Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Disarmament

  • The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

    The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons

    There are many serious problems confronting humanity, including climate change, infectious diseases, poverty and pollution, but none poses a more pervasive and urgent threat than the continuing dangers of nuclear weapons. There are still some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Twelve thousand of these are deployed, and some 3,500 are on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired in moments. Nuclear weapons are a delicately balanced “Sword of Damocles” hanging over our human future.

    We have seemingly failed to learn the lessons made evident by the atomic destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nine nuclear weapons states remain poised to inflict such mind-numbing devastation again, but on a far greater scale. The current nuclear weapons states show no signs of giving up their reliance on nuclear weapons and, as a result, other states may seek to join the nuclear club. The spread of nuclear weapons to additional states will only increase the risks of nuclear catastrophe.

    We are now in the seventh decade since nuclear weapons were created and used on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the outset of the Nuclear Age, the world has witnessed an insane nuclear arms race, which has threatened the human species with annihilation. Despite the end of the Cold War more than 15 years ago, this threat has not gone away. The future of civilization and even the human species hangs in the balance, and yet, among the world’s major problems, very little attention is being paid to ending this threat. We are challenged, individually and collectively, to address and end this ultimate danger to humanity. This is surely one of the greatest challenges of our time, and we share a common responsibility to meet this challenge and pass the world on intact to the next generation.

    Warnings

    Nuclear weapons unleash the power within the atom. The creation of these weapons demonstrated significant scientific achievement, but left humankind threatened as never before and faced with the challenge of what to do with them. Albert Einstein, whose theoretical understanding of the relationship of energy and mass paved the way for nuclear weapons, was deeply troubled by the creation of these weapons. “The unleashed power of the atom,” he stated, “has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein, who died in 1955, lived long enough to see the onset of the nuclear arms race and the development and testing of thermonuclear weapons.

    By 1955, ten years after the first use of nuclear weapons, both the US and USSR had developed thermonuclear weapons, potentially thousands of times more powerful than the weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear arms race had begun. The US and USSR had begun testing nuclear weapons on the lands and in the surrounding waters of indigenous and island peoples, demonstrating little concern for the health and well being of the native peoples affected. Along with philosopher Bertrand Russell, Einstein issued an appeal to humanity called the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which was additionally signed also by nine other prominent scientists. The Manifesto stated: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.” It was a stark warning.

    Other warnings from highly credible sources throughout the Nuclear Age sought to put the world on notice of the peril nuclear weapons pose to humanity. Warnings came from soldiers and scientists, politicians and literary figures. A notable warning was issued by a high-level group of eminent personalities in 1996 in the Report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. The Report stated:

    “The Canberra Commission is persuaded that immediate and determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it. The destructiveness of nuclear weapons is immense. Any use would be catastrophic.

    “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defense is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”

    One of the members of the Canberra Commission was General George Lee Butler, who had served as the commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command. In this capacity General Butler had been in charge of all US strategic nuclear weapons. After retiring from the US Air Force, General Butler devoted himself to the abolition of nuclear weapons. He argued, “What is at stake here is our capacity to move ever higher the bar of civilized behavior. As long as we sanctify nuclear weapons as the ultimate arbiter of conflict, we will have forever capped our capacity to live on this planet according to a set of ideals that value human life and eschew a solution that continues to hold acceptable the shearing away of entire societies. This simply is wrong. It is morally wrong, and it ultimately will be the death of humanity.”

    In 2006, another expert commission, the Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, also known as the Blix Commission after its chairman, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Hans Blix, issued a report, echoing the Canberra Commission Report. Referring to weapons of mass destruction, the Blix Commission Report stated: “So long as any state has such weapons – especially nuclear arms – others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain in any state’s arsenal, there is a high risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. Any such use would be catastrophic.” The Blix Commission Report continued:

    “The accumulated threat posed by the estimated 27,000 nuclear weapons, in Russia, the United States and the other NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] nuclear-weapon states, merits worldwide concern. However, especially in these five states the view is common that nuclear weapons from the first wave of proliferation somehow are tolerable, while such weapons in the hands of additional states are viewed as dangerous….

    “The Commission rejects the suggestion that nuclear weapons in the hands of some pose no threat, while in the hands of others they place the world in mortal jeopardy. Governments possessing nuclear weapons can act responsibly or recklessly. Governments can also change over time. Twenty-seven thousand nuclear weapons are not an abstract theory. They exist in today’s world.”

    In May 2007, the Founding Congress of the World Future Council issued “The Hamburg Call to Action.” In this document they warned: “Nuclear weapons remain humanity’s most immediate catastrophic threat. These weapons would destroy cities, countries, civilization and possibly humanity itself. The danger posed by nuclear weapons in any hands must be confronted directly and urgently through a new initiative for the elimination of these instruments of annihilation.”

    With the serious dangers that nuclear weapons pose to the human future, it is curious that so many warnings, over so long a period of time, have gone unheeded. Some 97 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons are in the arsenals of the United States and Russia. These must be the countries that lead the way, working with the seven other countries that also have nuclear weapons: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. They must also work with the more than 35 nuclear capable countries that could choose to develop nuclear arsenals – countries that possess the technological capability of developing nuclear weapons. Some countries, such as Japan, are virtual nuclear powers, possessing the technology and nuclear materials to develop nuclear arsenals in weeks or months.

    Awakening Humanity

    What will it take to awaken humanity, and change its course? Many people think that this will not happen until there is another catastrophic use of nuclear weapons. This would, of course, be an immense tragedy and a great failure of imagination. If we can imagine that another nuclear catastrophe is possible, shouldn’t we act now to prevent it?

    Throughout the Cold War, humanity lived with the danger of Mutually Assured Destruction, which has the appropriate acronym of MAD. Today MAD has an additional meaning, Mutually Assured Delusions. It is delusional to think that nuclear weapons protect us. Despite the official justifications that nuclear weapons provide security, it should be clear to those who think about it that nuclear weapons themselves cannot provide protection in the sense of physical security. At best, they can provide psychological security if one believes that they provide a deterrent against attack. But belief in and of itself does not make a person or a society safe, certainly not from nuclear dangers. The belief itself is a well-promoted delusion.

    The United States is currently spending tens of billions of dollars to develop a missile defense system, which its proponents argue is capable of defending against nuclear attacks by rogue states. The only reasonable interpretation of this expenditure is that US defense planners understand that deterrence is not foolproof and that it can fail. Of course, missile defenses themselves are far from foolproof, and many experts believe that they will not work as promised in real-world conditions. In fact, most scientists not being paid by the missile defense program and the industry benefiting from it believe that missile defenses will not be reliable. Like the French Maginot Line, they are a defensive barrier that is unlikely to provide security. Missile defenses may be thought of as a “Maginot Line in the sky,” a highly touted and expensive defensive system with a very low probability of actually providing defense.

    The Shortcomings of Deterrence

    The United States government bases its need for nuclear weapons in the 21st century on deterrence. The US Secretaries of Defense, Energy, and State released a joint statement in July 2007, “National Security and Nuclear Weapons: Maintaining Deterrence in the 21st Century.” The statement begins, “A principal national security goal of the United States is to deter aggression against ourselves, our allies, and friends. Every American administration since President Truman’s day has formulated US national security policy in much the same terms, making clear to adversaries and allies alike the essential role that nuclear weapons play in maintaining deterrence.” What the statement fails to state is who is being deterred, why nuclear weapons are critical to deterrence, and whether the US wouldn’t make its citizens and the world safer by negotiating the elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Reliance on deterrence is dangerous. Deterrence is a theory about human behavior and it has many shortcomings. For it to be effective, a threat of retaliation must be accurately communicated and it must be believed. Such a threat is likely to increase an opponent’s military might rather than to reduce conflict. In addition, deterrence won’t work when an opponent is suicidal or not locatable. This is surely the case against non-state extremist actors, groups such as al Qaeda.

    Should Nuclear Weapons Confer Prestige?

    If nuclear weapons cannot provide protection for a population, and almost certainly guarantee that a state possessing them will become a target of other states’ nuclear weapons, what other advantages do they offer? One possible answer to this question is prestige. Since the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council all developed nuclear weapons, it may seem to other states that nuclear weapons would contribute to their prestige in the world. This idea was given credence by the large-scale celebrations in the streets of India and Pakistan when these two countries tested nuclear devices in 1998.

    Even the capacity to make nuclear weapons by enriching uranium or separating plutonium appears to attract attention and is perceived to bestow prestige. Although there is no clear evidence that Iran seeks to develop nuclear arms, its uranium enrichment program has brought it under intense international scrutiny. This is reflective of current nuclear double standards, in which some countries, such as Iran, are highly criticized for developing nuclear technology, while others, such as India, seem to increase their status in the international community for having developed and tested nuclear weapons.

    Reflecting the positive view of his country’s nuclear capacity, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil stated in July 2007, “Brazil could rank among those few nations in the world with a command of uranium enrichment technology, and I think we will be more highly valued as a nation – as the power we wish to be.”

    Whatever prestige nuclear weapons or the technology to produce them may confer, it comes with a heavy price. Nuclear weapons are costly and possessing them will almost certainly make a country the target of nuclear weapons.

    Weapons of the Weak

    Nuclear weapons serve the interests of the weak more than they do the powerful. In the hands of a relatively weak nation, nuclear weapons can serve as an equalizer. One has only to look at the difference in the way the US has treated the three countries that Mr. Bush incorrectly labeled as being part of an axis of evil: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. The US invaded Iraq on the false charge of having a nuclear weapons program, is threatening Iran for enriching uranium, but has negotiated with North Korea, which has tested long-range missiles and is believed to have a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

    From the perspective of a powerful state, even one heavily armed with nuclear weapons, the worst nightmare would be for nuclear weapons to fall into the hands of a non-state extremist organization, whose members were both suicidal and not locatable. This could create the ideal conditions for these weapons to be used against a major nuclear power or another state. The US, for example, would be relatively helpless against a nuclear-armed al Qaeda. The US would not be able to deter al Qaeda. It could only hope to be able to prevent al Qaeda from obtaining a nuclear weapon or the materials to create one, or locate and destroy the weapon before it was detonated.

    Why Abolish Nuclear Weapons?

    Nuclear weapons undermine security. Under current circumstances, with so many nuclear weapons in the world and such an abundance of fissile materials for constructing nuclear weapons, there is a reasonable likelihood that nuclear weapons will eventually end up in the hands of non-state extremist organizations. This would be a disastrous scenario for the world’s most powerful counties, opening the door to possible nuclear 9/11s.

    In addition, nuclear weapons are anti-democratic. They concentrate power in the hands of single individuals or small cabals. The president of the United States, for example, could send the world spiraling into nuclear holocaust with an order to unleash the US nuclear arsenal. The undemocratic nature of nuclear weapons should be of great concern to those who value democracy and the participation of citizens in decisions that affect their lives.

    Nuclear weapons and their delivery system are also extremely expensive. The US alone has spent over $6 trillion since the onset of the Nuclear Age. The Soviet Union bankrupted itself and broke apart after engaging in a nuclear arms race with the United States for over 40 years. The funds currently expended for nuclear arsenals could be used far more constructively.

    Nuclear weapons should also be viewed in terms of their consequences. They are long-range weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. They destroy equally civilians and combatants; infants and the aged; the healthy and the infirm; men, women and children. Viewed from this perspective, these weapons must be seen as among the most cowardly ever created. By their possession, with the implicit threat of use that possession implies, nuclear weapons also destroy the souls of those who rely upon them.

    They are a coward’s weapon and their possession, threat and use is dishonorable. This was the conclusion of virtually all of the top military leaders of World War II, most of whom were morally distraught that the US used these weapons against Japan. Truman’s Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, for example, wrote this about the use of atomic weapons on Japan: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

    Humanity Has a Choice

    Humanity still has a choice; in fact, it is the same choice posed in the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. We can choose to eliminate nuclear weapons or risk the elimination of the human species. A continuation of the status quo, of reliance by some states on nuclear arsenals, is likely to result in the proliferation of nuclear weapons to others states and to extremist organizations. Ultimately, it will lead to their use. Richard Garwin, a leading US atomic scientist who helped develop thermonuclear weapons, believes that there is a 20 percent per year probability of nuclear weapons being used on a US or European city. This is a dangerous probability. The alternative is to pursue the path of eliminating nuclear weapons.

    What would it take to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons? On the one hand, the answer to this question is “very little.” On the other hand, because of the resistance, complacency and myopia of the leaders of the nuclear weapons states, the answer may be “a great amount.”

    To move forward with the elimination of nuclear weapons would require compliance with existing international law. The International Court of Justice concluded in 1996: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” In the decade since the Court announced its opinion, there has been scant evidence of “good faith” negotiations by the nuclear weapons states moving toward any reasonable conclusion.

    The negotiations that the Court describes as an obligation of the nuclear weapons states would need to move toward the creation of a Nuclear Weapons Convention, a treaty setting forth a program for the phased and irreversible elimination of nuclear weapons with appropriate means of verification. With the political will to pursue these required negotiations, a treaty would not be a difficult task to achieve. What is lacking is the requisite political will on the part of the leaders of nuclear weapons states. To achieve the requisite political will, the citizens of the nuclear weapons states, and particularly of the United States, must make their voices heard.

    A Special Responsibility, A Tragic Failure

    The United States, as the world’s most powerful country and the only country to have used nuclear weapons in warfare, has a special responsibility to lead in fulfilling its obligations under international law. In fact, without US leadership, it is unlikely that progress will be possible toward nuclear disarmament. But rather than lead in this direction, the United States under the Bush administration has been the major obstacle to nuclear disarmament. It has failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty; withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to pursue missile defenses, space weaponization and increased military dominance; opposed a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty; and in general has acted as an obstacle to progress on all matters of nuclear disarmament.

    The US has also pursued a double standard with regard to nuclear weapons. It has been silent on Israeli nuclear weapons, and now seeks to change its own non-proliferation laws to enable it to provide nuclear technology and materials to India, a country that has not joined the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has developed a nuclear arsenal. At the same time, in its 2001 Nuclear Posture Review the US called for contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against seven countries, five of which were at the time thought to be non-nuclear weapons states.

    It is tragic that the American people don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of their government’s failure. They are lacking in education that would lead to an understanding of the situation. Their attention has been diverted to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and they fail to see what is closest to home: the failure of their own government to lead in a constructive and lawful manner to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. “And thus,” in Einstein’s words, “we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

    To bring about real change in nuclear policy, people must begin with a vision of a world free of nuclear weapons, and then they must speak out as if their lives and the lives of their children depended on their actions. It is unlikely that governments will give up powerful weapons on their own accord. They must be pushed by their citizenry – citizens unwilling to continue to run the risk of nuclear holocaust or to accept the logic of Mutually Assured Delusions.

    A New Story

    We need a new story for considering nuclear dangers, a story that begins with the long struggle of humans over some three million years to arrive at our present state of civilization. That state is far from perfect, but few would suggest that it should be sacrificed on the altar of weapons of mass annihilation capable of reducing our major cities to rubble.

    The first humans lived short and brutal lives. They were both predators and preyed upon. They survived by their nimbleness, more of body than mind, doing well if they lived into their twenties. Enough early humans were able to protect and nurture their infants in their hazardous environments that some of the children of each generation could survive to an age when they could themselves reproduce and repeat the cycle.

    Without these clever and capable early ancestors, and those that followed who met the distinct challenges of their times and environments for many hundreds of thousands of generations, we would not be here. Our human ancestors needed to survive the perils of birth, infancy, childhood and at least early maturity in order for each of us to have made it into the world.

    On the basis of the pure physical capacity to survive, we owe a debt to our ancestors, but with this debt comes something more. We each have a responsibility for helping to assure the chain of human survival that passes the world on intact to the next generation. In addition to this, we share an obligation to preserve the accumulated wisdom and beauty created by those who have walked the earth before us – the ideas of the great storytellers and philosophers, the great music, literature and art, the artifacts of humankind’s collective genius in its varied forms. Our responsibility extends not only to each other and to the future, but to preserve and protect the rich legacy we have received from the past – from Socrates to Shakespeare; from Homer to Hemingway; from Beethoven to the Beatles; from Michelangelo to Monet.

    All of the manifestations of human genius and triumph are placed in jeopardy by nuclear weapons and the threat of their use. Why do we tolerate this threat? Why are we docile in the face of policies that could end not only humanity, but life itself?

    Those of us alive today are the gatekeepers to the future, but the management of power by the nuclear-armed states has left us vulnerable to the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation. The only way to be free of this threat is to be free of nuclear weapons. This is the greatest challenge of our time. It will require education so that people can learn to think about nuclear weapons and war in a new way. We will need organizational modes of collective action to bring pressure to bear on governments to achieve nuclear disarmament. Ordinary people must lead from below; citizens must lead their political leaders.

    The Role of Citizens

    Organizations working for nuclear disarmament – such as the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Abolition 2000, the Middle Powers Initiative and the Mayors for Peace – can help give shape to efforts to put pressure on governments. But the change that is needed cannot be the sole responsibility of interest groups. Without the intervention of large numbers of people, we will go on with business as usual, a course that seems likely to lead to nuclear proliferation and further catastrophic uses of nuclear weapons. This is not a distant problem, nor one that can be shunted aside and left to governments.

    We who have entered the 21st century are not exempt from responsibility for assuring a human future. Fifty years ago, Japanese Buddhist leader Josei Toda called for young people to take the lead in pursuing nuclear disarmament. His proposal has great merit given the fact that it is their future and the future of their children that is imperiled by these weapons. But we must ask: How do we educate young people to care and to believe that they can make a difference in what must seem an often indifferent and terribly dangerous world? How do we empower young people to live with integrity as citizens of the world and press for the changes that are needed to assure their future?

    Change occurs one person at a time. Each of us must take responsibility for creating a world free of nuclear threat. Noted anthropologist Margaret Mead offered this hopeful advice: “Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

    In the end, the necessary changes to eliminate nuclear dangers cannot be left to governments alone. For the most part, governments have failed to come to grips with the nuclear dangers that threaten humanity. Most governments have not even tried. They have lived with double standards, engaged in insane nuclear arms races, lived under “nuclear umbrellas,” and continued to rely upon nuclear weapons against the security interests of their own people.

    It is up to each of us to play a role. What can we do? There is no panacea, no magic wand. Change requires recognizing that this is not someone else’s problem, but a shared problem of humanity. It requires rolling up our sleeves and becoming active.

    I have five suggestions for those who would like to contribute to ending the nuclear threat to humanity. First, become better informed. You can do this by visiting the website of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation at www.wagingpeace.org as well as many other informative websites focused on nuclear disarmament. Second, speak out, wherever you are. You can raise these issues with your family, friends, and other people around you. Third, join an organization working to abolish nuclear weapons, and help it to become more successful. By becoming active in an organization working for nuclear disarmament you can help the outreach and effectiveness of the effort. Fourth, use your unique talents. Each of us has special talents that can help make a difference. Use them. Fifth, be persistent. This is a tough job requiring strength and persistence. Even if desired results don’t come about quickly, we must remain committed and not give up.

    By working for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons, you can be a force for saving the world. Being a nuclear weapons abolitionist will require all the courage and commitment of those who worked in the 19th century for the abolition of slavery. Abolishing slavery was the challenge of that time; abolishing nuclear weapons is the even more consequential challenge of our time.

    [Please note this related upcoming event: “The Challenge of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons” Conference, San Francisco, September 8-9.]

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

  • Is Peace that Difficult?

    Reprinted from The Age, August 28, 2007 edition.

    At the end of the Cold War there was an opportunity for the world to create a new collective security order. In 1991, after decades of blockages in the Security Council, it authorized armed intervention to stop the Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. In the same period, Russia and the United States took steps to reduce the number of deployed non-strategic nuclear weapons: the Chemical Weapons Convention was adopted in 1993, the Non-Proliferation Treaty was prolonged indefinitely after renewed commitments by nuclear weapon states to take get serious about disarmament; a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty was negotiated and adopted in 1996; and at the review conference of the NPT in 2000, countries agreed on 13 practical steps to disarmament.

    But the window of opportunity soon closed. The US embarked on unilateralism. In 2003, the UN Security Council was said to be irrelevant if it did not agree with the US and its coalition of the willing.

    By the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, US confidence and trust in international negotiations, particularly in dealing with disarmament issues, was at a record low. And tensions continue to grow. Instead of negotiations towards disarmament, nuclear weapon states are renewing and modernizing their nuclear arsenals.

    In 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear device. After a US decision to place components of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia declared its withdrawal from the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. China has demonstrated its space war capabilities by shooting down one of its own weather satellites.

    These developments are worrying and somewhat paradoxical. At a time when there are no longer any ideological differences between the main powers, when the economic and political interdependence between states and regions reaches new heights, and when the revolution in information technology brings the world into the living rooms of billions of people, we ought to be able to agree on steps to restrain our capacity for war and destruction.

    So, where do we go from here?

    There is some movement indicating that key actors may be moving back to multilateral approaches and diplomacy. The failure and vast human cost of the military adventures in Iraq and Lebanon may have demonstrated the limitations of military strategies to achieve foreign policy objectives. The shift in strategy towards North Korea in negotiations over its nuclear program and the resumption of the six-party talks is encouraging. Waving a big stick may be counterproductive. An alternative path, containing suitable carrots, needs to be offered. It remains to be seen if this approach will be taken also in the case of Iran.

    For the past few years, I have chaired the independent international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, with 14 experts from different parts of the world. In June 2006, I presented our report, Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear Biological and Chemical Arms. We made 60 recommendations on how to revive disarmament and restore the confidence in the international disarmament and non-proliferation regime.

    The commission urged all states to return to the fundamental undertakings made under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The treaty is based on a double bargain: the non-nuclear weapons states committed themselves not to develop nuclear weapons and the nuclear weapon states committed themselves to negotiate towards disarmament.

    So long as the nuclear weapon states maintain that they need nuclear weapons for their national security, why shouldn’t others? The commission concluded that one of the most important ways to curb weapons’ proliferation is working to avoid states feeling a need to obtain nuclear weapons.

    The co-operative approach needs to be complemented by the enforcement of the test-ban treaty, a cut-off treaty on the production of fissile material for weapons, and effective safeguards and international verification to prevent states as well as non-state actors from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    I hope the window of opportunity is not yet shut. There may still be time to wake up and turn back to co-operative solutions to contemporary security challenges.

    The new generation of political leaders has an unprecedented opportunity to achieve peace through co-operation. We do not have the threat of war between the military powers hanging over our heads. Admittedly, there are flashpoints that need to be dealt with constructively — such as Kashmir, the Middle East, Taiwan and so on. But the numbers of armed conflicts and victims of armed conflicts have decreased. Never before have nations been so interdependent and never before have peoples of the world cared so much for the wellbeing of each other. Prospects are great for a functioning world organization devoted to establishing peace, promoting respect for universal human rights and securing our environment for future generations.

    If all can agree that we need international co-operation and multilateral solutions to protect the earth against climate change and the destruction of our environment, to keep the world economy in balance and moving, and to prevent terrorism and organized crime, then should it be so difficult to conclude that we also need to co-operate to stop shooting at each other?

     

    Dr Hans Blix is president of the World Federation of United Nations Association and was director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997.

  • We Want Results on Disarmament

    Speech to Carnegie International Nonproliferation Conference, Washington, DC

    Thank you very much for that welcome and for those very kind words,

    I expect that many – perhaps all – of you here today read an article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal at the start of this year. The writers would be as familiar to an audience in this country as they are respected across the globe: George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn.

    The article made the case for, and I quote, “a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage”. That initiative was to re-ignite the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and to redouble effort on the practical measures towards it.

    The need for such vision and action is all too apparent.

    Last year, Kofi Annan said – and he was right – that the world risks becoming mired in a sterile stand-off between those who care most about disarmament and those who care most about proliferation. The dangers of, what he termed, such mutually assured paralysis are dangers to us all. Weak action on disarmament, weak consensus on proliferation are in none of our interests. And any solution must be a dual one that sees movement on both proliferation and disarmament – a revitalisation, in other words, of the grand bargain struck in 1968, when the Non-Proliferation Treaty was established.

    What makes this the time to break the stand-off ?

    Today the non-proliferation regime is under particular pressure. We have already seen the emergence of a mixture of further declared and undeclared nuclear powers. And now, two countries – Iran and North Korea, both signatories of the NPT – stand in open defiance of the international community. Their actions have profound and direct implications for global security. Each of them also raises the serious prospect of proliferation across their region.

    In the case of Iran, in particular, if the regime is trying to acquire nuclear weapons – and there are very few either in that region or outside it who seriously doubt that that is the goal – then it is raising the spectre of a huge push for proliferation in what is already one of the most unstable parts of the world.

    That alone makes the debate on disarmament and non-proliferation we have to have today different in degree: it has become more immediate and more urgent.

    On top of that, we must respond to other underlying trends that are putting added pressure on the original non-proliferation regime. One of those, just one, is the emergence of Al Qaeda and its offshoots – terrorists whom we know to be actively seeking nuclear materials.

    Another though is the anticipated drive towards civil, nuclear power as the twin imperatives of energy security and climate security are factored into energy policy across the world. How can we ensure this does not lead to either nuclear materials or particularly potentially dangerous nuclear know-how – particularly enrichment and reprocessing technologies – being diverted for military use or just falling into the wrong hands? How do we do so without prejudice to the economic development of countries that have every right under the NPT to develop a civil, nuclear capability.

    And last there are some very specific triggers for action – key impending decisions – that are fast approaching. The START treaty will expire in 2009. We will need to start thinking about how we move from a bilateral disarmament framework built by the US and Russia to one more suited to our multi-polar world.

    And then in 2010 we will have the NPT Review Conference itself. By the time that is held, we need the international community to be foursquare and united behind a global non-proliferation regime. We can’t afford for that conference to be a fractured or fractious one: rather we need to strengthen the NPT in all its aspects.

    That may all sound quite challenging – I meant it to. But there is no reason to believe that we cannot rise to that challenge.

    Let’s look at some of the facts. Despite the recent log-jam, the basic non-proliferation consensus is and has been remarkably resilient. The grand bargain of the NPT has, by and large, held for the past 40 years. The vast majority of states – including many that have the technology to do so if they chose – have decided not to develop nuclear weapons. And far fewer states than was once feared have acquired and retained nuclear weapons.

    Even more encouragingly, and much less well known outside this room, many more states – South Africa, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Argentina, Brazil – have given up active nuclear weapons programmes, turned back from pursuing such programmes, or – as the case of the former Soviet Union countries – chosen to hand over weapons on their territory.

    And of course the Nuclear Weapons States themselves have made significant reductions in their nuclear arsenals, which I will come to later.

    So we have grounds for optimism; but we have none for complacency. The successes we have had in the past have not come about by accident but by applied effort. And we will need much more of the same in the months and years to come. That will mean continued momentum and consensus on non-proliferation, certainly. But, and this is my main argument today, the chances of achieving that are greatly increased if we can also point to genuine commitment and to concrete action on nuclear disarmament.

    Given the proliferation challenges we face, it is not surprising that so much of our focus should be on non-proliferation itself.

    For the reasons I gave a moment ago, stopping and reversing nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran has to remain a key priority for the whole international community.

    With North Korea the best hope to reverse their nuclear programme remains patient multilateral diplomacy underpinned by sanctions regimes.

    As for Iran, the generous offer the E3+3 made in June 2006 is still on the table. Sadly Iran has chosen not to comply with its international legal obligations, thereby enabling negotiations to resume. That forced us to seek a further Security Council Resolution. And we will do so again if necessary.

    The US contribution on Iran has, naturally, been critical. It made the Vienna offer both attractive and credible – showing that the entire international community was willing to welcome Iran back into its ranks provided that it conformed to international norms on the nuclear file and elsewhere. And I have no doubt that the close co-operation between the US, Europe, Russia and China has been a powerful point of leverage on the Iranians. We must hope that it succeeds.

    The US has also taken the lead on much of the vital work that is going on to prevent existing nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists and rogue states. That framework is perhaps more robust than ever before – the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism and efforts to prevent the financing of proliferation.

    Meanwhile, there is some imaginative work going on aimed at persuading states that they can have guaranteed supplies of electricity from nuclear power without the need to acquire enrichment and reprocessing technologies. For example, the work on fuel supply assurances following the report of the IAEA expert group; the US’s own Global Nuclear Energy Partnership initiative on more proliferation-resistant technologies; and the UK’s own proposal for advanced export approval of nuclear fuel that cannot subsequently be revoked – the so-called “enrichment bond”.

    But the important point is this: in none of these areas will we stand a chance of success unless the international community is united in purpose and in action.

    And what that Wall Street Journal article, and for that matter Kofi Annan, have been quite right to identify is that our efforts on non-proliferation will be dangerously undermined if others believe – however unfairly –that the terms of the grand bargain have changed, that nuclear weapon states have abandoned any commitment to disarmament.

    The point of doing more on disarmament, then, is not to convince the Iranians or the North Koreans. I do not believe for a second that further reductions in our nuclear weapons would have a material effect on their nuclear ambitions.

    Rather the point of doing more is this: because the moderate majority of states – our natural and vital allies on non-proliferation – want us to do more. And if we do not, we risk helping Iran and North Korea in their efforts to muddy the water, to turn the blame for their own nuclear intransigence back onto us. They can undermine our arguments for strong international action in support of the NPT by painting us as doing too little too late to fulfil our own obligations.

    And that need to appear consistent, incidentally, is just as true at the regional level. The international community’s clear commitment to a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in successive UN resolutions has been vital in building regional support for a tough line against Iran.

    So what does doing more – and indeed being seen to do more – on disarmament actually mean?

    First, I think we need to be much more open about the disarmament steps we are already taking or have taken. Here in the long-standing, and perhaps understandable, culture of increased secrecy that surrounds the nuclear world we may be our own worst enemy. There is little public remembrance or recognition of the vast cuts in warheads – some 40 000 – made by the US and the former USSR since the end of the Cold War. Nor, for that that matter, the cuts that France and the UK have made to our much smaller stocks. We all need to do more, much more, to address that. And I welcome the US State Department’s recent moves in that direction.

    But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that this was a problem only of perception– simply of a failure to communicate, although that failure is very real. The sense of stagnation is real enough. The expiry of the remaining US-Russia arms control deals; the continued existence of large arsenals; the stalemate on a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty. They all point to an absence of debate at the highest levels on disarmament and a collective inability thus far to come up with a clear, forward plan.

    What we need is both vision – a scenario for a world free of nuclear weapons. And action – progressive steps to reduce warhead numbers and to limit the role of nuclear weapons in security policy. These two strands are separate but they are mutually reinforcing. Both are necessary, both at the moment are too weak.

    Let me start with the vision because, perhaps, that is the harder case to make. After all, we all signed up to the goal of the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons back in 1968; so what does simply restating that goal achieve today?

    More I think than you might imagine. Because, and I’ll be blunt, there are, I was going to say some, but I think many who are in danger of losing faith in the possibility of ever reaching that goal.

    That would, I think, be a grave mistake. The judgement we made forty years ago, that the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons was in all of our interests – is just as true today as it was then. For more than sixty years, good management and good fortune have meant that nuclear arsenals have not been used. But we cannot rely just on history to repeat itself.

    It would be a grave mistake for another reason, too. It underestimates the power that commitment and vision can have in driving action.

    A parallel can be drawn with some of those other decades-long campaigns conducted as we’ve striven for a more civilised world.

    When William Wilberforce began his famous campaign, the practice of one set of people enslaving another had existed for thousands of years. He had the courage to challenge that paradigm; and in so doing helped with many others to bring an end to the terrible evil of the transatlantic slave trade.

    Would he have achieved half as much, would he have inspired the same fervour in others if he had set out to ‘regulate’ or ‘reduce’ the slave trade rather than abolish it? I doubt it.

    Similarly the Millennium Development Goals, the cancellation of third-world debt, increased overseas aid were all motivated by the belief that one day, however far off it might seem, we could “Make Poverty History”.

    So too with nuclear weapons. Believing that the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons is possible can act as a spur for action on disarmament. Believing, at whatever level, that it is not possible, is the surest path to inaction. If there will always be nuclear weapons, what does it matter if there are 1000 or 10 000?

    And just as the vision gives rise to action, conversely so does action give meaning to the vision. As that Wall Street Journal article put it, and again I quote: “Without the bold vision, the actions will not be perceived as fair and urgent. Without the actions, the vision will not be perceived as realistic or possible”

    By actions, I do not mean that the nuclear weapons states should be making immediate and unrealistic promises – committing to speedy abolition, setting a timetable to zero.

    The truth is that I rather doubt – although I would wish it otherwise – that we will see the total elimination of nuclear weapons perhaps in my lifetime. To reach that point would require much more than disarmament diplomacy, convoluted enough though that is in itself. It would require a much more secure and predictable global political context.

    That context does not exist today. Indeed it is why, only a few months ago, the UK took the decision to retain our ability to have an independent nuclear deterrent beyond the 2020s.

    But acknowledging that the conditions for disarmament do not exist today does not mean resigning ourselves to the idea that nuclear weapons can never be abolished in the future. Nor does it prevent us from taking steps to reduce numbers now and to start thinking about how we would go about reaching that eventual goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons.

    That is why in taking the decision to retain our ability to have nuclear weapons, the UK government was very clear about four things. First that we would be open and frank with our own citizens and with our international partners about what we were doing and why. It is all being done upfront and in public – not as in the past, behind the scenes. Second that we would be very clear and up front that when the political conditions existed, we would give up our remaining nuclear weapons. Third that we were not enhancing our nuclear capability in any way and would continue to act strictly in accordance with our NPT obligations. And fourth that we would reduce our stock of operationally available warheads by a further 20 per cent – to the very minimum we considered viable to maintain an independent nuclear deterrent.

    This was our way – and I can assure you it was a difficult process – to resolve the dilemma between our genuine commitment to abolition and our considered judgement that sadly now was not the time to take a unilateral step to totally disarm.

    It’s the same dilemma every nuclear weapons state faces. And we can all make the same choices in recommitting to the goal of abolition and taking practical steps towards achieving that goal.

    Practical steps include further reductions in warhead numbers, particularly in the world’s biggest arsenals. There are still over 20 000 warheads in the world. And the US and Russia hold about 96 per cent of them.

    Almost no-one – politician, military strategist or scientist – thinks that warheads in those numbers are still necessary to guarantee international security. So it should not be controversial to suggest that there remains room for further significant reductions. So I hope that the Moscow Treaty will be succeeded by further clear commitments to significantly lower numbers of warheads – and include, if possible, tactical as well as strategic, nuclear weapons.

    Since we no longer live in a bipolar world, those future commitments may no longer require strict parity. They could be unilateral undertakings. Certainly the UK experience – and indeed the United States’ own experience with the reduction of its tactical weapons in Europe – is that substantial reductions can be achieved through independent re-examination of what is really needed to deter: that approach has allowed the UK to reduce our operationally available warheads by nearly half over the last ten years from what was already a comparatively low base. We have also reduced the readiness of the nuclear force that remains. We now only have one boat on patrol at any one time, carrying no more than 48 warheads – and our missiles are not targeted at any specific sites.

    Commitments like these need not even be enshrined in formal treaties. The UK’s reductions, after all, are not. But clearly both the US and Russia will require sufficient assurance that their interests and their strategic stability will be safeguarded. Part of the solution may be provided by the extension of the most useful transparency and confidence building measures in the START framework, should the US and Russia agree to do so.

    And I should make clear here again, that when it will be useful to include in any negotiations the one per cent of the world’s nuclear weapons that belong to the UK, we will willingly do so.

    In addition to these further reductions, we need to press on with both the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and with the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty. Both limit – in real and practical ways – the ability of states party to develop new weapons and to expand their nuclear capabilities. And as such they therefore both play a very powerful symbolic role too – they signal to the rest of the world that the race for more and bigger weapons is over, and that the direction from now on will be down and not up. That’s why we are so keen for those countries that have not yet done so to ratify the CTBT. The moratoriium observed by all the nuclear weapon states is a great step forward; but by allowing the CTBT to enter into force – and, of course, US ratification would provide a great deal of impetus – we would be showing that this is a permanent decision, a permanent change and in the right direction.

    At the same time, I believe that we will need to look again at how we manage global transparency and global verification. This will have to extend beyond the bilateral arrangements between Russia and the US. If we are serious about complete nuclear disarmament we should begin now to build deeper relationships on disarmament between nuclear weapon states.

    For our part, the UK is ready and willing to engage with other members of the P5 on transparency and confidence building measures. Verification will be particularly key – any future verification regime for a world free of nuclear weapons will need to be tried and tested. In my opinion, it will need to place more emphasis on the warheads themselves than the current arrangement which focuses primarily on delivery systems. That will become particularly true as numbers of warheads drop.

    And we have to keep doing the hard diplomatic work on the underlying political conditions – resolving the ongoing sources of tension in the world, not least in the Middle East and between Pakistan and India. We also need to build a more mature, balanced and stable relationship between ourselves and Russia.

    And since I have the non-proliferation elite gathered in one room, let me emphasise the importance this and future UK governments will place on the agreement of an international and legally binding arms trade treaty. Conflicts across the globe are made more likely and more intense by those who trade all arms in an irresponsible and unregulated way. And an arms trade treaty would contribute to a focus on arms reduction and help build a safer world.

    And when it comes to building this new impetus for global nuclear disarmament, I want the UK to be at the forefront of both the thinking and the practical work. To be, as it were, a “disarmament laboratory”.

    As far as new thinking goes, the International Institute of Strategic Studies is planning an in-depth study to help determine the requirements for the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons. We will participate in that study and provide funding for one of their workshops, focussing on some of the crucial technical questions in this area.

    The study and subsequent workshops will offer a thorough and systematic analysis of what a commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons means in practice. What weapons and facilities will have to go before we can say that nuclear weapons are abolished? What safeguards will we have to put in place over civil nuclear facilities? How do we increase transparency and put in place a verification regime so that everyone can be confident that no-one else has or is developing nuclear weapons? And finally – and perhaps this is perhaps the greatest challenge of all – what path can we take to complete nuclear disarmament that avoids creating new instabilities themselves potentially damaging to global security.

    And then we have these new areas of practical work. This will concentrate on the challenge of creating a robust, trusted and effective system of verification that does not give away national security or proliferation sensitive information.

    Almost a decade ago, we asked the UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment to begin developing our expertise in methods and techniques to verify the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons. We reported on this work throughout the last Non-Proliferation Treaty review cycle. Now we intend to build on that work, looking more deeply at several key stages in the verification process – and again report our findings as soon as possible.

    One area we will be looking at further is authentication – in other words confirming that an object presented for dismantlement as a warhead is indeed a warhead. There are profound security challenges in doing that. We need to find ways to carry out that task without revealing sensitive information. At the moment we are developing technical contacts with Norway in this area. As a non-nuclear weapons state they will offer a valuable alternative perspective on our research.

    Then we will be looking more closely at chain of custody issues – in other words how to provide confidence that the items that emerge from the dismantlement process have indeed come from the authenticated object that went into that process to begin with. Here we face the challenge of managing access to sensitive nuclear facilities. We have already carried out some trial inspections of facilities to draw lessons for the handling of access under any future inspections regime.

    And last we intend to examine how to provide confidence that the dismantled components of a nuclear warhead are not being returned to use in new warheads. This will have to involve some form of monitored storage, with a difficult balance once again to be struck between security concerns and verification requirements. We are currently working on the design concepts for building such a monitored store, so that we can more fully investigate these complex practical issues.

    The initiatives I have announced today are only small ones. But they are, I hope you will agree, in the right direction – a signal of intent and purpose to ourselves and to others. We will talk more and do more with our international partners – those who have nuclear weapons, and those who do not – in the weeks and months to come.

    I said earlier that I am not confident, cannot be confident, that I would live to see a world free of nuclear weapons. My sadness at such a thought is real. Mine, like yours, is a generation that has existed under the shadow of the bomb – knowing that weapons existed which could bring an end to humanity itself. We have become almost accustomed to that steady underlying dread, punctuated by the sharper fear of each new nuclear crisis: Cuba in 1962, the Able Archer scare of 1983, the stand-off between India and Pakistan in 2002.

    But there is a danger in familiarity with something so terrible. If we allow our efforts on disarmament to slacken, if we allow ourselves to take the non-proliferation consensus for granted, the nuclear shadow that hangs over us will lengthen and it will deepen. And it may, one day, blot out the light for good.

    So my commitment to that vision, truly visionary in its day, of a world free of nuclear weapons is undimmed. And although we in this room may never reach the end of that road, we can take thos first further steps down it. For any generation, that would be a noble calling. For ours, it is a duty.

  • Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility

    Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility

    I have just returned from Berlin and the annual Council meeting of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES). This is an organization much needed in our world, one that supports the ethical uses of science and technology for disarmament and sustainable development. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has helped to foster the work of this international organization since the inception of INES more than 15 years ago.

    The meeting included an important presentation by Professor Guillermo Lemarchand from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina on the extent to which scientific efforts are driven by large military research and development budgets. Lemarchand presented information on the close relationship between research and development funding and the exponential growth of the lethality of weaponry. During the 20th century the lethality (maximum number of casualties per hour that a weapon can generate) grew from about 100 at the beginning of the century to about six billion at the end of the century. The lethality growth of weapons in the 20th century was 60 million, and now encompasses the population of the planet.

    Scientists may not be concerned with or even know the reasons why their basic research is being funded by military sources. The driving of academic research and development by military budgets is becoming pervasive at universities throughout the world, leading to the variant of the famous statement in President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address that some now find appropriate – the military-industrial-academic complex.

    The University of California is an excellent example of a university providing research and development for military purposes. It provides management and oversight to the US nuclear weapons laboratories. Its funds for doing this come through the US Department of Energy, but the work of the nuclear weapons laboratories is largely secret and military in nature. Currently the labs are working on the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a new hydrogen bomb that the Bush administration hopes will replace every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal.

    The management of the nuclear weapons laboratories by the University of California is just the tip of the iceberg of military involvement with universities around the world. According to the report by Professor Lemarchand, a physicist, the US military assigns officers to practically all areas of the world to seek out scientific researchers who may be helpful in furthering US military purposes. Too often military funding is the only source of funding available for academic researchers.

    This can create a dilemma for professors, who are often under pressure to bring in research funding. On the one hand, they can accept funding from the military, and find themselves contributing toward new means of weaponization – an outcome they may find unethical. On the other hand, they can turn down offers of funding from the military and not be able to continue their research into basic areas of science that they find important.

    There are many issues that confront scientists and engineers in today’s world. These include weapons of mass destruction, genetic engineering, biotechnology, global warming and climate change, food supplies and agricultural production, energy use and alternative energy development, and pollution and health issues. How does one approach such issues from the perspective of global responsibility?

    First, global responsibility means working for the betterment of humanity. Practically this means using one’s talents and skills for constructive rather than destructive purposes. Second, it means speaking out, individually or collectively, against dangerous and destructive uses of science and technology. Third, it means putting the welfare of humanity as a whole ahead of the considerations of any one nation.

    The Council members of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility are a dedicated group that is making its voice heard on the ethical uses of science and technology. If you would like to find out more about their work and become involved in it, visit them online at www.inesglobal.com.

    David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons.

  • The ABCs of Nuclear Disarmament

    The chilling announcement that our government is preparing to replace our entire nuclear arsenal with new hydrogen bombs comes on the heels of a call for nuclear abolition by no less a peace activist than Henry Kissinger, joined by old cold warriors Sam Nunn, George Schultz, and William Perry in a recent Wall Street Journal Editorial.
    We’ve been pushing our luck for more than 60 years since the first and only two atomic bombs to be used in war were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 214,000 people in the initial days, and causing numerous cases of cancers, mutations and birth defects in their radioactive aftermath, new incidences of which are still being documented today. During these sixty years of the nuclear age, every site worldwide, involved in the mining, milling, production and fabrication of uranium, for either war or for “peace”, has left a lethal legacy of radioactive waste, illness, and damage to our very genetic heritage. Bomb and reactor-created plutonium stays toxic for more than 250,000 years and we still haven’t figured out how to safely contain it.
    For the world to have a real chance to deal with nuclear proliferation and avoid a tragic repetition of Hiroshima, it’s clear that we must eliminate the bombs as well as the nuclear power reactors that too often serve as bomb factories for metastasizing nuclear weapons states. On the 20th Anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, Gorbachev called for the phasing out of nuclear power and the establishment of a $50 billion solar fund.
    There are nine nuclear weapons states in the world today. The original five, the US, UK, Russia, China, and France, in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) promised to give up their nuclear weapons in return for a promise from all the other countries of the world not to acquire them. To sweeten the deal, the NPT promised all the other countries an “inalienable right” to “peaceful” nuclear technology, which Iran is now relying on as a member of the treaty. Only India, Pakistan and Israel, refused to go along, India arguing that the treaty was discriminatory. Since the NPT was signed, India, Pakistan, Israel, and now North Korea, have joined the nuclear club. It has been noted by several distinguished Commissions that so long as any one country has nuclear weapons, others will want them.
    There are 27,000 nuclear bombs on the planet today, 26,000 of which are in the US and Russia, with the remaining 1,000 located in the seven other nuclear weapons states. To make progress on nuclear abolition, the US and Russia will have to cut their enormous stockpiles and then call all the other nations to the table to negotiate a treaty for nuclear disarmament. They are all on record as willing to enter disarmament negotiations if the US and Russia get serious. There is an offer on the table from Russia to the US to discuss further cuts in the US-Russian arsenals. Putin called, several years ago, for cuts to 1,500 or even less nuclear weapons each, which would be a signal to the seven other nuclear weapons states to join the talks. Gorbachev tried to convince Reagan to abolish all nuclear weapons but rescinded his offer because Reagan wouldn’t agree to give up his Star Wars program and keep weapons out of space. China, repeatedly calls in the UN for negotiations to begin on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. In June, 2006, Putin called again for negotiations on new reductions.
    The silence from the US has been deafening. Rather, it is has rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, while pressing to plant our missiles right under Russia’s nose in Poland and the Czech Republic, despite promises given to Gorbachev when the wall came down, that if he didn’t object to a reunified Germany entering NATO, we would not expand NATO. This fall, the US was the only country in the world to have voted against negotiations for a treaty banning weapons in space, as we adhere to our brazen space mission to “dominate and control the military use of space to protect US interests and investments”. The newly announced hydrogen bomb to replace the entire nuclear arsenal is the product of an $8 billion annual program for the development of new nuclear weapons, and we have revised our nuclear weapons policy to include the right to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear attacks.
    A Plan for Avoiding Nuclear Proliferation
    Civil Society has produced a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, drafted by lawyers, scientists and policy makers in the Abolition 2000 Global Network for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, which is now an official UN document. It lays out all the steps for disarmament, including how to proceed with dismantlement, verification, guarding and monitoring the disassembled arsenals and missiles to insure that we will all be secure from nuclear break-out. It’s not as if we don’t know how to do it! Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey has proposed a resolution calling on the president to negotiate a treaty to ban the bomb.
    So here’s the plan.

    1. The US must honor its own NPT agreement for nuclear disarmament by putting a halt to all new weapons development and taking up Putin’s offer to negotiate for deeper US-Russian cuts..
    2. Once the US and Russia agree to go below 1,000 bombs, take up China’s offer to negotiate a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons and call all the nuclear weapons states to the table..
    3. As part of the negotiation, agree to Russia and China’s annual proposal in the UN to ban all weapons in space. Other countries will not be willing to give up their nuclear “deterrent” so long as the US continues its massive military buildup to achieve “full spectrum dominance” of the planet through space..
    4. Call for a global moratorium on any further uranium mining and nuclear materials production..
    5. Close the Nevada test site just as France and China have closed their sites in the South Pacific and Gobi Desert.
    6. Restrict the role of the nuclear-industry dominated International Atomic Energy Agency to only monitoring and verifying compliance with nuclear disarmament measures, and prohibit any further commercial activity to promote “peaceful” nuclear technology.
    7. Establish an International Sustainable Energy, which would supercede the NPT’s promise of an “inalienable right” to “peaceful” nuclear technology as we phase out nuclear power. Since every one of the earth’s 442 nuclear power reactors is a potential bomb factory, we wouldn’t be dealing with a full deck if we thought we could eliminate nuclear weapons, without dealing with their evil twins, nuclear reactors.
    8. Fund the International Sustainable Energy with the $250 billion in tax breaks and subsidies now going to the fossil, nuclear, and industrial biomass industries, and jump-start a 21st Century sustainable energy future.
    9. Reject plans for international “control” of the civilian nuclear fuel cycle. It’s just so 20th Century– a top-down, centralized model, to be run by preferred members of the nuclear club which will set up another hierarchical and discriminatory regime of nuclear “haves and have nots”, contribute to more radioactive pollution and health and terrorism hazards, and is doomed to fail. Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates recently indicated they are trying to get in under the wire and develop their “peaceful” nuclear technology before the US and its colonial old boys network establishes another discriminatory regime of nuclear apartheid. To prevent proliferation and the possibility of nuclear war as well as fossil-fuel driven climate catastrophes equal to nuclear war in destructive power, sensible folks know we must deal holistically by eliminating nuclear weapons as we phase out nuclear power and mobilize for safe, clean, sustainable energy–negotiating an end to the nuclear age.
    10. Establish the Bronx Project to clean up the mess created by the Manhattan Project, by isolating nuclear materials from the environment and providing a rational containment system during the eons their radioactivity will co-exist with us on earth.

     

    Alice Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a founder of the Abolition 2000 Global Network for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.

  • The Nuclear Threat

    The essay “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” published in this newspaper on Jan. 4, was signed by a bipartisan group of four influential Americans — George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn — not known for utopian thinking, and having unique experience in shaping the policies of previous administrations. It raises an issue of crucial importance for world affairs: the need for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

    As someone who signed the first treaties on real reductions in nuclear weapons, I feel it is my duty to support their call for urgent action.

    The road to this goal began in November 1985 when Ronald Reagan and I met in Geneva. We declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” This was said at a time when many people in the military and among the political establishment regarded a war involving weapons of mass destruction as conceivable and even acceptable, and were developing various scenarios of nuclear escalation.

    It took political will to transcend the old thinking and attain a new vision. For if a nuclear war is inconceivable, then military doctrines, armed forces development plans and negotiating positions at arms-control talks must change accordingly. This began to happen, particularly after Reagan and I agreed in Reykjavik in October 1986 on the need ultimately to eliminate nuclear weapons. Concurrently, major positive changes were occurring in world affairs: A number of international conflicts were defused and democratic processes in many parts of the world gained momentum, leading to the end of the Cold War.

    As U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations got off the ground, a breakthrough was achieved — the treaty on the elimination of medium- and shorter-range missiles, followed by agreement on 50% reduction in strategic offensive weapons. If the negotiations had continued in the same vein and at the same pace, the world would have been rid of the greater part of the arsenals of deadly weapons. But this did not happen, and hopes for a new, more democratic world order were not fulfilled. In fact, we have seen a failure of political leadership, which proved incapable of seizing the opportunities opened by the end of the Cold War. This glaring failure has allowed nuclear weapons and their proliferation to pose a continuing, growing threat to mankind.

    The ABM Treaty has been abrogated; the requirements for effective verification and irreversibility of nuclear-arms reductions have been weakened; the treaty on comprehensive cessation of nuclear-weapons tests has not been ratified by all nuclear powers. The goal of the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons has been essentially forgotten. What is more, the military doctrines of major powers, first the U.S. and then, to some extent, Russia, have re-emphasized nuclear weapons as an acceptable means of war fighting, to be used in a first or even in a “pre-emptive” strike.

    All this is a blatant violation of the nuclear powers’ commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its Article V is clear and unambiguous: Nations that are capable of making nuclear weapons shall forgo that possibility in exchange for the promise by the members of the nuclear club to reduce and eventually abolish their nuclear arsenals. If this reciprocity is not observed, then the entire structure of the treaty will collapse.

    The Non-Proliferation Treaty is already under considerable stress. The emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear-weapon states, the North Korean nuclear program and the issue of Iran are just the harbingers of even more dangerous problems that we will have to face unless we overcome the present situation. A new threat, nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, is a challenge to our ability to work together internationally and to our technological ingenuity. But we should not delude ourselves: In the final analysis, this problem can only be solved through the abolition of nuclear weapons. So long as they continue to exist, the danger will be with us, like the famous “rifle on the wall” that will fire sooner or later.

    Last November the Forum of Nobel Peace Laureates, meeting in Rome, issued a special statement on this issue. The late Nobel laureate and world-renowned scientist, Joseph Rotblat, initiated a global awareness campaign on the nuclear danger, in which I participated. Ted Turner’s Nuclear Threat Initiative provides important support for specific measures to reduce weapons of mass destruction. With all of them we are united by a common understanding of the need to save the Non-Proliferation Treaty and of the primary responsibility of the members of the nuclear club.

    We must put the goal of eliminating nuclear weapons back on the agenda, not in a distant future but as soon as possible. It links the moral imperative — the rejection of such weapons from an ethical standpoint — with the imperative of assuring security. It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.

    The irony — and a reproach to the current generation of world leaders — is that two decades after the end of the Cold War the world is still burdened with vast arsenals of nuclear weapons of which even a fraction would be enough to destroy civilization. As in the 1980s, we face the problem of political will — the responsibility of the leaders of major powers for bridging the gap between the rhetoric of peace and security and the real threat looming over the world. While agreeing with the Jan. 4 article that the U.S. should take the initiative and play an active role on this issue, I believe there is also a need for major efforts on the part of Russian and European leaders and for a responsible position and full involvement of all states that have nuclear weapons.

    I am calling for a dialogue to be launched within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, involving both nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states, to cover the full range of issues related to the elimination of those weapons. The goal is to develop a common concept for moving toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

    The key to success is reciprocity of obligations and actions. The members of the nuclear club should formally reiterate their commitment to reducing and ultimately eliminating nuclear weapons. As a token of their serious intent, they should without delay take two crucial steps: ratify the comprehensive test ban treaty and make changes in their military doctrines, removing nuclear weapons from the Cold War-era high alert status. At the same time, the states that have nuclear-power programs would pledge to terminate all elements of those programs that could have military use.

    The participants in the dialogue should report its progress and the results achieved to the United Nations Security Council, which must be given a key coordinating role in this process.

    Over the past 15 years, the goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor. It will be a challenge to the current generation of leaders, a test of their maturity and ability to act that they must not fail. It is our duty to help them to meet this challenge.

    Originally published in the Wall Street Journal.

     

    Mr. Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991.

  • It’s Time For a Plan to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

    It’s Time For a Plan to Abolish Nuclear Weapons

    In early January 2007, a surprising commentary appeared in the Wall Street Journal pleading for US leadership to move toward a world free of nuclear weapons. The surprise emanated from the identity of the writers: four prominent former high-level US foreign and defense policy officials, a bipartisan group with impeccable hawkish credentials – George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn.

    In their welcome if belated statement of concern about nuclear dangers, they harkened back to the 1986 summit at Reykjavik, where Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev came close to an agreement to rid the world of nuclear weapons. “Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons,” they wrote, “and practical measures toward achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America’s moral heritage. The effort could have a profoundly positive impact on the security of future generations.”

    The four men who signed this commentary might have harkened back even further. In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy likened nuclear weapons to a nuclear sword of Damocles, “hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness.” Kennedy concluded, as have the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who experienced the devastatingly destructive nuclear attacks at the end of World War II, that nuclear weapons “must be abolished before they abolish us.”

    It should be of deep concern to all Americans that more than a decade and a half after the end of the Cold War, the danger of the spread and use of nuclear weapons has not substantially diminished and has quite possibly increased. Moreover, it has become increasingly apparent that nuclear weapons may give far more leverage to relatively weak actors, such as terrorist groups, than they do to even the most powerful nations.

    In one of his last speeches at the conclusion of his ten-year tenure as Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan pointedly directed his remarks to the extreme dangers humanity faces due to the failure to eliminate nuclear weapons. He argued, “The one area where there is a total lack of any common strategy is the one that may well present the greatest danger of all: the area of nuclear weapons,” and he cited many reasons necessitating a concerted effort to both prevent proliferation and achieve nuclear disarmament.

    The lynchpin of Annan’s proposal, however, was the specific need for the nuclear weapons states to take action on their nuclear disarmament commitments. “I call on all the States with nuclear weapons,” he said, “to develop concrete plans -– with specific timetables -– for implementing their disarmament commitments. And I urge them to make a joint declaration of intent to achieve the progressive elimination of all nuclear weapons, under strict and effective international control.”

    There can be no doubt that a plan to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons is critically needed and should animate a national, indeed a global, dialogue. Nuclear weapons endanger our nation and the world. These weapons are capable of destroying cities and countries, including our own, and could put an end to civilization. They are tools of our own making that place a dark cloud over the human future. The continued reliance upon these weapons by the United States and other nuclear weapons states is a provocation to other countries to do the same and could lead to a breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

    Terrorists cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons because they cannot be located, and if terrorists gain possession of nuclear weapons they cannot be prevented from using them by threat of retaliation. The security of even a military superpower such as the United States could be dramatically undercut by a single terrorist group with just one nuclear weapon. Such is the leverage of nuclear weapons: they favor the weak over the strong.

    A consensus is finally building behind the conviction that the abolition of nuclear weapons is necessary and that US leadership is urgently needed to achieve this goal. Now we need increased momentum to achieve an action plan so that over the next decade nuclear weapons can be eliminated globally in a process that is transparent, verifiable and irreversible. To succeed in reaching this goal will require a new way of thinking that involves increased reliance on international cooperation and diplomacy to achieve security, and adherence by all nations, even the most powerful, to a strengthened body of international law.

    We are facing a challenge that will determine our common future. As Kofi Annan pleaded to the young people at Princeton who he was addressing in his speech, “Help us to seize control of the rogue aircraft on which humanity has embarked, and bring it to a safe landing before it is too late.”

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.

  • India’s Nuclear Disarmament Gets Critical

    In October 2006, eight years after India and Pakistan crossed the nuclear threshold, the world witnessed yet another breakout, when North Korea exploded an atomic bomb and demanded that it be recognised as a nuclear weapons-state. Talks aimed at persuading Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons, in return for security guarantees and economic assistance, collapsed last week.

    In 2006, the ongoing confrontation between the Western powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear programme got dangerously aggravated. The United Nations Security Council imposed harsh sanctions on Iran but these may prove counterproductive.

    Tehran dismissed the sanctions as illegal and vowed to step up its “peaceful” uranium enrichment programme. It added one more cascade of 164 uranium enrichment centrifuges during the year and is preparing to install as many as 3,000 of these machines within the next four months. (Several thousands of centrifuges are needed to build a small nuclear arsenal.)

    Developments in South Asia added to this negative momentum as India and the United States took further steps in negotiating and legislating the controversial nuclear cooperation deal that they inked one-and-a-half years ago. The deal will bring India into the ambit of normal civilian nuclear commerce although it is a nuclear weapons-state and has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

    Meanwhile, India and Pakistan continued to test nuclear-capable missiles and sustained their long-standing mutual rivalry despite their continuing peace dialogue. Looming large over these developments in different parts of Asia are the Great Powers, led by the U.S., whose geopolitical role as well as refusal to undertake disarmament has contributed to enhancing the global nuclear danger in 2006.

    According to a just-released preliminary count by the Federation of American Scientists, eight countries launched more than 26 ballistic missiles of 23 types in 24 different events in 2006. They include the U.S., Russia, France and China, besides India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

    “One can list other negative contributing factors too,” says Sukla Sen, a Mumbai-based activist of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, an umbrella of more than 250 Indian organisations. “These include U.S. plans to find new uses for nuclear armaments and develop ballistic missile defence (“Star Wars”) weapons, Britain’s announcement that it will modernise its “Trident” nuclear force, Japan’s moves towards militarisation, and a revival of interest in nuclear technology in many countries.”

    “Clearly,” adds Sen, “61 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world has learnt little and achieved even less so far as abolishing the nucleus scourge goes. The nuclear sword still hangs over the globe. 2006 has made the world an even more dangerous place. The time has come to advance the hands of the Doomsday Clock.” The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published from Chicago in the U.S., currently stands at seven minutes to midnight, the Final Hour. Since 1947, its minute hand has been repeatedly moved “forward and back to reflect the global level of nuclear danger and the state of international security”.

    The Clock was last reset in 2002, after the U.S. announced it would reject several arms control agreements, and withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits the development of “Star Wars”-style weapons.

    Before that, the Doomsday Clock was advanced in 1998, from 14 minutes to midnight, to just nine minutes before the hour. This was primarily in response to the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May that year.

    The closest the Clock moved to midnight was in 1953, when the U.S. and the USSR both tested thermonuclear weapons. The Clock’s minute hand was set just two minutes short of 12.

    The lowest level of danger it ever showed was in 1991, following the end of the Cold War and the signature of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The Clock then stood at 17 minutes to midnight.

    “The strongest reason to move the minute hand forward today is the inflamed situation in the Middle East,” argues M.V. Ramana, an independent nuclear affairs analyst currently with the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore.

    “Iran isn’t the real or sole cause of worry. It’s probably still some years away from enriching enough uranium to make a nuclear bomb. But there is this grave crisis in Iraq, which has spun out of Washington’s control. And then there is Israel, which is a de facto nuclear weapons-state and is seen as a belligerent power by its neighbours in the light of the grim crisis in Palestine. All the crises in the Middle East feed into one another and aggravate matters,” adds Ramana.

    At the other extreme of Asia, new security equations are emerging, partly driven by the North Korean nuclear programme.

    “Today, this is a key factor not only in shaping relations between the two Koreas, but the more complex and important relationship between North Korea, China, Japan and the U.S.”, holds Alka Acharya, of the Centre of East Asian Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University here. Adds Acharya: “The U.S. has failed to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis diplomatically. North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme will spur Japan and South Korea to add to their military capacities. There is a strong lobby in Japan which wants to rewrite the country’s constitution and even develop a nuclear weapons capability. Recently, Japan commissioned a study to determine how long it would take to develop a nuclear deterrent.”

    Japan has stockpiled hundreds of tonnes of plutonium, ostensibly for use in fast-breeder reactors. But with the fast reactor programme faltering, the possibility of diversion of the plutonium to military uses cannot be ruled out. Similarly, South Korea is likely to come under pressure to develop its own deterrent capability. “Driving these pursuits are not just nuclear calculations, but also geopolitical factors,” says Prof. Achin Vanaik who teaches international relations and global politics at Delhi University. “The U.S. plays a critical role here because of its aggressive stance and its double standards. It cannot convincingly demand that other states practise nuclear abstinence or restraint while it will keep it own nuclear weapons for ‘security’. Eventually, Washington’s nuclear double standards will encourage other countries to pursue nuclear weapons capabilities too.”

    In particular, the joint planned development of ballistic missile defence weapons by the U.S. and Japan is likely to be seen by China as a threat to its security and impel Beijing to add to its nuclear arsenal. Adds Vanaik: “The real danger is not confined to East Asia or West Asia alone. The overall worldwide impact of the double standards practised by the nuclear weapons-states, and especially offensive moves like the Proliferation Security Initiative proposed by the U.S. to intercept ‘suspect’ nuclear shipments on the high seas, will be to weaken the existing global nuclear order and encourage proliferation. The U.S.-India nuclear deal sets a horribly negative example of legitimising proliferation.” “A time could soon come when a weak state or non-state actor might consider attacking the U.S. mainland with mass-destruction weapons. The kind of hatreds that the U.S. is sowing in volatile parts of the world, including the Middle East, could well result in such a catastrophe,” Vanaik said.

    The year 2006 witnessed a considerable weakening of the norms of nuclear non-proliferation. Until 1974, the world had five declared nuclear weapon-states and one covert nuclear power (Israel). At the end of this year, it has nine nuclear weapons-states — nine too many.

    No less significant in the long run is the growing temptation among many states to develop civilian nuclear power. Earlier this month, a number of Arab leaders met in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and decided to start a joint nuclear energy development programme.

    “Although this doesn’t spell an immediate crisis, nuclear power development can in the long run provide the technological infrastructure for building nuclear weapons too,” says Ramana. “The way out of the present nuclear predicament does not lie in non- or counter-proliferation through ever-stricter technology controls. The only solution is nuclear disarmament. The nuclear weapons-states must lead by example, by reducing and eventually dismantling these weapons of terror.”

     

    The writer is a Delhi-based researcher, peace and human rights activist, and former newspaper editor.

  • Disarmament is a Two-Way Street

    The Bush administration’s current confrontation with Iran over what it claims is that nation’s nuclear weapons development program raises the question: Can the disarmament of one country occur in isolation from the disarmament of others?

    That question seemed to be answered by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968. Signed by almost all countries of the world, including the United States, it provided that the non-nuclear nations would forgo building nuclear weapons, while the nuclear nations would divest themselves of their own nuclear weapons.

    But, upon taking office, the Bush administration quickly abandoned the U.S. commitment to the NPT. It withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, moved forward with the deployment of a national missile defense system (a revised version of the Reagan administration’s “Star Wars” program), and opposed ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (negotiated and signed by President Clinton). Furthermore, it dropped negotiations for nuclear arms control and disarmament and, instead, pressed Congress to authorize the building of new U.S. nuclear weapons—for example, the nuclear “bunker buster” and “mini-nukes.”

    Nor are the Bush administration’s more recent actions in line with the U.S. government’s alleged commitment to nuclear disarmament.

    This past March, President Bush traveled to India, where he cemented a nuclear deal with the Indian government. India, of course, recently became a nuclear weapons nation, having spurned the NPT, conducted nuclear tests in 1998, and developed its own nuclear arsenal. Yet the agreement rewards India for its defiance of international norms. By supplying U.S. nuclear fuel and technology to India, the agreement facilitates a substantial expansion of that nation’s nuclear weapons complex. At the same time, it does not require India to stop producing nuclear material for weapons or to place Indian nuclear reactors under international inspection. As this U.S.-India agreement flies in the face of U.S. legislation that bans nuclear exports to nations that have not signed the NPT, the Bush administration is now pressing Congress to revoke such legislation. The Republican-led Congress seems likely to do so.

    In addition, the Bush administration is promoting legislation in Congress that will fund the development of what is called the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), as well as a sweeping modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons labs and factories. Although the RRW is billed as an item that would merely update existing U.S. nuclear weapons and ensure their reliability, it seems more likely to serve as a means of designing new nuclear weapons. And the quest for new nuclear weapons seems likely to lead to the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing and the final breakdown of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

    Furthermore, the Bush administration has come out in opposition to a pathbreaking treaty to create a nuclear weapons-free zone in Central Asia. Signed earlier this month by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the agreement commits the signatory countries not to produce, buy, or allow the deployment of nuclear weapons on their soil. According to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, the U.S. government’s opposition to the Central Asia treaty is based upon its reluctance “to give up the option of deploying nuclear weapons in this region.”

    Another sign of the Bush administration’s double standard when it comes nuclear weapons is its unwillingness to consider the idea of a nuclear weapons-free zone for the Middle East. Israel, after all, has developed a substantial nuclear arsenal, but the Bush administration has studiously ignored it. The contrast with the administration’s reaction to Iraq’s possible development of nuclear weapons is quite striking.

    In a letter published in the Washington Post on September 7, Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action—the largest peace organization in the United States–observed that the Bush administration’s nuclear nonproliferation policies were “incoherent and contradictory.” The administration, he charged, “is rewarding India’s nuclear weapons program with a deal to share technology; doing next to nothing about Pakistan’s veritable nuclear Wal-Mart; winking at Israel’s nuclear arsenal; unilaterally dropping out of arms control treaties . . . ; and ignoring our own obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

    Certainly, the Bush administration has been quite selective about which nations should have nuclear weapons and which should not. And most nations—including Iran–know it.

    The U.S. government would be far more convincing—and perhaps more effective with respect to diplomacy for creating a nuclear-free Iran—if it recognized that nuclear disarmament is a two-way street

     

    Dr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

    First published by the History News Network

  • Reliance on Nuclear Weapons in Naively Unrealistic

    Reliance on Nuclear Weapons in Naively Unrealistic

    For many years the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has advocated the global elimination of nuclear weapons. This advocacy is consistent with the moral position adopted by nearly all major religions as well as with the dictates of international law. It is also consistent with the security interests of all states, including the current nuclear weapons states. Nonetheless, many Americans cling tenaciously to the idea that the US is more secure with nuclear weapons than it would be without them.

    In response to an article that I wrote recently on “Global Hiroshima,” a letter to the editor took the position, “The proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons is idealistic, but it is naively unrealistic, unless a creditable concept for protecting the US from other nations’ nuclear weapons is available.” The writer concluded his letter by stating, “Our nuclear weapons are not to use, but to prevent other nations from using theirs.”

    This is, unfortunately, a falsely reassuring and illusory viewpoint. Nuclear deterrence – the threat of nuclear retaliation – could fail for many reasons, including accidental launches, miscalculations, poor decisions in time of crisis, or the inability to credibly threaten extremist organizations that cannot be located and therefore retaliated against. A threat to retaliate against an opponent that you cannot locate, such as al Qaeda, is futile.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has never called for the US to unilaterally disarm its nuclear arsenal. What we do advocate is for the US to take a leadership role in negotiating nuclear disarmament among all nations. This is a role that only the US can assume, due to its enormous military and economic power.

    By taking on this role, the US would be acting in accord with a unanimous 1996 ruling of the International Court of Justice, the world’s highest court, which concluded: “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”

    Our position at the Foundation is that the US should take this obligation under international law seriously, both because the US has a responsibility to follow the dictates of international law and because doing so will enhance our national security. This is not a prescription for immediate or unilateral nuclear disarmament. It is a prescription for demonstrating the political will to move judiciously but urgently toward a world free of nuclear weapons.

    The first step in following this path would be for the US to convene the other nuclear weapons states and set forth a negotiating agenda. An important confidence building measure would be a legal commitment by all nuclear weapons states to No First Use of nuclear weapons. This would demonstrate that nuclear weapons had no other purpose than deterring another country from using theirs. Other confidence building steps would include the de-alerting of existing nuclear weapons and ratification by all nuclear capable states of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

    The goal of the negotiations would be the phased elimination of nuclear arsenals under strict and effective international controls. Countries would phase out their nuclear arsenals gradually and in a verifiable manner. Processes would be established to assure that nuclear weapons and materials were not being diverted into secret stores outside the purview of international inspectors.

    The plan is simple. It begins with good faith negotiations convened by the US. It ends with a world free of nuclear weapons. In between, there is much to be worked out to assure the security of all states. One thing is certain, however: This is not a “naively unrealistic” plan. It is the only approach that will assure that cities, countries and civilization remain safe from nuclear devastation and that humankind is secure from future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a
    leader in the global effort for a world free of nuclear weapons.