Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

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  • Risk and Nuclear Weapons

    Those of us working to eliminate the threat that nuclear weapons pose to human survival face three major barriers that a new approach attempts to overcome:

    • The public is more worried about the risk of modifying our nuclear posture than maintaining it. Even a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is criticized as too risky by guardians of the nuclear status quo. Larger steps such as the recent efforts by Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn to pose even the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons are derided as fantasy.
    • Public interest only approaches an appropriate level when the world is on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe and fades at the first partial success. When the Cold War ended, I was horrified that public concern evaporated in the mistaken belief that the nuclear threat had been extinguished. Without an ongoing effort, it was only a matter of time before the pendulum swung back, as it is now doing, and the threat of nuclear war reared its ugly head once more.
    • A true solution to the nuclear threat involves such far-reaching changes in human thought and behavior that most people discount their ever occuring. “You can’t change human nature,” is a phrase we all have heard far too often. What naysayers miss is that these changes do not occur in one fell swoop, but rather as a process. What is impossible early on becomes feasible in the new environment produced by the first steps. Abolishing slavery and women’s suffrage, both initially derided as fools’ errands, came to be in just this fashion.

    Defusing the Nuclear Threat, as the new approach is called, is based on a simple, but surprising observation: People have a right to know the risk associated with locating a nuclear power plant near their homes and to object if they feel that risk is too high. Similarly, they should have a right to know the risk associated with nuclear deterrence and to object if they feel that risk is too high. But they cannot because that latter risk is largely unknown. The initial goal of the project is summarized in a statement endorsed by seven eminent individuals including two Nobel Laureates, a former president of Stanford University, a former Director of NSA and Deputy Director of the CIA, and which concludes:
    “We, the undersigned, therefore urgently petition the international scientific community to undertake in-depth risk analyses of nuclear deterrence and, if the results so indicate, to raise an alarm alerting society to the unacceptable risk it faces as well as initiating a second phase effort to identify potential solutions.” How do these proposed studies overcome the three barriers we face?

    • They do not change our military posture one iota and therefore cannot be criticized as “too dangerous.”
    • My preliminary analysis indicates that the current risk is literally thousands of times greater than acceptable. If the proposed in-depth studies agree even approximately, it says that society cannot go back to sleep at the first partial success.
    • Reducing risk a thousand-fold clearly cannot be done in one instantaneous act. The long-term nature of the solution as a process is almost self-evident: First find ways to halve the threat. Then halve it again, and again, and again. Thus, without ever explicitly calling for the ultimate goal of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, the world can discover if that end state is required as it journeys through ever safer levels.

    My paper “Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence” has just appeared in the magazine of the national engineering honor society and provides more details. While it includes some higher mathematics, those sections can be skipped without losing the paper’s main thrust.

    Martin Hellman is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford and previously taught at MIT. His invention of public key cryptography is the basis of secure financial transactions on the Internet and has been honored with numerous awards, most notably election to the National Academy of Engineering, election as a Fellow of the IEEE, and being named a Marconi International Fellow.

  • Accountability for the Iraq War

    David KriegerWe have been engaged in an illegal war in Iraq for five years – and there is no accountability.

    It is beyond doubt that our leaders lied us into this war – and there is no accountability.

    More than four thousand American and coalition soldiers are dead – and there is no accountability.

    Tens of thousands of American and coalition soldiers are seriously wounded – and there is no accountability.

    Our surviving soldiers are coming home traumatized from the war without proper medical and psychiatric care – and there is no accountability.

    More than a million Iraqis, mostly civilians, have been killed in this war and countless others wounded – and there is no accountability.

    More than four million Iraqis are displaced as internal or external refugees of this war – and there is no accountability.

    By using so-called “depleted uranium” weapons, we are poisoning the earth, air and water of Iraq, causing serious health problems to Iraqis and coalition soldiers – and there is no accountability.

    America has become a nation that tortures – and there is no accountability.

    America has become a nation that spies on its citizens – and there is no accountability.

    America has become a nation that hides the body bags of its soldiers killed in action – and there is no accountability.

    We are spending $12 billion a month on this war – and there is no accountability.

    Reputable economists calculate that this war will cost American citizens more than $3 trillion – and there is no accountability.

    This war is burdening unborn generations of Americans and Iraqis – and there is no accountability.

    This war has brought respect for America to its lowest ebb throughout the world – and there is no accountability.

    The war in Iraq has stretched our military forces to the breaking point, making us far less able to cope with real threats to our security – and there is no accountability.

    The war in Iraq has been a training ground for terrorists, making us far less safe – and there is no accountability.

    Accountability means holding to account those who are responsible for a war that is illegal under international law – in this case, it means holding to account those who have been irresponsible and criminal in their behavior. It means holding to account George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and others. It means not just their disgrace, but trials to bring them to justice.

    This is not a partisan issue – it is an issue of responsibility and accountability and, at a deeper level, an issue of restoring our decency, our dignity and our democracy.

    Americans must hold those responsible for this war to account.

     

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Why Today’s Peace Activists Should Not Be Discouraged: An Example from 1958

    Originally published on History News Network

    After nearly five years of bloody, costly war in Iraq, with no end in sight, many peace activists feel discouraged. Protest against the war and the rise of antiwar public opinion seem to have had little effect upon government policy.

    But, in fact, it is too early to say. Who really knows what impact peace activism and widespread peace sentiment have had in the past five years or will have in the near future? Certainly not historians, who will spend decades pulling together such information from once secret government records and after-the-fact interviews.

    What historians can do, of course, is assess the impact of popular protest on events in the more distant past. And here the record provides numerous intriguing illustrations of the power of protest.

    One example along these lines occurred fifty years ago, in 1958, when the Soviet and U.S. governments stopped their nuclear explosions and commenced negotiations for a nuclear test ban treaty.

    Ever since the first explosion of an atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, in July 1945, the great powers had been engaged in a deadly race to develop, test, and deploy what they considered the ultimate weapon, the final guarantee of their “national security.” The United States, of course, had the lead, and used this with devastating effect upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, in 1949, the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons was cracked by the Soviet Union. In 1952, the British also entered the nuclear club. As the nuclear arms race accelerated, all three powers worked on producing a hydrogen bomb–a weapon with a thousand times the destructive power of the bomb that annihilated Hiroshima. Within a short time, all of them were testing H-bombs for their rapidly-growing nuclear arsenals.

    The nuclear tests–which, by late 1958, numbered at least 190 (125 by the United States, 44 by the Soviet Union, and 21 by Britain)–were conducted mostly in the atmosphere and, in these cases, were often quite dramatic. Enormous explosions rent the earth, sending vast mushroom clouds aloft that scattered radioactive debris (fallout) around the globe. The H-bomb test of March 1, 1954, for example–which the U.S. government conducted at Bikini atoll in the Marshall Islands, a U.N. trust territory in the Pacific—was so powerful that it overran the danger zone of 50,000 square miles (an area roughly the size of New England). Generating vast quantities of radioactive fallout that landed on inhabited islands and fishermen outside this zone, it forced the evacuation of U.S. weather station personnel and Marshall Islanders (many of whom subsequently suffered a heavy incidence of radiation-linked illnesses, including cancer and leukemia). In addition, the Bikini test overtook a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, which received a heavy dose of radioactive ash that sickened the crew and, eventually, killed one of its members.

    Recognizing that these nuclear tests were not only paving the way for mass destruction in the future, but were already beginning to generate sickness and death, large numbers of people around the world began to resist. Prominent intellectuals, such Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, and Linus Pauling, issued public appeals to halt nuclear testing. Pacifists sailed protest vessels into nuclear test zones in an attempt to disrupt planned weapons explosions. Citizens’ antinuclear organizations sprang up, including the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (better known as SANE) in the United States, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Great Britain, and dozens of others in assorted nations. In the United States, the 1956 Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, made a halt to nuclear testing a key part of his campaign. Antinuclear pressures even developed within Communist dictatorships. In the Soviet Union, top scientists, led by Andrei Sakharov, appealed to Soviet leaders to halt nuclear tests.

    Polls during 1957 and 1958 in nations around the globe reported strong public opposition to nuclear testing. In the United States, 63 percent of respondents favored a nuclear test ban; in Japan, 89 percent supported a worldwide ban on the testing and manufacture of nuclear weapons; in Britain, 76 percent backed an agreement to end nuclear tests; and in India (with the survey sample limited to New Delhi), 90 percent thought the United States should unilaterally halt its nuclear tests. In late 1957, pollsters reported that the proportion of the population viewing H-bomb testing as harmful to future generations stood at 64 percent in West Germany, 76 percent in Norway, 65 percent in Sweden, 59 percent in the Netherlands, 60 percent in Belgium, 73 percent in France, 67 percent in Austria, and 55 percent in Brazil.

    Within the ranks of the U.S. government, this public aversion to nuclear testing was regarded as bad news, indeed. The Eisenhower administration was firmly committed to nuclear weapons as the central component of its national security strategy. Thus, halting nuclear testing was viewed as disastrous. In early 1956, Lewis Strauss–the chair of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the top figure in setting the administration’s nuclear weapons policy–insisted: “This nonsense about ceasing tests (that is tantamount to saying ceasing the development) of our nuclear weapons plays into the hands of the Soviets.” The United States, he told Eisenhower, should hold nuclear tests “whenever an idea has been developed which is ready for test.”

    And yet, other administration officials felt hard-pressed by the force of public opinion. In a memo written in June 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles noted that, although the United States needed a nuclear arsenal, “the frightful destructiveness of modern weapons creates an instinctive abhorrence to them.” Indeed, there existed “a popular and diplomatic pressure for limitation of armament that cannot be resisted by the United States without our forfeiting the good will of our allies and the support of a large part of our own people.” Consequently, “we must . . . propose or support some plan for the limitation of armaments.”

    But Dulles equivocated over specific plans, and the administration increasingly felt the heat. In September 1956, with Stevenson’s call for an end to nuclear testing now part of the presidential election campaign, Eisenhower ordered an administrative study of a test ban, citing “the rising concern of people everywhere over the effect of radiation from tests, their reaction each time a test was reported, and their extreme nervousness over the prospective consequences of nuclear war.” Given opposition from other officials, this study, too, went nowhere. Even so, Eisenhower remained gravely concerned about the unpopularity of nuclear testing. In a meeting with Edward Teller and other nuclear weapons enthusiasts in June 1957, the president told them that “we are . . . up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation,” and “the United States could [not] permit itself to be ‘crucified on a cross of atoms.’ ” There was not only “the question of world opinion . . . but an actual division of American opinion . . . as to the harmful effects of testing.”

    By early 1958, the outside pressures were becoming so powerful that Dulles began a campaign to halt U.S. nuclear tests unilaterally. Having learned, through the CIA, that the Soviet government was about to announce a unilateral suspension of its tests, he called together top administration officials on March 23 and 24 and proposed that Eisenhower issue a statement saying that, after the U.S. government completed its nuclear test series that year, there would be no further U.S. nuclear testing. “It would make a great diplomatic and propaganda sensation to the advantage of the United States,” Dulles explained, and “I feel desperately the need for some important gesture in order to gain an effect on world opinion.” But Strauss and Defense Department officials fought back ferociously, while Eisenhower, typically, remained indecisive. Testing was “not evil,” the president opined, “but the fact is that people have been brought to believe that it is.” What should be done in these circumstances? Nothing, it seemed. Eisenhower remained unwilling to challenge the nuclear hawks in his administration.

    However, after March 31, 1958, when the Soviet government announced its unilateral testing moratorium, the U.S. hard line could no longer be sustained. With the Soviet halt to nuclear testing, recalled one U.S. arms control official, “the Russians boxed us in.” On April 30, Dulles reported that an advisory committee on nuclear testing that he had convened had concluded that, if U.S. nuclear testing continued, “the slight military gains” would “be outweighed by the political losses, which may well culminate in the moral isolation of the United States.” The following morning, Eisenhower telephoned Dulles and expressed his agreement.

    Thereafter, the president held steady. Meeting on August 12 with Teller and other officials, he reacted skeptically to their enthusiastic reports about recent weapons tests. “The new thermonuclear weapons are tremendously powerful,” he observed, but “they are not . . . as powerful as is world opinion today in obliging the United States to follow certain lines of policy. Ten days later, after a showdown with the Defense Department and the AEC, Eisenhower publicly announced that, as of October 31, the United States would suspend nuclear testing and begin negotiations for a test ban treaty.

    As a result, U.S., Soviet, and British nuclear explosions came to a halt in the fall of 1958. Although the French government conducted its first nuclear tests in early 1960 and the three earlier nuclear powers resumed nuclear testing in late 1961, these actions proved to be the last gasps of the nuclear hawks before the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963–a measure resulting from years of public protest against nuclear testing. Against this backdrop, the 1958 victory for the peace movement and public opinion should be regarded as an important break in the nuclear arms race and in the Cold War.

    Thus, if peace activists feel discouraged today by the continuation of the war in Iraq, they might well take heart at the example of their predecessors, who recognized that making changes in powerful institutions requires great perseverance. They might also consider the consequences of doing nothing. As the great abolitionist leader, Frederick Douglass, put it in 1857: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

    Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany.

  • Science, Peace, and Sustainability

    Science, Peace, and Sustainability

    Speech delivered to INES Conference in Mexico City on March 1, 2008

    We are meeting to explore relevant issues of Science, Peace, and Sustainability. The relationship between science, peace, and sustainability affects the lives of all of the planet’s inhabitants as well as the lives of future generations yet unborn. The International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES) takes seriously issues of global responsibility, and we believe that engineers and scientists, because of their training, knowledge and privileged place in society, have a special role to play in improving the human condition and assuring a better future for humanity.

    INES has worked since 1991 in three principal areas: Peace and Disarmament, Sustainability, and Ethics in Science. INES is an international network of some 70 organizations in 34 countries. It also has individual members throughout the world. INES has held major conferences in Berlin, Amsterdam and Stockholm; and smaller meetings in many places in the world, including Buenos Aires, Argentina and most recently Nagpur, India. We are very pleased to be having our first meeting in Mexico. It is our hope that from this meeting will emerge many important and innovative ideas that will help strengthen the ties between science, peace and sustainability.

    Many years ago, in the early 1980s, I had the pleasure of working on a Reshaping the International Order (RIO) Foundation project on Disarmament, Development and the Environment with the great Mexican diplomat and Nobel Peace Laureate Alfonso Garcia Robles. He skillfully negotiated the world’s first Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone in an inhabited region, that of Latin America and the Caribbean. Last year that treaty celebrated the 40th year of its existence. It has been one of the significant success stories in the area of preventing nuclear proliferation.

    Many other regions of the world have followed in the footsteps of Latin America and the Caribbean, and we have Nuclear Weapon-Free Zones now in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, Antarctica and Central Asia. Virtually the entire Southern hemisphere has become a series of Nuclear Weapon-Free Zones. Now countries in the North need to learn from the South, and cease their hypocritical and dangerous posturing and brandishing of nuclear arms.

    Around the same time that the Treaty of Tlatelolco, establishing the Latin American and Caribbean Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone, was being agreed to, another treaty was being negotiated to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. That treaty, known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was signed in 1968 and entered into force in 1970. It contains a major trade-off. In exchange for the non-nuclear weapons states agreeing not to acquire nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons states agreed in Article VI to “good faith” negotiations for nuclear disarmament. The International Court of Justice advised in 1996 that this meant bringing to a conclusion “negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

    What I wish to emphasize is the abysmal lack of “good faith” on the part of the nuclear weapons states and, in particular, the United States. In UN General Assembly voting on nuclear disarmament matters in 2007, the United States had the distinction of voting against every one of the 15 measures put before the UN. France voted against 10 measures, the UK against 9 and Israel against 8.

    In 1982, I helped found an organization, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which believes that peace is an imperative of the Nuclear Age. This belief was earlier pronounced by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto issued on July 9, 1955. The Manifesto concluded, “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

    This is the power that scientists and engineers have placed in the hands of humanity: the power to create a new Paradise on Earth, and the power to foreclose the future by means of technologies capable of causing “universal death.” What shall we do? Which path shall we take? Which power shall we exercise? Science has contributed abundantly to war and continues to do so. Can science and scientists play a role in tipping the balance toward peace?

    And what about sustainability? Shall we go on using up the world’s resources because rich countries consider them to be inexpensive? Nothing irreplaceable can be considered inexpensive. This is another way of foreclosing the future. As an alternative course, scientists can contribute to protecting the world’s resources and developing sustainable forms of energy that do not place heavy burdens on future generations. To succeed in sustainable development, we will also need sustainable disarmament. They are inextricably linked.

    Resource depletion is a cause of war. So is greed. So is crushing poverty. If we want peace, we must protect our environment, conserve our resources, and have global standards of human dignity. We must also control and eliminate the weaponry we have created that could destroy human life on the planet, as well as most other forms of life.

    If we want peace, we must reverse the Roman dictum and prepare for peace. That means that we must use sustainable technologies and conserve our resources. It also means that scientists must work for constructive rather than destructive ends. They must also set appropriate professional standards that delegitimize destructive uses of science and technology. And they must speak out against such destructive uses and those scientists and engineers who succumb to such projects. We need a Hippocratic Oath for Scientists and Engineers based upon the commitment to “do no harm.”

    At our conference over the next few days, we will be exploring some critical issues:

    1. science, education and social responsibility;
    2. militarization and the spread of nuclear weapons;
    3. climate change and other serious environmental issues; and
    4. the paradigm of sustainability.

    All of this will be infused with the perspectives of Latin America.

    Time is not on our side, but perhaps in our deliberations we can make progress on deflecting the course of history that has divided humanity in the past, been conducive to wars, generated human rights abuses, tolerated environmental degradation, and set humanity on a collision course with catastrophe. Let us use our human capacities to choose hope and set a new course for the future, one rooted in peace, sustainability and the constructive uses of science and technology.

    I will conclude with a poem that is part of my first poetry book, Today Is Not a Good Day for War. The poem is about the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those who are victims, but also the ambassadors, of the Nuclear Age. It is called Hibakusha Do Not Just Happen.

    HIBAKUSHA DO NOT JUST HAPPEN

    For every hibakusha there is a pilot

    for every hibakusha there is a planner

    for every hibakusha there is a bombardier

    for every hibakusha there is a bomb designer

    for every hibakusha there is a missile maker

    for every hibakusha there is a missileer

    for every hibakusha there is a targeter

    for every hibakusha there is a commander

    for every hibakusha there is a button pusher

    for every hibakusha many must contribute

    for every hibakusha many must obey

    for every hibakusha many must be silent

    Of course this is not just about hibakusha. It is about us as well. It is about our responsibility and also our silence. In today’s world, we all are at risk of becoming hibakusha. We must choose peace, sustainability and human decency, while outspokenly refusing to allow the gifts of our human talents and skills to be used to improve warfare and its capacity for slaughter.

    We must break the silence and be leaders for peace and sustainability. We must each play our part in reversing the militarization of our planet and moving it toward a peaceful and sustainable future, the Paradise that Russell and Einstein believed was within our grasp.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • Understanding a Trillion

    Understanding a Trillion

    This is the way to understand a trillion. Begin by counting 1,2,3…one number each second, and count each second around the clock. In 12 days, you will reach one million. Keep counting. In 32 years, you will reach one billion. Admittedly, this is an impossible task, far beyond our capacities for concentration and focus, not to mention sleep deprivation.

    The really hard part, though, is that to reach one trillion would require counting for 32,000 years. It would require organizing the next 1,280 generations to continue the 24 hour counting in 32 year shifts. This would require passing the baton to future generations for more than three times the span of civilization from its roots in Mesopotamia to the present.

    Now consider that the world is spending over $1.2 trillion annually on military expenditures, and the United States is spending more than half of this amount on its military and its wars. Or consider this: the United States alone has spent some $7.5 trillion on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems since 1942. To count to $7.5 trillion would require counting for the next 240,000 years, through 9,600 generations. And our militarism has created in the US alone $9 trillion in debt which, along with our militarism and nuclearism, is our legacy to future generations.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Comments on Complex Transformation

    Comments delivered in Madison, WI on February 16, 2008

    I am grateful for this opportunity to comment on the Department of Energy’s proposed changes in the United States Nuclear Weapons complex. I speak both as a citizen and as a historian who has published extensively on America’s more than sixty-year encounter with nuclear weapons.

    The Department of Energy’s proposal focuses exclusively on narrow technical detail. I think it is important to place this proposal in a larger context. First of all, note the choice of language. The DoE’s goal is to “modernize” our nuclear-weapons complex. Certainly all would agree that “modernization” is a good thing. Right?

    Further, underlying the proposal is an unspoken assumption: that nuclear weapons production and stockpiling will continue to be a central aspect of American public policy into the foreseeable future. This represents a further embedding of nuclear weapons into the very core of our nation’s economy, culture, and strategic policy. There is no hint of a commitment to eliminating these terrible weapons, but rather this proposal simply assumes their permanence, and at a level of thousands of weapons—a total that would have appalled all Americans when the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, if they could have foreseen what lay ahead.

    Further, this proposed reconfiguration of the nation’s nuclear-weapons program must be viewed in the larger context of America’s overall nuclear-weapons policies over the years, and specifically the policies of the current administration. In fact, the assumption of this proposal that nuclear-weapons will remain a permanent part of the U.S. military arsenal is part of a larger pattern of government policies that pays lip service to nuclear disarmament, while in fact contributing to proliferation worldwide and dangerously worsening what used to be called the nuclear balance of terror—a term that remains all too appropriate today.

    • The current administration has worsened the danger of proliferation. The United States continues to supply Israel with military hardware and billions of dollars in aid each year, despite the fact that Israel secretly developed and stockpiled nuclear weapons in defiance of stated U.S. policy, and has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
    • This administration has entered into a highly controversial agreement to supply nuclear know-how and technology to India, despite India’s development of nuclear weapons in defiance of international nonproliferation agreements, its refusal to open all its nuclear facilities to inspection, and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
    • This administration has given billions in aid to Pakistan, despite Pakistan’s development and testing of nuclear weapons, and despite the role of Pakistan’s top atomic scientist, A. Q. Khan, in secretly giving vital weapons-making information to other countries.
    • This administration has continued to push for the development of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, the socalled “bunker buster” missiles, despite congressional opposition, and in violation of the spirit of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, by which the nuclear powers pledged to work in good faith for nuclear disarmament—not for developing new weapons systems.
    • Above all, the current administration has pursued the development and deployment of anti-missile missiles, a legacy of the socalled Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly called “Star Wars,” launched by President Ronald Reagan twenty five years ago. In addition to setting up anti-missile launch sites in Alaska and California, the administration now proposes further deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic, stirring fierce opposition from the Russian government, which is now threatening to target these sites with its own missiles.

    Russia’s reaction is entirely predictable, since the whole history of the nuclear arms race makes clear that an escalation by one side, whether labeled “offensive” or “defensive,” inevitably triggers a counter-move by the other side, leading to further escalation. Further, in taking this step, the Bush Administration abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had acknowledged the dangerously destabilizing effects of trying to develop a defense against missile attack. If such a system were ever actually deployed and proven to be workable, it would mean that the nation deploying the system could then safely launch a nuclear attack without fear of retaliation. The administrations anti-missile program is not only dangerous and unwise strategically, it is technologically unfeasible and a massive waste of money. As has often been noted, trying to shoot down a missile with another missile is the equivalent of trying to stop a bullet with another bullet. Test after test has resulted in failure, even when the timing of the target-missile’s firing and its trajectory were fully known! What are the chances of successfully destroying a missile fired at an unknown time, and on an unknown trajectory? Nevertheless, the current Bush administration has poured billions into this unwise and unworkable program. In the first Bush budget, spending on missile-defense hit nearly $8 billion. Despite a series of failed tests, the administration requested a staggering $9.3 billion for fiscal year 2007, the highest in the program’s history and more that the total 2006 budgets for the National Park Service, the Food and Drug Adminstration, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and the administration’s highly touted Millennium program to combat poverty and disease in Africa. In its final budget, released in February 2008, the Bush administration requested a staggering $10.4 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, plus nearly $2 billion more for missile-defense related projects buried in other parts of the budget. The “Star Wars” scheme that Reagan sprung on the nation out of the blue in 1983 is now an embedded Pentagon program, the Missile Defense Agency, with its own entrenched bureaucracy, powerful corporate interests that stand to profit, and lobbying muscle to secure billions in new funding year after year, whatever the record of failure. The whole depressing “Star Wars” story offers a classic example of how a dangerous, misguided, and technologically unworkable program can become lodged in the bureaucracy, and take on a life of its own. In 2006, President Bush told a California audience, “Technology will once again make this country the leader of the world, and that’s what we’re here to celebrate.” When it comes to nuclear weapons, the answer is not technology, but a renewed national commitment to eliminate them from the earth—not just from “rogue states” or designated enemy nations, but eliminating them entirely.

    Much of my research has looked at the shifting rhythms of Americans’ response to nuclear weapons and the shifting fortunes of the anti-nuclear movement. What I’ve found is a pattern of upsurges of grassroots opposition to nuclear weapons, followed by a calculated government effort to neutralize that opposition. The first antinuclear movement came right after World War II, amid a massive wave of fear and revulsion against a single bomb that could destroy an entire city and snuff out hundreds of thousands of human lives in an instant. This first surge of anti-nuclear activism was blunted, however, as government propaganda hailed the promise of “the peaceful atom,” and whipped up fears of a communist takeover as the Cold War began. The second wave of grassroots antinuclear activism came in the later 1950s and early 1960s, as deadly radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests posed a terrifying danger to public health, especially the health of the most vulnerable—babies taking in radioactive poisons with their mother’s milk. This surge of activism was blunted with the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. That treaty did not end nuclear tests, but it put them underground, out of sight, and the antinuclear movement soon faded. The third wave of grassroots antinuclear activism came in the early 1980s, in reaction to the Reagan administration’s nuclear build-up, belligerent Cold War rhetoric, and renewed focus on civil defense in a possible nuclear war. As public alarm mounted, millions of Americans rallied to the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign, the brainchild of Randall Forsberg, who died prematurely last October. Some veterans of that campaign are here today. The government, in the person of President Reagan, blunted that campaign with the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, with its deceptive promise of using America’s technological prowess to build a secure shield against nuclear attack. The whole idea was strategically dangerous and fatally flawed technologically, but it served its immediate political purpose. Reagan shifted the terms of the debate, and the nuclear freeze movement collapsed. We now stand at another crossroads. Attention to the global danger of nuclear proliferation and the massive nuclear arsenal still held by the United States, Russia, and other nations has been diverted since 9/11 by a very selective attention to the nuclear danger posed by two specific nations, North Korea and Iran. That danger is real, but it is part of a far larger danger to our planet itself—a danger in which the United States itself is deeply implicated. But while attention to the true nature of the nuclear threat has been blunted by propaganda, a profound movement for change is sweeping the nation. This may, indeed, be a propitious moment for a new surge of grassroots anti-nuclear activism by a new generation. Through determined effort by concerned citizens, we may be poised once gain to confront the threat the whole world faces from the horrendous new power of destruction that our government, in our name, unleashed on the world on August 6, 1945.

    Paul Boyer is the Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus as the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985) and Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (1998).

  • Money is the Real Green Power: The Hoax of Eco-Friendly Nuclear Energy

    Originally appeared in Extra!

    Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States-with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

    “With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry’s claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter,”comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The nuclear industry’s public relations effort has improved over the past 50 years, while the natural skepticism of reporters toward corporate claims seems to have disappeared.”

    The New York Times continues to be, as it was a half-century ago when nuclear technology was first advanced, a media leader in pushing the technology, which collapsed in the U.S. with the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accidents. The Times has showered readers with a variety of pieces advocating a nuclear revival, all marbled with omissions and untruths. A lead editorial headlined “The Greening of Nuclear Power” (5/13/06) opened:

    Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. . . . But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

    Nukes add to greenhouse

    Parroting a central atomic industry theme these days, the Times editors declared, “Nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming.” As a TV commercial frequently aired by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear industry trade group, states: “Nuclear power plants don’t emit greenhouses gases, so they protect our environment.”

    What is left unmentioned by the NEI, the Times and other mainstream media making this claim is that the overall “nuclear cycle”-which includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of radioactive waste-has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

    As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, wrote in an (unpublished) letter to the Times, the

    dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.

    She included information on “independent studies that document in detail the extent to which the entire nuclear cycle generates greenhouse emissions.”

    Separately, Lee wrote to a Times journalist stating that the “fiction” that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming “has been a prime feature of the nuclear industry’s and Bush administration’s PR campaign” that “unfortunately . . . has been swallowed by a number of New York Times reporters, op-ed columnists and editors.”

    Greens for hire

    In “The Greening of Nuclear Power,” the Times, like other mainstream media touting a nuclear restart, also spoke of environmentalists changing their stance on nuclear power. “Two new leaders” have emerged “to encourage the building of new nuclear reactors,” according to the editorial. They happen to be Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and Patrick Moore, “a co-founder of Greenpeace.” The Times heralded this as “the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists.”

    However, “both Whitman and Moore . . . are being paid to do so by the Nuclear Energy Institute,” noted the Center for Media and Democracy’s Diane Farsetta (PRWatch.org, 3/14/07). In her piece “Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups,” Farsetta also reported:

    A Nexis news database search on March 1, 2007 identified 302 news items about nuclear power that cite Moore since April 2006. Only 37 of those pieces-12 percent of the total-mention his financial relationship with NEI.

    Whitman and Moore were hired as part of NEI’s “Clean and Safe Energy Coalition” in 2006, which is “fully funded” by the institute, Farsetta noted. As for Moore and Greenpeace, his “association . . . ended in 1986,” and he “has now spent more time working as a PR consultant to the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries . . . than he did as an environmental activist.”

    According to Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Radiation (Brattleboro Reformer, 2/24/07), “Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization.” Wasserman went on to cite an actual founder of the organization, Bob Hunter, describing Moore as “the Judas of the ecology movement.”

    Scarce high-grade fuel

    Insisting that “there is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look,” “The Greening of Nuclear Power” further claimed, “It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel-uranium-that is both abundant and inexpensive.”

    This, too, was bogus. The uranium from which fuel used in nuclear power plants is made-so-called “high-grade” ore containing substantial amounts of fissionable uranium-235-is, in fact, not “abundant.” As Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation told BBC News (11/29/05), another “dirty little secret” of nuclear power is that “startlingly, there’s only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it needs for fuel.” This has been the projection for years.

    Indeed, this limit on “high-grade” uranium ore is why the industry projects that, in the long-term, nuclear power will need to be based on breeder reactors running on manmade plutonium. But use of plutonium-fueled reactors has been stymied because they can explode like atomic bombs-they contain tons of plutonium fuel, while the first bomb using plutonium, dropped on Nagasaki, contained 15 pounds. Because it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to make an atomic bomb, they also constitute an enormous proliferation risk.

    Blaming Jane Fonda

    “The Jane Fonda Effect” (9/16/07), a Times Magazine column by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, blamed nuclear power’s stall on the 1979 film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, which opened days before the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. “Stoked by The China Syndrome,” it caused “widespread panic,” wrote Dubner and Levitt, even though, they maintained, the accident did not “produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage.”

    In fact, the utility that owned Three Mile Island has for years been quietly paying people whose family members died, contracted cancer or were otherwise impacted by the accident. While settlements range up to $1 million, the utility company continues to insist this does not acknowledge fault. The toll of Three Mile Island is chronicled in my television documentary Three Mile Island Revisited (EnviroVideo, 1993) and Wasserman’s book Killing Our Own (which includes a devastating chapter, “People Died at Three Mile Island”), among other works.

    But Dubner and Levitt continue undeterred, declaring, “The big news is that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States.” They acknowledge the Chernobyl accident, stating that it “killed at least a few dozen people directly.” They admit that it “exposed millions more to radiation,” but keep silent about the consequences of this in terms of illness and death. This atomic version of Holocaust denial flies in the face of voluminous research on the disaster that puts the number of dead in the hundreds of thousands.

    “At least 500,000 people-perhaps more-have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine,” said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine (Guardian, 3/25/06). Dr. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, calculates a death toll of 300,000. In the book Chernobyl: 20 Years On, which he co-edited, Yablokov writes, “In 20 years it has become clear that not tens, hundreds of thousands, but millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere have suffered and will suffer from the Chernobyl catastrophe.”

    The New York Times Magazine also published “Atomic Balm?” (7/16/06), by Jon Gertner; the subhead read, “For the first time in decades, increasing the role of nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense.” Gertner used the term nuclear “renaissance,” and again forwarded the claim that “the supply [of uranium] is abundant.”

    Gertner told of how the “lifespan” for nuclear plants was set at 40 years because this was considered “how long a large nuclear plant could safely operate.” This has “proved a conservative estimate,” he states-without providing a factual basis. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been “granting 20-year extensions” to the 103 U.S. nuclear plants so they “can run for a total of 60 years.” (Consider the safety and reliability of 60-year-old cars speeding down highways.)

    “Even with such licensing renewals, though, it’s doubtful the current fleet of plants will run for, say, 80 years,” he continued, and “that means the industry, in a way, is in a race against time.” It needs to build new plants because the “absence” of nuclear power “would probably pose tremendous challenges for the United States.”

    The New York Times also allows its nuclear advocacy to slip into its news stories. In an article (11/27/07) about the French nuclear power company Areva signing a deal with a Chinese atomic corporation, Times reporter John Tagliabue wrote of Areva chief executive Anne Lauvergeon’s “long path from dirty hands to clean energy.” The “dirty hands” referred to a youthful interest in archaeology; that nuclear power is “clean energy” appears to require no explanation.

    Another story, datelined Fort Collins, Colorado (11/19/07), reported on two energy projects proposed for what the paper calls “a deeply green city.” Describing the plans as “exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront,” Times reporter Kirk Johnson wrote:

    Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

    Other revivalists

    Other media promoting a nuclear revival-their words prominently featured on NEI’s website-include USA Today (3/5/06): “The facts are straightforward: Nuclear power . . . creates virtually none of the pollution that causes climate change and delivers electricity cheaper than other forms of generation do.” And the Augusta Chronicle (8/21/06): “Nuclear power-for decades perceived as an environmental scourge-is emerging as the cleanest and most cost-efficient source of energy available, a fact conceded even by environmentalists.” And Investor’s Business Daily (12/1/06): “We can worry about imaginary threats of nuclear energy or the real dangers of fossil fuel pollution.”

    Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News also joined the chorus of support (5/2/07): “Look, America should embrace nuclear power, even if it’s [just] to get off the foreign oil bandwagon.” This is also common nuclear disinformation, that nuclear power is needed to displace foreign oil. The only energy produced by nuclear power is electricity-and only 3 percent of electricity in the U.S. is generated with oil.

    There are a few exceptions in the mainstream media, notably the other Times, the Los Angeles Times. “The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986,” the paper stated (7/23/07) in an editorial headlined: “No to Nukes: It’s Tempting to Turn to Nuclear Plants to Combat Climate Change, but Alternatives Are Safer and Cheaper.” Those who claim nuclear power “must be part of any solution” to global warming or climate change “make a weak case,” said the L.A. Times, citing

    the enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste. . . . What’s more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

    Staggering numbers

    As to the risks, the mainstream media’s handling-or non-handling-of the U.S. government’s most comprehensive study on the consequences of a nuclear plant accident is instructive. Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2 (known as CRAC-2) was done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1980s. Bill Smirnow, an anti-nuclear activist, has tried for years to interest media in reporting on it-sending out information about it continually.

    The study estimates the impacts from a meltdown at each nuclear plant in the U.S. in categories of “peak early fatalities,” “peak early injuries,” “peak cancer deaths” and “costs [in] billions.” (”Peak” refers to the highest calculated value-not a “worst case scenario,” as worse assumptions could have been chosen.) For the Indian Point 3 plant north of New York City, for example, the projection is that a meltdown would cause 50,000 “peak early fatalities,” 141,000 “peak early injuries,” 13,000 “peak cancer deaths,” and $314 billion in property damage-and that’s based on the dollar’s value in 1980, so the cost today would be nearly $1 trillion. For the Salem 2 nuclear plant in New Jersey, the study projects 100,000 “peak early fatalities,” 70,000 “peak early injuries,” 40,000 “peak cancer deaths,” and $155 billion in property damage. The study provides similarly staggering numbers across the country.

    “I’ve sent the CRAC-2 material out for years to media and have never heard a thing,” Smirnow told Extra!:

    Not anyone in the media ever even asked me a question. There’s no excuse for this media inattention to such an important subject, and it shows how they’re falling flat on their faces in not performing their purported mission of educating and informing the public. Whatever their reason or reasons for not informing their readers and listeners, the effect is one of helping the nuclear power industry and hurting the public. If the public was informed, this new big pro-nuke push would never happen.

    Also in the way of sins of omission is the media silence on “routine emissions”-the amount of radioactivity the U.S. government allows to be routinely released by nuclear plants. “It doesn’t take an accident for a nuclear power plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil,” says Kay Drey of Beyond Nuclear at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. “All it takes is the plant’s everyday routine operation, and federal regulations permit these radioactive releases. Rarely, if ever, is this reported by media.” The radioactive substances regularly emitted include tritium, krypton and xenon. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a “permissible” level for these “routine emissions,” but, as Drey states, “permissible does not mean safe.”

    Hidden subsidies

    Another lonely voice amid the media nuclear cheerleaders is the Las Vegas Sun, which recently has been especially outraged by $50 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build new nuclear plants included in the 2007 Energy Bill. The Sun demanded (8/1/07): “Pull the Plug Already.”

    In reporting on the economics of nuclear power, mainstream media virtually never mention the many government subsidies for it, while continuing to claim that it’s “cost-effective” (Augusta Chronicle, 8/21/06). One such giveaway is the Price-Anderson Act, which shields the nuclear industry from liability for catastrophic accidents. Price-Anderson, supposed to be temporary when first enacted in 1957, has been extended repeatedly and now limits liability in the event of an accident to $10 billion, despite CRAC-2’s projections of consequences far worse than that.

    Writing on CommonDreams.org (9/11/07), Ralph Nader explored the economic issue. “Taxpayers alert!” he declared:

    The atomic power corporations are beating on the doors in Washington to make you guarantee their financing for more giant nuclear plants. They are pouring money and applying political muscle to Congress for up to $50 billion in loan guarantees to persuade an uninterested Wall Street that Uncle Sam will pay for any defaults on industry construction loans. . . . The atomic power industry does not give up. Not as long as Uncle Sam can be dragooned to be its subsidizing, immunizing partner. Ever since the first of 100 plants opened in 1957, corporate socialism has fed this insatiable atomic goliath with many types of subsidies.

    Ignored alternatives

    Yet another claim by mainstream media in pushing for a nuclear revival is the “success” of the French nuclear program. 60 Minutes (4/8/07) did it in a segment called “Vive Les Nukes.” (See FAIR Action Alert, 4/18/07.) Correspondent Steve Kroft started with the nuclear-power-doesn’t-contribute-to-global-warming myth:

    With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing carbon-free energy. And one of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go, and may now be coming again. . . . With zero greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power, and one of the first places they’re looking to is France, where it’s been a resounding success.

    Though she was totally ignored, Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear told 60 Minutes of radioactive contamination in the marine life off Normandy where the French reprocessing center sits, leukemia clusters in people living along that coast, and massive demonstrations in French cities earlier in the year protesting construction of new nuclear power plants.

    The Union of Concerned Scientists was upset by 60 Minutes’ downplaying of alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar. UCS’s Alden Meyer wrote to 60 Minutes:

    In fact, wind power could supply more energy to the U.S. grid than nuclear does today, and when combined with a mix of energy efficiency and other renewable energy sources, could provide a continuous energy supply that would help us make dramatic reductions in global warming.

    Dismissal of renewable energy forms is another major facet of mainstream media’s drive for a nuclear power revival. As the St. Petersburg Times put it (12/08/06), “While renewable sources of energy such as solar power are still in the developmental stage, nuclear is the new green.” Renewables Are Ready was the title of a 1999 book written by two UCS staffers. Today, they are more than ready. “Wind is the cheapest form of new generation now being built,” wrote Greenpeace advisor Wasserman (Free Press, 4/10/07). He pointed to an “array of wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal and increased conservation and efficiency.”

    Wasserman has also written about another element ignored by most mainstream media (Free Press, 7/9/07): “The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them down ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error.” He stressed, again, that safe, clean energy is here and “we could replace everything with available technology that could easily supply all our needs while allowing a sustainable planet to survive and thrive.”

    The one green thing

    What are the causes of the media nuclear dysfunction? The obvious problem is media ownership. General Electric, for one, is both a leading nuclear plant manufacturer and a media mogul, owning NBC and other outlets. (For years, CBS was owned by Westinghouse; Westinghouse and GE are the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power.) There have been board and financial interlocks between the media and nuclear industries. There is the long-held pro-nuclear faith at media such as the New York Times. (See sidebar.)

    There is also the giant public relations operation-both corporate, led by the NEI, and government, involving the Department of Energy and its national nuclear laboratories. “You have the NEI and the nuclear industry propagandizing on nuclear power, and journalists taking down what the industry is saying and not looking at the veracity of their claims,” Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio told Extra!.

    And then there’s lots of money. FAIR recently exposed (Action Alert, 8/22/07) how National Public Radio, which broadcasts many pro-nuclear pieces, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from “nuclear operator Sempra Energy” and Constellation Energy, “which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction.”

    The only thing green about nuclear power is the nuclear establishment’s dollars.

    Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Books he has written about nuclear technology include Cover Up: What You ARE NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He has hosted many television programs on nuclear technology on EnviroVideo.com.

  • Wisconsin elected Officials Speak Out Against Building New Nuclear Weapons

    On Saturday, February 16th at a citizens’ hearing at the Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin, U.S. Senator Russell Feingold, U.S. Representative Tammy Baldwin, State Senator Frederick Kessler, and State Senator Mark Miller made statements opposing current U.S. nuclear weapons policy and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) proposed nuclear weapons complex transformation.

    At a citizen hearing co-sponsored by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, experts, representatives of state and federal government, members of the general public, and citizen groups addressed the Department of Energy’s (DOE) proposed $150 billion plan to revamp the industrial infrastructure responsible for building and maintaining U.S. nuclear weapons.

    Under the National Environmental Policy Act, DOE is required hold hearings around the country in the communities near nuclear weapons facilities. Madison was not one of those chosen communities, but the decision to build new nuclear weapons threatens all Americans. This hearing was a chance for Wisconsin to have a voice on the future of US nuclear weapons.

    A shorter, edited video of the hearing along with written testimony will soon be available on www.wagingpeace.org. If you would like to see the full version, go to www.wiseye.org/wisEye_programming/ARCHIVES-FEB08.html#evt_080216_cnf_nukes.

    For more information on this event, or for assistance in setting up a citizens’ hearing in your area, contact Nick Roth, Washington DC Office Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at (202) 543-4100 x.105 or nroth@napf.org.

  • Who’s Going to Give Them Up First?

    In January 2007, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal called “World Free of Nuclear Weapons” said: “Nuclear weapons today present tremendous dangers, but also an historic opportunity. U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage – to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands, and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world.”

    Bianca Jagger
    Photo: CND/Elliot Taylor

    Now who would have thought that I would be quoting Henry Kissinger, George P. Schultz, William J. Perry and Sam Nunn?

    But perhaps you should not be surprised. The nuclear issue is not a partisan political issue. It is reassuring to see some of the most conservative figures in both the UK and the USA supporting complete nuclear disarmament.

    Some of you may know that Ronald Reagan was strongly opposed to nuclear weapons. Reagan called for the abolition of “all nuclear weapons,” which he considered “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilisation.”

    We are at an historic moment in history in a number of respects. Many hard choices lay before us, with many serious consequences if we make the wrong decisions.

    The strategy of defending the manufacture and stockpiling of nuclear weapons, as an effective deterrent to others, is now recognised as a flawed argument. If they were once justified, as a means of American-Soviet deterrence, they are no longer. Nuclear weapons were considered essential to maintaining international security during the cold war, but that is no longer the case.

    Former shadow Defence Secretary Michael Ancram said: “The threat of using nuclear weapons is not only illogical but incredible… the need for a genuinely independent alternative and flexible non-nuclear deterrence is if anything greater.”

    Of course, the idea that the £76billion needed to finance refurbishment of the UK’s Trident submarines will provide us with an independent nuclear deterrent is nonsense. Unlike China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, the United States – and perhaps North Korea – the UK does not have and will not have an independent deterrent. We rely on the US for logistical support, and we import components from them, too.

    Independence comes at a price: France is spending four times what we are on their nuclear deterrent strategy. But if the adherents to this argument intend to be taken seriously, they could at least have presented us with a truly independent solution.

    Such a solution, in any case, is totally unacceptable. Quite aside from the monumental costs involved, Trident renewal will make it far more difficult to get arms reduction around the world. As Mohammed El-Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was quoted as saying, Britain “cannot modernise its Trident submarines while at the same time telling everyone else that nuclear weapons are not needed in the future… We need to treat nuclear weapons the way we treat slavery or genocide. There needs to be a taboo over possessing them.”

    Furthermore, the replacement of the Trident nuclear missile programme in the UK is in violation of international law. Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

    Kofi Annan has said of the UK’s policy that: “They should not imagine that this will be accepted as compatible with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
    Going further, The International Court of Justice, in their “Advisory Opinion on the Illegality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons on July 8, 1996, stated: “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.”

    The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was intended to guarantee the end of nuclear weapons, but as the January Wall Street Journal op-ed points out, despite the fact that every president since Nixon has renewed the U.S.’s obligations under the treaty, and that the UK government claims to remain committed to the Treaty, non-nuclear weapon states are – justifiably – growing increasingly suspicious of the intentions of the so-called nuclear powers. In addition, four nuclear powers – India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – either never ratified or have withdrawn from the Treaty. This is astonishing and unacceptable.

    In 2005 Peacerights, an NGO dedicated to peaceful conflict resolution, commissioned a report by legal experts Rabinder Singh QC and Professor Christine Chinkin, who concluded that a renewal of Trident would infringe on intransgressible requirements of customary international law, since nuclear weapons do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.

    In a second legal opinion, solicited in 2006, Philippe Sands QC and Helen Law found the renewal to be disproportionate, and therefore unlawful, under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

    But it is not only that our governments are violating international agreements that they themselves signed. They are also acting with arrogance and carelessness when it comes to handling the weapons they have already. Even the supposedly most advanced nations can by alarmingly lax when it comes to the security precautions in place for nuclear weapons.

    Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the unbelievable US Army security failure last August, in which six nuclear warheads were inadvertently removed from their bunkers and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana, “unprecedented”.  Owing to “a lack of attention to detail and lack of adherence to well-established Air Force guidelines, technical orders and procedures”, for thirty-six hours, no-one knew where the warheads were, or even that they were missing.

    Each of the warheads contained ten times the yield of that dropped on Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. No breach of nuclear procedures of this magnitude had ever occurred before. Surely it is only a matter of time before an error like this becomes a disaster. Commentators have blamed this failure on the US Army’s reduced nuclear focus in recent years. Why, I would argue, not go the whole way? Why not do away with nuclear weapons altogether?

    The tolerance for error when it comes to nuclear weapons is very low – in fact, it is zero. But zero tolerance cannot realistically be achieved, which is another reason why immediate and worldwide disarmament is such an important, and a pressing, priority. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger said, “Mistakes are made in every other human endeavour. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt?”

    David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, notes in an article this month that “even Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb, recognized, ‘Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof, even in a foolproof system.’”

    We have come to the point where something has to give. South Africa is to be heartily applauded for its total disarmament, which was officially declared in 1994, following an inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In order to affect real change globally, we now need one of the major powers to follow suit.
    The question has now become: “Who’s going to give them up first?”

    I would like to propose that Britain, as both the oldest parliamentary democracy in the world, and as one of the only countries with no independent nuclear deterrent in place, is the perfect candidate. I believe it is up to us to lead, and let others follow. It is up to us to take advantage of this perfect opportunity to pave the way.

    And Britain is uniquely positioned at this precise moment in time to act: the decision to renew Trident can still be repealed. In March 2007, a record 167 MPs from all sides of the House expressed their doubts that the case for Trident had been proven. They were unconvinced of the need for an early decision. Since March, the situation has not changed.

    Imagine the circumstances in which we might employ nuclear weapons. Let’s imagine the case of a rogue state that has threatened our major cities with a nuclear strike.

    Are we really prepared to engage in mutual obliteration? To kill millions because of the foolhardiness of the few? I wish every defender of nuclear weapons would read a little of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and ask themselves again whether such devastation and suffering can ever be justified. I do not believe it can.

    Last month I read an article in the Guardian reporting that a manifesto by five of the west’s most senior military officials and strategists, from the U.S., Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands, insists that a “first strike” nuclear option remains an “indispensable instrument”, since there is “simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world”. This is a horrifying development, but we cannot and we must not allow this to dishearten us.

    There is every prospect of a nuclear-free world. All that this manifesto shows is that not enough has been done to research the other options. Not enough has been done to examine the causes of increasing proliferation. We have the power to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. We have a responsibility to use that power to bring about global disarmament.

    Nuclear weapons are not containable. Where they exist, innocent lives are at risk. There is no such thing as a smart bomb. There will never be a “smart” nuclear weapon. And there will never be a smart supporter of nuclear weapons, either.

    Britain’s international obligations, as set out in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, are clear: we are legally committed to scrapping nuclear weapons. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our leaders were, for once, brave enough to make good on their promises?

    When they consider their responses to our pleas, politicians would do well to keep in mind the words of two men.

    The first is Dwight D. Eisenhower, who pledged America’s determination “to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”

    The second is a man who knows as much about nuclear weapons as anyone, Mikhail Gorbachev. He said that “that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.”

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has launched an appeal that I urge each of you to sign. It calls on the next President of the United States to:

    • De-alert all nuclear weapons;
    • Commit to No First Use;
    • Commit to no new nuclear weapons;
    • Ban nuclear testing forever;
    • Control nuclear material worldwide;
    • Uphold nuclear weapons conventions; and
    • Reallocate resources for peace.

    I would like to extend the reach of this appeal to Gordon Brown. I urge him to answer each of these points in the affirmative. I urge him to do it now.

    You can sign the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s appeal by visiting www.wagingpeace.org/appeal.

    Thank you very much.

    Speech at the CND Global Summit
    City Hall, London
    February 16, 2008

    Bianca Jagger is Chair of the World Future Council.

  • “Our Goal is Perfection”

    “Our Goal is Perfection”

    On August 30, 2007, six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded onto the wings of a B-52 aircraft and flown from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. It was a major error in the handling of nuclear weapons, leading to various investigations and the replacement of the commander of Minot Air Force Base. The new commander, Colonel Joel Westa, commented, “Our goal in this line of work is not to make errors. Our goal is perfection. It’s one of those missions where the tolerance is very low for error. In fact, it is zero.”

    Colonel Westa sounds like a well-meaning fellow, but perhaps someone should explain to him that humans are prone to errors, not only of judgment but of memory and inadvertence. For example, on the same day that Colonel Westa was professing that there is zero tolerance for error, February 12, 2008, the US Secretary of Defense, surely not purposefully, slipped on ice outside his home and broke his humerus, the bone connecting the shoulder to the elbow. Accidents occur.

    Even Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb, recognized, “Sooner or later a fool will prove greater than the proof even in a foolproof system.” With 26,000 nuclear weapons still in the world and 3,500 of these weapons still on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments, and with policies of launch on warning in effect in the US, Russia and other nuclear-armed states, there is unfortunately fertile ground for proving Teller right about the fool proving greater than the proof.

    Mikhail Gorbachev, who had his finger on the nuclear button for many years and who called in the mid-1980s for the abolition of nuclear weapons, offered sage advice when he stated “that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason.”

    Perfection is not possible, but it is possible to abolish nuclear weapons. Our choices are to play Russian Roulette with the human future, seeking an impossible standard of perfection for all possessors of nuclear weapons, or to recognize the wisdom in Gorbachev’s words and eliminate the overwhelming danger posed by these weapons by eliminating the weapons themselves.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.