Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Thalif Deen

  • Civil Society Challenges Nuclear Deterrence Doctrine

    This article was published by Inter Press Service News Agency.


    UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24, 2011 (IPS) – As the world’s nuclear powers continue to drag their collective feet, stalling all attempts at nuclear disarmament, a group of peace activists and civil society organisations is vigourously challenging the long-held myth of “nuclear deterrence”.


    “Nuclear deterrence is a doctrine that is used as a justification by nuclear weapon states and their allies for the continued possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons,” says the coalition, which met in Santa Barbara, California last week.


    Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation and one of the participants at the meeting, told IPS that members of the coalition agreed that the longstanding doctrine must be discredited and replaced with an urgent commitment to achieve global nuclear disarmament.


    “Before another nuclear weapon is used, nuclear deterrence must be replaced by humane, legal and normal security strategies,” she said.


    A declaration adopted by the coalition states: “We call upon people everywhere to join us in demanding that the nuclear weapon states and their allies reject nuclear deterrence and negotiate without delay a Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent elimination of all nuclear weapons.”


    The participants at the meeting ranged from representatives from the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Disarmament and Security Centre.


    The world’s five “declared” nuclear powers are the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council: the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.


    Additionally, there are four “undeclared” nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which studiously maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” nuclear policy).


    Asked if a worldwide campaign for nuclear disarmament by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) would succeed – as it did in the campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines years ago – Peter Weiss, president of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the analogy with the international campaign against landmines and cluster munitions must not be overdone.


    Those weapons, unlike nukes, were never seen by the countries that had them as ways of projecting their power to their neighbours or throughout the world, even if they never used them, he said.


    He pointed out that the last word on the difficulty which nuclear weapons countries have in giving them up was spoken years ago by Juan Marin Bosch.


    In his capacity as Mexico’s ambassador for disarmament, he said, in refreshingly undiplomatic language: “The big boys are scared shit that we’re going to take away their toys,” recounted Weiss, who is also a vice president of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA).


    Alyn Ware, director of the New Zealand-based Peace Foundation, said during the past four decades the international community has achieved treaties prohibiting and eliminating inhumane weapons such as anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, biological weapons and chemical weapons.


    However, the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, the most inhumane and destructive of all, remains elusive.


    Ware acknowledged the role played by civil society in achieving the mine ban treaty and the convention on cluster munitions. He said two key factors in the success were a focus on the humanitarian consequences of the use of these weapons, and the application of international humanitarian law.


    Ware also said that civil society action has been effective in changing public attitudes to nuclear weapons, especially in the states possessing nuclear weapons or covered by extended nuclear deterrence.


    Whereas public opinion polls in the 1980s indicated majority acceptance of nuclear weapons, recent public opinion polls indicate the majority now supports the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons, he noted.


    However, such a change in public opinion appears to have had only a minimal impact on government policy.


    But there has been a slight shift, in that most governments now accept the vision and responsibility for achieving a nuclear weapons-free world, he added.


    Nonetheless, said Ware, few of the nuclear weapons states or their allies are prepared to abandon nuclear deterrence, prohibit the threat or use of nuclear weapons, or commence negotiations on anything other than minimal steps towards disarmament.


    The real potential of civil society to effect change in nuclear weapons policy is probably somewhere in between two polarised perspectives: public pressure is not irrelevant to a political realist world, but nor is it a magic cure that will by itself deliver the abolition of nuclear weapons, Ware declared.


    Dr Mary-Wynne Ashford of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War said there are many NGOs working on the issue of nuclear disarmament, including the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).


    “Yes, an NGO campaign is practicable and feasible,” she said. “I think consistent pressure from civil society is essential to motivate the nuclear weapons states to move to zero.”


    Doctors continue to raise the issues of the health consequences of the entire nuclear cycle from mining to production of weapons, said Ashford, who is also an associate professor at the University of Victoria in Canada.


    Dr Dale Dewar, executive director of Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), told IPS her organisation has been sustained by donors for 30 years in its campaign for a nuclear weapons-free world.


    “It will continue to do so as long as a donor base is willing to support it,” she added.


    Nancy Covington, also of PGS, told IPS: “I personally don’t see any other option than to mobilise civil society.”


    “If there is enough public education (on nuclear disarmament), then maybe civil society can make a strong enough statement that we can be heard,” she declared.

  • New US Nuclear Posture Under Fire

    Originally Published by the Inter Press Service

    A top U.N. disarmament official assailed Thursday U.S. proposals to deploy nuclear weapons against countries wielding biological and chemical weapons.

    “I don’t think it makes sense,” said Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala. “If somebody uses a basic weapon against you, you do not use the maximum weapon you have in your arsenal.”

    ”We know from scientific evidence that the use of nuclear weapons can destroy not only large numbers of human beings but also the ecological system that supports human life,” and that ill-effects from radiation are prolonged, Dhanapala added.

    Last week, the New York Times reported that the administration of President George W. Bush is planning a broad overhaul of its nuclear policy.

    As part of the proposed policy, it reported, the administration is planning to develop new nuclear weapons including so-called “mini” weapons suited to striking specific targets in countries such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Libya.

    All five countries have been accused by the United States of either developing or possessing weapons of mass destruction including nuclear, biological, and chemical arms.

    Arab officials have complained that the United States has remained silent, however, on Israel, which they say possesses large quantities of mass destruction weapons.

    There are five declared nuclear powers in the world: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, all of them veto- wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

    At least three other countries are generally considered “undeclared nuclear powers”: Israel, India and Pakistan.

    The United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, when it bombed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

    In a report titled ‘The Nuclear Posture Review’ (NPR), the U.S. Department of Defence has said there is a need to resume nuclear testing and to develop new nuclear weapons to blow up underground bunkers where biological and chemical weapons may be in storage.

    Last week, U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said the only choice against adversaries using weapons of mass destruction is to make it clear in advance “that it would be met with a devastating response.”

    Dhanapala said the new U.S. policy “flies in the face of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty undertakings.” Under Article VI of the NPT, he said, states are expected to reduce nuclear weapons and ultimately eliminate them.

    “So this is to me a very serious contradiction of that, and will be a very major stumbling block, as we begin the process of preparing for the 2005 NPT Review Conference,” he said. These preparations are scheduled to begin next month.

    Dhanapala also warned that if the United States resumes nuclear testing or develops new nuclear weapons, it would encourage other countries to discard their obligations under the NPT and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

    “To go back on those treaties would amount to opening the flood gates, and regressing in the development of the norms that we have had,” he added.

    John Burroughs, executive director of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, told IPS the use of nuclear weapons under any circumstances, including retaliation against a nuclear, chemical or biological attack, must meet the requirements of humanitarian law. These include necessity, proportionality, and discrimination between military targets and civilians.

    “Nuclear weapons cannot meet these requirements,” he said. “As the International Court of Justice said, their radioactive effects cannot be limited in space and time. Therefore their use is barred.”

    Burroughs added that one of the “disturbing aspects” of the NPR is that it signals the possibility of U.S. nuclear use against a non- nuclear country – and not in retaliation for a chemical or biological attack, but rather to pre-empt such an attack.

    The NPR also refers to “surprising military developments” as a rationale, taking the issue out of the realm of weapons of mass destruction, he added.

    Chris Paine, a senior analyst with the Natural Resources Defence Council, said only a massive and unusually lethal chemical attack on large numbers of non-combatants could conceivably justify a nuclear response.

    Biological weapons have a much greater inherent lethality against unprotected civilian populations, and the devastating consequences of such an attack could possibly render nuclear weapons a proportionate response – “but not necessarily a rational or moral one”, he argued.

    This is particularly so, if alternative military means exist for punishing the perpetrators, who may or may not be readily targeted, or even susceptible to identification.

    The policy of pre-emptive strikes is foolish and counter- productive on several levels, he said, because it encourages other nation’s to consider whether they will be able to sustain an adequate conventional deterrent to foreign military interference or invasion, and therefore to acquire the very weapons of mass destruction that Bush claims so vigorously to oppose.

    Paine said that such a policy also deprives the United States of the moral and political standing to oppose other nation’s weapons of mass destruction programmes, leaving military coercion as the primary instrument for “dissuading” foreign countries from competing with the United States in the realm of mass destruction weaponry.

    “The Bush administration’s stance reduces a once vigorous U.S. non- proliferation posture to rubble,” he added.