‘US nukes threaten global safety’

Iraq war veteran Michael Prysner from Los Angeles has joined Press TV’s Debate to discuss Washington’s use of killer drones.

Below is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: It seems that the US air force, especially when it comes to many of these officers, seems to be in quite an embarrassing incidence over and over again.

Prysner: Well, I mean the officer corps in general in the US military is really just a rich boys’ club… have a really cushy lifestyle and then immediately… deal with the defense contractors and go straight into these high-paying defense contractor jobs once they leave the military.

But this scandal dealing with something as serious as nuclear weapons, really it is just a small problem in the context of a larger one and that is the existence of nuclear weapons especially in the hands of the US government and it is almost a miracle that there has not already been a nuclear explosion in the United States a hundred times bigger that the explosion in Hiroshima, in the United States and in other countries.

Already in the United States in Arkansas and North Carolina and other places nuclear weapons have been dropped but by a miracle just did not detonate.

And so we know it is considerably dangerous to have these weapons especially with the types of people who are in control of them.

Press TV: Indeed as you said these weapons are very dangerous, so what does this mean for the future considering we see such scandals, you know, coming out pretty much after every few months?

Prysner: Well I mean we can expect more of the same, but one of the nuclear commanders in the air force just said yesterday that he was very confident in the mission of the nuclear program. But what is that mission exactly? And really it is a mission of genocide because nuclear war would mean genocide, if not the end of life on the earth and so we have to remember that the United States government is not only in possession of these, but the only country to have ever used them against human beings and the one that routinely threatens other countries with them.

When they say phrases like no option off the table, they mean nuclear war.

Press TV: Indeed, and when we speak of no options off the table, what exactly is the US government going to do about these scandals?

Prysner: What the US military does in any scandal it has, it does whatever it can to cover it up and then lie about it. And that is what we can expect in this case as well.

Press TV: You are a war veteran yourself. So what is your experience when it comes to when such issues, when such scandals start hitting, you know, be it air force members or other members of different corps, what does that say about the morale of these officers who are working under such pressure?

Prysner: Well, I would say the officers, actually have a very, very easy job, they have a very cushy life style, very different than enlisted service members in the US military.

And so if there is an officer, a high-ranking officer like in these in the scandal, generally they are just forced to get retired early and that is their punishment, being able to retire earlier with a pension for the rest of their lives but enlisted soldiers who come from working class communities who join because they want to try to get college scholarships and things of bad nature, if they are caught up in any kind of scandal, they go to jail for a long time and so there is a great class disparity within the US military and these officers are the privileged ones and will be privileged to whatever punishment they get as well.

Press TV: And so going forward when we speak about the US image in the world, you know, President Obama said that he wanted to improve that image. This certainly does not bode well for that, I would imagine.

Prysner: No it does not at all, in terms of, you know, how safe people feel with this war machine, handling on a daily basis, these extremely destructive weapons. It is almost a probable inevitability that there will be some kind of major accident with them but in general I mean the real danger is, actually, the use of these things intentionally and of course the Obama administration ushering in this type of new era.

It has been an era with quite a lot of bombings, targeted strikes in fact, much, much more than the Bush administration when it comes to the drones and to the targeted missile strikes and things like that and so it is a worrisome precedent that this government is very willing to use this type of lethal force on a whim and we should not assume that nuclear weapons are off the table in that regard as well.