John Anjain was awake and drinking coffee on the morning of the Bravo nuclear test. What he first perceived to be a brilliant sunrise turned out to be something much more perilous. Following the initial brilliant light came smoke, scorching winds, and a lifetime of pain.
In his role as magistrate of Rongelap, John recalls warning people not to drink from water catchments as the water had a noticeable yellow tinge. He remembers trying to comfort those whose skin had blistered, whose vomiting wouldn’t stop and whose hair began to fall out in big clumps. Along with witnessing the suffering of his people, John faced tragedies in his own family.
Four of John’s children developed cancer attributed to radiation. John’s son, Lekoj, was one year old when the Bravo test occurred. He died 18 years later from myelogenous leukemia. Lekoj is officially recognized as the sole casualty of the nuclear tests, although John’s memory of countless miscarriages, cancer developments, and health complications contest this narrative.
John Anjain’s experience with nuclear testing led him to become a strong anti-nuclear advocate, both for the Marshall Islands and for the entire international community. For years, he appealed to the U.S. to provide aid for the radiation victims. He visited Japan many times to attend rallies and give lectures on nuclear disarmament. And he kept the only medical records of the Bikini Atoll nuclear test victims. At the time of the blast, John recorded the names of 86 victims. By 1997, 38 people on his list had died.
John Anjain passed away at age 81 in 2004. To this day, his memory survives in his endless work for the people of Rongelap and his impact on the anti-nuclear movement.
Pope Francis, who has already broken new ground in his outreach to a suffering humanity, has put the weight of the Catholic Church behind a new humanitarian movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The pope sent a message to the recent conference in Vienna, attended by more than 150 governments, to advance public understanding of what is now called the “catastrophic humanitarian consequences” of any use of the 16,300 nuclear weapons possessed by nine countries.
In his message, delivered by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, a leading Holy See diplomat, Pope Francis stripped away any lingering moral acceptance of the military doctrine of nuclear deterrence: “Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence.”
He called for a worldwide dialogue, including both the nuclear and non-nuclear states and the burgeoning organizations that make up civil society, “to ensure that nuclear weapons are banned once and for all to the benefit of our common home.”
Pope Francis has now put his firm stamp on the Church’s rejection of nuclear weapons, to the enormous satisfaction of the delegates crowding the Vienna conference. No longer can the major powers, still defending their right to keep possessing nuclear weapons, claim the slightest shred of morality for their actions.
The pope’s stand was supported by a remarkable Vatican document, Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition, also put before the Vienna conference. The document did not mince words: “Now is the time to affirm not only the immorality of the use of nuclear weapons, but the immorality of their possession, thereby clearing the road to abolition.”
The Church has now put behind it the limited acceptance of nuclear deterrence it gave at the height of the Cold War. That acceptance was given only on the condition that nuclear deterrence lead progressively to disarmament.
Washington, London and Paris, the three Western nuclear capitals where the Church’s words influence, to some degree, government policy, used this limited acceptance to justify their continued nuclear buildup.
When the Cold War ended, they continued modernizing their arsenals and refused demands, reiterated at the UN many times, to join in comprehensive negotiations with Moscow and Beijing.
PERMANENT DOCTRINE
When the Church saw that nuclear deterrence was indeed becoming a permanent military doctrine, Holy See spokespersons began speaking out in opposition to the continuing reliance on nuclear weapons. At the 2005 review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, permanent representative of the Holy See at the UN, stated:
“The Holy See has never countenanced nuclear deterrence as a permanent measure, nor does it today when it is evident that nuclear deterrence drives the development of ever newer nuclear arms, thus preventing genuine nuclear disarmament.”
The Holy See has repeatedly called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, but the public and even Church leaders around the world paid little attention.
Now the powerful personality of Pope Francis has put a world spotlight on the Church’s rejection of not only the use of nuclear weapons but their very possession. He scorned the technocratic defence of nuclear weapons: “It is moral reason that recognizes deterrence as an obstacle to peace, and leads us to seek alternative paths to a peaceful world.”
The pope gave full support to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Five-Point Plan for Nuclear Disarmament, starting with a nuclear weapons convention or a legal framework to eliminate the weapons. And he repeated the Holy See’s call for a worldwide conference to start negotiations.
Pope Francis’ document is a direct attack on the military-industrial complex, which keeps trying to justify nuclear weapons as an aid to peace: “The human family will have to become united in order to overcome powerful institutionalized interests that are invested in nuclear armaments.”
MISALLOCATION OF RESOURCES
He called for a global ethic of solidarity to stop the misallocation of resources “which would be far better invested in the areas of integral human development, education, health, and the fight against extreme poverty.”
The amount of money – $1 trillion – the major powers will spend on their nuclear arsenals over the next 10 years is a scandal of immense proportions. The United States alone will spend $355 billion.
Pope Francis’ document challenges hierarchies everywhere to act to change governments’ immoral policies of nuclear deterrence. The pressure will be felt intensely by the American bishops, who know their country is in the driver’s seat for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Each year since 1983, Daisaku Ikeda, the founder and president of Soka Gakkai International, has issued a Peace Proposal. Many of these proposals have included the subject of abolishing nuclear weapons – weapons that Ikeda’s mentor, Josei Toda, rightly called an “absolute evil.” In his 2014 Peace Proposal, his 32nd, President Ikeda puts forward an extremely important idea, that of holding a World Youth Summit to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in 2015. It is this part of his 2014 proposal that I will address in this article.
Convening a World Youth Summit to Abolish Nuclear Weapons implies that the leaders and diplomats of the world have not achieved success in dealing with nuclear weapons. This is clearly the case. As Ikeda points out, 2015 will mark the 70th year since the atomic bomb was created, tested, and then used twice in warfare, once on the city of Hiroshima and once on the city of Nagasaki. Despite the risk that nuclear weapons continue to pose to humanity, their threat still hangs over our collective heads.
The survivors of those bombings saw firsthand the damage done to their cities by the blast, fire and radiation. They have since learned that the consequences of the atomic bombings cannot be confined in space or time. The average age of these atomic bomb survivors now surpasses 78 years, and yet their fervent dream of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons remains unrealized. They have done their best to assure that their past does not become someone else’s future, but the leaders of the nuclear weapon states have failed to negotiate for Nuclear Zero, let alone achieve it.
The year 2015 will also mark the 45th year since the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty entered into force. That treaty was designed not only to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but also to level the playing field among nations by assuring that the parties to the treaty pursue negotiations in good faith for a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and for nuclear disarmament. The non-nuclear weapon states signed this treaty in good faith, believing that the nuclear weapon states would fulfill their part of the bargain by negotiating in good faith for a world free of nuclear weapons.
Convening a World Youth Summit to Abolish Nuclear Weapons also implies that new thinking regarding security and nuclear weapons is needed. Where better can this new thinking come from than the youth of the world? The old thinking, embodied in nuclear deterrence strategy, is based upon the belief that the threat of mass annihilation will keep the peace. This hypothesis has never been proven and has come close to failing on many occasions. It has, however, kept alive the threats of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) and Self-Assured Destruction (SAD).
To anyone who studies nuclear deterrence theory carefully, it must seem like a game of Russian roulette with a bullet loaded in one of six chambers of a gun pointed at the head of humanity. In fact, Martin Hellman, a Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, estimates that a child born today has a one-in-six chance of dying due to a nuclear war during his or her expected 80-year lifespan.
The world of the future belongs to the youth of today, but if they are not active in claiming this world, they may be subject to the consequences of the clash between powerful technologies and a level of human wisdom inadequate to control these technologies. Rather than sitting idly awaiting these consequences, Ikeda calls upon the youth of the world to take matters into their hands and develop a plan to abolish nuclear weapons. He calls for a specific outcome of the World Youth Summit, the adoption of “a declaration affirming their commitment to bringing the era of nuclear weapons to an end.”
To achieve this objective, young people will need to commence an exchange of ideas on developing a plan of action to abolish nuclear weapons. They will need to talk to each other across borders, learning together and planning together. They will need to focus their youthful enthusiasm on seeking a way out from under the nuclear threat that continues to hang precariously above all humanity. The youth will need to organize and develop strategies to lead their political leaders. They will need to see the world with fresh eyes, in order to teach their elders what is possible in that new world, when the threat of mass annihilation is removed because nuclear weapons are abolished and prohibited.
The World Youth Summit to Abolish Nuclear Weapons could base its declaration on ridding the world of nuclear dangers to all humanity, but especially to the youth of the world themselves. They could also argue their case on the need to disinvest in these dinosaur-like weapons and invest instead in meeting human needs, such as food, potable water, shelter, health care and education, and in protecting the environment from climate change and other serious threats.
Abolishing nuclear weapons is critical, but it is only a beginning. The youth of the world would find that, if they succeeded in ridding the world of nuclear dangers, they could do much more. They could turn their attention to building a world without war and one that is just for all, a world in which the arc of history would bend toward justice at a rate commensurate with the need to assure human dignity for all.
Daisaku Ikeda points out, “The greatest significance of such a summit and declaration would lie in the spur they provide to future action.” I would only add to this that the future is now; it is time for the youth of the world to seize the initiative to build a peaceful, just and ecologically sound world, free of nuclear threat – one that they will be proud to pass on to future generations.
David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He and Daisaku Ikeda had a dialogue that was published in Japan and the U.S. as Choose Hope, Your Role in Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age.
Global momentum is building for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons! While the world has banned chemical and biological weapons, there is no explicit legal prohibition of nuclear weapons, although the International Court of Justice ruled unanimously that there is an obligation to bring to a conclusion negotiations for their total elimination. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970, required the five existing nuclear weapons states, the US, Russia, UK, France and China (P-5) to make “good faith efforts” to eliminate their nuclear weapons, while the rest of the world promised not to acquire them (except for India, Pakistan, Israel, who never signed the NPT). North Korea relied on the NPT Faustian bargain for “peaceful” nuclear power to build its own bomb, and then walked out of the treaty.
More than 600 members of civil society, from every corner of the globe, with more than half of them under the age of 30 attended a fact-filled two day conference in Vienna organized by the International Coalition to Ban Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), to learn of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons from the bomb and from testing as well, and of the frightening risks from possible accidents or sabotage of the nine nuclear arsenals around the world. The meeting was a follow up to two prior meetings in Oslo, Norway and Nayarit, Mexico. ICAN members, working for a treaty to ban the bomb, then joined a meeting hosted by Austria for 158 governments in the historic Hofburg Palace, which has served as the residence of Austrian leaders since before the founding of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
In Vienna, the US delegate, delivered a tone-deaf statement on the heels of heart-wrenching testimony of catastrophic illness and death in her community from Michelle Thomas, a down winder from Utah, and other devastating testimony of the effects of nuclear bomb testing from the Marshall Islands and Australia. The US rejected any need for a ban treaty or a nuclear convention and extolled the step by step approach (to nuclear weapons forever) but changed its tone in the wrap-up and appeared to be more respectful of the process. There were 44 countries who explicitly spoke of their support for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, with the Holy See delegate reading out Pope Francis’ statement also calling for a ban on nuclear weapons and their elimination in which he said, “I am convinced that the desire for peace and fraternity planted deep in the human heart will bear fruit in concrete ways to ensure that nuclear weapons are banned once and for all, to the benefit of our common home.” This was a shift in Vatican policy which had never explicitly condemned deterrence policies of the nuclear weapons states although they had called for the elimination of nuclear weapons in prior statements.
Significantly, and to help move the work forward, the Austrian Foreign Minister added to the Chair’s report by announcing a pledge by Austria to work for a nuclear weapons ban, described as “taking effective measures to fill the legal gap for the prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons” and “to cooperate with all stakeholders to achieve this goal.” The NGO strategy now as presented at the ICAN debriefing meeting right after the conference closed, is to get as many nations as we can to support the Austrian pledge coming into the CD and the NPT review and then come out of the 70th Anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a concrete plan for negotiations on a ban treaty. One thought about the 70th Anniversary of the bomb, is that not only should we get a huge turnout in Japan, but we should acknowledge all the victims of the bomb, illustrated so agonizingly during the conference by Hibakusha and down winders at test sites. We should also think about the uranium miners, the polluted sites from mining as well as manufacturing and use of the bomb and try to do something all over the world at those sites on August 6th and 9th as we call for negotiations to begin to ban nuclear weapons and eliminate them.
Only a few days after the Vienna conference, there was a meeting of the Nobel Laureates in Rome, who after meeting with Nobel Prize winning IPPNW members Tilman Ruff and Ira Helfand, continued the momentum created in Vienna and issued a statement which not only called for a ban on nuclear weapons, but asked that negotiations be concluded within two years!
We urge all states to commence negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons at the earliest possible time, and subsequently to conclude the negotiations within two years. This will fulfill existing obligations enshrined in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which will be reviewed in May of 2015, and the unanimous ruling of the International Court of Justice. Negotiations should be open to all states and blockable by none. The 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2015 highlights the urgency of ending the threat of these weapons.
One way to slow down this process to negotiate a legal ban on nuclear weapons would be for the NPT nuclear weapons states to promise at this five year NPT review conference to set a reasonable date to bring to a conclusion time-bound negotiations and effective and verifiable measures to implement the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Otherwise the rest of the world will start without them to create an explicit legal prohibition of nuclear weapons which will be a powerful taboo to be used for pressuring the countries cowering under the nuclear umbrella of the nuclear weapons states, in NATO and in the Pacific, to take a stand for Mother Earth, and urge that negotiations begin for the total abolition of nuclear weapons!
Alice Slater is NY Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Coordinating Committee of Abolition 2000.
I’m proud to be here. I thank everyone in this room and their organizations who have made this possible for my country to be here. And I represent my country while I’m here. But I wanted to also share with you my personal experience so that those of you who have been involved in the law books and in the scientific journals and all the different sources of information that you have amassed to bring us to where we are today, will have a feeling, a direct touch, I hope, with what the Marshall Islands has gone through all these years and what brought us to where we are now.
The evacuation of the people of Bikini, you know the two – made room for the “peaceful use of the atom” – was in 1946. And even at that meeting when the United States representative told the Bikini people that they were going to be moved for just a while, a short while and that they would be repatriated as soon as possible, because this experiment was for the good of mankind, and it was the will of God – from that day on they started lying and giving us double talk and duplicity in all that they did in the testing period. Beyond and after to this day we are still being denied the information we seek to be educated, to be able to understand what happened to our country.
When the Enewetak people were forcibly removed in ’47 to make room for further testing on Enewetak, it was the same story. We will take you off on this ship to (this island) and we will bring you right back when we are through. To this day, neither Bikini nor Enewetak can be safely, totally safely resettled.
My experience with the bomb did not start in ’54. I actually remember as early as when I was four years old listening to the rumbles and the flashes from the west from the island where I lived with my grandfather called Likiep. But the experience of the morning of 1954, March 1st was, I think, the jolt on my soul that never quite left me. Seeing Bravo as a nine year old was an experience I would not recommend to anyone because it still gives us nightmares – the people of my age and younger and around maybe some older from that time.
So when we had the opportunity to go to school, four years later, 1958 I left home to go to school and did not return until 1968. When we had the opportunity to go to school, we were overwhelmed with having to catch up with civilization, with mathematics, with science, with whatever it took to graduate. And we were not able to access information that would give us more understanding of what we had experienced as children.
But when we returned we had that opportunity. We had that new license to speak – the fact that we were educated in American colleges was the license that we sought and that the people that we worked for recognized as the ability to speak up on their behalf. Even when I returned from school, the program of so-called “testing’ exposed people was in full swing. Each year, scientists – I call them scientists – though they liked to refer to themselves as doctors – would come in and study our people, take blood samples and other samples and do all kinds of things to keep up, to keep track of the radiation outside and within their bodies. It was not a pleasant experience for our communities, but it was a continuation of what had happened from Bravo and the subsequent years after.
From the time the testing started in ’47 until Bravo, about half of the 67 “events” were conducted by the United States. And then between ’57 and ’58, 33 or 34 more shots were done in that short period of time, of 2 years. After, the people were removed and were put back on Rongelap to continue the experiments.
Part of what John was referring to earlier in that interview in the movie, the video, Nuclear Savage, was our attempt to understand documents that had been released by the Clinton administration, pursuant to our requests, for years, for information which demonstrated and proved to us that these doctors that I spoke about were actually conducting human experiments on the people of Rongelap and Utirik. They we not treating them for the anomalies that were coming up, but they were actually studying the affects of radiation on human beings.
It is unfortunate that between 1954 and 1994 we were not able to access that information. But even after we’ve understood that, there is still denial that Project 4.1, the project I referred to is a project to study the affects of radiation on human beings. It’s still being denied by officials of the United States.
Our attempts to bring justice to the people of the Marshalls for all that happened to them during this time have been hampered primarily by the withholding of information by the United States on the excuse, and it’s simply an excuse, that it is in the security interest of the United States to do so. How information such as the yield of a particular weapon or the “event” or the “detonation” can be classified on that basis is a mystery to us. But nevertheless, it’s still being used to this day to deny us the information we seek.
The direct effects of some of the testing, especially Bravo, resulted in various anomalies, birth anomalies and sicknesses that the communities of the Marshalls had never experienced before.
But because the islands were closed to any interference from outside between 1946 and 1968, there was very little information that flowed out from the Marshalls until then.
Before 1968 in order, even for some of us to try to leave the Marshalls to go away to school, in order for us to leave our country we needed the permission of the Navy Admiral in Guam to allow us to catch military airplanes out of the Marshalls to Honolulu and on to the US mainland for schooling. So there was already at that time an attempt to decide who amongst us would be allowed to go away to school and who would be denied passage simply because of your family or because of whom you associated with in high school.
When the opportunity arose for us to seek compensation and seek the truth for the damages we suffered from the nuclear testing it was under the auspices of the negotiations leading to independence. We were concerned that the United States was cutting and running – walking away from a responsibility that it had created for itself and was denying in terms of making sure that we had the right information based upon which we could make the right decisions on how this relationship would proceed.
Secondly, we were being presented with information that was claimed to be the infinite, total, complete information that the United States was able to provide in a 1978 survey.
And number three, we were told that if we did not accept the nuclear deal, the 150 million compensation in a trust fund and the establishment of a nuclear claims tribunal, that we would not be allowed independence.
So regardless of what is said about that deal, it was tied to freedom. And the final decision that was placed on us was – are you willing to settle for this agreement, this nuclear claims agreement – in return for your freedom? Or, we will keep you as a trust territory for as long as we want because we have that authority under the United Nations.
The decision was made to be free.
But to continue to seek information that would give us a final answer to all our concerns about the testing period and what it did to us. We have since found out of course that the information provided to us was also very much, ah, “edited” “abridged” “painted” in a way that we would accept it and with the assurances that the amounts that the United States estimated to be adequate for health care and for compensation for physical injury would suffice. As it turned out, none of these things were true.
The people of the Marshalls have filed before in times past. Both the people of Bikini and the people of Enewetak have filed cases in US courts for compensation based on information that they were able to garner through the nuclear claims tribunal and experts hired by that tribunal to provide technical information that (assists) to them. These cases have been dismissed, not on any good grounds accept that the time had run out. We were violating, what is the word I’m looking for – we were violating statues of limitations issues and not on the merit of the cases themselves – procedural rather than substantial reasons.
Today, we have completely run out of funds to address the individual physical injury cases adjudicated by the tribunal and we have not even touched damages to home and property because there are no funds left to address those.
Under the Compact of Free Association there was an agreement that should the terms of the settlement be proven inadequate that there would be a window of opportunity to revisit the issue between the United States government and the Marshall Islands. This request has gone in, in several forms, over the past twenty years only to be rejected again on the grounds that time has run out and the political settlement had been reached in 1986.
So, while we still bear the scars and in fact in some cases, still the open wounds of physical harm from the testing period, there is no physical avenue of settlement at the present time. And just within the last five years, the US Supreme Court has rejected the last two attempts by the people of Enewetak and Bikini to seek justice.
Now, I should say from the beginning here that the lawsuits that I discussed before are different from what we have done now. What we seek now is for the United States and the nuclear powers to abide by the treaty to which they acceded before and for those that did not, by customary law, should also follow. It is an important part of our history because without it, it will remain open-ended – and incomplete. It will not be acceptable for us to leave that open (vacuum?) for our future generations.
It is also right for us to do that because we have seen first-hand the effects of nuclear weapons on human beings. The scourge of displaced communities within their own homeland – the scourge that the people of Enewetak must now live in an atoll that is half contaminated, half acceptable for habitation, at least by US standards, is not a very comfortable end of a very long hard journey.
Just recently a professor from Columbia University has written a piece about the Runit Dome, the only nuclear storage area in Micronesia located in Enewetak where the United States pushed and shoved plutonium contaminated material into a bomb crater, then steeled the top with a concrete cap, and said we will keep it away from human beings for 24,000 years. Now, we have seen because of normal wear and tear, and because of higher seas, cracks in the dome and the possibility now appears that some of this contaminated material may permeate into the lagoon and surrounding communities.
The most recent response from the United States to this concern is as follows: Even if the crater were to be blasted completely open and everything in it were to flow out to the community and the lagoon – what’s in the crater is not as dangerous as what’s outside the crater.
So much for the clean-up of Enewetak.
So, in spite of assurances that it is in fact safe for some of our people to live in, say, Rongelap, or Bikini, or Enewetak, it has always been a stressful issue. And neither Rongelap nor Bikini are inhabited and the half of Enewetak that is, in fact, occupied by some people of Enewetak, is very sparsely populated because most of them have left to the other atolls or to the big island of Hawaii where a sizable, meaning a few hundred, Enewetak people now live.
There is nothing more final in the life of an island person than to be separated from your homeland. It is living hell. It is death while alive. It is impossible to hold your head up as a human being when you cannot ask for your land, ask your land to provide for yourself and must depend on somebody else for that privilege.
So unless and until some form of settlement is again reached and people are repatriated to their own lands, this nuclear legacy of the Marshalls will continue. And we do not wish this upon anyone else, anyone else in the world.
I may not look that old but I do have nine grandchildren and four great grandchildren of which I’m very, very proud. And until today, until the very day I left to come on this trip they look up to you and they ask, “What’s going to happen? What are you going to come back with? What are the answers you seek? You’re away too much.” And you must always go back from these ones saying “Very soon, very soon.”
But we will never give up. And it is the support and the council of the people we have in this room today that gives us that courage and that determination – that through our efforts, as meager as they may be, and as small as we are in the world – we have one vote in the UN – and we have a voice that will not be silenced until the world is rid of all nuclear weapons. Because that’s the cause of this all. Thank you.
The Nuclear Zero lawsuits, initiated by the Marshall Islands, are about the law, but they are about much more than the law. They are also about saving humanity from its most destructive capabilities. They are about saving humanity from itself and about preserving civilization for future generations. They are incredibly important, and I will try to place them in a broader context.
I will begin by sharing two quotations with you. The first is by Jayantha Dhanapala, a Sri Lankan diplomat, former United Nations Under-Secretary General, and long-time and committed leader in the area of nuclear disarmament. He states: “The spectre of the use of a nuclear weapon through political intent, cyber-attack or by accident, by a nation state or by a non-state actor, is more real than we, in our cocoons of complacency, choose to acknowledge.”
The spectre of nuclear use, even nuclear war, is real and most of the world lives in “cocoons of complacency.” It is clear that we must break free from those cocoons, which are as dangerous to the human future as are the nuclear weapons that now imperil us. The Nuclear Zero lawsuits seek to accomplish that.
The second quote is by His Holiness Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church, who has brought new light and compassion to his office. He states: “As long as so great a quantity of arms are in circulation as at present, new pretexts can always be found for initiating hostilities. For this reason, I make my own the appeal of my predecessors for the non-proliferation of arms and for disarmament of all parties, beginning with nuclear and chemical weapons disarmament.” The Pope talks about disarmament in general, but he puts nuclear disarmament, along with chemical weapons disarmament, at the top of his list.
Pope Francis continues: “We cannot however fail to observe that international agreements and national laws — while necessary and greatly to be desired — are not of themselves sufficient to protect humanity from the risk of armed conflict. A conversion of hearts is needed which would permit everyone to recognize in the other a brother or sister to care for, and to work together with, in building a fulfilling life for all.”
“A conversion of hearts.” Can there be any doubt that such conversion is necessary? Can there be any doubt that traditional diplomacy is not getting the job done? And that preparations for war and resolving conflicts by means of warfare are moving us farther away from the needed conversion of hearts.
Disarmament negotiations have been stuck for some 20 years. The “step-by-step” approach of the nuclear-armed states is not working. There are no negotiations in good faith for nuclear disarmament, as required by international law. There are still over 16,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The use of even a small number of these would destroy civilization or, worse, end complex life on the planet – the only planet we know of in the universe that harbors life.
Nuclear weapons do not so much threaten our amazing planet itself, as they threaten the future of humanity and all the creatures, which are subject, for better or worse, to our stewardship. Over geological time with the passing of hundreds of thousands of years, the Earth will recover from the worst we can do to it. It is ourselves and civilization that we put at risk with our nuclear arsenals. We must have a “conversion of hearts” if we are to save our world, ourselves, and the human future.
The Marshall Islands has brought lawsuits against the nine nuclear-armed countries. They ask only that these nine nuclear-armed states do what is required of them under international law – under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and customary international law. They ask that the nuclear-armed countries fulfill their obligations under international law to pursue negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race and for nuclear disarmament. They ask only for the fulfillment of unkept promises and unmet obligations.
The Marshall Islanders are very sympathetic heroes and heroines. For 12 years, from 1946 to 1958, the United States tested nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, causing untold suffering to the islanders. The US tested 67 times, in the atmosphere and underwater. The power of these tests was the equivalent force of testing 1.6 Hiroshima bombs daily for 12 years. This led to countless health problems and premature deaths from cancer and leukemia. It also led to many birth defects and stillbirths. After the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no place on the planet has suffered more from nuclear weapons than has the Marshall Islands.
The United States was the trustee of the Trust Territory of the Pacific, which included the Marshall Islands. In this role, the US was responsible for protecting the life and health of the islanders. Instead, the US tested nuclear weapons on their islands, conducted secret radiation experiments on the islanders, and hid information from the islanders so as to evade paying them fair compensation for their pain, suffering and premature deaths. This was criminal behavior; it was certainly not the behavior of a responsible trustee.
With the Nuclear Zero lawsuits, the Marshall Islanders are acting out of compassion. They are not seeking compensation. They are breaking the bonds of complacency. They seek a conversion of the human heart in order to save their islands and the world from the ravages of nuclear weapons. They wish that no other country or people will ever suffer as they have. They have initiated these lawsuits as a public good.
As Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum put it, “Our people have suffered the catastrophic and irreparable damage of these weapons, and we vow to fight so that no one else on earth will ever again experience these atrocities. The continued existence of nuclear weapons and the terrible risk they pose to the world threaten us all.” I should note that this is the same perspective as that of the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is the perspective of all those who have suffered the terrible consequences of nuclear weapons use.
With regard to the legal aspects of these lawsuits, they are about whether treaties matter. They are about whether the most powerful nations are to be bound by the same rules as the rest of the international community. They are about whether a treaty can stand up with only half of the bargain fulfilled. They are about who gets to decide if treaty obligations are being met. Do all parties to a treaty stand on equal footing, or do the powerful have special rules specifically for them? They are also about the strength of customary international law to bind nations to civilized behavior.
These lawsuits, as I already noted, are about more than just the law. They are also about breaking the cocoons of complacency and a conversion of hearts. They are also about leadership, boldness, courage, justice, wisdom and, ultimately, about survival. Let me say a word about each of these.
Leadership. If the most powerful countries won’t lead, then other countries must. The Marshall Islands, a small island country, has demonstrated this leadership, both on ending climate chaos and on eliminating the nuclear weapons threat to humanity.
Boldness. Many of us in civil society have been calling for boldness in relation to the failure of the nuclear-armed countries to fulfill their obligations to negotiate in good faith to end the nuclear arms race and to achieve complete nuclear disarmament. The status quo has become littered with broken promises, and these have become hard to tolerate. Instead of negotiating in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race “at an early date,” the nuclear-armed countries have engaged in massive programs of modernization of their nuclear arsenals (nuclear weapons, delivery systems and nuclear infrastructure). Such modernization of nuclear arsenals could cost trillions of dollars and ensure that nuclear weapons are deployed through the 21st century and beyond. The Marshall Islands is boldly challenging the status quo with the Nuclear Zero lawsuits.
Courage. The Marshall Islands is standing up for humanity in bringing these lawsuits. I see them as David standing against the nine nuclear-armed Goliaths. But the Marshall Islands is a David acting nonviolently, using the courts and the law instead of a slingshot. The Marshall Islands shows us by its actions what courage looks like.
Justice. The law should always be about justice. In the case of nuclear weapons, both the law and justice call for an equal playing field, one in which no country has possession of nuclear weapons. That is the bargain of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the requirement of customary international law, and the Marshall Islands is taking legal action that seeks justice in the international community.
Wisdom. The lawsuits are about the wisdom to confront the hubris of the nuclear-armed countries. The arrogance of power is dangerous, and the arrogance of reliance upon nuclear weapons could be fatal for all humanity.
Survival. At their base, the Nuclear Zero lawsuits brought by the Marshall Islands are about survival. They are about making nuclear war, by design or accident, impossible because there are no longer nuclear weapons to threaten humanity. Without nuclear weapons in the world, there can be no nuclear war, no nuclear famine, no overriding threat to the human species and the future of humanity.
The dream of ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity should be the dream not only of the Marshall Islanders, but our dream as well, our collective dream, not only for ourselves, but for the human future.
The people of the world should follow the lead of the Marshall Islanders. If they can lead, we can support them. If they can be bold, we can join them. If they can be courageous, we can be as well. If they can demand that international law be based on justice, we can stand with them. If they can act wisely and confront hubris, with all its false assumptions, we can join them in doing so. If they can take seriously the threat to human survival inherent in our most dangerous weapons, so can we. The Marshall Islands is showing us the way forward, breaking cocoons of complacency and demonstrating a conversion of the heart.
I am proud to be associated with the Marshall Islands and its extraordinary Foreign Minister, Tony de Brum. As a consultant to the Marshall Islands, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has worked to build the legal teams that support the Nuclear Zero lawsuits. We have also built a consortium of over 50 civil society organizations and individuals supporting the lawsuits. We have also created a way for individuals to add their voices of support with a brief petition. You can find out more and add your voice at the campaign website, www.nuclearzero.org.
I will conclude with a poem that I wrote recently: “Testing Nuclear Weapons in the Marshall Islands.”
TESTING NUCLEAR WEAPONS IN THE MARSHALL ISLANDS
The islands were alive
with the red-orange fire of sunset
splashed on a billowy sky.
The islanders lived simple lives
close to the edge of the ocean planet
reaching out to infinity.
The days were bright and the nights
calm in this happy archipelago
until the colonizers came.
These were sequentially the Spanish,
Germans, Japanese and then, worst of all,
the United States.
The U.S. came as trustee
bearing its new bombs, eager to test them
in this beautiful barefoot Eden.
The islanders were trusting,
even when the bombs began exploding
and the white ash fell like snow.
The children played
in the ash as it floated down on them,
covering them in poison.
The rest is a tale of loss
and suffering by the islanders, of madness
by the people of the bomb.
This speech was delivered by NAPF President David Krieger at a public forum on the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits in Vienna, Austria, on December 5, 2014.
Nuclear Disarmament: Time for Abolition A Contribution of The Holy See
Permanent Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva
Vienna, 8 December 2014
Nuclear weapons are a global problem. They affect not just nuclear-armed states, but other non-nuclear signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, non-signatories, unacknowledged possessing states and allies under “the nuclear umbrella.” They also impact future generations and the planet that is our home. The reduction of the nuclear threat and disarmament requires a global ethic. Now more than ever the facts of technological and political interdependence cry out for an ethic of solidarity in which we work with one another for a less dangerous, morally responsible global future.
Breaches of Trust
Pope FrancisOur existing disarmament treaties are more than just legal obligations. They are also moral commitments based on trust between states and their representatives, and they are rooted in the trust that citizens place in their governments. Under the NPT, the duty of the nuclear powers and all other parties under what has been described as “a grand bargain” between nuclear and nonnuclear states is to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures to disarm. In the case of nuclear weapons, moreover, beyond the details of any agreement, there are moral stakes for the whole of humanity including future generations.
The purpose of this paper is to encourage discussion of the factors that underpin the moral case for nuclear disarmament, and, in particular, to scrutinize the counter-argument for the belief that nuclear deterrence is a stable basis for peace. The strategic nuclear situation has changed dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Rather than providing security, as the defenders of nuclear deterrence contend, reliance on a strategy of nuclear deterrence has created a less secure world. In a multi-polar world, the concept of nuclear deterrence works less as a stabilizing force and more as an incentive for countries to break out of the non-proliferation regime and develop nuclear arsenals of their own.
Contrary to the frequent assertions of nuclear strategists, the history of the nuclear age has shown that nuclear deterrence has failed to prevent unanticipated events that might have led to nuclear war between possessing states. These include: nuclear accidents, malfunctions, mishaps, false alarms and close calls. Even the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, previously characterized in popular literature as a success for diplomatic brinksmanship, involved events that all too easily could have launched a nuclear war independent of the intentions of national decision-makers.
A Changed Strategic Environment
Today because of the changing strategic environment, the structure of nuclear deterrence is less stable and more worrisome than at the height of the Cold War. The contemporary global environment includes the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states, as well as a growing risk of nuclear terrorism and nuclear weapons use. Possessing states believe preventing proliferation to some countries is necessary, while they have for years ignored the unacknowledged growth of nuclear arsenals in others. This double standard undermines the universality on which the NPT was constructed.
Under the weight of these developments, the architecture of nuclear deterrence has begun to crumble. The expansion and fears of expansion of the nuclear club bring new, unpredictable forces to bear on the bi-lateral strategic balance that has constituted nuclear deterrence. The superpowers no longer seem to share an acute risk of mutual nuclear war. Instead, the proximate threat of nuclear war mainly comes now from regional powers.
Furthermore, the merchandizing and export of nuclear material and expertise for civilian nuclear energy purposes has also increased the risk that terrorist groups will acquire nuclear weapons. In addition, instability threatens nuclear-armed states with the capture of nuclear weapons and related materials by insurgents with aspirations for global violence. The spread of global terrorism through weak and failed states, together with sustained insurgencies in nuclear-armed states, further complicates efforts for arms control and disarmament.
In addition, the process of disarmament by the major nuclear powers has slowed. The most recent arms reduction treaty between the superpowers (2010) fell far short of expectations; it left the world far from the goal of nuclear disarmament. Many more missiles remain on both sides than what even at the height of the Cold War was thought to be the minimum needed for stable deterrence. In addition, certain nuclear weapon possessors have taken actions or articulated policies which continue to make nuclear war-fighting an option for the future even where there is no nuclear provocation.
While the superpowers now deploy fewer weapons on alert, their numbers are still worryingly large. In addition many more thousands are stored in readiness for deployment. There are big gaps in accounting for fissile material over many decades, and the pace of re-processing materials for peaceful purposes has slowed. Missiles and other vehicles for weapons transport have yet to be reduced. Controls on delivery systems are lacking.
For sixty years nuclear deterrence has been thought to provide only “a peace of a sort.” Nuclear deterrence is believed to have prevented nuclear war between the superpowers, but it has also deprived the world of genuine peace and kept it under sustained risk of nuclear catastrophe. Since the end of the Cold War more than twenty years ago the end of the nuclear stand-off has failed to provide a peace dividend that would help to improve the situation of the world’s poor. Indeed, enormous amounts of money are still being spent on ‘modernizing’ the nuclear arsenals of the very states that are ostensibly reducing their nuclear weapons numbers.
Finally, it must be admitted that the very possession of nuclear weapons, even for purposes of deterrence, is morally problematic. While a consensus continues to grow that any possible use of such weapons is radically inconsistent with the demands of human dignity, in the past the Church has nonetheless expressed a provisional acceptance of their possession for reasons of deterrence, under the condition that this be “a step on the way toward progressive disarmament.” This condition has not been fulfilled—far from it. In the absence of further progress toward complete disarmament, and without concrete steps toward a more secure and a more genuine peace, the nuclear weapon establishment has lost much of its legitimacy.
The Problem of Intention
It is now time to question the distinction between possession and use which has long been a governing assumption of much ethical discourse on nuclear deterrence. Use of nuclear weapons is absolutely prohibited, but their possession is judged acceptable on condition that the weapons are held solely for deterrent purposes, that is, to dissuade adversaries from employing them.
The language of intention obscures the fact that nuclear armories, as instruments of military strategy, inherently bear active disposition for use. Nuclear weaponry does not simply lie dormant until the conditional intention is converted into an actual one at the moment when a nuclear attack is launched by one’s adversary. The machinery of nuclear deterrence does not work that way. It involves a whole set of acts that are pre-disposed to use: strategic designs, targeting plans, training drills, readiness checks, alerts, screening for conscientious objectors among operators, and so on.
The political and military officials of nuclear possessing states assume the responsibility to use these weapons if deterrence fails. But since what is intended is mass destruction—with extensive and lasting collateral damage, inhumane suffering, and the risk of escalation—the system of nuclear deterrence can no longer be deemed a policy that stands firmly on moral ground.
Toward a Non-nuclear Peace
The time has come for new thinking on how to challenge complacency surrounding the belief in nuclear deterrence. Changed circumstances bring new responsibilities for decision-makers. The apparent benefits that nuclear deterrence once provided have been compromised, and proliferation results in grave new dangers. The time has come to embrace the abolition of nuclear weapons as an essential foundation of collective security. Realists argue that nuclear deterrence as a security framework must be abandoned slowly and with calculation, if at all. But, is it realistic to allow the current unstable nuclear environment to persist with minor, incremental and essentially bilateral changes? Shall we continue to ignore the conditions that lead to nuclear instability, as systems of international control remain unable to restore stability? Is it realistic, moreover, to deny that the disparity between nuclear and nonnuclear states is one of the major factors resulting in destabilization of the Non-Proliferation Regime? Can we count on strategic ‘realism’ to build us a secure peace? We would be foolish to imagine so.
A genuine peace cannot grow out of an instrumental prudence that establishes a precarious ethics focused narrowly on the technical instruments of war. What is needed is a constructive ethic rooted in a deeper vision of peace, an ethic in which means and ends coincide more closely, where the positive components of peace inform and limit the use of force. World leaders must be reminded that the commitment to disarm embedded in the NPT and other international documents is more than a legal-political detail, it is a moral commitment on which the future of the world depends. Pacta sunt servanda (“Treaties must be observed”) is a first principle of the international system because it is the foundation on which trust can be built.
Solidarity and a Global Ethic of Abolition
Responsibility for the abolition of nuclear weapons is an essential component of the global common good. Abolition is one of those tasks that exceed the capacity of any single nation or any set of nations to resolve on their own. Reduction and disarmament of nuclear arsenals requires a global ethic to guide global cooperation.
On this issue in particular, now more than ever, the logic of technological interdependence cries out for an ethic of solidarity in which we work with one another for a less dangerous, morally responsible global future. It diminishes our humanity when the development of harmful technologies so often controls the imaginations and moral judgments of the brightest among us. To dwell in a humane society, we must govern our technologies with conscious attention to our global responsibilities.
In search of the political will to eradicate nuclear weapons, and out of concern for the world our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will inherit, the human family will have to become united in order to overcome powerful institutionalized interests that are invested in nuclear armaments. Only in solidarity will we recognize our common humanity, grow in awareness of the threats we face in common, and discover the paths beyond the impasse in which the world now finds itself.
The process of nuclear disarmament promised by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and repeatedly endorsed by religious and civic leaders is far from realization. At a time when political will among world leaders for the abolition of nuclear weapons is lacking, solidarity across nations could break through the blockages of diplomacy-as-usual to open a way to the elimination of these weapons of mass destruction. In the 1980s people round the world voiced their “No” to nuclear war-fighting. In this decade, the time has come for people of all nations to say, in solidarity, once and for all “a ‘No’ to nuclear weapons.”
Fifty years ago Pope John XXIII proposed that “nuclear weapons should be banned” and “all should come to agree on fitting program of disarmament.” Since that time the Holy See has repeatedly called for the abolition of nuclear weapons. At the General Assembly last September, Archbishop Dominque Mamberti endorsed the Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon’s “Five Point Plan for Nuclear Disarmament” and called for a worldwide conference to draw up a convention on abolition. “The Holy See,” he explained, in another talk, “shares the thoughts and sentiments of most men and women of good will who aspire to the elimination of nuclear weapons.” Chief among these are the former American statesmen who have become advocates of abolition. Their conversion from proponents of nuclear deterrence to advocates of nuclear abolition is a sign of the times that solidarity in this cause is possible between secular and religious leaders as well as between possessing and non-possessing states. Now is the time to affirm not only the immorality of the use of nuclear weapons, but the immorality of their possession, thereby clearing the road to nuclear abolition.
Other Ethical Issues Pressing for Disarmament
With solidarity as a basis for a global ethic of abolition, let us examine some of the particular factors that put in question the moral legitimacy of the architecture of the “peace of a sort” supposedly provided by deterrence between the major nuclear powers. We propose looking at four specific concerns: (1) the costs of the nuclear stalemate to the global common good, (2) the unstable security inherent in the current nuclear environment under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, (3) the built-in injustice in the NPT regime, and (4) the price to the poor and vulnerable of current nuclear policies.
Threats to the Global Common Good
Last year’s international conference in Oslo highlighted the egregious-humanitarian consequences that inevitably result from any use of nuclear weapons. These consequences amount to basic offenses against humanity and the global common good. So, too, would such use bring about widespread harm to other life forms and even eco-systems. In addition, maintenance of the world’s nuclear weapons establishment results in misallocation of human talent, institutional capacities and funding resources. Promotion of the global common good will require re-setting those allocations, re-ordering priorities toward peaceful human development.
Though it may be said, by way of a narrow casuistry, that possession of nuclear weapons is not per se evil, it does come very close to being so, because the only way such weapons work, even as a deterrent, is to threaten death to masses of human beings. And even should nuclear weapons be employed for narrowly restricted military goals, – so called “tactical” nuclear weapons – civilians would nonetheless be killed as “collateral damage”. Contaminants would be dispersed far into the future, resulting in harm to the environment for decades, even centuries, to come.
While most attention is giving to the mass-killing power of nuclear weapons, scientists and international lawyers are now giving attention to the “unnecessary suffering” inflicted by the use of nuclear weapons. It has been observed that survivors of a nuclear conflict will envy the dead. The infliction of unnecessary suffering has long been banned by military codes and international law. What is true in conventional war is all the more true of nuclear conflict.
To the immediate and long-term effects of radiation sickness must be added the suffering due to starvation, the disruption and contamination of water supplies, the spread of disease across a newly vulnerable population, and the inability of ecosystems to restore themselves to sustainable levels after nuclear detonations. The continuing radioactive disaster at the civilian nuclear energy plant at Chernobyl and Fukushima should be a stark reminder to us that technical fixes are non-trivial and certainly not feasible in the far worse situation of a nuclear weapon detonation in conflict. Not only human lives but the land and water and marine resources would be damaged for the foreseeable future.
Illusions of Security
Proponents of nuclear weapons and opponents of abolition have often presented nuclear deterrence as a major pillar of international peace. Some historians, however, offer a different perspective. Despite the common assertion that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives and brought the Japanese to sue for peace, records of the deliberation of the Japanese government, revisionist historians argue, show that it was not the dropping of the atomic bombs but the entrance of Soviet Union into the war that led to the collapse of Japanese resistance and its surrender to the U.S. Even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese Empire had already suffered more death and destruction in “conventional” fire-bombing of Japanese cities without surrendering than from the dropping of the two nuclear bombs.
Nuclear arsenals, moreover, have proved no obstacle to conventional war in the nuclear era. They did not intimidate smaller powers from going to war or fighting against nuclear adversaries in different regions at different times. Indeed, nuclear weapons have themselves been a casus belli in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Other examples of cyber or conventional attacks were conducted because of real or alleged nuclear weapons programs. In the lead up to the Cuban Missile Crisis, moreover, both sides had engaged in provocative acts that led them to the brink.
In 2003, false assessments of weapons of mass destruction development became a pretext for a war of choice against Iraq that unleashed a cascade of problems we too antiseptically call “instability” that continues to roll through that country and across the region.
The possession of nuclear weapons, moreover, seems to have posed little deterrent to attacks on nuclear powers from smaller, non-nuclear powers and non-state actors. It has not prevented conventional war between nuclear-armed states, and it has not dissuaded terrorists from attacking the nuclear powers. All the nuclear weapons states have endured terrorist attacks, often repeated ones.
Thus, the argument that nuclear deterrence preserves the peace is specious. The “peace of a sort” provided by nuclear deterrence is a misnomer and tends to cloud our collective vision. Prolongation of the current nuclear polyarchy has set the stage for wars and for ongoing tensions. It is an expensive system that can’t protect from prolonged low-level wars, inter-state wars or terrorist attacks. Accordingly, the misleading assumption that nuclear deterrence prevents war should no longer inspire reluctance to accepting international abolition of nuclear arsenals. If it ever was true, today it has become a dodge from meeting responsibilities to this generation and the next.
Inequality among NPT Signatories
The non-proliferation regime is rooted in inequality. In the grand bargain at the treaty’s foundation the non-possessing powers granted a monopoly on nuclear weapons to the possessing powers in return for a “transformative” good faith pledge by the nuclear weapons states to reduce and disarm their existing nuclear arsenals. What was intended to be a temporary state of affairs appears to have become a permanent reality, establishing a class structure in the international system between possessing and non-possessing states.
While other factors also underlie national status, the inequality between non-nuclear and nuclear states matters enormously because it appears to establish a unique kind of security which makes a nuclear-armed country immune to external pressures and so more able to impose its will on the world. For that reason, the nuclear disparity becomes an incentive for non-nuclear-armed states to break out of the NPT agreement in pursuit of major power status. Thus, the asymmetry of the relationship between nuclear and non-nuclear states affects the stability, the durability and the effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime.
In the absence of effective practical disarmament, efforts to enforce nonproliferation give rise to suspicions that the NPT is an instrument of an irremediably unequal world order. With the Cold War now a quarter century behind us, nonnuclear states increasingly perceive the regime as managing the system to serve the interests of those with nuclear weapons. Without solid progress toward disarmament as pledged under the NPT, questions continue to grow over the legitimacy of the system. Non-possession begins to appear inconsistent with the sovereign equality of nations and the inherent right of states to security and self-defense. Nuclear capability is still regarded in certain countries as a prerequisite of diplomatic influence and great power status, building incentives for proliferation and thus undermining global security.
Furthermore, at the same time as the nuclear powers enforce, with the assistance of the IAEA, strict non-proliferation measures on potential break-out states, there is no international monitoring and enforcement mechanism to implement the disarmament provisions of the NPT. There are no agreed-upon means to insure that the promise of transformation to a nuclear-arms-free world moves ahead. In the absence of a functioning Conference on Disarmament, those decisions are left to bi-lateral negotiation and unilateral policymaking, yielding slow and sometimes near-meaningless shifts in the nuclear balance. Under the 2010 NPT Action Plan, the nuclear-weapon States have committed to accelerate concrete progress on the steps leading to nuclear disarmament, contained in the Final Document of the 2000 Review Conference, in a way that promotes international stability, peace and undiminished and increased security. So far, the only accountability has been via non-governmental organizations monitoring the implementation of the 2010 NPT Action Plan. However, the nuclear weapons States are required to report their disarmament undertakings to the NPT Review Conference Preparatory Committee in 2014, and the 2015 Review Conference will take stock and consider the next steps for the full implementation of article VI.
Re-establishing the stability, legitimacy and universality of the NPT regime demands the establishment of norms and mechanisms for supervision of nuclear disarmament on the part of all nuclear weapons states. If there is little or no progress toward disarmament by the nuclear states, it is inevitable that the NPT will be regarded as an unjust perpetuation of the status quo. Only insofar as the nuclear-armed states move toward disarmament will the rest of the world regard the nonproliferation regime as just.
Neglect of the Poor and the Vulnerable
For decades the cost of the nuclear polyarchy to the world’s poor has been evident. Fifty years ago, the Second Vatican Council declared, “[T]he [nuclear] arms race is an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which injures the poor to an incredible degree.” Today, the production, maintenance and deployment of nuclear weapons continue to siphon off resources that otherwise might have been made available for the amelioration of poverty and socio-economic development for the poor. The prolongation of the nuclear establishment continues to perpetuate patterns of impoverishment both domestically and internationally.
In most societies, duties to the poor and vulnerable are primary moral obligations. In 2005 the international community in adopting the Responsibility to Protect agreed that it is the responsibility of government to protect its populations from basic deprivation, and it has allowed the international community to intervene when governments fail to do so. Humanitarian agencies and world religions likewise see support of the poor and promotion of development as essential to the global common good. But, after establishing the reduction of extreme poverty as one of the Millennial Goals in 2000, the United Nations’ goal of the reduction of the numbers of people living in absolute poverty by one half by the year 2015 is far from realization. Contributions by developed nations to this important developmental contribution to peace have fallen short.
Further delay in meeting those goals could be satisfied by matching savings from cuts in spending for nuclear weapons to expenditures in support for poverty reduction.
The re-allocation of funding from arms to development is essential to social justice. For social justice consists in the justice of our institutional arrangements. The disparity of resources between situations dedicated to human development and those dedicated to nuclear armament is a fundamental injustice in the global political order. Re-allocation of resources from wasteful and dangerous weapons programs to the constructive and peaceful purposes of global human development would undo shameful imbalances in public funding and institutional capacities.
Peace does not consist in the mere “absence of war,” but rather in enjoyment of a full set of rights and goods that foster the complete development of the whole person in community. The Millennium Development goals provide a handy summary of the material goods a peaceful life would include: the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, universal primary education, the empowerment of women, reduced childhood mortality, maternal health, combatting HIV/AIDs and other diseases, environmental sustainability, and a global partnership in development.
The philosopher William James sought a “moral equivalent of war,” a fulsome commitment of personal energies to a cause that would substitute for war as a great human undertaking. Writing at the time of the First Gulf War, Saint John Paul II called for “a concerted worldwide effort to promote development” as an endeavor of peace. He wrote, “[A]nother name for peace is development. Just as there is a responsibility for avoiding war,” he wrote, “so too there is a collective responsibility for promoting development.” Through their own work, he argued, the poor should be trusted to make their own contributions to economic prosperity. But to do so, they “need to be provided with realistic opportunities.” Re-allocation of resources from nuclear armaments to development programs is an eminently appropriate way to make those opportunities possible by further contributions to attaining the newly-updated Millennial Development Goals. In one move, there would be a double contribution to peace: reducing the danger of nuclear war and satisfaction of the collective responsibility for promoting development.
Reason, Rationality and Peace
As U. S. president John F. Kennedy began his work toward a nuclear test ban, he asserted in a June 1963 speech at American University that peace through nuclear disarmament is “the necessary, rational end of rational men.” The rationality that gives rise to peace is not the technical reasoning of weapons scientists and arms-control specialists. It consists rather in the broad moral reasoning that arises from examined living and is sourced by our historic wisdom traditions. At its best, it posits a morality of ends as the basic architecture of politics. Technical reason—the morality of means—should be its servant, not its governor. It is moral reason that tells us nuclear abolition is possible. It is moral reason that tells us how to utilize technocratic reason in the work of disarmament. It is moral reason that recognizes deterrence as an obstacle to peace, and leads us to seek alternative paths to a peaceful world.
Moral reasoning is not a simple rational calculation. It is reasoning informed by virtue, that is, “right reason”; it is reason shaped by the examined experience of moral lives, what the ancients called “wisdom.” Autonomous technical reason, unguided by a deeper moral vision and tempered by the virtues of the good human life, can result in catastrophe, as the misuse of the Just War Tradition in support of unjust wars over the centuries demonstrates. Moral reason is a beacon to a fully human life. It is only reason, in this larger sense, the logic of ends, which can lead us to a nuclear-free world.
In short, to achieve nuclear abolition, we need to resist succumbing to the limits set by political realism. While recognizing how these concepts can provide a prudent curb on unwarranted exuberance, we must ultimately reject them as the defining outlook for our common political future. The fear that drives the reluctance to disarm must be replaced by a spirit of solidarity that binds humanity to achieve the global common good of which peace is the fullest expression.
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To His Excellency Mr Sebastian Kurz Federal Minister for Europe, Integration and Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Austria President of the Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons
I am pleased to greet you, Mr President, and all the representatives from various Nations and International Organizations, as well as civil society, who are participating in the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.
Nuclear weapons are a global problem affecting all nations and impacting future generations and the planet that is our home. A global ethic is needed if we are to reduce the nuclear threat and work towards nuclear disarmament. Now, more than ever, technological, social and political interdependence urgently calls for an ethic of solidarity (cf John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 38), which encourages people to work together for a more secure world, and a future that is increasingly rooted in moral values and responsibility on a global scale.
The humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons are predictable and planetary. While the focus is often placed on nuclear weapons’ potential for mass killing, more attention must be given to the “unnecessary suffering” brought on by their use. Military codes and international law, among others, have long banned peoples from inflicting unnecessary suffering. If such suffering is banned in the waging of conventional war, then it should all the more be banned in nuclear conflict. There are those among us who are victims of these weapons; they warn us not to commit the same irreparable mistakes which have devastated populations and creation. I extend warm greetings to the Hibakusha , as well as other victims of nuclear weapons testing who are present at this meeting. I encourage them all to be prophetic voices, calling the human family to a deeper appreciation of beauty, love, cooperation and fraternity, while reminding the world of the risks of nuclear weapons which have the potential to destroy us and civilization.
Nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutually assured destruction cannot be the basis for an ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence among peoples and states. Then youth of today and tomorrow deserve far more. They deserve a peaceful world order based on the unity of the human family, grounded on respect, cooperation, solidarity and compassion. Now is the time to counter the logic of fear with the ethics of responsibility, and so foster a climate of trust and sincere dialogue.
Spending on nuclear weapons squanders the wealth of nations. To prioritise such spending is a mistake and a misallocation of resources which would be far better invested in the areas of integral human development, education, health and the fight against extreme poverty. When these resources are squandered, the poor and the weak living on the margins of society pay the price.
The desire for peace, security and stability is one of the deepest longings of the human heart. It is rooted in the Creator who makes all people members of the one human family. This desire can never be satisfied by military means alone, much less the possession of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Peace cannot “be reduced solely to maintain a balance of power between enemies; nor is it brought about by dictatorship” (Gaudium et Spes, 78). Peace must be built on justice, socio-economic development, freedom, respect for fundamental human rights, the participation of all in public affairs and the building of trust between peoples. Pope Paul VI stated this succinctly in his Encyclical Populorum Progressio : “Development is the new name for peace” (76). It is incumbent on us to adopt concrete actions which promote peace and security, while remaining always aware of the limitation of short-sighted approaches to problems of national and international security. We must be profoundly committed to strengthening mutual trust, for only through such trust can true and lasting peace among nations be established (cf John XXIII, Pacem in Terris , 113).
In the context of this Conference, I wish to encourage sincere and open dialogue between parties internal to each nuclear state, between various nuclear states, and between nuclear states and non-nuclear states, This dialogue must be inclusive, involving international organisations, religious communities and civil society, and oriented towards the common good and not the protection of vested interests. “A world without nuclear weapons” is a goal shared by all nationals and echoed by world leaders, as well as the aspiration of millions of men and women. The future and the survival of the human family hinges on moving beyond this ideal and ensuring that it becomes a reality.
I am convinced that the desire for peace and fraternity planted deep in the human heart will bear fruit in concrete ways to ensure that nuclear weapons are banned once and for all, to the benefit of our common home. The security of our own future depends on guaranteeing the peaceful security of others, for if peace, security and stability are not established globally, they will not be enjoyed at all. Individually and collectively , we are responsible for the present and future well-being of our brothers and sisters. It is my great hope that this responsibility will inform our efforts in favour of nuclear disarmament, for a world without nuclear weapons is truly possibly.
On December 5, 2014, the International Peace Bureau awarded the Sean MacBride Peace Prize the people and government of the Marshall Islands. Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum accepted the award. His speech is below. Video of the award ceremony is available here.
I am deeply honored to receive this, to accept this award, on behalf of the people and the government of the Marshall Islands. I accept it on behalf of President Christopher Loeak and his government, who have been very supportive of all our efforts in every faction on the floor of Parliament, in the cabinet, throughout the ministries and the public service, through the education system, through the public live broadcast system and in all of our encounters with the young people of the country – educational meetings, graduation speeches, and the like.
I accept it with humility on behalf of all the people of the Marshall Islands, for all the fathers of the many families, both those that remain in their homelands, and those that are so sadly separated from the land which nurtured their parents and their grandparents and which gives them the soul to be Marshallese persons.
I accept it on behalf of the women of the Marshall Islands who have had to quietly suffer through the years the indignation, the shame, the hardship of being cast aside as different or as deserving of their fate because they happened to not know what it was that affected them. I accept it on behalf of those women, especially of the community of Rongelap, who on the morning of Bravo – two days after Bravo actually was still the morning of Bravo in Rongelap – had to withstand the shame of being stripped naked in front of their village, in the village square, to be hosed down to get rid of the radioactive powder on their bodies, in front of their children, their sons, and their male relatives.
I accept it on behalf of all the children who were born partly human: jellyfish babies, children who were born without arms, or without heads, brains, but with a heart that beat nevertheless for some reason.
I accept it on behalf of children who have died because they had no access to medical care, proper medical care, whose diseases and sicknesses and anomalies could not be properly diagnosed because we were told that we could not hire doctors for the dead when we were struggling to employ doctors for the living.
I accept it on behalf of those women who were accused of having illicit relationships which caused their children to become jelly babies, being accused of incestuous relationships and therefore not being capable of having proper babies.
I accept it on behalf of the children who have survived, like my granddaughter whose two year battle with leukemia has resulted in a healthy nine-year-old in the fourth grade who is doing well, thank you, for now.
I accept it on behalf of all the people of Bikini who cannot return home, but must stay in two split societies, one in Kili, one in Ejit, while they still call themselves Bikinians, and are proud to say “I come from KBE,” – Kili, Bikini, Ejit – because Kili is where one half of them stay, Ejit is where the other half, and Bikini is the place where they long to stay.
My colleague, Obet Kilon, is from Bikini. He’s a young, up-and-coming Foreign Service officer in our government, and he will carry this banner long after I am dead and gone, I am sure. I accept it on behalf of Kilon and his family, and all the other people of Bikini.
The people of Enewetak, who must now live as one society, when in truth, they are really two societies in one atoll, who always refer to themselves as the people of Engebi and of Enewetak living in Enewetak Atoll, unfortunately must live on one island in that atoll because it is contaminated, and the people of Engebi cannot return to Engebi. I accept it on behalf of the people of Enewetak who must witness the breakup of the dome at Runit with tons and tons and tons of plutonium-contaminated material.
I accept it on behalf of the children of the Marshalls who will be born next year, and the year after, and the decade after who, for God’s sakes, must have a better life than their parents did.
I accept it on behalf of all of those who have contributed to make it happen that we are recognized for filing the cases against the nuclear states in the ICJ. Without your support, without your counsel, without your confirmation that what we wanted to do was the right thing to do, it would have been difficult for us to step forward and carry out this very, very important step in bringing peace to the world in getting rid of nuclear weapons once and for all.
I accept it on behalf of all those who have sent support for our efforts. I accept it on behalf of our friends from Japan, some of whom are here tonight, who have suffered more directly than we have.
If there was one thing that we could point to and accept as perhaps a wish that no one could possibly deny exists in the heart of every Marshallese, it is that this madness be nipped at the bud, that it not be allowed to happen again, that war with nuclear weapons must be recognized for what it is: an evil end to civilization. It is no longer bombs being tested, it is no longer select cities where bombs will be dropped, and then things will be over. It is a final, a very final, act of insanity.
And as someone earlier said, “How can we be sure that nuclear weapons will not be used again?” The only way to be sure that nuclear weapons are not used again is to make sure we don’t have any nuclear weapons to use. And the small islands of the Marshall Islands, barely 70,000 people, are maybe small islands but a big ocean country: we believe that firmly, and we want to share that belief with the world.
I will take this medal back with me to the President and his cabinet, to Parliament in the January session, which begins the first Monday of January, and then we will pass it around to all the islands of the Marshalls for them to see, for the children to feel it, for the children to see that, yes, there are smart and concerned people in the world that believe like we do.
The most rewarding part of doing what we do in spreading the word of nuclear peace is to see the eyes of children light up when they understand what is being done. Because the bad side of the story has been told to them, what we are trying to do is to tell them the good side of the story, and this will be a milestone in the telling of that story.
Pope Francis, who has already broken new ground in his outreach to a suffering humanity, has put the weight of the Catholic Church behind a new humanitarian movement to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Global momentum is building for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons! While the world has banned chemical and biological weapons, there is no explicit legal prohibition of nuclear weapons, although the International Court of Justice ruled unanimously that there is an obligation to bring to a conclusion negotiations for their total elimination. The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which entered into force in 1970, required the five existing nuclear weapons states, the US, Russia, UK, France and China (P-5) to make “good faith efforts” to eliminate their nuclear weapons, while the rest of the world promised not to acquire them (except for India, Pakistan, Israel, who never signed the NPT). North Korea relied on the NPT Faustian bargain for “peaceful” nuclear power to build its own bomb, and then walked out of the treaty.
For video of this event, 
I will begin by sharing two quotations with you. The first is by Jayantha Dhanapala, a Sri Lankan diplomat, former United Nations Under-Secretary General, and long-time and committed leader in the area of nuclear disarmament. He states: “The spectre of the use of a nuclear weapon through political intent, cyber-attack or by accident, by a nation state or by a non-state actor, is more real than we, in our cocoons of complacency, choose to acknowledge.”![By Tânia Rêgo/ABr (Agência Brasil) [CC BY 3.0 br (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/br/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Pope_Francis_at_Vargihna.jpg)
I am pleased to greet you, Mr President, and all the representatives from various Nations and International Organizations, as well as civil society, who are participating in the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.
I am deeply honored to receive this, to accept this award, on behalf of the people and the government of the Marshall Islands. I accept it on behalf of President Christopher Loeak and his government, who have been very supportive of all our efforts in every faction on the floor of Parliament, in the cabinet, throughout the ministries and the public service, through the education system, through the public live broadcast system and in all of our encounters with the young people of the country – educational meetings, graduation speeches, and the like.