Author: David Krieger
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Occupy Peace
This article was originally published by Truthout.
The Occupy Movement is demonstrating its durability and perseverance. Like a Japanese Daruma doll, each time it is knocked off balance it serenely pops back up. The movement has been seeking justice for the 99 percent, and justice is an essential element of peace.
For decades, our country has been in permanent preparation for war, spending over half of the total annual discretionary funds that Congress allocates on “defense,” our euphemism for war. World military expenditures exceed $1.5 trillion annually, and the US spends more than half of this amount, more than the rest of the world combined.
The US has been engaged in wars around the globe from Korea to Vietnam to El Salvador to Nicaragua to Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya. In all of these wars, many in the one percent reap financial gains. Many large corporations, such as Halliburton, formerly led by Dick Cheney, are the beneficiaries of lucrative government contracts that support war, while it is mainly the poor who are enlisted to fight, kill and die in our wars. War is a surefire way of transferring wealth up the social ladder.
It is time to wake up to being used as tools in warfare while others profit. War is not an effective or reasonable way to settle disputes. It uses up resources and destroys human lives. In war, people are expendable. Civilians all too easily become “collateral damage.” In the Nuclear Age, civilization itself could become collateral damage.
As President Eisenhower pointed out in 1953, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” How little our politicians have responded to the deep concern of this former military leader.
War is costly not only in dollars, but on our national psyche. We slaughtered innocent men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then celebrated our prowess. We went to war in Vietnam based on lies, killing millions of Vietnamese and dropping Napalm and Agent Orange on them, while they struggled for their freedom and independence. Ultimately, after the death of more than 58,000 Americans, we withdrew in defeat, declaring victory. We seemingly learned little that is meaningful from the experience, as we continue to send our soldiers to fight and die in far-off lands, and still based on lies. Enough is enough.
How do we occupy peace? First, we change our modes of thinking and stop basing our self-worth as a nation on our military prowess. Second, we bring our troops home from exploitative foreign wars. Third, we seek peaceful solutions to conflicts. Fourth, we make our priority justice, and peace will follow. Fifth, we work to end deaths due to starvation and preventable diseases rather than inflicting deaths by high altitude bombing and drone attacks. Sixth, we take the lead in abolishing nuclear weapons so no other cities or countries will suffer the fate of the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seventh, we reallocate our resources to health, education and ending poverty rather than continuing to gorge the military beast until it is too fat to move.
War is a place of fear and fear is a place of borders. Fear requires us to dehumanize our enemies and, in the process, to dehumanize ourselves. Borders should not provide a justification for dehumanization. That is a trick of militarists, who are in need of enemies, real or imagined, to make the war system work for them. But there is another way to deal with enemies, and that is to turn them into friends by our actions.
We need to stop fearing each other and treat each other with kindness. Consideration for the 99 percent does not stop at a country’s border. We are all humans together and we need each other to be fully human. We need to embrace our common humanity. In the Nuclear Age, war is far too dangerous, having the potential to end civilization and most life on the planet. Peace is an imperative. We need to find a way to occupy peace, which begins in our hearts and must expand to encompass the world.
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The High Costs of Nuclear Arsenals
Nuclear weapons are costly in many ways. They change our relationship to other nations, to the earth, to the future and to ourselves.
In the mid-1990s a group of researchers at the Brookings Institution did a study of US expenditures on nuclear weapons. They found that the US had spent $5.8 trillion between 1940 and 1996 (in constant 1996 dollars).
This figure was informally updated in 2005 to $7.5 trillion from 1940 to 2005 (in constant 2005 dollars). Today the figure is approaching $8 trillion, and that amount is for the US alone.
There are currently nine countries with a total of over 20,000 nuclear weapons, spending $105 billion annually on their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems. That will amount to more than $1 trillion over the next decade. The US accounts for about 60 percent of this amount.
The World Bank has estimated that $40 to $60 billion in annual global expenditures would be sufficient to meet the eight agreed-upon United Nations Millennium Development Goals for poverty alleviation by 2015.
Meeting these goals would eradicate extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality/empowerment; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop partnerships for development.
The US is now spending over $60 billion annually on nuclear weapons and this is expected to rise to average about $70 billion annually over the next decade. The US spends more than the other eight nuclear weapons states combined.
We are now planning to modernize our nuclear weapons infrastructure and also our nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. This was part of the deal that President Obama agreed to for getting the New START agreement ratified in the Senate. It may prove to be a bad bargain.
The US foreign aid contribution in 2010 was $30 billion; in the same year, we spent $55 billion on our nuclear arsenal. Which expenditures keep us safer?
Another informative comparison is with the regular annual United Nations budget of $2.5 billion and the annual UN Peacekeeping budget of $7.3 billion. UN and Peacekeeping expenditures total to about $10 billion, which is less than one-tenth of what is being spent by the nine nuclear weapon states for maintaining and improving their nuclear arsenals.
The annual UN budget for its disarmament office (United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs) is $10 million. The nuclear weapons states spend more than that amount on their nuclear weapons every hour. Or, to put it another way, the nine nuclear weapons states annually spend 10,000 times more for their nuclear arsenals than the United Nations spends to pursue all forms of disarmament, including nuclear disarmament.
The one place the US is saving money on its nuclear weapons is where it should be spending the most, and that is on the dismantlement of the retired weapons. The amount that the US spends on dismantlement of its nuclear weapons has dropped significantly under the Obama administration from $186 million in 2009 to $96 million in 2010 to $58 million in 2011. In the 1990s the US dismantled more than 1,000 nuclear weapons annually. We dismantled 648 weapons in 2008 and only 260 in 2010.
The US has about 5,000 nuclear weapons awaiting dismantlement, which, at the current rate of dismantlement, will take the US about 20 years. There are another 5,000 US nuclear weapons that are either deployed or held in reserve.
Beyond being very costly to maintain and improve, nuclear weapons have changed us and cost us in many other ways.
They have undermined our respect for the law. How can a country respect the law and be perpetually engaged in threatening mass murder?
These weapons have also undermined our sense of reason, balance and morality. They are designed to kill massively and indiscriminately – men, women and children.
They have increased our secrecy and undermined our democracy. Can you put a cost on losing our democracy?
Uranium mining, nuclear tests and nuclear waste storage for the next 240,000 years have incalculable costs. They are a measure of our hubris, as are the weapons themselves.
Nuclear weapons – perhaps more accurately called instruments of annihilation – require us to play Russian Roulette with our common future. What is the cost of threatening to foreclose the future? What is the cost of actually doing so?
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Looking Back at Reykjavik
This article was originally published by The Hill.
Twenty-five years ago, on October 11-12, 1986, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev met in Reykjavík, Iceland and came close to agreeing to eliminate their nuclear arsenals within 10 years. The main sticking point was the US “Star Wars” missile defense technology. Reagan wouldn’t give up its development and future deployment, and Gorbachev wouldn’t accept that.
The two men had the vision and the passion to achieve a world without nuclear weapons, but a difference of views about the role of missile defenses that kept them from concluding an agreement. For Reagan, these defenses were seen as protective and helpful. For Gorbachev, these defenses upset the strategic balance between the two countries by making the possibility of US offensive attacks more likely.
The summit at Reykjavik was a stunning moment in Cold War history. It was a moment when two men, leaders of their respective nuclear-armed countries, almost agreed to rid the world of its gravest danger. Both were ready to take a major leap from arms control negotiations to a commitment to nuclear disarmament. Rather than seeking only to manage the nuclear arms race, they were ready to end it. Their readiness to eliminate these weapons of annihilation caught their aides and the world by surprise. Unfortunately, their passion for the goal of abolition could not be converted to taking the action that was necessary.
When the two leaders met in Reykjavik, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, nearly all in the arsenals of the US and Soviet Union. Today there is no Soviet Union, but there remain over 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with over 95 percent in the arsenals of the US and Russia. In 1986, there were six nuclear weapon states: the US, Russia, UK, France, China and Israel. Today, three more countries have been added to this list: India, Pakistan and North Korea.
In 1986, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was in force and had been since 1972. An important element of the Soviet position was that this treaty should remain in force, preventing a defensive arms race that would feed an offensive arms race, and maintaining treaty provisions that would prevent an arms race in outer space. In 2002, George W. Bush unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty, and this has remained a strong element of contention between the US and Russia.
At the time of the summit in Reykjavik, there was a strong anti-nuclear movement in the US, the Nuclear Freeze Movement, but its goals were modest: a freeze in the size of nuclear arsenals. Today, many people have lost interest in nuclear disarmament and it has largely slipped off the public agenda. Public concern faded rapidly after the end of the Cold War in 1991, although serious nuclear dangers still plagued humanity then and continue to do so. These include nuclear proliferation, nuclear accidents, nuclear terrorism, and new nuclear arms races (for example, between India and Pakistan). As long as the weapons exist, the possibility will exist that they will be used by accident, miscalculation or design, all with tragic consequences for the target cities and for humanity.
There were other differences in the positions of the two sides at Reykjavik that would have needed to be worked out, even had they gotten through the stumbling block of missile defenses. While both side’s proposals called for a 50 percent reduction in strategic nuclear forces in the first five years, the proposals differed on the next five years. The Soviet proposal called for the elimination of all remaining strategic offensive arms of the two countries by the end of the next five years. The US proposal called for the elimination of all offensive ballistic missiles in the next five years, thus not including the elimination of strategic nuclear weapons carried on bomber aircraft. This was not an insignificant detail.
What is important to focus on is that these two leaders came close to achieving a goal that has eluded humanity since the violent onset of the Nuclear Age. They demonstrated that with vision and goodwill great acts of peace are within our collective reach. These two leaders didn’t reach quite far enough, but they paved the way for others to follow. In the last 25 years, there has been some progress toward eliminating nuclear weapons, but not nearly enough.
The people of the world cannot wait another 25 years for leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev to come along again. They must raise their voices clearly and collectively for a world free of nuclear threat. It is long past time to stop wasting our resources on these immensely destructive and outdated weapons that could be used again only at terrible cost to our common humanity.
Five important steps, supported by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, that would move the world closer to the goal are: first, make binding pledges of No First Use of nuclear weapons to reduce concerns about surprise attacks; second, lower the alert levels of all existing nuclear weapons to prevent accidental launches; third, negotiate a Middle East Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone; fourth, bring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty into force with the required ratifications of the treaty; and fifth, begin negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of nuclear weapons.
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2011 Evening for Peace Message
Our theme tonight is “From Hiroshima to Hope.”
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked the end of a terrible war, more costly in human life than any previous war in human history. The atomic bombings also marked the beginning of the Nuclear Age, an age characterized by its immense destructive power, a power that could leave civilization in shambles.
In a mad arms race between the US and USSR between 1945 and 1990, nuclear weapons were created and tested that were thousands of times more powerful than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the height of the nuclear arms race in 1986, there were over 70,000 nuclear weapons in the world, with humanity precariously balanced on the rim of a nuclear precipice. Today, more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, there are still more than 20,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nine countries.
Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was created in 1982 to confront the challenges of this new era dominated by nuclear threat. Our mission at the Foundation is: “To educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders.” We do this in many action-oriented ways, including through our Action Alert Network, Peace Leadership Program and this Evening for Peace.
We hope that all of you with us this evening, and particularly the students, will be inspired to become Peace Leaders. We need you and the world needs you.
In this past year, the Foundation held a conference on the Dangers of Nuclear Deterrence at which we took a hard look at the myths surrounding nuclear deterrence and developed the Santa Barbara Declaration, Reject Nuclear Deterrence: An Urgent Call to Action. This Declaration was placed in the Congressional Record by Representative Lois Capps.
We also worked with the Swiss government in holding a conference at the United Nations in Geneva on the need to lower the alert status of nuclear weapons. There are still some 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. This is truly MAD.
We held another conference in Geneva this year supported by the government of Kazakhstan on the need to bring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty into force. President Clinton signed this treaty in 1996, but the Senate voted down ratification in 1999 and still has not ratified it 15 years after it was signed.
The Foundation’s membership has grown to nearly 50,000. We have more than 2,500 participants in our Peace Leadership program. More than 600,000 unique viewers visit our websites annually. We have sent more than 70,000 messages on timely nuclear issues to political leaders this year through our Action Alert Network, and we’ve had some recent successes, including stopping a missile launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the International Day of Peace.
We have also networked with like-minded organizations throughout the world on our common goal of achieving a more peaceful and nuclear weapon-free world. In addition, 12 hardworking and committed interns from around the country have participated in many aspects of the Foundation’s work in 2011.
The Hibakusha
In all our work at the Foundation, we have taken strength from the spirit of Hiroshima and its survivors, the hibakusha. Hiroshima is more than a city. As the first city to be attacked by a nuclear bomb, it is a symbol of the wanton destructiveness of nuclear weapons. Along with the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki three days later, some 220,000 people died by the end of 1945 as a result of the two atomic bombings.
The survivors of the bombings, the hibakusha, have had an unconquerable spirit of hope and commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons. They have not only rebuilt their flattened cities and their lives, but they have taken it upon themselves to speak out so that their past does not become the future of some other city or of humanity as a whole. The hibakusha have said, “Nuclear weapons and human beings cannot co-exist.” They have stood firmly for a human future, seeking the abolition of all nuclear weapons.
At the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation we share the passion, commitment and hope of the hibakusha for achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.
Shigeko Sasamori, thank you for all you’ve done. Your life and the lives of Kaz Suyeishi and Kikuko Otake, and all the other hibakusha you represent this evening give us hope and strength to persevere.
So does the life of our next honoree.
Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba
It is now my privilege to introduce Tadatoshi Akiba, the recipient of the Foundation’s 2011 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award. In his early career, he was a professor of mathematics at Tufts University and later a professor of humanities at Hiroshima Shudo University. He served in the Japanese Diet, Japan’s House of Representatives, from 1990 to 1999. He then served as the Mayor of Hiroshima from 1999 to 2011. During his 12 years as mayor, he served as the president of Mayors for Peace, and oversaw the growth of this organization from some 440 members to nearly 5,000. Under Mayor Akiba’s leadership, Mayors for Peace initiated the 2020 Vision Campaign, calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons by the year 2020, and also the campaign, Cities Are Not Targets, a petition drive that asserts, “No! You may not target cities. You may not target children.”
For his work for peace, Mayor Akiba has received many awards, including the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, also known as the Asian Nobel Prize.
I have known Mayor Akiba since shortly after he became mayor, when I visited him in Hiroshima. I have admired his energy and eloquence on behalf of the hibakusha of Hiroshima and Mayors for Peace. He has given leadership to mayors throughout the world to take a stand for abolishing nuclear weapons. He is an honorable man who is dedicated to eliminating the nuclear weapons threat to humanity and all life.
On behalf of the Directors and members of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, I am pleased to present the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2011 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award to Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba.
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2011 Earth Charter Award
I’m honored to receive this Earth Charter Award from Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions, and particularly an award presented in memory of two dedicated and lifelong peace makers, Bill Hammaker and Betty Eagle.
The Earth Charter is a great collaborative and visionary document. Its words are both poetic and inspirational. It opens we this passage: “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.”
How succinct. How beautiful. How true.
I believe we should all strive to live as world citizens. I believe strongly in the principles embodied in the Earth Charter, including those for which this award is given: democracy, nonviolence and peace. They are, at the same time, both goals to achieve and maintain, and a way to live our lives.
Democracy, from my perspective, means the opportunity for all members of a society to participate fully and fairly in the political process. That possibility has been usurped in our political process by the power of money to buy candidates, legislators and legislation. Regardless of what they may rule at the Supreme Court, as they did in Citizens United, money cannot be allowed to equate to free speech in democratic elections. We can do far better than we have in making our institutions and political process open and fair.
It concerns me greatly that our democracy, such as it is, has become so militarized. We now spend more than half of the discretionary funds in our national budget on the military, some $700 billion annually. This does not include the tens of billions of dollars we also spend for nuclear weaponry through the Department of Energy, or the budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the interest on the national debt to pay for our foreign wars. We spend more on our military than all other countries in the world combined.
We also have more than 700 military bases and our powerful naval fleets spread throughout the world. We are the only country on Earth that does this. We are an empire without formal subjects, but we bind countries and leaders to us by our economic power to reward and punish and by the implied threat of our military might.
A militarized democracy with global reach becomes a militarized empire. It fights wars of its choosing, despite its obligations under international law, and its people are easily manipulated and lied into war. The US is now fighting wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, and something less than wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. We are developing a new technology of warfare, based on sanitized long-distance killing with drones and a Global Strike Force that allows the US to attack with no risk of taking casualties. Recently we have assassinated two American citizens in Yemen using drones. President Obama signed off on these assassinations. So much for due process of the law!
The Global Strike Force plans to replace nuclear warheads with powerful conventional warheads on some inter-continental ballistic missiles, making it possible to attack any target on the globe in under an hour. Drones and the Global Strike Force make long-distance killing more possible, but no more palatable.
Nonviolence is a strategy for social change. It is more powerful than weapons of war. These can kill and maim, but they have far less power to influence the human heart than techniques of nonviolence. The world moves in strange ways. Gandhi was the great leader of a nonviolent movement to end colonialism in India. He was influenced by Thoreau and Tolstoy, and in turn he influenced Martin Luther King, Jr. and many other leaders of nonviolent revolutions.
Nonviolence is the means to bring about a new world order, one based upon peace and justice. We have seen it again show its remarkable power during the Arab Spring. We are witnessing it show its power now on Wall Street in what will hopefully become an American Fall.
A.J. Muste said this about peace: “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” Without achieving peace in the Nuclear Age, we are all – wherever we live on the planet – potential victims of nuclear annihilation. Nuclear weapons go beyond the homicide and genocide of warfare, and make possible omnicide, the death of all.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, which I helped found three decades ago, works to abolish nuclear weapons. It is a stretch even to call them weapons. They are the ultimate long-distance killing devices, making the destruction of our world, including all that we hold dear, all too possible.
By our capacity for destruction, we have reached a point in our societal evolution at which peace is not only desirable but necessary for our survival – peace is an imperative of the Nuclear Age. The questions I ask myself are these: Will humanity choose peace? Will we grow up and put away our adolescent resort to violence as a means of resolving conflicts? Will we awaken in time to avert catastrophe?
The answers to these questions remain unclear, but it is clear that we are at a point of decision. Everything begins with choice and intention. We need to make the right choices and we need to set our intention to build a new world on a foundation of peace. We need to stop wasting our resources on war and its preparation. We need to find news ways to appreciate the miracle of life – our own and others. We need to become planetary patriots, replacing the acronym MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) with a new acronym: PASS (Planetary Assured Security and Survival). It is our job to pass the planet on intact to new generations.
Our world badly needs peace leadership if we are to create peace. I urge each of you to be a peace leader by speaking out and acting for peace. There are many areas of study and training, but a critical one that is often overlooked is peace leadership. This training is one of our most important projects at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. I hope you all will join in this essential effort, keeping in mind the final words of the Earth Charter: “Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.”
There is so much left to do. How can we not commit to this beautiful struggle?
None of us should be content to sit on the sidelines when there is so much to be done. Despite all the world’s serious problems, and there are many, we must choose hope, for it is hope that propels us to action. The opposite of hope is despair, which leads to indifference and inaction. So, I urge you to see hope as a choice, and choose it and live as though we can and will change the world.
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US Cancels Nuclear-Capable Missile Test on International Day of Peace
The US Air Force is standing down its plan to launch a nuclear-capable missile on the United Nations International Day of Peace. It’s a very small step, but it is a step in the right direction. It’s possible that the Air Force planners didn’t know about the International Day of Peace or even that there is such a day. There is such a day, though, and it is observed annually by the countries of the world on September 21st.
When the Air Force announced that it had scheduled a test of a nuclear-capable Minuteman III inter-continental ballistic missile for September 21st, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation notified its Action Alert Network. Members of this Network sent over 7,000 messages to President Obama calling for cancellation of the offending missile test, and for the president to act in taking US nuclear weapons off high-alert status.
Perhaps those thousands of messages awakened someone to the inappropriateness of demonstrating a nuclear show of force on the International Day of Peace. But perhaps not. In announcing the cancellation of the missile test, a spokesperson said it was being postponed in order to complete “post test analysis” of another Minuteman III test that failed on July 27th. It makes sense to study previous failures, but one wonders why the Air Force would announce a test shortly after a failure, and then use the failure as the reason to cancel the new test.
At any rate, the US has precluded one serious mistake, that is, to have thumbed its nose at the world community by performing a nuclear-capable missile test on the International Day of Peace. Regardless of its public justification for standing down its missile test, it was the right decision to cancel it.
The International Day of Peace will now be a slightly more peaceful day. But the fact remains that the United States and Russia each maintain some 1,000 nuclear weapons on high-alert status, a Cold War posture that has no place in the 21st century. President Obama could take a meaningful step toward his stated goal of a world free of nuclear weapons by taking all US nuclear weapons off high-alert status. This would be showing real leadership, the kind of leadership hoped for from the United States.
The United Nations General Assembly called in its Resolution 55/282 in 2001 for the International Day of Peace to “be observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence….” It would be a major step for the United States to actually observe the International Day of Peace by observing a ceasefire in its current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and its hostilities in various other countries. That would send a message to the world that the US is ready to begin leading an international effort for peace, rather than being so quick, determined and persistent in seeking to settle disputes with its powerful military forces.
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Ten Years, Ten Lessons
September 11, 2001 was a traumatizing day for the United States. The photographs of the airplanes crashing into the World Trade Towers are still haunting, and the senseless loss of life is still painful. Images of the burning trade towers and people jumping to their deaths are indelibly etched into the minds of those who saw them.
U.S. policy decisions after 9/11 have turned what began as a traumatizing day into a traumatizing decade for the United States and the world. It is not clear what our political leaders have learned over the span of these ten years, but here are some lessons that seem clear to me:
1. The United States, despite its vast military power, was and remains vulnerable. Our borders are not inviolate. Our citizens may be attacked on our own territory.
2. The U.S. is not hated for its freedom, as President George W. Bush opined, but for its policies in supporting dictatorial and repressive regimes, particularly in the Middle East. Whatever freedoms the American people had on 9/11 have been greatly restricted over the past decade by the Patriot Act and other measures to increase governmental powers.
3. Wars are costly and they undermine economic prosperity at home. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have overdrawn the U.S. budget and helped to create the current economic malaise in the country.
4. American leaders are willing to lie the country into war, specifically the war in Iraq. We should have learned this lesson from the Vietnam War. There has been no accountability for the initiation of an aggressive war, as there was for the German leaders who were tried and convicted at Nuremburg following World War II for their crimes against peace.
5. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have injured and killed large numbers of civilians. For each terrorist who has been killed, more terrorists have been recruited to expand their numbers. What the Bush administration called the “Global War on Terror,” and the Obama administration prefers to call the “Overseas Contingency Operation,” is unwinnable by military means and likely to be endless.
6. A volunteer military can be used and abused with little response from the American people. Large numbers of volunteer soldiers have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
7. Despite the illegality and moral repugnance of torture, American officials have been willing to engage in it and, as in the case of Dick Cheney, many remain unrepentant for its use.
8. President Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan has shown that there is bipartisan political support for keeping the flames of war burning.
After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, it had the sympathy of the world. By its policies of endless war, the U.S. long ago lost those sympathies. If the U.S. wants to find a more decent foundation on which to rest its policies, I would hope that it would be based upon these two larger lessons:
9. War is not the answer to dealing with the threat of terrorism.
10. The way forward is with policies that are legal (under U.S. and international law), moral (demonstrating appropriate care for the innocent) and thoughtful (not based in hubris, alienating to the rest of the world and conducive to creating more terrorists).
Sadly, at the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. seems lacking in sufficient self-reflection to grapple with these lessons. -
US Plans Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Test on International Day of Peace
Vaya aquí para la versión española.
In 1981, the United Nations General Assembly created an annual International Day of Peace to take place on the opening day of the regular sessions of the General Assembly. The purpose of the day is for “commemorating and strengthening the ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples.”
Twenty years later, in 2001, the General Assembly, desiring to draw attention to the objectives of the International Day of Peace, gave the day a fixed date on which it would be held each year: September 21st. The General Assembly declared in its Resolution 55/282 that “the International Day of Peace shall henceforth be observed as a day of global ceasefire and non-violence, an invitation to all nations and people to honor a cessation of hostilities for the duration of the Day.”
The Resolution continued by inviting “all Member States, organizations of the United Nations system, regional and non-governmental organizations and individuals to commemorate, in an appropriate manner, the International Day of Peace, including through education and public awareness, and to cooperate with the United Nations in the establishment of the global ceasefire.”
The United States has announced that its next test of a Minuteman III will occur on September 21, 2011. Rather than considering how it might participate and bring awareness to the International Day of Peace, the United States will be testing one of its nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missiles that, 20 years after the end of the Cold War, continue to be kept on high-alert in readiness to be fired on a few moments notice.
Of course, the missile test will have a dummy warhead rather than a live one, but its purpose will be to assure that the delivery system for the Minuteman III nuclear warheads has no hitches. As Air Force Colonel David Bliesner has pointed out, “Minuteman III test launches demonstrate our nation’s ICBM capability in a very visible way, deterring potential adversaries while reassuring allies.”
So, on the 2011 International Day of Peace, the United States has chosen not “to honor a cessation of hostilities,” but rather to implement a very visible, $20 million test of a nuclear-capable missile.
Perhaps US officials believe that US missile tests help keep the peace. If so, they have a very different idea about other countries testing missiles. National Security Spokesman Mike Hammer had this to say about Iranian missile tests in 2009: “At a time when the international community has offered Iran opportunities to begin to build trust and confidence, Iran’s missile tests only undermine Iran’s claims of peaceful intentions.”
In 2008, Condoleezza Rice, then Secretary of State, said, “We face with the Iranians, and so do our allies and friends, a growing missile threat that is getting ever longer and ever deeper – and where the Iranian appetite for nuclear technology is, to this point, still unchecked. And it is hard for me to believe that an American president is not going to want to have the capability to defend our territory and the territory of our allies, whether they are in Europe or whether they are in the Middle East against that kind of missile threat.”
The US approach to nuclear-capable missile testing seems to be “do as I say, not as I do.” This is unlikely to hold up in the long run. Rather than testing its nuclear-capable delivery systems, the US should be leading the way, as President Obama pledged, toward a world free of nuclear weapons. To do so, we suggest that he take three actions for the 2011 International Day of Peace. First, announce the cancellation of the scheduled Minuteman III missile test, and use the $20 million saved as a small down payment on alleviating poverty in the US and abroad. Second, announce that the US will take its nuclear weapons off high-alert status and keep them on low alert, as China has done, in order to lower the possibilities of accidental or unauthorized missile launches. Third, declare a ceasefire for the day in each of the wars in which the US is currently engaged. These three actions on the International Day of Peace would not change the world in a day, but they would be steps in the right direction that could be built upon during the other 364 days of the year.
To send a letter to President Obama opposing this test launch, click here.
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Bringing Purpose to Bear on Nuclear Arms
Recently, a friend sent me a copy of Admiral Hyman Rickover’s 1982 Morgenthau Memorial Lecture. The lecture, given under the auspices of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, was entitled, “Thoughts on Man’s Purpose in Life.” In the lecture, Rickover, who died in 1986 but remains widely respected for his role in building the US nuclear navy, spoke of “some basic principles of existence, propounded by thinkers through the ages….” Among these, he focused on responsibility, perseverance, excellence, creativity and courage, and he called for these to be “wedded to intellectual growth and development.”
I agree with the admiral on his choice of principles to give purpose to one’s life. If one can live by these principles, his or her life is likely to be purposeful. Yet, I think that Admiral Rickover missed an important point, which is: what one does with one’s life matters. Rickover chose to focus his professional activities on the development of a nuclear navy. In the questions following his speech, he was asked: “How can we equate nuclear weapons and warfare with moral and ethical values?”
He had a ready answer:
“I do not know why you point at nuclear weapons alone when moral and ethical issues are involved. Weapons of themselves are neither moral nor amoral; it is their use that raises the moral and ethical issue. In all wars man has used the best weapons available to him. Gunpowder made wars more deadly. Nuclear weapons are merely an extension of gunpowder. Therefore, it is not the weapon, but man himself. One can be just as dead from an axe as from a bomb. The issue is whether man is willing to wage war to carry out the moral, ethical, or other values he lives by. If history has any meaning for us, it shows that men will continue to use the best weapons they have to win. Throughout history, even when men have established leagues to prevent war, they have nevertheless resorted to it. Utopia is still beyond the horizon. Above all, we should bear in mind that our liberty is not an end in itself; it is a means to win respect and dignity for all classes of our society.”
In this statement, I think Rickover is wrong. Weapons are not morally neutral, particularly those that kill indiscriminately and cause unnecessary harm. Nuclear weapons, which are capable of massive infanticide, genocide and the ultimate transgression, omnicide, the death of all, go far beyond an extension of gunpowder. They are a threat to the continuation of civilization and advanced life on the planet, including human life. This is why we cannot be satisfied with projecting the past (history) into the future. We must radically change our approach to security and create a future in which human survival is assured.
When asked if he had any regrets “for helping create a nuclear navy,” Rickover replied: “I do not have regrets. I believe I helped preserve the peace for this country. Why should I regret that? What I accomplished was approved by Congress—which represents our people. All of you live in safety from domestic enemies because of the police. Likewise, you live in safety from foreign enemies because our military keeps them from attacking us. Nuclear technology was already under development in other countries. My assigned responsibility was to develop our nuclear navy. I managed to accomplish this.”
However, in testimony the same year before Congress, Rickover said:
“I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That’s why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits — attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available.”
Admiral Rickover further remarked: “Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it.” (Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982))
Jimmy Carter said in a 1984 interview with Diane Sawyer that Admiral Rickover had told him:
“I wish that nuclear power had never been discovered…. I would forego all the accomplishments of my life, and I would be willing to forego all the advantages of nuclear power to propel ships, for medical research and for every other purpose of generating electric power, if we could have avoided the evolution of atomic explosives.”
Of course, we did not avoid “the evolution of atomic explosives,” but this does not mean that we are condemned to live with these weapons forever. That is up to us. I believe that a purposeful life, in Admiral Rickover’s terms (but not in his actions), would bring responsibility, perseverance (more than one would think necessary), excellence, creativity and courage to bear upon the most serious threat confronting humanity, that of nuclear annihilation. Humans in the past have risen to the challenge of abolishing slavery. Now a common purpose of humanity must be to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. This will require replacing ignorance and apathy with focused concern and active engagement.