Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Disarmament

  • A World Free of Nuclear Weapons: The Wrong and Right Way to Do It

    UPI Outside View, January 24, 2008

     

    Since the beginning of the Atomic Age, policymakers and scholars have attempted to come up with formulas to constrain the nuclear genie. In mid-January, in an effort to move this ambition forward, former senior decision-makers — Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, Defense Secretary William Perry and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Samuel Nunn — released “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” a report published in the Wall Street Journal designed to advance nuclear abolition.

    The timing would seem propitious. In December 2007, in voting down a new nuclear weapon (the reliable replacement warhead), Congress mandated that President Bush and his successor rationalize the U.S. nuclear arsenal by the end of 2009 to justify future appropriations. As a result, a disarmament proposal advanced by such statesmen and endorsed by dozens of prominent experts should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, it cannot.

    At first blush the Shultz et al. proposal appears to be promising for nuclear-arms controllers, who could object to extension of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, deeper nuclear reductions beyond those promoted by the Bush administration or increasing the warning time for the initiation of nuclear use. Likewise the call for cooperative ballistic missile defense, increased security at nuclear materials sites, strengthening non-proliferation verification and implementation of the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. If constraining nuclear development or use marks the objective, the answer is no one.

    However, if the aim truly is the elimination of nuclear arms — the authors declared an objective to eradicate the “threat to the world” — the proposal falls far short. A review of what could be done versus what the authors say should be done supports this conclusion.

    — Set a timeline for the elimination of nuclear arsenals, not an “agreement to undertake further substantial reductions.” The authors’ call for extension of the monitoring provisions of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty coupled to undefined reductions below the 1,700 to 2,200 nuclear warheads allowed under the 1992 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia may be admirable, but it does not amount a “nuclear-free world.” Absent weapons elimination benchmarks — including disposal of non-deployed warheads — the authors’ plan amounts to maintenance of diminished but still substantial weapons caches.

    — Separate nuclear warheads from delivery systems. To reduce the risk of nuclear war prior to abolition, the authors advocate increased warning and decision time for nuclear initiation. They speak abstractly about mutually agreed upon “physical barriers in the command-and-control sequence” to prevent premature nuclear launch. Only warhead separation from missiles meets the objective. Certainly, if Pakistan can separate its bombs from delivery vehicles to allow time for prudent decisions, so can the United States, Russia and others.

    — Eliminate long-range ballistic missiles except those used for commercial and scientific research. Such an approach nullifies the authors’ promotion of ballistic missile defense. A precedent for negotiated missile elimination includes the 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev Intermediate Force Reduction Treaty. Elimination also finds precedent in the unilateral withdrawal and destruction of obsolete delivery systems from arsenals.

    — Eliminate all high enriched uranium and separated plutonium rather than enhance security at sites holding such material. The authors call for countries to apply the highest standards of security to nuclear materials. But only removal and disposal will prevent access by terrorists or nuclear ambitious nations.

    — Ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty. The U.S. Senate failed to do so during the Clinton administration. The authors propose a “process” to get the treaty implemented but fail to call upon the most prominent hold out to adopt the agreement it gave birth to.

    — Go beyond the Additional Protocol to verify that countries are not using civil nuclear programs for military purposes. The protocol allows International Atomic Energy Agency inspection of all suspect nuclear sites. Many countries have yet to adopt it, but the protocol itself is imperfect. Placing all atomic plants under IAEA co-management would do a better job to prevent nuclear breakouts.

    — Provide teeth to deal with nuclear violators. The authors fail to furnish a strategy to combat atomic cheats. Given the gravity of an attempted nuclear breakout, the international community must have “in place” a dedicated military capacity to stop any nuclear fudging.

    Shultz and his colleagues conclude, “Progress (toward a nuclear-free world) must be facilitated by a clear statement of our ultimate goal.”

    Unfortunately the goal is muddled by the authors’ own formulation. If nuclear disarmament is the objective, we can do far better.

    Bennett Ramberg, Ph.D., J.D., served in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration. The author of three books and editor of three others on international security, he has written for such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Ramberg’s Op-Eds have appeared in all major newspapers in the United States and many around the world.

  • The Dawning Age of Nuclear Zero

    This article was originally published on Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

    It is never clear to us why and how certain critical events reach a tipping point — that is how they fundamentally depart from the status quo. In the case of six decades of nuclear armament, that may be particularly true. But an argument can be made that we are at or near such a tipping point, a tipping point away from expanding nuclear arsenals and toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons.
    Two events in the United States bolster this argument. One was a proposal put forward by four moderate-to-conservative leaders — former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Defense Secretary William Perry — a year ago urging not just a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, but their elimination as a class. This was seen by many at the time, particularly those familiar with the support these figures had given to new strategic weapons systems in the past, as a shift of historic importance.
    More recently, an international organization of public and private figures — once again including a number of Americans and others who had never been identified with disarmament causes in the past — called Global Zero announced its intention to press nuclear-armed nations to reduce, and then eliminate, their arsenals.
    The political landscape clearly is shifting in meaningful ways.
    The reasons for this shift are many and, in the case of particular individuals, probably unknowable. These may include matters of personal legacy, how one’s public career and values are viewed by history. They may include pragmatic considerations, that the longer existing nuclear powers maintain large stockpiles of warheads and delivery systems (missiles), the more likely it will be that less stable or even unstable nations, such as Iran and North Korea, develop their own capabilities. They may include military considerations: only doomsday scenarios include the use of nuclear weapons as a viable option. They may include the new reality of the changing nature of conflict and the transformation of war, that nation-state wars are declining sharply in probability and unconventional conflict involving stateless nations against whom nuclear weapons represent no deterrent are increasing.
    The reasons for the tipping point in opinion may ultimately get down to that most basic of human motives: the desire to leave a safer world for one’s children and future generations now overrides the often casual discussion of the political power once thought to be derived from weapons of ultimate mass destruction.
    Now faced with frightening economic consequences of unregulated market collapse and the prospects of a very long international economic recovery, a new Obama administration in Washington could well be looking at initiatives that bring increased security at little or no cost, or indeed that produce cost savings. Nuclear zero, elimination of nuclear arsenals, must be at the top of this list. It may be argued that the president must fix the economy first before anything else gains attention. This false argument assumes intelligent people can do only one thing, even one complex thing, at a time or that some talented economic people cannot carry out their project while other talented diplomatic people carry out quite another.
    Reasons and motives are incidental to opportunity. And now the opportunity exists, an opportunity not known for more than 60 years, to rid the world of its greatest menace. Eliminating all nuclear weapons will not be easy. It will require skilled and patient multinational diplomacy. It will require breakthroughs in verification. It will require a tolerable sacrifice of national sovereignty. It will most of all require an enormous amount of international purpose and good will. But it can be done. The principal requirement is political will and visionary political leadership. And it must be done. If not now, when?

     

    Gary Hart is a former US Senator from Colorado.

  • Let’s Commit to a Nuclear-Free World

    This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal

    When Barack Obama becomes America’s 44th president on Jan. 20, he should embrace the vision of a predecessor who declared: “We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth.”

    That president was Ronald Reagan, and he expressed this ambitious vision in his second inaugural address on Jan. 21, 1985. It was a remarkable statement from a president who had deployed tactical nuclear missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet Union’s fearsome SS-20 missile fleet.

    President Reagan knew the grave threat nuclear weapons pose to humanity. He never achieved his goal, but President Obama should pick up where he left off.

    The Cold War is over, but there remain thousands of nuclear missiles in the world’s arsenals — most maintained by the U.S. and Russia. Most are targeted at cities and are far more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    Today, the threat is ever more complex. As more nations pursue nuclear ambitions, the world becomes less secure, with growing odds of terrorists obtaining a nuclear weapon.

    The nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran threaten a “cascade” of nuclear proliferation, according to a bipartisan panel led by former U.S. Defense Secretaries William J. Perry and James R. Schlesinger.

    Another bipartisan panel has warned that the world can expect a nuclear or biological terror attack by 2013 — unless urgent action is taken.

    Nuclear weapons pose grave dangers to all nations. Seeking new weapons and maintaining massive arsenals makes no sense. It is vital that we seek a world free of nuclear weapons. The United States should lead the way, and a President Obama should challenge Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to join us.

    Many of the world’s leading statesmen favor such an effort. They include former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, former Defense Secretary Perry, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, and former Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn.

    Unfortunately, for eight years the Bush administration moved in another direction, pushing aggressive policies and new weapons programs, threatening to reopen the nuclear door and spark the very proliferation we seek to prevent.

    President Bush made it the policy of the United States to contemplate first use of nuclear weapons in response to chemical or biological attack — even against nonnuclear states.

    He changed the “strategic triad” — which put nuclear weapons in a special category by themselves — by lumping them with conventional weapons in the same package of battlefield capabilities. This blurred the distinction between the two, making nuclear weapons easier to use.

    And he advocated new types of weapons that could be used in a variety of circumstances against a range of targets, advancing the notion that nuclear weapons have utility beyond deterrence.

    Mr. Bush then sought funding for new weapons programs, including:

    – A 100-kiloton “bunker buster” that scientists say would not destroy enemy bunkers as advertised, but would have spewed enough radiation to kill one million people.

    – The Advanced Concepts Initiative, including developing a low-yield nuclear weapon for tactical battlefield use.

    – The Modern Pit Facility, a factory that could produce up to 450 plutonium triggers a year — even though scientists say America’s nuclear triggers will be good for years.

    – Pushing to reduce time-to-test readiness at the Nevada Test Site in half — to 18 months — signaling intent to resume testing, which would have broken a test moratorium in place since 1992.

    – A new nuclear warhead, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which could spark a new global arms race.

    I opposed these programs, and Congress slashed or eliminated funding for them.

    But President Bush had sent dangerous signals world-wide. Allies could conclude if the United States sought new nuclear weapons, they should too. Adversaries could conclude acquiring nuclear weapons would be insurance against pre-emptive U.S. attack.

    Here’s how President-elect Obama can change course. By law he must set forth his views on nuclear weapons in U.S. national security strategy, in his Nuclear Posture Review, by 2010. In it, he should commit the U.S. to working with Russia to lower each nation’s arsenal of deployed nuclear warheads below the 1,700-2,200 the Moscow Treaty already calls for by 2013.

    It would be a strong step toward reducing our bloated arsenals, and signal the world that we have changed course.

    I was 12 when atomic bombs flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. The horrific images that went around the world have stayed with me all my life.

    Today, there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world hundreds of times. And we now face the chilling prospect of nuclear terrorism.

    The bottom line: We must recognize nuclear weapons for what they are — not a deterrent, but a grave and gathering threat to humanity. As president, Barack Obama should dedicate himself to their world-wide elimination.

    Dianne Feinstein is a Democratic Senator from California.

  • New Deal on South Asian Nukes

    This article was originally published on www.truthout.org

    Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari came out last Saturday with yet another series of statements to cause more than mere ripples in South Asia. He did so especially with pronouncements on the nuclear weapons issues between India and Pakistan that have made many sections in the subcontinent sit up and take notice.

    Do these statements, however, add up to a real promise of a new deal for the region, which has continued to be a dangerous place ever since the two rival nations became nuclear-armed neighbors in May 1998?

    Addressing India from Islamabad, at a video-conference in New Delhi at “Summit 2008,” organized by the leading daily The Hindustan Times, Zardari offered nothing less than Pakistan’s cooperation in turning South Asia into a nuclear-weapon-free zone, an objective to be achieved through a “non-nuclear treaty.” As he put it challengingly, “I can get around my parliament to this view, but can you get around the Indian parliament to this view?”

    He made an even greater impact by his answer to a question about the no-first-strike nuclear policy of India and the possibility of Pakistan adopting the same stand. His response was prompt and positive. He did not stop with saying that Pakistan would not use its nuclear weapons first. He went on to declare that he was opposed to these weapons anyway and to assert: “We do not hope to get into any position where nuclear weapons have any use.”

    The official Indian reaction was that Zardari’s statements were not quite official. Voices from India’s establishment, echoed in various media reports, wondered: Whom was the Pakistani president speaking for, anyway? Tauntingly, they asked whether he had the tacit support of Pakistan’s army on this subject.

    They had a point. By all accounts, Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has remained mainly under the control of the army, which is possessively proud of them. Officially, up to now, Pakistan has not altered its policy by which it has retained the right of first nuclear strike. While India has made much play about its renunciation of this option, Pakistan has maintained from the outset that it could not do so because it lacked parity with its bigger neighbor in conventional weapons.

    Pakistan’s new democratic dispensation has apparently kept its distance from the army but not demonstrated its dominance over the generals. Quite the reverse is the message sent out by the government’s attempt sometime ago to acquire control of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the army’s infamous and important arm, and Islamabad’s hasty retreat from the reform under obvious pressure.

    Rather surprisingly, there has been no other serious Indian response, not even from the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose leadership may have to do business with Zardari with the party’s return to power in the general elections due early next year. The statements, however, elicited more reactions within Pakistan.

    Zardari has drawn much flak in his country before for statements considered overly friendly to India. He and the government of his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) also had to beat a retreat after his statement in a media interview suggesting that the Kashmir issue could be kept on the back burner. In the video conference, he did not say the same thing about Kashmir but repeated his other controversial remark about seeing no “threat” from India. He may come in for criticisms again on these counts. His stand on the nuclear issue, however, has attracted no opposition offensive for the moment.

    Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of the Pakistan Muslim League(N), the main opposition, in fact, was quick to claim that he had made the proposals for nuclear peace first. Sharif, who had presided over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons tests a decade ago, let his party clarify: “This was Nawaz Sharif’s proposal as prime minister. On the Pakistan side, the position has always been consistent. But because India refuses to abandon its nuclear weapons, this proposal has been in the doldrums.”

    The PML(N) also claimed that the proposal was contained in the Lahore Declaration signed between Sharif and former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on February 1, 1999. While the claims are open to question, observers in Pakistan actually expect the opposition to unleash an offensive against the government on the presidential pronouncements. Front-ranking newspaper The Daily Times, for example, forecasts that a “chorus of criticism will now most probably overwhelm Mr. Zardari’s overtures to India and make them look like ‘concessions.’ “

    As for the reactions from uncommitted quarters, they are asking the same questions as India’s establishment. Lieutenant-General (retired) Talat Masood, a political commentator and head of the Pakistani chapter of Pugwash says:”The big question is, can President Zardari take along Pakistan’s ruling establishment, especially the military?” He adds, “Even if (Zardari) was not fully familiar with the nuclear vocabulary, what he possibly meant was that there has to be a strategic restraint regime between the two countries.”

    The fact is, the ruling establishments of the two countries have never been ready to consider any “strategic restraint regime” that envisages any reduction of their nuclear arsenals or any reversal of their nuclear weapons programs. They have been ready, in other words, to cooperate only in order to present a picture of “responsible” nuclear armed neighbors to the rest of the world.

    This, actually, was the larger purpose also of the Lahore Declaration, signed just nine months after nuclear weapons tests in both countries. The declaration recognizes “that the nuclear dimension of the security environment of the two countries adds to their responsibility for avoidance of conflict between the two countries.” The document voices commitment, not to regional peace as such, but to the “objective of universal nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.”

    The declaration calls upon the two countries only to “take immediate steps for reducing the risk of accidental or unauthorized use of nuclear weapons and discuss concepts and doctrines with a view to elaborating measures for confidence-building in the nuclear and conventional fields, aimed at prevention of conflict.”

    India and Pakistan are said to have made much progress in their “peace process” initiated in 2004. New Delhi and Islamabad, however, have made sure that the nuclear part of the process made no advance beyond what the declaration mandated. The confidence-building measures (CBMs) – which have never gone beyond steps like notification of each other before tests of nuclear-capable missiles – were somehow supposed to create confidence that the people of the two countries were safe even when such missiles stayed in military deployment.

    Setting up a hotline between designated officials of the two armies, in order to avert chances of nuclear accidents among other things, has not exactly made the people of the subcontinent safer than before. It has not done so because the nuclear hawks of the two countries have not desisted from threatening use of the weapons by design. Terrifying nuclear threats have been traded, as we have recalled more than once in these columns, between the two countries during the Kargil conflict of 1999 (following on the heels of the Lahore Declaration) and the fearsome confrontation of 2002.

    The peace process has not prevented the nuclear militarists in both countries from pursuing their projects. The period since the declaration has seen both participating in a missile race, displaying no coyness about its nuclear dimension at all. In 2004, former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf boasted: “My government has spent more money in the last three years on enhancing Pakistan’s nuclear capability than (spent for this purpose) in the previous 30 years.” We do not know whether the country’s current economic crisis has made any difference in this regard. Successive Indian governments may not have been forthcoming with similar figures. There is little doubt, however, that under the shroud of secrecy, they have swelled with the same pride over their misuse of taxpayers’ money to build weapons of mass-murder.

    At one point In the course of talks on CBMs, the rulers of India and Pakistan even agreed to seek “parity” with nuclear powers (P5), “consultations” with them “on matters of common concern,” and development of a “common nuclear doctrine.” The idea has not been pursued seriously, but has not been abandoned officially.

    This strange partnership of sworn nuclear rivals does not make the proposal from Pakistan’s president sound like a reliable promise for the peace-loving people of the region.

    J. Sri Raman is a freelance author and peace activist in India. He is the author of ” Flashpoint.”

  • The Deja Vu of the Cold War

    Historically as a fact and as a chapter in Encyclopedias, the so-called Cold War drew to a close in the last years of the 80’s and the early 90’s.

    To celebrate that epic event, bells were rung, walls were destroyed, books and poems were written, movies were made to announce the beginning of a “new peace era”. Basically, two decades have passed and in the last years, mostly during the present Bush administration, the key elements for the bellicose situation have been revived.

    We are entering into a new nuclear arms race. The sword has been pulled out of the old armoire. The rhetoric of the perennial accusations resounds one more time. “You are the one”, “No, you are the one”. The conditions to deteriorate even more the precarious peace are popping up all over.

    In the most recent events, Mr. Vladimir Putin, the now Prime Minister of Russia accused the US government of orchestrating the rebellion in Georgia for political gains during the US Presidential campaign. For many, these remarks are simply untrue, for others, it is possible. Once again the world starts to be divided into two fronts.

    What is it in human nature that lures us so often and so rapidly to jump from one conflict to the next? Is peace simply a pause between two wars? Is there a real possibility to live in concord?

    What are we teaching our children, when they read the History of Humankind, and they only see wars as the most important events? The military is the most heroic status in society. It is “so cool” to see the parade of war paraphernalia; soldiers, missiles, airplanes, nuclear bombs.

    If you oppose that way of thinking you will be labeled a pacifist. And in the political lexicon that means you are an appeaser. In the era of Rambo and Terminator that is not fashionable.

    As long as we continue piling the nuclear arsenals the world will be playing Russian roulette. Minor quarrels could become major conflicts and will threaten the use of the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.

    We need to convince our governments, those with Nuclear weapons to get rid of the Armageddon weaponry forever. But first, we need to convince ourselves that the elimination of nuclear weapons is not just a dream.

    More than ever we must unite forces, to put to work the best minds looking for real and permanent solutions, not only bandages for deep open wounds.

    The Appeal to the next US President is a powerful tool. Let’s work together and collect all the signatures we can. Let’s flood Washington with names from all over the world.

    Ruben Arvizu is Director for Latin America for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is coordinating the Appeal to the Next US President campaign in Latin America.
  • Is Japan Being Too Polite About Nuclear Disarmament

    Is Japan Being Too Polite About Nuclear Disarmament

    Why is it that when the leaders of the G-8 go to Japan, they scrupulously avoid visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki? The Japanese government doesn’t invite their guests to these cities that suffered the atomic bombings in 1945, and the guests don’t go out of their way to make such a visit. Perhaps Japanese leaders think it would be impolite for the guests, many of whom have control of nuclear arsenals, to see first-hand, in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Museums, the destruction that these weapons have caused. But then again, it might be highly educational for them.

    Nuclear weapons have become surrealistic. It has been nearly 63 years since they were used in warfare. For most people, they are out of sight and out of mind, but not for all people, and particularly not for the leaders of the G-8. They still talk about nuclear strategy, nuclear proliferation and nuclear umbrellas. What they should be talking about, though, is nuclear disarmament, and this doesn’t happen much in these dark closing days of the George W. Bush era.

    Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, came to Tokyo and proclaimed that the US “has the will and the capability to meet the full range, and I underscore full range, of its deterrent and security commitments to Japan.” One wonders how such a statement is received in Japan. Does it make the Japanese feel secure to know that the US is prepared, if necessary, to retaliate with nuclear weapons on behalf of Japan? The steady refrain of the hibakusha, the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, is “Never Again!” But as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, “again” cannot be ruled out.

    North Korea’s test of a nuclear weapon was worrisome, but surely the way forward with North Korea is not the threat of their nuclear obliteration by the US in the event they attacked Japan. At any rate, retaliation would give very little solace to Japan if it were attacked again with nuclear weapons. The key is nuclear disarmament, not only by North Korea, but by all nuclear weapons states. Why isn’t Japan pushing harder to achieve this goal?

    An appropriate Japanese response to Condoleezza Rice, and to George W. Bush, whose policies Rice was articulating, would have been: “Thank you very much for the offer, but we don’t want to sit under your nuclear umbrella and have you threaten massive annihilation in our name. We know what it means to be attacked by nuclear weapons, since we suffered this fate by your hands at the end of World War II. We stand with the hibakusha in calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. We want you to get on with serious nuclear disarmament talks now.”

    Taking it even a step further, the Japanese could have responded that no one should have control of nuclear weapons without witnessing the artifacts at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Peace Memorial Museums and without meeting survivors of the atomic bombings and hearing their stories. In fact, no country should have nuclear weapons in its arsenal. Until Japan takes such a posture, it will remain just another country that directly or indirectly supports the nuclear status quo with all its dangers.

    The people of Japan should be proud of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so magnificently rebuilt after the tragedies of the US atomic bombings, and they should be proud of the spirit and courage of the hibakusha. Japan has a key role to play in ending the nuclear weapons threat to humanity, but it will not be successful in this role by being a polite host, keeping its powerful guests away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and failing to demand more from its G-8 partners in ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a councilor of the World Future Council.

  • A Powerful Peace

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own.

    With each year that passes, nuclear weapons provide their possessors with less safety while provoking more danger. Possession of nuclear arms provokes proliferation. Both nourish the global nuclear infrastructure, which in turn enlarges the possibility of acquisition by terrorist groups.

    The step that is needed to break this cycle can be as little doubted as the source of the problem. The double standard of nuclear haves and have-nots must be replaced by a single standard, which can only be the goal of a world free of all nuclear weapons.

    What is it that prevents sensible steps toward nuclear abolition from being taken? The answer cannot be in doubt, either. It is the resolve of the world’s nuclear powers to hold on to their nuclear arsenals. Countries that already have nuclear arms cite proliferation as their reason for keeping them, and those lacking nuclear arms seek them in large measure because they feel menaced by those with them.

    A double-standard regime is a study in futility—a divided house that cannot stand. Its advocates preach what they have no intention of practicing. It is up to the nuclear powers to take the first step.

    Their nuclear arsenals would be the largest pile of bargaining chips ever brought to any negotiating table. More powerful as instruments of peace than they ever can be for war, they would likely be more than adequate for winning agreements from the non-nuclear powers that would choke off proliferation forever.

    The art of the negotiation would be to pay for strict, inspectable, enforceable nonproliferation and nuclear-materials-control agreements in the coin of existing nuclear bombs. What would be the price to the nuclear powers, for example, of a surrender by the nuclear-weapons-free states of their rights to the troublesome nuclear fuel cycle, which stands at the heart of the proliferation dilemma? Perhaps reductions by Russia and the United States from two thousand to a few hundred weapons each plus ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

    Further reductions, now involving the other nuclear powers, might pay for establishment and practice of inspections of ever-greater severity, and still further reductions might buy agreements on enforcement of the final ban on nuclear arms. When nuclear weapons holdings reached zero, former nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states, abolitionists all, would exercise a unanimous will to manage, control, roll back, and extirpate all nuclear weapon technology.

    A world from which nuclear weapons had been banned would, of course, not be without its dangers, including nuclear ones. But we must ask how they would compare with those now approaching.

    Let us suppose that the nuclear powers had agreed to move step by step toward eliminating their own arsenals. The iron chains of fear that link all the nuclear arsenals in the world would then be replaced by bonds of reassurance. Knowing that Russia and the United States were disarming, China could agree to disarm. Knowing that China was disarming, India could agree to disarm. Knowing that India was ready to disarm, Pakistan could agree to disarm as well. Any country that decided otherwise would find itself up against the sort of united global will so conspicuous by its absence today.

    During the Cold War, the principal objection in the United States to a nuclear-weapon-free world was that you could not get there. That objection melted away with the Soviet Union, and today the principal objection is that even if you could get there, you would not want to be there. The arguments usually begin with the observation that nuclear weapons can never be disinvented, and that a world free of nuclear weapons is therefore at worst a mirage, at best a highly dangerous place to be. It is supposedly a mirage because, even if the hardware is removed, the know-how remains. It is said to be highly dangerous because the miscreant re-armer, now in possession of a nuclear monopoly, would be able to dictate terms to a helpless, terrorized world or, alternately, precipitate a helter-skelter, many-sided nuclear arms race.

    This conclusion seems reasonable until you notice that history has taught an opposite lesson. Repeatedly, even the greatest nuclear powers have actually lost wars against tiny, backward nonnuclear adversaries without being able to extract the slightest utility from their colossal arsenals. Think of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or the U.S. in Vietnam, or Britian in Suez.

    If, in the 60 years of the nuclear age, no great power has won a war by making nuclear threats against even tiny, weak adversaries, then how could a nuclear monopoly by a small country enable it to coerce and bully the whole world? The danger cannot be wholly discounted, but it is surely greatly exaggerated.

    If the nuclear powers wish to be safe from nuclear weapons, they must surrender their own. They should collectively offer the world’s non-nuclear powers a deal of stunning simplicity, inarguable fairness, and patent common sense: we will get out of the nuclear weapon business if you stay out of it. Then we will all work together to assure that everyone abides by the commitment.

    The united will of the human species to save itself from destruction would be a force to be reckoned with.

    Jonathan Schell wrote this article as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Jonathan is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute and a senior visiting lecturer at Yale. He has written many books. This article is adapted from his latest, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

  • No Nuclear Weapons: An Interview with George Shultz

    Article originally appeared in YES! Magazine.

    George Shultz was there when nuclear disarmament slipped through our fingers. Today, he says, action is even more urgent. Sarah van Gelder interviews George Shultz, former Secretary of State.

    Twenty years ago, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair’s breadth of agreeing to phase out their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The encounter took place at Reykjavik, Iceland, and one of the people who was there was Secretary of State George Shultz. When the proposal came up, he is reported to have said, “Let’s do it!”

    Today, from his office at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, he’s back on the case. In collaboration with former Senator Sam Nunn, William Perry, who was secretary of defense under Bill Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, this veteran of the Cold War is taking on what may be the biggest threat to human security.

    YES! executive editor Sarah van Gelder spoke to Secretary Shultz in March 2008, shortly after he returned from Oslo, where he led the third in a series of conferences on eliminating nuclear weapons—this one involving representatives of all the countries of the world that have nuclear weapons.

    Sarah: Can the United States be secure without its nuclear stockpile?
    Shultz: You’re going to be more secure if there are no nuclear weapons in the world, because if you achieve this goal, you won’t be risking having nuclear weapons blow up in one of our cities.

    At the conferences abroad I’ve been attending, it was certainly borne in on me that the notion of a two-tiered world—where some countries can have nuclear weapons and others can’t—is getting less and less acceptable.

    The Nonproliferation Treaty in Article 6 says that those who don’t have nuclear weapons will have access to nuclear power technology and they won’t try to get nuclear weapons, and those who do have nuclear weapons will phase down their importance eventually to zero. People are looking for governments to live up to that treaty.

    Sarah: Is it possible to verify that nuclear weapons have been eliminated?
    Shultz: That’s one of the main subjects to be worked on. The British government has volunteered to take on verification—to try to think through how you work it out.

    We have the START Treaty between the United States and Russia that includes the best verification procedures of anything that’s been developed. It expires in December of 2009, so we’re suggesting that the treaty be extended so as not to lose those verification provisions.

    Sarah: How would it affect our relative power in the world if nuclear weapons were eliminated?
    Shultz: At a meeting in Washington, DC, about a year ago, Henry Kissinger said, “The thing that I lost sleep over, and that I agonized about more than anything else when I was in office, was what would I say if the president ever asked my advice on whether to use a nuclear weapon, knowing that a hundred thousand or maybe more would be killed, and if there were a nuclear exchange, it would be in the billions.”

    Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power, they’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use. So I think we’re better off without them.

    Of course the United States has such awesome conventional power, I think probably that on the relative balance we would be well off.

    Sarah: Do you think there can be nuclear energy without proliferation?
    Shultz: If you get the nuclear fuel cycle under control, yes. But I listen to people talk about nuclear power plants, and they hardly ever mention the issue. I don’t think people are alert to this problem.

    In terms of the nuclear fuel cycle, there is just as strong a feeling that you don’t want to have another two-tiered system, in which some countries are allowed to enrich uranium and others aren’t. I think there’s going to have to be an international regime on that.

    Sarah: Why is the reaction today so different from the reaction to President Reagan’s proposal at Reykjavik to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: After Reykjavik, you may remember, the reaction was very negative. Margaret Thatcher came over, practically summoned me to the British ambassador’s residence, and she read me out: How could I possibly take part in such a discussion?

    I think it has dawned on people that we’ve gone to sleep on this subject. The proliferation problems are growing, and the amount of nuclear fissile material around is large, and some of it isn’t well safeguarded. We have a terrorist phenomenon, and the non-proliferation treaty is fraying at the edges. So maybe we should do something a little different.

    Sarah: You just returned from a conference in Norway on the abolition of nuclear weapons. What happened there?
    Shultz: Sam Nunn and I went. Henry Kissinger and Bill Perry were not able to go. Twenty nine countries were represented—all the countries with nuclear weapons, including Israel. The people there had their doubts, but they were intrigued; they can see there is a danger—a tipping point problem.

    We’re getting to the point where proliferation could get out of control. If a terrorist group gets a nuclear weapon or the fissile material from which they can make one, they aren’t getting it for deterrence. They are getting it to use it.

    The Doctrine of Deterrence justified nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The deterrent impact of Mutual Assured Destruction kept an uneasy peace, although if you were involved, you knew that there were more close calls than you were comfortable with.

    At the end of the Cold War, more countries were acquiring nuclear weapons, and others were aspiring to have them.

    The Gulf states all want nuclear power plants, and if you enrich your own uranium—as the Iranians aspire to do—you can enrich it for a weapon. When the fuel is spent, it can be reprocessed into plutonium. If nuclear power spreads—as the people who are worried about global warming are pushing for—then the problem of the nuclear fuel cycle emerges. All of these things together give you that uneasy feeling.

    Sarah: Have you had a response from the leading presidential contenders?
    Shultz: I haven’t seen anything from Senator McCain. Senator Obama has made a statement supporting what we’re doing. Senator Clinton has been a little less forthcoming than Senator Obama, but has indicated interest.

    I hope that I, or Henry, or someone can get a chance to talk to Senator McCain before long.

    Sarah: Is there active opposition to your initiative to eliminate nuclear weapons?
    Shultz: There are people who think that the idea is not a good idea and that it will never happen. Mostly, however, they say that they are in favor of the steps that we’ve identified. So we say, OK, let’s get going on the steps that we can do today that will make the world safer.

    Sarah: What response have you had from the Russians to this proposal?
    Shultz: No formal response. But, at our meeting in London, two former Russian foreign ministers were there, one of whom, I understand, is close to the current regime. When he finished speaking, I said, “Igor, will you let me translate what you said? It is that as far as Russia is concerned, the door is open.” He said, “That’s a fair translation. We’re ready to think about it.”

    That’s as good as you can get.

    Sarah: What is the first thing you would like the next president to do to move this process forward?
    Shultz: I’m not trying to prescribe for the next president. We’re trying to get the building blocks ready. We’ve talked to people from some other countries, and they’re interested enough so that if the United States, working with Russia, were to take this initiative and get other people to join, it might be pretty exciting. And it might once again put us in the role of doing something that people feel good about.

    There is quite a list of people—large numbers of former secretaries of state, defense, and national security advisors—who have publicly stated their support. So we’d be in a position to say to a new president, “If you decide to go this way, here are a bunch of people from both sides of the aisle who are willing to stand up behind you and applaud.”

    Sarah van Gelder interviewed George Shultz as part of A Just Foreign Policy, the Summer 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Sarah is Executive Editor of YES! Magazine.

  • Ten Years of the Bomb

    Article originally appeared in The International News (Pakistan)

    It is 10 years since India and Pakistan went openly nuclear. The dangers of a nuclear south Asia are becoming more and more apparent, yet the governments of the two countries continue to build their arsenals. Both countries continue to produce plutonium for more and more bombs, both countries have been testing new kinds of delivery vehicles and both countries have conducted war games assuming the use of nuclear weapons. The pursuit of nuclear weapons is beginning to take, as elsewhere in the world, a logic of its own. South Asia awaits a strong peace movement that will make the governments of India and Pakistan see reason.

    In the 10 years since the May 1998 nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan, the bomb has largely faded from view in south Asia. But the bomb is not gone. The nuclear logic continues to unfold relentlessly.

    In both India and Pakistan, the nuclear tests were sold to the public as guaranteeing national security. It did not take long for both countries to discover that the bomb was no defence. The Kargil war followed barely a year after the nuclear tests. The war proved that the bomb would not defend India from attack and was no guarantee of victory for Pakistan. It only showed that two nuclear armed countries can fight a war and that in such a situation leaders in both countries will threaten to use nuclear weapons.

    But Kargil was not enough to teach caution and restraint. A little over two years later, India and Pakistan prepared to fight again. An estimated half a million troops were rushed to the border, and nuclear threats were made with abandon. What lessons have been learned? None, other than that they need to be better prepared to fight a war. Both countries have carried out major war games that assumed the possible use of nuclear weapons. effects of a Nuclear War Political leaders and military planners seem impervious to the fact that a war between Pakistan and India in which each used only five of their nuclear weapons on the other’s cities could kill several million people and injure many more. The effects of a nuclear war could be much worse if India and Pakistan use about 50 weapons each. They have made more than enough nuclear weapons material to do this. Recent studies using modern climate models suggest that the use of 50 weapons each by the two countries could throw up enough smoke from burning cities to trigger significant cooling of the atmosphere and land surface and a decrease in rainfall that could last for years. This could, in turn, lead to a catastrophic drop in agricultural production, and widespread famine that might last a decade. The casualties would be beyond imagination.

    India and Pakistan are still producing the plutonium and highly enriched uranium that are the key ingredients in nuclear weapons. Nuclear policymakers in both countries obviously do not think they have enough weapons. They have never explained how they will decide how many weapons are enough.

    For the past decade the two countries have also been waging a nuclear missile race. Both India and Pakistan have tested various kinds of missiles, including ones that would take as little as five minutes to reach key cities in the other country. Some of the tests are now carried out by the military, not scientists and engineers. These are user trials and field exercises. They are practising for fighting a nuclear war.

    There is more to come. Pakistan has been testing a cruise missile that could carry a nuclear warhead. India has tested a ballistic missile that can be fired from a submarine. It is reported that the plan is eventually to have a fleet of five submarines, with three deployed at any time, each armed with 12 missiles (perhaps with multiple warheads on each missile) with a range of 5000 km. Pakistan already has a naval strategic command and has talked also of putting nuclear weapons on submarines. It is a familiar logic that south Asia has still not learnt. The search for nuclear security is a costly and dangerous pursuit that will take on a life of its own and knows no end. It took almost 20 years to go from an American president declaring the bomb to be the “greatest thing in history”, to a successor recognising that nuclear weapons had turned the world into a prison in which man awaits his execution. This hard-won recognition has still not come to south Asia.

    Only when an active and sustained peace movement is able to awaken people and leaders to this terrible truth can we move to the next stage in resisting and eliminating the bomb and all that it represents.

    Zia Mian is a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA.

  • Opening Remarks for the Washington, DC Think Outside the Bomb Conference

    Welcome to the Second annual Washington, DC Think Outside the Bomb, conference. Before going forward, I would like to thank American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute and Americans for Informed Democracy. Without their help, this event would not be possible.

    My introduction to nuclear weapons issues came from American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute. As an undergraduate student, I was fortunate enough to travel to Japan to see the effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after 60 years the physical and emotional scars on the people of Japan have not dissipated. It was a life-changing experience for me and ultimately has led me here today. I hope many of you have the opportunity to travel to Japan.

    Before going ahead with the conference, I’d like to talk for a moment about what this conference is and why now more than ever there is a need for a new generation of peace leaders.

    I am an American born after 1978. According to pop culture and statistical studies, we are known as Millennials or Generation Y. We are considered socially progressive and politically active. However, my generation does not consider global nuclear disarmament a priority. I believe the reason for this is that we are the first generation to come of age in a post-Cold War society. We are the first post-Cold War Americans.

    At the end of the Cold War there was a common belief that the nuclear threat would subside. Rather than work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons, the Clinton Administration missed an opportunity to make sweeping changes and instead, to a large extent, reaffirmed antiquated Cold War policy already in place. The existence of nuclear weapons continued, but the public’s attention towards them waned.

    Unlike those who came before, my “post-Cold War Generation” was not exposed to a strong public outcry for the abolition of nuclear weapons. We also did not experience the nuclear arms race first hand. We did not live with the fear of duck and cover drills, nuclear testing, the Cuban missile crisis, and an unprecedented nuclear arms build up.

    The current generation of young people is a “post-Cold War Generation” that has been incorrectly taught that nuclear weapons are acceptable if possessed by responsible people. Instead of disarmament, they have embraced nonproliferation.

    There is a small window of opportunity before this generation takes seats of power in federal government and decide nuclear policy. Now more than ever, it is critical that young people learn about the dangers of nuclear weapons and the need for US leadership toward nuclear disarmament.

    In 2005 the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation responded to this growing need by bringing together 50 young leaders in the nuclear field to Santa Barbara, California for the first national Think Outside the Bomb Conference. That August, the Think Outside the Bomb Participants created a Statement of Principles that guides the work of the young people in the network.

    Those principles are as follows:

    • Inspired by the need for a new generation of leaders working toward a nuclear-free world, Think Outside the Bomb is a group of young people;
    • Aware of the historical context and the current urgency to address the devastating effects of the nuclear complex;
    • Recognizing the need to develop connections between the nuclear complex and global, environmental, racial, economic and social justice;
    • Emphasizing the importance of the right to self-determination of all indigenous peoples, who have been among the most affected by the nuclear complex;
    • Drawing attention to the need to redefine security in terms of human and environmental needs;
    • Underlining the need to move beyond military force as the principal means of solving conflict and instead resolve conflict by nonviolent means;
    • Understanding the devastation caused by nuclear weapons and memorializing the many victims of bomb production at every step – from uranium mining to design, to production, to testing, to use and threat of use; and
    • Reaffirming our humanity through mutual respect, nonviolence and consensus-building.

    Nickolas Roth is Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Washington, DC office.