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  • Nuclear Security

    This article was originally published by the International Herald Tribune

    The 47 heads of state who will assemble in Washington next week for the world’s first Nuclear Security Summit should focus like a laser beam on the biggest potential threat to civilization.

    Psychologically, it is almost impossible to imagine terrorists exploding a nuclear bomb that devastates the heart of Moscow or Mumbai, New York or Cairo. Analytically, however, there’s only one difference between Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack that extinguished the lives of 3,000 people in New York, or the 11/26 attack that killed nearly 200 in Mumbai, and a nuclear Mumbai or 9/11 that could kill hundreds of thousands in a single blow. That difference is terrorists getting a nuclear bomb.

    No one who has examined the evidence has any doubt that terrorist groups — including Al Qaeda, Chechen separatists and Lashkar-e-Taiba — have shown serious interest and undertaken substantial efforts to acquire material and equipment for this purpose. The highly enriched uranium required to make an elementary nuclear bomb could be hidden inside a football.

    The big insight that motivates the summit is that the leaders assembled there have in their power the ways and means to successfully prevent nuclear terrorism. The key to success is to deny terrorists the means to achieve their deadliest aspirations.

    Fortunately, physics provides a syllogism that says: no fissile material, no mushroom cloud, no nuclear terrorism.

    All that the members of the international community have to do to prevent this ultimate catastrophe is to lock up all nuclear weapons and materials as securely as gold in Fort Knox or treasures in the Kremlin Armory. This is a big “all” — but it consists of actions we know how to take and can afford. Other powerful radioactive sources should be equally protected.

    How can this be done? The leaders who convene will address an issue the international community has so far been dragging its feet on — implementing the obligation states have already committed themselves to in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, to adopt “effective, appropriate measures to secure all nuclear materials.”

    In confronting this challenge, those assembled can apply many of the lessons learned by the United States and Russia over the past 18 years in their cooperative threat-reduction program, as well as the best practices and technologies developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    The bottom line by which the summit should be scored is whether as a result of this effort, states take specific actions, including the allocation of resources to make the world safer from a nuclear explosion by an extremist group.

    A number of states will announce actions that they have already taken in preparation for the summit. Others, we hope, will make unambiguous commitments to take observable actions. We trust these actions will be supported by every state, reflecting a global recognition that a nuclear explosion anywhere is a nuclear explosion everywhere.

    This Nuclear Security Summit focuses on the most urgent dimension of nuclear danger. But this is only one part of a larger, more complex agenda. The “New START” arms control agreement between the United States and Russia takes another step on the path to eliminating all nuclear arsenals. Next month, the Nonproliferation Review Conference will provide a further opportunity for international cooperation in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

    To address the array of nuclear threats and specifically the specter of a nuclear bomb exploding in one of our cities with consequences that will fundamentally change our lives and our world, the supreme requirement is for meaningful, sustained international cooperation.

    We applaud the leaders for their initiative in focusing on this grave challenge. Still, as with many international summits that have gone before, we will withhold judgment until we see what leaders actually do measured in terms of the challenge we face.

  • Reaching Zero

    This article was originally published by The Nation

    What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular, has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of something like despair regarding their art. For example, Bernard Brodie, one of the originators of nuclear strategy in the 1940s, was forced near the end of his life to realize that “nuclear strategy itself–the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate–was something of an illusion,” according to historian Fred Kaplan. In the introduction to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman airs the suspicion that the phrase “nuclear strategy” may be a “contradiction in terms.” Henry Kissinger, a leading figure in nuclear strategizing for a half-century, has expressed a similar feeling of futility. In a remarkable reconsideration, amounting to an oblique recantation of his past thinking, he has written recently in Newsweek:

    The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the “mutual assured destruction” theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s.

    Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country’s nuclear forces.

    It will give the administration’s answer to the key questions: What nuclear forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the United States propose to do with them? On April 8 the United States and Russia will sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. Also in early April, President Obama will hold a Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-four other nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.

    The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will meet the mounting perils of the new situation. What’s needed for success, I will suggest, is a revival precisely of the discredited art of nuclear strategic thinking, which may, with suitable adjustments, yet have something to offer us. Strategy, military thinkers have long told us, is the art of marrying up tactical means with broad political ends. That is exactly what is most sorely missing in nuclear policy today. Certainly, no mere piecemeal examination will suffice. A comprehensive approach is needed.

    The Nuclear Surge

    For taken together, the dangers mark the world’s arrival at a new stage in the evolution of nuclear danger, forcing fundamental decisions on nuclear and nonnuclear powers alike. In a word, the nuclear predicament is coming of age, which is to say that it is fulfilling a potential that every competent scientist has known it possessed since the advent of the bomb in 1945: nuclear technology, no longer the preserve of a few privileged powers, is becoming available on a global basis. This is because of the simple but decisive fact that the bomb is based on scientific knowledge, which is in its nature unconfinable. This spread is at the heart of the growing nuclear peril–a kind of nuclear surge–in today’s world.

    To say that the technology is becoming available to all, however, is not to say that it is possessed by all or even that it will be. It means only that if nations or others want it, they will be able to have it. Japan, for example, does not have a nuclear bomb. But one is available to Japan in short order if it so chooses. According to the State Department, the bomb is thus available to some fifty other countries. This number of potential nuclear powers is destined to grow. If those countries do not build the bomb, the reason can only be a domestic and international political decision that they should not. The more this availability spreads (as it must), the higher and stronger the political barriers against proliferation must become.

    Of course, at a certain point, which may not be far off, availability, if not possession, will spill beyond national confines and reach smaller groups. At that point the political walls will have to be high and strong indeed. Otherwise, a nuclear 9/11 may be upon us.

    Obviously, any deliberate spread of nuclear technology, such as the “renaissance” of nuclear power that has apparently begun, will only accelerate the surge.

    This underlying and irreversible pressure of availability is the backdrop for today’s widespread and well-founded dread that proliferation by just a few countries–above all, North Korea and Iran–will push the world over what the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, a group set up by the Japanese and Australian governments, calls a “tipping point,” precipitating a “cascade” of proliferation that will wash away the current nuclear order. South Asia has of course already gone nuclear, with India and Pakistan engaged in an arms race. India, aping the United States, has planned a triad of air, land and sea nuclear forces while impoverished, crisis-ridden Pakistan struggles to keep up.

    The Middle East and East Asia, led by Iran and North Korea, could become the next regions to travel down this path. According to the Washington Post, A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb and the arch-proliferator of its nuclear technology, has said that Iranian officials asked him in the 1980s to sell them ready-made bombs. Since then Iran has appeared to many to be using its right to develop nuclear power technology as a pathway to building the bomb from scratch. If it does, other countries in the Middle East may well follow suit. More immediately, Iran and nuclear-armed Israel would find themselves in a perilous balance–or rather, extreme imbalance, since Israel already has an undeclared arsenal of perhaps 200 warheads. If North Korea, which already has the bomb, refuses, as seems likely, to give it up under pressure from the world community, then something similar could happen in East Asia, and Japan might indeed produce its own bomb.

    And yet if it’s tempting to some in the United States and elsewhere to define the new nuclear moment solely as a crisis of proliferation, they should be brought up short by a single brute fact: more than 95 percent of the world’s 23,000 or so nuclear warheads remain in the possession of two countries: the United States, with some 9,000, and Russia, with some 13,000.

    If one ineluctable truth of Year 65 of the bomb is that the sources of nuclear danger are destined to be global, another is that the world’s existing arsenals are likewise indivisibly global. They are joined in a kind of unity of hostility. Each nuclear nation (Israel, which has no nuclear adversary, may be the odd man out) cites the arsenal of another or others as the rationale for possessing its own, in multiple chains that link them together into a network of threats and counterthreats. For example, in one such chain, Pakistan fears India, which fears China, which fears Russia, which fears the United States. This network of terror and counterterror underscores another truth of the nuclear age: every possessor of the bomb, by its very existence, teaches possible proliferators a pair of lessons that are the prime (if not the only) motives for proliferation. First, you will be living in a nuclear-armed world; second, if you want to be protected in that world you must have nuclear arms yourself. (In addition, it has of course occurred to many countries, especially North Korea and Iran, that nuclear weapons could deter overwhelming conventional power such as that possessed by the United States.) From national points of view, each arsenal is distinct, but from a global proliferation point of view they are a joint inducement for the further spread of nuclear arms.

    The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can’t be stopped unless possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field. In this respect, too, the nuclear dilemma has become indivisibly global.

    This is a truth, however, that the world’s nine nuclear powers do not like to acknowledge, because it has an implication they are reluctant to accept, which is that if they want to be safe from nuclear danger they must commit themselves to surrendering their own nuclear arms.

    Strategic Incoherence

    And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama did in his speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, saying, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Encouragingly, his commitment has been accompanied by the widest support for nuclear abolition since President Harry Truman sent Bernard Baruch to ask the world in 1946 to choose between “the quick and the dead.” For one thing, a remarkable phalanx of former and current officials, Republican as well as Democratic, have embraced the goal. Their calls originated with the by-now-famous article by the “Gang of Four”–former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn–who in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article announced their support for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and called for “working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.” This unlikely foursome harked back to the previously underappreciated fact that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, had come within an ace of agreeing to nuclear abolition. (The deal foundered because Gorbachev would agree to it only if Reagan dropped his Strategic Defense Initiative, and Reagan would not.) Today, a majority of former secretaries of state and defense support a world free of nuclear weapons.

    A remarkable number of new government and civil panels, commissions and other initiatives have also sprung up to support the goal. Among them is a new group, Global Zero, which proposes abolition by 2030 and is supported by a Who’s Who of international as well as American signatories, including, for example, Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Nuclear Threat Initiative all have serious, well-funded programs to scout the path to zero and determine what would be required to stay there. Meanwhile, the traditional antinuclear movement, led by such groups as Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, are marshaling support for a nuclear weapons convention.

    If Obama’s commitment to abolition and the movement in support of it were setting the tone and agenda of current nuclear negotiations, the world might now be in the first stage of a final solution (to give that dread phrase a new and positive meaning) of the nuclear dilemma. Each proposal in the negotiations would be weighed in the light of the distance it traveled toward a nuclear-weapons-free world. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Instead, what have been offered are at best a series of timid makeshifts or, at worst, de facto subversion of the Prague objective. If this trend continues, it is entirely possible that the ultimate mockery will occur: nuclear arsenals will march forward into the future under a banner that reads Ban the Bomb.

    Let us consider two policy arenas: the START agreement and the Nuclear Posture Review.

    Nothing on the nuclear stage today is stranger or less adequately explained than the spectacle, still on view twenty years after the end of the cold war, of the United States and Russia holding each other hostage to nuclear annihilation with arsenals in the thousands poised on alert. The current agreement, which will remain in force until 2020, sets a ceiling of 1,550 warheads on each side that must be reached by 2017. The reduction from the old ceiling of 2,200 is of course welcome. The continuation of a system of inspections is even more welcome. But what are we to make of the 1,550 warheads that remain? After all, the limit on the 1,550 is also a permission for the 1,550. The arrangement indefinitely leaves intact the essential fact that the United States and Russia are poised to blow each other up many times over, as if the cold war had never ended. What is that about?

    If strategy is the art of using tactics to achieve political ends, then the persistence of these arsenals represents its nemesis. What political purpose is served? There is no quarrel between the two nations that would justify deployment of even a single nuclear weapon. An answer is often made that the United States must have such an arsenal because Russia still does–as a “deterrent.” But this begs the question. For today, as in the past forty years, since the beginning of arms control agreements in 1972, the size of the US arsenal has of course been a negotiated figure. The question is not, as is sometimes pretended, whether in the face of a Russian threat the United States needs to protect itself and size its forces accordingly; it is what figure the two sides should jointly set in talks like the ones just concluded. What stopped Hillary Clinton when she went to Moscow from proposing a force on each side of, say, 300 weapons, as has been suggested by a prominent Air Force officer and two Air University professors recently in Strategic Studies Quarterly? For that matter, why not zero? That step admittedly would require bringing the other nuclear powers into the talks. But why not do that–or at least set a time frame for doing so, thereby explicitly linking the current agreement to the president’s announced goal?

    It is here that the strategic deficit becomes most glaring. It’s not just that tactics have lost contact with political goals, it is that nuclear tactics (in this case, deployments) are weighed without any reference to politics whatsoever. Admittedly, the possibility of Russia backsliding into hostilities with the United States is sometimes cited as a reason for strategic “hedging,” but the obvious next question is whether the United States would prefer to be in a nuclear confrontation with a backslid Russia or in a merely conventional confrontation. Has Washington decided that in case of any hostilities nuclear confrontations are preferable to nonnuclear ones?

    Behind this issue looms a larger unasked strategic question. Are nations in general safer when they aim nuclear weapons at one another (“deter” one another)? Are some pairs safer and others not? Which ones? For example, do Americans think India and Pakistan were wise in 1998 to jointly go nuclear and threaten each other with annihilation? Are they safer today for having taken that step? The refusal of the United States and Russia to show the way by denuclearizing their own relationship is an answer that speaks louder than the Prague commitment and undercuts it. That refusal says that nuclear weapons are useful and do make you safer. But this lesson cuts the legs out from under any serious nonproliferation effort. Wasn’t the need for nonproliferation where we began? Isn’t that now the main professed goal of the United States in the nuclear field? Here is strategic incoherence in its acutest form. Deployments to meet a vanished threat spoil any effort to deal with a current real one.

    What we have heard so far of the Nuclear Posture Review exemplifies the same intellectual debacle. Reportedly, the document will reject the proposal for “no first use.” No first use is the policy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation for nuclear attacks. All other attacks, including ones with biological or chemical weapons, would be met by conventional forces.

    The rejection of no first use would crystallize, as perhaps nothing else can, the strategic disarray of American nuclear policy. Like the persistence of the forces of mutual assured destruction, it would represent the banishment of politics from strategy (meaning in fact that strategy no longer is strategy). The first-use policy was born in the 1950s, when US leaders believed they could deter perceived Soviet conventional superiority in Europe only by threatening a nuclear response. Is it really necessary to state once again that the cold war is over? Apparently it is, because in this arena, too, news of the geopolitical revolution of 1989-91 has yet to reach the American strategic brain. There, “extended deterrence” seems to be permanently planted on the basis of a kind of incurable nostalgia for the cold war. Fantastically, surreally, the United States is still using nuclear arms to repel a Russian conventional attack on Europe, as if it were 1958. (We might as well say “Soviet attack,” since the threat is imaginary.) This obsolete readiness is symbolically embodied in the deployment even today of some 200 American tactical nuclear warheads in Europe, ready at a moment’s notice to repel Soviet hordes coming through the Fulda Gap. In February, five of the European countries thus “defended” (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway) recommended that the weapons be withdrawn. Washington is still thinking about it.

    More important for today’s concerns is that a no-first-use policy is the sine qua non of any effective nonproliferation strategy. If nuclear weapons are needed not only to counter other nuclear weapons but to repel conventional, chemical and biological attacks as well, then what responsible national leader can afford to do without them? The problem is not merely symbolic. If the nine nuclear powers are ready to use their arms to perform a grab bag of tasks, then the dangers to nonnuclear countries really do multiply, perhaps inspiring them to acquire these devices, evidently so versatile and useful, for themselves.

    Toward a New Nuclear Strategy

    To escape from this scene of halfhearted and ineffectual measures serving unclear or contradictory goals, the United States needs new strategic thinking. In exploring what it should be, perhaps it will be useful to look back at past strategic thought.

    The great intellectual artifact of cold war strategy was the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. It adopted a new aim for military deployments. In the renowned words of Bernard Brodie in 1946, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.” This insight, which was recognized as a basis of policy in the early 1960s by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, marked a true revolution in military affairs. Broadly speaking, war-fighting strategies were replaced by war-not-fighting strategies. Not to fight, according to this policy, was to win. And yet under this policy the way not to fight was nevertheless to plan to fight. The trick was to restrict the plan for fighting to nuclear retaliation, in the hope that that day would never come. Thus was born the paradoxical, or contradictory, policy on which survival in the nuclear age was believed to rest. Safety from nuclear destruction depended not on getting rid of the arms that threatened it but on threats to inflict that same nuclear destruction.

    In retrospect, it seems the doctrine of deterrence has been a true Janus: it has been based on one thoroughgoing absurdity and one profound truth. The absurdity was the idea that you could lastingly and reliably avoid an action–mutual suicide in a nuclear war–by threatening the action. The problem, as many critics noted, was that at any given moment–but especially in a crisis–you did not know whether you would get the nuclear non-use that was the new strategic goal or the use whose threat was the tactical means to achieve the non-use. Strategists and moralists twisted and turned in the coils of this dilemma, even as the world lived (as it still technically lives) on the knife-edge of catastrophe. Moralists pondered the virtue of threatening a crime in order not to commit it; strategists wondered how a threat of “suicide” (McNamara) could be “credible” to the one so threatened. None of them found answers, yet the policy became so deeply ingrained in policy circles that today people refer to the American nuclear arsenal as “our deterrent,” as if the hardware and its alleged purpose were one.

    And yet the doctrine did also rest on one profound truth–its acknowledgment that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” as Reagan and Gorbachev put it in 1985.Implicit in this revolution in military affairs was a strategic revolution. The political gains that governments had pursued through wars were given up, now replaced by a need to preserve the peace, which itself became the only sane strategic objective. You might say that deterrence has pursued a sane goal by insane means–a cleavage manifested in the fact that even as deterrence fought off nuclear use, and in a certain sense fortified what has been called the “nuclear taboo” and the “tradition of non-use,” it at the same time pinioned the world permanently on the brink of such use.

    Is it then possible that abolition can be seen as a rectification and completion of the strategic revolution begun but left unfinished by deterrence? How great, after all, would be the shift from the strategic goal of “non-use,” or the “tradition of non-use,” to the strategic goal of “nonpossession,” to a “tradition of nonpossession”? Doesn’t non-use in a way already cast nuclear weapons on history’s scrap heap?

    It is a peculiarity of deterrence that the weapons themselves, rather than political developments, dictate the strategic aim (non-use). In its pathological form, this peculiarity leads to the divorce of deployments and posture from politics that we see now. But in the benign form of abolition, the strategy dictated by arms and the strategy dictated by policy would coincide. Both would say, with the new Henry Kissinger: there is no quarrel in the world worth a nuclear war, so don’t fight one or arm yourself to do so.

    The conclusion is strengthened when you recall that even at zero, deterrence does not melt away completely. The reason is that the roots of the nuclear dilemma lie in inextinguishable advances in scientific knowledge. For even as this knowledge could permit cheaters to violate an abolition agreement, so it would permit the international community to respond in kind. The point is not to propose overelaborate schemes of nuclear rearmament if a crisis were to occur at zero (the conventional forces of the threatened international community would surely suffice) but to point out that there is no sharp discontinuity, as is often suggested, between the “minimum deterrence” represented by, say, a few hundred weapons and zero. Rather there is a smooth continuity all the way to zero, and even beyond, as political and legal as well as technical arrangements needed to keep the world at zero gradually strengthened. Unfortunately, technical bans are all in principle reversible. It has been otherwise with a few moral and legal revolutions, including the abolition of slavery, and there is reason to hope that the abolition of nuclear arms would be one of these. When that happened, deterrence would have been left finally and completely behind.

    The Architecture of Zero

    The needed change is to turn abolition from a far-off goal into an active organizing principle that gives direction to everything that is done in the nuclear arena–in other words, a strategic goal. The indivisible nuclear surge under way in today’s world can be mastered only with an indivisible program to defeat it. Let us, then, borrowing from Obama in Prague, take “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” as the new strategic objective–the political goal in the pursuit of which all tactics become the means. That goal has two requisites. The first is getting rid of existing nuclear weapons. The tactical means to that goal are of course negotiations among the nuclear powers. The second requisite is building a system that safeguards the world from the recrudescence of nuclear weapons once they are gone. This system will be the true architecture of zero. The tactical means to that goal are negotiating an ever-tightening web of restrictions imposed on all technology usable for nuclear weapons.

    Of the two, the second is more difficult. For while the process of nuclear disarmament will continue for only a limited time, until zero is reached, the architecture of zero must be built to last forever, since the knowledge that underlies nuclear weapons will never disappear. The tactics for reaching this goal only begin with the construction of systems of inspection and enforcement. More important over the long run is building a political and legal order in which the attempt to build a nuclear weapon would be designated a crime against humanity. More important still would be the moral deepening of the taboo.

    The art of strategy–so notably absent in today’s contradictory mélange of policies–is to combine the measures needed to achieve the two goals into a single, coherent, self-reinforcing plan. Above all, the nonproliferation efforts that are the precursors to an architecture of zero are in mortal need of the united planetary political will that can be created only by a clear, credible commitment to a time-bound plan for abolition to which all nuclear powers are formally agreed. It should take the form of a commitment to create the sort of nuclear weapons convention that the antinuclear movement has long advocated–one that, as noted earlier, seeks to ban all weapons of mass destruction.

    To postpone abolition is to postpone nonproliferation. Today arms control and nonproliferation proceed in two parallel negotiating universes–the NPT review on the one side and START talks on the other. The two need to be brought together in a simple bargain that is already implicit in the provisions of the NPT: the nuclear powers will surrender their arsenals on condition that other powers agree not to obtain any.

    Such a strategy would build on the truth underlying deterrence doctrine while gradually retiring its absurd features. It would enable nuclear strategy, at last, to catch up with history. It would deliver Russia and the United States from the weapons-forged hostility that politically no longer exists. It would unify the world around a common goal–one already embraced under the NPT by 184 countries and enshrined in their laws. Nuclear states (as long as they persist as such) would be at one with nonnuclear states in preventing proliferation, even as they all worked together to put in place the architecture of zero that would make the ban permanent and safe. Finally, the strategy would provide a measuring rod for judging the merit of interim steps, such as START and no first use. They would be judged by the specific contribution they made to reaching the common strategic goal. To give some examples: adoption of no first use by all nuclear powers would be highly valued as a way station toward abolition. In principle at least, nuclear weapons would have been completely retired from use, for if no one strikes first, no one can strike in retaliation–thus no one will strike with a nuclear weapon at all, and no one will threaten to do so.

    Arms reductions would, of course, have value as steps toward zero; but the inspection regimes accompanying them would be especially prized, not just for their own sake but because an ever-stronger regime of inspection is a sine qua non of life in a world without nuclear weapons.

    Influence would flow from nonproliferation measures to arms control as well. The more nonnuclear-weapons states accepted stringent inspections, the more they permitted transparency of their nuclear facilities and the more they accepted restrictions on withdrawal from the NPT, the more ready would the nuclear powers be, less afraid now of cheating, to surrender their arsenals.

    What would nuclear weapons then be for? They almost tell us themselves. “We are here,” they say, “to abolish ourselves, and–a big bonus–to put up a barrier to major power war forever after into the bargain. For even after you are rid of us, we will hover in the wings, as a potential that cannot ever be removed.” The bomb is waiting for us to hear the message. It has been waiting a long time. If we do not, it can always return to what has always been its plan B, and abolish us. 

  • The New US Nuclear Posture

    In April 2009, President Obama went to Prague and told the world that the United States seeks “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” A year later, his administration is moving forward toward this goal. The Obama administration released its Nuclear Posture Review on April 6, 2010. On April 8, 2010, the president flew back to Prague to sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with the Russians.

    In both tone and substance the new Nuclear Posture Review is far more positive and hopeful than that of the George W. Bush administration. The Obama nuclear posture puts its primary focus on preventing nuclear proliferation and terrorism. “The threat of global nuclear war has become remote,” it says, “but the risk of nuclear attack has increased.” It views nuclear terrorism as “today’s most immediate and extreme danger.”  

    To prevent terrorists, such as al Qaeda, from obtaining nuclear weapons, the Obama administration seeks to bolster the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and secure all loose nuclear materials globally. It convened a Nuclear Security Summit on April 12-13, 2010 in Washington, with leaders of 46 other countries participating in making plans to prevent nuclear terrorism. The Obama administration is also pursuing arms control efforts, including the New START agreement, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty.  

    The administration has been straight forward in stating that it is taking these steps “as a means of strengthening our ability to mobilize broad international support for the measures needed to reinforce the non-proliferation regime and secure nuclear materials worldwide.”  In other words, the Obama administration understands that the US needs to show that it is taking steps to meet its own nuclear disarmament obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (something the Bush administration never grasped) if it hopes to have the support of other parties to that treaty for keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists.

    Many advocates of a nuclear weapon-free world, including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, encouraged the Obama administration to go further and adopt a policy of No First Use; that is, committing to use nuclear weapons only in response to a preceding nuclear attack.  While the administration did not demonstrate this level of leadership, it did consider a policy of making the deterrence of a nuclear attack the “sole purpose” of nuclear weapons. However, it dismissed even this step, while offering some hope that it will work toward this end in the future.  

    The administration did take a smaller step by committing in the new Nuclear Posture Review not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states that are in compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It referred specifically to North Korea and Iran as countries out of compliance with the treaty. The new nuclear posture will please some advocates of nuclear weapons by leaving open “a narrow range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring a conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners.”  

    The new Nuclear Posture Review states that the “fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons, which will continue as long as nuclear weapons exist, is to deter nuclear attack on the United States, our allies, and partners.” This suggests confusion in the policy. If terrorists are, in fact, the greatest threat to the country, and as non-state actors they cannot be deterred, then who exactly are the weapons deterring? The review may be contemplating Russia or China, but it also recognizes that the US is interconnected with these countries and the chances of war with them are very low. Or, it may be contemplating some unknown contingency in the future, but if this is the case then wouldn’t the country be better off moving more rapidly toward the goal of a world without nuclear weapons?  The review makes clear that the US “would only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” This approach, and the vagueness of “vital interests,” will likely be viewed internationally as an unfortunate double standard that other countries may also choose to rely upon.

    In the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the US and Russia will reduce their deployed strategic nuclear weapons to 1,550 each and reduce deployed delivery vehicles to 700 each with 100 reserve delivery vehicles each by the year 2017.  It is not a large step forward, but it is a step in the right direction, and the Obama administration is committed to seeking further reductions with Russia.  Together the two countries have some 95 percent of the world’s 23,000 nuclear arms.  The new US nuclear posture indicates that the US “will place importance on Russia joining us as we move to lower levels.”  In the document, however, there are no constraints on the ability of the US to deploy missile defenses.  Since this is a major concern to Russia, it could limit the possibilities for additional progress toward nuclear disarmament.  

    One of the phrases that recurs throughout the new Nuclear Posture Review is “ensuring the safety, security and effectiveness” of nuclear warheads.  Safety and security both make sense.  If we are to retain nuclear weapons, we want them to be both safe from accident and secure from theft.  But what does “effective” mean?  That the weapons will serve the purpose of deterring?  If so, who?  Effectiveness would be impossible to measure unless we can answer the question, “Effective for what?”  In the end, “safe, secure and effective,” appear to be arguments for modernizing the US nuclear arsenal and spending an additional $5 billion on its nuclear weapons laboratories over the next five years.

    The Nuclear Posture Review concludes by looking toward a world without nuclear weapons. It recognizes that certain conditions are necessary for such a world. These include halting nuclear proliferation, achieving greater transparency into nuclear weapons programs, improving verification methods, developing effective enforcement measures, and resolving regional disputes. The review states that such conditions do not exist today. However, with the requisite political will, these conditions could be developed in the process of negotiating a Nuclear Weapons Convention – a treaty for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons. While pausing to celebrate the incremental steps in arms reductions and the limitations on nuclear weapons use that are being made now, we should also recognize that a policy of No First Use and a commitment to negotiate a Nuclear Weapons Convention would move us far more rapidly toward the peace and security of the nuclear weapon-free world envisioned by President Obama.  

  • Glorious Beings: Creating a New World Culture

    I came into the world in a thunderstorm in June 1914, when great changes were beginning to happen. It was in a year when the First World War engulfed Europe and Africa and Asia, when the powers of science and technology brought down the barriers between nations – and great scientists gave us glimpses of our place in the throbbing universe.

    Dr. Brian Swime, a noted physicist, said “The vastness of this universe couldn’t have been otherwise…This universe, which is 30 billion light years across, the smallest universe we could fit into…The universe had to expand at this rate to enable our existence.  We belong here.  This is home.  This has been our home for 15 billion years…If you altered the origin of the universe even just slightly, none of us would even be here.  That means then, that our existence is implicit.  We don’t only stand on our feet, we stand on the original fireball; we stand on the expansion of the universe as a whole.”

    When I gaze at your luminous faces, I am convinced that Dr. Swime is right.  I am also sure that Albert Einstein was right when he said that if we could understand what we really are we would know that we are glowing fields of electromagnetic energy.  We are also collections of dancing atoms filled with negative and positive charges.

    There are auras of light around your amazing bodies and your immortal souls are shining through your eyes.

    Look at one another.  Listen to one another.  Touch one another.  Become aware of what glorious beings you are.  You are far more involved in shaping the future than you have begun to realize.

    Humanity is in a tragic situation.  You are surrounded by more dangers than any generation before you.  And yet you have more strength, more technological knowledge, more allies to help you than any previous people who came into existence in the years past.

    How do I dare to make such statements to you?  I dare because I have lived in this body for more than 90 years – and I have experienced many miracles.

    In my youth, I poured out stories of man’s incredible achievements.  I became known as a pioneer of wonder. I brought the book to show you what came forth from me when I was writing science fiction.

    One world was not enough for me.  I leaped from planet to planet.  I was drawn to the stars, as many young people in my time were.  When I walked at night in my father’s backyard and gazed at the blazing lights in the sky, I didn’t feel dwarfed by them or overcome by their intensity.  I saw them as playgrounds for my mind and spirit – and I still do.

    I believe that we human beings will triumph over all the horrible problems we may face, and over the bloody history of our failures.  We pray and we play.  We have divine sparks in us.  We discover what Einstein and other great ones among us discovered.  Einstein wrote: “Everyone who is involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a Spirit is manifested in the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and we must be humble in our awareness of that Spirit moving among us, shaping the future with us.”

    Through play we discover our kinship with the Almighty Being who brought us into life.  God laughs and dances.  God gave us the power to find endless joy in celebrating the mysteries and wonders of this life. Some of our scientists brought us into the Nuclear Age and made us realize that we must find ways of living in peace or confront unparalleled catastrophes.

    I grew up in a praying and playing family and the Glorious Beings I have encountered seem related to me.  I went to Catholic schools where the nuns taught me that I shared in the creative mightiness that had shaped the stars.  I felt that I was made to speak freely in all circumstances.

    As a young reporter on The Kansas City Star I was sent to a press conference sponsored by Franklin D. Roosevelt, just after he had won re-election by millions of votes.  I was given a chance to speak directly with him.  He said in a soft voice: “As a journalist you have much power, Mr. Kelly.”  “Not the powers you have,” I said.  He tilted his head and said, “But I think I missed my calling.”  “You did?” I said.  “Yes,” he answered: “I wanted to be a journalist,” he muttered.  “You can ask anybody anything – and people have to respond.  And nobody tells you what you have to say.”

    “That’s not the kind of power you have,” I replied then.  He shook his head.  “Everybody tries to tell me what to do,” the President responded.

    I left his presence with amazement.  He was famous and beloved by millions of his fellow citizens.  But he didn’t have the kind of power he wanted!

    I realized that some of the Glorious Beings who seem to tower above us do not realize how much strength they have.  I had already experienced many frustrations as a journalist, but I didn’t feel defeated or crushed by the limitations on me.

    In my many years of pursuing “truth” and “solid answers” in my contacts with leaders in many fields, I became aware that it was a special gift to feel “glorious.”

    In my program here tonight I want you to realize that many “creative beings” serve humanity with a demonstrated dedication to public service but feel in their hearts that they can never attain the fulfillment they are encouraged to seek.

    Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King met violent deaths although they were dedicated to non-violence.  Albert Einstein and other great scientists knew that they had helped to build devastating weapons that endangered life on earth.  Eleanor Roosevelt never succeeded in putting an end to the arms race.  She travelled over many parts of the world, demonstrating her willingness to exhaust herself in the noble efforts of the peacemakers.  Harry Truman tried to rebuild areas of the earth, which had been savagely scourged by his use of military power.

    When I entered journalism in 1935, I spent my first 10 months on The Star’s staff primarily on death notices.  In those months, I gained a deep appreciation of the significance of each human life and its impact on all those in the same stages around them.  I realized that Kansas City was a segregated place in those years.  Blacks and other minorities were in the background, living in their own atmosphere.  They had their own churches, their own emergency services, their own hospitals, their own cemeteries.

    I became disturbed by the fact that I knew little by the black people and the many poor families existing in my city.  After I became an expert in briefly describing many lives, I was suddenly hurled into the hectic atmosphere of the General Hospital.  I rode in ambulances with drivers and doctors to the scenes of accidents, explosions, fires, murders, and domestic violence.  I saw people lying in the streets or bleeding in back rooms of apartments and boarding houses.  I discovered that many men were brutal.  They pounded their wives and children with their fists and straps, they crashed into one another with their autos and motorcycles, ran over pedestrians, and exploded with rage when they were frustrated.  They had to be shackled or thrown into jails by tough policemen.  I became gradually convinced of the superiority of women and began to believe that women should rule the world.

    My estimates of women were affected by the fact that women rarely engaged in violent acts themselves. I was always grateful for the kindness of women, for their tenderness and nurturing affections for their parents, their sisters and brothers, their lovers and husbands, their children and their friends.  I knew they had human faults and failings; I knew they could be angry and speak harshly about other people; they could be dominating and vindictive; and occasionally inflict blows on other women and men; but they were rarely killers.  I became convinced that the flourishing of humanity depended partly upon the civilizing influences of women.

    My father demonstrated the aggressive qualities of men.  When he got drunk, he was ready to use his fists and any weapons he carried.  When I was 3 years old, in 1917, he responded aggressively to President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany after the Germans sank some American ships.  He rushed off to enlist in the army.  He was eager to execute the German Kaiser, to make the world safe for democracy.  He put me into a little soldier’s suit that made me look like a young soldier.  He taught me to salute him and all other officers.  He was eager to get into combat in France.  He killed Germans in face-to-face struggles in the trenches.

    He was severely wounded by a piece of shrapnel that lodged in his neck and his face was twisted by a scar on a deep wound.  When he came home, he suffered from nightmares of face-to-face attacks.  I had to wake him up from those screaming moments, and his yelling haunted me for the rest of my life.

    In war, men sought glory by wounding one another or killing their opponents.  The young Germans he encountered in the bloody trenches were often as brave as he was, as sure as he was that the murders they committed were justified.  Millions died, striving to validate their manhood.

    I remember the Armistice Day – November 11 – in 1918 – when church bells rang and victory sirens sounded.  I also remember the weeping and wailing of a woman in the boarding house where my mother and I stayed while we waited for my father to return from France.  That woman had received a telegram telling her that her husband had been killed in one of the last battles.  For her, as for many others who received similar telegrams, the victory was bitter.

    Why did glorious beings kill one another?  Why did young men, charged with the energy of youth, use heavy weapons to tear off the heads and arms and eyes of their labeled “enemies?”  Nobody could answer those questions for me.

    I had taken part in World War II, after the United States was directly attacked.  I was assured that there would be peace and lasting joy after Hitler and the Japanese militarists had been eliminated.  They were smashed in 1945 and those who had fought against them celebrated wildly.

    But then we learned that Russia was dominated by a communist dictatorship and Stalin and his minions had to be eliminated, too.  I was asked to write speeches for a president, Harry Truman, who had been compelled to make a horrendous decision – to use atom bombs against Japan to end the Second World War.  I discovered that he had given much thought to the creation of a global organization to save humanity from the scourge of war.

    Truman carried in his wallet a poem by a Glorious Being – Alfred Tennyson – written in 1842, predicting a final war involving aerial navies, which led to the formation of a Federation for the World, a Parliament for Humanity.

    A humble man who never exalted himself, Truman had a glorious agenda.  He had helped to launch and uphold the United Nations, and he was determined to make it effective in helping all countries to enter an unprecedented era of lasting peace and prosperity.  He strove to get the rich nations to devote some of their tremendous resources to aid the poor nations to reduce or eliminate poverty all over the planet.  He proclaimed that “a decent, satisfying life” was “the right of all people.”  He shared General Eisenhower’s view that war was a theft from the resources of people.

    In the 1948 campaign I helped Truman make the people aware that “the destiny of the United States is to provide leadership in the world toward a realization of the Four Freedoms.”  Those Freedoms were articulated in an address to the Congress in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  F.D.R. asserted that the American heritage had developed a full understanding of the basic freedoms vital for human progress: Freedom of speech and expression; freedom of worship; freedom from want by assuring a healthy peaceful life – and freedom from fear, by reducing military arms everywhere.

    The U.S. had emerged from the horrifying struggle of World War II with a booming economy – and a future with unlimited possibilities.  They felt that the future of humanity depended on the ethical behavior of a giant nation.

    I shared the hopes of those leaders.  I had lived through the transformation of the U.S. from the Depression years, with millions of unemployed and desperate citizens, into a place with dazzling opportunities in every field.

    When Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas became chairman of the Center’s board, I worked closely with him. He was a “glorious being,” full of courage and willing to take the initiative in many ways.  He advocated Centers in all the major cities of the world.

    The Center gave much attention to all the major problems facing humanity, especially the arms race and the Cold War.  Two Center pamphlets written by the noted analyst Walter Millis – one on Individual Freedom and the Common Defense and one on The Constitution and the Common Defense – were widely circulated.  Millis described what he called “the war system,” and he declared that would have to be dismantled if humanity really wanted to survive.  He predicted that the devastating power of nuclear weapons would force the great nations (those with thousands of those weapons) to agree on a nonproliferating treaty to avoid a nuclear holocaust.  Albert Einstein, the scientist recognized by all countries, said that the maintenance of such weapons might lead humanity to “drift into an unparalleled catastrophe.”  The dire commentaries of many brilliant scientists enabled humanity to avoid that catastrophe during the years of the “cold war” between the U.S. and the Soviets, but the dangers had to be seen for decades.

    Nuclear war was avoided but the U.S. plunged into an extensive disaster in Vietnam under several presidents.  The Vietnam War brought poverty and slaughter to millions for many years.  President Nixon took four years to sanction an American withdrawal.

    The “glorious beings” at the Center sponsored a trip to Vietnam by two directors – Harry Ashmore and William Baggs, who went to Vietnam and returned with proposals that could have ended the war in the 1960s.  But the leaders on both sides were not ready to settle their differences.

    The Center tried in many ways to build foundations for peace through exchanges of ideas and proposals by leaders from many countries who participated in an intervention convocation at the UN based on Pope John’s encyclical Pacem in Terris.

    Scholars at the Center were active in many ways.  It issued warnings on the decay and disarray of democratic institutions long before the Watergate scandal appeared in the headlines.  Other Center publications warned of the creeping pollution of the planet, long before millions of people realized that the web of life might be destroyed by such pollution.

    In advance of actual developments, people at the Center revealed the thinking of radical students, the changing attitudes of the young toward the whole society, the implications of the changes in race relations, and the demands of ethnic minorities.  The Center showed the defects of the mass media at a time when people were not aware of the corruption of the media and the pervasive impact of the press and broadcasting industries on every facet of modern life.

    Six years of discussions, involving dozens of meetings and thoughts of 200 consultants (including historians, judges, political scientists, economists, and others) went into the Center’s drafts for a new American Constitution.  A model for the 20th century was finally published in 1970.  The principal drafter was Rexford G. Tugwell, a former member of President Roosevelt’s “brains trust.”  But the man who pushed it into publication was Robert Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, the elected head of the Center in Santa Barbara.

    The model Constitution was not designed for ratification and implementation but as an instrument for thinking about the issues of the 1970s.  At a time when American institutions did not seem to be functioning effectively, the Center scholars hoped that the model might awaken hope in millions of apathetic citizens and bring new vitality to a sagging democracy.

    But the development of that model document turned out to be one of most controversial projects in which the Center had ever engaged.  It was regarded as foolish, futile, and possibly dangerous to the American system.  It stirred hot arguments for years, but it did not produce the long-range effects Hutchins had tried to evoke.

    When internal strife occurred at the Center in 1967 and 1975, it became evident to people outside the Center that the scholars on Eucalyptus Hill were not able to solve their own constitutional problems.

    In spite of its own internal failures, in spite of all the defects and limitations of its own projects, the Center had an impact on scholars, editors, broadcasters, political leaders, lawyers, economists and others in many fields in many countries.

    Admiral Hyman Rickover, commander of the American nuclear submarines, took part in several Center conferences and once donated $1,000 to help keep the Center going, said he thought the Center’s budget was relatively small.  He referred to the billions he could get from Congress for nuclear ships ad said he thought the Center was more vital for the future of humanity than submarines or other weapons.

    Paul Dickson, in his book on American research organizations entitled Think Tanks, said its dedication to future problems gave it a unique role.

    Many “glorious beings” were connected with the Center.  The threat of annihilation still hangs over humanity’s future.  The best thinking of the bravest people will always be needed.

  • A New Start with START

    This article was originally published by YES! Magazine

    The United States and Russia reached agreement on a new START treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) to lower their count of deployed atomic warheads from 2,200 each to between 1,500 and 1,675. They would also cut their stocks of strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles from a current level of 1,600 each to 800. The treaty replaces the 1991 START agreement, which expired last December. Since each country still has about 10,000 weapons, mostly undeployed and in storage, the new START is a modest step forward. It is, however, a down payment on improved U.S.-Russia relations and a possible prelude to the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. Presidents Obama and Medvedev will sign the new treaty in Prague, the site of President Obama’s groundbreaking speech one year ago in which he set out a vision for a nuclear free world.

    There are 23,000 nuclear bombs on the planet, all but 1,000 of them in the U.S. and Russia. To convince the other nuclear weapons states (the U.K., China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea) to join negotiations for their total elimination, it is imperative that the U.S. and Russia cut their enormous arsenals first.

    Obama and Medvedev pledged to negotiate these weapons cuts as a step towards “a nuclear free world.” The talks almost ran aground when the U.S. announced it was putting new missile defenses in Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, after it had canceled plans to site them in the Czech Republic. Russia views the expansion of U.S. missile defenses as a threat to the integrity of its nuclear arsenal. The parties agreed to finesse their differences by settling for language in the treaty’s preamble—which the U.S. argues is not binding—acknowledging that the size of offensive arsenals must be tied to the number of anti-missile defenses.

    Powerful forces are arrayed against Obama’s vision. Forty-one Republican senators wrote to him warning that they would not ratify the START treaty if the president made any moves to cut back on the U.S. missile defense program. They have also exacted a stiff price by requiring an increase in the nuclear weapons budget, including plans for a new facility to manufacture plutonium cores for new bombs. And the nuclear weapons labs are raising questions about the soundness of the nuclear arsenal without further money spent on testing and weapons development.

    Nevertheless, international expectations for progress in eliminating nuclear weapons are on the rise. In addition to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s proposal to begin negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention to ban the bomb, the German Bundestag has just passed a motion urging major steps towards nuclear abolition—including removing U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Germany and beginning international talks on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons.

    In May, the UN will host a conference to review the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which contains a promise from the nuclear powers to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a pledge from all the other states not to acquire them. Tens of thousands of citizen activists will march from Times Square to the UN headquarters in New York, calling for nuclear abolition. Strategy sessions to develop next steps are planned by the Abolition 2000 Network and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. On June 5th, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is organizing in communities all over the world to urge negotiations to ban the bomb.  While President Obama qualified his call for a nuclear free world by saying it might not be achieved “in my lifetime,” his very articulation of the vision has unleashed the aspirations of people all over the world, making the abolition of nuclear weapons an idea whose time has come.

  • Renew Our Hope for Our Shared Future

    We are all children of Mother Earth. We assert our deep desire, our firm commitment, and our inalienable right to live in harmony with each other and with nature’s laws of connectedness and interdependence.

    We urge you as world leaders to fulfill your duty as guardians of our unique, beautiful and endangered Earth.

    We call upon you to realize how your decisions and actions have threatened our future and have left us an unjust and destructive legacy.

    Still, we trust that you can rise to your highest ideals and change course to provide us with visionary and ethical leadership to create the future we dream of and deserve.

    We expect you to fulfill your obligations to us and future generations by:

    • Committing to abolish nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction, including ‘depleted’ uranium.
    • Ceasing the use of military force to resolve any dispute, and ending the arms trade.
    • Redirecting resources from militarism to human and planetary security.
    • Restoring the health of our Earth and ending the exploitation of her non-renewable resources.
    • Upholding human rights and the dignity of all humanity, and fulfilling your responsibilities under international law.

    We urge you to remove the obstacles that have been placed before us, and renew our hope for our shared future.

    Signed by the World Future Councilors of the Disarmament Working Group:

    Hafsat Abiola-Costello
    David Krieger
    Rama Mani
    Pauline Tangiora
    Judge C.G. Weeramantry

  • Excerpts from German Parliamentary Resolution Against Nuclear Weapons

    2010_03_30_german_parliament.pdf

  • Lying About Nuclear Weapons

    One of the most popular muckraking American journalists of the late twentieth century, I.F. Stone, once remarked:  “All governments lie.”  Even a prominent government official — Andrei Gromyko, the veteran Soviet diplomat — once admitted, in a weak moment:  “Governments are never sincere.”

    This gloomy assessment appears all too true when it comes to national security policy, and particularly so with respect to nuclear weapons.  Indeed, in early March, a new Japanese political party — swept into governmental power last year thanks to a political upheaval — revealed that its predecessors had lied for more than four decades about one of the most hallowed principles in Japanese public life:  Japan’s nuclear-free status.

    In 1968, Japan’s ruling conservatives — the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) — under enormous pressure from an antinuclear public, had proclaimed Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles:  the government would not manufacture, own, or allow the entry of nuclear weapons into Japan.  Ever since that time, there has been considerable controversy over whether U.S. warships in Japanese harbors were armed with nuclear weapons.  As it was hard to imagine how U.S. nuclear warships could dispose of their nuclear weapons before entering Japanese harbors, massive antinuclear demonstrations erupted in Japan’s port cities.  Meanwhile, the U.S. government refused to confirm or deny that its warships carried nuclear weapons, while the Japanese government swore that they did not.

    In recent years, although occasional statements by U.S. government officials indicated that nuclear weapons were probably entering Japan aboard U.S. warships, the Japanese government clung to its lies.  The latest denial was by Taro Aso, the last LDP prime minister before the new Democratic Party of Japan administration revealed the long record of deception.  A Foreign Ministry official told the Associated Press that he and other high-ranking officials of the past feared that disclosing the agreements with the American government to bring nuclear weapons into Japan would have created massive upheaval in Japanese life and, perhaps, toppled the prime minister.  “The political costs were too great,” he explained.

    Actually, in the case of nuclear weapons, the Japanese government had been playing a double game for years.  During the 1950s, Japanese officials issued numerous protests against nuclear weapons testing that were designed less to halt the testing than to soothe public opinion.  In May 1956, the Japanese ambassador explained that his government’s protests were “largely a public opinion matter inside Japan.”  The following day, secretly apologizing for delivering a diplomatic note calling for a halt to U.S. nuclear testing — and “off-the-record,” expressing his disagreement with it — the second in command at the Japanese embassy depicted it as an attempt to woo parliament and public opinion.

    Much the same policy continued in subsequent years.  In 1957, explaining his government’s critique of nuclear testing, the Japanese foreign minister told U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and other U.S. officials that “the Japanese people, old and young, are very sensitive on this question.”  Thus, “the Japanese government was placed in a position where it had to lodge a protest.”  He added, apologetically, that if the government failed to criticize nuclear testing, “the very existence of the Liberal Democratic Party might be endangered.”

    In the early 1960s, when the U.S. government resumed underground and, later, atmospheric nuclear testing, the Japanese government again assailed nuclear tests, but as in the past accompanied such statements with private assurances to U.S. officials that the protests had been made “to offset domestic political pressures.”  Secretly, some Japanese officials went so far as to remark that they favored Japan’s development of nuclear weapons.

    Thus, the Japanese government’s duplicity in connection with the Three Non-Nuclear Principles should not come as a total surprise.

    Of course, lying about nuclear weapons has not been limited to Japanese officials.  The French government argued for years that it was developing nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes — until it abruptly moved forward with its nuclear weapons program.  The Indian government denied that it had conducted a nuclear weapons test in 1974, when it set off a “Peaceful Nuclear Explosion.”  Meanwhile, the Soviet government, while posing for decades as a fierce foe of nuclear weapons, developed the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.  As for the U.S. government, it lied for years about the dangers of nuclear testing, downplayed the ability to detect nuclear testing and development abroad, and made nuclear disarmament offers based on their propaganda value.  One of the more interesting nuclear gambits has been pursued by the Israeli government, which has never admitted that it possesses nuclear weapons — although that government had Mordechai Vanunu kidnapped, tried, and locked in prison for eighteen years (eleven of them in solitary confinement) for the “crime” of publicly revealing their existence.

    In addition, one might ask what has been done to honor the pledge, made at the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference of 2000, for an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapons states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals”?  At the moment, there remain more than 23,000 nuclear weapons, 96 percent of them in the hands of Russia and the United States.

    But this outrageous record is only part of the story.  Over the years, intense pressure from disarmament organizations and the general public has forced reluctant governments to abandon their foremost nuclear ambitions.  Indeed, numerous non-nuclear nations have decided to forgo the nuclear option, while nuclear nations have scrapped roughly two-thirds of their nuclear weapons and have backed away from plans for nuclear war.  And this May, when the 2010 NPT review conference convenes at the United Nations, there will be a massive public outpouring of people from diverse nations demanding that long-promised — but never delivered — nuclear-free world.  Good luck to them!  They certainly deserve better than further nuclear lies and duplicity.

  • Zero Nuclear Weapons for a Sane and Sustainable World

    This is a transcript of the 2010 Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future, delivered by Max Kampelman on February 25, 2010 at Santa Barbara City College.

    It will take time, patience, pain and good fortune, but our welfare as human beings, indeed the survival for many, must be based on more than the threat of nuclear retaliation.  A balance of nuclear terror is not an adequate basis for our survival as human beings or as a country, or for our country’s strategic policy, although it did recently serve to permit the United States and Russia to substantially reduce the number of our strategic nuclear weapons.  What does remain and cannot be ignored, however, is the existence of active rogue and terrorist forces in the world seeking nuclear capabilities for their dangerous purposes.  I am convinced that zero nuclear weapons, urged by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and others, must be our immediate civilized goal.

    Where are we heading?  Are democracy and liberty our human destiny, as suggested by Francis Fukiyama?  Or do we face an inevitable violent clash of civilizations on perhaps a worldwide scale, as suggested by Samuel Huntington?  

    Let me point out that during my childhood, one lifetime, strange as it may appear to the young among us, there were no vitamin tablets, no antibiotics, no televisions, no dial telephones, no refrigerators, no FM radios, no synthetic fibers, no dishwashers, no electric blankets, no airmail, no transatlantic airlines, no instant coffee, no Xerox, no air conditioning, no frozen foods, no contact lenses, no birth control pills, no ballpoint pens, no transistors.  The list can go on.

    In my lifetime, medical knowledge available to physicians has increased perhaps more than tenfold.  I am told that more than 80 percent of all scientists who ever lived are alive today.  The average life span of the human being keeps steadily increasing.  We now have complicated computers, new materials, new biotechnological processes and more, which are altering every phase of our lives, deaths, and even reproduction.  

    We are living in a period of information power with the telefax, electronic mail, the super computer, high definition television, the laser printer, the cellular phone, the optical disc, video conferences, the satellite dish – instruments which still appear to my eyes to be near miracles.  No generation since the beginning of the human race has experienced or absorbed so much change so rapidly – and it is probably only the beginning.  As an indication of that, more than 100,000 scientific journals annually publish the flood of new knowledge that pours out of the world’s laboratories.

    These developments are stretching our minds and our grasp of reality to the outermost dimensions of our capacity to understand them.  Moreover, as we look ahead we must agree that we have only the minutest glimpse of what our universe really is.  We also barely understand the human brain and its energy; and the endless horizons of space and the mysteries found in the great depths of our seas are still virtually unknown to us.  Our science today is indeed still a drop, and our ignorance remains an ocean.

    It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention.  I suggest the corollary is also true; invention is the mother of necessity.  Technology and communication are necessitating basic changes in our lives.  Information has become more accessible in all parts of our globe, putting authoritarian governments at a serious disadvantage.  The world is very much smaller.  There is no escaping the fact that the sound of a whisper or a whimper in one part of the world can immediately be heard in all parts of the world – and consequences follow.  And yet, the world body politic has not kept pace with the world of scientific and technological achievements.  Just as the individual human body must adjust to the climate in which it lives, so is it necessary for governments and administrations to examine the atmosphere in which they live as new directions and changes become apparent.

    It is important for the human race to seek security without associating it with destruction.  Nuclear terror is not an adequate foundation for strategic policy.  President Obama has made that clear during his political campaign and in his later appearances at the United Nations where he and President Medvedev of Russia called for zero nuclear weapons.

    It is increasingly evident that the developing constructive relationship between the United States and Russia should realistically reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.  Indeed it provides the opportunity for more than prudent and even deep reductions.  The developing constructive relationship between the United States and Russia permits both of us to lead the world toward an enforceable United Nations General Assembly agreement that the development and possession of nuclear weapons is considered to be an international punishable crime.  The UN Security Council should then be charged by the UN General Assembly with the responsibility to eliminate nuclear cheating.  This could be accomplished by the creation of a UN Bank to purchase all active nuclear military materials and convert that material into civilian nuclear power for energy starved areas.  Violations of zero should result in political, economic and social world isolation.  

    The task of the UN General Assembly is to establish a civilized “ought” for the world and the task of the UN Security Council is to create the machinery of civilization necessary to achieve the goal of zero, to prevent cheating and to provide for political, economic and social isolation as a price for cheating.  

    The United Nations has been understandably disappointing to many, but it is alive and should be utilized.  At the opening session that created the United Nations, President Truman welcomed its presence in the United States, and in his formal greeting called for the abolition of nuclear weapons on behalf of the United States government.  He greeted the delegates from around the world and said that “there is nothing more urgent confronting the people of all nations than the banning of all nuclear weapons under a foolproof system of international control.”  It is time to remember that goal.

    It is time once again for the United States to lead the world towards that goal and sanity.  It is also time to achieve that goal of zero and to demonstrate that the United Nations is alive, that its goals are civilized and clear and that it can begin to earn civilized respect.  

    President Obama recently reminded us of the historic Truman message to the United Nations.  He was joined by our Russian colleague, President Medvedev, as they both declared a commitment to a nuclear free world.  In addressing the UN delegates from around the world, our President said: “there is nothing more urgent confronting the people of all nations than the banning of all nuclear weapons under an international set of agreements. . . .”

    The President’s message is clear.  And yet we all appreciate that until that zero goal is reached, problems must be met and resolved.  This reality should not be permitted to replace or postpone the goal we have set for ourselves as a nation.  I note this here because of understandable reactions by our highly trained and committed officials who are inclined to emphasize reductions in nuclear weapons more clearly than those of us who aspire and call for zero nuclear weapons.  

    The time for us to achieve our goal of zero is now!  

  • Moving from Omnicide to Abolition

    Nuclear weapons present humankind with an immense challenge, one far greater than most people understand.  Many people realize, of course, that nuclear weapons are dangerous and deadly, and that in the past they were used to destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with a single weapon demolishing each city.  But few people have grappled with the proposition that these weapons are omnicidal; they go beyond suicide and genocide to omnicide, the death of all.  

    In a cataclysmic strike, resulting in the destruction of present life forms on the planet, these weapons would also obliterate the past and future, destroying both human memory and possibility.  They would obliterate every sacred part of being, leaving vast ruin and emptiness where once life, love, friendship, decency, hope and beauty had existed.

    Despite the omnicidal capacity of nuclear weapons, leaders of a small number of countries continue to maintain and develop nuclear arsenals and rely upon these weapons for national security.  They justify this reliance on the basis of nuclear deterrence, arguing that the weapons prevent war by the threat of retaliation with overwhelming destructive force.  This argument has many flaws, the most important being that deterrence is only a theory and is subject to human fallibility.  

    Deterrence theory posits rational decision makers, but it is highly unlikely that all political leaders will act rationally at all times, particularly under conditions of high stress.  Deterrence is also widely understood to be ineffective against non-state actors, such as extremist groups, which cannot be located and whose members are suicidal.  In other words, deterrence may fail, and such failure would be catastrophic.

    Unfortunately, leaders of the major nuclear weapon states are continuing to drag their feet on nuclear disarmament, sometimes rhetorically expressing the vision of a nuclear weapon-free world, but resisting serious actions toward the abolition of their arsenals that would provide assurance of their commitment.  For example, in his much heralded Prague speech in April 2009, President Obama said, “I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”  But he quickly followed this visionary statement with a lowering of expectations.  “I’m not naïve,” he said.  “This goal will not be reached quickly – perhaps not in my lifetime.  It will take patience and persistence.”  

    President Obama is a relatively young man, who is likely to have a long life.  He is to be commended for his vision of a nuclear weapon-free world, but his lack of urgency in seeking the elimination of nuclear weapons opens the door to the further proliferation of nuclear weapons and their potential use.  There are still some 23,000 nuclear weapons in the world, far more than are needed to end civilization, the human species and other forms of complex life on the planet.  

    The next major international event at which the subject of nuclear weapons will be before the international community is the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which will take place in May 2010.  This treaty calls for both nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.  In their deliberations, the states parties to the treaty should bear in mind the following points in seeking a comprehensive solution to the omnicidal threat of nuclear weapons:

    • Nuclear weapons continue to present a real and present danger to humanity and other life on Earth.
    • Basing the security of one’s country on the threat to kill tens of millions of innocent people, perhaps billions, and risking the destruction of civilization, has no moral justification and deserves the strongest condemnation.
    • It will not be possible to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons without fulfilling existing legal obligations for total nuclear disarmament.
    • Preventing nuclear proliferation and achieving nuclear disarmament will both be made far more difficult, if not impossible, by expanding nuclear energy facilities throughout the world.
    • Putting the world on track for eliminating the existential threat posed by nuclear weapons will require new ways of thinking about this overarching danger to present and future generations.  

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation supports the following five priority actions for agreement at the 2010 NPT Review Conference:

    1. Each signatory nuclear weapon state should provide an accurate public accounting of its nuclear arsenal, conduct a public environmental and human assessment of its potential use, and devise and make public a roadmap for going to zero nuclear weapons.
    2. All signatory nuclear weapon states should reduce the role of nuclear weapons in their security policies by taking all nuclear forces off high-alert status, pledging No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nuclear weapon states and No Use against non-nuclear weapon states.
    3. All enriched uranium and reprocessed plutonium – military and civilian – and their production facilities (including all uranium enrichment and plutonium separation technology) should be placed under strict and effective international safeguards.
    4. All signatory states should review Article IV of the NPT, promoting the “inalienable right” to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, in light of the nuclear proliferation problems posed by nuclear electricity generation.
    5. All signatory states should comply with Article VI of the NPT, reinforced and clarified by the 1996 World Court Advisory Opinion, by commencing negotiations in good faith on a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons, and complete these negotiations by the year 2015.

    The most important action by the 2010 NPT Review Conference would be an agreement to commence good faith negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention.  Such an agreement would demonstrate the needed political will among the world’s countries to move forward toward a world without nuclear weapons.  If the United States fails to lead in convening these negotiations, I would urge Japan to do so.  Regardless of which countries provide the leadership, however, I would propose that the opening session of these negotiations be held in Hiroshima, the first city to have suffered nuclear devastation, and the final session of these negotiations be held in Nagasaki, the second and, hopefully, last city to have suffered atomic devastation.

    If agreement could be reached to begin these negotiations for a new treaty, a Nuclear Weapons Convention, we would be on a serious path toward a nuclear weapon-free world, one that would allow the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that their pleas have been heard.

    If climate change is an “inconvenient truth,” as Al Gore argues, then the potentially omnicidal consequences of nuclear weapons are an even more critical inconvenient truth.  Perhaps the greatest contemporary challenge confronting humanity in the 21st century is urgently ending the nuclear weapons era.  To move from omnicide to abolition will require a major outpouring of support from people everywhere.  The task cannot be left to political leaders alone.  Without a strong foundation of public support, political leaders are unlikely to be courageous and persistent in seeking to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.  Ordinary citizens must overcome their disempowerment and propensity to defer to experts in order to act for the benefit of all humankind and demand the change they seek, in this case the abolition of nuclear weapons.