Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Robin Cook

  • America’s Broken Nuclear Promises Endanger Us All

    Not a day goes by without a member of team Bush lecturing us on the threat from weapons of mass destruction and assuring us of the absolute primacy they give to halting proliferation. How odd then that the review conference on the non-proliferation treaty will break up this evening, barring an 11th-hour miracle, with no agreed conclusions. And how strange that no delegation should have worked harder to frustrate agreement on what needs to be done than the representatives of George Bush.

    The tragedy is that, for all its faults, the non-proliferation treaty has hitherto been the best barrier put up by the international community against the spread of nuclear weapons. With the support of all but a handful of nations, the treaty provided a robust declaration that the development of nuclear weapons is taboo. That peer-group pressure has since resulted in more countries abandoning nuclear weapons than acquiring them.

    South Africa disowned and dismantled its nuclear weapons after the collapse of the apartheid regime. New states to emerge from the Soviet Union, such as Ukraine, renounced the nuclear systems they inherited on their territory. Argentina and Brazil dropped the nuclear capability they were developing after negotiating a non-nuclear pact between themselves. Even Iraq turned out to have abandoned its nuclear weapons programme, although in that particular case the success of the non-proliferation regime was more of an embarrassment to George Bush.

    Previous review conferences, which come round every five years, have been used as an important opportunity to regenerate support for the treaty. Not this time. The full weight of Washington diplomacy was focused on preventing any reference in the agenda to the commitments the Clinton administration gave to the last review conference. As a result, the first two weeks of negotiation were taken up with arguing over the agenda, leaving barely one week for substantive talks. Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary and no peacenik, has observed that if the people of the world knew “they would not tolerate what’s going on in the NPT conference”.

    Observance of the non-proliferation treaty rested on a bargain between those states without nuclear weapons, who agreed to renounce any ambition to acquire them, and the nuclear-weapon powers, who undertook in return to proceed in good faith to disarmament. It suits the Bush administration now to present the purpose of the treaty as halting proliferation, but its original intention was the much broader ambition of a nuclear-weapon-free world. The acrimonious exchanges inside the present review conference reflect the frustration of the vast majority of states, who believe they have kept their side of the deal by not developing nuclear weapons but have seen no sign that the privileged elite with nuclear weapons have any intention of giving them up.

    It was to bridge the growing gulf between the two sides that the British delegation, led by Peter Hain, at the last review conference in 2000 helped broker agreement to 13 specific steps that the nuclear-weapon powers could take towards disarming themselves. Labour scores reasonably well against those benchmarks. Britain has taken out of service all non-strategic nuclear weapons and as a result has disarmed 70% of its total nuclear explosive power. It has also halted production of weapons-grade material and placed all fissile material not actually in warheads under international safeguards. This positive progress will be comprehensively reversed if Tony Blair does proceed as threatened to authorise construction of a new weapons system to replace Trident, but until then Britain has a good story to tell.

    Not that it gets heard in the negotiating chambers, where it is obscured by our close identification with the Bush administration and our willingness in the review conference to lobby for understanding of their position. Their position is simply stated: obligations under the non-proliferation treaty are mandatory on other nations and voluntary on the US. Even while the review conference was sitting, the White House asked Congress for funds to research a bunker-busting nuclear bomb, although to develop new nuclear weapons, especially ones designed not to deter but to wage war, is to travel in the opposite direction to the undertakings the US gave to the last review conference.

    The rationale for the bunker-buster is revealing. Its objective is to penetrate and destroy deeply buried arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. Perversely, the current regime in Washington does not perceive its development of nuclear weapons as an obstacle to multilateral agreement on proliferation but as the unilateral means of stopping proliferation. Whatever may be said for this muscular approach to proliferation, there is for sure no prospect of negotiating an agreed text with the rest of the world legitimating it.

    Any progress within the non-proliferation treaty is therefore likely to be on hold until George Bush is replaced by a president willing to return to multilateral diplomacy. This is worrying as there are other pressing problems that should not be left waiting.

    One of the design flaws of the treaty dates from its negotiation in the pre-Chernobyl era of rosy optimism about nuclear energy. As a result it turned on a deal in which the nuclear powers undertook to transfer peaceful nuclear know-how in return for other nations forswearing the military applications of nuclear technology. At the time many of us warned that it was inconsistent to enshrine the spread of nuclear energy in a treaty trying to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

    It therefore is no surprise that we now have a crisis over the advanced nuclear ambitions of Iran. One of the weaknesses in the west’s negotiating position is that there is nothing in the non-proliferation treaty to prohibit Iran from acquiring a declared nuclear energy programme, although it seems implausible that the country has any urgent need for one, as it practically floats on a lake of oil.

    The desirable solution is for an addition to the treaty banning countries without nuclear weapons from developing a closed fuel cycle for nuclear energy, which would stop them acquiring the fissile material for bombs. But this would deepen the present asymmetry between the nuclear powers and everyone else, and is only going to be negotiable if there is some evidence that we are serious about disarmament.

    If the review conference breaks up in failure to agree, I suspect there will be some in Washington celebrating tonight, perhaps not in anything as foreign as French champagne but in the Napa Valley imitation. Within their own narrow terms they will have succeeded. They will have stopped another multilateral agreement and will have escaped criticism for not fulfilling their commitments under the last one. But in the process they will have weakened the non-proliferation regime and made the world a more dangerous place. The next time they lecture us on their worries about weapons of mass destruction, they do not deserve to be taken seriously.

    Originally published by the Guardian

  • US Domestic Agenda Behind Blair’s Iraq War

    Chutzpah was the word that used to be applied to people who radiated belief in themselves without possessing any visible reason to justify it. In the chutzpah stakes US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is way off the top of the scale.

    Before the war he told us that Saddam had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an active program to develop nuclear weapons . After the war he explains away the failure to find any of these stockpiles or nuclear installations on the possibility that Saddam s regime decided they would destroy them prior to a conflict . You have to admire his effrontery.

    But not his logic. The least plausible explanation is that Saddam destroyed his means of defense on the eve of an invasion. The more plausible explanation is that he did not have any large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

    We need to rescue the meaning of words from becoming a further casualty of the Iraqi war. A weapon of mass destruction in normal speech is a device capable of being delivered over a long distanse and exterminating a strategic target such as a capital city. Saddam had neither a long-range missile system nor a warhead capable of mass destruction.

    Laboratory stocks of biological toxins or chemical shells for use on the battlefield do not add up to weapons of mass destruction. But we have not yet found even any of these.

    When the British Cabinet discussed the dossier on Saddam s weapons of mass destruction I argued that I found the document curiously derivative . It set out what we knew about Saddam s chemical and biological arsenal at the time of the (previous) Gulf War. It rehearsed our inability to discover what had happened to those weapons. It then leapt to the conclusion that Saddam must still possess all those weapons. There was no hard intelligence of a current weapons program that would represent a new and compelling threat to our interests.

    Nor did the dossier at any stage admit the basic scientific fact that biological and chemical agents have a finite shelf life. Odd, since it is a principle understood by every chemist. Go in to your medicine cupboard and check out the existence of an expiry date on nearly everything you possess.

    Nerve agents of good quality have a shelf life of about five years and anthrax in liquid solution of about three years. Saddam s stocks were not of good quality. The Pentagon itself concluded that Iraqi chemical munitions were of such poor standard that they were produced to a make-and-use regime under which they were usable for only a few weeks. Even if Saddam had destroyed none of his arsenal from 1991 it would long ago have become useless.

    It is inconceivable that no one in the Pentagon told Donald Rumsfeld these home truths, or at the very least tried to tell him. So why did he build a case for war on a false claim of Saddam s capability?

    Enter stage right (far right) his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, a man of such ferociously reactionary opinion that he has at least the advantage to his department of making Rumsfeld appear reasonable. He has now disclosed: For bureaucratic reasons we settled on weapons of mass destruction because it was the one issue everyone could agree on.

    Wolfowitz is famously a regime-change champion. He was one of the flock of Republican hawks who wanted a war to take over Iraq long before Sept. 11. Decoded, what his remarks mean is that the Pentagon went along with allegations of weapons of mass destruction as the price of getting Secretary of State Colin Powell and the British government on board for war. But the Pentagon probably did not believe in the case then and certainly cannot prove it now.

    Wolfowitz also let the cat out of the bag over the huge prize for the Pentagon from the invasion of Iraq. It has furnished them with an alternative to Saudi Arabia as a base for US influence in the region.

    As Donald Rumsfeld might express it, we have been suckered. Britain was conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even our major ally really believed. The truth is that the US chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat, but because they knew it was weak and expected its military to collapse. It is a truth that leaves the British government in an uncomfortable position. This week Prime Minister Tony Blair was pleading for everyone to show patience and to wait for weapons to be found. There is an historic problem with this plea. The war only took place because the coalition powers lost patience with Hans Blix and refused his plea for a few more months to complete his disarmament tasks.

    There is also a growing problem of trans-Atlantic politics with the British prime minister s plea for more time. The US administration wanted the war to achieve regime change and now they have got it they do not see why they need to keep up the pretence that they fought it to deliver disarmament. The more time passes, the greater the gulf will widen between the obliging candor on the US side that there never was a weapons threat and the desperate obfuscation on the British side that we might still find one.

    There is always a bigger problem in denying reality than in admitting the truth. The time has come when the British government needs to concede that we did not go to war because Saddam was a threat to our national interests. We went to war for reasons of US foreign policy and Republican domestic politics.

    One advantage of such clarity is that it would help prevent us from being suckered a second time. Which brings us to Rumsfeld s latest sabre-rattling against Iran. It is consistent with the one-dimensional character of the Rumsfeld world view. This time we must make clear to the White House that we are not going to subordinate Britain s interests to a US policy of confrontation. Iran must not become the next Iraq.
    * Robin Cook resigned from Tony Blair s Cabinet to protest the war on Iraq.