Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Blog

  • Missile Counter-Attack Open Letter to US Secretary of State Condolezza Rice

    Dear Condi,

    I’m glad you’ve decided to get over your fit of pique and venture north to visit your closest neighbour. It’s a chance to learn a thing or two. Maybe more.

    I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results.

    But, gosh, we folks above the 49th parallel are somewhat cautious types who can’t quite see laying down billions of dollars in a three-dud poker game.

    As our erstwhile Prairie-born and bred (and therefore prudent) finance minister pointed out in presenting his recent budget, we’ve had eight years of balanced or surplus financial accounts. If we’re going to spend money, Mr. Goodale added, it will be on day-care and health programs, and even on more foreign aid and improved defence.

    Sure, that doesn’t match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a “liberation war” in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.

    Just chalk that up to a different sense of priorities about what a national government’s role should be when there isn’t a prevailing mood of manifest destiny.

    Coming to Ottawa might also expose you to a parliamentary system that has a thing called question period every day, where those in the executive are held accountable by an opposition for their actions, and where demands for public debate on important topics such as missile defence can be made openly.

    You might also notice that it’s a system in which the governing party’s caucus members are not afraid to tell their leader that their constituents don’t want to follow the ideological, perhaps teleological, fantasies of Canada’s continental co-inhabitant. And that this leader actually listens to such representations.

    Your boss did not avail himself of a similar opportunity to visit our House of Commons during his visit, fearing, it seems, that there might be some signs of dissent. He preferred to issue his diktat on missile defence in front of a highly controlled, pre-selected audience.

    Such control-freak antics may work in the virtual one- party state that now prevails in Washington. But in Canada we have a residual belief that politicians should be subject to a few checks and balances, an idea that your country once espoused before the days of empire.

    If you want to have us consider your proposals and positions, present them in a proper way, through serious discussion across the table in our cabinet room, as your previous president did when he visited Ottawa. And don’t embarrass our prime minister by lobbing a verbal missile at him while he sits on a public stage, with no chance to respond.

    Now, I understand that there may have been some miscalculations in Washington based on faulty advice from your resident governor of the “northern territories,” Ambassador Cellucci. But you should know by now that he hasn’t really won the hearts and minds of most Canadians through his attempts to browbeat and command our allegiance to U.S. policies.

    Sadly, Mr. Cellucci has been far too closeted with exclusive groups of ‘experts’ from Calgary think-tanks and neo-con lobbyists at cross-border conferences to remotely grasp a cross-section of Canadian attitudes (nor American ones, for that matter).

    I invite you to expand the narrow perspective that seems to inform your opinions of Canada by ranging far wider in your reach of contacts and discussions. You would find that what is rising in Canada is not so much anti- Americanism, as claimed by your and our right-wing commentators, but fundamental disagreements with certain policies of your government. You would see that rather than just reacting to events by drawing on old conventional wisdoms, many Canadians are trying to think our way through to some ideas that can be helpful in building a more secure world.

    These Canadians believe that security can be achieved through well-modulated efforts to protect the rights of people, not just nation-states.

    To encourage and advance international co-operation on managing the risk of climate change, they believe that we need agreements like Kyoto.

    To protect people against international crimes like genocide and ethnic cleansing, they support new institutions like the International Criminal Court — which, by the way, you might strongly consider using to hold accountable those committing atrocities today in Darfur, Sudan.

    And these Canadians believe that the United Nations should indeed be reformed — beginning with an agreement to get rid of the veto held by the major powers over humanitarian interventions to stop violence and predatory practices.

    On this score, you might want to explore the concept of the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ while you’re in Ottawa. It’s a Canadian idea born out of the recent experience of Kosovo and informed by the many horrific examples of inhumanity over the last half-century. Many Canadians feel it has a lot more relevance to providing real human security in the world than missile defence ever will.

    This is not just some quirky notion concocted in our long winter nights, by the way. It seems to have appeal for many in your own country, if not the editorialists at the Wall Street Journal or Rush Limbaugh. As I discovered recently while giving a series of lectures in southern California, there is keen interest in how the U.S. can offer real leadership in managing global challenges of disease, natural calamities and conflict, other than by military means.

    There is also a very strong awareness on both sides of the border of how vital Canada is to the U.S. as a partner in North America. We supply copious amounts of oil and natural gas to your country, our respective trade is the world’s largest in volume, and we are increasingly bound together by common concerns over depletion of resources, especially very scarce fresh water.

    Why not discuss these issues with Canadians who understand them, and seek out ways to better cooperate in areas where we agree — and agree to respect each other’s views when we disagree.

    Above all, ignore the Cassandras who deride the state of our relations because of one missile-defence decision. Accept that, as a friend on your border, we will offer a different, independent point of view. And that there are times when truth must speak to power.

    In friendship, Lloyd Axworthy

    Lloyd Axworthy is president of the University of Winnipeg and a former Canadian foreign minister.

    (c) 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.

  • 2005: A Year of Significant Anniversaries

    2005 is a year of important anniversaries of the Nuclear Age. It marks the 60th anniversary of the first test of an atomic weapon, an event that occurred at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Just weeks later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each destroyed with a single atomic bomb, announcing to the world the onset of the Nuclear Age. Hibakusha — the survivors of these bombings, who have worked throughout their lives for the abolition of nuclear weapons — will gather with others from throughout the world on August 6th and 9th to renew their fervent plea of “Never again!” on the 60th anniversary of these bombings.

    This year commemorates the 50 th anniversary of the death of the great scientist Albert Einstein, whose theories changed our understanding of the universe and the relationship of energy to matter. At the urging of his friend Leo Szilard, Einstein sent a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 urging the United States to explore the possibility of an atomic weapon in order to be prepared to deter such weapons in the hands of Nazi Germany. Einstein later referred to his letter to Roosevelt as the greatest mistake of his life. Both Einstein and Szilard were active until their deaths in trying to abolish these most terrible weapons that they felt responsible for bringing into the world.

    July 9, 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, the last public document to which Einstein gave his support. The document sounded a grave warning to humanity. “No doubt,” it stated, “in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced.” Einstein, along with Bertrand Russell and the nine other prominent scientists who joined them in signing the Manifesto, warned that nuclear war could put an end to humanity. Their solution was to abolish war, a solution they understood to be both incredibly difficult and absolutely necessary. The Manifesto stated: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” Fifty years later, we remain confronted by this overriding problem.

    The 35th anniversary of the entry into force of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will also be observed in 2005. It is the world’s only treaty that requires the nuclear weapons states to make good faith efforts to achieve complete nuclear disarmament. Five years ago, at the 2000 NPT Review Conference, the parties to the treaty, now numbering 188 countries, agreed by consensus to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. This was viewed throughout the world as a means to fulfill the treaty obligations of the nuclear weapons states to achieve nuclear disarmament. Among the most important of the 13 points is one requiring “[a]n unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals….”

    Commitments made in 2000, however, have been thrown into severe doubt by the failure of the nuclear weapons states, and particularly the United States, to fulfill their obligations. US backtracking on the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament is casting a long shadow on the prospects for success at the 2005 NPT Review Conference that will be held in May at United Nations headquarters.

    Humankind cannot indefinitely postpone making a choice. One choice is to do nothing. Another choice is to heed the warnings of Einstein and Russell and seek to fulfill the aspirations of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a world without nuclear weapons. The latter course will require creative and persistent public education and advocacy, particularly in the nuclear weapons states. This is the daily work of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, as you will see in this report. I encourage you to visit our www.wagingpeace.org website regularly and to become an active participant in our Turn the Tide Campaign as well as our many other activities for a more secure and nuclear weapons-free future.

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

  • Gorbachev and the US People-Uncelebrated Victories in the Struggle for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons

    Originally Published in Science for Democratic Action, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2005

    Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is justly famous for inaugurating demokratizatsiya and glasnost in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. His steadfast support for non-violence gave the people of Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union a chance for open discourse about government, trust, democracy, and freedom. President Gorbachev, in partnership with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, gave hope to people everywhere that the world may get rid of nuclear weapons.

    But this essay is about what Mikhail Gorbachev is less known for. His actions also created conditions for a special demokratizatsiya and glasnost on nuclear weapons related questions in the United States. In turn, this caused a closure of most of the large U.S. nuclear weapons facilities in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In addition to raising the hopes of people in his own country, Gorbachev’s work also lifted a fear from the hearts and minds of the people of the United States, and enabled them to look at their own nuclear weapons establishment with fresh eyes.

    Gorbachev’s reach

    It started with the trip that Gorbachev made to Britain in December 1984, before he became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.He was immediately recognized as a prospective leader of the Soviet Union. With his wife, Raisa, Mr. Gorbachev charmed Prime Minister Thatcher, known in British politics as the “Iron Lady.” She said that he was a man with whom she “could do business.”

    After Gorbachev became General Secretary, he talked about reducing nuclear dangers and eliminating the threat of nuclear war. He abandoned the language of confrontation and replaced it with cooperation. If Margaret Thatcher could do business with him, President Reagan could too.

    Gorbachev’s U.K. trip opened the door for the people of the United States to do business with their own government in a manner that no one anticipated. Instead of keeping their eyes fixed on the Soviet Union out of fear, more and more people began to look more closely at the nuclear contamination in their neighborhoods. Some courageous ones had done that before, as indeed, they had in the Soviet Union. But the nuclear weapons establishment had generally been able to silence them, get lawsuits thrown out of court, and cover its own actions in rhetoric of national security and propaganda about the Soviet threat.

    Starting at about the time of Gorbachev’s visit to Britain and for the rest of the 1980s, the numbers of people in the United States with questions about water and air pollution, radioactive waste, and nuclear safety risks due to aging nuclear weapons plants grew rapidly. In times past, public concerns would have quickly died out. But this time, local and national media, law enforcement officials, elected legislators, congressional committees, and even the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid more attention to environmental matters relating to nuclear weapons production than they ever had.

    Certainly, it was unthinkable during the Cold War that the FBI might become involved in raiding a nuclear weapons plant to look for evidence of environmental crimes.2 It may have been denounced as a communist plot within the U.S. government. For example, in 1954, when the Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, became heavily contaminated with fallout for the U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini, the then-Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission falsely said that it was a Red spy boat inside the prohibited test area.3

    But this time, because of Gorbachev’s refusal to use violence to suppress the hopes of the people in Eastern Europe, the zerozero Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty for intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and the warm relationship between Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan, the result was dramatically different. By the time the Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov said in 1987, upon the signing of the INF treaty, “I do think the winter of mistrust is over,” much more than the fear of the Soviet Union had lifted. The people were routinely discovering that their own government had—under cover of secrecy, with the aid of bad science, and in the frigid public fright of the Cold War—done them and their children a great deal of harm.

    An Ohio story

    Consider a nuclear weapons factory in southwestern Ohio, about 17 miles west of Cincinnati. It produced half a million tons of uranium metal mainly for use in U.S. plutonium reactors at Hanford and South Carolina. In December 1984 Lisa Crawford, who lives near the plant, heard that some wells in the area were contaminated with uranium. Until then, she and most others like her did not even know they were living near a nuclear weapons plant. It was called the Feed Materials Production Center and had a water tower painted in a red and white checkerboard pattern that resembled the logo of Purina, the famous pet food company. With cows grazing near it, many people thought it was a pet food plant. Others thought it produced paint because it was run by a subsidiary of National Lead Industries, which was a wellknown paint-maker at the time. But few knew it was a nuclear weapons plant. It is commonly known as the Fernald plant.

    In January 1985 there was uproar in this quiet part of Ohio, known for its conservative, anti-communist views. People wanted to know whose wells were contaminated. Tom Luken, the area’s representative in the U.S. Congress at the time, held a meeting there. Hundreds came. Lisa found out that her well was one of polluted ones. She had a young son. She made food with water from the well, and filled her backyard pool with it. She was very upset.

    As usual, the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment said the water was quite safe and there was no need to worry. But, unlike the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, when most people trusted such assurances, Lisa and her neighbors did not. She was afraid her child might get cancer. (Thankfully, he is well). She did three things. First, she and her husband decided they were not going to have more children, a difficult and tragic way to make such a decision. Second, she got bottled water. Third, at the end of January 1985 she filed a tort lawsuit against the corporation that ran the Fernald plant for the government on behalf of her family and 14,000 other people who lived in the area. They claimed that the company, National Lead of Ohio, had been negligent and endangered their health and damaged their property. The U.S. government defended the lawsuit and paid all the expenses.

    There had been previous lawsuits regarding nuclear weapons issues. In fact, General Groves, who headed the Manhattan Project during World War II, was afraid of them as early as April 1945.4 For example, in the 1950s, shepherds had filed a lawsuit against the government claiming that thousands of sheep had died because of fallout. But representatives of the Atomic Energy Commission falsely told the court that it was not fallout. The case was dismissed. The judge found out in 1980 and wrote that the government had been “deceptive” and “deceitful” in its presentation of the evidence in the case.5 He reversed his decision and made one in favor of the shepherd. But the U.S. government appealed and prevailed.

    Lisa’s lawsuit succeeded where others had failed. Between 1985 and 1989 there was an enormous amount of local and national publicity about the Fernald plant. Lisa became a well-known figure in Ohio and other parts of the country. As part of the lawsuit, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research was retained to do an expert assessment of radioactivity releases from the plant. In 1989, Bernd Franke and I published the first independent assessment of radioactivity releases from a nuclear weapons plant. We concluded that the nuclear weapons establishment had done poor science, entered fraudulent data into official records, been negligent in operating the plant, and violated its own rules regarding radiation safety. We also concluded that the official estimates of uranium releases from the plant were much higher than what the government and its contractors had told the public. We estimated that releases of uranium had probably been more than 300,000 kilograms since the 1950s, compared to the government’s estimates in 1987 of 135,000 kilograms, revised in 1989 to 179,000 kilograms.6

    In April 2004 I asked Lisa whether Gorbachev’s becoming General Secretary and then President of the Soviet Union played a role in her thinking. She said it was not a direct influence. But she said it affected how she viewed the U.S. government’s criticism of the Soviet government. She specifically mentioned the Chernobyl accident. She said that she thought then that “the United States is horrified that the Soviets did not tell us for three days but they [the U.S. government] did not tell us [about Fernald] for thirty years.” It no longer worked for the U.S. government to point a finger at problems over there in the Soviet Union. It did not divert Lisa’s attention from the problem she was focused on—finding out about the pollution in her own neighborhood.7

    The government settled the lawsuit in June 1989 for $78 million. The money is mainly being used for providing medical monitoring to people. But there was another happy result. In July 1989, production at the Fernald plant was stopped forever. The combination of the Cold War winding down and the lawsuit and the scandals around radioactive pollution of air and water worked together to accomplish important progress in disarmament. The Fernald plant has been dismantled and the factory buildings have been torn down.

    Tank explosion risks

    June 1989 was an historic month in other ways as well. In that month the Soviet government admitted that a high-level waste tank had exploded in 1957 at Chelyabinsk-65 by filing a report about the accident with the International Atomic Energy Agency. I believe this was in response to a question about the accident that Dr. Bernard Lown had raised in a meeting in April 1989 with then-Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Schevernadze. That, too, had big implications for people working the United States. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had known about the accident since 1959. But, unlike so many other things, it took no propaganda advantage of it. Instead, it kept the matter secret, until its papers were revealed as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request by the nongovernmental organization Public Citizen in 1977. (A dissident Soviet scientist, Zhores Medvedev, had written about the accident in the West in 1976.)8

    I suspect that the Atomic Energy Commission did not want to admit that there was also a risk of tank explosion in the United States due to hydrogen build up because the official U.S. position continued to be that things were safe even after the CIA documents became public. But when the Soviet Union officially admitted in 1989 that there had been an explosion, one result was deeper NGO and Congressional investigations into the problems in the United States. The Department of Energy established its own panel on the high-level waste tanks at the Hanford site and steps were taken to reduce explosions risks. Concern about these risks helped ensure permanent closure of the last operating plutonium separation plant at Hanford in the early 1990s.

    FBI raid on Rocky Flats

    Perhaps the most dramatic event of June 1989 in this regard was the FBI raid on the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, a large scale factory for producing plutonium pits for nuclear weapons. Such a raid would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. But by 1989, there was daily publicity about safety issues in the nuclear weapons complex. There had been a Congressional investigation of human radiation experiments done by the U.S. government.More Congressional hearings were focused on health and safety. Before the mid-1980s, such hearings were mainly routine exercises to give more money for nuclear weapons establishment. The scandals multiplied.

    In this atmosphere, federal officials in the Department of Justice based in Colorado heard that illegal burning of plutonium-containing waste may be taking place at Rocky Flats. FBI headquarters in Washington took notice and ordered the raid. The Department of Justice convened a grand jury to investigate whether the corporation that ran the plant had committed environmental crimes. Production at the Rocky Flats plant was stopped.Deputy Energy Secretary W. Henson Moore went to Denver and admitted that the plant had been operated as if the nuclear establishment was above the law.

    In the late 1950s, the Rocky Flats Plant was producing about 10 plutonium pits every day. When production was stopped in 1989, the U.S. government fully intended to re-open it after fixing the safety and environmental problems. But Rocky Flats never re-opened. It will never again produce nuclear weapons. It has been dismantled, though the plutonium will remain for generations in the form of residual contamination.

    By 1989, the public feeling had grown strong that since the United States was arriving at agreements to reduce nuclear weapons, why should the people’s health be put at risk to operate unsafe nuclear weapons plants? The historic events that were occurring in Eastern Europe that are so well celebrated in history books found an echo in Colorado and elsewhere. The global importance of these local events is becoming clearer today than it was then.

    Uncelebrated victories

    The list of local events and concerns about health and environment that added up to an immense accomplishment for the elimination of nuclear weapons is long. All U.S. plutonium and tritium production reactors were closed in the same period. The large plutonium separation plant at Hanford in Washington State was shut. The plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was made at Hanford. Many smaller facilities were also closed. When the United States stepped down so many large nuclear weapons plants in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it fully intended to resume production. Sometimes plants were shut from one day to the next, with material still in the production lines.

    The Soviet moratorium on nuclear testing that President Gorbachev initiated reverberated in the United States. The nuclear weapons establishment argued against making the moratorium into a U.S. law, but failed. (They did get the so-called stockpile stewardship program for nuclear weapons and a great deal of money for it as a consolation prize, however.) The moratorium was enacted into law and played a role in the achievement of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

    Of course, there have been severe reverses since the mid-1990s on many fronts including nuclear weapons. The U.S. Senate rejected ratification of the CTBT. The U.S. nuclear weapons establishment has created a new nuclear weapons doctrine that actually names target states, including Russia. It wants to build usable nuclear weapons called “robust nuclear earth penetrators” and mini-nukes.9 Money for design of nuclear weapons as well as maintaining a huge U.S. arsenal is flowing at levels higher than the average of the Cold War.

    But amidst this gloom there are accomplishments from the 1980s and 1990s that endure. Specifically, the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment does not have the capacity to mass manufacture nuclear bombs because Rocky Flats was the only large-scale plutonium pit manufacturing facility in the United States. Its production buildings have been torn down. The Department of Energy has proposed building a new large-scale factory for manufacturing plutonium pits, but it will take a decade or more to build. That gives peace and environmental advocates some time to organize a struggle to prevent it from being built.

    Unlike during the Cold War, it is now much more difficult for the nuclear weapons establishment to get the money for such a factory. Many Congresspersons recognize it is a dangerous proliferation provocation. Local concerns are also crucial. While some want the money and jobs that a new factory would bring, many more are opposed than would have been imaginable during the Cold War, even though we are in a period that resembles it in many ways. But this time the government cannot pretend that such a plant will pose no risks. It is required to publish risk estimates, which indicate that, over the life of the plant with a capacity of 450 plutonium pits per year, nine workers would die from their work.10 The nuclear weapons establishment has asked people not to worry because it is only a statistical estimate. But the public is skeptical. The idea that a little plutonium won’t hurt you finds few takers.

    The gains on nuclear testing are also likely to endure. The nuclear weapons establishment would like to resume testing. But this would be very difficult. During the late 1980s and the 1990s, a huge scandal emerged regarding the poisoning of much of the U.S. milk supply with iodine-131. At first, in the 1980s, it was about iodine- 131 emissions from the plutonium separations plants at Hanford. But the issue grew from there. In 1997, the National Cancer Institute released a study showing that iodine-131 releases from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing at Nevada had been 130 million curies, more than 15 times greater than the releases from the Chernobyl accident. The high fallout areas were spread out all over the country from Idaho and Montana to Kansas and Iowa to New York and Vermont. In the course of pursuing the Cold War, the nuclear weapons establishment poisoned much of the U.S. milk supply and did nothing to protect it. At the same time, declassified documents revealed that the government had provided secret data to Kodak and other photographic film companies so that they could take measures to protect film from becoming fogged as a result of fallout.

    Today, as the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment prepares to test again, the National Academy of Sciences is looking into whether people should be compensated due to the milk contamination and if so how many. A conservative senator, Bob Bennett, Republican from Utah, is playing a role in slowing down the rush for testing.According to his website he has proposed legislation that“will prevent the resumption of nuclear testing without approval by the Congress, extensive environmental and safety analysis, and open public involvement.”11 If this law is passed, it will be difficult or impossible for the United States to resume testing unless some other country does it first.

    Enduring accomplishments

    In October 1989, President Gorbachev told the world,“the Soviet Union has no moral or political right to interfere in the affairs of its East European neighbors. They have the right to decide their own fate.” This opened up the arena for the people of the United States to decide the fate of U.S. nuclear weapons plants. The tradition of vigorous citizen participation in the United States re-awakened with Gorbachev’s determination not to repeat the ghastly violence of the past. The combination has produced a result in reducing the nuclear weapons menace that has not been celebrated, but whose fruits we continue to enjoy.

    The world is undeniably going through a difficult time; war and violence are a constant theme. But the accomplishments of mothers and fathers concerned about their children and water and milk that resulted in a shut down of production at so many nuclear weapons plants and a moratorium on nuclear testing endure. They provide us with breathing room to secure the gains of those times for posterity and to continue to push for the complete elimination of all nuclear arsenals and weapons plants.

    1. Some of the research for this article was done as part of a book grant to Arjun Makhijani made by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The working title is Science of Death, Science of Life: An Enquiry into the Contrasts between Weapons Science and Health and Environmental Science in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex.
    2. See Wes McKinley and Caron Balkany, Esq., The Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justice Department Covered Up Government Nuclear Crimes and How We Caught Them Red Handed. New York: Apex Press, 2004.
    3. Leo Strauss, as cited in Barton C. Hacker, Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing 1947–74. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994. pp. 150 –151.
    4. Barton C. Hacker, The Dragon’s Tail: Radiation Safety in the Manhattan Project 1942–1946. Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1987, p. 85.
    5. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Radioactive Heaven and Earth: The health and environmental effects of nuclear weapons testing in, on, and above the earth. New York: Apex Press, 1991, Chapter 4.
    6. For more information on Fernald releases, see Science for Democratic Action vol. 5 no. 3 (October 1996). For information about flawed nuclear worker dose records, see Science for Democratic Action vol. 6 no. 2 (November 1997).
    7. Arjun Makhijani, Science of Death, Science of Life manuscript, Lisa Crawford interview.
    8. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Plutonium: Deadly Gold of the Nuclear Age. Cambridge, MA: IPPNW Press, 1992.
    9. See “The ‘Usable’ Nuke Strikes Back,” in Science for Democratic Action vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
    10. See “Back to the Bad Old Days,” in Science for Democratic Action vol. 11, no. 4 (September 2003).
    11. Press release of U.S. Senator Bob Bennett, “Bennett Bill Halts Nuclear Testing Without Congressional Approval, Public Input,” September 7, 2004, online at http://bennett.senate.gov/press/record. cfm?id=225115.

  • Doomed to Fail

    North Korea ‘s dramatic public revelation that it possesses nuclear weapons represents a stark challenge for the Bush administration.

    The North Korean claim, if true, underscores the failure of President Bush’s nonproliferation policies that since the beginning of his first term had been subordinated to a grander vision of regime change. That policy was intended to transform strategically vital regions of the world into Western-style democracies supportive of the United States and the Bush administration’s vision of American global dominance.

    The intermingling of nonproliferation and regime change policies was doomed to fail. One requires skillful multilateral diplomacy based on the principles of uniform application of international law, the other bold application of a unilateral doctrine of aggressive liberation rhetoric backed by the real threat of military power. When blended, as the Bush administration did, unilateralism trumps multilateralism every time. North Korea’s announced accession to the nuclear club represents the inevitable result.

    The end of America’s meaningful role as a promoter of global nonproliferation can be traced to decisions made in the 1990s regarding regime change in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The United Nations had embarked on a bold effort to roll back the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through disarmament and, despite some initial difficulties, scored a dramatic success.

    It is now clear that Iraq, under pressure from U.N. weapons inspectors, was disarmed of its WMD by 1991 and had dismantled and destroyed the last vestiges of its weapons programs by 1996. But the United States had, since 1991, committed to a policy of regime change in Iraq, which required economic sanctions-based containment linked to a continued finding of Iraqi noncompliance with its disarmament obligation.

    Rather than embracing weapons inspections, three successive U.S. administrations denigrated and subverted the work of the inspectors in order to keep the primary policy objective of regime change in Iraq on track. The nail in the coffin of U.S. nonproliferation efforts came when the Bush administration willfully misstated the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs in order to justify its invasion of Iraq.

    North Korea and Iran concluded from events leading to the U.S. invasion of Iraq that the Bush administration did not regard nonproliferation as an endgame but a tool designed to weaken a target state to the point that it could succumb to the grander U.S. policy objective of regime change.

    Mr. Bush had stated that the world would be a better place with the regimes in Pyongyang and Tehran removed. Therefore, all diplomatic efforts – whether the six-party framework with North Korea or the European Union-brokered negotiations with Iran – were regarded as disingenuous fronts intended not to facilitate nonproliferation and stability but rather instability and regime change.

    With Iraq a model of the reality of America’s unilateral militaristic approach toward bringing about regime change, North Korea and Iran have embarked on the only path available to either of them – acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent intended to forestall what they perceive as irresponsible U.S. aggression.

    The Bush administration has come face to face with the reality of the failure of its policies. Rather than curtailing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the administration’s crusade against global tyranny has served as an accelerant in placing the most dangerous weapons known to man in the hands of xenophobic regimes that have been backed into a corner.

    But the situation in North Korea and Iran could still be resolved in a way that promotes global nonproliferation objectives.

    Real and meaningful economic incentives, backed by U.S. and allied willingness to permit North Korea and Iran to possess civilian nuclear programs operated under stringent international monitoring, could succeed in rolling back North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons and provide incentive for Iran to cease and desist in its own program.

    But the key to any such salvation lies with the willingness of the Bush administration to unlink nonproliferation efforts from regime change. This is highly unlikely, given the reality of the ideological composition of those at the senior decision-making levels of the Bush national security team and the huge political investment Mr. Bush has made in support of his global crusade against tyranny.

    “Freedom is on the march,” Mr. Bush has said. Unfortunately for the United States, North Korea and Iran don’t see it that way. And if America keeps marching, it could very well be in the direction of a nuclear apocalypse.

    Scott Ritter, a former intelligence officer and U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, is author of the forthcoming Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America’s Intelligence Conspiracy.

    © 2005 Baltimore Sun

  • US Won’t Rule Out Waging War in Space, General Says

    A top U.S. space commander says the United States can’t rule out attacking the satellites and other spacecraft of enemy nations in the future.

    But Lt.-Gen. Daniel Leaf, vice-commander of the American air force space command, says at this point the U.S. is focused on protecting its own space capabilities, although it has to keep an eye on the potential that weapons will be developed by other nations to target U.S. satellites and spacecraft. And even if it does decide to directly counter such moves, that doesn’t mean it will resort to putting weapons into orbit, according to the officer.

    The issue of turning space into a battleground has become a hot-button topic in the U.S. and Canada. Some defence analysts have voiced concern the Pentagon is preparing to fight a war in orbit and worry that Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government is being drawn into those plans. Analysts also cite a report issued last August by the U.S. air force, which, they note, acknowledged that satellites of enemy or neutral countries could be destroyed if necessary.

    “Our active plans right now are not along those lines,” Lt.-Gen. Leaf said in an interview with the Citizen. “They’re along the lines of denying access to space capabilities, protecting our own access, and having space situational awareness to know what’s going on.”

    “We don’t have the luxury of dismissing the fact that it may come to that point some day,” he added.

    “It is not in our interest or in our policy to make that day come sooner. But our thinking has to consider an adversary might do it.”

    Lt.-Gen. Leaf said countering efforts by other nations to strike at American space systems does not automatically mean the U.S. would respond by building space weapons. He cited an example of Iraqi forces trying to jam U.S. military navigation satellites, noting the response was to use aircraft to bomb the Iraqi jamming sites.

    But Washington-based defence analyst Theresa Hitchens said last year’s report lays out for air force commanders the procedures they would follow for launching attacks in space. It also signals the air force’s acceptance of space as a battle zone, said Ms. Hitchens, vice-president of the Center for Defense Information.

    She noted the study outlines the option of a pre-emptive attack on the satellites of other countries, including those operated by neutral nations that may be used by the Americans’ adversaries. “That doctrine does not rule out the use of destructive measures,” said Ms. Hitchens.

    She noted the Pentagon has become increasingly uneasy about the response from U.S. lawmakers concerned about a potential push to make space a battlefield. As a result, the U.S. military has increased its public relations efforts to downplay future space plans and to cast them as appearing to be defensive in nature, she added.

    “The air force talks about pre-emptive action against a satellite so isn’t that by definition an offensive technique?” asked Ms. Hitchens. “I don’t see how that is defensive.”

    Lt.-Gen. Leaf acknowledged the air force’s report discusses the potential to stop enemy nations from using satellites being operated by another nation, but said the answer to that is not in destroying those spacecraft.

    “When you ask how do we deny an enemy access to space capabilities that might come from a third country or a satellite that is used by others, the answer is clearly not through brute force,” he explained. “It is going to have to be a precise, refined, sophisticated approach to denying those capabilities. And those are the kind of tough issues we are grappling with.”

    Canada has several military space programs on the go, all designed to gather information for the Canadian Forces, but also to feed that data to the U.S. Included among those are Projects Sapphire and Polar Star as well as the ultra-secret program dubbed Polar Ice.

    Lt.-Gen. Leaf noted he can’t speak for Canada on those programs but responded: “Can they contribute to what our nations do as partners? Yes.”

    © The Ottawa Citizen 2005

  • Nuclear Folly

    According to recent news reports and as hinted in the president’s State of the Union Address, the neocons who dominate the Bush administration are gearing up for another pre-emptive military attack, this time upon Iran. The ostensible reason for such an attack is that the Iranian government is developing nuclear weapons.

    In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which regularly inspects Iran’s nuclear operations, has not found any signs of nuclear weapons. Although the IAEA has reported that Iran has produced enriched uranium–which can be used for either civilian or military purposes–such production has been halted thanks to a November 2004 Iranian agreement with France, Germany, and Britain. Thus, although it is possible that Iran might produce nuclear weapons some time in the future, this is hardly a certainty. Nor is it clear that the Iranian government has ever planned to produce them.

    Ironically, in the midst of this delicate situation, the Bush administration is busy dismantling the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This treaty, signed in 1968 by officials of the United States and of almost all other countries, obligates non-nuclear nations to forgo development of nuclear weapons and nuclear nations to take steps toward nuclear disarmament. The Bush administration reveres the first obligation and wants to scrap the second.

    In late December 2004, news accounts quoted an administration official as saying that the final agreement at the NPT review conference in 2000–which commits the declared nuclear weapons states to an “unequivocal undertaking” to abolish nuclear weapons–is a “simply historical document,” which does not reflect the drastic changes in the world since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Thus, he said, the Bush administration “no longer supports” all of the thirteen steps toward disarmament outlined in the 2000 agreement and does not view it as “being a road map or binding guideline or anything like that.”

    For those who have followed the Bush administration’s nuclear policy, this position should come as no great surprise. The administration has not only abandoned efforts toward negotiating nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements with other nations, but has withdrawn the United States from the ABM treaty (signed by President Nixon) and refused to support ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (signed by President Clinton).

    It has also championed a program of building new U.S. nuclear weapons, including so-called “bunker busters” and “mini-nukes,” and of facilitating the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing. Only an unexpected revolt in Congress–led by Representatives David Hobson and Pete Viclosky, the Republican chair and ranking Democrat of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee–blocked funding for the Bush administration’s proposed new nuclear weapons in 2004. Political analysts expect the administration to make another effort to secure the funding this year.

    For the Bush administration and its fans, this evasion of U.S. obligations under the NPT makes perfect sense. The United States, they believe, is a supremely virtuous nation, and nations with whom it has bad relations–such as Iran–are “evil.” In line with this belief, the U.S. government has the right to build and use nuclear weapons, while nations it places on its “enemies” list do not.

    As might be expected, this assumption does not play nearly as well among government officials in Iran, who seem unlikely to fulfill their part of the NPT agreement if U.S. officials flagrantly renege on theirs. At the very least, the Bush administration is offering them a convenient justification for a policy of building Iranian nuclear weapons.

    Other nations have drawn this same conclusion. In the fall of 2004, Helen Clark, the prime minister of New Zealand, warned: “First and foremost we need to keep before us the essential bargain that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty represents. While we will willingly contribute to non-proliferation and counter-proliferation initiatives, those initiatives should be promoted alongside initiatives to secure binding commitments from those who have nuclear weapons which move us further towards the longer-term goal of nuclear disarmament.”

    Much the same point was made in early January 2005 by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the IAEA. Calling upon all countries to commit themselves to forgo building facilities for uranium enrichment and nuclear reprocessing for the next five years, ElBaradei added: “We should not forget the commitment by the weapons states to move toward nuclear disarmament.”

    In fact, ElBaradei’s evenhanded approach to nuclear issues has angered the Bush administration, which is now working to deny him reappointment as IAEA director.

    The responsibility of all nations under the NPT will undoubtedly receive a good deal of discussion at the NPT review conference that will convene at the United Nations this May. Certainly it will be interesting to see how the Bush administration explains the inconsistencies in its nuclear policy.

    Unfortunately, by then we may well have another bloody military confrontation on our hands. Like the war in Iraq, it will be sold to us on the basis of the potential threat from a nation possessing weapons of mass destruction. And, also like the war in Iraq, it will be unnecessary–brought on by the arrogance and foolishness of the Bush administration.

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition (Stanford University Press).

    Originally published by the History News Network.

  • Us Redesigning Atomic Weapons

    Worried that the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal is increasingly fragile, American scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives, federal officials and private experts say.

    The officials say the program could help shrink the arsenal and the high cost of its maintenance. But critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race.

    So far, the quiet effort involves only $9 million for warhead designers at the nation’s three nuclear weapon laboratories, Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia. Federal bomb experts at these heavily guarded facilities are now scrutinizing secret arms data gathered over a half century for clues about how to achieve the new reliability goals.

    The relatively small initial program, involving fewer than 100 people, is expected to grow and produce finished designs in the next 5 to 10 years, culminating, if approval is sought and won, in prototype warheads. Most important, officials say, the effort marks a fundamental shift in design philosophy.

    For decades, the bomb makers sought to use the latest technologies and most innovative methods. The resulting warheads were lightweight, very powerful and in some cases so small that a dozen could fit atop a slender missile. The American style was distinctive. Most other nuclear powers, years behind the atomic curve and often lacking top skills and materials, settled for less. Their nuclear arms tended to be ponderous if dependable, more like Chevys than racecars.

    Now, American designers are studying how to reverse course and make arms that are more robust, in some ways emulating their rivals in an effort to avoid the uncertainties and deteriorations of nuclear old age. Federal experts worry that critical parts of the arsenal, if ever needed, may fail.

    Originally, the roughly 10,000 warheads in the American arsenal had an expected lifetime of about 15 years, officials say. The average age is now about 20 years, and some are much older. Experts say a costly federal program to assess and maintain their health cannot ultimately confirm their reliability because a global test ban forbids underground test detonations.

    In late November, Congress approved a small, largely unnoticed budget item that started the new design effort, known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. Federal officials say the designs could eventually help recast the nuclear arsenal with warheads that are more rugged and have much longer lifetimes.

    “It’s important,” said John R. Harvey, director of policy planning at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the arsenal. In an interview, he said the goal of the new program was to create arms that are not only “inherently reliable” but also easier to make and certify as potent.

    “Our labs have been thinking about this problem off and on for 20 years,” Dr. Harvey said. “The goal is to see if we can make smarter, cheaper and more easily manufactured designs that we can readily certify as safe and reliable for the indefinite future – and do so without nuclear testing.”

    Representative David L. Hobson, an Ohio Republican and chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, praised the program in a speech on Thursday and said it could lead to an opportunity for drastic cuts in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.

    “A more robust replacement warhead, from a reliability standpoint,” Mr. Hobson said, “will provide a hedge that is currently provided by retaining thousands of unnecessary warheads.”

    But arms control advocates said the program was probably unneeded and dangerous. They said that it could start a new arms race if it revived underground testing and that its invigoration of the nuclear complex might aid the design of warheads with new military capabilities, possibly making them more tempting to use in a war.

    “The existing stockpile is safe and reliable by all standards,” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said in an interview. “So to design a new warhead that is even more robust is a redundant activity that could be a pretext for designing a weapon that has a new military mission.”

    The reliability issue goes back to the earliest days of the nuclear era. At first, the bombs were huge and trustworthy. The first one, dropped in 1945, weighed five tons. The first deliverable hydrogen bomb, which made its debut in 1954, weighed four times as much and had hundreds of times the destructive power. It measured nearly 25 feet long from nose to tailfins.

    Over the decades, American designers worked hard to trim the dimensions.

    Small size was prized for many reasons. It meant that warheads could fit into cramped, narrow missile nose cones, which streaked to earth faster than blunter shapes and were less buffeted by winds during the fiery plunge, making them more accurate. It also meant that ships, bombers and submarines could carry more nuclear arms.

    By the 1970’s, warheads for missiles weighed a few hundred pounds and packed the power of dozens of Hiroshima-sized bombs. The arms continued to shrink and grow more powerful. The last one for the nation’s arsenal was built around 1990.

    Designers had few doubts about reliability because they frequently exploded arms in Nevada at an underground test site. But in 1992, after the cold war, the United States joined a global moratorium on nuclear tests, ending such reassurances.

    In response, the federal government switched from developing nuclear arms to maintaining them. It had its designers work on computer simulations and other advanced techniques to check potency and understand flaws that might arise.

    The cost of the nuclear program began at $4 billion a year. It is now more than $6 billion and includes a growing number of efforts to refurbish and extend the life of aging warheads.

    By the late 1990’s, top officials and experts began to openly question whether such maintenance could continue to stave off deterioration and ensure the arsenal’s reliability. As a solution, some called for a new generation of sturdier designs.

    The new program involves fewer than 100 full- and part-time designers and other experts and support staff, said Dr. Harvey, of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

    “There’s not a lot of hardware,” he added. “It’s mostly concept and feasibility studies that don’t require much fieldwork.”

    Dr. Harvey emphasized that the effort centered on research and not arms production. But he said the culminating stages of the program would include “the full-scale engineering development” of new prototype warheads. Both Congress and a future administration would have to approve the costly, advanced work, and an official said no decision had been made to seek such approval.

    The current goal of the program, Dr. Harvey said, is to “relax some of the design constraints imposed on the cold war systems.” He added that a possible area of investigation was using more uranium than plutonium, a finicky metal that is chemically reactive.

    He said the new designs would also stress easier manufacturing techniques and avoid hazardous and hard-to-find materials.

    “Our goal is to carry out this program without the need for nuclear testing,” Dr. Harvey said. “But there’s no guarantees in this business, and I can’t prove to you that I can do that right now.” Another official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the topic is politically delicate, said that such testing would come only as a last resort and that the Bush administration’s policy was to maintain the moratorium.

    The program, Dr. Harvey said, should produce a wide variety of designs. The Defense Department, which is participating in the effort, will help decide which weapons will be replaced, he said.

    “What we’re looking at now is a long-term vision,” Dr. Harvey said. “We’re tying to flesh this out and understand the path we need to be on, and to work with Congress to get a consensus.”

    Some critics say checking the reliability of the new designs is likely to require underground testing, violating the ban and inviting other nations to do the same, thereby endangering American security.

    Dr. P. Leonardo Mascheroni, a former Los Alamos scientist who is critical of the new program, said that it would require not only testing but also changes in delivery systems costing “trillions of dollars” because of its large, heavy warheads. Federal officials deny both assertions, saying the goal is to have new designs fit existing bombers and missiles.

    Dr. Mascheroni has proposed that federal designers make lighter, robust warheads and confirm their reliability with an innovative system of tiny nuclear blasts. That would still require a revision of the test ban treaty, he said in an interview, but it would save a great deal of money and avoid the political firestorm that would probably accompany any effort to resume full-scale testing.

    Robert S. Norris, a senior nuclear expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington that advocates arms control and monitors nuclear trends, said too little was known publicly about the initiative to adequately weigh its risks and benefits, and that for now it raised more questions than it answered.

    “These are big decisions,” Mr. Norris said. “They could backfire and come back to haunt us.”

    Originally published by the New York Times

  • Seven Steps to Raise World Security

    Four months from now, in New York, the world will have a rare opportunity to make significant improvements in international security. The question is whether we will be smart enough to use it.

    In recent years, three phenomena have radically altered the security landscape. They are the emergence of a nuclear black market, the determined efforts by more countries to acquire technology to produce the fissile material useable in nuclear weapons and the clear desire of terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

    We have been trying to solve these new problems with existing tools. But for every step forward, we have exposed vulnerabilities in the system. The system itself – the regime that implements the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT) – needs reinforcement. Some of the necessary remedies can be taken in May, but only if governments are ready to act.

    The opportunity in New York will come in the form of a conference. If that sounds like yet more bureaucracy – addressing nightmarish nuclear security scenarios with more meetings – I sympathise. But this is no ordinary conference. Every five years, the NPT Review Conference brings world leaders together to focus on combating the threat of nuclear weapons. All but four countries will participate as treaty members. Given the global nature of the threats, these four – India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea – should also be encouraged to contribute their insights and concerns.

    With seven straightforward steps, and without amending the treaty, this conference could reach a milestone in strengthening world security. The first step: put a five-year hold on additional facilities for uranium enrichment and plutonium separation. There is no compelling reason to build more of these facilities; the nuclear industry has more than enough capacity to fuel its power plants and research centres. To make this holding period acceptable for everyone, commit the countries that already have the facilities to guarantee an economic supply of nuclear fuel for bona fide uses. Then use the hiatus to develop better long-term options for managing the technologies (for example, in regional centres under multinational control). To advance these ideas, I have engaged a group of international nuclear experts, and their proposals will be put forward at the conference.

    Second, speed up existing efforts, led by the US global threat reduction initiative and others, to modify the research reactors worldwide operating with highly enriched uranium – particularly those with metal fuel that could be readily employed as bomb material. Convert these reactors to use low-enriched uranium, and accelerate research on how to make highly enriched uranium unnecessary for all peaceful nuclear applications.

    Third, raise the bar for inspection standards by establishing the “additional protocol” as the norm for verifying compliance with the NPT. Without the expanded authority of this protocol, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s rights of inspection are limited. It has proven its value recently in Iran and Libya and should be brought into force for all countries.

    Fourth, call on the United Nations Security Council to act swiftly and decisively in the case of any country that withdraws from the NPT, in terms of the threat the withdrawal poses to international peace and security.

    Fifth, urge states to act on the Security Council’s recent resolution 1540, to pursue and prosecute any illicit trading in nuclear material and technology.

    Sixth, call on the five nuclear weapon states party to the NPT to accelerate implementation of their “unequivocal commitment” to nuclear disarmament, building on efforts such as the 2002 Moscow treaty between Russia and the US. Negotiating a treaty to ban irreversibly the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons programmes would be a welcome start.

    Last, acknowledge the volatility of longstanding tensions that give rise to proliferation, in regions such as the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, and take action to resolve existing security problems and, where needed, provide security assurances. In the Middle East, urge all parties to pursue a dialogue on regional security as part of the peace process. One goal of this dialogue would be to make the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free zone.

    None of these steps will work in isolation. Each requires a concession from someone. But with leadership from all sides, this package of proposals will create gains for everyone. This opportunity will come again – in 2010. But given current trends, we cannot afford to wait another five years. As a UN panel put it recently: “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.” The stakes are too high to risk inaction.

    The writer is the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He writes here in a personal capacity.

    Originally published by the Financial Times.

  • Sisyphus with Bombs: A Modern Myth

    Sisyphus with Bombs: A Modern Myth

    Each day from dawn to dusk Sisyphus strained under his load of heavy bombs as he struggled up the mountain. It was slavish, back-breaking work. He sweated and groaned as he inched his way toward the top of the mountain.

    Always, before he reached the top, the bombs were taken from him and loaded onto bomber aircraft. Sisyphus would stand and wipe his brow as he watched the planes take off into the darkening sky on their way to destroy yet more peasant villages somewhere far away.

    Sisyphus believed that he was condemned by fate to carry the bombs up the mountain each day of his life. Since he never reached the top, each sunrise he began anew his arduous and debilitating task.

    Strangely, Sisyphus was happy in his work, as were those who loaded the bombs onto the planes and those who dropped the bombs on peasant villages. As Sisyphus often repeated, “It is a job and it fills my days.”

    Sisyphus with bombs contributes his labors to the war system, as so many of us do. Let us work to disarm Sisyphus and give him back his rock. Our reward will be saving peasant villages and their inhabitants from destruction and the world from annihilation. By our efforts, we may even save ourselves. It is the Sisyphean task of our time.

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

  • Erosion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Regime

    I recently participated in a meeting on the Future of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, sponsored by the Middle Powers Initiative at The Carter Center in Atlanta. The Middle Powers Initiative is a coalition of eight international civil society organizations, two of which have received the Nobel Peace Prize. I represented the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at the meeting, one of the founding organizations. In addition to civil society representatives such as myself, the meeting hosted diplomats from many countries. Among the participants were Marian Hobbs, New Zealand’s Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control; Senator Douglas Roche of Canada, chair of the Middle Powers Initiative; Nobuyasu Abe, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs; Ambassador Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, Brazilian Ambassador and President-Designate of the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference; former US Ambassador Robert Grey Jr.; and Ambassador Rajab M. Sukayri of the Jordanian Foreign Ministry.

    The participants in the consultation were mindful of the recent United Nations Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The Report, issued in December 2004, indicated that “the nuclear non-proliferation regime is now at risk because of lack of compliance with existing commitments, withdrawal or threats of withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons to escape those commitments, a changing international security environment and the diffusion of technology.” The Report found, “We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the non-proliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation.”

    The Report further found that “if a simple nuclear device were detonated in a major city, the number of deaths would range from tens of thousands to more than one million. The shock to international commerce, employment and travel would amount to at least one trillion dollars. Such an attack could have further, far-reaching implications for international security, democratic governance and civil rights.” It was against this background of concern that the Atlanta meeting took place. Ambassador Duarte, who will preside over the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, said, “What we have to contend with at the 2005 Review Conference is a persistent and serious situation of erosion of confidence in the mechanisms of the NPT and on the ability of the instrument to survive the tests it has been put through.”

    Among the major issues that were discussed were the need for the Non-Proliferation Treaty to become universal by bringing in the three nuclear weapons states that are not parties to the treaty (Israel, India and Pakistan) and bringing back North Korea; for the nuclear weapons states parties to the treaty to fulfill their obligations for good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament; for more effective safeguarding of nuclear materials and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency; and for some effective method of sanctions for violating the Treaty’s provisions.

    Former President Jimmy Carter, who spoke at the meeting, pointed out, “Prospects for this year’s discussions are not encouraging. I have heard that the [Preparatory Committee] for the forthcoming Non-Proliferation Treaty talks have so far failed even to achieve an agenda because of the deep divisions between the nuclear powers who seek to stop proliferation without meeting their own disarmament commitments, and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose demands include firm disarmament commitments and considerations of the Israeli arsenal.”

    President Carter also pointed to the contradictions in US nuclear policy. “The United States claims to be upholding Article VI,” he said, referring to the disarmament provision of the Treaty, “but yet asserts a security strategy of testing and developing new weapons [such as] Star Wars and the earth penetrating ‘bunker buster,’ and has threatened first use, even against non-nuclear states, in case of ‘surprising military developments’ and ‘unexpected contingencies.’”

    President Carter referred to another of the contradictions in the approach to nuclear non-proliferation in addressing the issue of Iran and the Middle East: “While the international community is justified in exerting strong pressure on Iran to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, there is no public effort or comment in the United States or Europe calling for Israel to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty or submit to any other restraints. At the same time, we fail to acknowledge what a powerful incentive this is to Iran, Syria, Egypt, and other states to join the nuclear community.”

    There was a general sense at the meeting that the non-proliferation regime, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty that is its centerpiece, is eroding, and that some measure of success at the May 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is critical to the future of this regime. Right now the United States is choosing not to recognize the progress made at previous NPT Review Conferences on nuclear disarmament obligations. The Bush administration doesn’t want to be bound by promises made at the 1995 and 2000 NPT Review Conferences, promises that committed the nuclear weapons states to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to make nuclear disarmament transparent and irreversible, and to an “unequivocal undertaking” to achieve complete nuclear disarmament.

    The US position is throwing the prospects for the 2005 Review Conference into disarray. There was a general sense at the meeting that unless the nuclear weapons states, including the United States, stand by their previous commitments, the prospects for assuring future efforts to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation are dim. This is where we stand three months prior to the beginning of the 2005 Review Conference.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and a member of the International Steering Committee of the Middle Powers Initiative.