On this fateful day, 70 years ago, the first of the only two atomic bombs ever used was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, with a second catastrophic detonation wreaked on Nagasaki on August 9th , killing over 220,000 people by the end of 1945, with many tens of thousands of more dying from radiation poisoning and its lethal after effects over the years. Yet despite these horrendous cataclysms in Japan, there are still 16,000 nuclear weapons on the planet, all but 1,000 of them held by the US and Russia. Our legal structures to control and eliminate the bomb are in tatters, as the five recognized nuclear weapons states in the Non-Proliferation Treaty—the US, UK, Russia, France, China–cling to their nuclear deterrents, asserting they are needed for their “security” despite the promises they made in 1970, 45 long years ago, to make good faith efforts to eliminate their nuclear arms. This “security” in the form of nuclear “deterrence” is extended by the United States to many more countries in the NATO nuclear alliances as well as to the Pacific states of Japan, Australia, and South Korea. Non-NPT states, India, Pakistan and Israel, as well as North Korea which left the NPT, taking advantage of its Faustian bargain for “peaceful” nuclear power, to make nuclear weapons similarly claim their reliance on nuclear “deterrence” for their security.
The rest of the world is appalled, not only at the lack of progress to fulfill promises for nuclear disarmament, but the constant modernization and “improvement” of nuclear arsenals with the US announcing a plan to spend one trillion dollars over the next 30 years for two new bomb factories, delivery systems and warheads, having just tested a dummy nuclear bunker-buster warhead last month in Nevada, its B-61-12 nuclear gravity bomb! At this last NPT Review Conference in May, which broke up when the US, UK, and Canada refused to agree to an Egyptian proposal for a conference on a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone, made to fulfill a 1995 promise as part of the commitments from the nuclear weapons states for an indefinite extension of the 25 year old NPT, the non- nuclear weapons states took a bold step. South Africa expressed its outrage at the unacceptable nuclear apartheid apparent in the current “security” system of nuclear haves and have nots—a system holding the whole world hostage to the security doctrine of the few.
In the past two years, after three major conferences with governments and civil society in Norway, Mexico and Austria to examine the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, over 100 nations signed up at the end of the NPT to the Austrian government’s Humanitarian Pledge to identify and pursue effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. There are now 113 countries willing to move forward to negotiate a prohibition and ban on nuclear weapons to stigmatize and delegitimize these weapons of horror, just at the world has done for chemical and biological weapons. See www.icanw.org It is hoped that countries harboring under their nuclear umbrellas will also be pressured by civil society to give up their alliance with the nuclear devil and join the Humanitarian Pledge. This August, as we remember and commemorate around the world the horrendous events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s long past time to ban the bomb! Let the talks begin!!
This article was originally published by the Huffington Post.
As the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, several people have been asking me to share my thoughts about those days in 1945, when our world changed forever. The first thing that comes to mind is an image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji — transformed into a charred, blackened and swollen child who kept asking in a faint voice for water until he died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would be 74 years old this year. This idea shocks me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a 4-year-old child who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. And it is this death of innocents that has been the driving force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. Eiji’s image is burnt into my retina.
In June I had the opportunity to visit Berlin and Potsdam to meet German citizens to talk about my experience in Hiroshima. Germans and Japanese experienced a similar historical trauma as aggressor-states in World War II. But there has been a decisively different way that the Japanese and German governments are dealing with their wartime responsibilities.
Many Japanese people were deeply inspired by the manner in which the German government confronted the past and dealt with wartime atrocities with integrity. Former President Richard von Weizeker’s inspiring speech on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Germany’s surrender touched the conscience of the world, and earned our profound respect when he said “We Germans must look truth straight in the eye — without embellishment and without distortion… There can be no reconciliation without remembrance.”
The Japanese government should emulate this profound sentiment in confronting the past and dealing with our as yet unresolved relationships with neighboring countries, particularly Korea and China. Tragically, the current Abe administration is seeking to expand Japan’s military role in the region and forsake our much-cherished Peace Constitution.
And in the United States, a repugnant remembrance is soon to be unveiled. The National Park Service and the Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Unlike the memorials at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the United States seeks to preserve the history of the once top-secret sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, where international scientists developed the world’s first nuclear bomb, as a sort of celebration of that technological ‘achievement’. Among the first so-called ‘successes’ of this endeavor was creating hell on earth in my beloved Hiroshima.
As a 13-year-old schoolgirl, I witnessed my city of Hiroshima blinded by the flash, flattened by the hurricane-like blast, burned in the heat of 4000 degrees Celsius and contaminated by the radiation of one atomic bomb.
Miraculously, I was rescued from the rubble of a collapsed building, about 1.8 kilometers from Ground Zero. Most of my classmates in the same room were burned alive. I can still hear their voices calling their mothers and God for help. As I escaped with two other surviving girls, we saw a procession of ghostly figures slowly shuffling from the centre of the city. Grotesquely wounded people, whose clothes were tattered, or who were made naked by the blast. They were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies were missing, flesh and skin hanging from their bones, some with their eyeballs hanging in their hands, and some with their stomachs burst open, with their intestines hanging out.
Within that single flash of light, my beloved Hiroshima became a place of desolation, with heaps of skeletons and blackened corpses everywhere. Of a population of 360,000 — largely non-combatant women, children and elderly — most became victims of the indiscriminate massacre of the atomic bombing. As of now, over 250,000 victims have perished in Hiroshima from the effects of the blast, heat and radiation. 70 years later, people are still dying from the delayed effects of one atomic bomb, considered crude by today’s standard for mass destruction.
Most experts agree that nuclear weapons are more dangerous now than at any point in our history due to a wide variety of risks including: geopolitical saber rattling, human error, computer failure, complex systems failure, increasing radioactive contamination in the environment and its toll on public and environmental health, as well as the global famine and climate chaos that would ensue should a limited use of nuclear weapons occur by accident or design. Yet few people truly grasp the meaning of living in the nuclear age.
This is why I have been overjoyed at witnessing the recent development of a global movement involving Non Nuclear Weapon States and NGOs working together to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. This movement has been reframing the problem of nuclear weapons from deterrence credibility and techno-military issues to the issue of humanitarian consequences. The result is a strong push for a nuclear Ban Treaty to begin a process for nuclear disarmament. Norway, Mexico and Austria have collaborated with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the International Committee of the Red Cross to organize three successful International Conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.
At the end of the most recent conference in Vienna last December, the Austrian government unveiled the “Austrian Pledge” to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons. Now referred to as the Humanitarian Pledge, it is supported by 113 nations that are calling on Nuclear Weapon States and those who stand with them, to begin a process for nuclear disarmament.
To repeat the words of Richard von Weizeker: “We must look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion.” The truth is, we all live with the daily threat of nuclear weapons. In every silo, on every submarine, in the bomb bays of airplanes, every second of every day, nuclear weapons, thousands on high alert, are poised for deployment threatening everyone we love and everything we hold dear.
How much longer can we allow the nuclear weapon states to wield this threat to all life on earth? The time has come for action to establish a legally binding framework to ban nuclear weapons as a first step in their total abolition. I passionately urge everyone who loves this world to join the growing global movement. And let us make the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the appropriate milestone to achieve our goal: to abolish nuclear weapons, and safeguard the future of our one shared planet earth.
In our town, we had the warmth of family life, the deep human bonds of community, festivals heralding each season, traditional culture and buildings passed down through history, as well as riversides where children played. At 8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945, all of that was destroyed by a single atomic bomb. Below the mushroom cloud, a charred mother and child embraced, countless corpses floated in rivers, and buildings burned to the ground. Tens of thousands were burned in those flames. By year’s end, 140,000 irreplaceable lives had been taken, that number including Koreans, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and American prisoners of war.
Those who managed to survive, their lives grotesquely distorted, were left to suffer serious physical and emotional aftereffects compounded by discrimination and prejudice. Children stole or fought routinely to survive. A young boy rendered an A-bomb orphan still lives alone; a wife was divorced when her exposure was discovered. The suffering continues.
“Madotekure!” This is the heartbroken cry of hibakusha who want Hiroshima—their hometown, their families, their own minds and bodies—put back the way it was.
One hundred years after opening as the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall and 70 years after the atomic bombing, the A-bomb Dome still watches over Hiroshima. In front of this witness to history, I want us all, once again, to face squarely what the A-bomb did and embrace fully the spirit of the hibakusha.
Meanwhile, our world still bristles with more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, and policymakers in the nuclear-armed states remain trapped in provincial thinking, repeating by word and deed their nuclear intimidation. We now know about the many incidents and accidents that have taken us to the brink of nuclear war or nuclear explosions. Today, we worry as well about nuclear terrorism.
As long as nuclear weapons exist, anyone could become a hibakusha at any time. If that happens, the damage will reach indiscriminately beyond national borders. People of the world, please listen carefully to the words of the hibakusha and, profoundly accepting the spirit of Hiroshima, contemplate the nuclear problem as your own.
A woman who was 16 at the time appeals, “Expanding ever wider the circle of harmony that includes your family, friends, and neighbors links directly to world peace. Empathy, kindness, solidarity—these are not just intellectual concepts; we have to feel them in our bones.” A man who was 12 emphasizes, “War means tragedy for adults and children alike. Empathy, caring, loving others and oneself—this is where peace comes from.”
These heartrending messages, forged in a cauldron of suffering and sorrow, transcend hatred and rejection. Their spirit is generosity and love for humanity; their focus is the future of humankind.
Human beings transcend differences of nationality, race, religion, and language to live out our one-time-only lives on the planet we share. To coexist we must abolish the absolute evil and ultimate inhumanity that is nuclear weapons. Now is the time to start taking action. Young people are already starting petition drives, posting messages, organizing marches and launching a variety of efforts. Let’s all work together to build an enormous ground swell.
In this milestone 70th year, the average hibakusha is now over 80 years old. The city of Hiroshima will work even harder to preserve the facts of the bombing, disseminate them to the world, and convey them to coming generations. At the same time, as president of Mayors for Peace, now with more than 6,700 member cities, Hiroshima will act with determination, doing everything in our power to accelerate the international trend toward negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention and abolition of nuclear weapons by 2020.
Is it not the policymakers’ proper role to pursue happiness for their own people based on generosity and love of humanity? Policymakers meeting tirelessly to talk—this is the first step toward nuclear weapons abolition. The next step is to create, through the trust thus won, broadly versatile security systems that do not depend on military might. Working with patience and perseverance to achieve those systems will be vital, and will require that we promote throughout the world the path to true peace revealed by the pacifism of the Japanese Constitution.
The summit meeting to be held in Japan’s Ise-Shima next year and the foreign ministers’ meeting to be held in Hiroshima prior to that summit are perfect opportunities to deliver a message about the abolition of nuclear weapons. President Obama and other policymakers, please come to the A-bombed cities, hear the hibakusha with your own ears, and encounter the reality of the atomic bombings. Surely, you will be impelled to start discussing a legal framework, including a nuclear weapons convention.
We call on the Japanese government, in its role as bridge between the nuclear- and non-nuclear-weapon states, to guide all states toward these discussions, and we offer Hiroshima as the venue for dialogue and outreach. In addition, we ask that greater compassion for our elderly hibakusha and the many others who now suffer the effects of radiation be expressed through stronger support measures. In particular, we demand expansion of the “black rain areas.”
Offering our heartfelt prayers for the peaceful repose of the A-bomb victims, we express as well our gratitude to the hibakusha and all our predecessors who worked so hard throughout their lives to rebuild Hiroshima and abolish nuclear weapons. Finally, we appeal to the people of the world: renew your determination. Let us work together with all our might for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of lasting world peace.
The election of Mogens Lykketoft as the new President of the United Nations General Assembly has opened the door to the solution of several of world’s most pressing problems. For example, it may now be possible to achieve a Nuclear Weapons Convention by a direct majority vote.
On June 15, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously elected Mogens Lykketoft, Denmark’s former parliament speaker and foreign minister, as president of its 70th anniversary session. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said that this anniversary year offers Lykketoft “an extraordinary opportunity to shape history”. In September, just before the annual General Assembly ministerial meeting, world leaders will hold a special summit to adopt new goals. Their aims will be to further reduce poverty, promote economic development, and tackle the roots of climate change.
Also among the aims will be the total abolition of nuclear weapons. Mogens Lykketoft has for many years been a prominent member of the worldwide organization Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament (PNND).
I vividly remember visiting M.P. Mogens Lykketoft at the Danish Parliament, together with Alyn Ware, the Global Coordinator of PNND, and with a member of the Danish branch of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. We talked with Mr. Lykketoft for about an hour, and he was willing to help with the work of PNND in every possible way. We can certainly expect that as the new President of the UN General Assembly, he will be willing to work hard for nuclear abolition.
One important possibility for progress on the seemingly intractable issue of nuclear disarmament would be for a nation or group of nations to put forward a proposal for a Nuclear Weapons Convention for direct vote on the floor of the UN General Assembly. It would almost certainly be adopted by a massive majority. I believe that such a step would be a great achievement, even if bitterly opposed by some of the nuclear weapons states.
There are several precedents for such a step: On April 2, 2013, a historic victory was won at the United Nations, and the world achieved its first treaty limiting international trade in arms. Work towards the ATT was begun in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which requires a consensus for the adoption of any measure. Over the years, the consensus requirement has meant that no real progress in arms control measures has been made in Geneva, since a consensus among 193 nations is impossible to achieve.
To get around the blockade, British U.N. Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant sent the draft treaty to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and asked him on behalf of Mexico, Australia and a number of others to put the ATT to a swift vote in the General Assembly, and on Tuesday, April 3, it was adopted by a massive majority.
The success achieved by moving discussion of the Arms Trade Treaty from the Conference on Disarmament (where it had remained blocked for decades) to the UN General Assembly points the way to progress on many other issues, especially the adoption of a Nuclear Weapons Convention. In my opinion, it is highly desirable to make a motion for the adoption of a Nuclear Weapons Convention on the floor of the General Assembly, following exactly the same procedure as was followed with the ATT. If this is done, the NWC (a draft of which is already prepared) would certainly be adopted by a large majority.
It might be objected that the nuclear weapon states would be offended by this procedure, but I believe that they deserve to be offended, since the threat or use of nuclear weapons is illegal according to the 1996 ruling of the International Court of Justice, and in fact the threat or use of force in international relations is a violation of the UN Charter. The adoption of the NWC would make clear the will of the great majority of the world’s peoples, who consider the enormous threat which nuclear war poses to human civilization and the biosphere to be completely unacceptable.
It is not only the ATT that forms a precedent, but also the International Criminal Court, whose establishment was vehemently opposed by several militarily powerful states. Nevertheless, the ICC was adopted because a majority of the peoples of the world believed it to be a step forward towards a stable, peaceful and just global society.
In 1998, in Rome, representatives of 120 countries signed a statute establishing a International Criminal Court, with jurisdiction over the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.
Four years were to pass before the necessary ratifications were gathered, but by Thursday, April 11, 2002, 66 nations had ratified the Rome agreement, 6 more than the 60 needed to make the court permanent. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of the International Criminal Court. At last international law acting on individuals has become a reality! The only effective and just way that international laws can act is to make individuals responsible and punishable, since (in the words of Alexander Hamilton), “To coerce states is one of the maddest projects ever devised.”
Although the ICC is in place, it has the defect that since it opposed by powerful states, it functions very imperfectly. Should the Nuclear Weapons Convention be adopted by the UN General Assembly despite the opposition of the nuclear weapon states, it would have the same defect. It would function imperfectly because despite the support of the vast majority of the world’s peoples, a few powerful opponents would remain.
Another precedent can be found in the Antipersonnel Land-Mine Convention, also known as the Ottawa Treaty. In 1991, six NGO’s organized the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and in 1996, the Canadian government launched the Ottawa process to ban landmines by hosting a meeting among like-minded anti-landmine states. A year later, in 1997, the Mine Ban Treaty was adopted and opened for signatures. In the same year, Jody Williams and the International Campaign to ban Landmines were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. After the 40th ratification of the Mine Ban Treaty in 1998, the treaty became binding international law on the 1st of March, 1999.
The adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty is a great step forward; the adoption of the ICC, although its operation is imperfect, is also a great step forward, and likewise the Antipersonnel Land-Mine Convention is a great step forward. In my opinion, the adoption of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, even in the face of powerful opposition, would also be a great step forward. When the will of the majority of the world’s peoples is clearly expressed in an international treaty, even if the treaty functions imperfectly, the question of legality is clear. Everyone can see which states are violating international law. In time, world public opinion will force the criminal states to conform with the law.
In the case of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, world public opinion would have especially great force. It is generally agreed that a full-scale nuclear war would have disastrous effects, not only on belligerent nations but also on neutral countries. Mr.Javier Pérez de Cuéllar , former Secretary-General of the United Nations, emphasized this point in one of his speeches:
“I feel”, he said, “that the question may justifiably be put to the leading nuclear powers: by what right do they decide the fate of humanity? From Scandinavia to Latin America, from Europe and Africa to the Far East, the destiny of every man and woman is affected by their actions. No one can expect to escape from the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear war on the fragile structure of this planet. …”
“No ideological confrontation can be allowed to jeopardize the future of humanity. Nothing less is at stake: today’s decisions affect not only the present; they also put at risk succeeding generations. Like supreme arbiters, with our disputes of the moment, we threaten to cut off the future and to extinguish the lives of innocent millions yet unborn. There can be no greater arrogance. At the same time, the lives of all those who lived before us may be rendered meaningless; for we have the power to dissolve in a conflict of hours or minutes the entire work of civilization, with all the brilliant cultural heritage of humankind.”
“…In a nuclear age, decisions affecting war and peace cannot be left to military strategists or even to governments. They are indeed the responsibility of every man and woman. And it is therefore the responsibility of all of us… to break the cycle of mistrust and insecurity and to respond to humanity’s yearning for peace.”
The eloquent words of Javier Pérez de Cuéllar express the situation in which we now find ourselves: Accidental nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, insanity of a person in a position of power, or unintended escalation of a conflict, could at any moment plunge our beautiful world into a catastrophic thermonuclear war which might destroy not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere.
As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarked, the General Assembly’s new President, Hon. Mr. Mogens Lykketoft, has an extraordinary opportunity to influence history and to solve the most pressing problems that humanity faces today. I believe that he has the courage and idealism to do just that. In particular, I believe that he can provide the leadership needed for the world to achieve a Nuclear Weapons Convention by direct majority vote at the United Nations General Assembly.
“This year, 2015, commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, yet I will always remember the horrible tragedy.
“During this year, in particular, the mass media covered many peace organizations that held anti-war and anti-nuclear events. I hope many people will participate in and learn from these events to cooperate for promotion of peace.
“People cannot live forever. People die from natural causes such as illness and disease and from natural disasters such as floods, fires, and earthquakes, but war claims the most lives. People start wars. People should stop wars.
“People worldwide still suffer from the aftermath of war.
“To have world peace, everybody in the world must cooperate.”
— Shigeko Sasamori, age 83, survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima
“The first thought that comes to me is the image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji transformed to a charred, blackened child who died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would have been 74 years old this year. This shocked me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a four-year-old child, who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. This has been the driving, compelling force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. His image is burned into my retina.
“Many survivors have been passing in recent years with their dream of the abolition of nuclear weapons unfulfilled. Yes, their motto was, ‘Abolition in our lifetime.’ This reality intensifies the sense of urgency more than ever, with firmer commitment.”
— Setsuko Thurlow, age 83, survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima
Marshall Islands Appeals U.S. Court’s Dismissal of Nuclear Zero Lawsuit
Small Island Nation Fights On. Archbishop Desmond Tutu Lends Support.
July 13, 2015 – The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) submitted its Appeal Brief today to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, appealing the dismissal of the Nuclear Zero Lawsuit. The case was dismissed in Federal District Court on February 3, 2015 by Judge Jeffrey White.
The lawsuit calls upon the U.S. to fulfill its legal obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and customary international law to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race at an early date and for total nuclear disarmament.
Upon learning of the impending Appeal, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former Nobel Peace Prize laureate and well-known human rights activists, stated, “An obligation to negotiate in good faith has real legal meaning and is not merely a theoretical ideal. The United States’ breach of NPT Article VI has serious consequences for humankind and the Marshall Islands appeal is of critical importance.”
Rather than allowing the case to be argued on its merits, the District Court dismissed the suit on the jurisdictional grounds of standing and political question doctrine. Today’s Appeal Brief directly challenges the Court’s decision, stating, “The District Court misapplied the law, misconstrued the harm alleged and the relief sought by the Marshall Islands, and inappropriately construed inferences in the Executive’s [the Executive Branch of the U.S. government] favor.”
The Marshall Islands suffered catastrophic and irreparable damages to its people and land when the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests on its territory between 1946 and 1958. These tests had the equivalent power of exploding 1.6 Hiroshima bombs daily for 12 years. The devastating impact of these nuclear detonations continues to this day. For more information, visit www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/03/runit-dome-pacific-radioactive-waste.
Despite these damages, the Nuclear Zero Lawsuit does not seek compensation. Rather, the Appeal Brief states, “The Marshall Islands seeks a declaration of the meaning of the NPT Article VI obligation; a legal determination of whether the Executive’s conduct satisfies the obligation, and an order requiring future compliance with the obligation, unless the U.S. chooses to withdraw from the Treaty.”
Laurie Ashton, lead attorney for the Marshall Islands in the U.S. case, commented, “This case asks the question whether the President of the United States is above the law – and the law here is Article VI of the NPT, a legally binding treaty. The Marshall Islands, like every NPT party, is entitled to the fulfillment of the United States’ promise to negotiate complete nuclear disarmament. But while the United States has the world focused on nonproliferation measures across the globe, it is in flagrant breach of its obligation to negotiate complete nuclear disarmament. It refuses to discuss any timetable whatsoever to achieve nuclear disarmament, and is instead actually modernizing its nuclear arsenal with new capabilities to last decades into the future at a budget of approximately $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars). The lawsuit brings these breaches to Court, forcing the U.S. to respond in public.”
David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and consultant to the RMI, noted,
“The Marshall Islands is the most courageous country on the planet. It is standing up to the nuclear-armed nations, demanding that they fulfill their legal obligations for nuclear disarmament. Its Appeal Brief in the U.S. case makes strong sense and shows that it is a country that will not give up or give in.”
The United States has one month to respond to the Marshall Islands Appeal Brief and then the Marshall Islands will have two weeks to reply to the U.S. Response Brief. To read the Appeal Brief in its entirety, visit www.wagingpeace.org/documents/rmi-appeal.pdf.
For more information about the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits, visit www.nuclearzero.org.
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Note to editor: to arrange interviews with David Krieger or Laurie Ashton, please call Sandy Jones or Rick Wayman at (805) 965-3443.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was founded in 1982. Its mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders. The Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations and is comprised of individuals and groups worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has published two new booklets on nuclear disarmament. PDF versions of the booklets are available to download free of charge by clicking the images below. To order printed copies of the booklets, please contact Rick Wayman, NAPF Director of Programs, at rwayman@napf.org or (805) 965-3443.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has two major purposes and together they form a grand bargain. First, the treaty seeks to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other countries. Second, the treaty seeks to level the playing field by the pursuit of negotiations in good faith to end the nuclear arms race at an early date and to achieve nuclear disarmament. The goal of the grand bargain, in other words, is a world without nuclear weapons.
For the most part the non-nuclear weapon states parties to the treaty are playing by the rules and not developing or acquiring nuclear weapons. However, one country – the United States – has stationed its nuclear weapons on the territories of five European countries otherwise without nuclear weapons (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey), and agreed to turn these weapons over to the host countries in a time of war. The US has also placed all NATO countries plus Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan under its “nuclear umbrella.” Collectively these countries are known as the weasel countries, non-nuclear in name but not in reality.
In addition, there has been nuclear proliferation outside the NPT. Three countries that never joined the NPT developed nuclear arsenals (Israel, India and Pakistan), and North Korea withdrew from the treaty and developed nuclear weapons. Despite all of this actual nuclear proliferation, attention seems to be primarily focused on the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons, even though Iran appears to be willing to take all necessary steps, including intrusive inspections, to assure the world that it is not seeking nuclear weapons.
It is the other side of the grand bargain, though, where things really break down. The five nuclear-armed countries that are parties to the NPT (US, Russia, UK, France and China) appear more comfortable working together to maintain and modernize their nuclear arsenals than they do to fulfilling their disarmament obligations under the treaty. Their common strategy appears to be “nuclear weapons forever.”
The US, which plans to spend $1 trillion on modernizing its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades, is also largely responsible for the modernization programs of Russia and China as a result of unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002 and placing land- and sea-based missile defenses close to the Russian and Chinese borders. Since missile defenses can also be part of an integrated plan to launch first-strike attacks, Russia and China may feel compelled to maintain the effectiveness of their nuclear deterrent by enhancing their offensive forces to counter US missile defenses. Avoiding such defensive-offensive escalations was the purpose of the ABM Treaty in the first place. One can get a better sense of this by imagining the US response if Russian missile defenses were placed on the Canadian border and Chinese missile defenses were placed on the Mexican border.
The parties to the NPT just completed a month of negotiations for their ninth five-year review conference. The conference ended in failure without agreement on a final document to guide the work of the parties over the next five years. The US, UK and Canada refused to support a conference to begin negotiating a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction to take place by March 1, 2016. This conference, promised when the NPT was extended indefinitely in 1995, has been put off previously and now it has been put off yet again.
Even if there had been consensus on a final document from the 2015 NPT review conference, however, it would not have been a strong or satisfactory document. The nuclear-armed parties to the treaty spent their time at the meetings watering down the disarmament provisions to which they had previously made an “unequivocal undertaking.” The nuclear-armed states and the weasel states, despite their protestations, don’t seem serious about keeping their commitments to achieve nuclear disarmament. Increasingly, the non-nuclear weapons states and civil society organizations are coming to the conclusion that the nuclear-armed countries are not acting in good faith and, as a result, the grand bargain is not being fulfilled.
A positive and hopeful outcome of the conference, though, is that the non-nuclear weapon states may be sufficiently fed up with the nuclear-armed countries to act boldly to push ahead on a new path to nuclear disarmament. More than 100 countries have now endorsed the Humanitarian Pledge, initiated by Austria, to work for a new legal instrument to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons, just as has been done for chemical and biological weapons and for landmines and cluster munitions. This legal instrument could take the form of a new Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.
Also on the positive and hopeful side are the bold and courageous Nuclear Zero lawsuits filed by the Republic of the Marshall Islands against the nine nuclear-armed countries in the International Court of Justice in The Hague and separately against the US in US federal court. These lawsuits seek declaratory relief, stating that the nuclear weapon states are in violation of the disarmament provisions of the NPT and of customary international law, and seek injunctive relief ordering the nuclear-armed countries to initiate and engage in negotiations in good faith for total nuclear disarmament. A well-attended side panel at the NPT review conference provided an update on the status of the lawsuits.
This is the 70th year since nuclear weapons were used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are still over 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Enough is enough. It is time to abolish these weapons before they cause irreversible damage to civilization, the human species and other forms of life. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations of life on Earth to break our chains of complacency and demonstrate that the engaged human heart is more powerful than even nuclear arms.
David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and the author of ZERO: The Case for Nuclear Weapons Abolition.
This article is the second in a series by Robert Kazel. To read Kazel’s first article, a longer interview with Gen. Lee Butler, click here. To read the final article by Kazel in this series about Gen. Butler, click here.
When Lee Butler looks back at his anti-nuclear efforts of the mid- to late-’90s, he views himself as a “reluctant activist.” The former commander in chief of U.S. strategic nuclear forces never felt comfortable fully allying himself with longstanding organizations that had waged the fight for nuclear abolition for many years already. To do so, he feared, would tarnish his reputation with elite decision-makers—government officials and military leaders. He felt his particular value to the cause of disarmament was as an expert who’d have access to the corridors of power in many countries, not as a radical peacenik. So Butler’s relationship with abolition groups was never uncomplicated, though he consistently lauded them for their patience and dedication.
Butler discussed his views on how anti-nuclear organizations today can survive and exert influence in a world that often appears apathetic.
KAZEL:Do you think anti-nuclear groups can still achieve abolition?
BUTLER: If you are an optimist, with respect to the future of mankind, you have to believe that more opportunities will come, like Sisyphus moving that ball up the hill. Sometime, you’re going to get to the top and it’s going to roll down the other side, and the era of nuclear weapons will be over.
If you wanted me to pick a date for that, I would say a possible prospect, and a happy one, would be July of 2045—the 100th anniversary of the first test of an atom bomb in the deserts of New Mexico.
KAZEL:Because that date could become a goal for people?
BUTLER: It’s possible. It has significance. It’ll be a hundred years in the Atomic Age. It’s far enough out, that enough things could happen serendipitously to make that possible.
KAZEL:Total nuclear disarmament by all nations by then?
BUTLER: Yes. What that requires, however, is for people to continue to stay focused, work very hard at it, keep advising sensible and acceptable alternatives that can be embraced by increasing numbers of people as opportunities present themselves—and they will.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and Global Zero, Bruce Blair’s organization, are vital, because they have to continue public education and awareness.
The former general’s metamorphosis into an anti-nuclear activist was featured on the cover of Washington Post Magazine in December 1997.
KAZEL:Can nuclear-abolition activists influence the views of military and political leaders today?
BUTLER: Your principal purpose is to understand who is your target audience. Political and military leaders are not your target audience. Their minds are made up, and they are not going to be changed. Your target audience is publics. I mean worldwide.
[Among the public] there is one group that is simply not interested in the subject, and will not be. There’s a second group that is already interested and committed, and you would be wasting your time preaching to the choir. It’s a third group, the unaware, who have simply never thought about these matters. It’s just never gotten on their radar screen. That’s the vast majority of the people in the world. The challenge for [anti-nuclear groups] is to frame a message that captures their attention and gets them to think.
I’ve talked to audiences ranging from sixth graders to corporate titans. I know what captures their attention immediately: the dimensions, the anecdotes, the histories drawn from the whole Cold War that get the response, “That’s utterly dismaying.” The $6 trillion that was spent on nuclear weapons alone in the Cold War. The number of warheads that were fabricated. You can count on very few fingers and toes the number of people in the world who actually understand how extraordinarily dangerous these weapons are, and how we lived on the brink of nuclear warfare in the Cold War years.
KAZEL:What would you tell nuclear abolition proponents of today, who might be discouraged?
BUTLER: You have to cling to the belief of what I call the “small weights in the pan” theory of opinion change. The scales of the blindfolded [Lady] Justice, right? It is still possible to imagine that those scales are now profoundly tipped on the side of nuclear deterrence. But I don’t see that as one enormous block, I see it a mountain of many small blocks of individual opinions. You just want to move those weights, one at a time, from one pan to the other. At some juncture, you reach a tipping point and opinion begins to shift more in favor of elimination.
That’s a long, hard process, but it has happened time and again throughout history. I’ve seen enormous changes in public morality, in societal values, happen in my lifetime. People just need to understand it’s hard.
These groups need to work in concert to develop a global strategic plan, if they’re going to maximize their resources. They need to be in league with one another.
KAZEL:You depict any use of nuclear weapons as a grave violation of morality. How can religious leaders help the cause of abolition?
BUTLER: What can be done, should be done, must be done is for a collective of organizations, like the World Council of Churches, to take their message to their flocks on a worldwide basis: a very bold statement with regard to the moral imperative [of abolition]. And these churchmen are long overdue, in my estimation.
This message needs to be sent from every pulpit, and it needs to be done in a coordinated and concerted way—a very strategic way. It’s not something you talk about every Sunday: “Today, let’s talk about tactical nuclear weapons.” No. It needs to be done once, and it needs to be done according to a very scripted message.
KAZEL:Where would religious leaders get the script?
BUTLER: I’d be happy to write it for them. Read my book. [Laughs]. Read my speeches. I’ve said it hundreds of times.
KAZEL:Lawrence S. Wittner, a retired professor who has written on antiwar movements, says nuclear abolition groups can be stronger if they reach out to partner with other kinds of organizations—medical, scientific, environmental, religious, anti-poverty, labor, professional. Do you agree?
BUTLER: It’s right on point. The IPPNW, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, is a very respected group with global reach who’ve done some groundbreaking work with regard to consequences of regional nuclear warfare and a case study on India and Pakistan. Get professional groups involved.
The climate change movement. You talk about climate change: It’s hard to imagine anything other than volcanoes that would pose a greater risk right now [than a nuclear exchange]. I would consider it a great misstep if [global warming activists] did not make some public statement about the climatological risks of nuclear weapons and be on record about their elimination. I mean, it’s right in their ballpark.
KAZEL:Can activists get the attention of the public these days? You write in your upcoming book that average people seem uninterested in, even largely unaware of, nuclear weapons—that they’re totally distracted by trivial news and the demands of consumerism.
BUTLER: People are self-absorbed. Social media has fueled the fires of worrying about what other people think, what they wear, what they eat, or what they’re doing at the moment. It is a ceaseless round of chatter—often inane things that have virtually no consequence. The lead singer leaves the boy band One Direction, and it becomes a worldwide tragedy. How do you generate that level of concern for nuclear weapons?
I’ve got six grandchildren that I can measure this against, and I watch how they spend their time: what they worry about, the subjects they discuss. [Laughs]. Wow. People can’t focus even on inane subjects for long. To me, the challenge has never been greater. How do you penetrate the cacophony of noise that surrounds everyday life?
KAZEL:Surveys say a pretty sizable portion of adults, especially younger adults, don’t even know the U.S. still has nuclear weapons.
BUTLER: They assume they all went away because the Cold War ended.
KAZEL:Do you see any positive side to technologies such as online social media?
BUTLER: We can see more and more on these global social networks people will respond with great compassion. The outpouring of monies to alleviate the suffering from hurricanes or tsunamis—that speaks volumes that there is a global well of empathy. For all of the social media that consumes us, some of the stories are very heart-touching with respect to how people respond so generously, often in the case of people they don’t know. That’s what ultimately is going to save us, not just from nuclear war but from wars of all kinds.
The world is, in fact, becoming much flatter. We’re connected in ways that were unimaginable just 10 years ago. Events are known worldwide in an instant, where people have developed a common set of emotional responses to tragic events.
Empathy to an important degree requires personal knowledge. It’s easier for us to empathize with people we know, who are suffering greatly, than complete strangers. When people reach the degree of personal interconnectedness where they say, “I know who they are; I’m not going to do [violence] to them”—I see great evidence of the possibilities.
There’s every chance that the bar of civilized behavior will be ratcheted upward. As it moves, I think there will be a greater focus on anomalies such as nuclear weapons, which threaten wholesale destruction.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
After the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the danger of nuclear weapons faded as a source of anxiety for some Americans. To them, worrying that the world’s stockpiles of missiles and bombs could eventually create catastrophe seemed as anachronistic as the duck-and-cover classroom drills of a previous generation. But for George Lee Butler, a four-star U.S. Air Force general and the commander of U.S. nuclear forces between 1991 and 1994, thinking about the possibility of just such a calamity didn’t end. The reality was always a phone call away.
The calls would come at least once a month, and there was never advance warning. Butler might be anywhere: his office at Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Neb., or traveling, or home sleeping. A hotline to other military officers and the White House sat on a bedside table, closer to his wife’s head because she was the lighter sleeper.
It always turned out to be an exercise—World War III obviously never broke out during Butler’s tenure. But, at least at the outset, he never knew for sure. The games were thought to be more useful if the participants—even a key player such as Butler—were kept in the dark about that.
Every drill ran an identical course; the dialog was scripted. An officer from NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, informed Butler that satellites and ground radar had seemingly detected nuclear missiles flying toward the United States. After a brief talk about the extent of the apparent attack, Butler was required to phone the President.
“You can imagine, it’s 2:37 in the morning, and the President has been at a gala that night—not feeling very well, kind of groggy,” Butler says today. “He gets a call from me that says, ‘Sir, the United States is under nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. It appears to be a wholesale nuclear attack: land-, sea- and air-based.’ At that point, while I’m talking, the Major with the briefcase [with Presidential nuclear launch codes] is unlocking it and pulling out the black three-ring binder.”
Actual presidents—in Butler’s day, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton—never took part in these “missile threat conferences.” Like a stand-in for a movie star who wished to avoid an unpleasant stunt, someone else always acted out the role of commander-in-chief at the other end of the line. Butler felt disgust that such a crucial task was left to a substitute.
Butler, pictured here in 1983, was commander of the 320th Bombardment Wing, Mather Air Force Base, east of Sacramento, Cal. The base was home to long-range, B-52 strategic bombers on alert for the Strategic Air Command.
Few knew it, but for Butler that sense of abhorrence gradually began to encompass nuclear weapons in general, as he became privy to more secrets about them. After he retired from the Air Force in 1994 as head of the U.S. Strategic Command (where he had authority over land-based missiles, bombers, and nuclear submarines), he worked for a time as president of a Nebraska-based energy company. Then, his life transformed in a way that he could never have anticipated. The former Air Force career officer and decorated Vietnam War pilot, considered one of the most knowledgeable experts on nuclear weapons and strategy in the world, began talking like the most passionate of anti-nuclear activists. A fascinated media listened, all over the world.
Former colleagues were surprised when Butler continued to make earnest, eloquent remarks to large audiences, condemning the same military systems he’d once managed. Now Butler was speaking freely about the “scourge” of nuclear weapons as being sinister and irreligious, and recommending they be dismantled everywhere they existed in the world through international agreements. These weapons were relics of a previous age when it was regrettably customary for rival nations to demonize one another, he argued. But they had no strategic value for any government in the post-Cold War world.
By 1999, he’d founded his own non-profit organization named the Second Chance Foundation and had begun to travel the world to promote his ideas. He spoke to journalists, military officers, defense officials, and scholars from the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Russia, Pakistan, India and China. He received NAPF’s Distinguished Peace Leadership Award in 1999.
His foundation lasted about two years. A desire to spend more time with family, in part, helped persuade Butler to give up a public life that had become stressful and tumultuous. But changes in the world political landscape also figured into the decision. Butler observed that progress in arms control under new leaders, such as George W. Bush and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, would probably be slow and difficult. Relations had worsened. Plans to develop anti-missile defense systems by the U.S., for instance, had contributed to estrangement and mistrust between the governments. Not long after, the terrorist attacks of 2001 indicated to Butler that formidable obstacles to nuclear abolition would exist, as the focus of American officials shifted sharply to beefing up security at home and to fighting a new war in Afghanistan.
Today, Butler is 75, and he has never stopped believing nuclear arms to be an enormous danger and outrageously immoral. They permit imperfect leaders to play God, he says, and make it all too easy for the planet to be ruined for all future generations in a span of hours. He’s incredulous that scores of U.S. missiles are still kept on hair-trigger alert, poised to be launched in minutes. And he is more disillusioned than ever that defense strategists and politicians keep defending nuclear deterrence: a theory born in the 1950s that asserts nations can prevent nuclear war by keeping nuclear weapons ready for use in retaliation. Butler believed that once, fervently. But he now says deterrence probably never made much sense, and certainly is unbelievable in a world of unstable, unpredictable regional nuclear actors and terrorists who seek to actually use weapons of vast, destructive power.
Now Butler has penned his life story, a project he painstakingly worked on for many years after he and his wife, Dorene, left Omaha and moved to a gated community in Laguna Beach, Calif., in 2001. The self-published memoir, which he expects to be out this summer, recounts his boyhood in Georgia as part of an Army family and his 33-year military career starting with his graduation from the Air Force Academy in 1961. It explains in depth why he ultimately called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, and discusses his disillusionment with government officials who, he says, have allowed shortsightedness, petty politics and bellicosity to obstruct the road to world nuclear disarmament.
Butler wants the autobiography, Uncommon Cause: A Life at Odds with Convention, to stand as his legacy. He’s hoping it will educate and inspire some of those who shape the world’s nuclear policies today.
In a wide-ranging interview at his house recently, Butler spoke with NAPF about the perils of nuclear weapons that arose during and just after the Cold War, and why the dangers continue. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
Decisions under pressure
KAZEL:In the ’90s, you often said nuclear abolition was a good long-term goal, but we could greatly reduce risks and maybe avert catastrophe by de-alerting our land-based weapons—our ICBMs [Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles]. What do you think about 450 of our Minuteman missiles being on high alert nearly 20 years later?
Gen. Lee Butler at his California home in 2015.
BUTLER: I just scratch my head in astonishment, quite frankly. That is such a feature of the Cold War era, when we were vulnerable to attack at any moment, so we had to be prepared to launch our forces on a moment’s notice. Somehow, we’ve managed to persuade ourselves that we need to continue in that posture.
I find that unseemly. I don’t know how many hundreds of billions of dollars of investments we have in Russia, and how many hundreds of thousands of our citizens are there at a given time. But somehow, just the thought of having an instantaneous circumstance in which we would even consider annihilating our own people, not to mention their assets, in Russia, boggles the mind.
From the standpoint of what I consider rationality, it doesn’t pass muster with me. Even when you have someone who can be irresponsible in his rhetoric, like a [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, I find it extremely difficult to imagine a scenario, in this day and age, when you’d have a nuclear weapons component [to a U.S.-Russian conflict]. A posture of immediate alert, I just think, is a complete anachronism at this point.
KAZEL:As commander of U.S. nuclear forces, you helped persuade the George H.W. Bush Administration to take our nuclear bombers off high alert. Did you or other military leaders also consider taking ICBMs off alert?
BUTLER: The farthest we proceeded was to retire the Minuteman IIs early, and then move in the direction of single-warhead Minuteman IIIs. The community was just not ready for the prospect of taking two of the vaunted Triad weapon systems off alert at the same time. It was a pretty big bite to swallow just to get those bombers off alert. Part of the price of that was everything else was considered sacrosanct.
KAZEL:Is there even a role for land-based missiles now? It seems they just increase danger by turning large portions of our territory into enemy targets.
BUTLER: I would have removed land-based missiles from our arsenal a long time ago. I’d be happy to put that mission on the submarines. I came to develop an extremely high regard for submarines—their flexibility, their invulnerability, etc. And contrary to myth, we can communicate with them very quickly. So, with a significant fraction of bombers having a nuclear weapons capability that can be restored to alert very quickly, and with even a small complement of Trident submarines—with all those missiles and all those warheads on patrol—it’s hard to imagine we couldn’t get by. Now, the Air Force would take exception to that.
KAZEL:How do present alert levels add to the pressure to respond quickly? What did those simulations tell you?
BUTLER: The biggest constraint is how tight the timelines are: about 10 minutes for the conversation between [the commander of nuclear forces] and the President to characterize the attack and then get a decision.
It’s a function of physics. If you take a nominal ICBM launch from the former Soviet Union to a nominal target, say, in the center of the United States, you’re talking about 30 minutes. But that missile launch has to be detected and then its trajectory has to be assessed through two independent warning means, satellite and ground radar. Well, that takes time. It takes about 15 minutes or so, and then the commander of NORAD has to be brought on line. All the while, more and more missiles are being launched and are coming onto the radar screen. At some point, the commander of NORAD has to say, “OK, I understand now what’s happening, we’re under nuclear attack.”
I would call the President. I had to lay out his options. The Nuclear War Plan has four major attack options with increasing numbers of weapons. Essentially all of our [recommendations were] MAO-4, Major Attack Option 4, which means we send everything we’ve got and it would cover all 10,000 weapons [in the U.S. arsenal at that time].
The war plan was my responsibility and had about 12,000 targets. Some weapons could destroy more than one target at the same time. That war plan was premised on all those weapons being available. If we allowed the Russian attack to take out any number of them, then the war plan may not have been viable. So, there reached a point where I would say, “Mr. President, I need your decision now.”
It became unequivocally obvious to me the immense responsibility of my role. The [person playing the role of the] President said at that point, “General Butler, what is your recommendation?” And effectively, on my answer—which he would always endorse—hung the fate of civilization.
If I said MAO-4 [full-scale counterattack], he would always agree. If it’s you sitting in that chair, knowing that once you said the fatal words, “I agree with your recommendation: MAO-4,” you’ve sealed the fate of hundreds of millions of people outright. Thanks to what science has now taught us, as Carl Sagan said many years ago, the combined effects of a wholesale attack involving 20,000 [American and Russian] thermonuclear warheads essentially would have been the end of civilization as we know it.
KAZEL:When you commanded Strategic Air Command, you ordered a major revision of the list of nuclear targets. You saw that U.S. missiles would hit political or military targets, but they’d be so numerous and so powerful that countless civilians in nearby cities and industrial areas would also be wiped out.
BUTLER: Well, the notion of the “1, 2, 3, 4” major attack options is that we would begin with leadership targets, MAO-1, then military targets, then military-industrial targets, and then finally, urban areas. That was always parsing matters pretty finely, because if you think about where the leadership targets were, they were in Moscow, for the most part. We had 400 warheads targeted on Moscow, in my day. Think about that: Fourhundred thermonuclear weapons, each on the order of 350 kilotons? The urban population certainly was not going to be spared simply because it was an attack on military leadership.
KAZEL:Your book looks critically at U.S. military leaders who kept using deterrence theory to justify large nuclear arsenals long after the Cold War ended. Do you think the new generation of leaders really still has faith in deterrence?
BUTLER: In the latest issue of the Air Force’s Air and Space Power Journal, there was an article on the five “myths” of arguments against deterrence, one of which was that submarines can do the job. I don’t want to use the word “desperate,” but I think it is a very concerted effort on the part of the Air Force to shore up deterrence. It all rings so hollow. It’s like the priest in the temple, and his voice is echoing amongst the columns. But you peel it all back and say, “Give me a situation when you would actually use one.”
KAZEL:Why isn’t deterrence reliable?
BUTLER: The first victim in a nuclear crisis is deterrence, because at that point all bets are off. One of the fatal flaws of deterrence, then and now, is deterrence applies in a circumstance in which you have a mortal enemy. If they’re a mortal enemy, you probably don’t have a very close relationship with them, which means you probably don’t understand how they think to a very high degree of precision—how they will respond under very threatening circumstances. That doesn’t sit very well with me. Even people who live with each other every day are sometimes hugely surprised.
Well, I can’t think of a situation where you’re more likely to be wrong. And in the case of the Soviet Union, we were wrong. They didn’t buy into “flexible” response. When I was a young, so-called “action officer” in the Pentagon and Air Force Headquarters, an Air Force brigadier [general] named Jasper Welch—who would shortly become my boss—had spent a very long period of his life developing a whole notion of “flexible” options to be incorporated into the Nuclear War Plan so that the President wasn’t left with an all-or-nothing [decision].
Now on the face of it, that seems like a very reasonable idea, instead of the President having to say, “That’s all I can do, just launch everything?” What if it’s not an all-out attack [on the U.S.]? That was perfectly rational and legitimate: limited and selected attack options.
KAZEL:As I understand this, our government started to think it might selectively strike Soviet political and military targets in a war, but that launching a massive attack at the beginning might be avoided?
BUTLER: This is one of the frailties of deterrence: the Soviets never bought into that sort of philosophy. For them, one warhead on the motherland, and that was it. If they should lose their leadership in an initial attack, they made provisions for the forces to be launched [by various lesser officials or military officers].
So, that gave the lie to the whole notion of flexible options.
If I could strike one word from the lexicon of the nuclear weapons enterprise, it would be “deterrence.” Because it’s easy. It’s lazy. It’s using rhetoric for a replacement of really rigorous thinking about what is exactly implied by your actions. I would force people to actually describe what it is they think they’re doing [by holding onto nuclear weapons] in very detailed terms, and then defend it on that basis.
KAZEL:You’ve also said that deterrence fails in practice because it ignites arms races—spiraling costs, new and revamped technologies, and instability as various nations seek not just security but superiority. Can deterrence theory give birth to conditions that are likelier to lead to war?
BUTLER: We had 40 years of history of that. Of the several things that deterrence did not do, it did not serve as any sort of guide for force levels. To the contrary, in service to deterrence, force levels constantly increased almost exponentially. At its height we had 36,000 weapons in our active inventory. Imagine that. Thirty-six thousand. We had warheads on artillery shells that could be launched from jeeps. We had dozens of warhead types and delivery systems. We had landmines and sea mines.
We deluded ourselves with regard to our capacity to manage crises. Deterrence was an open-ended invitation to just build more, and more complicated, systems. We always found a reason to go to the next level of arms, or the next hot technological biscuit to come popping out of the oven.
That just scared the bejesus out of the Soviets. They weren’t equipped to stay in that race, and ultimately Ronald Reagan saw that and he spent them into oblivion. The weapons became ever more numerous and more destructive. There’s no end to it, and the rationale was always that deterrence required it.
That we would pursue these weapons with such unfettered enthusiasm—competing amongst the [military] services for resources, going to roll out these shiny new things, cutting ribbons—spoke to me a great deal about the human condition. For some people, technology has absolutely mesmerizing qualities. If we can do it, we must. That’s the kind of thinking that got us where we are today. To add to that, the military-industrial complex was being fed a virtually endless trough of money. There is no end to the number of people who will find any way to justify building something new, brighter and better. I’ve seen that happen time and time and time again…
Fifteen hundred nuclear warheads [deployed by both the U.S. and Russia today] is still a mind-boggling amount of destructive potential. Mind boggling. I can’t think of anything that underscores that better than how concerned we are about one falling into the wrong hands. We still readily accept 1,500 as a reasonable number. That’s the kind of “logic” that we get locked into, in the nuclear era.
KAZEL:Aside from questions of strategy, you argue in your memoirs the same position you pounded home 20 years ago: that nuclear weapons violate basic ethics and are an affront to sacred human values. How did you start to believe that?
BUTLER: I guess I’m what some would call a spiritual person, from my study of the origin and evolution of the universe and life as we know it. I find it so awe-inspiring. That’s where I draw my sense of morality and humanity, and the overwhelming importance of sustaining the privilege of life. I think our No. 1 responsibility as human beings is to continue to elevate the bar of civilized behavior, to make conditions [hospitable to] life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That’s what captures my spiritual fancy these days.
Rather than being concerned about the moral implications of these devices, we continue to pursue them as if they were our salvation—as opposed to the prospective engine of our utter destruction. Human beings are by far the most destructive species on the planet, that the planet has ever seen. We kill each other for a variety of reasons, ranging from pleasure to vengefulness to fear for survival. As long as these weapons exist, and people hold them in such high regard for reasons of national esteem, they act as a brake on our capacity for advancing our humanity.
KAZEL:Were you already thinking that when you were commander of Strategic Air Command?
BUTLER: As they say, the prospect of hanging wonderfully concentrates the mind. When I finally began to understand the full import of the rather terse phrase “weapons of mass destruction”—their acquisition, their operation, their targeting, the execution of that war plan—I began to think and reflect more deeply on the question, how did we ever get ourselves into this circumstance? And, by extension, how are we ever going to get ourselves out?
We had become so enamored of nuclear weapons. Somehow they had become an end in themselves. Sort of a totem of power.
People embark on these sort of messianic quests. Some people climb Mt. Everest, some want to swim the Amazon. But for me, it was more about telling the story of how we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention—probably the latter in greatest proportion, for those who do believe in religious intervention. Because skill and luck certainly don’t account for it.
KAZEL:Do you believe it’s ever ethical to bomb civilians in wartime?
BUTLER:(Pauses.) One of the very first victims of all-out war is ethical considerations. In World War II, as an example, we burned 200 of the largest Japanese cities to the ground. In the history of warfare, circumstances have produced a sort of scorched-earth policy and ethical considerations are simply abandoned.
That was certainly the case in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were ostensibly military installations nearby, which were used to rationalize the bombings, but there were other targets that we could have struck that would have put far fewer civilians at risk.
The cold, hard fact of the matter is that a nuclear weapon is, at its very core, anti-ethical. It is simply a device for causing wholesale destruction. Nuclear conflict is essentially an irrational activity, because essentially what you’re doing is signing your own death notice.
Robert Kazel is a Chicago-based writer and was a participant in the 2012 NAPF Peace Leadership Workshop.
As the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, several people have been asking me to share my thoughts about those days in 1945, when our world changed forever. The first thing that comes to mind is an image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji — transformed into a charred, blackened and swollen child who kept asking in a faint voice for water until he died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would be 74 years old this year. This idea shocks me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a 4-year-old child who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. And it is this death of innocents that has been the driving force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. Eiji’s image is burnt into my retina.
“This year, 2015, commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, yet I will always remember the horrible tragedy.
“The first thought that comes to me is the image of my four-year-old nephew Eiji transformed to a charred, blackened child who died in agony. Had he not been a victim of the atomic bomb, he would have been 74 years old this year. This shocked me. Regardless of the passage of time, he remains in my memory as a four-year-old child, who came to represent all the innocent children of the world. This has been the driving, compelling force for me to continue my struggle against the ultimate evil of nuclear weapons. His image is burned into my retina.
The lawsuit calls upon the U.S. to fulfill its legal obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and customary international law to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race at an early date and for total nuclear disarmament.
For the most part the non-nuclear weapon states parties to the treaty are playing by the rules and not developing or acquiring nuclear weapons. However, one country – the United States – has stationed its nuclear weapons on the territories of five European countries otherwise without nuclear weapons (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey), and agreed to turn these weapons over to the host countries in a time of war. The US has also placed all NATO countries plus Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan under its “nuclear umbrella.” Collectively these countries are known as the weasel countries, non-nuclear in name but not in reality.
