Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: Nuclear Threat

  • How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks with Russia

    This article was originally published on Counter Punch

    Although Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged to work for a nuclear weapons free world this spring, they failed to take meaningful steps at their July summit to put the world on the proper path to nuclear abolition. Disappointingly, they only agreed to minor cuts in their respective weapons arsenals due to US unwillingness to cancel its plans to put missile and radar bases in Poland and the Czech Republic which Russia views as a threat to its security. Essentially we have come full circle to the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, when negotiations for the total abolition of nuclear weapons tragically collapsed because Reagan wouldn’t give up U.S. plans for a Strategic Defense Initiative to dominate space.

    Clinton similarly rejected opportunities to take up Putin’s proposal to cut our nuclear arsenals to 1,000 warheads. After Russia’s ratification of START II and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 2000, Putin called for new talks to reduce long-range missiles from 3,500 to 1,500 or even 1,000, upping the ante from planned levels of 2,500 warheads. This forward-looking proposal was accompanied by Putin’s stern caveat that all Russian offers would be off the table if the United States proceeded to build a National Missile Defense (NMD) in violation of the ABM Treaty. Astoundingly, U.S. diplomatic “talking points” leaked by Russia to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists revealed that Clinton was urging Russia it had nothing to fear from NMD as long as Russia kept 2,500 weapons at launch-on-warning, hair-trigger alert. Rejecting Putin’s offer to cut to 1,000 warheads, the United States assured Russia that with 2,500 warheads it could overcome a NMD shield and deliver an “annihilating counterattack”! If the Clinton administration had instead embraced Putin’s plan, the United States and Russia would have been able to call all nuclear weapons states to the table — even those with arsenals in the hundreds or fewer — to negotiate a treaty to ban the bomb. Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, pursuing U.S. plans “to dominate and control the military use of space, to protect U.S. interests and investments,” as set forth in the U.S. Space Command’s Vision 2020 mission statement and the Rumsfeld Commission Report of 2000.

    Had Obama been willing to forego the illusory US missile shield (which is incapable of offering any protection against incoming missiles, since those missiles could easily be accompanied by a barrage of indistinguishable decoys rendering the missile defenses useless) Russia might well have agreed to larger reductions in their mutual arsenals which together now total about 25,000 warheads with only about 1,000 more in the possession of all seven other nuclear powers—UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. If the US and Russia agree to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear bombs to 1,000 or less, they would then have the moral authority required to bring all the nuclear weapons states to the negotiating table to eliminate nuclear weapons.

    The numerous responses from US experts and commentators that have been highly critical and dismissive of Obama’s goal for nuclear abolition make it apparent that Obama must overcome the resistance of rusty cold warriors in the Pentagon and weapons labs to achieve a nuclear-free world. But he must also address the drivers for space weapons and missile shields–the millions of dollars spent unconscionably by Pentagon contractors now staffed by former Congress members and Capitol Hill aides. This corrupt revolving door system lobbies Congress and finances the re-election campaigns of members who can then be relied upon to keep the military-industrial-academic-congressional complex in the money to the detriment of nuclear disarmament and world peace.

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York representative.

  • What Has Prevented Nuclear War

    This article was originally published on the History News Network

    One of the great questions of the modern world is: Why has nuclear war not occurred since 1945?

    The conventional answer is that, thanks to fear of mutual destruction, nuclear weapons have “deterred” nuclear war. And yet, this answer fails to account for some important developments. Since 1945, nuclear powers have not waged nuclear war against non-nuclear powers. Furthermore, if nuclear weapons prevent nuclear war, it is hard to understand why nuclear powers have signed disarmament agreements or have worried (and still worry) about nuclear proliferation.

    An alternative explanation for nuclear restraint is that public opposition to nuclear war has caused government officials to step back from the brink. After all, peace groups have agitated vigorously against nuclear war and opinion polls over the years have shown that the public has viewed nuclear war with revulsion—two factors that government leaders have viewed with alarm. In addition, there is substantial evidence that underscores the decisive role of public pressure.

    In 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman had launched the atomic bombing of Japan without apparent moral qualms or influence by the public (which knew nothing of the government’s atomic bomb program). This use of nuclear weapons, Truman declared jubilantly, was “the greatest thing in history.” Consequently, five years later, when the Korean War erupted, there could well have been a repeat performance in that bloody conflict. Certainly, there seemed good military reasons for the use of nuclear weapons. On two occasions, U.S. troops were close to military defeat at the hands of non-nuclear powers. Also, there was no prospect of a nuclear counterattack by the Soviet Union, which was not participating directly in the war, had only recently developed an atomic bomb, and lacked an effective delivery system for it.

    But, thanks to burgeoning antinuclear sentiment, employing the atomic bomb in the war had become politically difficult. U.S. intelligence reported that, in Britain, there existed “widespread popular alarm concerning the possible use of the A-bomb.” From the State Department’s specialist on the Far East came a warning that use of the Bomb would cause a “revulsion of feeling” to “spread throughout Asia. . . . Our efforts to win the Asiatics to our side would be cancelled and our influence in non-Communist nations of Asia would deteriorate to an almost non-existent quantity.” Paul Nitze, the chair of the State Department’s policy planning staff, argued that, in military terms, the Bomb probably would be effective. But using it would “arouse the peoples of Asia against us.” Ultimately, then, political considerations overwhelmed military considerations, and Truman chose to reject calls by U.S. military commanders, such as General Douglas MacArthur, to win the war with nuclear weapons.

    The Eisenhower administration, too, began with a breezy sense of the opportunities afforded by U.S. nuclear weapons, promising “massive retaliation” against any outbreak of Communist aggression. But it soon came up against the limits set by popular loathing for nuclear war. According to the record of a 1956 National Security Council (NSC) meeting, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other administration officials called for greater flexibility in the employment of nuclear weapons, the President responded: “The use of nuclear weapons would raise serious political problems in view of the current state of world opinion.” The following May, countering ambitious proposals by Lewis Strauss (chair of the Atomic Energy Commission) and the Defense Department for nuclear war-fighting, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told another NSC meeting, according to the minutes, that “world opinion was not yet ready to accept the general use of nuclear weapons. . . . If we resort to such a use of nuclear weapons we will, in the eyes of the world, be cast as a ruthless military power.” Dulles predicted, hopefully, “that all this would change at some point in the future, but the time had not yet come.” Although the Secretary of Defense renewed his pleas for use of nuclear weapons, Dulles remained adamant that the United States must not “get out of step with world opinion.”

    The Kennedy administration also found its options limited by the public’s distaste for nuclear war. A late 1960 Defense Department report to the President-elect, recalled one of its drafters, argued that “the political mood of the country” weighed heavily against developing a U.S. “`win’ capability” for a future nuclear war. This fear of the public response also tempered administration policy during the Cuban missile crisis, when Kennedy—as Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled—worried about “an adverse public reaction,” including “demonstrations, peace groups marching in the streets, perhaps a divisive public debate.” In addition, even in conflicts with non-nuclear powers, U.S. policymakers felt it necessary to rule out nuclear war thanks to the stigma attached to it by the public. A nuclear power, Rusk explained years later, “would wear the mark of Cain for generations to come if it ever attacked a non-nuclear country with nuclear weapons.”

    The Vietnam War provided a particularly attractive opportunity for the U.S. government’s use of its nuclear might. Here, once more, U.S. military forces were engaged in a war with a non-nuclear nation—and, furthermore, were losing that war. And yet, as Rusk recalled, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations deliberately “lost the war rather than ‘win’ it with nuclear weapons.” McGeorge Bundy, who served as the national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, maintained that the U.S. government’s decision to avoid using nuclear weapons in the Vietnam conflict did not result from fear of nuclear retaliation by the Soviet and Chinese governments, but from the terrible public reaction that a U.S. nuclear attack would provoke in other nations. Even more significant, Bundy maintained, was the prospect of public upheaval in the United States, for “no President could hope for understanding and support from his own countrymen if he used the bomb.” Looking back on the war, Richard Nixon complained bitterly that, had he used nuclear weapons in Vietnam, “the resulting domestic and international uproar would have damaged our foreign policy on all fronts.”

    And so it went in the following decades. Even the remarkably hawkish officials of the Reagan administration came up sharply against political realities. Entering office talking glibly of fighting and winning nuclear wars, they soon confronted a worldwide antinuclear uprising, undergirded by public opinion. In April 1982, shortly after a Nuclear Freeze resolution began wending its way through Congress, the President began declaring publicly: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He added, on that first occasion: “To those who protest against nuclear war, I’m with you.” Cynics might argue that Reagan’s rejection of nuclear war was no more than rhetoric. Nevertheless, rhetoric repeated often enough inhibits a policy reversal. And, in fact, although the Reagan administration sponsored wars in numerous places, it does not appear to have factored nuclear weapons into its battle plans. Kenneth Adelman, who directed the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for most of the Reagan years, claimed that he “never heard anyone broach the topic of using nuclear weapons. Ever. In any setting, in any way.”

    Thus, evidence certainly exists that public pressure has prevented nuclear war. Where is the evidence that nuclear weapons have done so?

    Dr. Lawrence S. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement (Stanford University Press).

  • North Korea Nuke Test Makes Nuclear Abolition More Important Than Ever

    This article was originally published by YES! Magazine

    North Korea’s nuclear testing heightens and underlines the dangers of a world in which nuclear arms are spreading.

    The news media treats the North Korea’s nuclear weapons program as a story of a bad actor threatening international security, giving it the sort of attention rarely given to calls for constructive action to eliminate the danger of nuclear weapons. In particular, the frayed Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is seldom mentioned, nor the obligation contained in the treaty for the nuclear powers, including the U.S., to eliminate nuclear stockpiles.

    The contrast hits home in Hiroshima, Japan, the first city attacked with an atomic bomb. Just eight days before the North Korean test, the city’s daily newspaper, the Chugoku Shimbun, released an appeal from 17 Nobel Peace Prize laureates for citizens and governments to act for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Outside of Japan, the laureates’ Hiroshima-Nagasaki Declaration has received almost no media attention.

    When North Korea held its nuclear test, however, Hiroshima immediately became a media stage, and legitimately so: Citizens gathered in an outdoor protest. At the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a clock tracking the number of days since the world’s last nuclear test, which had been approaching 1,000, went back to one. Reporters sought out aging survivors for their comments. Suzuko Numata, an 85-year-old interviewed by Japan’s Mainichi newspaper from her bed at a home for the elderly, raised the real issue looming behind the North Korean test: a world in which nuclear weapons continue to be seen by some nations as something to be sought rather than as a threat to all humans.

    Just days before the Nobel Prize winners’ declaration, one of the signers, International Atomic Energy Authority head Mohamed ElBaradei, told the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper that existing agreements on nonproliferation are out of date and that he fears big growth in the number of nuclear powers. The story received at best limited attention, despite ElBaradei’s prominence and expertise.

    Then, there are the admirable efforts of some of the most prominent former U.S. national security leaders to generate momentum for a non-nuclear world. The group includes former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn. They did get space on the Wall Street Journal to write about their ideas, twice. Until recently, however, one was more likely to come across any details of their undertaking in a progressive magazine like YES! than in the main news media. But, as Shultz told YES! Magazine’s editor Sarah van Gelder for the summer 2008 edition, his group was engaging with leaders from all of the nuclear powers, including officially unacknowledged possessor Israel.

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

    More recently, though, the group received considerable media attention, because they met with President Barack Obama in the White House to endorse the vision for a nuclear-free world he unveiled in Prague earlier this spring. By speaking out, Obama has begun to make nonproliferation a more appealing story to a wider spectrum of the media.

    Certainly, the Nobel Peace Prize groups’s spearhead Mairead Maguire, ElBaradei, the Dalai Lama, Muhammad Yunus, and the rest of their group hope Obama can begin to make a difference. The head of Chugoku Shimbun’s Hiroshima Peace Media Center, Akira Tashiro, wrote the appeal, which was revised before publication to take account of Obama’s speech in Prague.

    The appeal’s timing was designed to fall a year ahead of a U.N. conference to review the treaty, including the duty of nuclear states to work towards disarmament. The 2005 review failed to produced substantive agreement, but observers say that the presence of the Obama administration has improved the atmosphere at a just-completed preparatory conference for 2010.

    For the treaty’s future, North Korea, Iran, or other states with nuclear ambitions are no more than half the problem. The Nobel laureates’ Hiroshima-Nagasaki Declaration says, “We are deeply troubled by this threat of proliferation to non-nuclear weapon states, but equally concerned at the faltering will of the nuclear powers to move forward in their obligation to disarm their own nations of these dreadful weapons.”

    In the same YES! edition as the Shultz interview, author Jonathan Schell wrote of the potential for a safer world if the nuclear powers would bargain to give up their bombs in exchange for enforceable promises by others to stay out of the nuclear business.

    In sorting through the likely reasons behind North Korea’s nuclear test this week, David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Peace Age Foundation, came to a related point: “North Korea’s nuclear testing is a manifestation of a deeper problem in the international system, that of continuing to have a small group of countries possess and implicitly threaten the use of nuclear weapons for deterrence or any other reason.”

    In an interview, Tashiro said he hoped that Americans would support nuclear disarmament on the grounds—expressed by Shultz, Kissinger, and others—of the threat created by proliferation and the potential for terrorists to acquire nuclear materials. But, to come to that conclusion, Americans need more information on the issue than they usually receive.

    Even with Obama talking about ending nuclear weapons, he and other nations’ leaders will need the support of an informed, engaged public if they are to create meaningful progress toward nuclear disarmament. In their conclusion, the declaration signers say, “As Nobel Peace laureates, we call on the citizens of the world to press their leaders to grasp the peril of inaction and summon the political will to advance toward nuclear disarmament and abolition.” That idea resonates in Hiroshima, a city that tries to make a better future out of horrible suffering. Perhaps as the world comes to terms with the dangerous possibilities of a nuclear-armed North Korea and Iran, the obligations of the current nuclear power to work towards abolition will get the attention required for action.

    Joe Copeland wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Joe, who is part of the online news startup Seattle PostGlobe, is a visiting researcher at the Hiroshima Peace Institute on a Fulbright grant for journalists. While in Japan, he has a blog at www.hiroshimastories.com. The views are his own.

  • Another Nuclear Anniversary

    Once upon a time making nuclear bombs was the biggest thing a country could do. But not any more; North Korea’s successful nuclear test provides rock-solid proof. This is a country that no one admires.

    It is unknown for scientific achievement, has little electricity or fuel, food and medicine are scarce, corruption is ubiquitous, and its people live in terribly humiliating conditions under a vicious, dynastic dictatorship. In a famine some years ago, North Korea lost nearly 800,000 people. It has an enormous prison population of 200,000 that is subjected to systematic torture and abuse.

    Why does a miserable, starving country continue spending its last penny on the bomb? On developing and testing a fleet of missiles whose range increases from time to time? The answer is clear: North Korea’s nuclear weapons are instruments of blackmail rather than means of defence. Brandished threateningly, and manipulated from time to time, these bombs are designed to keep the flow of international aid going.

    Surely the people of North Korea gained nothing from their country’s nuclearisation. But they cannot challenge their oppressors. But, as Pakistan celebrates the 11th anniversary of its nuclear tests, we Pakistanis — who are far freer — must ask: what have we gained from the bomb?

    Some had imagined that nuclear weapons would make Pakistan an object of awe and respect internationally. They had hoped that Pakistan would acquire the mantle of leadership of the Islamic world. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1998 tests, Pakistan’s stock had shot up in some Muslim countries before it crashed. But today, with a large swathe of its territory lost to insurgents, one has to defend Pakistan against allegations of being a failed state. In terms of governance, economy, education or any reasonable quality of life indicators, Pakistan is not a successful state that is envied by anyone. Contrary to claims made in 1998, the bomb did not transform Pakistan into a technologically and scientifically advanced country. Again, the facts are stark. Apart from relatively minor exports of computer software and light armaments, science and technology remain irrelevant in the process of production. Pakistan’s current exports are principally textiles, cotton, leather, footballs, fish and fruit.

    This is just as it was before Pakistan embarked on its quest for the bomb. The value-added component of Pakistani manufacturing somewhat exceeds that of Bangladesh and Sudan, but is far below that of India, Turkey and Indonesia. Nor is the quality of science taught in our educational institutions even remotely satisfactory. But then, given that making a bomb these days requires only narrow technical skills rather than scientific ones, this is scarcely surprising.

    What became of the claim that the pride in the bomb would miraculously weld together the disparate peoples who constitute Pakistan? While many in Punjab still want the bomb, angry Sindhis want water and jobs — and they blame Punjab for taking these away. Pakhtun refugees from Swat and Buner, hapless victims of a war between the Taliban and the Pakistani Army, are tragically being turned away by ethnic groups from entering Sindh. This rejection strikes deeply against the concept of a single nation united in adversity.

    As for the Baloch, they deeply resent that the two nuclear test sites — now radioactive and out of bounds — are on their soil. Angry at being governed from Islamabad, many have taken up arms and demand that Punjab’s army get off their backs. Many schools in Balochistan refuse to fly the Pakistani flag, the national anthem is not sung, and black flags celebrate Pakistan’s independence day. Balochistan University teems with the icons of Baloch separatism: posters of Akbar Bugti, Balaach Marri, Brahamdagh Bugti, and ‘General Sheroff’ are everywhere. The bomb was no glue.

    Did the bomb help Pakistan liberate Kashmir from Indian rule? It is a sad fact that India’s grip on Kashmir — against the will of Kashmiris — is tighter today than it has been for a long time. As the late Eqbal Ahmed often remarked, Pakistan’s poor politics helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Its strategy for confronting India — secret jihad by Islamic fighters protected by Pakistan’s nuclear weapons — backfired terribly in the arena of international opinion. More importantly, it created the hydra-headed militancy now haunting Pakistan. Some Mujahideen, who felt betrayed by Pakistan’s army and politicians, ultimately took revenge by turning their guns against their sponsors and trainers. The bomb helped us lose Kashmir.

    Some might ask, didn’t the bomb stop India from swallowing up Pakistan? First, an upward-mobile India has no reason to want an additional 170 million Muslims. Second, even if India wanted to, territorial conquest is impossible. Conventional weapons, used by Pakistan in a defensive mode, are sufficient protection. If mighty America could not digest Iraq, there can never be a chance for a middling power like India to occupy Pakistan, a country four times larger than Iraq.

    It is, of course, true that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons deterred India from launching punitive attacks at least thrice since the 1998 tests. Pakistan’s secret incursion in Kargil during 1999, the Dec 13 attack on the Indian parliament the same year (initially claimed by Jaish-i-Muhammad), and the Mumbai attack in 2008 by Lashkar-i-Taiba, did create sentiment in India for ferreting out Pakistan-based militant groups. So should we keep the bomb to protect militant groups? Surely it is time to realise that these means of conducting foreign policy are tantamount to suicide.

    It was a lie that the bomb could protect Pakistan, its people or its armed forces. Rather, it has helped bring us to this grievously troubled situation and offers no way out. The threat to Pakistan is internal. The bomb cannot help us recover the territory seized by the Baitullahs and Fazlullahs, nor bring Waziristan back to Pakistan. More nuclear warheads, test-launching more missiles, or buying yet more American F-16s and French submarines, will not help.

    Pakistan’s security problems cannot be solved by better weapons. Instead, the way forward lies in building a sustainable and active democracy, an economy for peace rather than war, a federation in which provincial grievances can be effectively resolved, elimination of the feudal order and creating a society that respects the rule of law.

    It is time for Pakistan to become part of the current global move against nuclear weapons. India — which had thrust nuclearisation upon an initially unwilling Pakistan — is morally obliged to lead. Both must announce that they will not produce more fissile material to make yet more bombs. Both must drop insane plans to expand their nuclear arsenals. Eleven years ago a few Pakistanis and Indians had argued that the bomb would bring no security, no peace. They were condemned as traitors and sellouts by their fellow citizens. But each passing year shows just how right we were.

    Pervez Hoodbhoy teaches nuclear physics at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan.

  • Toxic Link: The WHO and the IAEA

    This article was originally published in The Guardian‘s Comment Is Free

    Fifty years ago, on 28 May 1959, the World Health Organisation’s assembly voted into force an obscure but important agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency – the United Nations “Atoms for Peace” organisation, founded just two years before in 1957. The effect of this agreement has been to give the IAEA an effective veto on any actions by the WHO that relate in any way to nuclear power – and so prevent the WHO from playing its proper role in investigating and warning of the dangers of nuclear radiation on human health.

    The WHO’s objective is to promote “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health”, while the IAEA’s mission is to “accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world”. Although best known for its work to restrict nuclear proliferation, the IAEA’s main role has been to promote the interests of the nuclear power industry worldwide, and it has used the agreement to suppress the growing body of scientific information on the real health risks of nuclear radiation.

    Under the agreement, whenever either organisation wants to do anything in which the other may have an interest, it “shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement”. The two agencies must “keep each other fully informed concerning all projected activities and all programs of work which may be of interest to both parties”. And in the realm of statistics – a key area in the epidemiology of nuclear risk – the two undertake “to consult with each other on the most efficient use of information, resources, and technical personnel in the field of statistics and in regard to all statistical projects dealing with matters of common interest”.

    The language appears to be evenhanded, but the effect has been one-sided. For example, investigations into the health impacts of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine on 26 April 1986 have been effectively taken over by IAEA and dissenting information has been suppressed. The health effects of the accident were the subject of two major conferences, in Geneva in 1995, and in Kiev in 2001. But the full proceedings of those conferences remain unpublished – despite claims to the contrary by a senior WHO spokesman reported in Le Monde Diplomatique.

    Meanwhile, the 2005 report of the IAEA-dominated Chernobyl Forum, which estimates a total death toll from the accident of only several thousand, is widely regarded as a whitewash as it ignores a host of peer-reviewed epidemiological studies indicating far higher mortality and widespread genomic damage. Many of these studies were presented at the Geneva and Kiev conferences but they, and the ensuing learned discussions, have yet to see the light of day thanks to the non-publication of the proceedings.

    The British radiation biologist Keith Baverstock is another casualty of the agreement, and of the mindset it has created in the WHO. He served as a radiation scientist and regional adviser at the WHO’s European Office from 1991 to 2003, when he was sacked after expressing concern to his senior managers that new epidemiological evidence from nuclear test veterans and from soldiers exposed to depleted uranium indicated that current risk models for nuclear radiation were understating the real hazards.

    Now a professor at the University of Kuopio, Finland, Baverstock finally published his paper in the peer-reviewed journal Medicine, Conflict and Survival in April 2005. He concluded by calling for “reform from within the profession” and stressing “the political imperative for freely independent scientific institutions” – a clear reference to the non-independence of his former employer, the WHO, which had so long ignored his concerns.

    Since the 21st anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in April 2007, a daily “Hippocratic vigil” has taken place at the WHO’s offices in Geneva, organised by Independent WHO to persuade the WHO to abandon its the WHO-IAEA Agreement. The protest has continued through the WHO’s 62nd World Health Assembly, which ended yesterday, and will endure through the executive board meeting that begins today. The group has struggled to win support from WHO’s member states. But the scientific case against the agreement is building up, most recently when the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR) called for its abandonment at its conference earlier this month in Lesvos, Greece.

    At the conference, research was presented indicating that as many as a million children across Europe and Asia may have died in the womb as a result of radiation from Chernobyl, as well as hundreds of thousands of others exposed to radiation fallout, backing up earlier findings published by the ECRR in Chernobyl 20 Years On: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident. Delegates heard that the standard risk models for radiation risk published by the International Committee on Radiological Protection (ICRP), and accepted by WHO, underestimate the health impacts of low levels of internal radiation by between 100 and 1,000 times – consistent with the ECRR’s own 2003 model of radiological risk (The Health Effects of Ionising Radiation Exposure at Low Doses and Low Dose Rates for Radiation Protection Purposes: Regulators’ Edition). According to Chris Busby, the ECRR’s scientific secretary and visiting professor at the University of Ulster’s school of biomedical sciences:

    “The subordination of the WHO to IAEA is a key part of the systematic falsification of nuclear risk which has been under way ever since Hiroshima, the agreement creates an unacceptable conflict of interest in which the UN organisation concerned with promoting our health has been made subservient to those whose main interest is the expansion of nuclear power. Dissolving the WHO-IAEA agreement is a necessary first step to restoring the WHO’s independence to research the true health impacts of ionising radiation and publish its findings.”

    Some birthdays deserve celebration – but not this one. After five decades, it is time the WHO regained the freedom to impart independent, objective advice on the health risks of radiation.

    Oliver Tickell is author of the book Kyoto2.

  • Maybe We Should Take the North Koreans at Their Word

    Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear device in three years on Monday morning, it released a statement explaining why. “The republic has conducted another underground nuclear testing successfully in order to strengthen our defensive nuclear deterrence.”(1) If the Obama Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing, Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear arms do appear to serve North Korea’s national security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize that they mean what they say.

    From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to one’s adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold War’s long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on “nuclear use theorists” – whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS – that in the nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict upon that opponent “unacceptable damage” in reply. If an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as long as that damage was “unacceptable”), then, according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the possible obliteration of, oh, a state’s capital city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?

    Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this “unacceptable damage” model of nuclear deterrence – which we might as well call UD – failed to put the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the opponent’s society, “mutually assured destruction,” which soon came to be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression – nuclear attacks on an adversary’s nuclear weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an adversary’s closest allies (in Western and Eastern Europe) – that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side from using their nuclear weapons against one’s own cities and society, by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent’s cities and society in reply. “The Department of Defense,” said an Ohio congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, “has become the Department of Retaliation.”(2)

    Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. “Our twenty thousandth bomb,” said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project that built the world’s first atomic weapons, as early as 1953, “will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth.” (3) “Deterrence does not depend on superiority,” said the great strategist Bernard Brodie in 1965.(4) “There is no foreign policy objective today that is so threatened,” said retired admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1998, “that we would É accept the risk of receiving just one nuclear detonation in retaliation.”(5)

    Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion that “deterrence does not depend on superiority.” Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them – by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation.

    Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful potential adversary – the United States – in any kind of direct military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed, no state can.

    However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that capability immediately, before it’s too late, following the venerable maxim: “Use them or lose them.” The obliteration of an entire American military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire American city, would clearly seem to qualify as “unacceptable damage” for the United States.

    Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning “surgical strike.” However, with nuclear weapons, “almost” is not good enough. Even the barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets, and result in massive “unacceptable damage” for the United States, would in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.

    In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States disappeared tomorrow morning, but America’s conventional military superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.

    The “Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples,” a mouthpiece for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang’s logic quite plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that ‘the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force’”(6) Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North Korean general was asked to defend his country’s nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor replied, “We see what you are getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us.”(7)

    It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet – in contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran – no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.

    Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a “mutual” nuclear balance with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete “assured destruction.” To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an American city, would not be at all the same thing as the “destruction” of the entire American nation – as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.

    And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10 nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national security strategies solidly upon it.

    There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon follow their lead.

    President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, “Today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” (Unfortunately, he followed that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not “be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime,” suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)

    The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where they do-but so too do many others. And another track still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.

    The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.

    ——-

    (1) The Washington Post, May 25, 2009.

    (2) Quoted in Daniel Lang, An Inquiry Into Enoughness: Of Bombs and Men and Staying Alive (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), p. 167.

    (3) Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

    (4) Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 – first published in 1965), p. 274, quoted in Sarah J. Diehl and James Clay Moltz, Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 34.

    (5) Quoted in The Nation, Special Issue Containing Jonathan Schell’s interviews with several nuclear policy professionals and intellectuals, February 2/9, 1998, p. 40.

    (6) Quoted in Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Tilman Ruff and John Loretz, eds. (Boston: IPPNW, 2007), p. 37.

    (7) Don Oberdorfer, PBS, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, October 9, 2006, quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 141.

    Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His first book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in January 2010.

  • How To Reduce the Nuclear Threat

    Monday’s North Korean nuclear test was a dramatic reminder of the challenges to eliminating nuclear weapons world-wide. President Barack Obama has stated that he intends to pursue this goal while maintaining a reliable nuclear deterrent for the United States and its allies. But achieving nuclear abolition will likely require many years.

    Indeed, it is difficult to envision the necessary geopolitical conditions that would permit even approaching that goal. Unless the U.S. and its partners re-energize international efforts to lessen the present dangers of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism, they will never have the hope of reaching this long-term objective.

    An effective strategy to reduce nuclear dangers must build on five pillars: revitalizing strategic dialogue with nuclear-armed powers, particularly Russia and China; strengthening the international nuclear nonproliferation regime; reaffirming the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella to our allies; maintaining the credibility of the U.S. nuclear deterrent; and implementing best security practices for nuclear weapons and weapons-usable materials worldwide.

    With thousands of U.S. and Russian warheads still deployed, the threat of a nuclear war through strategic miscalculation is not entirely removed. Thankfully, Russia has neither shown nor threatened such intent against the U.S. The two nations cooperated through much of the post-Cold War period on reducing nuclear arsenals and curbing nuclear proliferation. But given the recent chill in U.S.-Russia relations — a result of NATO expansion efforts and missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic — the relationship faces significant challenges.

    In order to “press the reset button” with Russia, in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, the U.S. needs to base strategic dialogue on the common interests of stopping nuclear proliferation, preventing nuclear terrorism, and ensuring the peaceful use of nuclear energy. The U.S. and Russia should conduct a joint threat assessment as a prerequisite to renewed arms control. In tandem, the U.S. and China should discuss their threat perceptions and seek greater cooperation on nuclear security and stability.

    The spread of weapons-usable nuclear technologies may push the world to a dangerous tipping point. North Korea — despite nearly universal opposition — has developed a small nuclear arsenal and on Monday demonstrated its capability with a successful nuclear test. Iran claims to be developing a peaceful nuclear program but this is hard to believe. Partly in response to Iran, other Middle Eastern states, like Turkey and Egypt, are beginning to develop nuclear-power programs.

    To prevent further proliferation, the Obama administration needs to leverage the next 12 months in the run-up to the May 2010 Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. The U.S. must redouble global efforts to enact the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on nuclear weapons, call for a ban on the production of fissile material for weapons, and provide sustainable resources to the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world’s “nuclear watchdog.”

    In the meantime, as Mr. Obama has stated, the U.S. should maintain a safe, secure and reliable nuclear deterrent for itself and its allies. This deterrent should be adequately funded and staffed with top-notch managers, scientists and engineers. The administration should also decide whether to replace existing nuclear warheads with redesigned warheads or to increase programs to extend their operational lives on a case-by-case basis, weighing heavily recommendations from the weapons lab responsible for the warheads in question.

    Another critical concern is the massive global stockpile of weapons-usable fissile material that could fuel thousands of nuclear explosives. The more states that have fissile material, the greater the chances of it falling into the hands of terrorists. Laudably, the Obama administration has committed to work with international partners to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years. This ambitious agenda will require development of much better security practices and a cooperative effort among dozens of countries.

    The dangers of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism are real and imminent. Any serious effort to combat them will require the leadership of the United States.

    This article was originally published in the Wall Street Journal

    William Perry, a former secretary of defense, and Mr. Scowcroft, a former national security adviser, are the co-chairs of the Council on Foreign Relations-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. nuclear weapons policy. Mr. Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the project director.

  • North Korea’s Bomb Test Message

    David KriegerWhen a country tests a nuclear weapon, it is sending a message. It is not always clear, however, what that message is. In the case of the recent nuclear test by North Korea, some commentators have argued that the North Koreans are sending a “pay attention to me” message to the international community and particularly the United States. Other commentators have argued that the nuclear test was carried out for domestic purposes, to inspire the country with a display of technological prowess. A short statement from North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency suggests that both international and domestic audiences were relevant to the bomb testing message.

    The North Korean announcement indicated that the test had several purposes, including to “bolster up its nuclear deterrent for self-defense”; “settle the scientific and technological problems arising in further increasing the power of nuclear weapons”; “inspiring the army and people of the DPRK”; “contribute to defending the sovereignty of the country”; and “ensuring peace and security of the Korean Peninsula and the region around it….” These are worth examining.

    First, the rationale for virtually all nuclear tests by all states has been to bolster a country’s nuclear deterrent for the purpose of self-defense. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council, all nuclear powers, have tested nuclear weapons in total more than 2,000 times. The US alone has tested over 1,000 times. That means that North Korea, which has conducted two nuclear tests, has tested one thousandth the number of times as the five recognized nuclear weapons states have tested and one five-hundredth the number of times the US has tested. It is, of course, dead wrong that deterrence provides a country with protection. In fact, it may lead to a country being attacked by nuclear arms.

    Second, learning more scientifically about the characteristics of nuclear detonations is another principal reason the nuclear weapons states have used to justify testing their weapons. The North Koreans are unusually blunt in stating that they are looking at problems arising from developing more powerful nuclear weapons. Their first test in 2006 had a force of about one kiloton. Their recent test had a force some four times greater, roughly one-third the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

    Third, the North Koreans sought to inspire their army and people with their bomb test. It is unfortunate, but true that nuclear tests seem to inspire and promote nationalism. When the Indians and Pakistanis tested in 1998, their respective populations came into the streets celebrating the “achievement.” The US inspired its people by conducting over 1,000 nuclear tests, including 67 atmospheric tests in the Marshall Islands, then US Trust Territories, the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for 12 years.

    Fourth, the belief that nuclear tests contribute to defending the sovereignty of a country seems wildly wrong. It may send a message regarding deterrence capability, but it is more relevant that it now isolates a country and makes it a pariah state. This wasn’t always the case.

    Fifth, it is also far from assured that North Korea’s test and continued pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability will ensure peace on the Korean Peninsula and beyond. There may be an argument that nuclear weapons assured peace between the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, but this remains unproven and not subject to proof.

    So taking the North Koreans at their word, they have done little more than demonstrate their technological prowess for domestic consumption and recaptured the attention of the world in a most negative way. President Obama responded to the latest nuclear and missile tests by saying that they posed “a grave threat to the peace and security of the world and I strongly condemn their reckless action.”

    North Korea’s nuclear test is pushing it deeper into isolation from the international community. The tests may play well at home, but not on the world stage. At the same time, North Korea’s justifications for its tests are no better nor worse than those of the other countries that have tested. They are modeling their testing behavior on the nuclear weapons states that went before them.

    The United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council, which are so strong in their condemnation of North Korea’s nuclear testing, are not doing enough to resolve important security issues with North Korea by diplomacy, the only sensible solution. Nor are the permanent members of the Security Council setting the right example by adhering to their own obligations under international law for “good faith” negotiations for total nuclear disarmament.

    North Korea’s nuclear testing is a manifestation of a deeper problem in the international system, that of continuing to have a small group of countries possess and implicitly threaten the use of nuclear weapons for deterrence or any other reason.

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).

  • Time to Ban the Bomb and the Reactor

    This speech was delivered to delegates at the 2009 Non-Proliferation Treaty Preparatory Committee at the United Nations

    With the world’s hopes newly raised by inspiring statements from prominent leaders urging the elimination of nuclear weapons, including pledges by Presidents Obama and Medvedev, to work for “a nuclear free world,” the recent establishment of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) could actually enable us to realistically fulfill the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s mission for nuclear disarmament. In January, Germany, together with Denmark and Spain, launched IRENA in Bonn with 75 nations who signed its founding statute. Since IRENA is the Greek word for peace, this auspicious initiative is particularly well-named as the Agency is designed to spread the fruits of clean, safe sustainable energy, enabling the planet to avoid nuclear proliferation and catastrophic climate change and assist developing countries to access the abundant free energy resources provided by our Mother Earth.

    IRENA precludes reliance on fossil, nuclear and inefficient traditional biomass energy. With an International Atomic Energy Agency, promoting dangerous and toxic nuclear power technology, and an International Energy Agency, founded during the 1970s oil crisis to manage the fossil fuel supply, IRENA’s launch could not have been timelier as the world wrestles with the twin crises of nuclear proliferation and global warming. We urge every nation to join IRENA by signing its founding statute and to forego or phase out deadly nuclear technology, whether for war or for peace.

    Throughout the years of this NPT process, we NGOs have warned states parties that the spread of nuclear energy spells disaster for efforts to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons or to mitigate the impacts of climate change, threatening the very future of humanity’s existence. Distinguished physicians at these meetings have described for you the awful physical effects of carcinogenic pollution from nuclear power with increased cancer, leukemia, and birth defects in every community where nuclear reactors spew their lethal poisons into the air, water and soil. Since we last spoke to you, new German studies show a 60% increase in solid cancers and a 117% increase in leukemia among young children living near German nuclear facilities between 1980 and 2003.

    Indigenous leaders from around the planet have stood here and told you about the awful horrors wreaked on their communities from uranium mining. We reminded you of the creation story of the Rainbow Serpent, asleep in the earth, guarding over those elemental powers which lie outside of humankind’s control and how any attempt to seize those underworld elements will disturb the sleep of the serpent, provoking its vengeance: a terrible deluge of destruction and death. At the World Uranium Hearing, the world was warned that:

    The Rainbow Serpent has been wakened. Men turned into shadows, cancer, women giving birth to jellyfish babies, leukemia – since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, since the Bravo test in the Bikini Islands, and since the Chernobyl catastrophe in April of 1986, we know that the Rainbow Serpent doesn’t differentiate between uranium’s military and peaceful uses. Death is everywhere it touches. But what we perhaps don’t realize is that the destructive properties of uranium are unleashed the moment it’s mined from the ground.

    We have told you there is no known solution to the storage of nuclear waste which lasts for hundreds of thousands of years, spewing its silent poisons into our air, earth and soil, injuring not only the living, but unborn generations to come—our very genetic heritage. The United States, in 2009, cancelled 30 year-old plans to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain Nevada because it cannot safely contain the long-lived poisons that the nuclear industry lobbied to bury there for eons. After more than 60 years of ignorantly and mindlessly amassing huge quantities of toxic radioactive poisons, heedless of the consequences to earth’s biosphere, yet another Commission is to be appointed to yet again “study the issue”. We don’t have a clue! Rational behavior would demand we should stop making any more nuclear waste until, and if ever, we can figure it out!!

    In France, held up as the exemplar of a country enjoying the “benefits” of nuclear power, its nationally owned Areva, the largest nuclear corporation in the world, is plunged into debt. Its reprocessing center at La Hague has produced massive discharges of radiation into the English Channel and has over nine thousand containers of radioactive wastes with no safe place to go. In Japan, the costs from the earthquake last year that crippled seven reactors at Kashwazaki are still rising. In the UK, the Sellafield nuclear recycling plant is mired in debt and costly breakdowns.

    We have explained to you how the nuclear industry promotes false information about nuclear power’s ability to mitigate the effects of catastrophic climate disasters. Millions of dollars are spent in marketing campaigns to convince the public that nuclear power will prevent global warming. But the evidence is incontrovertible that nuclear power is the slowest and costliest way to reduce CO2 emissions. Financing nuclear power diverts scarce resources from investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Enormous sums spent for nuclear power would worsen the effects of global warming by buying less carbon-free energy per dollar, compared to investing those sums in sun, wind or efficiency. Nor is nuclear power carbon free. It uses fossil fuels for the mining, milling and processing of uranium, as well as for reactor decommissioning and waste disposition and depends on a grid usually powered by coal. It is unreliable in extreme weather conditions and needs back up power to prevent meltdown. In the summer of 2004, France had to shut down a number of reactors during an extreme heat wave.

    We have spoken to you of the folly of lusting for mastery of nuclear technology as a matter of “national pride”. This is holdover thinking from the 1960s when nuclear power developed in industrialized nations. Many scientists in developing countries were trained in nuclear technology as part of the Atoms for Peace programs in the US, Russia and Europe during the late 1950s and in the 1960s. Nuclear power growth stalled in the industrialized countries by the late 1980s, especially after the tragedies of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and as its economic burdens became clear. But by then the former young scientists were entrenched in running the industry and like their nuclear reactors were now middle aged and unwilling to let go of their positions of power.

    The nuclear renaissance was to be a passing on of the inheritance to the next generation but real world constraints are making this generation of new reactors even more problematic than the last and the nuclear baton is not likely to pass out of the existing “club”. The enormous cost and safety problems are still here. In the industrialized nations, the nuclear industry has great difficulty in recruiting nuclear engineers. Due to global shortages in nuclear reactor components it’s not possible for the world nuclear industry to build more that 10 reactors a year at most for the next decade. Because all of the operating reactors will have to be retired in that time, 1070 reactors would have to be built in 42 years, or about 25 reactors per year, in order for nuclear technology to lower carbon emissions of even one billion tons per year.

    In a “wedge” model which assumes that nuclear power could replace a portion of the energy used by coal fired plants, the effort expended would be insufficient to have even the smallest impact on climate change. And because the limited supply of production capacity to produce new reactors creates a seller’s market, the industry is much more likely to sell to countries with nuclear experience. This is due to the risks associated with inordinately long lead times for new construction, security and liability issues, and already existing infrastructure. Thus developing countries or countries with no nuclear industry will probably be rebuffed and are well advised to put their energy investments into much more reliable renewable sources

    Nevertheless, proposals to try to control civilian nuclear fuel production have sparked new interest in acquiring nuclear technology by countries that never wanted such technology before. A top-down, hierarchical, centrally controlled nuclear apartheid fuel cycle is being planned, creating a whole new class of nuclear “have nots” who can’t be trusted not to turn their “peaceful” nuclear reactors into bomb factories. It’s just so 20th century! These discriminatory proposals are doomed to fail. With the growing chorus of promising new calls for a nuclear free world, there is no need for any nation to have a virtual bomb in the basement. Far better to leap frog over this antiquated, poisonous 20th century technology and expend your financial and intellectual treasure on clean, safe renewable energy, averting the twin catastrophes of nuclear proliferation and radical climate change, while adding your nation’s voice to the growing numbers of world leaders demanding that negotiations for nuclear weapons abolition move forward.

    Critical energy investment choices must be made now if we are to prevent the looming climate calamity. Every thirty minutes, enough of the sun’s energy reaches the earth’s surface to meet global energy demand for an entire year. Wind has the potential to satisfy the world’s electricity needs 40 times over and could meet all global energy demand five times over. The geothermal energy stored in the top six miles of the earth’s crust contains an estimated 50,000 times the energy of the world’s known oil and gas resources. Global wave power, tidal and river power are vast untapped stores of clean energy. IRENA is dedicated to supporting nations to develop and share the research and technology that will enable us to harness that abundant, free energy to secure the future of our planet.

    While the NPT guarantees to States which agree to abide by its terms an inalienable right to so-called peaceful nuclear technology, it is highly questionable whether such a right can ever be appropriately conferred on a State. During the Age of Enlightenment natural law theory challenged the divine right of kings. The United States’ Declaration of Independence spoke of “self-evident truth” that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights …to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Where does “peaceful nuclear technology” fit in this picture?!? Just as the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban abrogated the right to peaceful nuclear explosions in Article V of the NPT, we urge you to adopt a protocol to the NPT mandating participation in the newly launched International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) which would supersede the Article IV right to “peaceful” nuclear technology.

    Civil Society’s Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, now an official UN document, includes an Optional Protocol Concerning Energy Assistance which would phase out nuclear power and provide funding and assist nations to shift to non-nuclear sustainable energy sources. Universal enrollment in IRENA, coupled with a moratorium on new reactors and fuel production, while phasing out nuclear power by relying on safe, renewable energy, must become an integral part of the good faith negotiations required to eliminate nuclear weapons. We urge your enrollment and participation with IRENA. Since IRENA was launched in January with 75 countries, two new countries, Belarus and India have signed its Statute. NGOs will campaign for 100% universal participation in IRENA by the 2010 Review Conference. Please join us!! Add your nation to the list!! It’s time to give peace a chance!

    Alice Slater is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s New York representative.

  • First Iran, Now Arabs Going Nuclear: An Interview with Richard Falk

    This interview was originally published on Al-Jazeera

    There is renewed effort to engage Iran on its nuclear programme. Washington has expressed willingness to hold direct talks with Tehran, which marks a dramatic shift between the policy of Barack Obama, the US president, and his predecessor George Bush.

    The emphasis on dialogue comes as North Korea signals that it is restarting a nuclear plant that produces arms-grade plutonium, and Arab nations are importing nuclear technology and assistance at an unprecedented pace.
    Al Jazeera spoke to Richard Falk, the chair of the board at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, about Iran’s nuclear programme, its effect on regional Arab ambitions for nuclear power, and whether the Middle East will enter a nuclear arms race.

    The following are excerpts from the interview:
    Al Jazeera: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, recently announced the opening of a nuclear fuel plant, and stressed Iran’s ability and right to enrich uranium. However, he also welcomed constructive dialogue with the US and other powers. What motives are behind his statements? f

    Falk: I think it is difficult to assess the motives behind this kind of Iranian public initiative. It may be connected with domestic politics – the eflection campaign there – where Ahmadinejad is trying to present himself as a leader who has restored Iran’s stature and that this stature is associated symbolically with a robust nuclear programme.

    It may also be a signal that though Iran seems receptive to resuming some kind of negotiations about their nuclear programme … this shouldn’t be made too easily.

    It could be that this is part of a bargaining strategy by indicating that they already have enrichment capabilities and if they were to curtail them they would have to be given quite a bit in exchange.

    Are Arab states pursuing nuclear programmes due to growing energy demands or does the perceived threat from Iran’s apparent capability to develop nuclear weapons play a role?

    Often in these kinds of decisions the true motives are disguised and the public explanations are presented in the most acceptable, least provocative form.

    I think that is the case here. Most of the rationale for these expanded nuclear energy programmes are almost always related to domestic factors, increasing electricity demand and the expense of importing energy.

    It is hard not to believe, given the geopolitical climate in the region – not only Iran, but the Iraq war and other factors like Israel’s nuclear capabilities – that the geo-strategic factors have not entered into the motives of all these countries going in that direction.
    Of course, they are also imitating one another. There is a sense that if you don’t move in this direction you are acknowledging you are subordinate or marginalised in the region.

    There is also a prestige element at work. It is extremely hard to read the hierarchy of motives. In the background it is probably the way in which India and Pakistan evolved their nuclear programmes.

    They developed over time and as a result, India began to be taken seriously as a world power when it crossed the nuclear threshhold.

    Will the Middle East witness a race for nuclear technologies?

    The background of all of this is the abandonment by the Arab countries of their earlier mission of seeking a nuclear-free region that are directed at weapons and combining it with regional security.
    Perhaps it is an interpretation that Israel is never going to go along with the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East.

    And now that Iran is at least a latent nuclear weapons state, it doesn’t make any sense to proceed in that direction anymore, rather to the extent that strategic considerations are at work.

    It seems that the leading Arab countries think that they need to have their own long-term security. It should be a contingency option for them.

    Arab leaders have implied that Israel does not want to see Arab countries acquire nuclear technology and has thwarted their efforts to advance their programmes.

    As you suggested, the evidence over the years is that Israel becomes very nervous when any of the Arab countries move in directions that could challenge its regional military superiority.

    Though that is sort of a remote prospect, the manner in which Israel views its relationship with its neighbours is such that it has consistently opposed arms sales of any kind or of enhancement of their potential capabilities.

    Maybe Israel would prefer to see the Arab countries energy-dependent rather than energy-independent. I think it is consistent with the kind of regional hegemonic ambition that Israel both defensively and offensively assert.

    Thirty years ago you called for a total renunciation of nuclear power in exchange for other pollution-free energy sources. Obama has also pledged to create a nuclear-free world. But is it too late?

    I think it is already too late. A number of elements make it too late.

    The first of which is this sense that alternative energy is indispensable for dealing with the limitations on oil supply and in the face of increasing demand for oil and gas, combined with considerations for climate change and combined with the fact that there is a sufficient commitment on the part of a sufficient number of important states that it is just implausible to think that this kind of total de-nuclearisation can occur.

    The only thing that might give it a renewed possibility is another Chernobyl-type accident. Or several Chernobyls which would highlight the other aspect of developing nuclear energy – what you do with the waste and a variety of related things.

    Jordan wants to maintain their right to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But the UAE has unilaterally given up theirs to prove their peaceful intentions to advance their programme. Should Arab countries be allowed to enrich uranium?

    The US geopolitical discipline in relation to nuclear energy and weapons has faced a two-tier view of international legitimacy. Some countries are allowed to have the weapons and other countries are not.

    Of the ones that are, most say that the others are not allowed to come close to the threshhold. At the same time, from the perspective of the international law regime embodied by the NPT, it was supposed to be consistent with having the complete benefits of peaceful uses, including the option to develop the nuclear fuel cycle.

    You have a much stricter regime geopolitically than you do legally. The UAE is trying to conform to the geopolitical discipline or reality by assuring the world its nuclear energy programme is accepting international inspection and forgoing the option to reprocess nuclear fuel or have the enrichment capability.

    I suppose the UAE is trying to make itself look like the optimal actor of how to ensure the energy security transition beyond the petroleum age. They also have the resources to pull off the kind of programme there.

    Is it fair for ‘nuclear weapons states’ to tell others they cannot produce weapons without stripping down their own nuclear arsenals?

    The fascinating fact is that they have been able to successfully for 45 years convince most of the actors in the world that they are better off going along with nonproliferation charades, rather than repudiating them.

    It is based on this whole pervasive double standard that is embedded in the whole idea of nuclear nonproliferation and what I call the mind game that has been successfully played by the nuclear weapons states that makes us believe that the danger comes more from those who don’t have the weapons, rather than those who have the weapons.

    Nuclear weapons states have not fulfilled the Article Six pledge of nuclear disarmament. It was unanimously affirmed in the advisory opinion of the world court of the legality of nuclear weapons.

    It was divided on the issues of use, but unanimous on obligation to seek in good faith and I think they have not acted in good faith and fulfilled the real bargain. Therefore non-nuclear states, from a legal point of view, would be quite entitled to say they are no longer bound either.

    Is it in the interest of these states, particularly Israel and the US, to work toward military de-nuclearisation?

    I would think it is in Israel’s long term interest. It is particularly pertinent to the region because there are several dimensions of unresolved conflict, one important adversary posses a rather formidable nuclear weapons capability, others, particularly Iran have clearly latent potential.

    So if one is thinking from the perspective of conflict avoidance or war prevention, it could seem that one is at a point where it would make a lot of sense to exert that kind of political pressure.
    Israel talks a lot about attacking Iran, but that is filled with uncertainty and probably would generate a very strong backlash in the region and possibly even in the US and Europe. They stand to gain a lot by a reliable process of regional regulation, security, system of mutual non-aggression.
    In that sense it exposes the unwillingness of the US to press Israel in the way it would press other countries, which is illustrative of another aspect of these double standard in nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

    Richard Falk is Chair of the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.