US to Launch Nuclear Missile from Vandenberg on March 1, Anniversary of Biggest-Ever US Nuclear Test

Second US Test of a Nuclear-Capable Missile in One Week.

Vandenberg Air Force base Courtesy: missiledefense.wordpress.com

(SANTA BARBARA) - The United States has selected March 1, 2012, the 58th anniversary of the Castle Bravo nuclear test, for its next launch of a Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The launch will take place at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with a target in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

Castle Bravo was the largest atmospheric nuclear test ever performed by the United States, with an explosive yield of 15 megatons – 1,000 times larger than the atomic bomb that devastated the city of Hiroshima. The Castle Bravo test is remembered for causing widespread contamination to many atolls in the Pacific, including Bikini, Rongelap and Rongerik, the effects of which continue today. Fallout from this test also poisoned the Japanese fishing ship The Lucky Dragon, killing one crew member and sickening the others.

David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said, “To conduct this test of a hydrogen bomb delivery vehicle on the anniversary of the most devastating US hydrogen bomb test is even more insulting to the people of the Marshall Islands than our other tests that target their lands. It is unconscionable that, six decades later, the US continues to use the Marshall Islands as its nuclear weapon testing grounds.”

The United States keeps 450 Minuteman III missiles, which carry nuclear warheads, on high-alert status, ready to be fired within moments of an order. Since their development in the late 1960s, the US has test-fired this type of nuclear missile over 200 times.

Thursday’s test of a Minuteman III will be the second test in less than a week; the Air Force also fired a Minuteman missile from Vandenberg on Saturday, February 25. Saturday’s 2:46 a.m. launch was preceded by an act of civil resistance by 15 individuals, including NAPF President David Krieger, Daniel Ellsberg and Cindy Sheehan.

David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, said, “Minuteman III missiles are first-strike nuclear weapons that are thoroughly obsolete 20 years after the end of the Cold War. Their continued testing and deployment put us at greater risk of nuclear war by accident or design. Rather than send messages to the world by means of ballistic missile tests, the US should be leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed missiles are quite simply instruments of indiscriminate mass murder.”

The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has initiated an Action Alert urging President Obama to cancel Thursday’s Minuteman missile test, and encouraging him to take all nuclear weapons off high-alert status in order to lower the possibilities of accidental or unauthorized missile launches. The Action Alert is at http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6357/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=9775.

Sent on behalf of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation