Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Robert Dodge

  • Eliminating War to Eradicate Polio

    This article was originally published by Common Dreams.

    Robert DodgePolio, once a global scourge, was on the verge of eradication in 2012. Since that time, it has reemerged as a global public health emergency according to the World Health Organization. Why has it now spread from its final strongholds in Nigeria, Afghanistan and Pakistan to at least 10 countries spanning Asia, Africa and the Middle East? It is not because of changes in the virus or ineffective vaccines. The answer is war, and as we all know, “truth is the first casualty of war.”

    The Taliban claims that immunizations can cause infertility or worse, and violently obstructs the polio vaccinators while vilifying them as part of a U.S. plot. In years past, the U.S. CIA did a great disservice when it disguised its officers as polio vaccine workers in efforts to capture Bin Laden, which has given fuel to the Taliban in its initiatives.

    Efforts to reclaim the momentum in eradicating polio will require a renewed global effort, and ultimately the elimination of war itself. In our ever shrinking world, it is only a matter of time before we see this scenario play out with a resurgence of polio in the U.S. and West as more and more young families avoid vaccinating their children against polio thinking it is a disease of generations past and in some cases a disease they have never heard of.

    How and where will the global effort to eliminate war in order to eradicate polio arise?

    There may be no organization in the world better suited to take on the challenge than Rotary International with its longstanding mission of peace and peace building, and a dedicated membership of 1.2 million Rotarians joined together in service work though Rotary clubs in 220 countries of the world including China and Russia.

    In our nuclear-armed, polio-infected world, President Kennedy’s statement that “mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind” remains true today.

    We must not be naïve in this effort. Self defense and international peacekeeping will always be needed. Peacekeeping and preventing war is much harder than fighting war.

    There will always be conflict – it is the tools of resolving conflict without war that must become the cultural norms. These are tools that already exist and that have been used to resolve every conflict that has ever been fought. These include:

    1. Diplomacy;
    2. Cooperation and collaboration on international programs like polio eradication;
    3. Appropriate foreign aid emphasizing the meeting of essential human needs of food, water, shelter, education, health care and a healthy environment and, finally;
    4. Adherence to international law, not unilateral action.

    We must abandon unexamined assumptions. Assumptions that war will always exist, that we can continue to wage war and survive, and that we are separate and not connected. When we awaken to the reality of interconnectedness we see that polio cannot be eradicated without ending war.

    As a ground up organization, Rotary International has had a university level peace fellows program for over 10 years pursuing understanding and international peace building. Individual Rotarians joined together to form a growing and active Rotarian Action Group for Peace in 2012. Eliminating nuclear weapons is an important step in this process. The Rotary Action Group for Peace has collaborated with the Nobel Peace Prize group Physicians for Social Responsibility and their international affiliate International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War to educate on the humanitarian consequences of even a very limited nuclear war. This has resulted in developing an international physician Rotary speaker’s bureau of 79 physicians in 21 countries speaking and engaging Rotary clubs the world over.

    This type of remarkable collaboration may be just the prescription for our very survival.

  • Defining Appropriate Action in Syria

    The horrific use of chemical weapons in Syria is a crime against humanity and demands an international response. President Obama states that the United States must take appropriate action vs. doing nothing. This is absolutely true. The problem comes in defining appropriate action. There are at least two options, military vs. non-military, the latter with a host of options.

    Framing that action in military terms guarantees the loss of additional innocent lives. Choosing a military option further fuels the sectarian strife spreading across the Middle East.  This will encourage the growth of anti-American sentiment rife in the region. Our trillion dollar war in Iraq has demonstrated that war is not the answer. Iraq is on the verge of falling into the worst chaos since the beginning of that conflict.

    This crisis does demand action ― non-military action.  Doing nothing is cowardly and not in keeping with the credibility or morals of the United States or any other country that professes to support the rule of international law and morality. This includes Russia, Iran and China.

    An international response is demanded. After 9/11 there was a brief period and opportunity when the world came together with a sentiment that the “whole world was American.” That feeling was quickly lost as the U.S. opted for bombing nation after nation, including a unilateral “pre-emptive” war against Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11. We have paid and will pay the price of that war for generations.

    Today, in a similar vein, the entire world identifies with and is sickened and horrified by the images of children and innocent victims of these cowardly gas attacks. But the military intervention being debated is not intended to end the violent conflict that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians. It won’t help the nearly two million Syrian refugees return home or get the more than 6.8 million people in need access to humanitarian aid.

    Our leaders need to show courage against the tide of war. The perpetrators of these crimes must be brought to justice. There is an international arena for these crimes against humanity to be addressed. The International Criminal Court’s mission is to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression. The International Court of Justice’s mission is to prosecute Nations that have committed crimes against humanity. These are just two methods by which perpetrators of these crimes can be held accountable. The United States has the opportunity to lead the way in empowering and supporting these international institutions in performing the role that they were established to do.

    This will take courage, strength, determination, vision and true international leadership―not bombs. This is the role that the United States can and must pursue if we hope to see an end to sectarian violence in this region and the world over.  We must call upon all nations and our own elected leaders complacent with arming the various sides in these conflicts to endorse and support this international peace keeping effort. This will demonstrate their true commitment to peace, international law and humanity.

    We must follow our moral compass. The United States and other world leaders should intensify their efforts to find a peaceful, political solution to end the bloodshed, not add more violence to a tragic civil war. The president needs to hear from us and be supported for his courage and willingness to pause and hear from the nation as we pursue the best hope for the ordinary men, women, and children of Syria.

    This article was originally published by HuntingtonNews.net.

  • Iraq 10 Years Later: What Lessons Have Been Learned?

    This article was originally published by the Ventura County Star.

    This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War. As the longest and most costly war in U.S. history, the true costs in dollars, lives, environmental contamination and opportunity costs may never be fully appreciated.

    This “preventive war” waged on our behalf has forever tainted the world view and standing of the U.S. Perhaps the most significant outcome of the war is the identification and clarification, a “how to” of what doesn’t work in resolving international conflict. Namely war itself.

    Dollar estimates of the combined war costs range from $1.4 trillion to $4 trillion spent and obligated or a bill of between $4,500 and $12,742 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.

    The human costs and death toll are immense. It is estimated that between 225,000 to more than 1 million have been killed when taking into account all the lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    To this tragedy are added the tens of thousands injured. Significant brain and spinal injuries to coalition forces approach 20 percent and PTSD 30 percent. The costs of treating these problems will continue for decades to come.

    The respected international mediator John Paul Lederach suggests that going to war to defeat terrorism is like hitting a mature dandelion with a golf club — it only creates another generation of terrorists.

    That graphic image is very telling in a part of the world where the mean age ranges from 17.9 in Afghanistan to 21.1 in Iraq. How will these future generations who lack the meeting of basic human needs respond to our war?

    We have fallen victim to the idea that the “ends justify the means” when in reality the means are the ends in the making.

    In his book Dying to Win, Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago examines the phenomenon of suicide bombing. His research reveals that despite religious conviction or revenge, the vast majority (95 percent) of suicide bombings always include the primary motivation of trying to push out foreign occupiers.

    In a way to somehow sanitize or numb ourselves to the horrific effects of this war we have seen an entirely new lexicon added to our language. From drones to PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) to TBI (traumatic brain injury) to collateral damage to enhanced interrogation (torture) to rendition (torturing prisoners in outsourced countries) to suicide bombers.

    We have written legal treatises to soothe and justify our use of terrorism and assassination of even our own citizens. In the use of these methods, machines and practices, have we not become the embodiment of “the enemy”? What happens when the entire world has the same capabilities and beliefs? These are some of the realities after 10 years of war.

    We have fallen into financial disarray at home, with a significant contribution from these wars. The robbing of our own social fabric to cover these costs will play out for years to come. Yet, there are those who would continue to dismantle our social infrastructure to continue this war effort and that of future wars at any cost. How we address the facts at hand will determine our future and that of the world.

    Indeed conflict is inevitable. War is optional. We have the necessary means to address conflict without war. The means are the ends in the making.

    Robert Dodge is a family physician in Ventura, California, and is a member of the NAPF Board of Directors.

  • Summer Days, Presidential Campaigns and Hiroshima

    This past Friday, the world quietly observed the 59th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the dawn of the first Nuclear Age.

    On this quiet late summer day in a presidential election season, not a word was noted in most of the communities across our land.

    In a local barbershop, a conversation was heard that there was hardly a difference in the candidates for this year’s presidential election. As I pondered this statement, I realized how remarkable it was in this season of remembrance and reflection. Currently, the world stands at the brink of entering a renewed second nuclear arms race dependent upon U.S. policy.

    Members of Congress, at home during their summer recess, will return to debate the president’s request for additional funding for new nuclear weapons systems, including the huge “Bunker Buster” and “Usable” mini-nukes. This reflects a mind-set that nuclear weapons are necessary and usable and that nuclear arms treaties constrict us and interfere with our ability to develop these new weapons systems.

    These ideas are reflected in the administration’s “Nuclear Posture Review,” released in March 2002. Remarkably, it also proposes that the United States alone could unleash a pre-emptive nuclear attack on a nation for the suspicion of threat. If no other issue were to be debated this season, this alone stands as the most critical for our future and that of future generations.

    Regarding the issues of nuclear security, we need to ask where the candidates stand. We must then decide and vote accordingly. Let’s look at three specific areas.

    1. Creation of new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
    2. Moratorium on nuclear testing and ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
    3. The problem of former Soviet nuclear weapons.

    The CIA and intelligence communities advise that one of the most significant threats to U.S. security is attack by some terrorist organization using a weapon obtained from former Soviet stockpiles. These weapons are potentially more readily available following the Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty, signed by President Bush and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, which aims to store rather than destroy nuclear stockpiles.

    On these questions, Bush is pressing Congress for funds to develop new nuclear weapons systems while Sen. John Kerry states he will “stop this administration’s program to develop new nuclear weapons. These are systems we don’t need.” He then questions what the message is that this sends to other countries.

    On nuclear testing, the president has asked for funding to prepare the Nevada test site for accelerated testing readiness and has spoken against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, while Kerry is an outspoken proponent of arms control and nonproliferation. He supports ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    Third, on former Soviet nukes, the president has negotiated the SORT treaty, which, as stated, plans to store nuclear stockpiles. Kerry states that SORT “runs the risk of increasing the danger of nuclear theft by stockpiling thousands of warheads.” He states that when he is president, he will make securing weapons and materials from the former Soviet Union a priority in relations between the United States and Russia.

    Finally, we must ask how other nations of the world and our adversaries will respond to our lip service of ridding the world of weapons of mass destruction, yet unilaterally pursuing the development and potential use of them.

    The answers to these questions will determine how we are viewed by the world community and the hope our future will hold.

    This 59th anniversary of Hiroshima, we are reminded of the famous Albert Einstein quote at the beginning of the first arms race: “With the unleashed power of the atom, we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe unless we change the way we think.”

    On these lazy days of summer, when politics seems so insignificant and remote, the choice is ours. There really are differences. We must decide. The world is watching.

    Robert Dodge, M.D., of Ventura, is co-chairman of Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions and president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Ventura County.

    Originally published by the Ventura County Star.