Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: US Nuclear Weapons Policy

  • Nuclear Weapons, Non-Proliferation and the Quest for Security

    A Nuclear Age Peace Foundation
    Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Panel Discussion

    During the 2004 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Preparatory Committee at the United Nations, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation convened a panel discussion entitled “Nuclear Weapons, Non-Proliferation and the Quest for Security,” enabling the opportunity to discuss current proliferation trends and recommendations to strengthen the non-proliferation regime.

    The panel was moderated by David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and speakers at the event included Canadian Senator and Chair of the Middle Powers Initiative, Douglas Roche OC, Kate Hudson, Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation, and Justine Wang, Research and Advocacy Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. The resulting discussions were constructive as panelists debated the challenges posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons as well as the responsibility to offer alternative visions of security for a more peaceful world.

    Senator Roche set the tone by addressing the current state of the world today. Since the NPT entered into force in 1970, nuclear weapons states have shown scant inclination to abide by their promise of good faith negotiations to achieve nuclear disarmament. Without a serious effort by nuclear weapons states to achieve nuclear disarmament, the NPT will continue to promote double standards that allow some states to continue to expand and improve their nuclear arsenal while denying others of the same rights. In order to meet the challenges of today, the NPT and the non-proliferation regime is in urgent need of reconstruction. In reflecting on the role he played both as a parliamentarian and as a representative of civil society, Senator Roche underlined the importance of the role of civilian grassroots and non-governmental organizations in educating the public and influencing top level policy decisions among different countries.

    Kate Hudson spoke on the subject of the “Special Relationship between the US and UK .” Having summarized the background to the relationship based on the UK ‘s historical economic dependence, Hudson spoke of the problems arising from the 1958 Mutual Defense Agreement (MDA) between the two countries. This provides the basis for extensive nuclear collaboration, without which it is unlikely that the UK would be able to sustain its possession of nuclear weapons on Trident submarines. According to Hudson , “It is unlikely that the UK could remain a nuclear weapon states without the support of the US .” The MDA is in line for renewal during 2004, which has a strong bearing on the issue of a possible Trident replacement and the potential development of new nuclear weapons.

    Hudson also discussed the UK ‘s strong support for the new framework of the 2001 US Nuclear Posture Review. It was noted that many observers feel that political support for US initiatives is part of the “Special Relationship.” The problem in the UK is that the current British government strongly supports the relationship and backs the full range of US policies, including pre-emptive war and nuclear first strike. CND is currently campaigning against the development of new nuclear weapons; for an immediate parliamentary discussion on MDA; for a rejection of pre-emptive war and nuclear first use policies; in opposition to a Trident replacement; for withdrawal of permission for US use of British bases for Missile Defense; and for withdrawal of US weapons from Lakenheath.

    Jacqueline Cabasso focused on US nuclear weapons policy and underlined the importance of nuclear disarmament as a core issue on the global peace movement’s agenda. According to Cabasso, while the Bush administration is demanding nuclear disarmament from other nations, it continues to upgrade and expand its nuclear arsenal. Cabasso supports this by referring to several US documents, including:

    • The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which calls for:
      • a variety of nuclear attack options to compliment other US military capabilities;
      • contingency plans for use of nuclear weapons against seven named countries (including non-nuclear weapons states) in “immediate, potential, and unexpected contingencies;” and,
      • a revitalized nuclear weapons research, development and production infrastructure to maintain the existing US nuclear arsenal, develop new nuclear warheads in response to new requirements, and maintain readiness to resume full scale underground nuclear testing.
    • The 2002 US National Security Strategy which highlights the administration’s willingness to engage in pre-emptive war, including the possibility of nuclear first strike by “acting against emerging threats before they are fully formed.”
    • The US Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction which reserves to the US the right to respond with overwhelming force – including using nuclear weapons – to the use of weapons of nuclear, chemical or biological against the US or its allies.

    According to Cabasso, the legitimization of nuclear weapons by the world’s first nuclear weapons state and super power, the US , poses the gravest threat to international security. The US policy of preventive war and its push to modernize its nuclear arsenal provide arguments for other countries to develop nuclear weapons of their own.

    Cabasso challenged that while the security policy of the Bush administration are more extreme than other administrations, they are really a continuation of them. Cabasso continued by pointing out that even if Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry (D-MA) succeeds in winning the election in November 2004, the global community must not assume that current US nuclear weapons policy will take a dramatic turn for the better. Reading excerpts from An American Security Strategy, released in July 2003 by the National Security Advisory Group to the Democratic Party, Cabasso revealed that Democratic national security policies are not necessarily opposed to current US nuclear weapons policy. The policy paper only demonstrates a marginal change from the current US stance and endorses the current level of spending on US nuclear weapons and other military programs.

    Current US nuclear policies have made visible the present and very real dangers of nuclear weapon use. Nuclear weapons threaten everyone’s security and Cabasso concluded for the need to redefine security, “throwing out the outdated model completely to replace it with a human security model” based on food, shelter, clean air and water, jobs, healthcare and education for everyone everywhere, without regard to national borders.

    Justine Wang ended the panel discussion by addressing recent calls for countering proliferation and suggesting recommendations for improving the NPT and non-proliferation regime. Wang addressed the recent initiatives proposed by US President George Bush on February 11 2004, IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei and the recently passed US-sponsored United Nations Security Council Resolution 1540 on the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. While these proposals are constructive and necessary to the extent that they don’t enshrine double standards, they fall seriously short of being able to meet the current global proliferation challenge.

    Wang called for the stemming of nuclear proliferation under a more strict, equitable and effective multilateral framework and shared recommendations of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to improve the NPT and non-proliferation regime. Recommendations include commencing negotiations on a Nuclear Weapons Convention, universal application of the NPT to all states under a strict timetable, entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty , universal and equal application of the Additional Protocol , and the phased elimination of nuclear power.

    Wang reiterated that the continuation of the current NPT regime that ignores existing double standards is destined to result in both further nuclear proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons. Only by embracing significant changes that end existing double standards and elevate nuclear disarmament obligations can the non-proliferation regime succeed.

    Krieger concluded the panel discussion and mentioned that the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is launching an online campaign entitled “Turn the Tide: Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy” as an example of a grassroots initiative needed to mobilize the public to alert policy makers on the threat of nuclear weapons on the world’s security.

    Discussions ended with a question and answer session, where many participants engaged in constructive dialogue on facing the challenge of the increasing threat of nuclear weapons and the future of the NPT and the non-proliferation regime.

  • Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    Three Reasons for the University of California to get out of the Nuclear Weapons Business

    We’ve all heard about the inspections that took place in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction and programs to make them.  As we know, none were found in Iraq.

    That would not be the case if the inspectors were to come to the University of California.  They would find that programs to research, design, develop, improve, test, and maintain nuclear weapons have been going on under the auspices of this University for more than 60 years and that they are going on today.  They would find that the University of California provides management and oversight to the nation’s two principal nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.  They would find that today these weapons laboratories are engaged in attempting to make new and more usable and reliable nuclear weapons.

    For a fee, the University of California has provided a fig leaf of respectability to the research and development of the most horrendous weapons known to humankind.  It is ironic that our government cannot tolerate the possibility of Iraqi scientists creating such weapons, but at the University of California such a horrid use of science is called “a service to the nation.”

    Two of the weapons developed at Los Alamos were used on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  These were relatively small weapons, and they caused the deaths of over 200,000 persons, mostly innocent civilians, by incineration, blast and radiation.  There are no guarantees that the nuclear weapons being developed today under UC auspices will not be used again.  In fact, the odds are that if we continue as we are, they will be used again, by accident or design.

    There are three important reasons the UC should get out of the nuclear weapons business.  First, the UC is a great University, and no great University should lend its talents to making weapons capable of destroying cities, civilizations and most life on Earth.  The function of a University is to examine the amazing wonders of our world, to collect and categorize knowledge, to expand the knowledge base, and to pass important knowledge from the past on to new generations.  How can a great University allow itself to be co-opted into becoming complicit in creating weapons of mass destruction?  How can the UC Board of Regents justify this as “a service to the nation”?

    Second, there is no moral ground on which nuclear weapons can rest.  These are weapons of mass murder.  They cannot discriminate between combatants and civilians.  They kill indiscriminately – men, women and children.  By continuing to develop and improve these weapons, the United States, economically and militarily the strongest country in the world, is signaling to other nations that these weapons would be useful for them as well.

    Third, the International Court of Justice has stated that the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is illegal under international law.  It allowed only one possible exception in which the “very survival of a state” was at stake.  In such a situation, it said that the law was unclear, but under any circumstance the use of nuclear weapons would not be legal if it violated international humanitarian law by failing to discriminate between civilians and combatants or causing unnecessary suffering.  There is virtually no possibility that nuclear weapons could be used in warfare without violating these precepts of international humanitarian law.

    Sir Joseph Rotblat, the only Manhattan Project scientist to leave the project on moral grounds and the 1995 Nobel Peace Laureate, asked: “If the use of a given type of weapon is illegal under international law, should not research on such weapons also be illegal, and should not scientists also be culpable?  And if there is doubt even about the legal side, should not the ethical aspect become more compelling?”

    In 1995, Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, a senior physicist on the Manhattan Project, issued this plea: “I call on all scientists in all countries to desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter – other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”

    If we are ever to end the nuclear weapons threat to humanity, we must heed the words of words of wise individuals such as professors Rotblat and Bethe.  Even if for personal reasons the scientists and engineers at the nuclear weapons laboratories are unwilling to give up their role in creating and improving nuclear weapons, then at least the larger UC community could send a message to the rest of the country and the world that it is no longer willing to participate in the management and oversight of laboratories making weapons of mass murder.

    The motto of the University of California is Fiat Lux, meaning “let there be light.”  It is unlikely that the light the founders of the University had in mind was the flash “brighter than a thousand suns” from the explosion of a nuclear weapon.  I think they meant the light of knowledge, truth and beauty.  Unfortunately, the University of California’s relationship to the nuclear weapons laboratories, renewed at Los Alamos in 2005, casts a dark shadow over the higher values that a university is charged with passing on to future generations.

    David Krieger is president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org).  He is the author of many studies of peace in the Nuclear Age, including Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

  • The Two Sides of the Nuclear Coin

    Despite George W. Bush’s repeated warnings about nuclear proliferation, he and his fellow Republicans deserve much of the blame for it. Ever since the advent of the Bush administration, it has charged that other nations are acquiring nuclear weapons. Justifying war with Iraq, the administration hammered away at that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. It has also assailed North Korea and Iran for their nuclear programs. On Feb. 11, in a major policy address, President Bush called for new steps to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. The world must act, he said, to “confront these dangers and to end them.”

    At the same time, the administration has virtually scrapped the longstanding U.S. policy of nuclear disarmament — exactly the policy that, over the decades, has provided the key to halting nuclear proliferation.

    In 1965, when the U.S. and Soviet governments worried about the prospect of nuclear weapons spreading to dozens of nations, they teamed up to submit nonproliferation treaties to the UN General Assembly. Non-nuclear nations immediately objected to these proposals, arguing that they would merely restrict the nuclear club to its current members (then the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China). Alva Myrdal, Sweden’s disarmament minister, insisted that “disarmament measures should be a matter of mutual renunciation.” Willy Brandt, West Germany’s foreign minister, argued that a nonproliferation treaty was justified “only if the nuclear states regard it as a step toward restrictions of their own armaments and toward disarmament.”

    Unlike the Bush administration, U.S. and Soviet leaders of the time recognized that nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear disarmament were two sides of the same coin. As a result, the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that emerged from the United Nations was substantially broadened. Non-nuclear states pledged “not to make or acquire nuclear weapons.” And nuclear nations agreed to take “effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.” Further, when it signed and ratified this treaty, the U.S. government pledged not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states that had endorsed the NPT and that were not allied with a nation possessing nuclear weapons.

    With this bargain struck between the nuclear haves and have-nots, nearly all nations signed the NPT. Over the next 30 years, only one additional nation (Israel) developed nuclear weapons. To some degree, the success of this nonproliferation policy reflected citizens’ campaigns for nuclear disarmament that stigmatized nuclear weapons and encouraged the signing of nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties. But it also resulted from the mutual renunciation features of the NPT, which paired abstention from building nuclear weapons by most nations with nuclear disarmament and non-threatening behavior by the others.

    Unfortunately, the NPT began unraveling in the late 1990s. The Republican-dominated U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a landmark measure negotiated and signed by President Clinton. Given their control of Congress, the Republicans also managed to advance plans for a national missile defense system, a venture that contravened a key arms control measure, the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Meanwhile, India, pointing to the failure of the nuclear powers to divest themselves of their nuclear weapons, became a nuclear nation in 1998. This act provoked Pakistan to do the same.

    After the presidential election of 2000, U.S. policy tilted sharply against nuclear disarmament and other pledges made in the NPT. Ignoring the commitments made by his Democratic and Republican predecessors, Bush pulled the United States out of the ABM treaty, ordered the deployment of a missile defense system and rejected the test ban treaty. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review called for sustaining and modernizing nuclear weapons for at least the next half-century. The review also included contingency plans for U.S. nuclear attacks upon non-nuclear nations, among them North Korea. In the fall of 2003, the Bush administration pushed legislation through Congress to authorize the development of new, “usable” nuclear weapons.

    Given this repudiation of NPT commitments, it’s not surprising that North Korea has pulled out of the NPT and, perhaps, has begun building nuclear weapons. Nor is it surprising that a number of other nations might be working to develop a nuclear weapons capability. If the nuclear powers cling to their nuclear weapons and threaten their use, then other nations will inevitably try to join the nuclear club.

    As Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has observed: “We all have to be moving away from nuclear weapons. It can’t be just a mandate from the United States that everybody goes in one direction while we go in another.” But this is exactly what the Bush administration — in yet another example of its go-it-alone foreign policy — is pressing for.

    Nuclear proliferation cannot be halted without nuclear disarmament. As the old song goes: “You can’t have one without the other!”
    *Mr. Wittner teaches history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press). He is a writer for the History News Service.

  • Nuclear Weapons ‘Immoral,’ Say Religious, Scientific Leaders

    WASHINGTON — An international group of religious and scientific leaders Monday launched an appeal to the United States and all other nuclear states to pledge never to use nuclear weapons and re-affirm their commitments to achieving total nuclear disarmament.

    The appeal, signed by the head of the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC) and the president of the international Catholic peace group, Pax Christi, and 74 others–including four Nobel laureates–declared such weapons to be “inherently immoral” and expressed particular concern over U.S. plans to develop of a new generation of nuclear bombs.

    ” Even so-called ‘mini-nukes’ and ‘bunker-busters’ would have disastrous effects,” the statement declared. “Threatened use of nuclear weapons in the name of deterrence is morally wrong because it holds innocent people hostage for political and military purposes.”

    ” Why do we continue to construct weapons that have the power to destroy us,” asked Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the NCC, which represents some 140,000 Protestant congregations in the U.S., “rather than build systems and structures that will save lives and help all persons reach the potential for which God created them?”

    Edgar said the appeal was being made with a “sense of real urgency,” in light of new nuclear planning by the Bush administration and the failure to date of any of the declared nuclear powers to substantially reduce their stockpiles.
    More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia retain a total of about 10,000 tactical and strategic nuclear weapons each. Together, they account for more than 95 percent of the world’s total arsenal.

    According to recent estimates by the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, China is next with an estimated 400 warheads, followed by France, with 350; Israel, with perhaps 200; Britain, with 185; India, with 60 or more; and Pakistan, with as many as 48. The Central Intelligence Agency says it believes North Korea has had as many as two devices for several years.

    Under the 1968 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), nuclear countries must not only halt the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear countries, but also agree to reduce their own arsenals to zero. In 1996, the International Court of justice at The Hague ruled that the NPT required eventual disarmament, a position that was formally reaffirmed in 2000 by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

    Sign the Moral Appeal for a Safer World without Nuclear Weapons

    This article was originally published by OneWorld.net.

  • The Bravo H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn’t Hide

    “There’s a story I can tell you”, a fellow called Bruno Lat said to me a few years back in Hawaii. “I was 13 at that time. My dad was working with the Navy as a laborer on Kwajalein”, an atoll in Lat’s native Marshall Islands controlled by the US military. “It was early, early morning. We were all outside on that day waiting in the dark. Everybody was waiting for the Bravo.”

    That day was fifty years ago, yesterday. March 1, 1954. Bravo was not the first, or the last, just the worst of America’s nuclear tests in the Pacific, a fission-fusion-fission reaction, a thermonuclear explosion, an H-Bomb, America’s biggest blast. In today’s poverty of expression, it would be called a WMD. Except that it was “ours”, and so real that days after marveling that some strange sun had lighted the western sky with “all kinds of beautiful colors”, young Bruno also took in the sight of refugees from downwind of the blast at Bikini Atoll, miserable and burned and belatedly evacuated to Kwajalein. Their scalp, he recalled, “you could peel it like fried chicken skin”.

    In the standard history of Bravo, much of what happened that morning was “an accident”. That is the term Edward Teller, the bomb’s designer, uses in his memoirs. The Navy said it had anticipated a six-megaton bomb, but Bravo came in at 15. It had anticipated the winds to blow one way, but they blew another. It had not evacuated downwinders in advance because the danger was deemed slight, and anyway the budget that year was tight. It had not expected that a Japanese fishing trawler, the Lucky Dragon, would be out on the sea 87 miles from the blast, or that when it returned home two weeks later its catch would be “hot”, creating a panic in Japanese fish markets. It had not expected reports of radioactive horses in New Zealand, radioactive rain in Sydney. It really had not expected that one of the Lucky Dragon fishermen, hospitalized with radiation sickness for months along with his mates, would die. Officially the US government maintained that the cause of death was hepatitis unrelated to radiation.

    Officially the Atomic Energy Commission also claimed, ten days after the blast, that the Bravo shot had been “routine” and that among those stricken Marshallese at whom Bruno Lat was gaping, “there were no burns. All were reported well.” A month later AEC chairman Lewis Strauss told reporters they were not only well but “happy” too.

    Their medical records from the time tell a story of burns and lesions, nausea, falling hair and weeping sores. Dr. Seiji Yamada of the University of Hawaii Medical School reviewed them in Kwajalein three years ago, and it is a simple matter to find government reports acknowledging same, now that that particular lie is unnecessary.

    The Bravo blast was so immense, so terrible that the typical comparison_”equal to 1,000 Hiroshimas”_seems almost evasive, as if there were a continuum of comprehensibility within which it might fit. The bomb on Hiroshima instantly killed 80,000 people, more or less. By crude mathematics, Bravo had the power to incinerate 80 million. Ten New Yorks? 26,666 Twin Towers, more or less? No one can grasp such numbers, and because they are crude abstractions, the easier thing, for most Americans, has been to forget the whole thing_or at best to regard Bikini as a bit of cold war kitsch, a curio in the attic of memory.

    Perhaps we can imagine a mushroom cloud with a “stem” 18 miles tall and a “cap” 62 miles across, but probably not. That’s a cloud five times the length of Manhattan, vaporizing all beneath it, sucking everything_in Bravo’s case, three islands’ worth of coral reef, sand, land and sea life, millions of tons of it_into the sky, and then moving, showering this common stuff, now in a swirl of radioactive isotopes, along its path.

    The Marshallese on the island of Rongelap, 120 miles from ground zero, had imagined snow only from missionaries’ photographs of New England winters. That March 1 they imagined the white flakes falling from the sky, sticking everywhere but especially to sweaty skin, piling up two inches deep, as some freakish snowstorm. Children played in it, and later screamed with pain. Unlike Bruno Lat, they had not been waiting for Bravo.

    On other islands the “snow” appeared variably as a shower, a mist, a fog. The Navy had a practice of sending planes into the blast area hours after detonation to measure “the geigers”, as radioactivity was colloquially known among sailors, and the early readings over inhabited islands after Bravo are staggering. Scientists didn’t know in 1954 that a radiation dose of 30 roentgens would double the rate of breast cancer in adults, that 90 would double the rate of stomach and colon cancer, that young children were ten times as vulnerable. But they did know that 150 roentgens, noted in one of the earliest military estimates for Rongelap, were catastrophic. Yet the Navy waited two days to evacuate Rongelap and Ailinginae; three days to evacuate Utirik.

    Nine years later thyroid cancers started appearing in exposed islanders who had been children during Bravo, then leukemia. Even in “safe” atolls, babies began being born retarded, deformed, stillborn or worse. In 1983 Darlene Keju-Johnson, a Marshallese public health worker, gave a World Council of Churches gathering this description: “The baby is born on the labor table, and it breathes and moves up and down, but it is not shaped like a human being. It looks like a bag of jelly. These babies only live for a few hours.”

    The Marshallese say that Bravo was not an accident. Decades after the fact, a US government document surfaced showing that weather reports had indeed indicated shifting winds hours before the blast. In 1954 the United States had nine years of data on direct effects of radiation but none on fallout downwind; select Marshallese have been the subject of scientific study ever since.

    In all events, as Alexander Cockburn once put it, “an ‘accident’ is normalcy raised to the level of drama”. Marshall Islanders endured sixty-seven US nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958. It has been calculated that the net yield of those tests is equivalent to 1.7 Hiroshima bombs detonated every day for twelve years. A full accounting of the displacements and evacuations, the lies and broken promises, beginning with the Bikini people’s surrender of their land to US officers who vowed “to test this new weapon which is designed to end all wars”, would fill pages. A full accounting of the health impact would fill volumes, and has never been done. Bruno Lat is not an official victim of any test, so his thyroid cancer doesn’t count; the same with his father’s stomach tumors.

    Of the broken culture and broken hearts, there can be no accounting. Never to be sure if the food is poison, if the doctors are honest, if the cancer will get you next; to never know home because however beautifully its white sands shimmer beneath the dome of blue, however energetically its coconut crabs skitter among the palms, living there is lethal; to live a different kind of lethal, in a Pacific ghetto hell, unknown in the region before the displacements and the testing, and to see no way out_we don’t call those things terror. Yesterday, March 1, on the fiftieth anniversary of Bravo, the Marshallese formally petitioning the US Congress to make full compensation for the ruin of their lands and their health. They also want Congress to express “deep regret for the nuclear testing legacy”. Some had wanted an apology, but that, the majority decided, America would never concede.

    *Joann Wypijewski, former managing editor of The Nation, writes about labor and politics for CounterPunch. She can be reached at: jw@counterpunch.org. This article was originally published by CounterPunch on 2 March 2004.

  • Suffering, Secrecy, Exile Bravo 50 years later

    Almira Ainri was 10 years old when she was catapulted into the atomic age.

    In June of 1946, as the U.S. Navy readied the first atomic bomb in peacetime – just the fourth in history – Ainri and about 100 other inhabitants of Rongelap Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, were sent south by ship to Lae Atoll, where it was thought they would be safe from the effects of the explosion 100 miles away, at Bikini Atoll.

    Eight years later, in 1954, Ainri and other Rongelapese weren’t as lucky.

    Then, on March 1 on Bikini Atoll, the U.S. detonated the Bravo shot, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb it dropped on Hiroshima.

    The most powerful bomb in U.S. nuclear history, Bravo had a radioactive cloud that plumed over 7,000 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey. A hundred or so miles downwind, near-lethal fallout powdered at least 236 inhabitants of the Rongelap and Utrik atolls, contaminating their ancestral homelands. The Bravo-dusted islanders entered history as unique examples of the effects of radioactive fallout on humans.

    Ainri, who now lives in Honolulu, is one of 118 survivors of the Bravo shot. For her and other islanders, the bomb’s detonation set off a chain reaction of events over the last half century. They became unwitting subjects in secret U.S. research on the effects of nuclear fallout and ultimately were forced to leave their idyllic homeland, which remains uninhabitable to this day due to radioactivity.

    Archeological finds on Bikini Atoll suggest that the first Micronesians likely arrived in the Marshall Islands between 2,500 and 4,000 years ago. Germany annexed the islands in 1885. Japan captured them in 1914. Allied forces captured and occupied them in World War II; the war’s end left them in U.S. hands. The U.S. began nuclear testing there the next year.

    The Marshall Islands were declared a Trust Territory by the United Nations in 1947, with the U.S. as the administrator, an arrangement that did not end until 1991. The following treatment of the irradiated islanders raises doubts about the behavior of the U.S. government:

    • U.S. officials failed to evacuate Ainri and other islanders before the Bravo shot and then delayed their removal for more than 50 hours after the fallout.
    • On March 7, 1954, six days after the Bravo shot, Project 4.1, “Study of Response of Human Beings Exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fallout from High Yield Weapons,” established a secret U.S. medical program to monitor and evaluate islanders exposed to radiation, turning them into experimental human subjects without their consent.
    • Ainri and other islanders were allowed to return to their irradiated homeland in 1957. It was later deemed unsafe for human habitation.
    • Marshall Islanders were injected with or fed radioactive tracers without their consent, contrary to medical recommendations made by U.S. medical officers six weeks after the Bravo shot that the islanders should receive no more exposure to radioactivity in their lifetimes.

    The research projects arising from Bravo were begun just seven years after war crimes tribunals convicted German medical officers for their horrific experiments with concentration camp inmates during World War II. Those tribunals led to the Nuremberg Code, an international standard for experiments involving human subjects, which stipulated that the voluntary consent of the subject “is absolutely essential.” The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission established similar standards, requiring the consent of human subjects and the expectation that an experiment would benefit the subject, but they had little distribution or effect in the U.S. bureaucracy.

    Did U.S. bureaucratic bungling and operational obstacles cause the mistreatment of the islanders or, as so many islanders and others say, did U.S. officials make the islanders guinea pigs to study the effects of radioactivity?

    ‘Like needles over my whole body’

    At about 6 a.m. on March 1, 1954, Almira Ainri was awakened by the brightness and noise of an inferno as hot as the core of the sun. Ainri was 18 then, married, and pregnant with her first child.

    The island shook, she recalled. The air was gray. Snowlike particles fell from the sky.

    A day later, U.S. soldiers with Geiger counters arrived and found people of Rongelap weak and vomiting. Fifty hours and more after Bravo’s detonation, the 236 inhabitants on or near Rongelap and Utrik atolls were evacuated to the military clinic at Kwajalein Atoll. There, they were scrubbed every day with special soaps. The pressure of the water on Ainri’s blistered skin felt “like needles over my whole body,” she said – “like I was burning.”

    After the blast, Ainri gave birth to a son, Robert. His thyroid glands were so damaged that he became dwarfed. The glands were later removed, consigning him to a lifelong regimen of medication. Ainri got pregnant again and gave birth, she said, to “a bunch of grapes, that had to be pulled out of me.” Twice more Ainri got pregnant, she said, and gave birth to children who appeared normal but died several days later. Another son, Alex, survived, but again with damaged thyroid glands. Ainri herself has thyroid problems; two new growths recently appeared there.

    The suffering of Ainri and her family is hardly unique. Within a decade of the Bravo shot, more than 90 percent of the children who were under 12 years old at the time of the explosion developed thyroid tumors. Today, Marshall Islanders have one of the world’s highest rates of abnormalities of the thyroid, which often result in cases of retardation, cretinism and stunted development.

    For these and other conditions that a special U.S.-Marshallese tribunal presumes were caused by nuclear weapons testing, the U.S. pays compensation. Those with leukemia or cancer of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas or bone are awarded $125,000. Islanders with severe growth retardation due to thyroid damage get $100,000.

    By the end of 2002, a U.S. trust fund had paid about $79 million to 1,808 islanders, but because the trust fund could not cover all its obligations, 46 percent of affected islanders died before they were fully paid for their injuries.

    Rongelap Atoll comprises 61 islets with a combined land mass of about three square miles and a lagoon of 388 square miles. Because it is still too radioactive for humans, its former residents are scattered. In Honolulu, Ainri lives in a home where her pandanus floor mats mingle with a caller-I.D. phone and a television set.

    Under a 1996, $45-million agreement with the U.S., projects are underway to prepare for the return of Rongelapese to the five southernmost, least-contaminated islets of the atoll. A glisteningly white church has been refurbished, complete with striking lapis trim. An airstrip, desalinization plant, field station, power plant and docks have been constructed or installed. Phase 2 calls for the construction of 50 four-bedroom homes, a dispensary and a hospital, school building, residences for doctors and teachers, a library, a town hall and a municipal building. All that is missing is a date when the resettlement will occur.

    The three surprises

    Corporal Don Whitaker hardly could have imagined the worldwide surprise his letter home would create. Writing to his hometown newspaper, in Cincinnati, in March 1954, Whitaker told of seeing distraught Marshall Islanders arrive at a navy clinic on Kwajalein after the Bravo shot. It was one of three surprises that shocked the world, and members of President Eisenhower’s administration.

    The first surprise was the magnitude of the Bravo bomb’s blast. Its 15-megaton yield was more than twice what U.S. officials had expected. Set off from Bikini Atoll, it vaporized three of the atoll’s 23 islets. The test was expected, however.

    Whitaker’s letter was the next surprise. In it, he revealed the evacuation of islanders that U.S. officials had tried to keep secret. Published March 9, eight days after the blast, Whitaker’s letter prompted the Atomic Energy Commission to issue a press release the next day, masking the magnitude of the Bravo shot and its radioactive effects with a bland announcement. But Bravo was hardly the “routine atomic test” the release described, and the phrase “some radioactivity” did not come close to describing the islanders’ dosage, which was the equivalent of the amount received by Japanese citizens less than two miles from Ground Zero at Hiroshima, lawyer-historian Jonathan M. Weisgall writes.

    Twenty-eight years later, the U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency would call the Bravo shot “the worst single incident of fallout exposures in all the U.S. atmospheric testing program.”

    The third surprise came just days after the AEC had assured the public that the irradiated islanders were fine. A Japanese tuna trawler, the No. 5 Fukuryu Maru(“Lucky Dragon”), was 112 miles east of Bikini Atoll at the time of the Bravo explosion, well outside the danger zone announced by U.S. officials. Yet Bravo’s staggering detonation powdered the boat’s 23 crew members with what is known in Japan as shi no hai – “ashes of death.” When the Fukuryu Maru reached its home port of Yaizu, about 120 miles south of Tokyo, on March 14, the crew was suffering from a radiation sickness that stunned the world.

    The crewmen’s sickness and the subsequent panic over radioactive tuna in the U.S. and Japanese fish markets led to an international furor. The Japanese government and people dubbed it “a second Hiroshima” and it nearly led to severing diplomatic relations. A U.S. government doctor dispatched to Japan blamed the Japanese press for exaggerating the condition of the fishermen, who, he predicted, would recover completely in about a month.

    Six months later, Aikichi Kuboyama, the 40-year-old radio operator of theFukuryu Maru , died. He was “probably the world’s first hydrogen-bomb casualty,” said The New York Times .

    It was this triple-play of surprises – Bravo’s tremendous force, Whitaker’s letter and the plight of the Fukuryu Maru – that chinked the U.S. government’s usual policy of secrecy. Instead, the word fallout entered the world’s lexicon. For the first time, people in Japan and Russia, London and Bonn, New York and Milwaukee, were aware of a danger that could not be smelled, seen, felt or heard.

    ‘The sun rising in the west’

    The Bravo shot was the first U.S. hydrogen device that could be delivered by airplane. It was designed to catch up with the Soviets who, in August 1953, had exploded their first hydrogen bomb deliverable by aircraft.

    The Bravo shot was so dangerous that it could not be detonated in the continental United States. Nor could it be set off at Enewetak Atoll, where the U.S. conducted nuclear blast tests from 1948 to 1958, for fear it would wipe out the extensive U.S. equipment and installations there. So it was tested at Bikini Atoll.

    Even before the Bravo shot, experts knew that the radioactive dust of atmospheric nuclear weapons explosions was invisibly and unknowingly powdering the continental United States and touching others worldwide. The U.S. government’s failure to move the Rongelap and Utrik Islanders in advance of the Bravo shot is painfully ironic because Almira Ainri and other Rongelapese had been moved before the first peacetime atomic test, in 1946 – and Bravo was 1,000 times more powerful. Yet the islanders were not moved in 1954 because of “the high cost and logistic problems. in supporting such an operation,” according to U.S. medical officers.

    Six hours before Bravo, U.S. officials knew that the winds had shifted, putting Rongelap and Utrik Islanders in the path of fallout, but they proceeded with the detonation anyway. That knowledge, coupled with the lag of several days after the detonation before islanders were evacuated, led to speculation that the U.S. deliberately used the islanders as guinea pigs.

    A month after the Bravo shot, Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss told reporters that allegations that the evacuation of the Marshall Islanders had been deliberately delayed were “utterly false, irresponsible and gravely unjust to the men engaged in this patriotic service.” He also said that he had just visited the islanders at the Kwajalein clinic and they “appeared to me to be well and happy.”

    Bravo was detonated at 6 a.m. Within four hours, the 28 U.S. weathermen on Rongerik Atoll, in the Marshall islands, saw a mist from the blast. Seven hours later, the needle of their radiation-measuring instrument went off the scale. They were evacuated the next day.

    Clouds of snowlike particles moved over Alinginae, Rongelap, Utrik and Ailuk atolls. The clouds deposited radioactive fallout on the people below and irradiated them with doses of “cloud shine,” radiation produced by the blast itself, which Rongelapese described as being like “the sun rising in the west.”

    About two-thirds of the Rongelapese were nauseated for two days, according to a U.S. medical officer who examined them a week after Bravo. Roughly one in ten were vomiting and had diarrhea. Some had itching, burning skin that turned into black-pigmented areas and lesions, some of which became ulcerated and infected. Hair fell out. Blood counts fell.

    The Bravo-dusted islanders disappeared from the news for the next year, because of the AEC’s clampdown on information. But if they were not making news, they were making medical history.

    Guinea pigs

    Within days of the Bravo shot, irradiated islanders were unwittingly swept into a top-secret effort to research the effects of radioactive fallout on humans. “Never before in history had an isolated human population been subjected to high but sub-lethal amounts of radioactivity without the physical and psychological complexities associated with nuclear explosion,” said scientist Neal O. Hines. Islanders would not learn the true nature of the experiment for 40 years, until 1994, when President Clinton ordered thousands of documents declassified in the wake of a national scandal involving human radiation experiments.

    Four months before the Bravo shot, a then-secret U.S. document listed research Project 4.1 among 48 tests to be conducted during and after the explosion. “(D)ue to possible adverse publicity reaction, you will specifically instruct all personnel in this project to be particularly careful not to discuss the purposes of this project and its background or its findings with any except those who have a specific ‘need to know,’” the document said.

    The purpose of Project 4.1 was to study the effects of fallout radiation on human beings.

    Three days after Bravo, Project 4.1 began to unfold in Washington, D.C., where top medical officials decided that the victims of its hazardous debris would be appropriate research subjects. A week after the blast, 25 officials of the AEC’s medical program arrived at Kwajalein Atoll. Six weeks after the blast, Project 4.1 workers recommended a lifelong study of the affected islanders. Rongelapese were studied annually, as were Utrik islanders after thyroid nodules were detected in 1963.

    Islanders began to complain that they were being treated like guinea pigs rather than sick humans needing treatment. A doctor who evaluated them annually came close to agreeing when he wrote, 38 years after Bravo, “In retrospect, it was unfortunate that the AEC, because it was a research organization, did not include support of basic health care of populations under study.”

    Return to Rongelap

    In 1957, U.S. officials assured Rongelapese that their homeland was safe and returned them there. Upon their return, U.S. medical officers shifted the emphasis of their study to what researchers who studied the documents released in the 1990s described as “the formation of an integrated long-term human environmental research program to document the bioaccumulation of fallout and the human effects of this exposure.” In sum, U.S. officials knew they were placing the Rongelapese in a radioactive environment, even though the islanders had already sustained more than a lifetime’s worth of radiation.

    A 1982 U.S. Department of Energy report indicated that some inhabited areas of Rongelap were as contaminated as the parts forbidden to humans. It was the first report prepared for the Rongelapese in their own language and it shocked them. “All we needed to see was the center fold-out and our worst fears were confirmed!” Marshall Islands Senator Jeton Anjain told the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 1991.

    Rongelap, their principal island of residence since their 1957 return, had been assigned a level “3” of contamination, meaning it was unsafe for human habitation.

    In 1984, Rongelapese representatives asked the U.S. to evacuate them. The U.S. refused.

    The next year, the Rongelapese left anyway. “It was by no means an easy decision, for our people knew that it might mean they and their children would never again know life on their ancestral homeland of the last 4,000 years,” Anjain told the U.S. Senate committee.

    “But the safety of our children and the unborn was more important.”

    After living on radioactive Rongelap for 28 years, 70 islanders were moved by Greenpeace to Majetto Island, 100 miles away. Confirming their fears, a 1988 study authorized by the U.S. government and subsequent official testimony recommended that part of Rongelap Atoll be considered “forbidden” territory and that the remaining part would be safe only if inhabitants ate imported food for the next 30 to 50 years .

    ‘The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany’

    Residents of Rongelap and Enewetak atolls were also used in human radiation experiments involving radioactive tracers of tritiated water and chromium-51 injections, Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Phillip Muller told the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs in 1996.

    The U.S. Department of Energy withheld critical information about the adverse effects of U.S. weapons tests from the U.S. Congress and Marshallese officials, Muller said, and medical research without the consent of Marshallese subjects continued.

    Marshallese Senator Tony de Brum told the committee that U.S. doctors 50 years ago pulled healthy as well as unhealthy teeth of islanders without their consent, for use in cesium, strontium or plutonium studies. Even in the mid-1990s, islanders were unsure whether they were being cared for or studied by U.S. medical personnel, de Brum said.

    In 1999, Muller’s allegations of human radiation experiments were confirmed by the Department of Energy, the successor agency of the Atomic Energy Commission. Declassified documents showed that U.S. officials included the irradiated islanders under the umbrella of its extensive biological program. Its worst known cases included irradiation of the male organs of Oregon and Washington state prisoners, feeding radioactive fallout materials to university students, giving small doses of radioactive iron to pregnant women and feeding Quaker Oats laced with radioactive traces of iron and calcium to supposedly mentally retarded boys in a Massachusetts state home. Upon first learning about these kinds of experiments in 1993, Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary exclaimed, “The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany.”

    Who will pay?

    Under the U.N. Trusteeship, the U.S. government was to prepare the people of the Marshall Islands for self-government. In 1986, President Reagan signed the Compact of Free Association after its ratification by the Marshall Islands government and Congress. Its provisions expired in 2001. New provisions for the compact were agreed upon earlier this year, but they are silent on U.S. funding that has since become inadequate to cover the spiraling claims of those harmed by U.S. nuclear weapons testing, including Bravo’s fallout.

    There may be a ray of hope for the Marshallese, however. The compacts say that nuclear testing damages to persons or property discovered after the original 1986 agreement can be covered in a new request to the U.S. Congress with documentation that circumstances have changed.

    One changed circumstance is that the U.S. government did not disclose to the Marshallese government the yield of 44 of the 66 U.S. nuclear weapons tests detonated in its republic until 1993. The next year, a comprehensive list of 1,054 U.S. nuclear weapons tests worldwide and their yields was made public by the Department of Energy. It shows that the yield of 82 tests in the U.S.-administered Bikini, Enewetak and Johnston Atolls and Pacific waters from 1946 to 1962 was at least 128,704 kilotons. That’s the equivalent of 8,580 Hiroshima-sized bombs, or 1.47 such bombs per day for 16 years.

    A second changed circumstance is that the personal-injury and property claims arising from nuclear weapons testing have exceeded the capacity of the $150 million trust fund established to pay them.

    The people of Enewetak and Bikini have been awarded just over $1 billion for property damages, radiological cleanup, loss of use and hardship and suffering, but as of the end of 2002, less than one percent of that money could be paid. And class-action damage claims for the people of Rongelap and Utrik are still pending.

    About 5,000 claims seeking a combined $5.75 billion for radiation-related damages arising from U.S. weapons testing in the Pacific have been pressed. The U.S. has paid $759 million through 1998, researchers Arjun Makhijani and Stephen I. Schwartz wrote in their landmark volume titled Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 . .

    In 2000, invoking the “changed circumstances” provision of the compact, the Marshallese government asked the U.S. Congress for more funds and services to meet health costs and property damages. (Its petition can be viewed online atwww.rmiembassyus.org – click “nuclear” and then “petition.”)

    In November 2001, the Marshallese government’s petition was resubmitted to a new U.S. Congress and President Bush. As of early this month, the U.S. has yet to take any action.

    This article has been adapted from University of Hawai`i Professor Beverly Deepe Keever’s forthcoming book News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb.

  • US Presidential Elections: An Opportunity For Debate On US Nuclear Weapons Policy

    US Presidential Elections: An Opportunity For Debate On US Nuclear Weapons Policy

    In the post 9/11 world there has been strong concern about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists or “rogue” states. The pretext for the initiation of the US war against Iraq was the concern that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, including a suspected program to develop nuclear weapons, posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. While it turned out that Iraq had neither such weapons nor programs, the United States continues to maintain a large nuclear arsenal as a matter of long-standing national policy. Whether US nuclear weapons policies serve to promote prospects for world peace and national security, or conversely to undermine them, is a question that begs for serious public debate.

    US nuclear weapons policy should be a subject of concern to every American. Yet there exists some kind of taboo that prevents the subject from being debated in public forums, in the media, or in Congress. The US presidential elections provide an important opportunity for national discussion and debate on this issue. With the US nuclear arsenal of some 10,000 nuclear weapons, along with policies to research more usable nuclear weapons while ignoring international obligations for nuclear disarmament, there are critical issues that require public attention and informed debate.

    Throughout the Cold War, the US and USSR built up their nuclear forces so that each threatened massive retaliation in a standoff of mutually assured destruction. This was a high-risk strategy. In the event of an accident, miscalculation or miscommunication, the world could have been engulfed in an omnicidal conflagration. While today the US and Russia are on friendly terms, each continues to base its nuclear policy, in major part, on the potential threat posed by the other.

    Despite the enormous changes in the world in the aftermath of the Cold War, there has not been a serious public debate in the United States about nuclear weapons policy that takes into account changes in the global security environment. To the extent that there has been consideration of nuclear weapons policy, it has been almost entirely about preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other states and to non-state actors, with virtually no consideration of how US nuclear policy affects US and global security.

    Current US Nuclear Weapons Policy

    US nuclear policy affects the security of every person on the planet, including, of course, every American. Current US nuclear weapons policy, under the Bush administration, sends a message to other states that the US intends to rely upon nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.

    The major outlines of current US nuclear weapons policy are as follows:

    • The US continues to rely upon its nuclear arsenal to threaten retaliation against a nuclear attack, and has extended this threat of nuclear retaliation to chemical and biological weapons attacks or threats of attacks on the US, as well as its troops or allies, wherever they are located in the world.
    • Despite previous promises not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states, the US has developed contingency plans to use nuclear weapons against five non-nuclear weapon states: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Libya. (It is possible, but still not certain, that North Korea has now developed a small nuclear arsenal.)
    • The US has withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in order to develop missile defenses, making way for the development of space weapons, despite promising to preserve and strengthen this treaty.
    • The US has not ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, despite making commitments to do so. While it still adheres to the nuclear testing moratorium, except for sub-critical tests and computer simulations, it has allocated funds to reduce the time needed to ready the Nevada Test Site to resume testing.
    • The US has entered into the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) with the Russians to reduce the deployed long-range nuclear weapons on each side to between 1,700 and 2,200 by the year 2012, but has failed to make these reductions irreversible in accord with the consensus agreement at the 2000 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. Additionally, the treaty terminates in 2012 unless extended. Despite this agreement, each side continues to keep some 2,250 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, poised to attack the other at a moment’s notice.
    • The US has ended a decade-long Congressional ban on research and development of nuclear weapons under 5 kilotons (mini-nukes), and allocated funds to perform research on the development of such weapons, increasing the likelihood of use of nuclear weapons and blurring the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons.
    • The US has allocated funds for researching more powerful Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator weapons, another way of making nuclear weapons more usable and therefore more likely to be used.
    • The US has allocated funds to create a facility to produce some 450 plutonium pits annually that could only be used for new nuclear weapons. This suggests to other nations that the US is planning to further develop new nuclear weapons and to possess and rely upon nuclear weapons for the indefinite future.
    • The US has not adhered to the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament agreed to in the year 2000 by the states that are parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, including the five declared nuclear weapon states.
    • The US has not challenged the reliance on nuclear weapons by our allies, including Israel, UK and France, and has made no attempt to provide leadership for broad-based nuclear disarmament.

    In sum, the current US approach to nuclear weapons is to rely upon them for extended deterrence, to research more usable weapons, to indicate that its reliance on these weapons is long-term, to violate treaty agreements, to unilaterally reverse previous commitments, and to fail to provide leadership toward significant and irreversible reductions in nuclear arms. In a post Cold War environment, with the United States wielding overwhelming military superiority, there is concern in many parts of the world that the United States could succumb to what has been referred to by Richard Falk, a leading international law professor, as the “Hiroshima Temptation,” to use nuclear weapons against a far weaker enemy without fear of meaningful response.

    US nuclear weapons policy under the Bush administration appears to be rooted in a “do as I say, not as I do” approach. This raises two important questions: Does this policy make the US more secure? Is this a policy that the American people would support if they understood it? I believe the answer to both these questions is No.

    A third question arises. Is it possible that members of the public could raise the issue of US nuclear weapons policy and stimulate a real debate on the current course of the country in this year’s presidential elections? It is of utmost importance that the American people recognize the importance of these issues and raise them with the presidential and congressional candidates, forcing these issues into the public arena.

    Considerations to Guide US Nuclear Weapons Policy

    In the post-Cold War and post-9/11 world there are important considerations that should guide US policy on nuclear arms. These include:

    • Nuclear weapons cannot be used against another country with nuclear weapons without facing retaliation unless a country can deliver a devastating first-strike (preventive) attack that would be calculated – likely wrongly – to destroy nearly all of the other side’s retaliatory force (the remainder would be calculated – likely wrongly – to be stopped with missile defenses or to be “acceptable losses”). Such a first-strike attack would potentially kill tens of millions of innocent people, be highly immoral and unlikely to be successful.
    • The use of nuclear weapons in a first-strike (preventive) attack against a country without nuclear weapons would be both immoral and illegal under international law.
    • The only possible justification for nuclear weapons is their role as a deterrent. But, so long as nuclear weapons threaten other nuclear weapon states, the threatening nation will in turn be threatened, even if it possesses so-called missile defenses.
    • The greater the number of nuclear weapons that exist in the world, the more likely that one or more of these weapons will fall into the hands of non-state extremists that could not be deterred from their use.
    • Russia can no longer be considered an adversary of the United States, and this creates an ideal opportunity to negotiate with them far greater reductions in nuclear arms and to make these reductions irreversible.
    • China can no longer be considered an adversary of the United States (in fact, it is a major trading partner), and US nuclear weapons policy should not provoke China to further develop its current minimal deterrent force. However, US development and deployment of missile defenses is causing China to increase its deterrence capability.
    • By branding nations as part of an “Axis of Evil” and by demonstrating willingness to engage in preventive warfare against Iraq, the US provides incentives to other countries, such as North Korea, to develop nuclear deterrent forces.
    • The greatest threat to US security arises from the possibility of extremists getting their hands on nuclear weapons and using them against a US city. The best way to prevent this possibility is to reduce nuclear weapons globally to a low number and assure that the remaining weapons are kept under strict control, preferably international control. It would also be necessary to establish a global inventory of weapons-grade fissile materials and the facilities capable of producing these materials and to place these under strict international control. The only way for this to happen is for the US to take leadership in promoting this course of action. The US would also have to provide additional funds to help assure the dismantlement and control of the aging Russian nuclear arsenal.
    • India and Pakistan, relatively recent additions to the nuclear weapons club, have indicated that they are willing to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, but not unless all other countries will do so as well. They are not willing to live in a world of nuclear apartheid, further demonstrating that the effort to achieve nuclear disarmament requires US leadership.
    • The widely recognized possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is provocative to other countries in the Middle East. Only the United States, due to the large amount of military aid it provides to Israel, can pressure Israel to forego its nuclear weapons and move forward with peace negotiations to resolve the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.
    • North Korea has indicated that it is willing to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and rejoin the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if it is given security assurances by the US and economic aid. This seems like a solid basis on which to establish an agreement that would benefit both North Korea and the international community.

    Given these considerations and the extent to which current US policy does not reflect them, there needs to be broad public discussion of these issues. This should include, and perhaps be led by, a debate among presidential candidates on the direction of US nuclear policy. The American people should demand that the candidates for the presidency of the United States address these most important security issues facing our country that will affect the future of all Americans.

    A Responsible US Nuclear Weapons Policy

    A responsible US nuclear policy should include the following:

    1. Removing all US nuclear weapons from hair-trigger alert, in conjunction with similar initiatives from Russia.
    2. Ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and supporting a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty that would place all weapons-grade nuclear materials in all countries under strict and effective international control.
    3. Reinstituting US Negative Security Assurances not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.
    4. Pledging No First Use of nuclear weapons and making this legally binding.
    5. Making all reductions in nuclear armaments irreversible through treaty agreements and verified inspection procedures.
    6. Putting the development of missile defenses and space weaponization on hold while negotiating for the elimination of nuclear weapons under strict and effective international control.
    7. Fulfilling US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for “a cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date” by ceasing to perform research on developing new nuclear weapons.
    8. Fulfilling further US obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “to pursue negotiations in good faith on … nuclear disarmament” by adhering to the agreed upon 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament, including “an unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear weapon states to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals.” The US should convene a meeting of all nuclear weapon states, declared and undeclared, to agree upon a treaty for the phased elimination of nuclear weapons.

    Without such changes in US nuclear policy, it is likely that nuclear weapons will again be used by accident or design, including finding their way into the hands of extremists who will not hesitate to use them as a statement of rage against the US or other countries. Additionally, serious US efforts to achieve both regional and global prohibitions on weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and otherwise, will aid the country in resuming the leadership role that it has lost in recent years due to policies of unilateralism, exceptionalism and belligerence, policies reflective of double standards in both law and morality.

    Each of us has a role to play in bringing these policy issues into the US presidential and congressional debates. Candidates should be asked to speak to his or her plan to reduce the security dangers that nuclear weapons continue to pose to the US and to all humanity, indeed to all life on earth.

     

    *David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the co-author of Nuclear Weapons and the World Court.

  • Get Rid of All Nuclear Arms

    President Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) provides the right solution, but to the wrong problem. Nuclear proliferation is merely a symptom; the real issue is the nuclear weapons themselves. And, in this sense, the PSI is no more than a Band-Aid, and a quite small one at that.

    The recent scandal in Pakistan, where a corrupt scientist sold nuclear secrets for profit, only demonstrates that such traffic is much too lucrative to be stopped by increased policing. For 60 years, ever since Hiroshima, the U.S. and the world have tried to control the spread of nuclear weapons. We’ve tried treaties, economic sanctions and moral persuasion. And we’ve failed.

    We could not stop the Soviets from getting nukes. We chose not to resist, and actually ignored, Israel’s nuclear program. We looked the other way when India went nuclear and, thus, could do little when Pakistan followed suit. And we merely fumed when North Korea flexed its nuclear muscles. In the meantime, we have built and maintained the world’s largest nuclear stockpile.

    Can we contain Pakistan’s nuclear program? Yes, we can. But first we will need to contain India’s. To do that, however, India will need to see China’s program rolled back. How does that happen? For that, we will need to start looking at our own. As my grandmother used to say, “If you point one finger at someone, at least three will point back at you.” No one said this was easy!

    Are we really surprised that the rest of the world rolls its eyes when we pontificate about the dangers of nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in general — as when Bush referred to them as “the greatest threat to humanity today”? What other countries doubt is our sincerity. It is hypocritical to tell the rest of the world that nuclear weapons are good enough for us, but not for them. We can’t have a world part nuclear and part not.

    Perhaps the fathers of our own atom bomb — Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues from the Manhattan Project — were correct in believing that the only real way of dealing with nuclear proliferation is to ban nuclear weapons altogether. Everywhere.

    International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei understands this reality. He recently wrote: “We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.”

    We must insist on a nuclear-free world. We must make a sincere commitment to it at home and demand it abroad. Rather than better mousetraps for proliferating nations, we need an approach to eliminate nuclear weapons. Some may argue this is unrealistic. But no more so than the misguided, even naive, hope that a feel-good Band-Aid called PSI will make the world a safer place.

    *Adil Najam is an associate professor of international negotiation and diplomacy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. This article was originally published by USA Today on February
    18, 2004.

  • Saving Ourselves From Self-Destruction

    Nuclear proliferation is on the rise. Equipment, material and training were oncelargely inaccessible. Today, however, there is a sophisticated worldwide network that can deliver systems for producing material usable in weapons. The demand clearly exists: countries remain interested in the illicit acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

    If we sit idly by, this trend will continue. Countries that perceive themselves to be vulnerable can be expected to try to redress that vulnerability — and in some cases they will pursue clandestine weapons programs. The supply network will grow, making it easier to acquire nuclear weapon expertise and materials. Eventually, inevitably, terrorists will gain access to such materials and technology, if not actual weapons.

    If the world does not change course, we risk self-destruction.

    Common sense and recent experience make clear that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which has served us well since 1970, must be tailored to fit 21st-century realities. Without threatening national sovereignty, we can toughen the nonproliferation regime.

    The first step is to tighten controls over the export of nuclear material, a priority President Bush identified yesterday in his speech on nuclear nonproliferation. The current system relies on a gentlemen’s agreement that is not only nonbinding, but also limited in its membership: it does not include many countries with growing industrial capacity. And even some members fail to control the exports of companies unaffiliated with government enterprise.

    We must universalize the export control system, remove these loopholes, and enact binding, treaty-based controls — while preserving the rights of all states to peaceful nuclear technology. We should also criminalize the acts of people who seek to assist others in proliferation.

    In parallel, inspectors must be empowered. Much effort was recently expended — and rightly so — in persuading Iran and Libya to give the International Atomic Energy Agency much broader rights of inspection. But the agency should have the right to conduct such inspections in all countries. Verification of nonproliferation treaty obligations requires more stringent measures, but to date, fewer than 20 percent of the 191 United Nations members have approved a protocol allowing broader inspection rights. Again, as President Bush suggested yesterday, it should be in force for all countries.

    In addition, no country should be allowed to withdraw from the treaty. The treaty now allows any member to do so with three months’ notice. Any nation invoking this escape clause is almost certainly a threat to international peace and security.

    This provision of the treaty should be curtailed. At a minimum, withdrawal should prompt an automatic review by the United Nations Security Council.

    The international community must do a better job of controlling the risks of nuclear proliferation. Sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle — the production of new fuel, the processing of weapon-usable material, the disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste — would be less vulnerable to proliferation if brought under multinational control. Appropriate checks and balances could be used to preserve commercial competitiveness and assure a supply of nuclear material to legitimate would-be users.

    Toward this end, negotiations on the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty must be revived. The treaty, which would put an end to the production of fissionable material for weapons, has been stalled in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva for nearly eight years. For the material that already exists, including in some countries of the former Soviet Union, security measures must be strengthened.

    Of course, a fundamental part of the nonproliferation bargain is the commitment of the five nuclear states recognized under the nonproliferation treaty — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — to move toward disarmament. Recent agreements between Russia and the United States are commendable, but they should be verifiable and irreversible. A clear road map for nuclear disarmament should be established — starting with a major reduction in the 30,000 nuclear warheads still in existence, and bringing into force the long-awaited Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    If the global community is serious about bringing nuclear proliferation to a halt, these measures and others should be considered at the nonproliferation treaty review conference next year.

    We must also begin to address the root causes of insecurity. In areas of longstanding conflict like the Middle East, South Asia and the Korean Peninsula, the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction — while never justified — can be expected as long as we fail to introduce alternatives that redress the security deficit. We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security — and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use.

    Similarly, we must abandon the traditional approach of defining security in terms of boundaries — city walls, border patrols, racial and religious groupings. The global community has become irreversibly interdependent, with the constant movement of people, ideas, goods and resources. In such a world, we must combat terrorism with an infectious security culture that crosses borders — an inclusive approach to security based on solidarity and the value of human life. In such a world, weapons of mass destruction have no place.

    *Mohamed ElBaradei is director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This article was originally published in the New York Times on February 12, 2004.

  • Congressional Bills Passed Support Bush Agenda For New Nuclear Weapons

    November 2003 witnessed the passing of the Defense Authorization Bill (HR1588) and Energy and Water Appropriations Bill (HR 2754) for Fiscal Year 2004. These bills provide authorization and funding for the nuclear weapons activities of both the US Department of Energy and the US Department of Defense.

    The 2004 bills include proposals to research a new generation of “usable” nuclear weapons, construct a plutonium pit facility and shorten readiness for nuclear testing, revealing the administration’s intent to rely on its nuclear forces for many decades to come – a stark contrast to US demands that other nations should forgo their nuclear arms.

    Defense Authorization Bill
    This bill authorizes annual US defense programs, including the nuclear weapons budget which is allocated in the Energy and Water Appropriations Bill.

    The 2004 Defense Authorization Bill includes provisions that would authorize funding for:

    • Research on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) or nuclear “bunker buster”;
    • Research on Advanced Nuclear Weapons Concepts for the development of low-yield nuclear weapons or “mini-nukes”;
    • Design, building and environmental review of a new nuclear bomb plant known as the Modern Pit Facility (MPF);
    • Reduction of Enhanced Test Readiness from between 24-36 months to 18 months.

    Most significantly, Congress voted to repeal of the Spratt-Furse amendment. Adopted as part of the 1994 Defense Authorization bill, the Spratt-Furse legislation prohibits the research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons (five kilotons or less). A final vote took place in November 2003 at the Conference Committee on Defense Authorization, where the Spratt-Furse ban was repealed by a House of Representatives vote of 362-40 and a Senate vote of 95-3. The bill, allocating $401billion, was signed by President Bush on 24 November 2003.

    Energy and Water Appropriations Bill
    The Energy and Water Appropriations Bill details the Department of Energy’s (DOE) nuclear budget, covering funds for the development and production of US nuclear weapons. In July 2003, the House accepted Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) amendments, which included the following modifications to the administration’s request:

    • Cut spending on the RNEP from $15 million to $5 million;
    • Eliminate $6 million on Advanced Nuclear Weapons Concepts for the design of “mini-nukes”;
    • Eliminate $25 million allocated for “Enhanced Test Readiness” which proposes to shorten nuclear test readiness from 24-36 to 18 months;
    • Cut spending on planning and environmental review for the MPF from $23 million to $11 million.

    Most of these proposals, however, were restored in the Senate in September 2003. The bill was reconciled at the House-Senate Conference Committee the following November, where funds totaling $27 billion were approved for water and energy programs. The House voted 387-36 to approve the final version of the bill, and the Senate later approved the bill by a unanimous voice vote. The 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations bill was signed by the President on 1 December 2003

    What the Bills Approved

    Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP)/ Nuclear “Bunker Busters”
    The Bush administration claims that current US nuclear weapons are unsuitable for use against growing numbers of deeply buried bunkers or stockpiles of chemical and/or biological weapons in enemy states and calls for developing the nuclear “bunker buster.” Designed to withstand high-speed collision with the ground, the “bunker buster” is a nuclear bomb capable of boring through 20-30 feet of rock or concrete before exploding. Research and design activities are currently taking place at Livermore (California) and Los Alamos (New Mexico) nuclear weapons laboratories, both of which are managed by the University of California.

    Unlike the “mini-nuke,” the “bunker buster” is a high yield weapon of between 100 to 300 kilotons (the Hiroshima bomb which killed 140,000 people was 15 kilotons). The detonation of such a weapon would create massive collateral damage; the targeting of underground stockpiles of chemical and/or biological weapons could spread dangerous contaminants and between 10,000-50,000 people would be exposed to a fatal dose radiation within 24 hours if used in urban areas.

    The 2004 Defense Authorization bill approved the continuation of current research on the nuclear “bunker buster.” Under its guidelines, scientists at nuclear weapons labs are able to draft detailed plans of nuclear “bunker busters,” but must seek approval from Congress prior to the commencement of engineering work on its production – a term often referred to as “bending metal.” The 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill approved $7.5 million in funds for the research and development (if further authorized by Congress) of the “bunker buster,” half of the $15 million that the Bush administration had requested.

    Low-yield nuclear weapons/“Mini-nukes”
    The concept of “mini-nukes” involves the development of small-scale nuclear warheads which are under five kilotons. With an explosive impact that is small and easier to control, the Pentagon argues that such weapons would be more accurate to target, thereby minimizing collateral damage and inducing only small amounts of radioactive fallout. Research of such weapons is also taking place at Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratories.

    Since the Spratt-Furse amendment in 1994, research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons or “mini-nukes” has been prohibited. The introduction of “mini-nukes” would blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weaponry, increasing the likelihood of their use in conflict.

    The passing of the 2004 Defense Authorization Bill was significant in revoking the Spratt-Furse amendment, reversing a decade of self-imposed restrictions. The 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations bill granted the full $6 million requested by the Bush administration for Advance Concept studies of “mini nukes.” $4 million of this amount will, however, be contingent on the administration’s submittal of a Nuclear Weapons Stockpile report to Congress, detailing reductions made to the US nuclear stockpile. As with the ‘bunker busters,” scientists are able to perform research on the development of “mini nukes,” but must receive Congressional approval prior to plans for production.

    Modern Pit Facility
    A plutonium pit is a steel encased ball that forms the explosive core of nuclear weapons. It serves as a trigger for the fission of atoms within a nuclear warhead, ensuring its explosion upon impact.

    The US had observed a 14-year moratorium since the 1989 closure of the Rocky Flats plutonium pit facility in Colorado. However, on 22 April 2003, Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory announced on that it had produced the first (small-scale) US plutonium pit, effectively re-establishing the nation’s capability to manufacture new plutonium cores for nuclear weapons. The DOE estimates that certification of Los Alamos produced pits will be complete by 2007, thus authorizing the laboratories to produce 10 pits annually for testing purposes.

    In addition, the DOE has also launched plans to build a Modern Pit Facility (MPF), a new nuclear bomb plant that would boost production in excess of 500 plutonium pits a year. Based on this, each year’s production would equal the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, that of China’s. The construction of the MPF could produce the next generation of nuclear weapons with the introduction of “mini-nukes” and “bunker busters” and could also facilitate the contingency held open by the Bush administration to bring old nuclear weapons out of storage and back on active duty.

    The MPF will cost between $2 to $4 billion to construct, with estimated annual operational costs of $300 million. The facility is due to be constructed by 2020 and an environmental investigation is being prepared to determine how and where the pits should be manufactured. The DOE plans to name a location for the plant by April 2004 and is considering the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina; the Pantex Plant facility in Texas; the Nevada Test Site; and sites at Los Alamos and Carlsbad in New Mexico.

    With over 10,000 intact warheads, the US has manufactured enough pits for this stockpile, with another 5,000-12,000 pits in reserve. The renewed production of plutonium pits contravenes US commitments to de-emphasize its reliance on nuclear weapons and adds to speculations regarding Bush’s nuclear weapons ambitions. Plans to launch the MPF and the development of the Los Alamos pit facility coincides with the administration’s plans to increase the US nuclear arsenal and develop a new generation of nuclear weapons.

    The 2004 Defense Authorization bill approved plans for the MPF while the 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations bill allocated only $11 million for the project, $12 million short of the $23 billion that the White House had originally requested.

    Enhanced Test Readiness
    Despite the current 11-year US test moratorium, the Bush administration has called for the recommencement of nuclear testing in order to prevent the “degradation” of the US nuclear arsenal.

    The last nuclear explosion at the main US nuclear testing ground, the Nevada Test Site, occurred on 23 September 1992. A US test moratorium was subsequently established in 1994, and between 24-36 months was required to prepare the site for the resumption of full-scale testing. For Fiscal Year 2004, the Bush administration has requested the shortening of this time to 18 months.

    While Bush insists that he will not end the moratorium, simultaneous plans for increased funding towards nuclear testing and enhanced readiness of the Nevada Test Site form part of a well-coordinated effort to resume production of nuclear weapons, including new and untested weapons.

    The 2004 Defense Authorization bill allocated $34 million in funds to improve the Nevada Test Site. The 2004 Energy and Water Appropriations bill approved $25 million in spending toward Enhanced Test Readiness, but restricted the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to improve its current test readiness capability to 24 months rather than the administration’s proposal of 18 months.

    Analysis: What do the Bills mean?

    In the 2002 US Nuclear Posture Review, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated that the US nuclear infrastructure had “atrophied,” and emphasized the importance of revitalizing it “to increase confidence in the deployed forces, eliminate unneeded weapons and mitigate the risks of technological surprise.” Furthermore, the Pentagon report, “Future Strategic Strike Force” asserts its aims “to transform the nation’s forces to meet the demands placed on them by a changing world order.” The report advocates a new role for nuclear weapons in US strategy, making them “relevant to the threat environment” in the “war on terror.”

    The Bush administration’s view is that US must obtain the technology and skills needed to counter threats of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. In April 2003, Linton Brooks, administrator at the NNSA and the Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security told a Congressional hearing, “We are seeking to free ourselves from intellectual prohibitions against exploring a full range of technical options.”

    Despite restrictions of certain funds, the approval of the Defense Authorization and Energy and Water Appropriation bills for 2004 shows strong support for most requests sought by the Bush administration. To critics this indicates moving a step closer to realizing the administration’s aggressive nuclear doctrine. The authorization of the bills further confirms to the world that nuclear weapons constitute a central component of the US defense strategy, prompting other countries to redouble their own efforts to acquire nuclear arms and begin nuclear testing.

    The Bush administration’s “vertical proliferation” plans contravene US commitments to de-emphasize reliance on nuclear weapons as well as disregard pledges made under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in taking steps towards disarmament. While the Bush administration demands that North Korea, Iran and other countries renounce their nuclear ambitions and submit to inspections in accordance with the NPT, the US does not engage in a process of transparent and irreversible reduction and elimination of its own arsenal.

    As Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, recently stated, “Double standards are being used here. The US government insists that other countries do not possess nuclear weapons.” He adds, “On the other hand they are perfecting their own arsenal. I do not think that corresponds with the treaty they signed.”

    By assigning a new, more “usable” role for nuclear weapons, the US is increasing the probability of nuclear weapons use, either by a nation or terrorist group. This would make it more likely, not less, that nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction would be used against the US. Unless effective measures are enforced to curb the current administration, the US will be guilty of leading the world down the slippery slope of an emerging global nuclear arms race.

    Opportunities are still available to prevent Bush’s aggressive nuclear plans from materializing. The future deployment of the administration’s new nuclear strategy will depend upon the outcome of the next presidential election, as well as congressional debates over the next few years. These, in turn, will depend upon US and international citizens engaging in a debate on future nuclear policies, and calling on Congress and presidential candidates to take a principled stance against the dangerous Bush nuclear policies.

    *Justine Wang is the Research and Advocacy Coordinator at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.