Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: International Issues

  • Ten Years After India’s Nuclear Tests: Deeper Into the Morass

    Article originally appeared in The Hindu

    Since Pokharan, we have been witness to an opportunistic shift in the stance of the government, from an outright condemnation of nuclear deterrence to an unabated enthusiasm for the development of a full-fledged arsenal.

    Hand in hand, expenditures on non-nuclear military activities and acquisition of conventional weapons have also increased dramatically…The impact of these expenditures, of course, falls primarily upon the poor and the vulnerable.

    In 1996, the International Court of Justice offered a historic Advisory Opinion where it ruled that “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of international humanitarian law” and endorsed unanimously a legal obligation on all States “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.” Earlier, as the case was being considered, India submitted a Memorial where it argued that nuclear deterrence should be considered “abhorrent to human sentiment since it implies that a state, if required to defend its own existence, will act with pitiless disregard for the consequences of its own and adversary’s people”. This description is apt. Though just an unproven assumption, nuclear deterrence relies on the accumulation of weapons of mass destruction aimed at killing large numbers of people in the wishful hope that such annihilation would deter another country from attacking because of fear.

    Some years later, in January 2003, the Indian government issued a nuclear doctrine which explicitly stated that the country is pursuing nuclear deterrence, though this was qualified as a minimal one. But the doctrine also warns that “nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage”. Unacceptable damage, in plain English, means that these nuclear weapons would be dropped on cities, each killing lakhs or millions of innocent people. The few years between the clear and forthright condemnation of deterrence and the enthusiastic invocation of deterrence are among the most important in recent Indian history.

    The biggest event occurred 10 years ago, on May 11, 1998, when three nuclear devices exploded in the Pokharan desert. Two days later, two more explosions were conducted and Prime Minister Vajpayee proudly announced that India was now a nuclear weapon State. Pakistan’s leaders, showing that they too subscribed to the twisted logic that drives the acquisition of nuclear weapons, conducted six explosions of their own on May 28 and 30. With those tests, the half-century-old conflict between India and Pakistan acquired a nuclear edge.
    Nuclear threats

    The edge was to be seen soon. Contrary to the claims of nuclear weapons advocates, who promised peace and a cessation of war, India and Pakistan fought over Kargil bitterly within a year of the tests. Though limited geographically, the war is estimated to have cost about 1,700 Indian lives and nearly 800 Pakistani ones. Indian and Pakistani officials delivered indirect and direct nuclear threats to one another at least 13 times. There are also plausible, though not convincing, reports that the two countries did prepare their nuclear arsenals for potential use.

    Kargil was the first major confrontation between two nuclear powers. Indeed, the war may even be the first caused by nuclear weapons. The late Benazir Bhutto stated that in 1996 Pakistani military officers had presented her with plans for a Kargil style operation, which she vetoed. It would therefore seem that the 1998 tests convinced Pakistan’s political and military leaders that the operation might be feasible with nuclear weapons to restrict any possible Indian riposte.

    The pattern of nuclear intimidation seen in Kargil was to be repeated during the major military crises that followed the militant attack on the Parliament in December 2001. Even Prime Minister Vajpayee warned: “no weapon would be spared in self-defence. Whatever weapon was available, it would be used no matter how it wounded the enemy”. On the other side of the border, former chief of the Pakistan Army, General Mirza Aslam Beg, declared: “We can make a first strike, and a second strike or even a third”.

    Although it did not develop into war, a number of factors make the 2002 crisis more dangerous than the Kargil war. Unlike Kargil, where Pakistan is clearly seen to have lost, especially politically, both sides claim the 2002 crisis as a victory. On the one hand General Musharraf’s promise that he would rein in Pakistan-based militant organisations is seen as proof that India’s “coercive diplomacy” worked. Pakistan’s case is simpler. Despite the huge build-up of forces by India, and much talk of attacking so-called terrorist camps within Pakistan, no military attacks actually occurred. That a massive military confrontation with strong nuclear overtones is seen by both sides as a victory increases the likelihood that similar incidents will occur in the future.

    Nuclear costs

    The obvious lesson of these two military crises, that nuclear weapons cause insecurity, has been ignored by nuclear advocates. Instead, they claimed that just testing nuclear weapons is insufficient for deterrence and called for the kinds of steps that India had earlier criticised nuclear weapons States for taking. Following their advice, India has not only adopted use-doctrines and practices similar to those of nuclear weapon States, but has also embarked on developing the paraphernalia needed for the adoption of these doctrines. These include a triad of delivery vehicles, including aircraft capable of dropping nuclear bombs, missiles launched from land and sea, and a nuclear submarine; training the military to use these; a command and control structure to oversee the deployment and use of nuclear weapons; components of an early warning system and an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defence system. No one has been keeping count of the crores of rupees being spent in this process. Hand in hand, expenditures on non-nuclear military activities and acquisition of conventional weapons have also increased dramatically. This is in direct contradiction to the erstwhile claims of nuclear advocates that the acquisition of nuclear weapons would reduce expenditure on conventional weapons. The impact of these expenditures, of course, falls primarily upon the poor and the vulnerable.

    A growing arsenal

    One of the adjectives appended to deterrence in India’s nuclear doctrine is minimal. (The other adjective – credible – is superfluous. A deterrent that is not credible cannot deter.) When asked to delineate what constitutes minimal, policy makers resort to obfuscation. Minimal, they claim, is a dynamic concept and one which cannot be specified in advance. Given the massive destructive power of nuclear weapons, it should be obvious that a dozen or so suffice to obliterate several cities and millions of people in Pakistan or China. But going by current public estimates, the fissile material stockpile just from CIRUS and Dhruva, the two reactors reportedly assigned for making plutonium for weapons, should be sufficient for over a hundred nuclear weapons. Perhaps the meaning of minimal is simply that it is not maximal.

    That the future arsenal size sought by policymakers is much larger was made clear during the negotiations and public debates surrounding the nuclear deal that is being negotiated with the United States. As a report from the International Panel of Fissile Materials, which the author is a part of, shows, the number of reactors that the DAE strenuously kept outside of safeguards can produce several dozen nuclear weapons worth of plutonium every year (available at www.fissilematerials.org).

    New attitudes

    During the 1990s, one oft-heard argument from those espousing nuclear weapons was that while these were evil, they were a necessary evil. To the extent that the pressures of this lobby were resisted, India acquired weapons only reluctantly. That was then. What is on display today is unabated enthusiasm for the ongoing development of a full fledged arsenal. And all the attitudes that go with being a State possessing nuclear weapons.

    Such a shift in attitude was on display during the unexpected vote against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005. While much attention was focused on US pressure, there was something deeper too. In an earlier era, Indian leaders would have denounced the hypocrisy of the United States, with its immense nuclear arsenal, lecturing Iran about its small uranium enrichment plant. Now, one heard many policy-makers talking about why nuclear proliferation was dangerous and Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear technology. Non-proliferation, which used to be seen as immoral, has come to take the place of disarmament, the truly worthwhile goal.

    The opportunistic switch in stance is somewhat akin to what has been called the third class railway compartment syndrome. Those waiting on a crowded platform clamour in the name of justice and fairness to be let into compartment. But once inside, the opportunist shuts the door and keeps the others outside, with force if necessary.

    In July 1946, following the US attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Mahatma Gandhi observed, “the atom bomb has deadened the finest feelings which have sustained mankind for agesŠIt has resulted for the time being in the soul of Japan being destroyed. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see.”

    Unfortunately in our case, the first decade after Pokharan has already started making the impacts quite clear. It is not too late to reverse these.

    M. V. Ramana is Senior Fellow, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream.

  • The New Nuclear Risk

    Article appeared in the Guardian’s Comment is Free site on March 31, 2008.

    Humans love to suppress abstract dangers. They react only after they get their fingers burned. In handling nuclear risks, however, we can hardly get away with such childlike behaviour.

    To begin with, the old system of nuclear deterrence, which has survived particularly in the US and Russia since the cold war’s end, still involves lots of risks and dangers. While the international public largely ignores this fact, the risks remain.

    To be sure, in the 1990’s the US and Russia reduced their nuclear arsenals from 65,000 to approximately 26,000 weapons. But this number is still almost unimaginable and beyond any rational level needed for deterrence. Moreover, there are another 1,000 nuclear weapons in the hands of other nuclear states.

    A second cause for worry is that the world is poised to enter a new nuclear age that threatens to be even more dangerous and expensive than the cold war era of mutually assured destruction. Indeed, the outlines of this new nuclear age are already visible: the connection between terrorism and nuclear weapons; a nuclear-armed North Korea; the risk of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East triggered by Iran’s nuclear program; a new definition of state sovereignty as “nuclear sovereignty”, accompanied by a massive increase in the number of small and medium-sized nuclear states; possible collapse of public order in nuclear Pakistan; the illegal proliferation of military nuclear technology; the legal proliferation of civilian nuclear technology and an increase in the number of “civilian” nuclear states; the nuclearisation of space, triggering an arms race among large nuclear powers.

    Important political leaders, especially in the two biggest nuclear powers, the US and Russia, know today’s existing risks and tomorrow’s emerging ones all too well. Yet nothing is being done to control, contain, or eliminate them. On the contrary, the situation is worsening.

    Vital pillars of the old arms-control and anti-proliferation regime have either been destroyed – as was the case with the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty – or substantially weakened, as with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Responsibility for this lies largely with the Bush administration, which, by terminating the ABM treaty, not only weakened the international control systems for nuclear weapons, but also sat on its hands when confronted with the NPT’s imminent collapse.

    At the beginning of the 21st century, proliferation of military nuclear technology is one of the major threats to humanity, particularly if this technology falls into terrorists’ hands. The use of nuclear weapons by terrorists would not only result in a major humanitarian tragedy, but also would most likely move the world beyond the threshold for actually waging a nuclear war. The consequences would be horrific.

    Nearly equally worrisome is the nuclear redefinition of state sovereignty because it will not only lead to a large number of small, politically unstable nuclear powers, but will also increase the risk of proliferation at the hands of terrorists. Pakistan would, most likely, no longer be an isolated case.

    An international initiative for the renewal and improvement of the international control regime, led by both big nuclear powers, is urgently needed to meet these and all other risks of the new nuclear age. For, if disarmament is to become effective, the signal must come from the top – the US and Russia. Here the commitment to disarmament, as agreed in the NPT, is of prime importance.

    The NPT – a bedrock of peace for more than three decades – is based on a political agreement between nuclear and non-nuclear states: the latter abstain from obtaining nuclear weapons while the former destroy their arsenals. Unfortunately, only the first part of this agreement was realised (though not completely), while the second part still awaits fulfilment.

    The NPT remains indispensable and needs urgent revision. However, this central pillar of international proliferation control is on the brink of collapse. The most recent review conference in New York, in May 2005, ended virtually without any result.

    The essential defect of the NPT is now visible in the nuclear dispute between Iran and the United Nations Security Council: the treaty permits the development of all nuclear components indispensable for military use – particularly uranium enrichment – so long as there is no outright nuclear weapons program. This means that in emerging nuclear countries only one single political decision is required to “weaponise” a nuclear program. This kind of “security” is not sufficient.

    Another controversial issue also has also come to the fore in connection with the current nuclear conflict with Iran: discrimination-free access to nuclear technology. Solving this problem will require the internationalisation of access to civilian nuclear technology, along with filling the security gap under the existing NPT and substantially more far-reaching monitoring of all states that want to be part of such a system.

    Leaders around the world know the dangers of a new nuclear age; they also know how to minimise them. But the political will to act decisively is not there, because the public does not regard nuclear disarmament and arms control as a political priority.

    This must change. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are not questions of the past. They need to be addressed today if they are not to become the most dangerous threats tomorrow.

    Joschka Fischer, a leader of the Green Party for nearly 20 years, was Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005. A leader in the Green Party for nearly 20 years, he is now a visiting professor at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

  • Comments on Complex Transformation

    Comments delivered in Madison, WI on February 16, 2008

    I am grateful for this opportunity to comment on the Department of Energy’s proposed changes in the United States Nuclear Weapons complex. I speak both as a citizen and as a historian who has published extensively on America’s more than sixty-year encounter with nuclear weapons.

    The Department of Energy’s proposal focuses exclusively on narrow technical detail. I think it is important to place this proposal in a larger context. First of all, note the choice of language. The DoE’s goal is to “modernize” our nuclear-weapons complex. Certainly all would agree that “modernization” is a good thing. Right?

    Further, underlying the proposal is an unspoken assumption: that nuclear weapons production and stockpiling will continue to be a central aspect of American public policy into the foreseeable future. This represents a further embedding of nuclear weapons into the very core of our nation’s economy, culture, and strategic policy. There is no hint of a commitment to eliminating these terrible weapons, but rather this proposal simply assumes their permanence, and at a level of thousands of weapons—a total that would have appalled all Americans when the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945, if they could have foreseen what lay ahead.

    Further, this proposed reconfiguration of the nation’s nuclear-weapons program must be viewed in the larger context of America’s overall nuclear-weapons policies over the years, and specifically the policies of the current administration. In fact, the assumption of this proposal that nuclear-weapons will remain a permanent part of the U.S. military arsenal is part of a larger pattern of government policies that pays lip service to nuclear disarmament, while in fact contributing to proliferation worldwide and dangerously worsening what used to be called the nuclear balance of terror—a term that remains all too appropriate today.

    • The current administration has worsened the danger of proliferation. The United States continues to supply Israel with military hardware and billions of dollars in aid each year, despite the fact that Israel secretly developed and stockpiled nuclear weapons in defiance of stated U.S. policy, and has refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
    • This administration has entered into a highly controversial agreement to supply nuclear know-how and technology to India, despite India’s development of nuclear weapons in defiance of international nonproliferation agreements, its refusal to open all its nuclear facilities to inspection, and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
    • This administration has given billions in aid to Pakistan, despite Pakistan’s development and testing of nuclear weapons, and despite the role of Pakistan’s top atomic scientist, A. Q. Khan, in secretly giving vital weapons-making information to other countries.
    • This administration has continued to push for the development of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, the socalled “bunker buster” missiles, despite congressional opposition, and in violation of the spirit of the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, by which the nuclear powers pledged to work in good faith for nuclear disarmament—not for developing new weapons systems.
    • Above all, the current administration has pursued the development and deployment of anti-missile missiles, a legacy of the socalled Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly called “Star Wars,” launched by President Ronald Reagan twenty five years ago. In addition to setting up anti-missile launch sites in Alaska and California, the administration now proposes further deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic, stirring fierce opposition from the Russian government, which is now threatening to target these sites with its own missiles.

    Russia’s reaction is entirely predictable, since the whole history of the nuclear arms race makes clear that an escalation by one side, whether labeled “offensive” or “defensive,” inevitably triggers a counter-move by the other side, leading to further escalation. Further, in taking this step, the Bush Administration abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had acknowledged the dangerously destabilizing effects of trying to develop a defense against missile attack. If such a system were ever actually deployed and proven to be workable, it would mean that the nation deploying the system could then safely launch a nuclear attack without fear of retaliation. The administrations anti-missile program is not only dangerous and unwise strategically, it is technologically unfeasible and a massive waste of money. As has often been noted, trying to shoot down a missile with another missile is the equivalent of trying to stop a bullet with another bullet. Test after test has resulted in failure, even when the timing of the target-missile’s firing and its trajectory were fully known! What are the chances of successfully destroying a missile fired at an unknown time, and on an unknown trajectory? Nevertheless, the current Bush administration has poured billions into this unwise and unworkable program. In the first Bush budget, spending on missile-defense hit nearly $8 billion. Despite a series of failed tests, the administration requested a staggering $9.3 billion for fiscal year 2007, the highest in the program’s history and more that the total 2006 budgets for the National Park Service, the Food and Drug Adminstration, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives, the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, and the administration’s highly touted Millennium program to combat poverty and disease in Africa. In its final budget, released in February 2008, the Bush administration requested a staggering $10.4 billion for the Missile Defense Agency, plus nearly $2 billion more for missile-defense related projects buried in other parts of the budget. The “Star Wars” scheme that Reagan sprung on the nation out of the blue in 1983 is now an embedded Pentagon program, the Missile Defense Agency, with its own entrenched bureaucracy, powerful corporate interests that stand to profit, and lobbying muscle to secure billions in new funding year after year, whatever the record of failure. The whole depressing “Star Wars” story offers a classic example of how a dangerous, misguided, and technologically unworkable program can become lodged in the bureaucracy, and take on a life of its own. In 2006, President Bush told a California audience, “Technology will once again make this country the leader of the world, and that’s what we’re here to celebrate.” When it comes to nuclear weapons, the answer is not technology, but a renewed national commitment to eliminate them from the earth—not just from “rogue states” or designated enemy nations, but eliminating them entirely.

    Much of my research has looked at the shifting rhythms of Americans’ response to nuclear weapons and the shifting fortunes of the anti-nuclear movement. What I’ve found is a pattern of upsurges of grassroots opposition to nuclear weapons, followed by a calculated government effort to neutralize that opposition. The first antinuclear movement came right after World War II, amid a massive wave of fear and revulsion against a single bomb that could destroy an entire city and snuff out hundreds of thousands of human lives in an instant. This first surge of anti-nuclear activism was blunted, however, as government propaganda hailed the promise of “the peaceful atom,” and whipped up fears of a communist takeover as the Cold War began. The second wave of grassroots antinuclear activism came in the later 1950s and early 1960s, as deadly radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests posed a terrifying danger to public health, especially the health of the most vulnerable—babies taking in radioactive poisons with their mother’s milk. This surge of activism was blunted with the signing of the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. That treaty did not end nuclear tests, but it put them underground, out of sight, and the antinuclear movement soon faded. The third wave of grassroots antinuclear activism came in the early 1980s, in reaction to the Reagan administration’s nuclear build-up, belligerent Cold War rhetoric, and renewed focus on civil defense in a possible nuclear war. As public alarm mounted, millions of Americans rallied to the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign, the brainchild of Randall Forsberg, who died prematurely last October. Some veterans of that campaign are here today. The government, in the person of President Reagan, blunted that campaign with the 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, with its deceptive promise of using America’s technological prowess to build a secure shield against nuclear attack. The whole idea was strategically dangerous and fatally flawed technologically, but it served its immediate political purpose. Reagan shifted the terms of the debate, and the nuclear freeze movement collapsed. We now stand at another crossroads. Attention to the global danger of nuclear proliferation and the massive nuclear arsenal still held by the United States, Russia, and other nations has been diverted since 9/11 by a very selective attention to the nuclear danger posed by two specific nations, North Korea and Iran. That danger is real, but it is part of a far larger danger to our planet itself—a danger in which the United States itself is deeply implicated. But while attention to the true nature of the nuclear threat has been blunted by propaganda, a profound movement for change is sweeping the nation. This may, indeed, be a propitious moment for a new surge of grassroots anti-nuclear activism by a new generation. Through determined effort by concerned citizens, we may be poised once gain to confront the threat the whole world faces from the horrendous new power of destruction that our government, in our name, unleashed on the world on August 6, 1945.

    Paul Boyer is the Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus as the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985) and Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America’s Half-Century Encounter with Nuclear Weapons (1998).

  • Laying the Foundations for Multilateral Disarmament

    Text of his address to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland on February 5, 2008

    I know it is rare for a defence Minister to address a conference on disarmament. That is precisely why I wanted to come here today. I want the fact that the British Secretary of State for Defence is addressing this Conference to send a strong message about the priority we give to our disarmament commitments.

    These are commitments not just theoretical obligations. They are priorities against which we have made real progress since we came to power in 1997. The UK has a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and, in partnership with everyone who shares that ambition, we intend to make further progress towards this vision in the coming years.

    Problem
    Over the past 15 years, we have seen some nations expanding their nuclear arsenals, some surreptitiously seeking nuclear weapons under the guise of a civil energy programme and others detonating nuclear test devices in the face of international condemnation.

    The proliferation of nuclear material, technology, know-how and weapons represents a grave threat to international security. There remain many thousands of nuclear warheads around the world. We must take action now to ensure such material is properly protected.

    We all want to see the world become a much safer place. International security architecture, in the form of Treaties and initiatives, exists to help us achieve that objective. The international community has been active in bolstering that architecture. It has not completely stopped proliferation. Nor is it yet strong enough to permit immediate unilateral disarmament by any recognised Nuclear Weapon State.

    We need to do more.

    But nuclear weapons and other Weapons of Mass Destruction are not the only concern, we must also maintain a focus on conventional weapons.

    Last month, Gordon Brown set out the key challenges facing the international community. He highlighted some of the ways international institutions need to reform to enable us all, collectively, to meet those challenges. He reminded us that one person is killed every minute by a conventional weapon. Kofi Annan famously called them “WMD in slow motion”.
    These weapons have an enormous effect in terms of lost human lives, in terms of broken communities, environmental impact and damage to economic prosperity and development. I have witnessed their devastating impact on the lives of people in Central Africa, Colombia, Northern Ireland and elsewhere.

    Consequently, I am proud support efforts such as the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons and the UK’s Arms Trade Treaty initiative. These efforts aim to contribute to a global control architecture which both meets the requirements of the 21st century and gives focus and coherence to existing measures.
    In addition, Gordon Brown and I have made clear our goal of securing an international instrument that bans those cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. Last year I withdrew from service the two types of cluster munitions for exactly this reason and only last week with my colleagues I met with NGOs and politicians concerned about the impact of cluster munitions to discuss both Oslo and CCW.

    Controlling and reducing the proliferation of conventional arms is important, but I have come here to focus on nuclear disarmament.

    As the preamble to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty makes clear, all States party to the Treaty should work towards “the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the elimination of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery…”

    This is not some “get out” clause for the five recognised Nuclear Weapon States. Rather it is recognition that all signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty already have agreed to strive for measures which provide an environment for all Nuclear Weapon States to eliminate their holdings. This is a joint commitment and it is a joint responsibility.

    As this Conference knows too well, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty has not yet entered into force and there is an ongoing stalemate on a Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty. This hardly gives the impression that progress is being made.

    I commend this Conference for playing a crucial role in moving forward the debate and seeking solutions. And I encourage all experts and representatives engaged in this process to redouble their efforts.

    Solutions

    It may be a truism but global challenges require global solutions. The solutions must take us all towards an increase in the pace of multilateral disarmament as well as a reduction in proliferation.

    The international community needs a transparent, sustainable and credible plan for multilateral nuclear disarmament. A plan that also addresses proliferation, so that disarmament and counter-proliferation both move forward together, each supporting the other. Although, we all understand that there is no formal conditionality between progress on disarmament and non-proliferation, our goal should be a virtuous circle, where progress on one reinforces the other.

    Our chances of eliminating nuclear weapons will be enhanced immeasurably if the Non-Nuclear Weapon States can see forward planning, commitment and action toward multilateral nuclear disarmament by Nuclear Weapon States. Without this, we risk generating the perception that the Nuclear Weapon States are failing to fulfil their disarmament obligations and this will be used by some states as an excuse for their nuclear intransigence.

    What then should this plan comprise of?

    Let me start with the question of reductions to the major nuclear arsenals.

    There is little public acknowledgement of the vast cuts so far in US and Russian warheads, especially since the Cold War. Nor, for that matter, the cuts to the much smaller French and UK stocks.

    I welcome the recent news by the US that, by 2012, their stockpile will be at its lowest for 50 years – less than one quarter of the level at the end of the Cold War. We all need to maintain this effort but we also need to get better at publicising the fact that we are on this path.

    We must also welcome the ongoing bilateral discussions between the US and Russia for a follow-on arrangement after the current START treaty expires. Success would provide a powerful signal that the post Cold War disarmament trend towards zero will continue.

    States also need to explore whether there is scope to reduce further the number of nuclear weapons they need to maintain an effective deterrent. The UK set an example by reducing our operationally available warheads by a further 20% when we decided last year to maintain our own minimum nuclear deterrent beyond the life of the current Vanguard-class submarines ,

    The international climate must become one that gives all Nuclear Weapon States the confidence to continue to make similar changes.

    I welcome the discussions on how to deal with States who may leave the NPT. Leaving any treaty is always a sovereign decision, but the NPT Review Conference in 2010 should send a message to any States considering withdrawal that such a decision will have consequences.

    We must be resolute in tackling proliferation challenges. We must confront states who are looking to breach their obligations and undermine global security by developing WMD. And within the international community we must ensure there is no space for such proliferators.

    The UK is committed to supporting the universal right of access to safe, secure and peaceful nuclear technology. But this cannot be at the risk of further proliferation. It is in this context that we have developed the concept of an Enrichment Bond – whereby assistance is granted in return for demonstrable commitment to non-proliferation.

    We should also continue to strive for the early entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and progress in its verification system. I warmly welcome the ratification last week by Columbia – real evidence of progress on this key piece of our security architecture. Since 1991, the UK has not tested a nuclear weapon and I call on all states to ratify the CTBT as soon as possible, especially those so-called Annex II states whose ratification is required for the Treaty’s entry into force

    I believe a key milestone towards building this climate for disarmament is securing a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty, which, in real ways, will limit the ability of signatory states to expand their nuclear arsenals and which will provide the necessary reassurance to their neighbours and the international community.

    Since 1995, the UK has had a moratorium on production of fissile material for nuclear weapons purposes and permanently placed excess defence material under international safeguards. The US, France and Russia have announced similar formal arrangements. But we want to see that political commitment transformed into a legal one through a treaty.

    In 2007, the International Community came very close to starting negotiations in 2007 and I commend all those states who were willing to take part. And I call on those three states that did not, to do so this year. As UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon, said last month, we all have legitimate national security concerns, but without any preconditions, let’s at least get to negotiations of a Treaty, where these security concerns can then be addressed.

    Some commentators have raised the idea of taking the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty out of the Conference and negotiating a treaty amongst a smaller group of like-minded nations. Frankly this misses the very point of the Conference – it is the only body where all nuclear armed States and Non-Nuclear Weapon States sit together to discuss security issues of the highest sensitivity.
    Safeguarding fissile material is a crucial responsibility of those who possess nuclear weapons. So let us work together within this Conference to make real multilateral progress.

    But just as the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty is a high priority for the UK, I acknowledge other nations have other priorities, such as negotiating a new legal instrument on preventing an arms race in space.

    At the UN, the UK consistently has supported the annual resolution on the Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space. But there is no international consensus on the need to start negotiations on a new international legal instrument governing the military use of space. So rather than allowing this stalemate to continue, efforts should instead be focused on areas such as transparency and confidence building to allow us all to move forward.

    UK / Defence Contribution

    So what is the UK, and more specifically the Ministry of Defence, doing to help move this agenda along, and to help create an environment conducive to multilateral nuclear disarmament?

    Already we have contributed in the most tangible way through reducing the number of operationally available warheads to fewer than 160. This has now been achieved. And if we are able to reduce further, we will do that.

    With a contribution from the UK government, the International Institute for Strategic Studies is examining the political and technical requirements for a world free from nuclear weapons. And I look forward to the final report, which will be published later this year.

    However, one area on which I would like to focus is our work on verification of nuclear disarmament.

    Just as Margaret Beckett said last year, I too want the UK to be seen as a ‘disarmament laboratory’. By that I mean the UK becoming a role model and testing ground for measures that we and others can take on key aspects of disarmament. In particular, measures needed to determine the requirements for the verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Any verification regime will have to be robust, effective and mutually trusted and, crucially, one that doesn’t give away national security or proliferation-sensitive information.

    The more reductions states make, the more confidence they will require that no one is cheating and secretly retaining a “marginal nuclear weapon”. It is therefore of paramount importance that verification techniques are developed which enable us all – Nuclear Weapon States and Non-Nuclear Weapon States – to have confidence that when a state says it has fully and irrevocably dismantled a nuclear warhead, we all can be assured it is telling the truth.

    The UK is ready to lead the way on this. Research into how one technically verifies the dismantlement of a warhead continues at the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

    Developing such techniques will take time but it is very important it is not undertaken in ‘splendid isolation’. It must be built on the requirements of Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Weapon States alike. We need to consider not only what information we are willing to divulge but also what information a Non-Nuclear Weapon State will want to receive.

    With this in mind, over the last year AWE has developed a technical cooperation initiative with several Norwegian defence laboratories. The process of engaging with Norway must avoid breaching our mutual NPT obligations, which in itself serves as useful insight into how future multilateral discussions might proceed.

    The difficulty is in developing technologies which strike the right balance between protecting security and proliferation considerations and, at the same time, providing sufficient international access and verification. But this is a challenge we can overcome.

    If we are serious about doing our bit to create the conditions for complete nuclear disarmament, we must now also begin to build deeper technical relationships on disarmament between nuclear weapon states.

    So I come to this Conference with a proposal.

    As a next step, and following on from the AWE research, the UK is willing to host a technical conference of P5 nuclear laboratories on the verification of nuclear disarmament before the next NPT Review Conference in 2010. We hope such a conference will enable the five recognised nuclear weapons states to reinforce a process of mutual confidence building: working together to solve some of these difficult technical issues.

    As part of our global efforts, we also hope to engage with other P5 states in other confidence-building measures on nuclear disarmament throughout this NPT Review Cycle. The aim here is to promote greater trust and confidence as a catalyst for further reductions in warheads – but without undermining the credibility of our existing nuclear deterrents.

    So to summarise, we face serious threats. But we face them together – that is the nature of today’s globalised interdependent world. We need a transparent, sustainable and credible plan for multilateral nuclear disarmament. A plan shared by Nuclear Weapon States and Non-Nuclear Weapon States alike.

    I have suggested some of the elements of that plan. But the UK certainly does not have a monopoly on good ideas – others have put equally good proposals on the table, and I encourage states to suggest further initiatives.

    So, Conference, let us all work together with resolve and ambition to lay the foundations that will allow us to move towards that shared vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

    Thank you.

    Des Browne MP is the Secretary of Defense of the United Kingdom.

  • Empire and Nuclear Weapons

    Over the past six decades, the United States has used its nuclear arsenal in five often inter-related ways. The first was, obviously, battlefield use, with the “battlefield” writ large to include the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The long -held consensus among scholars has been that these first atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war against Japan, and that they were designed to serve a second function of the U.S. nuclear arsenal: dictating the parameters of the global (dis)order by implicitly terrorizing U.S. enemies and allies (”vassal states” in the words of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.) The third function, first practiced by Harry Truman during the 1946 crisis over Azerbaijan in northern Iran and relied on repeatedly in U.S. wars in Asia and the Middle East, as well as during crises over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been to threaten opponents with first strike nuclear attacks in order to terrorize them into negotiating on terms acceptable to the United States or, as in the Bush wars against Iraq, to ensure that desperate governments do not defend themselves with chemical or biological weapons. Once the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club, the U.S. arsenal began to play a fourth role, making U.S. conventional forces, in the words of former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, “meaningful instruments of military and political power.” As Noam Chomsky explains, Brown was saying that implicit and explicit U.S. nuclear threats were repeatedly used to intimidate those who might consider intervening militarily to assist those we are determined to attack.

    The final role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is deterrence, which came into play only when the Soviet Union began to achieve parity with the United States in the last years of the Vietnam War. This is popularly understood to mean preventing a surprise first strike attack against the United States by guaranteeing “mutual assured destruction.” In other words, any nation foolish enough to attack the United States with nuclear weapons will be annihilated. However, Pentagon leaders have testified that deterrence has never been U.S. policy, and they have defined deterrence as preventing other nations from taking “courses of action” that are inimical to U.S. interests. This could include decisions related to allocation of scarce resources like oil and water, defending access to markets, or preventing non-nuclear attacks against U.S. allies and clients, i.e. role #2, using genocidal nuclear weapons to define and enforce the parameters and rules of the U.S. dominated global (dis)order.

    My argument is not that U.S. use and threatened use of nuclear weapons have always succeeded. Instead, successive U.S. presidents, their most senior advisers, and many in the Pentagon have believed that U.S. use of nuclear weapons has achieved U.S. goals in the past. Furthermore, these presidents have repeatedly replicated this ostensibly successful model. In fact, even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki achieved only one of their two purposes. These first bombs of the Cold War did communicate a terrorizing message to Stalin and the Soviet elite about the capabilities of these new weapons and about the U.S. will to use them. But, within weeks of the A-bombings, Washington was sharing influence in Korea with Moscow. Four years later northern China and Manchuria, which U.S. leaders thought they had won with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, fell into what was seen as the Soviet sphere. In 1954 France declined the offer of two U.S. A-bombs to break the Vietnamese siege at Dienbienphu, and in 1969 North Vietnam refused to be intimidated by Nixon’s “November ultimatum.”

    The U.S. commitment to nuclear dominance and its practice of threatening nuclear attacks have, in fact, been counterproductive, increasing the dangers of nuclear war in yet another way: spurring nuclear weapons proliferation. No nation will long tolerate what it experiences as an unjust imbalance of power. It was primarily for this reason that the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China, North Korea, and quite probably Iran opted for nuclear weapons.

    The Romance of Ruthlessness The Bush administration has again put nuclear weapons – and their various uses – at the center of U.S. military and foreign policy. The message of the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in December 2001 was unmistakable. As The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorialized, “Not since the resurgence of the Cold War in Ronald Reagan’s first term has U.S. defense strategy placed such an emphasis on nuclear weapons.” The NPR reiterated the U.S. commitment to first-strike nuclear war fighting. For the first time, seven nations were specifically named as primary nuclear targets: Russia, China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. Consistent with calls by senior administration figures who spoke of their “bias in favor of things that might be usable,” the NPR urged funding for development of new and more usable nuclear weapons. This included a new “bunker buster.” Seventy times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb, the bunker buster was designed to destroy enemy command bunkers and WMD (weapons of mass destruction) installations buried hundreds of feet beneath the surface.

    To ensure that the “bunker buster” and other new nuclear weapons could inflict their holocausts, the NPR called for accelerating preparations for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. It also pressed for the nuclear weapons laboratories to continue modernizing the nuclear arsenal and to train a new generation of nuclear weapons scientists. Among their first projects would be the design of a “Reliable Replacement Warhead” to serve as the military’s primary strategic weapon for the first half of the 21st century. With a massive infusion of new funds to consolidate and revitalize nuclear research, development and production facilities, National Nuclear Security Administration Deputy Administrator Tom D’Agostino testified it would “restore us to a level of capability comparable to what we had during the Cold War.”

    Later, the Rumsfeld Pentagon published and then ostensibly “rescinded” a non-classified version of its Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations. The Doctrine was revealing and profoundly disturbing. In the tradition of the Clinton administration’s Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence, the Doctrine communicated that the United States could all too easily “become irrational and vindictive.”

    Most striking was the Doctrine’s extended discussion of deterrence. Rather than define deterrence as the prevention of nuclear attacks by other nuclear powers, the Doctrine stated that “The focus of US deterrence efforts is… to influence potential adversaries to withhold actions intended to harm US’ national interests…based on the adversary’s perception of the…likelihood and magnitude of the costs or consequences corresponding to these courses of actions.” Diplomatically, the Doctrine continued, “the central focus of deterrence is for one nation to exert such influence over a potential adversary’s decision process that the potential adversary makes a deliberate choice to refrain from a COA [course of action.]” In addition to putting Chinese diplomatic efforts to marginalize U.S. power in Asia on notice or deterring unlikely Russian or French nuclear attacks, the central role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was global dominance. China, Russia, France and Germany were reminded of their proper places, and Iran and Venezuela received ample warning not to adopt oil and energy policies that might constitute- courses of action that would “harm U.S. national interests.”

    Placing the world on further notice, the Doctrine threatened that “The US does not make positive statements defining the circumstances under which it would use nuclear weapons.” Maintaining ambiguity about when the United States would use nuclear weapons helped to “create doubt in the minds of potential adversaries.” The Doctrine also refused to rule out nuclear attacks against non-nuclear weapons states.

    The Doctrine also baldly instructed the U.S. military that “no customary or conventional international law prohibits nations from employing nuclear weapons in armed conflict,” thus subordinating international law to U.S. military strategy. It also argued that nuclear wars could be won. The Doctrine gave increased authority to field commanders to propose targets for nuclear attacks and described the circumstances when field commanders could request approval to launch first-strike nuclear attacks. “Training,” it further stated, “can help prepare friendly forces to survive the effects of nuclear weapons and improve the effectiveness of surviving forces.” The Doctrine went on to reconfirm the bankruptcy of the nuclear reduction negotiations between the United States and Russia. The Doctrine was clear that U.S. nuclear forces would not actually be reduced because “US strategic nuclear weapons remain in storage and serve as an augmentation capability should US strategic nuclear force requirements rise above the levels of the Moscow Treaty.”

    Toward Abolition Since the end of the Cold War, the media and national political discourse in the United States have focused on the dangers of “horizontal proliferation.” These dangers include “rogue” states with nuclear weapons, the possibility of nations with nuclear power plants becoming nuclear weapons states, and leakage from nuclear stockpiles finding its way to “rogue” states or to non-state terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. One nightmare scenario has envisioned the overthrow of the Musharraf regime in Pakistan, with its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of radical Islamists.

    It doesn’t take a genius to understand the importance of under-funded initiatives like the congressional Nunn-Lugar Nuclear Threat Initiative, which was designed to secure the world’s nuclear weapons, fissile materials, and nuclear wastes. However, these efforts can be no more than stop-gap measures as long as the United States threatens other nations with nuclear attacks and insists on maintaining the terrorizing imbalance of power.

    Since the 1995 Nuclear Nonproliferation Review Conference, popular, elite, and governmental demands have been growing for the United States and other nuclear powers to fulfill their Article VI treaty commitment to negotiate the complete elimination of their nuclear arsenals. In 1996, in the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion on the use and threatened use of nuclear weapons ruled that both are violations of international law, and the Court directed the nuclear powers to implement their Article VI commitments. While NGOs and popular movements from across the world came together to form Abolition 2000, at the elite level former head of the U.S. Strategic Command Gen. Lee Butler – supported by many of the world’s generals and admirals – called for abolition. And, in January 2007, former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz joined former secretary of defense William Perry and former senator Sam Nunn in saying that U.S. double standards were driving nuclear weapons proliferation, and that the time had come for the United States to meet its NPT obligations.

    Since then, pressed by voters and community based activists, John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson have each stated that if elected, they will be the president who negotiates the complete elimination of the world’s nuclear weapons. They need to be held to these commitments, and other presidential and congressional candidates need to be pressed to join their commitment. (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel have made similar commitments.)

    The political and technical steps needed to eliminate nuclear weapons have long been known. First, the United States must renounce its “first strike” nuclear wear fighting doctrines. Next it must refuse to fund the development and deployment of new nuclear weapons. The other essential steps include verified and irreversible dismantling of nuclear weapons and their installations; halting production of weapons-grade fissile material and securely containing existing stockpiles; verification, including societal verification, and intrusive inspection systems; and investing power in a supranational authority, probably the UN Security Council, to isolate, contain, or remove threats to the nuclear-free order.

    Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.

    Like cannibalism and slavery, nuclear weapons can be abolished. The question is whether we humans have the will and courage to choose life.

    Table 1: Partial Listing of Incidents of Nuclear Blackmail

    (From Empire and the Bomb: How the United States Uses Nuclear Weapons to Dominate the World by Joseph Gerson)

     
    1946 Truman threatens Soviets regarding Northern Iran.
    1946 Truman sends SAC bombers to intimidate Yugoslavia following the downing of U.S. aircraft over Yugoslavia.
    1948 Truman threatens Soviets in response to Berlin blockade.
    1950 Truman threatens Chinese when U.S. Marines were surrounded at Chosin Reservoir in Korea.
    1951 Truman approves military request to attack Manchuria with nuclear weapons if significant numbers of new Chinese forces join the war.
    1953 Eisenhower threatens China to force an end to Korean War on terms acceptable to the United States.
    1954 Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Dulles offers French three tactical nuclear weapons to break the siege at Dienbienphu, Vietnam. Supported by Nixon’s public trial balloons.
    1954 Eisenhower used nuclear armed SAC bombers to reinforce CIA-backed coup in Guatemala.
    1956 Bulganin threatens London and Paris with nuclear attacks, demanding withdrawal following their invasion of Egypt.
    1956 Eisenhower counters by threatening the U.S.S.R. while also demanding British and French retreat from Egypt.
    1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against Iraq, if necessary to prevent extension of revolution into Kuwait.
    1958 Eisenhower orders Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare to use nuclear weapons against China if they invade the island of Quemoy.
    1961 Kennedy threatens Soviets during Berlin Crisis.
    1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
    1967 Johnson threatens Soviets during Middle East War.
    1967 Johnson’s public threats against Vietnam are linked to possible use of nuclear weapons to break siege at Khe Shan.
    1969 Brezhnev threatens China during border war.
    1969 Nixon’s “November Ultimatum” against Vietnam.
    1970 Nixon signals U.S. preparations to fight nuclear war during Black September War in Jordan.
    1973 Israeli Government threatens use of nuclear weapons during the “October War.”
    1973 Kissinger threatens Soviet Union during the last hours of the “October War” in the Middle East.
    1973 Nixon pledges to South Vietnamese President Thieu that he will respond with nuclear attacks or the bombing of North Vietnam’s dikes if it violated the provisions of the Paris Peace Accords.
    1975 Sec. of Defense Schlesinger threatens North Korea with nuclear retaliation should it attack South Korea in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam.
    1980 Carter Doctrine announced.
    1981 Reagan reaffirms the Carter Doctrine.
    1982 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher threatens to eliminate Buenos Aires during the Falklands War.
    1990 Pakistan threatens India during confrontation over Kashmir.
    1990-91 Bush threatens Iraq during the “Gulf War.”
    1993 Clinton threatens North Korea.
    1994 Clinton’s confrontation with North Korea.
    1996 China threatens “Los Angeles” during confrontation over Taiwan. Clinton responds by sending two nuclear-capable aircraft carrier fleets through the Taiwan Straight.
    1996 Clinton threatens Libya with nuclear attack to prevent completion of underground chemical weapons production complex.
    1998 Clinton threatens Iraq with nuclear attack.
    1999 India and Pakistan threaten and prepare nuclear threats during the Kargil War.
    2001 U.S. forces placed on a DEFCON alert in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
    2001 Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld refuses to rule out using tactical nuclear weapons against Afghan caves possibly sheltering Osama Bin Laden.
    2002 Bush communicates an implied threat to counter any Iraqi use of chemical weapons to defend Iraqi troops with chemical or biological weapons with a U.S. nuclear attack.
    2006 French Prime Minister Chirac threatens first strike nuclear attacks against nations that practice terrorism against France.
    2006 & 07 “All options are on the table”: U.S. threats to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure made by President Bush and presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton.

    This article is adapted from Joseph Gerson, Empire and the Bomb (University of Michigan Press, 2007).

    Joseph Gerson is the director of programs of the American Friends Service Committee in New England and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus. His previous books include The Sun Never Sets and With Hiroshima Eyes.

  • The High Price of Arrogance and the Bitter Harvest of Hypocrisy

    The Twin Horsemen of the New Apocalypse:

    Slowly, the nuclear genie escapes from the carefully constructed bottle of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, threatening the world with annihilation.

    Inexorably, global warming advances across the decades as temperatures climb, fires rage, glaciers melt, droughts escalate, hurricanes intensify, habitats shrink, species disappear.

    These, then are the twin horsemen of the new apocalypse: the prospect of nuclear war and the reality of global warming.

    No biblical prophesy this. The pale riders mounted upon these steeds are men, and they wait eagerly at the gate, their time come at last. Arrogance is their vehicle; hypocrisy their fuel.

    We are Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

    Imagine a world in which more than twenty-five countries possessed nuclear weapons, instead of the nine that do now. Imagine that number relentlessly growing, decade by decade until a hundred or more nations – all but the very poorest – were capable of detonating a nuclear device and initiating a nuclear holocaust. In such a world, the unthinkable would become the inevitable.

    The only reason we’re not living in that world today is that in 1968, the international community seized a rare moment of sanity and produced the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, stuffing the nuclear genie back in its bottle.

    Led by Ireland and Finland, 189 states signed the treaty.

    The NNPT was supposed to work as follows: Nations who had not yet developed nuclear weapons agreed not to pursue a nuclear arsenal. In return, nations possessing nuclear weapons agreed “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

    In short, the treaty was a quid-pro-quo. Nuclear have-nots agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons in exchange for nuclear haves agreeing to take real, verifiable steps to get rid of theirs.

    Now imagine a nation that broke this grand bargain, and risked bringing forth death and destruction of biblical proportion. That nation exists. It is US.

    Listen.

    At the time of the treaty, South Africa, Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, and several other countries who were actively developing nuclear weapons suspended their programs. Five nations – the US, Russia, Britain, China, and France agreed to suspend active programs and begin negotiations to dismantle their stockpile. Countries capable of constructing nuclear weapons, including Australia, Norway, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Finland, South Korea, and host of others then had no incentive to initiate programs, and the world was moved a little further from the brink of a nuclear insanity. There have been leaks. Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all developed nuclear weapons.

    But for years, the dream of a nuclear free world was a powerful card the world could play in constraining the spread of this deadly ambition.

    No longer.

    The nuclear haves – led by the US – have steadfastly ignored their responsibilities under this treaty. Indeed, under Bush, the US has scrapped the ABM treaty, sought funding for a new generation of nuclear weapons, and proposed to resume testing of nuclear devices, even as we’ve insisted that others abandon efforts to produce them. Thus, we approach the world as an arrogant hypocrite, and seem surprised that it is not working.

    Climate: the slow-motion nuclear war

    Forget wars, famine, pestilence and death. They are merely the stepchildren of global warming.

    Hyperbole?

    Consider this. The cumulative energy embedded in all fossil fuels is on the same order of magnitude as the energy that would be released from detonating all of the world’s nuclear devices. So if we burn all of those reserves, in terms of energy, it is the equivalent of an all out nuclear war. But wait, you say, even if we were to burn all those reserves, it would take place over three centuries, hardly the same as a nuclear conflagration.

    Fair enough, but try this little thought experiment, and in the words of Aldo Leopold, think like a mountain. In terms of geologic time, three centuries is virtually indistinguishable from an instant.

    Over the four and a half billion years the earth has existed, the systems that sustain us have been sculpted carefully from the ether. Life appeared some 3.8 billion years ago – simple procaryotes living off of methane and sulfur. Oxygenators became dominant about a billion years later, and slowly, the orange sky turned blue. Painstakingly, the world we know evolved until a scant million years ago hominids something like ourselves appeared. Homo Sapiens – man the wise – evolved about fifty thousand years ago, and in the last ten thousand years, blessed with a relatively benign climate, we began our march towards civilization.

    Now we look through the lens of our own life span and declare three centuries to be a long time. But to that mountain, the blinding death-flash of a nuclear holocaust, and the three hundred year combustion of fossil fuels are less distinguishable, and the consequences may be too. In a very real sense, climate change could play out like a slow-motion nuclear war, sans radioactive fallout.

    Just as with the nuclear threat, the US is the biggest impediment to progress, and the biggest cause of the problem. In 2005, the US released 7.1 billion tons of GHGs. To put that in context, the US – with about five percent of the world’s population – emitted about twenty five percent of the world’s greenhouse gasses. Cumulatively, the US contribution to global warming dwarfs any other country’s, and it will do so long after China supplants us as the largest annual emitter.

    The Origins of Arrogance

    Given the fact that we sit astride this heinous record of disregarding all elements of a sane world, on what basis do we now object to Iran or any country seeking to develop a nuclear capability? Certainly not moral grounds.

    How do we, the worlds biggest energy pig, justify our failure to ratify the Kyoto climate accords, and our failure to honor our obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which we did sign and ratify?

    Do we simply assert that we are different? Special in some way?

    A sizable number of neocons take precisely that point of view, referring to the US as the “Exceptional Nation.” Indeed, it is this notion which has animated our foreign policy to one degree or another since the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Bush, it has become an almost religious conviction.

    Presumably, this exceptionalism gives us the right to retain our nuclear weapons, expand our arsenal, and prevent anyone else – even those we threaten – from developing them. It could even be used to justify the fact that we continue to spew out GHG at more than six times the global per capita average.

    It’s worth examining the roots of this notion of the US as the exceptional nation. It was coined by De Tocqueville in the 1830’s, and predicated on his observation that the US was unique in that it had no feudal tradition, was more centered on rights, merit, religious beliefs, and was more egalitarian. This, according to De Tocqueville, set us apart from the more state-centered societies of Europe, and allowed democracy to flourish here, more than anywhere else.

    But it’s a big leap to go from there, to where the neocons would take us – the US as exempt from the civilizing treaties of the global community, by virtue of this exceptionalism.

    Of course, the problem with this arrogant stance is that it only works if other countries accept the neocons’ self-designated version of the US as “exceptional.”

    If they don’t – and why should they?- then our wholesale rejection of civilizing agreements such as the Land Mine Treaty, the Tobacco Treaty, the World Court, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Kyoto Climate Protocol looks less like De Tocqueville’s exceptionalism and more like ignorant and arrogant jingoism.

    Add to this list of ignominy that the US supports trade agreements that exploit labor and harm the environment and that, under Bush, we have consistently bad-mouthed the UN, essentially ignored the Geneva Conventions, preemptively invaded a sovereign nation, scuttled the chemical and biological weapons treaties, ignored our obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (to which we are a signatory) and publicly defended torture (water boarding is defined as torture in our own laws and in international laws) and “rendition,” as well as acted to limit the freedom and rights of our own citizens by subverting both the First and Fourth Amendments, and the necon case for exceptionalism becomes little more than a weak justification for a destructive form of jingoism that does more to limit freedom than champion it.

    The Harvest of Hypocrisy

    With a record of hypocrisy like this is it any wonder that a foreign policy based on arrogance is a complete failure? Might it not be at least a partial answer to the question, why do they hate us and, more to the point, why do they hate us even more now than they did in 2001? Certainly, arrogance without portfolio is the weakest platform from which to negotiate and lead.

    We the People of the United States have a choice about our country’s and the world’s destiny, and we will make that choice in the 2008 elections. On the one hand, we can choose to elect leaders who will continue to act as if we are not subject to the civilizing rules of the international community, while insisting others are. Down this path lies permanent confrontation, continuous wars and occupations, inevitable nuclear proliferation and nuclear brinksmanship, destruction of the climate that has sustained us since we appeared on the planet, a US that is increasingly isolated in the international community, and a world that is hurtling towards nuclear devastation and environmental destruction.

    On the other hand, we can choose to be truly exceptional, not simply by honoring our international obligations, but by actively leading the world community toward peace, prosperity and sustainability. This is not only ethically correct, it is strategically smart, and it would make the US a leader in all the ways mere military might cannot.

    Imagine a world in the process of destroying its nuclear weapons instead of its climate. Imagine the stature and influence that would accrue to the country leading that effort.

    It would have a moral authority that would be unambiguous and undeniable.

    Ghandi defeated Great Britain with the that kind of moral authority. Imagine, now, a nation with the military and economic power the US possesses, but blessed with Ghandi’s ethical leverage, too.

    Such a nation could walk across the world stage a colossus, and others would be forced to follow. It would be capable of building coalitions, blessed with allies, and capable of being a force for good that would be virtually unprecedented in human history. It would indeed be an exceptional nation.

    There is, in fact, only one country capable of becoming that nation. Us. If we were to choose this path, we would truly deserve to be known as the exceptional nation, and it would be others who designated us so, not an arrogant and belligerent claim we made on our own behalf.

    That’s the real opportunity cost of the Bush administration and the Republican doctrine; that’s the prize that will be lost if we allow the Democratic Party to be led by men and women of little vision and less courage, more interested in following polls than leading nations.

    There is no other country that can deliver us from this apocalypse; there is no other time we can choose to lead. It happens now, or it can’t happen. If we fail to call our nation to meet its destiny, the twin horses of the new apocalypse will ride, and we will sit astride them.

    Our votes and our voices will determine which it will be.

    This is either the blessing or the tragedy of our time.

    John Atcheson’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several work journals.

  • Are You With Us…Or Against Us

    Originally published at www.tomdispatch.com

    The journey to the martial law just imposed on Pakistan by its self-appointed president, the dictator Pervez Musharraf, began in Washington on September 11, 2001. On that day, it so happened, Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, was in town. He was summoned forthwith to meet with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who gave him perhaps the earliest preview of the global Bush doctrine then in its formative stages, telling him, “You are either one hundred percent with us or one hundred percent against us.”

    The next day, the administration, dictating to the dictator, presented seven demands that a Pakistan that wished to be “with us” must meet. These concentrated on gaining its cooperation in assailing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, which had long been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence services in Afghanistan and had, of course, harbored Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda training camps. Conspicuously missing was any requirement to rein in the activities of Mr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, who, with the knowledge of Washington, had been clandestinely hawking the country’s nuclear-bomb technology around the Middle East and North Asia for some years.

    Musharraf decided to be “with us”; but, as in so many countries, being with the United States in its Global War on Terror turned out to mean not being with one’s own people. Although Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, was already a dictator, he had now taken the politically fateful additional step of very visibly subordinating his dictatorship to the will of a foreign master. In many countries, people will endure a homegrown dictator but rebel against one who seems to be imposed from without, and Musharraf was now courting this danger.

    A public opinion poll in September ranking certain leaders according to their popularity suggests what the results have been. Osama bin Laden, at 46% approval, was more popular than Musharraf, at 38%, who in turn was far better liked than President Bush, at a bottom-scraping 7%. There is every reason to believe that, with the imposition of martial law, Musharraf’s and Bush’s popularity have sunk even further. Wars, whether on terror or anything else, don’t tend to go well when the enemy is more popular than those supposedly on one’s own side.

    Are You with Us?

    Even before the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, the immediate decision to bully Musharraf into compliance defined the shape of the policies that the President would adopt toward a far larger peril that had seemed to wane after the Cold War, but now was clearly on the rise: the gathering nuclear danger. President Bush proposed what was, in fact if not in name, an imperial solution to it. In the new dispensation, nuclear weapons were not to be considered good or bad in themselves; that judgment was to be based solely on whether the nation possessing them was itself judged good or bad (with us, that is, or against us). Iraq, obviously, was judged to be “against us” and suffered the consequences. Pakistan, soon honored by the administration with the somehow ridiculous, newly coined status of “major non-NATO ally,” was clearly classified as with us, and so, notwithstanding its nuclear arsenal and abysmal record on proliferation, given the highest rating.

    That doctrine constituted a remarkable shift. Previously, the United States had joined with almost the entire world to achieve nonproliferation solely by peaceful, diplomatic means. The great triumph of this effort had been the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, under which 183 nations, dozens quite capable of producing nuclear weapons, eventually agreed to remain without them. In this dispensation, all nuclear weapons were considered bad, and so all proliferation was bad as well. Even existing arsenals, including those of the two superpowers of the Cold War, were supposed to be liquidated over time. Conceptually, at least, one united world had faced one common danger: nuclear arms.

    In the new, quickly developing, post-9/11 dispensation, however, the world was to be divided into two camps. The first, led by the United States, consisted of good, democratic countries, many possessing the bomb; the second consisted of bad, repressive countries trying to get the bomb and, of course, their terrorist allies. Nuclear peril, once understood as a problem of supreme importance in its own right, posed by those who already possessed nuclear weapons as well as by potential proliferators, was thus subordinated to the polarizing “war on terror,” of which it became a mere sub-category, albeit the most important one. This peril could be found at “the crossroads of radicalism and technology,” otherwise called the “nexus of terror and weapons of mass destruction,” in the words of the master document of the Bush Doctrine, the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

    The good camp was assigned the job not of rolling back all nuclear weapons but simply of stopping any members of the bad camp from getting their hands on the bomb. The means would no longer be diplomacy, but “preventive war” (to be waged by the United States). The global Cold War of the late twentieth century was to be replaced by global wars against proliferation — disarmament wars — in the twenty-first. These wars, breaking out wherever in the world proliferation might threaten, would not be cold, but hot indeed, as the invasion of Iraq soon revealed — and as an attack on Iran, now under consideration in Washington, may soon further show.

    …Or Against Us?

    Vetting and sorting countries into the good and the bad, the with-us and the against-us, proved, however, a far more troublesome business than those in the Bush administration ever imagined. Iraq famously was not as “bad” as alleged, for it turned out to lack the key feature that supposedly warranted attack — weapons of mass destruction. Neither was Pakistan, muscled into the with-us camp so quickly after 9/11, as “good” as alleged. Indeed, these distinctions were entirely artificial, for by any factual and rational reckoning, Pakistan was by far the more dangerous country.

    Indeed, the Pakistan of Pervez Musharraf has, by now, become a one-country inventory of all the major forms of the nuclear danger.

    *Iraq did not have nuclear weapons; Pakistan did. In 1998, it had conducted a series of five nuclear tests in response to five tests by India, with whom it had fought three conventional wars since its independence in 1947. The danger of interstate nuclear war between the two nations is perhaps higher than anywhere else in the world.

    *Both Iraq and Pakistan were dictatorships (though the Iraqi government was incomparably more brutal).

    *Iraq did not harbor terrorists; Pakistan did, and does so even more today.

    *Iraq, lacking the bomb, could not of course be a nuclear proliferator. Pakistan was, with a vengeance. The arch-proliferator A.Q. Khan, a metallurgist, first purloined nuclear technology from Europe, where he was employed at the uranium enrichment company EURENCO. He then used the fruits of his theft to successfully establish an enrichment program for Pakistan’s bomb. After that, the thief turned salesman. Drawing on a globe-spanning network of producers and middlemen — in Turkey, Dubai, and Malaysia, among other countries — he peddled his nuclear wares to Iran, Iraq (which apparently turned down his offer of help), North Korea, Libya, and perhaps others. Seen from without, he had established a clandestine multinational corporation dedicated to nuclear proliferation for a profit.

    Seen from within Pakistan, he had managed to create a sort of independent nuclear city-state — a state within a state — in effect privatizing Pakistan’s nuclear technology. The extent of the government’s connivance in this enterprise is still unknown, but few observers believe Khan’s far-flung operations would have been possible without at least the knowledge of officials at the highest levels of that government. Yet all this activity emanating from the “major non-NATO ally” of the Bush administration was overlooked until late 2003, when American and German intelligence intercepted a shipload of nuclear materials bound for Libya, and forced Musharraf to place Khan, a national hero owing to his work on the Pakistani bomb, under house arrest. (Even today, the Pakistani government refuses to make Khan available for interviews with representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

    *Iraqi apparatchiks could not, of course, peddle to terrorists, al-Qaedan or otherwise, technology they did not have, as Bush suggested they would do in seeking to justify his war. The Pakistani apparatchiks, on the other hand, could — and they did. Shortly before September 11, 2001, two leading scientists from Pakistan’s nuclear program, Dr. Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the former Director General of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, and Chaudry Abdul Majeed, paid a visit to Osama bin Laden around a campfire in Afghanistan to advise him on how to make or acquire nuclear arms. They, too, are under house arrest.

    If, however, the beleaguered Pakistani state, already a balkanized enterprise (as the A.Q. Khan story shows) is overthrown, or if the country starts to fall apart, the danger of insider defections from the nuclear establishment will certainly rise. The problem is not so much that the locks on the doors of nuclear installations — Pakistan’s approximately 50 bombs are reportedly spread at sites around the country — will be broken or picked as that those with the keys to the locks will simply switch allegiances and put the materials they guard to new uses. The “nexus” of terrorism and the bomb, the catastrophe the Bush Doctrine was specifically framed to head off, might then be achieved — and in a country that was “for us.”

    What has failed in Pakistan, as in smashed Iraq, is not just a regional American policy, but the pillars and crossbeams of the entire global Bush doctrine, as announced in late 2001. In both countries, the bullying has failed; popular passions within each have gained the upper hand; and Washington has lost much of its influence. In its application to Pakistan, the doctrine was framed to stop terrorism, but in that country’s northern provinces, terrorists have, in fact, entrenched themselves to a degree unimaginable even when the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda’s camps before September 11th.

    If the Bush Doctrine laid claim to the values of democracy, its man Musharraf now has the distinction, rare even among dictators, of mounting a second military coup to maintain the results of his first one. In a crowning irony, his present crackdown is on democracy activists, not the Taliban, armed Islamic extremists, or al-Qaeda supporters who have established positions in the Swat valley only 150 miles from Islamabad.

    Most important, the collapsed doctrine has stoked the nuclear fires it was meant to quench. The dangers of nuclear terrorism, of proliferation, and even of nuclear war (with India, which is dismayed by developments in Pakistan as well as the weak Bush administration response to them) are all on the rise. The imperial solution to these perils has failed. Something new is needed, not just for Pakistan or Iraq, but for the world. Perhaps now someone should try to invent a solution based on imperialism’s opposite, democracy, which is to say respect for other countries and the wills of the people who live in them.

     

    Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute, and a visiting lecturer at Yale University

  • No Exceptions

    Article originally published in Haaretz on 11/5/2007

     

    How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that “Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel.” This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.
    What will Israel’s policy – or for that matter, America’s – be, if in Iran’s upcoming elections, Ahmadinejad were to give way to a more moderate leader, who were to announce that Iran recognizes Israel’s right to exist within the 1967, borders? Will Iran become one of the “moderate” Muslim states, like, say, Pakistan, which is allowed to develop nuclear weapons? There was a day when our friend the Shah ruled Iran, and then came the Ayatollahs, with whom we were happy to trade arms, until the whole affair became muddled. Regimes come and go, but nuclear weapons are forever.
    According to foreign reports, Israel recently bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor that was under construction. It was reported that the United States approved the attack on the Syrian installation and went so far as to encourage Israel’s violation of Syrian sovereignty. Syria is part of the axis of evil, mostly because of its ties with Iran, its involvement in Lebanon and its intentional failure to prevent the entry of anti-American extremists into Iraq. But it is a well-known phenomenon, in the world in general and in the Middle East in particular, that an evil leader can become a popular friend overnight. What will the Israeli and American policies be toward the Syrian nuclear program if Assad were to announce his intentions to step away from Iran, not interfere in Lebanon and seal the border with Iraq?

    A visit to Jerusalem 30 years ago transformed Anwar Sadat from enemy No. 1 into a hero for peace. President Hosni Mubarak is considered an astute, peace-loving leader, and a friend of the west. He was even democratically elected. Sort of. But what would happen if one day, when the nuclear reactor is operational in the middle of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood does to Mubarak’s heir what their Hamas brethren did to Mahmoud Abbas? Will we fly over to bomb the Egyptian nuclear reactor? And how does the free world need to deal with Pakistan, if its nuclear weapons fall under the control of Islamists? Is anyone proposing to preempt and invade Islamabad?
    Jordan’s King Abdullah said several months ago that most of the countries in the region, including his own, would begin developing nuclear energy. He was quick to stress that the Hashemite Kingdom would obviously place its nuclear installations under international supervision. He did not need to point out that this was “contrary to Israel.”
    The question is not therefore whether the Middle East is going nuclear, but when it will happen. The demand for a sanity certificate as a precondition for joining this club ensures that even the opponents of the Iranian regime will back Ahmadinejad against the entire world. Visitors who recently were in Tehran say that intellectuals, who did not hide their displeasure with their president, have expressed full support for his position on the nuclear question. They said that relinquishing the nuclear program would be interpreted as an admission that Iran belongs to the club of pariah nations and persisted in asking, “Why should it be forbidden to Iran when it is permitted to Pakistan and Israel?”
    The struggle against the Iranian and Syrian nuclear programs, and in the future perhaps the Egyptian and Jordanian programs, is meant to divert attention from the real problem in the Middle East – the war for hegemony over the region between the religious-extremist camp and the moderate-pragmatic one. The Annapolis summit is an excellent opportunity to update the formula for peace posed by the Arab League and conclude that when the conflict is resolved, the Middle East will be free of nuclear weapons. No exceptions!

     

    Akiva Eldar is the diplomatic affairs analyst for the Haaretz newspaper.

  • A Coup Has Occurred

    Text of a speech delivered September 20, 2007 at American University

    I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.
    If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
    Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.
    And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran — an escalation — which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.
    It’s a little hard for me to distinguish the two contingencies; they could come together. Another 9/11 or an Iranian attack in which Iran’s reaction against Israel, against our shipping, against our troops in Iraq above all, possibly in this country, will justify the full panoply of measures that have been prepared now, legitimized, and to some extent written into law. …
    This is an unusual gang, even for Republicans. [But] I think that the successors to this regime are not likely to roll back the assault on the Constitution. They will take advantage of it, they will exploit it.
    Will Hillary Clinton as president decide to turn off NSA after the last five years of illegal surveillance? Will she deprive her administration her ability to protect United States citizens from possible terrorism by blinding herself and deafening herself to all that NSA can provide? I don’t think so.
    Unless this somehow, by a change in our political climate, of a radical change, unless this gets rolled back in the next year or two before a new administration comes in — and there’s no move to do this at this point — unless that happens I don’t see it happening under the next administration, whether Republican or Democratic.
    The Next Coup
    Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.
    The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world — in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.
    There have been violations of these principles by many presidents before. Most of the specific things that Bush has done in the way of illegal surveillance and other matters were done under my boss Lyndon Johnson in the Vietnam War: the use of CIA, FBI, NSA against Americans.
    I could go through a list going back before this century to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in the Civil War, and before that the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 18th century. I think that none of those presidents were in fact what I would call quite precisely the current administration: domestic enemies of the Constitution.
    I think that none of these presidents with all their violations, which were impeachable had they been found out at the time and in nearly every case their violations were not found out until they were out of office so we didn’t have the exact challenge that we have today.
    That was true with the first term of Nixon and certainly of Johnson, Kennedy and others. They were impeachable, they weren’t found out in time, but I think it was not their intention to in the crisis situations that they felt justified their actions, to change our form of government.
    It is increasingly clear with each new book and each new leak that comes out, that Richard Cheney and his now chief of staff David Addington have had precisely that in mind since at least the early 70s. Not just since 1992, not since 2001, but have believed in Executive government, single-branch government under an Executive president — elected or not — with unrestrained powers. They did not believe in restraint.
    When I say this I’m not saying they are traitors. I don’t think they have in mind allegiance to some foreign power or have a desire to help a foreign power. I believe they have in their own minds a love of this country and what they think is best for this country — but what they think is best is directly and consciously at odds with what the Founders of this country and Constitution thought.
    They believe we need a different kind of government now, an Executive government essentially, rule by decree, which is what we’re getting with signing statements. Signing statements are talked about as line-item vetoes which is one [way] of describing them which are unconstitutional in themselves, but in other ways are just saying the president says “I decide what I enforce. I decide what the law is. I legislate.”
    It’s [the same] with the military commissions, courts that are under the entire control of the Executive Branch, essentially of the president. A concentration of legislative, judicial, and executive powers in one branch, which is precisely what the Founders meant to avert, and tried to avert and did avert to the best of their ability in the Constitution.
    Founders Had It Right
    Now I’m appealing to that as a crisis right now not just because it is a break in tradition but because I believe in my heart and from my experience that on this point the Founders had it right.
    It’s not just “our way of doing things” — it was a crucial perception on the corruption of power to anybody including Americans. On procedures and institutions that might possibly keep that power under control because the alternative was what we have just seen, wars like Vietnam, wars like Iraq, wars like the one coming.
    That brings me to the second point. This Executive Branch, under specifically Bush and Cheney, despite opposition from most of the rest of the branch, even of the cabinet, clearly intends a war against Iran which even by imperialist standards, standards in other words which were accepted not only by nearly everyone in the Executive Branch but most of the leaders in Congress. The interests of the empire, the need for hegemony, our right to control and our need to control the oil of the Middle East and many other places. That is consensual in our establishment. …
    But even by those standards, an attack on Iran is insane. And I say that quietly, I don’t mean it to be heard as rhetoric. Of course it’s not only aggression and a violation of international law, a supreme international crime, but it is by imperial standards, insane in terms of the consequences.
    Does that make it impossible? No, it obviously doesn’t, it doesn’t even make it unlikely.
    That is because two things come together that with the acceptance for various reasons of the Congress — Democrats and Republicans — and the public and the media, we have freed the White House — the president and the vice president — from virtually any restraint by Congress, courts, media, public, whatever.
    And on the other hand, the people who have this unrestrained power are crazy. Not entirely, but they have crazy beliefs.
    And the question is what then, what can we do about this? We are heading towards an insane operation. It is not certain. It is likely. … I want to try to be realistic myself here, to encourage us to do what we must do, what is needed to be done with the full recognition of the reality. Nothing is impossible.
    What I’m talking about in the way of a police state, in the way of an attack on Iran is not certain. Nothing is certain, actually. However, I think it is probable, more likely than not, that in the next 15, 16 months of this administration we will see an attack on Iran. Probably. Whatever we do.
    And … we will not succeed in moving Congress probably, and Congress probably will not stop the president from doing this. And that’s where we’re heading. That’s a very ugly, ugly prospect.
    However, I think it’s up to us to work to increase that small perhaps — anyway not large — possibility and probability to avert this within the next 15 months, aside from the effort that we have to make for the rest of our lives.
    Restoring the Republic
    Getting back the constitutional government and improving it will take a long time. And I think if we don’t get started now, it won’t be started under the next administration.
    Getting out of Iraq will take a long time. Averting Iran and averting a further coup in the face of a 9/11, another attack, is for right now, it can’t be put off. It will take a kind of political and moral courage of which we have seen very little…
    We have a really unusual concentration here and in this audience, of people who have in fact changed their lives, changed their position, lost their friends to a large extent, risked and experienced being called terrible names, “traitor,” “weak on terrorism” — names that politicians will do anything to avoid being called.
    How do we get more people in the government and in the public at large to change their lives now in a crisis in a critical way? How do we get Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for example? What kinds of pressures, what kinds of influences can be brought to bear to get Congress to do their jobs? It isn’t just doing their jobs. Getting them to obey their oaths of office.
    I took an oath many times, an oath of office as a Marine lieutenant, as an official in the Defense Department, as an official in the State Department as a Foreign Service officer. A number of times I took an oath of office which is the same oath office taken by every member of Congress and every official in the United States and every officer in the United States armed services.
    And that oath is not to a Commander in Chief, which is not mentioned. It is not to a fuehrer. It is not even to superior officers. The oath is precisely to protect and uphold the Constitution of the United States.
    Now that is an oath I violated every day for years in the Defense Department without realizing it when I kept my mouth shut when I knew the public was being lied into a war as they were lied into Iraq, as they are being lied into war in Iran.
    I knew that I had the documents that proved it, and I did not put it out then. I was not obeying my oath which I eventually came to do.
    I’ve often said that Lt. Ehren Watada — who still faces trial for refusing to obey orders to deploy to Iraq which he correctly perceives to be an unconstitutional and aggressive war — is the single officer in the United States armed services who is taking seriously in upholding his oath.
    The president is clearly violating that oath, of course. Everybody under him who understands what is going on and there are myriad, are violating their oaths. And that’s the standard that I think we should be asking of people.
    Congressional Courage
    On the Democratic side, on the political side, I think we should be demanding of our Democratic leaders in the House and Senate — and frankly of the Republicans — that it is not their highest single absolute priority to be reelected or to maintain a Democratic majority so that Pelosi can still be Speaker of the House and Reid can be in the Senate, or to increase that majority.
    I’m not going to say that for politicians they should ignore that, or that they should do something else entirely, or that they should not worry about that.
    Of course that will be and should be a major concern of theirs, but they’re acting like it’s their sole concern. Which is business as usual. “We have a majority, let’s not lose it, let’s keep it. Let’s keep those chairmanships.” Exactly what have those chairmanships done for us to save the Constitution in the last couple of years?
    I am shocked by the Republicans today that I read in the Washington Post who yesterday threatened a filibuster if we … get back habeas corpus. The ruling out of habeas corpus with the help of the Democrats did not get us back to George the First it got us back to before King John 700 years ago in terms of counter-revolution. We need some way, and Ann Wright has one way, of sitting in, in Conyers office and getting arrested. Ray McGovern has been getting arrested, pushed out the other day for saying the simple words “swear him in” when it came to testimony.
    I think we’ve got to somehow get home to them [in Congress] that this is the time for them to uphold the oath, to preserve the Constitution, which is worth struggling for in part because it’s only with the power that the Constitution gives Congress responding to the public, only with that can we protect the world from mad men in power in the White House who intend an attack on Iran.
    And the current generation of American generals and others who realize that this will be a catastrophe have not shown themselves — they might be people who in their past lives risked their bodies and their lives in Vietnam or elsewhere, like [Colin] Powell, and would not risk their career or their relation with the president to the slightest degree.
    That has to change. And it’s the example of people like those up here who somehow brought home to our representatives that they as humans and as citizens have the power to do likewise and find in themselves the courage to protect this country and protect the world. Thank you.

     

    Daniel Ellsberg is a Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Fellow and author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.

  • Preventing War Against Iran

    The United States is deeply mired in a preventive war of its own making in Iraq with no clear way out. Now the Bush administration is making accusations against Iran and bolstering US forces in the Persian Gulf with two additional naval battle groups.

    Why would the Bush administration contemplate a new war against Iran? How would a war against Iran in any conceivable way benefit the United States? There are no clear answers that explain the Bush administration’s increased threats toward Iran. Yet, despite the president’s statements that he will pursue “robust diplomacy,” the possibility that the United States will launch an attack against Iran cannot be dismissed.

    The Bush administration has continued trumpeting the fear that Iran may develop nuclear weapons, a technological possibility because of the uranium enrichment program it is pursuing. This charge, however, is not credible, at least in the near-term. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei reports there is no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. The CIA indicates that it would take Iran a decade to develop nuclear weapons, if that were its intention. Thus, the charge that Iran is on the brink of becoming a nuclear weapons state appears farfetched. The charge, and the lack of evidence to support it, is ominously similar to the spurious claims the Bush administration leveled against Iraq as a cause for initiating that war.

    More recently, the Bush administration has floated a new charge that Iran has provided Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) to insurgents in Iraq, even suggesting that the devices were responsible for the deaths of some 170 Americans. The administration has put forward little supporting information to substantiate its claim, and the government of Iran denies the allegation. It may be possible that Iranians are giving some support to Iraqi Shiites, but is this adequate cause to attack Iran and initiate a war with a country of some 70 million people? This is highly doubtful, unless the US is prepared to pay an even heavier price in blood and treasure than it is already paying in Iraq.

    Perhaps Mr. Bush thinks that he can bring democracy to another country in the Middle East, but this hasn’t worked out in Iraq and it is even less likely to happen in Iran. This is particularly true since US military forces are already stretched so thin that there would be little possibility for the US to put “boots on the ground” in Iran. A war against Iran would likely be an air war, a prolonged demonstration of “shock and awe.”

    What else could be motivating the Bush administration to pursue a war against Iran? Is it that the administration wishes to support Israel, which views Iran as a significant threat? Is it that Iran, like Iraq before it, is talking about changing its currency for oil revenues to Euros? Could it be that Mr. Bush likes being a “war president,” and, rather than accept defeat in Iraq, is seeking to widen the war by extending it to Iran?

    It is possible that the administration’s threatening behavior toward Iran is merely muscle flexing to strengthen the US hand in negotiations, but this possibility cannot be relied upon, particularly in light of the manner in which the Bush administration initiated the Iraq War.

    There have been reports by respected journalist Seymour Hersh that the US has contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. Even rumors of the US planning to use nuclear weapons preemptively against Iran should raise serious concerns in the halls of Congress and throughout the country. Nuclear weapons concentrate power in the hands of a single individual, undermining democracy and the future of global security.

    Congress opened the door for Mr. Bush’s attack against Iraq. Whatever the administration’s motives may be for its threatening behavior regarding Iran, Congress should now be responsible for closing the door to a US attack on another country. Speaker of the House Pelosi has said, “…Congress should assert itself…and make it very clear that there is no previous authority for the president, any president, to go into Iran.”

    Congress should act proactively and go on record before it is too late, foreclosing the president from attacking Iran without specific Congressional authorization, as well as appropriate authorization by the United Nations Security Council. The hour is late, but not too late, for Congress to assert its Constitutional responsibility.

    Senator Robert Byrd, among other Senators and members of Congress, has already put forward a resolution that requires Congressional approval of any offensive US military action taken against another country. In introducing Senate Resolution 39 on January 24, 2007, Senator Byrd stated, “I am introducing a resolution that clearly states that it is Congress…not the President – that is vested with the ultimate decision on whether to take this country to war against another country.” He called his resolution “a rejection of the bankrupt, dangerous and unconstitutional doctrine of preemption, which proposes that the President – any President – may strike another country before that country threatens us….”

    As bad as things are in Iraq – and there is no doubt that they are bad – for Mr. Bush to initiate a new war by attacking Iran would only make matters worse for the United States. The US needs to pursue an exit strategy from Iraq, not a preemptive war against yet another country that has not attacked the United States. The Congress of the United States needs to go on record now to assure that Mr. Bush understands this and the limits of his authority under the Constitution.

     

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