military facilities employing 40,000 soldiers throughout Japan in its host-country support budget (formerly known as omoiyari yosan ("sympathy budget")). The sympathy budget pays for base construction; base renovations; salaries of the Japanese employees working in the bases (including at golf courses, bowling alleys and other entertainment facilities); heating, electricity and water; and even dry-cleaning charges of military families.

American and Japanese taxpayers can't afford this level of ever-increasing national debt to pay for ever-increasing military spending. They are paying the price, along with citizens worldwide, in deteriorating national infrastructures and a plummeting quality of life. The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is about raising awareness on military spending and fostering public dialogue about priorities and how we want to co-create our future.


(Locations of worldwide GDAMS events)

GDAMS: Military Spending vs. Millennium Development Goals:

With less than one fifth of global military spending, we can: 世界の軍事支出の５分の１以下の予算で国連の「ミレニウム開発目標」（MDGｓ）の予算を賄うことができます。（下記のグラフ参照：４月１２日、世界の軍事予算を考えるアクション・デイのウェブサイトより）４月１２日のアクションへの案内の日本語訳も下方をご覧ください。

• Eradicate extreme hunger and poverty　極度の貧困と飢餓の撲滅

• Achieve universal primary education & promote equality and empower women　普遍的な初等教育の達成、ジェンダーの平等の推進と女性の地位向上

• Reduce child mortality and improve maternal health　幼児死亡率の引き下げ

• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases 妊産婦の健康状態の改善

• Ensure environmental sustainability　HIV/エイズ、マラリア、その他の疾病の蔓延防止

• Develop global partnership for development 開発のためのグローバル・パートナーシップの構築

The following graphs demonstrate the extent to which military spending eclipses all other global priorities. The estimated cost of compliance with all eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals – eradicating hunger, universal primary education, child mortality reduction, disease prevention, environmental sustainability, and global development – are all eclipsed by yearly military spending figures.



In fact, all eight MDGs combined cost less than a fifth of yearly military spending.

In 2009, global military spending surged to an all-time high of US $1.53 trillion. Given the numerous crises facing the planet — economic, environmental, health, diplomatic — it is imperative that we create a global movement to shift this money to human needs. We know that there are thousands of organizations and millions of individuals who support this point of view – what is needed is to begin a serious mobilizing effort to make it visible.

As part of this campaign, we propose a Global Day of Action on Military Spending for April 12, 2011 to coincide with the release of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s annual report, which will include new figures on military expenditures. On this day, people all over the world will join together in joint actions to focus public, political, and media attention on the costs of military spending and the need for new priorities. Such events will help us to build the international network around this issue.

While each location will craft its own approach, we hope there will be a common focus on calling attention to the overall size of global military spending. This would need in most cases to be linked to a related national (or local) issue, such as the Afghanistan war, anti-bases efforts, arms trade deals, work against small arms, resources for nonviolent conflict resolution, Article 9 campaign etc. We very much hope that peace groups will use this as an opportunity to connect up with anti-poverty, environmental, pro-democracy organizations and others who share our perspective.

As for types of actions: a whole range is possible! — from street theatre/demonstrations and erecting banners to seminars, signature collection and much more. Many slogans come to mind: What Would You Do With $1.5 Trillion? $1.5 Trillion Is Insane! Trillions for War or Trillions for Peace? etc. We plan to issue a Toolkit before long to assist organizers. A key aspect is the visual side. By generating some captivating images, we plan to attract widespread media coverage and make available photos of our rallies and events. We will compile an album of pictures from around the world and post them online to document the global movement and to use to accompany stories about the SIPRI report and our own actions.

We have commitments from organizations in the United States (in Washington, New York, Boston, Western Massachusetts, the Bay Area, Maine and Honolulu) as well as South Korea, Switzerland, South Africa, Lebanon, the Philippines, and Greece. Can we add you to our list?

To find out more, Global Action Day on Military Spending

予告：軍事費についてのグローバル行動日：2011年4月12日

軍事費の即時削減を！

グローバル行動日へのおさそい

2009年に、世界の軍事費支出は過去最高の1,53兆USドル（＝126.9兆円、$１＝￥83）に急増しました。地球が直面している多くの—経済、環境、健康、外交上の—危機を考えれば、この支出を我々人間が必要するものへと移すためのグローバルな運動を創出することは急務です。我々にはこの考えを支持する団体が数千、個人が数百万いることはわかっています―必要なことは、それを目に見えるものにするため、本気で結集する努力を始めることです。

このキャンペーンの一部として我々は、ストックホルム国際平和リサーチ研究所の年次報告の発表と同時期になるよう2011年4月12日、軍事費についてのグローバル行動日を設けることを提案します、というのはその報告書が軍事費支出に関して新たな数字を含むことになるからです。この日世界中の人々は一緒になって、一般人の、政治の、メディアの関心を軍事支出経費という新たな優先順位の必要性に向けるための共同行動に参加します。そのようなイベントはこの問題に取り組む国際ネットワークを我々が築く手助けとなるでしょう。

各地がそれ自身のアプローチを考案する一方で、グローバルな軍事支出の全体的規模に注意を呼ぶことに共通の焦点が置かれることを我々は期待します。これは大抵の場合には、関連した国内（あるいは地域の）問題、たとえばアフガン戦、反基地運動、武器取引協、小型武器反対運動、非暴力による紛争解決のリソース、日本の憲法9条キャンペーンなどに関連づけることが必要でしょう。我々は平和運動団体がこの日を、我々とものの見方を共有する反貧困、環境、民主主義擁護の団体と団結する機会として利用することを大いに期待します。

どんな運動をするかについては：あらゆることが可能です！--街頭劇やデモ、バナー設置、セミナー、署名活動など。多くのスローガンが浮かびます：1.5兆ドルあればあなたなら何をしますか？1.5兆ドルは正気じゃない！戦争に数兆ドルがいいかそれとも平和に数兆ドルがいいか？など。我々はオーガナイザーを支援するため、組織化用ツール一式をまもなく発表するつもりです。主要な側面はビジュアル化です。人心を捕らえるイメージを生み出すことで、我々は広範なメディア報道を惹きつけ、我々の行う集会やイベントの写真を入手可能にするつもりです。我々は世界中から届く写真のアルバムを作成し、オンラインでそれらを掲載して、このグローバル運動を文書化し、ストックホルム国際平和リサーチ研究所（SIPRI）報告と我々自身のアクションに伴う記事を掲載するのに使います。

それはエキサイティングで大切な企画であるということに皆さんが同意してくれるのを期待します。平和運動を指導しているひとりとして、我々は皆さんとそのグループが、それぞれお住まいの地域で（共同）後援することによりこの運動に参加して頂きたいと思います。我々は皆さんの地域で皆さんと共同してこの運動を行う人々を探す手伝いができますが、まずは皆さんたちの名前と連絡手段をリスト化して広範な人々に送る資料にしたいと思います。その資料をまもなくお送りして、参加に興味があるかどうか確認したいと思います。質問があれば遠慮なくコンタクトをお願いします。

現在、韓国、スイス、英国、ベルギー、マレーシア、インド、日本、アイルランド、ウガンダ、フィリッピン、ギリシャに加えて、米国（ワシントン、ボストン、マサチューセッツ西部、サンフランシスコ、オークランド、ニューヨーク、メイン、ヴァージニア、イリノイ）の団体が関わっています。みなさんもこのリストに加わってもらえませんか？

公式ウェブサイトはここです。

連絡先：GDAMS2011@GMAIL.COM.

Sincerely,

John Feffer ジョン・フェファー
Institute for Policy Studies
Washington, DC
johnfeffer@gmail.com
http://www.ips-dc.org/

Colin Archer　コリン・アーチャー
International Peace Bureau
Geneva
secgen@ipb.org
http://www.ipb.org/

U.S. members of Congress call to cut war spending & overseas military expansion

Today Rep. Barney Frank and Rep. Ron Paul joined in a bipartisan call for the U.S. government to face its runaway military spending:

For decades, the subject of military expenditures has been glaringly absent from public debate. Yet the Pentagon budget for 2010 is $693 billion — more than all other discretionary spending programs combined. Even subtracting the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending still amounts to over 42% of total spending.

It is irrefutably clear to us that if we do not make substantial cuts in the projected levels of Pentagon spending, we will do substantial damage to our economy and dramatically reduce our quality of life...

But the notion that American taxpayers get some benefit from extending our military might worldwide is deeply flawed...

In order to create a systematic approach to reducing military spending, we have convened a Sustainable Defense Task Force consisting of experts on military expenditures that span the ideological spectrum. The task force has produced a detailed report with specific recommendations for cutting Pentagon spending by approximately $1 trillion over a ten year period. It calls for eliminating certain Cold War weapons and scaling back our commitments overseas.

If U.S. taxpayers are lucky, the task force will take a longer look at the proposals for massive US military expansion in the Asia-Pacific.

Obama & Hatoyama choose 2006 Bush-Koizumi proposal • Can the indebted US & Japan afford more military spending? • What about "local consent"?

Although President Obama campaigned on promises of "change," his foreign policy choices in Latin America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific turned out to be more expansive versions of the Bush administration's neocon militarization goals.

Japanese people were among those worldwide who cheered Obama's victory, believing his message of hope. No one in Okinawa is cheering Obama or Hatoyama (who campaigned on the same promise of "change') anymore. Although these heads-of-state are set on the 2006 Bush-Koizumi deal—they still need local approval.

It's astonishing that these highly militarized, deeply indebted nations would pursue even more military spending.

As Washington continues to spend record sums to deepen the U.S. military footprint worldwide, most of the country remains mired in economic malaise and overwhelming environmental crises. The U.S. government's ever-increasing national debt hit $13 trillion this week; $4 trillion held by foreign countries, mostly China.

The Japanese sovereign debt (ratio of debt to GNP) is worse than that of the U.S. Analysts compare it to a "ticking time bomb."

Can the U.S. afford to carry out and maintain the Bush 2020 "Full Spectrum Dominance" plan for ever-expanding U.S. militarization throughout the entire world? Can Japan afford to continue its massive subsidies for the U.S. war in Afghanistan and U.S. plans for military expansion in the Asia-Pacific? Is any of this escalation necessary in the Asia-Pacific?

In this week's China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogues, China and the US committed to strengthening and stabilizing their partnership:

In fact, our two sides sitting together, having in-depth communications, candid exchanges, and rational discussions on our common interests and differences existing between us, this in itself is the most significant outcome of this round.

As our economic relationship gets increasingly close, we are now able to take into full consideration our differences in history, culture, national conditions, development stage, economic structure, and market sophistication. We are now able to manage our differences and problems arising in the course of growing economic relationship with a more rational and mature manner.

With this latest development of deepening economic integration between China and the U.S. (and Japan and the rest of the world), it seems highly unlikely that Beijing will launch a nuclear attack or land invasion upon Japan, its major trading partner, and fellow U.S. ally.

That leaves North Korea as the only possible arch-enemy for Japan and other U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific.

With formidable military presence extant in the Asia-Pacific (the U.S. already has 90 bases throughout Japan and Okinawa), and Japan has a powerful, up-to-date Self Defense Force. South Korea has a formidable military. Tthe idea that another U.S. base in Okinawa is necessary to stave off an unlikely North Korean missile attack does not make a lot of sense. Moreover, the real purpose of U.S. bases in Okinawa is for training Marines and other US troops in simulated battlefields before they set out for Iraq and Afghanistan (and before that, Vietnam).

For some perspective on the North Korean threat, it's wise to compare military spending and capability. From Bill Quigley's "Number One in War:"

...the USA is number one in war.  This coming year the US will spend 708 billion dollars on war and another $125 billion for Veterans Affairs – over $830 billion.  In a distant second place is China which spent about $84 billion on its military in 2008...

The US has 5 percent of the world’s population but accounts for more than 40% of the military spending for the whole world.

North Korea is not even on the chart, spending $5 billion a year. Japan spent $47 billion; South Korea $29 billion at last count (2008).

North Korea (1.1 million) does have the world's most militarized population, but the Chinese (2.1 million); the U.S. (1.5 million); and the Indian military forces (1.3 million) are larger. For more military facts, see the Guardian's "Information is beautiful: war games."

International Day of Peace: Which Countries are the Most Peaceful?

Today is the "International Day of Peace" celebrated by millions around the world; unknown to millions around the world.

According to the Global Peace Index, Japan is the 7th most peaceful country in the world––following New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria, and Sweden.

In Asia, Singapore rates 23rd; Malaysia 26th; South Korea 33rd; Taiwan 37th; Vietnam 39th; Bhutan 40th; China 74th; Mongolia 89th; Phillipines 114th; Thailand 118th; India 122nd; Pakistan 137th; and Afghanistan 143rd (last from the bottom place which goes to Iraq).

However, one has to wonder about the methodology of these ratings as the GPI puts the US––the world's largest arms dealer still at war in Iraq after invading it without provocation in 2003; now escalating conflict in Afghanistan––at only 83rd--while Iraq is rated last. Why should a country that experiences invasion and resulting ongoing violent conflict be rated less peaceful than the invading country?

And shouldn't "peaceful" points be deducted if a nation profits from weapons manufacturing? Arms sales originating from Sweden (6th most peaceful) exploded last year. US weapons manufacturers made record sales in 2009. The US was the world's largest arm exporter in 2008, followed by Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom, according to the data released by Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (www.sipri.org ). The UK's "first-class defense industry" had the most sales in 2007, according to the Times.

The US manufacturer Boeing was the top arms producer in 2007, with arms sales of $30.5 billion: "It's a great time to be in the fighter business." Lockheed Martin reported $42.7 billion in sales in 2008, with the supposedly second and third most peaceful nations of Denmark and Norway joining the United States, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, and Australia to co-finance the F-35 jet fighter. Japan and South Korea will be among the buyers.

It also doesn't look like spending on weapons was taken into consideration either. Global arms spending hit a record in 2008:

...Global military spending reached a record $1,464 billion last year with the United States taking up by far the biggest share of the total, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said on Monday.

Arms shipments were up 4 percent worldwide from 2007 and 45 percent higher than in 1999, the think tank said in its annual study of the global arms trade.

"The idea of the 'war on terror' has encouraged many countries to see their problems through a highly militarized lens, using this to justify high military spending," Sam Perlo-Freeman, head of the Military Expenditure Project at the think tank said in a statement.

"Meanwhile, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $903 billion in additional military spending by the USA alone."

The United States accounted for 58 percent of the worldwide increase between 1999 and 2008. China and Russia both nearly tripled their military spending over the decade, SIPRI said.

Other countries such as India, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Brazil, South Korea, Algeria and Britain also contributed substantially to the total increase....

The Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation put world spending on arms at $1.47 trillion in 2008. The US at $711 billion accounted for 48% of the world's spending on military weapons--followed by China, Russia, the UK, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and India.

And shouldn't "peaceful" points be deducted for maintaining weapons of mass destruction? Almost 2,000 nuclear warheads (of over 8,000 operational warheads) are kept on high alert and capable of being launched immediately. All together, the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel are holding onto a total of around 25,000 nuclear weapons.