Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: abolition

  • The Anti-Nuclear Mountain Is Being Scaled

    Douglas RocheA three-week global speaking tour has convinced me that the world is moving into a new stage in the long quest to eliminate nuclear weapons.  Weakened government ideology in support of nuclear weapons is now colliding with chronic deficits and other economic realities that make them unaffordable. 


    I found this a consistent theme in meetings with senior government officials in China, India, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. In the discussions surrounding my lectures to university students, think tanks and civil society groups, it became clear to me that the intellectual case for nuclear deterrence is crumbling.  Even in NATO headquarters in Brussels, where my arguments for nuclear disarmament in past visits were greeted by the derisory comment, “mission impossible,” the response this time could be characterized as “mission maybe.” 


    In addition to speaking on the themes of my book, How We Stopped Loving the Bomb, I presented a new brief, “A Global Law to Ban Nuclear Weapons,” prepared by the Middle Powers Initiative (MPI) and containing a central message: “It is urgent to seize the present opportunity, and to begin, soon, collective preparatory work leading to enactment of a universal, verifiable and enforceable legal ban on nuclear weapons.” 


    MPI has drafted a UN resolution, which would request the UN Secretary-General to convene a diplomatic conference in 2014 to negotiate a global ban on nuclear weapons.  But governments are balking at such “swift action,” and it may be that the best that can be obtained at the moment is agreement to have an Experts Group advise on steps that could lead to a Nuclear Weapons Convention. 


    The reluctance by governments to actually start working comprehensively on at least preparations for a convention, which would be a global treaty, appears on the surface to be yet another rebuff to nuclear disarmament advocates.  “It’s like a bucket of cold water thrown on us,” an activist in London complained.  But a physician of long experience likened the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons to the early days of the anti-smoking campaign when the scorn of smokers evolved into a new societal attitude against smoking. 


    My world tour showed me that the anti-nuclear weapons campaign is following the classic lines of other great social movements, such as the end of slavery, colonialism and apartheid: at first, the idea is dismissed by the powerful, then when the idea starts to take hold, it is vigorously objected to until, by persistence, the idea enters the norm of public thinking and laws start to be changed. 


    The emerging campaign to abolish nuclear weapons does not follow a straight path.  In China, I was told that the government is ready to engage in multilateral negotiations but first wants to see more progress in bilateral agreements between the US and Russia, which hold the lion’s share of the 20,000 nuclear weapons in existence.  In India, the public takes pride in their new acquisition of nuclear weapons in the mistaken belief that they would be of some use in the continuing conflict with Pakistan, but senior political officials are looking for a way to get global negotiations started.  In Russia, officials told me that US plans for a missile defence system in Europe along with other aspects of American military dominance, such as the weaponization of space, are an impediment to further agreements to lower the level of nuclear weapons.  


    All governments make excuses for resisting collaborative efforts for a global ban.  Even in Norway, Sweden and Germany, three countries thought to have progressive policies, the bureaucracies are sluggish, playing an “After you, Alphonse” game of delaying the definitive action of calling a conference to start working on a ban. The UK officials I talked to conceded the merits of the MPI brief  (and even invited me back), but are locked into temporary growth of their unaffordable Trident nuclear system by a combination of political pressures from the right wing and the felt need for coherence with the US and France. 


    Governments around the world today are relying on obfuscation to make their case for the retention of nuclear weapons.  The ideology that drove the escalation of nuclear weapons in the Cold War is long gone, younger officials are coming into status positions, and pragmatics are starting to determine how to maintain security without spending the $100 billion a year now devoured by the nuclear weapons industry for weapons whose use has been ruled out on military, political and moral grounds.  Only the building of a global law, as was effected to ban chemical and biological weapons, remains to be done to free humanity from the spectre of mass destruction. 


    The nuclear mountain is high indeed.  Scaling it is not for the faint-hearted.  But a historic shift in attitudes is under way.  And that shift is being hastened by the gradual recognition that the processes of globalization, which are elevating the standard of living for millions upon millions of people, should not be jeopardized by the squandering of money on military “junk.” 


    One unforgettable sight caught, for me, what the nuclear struggle is all about.  In Shanghai one evening, I stood on the walkway along the Bund.  On one side was the array of graceful 19th-century buildings, lit in soft amber colours.  Then, turning, I saw across the river a dazzling spectacle  of new skyscrapers garishly lit with flashing electronic signs.  The old China and the new.  The contrast is startling. 


    The new world, unfolding before our eyes, has huge problems, such as feeding the people and stopping pollution.  It’s starting to realize it doesn’t have the time, or the money, to continue stock-piling nuclear weapons.

  • Nobel Summit: Final Declaration on the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons

    The undersigned Nobel Peace Laureates and representatives of Nobel Peace Prize organizations, gathered in Hiroshima on November 12-14, 2010, after listening to the testimonies of the Hibakusha, have no doubt that the use of nuclear weapons against any people must be regarded as a crime against humanity and should henceforth be prohibited.

    We pay tribute to the courage and suffering of the Hibakusha who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and honour those that have dedicated their lives to teaching the rest of the world about the horrors of nuclear war. Like them, we pledge ourselves to work for a future committed to peace, justice and security without nuclear weapons and war.

    “Nuclear weapons are unique in their destructive power, in the unspeakable human suffering they cause, in the impossibility of controlling their effects in space and time, in the risks of escalation they create, and in the threat they pose to the environment, to future generations, and indeed to the survival of humanity.” We strongly endorse this assessment by the International Committee of the Red Cross, three times recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian work.

    Twenty-five years ago in Geneva, the leaders of the two largest nuclear powers declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” There has been some substantive progress since then. The agreements on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF); strategic arms reductions (START); and unilateral and bilateral initiatives on tactical nuclear weapons, have eliminated tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. We welcome the signing by the United States and Russia of the New START treaty and the consensus Nuclear Disarmament Action Plan that was adopted by the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.

    Nevertheless, there are still enough nuclear weapons to destroy life on Earth many times over. The proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibility of their use for acts of terrorism are additional causes for deep concern. The threats posed by nuclear weapons did not disappear with the ending of the Cold War.

    Nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented, but they can and must be outlawed, just as chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions have been declared illegal. Nuclear weapons, the most inhumane threat of all, should likewise be outlawed in keeping with the 2010 NPT Review Conference final document, which reaffirmed “the need for all States at all times to comply with applicable international law, including international humanitarian law”.

    Efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons must proceed along with measures to strengthen international law, demilitarize international relations and political thinking and to address human and security needs. Nuclear deterrence, power projection and national prestige as arguments to justify acquiring and retaining nuclear weapons are totally outdated and must be rejected.

    We support the UN Secretary General’s five point proposal on nuclear disarmament and proposals by others to undertake work on a universal treaty to prohibit the use, development, production, stockpiling or transfer of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon technologies and components and to provide for their complete and verified elimination.

    • We call upon heads of government, parliaments, mayors and citizens to join us in affirming that the use of nuclear weapons is immoral and illegal.

    • We call for the ratification without delay of the START agreement by the United States and Russia and for follow-on negotiations for deeper cuts in all types of nuclear weapons.

    • We call on all nuclear weapon possessor states to make deep cuts in their existing arsenals.

    • We call on the relevant Governments to take urgent steps to implement the proposals agreed on in the 2010 NPT Review Conference Final Document towards realising the objectives of the 1995 resolution on the Middles East.

    • We call on China, the United States, Egypt, Iran, Israel and Indonesia to ratify, and on India, Pakistan and North Korea to sign and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that has already been ratified by 153 nations so that the Treaty can be brought into full legal force.

    • We call on nations to negotiate an universal treaty to abolish nuclear weapons, in partnership with civil society

    To ensure that the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki never reoccur and to build a world based on cooperation and peace, we issue this call of conscience. We must all work together to achieve a common good that is practical, moral, legal and necessary – the abolition of nuclear weapons.

  • The Moral Challenge of a Nuclear-Free World

    This article was originally published by the Wall Street Journal.

    This May, delegations from more than 180 countries gathered in New York, at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, to discuss how to free the world from nuclear weapons. Despite the positive momentum that flowed from President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech on the issue in Prague, there was enormous pressure on the conference. With a spirit of cooperation and flexibility from all delegates, however, the conference lived up to its expectations.

    As foreign ministers, we draw two conclusions from this. First, it is remarkable that all delegates agreed on the conference’s action plan, which includes various new and important commitments on nuclear disarmament as well as concrete measures to implement the 1995 Middle East Resolution, which called for the a weapons of mass destruction-free zone in the region. We should do everything possible to implement this agreement.

    Our second conclusion is that the agreement is extremely fragile.

    Without an intensive concerted effort, states will not honor it. The irreconcilable views expressed throughout the conference-on such issues as the Iranian nuclear program and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s rules for how signatories withdraw-will not fade away.

    ØPrior to the conference, major nuclear-weapons states took some remarkable steps. The U.S. and Russia agreed to further cut their strategic nuclear weapons. The U.S. also presented a new approach in its Nuclear Posture Review, published in April, which provided strong negative security assurances (that is, assurances that it would not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states).

    We welcome and support the Obama administration’s commitment to achieving a world without nuclear weapons and strengthening nuclear security. Together with nuclear-weapons states, including the U.S., we are ready to discuss how to reduce the role of nuclear weapons-by, for example, committing to possess them only for the purpose of deterring others from using them. Even if nuclear states cannot immediately agree to abandon their nuclear weapons, they can take practical measures to reduce clear and present risks.

    It is also necessary to make the possession of nuclear weapons unattractive. North Korea and Iran must understand that acquiring nuclear weapons in contradiction of their nonproliferation obligations would never be tolerated and would not elevate their status in the international community.

    Like climate change, nuclear disarmament raises the question of whether mankind can feel a sense of responsibility across national borders and generations. Nuclear disarmament asks whether mankind can act to reduce the risks of self-destruction posed by “God’s fire.” We should never forget how human beings and buildings vanished in the tremendous flash of light and heat in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago. This is a global issue that tests our sense of responsibility and morality.

    Morality has recently played an important role in bringing about the success of treaties on land mines and cluster munitions. It is thus no coincidence that the Final Document of May’s conference cited the need for states to comply with international humanitarian law.

    Some may ask themselves why Japan and Germany are seeking to pursue nuclear disarmament with such vigor when both countries rely on the United States for nuclear deterrence. Our countries have long been advocates of disarmament. Since re-emerging from total devastation in the second world war, both countries have pursued a peaceful and stable world and the total elimination of nuclear weapons. It is in such a shared conviction that we find a common role. And we believe that pursuing nuclear disarmament is the path that will most reliably minimize nuclear risks and enhance international security.

    The 21st century will be about managing our planet. History will remember favorably those countries that respond with a sense of global responsibility. Let us set upon the realistic and responsible path towards a world without nuclear weapons. It is a moral responsibility.

  • Nuclear Deterrence Scam Blocking Progress to a Safer World

    This article was originally published on The Huffington Post.

    I recently returned home to New Zealand from attending a major conference at the United Nations in New York reviewing prospects for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Because a shaky consensus was reached, the conference has been hailed a success. However, what struck me was how detached the negotiations were from the reality of what the diplomats were haggling over.

    As a former operator of British nuclear weapons, I try to articulate this reality, and to “get up close and personal” with this desperately serious issue for humanity, most recently in Security Without Nuclear Deterrence and a New York Review of Books symposium on “Debating Nuclear Deterrence.”

    The nuclear weapon states’ blocking of any serious moves towards honoring their obligation in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to get rid of their nuclear arsenals is driven by their uncritical acceptance of nuclear deterrence. Yet my carefully considered conclusion is that nuclear deterrence is a huge confidence trick – an outrageous scam cooked up fifty years ago by the US military industrial monster created by the Manhattan Project and now dominating US politics. Look at how President Barack Obama’s vision for a nuclear weapon free world, raising global expectations in his Prague speech in April last year, was quickly contradicted by his caveat that “as long as these weapons exist, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to deter any adversary, and guarantee that defense to our allies…”

    In a statement on behalf of the non-governmental organization (NGO) community to delegates, I pointed out that belief in nuclear deterrence is based on a crazy premise: that nuclear war can be made less likely by deploying weapons and doctrines that make it more likely.

    A rational leader cannot make a credible nuclear threat against a nuclear adversary capable of a retaliatory strike. And a second strike is pointless, because it would be no more than posthumous revenge, in which millions of innocent people would die horribly. This is why enthusiasm for a nuclear weapon free world is incompatible with the nuclear-armed states’ copout mantra: “We’ll keep nuclear weapons for deterrence as long as anyone else has them.”

    Nuclear deterrence, like all theories, is not foolproof. It entails a hostile stand-off where, in the case of the US and Russia, each side still has over 2,000 warheads ready for launch within half an hour, over twenty years after the Cold War officially ended. What is more, they still have nearly 18,000 more nuclear warheads between them held in reserve.

    The George W. Bush administration was the first to admit nuclear deterrence would not work against terrorists, now perceived to be the greatest threat to Americans – other than the real risk of inadvertent nuclear war with Russia because nuclear deterrence dogma requires all those warheads on hair-trigger alert. As for terrorism, a nuclear “weapon” is militarily unusable, combining uniquely indiscriminate, long-term health effects, including genetic damage, from radioactivity with almost unimaginable explosive violence. In fact, it is the ultimate terror device, far worse than chemical or biological weapons, which are banned by global treaties.

    Recent research assessing a regional nuclear war involving use of just 100 warheads, each with an explosive power of 15 kilotons like the US bomb detonated over Hiroshima, on cities in India and Pakistan found that, in addition to millions of immediate casualties, smoke from fires could block enough sunlight to cause widespread famine. For all these reasons, the overwhelming majority of states feel more secure without depending on the circular logic, myths and misleading promises of nuclear deterrence – which is effectively state-sponsored nuclear terrorism.

    As in 2005, this year’s NPT Review Conference was bedevilled by two closely related issues: the nuclear programmes of Iran, which is suspected of trying to build nuclear weapons, and Israel, which has denied having them for over forty years. Intertwined with these is one of several fundamental contradictions about the NPT: its promotion of nuclear energy, which inevitably stimulates nuclear proliferation because it provides the fissile material for nuclear weapons. This, and the double standards imposed on the non-nuclear member states by the privileged five recognized nuclear-armed states, with their associated veto power in the UN Security Council, have finally reduced the NPT process to impotence.

    Perhaps the most positive outcome was a new groundswell of opinion among a large majority of the non-nuclear signatory states that the only hope of making any meaningful progress towards nuclear weapon abolition is to start a parallel process leading to a Nuclear Weapons Convention, like the ones banning chemical and biological weapons. A model treaty exists, drafted by a group of experts from the NGO community. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has been sufficiently impressed to have endorsed it as part of his five-point plan for nuclear disarmament.

    Meanwhile, in Britain a coalition government has taken power at a crucial moment for the future of British and global nuclear policy. The deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, leads the Liberal Democrats, whose election manifesto included opposition to both nuclear energy and replacing the Trident nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine force with a similar system. What is more, Clegg challenged the value to Britain of the US-UK special relationship, after the debacle of blindly following the US into Iraq and Afghanistan. Such poor decisions, driven by British nuclear dependence on the US, have left a black hole in the British defence budget, with the white elephant of a replacement Trident system increasingly vulnerable.

    Britain should take this opportunity to reassert its sovereignty, and exploit the US-UK relationship in a dramatically new way. Making a virtue from necessity, it should announce that it had decided to rescue the dysfunctional non-proliferation regime by becoming the first of the P5 to rely on more humane, lawful and effective security strategies than nuclear deterrence.

    As with the abolition of slavery, a new world role awaits the British. Such a ‘breakout’ would be sensational, transforming the nuclear disarmament debate overnight. In NATO, the UK would wield unprecedented influence in leading the drive for a non-nuclear strategy – which must happen if NATO is to survive the growing strains from overstretch in Afghanistan and confusion over a common European security policy. British leadership would create new openings for shifting the mindset in the US and France, the other two most zealous guardians of nuclear deterrence.

    The key is to see nuclear disarmament as a security-building process, moving from an outdated adversarial mindset to a co-operative one where nuclear weapons are recognized as a lethal liability.

  • Reaching Zero

    This article was originally published by The Nation

    What is the purpose, if any, of the nuclear bomb, that brooding presence that has shadowed all human life for sixty-five years? The question has haunted the nuclear age. It may be that no satisfactory answer has ever been given. Nuclear strategic thinking, in particular, has disappointed. Many of its pioneers have wound up in a state of something like despair regarding their art. For example, Bernard Brodie, one of the originators of nuclear strategy in the 1940s, was forced near the end of his life to realize that “nuclear strategy itself–the body of thoughts that he himself had helped formulate–was something of an illusion,” according to historian Fred Kaplan. In the introduction to The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Lawrence Freedman airs the suspicion that the phrase “nuclear strategy” may be a “contradiction in terms.” Henry Kissinger, a leading figure in nuclear strategizing for a half-century, has expressed a similar feeling of futility. In a remarkable reconsideration, amounting to an oblique recantation of his past thinking, he has written recently in Newsweek:

    The basic dilemma of the nuclear age has been with us since Hiroshima: how to bring the destructiveness of modern weapons into some moral or political relationship with the objectives that are being pursued. Any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign-policy objectives. Efforts to develop a more nuanced application have never succeeded, from the doctrine of a geographically limited nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s to the “mutual assured destruction” theory of general nuclear war in the 1970s.

    Now a new moment, full of fresh promise but also with novel perils, has arrived in the nuclear story, and all the old questions have to be asked again. As if responding to some secret signal sent out by a restless zeitgeist, the globe is seething with events large and small in the nuclear arena. Here in the United States, certainly, all the policy pots on the nuclear stove are at a boil. Soon, the Obama administration will complete its overdue Nuclear Posture Review, a statement that Congress requires of the president every four years on the disposition of the country’s nuclear forces.

    It will give the administration’s answer to the key questions: What nuclear forces should the United States deploy? Why? What, if anything, does the United States propose to do with them? On April 8 the United States and Russia will sign a new Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) agreement, which will reduce warheads to 1,550 on each side and restrict delivery vehicles to 800 apiece. Also in early April, President Obama will hold a Nuclear Security Summit with the heads of state of forty-four other nations to consider measures to prevent the diversion of nuclear weapon materials into unauthorized hands. In early May will come the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, which is a kind of nuclear posture review for the entire world. Decisions on passage of the long-rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as well as a resurrected Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty are also likely very soon.

    The key question, of course, is whether the policies and actions will meet the mounting perils of the new situation. What’s needed for success, I will suggest, is a revival precisely of the discredited art of nuclear strategic thinking, which may, with suitable adjustments, yet have something to offer us. Strategy, military thinkers have long told us, is the art of marrying up tactical means with broad political ends. That is exactly what is most sorely missing in nuclear policy today. Certainly, no mere piecemeal examination will suffice. A comprehensive approach is needed.

    The Nuclear Surge

    For taken together, the dangers mark the world’s arrival at a new stage in the evolution of nuclear danger, forcing fundamental decisions on nuclear and nonnuclear powers alike. In a word, the nuclear predicament is coming of age, which is to say that it is fulfilling a potential that every competent scientist has known it possessed since the advent of the bomb in 1945: nuclear technology, no longer the preserve of a few privileged powers, is becoming available on a global basis. This is because of the simple but decisive fact that the bomb is based on scientific knowledge, which is in its nature unconfinable. This spread is at the heart of the growing nuclear peril–a kind of nuclear surge–in today’s world.

    To say that the technology is becoming available to all, however, is not to say that it is possessed by all or even that it will be. It means only that if nations or others want it, they will be able to have it. Japan, for example, does not have a nuclear bomb. But one is available to Japan in short order if it so chooses. According to the State Department, the bomb is thus available to some fifty other countries. This number of potential nuclear powers is destined to grow. If those countries do not build the bomb, the reason can only be a domestic and international political decision that they should not. The more this availability spreads (as it must), the higher and stronger the political barriers against proliferation must become.

    Of course, at a certain point, which may not be far off, availability, if not possession, will spill beyond national confines and reach smaller groups. At that point the political walls will have to be high and strong indeed. Otherwise, a nuclear 9/11 may be upon us.

    Obviously, any deliberate spread of nuclear technology, such as the “renaissance” of nuclear power that has apparently begun, will only accelerate the surge.

    This underlying and irreversible pressure of availability is the backdrop for today’s widespread and well-founded dread that proliferation by just a few countries–above all, North Korea and Iran–will push the world over what the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, a group set up by the Japanese and Australian governments, calls a “tipping point,” precipitating a “cascade” of proliferation that will wash away the current nuclear order. South Asia has of course already gone nuclear, with India and Pakistan engaged in an arms race. India, aping the United States, has planned a triad of air, land and sea nuclear forces while impoverished, crisis-ridden Pakistan struggles to keep up.

    The Middle East and East Asia, led by Iran and North Korea, could become the next regions to travel down this path. According to the Washington Post, A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb and the arch-proliferator of its nuclear technology, has said that Iranian officials asked him in the 1980s to sell them ready-made bombs. Since then Iran has appeared to many to be using its right to develop nuclear power technology as a pathway to building the bomb from scratch. If it does, other countries in the Middle East may well follow suit. More immediately, Iran and nuclear-armed Israel would find themselves in a perilous balance–or rather, extreme imbalance, since Israel already has an undeclared arsenal of perhaps 200 warheads. If North Korea, which already has the bomb, refuses, as seems likely, to give it up under pressure from the world community, then something similar could happen in East Asia, and Japan might indeed produce its own bomb.

    And yet if it’s tempting to some in the United States and elsewhere to define the new nuclear moment solely as a crisis of proliferation, they should be brought up short by a single brute fact: more than 95 percent of the world’s 23,000 or so nuclear warheads remain in the possession of two countries: the United States, with some 9,000, and Russia, with some 13,000.

    If one ineluctable truth of Year 65 of the bomb is that the sources of nuclear danger are destined to be global, another is that the world’s existing arsenals are likewise indivisibly global. They are joined in a kind of unity of hostility. Each nuclear nation (Israel, which has no nuclear adversary, may be the odd man out) cites the arsenal of another or others as the rationale for possessing its own, in multiple chains that link them together into a network of threats and counterthreats. For example, in one such chain, Pakistan fears India, which fears China, which fears Russia, which fears the United States. This network of terror and counterterror underscores another truth of the nuclear age: every possessor of the bomb, by its very existence, teaches possible proliferators a pair of lessons that are the prime (if not the only) motives for proliferation. First, you will be living in a nuclear-armed world; second, if you want to be protected in that world you must have nuclear arms yourself. (In addition, it has of course occurred to many countries, especially North Korea and Iran, that nuclear weapons could deter overwhelming conventional power such as that possessed by the United States.) From national points of view, each arsenal is distinct, but from a global proliferation point of view they are a joint inducement for the further spread of nuclear arms.

    The necessary conclusion is clear: proliferation can’t be stopped unless possession is dealt with concurrently. In the seventh decade of the nuclear age, the time for half-solutions is over. The head of state with his finger on the button of some aging cold war arsenal, the head of state itching to put his finger on such a button, the nuclear power operator, the nuclear smuggler and the terrorist in his hideout dreaming of unparalleled mass murder are actors on a single playing field. In this respect, too, the nuclear dilemma has become indivisibly global.

    This is a truth, however, that the world’s nine nuclear powers do not like to acknowledge, because it has an implication they are reluctant to accept, which is that if they want to be safe from nuclear danger they must commit themselves to surrendering their own nuclear arms.

    Strategic Incoherence

    And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama did in his speech in Prague on April 5, 2009, saying, “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” Encouragingly, his commitment has been accompanied by the widest support for nuclear abolition since President Harry Truman sent Bernard Baruch to ask the world in 1946 to choose between “the quick and the dead.” For one thing, a remarkable phalanx of former and current officials, Republican as well as Democratic, have embraced the goal. Their calls originated with the by-now-famous article by the “Gang of Four”–former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn–who in a January 2007 Wall Street Journal article announced their support for “a world free of nuclear weapons” and called for “working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.” This unlikely foursome harked back to the previously underappreciated fact that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1986, had come within an ace of agreeing to nuclear abolition. (The deal foundered because Gorbachev would agree to it only if Reagan dropped his Strategic Defense Initiative, and Reagan would not.) Today, a majority of former secretaries of state and defense support a world free of nuclear weapons.

    A remarkable number of new government and civil panels, commissions and other initiatives have also sprung up to support the goal. Among them is a new group, Global Zero, which proposes abolition by 2030 and is supported by a Who’s Who of international as well as American signatories, including, for example, Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter and former GOP Senator Chuck Hagel. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Henry L. Stimson Center and the Nuclear Threat Initiative all have serious, well-funded programs to scout the path to zero and determine what would be required to stay there. Meanwhile, the traditional antinuclear movement, led by such groups as Peace Action, the American Friends Service Committee and the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, are marshaling support for a nuclear weapons convention.

    If Obama’s commitment to abolition and the movement in support of it were setting the tone and agenda of current nuclear negotiations, the world might now be in the first stage of a final solution (to give that dread phrase a new and positive meaning) of the nuclear dilemma. Each proposal in the negotiations would be weighed in the light of the distance it traveled toward a nuclear-weapons-free world. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. Instead, what have been offered are at best a series of timid makeshifts or, at worst, de facto subversion of the Prague objective. If this trend continues, it is entirely possible that the ultimate mockery will occur: nuclear arsenals will march forward into the future under a banner that reads Ban the Bomb.

    Let us consider two policy arenas: the START agreement and the Nuclear Posture Review.

    Nothing on the nuclear stage today is stranger or less adequately explained than the spectacle, still on view twenty years after the end of the cold war, of the United States and Russia holding each other hostage to nuclear annihilation with arsenals in the thousands poised on alert. The current agreement, which will remain in force until 2020, sets a ceiling of 1,550 warheads on each side that must be reached by 2017. The reduction from the old ceiling of 2,200 is of course welcome. The continuation of a system of inspections is even more welcome. But what are we to make of the 1,550 warheads that remain? After all, the limit on the 1,550 is also a permission for the 1,550. The arrangement indefinitely leaves intact the essential fact that the United States and Russia are poised to blow each other up many times over, as if the cold war had never ended. What is that about?

    If strategy is the art of using tactics to achieve political ends, then the persistence of these arsenals represents its nemesis. What political purpose is served? There is no quarrel between the two nations that would justify deployment of even a single nuclear weapon. An answer is often made that the United States must have such an arsenal because Russia still does–as a “deterrent.” But this begs the question. For today, as in the past forty years, since the beginning of arms control agreements in 1972, the size of the US arsenal has of course been a negotiated figure. The question is not, as is sometimes pretended, whether in the face of a Russian threat the United States needs to protect itself and size its forces accordingly; it is what figure the two sides should jointly set in talks like the ones just concluded. What stopped Hillary Clinton when she went to Moscow from proposing a force on each side of, say, 300 weapons, as has been suggested by a prominent Air Force officer and two Air University professors recently in Strategic Studies Quarterly? For that matter, why not zero? That step admittedly would require bringing the other nuclear powers into the talks. But why not do that–or at least set a time frame for doing so, thereby explicitly linking the current agreement to the president’s announced goal?

    It is here that the strategic deficit becomes most glaring. It’s not just that tactics have lost contact with political goals, it is that nuclear tactics (in this case, deployments) are weighed without any reference to politics whatsoever. Admittedly, the possibility of Russia backsliding into hostilities with the United States is sometimes cited as a reason for strategic “hedging,” but the obvious next question is whether the United States would prefer to be in a nuclear confrontation with a backslid Russia or in a merely conventional confrontation. Has Washington decided that in case of any hostilities nuclear confrontations are preferable to nonnuclear ones?

    Behind this issue looms a larger unasked strategic question. Are nations in general safer when they aim nuclear weapons at one another (“deter” one another)? Are some pairs safer and others not? Which ones? For example, do Americans think India and Pakistan were wise in 1998 to jointly go nuclear and threaten each other with annihilation? Are they safer today for having taken that step? The refusal of the United States and Russia to show the way by denuclearizing their own relationship is an answer that speaks louder than the Prague commitment and undercuts it. That refusal says that nuclear weapons are useful and do make you safer. But this lesson cuts the legs out from under any serious nonproliferation effort. Wasn’t the need for nonproliferation where we began? Isn’t that now the main professed goal of the United States in the nuclear field? Here is strategic incoherence in its acutest form. Deployments to meet a vanished threat spoil any effort to deal with a current real one.

    What we have heard so far of the Nuclear Posture Review exemplifies the same intellectual debacle. Reportedly, the document will reject the proposal for “no first use.” No first use is the policy of using nuclear weapons only in retaliation for nuclear attacks. All other attacks, including ones with biological or chemical weapons, would be met by conventional forces.

    The rejection of no first use would crystallize, as perhaps nothing else can, the strategic disarray of American nuclear policy. Like the persistence of the forces of mutual assured destruction, it would represent the banishment of politics from strategy (meaning in fact that strategy no longer is strategy). The first-use policy was born in the 1950s, when US leaders believed they could deter perceived Soviet conventional superiority in Europe only by threatening a nuclear response. Is it really necessary to state once again that the cold war is over? Apparently it is, because in this arena, too, news of the geopolitical revolution of 1989-91 has yet to reach the American strategic brain. There, “extended deterrence” seems to be permanently planted on the basis of a kind of incurable nostalgia for the cold war. Fantastically, surreally, the United States is still using nuclear arms to repel a Russian conventional attack on Europe, as if it were 1958. (We might as well say “Soviet attack,” since the threat is imaginary.) This obsolete readiness is symbolically embodied in the deployment even today of some 200 American tactical nuclear warheads in Europe, ready at a moment’s notice to repel Soviet hordes coming through the Fulda Gap. In February, five of the European countries thus “defended” (Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway) recommended that the weapons be withdrawn. Washington is still thinking about it.

    More important for today’s concerns is that a no-first-use policy is the sine qua non of any effective nonproliferation strategy. If nuclear weapons are needed not only to counter other nuclear weapons but to repel conventional, chemical and biological attacks as well, then what responsible national leader can afford to do without them? The problem is not merely symbolic. If the nine nuclear powers are ready to use their arms to perform a grab bag of tasks, then the dangers to nonnuclear countries really do multiply, perhaps inspiring them to acquire these devices, evidently so versatile and useful, for themselves.

    Toward a New Nuclear Strategy

    To escape from this scene of halfhearted and ineffectual measures serving unclear or contradictory goals, the United States needs new strategic thinking. In exploring what it should be, perhaps it will be useful to look back at past strategic thought.

    The great intellectual artifact of cold war strategy was the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. It adopted a new aim for military deployments. In the renowned words of Bernard Brodie in 1946, “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.” This insight, which was recognized as a basis of policy in the early 1960s by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, marked a true revolution in military affairs. Broadly speaking, war-fighting strategies were replaced by war-not-fighting strategies. Not to fight, according to this policy, was to win. And yet under this policy the way not to fight was nevertheless to plan to fight. The trick was to restrict the plan for fighting to nuclear retaliation, in the hope that that day would never come. Thus was born the paradoxical, or contradictory, policy on which survival in the nuclear age was believed to rest. Safety from nuclear destruction depended not on getting rid of the arms that threatened it but on threats to inflict that same nuclear destruction.

    In retrospect, it seems the doctrine of deterrence has been a true Janus: it has been based on one thoroughgoing absurdity and one profound truth. The absurdity was the idea that you could lastingly and reliably avoid an action–mutual suicide in a nuclear war–by threatening the action. The problem, as many critics noted, was that at any given moment–but especially in a crisis–you did not know whether you would get the nuclear non-use that was the new strategic goal or the use whose threat was the tactical means to achieve the non-use. Strategists and moralists twisted and turned in the coils of this dilemma, even as the world lived (as it still technically lives) on the knife-edge of catastrophe. Moralists pondered the virtue of threatening a crime in order not to commit it; strategists wondered how a threat of “suicide” (McNamara) could be “credible” to the one so threatened. None of them found answers, yet the policy became so deeply ingrained in policy circles that today people refer to the American nuclear arsenal as “our deterrent,” as if the hardware and its alleged purpose were one.

    And yet the doctrine did also rest on one profound truth–its acknowledgment that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” as Reagan and Gorbachev put it in 1985.Implicit in this revolution in military affairs was a strategic revolution. The political gains that governments had pursued through wars were given up, now replaced by a need to preserve the peace, which itself became the only sane strategic objective. You might say that deterrence has pursued a sane goal by insane means–a cleavage manifested in the fact that even as deterrence fought off nuclear use, and in a certain sense fortified what has been called the “nuclear taboo” and the “tradition of non-use,” it at the same time pinioned the world permanently on the brink of such use.

    Is it then possible that abolition can be seen as a rectification and completion of the strategic revolution begun but left unfinished by deterrence? How great, after all, would be the shift from the strategic goal of “non-use,” or the “tradition of non-use,” to the strategic goal of “nonpossession,” to a “tradition of nonpossession”? Doesn’t non-use in a way already cast nuclear weapons on history’s scrap heap?

    It is a peculiarity of deterrence that the weapons themselves, rather than political developments, dictate the strategic aim (non-use). In its pathological form, this peculiarity leads to the divorce of deployments and posture from politics that we see now. But in the benign form of abolition, the strategy dictated by arms and the strategy dictated by policy would coincide. Both would say, with the new Henry Kissinger: there is no quarrel in the world worth a nuclear war, so don’t fight one or arm yourself to do so.

    The conclusion is strengthened when you recall that even at zero, deterrence does not melt away completely. The reason is that the roots of the nuclear dilemma lie in inextinguishable advances in scientific knowledge. For even as this knowledge could permit cheaters to violate an abolition agreement, so it would permit the international community to respond in kind. The point is not to propose overelaborate schemes of nuclear rearmament if a crisis were to occur at zero (the conventional forces of the threatened international community would surely suffice) but to point out that there is no sharp discontinuity, as is often suggested, between the “minimum deterrence” represented by, say, a few hundred weapons and zero. Rather there is a smooth continuity all the way to zero, and even beyond, as political and legal as well as technical arrangements needed to keep the world at zero gradually strengthened. Unfortunately, technical bans are all in principle reversible. It has been otherwise with a few moral and legal revolutions, including the abolition of slavery, and there is reason to hope that the abolition of nuclear arms would be one of these. When that happened, deterrence would have been left finally and completely behind.

    The Architecture of Zero

    The needed change is to turn abolition from a far-off goal into an active organizing principle that gives direction to everything that is done in the nuclear arena–in other words, a strategic goal. The indivisible nuclear surge under way in today’s world can be mastered only with an indivisible program to defeat it. Let us, then, borrowing from Obama in Prague, take “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” as the new strategic objective–the political goal in the pursuit of which all tactics become the means. That goal has two requisites. The first is getting rid of existing nuclear weapons. The tactical means to that goal are of course negotiations among the nuclear powers. The second requisite is building a system that safeguards the world from the recrudescence of nuclear weapons once they are gone. This system will be the true architecture of zero. The tactical means to that goal are negotiating an ever-tightening web of restrictions imposed on all technology usable for nuclear weapons.

    Of the two, the second is more difficult. For while the process of nuclear disarmament will continue for only a limited time, until zero is reached, the architecture of zero must be built to last forever, since the knowledge that underlies nuclear weapons will never disappear. The tactics for reaching this goal only begin with the construction of systems of inspection and enforcement. More important over the long run is building a political and legal order in which the attempt to build a nuclear weapon would be designated a crime against humanity. More important still would be the moral deepening of the taboo.

    The art of strategy–so notably absent in today’s contradictory mélange of policies–is to combine the measures needed to achieve the two goals into a single, coherent, self-reinforcing plan. Above all, the nonproliferation efforts that are the precursors to an architecture of zero are in mortal need of the united planetary political will that can be created only by a clear, credible commitment to a time-bound plan for abolition to which all nuclear powers are formally agreed. It should take the form of a commitment to create the sort of nuclear weapons convention that the antinuclear movement has long advocated–one that, as noted earlier, seeks to ban all weapons of mass destruction.

    To postpone abolition is to postpone nonproliferation. Today arms control and nonproliferation proceed in two parallel negotiating universes–the NPT review on the one side and START talks on the other. The two need to be brought together in a simple bargain that is already implicit in the provisions of the NPT: the nuclear powers will surrender their arsenals on condition that other powers agree not to obtain any.

    Such a strategy would build on the truth underlying deterrence doctrine while gradually retiring its absurd features. It would enable nuclear strategy, at last, to catch up with history. It would deliver Russia and the United States from the weapons-forged hostility that politically no longer exists. It would unify the world around a common goal–one already embraced under the NPT by 184 countries and enshrined in their laws. Nuclear states (as long as they persist as such) would be at one with nonnuclear states in preventing proliferation, even as they all worked together to put in place the architecture of zero that would make the ban permanent and safe. Finally, the strategy would provide a measuring rod for judging the merit of interim steps, such as START and no first use. They would be judged by the specific contribution they made to reaching the common strategic goal. To give some examples: adoption of no first use by all nuclear powers would be highly valued as a way station toward abolition. In principle at least, nuclear weapons would have been completely retired from use, for if no one strikes first, no one can strike in retaliation–thus no one will strike with a nuclear weapon at all, and no one will threaten to do so.

    Arms reductions would, of course, have value as steps toward zero; but the inspection regimes accompanying them would be especially prized, not just for their own sake but because an ever-stronger regime of inspection is a sine qua non of life in a world without nuclear weapons.

    Influence would flow from nonproliferation measures to arms control as well. The more nonnuclear-weapons states accepted stringent inspections, the more they permitted transparency of their nuclear facilities and the more they accepted restrictions on withdrawal from the NPT, the more ready would the nuclear powers be, less afraid now of cheating, to surrender their arsenals.

    What would nuclear weapons then be for? They almost tell us themselves. “We are here,” they say, “to abolish ourselves, and–a big bonus–to put up a barrier to major power war forever after into the bargain. For even after you are rid of us, we will hover in the wings, as a potential that cannot ever be removed.” The bomb is waiting for us to hear the message. It has been waiting a long time. If we do not, it can always return to what has always been its plan B, and abolish us. 

  • Excerpts from German Parliamentary Resolution Against Nuclear Weapons

    2010_03_30_german_parliament.pdf

  • Nuclear Weapons After Bush: Prospects for Abolition

    2010_01_25_conference_transcript.pdf

  • A Brief Salute to a Great Man

    The “most trusted voice in America” is silenced now, but his message will live as an example of what news should be.
    Mr. Walter Cronkite lived through and witnessed many of the most important events of the 20th Century, reporting and commenting with his authoritative and calm voice.
    His now prescient pronouncement of the futility of the war in Vietnam was pivotal in bringing it to an end. He also voiced his opposition to the Iraq war. Until the end of his life, he was a strong defender of justice and peace.
    We, at Nuclear Age Peace Foundation were very fortunate and honored to have benefited from his wisdom and experience in our Advisory Council. We will miss him and we will continue the mission of his ardent wish for a nuclear weapons free World.
    And that’s the way it will continue to be, Uncle Walter.

    Rubén Arvizu is the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s Director for Latin America.
  • Civil Society Initiatives for Nuclear Disarmament

    Civil Society Initiatives for Nuclear Disarmament

    The fate of the world depends upon whether humankind will be able to eliminate the world’s nuclear arsenals. Nuclear weapons, designed to cause massive damage to large populations, are essentially city-destroying weapons, as was tragically demonstrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These weapons may be created in the hope that they will never be used, but this cannot be guaranteed. Once created, nuclear weapons are an ongoing threat to humanity and other forms of life. So long as these weapons exist, no leader can provide a guarantee that they will not be used.

    I keep on my desk a small booklet, published by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, with the words of General George Lee Butler, a former Commander of the United States Strategic Command. General Butler, who advocates abolition of all nuclear weapons, believes that humanity has been given a “second chance” by our Creator. Here is the perspective of this retired four-star general who now sees himself simply as “a citizen of this planet”:

    “Sadly, the Cold War lives on in the minds of men who cannot let go the fears, the beliefs, the enmities of the Nuclear Age. They cling to deterrence, clutch its tattered promise to their breast, shake it wistfully at bygone adversaries and balefully at new or imagined ones. They are gripped still by its awful willingness not simply to tempt the apocalypse but to prepare its way.

    “To them I say we cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it. It is time to reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity.” 1

    These are powerful words, not the kind we are accustomed to hearing from politicians or military leaders. General Butler, an anomaly, is a retired air force officer, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, who once commanded the entire US strategic nuclear arsenal, and came away from this experience sobered by what he had learned. For a short time, General Butler spoke eloquently for a world free of nuclear weapons, his military background giving authenticity to his concerns.

    But there are few military men such as General Butler, and fewer still who have spoken publicly on this most important of all issues confronting humanity. For the most part, military leaders and politicians appear comfortable moving forward with only slight variations of the nuclear status quo. It appears that if there is to be change toward a world free of nuclear threat, the leadership must come from civil society organizations. These organizations face the challenge of awakening largely dormant populations within somnambulistic societies that seem content to sleepwalk toward Armageddon.

    Civil Society Leadership

    In the area of nuclear disarmament, the role of civil society leadership is critical. We obviously cannot depend upon political leadership, which is capable in our frenetic world of only dealing with problems as they become acute. There is a furious pace to politics that dulls the political imagination and often results in less than visionary leadership.

    There are two possible paths to awakening the political imagination on the issue of nuclear disarmament. The first and tragic possibility would be a sadly belated response to a nuclear detonation destroying a city, whether by accident or design, by a nuclear weapons state or by a non-state extremist group. The second would be by an effective campaign led by civil society that awakened and empowered the people of the planet to put sufficient pressure on their political leaders for them to take action as a political expedient without needing to engage their moral imaginations.

    Clearly the second option is far preferable to the first. The critical question is whether civil society organizations can actually provide the leadership to sufficiently awaken a dormant public to in turn move political leaders to take action.

    Why have civil society organizations and their followers not been successful in past campaigns calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons? Intrinsic psychological, political and social factors impede efforts to build a sustained and effective mass movement seeking this goal. A crude but accurate analogy can be made with the plight of a frog placed in a pot of lukewarm water and placidly treading water while the pot is gradually heated to a boil. Here are some of the reasons one could speculate that the frog (or our own species) fails to take the necessary action to save itself:

    • Ignorance. The frog may fail to recognize the dilemma. It may be unable to predict the consequences of being in water in which the temperature is steadily rising.
    • Complacency. The frog may feel comfortable in the warming water. It may believe that because nothing bad has happened yet (even though it has), nothing bad will happen in the future.
    • Deference to authority. The frog may believe that others are in control of the thermostat and that it has no power to change the conditions in which it finds itself.
    • Sense of powerlessness. The frog may fail to realize its own power to affect change, and believe that there is nothing it can do to improve its situation.
    • Fear. The frog may have concluded that, although there are dangers in the pot, the dangers outside the pot are even greater. Thus, it fails to take action, even though it could do so.
    • Economic advantage. The frog may conclude that there are greater short-term rewards for staying in the pot than jumping out.
    • Conformity. The frog may see other frogs treading water in the pot and not want to appear different by sounding an alarm or acting on its own initiative.
    • Marginalization. The frog may have witnessed other frogs attempt to raise warnings or jump out, and seen them marginalized and ignored by the other frogs.
    • Technological optimism. The frog may understand that there is a problem that could lead to its demise, but believe that it is not necessary to act because someone will find a technological solution.
    • Tyranny of experts. Even though the frog may believe it is in danger, the experts may provide a comforting assessment that makes the frog doubt its own wisdom.

    Identical challenges must be overcome if civil society initiatives are to be successful in moving the human population to action. Other challenges have to do with the mass media, which is not inclined to cede either time or authority to civil society leadership. Thus, the messages of those who often have little to say, but are in powerful positions, tend to dominate the media, while civil society organizations struggle for even modest media exposure.

    Civil Society Initiatives

    Indeed, there have been many courageous and ambitious civil society initiatives for nuclear disarmament over the period of the Nuclear Age. They have included marches, protests, appeals, policy recommendations and civil disobedience. I will discuss a few of these important initiatives that have occurred in the post Cold War period, although there are far too many for me to provide a comprehensive overview. Some of these outstanding initiatives have been Abolition 2000, The Middle Powers Initiative, the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons, and the Turn the Tide Campaign of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

    Abolition 2000, a global network of over 2,000 civil society organizations and municipalities, was formed during the 1995 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review and Extension Conference by representatives of organizations that were disappointed with the manner in which the nuclear weapons states, particularly the United States , had manipulated the outcome of the Conference. Despite the serious lack of progress by the nuclear weapons states in fulfilling their nuclear disarmament obligations to that point in time, the treaty was extended indefinitely. Abolition 2000 began with a Founding Statement, created by civil society representatives at the 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference, which articulated its principles. 2 The strong points of Abolition 2000 were that it was broadly international, included many forms of expertise, was activist in its orientation, and was committed to complete nuclear disarmament. This network was largely responsible for bringing the terms “abolition” and “elimination” into the dialogue on nuclear disarmament. It moved the discussion from arms control to abolition.

    The initial goal of Abolition 2000 when it was formed in 1995 was to achieve an agreement for the total elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. When this agreement by governments proved impossible to achieve, despite Abolition 2000 having drafted a Model Nuclear Weapons Convention, the network decided to continue its abolition work, maintaining contacts within the global network with the more than 2,000 civil society organizations and municipalities that comprised the network.

    The Middle Powers Initiative (MPI) is a coalition of eight international civil society organizations. It was formed in 1998 to encourage middle power governments to promote a nuclear disarmament agenda. Only months after MPI’s formation, a group of middle power countries, calling itself the New Agenda Coalition (NAC), went public with a strong nuclear disarmament agenda. These countries were: Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden. 3 They have been active in promoting their agenda in the First Committee of the United Nations (Disarmament Committee) and at the meetings of the parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They were instrumental in achieving the consensus adoption of the 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament in the Final Document of the 2000 NPT Review Conference.

    MPI has given support to the New Agenda countries by convening high level consultations, sending delegations to many countries, including NATO countries and Japan , and publishing briefing papers in support of NAC positions and the preservation of the NPT. By its support of the NAC, the Middle Powers Initiative has tried to focus the attention and efforts of key civil society organizations to bring pressure to bear on the nuclear weapons states from friendly middle power governments. 4

    The Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons, also known as Vision 2020, is a relatively recent campaign, having begun its work in 2003. The goal of the campaign is to press governments to begin negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons in 2005, to complete negotiations on this treaty by the year 2010 and to eliminate all nuclear weapons by the year 2020. In a sense, this Emergency Campaign picks up from Abolition 2000, setting its target date for governments to complete negotiations just a decade further in the future than Abolition 2000. This Emergency Campaign has another important element. It is led by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , two cities dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons, and is composed of mayors in over 600 cities. 5

    The Mayors for Peace participated in the 2004 Preparatory Committee meeting of the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, bringing 16 mayors and deputy mayors from 12 countries to New York to attend the meetings. They are planning to bring over 100 mayors and deputy mayors to the 2005 NPT Review Conference. There is no doubt that the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign is bringing important new energy to the global effort for nuclear disarmament. Abolition 2000 has created a special arm, Abolition Now!, to support the mayors campaign and that calls upon all countries to make public their plans for nuclear disarmament in accord with their treaty obligations under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. 6

    A new and hopeful campaign focuses on the United States , the world’s most powerful state, because US leadership and support is essential for serious global progress on nuclear disarmament. The campaign, called Turn the Tide, is a project of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. It seeks to inform and mobilize US citizens to participate in directing messages via the internet to their elected representatives on key nuclear weapons issues. The campaign utilizes sophisticated software to send action alerts and enables easy communications with key officials. 7

    The Turn the Tide Campaign is based on a 13-point Statement:

    • Stop all efforts to create dangerous new nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
    • Maintain the current moratorium on nuclear testing and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
    • Cancel plans to build new nuclear weapons production plants, and close and clean up the toxic contamination at existing plants.
    • Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No Use of nuclear weapons against any nation or group that does not have nuclear weapons.
    • Establish and enforce a legally binding US commitment to No First Use of nuclear weapons against other nations possessing nuclear weapons.
    • Cancel funding for and plans to deploy offensive missile “defense” systems which could ignite a dangerous arms race and offer no security against terrorist weapons of mass destruction.
    • In order to significantly decrease the threat of accidental launch, together with Russia , take nuclear weapons off high-alert status and do away with the strategy of launch-on-warning.
    • Together with Russia , implement permanent and verifiable dismantlement of nuclear weapons taken off deployed status through the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
    • Demonstrate to other countries US commitment to reducing its reliance on nuclear weapons by removing all US nuclear weapons from foreign soil.
    • To prevent future proliferation or theft, create and maintain a global inventory of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons materials and place these weapons and materials under strict international safeguards.
    • Initiate international negotiations to fulfill existing treaty obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the phased and verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons.
    • Initiate a moratorium on new nuclear power reactors and gradually phase out existing ones, as these are a primarily means for the proliferation of nuclear materials, technology and weapons; simultaneously establish an International Sustainable Energy Agency to support the development of clean, safe renewable energy.
    • Redirect funding from nuclear weapons programs to dismantling nuclear weapons, safeguarding nuclear materials, cleaning up the toxic legacy of the Nuclear Age and meeting more pressing social needs such as education, health care and social services.

    Conclusions

    For nearly 60 years, since the first nuclear test at Alamogordo , New Mexico , the world has been muddling through the nuclear dilemma. Despite the end of the Cold War, we are far from being secure from the nuclear threat. The threat today takes a different form, but is no less dangerous. In our divided world, there are terrible tensions and there is the possibility that nuclear weapons could end up in the hands of non-state extremists who would have no reservations about using them against the populations of many countries, including the nuclear weapons states. The irony of this is that none of the nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nuclear weapons states can provide an ounce of deterrence or security against such extremists.

    The only way to assure the security of the nuclear weapons states, or any state, from a nuclear attack, is to eliminate these weapons in a phased, orderly and verified manner and place the materials to make these weapons under strict and effective international control. This is the reality of our common nuclear dilemma, and getting this message through to the leaders of nuclear weapons states, particularly the United States, is one of the most critical challenges, if not the most critical challenge, of our time. Only with the success of civil society in meeting this challenge can we have a reasonable expectation, in General Butler’s words, to “reassert the primacy of individual conscience, the voice of reason and the rightful interests of humanity.”

    David Krieger is a founder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is the co-author of Nuclear Weapons and the World Court and may other studies of peace in the Nuclear Age.

    Butler , George Lee, “Ending the Nuclear Madness,” Nuclear Age Peace Foundation Waging Peace Series, Booklet 40, September 1999.

    See http://www.abolition2000.org

    Originally Slovenia was also a part of the New Agenda Coalition, but did not stay long in the coalition.

    See http://www.mpi.org

    See http://www.mayorsforpeace.org

    See http://www.abolitionnow.org

    See https://wagingpeace.davidmolinaojeda.com

  • Meeting the Russell-Einstein Challenge to Humanity

    Meeting the Russell-Einstein Challenge to Humanity

    “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.”

    Vaclav Havel

    On July 9, 1955, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was issued in London. Its concern was with the new, powerful H-bombs, which the signers of the Manifesto believed placed the human race in jeopardy of annihilation. “Here, then, is the problem,” the Manifesto stated, “which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.”

    Nuclear Age Peace Foundation President David Krieger speaking to Soka Gakai in Hiroshima, Japan.

    Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein were two of the leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. Russell was a philosopher, mathematician and Nobel Laureate in Literature. Einstein was a theoretical physicist, considered the greatest scientist of his time, and a Nobel Laureate in Physics. Both men were tireless advocates for peace throughout their lives.

    Russell was primarily responsible for drafting the Manifesto, but it contained ideas that Einstein often discussed. Einstein signed the document just days before his death. It was his last major act for peace.

    In addition to Russell and Einstein, the Manifesto was signed by nine other scientists: Max Born, Perry W. Bridgman, Leopold Infeld, Frederic Joliot-Curie, Herman J. Muller, Linus Pauling, Cecil F. Powell, Joseph Rotblat and Hideki Yukawa. All of these men either already had received or would receive the Nobel Prize. Linus Pauling, the great American chemist, would receive two Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry and one for Peace.

    Sir Joseph Rotblat is the only signer of the Manifesto still living, and he is now 96 years old. He is an extraordinary man, who has been a tireless advocate of the Manifesto throughout his long life. He was the only scientist in the Manhattan Project to leave his position when he realized that the Germans would not succeed in developing an atomic weapon. He was the founder of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and served as president of that organization until in recent years his advanced age caused him to step back. In 1995, Professor Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize. When Professor Rotblat turned 90, he announced that he had two remaining goals in life: first, the short-term goal of abolishing nuclear weapons; and, second, the long-term goal of abolishing war.

    The Russell-Einstein Manifesto makes the following points:

    1. Scientists have special responsibilities to awaken the public to the technological threats, particularly nuclear threats, confronting humanity.
    2. Those scientists with the greatest knowledge of the situation appear to be the most concerned.
    3. Nuclear weapons endanger our largest cities and threaten the future of humanity.
    4. In the circumstance of prevailing nuclear threat, humankind must put aside its differences and confront this overriding problem.
    5. The prohibition of modern weapons is not a sufficient solution to the threat; war as an institution must be abolished.
    6. Nonetheless, as a first step the nuclear weapons states should renounce these weapons.
    7. The choice before humanity is to find peaceful means of settling conflicts or to face “universal death.”

    In the end, the signers of the Manifesto believed, that humanity had a choice: “There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”

    Nuclear Age Peace Foundation President David Krieger speaking to Soka Gakai in Hiroshima, Japan.

    It has now been nearly 50 years since this Manifesto was made public. On the 40th anniversary of issuing the Manifesto in 1995, Joseph Rotblat concluded his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by echoing the call: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

    In 2005, when the Russell-Einstein Manifesto has its 50th anniversary, we will be 60 years into the Nuclear Age and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will commemorate the 35th anniversary of its entry into force. In April 2005, the 189 parties to the NPT will meet at the United Nations in New York for their 7th Review Conference. The meeting promises to be contentious and disappointing.

    In 1995, the parties to the NPT agreed to extend the NPT indefinitely. At the time, the nuclear weapons states had reaffirmed their obligation in Article VI of the Treaty to pursue good faith efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament. Five years later, at the year 2000 NPT Review Conference, the parties to the Treaty agreed to 13 Practical Steps for Nuclear Disarmament. These included early entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a verifiable treaty banning the production of fissile materials, application of the principle of irreversibility to nuclear disarmament, and an “unequivocal undertaking by the nuclear-weapon States to accomplish the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals..”

    The nuclear weapons states have made virtually no progress on the 13 Practical Steps and little seems likely. The United States has been the worst offender. It has failed to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, opposed creating a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty that is verifiable, treated nuclear disarmament as completely reversible and, in general, shown no good faith toward its obligations under the Treaty.

    Rather than fulfilling its own obligations, the US has pointed the finger at some potential nuclear proliferators. It initiated an illegal war against Iraq, alleging it possessed or was developing weapons of mass destruction programs, including nuclear programs, which turned out not to exist. It has stated that Iran will not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, implicitly threatening to attack Iran as well. After North Korea withdrew from the NPT, the US entered into six party talks with North Korea , but has been only half-hearted in its attempts to meet their concerns by offering security guarantees and development assistance.

    At the same time, the US has never expressed concern that Israel ‘s nuclear weapons pose a threat to Middle Eastern or global stability. When India and Pakistan tested nuclear devices in 1998 the US initially expressed concern. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US tightened its relations with both of these countries and lifted its sanctions on military materials. Even after the discovery that Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan was conducting a global nuclear arms bazaar, the US has maintained its close ties to Pakistan , despite the fact that Pakistani President Musharaf moved quickly to grant Khan a pardon. The US has yet to question Khan with regard to the extent of his nuclear proliferation.

    Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently reiterated that forty countries have the potential to become nuclear weapons states. Increased nuclear proliferation could be the ultimate result of the failure of the nuclear weapons states to fulfill their obligations for nuclear disarmament. One of these proliferating countries could be Japan , which remains a virtual nuclear weapons power with the technology and nuclear materials to become a nuclear weapons state in a matter of days.

    As we approach this important anniversary year of 2005, there is a failure of governmental leadership toward nuclear disarmament and little cause for hope. The United States , under the Bush administration, has turned the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 into an ongoing war, first in Afghanistan and then Iraq . Neither of these wars is going well. The Bush administration speaks of creating democracy in these two countries, but in fact both countries are now presided over by US-selected former CIA assets.

    If Mr. Bush should be elected to a second term, the American people will have ratified his policies of preventive war, deployment of missile defenses, creation of new nuclear weapons, the undermining of international law and the ravaging of the global environment for the benefit of US global hegemony and corporate profit. This would be a tragedy for the United States and for the rest of the world. This decision will be made on November 2, 2004 in the most important election in our lifetimes. Until this decision is made, we cannot predict the prospects for success at the 2005 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference. We can project, though, that if Bush is elected, the prospects for the success of the Treaty conference and the future of the NPT will be exceedingly dim.

    The vision of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, and of the two great men who put their names on it, stands in stark contrast to the vision of the leaders of today’s nuclear weapons states and, particularly, the present leadership in the United States . The Russell-Einstein Manifesto calls upon us to remember our humanity, ban nuclear weapons and cease war. Mr. Bush, in contrast, seems incapable of embracing a broader humanity, has shown no leadership toward banning nuclear weapons and has demonstrated his willingness to engage in preventive war on false pretenses.

    The Russell-Einstein Manifesto calls upon humanity to choose dramatically different futures. Since humanity is made up of all of us, we all must choose. And the choice of each of us matters. This great city of Hiroshima , a city that has experienced so much devastation and rebirth, led by its hibakusha , has chosen the path of a nuclear weapons-free future. I am always inspired by the spirit of Hiroshima and its courageous hibakusha , and I stand in solidarity with you on this path.

    One truly hopeful action at this time is the Mayors for Peace Emergency Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons. This campaign, led by the Mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, calls for the initiation of negotiations in 2005 and the completion of negotiations in 2010 for the elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world by the year 2020. This is a great and necessary challenge, one which deserves our collective support. Just a few days ago, on behalf of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, I presented our 2004 World Citizenship Award to the Mayors for Peace for their critical effort on behalf of humanity.

    Our cause is right and it is noble. It seeks, in the spirit of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, to preserve humanity’s future. It calls upon us to raise our voices, to stand our ground, and to never give up. The year 2005 is a critical year, but it is not the only year. Our efforts must be sustained over a long period of time, perhaps longer than our lifetimes. This means we must inspire new generations to act for humanity.

    There will be times when we may be tired and discouraged, but we are not allowed to cease our efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons. No matter what obstacles we face in the form of political intransigence or public apathy, we are not allowed to give up hope. This is the price of being fully human in the Nuclear Age. The future demands of us that we keep our hearts strong, our voices firm, and our hope alive.

    David Krieger is a founder and the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). He is a leader in the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons.