Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: International Law

  • Compassion, Wisdom and Courage: Building a Global Society of Peace and Creative Coexistence

    To download the full 2013 Peace Proposal, click here.

    Synopsis

    Efforts are currently under way to define a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a target date of 2030. As we debate these goals, we must face head-on the underlying ailments of human civilization in order to ensure that efforts to improve the human condition are more than mere stopgap measures—that they enable people struggling in the face of dire threats to recover the hope and strength needed to lead lives of dignity.

    For this we need a spiritual framework that will bring into greater clarity those things we cannot afford to ignore, while ensuring that all that we do contributes to the larger objective of a global society of peace and creative coexistence.

    If we picture such a society as an edifice, the ideals of human rights and human security are key pillars that hold it up, while the foundation on which these rest is respect for the dignity of life. For this to be a meaningful and robust support for other endeavors, it must be felt and experienced palpably as a way of life.

    To this end, I would like to propose the following three commitments as guidelines for action:

    • The determination to share the joys and sufferings of others
    • Faith in the limitless possibilities of life
    • The vow to defend and celebrate diversity

    I believe that the social mission of religion in the twenty-first century must be to bring people together in an ethos of reverence for life’s inherent dignity and worth.

    One pressing threat to the dignity of far too many people in our world today is poverty. The pervasive stress of economic deprivation is compounded when people feel that their very existence is disregarded, becoming alienated and being deprived of a meaningful role and place within society. This underlies the need for a socially inclusive approach focused on the restoration of a sense of connection with others and of purpose in life.

    Regardless of circumstance, all people inherently possess a life-state of ultimate dignity and are in this sense fundamentally equal and endowed with limitless possibilities. When we awaken to our original worth and determine to change present realities, we become a source of hope for others. Such a perspective is, I believe, valuable not only for the challenges of constructing a culture of human rights, but also for realizing a sustainable society.

    To forestall the further fissuring of society and enable a culture of peace to take root in the world, dialogue based on the celebration of our diversity is indispensable.

    Outlawing nuclear weapons as inhumane

    There has been a growing movement to outlaw nuclear weapons based on the premise that they are inhumane. It is my strong hope that an expanding core of NGOs and governments supporting this position will initiate the process of drafting a treaty to outlaw these weapons in light of their inhumane nature.

    Japan, as a country that has experienced nuclear attack, should play a leading role in the realization of a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC). Further, it should undertake the kind of confidence-building measures that are a necessary predicate to the establishment of a Northeast Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone and to creating the conditions for the global abolition of nuclear weapons.

    The SGI’s efforts to grapple with the nuclear weapons issue are based on the recognition that the very existence of these weapons represents the ultimate negation of the dignity of life. At the same time, nuclear weapons serve as a prism through which to perceive new perspectives on ecological integrity, economic development and human rights. This in turn helps us identify the elements that will shape the contours of a new, sustainable society, one in which all people can live in dignity.

    Toward this end, I would like to make three concrete proposals:

    • Making disarmament a key theme of the Sustainable Development Goals. Halving world military expenditures relative to 2010 levels and abolishing nuclear weapons and all other weapons judged inhumane under international law should be included as targets for achievement by the year 2030.
    • Initiating the negotiation process of a Nuclear Weapons Convention. The international community should engage in active debate to broadly shape international public opinion, with the goal of agreement on an initial draft by 2015.
    • Holding an expanded summit for a nuclear-weapon-free world. The G8 Summit in 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would be an appropriate opportunity for such a summit.

    Fostering a culture of human rights

    To enhance United Nations efforts to promote a culture of human rights, I propose that the promotion of human rights be a central element of the SDGs for the year 2030, including the following two specific targets.

    Every country should set up a Social Protection Floor (SPF) to ensure that those who are suffering from extreme poverty are able to regain a sense of dignity. Some thirty developing countries have in fact already started implementing plans for minimum income and livelihood guarantees. Such guarantees are a necessary condition for sustainability and a culture of human rights.

    Every society should promote human rights education and training. Alongside the legal system of guarantees and remedies, efforts to raise awareness of human rights through education and training could serve as a catalyst for the social interaction and support that provides a sense of connection and helps people regain hope and dignity. Regional centers for human rights education and training could be established within the framework of the United Nations University, along the lines of the centers currently promoting education for sustainable development.

    Today’s children will inevitably play a crucial role in the work of constructing a culture of human rights. To protect them and improve the conditions under which they live, it is crucial that all countries ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its Optional Protocols, and pass the domestic legislation needed to fulfill the treaty obligations.

    Strengthening Sino-Japanese relations

    Improving relations between China and Japan—currently said to be at their worst since World War II—is an essential element in building a global society of peace and coexistence.

    Political and economic relations between these two countries are constantly impacted by the ebb and flow of the times. This is why, faced with a crisis, it is important to adamantly uphold the two central pledges in the Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Japan and the People’s Republic of China (1978): To refrain from the use or threat of force, and not to seek regional hegemony.

    I urge Japan and China to set up a high-level forum for dialogue aimed at preventing any worsening of the situation. Its first order of business should be to institute a moratorium on all actions that could be construed as provocative. This should be followed by an analysis of the steps by which the confrontation evolved in order to facilitate the development of guidelines for more effective responses to future crises.

    I suggest that Japan and China institute the practice of holding regular summit meetings, similar to those established through the Élysée Treaty that regularly brought together French and German Heads of State and Government. I further propose that Japan and China together launch an organization for environmental cooperation in East Asia. This would help lay the foundations of a new partnership focused on peace and creative coexistence and joint action for the sake of humanity.

    The key to realizing all these goals ultimately lies in the solidarity of ordinary citizens. The year 2030 serves as a major goal in the effort to promote cooperation in the international community, and will also mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Soka Gakkai. Working with all those committed to a global society of peace and creative coexistence, we will continue to foster solidarity among the world’s people as we look ahead to that significant milestone.

    Daisaku Ikeda is President of Soka Gakkai International.

  • Draft of U.N. Security Council Resolution on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Disarmament

    United States Draft
    UNSC Resolution on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Nuclear Disarmament
    The Security Council,
    PP1. Resolving to seek a safer world for all and to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons, in accordance with the goals of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), in a way that promotes international stability, and based on the principle of undiminished security for all,
    PP2. Reaffirming the Statement of its President adopted at the Council’s meeting at the level of Heads of State and Government on 31 January 1992 (S/23500), including the need for all Member States to fulfill their obligations in relation to arms control and disarmament and to prevent proliferation in all its aspects of all weapons of mass destruction,
    PP3. Recalling also that the above Statement (S/23500) underlined the need for all Member States to resolve peacefully in accordance with the Charter any problems in that context threatening or disrupting the maintenance of regional and global stability,
    PP4. Bearing in mind the responsibilities of other organs of the United Nations in the field of disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation, and supporting them to continue to play their due roles,
    PP5. Underlining that the NPT remains the cornerstone of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and the essential foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament and for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and calling upon all States Parties to the NPT to cooperate so that the 2010 NPT Review Conference can successfully strengthen the Treaty and set realistic and achievable goals in all the Treaty’s three pillars: non-proliferation, the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and disarmament,
    PP6. Reaffirming its firm commitment to the NPT and its conviction that the international nuclear non-proliferation regime should be maintained and strengthened to ensure its effective implementation,
    PP7. Calling for further progress on all aspects of disarmament to enhance global security,
    PP8. Welcoming the decisions of those non-nuclear-weapon States that have dismantled their nuclear weapons programs or renounced the possession of nuclear weapons,
    PP9. Welcoming the nuclear arms reduction and disarmament efforts undertaken and accomplished by nuclear-weapon States, and underlining the need to pursue further efforts in the sphere of nuclear disarmament, in accordance with Article VI of the NPT,
    PP10. Welcoming in this connection the decision of the Russian Federation and the United States of America to conduct negotiations to conclude a new comprehensive legally binding agreement to replace the Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, which expires in December 2009,
    PP11. Welcoming and supporting the steps taken to conclude nuclear-weapon-free zone treaties and reaffirming the conviction that the establishment of internationally recognized nuclear-weapon-free zones on the basis of arrangements freely arrived at among the States of the region concerned, and in accordance with the 1999 UN Disarmament Commission guidelines, enhances global and regional peace and security, strengthens the nuclear nonproliferation regime, and contributes toward realizing the objectives of nuclear disarmament,
    PP12. Recalling the statements by each of the five nuclear-weapon States, noted by resolution 984 (1995), in which they give security assurances against the use of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear-weapon State Parties to the NPT, and reaffirming that such security assurances strengthen the nuclear nonproliferation regime,

    PP13. Reaffirming its resolutions 825 (1993), 1695 (2006), 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009),
    PP14. Reaffirming its resolutions 1696 (2006), 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008), 1835 (2008),
    PP15. Reaffirming all other relevant non-proliferation resolutions adopted by the Security Council,
    PP16. Gravely concerned about the threat of nuclear terrorism, including the provision of nuclear material or technical assistance for the purposes of terrorism,
    PP17. Mindful in this context of the risk that irresponsible or unlawful provision of nuclear material or technical assistance could enable terrorism,
    PP18. Expressing its support for the 2010 Global Summit on Nuclear Security,
    PP19. Affirming its support for the Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism,
    PP20. Recognizing the progress made by the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, and the G-8 Global Partnership,
    PP21. Reaffirming UNSC Resolution 1540 (2004) and the necessity for all States to implement fully the measures contained therein, and calling upon all UN Member States and international and regional organizations to cooperate actively with the Committee established pursuant to that resolution, including in the course of the comprehensive review as called for in resolution 1810 (2008),

    1. Emphasizes that a situation of noncompliance with nonproliferation obligations shall be brought to the attention of the Security Council, which will determine if that situation constitutes a threat to international peace and security, and emphasizes the Security Council’s primary responsibility in addressing such threats;
    2. Calls upon States Parties to the NPT to comply fully with all their obligations under the Treaty, and in this regard notes that enjoyment of the benefits of the NPT by a State Party can be assured only by its compliance with the obligations thereunder;
    3. Calls upon all States that are not Parties to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to join the Treaty so as to achieve its universality at an early date, and in any case to adhere to its terms;
    4 Calls upon the Parties to the NPT, pursuant to Article VI of the Treaty, to undertake to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to nuclear arms reduction and disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control, and calls on all other States to join in this endeavor;
    5. Calls upon all States to refrain from conducting a nuclear test explosion and to join the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), thereby bringing the treaty into force;
    6. Calls upon the Conference on Disarmament to negotiate a Treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices as soon as possible, and welcomesthe Conference on Disarmament’s adoption by consensus of its Program of Work in 2009;

    7. Deplores in particular the current major challenges to the nonproliferation regime that the Security Council has determined to be threats to international peace and security, and demands that the parties concerned comply fully with their obligations under the relevant Security Council resolutions,

    8. Encourages efforts to advance development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy in a framework that reduces proliferation risk and adheres to the highest international standards for safeguards, security, and safety;

    9. Underlines that the NPT recognizes in Article IV the right of the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I , II and III of the Treaty;

    10. Calls upon States to adopt stricter national controls for the export of sensitive goods and technologies of the nuclear fuel cycle;

    11. Encourages the work of the IAEA on multilateral approaches to the nuclear fuel cycle, including assurances of nuclear fuel supply and related measures, as effective means of addressing the expanding need for nuclear fuel and nuclear fuel services and minimizing the risk of proliferation, and urges the IAEA Board of Governors to agree upon measures to this end as soon as possible;
    12. Affirms that effective IAEA safeguards are essential to prevent nuclear proliferation and to facilitate cooperation in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and in that regard:
    a. Calls upon all non-nuclear-weapon States party to the NPT that have yet to bring into force a comprehensive safeguards agreement or a modified small quantities protocol to do so immediately,
    b. Calls upon all States to adopt and implement an Additional Protocol, which together with comprehensive safeguards agreements constitute essential elements of the IAEA safeguards system,
    c. Stresses the importance for all Member States to ensure that the IAEA continue to have all the necessary resources and authority to verify the declared use of nuclear materials and facilities and the absence of undeclared activities, and for the IAEA to report to the Council accordingly as appropriate;
    13. Encourages States to provide the IAEA with the cooperation necessary for it to verify whether a state is in compliance with its safeguards obligations, and affirms the Security Council’s resolve to support the IAEA’s efforts to that end, consistent with its authorities under the Charter;
    14. Undertakes to address without delay any State’s notice of withdrawal from the NPT, including the events described in the statement provided by the State pursuant to Article X of the Treaty, while recognizing ongoing discussions in the course of the NPT review on identifying modalities under which NPT States Parties could collectively respond to notification of withdrawal, and affirmsthat a State remains responsible under international law for violations of the NPT committed prior to its withdrawal;
    15. Encourages States to require as a condition of nuclear exports that the recipient State agree that, in the event that it should terminate, withdraw from, or be found by the IAEA Board of Governors to be in noncompliance with its IAEA safeguards agreement or withdraw from the NPT, the supplier state would have a right to require the return of nuclear material and equipment provided prior to such termination, noncompliance or withdrawal, as well as any special nuclear material produced through the use of such material or equipment;
    16. Encourages States to consider whether a recipient State has in place an Additional Protocol in making nuclear export decisions;
    17. Urges States to require as a condition of nuclear exports that the recipient State agree that, in the event that it should terminate its IAEA safeguards agreement, safeguards shall continue with respect to any nuclear material and equipment provided prior to such withdrawal, as well as any special nuclear material produced through the use of such material or equipment;
    18. Calls for universal adherence to the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials and its 2005 Amendment;
    19. Welcomes the March 2009 recommendations of the Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1540 (2004) to make more effective use of existing funding mechanisms, including the consideration of the establishment of a voluntary fund, and affirms its commitment to promote full implementation of UNSCR 1540 by Member States by ensuring effective and sustainable support for the activities of the 1540 Committee;
    20. Reaffirms the need for full implementation of UNSCR 1540 (2004) by Member States and, with an aim of preventing access to, or assistance and financing for, weapons of mass destruction, related materials and their means of delivery by non-State actors, as defined in the resolution, and calls upon Member States to cooperate actively with the Committee established pursuant to that resolution and the IAEA, including rendering assistance, at their request, for their implementation of UNSCR 1540 provisions, and in this context welcomes the forthcoming comprehensive review of the status of implementation of UNSCR 1540 with a view to increasing its effectiveness, and calls upon all States to participate actively in this review;
    21. Calls upon Member States to share best practices with a view to improved safety standards and nuclear security practices and raise standards of nuclear security to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism, with the aim of securing all vulnerable nuclear material from such risks within four years;
    22. Calls upon all States to manage responsibly and minimize to the greatest extent that is technically and economically feasible the use of highly enriched uranium for civilian purposes, including by working to convert research reactors and radioisotope production processes to the use of low enriched uranium fuels and targets;
    23. Calls upon all States to improve their national technical capabilities to detect, deter, and disrupt illicit trafficking in nuclear materials throughout their territories, and to work to enhance international partnerships and capacity building in this regard;
    24. Urges all States to take all appropriate national measures in accordance with their national authorities and legislation, and consistent with international law, to prevent proliferation financing, shipments, or illicit trafficking, to strengthen export controls, to secure sensitive materials, and to control access to intangible transfers of technology;
    25. Declares its resolve to monitor closely any situations involving the proliferation of nuclear weapons, their means of delivery or related material, including to or by non-State actors as they are defined in resolution 1540 (2004), and, as appropriate, to take such measures as may be necessary to ensure the maintenance of international peace and security;
    26. Decides to remain seized of the matter.

    US President Barack Obama will chair a special meeting of the UN Security Council on September 24 to discuss nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

  • Does Nuclear Deterrence Deter?

    This article was originally published on Defusing the Nuclear Threat.

    A few years ago, my wife pointed out that whoever coined the term nuclear deterrence was a marketing genius: it implies that threatening to destroy the world will deter behavior we don’t like. But what happens if nuclear deterrence morphs into nuclear chicken, with neither side willing to back down and be humiliated? Two articles I came across today help illuminate how that could happen.

    Today’s New York Times has an article about the ongoing Sino-Japanese dispute over a few uninhabited island known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. The article noted:

    The diplomatic maneuvering underscores the emotions in both nations. In China, the islands are seen as the last unreturned piece of Chinese territory seized during the building of Japan’s empire more than a century ago, and thus a sign that Japan remains unrepentant. To many Japanese, the islands have become emblematic of the broader challenge that their nation, long Asia’s strongest power, faces from the emergence of an increasingly powerful China seemingly bent on settling old scores.

    Where territorial disputes are concerned, even a few small, uninhabited islands can cause rationality to evaporate, and an irrational adversary is unlikely to be deterred. If Japan is irrational enough to get into a war with China, we would be dragged in by our mutual security treaty which Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell clearly stated extends to these disputed islands.

    Paradoxically, nuclear deterrence depends on our adversary being rational enough to be deterred, while we must appear irrational enough to risk our existence as a nation. The second part of that paradox was clearly enunciated in a 1995 USSTRATCOMM white paper, “Essentials of Post-Cold War Deterrence”:

    Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially “out of control” can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project to all adversaries. [emphasis added]

    The second article today which relates to a potential failure of nuclear deterrence is Ward Wilson’sguest post on the Arms Control Wonk blog, which explains how President Kennedy failed to be deterred during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ward’s column is related to his new book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, which I highly recommend. When I got my copy of the book, I wasn’t sure how much time I’d be able to give it. After all, this is my primary area of academic interest and I’ve read extensively on the issues treated here. But I found myself drawn in to the point that I finished the book the same day it arrived! That hasn’t happened in a long time, and is a tribute to both Ward’s masterful writing style and his concise arguments. Buy it, you’ll like it!

    And, most importantly, let’s start recognizing that nuclear chicken (i.e., nuclear deterrence) is not a rational basis for our national security.

    Martin Hellman is a NAPF Associate and is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

  • Advancing the Disarmament and Non-proliferation Agenda: Seeking Peace in an Over-armed World

    Ban Ki-moon delivered this speech at the Monterey Institute of International Studies on January 18, 2013.

    It is a pleasure to be at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

    I thank President Sunder Ramaswamy for hosting. I also want to recognize Dr. William Potter, Director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

    It is not surprising that this Center is located at the Monterey Institute.

    Your graduates are grappling with the many challenges of a world in transition: protecting the environment; promoting sustainable development; strengthening international peace and security.

    Your faculty and students have worked closely with the United Nations.

    The world needs your skills and commitment, especially in advancing disarmament and non-proliferation.

    These are great causes. They are part of the UN’s very identity, helping to define who we are and what we stand for.

    These issues are also part of my own personal and professional DNA.

    In 1992, I served as vice-chair of the South-North Korea Joint Nuclear Control Commission aimed at realizing the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

    I also served in 1999 as Chair of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization.

    As United Nations Secretary-General, one of my first decisions was to restructure our disarmament office and re-energize its work.

    I also launched a five-point plan on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation early in my tenure.

    Today I would like to review what we have achieved and what challenges remain.

    I will focus on five linked and mutually reinforcing points – accountability; the rule of law; partnerships; the role of the Security Council; and education.

    As I look at the disarmament landscape, my feelings are mixed.

    The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty remains a cornerstone of the global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation regime. It has helped curb nuclear proliferation and avoid a world with many dozens of nuclear states as had been feared.

    I also recognize the combined efforts of governments, experts, civil society and international organizations with disarmament and non-proliferation mandates.

    But, as we know, the architecture of non-proliferation is not perfect. There are loopholes and gaps.

    And even more troubling, nuclear disarmament progress is off track.

    Delay comes with a high price tag.

    The longer we procrastinate, the greater the risk that these weapons will be used, will proliferate or be acquired by terrorists.

    But our aim must be more than keeping the deadliest of weapons from “falling into the wrong hands”.

    There are no right hands for wrong weapons.

    This brings me to my first point: accountability.

    Each Member State needs to uphold its commitments.

    My advice, my appeal to all, is this: Be a first mover. Don’t look to others or to your neighbours to start disarmament and arms control measures.

    If you take the lead, others will follow.

    Deferring nuclear disarmament indefinitely pending the satisfaction of an endlessly growing list of preconditions can lead only to a world full of nuclear weapons.

    I want to stress the special responsibility of the nuclear-armed States.

    I also encourage nuclear-weapon-States to come up with a bold set of measures to promote transparency of their nuclear arsenals.

    They can do this next April at the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2015 NPT Review Conference.

    Or they can start today by contributing data to the UN’s “Repository of information provided by nuclear-weapon States”, as mandated at the Review Conference in 2010.

    This should commence with in-depth consultations between the States with the largest nuclear arsenals — the Russian Federation and the United States — followed by deep and verified cuts in their arsenals and additional reductions by other States.

    I urge all nuclear-armed States to reconsider their national nuclear posture.

    Nuclear deterrence is not a solution to international peace and stability. It is an obstacle.

    Member States also need to reinvigorate the international disarmament machinery.

    When I spoke to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva I said plainly that the very credibility of the body is at risk.

    The Conference’s record of achievement is overshadowed by inertia that has now lasted for more than a decade. That must change.

    Another year of stalemate in the Conference on Disarmament is simply unacceptable.

    The Conference should start long-overdue negotiations on a fissile material treaty as a priority.

    It should also start deliberations on a nuclear weapons convention, a legal security assurance for non-nuclear weapon States against nuclear threats, and the prevention of an arms race in outer space.

    Global nuclear disarmament requires global arrangements.

    Ladies and Gentlemen,

    My second point relates to strengthening the rule of law.

    We must intensify efforts to bring the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty into force.

    I urge the remaining eight states whose ratification is essential for the Treaty’s entry into force to do so without further delay.

    In April, I will travel to Washington D.C. with the leadership of the CTBTO to support the Obama Administration’s efforts to get this treaty ratified.

    We also need to achieve universal membership in the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions.

    This is not a theoretical issue; there are concerns in the here and now.

    Twice in recent months, I have written to President Assad of Syria to warn against the use of these weapons in the conflict, and I have urged the Syrian government to join the Chemical Weapons Convention without further delay.

    Let there be no doubt: The use of such weapons would be an outrageous crime with dire consequences.

    We also have to further strengthen the capacity of the organizations with key responsibilities for ensuring implementation of treaties and other agreements, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the CTBTO.

    One major rule of law priority this year is to reach agreement on an Arms Trade Treaty.

    There is a great need for responsible standards in the legal trade in conventional weapons, as well as for expanded international cooperation to combat the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.

    Every day, we at the United Nations see the human toll of an absence of regulations or lax controls on the arms trade.

    We see it in the suffering of populations caught up in armed conflict or victimized by pervasive crime.

    We see it in the killing and wounding of civilians – including children in schools.

    We see it in the massive displacement of people and through grave violations of international law.

    An agreed set of standards for arms exports along with strong national legislation can help begin to change all of that.

    When concluded, the Arms Trade Treaty will advance global efforts to bring the rule of law to the conventional arms trade.

    This would expand on past successes in conventional arms control, especially the conclusion of Conventions outlawing cluster munitions and landmines.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    My third point today is the importance of advocacy and partnerships.

    Disarmament cannot be considered in isolation from other global challenges.
    The world spends more on the military in one month than it does on development all year.

    And four hours of military spending is equal to the total budgets of all international disarmament and non-proliferation organizations combined.

    The world is over-armed. Peace is under-funded.

    Bloated military budgets promote proliferation, derail arms control, doom disarmament and detract from social and economic development.

    The profits of the arms industry are built on the suffering of ordinary people – in Mali, Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

    At the foot of the pyramid lie small arms. At the top are nuclear weapons.

    I will continue to use my moral authority and convening power to advocate for disarmament, non-proliferation and nuclear security.

    That is why I was the first Secretary-General to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where I met with the survivors — the hibakusha.

    It is why I visited the former nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk, in Kazakhstan.

    I have also been to Chernobyl and Fukushima, and convened high-level meetings at the United Nations on Nuclear Safety and Security and on Countering Nuclear Terrorism.

    In all I do, I rely on partners to help me spread the word.

    Non-governmental organizations are making significant contributions, such as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the Global Zero movement and many other groups.

    We are using social media to enrol individuals around the world as messengers for peace, as with the UN’s “WMD-WeMustDisarm!” multimedia campaign in 2009.

    But the responsibility lies ultimately with Member States.

    This brings me to my fourth point — specific regional issues and the role of the Security Council.

    I am deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear programme.

    I visited Iran last August and emphatically urged the country’s leaders to take concrete steps to reassure the world community about the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.

    Iran must fully comply with relevant Security Council resolutions.

    And as these issues are being addressed, parallel efforts should be undertaken to advance the broader goal of promoting peace and security in the region.

    In 1995, concerns about other security challenges in the Middle East led the States Parties to the NPT to adopt a resolution calling for the region to be free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

    Last year, we saw the postponement of an important conference to address this issue.

    We have missed a deadline. But we have not lost the opportunity to move this initiative forward.

    This year, the world community must insist on doing exactly that. And I will do all I can to help.

    Turning to the DPRK, the recent launch of a long-range rocket has exacerbated global concern about its pursuit of nuclear weapons, including means of delivery.

    I once again urge the DPRK to fully abide by the relevant Security Council resolutions.

    Countries in Northeast Asia are in transition, which can offer a new window of opportunity for the DPRK.

    I encourage the new leadership in Pyongyang to build confidence with neighbouring countries and address the concerns of the international community.

    This leads me to another important question: how to respond when Security Council resolutions are violated.

    Unless equipped with robust verification and enforcement measures, the credibility of the Security Council will be called into question.

    I urge the Security Council to take up this matter at a high-level meeting.

    The Council has a critical role to play in advancing disarmament and non-proliferation goals.

    In 2008, I urged the Council to convene a Summit-level meeting on these issues and they did so in 2009. This welcome development should be followed by further meetings and future Summits.

    By considering — and acting – on major existential threats, the Security Council can spur much-needed global debate.

    This brings me to my fifth and final point — the importance of disarmament education.

    A 2002 UN study put it well: the goal must be “To learn how to think rather than what to think.”

    Unfortunately, funding for disarmament education, training and research remains low to non-existent in many States.

    Most damaging of all, the next generation of leaders, legislators and administrators is being encouraged not to think.

    It is easier for students to learn the logic of nuclear deterrence than to learn to discard the myths that keep nuclear weapons in place.

    But education can help to refute the claim that nuclear disarmament is utopian.

    We hear this year after year, especially from critics who seem blind to the social and economic costs of such weapons and the catastrophic human effects of their use.

    Innovative teaching methods are one way forward, and here I credit the approach used at Dr. Potter’s Center, which relies heavily on simulations and role-playing.

    Technology, too, has much to offer. Web-based “massive open online courses” can reach huge audiences worldwide.

    In 2010, the UN launched its “Academic Impact” initiative to deepen its cooperation with the world’s universities.

    I hope we can encourage academia to include disarmament and non-proliferation issues in their curricula and research agendas, as you have done here.

    I am pleased to announce today that the Monterey Institute of International Studies has agreed to join the UN Academic Impact – and I thank you for your leadership and example.

    Disarmament education can also benefit governments through programmes offered at the UN’s regional centres for peace and disarmament in Latin America, Africa and in Asia and the Pacific.

    The UN’s Programme of Fellowships on Disarmament has trained over 800 public officials, mainly from developing countries.

    The UN Institute for Disarmament Research, based in Geneva, continues to perform important work, and I believe it deserves increased financial support.

    And the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the CTBTO have their own excellent training programmes.

    Education can help the world to build a global culture of peace that rejects all weapons of mass destruction as illegitimate and immoral.

    Ladies and Gentlemen,

    Over a half century ago, President John Kennedy stood at the podium in the United Nations General Assembly and warned:

    “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

    The world was lucky that the nuclear arms build-up that followed did not result in a global nuclear catastrophe.

    Yet the nuclear sword remains — as does that slender thread.

    But so, too, does that plea for abolition — an appeal rooted in the threats posed by weapons of mass destruction and the unrestrained global competition for more, and more potent, weaponry.

    So I will add my own appeal to you today.

    Focus your minds not on clever ways to strengthen the thread. Focus instead on how to remove the sword.

    This is the true challenge for disarmament and non-proliferation.

    Thank you.

    Ban Ki-moon is the United Nations Secretary-General.

  • Outlawing Nuclear Weapons: Time for a New International Treaty?

    David KriegerIs it time for a new international treaty that would outlaw nuclear weapons?  The short answer to this question is, Yes, it is time.  Actually, it is past time.  The critical question, however, is not whether we need a new international treaty.  We do.  The critical question is: How do we achieve the political will among the nuclear weapon states to begin negotiations for a new international treaty to outlaw and eliminate all nuclear weapons?

    The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Is Failing

    The NPT has reciprocal obligations.  The nuclear weapon states seek to hold the line against proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries.  In return, the non-nuclear weapon states rely upon Article VI of the NPT to level the playing field.  Article VI contains three obligations:

    “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes 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.”

    None of these obligations have been fulfilled.  Negotiations in good faith have not been pursued on any of the three obligations.

    It has been 42 years since the treaty entered into force, and the nuclear arms race continues.  All of the NPT nuclear weapon states are modernizing their arsenals.  They have not negotiated in good faith to end the nuclear arms race at an early date.

    Nor have the NPT nuclear weapon states negotiated in good faith to achieve nuclear disarmament.  They have not acted with a sense of urgency to achieve the goal of nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.  They have not made a commitment to zero nuclear weapons.

    Finally, the NPT nuclear weapon states have not negotiated in good faith on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.  Since the NPT entered into force in 1970, there have been no negotiations on general and complete disarmament.

    The NPT nuclear weapon states seem perfectly comfortable with their failure to fulfill their obligations under Article VI of the NPT.  Given this lack of political will to achieve any of the three Article VI obligations, the prospects for a new international treaty are dim if states continue with business as usual.  That is why the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation called for bold action by the non-nuclear weapon states in its Briefing Paper for the 2012 Preparatory Committee Meeting for the 2015 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.  The Briefing Paper concluded:

    “It is necessary to ensure that nuclear weapons will not be used again as instruments of war, risking the destruction of civilization, nuclear famine and the extinction of most or all humans and other forms of complex life.  Exposing the dangers of launch-on-warning nuclear policies and the dysfunctional and counterproductive nature of nuclear deterrence theory is essential for awaking policy makers and the public to the imperative goal of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.  It is a goal that demands boldness by all who seek a sustainable future for humanity and the planet.  The non-nuclear weapon states that are parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty have both the right and the responsibility to assert leadership in assuring that the nuclear weapon states fulfill their obligations for good faith negotiations for complete nuclear disarmament.”

    The Premises of Bold Action

    Bold action by the non-nuclear weapon states would be based upon the following premises:

      1. The NPT nuclear weapon states have failed to fulfill their obligations under Article VI; this failure poses serious risks of future proliferation.

     

      1. The understanding that even a regional nuclear war would have global consequences (e.g., nuclear famine modeling).

     

      1. The risks of nuclear war, by accident or design, have not gone away.  Stanford Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman, an expert in risk analysis, estimates that a child born today has a one-in-six chance of dying due to a nuclear weapon in his or her 80-year expected lifetime.

     

      1. The understanding that humans and their systems are not infallible (e.g. Chernobyl and Fukushima).

     

      1. The understanding that deterrence is only a theory that could fail catastrophically (see the Santa Barbara Declaration at  /?p=356).

     

      1. Continued reliance upon nuclear weapons is a threat to civilization and the future of complex life on the planet.

     

    1. There needs to be a sense of urgency to eliminate the risks posed by nuclear weapons, nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.

     

    What Would Constitute Bold Action?

     

    The non-nuclear weapon states need to demonstrate to the nuclear weapon states that they are serious about the need for a new international treaty, which would be the means to fulfill the NPT Article VI obligations.  UN General Assembly Resolutions are not getting the job done.  They are not being taken seriously by the nuclear weapon states; nor are exhortations by the UN Secretary-General and other world leaders.  Bold action by non-nuclear weapon states, in descending order of severity, could include these options:

     

     

      1. Announcing a boycott of the 2015 NPT Review Conference if the nuclear weapon states have not commenced negotiations for a Nuclear Weapons Convention or Framework Agreement prior to 2015.

     

      1. Commencing legal action against the NPT nuclear weapon states, individually and/or collectively, for breach of their NPT Article VI obligations.

     

      1. Withdrawal from the NPT as a protest against its continuing two-tier structure of nuclear haves and have-nots.

     

    1. Declaring the NPT null and void as a result of the failure of the nuclear weapon states to act in good faith in fulfilling their Article VI obligations.

     

    Conclusion

    At the outset, I posed this question: How do we achieve the political will among the nuclear weapon states to begin negotiations for a new international treaty to outlaw and eliminate all nuclear weapons?  The answer is that the non-nuclear weapon states must unite and pressure the nuclear weapon states by bold action.

     

    Fifty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and more than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, we are approaching a critical time in the Nuclear Age.  Our technological genius threatens our human future.  Too much time has passed and too little has been accomplished toward achieving a world free of nuclear weapons.

     

    Bold action is needed to move the nuclear weapon states to fulfill their obligations under Article VI of the NPT.  I favor the first two actions listed above: a boycott and legal action.  I fear that, unless such actions are taken soon by non-nuclear weapon states to pressure the nuclear weapon states to act in good faith, the likelihood is that business as usual will continue, and states will end up choosing the more extreme remedies of the third and fourth actions listed above: withdrawal from the NPT or deeming it null and void.  Should this be the case, we will lose the only existing treaty that obligates its members to nuclear disarmament and also the likelihood of achieving a new international treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons.

  • Opening Statement

    (The Vandenberg 15 – which includes Daniel Ellsberg, Cindy Sheehan, Father Louis Vitale, John Amidon and me – protested the launching of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the early morning hours of February 25, 2012. As we sought to deliver a message to the Base Commander calling for a cancellation of the test missile launch, we were arrested for trespass.  All 15 defendants pleaded innocent to the charge. We had gone to Vandenberg Air Force Base to exercise our first amendment rights to protest an illegal act on the part of the government. The prosecution sought to limit the trial to the narrow issue of trespass, while we sought to put nuclear weapons and US nuclear weapons policy on trial. On the opening morning of the trial, the government moved to dismiss all charges and the Court granted the government’s motion. The case against the Vandenberg 15 was dismissed. It was a small but significant victory for the people. The real victory will come when nuclear weapons are abolished, which will happen when the people awaken to the threat posed by these insane weapons and demand of  their leaders to lead the way to a world free of nuclear weapons. This is the statement I had planned to give as my Opening Statement.)


    David KriegerYour honor, the protest that occurred at Vandenberg Air Force Base on February 25, 2012 was legal.  There was no crime of trespass.


    Right and Duty of Citizens to Report a Crime or Suspected Crime


    There is a right to speak out in the performance of our duties as citizens. For example, one has a right and a duty to speak out against voter fraud. Or, if one sees a policeman commit a crime or learns that a policeman is about to commit a crime, there is a right and a duty to inform his superior at the police department. If one were arrested for trespass at the county elections office or at the police station when trying to report a crime or suspected crime, one’s right to free speech – protected by the first amendment to our Constitution – would be violated. 


    Such a violation of first amendment rights would have a chilling effect on other citizens seeking to exercise their rights as citizens under the first amendment.


    One of the great gifts given to us by our forefathers is the right to speak out in protest of governmental acts and to petition our government for redress of grievances. In fact, it is both a right and a non-delegable duty. For example, a citizen is not required to go to the city council before reporting a crime to the chief of police. 


    Your honor, I am not speaking about the defense of necessity, but about the rights, as well as responsibilities, of citizens under the first amendment to the United States Constitution.


    Legitimate Business


    The government alleges that it read a “Declaration Advisement Prior to Removal to Non-Barred Persons.” It is a Declaration that I never heard at Vandenberg Air Force Base, nor is it to be heard on all the hours of DVDs that were provided by the government. In this Declaration Advisement are the words, “Individuals without legitimate business on Vandenberg Air Force Base will not be permitted to enter or remain within the geographical confines of this installation.” But those of us who walked toward the kiosk at Vandenberg on the evening of February 25, 2012 did have legitimate business – we were exercising our first amendment rights to report a suspected crime to the Base Commander and to petition the Base Commander to cancel the planned test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. 


    In my own case, I was trying to deliver to the Base Commander, or her subordinate, a booklet written by General George Lee Butler, a former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command. General Butler, who was once in charge of all US strategic nuclear weapons, stated, “Nuclear weapons are the enemy of humanity. Indeed, they’re not weapons at all. They’re some species of biological time bombs whose effects transcend time and space, poisoning the earth and its inhabitants for generations to come.”


    This is an important statement for several reasons. First, it was made by a former commander-in-chief of the US Strategic Command. Second, it implies what should be obvious to all – that nuclear weapons are biological time bombs, and thus illegal. Third, it makes clear that nuclear weapons affect not only present generations, but future generations as well – in other words, our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren and so on.


    Regarding nuclear deterrence theory, General Butler stated, “Nuclear deterrence was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations, incomplete intelligence and fragile human relationships.” He was saying, in effect, “don’t rely upon nuclear deterrence for protection – it is only a ‘slippery intellectual construct.’”


    I hold the same belief that General Butler expressed. I thought that the Base Commander would be more likely to believe this relevant information from General Butler than from me. In fact, on the evening we were arrested at Vandenberg, I handed the booklet to the young airman who handcuffed me without seeking to ascertain the legitimacy of my business at Vandenberg.  Despite my telling the airman that I brought the booklet for the Base Commander, he returned it to one of the other members of the public who was there that evening but was not arrested. 


    Your honor, before my arrest, no one asked me why I was there. No one at Vandenberg sought to ascertain whether my business there was legitimate or not. This was the case for all the individuals arrested that evening at Vandenberg.  So, how could Vandenberg personnel have lawfully arrested us when they never sought to inquire about the legitimacy of our business there?


    The Government’s Breaches of the Non-Proliferation Treaty  


    According to the US Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land.  Article VI, Section 2 of the Constitution states: “This constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” (Emphasis added.)
    The United States signed and ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The treaty entered into force in 1970.  Therefore, it is part of the “supreme law of the land.”  Under Article VI of this treaty, “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes 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.”


    Your honor, the United States is in breach of its obligations under Article VI of the NPT. It has not pursued negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the arms race at an early date. It has not pursued negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to nuclear disarmament. And it has not pursued negotiations in good faith on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.


    The test launching of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from Vandenberg only underlines our government’s failures to live up to our obligations under the NPT, its breaches of the treaty, and its lack of good faith. Each of the 450 Minuteman III missiles deployed by the US carries a powerful thermonuclear weapon – many times more powerful than the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These missiles are kept on high alert 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They are highly accurate, but also easy to target. In a time of crisis, there is incentive to “use them or lose them.” They are first-strike weapons that could be launched in response to a false warning of attack.


    Your honor, all of this is important information for the Base Commander at Vandenberg to understand and for the American people to understand.


    Criminal Activity


    Is the launching of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg a criminal act? These missiles carry thermonuclear weapons when they are in their silos on high alert. The test launching of these missiles is a threat to other countries – a reminder that we can attack them with nuclear weapons. Just as murder is a crime, the threat to murder someone is also a crime. In the case of nuclear-armed missiles, the threat is to kill millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions of people. A US nuclear attack against another country would almost certainly result in a counter-attack against the American people.


    Self-Defense


    The US government is engaging in conduct that bit by bit will lead to nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, nuclear war and to the destruction of the human race. As a member of the human race, I have a right to defend myself and my family. Do I and my fellow defendants have a right to believe that Minuteman III tests, such as the test launch from Vandenberg on February 25, 2012, put us, our families and our fellow Americans in danger? Or perhaps the question can be put this way: Would a reasonable person, knowing that nuclear weapons are capable of destroying civilization and most complex life, believe there was danger from the continued muscle-flexing behavior of testing nuclear-capable Minuteman III missiles? And further, would a reasonable person take steps to nonviolently alert proper authorities to the risks this conduct creates?


    There Was No Trespass


    The place of protest must have a reasonable physical proximity to where the protest can be heard. Vandenberg designated a protest area where protesters can only be seen by people in vehicles passing by rapidly.


    It is easily observable that the public can access the property that Vandenberg deems to be its exclusive jurisdiction. Members of the public walk and drive on that property routinely, going to the Vandenberg Visitor Center and to the kiosk where cars are stopped.


    We went to Vandenberg to peacefully exercise our first amendment rights, speak to the Base Commander or transmit information to her, and warn our fellow citizens of the dangers of such launches of missiles that are ordinarily armed with thermonuclear weapons.


    In walking toward the kiosk, seeking to exercise our first amendment rights, we were doing no more than members of the public do every day at Vandenberg.


    There was no barrier to our walking on this road toward the kiosk until Air Force personnel formed a human barrier in front of us.  If there was a line on the road, it was not clear and it was not a barrier. We stopped when we were told to stop. Then, rather than being asked if we had legitimate business at Vandenberg, we were immediately apprehended and arrested.


    Your honor, the Commander and personnel at Vandenberg sought to make us criminals where there was no crime. In fact, if there was a crime, it was a crime on the part of those who would threaten others with the massive annihilation of which nuclear-armed missiles are capable. The defendants had legitimate business at Vandenberg. We were exercising our rights, as well as our responsibilities, as citizens under the first amendment of the United States Constitution.


    We were saying to our government that nuclear weapons and their delivery systems are tools of annihilation. We cannot continue treating them as business as usual. We must stop this recklessness and madness before we and those who follow us on this planet, suffer – by accident or design – the terrible consequences of nuclear war.

  • Pacta Sunt Servanda: Promises to Keep

    Jonathan GranoffOn United Nations Day, three years ago Secretary General Ban Ki-moon set forth a compass point for international cooperation to eliminate nuclear weapons and to make the world safer on the path to this achievement. In addition to calling for work on a nuclear weapons convention or a framework of instruments to achieve disarmament , he called for entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, negotiations of a fissile material treaty, entry into force of the Protocols to regional nuclear weapons free zones, and efforts to establish a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, as well as the development of new norms for space weapons, missiles and conventional arms.


    The Secretary General’s Five Point Proposal remains relevant today and can help inspire work in many different forums and levels of diplomacy and civil society. It upholds a clear goal and emphasizes the incremental steps needed to get there. Such bold leadership will be needed to fulfill the aspiration, expressed so eloquently by President Obama, as “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” which will constitute in the words of Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, “a global public good of the highest order.” 


    Failure to achieve greater progress in fulfilling this moral and practical imperative will result in  cynicism toward the most important tool the world presently has to ensure peace — solemnly negotiated and agreed upon commitments. Without such explicit commitments — conventions, treaties — we rely upon ad hoc arrangements which are only as strong as short term perceived interests. With treaties norms are set and common purposes achievable. 


    But, these explicit arrangements are only as strong as the integrity of the parties and their adherence to them. The term in international law to remember is pacta sunt servanda – agreements must be kept and honored in good faith. Or, in the words of President Obama: “words must mean something.”


    The 2010 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review’s Final Statement, contains a reaffirmation of an “unequivocal undertaking to accomplish”, not just to aspire, but “to accomplish the total elimination of nuclear weapons.”


    It calls upon states “to undertake concrete disarmament efforts…” in fact “special efforts to establish the necessary framework to achieve and maintain a world without nuclear weapons.” It highlights that this is a matter that requires our most committed actions by saying “there is an urgent need.”


     “Urgent”, “concrete”, “unequivocal” – These are strong words requiring the strongest of actions.


    Many of us were heartened by the attention paid to the progressive five point agenda of the Secretary General’s Five Point proposal and particularly reference to a convention or framework of instruments to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons.
    Without such clarity of purpose the dynamism required to achieve significant threat reducing steps will be difficult to obtain. Thus we are now  seeing how difficult it is just to achieve the very modest incremental steps, such as a fissile materials treaty or strengthening IAEA safeguards, needed to enhance everyone’s security. The galvanizing effect of collectively seeking the common goal of a nuclear weapons free world will make all the steps needed to move there so much easier.


    In the recent United States Nuclear Posture Review, there is a “commitment to a nuclear weapons-free world” and there is even a commitment “to initiate a comprehensive national research and development program to support continued progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons,” including, but not limited to, “expanded work on verification technologies.”


    What have we seen since these commitments were made?


    Nearly every state with nuclear weapons seems to be upgrading, expanding, or modernizing their weapons. For example in the United States, as part of the negotiations for obtaining the START treaty, a new commitment was made to allocate potentially over 200 billion dollars to modernize  the arsenal – modernizing delivery systems and modernizing weapons.  There may also be some commitment to initiating a comprehensive national research and development program, as called for in the Nuclear Posture Review, but if any funds have been allocated to this task,  they are dwarfed by the commitment to modernize the arsenal.


    The language of the final statement of the NPT Review Conference is very consistent with initiating a comprehensive research and development program at an international level. And if anything is needed now, it is a clear, unambiguous, unequivocal, irreversible, well-funded effort by like-minded states, or all states if possible, on laying out the framework necessary to obtain and maintain a nuclear weapons-free world. There is no ongoing forum in which nuclear disarmament is being discussed and advanced on a daily, regular, systematic basis. There is language, there are statements, but we don’t see the institutionalization, we don’t see the commitment being operationalized and that’s what’s really important.


    Without such a clear course of action, we become subject to backsliding. The ongoing debate should be about how to get rid of nuclear weapons. Yet, continually we are forced to return to the argument whether we should get rid of nuclear weapons. That argument should have been laid to rest in 2000, when the “unequivocal undertaking” to elimination was made at that NPT Review Conference.


    I assure you, we will again be faced with bureaucracies and think-tanks and politicians who will force us to revisit the argument whether we should get rid of nuclear weapons again and again unless we lay out the framework or proceed to negotiate the preparatory process for a nuclear weapons convention.


    Some people say working on a framework or convention is a distraction from the NPT. I very much disagree with that analysis. The NPT contemplates subsidiary instruments to fulfill its non-proliferation and disarmament purposes. Nobody argues that a test ban treaty is a distraction from the non-proliferation purposes of the NPT or that a  Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty is a distraction. The NPT contemplates subsidiary instruments. We need subsidiary instruments to achieve non-proliferation goals and likewise to achieve disarmament goals. It is to fulfill the disarmament pillar of the NPT that a framework of agreements or a convention is needed.


    Some people say there are many preconditions to beginning this process.  There seems to be a proliferation of preconditions. For some the precondition is the elimination of bad people. For others it’s the elimination of bad states. For others it’s a utopian world in utter harmony. But there is no language in the Final Statement of the NPT Review and there is no language in the Nuclear Posture Review that there are preconditions to beginning this process of making progress to move toward negotiating the elimination of nuclear weapons. There is no legal basis for that position.


    It is a political basis and it is for countries’ leaders, and all of us, to educate the public on the consequences of not commencing to more substantially work on nuclear disarmament now.


    There appear to be three paths before us:


    One is ad hoc incremental steps with numerous preconditions before actually commencing the real work of negotiating disarmament.


    Two is beginning the creation of a comprehensive framework that incorporates both incremental steps, but insures the clarity of purpose of disarmament, thus forming a basis to critique diversions from the disarmament process and a context to integrate many programs and approaches.


    Third is a fast-track toward a convention with prompt commencement of preparatory work, leading to negotiations as early as possible.


    I think the latter two are much preferred and the ad hoc incremental approach is proving to be too slow.


    I believe that what can drive this process is the understanding that nuclear weapons are morally, culturally, and humanly repugnant.


    Imagine if the Biological Weapons Convention said that no countries can use smallpox or polio as a weapon, but nine countries can use the plague as a weapon.  We would all say this is incoherent and utterly immoral.  We recognize that the plague is unacceptable.


    The weapon itself is unacceptable. It is not legitimate, legal, or moral for any country, good or bad, to use or threaten to use such a weapon. Such conduct would clearly violate our most basic universal civilized standards which are embodied in international humanitarian law. That is why in the final statement of the 2010 NPT Review Process one of the most important elements is the explicit, positive, and unambiguous commitment to the application of international humanitarian law in nuclear weapons policy.


    This is an area for nuclear disarmament advocacy that should be utilized very forcefully. International humanitarian law is the body of law that governs the use of force in war. It prohibits the use of weapons that are unable to discriminate between civilians and combatants. It necessitates that all weapons must be proportionate to specific military objectives. They must not cause unnecessary or aggravated suffering even to combatants. They must not affect states that are not parties to the conflict, and  they must not cause severe, widespread, or long-term damage to the environment. The International Court of Justice in its landmark advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons highlighted the fact that it is impossible to control nuclear weapons in space and time.


    Indeed, one can with great imagination imagine certain uses that would be compliant with international humanitarian law. A depth charge in the high seas might do so. A small nuke in a desert might do so. But the vast majority of missions and deployments of nuclear weapons are not those exceptions. The vast majority of deployments and missions of nuclear weapons  violate those principles of international humanitarian law.  That highlights the need to operationalize creating the framework of instruments needed to eliminate nuclear weapons, begin the preparatory process for a convention and begin that process now.
    The threat covers everyone on the planet and thus every state, not just nuclear weapon states, have a responsibility to start this process.


    There are no good reasons to wait and there are many good reasons to seize this political moment, a moment where those states that possess nuclear weapons are not existential enemies.


    The global economy has become one fabric. Today, as never before, we are communicating ideas, passions, and art without borders. We share a common climate, common oceans, and it is time that we realized we share a common future. The security our children deserve requires global security with multinational cooperation based on the rule of law. When it comes to nuclear weapons, the pursuit of national self interest must not be distorted by the provincialism of national myopia. Realism requires common efforts. It is in the interest of every nation to work to eliminate nuclear weapons.  We live in one world. It is time that we started living in a civilized fashion. As the late Senator Alan Cranston used to say, “Nuclear weapons are unworthy of civilization.”  We have to get rid of them.  Thank you.

  • The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence Today: International Law as Anchoring Ground

    Ladies and gentlemen:

    I am very happy to be speaking with you this evening. I want to express my gratitude to Zeit-Fragen for publishing the German language edition of my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence (Clarity Press: 2002) which comes out now on the anniversary of the end of the Second World War.  At this time 65 years ago, Japan surrendered to the United States after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the incineration of 250,000 completely innocent human beings.

    My father was a Marine who invaded Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa, and was preparing to invade Mainland Japan. I was brought up to believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved my father’s life and thus made mine possible, although my father never raised me to be anti-Japanese or anti-German.  But when I came to study international relations, I realized: This simply was not true.  Indeed it was total propaganda by the United States government to justify nuclear terrorism and the mass-extermination of a quarter of a million human beings. Even Justice Pal in his dissent to the Tokyo Judgment said that the Japanese war criminals had nothing to their discredit as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which you can only compare to Nazi Acts.

    Today the world is at a precipice of another world war. The United States government has committed acts of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and has authorized, armed, equipped, and supplied Israel to commit acts of aggression, crimes against humanity, and outright genocide against Lebanon and Palestine. Today the United States government is threatening to attack Iran under the completely bogus pretext that they might have a nuclear weapon, which the International Atomic Energy has said is simply not true. If they attack Iran with the Israelis, a British think-tank has predicted they could exterminate 2.8 million Iranians! They are fully prepared — the Americans and the Israelis — to use tactical nuclear weapons.

    Indeed today tactical nuclear weapons have been fully integrated into U.S. armed forces and tactical training and programs. I have read the manual myself.  Nukes are now treated — starting with the Bush Junior administration — as if they were just another weapon.

    We must remember when President Putin was in Iran and he said he did not believe the Iranians had a nuclear weapon, President Bush Jr. publicly got up and threatened World War III. Remember that threat! He threatened World War III! I cannot recall in my lifetime a threat of this nature. You would have to go back to Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo to find high level government officials threatening a world war.

    What did this threat mean? It was saying to Russia: “You had better stand back if we attack Iran.” It wasn`t a threat to Iran; that would not produce a world war attacking Iran, but just a slaughter.  But saying to Russia: “You had better stand back, we are prepared to risk World War III if you don’t let us get our way with Iran.” An attack on Iran would set this entire region of the world on fire, from Egypt over to India, from Uzbekistan down to Diego Garcia. And as my friend and my colleague, Hans von Sponeck pointed out yesterday with his map: We see the counter-alliance to NATO: Russia, China and the so-called Central Asia Collective Security Organization. If you read about the origins World War I or World War II an attack on Iran could clearly set off World War III – remember Bush threatened it. And it could easily become nuclear. I kid you not on the dangers we are facing us all as human beings today.

    We stand on a nuclear precipice, and any attempt to dispel this ideology of nuclearism and its myth propounding the legality and morality of nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence must come to grips with the fact that the nuclear age was conceived in the original sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons have always been criminal!  Remember they were developed to deal with the Nazis, out of fear that the Nazis would get them first. And yet for some reason they used them on the Japanese to make a point, to terrorize the rest of the world.

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity as defined by the Nuremberg Charter of August 8th 1945 — right after the United States bombed Hiroshima, and the day before they bombed Nagasaki — that condemned the wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages; and applied it to the Nazi leaders, but of course never applied it to themselves. In my book The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence there is an entire chapter on the criminality of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I list all the legal violations there, up to and including the United States Department of War Field Manual 27-10 (1940).  So these bombings, and also the firebombing of Tokyo, exterminating 100,000 civilians, were war crimes. Even as recognized officially by the United States government itself.

    The start of any progress towards resolving our nuclear predicament as human beings must come from the realization that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence have never been legitimate instruments of state policy, but have always constituted instrumentalities of internationally lawless and criminal behaviour. And those states that wield nuclear weapons, their government officials are criminals in accordance with the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles, and the Tokyo Charter and Judgment that the Allies applied to the Nazi war criminals and the Japanese war criminals after World War II.  So I’m not talking here about applying any principle of law that the United States government and the other victors of World War II applied to their enemies to hold them accountable.

    The use of nuclear weapons in combat is contemplated now by the United States and Israel against Iran. How many times have we heard U.S. government officials involved in the Bush Junior administration and now the Obama administration say: “All options are on the table.”  They mean it: not just the use the force but the use of nuclear weapons as well. These are prohibited by conventional and customary international law, including the Genocide Convention of 1948, designed to prevent a repetition of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, the Poles, the Russians, the Ukrainians. The use of nuclear weapons would also violate Resolutions of the U.N. General Assembly that repeatedly condemned their use as an international crime.  We must understand that when dealing with nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence: They are not simply immoral, they are not simply illegal, but they are criminal across the board!

    The Swiss Foreign Ministry a commissioned a study of nuclear deterrence by three American authors, I read it, and I agree with what they said. They pointed out that the critical factor is the delegitimisation of nuclear weapons in the minds of the people. Having litigated nuclear weapons protest cases in the United States, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere since 1982, for me the critical factor in winning these cases is to explain to the common, ordinary people on juries that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence are criminal. Not simply illegal, not simply immoral, but criminal!

    Yet the government officials in all the nuclear weapon states, not just the United States — they are the worst of them — but also Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea: They are the criminals! For threatening to exterminate all humanity! For threatening Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. That’s what nuclear deterrence really is: threatening mass extermination.  And in the Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice on nuclear weapons, the World Court ruled that the threat stands or falls on the same legal grounds as the actual use.  If mass extermination of human beings is a crime, the threat to commit mass extermination is also a crime.

    It is as if the leaders of the nuclear weapon states have all taken out a gun, cocked the trigger, and held it at the heads of all humanity! In any system of criminal justice today that activity is criminal! In the United States it would be attempted murder, and you would be prosecuted for it.  Yet today U.S. government officials threaten murder to millions of people around the world. And now especially in Iran.

    According to the Nuremberg Judgment soldiers would be obliged to disobey criminal orders to launch and wage a nuclear war. And yet, how many soldiers have been educated to understand these principles? A few have educated themselves, acted on it, and have been prosecuted by the United States government.  I have helped to defend them, with a good deal of success, but not complete success. You can read about this in my latest book Protesting Power: War Resistance and Law (Rowman & Littlefield: 2008). How we defended military resisters in our all-volunteer Armed Forces who refused to fight in illegal, criminal wars waged by the United States government, going back to Gulf War I by Bush Senior, Haiti by Clinton, Gulf War II by Bush Junior.

    All government officials and military officers who might launch or wage a nuclear war would be personally responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. And such individuals whether statesmen or high level military personnel would not be entitled to any defenses of superior orders, act of state, tu quoque, self-defense, presidential authority, etc. All those defenses were made by lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg and they were rejected. And yet today in the United States of America starting with the Bush Junior administration and now continuing with Obama you will hear international lawyers working for the government, and many in the private sector, making Nazi arguments to justify what the United States government is doing around the world. That’s how desperate the situation is!

    The whole Bush Doctrine of preventive warfare, which is yet to be officially repealed by Obama now after 18 months, was made by the Nazi lawyers for the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg, and it was rejected. And the argument by Nuremberg was: There is no such thing as preventive self-defense or things of this nature. What is self-defense can only be determined by reference to international law. And the test is clearly: the necessity of self-defense must be instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, no moment for deliberation. Certainly not Afghanistan or Iraq or Lebanon or Palestine or Iran or Somalia or Yemen or Pakistan. And yet all victims of this Nazi doctrine of preventive self-defense that is now justified by all these prostituted international lawyers on the payroll of the United States government, leaving government service, now they infiltrate into American academia where they likewise try to justify these doctrines and policies that were condemned as criminal at Nuremberg.

    Article 2, paragraph 4 of the United Nations Charter prohibits both the threat and the use of force except in cases of legitimate self-defense. And there is a standard for self-defense. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, and as supplemented by Nuremberg, that clearly rejects the wars against Afghanistan as aggression – explained in my book in greater detail — against Iraq, against Pakistan, which by the way has nuclear arms.  The Obama administration has now escalated to a war against Pakistan, trying to set off civil war and destabilize Pakistan, just as they did in Yugoslavia, just as they did in Iraq, just as they did in Afghanistan. As we lawyers say: “The modus operandi is the same.”

    The Empire does not change from one administration to the next! In America the government is run by elites who are either liberal imperialists, conservative imperialists, or reactionary imperialists, like the Neocons. But they are all imperialists! And they believe in the god-given right to the American Empire. That’s the way America started. Remember, how did the United States of America start? White European settlers coming over to North America, exterminating millions of indigenous people, and robbing their land, and building an Empire. The process just continues today as we speak.

    The threat to use nuclear weapons, what we call “nuclear deterrence” — I would call “nuclear terrorism” — constitutes ongoing international criminal activity: planning, preparation, solicitation, and conspiracy to commit Nuremberg crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide.  These are what we lawyers call inchoate crimes, not the substantive offences themselves, but crimes leading up to the commission of the substantive offences. They were made criminal at Nuremberg in order to establish a bright line and that we would punish even walking up to that bright line as criminal.

    In the case of nuclear weapons once a nuclear war starts I doubt very seriously we are going to be having another war crimes tribunal for anyone.  So what that means then is that it is up to us citizens of the world to stop and prevent a nuclear war, and to stop and prevent the threat, conspiracy, solicitation of the use of nuclear weapons. “Everything is on the table” — clearly a threat to use nuclear weapons, clearly a criminal threat under the World Court Advisory Opinion, against Iran.

    As I explain in more detail in my book, the design, research, testing, production, manufacture, fabrication, transportation, deployment, installation, storing, stockpile, sale, and purchase and the threat to use nuclear weapons are criminal under well-recognized principles of international law.  And I know the German government has finally asked the United States, NATO, to take its nukes out of Germany. And Mrs. Clinton has said: “We don’t support it.” Well is the German government going to cave in? Or will it use law and international law and the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment and Principles to get American criminal nukes out of Germany? I guess we will find out this Fall.

    Those government decision-makers in all nuclear weapon states with command responsibility for nuclear weapons are responsible today for personal criminal activity under the Nuremberg Principles for this practice of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, that they inflict on all states and peoples in the world today.  And in particular counter-ethnic targeting for the United States, destroying Russians just because they are Russian.

    Also counter city-targeting!  When I worked on the case of the U.K. nuclear weapons in Scotland we established that the entire purpose of the U.K. nuclear weapons force, under the control and allocated to NATO, was to destroy the city of Moscow, seven million human beings! It had no other purpose. Needless to say, once we did that we got all of our defendants off for four counts each of malicious destruction of property when they destroyed a tender servicing the U.K. Trident II nuclear weapons submarines with these weapons of mass extermination. They might have destroyed the tender, but they did not act maliciously.  They acted for the perfectly lawful reason to stop the nuclear extermination of seven million human beings.

    So, I argue in my book, the simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons and deterrence can be used to pierce through the ideology of nuclearism, to which so many citizens in the nuclear weapon states and around the world have succumbed — by means of propaganda techniques, propagated by the governments, going back to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government tried to present this as positive to the American people and in particular that it was necessary to end a war to avoid an invasion of Japan, which of course was not going to happen, because the Japanese were already defeated and were trying desperately to negotiate a surrender.

    It is with this simple idea of the criminality of nuclear weapons that people can easily comprehend the illegitimacy and fundamental lawlessness of these policies that their governments pursue in their names — or allied governments as well. And to those living in the NATO states today: Their leaders are all accomplices, they go along with nuclear policies as well. They send their generals over to NATO headquarters to be integrated into NATO’s strategy.

    I remember after the Berlin Wall fell, the German Branch of International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms had a big conference in Berlin and I gave the keynote address along these lines. And they asked the German General of the Bundeswehr in charge of liaison with NATO on nuclear weapons to respond to me. And he got up and he said: “Well, we all know that Nuremberg is soft law.”

    I had two reactions to that. One: “Mister General, we hanged your predecessors at Nuremberg, under the Nuremberg laws. How can you say it is soft law?”  Not that I support the death penalty even for major war criminals like Bush Junior and Tony Blair.

    But the second reaction I had to this notion of soft law like Joe Nye’s “soft power”: “Soft law’”, I said, “you know, he got that from us.” So we Americans have convinced German generals that Nuremberg is soft law in order to pursue our nuclear policies with the cooperation of the next generation of German generals whose predecessors we hanged at Nuremberg.

    After the public speech I discussed this matter with him, and he agreed with me but he said: “Look, we have no alternative but to do what the Americans tell us to do.” And I quoted to him a passage from the Bible saying: “Yes, and the blind shall lead the blind.”  And the German General said:  “We have to trust that the Americans are doing the right thing.”  Right over the nuclear precipice! The German people have to stand up here and say: “Enough! We want your nukes out of Germany for sure and we are no longer going to cooperate with you on nuclear weapons policies.”

    Humankind must abolish nuclear weapons before nuclear weapons abolish humankind!  Nevertheless there are a small number of governments in the world that continue to maintain their nuclear weapons systems despite the rules of international criminal law to the contrary. I would respond in a very simple way: Since when has a small gang of criminals — the leaders of the nuclear weapons states — been able to determine what is illegal or legal for the rest of the world by means of their own criminal behaviour? What right do nuclear weapons states have to argue that by means of their own criminal behaviour — nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism — they have made criminal acts legitimate? No civilized state would permit a small gang of criminal conspirators to pervert its domestic legal order in this way. Indeed both the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Tokyo Tribunal made it clear that a conspiratorial band of criminal states has no right to opt-out of the international legal order by means of invoking their own criminal behaviour as the least common denominator of international deportment. It’s a basic rule of international law: Right cannot arise out of injustice! Ex iniuria ius non oritur!

    The entire human race has been victimized by an international conspiracy of ongoing criminal activity carried out by the nuclear weapons states and their leaders under this doctrine of nuclear deterrence which is really a euphemism for nuclear terrorism. And the expansion of NATO has now drawn in almost all of Europe. They have broken down – the United States and NATO – even the traditionally neutral states. Sweden today acts as if it were a de facto but not yet de jure member of NATO. Finland has basically abandoned its neutrality. Austria, with a constitutional obligation to be neutral, has basically abandoned its neutrality. Even Ireland, little bitty Ireland – I have dual nationality with Ireland.  The Americans have forced and compelled Ireland to join up to the Partnership for Peace (PFP) which is one step away from NATO membership, and have forced Ireland then under PFP to put some troops in Afghanistan to help them wage an illegal and criminal war of aggression against Afghanistan.

    The only state in Europe still holding out is Switzerland. Yes, it signed up for Partnership for Peace which it should never have done. But at least Switzerland is holding out, it has no troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. And Switzerland must continue to hold out. And that is exactly why it is been subjected to so much pressure! Including an attack on its banking and financial system to bring Switzerland into line with NATO and the United States, exactly as every other country in Europe has done and succumbed.  That is really what’s at stake here. Are you, the Swiss, going to join up – either de facto or de jure – with NATO and the Americans, so that if and when they attack Iran and perhaps set off a new world war, you and your children will get sucked into it? Switzerland avoided the last two world wars. I certainly hope Switzerland will avoid the next one by having nothing to do with the United States and NATO. And somehow working your way out of Partnership for Peace.

    This international criminal conspiracy of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, is no different from any other conspiracy by a criminal gang or band. They are the outlaws. We are the sheriffs — the citizens of the world. So it is up to us to repress and dissolve this international criminal conspiracy by whatever non-violent means are at our disposal and as soon as possible.  As I said: If we all don’t act now, Obama and his people could very well set off a Third World War over Iran, that has already been threatened publicly by Bush Junior.

    Every person around the world has a basic human right to be free from the criminal practice of nuclear deterrence/nuclear terrorism, and its specter of nuclear extinction. All human beings in our capacities as creatures of God possess the basic right under international law to engage in civil resistance for the purpose of preventing, impeding or terminating the ongoing commission of these international crimes.

    And this is not civil disobedience.  It’s civil resistance! We have disobeyed nothing! We are obeying the dictates of international law! It is the government officials in the nuclear weapons states and their allied states that are disobeying international law. They are the criminals! We are the sheriffs! And it is up to us to stop them!

    Every citizen of the world community has the right and the duty to oppose the existence of nuclear weapons systems by whatever non-violent means are at his or her disposal. Otherwise the human race will suffer the same fate as the dinosaurs. And the planet earth will become a radioactive waste-land. And it very well could happen in our life-time.

    The time for preventive action is now! And civil resistance by all of us human beings is the way to go.

    Thank you.

  • Disarmament Work and Justice in a Divided World

    This article was originally published on disarmamentactivist.org

    We are now several years in to a deep global economic and political crisis that shows no sign of abating. Those in command of the world’s political systems seem capable of doing little beyond protecting the immediate interests of privileged elements in their societies. At the same time, the familiar forms of oppositional activity seem spent, unable to pose a coherent and convincing alternative to the current order of things. Movements for peace and for a society that is more fair economically and sustainable ecologically can be found everywhere, but often are fragmented by specialization or particularized grievances and mired in habitual forms of thought and action. It is essential that all of us in these movements try to develop a broader understanding of this time and its challenges, starting from our particular work and location in the world and sketching the connections, however tentatively, to the larger whole. This will be one such sketch, with its starting point in disarmament work in the heartland of the U.S. aerospace-military-industrial complex in California.

    Disarmament “progress” in the United States: rhetoric vs. reality

    Last month in New York, the states that are parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty met to review the status of the treaty and the performance of its parties, a review that occurs every five years. After opening the conference with general endorsements of the concept of nuclear disarmament, the United States (together with other nuclear weapons states) spent the remainder of the month doing its best to weaken or eliminate language in drafts of the Review Conference final document that would impose any substantive disarmament obligations on the nuclear weapons states, such as time limits or definite commitments to negotiate a convention for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile in Washington D.C., the Obama administration proposals for increases in nuclear weapons spending were moving through Congress, the only significant opposition coming from those who claim that the budget increases are too small.We now have a flurry of elite rhetorical enthusiasm for disarmament, and much celebration of a U.S.-Russia treaty that will have little effect on the thousands of nuclear weapons they currently deploy, and even those requirements aren’t mandatory until 2017. But a few hundred nuclear weapons can destroy any country on earth, and a thousand are more could have effects that destroy much of the world’s civilization, killing a significant portion of its inhabitants.

    And in this year’s budget request, the Obama administration, if anything, seems determined to outflank its Congressional critics from the right, proposing a 10% increase in nuclear warhead research and production funding and further increases for future years. And that’s just the Department of Energy budget. The Defense Department budget also has sizable increases for nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In evaluating the level of commitment to disarmament of this administration, it might be wise to remember the observation repeated by several economists of the last century, that “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”

    In early June I spoke at a protest at the gates of Vandenberg Air Force Base, a vast installation sprawling for miles along the southern California coast. Unlike the rest of the U.S. economy, Vandenberg is thriving, playing key roles in both the present and the future of this country’s war cycle, fighting endless wars in the present while striving endlessly for dominance in all imaginable wars to come. Vandenberg represents a kind of microcosm both of the gigantic U.S. military machine and of the upper echelons of U.S. society, tending ever more towards a perpetual exercise in maintaining power over others through violence while hiding behind layers of gates, guards, and guns.

    The United States is continuing a broad effort aimed at developing new generations of strategic weapons and refining the techniques for using them, spending far more on high-tech weapons than any other country. This effort today includes upgrading existing intercontinental ballistic missiles and planning for work on next generation long-range missiles. For decades, Vandenberg Air Force Base has tested new generations of long range missiles, and continues to flight test those now operational.

    Vandenberg is both a test range and one of the first two deployment sites for mid-course ballistic missile defense interceptors. And just a few weeks ago, the Air Force launched a Hypersonic Technology Vehicle from Vandenberg aimed at a target area at Kwajelein Atoll in the Pacific. That test was part of a program to develop a new generation of maneuverable gliding delivery vehicles that will be able to hit targets anywhere on earth within an hour or two. If deployed, these systems are intended to carry highly accurate non-nuclear payloads, permitting destruction by missile at global ranges with non-nuclear weapons for the first time. And one of the sites being considered for deployment is Vandenberg Air Force Base, supposedly to avoid confusion with the launch of nuclear-armed missiles from their bases in the Midwest.

    Vandenberg is where the present and future of U.S. war making comes together. Many of the military satellites used for surveillance, to target weapons and to provide communications for current U.S. wars are launched here. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg does day to day planning of missions for the positioning and use of military satellites in those ongoing wars.

    According to a Vandenberg Air Force Base fact sheet:

        “The Joint Space Operations Center… is a synergistic command and control weapon system focused on planning and executing USSTRATCOM’s Joint Functional Component Command for Space… mission. The purpose of the JSpOC is to provide a focal point for the operational employment of worldwide joint space forces, and enables the Commander, [Joint Functional Component Command for Space] to integrate space power into global military operations.”

    It is this globe-girdling network of command centers and satellites that allows young Americans sitting at an air force base in Nevada, looking at a screen and manipulating buttons and joy sticks, to use pilotless drone aircraft to kill people on the other side of the world with no more risk, and little more existential engagement, than if they were playing a video game.

    The Obama military budget also includes a ramp up of funding over the next five years for the “prompt global strike” weapons recently tested at Vandenberg. It should be noted that there are nothing but paper policy restrictions preventing the United States from using these new delivery systems technologies for nuclear weapons. Even in its conventional version, global strike underscores the aggressive global stance of the US military and its determination to maintain global military dominance, further complicating arms control efforts. It is also noteworthy that the launch vehicle used for the test was made from parts of MX missiles, nuclear-armed ICBMs decommissioned as a result of a prior round of arms agreements, another illustration of the ambiguities of current approaches to arms control.

    Beyond single issue politics: understanding the connections

    After decades in disarmament work, I have come to believe that disarmament initiatives unaccompanied by strong social movements for democracy, global economic equity, and a more ecologically sustainable way of life are highly unlikely to create the political conditions in which significant progress towards disarmament can occur. For those of us who work on disarmament, our goal must be to better understand what part disarmament work can play in these broader movements for fundamental social change.

    We need a way of looking at the world as it now is. Our approach must acknowledge the obstacles as well as the opportunities involved in transforming the global economy and our societies if they are to become ecologically sustainable, democratic, and peaceful.

    A significant part of this approach is a better understanding of the political nature of technology choices. We live in a world dominated by immense organizations that deploy particular combinations of advanced technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology. These organizations are instrumentally rationalized both within and without. They are largely authoritarian in internal structure, and deal with the world around them instrumentally–as an environment to be controlled to the maximum extent possible in order to achieve their goals.

    The main goal of these organizations is to extract a privileged wealth stream for their upper echelon inhabitants from the rest of an increasingly globalized economy. They also form alliances, many of them long–running, to do so. The “military industrial complex” was only the first of these to be recognized.

    The legal character of these organizations varies from place to place, with the public/private boundary and the powers of large private organizations defined differently in different countries. But similar kinds of organizations–by which I mean organizations deploying similar sets of technology, bureaucratic technique, and ideology–in significant ways behave alike whether defined as “public” or “private.”

    Technologies are not chosen solely because they “work” better in some abstract sense, or even because they are somehow “cheaper” in some fundamental sense related to the organization of the physical world, for example in terms of their thermodynamic efficiency. They are chosen because they work well in combination with other aspects of modern large organization techniques to gain and sustain wealth and power for those in the upper echelons of the immense organizations that dominate every aspect of global economic and political life today.

    The upper level inhabitants of these organizations constitute roughly a fifth of the world’s population, and the divide between them and the rest is growing, as that top fifth and its predatory organizations insatiably seize, consume, and degrade the land, resources, and ecosystems that all depend on.

    This split, I believe, is the defining political fact of our time. It limits society’s potential for adaptation to resource and ecological limits and drives the growing chaos and conflict that the dominant constellations of large organizations meet only with more militarized high–tech “security.” And providing this security at every level from executive protection to high performance strike aircraft to ever more accurate long range missiles has become one of the most dependable strategies for organizational growth and profit everywhere.

    It is all of this we must understand and confront. Nuclear weapons are only a leading instance, their vivid irrationality both exemplar and metaphor for the whole.

    Beyond balance sheet economics and politics: neither we nor the world are for sale

    In August of 1967 Martin Luther King said,

        “A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them–make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.”[1]

    King understood that slavery was an expression of the social system that was and is the Western-style modernity. And he was telling us that one of its fundamental characteristics–the treating of human beings as objects, as things to be bought, sold, and profited from–was deeply rooted, and is with us still. Equally important is the same system’s reduction of the natural world to an array of things to be manipulated and controlled, seen as nothing more than a source of resource inputs and profit.

    Ultimately, it is these two fundamental characteristics of the economic and political system that has come to dominate the planet that we must overcome.

    These goals may seem huge and abstract, and also utterly impractical where the immense institutions of power and profit-seeking instrumentalism dominate every aspect of the political, economic, and cultural landscape. Yet we must do what we can to seek real change, even when what we can do seems awfully small.But at the same time, we are told over and over by political and NGO professionals that we must seek only incremental change, only what is “practical” and “achievable.”

    So what are our guideposts? How can we tell if the incremental steps offered us by our professional and political classes even are moving in the right direction?

    In that same address, King also said, “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

    I believe that this was, and is, less a description than a prescription. Only we can be the vehicle of that justice, only we can bend that arc.

    The measure of the incremental steps we are offered by our political classes today must be how much they move us in the direction of a more just world.

    Unfortunately we’re not seeing much movement towards fairness and justice, on disarmament or climate change or anything else. Instead we see the further entrenchment of a political and economic order that treats both people and nature like things, as profit centers to be exploited. We are seeing what should be opportunities for reform used to mask the further consolidation of power by the most powerful institutions.

    Here in the United States, an opportunity for health care reform turned into a mandate that will force Americans to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to a health insurance industry whose financial interests are served by providing as little health care as possible. The clear need for an energy system transformed to prevent catastrophic climate change and to replace diminishing fossil fuels has instead been turned into a veritable Christmas tree for existing energy interests, from coal to oil to nuclear power, with a small fig leaf of subsidies for renewable energy alternatives thrown in.

    As oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico from a well drilled by an industry that has successfully socialized much of its risks through liability limits for the damage it causes, the administration pushes forward with an energy plan that will encourage more offshore drilling, and that will subsidize a nuclear energy industry that also enjoys limits on its liability that are a tiny fraction of the damage that a serious accident would cause. But of course we are told that serious nuclear accidents, like massive deep sea oil blowouts, are far too unlikely to worry about.

    And the much touted new START treaty, advertised as the first step on the path towards disarmament, will have a still–unknown cost, equal to whatever the powerful advocates of the nuclear weapons complex can extort. The Obama administration already has made a down payment that will postpone meaningful movement towards disarmament for a decade or more, promising to spend at least $180 billion over the next ten years to sustain and modernize US nuclear forces and the vast array of laboratories and factories that build and maintain them.

    In early March, I joined thousands of people in California and around the United States, protesting rising tuitions at public universities and colleges and cuts in services at all levels of public education. Professors and students, school teachers, parents, and bus drivers organized  rallies and marches large and small all across the state.The day was full of a sense that people are ready for greater change, and to take more action to get it.

    Speaker after speaker called for ending California’s undemocratic supermajority requirements for budget and tax legislation, and for progressive taxation of corporations and the wealthy to reverse the steady flow of wealth upward that has been a defining feature of US economic and political life for the last three decades. There were signs everywhere with messages like “Fund Schools, Not War!”

    Whether or not it will develop into one, the wave of actions rippling out from the public university protests have some of the makings of a social movement. There was a sense of urgency, grounded in an understanding of how the issues affected each of us–and all of us–directly. People from different segments of society–not only students but relatively privileged university professors and the people who maintain the classrooms and laboratories they depend on, public school teachers and parents who both are burdened by a regressive tax system and need public institutions to educate their children–were starting to have a conversation directly with each other, and coming to realize that the growing crisis in institutions they all depend on in different ways has deeper causes, and may require significant social change if there are to be solutions that work for all.

    Nuclear disarmament work today stands in sharp contrast to energetic new movements brimming with potential–and also stands largely apart from them. Most people don’t think about nuclear weapons from one end of the year to another, and don’t perceive nuclear weapons as constituting a concrete threat to themselves or the people and places they love. Most of the grassroots disarmament organizations are gone. For most arms control and disarmament professionals, the notion of building a social movement, and beyond that a movement that addresses not only the causes of war and entrenched militarism, but that builds a common understanding of the causes of the injustices that afflict most of humanity, has largely receded into the past. Yet if nuclear disarmament work is to avoid irrelevance, much less make genuine progress in these turbulent times, the first priority must be helping to build movements looking for new ways towards justice, and by doing so saving our world.

    Beyond expert rationales for the current order of things: restoring our divided consciousness

    In 1930, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Millikan wrote that “One may sleep in peace with the consciousness that the Creator has put some foolproof elements into his handiwork, and that man is powerless to do it any titanic damage.”

    This statement, by one who was a leading “expert” in his time, has been proven false not only by nuclear weapons, but by the devastating ecological effects of endless accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and today by the growing ability of human beings to manipulate the most basic building blocks of the natural world itself.These threats to our future are manifestations of a global society in which most resources and most of the earth itself is controlled by a tiny minority, with the choices which affect us all dressed up as inevitable and necessary by experts who work in their service.

    A common theme in all of these issues is that decisions are made at a great remove, both socially and geographically, from the places where the human and ecological impacts are felt. One of the great paradoxes of our time is that in a society that depends on the systematic analysis of cause and effect in order to control both nature and human beings, one of the main strategies for maintaining wealth and power is avoiding responsibility, whether moral or financial, for the effects of one’s actions. From the limits on liability for the BP blowout to the socialization of wealthy bankers and investors’ risk by the bank bailout to the endless PR spin employed to absolve every act of malfeasance by the powerful to the soldier fighting a push–button war, killing people he will never truly see, we have created a world that has systematically separated cause and effect. By doing so we have largely destroyed our collective moral consciousness.

    It is this same eliding of consequences that allows us, through our most powerful institutions, to prepare every day for our own annihilation, an end that becomes more likely the longer we allow it to go on.

    This separation of cause and effect also intensifies a phenomenon which is central to the modern order of things: the way people who work in large organizations split their consciousness, focusing only on the task at hand and on the use of their technical or professional skills, leaving at the door all other pieces of their humanity, the fact that they are mothers or fathers or sons or daughters or creatures with living bodies in a living world.

    This state of affairs constitutes both a challenge and an opportunity for nonviolent thought and political action. We need to find creative ways to bring this splitting to light, and make it difficult to sustain. By doing so, we may transform not only our opponents in a particular conflict, but ourselves as well. We too have been raised in this system, and fall back easily into our own ingrained training and habits, even if we are doing what we think of as work for social change.

    Our task is to build a politics that can give voice and decision making power to all those who affected by the decisions of the huge organizations that now dominate our lives, and by doing so democratize the economy, and with it decisions about technology choice. We need to build a social movement that brings these themes together, starting with people where they live, from the bottom up.

    References

    1. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, August 16, 1967

    2. Robert Millikan (Nobel 1923), “Alleged Sins of Science,” in Scribner’s Magazine, 87(2), 1930, pp. 119-30, quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 534.

  • US Opposes ICC Bid to Make ‘Aggression’ a Crime Under International Law

    This article was originally published by the Christian Science Monitor.

    The United States under the Obama administration has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the International Criminal Court in The Hague. But that growing engagement with a controversial institution of international law was unable to prevent the ICC from expanding the scope of its work to include the murky crime of “aggression,” a move the US had vehemently opposed.

    At the 111-nation ICC’s first review conference that wrapped up last week in Kampala, Uganda, delegates decided to expand the international court’s purview to include the crime of aggression – a crime that only the US has successfully tried, in the post-World War II tribunals in Nuremburg and Tokyo.

    State Department officials say the US, which is not a signatory to the ICC, was able to mitigate the drawbacks of such an expansion of the court’s reach, primarily by putting off any prosecution of the newest international crime until at least 2017.

    But some critics say the US failure to stop the enshrining of “aggression” as an international crime demonstrates the limits of President Obama’s multilateralist vision – and sets the US on a collision course with the ICC when the issue comes up again later in the decade.

    “The fact remains that the Obama administration’s vaunted ‘engagement’ strategy was only able to check the ICC’s move towards defining ‘aggression,’ not stop it entirely,” says Brett Schaefer, an expert in international institutions at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “And it sets the US up for another battle in 2017 when the ICC’s advocates will make another push to activate the ICC’s jurisdiction over ‘aggression.’”

    The US confirmed its new footing with the world’s first permanent court for trying war crimes and crimes against humanity, US officials say, although they acknowledge that the US did not get everything it wanted in Kampala. The Rome Statute establishing the ICC was finalized in 1998, but the court did not begin to function until 2002, when the minimum 60 countries ratified it.

    US participation in the Kampala conference “reset US relations with the court from hostility to positive engagement,” says State Department legal adviser Harold Koh. He says the US focus at the review conference was on efforts to “strengthen justice on the ground” in countries so that eventually their judicial systems will be strong enough to take on the kinds of human-rights work the ICC addresses.

    Mr. Koh says that focus was particularly well-received in Africa, “where there is a strong desire to have these cases tried at the national level.”

    Some ICC critics have also noted that the court has only taken up two cases so far, both involving African countries – one involving the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, and the other regarding Sudan – and they dismiss the largely European-Union funded court as a colonial institution pressing Western interests.

    But the US increasingly sees the value of the ICC, especially as it has tried cases that begged for international intervention.

    “If it weren’t for the ICC [in cases like Sudan or Uganda] you would have had to set up a special tribunal,” says Stephen Rapp, the State Department’s coordinator for war crimes issues.

    One of the main US concerns in seeing “aggression” added to the ICC’s jurisdiction was the impact it could potentially have on US military operations abroad. But Koh says the US successfully negotiated the “aggression” statute’s wording so that US forces won’t be susceptible to it.

    “No US national can be prosecuted for ‘aggression’ while the US is not a signatory” to the ICC, he says.