Summary by David Ratcliffe:
I began working with Steven Starr MPH, MT(ASCP)BB, in 2013, producing the annotated transcript of his presentation on The Implications of The Massive Contamination of Japan With Radioactive Cesium at Helen Caldicott’s Fukushima Symposium conducted at the New York Academy of Medicine. In 2015 I produced 8 transcripts of speakers from Caldicott’s Symposium: The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction including Steven Starr’s presentation, Nuclear War: An Unrecognized Mass Extinction Event Waiting To Happen. His breadth-and-depth knowledge and understanding of the risks and consequences of nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear fallout, and nuclear winter is profound and far-reaching. See his ongoing work at: Nuclear Famine – The Deadly Consequences of Nuclear War.
Professor Starr directed the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia for 11 years; he retired from that position in 2021. He obtained his degrees at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and he has also worked in Missouri clinical labs for 37 years as a Medical Technologist. Starr is an Associate of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and has been a Board Member and Senior Scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility. Starr also teaches a class for the MU Peace Studies Program entitled Nuclear Weapons: Environmental, Health, and Social Effects.
His work has been published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, the International Commission for Nuclear Non-proliferation, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Strategic Arms Reduction website of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies, by the Scientists for Global Responsibility, and the International Network of Scientists Against Proliferation. Starr began making presentations at side panels at the United Nations in 2007, sometimes working as an expert witness for Switzerland, New Zealand, and Chile at the UN offices in NYC and Geneva. In 2010, Starr addressed the UN First Committee, discussing the environmental consequences of nuclear war, including nuclear winter and nuclear famine.
On 9 Feb 2023 Steven Starr was a guest on Hrvoje Morić’s Geopolitics and Empire with the focus being, We Are Already In World War III:
Professor Steven Starr explains that we are already in WWIII. As the U.S. pushes for an Asian NATO, South Korea and Japan could very quickly become nuclear weapons states. The arms control treaties and safeguards have all but been dismantled and Russia’s response was the creation of hypersonics. He discusses the folly of this idea of “limited nuclear war” via the use of tactical mini-nukes, the concepts of “firebreak” and the “dead hand system”, and how it is that Washington thinks it can win a nuclear war. He also discusses the growing existential threat of an EMP attack.
An mp3 recording of the complete discussion is here: https://ratical.org/radiation/StevenStarr-AlreadyInWWIII-020923.mp3
Excerpts of this program:
As long as the nuclear weapons race continues, and the nuclear weapons states keep nuclear weapons as a cornerstone of their arsenals, that’s going to set the example for the rest of the world. I did work at the UN for a while as an expert witness and on the effects of nuclear war. And some nations there considered the non-Proliferation treaty as a nuclear apartheid. It’s okay for the five original nuclear weapon states who are also permanent members of the Security Council to have nuclear arsenals, but it’s not okay for other nations. And that’s not going to last; you can see that’s eroding in South Korea and Japan.
Hrvoje Morić: You mentioned those, especially in the West, thinking they can win nuclear war … that some of these folks in the Pentagon or or in Brussels think they can win nuclear war. Could you walk us through that?
Steven Starr: If you go back to 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations published in Foreign Affairs, this article called The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy by these two academics, Lieber and Press that basically said that the US could, with a US nuclear first strike, take out all of Russia’s nuclear ability to retaliate a hundred percent. Well that raised a lot of alarms in Russia. My friend Colonel [Valery] Yarnyich contacted me and wrote a rebuttal to that. But, you know, that started the thinking that the neocons—I mean—the Russians look at the Council on Foreign Relations as a kind of—if they say it, then that’s what the government’s thinking. And I think about nine years later, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published an article about the new fuses on the Trident D5 missiles that allow the warheads to be three times more accurate than the previous missiles were.
So the war planners believe this gives two Trident subs the ability, with a first strike, to take out all of Russia’s land-based ICBMs. And a large percentage of their nuclear forces are in their ICBM silos. So that’s what I worry about is the people in the White House, Victoria Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan—they’re really neocons. All you have to do is listen to them talk. They, they seem convinced that they can threaten Russia and Russia will back down. I think if they have in the back of their minds this basically false information that they can win a nuclear war with the first strike, then we’re really in trouble….
These are the people that are in charge of our future, of nuclear war, and they don’t know about nuclear winter. I wrote a paper for the Federation of American Scientists published in 2017 called Turning a Blind Eye Towards Armageddon — U.S. Leaders Reject Nuclear Winter Studies and the basis of that title was a good friend of mine, Greg Mellow (who runs the Los Alamos Study Group). He knew people that knew the people that make the decisions. And he said, No, they’ve rejected the idea of nuclear winter. They think it’s bad science. So that’s where we are. We have at least US leadership that does not believe in the peer reviewed forecasts of the long-term environmental destruction of the planet from nuclear war.
I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think we could stop it. If I’d given up hope I’d just be out in the yard right now working…. Earth is a beautiful place, there’s so many wonderful living things … We’ve got to turn around from this and start devoting our intelligence and our resources to improving the lot of humanity and the rest of the world.
