Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Disarmament

  • European Parliament Resolution on sub-critical nuclear testing

    The European Parliament,

    – having regard to its previous resolutions on nuclear non-proliferation,

    A. whereas sub-critical nuclear tests were carried out by the United States on 2 July 1997 and on 18 September 1997 at the Nevada Test Site, and whereas the US plans to carry out four more such tests before September 1998,

    B. noting that the US Government has presented the tests as necessary to ensure the safety and reliability of its existing nuclear arsenal, but also noting that critics of the programme claim that the tests also can be used to create new types of warheads as well as to upgrade existing ones,

    C. whereas no international verification exists on whether the tests are in fact sub-critical and therefore in compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT),

    D. whereas the tests may not be against the letter of the CTBT, but still violate the spirit of the treaty and place in jeopardy its entry into force by creating a “crisis of confidence”,

    E. whereas sub-critical tests and new weapons development risk reinforcing India and Pakistan in their refusal to sign the CTBT, thus blocking its entry into force, and also reinforcing opposition to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), especially in these two nations,

    F. noting that at least 15 countries, including Norway, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia and Iran, as well as the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 46 members of the US Congress, have publicly expressed their concern about or opposition to these tests,

    G. whereas all EU Member States signed the CTBT after it was opened for signature in September 1996,

    H. whereas states who have signed the CTBT are bound to “refrain from any action that could defeat its object and purpose”, by definition of the Vienna Convention on Treaties,

    1. Reaffirms its support for the CTBT and its request for early ratification of the treaty, and calls on all Member States to act promptly,

    2. Calls on the US Government to halt the series of sub-critical tests and calls on all governments to refrain from carrying out such tests;

    3. Calls on the US Government to issue an official declaration stating that the tests in no way form part of a new weapons design programme, and that new nuclear weapons design does not form part of US policy,

    4. Calls for increased transparency on-site as well as additional confidence-building measures, in order to allay international concern over possible CTBT violations,

    5. Calls on the Council to adopt a joint action under Article J.3 of the Treaty on European Union, to promote signature and ratification by other states, and to include all necessary assistance to enable other states to comply with the provisions of the treaty, particularly the establishment of an effective global verification regime,

    6. Instructs its President to forward this resolution to the Council, the Commission and the President and Congress of the United States of America.

  • Question and Answer Session at the National Press Club Newsmakers Luncheon with General Lee Butler

    USAF, (ret.), Commander-in-Chief, United States Strategic Air Command (1991-92); Commander-in-Chief, United States Strategic Command (1992-94)

    DOUG HARBRECHT (Moderator. National Press Club president and Washington news editor of Business Week): (Brief audio break) – [Do you think the U.S. should consider using nuclear weapons in] Iraq or in response to any chemical or biological weapon threat?

    GEN. BUTLER: At the risk of reiterating something I just said, I think it’s worth reiterating perhaps in a slightly different context. I had the opportunity to go through this calculus. When I was the director of strategic plans and policy in the 1989 to ’91 time frame, it was my direct responsibility to draw up the strategic objectives of our prospective war in the Persian Gulf, to imagine outcomes and to set war termination objectives.

    At the very heart of that calculus was to imagine the prospect of using nuclear weapons. And I would point out to those of you here who might have read Colin Powell’s memoirs that he goes through this himself in the latter stages of his book, because he was asked to imagine the kinds of targets in the Persian Gulf that might be struck with nuclear weapons. I share his reservations absolutely.

    The first issue, of course, is the one that I posed in my remarks. If we rightfully abhor and condemn the resort to the use of a weapon of mass destruction, how is it we could possibly justify — we, the United States, a democratic society — ourselves steeping to such ends?

    Number two, can you imagine the impact in a part of the world where we worked so assiduously for so many years to build our presence, to build support and credibility, of being the nation that used a nuclear weapon against Arab peoples? Only the second time in history that such a device had been used, and it would be the United States, and it would be in a part of the world where even today those actions raise powerful suspicions.

    Secondly, what would — thirdly, what would have happened to the coalition? How painstakingly we worked to put together a coalition of some 30 nations from very disparate points on the ideological and cultural compass in order to provide the proper underpinnings of the international community for that war. Can you imagine the impact on that coalition if we, the United States, had used a nuclear weapon, even in response to the use of a weapon of mass destruction by the Iraqis? It would have been devastating.

    There’s the question of targets. If you were the target planner for the use of a nuclear weapon in the Persian Gulf, what would be your choice? Surely it would not be the city of Baghdad. Would you hold hundreds of thousands of people accountable for the acts of their leader? Would it be an Iraqi division in the far western reaches of that nation? You might be interested to know the calculation of how many tactical nuclear weapons it requires to bring even one division to its knees when it’s spread over such a vast expanse.

    What would have happened to the fallout from the blast? If you want to do maximum damage, you use a (surface aspirant?). How is it that the fallout patterns would have arrayed themselves beyond the borders of Iraq, perhaps even to the south if the wind had been blowing in that direction?

    The real point of the exercise is that the United States has put itself happily in a position where it has no need to resort to weapons of mass destruction to respond to such provocation. We brought Iraq to its knees conventionally. We could have decimated that country. We could have occupied it as we did Japan and Germany at the end of World War II. We chose not to do that, but it was within our capacity to do so. And if we could do that in 1991, when they had the fourth-strongest army in the world and a significant air force, can you imagine the task today when we’ve reduced all of that by at least two-thirds? It is wrong from every aspect. It is wrong politically. It makes no sense militarily. And morally, in my view, it is indefensible.

    MR. HARBRECHT: General, what happens to an officer — (applause). What happens to an officer who breaks, as you have, from the orthodoxy of our military? Is the military changing in this respect?

    GEN. BUTLER: It is, of course, very difficult and probably presumptuous in the extreme to answer on behalf of something called the military. And so I won’t pretend to do that. But I think that I can speak to it from this regard.

    It has been very gratifying over the last two years to receive countless phone calls and letters from colleagues who were on active duty with me, now retired, or who continue to serve, who support the arguments that I have tried to make, who believe, as I do, that it was near-miraculous that we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust, and that our number one foreign policy and national security priority should be the normalization of relations with the former Soviet Union and to walk back from the abyss that we created by the amassing of nuclear weapons in the tens of thousands.

    And, so, no, I would not pretend to speak for the military. And with regard to what happens, it’s also gratifying to have the comfort and to experience the fact that we live in a country where people can express their views freely. And while some, many, might take exception to them, no one in my experience has yet but to do anything but to applaud the fact that we’re trying to bring this issue back to the forefront of policy discourse in this country.

    MR. HARBRECHT: Do you also believe that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary or counterproductive?

    GEN. BUTLER: I don’t know. I don’t know. There are some historical eras into which I can put myself with some comfort; I’ve got the context right. But they’re really only those eras in which I actively participated. I was in uniform as an officer for 33 years. I understand that era very, very well.

    As an itinerant associate professor of political science, formerly with the Air Force Academy, and an historian, particularly a military historian, I have some understanding of the challenges that were faced by political leaders and military forces in early eras.

    It’s very difficult for me yet to recreate in my own mind the intensity of the period in which that decision was made by the president of the United States. And as I said in my speech, my purpose is not to accuse but to assess. It’s to try to understand the lessons that might be drawn from that. It’s to try and understand the consequences of having dropped atomic devices on Japan.

    At the time and today, we still believe that we spared the lives of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million U.S. and allied soldiers. But at the same time, we took the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. And now we have the opportunity, thank God, to step back, to pause and reflect on that in a different political, military and moral climate. And that’s what I’m trying to do. So I can’t make that judgment, but I certainly can try and draw my own observations.

    MR. HARBRECHT: General, it’s widely believed that Israel not only possesses nuclear weapons but would use them if its survival depended upon them. Is Israel’s reliance on its nuclear weapons in the dangerous Middle East ill-advised?

    GEN. BUTLER: I think that it is a perfect illustration of the short-sightedness that tends to surround this issue of whether or not nations should acquire nuclear capability. What was it that prompted Iraq to try and acquire weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear weapon arsenal of their own? Could it have in any way been tied to the fact that Israel acquired such capability? And what of Syria or Iran? What of Libya?

    These things have causes and they have effects. They’re related. The circumstances in which nuclear weapons capability is created and sustained aren’t static. As a consequence, in my view, it is dangerous in the extreme that in the cauldron of animosities that we call the Middle East, one nation has armed itself, ostensibly, with stockpiles of nuclear weapons, perhaps numbering in the hundreds, and that that inspires other nations to do so. And, of course, that’s not the only regional conflict where we see this perilous confrontation.

    I will tell you what I do think. I cannot imagine any regional quarrel or conflict that is or will be made easier to resolve by the presence of the further introduction of nuclear weapons.

    MR. HARBRECHT: What can be done to persuade an emerging superpower like China to give up nuclear weapons? Would such a decision have to wait for the emergence of democracy in China?

    GEN. BUTLER: There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, but it’s been in the literature for many years, as to why it was that the Chinese acquired nuclear weapons capability. The story goes that it was proposed to Mao and he said, “Why should I do this?” And he was told, “Well, other nations have them.” And his answer purportedly was, “Well, I guess we should have some.”

    If you look at the Chinese nuclear arsenal, it is far from modern. Their forces are not on alert. They’re struggling to bring up its safety and surity characteristics. China has avowed time and again that they are a no-first-use nation and that they are strongly on record in favor of nuclear abolition. I don’t know what it would take to persuade China to abandon their nuclear arsenals, but I am comforted by what they say.

    I believe that the keys to creating a climate in which the Chinas of the world — Great Britain, France, the non-declared states — are willing to join in a serious-minded, forthright and concrete series of commitments and steps to move steadfastly toward the abolition of nuclear weapons is for the United States and Russia to take the lead.

    I believe that we are missing priceless opportunities in what is perhaps a perishable window of opportunity to move forward much more swiftly and boldly in getting our forces off alert, bringing tactical nuclear weapons home from Europe, declaring no-first-use policies, and most importantly, reaching out to our friends in Russia and making the decision that it is time to get on with concrete measures for much more severe cuts in nuclear stockpiles than we’ve been willing to acknowledge to date.

    It is, in my view, a sad commentary on the current state of thinking on this issue that we are comfortable with a goal for reductions that would still have 3,500 operational nuclear weapons on alert 10 years from now. It is a dismal commentary on the current state of thinking that we still believe that distant nuclear arsenals that measure in the hundreds is a low number.

    It is time for the United States to act much more boldly and with stronger leadership with respect to getting on with getting the nuclear era to a close.

    MR. HARBRECHT: General, do you ever feel any guilt for having been so integral a part of building the nuclear machine? Shouldn’t you have spoken up earlier?

    GEN. BUTLER: Well, this isn’t about guilt. This is about understanding. This is about reflection. I talked with Bob McNamara about this subject. He took a lot of heat when he published his recent book, “Vietnam.” And Bob may, in fact, be here today. I told him forthrightly that as a veteran of Vietnam, I was anguished by some of what he said. I felt like that perhaps he hadn’t shown enough guilt.

    And he said to me, “Lee, we were who we were and we were where we were.” He said, “I can’t change any of that.” He said, “But what I can do is to try and think through and make public and help others to understand the judgments and the pressures and the outcomes and how I see them now, not in order to assess blame, but in the hope that future generations of policymakers can read those lessons and not make the same mistakes.” That’s all. I’m trying to do here. (Applause.)

  • The Risks of Nuclear Deterrence: From Superpowers to Rogue Leaders

    National Press Club

    Thank you, and good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Dorene and I are honored by your presence and gratified by your welcome. Although we are now proud residents of Nebraska — note the obligatory display of home team colors — Dorene and I feel very much at home in this city. I see many familiar faces in this audience, which makes the moment all the more special.

    I have two roles to serve this afternoon, both very much akin to the events marking my appearance here just over a year ago. As your speaker, I intend to address two matters that go to the heart of the debate over the role of nuclear weapons: why these artifacts of the cold war continue to hold us in thrall; and the severe penalties and risks entailed by policies of deterrence as practiced in the nuclear age.

    But first, it is my privilege to announce a compelling addition to the roster of distinguished international figures who have joined their voices in calling publicly for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Last year General Goodpaster and I unveiled a list of some 60 retired generals and admirals from a host of nations who declared their strong conviction that the world would be better served by the total elimination of these weapons. Today, at a press conference following my remarks, Senator Alan Cranston and I will present the names of more than one hundred present and former heads of state and other senior civilian leaders who have signed their names to a powerful statement of common concern regarding nuclear weapons and who have endorsed a reasoned path toward abolition.

    The willingness of this extraordinary assembly to speak so publicly and directly to these issues is very much in keeping with what I have experienced since I became engaged in the abolition debate some two years ago. I have met legions of remarkable men and women from every corner of the earth who have labored long and patiently in this cause. Their ranks have now been swelled by tens of millions of citizens of our planet who reject the prospect of living in perpetuity under a nuclear sword of Damocles.

    My purpose in entering the debate was to help legitimize abolition as an alternative worthy of serious and urgent consideration. My premise was that my unique experience in the nuclear weapons arena might help kindle greater antipathy for these horrific devices and the policies which justify their retention by the nuclear weapon states. My purpose this afternoon is to share with you the abiding concern I harbor about the course of the debate. I accepted the press club invitation because I believe this forum is well suited to speak to that concern. In so doing, I intend to render a much more explicit account than I have given to date of the lessons I have drawn from over thirty years of intimate involvement with nuclear weapons.

    Permit me, however, to preface my remarks by postulating that with respect to legitimizing the prospect of abolition, there is much to applaud on the positive side of the ledger. Nuclear issues now compete more strongly for the attention of policy makers and the media that often shapes their interest. Converts are being won on many fronts to the propositions that these issues matter, that nuclear arsenals can and should be sharply reduced, that high alert postures are a dangerous anachronism, that first use policies are an affront to democratic values, and that proliferation of nuclear weapons is a clear and present danger. I am persuaded that in every corner of the planet, the tide of public sentiment is now running strongly in favor of diminishing the role of nuclear weapons. Indeed, I am convinced that most publics are well out in front of their governments in shaking off the grip of the cold war and reaching for opportunities that emerge in its wake.

    Conversely, it is distressingly evident that for many people, nuclear weapons retain an aura of utility, of primacy and of legitimacy that justifies their existence well into the future, in some number, however small. The persistence of this view, which is perfectly reflected in the recently announced modification of U. S. nuclear weapons policy, lies at the core of the concern that moves me so deeply. This abiding faith in nuclear weapons was inspired and is sustained by a catechism instilled over many decades by a priesthood who speak with great assurance and authority. I was for many years among the most avid of these keepers of the faith in nuclear weapons, and for that I make no apology. Like my contemporaries, I was moved by fears and fired by beliefs that date back to the earliest days of the atomic era. We lived through a terror-ridden epoch punctuated by crises whose resolution held hostage the saga of humankind. For us, nuclear weapons were the savior that brought an implacable foe to his knees in 1945 and held another at bay for nearly a half-century. We believed that superior technology brought strategic advantage, that greater numbers meant stronger security, and that the ends of containment justified whatever means were necessary to achieve them.

    These are powerful, deeply rooted beliefs. They cannot and should not be lightly dismissed or discounted. Strong arguments can be made on their behalf. Throughout my professional military career, I shared them, I professed them and I put them into operational practice. And now it is my burden to declare with all of the conviction I can muster that in my judgement they served us extremely ill. They account for the most severe risks and most extravagant costs of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. They intensified and prolonged an already acute ideological animosity. They spawned successive generations of new and more destructive nuclear devices and delivery systems. They gave rise to mammoth bureaucracies with gargantuan appetites and global agendas. They incited primal emotions, spurred zealotry and demagoguery, and set in motion forces of ungovernable scope and power. Most importantly, these enduring beliefs, and the fears that underlie them, perpetuate cold war policies and practices that make no strategic sense. They continue to entail enormous costs and expose all mankind to unconscionable dangers. I find that intolerable. Thus I cannot stay silent. I know too much of these matters, the frailties, the flaws, the failures of policy and practice.

    At the same time, I cannot overstate the difficulty this poses for me. No one who ever entered the nuclear arena left it with a fuller understanding of its complexity nor greater respect for those with whom I served its purposes. I struggle constantly with the task of articulating the evolution of my convictions without denigrating or diminishing the motives and sacrifice of countless colleagues with whom I lived the drama of the cold war. I ask them and you to appreciate that my purpose is not to accuse, but to assess, to understand and to propound the forces that birthed the grotesque excesses and hazards of the nuclear age. For me, that assessment meant first coming to grips with my experience and then coming to terms with my conclusions.

    I knew the moment I entered the nuclear arena I had been thrust into a world beset with tidal forces, towering egos, maddening contradictions, alien constructs and insane risks. Its arcane vocabulary and apocalyptic calculus defied comprehension. Its stage was global and its antagonists locked in a deadly spiral of deepening rivalry. It was in every respect a modern day holy war, a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and darkness. The stakes were national survival, and the weapons of choice were eminently suited to this scale of malevolence.

    The opposing forces each created vast enterprises, each giving rise to a culture of messianic believers infused with a sense of historic mission and schooled in unshakable articles of faith. As my own career progressed, I was immersed in the work of all of these cultures, either directly in those of the western world, or through penetrating study of communist organizations, teachings and practices. My responsibilities ranged from the highly subjective, such as assessing the values and motivation of Soviet leadership, to the critically objective, such as preparing weapons for operational launch. I became steeped in the art of intelligence estimates, the psychology of negotiations, the interplay of bureaucracies and the impulses of industry. I was engaged in the labyrinthian conjecture of the strategist, the exacting routines of the target planner and the demanding skills of the aircrew and the missilier. I have been a party to their history, shared their triumphs and tragedies, witnessed heroic sacrifice and catastrophic failure of both men and machines. And in the end, I came away from it all with profound misgivings.

    Ultimately, as I examined the course of this journey, as the lessons of decades of intimate involvement took greater hold on my intellect, I came to a set of deeply unsettling judgements. That from the earliest days of the nuclear era, the risks and consequences of nuclear war have never been properly weighed by those who brandished it. That the stakes of nuclear war engage not just the survival of the antagonists, but the fate of mankind. That the likely consequences of nuclear war have no politically, militarily or morally acceptable justification. And therefore, that the threat to use nuclear weapons is indefensible.

    These judgements gave rise to an array of inescapable questions. If this be so, what explained the willingness, no, the zeal, of legions of cold warriors, civilian and military, to not just tolerate but to multiply and to perpetuate such risks? By what authority do succeeding generations of leaders in the nuclear weapons states usurp the power to dictate the odds of continued life on our planet? Most urgently, why does such breathtaking audacity persist at a moment when we should stand trembling in the face of our folly and united in our commitment to abolish its most deadly manifestation?

    These are not questions to be left to historians. The answers matter to us now. They go to the heart of present day policies and motivations. They convey lessons with immediate implications for both contemporary and aspiring nuclear states. As I distill them from the experience of three decades in the nuclear arena, these lessons resolve into two fundamental conclusions.

    First, I have no other way to understand the willingness to condone nuclear weapons except to believe they are the natural accomplice of visceral enmity. They thrive in the emotional climate born of utter alienation and isolation. The unbounded wantonness of their effects is a perfect companion to the urge to destroy completely. They play on our deepest fears and pander to our darkest instincts. They corrode our sense of humanity, numb our capacity for moral outrage, and make thinkable the unimaginable. What is anguishingly clear is that these fears and enmities are no respecter of political systems or values. They prey on democracies and totalitarian societies alike, shrinking the norms of civilized behavior and dimming the prospects for escaping the savagery so powerfully imprinted in our genetic code. That should give us great pause as we imagine the task of abolition in a world that gives daily witness to acts of unspeakable barbarism. So should it compound our resolve.

    The evidence to support this conclusion is palpable, but as I said at the outset of these remarks for much of my life I saw it differently. That was a product of both my citizenry and my profession. From the early years of my childhood and through much of my military service I saw the Soviet Union and its allies as a demonic threat, an evil empire bent on global domination. I was commissioned as an officer in the United States Air Force as the cold war was heating to a fever pitch. This was a desperate time that evoked on both sides extreme responses in policy, in technology and in force postures: bloody purges and political inquisitions; covert intelligence schemes that squandered lives and subverted governments; atmospheric testing with little understanding or regard for the long term effects; threats of massive nuclear retaliation to an ill-defined scope of potential provocations; the forced march of inventive genius that ushered in the missile age arm in arm with the capacity for spontaneous, global destruction; reconnaissance aircraft that probed or violated sovereign airspace, producing disastrous encounters; the menacing and perilous practice of airborne alert bombers loaded with nuclear weapons.

    By the early 1960’s, a superpower nuclear arms race was underway that would lead to a ceaseless amassing of destructive capacity, spilling over into the arsenals of other nations. Central Europe became a powder keg, trembling under the shadow of armageddon, hostage to a bizarre strategy that required the prospect of nuclear devastation as the price of alliance. The entire world became a stage for the U. S. – Soviet rivalry. International organizations were paralyzed by its grip. East-West confrontation dominated the nation-state system. Every quarrel and conflict was fraught with potential for global war.

    This was the world that largely defined our lives as American citizens. For those of us who served in the national security arena, the threat was omnipresent, it seemed total, it dictated our professional preparation and career progression, and cost the lives of tens of thousands of men and women, in and out of uniform. Like millions of others, I was caught up in the holy war, inured to its costs and consequences, trusting in the wisdom of succeeding generations of military and civilian leaders. The first requirement of unconditional belief in the efficacy of nuclear weapons was early and perfectly met for us: our homeland was the target of a consuming evil, poised to strike without warning and without mercy.

    What remained for me, as my career took its particular course, was to master the intellectual underpinning of America’s response, the strategic foundation that today still stands as the central precept of the nuclear catechism. Reassessing its pervasive impact on attitudes toward nuclear weapons goes directly to my second conclusion regarding the willingness to tolerate the risks of the nuclear age.

    That also brings me to the focal point of my remarks, to my purpose in coming to this forum. For all of my years as a nuclear strategist, operational commander and public spokesman, I explained, justified and sustained America’s massive nuclear arsenal as a function, a necessity and a consequence of deterrence. Bound up in this singular term, this familiar touchstone of security dating back to antiquity, was the intellectually comforting and deceptively simple justification for taking the most extreme risks and the expenditure of trillions of dollars. It was our shield and by extension our sword. The nuclear priesthood extolled its virtues, and bowed to its demands. Allies yielded grudgingly to its dictates even while decrying its risks and costs. We brandished it at our enemies and presumed they embraced its suicidal corollary of mutual assured destruction. We ignored, discounted or dismissed its flaws and cling still to the belief that it obtains in a world whose security architecture has been wholly transformed.

    But now, I see it differently. Not in some blinding revelation, but at the end of a journey, in an age of deliverance from the consuming tensions of the cold war. Now, with the evidence more clear, the risks more sharply defined and the costs more fully understood, I see deterrence in a very different light. Appropriated from the lexicon of conventional warfare, this simple prescription for adequate military preparedness became in the nuclear age a formula for unmitigated catastrophe. It was premised on a litany of unwarranted assumptions, unprovable assertions and logical contradictions. It suspended rational thinking about the ultimate aim of national security: to ensure the survival of the nation.

    How is it that we subscribed to a strategy that required near perfect understanding of an enemy from whom we were deeply alienated and largely isolated? How could we pretend to understand the motivations and intentions of the Soviet leadership absent any substantive personal association? Why did we imagine a nation that had survived successive invasions and mindnumbing losses would accede to a strategy premised on fear of nuclear war? Deterrence in the cold war setting was fatally flawed at the most fundamental level of human psychology in its projection of western reason through the crazed lens of a paranoid foe. Little wonder that intentions and motives were consistently misread. Little wonder that deterrence was the first victim of a deepening crisis, leaving the antagonists to grope fearfully in a fog of mutual misperception. While we clung to the notion that nuclear war could be reliably deterred, Soviet leaders derived from their historical experience the conviction that such a war might be thrust upon them and if so, must not be lost. Driven by that fear, they took herculean measures to fight and survive no matter the odds or the costs. Deterrence was a dialogue of the blind with the deaf. In the final analysis, it was largely a bargain we in the west made with ourselves.

    Deterrence was flawed equally in that the consequences of its failure were intolerable. While the price of undeterred aggression in the age of uniquely conventional weaponry could be severe, history teaches that nations can survive and even prosper in the aftermath of unconditional defeat. Not so in the nuclear era. Nuclear weapons give no quarter. Their effects transcend time and place, poisoning the earth and deforming its inhabitants for generation upon generation. They leave us wholly without defense, expunge all hope for meaningful survival. They hold in their sway not just the fate of nations, but the very meaning of civilization.

    Deterrence failed completely as a guide in setting rational limits on the size and composition of military forces. To the contrary, its appetite was voracious, its capacity to justify new weapons and larger stocks unrestrained. Deterrence carried the seed, born of an irresolvable internal contradiction, that spurred an insatiable arms race. Nuclear deterrence hinges on the credibility to mount a devastating retaliation under the most extreme conditions of war initiation. Perversely, the redundant and survivable force required to meet this exacting test is readily perceived by a darkly suspicious adversary as capable, even designed, to execute a disarming first strike. Such advantage can never be conceded between nuclear rivals. It must be answered, reduced, nullified. Fears are fanned, the rivalry intensified. New technology is inspired, new systems roll from production lines. The correlation of force begins to shift, and the bar of deterrence ratchets higher, igniting yet another cycle of trepidation, worst case assumptions and ever mounting levels of destructive capability.

    Thus it was that the treacherous axioms of deterrence made seemingly reasonable nuclear weapon stockpiles numbering in the tens of thousands. Despite having witnessed the devastation wrought by two primitive atomic devices, over the ensuing decades the superpowers gorged themselves at the thermonuclear trough. A succession of leaders on both sides of the east-west divide directed a reckless proliferation of nuclear devices, tailored for delivery by a vast array of vehicles to a stupefying array of targets. They nurtured, richly rewarded, even reveled in the industrial base required to support production at such levels.

    I was part of all of that. I was present at the creation of many of these systems, directly responsible for prescribing and justifying the requirements and technology that made them possible. I saw the arms race from the inside, watched as intercontinental ballistic missiles ushered in mutual assured destruction and multiple warhead missiles introduced genuine fear of a nuclear first strike. I participated in the elaboration of basing schemes that bordered on the comical and force levels that in retrospect defied reason. I was responsible for war plans with over 12,000 targets, many struck with repeated nuclear blows, some to the point of complete absurdity. I was a veteran participant in an arena where the most destructive power ever unleashed became the prize in a no holds barred competition among organizations whose principal interest was to enhance rather than constrain its application. And through every corridor, in every impassioned plea, in every fevered debate rang the rallying cry, deterrence, deterrence, deterrence.

    As nuclear weapons and actors multiplied, deterrence took on too many names, too many roles, overreaching an already extreme strategic task. Surely nuclear weapons summoned great caution in superpower relationships. But as their numbers swelled, so mounted the stakes of miscalculation, of a crisis spun out of control. The exorbitant price of nuclear war quickly exceeded the rapidly depreciating value of a tenuous mutual wariness. Invoking deterrence became a cheap rhetorical parlor trick, a verbal sleight of hand. Proponents persist in dressing it up to court changing times and temperaments, hemming and re-hemming to fit shrinking or distorted threats.

    Deterrence is a slippery conceptual slope. It is not stable, nor is it static, its wiles cannot be contained. It is both master and slave. It seduces the scientist yet bends to his creation. It serves the ends of evil as well as those of noble intent. It holds guilty the innocent as well as the culpable. It gives easy semantic cover to nuclear weapons, masking the horrors of employment with siren veils of infallibility. At best it is a gamble no mortal should pretend to make. At worst it invokes death on a scale rivaling the power of the creator.

    Is it any wonder that at the end of my journey I am moved so strongly to retrace its path, to examine more closely the evidence I would or could not see? I hear now the voices long ignored, the warnings muffled by the still lingering animosities of the cold war. I see with painful clarity that from the very beginnings of the nuclear era, the objective scrutiny and searching debate essential to adequate comprehension and responsible oversight of its vast enterprises were foreshortened or foregone. The cold light of dispassionate scrutiny was shuttered in the name of security, doubts dismissed in the name of an acute and unrelenting threat, objections overruled by the incantations of the nuclear priesthood.

    The penalties proved to be severe. Vitally important decisions were routinely taken without adequate understanding, assertions too often prevailed over analysis, requirements took on organizational biases, technological opportunity and corporate profit drove force levels and capability, and political opportunism intruded on calculations of military necessity. Authority and accountability were severed, policy dissociated from planning, and theory invalidated by practice. The narrow concerns of a multitude of powerful interests intruded on the rightful role of key policymakers, constraining their latitude for decision. Many were simply denied access to critical information essential to the proper exercise of their office.

    Over time, planning was increasingly distanced and ultimately disconnected from any sense of scientific or military reality. In the end, the nuclear powers, great and small, created astronomically expensive infrastructures, monolithic bureaucracies and complex processes that defied control or comprehension. Only now are the dimensions, costs and risks of these nuclear nether worlds coming to light. What must now be better-understood are the root causes, the mindsets and the belief systems that brought them into existence. They must be challenged, they must be refuted, but most importantly, they must be let go. The era that gave them credence, accepted their dominion and yielded to their excesses is fast receding.

    But it is not yet over. Sad to say, the cold war lives on in the minds of those who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs, and the enmities born of the nuclear age. They cling to deterrence, clutch its tattered promise to their breast, shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. They are gripped still by its awful willingness not simply to tempt the apocalypse but to prepare its way.

    What better illustration of misplaced faith in nuclear deterrence than the persistent belief that retaliation with nuclear weapons is a legitimate and appropriate response to post-cold war threats posed by weapons of mass destruction. What could possibly justify our resort to the very means we properly abhor and condemn? Who can imagine our joining in shattering the precedent of non-use that has held for over fifty years? How could America’s irreplaceable role as leader of the campaign against nuclear proliferation ever be re-justified? What target would warrant such retaliation? Would we hold an entire society accountable for the decision of a single demented leader? How would the physical effects of the nuclear explosion be contained, not to mention the political and moral consequences? In a singular act we would martyr our enemy, alienate our friends, give comfort to the non-declared nuclear states and impetus to states who seek such weapons covertly. In short, such a response on the part of the United States is inconceivable. It would irretrievably diminish our priceless stature as a nation noble in aspiration and responsible in conduct, even in the face of extreme provocation.

    And as a nation we have no greater responsibility than to bring the nuclear era to a close. Our present policies, plans and postures governing nuclear weapons make us prisoner still to an age of intolerable danger. We cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it. We cannot hold hostage to sovereign gridlock the keys to final deliverance from the nuclear nightmare. We cannot withhold the resources essential to break its grip, to reduce its dangers. We cannot sit in silent acquiescence to the faded homilies of the nuclear priesthood. It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity.

     

  • 20 Mishaps that Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War

    Ever since the two adversaries in the Cold War, U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., realized that their nuclear arsenals were sufficient to do disastrous damage to both countries at short notice, the leaders and military commanders have thought about the possibility of a nuclear war starting without their intention or as a result of a false alarm. Increasingly elaborate accessories have been incorporated in nuclear weapons and their delivery systems to minimize the risk of unauthorized or accidenta launch or detonation. A most innovative action was the establishment of the “hot line” between Washington and Moscow in 1963 to reduce the risk of misunderstanding between the supreme commanders.

    Despite all precautions, the possibility of an inadvertent war due to an unpredicted sequence of events remained as a deadly threat to both countries and to the world. That is the reason I am prepared to spen the rest of my life working for abolition of nuclear weapons.

    One way a war could start is a false alarm via one of the warning systems, followed by an increased level of nuclear forces readiness while the validity of the information was being checked. This action would be detected by the other side, and they would take appropriate action; detection of that response would tend to confirm the original false alarm; and so on to disaster. A similar sequence could result from an accidental nuclear explosion anywhere. The risk of such a sequence developing would be increased if it happened during a period of increased international tension.

    On the American side many “false alarms” and significant accidents have been listed, ranging from trivial to very serious, during the Cold War. Probably many remain unknown to the public and to the research community because of individuals’ desire to avoid blame and maintain the good reputation of their unit or command. No doubt there have been as many mishaps on the Soviet side.

    Working with any new system, false alarms are more likely. The rising moon was misinterpreted as a missile attack during the early days of long-range radar. A fire at a broken gas pipeline was believed to be enemy jamming by laser of a satellite’s infrared sensor when those sensors were first deployed.

    The risks are illustrated by the following selection of mishaps. If the people involved had exercised less caution, or if some unfortunate coincidental event had occurred, escalation to nuclear war can easily be imagined. Details of some of the events differ in different sources: where there have been disagreements, I have chosen to quote those from the carefully researched book “The Limits of Safety” by Scott D. Sagan. Sagan gives references to original sources in all instances.

    1956, November 5: Suez Crisis coincidence
    British and French forces were attacking Egypt at the Suez Canal. The Soviet Government had suggested to U.S. that they combine forces to stop this by a joint military action, and had warned the British and French governments that (non-nuclear) rocket attacks on London and Paris were being considered. That night the U.S. military HQ in Europe received messages that:
    (i) unidentified aircraft were flying over Turkey and the Turkish
    air force was on alert
    (ii) 100 Soviet MIG-15’s were flying over Syria
    (iii) a British Canberra bomber had been shot down over Syria
    (iv) the Russian fleet was moving through the Dardanelles. It is reported that in U.S.A. General Goodpaster himself was concerned that these events might trigger the NATO operations plan for nuclear strikes against U.S.S.R.

    The 4 reports were all shown afterwards to have innocent explanations. They were due, respectively, to:
    (i) a flight of swans
    (ii) a routine air force escort (much smaller than the number reported) for the president of Syria, who was returning from a visit to Moscow
    (iii) the Canberra bomber was forced down by mechanical problems
    (iv) the Russian fleet was engaged in scheduled routine exercises.

    1961, November 24: BMEWS communication failure
    On the night of 24 November, 1961, all communication links went dead between SAC HQ and NORAD, and so cut SAC HQ off from the three Ballistic Missile Early Warning sites (BMEWS) at Thule (Greenland), Clear (Alaska), and Filingdales (England). For General Power at SAC HQ, there were two possible explanations: either enemy action, or the coincidental failure of all the communication systems which had redundant and ostensibly independent routes including commercial telephone circuits. All SAC bases in U.S.A. were therefore alerted and B-52 nuclear bomber crews started their engines, with instructions not to take off without further orders. Radio communication was established with an orbiting B-52 on airborne alert which was near Thule. It contacted the BMEWS station by radio and could report that no attack had taken place.

    The reason for the “coincidental” failure was that the redundant routes for telephone and telegraph between NORAD and SAC HQ all ran through one relay station in Colorado. At that relay station a motor had overheated and caused interruption of all the lines.

    THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS LASTED FOR THE TWO WEEKS 14-28 OCTOBER 1962. MANY DANGEROUS EVENTS TOOK PLACE IN RELATION TO THE CRISIS, SOME OF THEM BECAUSE OF CHANGES MADE TO ENHANCE MILITARY READINESS. ELEVEN HAVE BEEN SELECTED:

    1962, August 23: B-52 Navigation Error
    SAC Chrome Dome airborne alert route included a leg from the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, SW across the Arctic Ocean to Barter Island, Alaska. On 23 August,1962, a B-52 nuclear-armed bomber crew made a navigational error and flew a course 20 deg. too far north. They approached within 300 miles of Soviet airspace near Wrangel island, where there was believed to be an interceptor base with aircraft having an operational radius of 400 miles.

    Because of the risk of repetition of such an error, in this northern area where other checks on navigation are difficult to obtain, it was decided to fly a less provocative route in future. However, the necessary orders had not been given by the time of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, so throughout that crisis the same northern route was being flown 24 hours a day.

    August-October 62: U2 flights into Soviet airspace
    U2 high altitude reconnaissance flights from Alaska occasionally strayed unintentionally into Soviet airspace. One such episode occurred in August 1962. During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 the U2 pilots were ordered not to fly within 100 miles of the Soviet airspace.

    On the night of 26 October, for a reason irrelevant to the crisis, a U2 pilot was ordered to fly a new route, over the north pole, where positional checks on navigation were by sextant only. That night the aurora prevented good sextant readings and the plane strayed over the Chukotski Peninsula. Soviet MIG interceptors took off with orders to shoot down the U2. The pilot contacted his U.S. command post and was ordered to fly due east towards Alaska. He ran out of fuel while still over Siberia. In response to his S.O.S., U.S. F102-A fighters were launched to escort him on his glide towards Alaska, with orders to prevent the MIG¹s from entering U.S. airspace. The U.S. interceptor aircraft were armed with nuclear missiles. These could have been used by any one of the F102-A pilots at his own discretion.

    1962, October 24: Russian satellite explodes
    On 24 October a Russian satellite entered its parking orbit, and shortly afterwards exploded. Sir Bernard Lovell, director of the Jodrell Bank observatory wrote in 1968: “the explosion of a Russian spacecraft in orbit during the Cuban Missile Crisis… led the U.S. to believe that the USSR was launching a massive ICBM attack.” The NORAD Command Post logs of the dates in question remain classified, possibly to conceal the reaction to this event. Its occurrence is recorded, and U.S. space tracking stations were informed on 31 October of debris resulting from breakup of “62 BETA IOTA”.

    1962, October 25: Duluth intruder
    At around midnight on 25 October, a guard at Duluth Sector Direction Center saw a figure climbing the security fence. He shot at it, and activated the “sabotage alarm”. This automatically set off sabotage alarms at all bases in the area. At Volk Field, Wisconsin, the alarm was wrongly wired, and the Klaxon sounded which ordered nuclear-armed F-106A interceptors to take off. The pilots knew there would be no practice alert drills while DEFCON 3 was in force, and they believed World War III had started.

    Immediate communication with Duluth showed there was an error. By this time aircraft were starting down the runway. A car raced from the command center and successfully signalled the aircraft to stop.

    The original intruder was a bear.

    1962, October 26: ICBM Test Launch
    At Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, there was a program of routine ICBM test flights. When DEFCON 3 was ordered all the ICBM’s were fitted with nuclear warheads except one Titan missile that was scheduled for a test launch later that week. That one was launched for its test, without further orders from Washington, at 4 a.m. on 26 October.

    It must be assumed that Russian observers were monitoring U.S. missile activities as closely as U.S. observers were monitoring Russian and Cuban activities. They would have known of the general changeover to nuclear warheads, but not that this was only a test launch.

    1962, October 26: Unannounced Titan missile launch
    During the Cuba Crisis, some radar warning stations that were under construction and near completion were brought into full operation as fast as possible. The planned overlap of coverage was thus not always available.

    A normal test launch of a Titan-II ICBM took place in the afternoon of 26 October, from Florida towards the S. Pacific. It caused temporary concern at Moorestown Radar site until its course could be plotted and showed no predicted impact within the United States. It was not until after this event that the potential for a serious false alarm was realized, and orders were given that radar warning sites must be notified in advance of test launches, and the countdown be relayed to them.

    1962, October 26: Malmstrom Air Force Base
    When DEFCON 2 was declared on 24 October, solid-fuel Minuteman-1 missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base were being prepared for full deployment. The work was accelerated to ready the missiles for operation, without waiting for the normal handover procedures and safety checks. When one silo and the first missile were ready on 26 October no armed guards were available to cover transport from the normal separate storage, so the launch- enabling equipment and codes were all placed in the silo. It was thus physically possible for a single operator to launch a fully armed missile at a SIOP target.

    During the remaining period of the Crisis the several missiles at Malmstrom were repeatedly put on and off alert as errors and defects were found and corrected. Fortunately no combination of errors caused or threatened an unauthorized launch, but in the extreme tension of the period the danger can well be imagined.

    October 1962: NATO Readiness
    It is recorded in British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan¹s diary for 22 October that in order to avoid provocation of U.S.S.R., he and the NATO Supreme Commander, General Lauris Norstad, agreed not to put NATO on alert. When the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered DEFCON 3 Norstad was authorized to use his discretion in complying. Norstad therefore did not order a NATO alert. However, several NATO subordinate commanders did order alerts to DEFCON 3 or equivalent levels of readiness at bases in West Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Britain. This seems to have been largely due to the action of General Truman Landon, CINC U.S. Air Forces Europe, who had already started alert procedures on 17 October in anticipation of a serious crisis over Cuba.

    October 1962: British Alerts
    When U.S. SAC went to DEFCON 2, on 24 October, Bomber Command was carrying out an unrelated readiness exercise. On 26 October Air Marshall Cross, C-in-C Bomber Command, decided to prolong the exercise because of the Cuba crisis, and later increased the alert status of British Nuclear forces so that they could launch within 15 minutes.

    It seems likely that Soviet intelligence would perceive these moves as part of a coordinated plan in preparation for immediate war. They could not be expected to know that neither the British Minister of Defence nor Prime Minister Macmillan had authorized them.

    It is disturbing to note how little was learned from these errors in Europe. McGeorge Bundy wrote in Danger and Survival (New York: Random House 1988) “the risk [of nuclear war] was small, given the prudence and unchallenged final control of the two leaders.”

    1962, October 28: Moorestown false alarm
    Just before 9 a.m. on 28 October, the Moorestown, N.J., radar operators informed national command post that a nuclear attack appeared to be under way. A test tape simulating a missile launch from Cuba was being run, and simultaneously a satellite came over the horizon. Operators became confused and reported by voice line to NORAD HQ that impact was expected 18 miles west of Tampa at 9.02 a.m. The whole of NORAD was alerted, but before irrevocable action had been taken it was reported that no detonation had taken place at the predicted time, and Moorestown operators reported the reason for the false alarm.

    During the incident overlapping radars that should have confirmed or disagreed were not in operation. The radar post had not received routine information of satellite passage because the facility carrying out that task had been given other work for the duration of the Crisis.

    1962, October 28: False warning due to satellite sighting
    At 5.26 p.m. on 28 October, the Laredo radar warning site had just become operational. Operators misidentified a satellite in orbit as two possible missiles over Georgia, and reported by voice line to NORAD HQ. NORAD was unable to identify that the warning came from the new station at Laredo and believed it to be from Moorestown, and therefore more reliable. Moorestown failed to intervene and contradict the false warning. By the time C-in-C NORAD had been informed, no impact had been reported and the warning was “given low credence”.

    END OF CUBA CRISIS EVENTS

    1962 November 2: The Penkovsky False Warning
    In the Fall of 1962 Col. Oleg Penkovsky was working in Russia as a double agent for the (U.S.) CIA. He had been given a code by which to warn the CIA if he was convinced that a Soviet attack on the United States was imminent. He was to call twice, one minute apart, and only blow into the receiver. Further information was then to be left at a “dead drop” in Moscow.

    The prearranged code message was received by the CIA on 2 November, 1962.

    It was not known at CIA that Penkovsky had been arrested on 22 October. Penkovsky knew he was going to be executed. It is not known whether he had told KGB the meaning of the code signal or only how it could be given, nor is it known exactly why or with what authorization KGB staff used it. When another CIA agent checked the dead drop he was arrested.

    1965, November: Power failure and faulty bomb alarms
    Special bomb alarms were installed near military facilities and near cities in U.S.A. so that the locations of nuclear bursts would be transmitted before the expected communication failure. The alarm circuits were set up to display a red signal at command posts the instant that the flash of a nuclear detonation reached the sensor and before the blast could put it out of action. Normally the display would show a green signal, and yellow if the sensor was not operating or was out of communication for any other reason.

    During the commercial power failure in NE United States in November 1965, displays from all the bomb alarms for the area should have shown yellow. In fact two of them from different cities showed red because of circuit errors. The effect was consistent with the power failure being due to nuclear weapon explosions, and the Command Center of the Office of Emergency Planning went on full alert. Apparently the military did not.

    1968, January 21: B-52 crash near Thule
    Communication between NORAD HQ and the BMEWS station at Thule had 3
    elements:
    1. Direct radio communication.
    2. A “bomb alarm” as described above.
    3. Radio communication relayed by a B-52 bomber on airborne alert.

    On 21 January, 1968, fire broke out in the B-52 bomber on airborne alert near Thule. The pilot prepared for an emergency landing at the base. However the situation deteriorated rapidly, and the crew had to bale out. There had been no time to communicate with SAC HQ, and the pilotless plane flew over the Thule base before crashing on the ice 7 miles offshore. Its fuel and the high explosive component of its nuclear weapons exploded, but there was no nuclear detonation.

    At that time, the “one point safe” condition of the nuclear weapons could not be guaranteed, and it is believed that a nuclear explosion could have resulted from accidental detonation of the high explosive trigger. Had there been a nuclear detonation even at 7 miles distant, and certainly if much nearer the base, all three communication methods would have given an indication consistent with a successful nuclear attack on both the base and the B-52 bomber. The bomb alarm would have shown red, and the two other communication paths would have gone dead. It would hardly have been anticipated that the combination could have been caused by accident, particularly as the map of the routes for B-52 airborne alert flights approved by the president showed no flight near to Thule. The route had apparently been changed without informing the White House.

    October 73: False alarm during Middle East crisis
    On 24 October, 1973, when the UN-sponsored ceasefire intended to end the Arab-Israeli war was in force, further fighting started between Egyptian and Israeli troops in the Sinai desert. U.S. intelligence reports and other sources suggested that U.S.S.R. was planning to intervene to protect the Egyptians. President Nixon was in the throes of the Watergate episode and not available for a conference, so Kissinger and other U.S. officials ordered DEFCON 3. The consequent movements of aircraft and troops were of course observed by Soviet intelligence. The purpose of the alert was not to prepare for war, but to warn U.S.S.R. not to intervene in Sinai. However, if the following accident had not been promptly corrected then the Soviet command might have made a more dangerous interpretation.

    On 25 October, while DEFCON 3 was in force, mechanics were repairing one of the Klaxons at Kinchloe Air Force Base, Michigan, and accidentally activated the whole base alarm system. B-52 crews rushed to their aircraft and started the engines. The duty officer recognized that the alarm was false, and recalled the crews before any took off.

    1979 November 9: Computer Exercise Tape
    At 8.50 a.m. on 9 November, 1979, duty officers at 4 command centres (NORAD HQ, SAC Command Post, the Pentagon National Military Command Center, and the Alternate National Military Command Center) all saw on their displays a pattern showing a large number of Soviet missiles in a full-scale attack on U.S.A. During the next 6 minutes emergency preparations for retaliation were made. A number of Air Force planes were launched, including the president’s National Emergency Airborne Command Post, though without the president! The president had not been informed, perhaps because he could not be found.

    No attempt was made to use the hot line either to ascertain the Soviet intentions or to tell the Russians the reason for the U.S. actions. This seems to me to have been culpable negligence. The whole purpose of the “Hot Line” was to prevent exactly the type of disaster that was threatening at that moment.

    With commendable speed, NORAD was able to contact PAVE PAWS early warning radar and learn that no missiles had been reported. Also, the sensors on satellites were functioning that day and had detected no missiles. In only 6 minutes the threat assessment conference was terminated.

    The reason for the false alarm was an exercise tape running on the computer system. U.S. Senator Charles Percy happened to be in NORAD HQ at the time and is reported to have said there was absolute panic. A question was asked in Congress. The General Accounting Office conducted an investigation, and an off-site testing facility was constructed so that test tapes did not in future have to be run on a system that could possibly be in military operation.

    June 80: Faulty Computer Chip
    The warning displays at the Command Centers mentioned in the last episode included windows that normally showed

    0000 ICBMs detected 0000 SLBMs detected

    At 2.25 a.m. on 3 June, 1979, these displays started showing various numbers of missiles detected, represented by 2’s in place of one or more 0’s. Preparations for retaliation were instituted, including nuclear bomber crews starting their engines, launch of Pacific Command’s Airborne Command Post, and readying of Minuteman missiles for launch. It was not difficult to assess that this was a false alarm because the patterns of numbers displayed were not rational.

    While the cause of that false alarm was still being investigated 3 days later, the same thing happened and again preparations were made for retaliation.

    The cause was a single faulty chip that was failing in random fashion. The basic design of the system was faulty, allowing this single failure to cause a deceptive display at several command posts.

    This selection represents only a fraction of the false alarms that have been reported on the American side. Many probably remain unreported, or are hidden in records that remain classified. There are likely to have been as many on the Soviet side which are even more difficult to access.

    The extreme boredom and isolation of missile launch crews on duty must contribute to occasional bizarre behaviour. An example is reported by Lloyd J.Dumas in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists vol.36, #9, p.15 (1980) quoting Air Force Magazine of 17 Nov.71. As a practical joke, a silo crew recorded a launch message and played it when their relief came on duty. The new crew heard with consternation what appeared to be a valid launch message. They would not of course have been able to effect an actual launch under normal conditions, without proper confirmation from outside the silo.

    COMMENT AND NOTE ON PROBABILITY

    The probability of actual progression to nuclear war on any one of the occasions listed may have been small, due to planned “failsafe” features in the warning and launch systems, and to responsible action by those in the chain of command when the failsafe features had failed. However, the accumulation of small probabilities of disaster from a long sequence of risks adds up to serious danger.

    There is no way of telling what the actual level of risk was in these mishaps but if the chance of disaster in every one of the 20 incidents had been only 1 in 100, it is a mathematical fact that the chance of surviving all 20 would have been 82%, i.e. about the same as the chance of surviving a single pull of the trigger at Russian roulette played \ with a 6-shooter. With a similar series of mishaps on the Soviet side: another pull of the trigger. If the risk in some of the events had been as high as 1 in 10, then the chance of surviving just seven such events would have been less than 50:50.

    The following incident is added to illustrate that even now, when the Cold War has been over for 8 years, errors can still cause concern. Some have said this incident brought the world very close to an accidental nuclear war. That is debatable, but there are still 30,000 nuclear weapons deployed, so grave danger would exist if two nuclear weapons states should get into a hostile adversarial status again.

    January 95: Norwegian Meteorological Missile
    On 25 January, 1995, the Russian early warning radars detected an unexpected missile launch near Spitzbergen. The estimated flight time to Moscow was 5 minutes. The Russian President, the Defence Minister and the Chief of Staff were informed. The early warning and the control and command systems switched to combat mode. Within 5 minutes, the radars determined that the missile’s impact point would be outside the Russian borders.

    The missile was carrying instruments for scientific measurements. On 16 January Norway had notified 35 countries including Russia that the launch was planned. Information had apparently reached the Russian Defense Ministry, but failed to reach the on-duty personnel of the early warning system.

    Principal Sources

    Sagan, Scott D.: The Limits of Safety (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
    University Press, 1993).
    Peace Research Reviews, vol.IX, 4, 5 (1984); vol.X, 3,4(1986) (Dundas,
    ON.: Peace Research Institute, Dundas).
    Calder, Nigel: Nuclear Nightmares (London: British Broadcasting
    Corporation, 1979).
    Britten, Stewart: The Invisible Event (London: Menard Press, 1983)

    Acronyms

    BMEWS Ballistic Missile Early Warning Site
    CIA Central Intelligence Agency
    CINC Commander in Chief
    DEFCON Defense Readiness Condition
    (DEFCON 5 is the peacetime state;
    DEFCON 1 is maximum war readiness)
    HQ Headquarters
    ICBM Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (land based)
    KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopaznosti
    (Soviet Secret Police and Intelligence)
    NORAD North American Air Defense Command
    PAVE PAWS Precision Acquisition of Vehicle Entry Phased-Array Warning System
    SAC Strategic Air Command
    SIOP Single Integrated Operational Plan
    SLBM Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile

  • Nuclear Weapons: The Global Dialogue

    Nuclear weapons, which might more appropriately be called “instruments of genocide,” are the ultimate weapons of mass annihilation. Global dialogue, on the other hand, is an engaged series of communications that seeks a deeper understanding and reconciliation of differences as well as peaceful solutions to conflicts affecting the international community. Nuclear weapons necessitate global dialogue.

    Throughout the Nuclear Age, most of the exchange on nuclear weapons within the nuclear weapons states has been insular, technical and restricted to an elite group of political, military, industrial and academic participants–hardly a dialogue. It has been restricted to what kind of nuclear weapons to create, how to deploy them, how they should be developed and tested, and how many are needed. This non-dialogue has taken place within national security establishments, generally behind closed doors, with little public involvement. The result has been the development of tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, reliance on untestable theories of deterrence, and security policies with the crudeness and finality of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).

    Even in democratic societies such as the U.S., Britain and France, the public has never been offered a significant role in decisions on nuclear policy. The public has managed to intrude itself in the discourse only in extreme circumstances. One such circumstance occurred from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s when the public, with leadership from men like Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer, became justifiably worried about the health effects of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Public protests of atmospheric testing in the U.S. and elsewhere led to the signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting the testing of nuclear weapons in the oceans, the atmosphere and outer space.

    In the U.S., the public again entered the discourse on nuclear weapons issues in the early 1980s when Cold War rhetoric reached alarming levels. Ronald Reagan was referring to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” and dialogue between the leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union had all but vanished. Large numbers of people became active in a campaign to freeze nuclear arsenals as a first step towards nuclear disarmament. Civic and religious organizations throughout the nation added their voices in support of the freeze. On June 12, 1982 some one million people gathered in New York in support of the nuclear freeze movement.

    In the mid-1980s, when the nuclear freeze movement was active in the United States, Europeans were protesting the deployment of U.S. cruise and Pershing missiles on their territories. People throughout Europe feared that with the emplacement of these nuclear-armed missiles on their soil, Europe would become the primary battleground for a nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union.

    Each of these periods of public involvement opened the door to dialogue between the U.S. and Soviet governments on arms control issues. Unfortunately, the governments chose to take only small steps rather than significant strides. They ceased atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, but continued their testing underground. In doing so, they immediately reduced the environmental threat to humanity, but they failed to take the more important step of ending the nuclear arms race. The nuclear freeze movement led to a resumption of dialogue between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev, a leader with surprising vision, had become the head of the USSR. He and Ronald Reagan almost agreed to the elimination of their nuclear arsenals at a face to face meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986. For a few hours the two leaders, without their national security subordinates, actually engaged in a serious dialogue on eliminating their nuclear weapons. In the end, they were unable to reach an accord due to President Reagan’s commitment to building a missile defense system. A few years later, however, they began the process of strategic arms reductions. The U.S. and USSR were also able to agree to the elimination of all intermediate-range nuclear missiles, leading to the removal of U.S. cruise and Pershing missiles from Europe.

    Among governments in the international community, a dialogue on nuclear weapons began almost immediately after the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S. at the end of World War II. The very first resolution of the United Nations in January 1946 called for the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission with the task of eliminating nuclear weapons from national arsenals. Early efforts to achieve the international control of nuclear weapons at the United Nations failed, however, and the U.S. began atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific in mid-1946. Three years later the USSR began testing its own nuclear weapons.

    In 1968 the international community reached agreement on a treaty to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This agreement defined two classes of states, those with nuclear weapons prior to January 1, 1967, and all other states. In effect, this treaty divided the world into nuclear “haves” (U.S., USSR, UK, France and China), and nuclear “have-nots” (all other countries). It effectively established a system of nuclear apartheid. In Article VI of this treaty, the nuclear weapons states promised the other states that they would proceed with good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament. Today, 30 years later, many non-nuclear weapons states rightfully question the good faith of the nuclear weapons states.

    In 1995 the dialogue on non-proliferation and disarmament continued when the parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) held a review and extension conference. At this conference, the nuclear weapons states sought an indefinite extension of the treaty, and brought much pressure to bear on non-nuclear weapons states to achieve this goal. A number of the non-nuclear weapons states argued for extensions for periods of time (such as 5 to 25 years) with renewals contingent upon progress by the nuclear weapons states in keeping their Article VI promises. In the end, the nuclear weapons states prevailed and the treaty was extended indefinitely.

    Certain non-binding commitments, though, strongly advocated by the non-nuclear weapons states, were agreed to by the nuclear weapons states. These were: adoption of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996, undertaking negotiations for a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, and the promise to engage in the “determined pursuit… of systematic and progressive efforts” to achieve nuclear disarmament. A CTBT was adopted in 1996, but negotiations have yet to begin on a fissile material cut-off. The “determined pursuit… of systematic and progressive” efforts by the nuclear weapons states to achieve nuclear disarmament is not apparent.

    There are encouraging developments of more recent public involvement in the global dialogue on nuclear weapons. In the mid-1990s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) came to the NPT Review and Extension Conference and lobbied for a commitment to the elimination of nuclear arsenals. When their lobbying of the nuclear weapons states fell largely on deaf ears, these NGOs prepared and adopted the Abolition 2000 Statement, which calls for negotiating a treaty by the year 2000 for the phased elimination of nuclear weapons. The goal of these NGOs was to enter the 21st century with such a treaty in place. These NGOs and others formed themselves into a global network to eliminate nuclear weapons, which is called Abolition 2000. Organizations in the network have attempted to enter into a dialogue with states on the issue of abolishing nuclear arsenals.

    Another major citizen activity that brought the public into the global dialogue on nuclear weapons was the World Court Project. This project sought a decision from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. Over 600 NGOs lobbied at the United Nations and around the world in support of taking this matter to the ICJ. They succeeded in getting both the World Health Organization and the UN General Assembly to ask the Court for an advisory opinion on the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

    Oral hearings at the Court took place in October and November 1995. The nuclear weapons states and their NATO allies argued that the Court should not issue an opinion but, if it did, it should rule that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be legal under certain circumstances. Nearly all of the other states that came before the Court argued that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be illegal under international law under any circumstances.

    On July 8, 1996 the Court issued its opinion. It found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be generally illegal. Based upon the facts before it and the current state of international law, however, the Court was unable to conclude whether or not the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be legal or illegal in an extreme circumstance of self-defense in which the very survival of a state would be at stake. The Court also said that any threat or use of nuclear weapons that violated international humanitarian law would be illegal. Thus, even in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, when its very survival was at stake, a state would still have to use nuclear weapons in such a way as not to injure or kill civilians and not to cause unnecessary suffering to combatants. Because of the nature of nuclear weapons (instruments of genocide) this would not be possible.

    The Court concluded its opinion by stating: “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.” The nuclear weapons states have thus far largely ignored this obligation. The UN General Assembly has responded by referring to this obligation in annual resolutions calling upon “all States immediately to fulfill that obligation by commencing multilateral negotiations … leading to an early conclusion of a nuclear weapons convention prohibiting the development, production, testing, deployment, stockpiling, transfer, threat or use of nuclear weapons and providing for their elimination.” These resolutions have been adopted by the UN general Assembly in 1996 and 1997.

    Currently, many prominent voices are being heard in a decidedly one-sided attempt at global dialogue. These include distinguished international personalities–including U.S. General Lee Butler, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, British Field Marshall Lord Carver, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, and Nobel Peace Laureate Joseph Rotblat–who were called together by the Australian government in the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. This commission made a strong plea for the elimination of nuclear arsenals in their 1996 report. They stated, “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used–accidentally or by decision–defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.”

    Some 60 former generals and admirals from throughout the world, also joined the call for the abolition of nuclear weapons in late 1996. The generals and admirals argued, “We believe… that business as usual is not an acceptable way for the world to proceed in nuclear matters. It is our deep conviction that the following is urgently needed and must be undertaken now:

    “First, present and planned stockpiles of nuclear weapons are exceedingly large and should now be greatly cut back;

    “Second, remaining nuclear weapons should be gradually and transparently taken off alert, and their readiness substantially reduced both in nuclear weapons states and in de facto nuclear weapons states;

    “Third, long-term international nuclear policy must be based on the declared principle of continuous, complete and irrevocable elimination of nuclear weapons.”

    In early 1998 over 100 international civilian leaders, including some 50 current or past heads of state or heads of government, also joined in the call for eliminating nuclear arsenals. These civilian leaders argued that the following six steps should be taken immediately:

    1. Remove nuclear weapons from alert status, separate them from their delivery vehicles, and place them in secure national storage.

    2. Halt production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons.

    3. End nuclear testing, pending entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

    4. Launch immediate U.S./Russian negotiations toward further, deep reductions of their nuclear arsenals, irrespective of START II ratification.

    5. Unequivocal commitment by the other declared and undeclared nuclear weapon states to join the reduction process on a proportional basis as the U.S. and Russia approach their arsenal levels, within an international system of inspection, verification, and safeguards.

    6. Develop a plan for eventual implementation, achievement and enforcement of the distant but final goal of elimination.

    Nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998 impacted the global dialogue, underscoring the Indian position that they will live in a world with no nuclear weapons, but not in a world of nuclear apartheid. It reflects the failure of the global dialogue that states as poor as India and Pakistan would find it necessary to devote any of their resources to nuclear weapons when so many of their people are without adequate food, shelter, education, and health care.

    Over the years, religious organizations have from time to time spoken out on nuclear weapons issues. Some 75 U.S. Catholic Bishops associated with Pax Christi USA issued an important statement in June 1998 in which they challenged the theory of deterrence. Their statement concluded, “[T]he time has come for concrete action for nuclear disarmament. On the eve of the Third Millennium may our world rid itself of these terrible weapons of mass destruction and the constant threat they pose. We cannot delay any longer. Nuclear deterrence as a national policy must be condemned as morally abhorrent because it is the excuse and justification for the continued possession and further development of these horrendous weapons. We urge all to join in taking up the challenge to begin the effort to eliminate nuclear weapons now, rather than relying on them indefinitely.”

    In June 1998, eight middle power nations, referring to themselves as the New Agenda Coalition (Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden), called for entering the new millennium with a commitment in place to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. In important respects, the call of the New Agenda Coalition echoed that of Abolition 2000. “The international community must not enter the third millennium,” the eight nation declaration asserted, “with the prospect that the maintenance of these weapons will be considered legitimate for the indefinite future, when the present juncture provides a unique opportunity to eradicate and prohibit them for all time. We therefore call on the Governments of each of the nuclear-weapons States and the three nuclear-weapons-capable States to commit themselves unequivocally to the elimination of their respective nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons capability and to agree to start work immediately on the practical steps and negotiations required for its achievement.”

    While the chorus of voices seeking to eliminate nuclear weapons is growing and includes many significant leaders, a real dialogue is not yet occurring. The nuclear weapons states are not taking seriously the calls for abolition, and they are not responding to these calls. For the most part, the acts of the nuclear weapons states constitute a continuation of the status quo. By the behavior of the nuclear weapons states, including their lack of dialogue, one would think that the Cold War had not ended nearly ten years ago.

    We appear to be in a dialogue of the deaf. The people speak, but their voices are still weak. The political leaders and national security establishments of the nuclear weapons states do not respond. Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin have been practically moribund with regard to their own nuclear dialogue. By their work to extend the NPT indefinitely and to achieve a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, they have, arguably, only sought to perpetuate nuclear apartheid. They also pushed back the date for completing the START 2 nuclear arms reductions from January 1, 2003 to December 31, 2007.

    Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin certainly have not moved decisively toward eliminating the nuclear threat to humanity or reducing their own arsenals. I believe that they will be judged harshly in the future for missing this historic opportunity. It is unfortunate that they are now being judged harshly for their respective addictions rather than for their abdication of responsibility on this issue of greatest importance to humanity’s future.

    Dialogue is a characteristic of a healthy society. People must speak and listen to each other. Without dialogue, democracy fails. Without dialogue, needs go unmet and preventable disasters occur. In a global society, with technologies as powerful as nuclear weapons, dialogue is essential if we are to prevent major catastrophes.

    We can learn from the history of the Nuclear Age that when enough people speak with a strong and unified voice the political leaders will respond. However, if the people do not speak, their political leaders will be unlikely to alter the status quo by themselves. This is one of the great tragedies of our time. Our political leaders have led by following. This places additional responsibility on people everywhere. More and more people must again make their voices heard on nuclear disarmament. They must demand an end to secrecy and elitism with regard to decisions on nuclear armaments. But most of all, they must demand an end to the nuclear weapons era. They must demand negotiations on the elimination of nuclear armaments, and the conclusion of a treaty to complete this process.

    The future of humanity and much of life remains in jeopardy of annihilation by nuclear arsenals. The promises of the nuclear weapons states for good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament remain to be fulfilled. The people of the world, and particularly the people of the nuclear weapons states, must demand that the promise of Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty for good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament, be kept.

    There are hopeful signs. The growth of Abolition 2000 to over 1,100 organizations is a sign of hope. In Japan, in only three months, over 13 million people signed the Abolition 2000 International Petition calling for ending the nuclear threat, signing a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, and reallocating resources to meet human needs. Abolition 2000’s goal of achieving an international treaty on nuclear disarmament by the year 2000 has now been echoed by the eight nations of the New Agenda Coalition. It is a reasonable goal. It provides an immediate focus for a global dialogue on nuclear disarmament. The missing actors in this dialogue are the leaders of the nuclear weapons states. The people must now lead them to the negotiating table.

     

  • Ending the Nuclear Weapons Era

    The Nuclear Age

    The Nuclear Age began on a quiet stretch of desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Robert Oppenheimer, a principal scientist in the effort to create the atomic bomb, is reported to have recalled this line from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” Just three weeks after the first test, a second atomic bomb was exploded, this time over the city of Hiroshima. On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became death. Three days later, on August 9, 1945, Nagasaki became death. Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists were, indeed, shatterers of worlds.

    The Nuclear Age was conceived in fear and born with destructive impulse. The atom bomb was developed to protect its creators; it was used to destroy their enemies. It remains to be seen whether it will also destroy its creators. For the first time in history, humankind had created a tool powerful enough to destroy itself. Thus, we should be sobered by our own invention, and warned by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But as a species we seem to be neither sufficiently sobered nor warned.

    In the name of national security, a mad race to develop nuclear arsenals took place between the United States and the former Soviet Union. It drained the treasuries of these countries, and cast a dark shadow on the souls of their inhabitants. With scientific genius, these so-called superpowers (and ethical weaklings) improved the power and efficiency of their nuclear devices. Their leaders believed that national security justified threatening to kill hundreds of millions of innocent people that were called “the enemy.”

    On each side, the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction was pursued with intensity of purpose. This is the atmosphere into which most of the world’s people now living have been born and raised. This is the Nuclear Age.

    Einstein warned that “the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” How are we to respond? How are we to change our thinking? How are we to avoid the catastrophes that lurk not only in the shadows of the Nuclear Age, but in our Congresses, our Parliaments, our Diets, our Dumas, our very hearts?

    The Nuclear Age was born from the destruction of World War II. The atomic bombs were the final exclamation points on a world crazed with killing. From this same frenzy and turmoil of war came other creations more hopeful. From the ashes of World War II came the United Nations, an organization dedicated to preventing the “scourge of war,” which twice in the lifetimes of the U.N.’s creators had brought “untold sorrow to mankind.” The United Nations was viewed as a place where representatives of nations could gather to resolve the world’s problems with civility rather than bombs. On occasion, it has succeeded in dramatic and more subtle ways, but on many other occasions it has failed to prevent wars from erupting.

    It is a great irony of history that in the three-day period between the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, representatives of the U.S., U.K., USSR and France met in London to sign the treaty establishing the International Military Tribunal to hold Nazi leaders accountable for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. At this Tribunal held in Nuremberg and at other international tribunals, the principle of individual accountability was upheld against the leaders of the defeated Axis powers. The concept of individual accountability under international law was given broad support by the United Nations General Assembly, but it has taken root in the succeeding half century far more slowly than its dangerous sibling, the bomb.

    In the Nuclear Age, there has been a fearful acceleration of the struggle between the forces of violence and the forces of reason, between brutality and civility, that have been woven through human history. But the tools have changed as have the stakes of the outcome. In the Nuclear Age, the most awesome tools of violence, nuclear weapons, threaten the continuation of our species. The forces of reason include a place of global dialogue, the United Nations, and the concept that all individuals, even national leaders, must be held accountable for acts constituting crimes under international law. The struggle continues. The outcome remains uncertain.

    The Past Decade

    The world has changed dramatically since the mid-1980s. As 1985 began, the nuclear arms race was at its zenith. The U.S. under President Reagan was pressing ahead with development of Star Wars, a space-based missile defense system. It appeared that the U.S. and USSR were on the verge of entering an even more dangerous chapter of the nuclear arms race in which costly new defensive systems would stimulate the deployment of even more lethal offensive systems. The nuclear weapons states seemed fully committed to pursuing their nuclear weapons programs no matter what the cost.

    In the midst of those dark days, a bright light of sanity appeared. Some, like Helen Caldicott, have described it as a miracle. Mikhail Gorbachev, the new leader of the Communist Party of the USSR, declared a moratorium on all nuclear tests on August 6, 1985, the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. He invited the U.S. to join in the moratorium, but the U.S. continued to test.

    The year 1985 ended with the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Accepting the award for IPPNW, its

    co-founder, Dr. Bernard Lown, stated, “Combatting the nuclear threat has been our exclusive preoccupation, since we are dedicated to the proposition that to insure the conditions of life, we must prevent the conditions of death. Ultimately, we believe people must come to terms with the fact that the struggle is not between different national destinies, between opposing ideologies, but rather between catastrophe and survival. All nations share a linked destiny; nuclear weapons are the shared enemy.”

    Early in 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev called for the abolition of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. His dramatic proposal was not met with particular interest by the other nuclear weapons states.

    In the Spring of 1986 an accident occurred at Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which spewed some 50 million curies of radiation into the environment. The Chernobyl accident demonstrated an often overlooked facet of the Nuclear Age: it is not only our warlike technologies that threaten humanity; our so-called peaceful technologies can also cause devastation to life and property.

    In the Fall of 1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev held a summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two presidents seriously discussed the possibility of abolishing nuclear weapons, but the talks ultimately failed due to Reagan’s refusal to abandon his plans to develop a space-based missile defense system. The utterly impractical plan to provide a shield against missile attack prevented agreement on creating a nuclear weapons free world. The nuclear arms race between the U.S. and USSR continued, but with less intensity. Gorbachev had challenged the West to end the dangerous nuclear arms race, and there was growing pressure in the West to respond.

    In 1987 the U.S. and USSR entered into an agreement to establish Nuclear Risk Reduction Centers, providing a direct communications link that would be used to exchange information on ballistic missile tests and other matters. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 1987, eliminating all land-based missiles held by the two countries with ranges between 300 and 3,400 miles. For the first time in the Nuclear Age an entire class of nuclear weapons was eliminated. This Treaty entered into force on June 1, 1988.

    By Fall 1990 the last Pershing II missiles were removed from Germany. By mid-1991 the new American President George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), providing for the elimination of almost 50 percent of the strategic nuclear warheads carried by ballistic missiles. In 1991 both Bush and Gorbachev were making promises of further unilateral reductions in their nuclear arsenals. Bush announced the cancellation of controversial nuclear weapons programs, and the withdrawal of all remaining army and navy tactical nuclear weapons worldwide. Gorbachev announced the elimination or reduction of a range of tactical nuclear weapons on land, sea and air, and promised to exceed the START I requirements by reducing the number of Soviet strategic warheads to 5,000 within seven years. He also initiated a new moratorium on nuclear testing.

    While nuclear arms negotiations were proceeding, a sea change in international politics was occurring. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. The Soviet Union was disintegrating, and would cease to exist by Christmas 1991 when Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR, ending nearly 75 years of communist rule. The nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union ended up in the control of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. It would be necessary to reach agreements with Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus with regard to control of the nuclear warheads left on their territories. All subsequently agreed to transfer their nuclear arsenals to Russia and join the NPT as non-nuclear weapons states.

    In 1992 George Bush and Boris Yeltsin reached an agreement on a second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II), this one calling for a reduction by each side to 3,000-3,500 strategic nuclear warheads by the year 2003. Bush stated, “The nuclear nightmare recedes more and more.” Yeltsin, addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress said that nuclear weapons and the Cold War “turned out to be obsolete and unnecessary to mankind, and it is now simply a matter of calculating the best way and the best time schedule for destroying them and getting rid of them.”

    Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference

    Despite these achievements, ridding the world of nuclear weapons has proven to be more difficult than President Yeltsin suggested. Three major events that occurred in 1995 demonstrate the problems involved. The first of these major events was the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review and Extension Conference, which was held in April and May at the United Nations in New York. This Conference was called for in the 1970 Treaty to decide whether the Treaty should be extended indefinitely or for a fixed period or periods. Four of the five declared nuclear weapons states (U.S., U.K., France, and Russia), argued for indefinite extension of the Treaty. With indefinite extension, other states would remain obligated indefinitely not to develop nuclear arsenals, while the nuclear weapons states would continue their special status of possessing nuclear weapons. The U.S. lobbied particularly hard for this, beginning its lobbying efforts nearly two years in advance of the Conference. The fifth declared nuclear weapons state, China, adopted a more neutral posture that was more conciliatory to non-nuclear weapons states. China indicated its willingness to eliminate its nuclear arsenal, contingent upon all other nuclear weapons states doing so.

    In advance of the Conference, a number of citizen action groups, including the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, lobbied for extension of the Treaty for a series of fixed periods that would be tied to a commitment by the nuclear weapons states to the total elimination of their nuclear weapons within a time-bound framework. We argued that the nuclear weapons states had promised in the NPT to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The Treaty had entered into force in 1970, but during the following 25-year period the nuclear weapons states had increased rather than decreased the size of their nuclear arsenals, as well as substantially improving them qualitatively. Therefore, an indefinite extension of the Treaty would be the equivalent to giving a blank check to states that had not fulfilled their past promises.1

    A group of non-aligned countries held out against an indefinite extension of the Treaty, but in the end the nuclear weapons states prevailed and the Treaty was extended indefinitely. However, the price for achieving this was the adoption of a set of Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament. Among these were:

    “(a) The completion by the Conference on Disarmament of the negotiations on a universal and internationally and effectively verifiable Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty no later than 1996. Pending the entry into force of a Comprehensive-Test-Ban Treaty, the nuclear-weapon States should exercise utmost restraint;

    “(b) The immediate commencement and early conclusion of negotiations on a non-discriminatory and universally applicable convention banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices in accordance with the statement of the Special Coordinator of the Conference on Disarmament and the mandate contained therein;

    “(c) The determined pursuit by the nuclear-weapon States of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons, and by all States of general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”2

    These commitments were non-binding, but they set clear standards by which the behavior of the nuclear weapons states could be measured. Yet, within days of making these commitments, the Chinese conducted a nuclear weapons test, and just over a month later French President Jacques Chirac announced that the French would conduct a series of eight nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific.

    French Testing

    French testing was the second of the major events in 1995 related to the struggle to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Despite protests from throughout the world and in France, where over 60 percent of the population opposed the tests, the French conducted six nuclear weapons tests on the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa. The most important lesson to be drawn from the French testing is that one leader of a nuclear weapons state can set his will against the people of the world, including his own people. On this occasion, Jacques Chirac unilaterally led the French government in a series of nuclear tests. In the future, a leader of a nuclear weapons state may decide, against the will of the people, to use nuclear weapons as a means of attack. This is a reality of the Nuclear Age. The decision to use nuclear weapons is not subject to a democratic process. The weapons themselves are an obscene concentration of power that undermine democracy.

    French testing also showed the extent of opposition to nuclear weapons throughout the world. Protests came not only from citizens groups, but from many governments. As a direct result of their anger over French testing, the Australian government established the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. In announcing the formation of the Commission, the then Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, said, “Some years ago a commission of this type would have been a theoretical exercise. But the end of the Cold War means that we can seriously envisage a concrete program to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”3

    For the first time a country in the Western alliance was taking steps at the government level to promote the abolition of nuclear weapons. The Canberra Commission, composed of 17 eminent government leaders, scientists, disarmament experts, and military strategists from throughout the world, held its first of four meetings in January 1996. The Commission’s members included British Field Marshal Michael Carver, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard.

    The Commission released its report on August 14, 1996. It found “that immediate and determined efforts need to be made to rid the world of nuclear weapons and the threat they pose to it.” The Report continued, “The proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained in perpetuity and never used defies credibility. The only complete defense is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.” The Committee called for an unequivocal commitment by the nuclear weapons states to a nuclear weapons free world and the following immediate steps:

    • Take nuclear forces off alert
    • Remove warheads from delivery vehicles
    • End deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons
    • End nuclear testing
    • Initiate negotiations to further reduce United States and Russian nuclear arsenals

    Achieve agreement amongst the nuclear weapons states of reciprocal no first use undertakings, and of a non-use undertaking by them in relation to the non-nuclear weapon states. 4

    World Court Opinion on the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons

    The third event in 1995 related to ridding the world of nuclear weapons was the oral arguments at the International Court of Justice in The Hague on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. At these hearings, which were initiated at the request of the World Health Organization and the United Nations General Assembly, the nuclear weapons states argued that the threat or use of nuclear weapons was a political rather than a legal question and, therefore, the Court should not issue an advisory opinion. The nuclear weapons states went further, and argued that if the Court did decide to issue an advisory opinion it should find that the weapons themselves were not inherently illegal. The majority of states presenting positions to the Court argued that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law.

    The Court issued its advisory opinion on July 8, 1996.5 It found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons was generally illegal under international law and that the nuclear weapons states were obligated to complete negotiations on nuclear disarmament. The Court was unable to reach a conclusion on whether or not the threat of use of nuclear weapons for self-defense would be legal in the extreme circumstance when the survival of the state was at stake.

    The decision of the Court will have far-reaching effects for the future of nuclear weapons and for the future of humanity. The opinion that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal under international law gives strong support to the advocates of a nuclear weapons free world and puts the governments of the nuclear weapons states under increased pressure to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

    In December 1995, Joseph Rotblat, a former Manhattan Project scientist, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs shared the Nobel Peace Prize. In his Nobel Lecture, Professor Rotblat stated, “As for the assertion that nuclear weapons prevent wars, how many more wars are needed to refute this argument? Tens of millions have died in the many wars that have taken place since 1945. In a number of them nuclear states were directly involved. In two they were actually defeated. Having nuclear weapons was of no use to them. To sum up, there is no evidence that a world without nuclear weapons would be a more dangerous world. On the contrary, it would be a safer world.”6

    Also in December 1995 the nations of Southeast Asia created a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone throughout Southeast Asia.

    The year 1995 ended with the United Nations General Assembly passing a resolution calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons within a time-bound framework. The resolution called upon the nuclear weapons states “to undertake step-by-step reduction of the nuclear threat and a phased programme of progressive and balanced deep reductions of nuclear weapons, and to carry out effective nuclear disarmament measures with a view to the total elimination of these weapons within a time-bound framework.”7 The resolution was opposed by the same nuclear weapons states and their allies that had fought so hard at the NPT Review and Extension Conference for an indefinite extension of that Treaty.

    In April 1996 the Treaty of Pelindaba was signed creating an African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. With the signing of this treaty nearly the entire Southern hemisphere had designated itself as nuclear weapons free.

    The Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva drafted a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The CD, however, was unable to reach consensus on the Treaty due to India’s demand that the nuclear weapons states make a commitment to eliminate their nuclear arsenals within a time-bound framework.

    Australia took the draft CTBT to the U.N. General Assembly, and in special session on September 10, 1996, the General Assembly adopted the Treaty by a vote of 158 to 3 with 5 abstentions and 19 members absent. The Treaty was opened for signatures on September 24, 1996. All five declared nuclear weapons states have signed the Treaty. However, to enter into force the Treaty requires the signatures and ratifications of all 44 nuclear capable countries, including India. India has made it clear that it will neither sign nor ratify the Treaty until the nuclear weapons states have made the commitment to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

    The Twenty-First Century

    As we approach the twenty-first century, the struggle continues between those who would rely upon nuclear weapons to provide for their national security and those who would abolish these weapons of indiscriminate mass murder. More than anything else, the issue seems to be one of privilege within the international system. The nuclear weapons states are comfortable with their privileges in the current two-tier system of nuclear “haves” and “have nots.” The “haves” appear willing to cut back their arsenals, to eliminate underground nuclear tests (but not laboratory testing), and to make promises about “the ultimate goal” of eliminating nuclear weapons. They appear unwilling, however, to make a commitment to eliminating their nuclear weapons within a time-bound framework.

    In essence, the nuclear weapons states are resisting giving up what they perceive to be their privileged status within the structure of the international system. Of course, there is a huge blindspot in their strategy of attempting to maintain their special status. In the last analysis, other states will do as the nuclear weapons states do, not as they say. If, as the behavior of the nuclear weapons states demonstrates, nuclear weapons are deployed to provide security in a dangerous world, then other states will eventually turn to this form of security. The result will be an even more dangerous world.

    Finding a Way Out

    But there is a way out. More than half the world sees it, and has called for the elimination of nuclear weapons within a time-bound framework. Eventually the nuclear weapons states also will be forced to see it. A nuclear weapons free world is in the interests of all people on Earth, and all those who will follow. This includes the interests of the nuclear weapons states. In fact, their reliance on nuclear weapons is the main threat to their own security.

    Nuclear weapons are a test for humanity. If we can control and eliminate these and other weapons of mass destruction that threaten our common future, it is possible for humanity to join in common purpose to solve other pressing problems confronting us, such as eliminating poverty, protecting human rights, and safeguarding the environment from pollution and over-exploitation.

    In the Nuclear Age, humanity must grow to meet the new responsibilities that it has created for itself. The new way of thinking that Einstein called for is perhaps not so new. It may be as old as the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. It may be as simple as attempting to view the world from an imagined vantage point of a perceived opponent or of future generations. It may be as simple as Joseph Rotblat said in concluding his Nobel Laureate Address, “Remember your duty to humanity.”

    But most likely it will not be this simple. Ending the nuclear weapons era will require dedication, sustained effort, and mass education. It will require the commitment of millions of individuals who believe that humanity is worth saving, that the future is worth preserving. It will require an optimism that refuses to give way to despair. It will require hope. It will require friendship. It will require sacrifice.

    Between 1985 and the present there has been substantial progress in reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals. It is not too much to hope that we could enter the new millennium with a treaty in place committing the world to the elimination of nuclear weapons within a time-bound framework. It is our challenge to make this vision a reality.

    Other Nuclear Age Issues

    I have focused attention primarily on nuclear weapons and the need for their abolition. But this is far from the whole story of the Nuclear Age. Nuclear weapons are only the most prominent, dramatic, and dangerous development of the Nuclear Age. There are many other issues that require the attention of society. Without going into detail, I wish to mention some of these.

    1. The environmental impacts of nuclear technology. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were produced with only minimal concern for the environment. Today leaking storage tanks and inadequate methods of waste storage are major problems that need to be remedied. It will require hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up behind the weapons producers.

    Many nuclear submarines carrying nuclear weapons have suffered accidents and gone down at sea. Others have been purposefully dumped at sea after their useful life has ended. As the nuclear materials in the sunken reactors and weapons breach their containments, the ocean environment will be threatened.

    Even today there is no adequate answer to the question of how to dispose of long-lived radioactive wastes. The best that scientists can suggest at this time is monitored, multi-barrier retrievable storage. This is not a permanent solution. It simply puts off a long-term solution to a later date; it recognizes that we don’t know enough to attempt a permanent solution that will affect thousands of generations in the future. There are hundreds of nuclear power plants scattered throughout the world. Each of these plants produces high level radioactive wastes in the process of boiling water to generate electricity. The costs of attempting to shield these wastes from the environment for thousands of years have not been adequately assessed. Proceeding with the development of nuclear power plants without having an adequate answer to the problem of nuclear waste storage reflects an arrogance almost as great as using the power of the atom to create weapons that place humanity’s future in jeopardy.

    2. The role of science in society. The Manhattan Project to develop a nuclear bomb was the first great project of corporate science put at the disposal of the nation-state. Corporate science and nationalism have proven to be a dangerous combination. They have given us both nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.

    Scientists have been rewarded for their efforts by receiving a special status in modern societies, a status reserved for medicine men, healers, and spiritual leaders in more primitive societies. Alvin Weinberg, a prominent nuclear scientist, has spoken of the need for a “nuclear priesthood” to be the guardians of nuclear materials in the future, and to pass on their knowledge from generation to generation. This is a heady proposition, that society should become beholden to those with special knowledge to protect thousands of future generations from the potential harm of radioactive materials and to keep these materials from the hands of terrorists.

    Scientists as a group and as individuals have rarely exercised responsibility for their discoveries. Rather than providing cautious advice, they have often been overly optimistic about society’s ability to manage and control the products of their knowledge. Of course, scientists, like other humans, cannot foresee the ways in which their discoveries might be used. They can, however, draw a line at working on improving or testing weapons of mass destruction or at developing industries that have dangerous waste products that cannot be contained with certainty.

    3. Secrecy and democracy. The Nuclear Age brought forth elaborate measures to maintain secrecy with regard to the development and improvement of nuclear weapons. Such measures were believed to be necessary to prevent the spread of knowledge about making nuclear weapons, but they did not succeed. Today the knowledge of how to make a nuclear weapon is widespread. Even undergraduate college students have demonstrated a grasp of this knowledge, which they have been able to discover from scientific literature available to the public. It is widely acknowledged that terrorists would be able to develop nuclear weapons perhaps crude weapons, but nonetheless nuclear weapons if they were able to get their hands on bomb-grade nuclear materials.

    Secrecy in the Nuclear Age has expanded beyond technological considerations to encompass policy decisions and information that governments find embarrassing. The revelations, for example, that the U.S. government conducted secret experiments with radioactive materials on hospital patients and prisoners without their consent has come to light decades after the experiments took place.

    The real danger of secrecy is that it undermines democracy. Citizens in democracies cannot make intelligent choices about their societies if they are lacking the requisite information. Just as we have accepted that informed consent is necessary in a medical context regarding our bodies, we must apply the same principle to decisions of the body politic.8 If citizens are not informed of government decisions because they are taking place behind a wall of secrecy, then citizens have lost control of their political process and, therefore, of their future.

    In the Nuclear Age the only way that individuals in governments can be held accountable for their acts is by transparency: open decisions openly arrived at. Citizens should demand that if government actions cannot be done in full public view, they shouldn’t be done.

    4. International cooperation. The power of our technologies, most dramatically represented by nuclear technology, has globalized many of the problems we face. These problems include the transportation and storage of nuclear wastes, the safety of nuclear power plants, the diversion of nuclear materials from the nuclear fuel cycle for weapons, the prevention of nuclear terrorism, and the inspection and verification of disarmament agreements.

    National boundaries are largely permeable. National governments cannot prevent people, pollution, projectiles (missiles), or ideas from crossing their borders. Thus, sovereignty is eroding in the face of technological advances. Information travels the world instantaneously. Electronic communications make events anywhere in the world available instantaneously to people everywhere. The spread of pollutants by accident or design, including radioactive pollutants, has a slower migration, but is equally without respect for national borders.

    In the Nuclear Age there are problems that can only be solved at the global level. Among these are problems of transboundary pollution, transportation of hazardous wastes, proliferation of nuclear weapons, and protection of the common heritage of humankind (the oceans, the atmosphere and outer space). These problems cannot be solved by any one nation or group of nations; they can only be solved by global cooperation. They force us to recognize our common humanity and our common future. Global cooperation, through the United Nations and its affiliated agencies, is the key to providing for our common security. However, there is much that needs to be done to transform the United Nations into an institution that is democratically empowered to meet the challenges that confront it.

    5. The power of the individual. The greatest threat to the future of humanity in the Nuclear Age may not be nuclear weapons or nuclear waste. It may be the lack of compassion, commitment and vision of individuals, including our leaders, in the global community. Apathy is disempowering. We must overcome it by education that opens our eyes to the threats that confront us if we fail to take required actions.

    There is only one place in the universe that we know of where life exists, and it is our Earth. As far as we know, we humans are life’s fullest expression of intelligence to date. Visitors from another planet, were they to exist and were they to visit us, might not think so. We are not doing so well in managing our planetary home. But we can change this. It is within our power as individuals to do so. We can make the world a better place. We can fulfill our responsibility to future generations to pass on the planet, intact, to the next generation. We must begin from where we are, with an awareness of the dangers and challenges of the Nuclear Age. We must not be silent nor passive. We must stand up and act for a safer and saner world, a better tomorrow. By our actions, we must restore a sense of hopefulness about our common future.

    If Gandhi could lead the Indian subcontinent to independence from Britain and Nelson Mandela could spend 27 years in prison and come out to end apartheid in South Africa and become president of that country, each of us can also play a role in changing the world. We may not all be Gandhis or Mandelas, but we can play a role in meeting the challenges of the Nuclear Age. Each of us can make a difference.

    Conclusion – Two Ways Out

    Knowledge gained cannot be unlearned, but we can manage and control our dangerous technologies. The genie of knowledge may not fit back into the bottle. There is no reason, however, that the most dangerous tools created with that knowledge cannot by agreement be dismantled and systems established to prevent these tools from being recreated. It is within our power to end the nuclear weapons era, if not the Nuclear Age. Whether or not we will succeed will depend upon the clarity of our vision and the steadiness of our commitment.

    There are only two ways out of the Nuclear Age. One is by death and destruction, by nuclear conflagration, by Nuclear Winter, by the poisoning of our life support systems. Few would consciously choose this path, but many of our decisions, based on national rather than global priorities, have led us in this direction. There is, however, a second option, and that is to affirm without reservation that the power of life is greater than the power of death. Technology is already breaking down barriers between nations. Education and spiritual grounding in the miracle of Creation must now provide the basis for breaking down the barriers in our minds that separate us. We are one humanity. We share one Earth.

    If we awaken to who we truly are not only Americans, not only Russians, not only Japanese, not only Indians, but above all citizens of Earth then our choices will be clear, and we will do everything within our power to preserve this extraordinary planet and its abundant forms of life. Our first step forward on this path will be our absolute commitment to ridding the world of nuclear weapons, the only weapons capable of destroying the future of human life on this planet. In achieving this goal, we will know what we are truly capable of accomplishing, and we will get on with the serious problems of creating cultures that are committed to liberty, justice, human dignity, and ecological integrity.

    Notes

    1. See Krieger, David and Bas Bruyne, “Preventing Proliferation By Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Supporting a Limited Extension of the NPT,” Global Security Study No. 20, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, September 1994.

    2. “Principles and Objectives for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament,” 1995 Review and Extension conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, NPT/CONF. 1995/L.5, 9 May 1995.

    3. “Commission for a Nuclear-Weapons-Free World,” Press Release of Australian Government, November 27, 1995.

    4. Report of the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, August 14, 1996, p. 4.

    5. “Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons,” International Court of Justice, General List No. 95, July 8, 1996.

    6. The Nobel Lecture given by The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 1995 Joseph Rotblat, Oslo, December 10, 1995. Copyright The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm 1995.

    7. United Nations General Assembly, A/C.1/50/L.46/Rev.1, 14 November 1995.

    8. See Hull, Diana, “Informed Consent: From the Body to the Body Politic,” in Krieger, David and Frank Kelly (Editors), Waging Peace in the Nuclear Age, Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1988

    * David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • The Illegality of NATO’s Nuclear Weapons

    The following notes summarise what we in the World Court Project (UK) believe are the strongest arguments flowing from the Advisory Opinion of 8 July 1996 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which can be used in exposing the illegality of NATO’s nuclear policy.

    It is important to recognise that none of our arguments will guarantee success in court. However, we are convinced that what we have to say is plausible and carries conviction.

    As a general point, it is important to emphasise that the ICJ found threat and use to be indivisible. Whatever is illegal about use is also illegal about threat. This relates directly to nuclear deterrence.

    NATO’s First Use Option

    NATO retains the option of using nuclear weapons first. In paragraph 94 of the Opinion, the ICJ challenged the nuclear States that they had neither specified any legal circumstance for use, nor convinced it that “limited use would not tend to escalate into the all-out use of high-yield nuclear weapons.” It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a situation in which using nuclear weapons first would not have such a tendency.

    This is especially applicable to the most likely scenario for the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the NATO nuclear States. The US, UK and France have plans to threaten to use nuclear weapons against even non-nuclear “rogue” States to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or to protect US/UK/French so-called “vital interests” anywhere in the world. For such so-called sub-strategic use, some of the missiles in the currently patrolling UK Trident submarine are fitted with a single, variable lower-yield warhead – because six 100 kiloton warheads on a missile are not a credible deterrent threat to a “rogue” regime or terrorists.

    These scenarios fall far short of those postulated in the ICJ’s only concession, that it could not “conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” We can therefore argue that NATO first use would be illegal, whatever the yield of nuclear weapon used.

    Complying with Humanitarian Law

    The ICJ concluded that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is generally illegal. Indeed, it found no circumstance in which the threat or use of nuclear weapons would not violate humanitarian law.

    Even in extreme circumstances, the threat or use of nuclear weapons must comply with international humanitarian law (paragraph 105D). Thus any use must, for example, discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, must not cause unnecessary or superfluous suffering, and must respect neutral States.

    The NATO nuclear States deploy some, at least, of their nuclear warheads on behalf of the Alliance, and are willing to use them in collective self-defence. Although some of these warheads might be relatively small, the majority are far larger in their yield than the Hiroshima bomb.

    For example, most UK Trident warheads are 100 kilotons – about 8 times larger than Hiroshima; moreover, most UK Trident missiles have six warheads. Such enormous destructive power, combined with the ability to cause untold human suffering and damage to generations to come from radiation effects, makes them incapable of complying with humanitarian law.

    Francis Boyle, a US Professor of International Law who has specialized in nuclear weapon issues, advises that the best way to deal with this question is to apply the language of the Opinion to the specific nuclear weapons system under legal challenge.

    The Nuremberg Connection

    The ICJ’s confirmation that the Nuremberg Charter, as part of humanitarian law, applies to nuclear weapons has serious implications for all involved in implementing NATO’s nuclear policy. For example, military professionals need to be seen to be acting within the law if they are to be distinguished from hired killers or terrorists.

    Military professionals shunned chemical and biological weapons before they were prohibited, because they were too indiscriminate and repulsive. NATO’s plans to use even low-yield nuclear weapons are vulnerable to the ICJ’s finding that the effects of nuclear weapons are unique, and more severe, widespread and long-lasting than those of chemical weapons. In so doing, the ICJ confirmed that nuclear weapons are in the same stigmatised category of weapons of mass destruction as chemical and biological weapons – only in many respects far worse.

    Unanimous Call for Nuclear Disarmament

    The judges’ unanimous call in paragraph 105F for nuclear disarmament went further than Article VI of the NPT, by stating that negotiations should be concluded irrespective of any treaty on general and complete disarmament, behind which hitherto the nuclear States have hidden.

    This challenges the current perception among NATO decision-makers that “nuclear might is right” and lawful, and that NATO nuclear policy is sustainable.

    Although NATO’s nuclear plans are secret, its post-Cold War posture shows that it has no intention of renouncing nuclear weapons; it is determined to maintain a nuclear warfighting capability; and it is prepared to threaten to use low-yield warheads first, backed by massive nuclear strikes when its public stance is one of last-resort, so-called “minimal deterrence” in self-defence.

    NATO as a Nuclear Alliance

    NATO is an alliance which relies on nuclear deterrence doctrine. The NATO Nuclear Planning Group takes collective decisions. Therefore NATO, as an institution as well as its individual members, carries responsibility for its nuclear policy.

    To date, there is no evidence that the NATO Nuclear Planning Group has responded to the implications of the ICJ’s Opinion. The onus is now on NATO to demonstrate that its nuclear plans would:

    1) fit the criteria of extreme circumstance; 2) not violate the humanitarian laws of warfare.

    Our foregoing assessment suggests that NATO should urgently review its nuclear policy in order to comply with the ICJ’s opinion.

    The Authority of the International Court of Justice

    The UK government has consistently argued that the Opinion is not binding and changes nothing. However, on 24 September 1996 in the UN, the UK Foreign Secretary pledged “both moral and material support” to the ICJ, adding that “the more we accept that international law must be the foundation of international relations, the safer we shall all be.”

    The ICJ is the UN’s Court. It can give Advisory Opinions on any question at the request of a UN agency, such as the General Assembly, in order to assist that agency in its duties. These Opinions clarify international law with the highest possible authority. An Advisory Opinion is only given after careful and lengthy deliberation by 15 judges after full hearings involving all interested States and UN agencies. In this case, 43 states – a record number, including the USA, UK and France – filed written submissions and 22 (again including the NATO nuclear States) made oral statements.

    The USA, UK and France have signed the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and have affirmed the Nuremberg Principles. They are therefore bound to abide by these. Thus, the ICJ’s decision that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally violate the Law of War as codified in these conventions and principles means that the NATO nuclear States are under an obligation to respect this.

    It is also worth pointing out that in December 1994, by a comfortable majority, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) requested the Court to deliver its Advisory Opinion on the threat or use of nuclear weapons. On 10 December 1996, an even larger majority of the UNGA adopted Resolution 51/45M which “takes note of” the Opinion and “expresses its appreciation to the ICJ”. The Resolution went on to call for “negotiations in 1997 leading to the early conclusion of a Nuclear Weapons Convention”.

    Conclusion

    By ignoring the ICJ’s decision, NATO is defying the most authoritative view of how international law applies to nuclear weapons; it is opposing the overwhelming majority of world opinion; and it is failing to heed what the UK Foreign Secretary said in the UN on 24 September 1996. This sets an irresponsible example, and augurs ill for the safety of the world.

     

    ******************************************************************* The World Court Project is an international citizens’ network which is working to publicise and have implemented the July 8 1996 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice which could find no lawful circumstance for the threat or use of nuclear weapons.

    The World Court Project is part of Abolition 2000, a global network to eliminate nuclear weapons.

    World Court Project UK George Farebrother, UK Secretary 67, Summerheath Rd, Hailsham, Sussex BN27 3DR Phone & Fax 01323 844 269, Email geowcpuk@gn.apc.org

  • Nuremberg and Nuclear Weapons

    The principal message of the Nuremberg trials is that individuals are responsible for what they do, and will be held accountable for committing serious crimes under international law. At Nuremberg, these serious crimes included crimes against peace (that is, planning, preparing for, or participating in acts of aggressive warfare), war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

    One of the great ironies of history or perhaps it is not such a great irony is that the Charter establishing the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was signed on August 8, 1945. That was just three months after the German surrender. More importantly, it was just two days after the first nuclear weapon was used in warfare on the city of Hiroshima, and one day prior to a nuclear weapon being used on the city of Nagasaki. The nuclear weapon used on Hiroshima, with an equivalent force of some 15 kilotons of TNT, killed some 90,000 people immediately and some 140,000 by the end of 1945. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, with an equivalent force of some 20 kilotons of TNT, killed some 40,000 people immediately and some 70,000 by the end of 1945.

    It has been pointed out that the number of people who died immediately from the use of each of these nuclear weapons was less than the number of people who died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945 as a result of U.S. bombing raids. This number is estimated at approximately 100,000. The major difference between the Tokyo bombings and those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the former took nearly a thousand sorties to accomplish, while the destruction of the latter two cities took only one bomb each.

    I think it is reasonable to speculate that if the Germans had had two or three atomic bombs, as we did at that time, and had used them on European cities prior to being defeated in the Second World War, we would have attempted to hold accountable those who created, authorized, and carried out these bombings. We would likely have considered the use of these weapons on cities by the Nazi leaders as among the most serious of their crimes.

    The irony of history, of course, is that the Germans did not develop nor use atomic weapons, and thus this issue never came before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, or before any other international tribunal. The record of the past 50 years reflects the consequences of this lack of accountability, namely, the nuclear arms race pursued by the United States and the former Soviet Union, which lasted until the end of the Cold War in approximately 1990.

    The question which I want to address is not whether war crimes were committed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Under the rules of international humanitarian law they were, and they were also committed by the bombings of London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo. The primary targets of all these bombings were civilians, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians has always in modern times been understood to be a clear violation of the laws of war.

    Nuclear Weapons and International Law

    The more relevant question has to do with where we stand today. Not long ago, on July 8, 1996, the International Court of Justice in the Hague issued an opinion on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. Actually, two questions were placed before the Court for advisory opinions. The first question, posed by the World Health Organization in May 1993, asked: “In view of the health and environmental effects, would the use of nuclear weapons by a state in war or other armed conflict be a breach of its obligations under international law?”

    The second question, put to the Court by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1994, asked: “Is the threat or the use of nuclear weapons in any circumstances permitted under international law?”

    The International Court of Justice found that the question asked by the World Health Organization, as a legal question, fell outside the scope of activities of the organization, and thus declined to accept jurisdiction. On the question posed by the United Nations General Assembly, however, the Court did find jurisdiction, and issued an advisory opinion.

    In a multi-part answer to the question, the Court found the following: “…that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law.

    “However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.”

    In reaching this opinion, the Court dramatically reduced the possible circumstances in which nuclear weapons could be threatened or used in conformity with international law. The Court left open only the slim possibility of legality under “an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake.” Even in this circumstance, the Court did not say that such use would be legal; it said only that it could not determine legality under these conditions. Judge Bedjaoui, the president of the Court, said in his declaration upon releasing the Court’s opinion, “I cannot insist strongly enough on the fact that the inability of the Court to go beyond the statement it made can in no way be interpreted as a partially-opened door through which it recognizes the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons.”

    Judge Bedjaoui went further to describe nuclear weapons as “blind weapons” that “destabilize, by their very nature, humanitarian law, the law of distinguishing in the use of weapons.” He continued, “Nuclear weapons, absolute evil, destabilize humanitarian law in so far as the law of the lesser evil. Thus, the very existence of nuclear weapons constitutes a great defiance (challenge) to humanitarian law itself…. Nuclear war and humanitarian law seem, consequently, two antithesis which radically exclude each other, the existence of one necessarily supposing the non-existence of the other.”

    Where does this leave us today? Although the opinion of the Court is an advisory opinion, it is the most authoritative statement of international law on this question, and must be taken seriously. Thus far, however, there have been no statements made by any of the declared or undeclared nuclear weapons states indicating that they plan any changes in their nuclear policies as a result of the Court’s opinion.

    Individual Accountability

    We know what the Principles of Nuremberg tell us about individual accountability. The primary principle is that “Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.” The fact that there is no penalty for the act under internal law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law. Nor does the fact that the person acted as a Head of State or as a responsible government official relieve that person of responsibility. Nor does the fact that the person acted pursuant to superior orders, so long as a choice was in fact possible to him, relieve him of responsibility.

    It was the United States, along with the U.K., France, and Russia, that created the Nuremberg Principles after the Second World War by holding Nazi and other Axis leaders accountable for their crimes under international law. I submit that if we want to create a world community that lives under international law in the 21st Century, we must apply the Nuremberg Principles to one and all, equally and without prejudice. That means we must apply these Principles to ourselves as well as to others. If the threat or use of nuclear weapons is, in fact, illegal under international law in virtually every conceivable circumstance, then we must act accordingly and neither use nor threaten the use of these weapons. Instead, we must dismantle our nuclear arsenal subject to agreement with other nuclear weapons states. In the meantime, we must explain to all military personnel with responsibilities for nuclear weapons the criminality under international law attendant to the threat or use of these weapons.

    Military organizations must operate under the law, and that clearly includes the international law of armed conflict. If military organizations do not operate under the law, then are they any better than state-organized thugs? It was for violating the laws of war at My Lai that Lt. Calley was tried and convicted. Lt. Calley’s crimes, terrible though they were, would pale in comparison to the crime of again using nuclear weapons on cities filled with innocent people.

    The International Court of Justice added to their opinion a clarification of Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Court unanimously found that: “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.”

    The Court has clearly indicated that the nuclear weapons states have an obligation to negotiate in good faith not only for nuclear disarmament, but for nuclear disarmament “in all its aspects” and to bring these negotiations to a conclusion. In the aftermath of the Cold War, we have been moving far too slowly to attain this goal. It is a necessary goal so that no other city will ever again have to face the consequences of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the future of humanity will not be jeopardized.

    The Need for a Permanent International Criminal Court

    Even if the threat or use of nuclear weapons is unlawful under international law, however, there currently exists no tribunal where persons committing such acts can be brought to account. One of the great shortcomings of the current international institutional structure is the lack of a permanent International Criminal Court. Two Ad Hoc Tribunals have been created by the United Nations Security Council one for the former Yugoslavia and one for Rwanda. The jurisdiction of both of these tribunals, however, is limited by time and space. It is perhaps ironic that while the effects of nuclear weapons are unlimited by either time or space, the jurisdiction of our international criminal tribunals is so limited.

    Were nuclear weapons to be used by accident or design, the consequences would be horrible beyond our deepest fears. Nazis and other war criminals were convicted and punished in part for bringing human beings to the incinerators of the Holocaust. Nuclear weapons may be conceived of as portable incinerators portable crematoria, if you will that bring incinerators to the people. In my view, the silence of the American, Russian, British, French, and Chinese people in the face of these potentially genocidal or omnicidal weapons is as disquieting as the silence of the Germans in the face of Nazi atrocities. Yet none of the people in countries possessing nuclear weapons today are facing the same fearful authoritarian rule that the Nazis imposed upon the Germans during World War II.

    For many, perhaps most, people in nuclear weapons states today, nuclear weapons are not perceived as a critical issue. They are largely ignored. However, if they were to be used again, I think future historians if there were any would be very critical of our lack of commitment to ridding the world of these terrible weapons.

    We have the opportunity, in fact the responsibility under the Nuremberg Principles, to speak out against these genocidal weapons, but for the most part we do not do so. We must break the silence that surrounds our reliance upon these weapons of mass destruction. A hopeful sign recently occurred at the State of the World Forum in San Francisco when General Lee Butler, a former commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, broke his personal silence and made a ringing plea to abolish nuclear weapons. “We can do better,” he said, “than condone a world in which nuclear weapons are enshrined as the ultimate arbiter of conflict. The price already paid is too dear, the risks run too great. The nuclear beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste. The task is daunting but we cannot shrink from it. The opportunity may not come again.”

    It is within our grasp to end the nuclear weapons era, and begin the 21st Century with a reaffirmation of the Nuremberg Principles.

    Steps That Need To Be Taken

    1. The following confidence building measures proposed by the Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons:

    • Taking nuclear forces off alert;
    • Removal of warheads from delivery vehicles;
    • Ending deployment of non-strategic nuclear weapons;
    • Initiating negotiations to further reduce United States and Russian nuclear arsenals; and
    • Agreement amongst the nuclear weapons states of reciprocal no-first-use undertakings, and of a non-use undertaking by them in relation to the non-nuclear weapons states.

    2. International agreement by the year 2000 on a Nuclear Weapons Convention that, under strict international control, would eliminate all nuclear weapons within a reasonable period of time and prohibit their possession.

    3. The establishment by treaty of a permanent International Criminal Court to hold all individuals, regardless of their rank or nationality, accountable for acts constituting crimes under international law. Considerable progress has been made in preparing such a treaty at the United Nations. It may be hoped that this treaty will be ready to be opened for signatures in 1998, and certainly by 1999 when a third International Peace Conference is convened in the Hague.

  • Fifth Step: Make the U.N. Effective for the 21st Century

    planethood

     

     

     

     

    The following is an excerpt from Planethood, by Benjamin B. Ferencz and Ken Keyes, Jr.

    Since the end of World War II, our failure to create an effective world system to govern the planet has resulted in millions killed, many more injured, businesses disrupted, lives twisted through fear and hatred, property destroyed, environmental pollution and degeneration accelerated, and money wasted on killing machines (this term includes both people and guns). The insanity of nuclear killing machines is making us realize that World War III (with possibly 5 million fatalities) may bring about the end of all people on this planet. It is the plea of PlanetHood that we end the arms race—not the human race.

    The First Four Steps

    Let’s briefly review the steps we’ve covered so far. Step One requires us to assert our ultimate human right to live with dignity in a healthy environment free from the threat of war. Step Two asks us to understand the new top layer of government we need in order to nail down this ultimate human right for you and your family for all time – no more international anarchy. We need to complete the governmental structure of the world with a limiting constitution setting up a lawmaking body (representing the people of the world), a world court (staffed with the wisest judges chosen from among the nations of the world), and an effective system of sanctions and peacekeeping forces to enforce the agreed standards of national behavior. This final layer of government would globally ensure our basic human rights, protect the sovereignty of nations, settle disputes legally, and protect the environment.

    By taking Step Three we realize what it means to become a Planethood Patriot. We are urged to step into George Washington’s footsteps in creating and supporting a new constitution to govern the nations of the world. The Federal Republic of the World must be strong enough to avoid ineffectiveness, and have checks and balances to limit power and avoid tyranny. This is secured by a wise balance of power between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

    In Step Four we acknowledge our enormous progress over the past century in creating international law. We have been gradually globalizing. We note how the nations of the world have been getting accustomed to working with each other – gradually and safely yielding small portions of their sovereignty in order to benefit from binding international agreements for the common good. We see that nation-states are already merging into larger economic and political entities to meet their common needs – such as the European Union. There is a growing awareness that the world system must change to meet the challenge of the 21st Century.

    In Step Five we will discuss updating our vehicle for survival – the U.N. – as we move toward an effective world system with checks and balances to protect our rights and freedoms. This step is primarily concerned with spelling out how we need to reform the U.N. to ensure world peace.

    After the carnage of World War II with 35 million dead, many nations were determined not to go through that again. Toward the end of the war we began to plan the United Nations Organization. In October 1945 the Charter was ratified by 50 nations at San Francisco. Enthusiasm ran high. “The U.N. Charter can be a greater Magna Carta,” said John Foster Dulles, our Secretary of State, who was a delegate to the San Francisco conference.

    It’s interesting to note that the U.N. Charter was completed on June 26, 1945 – six weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This may help explain its weakness. The delegates were unaware of the devastation we would face in the nuclear era. They did not know that humanity’s survival would be at stake. They failed to understand that we could no longer drag our feet in replacing international anarchy with enforced international law.

    The Security Council

    The Charter provides for a Security Council and a General Assembly. The Security Council was supposed to be the enforcement arm. Its five permanent members were victorious in World War II: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China (in 1971 the People’s Republic of China replaced Nationalist China on the Security Council, in 19__, the Soviet Union was replaced by Russia). In addition, there are now ten rotating members – originally there were six.

    It was deliberately set up so that the big powers could ignore any vote they didn’t like. Any one of the five permanent members of the Security Council can veto any enforcement action—even If the rest of the world is for it! Since the Big Five have been behind most of the trouble in the world, it’s like setting up the foxes to guard the chicken coop.

    Because of the distrust and conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States (and because we usually vote to support our friends and they usually support their friends), deadlocks on all important issues involving war and peace have usually blocked effective action by the U.N. For example, the U.S. in 1990 vetoed a resolution for the U.N. to send a fact- finding mission to get information on the Jewish-Arab conflict in the occupied territories. An impartial understanding of what’s happening is a needed first step in the peace process. This lack of respect for legal, peaceful conflict resolution has set a poor example for the other nations of the world.

    Brian Urquhart, U.N. under secretary-general for special political affairs, lamented, “There are moments when I feel that only an invasion from outer space will reintroduce into the Security Council that unanimity and spirit which the founders of the Charter were talking about.” Let us hope that the shock of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the threat to Saudi Arabia will begin to do it for us!

    Thus we have a toddling Security Council that under the Charter is empowered to send armed forces anywhere on earth to stop war. And it is usually rendered impotent because of the Charter requirement for the unanimous vote of the permanent members of the Security Council to act in preserving peace. In 1945 we weren’t quite ready yet to take the final step. Perhaps we’re now waking up to the idiocy of living in an ungoverned world!

    The General Assembly

    In addition to the Security Council, the Charter of the United Nations set up the General Assembly. It has been called a “town meeting of the world” by former Secretary-General Trygve Lie. Each nation has one vote in the General Assembly, which has grown from the original 50 nations to 160 today. Thus small nations, regardless of size, have the same vote as large nations, regardless of population. For example, Grenada with about 90,000 people has an equal vote with the United States, which has 1/4 billion people.

    Since the Security Council has all the power to act, the big powers gave the other nations of the world the power to talk! It’s interesting to note that when a resolution passes the General Assembly, it goes to the Security Council as a recommendation only. The General Assembly has no Charter power to require any action to keep the peace – or to do anything but suggest!

    Thus we are heading for the 21st Century with 160 “But the hard fact remains,” comments Richard Hudson in his newsletter Global Report, “that the decision-making system in the world body is too flawed to deal with the awesome gamut of our planet’s problems in the coming decades. It is neither morally right nor politically sensible to leave veto power in the Security Council in the hands of the five nuclear powers. It is plainly absurd to have decisions made on the basis of one nation, one vote in the General Assembly, thus giving countries with minute populations and minuscule contributions to the U.N. budget the same influence in decision- making as the bigger countries that have to pay the bills. Moreover, a central global decision-making body that can pass only non-binding recommendations is not what the world needs for the 21st century.”

    The Need for Reform

    Patricia Mische, co-founder of Global Education Associates, tells a story that compares the United Nations to a dog that is expected to give protection from thieves and murderers. The dog is a good dog, but it has three problems. First, the masters muzzle the dog so the dog can bark but not bite, and thieves and murderers know this. Second, the masters don’t feed the dog very well, so the dog is always hungry and anxious for itself, and lacks energy to do its job well. Third, the dog has 160 masters, and they often give conflicting directions and confuse the dog.

    Here is the prescription for rebuilding the UN: Remove the muzzle, feed the dog, and reform the masters, so they will not be confusing the dog.

    Vernon Nash wrote in The World Must Be Governed, “. . . if Hamilton or any other founding father returned to the United States today and read a. current article about the performance and prospects of the United Nations, he certainly would say to himself, ‘This is where I came in.’. . . Then, as now, men kept trying to get order without law, to establish peace while retaining the right and power to go on doing as they pleased.”

    The United States, which was the principal mover in creating the World Court, gave the appearance of accepting compulsory jurisdiction over “any question of international law.” But that was quite deceptive. By special reservations, the U.S. excluded certain types of disputes, which the U.S. could by itself decide it wanted solely within its own domestic jurisdiction.

    A nation undermines the Court when it gives the appearance of accepting the Court and, at the same time, denies to the tribunal the normal powers of every judicial agency. A nation that defies the Jurisdiction of the Court when it becomes a defendant shows contempt for the Court. A nation that ignores the Court when it doesn’t like a judgment against it undercuts the process of law. When these things are done by – the U.S., which helped establish the World Court, it diminishes respect for itself.

    Despite technical legal arguments that were raised to justify the U.S. position when Nicaragua in 1984 complained that we were mining its harbors and seeking to overthrow its government, the fact is that the U.S. refused to honor the Court or its judgments. This was seen throughout the world as a hypocritical manifestation of scorn for the tribunal – which the United States praised when decisions went in its favor. Defiance of law is an invitation to disaster. What may have been tolerable in the pre-nuclear age is intolerable now.

    In a world of law and order, aggressor nations should clearly be identified as outlaws for rejecting the rule of law. This is not to suggest that justified grievances should be ignored; sincere efforts must be made to find just solutions. But a handful of states, or a small group of fanatics, should not be permitted to thwart humankind’s progress toward a more lawful and peaceful world.

    Supporting the U.N.

    In 1986 the U.S. Congress reduced its financial support of the United Nations by over half, largely because it did not like certain expenditures. Since the total U.N. budget is less than New York City’s, any reduction of its annual $800 million income is crippling. In the past the Soviet Union has also failed to pay its U.N. dues for the same reason. In October 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev talked of invigorating the Security Council. To back up his words, the Soviet Union announced that it would pay all its overdue U.N. bills, which came to $197 million. And they’ve followed through on this promise.

    That left the United States in October 1987 the outstanding delinquent, who still owed over $414 million, including $61 million for peacekeeping forces that the U.S. opposed! As of December 1989, the U.S. was behind $518 million – in violation of its treaty obligations. In his last budget request, President Reagan asked for full U.N. current funding and about a 10% payment on our past dues. Bush in his first budget made the same request. Our Congress was still unwilling to honor our obligations. The cost of only one Stealth bomber would cover our disgracefully broken contractual agreements with the U.N. – and with humanity’s future.

    The world spends only $800 MILLION a year on peace through the U.N., and about $1 TRILLION on national military budgets – over a thousand times more!!! Does it come as a surprise that we are today 1,000 times more effective at waging war than at waging peace?

    There are amazing parallels between our situation with the United Nations today and the dangerous situation in the United States two centuries ago. Tom Hudgens in his book Let’s Abolish War points out that the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation:

    1. Had no independent taxing powers.
    2. Could not regulate interstate and foreign commerce.
    3. Had no powers of direct enforcement of its laws.
    4. Was ineffective in foreign affairs.
    5. Had no chief executive.
    6. Had no binding court of justice…

    “Do you realize,” Hudgens asks, “that every one of these charges can be leveled at the United Nations today? We are living today under the Articles of Confederation except we call it the United Nations.”

    Instead of starting all over again, the U.N. may be our best bet to rapidly ensure our ultimate human right. A redrafting of the Charter and its ratification by the nations of the world is needed. It won’t be easy to persuade nations to mend their ways, but it can be done.

    For years, the officials of the U.N. have known what needs to be done. They’re powerless unless authorized by the nations of the world. They’ve been waiting for you to take the needed steps to alter the views of the entrenched diplomats, which would permit them to respond effectively to international lawlessness – and thus set the stage for a new era of prosperity and peace on earth.

    Confederation vs. Federation

    In order to take Step Five by working to make the U.N. more effective in the nuclear age, you must clearly understand the key differences between the U.N. today and the world federation we need for tomorrow. Just as the terms “Confederation” and “Federation” were confusing to the 1787 delegates at Philadelphia, people usually don’t understand their significance today. The World Federalist Association in its pamphlet We the People helps us clarify the crucial differences between a league or confederation, and a federation or union:

    • In a league or confederation (like the U.N.), each state does as it pleases regardless of the consequences to the whole; in a federation or union (like the U.S.), each state accepts some restrictions for the security and wellbeing of the whole.
    • In a league, the central body is merely a debating society without authority to control the harmful behavior of individuals; in a federation, the central body makes laws for the protection of the whole and prosecutes individuals who break them.
    • In a league, any enforcement is attempted only against member states; in a federation, enforcement of laws is directed against individual lawbreakers.
    • In a league, conflicts among members continue unabated, resulting in costly arms races and wars; in a federation, conflicts among states are worked out in a federal parliament and in federal courts.
    • A league has no independent sources of revenue; a federation has its own supplemental sources of revenue.
    • In a league, state loyalty overrides loyalty to the wider community; in a federation, loyalty to each state is balanced by loyalty to the wider community.

    Finding the Best Way

    Could you feel secure if a congress made up of people from all over the world enacted binding international laws? Would you be taken advantage of? Too heavily taxed? Your rights ignored? Could a dictator grab power? Can we set up a world legislature, court, and executive branch that will be more protective of the U.S. than the Pentagon? How can we actually increase our “defense” through a reformed U.N.? How do we reform the U.N. to avoid ecocide?[1]

    As George Washington and Benjamin Franklin would testify, there is no one simple way to hammer out a new constitution. It takes an open-minded willingness to consider all points of view, to lay aside one’s prejudices and psychological certainties, and to be patient enough to listen and search until effective answers are found and agreed upon. Just as success in 1787 required that various states be satisfied, in like manner we must create a reformed U.N. that meets today’s needs and interests of the nations of the world.

    There have been many proposals to improve the United Nations and make it more effective as the keeper of the peace. One suggestion, known as the “Binding Triad,” comes from Richard Hudson, founder of the Center for War/Peace Studies. It requires two basic modifications of the U.N. Charter:

    The voting system in the General Assembly would be changed. Important decisions would still be adopted with a single vote, but with three simultaneous majorities within that vote. Approval of a resolution would require that the majority vote include two-thirds of the members present and voting (as at present), nations representing two-thirds of the population of those present and voting, and nations representing two-thirds of the contributions to the regular U.N. budget of those present and voting. Thus, in order for a resolution to pass, it would have to be supported strongly by most of the countries of the world, most of the population of the world, and most of the political/economic/military strength of the world.

    The powers of the General Assembly would be increased under the Binding Triad so that in most cases its resolutions would be binding, not recommendations as at present. The new General Assembly, now a global legislature, will be able to use peacekeeping forces and/or economic sanctions to carry out its decisions. However, the Assembly would not be permitted “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the jurisdiction of any state.” If the jurisdiction were in doubt, the issue would be referred to the World Court, and if the court ruled that the question was essentially domestic, the Assembly could not act.”[2]

    This is only one possibility for giving the General Assembly limited legislative powers. A World Constitution for the Federation of Earth has been drafted by the World Constitution and Parliament Association headed by Philip Isely of Lakewood, Colorado. There are many ways to reform the U.N. to give the world binding international laws, a binding court of international justice, and an executive branch to enforce the law with effective economic sanctions and an international military force that replaces national armies, navies, and air forces.

    A 14-point program is shown on the next page. Models of new international systems to create world order have been prepared by many scholars, among who are Professor Richard Falk of Princeton University, Professor Saul Mendlovitz of Rutgers, and Professor Louis Sohn of Harvard University. With wise checks and balances, we can set up an overall system that will enable the world to work! Political leaders lack the political will to make the required changes in the U.N. It’s time for the public to speak out.

    Once the world union is formed, do we want to permit an easy divorce if a nation wants to get out when it disagrees about something? The American Civil War in 1861-1865 settled whether states could leave the federal union if they disagreed with its policies. The victory by the Union dearly established that no state could secede from the federal government once it agreed to be a member.

    If politicians in a nation become angry and could whip up the people to get out, it would signal the end of the world system. Once a nation agrees to the reformed U.N., it must be permanent. By resigning from the organization,” Cord Meyer warns, “a nation could free itself from international supervision, forcing a renewal of the armament race and certain war. In view of the nature of the new weapons, secession would be synonymous with aggression.[3]

    As we’ve pointed out, there is no one way to transform the United Nations into an effective world government. It is important that you give thought to this vital matter and arrive at your own conclusions on how to do it. Then discuss them with your friends and neighbors, who will no doubt develop their own ideas. It is only from the clash of opinions that a living truth will emerge that will point to an effective way to complete the governmental structure of the world.

    The Challenge of Our Age

    We are at a crucial point in history. We are on the threshold of great progress. We have reached the stage where large-scale wars are no longer compatible with the future of the human race. We have gone beyond the point where such military power is protective. Instead it threatens to kill us all. We are gradually fouling our environment so that it cannot support human life. And we now know that we must have global institutions to solve our global problems.[4]

    “Environmental knowledge and concerns,” according to Pamela Leonard, “have risen at an increasingly rapid rate in recent years, and many nations have enacted laws and set up agencies to deal with them. Yet little has been done to create laws or institutions on an international scale, despite the fact that the impacts of air and water pollutants travel as easily across national boundaries as across municipal boundaries.”[5]

    Increasing Abundance

    Even if we were not threatened by nuclear war or environmental ruin, we would benefit enormously by a reformed U.N. Through a world republic, our children will have greater prosperity, more personal opportunities for a good life, better maintenance of our precious planet, and better protection of their human rights and freedoms.

    Imagine what a difference this would make in your life and that of your loved ones. The heavy taxes that spill your “economic blood” year by year would no longer be used to feed a greedy war machine. Your children could then feel confident that they would have a future. Business could be liberated from the import and export fences that limit opportunities. We could effectively begin to improve the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Education, medical care, and quality of life would vastly improve when the world no longer spent $1.5 million each minute on increasing its killing capacity. A small international peacekeeping force of several hundred thousand well-trained and equipped people could replace the millions of soldiers now under arms who constantly disrupt the peace of the planet.

    Over the past several centuries there has been a gradual awakening to the importance of international law that can override the military passions of the 160 separate nations around the globe. We have tried world courts and have found that they work if we want them to. We have set up international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Each has been a step forward. All this experimenting, testing, trying, and hoping have been important steps up the ladder of international growth toward the completion of the governance of our world. We now have the glorious challenge of creating lasting peace and prosperity by reforming the United Nations into a world republic.

    Approaching Planethood

    Many nations today, and eventually all nations, will be willing to cooperate in a reformed United Nations. They will respond to the insistence of their people that we do not let our planet be ruined or blown apart through war. These nations will want to benefit from the much safer and far less costly protection of their national rights and freedoms that only a world government can offer them.

    At long last, the people of this world can get out of the arms race and enjoy a much higher standard of living, environmental protection, education, culture, medical care, etc. We need a world governance that, unlike the present Security Council, cannot be vetoed by one of the five victorious nations of World War II. It will be able to effectively respond to environmental problems that threaten the security of everyone everywhere.

    It is now time for the people to insist on reforming the U.N. Charter. They will become a powerful force when they unite and act together. Sooner or later, those who resist at first will join in – just as holdout states discovered they could not afford to pass up the many benefits of becoming a part of the United States two centuries ago.

    The draft of the U.N. Charter was discussed at Dumbarton Oaks, a private estate in Washington, DC. On a tablet in the garden was inscribed a prophetic motto: “As ye sow, so shall

    ye reap.” When the final instrument was accepted by 50 nations on June 26, 1945, everyone knew that it was less than perfect. The Secretary of State reported to President Truman: “What has resulted is a human document with human imperfections but with human hopes and human victory as well.”

    We need a new “Dumbarton Oaks” to the 21st Century. On December 23, 1987, our Congress passed a law calling for the appointment by our President of a bipartisan U.S. Commission to Improve the Effectiveness of the United Nations. Commissioners should have been appointed by June 1, 1989. By August 1990 there was still no indication that our President would comply with this law of Congress. Let the voice of the people be heard!

    Send a copy of PlanetHood to the President and to your congressional leaders. Tell them you’re tired of delay and indecision. If they get flooded with reminders from the voters, they’ll soon take notice. It is time to act NOW so that the dreams of the U.N. founders may finally become a reality.

    We can no longer pretend that we don’t know what needs to be done. How long will It be until a president, prime minister, or general secretary calls for a Conference to Reform the United Nations or an International Constitutional Convention—and invites all nations to send delegates? Here is an opportunity for statesmanship and fame of the highest order. Let us seize this history- making opportunity and accept the challenge to create a more peaceful world.

    Like Paul Revere, let’s awaken our neighbors. Let’s give ourselves effective international law, world courts, and enforcement in a safe system of checks and balances. Let’s work continuously to bring about the day when our front lines of defense consist of brigades of international attorneys practicing before a binding world court. Then we’ll have finally secured our ultimate human right to live in dignity in a healthy environment free from the threat of war.

    We need a reliable cop on the international corner. Will you help our ungoverned world to create a world system that can work?

    You’ll be taking the Fifth Step toward planethood when you play your part in making the U.N. effective for the 21st Century. As a Planet- hood Patriot, you’ll know that you are doing what you can to make your life count. You will have saved yourself, your family, and all of the men, women, and children throughout our beautiful planet – now and for generations to come.

    IT DEPENDS ON YOU!

    Pull Quotes

    If we want peace, we must reform, restructure and strengthen the United Nations.
    – Dr. John Logue, Director Common Heritage Institute, 1985

    When we get to the point, as one day we will, that both sides know that in any outbreak of general hostilities, regardless of the element of surprise, destruction will be both reciprocal and complete, possibly we will have sense enough to meet at the conference table with the understanding that the area of armaments has ended and the human race must conform its actions to this truth or die.
    – Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President, April 4, 1965

    When there is a problem between two small nations, the problem disappears. When there is a problem between a big country and a small country, the little country disappears. When there is a problem between two big countries, the United Nations disappears.
    – Victor Belaunde, Peruvian U.N. Ambassador

    A Security Council that can be rendered impotent by the vote of one nation obviously cannot begin to guarantee security. A General Assembly that can pass resolutions with the votes of nations representing less than 10 percent of the world’s population, and some 3 percent of the gross world product, will not have, and cannot get, the respect it must have if its decisions are to be taken seriously.
    – Dr. John Logue, Director Common Heritage Institute
    ”A More Effective United Nations” New Jersey Law Journal December 26, 1985

    As Secretary General of this organization, with no allegiance except to the common interest, I feel the question must be justifiably be put to the leading nuclear powers: By what right do they decide the fate of all humanity?…No one can expect to escape from the catastrophic consequences of a nuclear war on the fragile structure of our planet. The responsibility assumed by the Great Powers is now no longer to their populations alone; it is to every country and every people, to all of us.
    – Javier Perez de Cuellar, U.N. Secretary General December 1984

    The cause of the United Nations is inseparable from the cause of peace. But we will not have peace by afterthought. If the United Nations is to survive, those who represent it must bolster it, those who advocate it must submit to it, and those who believe in it must fight for it.
    – Norman Cousins, President World Federalist Association
    Author, Anatomy of an Illness

    The United Nations is an extremely important and useful institution provided the people and governments of the world realize that it is merely a transitional system toward the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority vested with sufficient legislative and executive powers to keep the peace.
    – Albert Einstein

    World federalists are working for disarmament by seeking the ways to end all use of force in international relations. The only real alternative to war is an international legal system which provides common security for all states through the peaceful and just resolution of disputes according to law. This is vitally important in a world which has nuclear weapons. World federalists believe the test of sincerity of all who claim to want disarmament is their willingness to create and to be bound by a common world law and by agreed procedures for preventing aggression and solving conflicts peacefully. 
    – World Federalism
    World Association for World Federation

    We seek to strengthen the United Nations, to help solve its financial problems, to make it a more effective instrument for peace, to develop it into a genuine world security system… capable of resolving disputes on the basis of law, of insuring the security of the large and the small, and of creating conditions under which arms can fully be abolished… This will require a new effort to achieve world law.
    – John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

    The proposed system of comprehensive security will become operative to the extent that the United Nations, its security council and other international institutions and mechanisms function effectively. A decisive increase is required in the authority and role of the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
    – Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet General Secretary, address to U. N., September 1987

    This planet is in bad political shape and is administered appallingly. An outer-space inspection team would undoubtedly give us an F (failure) or a triple D (dumb, deficient, and dangerous) in planetary management. Our world is afflicted by a good dozen conflicts almost permanently. Its skies, lands, and oceans are infested with atomic weapons which cost humanity 850 billion dollars a year, while so many poor people are dying of hunger on this planet. And yet, I have seen the U.N. become universal and prevent many conflicts. I have seen the dangerous decolonization page turned quickly and with infinitely less bloodshed than in Europe and the Americas in preceding centuries. I have seen a flowering expansion of international cooperation in thirty-two U.N. special agencies and world programs.
    – Robert Muller, Former U. N. Assistant Secretary General

    There is enough bad people to make world federal government necessary, and there is enough good people to make it work. 
    – Source Unknown

    Many of these proposals may appear unpatriotic or even treasonous to those who identify being patriotic with the worship of American military power… If patriotism is an active concern for one’s freedom, welfare and survival of one’s people, there is no patriotic duty more immediate than the abolition of war as a national right and institution.
    Cord Meyer
    Peace or Anarchy

    Let us also think about establishing an emergency environmental aid centre within the U.N. Its function would be to promptly dispatch international groups of experts to areas that have experienced a sharp deterioration in the environmental situation.
    Mikhail Gorbachev
    Soviet General Secretary
    Address to the U.N., New York
    December 7, 1988

    It is dangerous in the most literal sense of the word, when streams of poison flow into the rivers, when toxic rains fall on the earth from the sky, when towns and entire regions are suffocating in an atmosphere saturated with the fumes put out by industry and by vehicles, when the development of nuclear power is accompanied by unacceptable risks.
    – Mikhail Gorbachev
    Soviet General Secretary
    Address to U.N., September 1987

    A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient means of social justice to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
    – H.G. Wells
    Noted Historian

    With all the positive news that’s coming from Eastern Europe and the U. S. government about significant nuclear arsenal reductions (as much as 50%), it’s easy to get lulled into complacency about the nuclear arms race. But consider this: the U.S. is still building and testing nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. We are still building the ultimate doomsday device known as star Wars. Even with these reductions in our arsenals, U.S. and Soviets will still have enough fire power to blow the world up 5,000 times, not to mention the French, Israeli, or Chinese stockpiles (as well as the rest of the world). And what about all the toxic wastes? Where will the madness end?
    – Richard Gold
    Eugene Peace Works
    Eugene, Oregon

    The founding of the United Nations embodies our deepest hopes for a peaceful world. And during the past year, we’ve come closer than ever before to realizing those hopes. We’ve seen a century sundered by barbed threats and barbed wire, give way to a new era of peace and competition and freedom. This is a new and different world. Not since 1945 have we seen the real possibility of using the United Nations as it was designed, as a center for international collective security.
    – George Bush
    U.S. President, October 1, 1990
    Address to the United Nations

    Environmentalists and politicians can argue the costs and benefits of international action on global warming from now until doomsday, and they probably will. But nothing will get done without an institutional mechanism to develop, institute, and enforce regulations across national boundaries.
    – Elliot Richardson
    Head of the U. S. Delegation
    Law of the Sea Conference

    A 14-POINT PROGRAM for Reforming the United Nations

    1. Improve the General assembly decision-making process.

    2. Modify the vet in the Security Council.

    3. Create an International Disarmament Organization.

    4. Improve the dispute settlement process.

    5. Improve the U.N.’s peacekeeping capability.

    6. Provide for adequate and stable U.N. revenues.

    7. Create an International Court of Justice.

    8. Create an International Criminal Court to try hijackers and terrorists.

    9. Improve the U.N.’s human rights machinery.

    10. Create a stronger U.N. environmental and conservation programs.

    11. Provide international authorities for areas not under national control.

    12. Provide for more effective world trade and monetary systems.

    13. Establish a U.N. development program.

    14. Achieve administrative reform of the U.N. system.

    For more information, write to Campaign for U.N. Reform, 418 Seventh Street, S.E., Washington, DC 20003. Phone: (202) 546-3956

     

    PRESERVING THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT

    Prepared by the World Resources Institute, Washington DC, and the American Assembly, affiliated with Colombia University, founded by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1950.

    Three indivisibly linked global environmental trends together constitute an increasingly grave challenge to the habitability of the earth. They are human population growth; tropical deforestation and the rapid loss of biological diversity; and global atmospheric change, including stratospheric ozone loss and greenhouse warming. These trends threaten nations’ economic potential security therefore their internal political security, their citizen’s health (because of increased ultraviolet radiation), and, in the case of global warming, possibly their very existence. No more basic threat to national security exists. Thus, together with economic interdependence, global environmental threats are shifting traditional national security concerns to a focus on collective global security.

    The degradation of the global environment is integrally linked to human population growth. More than 90 million people are added each year – more than ever before. On its present trajectory, the world’s population could nearly triple its current size, reaching 14 billion before stabilizing. With a heroic effort, it could level off at around 9 billion. However, today’s unmet need for family planning is huge: only 30 percent of reproductive age people in the developing world outside of China currently have access to contraception. Women’s full and equal participation in society at all levels must be rapidly addressed.

    Tropical deforestation and the loss of a diverse set of species rob the earth of its biological richness, which undermines long-range ecological security and global economic potential. Nearly 20 million hectares of tropical forests are lost every year. Conservative estimates put the extinction rate at one hundred species per day: a rate unmatched since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Escalating human populations, deforestation, disruptions of watersheds, soil loss, and land degradation ate all linked in a vicious cycle that perpetuates and deepens poverty, and often creates ecological refugees.

    The depletion of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) allows increased ultraviolet B radiation from the sun to enter the earth’s atmosphere, threatening human health and the productivity of the biosphere.

    There is a scientific consensus that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases will cause global climactic change. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have increased 25 percent since the beginning of the industrial era.

    Therefore, the earth is set to experience substantial climate change of unknown scale and rapidity. The consequences are likely to include sea level rise, greater frequency of extreme weather events, disruption of ecosystems, and potentially vast impacts on the global economy. The processes of climate change are irreversible and major additional releases could be triggered from the biosphere by global warming in an uncontrollable self-reinforcing process (example: methane release from unfrozen Arctic tundra).

    We call attention to the immediate need for immediate international action to reverse trends that threaten the integrity of the global environment. These trends endanger all nations in the common interest. Our message is one of urgency. Accountable and courageous leadership in all sectors will be needed to mobilize the necessary effort. If the world community fails to act forcefully in the current decade, the earth’s ability to sustain life is at risk.

    Excert from Preserving the Global Environment: A Challenge of Shared Leadership. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.

    [1] Ecocide is the deliberate destruction of the natural environment, as by pollutants. 
    [2] For more information and a videotape on the Binding Triad, write the Center for War/Peace Studies, 218 E. 18th Street, New York, NY 10003. Phone: (212) 475-1077.
    [3] After World War II, the Soviet Union took over Lithuania by military conquest – not the free vote of the people. You will recall that the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 clearly specified that the vote of the people – not the politicians – was required to join the United States of America. Lithuania’s desire today for independence is not considered aggression. 
    [4] Pace Law School in White Plains, New York has a Center for Environmental Legal Studies headed by Professor Nicholas A. Robinson. He teaches lawyers about environmental problems now facing our nation and the world.
    [5] From Effective Global Environmental Protection by Pamela Leonard. Published by World Federalist Association, May 1990.

  • The Magna Carta For The Nuclear Age: A Universal Declaration of Individual Accountability Prepared by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

    Preamble

    Affirming that all people of the World are entitled to life, liberty and other basic human rights;

    Believing that all individuals, states and international organizations share in the responsibility to ensure peace, protect human rights and sustain the common heritage of the planet;

    Acknowledging the significant efforts of the United Nations and other international organizationstoward these ends;

    Committed to the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Nuremberg Principles;

    Convinced that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have no place in a civilized World order;

    Further convinced that survival in the nuclear age requires adherence to principles of justice and the World rule of law;

    Determined to establish a just, peaceful and civilized World order in the twenty-first century,

    We proclaim this Magna Carta for the Nuclear Age.

    Article I

    All individuals, including Heads of State, Ministers of Government, industrial, scientific and military leaders, shall be held personally accountable under international law for planning, preparing, initiating or committing the following acts:

    • Crimes against peace, including waging a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties.
    • War crimes, including deliberate attacks against civilian populations, the use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and other grave breaches of humanitarian law.
    • Crimes against humanity, including genocide, torture, and other serious mass violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
    • Crimes against the environment, including intentional spoliation of living habitats.
    • Economic crimes against a people or nation, including slavery in all forms.
    • Terrorism, piracy, kidnapping, hostage taking, and the training, support or sheltering of persons engaged in such crimes.
    • Illicit trafficking in arms or narcotics, and all acts in furtherance of such crimes.
    • Covert acts to overthrow or destabilize a legitimate foreign government, including assassination.
    • Deliberate persecution or denial of civil rights on grounds of race, color, gender, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, or other status.

    Article II

    The World Community shall ensure the further codification of these provisions through the continuing activities of the United Nations and other international organizations, and shall ensure compliance with them by establishing and maintaining the following institutions:

    • An International Commission of Inquiry to engage in fact finding and certification of cases for trial;
    • An International Criminal Court, composed of distinguished jurists, to try cases certified by the International Commission of Inquiry;
    • International Police Forces to enforce the orders of the International Criminal Court;
    • An International Criminal Penitentiary for confinement of convicted offenders; and
    • A Center for the Advancement of International Criminal Law and Justice, independent of governments, to assist in codification of international criminal law and monitoring the implementation of this Charter.
    • An International Commission of Inquiry to engage in fact finding and certification of cases for trial;
    • An International Criminal Court, composed of distinguished jurists, to try cases certified by the International Commission of Inquiry;
    • International Police Forces to enforce the orders of the International Criminal Court;
    • An International Criminal Penitentiary for confinement of convicted offenders; and
    • A Center for the Advancement of International Criminal Law and Justice, independent of governments, to assist in codification of international criminal law and monitoring the implementation of this Charter.

    Article III

    These provisions, upon adoption, may be added to, abridged or altered by the common consent of the World Community of nations and peoples, but without amendment they shall be binding in perpetuity.