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  • Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People

    Firings and Hirings: the US Nuclear Arsenal Versus the People

    Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced the firing of two top Air Force officials for failure to adequately secure the nation’s nuclear weapons, citing a report that found a “problem…not effectively addressed for over a decade.” The individuals fired were the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force Chief of Staff. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But why stop there?

    The firing of these two men suggests that the problem is the adequate safeguarding of nuclear weapons and materials in the US arsenal. That is a serious problem, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if we could assure the security of all US nuclear weapons, we would not have dealt with the larger problem of assuring the security of US citizens from nuclear weapons. It is not only our own nuclear weapons we must worry about, but those of all other nuclear weapon states as well.

    What most Americans don’t realize is that nuclear weapons do not and cannot protect us. They are not a defensive shield. All we can do with nuclear weapons is threaten their use against a country that would attack us and then hope that our threat is adequately communicated and believed, and that the leadership on the other side behaves rationally. In other words, deterrence (threat of retaliation) is a theory about how people may behave, and not a means of defense. We are staking the future of our country and the world on deterrence working under all circumstances. Whoever came up with this concept should be fired immediately.

    In fact, some of the strongest proponents of deterrence during the Cold War are now calling for US leadership for a nuclear weapons-free world, precisely because they have concerns about the capacity of deterrence to provide for US security. Former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz have joined with former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn in pressing for a new approach to US nuclear policy. They wrote in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article, “We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.”

    Working to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons will require far more than firing two air force officials. In the current administration, it would require firing the president. He has failed to pursue US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; threatened preemptive use of nuclear weapons; kept US nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status; sought to develop new nuclear weapons; failed to support US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; abrogated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue missile defenses (or, more accurately, missile offenses); and has blocked proposals by Russia and China to ban the weaponization of space. The one nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia that the president achieved, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), does not go as low in the number of weapons as the Russians proposed, has no provisions for verification, requires no dismantling of weapons taken off deployed status, and ends on December 31, 2012.

    Both major party presidential candidates have said in general terms that they support the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. McCain stated that he shares Ronald Reagan’s dream “to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth.” However, he characterizes that dream as “a distant and difficult goal.”

    Barack Obama has stated, “A world without nuclear weapons is profoundly in America’s interest and the world’s interest. It is our responsibility to make the commitment, and to do the hard work to make this vision a reality. That’s what I’ve done as a Senator and a candidate, and that’s what I’ll do as President.”

    Both candidates are short on details of how they intend to move forward. It is the responsibility of the American people to assure that the next president they elect have a solid plan for getting from where we are now to a world free of nuclear weapons and that he be ready to begin the process on his first day in office. It is certain that without determined US leadership a nuclear weapons-free world will remain a distant goal and the security of the American people will continue to be endangered by the threat of nuclear war, by design or accident, and by nuclear terrorism; and further, that our current arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons will provide us with no protection.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The Foundation’s Appeal to the Next President can be signed at www.wagingpeace.org/appeal.

  • A Powerful Peace

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own.

    With each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger. Possession of nuclear arms provokes proliferation. Both nourish the global nuclear infrastructure, which in turn enlarges the possibility of acquisition by terrorist groups.

    The step that is needed to break this cycle can be as little doubted as the source of the problem. The double standard of nuclear haves and have-nots must be replaced by a single standard, which can only be the goal of a world free of all nuclear weapons.

    What is it that prevents sensible steps toward nuclear abolition from being taken? The answer cannot be in doubt, either. It is the resolve of the world’s nuclear powers to hold on to their nuclear arsenals. Countries that already have nuclear arms cite proliferation as their reason for keeping them, and those lacking nuclear arms seek them in large measure because they feel menaced by those with them.

    A double-standard regime is a study in futility—a divided house that cannot stand. Its advocates preach what they have no intention of practicing. It is up to the nuclear powers to take the first step.

    Their nuclear arsenals would be the largest pile of bargaining chips ever brought to any negotiating table. More powerful as instruments of peace than they ever can be for war, they would likely be more than adequate for winning agreements from the non-nuclear powers that would choke off proliferation forever.

    The art of the negotiation would be to pay for strict, inspectable, enforceable nonproliferation and nuclear-materials-control agreements in the coin of existing nuclear bombs. What would be the price to the nuclear powers, for example, of a surrender by the nuclear-weapons-free states of their rights to the troublesome nuclear fuel cycle, which stands at the heart of the proliferation dilemma? Perhaps reductions by Russia and the United States from two thousand to a few hundred weapons each plus ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

    Further reductions, now involving the other nuclear powers, might pay for establishment and practice of inspections of ever-greater severity, and still further reductions might buy agreements on enforcement of the final ban on nuclear arms. When nuclear weapons holdings reached zero, former nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states, abolitionists all, would exercise a unanimous will to manage, control, roll back, and extirpate all nuclear weapon technology.

    A world from which nuclear weapons had been banned would, of course, not be without its dangers, including nuclear ones. But we must ask how they would compare with those now approaching.

    Let us suppose that the nuclear powers had agreed to move step by step toward eliminating their own arsenals. The iron chains of fear that link all the nuclear arsenals in the world would then be replaced by bonds of reassurance. Knowing that Russia and the United States were disarming, China could agree to disarm. Knowing that China was disarming, India could agree to disarm. Knowing that India was ready to disarm, Pakistan could agree to disarm as well. Any country that decided otherwise would find itself up against the sort of united global will so conspicuous by its absence today.

    During the Cold War, the principal objection in the United States to a nuclear-weapon-free world was that you could not get there. That objection melted away with the Soviet Union, and today the principal objection is that even if you could get there, you would not want to be there. The arguments usually begin with the observation that nuclear weapons can never be disinvented, and that a world free of nuclear weapons is therefore at worst a mirage, at best a highly dangerous place to be. It is supposedly a mirage because, even if the hardware is removed, the know-how remains. It is said to be highly dangerous because the miscreant re-armer, now in possession of a nuclear monopoly, would be able to dictate terms to a helpless, terrorized world or, alternately, precipitate a helter-skelter, many-sided nuclear arms race.

    This conclusion seems reasonable until you notice that history has taught an opposite lesson. Repeatedly, even the greatest nuclear powers have actually lost wars against tiny, backward nonnuclear adversaries without being able to extract the slightest utility from their colossal arsenals. Think of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or the U.S. in Vietnam, or Britian in Suez.

    If, in the 60 years of the nuclear age, no great power has won a war by making nuclear threats against even tiny, weak adversaries, then how could a nuclear monopoly by a small country enable it to coerce and bully the whole world? The danger cannot be wholly discounted, but it is surely greatly exaggerated.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own. They should collectively offer the world’s non-nuclear powers a deal of stunning simplicity, inarguable fairness, and patent common sense: we will get out of the nuclear weapon business if you stay out of it. Then we will all work together to assure that everyone abides by the commitment.

    The united will of the human species to save itself from destruction would be a force to be reckoned with.

    Jonathan Schell wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Jonathan is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior visiting lecturer at Yale. He has written many books. This article is adapted from his latest, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

  • No Nuclear Weapons: An Interview with George Shultz

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    George Shultz was there when nuclear disarmament slipped through our fingers. Today, he says, action is even more urgent. Sarah van Gelder interviews George Shultz, former Secretary of State.

    Twenty years ago, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to phase out their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The encounter took place at Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of the people who was there was Secretary of State George Shultz. When the proposal came up, he is reported to have said, “Let’s do it!”

    Today, from his office at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, he’s back on the case. In collaboration with former Senator Sam Nunn, William Perry, who was secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, this veteran of the Cold War is taking on what may be the biggest threat to human security.

    YES! executive editor Sarah van Gelder spoke to Secretary Shultz in March 2008, shortly after he returned from Oslo, where he led the third in a series of conferences on eliminating nuclear weapons—this one involving representatives of all the countries of the world that have nuclear weapons.

    Sarah: Can the United States be secure without its nuclear stockpile?
    Shultz: You’re going to be more secure if there are no nuclear weapons in the world, because if you achieve this goal, you won’t be risking having nuclear weapons blow up in one of our cities.

    At the conferences abroad I’ve been attending, it was certainly borne in on me that the notion of a two-tiered world—where some countries can have nuclear weapons and others can’t—is getting less and less acceptable.

    The Nonproliferation Treaty in Article 6 says that those who don’t have nuclear weapons will have access to nuclear power technology and they won’t try to get nuclear weapons, and those who do have nuclear weapons will phase down their importance eventually to zero. People are looking for governments to live up to that treaty.

    Sarah: Is it possible to verify that nuclear weapons have been eliminated?
    Shultz: That’s one of the main subjects to be worked on. The British government has volunteered to take on verification—to try to think through how you work it out.

    We have the START Treaty between the United States and Russia that includes the best verification procedures of anything that’s been developed. It expires in December of 2009, so we’re suggesting that the treaty be extended so as not to lose those verification provisions.

    Sarah: How would it affect our relative power in the world if nuclear weapons were eliminated?
    Shultz: At a meeting in Washington, DC, about a year ago, Henry Kissinger said, “The thing that I lost sleep over, and that I agonized about more than anything else when I was in office, was what would I say if the president ever asked my advice on whether to use a nuclear weapon, knowing that a hundred thousand or maybe more would be killed, and if there were a nuclear exchange, it would be in the billions.”

    Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power, they’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use. So I think we’re better off without them.

    Of course the United States has such awesome conventional power, I think probably that on the relative balance we would be well off.

    Sarah: Do you think there can be nuclear energy without proliferation?
    Shultz: If you get the nuclear fuel cycle under control, yes. But I listen to people talk about nuclear power plants, and they hardly ever mention the issue. I don’t think people are alert to this problem.

    In terms of the nuclear fuel cycle, there is just as strong a feeling that you don’t want to have another two-tiered system, in which some countries are allowed to enrich uranium and others aren’t. I think there’s going to have to be an international regime on that.

    Sarah: Why is the reaction today so different from the reaction to President Reagan’s proposal at Reykjavik to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: After Reykjavik, you may remember, the reaction was very negative. Margaret Thatcher came over, practically summoned me to the British ambassador’s residence, and she read me out: How could I possibly take part in such a discussion?

    I think it has dawned on people that we’ve gone to sleep on this subject. The proliferation problems are growing, and the amount of nuclear fissile material around is large, and some of it isn’t well safeguarded. We have a terrorist phenomenon, and the non-proliferation treaty is fraying at the edges. So maybe we should do something a little different.

    Sarah: You just returned from a conference in Norway on the abolition of nuclear weapons. What happened there?
    Shultz: Sam Nunn and I went. Henry Kissinger and Bill Perry were not able to go. Twenty nine countries were represented—all the countries with nuclear weapons, including Israel. The people there had their doubts, but they were intrigued; they can see there is a danger—a tipping point problem.

    We’re getting to the point where proliferation could get out of control. If a terrorist group gets a nuclear weapon or the fissile material from which they can make one, they aren’t getting it for deterrence. They are getting it to use it.

    The Doctrine of Deterrence justified nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The deterrent impact of Mutual Assured Destruction kept an uneasy peace, although if you were involved, you knew that there were more close calls than you were comfortable with.

    At the end of the Cold War, more countries were acquiring nuclear weapons, and others were aspiring to have them.

    The Gulf states all want nuclear power plants, and if you enrich your own uranium—as the Iranians aspire to do—you can enrich it for a weapon. When the fuel is spent, it can be reprocessed into plutonium. If nuclear power spreads—as the people who are worried about global warming are pushing for—then the problem of the nuclear fuel cycle emerges. All of these things together give you that uneasy feeling.

    Sarah: Have you had a response from the leading presidential contenders?
    Shultz: I haven’t seen anything from Senator McCain. Senator Obama has made a statement supporting what we’re doing. Senator Clinton has been a little less forthcoming than Senator Obama, but has indicated interest.

    I hope that I, or Henry, or someone can get a chance to talk to Senator McCain before long.

    Sarah: Is there active opposition to your initiative to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: There are people who think that the idea is not a good idea and that it will never happen. Mostly, however, they say that they are in favor of the steps that we’ve identified. So we say, OK, let’s get going on the steps that we can do today that will make the world safer.

    Sarah: What response have you had from the Russians to this proposal?
    Shultz: No formal response. But, at our meeting in London, two former Russian foreign ministers were there, one of whom, I understand, is close to the current regime. When he finished speaking, I said, “Igor, will you let me translate what you said? It is that as far as Russia is concerned, the door is open.” He said, “That’s a fair translation. We’re ready to think about it.”

    That’s as good as you can get.

    Sarah: What is the first thing you would like the next president to do to move this process forward?
    Shultz: I’m not trying to prescribe for the next president. We’re trying to get the building blocks ready. We’ve talked to people from some other countries, and they’re interested enough so that if the United States, working with Russia, were to take this initiative and get other people to join, it might be pretty exciting. And it might once again put us in the role of doing something that people feel good about.

    There is quite a list of people—large numbers of former secretaries of state, defense, and national security advisors—who have publicly stated their support. So we’d be in a position to say to a new president, “If you decide to go this way, here are a bunch of people from both sides of the aisle who are willing to stand up behind you and applaud.”

    Sarah van Gelder interviewed George Shultz as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

  • Humanity’s Great Future

    Address in Saint Paul’s Cathedral San Diego, California April 27, 2008

    In this ever changing life, upon this glowing transforming globe, I have lived for nearly 100 years, traveling inwardly and outwardly, in my thoughts and in my dreams, realizing that there are no limits to the paths which can be explored in the thunderous days and illuminated nights of this journey.

    I was born in a thunder storm with lightening flickering around my mother’s body. I have landed on a torn beach in Normandy, leaping from a small boat onto a strip of sand covered by parts of bodies and wreckage. I have ridden through villages smashed by allied bombs and shared in the liberation of the city of Paris on a blazing day in August 1944.

    I have ridden with a President threatened by defeat and hidden assassins, and sat close to him on the day of his inauguration when the sky was filled with war planes and thousands of men went marching by. I have worked in a huge office in the Capitol of the United States – an office once occupied by the Supreme Court. I have hidden in a cavern under that majestic building, made fearful by reports of a possible attack by enemy bombers.

    In all many places I have had glimpses of the Creator who shaped all life. I have seen His awesome power in clouds and volcanoes, in giant animals pacing in cages, in the smiles and wails of little children, in old men and women with authority, in the beauty and delight of love and in nightmares when I thought I heard the cries of a dying Savior asking why he had been forsaken.

    I was born in 1914, a year when nations plunged into the catastrophe known as World War I. When President Woodrow Wilson took this country into that war in 1917, proclaiming that it was a war to end war, my father volunteered for military service. He was sent to Camp Funston for training and became a captain in the infantry. But when he went overseas with thousands of other men to crush the German Kaiser, my mother and I felt strangely abandoned.

    My father ordered me to wear a little soldier suit – and forced me to salute him and other men in uniform. He ordered me to take care of my dear mother while he bloodied his hands in the Wilsonian crusade. I did not begin to understand the murderous nature of war until he’d returned from France horribly wounded. I did not recognize him. He had a scarred hole in his neck and he woke up at night in savage struggles, fighting in trenches hand to hand confronting the bloody bowels of men he had ripped open with a bayonet.

    His nightmares afflicted me – and still do. Our house in Kansas City was filled with deep pains I had not earned and those memories have remained with me all the years of my life. I had been taught that God was good but the world he had made reeked with evils.

    To escape from the planet of terror on which I had been born, I leaped toward the stars. It seemed to me that all those glistening spangles in the night skies were there to be explored by voyagers from earth. The stars to me seemed the very signs of God. I was a very religious boy and I felt His arms around me, pulling me into ecstasies.

    In my early teens, I wrote science fiction stories about traveling to other planets. When I saw the astronauts landing on the moon many years later, it seemed to me that they were dressed exactly as I had depicted them in my stories. The explorations of space seemed to me very relevant to the questions I had wrestled with in my youth.

    My first teachers were Catholic nuns who taught me that the powerful God who gleamed in the stars had also made me. This God loved to make stars, beasts and beetles and millions of other living beings and he loved everything he made. He had created me to love Him and to serve Him and to be happy with Him forever. That was what they taught me.

    Yet there were perils which had to be faced. The nuns taught me that there were angels and demons around at all times. Invisible spiritual warfare was even worse than the slaughter in which my father had participated. It was going on around me and around us all. There were dark powers and principalities seeking to devour me and resplendent angels defending me. So they convinced me that I was very important to God and to the enormous power called the devil.

    My favorite teacher was a beautiful nun who was not frightened by the questions I hurled at her. She encouraged me to write stories of wonder, to let my mind run freely, to leap toward the farthest places if I felt like jumping high. She told me that God had given me some of his creative power, some of his courage, some of his strength. I was a pioneer of wonder – so I had to be brave and strong.

    As I tried to spring higher and higher, I encountered the marvelous eloquence of a scientist, Brian Swimme, who declared: “The vastness of this universe could not have been otherwise….This universe, which is 30 billion light years across, is the smallest universe that we can fit into….The universe had to expand at this rate to enable our existence….We belong here. This is our home. This has been our home for 15 billion years. If you altered the universe even just slightly, none of us would even be here. That means that our very existence is implicit! We don’t only stand on our own feet….We stand on the original fireball; we stand on the expansion of the universe as a whole!”

    Now when I stand here in this great center of worship, built by the tremendous surges of creative power, I’m sure that Brian Swimme and other physicists are right. The unfolding of this universe, the Big Bang that occurred billions of years ago, had to happen just as it did.

    The first book of Moses, commonly called Genesis, puts it another way, saying that in the beginning the earth was without form and utterly dark and then there was a great burst of light. The whole process began with the emergence of the shining brightness that brings forth the understanding which transforms everything forever. When God said, “Let there be Light,” everything changed.

    There are many possibilities for despair in the age of turmoil in which we live. I have often reached the edge of darkness but I’ve always been suddenly aware of those ringing words: “Let there be Light.”

    As I gaze at the shining faces that glow before me this morning, I see glorious beings – reaching everywhere.

    You are glorious because you are connected to the starry skies – that blaze above and beyond this hall. You have radiating through you the glory of this vast universe! The Big Bang brought you here!

    I am sure that Albert Einstein had a glimpse of reality when he said that if we could envision what we really are, we would know that we are glowing fields of electro-magnetic energy. We are collections of vibrating molecules composed of dancing atoms filled with positive and negative charges. And yet we are more than all that! The physicist can describe what we are but cannot convey who we are.

    There are auras of light around your amazing bodies, and your immortal souls are visible through your eyes. Look at one another. Listen to one another, to the breathing that goes on, to the heartbeats, to the throbbing of pulses.

    Become fully aware of what towering beings you are. You are far more involved in the survival of your planet, in shaping your future, than you have ever begun to realize.

    You know that humanity is involved in a tragic situation today. You are surrounded by more dangers than any generation before you – and yet you have more strength in big and little matters, more technological knowledge, more allies to help you than you have fully understood.

    How do I dare today to make such statements to you? I dare because I have lived in this body for more than 90 years and in that long life I have experienced many miracles. In my science fiction in the 1920s, I predicted some of the transformations through which humanity has already passed – and glimpsed many more.

    In the presidential election of 1948, I had the privilege of writing speeches for Harry Truman, who had attained the Presidency without seeking it, who had survived a war without expecting to be elevated to the highest levels of political power. In a personal interview he revealed to me the principles he had learned from his mother and from reading the Bible. He felt, as I did, that he had to carry the whole world on his shoulders.

    He had been taught, as I had, that he had to be an obedient servant of the Creator, a man who prayed publicly and privately to carry out his obligations. In his diary, Truman recorded this prayer: “Oh almighty and everlasting God, Creator of Heaven, earth and the Universe, help me to be, to think, to act on what is right because it is right; make me truthful, honest, and honorable in all things….”

    His philosophy was based on confronting what he regarded as reality. In describing how he made what he called the most terrible decision any human had to make in the history of humanity – the use of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities – he spoke in very personal terms. He told me that General LeMay, commander of the B29 Bombers that dropped fire bombs on many places in Japan, thought that Japan could be defeated by those blazing attacks. Truman made a sweeping gesture with his right arm and said: “LeMay told me we didn’t need to use those new atomic weapons. We could burn up Japan from one end to the other. That would have meant setting fire to millions of mothers and children. I couldn’t sanction that!” He leaned toward me: “You know Frank, those Japanese are just as human as we are. Could you have burned up your mother?” I understood his burden. Most of the people in the world felt that the use of the Atom Bombs brought a speedy end to World War II. Mr. Truman believed that, but he thought of it as saving millions of mothers and children.

    Later I served as one of Truman’s representatives on the committee which developed the national Democratic Platform in 1948. Mr. Truman told us that he would treat that platform as much more than an instrument to win votes. He reminded me that he had taken steps to rebuild Europe after World War II. We had supported the United Nations fully and we had pledged fully to participate in international programs leading to the development of the UN, which would truly constitute an effective parliament of the world’s peoples.

    Mr. Truman carried in his wallet a poem by an English writer Alfred Tennyson, predicting the eventual creation of such a parliament. In that poem written in 1842, the English author wrote:

    For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that could be; Saw the heavens filled with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Heard the heavens filled with shouting and there rained a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue Till the war drums throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled In the parliament of man, the federation of the world….

    When I was released from the American army in 1945, I was sent by the Associated Press to cover the first sessions of the United Nations. I witnessed Truman’s use of power to get the Soviets to withdraw their soldiers from the Northern part of Iran. I used the knowledge I gained then to write a novel about the United Nations entitled, An Edge of Light, showing Truman’s determination to keep the military strength of nations to be used for the averting of bloody clashes. He insisted that strength had to be an imperative element for maintaining peace. He got the Soviets to back down.

    In my conversations with that President, I was enormously encouraged by his confidence and hope. He predicted that the Soviet system would collapse, and that Americans and Russians would work together in meeting the needs of people in many places. In 1983 I was invited to go to Russia under the auspices of the Council of Citizens to discuss steps toward cooperation. I found that many Soviet leaders were eager for peace with Americans. Truman’s efforts to rebuild Europe were known and appreciated in Moscow.

    In addition to working with Truman and later serving as assistant to the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, I had the benefit of being Vice President of the Fund for the Republic, an educational foundation, dedicated to preserving the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. With financial backing from the Ford Foundation and other donors, the fund helped many non-profit organizations to uphold civil rights and liberties in a period of expanding challenges to those rights and freedoms.

    The Center for the Study of Democratic institutions created by the fund for the Republic was active for 22 years. It helped to prevent a war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It fostered efforts to end the tragic conflict in Viet Nam. It was a pioneer in the environmental movement. It sponsored discussions of the constructive and negative effects of organized religions. It called attention to the positive and negative effects of the mass media, the skeptical clashes between the press and the people, and the destructive impact of commercial television. It published a model Constitution for the World. It brought thousands of people into dialogues and conferences in New York, Geneva,, San Francisco, Washington and many other places. It became “an early warning system” for humanity.

    In my 16 years of participation in the Center’s work I gained a full appreciation of the value of long-range thinking. I read and heard the ideas of brilliant people from every field – atomic scientists, philosophers, generals, military strategists, novelists, bishops, priest, theologians, psychologists, poets, science fiction writers including Aldous Huxley and those who’d experimented with LSD and other mind-altering substances, peace activists, Supreme Court judges, senators, governors, presidential candidates, labor leaders, university administrators, state and local officials, economists and others. I argued with Nobel Prize winners and offered questions to the scholars who were employed by the Center, to make major revisions in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

    On the Center staff, we planned meetings on science and world affairs, on the demands of technology, on the prospects for democracy in the new nations that had arisen after the collapse of the European Colonial Empires, on the possible changes in the American character in an affluent society, and the connection between American problems and world problems. We had an insatiable thirst for knowledge about everything in every area of human activity. We were intensely concerned about the effects of current events on the lives of coming generations. We were accused of fostering a new sin – the sin of intellectual gluttony. I was among those guilty of that sin -of wanting to know everything there was to know about everything. I am still guilty of that thirst to know as much as God does.

    THE NATIONAL PEACE ACADEMY CAMPAIGN

    I left The Center in 1975, after it went through a drastic reorganization. After several years of writing books and articles, I had another chance to engage in a project with impacts on humanity’s future. I was invited to join the board of directors of The National Peace Academy Campaign, which had been created to get congress to approve an idea which had been around for almost two centuries – the formation of a federal institution to “promote and preserve perpetual peace.”

    In 1793, when George Washington was President, two far-seeing citizens – a Black mathematician named Benjamin Banneker and Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of The American Declaration of Independence, deplored the fact that the new nation had a War Department but no Peace Department. They launched a proposal to create a Peace Office for the United States. They didn’t get much support.

    In the 19th Century, various members of Congress and other citizens had tried to bring a Department of Peace into existence, but they couldn’t get enough public backing to put it over. In the 1970s, in the connection with the Bicentennial celebration of the American Republic, Senator Hartke of Indiana and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon sponsored a bill to “establish an educational institute” to promote understanding of “the process and the state of peace.” The United States had been involved in many wars and they thought it was time for this country “to consider the dimensions of peaceful resolution of differences.” Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, who had been my executive assistant in Averell Harriman’s campaign for the presidency in 1952, held hearings on the Hartke – Hatfield Bill and suggested the formation of a national commission to examine proposals for a Peace Academy. The commission came into existence in 1980, and conducted public hearings in various locations ranging from Hawaii to Massachusetts and finally urged the Congress to establish the Academy. In 1984, through an amendment attached by Senator Hatfield to a huge Defense Department of Appropriations bill, a few million dollars were allocated to make available to what was then called the United States Institute of Peace. At last, the United States had an agency engaged in full time programs for peace. Harry Truman and Woodrow Wilson must have rejoiced!

    Remembering my father’s years of nightmares – and the sufferings of wounded men I had seen in World War II, I hoped that my sons and my grandsons – as well as the children of millions of other veterans – would not have to settle disputes by stabbing or shooting or bombing one another. When I spoke in honor of President Truman in a recent meeting in Kansas City, a man in the audience came up and gave me a copy of a science fiction story I had written in the 1920s celebrating the erection of a giant peace tower in the 21st century America, signifying the increasing progress for peace made by Americans.

    When the Peace Academy Campaign was at its height, I was invited to become a founder of another organization with a global mission – The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, launched by David Krieger, Wallace Drew, Charles Jamison and myself in 1982. That Foundation initiates and supports worldwide efforts to abolish nuclear weapons, to strengthen International law and institutions, to use technology responsibly, and to empower young people to create a more peaceful society.

    The Foundation publishes a journal and sponsors and co-sponsors meetings, dialogues and conferences with schools, colleges, universities, women’s organizations, and other peace groups. It has consultative status to the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council, and is recognized by the UN as a Peace Messenger organization.

    I am grateful to be connected to this inspiring foundation. Its vision is a world full of joyful activities, free from aggressive assaults and the threats of mass destruction. We try to develop an atmosphere in which human beings realize how glorious they are, how many gifts they have, how the future may unfold with beauty and unconditional love everywhere.

    We work daily to make that future possible. We honor people who have demonstrated leadership in advancing peace and justice. We have presented awards to educators, scientists, religious leaders, artists and others. Among them are Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Mairead Maguire of Ireland, The Dalai Lama of Tibet, Dr. Linus Pauling, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Carl Sagan, Paul Ehrlich, Yehudi Menuhin, Queen Noor of Jordan, Senator Claiborne Pell, Jacques Cousteau, Admiral Gene LaRocque and others.

    We also acknowledge the dangers of the modern world. People from 80 countries died in the wreckage of the World Trade Towers in New York after they were attacked from the air. Everyone now knows that terrorists may strike again at any time, anywhere. The “preventive war” launched by the US in Iraq in 2003 has brought many deaths and much suffering to millions of people in the Middle East. The war in Afghanistan destroyed one terrorist group, but there are now reported to be such groups in 65 nations. People everywhere are now fully aware of the vulnerability that has to be faced in big rich countries and small poor ones.

    That awareness of vulnerability has made us all realize that we are all connected. We had a large meeting in Santa Barbara in 2001 to present peace leadership awards to two young people for their bravery.

    One went to Hafsat Abiola, who founded the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy on the African Continent. The other was given to Craig Kielberger, founder of the Free the Children organization, who started a movement that led to the liberation of thousands of children from slave labor.

    When these two young leaders described what they had done, the people there gave them standing ovations. Bursts of admiration and affection flashed through the men and women of all ages in that gathering. The young leaders had shown how constructive human beings could become.

    I thought then of the triumphant joy I had felt on the day in August 1944, when I had taken part in the liberation of Paris. That beautiful city in France had been occupied for years by the gray legions of Hitler’s army. Thousands of Frenchmen had been taken away to German prison camps.

    As a member of General Patton’s army, I had ridden into that city to the sound of applause. I saw the Nazis running. French people came to our trucks and embraced us. We were kissed by bearded men as well as women. We were hailed as Heroes. The city was bubbling like a fountain of champagne.

    In that glorious moment, I remembered the men who had been wounded or killed on the roads after we had moved inland from Normandy. I thought of the bodies on the beach, the torn legs and arms, the eyes and limbs we had passed over. Why had we been spared? Why were we given a share in that tremendous celebration? I had been in a training camp for “replacements” for months before D-Day. Then an officer from General Eisenhower’s headquarters had come to our camp looking for men with journalistic experience. Because I had worked for the Associated Press, I had been taken out of the ranks and given patches on my uniform, which had proclaimed me to an “Army Correspondent.” I still carried a rifle but I was not asked to use it. I was ordered to interview the bloody wounded for the army newspaper Stars and Stripes and hometown publications. I was supposed to depict every soldier as a hero even though he might be crying out for his mother or weeping for his dead friends.

    Even now, I can’t explain why I was pulled from the edge of death and carried into a bright city full of hugs and embraces. Years later, when I was asked by Admiral Hyman Rickover to explain the miracles of my life, I could only bring forth words put into the mouth of Hamlet by the great poet William Shakespeare: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

    In preparing for the talk I am delivering here today, I examined the draft of the new constitution I helped to write many years ago. In that document, I saw the signs of a global community arising from the efforts of people in many nations. I advocated the creation of a Center for Humanity’s Future at that time.

    I thought then and still do now that the Center should be dedicated to celebration – to foster the release of everyone’s finest thoughts and everyone’s dancing spirit. Celebration means more than a never-ending party, although it does include all aspects of joy, because human beings are at their best when they are joyful, feasting and frolicking.

    This Center could spread the light of eternal sunrise over our beautiful earth. It would honor all the works of compassion going on in many places, sparking many dialogues, and loving exchanges, inviting everyone to open up and communicate with people of all ages.

    Now there are many thousands of non-profit organizations, engaged in providing food and medicines for the poor in many countries, learning from one another, striving to end wars, and to send aid to people struck by hurricanes, tornadoes, epidemics, and other natural disasters. This Center could work with all of them.

    I have to mention that the Center I have described here today is simply a revival of a proposal I made in 1962 in the Saturday Review. It came to the attention of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower through the recommendation of Everett Clinchy, then head of The National Conference of Christians and Jews. Eisenhower endorsed the idea in a letter to me and it also received support from 15 members of the US Senate, but it never went into operation.

    I know that people in this great Cathedral have demonstrated their concerns for humanity’s future in many ways. I am very grateful to the Reverend Richard Lief for giving me a chance to express my confidence in the greatness of human beings.

    I am encouraged by the recent creation in Hamburg, Germany of a World Future Council, which was designed to link moral authority with political power. Jacob Von Uexkull, one of the founders of this Council, recently gave a Frank Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, financed by 100 donors who share these ideas.

    Von Uexkull said, “This Council will work closely with policymakers worldwide to implement national legislation and to create binding international agreements based on best-practices solutions. It will expand the boundaries of what is regarded as politically realistic, building on previous initiatives, which had been too narrowly focused or lacked the necessary follow-ups.” “The World Future Council is a uniquely broad institution with members from governments, parliaments, civil societies, businesses, science and the arts. Councillors – ‘planeary elders,’ global pioneers and visionaries – are world citizens, serving in a personal capacity. I am very happy that David Krieger, President of the NAPF, has accepted the invitation to join the Council, as has Frances Moore-Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet.”

    Today I have taken you with me through the long journey of my life, which began in 1914 and still continues (to my amazement) with high vitality.

    In closing, I must say that this speech today is a song of thanksgiving – for all the blessings, for all the wonderful people who have helped me and guided me – for the Franciscans, the Catholics of all kinds, the good Protestants, for Harry Truman, for Robert Hutchins, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eleanor Roosevelt, Barbara Mandigo Kelly, Christine Boesch, for the Liefs, for Fr. Virgil Cordano, for Terry and Mary, for Stephen and Misa, Carol Ann Manzi and Tom Heck, for Maryellen Kelley, Sisters of the Holy Nativity, Fabio Duran, Ernest Hemingway and thousands of others who have inspired me to believe in the greatness of humanity.

    Frank Kelly is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War Launched in Japan

    ARTICLE 9: JAPANESE CONSTITUTION: Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

    After World War II, the victorious allied powers, implementing a transition to democracy in Japan, required Japan to forego any future aggressive military action by including a provision in their new Constitution to renounce war and the threat or use of force. But by 1950, following the outbreak of the Korean War, when US General MacArthur ordered the establishment of a 75,000-strong Japanese National Police Reserve equipped with US Army surplus materials, numerous assaults have been made on the integrity of Article 9. By 1990, Japan was ranked third in military spending after the US and the Soviet Union, until 1996 when it was outspent by China and dropped to fourth place. Today, the US-Japanese joint Theater Missile “Defense” which in reality poses an “offensive” threat to China, as well as the US military bases in Japan, and other US-Japanese military cooperation have further undermined the spirit of Article 9. Presently, the Bush Administration is creating an all out assault on the peace constitution, pressuring the Japanese government to amend Article 9 in order to permit Japanese soldiers to serve in the wars of the Empire, providing fresh cannon fodder for battles in Iraq and Afghanistan and other imperial adventures yet undeclared.

    The citizen activists of Japan are resisting the US led assault on their beloved peace constitution. This May in Tokyo, at the launch of a Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War, organized by the Japanese NGO, Peaceboat, 15,000 people showed up for the first day’s plenary and over 3,000 people had to be turned away from the filled-to-capacity convention center, causing the organizers to set up an impromptu program outdoors for the overflow crowd where keynote speakers, including Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, rallied the participants to call on their government to preserve their constitution’s provision for the renunciation of war. This unprecedented turnout to uphold Japan’s constitution, launched a Global Article 9 Campaign to Abolish War with more than 22,000 people attending the three day meeting in Tokyo, and 8,000 more gathering in Hiroshima, Osaka, and Sendai to organize for peace. More than 40 countries were represented at the various plenaries and workshops with over 200 international visitors, which examined opportunities to reinforce and expand Article 9 in a new 21st century context. Article 9 was promoted not only as a disarmament measure for all the nations of the world, but as a means of redistributing the world’s treasure, now wasted at the rate of over one trillion dollars per year to feed the murderous war machine, using those funds to restore the health of the planet and end poverty on earth.

    One of the most moving and inspiring presentations was the shared experiences of a young Iraqi Sunni soldier, Kasim Turki, who quit fighting in the middle of a fierce battle in Ramadhi and has now organized a team working to rebuild schools and hospitals in Iraq, joined by Aidan Delgado, an American Iraq war vet, who also laid down his arms in the middle of a battle in Iraq and took conscientious objector status, refusing to ever kill again.. The two young soldiers and former enemies have become friends, sharing experiences and urging the abolition of military power and war. Their presentations were welcomed resoundingly by the participants who were inspired and moved by their fierce devotion to peace.

    Although cruel wars have been common throughout human history, there has been nothing like the enormous speed up of destructive war, fueled by science and technology, suffered in this last century, starting with 20 million deaths after World War I and ending with well over 100 million deaths by the end of the 20th Century– the horrors of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda– only a few of the tragic catastrophes rendered by the instruments of war. Yet it was only in 1969, less than 40 years ago, that humanity landed on the moon and, for the first time saw the image of our fragile, beautiful blue planet, floating in space, giving us a new perspective of a unified world, sharing this small spaceship earth. It could only have been a profound influence on our consciousness that is bound to help us shift from the paradigm of war and technological domination and control to a more balanced nurturing interdependent vision for the health of earth’s inhabitants in an expanded understanding of Article 9.

    The US Constitution was imperfect at its drafting, failing to consider slaves as people or to recognize women’s right to vote. Evolving consciousness led to the abolition of slavery and the enfranchisement of women. Similarly, it is hoped, by the many participants who gathered in Japan, that a transformed earth consciousness will perfect the original limited vision of the “Renunciation of War” infusing the Article 9 initiative for a global effort to stop all violence on the planet, not only for Japan, but for the whole earth. We discussed not only the violence of wars in the traditional meaning but in an expanded context of destruction against all living things and the very living systems of our planetary home itself– or as Professor Keibo Oiwa at at Meiji Gakuin University characterized it in the workshop, “Linking Environment and Peace”, a Pax Ecologia.

    And as we met in Tokyo, half way around the world in Berlin, only a few days earlier, Germany convened a meeting of sixty nations to launch a Campaign for IRENA, an International Renewable Energy Agency, see www.irena.org, to facilitate new reliance around the world on the safe, abundant, free energy of the sun, wind, and tides, foregoing resource wars and food shortages, currently plaguing the earth’s people as a result of a non-sustainable out of date energy regime of fossil, nuclear and biofuels. Irene, the Greek word for peace adds a unique resonance to this critical initiative to shift our dependence on energy to benign sources, plentifully distributed around our planet for all to access peacefully. Support for the establishment of IRENA was issued in the final statement of the Article 9 conference to the participants at the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference which convened at the same time in Geneva to address issues of nuclear disarmament and proliferation.

    Currently, only one other country, Costa Rica, has a constitutional provision similar to Japan’s to abolish war. At the close of the conference, Carlos Vargas, representing Costa Rica, invited the organizers to his country for a follow up planning meeting to expand the Article 9 Campaign to make peace provisions a reality in every national constitution around the world. For more information, see http://www.article-9.org/en/index.html ; http://www.peaceboat.org/english/index.html

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York representative (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Simulated Attack Reveals Security Flaws at Livermore

    A recent mock terrorist infiltration conducted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), located near San Francisco, showed that fissile material necessary for building nuclear weapons was not hard to obtain. In Building 332, the faux-invaders found access to approximately 2,000 pounds of weapons-grade uranium and deadly plutonium, a surplus bountiful enough to build at least 300 nuclear weapons. The simulated attack also revealed problems with the lab’s hydraulic system which controls the Gatling gun responsible for protecting the facility.

    Voices from Capitol Hill, across party lines, called the incident “an embarrassment to those responsible for securing the nation’s nuclear facilities,” and called for immediate steps to correct the lab’s major security weaknesses. Danielle Brian, Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight, explained the danger of allowing terrorists access to the wealth of nuclear materials at Livermore. She argued that terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives would not need to escape the lab safely with apprehended fissile materials. “They could simply detonate it as part of an improvised nuclear device on the spot.” With nearly seven million residents within 50 miles of the lab, the possibility of such a detonation has led many experts to urge the lab to choose a more remote location for nuclear material.

    The laboratory undergoes staged attacks annually, and the faux foes are timed to see how much damage real invaders could inflict. Can the attackers evade the lab’s security system just in time to build a “dirty bomb” for immediate detonation? Can they hold off the lab’s armed guards long enough to quickly construct a rudimentary device with a destructive capability akin to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Or, would it be best to simply rush past the out-of-order Gatling gun and leave the lab altogether, fissile materials in tow, to use a nuclear device in the heart of San Francisco?

    Located above an irrigation canal, less than two miles from elementary schools, a pre-school, a middle school, a senior center, and a major highway junction, Livermore’s security defects have invigorated opposition to the storage of nuclear weapons materials at the lab. Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CARES, a nuclear weapons watchdog group, argued that the fissile materials at Livermore “simply cannot be made safe and secure.” She explained that the Livermore community, consisting of 81,000 residents, strongly desires that the plutonium and highly enriched uranium be moved elsewhere.

    The stores of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium across the street are not the only thing inducing anxiety among Livermore’s residents. The lab’s security system, assuming that its components are in working order, also serves to stir unease in the suburban homes nearby. The laboratory’s Gatling guns, which were purchased by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) just after the Department of Energy approved doubling the lab’s plutonium storing capacity, each release the force of a dozen armed guards, firing 4,000 rounds per minute and taking down targets up to a mile away. Former Administrator of the NNSA, Linton Brooks, explained that the guns “leave no doubt about the outcome” in the event of a military-style air or ground attack on the lab.”

    Kelley, of Tri-Valley CARES, referred to “children on bicycles and skateboards … people walking their dogs,” along the western perimeter of the lab, and questioned the transformation of the science laboratory into a fortified arsenal, prepared for military style attacks. In a residential neighborhood, she argued, “you can’t just indiscriminately open fire.” The Gatling guns are supposed to be tested regularly, and no explanation has been given for their malfunction.

    While the security failures exposed at Livermore seem unacceptable to most, many experts believe that many more exist, and remain undiscovered due to inherent flaws in the “force-on-force” simulated attacks. The mock intrusions generally occur at night or on weekends when the lab’s employees are safe at home and not susceptible to hostage-taking, and when the defenders are given advance notice of the attack. The staff-free corridors of the laboratory during these simulations do not give the defenders accurate practice at securing the lab, as they do not have to distinguish their firing between innocent bystanders and intruders. The “force-on-force” exercises also do not assess the lab’s capability of withstanding an attack from a rogue aircraft passing along one of the flight paths to or from one of the nearby airports.

    In a press release on the newly exposed security flaws, the Department of Energy (DOE) explained that the “force-on-force” simulation revealed both positive aspects of the security system and others “requiring corrective action.” A spokesperson told Time that the DOE does not believe the nuclear materials at Livermore are at risk, but is “interested in examining any deficiencies.”

    As long as there are those who seek access to the US’ stores of plutonium and uranium at Livermore, and those who build their lives on the suburban streets around the lab, perhaps the DOE should examine the prospect of transplanting its fissile material fortress, rather than waiting for new deficiencies to emerge, or simulated failures to become real tragedies.

    Rachel Hitow is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Washington, DC Intern.

  • Major Lapses in Nuclear Security Are Routine

    Article originally appeared in The Independent (UK)

    Do you know the story of the grizzly bear that nearly destroyed the world? It sounds like a demented fairytale — but it is true. On the night of 25 October 1962, when the Cold War was at its hottest and Kennedy and Krushchev’s fingers were hovering over the nuclear button, a tall, dark figure tried to climb over the fence into a US military installation near Duluth, Minnesota. A panicked sentry fired at the figure but it kept coming — so he sounded the intruder alarm. But because of faulty wiring, the wrong alarm went off: instead, the klaxon announcing an incoming Soviet nuclear warhead began its apocalyptic wah-wah. Everyone on the base had been told there would be no drills at a time like this. The ashen men manning the station went ahead: they began the chain reaction of retaliation against Moscow.

    It was only at the last second that the sentry got through to the station. It was a mistake, he cried — just a bear, growling at the fence. If he had made that call five minutes later, you wouldn’t be reading this article now.

    I have been thinking about that bear recently, because there has just been a string of startling security lapses in the British and American nuclear arsenals. In the past year alone, a truck carrying a fully-assembled nuclear weapon has skidded off the road in Wiltshire and crashed, while six nuclear warheads were lost by the US military for 36 hours.

    A new documentary called Deadly Cargo, recently premiered in Glasgow, documents a simple and extraordinary fact: every week, fully assembled Weapons of Mass Destruction are driven along the motorways and byways of Britain. Britain’s nuclear submarines are up in Scotland, while the factories that need to test and replenish them are down in Reading — so they are shuttled between them all the time in large green trucks that are followed a half-mile behind by decontamination units. It slipped on ice and crashed not long ago.

    The film shows how a group of brave protesters called NukeWatch have been able to figure out the exact route of the convoy and track it. One of them explains, “You reach out on the motorway and they’re an arm’s length from you. That’s how close the British public come to nuclear weapons.” If they could work it out, couldn’t other groups with uglier motives do the same?

    Leaked documents from the Ministry of Defence show them fretting that an attack on the convoy “has the potential to lead to damage or destruction of a nuclear warhead within the UK” and “considerable loss of life”.

    More amazingly still, Britain’s weapons do not have a secret launch code. They can be fired or detonated by the commander in charge of them simply by opening them up manually and turning some switches and buttons. Every other nuclear power has an authorisation code known only to the country’s leader, which has to be read out to the soldiers in charge of the weapon before it can be used. Not us. Whenever the British government has tried to introduce this basic safety procedure, the Navy has got huffy and refused to participate, saying it is “tantamount” to claiming their officers are not “true gentlemen”.

    The Navy dismiss the risk of a hijacking, or a Doctor Strangelove situation where a navy commander goes nuts. But the latter has almost happened. In 1963, a US B-47 bomber crew guarding a nuclear bomb discovered that one of their colleagues had broken all the seals, removed all the safety wires, and turned on the pilot’s readiness switch and the navigator’s control switch on the nuclear bomb. The man seemed to be going through a bout of insanity.

    In the US, an even-more startling nuclear lapse occurred last summer: bombs with the force of 60 Hiroshimas were simply lost by the military. On 29 August, a group of US airmen accidentally attached six nuclear warheads to their plane, mistaking them for unarmed cruise missiles intended for a weapons graveyard. They were then flown across the continental United States and left, unwatched by anyone, on an airstrip in Louisiana. Nobody even noticed they were gone for more than a day. This is not, it seems, a freak event: the Air Force’s inspector general found in 2003 that half of the “nuclear surety” inspections conducted that year were failures. Yes, that’s half.

    This is what we know is happening in relatively orderly and open societies. There have almost certainly been incidents in China and North Korea and Pakistan that we will never hear about — until the worst happens.

    The dangers of any individual nuclear accident are, of course, very small — but small risks of massive death, accumulating over the 60 years of the nuclear age, suddenly don’t look so negligible any more. Those who campaign for a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons are often referred to as utopian, or naïve. In fact, it is utopian to believe we can carry on like this without an explosion sooner or later.

    So it is disturbing that the number of nuclear weapons in the world may be about to dramatically increase. Not in Iran, where (thankfully) sanctions seem to be working, but in Russia and China. The Bush administration, backed by the British government, has been insisting for more than 20 years on building a “nuclear shield” that would, in theory, shoot down any incoming nuclear weapons before they struck the US and its allies. After more than $100bn of military-industrial bungs, the technology still doesn’t work, but they are pushing on with it anyway. Russia and China have been pleading for a treaty that would prevent it because they want to retain the existing balance of power — but the Bush administration has flatly refused.

    The result? China and Russia are now saying they will significantly increase their nuclear weapon production. It is, they insist, the only way to ensure they would be able to punch through the US missile shield and so retain some parity with US power.

    The more weapons, the more likely an accident — or worse. But when the world should be scaling down the number of nukes, the Bush administration is actually ensuring they are ramped up.

    Almost unnoticed in the Presidential race, Barack Obama has proposed the US recommit itself to moving towards a world without nukes. This isn’t out-of-the-blue: his best work as a Senator has been trying to lock up Russia’s barely guarded old weapons — while Bush tried to slash the funding for it. Some 66 per cent of the US public support the zero-nukes goal. Yet Hillary Clinton has been bragging about her ability to “obliterate” Iran instead, while McCain has cheered on the Bush shield-madness. There is no popular movement to pressure them into sanity.

    Without the careful multilateral dismantling of these weapons, thousands of them will remain scattered across the earth, waiting — waiting for an accident with a bear, or a hijacked convoy, or a flipped-out submarine commander. Precisely how many nuclear near-death experiences do you want to risk?

    Johann Hari writes for The Independent.

  • Support the Czech Hunger Strikers

    On May 13th, Jan Tamas and Jan Bednar began a hunger strike in Prague. They are asking for respect for the expressed will of 70% of the people of the Czech Republic and that a democratic referendum be held to determine whether or not to install a U.S. military base on Czech territory. “We have tried almost everything, but our government has failed to listen to us,” says Tamas.
    The U.S. government, as part of its global so-called “Missile Defense” initiative, is planning to install a radar base in the Czech Republic, despite the opposition of the overwhelming majority of the Czech people. Although it is presented as a defense system against possible attacks from non-existent Iranian missiles, the “Missile Defense” system is, in fact, a first strike weapon. It is a tool for global dominance which represents the first step towards U.S. weaponization and control of space. It is seen by the Czech Republic’s neighbor and former Cold War ally, Russia, as a threat and a provocation, which is spurring Russia to engage in a new arms race with the United States.
    For over two years, citizens in the Czech Republic have repeatedly expressed their opposition to the proposed base through mass demonstrations, opinion polls, and petitions, yet the Czech government has refused to allow a public debate on the issue. Time is now running out, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is expected to travel to Prague in June to sign the agreement between the two countries.
    We can show our support for the hunger strikers as we call upon our own government to end its plans for the “Missile Defense” project, which endangers the peace and co-existence of people worldwide. While a military base in the Czech Republic would be located thousands of miles away from the U.S., it would have major implications for people around the United States and the world.

    Leslie Cagan is National Coordinator of United for Peace and Justice (www.unitedforpeace.org).

    Here’s what you can do:
    1) Add your name to the more than 99,000 people who have already signed the online petition – and then encourage others to sign on as well: http://www.nonviolence.cz You can also read messages of support that have come in from around the world at http://www.nenasili.cz/en/723_messages-of-support
    2) Throughout Europe groups have been demonstrating their support for the hunger strikers – as well as their opposition to the U.S. “Missile Defense” initiative. Find out more about these activities: http://nenasili.cz/en/1081_campaign-in-europe
    3) Make sure your member of Congress knows about your opposition to the radar base in the Czech Republic, and to the whole “Missile Defense” initiative. Click here to see a letter that Congressman Dennis Kucinich recently wrote in support of the hunger strikers.
    4) Forward this message to others in your networks!

  • Ten Years of the Bomb

    Article originally appeared in The International News (Pakistan)

    It is 10 years since India and Pakistan went openly nuclear. The dangers of a nuclear south Asia are becoming more and more apparent, yet the governments of the two countries continue to build their arsenals. Both countries continue to produce plutonium for more and more bombs, both countries have been testing new kinds of delivery vehicles and both countries have conducted war games assuming the use of nuclear weapons. The pursuit of nuclear weapons is beginning to take, as elsewhere in the world, a logic of its own. South Asia awaits a strong peace movement that will make the governments of India and Pakistan see reason.

    In the 10 years since the May 1998 nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan, the bomb has largely faded from view in south Asia. But the bomb is not gone. The nuclear logic continues to unfold relentlessly.

    In both India and Pakistan, the nuclear tests were sold to the public as guaranteeing national security. It did not take long for both countries to discover that the bomb was no defence. The Kargil war followed barely a year after the nuclear tests. The war proved that the bomb would not defend India from attack and was no guarantee of victory for Pakistan. It only showed that two nuclear armed countries can fight a war and that in such a situation leaders in both countries will threaten to use nuclear weapons.

    But Kargil was not enough to teach caution and restraint. A little over two years later, India and Pakistan prepared to fight again. An estimated half a million troops were rushed to the border, and nuclear threats were made with abandon. What lessons have been learned? None, other than that they need to be better prepared to fight a war. Both countries have carried out major war games that assumed the possible use of nuclear weapons. effects of a Nuclear War Political leaders and military planners seem impervious to the fact that a war between Pakistan and India in which each used only five of their nuclear weapons on the other’s cities could kill several million people and injure many more. The effects of a nuclear war could be much worse if India and Pakistan use about 50 weapons each. They have made more than enough nuclear weapons material to do this. Recent studies using modern climate models suggest that the use of 50 weapons each by the two countries could throw up enough smoke from burning cities to trigger significant cooling of the atmosphere and land surface and a decrease in rainfall that could last for years. This could, in turn, lead to a catastrophic drop in agricultural production, and widespread famine that might last a decade. The casualties would be beyond imagination.

    India and Pakistan are still producing the plutonium and highly enriched uranium that are the key ingredients in nuclear weapons. Nuclear policymakers in both countries obviously do not think they have enough weapons. They have never explained how they will decide how many weapons are enough.

    For the past decade the two countries have also been waging a nuclear missile race. Both India and Pakistan have tested various kinds of missiles, including ones that would take as little as five minutes to reach key cities in the other country. Some of the tests are now carried out by the military, not scientists and engineers. These are user trials and field exercises. They are practising for fighting a nuclear war.

    There is more to come. Pakistan has been testing a cruise missile that could carry a nuclear warhead. India has tested a ballistic missile that can be fired from a submarine. It is reported that the plan is eventually to have a fleet of five submarines, with three deployed at any time, each armed with 12 missiles (perhaps with multiple warheads on each missile) with a range of 5000 km. Pakistan already has a naval strategic command and has talked also of putting nuclear weapons on submarines. It is a familiar logic that south Asia has still not learnt. The search for nuclear security is a costly and dangerous pursuit that will take on a life of its own and knows no end. It took almost 20 years to go from an American president declaring the bomb to be the “greatest thing in history”, to a successor recognising that nuclear weapons had turned the world into a prison in which man awaits his execution. This hard-won recognition has still not come to south Asia.

    Only when an active and sustained peace movement is able to awaken people and leaders to this terrible truth can we move to the next stage in resisting and eliminating the bomb and all that it represents.

    Zia Mian is a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA.

  • Nuclear Weapons and Future Justice

    Nuclear Weapons and Future Justice

    Future justice requires that the inhabitants of the future be treated justly and equitably. This implies that our current social, economic and political relations, both nationally and internationally, become more just and equitable. It also adds an explicit focus on the longer term consequences of these relations. The decisions taken in the present must be made with a view to their effect upon future generations.

    Many indigenous peoples lived with an ethic of considering present impacts on the “seventh generation.” Modern societies have been far less respectful of those who will follow us on the planet, as the expanding population of the planet combined with our greed for natural resources and the power of our technologies has exponentially increased the human impact upon the Earth and upon future generations.

    We need an ethic that expands our concept of justice to generations yet unborn. We need to recognize and appreciate the extent to which our decisions and acts in the present have serious, potentially irreversible, consequences for the future. In the 1990s, The Cousteau Society, led by respected ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, developed and promoted a Bill of Rights for Future Generations. Its five articles are:

    Article 1. Future generations have a right to an uncontaminated and undamaged Earth and to its enjoyment as the ground of human history, of culture, and of the social bonds that make each generation and individual a member of one human family.
    Article 2. Each generation, sharing in the estate and heritage of the Earth, has a duty as trustee for future generations to prevent irreversible and irreparable harm to life on Earth and to human freedom and dignity.
    Article 3. It is, therefore, the paramount responsibility of each generation to maintain a constantly vigilant and prudential assessment of technological disturbances and modifications adversely affecting life on Earth, the balance of nature, and the evolution of mankind in order to protect the rights of future generations.
    Article 4. All appropriate measures, including education, research, and legislation, shall be taken to guarantee these rights and to ensure that they not be sacrificed for present expediencies and conveniences.
    Article 5. Governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals are urged, therefore, imaginatively to implement these principles, as if in the very presence of those future generations whose rights we seek to establish and perpetuate.

    To enforce such a set of rights for future generations, we need to create a criminal conceptualization that designates the worst offenses against these rights as crimes against future generations, the worst crimes being those that would foreclose the future altogether or that would make life on the planet untenable. Two areas of human activity that would clearly fit into this category of foreclosing the future are nuclear war and climate change. Both have the potential to destroy human life on our planet, along with much other life.

    Responsibilities towards Future Generations

    Rights cannot exist in a vacuum. Along with rights, there must be concomitant responsibilities, including responsibilities to assure the rights of future generations. On November 12, 1997, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) solemnly proclaimed the UNESCO Declaration on the Responsibilities of Current Generations towards Future Generations. The Declaration was composed of 12 Articles covering a full range of responsibilities towards future generations. The two Articles most closely related to preserving a human future and a future for life on the planet are Articles 3 and 4.

    Article 3 – Maintenance and perpetuation of humankind – The present generations should strive to ensure the maintenance and perpetuation of humankind with due respect for the dignity of the human person. Consequently, the nature and form of human life must not be undermined in any way whatsoever.

    Article 4 – Preservation of life on Earth – The present generations have the responsibility to bequeath to future generations an Earth which will not one day be irreversibly damaged by human activity. Each generation inheriting the Earth temporarily should take care to use natural resources reasonably and ensure that life is not prejudiced by harmful modifications of the ecosystems and that scientific and technological progress in all fields does not harm life on Earth.

    The Declaration calls for “intergenerational solidarity.” Such solidarity with future generations requires that current generations take responsibility for assuring that the policies of those in power today will not lead to foreclosing the future for generations yet to be born. Thus, the importance of conceptualizing crimes against future generations cannot be evaded by the people of the present. A strong example of such crimes can be found in the example of policies promoting the possession, threat or use of nuclear weapons. Such policies constitute assaults upon future generations, as well as upon present life on the planet.

    Nuclear Weapons and International Law

    In the record of human history, survival chances have been enhanced by affiliation with the tribe and later with the nation-state. Such affiliations have provided a defense against the aggression of other groups. Violent conflicts between tribes and later nations have given rise to the pattern of warfare that has characterized human behavior from its earliest history. Technological innovations in warfare, such as the stirrup, crossbow, machinegun, airplane and submarine have given advantage to one side or another.

    What characterizes the Nuclear Age is the innovation of a form of weaponry that makes possible the destruction of the species. Nuclear weapons, which are weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction, have the capacity to foreclose the future of human life on the planet. The philosopher John Somerville coined a new term for the potential of nuclear weapons – omnicide, meaning the death of all. He reasoned that humans had moved from suicide, to genocide, to the potential of omnicide. The threat or use of nuclear weapons constitutes the ultimate crime against the future, the crime of omnicide, including the destruction of the human species.

    In 1996, the International Court of Justice issued an Advisory Opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. The Court found, “The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time. They have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet.” It further found that “the use of nuclear weapons would be a serious danger to future generations.” Even setting aside the blast effects of nuclear weapons, the Court found, “Ionizing radiation has the potential to damage the future environment, food and marine ecosystem, and to cause genetic defects and illness in future generations.”

    The Court unanimously concluded that any threat or use of nuclear weapons that violated international humanitarian law would be illegal. This meant that there could be no legal threat or use of nuclear weapons that was indiscriminate as between civilians and combatants, that caused unnecessary suffering, or that was disproportionate to a prior attack. Despite the fact that there could be virtually no threat or use of nuclear weapons that did not violate international humanitarian law, the Court also found on a split vote that “in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

    In light of the above conclusions, the Court found unanimously, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Thus, the Court was clear in reaffirming the obligation to nuclear disarmament in Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although this aspect of the Court’s opinion does not specifically refer to the rights of future generations, adherence by the nuclear weapons states to “nuclear disarmament in all its aspects” would eliminate the possibility of nuclear weapons foreclosing the future by eliminating the weapons. Unfortunately, the political leaders of the nuclear weapons states have not fulfilled their obligations under international law.

    Nuclear Weapons Possession as Criminal Behavior

    Today there are nine states in the world that possess nuclear weapons: the US, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. If we know that nuclear war could foreclose the future and would be a crime against future generations, does that make the possession of nuclear weapons by these states a crime against the future? Arguably, possession alone, without use or threat of use, is not a crime. But to take the inquiry one step deeper, is it possible that there can be possession without at least the implicit threat of use? In order to eliminate the possibility of threat or use of nuclear weapons, a state at a minimum would need to have a policy of “No First Use,” and would have to separate its warheads from delivery vehicles so that there could not be an inadvertent use of the weapons. While this would be better nuclear policy than one that left open the possibility of first use, it would not eliminate the possibility of a second use of the weapons, which would escalate a nuclear war, kill great numbers of innocent civilians, impact the health of children of the victims and even place the future of humanity at risk. Thus, the conclusion seems inescapable that the possessionof nuclear weapons by a state undermines future justice and constitutes a continuing crime against future generations.

    Individual Accountability for Criminal Acts

    The possession of nuclear weapons can be viewed as a crime of state, and this crime would apply to the nine states in possession of nuclear weapons. But beyond state criminal activity, there should also be culpability for the crime against the future by the leading state and military officials that support and promote nuclear weapons possession, as well as policies that make nuclear war more likely and total nuclear disarmament less likely. In addition, corporations, corporate executives and scientists who contribute to the maintenance and improvement of nuclear weapons should also be considered culpable for committing a crime against future generations.

    It is fundamental to criminal law that individuals have culpability for crimes, and that individual accountability not be covered over by state or corporate culpability. At the Nuremburg Tribunals following World War II, the principle was upheld that all individuals who commit crimes under international law are responsible for such acts, and this is true even if they are high government officials and domestic law does not hold such acts to be crimes. Along with responsibility goes individual accountability for crimes against future generations.

    The Need for a Taboo against Nuclear Arms

    In the present global environment, the possession of nuclear weapons is not viewed as a crime against future generations or even broadly as a crime against the present, but rather as a normative behavior of powerful states. There is a strong need to change this general orientation toward nuclear weapons through education about their dangers and their capacity to foreclose the future. One of the best reasons to eliminate nuclear weapons is that they have the potential to eliminate the human species, now or in the future. So long as nuclear weapons exist and are held in the arsenals of some countries, the danger of the use of these weapons under some conditions, by accident or design, cannot be entirely excluded. In addition, the existence of these weapons in the arsenals of some states creates pressures for other states to acquire such weaponry.

    It is essential to establish a norm that the possession of nuclear weapons is a crime against future generations, a crime that can only be prevented by the total elimination of these weapons. A taboo must be established that puts nuclear weapons in the same category of unacceptable behaviors as cannibalism, incest, slavery and torture, a taboo that ostracizes those who contribute to maintaining these weapons and who set up obstacles to their elimination.

    Signs of Hope

    1. The vast majority of states in the world support a world free of nuclear weapons.
    2. The vast majority of US and Russian citizens support a world free of nuclear weapons.
    3. More than 2100 mayors in some 125 countries throughout the world support the Mayors for Peace 2020 Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons by the year 2020.
    4. More than half the world, virtually the entire southern hemisphere, is covered by nuclear weapons-free zones.
    5. Former high-level US policy makers, including former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, have spoken out in favor a world free of nuclear weapons.
    6. Norway’s government pension fund has set a powerful example by divesting from companies providing components for nuclear weapons.
    7. Legal measures to return to the International Court of Justice are being taken to challenge the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament obligations.
    8. University students are showing increased concern for university involvement in nuclear weapons research and development.
    9. Leading scientists, including the late Nobel Laureates Hans Bethe and Joseph Rotblat, are calling upon scientists in all countries to cease working on nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.
    10. UK Minister of Defense Des Browne has proposed a conference of the five principal nuclear weapons states to address the technical challenges of verifying nuclear disarmament.

    Providing Hope with Teeth

    While these signs of hope hold promise, far more needs to be done to establish a taboo against the possession, threat and use of nuclear weapons that will result in a world free of nuclear weapons. Organizations such as the World Future Council need to take a leadership role in promoting the concept of future justice and crimes against future generations, identifying those particular crimes, such as nuclear war and the antecedent possession, threat or use of nuclear weapons, which are capable of foreclosing the future.

    Those of us alive on the planet now are the trustees for future generations. We have the responsibility to assist in passing the world on intact to the next generation. We must act in intergenerational solidarity with those who are not yet present. In the words of the Cousteau Society’s Bill of Right for Future Generations, we must act “as if in the very presence of those future generations whose rights we seek to establish and perpetuate.”

    Among the tools needed to succeed in passing the world on intact to future generations is the identification of crimes against future generations to underpin the establishment of taboos against such crimes. Also needed is a system of accountability to ostracize and otherwise punish individuals, regardless of their office, who are engaged in the preparation or commission of such crimes. The possession, threat or use of nuclear weapons is unquestionably among the most serious of these crimes. Future justice is not a possibility in a world without a future.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a Councilor of the World Future Council (www.worldfuturecouncil.org).