Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Articles by David Krieger

  • A Letter to The New York Times

    Below is a letter that I sent to The New York Times about an editorial by their Editorial Board that appeared on April 6, 2015.  Regretfully, they did not publish the letter because it makes a point that is too often overlooked in US nuclear policy: that the US cannot always be attempting to put out nuclear fires while, at the same time, helping to start and fan those fires by its own nuclear policies.  Nuclear dangers need to be dealt with systemically through negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament.  That is what the Non-Proliferation Treaty requires and what the Marshall Islands is trying to achieve through its lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed countries.  Here is the letter:

    Editor:

    David KriegerConcerns expressed in your editorial, “Nuclear Fears in South Asia,” are well warranted.  What seems obvious, but is unstated, is that India and Pakistan are modelling behavior long demonstrated by the US, Russia and other nuclear powers, all of which have policies of nuclear deterrence and are modernizing their nuclear arsenals.

    We’ve already missed the non-proliferation train in South Asia. Now, the only sensible goal is nuclear disarmament, as required by Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and by customary international law for countries not parties to the NPT, such as India and Pakistan. This is the basis for the lawsuits brought by the Marshall Islands against all nine nuclear-armed countries at the International Court of Justice and separately against the US in US Federal Court.  Rather than continuing to evade its obligations for nuclear disarmament, the US should take the lead in convening negotiations for nuclear zero. We owe it to ourselves and to the future of humanity.

  • To the Americans Who Died in the Vietnam War

    Perhaps you thought you were doing the right thing, fighting in a small distant country for president and country.  It is the way we were all indoctrinated.  When the country calls, you must answer.  But the leaders of the country were dead wrong about fighting in Vietnam, and this wall with your names etched on it speaks to the terrible loss of each of you in that savage, brutal and unnecessary war.  I mourn your loss.  I mourn the loss of possibilities that were cut off when your lives ended in that war.  You might have stayed home to live and love, to have children and grandchildren, to follow your dreams, but for that war.

    David KriegerThe war was so wrong in so many ways.  It was wrong for you, for the people you were ordered to kill, and for the soul of America.  It was a war that was neither legal nor moral and, as such, set the tone for future US wars.  After that war, I don’t see how we can ever be proud of our country again.

    Some three million Vietnamese were killed in the war.  Some were fighting for their independence.  Others were innocent civilians.  Many were women and children.  You and other Americans were sent half way around the world because American leaders feared the communists, feared that countries in Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes to the communists.  But Ho Chi Minh was more than a communist.  He was a nationalist, leading his country to independence from colonial rule.  He was a nationalist who admired Thomas Jefferson, and he had once asked the United States for help in seeking that independence.  We turned him down, turning our backs on our own history and on your future.

    Once Lyndon Johnson became president it was all escalation in Vietnam.  General Westmoreland always wanted more men.  He kept upping the ante in his calls for more American soldiers, and LBJ and McNamara kept obliging him.  They kept pulling young Americans from their lives and dreams to fight in the jungles of Vietnam.  You know better than I do that it was a hopeless war, a war in which you were sent to kill and die for no good reason, for the delusions of American leaders who didn’t want to lose a war.  Of course, that’s exactly what happened in the end, and by that time Nixon and Kissinger had joined the Johnson and Westmoreland team in failure.  According to the rigged body counts on the nightly news, we were winning the war, but that was only until we lost.

    One slogan stands out in my mind, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”  We’ll never know how many there were, but there were many.  The war drove LBJ from office, but it brought in Richard Nixon.  He said he had a plan to end the war.  This turned out to be massive bombing of North Vietnam, and secret and illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia.  It was shameful, but not as shameful as Kissinger receiving a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the shape of the table for peace talks with the Vietnamese.

    What kind of a country could pursue such a war against peasants fighting for their freedom?  Answer: The same kind of country that could drop atomic bombs on civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Sadly, in the years since you’ve been gone, our country has learned little about compassion.  We have fought new wars, including one in Iraq, based upon presidential lies having to do with illusory weapons of mass destruction.

    America has continued to waste its treasure in fighting wars around the world, as well as its dignity, its goodwill, its youth and its future.  I wish I could give you a more positive report on what America learned from the Vietnam War, but most of what it has learned seems intended to make wars easier to prosecute, such as ending conscription, relying on a poverty-driven volunteer army, embedding reporters with the troops, and not allowing photographs of returning coffins.  Incidentally, no dominoes ever fell.

    America has yet to learn that war is not the answer, that bombs do not make friends and military power does not bring peace.  Our military budget is immense.  When all is added in, it amounts to over a trillion dollars annually.  Imagine what a difference even a fraction of those funds would make in fulfilling basic human needs for Americans and people throughout the world.

    I wish you were here to stand up and speak out for peace and justice, for a better, more peaceful country and world.  We need you.

  • Vandenberg ICBM Tests Are Not Innocuous

    Regarding the second ICBM test from Vandenberg within a week, it has become tedious to read time after time that the tests “are a visible reminder to both our adversaries and our allies of the readiness and capabilities of the Minuteman III weapon system.”

    We certainly know by now that these missiles, when armed with nuclear weapons, can destroy cities and, in a nuclear war, contribute to human extinction.  We also know that nuclear deterrence is only a hypothesis about human behavior that has not and cannot be proven to be effective.  In the 70 years of the Nuclear Age there have been many close calls when nuclear deterrence came close to failing.

    General Lee Butler, a former commander-in-chief of the US Strategic Command, who was once in charge of all US strategic nuclear weapons, has said, “Nuclear deterrence was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence and fragile human relationships.”

    General Butler’s wisdom makes the colonels from Vandenberg who are quoted sound like naïve school children.  Of course, these officers are only doing their job and repeating a simplistic message about the value of nuclear deterrence.  Unfortunately, their perspective endangers the lives of all school children, and the rest of us, now and in the future.

    There are more reasons to oppose ICBM tests from Vandenberg than that they are too expensive and violate treaty agreements, although these are certainly valid.  The tests are a waste of resources and they violate US obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to negotiate in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race at an early date.

    Other reasons include: attempting to justify the “use them or lose them” nature of the Minuteman III missile force; the incentives for proliferation that US missile testing provide; the dangers to Santa Barbara County due to the proximity of Vandenberg; and the immorality of threatening to use nuclear-armed missiles that together could result in billions of deaths of humans and other forms of life.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has a new booklet entitled, “15 Moral Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons,” available on its website.

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

  • The Merry-Go-Round

    The end could begin with a missile launched by accident.
    And then the response would be deliberate, as would be
    the counter-response, and on and on until we were all

    gone.

    Or, it could be deliberate from the outset, an act
    of madness by a suicidal leader, setting the end in motion.

    First, the blasts and mushroom clouds.  Then the fires
    and burning cities and the winds driving the fires, turning
    humans into projectiles, and all of it mixed with deadly
    radiation.  Finally, for the last act, the soot from destroyed
    cities rising into the upper stratosphere, blocking the sunlight
    and the temperatures falling into a frozen Ice Age, followed
    by mass starvation.

    If any humans were left to name it, they might call it
    “Global Hiroshima,” but none would be left.
    It would be ugly for a while, eerily still and silent
    for some stretch of time, but no one would be there
    to observe.  Still, the Earth would go on rotating
    around the sun and the universe would go on expanding.

    Only we humans would be off the not-so-merry-go-round.

     

     

  • Nuclear Weapons and Possible Human Extinction: The Heroic Marshall Islanders

    Extinction is a harsh and unforgiving word, a word that should make us shiver. Time moves inexorably in one direction only and, when extinction is complete, there are no further chances for revival. Extinction is a void, a black hole, from which return is forever foreclosed. If we can imagine the terrible void of extinction, then perhaps we can mobilize to forestall its occurrence, even its possibility.

    The brilliant American author Jonathan Schell, who wrote The Fate of the Earth and was an ardent nuclear abolitionist, had this insight into the Nuclear Age, “We prepare for our extinction in order to assure our survival.”[i] He refers to the irony and idiocy of reliance upon nuclear weapons to avert nuclear war.

    David KriegerNuclear deterrence is what the political, military and industrial leaders of the nuclear-armed and nuclear-dependent states call strategy. It involves the deployment of nuclear weapons on the land, in the air and under the oceans, and the constant striving to modernize and improve these weapons of mass annihilation.

    Nuclear deterrence strategy rests on the unfounded, unproven and unprovable conviction that the deployment of these weapons, including those on hair-trigger alert, will protect their possessors from nuclear attack. It rests on the further naïve beliefs that nothing will go awry and that humans will be able to indefinitely control the monstrous weapons they have created without incident or accident, without miscalculation or intentional malevolence. In truth, these beliefs are simply that, beliefs, without any solid basis in fact. They are tenuously based, on a foundation of faith as opposed to a provable reality. They are the conjuring of a nuclear priesthood in collaboration with pliable politicians and corporate nuclear profiteers. They are seemingly intent upon providing a final omnicidal demonstration of, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “the banality of evil.”[ii]

    Nuclear strategists and ordinary people rarely consider the mythology that sustains nuclear deterrence, which is built upon a foundation of rationality. But national leaders are often irrational, and there are no guarantees that nuclear weapons will not be used in the future. There have been many close calls in the past, not the least of which was the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Does it seem even remotely possible that all leaders of all nuclear-armed countries will act rationally at all times under all circumstances? It would be irrational to think so.

    In nuclear deterrence strategies there are vast unknowns and unknowable possibilities. Our behaviors and those of our nuclear-armed opponents are not always knowable. We must expect the unexpected, but we cannot know in advance in what forms it will present itself. This means that we cannot be prepared for every eventuality. We do know, however, that human fallibility and nuclear weapons are a volatile mix, and this is particularly so in times of crisis, such as we are experiencing now in US-Russian relations over Ukraine.

    Such volatility in a climate of crisis deepens the concern regarding the possibility of nuclear extinction. We can think of it as Nuclear Roulette, in which the nuclear-armed states are loading nuclear weapons into the metaphorical chambers of a gun and pointing that gun (or those several guns) at humanity’s head. No one knows how many nuclear weapons have been loaded into the gun. Are our chances of human extinction in the 21st century one in one hundred, one in ten, one in six, or one in two? The truth is that we do not know, but the odds of survival are not comforting.

    My colleague, physicist John Scales Avery, views the prospects of human survival as dim at best. He writes: “It is a life-or-death question. We can see this most clearly when we look far ahead. Suppose that each year there is a certain finite chance of a nuclear catastrophe, let us say 2 percent. Then in a century the chance of survival will be 13.5 percent, and in two centuries, 1.8 percent, in three centuries, 0.25 percent, in four centuries, there would only be a 0.034 percent chance of survival and so on. Over many centuries, the chance of survival would shrink almost to zero. Thus, by looking at the long-term future, we can see clearly that if nuclear weapons are not entirely eliminated, civilization will not survive.”[iii]

    Here is what we know: First, nuclear weapons are capable of causing human extinction, along with the extinction of many other species. Second, nine countries continue to rely upon these weapons for their so-called “national security.” Third, these nine countries are continuing to modernize their nuclear arsenals and failing to fulfill their legal and moral obligations to achieve a Nuclear Zero world – one in which human extinction by means of nuclear weapons is not a possibility because there are no nuclear weapons.

    Given these knowable facts, we might ask: What kind of “national security” is it to rely upon weapons capable of causing human extinction? Or, to put it another way: How can any nation be secure when nuclear weapons threaten all humanity? Certainly, it requires massive amounts of denial to remain apathetic to the extinction dangers posed by nuclear weapons. There appears to be a kind of mass insanity – a detachment from reality. Such detachment seems possible only in societies that have made themselves subservient to the nuclear “experts” and officials who have become the high priests of nuclear strategy. Whole societies have developed a gambler’s addiction to living at the edge of the precipice of nuclear annihilation.

    Remember Jonathan Schell’s insight: “We prepare for our extinction in order to assure our survival.” Of course, it is nonsensical to prepare for extinction to assure survival. Just as to achieve peace, we must prepare for peace, not war, we must be assuring our survival not by preparing for our extinction, but by ridding the world of the weapons that make this threat a possibility. We must, as Albert Einstein warned, change our “modes of thinking” or face “unparalleled catastrophe.”[iv]

    The Victims

    There have been many victims of the Nuclear Age, starting with those who died and those who survived the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This year marks the 70th anniversary of those bombings. The survivors of those bombings are growing older and more anxious to see their fervent wish, the abolition of nuclear weapons, realized.

    In addition to the victims in the atomic-bombed cities, there have been many other victims of nuclear weapons. These include the people at the nuclear test sites and those downwind from them. They have suffered cancers, leukemia and other illnesses. The effects of the radiation from the nuclear tests have also affected subsequent generations, causing stillbirths and many forms of birth defects.

    The Marshall Islanders were one group of nuclear victims. They lived on pristine Pacific islands, living simple lives close to the ocean waters that provided their bounty. But between 1946 and 1958 the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The tests had the equivalent power of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs being exploded daily for 12 years. Some of the islands and atolls in the Marshall Islands became too radioactive to inhabit. The people of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), who became guinea pigs for the US to study, continue to suffer. They have never received fair or adequate compensation for their injuries resulting from the US nuclear testing program.

    On March 1, 1954, the US conducted a nuclear test on the island of Bikini in the Marshall Islands. The bomb, detonated in a test known as Castle Bravo, had 1,000 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. It contaminated the Bikini atoll and several other islands in the Marshall Islands, including Rongelap (100 miles away) and Utirik (300 miles away), as well as fishing vessels more than 100 miles from the detonation. Crew members aboard the Japanese vessel “Lucky Dragon” were severely irradiated and one crew member died as a result of radiation poisoning. This day is known internationally as “Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day” or “Bikini Day.” Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum remembers the Bravo explosion as “a jolt on my soul that never left me.”[v]

    The Victims as Heroes

    On April 24, 2014, after more than a year-and-a-half of planning and preparations, the Marshall Islands filed lawsuits against nine nuclear-armed states in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague and against the United States separately in US Federal District Court in San Francisco. The Marshall Islanders seek no compensation in these lawsuits, but rather declaratory and injunctive relief declaring the nuclear-armed states to be in breach of their nuclear disarmament obligations and ordering them to fulfill these obligations by commencing within one year to negotiate in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament.[vi]

    The Marshall Islands lawsuits referred to obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and under customary international law. Regarding the latter, they relied upon a portion of the ICJ’s 1996 Advisory Opinion on the Illegality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons in which the Court stated: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”[vii]

    The Marshall Islands is the mouse that roared, it is David standing against the nine nuclear goliaths, it is the friend not willing to let friends drive drunk on nuclear power. Most of all, the Marshall Islands is a heroic small nation that is standing up for all humanity against those countries that are perpetuating the risk of nuclear war and the nuclear extinction of humanity and other forms of complex life on the planet. The courage and foresight of the Marshall Islands is a harbinger of hope that should give hope to us all.

    The Current Status of the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits

    In the US case, the US government filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit against it on jurisdictional grounds. On February 3, 2015, the federal judge, a George W. Bush appointee, granted the motion. The Marshall Islands have announced their intention to appeal the judge’s decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    At the International Court of Justice, cases are in process against the three countries that accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the court – India, Pakistan and the UK. Both India and Pakistan are seeking to limit their cases to jurisdictional issues. It remains to be seen whether or not the UK will follow suit. Of the other nuclear-armed countries that do not accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the court, none have accepted the Marshall Islands invitation to engage in the lawsuits, but only China has explicitly said that it will not.

    An important observation about the lawsuits is that there has been reticence by the nuclear-armed states to have the issue of their obligations for nuclear disarmament heard by the courts. It would appear that the nuclear-armed countries are not eager to have their people or the people of the world know about their legal obligations to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament or about their breaches of those obligations. Nor do they want the courts to order them to fulfill those obligations.

    The Lawsuits Are about More than the Law

    With regard to the legal aspects of these lawsuits, they are about whether treaties matter. They are about whether the most powerful nations are to be bound by the same rules as the rest of the international community. They are about whether a treaty can stand up with only half of the bargain fulfilled. They are about who gets to decide if treaty obligations are being met. Do all parties to a treaty stand on equal footing, or do the powerful have special rules specifically for them? They are also about the strength of customary international law to bind nations to civilized behavior.

    These lawsuits are about more than just the law. They are about breaking cocoons of complacency and a conversion of hearts. They are also about leadership, boldness, courage, justice, wisdom and, ultimately, about survival. Let me say a word about each of these.

    Leadership. If the most powerful countries won’t lead, then other countries must. The Marshall Islands, a small island country, has demonstrated this leadership, both on ending climate chaos and on eliminating the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.

    Boldness. Many of us in civil society have been calling for boldness in relation to the failure of the nuclear-armed countries to fulfill their obligations to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and to achieve complete nuclear disarmament. The status quo has become littered with broken promises, and these have become hard to tolerate. Instead of negotiating in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race “at an early date,” the nuclear-armed countries have engaged in massive programs of modernization of their nuclear arsenals (nuclear weapons, delivery systems and infrastructure). Such modernization of the US nuclear arsenal alone is anticipated to cost a trillion dollars over the next three decades. Nuclear modernization by all nuclear-armed countries will ensure that nuclear weapons are deployed throughout the 21st century and beyond. The Marshall Islands is boldly challenging the status quo with the Nuclear Zero lawsuits.

    Courage. The Marshall Islands is standing up for humanity in bringing these lawsuits. I see them as David standing against the nine nuclear-armed Goliaths. But the Marshall Islands is a David acting nonviolently, using the courts and the law instead of a slingshot. The Marshall Islands shows us by its actions what courage looks like.

    Justice. The law should always be about justice. In the case of nuclear weapons, both the law and justice call for an equal playing field, one in which no country has possession of nuclear weapons. That is the bargain of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the requirement of customary international law, and the Marshall Islands is taking legal action that seeks justice in the international community.

    Wisdom. The lawsuits are about the wisdom to confront the hubris of the nuclear-armed countries. The arrogance of power is dangerous, and the arrogance of reliance upon nuclear weapons could be fatal for all humanity.

    Survival. At their core, the Nuclear Zero lawsuits brought by the Marshall Islands are about survival. They are about making nuclear war, by design or accident or miscalculation, impossible because there are no longer nuclear weapons to threaten humanity. Without nuclear weapons in the world, there can be no nuclear war, no nuclear famine, no nuclear terrorism, no overriding threat to the human species and the future of humanity.

    The dream of ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity should be the dream not only of the Marshall Islanders, but our dream as well It must become our collective dream – not only for ourselves, but for the human future. We must challenge the “experts” and officials who tell us, “Don’t worry, be happy” with the nuclear status quo.

    The people of the world should follow the lead of the Marshall Islanders. If they can lead, we can support them. If they can be bold, we can join them. If they can be courageous, we can be as well. If they can demand that international law be based on justice, we can stand with them. If they can act wisely and confront hubris, with all its false assumptions, we can join them in doing so. If they can take seriously the threat to human survival inherent in our most dangerous weapons, so can we. The Marshall Islands is showing us the way forward, breaking cocoons of complacency and demonstrating a conversion of the heart.

    I am proud to be associated with the Marshall Islands and its extraordinary Foreign Minister, Tony de Brum. As a consultant to the Marshall Islands, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has worked to build the legal teams that support the Nuclear Zero lawsuits. We have also built a consortium of 75 civil society organizations that support the lawsuits. We have also created a way for individuals to add their voices of support with a brief petition. Already over 5 million people have signed the petition supporting the Nuclear Zero lawsuits. You can find out more and add your voice at the campaign website, www.nuclearzero.org.

    I will conclude with a poem that I wrote recently, entitled “Testing Nuclear Weapons in the Marshall Islands.”

    TESTING NUCLEAR WEAPONS
    IN THE MARSHALL ISLANDS

    The islands were alive
    with the red-orange fire of sunset
    splashed on a billowy sky.

    The islanders lived simple lives
    close to the edge of the ocean planet
    reaching out to infinity.

    The days were bright and the nights
    calm in this happy archipelago
    until the colonizers came.

    These were sequentially the Spanish,
    Germans, Japanese and then, worst of all,
    the United States.

    The U.S. came as trustee
    bearing its new bombs, eager to test them
    in this beautiful barefoot Eden.

    The islanders were trusting,
    even when the bombs began exploding
    and the white ash fell like snow.

    The children played
    in the ash as it floated down on them,
    covering them in poison.

    The rest is a tale of loss
    and suffering by the islanders, of madness
    by the people of the bomb.

     

    [i] Krieger, David (Ed.), Speaking of Peace, Quotations to Inspire Action, Santa Barbara, CA: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 2014, p. 69.

    [ii] Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1023716-eichmann-in-jerusalem-a-report-on-the-banality-of-evil

    [iii] Avery, John Scales, “Remember Your Humanity,” website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/remember-your-humanity/

    [iv] Krieger, David (Ed.), op. cit., p. 52.

    [v] De Brum, Tony, website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation: https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com/tony-debrum/

    [vi] Information on the Marshall Islands’ Nuclear Zero Lawsuits can be found at www.nuclearzero.org.

    [vii] “Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons,” United Nations General Assembly, A/51/218, 15 October 1996, p. 37.

  • 2015 Kelly Lecture Introduction

    Welcome to the 14th annual Frank K. Kelly Lecture on Humanity’s Future, a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

    I want to thank our sponsors for tonight’s event and make special mention of our principal sponsors: The Santa Barbara Foundation and the Terry and Mary Kelly Foundation. I also want to thank all of you for being here tonight and for caring about humanity’s future.

    kelly_2015The Kelly Lecture Series honors the vision and compassion of Frank K. Kelly, a founder and long-time senior vice president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Frank believed deeply that everyone deserves a seat at humanity’s table. He gave the first lecture in the series in 2002 on the subject, “Glorious Beings: What We Are and What We May Become.” Just the title of his talk gives you an idea of his unbounded optimism.

    For this Lecture series, the Foundation invites a distinguished speaker each year. Recent Kelly Lecturers have included Noam Chomsky, Dennis Kucinich and Daniel Ellsberg. Other lecturers in the series include Dame Anita Roddick, Frances Moore Lappe and Mairead Corrigan Maguire. You can find a complete list of the lecturers and their lectures on-line, as well as other information on the Foundation, at www.wagingpeace.org.

    The Kelly Lecture is one of many projects of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Other major projects include consulting with the Marshall Islands on their Nuclear Zero lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed countries. These David versus Goliath lawsuits seek no compensation, but rather ask the Courts to order the nuclear-armed countries to fulfill their obligations under international law to negotiate in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament.

    Another important Foundation project is our Peace Leadership Program, headed by Paul Chappell, who travels the world training people to become peace leaders and training peace leaders to be more effective in their efforts. Right now Paul is in Washington, DC, where there is a definite need for an infusion of peace Leadership.

    Another of our projects is exploring the moral reasons to abolish nuclear weapons, and to break the bonds of complacency that have led in the Nuclear Age to putting the future of humanity into the hands of so-called nuclear “experts” and policy makers, a most dangerous nuclear “priesthood.”

    The most important of these moral reasons is that we are putting all of Creation at risk of extinction. Could there be a greater crime or moral shortcoming? It is the multiplication of homicide by more than seven billion. It is moving beyond homicide and genocide to omnicide, the death of all.

    Let me share with you a quote from humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm: “For the first time in history, the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart.”

    Our lecturer tonight has worked for over four decades to create this radical change in the human heart. She is a passionate and committed advocate of a nuclear weapons-free world. She is a medical doctor, a pediatrician, from Australia who works to save the world’s children and, with them, the rest of us. She has diagnosed the severe societal disease of “nuclearism” and has advocated its cure through nuclear abolition.

    Dr. Caldicott is a recipient of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, and has served as a member of our Advisory Council since 1994. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by two-time Nobel recipient Linus Pauling. The Smithsonian has named her one of the most influential women of the 20th century.

    She has just organized and held a vitally important symposium in New York on “The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction.” I was privileged to be one of the speakers at the symposium, which took place this past weekend at the New York Academy of Medicine.

    Tonight Dr. Caldicott will be speaking on “Preserving Humanity’s Future.” It is my pleasure to introduce our 2015 Kelly Lecturer, Dr. Helen Caldicott.

    (The video of Dr. Caldicott’s lecture will be at this link. DVD copies will also be available to use for public screenings. For further information, contact Rick Wayman at rwayman@napf.org.)

  • Bush-Appointed Judge Dismisses Nuclear Zero Lawsuit; Marshall Islands to Appeal

    On April 24, 2014, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a Pacific Island country of 70,000 inhabitants, took bold action on nuclear disarmament. It brought lawsuits at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the world’s highest court, against the nine nuclear-armed countries, accusing them of violating their obligations under international law to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and for total nuclear disarmament. Because of the importance of the US as a nuclear power and the fact that it does not accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ, the Marshall Islands at the same time brought a similar lawsuit against the US in US federal district court in Northern California.

    In the US case, rather than engaging in the case in good faith, the US government responded by filing a motion to dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds. On February 3, 2015, George W. Bush appointee Judge Jeffrey White granted the US motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the RMI, although a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), lacked standing to bring the case and that the lawsuit is barred by the political question doctrine.

    Regarding the RMI’s standing to bring the case, Judge White found that the harm of the future spread and use of nuclear weapons is too speculative “to establish injury in fact.” By implication, the Court is taking the position that the RMI must wait until there is further nuclear proliferation or a nuclear war to establish a concrete injury suitable to provide standing. Further, the Court found that the RMI claims of injury “cannot be redressed by compelling the specific performance of only one nation to the Treaty,” that is, the US. But this is not what the RMI was asking of the Court. It was asking that the Court declare the US in breach of its obligations under the NPT and customary international law and to order the US to commence negotiations in good faith within one year.

    The Court went on to say that even if the RMI could establish standing to sue it would be barred by the political question doctrine, which says that political questions should be handled by the political branches of government rather than by the courts. In this case, the Court deferred to the Executive branch of government, the branch that the RMI accused of failing to fulfill its legal obligations. The Court’s decision on this is akin to turning the matter over to the foxes to guard the nuclear henhouse. This will cause many national leaders to reconsider the value of entering into treaties with the US.

    In an important concluding footnote to the Court’s decision, Judge White wrote, “…the Court finds enforcement shall depend upon the interest and honor of the parties to the Treaty.” The judge was drawing upon an 1884 case known as Hard Money Cases, and included this quote from that case, “If these [interests] fail, its infraction becomes the subject of international negotiations and reclamations….It is obvious that with all this the judicial courts have nothing to do and can give no redress.” What the judge omitted in the ellipses following the word “reclamations” was “so far as the injured party chooses to seek redress, which may in the end be enforced by actual war.”

    In other words, in dismissing the Marshall Islands case, the judge relied upon a 19th century case that left matters to the Executive branch of government with the fallback position not of a peaceful judicial remedy, but enforcement by war. Of course, so long as nuclear weapons exist, that war could be a nuclear war, with the possibility of destroying cities, countries, civilization and human life on the planet.

    Knowing how high the stakes are for humanity, the Marshall Islands will not give up. Their people suffered the catastrophic and irreparable damage of these weapons when the US conducted 67 nuclear tests on their islands between 1946 and 1958, with the equivalent power of exploding 1.6 Hiroshima bombs daily for 12 years. The RMI has vowed to fight so that no one else on Earth will ever have to suffer these atrocities. It intends to take the next step and appeal the Court’s order to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. It also remains engaged in the three lawsuits for which there is compulsory jurisdiction at the ICJ, those against India, Pakistan and the UK.

    Despite the Court’s ruling on the motion to dismiss, there is nothing preventing the US from fulfilling its obligations to enter into negotiations in good faith for complete nuclear disarmament. Surely, a US initiative for convening such negotiations would be welcomed by most of the world’s countries and people. It would reduce the chances of nuclear proliferation, nuclear accident and nuclear war. It would also be consistent with President Obama’s Prague promise regarding “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a consultant to the Marshall Islands in the Nuclear Zero lawsuits.

    This article was published on Truthout at http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28997-bush-appointed-judge-dismisses-nuclear-zero-lawsuit-marshall-islands-to-appeal

  • Where’s America’s Commitment to Seek a World Without Nuclear Weapons?

    Nuclear weapons do not make Americans safer.  Rather, they threaten us all with their uncontrollable and unforgiving power.  They are weapons of mass annihilation, indiscriminate in nature, threatening combatants and civilians alike. They kill and maim.  They cause unnecessary suffering.  They are immoral and their use would violate the humanitarian laws of warfare.  No country should be allowed to possess weaponry that is capable of destroying civilization and ending most life on the planet, including the human species.

    David KriegerNuclear weapons and human fallibility are a most dangerous mix.  As long as nuclear weapons exist in the world, civilization and the human species are threatened.  Nuclear deterrence is not foolproof, and time is not our friend.  We must approach this task with the urgency it demands.  We must confront nuclear weapons and those countries that possess and rely upon them with what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.”

    There are still more than 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world, most in the arsenals of the United States and Russia.  However, seven other countries also possess these annihilators.  These countries are: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.  Even one of these weapons can destroy a city, a few can destroy a country, and an exchange of 100 of them between India and Pakistan on the other side’s cities could trigger a nuclear famine resulting in the deaths of some two billion people globally.  A larger nuclear exchange between the US and Russia could return the planet to an ice age, resulting in nearly universal death.

    What is needed today is for the countries of the world to engage in negotiations in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and to achieve total nuclear disarmament.  That is what is required of us and the other countries of the world under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law.  Unfortunately, rather than negotiating in good faith for these ends, the nuclear-armed countries are engaged in expensive programs to modernize their nuclear arsenals.

    The goal of negotiations should be a universal agreement for all the nuclear-armed countries to give up their nuclear arsenals in a phased, verifiable, irreversible and transparent manner.  It will require the participation of all countries, but some country will need to lead in convening these negotiations.  That country should be the United States of America, given its background in developing, using and testing nuclear weapons.  But, if history is a guide, that won’t happen until the people of the United States demand it of their government.

    The country that has stepped up to take a leadership role in calling on the nuclear-armed nations to fulfill their obligations for nuclear disarmament is a small, courageous Pacific Island state, the Republic of the Marshall Islands.  It is suing the nine nuclear-armed nations to require them to do what they are obligated to do under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and customary international law; that is, to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament.

    The Nuclear Zero initiative of the Marshall Islands falls in this 70th anniversary year of the first use of nuclear weapons by the United States.  Enough people have already suffered from nuclear weapons – those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, those in the Marshall Islands, the Nevada Test Site, Semipalatinsk, Lop Nor and other nuclear weapon test sites around the world.  It is time for humanity to take charge of its own destiny.  In the Nuclear Age, ridding the world of nuclear weapons is an imperative.  Our common future depends upon our shared success.

    Of course, the perspective expressed above is my own.  It is tragic, though, that such a perspective did not make it into the President’s 2015 State of the Union Message to the Congress and People of the United States.  It was an opportunity to teach and lead that was missed by the President.  Why, we might ask, is he engaged in modernizing the US nuclear arsenal, a trillion dollar project, instead of negotiating for the elimination of nuclear weapons?  After all, in Prague in 2009, the president expressed boldly, “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”  What has happened to that commitment?

    Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).  He is the author of ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition. 

    This article was originally published by The Hill.

     

  • The 2015 State of the Union Address: A Major Omission

    When President Obama first took office he was deeply concerned about nuclear disarmament. In 2009, in a speech in Prague he had this to say about nuclear weapons:

    Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. Testing has continued. Black market trade in nuclear secrets and nuclear materials abound. The technology to build a bomb has spread. Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.

    He also said at Prague:

    So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.) I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly — perhaps not in my lifetime. It will take patience and persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that the world cannot change. We have to insist, “Yes, we can.” (Applause.)

    us-presidential-sealWe might well ask not only what happened to “America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but what happened to President Obama’s commitment?

    In President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union Address, the only mention of nuclear weapons was in relation to the agreement the Obama administration is seeking to negotiate with Iran. The President promised to veto any additional sanctions placed on Iran, which he said would undermine the negotiations between the US and Iran to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. President Obama also expressed considerable concern for the dangers of climate change, a clear danger to the environment and the future. But there was no mention in the State of the Union of “America’s commitment” to nuclear disarmament.

    President Obama’s early concerns for nuclear disarmament led to his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, but he seems to have given up his pursuit of a world without nuclear weapons. He does so to the detriment of all Americans and all people of the world. Nuclear weapons are equal opportunity destroyers – women, men and children. Under Obama’s leadership, America is setting a course to modernize its nuclear infrastructure, weapons and delivery systems. Not only is the expected price tag for the US nuclear modernization program expected to exceed $1 trillion over the next three decades, but such a program endangers all Americans rather than providing them with security.

    In a recent article in The Nation, Theodore Postol, a MIT professor emeritus of science, technology and national security policy, argued, “No rational actor would take steps to start a nuclear war. But the modernization effort significantly increases the chances of an accident during an unpredicted, and unpredictable, crisis – one that could escalate beyond anyone’s capacity to imagine.” Postol concluded, “In a world that is fundamentally unpredictable, the pursuit of an unchallenged capacity to fight and win a nuclear war is a dangerous folly.”

    Mr. President, we live in an unpredictable world, but it is predictable based on history that nuclear weapons and human fallibility are a dangerous and highly flammable mix. Nuclear weapons, including our own, threaten all Americans and all humanity. Don’t give up on the essential quest for a Nuclear Zero world, which you seemed so eager to achieve upon assuming office.

  • Fifteen Moral Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

    1. Thou shalt not kill.
    2. Thou shalt not threaten to slaughter the innocent.
    3. Thou shalt not cause unnecessary suffering.
    4. Thou shalt not poison the future.
    5. Thou shalt not hold hostage cities and their inhabitants.
    6. Thou shalt not threaten to destroy civilization.
    7. Thou shalt not abandon stewardship of fish and fowl, birds and beasts.
    8. Thou shalt not put all of Creation at risk of annihilation.
    9. Thou shalt not use weapons that cannot be contained in space or time.
    10. Thou shalt not waste resources on weapons – resources that could be far better used for meeting basic human needs of the poor and downtrodden.
    11. Thou shalt not fail to fulfill one’s obligations to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament.
    12. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s missiles.
    13. Thou shalt not worship false idols.
    14. Thou shalt not keep silent in the face of the nuclear threat to all we love and treasure.
    15. Thou shalt live by the Golden Rule, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.Thou shalt not kill